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By Root 811 0

“Mr. Churchill seemed to be always in the bath933 and General Ismay always on the telephone. So that, though we were physically nearer the battle, it was almost impossible to conduct any business.” Out of earshot of the prime minister, Ernest Bevin and the foreign secretary chatted amiably, though disloyally, about the possibility of sustaining the coalition government if “the old man” was obliged to retire. Bevin said he could work with Eden as prime minister, so long as the Tory committed himself to nationalising the coal mines, which the unions would insist upon. Smuts joined them, and asked what they had been discussing. When told Bevin’s terms, “Socrates” said crisply: “Cheap at the price.”934 It was a curiously tasteless discussion for the three men to hold, as half a million young men prepared to hurl themselves at Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. But it reflected the new mood among Britain’s politicians, who were looking to a future beyond Winston Churchill.

De Gaulle came, belatedly summoned from Algiers. The prime minister walked down the rail tracks to meet him, arms outstretched in welcome. The Frenchman ignored the offered embrace, and vented his bitterness that he himself was denied a role in the Allied return to his country. Churchill told him that the Americans insisted that his committee should not be granted its claim to the governance of liberated French territory. The British must respect U.S. wishes. He urged de Gaulle to seek a personal meeting with Roosevelt, in the hope that this might resolve their differences. The Frenchman later claimed that at Droxford Churchill told him that if forced to choose between America and France, Britain would always side with the United States. This was almost certainly false, or at least a wilful exaggeration. But de Gaulle’s bitterness about being denied authority in France, a claim which he had striven for four years to justify, confirmed an animosity towards Britain which persisted for the rest of his life. Churchill exchanged cables with Roosevelt about the possibility of sending the Free French leader back to Algiers. In the event, he was allowed to remain. But Anglo-French relations were poisoned to a degree unassuaged by de Gaulle’s subsequent elevation to power.

The Yugoslav partisan leader Milovan Djilas was with Stalin at his dacha outside Moscow when word came that the Allies would land in France the next day. The Soviet warlord responded with unbridled cynicism: “Yes, there’ll be a landing935, if there is no fog. Until now there was always something that interfered. I suspect tomorrow it will be something else. Maybe they’ll meet up with some Germans! What if they meet up with some Germans? Maybe there won’t be a landing then, but just promises as usual.” Molotov hastily explained to the Yugoslav that Stalin did not really doubt that there would be an invasion, but enjoyed mocking the Allies. On this matter, after the prevarications and deceits of the previous two years, the Soviet leader had perhaps earned his jibes.

By the evening of June 5, Churchill was back in London. As Clementine departed for bed, she bade good night to her husband in his Map Room below Whitehall. He said: “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand young men may have been killed?” Unlike the Americans, with their unshakeable optimism, Churchill had borne the consequences of so many failures since 1940. It would be the crowning misery if British arms now failed to acquit themselves in a manner worthy of this crowning hour.

The D-Day landings of June 6 represented the greatest feat of military organisation in history, a triumph of planning, logistics and above all human endeavour. The massed airborne assault on the flanks which began in darkness, the air and naval bombardment followed by the dawn dash up the fire-swept shoreline by more than 100,000 American, British and Canadian engineers, infantrymen, armoured crews and gunners, achieved brilliant success. In a spirit that would have warmed the prime minister’s heart, as one landing craft of the East