slowly to earth.’ The RAF’s sacrifice was anyway too late. Much of the German armour was already across the Meuse, and racing westward.
On the morning of the 16th it was learned in London that the Germans had breached the Maginot Line. The war cabinet agreed to deploy four further fighter squadrons to operate over the battlefield. At 3 o’clock that afternoon the prime minister flew to Paris, accompanied by Ismay and Gen. Sir John Dill, Ironside’s Vice-CIGS. Landing at Le Bourget, for the first time they perceived the desperation of their ally. France’s generals and politicians were waiting upon defeat. As the leaders of the two nations conferred at the Quai d’Orsay, officials burned files in the garden. When Churchill asked about French reserves for a counter-attack, he was told that these were already committed piecemeal. Reynaud’s colleagues did not conceal their bitterness at Britain’s refusal to dispatch further fighters. At every turn of the debate, French shoulders shrugged. From the British embassy that evening, Churchill cabled the war cabinet urging the dispatch of six more squadrons. ‘I…emphasise the mortal gravity of the hour,’ he wrote. The chief of air staff, Sir Cyril Newall, proposed a compromise: six further squadrons should operate over France from their British airfields. At 2 a.m., Churchill drove to Reynaud’s flat to communicate the news. The prime minister thereafter returned to the embassy, slept soundly despite occasional distant gunfire, then flew home via Hendon, where he landed before 9 a.m. on the 17th.
He wore a mask of good cheer, but was no longer in doubt about the catastrophe threatening the Allies. He understood that it had become essential for the BEF to withdraw from its outflanked positions in Belgium. Back in Downing Street, after reporting to the war cabinet he set about filling further minor posts in his government, telephoning briskly to prospective appointees, twelve that day in all. Harold Nicolson recorded a typical conversation:
‘Harold, I think it would be wise if you joined the Government and helped Duff [Cooper] at the Ministry of Information.’
‘There is nothing I should like better.’
‘Well, fall in tomorrow. The list will be out tonight. That all right?’
‘Very much all right.’
‘OK.’
Sir Edward Bridges and other Whitehall officials were impressed by Churchill’s ‘superb confidence’, the ‘unhurried calm with which he set about forming his government’. At the outset, this reflected failure to perceive the immediacy of disaster. Within days, however, there was instead a majestic determination that his own conduct should be seen to match the magnitude of the challenge he and his nation faced. From the moment Churchill gained the premiership, he displayed a self-discipline which had been conspicuously absent from most of his career. In small things as in great, he won the hearts of those who became his intimates at Downing Street. ‘What a beautiful handwriting,’ he told Jock Colville when the private secretary showed him a dictated telegram. ‘But, my dear boy, when I say stop you must write stop and not just put a blob.’ Embracing his staff as an extension of his family, it never occurred to him to warn them against repeating his confidences. He took it for granted that they would not do so—and was rewarded accordingly.
Churchill lunched on 17 May at the Japanese embassy. Even in such circumstances, diplomatic imperatives pressed. Japan’s expansionism was manifest. Everything possible must be done to promote its quiescence. That afternoon he dispatched into exile former Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare, most detested of the old appeasers, to become ambassador to Spain. He also established economic committees to address trade, food and transport. A series of telegrams arrived from France, reporting further German advances. Churchill asked Chamberlain, as Lord President, to assess the implications of the fall of Paris—and of the BEF’s possible withdrawal from the Continent through the Channel ports. His day, which had begun in Paris, ended with dinner at Admiralty House in the company of Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken.
Posterity owes little to Churchill’s wayward son Randolph, but a debt is due for his account of a visit to Admiralty House on the morning of 18 May:
I went up to my father’s bedroom. He was standing in front of his basin and shaving with his old-fashioned Valet razor…
‘Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving.’ I did as told. After two or three minutes of hacking away, he half turned and said: ‘I think I see my way through.’ He resumed his shaving. I was astounded, and said: ‘Do you mean that we can avoid defeat?’ (which seemed credible) ‘or beat the bastards?’ (which seemed incredible).
He flung his Valet razor into the basin, swung around and said:—‘Of course I mean we can beat them.’
Me: ‘Well, I’m all for it, but I don’t see how you can do it.’
By this time he had dried and sponged his face and turning round to me, said with great intensity: ‘I shall drag the United States in.’
Here was a characteristic Churchillian flash of revelation. The prospect of American belligerence was remote. For years, Neville Chamberlain had repeatedly and indeed rudely cold-shouldered advances from Franklin Roosevelt. Yet already the new prime minister recognised that US aid alone might make Allied victory possible. Eden wrote that day: ‘News no worse this morning, but seems to me too early to call it better. PM and CIGS gave, however, optimistic survey to Cabinet.’ Whatever Churchill told his colleagues, he was now obliged to recognise the probability—though, unlike France’s generals, he refused to bow to its inevitability—of German victory on the Continent. Reports from the battlefield grew steadily graver. Churchill urged the chiefs of staff to consider bringing large reinforcements from India and Palestine, and holding back some tank units then in transit from Britain to the BEF. The threat of a sudden German descent on England, spearheaded by paratroops, seized his imagination, unrealistic though it was.
A Home Intelligence report suggested to the government that national morale was badly shaken: ‘It must be remembered that the defence of the Low Countries had been continually built up in the press…Not one person in a thousand could visualise the Germans breaking through into France…A relieved acceptance of Mr Churchill as prime minister allowed people to believe that a change of leadership would, in itself, solve the consequences of Mr Chamberlain. Reports sent in yesterday and this morning show that disquiet and personal fear have returned.’
That evening of 18 May, the war cabinet agreed that Churchill should broadcast to the nation, making plain the gravity of the emergency. Ministers were told that Mussolini had rejected Britain’s proposal for an Italian declaration of neutrality. This prompted navy minister A.V. Alexander to urge the immediate occupation of Crete, as a base for operations against Italy in the Mediterranean. Churchill dismissed the idea out of hand, saying that Britain was much too committed elsewhere to embark upon gratuitous adventures.
On the morning of Sunday, 19 May, it was learned that the BEF had evacuated Arras, increasing the peril of its isolation from the main French forces. Emerging together from a meeting, Ironside said to Eden: ‘This is the end of the British Empire.’ The Secretary for War noted: ‘Militarily, I did not see how he could be gainsaid.’ Yet it was hard for colleagues to succumb to despair when their leader marvellously sustained his wit. That same bleak Sunday, the prime minister said to Eden: ‘About time number 17 turned up, isn’t it?’ The two of them, at Cannes casino’s roulette wheel in 1938, had backed
