His Finest Hour

For a quarter of a century, historian John Lukacs has treated World War II like a photographer with a zoom lens, bringing his subject into progressively closer focus. His 1976 work The Last European War told the story of the European theater from Hitler’s September 1939 thrust into Poland until Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. His 1991 book The Duel reconstructed the contest of wits, rhetoric, and arms between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill from the time of Churchill’s elevation to the prime ministership on May 10, 1940, to Hitler’s secret decision to invade Russia. Now with Five Days in London: May 1940, Lukacs dwells on a duel of a different sort that took place near the beginning of the war, when “the danger, not only to Britain but to the world, was greater and deeper than most people still think.”

This duel was waged within the British War Cabinet from May 24 to May 28. Perhaps to the reader’s surprise (and certainly to Churchill’s relief), the combatants were not the suddenly unleashed lion (Churchill) and the stubbornly unrepentant appeaser who preceded him as prime minister (Neville Chamberlain). Rather, the duel of Lukacs’s story pits Churchill (and a repentant Chamberlain) against the third Conservative of the five-member War Cabinet: Lord Halifax, foreign secretary under both Chamberlain and Churchill.

In Lukacs’s view, the “great conflicts” in British politics through much of the 1930s were not between Right and Left, but between “two Rights.” Such was still the case when Churchill, the “reactionary,” was forced to confront Halifax, the conservative aristocrat. Barely two weeks into his prime ministership, Churchill had yet to solidify his control over the government, much less to establish his leadership of the country. He did have the tacit support of Chamberlain, who had changed his mind about both Germany and Hitler. But, as Lukacs so precisely and damningly puts it — Chamberlain “could not change his character.” He was not a war leader and he knew it.

To Chamberlain’s everlasting credit, he remained in the War Cabinet at a time when conservative support for Churchill was anything but firm. To many conservatives, Halifax perhaps foremost among them, Churchill was a hopeless reactionary. As foreign secretary, Halifax might well have succeeded Chamberlain at 10 Downing Street instead of Churchill. The king preferred Halifax; so did key members of his party. But say this much for Halifax: He, too, knew himself very well. A patriot first and a politician a distant second, he was right to spurn the prime ministership, even as he was wrong to persist in thinking Hitler could be appeased.

Halifax at bottom lacked resolve when it came to the impending clash with Hitler. He failed to understand, as Lukacs puts it, that Hitler “would have been contemptuous of the kind of Britain that would inquire for terms.” Nonetheless, Halifax was “not a defeatist, nor was he an intriguer.” He was simply wrong on the only issue that mattered at the moment.

Why Halifax was so wrong about Hitler bears some consideration. Lukacs’s Hitler was not a madman. Certainly he behaved nothing like a madman in the spring of 1940, when Germany came perilously close to winning the western phase of the last European war. Lukacs’s position, which he elaborated in The Hitler of History (1997), is that Hitler in late May 1940 was still a highly popular national leader, a wily diplomat, and most important, a military strategist who was not bound to fail in his effort to control all of Europe. He was also a revolutionary. As a mobilizer of the masses, he was unparalleled. Moreover, and more to the point, as a populist and a nationalist he represented a potential wave of the future far more than Stalin did.

In late May 1940, that wave was poised to engulf all of Europe. Churchill understood as much at the time. This is the Churchill who draws Lukacs’s praise, a man who never underestimated his enemy. Now Lukacs, as it happens, thinks Churchill was premature in advocating war with Germany two years earlier, at the time of Chamberlain’s Munich settlement: “He may have been right, morally speaking; practically, he was wrong.” But Churchill was decidedly not wrong in late May 1940. How he brought the War Cabinet to heel is the tale told in Five Days in London, a skillful weaving together of great power diplomacy, intra-War Cabinet debates, and pulse-takings of British blokes-in-the-street. It is a book with many virtues, the most surprising of which may be its timeliness, for it comes just as Reform party presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan has managed the unlikely feat of reopening debate over the American decision to participate in the transformation of the last European war into the Second World War.

Earlier this year, Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire resurrected the long-discredited A. J. P. Taylor thesis, which holds that Hitler was bent solely on acquiring Lebensraum to the east. Buchanan would have preferred that Hitler and Stalin destroy one another in the name of preserving an independent foreign policy for the American republic. Buchanan, in short, thinks that Halifax had the better argument, and that Hitler might have been bought off.

To borrow from Lukacs (and to be fair to Buchanan), there is “some but not enough” truth in the Buchananite version of interwar history. Franklin Roosevelt did follow an isolationist path through much of the 1930s. The United States was woefully slow to rearm in the late 1930s. Roosevelt did applaud Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich. Hitler would have preferred not to go to war with Great Britain and the United States. Roosevelt was less than candid with the American people between 1939 and 1941. And there were tragic consequences to World War II, not the least of which was the Soviet occupation of Central Europe (as Hungarian-born John Lukacs well knows).

Despite this terrible result, Lukacs is willing to thank God, Churchill, Roosevelt, and, yes, even Stalin for ridding the world of Hitler. Churchill’s performance as a statesman was critical. The history of the world would have been very different if only Churchill had not stood in Hitler’s path in 1940. And some “if onlys” are more illuminating than others. Put simply, Buchanan is dreaming if he thinks that Great Britain — or even the United States — could have survived intact and prosperous, unaffected and unwashed by any Hitlerian wave of the future, if only Chamberlain had persisted in his policy of appeasement.

As Lukacs notes, even Halifax, as Chamberlain’s foreign secretary, understood the necessity of the British guarantee to Poland. However, this did not prevent Halifax as Churchill’s foreign secretary from returning to an accommodationist line fifteen months later, proposing a last ditch overture to Mussolini in the wake of the Nazi blitzkrieg and in the name of giving Hitler pause before trying to cut a deal with him. The moment of truth within the War Cabinet arrived on Monday, May 27, 1940, when Churchill confronted Halifax. In doing so, he accomplished two objectives at once: He persuaded the War Cabinet not to attempt the Halifax strategy, and he convinced Halifax not to resign. At this point the British evacuation from Dunkirk had yet to be attempted, and there was no good evidence it would succeed. But Churchill had drawn his line on the beach. Better drowned than brown. Or, as Churchill put it to his fellow cabinet members, “even if we were beaten, we should be no worse off than we should be if we were now to abandon the struggle.”

The English people knew very little of all this in late May 1940 — of the desperate predicament of their troops on the continent, of Churchill’s tenacity in persuading the War Cabinet to fight on. As Lukacs points out, the gravity of the situation on the ground was kept within the cabinet and out of the newspapers. Nonetheless, Lukacs cannot resist concluding nearly each chapter with assessments of what were called “Mass-Observation” reports, on-the-spot plumbings of British public opinion.

Despite their ignorance of the gravity of the situation, the “better off” folks were instinctively defeatist and highly suspicious of Churchill, while ordinary blokes simply could not conceive that Britain might lose the war and intuited that they had a leader on their hands who may not be one of them, but who was well worth following. Churchill, then, was proceeding as though he was winning the debate at the top and the bottom of English society.

Churchill and Great Britain could not have won the war without America and Soviet Russia. But in late May 1940 Churchill could easily have lost it. Nonetheless, he was not prepared to go on bended knee to the Roosevelt administration. Better to make a bold stand and win the American president’s respect than to surrender hastily to Berlin — or to grovel in Washington.

And Stalin? Permit Lukacs, who fled the dictator’s rule in 1946, nearly the last word: “If the price of survival of British independence and British democracy was the eventual transference of much of the imperial burden to the Americans, so be it; and if the price of winning the war was the tacit acceptance of Russian overlordship of much of Eastern Europe, that was unavoidable, too.”

Such is the magnanimous conclusion of a long-ago refugee from Soviet-occupied Hungary. Hitler, the “greatest revolutionary of the twentieth century,” was a barbarian. At the end of the twentieth century Lukacs worries about the “rise of new kinds of barbarism” that “may darken the lives of our children and grandchildren.” Whether one shares this grim vision or not, it is easy to share his admiration for the man whose tenacity during those five crucial days in May 1940 led to the defeat of Hitler and a reprieve for the West.

John C. Chalberg teaches history at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota.