Finest Years (43 page)

Americans were impressed that such strictures could be expressed. ‘Polyzoides' wrote in the
Los Angeles Times
: ‘
The fact that, during one of
the most critical periods in the history of the British Empire, there is still freedom of speech and criticism testifies to the greatness of the nation.' Such high-minded sentiments provided, however, small comfort to the prime minister. Leo Amery wrote: ‘
Winston is I think
far too inclined to attribute to sheer personal malice the anxiety of various people to know what is really happening and makes no allowance either for the value in a democracy of telling
our people the whole truth however unpalatable.' A housewife diarist, Mrs Clara Millburn, though a warm admirer of Churchill, was nonetheless impressed by the report of Wardlaw-Milne's performance in the Commons: ‘
His speech sounds very good to us
at first hearing.' By contrast, she thought little of Oliver Lyttelton's opening speech for the government: ‘Everyone seems to want C as PM, but they do not think he has chosen wisely for his Cabinet.' When the House divided, Churchill won by 475 votes to twenty-five. ‘
He is a giant among pygmies
when it comes to a debate of this kind, and I think that everybody realizes it,' wrote Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam, often a sceptic. But he added that if the censure motion had been directed against the Ministry of Supply, he himself would not have voted against it. Next day, Mrs Millburn wrote: ‘
It is to be hoped that the PM
takes some notice of the criticisms, for one feels some changes are necessary.'

Churchill's Commons success did nothing to stifle wide-ranging and bitter criticism of the government's conduct of the war.
The Times
, in an editorial on 10 July, though asserting that ‘No responsible body of opinion dreams of changing the national leadership,' repeated its oft-made demand for a separation of the roles of prime minister and Minister of Defence. The paper returned to the charge on 20 July, observing: ‘A British victory is urgently needed'; and again on the 22nd: ‘All the evidence goes to show that the war machine is both cumbrous and unmethodical.' In
The Times
's letters column, a correspondent named Clive Garcia, writing from the Army & Navy club, spoke of ‘a vicious circle to which we have now grown accustomed: first, disaster; then a debate on the conduct of the war, voicing profound apprehension; then a vote of confidence in the Government…then a pause until the next disaster'. Meanwhile, asserted Garcia, ‘defects in the war machine go uncorrected'.

Several other letter-writers addressed intelligently and pertinently the inadequacy of British tanks.
The Times
commented on their strictures:‘
The simple question
—though the answer may be complex—is how a great and inventive industrial country nearing the end
of the third year of War has failed to supply its Army with weapons superior to those employed by the enemy, the nature of which was for the most part known?' An editorial in the
New Statesman
on 29 July asserted that the ‘military situation of the [Allies] is graver than at any time since 1940'.

Within a few minutes of Churchill's return to Downing Street from the Commons on 2 July, Leo Amery arrived with his son Julian, an army officer just back from Egypt. To the fury of Alan Brooke, who was also present, young Amery—‘
a most objectionable young pup
', in the general's words—painted for the prime minister a picture of the desert army as demoralised, poorly equipped and bereft of confidence in its commanders. This confirmed Churchill's own views. In an unpublished draft of his war memoirs he characterised the 1942 desert defeats as
‘discreditable' and ‘deplorable'
. In six months, Auchinleck's forces had been driven back 600 miles. Worst of all, Captain Amery played to the strongest instincts of the prime minister by urging that Churchill should go himself to the Middle East and resolve the situation. ‘
The cheek of the young brute
was almost more than I could bear,' wrote Brooke. The CIGS had hoped to travel alone to Egypt to address the army's difficulties. Now, instead, the prime minister was determined to intervene personally, then fly on to Moscow to confront Stalin.

But first, there was another visit to London by Hopkins, Marshall and King. Before they arrived, former CIGS Sir John Dill wrote to Churchill from Washington: ‘
May I suggest with all respect
that you must convince your visitors that you are determined to beat the Germans, that you will strike them on the continent of Europe at the earliest possible moment even on a limited scale, and that anything which detracts from this main effort will receive no support from you at all.' The general mused tendentiously about a possible landing in France: ‘What does success mean? If invasion ultimately fails tactically but causes diversion from Russian front will it have succeeded?' Such maudlin reflections were unlikely to increase Churchill's confidence in Dill, who had gained some personal popularity in Washington because he was thought to favour an early
Second Front. ‘
Churchill, however, believes
the other way,' wrote vicepresident Henry Wallace. ‘Apparently the ruling class in England is very anxious not to sacrifice too many British men. They lost so many in World War I that they feel they cannot afford to lose more in World War II. They want to wait until the American armies have been sufficiently trained so that losses will be at least fifty-fifty. Dill does not belong to this school of thought.' It was certainly true that some people in London believed the general had ‘gone native' in Washington.

To the prime minister's annoyance, following Marshall, King and Hopkins's arrival in London on 19 July, they spent some hours communing with the newly appointed senior US officer in Europe, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, before calling at Downing Street. When Anglo-American discussions began, the visitors repeated their familiar demand for a 1942 beachhead in France. They clung stubbornly to two propositions which the British deemed monstrous. First, they thought that a ‘redoubt', such as Churchill had briefly favoured in June 1940, might be seized and held in northern France. Second, they considered that even if such an operation failed, the losses—destined to be overwhelmingly British—would be justified by the inconvenience imposed upon the Germans.

Brooke rehearsed familiar objections. The US chief of the army challenged him bluntly, demanding: ‘
Well, how are we
going to win this war? You cannot win it by defensive action.' Churchill formally presented Marshall's proposal to the war cabinet, which unanimously rejected it. There was little more to be said. The Americans remained deeply unhappy, but knew that they could not impose a scheme dependent almost entirely upon the sacrifice of British lives. Marshall had come to London with a brief from Roosevelt to make this final attempt to reconcile the British to an invasion of France; then, if he failed, to accept the North African plan. On 22 July the president cabled acquiescence in British rejection of an early assault on the Continent. With utmost reluctance, Marshall committed himself to what became the
Torch
landings of November 1942.

Now the British were all smiles, and it was the Americans' turn to
sulk. ‘Gil' Winant, the ambassador, usually mild-mannered, expressed vehement objections to the North African plan. The American visitors spent a final weekend at Chequers, with the prime minister at his sunniest, then returned to Washington, nursing frustration.

For most of August, Marshall continued to agitate against
Torch
. From the moment Churchill first mooted the North African scheme back in December, the chief of the army had been willing to indulge it only if US troops could land unopposed, with Vichy French acquiescence. The Americans were fearful that if they were obliged to launch an amphibious assault, the Germans would swiftly reinforce North Africa through Franco's Spain, isolating any US forces deployed east of the Straits of Gibraltar. It is important to emphasise that in the late summer of 1942 the American chiefs believed that the British were doomed to lose Egypt. This would free Rommel's army to turn on a US invasion force. Marshall not only disliked committing American soldiers to the Mediterranean theatre: he feared that a campaign there could fail. A cynic such as Alan Brooke might have contrasted unfavourably the US chief of the army's insouciance about the perils of an abortive British descent on France with his sensitivity about the prospect of an unsuccessful American one on North Africa.

The
Torch
commitment represented one of Churchill's most important victories of the war. He had persuaded Roosevelt to impose a course of action on his chiefs of staff against their strongest wishes. As for the president, this was his most significant strategic intervention, one of the few occasions when he acted in earnest the part of commander-in-chief, instead of delegating his powers to his military advisers. The two national leaders displayed the highest wisdom. Roosevelt's decision was driven by the same political imperatives that Churchill recognised. Marshall later acknowledged this, saying of the US chiefs of staff: ‘
We failed to see
that a leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. The people demand action.' Fulfilment of this requirement was matched by the president's acknowledgement that if the British did not choose to land in France in 1942, they could not be made to do so. At this stage also, Roosevelt was
much more ready than in subsequent years to be influenced by Churchill's judgement. The US would land only an initial 70,000 men in North Africa, though thereafter these would be progressively reinforced. In 1942 a significant proportion of Marshall's available forces were committed to home defence of the United States, though it was hard to see who might mount an invasion.

The British sought to salve bruised US Army sensibilities by offering a strong endorsement of its ambitions for a landing in France in 1943. But Marshall knew that once American forces were fighting in the Mediterranean, it would be hard to get them out again in time for an invasion of France the following year. In the formal document decreeing the North African commitment, CCS94, the chiefs of staff acknowledged ‘that it be understood that a commitment to [
Torch
] renders
Roundup
[an invasion of France] in all probability impracticable of successful operation in 1943'. Only much later did some prominent American soldiers grudgingly concede that Churchill might have been right; that his and Roosevelt's commitment to
Torch
saved the Allies from a colossal folly. And this was only when the US Army had experienced for itself the savage reality of fighting the Wehrmacht.

Churchill travelled to the Middle East in austere and dangerous discomfort. ‘
What energy and gallantry
of the old gentleman,' marvelled Oliver Harvey, ‘setting off…across Africa in the heat of mid-summer.' This was true enough, but masked the reality that for the rest of the war Churchill was much happier in overseas theatres of war than amid the drabness of Britain, where he found scant romance, increasing pettiness and complaint. Though he cherished a vision of fortress Albion, its reality became increasingly uncongenial. Before his departure, the prime minister discussed with Eden whether another minister should join his party: ‘
He felt the need
for company, especially in Moscow.' Here was a glimpse of Churchill's loneliness when he faced great challenges. He yearned for the comradeship of some peer figure such as Beaverbrook in whom he could confide, with whom he could exchange impressions and jokes. This time, however, it was decided that he should take in his entourage only civil servants and soldiers, Alan Brooke foremost among them. They would be joined for the Moscow leg by Averell Harriman, whose presence was designed to ensure Russian understanding that what the British asserted, the Americans endorsed, and by Sir Archibald Wavell, who had served in Russia in 1919 and spoke the language.

They travelled aboard a Liberator bomber which possessed desirable virtues of performance—range, speed and altitude—but none of the luxuries of the Boeing Clipper. Somewhat to the embarrassment of Britain's airmen, the safety of the prime minister was entrusted to a young Atlantic ferry pilot named Bill Vanderkloot,
who hailed from Illinois. Vanderkloot was deemed to possess temperament, navigational skills and long-range experience which no available home-grown British pilot could match. The American admirably fulfilled expectations. His plane, however, was a cramped and unsuitable conveyance for an elderly man upon whose welfare, in considerable degree, the hopes of Western civilisation rested. It was so noisy that Churchill could communicate with his fellow passengers only by exchanging notes. The flight was long and cold. They made an African landfall over Spanish Morocco, then struck a course which took them well inland before turning east over the desert, flying high and using oxygen. In his mask, wrote one of the plane's crew, Churchill ‘
looked exactly as though
he was in a Christmas party disguise'. He sat in the co-pilot's seat, reviving a host of youthful memories as they approached Cairo: ‘
Often had I seen
the day break on the Nile.' Once on the ground, he began a long, painstaking grilling of soldiers and officials about the desert campaign, the army and its commanders.

All that he saw and heard confirmed his instincts back in London. Ever since 1939, visitors to Egypt had been dismayed by the lassitude pervading the nexus of headquarters, camps, villas, hotels and clubs that lay along the Nile. An air of self-indulgent imperialism, of a kind that confirmed the worst prejudices of Aneurin Bevan, persisted even in the midst of a war of national survival. ‘
Old Miles
[Lampson, British ambassador to Egypt] leads a completely peacetime existence, a satrap,' wrote Oliver Harvey scornfully. ‘He does no work at all.' The habits and complacency of peacetime also prevailed in many military messes. In 1941 Averell Harriman, no ascetic, was shocked by the indolence and luxury he saw around him on his first visit to Cairo. A year later, too many gentlemen still held sway over too few players. The former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, passing through Egypt, perceived a ‘lackadaisical' attitude to the war which was ‘painful'. Auchinleck had repeatedly disappointed Churchill's hopes. The good soldiers in the Middle East were tired. A staff officer wrote from Egypt in July 1942: ‘
There seem to me
to be too many people at home who have had no war—through
no fault of their own—and too many people out here who have had too much war.'

The desert army continued to suffer grave technical and tactical deficiencies. The cavalry ethos still dominated armoured operations, despite the frequent failures of British tanks' attempts to destroy German ones. ‘The Auk's' formations seemed unable to master the Afrika Korps' art of using anti-tank guns to stop British armour before committing its own Panzers. The shoddiness of British industrial production was exposed when home-built tanks were offloaded in Egypt. Their bolts proved to have been only hand-tightened at the factories, and most had been inadequately packed and loaded for ocean passage. Weeks of labour were necessary in the workshops of the Nile Delta before armoured vehicles were fit for action. American Grant tanks, which now equipped some British armoured units, mounted a 75mm sponson gun capable of destroying German Panzers, but were otherwise outmatched by them. New Shermans were still in transit from the US.

Auchinleck's troops had been outfought again and again. British defeats in 1940-41 had been attributable to circumstances beyond commanders' control: pre-war neglect, lack of air support and German superiority. The failures of late 1941 and 1942, however, reflected culpable weaknesses. The two ablest airmen in Cairo, Arthur Tedder and ‘Maori' Coningham, talked frankly to Churchill and Brooke about their perceptions of the army's shortcomings. Colonel Ian Jacob noted in his diary during the Cairo visit that there had been ‘
far too many cases
of units surrendering in circumstances in which in the last war they would have fought it out…The discipline of the Army is no longer what it used to be…There is lacking in this war the strong incentive of a national cause. Nothing concentrate has replaced the old motto “For King and Country”. The aims set before the people…are negative, and it still does not seem to have been brought home…that it is a war for their own existence.' War correspondent Alan Moorehead agreed: ‘
In the Middle East there was
, in August, a general and growing feeling [among the troops] that something was being held back from them, that they were being asked to fight for a cause
which the leaders did not find vital enough to state clearly. It's simply no good telling the average soldier that he is fighting for victory, for his country, for the sake of duty. He knows all that. And now he is asking, “For what sort of victory? For what sort of a post-war country? For my duty to what goal in life?” '

If this was indeed true—and Moorehead knew the desert army intimately—then the prime minister himself deserved some of the blame. It was he who, despite the urgings of ministers, refused to address himself to ‘war aims', a post-war vision. Instead, he held out to British soldiers the promise of martial glory, writing to Clementine from Cairo: ‘
I intend to see every
important unit in this army, both back and front, and make them feel the vast consequences which depend upon them and the superb honours which may be theirs.' In supposing such things to represent plausible or adequate incitements for citizen soldiers, Churchill was almost certainly mistaken. But it was not in his nature to understand that most men cared more about their prospects in a future beyond war than about ribbons and laurels to be acquired during the fighting of it.

In Churchill's eyes the first priority in Egypt was, as usual, to identify new commanders. By 6 August he had made up his mind to sack Auchinleck.
The general received his dismissal
ungraciously, and harboured bitterness for the rest of his life. Dill blamed Churchill for the Middle East C-in-C's failure, claiming that the prime minister ‘had ruined Auchinleck…he had dwarfed him just as he dwarfs and reduces others around him'. This charge says more about Dill's limitations, as a shop steward for unsuccessful British generals, than about the prime minister's. Of course Churchill had harried Auchinleck. It has been suggested above that the general's failure in part reflected institutional weaknesses in the British Army. But ‘the Auk' had been the man in charge through a succession of operations abysmally conducted by subordinates of his choice. British failure to defeat the Afrika Korps at Gazala in May-June 1942 reflected gross command incompetence. It was surely right to dismiss Auchinleck.

Churchill's first impulsive thought for his replacement was Alan Brooke. The CIGS was much moved by the proposal, but wisely and
selflessly rejected it. He perceived himself as indispensable at the War Office—and he was right. The prime minister's next choice was Lt. Gen. William ‘Strafer' Gott, who had gained a reputation for dashing leadership from the front, but in whom Brooke lacked confidence. Since 1939 the prime minister had been convinced that Britain's armed forces lacked leaders with fire in their bellies, and had sought to appoint to high command proven warriors, heroes. In this he was often mistaken. Steely professionalism was needed, rather than conspicuous personal courage. There is something in the observation of the Russian writer who asserts that ‘Courage often proves to be the best part of the man who possesses it.'Many of Churchill's favourite warriors lacked intellect. In 1940 he had elevated Admiral Sir Roger Keyes to become Director of Combined Operations. Keyes had conceit and a talent for bombast, but was otherwise quite unfit for his post, as Churchill was obliged to recognise the following year. Keyes's replacement, Mountbatten, caught Churchill's imagination by his exploits at sea. But the Royal Navy deemed ‘Dickie' an indifferent destroyer flotilla leader, and admirals were disgusted that glamour, fluency and royal connections secured his meteoric promotion. Freyburg failed in Crete. Another Churchillian favourite, Maj. Gen. Sir Edward Spears, was responsible for many difficulties in relations with the Free French, especially in his role as senior British representative in Syria.

In 1942, Churchill chose Admiral Sir Henry Harwood to succeed Andrew Cunningham as naval C-in-C Mediterranean. Harwood had won the prime minister's approval by leading his cruiser squadron in the December 1939 Battle of the River Plate against the pocket battleship
Graf Spee
, but for all his undoubted courage he was a notoriously stupid officer whose removal soon became necessary. Yet Churchill's enthusiasm for naval heroes remained undiminished. When Dudley Pound died in September 1943, Churchill wanted Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser to replace him as First Sea Lord. Naval officers thought Fraser dim, but Churchill perceived him as a fighter. When the navy instead insisted on Cunningham, who had often locked horns with the prime minister, Churchill said petulantly: ‘
All right. You can have
your Cunningham, but if the Admiralty don't
do as they are told I will bring down the Board in ruins even if it means my coming down with it.'

Gott was yet another officer who commended himself to the prime minister because he had made a name as a thruster, yet it is most unlikely that he was competent to command Eighth Army. Fate intervened. En route to Cairo to receive his appointment, Gott's plane was shot down and he was killed. Instead Brooke's nominee, Sir Bernard Montgomery, was summoned from a corps command in England to head Eighth Army. Churchill had met Montgomery on visits to his units, and was impressed by his forceful personality, if not by his boorish conceit. But in accepting his appointment to the desert, the prime minister was overwhelmingly dependent on the CIGS's judgement. Gen. Sir Harold Alexander, a brave, charming but unassertive Guardsman who had recently presided over the British retreat from Burma, was appointed C-in-C Middle East. The prime minister, who found ‘Alex' congenial and reassuring, expected him to play a far more important role in shaping future operations than Montgomery. Several senior subordinate officers were also earmarked for sacking and replacement.

Having set in motion wholesale change at the top, Churchill departed from Cairo on the most taxing stage of this epic excursion. He was to meet the Soviet Union's warlord, and deliver the unwelcome news that the Western Allies had determined against launching a Second Front in 1942. After a brief stopover in Tehran, on 12 August he made a 10
¹
/
₂
-hour flight to Moscow, accompanied by his personal staff and Averell Harriman. A few hours after landing, Churchill was summoned to the Kremlin. He asked Harriman to accompany him: ‘I feel things would be easier if we all seemed to be together. I have a somewhat raw job.'

In truth, and as surprisingly few historians show recognition of, Stalin was already aware of all that Churchill feared to tell him. Whitehall and Washington were alike deeply penetrated by communist sympathisers. Among the most prominent, John Cairncross served as Lord Hankey's private secretary, with access to war cabinet
papers until Hankey's sacking in 1942, when he was transferred to Bletchley Park. Anthony Blunt served in MI5, while Guy Burgess and Kim Philby worked for SIS. Donald Maclean had access to key Foreign Office material, especially concerning research on the atomic bomb. In the US government—which was anyway lax about securing its secrets from the Russians—Harry Dexter White worked for Henry Morgenthau, Nathan Silvermaster for the Board of Economic Warfare, Alger Hiss for the State Department. Harry Hopkins talked with surprising freedom, though surely not ill intent, to a key NKVD agent in the United States. Throughout the war, a mass of British and US government reports, minutes and decrypted Axis messages was passed to Moscow by such people, through their controllers in London and Washington. As a result, before every Allied summit the Russians were vastly better informed about Anglo-American military intentions, than vice versa. So much material reached Stalin from London that he rejected some of it as disinformation, plants by cunning agents of Churchill. When Kim Philby of SIS told his NKVD handler that Britain was conducting no secret intelligence operations in the Soviet Union, Stalin dismissed this assertion with the contempt he deemed it to deserve. Molotov and Lavrenti Beria, the Soviet intelligence and secret police chief, frequently concealed from their leader accurate intelligence which they believed would anger him.