Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [16]
The House of Commons on May 20, with the kind of inspired madness that contributed to the legend of 1940, debated a Colonial Welfare Bill. Many people in Britain lacked understanding of the full horror of the Allies’ predicament. Newspaper readers continued to receive encouraging tidings. The Evening News headlined on May 17: BRITISH TROOPS SUCCESS. On the nineteenth, the Sunday Dispatch headline read: ATTACKS LESS POWERFUL. Even two days later, the Evening News front page proclaimed: ENEMY ATTACKS BEATEN OFF. An editorial in the New Statesman urged that “the government should at once56 grapple with the minor, but important problem of Anglo-Mexican relations.”
Gort’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Henry Pownall, complained bitterly on May 20 about the absence of clear instructions from London: “Nobody minds going down57 fighting, but the long and many days of indigence and recently the entire lack of higher direction … have been terribly wearing on the nerves of all of us.” But when orders did come from the prime minister three days later—for a counterattack south-eastwards by the entire BEF—Pownall was even angrier: “Can nobody prevent him58 trying to conduct operations himself as a super Commander-in-Chief? How does he think we are to collect eight divisions and attack as he suggests? Have we no front to hold? He can have no conception of our situation and condition … The man’s mad.”
Only the port of Dunkirk still offered an avenue of escape from the Continent, and escape now seemed the BEF’s highest credible aspiration. On May 22 and 23, the British awaited tidings of the promised French counteroffensive northeastward towards Gort. Gen. Maxime Weygand, who had supplanted the sacked Gamelin as Allied supreme commander, declared this to be in progress. In the absence of visible movement Churchill remained sceptical. If Weygand’s thrust failed, evacuation would become the only British option. Churchill reported as much to the king on the night of May 23, as Boulogne was evacuated. On the night of the twenty-fourth, he fumed to Ismay about Gort’s failure to launch a force towards Calais, to link up with its garrison. He demanded to know how men and guns could be better used. He concluded, in the first overtly bitter and histrionic words he had deployed against Britain’s soldiers since the campaign began: “Of course, if one side fights and the other does not, the war is apt to become somewhat unequal.” Ironside, the CIGS, told the Defence Committee that evening that if the BEF was indeed evacuated by sea from France, a large proportion of its men might be lost.
Churchill was now preoccupied with three issues: rescue of Gort’s men from Dunkirk; deployment of further units of the British Army to renew the battle in France, following the BEF’s withdrawal; and defence of the home island against invasion. Reynaud dispatched a bitter message to London on May 24, denouncing the British retreat to the sea and blaming this for the failure of Weygand’s counteroffensive—which in truth had never taken place. “Everything is complete confusion,”59 Sir Alexander Cadogan, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, noted in his diary on the twenty-fifth, “no communications and no one knows what’s going on, except that everything’s black as black.”
Churchill cabled to the dominion prime ministers, warning that an invasion of Britain might be imminent. He rejoiced that reinforcements from the Empire were on their way, and asserted his confidence that the Royal Navy and RAF should be able to frustrate an assault, following which “our land defence will deal with any sea-borne