Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen – we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or – what is perhaps a harder test – a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy – we shall ask for none.
One of the prime minister’s listeners wrote: ‘Radio sets were not then very powerful, and there was always static. Families had to sit near the set, with someone always fiddling with the knobs. It was like sitting round a hearth, with someone poking the fire; and to that hearth came the crackling voice of Winston Churchill.’ Vere Hodgson, a thirty-nine-year-old London woman, wrote: ‘Gradually we came under the spell of that wonderful voice and inspiration. His stature grew larger and larger, until it filled our sky.’ Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband Harold Nicolson, saying that one of Churchill’s speeches ‘sent shivers (not of fear) down my spine. I think that one of the reasons why one is stirred by his Elizabethan phrases is that one feels the whole massive backing of power and resolve behind them, like a great fortress: they are never words for words’ sake.’ Mollie Panter-Downes told readers of the New Yorker: ‘Mr Churchill is the only man in England today who consistently interprets the quiet but completely resolute national mood.’
Isaiah Berlin wrote: ‘Like a great actor – perhaps the last of his kind – upon the stage of history, he speaks his memorable lines with a large, unhurried, and stately utterance in a blaze of light, as is appropriate to a man who knows that his work and his person will remain the objects of scrutiny and judgement to many generations.’ Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam wrote in his diary on 16 July: ‘It is certainly his hour – and the confidence in him is growing on all sides.’ Churchill’s sublime achievement was to rouse the most ordinary people to extraordinary perceptions of their own destiny. Eleanor Silsby, an elderly psychology lecturer living in south London, wrote to a friend in America on 23 July 1940: ‘I won’t go on about the war. But I just want to say that we are proud to have the honour of fighting alone for the things that matter much more than life and death. It makes me hold my chin high to think, not just of being English, but of having been chosen to come at this hour for this express purpose of saving the world…I should never have thought that I could approve of war…There is surprisingly little anger or hate in this business – it is just a job that has to be done…This is Armageddon.’ Churchill was much moved by receiving through the post a box of cigars from a working girl who said that she had saved her wages to buy them for him. One morning at Downing Street, John Martin found himself greeting a woman who had called to offer a £60,000 pearl necklace to the service of the state. Told of this, Churchill quoted Macaulay:
Romans in Rome’s quarrel,
Spared neither land nor gold
Much of the German press editorialised about Churchill’s 14 July speech, describing him as ‘Supreme Warlord of the Plutocracy’. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was among the titles which suggested that his foolish determination to fight to the last would bring down upon London the same fate as had befallen other conquered cities: ‘The unscrupulous rulers of Warsaw did not perceive the consequences of obstinacy until their capital lay in ruins and ashes. Likewise, Rotterdam paid the price for its failure to reach a rational decision, such as saved other Dutch cities and – at the eleventh hour – Paris.’ German forces, Hitler’s people were told, felt well rested after the French campaign, and now stood poised to launch an assault on Britain whenever the Führer gave the order. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe’s air attacks on Churchill’s country, which had hitherto been on a small scale, would escalate dramatically. A quick victory over Britain was to be confidently anticipated. German radio’s English-language propaganda broadcasts conveyed the same message, of imminent doom.
On 19 July Hitler addressed the Reichstag and the world, publicly offering Britain a choice between peace and ‘unending suffering and misery’. Churchill responded: ‘I don’t propose to say anything in reply to Herr Hitler’s speech, not being on speaking terms with him.’ He urged Lord Lothian, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, to press the Americans to fulfil Britain’s earlier request for the ‘loan’ of old destroyers. On 1 August he delivered a magisterial rebuke to the Foreign Office for the elaborate phrasing of its proposed response to a message from the King of Sweden, who was offering to mediate between Britain and Germany. ‘The draft errs,’ he wrote, ‘in trying to be too clever, and to enter into refinements of policy unsuited to the tragic simplicity and grandeur of the times and the issues at stake.’ That day, Hitler issued his Directive No. 17, unleashing the Luftwaffe’s massive air campaign against Britain.
Thus began the events that will define for eternity the image of Britain in the summer of 1940. Massed formations of German bombers with their accompanying fighter escorts droned across blue skies towards Kent and Sussex, to be met by intercepting Hurricanes and Spitfires, tracing white condensation trails through the thin air. The most aesthetically beautiful aircraft the world has ever seen, their grace enhanced in the eyes of posterity by their role as the saviours of freedom, pierced the bomber formations, diving, twisting, banking, hammering fire. Onlookers craned their heads upwards, mesmerised by the spectacle. Shop-workers and housewives, bank clerks and schoolchildren, heard the clatter of machine-guns; found aircraft fragments and empty cartridge cases tinkling onto their streets and littering suburban gardens; sometimes even met fallen aircrew of both sides, stumbling to their front doors.
Stricken planes spewing smoke plunged to the ground in cascades of churned-up earth if their occupants were fortunate enough to crash-land, or exploded into fiery fragments. This was a contest like no other in human experience, witnessed by millions of people continuing humdrum daily lives, bemused by the fact that kettles boiled in kitchens, flowers bloomed in garden borders, newspapers were delivered and honey was served for tea a few thousand feet beneath one of the decisive battlefields of history. Pilots who faced oblivion all day sang in their ‘locals’ that night, if they lived. Their schoolboy slang – ‘wizard prang’ and ‘gone for a Burton’ – passed into the language, fulfilling the observation of a French writer quoted by Dr Johnson: ‘Il y a beaucoup de puerilities dans la guerre.’
Once bombs began to fall on Britain’s cities in August, blast caused a layer of dust to settle upon every surface, casting over the urban fabric of the country a drab greyness which persisted throughout the blitz. Yet islands of seasonal beauty survived. John Colville was struck by the tortoiseshell butterflies fluttering gaily over the lawn behind Downing Street: ‘I shall always associate that garden in summer, the corner of the Treasury outlined against a china-blue sky, with 1940.’ Churchill, intensely vulnerable to sentiment, witnessed many scenes which caused him to succumb. While driving to Chequers one day, he glimpsed a line of people. Motioning the driver to stop, he asked his detective to enquire what they were queuing for. Told that they hoped to buy birdseed, Churchill’s private secretary John Martin noted: ‘Winston wept.’
10 July was later officially designated as the first day of the Battle of Britain, though to the aircrew of both sides it seemed little different from those which preceded and followed it. The next month was characterised by skirmishes over the Channel and south coast, in which the Luftwaffe never lost more than sixteen aircraft