The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (27 page)

The difference between Churchill and others was that he acted on his insights. He not only meditated on what was happening; he tried to change it. Most politicians go with the flow of events. They see what seems inevitable, and then try to align themselves with destiny—and then (usually) try to present matters as well as they can and try in some feeble way to claim credit for whatever has occurred.

Churchill had a few fixed ideas about what
should
happen: the preservation of the British Empire, the encouragement of
democracy, the boosting of British ‘prestige’—and then he used his Herculean strength to bend the course of events so as to conform to those ideals. Think of him dredging and damming a river so as to find his father’s watch.

That was why he was associated with so many epic cock-ups—because he dared to try to change the entire shape of history. He was the man who burst the cabin door and tried to wrestle the controls of the stricken plane. He was the large protruding nail on which destiny snagged her coat.

The last thing Britain or the world needed in 1940 was someone who was going to sit back and let things unfold. It needed someone with almost superhuman will and courage, to interpose themselves between the world and disaster. He spoke of his relief when he took office in 1940, because this time—unlike with Gallipoli or the Russian bungle—he had full authority to direct events; which is why he chose to be both Prime Minister and Minister of Defence.

Our argument so far has been that Churchill, in comparison to his rivals at home and abroad, was like some unbeatable card in a game of Star Wars Top Trumps. He was the best for work rate, for rhetorical skills, for humour, for insight. He beat his rivals for technical originality and sheer blind bravery. If you have ever played that excellent game, you will know what I mean when I say that he was also the character with the greatest ‘Force Factor’. It is time to see how he played that card in the Second World War.

CHAPTER 16

AN ICY RUTHLESSNESS

T
he French sailors had no time to get angry and barely a moment to prepare their souls for the end. When the bombardment began at 5.54 p.m. on 3 July 1940 the dominant feeling was surely one of total disbelief. Those were British ships—the very ones they had cheered when they arrived in the morning. They were British sailors; allies—the same people they had been out with on shore leave in Gibraltar, painting the town red.

They were meant to be friends, for God’s sake—and yet for ten minutes those friends sent down a rain of death: a shelling that is still recognised as one of the most concentrated big-gun naval barrages in history. Out of the 15-inch muzzles of HMS
Hood
—then the largest battleship ever built—came the first salvo, and at 2,500 mph those three-quarter-ton projectiles described their elegant arcs across the azure sky.

The light was ideal. The targets were motionless. The conditions were altogether perfect. Then the other British ships joined in, and the explosions became so loud that the Frenchmen who survived
reported a bleeding from their ears. HMS
Valiant
fired her guns, along with HMS
Resolution
.

The gunners toiled in the heat, sweat running down their half-naked forms, firing and firing until the colossal steel tubes were red hot. Soon they were getting their range, starting to find the French ships nicely. Since the mouth of the harbour had just been mined by British planes, there was nothing the French could do. As one British sailor said many years later, it was like ‘
shooting fish in a barrel’.

On the French side, witnesses spoke of sheets of flame, and balls of fire landing in the sea; of men with their heads missing, and men so badly burned or maimed that they called to their colleagues with the terrifying plea of ‘
achève-moi!
’: finish me off! Then a British shell hit the magazine of France’s most advanced warship, the
Bretagne
—and the noise was like the death of Krakatoa.

A mushroom cloud rose over the harbour and within minutes the
Bretagne
had capsized. Some of her crew leapt into the evil black sea, bubbling like chip fat, where they held their breath and swam underwater to escape the burning oil. Most of the complement was drowned.

Altogether the British shot 150 shells into the fortified harbour at Mers-el-Kébir, near the Algerian town of Oran, on that cloudless day in 1940. By the time their guns fell silent, five French ships were crippled and one destroyed; and 1,297 French seamen had been killed. A massacre had taken place; and there were plenty who were willing to call it a war crime.

Across France there was a sense of indignation, a hatred that the Nazi propaganda machine scarcely needed to fan. For the first time since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the British had fired on the French and with murderous intent. Posters were circulated everywhere of a French sailor drowning amid the inferno, or of the British
war leader as a bloodthirsty Moloch. Relations between London and the new Vichy regime were ended, and to this day the memory of Mers-el-Kébir is so toxic as to be taboo in discussions between Britain and France.

If it had been left to him, said Admiral James Somerville, he would never have given the order. The British sailors were sick at heart as they saw what they had done; incredulous that these were really their instructions. Generations of French schoolchildren have been taught that there was one man who decreed that massacre and whose busy fingers wrote out that murderous ultimatum. Those teachers are right.

When Churchill rose to explain his actions the next day in the House of Commons, he expected to be assailed on every side. He had unleashed the most lethal modern weaponry on effectively defenceless targets—and on sailors with whom Britain was not at war.

As he later admitted, he felt ‘ashamed’ as he stood up to speak, before a packed Chamber. His typed notes trembled in his hands. He gave a full account of the events that led up to the disaster. He wound up by saying that he would leave the judgement of his actions to Parliament. ‘
I leave it also to the nation, and to the United States. I leave it to the world and to history.’

With this he sat down; and something peculiar happened. To his surprise, there was no disapproving silence. On the contrary, they were cheering. They were on their feet and waving their Order Papers in scenes of jubilation such as the Commons had not seen for years. His cabinet colleagues were clustering around and clapping him on the back—in what seems to us a bizarre and tasteless response to the deaths of almost 1,300 Frenchmen.

Amid the rejoicing sat Churchill, a hunched figure in his black jacket and striped grey trousers, with his chin in his hands and tears flowing down his cheeks.

To understand this tragedy, you must appreciate how much Churchill loved France. As his doctor Charles Moran once observed, ‘
France is civilization.’

He had grown up in France’s belle époque; Paris was the city where his parents chose to get married, the city of lights and infinite diversions, the place he went to spend his gambling winnings—on books and ‘
in other directions’. Even for an Englishman as patriotic as Winston Churchill there was no shame in acknowledging the superiority of the French quality of life: the wine, the food, the cheese; the elegance of the chateaux; the fun and style of the casinos; the pleasure of bathing on the Côte d’Azur, and of trying to capture its outstanding natural beauty in paint. French was the only foreign language in which he even attempted to make himself understood. But it went deeper than that.

Churchill believed in the greatness of France, and it came as a terrible shock, in the opening weeks of his premiership, to see the humiliation of the army that had once been led by Napoleon, the man whose bust reposed on his desk. He had done everything in his power to keep France in the war, to put some lead in the pencil of the French politicians and generals. As the news got worse and worse, he flew out to France himself—on four occasions—where he tried to revivify the despondent French leadership with his manful Franglais. He risked his life just to get there.

On one occasion he was flying back in his Flamingo when the pilot had to dive suddenly to avoid two German planes that were strafing fishing boats near Le Havre. That was on 12 June—and thirty-six hours later the French telephoned again, this time to demand an urgent meeting at Tours. He turned up at Hendon to find that the weather was too bad for take-off.

‘
To hell with that,’ said the sixty-five-year-old aviator. ‘I’m going, whatever happens. This is too serious a situation to bother about the
weather.’ They duly arrived at Tours in a thunderstorm—a pretty hairy experience even today, and which must have been unnerving for Beaverbrook and Halifax, who had come with him on the mission.

The runway had been freshly cratered by the Germans, and there were some French ground crew lounging around who had no idea who they were. Churchill had to explain that he was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and that he needed a ‘
voiture
’.

When they got to the prefecture they found that there still didn’t seem to be a welcoming party; still no one recognised them. They wandered around the corridors until eventually the British delegation were taken to a nearby restaurant for cold chicken and cheese. Poor old Halifax: I don’t suppose it was his style of diplomacy.

At last the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, turned up, and asked miserably whether Britain would release France from her obligations, and allow her to surrender. Churchill tried one last time to apply his patent morale-boosting electro-convulsive Franglais therapy to the recumbent French. There was no response.

The patient had expired; and on 14 June the Germans were goose-stepping down the Champs-Élysées. Marshal Pétain—hollow eyed, snaggle toothed and utterly defeatist—was in charge. The capitulation was complete; the French had passed up the chance to fight on from North Africa, and the British were now alarmed about what they would do next, and in particular about what would happen to the French fleet.

This was the second biggest in Europe after the Royal Navy, bigger than the German Kriegsmarine. Some of the French ships were state-of-the-art, better equipped even than the British vessels. If they fell into German hands they could be lethal to British interests. And what, frankly, could stop them falling into German hands? Everyone
had seen the speed with which the Germans had overwhelmed the Maginot Line. Nowhere was safe from the panzers.

If Britain was to fight on, Churchill had to eliminate the risk those French ships embodied. And there was a further consideration. If Britain was credibly to fight on he had to show to the world that the country he led was truly made of fighting stuff; that Britain would do whatever it took to win. This was crucial, because there were sceptics at home and abroad.

Remember how frail his position still was, how distrusted he was by the Tory Party. The Leader of the Labour Opposition, George Lansbury, had resigned because he objected to war, and there were plenty of others who took the same view on both sides of the House. The Lords was full of Stilton-eating surrender monkeys—arch-appeasers such as Lord Brocket, the Earl of Londonderry, Lord Ponsonby, the Earl of Danby, as well as Bendor, the Duke of Westminster, a flamboyant and charming personality who said that ‘
the war was part of a Jewish and Masonic plot’. Those were the days when Tory prime ministers had to pay more attention to the views of dukes and earls.

These would-be quislings were not alone. Rab Butler, then a junior Foreign Office minister, was caught telling a Swedish diplomat that he thought Britain should do a deal—if Hitler offered the right terms. Even Churchill’s buddy and supposed ally Beaverbrook was in favour of a negotiated peace. The city was full—as it always is—of people who preferred to make money than go to war.

There were sceptics in the ranks of his own closest officials; perhaps not surprisingly, since they had all until recently been serving Neville Chamberlain. His Private Secretary, Eric Seal, muttered about his boss and his ‘
blasted rhetoric’, and indeed he was among the few who remained immune to the new Prime Minister’s charm (‘
fetch Seal from his ice floes’, Churchill would say).

Worse still, there were doubters among the most important audience of all—in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The American electorate opposed involvement in the war by a huge majority—thirteen to one, according to one poll. President Roosevelt had promised that he would not ‘entangle’ America in any European conflict, and he knew that if he broke that promise he would be punished at the presidential elections in November that year.

These days there are many conservative American politicians who ritually denounce Neville Chamberlain, and his spaghetti-like refusal to stand up to Hitler. The whole notion of appeasement has become a kind of cuss-word in American politics—and reasonably so. But it is worth remembering that in May and June of 1940, when Britain stood alone against what was by then well known to be a racist and anti-Semitic tyranny, there were some senators of the United States who did not exactly bust a gut to help; and certainly not immediately.

The US Secretary for War was an ardent isolationist called Harry Woodring, who spent the days between 23 May and 3 June deliberately delaying the shipment to Britain of war material that had already been condemned as surplus. He insisted that the goods must be properly advertised, so that anyone could buy them before they were sold to the British. This was while British soldiers were dying on the beaches of Dunkirk, in the biggest military disaster of the last 100 years.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee blocked the sale of ships and planes; the War Department refused to hand over some bombs the poor French had already paid for; and a senator called David Walsh managed to scupper a deal by which Britain was to buy twenty motor torpedo boats: useful things to have, you might have thought, if you were facing the prospect of a seaborne invasion by the Nazis.