Turning Point.

• Author: Howard, Michael
• Position: Review

John Lukacs, Five Days in London: May 1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 236 pp., $19.95.

"HISTORY IS NOW, and England", wrote the American expatriate poet T.S. Eliot during the Second World War. This certainly was the case in the summer of 1940. Professor Lukacs' claim that the five days in London between May 24 and 28 saw a turning point in history sounds hyperbolic, but it stands up well to examination. It was then that the British government under the leadership of Winston Churchill decided not to ask a triumphant Adolf Hitler for terms, but to fight on whatever the odds. By that decision they gained the support of the United States, and persuaded Hitler to turn directly on his ultimate objective, the Soviet Union. Britain did not thereby win the war, but it created the conditions that made it virtually certain that Hitler would lose it. As a result, "civilization as we know it" survived for another fifty years. "Perhaps", Professor Lukacs concludes gloomily, surveying the scene at the end of the century, "that is enough."

Those five days, and that decision, have received repeated scrutiny. Scores of memoirs have been written by contemporaries, and the events have been minutely analyzed by such British historians as David Dilks, Philip Bell and Andrew Roberts. In this typically idiosyncratic work, John Lukacs generously acknowledges their work, as he does the unpublished theses of G.N. Esnouf and Sheila Lawlor, and it must be said that his own research has turned up little that we did not already know. But he brings to his topic, as to everything else he has treated, a sparkling and original mind, and interpretations that have to be taken very seriously, even if they are not entirely accepted.

In this study he makes two major contributions. The first is to examine the evolution of British public opinion during those fateful days, largely through the reports of that innovative institution, "Mass Observation", which are now preserved at the University of Sussex. The second is to analyze minutely the reports of the British cabinet meetings from May 25-28, when the possibility of using Mussolini as an intermediary to discuss peace terms was strongly pressed by the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, and not entirely discounted, at least initially, by Winston Churchill himself.

"There was a white glow, overpowering, sublime", wrote Churchill of those days, "which ran through our island from end to end." But as the Mass Observation and other reports make clear, it was not quite like that. On May 16, when the full extent of the German breakthrough in France became apparent, there was initial bewilderment: "It just hadn't occurred to people"...