Finest Years (78 page)

Smuts said, more than two years earlier: ‘
Winston's mind has a stop
in it at the end of the war.' Churchill grumbled: ‘
I do not believe in this
brave new world…Tell me any good in any new thing.' Even had he won the election, the great conflict with which he would be inseparably identified for the rest of human history had barely three weeks to run. The nugatory military decisions still at the discretion of a British national leader could exercise little influence upon the manner in which its final operations were conducted. Thereafter, while Churchill might have enjoyed retaining the trappings of power, as all prime ministers do, he was quite unsuited to address the challenges of peace. Isaiah Berlin wrote: ‘
Churchill sees history
—and life—as a great Renaissance pageant: when he thinks of France or Italy, Germany or the Low Countries, Russia, India, Africa, the Arab lands, he sees vivid historical images—something between Victorian illustrations in a child's book of history and the great procession painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi Palace…No man has ever loved life more vehemently and infused so much of it into everyone and everything that he has touched.'

Yet by July 1945 the British people hungered for simpler and more immediate things. They had played their parts in the most terrible global drama in history. Now they were eager to quit the stage, to address themselves to their own private and social purposes, which Churchill only dimly understood, and was unsuited to assist them to fulfil. Alexandre Dumas wrote: ‘
Il existe des services si grands par qu'ils peuvent se payer que l'ingratitude
.' The electorate had performed a service to Churchill, as well as to itself, by parting company with its great war leader when there was no more war for him to lead. He was profoundly glad for his nation that its struggle was approaching a conclusion, but deeply grieved for himself. At noon on 27 July he held his final cabinet—‘a pretty grim affair', in Eden's words:

After it was over
I was on my way to the front door when W. called me back and we had half an hour alone. He was pretty wretched, poor old boy. Said he didn't feel any more reconciled this morning, on the contrary it hurt more, like a wound which becomes more painful after the first shock. He couldn't help feeling his treatment had been scurvy. ‘Thirty years of my life have been passed in this room. I shall never sit in it again. You will, but I shall not,' with more to the same effect.

As he left Chequers after a final weekend with his family and intimates, he wrote in its visitors' book: ‘FINIS'. Three weeks later, on 15 August, Japan's surrender brought an end to the Second World War.

Churchill had wielded more power than any other British prime minister had known, or would know again. In 1938 he seemed a man out of his time, a patrician imperialist whose vision was rooted in Britain's Victorian past. By 1945, while this remained true, and goes far to explain his own disappointments, it had not prevented him from becoming the greatest war leader his country had ever known, a statesman whose name rang across the world like that of no other Englishman in history. Himself believing Britain great, for one last brief season he was able to make her so. To an extraordinary degree, what he achieved between 1940 and 1945 defined the nation's self-image even into the twenty-first century.

His achievement was to exercise the privileges of a dictator without casting off the mantle of a democrat. Ismay once found him bemoaning the bother of preparing a speech for the House of Commons, and obviously apprehensive about its reception. The soldier said emolliently: ‘
Why don't you tell them
to go to hell?' Churchill turned in a flash: ‘You should not say those things: I am the servant of the House.' General Sikorski remarked at Chequers that the prime minister was a dictator chosen by the people. Churchill corrected him: ‘
No, I am a privileged
domestic, a
valet de chambre
, the servant of the House of Commons.' It should be a source of
wonder and pride, that such a man led Britain through the war, more than half-believing this. It was entirely appropriate that he led a coalition government, for he was never a party man. He existed,
sui generis
, outside the framework of conventional politics, and never seemed any more comfortable with the Conservative Party than was it with him. A.G. Gardiner wrote of Churchill back in 1914: ‘
He would no more think
of consulting a party than the chauffeur would of consulting the motor car.' The same was true in 1945.

As for Churchill's war direction, it is not difficult to identify his strategic errors and misplaced enthusiasms. Anatole France wrote, ‘
Après la bataille, c'est l`a que triomphent les tacticiens
.' Yet the outcome justified all. The defining fact of Churchill's leadership was Britain's emergence from the Second World War among the victors. This, most of his own people acknowledged. No warlord, no commander, in history has failed to make mistakes: as Tedder observed, ‘War is organised confusion.' It is as easy to catalogue the mistakes of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon as those of Churchill. Both Britain's most distinguished earlier war leaders, Pitt the Elder and Younger, were responsible for graver strategic follies than himself.

Historians and biographers have a duty to present evidence for the prosecution, to identify blunders and shortcomings. But before the jury retires, it is necessary to strip away nugatory matter, and focus upon essentials. Churchill towers over the war, standing higher than any other single human being at the head of the forces of light, as many Americans recognised. Mark Sullivan wrote in the
New York Herald Tribune
on 11 May 1945: ‘Churchill's greatness is unexcelled…Churchill's part in this world war reduces the classic figures of Rome and Greece to the relatively inconsequent stature of actors in dramas of minor scope…Churchill was the fighting leader, and his own poet.' Anyone who attempts the difficult feat of imagining British wartime history deprived of his presence will find it sadly shrunken in stature. Even Brooke was once moved to complain: ‘
dull cabinet without PM
'. To an extraordinary degree, one man raised his nation far above the place in the Grand Alliance which its contribution in troops, tanks, ships, planes could have justified from 1943 onwards.
It must be mistaken to assess Churchill's war leadership in isolation. When it is measured against that of Roosevelt or Stalin, not to mention Hitler, Mussolini or Tojo, his failures and shortcomings shrink dramatically. No honourable course of action existed which could have averted his nation's bankruptcy and exhaustion in 1945, nor its eclipse from world power amid the new primacy of the United States and Russia.

Churchill possessed the ability, through his oratory, to invest with majesty the deeds and even failures of mortal men. More than any other national leader in history, and aided by the power of broadcast communications, he caused words to become not mere assertions of fact or expressions of intent, but acts of governance. ‘
His countrymen have come
to feel that he is saying what they would like to say for themselves if they knew how,' wrote Moran. ‘…Perhaps for the first time in his life, he seems to see things through the eyes of the average man. He still says what he is feeling at the moment, but now it turns out that he is speaking for the nation.'

In reality, as this book has sought to show, Churchill did not command the respect and trust of all the British people all of the time. But he empowered millions to look beyond the havoc of the battlefield, the squalor of their domestic circumstances amid privation and bombardment, and to perceive a higher purpose in their struggles and sacrifices. This was, of course, of greater importance in averting defeat in 1940-41 than later, when the Allies were able to commit superior masses of men and material to securing victory. Churchill's rhetoric has played a significant part in causing the struggle against Hitler to be perceived by posterity as ‘the good war'. He explained the struggle as no one else could, in terms mankind could comprehend and relate to, now as then. Even most American historians, when chronicling the wartime era, are more generous in their use of quotations from the words of Winston Churchill than from those of their own president, Franklin Roosevelt.

He cherished aspirations which often proved greater than his nation was capable of fulfilling. This, too, has been among the principal themes of this narrative. But it seems inconsistent to applaud
his defiance of reason in insisting that Britain must fight on in June 1940, and then to denounce the extravagance of his later demands upon the nation and its armed forces. The service chiefs often deplored his misjudgements and intemperance. Yet his instinct for war was far more highly developed than their own. If they were often right in pleading that the time was not ripe to fight, left to their own devices they would have been intolerably slow to fight at all. While Brooke was an officer of remarkable qualities, like many soldiers he was a limited human being. He deluded himself in claiming, as he did after the conflict, that Western strategy had evolved in accordance with his own conception. While this may have been so in 1942-43, thereafter the European war was brought to a conclusion in consequence of Soviet exertions aided by American supplies, with significant assistance from the strategic air offensive and Eisenhower's armies. In the west, major military operations—which means the north-west Europe campaign—conformed to an American design, to which the foremost British contribution was to delay the invasion of the Continent until conditions were overwhelmingly favourable.

Britain produced few outstanding military commanders in the Second World War, a reflection of the institutional debility of the British Army which also afflicted its tactics, choice of weapons, and battlefield performance. The Royal Navy was Britain's finest fighting service of the war, its performance tarnished only by the limitations of the Fleet Air Arm. The Royal Air Force also made an outstanding contribution, but like the USAAF it suffered from the obsessive reluctance of its higher commanders to subordinate their independent strategic ambitions to the interests of naval and ground operations.

It is often and justly remarked that Churchill enjoyed war. He revered heroes. Yet away from the battlefield, he seldom found such men congenial companions. Few generals are highly cultured men or notable conversationalists, capable of illuminating a conference room or dinner table to Churchill's standard. In his peacetime life, even after the two world wars, old warhorses played little part. Many people supposed that he himself would have coveted a Victoria Cross.
This was surely true in his youth. But when his daughter Mary asked in his old age whether he felt that anything was missing from his wondrous array of laurels, he said nothing of medals, but instead answered slowly: ‘
I should have liked
my father to have lived long enough to see that I made something of my life.'

During the war years, his commanders far more often disappointed his hopes than fulfilled them. He was forever searching for great captains, Marlboroughs and Wellingtons, yet towards the end he grew impatient even with Alexander, his unworthy favourite. He valued both Brooke and Montgomery, but never warmed to them, save as instruments of his will. Neither the British Army nor its chieftains fulfilled his soaring warrior ideal, and it was never plausible that they should. Much of the story of Churchill and the Second World War is of Britain's leader seeking from his nation's torpid military culture greater things than it was capable of achieving. He inspired it to accomplish more than it dreamed possible in June 1940, but never as much as he wanted. Such is the nature of the relationship between many great leaders and their peoples, who know themselves mortal clay. Had Britain—or America—produced legions of warriors such as those of wartime Germany and Japan, they would have ceased to be the kind of liberal democracies the war was fought to preserve.

If Churchill's rhetoric and personality had been less remarkable, if he himself had not been so lovable, some of his military decisions might have been more harshly judged both by his contemporaries and by posterity. As it was, he was able to weave spells in the House of Commons and in his writings, which deflected even the best-merited criticisms. The only charge against him which stuck with the public, and lost him the general election of 1945, derived from his indifference to forging a new society. Moran wrote in 1943: ‘With Winston war is an end in itself rather than a means to an end.' The British people understood his indifference to humdrum domestic issues, and thus acted as sensibly in evicting Churchill from Downing Street in 1945 as they had done by supporting his installation there in 1940.

Macmillan was at least half right in asserting that only Churchill could have secured the commitment of American power to the
Mediterranean and Europe in the year following Pearl Harbor. Without his personal influence, the lure of the Pacific might have proved irresistible to Roosevelt and his chiefs of staff. If the Americans in 1944-45 came to regret their engagement in the Mediterranean, in 1942-43 it is impossible to perceive how else the Western Allied armies could have played their part in fighting Hitler's armies.

There is an inescapable pathos about Churchill's predicament in the last year of the war, because almost all his ambitions were frustrated, save for victory over the Axis. His engagement with armies became almost exclusively that of a tourist, because he could no longer much influence their movements. For such a mighty warrior, this was a source of unhappiness. The limits to his powers of negotiation with Roosevelt and Stalin were set by economic and strategic realities. But he accomplished the little that a British leader could.

Churchill's view of the British Empire and its peoples was unenlightened by comparison with that of America's president, or even by the standards of his time. This must be set in the balance against his huge virtues. He excluded brown and black peoples from his personal vision of freedom. Yet almost all of us are discriminatory, not necessarily racially, in the manner and degree in which we focus our finite stores of compassion. In this as in many other things, Churchill displayed mortal fallibility. Most great national leaders are cold men, as Roosevelt ultimately was, for all his capacity to simulate warmth. Churchill, despite monumental egoism, displayed a human sympathy that was none the less impressive because he often neglected intimates and servants, and failed to extend his charity to imperial subject races.