were serving officers. Mr Henry Morris-Jones, Liberal MP for Denbigh, deplored the vote that had taken place, observing complacently that he himself had abstained. The news from France was mocked by a beautiful spring day, with bluebells and primroses everywhere in flower.
‘Chips’ Channon, millionaire Tory MP, diarist and consummate ass, wrote on 10 May: ‘Perhaps the darkest day in English history…We were all sad, angry and felt cheated and out-witted.’ His distress was inspired by the fall of Chamberlain, not the blitzkrieg in France. Churchill himself knew better than any man how grudgingly he had been offered the premiership, and how tenuous was his grasp on power. Much of the Conservative Party hated him, not least because he had twice in his life ‘ratted’—changed sides in the House of Commons. He was remembered as architect of the disastrous 1915 Gallipoli campaign, 1919 sponsor of war against the Bolsheviks in Russia, 1933-34 opponent of Indian self-government, 1936 supporter of King Edward VIII in the Abdication crisis, savage backbench critic of both Baldwin and Chamberlain, Tory prime ministers through his own ‘wilderness years’.
In May 1940, while few influential figures questioned Churchill’s brilliance or oratorical genius, they perceived his career as wreathed in misjudgements. Robert Rhodes-James subtitled his 1970 biography of Churchill before he ascended to the premiership A Study in Failure. As early as 1914, the historian A.G. Gardiner wrote an extraordinarily shrewd and admiring assessment of Churchill, which concluded equivocally: ‘ “Keep your eye on Churchill” should be the watchword of these days. Remember, he is a soldier first, last and always. He will write his name big on our future. Let us take care he does not write it in blood.’
Now, amidst the crisis precipitated by Hitler’s blitzkrieg, Churchill’s contemporaries could not forget that he had been wrong about much even in the recent past, and even in the military sphere in which he professed expertise. During the approach to war, he described the presence of aircraft over the battlefield as a mere ‘additional complication’. He claimed that modern anti-tank weapons neutered the powers of ‘the poor tank’, and that ‘the submarine will be mastered…There will be losses, but nothing to affect the scale of events.’ On Christmas Day 1939 he wrote to Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord: ‘I feel we may compare the position now very favourably with that of 1914.’ He had doubted that the Germans would invade Scandinavia. When they did so, Churchill told the Commons on 11 April: ‘In my view, which is shared by my skilled advisers, Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error in spreading the war so far to the north…We shall take all we want of this Norwegian coast now, with an enormous increase in the facility and the efficiency of our blockade.’ Even if some of Churchill’s false prophecies and mistaken expressions of confidence were unknown to the public, they were common currency among ministers and commanders.
His claim upon his country’s leadership rested not upon his contribution to the war since September 1939, which was equivocal, but upon his personal character and his record as a foe of appeasement. He was a warrior to the roots of his soul, who found his being upon battlefields. He was one of the few British prime ministers to have killed men with his own hand—at Omdurman in 1898. Now he wielded a sword symbolically, if no longer physically, amid a British body politic dominated by men of paper, creatures of committees and conference rooms. ‘It may well be,’ he enthused six years before the war, ‘that the most glorious chapters of our history have yet to be written. Indeed, the very problems and dangers that encompass us and our country ought to make English men and women of this generation glad to be here at such a time. We ought to rejoice at the responsibilities with which destiny has honoured us, and be proud that we are guardians of our country in an age when her life is at stake.’ Leo Amery had written in March 1940: ‘I am beginning to come round to the idea that Winston with all his failings is the one man with real war drive and love of battle.’ So he was, of course. But widespread fears persisted, that this erratic genius might lead Britain in a rush towards military disaster.
Few of the ministers whom he invited to join his all-party coalition were equal to the magnitude of their tasks. If this is true of all governments at all times, it was notably unfortunate now. Twenty-one out of thirty-six senior office-holders were, like Halifax, David Margesson, Kingsley Wood and Chamberlain himself, veterans of the previous discredited administration. ‘Winston has not been nearly bold enough with his changes and is much too afraid of the [Conservative] Party,’ wrote Amery, who had led the Commons charge against Chamberlain.
Of the Labour recruits—notably Clement Attlee, A.V. Alexander, Hugh Dalton, Arthur Greenwood and Ernest Bevin—only Bevin was a personality of the first rank, though Attlee as deputy prime minister would provide a solid bulwark. Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Liberal leader who had served as an officer under Churchill in France in 1916 and now became Secretary for Air, was described by those contemptuous of his subservience to the new prime minister as ‘head of school’s fag’. Churchill’s personal supporters who received office or promotion, led by Anthony Eden, Lord Beaverbrook, Brendan Bracken and Amery, were balefully regarded not only by Chamberlain loyalists, but also by many sensible and informed people who were willing to support the new prime minister, but remained sceptical of his associates.
Much of the political class thought Churchill’s administration would be short-lived. ‘So at last that man has gained his ambition,’ an elderly Tory MP, Cuthbert Headlam, noted sourly. ‘I never thought he would. Well—let us hope that he makes good. I have never believed in him. I only hope that my judgement…will be proved wrong.’ The well-known military writer Captain Basil Liddell Hart wrote gloomily on 11 May: ‘The new War Cabinet appears to be a group devoted to “victory” without regard to its practical possibility.’ Lord Hankey, veteran Whitehall éminence grise and a member of the new government, thought it ‘perfectly futile for war’ and Churchill himself a ‘rogue elephant’.
Even as Hitler’s Panzer columns drove for Sedan and pushed onward through Holland and Belgium, Churchill was filling lesser government posts, interviewing new ministers, meeting officials. On the evening of 10 May Sir Edward Bridges, the shy, austere Cabinet Secretary, called at Admiralty House, where Churchill still occupied the desk from which he had presided as First Lord. Bridges decided that it would be unbecoming for an official who until that afternoon had been serving a deposed prime minister, too obsequiously to welcome the new one. He merely said cautiously: ‘May I wish you every possible good fortune?’ Churchill grunted, gazed intently at Bridges for a moment, then said: ‘Hum. “Every good fortune!” I like that! These other people have all been congratulating me. Every good fortune!’
At Churchill’s first meeting with the chiefs of staff as prime minister on 11 May, he made two interventions, both trifling: he asked whether the police should be armed when sent to arrest enemy aliens, and he pondered the likelihood of Sweden joining the war on the Allied side. Even this most bellicose of men did not immediately attempt to tinker with the movements of Britain’s army on the Continent. When Eden, the new Secretary for War, called on the prime minister that day, he noted in his diary that Churchill ‘seemed well satisfied with the way events were shaping’. If these words reflected a failure to perceive the prime minister’s inner doubts, it is certainly true that he did not perceive the imminence of disaster.
Churchill cherished a faith in the greatness of France, the might
