In part this imbalance was a reflection of the tumultuous times in which he lived. Moreover, he was writing—particularly toward the end of the History—under tremendous pressure. And in fact it would not be published until after the coming war. But the wonder is not that his text was incomplete and flawed, but that he got most of the job done when he did. Part of the explanation was his skill in dictation; part was his memory, which one survivor of those days calls “Napoleonic”; part his prowess in commanding his team of researchers; and part his proficiency in gathering a chaos of material in his mind, mastering it, assembling it in an inner prism, and then refracting it in a terrific, blinding beam. Of course, he could have improved upon it had he had time, but with an eye on central Europe he did his best, and Churchill’s best was very, very good. If his reach exceeded his grasp, it was because he was intent upon more than literary achievement in the first eight months of 1939. Had he not been the preeminent leader in the struggle against Hitler during this time, the results would doubtless have been very different.
Certainly his understanding of Britain’s political history was remarkable. In the first week of January his mind had leaped nimbly back 216 years from Joan of Arc’s execution to the Magna Carta (1215), then leapfrogged four centuries to the Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679). In sending Wheldon a check for £52.10 he asked him to read, “for a similar fee,” chapters he had written spanning 1455 to the death of Henry VIII in 1547. Back at Chartwell on April 6, the eve of Mussolini’s invasion of Albania, he wrote Wheldon: “I send you herewith Richard III, Henry VII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth.” All except Elizabeth were in a “very rudimentary form”; he would be “most grateful” for “any improvements and expansions you can make to them.” The manuscript was moving swiftly between the 1400s and 1500s at a time when events in the 1930s begged for his attention, and it was a strain, even for him. On March 24, when Hitler wrenched Memel from Lithuania, he wrote Ashley: “It is very hard to transport oneself into the past when the future opens its jaws upon us.”155
April had brought conscription, Roosevelt’s appeal to Hitler and Mussolini, and the introduction of anti-Semitic laws, based on those of the Reich, in Hungary. Winston was asking Bullock for “two or three thousand words” of English social history which “I could then interweave… with the text as it stands”; he was also thanking G. M. Young “for your invaluable notes on the Stuart period,” and sending him five thousand words on the opening of Charles II’s reign, including an analysis of the Protestant status under the Clarendon Code.156
In May the Axis powers had signed the Pact of Steel, while the Japanese, threatening British communications between Hong Kong and Singapore, blockaded the British and French concession at Tientsin, and demanded British withdrawal of support for the Chinese. Winston sent Young revisions of his seventeenth-century chapters, including one on the Restoration (1660) but “omitting the Cromwell period which I am going to reconsider later.” A week later he executed a mighty leap, in time and place: “I have the American Civil War on my hands now, which should take me about a fortnight.” Actually four weeks passed before he reported again. It was June 11—Britain and France were trying to form a “peace front” against Nazi aggression—before he sent Civil War galleys to Brigadier Edmonds, and even then he had only reached the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863). He hoped, however, “to complete the tale to the death of Lincoln in 40,000 words.” Simultaneously, he was revising the text on the 1400s, four centuries earlier. Even as he wrote about Gettysburg, he was dictating passages on the Norman Conquest of 1066. And four days later he was deep in chapters on the reigns of King John (1199–1216), Edward the Confessor (1042–1066), and Canute (1016–1035).157
By July the war fever had reached Washington, and Churchill’s determination to stand by his Disraeli desk night after night approached the heroic. Roosevelt had asked Congress for a repeal of the arms embargo and revisions in the Neutrality Act; at the same time he announced that he would abrogate the U.S. 1911 trade treaty with Japan. Chamberlain maundered on, defending his foreign policy. The urge to shred it in a major speech was almost irresistible, but Churchill could do nothing for England if broke. Nevertheless, he attended all significant sessions of Parliament; his presence was felt in the service ministries, the Foreign Office, on the Continent, and even in Washington and Moscow.
His manuscript, however, had absolute priority, and he believed he was going to meet his deadline. On July 9 he wrote his publisher: “You will be glad to know that the ‘Story of the English Speaking Peoples’ is now practically complete. Four hundred and sixty thousand words are actually in print”—Churchill used galley proofs when a thriftier writer would use typists—“and more than half has gone a second revise. I hope, therefore, to let you have the work ready for publication in plenty of time before the end of the year.” He thought the “American side has been very well treated, and the story of the American Civil War is a small book in itself.” But he had far to go. The following day he was back in the 1300s with John Wycliffe and Richard II, then in the 1200s with Henry III and Edward I. A week later he decided to redraft forty-seven thousand words; then he sent Bullock his Henry III galleys, asking him to “kindly read it again for accuracy, challenging any points on which you do not agree.” Style (“Will you think over some rules to be given to the printer about Capitals?”) had to be settled with Eddie Marsh. It was mid-August before his treatment of the Victorian Age was complete, and at the end of the month he confronted Deakin with a major problem, the organization of the work. “What we want is a chronological account of the Seven Years War, featuring the rise of Chatham. This will include the ‘Continental Struggle’ and ‘Frederick the Great.’… Will you let me have some books on the period covered by Chapter VII ‘The Great Pitt’? While you are sending them to me, I am going on with ‘Queen Elizabeth.’ ”158
It may be argued that if Churchill had not been a virtual prisoner in his Chartwell study during those critical months, England might have been better prepared in September, but he was still far from power, virtually impotent in the House of Commons. Only catastrophe could place England’s fate in his hands. Yet because of the very men who had ignored or mocked him in the years since Hitler became Reich chancellor and führer, catastrophe was ineluctable. Some of the appeasers showed signs of uneasiness. Even The Times, while belittling public support for him, nevertheless commented on July 13: “Mr Churchill may well be needed in a Government again.”
To Chamberlain this was heresy; his conviction that he would be vindicated was unshakable. Two days later, on July 15, he wrote his sister Ida: “If I refuse to take Winston into the Cabinet to please those who say it would frighten Hitler, it doesn’t follow that the idea of frightening Hitler or rather of convincing him that it would not pay him to use force need be abandoned.” On July 23 he again wrote her: “One thing is I think clear namely that Hitler has concluded that we mean business and that the time is not ripe for the major war. Therein he is fulfilling my expectations. Unlike some of my critics I go further and say the longer the war is put off the less likely it is to come at all as we go on perfecting our defences and building up the defences of our allies. That is what Winston and Co never seem to realise.”159
They didn’t realize it because it wasn’t true. Churchill knew that Hitler’s huge army and the Ruhr’s smokestack barons were widening their lead over Britain and France. He wasn’t speculating; he had the facts, and was sending them to the P.M. and the cabinet, hoping to rouse them before the blow fell. He was still recruiting new informants in Whitehall or the Wilhelmstrasse. A March 21 letter to Chamberlain urging a crash antiaircraft program, for example, had been provoked by Major F. L. Fraser, who probably knew more about AA than anyone else in England. Fraser’s reason for joining the net sheds light on why career officers volunteered to flout the Official Secrets Act. “In 1916 when you were commanding a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers,” he had written Winston on March 15, “I
was GSO 3 of the 9th Division; in 1917, when I was wounded, you were kind enough to come & see me in hospital…. I am now Chief Intelligence Officer of the ARP [Air Raid Precautions] Dept and have been with the Dept since 1936. I should be most grateful if you could spare me a few minutes, as I should like to discuss certain matters with you.” Chamberlain’s chief accomplishments during the Great War had been serving as lord mayor of Birmingham and then as director-general of National Service. He had no concept of the bond between men who have worn the same uniform and survived heavy fighting together.160
In June the secretary for air, Kingsley Wood, offered Churchill a tour of airfields where radar was being installed. After inspecting the towers at Biggin Hill, Bawdsey, and Martlesham, Churchill wrote Wood that his trip had been “profoundly interesting, and also encouraging.” He then anticipated Hermann Göring by over a year by noting: “These RDF stations require immediate protection.” He had thought of “erecting dummy duplicates and triplicates of them at little expense” but “on reflection it seems to me that here is a case of using the smoke-cloud.” He ended: “We are on the threshold of immense securities for our island. Unfortunately we want to go further than the threshold and time is short.”161
The prime minister, too, was concerned about time, but he lacked Winston’s sense of urgency. Chamberlain wrote his sister: “As always I want to gain time for I never accept the view that war is inevitable,” and, in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, he predicted that “some day the Czechs will see that what we did was to save them for a happier future.” Sacrificing them, he believed, had “at last opened the way to that general appeasement which alone can save the world from chaos.” Halifax, addressing the House of Lords in early June, declared that “the really dangerous element in the present situation… is that the German people as a whole should drift to the conclusion that Great Britain had abandoned all desire to reach an understanding with Germany and that any further attempt at such a thing must be written off.”162
Winston wrote Halifax that he had been “a little disturbed” by his remarks, which suggested more appeasement. He called the foreign secretary’s attention to the “very bad reports” of “bloody episodes,” including “oppression and terrorism” in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia. Because of these outrages, he continued, “I am sure you realise that to talk about… lebensraum, or any concession, while nine million Czechs are still in bondage, would cause great division among us.” But defeatism seemed to lie over Whitehall like a dense pea-souper. In public appearances Joseph Kennedy, Hitler’s best friend in the diplomatic community, was loudly cheered by Londoners. Churchill was confronted by the American ambassador’s views at a dinner party given by Harold Nicolson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West. The American publicist Walter Lippmann, a fellow guest, recounted his afternoon with Kennedy, who had left the impression that he was pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic, and convinced that war was inevitable, and that Britain would be defeated. Nicolson noted: “Winston is stirred by this defeatism into a magnificent oration. He sits hunched there, waving his whisky-and-soda to mark his periods, stubbing his cigar with the other hand.” According to his host’s diary, Churchill said:
It may be true, it may well be true… that this country will at the outset of this coming and to my mind almost inevitable war be exposed to dire peril and fierce ordeals. It may be true that steel and fire will rain down upon us day and night scattering death and destruction far and wide. It may be true that our sea-communications will be imperilled and our food-supplies placed in jeopardy. Yet these trials and disasters, I ask you to believe me, Mr Lippmann, will but serve to steel the resolution of the British people and to enhance our will for victory. No, the Ambassador should not have spoken so, Mr Lippmann; he should not have said that dreadful word. Yet supposing—as I do not for one moment suppose—that Mr Kennedy were correct in his tragic utterance, then I for one would willingly lay down my life in combat, rather than, in fear of defeat, surrender to the menaces of these most sinister men. It will then be for you, for the Americans, to preserve and maintain the great heritage of the English-speaking peoples. It will be for you to think imperially, which means to think always of something higher and more vast than one’s own national interests. Nor should I die happy in the great struggle which I see before me, were I not convinced that if we in this dear dear island succumb to the ferocity and might of our enemies, over there in your distant and immune continent the torch of liberty will burn untarnished and—I trust and hope—undismayed.163
But Churchill was always more than a rhetorician. Lippmann had been seated beside him at dinner, and the American’s notes made later that night reveal Winston’s grasp of global politics and his plan for victory:
Would cut losses in Far East; no dispersion of the fleet; settle with Japan after the war. Central Europe mobilized as a unit in 1914. Then Germany had ten divisions from Czechoslovakia; now they need six to hold it. Hungary, Jugoslavia, Rumania, dangerous and unreliable. Poland, a new force, and behind it the Russian pad. No use to say to Germany they are not being encircled. Better to overwhelm them with righteous indignation. Only argument that counts is force. No use shaping policy in accordance with Goebbels’ propaganda. Take your own line and make them follow. In event of German mobilization, mobilize fleet; at first provocative action, cut German railway communication with Europe and defy them to do anything about it….164
It is impossible to put a good face on war, but war, Churchill argued in the News of the World on June 18, did not mean annihilation. Even the “atrocity” of bombing civilians could be met by evacuations, RAF attacks on the bombers, antiaircraft—he couldn’t mention radar, which was still highly secret—and shelters. Nevertheless, defeatism and the policy to which it gave voice—peace at any price—still flourished at the highest levels of English society. Hitler had betrayed Chamberlain in Prague and Chamberlain had struck back blindly, but appeasement remained his faith. He was also a loyal subject of the Crown, and this was one of those rare moments when a constitutional monarch could have influenced policy. Victoria had done so repeatedly, simply by speaking out forcefully. But this chance was missed. George VI, reticent, said little, and his sympathies lay with Chamberlain. The Queen Mother, in a letter to the King, had expressed the Royal Family’s reaction to Munich: “I’m sure you feel as angry as I do at people croaking as they do at the P. M.’s action; for once I agree with Ly. Oxford who is said to have exclaimed as she left the House of Commons yesterday, ‘He brought home Peace, why can’t they be grateful?’ ”
Churchill yearned to finish his manuscript and do things which ought to be done and no one else was doing. He knew, from his informants in Whitehall, that the prime minister and his foreign secretary had been treating their French ally shabbily, dealing directly with Hitler and Mussolini without even informing the French. To be sure, those holding political power in Paris almost seemed to encourage this. At Munich, Daladier had played second fiddle to Chamberlain. The agreement had dismayed him but he failed to protest, despite the fact that he was among the more assertive premiers of the tottering Third Republic. But if war came again, poilus, not Tommies, would bear the heavier burden on the battlefield. Winston felt that it was time fences between the allied democracies were mended. Chamberlain and Halifax, however, still dreamed of a London-Berlin-Rome axis.
FIVE
SURGE
CHASING deadlines, Churchill was pushing himself and his secretaries ruthlessly, but when an important guest arrived he gave them, their silent typewriters, and himself a rest. As Chartwell moved through spring and high summer, it became the chief watering place for parliamentarians, flag officers, generals, air marshals, members of the established government, and even cabinet ministers haunted by nightmares of triumphant Nazis marching through the streets of London.
Among those who put their careers at risk to seek Winston’s advice was a future chief of the Imperial General Staff, Tiny Ironside, now Sir Edmund Ironside, inspector-general of overseas f
orces. The general not only shared his host’s concerns; they had been friends since the Boer War, and he regarded him with genuine affection. In his diary he wrote that the two of them “made a night of it”; after dining alone they “sat talking till 5 am this morning.” The talk was of this and that. Churchill said he would have to “pull in my horns considerably” if he were returned to office, because he “would have to cease making money by writing.” Ironside speculated that had last year brought war instead of Munich, his host would at the very least be first lord or war minister, and possibly P.M. But Winston had made friends in the cabinet, particularly “Belisha because… it was Belisha who got conscription through.” They agreed that “Neville Chamberlain is not a war Prime Minister. He is a pacifist at heart. He has a firm belief that God has chosen him as an instrument to prevent this threatened war.” In Winston’s opinion, the general noted, it was “now too late for any appeasement. The deed was signed and Hitler is going to make war.” Ironside concurred, and the prospect troubled him, for he knew that despite Hore-Belisha’s efforts the General Staff had “no considered plans, no plans to deal with the war in general.”1
Unlike the War Office, Churchill had plans. In a paper he had written on stratagems for the Royal Navy, he proposed, among other moves, that the Admiralty put “a Squadron of battleships into the Baltic. It would paralyse the Germans and immobilise many German divisions.” The following day Ironside noted: “It ran through my head that here was a grand strategist imagining things, and the Navy itself making no plans whatever.” When the present first sea lord had commanded the Mediterranean Fleet, Ironside had asked him for “any offensive plan for dealing with Italy.” He had none then, and, the general added: “I am sure there is none now.”2
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