Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [38]
His wit never faltered. When he heard that six people had suffered heart failure following an air-raid warning, he observed that he himself was more likely to die of overeating. Yet he did not want to perish quite yet, “when so many interesting things121 were happening.” Told that the Luftwaffe had bombed ironworks owned by the family of Stanley Baldwin, the archappeasing thirties prime minister, he muttered, “very ungrateful of them.” When his wife, Clementine, described how she had marched disgusted out of a service at St. Martin-in-the-Field after hearing its preacher deliver a pacifist sermon, Churchill said, “You ought to have cried ‘Shame,’122 desecrating the House of God with lies.” He turned to Jock Colville and said, “Tell the Minister of Information with a view to having the man pilloried.” General Sir Bernard Paget exclaimed to Colville: “What a wonderful tonic he is!”
Between June and September 1940, and to a lessening degree for eighteen months thereafter, the minds of the British government and people were fixed upon the threat that Hitler would dispatch an army to invade their island. It is a perennially fascinating question, how far such a peril was ever realistic—or perceived as such by Winston Churchill. The collapse of France and expulsion of the British Army from the Continent represented the destruction of the strategic foundations upon which British policy was founded. Yet if the German victory in France had been less swift, if the Allies had become engaged in more protracted fighting, the cost in British and French blood would have been vastly greater, while it is hard to imagine any different outcome. John Kennedy was among the senior British soldiers who perceived this: “We should have had an enormous army123 in France if we had been allowed to go on long enough, and it would have lost its equip[men]t all the same.” Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, claimed that on news of the French surrender “I went on my knees124 and thanked God,” because no further British fighters need be vainly destroyed on the Continent. Only German perceptions of the BEF’s marginal role permitted so many of Britain’s soldiers to escape from the battlefield by sea not once, but twice, in June 1940. No staff college war game would have allowed so indulgent an outcome. Though it was hard to see matters in such terms at the time, if French defeat had been inevitable, Britain escaped from its consequences astonishingly lightly.
The British in June 1940 believed that they were threatened by imminent invasion followed by likely annihilation. Unsurprisingly, they thought themselves the focus of Hitler’s ambitions. Few comprehended his obsession with the east. They could not know that Germany was neither militarily prepared nor psychologically committed to launch a massive amphibious operation across the Channel. The Wehrmacht needed months to digest the conquest of France and the Low Countries. The Nazis’ perception of Britain and its ruling class was distorted by prewar acquaintance with so many aristocratic appeasers. Now, they confidently awaited the displacement of Churchill’s government by one which acknowledged realities. “Are the English giving in? No sure signs visible yet,” Goebbels wrote in his diary on June 26. “Churchill still talks big. But then he is not England.” Some historians have expressed surprise that Hitler prevaricated about invasion. Yet his equivocation was matched by the Allies later in the war. For all the aggressive rhetoric of Churchill, the British for years nursed hopes that Germany would collapse without an Allied landing in France. The Americans were