Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [10]
Much of the political class thought Churchill’s administration would be short-lived. “So at last that man34 has gained his ambition,” an elderly Tory MP, Cuthbert Headlam, noted sourly. “I never thought he would. Well—let us hope that he makes good. I have never believed in him. I only hope that my judgement … will be proved wrong.” The well-known military writer Captain Basil Liddell Hart wrote gloomily on May 11: “The new War Cabinet35 appears to be a group devoted to “victory” without regard to its practical possibility.” Lord Hankey, veteran Whitehall éminence grise and a member of the new government, thought it “perfectly futile for war36” and Churchill himself a “rogue elephant.”
Even as Hitler’s panzer columns drove for Sedan and pushed onwards through Holland and Belgium, Churchill was filling lesser government posts, interviewing new ministers, meeting officials. On the evening of May 10 Sir Edward Bridges, the shy, austere Cabinet secretary, called at Admiralty House, where Churchill still occupied the desk from which he had presided as first lord. Bridges decided that it would be unbecoming for an official who until that afternoon had been serving a deposed prime minister obsequiously to welcome the new one. He merely said cautiously: “May I wish you every possible37 good fortune?” Churchill grunted, gazed intently at Bridges for a moment, then said: “Hum. ‘Every good fortune!’ I like that! These other people have all been congratulating me. Every good fortune!”
At Churchill’s first meeting with the Chiefs of Staff as prime minister on May 11, he made two interventions, both trifling: he asked whether the police should be armed when sent to arrest enemy aliens; and he pondered the likelihood of Sweden joining the war on the Allied side. Even this most bellicose of men did not immediately attempt to tinker with the movements of Britain’s army on the Continent. When Eden, the new secretary for war, called on the prime minister that day, he noted in his diary that Churchill “seemed well satisfied38 with the way events were shaping.” If these words reflected a failure to perceive the prime minister’s inner doubts, it is also certainly true that he did not perceive the imminence of disaster.
Churchill cherished a faith in the greatness of France, the might of her armed forces, most touching in a statesman of a nation traditionally wary of its Gallic neighbour. “In Winston’s eyes,”39 wrote his doctor later, “France is civilisation.” Even after witnessing the German conquest of Poland, Norway and Denmark, Churchill understood little about the disparity between the relative fighting powers of Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, and those of the French and British armies and air forces. He, like almost all his advisers, deemed it unthinkable that the Germans could achieve a breakthrough against France’s Maginot Line and the combined mass of French, British, Dutch and Belgian forces.
In the days that followed his ascent to Downing Street on May 10, Churchill set about galvanising the British machinery of war and government for a long haul. As war leader, he expected to preside over Britain’s part in a massive and protracted clash on the Continent. His foremost hope was that this would entail no such slaughter as that which characterised the 1914–18 conflict. If he cherished no expectation of swift victory, he harboured no fear of decisive defeat. On May 13, headlines in the Times asserted