June 1, 2015

Finest Hour 107, Summer 2000

Page 41

By MICHAEL KORDA

January’s controversy over who should have been Time magazine’s “Man of the Century” was reported to have ended in a choice between Albert Einstein and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Disappointingly, the magazine chose Einstein (even all these years after Henry Luce’s death, there seems to be an anti-FDR bias floating around in the Time-Life Building, like Legionnaires’ disease embedded in the air vents). After all, FDR saved the United States from total collapse in 1933, and perhaps only he could have transformed his country into not only “the great arsenal of democracy” that it became but arguably the world’s greatest—and most benevolent—power from 1945 on. Furthermore, had he not possessed the good sense to take Einstein’s famous letter seriously, the atomic bomb might never have been developed or might have been developed first by the enemy.

The truth, however, is that one man, and one man only, was the logical choice for Man of the Century. John Lukacs’s superb new book, Five Days in London—the title refers to the brief period in the spring of 1940, when Winston Churchill had to convince his cabinet to keep fighting against Germany rather than seek a way out of the war—makes clear why. (Reviewed in FH 105, pp. 38-39. Ed.) Not only did Churchill’s checkered political career span more than half of the century (he was first elected to Parliament as a much publicized hero of the Boer War on 1 October 1900, and resigned as prime minister on 5 April 1955) but it can truly be said of him, as of perhaps no other figure of the 20th century, that he saved the Western world. Had Churchill not lived—or had he been killed when, for example, he was struck by a car on Fifth Avenue in 1931 (he was crossing the avenue on foot and had forgotten that Americans drive on the right)—the world would be a radically different and darker place, dominated in some way by a triumphant Nazi Germany, with results that are today, happily, the province of novelists of the “What if?” school.

Churchill saw clearly the truth about Hitler when so many people (such as Roosevelt) merely looked the other way; or, like Neville Chamberlain and Lloyd George, were tricked into seeing a reasonable statesman; or took refuge in the favorite rationalization of the French politicians: Mieux vaut Hitler que Staline (“Better Hitler than Stalin”). Churchill realized, early in Hitler’s career, that the Fuehrer was not just a right-wing German politician of comic—to the Anglo-Saxon mind—dress and habits, not just a bad man or the head of a movement of cloudy German visionaries and brutal thugs, but one of the few genuinely evil political personalities in human history. And that realization, Churchill’s equivalent of Saul’s vision on the road to Damascus, eventually made possible our survival.

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It is perhaps a shame that Hitler and Churchill never met. They came very close to it in the Thirties, when Churchill was touring the battlefields of his ancestor the great Duke of Marlborough preparatory to writing his magisterial six-volume biography of Marlborough. Hitler’s friend Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl tried to persuade Hitler to join Churchill for dinner in Munich, but Hitler refused, asking, “What part does Churchill play? He’s in opposition, and no one pays any attention to him.” Since Churchill had been outspokenly critical of Hitler’s anti-Semitic opinions to Hanfstaengl, it is reasonable to assume that Hitler simply saw no benefit in arguing with him.

If so, he was correct. Churchill was impatient of all forms of anti-Semitism, even the comparatively benign upperclass kind that pervaded the court, the aristocracy, and most of the Conservative Party in Britain (and which is by no means dead even today); he was therefore perhaps the one major British politician of the era (to say nothing of the Americans) who would have been unable to sit quietly listening to Hitler’s opinions about the Jews. The Fiihrer was spared—or, more precisely, spared himself—a difficult scene, since Churchill would certainly have challenged him on the subject.

It is unlikely that a meeting with Hitler—even with the Fiihrer on his best behavior, as he invariably was when meeting distinguished Englishmen in die Thirties—would have changed Churchill’s opinion. Hermann Rauschning, like Hanfstaengl another of Hitler’s early admirers, had his own insight into Hitlers madness during a tea party at die Fiihrer’s house in Berchtesgaden in the early days of the regime when, over die clatter of tea cups and silver, and the serving of cakes by handsome young S.S. men in white jackets, Rauschning claimed to have heard the screams of suffering and smelled the stench of evil. Above the bourgeois table and the polite conversation diere hung the vision of what was to come: nihilism, mass murder, Weltmacht oder Niedergang (“World power or destruction”), the motto of a man who was to end his career in defeat, saying that he doubted “whether the German people are worthy of my great ideas.”

Churchill didn’t need to take tea with the Fiihrer to smell the brimstone. Others might suppose or imagine that Hitlers opinions about the Jews were a personal idiosyncrasy or merely the tough talk of a canny politician who needed to keep his followers in hand; or else they might rationalize, as one French politician did, that “soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked” (for many thought that when Hitler reached power he would discard his anti-Semitism, not realizing that the very reason Hitler was seeking power in the first place was to destroy the Jews). Churchill took Hitler at his word, guessed what lay behind the puffy face with the silly mustache, the unruly Napoleonic shock of hair, and the opaque, hypnotic blue eyes, and decided from the beginning that what England needed to do was rearm and prepare to fight for her life.

He then said so, eloquently, frequently, stubbornly, even when most of his own party, all of the opposition, Liberal and Labour, not to speak of the court, the press, and quite a few members of his own family, repudiated and ridiculed his views. He was right on the subject that mattered most in our century, even if he wasn’t taken seriously until it was almost too late and however many other things he may have been wrong about. This background—the fact that Churchill understood for so long what almost nobody else in England (or America) did, that he stuck to his guns when any lesser man would have given in to those who wanted to appease Hitler, and that he had, above all else, the courage of his convictions—must be borne in mind in order to fully appreciate the drama of Five Days in London.

Lukacs focuses his attention on five critical days of World War II, from 24 May 1940, through May 28th, a period during which, as Lukacs sees it, Hitler failed to win his war, and failed entirely because it was Winston Churchill who held the office of prime minister (which he had assumed on 10 May). By the 28th the British barely held on to Calais and Boulogne but would shortly lose both, leaving Dunkirk as the only port from which the BEF— a force of more than 300,000 men, the bulk of the regular army, without whom it would surely be impossible to defend England from a German invasion—could possibly be evacuated. It looked very likely, to two such different men as Churchill and the famously dour Field Marshal Edmund Iron-side, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, that Britain was about to experience the greatest military defeat in its history, one very likely to be followed soon thereafter by an invasion.

Appeals to the French to stand and fight only revealed the complete impotence and collapse of Paul Reynaud’s government, the defeatism and ineptitude of France’s leading generals, and the presence of the aged Marshal Petain in the wings, ready to make peace at the expense of la perfide Albion at the first opportunity. Appeals to President Roosevelt brought only the most timid and unhelpful responses (FDR concerned himself during these crucial days mainly with trying to persuade the British government to send its fleet to Canada and the United States rather than let it fall into the hands of the Germans), while the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Joseph P. Kennedy, was openly defeatist, pro-German, and in favor of peace with Hitler at any price (so long as America did not have to pay it).

Unlike the French, however, who had only too accurate an idea of how badly things were going, since the Germans were overrunning their country and sweeping unopposed past places that had been defended from 1914 through 1918 at the cost of millions of lives, the British public remained largely unaware of what was happening in the war.

That things were not going well was obvious to anybody, but Britain has a long history of beginning wars with a series of stunning defeats, then winning in the end. And in any event, the country had historically shied away from fielding a major European army except in cases of dire necessity, as had been the case when Churchill’s ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough fought his great battles to prevent Louis XIV from doing in Europe what Adolf Hitler was apparently in the process of completing in 1940.

The result was that the British Army in 1940 was—as Evelyn Waugh depicts it so scathingly, but accurately, in Officers and Gentlemen and Men at Arms-—largely amateurish, poorly equipped, and commanded at the top by fox-hunting Tory country gentlemen in uniform. The authentic military flavor of the period is well represented by the official army manual on tactics with which Britain went to war, in which the tank is described as an armored, mechanical horse.

Most of Britain’s senior army officers disliked everything about Winston Churchill, whom they considered a cheap adventurer and headline-seeker, a dangerously amateurish soldier, and a “half-breed” part-American. Still more, they disliked the flashy “gangsters” (as one Conservative called them) who were his friends and supporters—such outrageous and outspoken mavericks as Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s brash, abrasive, and self-confident financial adviser and alter ego, or the even brasher press lord Max Beaverbrook, not to speak of a whole supporting cast of wealthy Jews (including my Uncle Alex, a close friend, who bought the motion picture rights to Churchill’s Marlborough, hired Sir Winston to write film scripts, employed two of his daughters, and did everything possible to keep Churchill afloat during the lean years when he was a prophet without honor in his own country).

The five-day period on which Lukacs concentrates was marked by struggle in England as well as around Dunkirk, and although the home struggle was conducted more sedately—life-or-death politics played out in a quiet English way, over tea cups or, in Churchill’s case, weak whiskey and sodas—it was even more important and decisive than the military one.

At the outset of the crisis, after Leo Amery’s speech in the Commons had made it clear even to Chamberlain’s most loyal supporters that Chamberlain would have to resign his office, the logical successor had seemed to be the Earl of Halifax. Halifax, then foreign secretary, was Chamberlain’s first choice. He had the support of the Conservative Party, and he was the choice of the King, for both the King and Queen liked and admired him (whereas they distrusted Churchill, whom they found flamboyant and self-absorbed). Churchill, with his quick mind, his eloquence, his brutal self-confidence and roguish wit, was not a man against whom George VI, a shy and somewhat timid fellow with a bad stutter and a slow mind, could easily hold his own. Halifax, deferential, deeply religious, and sympathetic to his sovereign’s shyness and speech difficulties (having been born without a left hand, he was always sympathetic to those with handicaps), was precisely to the Royal couple’s taste, and they made no secret of the fact.

The favored Establishment scenario was for Chamberlain to resign his office to Halifax, but the decisive moment was botched—partly by a certain English reticence (Chamberlain was unwilling to push hard enough on Halifax’s behalf, Halifax was unwilling to push himself as if he were eager for higher office), partly because Beaverbrook and Bracken guessed that this would be the case and urged Churchill to keep his mouth shut for once, and partly because as a peer Halifax would have had to govern the country from the House of Lords, with Churchill as his unruly and headstrong leader in the House of Commons.

Thus the choice of Churchill over Halifax, on May 10th—however much it was owed to the offstage sleight of hand of Beaverbrook and Bracken, the reluctance of Labour and the Liberals to serve under Halifax, and, not least, to Churchill’s self-imposed silence while Halifax expounded on the difficulty of governing the country from the House of Lords—was a decision to fight on instead of negotiating, and everyone in the room knew it, as did the King.

On Saturday, May 25th, when the British War Cabinet met (a small body consisting of five men: Churchill, Chamberlain, Halifax, and the Labour leaders Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood) to digest the flood tide of disastrous news, Halifax dropped the political equivalent of a bombshell and revealed that he had made plans to hold discussions with the Italian ambassador about the possibility of Mussolini’s intervening with Hitler on Britain’s behalf.

Not known as “the holy fox” for nothing, Halifax couched all this in diplomatic terms, but all the diplomacy he could muster did not conceal the basic fact that he was proposing that Great Britain approach Italy (which was on the verge of entering the war, despite a last minute personal appeal from Churchill to II Duce) to seek terms from Germany. It was Halifax’s professed belief that these terms could always be rejected if they were unsatisfactory, but this seems unnaturally naive for such a distinguished diplomat. As the French were shortly to discover, once you asked for terms there was no turning back. Still, there it was—the unspeakable had been said, and the unthinkable now required thinking about.

The next day, under the pressure of events, Churchill was obliged to concede at least this much: that he would think about it. In the afternoon, after a flying visit from French premier Reynaud, who bore with him the pretty clear indication that France was going to fold, the War Cabinet met again. This time Halifax challenged Churchill directly, forcing a reluctant Churchill to agree in principle to the idea of an appeal to Mussolini, “even at the cost of some territory” (Lukacs’s emphasis), since it was becoming evident that Italy would probably have to be bought off before the Germans took their whack. A further meeting that same day led to a widening of the breach between the two men, though Halifax may have been surprised that he did not receive from Chamberlain the support he expected. Still, Halifax—by seeing the Italian ambassador in the first place on the 25th, and allowing that conversation to go as far as it went—had set in motion something that was fast developing an impetus of its own. The genie was out of the bottle, and throughout that long Sunday—surely among the darkest in British history—Churchill could find no way to put it back.

That ghastly day ended even more depressingly, leaving Churchill for once without the appetite to eat his dinner, his thoughts on the Calais garrison, which he had ordered to fight to the last, and on the 300,000 men now apparently trapped in Dunkirk. He dined with Eden, Ismay and Ironside (firmer and more congenial company, no doubt, than Paul Reynaud or the War Cabinet), and Ismay remembered, “As we rose from the table, [Churchill] said: ‘I feel physically sick.'”

The next day, May 27, was gloomier still. At another long meeting of the War Cabinet, Churchill and Halifax fought over the issue of war—which was apparently lost—or peace, which Halifax believed might be secured for the asking.

Yet by Tuesday 28 May, as we read in Lukacs’s account, Churchill’s confidence had begun to return, despite all the bad news. Perhaps he was buoyed by the first hints that the navy might be able to get a sizable number of the troops out of Dunkirk, and that the RAF was holding its own— more than its own—against the Luftwaffe in the skies above the flaming port, but Churchill had finally hit upon a way of silencing Halifax and keeping Britain in the war.

As always, his battleground was the place he loved best: the House of Commons. And his weapon was words. When he spoke to the House that day about the fall of Belgium and the fate of the BEF at Dunkirk, he knew exactly what he wanted to say, and he did not pull his punches, as another man might have. He told the truth, magnificently:

Meanwhile the House should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings. I have only to add that nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend the world cause to which we have vowed ourselves nor should it destroy our confidence in our power to make our way, as on former occasions in our history, through disaster and through grief to the ultimate defeat of our enemies.

“Heavy tidings,” “disaster,” “grief: the words brought home to the House of Commons what was happening across the Channel even as he spoke. It was not much, but it was enough. Afterward, in his room in the House, Churchill met with the Cabinet ministers, a much larger body of thirty, most of whom were not in on the secrets of what was happening in France or of what Halifax (who, along with Chamberlain, did not attend the meeting) was fighting so hard to achieve in the War Cabinet.

Churchill spoke of wondering “whether it was part of my duty to consider entering negotiations with That Man”—a delicate way of alluding to his dispute with Halifax over seeking terms from Hitler via Mussolini—and went on to draw his own conclusions: that England would, in any event, get no worse terms from Germany if she fought on and were defeated. Either way, she would become “a slave state,” though no doubt “a British government” of some sort would be set up “under Mosley or some such person.” Labour politician Hugh Dalton remembers that Churchill ended by saying to them: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground. “

Surely he did say something like this—it sounds very like Churchill—and the effect was electric, galvanizing. The ministers, professional politicians and by no means all admirers of Churchill, stood up, shouted, applauded, and crowded around him, cheering him, slapping him on the back and shoulders, while tears poured down his cheeks and theirs. There has probably never been a more emotional moment in English politics, nor a more significant one, for when Churchill returned to the War Cabinet to deal with Halifax’s demand for negotiations with Hitler the moment had passed, as Halifax himself seemed to have recognized. No matter how bad the news—and it would only get worse over the next few weeks— there would be no opportunity to request Mussolini to ask Hitler what terms Germany would offer Great Britain, no victory for Hitler, except his victory over France. The war would go on until Britain won it or was destroyed, and that was that. For seventy-two hours Churchill had struggled through his dark night of the soul and had found, at last, the words and the occasion to resist Halifax, in a scene (wonderfully described by Lukacs) that might have come straight out of Henry V. There would be no more talk of negotiation.

Ironically, Hitler may never have been aware of how close he came to winning his war—he cannot have known, after all, what was happening in the War Cabinet, though he may have known about Halifax’s talks with the Italian ambassador. There was Hitler’s much discussed order for the German armored divisions to rest and refit before plunging on to Dunkirk, where they might have decimated the BEF before it could be evacuated. Perhaps Hitler was holding out a peace offering to the British, perhaps he was simply overcome by the sheer magnitude and speed of his victory over the French Army, or perhaps, like many another gambler, he hesitated at the wrong moment. More likely, as Lukacs suggests, events were moving too fast for him to make a rational decision one way or the other.

Some weeks later, when France had surrendered, the King wrote to his mother, “Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to & to pamper”—a typical English sentiment. Most of his subjects would have agreed, and would have been right. From May 28th, on, while the British were in no position to win the war, they were no longer in immediate danger of losing it, nor would they be again. Less than four months later, the RAF victory in the Battle of Britain made it plain that there would be no invasion. A year later Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and nineteen months later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered the war. Four years later Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.

There is a wonderful story about Churchill in old age. An admirer of his wanted his young son to meet the old man, so that the boy could always remember having met “the greatest man in the world.” When they arrived at Chartwell, however, Lady Churchill had to tell them that, alas, Sir Winston wasn’t feeling well, and they would have to have tea without him. The boy was sent out to play.

On the way home, the father turned in the car to the boy and said what a pity it was that he hadn’t met die greatest man in the world, since it would have been something for him to remember all his life.

“Oh, but I did,” the little boy said. “I got bored playing in the garden, so I went inside, and went up a long flight of stairs, and found a big wooden door, and pushed it open to look inside, and there, lying in bed smoking a cigar, was a fat, old, bald man with glasses, reading the newspapers. I said to him, ‘Excuse me, sir, are you the greatest man in the world’ And he looked at me and said, ‘Yes, I am. Now bugger off.'”