Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [18]
A substantial part of the British ruling class, MPs and peers alike, had since September 1939 lacked faith in the possibility of military victory. Although Churchill was himself an aristocrat, he was widely mistrusted by his own kind. Since the 1917 Russian Revolution, many British grandees, including such dukes as Westminster, Wellington and Buccleuch and such lesser peers as Lord Phillimore, had shown themselves much more hostile to Soviet Communism than to European Fascism. Their patriotism was never in doubt. However, their enthusiasm for a fight to the finish with Hitler, which they feared would end in rubble and ruin, was less assured. Lord Hankey observed acidly before making a speech to the House of Lords early in May that he “would be addressing63 most of the members of the Fifth Column.”
Lord Tavistock, soon to become Duke of Bedford, a pacifist and plausible Nazi collaborator, wrote to former prime minister David Lloyd George that Hitler’s strength was “so great … it is madness64 to suppose we can beat him by war on the continent.” On May 15, Tavistock urged Lloyd George that peace should be made “now rather than later … if the Germans received fair peace terms a dozen Hitlers could never start another war on an inadequate … pretext.” Harold Nicolson wrote: “It is not the descendants65 of the old governing classes who display the greatest enthusiasm for their leader.” Likewise, some financial magnates were sceptical of any possibility of British victory, and thus of the new prime minister: “Mr. Chamberlain is the idol of the business men … They do not have the same personal feelings for Mr. Churchill … There are awful moments when they feel that Mr. Churchill does not find them interesting.”
There were also defeatists lower down the social scale. Muriel Green, who worked at her family’s garage in Norfolk, recorded a conversation at a local tennis match with a grocer’s roundsman and a schoolmaster on May 23. “I think they’re going to beat us66, don’t you,” said the roundsman. “Yes,” said the schoolmaster. He added that, as the Nazis were very keen on sport, he expected “we’d still be able to play tennis if they did win.” Muriel Green wrote: “J said Mr. M. was saying we should paint a swastika under the door knocker [sic] ready. We all agreed we shouldn’t know what to do if they invade. After that we played tennis, very hard exciting play for 2 hrs, and forgot all about the war.”
In those last days of May, the prime minister must have perceived a real possibility, even a likelihood, that if he himself appeared irrationally intransigent, the old Conservative grandees would reassert themselves. Amid the collapse of all the hopes on which Britain’s military struggle against Hitler were founded, it was not fanciful to suppose that a peace party might gain control in Britain. Some historians have made much of the fact that at this War Cabinet meeting, Churchill failed to dismiss out of hand an approach to Mussolini. He did not flatly contradict Halifax when the foreign secretary said that if the Duce offered terms for a general settlement “which did not postulate the destruction of our independence … we should be foolish if we did not accept them.” Churchill conceded that “if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies, he would jump at it.” At the following day’s War Cabinet meeting, he indicated that if Hitler was prepared to offer peace in exchange for the restoration of his old colonies and the overlordship of central Europe, a negotiation could be possible.
It seems essential to consider Churchill’s words in context. First, they were made in the midst of long, weary discussions, during which he was taking elaborate