The Written Word
for March 26, 2000

The book is called Five Days in London by John Lukacs, a very highly regarded American Historian and if you are a history buff and buy no other book this year, buy this one. It’s the story of five days, as you may have guessed, May 24-28^th 1940. During those five days it was decided whether or not Winston Churchill, who became Prime Minister on the 10^th of May, would remain there. And the plot, for plot it was, involved three people, essentially – Churchill, Neville Chamberlain whom Churchill had replaced and Viscount Halifax whom he had beaten out for the job.

The story of Britain and Churchill in the summer of 1940 is a well known one but unfortunately it has been compromised by wartime propaganda and by those who loved Churchill and those who hated him. And the story really starts in the 30s where Churchill, out of office but a very powerful backbencher in the Conservative caucus, made enemies of his own party on three main issues – he was against home rule for India, he bravely, loyally and stupidly supported Edward VIII in l’affaire Wallis Simpson, and he proved to be horribly right about Adolf Hitler. In this latter regard he made a speech on the debate over Munich that lashed his colleagues and all who agree with him very badly. It made him very unpopular in a country that badly wanted to see this abreement as a deliverance.

Chamberlain and Halifax were appeasers. But Chamberlain saw the light when Hitler, in March of 1939 and against the Munich agreement, cynically invaded Prague and the rest of Czechoslovakia he had not got at Munich. Chamberlain had taken, very publicly, Hitler at his word. And by the time War started in September 1939 he was good and mad.

At the outset of war, Chamberlain very quickly brought Churchill into the cabinet and into the inner War Cabinet, as First Lord of the Admiralty. By May of 1940 the public and the Commons were sick of the Conservative government, ironically as it turned out because a botched adventure in Norway for which Churchill bore much responsibility. In any event, Chamberlain took an awful shellacking in a Confidence vote on May 9^th – he won but there was an enormous number of abstainers in the Tory ranks. It was clear that a coalition government must be formed and it got down to Churchill and Halifax, the latter being handicapped by being in the House of Lords - but that handicap could have been remedied. The decision was made by the Labour Party which refused to serve under Halifax but would under Churchill.

The five days coincided with the very worst moments of the war for Britain. The British Expeditionary Force had been cut off and surrounded on three sides, the other side being the sea at Dunkirk. Churchill reckoned that it would be a miracle if 50,000 men were saved. In the event it was a miracle – 335,000 were saved though virtually all equipment was lost.

During that five days, Halifax wanted to continually explore peace opportunities. Churchill saw that peace would only come on Hitler’s terms. Chamberlain, dying of cancer was the only other Tory in the five man War Cabinet, the Labourites being Arthur Greenwood and Clement Attlee so he was the deciding factor.

I won’t spoil the book by telling how it happened.

My only criticism of the book is that there are far too many footnotes and the numbers indicating the footnotes are so small that you often miss them and must re-scan the page.

Let me give you the author’s closing words.

"…what we must understand is that the history of the 50 years from 1940 to 1900 was inseparable from what happened in 1940, just as the Cold War was too but the result of the Second World War. At best, civilization may survive, at least in some small part due to Churchill in 1940. At worst he helped give us – especially those of us who are no longer young but who were young then -–fifty years. Fifty years before the rise of new kinds of barbarism not incarnated by the armed might of Germans or Russians, before the clouds of a new Dark Age may darken the lives of our children and grandchildren. Fifty years! Perhaps that was enough."