Churchill · 1940
We shall fight on the beaches
On the morning of the twenty-eighth of May 1940, the third day of his premiership, with the British Expeditionary Force surrounded at Dunkirk and the French government already sounding out terms, Winston Churchill faced the sharpest argument of his political life inside the five-man War Cabinet. The Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax wanted to ask the Italian ambassador to ask Mussolini to ask Hitler what terms he might accept for peace. Churchill argued for three days, in three War Cabinet meetings, that any approach would be the end. He carried the wider Cabinet of twenty-five on the afternoon of the twenty-eighth in a meeting at 10 Downing Street. A week later, with 338,000 men evacuated from Dunkirk, he gave the speech in the Commons that committed the country to fighting on. The thirty-six minutes that ended in the lines about the beaches and the landing-grounds and the fields and the streets and the hills, and never surrendering.
It is twenty past four in the afternoon of the twenty-eighth of May 1940, in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, in the third day of the second War Cabinet meeting on the question. He is sixty-five years old. He has been Prime Minister for eighteen days. He has lost half his army onto the beach at Dunkirk, where the navy is, at this hour, taking off the second day's worth of men in trawlers and pleasure-launches and Thames lighters under Stuka attack. The French are in collapse on the Somme. The Belgians surrendered at four o'clock this morning. Lord Halifax, his Foreign Secretary, the man the King wanted as Prime Minister three weeks ago and who declined the seal because he knew the country would not have a peer, has put it to the cabinet for the third time in three days that an approach should be made through Italy.
Halifax's argument is rational. The Italian ambassador, Bastianini, is asking discreetly what terms might be discussed. Mussolini has not yet declared on the German side. If the British will not entertain talks, the worst that can happen is the French ask for an armistice without us, the BEF is interned in France, and the country is alone against an enemy on the Channel coast with three months to invade.
Churchill's argument is that any approach will be the end. The country, he says, has a great deal more strength than its leaders allow themselves to think. The terms Hitler will offer will not be terms; they will be a re-arrangement of subjection. To be at the table is to have lost the war.
Halifax has, this afternoon, threatened to resign. The Cabinet of five is split three-two against him; Chamberlain, who has the Conservative party, is on the line and has not yet decided. Without Chamberlain, Churchill cannot go on. Halifax leaves the room at half past four for a walk in the garden. Churchill follows him out. They speak for ten minutes among the rose-bushes by the wall. No-one ever wrote down what was said there. Halifax, on his return, does not resign.
He thinks: if Halifax goes I lose Chamberlain in the Commons within a week. If I lose Chamberlain in the Commons I am out, and the man who comes in goes to Bastianini in the morning.
He thinks: I have to take this to the wider Cabinet. I have to put it to twenty-five men in this house this evening.
He thinks: I cannot put it to them as a question. I have to put it to them so they say no.
He calls the wider Cabinet for six o'clock. They come in by the back stair from the Treasury side. He has not warned them what it is for. He puts to them, in seven minutes, the position. He says, by Hugh Dalton's note of the meeting written within the hour: 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 room, by Dalton, makes a noise he has not heard in a Cabinet room before. Several ministers stand up. They go round the table, every one in turn, and every one says no terms. Halifax, at the end, says no terms. The Cabinet breaks up at twenty-five past seven. Bastianini does not get his answer.
He gives the speech in the Commons on the fourth of June at 3:40 p.m. It runs thirty-six minutes. Most of it is on the operational details of Dunkirk, the lift of three hundred and thirty-eight thousand men from a beach the navy did not believe could be cleared. The closing six sentences he has been turning over in his head for two days. He delivers them flat. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. He sits down to a cheering that lasts a long time. He says to Sir Edward Grigg, in the lobby afterwards, mock-rough: if the worst comes to the worst, we'll fight 'em with the broken end of bottles.
The speech was not broadcast live. The country read it the next morning in The Times and The Manchester Guardian. Churchill recorded the closing passage at the BBC nine years later, in 1949, for a gramophone series; the recording most people now associate with the moment is from the Decca disc, not from the chamber in 1940. What is attested in the chronicle is what Halifax wrote in his diary that night, which is that the Prime Minister had carried the argument because he had refused to allow the question to be asked. The country fought on because its government, in three days at the end of May 1940, declined to find out what terms the enemy would have offered. The cabinet papers were closed for fifty years. They opened in 1990. The minutes are bare. The shape of the argument is in the diaries. The decision is in what did not happen next.