Finest Years (42 page)

London voluntary worker Vere Hodgson, bewildered as the rest of the nation by the fall of Tobruk, wrote crossly in her diary: ‘
The enemy did not seem
to understand what was expected of them, and failed to fall in with our plans. Grrr! As Miss Moyes says, it makes you see green, pink and heliotrope. I woke up in the middle of Sunday night, and thought of that convoy delivered with so much blood, sweat and losses to Tobruk on Saturday—to fall like ripe fruit into German mouths. I squirmed beneath the bedclothes and ground my teeth with rage.' She added after the prime minister broadcast two weeks later: ‘
Mr Churchill's speech did not
contain much comfort. He dominated us as he always does, and we surrender to his overpowering personality—but he knows no more than any of us why Tobruk fell!'

George King wrote to his son from Sanderstead in Surrey: ‘
We heard yesterday
that we have lost Tobruk; the same old story—rotten leadership. The Yanks will yet show us how to do the job. The “red tabs”form the only rotten part of the British Army!' Lancashire housewife Nella Last, intensely loyal to Churchill, mused in bewilderment to her diary on 25 June 1942: ‘Where can soldiers go where they have a reasonable chance? Tobruk has gone—what of Egypt, Suez and India? Nearly three years of war: WHY don't we get going—what stops us? Surely by now things should be organised better in some way. Why should our men be thrown against superior mechanical horrors, and our equipment not standardised for easier management and repair? There is no flux to bind us—nothing. It's terrifying. Not all this big talk of next year and the next will stop our lads dying uselessly. If only mothers could think that their poor sons had not died uselessly—with a purpose…It's shocking.'

A report of the Home Intelligence Division of the Ministry of Information declared: ‘
Russian successes continue
to provide an antidote to bad news from other fronts…“Thank God for Russia” is a frequent expression of the very deep and fervent feeling for that country which permeates wide sections of the public.' Membership of Britain's Communist Party rose from 12,000 in June 1941 to 56,000 by the end of 1942. The British media provided
no hint of the frightful cruelties through which Stalin sustained the Soviet Union's defence, nor of the blunders and failures which characterised its war effort in 1941-42.

In informed political and military circles there was no scintilla of the guilt about Soviet sacrifices that prevailed among the wider public. From Churchill downwards, there was an overwhelming and not unreasonable perception that whatever miseries and losses fell upon the Russian people, the policies of their own government—above all the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact—were chiefly responsible. Brooke wrote disgustedly about British aid to Russia: ‘
We received nothing
in return except abuse for handling the convoys inefficiently.' John Kennedy expressed bewilderment about public attitudes: ‘
There is an extraordinary
and misguided enthusiasm for the Russians. Stalin is more of a hero than the King or even Winston.' A naval officer, Commander Andrew Yates, wrote to a friend in America: ‘
Little as I formerly liked him
, the man who killed a million Germans, Jo Stalin, becomes my friend for life.' A Ministry of Information official cautioned, however, against exaggerated fears that popular applause for Soviet military prowess equated with a mass conversion to communism, such as some Tory MPs perceived: ‘
That danger will never come
through admiration of the achievements of another country, but only through dissatisfaction with our own—dissatisfaction savage enough to cherish a revolutionary programme.'

Nonetheless, perceptions of the Red Army as braver and more willing for sacrifice than their own soldiers were a source of anger and shame among Churchill's people, which persisted throughout the summer of 1942. The public could not be told that Stalin's armies achieved their remarkable feats under draconian compulsion; that if Russian soldiers sometimes displayed more fortitude than British or American ones, this was chiefly because if they flinched they faced execution by their own commanders, a sanction imposed upon hundreds of thousands of Stalin's men in the course of the war. Debate about British military inertia and failure continued to dominate the press. ‘
Reactionary attitudes are spreading
,' complained communist Elizabeth Belsey. ‘The
Spectator
this week sounds much opposed to the 2nd front. What do
all these people suppose Russia is to do without the 2nd Front? Continue fighting with faith instead of oil?'

Maggie Joy Blunt, a journalist of left-wing sympathies, wrote on 7 August 1942: ‘Why is not Mr Churchill, rather than his critics, standing on the plinth of the Nelson column shouting for a Second Front and demanding greater efforts from every man and woman in the country? The desire to make that effort is there. The people would respond instantly to the right word from Churchill. We have the feeling, strongly, that Powers That Be wish to see Russian might crippled before they will move a finger to help. They do not want Russia to have any say in the peace terms. Capitalist interests are still vastly strong, and the propertied bourgeois, although a minority, have still an enormous influence on the conduct of our affairs and are terrified of the idea of Socialism. Socialism is inevitable.' Londoner Ethel Mattison wrote to her sister in California on 1 August: ‘
When the Anglo-Soviet Alliance
was signed, and…the Second Front was one of the main points…[It] rather tended to make people sit back and wait for it. However, the waiting has been so long and the Russians are suffering so terribly that it seems the idea must be pushed into realisation by the force of public opinion. Everywhere you go, in buses, trains and in lifts you hear fragments of conversation in connection with it.'

The Russian press, unsurprisingly, devoted much space to the Second Front lobby.
Pravda
carried a story reporting the mass rallies in Britain in support of early action under the headline ‘
English people are willing
to help their Russian comrades'. It quoted Associated Press correspondent Drew Middleton declaring after a tour of Britain that there was overwhelming public support for an invasion, that shipping difficulties could be overcome, that bombing of Germany was recognised as an insufficient support to Russia.
Pravda
also described Second Front demonstrations in Canada. Through the months that followed there was much more Moscow press comment on the same theme. On 9 August
Pravda
headlined: ‘No time to lose—British press on the Second Front'. On 15 August: ‘Time has come to act, say American newspapers'. Next day, a report
described a deputation representing 105,000 British workers from seventy-eight companies calling at Downing Street to present a Second Front petition to Churchill. On the 19th,
Pravda
headlined: ‘English public organisations demand offensive against Germany', and on the 23rd: ‘We have no right to wait—English trades unions demand opening Second Front'.

The narrative of the Second World War presented by most historians is distorted by the fact that it focuses upon what happened, rather than what did not. Until November 1942, weeks and sometimes months passed without much evidence of activity by British land forces. Between June 1941 and the end of the war, British newspapers and BBC broadcasts were often dominated by reports of the struggle on the eastern front, where action appeared continuous. Countless editorials paid tribute to the deeds of ‘our gallant Russian allies'. This goes far to explain why Russia commanded such admiration in contemporary Britain. Accounts of the eastern fighting were vague and often wildly inaccurate, but they coalesced to create a valid impression of vigorous, hideously costly and increasingly successful action by the Red Army. The battle for Stalingrad, which now began to receive massive coverage, intensified public dismay about the contrast between British and Russian achievements. ‘
Every week of successful
defence,' reported the Ministry of Information on 9 October 1942, ‘confirms the popularity of the Russians and there is much uneasiness and unhappiness at the spectacle of our apparent inaction.'

Ismay said that he admired
Churchill as much for the courage with which he resisted a premature Second Front as for the vigour with which he promoted other projects. He observed that a lesser man might have given in to the vociferous lobbyists. He deplored the public's inescapable ignorance of the fact that real partnership with the Russians was impossible, given their implacable secretiveness. To understand the British public temper in World War II, it is necessary to recognise how little people knew about anything beyond the visible movements of armies and the previous night's bomber raids on
Germany. Information which is commonplace in time of peace becomes the stuff of high secrecy in war: industrial production figures, weapons shortages, shipping movements and losses, details of aid to Russia or lack of it. Many reports in newspapers, especially those detailing Allied combat successes and enemy losses, were fanciful. The prime minister offered the nation only the vaguest and most general notion of its likely prospects. This was prudent, but obliged millions of people to exist for years in a miasma of uncertainty, which contributed decisively to the demoralisation of 1941-42.

A study of contemporary British newspapers surprises a modern reader, because in contrast to twenty-first-century practice, greater attention was paid to events than to personalities, even that of Churchill himself. He received much less coverage than does a modern prime minister, partly because little detail about his personal life was revealed outside his inner circle. For security reasons his travels were often unreported until he had left a given location. His speeches and public appearances were, of course, widely covered, but many days of the war passed without much press reference to the prime minister. While battlefield commanders such as Alexander and Montgomery became household names, other key figures remained almost unknown. Sir Alan Brooke, for instance, whose military role was second in importance only to that of Churchill, was scarcely mentioned in the wartime press. Above all, accurate prophecy was rendered impossible by the fact that the condition of the enemy, the situation ‘on the other side of the hill', remained largely shrouded in mystery even to war leaders privy to Ultra secrets. Conditions in occupied Europe, as well as the state of Hitler's war machine, were imperfectly understood in London. It was widely reported that the Nazis were conducting appalling massacres, killing many Jews in death camps. But the concept of systematic genocide embracing millions of victims was beyond popular, and even prime ministerial, imagination. Entire books have been written about Churchill and the Holocaust, yet the fundamentals may be expressed succinctly: the prime minister was aware from 1942 onwards that the Nazis were
pursuing murderous policies towards the Jews. British Jewish leaders sought to urge upon him that their people were subject to unique and historically unprecedented horrors. He responded with words of deep sympathy, indeed passion, and once urged that the RAF should do whatever was possible to check the slaughter. But he did not himself pursue the issue when told of ‘operational difficulties'—which meant that the airmen did not believe that attempts to destroy railway tracks in Eastern Europe were as useful to the war effort as continuing the assault on Germany's cities. Churchill perceived the killing of the Jews in the context of Hitler's wider policies of massacre, which embraced millions of Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks and other races. He believed that the only way to address these horrors was by hastening the defeat of Germany and liberation of the occupied nations. This assumption also guided public sentiment.

Public ignorance fed endless speculation, embracing a range of possibilities from the war's ending within months to its indefinite continuation. When Harold Macmillan became British minister in the Mediterranean, he wrote: ‘
The trouble…is that
no one really has any idea as to the future course of the war. One minute people rush to an extreme of pessimism—and think it will never end. The next they become so excited by a favourable battle that they regard it as more or less over. And the experts cannot give us any guidance. The better they are, the less willing I find them (I mean men like Cunningham, Tedder and Alexander) to express a view.' A contributor to
Punch
composed a poem about his own ‘befuddlement amid one bright star of England'. This struck a chord with Alan Lascelles, assistant private secretary to King George VI, who wrote in his diary: ‘
I suppose that, with the exception
of some thirty or forty High Esoterics—the War Cabinet and its immediate minions—I get as much illumination on the drear fog of war as anyone in this country. Yet I am befogged, all right.' For a humble citizen to keep going it was necessary to hope blindly, because evidence for informed optimism was lacking.

In the first two days of July, Churchill faced a debate on the censure motion tabled against him in the Commons. Sir John Wardlaw-Milne
destroyed his own case in the first minutes of his speech by proposing that the Duke of Gloucester, the king's notoriously thick-headed brother, should become Britain's military supremo. The House burst into mocking laughter, and Churchill's face lit up. He knew, in that moment, that he could put his critics to flight. But he was nonetheless obliged to endure a barrage of criticism. Aneurin Bevan spoke with vicious wit: ‘The prime minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.' Bevan also asserted that arms factories were producing the wrong weapons; that the army was ‘riddled by class prejudice' and poorly commanded.

Then he delivered the sort of peroration which disgusted Churchill, but struck a powerful echo with the public: ‘For heaven's sake do not let us make the mistake of betraying those lion-hearted Russians. Speeches have been made, the Russians believe them and have broken the champagne bottles on them. They believe this country will act this year on what they call the second front…they expect it and the British nation expects it. I say it is right, it is the correct thing to do…Do not in these high matters speak with a twisted tongue.' In the course of the Confidence debate, MPs voiced valid criticisms of the army's poor tanks and leadership. Much was said about the RAF's lack of dive-bombers, to which the British accorded exaggerated credit for German successes. Unsurprisingly, no one hinted that the British soldier was not the equal of his German counterpart, but there were fierce denunciations of the high command and class culture of the army, some of it from MPs less jaundiced than Bevan.