Winston Churchill - Their Finest Hour (Complete Edition)

But I trust you realise, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear. All I ask now is that you should proclaim non-belligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces. Immediate needs are, first of all, the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers to bridge the gap between what we have now and the large new construction we put in hand at the beginning of the war. This time next year we shall have plenty. But if in the interval Italy comes in against us with another hundred submarines we may be strained to breaking-point. Secondly, we want several hundred of the latest types of aircraft, of which you are now getting delivery. These can be repaid by those now being constructed in the United States for us. Thirdly, anti aircraft equipment and ammunition, of which again there will be plenty next year, if we are alive to see it. Fourthly, the fact that our ore supply is being compromised from Sweden, from North Africa, and perhaps from Northern Spain, makes it necessary to purchase steel the United States. This also applies to other materials. We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff all the same. Fifthly, we have many reports of possible German parachute or air-borne descents in Ireland. The visit of a United States squadron to Irish ports, which might well be prolonged, would be invaluable. Sixthly, I am looking to you to keep the Japanese quiet in the Pacific, using Singapore in any way convenient. The details the material which we have in hand will be communicated to you separately.

With all good wishes and respect...

On May 18 a reply was received from the President welcoming the continuance of our private correspondence and dealing with my specific requests. The loan or gift of the forty or fifty older destroyers, it was stated, would require the authorisation of Congress, and the moment was not opportune. He would facilitate to the utmost the Allied Governments obtaining the latest types of United States aircraft, anti-aircraft equipment, ammunition, and steel. In all this the representations of our agent, the highly competent and devoted Mr. Purvis (presently to give his life in an air accident), would receive most favourable consideration. The President would consider carefully my suggestion that a United States squadron might visit Irish ports. About the Japanese, he merely pointed to the concentration of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour.

***

On Monday, May 13, I asked the House of Commons, which had been specially summoned, for a vote of confidence in the new Administration. After reporting the progress which had been made in filling the various offices, I said: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” In all our long history no Prime Minister had ever been able to present to Parliament and the nation a programme at once so short and so popular. I ended:

You ask, What is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us: to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory—victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival. Let that be realised: no survival for the British Empire; no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, “Come, then, let us go forward together with our united strength.”

Upon these simple issues the House voted unanimously, and adjourned till May 21.

***

Thus then we all started on our common task. Never did a British Prime Minister receive from Cabinet colleagues the loyal and true aid which I enjoyed during the next five years from these men of all parties in the State. Parliament, while maintaining free and active criticism, gave continuous, overwhelming support to all measures proposed by the Government, and the nation was united and ardent as never before. It was well indeed that this should be so, because events were to come upon us of an order more terrible than anyone had foreseen.

Table of Contents

Plan D—The German Order of Battle—German and French Armour—French and British Advance through Belgium—Holland Overrun—The Belgian Problem—Accepted Primacy of France in the Military Art—The Gap in the Ardennes—British Difficulties during the Twilight War Phase—Progress of Plan D—Bad News of 13th and 14th—Kleist’s Group of Armies Break the French Front—Heavy British Air Losses—Our Final Limit for Home Defence—Reynaud Telephones Me Morning of 15th—Destruction of the French Ninth Army Opposite the Ardennes Gap—“Cease Fire” in Holland—The Italian Menace—I Fly to Paris—Meeting at the Quai d’Orsay—General Gamelin’s Statement—No Strategic Reserve: “Aucune”—Proposed Attacks on the German “Bulge”—French Demands for More British Fighter Squadrons—My Telegram to the Cabinet on the Night of May 16—Cabinet Agrees to Send Ten More Fighter Squadrons.

At the moment in the evening of May 10 when I became responsible no fresh decision about meeting the German invasion of the Low Countries was required from me or from my colleagues in the new and still unformed Administration. We had long been assured that the French and British staffs were fully agreed upon General Gamelin’s Plan D, and it had already been in action since dawn. In fact, by the morning of the 11th the whole vast operation had made great progress. On the seaward flank General Giraud’s Seventh French Army had already begun its adventurous dash into Holland. In the centre the British armoured-car patrols of the 12th Lancers were upon the river Dyle, and to the south of our front all the rest of General Billotte’s First Group of Armies were hastening forward to the Meuse. The opinion of the Allied military chiefs was that Plan D, if successful, would save anything from twelve to fifteen divisions by shortening the front against Germany; and then of course there was the Belgian Army of twenty-two divisions, besides the Dutch Army of ten divisions, without which our total forces in the West were numerically inferior. I did not therefore in the slightest degree wish to interfere with the military plans, and awaited with hope the impending shock.

Nevertheless, if in the after-light we look back upon the scene, the important paper written by the British Chiefs of Staff on September 18, 1939, becomes prominent. 7 In this it had been affirmed that unless the Belgians were effectively holding their front on the Meuse and the Albert Canal it would be wrong for the British and French to rush to their aid, but that they should rather stand firm on the French frontier, or at the most swing their left hand slightly forward to the line of the Scheldt. Since those days of September 1939 agreement had been reached to carry out General Gamelin’s Plan D. Nothing had however happened in the interval to weaken the original view of the British Chiefs of Staff. On the contrary, much had happened to strengthen it. The German Army had grown in strength and maturity with every month that had passed, and they now had a vastly more powerful armour. The French Army, gnawed by Soviet-inspired Communism and chilled by the long, cheerless winter on the front, had actually deteriorated. The Belgian Government, staking their country’s life upon Hitler’s respect for international law and Belgian neutrality, had not achieved any effective joint planning between their Army chiefs and those of the Allies. The anti-tank obstacles and defensive line which were to have been prepared on the front Namur-Louvain were inadequate and unfinished. The Belgian Army, which contained many brave and resolute men, could hardly brace itself for a conflict for fear of offending neutrality. The Belgian front had been, in fact, overrun at many points by the first wave of German assault, even before General Gamelin gave the signal to execute his long-prepared plan. The most that could now be hoped for was success in that very “encounter battle” which the French High Command had declared itself resolved to avoid.