Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made

by Richard Toye

  How central was the Empire to Churchill’s strategic vision at this time? As war approached, he told General Edmund Ironside ‘that sometimes he couldn’t sleep at night thinking of our dangers, how all this wonderful Empire which had been built up so slowly and so steadily might all be dissipated in a minute’.145 Irwin, after his Viceroyship ended, had returned to domestic politics and succeeded to the title of Lord Halifax. In 1937 he visited Hitler on behalf of the government and, as one junior minister noted, ‘Winston could well discover the same ignominy in seeing a British Cabinet Minister travel wearily to Berchtesgaden, as he saw in the Viceroy of India receiving a man “striding half-naked up the steps of Government House”.’146 Yet, with uncharacteristic restraint, Churchill avoided comparisons of this type; memories of the India campaign were left to fade away.

  Churchill had never been a great enthusiast for the League of Nations. Now, however, he spoke often of the requirement to preserve collective security via the League. This should be seen in the context of his efforts to court progressive opinion within Britain and gain Liberal and Labour support for a tough line against the Nazis. In turn, he sounded a moderate note when talking about imperial issues. When asked to broadcast in a series on ‘Responsibilities of Empire’ he stressed that the Empire power would never be used for any purpose inconsistent with the League’s covenant.147 In a further speech he denied that the Empire was held together by ‘outworn Jingoism or grasping Imperialism’. Rather, ‘If in these hours of anxiety [. . .] we feel the surge of unity and of duty thrilling the pulses of the British race, it is because we are bound together by principles, themes and conceptions which make their appeal not only to the British Empire, but to the conscience and to the genius of humanity.’148 Churchill spoke too of the need for the unity of ‘the English-Speaking Peoples’. His emphasis on this could be seen as part of an effort to woo US opinion. Churchill’s first public reference to ‘the unity of the English-speaking races’ came in 1911 – when such ideas were already quite common – but it was only in the 1930s that it became one of his most dominant themes, other prominent politicians having used similar language in the meantime.149 It was a seemingly racialized vision in which the Britons of the ‘White Dominions’ and America were linked as part of a broader global community with a common interest in defending freedom.150

  Churchill did not exactly downplay the Empire in his rhetoric at this time, but he could, perhaps, have emphasized it more. A comparison with Amery is instructive here. Amery was a strong opponent of the National Government’s foreign policy. Like Churchill, he was opposed to disarmament. Like Churchill, he rejected the idea that Germany’s lost colonies should be returned to her without the consent of the inhabitants. Unlike him, though, he wanted Britain to keep her distance from European diplomacy and was scathing about the League of Nations. He wanted to strengthen the power of the Empire by integrating it as an economic bloc, while leaving Germany the power to build up her own bloc in central Europe.151 Churchill, for his part, ridiculed such views, observing in a 1934 broadcast on ‘The Causes of War’:

  There are those who say, ‘Let us ignore the continent of Europe. Let us leave it with its hatreds and its armaments to stew in its own juice, to fight out its own quarrels, and cause its own doom. Let us turn our backs upon this melancholy and alarming scene. Let us fix our gaze across the oceans and lead our own life in the midst of our peace-loving dominions and Empire.’

  Now there would be much to be said for this plan, if only we could unfasten the British islands from their rock foundations and could tow them three thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, and anchor them safely upon the smiling coasts of Canada.152

  This was not Little Englandism. Churchill did not believe the Empire was unimportant; rather he believed that the chief threat to it came from Europe, not from more distant enemies.

  Admittedly, Churchill did underrate other threats. ‘But why should there be a war with Japan?’ he wrote in 1924 when battling to keep naval spending down. ‘I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime.’ (In the same memorandum he pointed out, rather more far-sightedly, that the Japanese would find it very hard to invade Australia.)153 ‘The Japanese war bogey leaves me completely cold’, he told a Cabinet committee in 1928.154 In the 1930s he showed himself to be overly sanguine about the strength of Britain’s naval base at Singapore, which was seen as an important symbol of Britain’s commitment to the defence of Australia and New Zealand.155 Arguably, though, his broad sense of priorities was correct. In the event of a world war, Britain would need to win first in Europe before turning her attention to the Far East. For him, the British Isles were indeed the starting point of policy, but it was not the case, as Amery liked to allege, that they were the sole end point too.

  In July 1939 Mackenzie King – who had returned to office as Prime Minister in Ottawa four years earlier – heard a rumour that Chamberlain had brought Churchill into the government in London. He was terribly worried, because he believed that this would make war inevitable. It seemed possible at this time that the Soviet Union might in that event become an ally of Britain; what should Canada do? ‘We would not like to stand behind Churchill – or Russia – it is all a terrible muddle.’156 The rumour on this occasion proved false; it was only at the outbreak of war in September that Chamberlain appointed Churchill to his old post of First Lord of the Admiralty. But even after Germany invaded Poland, Mackenzie King held Churchill partly responsible for the war.157 Robert Menzies, the new Prime Minister of Australia, was no unqualified admirer either. A supporter of appeasement, he had met Churchill at Chartwell in 1935 and found him ‘an arresting person’, but after seeing him in action in the Commons judged that the idol had feet of clay. He wrote in his diary: ‘his theme is a constant repetition of “I told you so”, and a first class man usually doesn’t indulge in this luxury. If a first-rater has once said an important thing, he doesn’t need to remind people that he’s said it.’158 Churchill could count on hostility from J. B. M. Hertzog, the South African Prime Minister, but sympathy from Smuts, now Hertzog’s deputy. Hertzog’s government split when war broke out, and he himself, who supported neutrality, was narrowly defeated in Parliament and replaced by Smuts. With South Africa at war, and Churchill back at the Admiralty, the latter sent a telegram to Smuts: ‘I rejoice to feel that we are once again on commando together.’159

  Churchill was not yet, of course, Prime Minister, and attitudes to him were not necessarily a proxy for attitudes to Britain and to the Empire. Mackenzie King felt confidence in Chamberlain and Halifax (now Foreign Secretary).160 His policy was that Canada would support Britain if she went to war, and when hostilities broke out he secured his Parliament’s approval for this course; the Canadian declaration of war came a week after those of Britain and France. In Canberra there were no such formalities: for Menzies it was axiomatic that if Britain was at war then Australia was too. New Zealand’s anti-appeasing Labour government under Michael Savage also joined the war immediately. But, if Churchill did emerge as Britain’s new leader, there was no guarantee that he could count on unqualified support from all parts of the Empire for an uncompromising prosecution of the war. The next years would unleash conflicting forces promoting, on the one hand, imperial military cohesion in the short term and, on the other, the nationalist spirit and economic strain that would seal the Empire’s eventual dissolution. It was Churchill’s longstanding conviction that ‘The British Empire will last so long and only so long as the British race is determined to maintain it.’161 This revealing assertion, which seemed to assume that British willpower (or the lack of it) was the only factor in world politics, was now to be put to the test.

  PART THREE

  Liquidation

  7

  UNDISMAYED AGAINST DISASTER, 1939–1942

  A few days after the outbreak of war Churchill found the time, in the midst of his new tasks at the Admiralty, to inquire after the health of his old commander, General Sir Bindon B
lood, who was now ninety-six. Blood’s wife wrote afterwards to thank him for his call. She reported that ‘my Bindon’ was ‘very feeble & his brain [is] in a shocking muddle, but he knew you had phoned & how pleased he was he looked up and said “Winston is a grand man” ’.1 Blood lived on until the following year and died just six days after Churchill became Prime Minister. His longevity reminds us of the contrast in the scale of the threats the British Empire faced at the start of Churchill’s career and at its high-water mark. Churchill himself joked to journalists that ‘one may look back with envy to the past, and to the Victorian Age when great controversies were fought about what now seem to us vy minor matters’. At that time great states ‘fought little wars’ and ‘the pugnacious instincts of our people were satisfied with such comparatively harmless objects as Cetewayo, the Mahdi, President Kruger and the Mad Mullah’. The social, economic and military problems of ‘this shattering 20th Century’ posed an entirely new challenge.2 In his public rhetoric, Churchill emphasized the ‘vast latent power of the British and French Empires’ that equipped them to deal with the German threat. ‘We have the freely-given ardent support of the twenty millions of British citizens in the self-governing Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa’, he said in a broadcast after the first month of war. He added, rather less convincingly, ‘We have, I believe, the heart and moral conviction of India on our side.’3

  Churchill quickly established a phenomenal work-rate, although he was no slave to formality. One late-night visitor to the Admiralty found him walking about in his socks, smoking a big cigar and with a whisky and soda on his desk; he seemed a little drunk.4 As ever in need of money, he even found time – with the help of assistants – to labour on his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, although it was not completed until after the war. His political fortunes continued to rise, bolstered by strong performances on the radio and in the Commons. Harold Nicolson described how in one speech ‘he sounded every note from deep preoccupation to flippancy, from resolution to sheer boyishness. One could feel the spirits of the House rising with every word. [. . .] In those twenty minutes Churchill brought himself nearer the post of Prime Minister than he has ever been before.’5

  I

  Churchill’s preoccupation with the submarine menace brought Ireland firmly back into the field of his concern at the oubreak of war. The IRA was engaged in a bombing campaign on the British mainland. ‘If they throw bombs in London,’ he asked, ‘why should they not supply petrol to U-boats?’6 As Churchill had feared, moreover, De Valera’s government committed Éire – as the Free State was officially named in 1937 – to neutrality. It was, however, willing to provide covert cooperation to the British (and Éire also remained a rich source of recruits). But Churchill did not recognize Ireland’s right to remain neutral in the first place. Its status was ambiguous, the 1937 constitution failing to make clear whether or not it was a republic. On Churchill’s reading of the situation, Éire was technically committed by the King’s declaration of war. ‘It is not a Dominion’, he wrote. ‘They themselves repudiate this idea. It is certainly under the Crown. [. . .] Legally I believe they are at “at war but skulking”.’7 At the end of October he told the War Cabinet that Ireland ‘should be told clearly that she was at a parting of the ways, and it should be brought home to her what she stood to lose in being declared a foreign power’. If things ‘came to such a pass that Eire was expelled from the Commonwealth’, Britain should insist on regaining the so-called treaty ports. (These ports, Queens-town, Berehaven and Lough Swilly, had been reserved for Britain’s use in 1921 but had been returned to Éire, against Churchill’s urging, in 1938.) Churchill’s argument had no effect, however. Chamberlain pointed out that De Valera was probably right to claim that no Irish government could survive if it departed from neutrality, and seizure of the ports would be seen in the USA and India as ‘high-handed and unwarranted’.8 During a subsequent meeting with the secret services Churchill urged ‘that complete censorship should be imposed on Eire and when opposition was raised on the grounds that this might antagonise the Irish government, he said dramatically, “What is that to the sinking of one of our warships?” ’9

  His table-thumping approach was not to everyone’s taste. Anthony Eden, the Secretary of State for the Dominions, complained privately about Churchill’s wish to ‘drive Eire out of the Empire’. Eden, who had resigned as Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary in 1938, was a political ally of Churchill, but as Oliver Harvey, one of his confidants in the Foreign Office, recorded: ‘A.E. is beginning to doubt whether Churchill could ever be P.M. so bad is his judgement in such matters.’10 Nevertheless, Churchill’s outbursts must be kept in proportion, not least in relation to Eden’s own epic tantrums. In part, they were a way of venting emotion at a time of great stress, and he was usually persuaded to see reason. Security cooperation from Dublin and the failure to find evidence of U-boat activity on Ireland’s west coast in due course assuaged his fears.11 The IRA, which was the enemy of the Irish government as much as of the British, was ruthlessly suppressed by De Valera. However, Churchill did not buy the idea that Irish unification would end bitterness towards Britain and bring Éire into the war on the side of the Allies. At the start of the war he wrote, ‘They [the Irish] will not unite at the present time, and we cannot in any circumstances sell the loyalists of Northern Ireland.’12

  According to Eden, ‘Winston’s attitude over India’ was ‘just as bad’ as his attitude to Ireland.13 One of Churchill’s decisions at the Admiralty casts interesting light on his approach to Indian issues. A few weeks into the war he wrote a note on ‘Employment of Indians or Colonial Natives in the Royal Navy’. He began with an apparently unambiguous statement: ‘There must be no discrimination on grounds of race or colour.’ Yet he continued, ‘In practice much inconvenience would arise if this theoretical equality had many examples.’ Cases should be judged on their merits – that is to say, ‘from the point of view of smooth administration’. He concluded: ‘I cannot see any objections to Indians serving on HM ships where they are qualified and needed, or if their virtues so deserve rising to be Admirals of the Fleet. But not too many of them please.’14 This final sentence plainly undermined his initial declaration, for if there was to be no discrimination how could the numbers be kept down? The ambivalence was in some ways more revealing than notorious remarks such as his description of the Indians as ‘the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans’.15 It perfectly encapsulated the double standard whereby nominal racial equality within the Empire was vitiated by the supposedly ‘practical’ considerations that would attend its full enforcement. Individuals’ qualifications in the end took second place to ‘smooth administration’, which too many promotions based on merit might disrupt. This was certainly not apartheid, but it was an official endorsement of the glass ceiling. Not surprisingly, no Indian rose to become an Admiral of the Fleet in the Royal Navy during World War II.

  When it came to Indian politics, the focus of Eden’s comment, Churchill did not trouble to pay lip service to progressive attitudes. Lord Linlithgow, the conservative, stiff-mannered Viceroy, had with tactless constitutional correctness simply announced that India was at war, without consulting its political leaders or the governments of the provinces. The nationalists were divided. Gandhi, of course, opposed violence but was prepared to give moral support to the British unconditionally. The official Congress leadership, by contrast, was potentially prepared to support the war effort if its conditions on the future of India were met. They were not to be satisfied, though, with Linlithgow’s reiteration, coupled with other assurances, that Dominion status remained the British aim. The Congress provincial governments resigned, and it was in due course resolved that Britain was ‘carrying on the war fundamentally for Imperialist ends’, to which Congress would not become a party.16 M. A. Jinnah’s Muslim League supported the war, however. Jinnah told Linlithgow that ‘he was extremely doubtful as to the capacity of India and Indians to look a
fter themselves. [. . .] If the British should by any chance be beaten in the war and driven out of India, India would break into a hundred pieces in three months and lie open, in addition, to external invasion.’17 The Marquess of Zetland, the Secretary of State for India, pressed Linlithgow to put forward new constitutional proposals to win over Congress. When the issue was discussed by ministers in February 1940, Churchill asked: ‘Was it fair that Parliament and the War Cabinet should have to involve themselves in these complications in the midst of a great war?’ Linlithgow would doubtless have to see Gandhi, he said, but should not go beyond previous statements. Zetland and Linlithgow had told Gandhi that communal divisions must be settled before Dominion status could proceed. However:

  The First Lord said that he did not share the anxiety to encourage and promote unity between the Hindu and Moslem communities. Such unity was, in fact, almost out of the realm of practical politics, while, if it were to be brought about, the immediate result would be that the united communities would join in showing us the door. He regarded the Hindu–Moslem feud as a bulwark of British rule in India.18

  The traditional justification for the Raj was that only British rule could keep the different communities from each other’s throats. Churchill was now openly arguing that they had to be kept at each other’s throats in order to sustain British rule.

  On 24 March, at its annual meeting in Lahore, the Muslim League took a momentous step. It passed a resolution declaring that ‘the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the north-western and eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute “independent states” ’.19 Perhaps, in making this demand for partition, Jinnah was simply trying to acquire a bargaining chip in order to improve the position of Muslims within a future united India; but it took on a life of its own, and the stage was set for the eventual creation of Pakistan. Zetland was disturbed by the Lahore resolution, but Churchill was sanguine. ‘His view was that the awakening of a new spirit of self-reliance and self-assertiveness on the part of the different communities, of which the Moslem League’s resolution was a sign, constituted a hopeful development.’20 According to the Chancellor, Sir John Simon, who was himself something of a hardliner, ‘Winston rejoiced in the quarrel which had broken out afresh between Hindus and Moslems, said he hoped it would remain bitter and bloody and was glad that we had made the suggestion of Dominion status which was acting as a cat among the pigeons.’21 The Cabinet deferred any major step for the time being.