Chamberlain’s War Cabinet

On 3 September 1939, a few hours after Great Britain declared war on Germany, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, reshaped his government for war. Following the example of David Lloyd George, who in December 1916 had entrusted the conduct of the war to a small circle of five ministers, he formed a War Cabinet of nine politicians. The most striking change was the return to office of Winston Churchill, a critic of appeasement who had been out of government for ten years and who now, after almost a quarter of a century, once again became First Lord of the Admiralty. On the same day King George VI gave his assent to an act imposing universal conscription on men aged 18 to 41, and at the first meeting of the new cabinet a Chief of the Imperial General Staff and a commander for the troops that were to go to France were appointed.

Nine ministers

Before the war Chamberlain’s full cabinet numbered more than twenty ministers, which in wartime would have made swift decisions impossible. As early as the last days of August the Prime Minister had been planning to replace it with a smaller body. The War Cabinet consisted of:

• Neville Chamberlain – Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons;
• Samuel Hoare – Lord Privy Seal (previously Home Secretary);
• John Simon – Chancellor of the Exchequer;
• Lord Halifax – Foreign Secretary;
• Leslie Hore-Belisha – Secretary of State for War;
• Kingsley Wood – Secretary of State for Air;
• Winston Churchill – First Lord of the Admiralty;
• Lord Chatfield – Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, a former First Sea Lord;
• Lord Hankey – Minister without Portfolio, for more than twenty years Secretary to the Cabinet and to the Committee of Imperial Defence, who had also served as secretary to Lloyd George’s War Cabinet.

The composition was a compromise. Churchill and some commentators advised that the War Cabinet should be made up of ministers without departmental duties, who could devote themselves entirely to strategy, as in 1916. Chamberlain, however, included all three service ministers, and alongside them the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, so that responsibility for military matters was spread among several people. The cabinet was also old: the average age of its members was over sixty, and the youngest, Hore-Belisha, was 45. The chiefs of staff of the three services regularly attended its meetings.

Several ministers who played an important part in the war remained outside the War Cabinet. John Anderson became Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security, responsible for civil defence. Anthony Eden, who had left the Foreign Office in February 1938 in protest at the Prime Minister’s policy, returned to government as Dominions Secretary. He was not a member of the War Cabinet but was given the right to attend its meetings, because the dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) were to enter the war in their own right and had to be kept constantly informed. A new Ministry of Economic Warfare was also created to conduct the blockade of Germany.

The government was not a coalition of all parties. The Labour Party, whose leader Clement Attlee was being deputised for in those days by Arthur Greenwood, refused to join Chamberlain’s government. So did the Liberals under Archibald Sinclair. The opposition did not trust the Prime Minister after years of appeasement and after two days of delay, during which the government, instead of declaring war at once, had confined itself to warnings to Berlin. The cabinet was therefore made up of Conservatives together with a few National Liberals and National Labour members, who had formed part of the so-called National Government since 1931.

“Winston is back”

Churchill had been waiting to return to office since 1 September. On that day, when Germany attacked Poland, Chamberlain invited him to Downing Street and offered him a place in the future War Cabinet, probably as a minister without portfolio. Churchill agreed, but for the next two days he heard nothing, and on 2 September, during the stormy sitting of the House of Commons when the government was still delaying its ultimatum, he wrote to the Prime Minister expressing his anxiety about the weakening of national spirit. On 3 September, at the sitting of the Commons that began at noon, he said that this was not a question of fighting for Danzig or for Poland: “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man.” After the sitting Chamberlain offered him the Admiralty together with a seat in the War Cabinet.

Churchill took up the same office he had held from October 1911 to May 1915, when he had prepared the fleet for the First World War and then lost his post after the failure of the operation in the Dardanelles. On the evening of 3 September he returned to the very same room in the Admiralty building. As he recalled, in a cupboard behind his chair he found the wooden case of maps of the North Sea that he had had placed there in 1911. In his memoirs, published in 1948, he wrote that the Board of Admiralty had then signalled to the fleet: “Winston is back”. The story became part of the Churchill legend, but historians, including scholars associated with the International Churchill Society, point out that the text of any such signal has never been found in the archives and that the source of the story remains chiefly Churchill himself. Whether or not the signal was sent, Churchill’s return was of great political importance: the most prominent opponent of appeasement now sat in the government that had pursued it, and from the first days he became its most visible minister.

Over the following months the Royal Navy was the only British service that was actually fighting, and Churchill, in his broadcasts and in the House of Commons, grew into the voice of the war in a way that Chamberlain, Halifax and Simon could not.

Conscription from 18 to 41

Great Britain introduced peacetime conscription for the first time in its history in May 1939, when the Military Training Act was passed. It covered only young men in their early twenties, the so-called militiamen, called up for six months’ training. The first of them reported to their units in mid-July. The outbreak of war demanded a far broader measure.

On 3 September 1939 parliament passed, and the King on the same day gave his assent to, the National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939. Under it all men who were British subjects aged 18 to 41 and resident in Great Britain became liable to conscription. The Act did not extend to Northern Ireland, where the government feared opposition from the Catholic population. Those exempted included, among others, the unfit, clergymen, students and, above all, workers in “reserved occupations” needed in the arms industry, agriculture, mining or medicine. Conscientious objectors could appeal to special tribunals, which granted them complete exemption or non-combatant service, or rejected their application.

Age groups were called up in turn, beginning with the youngest. The first registration, covering men aged 20–23, took place in October 1939, and further age classes were registered in the following months. The Act was to remain in force until the end of “the present emergency”. In December 1941 a new act extended the obligation of service to unmarried women aged 20–30, who were directed into the auxiliary military services, civil defence and industry.

Ironside and Gort

At its first meeting, still on 3 September, the War Cabinet approved changes in the army command. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General John Vereker, Lord Gort, who had held the post since December 1937, was given command of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), which was to go to France. His place at the War Office was taken by General Edmund Ironside, hitherto Inspector-General of Overseas Forces.

The appointments were largely the work of the Secretary of State for War, Hore-Belisha, who in the course of 1939 had fallen into bitter conflict with Gort and wanted him out of London. Ironside himself was surprised: he had expected a field command and had already sent one of his officers to Aldershot to prepare his headquarters. His candidacy as Chief of the Imperial General Staff had Churchill’s backing, while General John Dill, the commander at Aldershot, regarded by many as the ablest staff officer in the army, was passed over. Ironside, a tall and energetic veteran of many campaigns, had no experience of working with politicians, while Gort, a First World War hero decorated with the Victoria Cross, was a superb fighting commander but in the view of many, Ironside included, unsuited to leading an army. The result was an arrangement in which both generals held posts for which they were not the best prepared.

Place in the war

Chamberlain’s War Cabinet led Great Britain through the Phoney War. In the first weeks it did not decide on any action that might have relieved the pressure on Poland as it fought: the air force dropped leaflets over Germany, not bombs, in keeping with the declared policy of not attacking targets that might endanger the civilian population. Leo Amery recalled that when he suggested to Kingsley Wood setting fire to the forests of the Black Forest, where ammunition dumps were hidden, the minister replied that they were private property. The anecdote, often cited as a symbol of the government’s inaction, comes from Amery alone, but it captures well the mood of the autumn of 1939. British strategy, shared with the French, assumed a long war: a naval blockade, the expansion of the army and the air force, and an offensive only once the Allies had gained the upper hand.

The composition of the cabinet soon changed. In January 1940 Chamberlain dismissed Hore-Belisha, with whom the generals could not work, and in April the post of Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence was abolished and Chatfield left the cabinet. After the defeat in Norway the House of Commons debated the conduct of the war on 7–8 May 1940, and on 10 May, the day of the German offensive in the west, Churchill became Prime Minister. He formed a new War Cabinet of five that included the Labour Party. At the end of May 1940 Ironside made way for Dill and took command of the home forces, while Gort brought the remnants of the BEF out through Dunkirk. The conscription act of 3 September 1939, by contrast, remained in force until the end of the war and became the basis of the mobilisation through which Great Britain raised armed forces several million strong.