Cabinet's Finest Hour

Using the Cabinet papers from the National Archives, former Foreign Secretary David Owen has written a new history of the pivotal British War Cabinet meetings of May 1940. Eight months into the war defeat seemed to many a certainty. With the United States and Russia over a year away from entering the conflict, Britain found herself in a perilous and lonely position. The Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax was pushing Churchill, his Prime Minister, to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace with Hitler, using Mussolini as a conduit. Ignored in Churchill's later account of the con--flict, the question before the War Cabinet was straightforward: should Britain fight on in the face of overwhelming odds, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives, or seek a negotiated peace? The minutes of these meetings reveal just how close Halifax came to convincing the Cabinet that negotiations should be sought.