The War Cabinet crisis

Late in the afternoon of 28 May 1940, during an adjournment of the War Cabinet, Prime Minister Winston Churchill gathered some twenty-five ministers from outside the inner Cabinet in a room in the House of Commons. He told them about the position of the army in Flanders, about the capitulation of Belgium and about the possibility that France might soon collapse. Then he declared that Britain would not negotiate. According to the notes of the Minister of Economic Warfare, Hugh Dalton, he ended with the words: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” The ministers jumped up and slapped the Prime Minister on the back; no one voiced any dissent. At seven in the evening Churchill reported this to the War Cabinet, and the three-day dispute with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, over whether to sound out peace terms with Germany through Italy, was settled.

Some chronologies place this event on 30 May and state that at a “crucial Cabinet meeting” Churchill “won a vote” on continuing the war, despite vigorous arguments from Halifax and Chamberlain. This needs correcting on three points. The dispute ran from 25 to 28 May and was resolved on the evening of 28 May. There was no vote: the British Cabinet did not usually vote, and the decision emerged from discussion, sealed by the support of a wider circle of ministers. Finally, Chamberlain did not side with Halifax. He was cautious and long wavered between the two positions, but in the decisive phase he supported Churchill, which historians regard as one of the turning points of the war.

A Cabinet of five

Churchill had been Prime Minister for eighteen days. The Norway Debate and the German offensive in the west had brought him to power, but his position was weaker than his popularity suggested. Chamberlain remained leader of the Conservative Party, which had a huge majority in the House of Commons, and many Tories would have preferred to see at the head of the government Halifax, who had himself stepped aside. The War Cabinet consisted of five men: Churchill; Chamberlain as Lord President of the Council; Halifax as Foreign Secretary; and two Labour men, Clement Attlee and Arthur Greenwood. Had Chamberlain and Halifax resigned together, the government would probably not have survived.

In the last days of May the military situation was catastrophic. The German panzer divisions had reached the English Channel and cut off in the north Lord Gort’s British Expeditionary Force together with the French and Belgian armies. On 24 May Hitler halted his tanks before Dunkirk, but no one in London knew how many soldiers could be taken off the coast. On 25 May the Chiefs of Staff presented their report “British Strategy in a Certain Eventuality”: Britain could hold out against invasion as long as its air force and navy remained intact, but it could not win the war without the help of the United States.

At the same time the French were looking for a way to keep Italy out of the war. On 24 May they proposed that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt should ask Mussolini what his demands were. Late in the afternoon of 25 May Halifax spoke with the Italian ambassador, Giuseppe Bastianini. According to the British record of the conversation, he told him that questions troubling Italy would have to be discussed as part of a general European settlement. Bastianini asked whether Britain would be prepared for a conference on peace in Europe. Halifax replied that the government would consider any proposal that might lead to this, provided that the country’s freedom and independence were preserved.

Sunday 26 May

In the morning Halifax reported this conversation to the War Cabinet and for the first time stated the matter openly: they had to accept that the question now was not so much the complete defeat of Germany as safeguarding the independence of the Empire and, if possible, of France. Churchill retorted that peace and security might be achieved under German domination of Europe, and that Britain would never accept that.

At midday the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, flew to London. Over lunch he told Churchill that the military situation was desperate. He himself did not intend to sign a separate peace, which he had undertaken not to do in the two governments’ March declaration, but he feared he might be pushed aside by advocates of an armistice, above all Marshal Philippe Pétain. He wanted to keep Italy out of the war at any price, even at the cost of territorial concessions, and asked for a joint approach to Mussolini. In the afternoon he talked with Halifax and then with the other members of the Cabinet.

After Reynaud had flown back, the Cabinet met again at the Admiralty. Halifax said that he attached more importance than the Prime Minister did to letting France explore the possibilities of a European equilibrium, and that it would be worth talking to Mussolini and then considering the Italian claims. Greenwood and Chamberlain observed that Mussolini could pursue an independent policy only if Hitler allowed him to. Churchill did not yet want an open confrontation. He proposed that nothing should be decided until it was known how many soldiers could be evacuated, and agreed that Halifax should draft a reply to the French. At the same time he insisted that the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberals and an old friend of his, should attend the meetings concerning Italy. After six in the evening Churchill gave his consent to the evacuation, and at 6.57 p.m. Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay at Dover signalled the start of Operation Dynamo.

Monday 27 May

The sharpest clash came at the meeting at 4.30 p.m., devoted to Halifax’s memorandum. It proposed that Mussolini should be warned of the dangers German hegemony posed to Italy and assured that the Allies would take his claims into account in a general settlement, and that Roosevelt, at the joint request of London and Paris, should propose a peace conference with Italian participation. Sinclair objected to a direct approach to Mussolini, since any sign of weakness would destroy the country’s morale. Attlee added that Mussolini would never be satisfied with what he got, and Greenwood judged the whole idea disastrous. Chamberlain considered the French proposal useless, being convinced that Italy would enter the war anyway, but advised against rejecting it outright so as not to discourage the French.

Churchill said that an approach to Mussolini would be futile and dangerous and would destroy the credibility of Britain’s stand. Britain must not let itself be dragged down a slippery slope together with France. It would help the French most by assuring them that, whatever happened, it would fight to the end. “If the worst came to the worst, it would not be a bad thing for this country to go down fighting for the other countries which had been overcome by the Nazi tyranny.” Halifax replied with evident irritation that he was not proposing to sue for peace and that the day before the Prime Minister had said something different. He conceded that Hitler would probably not offer decent terms, but as long as there was a chance of a settlement guaranteeing the country’s independence, he could not accept the principle of fighting to the end. According to his diary and the notes of the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Alexander Cadogan, he threatened to resign: if that was the government’s view, their ways must part. In his diary he noted that Churchill and Greenwood had “talked the most frightful rot”. After the meeting Churchill invited him for a walk in the garden of Downing Street and managed to calm him down. It was decided that Reynaud should wait for the outcome of the American initiative towards Mussolini. Late in the evening the Cabinet was already dealing with the capitulation of the Belgian Army, announced for that night.

Tuesday 28 May

In the morning word came from Washington that Mussolini had received Roosevelt’s appeal in an “entirely negative” manner. In the afternoon Churchill informed the House of Commons of the Belgian capitulation and warned that the House should prepare itself for “hard and heavy tidings”. At 4 p.m. the War Cabinet met in his room in the Palace of Westminster to consider Reynaud’s renewed request for a joint approach to Italy. This time the Prime Minister did not seek a compromise. He said that what the French wanted was for Mussolini to mediate between Britain and Hitler, and then the Duce would “take his whack” at Britain’s expense. When the representatives of the two countries came away from such a conference, they would find that all the resolve the country now possessed had vanished. Britain would get no worse terms by fighting on, even if it were beaten, than were open to it now. “Nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished.” He put the chance of decent terms at a thousand to one.

Halifax would not give way: better terms could be obtained now, before France collapsed, than in a few months’ time, when the German air force had bombed Britain’s aircraft factories. Chamberlain’s voice proved decisive. He conceded that in principle decent terms ought to be considered if they were offered, but he did not believe that an approach to Mussolini would produce such an offer, and he stated that concessions to Italy could not be made in the middle of a war. He also judged that the alternative to fighting on was itself a great gamble. Attlee and Greenwood pointed to public feeling: any sign of weakness on the government’s part would be taken in the industrial districts as defeat. Halifax was left on his own.

Late in the afternoon the Cabinet adjourned (the minutes give the time as 6.15 p.m.; some studies place the meeting with the ministers as early as about 5 p.m.) so that Chamberlain and Halifax could draft a reply to Reynaud, and Churchill went to the ministers outside the Cabinet. Dalton recorded that the Prime Minister told them the Germans would demand the fleet and the naval bases, and that Britain would become a slave state with a puppet government under Mosley or someone like him. Then came the words about “this long island story of ours”. Other accounts, including Churchill’s own memoirs, render them somewhat differently, but all agree in describing the enthusiasm in the room. Leo Amery, recently appointed Secretary of State for India, noted that everyone came away “immensely heartened” by the Prime Minister’s resolve.

At 7 p.m. the War Cabinet met again. Churchill said that he did not remember ever having heard a gathering of people holding high office express themselves so emphatically. The reply to Reynaud, drafted by Chamberlain and Halifax, was approved: this was not the moment for an approach to Mussolini, and France and Britain would gain more if both fought on. The telegram was sent to Paris late that night. Halifax accepted his defeat. According to Roy Jenkins, he understood that he would not break the Prime Minister’s determination and, above all, that he had lost Chamberlain.

Place in the war

The very next day brought confirmation that Churchill had not been mistaken. The ambassador in Rome, Sir Percy Loraine, reported that the Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, regarded Italy’s entry into the war as settled, with Mussolini to decide the timing. On 10 June Italy declared war on France and Britain. The evacuation from Dunkirk, completed on 4 June, saved more than 330,000 soldiers, which Churchill called “a miracle of deliverance”, while warning that wars are not won by evacuations. When in July, after the fall of France, Hitler made his “appeal to reason” in the Reichstag, it was Halifax who rejected it in a broadcast on 22 July. He remained Foreign Secretary until December 1940, when Churchill, by then leader of the Conservatives after Chamberlain’s death, sent him to Washington as ambassador.

For years this episode remained almost unknown. In his memoirs Churchill wrote that the question of whether to fight on alone never found a place on the War Cabinet’s agenda. Only the release of the minutes in the 1970s showed how close the split had come. Historians judge the dispute in different ways. To some, Halifax was a defeatist ready for a second Munich. Others, like his biographer David Dutton, stress that his arguments had a rational basis and that what he sought was not capitulation but to find out whether terms existed that would preserve the country’s independence. On one point they agree: had the British government in May 1940 even begun to sound out peace terms, it would have been hard to recover the will to fight, and Britain might have dropped out of the war. The decision of 28 May meant that in June, after the fall of France, London became the last centre of resistance in Western Europe, a haven for governments in exile, the Polish one among them, and in time the base from which the invasion of the Continent set out in 1944.