Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin

Author:Nicholas Rankin [Nicholas Rankin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571247899
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 1975-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

It was a dramatic day in European history. At 3 a.m., Germany launched Fall Gelb (Operation yellow), its offensive in the West, a simultaneous land and air attack on the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Neutrality and obsequious diplomacy were no defence against Nazi contempt for protocol; water and wire offered no protection against blitzkrieg. Neutral Switzerland mobilised fully, and Eire began to panic: ‘The fact that we want to keep out of war’, said Eamon de Valera to a Fianna Fail convention, ‘will not, or may not, be sufficient to save us.’

The onslaught was underway; standing up to it a tremendous task. When Churchill told the House of Commons on 13 May, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat,’ he was almost quoting the opening chapter to volume 5 of The World Crisis, thinking back to what he had described as ‘incomparably the greatest war in history’, the Eastern Front of the First World War, which destroyed three empires and involved ‘the toils, perils, sufferings and passions of millions of men. Their sweat, their tears, their blood bedewed the endless plain…’

The alarming idea of soldiers dropping from the skies jolted civilian Britain into action. The day after Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for War, appealed for Local Defence Volunteers – what we think of now as ‘Dad’s Army’ – to guard against enemy parachute landings, a quarter of a million men joined. Eden was still speaking on the BBC after the nine o’clock news on 14 May 1940 (‘You will not be paid, but you will receive uniforms and will be armed…’) when listeners started phoning their local police stations in order to sign up in ‘the parashooters’.

As the United Kingdom pulled itself together in 1940, the working classes were quicker than some of the upper classes – many of whom loathed and distrusted Churchill – at putting their shoulders to the wheel. On 13 May, the Labour Party conference had backed the new national government, which had Labour ministers in the War Cabinet. The cartoon by the New Zealander David Low in the Evening Standard the next day, ‘All behind you Winston’, showed an army of politicians and people striding in step with Churchill, all rolling up their sleeves. Suddenly, the country was organising for Socialism; the mood was swinging leftwards.

The Minister of Labour and National Service was the formidable Transport and General Workers Union leader and ex-docker Ernest Bevin, who soon had the Trades Union Congress and the British Employer’s Confederation working together. When Herbert Morrison, the Minister of Supply, asked all contractors to ‘work at war speed’, in shifts covering twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, providing ‘more shells, more tanks, more guns’, the TUC sent a message: ‘Men of the fighting forces, we salute your courage and determination. We are unitedly resolved that all our resources shall be used to the full to provide the arms and munitions you need.’ ‘Go to it!’ exhorted the Ministry posters.

In his ‘Grand Coalition’ cabinet, Churchill made himself Minister of Defence.

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