The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (418 page)

He never ceased to express to the Chiefs of Staff both his keen desire to bomb Germany and his suspicion that the effects on German industry were neither “decisive” nor up to the “hypothetical and indefinite” objectives cited by Air Marshal Portal and Bomber Harris. “It is very disputable,” he wrote in a memo to Portal, “whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war.” Yet Churchill had also tried to sell Stalin on the idea that the air war was not only a de facto second front but also an effective second front, a claim that Stalin dismissed (but Eisenhower agreed with, as did Goebbels when the bombs took an increasingly greater toll). At the core of Churchill’s fluctuating beliefs regarding airpower was the unsettling prospect that if airpower did not reduce Germany to ruin, large Anglo-American armies would have to do so. He had long known that armies would have to go ashore someday, but airpower, as seductively portrayed by Portal and Harris, held up the possibility of sparing the troops (although at terrible cost to the air crews). In one of Churchill’s disputatious memos to Portal he argued that even if “all the towns in Germany were rendered largely uninhabitable it does not follow that the military control would be weakened or even that Germany’s war industry could not be carried on.” In fact, Churchill feared Hitler would scatter war production throughout Eastern Europe such that it became independent of events in the Reich, and untouchable.

In the end, his doubts proved justified. German production of tanks, planes, artillery, and submarines increased during each year of the war, and fell off only during the final twelve weeks (although the rate of increase was assuredly slowed by bombing). Churchill saw the inherent contradictions in the arguments put forth by the strategic bombing advocates. On the one hand, pinpoint accuracy (which was unattainable) was not necessary for a reduction in German morale, but it was absolutely necessary if German industry was to be destroyed. He had no choice but to continue the bombing. It
might
erode morale; it
might
smash industrial targets. Whatever the results, British morale would be boosted. Britons were not to be denied their revenge. By war’s end the effort cost Britain almost 11,000 aircraft and 55,000 killed, the Americans more than 8,000 planes and 26,000 killed. As for Spaatz, who later commanded all U.S. air forces in Europe and believed those forces could alone defeat Hitler in 1944, Churchill offered to
Harris that the American was “a man of limited intelligence.” Harris’s reply to Churchill is ironic, given his bomber mania and the slaughter within his RAF ranks: “You pay him too high a compliment.”
³⁷

Neutral nations also thwarted the destruction of German industry. Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, and Spain all carried on robust and profitable trade with Germany, to the ongoing frustration of the Allies. Almost 100 percent of Europe’s wolframite, a tungsten ore critical to the manufacture of armored steel plate, came from the Iberian Peninsula. Half of Portugal’s wolframite went to Germany, a trade policy that resulted in dead Britons. That was one reason Churchill for two years had considered the possibility of taking the Azores by force if Portugal’s dictator, Dr. António Salazar, did not agree to grant Allied ships and aircraft refueling rights in those islands. Were Allied aircraft allowed use of the Azores, the air cover over convoys would effectively double. Salazar continued to play both ends against the middle until late 1943, when—after Churchill threatened to take the islands by force—he finally granted refueling and landing rights to the Allies. When Salazar objected to American troops being stationed in the Azores, Churchill again threatened direct action, cabling Eden, “There is no need for us to be apologetic in dealing with any of these neutrals who hope to get out of Armageddon with no trouble and a good profit.”
³⁸

The neutrals profited handsomely from their relations with Berlin. The Swedes supplied the Reich iron ore, canned fish, and ball bearings. The Swiss sold Hitler arms and ammunition, and industrial diamonds used in cutting tools and bomb fuses. Pressed in early 1943 by the British and Americans to curtail their arms trade with Germany, the Swiss promised to look at their trade practices, and then went on that year to increase shipments to Germany by over 50 percent. The Swedes were stubborn when pressed to limit trade with Germany, wrote Dean Acheson, then an assistant secretary in the State Department, but “the Swiss were the cube of stubbornness.” The neutrals argued that self-preservation drove their trade policies; it did not pay to say no to Germany. Even Franco, a Fascist and hostile neutral who flirted with outright union with the Axis, had to watch his back. To keep him on the fence the Allies continued to send Franco food to feed his people. There were consequences. The American press attacked Churchill as an appeaser after word leaked out of the State Department that he was pondering an offer to Franco to increase food and oil shipments in return for Spain’s making small concessions to Britain, including a reduction in Spain’s sale of wolframite to Germany. Lord Cherwell proposed turning the behavior of neutrals against the Germans. He developed a plan to clandestinely introduce botulin into the canned fish Sweden sold to Germany. “A small amount of it [botulin] would be enough to destroy all mankind,” he later told one of Churchill’s secretaries.
³⁹

An irony attached itself to dealings with neutral nations. The Allies considered German-occupied countries to be legitimate targets of economic and military warfare. The citizens of those nations were therefore doubly victimized—by the Nazis and by RAF bombs, which were no more accurate when dropped on Holland or Norway or France than when dropped on Germany. But neutrals such as Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, and Spain were immune from RAF bombs, immune from the bloodiest consequences of the war. Neutrals might be persuaded by diplomacy to adopt policies acceptable to the Allies, but they could not be cudgeled into good behavior. Meanwhile, they supplied skilled workers, raw materials, machine tools, and bullets that killed American and British soldiers, and banked the profits. Eamon de Valera (whose term for the war was “the Emergency”) was an adroit fence-sitter, dutifully interning both German and British pilots who were forced to land in Ireland (and Americans, too, until an arrangement was made later in the year).

The Swiss allowed Britain to manufacture their deadly efficient Oerlikon 20mm cannon under license but also sold the cannon and ammunition to Berlin. Both Tokyo and Berlin had reached an agreement years earlier with Switzerland to manufacture versions of the gun. Thus, when a Messerschmitt Bf 110 armed with Oerlikon cannons attacked a British frigate, also armed with the anti-aircraft version of the gun, each side found itself shooting at the other with the same Swiss weapon. Only Turkey among the largest neutrals displayed a modicum of moral fortitude, when it risked incurring Hitler’s wrath by suspending shipments of chrome to Germany; but it did so only in mid-1944, when Hitler was on a sure path to destruction and only after a threat of economic blockade by the Allies. Neutral nations could not be persuaded to act reasonably by B-17 bombers; nor could they be punished by B-17s when they did not. If Allied bombers blew one of Hitler’s munitions factories to smithereens, he could bank on the Swiss making up his loss, and the Swedes for the iron to smelt into new cannons. The ring of steel Churchill envisioned around Germany always admitted to a degree of porosity.
⁴⁰

O
n January 11, the same day that Churchill mulled over Tizard’s bombing projections, the
Sunday Dispatch
announced the possibility of “one little bomb that would destroy the whole of Berlin… a bomb that would blast a hole twenty-five miles in diameter and wreck every structure within a hundred miles…. The explosive in this bomb would be the energy contained
in the uranium atom.” HMG saw no need to comment on such a ludicrous example of sensationalist journalism.
⁴¹

Churchill also used the delay on the eleventh to take a first and perfunctory look at a three-hundred-page paper on postwar domestic policy titled “Social Insurance and Allied Services,” produced by Sir William Beveridge, released to Parliament in November and published by the government as a white paper in early December.
^*
The British and American press had been parsing Beveridge’s plan for weeks. Churchill had not; the sheer length of the report argued against his reading it.

Beveridge was Britain’s leading authority on unemployment insurance, master of University College, Oxford, and an old colleague of Churchill’s from his days as a Liberal, when he and Lloyd George had asked Beveridge to prepare the nation’s first comprehensive plan for national insurance. The 1942 paper—the Beveridge Report, as it came to be known—amounted to a manifesto of social reform, which the
Manchester Guardian
called “a great and fine thing.” It outlined a compulsory, flat-rate national program that would address wage loss, maternity care, pensions, disability insurance, housing, education, widows’ benefits, health insurance, funeral expenses—every financial need encountered by Britons from birth to funerary interment. Churchill didn’t like what little he read, not because he opposed the idea of HMG restructuring Britain’s social security apparatus, but because, as he told the War Cabinet, he did not wish to deceive the people “by false hopes and airy visions of Utopia and El Dorado.” Besides, he offered, Britain would be nearly broke after the war, the United States would be a formidable competitor, and Britons would “get very angry if they felt they had been gulled or cheated” by promises made, and then unmade. Yet Beveridge, anticipating Conservative opposition, argued that in a postwar world of reduced tariffs and free markets, a shift of pension and health insurance costs from corporations to the government would make British industry more competitive in world markets.
⁴²

Beveridge convinced some Conservatives but by no means all. Harold Nicolson thought Beveridge took delight in “upsetting governments and wrecking constitutions” with his radical agenda. “He is a vain man,” Nicolson wrote. The usual Conservative strategy in such cases, Nicolson told his diary, would be “to welcome the Report in principle, and then whittle it away with criticism.” Many Tory MPs had already concluded that Beveridge’s plan was “an incentive to idleness.” Nicolson’s wife, Vita
Sackville-West, expressed her opinion on the matter in tones that would not have surprised anyone who claimed the British upper class lacked empathy for the common man: “I am all for educating the people into being less awful, less limited, less silly, and for spending lots of money on (1) extended education; (2) better paid teachers, but
not
for giving them everything for nothing, which they don’t appreciate any how” (italics Sackville-West).
⁴³

Churchill had so far kept to his self-imposed prohibition of any public rumination on postwar policies. Yet he had known since Pearl Harbor that the war would someday be won. He had told his countrymen in November that the end of the beginning was at hand; now Britons sought some sense of where their government intended to go once victory was attained. They especially sought some sense of where the Conservatives were going, for according to Labour, the party of Baldwin, Chamberlain, and Churchill had brought Britain economic depression, the shame of appeasement, and, finally, war. That Labour could make such a claim with a straight face, having done its best to retard re-armament and having voted against even limited conscription just four months before Hitler invaded Poland, did not among Britons diminish doubts about the Tories.

For more than two years, Britons had merrily sung “The Lambeth Walk” (which Berlin radio called “Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping”) as they scrambled down into the Underground when the sirens wailed. Six thousand Londoners scuttled into the shelters every night, a decrease of 10,000 from the previous year and 150,000 from the height of the Blitz. Yet a census of the shelters found that almost 6,000 lived there permanently. Two-year-old children who had never seen the inside of a real house had spent their entire lives beneath the streets. Britons had taken everything the Luftwaffe had thrown their way. They loved Churchill and would recoil against any partisan attempt to change horses in midstream, but someday they would be across the river. They wanted to know what they’d find on the other side, other than Churchill’s sunlit uplands. Churchill, after returning from Casablanca, and after a more careful examination of the Beveridge Report, told the War Cabinet that the plan “constitutes an essential part of any postwar scheme of national betterment.” This was the old Liberal voicing his belief that government could and should rearrange the social structure, and could do so without degrading into doctrinaire socialism, which he loathed.
⁴⁴

Yet, by not telling the British people as much, he missed an opportunity to claim as his cause the postwar rebuilding of Britain. He considered parts of the Beveridge Report worthy, but also a nuisance that interfered with the war effort. Attlee and the Labourites, meanwhile, saw the Beveridge Report as a blueprint for their political future. Many Britons approaching
the age of thirty had never voted in a national election, had never had the opportunity to choose their leaders. Their patience was not infinite.