Churchill heads the Military Coordination Committee

On 3 April 1940 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain accepted the resignation of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Ernle Chatfield, the Minister for Co-ordination of Defence, and carried out a minor government reshuffle. Chatfield’s post was not filled again. The next day Downing Street announced that the chairmanship of the Military Co-ordination Committee, hitherto held by Chatfield, would pass to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, as the senior of the three service ministers.

Many accounts state that a ministerial defence committee chaired by Churchill “replaced” Chatfield’s post. This is a simplification. The committee was not a new body: it had existed since the autumn of 1939, and all that changed was the person who chaired it. What was abolished was the ministerial office which for four years had been meant to reconcile the needs of the army, the navy and the air force, and which in wartime had proved superfluous.

A minister without a department

The office of Minister for Co-ordination of Defence had been created in March 1936 by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who was being criticised for rearming too slowly in the face of Germany’s growing power. Many expected at the time that the post would go to Churchill, the most vocal advocate of rearmament. Baldwin, however, chose the Attorney General, Sir Thomas Inskip, to general astonishment. At the beginning of 1939 Inskip was succeeded by Chatfield, First Sea Lord in 1933–1938, a commander without political experience who as head of the navy had secured the expansion of the cruiser fleet and the return of naval aviation to the control of the Admiralty.

When Chamberlain formed his War Cabinet in September 1939, the assumption was that Chatfield would represent all three services in it. For political reasons, however, the ministers of all three service departments – the Admiralty, the War Office and the Air Ministry – also joined the cabinet. Each of them had his own voice, his own department and his own chief of staff, while Chatfield, who ran no ministry, increasingly had nothing to do. He did chair the Military Co-ordination Committee, on which the service ministers sat and whose meetings the chiefs of staff attended – Admiral Dudley Pound, General Edmund Ironside and Air Chief Marshal Cyril Newall – but the committee could only prepare recommendations for the War Cabinet. Churchill later wrote that Chatfield’s office had “become superfluous”, and the minister himself resigned of his own accord. Chatfield never held office again and devoted the rest of his life to writing his memoirs.

The reshuffle of 3 April

Chatfield’s departure was used to make several other changes. Sir Samuel Hoare, until then Lord Privy Seal, swapped posts with Sir Kingsley Wood: Hoare returned to the Air Ministry, which he had already headed in the 1920s, and Wood became Lord Privy Seal. Both remained in the War Cabinet. Outside the cabinet, the industrialist Frederick Marquis, Lord Woolton, became Minister of Food, and his predecessor William Shepherd Morrison became Postmaster General. The Ministry of Shipping, left vacant by the death of Sir John Gilmour on 30 March, went to Robert Hudson, while Lord De La Warr and Herwald Ramsbotham exchanged the Board of Education and the post of First Commissioner of Works.

Public opinion and the opposition received the changes coolly. Neither Labour nor the Liberals entered the government, no new names appeared from among the critics of appeasement, and the most important posts were once again shared out among the same men. The reshuffle came at a moment when the government was convinced that time was on the Allies’ side. On 4 April Chamberlain told a meeting of the Conservative Party’s Central Council that Hitler had “missed the bus” by failing to exploit the advantage he had had at the start of the war. Five days later Germany attacked Denmark and Norway.

The committee in April

The Military Co-ordination Committee was at once at the centre of events. At the meeting of the Supreme War Council on 28 March the Allies had decided to mine Norwegian territorial waters in order to cut the route by which Swedish iron ore reached Germany. On the morning of 8 April British destroyers laid mines at the entrance to the Vestfjord, on the approach to Narvik (Operation Wilfred), and the next day the German invasion began. From 8 to 15 April Churchill chaired the committee every day, sometimes twice a day. In doing so he had to agree decisions with two other ministers who were his equals in the War Cabinet, and with the chiefs of staff, who worked out their position among themselves. The committee’s recommendations went to the cabinet’s defence committee and to the War Cabinet, while the situation in Norway changed from hour to hour.

After the war Churchill described his position as one of “an exceptional measure of responsibility but no power of effective direction”. Among the service ministers he was “first among equals”, but he could impose nothing. The other members of the committee, for their part, complained about his way of working: hours-long night sessions, interference in the details of army and air force operations, and changes of plan, in which one of the main disputes was the choice between Narvik and Trondheim. According to historians of the International Churchill Society, his manner of conducting the meetings “exhausted and infuriated” the other members of the committee.

On 15 April Churchill himself asked Chamberlain to take over the chair, and from 16 April the Prime Minister presided over almost all the committee’s meetings during the fighting in Norway. Chamberlain announced in the House of Commons that, at the request of the First Lord of the Admiralty, he had agreed to preside when matters of exceptional importance to the conduct of the war were under discussion. On 24 April Churchill drafted a letter demanding that a single minister should direct the war effort as a whole, but he did not send it, because the Prime Minister invited him for a talk that evening. Its outcome was Chamberlain’s note of 1 May: Churchill was henceforth to deputise for the Prime Minister as chairman of the committee and, “on behalf of the committee”, to give the chiefs of staff “guidance and direction”, and he was given a Central Staff under Major General Hastings Ismay, who became an additional member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Churchill regarded this as an improvement, but noted that he had once again been given “an immense responsibility” without real power.

Place in the war

The new arrangement lasted a week. The withdrawal of Allied troops from central Norway at the turn of April and May provoked a debate in the House of Commons on the conduct of the war, known as the Norway Debate (7–8 May 1940). Churchill defended the government in it and took responsibility for the Admiralty’s actions; even so, in the division the government’s majority fell to 81, and several dozen Conservative MPs voted with the opposition. On 10 May, the day of the German offensive in the west, Churchill became Prime Minister. He also took the new office of Minister of Defence, abolished the Military Co-ordination Committee and replaced it with the Defence Committee of the War Cabinet, while Ismay became his chief of staff and liaison with the chiefs of staff until July 1945.

Paradoxically, the Norwegian defeat, for which Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty and chairman of the committee bore a large share of responsibility, opened his way to power. The April experience, however, taught him what not to repeat: as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence he concentrated in his own hands the direction of the war that had been lacking in the system inherited from Chamberlain and Chatfield.