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elective process, popular acclaim bore him to the premiership—and to the role as minister of defence which he also appropriated. Tory MP Leo Amery was among those sceptical that Churchill could play so many parts: “How Winston thinks that he can be Prime Minister19, co-ordinator of defence and leader of the House all at once, is puzzling, and confirms my belief that he really means the present arrangement to be temporary. Certainly no one can coordinate defence properly who is not prepared to be active head of the three Chiefs of Staff and in fact directly responsible for plans.” Critics were still expressing dismay about Churchill’s joint role as national leader and defence minister three years later. Yet Churchill’s dispositions were prompted not by mere personal conceit, but by dismay at the shocking lack of coordination between the services which characterised the Norway campaign. And posterity perceives, as did he at the time, that beyond his own eagerness to run Britain’s war machine, there was no other political or military figure to whom delegation of such power would have been appropriate.

In one of the most famous and moving passages of his memoirs, Churchill declared himself on May 10 “conscious of a profound20 sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and this trial.” He thrilled to his own ascent to Britain’s leadership. Perhaps he allowed himself a twitch of satisfaction, now that he could at last with impunity smoke cigars through Cabinet meetings, a habit which had annoyed his predecessor. If, however, he cherished a belief that it would be in his gift to shape strategy, events immediately disabused him.

At dawn on May 10, a few hours before Churchill was summoned to Buckingham Palace, Hitler’s armies stormed across the frontiers of neutral Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Capt. David Strangeways, serving with the British Expeditionary Force near Lille, just inside the French border, bridled at the impertinence of an orderly-room clerk who rushed into the quarters where he lay abed shouting: “David, sir, David!”21 Then the officer realised that the clerk was passing the order for Operation David, the BEF’s advance from the fortified line which it had held since the previous autumn deep into Belgium to meet the advancing Germans. Though the Belgians since 1936 had declared themselves neutrals, Allied war planning felt obliged to anticipate an imperative need to offer them aid if Germany violated their territory.

Operation David perfectly fulfilled Hitler’s predictions and wishes. On May 10 the British, together with the French First and Seventh armies, hastened to abandon laboriously prepared defensive positions. They mounted their trucks and armoured vehicles, then set off in long columns eastward towards the proffered “matador’s cloak,” in Basil Liddell Hart’s phrase, which the Germans flourished before them in Belgium. Farther south, in the Ardennes forest, panzer columns thrashed forward to launch one of the war’s great surprises, a thrust at the centre of the Allied line, left inexcusably weak by the deployments of the Allied supreme commander, France’s General Maurice Gamelin. Heinz Guderian’s and Georg Reinhardt’s tanks, racing for the Meuse, easily brushed aside French cavalry posturing in their path. Luftwaffe paratroops and glider-borne forces burst upon the Dutch and Belgian frontier fortresses. Stukas and Messerschmitts poured bombs and machine-gun fire upon bewildered formations of four armies.

No more than his nation did the prime minister grasp the speed of approaching catastrophe. The Allied leaders supposed themselves at the beginning of a long campaign. The war was already eight months old, but thus far neither side had displayed impatience for a decisive confrontation. The German descent on Scandinavia was a sideshow. Hitler’s assault on France promised the French and British armies the opportunity, so they supposed, to confront his