by Walter Reid
In the event it did more to enhance the Churchillian legend than to reduce it: Churchill’s intimates, under the editorship of Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, and with the active encouragement of Clementine Churchill, published Action this Day: Working with Churchill in 1968, and very effectively displaced the Moran account with a picture of a vital, decisive and stimulating war leader, whose judgement and intuitive vision was the indispensable source of victory. Churchill himself could not have hoped for more.
One of the contributors to Action this Day was Churchill’s former Private Secretary and subsequently his most devoted defender, John Colville. In his The Churchillians of 1981 he developed his theme and in his diaries and The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955, he supplied a substantial volume of data with which to support it. His books are not the only ones on which the Churchillian legend now rests.
At a certain level serious efforts have been made to reappraise Churchill, and to assess him according to normal historical criteria.6 There have also been more generalised attacks by David Irvine and Clive Ponting. A recent example, written with great gusto, is Gordon Corrigan’s Blood, Sweat and Arrogance, and the Myths of Churchill’s War (2006). The broadest revisionist attack was John Charmley’s Churchill, The End of Glory: A Political Biography (1993), which received more publicity than it might have done because of a favourable review by Alan Clark. Charmley is concerned to cut Churchill down to size, determined – as Sir Michael Howard pointed out – never to give him the benefit of the doubt.7
While his thesis is not entirely clear, Charmley appears to favour appeasement and to think that Halifax and Chamberlain were right to wish to seek peace with Germany in 1940. He makes the point that by standing out against Hitler, Britain only won the war at the cost of financial bankruptcy and loss of world power. It was on this point that Alan Clark agreed with him, though Britain would not have retained much world power, and probably not much financial power either, if Hitler had dominated the world as he planned to do.
The fact that Britain was weak and diminished by 1945 is in itself neither particularly startling nor noteworthy. What is interesting is to consider why this was the corollary of victory and whether things could have been done better.
While it is true, as this book seeks to emphasise, that as the years went by, Churchill had less and less control over the war and increasingly became America’s humiliated and ignored petitioner, that was a fate infinitely less abject than being a British Pétain. Churchill had to work within the circumstances that existed. It is clear now, as his own history never revealed, that at many levels his room for manoeuvre was limited. He had to fight to have his strategy adopted, to the extent it was. He frequently failed. He had to fight against the Americans; he had to fight against British generals and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The Free French alliance was often much more trouble than it was worth. The backing of his own party could not be relied upon in the House of Commons, and the War Cabinet overruled him from time to time. Sometimes he lacked even domestic support.
These various sources of obstruction have been dealt with individually: they are brought together in this volume not to emphasise Churchill’s weaknesses and failures, but rather to suggest that what he did is all the more remarkable in the face of such opposition.
Churchillism may have been overdone; so has revisionism, if that consists of a bleak enumeration of the ways in which Britain’s standing in the world was diminished as a result of the war. It is time for post-revisionism, by which I mean an analysis of some of the factors by which Churchill was constrained.
It is the argument of this book that in the West it was Churchill, more than anyone else, who devised the strategy that won the war, and that he succeeded in doing so despite the efforts and interventions of less far-seeing strategists who were motivated by sectional concerns or, in the case of the Americans, by a desire to mould the polity and economy of a post-war world. In the course of this narrative there will be numerous occasions where Churchill’s will be seen to be the broader vision and the more inspired concept. But not always; and his shortcomings are also recorded.
The book attempts to bring together the characters, events and trends that tended to limit Churchill’s freedom of action, to explore the extent to which he was able to resist the impeding factors and to see how far he or others were in the right when there were differences. Other, structural constraints over which he had little or no control, such as problems of mobilisation, foreign exchange and trade, also of course bore down upon him.
I have tried to strike a balance between a discussion of themes and a sequential narrative treatment of events in order to give a comprehensible history of the war. I have sought to concentrate on the western war, and the Pacific dimension appears only when unavoidable. Relations with Russia are only slightly more prominent, and in order to contain the book within reasonable compass are not discussed at length. Stalin was in any event the ally from whom Churchill might reasonably have expected trouble, though for much of the war he proved surprisingly reliable.
In 1940 Churchill was a political outsider, widely distrusted by his own party, vulnerable and not expected to last. The Crown and what was not then called the Establishment did not greatly like him. Senior naval commanders and many senior army officers regarded him with a degree of hostility. He had to weld together a new means of political control over the service chiefs, and by slow degrees he consolidated his political position.
It was not until the outcome of the Second Battle of El Alamein in November 1942 that he was safe from imminent deposition. From then for a time he was dominant in the Atlantic Alliance and was generally able to bend his military advisers to his will. It was a period he enjoyed, but a short one. As early as the Casablanca Conference his own service chiefs were beginning to gain in confidence, and increasingly the Allied Joint Chiefs sidelined both Roosevelt and Churchill, whom they described as ‘paltering’ at some of the conferences. By the time of the Teheran Conference at the end of 1943 he was a relatively negligible figure in the Alliance, and even at home his own party felt able to rebel, for instance over Yalta and even over teachers’ pay.
He had little time or interest for the crucial domestic political planning that was going on by this stage in the war. It involved Conservative politicians such as Sir John Anderson and Rab Butler as well as Labour Ministers, but the fact that this was not generally recognised may account for the final blow, which Churchill felt so acutely, the defeat at the 1945 general election.
It has been estimated that about 1,633 books have now been written about Churchill.8 No apology is made for adding to that total. No one who is interested by this ever-fascinating sport of nature who emerged at a critical moment in the history of the world and affected that history for the better is disappointed to see another book about him.
One of the most moving pictures of Churchill is of him in old age, at table, despairingly saying that his whole life had been a failure. ‘I have worked hard all my life, but what have I achieved? Nothing.’ Of course this was the most monstrous misappreciation of his enormous achievements. His wonderful buoyancy had succumbed to age and an impaired circulation. But what lay behind this sense that all he had done for his country had been negated? That is what this book is about.
2
The Semblance of Power
The debate over the Norway campaign brought Churchill to power. He could equally well have been its victim. Far more than any other Minister, he had been intimately involved in the Norway campaign, and his conduct was certainly not free from fault. There were many in the Commons who would have been glad to see him fall. Fortunately for him the preoccupation of activists on both sides of the House was not Churchill but Chamberlain. Dissident Tories had finally thrown off tribal loyalties and fear of a savage Whips’ office, and had nerved themselves to join with the opposition in tearing down a Prime Minister whom they believed incapable of a successful prosecution of the war. Churchill could not
be allowed to get in the way. His interventions to acknowledge his own responsibility were brushed aside, and only served to emphasise his loyalty. In later life he frequently referred to the exquisite circumstances in which every avowal of culpability was met with an expression of support. He emerged from the debate with his position strengthened and not weakened.
All the same it was initially far from clear that he, or anyone else, would be replacing Chamberlain as Prime Minister. Although the proceedings in the House had assumed the character of a Vote of Censure when the Opposition declared its intention of forcing a vote, what had begun on 7 May 1940 was technically only a debate on an Adjournment Motion. And the government did secure a majority despite the strength of the vote against it on the evening of 9 May. At ten o’clock on the following morning Churchill was told that Chamberlain had decided to stay on as Prime Minister.
Hitler changed his mind for him. This was the day on which he launched his Western Offensive and entered France. At eleven o’clock Churchill was summoned to Downing Street for his momentous meeting with Chamberlain and Halifax. The accounts of that historic confrontation vary in details, and Churchill amazingly gets the date wrong; but in their essentials they hang together. Brendan Bracken and Kingsley Wood, a staunch Chamberlainite who had suddenly jumped ship, presumably because he had heard that his chief was ready to drop him as the price for staying in office, secured an undertaking that Churchill would say little or nothing, and when Halifax put the critical question to him, ‘Can you see any reason, Winston, why in these days a Peer should not be Prime Minister?’, he turned his back, looked out on Horse Guards Parade and maintained the silence which he described in his memoirs as seeming ‘longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemoration of Armistice Day’.1
Halifax, the successor that Chamberlain and the King would have preferred, broke the silence by saying that, as a peer, he could not carry out the responsibilities of Prime Minister. Well, maybe, but it seems more likely that he simply wanted to take the job at a more propitious moment. Earlier in the day he had told Rab Butler, his Parliamentary Under-Secretary, that he felt he could do it.2 But in the current circumstances he did not have the stomach for the task: literally so – he felt sick at the prospect and when Margesson failed to make a choice between him and Churchill earlier in the day, ‘my stomach ache continued’.3 If he had wanted the job then and there he could have taken it without any great constitutional difficulty. The desperate circumstances were very different from those that had, only just, ruled out Curzon, as a peer, from the premiership as recently as 1923. Halifax would have had the support of the Labour and Liberal parties, and he was infinitely more acceptable to the Conservatives.
The King was certainly not initially a supporter of Churchill, the man who had championed his brother during the Abdication Crisis; and his mother, Queen Mary, expressed the Royal Family’s views when she urged Colville to remain with Chamberlain and not to work for the new Prime Minister. When Chamberlain demitted office the King told him he had been unfairly treated, and that he thought his successor should be Halifax.4 The King did indeed cause some problems in Churchill’s early months in office: he was unnecessarily obstructive, for instance in opposing the appointment of Beaverbrook as Minister of Aircraft Production and the conferment of a privy councillorship on Bracken. For all his devoted royalism, Churchill did not allow his monarch to get in the way of waging the war, and the King soon came to realise the worth of his First Minister, and a mood of mutual respect was established.
Before the day was out Churchill was Prime Minister, and in one of the most memorable passages in his history of the war he described how as he went to bed he was ‘conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene.’5 That was fiction. He was the prisoner of his enemies in his own party, sustained by his former enemies in the Opposition. He was conscious now and for a considerable time to come that his hold on power was tenuous and critically dependent on delivering results. There was a widespread view that he would not be Prime Minister for long.6
Even within the War Cabinet he could not be confident of getting his way. Powerful figures saw him as no more than a stopgap, and the bulk of the Conservative parliamentary party viewed him with ill-disguised distaste. At about the same time as Churchill was going to bed conscious of his profound relief, Rab Butler, Lord Dunglass, the future Sir Alec Douglas-Home (‘the kind of people surrounding Winston are the scum’) and John Colville, Chamberlain’s Private Secretary, met to drink a champagne toast to Chamberlain, ‘the King over the water’. Colville later recalled the distaste with which he and his colleagues saw the appeasers, Sir Horace Wilson, Dugdale and Lord Dunglass, replaced by the arrival of Churchill’s ‘myrmidons’, Brendan Bracken, Lindemann and Desmond Morton. ‘Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with “the Establishment” as it would now be called, so dubious of the choice and so prepared to find its doubts justified.’7
Colville had to adjust to a dramatic change in tempo as he started to work for the dynamic Churchill, rather than the dignified, correct and very traditional Chamberlain. Government business was now transacted 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, with little rest for the Private Secretaries, who followed their master wherever he might be. Chamberlain never took his Private Secretaries to Chequers, where he was connected to the rest of the world by just a single telephone – in the pantry.
A generation earlier it would have been difficult to overstate the Conservative Party’s dislike for Churchill. During the First War it neither forgave nor forgot his treachery in crossing the floor to join the Liberals. As President of the Board of Trade, allied closely to Lloyd George, his speeches were intemperate and sometimes ill-judged and the Establishment, including Edward VII, found it inexcusable that someone of his background should seek, as they saw it, to tear down the institutions they prized. In the First World War, the Tories had insisted on his removal from the Admiralty as the price of coalition, and the suspicion, even hatred behind that demand was more typical of the party’s sentiments than Baldwin’s rehabilitation of Churchill in the 1920s.
These memories were still strong among the traditionalists; younger and more progressive Tories were unimpressed by what they had seen as antediluvian resistance to the India Bill. There was additionally a general view that despite his aristocratic, ducal connections, he was not quite a gentleman.
Even more than his policy over the India Bill, Churchill’s maverick championing of Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis, and the talk of a King’s Party, did him incalculable harm. Many thought that the episode had ended his political career, and many certainly hoped that was the case.
Churchill was always too mercurial a personality, too big a persona, to be contained comfortably in any one political party, and the Conservative Party under Chamberlain was a particularly uncomfortable place. Chamberlain had considerable abilities, but the degree of his control over the party was unappealing, almost dictatorial. Independence of thought was not encouraged. The whips under Margesson were ruthless in their tactical use of spying and dirty tricks. Their behaviour in the Perth and Kinross by-election, when the Duchess of Atholl stood as an independent candidate, is a good example. Fifty Conservative MPs were sent north to tell the electorate that a vote for the Duchess was a vote for war. Local landowners were induced to bribe and threaten their employees to ensure they did not vote for her.
Chamberlain looked continuously for evidence of conspiracies, and manipulated the press shamelessly to support the government. It was not a good period for parliamentary democracy. The Conservative Party generally knuckled under, and accepted a culture in which disloyalty to the leader was regarded as tantamount to treason. It followed that Churchill was excoriated by the unthinking majority of Tory party members in and out of the Houses of Parliament. It was largely pressure from outside the party that caused Chamberlain to bring Churchill back to the Admiralty on the outbreak of war.
Churchill’s loyalty to Chamberlain thereafter was total, and indeed matured into a romantic regard for his chief, but Chamberlain and those close to him did not respond in kind. In the aftermath of Norway, Chips Channon recorded that Lord Dunglass had asked him whether he thought that, ‘Winston should be deflated. Ought he to leave the Admiralty?’8 Chamberlain was said to be thinking along these lines, and Nicolson reported that the whips were briefing against Churchill and representing Norway as ‘another Churchill fiasco’, an allusion to a popular view of the Dardanelles.9
The conspirator’s punishment is that he sees conspiracies where they do not exist, and Chamberlainites suspected Churchill of plotting against his leader. But he was scrupulously loyal. When asked to throw in his lot with those who wished to see Chamberlain replaced, and despite the fact that he would have been the replacement, he repeatedly replied that he had ‘signed on for the voyage’. And after the vote in the Norway debate he wrote to his captain, ‘This has been a damaging debate, but you have a good majority. Do not take the matter grievously to heart.’
Even after he had become the captain of the ship, he was viewed by the traditionalists as being – at best – a necessary and temporary expedient in the exigencies of the times. Nancy Dugdale, the wife of a junior whip, wrote to her husband, now in the army, ‘I could hardly control myself … W.C. is really the counterpart of Goering in England, full of the desire for blood, “Blitzkrieg”, and bloated with ego and over-feeding, the same treachery running through his veins, punctuated by heroics and hot air.’ In reply her husband referred to his Prime Minister’s colleagues in terms that he might have been applying to Hitler’s: ‘All those reptile satellites – Duff-Cooper – Bob Boothby – Brendan Bracken, etc. – will ooze into jobs they are utterly unsuited for. All we are fighting for will go out of public life. I regard this as a greater disaster than the invasion of the Low Countries’.10
