Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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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