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Would the Royal Family and Churchill Evacuate if the Germans Invaded?
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | February 1, 2022
- Category: Personal Matters Q & A
Q: Evacuate the Royals?
I am arguing on another forum that there was a plan in the Second World War to evacuate Churchill and the Royal Family to Canada if the Nazis invaded. I believe it was called Operation Coates, but the reference I found doesn’t mention Churchill.
Churchill doesn’t seem like the sort of person to evacuate. At Sidney Street he was in the front line. In the Great War he patrolled No Man’s Land and didn’t duck. In air raids in WW2 he went to the rooftops to watch. He was a crack shot and said to his daughter-in-law, “you can always take one with you.” So I don’t think he would evacuate on invasion. Am I wrong? Would Churchill have left to continue the fight from overseas? —Andrew Smith on Churchillchat
A: Highly unlikely
No one can say, but your surmise is probably correct. Of course there was a plan, as there were for every contingency. Many children had already been sent to Canada when someone suggested that Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose should go as well. Queen Elizabeth quickly put an end to that: “The children can’t go without me. I can’t leave the King, and of course the King won’t go.”1 Around the same time, Churchill had declared in Parliament:
…and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.2
“Street by street”
In Churchill’s unbelieved scenario, the King and his family might been forced to evacuate with the Fleet. But persuading them would have been difficult—as it was with many Britons in those days. Martin Gilbert offers a striking example:
One child, however, who had no intention of going to Canada was the eleven-year-old David Wedgwood Benn, youngest son of the Labour MP and former Secretary of State for India, William Wedgwood Benn. On July 4 The Times had published a letter from David Wedgwood Benn, opposing his dispatch to Canada, “I would rather be bombed to fragments,” he wrote, “than leave England.” Brendan Bracken sent a copy of this letter to Churchill, who wrote in his own hand to Wedgwood Benn senior: “A splendid letter from your boy. We must all try to live up to this standard.” Churchill also sent the young man himself a signed copy of My Early Life, for which gift he received the following reply, delivered by hand to Downing Street:
Dear Prime Minister, I was greatly honoured to receive your book, on my return from school. I have read 38 pages and find it very fascinating. It will be interesting in my later life to remember your kindness and to keep your book as a relic for ever. The Fortresses of London in which we shall fight for our lives “street by street” will also be worthy of remembrance. I am very glad that I am not to be ushered into safety.3
David Wedgwood Benn was the brother of the future Labour cabinet minister and left-wing activist Tony Benn.
In extremis
Would Churchill ever evacuate? We may only guess. It seems likely, however, that he would prefer the Götterdämmerung finale. After all, he’d told his Cabinet: “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”4 One memorable view of that end was conjured up by Norman Longmate in his stark counterfactual, If Britain Had Fallen (1972):
Later that afternoon with the Germans already in Trafalgar Square and advancing down Whitehall to take their position in the rear, the enemy unit advancing across St. James’s Park made their final charge. Several of those in the Downing Street position were already dead, among them the Commander-in-Chief, and at last the Bren ceased its chatter, its last magazine emptied. Churchill reluctantly abandoned the machine-gun, drew his pistol and with great satisfaction, for it was a notoriously inaccurate weapon, shot dead the first German to reach the foot of the steps.
As two more rushed forward, covered by a third in the distance, Winston Churchill moved out of the shelter of the sandbags, as if personally to bar the way up Downing Street. A German NCO, running up to find the cause of the unexpected hold-up, recognised him and shouted to the soldiers not to shoot, but he was too late. A burst of bullets from a machine-carbine caught the Prime Minister full in the chest. He died instantly, his back to Downing Street, his face toward the enemy, his pistol still in his hand.5
Retrospective reminder
With all our troubles we are, one hopes, still far removed from such sterner days. To some, Longmate’s vision may seem other-worldly. But Churchill had few doubts what the end might be:
…if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.6
Endnotes
1 John Pearson, Citadel of the Heart (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), 291.
2 Winston S. Churchill, “Fight on the Beaches,” House of Commons, 4 June 1940, in Richard M. Langworth, ed., Churchill by Himself (New York: Rosetta, 2016), 5.
3 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, 6, Finest Hour 1939-1941 (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 2011), 670-71.
4 Ibid., 420.
5 Norman Longmate, If Britain Had Fallen: The Real Nazi Occupation Plans, 1972. New edition, (London: Frontline Books, 2012), 107-08.
6 Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 272.
You wrote in your article “Feeding the Crocodile: Was Leopold Guilty?” that George VI expected Leopold to reign in exile, while he himself never intended to do so. This is irrelevant because Britain was never occupied; for George VI, the decision never arose. Important to know in reading this story.
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By the same token we could say that George VI was never faced with that decision because Britain was never occupied. Who knows what he would have done (or been advised to do) then? Both options are honorable: leave and head a government-in-exile (like Sikorski). or stay and do what you can for your country (like Leopold). Both Sikorski and Leopold were honorable leaders. —RML