The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (482 page)

Churchill went on, paraphrasing the economist Friedrich Hayek from
The Road to Serfdom.
“My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.”

He laced into Labour’s Herbert Morrison, who had outlined “his plans to curtail Parliamentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolutions of broad principle in the House of Commons.” And he excoriated Sir Stafford Cripps for advocating what amounted to a rubber-stamp role for Parliament in the new socialist state. Then he arrived at the passage Clementine thought hideous:

Churchill thundered and roared, confident that Clement Attlee lacked the oratorical skills to respond in kind. Ed Murrow of CBS believed so, offering that Attlee approached a subject “as if elucidating some obscure, unimportant passage in a Latin translation.” The night following Churchill’s Gestapo speech, Attlee—whom Colville described as having “no shred of either conceit or vanity”—took to the airwaves and delivered a devastating reply. Churchill’s object, Attlee declared, was to make “electors understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr. Churchill, the party Leader of the Conservatives…. The voice we heard last night was that of Mr. Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook.” The timid, balding, sometimes fussy Attlee had made himself overnight into a campaign leader. As for Beaverbrook’s role in crafting Churchill’s speech, he had “no hand” in the matter, Colville wrote. Beaverbrook and his newspapers had been “firing vast salvos” of late, which mostly, Colville believed, “miss their mark.” Churchill, trying to cast Attlee as a bogeyman, had also missed his mark, but Attlee, casting Beaverbrook
and
Churchill likewise, had not.
²²

The Beaver put on a relentless, shrill, and clumsy demonstration of loyalty to Churchill in the pages of his
Express,
but Beaverbrook had never really understood Englishmen and, critically, Englishwomen. The tabloid
Daily Mirror,
Britain’s largest-selling paper, did. The only large newspaper not controlled by Camrose, Beaverbrook, or Bracken, the
Mirror
went after the service
wives,
telling the women of Britain on the eve of the election, “Vote for them!” [the servicemen] who “for five long years… from Berlin to Burma… have fought and are still fighting for YOU…. You know which way your men would march. Vote for them!” Even Churchill loyalists began to doubt their man; Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson: “You know I have an admiration for Winston amounting to idolatry, so I am dreadfully distressed by the badness of his broadcast election speeches…. If I were a wobbler they would tip me over to the other side.” Nicolson’s friend the literary critic Raymond Mortimer also jotted a note to Nicolson, in which he wrote, “I think that Churchill more than anyone else was responsible for the squalid lies in these elections. He started the rot with his talk of Mr. Attlee’s Gestapo.”
²³

Churchill’s “favorability rating” as measured by Gallup polls had exceeded 90 percent since El Alamein, but for a brief drop during his January 1944 recuperation in Marrakech and his Christmas 1944 foray to Greece. After V-E day, his favorability numbers dipped into the 80 percent range, a mere bag of shells, for he was the most popular leader in living history, the savior of England. Yet, Gallup’s newfangled computations were inexact. Asked if they had an “overall” favorable impression of Churchill,
Britons responded, politely, yes. Thus, as Churchill campaigned up and down and across the land by private train and open auto, delivering ten speeches and broadcasts in the process, he was deeply moved, Eden wrote, by the goodwill and cheering crowds he found along all his routes. Yet, Eden later wrote, “He [Churchill] could not be expected to sense that there was also something valedictory in their message. He would not have been Winston Churchill if he had.”
²⁴

Colville was not optimistic about the election, telling his diary, “Without Winston’s personal prestige the Tories would not have a chance. Even with him I am not sanguine of their prospects, though most of their leaders are confident of a good majority.” That was true; Churchill, Eden, and Beaverbrook all believed they would take the House with a majority of perhaps eighty seats, maybe even as many as one hundred. Even Attlee believed the Tories would win, later telling Colville that “there might, with luck, be a Conservative majority of only some forty seats.” Much would depend on the soldiers’ vote, four million strong, and almost 20 percent of the total electorate. Over lunch, Churchill asked General Billy Slim, the hero of Burma, how he thought his troops would vote. “Ninety percent Labour,” Slim replied. Churchill grunted. “What about the other ten percent?” Slim said, “They won’t vote at all.”
²⁵

On July 3, Churchill delivered his final campaign speech at Walthamstow Stadium, a greyhound racing track in East London. After a band warmed up the crowd of 20,000 with “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “Umbrella Man,” Churchill, accompanied by Clementine, took the stage to tremendous cheers. He had no sooner begun speaking when several thousand Labour rowdies scattered throughout the stadium let him have it.
“We want Attlee,”
they shouted over his words. When he tried to engage them on the topic of free speech—“In a free country like ours…”—they shouted him down with a chorus of boos. “Surely that is not a party question,” said Churchill. He went on: “I want to congratulate London… upon her wonderful record in the war…. Would you like to boo that?” He went after the socialists and their “absurd utopias,” proclaiming that there must be “improvement of human hearts and human heads before we can achieve the glorious Utopia that the Socialist woolgatherers place before us. Now where is the boo party? I shall call them henceforward in my speech the booing party. Everyone have a good boo.” Some in the audience jeered at that. He closed with an election prediction: “I give my entire forgiveness to the booers. They have this to take away with them—I am sure they are going to get a thrashing such as their party has never received since it was born.”
²⁶

That day Churchill instructed the cabinet to prepare legislation for a national insurance plan and a national health service. This was not cynical posturing; Churchill had supported both programs since he put Sir
William Beveridge on the case more than three decades earlier. As for the fate of the coal mines, since the General Strike of 1926 he had been much more sympathetic to the miners than to the mine owners. Churchill did not hate Labour programs; he hated the intellectual arrogance of the left—of Bevan, Cripps, and Laski. Churchill, Colville later wrote, was “never anything but hostile to Socialist theory.” He had certainly made that clear during the campaign. In any case, voters were unaware of Churchill’s instructions to the cabinet when they went to the polls on July 5.
²⁷

O
n July 7, Churchill, Mary, Clemmie, Lord Moran, and Colville made for the Basque coast of France near St-Jean-de-Luz for a one-week vacation before Churchill undertook the next order of business: the Big Three conference due to open in Potsdam on the sixteenth. Churchill himself had code-named the conference Terminal, a curious choice given that the final phase of the war against Japan had yet to begin and the atomic bomb, which might hasten the end of the Pacific war, had yet to be tested. Many military men, including Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, who gave odds and took bets, believed it would not work.

Churchill’s valet, Sawyers, made the journey to France, as keeper of the Old Man’s brushes and palettes and paints. It was intended as a beach and painting vacation, and the absence of paperwork and urgent telephone calls ensured an air of quietude. The Old Man spent his mornings swimming about “like a benevolent hippo” off a sandy beach while a squad of French gendarmes dog-paddled around the Great Man to provide a cordon sanitaire between the P.M. and curious locals. So complete was Churchill’s rest and relaxation that he utterly failed to prepare for the Potsdam Conference. To make matters worse, neither had Anthony Eden, who had returned from San Francisco with a duodenal ulcer and, under Lord Moran’s orders, had spent much of June in bed resting. Churchill—with the election always intruding on his thoughts—had no heart for the upcoming Potsdam parley, telling his doctor, “Nothing will be decided at the conference… I shall only be half a man until the result of the poll. I shall keep in the background at the conference.” A report from Max Beaverbrook arrived that lifted Churchill’s spirits; the Beaver now predicted a Conservative majority of one hundred. And although Churchill now believed that he might have lost the service vote, he told Clementine he was quite sure the servicewomen were for him. When Clemmie reminded him that early in his career he had opposed giving women the vote, he replied, “Quite true.”
²⁸

On July 15, Churchill, Sawyers, Mary, and Moran flew on to Berlin, while Colville and Clementine returned to London. Attlee and Ernest Bevin also journeyed to Potsdam; it was Churchill’s wish that the British present a unified front to the Americans and especially to Stalin. When Churchill told the House of his desire to bring Attlee to Berlin, a Labour MP called out, “Is the right honourable Gentleman going to take the Gestapo with him?” The Old Man thus arrived at his lodgings in Babelsberg, about six miles from Potsdam, with a hostile House waiting in London, a hostile Stalin waiting in Potsdam, and without any guarantee from President Truman that the Americans were prepared to play hardball with Stalin on the matter of free Polish elections.
²⁹

Truman also arrived in Babelsberg on the fifteenth, and took up residence in a grand town house two blocks from Churchill’s residence. Elements of the British, American, and Red armies—out in force—guarded both houses. The next day at dawn—early afternoon in Berlin—the Americans successfully detonated an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. On the seventeenth, before the first plenary session with Stalin, Henry Stimson shoved a piece of paper across a table to Churchill. On it Stimson had scribbled, “Babies satisfactorily born.” Churchill did not understand, until Stimson made clear just what had taken place in New Mexico. Of this news, Churchill later wrote, “Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War, and perhaps to much else besides.” In that moment, Churchill saw no further need to seek Russian help against Japan, and he saw a possible solution to the Soviet tide rolling westward in Europe. The Prof—Lord Cherwell—beheld a way to make this horrific new weapon even more terrible. Knowing that the initial burst of such a bomb would blind anyone who happened to be looking skyward at the moment it detonated, Cherwell advised that preliminary pyrotechnics be set off as the bomb made its descent in order that the optimum number of Japanese were looking skyward at the moment of truth.
³⁰

Churchill had anticipated the fate of Japan more than three years earlier. Weeks before the fall of Singapore, with the British Empire reeling from the Japanese blows in the Far East but fully appreciating that the home islands of Japan were the key to the Pacific theater, as much as England was to the European, Churchill communicated to the Chiefs of Staff his strategy: “The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs will bring home in a most effective way to the people of Japan the dangers of the course to which they have committed themselves.” The word “incendiary” jumps from the memo. He does not propose the use of parachute bombs or four-thousand-pound high explosives. He does not envision bringing Japan to bay with commandos, sabotage, or trickery. He goes straight to the most efficient solution. He would set Japan ablaze, literally,
for Japanese cities were built of paper and wood. That strategy now fell to Truman to implement.