Darkest Hour Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1. A House Divided

  2. The Social Wastrel

  3. A Leader Falls

  4. The Holy Fox

  5. The Great ‘Dictator’

  6. Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat

  7. The Worsening Situation

  8. Fear, Doubts and Pressures from Within

  9. Cabinet Crisis and Leadership

  10. ‘Fight on the beaches’

  Epilogue: If the Truth be Told

  Acknowledgements

  References

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Over the years, my bookshelves have always held a few volumes whose subject could broadly be called ‘Great Speeches That Changed the World’. The thesis of these books is that this questionable feat has been achieved multiple times, under the right conditions: timely words, alloyed to a timely idea, spoken by a timely, brilliant person.

  In these anthologies I could expect to find at least one speech by Winston Spencer Churchill. Often two or three. They sounded slightly old-fashioned, lofty, with his wordsmithery elevated to near pomposity, yet always they contained a brace of exquisite phrases, superb sound-bites that would have been just as memorable to an audience 1,000 years in the past as 1,000 years in the future.

  As I became a minor student of the speeches of Nehru, Lenin, George Washington, Hitler, Martin Luther King and others, I fed my admiration for the art of oratory and these men’s rising arrow-showers of words. At their best they had the power to summon into being the unexpressed thoughts of a people, to galvanize disparate emotions into a locus of shared passion capable of making the unthinkable a reality.

  What struck me as remarkable about Churchill was that he wrote three of these speeches within just four weeks. For him, May 1940 was a single span of inspired grandiloquence. And he did so all by himself. What was it about that moment that spurred him to such heights? What political and personal pressures compelled him, three times in so few days, to turn coal into such diamonds?

  The simple answer? Britain was at war. The horrors of Blitzkrieg saw one European democracy after another fall in rapid succession to the Nazi boot and shell. Facing this horror, with pen in hand and typist-secretary at the ready, Britain’s new Prime Minister wondered what words could rouse the country to a heroic resistance when the invasion of the country by a terrible foe seemed mere hours away.

  This book, and the screenplay for the film Darkest Hour, emerged from these questions and from this fascination. The aim is to look at the working methods, leadership qualities, thinking and psychological states of one man in these critical days – a man who believed, in the core of his rather poetic soul, that words mattered, that they counted, and could intercede to change the world.

  My initial research led me to focus on the period from Churchill’s unexpected promotion to the prime ministership on 10 May 1940 until the near-complete evacuation of the endangered British army from Dunkirk (which signalled the imminent fall of France) on 4 June – the date, by the way, on which he delivered the last speech in his rhetorical trilogy.

  The National Archives provided a vital research tool: access to the actual minutes of the War Cabinet meetings that Winston chaired during those dimming days. These shed light on a rare period of uncertainty in his career, a wobble in his otherwise steady leadership. Pedestals are for statues, not for people, and a close reading of the minutes reveals not only a leader in trouble, under attack from all sides and uncertain at times what direction to take, but also a story I had not heard: of a British War Cabinet that, had it made peace with the enemy, would have reshaped the world for ever. How close did Winston come to entering into a peace deal with Hitler? Dangerously so, I discovered.

  The question before that War Cabinet, gathering in 1940 initially at the Admiralty (a short walk up Whitehall from Downing Street) and thereafter in its bunker deep under the Treasury Building, was whether Britain was to fight on alone, perhaps to the destruction of its armed forces and even the nation itself, or play it safe by exploring a peace deal with Hitler. The Italian Ambassador in London, in exchange for some colonial trades in Africa and Malta and Gibraltar, had indicated he was prepared to ask the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, to act as the go-between for Berlin and London in such a deal. With Winston’s rival for the leadership, Lord Halifax, emphatic in his call for this option to be explored, at least until Hitler’s terms could be discerned, and with Winston’s predecessor as PM, Neville Chamberlain, agreeing that this seemed the only sensible way to escape almost certain annihilation, Winston faced some very lonely hours in which he truly had only his own counsel to draw upon.

  Many readers will be astonished to learn that the great Winston Churchill, presented to history as a staunch and unyielding foe of Hitler, told his colleagues in the War Cabinet that he would not object in principle to peace talks with Germany ‘if Herr Hitler was prepared to make peace on terms of the restoration of German colonies and the overlordship of Central Europe’. At one point, on 26 May, he went further, and was reported to have stated ‘that he would be thankful to get out of our present difficulties, provided we retained the essentials of our vital strength, even at the cost of some cession of territory’. What territory? Not only European, but British territory. And there was more. Chamberlain’s diary for 27 May records that Churchill told the War Cabinet that ‘if we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies he [Winston] would jump at it’.

  Was Churchill seriously considering entering into peace talks with a homicidal maniac whom he loathed beyond all others? It would seem so. Such were the pressures upon him that he not only entertained the idea but permitted Halifax to begin drafting a top-secret memorandum to the Italians, laying out Britain’s terms and taking the first step in a process to find out how severe Hitler’s would be.

  For those who might find that any image of a Churchill willing to seriously consider such a deal belittles the great man, doing injury to his reputation, I would argue the opposite: that the public image of a pugnacious battler who never doubted himself does not do him justice; it makes him unreal, a cliché, less a three-dimensional human being than the product of a collective dream. Rather than diminish him, his indecision, his ability to put on a strong face in order to keep morale up while thinking of different solutions, recommends him.

  These, then, are the dark hours to which the title refers, but from them – and, moreover, because of them – Churchill emerged with two coups de théâtre, magnificent examples of peroration: the first delivered to a group of outer Cabinet members not privy to the War Cabinet talks, and the second to the full Parliament for all the world to hear. The first was a warm-up for the real thing, and no full record of it exists, but diary entries by two men who heard it suggest its broad outlines and many key phrases. The second speech entered history the moment the words came out of Winston’s mouth, as he listed beaches, landing grounds, fields, hills, seas and oceans, and the air as the places where the British would fight the dreaded Hun.

  In both these speeches, and in an earlier one delivered a few weeks before – in which he promised the public his blood, toil, tears and sweat, whether they wanted them or not – he used every trick in the book. These were lessons he’d learned from the Greeks and Romans generally, and Cicero specifically: first arousing sympathy for his country, himself, his clients, his case, and then building towards a direct emotional appeal – what the Roman orators called epilogos – aimed at leaving not a heart unmoved or a dry eye in the house.

  Models exist for the kind of fireworks he delivered three times in May and e
arly June 1940 – notably the speech of Marcus Antonius in defence of Aquillius, during which Antonius tore open the tunic of Aquillius to reveal his battle scars – but the British House of Commons and the British public had heard nothing like it. With words, Churchill changed the political mood and shored up the nervous will of a shaking people, compelling them down an uncertain road that–eventually, and against the odds, and with all the sacrifice Winston predicted (and then some!) – ended in total victory.

  It is some story.

  When Winston died, it was said of him that in those dark days in 1940, when Britain stood alone before a monstrous enemy, he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. This isn’t merely a pretty metaphor. Words were really all he had in those long days. But if you are to be left with only one thing to fight with, then – the lesson must be – you could do a lot worse.

  TUESDAY, 7 MAY 1940

  HITLER HAD ALREADY INVADED CZECHOSLOVAKIA, POLAND, DENMARK AND NORWAY.

  HE WAS NOW POISED TO CONQUER THE REST OF EUROPE.

  IN BRITAIN, PARLIAMENT HAD LOST FAITH IN ITS LEADER, NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN. THE SEARCH FOR A REPLACEMENT HAD ALREADY BEGUN.

  1. A House Divided

  The Debating Chamber of the British Parliament was in an uproar of condemnation and invective. ‘Out, out!’ they howled from the upper galleries, where aristocrats and members of the House of Lords craned forward to get a clear view. ‘Resign, man! Resign!’ British politics had never seen anything quite like it. Members of the Opposition parties were rolling their order papers into daggers and thrusting them in the direction of the collapsed, already failing and secretly ailing figure sitting in front of the despatch box – the Conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain.

  But Chamberlain, for many reasons, was reluctant to stand down as leader – not least because of his deep uncertainty about who could possibly succeed him.

  Britain had been at war for eight months, and it was going badly. Both politicians and the public were baying not just for a leader, but, as all great times demand, a great leader – one capable of delivering what only great leaders can: words that can move and sway and convince and galvanize and inspire and even forge in the hearts of the public levels of feeling they do not know they have. From these words would come actions and, depending on the wisdom of these actions, either triumph or bloody defeat.

  And there was perhaps a more surprising ingredient that any nation in grave crisis might wish to find in its leader: doubt. The vital ability to doubt his or her own judgements, to possess a mind capable of holding two contrary ideas at the same time and only then to synthesize them; to have a mind not made up, and so remain in conversation with all views. This contrasted with a mind made up which could remain in conversation with only one person: the self. Britain had little use for an ideologue in these days. What it needed was a 360-degree thinker.

  As Oliver Cromwell wrote in 1650 to the Church of Scotland: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’ In these doubtful times, and with the issues faced by the British nation so grave that its very future hung on its next moves, the great question was: where could such a leader be found?

  ‘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!’ Leo Amery, Member of Parliament for Sparkbrook, in Birmingham, resumed his seat to thunderous applause on this, the first night of the now-legendary Norway Debate on Tuesday, 7 May 1940. The House had now been sitting for almost nine hours. It was a warm early summer’s evening and darkness had fallen. His words were the knife in fellow-Conservative Chamberlain’s side.

  Britain was a country divided, and the Government, instead of pulling together, was being torn apart by egos and petty differences which had contributed to catastrophic military failures on both the battlefield and the high seas. The prospect of fascism succeeding and of democracy drawing to a close in Europe was no longer unimaginable.

  The seeds of the famous debate happening in the Chamber that night were sown five days earlier, when the news broke that Britain was evacuating her troops from the Norwegian port of Trondheim after coming under heavy Nazi attack for the first time. Leo Amery and members of Lord Salisbury’s Watching Committee, made up of Conservative MPs and Lords with the object of holding the Government to account, along with an All-Party Parliamentary Action Group, with a similar objective but led by the Liberal MP Clement Davies and including members of the Labour Party, had agreed to force a debate on the blunders made during this first encounter with Nazi troops, and, with this debate, attempt to finally rid themselves of the leader they felt was failing them and the country.

  Chamberlain had first begun to speak to the House on the ‘Conduct of the War’ at 3.48 p.m. on 7 May, the first of two days of debate. His words, his attempt at a salvage job, did nothing to strengthen his position or to allay fears that Britain was essentially headed for a wreck. Rather, they confirmed him as being tired and defensive, a man who would only speed the nation towards peril. Looking ‘heart-broken and shrivelled’, as one commentator later put it, he soldiered on, as far more memorable phrases were hurled back at him by his enemies. He knew these phrases well, for he had fashioned them himself: ‘Peace in our time!’ (his lofty promise of a year earlier) and ‘Missed the bus!’ (his reference to what he had seen as Hitler’s lost opportunity to wreak any havoc at all in Europe). Now they exploded like hand-grenades at his feet.

  What muted support Chamberlain received during this speech was described by Labour’s Arthur Greenwood as ‘synthetic’, for the mood of the House had never been graver: ‘Its heart is troubled. It is anxious; it is more than anxious; it is apprehensive.’

  After Chamberlain retook his seat, the Conservative MP Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, dressed in full military regalia (unheard of in the Commons), made his theatrical entrance and silenced the House. A long-time critic of the PM, Keyes denounced the Government’s ‘shocking story of ineptitude’. He knew what he was talking about: he had witnessed the blunders first hand.

  Next to speak was Clement Attlee, leader of the Opposition Labour Party. He was a man not exactly known for oratorical zingers, but his theme clearly inspired him, and he spoke cuttingly of the Government’s ‘inept’ handling of the situation:

  It is not Norway alone. Norway comes as the culmination of many other discontents. People are saying that those mainly responsible for the conduct of affairs are men who have had an almost uninterrupted career of failure. Norway follows Czecho-Slovakia [sic] and Poland. Everywhere the story is ‘Too late.’ The Prime Minister talked about missing the buses. What about all the buses which he and his associates have missed since 1931? They all missed the peace buses but caught the war bus. The people find that these men who have been consistently wrong in their judgment of events, the same people who thought that Hitler would not attack Czecho-Slovakia, who thought that Hitler could be appeased, seem not to have realised that Hitler would attack Norway.

  Just before midnight on 7 May, Chamberlain’s fate was sealed, but it seemed to many that the Prime Minister himself was unable to recognize it. This blindness was nothing new. John ‘Jock’ Colville, his Principal Private Secretary (PPS), had written in his diary on Monday, 6 May 1940: ‘The P.M. is very depressed about the press attacks on him . . . I think he suffers from a curious vanity and self-esteem which were born at Munich [referring to September 1938, when Chamberlain was judged to have acquiesced to all of Hitler’s demands but maintained he had negotiated peace] and have flourished, in spite of a good many wounds, ever since.’

  So it was that on the morning of 8 May, before the second and most decisive day of the debate, and in light of Chamberlain’s clear reluctance to stand down as leader, members from both the Watching Committee and the All-Party Parliamentary Action Group convened once more in Parliament. They decided to force a division of the House where the Members would be asked to vote on what the Labour MP Herbert Morris
on explained would ‘indicate whether they are content with the conduct of affairs or whether they are apprehensive about the conduct of affairs’: in other words, deliver the knock-out punch by draining Chamberlain of the number of supporters he needed to effectively go on as leader.

  Word went out to the party Whips, who began frantically to strike deals of support among members of the various voting blocs. Colville wrote in his diary how senior Conservatives were ‘all talking about reconstituting the Government and seriously discussing schemes such as a bargain (to be put by [Lord] Halifax to [Herbert] Morrison) whereby the Opposition Labour Party should be asked to come into the Government in return for the dropping of key government bigwigs – Sam Hoare, Kingsley Wood, [Sir John] Simon etc., but only on the stipulation that Chamberlain retained the leadership’.

  The knives were out and were particularly sharp then when the House met at 2.45 p.m. to resume debating the Conduct of the War.

  Pleas to the Labour MP Herbert Morrison not to divide the House had fallen on deaf ears. Labour members had made up their minds: they would not serve in a National Government led by ‘that man’ Chamberlain. Morrison spoke passionately for twenty minutes, urging the members of the House to vote with their conscience and to think deeply about whether Great Britain could continue with the current state of affairs given the pitiful captaincy of a war only eight months old. The message was simple and clear: not only had Chamberlain to go, but with him all those who had supported the policy of appeasement, the flawed belief that had dominated British policy towards Germany during the 1930s – namely, that a dictator, if well fed, would retire, sated, to his cave. Out then must also go Sir Samuel Hoare (Minister for Air) and Sir John Simon (Chancellor of the Exchequer).

  The decision to resign belonged to Chamberlain. Surely, weakened by attacks from all sides, he would yield. But still he resisted, remaining on his bench and only occasionally looking up into the harsh glare of detraction and calumny. When he did finally rise to his feet – as the memoirs of the Labour MP Hugh Dalton record – he furiously ‘jumped up, showing his teeth like a rat in a corner, and cried: “I accept the challenge and I ask my friends, and I still have some friends in this House, to support the Government tonight in the Lobby.”’