Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [22]
Evelyn Waugh’s fictional Halberdier officer, the fastidious Guy Crouchback, was among many members of the British upper classes who were slow to abandon their disdain for the prime minister, displaying an attitude common among real-life counterparts such as Waugh himself:
Some of Mr. Churchill’s broadcasts72 had been played on the mess wireless-set. Guy had found them painfully boastful and they had, most of them, been immediately followed by the news of some disaster … Guy knew of Mr. Churchill only as a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, an advocate of the Popular Front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and Lloyd George. He was asked: “Uncle, what sort of fellow is this Winston Churchill?” “Like Hore-Belisha [a sacked secretary for war, widely considered a charlatan], except that for some reason his hats are thought to be funny” … Here Major Erskine leant across the table. “Churchill is about the only man who may save us from losing this war,” he said. It was the first time that Guy had heard a Halberdier suggest that any result, other than complete victory, was possible.
Some years before the war, the diplomat Lord D’Abernon observed with patrician complacency that “an Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” In May 1940, he might have perceived Churchill as an exemplar.
TWO
The Two Dunkirks
ON MAY 28, Churchill learned that the Belgians had surrendered at dawn. He observed that it was not for him to pass judgement on King Leopold’s decision. He repressed until much later his private bitterness, though this was unjustified when Belgium had no rational prospect of sustaining the fight. Overnight a few thousand British troops had been retrieved from Dunkirk, but Gort was pessimistic about the fate of more than 200,000 who remained, in the face of overwhelming German airpower. “And so here we are back73 on the shores of France on which we landed with such high hearts over eight months ago,” Pownall, Gort’s chief of staff, wrote that day. “I think we were a gallant band who little deserve this ignominious end to our efforts … If our skill be not so great, our courage and endurance are certainly greater than that of the Germans.” The stab of self-knowledge reflected in Pownall’s phrase about the inferior professionalism of the British Army lingered in the hearts of its intelligent soldiers until 1945.
That afternoon at a War Cabinet meeting in Churchill’s room at the Commons, the prime minister again—and for the last time—rejected Halifax’s urgings that the government could obtain better peace terms before France surrendered and British aircraft factories were destroyed. Chamberlain, as ever a waverer, now supported the foreign secretary in urging that Britain should consider “decent terms if such were offered to us.” Churchill said that the odds were a thousand to one against any such Hitlerian generosity, and warned that “nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.” Attlee and Greenwood, the Labour members, endorsed Churchill’s view. This was the last stand of the old appeasers. Privately, they adhered to the view, shared by former prime minister Lloyd George, that sooner or later negotiation with Germany would be essential. As late as June 17, the Swedish ambassador reported Halifax and his junior minister R. A. Butler declaring that no “diehards” would be allowed to stand in the way of peace “on reasonable conditions.”74 It remains extraordinary that some historians