The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (3 page)

From his very emergence as a young Tory MP he had bashed and satirised his own party; he had then deserted them for the Liberals, and though he had eventually returned to the fold, there were too many Tories who thought of him as an unprincipled opportunist. Only a few days earlier the Tory benches had conspicuously cheered for Chamberlain, when he entered the Chamber, and were muted in their welcome for Churchill. Now he was sitting with two powerful Tories—Chamberlain himself, Lord President of the Council, and Edward Wood, First Earl of Halifax and Foreign Secretary.

Both men had clashed with Churchill in the past. Both had reason to regard him as not just volcanic in his energies, but (to their way of thinking) irrational and positively dangerous.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill had deeply irritated Chamberlain with his plan to cut business rates—which Chamberlain thought would unfairly curb the revenues of Tory local government—to say nothing of the systematic monstering Churchill had given Chamberlain, for months and years, over the failure to stand up to Hitler. As for Halifax, he had been viceroy of India in the 1930s, and borne the brunt of what he saw as Churchill’s bombastic and blimpish opposition to anything that smacked of Indian independence.

Then there was a further aspect to Halifax’s political position that gave him—in those grim May days—an unspoken authority, even over Churchill. Chamberlain had sustained his fatal wound on 8 May, when large numbers of Tories refused to back him in the Norway debate; and in that key meeting of 9 May, it was Halifax who had been the departing Prime Minister’s choice. Chamberlain had
wanted Halifax. King George VI wanted Halifax. Many in the Labour Party, in the House of Lords, and above all on the Tory benches would have preferred to see Halifax as Prime Minister.

In fact the only reason Churchill had finally got the nod was because Halifax—following a ghastly two-minute silence after Chamberlain offered him the job—had ruled himself out of contention; not just because it would be hard to command the government from the unelected House of Lords, but as he explicitly said, because he didn’t see how he would be able to cope with Winston Churchill rolling around untethered on the quarterdeck.

Still, it must give a man a certain confidence to think he had momentarily been the King’s preferred choice as Prime Minister. In spite of Churchill’s clear opposition, Halifax now returned to the fray. What he offered was, with hindsight, shameful.

The gist of it was that we should enter a negotiation with the Italians, with the blessing of Hitler, at which our opening gambit would be the surrender of various British assets—and though he did not spell these out in the meeting, they are thought to have been Malta, Gibraltar and a share of the running of the Suez Canal.

It says something for Halifax’s nerve that he felt able to offer this to Churchill as a course of action. Reward aggression by entering talks? Hand over British possessions to a ludicrous jut-jawed and jackbooted tyrant like Mussolini?

Churchill repeated his objections. The French were trying to get us on a ‘slippery slope’ towards talks with Hitler and capitulation. We would be in a much stronger position, he argued, once the Germans had tried and failed to invade.

But Halifax came back again: we would get better terms now, before France had gone out of the war—before the Luftwaffe had come over and destroyed our aircraft factories.

It makes one cringe, now, to read poor Halifax’s defeatism; and
we need to understand and to forgive his wrong-headedness. He has been the object of character assassination ever since the July 1940 publication of the book
Guilty Men
, Michael Foot’s philippic against appeasement.

Halifax had been over to see Hitler in 1937—and though he at one stage (rather splendidly) mistook the Führer for a footman, we must concede that he had an embarrassing familiarity with Goering. Both men loved fox-hunting, and Goering nicknamed him ‘Halalifax’—with emetic chumminess—because
halali
is a German hunting cry. But it is nonsense to think of him as some kind of apologist for Nazi Germany, or a fifth columnist within the British government. In his own way, Halifax was a patriot as much as Churchill.

He thought he could see a way to protect Britain and to safeguard the empire, and to save lives; and it is not as if he was alone. The British ruling class was riddled—or at least conspicuously weevilled—with appeasers and pro-Nazis. It wasn’t just the Mitfords, or the followers of Britain’s home-grown would-be
duce
, fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.

In 1936 Lady Nelly Cecil noted that nearly all of her relatives were ‘
tender to the Nazis’, and the reason was simple. In the 1930s your average toff was much more fearful of Bolshevism, and communists’ alarming ideology of redistribution, than they were fearful of Hitler. Indeed, they saw fascism as a bulwark against the reds, and they had high-level political backing.

David Lloyd George had been to Germany, and been so dazzled by the Führer that he compared him to George Washington.
Hitler was a ‘born leader’, declared the befuddled former British Prime Minister. He wished that Britain had ‘
a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today’. This from the hero of the First World War! The man who had led Britain to victory over the Kaiser!

Now the snowy-haired Welsh wizard had been himself bewitched, and Churchill’s former mentor had become an out-and-out defeatist. It wasn’t so very long ago that the media had been singing the same tune. The
Daily Mail
had long been campaigning for Hitler to be given a free hand in eastern Europe, the better to beat up the bolshies. ‘
If Hitler did not exist,’ said the
Mail
, ‘all western Europe might now be clamouring for such a champion.’

The Times
had been so pro-appeasement that the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, described how he used to go through the proofs taking out anything that might offend the Germans. The press baron Beaverbrook himself had actually sacked Churchill from his
Evening Standard
column, on the grounds that he was too hard on the Nazis. Respectable liberal opinion—theatre types like John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike, G. B. Shaw—were lobbying for the government to ‘give consideration’ to talks.

Of course, the mood had changed in the last year; feelings against Germany had unsurprisingly hardened and grown much more widespread. All we are saying—in mitigation of Halifax—is that in seeking peace, he had the support of many British people, at all levels of society. And so the argument went on, between Halifax and the Prime Minister, for that crucial hour.

Outside it was a warm and gorgeous May day; the chestnut candles were out in St James’s Park. Inside it was a game of ping-pong.

Churchill told Halifax that any negotiation with Hitler was a trap that would put Britain at his mercy; Halifax said he couldn’t understand what was so wrong with the French suggestion.

Chamberlain and Greenwood both chipped in with the (useless) observation that both options—fighting on and entering negotiations—were risky.

As it got to five o’clock, Halifax said that nothing in his suggestion could be remotely described as ultimate capitulation.

Churchill said that the chances of Britain being offered decent terms were a thousand to one against.

It was a stalemate; and it was now—according to most historians—that Churchill played his masterstroke. He announced that the meeting would be adjourned, and would begin again at 7 p.m. He then convened the full cabinet of twenty-five, ministers from every department—many of whom were to hear him as Prime Minister for the first time. Consider his position.

He could not persuade Halifax, and nor could he simply crush or ignore him. Only the previous day the Foreign Secretary had been so bold as to accuse him of talking ‘
frightful rot’. If Halifax resigned, Churchill’s position would be weak: it was hardly as if his first efforts as war leader had been crowned with triumph—the Norway campaign, for which he was overwhelmingly responsible, had been a considerable fiasco.

The appeal to reason had failed. But the bigger the audience, the more fervid the atmosphere; and now he made an appeal to the emotions. Before the full cabinet he made a quite astonishing speech—without any hint of the intellectual restraint he had been obliged to display in the smaller meeting. It was time for ‘frightful rot’ on steroids.

The best account we have is from the diary of Hugh Dalton, the Minister of Economic Warfare, and there seems to be no reason not to trust it. Churchill began calmly enough.

I have thought carefully in these last days whether it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man [Hitler].

But it [is] idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms than if we fought it out. The
Germans would demand our fleet—that would be called disarmament—our naval bases, and much else.

We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler’s puppet would be set up—under Mosley or some such person. And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other side we have immense reserves and advantages.

He ended with this almost Shakespearean climax:

And I am convinced that every one of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.

At this the men in that room were so moved—according both to Dalton and to Leo Amery—that they cheered and shouted, and some of them ran round and clapped him on the back. Churchill had ruthlessly dramatised and personalised the debate.

It was not some diplomatic minuet. It was a choice between protecting their country or dying, choking in their own blood. It was an eve-of-battle speech, and it appealed to them in some primeval and tribal way. By the time the War Cabinet resumed at 7 p.m., the debate was over; Halifax abandoned his cause. Churchill had the clear and noisy backing of the cabinet.

Within a year of that decision—to fight and not to negotiate—30,000 British men, women and children had been killed, almost all of them at German hands. Weighing up those alternatives—a humiliating peace, or a slaughter of the innocents—it is hard to
imagine any modern British politician having the guts to take Churchill’s line.

Even in 1940, there was no one else who could conceivably have given that kind of leadership—not Attlee, not Chamberlain, not Lloyd George, and certainly not the most serious alternative, the 3rd Viscount Halifax.

Churchill punningly nicknamed Halifax the ‘
Holy Fox’, partly because he was churchy, and partly because he loved riding to hounds, but mainly because he had a mind of foxy subtlety. But if the fox knew many things, Churchill knew one big thing.

He was willing to pay that butcher’s bill, because he actually saw more clearly than Halifax. He had the vast and almost reckless moral courage to see that fighting on would be appalling, but that surrender would be even worse. He was right. To understand why, let us imagine May 1940 without him.

CHAPTER 2

THE NON-CHURCHILL UNIVERSE

L
et’s go back to that moment on 24 May 1940, when Heinz Guderian, one of the most audacious tank commanders in history, is on the verge of an extraordinary triumph. After vicious fighting, his panzers have crossed the Aa canal in northern France. They pause in their exertions, their engines pinking gently in the sun, and Guderian prepares for a final assault on the British.

His prey is now less than twenty miles away—the 400,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force: flinching, fearful, bracing themselves for the ignominy of surrender. All Guderian needs to do is rev up those mighty Maybach engines, plunge onwards towards Dunkirk, and the British army will be shattered. Back home, the islanders’ ability to resist will be gone. And then he gets a message from Berlin—a decision that he will later denounce as a disaster.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, Hitler wants him to stop; to wait; and in an ecstasy of frustration, Guderian obeys. For the next
few days—because the evacuation is agonisingly slow—the British jugular is pitifully exposed, pulsing beneath the Nazi knife.

In this horrific context, the British War Cabinet ponders what to do: to deal, or to fight. Now let us take Churchill out of the equation.

Let’s send down one of those giant Monty Python hands and pluck him from the smoke-filled room. Let us suppose that he’d copped it as a young man, on one of those many occasions when he had set out so boisterously to cheat death. Let’s imagine that his preposterous luck had run out years earlier, and that he had been skewered by a Dervish spear or plugged by a ten-rupee jezail or that he had crashed one of his rope-and-canvas flying machines or died in the trenches.

We leave the fate of Britain and the world in the hands of Halifax, Chamberlain and the representatives of the Labour and Liberal parties. Would they have treated with Hitler, as the Foreign Secretary was proposing? It seems overwhelmingly likely.

Chamberlain was already physically feeble, and was to die of cancer only a few months later: and the whole purpose of his removal from the Premiership was that it was impossible to see him as a war leader. Halifax’s position we know: he wanted to negotiate. The others had neither the parliamentary clout nor the bellicose flair to lead the country, in defiance of Hitler, at a moment of terrifying danger.

It was Churchill—and only Churchill—who had made resistance to the Nazis his political mission. There was a sense in which his objections to Halifax were selfish.

He was fighting for his political life and credibility, and if he gave in to Halifax he was finished. His prestige, his reputation, his prospects, his ego—all those things that matter to politicians—were engaged in the cause of fighting on; and this has led some historians to make the mistake of thinking that it was all about him, and not about the British interest.