Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [36]
Churchill’s conduct after the fall of France exasperated some sceptics who perceived themselves as clear thinkers. His supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilise Britain’s warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, and to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British people faced the world united and exalted. The “Dunkirk spirit” was not spontaneous. It was created by the rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political leadership for the rest of time. Under a different prime minister, the British people in their shock and bewilderment could as readily have been led in another direction. Nor was the mood long-lived. It persisted only until winter, when it was replaced by a more dogged, doubtful and less exuberant national spirit. But that first period was decisive: “If we can get through the next three months, we can get through the next three years,” Churchill told the Commons on June 20.
Kingsley Martin argued in that week’s New Statesman that Churchill’s June 18 “finest hour” broadcast to the nation was too simplistic: “He misunderstood [the British people’s] feelings when he talked of this as the finest moment of their history. Our feelings are more complex than that. To talk to common people in or out of uniform is to discover that determination to defend this island is coupled with a deep and almost universal bitterness that we have been reduced to such a pass.” Yet the prime minister judged the predominant mood much more shrewdly than the veteran socialist. In 1938, the British had not been what Churchill wanted them to be. In 1941 and thereafter, they would often disappoint his hopes. But in 1940, to an extraordinary degree, he was able to shape and elevate the nation to fulfil his aspirations.
Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in the New Yorker of June 29:
It would be difficult for an impartial observer to decide today whether the British are the bravest or merely the most stupid people in the world. The way they are acting in the present situation could be used to support either claim. The individual Englishman seems to be singularly unimpressed by the fact that there is now nothing between him and the undivided attention of a war machine such as the world has never seen before. Possibly it’s lack of imagination; possibly again it’s the same species of dogged resolution which occasionally produces an epic like Dunkirk. Millions of British families, sitting at their well-stocked breakfast tables eating excellent British eggs and bacon, can still talk calmly of the horrors across the Channel, perhaps without fully comprehending even now that anything like that could ever happen in England’s green and pleasant land.
Many Americans, by contrast, thought it unlikely that Britain would survive. In New York, “one thing that strikes me113 is the amount of defeatist talk,” wrote U.S. general Raymond Lee, “the almost pathological assumption that it is all over bar the shouting … that it is too late for the United States to do anything.” Key Pittman, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on Churchill to send the British fleet to the New World: “It is no secret that Great Britain114 is totally unprepared for defense and that nothing the US has to give can do more than delay the result … It is to be hoped that this plan will not be too delayed by futile encouragement to fight on. It is conclusively evident that Congress will not authorize intervention in the European war.” Time magazine reported on July 1: “So scared was many a US citizen last week that he wanted to shut off aid to Britain for fear that the US would weaken its own defenses, wanted to have the US wash its hands of help for Britain, for fear of getting involved on the losing side.