Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [6]
While much of the ruling class disliked and mistrusted the new premier, he was the overwhelming choice of the British people. With remarkably sure instinct, they perceived that if they must wage war, the leadership of a warrior was needed. David Reynolds has observed that when the Gallipoli campaign failed in 1915, many people wished to blame Churchill—then, as in 1940, first lord of the Admiralty—while after Norway nobody did. “It was a marvel,”11 Churchill wrote in an unpublished draft of his war memoirs. “I really do not know how—I survived and maintained my position in public esteem while all the blame was thrown on poor Mr. Chamberlain.” He may also have perceived his own good fortune in not having achieved the highest office in earlier years, or even in the earlier months of the war. Had he done so, it is likely that by May 1940 his country would have tired of the excesses which he would surely have committed, while being no more capable than Chamberlain of stemming the tide of fate on the continent. Back in 1935, Stanley Baldwin explained to a friend his unwillingness to appoint Churchill to his own Cabinet: “If there is going to be a war12—and who can say there is not—we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister.” Baldwin’s tone was jocular and patronising, yet there proved to be something in what he said.
In May 1940 only generals and admirals knew the extent of Churchill’s responsibility for Britain’s ill-starred Scandinavian deployments. Nonetheless the familiar view, that he was the sole architect of disaster, seems overstated. Had British troops been better trained, motivated and led, they would have made a better showing against Hitler’s forces, which repeatedly worsted them in Norway while often inferior in numbers. The British Army’s failure reflected decades of neglect, together with institutional weaknesses which would influence the fortunes of British arms through the years which followed. These were symbolically attested to by a colonel who noticed among officers’ baggage being landed at Namsos, on the central Norwegian coast, “several fishing rods13 and many sporting guns.” No German officer would have gone to war with such frivolous accoutrements.
Now, Halifax wrote disdainfully to a friend, “I don’t think WSC will be14 a very good PM though … the country will think he gives them a fillip.” The foreign secretary told his junior minister R. A. Butler, when they discussed his own refusal to offer himself for the premiership: “It’s all a great pity15. You know my reasons, it’s no use discussing that—but the gangsters will shortly be in complete control.” Humbler folk disagreed. Lancashire housewife Nella Last wrote in her diary on May 11: “If I had to spend my whole life16 with a man, I’d choose Mr. Chamberlain, but I think I would sooner have Mr. Churchill if there was a storm and I was shipwrecked. He has a funny face, like a bulldog living in our street who has done more to drive out unwanted dogs and cats … than all the complaints of householders.” London correspondent Mollie Panter-Downes told New Yorker readers: “Events are moving so fast17 that England acquired a new Premier almost absent-mindedly … It’s paradoxical but true that the British, for all their suspicious dislike of brilliance, are beginning to think they’d be safer with a bit of dynamite around.” National Labour MP Harold Nicolson, a poor politician but fine journalist and diarist, wrote in the Spectator of Churchill’s “Elizabethan zest for life18 … His wit … rises high in the air like some strong fountain, flashing in every sunbeam, and renewing itself with ever-increasing jets and gusts of image and association.”
Though Churchill’s appointment was made by the king on the advice of Chamberlain, rather than following any