The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (269 page)

Slowly the Admiralty came to realize that while the first lord might be dissuaded from this or that, he never lost because he never quit; his mind had many tracks, and if one was blocked, he left it and turned to another, the very existence of which was unknown until he chose to reveal it. Admiral Fraser, the flag officer responsible for naval construction, later wrote how Winston stunned him by asking him point-blank: “Well, Admiral, what is the navy doing about RDF?” Fraser was tongue-tied. Radar was the most closely guarded secret in the British military establishment, roughly comparable to America’s Manhattan Project three years later. “A number of able officers were working on the problem,” Fraser later wrote, “but to make any real progress a high degree of priority—especially in finance—was essential.”
⁵¹

Fully developed RDF had been a casualty of Chamberlain’s cuts in military spending. England should have had a long lead with this extraordinary defensive weapon; Englishmen had discovered and perfected it, and Zossen didn’t even know it existed. Yet not a single vessel in the Royal Navy had been equipped with it. After a long silence Churchill said, “Well, Admiral, it is very important,” and later sent Fraser an instruction that all British warships, particularly “those engaged in the U-boat fighting,” be provided “with this distinguishing apparatus.” Fraser wondered how Churchill, a backbencher until the day England declared war on Germany, had heard about RDF. His bewilderment would have deepened had he known that Winston’s knowledge of radar dated from July 25, 1935—within twenty-four hours of Robert Watson-Watt’s completion of experiments proving that the distance and direction of approaching aircraft could be pinpointed by using radio waves.
⁵²

If all the views of Churchill’s months at the Admiralty are pooled—Winston seen in the letters, diaries, memoirs, and recollections of those who worked under him then and were close enough to reach informed judgments—a striking portrait emerges. It is distorted as Picasso’s
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
is distorted, complex and defying proportion but recognizable as the powerful image of an emerging warlord. The approval or disapproval of the witnesses is essentially irrelevant. They see him differently because he is different to each, possessing a plural, kaleidoscopic personality. His guise depends upon the man confronting him, and what he wants that man to see.

The first sea lord outranks the others and is closest to him. His admiration for Churchill is almost unqualified. No one in the Royal Navy can launch a direct attack on the first lord because Sir Dudley Pound, a great sailor and a man of absolute integrity, will deflect the blow. Pound’s loyalty is reinforced by the first lord’s popularity in the fleet. Captain S. W. Roskill, the distinguished naval historian, challenges this popularity, noting that “There was not one Admiral in an important sea command… whom Churchill, sometimes with Pound’s support, did not attempt to have relieved.” But admirals are not the fleet. Below decks, support for the first lord is strong. The ratings admire a fighter; they have heard of his concern for their welfare, which is genuine, and see him as a stimulating, inspiring first lord. Winston’s constituency, then, is solidly behind him.
⁵³

He needs that support because a warlord, by definition, is a man with enemies. His natural aggression, curbed in peacetime, a stigma only a year earlier, is now a virtue. He cannot compromise, nor should he. Leaders in battle are guided less by reason than by instinct. He has always distrusted Eamon de Valera, and now in the War Cabinet he proposes that England reclaim her former bases in Eire, by force if necessary. Even Pound knows that the navy has no use for the bases and can easily deny them to the Germans. Churchill is wrong. Nevertheless, Englishmen approve, remembering:
Churchill stood up to the IRA
. Sir Andrew Cunningham, the RN’s Mediterranean commander in chief, protests the first lord’s repeated interference in tactical issues, telling him not only what to do, but how to do it. Commanders in chief in other theaters have the same grievance but wisely remain silent. Cunningham wins little sympathy in England.
Churchill has shown him who’s in charge
. Winston has issued an order—“Plan R”—for strengthening the defenses at Scapa Flow. Contracts are signed. Nothing happens. He issues a general order to the Admiralty, reminding all hands of the time lag since Plan R was approved, and asks: “What, in fact, has been done since? How many blockships sunk? How many nets made? How many men have been in work for how many days? What buildings have been erected? What gun sites have been concreted and prepared? What progress has been made with the run-ways of the aerodrome? I thought we settled two months ago to have a weekly report…. Up to the present I share the Commander-in-Chief’s anxieties about the slow progress of this indispensable work.”
⁵⁴

That is on a Monday. On Tuesday Scapa is a hive of construction activity. R. D. Oliver, the officer responsible for Plan R, recalls: “With his backing it was amazing how bureaucratic obstruction melted.” The impression:
Churchill gets things done
.
⁵⁵

In the House of Commons he consistently overstates the number of Nazi U-boats destroyed. His old adversaries make much of that, but this is war; facts are its first casualties. Leaders exaggerate the enemy’s losses and inflate their own triumphs. To do otherwise would be interpreted, in the eyes of his people and his foes, as a sign of weakness. Donald McLachan, who understands this, writes afterward: “The First Lord had a morale role to play. The Navy was the only Service which was fully engaged at the time; it must not be discouraged by too rigorous a method of assessing ‘kills’; it was essential that the nation should have some sense of action and success and achievement; and the only material that was readily available at that time came from the U-boat war. It was essential to make the most of what was happening [though] in the process truth suffered.” Significantly, in less than a year the RAF will play faster and looser with
its
kill figures, but its records will go virtually unchallenged. There is no Churchill at the Air Ministry to incite critics.
⁵⁶

Nevertheless Churchill is disqualified, by temperament, from waging an effective campaign against U-boats. He has known from the beginning that if Britain loses the duel with Nazi submarines she cannot survive. The high priority he gives to converting trawlers into antisub vessels and his emphasis on destroyer production will contribute to the Admiralty’s eventual success. The difficulty is that all this is
defensive
, and he is comfortable only when carrying the war to the enemy. He overrates the asdic. Worse, he withdraws destroyers from convoys to form “hunting groups” or “attacking groups,” directing them to seek and destroy U-boats. This is “aggressive,” he argues; convoy duty, on the other hand, is “passive.” He minutes to Pound—who agrees—that “Nothing can be more important in the anti-submarine war than to try to obtain an independent flotilla which could work like a cavalry division.” He is dead wrong; weakening convoys to permit offensive sweeps fails on both counts—no U-boats are sunk, and their elusive commanders, seizing opportunities while the destroyers are looking for them elsewhere, penetrate convoys with alarming results. Yet Churchill will stick to his “hunt ’em down” strategy after he becomes prime minister. Not until 1942, when the effectiveness of the convoy strategy has been demonstrated beyond all doubt, does he accept it without reservation.
⁵⁷

Meetings of the full cabinet, the War Cabinet, and the Land Forces Committee engage him in frequent and often lengthy colloquies with men against whom he has been waging parliamentary guerrilla warfare for the better part of a decade. He bears no grudges—“The only man I hate is Hitler,” he says, “and that’s professional”—but some of his adversaries are less generous. Although the year since Munich should have humbled them, humility is a rare virtue among men of this class, especially at this time. Sam Hoare was first lord in 1936 and 1937; he cannot evade some of the responsibility for the neglect of Scapa’s defenses, without which Lieutenant Commander Prien’s feat would have been impossible. Yet if Hoare has ever suffered a pang of guilt, no one has heard him acknowledge it. In the first days of the war he
was
heard describing Churchill as “an old man who easily gets tired,” a judgment which would startle those at the Admiralty trying to match the old man’s pace. According to John Reith, whom Chamberlain brings into the government as minister of information, the prime minister says Churchill’s reputation is “inflated,” largely “based on broadcasts.” Reith, who would have prevented those broadcasts if Winston hadn’t been a minister, agrees, and notes in his diary that there is “no doubt” about how the P.M. “feels about Churchill.” Early in the war Hoare tells Beaverbrook that at meetings Winston is “very rhetorical, very emotional, and, most of all, very reminiscent.” Actually, the Cabinet Papers show that Churchill, like everyone else at the time, is trying to understand what is happening in Poland.
⁵⁸

S
o the word appears in
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary
, presented as a term borrowed from the German. The anonymous journalist who first used it in an English periodical clearly agreed. “In the opening stage of the war,” he wrote in the October 7, 1939, issue of
War Illustrated
, “all eyes were turned on Poland, where the German military machine was engaged in
Blitz-Krieg
—lightning war—with a view to ending it as soon as possible.” In fact, the term “lightning war,” like the concept itself, was of British origin. The bloody stalemate of 1914–1918 had bred pacifism and isolationism among civilians. Professional soldiers—and one statesman, Churchill—agreed that a reprise of trench warfare, with its adumbrations of stalemate and lethal attrition, was unthinkable.

They doubted, however, that it could be abolished; like Plato they believed that only the dead have seen the end of war. Therefore, men like Major General J. F. C. Fuller and Captain Basil Liddell Hart, searching for an alternative, studied Great War engagements in which tanks had been used successfully. Working out the theoretical possibilities of a totally mechanized offensive, they evolved the doctrine of mobile warfare, combining tanks and tactical aircraft. Commenting on the Wehrmacht’s Polish campaign Liddell Hart wrote: “When the theory had been originally developed, in Britain, its action had been depicted in terms of the play of ‘lightning.’ From now on, aptly but ironically, it came into worldwide currency under the title of ‘Blitzkrieg’—the German rendering.”
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It might also have been christened
guerre d’éclairs
, for in Paris Colonel Charles de Gaulle, working independently, as always, had reached the same conclusion: “
la fluidité
” would be imperative on battlefields of the future and must be achieved, for “the sword is the axis of the world.” But neither England nor France was interested in military innovation between the wars. Victors rarely are. Professional soldiers are wedded to tradition and resent change; politicians and the public flinch at the prospect of slaughter.
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The Conseil Supérieur had dismissed de Gaulle as an eccentric; Fuller, who had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way, was forced into early retirement; Liddell Hart was regarded as an entertaining writer with beguiling but impractical ideas.

Colonel Heinz Guderian, an enthusiastic reader of Fuller and Liddell Hart, was luckier. In the years before the Republic of Germany became the Third Reich, Guderian’s superiors, like their fellow generals in England and France, were skeptical of mobile warfare. But he was among the ablest officers in the Reichswehr, the Wehrmacht’s precursor, and so they threw him a sop—command of an armored battalion. He had no tanks, only automobiles with canvas superstructures identified by cardboard signs,
PANZER
or
PANZERWAGEN
, and aircraft had to be imagined. Then came Hitler. Like Churchill, the new Reich chancellor was fascinated by technical innovation. He first visited army maneuvers in the spring of 1933, and while other spectators were amused by Guderian’s performance, Hitler instantly grasped its possibilities. He cried: “That’s what I need! That’s what I want!”
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Later Goebbels tried—with considerable success—to convince the world that every German division invading Poland was armored. Actually only nine were; the other forty-seven comprised familiar, foot-slogging infantrymen, wearing the same coal-scuttle helmets, the same field gray uniforms, and equipped much as their fathers had been on the Somme, in Flanders, and in the Argonne. That does not slight them; the Führer’s soldiers were the best fighting men in Europe, and their morale was now at fever pitch. But it was the panzers which were terrifying. Each of Guderian’s divisions was self-contained, comprising two tank regiments, self-propelled guns, and supporting units—engineers, reconnaissance companies, antitank and antiaircraft batteries, signalmen, and a regiment of infantry—transported on trucks or armored half-tracks. The Poles prayed for rain; commentators talked about “General Mud,” as though World War II might be called off because of bad weather. But God wasn’t riding at the Poles’ stirrups that golden month. In 1870 and 1914 men in spiked helmets had talked of
Kaiserwetter
. Now it was
Hitlerwetter
, and Guderian’s men found the dry, rolling plains of Poland ideal for maneuver.