Churchill Takes Charge
By Williamson Murray

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The issue came up again in early June, when desperate French appeals for air support led Churchill to re-approach the cabinet for additional air support. The most to which his colleagues would agree were three more squadrons of Hurricanes. Again Dowding spoke out strongly against the allotment, pointing out that between May 8 and 18, Fighter Command had lost 250 Hurricanes, with additional heavy losses among Spitfire squadrons on the Dunkirk perimeter.

Churchill also had to address a looming technological issue. R.V. Jones, a 29-year-old Cambridge-educated physicist, had been recently appointed the Air Ministry’s deputy director of intelligence research. On the basis of fairly flimsy evidence, Jones determined that the Germans were planning to use intersecting radio beams for blind bombing at night or in periods of bad weather. Virtually the entire RAF senior leadership and many of Britain’s leading physicists dismissed Jones’ theory as sheer nonsense, unworthy of further investigation.

Regardless, the matter went before the cabinet, and Jones was forced to defend his conclusions. No one in the room accepted his arguments—except the prime minister. Here Churchill proved his ability to divine what really mattered. Even if there were only a 5 percent chance Jones was correct, Britain could not afford to gamble. Churchill ordered the RAF to test Jones’ theory. Sure enough, on the second night of tests, an RAF aircraft equipped with sophisticated radio gear detected the German Knickebein (crooked leg) system. In the winter of 1940–41 the British were able to use countermeasures to distort the system, rendering ineffective most of the German night bombing raids at a time when the RAF had few other defenses.

May 20, the same day Churchill suspended further air reinforcements to France, the prime minister ordered the admiralty to begin gathering “a large number of vessels in readiness to proceed to ports and inlets on the French coast.” As the German drive curved toward Abbeville and the English Channel , the British were forced to consider how and when to save their army.

The French showed no interest in preparing for any such evacuation from the steadily forming pocket. In fact, General Weygand, the new commander of the French army, seemed bent on creating a morass even the British could not escape. He proposed a major drive, led by units of the British Expeditionary Force, from the Allied left in Belgium to the south, where they would supposedly meet up with nonexistent French forces driving north.

Here, Lord Gort, commander of the BEF, took matters into his own hands. Gort was not a great general, or even necessarily a competent one, but at the right moment he made the absolutely right decision. Initially, he was willing to launch a counterattack; a British tank attack near Arras had caused the Germans some bad moments. But now, facing a German advance toward his rear and with no significant help from the French, Gort ordered his forces to retreat to the channel coast. It was a decision of great moral courage that made possible “the miracle of Dunkirk,” enabling the British army to fight another day.

Nevertheless, Gort’s decision caused Churchill great difficulties with the French. Weygand blamed the British for thwarting his plans to launch a counterattack. And now Allied forces were gathering along the channel coast to attempt the impossible—an amphibious evacuation of more than 300,000 men. To German and French generals, the channel was a realm where serious military operations simply did not take place.

But in grand British naval tradition, the world’s oceans comprised a great highway. As Churchill was to say later, wars are not won by evacuations, but Dunkirk represented a great moral victory, one that Churchill’s magnificent oratory further magnified.

Meanwhile, Churchill was shuttling back and forth in a desperate attempt to keep the French in the war, at one point suggesting to Reynaud a union of their two nations. But Pétain’s and Weygand’s infectious defeatism had spread, and no amount of Churchill’s persuasive rhetoric could dissuade the French leadership from its belief that all was lost. The collapse of French defenses along the Somme in early June forecast the impending fall of metropolitan France. Churchill urged the French to fight on from their territories in North Africa and elsewhere. But to French leaders like Pétain, there was nothing of worth outside la belle France. Moreover, they were convinced Britain, too, would soon fall to Hitler’s seemingly invincible legions. Or as Weygand put it, Britain would “soon have her neck wrung like a chicken.”

Tags: Historical Figures, Military Technology, World War II

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