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By Root 906 0

fanciful pledges of further military aid, though its impact would have been insignificant. Britain’s two divisions in the northwest were irrelevant to the outcome of the battle, and were desperately needed to defend the home island. But Churchill told the War Cabinet in London on June 1 that more troops must be dispatched across the Channel, with a suitable air component. Even as the miracle of Dunkirk unfolded, he continued to waver about dispatching further fighters to the Continent. He trumpeted the success of the RAF in preventing the Luftwaffe from frustrating the evacuation, which he declared a splendid omen for the future.

Chamberlain and Halifax urged against sending more men to France, but Churchill dissented. He felt obliged to respond to fresh appeals from Reynaud. He envisaged a British enclave in Brittany, a base from which the French might be inspired and supported to maintain “a gigantic guerrilla … The B.E.F. in France must immediately be reconstituted, otherwise the French will not continue in the war.” Amid the dire shortage of troops, he committed to France the 1st Canadian Division, which had arrived in Britain virtually untrained and unequipped. The prime minister told one of the British generals who would be responsible for sustaining the defence of northwest France that “he could count on no artillery.”82 An impromptu new “division” was created around Rouen from lines-of-communications personnel equipped with a few Bren and antitank guns which they had never fired, and a single battery of field artillery that lacked dial sights for its guns. Until Lt. Gen. Alan Brooke, recently landed from Dunkirk, returned to France on June 12, British forces there remained under French command, with no national C-in-C on the spot.

By insisting upon resumption of an utterly doomed campaign, Churchill made his worst mistake of 1940. It is unsurprising that his critics in the inner circle of power were dismayed. The strength of Churchill’s emotions was wonderful to behold. But when sentiment drove him to make deployments with no possibility of success, he appalled his generals, as well as the old Chamberlainite umbrella men. Almost every senior civilian and uniformed figure in Whitehall recognised that the Battle of France was lost. Further British commitments threatened to negate the extraordinary deliverance of Dunkirk. The Air Staff closed ranks with Halifax, Chamberlain and others to resist Churchill’s demands that more fighters should be sent to France, in addition to the three British squadrons still operating there. On the air issue, Churchill himself havered, then reluctantly gave way. This was the first of many occasions on which he mercifully subordinated his instincts to the advice of service chiefs and colleagues. Chamberlain and Halifax were not wrong about everything. The moral grandeur of Churchill’s gestures towards his ally in the first days of June was entirely subsumed by the magnitude of France’s tragedy and Britain’s peril.

The Dunkirk evacuation approached a conclusion on June 4, by which time 224,328 British troops had been evacuated, along with 111,172 Allied troops, most of whom subsequently elected to be repatriated to France rather than fight on in exile. For thirty-five minutes that afternoon, Churchill described the operation to the Commons, concluding with some of his greatest phrases: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”

That evening he found time to dispatch brief notes, thanking the king for withdrawing his character objections to Brendan Bracken’s membership of the Privy Council and expressing appreciation to former prime minister Stanley Baldwin for a letter offering good wishes. Churchill apologised for having taken a fortnight to respond. “We are going through v[er]y hard times & I expect worse to come,” he wrote; “but I feel quite sure better days will come; though whether we shall live to see them is more doubtful. I do not feel the burden