Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

Though the Royal Navy’s achievement at Dunkirk embraced its highest traditions, many men noted only the chaos. ‘It does seem to me incredible that the organisation of the beach work should have been so bad,’ wrote Lt. Robert Hichens of the minesweeper Niger, though he admired the absence of panic among embarking soldiers.

We were told that there would be lots of boats and that the embarkation of the troops would all be organised…That was what all the little shore boats were being brought over from England for…One can only come to the conclusion that the civilians and small boats packed up and went home with a few chaps instead of staying there to ferry to the big ships which was their proper job. As for the shore organisation, it simply did not exist…It makes one a bit sick when one hears the organisers of the beach show being cracked up to the skies on the wireless and having DSOs showered upon them, because a more disgraceful muddle and lack of organisation I have never seen…If a few officers had been put ashore with a couple of hundred sailors…the beach evacuation would have been a different thing…When the boats were finally hoisted I found that I was very tired and very hoarse as well as soaking wet. So I had a drink and then changed. I had an artillery officer in my cabin who was very interesting. They all seem to have been very impressed by the dive bombers and the vast number of them, and by the general efficiency of the German forces. The soldiers are not very encouraging, but they were very tired which always makes one pessimistic, and they had been out of touch for a long time. This officer did not even know that Churchill had replaced Chamberlain as Premier.

Pownall arrived in London from France to describe to the defence committee on 30 May Gort’s plans for holding the Dunkirk perimeter. ‘No one in the room,’ wrote Ian Jacob of the war cabinet secretariat, ‘imagined that they could be successful if the German armoured divisions supported by the Luftwaffe pressed their attack.’ It was, of course, a decisive mercy that no such attack was ‘pressed’. In the course of the Second World War, victorious German armies displayed a far more consistent commitment to completing the destruction of their enemies when opportunity offered than did the Allies in similarly advantageous circumstances. Dunkirk was an exception. Most of the BEF escaped not as a consequence of Hitler’s forbearance, but through a miscellany of fortuities and misjudgements. Success beyond German imagination created huge problems of its own. Commanders’ attention was fixed upon completing the defeat of Weygand’s forces, of which large elements remained intact. The broken country around Dunkirk was well suited to defence. The French First Army, south of the port, engaged important German forces through the critical period for the BEF’s escape, a stand which received less credit from the British than it deserved.

On 24 May von Rundstedt, commanding Army Group A, ordered his Panzers, badly in need of a logistical pause, not to cross the Aa canal and entangle themselves with British ‘remnants’, as Gort’s army was now perceived. Hitler supported his decision. He was amenable to Goering’s eagerness to show that his aircraft could complete the destruction of the BEF. Yet, in the words of the most authoritative German history, ‘The Luftwaffe, badly weakened by earlier operations, was unable to meet the demands made on it.’ In the course of May, Goering’s force lost 1,044 aircraft, a quarter of them fighters. Thanks to the efforts of the RAF’s Fighter Command over Dunkirk, the German Fourth Army’s war diary recorded on the 25th: ‘The enemy has had air superiority. This is something new for us in this campaign.’ On 3 June the German air effort was diverted from Dunkirk, to increase pressure on the French by bombing targets around Paris.

Almost the entire RAF Air Striking Force was reduced to charred wreckage, strewn the length of northern France. It scarcely seemed to the Germans to matter if a few thousand British troops escaped in salt-stained battledress, when they left behind every tool of a modern army – tanks, guns, trucks, machine-guns and equipment. Hitler’s failure to complete the demolition of the BEF represented a historic blunder, but an unsurprising one amid the magnitude of German triumphs and dilemmas in the last days of May 1940. The Allies, with much greater superiority, indulged far more culpable strategic omissions when they returned to the Continent for the campaigns of 1943–45.

Ian Jacob was among those impressed by the calm with which Churchill received Pownall’s Dunkirk situation report of 30 May. Thereafter, the war cabinet addressed another budget of French requests: for troops to support them on the Somme front; more aircraft; concessions to Italy; a joint appeal to Washington. Churchill interpreted these demands as establishing a context for French surrender, once Britain had refused them. The decision was taken to withdraw residual British forces from north Norway. The prime minister determined to fly again to Paris to press France to stay in the war, and to make plain that Britain would dissociate itself from any parley with Germany mediated by the Italians. Next morning, as Churchill’s Flamingo took off from Northolt, he knew that 133,878 British and 11,666 Allied troops had been evacuated from Dunkirk.

The prime minister’s old friend Sir Edward Spears, viewed by his fellow generals as a mountebank, was once more serving as a British liaison officer with the French, a role he had filled in World War I. Spears, waiting at Villacoubray airfield to meet the party, was impressed by the prime minister’s imposture of gaiety. Churchill poked the British officer playfully in the stomach with his stick, and as ever appeared stimulated by finding himself upon the scene of great events. He beamed upon the pilots of the escorting Hurricanes which had landed behind him, was driven into Paris for lunch at the British embassy, then went to see Reynaud at the Ministry of War.

Amid the gloom that beset all France’s leaders, gathered with her prime minister, Pétain and Admiral Jean François Darlan showed themselves foremost in despair. As Ismay described it: ‘A dejected-looking old man in plain clothes shuffled towards me, stretched out his hand and said: “Pétain.” It was hard to believe that this was the great Marshal of France.’ The rationalists, as they saw themselves, listened unmoved to Churchill’s outpouring of rhetoric. He spoke of the two British divisions already in north-western France, which he hoped could be further reinforced to assist in the defence of Paris. He described in dramatic terms the events at Dunkirk. He declared in his extraordinary franglais, reinforced by gestures, that French and British soldiers would leave arm in arm – ‘partage – bras dessus, bras dessous’. On cabinet orders, Gort was to quit Dunkirk that night. If, as expected, Italy entered the war, British bomber squadrons would at once strike at her industries. Churchill beamed once more. If only France could hold out through the summer, he said, all manner of possibilities would open. In a final surge of emotion, he declared his conviction that American help would come. Thus this thirteenth meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council concluded its agenda.

Reynaud and two other ministers were guests for dinner that night at the palatial British embassy in the rue Saint-Honoré. Churchill waxed lyrical about the possibility of launching striking forces against German tank columns. He left Paris next morning knowing he had done all that force of personality could achieve to breathe inspiration into the hearts of the men charged with saving France. Yet few believed a word of it. The Allies’ military predicament was irretrievably dire. It was impossible to conceive any plausible scenario in which Hitler’s armies might be thrown back, given the collapse of French national will.

Paul Reynaud was among a handful of Frenchmen who, momentarily at least, remained susceptible to Churchill’s verbiage. To logical minds, there was an absurdity about almost everything the Englishman said to ministers and commanders in Paris. Britain’s prime minister paraded before his ally his own extravagant sense of honour. He promised military gestures which might further weaken his own country, but could not conceivably save France. He made wildly fanciful pledges of further military aid, though its impact must be insignificant. Britain’s two divisions in the north-west were irrelevant to the outcome of the battle, and were desperately needed to defend the home island. But Churchill told the war cabinet in London on 1 June that more troops must be dispatched across the Channel, with a suitable air component. Even as the miracle of Dunkirk unfolded, he continued to waver about dispatching further fighters to the Continent. He trumpeted the success of the RAF in preventing the Luftwaffe from frustrating the evacuation, which he declared a splendid omen for the future.

Chamberlain and Halifax urged against sending more men to France, but Churchill dissented. He felt obliged to respond to fresh appeals from Reynaud. He envisaged a British enclave in Brittany, a base from which the French might be inspired and supported to maintain ‘a gigantic guerrilla…The B.E.F. in France must immediately be reconstituted, otherwise the French will not continue in the war.’ Amid the dire shortage of troops, he committed to France 1st Canadian Division, which had arrived in Britain virtually untrained and unequipped. The prime minister told one of the British generals who would be responsible for sustaining the defence of north-west France that ‘he could count on no artillery’. An impromptu new ‘division’ was created around Rouen from lines of communications personnel equipped with a few Bren and antitank guns which they had never fired, and a single battery of field artillery that lacked dial sights for its guns. Until Lt.Gen. Alan Brooke, recently landed from Dunkirk, returned to France on 12 June, British forces there remained under French command, with no national C-in-C on the spot.

By insisting upon resumption of an utterly doomed campaign, Churchill made his worst mistake of 1940. It is unsurprising that his critics in the inner circle of power were dismayed. The strength of Churchill’s emotions was wonderful to behold. But when sentiment drove him to make deployments with no possibility of success, he appalled his generals, as well as the old Chamberlainite umbrellamen. Almost every senior civilian and uniformed figure in Whitehall recognised that the Battle of France was lost. Further British commitments threatened to negate the extraordinary deliverance of Dunkirk. The Air Staff closed ranks with Halifax, Chamberlain and others to resist Churchill’s demands that more fighters should be sent to France, in addition to the three British squadrons still operating there. On the air issue, Churchill himself havered, then reluctantly gave way. This was the first of many occasions on which he mercifully subordinated his instincts to the advice of service chiefs and colleagues. Chamberlain and Halifax were not wrong about everything. The moral grandeur in Churchill’s gestures towards his ally in the first days of June was entirely subsumed by the magnitude of France’s tragedy and Britain’s peril.

The Dunkirk evacuation approached a conclusion on 4 June, by which time 224,328 British troops had been evacuated, along with 111,172 Allied troops, most of whom subsequently elected to be repatriated to France rather than fight on as exiles. For thirty-five minutes that afternoon, Churchill described the operation to the Commons, concluding with some of his greatest phrases: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.’

That evening he found time to dispatch brief notes, thanking the King for withdrawing his objections to Brendan Bracken’s membership of the Privy Council on the grounds of character; and to former prime minister Stanley Baldwin, expressing appreciation for a letter offering good wishes. Churchill apologised for having taken a fortnight to respond. ‘We are going through v[er]y hard times & I expect worse to come,’ he wrote; ‘but I feel quite sure better days will come; though whether we shall live to see them is more doubtful. I do not feel the burden weigh too heavily, but I cannot say that I have enjoyed being Prime Minister v[er]y much so far.’

The German drive on Paris began on 5 June. Anglo–French exchanges in the days that followed were dominated by increasingly passionate appeals from Reynaud for fighters. Five RAF squadrons were still based in France, while four more were operating from British bases. The war cabinet and chiefs of staff were united in their determination to weaken Britain’s home defence no further. On 9 June, Churchill cabled to South African premier Jan Smuts, who had urged the dispatch of more aircraft, saying: ‘I see only one sure way through now, to wit, that Hitler should attack this country, and in so doing break his air weapon. If this happens he will be left to face the winter with Europe writhing under his heel, and probably with the United States against him after the Presidential election is over.’ The Royal Navy was preoccupied with fears about the future of the French fleet. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, declared that only its sinking could ensure that it would not be used by the Germans.

Yet perversely, and indeed indefensibly, Churchill continued to dispatch troops to France. The draft operation order for 1st Canadian Division, drawn up as it embarked on 11 June, said: ‘The political object of the re-constituted BEF is to give moral support to the French Government by showing the determination of the British Empire to assist her ally with all available forces…It is the intention…to concentrate…in the area North and South of Rennes…A division may have to hold 50 miles of front.’ At a meeting of ministers in London that day, Dill was informed that a study was being undertaken for the maintenance of a bridgehead in Brittany, ‘the Breton redoubt’. As late as 13 June, Royal Engineers were preparing reception points and transit camps on the Brittany coast, to receive further reinforcements from Britain.

Churchill recognised the overwhelming likelihood of French surrender, yet still cherished hopes of maintaining a foothold across the Channel. It seemed to him incomparably preferable to face the difficulties of clinging on in France, rather than those of mounting from Britain a return to a German-defended coast. He sought to sustain French faith in the alliance by the deployment of a mere three British divisions. He seemed unmoved by Mussolini’s longexpected declaration of war on 10 June, merely remarking to Jock Colville: ‘People who go to Italy to look at ruins won’t have to go as far as Naples and Pompeii again.’ The private secretary noted his master’s bitter mood that day. On the afternoon of 11 June, Churchill flew with Eden, Dill, Ismay and Spears to the new French army headquarters at Briare on the Loire, seventy miles from Paris, to meet the French government once again. The colonel who met their plane, wrote Spears, might have been greeting poor relations at a funeral. At their destination, the Château du Muguet, there was no sense of welcome. At that evening’s meeting of the Supreme War Council, after the French had unfolded a chronicle of doom, Churchill summoned all his powers. He spoke with passion and eloquence about the forces which Britain could deploy in France in 1941 – twenty, even twenty-five divisions. Weygand said dismissively that the outcome of the war would be determined in hours, not days or weeks. Dill, pathetically, invited the supreme commander to use the makeshift British forces now in France wherever and however he saw fit.

The French, with the Germans at the gates of Paris, could scarcely be blamed for thinking themselves mocked. Eden wrote: ‘Reynaud was inscrutable and Weygand polite, concealing with difficulty his scepticism. Marshal Pétain was overtly incredulous. Though he said nothing, his attitude was obviously “C’est de la blague” – “It’s a joke.”’ The harshest confrontation came when Weygand asserted that the decisive point had been reached, that the British should commit every fighter they had to the battle. Churchill replied: ‘This is not the decisive point. This is not the decisive moment. The decisive moment will come when Hitler hurls his Luftwaffe against Britain. If we can keep command of the air over our own island – that is all I ask – we will win it all back for you.’ Britain would fight on ‘for ever and ever and ever’.

Reynaud seemed moved. The newly appointed army minister, Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle, was much more impressed by the prime minister’s representation of himself as an Englishman than as an ally: ‘Mr Churchill appeared imperturbable, full of buoyancy. Yet he seemed to be confining himself to a cordial reserve towards the French at bay, being already seized – not, perhaps, without an obscure satisfaction – with the terrible and magnificent prospect of an England left alone in her island, with himself to lead her struggle towards salvation.’ The other Frenchmen present made nothing of the prime minister’s words. Though courtesies were sustained through a difficult dinner that night, Reynaud told Britain’s leader over brandy that Pétain considered it essential to seek an armistice.

To his staff, Churchill fumed at the influence upon Reynaud of his mistress, the comtesse de Portes, an impassioned advocate of surrender: ‘That woman…will undo everything during the night that I do during the day. But of course she can furnish him with facilities that I cannot afford him. I can reason with him, but I cannot sleep with him.’ For all the hopes which Churchill reposed in Reynaud, even at his best the French prime minister never shared the Englishman’s zest for war à l’outrance. The American Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, reported a conversation with France’s leader earlier that summer: ‘M. Reynaud felt that while Mr C[hurchill] was a brilliant and most entertaining man with a great capacity for organization, his kind has lost elasticity. He felt that Mr C could conceive of no possibility other than war to the finish – whether that resulted in utter chaos and destruction or not. That, he felt sure, was not true statesmanship.’ This seems a convincing representation of Reynaud’s view in June 1940. Like a significant number of British politicians in respect of their own society, the French prime minister perceived, as Churchill did not, a limit to the injury acceptable to the fabric and people of France in the cause of sustaining the struggle against Nazism.

Next morning, 12 June, Churchill told Spears to stay with the French, and to do everything possible to sustain them: ‘We will carry those who will let themselves be carried.’ Yet Britain had no power to ‘carry’ France. Pétain absented himself from the ensuing meeting of the Supreme War Council. His own decision was reached. Churchill raged at news that a planned RAF bombing mission to Italy the previous night had been frustrated by farm carts pushed across the runway by French airmen. Reynaud said that any further such missions must be launched from England. At Briare airfield, Ismay observed encouragingly that with no more allies to worry about, ‘We’ll win the Battle of Britain.’ Churchill stared hard at him and said: ‘You and I will be dead in three months’ time.’ There is no reason to doubt this exchange. Churchill claimed later that he had always believed Britain would come through. He certainly had a mystical faith in destiny, however vague his attachment to a deity. But it is plain that in the summer of 1940 he suffered cruel moments of rationality, when defeat seemed far more plausible than victory, when the huge effort of will necessary to sustain the fight was almost too much for him.

Six months later, Eden confessed to the prime minister that during the summer he and Pound, the First Sea Lord, had privately acknowledged despair to each other. Churchill said: ‘Normally I wake up buoyant to face the new day. Then, I awoke with dread in my heart.’ In the fevered atmosphere of the time, some MPs panicked. Harold Macmillan was among the prime movers in the so-called ‘undersecretaries’ revolt’ by Tories demanding that the old ‘men of Munich’ should be summarily expelled from the government. ‘All this,’ in Leo Amery’s words, ‘on the assumption that France is going out altogether and that we shall be defeated.’ The young turks were squashed.

When so many others were dying, Churchill could scarcely take for granted his own survival. A German bomb, a paratroop landing in Whitehall, an accident by land, sea or air such as befell many other prominent wartime figures, could extinguish him at any time. His courage, and that of those who followed and served him, lay in defying probability, sweeping aside all thought of the most plausible outcome of the struggle, and addressing each day’s battles with a spirit undaunted by the misfortunes of the last. That Wednesday morning of 12 June, his Flamingo hedgehopped home over the lovely countryside of Brittany. Near the smoking docks of Le Havre, the pilot dived suddenly to avoid the attentions of two German planes which were strafing fishing boats. The Flamingo escaped unseen, landing safely at Hendon, but this was one of Churchill’s closest calls. Later in the afternoon he told the war cabinet that it was obvious French resistance was approaching an end. He spoke admiringly of De Gaulle, whose resolution had made a strong impression on him.

Churchill had been back in London less than thirty-six hours when Reynaud telephoned, soon after midnight, demanding a new and urgent meeting at Tours, to which he had now retreated. The prime minister left next morning, accompanied by Halifax and Beaverbrook, driving through the incongruous London summer shopping crowds. He was greeted at Hendon with news that bad weather required a take-off postponement. ‘To hell with that,’ he growled. ‘I’m going, whatever happens. This is too serious a situation to bother about the weather!’ They landed at Tours amid a thunderstorm, on an airfield which had been heavily bombed the previous night, and solicited transport from a jaded rabble of French airmen. Churchill, Beaverbrook and Halifax crowded with difficulty into a small car which took them to the local prefecture, where they wandered unrecognised through the corridors. At last a staff officer escorted them to a nearby restaurant for cold chicken and cheese. This was black comedy. It is not difficult to imagine Halifax’s disdain for the ordeal to which Churchill had exposed him.

Back at the prefecture, the British waited impatiently for Reynaud. It was essential that they take off again in daylight, because the bombcratered and unlit runway was unfit for night operations. At last the French prime minister arrived, with Spears. He told the English party that while Weygand was ready to surrender, it was still possible that he could persuade his colleagues to fight on – if he received a firm assurance that the Americans would fight. Otherwise, would Britain concede that it was now impossible for France to continue the war? Churchill responded with expressions of sympathy for France’s agony. He concluded simply, however, that Britain would sustain its resistance: no terms, no surrender. Reynaud said that the prime minister had not answered his question. Churchill said he could not accede to a French capitulation. He urged that Reynaud’s government should make a direct appeal to President Roosevelt before taking any other action. Some of the British party were dismayed that nothing was said about continuing the fight from France’s North African empire. They were fearful that Reynaud’s nation would not only cease to be their ally, but might join Germany as their foe. They were acutely aware that, even though the French leader still had some heart, his generals, excepting only De Gaulle, had none.

In the courtyard below, a throng of French politicians and officials, emotional and despairing, milled around Churchill as he left. Hands were wrung, tears shed. The prime minister murmured to De Gaulle: ‘L’homme du destin.’ He ignored an impassioned intervention by the comtesse de Portes, who pushed forward crying out that her country was bleeding to death, and that she must be heard. French officials told the assembled politicians that Churchill at this last meeting of the Supreme War Council had shown full understanding of France’s position, and was resigned to her capitulation. Reynaud did not invite Churchill to meet his ministers, as they themselves wished. They felt snubbed in consequence, though the omission changed nothing.