June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 118, Spring 2003

Page 37

By ALI STAIR COOKE

Churchill at War 1940-45, by Lord Moran. Carroll & Graf, 352 pp. softbound, $18, member price $12


May 10th, 1940 is surely a date as ominous as December 7th or September 11th. It marked the true beginning of World War II, when Hitler’s explosive invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands presaged their early fall and the conquest of France in six weeks. On the other hand, May 24th, 1940, is not a date that today strikes a chord. But to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, only two weeks in Downing Street, it was probably the most despairing day of his life.

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The French had been overwhelmed by the new blitz offensive and their surrender was already contemplated. One British army was holding off the Germans at Calais in the desperate hope of giving the rest of the British Expeditionary Force time to regroup or—as they came to do—to abandon all their weapons and materiel on their retreat and then embark for England from the port of Dunkirk.

Churchill, on the morning of May 24th, decreed that no more troops or planes should be sent to France. As the Nazis began to fortify the French coast only twenty-one miles from the cliffs of Kent, he ordered fifty aircraft to mine the sea lanes and overnight evacuated residents of the coastal towns to prepare for an imminent invasion. At this “darkest hour,” as Churchill called it, Hitler offered peace terms, which the British ambassador in Washington, for one, found very attractive. The gist of Hitler’s offer was: “I’ll keep Europe, you keep your empire and I will respect your island independence.”

Several of Churchill’s own cabinet members were secretly, guiltily, inclined to accept this offer. It particularly appealed to Lord Halifax, the powerful foreign secretary, who had made Churchill prime minister in the sense of having declined Neville Chamberlain’s offer of the premiership. Churchill abominated the thought of an armistice but—for fear of having Halifax quit the cabinet and overthrow the government—exercised a rare feat of restraint by cooling, in front of Halifax, his boiling contempt for Hitler’s offer of “your independence.” (“We would become an immediate Nazi satellite,” Churchill said, “a slave state.”)

From May 24th, Churchill would call nine cabinets in five days, at the last of which he unloaded his scorn of Hitler’s “good faith,” shouted his preference to fight on and on and be found here “choking on our own blood.” At the end of this outburst, the cabinet rose from its coma and came over to pat the shoulder of a bowed 65-yearold streaming with tears.

All these disasters, actual and prospective, were on Churchill’s mind at noon on May 24th, when there arrived at his bedside a doctor whom a friend of Churchill’s had urged to serve as permanent medical watchdog of the outrageously overburdened prime minister. Churchill paid no attention to the man and went on reading a book. “After what seemed a long time,” the doctor later recounted, “he…said impatiently: ‘I don’t know why they’re making such a fuss, there’s nothing wrong with me.'” After another rude pause Churchill added: “I suffer from dyspepsia and this is the treatment.” He threw back the bedclothes and started breathing heavily, “his big white belly moving up and down.”

Later, Sir Charles Wilson (soon to be president of the Royal College of Physicians and later Lord Moran) noted in his journal: “I do not like the job and I do not think it will last.” It lasted almost twenty-five years, until January 24th, 1965, at eight in the morning, when Churchill’s daughter Mary, sitting by his bedside, looked up at Moran. “I got up and bent over the bed,” Moran remembered, “but he had gone.”

We know all this because, three years after the war was over, Lord Moran had found himself sitting at a formal dinner next to a stranger, to whom he in time retailed some personal anecdotes about Churchill. The stranger was the famous historian G.M. Trevelyan, who was sufficiently captivated to insist: “This is history, you must get it on paper.” Moran claims he protested that he was still Churchill’s doctor and was prohibited from writing about him by the forbidding code of the doctor-patient relationship.

But Moran kept on collecting a rag-bag of notes, jottings and memories on every sort of scrap paper and in 1966, the year after Churchill’s death, published his 850-page memoir to the scandalized gasp of the medical establishment. This public protest did not last long. It had only the shrill voice of professional piety to sustain it. Soon a large reading public, half the medical profession and posterity itself had confirmed the unique value and, in the result, the brilliance of Lord Moran’s memoir. A sizable part of it has just been published in a new edition called “Churchill at War,” with an introduction by Lord Moran’s son.

Amazingly, there are no diary entries throughout the glory days—the ordeal of the 1940 summer and the following Battle of Britain. At first no doubt the doctor, like many others, did not take to Churchill’s irascibility, temper tantrums, ill manners and egotism. But he decided that the Prime Minister was too engaged with the enemy to be ill. He also came to marvel that the PM’s 16-hour days and Lucullan indulgence of food and drink could not seriously impair a constitution whose stamina mystified his colleagues.

But when the diary does begin, it begins with a bang. Just after Christmas 1941, Churchill was visiting the White House in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Late at night, he opened his bedroom window and suffered the classic radial pain (chest and down the left arm) of a heart attack. Moran, noting that “the textbook treatment…is six weeks in bed,” took the risk of letting Churchill follow his hectic schedule: speech to Congress, night train to frigid Ottawa, speech to Canada’s Parliament, policy meetings, back to Washington, flight to Florida.

Thereafter, in his late sixties, Churchill became vulnerable, even as you and I, to mortal ills. During the war years he suffered more coronary trouble, three pneumonias, two strokes, an abdominal operation, hernia, deafness, an intractable skin disease and numerous minor ailments. He was more irritated than dispirited by illness and consequently had a preference for quacks and quick fixes. Moran obediently employed the local wizard but also fetched from London, to the most exotic and barren places, famous specialists, who stood aside and glowered till the magic treatment failed.

There is much delight as well as instruction in these scenes from Moliere. Churchill was always eager to know the process of his various afflictions and liked to give them a military role. Thus he was delighted to hear about the defensive function of the white blood cells and came to refer to them as “those splendid reserves, ever ready to repel the invader.” But apart from the fun and wisdom available in the medical notes, there is a remarkable record of Moran’s reflections on the character and conflicts of the large court that the prime minister traveled with. Moran was a fine writer and a better judge of men than Churchill or any of those who composed his entourage; and Moran’s insights into the whole range of the summiteers (Stalin, Attlee, Truman, Eden, Roosevelt et al.) are often more penetrating than the judgments of more famous chroniclers.

Yet the unique pleasure of the book is the doctor’s eye for Churchill’s human foibles and ear for the tang of his speech. Recall the recent 1000-page biography of Churchill by Lord Jenkins and one has to respond: “the most superb documentary account of a political animal.” Say Moran and there flash into life a score of priceless anecdotes. Asked once what he had come to enjoy most in life, Churchill slowly replied: “Lying full length in my bath, squiggling my toes on the surface—as at birth.”

All in all, more than any other Churchill memoirist, Lord Moran passes on to the reader an uncanny sense of living every minute of the day, and many nights, with this magnetic, monstrous, oddly lovable man, who told a listless nation it was heroic, and it became so.


Mr. Cooke has delivered the BBC’s “Letter from America” since 1946. Carroll & Graf has just published a new edition of his classic best-seller, Alistair Cooke’s America.

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