Winston Churchill Takes Charge of the War Effort: Two Remarkable Pieces from Just Days Into His First Prime Ministership, Precious Mementos of World War II and the Evacuation at Dunkirk

A note from the War Cabinet, May 20, 1940, pre-Dunkirk, written in his presence, trying to respond to the Nazi blitzkrieg in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands

 

Both salvaged and retained for posterity by his private secretary John Colville, and affixed in a form of journal entry, with Colville’s handwritten annotations as provenance

 

Truly unique, we have never seen anything like this on the market before

The Battle of France

On May 10, 1940, the Phony War came to a stunning end as Hitler invaded the Low Countries—Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands—and France. His progress just in the first day was dramatic and altogether unlike the experience of World War I. It was clear that Britain needed a coalition government that would put aside party considerations and turn all attention to actively dealing with the war. The Labor Party refused to serve under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, whose appeasement policies were blamed for Britain’s unpreparedness, and it was clear that Chamberlain had lost the confidence of the House of Commons. He resigned. Chamberlain and the King wanted appeaser Lord Halifax as his successor, but Halifax declined, likely because he did not want to be at the epicenter of the crisis with Winston Churchill nipping at his heals. The King called on Churchill to form a government. Churchill later said of this moment, “I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial…” That day the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) entered Belgium from France intending to meet the German attack there.

On May 12, the ill prepared French defenses at Sedan are overrun by German forces. The captured bridges that span the Meuse River allowed German troops and armor to pour across, giving them direct access to the rear of the undefended Allied frontline. The next day, May 13, in his first speech before the House of Commons, Churchill declared that “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat” and offered an outline of his bold plans for British resistance.

On May 15, the Netherlands surrendered. The next day, in office but six days, Churchill visited Paris only to hear that the French were defeatist and considered the war as good as lost. While there he learned that the Belgian government had fled the country. Churchill was desperate to keep France in the war, but on the 17th learned that Paul Reynaud has formed a new French government, one that included 84-year-old arch-defeatist Marshal Pétain, the French hero of World War I. The next day Maxime Weygand, an advocate of seeking an armistice with the Germans, was named commander of the French armed forces. These were ominous developments indeed for the British and their Prime Minister, in office one week.

Meanwhile the Battle of France continued, if just barely. On May 18 the Germans reached the Aisne River. It became apparent that their major objective is not Paris but the Channel coast, in the hope of cutting off the British and Belgian armies as well as the French divisions in Belgium. The French did not claim that the Germans had been halted, but said they had been slowed down. The Germans claimed that they are within 60 miles of Paris, but the French said 90 miles; the difference hardly mattered at all. French military circles estimated that the Germans are using 80 divisions, 11 of them motorized. They are said to have thrown in from 2,500 to 3,000 tanks. Things were going from bad to worse, and quick.

On May 19, the key city of Amiens was besieged by German troops. The brilliant General Rommel’s forces surrounded Arras; other German forces reached Noyelles; all the towns were close indeed to the English Channel. The next day the Panzers reached Amiens, following two days of heavy air raids. The Germans gradually penetrated the city and two other armored divisions supported the offensive. On or about the 20th, the British War Cabinet decided that their best bet was for the B.E.F. to assume the offensive and march upon Amiens. It ordered the B.E.F. to coordinate plans with General Billotte and General Blanchard. On the 20th, likely in response to word from the War Cabinet, General Ironside, Chief of the British Imperial Staff, visited BEF headquarters in Belgium for consultations with generals Gort, Billotte and Blanchard. They planned a Franco-British offensive for the next day.

By May 21, 1940, France was broken. German armored forces, breaking through the dense Ardennes Forest and driving toward French ports along the English Channel had now broken the hinge between the BEF and French forces fighting in northern France and Belgium on the one hand; and the main body of the French army fighting further toward the south on the other. Desperate to sever the German spearhead, British and French tanks and infantry launched an assault at Arras. All the German bridgeheads were either thrown back or contained by vigorous but costly British counter-attacks and the remaining German troops were ordered to retire across the river by the night of 22 May. Later that same night, however, events further south nullified this apparent gain and prompted an order for the BEF to retire again, this time back to the Gort Line on the Franco-Belgian border. Thus the Arras operation, though initially promising, failed in its objective. After the tactical defeat of Arras, the British troops began a retreat toward the English Channel.

But the Channel ports were not secure and at risk of capture. Fresh troops were rushed from England to defend Boulogne and Calais. After hard fighting, Calais was isolated by May 22 and would surrender on May 27. Boulogne was under assault and would be captured by the Germans on May 25. Seeing the Channel ports sure to surrender imminently, on May 25 Gort ordered the BEF to withdraw to Dunkirk, the only port from which the BEF could still escape. British and French troops retreated to Dunkirk and Operation Dynamo, the Allied evacuation of Dunkirk, began on the May 26, 1940.

Churchill had been Prime Minister for 16 days. He, the Royal Navy, and innumerable British civilian boats then orchestrated the great evacuation from Dunkirk. In the nine days from May 27 to June 4, 338,226 men escaped, including most of the BEF, and 139,997 French, Polish, and Belgian troops, together with a small number of Dutch soldiers, aboard 861 vessels.

Churchill’s private secretary at this time was John Colville, whose diaries, now in the Churchill Papers at Cambridge, form a prime resource for the times. Colville had a keen sense of history, and made it his business to retain those items of Churchill and the War Cabinet, such as important drafts, that were slated to be discarded. One was a memo in the hand of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden which memorialized a note from May 20 or perhaps 21, saying: “British War Cabinet has formed the strongest view that the best, indeed the only possible course, is for the B.E.F. to assume the offensive and march upon Amiens. C.I.G.S. has left. B.E.F. to coordinate plans with General Billotte and General…” Colville provides a handwritten caption on the side reading, “Order to the B.E.F. to march southwest and join up with the French, thus closing the gap made by the German penetration at Amiens. This was written by Mr Eden in my room, with the help of Sir John Dill from memory, because the minimal draft had been mislaid. It was afterwards found and this draft left unfinished (C.I.G.S. was Ironside)”.

The Cabinet Crisis Between Churchill and the Appeasers

With the BEF in retreat to Dunkirk and the fall of France seemingly imminent, Lord Halifax, who had backed Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler, believed that the British government must explore the possibility of a negotiated peace settlement. His plan was that Hitler’s ally, the still-neutral Italian dictator Mussolini, would broker an agreement. When a memorandum proposing this approach was discussed by the War Cabinet on May 27, 1940, Churchill opposed it and urged his colleagues to fight on without negotiations. He was supported in the War Cabinet by its two Labor Party members, Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood, and also by the Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberal Party. Churchill’s biggest problem was that he was not the leader of his own party, the Conservative Party; Chamberlain was, and he needed to win the support of Chamberlain, without which he could have been forced to resign by the large Conservative majority in the House of Commons. The pressure was on Churchill, as the King was a friend of Halifax and suspicious of Churchill, and Churchill himself wondered for a while whether “it was part of my duty to consider entering into negotiations with That Man [Hitler].”

On 28 May, Churchill brilliantly outmaneuvered Halifax by calling a meeting of his 25-member outer cabinet. He told them that Britain should not get better terms from Germany now than if she fought it out. Germany’s terms, he said, would include a demand for the fleet, and Great Britain would become a puppet state “under [British fascist] Mosley or some such person”. Churchill went on to a dramatic and defiant conclusion by saying that “I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground”. There was unanimous approval round the table and not even the faintest flicker of dissent. Several ministers patted Churchill on the shoulder as they were leaving. These men, sophisticated politicians all, were inspired to be ready to die if need be to save Britain. The War Cabinet subsequently rejected Halifax’s proposal; there were to be no negotiations with Hitler.

Halifax then accepted the rejection of his proposal, though he may have been more influenced by the loss of Chamberlain’s support. There is a consensus among historians that Chamberlain’s eventual support for Churchill was a critical turning point in the war.

The Battle of Britain

On June 3, the last British troops were evacuated from Dunkirk. The Battle of France was essentially over. Churchill turned his attention to the Battle of Britain that was soon to begin. His main concern was planes and pilots, and acknowledging an increase in the number of planes built in a letter that day he wrote to Archibald Sinclair, who was his Secretary of State for Air, Churchill goaded him for more pilots, asking what would be the good “if we have machines standing idle for want of pilots to fly them.”

Churchill was Minister of Defense in addition to being Prime Minister. In a sternly worded letter to Halifax (who bore some of the blame) that same day – June 3 – he decried the British inaction in the days of the Phony War, and said that when the immediate threat of invasion has passed, the BEF must be rebuilt. In the letter Churchill gave his considered opinion that “I have a large measure of responsibility as Minister of Defense for advising the Cabinet upon the main grouping and development of our Forces.” “Were France to go ‘out of the war’,” Churchill told Halifax, it would be because Britain had been unable to make “anything like the military effort which we made in the first year of the last war”. The least that could now be done was, “the moment the invasion danger has been parried”, to try to build up “a new and stronger Expeditionary Force”. The build up of such a force would be indispensable, and would require all the “regular British cadres”. Churchill’s letter ended: ‘I hope I may be given some help in this, and be allowed to view the War situation as a whole.’ The letter is quoted in “Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939–1941”, by noted Churchill biographer Martin Gilbert.

That day Churchill also circulated a draft of the speech he was to give the next day. It was to be his most famous. He said on the 4th in part: “Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and 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, until, 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.” Churchill had been in office for 25 days.

Churchill and Appeasement:

One of the items Colville retained was a portion of the letter Churchill wrote Halifax on June 3, 1940, about rebuilding the BEF to fight on. Page two of Churchill’s letter was taken by him to notate, and it says “…been parried, it will be indispensable to build up a new and stronger British Expeditionary Force.” Churchill then adds in his own hand, “For this I must use all the available British cadres.” He ends by saying, “I hope I may be given some help in this.” And after “help in this”, he adds in his hand, “and be allowed to view the war situation as a whole.” Thus he was not only insisting on Halifax’s support, but making it clear that he and he alone would view the war situation and make decisions.

Below this text Colville writes, “This is the end of a letter, subsequently recopied, written after the evacuation from Dunkirk. I do not remember to whom it was written, possibly to Eden, the S. of S. for War.” Historian Martin Gilbert had access to the full letter, and identified the recipient as Halifax.

A Treasure Trove of Churchill in May 1940

Here we have two deeply important, and even moving, mementos of Churchill’s first month in office. There is the letter to the arch-appeaser Halifax the day the Dunkirk operation ended saying he expected Halifax’s cooperation in rebuilding the BEF and fighting on, as well as making it clear he was in charge; and the note from the War Cabinet trying to respond to the Nazi blitzkrieg in real time. Both are fully annotated in Colville’s hand. Truly unique, we have never seen anything like this on the market before. Both items are adhered to opposite sides of the same light board.