The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (390 page)

No pretender had earned, as Churchill had since 1940, the wide public respect and popularity needed to assume command in wartime. With criticism coming at him from the Commons and the press, Churchill “resolved to yield nothing to any quarter.” He had three unassailable advantages, and he knew it. In 1940 and 1941 he had shown himself the guardian of the national will; unlike Chamberlain, he loved the House of Commons and held sacred that body’s place in English life; and though he had critics, he had no rival who could best him in the hearts of Englishmen. Years later, Brian Gardner, Fleet Street veteran and historian, wrote, “Most Britons were prepared to go on waging war with the man they knew, whom many loved, in the siren suit, with the cigar, the V-sign, and the grin. His removal would have been resented. The House of Commons knew this, and most members acted accordingly.”
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The attack against Churchill was led by the Labour MP Aneurin (“Nye”) Bevan, a forty-four-year-old hard-drinking product of the North Wales coalfields, and a speaker whose oratory was as tempestuous and cutting as the gales that raced down the Snowdon Massif. He managed
The Tribune,
a left-wing sheet begun by Stafford Cripps five years earlier, which, on the twenty-third, went after Churchill, and went to the nub of the problem as Bevan saw it: “The question is beginning to arise in the minds of many: is he [Churchill] as good a war maker as he is a speech maker?”
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Beaverbrook, who pollinated his newspapers with young, up-and-coming left-wing intellectuals, had mentored Bevan in the 1930s. But for Bevan’s lack of ruthlessness, Beaverbrook believed he might have emerged as the Lenin of England, although Beaverbrook also claimed Bevan had become enthralled “with the pleasure of high living,” which diverted him from a more pure-Leninist path. Yet, along with Cripps, Bevan had opposed appeasement in the late 1930s and at the time reluctantly saw Churchill as the only alternative (as had Cripps), yet not so much to save the British Empire as to help safeguard the Soviet socialist experiment. This was not patriotism, as Churchill saw it, but the opportunistic championing by the left wing of foreign causes and complex philosophical/political systems of a sort only an intellectual could love. When Colville later wrote that Churchill “hated casuistry,” he had Bevan in mind. While Churchill “considered parliamentary opposition to be the lifeblood of British politics, the form in
which Aneurin Bevan applied it seemed to contribute nothing toward our principal objective, which was to win.” Yet Churchill thought personal animus a waste of time, once telling colleagues in the House, “Such hatred as I have left—and it isn’t much—I would rather reserve for the future than the past.” He called that “a judicious and thrifty disposal of bile.” Churchill enjoyed the company of many of those with whom he disagreed, but he drew the line at Bevan, not because of Bevan’s views but because Churchill doubted his patriotism.
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That, for Churchill, was an unforgivable sin.
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Bevan was the MP for Tredegar, a coal town in the Sirhowy Valley of western Gwent, a place where the local surgeons were kept busy setting the smashed bones of miners and quarrymen, and where the leading causes of death for males were tuberculosis (the Cough) and pneumoconiosis (Black Lung), the disease that killed Bevan’s father. Bevan’s grandfather had forged the iron fences around a cemetery built far outside town in the mid-nineteenth century, a burial ground where every headstone bears the date 1849, for that was the year cholera swept the valley. The North Wales of Bevan’s youth was a place where few over forty had their teeth, where fresh water was so scarce that baths were a rare luxury, and where “cobwebs were used to stop bleeding.” There, the cure for coal dust in the eyes was “a comrade’s lick.” There, in the Ebbw Vale, Bevan early on pledged himself to enlist the government to bring modern medicine to his people. When he spoke to what was in his heart, he did not summon images of distant gathering storms or promise sunlit uplands; he explicated the here and now in words and phrases that crashed down upon listeners like wind-driven hail. Bevan (like Roosevelt and unlike Churchill) spoke to his audiences, not at them. Churchill’s listeners basked in his phrases as if at a great distance from some cosmic power source, but Bevan pummeled his audiences with his words. His thick black hair was usually mussed; he was a tad jowly; and his dark eyes telegraphed anger, determination, and inflexibility. Churchill years later called Bevan “as great a curse to this country in time of peace, as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war.” Yet Bevan had earned the respect of many of his enemies, for there wasn’t a false bone in the man. When he wore a scowl, which he habitually donned in Churchill’s presence, he bore a resemblance to John L. Lewis, a grandson of Wales and himself a product of the coal mines of America. Churchill, when peering at Bevan across the House chamber, saw in the Welshman’s eyes “the fires of implacable hatred.” Indeed, Bevan’s goal, for the rest of his life, was nothing less than the extermination of the Conservative Party.
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Churchill never asked why Bevan—and Bevan’s constituency—so hated
him and his fellow Tories. “He [Churchill] has no gift for getting into other people’s minds,” his doctor later wrote, “sometimes he does not even appear to be interested.” Churchill had promised Britons only victory over Hitler, nothing more. But now they wanted more; they wanted some sort of explanation from Churchill of Tory peace aims, Churchill’s war aims being well known to all. Britons had deduced that with America in, victory was someday assured, and therefore there was no time like the present to begin a discussion of postwar housing and health and Social Security insurance. Churchill, as he had since 1940, considered any public discussion of the postwar world to be ill conceived, as it could only degenerate into a partisan affair. His stance would prove a costly misjudgment in three years, for although Britons loved their warrior Churchill, he refused to tell them which Churchill they’d get in peace, the old Tory or the old Liberal.
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It was the old warrior who showed up in the Commons for three days of debate. The doubters spoke their piece, including John Wardlaw-Milne, Herbert Williams, and Earl Winterton, all Conservatives, and Emanuel (“Manny”) Shinwell, an old Glasgow radical and Red Clydesider, a tough, blunt-spoken patriot who shared at least one trait with Churchill, a loathing of pompous intellectualism. On this day, however, Shinwell shared nothing with Churchill. Harold Nicolson thought Shinwell’s attack on Churchill “vicious.” Randolph, on leave from Cairo, leapt to his father’s defense and attacked “most cruelly” those who had abused his father. Nicolson found Randolph to be “amusing and brave,” yet along with Bob Boothby, Nicolson “harbored a dreadful feeling that Randolph may go too far.” Pamela, in the gallery, “was squirming” as her husband let fly. Yet here was Randolph’s chance to do for his father what was denied Winston by his father’s early death—mount a display of dynastic solidarity. The result, however, was pure Randolph, pure bombast, and gave new meaning to the concept of bully pulpit. Nicolson noted that Churchill himself looked “embarrassed.”

In the end, the father came to the defense of the son after Archibald Southby interrupted Randolph and implied that by virtue of Randolph’s being in London rather than in the Western Desert, he was not a fighting soldier. Churchill afterward chased Southby down in the lobby and, shaking his fist in the MP’s face, shouted, “You called my son a coward. You are my enemy. Do not speak to me.” Randolph, Colville later wrote, was a talented journalist, “a natural orator, an original wit.” He made friends easily but lost them more easily. He was “imaginative and original in his ideas,” but he became “excessively addicted to drink” and regularly turned “inexcusably abusive.” He “squabbled with his father,” but remained devoted to him, as the father did to the son. Southby’s mistake was not only to attack Randolph but to imply that he was not a brave soldier. Randolph was a brave soldier. His experience in the House that day, the jeers
of his peers, and the awakening realization that he would always walk in his father’s shadow, moved him within months to volunteer for the newly formed Special Air Service and still later to volunteer for an extremely dangerous mission—to parachute into the mountains of Yugoslavia in order to fight alongside Tito’s partisans. Randolph, as did his father before him, chose to earn his country’s respect on the battlefield, or die trying.
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The following day Churchill wound up the debate with what Nicolson thought a “very genial and self-confident” address wherein he congratulated his opponents on their adroit speechifying. But the engaging and conciliatory Churchill gave way in his peroration to the emphatic: “I make no apologies. I offer no excuses. I make no promises. In no way have I mitigated the… impending misfortunes that hang over us.” He ended with an avowal of his certainty in final victory. With that, he said he was finished. Nicolson had already concluded two days earlier that “it is clear there really is no opposition at all.” The Old Man insisted on a division—a vote. The bells were rung summoning members into the voting lobbies. The final tally: 423–1 in support of the government, with James Maxton, another old Red Clydesider, the lone dissenter. Bevan abstained. Dozens more could not vote; they were overseas, in uniform.
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Though badly misjudging the mood of both the public and the House, Bevan increased his attacks.
The Tribune
let loose on January 30: “It would be an excellent thing for Mr. Churchill to make certain changes in his team, but it would be a profound mistake to suppose that from this alone any fundamental improvement would result…. This is no National Government and Churchill is no National Leader. He struts in that guise but in fact he insists that the war shall be conducted in accordance with the principles of the Tory Party. The British Empire is finished. Nothing can save it. Who wants to? Not the millions who suffered under it. They rejoice to see it go…. We shall need a different spirit than the one which breathed through the speech of the last Imperial spokesman—Winston Spencer Churchill.”
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A
s Harold Nicolson exited the vote of confidence debate on the twenty-ninth, he stopped at the electronic ticker in the lobby, where he learned from the uncoiling stream of paper that “the Germans claim to have entered Benghazi.” Randolph Churchill was there and told Nicolson that only half of Rommel’s reinforcements had reached Africa, a spot of good news among all the bad, had it been true. In fact, all of Rommel’s supplies had gotten through, including sixty new panzers.
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It had been just over a week since Rommel—his forces newly christened Panzer Army Africa—probed outward from his lines at El Agheila, near the Tripolitania frontier. That Rommel could even contemplate an offensive was due to Churchill’s Asian strategy. When Churchill stripped away Auchinleck’s men and matériel in hopes of saving Malaya, he dashed all prospects of the Eighth Army crushing Rommel. Of greater significance, in combination with the ongoing ravishing of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, the attrition of Auchinleck’s forces threw into question his ability to defend against Rommel. In fact, Auchinleck’s Operation Crusader had been destined to stall before it began, by events that took place ten weeks earlier, at sea. On November 12 the aircraft carrier HMS
Ark Royal,
returning home from ferrying planes to Malta, was torpedoed twenty-five miles from Gibraltar. Only one crewman perished and more than 1,500 survived, a ready-made crew for another carrier, but no new carriers were on hand. Two weeks later, the battleship HMS
Barham
was torpedoed off Tripoli.
Barham
and more than 800 men of the crew went down so quickly that the U-boat commander who had shot her assumed the battleship had escaped when just moments later he raised his periscope to survey the scene and beheld an empty sea.

Within days, with no jubilant announcement of the sinking coming out of Berlin, the British realized the Germans did not know
Barham
was gone. Churchill of course knew, but he sat on the news until after the vote of confidence. Then, on December 19, Churchill learned that six Italian frogmen riding atop miniature submersibles (he called them “human torpedoes”) had penetrated the Royal Navy anchorage at Alexandria and affixed mines to the battleships
Queen Elizabeth
(with Admiral Andrew Cunningham on board) and
Valiant.
The frogmen were captured, but not before the two largest ships in the eastern Mediterranean, their keels ripped apart, settled into the mud, useless hulks. The news was kept from the British people for six months. Churchill and the press had for more than a year denigrated Italian seamanship.
Time
ran a photo taken from astern of several Italian destroyers with the caption: “The British usually see them this way.” Yet the Italians, with much help from Stukas based in Sicily, had by late December reduced the entire British eastern Mediterranean fleet to a few destroyers and light cruisers.
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