Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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assumption that it is all over bar the shouting…that it is too late for the United States to do anything’. Key Pittman, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on Churchill to send the British fleet to the New World: ‘It is no secret that Great Britain is totally unprepared for defense and that nothing the US has to give can do more than delay the result…It is to be hoped that this plan will not to be too delayed by futile encouragement to fight on. It is conclusively evident that Congress will not authorize intervention in the European war.’ Time magazine reported on 1 July: ‘So scared was many a US citizen last week that he wanted to shut off aid to Britain for fear that the US would weaken its own defenses, wanted to have the US wash its hands of help for Britain, for fear of getting involved on the losing side.’
A Fortune opinion survey showed that even before France collapsed, most Americans believed that Germany would win the war. Only 30.3 per cent saw any hope for the Allies. A correspondent named Herbert Jones wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer which reflected widespread sentiment: ‘The great majority of Americans are not pacifists or isolationists, but, after the experience of the last war and Versailles, have no desire to pull Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire for her, under the slogan of “Save the World for Democracy”. They rightly feel that that little is to be gained by pouring out our money and the lives of our young men for the cause of either the oppressor of the Jews and Czechs or the oppressor of the Irish and of India…’ Richard E. Taylor of Apponaugh, Rhode Island, wrote to a friend in England urging him to draw the attention of the authorities to the danger that the Germans might tunnel under the Channel.
Yet some Americans did not despair. An ‘aid to Britain’ committee gathered three million signatures on petitions to the White House. The organisation spawned a Historians’ Committee under Charles Seymour of Yale; a Scientists’ Committee under Nobel Prize-winner Harold Urey; a Theatre Committee under playwright and Roosevelt speechwriter Robert Sherwood. Americans were invited to set aside their caricature view of Britain as a nation of stuffed-shirt sleepyheads, and to perceive instead battling champions of freedom. Novelist Somerset Maugham, arriving in New York, predicted a vastly different post-war Britain, and hinted at the beginnings of one more sympathetic to an American social vision: ‘I have a feeling…that in the England of the future evening dress will be less important than it has been in the past.’ America was still far, far from belligerence, but forces favouring intervention were stirring.
In 1941 Churchill devoted immense energy to wooing the US. But in 1940, once his June appeals to Roosevelt had failed, for several weeks he did not write to the president at all, and dismissed suggestions for a British propaganda offensive. ‘Propaganda is all very well,’ he said, ‘but it is events that make the world. If we smash the Huns here, we shall need no propaganda in the United States…Now we must live. Next year we shall be winning. The year after that we shall triumph. But if we can hold the Germans in this coming month of July…our position will be quite different from today.’
But how to ‘hold them’? the anglophile General Raymond Lee, military attaché at the London embassy, wrote: ‘One queer thing about the present situation is that it is one which has never been studied at the Staff College. For years [British officers] had studied our [American Civil War] Valley campaign, operations in India, Afghanistan, Egypt and Europe, had done landings on a hostile shore, but it had never occurred to them that some day they might have to defend the non-combatants of a country at war.’ An MP recounted Churchill saying at this time: ‘I don’t know what we’ll fight them with – we shall have to slosh them on the head with bottles – empty ones, of course.’ This joke was almost certainly apocryphal, but as the prime minister himself observed of the manner in which spurious Churchilliana accrued, he became ‘a magnet for iron filings’.
On 8 June, Britain’s Home Forces boasted an inventory of just fifty-four two-pounder anti-tank guns, 420 field guns with 200 rounds of ammunition apiece, 613 medium and heavy guns with 150 rounds for each; 105 medium and heavy tanks and 395 light tanks. There were only 2,300 Bren light machine-guns and 70,000 rifles. Visiting beach defences at St Margaret’s Bay in Kent on 26 June, Churchill was told by the local brigadier that he had three anti-tank guns, with six rounds of ammunition apiece. Not one shot must be wasted on practice, said the prime minister. He dismissed a suggestion that London might, like Paris, be declared an open city. The British capital’s dense streets, he said, offered peerless opportunities for local defence. So dire was the shortage of small arms that when a consignment of World War I-vintage rifles arrived from the US on 10 July, Churchill decreed that they must be distributed within forty-eight hours. He rejected a proposal that Britain should try to deter Spain from entering the war by promising talks about the disputed sovereignty of Gibraltar as soon as peace returned. The Spanish, he said, would know full well that if Britain won, there would be no deal.
His wit never faltered. When he heard that six people had suffered heart failure following an air-raid warning, he observed that he himself was more likely to die of overeating. Yet he did not want to perish quite yet, ‘when so many interesting things were happening’. Told that the Luftwaffe had bombed ironworks owned by the family of Stanley Baldwin, arch-appeasing thirties prime minister, he muttered, ‘Very ungrateful of them.’ When his wife Clementine described how she had marched disgusted out of a service at St Martin-in-the-Fields after hearing its preacher deliver a pacifist sermon, Churchill said:‘You ought to have cried “Shame,”desecrating the House of God with lies.’ He then turned to Jock Colville: ‘Tell the Minister of Information with a view to having the man pilloried.’ General Sir Bernard Paget exclaimed to Colville: ‘What a wonderful tonic he is!’
Between June and September 1940, and to a lessening degree for eighteen months thereafter, the minds of the British government and people were fixed upon the threat that Hitler would dispatch an army to invade their island. It is a perennially fascinating question, how far such a peril was ever realistic – or was perceived as such by Winston Churchill. The collapse of France and expulsion of the British Army from the Continent represented the destruction of the strategic foundations upon which British policy was founded. Yet if the German victory in France had been less swift, if the Allies had become engaged in more protracted fighting, the cost in British and French blood would have been vastly greater, while it is hard to imagine any different outcome. John Kennedy was among senior British soldiers who perceived this: ‘We should have had an enormous army in France if we had been allowed to go on long enough, and it would have lost its equip[men]t all the same.’ Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, claimed that on news of the French surrender ‘I went on my knees and thanked God,’ because no further British fighters need be vainly destroyed on the Continent. Only German perceptions of the BEF’s marginal role permitted so many of Britain’s soldiers to escape from the battlefield by sea not once, but twice, in June 1940. No staff college war game would have allowed so indulgent an outcome. Though it was hard to see matters in such terms at the time, if French defeat had been inevitable, Britain escaped from its consequences astonishingly lightly.
The British in June 1940 believed that they were threatened by imminent invasion followed by likely annihilation. Unsurprisingly, they thought themselves the focus of Hitler’s ambitions. Few comprehended his obsession with the East. They could not know that Germany was neither militarily prepared nor psychologically committed to launch a massive amphibious operation across the Channel. The Wehrmacht needed months to digest the conquest of France and the Low Countries. The Nazis’ perception of Britain and its ruling class was distorted by pre-war acquaintance with so many aristocratic appeasers. Now, they confidently awaited the displacement of Churchill’s government by one which acknowledged realities. ‘Are the English giving in? No sure signs visible yet,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary