The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (108 page)

This was the kind of appeal which could rally Liberal, Labour, and Irish Nationalist MPs behind him, and if they united, Lloyd George could be unseated. But Churchill saw a looming issue far greater than the silencing of the press. The United States had just declared war on Germany. Churchill suspected that Haig wanted to win the war before U.S. soldiers could reach France in strength. (He was right; on June 10 Haig wrote in his diary: “There must be no thought of staying our hand until America puts an Army in the field next year.”) Winston asked his cousin Freddie, the government’s chief whip, to propose a secret session of the House. Lloyd George scheduled it for May 10. Asquith’s seniority permitted him to speak first, but he was unprepared; so was everyone else in the Opposition except Churchill, who began by asking: “Is it not obvious that we ought not to squander the remaining armies of France and Britain in precipitate offensives before the American power begins to be felt on the battlefields?” The logic, to him, was inescapable: “We have not got the numerical superiority necessary for a successful offensive. We have no marked artillery preponderance over the enemy. We have not got the numbers of tanks which we need. We have not established superiority in the air. We have discovered neither the mechanical nor the tactical methods of piercing an indefinite succession of fortified lines defended by German troops.” The exigent question, therefore, was: “Shall we then in such circumstances cast away our remaining manpower in desperate efforts on the Western Front before large American forces are marshalled in France? Let the House implore the Prime Minister to use the authority which he wields, and all his personal weight, to prevent the French and British High Commands from dragging each other into fresh bloody and disastrous adventures. Master the U-boat attack. Bring over the American millions, so as to economize French and British lives, and so as to train, increase and perfect our armies and our methods for a decisive effort in a later year.” George’s reply, when he appeared, was evasive—he was already committed to a new attack in Flanders—but Churchill had preyed on doubts already in the prime minister’s mind. As the session ended, the two met fortuitously behind the Speaker’s chair. Churchill later recalled: “In his satisfaction at the course the Debate had taken, he assured me of his determination to have me at his side. From that day, although holding no office, I became to a large extent his colleague. He repeatedly discussed with me every aspect of the war and many of his secret hopes and fears.”
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How deep, Lloyd George asked Beaverbrook in June, did the Tory animosity toward Winston really go? It was still there, Beaverbrook replied, but he thought it could be defied. Office therefore came to Churchill once more on July 17, 1917, when the prime minister appointed him minister of munitions. “Not allowed to make the plans,” he later wrote wryly, “I was set to make the weapons.” The prime minister had confided in no one; everyone, including his closest colleagues, learned of his decision from the newspapers. The reaction was sharp. The secretary for war threatened to resign. The colonial secretary wrote No. 10 that the prospect of facing Winston across the cabinet table made it “extremely difficult for many of my friends to continue their support.” Leo Amery wrote in his diary that bringing Churchill “into the Government has shaken its prestige and reputation seriously,” and Lloyd George agreed; the antagonism, he said in his memoirs, “swelled to the dimensions of a grave ministerial crisis which threatened the life of the Government.” It peaked when forty Tory MPs sailed into Bonar Law’s office to protest. Law, though angry himself, told them that the issue was not strong enough to topple the coalition. Thereafter the danger receded, though resentment remained. Nothing in recent memory had created “such widespread bitterness,” said the
Morning Post,
which, as usual, led the Fleet Street pack, commenting that the appointment “proves that although we have not yet invented the unsinkable ship, we have discovered the unsinkable politician.” The Dardanelles was exhumed, as though the commission had never existed. That debacle, said the
Post
, was “managed more or less personally by Mr Churchill, whose overwhelming conceit led him to imagine he was a Nelson at sea and a Napoleon on land.” More calamities would ensue, the paper predicted: “We confidently anticipate that he will continue to make colossal blunders at the cost of the nation.” The Tory minister Walter Long wrote on July 29, 1917: “The real effect has been to destroy all confidence in Ll. G. It is widely held that for purposes of his own quite apart from the war he has deceived and jockeyed us. The complaints come from our very best supporters, quiet, steady staunch men, and W. C. has made matters worse by stating at Dundee that the opposition comes from his political opponents.”
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It is hard to conceive of where else it could have come from; Churchill, as a new minister, was fighting a by-election in Dundee. But if the uproar in London startled him, as it must have, he showed no scars. C. à C. Repington, the military writer, described him as “looking a different man… I never saw anyone so changed, and to such an advantage, in so short a time.” The return to office was largely responsible for this, but since the spring he had also presided over a happier family. The lease on 33 Eccleston Square having expired, they moved back there. They had also acquired a second home. Clementine had always dreamed of living in “a little country basket,” and Winston had bought a gray-stone cottage in Lullenden, near East Grinstead in Kent, for £6,000, cashing in £5,000 of Pennsylvania Railroad stock and a £1,000 Exchequer war bond. The property had many attractions: a large barn nearby where the children could play, a pony and light carriage for transportation when Churchill had the car in London, landscapes he could paint, and a large high room downstairs where Clementine, pregnant for the fourth time, could nap on lazy summer afternoons and still be within earshot of the nanny. At first they only went down for weekends, but after German air raids on the capital increased, they were there all the time. Winston loved Kent—the coastal country from which the sea retreats in southeastern England—and during his first summer as proprietor he was often in Lullenden, leaving it to campaign fitfully in Dundee. On July 29 he was reelected with a majority 5,266 votes. Two days later he took his seat on the front bench and was greeted, according to
The Times,
“with some cheers.” It was twenty months since he had held office. During the interval 340,973 British soldiers had been killed in action and 804,457 wounded. The missing, mutilated beyond recognition, would be remembered in annual memorial ceremonies as the “unknown.”
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T
he Ministry of Munitions, a small empire employing over twelve thousand civil servants divided into fifty departments, was directed from the fashionable Hotel Metropole in Northumberland Avenue, abutting on Trafalgar Square. Churchill had convened its staff before the votes had been counted in Dundee, and one member, Harold Bellman, later described the meeting in his memoirs. Like everyone else in England, Bellman’s colleagues had decided views about Churchill. They were nervous, they were worried, and many were hostile. “Those who attended from the secretariat,” Bellman wrote, “fully expected a stormy scene.” Winston, he said, “was received rather coldly, and opened by saying that he had perceived that ‘he started at scratch in the popularity stakes.’ He went on boldly to indicate his policy and to outline his proposals for an even swifter production of munitions. As he elaborated his plans the atmosphere changed perceptibly. This was not an apology. It was a challenge. Those who came to curse remained to cheer. The courage and eloquence of the new minister dispelled disaffection and the minister took up his task with a willing staff. It was a personal triumph at a critical juncture.”
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His responsibilities were not limited to guns and ammunition. They included the railroads, airplanes, and tanks. Nor was the mandate confined to British needs. The Americans were building a “bridge of ships” across the Atlantic to transport six U.S. armies—forty-eight divisions—to France. They would need, among other weapons, 12,000 artillery pieces. Churchill quickly established contact with his American counterpart, Bernard Baruch, the chairman of the U.S. War Industries Board, who, when they met later at the peace conference, would become his lifelong friend. Winston signed a £100,000,000 contract and entered into a gentleman’s agreement with Baruch under which Britain agreed to make no profit and the United States promised to make good any loss. In the ministry itself, Winston undertook a massive reorganization. The fifty departments were reduced to twelve, and in conversation and correspondence he referred to each by a letter: finance became “F,” design “D,” projectiles “P,” explosives “X,” and so on. British businessmen were recruited and then governed by what he called a “ ’Clamping’ committee.” He surveyed his new realm with pride. “Instead of struggling through the jungle on foot,” he later wrote, “I rode comfortably on an elephant, whose trunk could pick up a pin or uproot a tree with equal ease, and from whose back a wide scene lay open.”
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In a speech at Bedford he identified his primary objective: the production of “masses of guns, mountains of shells, clouds of airplanes.” Always the total warrior, he was indignant when told that the International Red Cross had proposed outlawing poison gas and that the French were sympathetic. He sharply pointed out that it was after all the Germans who had introduced gas to the battlefield, at Ypres in April 1915. To Louis Loucheur, France’s under secretary of state for munitions, he wrote: “Apparently France is strongly in favour of our offering to give up this form of warfare, or at any rate of accepting a German offer. I do not believe this is to our advantage…. Anyhow I would not trust the German word.” He predicted that the enemy would let the Allies “fall into desuetude” and then break the agreement. Far from banning it, he favored “the greatest possible development of gas-warfare, and of the fullest utilisation of the winds, which favour us so much more than the enemy.” His view prevailed, and he doubled the British output of gas shells; by 1918 one out of every three shells fired by Haig’s artillerymen contained gas. The Red Cross protested that it was inhumane. So, Winston replied, was the rest of the war. No principle was exempt from sacrifice. The Allied Aeroplane Works was strikebound. Churchill simply took over its factories in the name of the government and ignored
The Times
’s comment that there was “no precedent for such a measure.” Munitions workers walked out in Coventry, Manchester, and Birmingham. Lloyd George temporized. Christopher Addison, the previous munitions minister, was among those who breakfasted with Winston to discuss the crisis, and he noted in his diary that Churchill came “out hotfoot against the strikers, his prescription being a simple one, viz., that their exemptions should be withdrawn and that they should be called up for military service. There was considerable demur, with which I agreed, to using the Military Service Act as an agent in an industrial dispute.” But when 300,000 munitions workers threatened to strike in Leeds, Winston persuaded the prime minister to threaten them with conscription. The warning worked, though British labor, which has a long memory and had not forgotten Tonypandy, put another black mark against his name.
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It was Churchill’s energy, efficiency, and imagination which had brought him back to office, and with Eddie Marsh at his elbow, he invigorated a ministry which until now had been grim and dull. Presently countless new projects were flourishing under his direction, and he kept himself informed about all of them by ordering that all reports submitted to him must be “on a single sheet of paper.” During his first eight months in the Metropole he visited France four times, questioning generals on their munitions needs. Often he slept in his office. This, he wrote a friend, “has many conveniences from the point of view of getting work done. It enables me to work up to dinner, and to begin with shorthand assistance as early as I choose in the morning.” He invested his tasks with drama and color. He was, he boasted, “the Nitrate King.” Writing in the
Sunday Pictorial
while still a back-bencher, he had argued that technological innovations could be used as “a substitute for men.” Now he ordered a thousand warplanes, assigned a task force of engineers to improve trench mortars, and, in his spare time, sketched extraordinary Leonardesque machines of war. Most were absurd. Two weren’t: prototypes of the amphibious landing craft and man-made “Mulberry” moorings of World War II. As the father of the tank he gave it priority.
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This, he said, was the surest way to “beat the trench,” to “augment the power of the human hand and shield the sacred chalice of human life.” Its present role was “miniature and experimental,” he wrote, but “the resources are available, the knowledge is available, the result is certain: nothing is lacking except the will.” On the afternoon of January 3, 1916, one of his darker days at Ploegsteert, he had been summoned to Haig’s GHQ, told that the Operations Division of the War Office wanted to explore his concept of a “caterpillar,” and asked “who to apply to in England about them.” Churchill, furious, had written Clementine that evening: “This after 9 months of actual manufacture and committees unending. God, for a month of power & a good shorthand writer.” He had the authority and the staff now, and he set two goals: 4,459 tanks by the spring of 1919 and twice that by the following September. Not everyone approved. The military hierarchy was skeptical. Haig in particular took a jaundiced view of Churchill’s emphasis on armor. “This is done,” he complained in his diary, “without any consideration of the manpower situation and the crews likely to be available to put into them.” But the grumbling in GHQ was predictable. The relationship between the commander in chief and the munitions minister had become dissonant even before Churchill took office, borne only because neither could survive without the other. Even Haig could not ignore Winston’s accomplishments. In another diary entry he wrote warily: “For the time being he is most friendly and is doing all he can to help the Army. He has certainly improved the output of the munitions factories very greatly, and is full of energy in trying to release men for the Army, and replace them by substitutes.” The key phrase, however, is “for the time being.” In the long run, Haig knew, he could expect nothing but trouble from Winston. The new minister had, in fact, become his savage critic.
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