Cabinet Office, War Cabinet

When World War Two began for Britain on 3 Sep 1939, Prime Minister Rt Hon (Arthur) Neville Chamberlain appointed an eight member strong War Cabinet. It consisted of the Prime Minister, who was the Chairman; the Chancellor of the Exchequer; the Foreign Secretary; the three service Secretaries; the Lord Privy Seal; the Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence; and the Minister without Portfolio. This number increased when select non-War Cabinet Ministers were invited to attend meetings and when the Chiefs of Staff and the Permanent Under Secretary to the Treasury attended, bringing the Cabinet numbers to fifteen members. The War Cabinet met daily during the first year of the war and, as the war progressed, often met more than once a day to deal with a range of issues from military planning to food rationing. The Cabinet Minutes from Sep 1939 to May 1940 were devoted almost exclusively to the situation on the Western Front, which remained decidedly unchanged throughout the period. From May 1940, Rt Hon Winston (Leonard Spencer) Churchill, who had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty at the outbreak of war, criticised the Chamberlain government's handling of the war and urged a more offensive British approach to the Western Front. In addition, the Allied campaign in Norway ended in disaster. Consequently, and following a debate in the House of Commons, at which 200 members voiced a non- confidence against Chamberlain, Churchill became Prime Minister and Chairman of the War Cabinet. Following the defeat of France in Jun 1940, the United Kingdom faced a severe defensive crisis and thus the War Cabinet was enlarged. Rt Hon Clement Richard Attlee; Rt Hon Arthur Greenwood; Rt Hon Robert Anthony Eden; and Rt Hon Sir John Anderson immediately entered, as would eventually Rt Hon Ernest Bevin, as Minister of Labour and National Service; Rt Hon William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, as Minister of Aircraft Production; Rt Hon Sir Kingsley Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer; Capt Rt Hon Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of State in the Far East; Rt Hon Sir (Richard) Stafford Cripps as Lord Privy Seal; Rt Hon Herbert Stanley Morrison as Secretary of State for Home Affairs and Minister of Home Security; and Rt Hon Frederick James Marquis, 1st Baron Woolton of Liverpool, as Minister of Reconstruction. At the end of 1940, the War Cabinet was preoccupied with the planning a unified British strategy for the waging of war, with Gen Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, often acting as a refrain to Churchill's more unconventional ideas about strategy. By mid-1941, concentration turned from the defence of Britain to intervention in Balkans, the war in North Africa, plans for providing armed forces to Europe to draw German forces from the Soviet Union, and the prospect of bringing the United States into the war. In 1942, the British persuaded US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to authorise a combined invasion of North Africa. In 1943, the War Cabinet remained pre-occupied with strategic affairs, but began to think increasingly about the post-war reconstruction of Britain and general social security measures for the British population. With a firm schedule for the Allied invasion of France firmly in place in 1943, the War Cabinet turned its attention to the post-war settlement of Europe, an Allied occupation strategy for Germany and Austria, and the post-war rehabilitation of Britain. As the war drew to a close, there began to appear increasing signs of strain between the two major parties in the British Coalition Government, which ultimately affected the War Cabinet's ability to operate effectively. On 23 May 1945, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister. On 30 May 1945, the first meeting of the new British Cabinet took place, marking the end of the War Cabinet and the return to peace-time civil procedures.