Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  Some measure of the man who took office in 1940 can be found in his recollection of the triumph: ‘At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial …’69 Churchill’s outlook was incurably romantic and overblown. He treated life, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once commented, ‘as a great Renaissance pageant’.70 His was not a subtle or devious personality. He saw things in black and white, right or wrong. He had a great respect for liberty and an intense dislike of tyranny, though he never defined either very deeply. He was steeped in history at the expense of the present, from which he seemed oddly alienated. He might have flourished in any age – a knight at arms, an Elizabethan captain, a cavalier, an old-regime general like the ancestor he so admired, John, First Duke of Marlborough. His great love was war. He was not personally bloodthirsty, but took a boyish delight in military action. He told French leaders on the eve of their capitulation that Britain would ‘fight on for ever and ever and ever’. That same summer, when Halifax asked if he would consider transferring the government to Canada, Churchill disarmingly replied that if the Germans invaded, ‘I shall take a rifle (I’m not a bad shot with a rifle) and put myself in the pillbox at the end of Downing Street and shoot till I’ve no more ammunition.’ Halifax had his doubts, but Churchill said very much the same to Harriman two years later on a voyage across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, when he disclosed that his lifeboat was to be fitted with a machine gun if they were torpedoed: ‘I won’t be captured. The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy.’71

  No one ever doubted Churchill’s bravery, nor the energy and impetuosity that he brought to the war effort. But there was a darker side to his character. He had a group of intimates with whom he shared his extravagant, almost bohemian lifestyle, the sybaritic habits of that louche nobility into which he was born, but he was otherwise cut off from people. His wife regarded him as selfish and egotistical, ‘like Napoleon’.72 He was a difficult man to cross; he would pursue his point of view to the length of obsession. He was temperamental and petulant, though, by all accounts, not mean-spirited. Beneath the blustering exterior lurked a more sensitive and insecure individual, prone to bouts of deep depression, the ‘Black Dog’. During the Teheran conference Churchill’s doctor found him unusually gloomy and desperate: ‘we are only specks of dust, that have settled in the night on the map of the world …’73

  Few people have doubted that in 1940 the hour found the man. The defeat in France and the threat of invasion brought close the collapse of Britain’s war effort. A peace with Hitler was a possibility, as Churchill told his ministerial colleagues at the time of Dunkirk. But he recognised, as the French discovered, that peace on Hitler’s terms would be shortlived and one-sided. Had Churchill made peace, German domination of the Continent would have been assured. There would have been little prospect of rousing the British public for a second war against Hitler’s Germany if the peace turned sour. But Churchill did not think that agreement with Hitler was compatible with ‘his own conscience or honour’. No one seriously challenged this view, and Churchill’s personal defiance came to stand for that of the whole nation.74 Churchill was the least likely figure to abandon the contest; he saw himself as a leader chosen to run the war, not to make the peace. The British decision to fight on in the summer of 1940 owed a good deal to the nature of Britain’s new helmsman.

  Churchill’s main contributions in the first months of his premiership were not only his resolute will to fight on, but also his construction of a clear, centralised system to run the war. His memories of the First World War, of political crisis and military confusion, inclined him to fuse political and military responsibilities in his own hands. As Prime Minister and Minister of Defence Churchill, like Roosevelt, could oversee the whole war effort. He set up his own political and military secretariats to keep him in close touch with the detailed movement of events. The Chiefs-of-Staff Committee was quickly established as the main forum for the formulation of strategy, while a small War Cabinet discussed the wider political issues of war. Churchill introduced the novelty of communicating quickly by personal and often peremptory notes, sent directly to ministers and generals rather than left to wind their way through the usual bureaucratic channels. Churchill, again like Roosevelt, preferred informality to protocol. He disliked what he called the ‘official grimace’. He saw it as his role to prod officials into action, to energise and invigorate, to expedite policy.75

  Churchill’s real interest was in strategy, and it is here that his leadership was at best a mixed blessing however generously it is assessed. His habit was to pursue every project that occurred to him if it seemed to promise swift or dramatic results. His instincts were all for the offensive, as if every operation were a cavalry charge. His long-suffering army Chief-of-Staff, General Brooke, found him ‘erratic’ and ‘impulsive’, working through intuition rather than analysis.76 The one merit of this approach was that it kept subordinates on their toes, arguing against his more hare-brained schemes and thoroughly preparing their objections. If the case against was sensible, recalled one of his private secretaries, ‘you had a fair hearing, and he was open to argument’. Churchill never overruled the Combined Chiefs-of-Staff if they were against him, though he would complain bitterly if he did not get his way.77 He once ruefully observed that he did not have ‘autocratic powers’ like Stalin or Hitler, but Britain’s war effort was almost certainly the better for it.

  On two issues he was clear-sighted: his pursuit of American assistance and his support for air power. He had proposed the same strategy in the Great War: ‘There are only two ways of winning the war’, he announced in 1917, ‘and they both begin with an A.’78 In 1940 there were few other options. No major state could provide effective help for Britain except for America; the war could only be brought home to Germany through bombing. The pursuit of both in 1940 and 1941, though results at first were meagre, proved in the long run to be of inestimable value in the defeat of Germany. But on almost every other strategic issue Churchill’s judgement was questionable. The Norwegian campaign was a disaster; Churchill was all for sending more aircraft to France in June 1940 to be frittered away in an unwinnable battle; and in the spring of 1941 he explored the possibility of laying on an ‘air banquet’, drawing together every available aircraft in Britain, even from the training schools, to launch a single all-out air attack against Germany.79 It was Churchill who sent the Prince of Wales and Repulse to the Far East on the grounds that battleships could still fight their way past air power; Dakar, Greece, Crete – a positive gazetteer of poorly prepared, poorly supplied operations. Finally, Churchill’s single-minded pursuit of the Mediterranean option, and his obsession with Turkey and the Balkans – again a hangover from the First World War – might well have inflicted serious damage on western strategy if he had won his way. Hemmed in by the Alps and the Balkan ranges, at the end of long supply lines, the western Allies would have inflicted much less damage on Hitler than they did in France, while the Soviet advance in the east would have been slowed up, as Stalin fully realised at Teheran. On these issues Churchill showed himself at his worst, angrily convinced of his own strategic insight, unable to concentrate on other issues, bullying and cajoling by turns. He remained certain at Teheran that he was right about the ‘shining, gleaming opportunities in the Mediterranean’, but he could carry neither his allies nor many of his staff with him.80 It was a conviction all the more difficult to understand in the light of Churchill’s failure at Gallipoli, and the insignificant part the Balkans and Middle East played in the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918.

  It is difficult not to conclude that Allied strategy succeeded despite Churchill, though his pugnacity and spirit remained a valuable symbol of the Allied will to win. Both his allies and his military staffs soon learned how to cope with their mercurial companion by diverting and ignoring his interventions. He was a
poor administrator, and left much of the machinery of war, once it was established, to run itself. He grew out of touch with policy on the home front. In military affairs he met his match in Brooke, who managed to blunt his excesses. His notorious habit of interfering with front-line operations, and sacking generals and admirals he did not value, was curbed with the emergence of strong military personalities – Alexander in the Mediterranean, Montgomery in Europe – who ensured his bark remained much worse than his bite. By 1943 his influence on the war effort was much reduced; at Teheran he confided that he was ‘appalled by his own impotence’.81 Despite the postwar mythology, his popularity with the population was not as secure as he would have wished. In early 1942 opinion polls showed fewer than half of those asked in favour of his premiership. In July 1942 he was subjected to a Parliamentary vote of no confidence, though he survived it comfortably. However in 1945, two months after the victory in Europe, Churchill was heavily defeated in the General Election, ‘immediately dismissed by the British electorate’ he remarked in his memoirs, his bitterness scarcely concealed. Churchill had been the man for the hour, but for no longer. ‘Don’t you feel lonely without a war?’ he asked his doctor a decade later. ‘I do.’82

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  There is no ideal war leader. For all their many strengths the coalition leaders had their share of flaws. What is striking, as the war effort went on, was the ability of the wartime apparatus to cope with those flaws. In each case the personal role of the leader moved from a deliberate prominence at the start of the conflict to a more subdued participation by its end. This was an inevitable product of the war, even for Stalin. No one man could hope to master every area of activity; delegation was an absolute necessity. The western war effort was run by large committees staffed by both Allies. These committees formed the apex of a pyramid of staffs and offices where the routine work of the war effort was conducted. The war was not so much led as administered.

  What such systems needed were managers, and it is to the credit of all three Allied leaders that this was quickly recognised. Behind each leader there emerged a cohort of military managers and civilian officials who took on the real responsibility of running the war. In general these tasks were carried out by professionals, whose experience and qualities singled them out for office. The Allied wartime administration was on balance surprisingly free of political stoodges and dud appointments; incompetence at the highest level was difficult to conceal. Functional effectiveness rather than political loyalty governed promotion, and resulted in a valuable degree of stability and continuity at the higher levels of leadership of all three states.

  Three examples may serve to demonstrate the force of this assertion. Each one illustrates the way in which Allied leadership came to be shared between commander-in-chief and professional specialist. The first is the case of Alan Brooke. A career soldier from Northern Ireland, Brooke made his reputation early in the war rescuing the defeated forces from north-east France. He was promoted on his return to head the Home Army, and set about the reorganisation and training of forces to repel invasion. In December 1941 he replaced Sir John Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the most senior military appointment. Dill was a clear-sighted and energetic chief, but he had not been able, on his own admission, to cope with the nervous strain of constantly arguing with Churchill. Brooke had no such qualms. He had a quick temper and a strong streak of stubbornness and was happy to argue issues out face to face with Churchill. He did so from a position of great strength. He was much more closely in touch with the war effort than Churchill; he had a quick mind and was able to grasp the strategic effort as a whole, to weigh means and ends precisely. His manner was terse to the point of rudeness; subordinates found him severe, demanding, and aloof. He worked hard and efficiently and expected nothing less from those around him. He was the very opposite of Churchill, sceptical where his chief was enthusiastic, consistently sensible rather than erratic, a thorough and unruffled administrator. He cultivated a mask of complete imperturbability. ‘I considered it essential’, he wrote after the war, ‘never to disclose outwardly what one felt inwardly … It was of primary importance to maintain an outward appearance that radiated confidence.’83 When in June 1942 he became Chairman of the Chiefs-of-Staff Committee, and the leading British representative among the inter-allied Combined Chiefs, he was able to influence the whole Allied military effort.

  His brusque manner and and persona grated on his American opposite numbers, but his exceptional grasp of the complexities of global strategy, meticulous preparation and analytical power dominated the early Allied meetings as well. Churchill found him an uncongenial foil: ‘When I thump the table and push my face towards him, what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me …’84 But he recognised the virtues of the military manager and Brooke kept his place for the remaining years of the war, running every aspect of the conflict from the Cabinet War Room in Great George Street, a little way from St James’s Park in central London. For the man regarded by the Secretary for War, James Grigg, as second only to Churchill in his contribution to victory, he features remarkably little in Churchill’s history of the war, beyond the bland assertion that Brooke rendered ‘services of the highest order’. But other colleagues with less to conceal testified to Brooke’s exceptional qualities. Ismay, Churchill’s go-between, observed the work of eight Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff at close quarters and considered Brooke ‘the best of them all’. Though Eisenhower did not like Brooke’s strange mannerisms when they first met, and thought him shrewd rather than wise, he ended by regarding him ‘as a brilliant soldier’.85 Brooke rather than Churchill was the architect of Britain’s military revival from 1942. His one weakness, a product of his gruelling experiences in the retreat from France in 1940, was his excessive caution over direct cross-Channel assault, even though he knew it made strategic sense. He preferred the peripheral to the direct strategy in 1942 and 1943 on grounds of military realism, but he accepted the joint decision of the coalition to launch an invasion in 1944, and hoped to command it. Instead he remained at his existing post until February 1946 when he was succeeded by Montgomery.

  The second example is less well known. During the course of 1942 in the Soviet Union the crises of retreat brought a rapid turnover of key military personnel. Zhukov and Novikov continued to enjoy Stalin’s confidence, but it proved impossible to find a satisfactory Chief-of-Staff or Chief-of-Operations, positions of critical importance in the Soviet military structure. Between June and December there were no fewer than seven Operations Chiefs.86 A settled Chief-of-Staff, Vasilevsky, was appointed in July, but he was compelled by common practice to spend long periods at the front directly coordinating operations. In December 1942 the remaining gap was filled by the appointment of General Alexei Antonov as Chief-of-Operations, and simultaneously deputy Chief-of-Staff, to act when the Chief was at the front. Antonov, 46 years of age and a distinguished staff officer, was Chief-of-Staff to the Trans-Caucasian front when the summons came from Moscow. He was an inspired choice. He made it clear that he was not going to follow his unfortunate predecessors by jumping to Stalin’s tune. He spent a week in Moscow familiarising himself with the military situation before he visited Stalin. Instead of the brief sojourn everyone expected, Antonov stayed at this post until February 1945, when he was made full Chief-of-Staff. His deputy, General Shtemenko, regarded him as an officer of exceptional qualities, firm, even-tempered, clear-minded. Shtemenko never saw him lose his self-control in six years. Like Brooke he was impatient with less able men, intolerant of ‘superficiality, haste, imperfections and formalism’.87 He praised people seldom, planned his work with a meticulous care, spoke ‘with brevity and clarity’. His calmness and breadth of vision restored morale at the army’s head.

  Stalin developed a great respect for Antonov, not least because he gave him straightforward accounts of the state of affairs at the front, however unpalatable. In addition, Antonov was not afraid to argue with Stalin, which was even
more unusual. He quickly acquired a reputation for the skill with which he presented the General Staff case. Even Marshal Zhukov, never happy at sharing the limelight, allowed Antonov, ‘a master at presenting material’, to draw up the operational maps and schedules and to go over them with Stalin at the evening briefings.88 Gradually the pattern of General Staff work altered. More and more of Stalin’s directives were prepared by Antonov, and Stalin would sometimes sign them without even reading them. The balance between the generals and Stalin perceptibly changed. In the months leading up to the Battle of Kursk Antonov played a key part in the planning and preparation, and in allaying Stalin’s fears that the 1943 campaign would be a repeat of 1941 and 1942. Antonov and Zhukov between them argued against Stalin’s desire for a quick pre-emptive strike at the gathering German forces. Over the shape of Soviet strategy in the summer of 1943 the General Staff view prevailed. Antonov took a leading role in the planning of the drive into Poland, and the final assault on Berlin, but he was able to conduct much of his work from Moscow, by telephone, rather than suffer the time-wasting visits to the front forced on other senior commanders. After the war he retained Stalin’s affections longer than Zhukov, but in 1948 he was suddenly demoted from the General Staff to command the Trans-Caucasian Military District. In 1954 he was reinstated and became from 1955 until his death in 1962 Chief-of-Staff of the Warsaw Pact.89