Chamberlain asked whether Labour would serve under him, or, if not, under another Conservative prime minister. Their formal response, they said, would depend upon the views of the party, now convening in Bournemouth, but they believed the reply to the first question would be “almost certainly, ‘no’ ”; to the second “probably ‘yes.’ ” Both Halifax and Churchill loyally urged support for Chamberlain, but just as Winston was beginning to work himself up toward a cadenza, Greenwood cut in: “We haven’t come here to listen to you orating, Winston.” Whatever their feelings, they said, they lacked the power to make decisions “because members of our party have got absolutely no confidence in the Prime Minister.” Attlee was even more blunt: “I’m bound to tell you, Prime Minister, that in my view our party will not serve under you, nor does the country want you.” Serving under another Conservative prime minister was another matter; they would lay it before the Labour Party Executive at Bournemouth tomorrow and Attlee would telephone yes or no. He and Greenwood then withdrew. Chamberlain, Halifax, and Churchill remained in the Cabinet Room; because this was a political matter, David Margesson joined them. If Kingsley Wood had been right, this was the time to be on the qui vive.245
Chamberlain told them he was now convinced that forming a national government was beyond his power. Attlee and Greenwood had tied the knot of that shroud. Margesson, asked for his opinion, agreed. Unity was indispensable, he said, and as long as Chamberlain remained in power it would be beyond reach. He added that he was not prepared—at the moment—to comment on the political strengths of Churchill and Halifax among Conservative backbenchers, at which, Halifax noted in his diary, “my stomach ache continued.” Chamberlain’s task now was to tell the King who should be sent for after he had surrendered the seals of office. He seemed calm, cool, almost detached. But he looked across the table at both of them.246
At this point we must choose between Churchill’s recollection and Halifax’s. Winston’s account, the more engaging, has been almost universally accepted and presented in various stage, television, and film dramas. In this version he remembered Kingsley Wood’s admonition to say nothing—advice far more difficult for Winston to follow than most men—and sat immobile while “a very long pause ensued. It certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemorations of Armistice Day.” Then, he tells us, Halifax said he couldn’t possibly lead a government because, being a peer, he sat in the House of Lords.247
But Winston’s tale, as it appears in The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his World War II history, does not bear close scrutiny. The meeting in the Cabinet Room occurred on May 9. He puts it on May 10. The difference between the two is huge; on May 9 the borders of France and the Low Countries were inviolate. The great surge of the Wehrmacht came on May 10, and Churchill tells us that upon returning to the Admiralty from the Cabinet Room, he found that “the Dutch Ministers were in my room. Haggard and worn, with horror in their eyes, they had just flown over…. Their country had been attacked without the slightest pretext or warning.” The day before, when Chamberlain actually faced Halifax and Winston, Holland had been peaceful. Churchill got it wrong. And no wonder. He was dictating it six years after the event—six of the most crowded years any man had endured. To acquire some inkling of what that pressure did to his memory, one need only reflect upon what the first year did to it. Millions remember, and can recite, lines from his great speeches of 1940: “Their finest hour,” “We shall fight on the beaches,” and his tribute to the RAF after the Battle of Britain. Yet twelve months later, in 1941, Winston himself couldn’t remember any of them.248
The more plausible account, and unquestionably the correct one, lies in these notes which Halifax scribbled upon returning to his office on the other side of Downing Street, and then turned over to Cadogan:
PM said I was the man mentioned as the most acceptable. I said it would be hopeless position. If I was not in charge of the war (operations) and if I didn’t lead the House, I should be a cypher. I thought Winston was a better choice. Winston did not demur. Was very kind and polite but showed that he thought this right solution.
The PM, Winston, David Margesson and I sat down to it. The PM recapitulated the situation, and said he had made up his mind that he must go, and that it must be either Winston or me. He would serve under either…. I then said that I thought for the reasons given the PM must probably go, but that I had no doubt at all in my own mind that for me to take it would create a quite impossible position…. Winston, with suitable positions of regard and humility, said he could not but feel the force of what I had said, and the PM reluctantly, and Winston evidently with much less reluctance, finished by accepting my view.249
Margesson had been unwilling to comment on the popularity of the two among Tories until the decision had been made; now he could, and he observed that they had been “veering towards” Winston. Halifax had noted the same trend and remarked upon it to Cadogan, adding that if Chamberlain were to remain in the government, “as he is ready to do,” his advice and judgment “would steady Winston.” The prime minister had left them, explaining that he had to see someone else. The man who felt himself dispensable and the man who knew he was indispensable were left alone. They decided to have tea. “It was a bright, sunny afternoon,” Churchill wrote, “and Lord Halifax and I sat for a while… in the garden of Number 10 and talked about nothing in particular.” They then parted, each to his office. Winston knew Chamberlain could not move until Attlee called, and in the Cabinet Room he had said that he would “have no communication with either of the Opposition Parties until I had the King’s commission to form a Government…. I then went back to the Admiralty.”250
At “about 8 o’clock,” Channon’s diary entry read, he called at No. 10 and left with the impression that “Neville still reigns, but only just.” A half-hour later, on the other side of the Horse Guards Parade, Churchill sat down to dinner in Admiralty House with four guests: the Prof, Bracken, Anthony Eden, and Archie Sinclair. He told them, Eden wrote, that he thought it “plain” that Chamberlain would advise the King to send for him, because Halifax, his only rival, “did not wish to succeed.” As the evening lengthened, Winston slowly absorbed the massive fact of his position. During the evening Randolph called from his battalion, billeted in Northamptonshire, some seventy miles northwest of London. He asked if there was any news. His father replied: “I think I shall be Prime Minister tomorrow.”251
On the evening of May 9, as Churchill entertained his friends at dinner, Labour’s leaders in the palm courts of Bournemouth pondered whether to serve under him in an all-party government, and the London News Chronicle went to press with a banner story reporting that “Mr Chamberlain’s early resignation is now certain”—the Bore War, in short, continued to bore. But developments across the Channel continued to foreshadow England’s approaching peril.
On Germany’s side of the Rhine, the Führer had assembled 136 divisions and their reserves—two million men, including a contingent wearing uniforms of the Netherlands army and fluent in the Dutch language. The Low Countries would be overwhelmed by vast surging waves of infantry and armor “unprecedented for size, concentration, mobility,” Shirer wrote, which “stretched in three columns back for a hundred miles beyond the Rhine.”252
The Führer’s bold strategy deployed three great formations, one of which was meant to persuade the Allies that the Germans were following the Schlieffen Plan of 1914. In the north, the thirty divisions of Army Group B would strike into Holland and Belgium in a four-pronged assault. To meet what they were meant to think was the main threat, the best British and French troops would rush into Belgium, taking a stand along the Dyle River. In the south, Army Group C’s nineteen divisions would feint toward the Maginot Line, keeping the poilus there tied up. The real Nazi blow would be delivered in the center, by Army Group A—forty-five divisions, including most of the Wehrmacht’s panzers. Plunging through Luxembourg and the Ardennes, these motorized units would pour through t
he gap between the Maginot Line and the line of the Dyle, race westward to the Channel, and then pivot northward, joining Army Group B in the encirclement and destruction of the French and British troops.
Thus, the main body of the German army, cutting across the Allied rear, and using the panzers as it had in Poland, would exploit the new concept in warfare—deep penetration into enemy territory by mobile armored forces—a concept as revolutionary, Liddell Hart has pointed out, as “the use of the horse, the long spear, the phalanx, the flexible legion, the ‘oblique order,’ the horse-archer, the longbow, the musket, the [artillery] gun.”253
On May 9, in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf, Colonel Oster of the Abwehr dined for the last time with his friend Colonel Sas, the Dutch military attaché. Oster once more confirmed that Fall Gelb would be unleashed at daybreak. To double-check, he drove them to OKW’s Berlin headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse after their coffee and brandy. Sas waited in the car while the Abwehr colonel inquired within. Returning, Oster said there had been no changes. He added: “Das Schwein ist zur Westfront”—“The swine [Hitler] has gone to the Western Front.” They parted. Sas passed the new information to the Belgian military attaché, then crossed to his own legation and called The Hague to transmit, in simple code, the message: “Tomorrow at dawn!”254
At 10:20 that Thursday morning, when Chamberlain was offering the prime ministry of England to Halifax, Paul Reynaud announced that he would present the premiership of France to anyone who could form a government, unless his cabinet agreed with his indictment of Gamelin, commander in chief of the French army; supreme commander of the Allied forces, British as well as French; and the officer who presided over both the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre and the Haut Comité Militaire. This was not Reynaud’s first attempt to sack him—nor was Reynaud the first to try—but it was by far the most vigorous. The premier, though suffering a sore throat, spent over two hours reading his presentment. French military appointments were determined to a remarkable degree by an officer’s politics and religion, and Gamelin had been a beneficiary of that drôle system, having served as France’s senior soldier for five years. Afterward, after the calamitous spring of 1940, he and his officers bitterly complained that the Chamber of Deputies never gave them the arms to fight with. An audit revealed that each year Gamelin returned appropriations unspent—as much as 60 percent of his budget. He hated allies because they entailed the possibility of bloodshed, and would go to great lengths to avoid a fight, but the last straw, for Reynaud, had been the Norwegian operation. Gamelin had exercised none of his powers as supreme commander, and the first French force of any size—two demibrigades of Chasseurs Alpins and a third of foreign legionnaires—had not arrived in Norway until April 27, when the issue had already been decided. It is extraordinary to reflect that his name was never mentioned in newspaper accounts of the struggle there, never raised during the two-day debate in the House. He had participated in the plan to mine Norwegian waters. When the Germans swooped down on Norway, Reynaud had asked what he proposed to do. Mine the waters, Gamelin replied; that was the plan, and he meant to carry it out. The sudden appearance of the Germans was, to him, irrelevant.
Paul Baudouin, who kept the minutes, noted that throughout most of the premier’s arraignment of the country’s most prestigious military figure the cabinet observed “un silence total. Personne ne dit mot.” As Reynaud went on and on, piling up his case, one minister whispered to another, “C’est une exécution.” At 12:30 P.M. Reynaud finished, commenting that if France continued with such a supreme commander, she was sure to lose the war. The minister of finance was convinced, he said, of “l’impossibilité de laisser le général Gamelin à la tête des armées françaises.”255
Everyone turned to Daladier. He was minister of defense; he had defended Gamelin in the past. This was not the Daladier who had once been ready to fight for Czechoslovakia. He was defeatist now, infected with the spiritual corruption which had infected the government, the army, and virtually the entire infrastructure of French society. Replying to the premier, he blamed the British for the failure in Norway. Gamelin, he said, bore no share of the responsibility. He believed Gamelin was “un grand chef militaire,” a soldier with tremendous prestige and a fine military record. Everyone acknowledged his superior intelligence. True, he was seventy, but he was more active than many men his age. Daladier opposed “the desire of the premier to replace the generalissimo.”256
Reynaud appealed to other ministers to speak up. Surely they had formed opinions; duty required that they voice them. But these were frightened little men. If one took a position, one might offend a powerful figure; by remaining silent, one lost nothing. Reynaud, however, wasn’t going to let them off that easily. Their failure to speak, he said, meant they opposed him; since the government could not survive such a loss of confidence, therefore, “I consider the government as having resigned.” They were dismayed. None had thought he would actually dissolve the government. Now they were all ex-ministers, as he was an ex-premier.257
During the afternoon Gamelin, glooming around in his Vincennes dungeon, learned of the bill of particulars Reynaud had drawn up against him. Indignant, he resigned.
At 1:00 A.M. he was awakened. A French agent behind the German lines had sent an urgent signal: “Colonnes en marche vers l’ouest”—“Columns marching westward.”
Hitler was on his way.
France had no government. The French army had no commander.
The telephones began ringing in Whitehall as the first olive moments of daybreak revealed the majestic buildings towering against a darkling, still starry sky—vast cathedrals of an empire whose celebrants had been dwindling year by year since what had been called, and was now known to be, the Armistice.
Shortly after 5:30 A.M. Churchill was wakened and told the first, fragmentary reports. Before the mists of legend envelop him, before he comes to power and assumes leadership of the struggle to crush the monster in central Europe—while he is still, so to speak, Drake bowling when informed that the Armada has been sighted—it is useful to glimpse the entirely mortal Winston. The vision is less than inspiring; unlike some earlier heroes, Winston is engaged in no mundane but memorable act when the news arrives. Instead, wearing his blue dressing gown and carpet slippers, he stumbles down to the upper war room and is told that thus far the attack is “on Holland alone.” Assuming, like everyone else in His Majesty’s Government, that the main Nazi thrust will come here, he phones Charles Corbin, the French ambassador. He asks: Will the Allied armies move into Belgium on the strength of the little now known?
At 6:20 Corbin called back. German troops were now across the Belgian border, he said, and Brussels had “asked for help.” Therefore, Gamelin had been told to invoke Plan D—the advance of the French Seventh Army and the British Expeditionary Force to the line of the Dyle River, there to join the Belgian and Dutch forces. Randolph Churchill, breakfasting in his camp, had heard a radio bulletin. He phoned his father, asking: “What’s happening?” Winston replied: “Well, the German hordes are pouring into the Low Countries.” He told him of the Allied countermove, adding, “In a day or two there will be a head-on collision.” His son asked him about his reference the previous evening to “you becoming Prime Minister today.” Churchill said, “Oh, I don’t know about that. Nothing matters now except beating the enemy.”258
In this crisis Sam Hoare and Oliver Stanley, the other two service ministers, appeared with their chief advisers at Admiralty House. Later Hoare would remember, “We had had little or no sleep, and the news could not be worse, yet there he was, smoking his large cigar and eating fried eggs and bacon, as if he had just returned from an early morning ride.” He was surrounded by yesterday’s newspapers. The Times leader that morning rebuked Labour for dividing the House, since it had been obvious that Chamberlain intended to rebuild his cabinet when “the Labour Party ran up its flag,” throwing the prime minister’s plans “into confusion.” The News Chronicle—which had champio
ned Lloyd George—more accurately reported that since neither Liberal nor Labour leaders were willing to serve under Chamberlain, “a new Premier will thus have to be found. He is more likely to be found in Mr Winston Churchill than anyone else.” Winston swept the papers to the floor with one vigorous arm, rose, and suggested they meet in the war room downstairs. There, with him in the chair, they agreed that two RAF squadrons should be sent to France “in accordance with the prearranged plan.” Then orders to execute Royal Marine, his plan to mine the waters of the Rhine, were issued at long last.259
The first casualty of the Nazi offensive was the feud between Reynaud and Gamelin. The premier sent Vincennes a message: “The battle has begun. Only one thing counts: to win it.” Gamelin agreed, replying: “Seule la France compte”—“Only France counts.” His Majesty’s Government, preoccupied with its own political crisis, had known nothing of the impasse in Paris. It had little meaning now anyway; what mattered was news of the enemy’s penetration. Minute by minute information was accumulating. German paratroopers had landed in Belgium, the Luftwaffe was bombing airfields in France and the Low Countries, and the British and French were marching into Belgium—the last thing, we now know, that they should have done. The Führer’s Army Group B had their undivided attention. Nothing much was happening to Army Group C, holding the frontier opposite the Maginot Line, and nothing was known of Rundstedt’s Army Group A. Allied intelligence wasn’t even aware that it was by far the largest, dwarfing the other two.260