Churchill and the King Read online

  Did this really matter? It did and it did not. Should it have mattered? Perhaps. Few people questioned Churchill’s preeminence, least of all the two allies. Yet in the back of their mind there was the existence of another authority that could challenge a particular decision. Nearer the front of Churchill’s mind must have been the same notion. Of the many reasons weighing in favor of his close alliance with the king, surely the king’s public support was one of the most important. That there is so little evidence of anyone attempting to overstep Churchill with his monarch is as much, or perhaps even more, a result of the king’s own trust in his position with the prime minister as it is of the latter’s diligence in satisfying the king’s need for inclusion. Yet even Roosevelt, shortly before his death, was overheard muttering to himself while “staring into space, and apparently completely absorbed in his own thoughts. He only spoke three times (not to the visitor but as if to himself)—‘If Churchill insists on Hongkong, I will have to take it to the King.’ This was repeated three times.”

  —

  “I must warn you that you are approaching a head-on smash in Norway,” Churchill began a letter to Chamberlain on April 24, 1940, then deleted the line. Did he foresee the events of the next month? He had been a loyal if argumentative member of Chamberlain’s cabinet. Following the failed attempt to expel the Germans from Narvik, which, in an echo of the Dardanelles, foundered on a maldistribution of resources, Churchill could claim that his plans had been thwarted by colleagues and underlings. (“You admirals [are] all the same . . . agree on plans . . . when it comes to fighting you’re yellow”—which was not true in this case.) But he withheld public criticism. “It was the only time in my life,” he said, “when I have kept my mouth shut.”

  Some worried whether Narvik and the failure of related operations would tarnish him or perhaps, at some level, if he was still up to the job and if it had been a mistake to recall him. The more immediate problem had to do with Chamberlain. The Norwegian disaster proved fatal to what was left of his career. Back in the House of Commons, Chamberlain “sat there, his dark figure erect,” observed a witness, Edward Spears:

  Then he stood up. He held himself very straight. The whole House watched him as he looked for a moment at the Assembly that had dealt him such a grievous blow, the last and most significant thrust of the many cruel ones delivered during two days of almost unrelieved attack. He often gave the misleading impression that he was sneering owing to the way his nostrils lifted when he smiled or even spoke. Such an expression flitted on his face for a moment, then froze into a more usual one of cold aloofness, almost of distaste. . . . He walked out of the House and through the lobby with heavy feet, a truly sad and pathetic figure.

  Churchill would escape punishment; indeed, he would prevail in the moment. History did not repeat itself, not this time. He would remain wedded to—some would say fixated on—“mad plans” for a Norwegian front for some time to come, but this was not to happen the way he wanted, in good part because the chiefs, Brooke especially, did not get the point of his interest in it. Now, at last, though, he became prime minister. Other fronts, namely France, became paramount.

  France was on the eve of defeat. On an earlier occasion—his capture by a Boer patrol—Churchill had recalled the words of Napoleon: “When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned.” Not this time. Britain stood alone but she was not a prisoner. She was not defeated. Nor would she be destroyed. But Hitler’s armies had begun their conquest. The Sitzkrieg, or Phony War, was over. The real war that so many had feared had begun. “There were many people in this country who looked on quite happily while Herr Hitler stripped leaf after leaf from the European artichoke,” Harold Nicolson has written, “and who contended that it was not merely fit and proper that he should obtain this satisfaction but that he would be so charmed, so ‘satiated,’ by the outer leaves that he would discard the choke and not proceed to examine the succulent receptacle which would remain behind.” Not so. “There are very few leaves left upon that artichoke today.” Churchill, however, was in a fine mood. Spears saw him

  sitting relaxed and rotund in an arm-chair at his desk. He offered me a cigar, looked at me for a moment as if I were a lens through which he was gazing at something beyond, then the kindliest, friendliest expression spread over his face as he focused on me, his face puckered into a lovable baby-like grin, then he was grave again.

  Churchill’s first efforts were to stiffen the morale of the French and to see for himself the conditions of the French army. He was known to be a fond Francophile who saw that country as being synonymous with civilization. He took several trips across the Channel, each one seeming more obviously dire than the previous, to do what he could to avert the country’s collapse. Ismay recalled the final scene in June 1940:

  A bare room in a disused chateau on the Loire. The actors—the French and British High Commands, seated round a long table. General Weygand describing the desperate plight of the French Army, and pleading that all fighter aircraft in England should be sent to their aid.

  “Here,” said the General, “is the decisive point, now is the decisive moment. Nothing must be held back. Everything must be hurled into battle.”

  A terrible moment for Winston Churchill, a great lover of France and the most loyal and generous of friends. A long pause, and then the measured reply: “No. This is not the decisive point or the decisive moment. That will come when Hitler hurls his bombers against Great Britain. If we can keep command of the air over our islands, and if we can keep the seas open, as we certainly shall do, we will win it all back for you.”

  And then a characteristic gesture of chivalry and defiance— “But if you think it best for France in her agony that her Army should capitulate, let there be no hesitation on our account. Whatever happens here, we shall fight on for ever and ever and ever. I pledge you my word that Britain will never surrender.”

  M. Reynaud, obviously touched, said: “But if our Army surrenders, the whole might of Germany will be turned upon you and they will invade you. Then what will you do?”

  Back whipped the reply: “I haven’t thought that out very carefully, but, broadly speaking I should propose to drown as many as possible of them on the way over, and then to knock on the head any that managed to crawl ashore.”

  The French generals Maurice Gamelin and Maxime Weygand had begged him for men, money, supplies, and aircraft—especially aircraft. How things had changed from the moment in 1936 when Weygand had said he would want six divisions from England if France were again at war with Germany. Weygand characterized the situation now simply as “a race between the exhaustion of the French and the shortness of breath of the enemy divisions.” Churchill “hunched over the table, his face flushed, was watching Weygand intently. His expression,” Spears observed, “was not benevolent.” He tried using the French language, his own particular fluent if idiosyncratic form of “frog speech.” Weygand seemed by now to want to capitulate, and Marshal Pétain looked hopeless. Gamelin just shrugged.

  Churchill had ordered the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) sent to keep the French viable. It arrived at the end of 1939 and was unable to do much of anything for French military strength, especially because the British had withheld—by necessity—sending most of the air force as well. At this point the BEF could only prepare for its own retreat. Unfortunately, as Dill telephoned to Brooke, “The Prime Minister does not want you to do that.” Brooke replied, “What the hell does he want?” Churchill then picked up the receiver and told Brooke that he “had been sent to France to make the French feel that we were supporting them.” Brooke “replied that it was impossible to make a corpse feel.” The conversation went back and forth, until, “at last,” when Brooke “was in an exhausted condition,” Churchill finally said, “All right. I agree with you!” The general could be forgiven for concluding that “it is the only time in all the work we subsequently did together that he made use of those words.”
r />   “Nothing but a miracle can save the BEF now,” Brooke had written in May, as it proceeded to Dunkirk. Churchill said, “Of course, whatever happens at Dunkirk we shall fight on”; the enemy, in another of his favorite phrases, must “bleed and burn.” The king took to recording the number of evacuees in his diary over the course of the operation. He was not incapable of seeing a silver lining. He wrote to his mother, “Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to & to pamper.” Then he added in his diary, “I always feel that we have to be thankful France collapsed at once after Dunkirk, so that we were able to reorganize the Army at home, & gave us time to prepare the Air Force to repel the Blitzkrieg.”

  The French fleet continued to preoccupy Churchill. When it was suggested that the French might keep it or, even worse, let it fall to the Germans, he was adamant: “Tell them that if they let us have their fleet we shall never forget, but that if they surrender without consulting us we shall never forgive. We shall blacken their name for a thousand years!” He later retracted that statement but still said to Admiral Jean-François Darlan, the French commander, “Darlan, you must never let them get the French Fleet.” This sentiment was endorsed from an unexpected source:

  Dear Prime Minister

  Why not declare war on France and capture her fleet (which would gladly strike its colors to us) before A.H. recovers his breath?

  Surely that is the logic of the situation?

  Tactically,

  G. Bernard Shaw.

  The British went on to destroy the fleet. Darlan was later assassinated under mysterious circumstances.

  By June, France had fallen. There was now “a rift between us, a slight crack in the crystal cup sufficient to change its sound when touched,” recalled Spears. “I had my password and they did not have theirs. We no longer belonged to one society bounded by the same horizon. A lifetime steeped in French feeling, sentiment and affection was falling from me. England alone counted now.”

  The fall of France meant a whole new kind of war from the one fought there previously. On the whole, there were only three ways to win it: blockade, bombing, and insurgency. There seemed to be little in any of these efforts that France could offer, with the partial exception of the third, but the French should not be abused for all that they had lost. Churchill had to remind colleagues that “[s]o far the French had had nine-tenths of the casualties . . . and endured ninety-nine-hundredths of the suffering.” Magnanimity in defeat, alas—even in the defeat of one’s own ally. To the king he wrote, “Better days will come—though not yet.”

  The king had been keeping busy from the outset of the war in the way that his father had prepared him: reading papers, talking with ministers, visiting factories, hospitals, and troops. He often seemed to want to be doing more. That he had felt the same way during the previous war no doubt did not help: “Everyone,” he wrote, was “working at fever heat except me.”

  He did what he could closest to home. He carried a rifle and a revolver, and both he and the queen took up shooting practice in Buckingham Palace Gardens, possibly forgetting that they had allowed their friend Halifax and his wife to walk there whenever they liked without warning. He also tried to establish rapport with Churchill, but not so easily at first. Halifax reported that the king was “funny about Winston, and told me he did not find him very easy to talk to. Nor was Winston willing to give him as much time, or information, as he would like.” This appeared in a couple of other accounts, including the king’s diary from nine months before: “Winston is difficult to talk to but in time I shall get the right technique I hope.” The difficulty was compounded by Churchill’s failure to be punctual, keeping both Their Majesties waiting over an hour on more than one occasion.

  —

  Thus in September the two resolved to hold their weekly lunches. The dramatic events culminating in the Dunkirk evacuation had done much to bring them together, as Churchill had kept the king well informed during the ordeal. They fell into a pattern, so much so that the king could write to his mother, “I am getting to know Winston better, & I feel that we are beginning to understand each other. . . . Winston is definitely the right man at the helm at the moment.” From the other side of the wall, on another occasion, their “two tongues” were heard “wagging like mad!”

  Churchill continued: “King George and Queen Elizabeth are a far finer, more popular and more inspiringly helpful pair than the other [Edward VIII and Wallis] would have been. We could not have a better King and Queen in Britain’s most perilous hour.” And Colville observed, “Relations between the King and the Prime Minister soon became excellent. . . . [E]ven Queen Mary developed an immense admiration for Winston. . . . As the war proceeded the King and Queen became as devoted to Winston Churchill as he consistently was to them.”

  —

  A high priority for both leaders was to secure the support of the United States. This was a frustrating task, and one to be tackled with much diplomacy. Typical was the view of the king back in 1938: “The U.S.A. must be left alone. They will never take a more active line if we preach at them.” But something had to be done. The writer Eve Curie put her finger on the difficulty when she addressed the Americans: “If you have been helping these people for their sake, what you are doing is magnificent, but if you are doing it to protect yourselves it is not nearly enough!” The United States wished the British well but within limits that nobody, not even Churchill, could expect to remove immediately. On the other hand, there was a mutual interest, even logic of alliance, that both Churchill and the king were determined to exploit. In September 1939 the king had remonstrated with Ambassador Kennedy, notorious then for his isolationism:

  As I see it, the U.S.A., France & the British Empire are the three really free peoples in the World, & two of these great democracies are now fighting against all that we three countries hate & detest. . . . England, my country . . . has been expected to act & has had to act. . . . The British Empire has once again shown to the World a united front in this coming struggle. . . . The British Empire’s mind is made up. I leave it at that.

  There was more to be done. One day, Randolph entered his father’s bedroom. The prime minister

  was standing in front of his basin and shaving with his old fashioned Valet razor. . . . “Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving.”

  I did as told. After two or three minutes of hacking away, he half turned and said: “I think I see my way through.” He resumed his shaving. I was astonished, and said: “Do you mean that we can avoid defeat? (which seemed credible) or beat the bastards?” (which seemed incredible).

  He flung his Valet razor into the basin, swung around and said:—

  “Of course I mean we can beat them.”

  “Well, I’m all for it, but I don’t see how you can do it.”

  By this time he had dried and sponged his face and turning round to me, said with great intensity: “I shall drag the United States in.”

  Luckily Franklin Roosevelt was less bald than Mussolini, who once used similar phraseology—“trying to drag me into the war by the hair”—regarding Hitler and his attempt to entice Italy into an alliance. So single-minded was Churchill’s determination for American ships, whose value was “measured in rubies,” that a cartoon once showed the king in bed with a glum expression. “George, why do you look so low this morning?” asked the queen. “Because I have it on the best authority that Winston means to swap me for an old destroyer.” When it was later suggested following the U.S. intervention that there would be an accounting for all the aid the Americans had given, Churchill replied happily, “But I shall have my account to put in too and my account is for holding the baby alone for eighteen months, and it was a very rough brutal baby I had to hold. I don’t quite know what I shall have to charge for it.”

  For now the United States was of two minds. This included the president, evidently. Roosevelt wrote to a friend and fo
rmer teacher, the Harvard professor Roger Merriman:

  I wish the British would stop this “We who are about to die, salute thee” attitude. Lord Lothian was here the other day, started the conversation by saying he had completely abandoned his former belief that Hitler could be dealt with as a semi-reasonable human being, and went on to say that the British for a thousand years had been the guardians of Anglo-Saxon civilization—that the scepter or the sword or something like that had dropped from their palsied fingers—that the U.S.A. must snatch it up—that F.D.R. alone could save the world—etc., etc.

  I got mad clear through and told him that just so long as he or Britishers like him took that attitude of complete despair, the British would not be worth saving anyway.

  What the British need today is a good stiff grog, inducing not only the desire to save civilization but the continued belief that they can do it. In such an event they will have a lot more support from their American cousins—don’t you think so?

  Churchill liked to say he was half American, which was nominally the case, since his mother was born in the United States. He had visited America a few times and had American cousins and friends. He had some sympathy for, but little mastery of, the country’s politics, had never lived there for any extended period, and had almost no exposure to the American president, whom he had only met once many years before. He did not even recall this meeting when Roosevelt reminded him of it. Now Roosevelt was the indispensable man and Churchill was determined to woo him. He was less successful with Eleanor, who was once heard to say that Churchill was “sixty years out of date.” Wooing the president may seem in retrospect to be easier than it was at the time, and without the arch-facilitator, Roosevelt’s assistant Harry Hopkins—“Lord Root of the Matter,” as Churchill called him—it might never have happened. Hopkins quoted Scripture to describe what he would say to the president: “‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’