Part II
5 From Poland to the North Cape
6 The Fall of France
7 The Battle of Britain
8 The Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East
9 Barbarossa
10 War with America
THE European war began when the Germans invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. On 17 September the Russians did so too and Poland ceased once more to exist as an independent state. Successful in the east Hitler paused, but Stalin in November made demands on Finland which led to a war which the Russians at first bungled but eventually won in March 1940. In April Hitler conquered Denmark and Norway and in May–June the Netherlands, Belgium and France. In July–September he failed, in the Battle of Britain, to win the air superiority necessary for an invasion. Great Britain remained at war, not only in the west, but also with naval, ground and air forces in the eastern Mediterranean. Hitler toyed with the idea of a descent into the western Mediterranean through France and Spain, but the war was resumed in the eastern Mediterranean when Mussolini attacked Greece unsuccessfully in October and the British attacked the Italians successfully in North Africa in December. In 1941 Hitler consolidated his control of south-eastern Europe, including Greece, and went to the help of the Italians in Africa. On 22 June he attacked the USSR which, besides strengthening its defences in the north by the peace imposed on Finland, had annexed the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the Rumanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. There were therefore at the end of 1941 three separate theatres of war: first, the USSR where Leningrad was invested, German forces had come within sight of Moscow, and the Ukraine had been overrun by German armies on their way into the Crimea and the Caucasus; secondly, the remnant of a war in the west maintained by the Royal Air Force in Great Britain but pushed out into the Atlantic and waged chiefly by German U-boats and their pursuers; and thirdly, the Mediterranean where the Germans and Italians were trying to win North Africa – and thence the Middle East – against the opposition of the British Mediterranean fleet and British land and air forces based in Egypt and Malta. At the end of the year this European war, begun in 1939, ceased to be purely European and merged with the wars begun before and after it by Japan – against China in 1937 and against the United States in 1941.
CHAPTER 5
THE German attack on Poland was a combination of a straight punch and a pincer movement. The central German blow was delivered from Pomerania, Silesia and Moravia and was accompanied by simultaneous attacks from eastern Pomerania in the north and Slovakia in the south. All attacks were made with withering material and technical superiority, Hitler having taken the risk of committing the whole of his armoured and mechanized forces in Poland and of denuding his western fronts. The Polish forces fell back rapidly, taking the civilian authorities with them and leaving the German inhabitants exposed to the harsh vengefulness of their Polish neighbours. Fantastic rumours about the activities of a German fifth column – rumours which were to be repeated all over Europe and which were almost totally groundless – produced a panic-struck wave of summary injustice in which as many as 7,000 Germans may have been killed.
No help came to Poland from its guarantors. The French army put a symbolic toe across the German frontier but otherwise France composed itself to await the arrival of the British (that year or the next) and, when pressed by the Polish Ambassador in Paris, hedged over the promise given in May to launch an immediate major offensive. General Gamelin did not disown the promise but said, evasively and incorrectly, that French forces were engaging the enemy on the ground and in the air. Great Britain sent twenty-nine aircraft to attack German shipping (and lost seven of them) but for six months dropped nothing more serious than leaflets on German soil. The cabinet feared massive air reprisals and in Parliament the Secretary of State for Air went so far as to defend this inactivity by reminding his more bellicose critics, who wanted the R A F to attack the Ruhr which was within its bombing range, that the targets proposed were private property. The Germans in the west uneasily occupied the incomplete West Wall. They deployed thirty-three divisions, twenty-five of which were of the second grade or lower. They had no tanks, no aircraft and three days’ supply of ammunition. Opposite them was the French army with over seventy divisions on the border, nearly 3,000 tanks and command of the air.
The Poles, whether from misplaced hopes or through temperamental impetuosity or sheer desperation, had placed their forces in forward positions where they were quickly overwhelmed by an enemy who was superior in every way. Their mobilization was slow, their leadership poor, their communications flimsy, their reserves thin, their aircraft obsolete and their tactics – cavalry charging tanks with the aim of dashing into Germany – hopeless. On the ground they were thrown back at all points by the German armour and dive-bombers. In the air the rest of the Luftwaffe, although hampered by fog on the morning and evening of the first day, quickly forced the Poles to battle by attacking Warsaw. The Polish air force was crippled in two days and extinguished in two weeks as a result of air combats and the overrunning of its airfields by the German army. The Polish army scored one noteworthy sucess by night attack southwards across the river Bzura on 9–10 September, but this stroke was held in check by the Luftwaffe and although one German army was temporarily disorganized a second, which was already to the east on its way to Warsaw, turned about and, together with a third army north of the Polish force, encircled the Poles and inflicted fatal casualties on them. On 25 September Warsaw was bombed all day. German command of the air was so complete that even Ju. (Junkers) 52 transports joined in the bombing, and the city surrendered the next day. Hitler arrived to see it on 5 October.
The German victory disconcerted the Russians both for what it was and by its speed, and on 17 September Russian forces moved into what the Russians called Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine on the plea that the Polish state had disintegrated. At the cost of 734 dead the Russians occupied half Poland (admittedly the half where Poles were in a minority). They also, in October, took control of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania by exacting from their governments treaties of mutual assistance which permitted the entry of Russian troops and meant in effect that the Russians would take over if the Germans looked like doing so. Upon Finland the Russians had even more serious demands to make because of the vulnerability of Leningrad, situated no more than fifteen miles from the Finnish frontier on the Karelian isthmus and close to Lake Ladoga whose shores were partly Finnish territory. The Russians wanted to protect Leningrad against land and sea attack by obtaining Finnish territory in the immediate neighbourhood of the city and control of the Gulf of Finland.
The issue was one between Russian security and Finnish rights. During October and early November Finnish delegations went three times to Moscow. On each occasion the Russians made small concessions but they refused to abate the substance of their demands: a lease of Hangö in south-western Finland at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, the cession of a number of islands in the Gulf, a slice of territory in the Karelian isthmus (including the town of Viipuri) to the north-west of Leningrad and – in the far north – the Finnish half of the peninsula guarding the approaches to the Russian port of Murmansk. In exchange the Russians offered a piece of Russian Karelia twice as large as the areas demanded. They also asked for a treaty debarring each signatory from entering into agreements directed at the other. Finnish opinion was overwhelmingly against making any large cessions to an hereditary enemy, although one or two leaders argued that the Russians were not bluffing and could not in the end be denied. When the Russians saw that they could not get what they wanted by negotiation they set up a puppet Finnish government and attacked on the last day of November – for which the USSR was expelled from the League of Nations. Four Russian armies, comprising forty-five divisions, went into action, one on either side of Lake Ladoga, one directed across the waist of Finland and the fourth in the far north. The Finnish armies of 200,000 men offered magnificent resistance. They were much better clad and better shod than the ill-prepared Russians and they operated in small ski groups against inappropriately large Russian formations, but in the long term they lacked practically everything except courage and discipline. Within a short time of the opening of the campaign they were relying on teenagers to fill their fighting ranks.
The Russians began by mismanaging the campaign so thoroughly that their attacks in the south were brought to a standstill before the end of the year and they were decisively defeated in the centre in January. The Russian troops had been led to believe that they would win without serious fighting. They found themselves instead fighting unsuccessfully in a particularly cold winter in which the temperature fell below – 50 degrees C. They suffered commensurately. The Finns on the other hand were so buoyed up by their initial successes that they believed that they had secured the necessary breathing space to allow foreign friends to come to their aid and complete the defeat of their enemy. (The Americans had a special regard for Finland as the only country in Europe which went on paying interest on its foreign debts in spite of the economic collapse of 1931.) But no help came. Hitler stuck to his bargain with Stalin and urged the Finns to come to terms. Sweden, Finland’s nearest neighbour, was prepared to offer all aid short of war, but not fighting men. In Great Britain and France there was fervent sympathy and admiration for the Finns. Volunteers scented a cause in which they could worthily engage themselves instead of staying inactively at home watching other weak nations being bullied by Germany.
The British and French governments had more complicated reactions. Going to the help of Finland was part of a scheme for strangling Germany without having to fight it. If Germany’s supplies from the USSR and Scandinavia could be stopped, Hitler would be forced to negotiate. So General Weygand, who was in Syria, would march on Baku (the Caucasian oil port) and might even link up with an Anglo-French expeditionary force starting from Finland 2,000 miles away – which would in any case meanwhile get into Scandinavia ahead of the Germans, stop Germany’s supply of Swedish iron ore and, even if it could not bring the war to a halt, possibly force Hitler into a war in a northern theatre instead of the threatened attack in the west. This plan, one of the wildest surmises of the war, entailed either the cooperation of Norway and Sweden or the violation of their neutrality. Both countries refused to allow the passage of British and French troops through their territory. Plans were therefore made – or, more correctly, discussed, for nothing like a coherent plan emerged – to send four divisions to fight the Russian armies in Scandinavia. As a first step they were to invade Norway in order to prevent the Germans from getting there first, but while these measures were being discussed by cabinets and staffs in London and Paris (which had however no adequate information about the terrain or the road and rail systems which they hoped to use) the situation at the front changed. The Russians recovered themselves and launched in February a new and overwhelming attack under Marshal Timoshenko in the Karelian isthmus. The Finnish air force was reduced to one hundred aircraft against eight times that number. The Finnish line was broken. The government came to the conclusion that foreign help would be too little and too late. It decided to make peace in spite of Anglo-French – particularly French – attempts to keep Finland in the war and on 12 March Finland capitulated. At a cost of 68,000 dead the Russians secured all their original demands and a few more. Two hundred thousand Finns had to pack up and leave their homes and cross a new frontier in order to remain in their own country. Leningrad was a few degrees safer. The relations between the Soviet Union and Great Britain and France – and the United States – were several degrees colder. But Great Britain and France had been saved by the Finnish collapse from making war on the USSR while they were still at war with Germany. When, a few weeks after the end of the Russo-Finnish war, they entered Scandinavia they did so to fight the Germans and not the Russians. One consequence of this episode was the fall of Daladier. He was succeeded by Paul Reynaud who concluded with Great Britain an agreement that neither country would make a separate peace with Germany.
In February there had occurred one of those incidents which catch the imagination and help perhaps to precipitate events. The German supply ship Altmark was threading her way through the Leads along the coast of Norway, homeward bound from the south Atlantic. Aboard were 299 British captives, taken off ships which had been caught by the German battleship Graf Spee.
Graf Spee was by this time on the bottom of the sea. Like her sister ships Scheer and Deutschland (the latter renamed Lützow in 1940), Graf Spee was a pocket battleship designed to comply with the provisions of the treaty of Versailles which forbade Germany to have warships of more than 10,000 tons. In fact she slightly exceeded that limit. The pocket battleships were faster than anything which could outgun them and outgunned in range and weight of shell anything which could catch them. On the eve of war Graf Spee and Deutschland were dispatched into the Atlantic and from October to December they harried the commerce of Germany’s enemies in the southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Their success was moderate. Graf Spee claimed nine victims before the end of her career – roughly one a week. Eight groups from the British and French navies were formed to hunt the German raiders and soon after dawn on 13 December one of these – a British and New Zealand cruiser force consisting of Exeter, Ajax and Achilles under Commodore Henry Harwood – opened battle. Exeter was soon very badly damaged and after an hour and a half Ajaxand Achilles were forced to break off the engagement and limit themselves to shadowing. The damage and casualties which they had managed to inflict on Graf Spee were slight, but her commander, Captain Hans Langsdorff, decided to make for harbour and shortly after nightfall she dropped anchor in Montevideo Roads in the estuary of the River Plate. The British representatives in the capital of neutral Uruguay used every device of international law to prevent her from sailing again before Commodore Harwood, waiting off shore with Ajax and Achilles, could be reinforced. During the night of the 14th-15th, the cruiser Cumberland joined him. On the 17th Graf Spee was seen to be disembarking her crew. In the afternoon she set course for the open sea, accompanied by a German merchant ship. A few miles out the remainder of her crew left her. At sunset she blew up. Captain Langsdorff had been authorized to destroy his ship if he saw no way of bringing her back home. Nevertheless two days later he shot himself.
A sea chase and a sea victory have for centuries given a special delight to the British people. The sinking of Graf Spee was a timely tonic during a period of mixed disaster and inactivity. It was an item in the stiffening resolve of Great Britain which was to be put to the test when France fell and the decision to fight on against Hitler rested more upon spirit than reason. More immediately there was the question of Graf Spee’s victims whom she had transferred to Altmark before being engaged by Commodore Harwood’s cruisers. Two months after Graf Spee sank, Altmark and her prisoners entered Norwegian waters homeward bound. She raised a question of international law. Norway was a neutral and it was argued on the British side that it was a breach of neutrality for Norway to permit the passage of prisoners of war through neutral territorial waters. Moreover the Norwegian authorities, upon being assured by Altmark’s captain that she carried no prisoners, had failed to carry out an effective search. A light British force thereupon sailed into Norwegian waters on 17 February, boarded the German vessel and rescued the captives. This dashing episode was another boost to British morale, greatly irritated Hitler and brought an incidental compliment from Ciano who told the British Ambassador that it reminded him of the boldest traditions of the British navy in the time of Francis Drake. (The Italians were already annoyed with Hitler’s Scandinavian policies. Hitler had refused to allow Italian aircraft, ordered by Finland before the Russian attack, to be sent via Germany. Pro-Finnish demonstrations in Rome had had a clear anti-German tone.)
The Finnish war and the Altmark episode showed that Norway’s hopes of keeping out of the Second World War as it had kept out of the First were tenuous. Norway was too important. Its main geographical feature is its coastline of a thousand miles, guarded and punctured by islands and inlets. This coast could provide valuable bases either for a British blockade of Germany or for a German offensive against shipping in the Atlantic. It had also a second importance as an outlet for Swedish iron ore. Northern Sweden is one of Europe’s principal sources of iron ore, and early in the war exaggerated hopes were attached to preventing this ore from reaching Germany. The Swedish orefields lie midway between the Swedish port of Luleå in the Gulf of Bothnia, which freezes over in winter, and the Norwegian port of Narvik, which does not. By the beginning of 1940 both sides had their eyes on Norway and when the Finnish war ended in March Churchill wanted nonetheless to proceed to secure a foothold in northern Norway. But he failed to carry the cabinet with him and it was decided instead to mine the Leads and to make preparations to land in Norway if the Germans landed or seemed clearly about to do so.
On the other side Hitler had been pressed for some time by Grand Admiral Raeder to take action against Norway before Great Britain did. By December 1939 he had made up his mind to do this and in that month Raeder introduced to him Vidkun Quisling, the only personage of the Second World War who was destined to give his name to a human type. Quisling, two years older than Hitler, was a well-educated, romantic racialist, who had had the beginnings of a brilliant army career before 1914, had helped his great compatriot Fridtjof Nansen with his humanitarian work for the League of Nations in the twenties, had gone to work and found a wife in the Ukraine, and had then turned to politics as something between a socialist and a communist. Tactless and unpopular, as well as talented, he did not fit into party life and after holding office briefly as Minister of Defence in 1931–3 he founded his own party and newspaper, both of which were complete failures. He was taken up by the Nazi ideologist and eastern specialist, Alfred Rosenberg, and a few years later was passed on to Hitler by Raeder as a useful instrument of German policy. His rewards were the post of Prime Minister during the German occupation and execution by his countrymen after the end of the war.
Hitler issued a formal directive for an invasion of Norway (plus Denmark because it was on the way) on 1 March 1940. Operations were placed under the control of the OK W – Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the inter-service planning headquarters of which Hitler himself was chief with the pliant Keitel to do his bidding. The plan was a daring one. Resistance by Danes and Norwegians could not be a serious obstacle but Great Britain held command of the seas and Germany might therefore be expected – and was expected in Great Britain – to proceed by land (much as the Anglo-American armies proceeded up Italy by land three years later). Hitler chose, however, to confront British naval superiority and to seize points along the Norwegian coast as far north as Narvik, while at the same time seizing airfields by airborne troops – the first such enterprise ever attempted. The attack on Norway, from Oslo to Narvik, was launched on 9 April. In gales and snowstorms it was successful at most points, although a number of ships were lost, including the battleship Blücher sunk by gunnery while trying to force the passage up the Oslo fjord, and the admiral and general in command of operations were both captured. So was a Gestapo party on its way to arrest the king. The Norwegian parliament conferred full powers on the king who refused to surrender and, after escaping death in an air attack on a village where he had been located, held out in the hope of British and French help.
In London reports that the Germans had landed as far north as Narvik seemed so incredible that they were for a time believed to be a mistake for Larvik, which is near the Oslo fjord. Although Swedish sources had given warnings of the assembly of the invading forces in north German harbours, it was believed in London that these were being held ready to counter an Anglo-French invasion and not to make the first move. The British cabinet was taken by surprise, the British staffs found themselves equipped with inadequate information about harbours and airfields, plans were made and unmade in confused succession even after operations had been set in motion. With the Germans in occupation of all ports and airfields the British and French were faced with the necessity of making hazardous landings from the sea or air. They proposed at first to go ashore near Narvik but then switched to Trondhjem fjord in central Norway, where the Norwegians wanted to concert a combined campaign. Next it was decided to attempt both the northern and the central ventures but later still a direct attack up Trondhjem fjord was abandoned in favour of two separate landings at Namsos and Andalsnes 125 and 190 miles away. In this confusion, made worse by notably inefficient cooperation between the army and the navy, British, French and Polish forces went into action against heavy odds and were worsted. In Scotland troops which had been embarked for Norway were disembarked when news of the German attacks arrived, in order to get the ships to sea as quickly as possible, but were then not used. At Namsos French forces were put ashore but were without even skis or snowshoes, let alone guns and tanks, since the ship carrying their equipment found on arrival that it was too big to enter the harbour. For a week these men were immobile and defenceless against air attacks. Inferior in numbers and ill supported from the air, Anglo-French forces in the centre were withdrawn in the first week of May, giving their Norwegian allies lamentably short notice of the necessity to capitulate. In the north evacuation was delayed until the beginning of June when it was harassed by the German fleet. The Royal Navy lost the aircraft-carrier Glorious with two squadrons of aircraft and failed to discover the intentions or the whereabouts of German heavy units which were at sea in the area. The retreating transports nevertheless escaped and reached Great Britain with the survivors of the expedition and also the Norwegian king. The Germans were left in possession of bases from which to operate against Atlantic traffic and, later, convoys bound for the USSR. There would in future be no difficulties about the transport of Swedish iron ore to Germany. Hitler’s victory was won by the imaginative use of air transport, skilful handling of naval forces, good inter-service cooperation and a superior meteorological service – helped by the bungling of his adversaries. The cost was borne by the German navy which (like the German glider and parachute arms in the battle for Crete) suffered crippling losses at the hands of the defenders in the first phase of the operation.
The sorry Norwegian campaign was debated in the House of Commons on 7 and 8 May. The Chamberlain government was deserted by one hundred and one of its supporters, and although the Prime Minister still commanded a majority of eighty-one in that solid, stolid House he no longer had the backing needed to carry on the war. He tried to convince himself and others that mounting disaster made it desirable for him to remain at the helm, but this argument did not work. He was deposed by the Commons as a result of disorder within its Conservative ranks. There was also a growing feeling that the country needed an all-party government and the Labour Party would not serve under Chamberlain. The obvious successor in political terms was Halifax. Chamberlain himself, the Conservative Party and the king all wanted Halifax and the Labour leaders were willing to join a Halifax administration. But at a meeting between Chamberlain, Halifax and Churchill on 9 May the lot fell on Churchill. Chamberlain proposed Halifax, expecting Churchill to express his agreement, but Churchill, acting on advice given him by Brendan Bracken, stayed silent. In breaking an awkward pause to say something about the difficulties of leading a government from the House of Lords Halifax threw away his chances, and shortly afterwards Chamberlain was on his way to Buckingham Palace to tell the king that it must be Churchill, who thus assumed office and the responsibility for victory or defeat on 10 May.
When he took office in 1940 Churchill was sixty-five years old. He had been a prominent political figure for forty years and famous for most of that time. He had sat in the House of Commons since 1900 (with only a brief exclusion in 1922–4) and in cabinet on and off since 1908. He had held office as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, Colonial Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was unusually versatile. He had written over a dozen books, including a history of the First World War in five volumes, an excellent biography of his father and another in four volumes of his remoter ancestor the first Duke of Marlborough. He was a competent amateur painter and an addict of English and European history. He had been a war correspondent in Africa and India. In the variety of his aptitudes and his achievements he was matched by two only of his predecessors in the premiership, Disraeli and Balfour; he was closer to the colourful talents of the former than the philosophical intellect of the latter. He had also the vigorous and independent spirit of Palmerston, manifested in longevity and the ability to appeal to the masses. Churchill and Palmerston are the only British Prime Ministers who have been popularly referred to by friendly nicknames. As a war leader Churchill has inevitably been compared with Lloyd George but the similarities between the two men lie in their circumstances rather than their characters or tastes.
Yet in 1940 Churchill had held no office for over ten years. First a Conservative, then a Liberal and once more a Conservative after the First World War his political career was tinged with an inconstancy which is rare in British politics and is regarded with distrust. Even after the war, when his standing was unique in British political history, he was suffered to become the leader of the Conservative Party because of his enormous popularity and not because he was regarded by Conservative leaders as one of them, and during the thirties he was to all intents and purposes a man without a party, an eccentric without an accepted place in political life. In these years he was chiefly prominent for his opposition to the Conservative government’s India Bill and for his campaign in favour of rearmament. He had spent three years of his early life in India and had formed a romantic attachment to the idea of the British-in-India which penetrated his prose style and ever afterwards provided him with some of the most effective embellishments of his oratory. But he was neither much interested in the real India nor well informed about it, so that his opposition to the Bill was romantic rather than sensible and his long but ineffectual crusade against it had no effect on the history of India. It did, however, widen the gap between him and the leaders of his party, and it strengthened the view held by many in political circles that, however great his abilities, his judgement was erratic. He was more liked than listened to. This element in his reputation was not new. As against Baldwin he had been on the side of toughness in dealing with the General Strike in 1926 and he had come in for criticism because as Chancellor of the Exchequer he had accepted, against his better judgement, the arguments for a return to the gold standard in 1925 at the pre-war parity. In 1936 he made no concealment of his sympathies with King Edward VIII during the abdication crisis – a generous attitude which may have been applauded by the people at large but greatly irritated the Baldwin government and the rest of the establishment in state and church. His campaign for rearmament won him few friends: while the left dubbed him a warmonger, Conservatives resented his opposition to their policy of appeasement and feared – especially in the light of the by-election in Fulham in 1933 where the Conservative candidate was defeated by, it was thought, pacifist sentiment – that his agitation was costing them votes.
But when war came there was an almost universal feeling that Churchill must have a big share, perhaps the biggest, in conducting it. It is easier to record this judgement than to identify its sources. There was first of all the fact that Churchill, however often he had been wrong in the past on this issue or that, had been right about Hitler’s Germany. His knowledge of history was here crucial, for it was as a historian and not as a moralist that he took his stand. He had not only absorbed European history but had understood it thoroughly and acquired insights which equally well read and more intellectual observers missed. He became certain that war was coming and that Great Britain could not avoid it, for he saw the rise of Nazi Germany in terms of the classic British doctrine that no single power must be allowed to dominate the European continent. He did not suffer from the delusion that Great Britain was not a part of the continent and so could sidestep the catastrophe. Although he sensed the strategic challenge to Great Britain before the moral one to civilized behaviour – he was no quicker than most of his countrymen to react to the moral issue, commended Mussolini’s rule on a number of occasions and was for a time ambivalent about Hitler – he developed also a deep and genuine loathing of Nazi brutishness and had the power to express it with peculiar sting.
This was the second source of his special position when war came. The challenge once seen, Churchill was exceptionally well equipped to expose and meet it. He was combative and patriotic in the best sense of these words and he gave the most reassuring appearance of being firm in purpose and unhesitating in action. He was not in fact a man who knew no doubts – only a singularly stupid or vain man could have avoided them and he was often fearfully worried – but he had the courage and the skill to hide his anxieties and to give the impression that he was certain of his course and applying himself undividedly to the business of doing what had to be done. He was able to communicate his attitudes to the British people and to evoke from them their latent determination to resist danger and conquer evil. The essence of his famous oratory was his ability to give voice to elemental sentiments in big words and simple phrases. He was moreover the kind of leader who suited the British people. He was both an aristocrat and a democrat, a combination which the British like and which does not strike them as a paradox. Churchill had the assurance, even something of the arrogance, of the born aristocrat, but he combined this superiority with a capacity for feeling himself a part of the people and not apart from them. For him the people meant all the people and not, as so often in British parlance, the working-class bottom half.
He possessed, finally, an abundant mental energy. This worked both ways. His habits of work sometimes irritated and exhausted his advisers who were required to consider a stream of ideas, some of which were inevitably bad ideas, and to do so at unconventional hours of the day or night. But the gain was great, for with Churchill in command there could never be any doubt about whether things were happening or not. Churchill was a leader who had no intention of allowing anybody inferior to give directions, but he was also a respecter of the people and of their principal institution, the House of Commons. Undoubted head of the executive and of the armed services, master of the bureaucracy and sometimes a rough master, he was at the same time the servant of the legislature and the electorate. He showed, because he believed, that one does not have to be a dictator to be a leader.
On the day that he became Prime Minister Hitler invaded France and the Low Countries. The so-called phoney war had come to an end. The phoney war was a period in which nothing very warlike happened (except locally, sporadically and briefly) and, more than that, in which it was possible for people who were so disposed to go on hoping that nothing very warlike would happen. It was the time in which the era of appeasement and the years of war overlapped. In May 1940 Hitler made war on the western democracies. Less obviously but no less significantly Churchill’s government did something which Chamberlain’s government had never done: it dropped a bomb on Germany.