Gandhi & Churchill (82 page)

One who did not was Kingsley Wood, the minister of air. Drab and unprepossessing, one of the worst speakers in the House of Commons, his chief qualification for office had been his loyalty first to Baldwin and then to Chamberlain. He knew almost nothing about war or airplanes. But the morning of May 9 he sat down to lunch with Churchill and Anthony Eden and announced that if Chamberlain had to go, then Winston must take his place.
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It was an extraordinary admission, an indication that the conventional wisdom was starting to turn. It must have echoed in Churchill’s mind when he received the summons that afternoon to meet Chamberlain in the Cabinet Room.

Chamberlain and Lord Halifax were both present when he arrived. The prime minister said there was no hope of forming a National Government; he would have to resign. His “demeanor was cool, unruffled, and seemingly quite detached from the personal aspect of the affair,” Churchill remembered later. The only question was who should replace him as prime minister.

Chamberlain looked at both men across the table. Then he asked with a sharp glance, “Can you see any reason, Winston, why in these days a peer should not be prime minister?”

Churchill realized at once that this was a subtle trap.
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If he answered no, then the mantle of power would almost certainly fall on Halifax. The man who had bested him over India still enjoyed the full faith and confidence of the Tory party, but he would be as disastrous a war leader as Chamberlain had been. On the other hand, if Winston answered yes, it would reveal his ambition for the post himself—while seeming to use a minor constitutional point to secure it.

It was a no-win situation. So Churchill decided to say nothing. For a full two minutes the room was silent—“it certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemorations of Armistice Day,” Churchill remembered. He gazed out the window at the Horse Guards Parade and waited for someone else to break the spell.
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Finally Halifax cleared his throat. For the second time in his life, he performed a purely selfless act to protect his country. The first had propelled Gandhi to national leadership; the second would do the same for Winston.

“It would be a hopeless position,” Halifax said, for him to accept the prime ministership. “If I am not in charge of the war operations, and if I didn’t lead the House [of Commons], I should be a cipher. I think Winston is a better choice.”

Churchill, as Halifax sardonically put it in his notes after the historic discussion, “did
not
demur.”
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A few minutes later the Tory chief whip entered, and the four men settled down to the business of planning the next government. At around six that afternoon Chamberlain went to Buckingham Palace to submit his resignation. An hour later Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill went to the palace, where King George VI (no doubt with some misgivings) spoke the fateful words, “I want you to form a government.”
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Churchill was prime minister. Many were horrified; some despaired. Chamberlain and Halifax had “weakly surrendered to a half-breed American,
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” R. A. Butler railed to John Colville. Another parliamentarian wrote in his diary, “Perhaps the darkest day in English history…I sat numb with misery.”
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Perhaps no one was more surprised than Churchill himself. “It was a marvel,” as he remarked later. By engineering a major military disaster, he had managed to propel himself to the leadership of his country.

Yet in a sense his entire life had been preparation for this moment. At sixty-five years of age, he was the one member of the government who had personally served in
both
of Britain’s previous full-scale wars: the conflict with the Boers and the Great War. He was the only figure who had served in a War Cabinet twice against the German foe, once in 1914 and again in 1939. Even as he drew up the list for cabinet posts and decided which Labour and Liberal figures would be invited to join his National Government, his mind was already tackling the immense task of deciding on his war strategy and its twin objectives.

The first aim was to defeat Hitler—at whatever cost. On May 10 this aim was not only a strategic goal but an imperative. That same day Hitler had hurled his forces into Holland and Belgium. The war in the west had begun; and even while, under steady German air attack, the Royal Navy was extracting the last of the Norway expedition, German panzers were executing their breakthrough in France.

Churchill spent his first weeks in office in a cyclone of disasters. By May 27 it was clear that France was doomed. The French army, which Winston only four years earlier had thanked God for serving as a bulwark against Hitler, collapsed. The British Expeditionary Force had to withdraw to the beaches at Dunkirk to be evacuated. With a huge heroic effort, the Royal Navy managed to save the British Army; but as Winston noted in his speech afterward, “Wars are not won by evacuations.”
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By the third week of June 1940 the war was very close to being lost. The French sued for an armistice. Britain and Churchill found themselves standing alone against the Nazi war machine. Churchill’s goal of defeating Hitler had to take a dramatic detour to achieve a new goal: saving Great Britain itself.

Even at this hour Churchill did not forget the imperative to protect Britain’s empire: in his later famous phrase, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” To his mind, this goal was not separate from that of defeating Hitler. They were part and parcel of the same thing. Just as Hitler represented the forces of darkness, so the British Empire represented the forces of light, even in India. The peoples of the empire held “the title deeds of progress” and of “Christian civilization,” which to Churchill meant the moral standards that governed modern life.
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“The British Empire stands invincible,” he told a jammed House of Commons on August 20 after the most intense attack yet on British airfields by German bombers. By standing firm against Hitler, he proclaimed, the empire “will kindle again the spark of hope in the breasts of hundreds of millions of down-trodden or despairing men and women throughout Europe,” which will “presently [become a] cleansing and devouring flame.” Countries “bred under institutions of freedom” will “prove more enduring and resilient than anything that can be got out of the most efficiently enforced mechanical discipline.”
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Gandhi had a term for such spiritual power: satyagraha. To Churchill, the British Empire was not the negation of soul force but its living embodiment.

He never doubted its ultimate victory. He spoke of the empire as an irresistible force, almost a force of nature, and it was encapsulated in his notion of the English-speaking peoples. It included the Dominions; it included America, where President Franklin Roosevelt had made the first tentative gestures toward support of Britain in its most desperate hour. He had concluded his August 20 speech with a reference to future Anglo-American cooperation as a mighty river like the Mississippi: “Let it roll on!” he boomed. In the drive back to Number 10 afterward, John Colville could hear him singing “Old Man River” from the backseat.
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Churchill also believed in the empire in narrower terms, “Imperial England, beribboned and bestarred and splendid, living in majestic profusion up till the very moment of war.”
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Maintaining that empire intact was also a crucial goal for Churchill, albeit a far more precarious one. His fear was that Britain’s momentary weakness might have ripple effects across the Dominions, across the Middle East, and into the very heart of that empire in India.

India was never far from his thoughts, even in the worst moments. His second wartime broadcast on November 12, 1939, when he was still First Lord of the Admiralty, had mentioned that “the hundreds of millions of people in India and China, whatever their other feelings, would regard with undisguised dread a Nazi triumph, well knowing what their fate would be.” After Dunkirk, the Indian Army was crucial to his plans for rebuilding the British Army—Indian units would replace British forces in Palestine. Even in that famous speech of August 20, 1940, while the Battle of Britain raged in the skies overhead and he paid tribute to the Royal Air Force by saying “never in the field of human endeavor was so much owed by so many to so few,” he added, “Even if Hitler were at the gates of India, it would profit him nothing,” as long as Great Britain stood firm.
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Three weeks earlier he had made his first major decision as prime minister regarding India. On July 22 he learned of the Congress’s September offer. The earlier news of conflict between the Congress and the Muslim League had been music to his ears. Sir John Simon reported that Churchill’s “masculine and simple view” was that the conflict worked to keep Britain in charge in India, and said “[Churchill] hoped it would be bitter and bloody and was glad that we had made the suggestion of Dominion status which was acting as a cat among the pigeons.”
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Lord Zetland had resigned as secretary of state for India as soon as he learned Winston was to be prime minister: he knew his moderate and conciliatory approach would no longer find favor at Number 10. Linlithgow and the new secretary of state, Leo Amery, would soon find out the same thing.

That month was one of the tensest yet. On July 3 Churchill risked all-out war with France’s new Vichy government when he decided to order British warships to fire on the fleet of his former ally at Mersel-Kebir. On July 10 the British and Italian fleets clashed in the Mediterranean, and on the seventeenth Winston went down to Portsmouth to visit the coastal defenses, as military experts tried to guess where and when a German invasion would come. Having to deal with unwelcome news from India angered him. He told his secretary that Congress’s offer was “long-winded as ever and a piece of hypocrisy from beginning to end.”
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Even more infuriating, Linlithgow and Amery had been talking behind his back.

Leo Amery was as much an imperialist as Winston, perhaps even more of one. For years he had dreamed of transforming the empire from an agglomeration of separate territories into “an arch of British influence stretching…from Egypt through the Middle East to India through Southeast Asia,” with the Dominions (South Africa, Australia, New Zealand) as its foundation.
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Bereft of racial prejudice, he saw no reason why India should not join them.
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But he found Churchill’s views on the subject “romantic, false and dangerous,” and they had fought bitterly over the India Bill. Amery realized that the attachment to the Raj was one of Winston’s “deepest and sincerest emotions.” But “I am by no means sure whether on this subject of India he is quite sane,” and he speculated that “India, or any form of self-government for colored peoples, raises in him an uncontrollable complex.”
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This suspicion was confirmed on July 26. Amery had been pushing Linlithgow to make some encouraging statement about Indian independence one year after the war, in order to meet the Congress demands halfway. As secretary of state for India, Amery no more consulted with the cabinet on this matter than Winston’s father might have done. When he learned of it, however, Churchill exploded. John Colville noted in his diary that there was “a bloody row” between the two Old Harrovians, and he worried that Amery might have to resign. (He did not.) Churchill, meanwhile, sent a furious signal to Linlithgow.
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“[Amery] has shown me the telegrams which have been passed,” it said, “and for the first time I realize what has been going on.” Churchill asked that he be allowed to show all the cables to the rest of the cabinet: “It does not seem to me possible to withhold the facts from my colleagues.” In the meantime, he said, the cabinet was committed to the policy of the past: it would make no promise about postwar independence and no promise (as Amery wanted) of a constitutional assembly for India. He wound up his telegram by pleading that the war precluded any decisions about India. “You must remember that we are here facing constant threat of invasion,” he wrote. “In these circumstances immense constitutional departures cannot be effectively discussed in Parliament and only by the Cabinet to the detriment of matters touching the final life and safety of the State.” Churchill had John Colville hand-carry the message over to the India Office so that Amery would not see it. “[I] had to suborn one of the men in the telegram dispatch room,” Colville confided in his diary, “and cypher the telegram with him.”
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And so, without anyone except Amery and Linlithgow noticing it, another road was left untaken—while events moved closer to a final collision between Churchill and Gandhi. The government would not budge; Congress’s offer to support the war effort had been rejected. Certainly one cannot blame Churchill too much—he had other things on his mind. The outcome of the Battle of Britain still hung in the balance. He now firmly believed Hitler could be defeated only with the help of the United States and Russia, but he still had no idea how.

He had another difficulty that summer: despite his national popularity, the majority of his Tory colleagues still distrusted him and even despised him. One member wrote at the end of May that Churchill was “fighting a war on two fronts, against Hitler and against enemies much nearer at home,” meaning his own party. Ill feeling from the battle over India, a sense that Churchill had “betrayed” Chamberlain, hope that Halifax might still replace him, lingered in Tory ranks and leadership (as historian Andrew Roberts argues) until well into the following summer. Ironically, Churchill’s staunchest supporters sat on the Labour and Liberal benches.
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