After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The next month, after Dowding’s confrontation with Churchill in the Cabinet Office, was decisive. French defeat had now become inevitable. Lord Gort, C-in-C of the British Expeditionary Force, had the choice of watching his troops be marooned in enemy-occupied France, or organizing a tactical retreat. He was faced with the need to evacuate an army of over 360,000 men from the beaches of Dunkirk. Around 5,000 British soldiers were killed in the operation, but the rest of the army was rescued, chiefly by the Royal Navy, but with the assistance of the ‘little boats’, pleasure steamers, fishing craft and the like, which volunteered to make the cross-Channel journey. Many arrived in the ports and seaside resorts of the English South Coast, their funnels splintered with bullet-holes, only to turn round when their passengers had disembarked, and return to France to pick up more.

  The weather was preternaturally calm and bright; the result, many averred, of prayer. All the non-portable equipment was lost, every heavy gun, every tank. Many men had even lost their rifles. The RAF was vital in warding off the attacks by Stuka bombers. They lost 474 planes in the fight, and the Royal Navy lost six destroyers, but the bulk of the army, thanks to Gort, was rescued. In total, over half a million men were transported across the Channel, 18,246 of whom were French, 24,352 Polish, 4,938 Czech and 163 Belgian.7 It meant that, if the Germans did try to invade Britain, they would find, by September 1940, 16 divisions amassed in the South East. The disadvantage, from the British point of view, is that the Germans would have found them more or less unarmed.

  Could you please oblige us with a bren gun,

  Or failing that, a hand grenade would do,

  trilled Noël Coward.

  We’ve got some ammunition

  In a rather damp condition,

  And Major Huss

  Has an arquebus

  Which was used at Waterloo.

  The German High Command was divided about the best method of putting their invasion plan – Sea Lion – into operation. The army wanted to enter Britain in September, landing in Kent, but Reichsmarschall Goring believed that the Luftwaffe alone could defeat Britain. Not all his officers agreed. Adolf Galland, a squadron commodore in the Luftwaffe, said: ‘In my opinion the plan’ – to invade Britain – ‘was not serious. Our preparations were ridiculous. The air force was not trained to conduct an independent air war over England.’ That would seem to have been the case. So long as the German air force was used as backup to its, to date, unbeaten army, with the support of its navy, it would probably have been unbeatable. Against Dowding and his fighter pilots, it was a different story.

  It was partly the courage and ingenuity of the pilots, partly the superiority of the aircraft design, but above all it was the technological ingenuity of the boffins, which helped win the Battle of Britain. Radio direction finding, RDF, had been pioneered in 1935 by Robert Watson-Watt, who initially developed it as an instrument of meteorology and immediately saw its defence potential. By 1938, Watson-Watt had supervised the building of the first CH (chain, home) radar station on the east coast; a second chain (CHL) could provide low cover on 1.5 metres wavelength for aircraft flying beneath the detection zones of the CH stations. Similar devices were available for ships at sea. By the beginning of the war, Watson-Watt was the director of communications at the Air Ministry with special responsibility for radar. The system he created could rightly be described as ‘one of the greatest combined feats of science, engineering, and organization in the annals of human achievement’.8 Max Aitken, Beaverbrook’s son and a squadron leader in 1940, said: ‘Radar won the Battle.’9

  By the time Goring sent his Luftwaffe, Watson-Watt had organized a chain of radar stations round the coast looking out as far as 100 miles and feeding all the information instantaneously to Fighter Command. Dowding could therefore decide how to deploy his fighters, many of whom were desperately undertrained, to the best advantage. The first attacks by the Germans were bombing raids by the Stukas on merchant convoys and harbours. Dover was badly hit. Such tactics gave Dowding valuable time to plan, and to retrench. On 13 August, Goring suddenly changed his tack and ordered an attack on the radar stations. For the next fortnight, in the summer-holiday sky, the fighter pilots of England and Germany confronted one another. It was almost like a return to the single combat of medieval warfare. The fate of Britain hung on the fighting skills of about 1,400 men, some of whom were barely out of school. The Luftwaffe bombed airfields with serious, but never devastating, results.

  It was at the end of the month of August, after two weeks of particularly heavy losses of aircraft on the ground and sustained fighting in the air, that the pilots experienced what they called ‘the miracle’. Instead of attacking airfields, on 7 September the German bombers bombed the London docks. By the time the next major Luftwaffe daylight attack occurred, on 15 September, the RAF was waiting for them, with Spitfires and Hurricanes regrouped skilfully by Dowding. On 15 September, 56 German planes were shot down. Britain had maintained control of the air by day. The German planes remained a droning presence of malice and doom over the night skies of British cities, but by day the air was clear. The RAF had won the Battle of Britain. No invasion would be possible until the following spring.

  Dowding had been due for retirement when the Battle of Britain began. On 25 November 1940 he was replaced at Fighter Command by Deputy Chief of Staff Air Vice-Marshal Sholto Douglas. Thereafter, Dowding was sidelined. He was difficult to work for, the men in the Air Ministry did not like him, and Churchill could not quite forgive him for having been right in May 1940. The Prime Minister eagerly hogged the glory of the Battle of Britain with his ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few’; but he would have preferred the actual victor, a man who is surely the Second World War equivalent of Lord Nelson, to have been dropped from the cast list of heroes. Dowding was sent to America to ask for supplies on behalf of the Air Ministry; the visit was not a success: the Americans did not like ‘Stuffy’ Dowding, nor he them. The Air Ministry asked him to write a short book about the Battle of Britain. He wrote the book, and sent a typescript to Churchill, asking him to read it, and saying that if he did so, the Prime Minister might understand why Dowding did not wish to stay in the air force with the job of overseeing possible economies. The book ended with a heartfelt wish that in future the world might learn to solve its differences by peaceable means.

  He was summoned to dine and sleep at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official country residence. The dinner was something which Dowding, habitually abstemious, found deeply uncongenial. There was much shouted conversation between Brendan Bracken and Churchill, then the showing of a Russian film, which Dowding thought crude. Very late at night Churchill got round to talking with Dowding. The book contained a passage about a balance of power in the world. Churchill did not like it. He believed it would be quoted ‘by our enemies’. Dowding was then astounded to hear Churchill say that he ‘did not believe in world harmony’. He compared it with mixing together all the colours in a child’s paintbox. Dowding formed the impression that Churchill ‘didn’t seem to believe in working for peace’. He apparently thought – or ‘thought’, for it was late at night – ‘that an atmosphere of struggle was necessary to avoid decadence. “I said it was all very well in the old days when all that was necessary was for men to keep their bodies fit and their weapons handy”. But Churchill was drunk, and it was not an occasion “for serious or sensible discussion”.’10

  After the war, Dowding, who had been for many years a widower, remarried – in 1951. He lived until February 1970, increasingly lean and bright-eyed. ‘His vision was intense but narrow,’ wrote E. B. Haslam.11 Dowding was a spiritualist who wrote a number of books about his certainty of a future life. He gave up shooting and became a vegetarian. When a grandchild developed a passion for collecting butterflies, Dowding expressed disapproval. The idea of pinioning these silent, colourful creatures with their outstretched wings shocked the gentle soul of a man who had directed aerial wa
rfare with more acuity than anyone else in history.12 When he was approached, yet again, by an historical researcher who wanted help with a book about the Battle of Britain, he replied: ‘If you ever “did” the Aeneid at school, you may remember one of the opening lines: “Infandum regina jubes renovare dolorem”, “You ask me, O Queen, to resuscitate an intolerable grief”.’13

  Britain, during the winter of bombing in 1940–41, dug itself in for the long haul. There was no hope of achieving victory against the Germans in France, even if there had been the technical possibility of landing a British army on the Normandy beaches in 1941. Churchill’s policy was to concentrate on dominating the Mediterranean. The Australians had notable success in capturing the Libyan port of Bardia from the Italians in January 1941, and taking 45,000 prisoners. (James Joyce died a week later in Zurich.) Under the overall command of the gentle, one-eyed (he lost an eye at Ypres) General Sir Archibald Wavell, the British drove the Italians back in the desert, with fighting of prodigious tenacity led by Lieutenant-General Richard O’Connor, ‘the little Irish terrier’ who fought with his troops in the front line, and, in the week that the Italians captured Bardia, took Tobruk from the Italians. There was then an ill-fated attempt to occupy Greece. The German army was simply too much for the opposition in the Balkans. Yugoslavia was smashed into submission; Belgrade was flattened with German bombs; the Allies retreated ignominiously from Athens in April; and in May there was a hellish week of fighting in Crete – Australian, New Zealand and British troops, as well as Greeks and Cretans – followed by the evacuation from the island, after a German airborne invasion. When General Rommel landed with his Afrika Korps in North Africa, he had little difficulty in regaining most of the Italian losses. By June 1942, Tobruk had fallen to the Germans, with over 30,000 Allied prisoners taken. All the gains by Wavell and O’Connor in 1940–41 were thrown away by the folly of the Greek and Cretan campaigns.

  By 1941, Churchill had ‘peaked’ as a war leader. His great achievement was standing firm in 1940, and steadying national morale. Thereafter, there was a very great deal of hit and miss; alcohol, age and illness clouded his judgement. Sir Alan Brooke, who was chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1942, wrote after the war: ‘The President [Roosevelt] had no great military knowledge and was aware of this fact and consequently relied on Marshall and listened to Marshall’s advice … My position was very different. Winston never had the slightest doubt that he had inherited all the military genius of his great ancestor, Marlborough … To wean him away from his wilder plans required superhuman efforts.’14 As F. E. Smith, one of Churchill’s closest friends in the early days of his political life, used to say, ‘Winston was often right, but when he was wrong, well, my God.’15

  Had Hitler wished to use the concerted expertise and fighting strength of his army, navy and air force to invade Britain in the spring of 1941, he might well have conquered. It might well have brought the war to an end, and ushered in, if not the thousand years of which he dreamed, a very long time in which Europe was ruled by murderous gangsters. Instead, as anyone knew who had studied his overblown account of his world view in Mein Kampf, he wanted to conquer Russia. ‘What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us!’ he mused in August 1941. ‘If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future.’16

  The Germans invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. It does not make sense to compare one sort of suffering with another, and yet it is hard to believe that any soldiers in other parts of the world were as sorely tried in battle as the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, locked in the vast, mechanized Iliad of suffering which was Operation Barbarossa. The Nazi-Soviet Axis, which had posed such a sinister threat to the West, was now turned into a deadly struggle between two monster tyrannies, fought out by their brilliantly trained and courageous soldiers. The Russian citizens themselves, above all in the besieged cities of Stalingrad and Leningrad, endured great hardship. More than 20 million Soviet citizens died during the war, and perhaps 11 million Soviet soldiers.17

  The advance of the German army also led to a general increase in barbarity, some of it planned. Vyacheslav Molotov, in November, protested against the German treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. In one day alone, in the Chernukhinsk camp in the Ukraine, 95 prisoners were shot. Far greater numbers of Jews were now being rounded up and killed – by November, for example, over 18,000 at Sachsenhausen concentration camp alone. In Berlin at the end of July, Goring directed Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Chief Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA): ‘I commission you to carry out all organizational, material and financial preparations for a total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.’ Already, by the end of September, at Babi Yar, members of Einsatzgruppe C, led by Otto Rasch, had murdered 33,771 Jews in two days. They were thrown down a ravine on the outskirts of the city of Kiev. The SS men machine-gunned the adults, but hurled the children off the edge alive. Most of these atrocities came to light only after the end of hostilities, but when they did they surely confirmed Churchill’s instinct that, if Europe were not purged of Nazism, the Dark Ages would indeed have come again.

  While these dreadful events were in preparation, on the night of 10 May 1941 Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, jumped by parachute from a Messerschmitt 110, having flown the plane from Germany to Scotland. In his hand he clutched a briefcase, believed to contain an offer of peace from the Führer. One of Hitler’s supposed conditions was that the Churchill government should resign; if so, it is hardly surprising that the matter was not given very serious consideration in cabinet. Hess had come to meet the Duke of Hamilton, whom he claimed to have got to know during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. ‘This is one of those cases,’ Churchill told the Commons, ‘where imagination is somewhat baffled by the facts as they present themselves.’ But quite what the facts are, or were, remains a mystery. A now semi-substantiated theory is that the Duke of Kent was posing as a potential Quisling or double-agent and waiting to meet a representative of the Führer in Scotland, but Hess got hopelessly lost and the plot was abandoned. Hess was imprisoned after the war and kept under a four-power guard in Spandau gaol until, at the age of ninety-three, he was strangled in his cell. What discussions, if any, he had with senior British politicians, and how realistic the chance of a negotiated peace would have been, will remain a mystery until papers in the Churchill archive, if they exist, throw light on the matter. The dismissal of the peace offer, if it was serious, was probably in accord with the general will, but we shall never know the truth of that either. By May 1941, Churchill enjoyed all but absolute power.

  Tom Jones, deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, is reported to have said: ‘If Winston Churchill had been born ten years later he would, in the 1930s, have made England a fascist state, ranged with the other fascist powers; but … he was too old a man with roots too firmly rooted in the Victorian aristocratic traditions to adopt so alien a philosophy.’18 Clementine Churchill reminded her husband that ‘except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury, & the Speaker, you can sack anyone & everyone’.19

  Yet the paradox of this is that Churchill suffered almost more than any character in British history from watching his most decisive acts have the very opposite effect of the one intended. He who so deplored communism saw Eastern Europe go communist; he who loved the British Empire lost the Empire; and he who throughout his peacetime political career had lambasted socialism presided over an administration which was in many ways the most socialist government Britain ever had. While Churchill directed the war he left domestic policy to his socialist colleagues Attlee and Bevin. The controlled wartime economy, rationing, propaganda newsreels, austere ‘British restaurants’ for food, and the tightest government control over what could be bought, sold, said, published, worn, produced what A. J. P. Taylor called ‘a country more fully socialist than anything achieved by the conscious planners of Soviet Russia’.20

  The newsreels, delivered inva
riably in the strangulated vowels of BBC English, kept up a relentless facetiousness which might have had the sole purpose of cheering people up, but which also tried to infantilize them. ‘The one-time footsloggers have turned kickstart pushers,’ says the commentary to one of them, as the black and white screen shows a lot of men on motorbikes more festooned with foliage camouflage than Malcolm’s soldiers marching through Dunsinane at the end of Macbeth. ‘The left right, left right folks have got both feet off the ground at the same time. They are part of Britain’s mighty mobile mountain. All keen welcomers of Adolf when he drops in for a cup of tea and a cream bun.’ Watching the motorbikes swoop down into a ditch and judder upwards over some heathland, the cinema audiences are rib-nudgingly told: ‘Up and down they go but unlike the Hun they are always on the level.’21

  Many of the gestures called for by government had emblematic rather than practical significance. The handsome railings outside London parks, or the areas of houses, were torn out, supposedly for armament, in fact for scrap. Beaverbrook, when he became Minister of Aircraft Production on 4 February 1942, asked for the population to hand in saucepans and frying-pans. The fantasy that aluminium pots could be melted down and transformed into Lancaster bombers was never believed by anyone in government. It was merely assumed that such pointless gestures of sacrifice would improve morale. The saucepans were all thrown away.

  It is no accident that the Second World War was approached by so many in a spirit of grim irony. The mawkish patriotism of so much propaganda and attempts at poetry during the First World War was not something the 1940s generation, whether in or out of uniform, could really echo. ‘Who the hell dies for King and Country any more? That crap went out in the first world war,’ said one Canadian soldier who spoke for almost everyone.22