The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (28 page)

Other Americans, of course, were far more sympathetic. They
included much of the media and the President himself. But Roosevelt was limited in what he could do by the terms of the Neutrality Act, and by the general climate of the times. He also hesitated by reason of simple prudence. On 15 May—barely a week after taking the reins—Churchill sent him a letter in which he requested military help, in the form of some antiquated American destroyers.

This appeal was not perhaps phrased as judiciously as it might have been. He begged, he pleaded for the destroyers, and he concluded with a veiled threat: that if Britain fell, then there would be nothing to stop Hitler expropriating the entire British navy, and using those ships against the United States herself. In this first substantive exchange of that pivotal relationship, Churchill failed to imagine how his correspondent might react.

Roosevelt took one look at this communication, and concluded from its note of wheedling and blustering desperation that perhaps Britain might indeed be about to go the way of every other European country; in which case what on earth was the point of sending some destroyers, whose guns could simply be turned back on the USA?

Churchill had inadvertently made a point against himself; he had excited and not allayed the anxiety in Washington about a British collapse. Then there was one other international observer who was known to have his doubts about Britain, and her ability to fight on: and that was Admiral François Darlan of the French fleet.

This Darlan was a prickly customer, who had become so enraged at what he saw as the inadequacies of Britain’s assistance to France that he became positively Anglophobe. At one stage he had to be calmed down, and reminded that he was fighting the Boche and not the rosbifs. He had met Churchill during those ghastly funereal encounters in early June, and he had assured him that the French fleet would not fall into German hands. But what trust could possibly be placed in the word of Darlan?

He might well be an honourable man; he might believe it was unthinkable that his fleet should be used by the Germans—but then plenty of unthinkable things had already taken place. As long as the fleet was within German reach, there seemed little to stop those boats eventually flying a Nazi flag. That was not a risk that Churchill thought he could run.

Some historians have been strongly critical of Churchill’s behaviour. In
a fascinating study, Richard Lamb has argued that he was far too brutal and impetuous; that more time should have been given to his admirals to sort it out with the French; that Churchill sanitised the official history after the war—exploiting the fact that he was Prime Minister again in 1951—and effectively stifled criticism of his ‘butchery’.

What is certainly true is that Churchill was in charge of the whole process, driving events like a bulldozer. As soon as France had fallen, he became obsessed with the risk posed by those sleek, fast, modern French ships. In the War Cabinet on 22 June he noted the qualities of the
Richelieu
and the
Jean Bart
and others. They should be bombed, he urged, or they must be penned in their harbours by British mines. Their captains should surrender or be treated as traitors.

Halifax led the rest of the cabinet in trying to cool him down. ‘
All efforts must be made to make the parleys a success,’ he said; but two days later Churchill was at it again. The armistice had come into effect. France was out of the war. What were we going to do about those damn ships?

Now the naval chiefs joined the cabinet in opposing violence against the French. Even the First Sea Lord, Sir Dudley Pound, normally a Churchill yes-man, said he could not recommend an operation against them.

On Churchill bashed and butted like a bull at a barn door. In Gibraltar the British admirals held a conference, at which every flag
officer was invited to give an opinion, as well as all the naval liaison officers from the French ports in North Africa. Was it a good idea to prepare some kind of action against the French fleet?

No, said the experts, the men on the spot; the very threat of force would be ‘disastrous’ and more likely to turn the French against the British. They protested in vain. Churchill trampled their hesitations with autocratic indifference. Lamb argues that at this stage in the war he was virtually a military dictator.

By 1 July the chiefs of staff and the cabinet had been bludgeoned into seeing things the Churchill way. Operation Catapult was launched, to neutralise and if necessary to sink the French fleet. It didn’t matter to Churchill that the French were doing their best to honour what they thought were their commitments. They scuttled ships and submarines in French ports, and the remainder they indeed sailed away from German-occupied France. The
Richelieu
and twenty-four others sailed from Brest to Morocco; the
Jean Bart
sailed from St Nazaire; others left Lorient.

In fact the French left not a single vessel in the German-occupied zone—and yet Churchill still felt that ‘
at all costs, at all risks, in one way or another we must make sure that the Navy of France did not fall into the wrong hands and then perhaps bring us and others to ruin.’

Before the armistice the British had assured the French that it would be satisfactory if the French fleet were taken to North Africa, or to Toulon, outside the German zone. Now perfidious Albion was again going back on her word.

On 3 July the British task force under James Somerville arrived outside Mers-el-Kébir, and the French sailors were thrilled—thinking they would shortly be together on the high seas, taking the fight to the Germans. Then the British planes appeared in the sky, dropping mines in the harbour mouth. French suspicions grew.

A British envoy was sent to negotiate with the French admiral Marcel Gensoul. At first Gensoul refused to see him, thinking it was beneath his dignity to parley with a mere captain—but Captain ‘Hookie’ Holland managed to hand over the ultimatum from Churchill.

The French were told to scuttle their ships, or sail them either to British ports or to the West Indies; or face the consequences. The day wore on. The tension grew. Hookie Holland bobbed up and down in his lighter, surrounded by French vessels. Finally at 14.42 Gensoul signalled that he was ready to receive the British delegate for ‘
honourable discussions’. By 16.15 Holland was on board the French flagship, the
Dunkerque
, and they began to make progress.

Gensoul showed him orders from Darlan, making it clear that if Germany tried to seize the boats, he should sail to America or scuttle them. ‘
If we had known all this before, it would have made all the difference,’ said Holland. Gensoul then went farther: he was willing to disarm all his ships, even though this meant exceeding his instructions. But by then it was too late.

Darlan had sent naval reinforcements; there was no saying when they would arrive. A full-scale battle between the British and the French fleet was in prospect. Churchill sent a short telegram: ‘
Settle matters quickly’. The fate of the sailors was sealed. The bombardment began.

As he said later, ‘
It was a terrible decision, like taking the life of one’s own child to save the state.’ In its icy logic, Churchill’s decision was also 100 per cent correct.

Whichever way you cut it, the French should have recognised that their ships were now effectively forfeit to the Germans, or at best they were bargaining counters in negotiations with the Nazis. Lamb argues that the Germans merely wanted to ‘control’ the French fleet in the sense of ‘check’ or ‘supervise’—‘control’ as in passport ‘
kontrol
’.

That is surely implausible. The Germans had captured Paris; they had their boot on the French neck. Ultimately they could have made the French do whatever they wanted with those ships. The French guarantees were worthless, and they should have recognised as much. Darlan and his admirals should have swallowed their pride and abandoned all pretence of autonomy and done what Churchill suggested: sailed to British ports, or to the Caribbean—and if he had done so, Darlan would have been a hero.

It was Churchill’s duty as Prime Minister to remove any threat to his country’s independence; and he was right to be ruthless at Mers-el-Kébir, because the following week there began the Battle of Britain.

—

T
HROUGHOUT THAT
lovely summer the British craned their necks to watch one of the decisive battles of world history. They watched the destiny of the world written in the vapour trails of the planes that tussled in the skies above southern England. They saw blackened Germans tottering up their garden paths and they found bits of plane on suburban streets.

They watched their RAF protectors as they performed their astonishing aerobatics, sometimes bringing down the enemy, sometimes crashing in dreadful blazes or heaps of tangled metal. Week after week they had a clear sense of what was at stake: that this attack on the RAF was the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Britain. They had every reason to think that they were next on Hitler’s itinerary of conquest.

It is sometimes said that Churchill exaggerated the threat of invasion, to promote national cohesion and get the country behind him. I am not sure that is so. He believed the threat was so imminent in June 1940 that he took to the firing range at Chequers, and began
practising with his revolver and his Mannlicher rifle. Every day he would study the tides to work out when the Germans might come.

The
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
prophesied on 14 July that London would follow Warsaw, and be reduced to ashes. On 19 July Hitler spoke to the Reichstag and offered Britain a choice between peace and ‘
unending suffering and misery’. He drew up the plans: Operation Sea Lion, he called it, a multi-pronged seaborne invasion of the south coast.

If Hitler had won control of the skies and the seas, there is little doubt that he would have gone for it. He had assembled 1,918 barges off the coast of Holland, and if he had been able to convey his force across the Channel, it is hard to see how Britain could have fought on for long. The army had been routed at Dunkirk; there were no fortifications or fall-back positions.

The country had not been successfully invaded for 900 years—and so London was not only the biggest and most sprawling city in Europe (a great fat cow, as Churchill called the capital). It was also the least defended: the only surviving walls and battlements were made by the Romans, and they weren’t in great shape.

Hitler had a giant strategic imperative in attacking Britain: he had to knock out Britain before he went east, and took on Russia. Even in July 1940, the whole shape and dynamics of the war were clear to Winston Churchill—just as he had foreseen the shape of the First World War as well.

‘
Hitler must invade or fail. If he fails, he is bound to go east, and fail he will,’ he said at Chequers on 14 July. He saw, with his unerring and pellucid understanding of the big picture, that if Britain could survive, if Britain could hang on—then Hitler would lose, because not even the Nazi war machine could fight on two fronts at once.

It was thanks to Churchill—and at crucial moments, thanks to him alone—that Britain did hang on. It is clear that there was
something utterly magical about his leadership that summer. With his poetic and sometimes Shakespearean diction he made people feel noble, exalted—that what they were doing was better and more important than anything they had done before.

He mentally elided ideas of Englishness and freedom, and it helped that the weather was fine, because there is nowhere lovelier than England in June; and perhaps that gentle beauty sharpened the general sentiment he encouraged: that the threat must be repelled, and that this was an island to fight and to die for. He gave the people an image of themselves: as a tiny band of heroes—analogous to the tiny band of RAF pilots—holding out against tyranny and against the odds, the story from Thermopylae to the Defence of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu war—the eternal and uplifting story of the few against the many.

In this mood of adrenalin-fuelled exhilaration the British indeed accomplished extraordinary things. There is only one period that I can discover in the last 120 years when British manufacturing output overtook Germany’s—and that was the summer of 1940. Britain produced more planes than Germany; and by the autumn they had seen off the Luftwaffe. Goering made the fatal mistake of turning the attention of his fighters and bombers to the towns of Britain, and giving up on Dowding’s airfields.

The Germans might so easily have won. There were some evenings when every plane available to Britain was up in the sky, desperate to hold them off. And if Goering had controlled the skies, then that invasion fleet could have made an untroubled crossing of the Channel; and that armada would have been all the more frightening and lethal—and Hitler’s confidence would have been all the greater—for the addition of those French warships.

The German fleet had been badly knocked about in the Norwegian campaign; with the addition of the French, they might have
been invincible. What Churchill did at Mers-el-Kébir was indeed butchery, but it was necessary. It was the chilling and calculated act of a skull-piling warlord from the steppes of central Asia.

But that is what he was: a warlord. He was leading and directing military action in a way that is unthinkable for a modern democratic politician. He had done his best for France, right up until the capitulation and beyond; he had made his generals commit men and material to the battle long after it was obvious that the game was up—indeed, he is blamed for needlessly throwing away the 51st Highland Division, many of whom were killed or captured, and for wasting time and energy by trying to create an Asterix-like redoubt against the Nazis in Brittany.

Now that France had fallen, he drew the only logical conclusion—and the real tragedy is surely that neither Admiral Gensoul nor Darlan could see how radically their world had changed. I think I can understand why the House of Commons was so elated by this depressing and in many ways disgusting massacre.