224. Very well, alone

The phoney war’s over. The shooting war has begun. And it isn’t going at all well.

France is in collapse, its generals quickly turning defeatist and its politicians unable to shake them out of their inertia. Churchill tried hard, flying across to talk them into keeping up the fight, but without success. In the end, they surrendered to the Germans, being forced to sign an armistice in the same railway wagon, in the same forest, where they had previously forced the Germans to sign their armistice at the end of World War One.

Britain was now more isolated than ever. Not as alone as many liked to think, since it had its empire and dominions still with it, and they supplied huge numbers of men. But without either of the growing world powers, the US or the Soviet Union.

Now Churchill had to become tougher than ever. First, he had to see off Halifax, his own defeatist, serving in his war cabinet. Fortunately, he had the support of the Labour members, and the man invited as a guest, the Liberal leader too. When Chamberlain finally came down on his side, Churchill, buoyed by the success of the Dunkirk evacuation, could see off Halifax.

Next, he had to show that he had the hard core, the ruthlessness even, to win the war. He did that but in a tragic action, the firing by British warships on a French fleet in Mers el-Kébir, in Algeria. The major loss of life among men who’d been allies weeks earlier was a bitter pill for everyone to swallow.

Arguably, though, it prepared the British to develop the toughness for the harsh trial that was about to start. As Churchill warned, Hitler had now to turn his ‘whole fury and might’ on them. That’s the subject of next week’s episode.

Illustration: ‘Very well, Alone’, cartoon by David Low, June 1940.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License