Saturday 22 July 2017

Just how close were we to SS GB?

The recent BBC tv dramatisation of Len Deighton's book SS-GB, published in 1978 but set in 1941 in which history was rewritten presuming a British surrender after a successful German Operation Sealion invasion in 1940, made some impact. I didn't watch it - it got good reviews although, by all accounts, I would have had to use the subtitles as BBC went for their mumble setting on diction and sound. Nevertheless it posed a chilling "what if". And not the only one, as US tv was recently showing The Man In The High Castle, a dramatisation of Philip K. Dick's novel, published and set in 1962, in which the USA stayed out of WWII but got invaded anyway. Nazi Germany and Japan won the war with Germany controlling Europe, the Middle East and the USA from the east coast to the Rockies, while Japan controls everything in and around the Pacific Ocean, including the western seaboard of the US.

This all  comes to mind because some of my holiday reading was Boris Johnson's book on Churchill*. It's a rattling good read. Churchill can seem like some kind of dinosaur to us today but his personal contributions were enormous, from promoting the use of aviation in defence** and establishing the project that invented the caterpillar tracked tank - because he thought there had to be an alternative to the heavy toll from senseless Blackadder style charges on trenches and he found a way of using the Navy budget for its development  - to the first precursors of the welfare state and workers rights (amongst other things he introduced the Trades Board Bill in 1908 leading to the first minimum wages and he created Job Centres, then called Labour Exchanges, in 1909). That's long before you get to his role as prime minister in WWII, when it is often said Britain stood alone but it was damned near to Churchill standing alone.

Johnson takes us to May 1940 and the room in the House of Commons used today by prime ministers to meet colleagues. Then it was used for war cabinet meetings. Churchill had only just become prime minister, after the fall of Chamberlain's Conservative government. Churchill came to power with a Tory-Lab-Lib coalition in place on 10 May 1940. He didn't have the full support of his own party and was only prime minister because Halifax had turned it down as he did not think he could do the job effectively from the House of Lords, especially with Churchill running the war effort (Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty since the start of the war in September 1939), a situation Johnson describes as, from Halifax's perspective, "Churchill rolling around untethered on the quarterdeck." The House of Lords had not welcomed Churchill's appointment - the announcement of which they greeted with silence and, after his first commons appearance as PM, greeted without enthusiasm from the Tory back benches, he was heard to mutter that he didn't expect to be in post for long.

There were 9 meetings of the cross-party war cabinet between 26 and 28 May deliberating over an Italian approach to Halifax to assist in reaching a negotiated peace settlement that they all assumed, almost certainly correctly, had been blessed by Hitler. Italy was, at that stage, still officially neutral.  It is thought that, in making the offer, Italy had its eyes on British assets in and around the Mediterranean, such as Gibraltar, Malta and Suez. It was also supported by France, which was on the point of surrender and so would much have preferred to save face - and maybe secure better terms - if Britain also settled for peace.

Churchill assessed that Hitler wanted to negotiate so he could concentrate on defeating Russia. The people in Britain who might politely be called the doves thought a satisfactory settlement could be negotiated in which Britain kept control of its empire, which then covered  25% of the world's population and 30% of its landmass. (By the end of the war it was even bigger but totally unsustainable as Britain was, effectively, bankrupt).  But it was surely naive to think that Britain would have been able to continue as before. Churchill was certain that it would have to give up its Navy and accept a puppet government. Those looking for an easy life would have collaborated (and I'm not implying blame here, it's just the way it would have been). If you doubt that, look at Vichy France, who sent hundreds of Jews to concentration camps. The last train, with many children and infants on board, went just a few weeks before Paris was liberated and long after you'd have thought collaboration was a necessity for survival. Not only was the SS established in Vichy, 3000 people volunteered to join it***.

There was a lot of political support for negotiating with Hitler, in particular amongst the elite and chattering classes - the respectable liberal opinion of the day. And of course the luvvies of the day, including theatre types like John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike and G B Shaw, were lobbying for the government to 'give consideration to negotiations'. Strange how not much changes, isn't it? Why on earth, then or now, these people think their occupation gives them the insight of the oracle and the right to pontificate.... (hmm, strange comment for a blogger, who doesn't even have an occupation, I agree!)

But even the political classes had been beguiled: after all David Lloyd George had, a few years earlier, called Hitler a 'born leader' and wished Britain had 'a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs of our country today'. And, in their defence, the propertied classes had spent 20 years in terror of Bolshevism and so had been  much less concerned about fascism than we would expect from the distance of today. Strange now that extreme left views are the ones that seem tolerated, with the extreme right always reviled when they are usually, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable.

However, back to Churchill and the War Cabinet meeting of 28 May 1940. After many more hours Churchill realised he would not win over Halifax, Chamberlain, Attlee and Greenwood. Indeed Halifax accused him of talking 'frightful rot'. The meeting adjourned for a diaried meeting of the full cabinet and Churchill decided it was time for frightful rot on steroids. Climaxing his speech by saying he was convinced everyone there would rise up and 'tear me down from my place' if he were for one moment to contemplate surrender, he said ' If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each and every one of us lies choking in his own blood on the ground.'

We know this is what Churchill said from the account of Hugh Dalton, the newly appointed Labour Minister of Economic Warfare in the coalition cabinet. And we know the reaction from Churchill's own account : the cabinet cheered, shouted and some ran round to clap him on the back. With the backing of the full cabinet, when the war cabinet reconvened at 7pm Churchill had his way to fight on and not negotiate.

Of course, for most of Churchill's speeches we know exactly what he said as he wrote wrote them out long hand, a result of him drying up early in his Commons career and having to sit down, saying "I thank the House for listening to me" having lost his thread completely a long way into a speech, before reaching his conclusions. And he recorded everything: he was a prolific writer, publishing more words than Shakespeare and Dickins combined. But on this occasion he might have had to extemporise.

Johnson poses the question what would have happened if Churchill had not had his way. Many historians have considered this scenario, not just authors like Deighton and Dick who posited a Nazi war win. They are just about unanimous in their thoughts. It would have been totally, unutterably awful for Europe and the world. Germany would probably have defeated Russia (after all, starting later and with a 2nd front in the west they reached the outskirts of Moscow). The Nazis would have been free to paint their totalitarian canvas from the west coast of mainland Europe to the Urals at least, with its ethnic cleansing, eugenic experiments, etc. Even if Russia had held out, there would still have been totalitarian regimes controlling the vast swathe from Calais to Vladivostock. Britain would surely have been a compliant puppet state. The USA would have remained isolationist. Even if they felt otherwise there would have been no bridgehead, with Britain surely demilitarised and forbidden to rearm at best. A bleak prospect indeed.

So I recommend Johnson's book. It's a fraction of the length of Roy Jenkins's biography of Churchill which I read on holiday a few years ago and far more inspiring, for me, than reading a novel. The Jenkins book is the fully detailed, chronoligical, scholarly work. And you need a good vocabulary to follow it: I brought back a list of words the length of an A4 page to look up in the dictionary on my return, this being before I had a smartphone. Contumely, desuetude or recrudescence were amongst them****.

But in answer to my question, how close were we to SS-GB for real? Damned close....
after all, the German panzers stopped advancing 30 miles from British Expeditionary Force, stranded and vulnerable at Dunkirk. They only stopped, much to the disappointment of their commanding officer, because Hitler feared a counter attack, which in hindsight was not a realistic threat. Had the BEF been liquidated and captured it's hard to believe Brirain could have resisted an invasion. So, either because we gave in (which Churchill resisted) or were pushed into the sea at Dunkirk, or lost the Battle of Britain (as per Deighton) or were starved out a bit later during the Battle of the Atlantic, the result would have been much the same. Any of these outcomes seem more likely, looking back, that what actually happened. So damned close. And certain but for Churchill.

This post - and Johnson's book - have nothing to do with Brexit. But, of course, even now, these events still have some influence over modern day thinking on both sides of the channel. Though the next "Battle of Britain" looks to me to be fought out in the fields of business, commerce and banking.

*Boris Johnson, The Churchill Factor, Hodder 2014
**Churchill was fascinated by aviation and flew - and crashed - himself. He was in charge of the Admiralty when he set up and fostered the Royal Naval Air Service before WWI. His pretext was the protection of our naval bases, though he was one of few who saw the offensive potential forseeing, for example, seaplanes using torpedoes to attack ships. He championed the creation of the RAF by merging the RNAS and its army run equivalent. As Chancellor he fought off attempts to cut the fledgling RAF in the early 1920s and 'spent to save' by expanding the RAF in order to save in other areas. See winstonchurchill.org, finest hour 127, Churchill, the RAF and naval (that is the full title)
***Wikipedia: 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French)
The May 1940 War Cabinet Crisis has a detailed page on Wikipedia, but Johnson's account is a much better read.
****For those as limited as me in vocabulary, contumely is an archaic word for criticisms that show a lack of respect, desuetude is the principle that laws can stop having legal force if they have not been used for a long time (to be fair this was a Churchill quote, not a Jenkins word) and recrudescence is a sudden new appearance and growth, especially of something dangerous and unpleasant

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