Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [12]
On May 14, for the first time Churchill glimpsed the immensity of the Allies’ peril. Paul Reynaud, France’s prime minister, telephoned from Paris, reporting the German breakthrough and asking for the immediate dispatch of a further ten RAF fighter squadrons. The Chiefs of Staff Committee and the War Cabinet, which met successively at six and seven o’clock, agreed that Britain’s home defences should not be thus weakened. At seven the next morning, May 15, Reynaud telephoned personally to Churchill. The Frenchman spoke emotionally, asserting in English: “the battle is lost.” Churchill urged him to steady himself, pointing out that only a small part of the French army was engaged, while the German spearheads were now far extended and thus should be vulnerable to flank attack.
When Churchill reported the conversation to his political and military chiefs, the question of further air support was raised once more. Churchill was briefly minded to accede to Reynaud’s pleas. But Chamberlain sided with Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, who passionately demurred. No further fighters were committed. That day Jock Colville, the prime minister’s twenty-five-year-old junior private secretary and an aspiring Pepys, noted in his diary the understated concerns of Maj. Gen. Hastings “Pug” Ismay, chief of staff to Churchill in his capacity as minister of defence. Ismay was “not too happy about the military44 situation. He says the French are not fighting properly: they are, he points out, a volatile race and it may take them some time to get into a warlike mood.”
Sluggish perception lagged behind dreadful reality. Churchill cabled to President Franklin Roosevelt: “I think myself that the battle45 on land has only just begun, and I should like to see the masses engage. Up to the present, Hitler is working with specialized units in tanks and air.” He appealed for American aid, and for the first time begged the loan of fifty old destroyers. Washington had already vetoed a request that a British aircraft carrier should dock at an American port to embark fully assembled, battle-ready fighters. This would breach the U.S. Neutrality Act, said the president. So, too, he decided, would the dispatch of destroyers.
In France on May 15, the RAF’s inadequate Battle and Blenheim bombers suffered devastating losses while attempting to break the Germans’ Meuse pontoon bridges. A watching panzer officer wrote: “The summer landscape46 with the quietly flowing river, the light green of the meadows bordered by the darker summits of the more distant heights, spanned by a brilliantly blue sky, is filled with the racket of war … Again and again an enemy aircraft crashes out of the sky, dragging a long black plume of smoke behind it … Occasionally from the falling machines one or two white parachutes release themselves and float slowly to earth.” The RAF’s sacrifice was anyway too late. Much of the German armour was already across the Meuse, and racing westward.
On the morning of the sixteenth, it was learned in London that the Germans had breached the Maginot Line. The War Cabinet agreed to deploy four further fighter squadrons to operate over the battlefield. At three o’clock that afternoon, the prime minister flew to Paris, accompanied by Ismay and Gen. Sir John Dill, Ironside’s vice chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). Landing at Le Bourget, for the first time they