Читаем The World полностью

Churchill, an aristocratic imperialist, was an eccentric throwback, extravagant and bon vivant, heavy-drinking and cigar-chomping, irascible, cutting and witty, with a taste for idiosyncratic uniforms – his self-designed siren suit resembled a baby’s romper suit. Yet not only had he recognized the nature of Hitler, but his martial temperament, visionary creativity, exuberant energy, unrivalled ministerial experience, knowledge of war and history, and mastery of language made him singularly qualified to ensure British survival. ‘Poor people, poor people,’ murmured Churchill. ‘They trust me, and I can give them nothing but disaster for quite a long time.’

On 10 May, after months of ‘phoney war’, Hitler, skittish and nervous, announced a battle that would decide ‘the fate of the German people for a thousand years’ and struck west through Belgium and Holland. But he aimed his main thrust further south through the Ardennes, boldly using his tanks in a lightning war – Blitzkrieg. ‘We’ve been defeated,’ the French premier Paul Reynaud, told Churchill, who flew out to stiffen French resistance. When Churchill asked, ‘Where’s the strategic reserve?’, the French commander-in-chief replied, ‘Aucune.’ None.

Reynaud appointed the Verdun hero, Marshal Pétain, aged eighty-four, to his government along with a general who had led three failed counter-attacks and believed that France should never surrender: Charles de Gaulle, under-secretary of war, was an ungainly, six-foot-four soldier-scholar of minor nobility with a small head and long nose nicknamed Le Grand Asparagus. On 9 June, he flew to see Churchill at Downing Street and requested the commitment of the RAF to the battle of France. Churchill refused. But he admired the ‘young and energetic’ de Gaulle: hardened by his German imprisonment as a First World War PoW, he believed in ‘a certain idea of France’, a France of grandeur, preferably led by a regal leader who might one day be himself.

Two days later Churchill returned to France to meet a despondent Reynaud, and there observed de Gaulle’s ‘vigour’; Pétain was already a defeatist. Back in London, Churchill proposed an Anglo-French union, but on 10 June Reynaud resigned and Pétain became premier to negotiate with Hitler. As Mussolini joined the war, invading France from the south, de Gaulle escaped to London, ‘alone and deprived of everything … I was entering into an adventure.’ On 14 June, Paris fell. Four days later ‘I, General Charles de Gaulle, currently in London’, broadcast to France. He asked, ‘Has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No! … Nothing is lost for France.’

As Pétain opened negotiations, the British army was surrounded on the beach at Dunkirk. The victory was so total that Hitler wavered. ‘Führer’s terribly nervous,’ wrote his chief of staff. ‘Frightened by his own success’. While Hitler vacillated, 300,000 British soldiers were rescued by a flotilla of small boats.

Hitler received the French surrender – technically an armistice – in the same carriage at Compiègne where the Germans had surrendered in 1918; and left southern France and the French empire intact under Pétain ruling from Vichy. The ex-kaiser and his sons congratulated Hitler.

At dawn on 23 June, accompanied by Speer, Hitler flew into Paris for sightseeing in an open Mercedes, stopping at the Tour Eiffel and standing before Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, where he ordered the return of the body of the emperor’s son, the duke of Reichstadt, one of his stranger historical obsessions. ‘Wasn’t Paris lovely?’ he said to Speer. In July, Hitler arrived in Essen to celebrate Krupp’s seventieth and to thank him in person for the panzers.^* At Bayreuth, he watched an operatic Götterdämmerung. ‘I hear,’ he told Winifred Wagner, ‘the wings of the goddess of victory.’ He was about to order the greatest gamble of a gambling life.

He expected the British to surrender. Halifax suggested negotiations. Churchill held his nerve, telling the British people, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’ in a war ‘against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime’. Sneering at ‘Britain’s hopeless military situation’, Hitler ordered a sea assault (Operation Sealion), but his admirals warned that such an operation would be possible only with air superiority. In July 1940, Hitler commanded his chosen heir, Göring, the Luftwaffe commander recently promoted to Reichsmarschall, to ‘beat down the RAF’ then ‘eliminate the English motherland and … occupy the country completely’. But he was already turning to the crusade of his life: ‘Once Russia has been destroyed, England’s last hope will vanish.’