CHURCHILL's WAR Is a Series of Volumes on the Life of the British Statesman
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David Irving CHURCHILL’S WAR i – The Struggle for Power Part of Chapters – F FOCAL POINT Copyright © Parforce (UK) Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be commercially reproduced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission of the author in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act of (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and to civil claims for damages. CHURCHILL'S WAR is a series of volumes on the life of the British statesman. Vol. i – The Struggle for Power (ISBN ) – was originally published by Veritas (Western Australia) in , by Hutchinson (London) in , by Avon Books (New York) in , and by Herbig Verlag (Munich) in . Vol. ii – Triumph in Adversity (ISBN ) – was published by Focal Point Publications (London) in . A third volume is in preparation. Contents : Britain Can Take It : All Very Innocent :The Unsordid Act : There Goes the Empire : Against His Better Judgement : The Midas Touch : Mr Optimist Frog : The Telephone Job : Turning Point : Beaverbrook, and DAVID IRVING : Britain Can Take It war ended and D-notice restrictions were lifted, Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers revealed that, while the king W and queen had left London by car every evening during the Blitz to join the princesses at Windsor, and while the queen mother had spent the war years at Badminton, Mr Churchill had been ‘living through- out his premiership at No. Downing-street, and spending week-ends at Chequers.’ This appealing legend was enriched over the years. Readers learned that Second Lieutenant John Watney had been detailed to drive the P.M. round bomb-torn London in his armoured car. ‘But,’ puzzled this soldier, ‘he never got into it. I would call at the front door in Down- ing-street with the car, and Churchill would go out of the back.’ Until every citizen had an armoured car he pledged he wouldn’t use one. His was a robust image. To junior ministers soon after taking office in May he had declared himself against any evacuation from London, unless life became impossible. ‘Mere bombing,’ this indomitable man had said, ‘will not make us go.’ By ‘us’ he meant the Londoners. In October he decided that even Chequers was not safe. He feared that the knavish Göring might lay a Knickebein beam across Chequers and blast it off the map of Buckinghamshire. He began to cast about for an alternative country retreat. In October over six thousand Britons had been slain. In November , more would die. Movie theatres were running the film ‘Britain Can Take It,’ but propaganda alone could not patch the Londoners’ fragile mo- rale. One neutral observer reported a growing ferment in the lower classes against ‘the very differing plights of car owners who are able to betake themselves to safety, and those who have to spend the night in im- provised shelters or Underground stations.’ He recognised that many offi- cials still clung to the hope of an early negotiated peace. As the raids wors- ened, a clamour began among the P.M.’s friends like Josiah Wedgwood who urged him to seek a deeper shelter. ‘Eventually I agreed,’ Churchill would write. ‘One felt a natural compunction at having much more safety CHURCHILL’S WAR than most other people; but so many pressed me that I let them have their way.’ Another neutral, an American who had dallied six months in London, meeting men like Spears and Duff Cooper, gave the Germans in Lisbon this picture a few weeks later: devastated docks, dwindling food supplies, and a stultified public opinion – people did whatever Whitehall com- manded. Commenting on de Gaulle, Spears had said: ‘We bet on the wrong horse.’ Meanwhile, the American added, Churchill was trying to find ways of restoring contact with Vichy. De Gaulle’s prestige was at low ebb; he was ‘a loser.’ On October , shortly after the Dakar fiasco, Lord Halifax had persuaded the cabinet to face up to the general problem of Britain’s relations with Marshal Pétain and his government at Vichy. ‘I still think,’ Halifax dictated into his pri- vate diary, ‘that with the German behaviour in France, if we could play our cards, French opinion is likely to turn more and more our way. The ultimate alternative is something like hostilities with Vichy.’ They gnawed over the Vichy problem in cabinet that day, and the foreign sec- retary found Churchill not unhelpful – ‘much as it goes against his natural instinct for bellicosity.’ Halifax reminded him that Britain’s purpose was to defeat Germany, and not to make new enemies. Fortunately, Churchill was not committed to ‘any exact restoration of the territories’ of France, and he felt after Dakar that losing Morocco might be a suitable penalty for France’s ‘abject’ attitude. He asked Halifax to let the Spanish know that Britain would be ‘no obstacle to their Moroc- can ambitions.’ * But when the foreign secretary suggested that they also hint at handing back Gibraltar after the war, the P.M. put his foot down: ‘Does anyone think,’ he inquired, ‘that if we win the war opinion here will consent to hand over Gib. to the Dons? And, if we lose, we shall not be consulted.’ Churchill’s hostility toward de Gaulle grew during October. In pri- vate remarks he showed an inclination to deal with Pétain, whatever the public vilification of the marshal. ‘Vichy is being bad enough,’ he had told the journalist Knickerbocker at the end of September, ‘but not as bad as it could be; for instance, they could turn over their ships to Germany if they wanted to be nasty.’ Writing to Roosevelt a week later, the P.M. men- tioned that Vichy was trying to enter into relations with London, ‘which,’ * In Franco staggered Randolph Churchill by revealing that, in , ‘the British ambassador offered me part of French Morocco if I promised to remain neutral.’ Sam Hoare (Lord Templewood) denied this as ‘entirely untrue and without any foundation.’ (Daily Telegraph, February , .) DAVID IRVING he suggested, ‘shows how the tides are flowing in France now that they feel the German weight and see we are able to hold our own.’ What he did not tell Roosevelt was his decision to embark on clandes- tine conversations with Vichy aimed at reaching a modus vivendi, a gentle- man’s agreement. Broadly speaking, once he was sure that Pétain was moving the right way he was prepared to relax the naval blockade he had announced at the end of July. He put out his secret feelers through Ma- drid, asking Sam Hoare on the twentieth to convey to the French ambas- sador there two root ideas, as he called them: that Britain could always let bygones be bygones; but failing that ‘we shall stop at nothing.’ On the following evening he broadcast to France – first, ignoring professional advice, in French, and then in more intelligible English. The British were waiting for Hitler’s invasion, he said: ‘So are the fishes.’ ‘Never,’ he added, ‘will I believe that the soul of France is dead.’ Out of this developed two extraordinary and controversial meetings with a Vichy emissary, Louis Rougier. Equipped with credentials signed by Marshal Pétain, this French-Canadian professor of philosophy arrived in London via Madrid on the day after Churchill’s broadcast. The F.O. for- bade him to contact either de Gaulle or the American embassy. Before he was brought over to No. there was an unexpected in- terlude: on the twenty-fourth Hitler met both Prime Minister Pierre Laval and Marshal Pétain, and during the night rumours reached London that at Montoire the aged marshal had agreed to hand over Toulon naval base to the enemy. Churchill had taken fitful refuge from the bombs in his private Down- street deep shelter, The Barn. A secretary woke him with the news; he hurried back to No. and drafted a disapproving message for the king to send Pétain. It spoke of Britain’s resolve to fight on to the end and restated the promise to restore ‘the freedom and greatness of France’ – though not mentioning her territories. The rumours about Toulon worried him, and he asked his military staff to consider a purely British assault on Dakar – proof of how far de Gaulle had fallen in esteem. Lord Halifax’s diary of October , renders an amusing picture of that day: Dorothy and I had slept in the [Dorchester Hotel’s bomb- proof] dormitory and at : .. I was woken up by the night waiter who said that the foreign office wanted to telephone me on the prime minister’s instructions. I could not have been more an- CHURCHILL’S WAR noyed and came upstairs wondering whether Alec [Cadogan] had been hit by a bomb or the Germans had gone into Spain or An- thony Eden had been assassinated in Egypt. It turned out to be a message from Sam Hoare giving some side-lights on the Vichy conversations with Hitler [at Montoire], in regard to which Sam suggested certain prompt action might be helpful. When I got to the [foreign] office after breakfast I went over to No. where I found Winston in his dugout, having drafted one or two telegrams which he invited me to improve. He was . in what I understand nurses are accustomed to call a ‘romper suit’ of Air Force colour Jaeger-like stuff, with a zip fastening up the middle, and a little Air Force forage cap. I asked him if he was going on the stage but he said he always wore this in the morning.