Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) “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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 on 26 June. ‘Churchill still talks big. But then he is not England.’ Some historians have expressed surprise that Hitler prevaricated about invasion. Yet his equivocation was matched by the Allies later in the war. For all the aggressive rhetoric of Churchill and Roosevelt, the British for years nursed hopes that Germany would collapse without an Allied landing in France. The Americans were much relieved that Japan surrendered without being invaded. No belligerent nation risks a massive amphibious operation on a hostile shore until other options have been exhausted. Germany in 1940 proved no exception.

Churchill’s people might have slept a little easier through that summer had they perceived that they were more happily placed to withstand the siege and bombardment of their island than any other conceivable strategic scenario. Their army had been delivered from the need to face the Wehrmacht on the battlefield, and indeed would not conduct major operations on the Continent for more than three years. The Royal Navy, despite its Norwegian and Dunkirk losses, remained an immensely powerful force. A German fleet of towed barges moving across the Channel at a speed of only three or four knots must remain within range of warship guns for many hours. On 1 July, the German navy possessed only one heavy and two light cruisers, together with four destroyers and some E-boats, available for duty as escorts. The Royal Air Force was better organised and equipped to defend Britain against bomber attack than for any other operation of war. If a German army secured a beachhead, Churchill’s land forces were unfit to expel it. But in the summer of 1940 England’s moat, those twenty-one miles of choppy sea between rival chalk cliffs, represented a formidable, probably decisive obstacle to Hitler’s landlubbing army.

Among the government’s first concerns was that of ensuring that the Vichy French fleet did not become available to Hitler. During days of cabinet argument on this issue, Churchill at one moment raised the possibility that the Americans might be persuaded to purchase the warships. In the event, however, a more direct and brutal option was adopted. Horace Walpole wrote two centuries earlier: ‘No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the lengths that may be necessary.’ At Mers-el-Kebir, Oran, on 3 July, French commanders rejected an ultimatum from Admiral Sir James Somerville, commanding the Royal Navy’s Force H offshore, either to scuttle their fleet or sail to join the British. The subsequent bombardment of France’s warships was one of the most ruthless acts by a democracy in the annals of war. It resulted from a decision such as only Churchill would plausibly have taken. Yet it commands the respect of posterity, as it did of Franklin Roosevelt, as an earnest of Britain’s iron determination to sustain the struggle. Churchill told the House of Commons next day: ‘We had hoped until the afternoon that our terms would be accepted without bloodshed.’ As to passing judgement on the action, he left this ‘with confidence to Parliament. I leave it also to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.’

As MPs cheered and waved their order papers in a curiously tasteless display of enthusiasm for an action which, however necessary, had cost 1,250 French lives, Churchill resumed his seat with tears pouring down his face. He, the francophile, perceived the bitter fruits that had been plucked at Oran. He confided later: ‘It was a terrible decision (#litres_trial_promo), like taking the life of one’s own child to save the State.’ He feared that the immediate consequence would be to drive Vichy to join Germany in arms against Britain. But, at a moment when the Joint Intelligence Committee was warning that invasion seemed imminent, he absolutely declined to acquiesce in the risk that French capital ships might screen a German armada.

Pétain’s regime did not declare war, though French bitterness about Oran persisted for years to come. The bombardment was less decisive in its strategic achievement than Churchill claimed, because one French battle-cruiser escaped, and a powerful fleet still lay at Toulon under Vichy orders. But actions sometimes have consequences which remain unperceived for long afterwards. This was the case with the attack on Mers-el-Kebir, followed by the failure two months later of a Free French attempt to take over Dakar, the capital of France’s African colony Senegal. When General Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator, submitted to Hitler his shopping list for joining the Axis, it was headed by a demand that Hitler should transfer to Spain French colonies in Africa. Yet Vichy France’s rejection of both British diplomatic advances and military threats, together with the refusal of most of France’s African colonies to ‘rally’ to De Gaulle, persuaded Hitler to hope that Pétain’s nation would soon become his fighting ally. He therefore refused to satisfy Franco at French expense. The attack on Oran, a painful necessity (#litres_trial_promo), and Dakar, an apparent fiasco, contributed significantly to keeping Spain out of the war.

One part of the British Commonwealth offered no succour to the ‘mother country’: the Irish Free State, bitterly hostile to Britain since it gained independence in 1922, sustained nominal allegiance by a constitutional quirk under the terms of the island’s partition treaty. Churchill had heaped scorn upon Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 surrender of Britain’s Irish ‘Treaty Ports’ to the Dublin government. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1939 he contemplated military action against Eire, as the southern Irish dominion was known. Amid the desperate circumstances of June 1940, however, he responded cautiously to a suggestion by Chamberlain – of all people – that Ireland should be obliged by force to yield up its harbours, which might play a critical role in keeping open Britain’s Atlantic lifeline. Churchill was moved to oppose this by fear of a hostile reaction in the United States. Instead, the British government urged Lord Craigavon, prime minister of the Protestant north, which remained part of the United Kingdom, to seek a meeting with Irish prime minister Éamon de Valera to discuss the defence of their common island. Craigavon, like most of his fellow Ulstermen, loathed the Catholic southerners. He dismissed this notion out of hand.

Yet in late June, London presented a remarkable and radical secret proposal to Dublin: Britain would make a principled commitment to a post-war united Ireland in return for immediate access to Irish ports and bases. Britain’s ambassador in Dublin reported De Valera’s stony response. The Taoiseach would commit himself only to the neutrality of a united Ireland though he said unconvincingly that he ‘might’ enter the war after the British government made a public declaration of commitment to union.

The British government nonetheless urged Dublin to conduct talks with the Belfast regime about a prospective union endorsed by Britain, in return for Eire’s belligerence. Chamberlain told the cabinet: ‘I do not believe that the Ulster government would refuse to play their part to bring about so favourable a development.’ De Valera again declined to accept deferred payment. MacDonald cabled London, urging Churchill to offer personal assurances. The prime minister wrote in the margin of this message: ‘But all contingent upon (#litres_trial_promo) Ulster agreeing & S. Ireland coming into the war.’

On 26 June Chamberlain belatedly reported these exchanges to Craigavon, saying: ‘You will observe that the document (#litres_trial_promo) takes the form of an enquiry only, because we have not felt it right to approach you officially with a request for your assent unless we had first a binding assurance from Eire that they would, if the assent were given, come into the war…If therefore they refuse the plan you are in no way committed, and if they accept you are still free to make your own comments or objections as may think fit.’ The Ulsterman cabled back: ‘Am profoundly shocked and disgusted (#litres_trial_promo) by your letter making suggestions so far-reaching behind my back and without any preconsultation with me. To such treachery to loyal Ulster I will never be a party.’ Chamberlain, in turn, responded equally angrily to what he perceived as Craigavon’s insufferable parochialism. He concluded: ‘Please remember the serious nature (#litres_trial_promo) of the situation which requires that every effort be made to meet it.’

The war cabinet, evidently unimpressed by Craigavon’s anger, now strengthened its proposal to Dublin: ‘This declaration would (#litres_trial_promo) take the form of a solemn undertaking that the Union is to become at an early date an accomplished fact from which there shall be no turning back.’ When Craigavon was informed, he responded: ‘Your telegram only confirms my confidential information and conviction De Valera is under German dictation and far past reasoning with. He may purposely protract negotiations till enemy has landed. Strongly advocate immediate naval occupation of harbours and military advance south.’

Craigavon asserted in a personal letter to Churchill that Ulster would only participate in an All-Ireland Defence Force ‘if British martial law is imposed throughout the island’. The two men met in London on 7 July. There is no record of their conversation. It is reasonable to assume that it was frosty, but by then Churchill could assuage the Ulsterman’s fears. Two days earlier, De Valera had finally rejected the British plan. He, like many Irishmen, was convinced that Britain was doomed to lose the war. He doubted Churchill’s real willingness to coerce Craigavon. If he ever seriously contemplated accepting London’s terms, he also probably feared that once committed to belligerence, Ireland would become a British puppet.

Churchill makes no mention of the Irish negotiation in his war memoirs. Since the British offer to Dublin was sensational, this suggests that recollection of it brought no pleasure to the prime minister. Given De Valera’s implacable hostility, the Irish snub was inevitable. But it represented a massive miscalculation by the Irish leader. Ernest Bevin wrote in confidence to an academic friend who was urging a deal on a united Ireland: ‘There are difficulties (#litres_trial_promo) which appear at the moment almost insurmountable. You see, De Valera’s policy is, even if we get a united Ireland, he would still remain neutral. On that, he is immovable. Were it not for this attitude, I believe a solution would be easy…You may rest assured that we are watching every possible chance.’ If Ireland had entered the war on the Allied side at any time, even after the US became a belligerent in December 1941 and Allied victory was assured, American cash would have flooded into the country, perhaps advancing Ireland’s economic takeoff by two generations.

The exchanges of July were not quite the end of the story. In December 1940, Churchill suggested in a letter to President Roosevelt that ‘If the Government of Eire (#litres_trial_promo) would show its solidarity with the democracies of the English-speaking world…a Council Of Defence of all Ireland could be set up out of which the unity of the island would probably in some form or other emerge after the war.’ Here was a suggestion much less explicit than that of the summer, obviously modified by the diminution of British peril. It is impossible to know whether, if De Valera had acceded to the British proposal of June 1940, Churchill would indeed have obliged the recalcitrant Ulster Protestants to accept union with the south. Given his highhanded treatment of other dominions and colonies in the course of the war – not least the surrender of British overseas bases to the United States – it seems by no means impossible. So dire was Britain’s predicament, of such vital significance in the U-boat war were Irish ports and airfields, that it seemed worth almost any price to secure them.

Churchill threw himself into the struggle to prepare his island to resist invasion. He decreed that if the Germans landed, all measures including poison gas were to be employed against them. On 6 July he inspected an exercise in Kent. ‘Winston was in great form (#litres_trial_promo),’ Ironside wrote in his diary, ‘and gave us lunch at Chartwell in his cottage. Very wet but nobody minded at all.’ A consignment of 250,000 rifles and 300 old 75mm field guns arrived from America – poor weapons, but desperately welcome. Ironside expected the German invasion on 9 July, and was surprised when it did not come. On 10 July, instead, the Luftwaffe launched its first big raid on Britain, by seventy aircraft against south Wales dockyards. Churchill knew this was the foretaste of a heavy and protracted air assault. Two days later he visited RAF Hurricane squadrons at Kenley, to the south of London. Straining to harness every aid to public morale, he demanded that military bands should play in the streets. He urged attention to gas masks, because he feared that Hitler would unleash chemical weapons. He resisted the evacuation of children from cities, and deplored the shipment of the offspring of the rich to sanctuary in the US. He argued vigorously against over-stringent rationing, and deplored pessimism wherever it was encountered. Dill, less than two months head of the army, was already provoking his mistrust: the CIGS ‘strikes me as tired (#litres_trial_promo), disheartened and over-impressed with the might of Germany’, wrote the prime minister to Eden. In Churchill’s eyes, all through the long months which followed, defeatism was the only crime beyond forgiveness.

On 19 July, Ironside was dismissed as C-in-C Home Forces, and replaced by Sir Alan Brooke. Ironside wanted to meet an invasion with a thin crust of coastal defences, and to rely chiefly upon creating strong lines inland. Brooke, by contrast, proposed swift counterattacks with mobile forces. Brooke and Churchill were surely correct in perceiving that if the Germans secured a lodgement and airfields in south-east England, the battle for Britain would be irretrievably lost. Inland defences were worthless, save for sustaining a sense of purpose among those responsible for building them.

Peter Fleming argued in his later history of the period that although the British went through the motions of anticipating invasion, they did not in their hearts believe in such an eventuality, because they had no historical experience of it: ‘They paid lip-service (#litres_trial_promo) to reality. They took the precautions which the Government advised, made the sacrifices which it required of them and worked like men possessed…But…they found it impossible, however steadfastly they gazed into the future, to fix in a satisfactory focus the terrible contingencies which invasion was expected to bring forth.’ Fleming added a perceptive observation: ‘The menace of invasion (#litres_trial_promo) was at once a tonic and a drug…The extreme and disheartening bleakness of their long-term prospects was obscured by the melodramatic nature of the predicament in which…the fortunes of war had placed them.’

Churchill understood the need to mobilise the British people to action for its own sake, rather than allowing them time to brood, to contemplate dark realities. He himself thought furiously about the middle distance. ‘When I look around to see how we can win the war,’ he wrote to Beaverbrook on 10 July, ‘I see only one sure path. We have no continental army which can defeat the German military power. The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and probably Africa to draw upon. Should he be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.’ Likewise at Chequers on 14 July: ‘Hitler must invade or fail (#litres_trial_promo). If he fails he is bound to go east, and fail he will.’ Churchill had no evidential basis in intelligence for his assertion that the Germans might lunge towards Russia. At this time only a remarkable instinct guided him, shared by few others save Britain’s notoriously erratic ambassador in Moscow, the Independent Labour MP Sir Stafford Cripps. Not until March 1941 (#litres_trial_promo), three months before the event, did British intelligence decide that a German invasion of the Soviet Union was likely.

As for aircraft production, while fighters were the immediate need, the prime minister urged the creation of the largest possible bomber force. This, a desperate policy born out of desperate circumstances, absolute lack of any plausible alternative, would achieve destructive maturity only years later, when victory was assured by other means. Churchill appointed Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, the brainless old hero of the 1918 Zeebrugge raid, to become Director of Combined Operations, with a brief to prepare to launch raids on the Continent of Europe. He wanted no pinprick fiascos, he said, but instead attacks by five to ten thousand men. He ordered the establishment of Special Operations Executive, SOE, under the direction of Hugh Dalton as Minister of Economic Warfare, with a mandate to ‘Set Europe ablaze.’ He endorsed De Gaulle as the voice and leader of Free France. Brooke, at Gosport with Churchill on 17 July, found him ‘in wonderful spirits (#litres_trial_promo) and full of offensive plans for next summer’. Most of the commitments made in those days remained ineffectually implemented for years to come. Yet they represented earnests for the future that inspired Churchill’s colleagues; which was, of course, exactly as he intended.

And above all in those days, there were his words. ‘Faith is given to us to help and comfort us when we stand in awe before the unfurling scroll of human destiny,’ he told the British people in a broadcast on 14 July, Bastille Day, in which he recalled attending a magnificent military parade in Paris just a year before. ‘And I proclaim my faith that some of us will live to see a Fourteenth of July when a liberated France will once again rejoice in her greatness and her glory.’ He continued:

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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) (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) in England today who consistently interprets the quiet but completely resolute national mood.’

Isaiah Berlin wrote: ‘Like a great actor (#litres_trial_promo) – 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 (#litres_trial_promo) – 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 (#litres_trial_promo). 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.

FOUR The Battle of Britain (#ulink_89c24c75-7269-58f9-a507-c190ef88bb21)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo).’

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 in a day’s combat – on 25 July – and Fighter Command no more than fifteen. Churchill insisted that coastal convoys should continue to sail the Narrows, partly to assert British rights of navigation, partly to provoke the Luftwaffe into action on what were deemed favourable terms for the RAF. On 11 August, attrition sharply increased: thirty British aircraft were shot down for thirty-five German. In the month thereafter, Goering launched his major assault on Fighter Command, its airfields, control centres and radar stations. Between 12 and 23 August, the RAF lost 133 fighters in action, a further forty-four to mishaps, while the Luftwaffe lost 299 aircraft to all causes.

By early autumn, British casualties and damage to installations had reached critical proportions. Among Dowding’s squadron commanders, eleven out of forty-six were killed or wounded in July and August, along with thirty-nine of ninety-seven flight commanders. One Fighter Command pilot, twenty-one-year-old George Barclay of 249 squadron, a Norfolk parson’s son, wrote after the bitter battles of 7 September: ‘The odds today (#litres_trial_promo) have been unbelievable (and we are all really very shaken!)…There are bombs and things falling around tonight and a terrific gun barrage. Has a blitz begun? The wing-commander’s coolness is amazing and he does a lot to keep up our morale – very necessary tonight.’ As in every battle, not all participants showed the stuff of heroes. After repeated German bombings of the RAF’s forward airfield at Manston, ground crews huddled in its air-raid shelters and rejected pleas to emerge and service Hurricanes. The work was done by off-duty Blenheim night-fighter crews.

The prime minister intently followed the progress of each day’s clashes. The Secret Intelligence Service warned that a German landing in Britain was imminent. Yet it was not easy to maintain the British people at the highest pitch of expectancy. On 3 August, Churchill felt obliged to issue a statement:‘The Prime Minister wishes it to be known that the possibility of German attempts at invasion has by no means passed away.’ He carried this spirit into his own household. Downing Street and the underground Cabinet War Rooms were protected by Royal Marine pensioners, Chequers by a Guards company. The prime minister took personal charge of several practice alerts against the possibility of German paratroop landings in St James’s Park. ‘This sounds very peculiar (#litres_trial_promo) today, but was taken quite seriously by us all in the summer of 1940,’ a war cabinet secretariat officer recalled.

Churchill practised with a revolver and with his own Mannlicher rifle on a range at Chequers, entirely in earnest and not without pleasurable anticipation. It was odd that the Germans, having used special forces effectively in the May blitzkrieg on the Continent, never thereafter showed much interest in their possibilities. A direct assault on Churchill in 1940, most plausibly by a paratroop landing at Chequers, could have paid handsome dividends. Britain was fortunate that such piratical ventures loomed far less prominently in Hitler’s mind, and in Wehrmacht doctrine, than in Churchill’s imagination. In the summer of 1940 the Germans had yet to understand how pivotal to Britain’s war effort was the person of the prime minister.

The supply of aircraft to Fighter Command was a critical factor. While propaganda lauded the achievements of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, in Whitehall its conduct by Lord Beaverbrook provoked bitter criticism. For some weeks he ran the department from his private residence, Stornoway House in Cleveland Row, behind the Ritz Hotel. It is easy to perceive why many people, Clementine Churchill prominent among them, deplored the press baron, then sixty-one. He was a former appeaser, who had secretly subsidised the pre-war political career of Sir Samuel Hoare, most egregious of Chamberlain’s ministers. In January 1940 Beaverbrook addressed the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, about a possible peace offer to Germany. On 6 May he asserted in his own Daily Express that London would not be bombed, and that the Germans would not attack the Maginot Line. Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess later told Beaverbrook: ‘Hitler likes you very much.’ The historian G.M. Young suggested that Beaverbrook looked like a doctor struck off for performing an illegal operation. It was once said of his newspapers that they never espoused a cause which was both honourable and successful. The King opposed his inclusion in the cabinet, but among all men Churchill chose this old colleague from the 1917–18 Lloyd George government as his luncheon companion on 10 May 1940.

Beaverbrook cast a spell over Churchill which remained unbroken by his old friend’s petulance, disloyalty and outrageous mischief-making. The Canadian-born magnate’s command of wealth, such as the prime minister had always craved, impressed him. Churchill recognised in ‘dear Max’ a fellow original, full of impish fun, which was scantily available in Downing Street that summer. It is often remarked that Churchill had acolytes, but few intimates. More than any other person save his wife, Beaverbrook eased the loneliness of the prime minister’s predicament and responsibilities. Churchill’s belief in his old comrade’s fitness for government was excessive. But who among Beaverbrook’s cabinet colleagues was more blessed with dynamism and decision, such as seemed vital to meet the challenges of 1940?

As a minister, Beaverbrook trampled on air marshals, browbeat industrial chiefs, spurned consultation and cast aside procedure in pursuit of the simple objective of boosting fighter output. He ruled by row. Jock Colville once suggested that Beaverbrook took up more of Churchill’s time than Hitler. The prime minister himself remarked a resemblance between Beaverbrook and the film star Edward

G. Robinson, most notable for his portrayals of gangsters. It is hard to dispute that Beaverbrook was a monster. The Royal Air Force detested him. Much of his success in increasing aircraft output was achieved in consequence of decisions and commitments made before he took office. Yet for a brief season he deserved gratitude for injecting into the key element of British weapons production an urgency which matched the needs of the hour. He was supported by three great civil servants – Eaton Griffiths, Edmund Compton and Archibald Rowlands – together with Sir Charles Craven, former managing director of Vickers Armstrong, and Patrick Hennessy, forty-one-year-old boss of Ford at Dagenham. His other key prop, and sometimes adversary, was Air Marshal Sir Wilfred Freeman, who loathed Beaverbrook as a man, but grudgingly conceded his usefulness that summer.

Daily pressures upon the prime minister were unrelenting. The war cabinet met 108 times in the ninety-two days between 10 May and 31 July. His black dispatch box contained a pile of papers which seemed never to diminish, ‘a farrago of operational (#litres_trial_promo), civil, political and scientific matters’. Overriding War Office objections, he promoted Maj.Gen. Jefferis, a clever soldier engaged in weapons experimental work, and ordered that he should report directly to Lindemann at the Cabinet Office. He insisted that the maverick armoured enthusiast Maj.Gen. Percy Hobart should be given suitable employment, overruling Dill’s objections with the assertion that he should remember that not only good boys help to win wars: ‘It is the sneaks (#litres_trial_promo) and stinkers as well.’ He harassed the service chiefs in support of one of ‘the Prof’s’ most foolish personal initiatives, aerial rocket deployments against enemy aircraft. Sir Hugh Dowding of Fighter Command wanted his pilots to kill German aircrew who took to their parachutes. Churchill, recoiling from what he perceived as dishonourable conduct, would have none of this. Travelling with Roger Keyes at the end of July, he told the admiral that he had ‘many detractors’ as chief of combined operations. Keyes responded tartly: ‘So had you, but you are now there in spite of it.’ Churchill said: ‘There are no competitors for my job now – I didn’t get it until they had got into a mess.’

Beyond pressing the urgency of fighter production, Churchill made few tactical interventions in the Battle of Britain, but one of the most justly celebrated took place in the Downing Street cabinet room on 21 June. There was fierce controversy between Lindemann and Sir Henry Tizard, chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, about a suggestion from air intelligence that the Luftwaffe intended to use electronic beams to guide its night raiders to British targets. Tizard dismissed the feasibility of such a technique. Churchill summoned him, together with Lindemann and senior airmen, to a meeting attended by twenty-eight-year-old scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones. It soon became obvious that Jones alone understood the issue. Though awed by finding himself in such company, he said to the prime minister: ‘Would it help, sir, if I told you the story right from the start?’ Churchill was initially taken aback, then said: ‘Well, yes, it would!’ Jones spent twenty minutes (#litres_trial_promo) explaining how his own researches, aided by ‘Ultra’ German signals decrypted by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park – still fragmentary at this stage of the war – had led him to an understanding of the Luftwaffe’s navigational aids. Churchill, characteristically, found himself paraphrasing in his mind lines from the parodic nineteenth-century folklore collection The Ingoldsby Legends: ‘But now one Mr Jones/Comes forth and depones/That fifteen years since, he had heard certain groans.’

When Jones finished, Tizard expressed renewed scepticism. Churchill overruled him, and ordered that the young scientist should be given facilities to explore the German beams. Initially much dismayed by Jones’s revelations, he thrilled when the young ‘boffin’ told him that, once wavelengths were identified, the transmissions could be jammed. Jones himself, of course, was enchanted by the prime minister’s receptiveness: ‘Here was strength (#litres_trial_promo), resolution, humour, readiness to listen, to ask the searching question and, when convinced, to act.’ The beams were indeed jammed. Jones became one of the outstanding British intelligence officers of the war. Tizard’s career was, alas, virtually destroyed by his misjudgement. He was an old enemy of Lindemann, who now possessed ammunition with which to discredit him. Though a man of exceptional ability who had made a critical contribution to the creation of Britain’s radar defences, never again did Tizard wield important influence. But the ‘beams’ episode showed Churchill at his best: accessible, imaginative, penetrating, decisive, and always suggestible about technological innovation.

From the summer of 1940 onwards, decrypts of German signals assumed a steadily rising importance to the British war effort. Selected samples codenamed Boniface were delivered to Churchill daily, in a special box to which even the private secretaries were denied a key. The chiefs of staff deplored his direct access to Ultra, arguing that he often derived false impressions from raw intelligence, and misjudged the significance of enemy exchanges. Yet Ultra armed the prime minister for the direction of the war in a fashion unknown to any other national leader in history. It played a critical role in guiding Churchill’s own perceptions of strategy, both for good and ill, and fortified his confidence in overruling commanders.

The Bletchley Park codebreaking operation, still in its infancy in 1940, was the greatest British achievement of the war, and from 1941 became the cornerstone of its intelligence operations. The Secret Intelligence Service was directed by Brigadier Sir Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, a quintessential officer and gentleman, former president of ‘Pop’ and captain of the cricket XI at Eton, Life Guardsman and member of White’s club. Menzies owed his appointment to Halifax. His record was more impressive as a Whitehall intriguer than as a spymaster. SIS never gained significant ‘humint’ – agent intelligence – about the Axis high command. Before Ultra got into its stride, most of Menzies’s assessments of – for instance – German intentions in 1940–41 were wildly mistaken. He had little to do with the pre-war development of Bletchley Park, but by a skilful coup gained administrative control of its operations. He made it his business to deliver personally to the prime minister the most delectable codebreakers’ delicacies, and in consequence was always a welcome visitor at Downing Street. All national leaders gain a frisson of excitement from access to secret intelligence. This was especially and understandably so of Churchill. Menzies, purveyor of Bletchley’s golden eggs, gained exaggerated credit as owner of the goose.

Amid the great issues of national defence there were constitutional responsibilities, including regular meetings with the monarch. The King and Queen were ‘a little ruffled (#litres_trial_promo)’, Jock Colville learned, ‘by the offhand way he treated them – says he will come at six, puts it off until 6.30 by telephone, then comes at seven’. Only a king would dare to resent his prime minister’s tardiness when Churchill had to supervise the creation of the Takoradi aircraft ferry route across Africa to Egypt, visit blitzed airfields, bully the Treasury into paying compensation for private homes destroyed by bombs, and write at length in his own hand to Neville Chamberlain, now stricken with the cancer that would kill him within three months. There were certainly difficulties, the prime minister acknowledged to his predecessor in a letter of 31 August: ‘however when all is said and done I must say I feel pretty good about this war’. But Churchill was exasperated on 10 August when Sir Stafford Cripps, the Moscow ambassador, submitted to him a paper detailing proposals on post-war reconstruction. There would come a time for such things, but it was not the summer of 1940. Only a fool could have thought otherwise.

Meanwhile, Britain was running out of money. The war was costing £55 million a week, and Washington was implacable in its demands for immediate cash payment for every ton of weapons and supplies shipped across the Atlantic. Kingsley Wood, the chancellor, suggested melting down the nation’s gold wedding rings, which would raise £20 million. The prime minister said that the Treasury should hold back from such a drastic measure, unless it became necessary to make a parade of it to shame the United States. On 16 August he visited Fighter Command’s 11 Group Operations Room, and intently watched progress of the day’s fighting on the huge plotting board. On the way back to Chequers in his car, ‘Pug’ Ismay, his chief of staff, made some remark. Churchill said: ‘Don’t speak to me (#litres_trial_promo). I have never been so moved.’ After a few minutes’ silence he leaned forward and said, ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’ Ismay wrote: ‘The words burned into my brain.’ That day, the Combined Intelligence Centre reported its belief that Hitler would make no decision about invasion until the outcome of the air battle became clear. On 24 August the first German bombs fell on outer London, and Fighter Command’s airfields were again badly hit.

Sunday, 1 September, yet another day when intelligence suggested that invasion might come, passed without incident. On the 3rd, for the second time the war cabinet met in the new underground Central War Room. Churchill declared it to be ‘lamentable’ that only 500,000 rifles were scheduled to be produced by British manufacturers before the end of 1941. On 5 September he used the same adjective to deplore the ‘passivity’ to which the Royal Navy seemed reduced when it declined to bombard new German batteries at Cap Gris Nez, only twenty miles from the English south coast. He told Cunningham, Mediterranean C-in-C, that the supposed vulnerability of his fleet to Italian aircraft was ‘exaggerated’. He urged the swift construction of landing craft to facilitate the raids on enemy shores he was so impatient to launch.

A wag in the War Office discovered in the Book of Job a description of a warhorse which the generals thought entirely fitting to their political master: ‘He paweth in the valley (#litres_trial_promo), and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage…He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.’ Yet while Churchill never disdained the gestures and symbols of warriorhood, he strove also for substance. Each night, he told Colville, ‘I try myself by court martial (#litres_trial_promo) to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground – anyone can go through the motions – but something really effective.’