about Churchill’s wartime existence.
He himself, of course, bestrides the tale in all his joyous splendour. Even at the blackest periods, when his spirits sagged, flashes of exuberance broke through, which cheered his colleagues and contemporaries, but caused some people to recoil from him. They were dismayed, even disgusted, that he so conspicuously thrilled to his own part in the greatest conflict in human history. ‘Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?’ he exulted to Australian prime minister Robert Menzies in 1941. It was this glee which caused such a man as the aesthete and diarist James Lees-Milne to write fastidiously after it was all over: ‘Churchill so evidently enjoyed the war that I could never like him. I merely acknowledge him, like Genghis Khan, to have been great.’
Lees-Milne and like-minded critics missed an important aspect of Churchill’s attitude to conflict in general, and to the Second World War in particular. He thrilled to the cannon’s roar, and rejoiced in its proximity to himself. Yet never for a moment did he lose his sense of dismay about the death and destruction that war visited upon the innocent. ‘Ah, horrible war, amazing medley of the glorious and the squalid, the pitiful and the sublime,’ he wrote as a correspondent in South Africa in January 1900. ‘If modern men of light and leading saw your face closer simple folk would see it hardly ever.’ Hitler was indifferent to the sufferings his policies imposed upon mankind. Churchill never flinched from the necessity to pay in blood for the defeat of Nazi tyranny. But his sole purpose was to enable the guns to be silenced, the peoples of the world restored to their peaceful lives.
Appetite for the fray was among Churchill’s most convincing credentials for national leadership in May 1940. Neville Chamberlain had many weaknesses as prime minister, but foremost among them was a revulsion from the conflict to which his country was committed, shared by many members of his government. One of them, Rob Bernays, said: ‘I wish I were twenty. I cannot bear this responsibility.’ A nation which found itself committed to a life-and-death struggle against one of the most ruthless tyrannies in history was surely wise to entrust its leadership to a man eager to embrace the role, rather than one who shrank from it. This book discusses Churchill’s follies and misjudgements, which were many and various. But these are as pimples upon the mountain of his achievement. It is sometimes said that the British and American peoples are still today, in the twenty-first century, indecently obsessed with the Second World War. The reason is not far to seek. We know that here was something which our parents and grandparents did well, in a noble cause that will forever be identified with the person of Winston Churchill, warlord extraordinary.
Max Hastings
Chilton Foliat, Berkshire
May 2009
For seven months after the Second World War began in September 1939, many British people deluded themselves that it might gutter out before there was a bloodbath in the West. On 5 April 1940, while the armed but passive confrontation which had persisted since the fall of Poland still prevailed on the Franco-German border, prime minister Neville Chamberlain told a Conservative Party meeting: ‘Hitler has missed the bus.’ Less than five weeks later, however, on 7 May, he addressed the House of Commons to explain the disastrous outcome of Britain’s campaign to frustrate the German occupation of Norway. Beginning with a tribute to British troops who had ‘carried out their task with magnificent gallantry’, in halting tones he continued:
I hope that we shall not exaggerate the extent or the importance of the check we have received. The withdrawal from southern Norway is not comparable to the withdrawal from Gallipoli…There were no large forces involved. Not much more than a single division…Still, I am quite aware…that some discouragement has been caused to our friends, and that our enemies are crowing…I want to ask hon. Members not to form any hasty opinions on the result of the Norwegian campaign so far as it has gone…A minister who shows any sign of confidence is always called complacent. If he fails to do so, he is labelled defeatist. For my part I try to steer a middle course—[Interruption]—neither raising undue expectations [Hon. Members: ‘Hitler missed the bus’] which are unlikely to be fulfilled, nor making people’s flesh creep by painting pictures of unmitigated gloom. A great many times some hon. Members have repeated the phrase ‘Hitler missed the bus’—[Hon. Members: ‘You said it’]…While I retain my complete confidence on our ultimate victory, I do not think that the people of this country yet realise the extent or the imminence of the threat which is impending against us [An Hon. Member: ‘We said that five years ago’].
When the debate ended the following night, thirty-three Tories voted against their own party on the Adjournment Motion, and a further sixty abstained. Though Chamberlain retained a parliamentary majority, it was plain that his Conservative government had lost the nation’s confidence. This was not merely the consequence of the Norway campaign, but because through eight fumbling months it had exposed its lack of stomach for war. An all-party coalition was indispensable. Labour would not serve under Chamberlain. Winston Churchill became Britain’s prime minister following a meeting between himself, Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and Tory chief whip David Margesson on the afternoon of 9 May 1940, at which Halifax declared his own unsuitability for the post, as a member of the House of Lords who would be obliged to delegate direction of the war to Churchill in the Commons. In truth, some expedient could have been adopted to allow the Foreign Secretary to return to the Commons. But Halifax possessed sufficient self-knowledge to recognise that no more than Neville Chamberlain did he possess the stuff of a war leader.
While much of the ruling class disliked and mistrusted the new premier, he was the overwhelming choice of the British people. With remarkably sure instinct, they perceived that if they must wage war, the leadership of a warrior was needed. David Reynolds has observed that when the Gallipoli campaign failed in 1915, many people wished to blame Churchill—then, as in 1940, First Lord of the Admiralty—while after Norway nobody did. ‘It was a marvel,’ Churchill wrote in an unpublished draft of his war memoirs, ‘I really do not know how—I survived and maintained my position in public esteem while all the blame was thrown on poor Mr Chamberlain.’ He may also have perceived his own good fortune that he had not achieved the highest office in earlier years, or even in the earlier months of the war. Had he done so, it is likely that by May 1940 his country would have tired of the excesses which he would surely have committed, while being no more capable than Chamberlain of stemming the tide of fate on the Continent. Back in 1935, Stanley Baldwin explained to a friend his unwillingness to appoint Churchill to his own cabinet: ‘If there is going to be a war—and who can say there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.’ Baldwin’s tone was jocular and patronising, yet there proved to be something in what he said.
In May 1940 only generals and admirals knew the extent of Churchill’s responsibility for Britain’s ill-starred Scandinavian deployments. Nonetheless the familiar view, that he was sole architect of disaster, seems overstated. Had British troops been better trained, motivated and led, they would have made a better showing against Hitler’s forces, which repeatedly worsted them in Norway while often inferior in numbers. The British Army’s failure reflected decades of neglect, together with institutional weaknesses that would influence the fortunes of British arms through the years which followed. These were symbolically attested by a colonel who noticed among officers’ baggage being landed at Namsos on the central Norwegian coast ‘several fishing rods and many sporting guns’. No German officer would have gone to war with such frivolous accoutrements.
Now Halifax wrote
