The Allies

by Winston Groom

  * * *

  THE PRESS HAD A FIELD DAY with Churchill’s resignation. Both scorn and approbation were heaped upon him. He remained convinced that the Dardanelles operation would have been successful if the original fleet had tried harder to get through, and that it could be successful still if more Allied troops were sent to Gallipoli to turn the flank of the Turkish army. If Turkey had been knocked out of the war, it would have been a terrific blow to the Germans and a huge boon to the Russians; it might have postponed or even averted the Communist takeover and perhaps the Russian Revolution. But all of the plans suggested were, in the end, rejected—and at last it was decided to evacuate the army from Gallipoli, a most dangerous undertaking. At this decision, Asquith resigned as prime minister; his place was taken by David Lloyd George.

  The Dardanelles-Gallipoli adventure ended in January 1916, ten months after it had begun. By then the Allied armies there had swollen to nearly half a million; roughly half of these became casualties. It was the most conspicuous British defeat of the war.

  Jacky Fisher’s Iago-like role in Churchill’s downfall was disgraceful. But he was an old man, and some said off his head. Nevertheless, Churchill felt stabbed in the back. “I am finished,” he told Violet Asquith when they met in a corridor of the House of Commons a day after he resigned. “What I want above all things is to take some active part in beating the Germans. But I can’t—it’s been taken from me.”

  But it hadn’t, actually. Churchill retained his reserve membership in his old army regiment and, after it became apparent that the Tories intended to block any further political role he might play in the war effort, he requested that he be sent to the fighting front. In the autumn of 1915, as the last soldiers were preparing for evacuation from Gallipoli, Churchill was recommissioned with the rank of major, with orders to report to army headquarters in France.

  There, he was received warmly by the British army’s commander in chief, General Sir John French, who took him to dinner and explained the general war situation. Next morning, French asked Churchill what he would like to do. When Churchill replied that “I will do whatever I am told,” French replied, “Will you take a brigade?”

  Churchill was delighted. It was a huge leap from the rank of major, which is a mid-level staff position, to brigadier general in charge of five thousand infantry with artillery, cavalry, and all the rest.2 He answered that he “would be proud to do so,” adding that he wanted to learn firsthand about trench warfare. French arranged for him to be attached to the “best school of all—the Guards,” and taken personally by the commander of the Guards Division to the Grenadier Battalion, where he was introduced to the colonel (who was the only surviving officer of the battalion since it had arrived in 1914) and his staff.3

  That, however, was the end of warm welcomes. The next day, as they were walking toward the frontline trenches on “a darkening plain in an icy drizzle amid the red flashes of the guns,” the battalion colonel said to Churchill rather curtly that the battalion was “not at all consulted in the matter of you coming to us.” Churchill replied that he didn’t know himself where he’d be sent, but he thought it would “be all right.” They walked on.

  The battalion adjutant broke another long, icy silence by telling Churchill that they “had to cut down” his baggage, which included in addition to boxes of fine cigars, cases of brandy, and tins of fancy food from Harrods and Selfridges a bathtub complete with a boiler for heating the water—and, of course, his painting gear.4 The adjutant went on, “We have found a servant for you,” who was carrying a spare pair of Churchill’s socks and his shaving gear. “We have had to leave the rest behind.”

  It was pitch-dark when they reached battalion headquarters near the frontline trenches. Churchill was given a choice of where to sleep: a stuffy cubbyhole occupied by four Morse code signalers or “a sort of pit” that was two hundred yards away and knee-deep in water.

  The headquarters itself was located in “a pulverized ruin” called Ebenezer Farm,*1 where they were offered food, tea, and condensed milk, but nothing stronger, because the colonel ran a “dry” headquarters, much to Churchill’s surprise and indignation. He had always warmed himself with liquor on cold wintry nights. He turned down the water pit in favor of the signal office, and as they stumbled back in the dark, “the bullets, skimming over the front line, whistled drearily,” he wrote later. “Such was my welcome to the Grenadier Guards.”5

  Within a few days Churchill had won them over. He asked the colonel to let him accompany him on his twice-daily visits to the trenches: two- or three-hour ordeals in which they “slid or splashed or plodded together through snow or mud…where no one was ever dry or warm”—nor, he might have added, safe. He was jolly in the face of fire, because, like them, he’d been there before. What they didn’t understand was that he relished it, thrived on it, had been brought up gnawing on a different bone.

  Churchill suggested to the colonel that he could better understand the conditions in the trenches if instead of living at battalion headquarters he might live with the companies in the line at the very edge of no-man’s-land (and where the rules about alcohol were also greatly relaxed). He was forty-one years old, going pudgy, still baby-faced, a former minister in the government, and it had been a long time since he’d stood the rigors of outdoors warfare. Remarkably, he stood them cheerfully and well. He was not at all astonished at the huge rats that inhabited many parts of the trenches, and he actually claimed they performed a useful duty eating corpses.*2 When the second in command went on leave, Churchill was invited to take over his duties, a request Churchill felt was “one of the greatest honours I have ever received.”6

  Stationed on the front, Churchill even found a few times when he could set up his easel and paint. Little did he know that in the enemy lines not far from his position there was another amateur artist painting scenes across no-man’s-land: Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler.*3

  By now Churchill was thoroughly in his element. Comfortable with the hazards, easy with the men, everyone seemed to warm to him. He often crept out at night and into no-man’s-land to check the barbed wire, reconnoiter trails, or look for signs of enemy penetration. He was dazzled, he said, “by the bright eyes of danger.” He was older and a stabilizing figure, out in the mud and slime and rats of the trenches. He shared with the men his bounty of food and brandy that arrived from Clementine on almost a daily basis. He wrote to her: “I am very happy here. I did not know what release from care meant. It is a blessed place.”7

  Several days later, Churchill had a terribly close call. He was about to enter his two-man dugout after running an errand when a sergeant stopped him. “Sir, don’t go in there,” the sergeant told him, and explained that about five minutes after Churchill had left an enemy artillery shell had penetrated the roof and exploded, decapitating the other occupant. Luck, chance, destiny were all the same thing, Churchill mused. The incident confirmed in his mind that the universe was dominated by a “superior power.”

  * * *

  CHURCHILL NEVER GOT HIS infantry brigade. His political enemies were utterly antagonistic, and now they had serious power again. After the Gallipoli disaster, Prime Minister Asquith had been obliged to form a wartime coalition government in the summer of 1915, and the Tories turned their ire on the man they still regarded as a traitor to the party. Instead he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and given a battalion, the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers: eight hundred Scottish lowlanders, many of them miners. With the battalion came a hint that, if he performed well for a year or so and wasn’t killed, he might get the brigade and another promotion. The battalion was stationed at the line in the ruined Belgian town of Ploegsteert, which the men called “Plug Street.” It was a highly dangerous place, being as it was part of the giant Battle of Ypres (which the men called “Wipers”), where the fighting had been bitter and nearly continuous since the early days of the war.

  At the beginning, Churchill
was resented. The old commanding officer was well liked and the men couldn’t understand why a prominent politician had been sent there to lead them. But, as he had in the Guards, Churchill won them over in time. He hadn’t been in the military for seventeen years—but he remembered enough of it to put his own stamp on the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers, whose regiment had been born 237 years earlier.

  First he conducted a war on lice, delivering of himself a scholarly dissertation on the history of the louse from ancient times on, and how it affected the morale of the men. Baths were scheduled, heads shaved, clothing deloused. In due time, the battalion was rendered liceless. He made the men sing while they were marching to and from the front on grounds that it abated fatigue. (All most of them knew were church hymns, so at first they sang those.) He supervised the building of defenses—of parapets and traverses and such—with the keen eye of a graduate of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Morning and night he was in the trenches, inspecting, improving, learning. He told wonderful stories to the men of historic battles that the battalion had fought, summoning up the stylish rhetoric of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough. The men loved it. He ordered his officers always to smile during enemy artillery barrages or when in actual combat. “If you can’t smile, grin,” Churchill told them. He believed it had a “pleasing effect” on the men.

  All the while, his fertile mind was churning with ideas about how the war could be won. Unlike most officers and practically all the men, Churchill truly loved being in a combat command. He understood more than most the queer psychology of the battlefield, which is one thing to men in line and quite another to somebody looking at a map back at headquarters. It had to be endured to be believed—the bizarre proximity of the armies, sometimes only two hundred yards apart, where men on both sides could hear their enemies laughing or cursing or smell their cooking across the rot and stench of no-man’s-land. Compared with the impersonality of an artillery barrage or the sniper’s bullet, this lent a strange intimacy to the war.

  But as the days passed Churchill began to feel he was being underused. His battalion was only a tiny cog in the gigantic wheel of war, which at its apotheosis would see 68 million men under arms on both sides. (Before it ended, nearly 10 million of these would be dead.) It was the greatest event of his lifetime, Churchill believed—and here he was, mired in the mud and the blood of the trenches.

  From that perspective he saw, for example, that futile infantry charges only kept the coffinmakers in business; that German planes ruled the sky, and that Britain desperately needed an effective air policy. Above all others, Churchill had been responsible for the development of the tank, and now that it was in field trials it had become an underfunded political football. He understood firsthand that conscription was a necessary evil to fill gaps in the understrength battalions, now that volunteerism had dried up. But the draft was another political hot potato. And the navy—once his navy—was moribund and lacking initiative. Unless something was done, he felt, the Allies would lose the war.

  He went on leave to London in April, and he astonished everyone by calling for a return to the Admiralty of his old enemy Sir Jacky Fisher. The present administration of the navy didn’t know what it was doing, Churchill suggested, and that at least Fisher did. He was lampooned in the press.

  When he returned to the war he found that his brigade had been so shot up by German artillery it was merged into another division, and that the brigade commander had moved on. Churchill did not get the promotion. He decided it was time, after half a year on the Western Front, to return to England and to Parliament, where he retained his seat but, thanks to the Tories’ eternal venom, held no role in government. His fellow officers at the front gave Churchill a farewell lunch at which every one of them spoke of a sense of “personal loss” at his going.

  * * *

  CHURCHILL BIDED HIS TIME. He secretly became Lloyd George’s personal adviser on the war, for if the Tories found out there would be hell to pay. In the meanwhile, he began earning handsome fees writing magazine and newspaper pieces for the London press barons Lords Northcliffe and Beaverbrook. These monies easily outstripped the financial vacuum created when he lost his ministerial seat in the government.

  By the summer of 1917 Lloyd George felt strong enough to defy the Tories in the coalition government and named Churchill as minister of munitions: at that time, a most critical position. In typical Churchillian fashion, he stormed into his ministry and soon began sweeping changes that would vastly improve the efficiency, quality, and quantity of the tremendous array of weaponry with which the war was fought. Moreover, a blue ribbon committee of the House cleared Churchill of any mismanagement regarding the Dardanelles campaign, laying the blame mostly on Admiral Fisher, where it belonged.

  Churchill’s leadership at munitions was so effective that the press seemed for the time being to forgive his past transgressions. By the following year he was named secretary of state for war, meaning that, with limitations, he would run the whole shebang—including his pet project the tank, which had at last proven its merits on the battlefield.

  The system Churchill had set up at munitions created an easy and efficient resupply of artillery shells and bullets for individual weapons, which allowed the British to respond effectively to German attacks in early 1918. By March, the German ranks had swollen by more than a million men following Lenin’s sudden Bolshevik coup and the surrender of Russia. They launched a last-ditch offensive along the Western Front. The German strategy was to split the British and French armies, capture the channel ports, and bring a swift end to the war before the Americans could arrive in force.

  After initial successes the German attack stalled, in large measure because of Churchill’s reforms. Churchill was frequently at the fighting front and, as his duties also included overseeing the air force, he began flying across the English Channel to consult and inspect. This of course terrified Clementine almost to distraction—all the more because she was pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, who would be named Marigold.

  The German army was now bleeding to death from Allied counterattacks and unable to hold on to its gains. Slowly, but ferociously, the Germans began to give ground when pressed by the British, French, and now American forces, who fought bravely but without the skill of those who had been at the front for years. In British lines, it was rumored that the Germans had established a “corpse factory,” which turned dead bodies into tinned can food for their soldiers, whose rations had been cut almost to starvation level because of the continued British blockade of German ports.

  By November 1918 the Germans had had enough and called for a cease-fire, or armistice, that became a de facto surrender. Against the advice of the American commander, the German armies were allowed to return to their homes unescorted and German territory was mostly unoccupied. It has been argued that this oversight allowed for the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, who convinced the people that their armies were never defeated but “stabbed in the back” by cowardly politicians in Berlin.

  The victorious Allies divided up German colonies and changed the face of the Middle East. The kaiser abdicated to Holland and a democracy was installed to govern the country. Steep reparations and territorial losses were inflicted on Germany, which fueled the resentment and breakdown of democracy that marked the Hitler years. Large parts of France and Belgium had been utterly destroyed, and their restoration in some cases went on into the 1960s. (Farmers plowing in the area from that day to this uncover live artillery shells or other unexploded munitions, which on average have killed several persons a year for a century.)

  Not content with this undisputed victory, Churchill’s antipathy toward the Bolsheviks was such that he successfully argued for British and other Allied troops to intervene in Russia, which was undergoing a civil war after the deposition of the czar and the Communist takeover of the government. Here was where a split with the prime minister began. Lloyd George had had enough of w
ar, and he also had a rebellious situation on his hands in Ireland, whose Irish Republican Army had taken advantage of Britain being so deeply involved in the war and was able to organize a formidable force of its own.

  Lloyd George dealt with the Irish problem by sending British soldiers who’d been at the front to quell the Irish rebellion. These became the hated “black and tans,” so named for the uniforms they wore. Churchill continued to agitate for British troops to save Russia from Communism, but the prime minister viewed that country’s vast expanses as the kind of place where troops, money, and everything else could simply vanish without a trace. In 1921, in order to get Churchill off his back, Lloyd George transferred him to the Colonial Office, which had no responsibility for intervention in Russia.

  Ever restless, Churchill as minister of the Colonial Office began meddling in the Middle East, a term he officially institutionalized by organizing the Cairo Conference. In March 1921 Churchill summoned all the British military and civil leaders across the Middle East to determine what was to be done with this seething, exotic, Islamic vastness. For generations, the Middle East had been ruled from Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire, which after World War I was no more. When Turkey surrendered, it left a great vacuum in the region: a jumble of deserts, mountains, oases, towns, and cities, superimposed on a mostly Islamic culture of numerous tribes and sects, many of which were at war with one another.

  For the British, the main issues were the security of the Suez Canal and the stupendous quantities of oil in the Persian Gulf region, as well as a promised homeland for Jewish peoples in the Palestine territory.