Finest Years (16 page)

Privately, the prime minister expressed concerns about the staunchness of the upper classes. Among some of Britain's ruling
caste, admiration for his dazzling oratory did not confirm his fitness for the premiership. At dinner tables in some great houses, traditional arbiters of power muttered into their soup about the perceived vulgarities, follies and egomania of the chubby cuckoo whom fate had so rashly planted in Downing Street and entrusted with Britain's destinies. Some people in high places—senior officers as well as politicians—resented his popularity with the public. They failed to perceive how desperately the nation needed to suppose itself led by a superman. How else might its survival be secured?

The House of Commons, through the summer, was swept along by the national mood and Churchill's stunning speeches. George Lambert, a Liberal MP since 1891, told the House at a secret session on 30 July that he had not heard such oratory since Gladstone. But old Chamberlainites continued to sulk, withholding trust as well as warmth from the prime minister. More than a few Tories still expected his administration to be short-lived, and hankered to identify a credible replacement. ‘
Feeling in the Carlton Club
is running high against him,' wrote ‘Chips' Channon on 26 September. When Chamberlain died in November, it was deemed unavoidable but regrettable that Churchill should be elected in his place as Tory leader. Not until much later in the war did Conservative MPs display towards the prime minister anything of the affection they had conferred upon his predecessor.

Clementine strongly advised him against embracing the inescapably partisan role of Tory leader. He would have enhanced his stature as national warlord by declining. But acceptance fulfilled a lifelong ambition. More important, he knew how fickle was the support of public and Parliament. He was determined to indulge no possible alternative focus of influence, far less power, such as the election of another man as Tory leader—most plausibly Anthony Eden—might create. There remained a small risk, and an intolerable one, that if Churchill refused, the Tories' choice might fall upon Halifax. It seemed to the prime minister essential to ensure control of the largest voting bloc in the Commons. Subsequent experience suggested that he was probably right. Had he placed himself beyond
party, in the dog days of 1942 he might have become dangerously vulnerable to a party revolt.

As autumn turned to winter, the toll of destruction imposed by the Luftwaffe mounted. But so too did government confidence in the spirit of the nation. Some British people seemed to derive an almost masochistic relish from their predicament. London housewife Yolande Green wrote to her mother: ‘
I think it's a good thing
that we've suffered all the reverses we have this last year for it has shaken us all out of our smug complacency better than any pep talk by our politicians…last weekend we had a nice quiet time in spite of six [air raid] alarms—one gets so used to them they hardly disturb one nowadays.' By October Churchill, drawing on a great cigar as he sat at the Chequers dining table in his siren suit, was able to observe with equanimity that he thought ‘
this was the sort of war
which would suit the English people once they got used to it. They would prefer all to be in the front line taking part in the battle of London than to look on hopelessly at mass slaughters like Passchendaele.'

Bombing created mountains of rubble, obliterated historic buildings, killed thousands of people, damaged factories and slowed production. But it became progressively apparent to Churchill and his colleagues that the industrial fabric of Britain stretched too wide to be vulnerable to destruction from the air. The blitz never came close to threatening Britain's ability to continue the war. The aerial bombardment of cities, which a few years earlier had been perceived by many strategists as a potential war-winning weapon, now proved to have been much exaggerated in its effects, unless conducted with a weight of bombs undeliverable by the Luftwaffe—or, for years to come, by the Royal Air Force.

Millions of British people maintained existences compounded in equal parts of normality inside their own homes, and perils that might at any moment destroy everything around them which they held dear. Almost ninety years earlier, the novelist Anthony Trollope visited the United States during its Civil War. He noted the banalities of domestic life amid the struggle, and suggested with droll
prescience: ‘
We…soon adapt ourselves
to the circumstances around us. Though three parts of London were in flames, I should no doubt expect to have my dinner served to me, if I lived in the quarter which was free from fire.' In 1940 Lady Cynthia Colville echoed Trollope, observing at breakfast one morning that ‘
If one looked on all this
as ordinary civilian life it was indeed hellish, but if one thought of it as a siege then it was certainly one of the most comfortable in history.'

Churchill himself was sometimes very weary, especially after striving to arbitrate on a dozen intractable strategic issues, and enduring perceived petulance from MPs in the Commons. ‘
Malaya, the Australian government's
intransigence and “nagging” in the House was more than any man could be expected to endure,' he grumbled crossly one night to Eden. Yet his generosity of spirit seldom weakened, even towards the enemy. For all his frequent jibes at ‘the horrible Huns', and at a moment when Britain's very existence was threatened, he displayed no vindictiveness when discussing a post-war vision. ‘
We [have] got to admit
that Germany should remain in the European family,' he observed. ‘Germany existed before the Gestapo.'

His energy seemed inexhaustible. That same evening at Chequers on which he likened himself to a swineherd, he conferred with two generals about Home Guard tasks in the event of invasion. He then studied aircraft production charts, which prompted him to marvel aloud that Beaverbrook had genius, ‘and also brutal ruthlessness'. He led his guests for a moonlit walk in the garden, then settled down to quiz an officer newly returned from Egypt about tactics in the Western Desert. In both London and Buckinghamshire he received an endless stream of visitors. The exiled Polish prime minister, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, came to request some foreign exchange, and provoked a memorable Churchillian sortie into franglais: ‘
Mon général, devant
la vieille dame de Threadneedle Street je suis impotent.
' There was always time for Americans. Whitelaw Reid, twenty-eight-year-old London correspondent of the
New York Herald Tribune
, was awed to find himself invited to lunch with the prime minister at Downing Street. Rear-Admiral Robert Ghormley of the
US Navy, on a mission to London, was presented with inscribed copies of the four volumes of Churchill's
Life of Marlborough
.

The death of Neville Chamberlain on 9 November roused Churchill to one of his most notable displays of magnanimity. His private view of the former prime minister was contemptuous: ‘
the narrowest, most ignorant
, most ungenerous of men'. He felt gratitude for Chamberlain's loyal service as his subordinate since 10 May, and admiration for the courage with which he faced his mortal illness, but none for his record as prime minister. Now, however, he summoned his utmost powers of statesmanship to draft a tribute. He called his private secretary Eric Seal from bed to read it: ‘Fetch the seal from his ice floe.' Next day, he delivered to the House of Commons a eulogy which forfeited nothing of its power and dignity by the fact that it memorialised a man so uncongenial to him:

In paying a tribute of respect and regard to an eminent man who has been taken from us, no one is obliged to alter the opinions which he has formed or expressed upon issues which have become a part of history; but at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgements under a searching review. It is not given to human beings—happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable—to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong…History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these
high hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.

It was a supreme political act, to exhibit such grace towards the memory of a man who had failed the British people, and whom Churchill himself justly despised. Yet by November 1940 he could afford to display generosity. His mastery of the nation was secure. His successful defiance of Hitler commanded the admiration of much of the world. He had displayed gifts of self-discipline and political management such as had hitherto been absent from his career. His speeches were recognised as among the greatest ever delivered by a statesman, in war or peace. All that now remained was to devise some means of waging war against an enemy whose control of the Continent was unchallengeable, and whose superiority over Britain remained overwhelming. For Winston Churchill, the hardest part began when the achievement of ‘the Few' was already the stuff of legend.

In the autumn of 1940, even Churchill's foes at Westminster and in Whitehall conceded that since taking office he had revealed a remarkable accession of wisdom. He had not become a different person from his old self, but shed the maverick's mantle. He looked and sounded a king, ‘Ay, every inch a king,' albeit one movingly conscious that he was the servant of a democracy. In a few months he had achieved a personal dominance of the country which rendered his colleagues acolytes, almost invisible in the shadow of his pedestal. Only Eden and Bevin made much impact on the popular imagination.

Among politicians and service chiefs, however, widespread uncertainty persisted, even if it was discreetly expressed. Though the Germans had not invaded Britain, what happened next? What chance of victory did Britain have? The well-known military writer Captain Basil Liddell Hart
saw no prospect beyond
stalemate, and thus urged a negotiated peace. In September Dalton reported Beaverbrook as ‘very defeatist', believing that Britain should merely ‘
sit tight and defend ourselves
until the USA comes into the war'. But would this ever happen? Raymond Lee, US military attaché in London, was among many Americans bemused about what President Roosevelt meant when he promised that their country would aid the British ‘by all means short of war'. Lee sought an answer from senior diplomats at his own embassy: ‘
They say no one knows
, that it depends
on what R thinks from one day to another. I wonder if it ever occurs to the people in Washington that they have no God-given right to declare war. They may wake up one day to find that war has suddenly been declared upon the United States. That is the way Germany and Japan do business. Or, can it be that this is what Roosevelt is manoeuvring for?'

Once the Battle of Britain was won, the foremost challenge facing Churchill was to find another field upon which to fight. In July 1940, Lee was filled with admiration for Britain's staunchness amid the invasion threat. But he suggested sardonically that if Hitler instead launched his armies eastward, ‘
in a month's time
England would go off sound asleep again'. Likewise MP Harold Nicolson: ‘
If Hitler were to postpone
invasion and fiddle about in Africa and the Mediterranean, our morale might weaken.' As long as Britain appeared to face imminent catastrophe, its people displayed notable fortitude. Yet it was a striking feature of British wartime behaviour that the moment peril fractionally receded, many ordinary people allowed themselves to nurse fantasies that their ordeal might soon be over, the spectre of war somehow banished. Soldier Edward Stebbing wrote on 14 November: ‘
I have heard
a good many members of this unit say that they wished the war would end whether we win or lose…almost every day I hear some variations of the same idea, the common reason being that most of us are fed up with the whole business…The government is criticised for its lack of aggressiveness.'

A trades union correspondent wrote to Ernest Bevin from Portsmouth: ‘
At our weekly meeting
last night of delegates representing thousands of workers…the members were very disappointed at your not telling the public that the government intended to prosecute the war more vigorously, and take the offensive, instead of always being on the defensive…We have retired service officers who tell us that we have no leaders. We have not won a battle since the war started and it is for that reason no country will join us, knowing full well that Germany will attack and swallow them, whilst our own government are debating the issue…Our workers' clubs contain Unionists, Liberals and Labour, all united to push the present government out
of office at the first chance, and if something don't happen soon, the leaders will not be able to hold the workers.'

Yet how could Britain display aggressiveness, a capability to do more than merely withstand Axis onslaughts by bombers and U-boats? Clementine Churchill enquired at lunch one day: ‘
Winston, why don't we land
a million men on the continent of Europe? I'm sure the French would rise up and help us.' The prime minister answered with unaccustomed forbearance that it would be impossible to land a million men at once, and that the vanguards would be shot to pieces. Back in 1915, as Lt.Col. Winston Churchill prepared to lead a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers into the trenches, he told his officers: ‘
We will go easy
at first: a little digging and feeling our way, and then perhaps later on we may
attempt a deed
.' This latter proposition commanded little enthusiasm among his comrades at the time, and even less among his generals a generation later. But by the winter of 1940 Churchill knew that a ‘deed' must be attempted, to sustain an appearance of momentum in Britain's war effort.

At home, there could be no German invasion before spring. The nation's city-dwellers must bear the blitz, while the Royal Navy sustained the Atlantic lifeline against U-boats and surface commerce raiders. The navy had already suffered heavily, losing since 1939 one battleship, two aircraft-carriers, two cruisers, twenty-two submarines and thirty-seven destroyers. More ships were building, but 1941 losses would be worse. Churchill pinned great hopes on the RAF's offensive against Germany, but as he himself observed on 1 November 1940, ‘
the discharge of bombs
is pitifully small'. It would remain so for a long time to come. CIGS Sir John Dill instructed his director of military operations, Maj.Gen. John Kennedy, to draft a strategy paper on how the war might be won. Kennedy said the best that he could offer was a plan for averting defeat. To make victory possible, American belligerence was indispensable.

Lt.Gen. Henry Pownall attended an army conference addressed by the prime minister in November 1940, and was impressed by his robust good sense: ‘
No more than anyone else
did he see clearly how the war was going to be won, and he reminded us that for four years
in 1914-18 nobody could foretell the final collapse of Germany, which came so unexpectedly…All we could do for the present, as during the Great War, was to get on with it and see what happened…He talked as well as ever, and I was much impressed by the very broad and patient view that he took of the war as a whole.' Churchill expressed the same sentiments to senior RAF officers conferring at Downing Street: ‘
As the PM said goodnight
to the Air Marshals, he told them he was sure we were going to win the war, but confessed he did not see clearly how it was to be achieved.'

A chiefs of staff paper on Future Strategy, dated 4 September 1940, suggested that Britain should aim ‘to pass to the general offensive in all spheres and in all theatres with the utmost possible strength in the Spring of 1942'. If even this remote prospect was fanciful, what meanwhile was the army to do? Churchill, with his brilliant intuitive understanding of the British people, recognised the importance of military theatre, as his service chiefs often did not. The soldiers' caution might be prudent, but much of the public, like unheroic Edward Stebbing and his comrades, craved action, an outcome, some prospect beyond victimhood. There was a rueful War Office joke at this time, prompted by the blitz, that Britain's soldiers were being put to work knitting socks for the civilians in the trenches.

Here was one of the foremost principles of wartime leadership which Churchill got profoundly right, though he often erred in implementation. He perceived that there must be action, even if not always useful; there must be successes, even if overstated or even imagined; there must be glory, even if undeserved. Attlee said later, very shrewdly: ‘
He was always, in effect
, asking himself…“What must Britain do now so that the verdict of history will be favourable?”…He was always looking around for “finest hours”, and if one was not immediately available, his impulse was to manufacture one.'

Churchill addressed the conduct of strategy with a confidence that dismayed most of Britain's generals, but which had evolved over many years. As early as 1909, he wrote to Clementine about Britain's generals: ‘
These military men v[er]y often
fail altogether to see the simple truths underlying the relationship of all armed forces…Do
you know I would greatly like to have some practice in the handling of large forces. I have much confidence in my judgement on things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I seem to feel the truth more than in tactical combinations.' While he was travelling to America in 1932, Clementine read G.F.R. Henderson's celebrated biography of Stonewall Jackson. She wrote to her husband: ‘
The book is full of
abuse of politicians who try to interfere with Generals in the field—(Ahem!).' Her exclamation was prompted, of course, by memories of his battles with service chiefs during the First World War.

Churchill believed himself exceptionally fitted for the direction of armies, navies and air forces. He perceived no barrier to such a role in the fact that he possessed neither military staff training nor experience of higher field command. He wrote in his own history of the First World War:

A series of absurd
conventions became established, perhaps inevitably, in the public mind. The first and most monstrous of these was that the Generals and Admirals were more competent to deal with the broad issues of the war than abler men in other spheres of life. The general no doubt was an expert on how to move his troops, and the admiral upon how to fight his ships…But outside this technical aspect they were helpless and misleading arbiters in problems in whose solution the aid of the statesman, the financier, the manufacturer, the inventor, the psychologist, was equally required…Clear leadership, violent action, rigid decision one way or the other, form the only path not only of victory, but of safety and even of mercy. The State cannot afford division or hesitation at the executive centre.

Tensions between his instincts and the judgements of Britain's professional commanders would characterise Churchill's leadership. A Polish officer, attending a lecture at the British staff college on principles of war, rose at its conclusion to suggest that the speaker had omitted the most important: ‘Be stronger.' Yet where might Britain achieve this? As Minister of Defence, Churchill issued an important directive. Limitations of numbers, he said, ‘make it impossible for the
Army, except in resisting invasion, to play a primary role in the defeat of the enemy. That task can only be done by the staying power of the Navy and above all by the effect of Air predominance. Very valuable and important services may be rendered Overseas by the Army in operations of a secondary order, and it is for these special operations that its organization and character should be adapted.' After a British commando raid on the Lofoten Islands, Churchill wrote to the C-in-C Home Fleet: ‘
I am so glad
you were able to find the means of executing “
Claymore
”. This admirable raid has done serious injury to the enemy and has given an immense amount of innocent pleasure at home.' The latter proposition was more plausible than the former.

Churchill and his military chiefs renounced any prospect of engaging Hitler's main army. They committed themselves to a strategy based on minor operations which persisted, in substantial measure, until 1944. Pantellaria, the tiny Italian island between Tunis and Sicily, exercised a baleful fascination upon the war cabinet. After a dinner at Chequers in November 1940, Churchill fantasised about an assault ‘
by 300 determined men
, with blackened faces, knives between their teeth and revolvers under their tails'. Eden in 1940-41 cherished absurd notions of seizing Sicily: ‘The Sicilians have always been anti-fascist,' he enthused. A War Office plan dated 28 December called for a descent on the island by two infantry brigades. There was talk of Sardinia, and of the Italian-held Dodecanese islands. The chiefs of staff learned to dread mention of north Norway in the prime minister's flights of fancy.

None of these schemes was executed, save a brief and embarrassingly unsuccessful foray into the Dodecanese, because the practical objections were overwhelming. Even the most modest raid required scarce shipping, which could not sensibly be hazarded within range of the Luftwaffe unless air cover was available, as it usually was not. It was hard to identify credible objectives for ‘butcher and bolt' forays, and to gather sufficient intelligence to give them a reasonable chance of success. However strongly the prime minister pressed for British forces to display initiative and aggression, the chiefs of staff resolutely
opposed operations which risked substantial losses in exchange for mere passing propaganda headlines.

In the autumn of 1940, Africa offered the only realistic opportunities for British land engagement. Libya had been an Italian colony since 1911, Abyssinia since 1936. Churchill owed a perverse debt of gratitude to Mussolini. If Italy had remained neutral, if her dictator had not chosen to seek battle, how else might the British Army have occupied itself after its expulsion from France? As it was, Britain was able to launch spectacular African campaigns against one of the few major armies in the world which it was capable of defeating. Not all Italian generals were incompetents, not all Italian formations fought feebly. But never for a moment were Mussolini's warriors in the same class as those of Hitler. North Africa, and the
Duce
's pigeon-chested posturing as an Axis warlord, offered Britain's soldiers an opportunity to show their mettle. If the British Army was incapable of playing in a great stadium against world-class opposition, it could nonetheless hearten the nation and impress the world by a demonstration in a lesser league.

Britain's chiefs of staff, however, remained sceptical about the strategic value of any big commitment in the Middle East, win or lose. The Suez Canal route to the East was anyway unusable, because the Mediterranean was too perilous for merchant shipping, and remained so until 1943. The Persian oilfields fuelled British military operations in Middle East C-in-C Sir Archibald Wavell's theatre, but lay too far from home by the Cape route to provide petrol for Britain, which instead relied upon American supplies. It is often forgotten that in those days the US was overwhelmingly the greatest oil producer in the world. Dill advocated reinforcing the Far East against likely Japanese aggression, and remained in his heart an opponent of the Middle East commitment throughout his tenure as head of the army. The CIGS understood the political imperatives facing Churchill, but foremost in his mind was a fear that acceptance of unnecessary new risk might precipitate further gratuitous disaster. The prime minister overruled him. He believed that the embarrassment of inertia in the
Middle East much outweighed the perils of seizing the initiative. In the midst of a war, what would the world say about a nation that dispatched large forces to garrison its possessions on the far side of the world against a possible future enemy, rather than engage an actual one much nearer to hand?