Five Days in London, May 1940 Read online

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  Five Days in London

  “A gripping historical drama.… Lukacs’s story is not new, … but [he] has transformed it into a memorable drama.” — M. F. Perutz, New York Review of Books

  “[A] fascinating work of historical reconstruction.… [Lukacs] gives us much to ponder in this intriguing—and perhaps still controversial—story.”—Stanley Weintraub, Wall Street Journal

  “Between May 24 and May 28 (1940), history itself was in the balance, and Lukacs reconstructs these days with the immediacy and detail of a thripller, using a wide range of government and private papers.” — David Pryce-Jones, National Review

  “Lukacs’s scholarship re-creates with great immediacy the chaotic few days during which, according to the author, Hitler came closest to winning the war.”—New Yorker

  “Lukacs has a storyteller’s gift and writes beautifully on a subject that might by lesser historians be taken for granted. Must reading for any World War II scholar or buff.”—Virginia Quarterly Review

  “Eminent historian Lukacs delivers the crown jewel to his long and distinguished career with this account of five days—May 24-28, 1940—that could have changed the world.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “[A] riveting book.… Lukacs weaves his account from a rich assembly of sources—excerpts from the diaries of Enoch Powell, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, mystery writer Margery Allingham, all the official records and the opinion surveys that kept showing a stubborn determination of the ordinary British to carry on.”—Sandra Gwyn, Toronto Globe and Mail

  “This is a readable and rigorous little volume that is put down with difficulty in the middle and with regret at the end.”—Conrad Black, Daily Telegraph

  “Lukacs has constructed a gripping narrative.… This is a must for every World War II buff.”—Jules Wagman, Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Those concerned with the long tides of history and with the coils of chance in human destiny will delight in the elegant, searching, and affecting book Lukacs has written about a critical time.”—Lynwood Abram, Houston Chronicle

  “[Lukacs] brings to his topic, as to everything else he has treated, a sparkling and original mind.”—Michael Howard, National Interest

  “Historian John Lukacs, who has written widely on World War II and on Hitler and Churchill, comprehensively traces the events of that long weekend, which culminated in Churchill’s decision on May 28th to fight on, no matter what happened to France.”—David Murray, New York Times Book Review

  “Artfully constructed and elegantly narrated.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A skillful weaving together of great power diplomacy, intra-War Cabinet debates, and pulse-takings of British blokes-in-the-street. … A book with many virtues, the most surprising of which may be its timeliness.”—Weekly Standard

  “No historian of the Second World War has John Lukacs’s range, acuteness, intuition. He has written great works. Now comes a masterpiece. In Five Days in London we are present, moment by moment, May 24 to May 28, 1940, as the British War Cabinet ponders whether to seek terms from Hitler, or fight on. Alone. ‘Not only the end of a European war but the end of Western civilization was near.’ In the end Churchill prevails—just.”—Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  Five Days in London

  May 1940

  Books by John Lukacs

  The Great Powers and Eastern Europe

  Tocqueville: The European Revolution

  and Correspondence with Gobineau (editor)

  A History of the Cold War

  Decline and Rise of Europe

  A New History of the Cold War

  Historical Consciousness

  The Passing of the Modern Age

  The Last European War, 1939-1941

  1945: Year Zero

  Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950

  Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the

  United States in the Twentieth Century

  Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a

  City and Its Culture

  Confessions of an Original Sinner

  The Duel: 10 May-31 July; The Eighty-Day

  Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler

  The End of the Twentieth Century and the

  End of the Modern Age

  Destinations Past

  George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment,

  1944-1946: The Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence

  The Hitler of History

  A Thread of Years

  Five Days in London

  May 1940

  John Lukacs

  First published as a Yale Nota Bene book in 2001.

  Copyright © 1999 by John Lukacs. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  “In Westminster Abbey” is reprinted from John Betjeman,

  Collected Poems, by permission of John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

  For information about this and other Yale University Press publications,

  please contact: U.S office [email protected]

  Europe office [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Lukacs, John, 1924-

  Five Days in London, May 1940 / John Lukacs.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

  ISBN 0-300-08030-1

  1. World War, 1939-1945 – Diplomatic history. 2. World War, 1939–1945

  -Great Britain. 3. Great Britain-Politics and government–

  1936-1945. 4. Halifax, Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, 1st Earl of,

  1881–1959. 5. Churchill, Winston, Sir, 1874-1965.

  I. Title. II. Title: 5 days in London, May 1940.

  D750.L85 1999

  940.53 ′2-dc21 99-27583

  ISBN 0-300-08466-8 (pbk.)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  This book is dedicated

  to Philip and Marjorie

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  ONE

  The Hinge of Fate

  The turning point. Two accounts. – The awesomeness of the

  German tide. – Black Fortnight. – Problems of British

  morale. – Distrust of Churchill. – Opinions and sentiments. –

  “Outwardly calm, inwardly anxious.”

  TWO

  Friday, 24 May

  Hitler’s halt order. – The Germans before

  Dunkirk. – Calais. – Hitler and the Conservatives. – The two

  Rights. – Chamberlain. -Appeasers. – Halifax. – The War

  Cabinet. – Churchill and Roosevelt. – The British press. –

  “A slight increase in anxiety and a slight

  decrease in optimism.”

  THREE

  Saturday, 25 May

  An English weekend. – The French: Weygand and

  Pétain. – Halifax and the Italian ambassador. – Churchill and

  the Defence Committee. – “Depression is quite definitely up.”

  FOUR

  Sunday, 26 May

  An agitated day. – Three meetings of the War Cabinet. –

  Chamberlain, Halifax, Churchill. – Disagreements between

  Halifax and Churchill. – Scarcity of news: “A mandate to delay

  judgment and not to worry” �
�� “In Westminster Abbey.”

  FIVE

  Monday, 27 May

  What was happening at Dunkirk. – The Belgians

  surrender. – American considerations. – Three War Cabinets

  and a walk in the garden.—“You’d have been better

  off playing cricket.”

  SIX

  Tuesday, 28 May

  Momie, opinion, and the press. – “We cannot possibly starve

  the public in this way.” – Foreigners and refugees. – Churchill’s

  instructions and the first War Cabinet. – His statement in the

  Commons. – The second War Cabinet. – Churchill’s coup-

  He comes through.

  SEVEN

  Survival

  A long-range view of the war. – The meaning of Dunkirk. –

  “It is time to face up to facts” – Halifax redux. – An

  antiquated Britain. – Churchill and Europe. – Fortissimo.

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  Preface

  My history of this history has no ascertainable origin. About forty, perhaps even fifty, years ago I was beginning to think that the last days of May in 1940 may have been decisive for the outcome of the Second World War. This idea, or thought, or perhaps not much more than a sense, accorded with my conviction that the most important phase of the Second World War was the one before December 1941, that is, before the American entry into the war, coinciding with the first German retreat before Moscow—after that, Hitler could still win great battles, but no longer the entire war. From this realization sprang my decision, in 1968, to write a rather large work, The Last European War, 1939-1941, eventually published in 1976. It was during this time, in 1970, that the British government chose to shorten the closed period of most of its papers, from fifty years to thirty. Accordingly I spent a few weeks in London in 1971, mostly at the Public Record Office. I may have been among the first to read and work from the PRO’S cabinet papers of May-June 1940. What I read confirmed my suspicion (if that was what it was) that those days in London were very critical, and not only because of the catastrophic military situation in Flanders and in France — that Churchill’s situation within the War Cabinet was much more difficult than most people, including historians at that time, thought. However, given the scope and the size and the unusual structure of The Last European War, I could devote not more than three pages to this, all of them in part I, the narrative portion of the book.

  Sixteen years passed, during which I wrote four or five other books, each about a different topic. In 1989 my then editor and publisher and friend John Herman, of Ticknor & Fields (now defunct), asked me what I might be thinking of writing next. I thought for a while, and said: A book about 1940 – more precisely, about the eighty days from 10 May to 31 July 1940, marked by the duel between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler. While writing The Duel I again spent a few weeks in England at the Public Record Office and at some other archives. In The Duel about fourteen or fifteen pages were devoted to the last week of May 1940. And then, seven years after the completion of the manuscript of The Duel, I chose to return to the history of those days, encouraged by the editorial director of Yale University Press, my present publishers. In 1997 and 1998 I returned to London twice for the purposes of my researches, broadened and deepened by reading in a large variety of archives and private papers. Habent sua fata libelli: this is the story of the present book.

  Thus it may be said that this book amounts to the completion of a very lopsided trilogy: from three pages in The Last European War to fifteen pages in The Duel and then to two hundred and twenty pages in this one. Or from macrocosmic to microcosmic history, of a sort. A friend said the other day, in mock seriousness, “Will your next book be Three Hours in London?” No, it won’t.

  I must now add a caveat. This is that not only the scope but the structures of the abovementioned books are very different. A somewhat uncategorizable historian, I am not a specialist in British political or social or military history. However, one consideration may intrude here. During the past fifteen or twenty years, British historians have written valuable articles and books dealing with Churchill and Halifax and the politics of war, parts of which include those five days in May 1940. At the risk of presumption, I shall venture to say that I have had one advantage over many of them. This has been my knowledge about Hitler—or, rather, my familiarity with documents and other materials relating to him, in this case especially in 1940. For, without understanding what Hitler said and thought and how close he came to winning the war in May 1940, that secondary “duel” between Churchill and Halifax in the War Cabinet seems less important. A flicker of doubt, perhaps; a conflict between two personalities; a footnote in the political history of modern Britain. There were, and are, reasons to look at and treat the five days in London in May 1940 in that way. Such treatments are not necessarily the results of narrowmindedness or excessive specialization. Tightly focused views are often useful, while there is a kind of broad-mindedness that can be flat. In this book, however, I have attempted to combine the narrowing acuity of a specialist with a broader perspective, aware that perspective is a component of reality itself: in sum, that during those five days in London, the danger, not only to Britain but to the world, was greater and deeper than most people still think.

  Acknowledgments

  I can recall few books of mine where my debts are as many as they are for this one. Let me list them according to their relative order, though not necessarily according to their relative importance.

  I wish to affirm my appreciation for Yale University Press, with which my relations have been untroubled by the problems and irritations that nowadays beset most authors, and especially for the Press’s editorial director, Jonathan Brent, and superb manuscript editor Brenda W. Kolb. And to the Earhart Foundation and its secretary, Antony Sullivan, who, as often in the past, were ready and willing and generous in offering financial assistance for my researches in England.

  My principal research assistant in the Public Record Office was András D. Bán, whose reliability, precision, and thorough knowledge of the intricacies of the PRO files were invaluable. Joanna Shaw Myers volunteered to accompany me to Cambridge, assisting my passage through the large (and exceptionally well catalogued) Churchill Archives. Among British scholars of modern English history, Philip Bell and Brian Bond gave fine advice and often essential guidance, as did David Astor, David Dilks, M. R. D. Foot, and Andrew Roberts. Among American scholars of British literary history, Samuel Hynes offered the same. The librarian at the Foreign Office in London as well as the archivists and keepers of Churchill College and Trinity College at Cambridge University, of the Neville Chamberlain Papers in the library of the University of Birmingham, of the Halifax diaries and papers in the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research at the University of York, of the Mass-Observation Archives in the University of Sussex of Falmer—Brighton, of the Nicolson diaries in the library of Balliol College at Oxford University, of the Astor papers in the library of the University of Reading, and of the library of King’s College in London — all were, without exception, more than benevolent and often especially forthcoming. Edward Baptist, at the University of Pennsylvania, helped in my quest to find books and articles that were not easily available. Helen Hayes, formerly research librarian of Chestnut Hill College, typed a difficult and scribbled-over manuscript under a considerable pressure of time. My wife, Stephanie, reads everything—well, almost everything—that I write; her comments are often funny and incisive, reflections of her sparkling and charming personality, a benison for a manuscript as it is for a man’s life.

  1997-98

  PICKERING CLOSE

  (NEAR PHOENIXVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA)

  Five Days

  in London

  May 1940

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Hinge of Fate

  The turning point. Two accounts. – The awesomeness of the Ger
man tide. – Black Fortnight. – Problems of British morale. -Distrust of Churchill. – Opinions and sentiments. – “Outwardly calm, inwardly anxious.”

  This book attempts to reconstruct the history of five days that could have changed the world. The setting is London, and the five days are Friday through Tuesday, 24 to 28 May 1940. Then and there Adolf Hitler came closest to winning the Second World War, his war.

  One man who knew how close Hitler had come to his ultimate victory was Winston Churchill. In the years after the war he gave the tide The Hinge of Fate to the fourth volume of his War Memoirs. That volume dealt with the year 1942, near the end of which the Germans were turned back on many fronts. In November 1942 he said to the British people that this was not yet the beginning of the end but perhaps the end of the beginning. November 1942 was the military hinge of fate on the battlefields of Egypt, North Africa, and Russia: the military turning points. Even then Britain could not win the war. In the end America and Russia did. But in May 1940 Churchill was the one who did not lose it. Then and there he saved Britain, and Europe, and Western civilization. And about that hinge of fate his War Memoirs— essentially his History of the Second World War—are largely silent.

  In the history of states and of peoples a turning point is often a battle or an episode during a revolution: more precisely, a sudden shifting of events and movements in a battle or during a revolution. A turning point is not a milestone; the latter is a numerically fixable place, foreseeable, linear, and sequential. A turning point may occur in a person’s mind; it may mean a change of direction; it has consequences that are multiple and unpredictable, consequences that are more often than not recognizable only in retrospect. A turning point may sometimes be foreseeable, but not with certainty’. In this case the moment came late on Tuesday, 28 May. It was the resolution of a struggle which, at that very moment, Churchill had won. He declared that England would go on fighting, no matter what happened. No matter what happened: there would be no negotiating with Hitler. Here is his reconstruction of what he said to the Outer Cabinet: