David Carlton. World Affairs. Volume 156, Issue 2, Fall 1993.
Winston Churchill’s ultimately marginal role in 20th century history renders the academic debate over his willingness to compromise with Germany in 1940 meaningless. Revisionist historians have questioned whether Churchill was committed to total victory or whether he seriously considered some settlement with Hitler. The future of Great Britain was sealed before Churchill entered office when assets had to be liquidated to fund the war in 1939. Also, the benefit and enforceability of a pact with Germany would have been highly questionable.
In his volume of the Oxford history of England, published in 1965, the late A. J. P. Taylor described Winston Churchill, in a famous footnote, as “the saviour of his country”—an uncharacteristic endorsement of the British establishment’s current view of the great man’s supposed role in 1940 and after. It is thus ironic that it is one of Taylor’s self-confessed admirers, John Charmley of the University of East Anglia, who should have recently caused a furor by publishing a revisionist study of Churchill that suggests that reaching a compromise peace with Germany might have served long-term British interests better than the heroic policy of doggedly fighting on after the fall of France.
Before considering the merits of this particular contention, the reader needs to appreciate, however, that there is a second debate in progress with respect to Churchill’s role in the matter of compromise peace. This concerns the precise attitude taken by Churchill and his senior colleagues in May 1940 on the question of both the possibility and the desirability of a genuine compromise settlement with Germany that would in no way have been synonymous with the surrender that was to be forced on France. Here again, Taylor initially represented the orthodox approach. In 1965, before any of the relevant public or private British archives had been opened, he wrote dogmatically:
The continuance of the war was never formally debated. It was taken for granted. On 28 May Churchill met all ministers of cabinet rank and, after surveying the situation, remarked casually: “Of course whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall right on.” Ministers shouted: “Well done, prime minister.” Some burst into tears. Others slapped Churchill on the back. This was the nearest approach to a discussion or a decision.
This account was based primarily on Churchill’s own war memoirs, which were soon shown to have been remarkably economical with the truth in this respect.
The upshot was that by 1969, faced with irrefutable evidence emerging from private archives, even the gullible Taylor was forced to change his tune. Now he conceded that the all-powerful War Cabinet—consisting of Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Clement Attlee, and Arthur Greenwood—had indeed debated compromise peace. But, at the same time, he strove to protect Churchill’s heroic reputation in the following fashion:
Churchill at once defined British war aims, or rather he laid down a single aim: the total defeat of Hitler and the undoing of all Germany’s conquests. When he came to write his account of the war, he implied that his definition was hardly necessary and that the entire nation was united in pursuing total victory or, put the other way round, unconditional surrender by the Germans. It is unlikely that he played such a modest part. Despite Churchill’s assertion that negotiations with Hitler were never discussed by the War Cabinet, it is now known that Halifax raised the topic on 27 May. In fact Churchill was showing his usual generosity when he gave the impression that all his associates were as resolute as himself, and his cover for them perhaps appears less surprising, if it is borne in mind that the weaker vessels were Conservatives, members of the party which Churchill led.
The next turning point came in 1971 with the opening of the public archives under the terms of the newly enacted thirty-year rule. The full extent of the War Cabinet’s agonizing about a possible compromise peace on 26, 27, and 28 May 1940 was open for all to inspect. I myself was an early visitor to the Public Record Office and rapidly came to the conclusion that Taylor’s latest gloss was no less misguided than his earlier line.
The real reason, in my opinion, why Churchill had shown such “generosity” to his War Cabinet colleagues was that in the privacy of their meetings he had been, to judge by the record, in some respects no more resolute and principled than they were. He did not, for example, declare himself unalterably averse to a compromise settlement with Adolf Hitler. He thus did not, as Taylor supposed, stand resolutely for “the total defeat of Hitler and the undoing of all Germany’s conquests.” On the contrary, in the circumstances of May 1940, he did not oppose in principle a settlement that would have given Germany “overlordship of Eastern Europe.”
This did not mean, however, that he was in total agreement with his foreign secretary, Halifax. But what actually divided them, again judging by the record, was a rather narrow point: their respective evaluations of whether and when acceptable peace terms might be offered. Halifax was sufficiently open-minded about Hitler’s intentions that, while he thought the issue was “probably academic,” he favored a French proposal for jointly trying to discover at once, via a neutral Italy, what they might be. He was conscious that otherwise in the impending Battle of Britain “the future of the country turned on whether the enemy’s bombs happened to hit our aircraft factories.” “He was prepared,” the cabinet minutes continue, “to take that risk if our independence was at stake; but if it was not at stake he would think it right to accept an offer which would save the country from avoidable disaster.” Churchill, for his part, thought it certain that at a point when France was tottering Hitler would indeed want to impose crippling terms on Britain. Given this premise, he considered that actively seeking information about possible terms at this particular juncture and in association with the French government would be a fruitless exercise and might have deplorable implications for British morale. In the event, Chamberlain had relatively little difficulty in reconciling Churchill and Halifax. The cabinet minutes of 28 May record him as saying: “While he thought that an approach to Italy was useless at the present time, it might be that we should take a different view in a short time, possibly even a week hence. The real question, therefore, was how to frame a reply to the French, which while not rejecting their idea altogether, would persuade them that now was the wrong time to make it.” This approach “gained general agreement” from the War Cabinet and was embodied in a telegram sent by Churchill to his French counterpart.
France alone appealed to Benito Mussollini to act as mediator, but he refused the role, preferring instead to join the war on the German side. It must remain a matter for speculation whether, if he had acted otherwise, Hitler, given that his primary interest had always lain in consquest in the East, would have offered the Western powers the kind of terms that Churchill and Halifax were apparently willing to consider. As it was, the Battle of Britain went ahead. And when its outcome proved sufficiently favorable to the British to allay their worst fears, as earlier expressed by Halifax, the War Cabinet had no difficulty in uniting on the policy of unambiguous prosecution of the war.
Armed with all this material in the early 1970s, I sought to be commissioned to write a book challenging the Taylorian orthodoxy—tentatively entitled When Winston Wavered. But no reputable London publisher could at that time be found for a work that would have been so destructive of a national myth. (Incidentally, I expect no better fate when I try to market in New York my forthcoming work provisionally entitled The First Modern Terrorist. A Study of George Washington.)
In the 1970s, therefore, the best I felt able to do by way of puncturing Taylor’s cozy picture was to slip a footnote into an academic article on a completely different matter. I contrived to include these cautionary words about reliance on British “official” historians: “It certainly cannot be assumed that |official’ historians will exercise discretion only where present-day security or the private lives of living persons are concerned.” I then illustrated the point by referring to Sir Llewellyn Woodward’s British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, which I claimed presented “a rather misleading picture” of the debate about compromise peace. This enabled me to continue:
In particular, no mention was made of the fact that in the Cabinet Minutes Lord Halifax reported Winston Churchill as having said that “…if he was satisfied that matters vital to the independence of this country were unaffected, he would be prepared to discuss terms” and that Churchill had further said … that he would be thankful to get out of our present difficulties, providing we retained the essentials and elements of our vital strength, even at the cost of some cession of territory.”
In one sentence, I had thus succeeded in getting the essence of the revisionist case into the public domain.
At the earliest opportunity, however, the journal I had used, British Journal of International Studies, published an entire article devoted to “correcting” the impression given by my footnote. Its author, Jonathan Knight, insisted that “the truth is otherwise, or rather, it is as we have always known it to be: the British people led by Churchill would continue against Germany, alone if necessary, and negotiations with Hitler were out of the question.” He dismissed my quotations in this fashion: “Halifax’s statement … does not expose the prime minister’s interest in approaching Hitler, but what Halifax wanted others to think, or perhaps what he wanted himself to think.” The prime minister’s sole aim apparently was to say “no to Halifax, but not abruptly.”
There matters rested for some years, for I preferred to keep most of my powder dry rather than engage in an extended debate in a relatively obscure academic journal. But, as the Churchillian generation has gradually left the stage, the debate on Churchill’s attitude to peace negotiations has re-emerged in recent years. Much is owed to David Reynolds, Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. In 1985, in a Festschrift presented to Sir Harry Hinsley, he made clear that he could not simply endorse the simplistic view of those represented by Taylor and Knight even though he did not take as literal a view of the meaning of the cabinet minutes as I am inclined to do. He wrote:
Was Churchill simply trying to maintain Cabinet unity by reassuming influential colleagues that he was not a romantic diehard? This argument is certainly plausible, especially when we remember Churchill’s relatively weak political position that summer. But before we dismiss his statements as a tactical ploy, we should note that he took a similar fine in other, more public situations when one might have expected a pugnacious, optimistic statement to strengthen domestic opinion. For instance, on 29 May, concerned at defeatist talk in London, he issued a general injunction to ministers to maintain “a high morale in their circles; not minimizing the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war till we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination.” No mention here of total victory.
After examining further arguments in detail Reynolds concluded:
In the end these arguments are speculative: inferences from fragmentary and ambiguous evidence. But there can be little doubt that, contrary to the mythology he himself sedulously cultivated, Churchill succumbed at times to the doubts that plagued British leaders in the summer of 1940…. [T]he Churchill of myth (and of the war memoirs) is not always the Churchill of history. Scholars working on the 1930s and World War II have long been aware of this discrepancy, but it deserves to be underlined in view of the dogged rearguard action fought by popular biographers and television producers. Contrary to national folklore, Churchill did not stand in complete and heroic antithesis to his pusillanimous, small-minded political colleagues. British leaders in the 1930s and World War II all faced the same basic problem of how to protect their country’s extended global interests with insufficient means at their disposal. The various policies they advanced are not to be divided into separate camps—appeasers and the rest—but rather marked on different points of a single spectrum, with no one as near either extreme as is often believed. This is true of the Chamberlain era; it is also true, as I have argued here, in 1940. In private Churchill often acknowledged that the chances of survival, let alone victory, were slim. He also expressed acceptance, in principle, of the idea of an eventual negotiated peace, on terms guaranteeing the independence of the British Isles, even if that meant sacrificing parts of the empire and leaving Germany in command of Central Europe…. This is not in any sense to belittle Churchill’s greatness. On the contrary. My contention is that the popular stereotype of almost blind, apolitical pugnacity ignores the complexity of this remarkable man and sets him on an unreal pedestal. A not unskillful politician handling the same issues in different ways for domestic and foreign audiences, privately wrestling with his own doubts and fears, yet transcending them to offer inspiring national and international leadership—that is surely a more impressive as well as a more accurate figure than the gutsy bulldog of popular mythology.
Others to join the revisionist camp include Clive Ponting and Andrew Roberts. The former wrote in 1990:
It is clear from the widespread evidence of war cabinet discussions and approaches via the Swedes and the Americans that in May and June 1940 not only did Britain seriously consider making peace with Germany, but that some members of the government went as far as to ask what terms the Germans would offer. Within the war cabinet there was a spectrum of views: from Halifax who favoured trying to make peace before the military situation became even worse; to Churchill, who wanted to fight on for a few months.(11) And Roberts, Halifax’s latest biographer, wrote in 1991: “To see this critical period in the black and white of the treacherous Halifax versus a heroic Churchill is simplistic and unhistorical but, partly one suspects because of the British predilection for blame and betrayal, it is this perception which has survived to impugn Halifax’s patriotism to this day.”
Right on cue, also in 1991, a book appeared representing just this outlook. This was John Costello’s Ten Days That Saved the West. After examining much the same evidence as Reynolds, Ponting, and Roberts, he came to a diametrically opposed conclusion. He saw Churchill as adamantly opposed to any compromise peace but forced by circumstances to avoid a showdown with Halifax, whom he (Costello) characterized as “defeatist”:
While Churchill could have carried the majority of the government on his opposition to negotiations, forcing the issue to a vote might have precipitated Halifax’s threatened resignation. The urge to appease died hard among those ministers who had made it their article of faith for so many years. History had shown that neither Hitler nor Mussolini could be trusted, but the record shows how Churchill had to battle through that long crisis-filled weekend to forestall Halifax’s attempt to resurrect the discredited policies. At the same time he knew that if he went over the heads of the Foreign Secretary and Lord President [Chamberlain], it might have triggered a rancorous parliamentary showdown. If this had erupted during the critical days of the Dunkirk evacuation, it must be doubted whether even Churchill’s rhetoric or the support of the opposition parties could have sustained him if the Conservatives in Parliament had turned against his leadership.
Not only did Costello see the domestic struggle in black-and-white terms, but he was also unambiguous, as his title suggests, about where British interests lay: “The records leave little doubt that, but for Churchill, World War II [sic] would have ended during the first half of June 1940, setting the whole course of global history on a different and more sinister course.”
Ironically, Costello’s analysis of what the records show about the struggle in the war cabinet is broadly accepted by the latest protagonist, namely Charmley, the author with whom we began. He is, of course, aware of the sensational evidence in the cabinet minutes but sees fit to dismiss it in terms that will delight the most ardent keepers of the Churchillian flame: “In order to keep Halifax he had to make noises which sounded as though he would in some circumstances countenance the idea of a compromise peace. That these hesitations … reflected nothing more than momentary concessions to Halifax can hardly be doubted.” But there the identity of view between Costello and Charmley ends, for the latter ironically refuses to accept the other part of the traditional interpretation, namely that Churchill was the “saviour of his county.”
This brings us back to the controversy that has recently been raging among the members of the British chattering classes. Charmley’s essential conclusion comes on his final page:
Surveying the situation in July 1945 it was hard to argue that Britain had won in any sense save that of avoiding defeat…. He [Churchill] had destroyed the awful tyranny of Hitler, but what had risen in its place? Perhaps his own comments to [Harold] Macmillan in Cairo in 1943 about Cromwell indicate a degree of self-knowledge: “he made one terrible mistake. Obsessed in his youth by fear of the power of Spain, he failed to observe the rise of France. Will that be said of me?” If “Germany” is substituted for “Spain” and “Russia” for “France,” then the answer to Churchill’s rhetorical question might well be “yes.”
Churchill stood for the British Empire, for British independence and for an “anti-socialist” vision of Britain. By July 1945 the first of these was on the skids, the second was dependent upon America and the third had just vanished in a Labour election victory. An appropriate moment to stop, for it was indeed the end of glory.
Alan Clark, the maverick former Conservative MP and minister, quickly hailed Charmley’s book as “probably the most important revisionist text to be published since the war.” But he skillfully hijacked the subsequent controversy to some extent by arguing quite explicitly that the best moment for seeking peace with Germany would have been in 1941 rather than 1940:
In spring 1941, following the total defeat of the Italians in Africa, Britain had recovered its military poise and had not yet paid over all its gold reserves to America. Hitler wanted to secure his flank before he turned on Russia. Hess, his deputy, flew uninvited to Britain with terms. Churchill, who saw the domestic dangers, would not talk to him. … This was the real watershed because if Britain had made peace in April 1941 the fleet and the Spitfires could have been moved to Singapore. The Japanese would never have attacked and the far Eastern empire would have endured. But Churchill did not attach as much importance to this as to defeating Hitler.
Clark concluded:
The war went on far too long, and when Britain emerged the country was bust. Nothing remained of the assets overseas. Without immense and punitive borrowings from the US we would have starved. The old social order had gone forever. The empire was terminally damaged. The Commonwealth countries had seen their trust betrayed and their soldiers wasted, while the colonies had been most effectively taught by their evicted masters how to rebel against an occupying power.
Whether 1940 or 1941 would have been the better year for a compromise peace for Great Britain is, however, obviously less central than whether any peace at all was desirable. And most of the letters to The Times and other comments made in January 1993 when the controversy erupted not surprisingly addressed the broader issue. There was, of course, a lunatic fringe that insisted, quite unreasonably, that either Charmley or Clark was retrospectively proposing something that would not have been a compromise peace at all but rather in effect a surrender. Martin E. Simons, for example, wrote to The Times that “appeasement never pays” and that “even if a sort of peace had been made by allowing the Quisling and Darlan puppets in Oslo and Algeria, and their ilk, to displace the likes of King Haakon of Norway and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and by putting Churchill and de Gaulle into a concentration camp, the respite would have been brief.” Most of those who entered the controversy, however, did not blatantly distort the arguments of Charmley and Clark. They simply raised a series of speculative questions to which no entirely satisfactory answer can probably ever be given.
First, did Germany want “peace” in 1940 or 1941 and, if so, on what terms? My own conclusion, for what it is worth, is that Hitler was still mainly interested in expanding in the East and ultimately in overrunning the Soviet Union. The war in the West in 1940 was, on this reading, a temporary distraction forced on him by the Western European Powers’ decision to go to war for the sake of Poland. Hence once all effective fighting on the Western front had ended after the fall of France and after the British had survived the Battle of Britain, he was once again free to proceed with his plans that matured with his attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Clearly, the fact that he went ahead while still in a nominal state of war with Great Britain suggests that the absence of a settlement with London made no difference to him. So probably he would not have paid a particularly high price for a peace treaty if he had been interested in one at all. Seen from the British side, this suggests that the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 was a turning point. There surely was something in Halifax’s argument that, if reasonable terms were offered, it was reckless to refuse to consider them in May 1940 when nobody knew whether control over British skies would be lost. But once that issue had been favorably resolved—by September 1940—there was no compelling urgency for the British to seek a deal with Germany. It made more sense to inaugurate a second period of “phoney war” and await Hitler’s next move.
This came, of course, with the attack on the Soviet Union. But once again questions relating to Great Britain arise. First, were British long-term interests really likely to be served by following Churchill’s line of giving unequivocal support to such a tyrant as Stalin? But, in any case, was the fact that the Soviets were presented with an ally in the West of any decisive importance to her survival in the first vital year of her war with Germany? Perhaps Soviet archives will enable us to answer this further question with high confidence in the future. But my present guess is that Great Britain made virtually no difference. Ponting, for example, makes the telling point: “Until the end of 1942 the British army never fought at any time more than four weak German divisions out of a total of over two hundred.”
Perhaps it is the same story in the case of the Americans, too. The fact is that the British refusal to parley in 1940 did not pave the way for an American entry into the war. The decisions for a genuine world war were taken in Tokyo and Berlin and not, as Churchill had always gambled would happen, in Washington. In my opinion, Tokyo was in no way influenced by the fact that the British and the Germans at the other end of the planet had not patched up their differences—in this respect Clark’s arguments seem quite unpersuasive. And even in the case of Berlin, it is hard to make a convincing case that London’s supposedly heroic stand was what led Hitler to go to war at Tokyo’s side—even though he was undoubtedly vexed at the lend-lease policies of the United States and Anglo-American control of the North Atlantic. For the decision to gratuitously add the mighty United States to Germany’s existing enemies was a move of such self-evident lunacy as to render rational explanation impossible.
All of this may add up to saying what few on either side of the current British controversy would wish to face: whether Great Britain stayed at war or reached an honorable settlement in 1940-1941 made little difference insofar as long-term geopolitics were concerned. And it also may be that even the decisive moment relating to British economic decline had come at least a year before Churchill became prime minister.
The turning point probably came in April 1939 when, in the wake of the reckless decision to “guarantee” Poland, the British cabinet felt obliged to massively increase defense spending and to introduce conscription in order to be able to send an army, of up to thirty-two divisions, to fight on the continent. The strains on the British economy, which had been felt in the preceeding six years, now reached a virtual breaking point. Ponting explains:
From 1935 defence expenditure rose rapidly at about forty per cent a year, so that by 1939 spending was over 700 million [pounds], a sevenfold increase compared with the 1933 figure. As a proportion of national wealth, defence expenditure rose from three per cent in the early 1930s to eighteen per cent in 1939. This was a prodigious effort by any standards, especially since Britain also had to cope with the highest per capita debt in the world, caused by the First World War. Income tax rose from 22 1/2 per cent in 1934 to 27 1/2 per cent by the spring of 1939. In addition, a special defence loan was introduced in 1937 and expanded to 800 million [pounds] in the autumn of 1938. As industrial capacity was increasingly devoted to armaments, that available for export declined and armament production itself required more raw materials and therefore increased imports. The first signs of balance of payments problems came in 1936 with a small deficit of 18 million [pounds], but this tripled to 55 million [pounds] in 1937 and reached 250 million [pounds] in 1939.
What this meant was that once war had actually broken out in September 1939, overseas assets had to be progressively liquidated—thus ensuring that Great Britain’s future as a rentier nation was already settled by the time Churchill was sent for in the following May.
Churchill, then, should be seen neither as hero nor villain but rather as one whose entire role has been greatly exaggerated. In terms of world history, he was simply not among the decisive men of the century. They arguably were Vladimir Lenin and some of his successors, President Harry Truman and some of his successors, and, above all, Hitler. Lenin, by successfully establishing Bolshevism in Russia, threatened to cause a global polarization on class fines. This duly led much of the German middle class to prefer Hitler to Marxism. He, in turn, then rendered a signal service to the cause of Western liberalism—doubtless unintentionally—by declaring war on the United States. This brought the Americans physically back into the world’s heartland (which no American leaders could have achieved). There, thanks in particular to Truman and his successors, the Americans have remained—with ultimately happy results for enemies of fascist and communist totalitarianism. Churchill would no doubt have rejoiced at this outcome. But he would probably have found it unbearable to be told that his own role, like that of his country, was never more than marginal.