On this days 1940: One of the most important days of World War II.

 On this days 1940: One of the most important days of World War II. On that day, Neville Chamberlain resigned as prime minister of Britain, and Winston Churchill took his place. 

Just a few hours earlier, millions of German troops had poured over the borders of Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg to begin their blitzkrieg of Western Europe.

If it hadn’t been for a small group of Churchill’s colleagues in Parliament, he might never have become prime minister, and Britain might well have negotiated with Adolf Hitler or even gone down to defeat. 

The behind-the-scenes story of Churchill’s coming to power involves a small group of members of Parliament who, in the spring of 1940, set out to get rid of Neville Chamberlain, who was the leader of the Conservative Party - their own party. 

The challenge by the Tory rebels was an intensely bitter, intensely personal fight.

By the spring of 1940, the British had been at war with Germany for eight months. 

The war broke out after Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. 

In the two years leading up to Britain’s declaration of war, Neville Chamberlain and his government had done their very best to appease Hitler.

 When war was finally forced on the prime minister, he made clear he had no real interest or intention of actually fighting it. 

But Chamberlain was determined to stay in power, and most Tories in the House of Commons seemed determined to support him. 

So did the BBC and most British newspapers. This was what the Tory rebels faced as they plotted to get rid of Chamberlain in May 1940.

They had actually begun their fight in the early spring of 1938, just before Hitler annexed one of Germany’s neighbors, Austria. 

The annexation of Austria, which was called the Anschluss, was the first time that Hitler, in his march to war, had actually taken over a sovereign country. 

Neville Chamberlain turned a blind eye. Six months later, at the Munich conference, he went even further in his attempts to appease Hitler by ordering Czechoslovakia, Germany’s latest victim, to agree to Hitler’s demands to give him much of its territory.

Chamberlain was a very powerful prime minister, with a huge Conservative Party majority in the House of Commons. He was ferocious in attacking anyone who opposed or even criticized him. 

He shut down public debate by intimidating the press and by claiming that anyone who dared criticize the government was guilty of disloyalty and damaging the national interest in time of war.

One of Chamberlain’s chief targets was a 31-year-old Tory member of Parliament named Ronald Cartland. 

Cartland was the youngest and the most fearless of the rebels. He never backed away from speaking his mind, no matter the consequences.

 He proved that in a speech in a House of Commons debate held on August 2, 1939, just a month before the war began. It was clear by then that war was about to break out. 

Tens of thousands of German troops had gathered on the Polish border. Hitler was demanding that Poland give him parts of its territory.

Yet Chamberlain insisted that, even with all this going on, Parliament must go out on its annual two-month summer vacation. 

Most members of Parliament, including those who supported Chamberlain, were opposed to that idea. 

Ronald Cartland was furious. It was his view that Chamberlain had turned Parliament into a lapdog legislature, existing only to do his will.

During this particular debate, Cartland stood up and called Chamberlain a dictator to his face.

 He also predicted that very soon, young Englishmen like himself were going to fight, and they were going to die. 

He was booed, hissed, and screamed at during the debate by members of his own party. 

The prime minister was outraged, and he did his best to get Cartland out of the House of Commons.

Because Chamberlain was so strong in Parliament during this two-year period leading up to May 1940, the small group of Tory rebels - whose core was never more than 30 people - did not have the numbers to challenge him directly. 

To have an impact, they needed to rally the country behind them and, for that to happen, they had to have a nationally recognized leader. 

At first glance, the choice would seem to be obvious: Winston Churchill, who was the most notable and certainly the most eloquent opponent of appeasement in the House of Commons.

 But he never led them. Before the anti-appeasement campaign began, Churchill was in the political wilderness, in large part because of his passionate opposition in the early 1930s to limited self-government for India.

 When he began warning in 1933 about the growing menace of a rearmed Germany, few members of Parliament, even those who agreed with him, rallied round him.

Additionally, when war broke out in 1939, Neville Chamberlain realized that, for political reasons, he would have to bring his most prominent opponent into the government.

 He made Churchill first lord of the admiralty, the government minister in charge of the Royal Navy. 

It was a very shrewd move on Chamberlain’s part because Churchill, once inside the government, stayed loyal to him publicly throughout the “phony war,” even though privately he pressured Chamberlain and his fellow ministers to actually wage war.

The man who finally took over as leader of the anti-appeasement group was Leo Amery, a rival of Churchill. 

Amery, in fact, was a longtime friend and supporter of Neville Chamberlain’s. 

But it was Leo Amery, more than anyone else, who was responsible for getting rid of Chamberlain and bringing Churchill to power.

Amery had joined the antiappeasement rebels shortly after the German annexation of Austria.

 He was a man of unquestioned integrity and honor, and what he saw happening in Austria, particularly the Nazis’ brutal persecution of Austrian Jews, sickened him.

At the time of the Munich agreement, Leo Amery spoke out very strongly against what he saw as a betrayal of Czechoslovakia by Chamberlain. 

But unlike some of the younger, more radical rebels like Ronald Cartland, he was not ready to bring Chamberlain down. He had not yet lost all faith in the prime minister. 

That happened after the war began, and after Chamberlain made very clear that he was not interested in waging real war. 

That was when Amery took over leadership of the anti-appeasement forces in Parliament.

 He also took over Churchill’s former role as the senior Tory critic of the government, mounting attack after attack against the government’s failure to gear up for war.

The spirit of revolt was smoldering. Now all it needed was a major issue to make it burst into flames.

 The spark came on April 9, 1940, when German forces launched a lightning attack against Denmark and Norway. 

Within hours, Denmark was totally occupied. In Norway, German troops seized the capital - Oslo - and all of the country’s major ports.

It took the British government almost a week to come up with a response to the invasion, and from the beginning it was a botched operation. 

Less than three weeks after British troops landed in Norway, Chamberlain announced that most of them had been forced to retreat and were now in the process of being evacuated. 

This was a devastating confession of failure, and it rocked the British hard.

On May 2, 1940, shortly after Neville Chamberlain’s announcement of the evacuation, Leo Amery phoned a member of the cabinet and exclaimed, “The government must go!” The time had come, he told a friend, for open warfare.

Amery and the other rebels decided to use a two-day parliamentary debate that was already scheduled for the following week as the vehicle for an all-out attempt to get rid of Chamberlain and his men. 

On May 7, 1940, thanks in large part to the rebels, the House of Commons launched what was arguably the most crucial debate in its history. 

It was their final showdown against Chamberlain.

When the debate began, the rebels knew that the odds of their succeeding were regarded as slim to none. 

Leo Amery decided he would be one of the anti-government speakers in the debate, which was a very risky move on his part. He had the reputation of being a boring speaker. 

But Amery knew this was the speech of his life, and he prepared very hard for it. 

As he was jotting down notes for the speech the morning of the debate, he put in his notes a quotation from Oliver Cromwell, the head of the British government in the mid-17th century. 

It was a scathing, brutal quotation, and Amery wasn’t sure whether he would use it. He decided to wait and see.

Later that day, in the House chamber, Amery rose for his speech to his fellow members of Parliament.

“Somehow or other, we must get into the government men who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution, and in thirst for victory. 

It may not be easy to find these men. They can be found only by trial and by ruthlessly discarding all who fail. 

But find them we must - for we are fighting today for our life, for our liberty, for our all.”

Amery paused at that point. He thought of the Oliver Cromwell quotation that he had written down that morning, and he eventually decided to use it. 

Amery told the House he would quote these words of Cromwell with “great reluctance, because I am speaking of those who are old friends and associates of mine. 

But they are words which I think are applicable to the present situation.”

Amery looked down at his notes, then went on: “This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it was no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation.” 

At that point, Amery’s voice hardened, and he fixed his gaze on members of the cabinet. 

Talking to them directly, he said, “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!”

Those last few words electrified the House of Commons. 

Afterward it was clear that Amery had persuaded a number of Tories who had not openly opposed Chamberlain before that that the prime minister should resign.

Thanks to Amery’s speech and others like it, the leaders of the opposition party, the Labour Party, decided the next day to call for a vote of confidence in Chamberlain and his government. 

Ironically, one of the few pro-government speeches was made by none other than Winston Churchill, who criticized the rebels for what they were doing. 

But what he said had little effect on his fellow members of Parliament.

In arguably the most important debate in the history of Parliament, it was the oratory of Leo Amery, not Winston Churchill, that in the end was to have the most lasting impact on the fate of Britain.

The vote was held late on the night of May 8. Chamberlain actually won the vote, but by a much reduced majority.

 It was clear to everyone in the chamber that this ostensible victory was in fact a stunning defeat. Chamberlain clung to power for two more days, trying frantically to round up enough support, but to no avail.

On the morning of May 10, 1940, Hitler invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. That evening, Chamberlain resigned, and Winston Churchill became prime minister. This is where the Churchill epic began.

Ronald Cartland was not around for the Norway debate. He was an officer in the British Army, and when the Germans began their blitzkrieg on May 10, he and his regiment were part of the British forces trying to stop the German advance.

Cartland was thrilled when he heard of Churchill’s coming to power. However, two weeks later, he was killed while trying to lead his men to Dunkirk. He was just 33 years old.

In the years since then, there have been historians who argue that Neville Chamberlain was brought down by, what one of them called, “parliamentary spontaneous combustion,” an impersonal, historic force. In my opinion, that’s far from the truth. 

It was men, and their actions, that ousted Chamberlain and helped bring Churchill to power.

These men were not untarnished heroes. Some of them were timid and cautious on occasion. 

Some of them were influenced for a time by the pressure put on them by Chamberlain and his men.

 They were worried about their careers and about being branded as pariahs in the House of Commons.

 But when their country’s future hung in the balance, they put all those considerations aside. 

They showed moral and political courage and leadership when it mattered most, during one of the greatest crisis their country ever faced.