The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (350 page)

O
ther than by air, Churchill could not take the battle directly to Hitler, but he could take it to him indirectly. The previous summer he had approved a proposal to finance and arm those brave enough among the conquered peoples to rise up against their Nazi jailers, to resist by any
means and with any weapon. He encouraged those who were too fearful to strike at the enemy; many listened, and in time many fought. During the Battle of Britain he had ordered Ismay to create a force of “specially trained troops of the hunter class” to bring a “reign of terror” to Nazi positions along the European coasts, at first with a strategy of “butcher and bolt,” to be followed in time with the storming and reducing of “Hun garrisons” while “leaving a trail of German corpses behind.” It was to be a dirty but necessary business.
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At the time, Hugh Dalton, minister for economic warfare, which included covert “black” propaganda (lies and misinformation), argued the need “to organize movements in enemy-occupied territory comparable to the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland, to the Chinese Guerillas now operating against Japan… or—one might as well admit it—to the organizations which the Nazis themselves have developed so remarkably in almost every country in the world.” A socialist, Dalton called his proposed organization the “democratic international.” It would employ tactics such as “industrial and military sabotage, labour agitation and strikes, continuous propaganda, terrorist acts against traitors and German leaders, boycotts and riots.” It was clear to Dalton that such an organization must operate “entirely independent” of ordinary departmental or cabinet rules and supervision, including the War Office. In essence, he proposed to Halifax an organizational structure of the sort Americans decades later termed “stand alone and off the shelf.” Not only would this special unit function without oversight, but in Dalton’s estimation, the success of its future operations depended on “a certain fanatical enthusiasm.”
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Churchill heartily embraced the scheme. If fanaticism proved necessary in the battle against Hitlerism, then let the mayhem commence. If it did not prove effective, Dalton and his socialist friends could take the blame. In July 1940 Churchill summoned Dalton to join him and the “usual nocturnal visitors”—the Prof and Bracken—to work things up. Over dinner and drinks Churchill asked Dalton to head “a new instrument of war,” the Special Operations Executive (SOE). It was exactly the organization Dalton had proposed to Halifax, and it would engage in exactly the sort of murderous raids Churchill had proposed to Ismay. Churchill termed it the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” The meeting over, Churchill sent Dalton off with a final command: “And now, set Europe ablaze.”
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Though that phrase has long been cited as an example of Churchill’s determination to smite Hitler, Dalton’s biographer, Ben Pimlott, points out the sad irony of the utterance, given the obvious military weakness of Britain at the time. Many within Churchill’s circle did not share Dalton’s enthusiasm. The Foreign Office was keener on avoiding trouble in Europe than on stirring it up; deceiving friends and neutrals would someday lead
to repercussions. And, later in the year, soon after taking over the Ministry of Information, Brendan Bracken, long a political enemy of Dalton, unleashed his own campaign of ungentlemanly rumors directed at the SOE and Dalton. Bracken sought to discredit the SOE in order to merge the “black” propaganda conducted by the SOE into the Ministry of Information, which produced “white” (largely truthful) propaganda. It was a turf war plain and simple. Rumors flourished. Within certain circles the SOE was said to be “infested with crackpots, communists, and homosexuals.” T. E. Lawrence, it was whispered around Whitehall, would have given his approval to this “cult of intimate friendship with peasant partisans.”
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General Auchinleck and Air Marshal Portal had complained to Churchill that the section of SOE that dealt in agitation and subterfuge (versus intelligence) was “a bogus, irresponsible, corrupt show.” However unseemly it might appear to refined gentlemen such as Auchinleck and Portal, if assassins could bloody the Nazis, Churchill was all for them. Dalton set up his secret shop in Baker Street.
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Whenever they were captured by the Nazis, Dalton’s saboteurs and resistance fighters and their families paid a terrible price. Reports of Nazi reprisals against those who defied them arrived daily in Whitehall. When Polish patriots murdered an ethnic German, the Gestapo seized 160 hostages and shot seventeen. Death was the penalty for singing the Polish national anthem. Death was the penalty for two Norwegian trade unionists who had the temerity to speak publicly of fair labor practices. Eighteen Dutch resistance fighters sang their national anthem on the way to their execution. To remind the Dutch that they were not forgotten, British bombers dropped thousands of pounds of tea in two-ounce tea bags with a message: “Greetings from the Free Netherlands Indies. Keep a good heart. Holland will rise again.” With the creation of SOE, Churchill came up with something far more lethal than a barrage of tea leaves to help the Dutch—all Europeans—to rise again. To that end, the SOE during the next four years inserted almost five hundred agents, including sixty women (thirteen of whom would be tortured and killed by the Gestapo), behind enemy lines throughout the Continent. If women could spy and if need be kill, Churchill wanted them out there spying and killing. Churchill’s SOE agents became—in modern special-forces terminology—force multipliers, sent with his blessing to train the locals, to organize mass mayhem, to spy, and to kill those who needed killing.
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HMG could not of course disclose any of this to Britons. Churchill’s relationship with Britons was based on the trust he asked them to place in him, and the symbolism he gave in return. During 1941 he had not much else to give but inspiring words, somber poses, and his most inspired gesture of all, the “V” for victory. The “V campaign” began in January when
Victor de Laveleye, a Belgian refugee and head of the BBC Belgian section, made shortwave radio broadcasts from London in which he urged Belgians—who had been scrawling “RAF” on sidewalks and walls—to show their defiance of the Germans by marking the letter “V” in public places. The symbol caught on. In French it stood for
Victorie
(victory); in Flemish (the second major language in Belgium),
Vrijheid
(freedom); in Dutch it stood for
Vryheid
(freedom); in Serbian,
Vitestvo
(heroism); in Czech,
Vite zstoi
(victory). However, with predictable arrogance and astounding stupidity, the Nazis also adopted the symbol. Berlin radio claimed credit for the campaign, noting that the “V”—for
victoria,
the Latin word for “victory”—showed up wherever Germans went in Europe. Indeed it did, but by trying to appropriate the “V” as their own, the Nazis backed themselves into a corner: German soldiers could do nothing but smile and return the salute whenever a Belgian, Dutchman, or Frenchman proffered it. In July, a “Colonel Britton” (the broadcaster Douglas Ritchie) broadcast on the BBC a message from Churchill to occupied Europeans: “It is dark now. Darkness is your chance. Put up your ‘V’ as a member of this vast army. Do it in the daytime too.” They did. In short order, whenever Churchill flashed the “V,” flashbulbs popped. The symbol merged with his bulldog snarl into a single defiant entity. For the remainder of his life, he raised it on any occasion of national duress or personal ordeal.
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To his staff’s amusement and chagrin, Churchill, a cigar gripped between his index and middle fingers, often proffered the “V” with his palm facing inward—the British equivalent of the American raised middle finger—instead of giving the proper, palm-outward salute. Whether the nasty or the patriotic “V,” crowds howled with delight, for surely the P.M. was telling Hitler—one way or the other—to bugger off. So powerful was the connection, that had Churchill lost his voice, his two upraised fingers could have done his speaking, without diminution of his message. For the introduction of its nightly overseas programming, the BBC borrowed the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which corresponded to the Morse code designation for “V”—
dot, dot, dot, dash.
Colonel Britton encouraged the people of occupied Europe to tap the signal on wineglasses and coffee cups whenever Germans entered a room. The Germans were powerless to respond; they claimed to have invented the campaign, after all.
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W
hen touring America in 1940, Duff Cooper found that most of the Americans he met held erroneous opinions about Britain. Americans believed the larger Dominions were still colonies of Britain, something like
the thirteen American colonies had been. Virtually every American Cooper met had no idea of the bloodshed that HMG believed would likely result in India between Hindu and Muslim were London to abandon that nation, but Americans were steadfast in their opinion that the British were wrong to be there and should get out. Cooper grew to believe that Britain was losing not only the war in Europe but also the propaganda war in America. Churchill believed he knew Americans. He had written, and Americans had read, numerous magazine pieces, collections of essays, and three great works—his biography of Marlborough, his history of World War One, and his eminently readable account of his youth,
My Early Life.
In 1939 he published a collection of essays,
Step by Step,
that explained how during the 1930s Europe marched toward war. But most Americans did not read books by foreign politicians in order to formulate their political opinions or take a man’s measure. On his earlier journeys to America in the late twenties, Churchill attained a minor celebrity status, drawing audiences of three to five thousand to his big city lectures, a sizable number, particularly at a time when most Americans cared little about faraway events. (Granted, his speeches then were not designed to unmask the risks to humanity of totalitarianism but to sell his books and articles.)
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Churchill’s style, wit, and literary abilities had been well documented in the U.S. press for two decades:
Time
magazine in early 1923 put him on the cover of its seventh issue. By the late 1930s Churchill, an exile within his own party, had been much heard in America, and his words were often prescient. In a 1938
Saturday Evening Post
article he called for a united states of Europe and the jettisoning of European tariffs. And, of course, he predicted the catastrophic violence that had since overtaken Europe. Yet up until December 1941 most Americans, according to Gallup polls, cared neither about the unsavory events in distant lands nor about whether Winston Churchill was correct in his predictions of a new Dark Age. In 1941, Charles Lindbergh filled sports stadiums with tens of thousands who flocked to his isolationist speeches and hissed whenever Lindy mentioned Churchill’s name. Americans grasped a simple truth: If America went to war, their sons would fight, and tens of thousands of them would die.

Churchill might have been half American, but he was all English, and an aristocratic Englishman at that. He put on his pants one leg at a time, but his valet held the pants. He wore a large Breguet pocket watch—the “turnip,” he called it—on a heavy gold chain pulled across his waistcoat, which imparted to him a Daddy Warbucks look, this during a decade when most Americans could afford neither a waistcoat, a gold watch, nor a gold chain to hang it on.
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Churchill’s political genius did not extend to the mind-set of working-class Americans, yet it was their support he needed. His greatest weakness as he sought American help was his history. Until 1940, Americans knew of only Churchill the loose cannon, impetuous, often witty, sometimes spot-on in his predictions, but in the end unreliable. “He was all snakes and ladders during much of his earlier career,” recalled A. J. P. Taylor, “but on the occasions when he climbed the ladder, he’d seem to find a way to snake right back down.” Since becoming prime minister, he had inspired Britain, but Britain teetered still on the edge of the abyss. Given his irregular history, he might prove just the man to administer the final push.
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Time,
in its first issue of January 1941, named the previously unreliable Churchill 1940 Man of the Year. Churchill, the editors declared, shared with Lenin and Hitler a genius for the spoken word. Through their words, these three giants had changed history, two for ill and one, Churchill, for good, but only should he prevail in the current struggle: “He [Churchill] gave his countrymen exactly what he promised them: blood, toil, sweat, tears, and one more thing—untold courage.” Some readers wrote the magazine to express surprise. Churchill as Man of the Year? Why not Hitler? Hitler could lay claim to the prize, not because of the enormity of his misdeeds since 1939 but because Hitler, in the opinion of many Americans, had rebuilt Germany. When the first electric lights in Appalachia were just sputtering into incandescence, the Reichsführer was building his autobahns, a system of futuristic roadways Americans would not see for another generation. Now he was busting up the old order pretty smartly. A New Jersey letter writer said: “If England wins… the world will have lost the opportunity to be governed by the smartest master since the days of Moses.” Though pairing Hitler with the biblical hero who delivered the Jews from tyranny resounds now with terrible irony, many Americans did not consider Hitler—and certainly not the whole of Germany—an enemy. And, Americans wondered, were Britain and Churchill worthy of American aid, or were they imperialists on the brink of defeat, for whom any help would come too late.
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