A History of Britain, Volume 3 (68 page)

Had the operation worked, that fact might have been overlooked. But in a chilling rerun of some of the blunders of 1915, nothing did work as planned. Instead of holding the Germans at bay, the expedition, launched in April 1940 after many delays, afforded an excuse for the pre-emptive strike already planned by Hitler. As the mining of Norwegian waters had been fatally held up by one of Churchill’s flying trips to Paris to persuade the French to embrace the plan, a modest German force was enabled to establish itself by 7 April, and then, embarrassingly, to frustrate attempts at a British landing. Churchill had also grievously miscalculated, as it turned out, the exposure of battle cruisers to attack from the air. The whole thing was a wretched mess and by June the only substantial British bridgehead, at Narvik, was abandoned.

As first lord of the admiralty Churchill might have been expected to take the lion’s share of the blame, yet somehow he escaped the whipping.
This
may have been, at least in part, because he had begun to broadcast on the radio, and had already established some of the persona – honest, resolute, intensely engaged – that was to boost public morale so powerfully during the rest of the war. He was still not at all popular with most of the Tory rank and file in the Commons, and even less popular with the Labour MPs, many of whom had memories that stretched back to the general strike and even Tonypandy. Some of his speeches in the House seemed, even to supporters like Harold Nicolson, stilted and bumbling, taking refuge in stale clouds of oratory when clear information was what was needed. In the country, however, the contrast between Churchill and Chamberlain was becoming clearer, not least because Chamberlain (beginning to suffer from what turned out to be stomach cancer) had backed into the war and somehow never seemed to manage to rouse himself from what had been a personal defeat. Churchill, on the other hand, having argued for armed resistance to the Third Reich, was flush with vindication.

By the time the Norway fiasco was due to be debated on 7 May, the Labour opposition was roiled by dissatisfaction. ‘It is not just Norway’, Clement Attlee would say in the debate. ‘Norway comes as the culmination of many discontents. People are asking why those mainly responsible for the conduct of affairs are men who have had an almost uninterrupted career of failure.’ A growing number of Tories (though still a minority) took the point and made an approach to see if Labour would be receptive to the idea of a national coalition. Churchill himself remained steadfastly loyal to the government, allowing himself to be used, as Lloyd George wickedly said, ‘as an air raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues’. But his old gang were ready to roar their heads off. Leo Amery, normally one of the quieter anti-appeasers, concluded a devastating indictment of Chamberlain’s war leadership by invoking Oliver Cromwell’s famous dismissal of the Rump Parliament: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!’ And there were other surprises at the debate, the most startling being the appearance in full dress uniform of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, who seemed to be saying (the rigid upper lip made it hard to hear him) that the navy had been prevented from playing their part in Norway by being told that the army was doing such a splendid job.

Suddenly a slightly sticky parliamentary statement (which Chamberlain petulantly thought he hadn’t needed to make anyway) turned into a court martial of the government for dereliction of duty. The Labour front bench decided to divide the House, simply on a motion to
adjourn.
When they filed into the opposition lobby they found themselves mixing, as one of them remembered, with young Conservatives in uniform; a further 41 Tories abstained. When the roll was called and it was discovered that the government’s majority had dropped to 81, shouts of ‘Go! Go! Go!’ hounded Chamberlain as he left the House. One Tory MP started singing very loudly ‘Rule Britannia’.

To Chamberlain’s preliminary inquiry, Arthur Greenwood and the Labour leadership made it clear that a condition of their serving in a national war coalition was that it would not be under him. Only two serious candidates were possible, Halifax and Churchill, but Labour did not specify a preference. Churchill was still deeply suspect to them and most of them assumed, since many of the Tories disliked him too, that the job would go to Halifax. Nor did they mind. On 9 May Chamberlain then called a remarkable meeting that changed British history. Present were himself, Halifax and Winston. Explaining that it was beyond his power to form a coalition government, Chamberlain then asked the two men whom he should advise the king to send for after his own resignation had been accepted. There was a very long pause before Halifax, making by far the best decision of his life, said that his peerage made it impossible for him to take the post. He meant that it would be difficult for him to control his party from the Lords or to run the government as a peer. But that was disingenuous: it would have been easy to find him a seat in the Commons if that were really the objection. It was something inside Halifax’s own make-up that stopped him. Perhaps he had no stomach to be the next in the firing line for discontented Labour and Tory barrackers. Perhaps he thought, with western Europe on the point of being over-run, that to accept would be tantamount to political suicide. Chamberlain’s experience of taking the blame for Norway showed that he would in any case be an ‘honorary PM’ while Churchill ran the war without, it seemed, having to take real responsibility. Better that Churchill should actually carry the can for the disaster that was surely about to happen. Then, perhaps, Halifax could step in to clean up the mess and rally the sensible for a sensible peace.

So when Chamberlain went to the Palace and George VI asked him whom he should send for, the king may have been surprised to hear that it was not the good egg, the sound Lord Halifax whom both he and queen liked and who had been a shooting regular at Balmoral. It was Churchill who kissed the king’s hands the next afternoon on 10 May. The premiership could not have come at a more testing time. Early the same day, the Germans had invaded Holland and Belgium. A lesser man, or at least one without Churchill’s sense of historical appointment, might have
flinched.
But as he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last with Destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.’ On Whit Monday, 13 May, when King George had been contacted personally by Queen Wilhelmina of Holland asking for help (and, if necessary, asylum for her government-in-exile), Churchill went to the Commons to deliver a short speech, shocking in its quiet, truthful sobriety, its absolute moral clarity and its defiant optimism:

I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined the Government: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. 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.

The cheers, however, came overwhelmingly from the Labour benches. There was now a sense – with Clement Attlee in the small war cabinet, and Greenwood, Herbert Morrison, the one-eyed policeman’s son, and, above all, Ernest Bevin at the ministry of labour – that Churchill was
their
prime minister. Chamberlain had been damaged by his failure to win the trust of the unions, but that was no longer an issue since Bevin and Morrison had been given massive powers. It was, in fact, the realization of that most unideological trade unionist Bevin’s passion for genuine management-union cooperation. War had brought those two Britains back together.

And however the Tories felt about Churchill, the speeches of May, the Commons speech repeated for radio, and the almost equally extraordinary prime ministerial broadcast of 19 May in which he had the unenviable task of announcing the German breakthrough into France three days earlier, steeling the public for a battle ahead ‘for all that Britain is, and all that Britain means’, irreversibly changed the way the country felt about him. A primitive opinion poll conducted in 1941 found that 78 per cent of those asked approved of Churchill’s leadership, and that measure of appreciation was never to diminish significantly throughout the war.

Many years later Clement Attlee wrote that, if someone asked him, ‘What, exactly, Winston did to win the war, I would say, “talk about it”.’ Ed Murrow, the American news correspondent, said much the same when he wrote of Churchill’s mobilization of words. The effect of his speeches on British morale is incalculable – meaning, literally, that despite most of those early opinion-soundings it can never be precisely measured. But anyone of my generation (born as the war ended) who talks to anyone of my parents’ generation knows, at least anecdotally, that those speeches can be described, without hyperbole, as transforming. Some 70 per cent of the country listened whenever the prime minister spoke. And in stark contrast to what had been happening in the phoney war, his words bound parliament and the rank and file of the political parties firmly to the war government. They also gripped the attention – as they were meant to – of both politicians and people in the United States and anywhere else that an English-speaking population had radios. They seriously irritated the Nazis and arguably contributed to Hitler making ill-advised strategic decisions such as switching bombing raids from British airfields to civilian centres. But most of all they made Britain – not just England – a whole nation again. Even Orwell, who needless to say had deep misgivings about demagoguery, breathed a sigh of relief in May 1940 that at last the country had a leader who understood ‘that wars are won by fighting’.

Of course, Churchill had been revelling in oratory for his entire life, ever since he had stood on top of Mrs Ormiston Chant’s screen in the Empire, Leicester Square, in November 1894, and certainly since he had graduated with honours from the Lloyd George school of verbal manhandling. Occasionally, perhaps more than occasionally, he had been guilty of shameless grandstanding; sometimes the reach for Shakespearean diction and cadence had been a reach too far and the effect thudded into hollow bombast. But this all changed in May 1940. Churchill felt that he was, in some peculiar way, possessed by his nation’s history. This gave him the strength and the sincerity to make millions of Britons feel, through listening to him, that they too, without ever seeking the moment, had become embodiments of the British will to endure in freedom. Blue-blooded or not, Churchill had an almost perfect ear for what the public needed to hear. This was no small achievement in a country where social divisions were marked, above all, by accent and mannerisms of speech. But Churchill’s diction, however romantically high-flown, was never high-class in the sense of being the nasal twang of the point-to-point upper-crust, much less the thin refinement of philosophical Oxbridge. That his voice was so peculiar – by turns a growl, a rumble, a chuckle, a vocal
swoop
and, sometimes, a rising shout – detached it from any obvious class and made it instead a voice for, if not exactly of, the people; somehow both grandiose and familiar, both aristocratic and democratic. Everything Churchill did was calculated to have this same street-wise social cheekiness – not least the famous ‘V’ for victory sign, a reversed and therefore ostensibly cleaned-up version of a famously profane gesture, deliberately designed to retain something of the original’s up-yours defiance.

Many of the great speeches followed a set structure, no less effective for being so often repeated: an opening motif of solemn, if not tragically weighted, confessional frankness (‘Tonight I must speak to you’; ‘The situation is very serious’); a slow movement in which the solemn theme gets elaborated into detail; a sparkling scherzo of sly jokes at the expense of Hitler and the ‘Nahzees’, (‘Some chicken, some neck’); and a great finale of ferocious resolution, comradely obstinacy and often poetic salvation, the coda delivered with a glorious, almost offhand dip of the voice (‘But westward, LOOK [voice up]. The land is [voice down] bright!’).

This extraordinary instrument of mobilizing allegiance did not work by itself. It took Churchill between six and eight hours to get each speech right, and he would rehearse them relentlessly until he felt he had each line perfectly weighed and timed. It was as important for him, as for any great thespian, to pace himself between reassuring gentleness (of which there is much more than meets the eye in reading the printed text) and heroic apostrophe. In the performance of ‘we shall fight them on the beaches’, done for both parliament and the BBC, the reiterated mantra of defiance is actually spoken very softly, almost ecclesiastically, with the resignation of someone who knows he is merely stating the obvious. ‘We shall fight them in the hills’ thus becomes not a summons but simply a statement of confident fact.

This was, of course, to pay Britons – many of whom were undoubtedly not looking forward to fighting either on the hills or on the beaches – an enormous compliment. But then Churchill was full of compliments for the people whom in 1940, whether they were waving at him from the smouldering rubble of their cities, exiting from the cockpit of a Hurricane, or just standing around a village green with an ancient shotgun, he transparently loved with a rich passion that was decidedly un-British in its intensity and completely foreign to politics. This love wasso powerful that it persuaded him to do something else unheard of in politics, and that was to tell the truth. Not the
whole
truth, of course (this was not fairyland), but an astonishing measure of it. Most of the five great speeches of 1940 had little good to report except the raw fact of survival, and when, as in the speech made after Dunkirk, there seemed to be
something
to feel relatively happy about, Churchill was quick to guard against premature self-congratulation. ‘Wars are not won by evacuations,’ he said on 4 June 1940, and took care to enumerate just how much equipment had been left behind in France along with the loss of 30,000 men. Another compliment was being paid to the British people by his not treating them like children in need of the consolations of lying propaganda. By not disguising the gravity of the situation, but without making any concession to defeatism, Churchill won credibility. When he eventually did have good news to report, he could be trusted not to be indulging in idle hopes.