The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 1

THE OFFER FROM HITLER

If you are looking for one of the decisive moments in the last world war, and a turning-point in the history of the world, then come with me. Let us go to a dingy room in the House of Commons—up some steps, through a creaky old door, down a dimly lit corridor; and here it is.

You won’t find it on the maps of the Palace of Westminster, for obvious security reasons; and you can’t normally get the guides to show you. In fact the precise room I am talking about doesn’t really exist any more, since it was blown up in the Blitz; but the replacement is faithful enough to the original.

It is one of the rooms used by the Prime Minister when he or she wants to meet colleagues in the Commons, and you don’t need to know much about the decor, because it is predictable.

Think of loads of green leather, and brass studs, and heavy coarse-grained oak panelling and Pugin wallpaper and a few prints, slightly squiffily hung. And think smoke—because we are talking about the afternoon of 28 May 1940, and in those days many politicians—including our subject—were indefatigable consumers of tobacco.

It is safe to assume there wasn’t much daylight getting through the mullioned windows, but most members of the public would easily have been able to recognise the main characters. There were seven of them in all, and they were the War Cabinet of Britain.

It is a measure of the depth of their crisis that they had been meeting almost solidly for three days. This was their ninth meeting since 26 May, and they had yet to come up with an answer to the existential question that faced them and the world.

In the chair was the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. On one side was Neville Chamberlain, the high-collared, stiff-necked and toothbrush-moustached ex–Prime Minister, and the man Churchill had unceremoniously replaced. Rightly or wrongly, Chamberlain was blamed for fatally underestimating the Hitler menace, and for the failure of appeasement. When the Nazis had bundled Britain out of Norway earlier that month, it was Chamberlain who took the rap.

Then there was Lord Halifax, the tall, cadaverous Foreign Secretary who had been born with a withered left hand that he concealed in a black glove. There was Archibald Sinclair, the leader of the Liberal Party that Churchill had dumped. There were Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood—representatives of the Labour Party against which he had directed some of his most hysterical invective. There was the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, taking notes.

The question before the meeting was very simple, and one they had been chewing over for the last few days, as the news got blacker and blacker. No one exactly spelled it out, but everyone could see what it was. Should Britain fight? Was it reasonable for young British troops to die in a war that showed every sign of being lost? Or should the British do some kind of deal that might well save hundreds of thousands of lives?

And if a deal had been done then, and the war had effectively ended with the British exit, might it have been a deal to save the lives of millions around the world?

I don’t think many people of my generation—let alone my children’s generation—are fully conscious of how close we came to it; how Britain could have discreetly, and rationally, called it quits in 1940. There were serious and influential voices who wanted to begin ‘negotiations’.

It is not hard to see why they thought as they did. The news from France was not just bad: it was unbelievably bad, and there did not seem the slightest hope that it would improve. German forces were lunging towards Paris, buffeting aside the French defences with such contemptuous ease that it really looked as if they belonged to some new military master race, pumped with superior zeal and efficiency. Hitler’s panzers had surged not just through the Low Countries but through the supposedly impenetrable ravines of the Ardennes; the ludicrous Maginot Line had been bypassed.

The French generals cut pathetic figures—white-haired dodderers in their Clouseau-like kepis. Every time they fell back to some new line of defence, they found that the Germans were somehow already there; and then the Stuka dive-bombers would come down like banshees and the tanks would drive on again.

The British Expeditionary Force had been cut off in a pocket around the Channel ports. They had tried briefly to counter-attack; they had been repulsed, and now they were waiting to be evacuated at Dunkirk. If Hitler had listened to his generals, he could have smashed us then: sent the ace general Guderian and his tanks into the shrinking and virtually defenceless patch of ground. He could have killed or captured the bulk of Britain’s fighting forces, and deprived this country of the physical ability to resist.

As it was, his Luftwaffe was strafing the beaches; British troops were floating in the water face down; they were firing their Lee Enfields hopelessly at the sky; they were being chopped to bits by the dive-bombers. At that moment, on 28 May, it seemed very possible—to generals and politicians, if not to the wider public—that the bulk of the troops could be lost.

The War Cabinet was staring at the biggest humiliation for British armed forces since the loss of the American colonies, and there seemed no way back. It chills the marrow to look at the map of Europe as it must have appeared to that War Cabinet.

Austria had been engulfed two years earlier; Czechoslovakia was no more; Poland had been crushed; and in the last few weeks Hitler had added a shudder-making list to his portfolio of conquest. He had taken Norway—effortlessly outwitting the British, Churchill included, who had spent months elaborating a doomed plan to pre-empt him. He had captured Denmark in little more than four hours.

Holland had surrendered; the Belgian King had pusillanimously run up the white flag at midnight the previous evening; and with every hour that went by more French forces surrendered—sometimes after resistance of insane bravery; sometimes with a despairing and fatalistic ease.

The most important geostrategic consideration of May 1940 was that Britain—the British Empire—was alone. There was no realistic prospect of help, or certainly no imminent prospect. The Italians were against us. The fascist leader Mussolini had entered into a ‘Pact of Steel’ with Hitler, and—when it looked as though Hitler couldn’t lose—would shortly join the war on his side.

The Russians had signed the nauseating Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, by which they had agreed to carve up Poland with the Nazis. The Americans were allergic to any more European wars, understandably: they had lost more than 56,000 men in the First World War, and more than 100,000 if you include the toll from influenza. They were offering nothing much more than murmurs of distant sympathy, and for all Churchill’s wishful rhetoric there was no sign of the US cavalry coming tootling over the brow of the hill.

Everyone in that room could imagine the consequences of fighting on. They knew all about war; some of them had fought in the Great War, and the hideous memory of that slaughter was only twenty-two years old—less distant in time from them than the first Gulf War is from us today.

There was scarcely a family in Britain that had not been touched by sorrow. Was it right—was it fair—to ask the people to go through all that again? And to what end?

It seems from the cabinet minutes that the meeting more or less kicked off with Halifax. He went straight to the point: the argument he had been making for the last few days.

He was an impressive figure. He was tall, very tall; at 6 foot 5 he loomed about ten inches above Churchill—though I suppose that advantage matters less around a table. He was an Etonian and an academic star, with the domed forehead that seemed fitting in a prize fellow of All Souls. (Churchill, don’t forget, had not even been to university, and got into Sandhurst only on the third attempt.) To judge by the evidence of contemporary footage, Halifax spoke in a low and melodious sort of voice, though with the clipped enunciation of his time and class. He looked through thickish round glasses, and he perhaps raised his right hand, lightly clenched, to make his case.

The Italian embassy had sent a message, he said: that this was Britain’s moment to seek mediation via Italy. The information came via Sir Robert Vansittart—and that was a clever name to invoke, since Sir Robert Vansittart was a diplomat who was known to be ferociously anti-German and against the appeasement of Hitler. The message was therefore as delicately and appetisingly wrapped as possible, but the meaning was naked.

This was not just a simple overture from Mussolini: it was surely a signal from his senior partner. Coiling itself round Whitehall and penetrating the heart of the House of Commons, it was a feeler from Hitler. Churchill knew exactly what was going on. He was aware that the despairing French Prime Minister was in town—and indeed had just had lunch with Halifax.

M. Paul Reynaud knew that France was beaten; he knew in his heart what his British interlocutors could scarcely believe—that the French were possessed of an origami army: they just kept folding with almost magical speed. Reynaud knew that he was going to be remembered as one of the most abject figures in the history of France; and he believed that if he could persuade the British also to enter negotiations, that humiliation would be shared and palliated—and above all he might win better terms for France.

So that was the message: conveyed by the Italians, supported by the French, and originating from the German dictator: that Britain should see sense and come to an arrangement with reality. We don’t know exactly the words with which Churchill replied; all we have is the laconic and possibly sanitised summary of Sir Edward Bridges. We don’t know precisely how the Prime Minister appeared to his colleagues that afternoon, but we can have a pretty good guess.

Contemporary accounts say Churchill was by now showing signs of fatigue. He was sixty-five, and he was driving his staff and his generals to distraction by his habit of working on into the small hours—fuelled by brandy and liqueurs—ringing round Whitehall for papers and information, and actually convening meetings when most sane men were tucked up with their wives.

He was dressed in his strange Victorian/Edwardian garb, with his black waistcoat and gold watch chain and his spongebag trousers—like some burly and hungover butler from the set of Downton Abbey. They say he was pale, and pasty, and that seems believable. Let us add a cigar, and some ash on his lap, and a clenched jaw with a spot of drool.

He told Halifax to forget it. As the minutes put it: ‘The Prime Minister said that it was clear that the French purpose was to see Signor Mussolini acting as intermediary between ourselves and Herr Hitler. He was determined not to get into this position.’

He understood exactly what the offer implied. Britain was at war with Germany, and had been since 1 September the previous year. It was a war for freedom and for principle—to protect Britain and the empire from an odious tyranny, and if possible to repel the German armies from the subjugated states. To enter ‘talks’ with Hitler or his emissaries, to enter ‘negotiations’, to get round the table for any kind of discussion—it all meant the same.

The minute Britain accepted some Italian offer of mediation, Churchill knew that the sinews of resistance would relax. A white flag would be invisibly raised over Britain, and the will to fight on would be gone.

So he said no to Halifax, and some may feel that ought to have been enough: the Prime Minister had spoken in a matter of national life or death; in another country, the debate might therefore have been at an end. But that is not how the British constitution works: the Prime Minister is primus inter pares—first among equals; he must to some extent carry his colleagues with him; and to understand the dynamics of that conversation we must remember the fragility of Churchill’s position.

He had been Prime Minister for less than three weeks, and it was far from clear who were his real allies round the table. Attlee and Greenwood, the Labour contingent, were broadly supportive—Greenwood perhaps more than Attlee; and the same can be said for Sinclair the Liberal. But their voices could not be decisive. The Tories were by some way the largest party in Parliament. It was the Tories on whom he depended for his mandate—and the Tories were far from sure about Winston Churchill.

From his very emergence as a young Tory MP he had bashed and satirised his own party; he had then deserted them for the Liberals, and though he had eventually returned to the fold, there were too many Tories who thought of him as an unprincipled opportunist. Only a few days earlier the Tory benches had conspicuously cheered for Chamberlain, when he entered the Chamber, and were muted in their welcome for Churchill. Now he was sitting with two powerful Tories—Chamberlain himself, Lord President of the Council, and Edward Wood, First Earl of Halifax and Foreign Secretary.

Both men had clashed with Churchill in the past. Both had reason to regard him as not just volcanic in his energies, but (to their way of thinking) irrational and positively dangerous.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill had deeply irritated Chamberlain with his plan to cut business rates—which Chamberlain thought would unfairly curb the revenues of Tory local government—to say nothing of the systematic monstering Churchill had given Chamberlain, for months and years, over the failure to stand up to Hitler. As for Halifax, he had been viceroy of India in the 1930s, and borne the brunt of what he saw as Churchill’s bombastic and blimpish opposition to anything that smacked of Indian independence.

Then there was a further aspect to Halifax’s political position that gave him—in those grim May days—an unspoken authority, even over Churchill. Chamberlain had sustained his fatal wound on 8 May, when large numbers of Tories refused to back him in the Norway debate; and in that key meeting of 9 May, it was Halifax who had been the departing Prime Minister’s choice. Chamberlain had wanted Halifax. King George VI wanted Halifax. Many in the Labour Party, in the House of Lords, and above all on the Tory benches would have preferred to see Halifax as Prime Minister.

In fact the only reason Churchill had finally got the nod was because Halifax—following a ghastly two-minute silence after Chamberlain offered him the job—had ruled himself out of contention; not just because it would be hard to command the government from the unelected House of Lords, but as he explicitly said, because he didn’t see how he would be able to cope with Winston Churchill rolling around untethered on the quarterdeck.

Still, it must give a man a certain confidence to think he had momentarily been the King’s preferred choice as Prime Minister. In spite of Churchill’s clear opposition, Halifax now returned to the fray. What he offered was, with hindsight, shameful.

The gist of it was that we should enter a negotiation with the Italians, with the blessing of Hitler, at which our opening gambit would be the surrender of various British assets—and though he did not spell these out in the meeting, they are thought to have been Malta, Gibraltar and a share of the running of the Suez Canal.

It says something for Halifax’s nerve that he felt able to offer this to Churchill as a course of action. Reward aggression by entering talks? Hand over British possessions to a ludicrous jut-jawed and jackbooted tyrant like Mussolini?

Churchill repeated his objections. The French were trying to get us on a ‘slippery slope’ towards talks with Hitler and capitulation. We would be in a much stronger position, he argued, once the Germans had tried and failed to invade.

But Halifax came back again: we would get better terms now, before France had gone out of the war—before the Luftwaffe had come over and destroyed our aircraft factories.

It makes one cringe, now, to read poor Halifax’s defeatism; and we need to understand and to forgive his wrong-headedness. He has been the object of character assassination ever since the July 1940 publication of the book Guilty Men, Michael Foot’s philippic against appeasement.

Halifax had been over to see Hitler in 1937—and though he at one stage (rather splendidly) mistook the Führer for a footman, we must concede that he had an embarrassing familiarity with Goering. Both men loved fox-hunting, and Goering nicknamed him ‘Halalifax’—with emetic chumminess—because halali is a German hunting cry. But it is nonsense to think of him as some kind of apologist for Nazi Germany, or a fifth columnist within the British government. In his own way, Halifax was a patriot as much as Churchill.

He thought he could see a way to protect Britain and to safeguard the empire, and to save lives; and it is not as if he was alone. The British ruling class was riddled—or at least conspicuously weevilled—with appeasers and pro-Nazis. It wasn’t just the Mitfords, or the followers of Britain’s home-grown would-be duce, fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.

In 1936 Lady Nelly Cecil noted that nearly all of her relatives were ‘tender to the Nazis’, and the reason was simple. In the 1930s your average toff was much more fearful of Bolshevism, and communists’ alarming ideology of redistribution, than they were fearful of Hitler. Indeed, they saw fascism as a bulwark against the reds, and they had high-level political backing.

David Lloyd George had been to Germany, and been so dazzled by the Führer that he compared him to George Washington. Hitler was a ‘born leader’, declared the befuddled former British Prime Minister. He wished that Britain had ‘a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today’. This from the hero of the First World War! The man who had led Britain to victory over the Kaiser!

Now the snowy-haired Welsh wizard had been himself bewitched, and Churchill’s former mentor had become an out-and-out defeatist. It wasn’t so very long ago that the media had been singing the same tune. The Daily Mail had long been campaigning for Hitler to be given a free hand in eastern Europe, the better to beat up the bolshies. ‘If Hitler did not exist,’ said the Mail, ‘all western Europe might now be clamouring for such a champion.’

The Times had been so pro-appeasement that the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, described how he used to go through the proofs taking out anything that might offend the Germans. The press baron Beaverbrook himself had actually sacked Churchill from his Evening Standard column, on the grounds that he was too hard on the Nazis. Respectable liberal opinion—theatre types like John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike, G. B. Shaw—were lobbying for the government to ‘give consideration’ to talks.

Of course, the mood had changed in the last year; feelings against Germany had unsurprisingly hardened and grown much more widespread. All we are saying—in mitigation of Halifax—is that in seeking peace, he had the support of many British people, at all levels of society. And so the argument went on, between Halifax and the Prime Minister, for that crucial hour.

Outside it was a warm and gorgeous May day; the chestnut candles were out in St James’s Park. Inside it was a game of ping-pong.

Churchill told Halifax that any negotiation with Hitler was a trap that would put Britain at his mercy; Halifax said he couldn’t understand what was so wrong with the French suggestion.

Chamberlain and Greenwood both chipped in with the (useless) observation that both options—fighting on and entering negotiations—were risky.

As it got to five o’clock, Halifax said that nothing in his suggestion could be remotely described as ultimate capitulation.

Churchill said that the chances of Britain being offered decent terms were a thousand to one against.

It was a stalemate; and it was now—according to most historians—that Churchill played his masterstroke. He announced that the meeting would be adjourned, and would begin again at 7 p.m. He then convened the full cabinet of twenty-five, ministers from every department—many of whom were to hear him as Prime Minister for the first time. Consider his position.

He could not persuade Halifax, and nor could he simply crush or ignore him. Only the previous day the Foreign Secretary had been so bold as to accuse him of talking ‘frightful rot’. If Halifax resigned, Churchill’s position would be weak: it was hardly as if his first efforts as war leader had been crowned with triumph—the Norway campaign, for which he was overwhelmingly responsible, had been a considerable fiasco.

The appeal to reason had failed. But the bigger the audience, the more fervid the atmosphere; and now he made an appeal to the emotions. Before the full cabinet he made a quite astonishing speech—without any hint of the intellectual restraint he had been obliged to display in the smaller meeting. It was time for ‘frightful rot’ on steroids.

The best account we have is from the diary of Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, and there seems to be no reason not to trust it. Churchill began calmly enough.

I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man [Hitler].

But it [is] idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet—that would be called disarmament—our naval bases, and much else.

We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up—under Mosley or some such person. And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other side we have immense reserves and advantages.

He ended with this almost Shakespearean climax:

And I am convinced that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.

At this the men in that room were so moved—according both to Dalton and to Leo Amery—that they cheered and shouted, and some of them ran round and clapped him on the back. Churchill had ruthlessly dramatised and personalised the debate.

It was not some diplomatic minuet. It was a choice between protecting their country or dying, choking in their own blood. It was an eve-of-battle speech, and it appealed to them in some primeval and tribal way. By the time the War Cabinet resumed at 7 p.m., the debate was over; Halifax abandoned his cause. Churchill had the clear and noisy backing of the cabinet.

Within a year of that decision—to fight and not to negotiate—30,000 British men, women and children had been killed, almost all of them at German hands. Weighing up those alternatives—a humiliating peace, or a slaughter of the innocents—it is hard to imagine any modern British politician having the guts to take Churchill’s line.

Even in 1940, there was no one else who could conceivably have given that kind of leadership—not Attlee, not Chamberlain, not Lloyd George, and certainly not the most serious alternative, the 3rd Viscount Halifax.

Churchill punningly nicknamed Halifax the ‘Holy Fox’, partly because he was churchy, and partly because he loved riding to hounds, but mainly because he had a mind of foxy subtlety. But if the fox knew many things, Churchill knew one big thing.

He was willing to pay that butcher’s bill, because he actually saw more clearly than Halifax. He had the vast and almost reckless moral courage to see that fighting on would be appalling, but that surrender would be even worse. He was right. To understand why, let us imagine May 1940 without him.