Churchill's Legacy

by Alan Watson

  They would be a difficult four years plagued by the visceral witch hunting of suspected communists led by Joe McCarthy and followed by a Republican victory bringing General Eisenhower to the White House and Foster Dulles to the State Department. This development posed a problem for Winston Churchill who would find himself back in Downing Street as prime minister. Yet none of this can or should distract from the extraordinary turning of the tide in the Cold War in 1947, 1948 and 1949 – a metamorphosis in part enabled by Churchill’s impact in 1946.

  Pivotal was the Berlin blockade and its outcome. That the Western Allies – the USA, Britain and France – were able to keep Berliners heated and fed from June 1948 to May 1949 in an airlift in which Allied planes were landing, on average, every ninety seconds, carrying fuel and food, and flying along restricted air corridors that were the only lines of supply for over two million beleaguered women, men and children, was a triumph of logistics, airmanship and courage. It was also an awesome political achievement. The air forces that had devastated wartime Berlin now saved it. They did so with the support of the US Congress, the British Parliament and the French government. Churchill’s speech of 1946 played a significant part in this – alerting political and public opinion to the true nature of ‘good old Uncle Joe’, the reality of the Iron Curtain and the imperative for an Atlantic alliance capable of containing Russia.

  Why had Stalin ordered the blockade? He was faced with the US initiatives to deny him his ambition for Germany as a bridgehead to wider domination. He believed, as had Lenin, that Germany and its proletariat was the key to opening continental Western Europe to communist control. Communist support in France, Italy and Greece was important but would not be decisive. In any case the appeal of these parties would be eroded by prosperity and the impact of the Marshall Plan. If the same changes swept Berlin and Western Germany, if a new West denied him German reparations, if the Western zones of Germany successfully merged and a democratic federal republic emerged, then he would be thwarted.

  As we have noted, on being told by Truman in Potsdam of the advent of the atomic bomb, Stalin had told Zhukov and Gromyko that he believed Britain and America wished to force the USSR to accept their plans during the time it would take to build a Soviet bomb. He assured them ‘that’s not going to happen’. To gain control of all Berlin seemed the best way to ensure that what he feared ‘was not going to happen’. It was dramatic, dangerous, ruthless, and in the event it failed.

  One extraordinary dimension to Stalin’s gamble and Western resolve turned on the critical duration of America’s temporary atomic monopoly. During the airlift and at Britain’s request B29s were flown to the UK. They would have been able to reach Russia, but they were not as yet equipped to carry atomic bombs even if such weapons were available. Their production lagged way behind expectations.

  Nevertheless sixty B29s reached England in July 1947. British and American determination was hardening. According to Marshall’s biographer, Forrest Pogue, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin judged that ‘the abandonment of Berlin would mean the loss of Western Europe’. The West had to break the blockade. Marshall was hugely encouraged by the swing in US public opinion. He declared ‘from all reports the country is more unified in its determination not to weaken in the face of the pressure of an illegal blockade than on any other issue we can recall in time of peace’.14

  Yet American confidence still ultimately relied on its bomb – the weapon that balanced the Soviets’ huge superiority on the ground in Central Europe. They did believe it would take years for Russia to develop its weapon. Stalin was right in the analysis he gave Zhukov and Molotov. Washington probably thought it would take up to six years. They underestimated Beria’s energy and the effectiveness of Stalin’s terror to accelerate his nuclear programme. The West’s monopoly held out throughout the crucial winter of 1947–8 as Western supplies kept Berlin alive. Yet the outcome was so perilous that the White House had directly to confront the issue of whether to use the bomb if all seemed lost. Truman said he prayed he would not have to make such a decision but that if it became necessary they should have ‘no doubt’ about his decision.15

  Fortunately he never had to. The Soviets successfully tested their first atomic bomb on 29 August 1949. By then any hope of strangling Berlin had gone. The Berlin blockade had been lifted on 12 May – three months earlier. In September, Stalin went on a three-month holiday. The USA’s journey from irritation to determination had reached its decisive destination. Stalin never recovered the initiative in Europe.

  PART VI

  WINNERS AND LOSERS

  19

  How and Why the Impact?

  How did Churchill pull it off? In the aftermath of personal defeat and at the zenith of Soviet power, Churchill succeeded in creating a new beginning for the West and ultimately the world. There were three reasons.

  First, no one could stop him. He was not prime minister. He was not bound by either Parliament or the civil service. Although Attlee’s support was guarded, and Truman distanced himself dramatically, they both wished and willed Churchill to act. Attlee needed him to exploit his unique status in the USA to achieve the financial loan to Britain. Truman was alert to the Soviet threat and closely informed by George Kennan and General Marshall. Domestically he was not strong enough to challenge the Roosevelt legacy of ‘good old Uncle Joe’, but despite this Truman would not stop Churchill and in any case he could not have done so. On the British side, Ernest Bevin welcomed Churchill’s call to arms. He was deeply alarmed by the Soviet threat and resolutely anti-communist because of his trade-union experience.

  Second, if the above constituted a kind of mandate, Churchill’s personal travail provided a substantial part of his motivation. After the election he believed he had lost the power to shape events. He had plummeted from the stratosphere at which he was happiest. However, Fulton and Zurich proved that he still had the power to take the initiative in constructing a new Atlantic alliance.

  Third, uniquely, he had the celebrity status to command a global audience and make a difference. His credibility was based on having been the only statesman to get it right in 1940 and to have inspired Britain to stand alone against Hitler.

  Essential to Winston Churchill’s ability to seize the hem of history in 1946, despite his lack of office, was his understanding and command of the power of the word. He believed that words can shape the world, alter the course of events and even determine the success or failure of nations at critical moments. He also believed from personal experience that the power of the word can do the same for the individual. To him, his career would have been inconceivable and unrealisable without his success with both the written and spoken word.

  The written word was for him the easier medium. His writings were prolific – in his lifetime no fewer than forty-three books and many thousands of articles. The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 would be one of his most valued awards. He wrote to promote his beliefs, to warn of the worst and encourage the best of what he could see and foresee. He also wrote to defend his reputation – acutely aware that he could rely only on his own pen to ultimately achieve this. His accounts of the two world wars, so very different, share this characteristic: it was vital to persuade present and future generations to see the past as he did.1

  He also used his power with words to make a living – as he often reminded people. In the hard times between the wars, having lost much money in the crisis of capitalism starting with the Great Crash of 1929 and having lost office for much of the period, his lifestyle – aristocratic and sybaritic – could only be sustained by his outpouring of words. He was fortunate but also astute in identifying those who would pay well. Lord Beaverbrook, so pivotal to Churchill in war, was also crucial to him in peacetime helping to ensure, by commissioning his journalism, that he could remain satisfied with the very best. Churchill’s hospitality, Chartwell itself, the wines, the food, the cigars and the ambiance of great success especially when it eluded him, was not only essential
to his own morale, but vital in persuading others of his relevance and potential. It was his stage.

  He loved the English language – cherished it, revelled in it, pursued its power to communicate with passion and dedication. It was this commitment to identifying the right words and phrases that could enchant him but also exhilarate him. He was an athlete with the written word – exacting of himself and the secretaries who became so essential to his writing and his speaking.

  The written word was the bridge for him to the spoken word. A natural writer, he was not a natural orator. As an MP he learnt early that being unprepared meant he could be unsuccessful. His maiden speech on 18 February 1901 was well regarded. Some of his later speeches – less well worked on – were judged vacuous and ineffective.

  How he learned to command the spoken word – which he was to do so irreplaceably in 1940 and later so powerfully in 1946 – involved him in the considered choice of every word he deployed. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the drafts of speeches now kept at the Churchill Archives at Cambridge.

  For me, this is especially so in the text of his broadcast on 17 June 1940 following France’s capitulation. What rivets one’s attention are Churchill’s handwritten alterations. The typed text had read: ‘What has happened in France makes no difference to our actions and purpose.’ But Churchill had the realism to look into the abyss as well as the courage to bridge it. He knew only too well how the fall of France must affect British actions. With his pen he strikes out ‘no’, and tries ‘some’, and then ‘little’. But this makes the sentence equivocal, uncertain. The purpose of the speech is to engender courage, defiance and hope. So Churchill restores his original ‘no’ but changes ‘actions’ to ‘faith’. The sentence is now armed to be sent into battle. It reads: ‘What has happened in France makes no difference to our faith and purpose.’ The archival evidence would seem to suggest that Churchill made these changes at the last minute, as the un-amended text was already in circulation. The recording of the broadcast reveals one further alteration. He replaced ‘our’ with ‘British’.

  Churchill altered the text when describing Soviet ambition. He had written ‘what they [Soviets] desire is the fruits of war and the undefined expansion of their power and doctrines’. He changed ‘undefined’ to ‘indefinite’ and stuck with the change. The realisation that the expansion of Soviet power would be opportunistic and only restricted by a reluctance to risk nuclear war was uniquely a Churchillian perspective.

  At Zurich, Churchill altered his text from the general to the specific. He talked of re-creating the European family and providing it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, safety and freedom. Then, by hand, he added the sentence ‘we must build a kind of United States of Europe’. This phrase has become the cause of confusion and controversy in Britain and in particular amongst British right-wing Conservatives, even today. In fact, the speech makes it clear that he sees this being led by a partnership between France and Germany with Britain in full support, but not with membership.

  The second alteration, on page 7, is a matter of drama and delivery. His original text says ‘I am going to say something that will astonish you’, but after ‘I am’ he added ‘NOW’. And indeed it did astonish. It is Churchill’s sense of the moment and the power of rhetoric to define it. A call to arms and a sense of urgency is brought to what he is about to say.

  That these wartime speeches – so alive and powerful within these Archives – changed the course of the war is clear. British morale did not collapse, neither in 1940 nor during the Blitz. Churchill’s words met the supreme challenge to democratic leadership at a time of ultimate crisis. They made free people brave. They steadied nerves and stiffened resolution. They built the conviction that Britain’s cause was right and would ultimately triumph.

  In January 2006 an obituary appeared in the Daily Telegraph. It was of Iris ‘Fluff’ Bower, an RAF nurse bombed out twice, her husband killed in action only a year after their marriage. She went on to land with the first British troops on Juno Beach on 12 June 1944, and to serve with distinction to the end of the war. She volunteered for the service she gave. What was her motivation? She wrote: ‘I had a strong feeling that what we were taking part in was grand and noble.’2

  Bower did not mention Churchill or his speeches but it was their purpose to persuade the British that their cause was ‘grand and noble’ and they succeeded. Churchill’s words could and did reshape opinion.

  The poet A. P. Herbert, on first hearing one of Churchill’s wartime broadcasts, wrote that his impact was ‘like an organ filling a church, sending the congregation refreshed and resolute to do or die’.3

  This judgement that his speeches changed opinion has been challenged most recently by Professor Richard Toye. The organisation Mass Observation, which attempted to track British public opinion during the Second World War, found that there were those who thought Churchill’s broadcast speeches ‘depressing’ and ‘suspected he was either lying or quite simply drunk’.4 However, Mass Observation never measured how many people held such views. By contrast, Gallup did and, as the eminent pollster Peter Kellner has pointed out in the British Press, only rarely did Churchill’s oratory fail to win an approval rating of 80 per cent or more despite the often bleak messages he had to convey.

  David Cannadine, in his excellent and perceptive introduction to The Speeches of Winston Churchill, begins with a sentence that sums up the paradox of Churchill’s oratory. He writes, ‘Winston Churchill was the most eloquent and expressive statesman of his time, truly both the master and the slave of the English language’,5 and ‘it was as an orator that Churchill became the most fully and completely alive and it was through his oratory that his words and his phrases made their greatest and most enduring impact’.6

  But his speeches didn’t win him Number 10. In fact, his infamous attack on Labour’s ‘Gestapo’ helped him lose the 1945 election. So what were the weaknesses in Churchill’s oratory? Cannadine identifies three.

  First, that

  the very luxuriance of his rhetoric . . . so readily mobilised in support of so many and even contradictory causes only served to reinforce the view – which became widespread . . . that he was a man of unstable temperament and defective judgement, completely lacking in any real sense of proportion.7

  Undeniably in 1940 and again in 1946 ‘he mobilised the English language’ and sent it into battle for freedom. But he also mobilised it to battle for the doomed Prince of Wales before his abdication, to denounce Gandhi (now on a plinth with him in Parliament Square), to attack the Tories of whom he had been so conspicuous a member and then to advocate the Liberal cause only to abandon it as well. His rhetoric was harnessed to ‘ratting and re-ratting’, as he put it.

  Second, Cannadine quotes Charles Masterman’s scathing complaint that Churchill ‘can convince himself of almost every truth if it is once allowed to start on its wild career through his rhetorical machinery!’8

  Third, his rhetoric was often ill-suited for the stage he cared most about – the floor of the House of Commons. Cannadine recounts Attlee’s verdict. While Churchill’s parliamentary speeches were often ‘magnificent rhetorical performances’ they were frequently ‘too stately, too pompous, and too elaborate to be ideal House of Commons stuff’.9

  Churchill’s wit and sarcasm could be lethal – his dismissal of Attlee’s modesty as a recognition that he had much to be modest about is well known, as is the occasion for it. His repartee was not only devastating when directed at his opponents. It could be directed against anyone who annoyed him. My own favourite story to illustrate how devastating his retorts could be relates to his occupancy of the headquarters of the English Speaking Union, at 37 Charles Street in the heart of Mayfair. He was its chairman which gave him rooms at a most desirable address and invitations to exclusive dinners.

  On one occasion Churchill was greeted by the wealthy lady occupant at the door only to be told by her that she had invited too many men for the number
of women attending. Churchill was dismayed and commented that he understood that ‘the purpose of this evening was to dine, not to breed.’ It was, of course, a brilliant retort and probably spontaneous, but spontaneity was not his forte. He prepared and rehearsed his wit as tirelessly as all other aspects of his rhetoric – as Attlee too commented on this characteristic that his humour was ‘too elaborate to be ideal House of Commons stuff’.

  Overall, Churchill’s grasp of ‘the power of the word’ was overwhelmingly effective. He turned his lisp into a distinctive characteristic. It became part of his brand. Largely self-educated, he drew thirstily from the wells of his own reading – Gladstone, the Younger Pitt, and as a subaltern stationed in India, the cadences of Gibbon and ‘the pungent wit of Macaulay’.10

  However, one man – unexpected and unlikely – seems to have had more influence in shaping the style, discipline and panache of his rhetoric than any other – an Irish-American Congressman by the name of Bourke Cockran.

  When visiting Fulton, Missouri in late January 2015 to attend and participate in a service in the Wren Church blitzed by the Germans in 1940 and transported across the Atlantic and rebuilt in Fulton to commemorate Churchill after his death in 1965, I encountered a namesake, Baxter Brown Watson.

  When Churchill spoke at Fulton in 1946, Baxter Brown Watson, then a young student, was chosen to lead the procession of Churchill and President Truman into the gymnasium where he spoke and which still stands substantially unaltered. At a lunch after the service attended by Britain’s ambassador to Washington, the young Duncan Sandys, as well as the artist Edwina Sandys, I sat next to Watson, now a spruce man in his nineties with a lively and accurate memory. I asked him what the audience in the gymnasium had made of Churchill’s rhetoric back on 5 March 1946. He replied: