I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air,
with all our might and with all the strength God can give us….
That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim?
I can answer in one word: It is victory,
victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror,
victory however long and hard the road may be;
for without victory, there is no survival.279
The mighty Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, with its garrison of 1,200, fell on Saturday, May 11, the second day of the great Nazi offensive, captured by only 78 parachute-engineers led by a lieutenant. Landing in gliders on the unguarded roof, they blew up the armored cupolas and casemates of the fort’s guns with a new, highly intensive explosive kept secret until now. Belgian frontier guards were prepared to blow up the bridges of the King Albert Canal, blocking the Nazi advance, but another small Nazi detachment, dropping silently out of the night sky, massacred them. In Holland the French Seventh Army engaged the Germans and was flung back. Liège fell to blond young Nazis shouting “Heil Hitler!” as they threw their bodies on the muzzles of Belgian machine guns, sacrificing themselves to maintain the blitzkrieg’s momentum. On Tuesday, Rotterdam was the target of a massive Luftwaffe terror attack; thousands of 2,200-pound delayed-action bombs gutted the center of the city, destroyed 25,000 houses, and left 78,000 civilians homeless and a thousand dead. Rotterdam capitulated. The Dutch commander in chief surrendered his entire army. Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government fled to London.
That was the small shock. The great shock came in barely coherent dispatches from the Meuse. Guderian, leading mechanized spearheads of Rundstedt’s army group, had been racing through Luxembourg and Belgium’s Luxembourg Province. After rocking and tilting and pivoting their way through a seven-mile stretch of the Ardennes—they had been elaborately rehearsed in the Black Forest—these forces had entered France Sunday, right on schedule. Before Churchill had completed the formation of his cabinet, the Germans had seven tank divisions on the Meuse near Sedan. The heights on the far side of the Meuse were forbidding. The French had rushed heavy artillery there, and after firing a few rounds at the panzers, the artillery officer predicted that the Nazis would try to cross elsewhere. But the Germans had rehearsed this, too, and Rundstedt was a master at integrating his commands, including the use of tactical air. At first light on Monday, Stukas and low-level bombers began pounding the French batteries; by 4:00 P.M. every field piece, every enemy howitzer on the heights, had been destroyed. Nazi rubber boats reached the far shore unmolested; beachheads were established; pontoon bridges spanned the river, then heavy bridges—and finally, lumbering and growling, German tanks.
French tanks appeared to challenge them. They were superior to the Germans’ in design and armament, and history’s first great tank battle seemed imminent. But the outcome, to use a word that was on everyone’s lips that week, was une débâcle. The French tank commanders weren’t to blame. Their high command, having ruled that armor was to be used only in support of infantry, had gone to extraordinary lengths to discourage attacks by armored formations. The installation of radios in turrets had been forbidden. The French drivers, assembled from different units and unable to communicate with one another, could not coordinate a counterattack. In two hours Guderian’s panzers had blown up fifty of them. The rest fled. Among the frustrated Frenchmen was Colonel de Gaulle. To his astonishment, dismay, and effroi, he saw shuffling mobs of poilus without weapons. The Germans had no time to take prisoners; they had disarmed the men and left them to blunder about. Meantime, the panzers had made a second crossing of the Meuse at Dinant. German armor was now pouring across the river. In Vincennes, however, concerned French officials calling upon Généralissime Gamelin found him still confident. He did ask if they had any news of the fighting. Apparently all the dispatches sent to him had gone astray.
Guderian’s tanks had reached Montcornet, less than fifteen miles from Laon; they were plunging down the valley of the Somme toward Abbeville on the English Channel. Aghast, the Allied forces in Belgium, including the BEF, realized that the great German scythe slicing across France was slicing behind them. Already they were cut off from the main French armies in the south. On the nineteenth Reynaud dismissed Gamelin from all commands; his predecessor, seventy-three-year-old Maxime Weygand, was brought out of retirement to take over, but Weygand was helpless; events were beyond his control; the Nazis seemed to be everywhere, and everywhere victorious. Thus, only a few days after their advance into Belgium, the French and British divisions in the north disengaged and retreated behind the line of the Scheldt. Lord Gort was poring over a map, studying routes to the Channel ports, where the Germans planned to turn the last key in the last lock.
On May 19, Churchill addressed the nation over the BBC:
I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister
in a solemn hour for the life of our country,
of our Empire, of our Allies,
and above all of the cause of freedom.
A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders.
The Germans, by a remarkable combination
of air bombing and heavily armoured tanks,
have broken through the French defences
north of the Maginot Line,
And strong columns of their armoured vehicles
are ravaging the open country,
which for the first day or two
was without defenders.
They have penetrated deeply
and spread alarm and confusion in their track.
Behind them there are now appearing
infantry in lorries,
and behind them, again,
the large masses are moving forward.
He had received, he said, “the most sacred pledges” from the leaders of the French Republic, “and in particular from its indomitable Prime Minister, M. Reynaud… that whatever happens they will fight to the end, be it bitter or glorious.” Then, a typical Churchill touch: “Nay, if we fight to the end, it can only be glorious.”
Since receiving the King’s commission, he told the country, he had formed a government “of men and women… of almost every point of view.
We have differed and quarreled in the past;
but now one bond unites us all—
to wage war until victory is won,
and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame,
whatever the cost and agony may be.
If this is one of the most awe-striking periods
in the long history of France and Britain,
it is also, beyond doubt, the most sublime.
Side by side… the British and French peoples have advanced
to rescue not only Europe but mankind
from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny
which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history.
Behind them, behind us—
behind the armies of Britain and France—
gather a group of shattered states and bludgeoned races:
the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians,
the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians—
Upon all of whom a long night of barbarism will descend
unbroken even by a star of hope,
unless we conquer, as conquer we must;
as conquer we shall.280
Despite the “most sacred pledges” from Paris, the possibility loomed that France might not fight “to the end.” The leaders of a nation verging on collapse cannot commit their countrymen if the army can no longer defend them. In capitals around the world leaders and newspapers wondered whether, if France fell, England would also quit. The prime minister again went on the air, on June 18, the day after Pétain sued for peace, to discount such speculation—to vow that England would continue the battle alone:
Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation.
Upon it depends our own British l
ife,
and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire….
Hitler knows that he will have to break us on this island
or lose the war.
If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free
and the life of the world may move forward
into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world,
including the United States,
including all we have known and cared for,
Will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age
made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted,
by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties,
and so bear ourselves
that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth
last for a thousand years,
Men will still say:
“This was their finest hour.”281
He had come to power because he had seen through Hitler from the very beginning—but not, ironically, because his inner light, the source of that insight, was understood by Englishmen. Churchill’s star was invisible to the public and even to most of his peers. But a few saw it. One of them wrote afterward that although Winston knew the world was complex and in constant flux, to him “the great things, races, and peoples, and morality were eternal.” Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher, later observed that the Churchill of 1940 was neither “a sensitive lens, which absorbs and concentrates and reflects… the sentiments of others,” nor a politician who played “on public opinion like an instrument.” Instead Berlin saw him as a leader who imposed his “imagination and his will upon his countrymen,” idealizing them “with such intensity that in the end they approached his ideal and began to see themselves as he saw them.” In doing so he “transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armour.”282
Churchill’s mood seemed to confirm this. He possessed an inner radiance that year and felt it. In his memoirs he wrote that “by the confidence, indulgence, and loyalty by which I was upborne, I was soon able to give an integral direction to almost every aspect of the war. This was really necessary because times were so very bad. The method was accepted because everyone realised how near were death and ruin. Not only individual death, which is the universal experience, stood near, but, incomparably more commanding, the life of Britain, her message, and her glory.”283
To him, Britain, “her message, and her glory,” were very real. At times he would address his country as though she were a personage. After he had comprehended the revolution wrought at Kitty Hawk he said (to the astonishment of his companion, who had thought they were alone), “You came into big things as an accident of naval power when you were an island. The world had confidence in you. You became the workshop of the world. You populated the island beyond its capacity. Through an accident of airpower you will probably cease to exist.” It sounded quaint, and it was. Churchill was not a public figure like, say, Roosevelt, who thought and spoke in the idiom of his own time. He was instead the last of England’s great Victorian statesmen, with views formed when the British lion’s roar could silence the world; he was the champion of the Old Queen’s realm and the defender and protector of the values Englishmen of her reign had cherished, the principles they held inviolate, the vision which had illumined their world, which had steadied them in time of travail, and which he had embraced as a youth.284
He was ever the impassioned Manichaean, seeing life and history in primary colors, like Vittore Carpaccio’s paintings of St. George; a believer in absolute virtue and absolute malevolence, in blinding light and impenetrable darkness, in righteousness and wickedness—or rather in the forces of good against the forces of evil, for the two would always be in conflict and be therefore forever embattled. He had been accused of inconsistency and capricious judgment. Actually, it was MacDonald and Baldwin and Chamberlain who tailored their views to fit the moment. Churchill’s binnacle remained true. “Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey,” he told the House of Commons; “hardship our garment, constancy and valour our only shield.”285
And, he might have added, grief as their reward. He was sure Britons could take it. Despite his high birth he had an almost mystical faith in the power of the ordinary Englishman to survive, to endure, and, in the end, to prevail. “Tell the truth to the British people,” he had begged the shifty prime ministers of the 1930s; “they are a tough people, a robust people…. If you have told them exactly what is going on you have ensured yourself against complaints and reproaches which are not very pleasant when they come home on the morrow of some disillusion.”286
But in those shabby years His Majesty’s Governments believed that there were some things the country ought not to know, and that their policy of duplicity—which at times amounted to conspiracy—would be vindicated in the end. Chamberlain would be the scapegoat of appeasement, and before the year was out sackcloth would be his shroud, but he was only one of many. Baldwin, for example, bore a greater responsibility for weakening Britain’s defenses while Hitler built his military juggernaut. The appeasers had been powerful; they had controlled The Times and the BBC; they had been largely drawn from the upper classes, and their betrayal of England’s greatness would be neither forgotten nor forgiven by those who, gulled by the mystique of England’s class system, had believed as Englishmen had believed for generations that public school boys governed best. The appeasers destroyed oligarchic rule which, though levelers may protest, had long governed well. If ever men betrayed their class, these were they.
Because their possessions were great, the appeasers had much to lose should the Red flag fly over Westminster. That was why they had felt threatened by the hunger riots of 1932. It was also the driving force behind their exorbitant fear and distrust of the new Russia. They had seen a strong Germany as a buffer against bolshevism, had thought their security would be strengthened if they sidled up to the fierce, virile Third Reich. Nazi coarseness, anti-Semitism, the Reich’s darker underside, were rationalized; time, they assured one another, would blur the jagged edges of Nazi Germany. So, with their eyes open, they sought accommodation with a criminal regime, turned a blind eye to its iniquities, ignored its frequent resort to murder and torture, submitted to extortion, humiliation, and abuse until, having sold out all who had sought to stand shoulder to shoulder with Britain and keep the bridge against the new barbarism, they led England herself into the cold damp shadow of the gallows, friendless save for the demoralized republic across the Channel. Their end came when the House of Commons, in a revolt of conscience, wrenched power from them and summoned to the colors the one man who had foretold all that had passed, who had tried, year after year, alone and mocked, to prevent the war by urging the only policy which would have done the job. And now, in the desperate spring of 1940, with the reins of power at last firm in his grasp, he resolved to lead Britain and her fading empire in one last great struggle worthy of all they had been and meant, to arm the nation, not only with weapons but also with the mace of honor, creating in every English breast a soul beneath the ribs of death.
About the Author
William Manchester was a hugely successful popular historian and biographer. In addition to the The Last Lion, his books include Goodbye Darkness, A World Lit Only by Fire, The Glory and the Dream, The Arms of Krupp, American Caesar, The Death of the President, and assorted works of journalism.
Books by William Manchester
Biography
DISTURBER OF THE PEACE: The Life of H. L. Mencken
A ROCKEFELLER FAMILY PORTRAIT: From John D. to Nelson
PORTRAIT OF A PRESIDENT: John F. Kennedy in Profile
AMERICAN CAESAR: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964
THE LAST LION: WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL; Visions of Glory: 1874–1932
THE LAST LION: WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL; Alone: 1932–1940
History
THE DEATH OF A PRESIDENT: November 20–November 25,
1963
THE ARMS OF KRUPP, 1587–1968
THE GLORY AND THE DREAM: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972
A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance
Essays
CONTROVERSY: And Other Essays in Journalism, 1950–1975
Fiction
THE CITY OF ANGER
SHADOW OF THE MONSOON
THE LONG GAINER
Diversion
BEARD THE LION
Memoirs
GOODBYE, DARKNESS: A Memoir of the Pacific War
ONE BRIEF SHINING MOMENT: Remembering Kennedy
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Source Notes
Primary Biographical Sources
By far the largest single source for les justifications, as the French call scholarly citations, is the Churchill College Archives Centre at Cambridge University, the repository of 300 collections of private papers, including those of Baroness Spencer-Churchill (Clementine), Bracken, Violet Pearman, Bevin, Grigg, Keyes, E. L. Spears (partial), Hankey (partial), Phipps, Lord Lloyd, Lord Thurso (Sinclair), Christie, Page Croft, Margesson, Attlee, and Halifax (on microfilm—the originals are in the India Office Library, the Public Records Office, and the estate of his heir). Papers of Viscount Templewood (Hoare, partial), Baldwin, and Crewe may be found in the Cambridge University Library; those of Beaverbrook, Lloyd George, and Samuels—until their recent transfer to the Jerusalem Archive—were available in the House of Lords Library; those of Austen and Neville Chamberlain in the Birmingham University Library; those of Lothian and Margo Asquith in the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Derby’s in the Liverpool Public Record Office; Henry James Scrymgeours-Wedderburn’s in the Dundee Archives; Hankey’s (partial) in the Public Record Office; Marsh’s in the New York Public Library; Dalton’s diary and papers, as well as those of Cherwell (partial) in the British Library of Political and Economic Science; and Baruch’s in the Princeton University Library.