Part 14

I was in London during those peak months of the Battle of Britain, August and September 1940 when the Germans were bombing by day as well as by night, trying to conquer the R.A.F. to make invasion possible. One day I was driving through London with Mr. Churchill, and as we passed a particularly large and well-camouflaged machine-gun emplacement at a street intersection, the Prime Minister called my attention to it. “Do you see that?” “Yes,” I said, “it seems you really meant it when you said the British would fight in the streets.” “Meant it!” exclaimed Mr. Churchill. “Why the Germans could if they liked drop a hundred thousand parachutists on London, and if they did we would chew them up and spit them out.” There was in his voice a note of delight at the prospect. This note is present in all of Churchill’s references to getting at the enemy. Although no man would act more quickly to relieve his people of the necessity of shedding their blood, while the fight is on Churchill revels in it. The responsibilities which are his now must be greater than those carried by any other human being on earth. One would think such a weight would have a crushing effect upon him. Not at all. The last time I saw him, while the Battle of Britain was still raging, he looked twenty years younger than before the war began. As we walked across the garden in the rear of Number Ten Downing Street I had to quicken my pace and almost trot to keep up with him, so swiftly did he stride along the gravel path.

His uplifted spirit is transmitted to the people and it is my impression that the British are, just as Churchill said, “proud to be under the fire of the enemy.” You may think it overdrawn but if you had shared with them the experience of heavy air bombardment, you would agree that Churchill was only expressing the exact truth when he said: “The sublime but also terrible experience and emotions of the battlefield which for centuries have been reserved for soldiers and sailors now are shared for good or ill by the entire population.” Even in the midst of the most fearful danger Churchill taunts the enemy--“We are waiting for that long promised invasion. So are the fishes.” I would not be surprised if Churchill really wanted the Germans to try, for if they were to try and fail it would be a defeat so disastrous that it might well lead to a German collapse.

Without courage nothing can be accomplished. With it plus intelligence everything can be done. Churchill’s courage is of every variety. He has the simple battle courage of the Hussar. Remember the cavalry charge at Omdurman in the Sudan when the young Lieutenant Churchill fought his way through a tangle of howling dervishes? He has the enduring physical courage to play a championship game of polo with a dislocated shoulder. He has the moral courage to lead a lost cause. It was he who defended the Duke of Windsor at the abdication, when the once most popular man in the British Empire had lost every other friend. He has the courage to take responsibility, and since he has been Prime Minister he has personally taken the criticism for every ill turn of fortune, every plan gone wrong. He can meet a hostile mob and talk it down. He can lead in battle. He can lead in war. Above all he can infuse his courage into others.

One’s pulse quickens at that immortal peroration of his delivered on June 18, 1940, when France had surrendered, the British Expeditionary Force had escaped with the loss of all its tools, and England stood weaponless before the foe, in greater mortal peril than ever in ten centuries. The words Churchill spoke then were the equivalent of a strong army to defend the British Isles. Translated into the deeds of the R.A.F., they defeated the enemy. Churchill said: “What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Q. _What was it Churchill said about carrying on even if the British Isles were conquered?_

A. On August 20, 1940 in the midst of the Battle of Britain, Churchill said: “If we had been put in the terrible position of France, a contingency now happily impossible, although, of course, it would have been the duty of all war leaders to fight on here to the end, it would also have been their duty, as I indicated in my speech of June 4, to provide as far as possible for the Naval security of Canada and our Dominions and to make sure they had the means to carry on the struggle from beyond the oceans.”

Q. _That would be fine for us if we could depend upon it, but do you think Churchill really meant it? What good would it do for the British Navy to carry on if the British Isles were conquered?_

A. I am sure that Churchill himself would do exactly as he said he would. He would perish with his troops or with his Navy--who can tell how or where--but he would never surrender. Can you doubt it when you hear those words of his which are as much an inspiration for us today as they were for the British when he uttered them on the last day of the evacuation of Dunkirk? They deserve to be memorized by us all. “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.”

With Churchill’s picture these words are placarded in homes and offices throughout the British Empire. Their spirit is the spirit of Britain. But having said this I am compelled to add that it would be feeble-minded for us to expect that the British Navy would continue resistance to the Germans after the British Isles had been conquered.

Let us examine what the position would be if the British Isles fell. First let us ask a British Naval Officer what would happen to the Royal Navy if the British Isles were conquered. He will tell you: “There wouldn’t be any Navy left.” I can see readily how this would be true. If the Germans try invasion, the Royal Navy is going to throw itself between the home island and the invaders with a desperation such as has never been equaled in British Naval history, and that is saying a very great deal. The Germans cannot capture the British Isles by air power alone. They can land men and machine guns by air as they did at Crete, but the heavy weapons they need to beat off and batter down the formidable British artillery and heavy tanks now massed at home, they will have to land by sea. Without these weapons they cannot win. The Royal Navy will prevent their landing or perish in the attempt. The Germans will try to clear the way for their invading craft by torpedoes, mines, speedboats, Stukas, burning oil on the water, and every conceivable means, and by some perhaps not now conceivable to us. The British defenders will discard caution and risk everything. They will hurl themselves at the invader. If they lose there will surely be little left of the Navy.

But suppose there were left a British naval force large enough when taken in combination with what we could spare from the Pacific to continue to maintain practical control of the Atlantic, enough anyway to prevent any German attempt at sending an invading army to America. Could we then expect this remnant of the British Navy to retire to Canada or the United States, and continue resistance to the Germans? I do not think so.

In the first place, what would be the purpose of the British Navy in continuing resistance to the Germans after the British Isles had been captured? Would it be for the purpose of eventually reconquering the British Isles? No, because that would be impossible. This is one of those grim facts which are too ugly for most people to look at, but there is no use turning our eyes away and refusing to see that if the Germans do invade and conquer the British Isles, the British people will have finished their life. It would be the end for them, not for the duration of this war, which would in fact be ended then, but for as far into the future as the imagination can travel. The Germans might remain in possession of the British Isles or in effective control for the thousand years Hitler so often boasts about, or until they became weak through centuries of good living. Hitler would disarm the people of Britain and allow hunger to decimate them. He could count on forty per cent of the population dying of starvation in a year or so. Does this seem an exaggeration? It is only one more of those facts about Hitler which nobody would believe. The trusting Dutch would not believe what Hitler was like until he taught the people of Rotterdam. But the British people have now learned their lesson. They have totally lost the wide-eyed faith of our Lindberghs, that Hitler is “human after all.” The British know Hitler would do just what I have said, he would deliberately destroy a great part of the population, allowing to remain alive only those sufficiently broken to become good slaves. But why, you ask, could not the British Navy reconquer the British Isles, if they had our wholehearted help? The answer is that there would be no base from which to operate.

We can now contemplate reconquering Europe from the Nazis because we have a base or several possible bases from which to operate against the Reich. We have the British Isles and Russia and the Middle East, and parts of North Africa, and may have other bases before the war is over. But if the British Isles were captured, where could the British Navy land to invade and repossess them? And with what troops would this engagement be fought? With the Canadians and Australians? Nobody would dare disparage the fighting qualities of these magnificent men, but if the 46,000,000 Britishers in the British Isles had failed to throw back the German Army is it likely that 16,000,000 Canadians and Australians could defeat it? What about the United States? If we had not entered the war before the conquest of the British Isles, is it likely we would go to war after the British had been beaten? Moreover, if we did, it is inconceivable that we should beat the Germans after they had seized the resources of the United Kingdom. They would then have added to the shipbuilding capacity of the continent all the British shipyards, at this moment the most productive in the world. It might be worth our while to glance an instant at the shipbuilding situation which would exist if Germany takes the British Isles.

The shipbuilding capacity of each of the following countries is listed as of the most productive year since 1917. This was usually 1919.

_Tons_ Germany 600,000 Denmark 140,000 France 210,000 Holland 240,000 Norway 60,000 Sweden 165,000 Italy 220,000 Japan 700,000 --------- 2,335,000 United Kingdom 2,000,000 --------- Total 4,335,000

After the defeat of Britain, Germany and her allies would possess the capacity to build 4,335,000 tons of ships a year, which is more than four times our 1941 production of around 1,000,000 tons and is even larger than our record performance in 1919 when we turned out 4,075,000 tons of ships. Admiral Land’s prediction that we would eventually build 6,000,000 tons a year remains to be fulfilled. As matters now stand if the Germans were to capture Britain, time would be on their side for the building of ships. Furthermore, of course, the Germans would inherit the vast British industrial machine, and save for the production of steel, would have the power to turn out more airplanes and munitions than we could for many years. All of this is merely to emphasize what the fall of Britain and the end of the British Navy as a fighting force against Hitler would mean to the United States.

Q. _But isn’t Churchill often wrong in his military judgment? Hasn’t he made mistakes due to overconfidence?_

A. It is true that Mr. Churchill has the vices of his virtues, and since his most prominent virtue is courage, he also possesses what has seemed at times to be recklessness. His sanguine temperament makes him ideally equipped to lead a nation in desperate circumstances, but his critics of whom a few still exist will never cease insisting on the obvious, that he makes mistakes, as though it were not the hoariest of adages that only the man who never does anything commits no errors. They list a roll of his alleged military failures, beginning with his unsuccessful defense of Antwerp and the costly attempt to take the Dardanelles in the last war; and in this war Norway, Greece, and Crete. But if these events are analyzed it will be seen that each of them had its justification.

Many military critics looking back at the last war now agree that Mr. Churchill was right to advocate holding Antwerp as an Allied strong point behind the German lines, and if the Allied High Command had supported him sufficiently Churchill’s defense might have succeeded. The Dardanelles attempt--which used to be the failure his enemies most enjoyed--was in the view of most military men today a brilliant conception which would have ended the war victoriously for the Allies two years earlier, if Churchill’s plan had been carried out as it could have been. We know now not only that the campaign could have succeeded from the outset and at comparatively little cost, if the Churchill timetable had been scrupulously kept, but also that the straits could have been captured even at the very end if one last push had been made. One of Raymond Swing’s best stories is of his experience as a war correspondent with the Turks, whom he saw hoarding their last few rounds of ammunition as, to their astonishment, the British steamed away, losing with a completely un-British lack of persistence. It was jealousy more than anything else that spoiled the Dardanelles campaign, Kitchener’s jealousy of Churchill.

In his old age, Kitchener, the Army chief, obstinately refused to do what the Navy chief advised, and the end was failure. It was perhaps the most keenly felt failure in the life of Churchill when he resigned after the Dardanelles. Anyone who reads the painstaking account he has written of the campaign in his history of the war, _The World Crisis_, may perceive how heavy the blow was. Even clearer evidence are the pictures of him in his country place at Chartwell. One for which he sat immediately after the Dardanelles campaign shows him looking years older than a picture of him before the campaign began. No, the Dardanelles ought to be remembered to Churchill’s credit, and it will be eventually.

In this war its place has been given by his critics to Norway, Crete, and Greece. Ed Angly, my companion in flight from France, used humorously to wonder if the British were ever going to cease retreating and my reply was that they probably never would until they had retreated to victory. The Norwegian campaign discouraged many, and critics on both sides of the Atlantic demanded to know why the British secret service had not known in advance of the German intention to invade Norway; why the Royal Navy had not prevented invasion; why the British Army landed in the north could not hold on.

The reproach of faulty information can be leveled only by persons not acquainted with the nature of the Gestapo. It must not have escaped general attention that when the German Army marches into a captured territory, for a few days news of a sort continues to trickle out, and we may hope that British or other enemy agents continue to function during this time. But as soon as the Gestapo appears, with Himmler directing its hordes of agents in civilian clothes, and its tens of thousands of black-uniformed SS, it is as though an asbestos curtain had fallen on the frontiers of the country, and from then on the silence of the grave envelops the land. I was not surprised that Hitler could strike with such devastating secrecy; what victim of his has been warned except by the general reputation of the invader? Even the Bolsheviks were plaintively surprised when the “assassin of the working classes” so violently dissolved his friendship with the “scum of the earth.” We may be sure that if Hitler were ever put, by the fall of Britain, in a position to attack the Western Hemisphere, we would also be surprised, not by the action but by the time and method. The Norwegian surprise was no fault of Churchill.

The question why the British could not hold on is one that is put not only about Norway but about Crete and Greece and it may be put again before the last battle is fought. The answer is one which may have to be borne in mind for a long time. It is contained in the simplest facts about the war, which tend to be forgotten in the riot of daily news. The principal fact is that Britain after two years of war has not yet caught up with the numbers and equipment of the German war machine built by a population double that of the British over seven years of peacetime preparation and two of war. The British have fought on nearly every one of their battlefields so far with inferior numbers against superior material and better-trained men. Let those of us in America who imagine we have only to call a few million boys to the colors and train them a year in order to have an army, consider the British experience. The British soldiers are only now after more than two years of war training, becoming a capable modern army, about one-third the size of Britain’s “medium-sized” army.

Finally we heard the criticism that Churchill’s decision to send troops to Greece was a mistake, since he knew they could not hold out against the Germans. “Political” reasons, it was said, ought not to govern military decisions. But what is the war being fought about if not to re-establish honor among nations? Britain was sworn to come to the aid of Greece. Had she failed to do so, forlorn though the hope was of immediate success, she would have lost a good part of that moral reputation which is worth more than many army corps to her today. This “political” decision was made in the sense of the classical definition of politics, “that branch of ethics dealing with the ethical relations and duties of states.”

Churchill did make one public mistake, and it was shared by hopeful millions, when he said at the beginning of the Norwegian campaign, “Herr Hitler has committed a grave strategic error in spreading the war so far to the north.” The man who had almost never underestimated the Germans did so that time.

Q. _Wasn’t that apparent error in judgment perhaps really a piece of good-cheer propaganda for the people?_

A. I do not think so; it was a real mistake based on his own audacity, yet who would not prefer a leadership which tries and fails to one which does not try at all? In Churchill the British have one leader who understands that wars are never won on the defensive, and we may be sure that he can be depended upon to seize the first conceivable opportunity to carry the war into Hitler’s territory. The offensive spirit never had a more consistent exponent than Churchill, as in his proclamation:

“We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of his Nazi regime; from this nothing will turn us--nothing. We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his men. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated his peoples from the yoke.”

This eloquence of Churchill is a gift from Heaven for our side during these terrible years, when confusion of mind is the greatest foe of the democracies. One of the most famous sayings of Hitler, quoted by Rauschning is: “Mental confusion, contradiction of feeling, indecisiveness, panic; these are our weapons.”

We in America can see how effective these weapons are. Consider the mental confusion, indecisiveness, and conflicting feelings aroused in the United States by the speeches of Hitler’s American Quislings, the Lindberghs and Wheelers. The counterpart of these circles existed in England but they were long ago rendered powerless and even speechless by the analytical eloquence of Churchill. Take the case of Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Hitler undoubtedly expected to divide the outside world by proclaiming his “Holy Crusade” against Bolshevism. But Churchill choked this deceit in its inception. The Germans began their attack on Russia at four o’clock in the morning, and before the day was out Churchill had given the world his answer. Other statesmen might have waited a day or even a week. Churchill gave Hitler no time to spread mental confusion. “Any man or state,” Churchill declared, “who fights against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe.... Hitler’s invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles.... The Russian danger is therefore our danger and the danger of the United States.... Let us redouble our exertions and strike with united strength while life and power remain.” This declaration, swift and uncompromising as a bullet, was equivalent to the loss of a great battle for Hitler. I am sure he entertained hopes that he could induce Britain even to stop fighting in order that he could more easily destroy Bolshevik Russia. Churchill’s speed prevented the question from even being debated. This is the finest example of leadership. The Prime Minister did not wait to find out by Gallup poll or otherwise what the British people thought. He boldly led them.

Q. _Do you think the flight of Hess to England had any connection with the German attack on Russia which followed six weeks later?_

A. Hess fled to England May 10, and Hitler attacked Russia June 21. I think there must have been a connection, and I have my theory of it, but it is only a theory. I think Hess may have carried Churchill a message from Hitler saying he was going to attack Russia, offering a negotiated peace, and soliciting the benevolent neutrality if not the active aid of Britain to destroy the Bolshevik menace. We may be sure that whatever was the purpose of Hess’s visit, Churchill knows all about it by now.