Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [8]
One of the Ministers present at the six o’clock meeting, Hugh Dalton—who had just been appointed Minister of Economic Warfare—recorded in his diary the words Churchill used in the moments leading up to the sudden demonstration of support for continuing the war. “I am convinced,” Churchill told them, “that every man 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.” Then followed the demonstration of support. Dalton noted in his diary: “Not much more was said. “No one expressed even the faintest flicker of dissent.”
Thus Churchill learned that his determination not to surrender reflected a wider mood. He was certain it would be supported by the nation at large, and he immediately wrote one of the strongest official notes of his war premiership, addressed to all Cabinet Ministers and senior civil servants. Marked “Strictly confidential,” it was a supreme example of his war leadership, putting to those at the apex of power his implacable opposition to defeatism. “In these dark days,” the note read, “the Prime Minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in the Government, as well as high officials, would maintain a high morale in their circles; not minimizing the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war till we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination. No tolerance should be given to the idea that France will make a separate peace; but whatever may happen on the Continent, we cannot doubt our duty and we shall certainly use all our power to defend the Island, the Empire and our Cause.”
The battle against defeatism was not over. On the last day of May, Churchill was shown a seven-page note by the Australian High Commissioner in London, Stanley Bruce, favouring an international conference “to formulate a peace settlement.” Churchill struck out this paragraph, writing in the margin a single word: “No.” Against another point made by Bruce, that “the further shedding of blood and the continuance of needless suffering is unnecessary” and that the belligerents should “cease the struggle,” Churchill wrote the word “Rot.” Where Bruce concluded that negotiations were possible, Churchill commented, “The end is rotten.”
Churchill tried to prevent any suggestion of defeatism, wherever it emerged. In the summer of 1940 the Admiralty devised a scheme—of which I, aged three and a half, was a part—to evacuate British children to Canada and the United States. Churchill opposed this plan. It only went ahead because the meeting at which it was put before the War Cabinet was interrupted by news of the Franco-German armistice, before any formal decision about the evacuees was reached. “A large movement of this kind,” Churchill told the War Cabinet during the discussion, “encourages a defeatist spirit, which was contrary to the true facts of the position and should be sternly discouraged.” The Minister concerned went ahead, regardless.
At that same War Cabinet meeting, convened at a time when rumours of an imminent invasion were gaining momentum, the Cabinet invited Churchill to issue a circular to the heads of all government departments, instructing them to take drastic steps to put a stop to defeatist talk. The War Cabinet had just been told by the Intelligence Services, based partly on intercepted private correspondence, that the publication of the most recent deaths from a German air raid—eleven civilians killed and more than a hundred injured in the Newcastle area— might “have a demoralizing effect in the country.” To combat this mood, the War Cabinet agreed that Churchill himself should draft and sign a message to be sent to more than three thousand people: to all Members of Parliament, Peers, Lord Lieutenants of the counties of the United Kingdom, Lord Mayors and Privy Councillors—the very centre of British governance. The message,