Six Minutes in May: How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister – review

Hitler died amid the flames of Berlin in April 1945. The most reckless criminal in modern history was no more. So long as “good” Germans are at the helm of Germany today, a Fourth Reich seems unimaginable. Yet Nazism really did happen, and it came close to engulfing Britain. The BBC sitcom Dad’s Army poked fun at the feared German invasion. In one episode, Private Godfrey’s sisters are seen to prepare their Regency cottage for the most charming of guests. “The Germans are coming, Miss Godfrey,” Lance Corporal Jones warns. “Yes, I know, so many people to tea. I think I’d better make some more.”

The second world war continues to fascinate young and old alike: how to make a familiar subject new? Several large, one-volume histories have appeared in recent years. Smoothly readable, they present the standard British narrative of the war built round the rise of Hitler and the dictator’s attempts to assert hegemony over Europe. Correspondingly little analysis is made of the Scandinavian theatre of operations, though the Führer’s assault on neutral Norway in 1940 set the stage for the coming “total” war, which claimed the lives of more than 50 million people.

Six Minutes in May, by Nicholas Shakespeare, chronicles Churchill’s lightning-quick rise to power following Hitler’s invasion of Norway. Shakespeare, better known as a novelist, has written an absorbing account of how events 1,300 miles away across the North Sea led to the most drastic cabinet reshuffle in modern British history. The odds were stacked against Churchill becoming prime minister. As first lord of the Admiralty he had bungled the Anglo-French operation to counter Hitler’s aggression in Norway. Campaigns that end in failure usually tend to be forgotten very quickly, and the April-May 1940 Norwegian campaign was no exception. The operation’s strategic prize was to cut off the supply of Swedish ore shipped to Germany through Norway; instead, British troops had to be ignominiously evacuated.

The episode was considered such a disaster that the Admiralty later mislaid crucial files so as to hide its mistakes from historic records. Churchill’s campaign did, however, help to extricate the Norwegian royal family and much of the gold reserves (for which the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square each year is a memorial gift). Churchill’s failure to deny Hitler his iron ore meant that Britain faced the real threat of Nazi German invasion.

It is also meant, ironically, that Churchill was favoured to take over from Neville Chamberlain as prime minister. The Umbrella Man in pince-nez and wing collar, who had returned from Munich in September 1938 “fluttering a barren sheet of paper”, was reckoned to be too weak for the job. “In the name of God, go!” the Birmingham-born Chamberlain was commanded in the House of Commons on 7 May 1940, a watershed date, after which Chamberlain left office, and presently died. Shakespeare is at pains to rescue Chamberlain’s reputation from Churchill’s revisionist history; far from the feeble prevaricator of legend, Chamberlain was a resolute and quietly humorous man, who had run a sisal plantation in the Bahamas and, as prime minister from 1937-1940, ensured that Britain spent an astonishing 40-50% of its GDP on defence.

In Shakespeare’s view, Churchill tried to freeze the “narrow, obstinate man” Chamberlain out of posterity. It was easy to do. Churchill had all the best lines in his four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, published between 1956 and 1958. If Churchill claimed that Chamberlain was “the most disastrous prime minister in British history”, it must be true. Though indifferently written at times (“Churchill’s star might have sunk to its lowest in eight months, but that of Lloyd George had rocketed over the weekend to astronomical heights”), Shakespeare’s book grips the attention from beginning to end. He conjures the characters and personalities of the senior commanders in the Norwegian campaign with a novelist’s flair and eye for detail. Most memorable are the Earl of Cork and Orrery, a monocle-wearing admiral known to junior officers as “Cork-n-orrible” and Adrian Carton de Wiart VC, who wore a patch after losing an eye during the first world war and was the model for Evelyn Waugh’s Brigadier Ritchie-Hook in the Sword of Honour trilogy. The fjords and ironbound rocks of Norway are memorably evoked. The country that gave us trolls and Peer Gynt also gave us, indirectly, Winston Churchill.