HIS FINEST HOUR
By WILSON HARRIS
TO describe Mr. Churchill's second volume* as monumental is to state the incontestable in the form of a commonplace. How could it be anything but monumental ? When before through all the centuries of this island's history has such a theme been matched with such a pen ? When have events so tremendous that the fate of all humanity hung on them been recorded, soberly, yet by the very soberness dramatically, by the man who at their climax had more part than any other in the shaping of them ? When again, unless human madness flames up incalculably once more, will such a combination of theme and pen be seen ?
* The Second World War. Vol. II: Their Finest Hour. By Winston S. Churchill. Macmillan, 25s. How, then, could the story of 1940 told by such a chronicler be other than monumental ? The story, indeed, impresses even more than the events themselves did, for outside the narrowest circle at the top no one knew fully what the magnitude of the peril was. We did not know then of Hitler's definite order that plans for the invasion of Britain should be ready by mid-August and completed by September 15th ; hence the Fiihrer's statement to his staff that " the decisive stage of the war had already been reached, but that England had not yet recognised it." Now, with the events that led inexorably to the climax set out objectively and methodically, in due proportion and due relation, it is possible perhaps for the first time to realise what this nation was saved from, and how narrowly. And students of Mr. Churchill's personality will not fail to note that on September 18th, in the week when the crisis reached its unbelievable height, the Prime Minister could minute the First Lord of the Admiralty: " Surely you can run to a new Admiralty flag. It grieves me to see the present dingy object every morning."
Recall for a moment what 1940 meant, and above all that part of it, from May onwards, with which this volume deals. At home a new administration, with Mr. Churchill, distrusted and disliked by his own party, at its head. Across the Channel the thunderous end of the twilight war and the beginning of the hail of blows that laid low Norway and Holland, Belgium and France, and left Hitler faced with resistance nowhere except in one unconquered island. Mr. Churchill grimly marshals the shattered illusions. Holland was to save herself by her inundations, Belgium by her neutrality (that, though half her population could remember 1914), France by the " impassable " (and therefore unfortified) Ardennes. Only with pro-. found pain can the story of the defeat and demoralisation of France, of Gamelin's pathetic faith in his fortifications, of Petain's innate defaitisme, of Laval's open treachery, be read today, even as presented by a writer as warm as any man living in his admiration for all that France has been and yet will be.
Objective though the record is, there is anguish underlying every line of it. Desperate decisions had to be taken and desperate decisions to be resisted. The British Prime Minister must be con- stantly flying to and fro, exhorting, reasoning, appealing. At one dramatic interview in Paris as early as May 15th, he broke into a discussion on strategy to ask General Gamelin, " Where is the strategic reserve ? " The answer was cataclysmic in its brevity: " Aucune." Yet even such an answer need not have ended hope. On another 15th—this time of September, with France crushed to helplessness under Hitler's heel—Winston, was talking strategy again, in the underground Operations Room of Fighter Command at Uxbridge. The Battle of Britain had reached its culminating point. Every fighter in the Air Force was grappling with the enemy over Kent and London. The Prime Minister watched the changing lines of bulbs on the screen, vaguely conscious of their import. After gazing long in silence he asked, " What other reserves have we ? " " There are none," said Air Vice-Marshal Park. As fate ordained, none were needed. The enemy was already speeding homewards.
On many minor points and some major ones Mr. Churchill com- pels a revision of judgements based hitherto on accepted assumptions. He has long and often been criticised for his almost melodramatic offer to France of an " indissoluble union " and a common citizenship in the blackest days of June. It is here disclosed that the project had been evolved between Sir Robert Vansittart and Col. Desmoncl Norton on the one side and M. Jean Monnet and M. Pleven, with General de Gaulle's strong approval, on the other. Churchill's first reactions to it were hostile, and he 'remained sceptical even when it was brought, presumably by the Foreign Secretary, before the War Cabinet. But the members of that body—Lord Halifax, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, Mr. Attlee and Mr. Arthur Greenwood—were surpris- ingly enthusiastic, and the declaration was communicated by tele- phone to the French Premier, M. Reynaud, at Bordeaux forthwith. That was the end of it. It was not submerged by events, swiftly as the end for France was approaching ; it was the French Cabinet, shell-shocked, divided, half defeatist, which rejected it without a formal vote. That in retrospect may seem France's folly and be seen as Britain's salvation. If the plan had gone through we should have been compelled to fight to the end on the continent of Europe, and the end might have been the end of Britain. The one decision on which, says Mr. Churchill, we remained adamant in the face of all appeal—to retain twenty-five fighter squadrons in Britain—could never have been maintained. And without the twenty-five squadrons the Battle of Britain must have been lost.
So the scroll of Britain's darkest days is unrolled. Brilliant achievements like the Dunkirk evacuation lightened it, but as Mr. Churchill reminded Parliament at the time, " wars are not won by evacuations," and the result of the defeat in France was that the defenders of Britain were left with little more than their hands to fight with. We were alone. France was finished. Russia was in full alliance with Hitler and acclaiming all his victories. Lend-Lease, neutral America's decisive contribution to victory, was six months and more ahead. It was at that moment that the Prime Minister, addressing a Parliament which never intermitted its regular sittings for all Hitler could do, closed what is perhaps the greatest of all his speeches (" We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the land- ing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets ; we shall never surrender ") with a passage alike prophetic and dynamic: " Even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, till in God's good time the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old."
How much indirectly the developing decisions of the New World were influenced by the author of those words, his plain narra- tive of events—not any claim, direct or indirect, to personal credit— convincingly reveals. Mr. Churchill took office on May loth ; five days later the first of the long series of confidential conimunications between the Prime Minister of Great Britain (styling himself for this purpose " Former Naval Person ") and the President of the United States, who initiated the correspondence in the first month of the war, was despatched. It contained a catalogue of the services America could, if America would, render to Great Britain in her peril. Chief of them was the supply of forty or fifty old destroyers, for lack of which it might be impossible to hold submarine attacks in check. The appeal recurs, with growing insistence, through the critical months that followed May. But there were certain things the President could not do. One was the commission of an act so unneutral that it might well have involved the United States itself in war. Yet in need so urgent a formula had somehow to be found. It was found on this side, in the proposal that bases in the West Indies necessary for America's defence should be leased to her in return for the loan of the destroyers. Even so, with Parliament to satisfy about the bases and Congress about the destroyers, it was not till September, the month of climacteric deci- sion, that the deal went through, and not till October that the vessels themselves came to hand. Meanwhile, America had been releasing every ounce she could spare of every kind of ammunition and equip- ment, selling it to a private concern which re-sold it to Britain so long as Britain could find dollars or their equivalent to pay in.
But how long could that be, at the rate money was being spent in 194o ? The question had been frankly faced in Churchill's May 15th message to the President: " We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff all the same" ; on such terms of mutual trust did Prime Minister and President stand already. The "cash and carry" principle was well enough, but for Britain carrying was far easier than cash. Long before the end of 1940 the position had grown desperate, and at the end of November a message of some four thousand words sped from Downing Street to the White House at Washington. It disclosed the whole stark situation unflinchingly, especially its financial aspect. Even so no appeal and no proposal were put forward. "We leave it with con- fidence to you and to your being sure that ways and means will be found which future generations on both sides of the Atlantic will approve and admire." They were. From that communication sprang "the most unsordid•act in history." The President received the message on a pleasure cruise. For two days he meditated, and out of the meditation Lend-Lease was born. A statute of 5892 authorising the lease of Army property was unearthed. By March, 5941, Lend- Lease was law. By ten months later America was at war herself, and all was common cause.
But those ten months, like the ten that had preceded them, were vital. In those twenty Britain stood alone. This volume does not cover all the twenty. It begins when the Churchill Government took office in May, 5940 ; it ends with " the desert victory " in Libya as 1940 faded into 5941, a victory due largely to the tremendous decision (originating with Dill and the General Staff)" to send to Wavell in Egypt Britain's only armoured division at a moment—in August—when Britain herself lay stripped and defenceless, exposed to mortal peril. Of those months " Winston S. Churchill " writes as no other living man could write. No one else had comparably comprehensive knowledge ; no one else writes English with greater clarity and force. He set out to write a history, not an epic ; but his theme has made it one of the great epics of the world. It is history, of course, written by the principal actor in it, but central figure though that actor necessarily is, there is no trace of conscious self-glorification from beginning to end. And at every point the facts can be checked by the ample documentation. It is in the documents above all that Mr. Churc;hill stands revealed, revealed as the man who saved his country hardly less by faith than by words. No one who ever heard them can forget those war-time broadcasts ; no one who heard them will fail, coming on some of the sharp staccato sentences in this book, to find the familiar lisp and lilt re-echoing in his ears. The references to " that man," " that bad man," have their entertaining echo too.
And what a story the mere documents tell. To President Roosevelt, in July, 5940, with the Battle of Britain still to come: " I am beginning to feel very hopeful about this war if we can get round the next three or four months." A month earlier still, to Smuts: " I see only one sure way through now, to wit, that Hitler should attack this country, and in so doing break his air weapon." To Sir Samuel Hoare in Madiid, in October: " We have got Hitler beat, and though he may ravage the Continent and the war may last a long time his doom is certain." And in a statement reported to Parliament in July—a statement that brought members cheering to their feet: "The Prime Minister desires to impress upon all persons holding responsible positions in the Government, in the Fighting Services or in the Civil Departments, their duty to maintain a spirit of alert and confident energy.... The Prime Minister expects all His Majesty's servants in high places to set an example of steadiness and resolution." The old Roman virtues do not easily fit the frame- work of this swiftly moving world. Yet how this volume brings back the classic strife of Rome and Carthage. "The Senate gave thanks to the consul for not having despaired of the Republic." Unus homo nobis—hortemdo ? nitendo ? credendo ?—restituit rem. It was of course, in 1940, not a case of a single man. Europe, said Mr. Pitt, in the last public utterance before his death, is not to be saved by any single man. Nor was Britain. Never perhaps in the history
of Britain did every man and woman in Britain more valiantly play their parts. But to one man events, or Parliament, or Fate, or Providence allotted the supreme part. How supreme it was no one who has not read this volume will completely comprehend. Here is the story ; here is the man. Perhaps the greatest story in English history ; not impossibly, as these years show him, the greatest man. "Their Finest Hour." Assuredly his too.
Previous page
