Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [94]
The other two cannot believe it.
Not only could my mates not grasp what had happened. They could neither take in nor even imagine that this might mean the end of the war or making peace with Hitler. (Actually, reading my own immediate reactions to the fall of France, and in spite of the official Party line since September 1939, neither could I. A victory for Hitler was not what we had had in mind.) They could envisage defeat at the end of a fighting war – nothing was easier in June 1940. It was also clear to anyone near the East Anglian coast that, if Hitler invaded, as everyone expected him to, there was nothing much to stop him. What they could not envisage was not going on with the war, even though it was plain to anyone with a sense of political realities (even one reduced to an occasional sight of the Daily Telegraph on the East Anglian marsh), that Britain’s situation was desperate. This feeling that Britain was not defeated yet, that it was natural to go on with the war, was what Winston Churchill put into words for them, though with a tone of heroic defiance which, pretty certainly, none of my mates felt. He spoke for a British people of ordinary folk, such as those of the 560th Field Company, who (unlike many of the better-informed) simply could not imagine that Britain might give up.
As we now know, in the words of Hitler’s Chief of General Staff, General Halder, ‘the Fuhrer is greatly puzzled by England’s persistent unwillingness to make peace’, since he believed himself to be offering ‘reasonable’ terms. 1 At this point he saw no advantage in invading and occupying Britain which (to quote Halder again) ‘would not be of any benefit to Germany. German blood would be shed to accomplish something that would benefit only Japan, the United States and others.’ In effect, Hitler offered to let Britain keep her empire as what Churchill, writing to Roosevelt, correctly described as ‘a vassal state of the Hitler empire’.2 In the 1990s a school of young Conservative historians argued that Britain should have accepted these terms. If Lord Halifax and the powerful peace party in the 1940 Conservative Party had prevailed it is not impossible – indeed, it is not unlikely – that the bulk of Britons would have gone along with them, as the bulk of Frenchmen went along with Marshal Petain. Yet nobody who now remembers that extraordinary moment in our history could believe that the defeatists had a real chance of prevailing. They were seen not as the peace-bringers but as the ‘guilty men’ who had brought the country to this pass. Confident in this massive popular backing, Churchill and the Labour ministers were able to hold their own.
We knew none of this – neither of the peace party in Churchill’s government (though the left suspected there was one), nor of Hitler’s offers and hesitations. Luckily in August 1940 Hitler began the mass aerial attack on Britain, which became the nightly bombing of London in early September. From being a people that went on with the war because we could not think of anything else to do, we became a people conscious of our own heroism. All of us, even the ones not directly affected, could identify with the men and women who continued with everyday life under the bombs. We would not have put it in Churchill’s bombastic terms ourselves (‘This was their finest hour’), but there was considerable satisfaction in standing up to Hitler alone.
But how were we to go on? There was not the slightest chance of returning to the continent within the foreseeable future, let alone winning the war. Between the Battle of Britain and the time the East Anglian division was sent to its doom, we moved across vast stretches of Britain, from Norfolk to Perthshire, from the Scottish Borders to the Welsh Marches, but during this entire period