Finest Years (63 page)

It was unquestionably vital for the Allies to sustain contact between the free world and the occupied countries. The BBC's broadcasts in
many languages kept alight candles of hope which played a moving and critical role in the lives of millions of people enduring tyranny. There remains no doubt of the merits of dispatching agents to gather intelligence, contact anti-German groups, establish networks and assist escaping Allied personnel. In 1944-45, partisans were often useful as guides and intelligence sources for the advancing Allied forces, but this was a marginal activity.

The important question about SOE concerns the wisdom of its military policies. To the end of the war, while the chiefs of staff were eager for resistance to ‘make a mess', as one SOE officer in occupied France interpreted his orders, no coherent strategy was promulgated, based on a realistic assessment of what guerrillas might hope to achieve. Though useful work was done in France after D-Day, attacks on communications and German garrisons almost invariably hurt local populations more than the enemy. What else could have been expected?

The British chiefs of staff in 1944 urged that local resisters should be warned against provoking pitched battles with the Germans. Maj. Gen. Colin Gubbins, military head of SOE, was formally rebuked when a bloody uprising took place in Slovakia, because his organisation appeared to have defied its orders and promoted it.

But the high command was thus attempting belatedly to reverse the policy pursued by SOE, strongly encouraged by the prime minister, since 1940. Nor did Churchill share the generals' scruples. For instance, at a 27 January 1944 meeting with the air chiefs, the Minister of Economic Warfare, Ismay and others, he expressed the desire to promote large-scale clashes between the French Resistance and the Germans. ‘
He wished and believed
it possible to bring about a situation in the whole area between the Rhone and the Italian frontier comparable to the situation in Yugoslavia. Brave and desperate men could cause the most acute embarrassment to the enemy and it was right that we should do all in our power to foster so valuable an aid to Allied strategy.' On 22 April, Churchill was urging on the chiefs of staff Operation
Caliph
, a scheme to land some thousands of British troops on the coast near Bordeaux
simultaneously with D-Day. There was, he wrote, ‘a chance of a surprise descent into a population eager to revolt'.

Though
Caliph
was never executed, Churchill was still eager to incite guerrillas to strike wholesale at the Germans. A million Yugoslavs died in strife which he explicitly sought to replicate in southern France. Popular revolts, of which the last took place in Prague in May 1945, cost many lives to little useful purpose. Mark Mazower has written: ‘
Only in the USSR
did German counter-terror fail.' Churchill's grand vision for revolt by the oppressed peoples of Europe was heroic, but could play no rightful part in industrialised war against a ruthless occupier. Deliverance relied upon great armies.

Any judgement on Resistance must weigh the balance between moral benefit and human cost, acknowledging that the military achievement was small. Colonel Dick Barry, chief of staff to Gubbins, admitted afterwards: ‘
It was only just worth it
.' The French people, for instance, took pride in the FFI's flamboyant demonstration when they took to the streets of Paris as the Germans retreated in August 1944. But the German decision to quit the capital was quite uninfluenced by resistance. In Crete in July 1944, against the orders of SOE, local guerrillas embarked upon open attacks which provoked the Germans to execute a thousand innocent civilians, and burn thirty villages. SOE's own historian wrote ruefully: ‘
The game was not worth
pursuing on these terms.'

The most disastrous Resistance epic of all was, of course, the Warsaw rising which began in August 1944. There, Churchill's 1940 vision of an oppressed people breaking forth in revolt against their occupiers was dramatically fulfilled, though SOE did not directly encourage the Polish initiative. But, in the absence of Allied regular forces, the Home Army was comprehensively defeated. The British made much of their attempts, thwarted by Russian intransigence, to parachute arms to the Warsaw Poles.
Gubbins was even
rash enough to urge the chiefs of staff to accede to the urging of the Home Army's leaders that a Polish parachute brigade then in Britain should be dropped to aid the rebels. Even beyond the practical difficulties, it reflected lamentably on Gubbins's professional judgement that he
endorsed such a romantic and futile notion. Parachute-dropped aid from Britain might have assuaged the frustration of Churchill and his people, but could not conceivably have altered the tragic outcome in Warsaw. Large-scale popular uprisings were doomed, unless conducted in concert with the advances of armies, which rendered them strategically irrelevant. The incitement of violent opposition in occupied countries made sense between 1940 and 1942, when every ruthless expedient had to be tried, to avert Allied defeat. But it became irresponsible in 1944-45, when Allied victory was assured.

Among the occupied nations, post-war gratitude to Britain for the promotion of Resistance was often equivocal. De Gaulle, with characteristic gracelessness, expelled SOE personnel from France as soon as he had power to do so. Georgios Papandreou, the Greek exile prime minister, told Harold Macmillan shortly before his country's liberation that the British should not disguise from themselves the fact that their prestige in the Balkans had fallen, while that of the Russians had risen, despite Allied victories in France and Italy: ‘
Moreover, in our desire
to attack the Germans we had roused and armed most dangerous Communist forces in Greece itself.' Churchill's wartime enthusiasm for Resistance was soured in 1944 and thereafter by the triumphs of several communist and nationalist movements in their own countries. They seized power, or in some cases merely attempted to do so, throwing themselves into domestic struggles with greater determination than they had displayed against the Germans.

Towards the end of the war, Jock Colville describes how the controller of BBC European services, former diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick, ‘
gave a damning account
of the inefficacy of both SOE and PWE [Political Warfare Executive], both of which have been loud in self-advertisement'. Kirkpatrick observed that their failures confirmed his own beliefs in the importance of parliamentary scrutiny. Secret mandates rendered SOE and PWE immune from the sceptical oversight their activities would otherwise have received. This is a criticism applicable to most secret intelligence organisations in war or peace, but Kirkpatrick saw enough of SOE to render
his view significant. ‘Special ops' recruited some remarkable men and women, and could claim useful sabotage achievements. But its essential purpose was misconceived. ‘
The occupied nations believed
with passion,' in the words of Sir William Deakin, ‘and fought to construct their secret armies in the interior and exterior Resistance which would play a leading part in the last stage of liberation of their countries. But this was an obsessive dream.'

The educator and historian Thomas Arnold declared sternly in 1842: ‘
If war, carried out
by regular armies under the strictest discipline, is yet a great evil, an irregular partisan warfare is an evil ten times as intolerable…letting loose a multitude of armed men, with none of the obedience and none of the honourable feelings of the soldier.' It may be argued that Arnold's idealised view of warfare was rendered anachronistic by Hitler's tyranny, and by the need to mobilise every possible means of undoing it. Arnold, indeed, qualified his own assertion by saying that if an invader breached the laws of conflict, ‘a guerrilla war against such an invader becomes justifiable'. But nowhere, even in Yugoslavia, did Resistance operations avert the need for regular forces to defeat those of the Nazis. France would not have been liberated one day later had the
maquis
never existed. The case for Resistance, though by no means a negligible one, rests upon its contribution to the historic self-respect of occupied societies, to national legend.

The most baleful consequence of Resistance was that it represented the legitimisation of violent civilian activity in opposition to local regimes, of a kind which has remained a focus of controversy throughout the world ever since. Not only the Germans, but also many citizens of occupied countries, endorsed the view that ‘One man's freedom-fighter is another man's terrorist.' It is useful to recall that such a man as Portal perceived SOE's personnel as terrorists. Though British agents were seldom directly concerned in the more ruthless actions of local groups, it was endemic to the nature of the struggle that partisans armed by London shot prisoners, sometimes wholesale; murdered real or supposed collaborators, and members of rival factions; and often supported themselves through institutionalised
banditry. A precedent was set by the wartime democracies' support for irregular warfare which could never be undone.

It would be an exaggeration to say that SOE enabled dissident elements of several societies to overthrow their traditional social orders. The collapse of the Balkan monarchies was inevitable, cause for lament only to a Victorian sentimentalist such as the prime minister. In Western Europe anti-communist governments, decisively assisted by the presence of Anglo-American armies, were able to prevail in 1944-45. But the impact of SOE's aid to Resistance movements was significantly greater upon post-war societies than on military outcomes in the struggle against the Germans. Churchill came to recognise this.
David Reynolds
notes the remarkable fact that, in the six volumes of his war memoirs, SOE is mentioned only once, in an appendix.‘
“Setting Europe ablaze” had proved
a damp squib,' says the historian. It was fortunate for the peoples of many occupied countries that this was so.

In the fifth year of Britain's war, all those concerned with its direction were desperately tired: ‘
It's not the hard work
, it's the hard worry,' said Robert Bruce Lockhart, head of the Political Warfare Executive. After a ministerial meeting presided over by Churchill, Dalton wrote: ‘I sense that Woolton and a number of the rest are almost completely exhausted.' To the British public the wait for D-Day, decisive milestone in the war in the west, seemed interminable. The Ministry of Information, in one of its regular opinion surveys, described domestic morale in the spring of 1944 as ‘poor', not least because of public apprehension about invasion casualties. ‘
Spirits remain at a low level
,' reported the ministry's monitors on 14 April.

More and more workers flaunted disaffection. Industrial stoppages soared. February found 120,000 miners on unofficial strike in Yorkshire, 100,000 in Wales, and several hundred thousand more elsewhere. Even the president of the miners' union suggested that Trotskyite agitation was playing a part. Miners' strikes abated in April after a reconstruction of wages, but there were also stoppages among gas workers and engineering apprentices. Some 730,000 man-hours were lost in one Scottish aircraft factory. At another firm in August 1944, 419,000 hours were lost when workers rejected a management proposal that women should manufacture textile machinery—the firm's normal business—while men continued to make aircraft components. On 8 April 1944, the British embassy in Washington reported to London about American public opinion: ‘
Considerable disquiet
is being evidenced over general political situation in England.
This has centred mainly round Churchill's demand for a [parliamentary] vote of confidence, through continuing coal and shipyard strikes, alleged evidence of failures of party truce…are being taken as indications that all is by no means well. Press reports give impression that there is deep dissatisfaction over domestic policy and that British public no less than American is apprehensive over apparent lack of Allied unity.'

The British and American peoples would have been even more alarmed had they known of the acrimony which overtook relations between Churchill and his chiefs of staff in the spring of 1944. Ironically, given that the prime minister's interest in the Japanese war was desultory, this was provoked by argument about operations in the Far East. Churchill had become obsessed with the desire to commit all available British forces, including the powerful fleet earmarked to join the Americans in the Pacific, to a ‘Bay of Bengal' strategy for the recapture of Burma and Malaya. He was especially enthusiastic about a prospective landing on Sumatra, to provide a stepping stone. He threatened to impose this plan on the chiefs of staff, against their implacable opposition, by exercising his prerogative as Minister of Defence. On 21 March, Brooke wrote of a meeting with Cunningham and Portal: ‘
We discussed…how best
to deal with Winston's last impossible document. It is full of false statements, false deductions and defective strategy. We cannot accept it as it stands and it would be better if we all three resigned sooner than accept his solution.'

It was a measure of the extravagance of Churchill's behaviour, and of the exhaustion of the chiefs at this time, that they should have discussed resignation in the shadow of D-Day. The prime minister had never visited the Far East, knew nothing of conditions there, and seldom acted wisely in his occasional interventions in a hemisphere where Allied operations were overwhelmingly dominated by the US. In the event, a compromise was fudged. The British projected a campaign against the Japanese, launched from Australia through Borneo. A minor-key version of this was executed by Australian forces in the summer of 1945. Relations between the chiefs
of staff and the prime minister steadied in the weeks following the awful March 1944 meetings as the minds of these strained and weary men focused on the overpowering reality of impending invasion of the Continent.

Churchill's misgivings about
Overlord
persisted until D-Day. Sir Frederick Morgan, the D-Day planner whose rancour was increased by being denied an operational role in the landings, said later: ‘Until the invasion of NW Europe was actually demonstrated to be successful, I believe [the prime minister] had the conviction it could not succeed.' This is an overstatement and oversimplification, but there is no doubt of Churchill's unhappiness about Allied deployments. All through the spring of 1944 he chafed at the inadequate resources, as he perceived it, committed to Italy, and about continuing American insistence upon
Anvil
, the planned Franco-American landing in southern France. Ironically, after so many clashes between Churchill and his chiefs of staff, they were now brought together by opposition to US European strategy. ‘
Difficulties again with
our American friends,' Brooke wrote on 5 April, ‘who still persist in wanting to close down operations in Italy and open new ones in the south of France, just at the most critical moment.' The same day, Churchill minuted the chiefs: ‘The campaign in the Aegean was ruined by stories of decisive battles in Italy. The decisive battles in Italy were ruined by pulling out seven of the best divisions at the critical time for
Overlord
.'

On 19 April he talked of the invasion to Cadogan: ‘
This battle has been forced
upon us by the Russians and the United States military authorities.' The diplomat, who spent some hours that day in meetings with the prime minister, was dismayed by his rambling: ‘I really am fussed about the PM,' he wrote in his diary. ‘He is not the man he was twelve months ago, and I really don't know whether he can carry on.' When the Dominion prime ministers met in London on 1 May to begin a nine-day conference, Canadian premier Mackenzie King joined South Africa's Jan Smuts in paying tribute to Churchill's achievement in having deflected the Americans from a D-Day in 1942 or 1943. Churchill freely avowed to the Dominion leaders that
he himself would have ‘
preferred to roll up
Europe from the southeast, joining hands with the Russians. However, it had proved impossible to persuade the United States to this view. They had been determined at every stage upon the invasion in North-West Europe, and had consistently wanted us to break off the Mediterranean operations.'

The range of problems besetting the prime minister was as daunting as ever, especially when others saw in him the same exhaustion as did Cadogan. ‘
Struck by how very tired
and worn out the prime minister looks now,' wrote Colville on 12 April. Churchill was full of fears about the likely cost of
Overlord
, though he wrote cheerfully to Roosevelt that day, asserting that he did not think losses would be as high as the pessimists predicted: ‘
In my view, it is
the Germans who will suffer very heavy casualties when our band of brothers gets among them.' The prime minister had never liked Montgomery, whose egoism and crassness grated on him. Now he told the War Office that the general must abandon his noisy round of public receptions and civic visits. In particular, Churchill recoiled from Monty's proposal to hold a ‘day of prayer' and to ‘hallow' Britain's armed forces in advance of D-Day at a grand religious service during which the king's coronation regalia would be paraded. Such an occasion, thought Churchill, would be more likely to demoralise the invasion forces than inspire them.

Intelligence warned that Hitler's secret weapons, flying bombs and rockets, would soon start to fall upon Britain. There was continuing difficulty with the Americans about the Free French: Washington refused to concede authority in France to De Gaulle following the invasion. Churchill agreed that it would be prudent to keep the intractable general in Algiers until the last moment before D-Day. He chafed unceasingly abut the stalemate in Italy, both at Anzio and around Monte Cassino. Again and again, Allied forces suffered heavy casualties in assaults frustrated by Kesselring's stubborn defenders. Greek troops and sailors in Egypt mutinied, calling for communist participation in their own leadership. An ugly armed confrontation
took place. Churchill insisted on rejection of the mutineers' demands. The revolt was suppressed after a British officer was killed.

The Foreign Office and service chiefs urged the prime minister to curb his telegraphic bombardment of Roosevelt about strategic issues. Churchill now favoured additional landings on the Atlantic coast simultaneous with
Overlord
. Dill cautioned him on 24 April: ‘The president, as you know, is not military-minded.' Appeals to Roosevelt were simply referred to Marshall, who must be irked by attempts to circumvent him. The British lost an important battle with Washington about pre-invasion bombing of French rail links. Churchill and the war cabinet opposed extensive attacks, which were bound to kill many French civilians. Eisenhower and his staff insisted that a sustained interdiction campaign was essential, to slow the German post-D-Day build-up. Roosevelt and Marshall agreed, and were surely right. The RAF joined the USAAF to mount raids by night and day in the weeks before 6 June, which inflicted damage of critical value to the Allied armies, at the cost of around 15,000 French lives. In the course of the whole war, Allied bombing killed 70,000 French people, against 50,000 British who died at the hands of the Luftwaffe.

Relations with the Russians had grown icy. Moscow accused the British of intriguing against them in Romania. Churchill wrote bleakly to Eden on 8 May: ‘The Russians are drunk with victory, and there is no length they may not go.' In the preceding six months, 191 British ships had carried more than a million tons of weapons and supplies to Russia, at last matching the scale of deliveries to the need. But there was no gratitude from Stalin. Wrangles about Poland persisted. Churchill again urged the London Poles to show themselves less intractable. He perceived how little leverage they possessed, with the Russians on the brink of overrunning their country, and Washington apparently indifferent.

The British won a notable victory that spring by repulsing a Japanese offensive in north-east India, against Imphal and Kohima. This, however, increased tensions with the Americans. They intensified demands for a major offensive into north Burma, to open the
land route into China. Churchill deplored the prospect of a campaign in steaming, fever-ridden jungles, to no purpose that he valued. But, in the absence of US shipping for amphibious landings in South-East Asia, Slim's Fourteenth Army was indeed committed to invade north Burma.

On 14 May there was good news from Italy. Alexander's
Diadem
offensive broke through the German line, a notable contribution being made by General Alphonse Juin's French colonial forces. On the 23rd, the Anglo-Americans launched their breakout from the Anzio perimeter. Churchill urged on Alexander the importance of cutting off Kesselring's retreat, a much more important objective than the seizure of Rome. General Mark Clark disagreed, however. His US Fifth Army drove hard for the Italian capital, diverting only a single division to impede the enemy's withdrawal.
So skilful were German
disengagements, in Italy as later in north-west Europe, that it is unlikely Clark could have stopped Kesselring even had he committed himself wholeheartedly to do so. But he did not. The liberation of Rome on 4 June prompted celebration among the Allied nations for a symbolic victory, but its strategic significance was small. As everybody concerned from the prime minister downwards should have perceived, the Italian capital was a mere geographical location. Kesselring was once more able to establish a defensive line. The Italian campaign continued as it had begun, in frustration and disappointment for its commanders and above all for its principal sponsor, Winston Churchill.

The prime minister seems quite wrong to have supposed that the Allied cause would have profited from an increased Italian commitment in 1944. For all Churchill's personal enthusiasm for Alexander, the Guardsman was an inadequate commander whose chief virtue was that he worked amicably with the Americans, as Montgomery did not. He seldom pressed a point, because he rarely had one to make. The terrain of Italy favoured the defence, which Kesselring conducted brilliantly. It was right for the Allies to take Sicily in July 1943, right to land and fight in Italy two months later. It was essential, once committed, to sustain a limited campaign there until 1945.
But the Americans were correct, first to insist upon
Overlord
, then to accord its interests overwhelming priority. It is hard to believe that the forces later diverted to Operation
Anvil
would have achieved commensurate results if they had been retained in Italy. The Germans were too good, the battlefield unsuited to Allied purposes. Moreover, with the northern French rail net wrecked by bombing, Marseilles later proved a vital logistics hub for all of Eisenhower's armies, a channel for 40 per cent of their supplies up to December 1944.

The prime minister thus expended capital in a struggle with Washington that he was bound to lose, and deserved to. He might have fared better in some of his trials of strength with the US in 1944 had he not chosen to challenge his ally on so many fronts. On 4 June, following the news of Rome's fall, he cabled Roosevelt: ‘
How magnificently
your troops have fought. I hear that relations are admirable between our own armies in every rank there, and here certainly it is an absolute brotherhood.' It is necessary for great men at great moments to say such things to each other, but Churchill's rhetoric stretched truth to its limits. The American journalist John Gunther put the matter more realistically when he wrote in a contemporary book about
Overlord
: ‘
Lots of Americans and British
have an atavistic dislike of one another.'

The best that can be said about Anglo-American relations in 1944—and it is a very important best—is that at operational level, the two nations' armed forces worked adequately together. The men on the spot knew it was vital that it should be so. The Americans liked some senior British officers—Portal, Tedder, Morgan, Montgomery's chief of staff De Guingand—even if they found it hard to relate to others such as Brooke. Cunningham, for the Royal Navy, observed that he found it easier to get along with America's soldiers than with her sailors, above all the glowering chief of naval operations, King. The US admiral never forgave the British for rejecting a request for the loan of an aircraft-carrier for Pacific operations at a desperate moment in 1942, after the Americans had several times made their own ‘flat-tops' available to support British purposes in the west. But if it is acknowledged that all alliance relationships are profoundly
difficult, there remains much cause for admiration and gratitude for the manner in which US and British armed forces made common cause between 1942 and 1945. Eisenhower, who privately liked the British a good deal less than his geniality caused them to suppose, deserved much of the credit.