The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (308 page)

For almost a decade Churchill had drummed warnings to his countrymen that this day would come. Three hundred years earlier, during the English Civil War, both the Royalist and Parliamentary armies introduced drummers into their ranks. They went into battle unarmed and beat out coded orders that could be heard over the crash of muskets and cannon:
form up, face right, left, volley.
The drummers were not meant to inspire or comfort their comrades, or to introduce confusion and fear into enemy ranks, yet within the blinding stinking smoke and bloody mayhem of combat, their relentless, rhythmic,
tap
and
thrum
did just that. Where the drummers of England went, Empire followed. Rudyard Kipling glorified
them in “The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” in which the courage of two young regimental drummers inspires the regiment, which, on the verge of annihilation at the hands of Afghan tribesmen, regroups, attacks, and at the end of the slaughter claims victory.

Churchill’s heroes—Pitt, Marlborough, Nelson—had not only led, they had inspired. Winston Churchill was prepared now to step forward as England’s master and commander, and its drummer. But were his King and countrymen ready for him? Would Britons join him when the Hun arrived, and fight alongside him to the end? Were they prepared, each and all, to die in defense of family, home, King, and country? Churchill was. He had readied himself for this moment during every hour of every day for six decades, when he first sent his toy armies charging across the floors of his father’s London town house.

The glorious weather held. Lilacs—in English folklore the harbingers of springtime rebirth—bloomed across the land. “Lovely day,” Alexander Cadogan noted in his diary hours before Hitler gave his order to attack. “Tulips almost at their best and everything smiling, except human affairs.”

Cadogan, a Chamberlain loyalist, by then knew that the Chamberlain government was finished. “But
what,
” he asked his diary, “are we going to put in its place?” Who would lead? “Attlee? Sinclair? Sam Hoare?”

He eliminated one candidate out of hand: “Winston useless.”
⁹⁵

S
hortly after tea on Friday, May 10, fifteen hours after Hitler drove his steel into the Low Countries, Neville Chamberlain reluctantly returned the seals of his office to King George VI, who received them with equal reluctance: “I accepted his resignation,” the sovereign wrote in his diary that evening, “& told him how grossly, unfairly I thought he had been treated.” Shortly after six o’clock, the King anointed as prime minister the massive, stooped, sixty-five-year-old first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. Later King George became one of Churchill’s most ardent admirers, but his feelings were mixed at the time. In his diary that day Jock Colville wrote that the King “(remembering perhaps the abdication, which Churchill had opposed) is understood not to wish to send for Winston.” Nevertheless, an all-party government was essential, and Labour had been adamant: they would not serve under Chamberlain.
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Defending Britain and her Empire would be the new prime minister’s responsibility for the next five years, or until he was hurled from office by Parliament or Hitler. Yet, as he rode back from Buckingham Palace, neither he nor anyone else in London felt unduly alarmed over the course of the war. Little was known that evening about the day’s developments across the Channel. The Luftwaffe had bombed airfields in Belgium and Holland; parachute troops had landed among the Belgians, who were said to be fighting well; Dutch resistance was reportedly “stubborn”; and the Allies were taking up strong positions on the Antwerp-Namur Line, preparing to defend the Albert Kanaal. Everything was going as expected, or so it seemed at that hour.
²

When the BBC announced Churchill’s appointment that night, his daughter Mary, seventeen, listened to the broadcast in the small cottage at Chartwell where her governess lived. When it finished she switched off the wireless and said a prayer for her father.
³

Churchill was surrounded by his family, whether at No. 10 or in the underground Annexe. Of the older Churchill children, only Sarah, the actress, was still a civilian, living with her husband in a Westminster Gardens flat, and soon she too would be commissioned in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Sarah’s husband, Vic Oliver, Austrian by birth, the son of Baron Viktor Oliver von Samek, had renounced his barony, changed
the “k” in Viktor to “c,” and was now an American citizen. Churchill, upon first meeting Oliver in 1936, took an immediate dislike to the man, and in a letter to Clementine cut loose. Oliver was “common as dirt,” possessed “a horrible mouth,” and spoke with “an Austro-Yankee drawl.” Yet no mention was made of the one trait which many in the English aristocracy would have found sufficient to dismiss Vic Oliver outright: his family was Jewish. It would not have occurred to Churchill to do so. He measured the man.
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Of the other children, Diana and Randolph were already officers, she in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, or Wrens in naval slang), Randolph in his father’s old regiment, the 4th Hussars. Mary worked in a canteen and for the Red Cross and lived with her parents. So did Randolph’s twenty-year-old wife, Pamela, who was expecting their first child in October. When the air raids began with June’s full moon, Pamela and her father-in-law shared bunk beds in the basement of No. 10. Because she was pregnant, hers was the bottom bunk, and in the early hours of each morning she woke to hear Churchill laboriously climb the short ladder to his. Clementine slept in another basement bedroom.
⁵

As prime minister, Churchill was also surrounded by a large official family, “The Secret Circle,” as he called them. Always at his elbow were his three private secretaries, John (“Jock”) Colville, who remained at No. 10 after Chamberlain’s departure, and Eric Seal and John Martin, whom Churchill had brought over from the Admiralty. Also within earshot were his typists, Kathleen Hill, Grace Hamblin, and Edith Watson, who had aided every P.M. since Lloyd George. Pug Ismay served as his liaison with His Majesty’s Chiefs of Staff, whose offices were in Richmond Terrace: the chiefs were Admiral Sir Alfred Dudley Pound, General Sir John Dill, and Air Marshal Sir Cyril Newall. Colville told his diary that Churchill considered the three chiefs to be “sound, but old and slow.” Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal replaced Newall in October.
⁶

A recent arrival at No. 10 was Dr. Charles Wilson, the P.M.’s personal physician, who kept a diary from the day of his appointment. On first meeting the doctor, Churchill treated him as he did all underlings, with a mixture of curtness and impatience. Dr. Wilson had found Churchill in bed, at noon, reading papers, which he continued to peruse as Wilson stood nearby, waiting for some acknowledgment. Finally, from Churchill: “I don’t know why they’re making such a fuss.” Churchill snarled, “There’s nothing wrong with me.” That was true enough, for the doctor makes no further diary entries for the remainder of the year.
⁷

Churchill hadn’t wanted a doctor; he claimed that there was nothing wrong with him. Churchill’s old friend Max Beaverbrook insisted, however, and no one could insist more strenuously than “the Beaver,” as everyone called him. That was why Churchill had named him chief of aircraft
production. England had to have planes for the coming air battle. In pursuit of a vital goal, the Beaver was ruthless, unscrupulous, even piratical. He seized factories, broke into warehouses, and imprisoned those who tried to stop him. None of this was against the law. On May 22, Parliament had passed an Emergency Powers (Defence) Act giving His Majesty’s Government sweeping prerogatives. One section, 18B, effectively removed the
habeas
from
habeas corpus.
HMG held absolute power over all British citizens, requiring them “to place themselves, their services, and their property at the disposal of His Majesty,” specifically of the minister of defence, who happened also to be the prime minister. Churchill could have become a dictator had he so chosen. Instead he became almost obsessive in his belief that the House should be fully informed of all developments.
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Among the other newcomers to HMG were three Churchill votaries—“the fearsome triumvirate,” Colville called them—whom the civil servants had awaited with dread: Brendan Bracken, MP; Frederick Lindemann (“the Prof”); and Major Desmond Morton, a Westerham neighbor of Churchill who had played a vital role in Churchill’s prewar intelligence net, assembling proof of England’s military unpreparedness. But Morton lacked access to the most vital intelligence, from Bletchley. Within a year Morton’s star began to set, since Churchill, informed by Bletchley, no longer needed his own private secret service, and Morton apparently did not provide enough panache at the dinner table to rate a regular weekend dinner invitation. Churchill’s friendships admitted to a certain degree of utilitarian relativity, though for the time being Morton’s past loyalty trumped his diminishing utility. Bracken had long been Churchill’s most devout supporter in the House of Commons. He was also a very odd young man who, to Clementine’s annoyance, had in the 1920s encouraged rumors that he was Churchill’s natural son (he ceased doing so at Churchill’s request). The Prof was even odder. German born, educated at Berlin University, a bachelor and vegetarian, he believed that all women looked upon him as a sex object. But he was a brilliant physicist and a consummate interpreter of science for laymen. He was to become the strongest advocate for the unrestricted bombing and burning of the cities of his homeland.
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Churchill, his family, his colleagues, and his cronies were prepared to meet whatever came their way via Berlin. If Britons were not yet prepared, Churchill intended that they soon would be.

I
t is impossible to exaggerate the influence of World War I on the opening battles of World War II. Afterward, Churchill wrote that it was “a joke in
Britain to say that the War Office is always preparing for the last war.” That was also true of soldiers, and it was equally true of statesmen—even the Führer was preoccupied with the trench fighting of 1914–1918. Churchill was no exception. During the Great War he had learned certain precepts of modern warfare, including one of immense significance: tactical breakthroughs were impossible, because whenever a position was in peril, it could be swiftly reinforced. The continuous front had never broken. And another lesson learned: nothing in that war had happened quickly.
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In the current war,
everything
was happening quickly—too quickly—and none of it good. German panzers were smashing all the old strategic and tactical paradigms. Britain’s survival depended upon finding the weaknesses in the Nazi strategy, and then exploiting them. This would be Churchill’s ultimate problem. His immediate problem was political: Conservative MPs, who held 432 of the 607 seats in the House, dominated Parliament. The source of this problem lay in the country’s last general election, five years earlier. Misled by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who had assured Parliament that England’s defenses were more than adequate, Britain had elected a House of Commons top-heavy with irreconcilable pacifists and die-hard appeasers. Since then, the country’s mood had turned 180 degrees, but in their hearts, the Conservative majority remained loyal to the memory of Baldwin and the disastrous policies of Neville Chamberlain, even though they had led England to this fearful pass.

The new P.M., though a Tory himself, had been their gadfly throughout the 1930s, a vehement opponent of their “Splendid Isolation,” which they defined as “a plea for the detachment of Britain from Continental quarrels.” Again and again he had warned of the Nazi menace, demanding larger defense budgets. The fact that subsequent events had proven him right and them wrong did not endear him to them. An embittered R. A. (“Rab”) Butler (an appeaser and Chamberlain loyalist) called Churchill “a half-breed American” and “the greatest adventurer in modern political history.” That Friday, the tenth, Butler denounced “this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble.” Another Conservative MP wrote Stanley Baldwin—who had described Churchill as part of “the flotsam and jetsam of political drift thrown up on the beach”—that “the Tories don’t trust Winston. After the first clash of war is over it may well be that a sounder Government may emerge.” A civil servant noted, “There seems to be some inclination in Whitehall to believe that Winston will be a complete failure and that Neville will return.” The pacifist editor Max Plowman wrote: “Perhaps Winston will win the war. Perhaps he won’t. How anybody could
expect
him to, I don’t know, in view of his unparalleled record in losing everything he puts his hand to.”
¹¹

The permanent secretariat at No. 10 Downing Street, who knew Churchill only as a critic of his predecessors, despaired. For as long as the private secretaries there could remember, Baldwin or Chamberlain had been in power. They were mostly Tories themselves, young gentlemen working in what had been, until then, a comfortable private home, where everything went smoothly and quietly, with messengers summoned at the tinkle of a bell, clean towels and ivory brushes in the cloakroom, and everything, as one of them put it, “reminding the inhabitants that they were working at the very heart of a great empire, in which haste was undignified and any quiver of the upper lip unacceptable.” Everything about Churchill’s reputation horrified them. Jock Colville wrote in his diary that Churchill’s rise “is a terrible risk, and I cannot help feeling that this country may be manoeuvred into the most dangerous position it has ever been in.” Later Colville recalled that “in May 1940 the mere thought of Churchill as Prime Minister sends a cold chill down the spines of the staff at No. 10 Downing Street…. Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment so dubious of the choice & so prepared to have its doubts justified.” Quite apart from the fortunes of war, already darkening England’s prospects for survival, Churchill’s government was being launched in very rough political waters.
¹²

They swiftly calmed. “Within a fortnight,” Colville wrote, “all was changed.” Churchill arrived on the scene like a summer squall at a sailboat regatta. Whitehall was galvanized, and the office at No. 10 was pandemonium. Bells were ringing constantly, telephones of various colors were being installed in every nook at No. 10, and the new prime minister was attaching maroon labels demanding “Action This Day” or green ones saying “Report in Three Days” to an endless stream of directives that were being dictated to typists in the Cabinet Room, the P.M.’s bedroom, and even his bathroom, with replies expected within minutes. Ministers, generals, and senior civil servants appeared and departed within minutes. Working hours began early each morning and ended after midnight. “The pace became frantic,” another private secretary, John Martin, recalled. “We realized we were at war.”
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Chamberlain had been cold and orderly; Churchill, John Martin recalled, was “a human dynamo.” In the words of Sir Ian Jacob: “His pugnacious spirit demanded constant action. The enemy must be assailed continuously: the Germans must be made to ‘bleed and burn.’ ” Churchill appointed himself his own minister of defence, thereby assuring that he himself, working through Major General Ismay, would manage the Chiefs of Staff, conducting the war day by day, even hour by hour. Yet Churchill always took care to pass his wishes to the generals through Ismay, whose “loyalty to his seniors and juniors was absolute” such that,
in turn, he was never shy about telling Churchill just what the generals and their Joint Planning Staff thought of his suggestions—often, not much, which led Churchill to call the JPS “the whole machinery of negation.” Ismay’s loyalty to Churchill did not insulate him from prime ministerial outbursts any more than did the allegiance of others on the Old Man’s staff. After one contentious meeting with the Chiefs of Staff, he let loose on the “pusillanimity and negative attitude” displayed by the chiefs, “and you are one of the worst,” he declared to the indignant Ismay. After another unsatisfactory meeting with his COS and Ismay, Churchill told Colville, “I am obliged to wage modern warfare with ancient weapons.”
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