Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these high hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.

  It was a supreme political act, to exhibit such grace towards the memory of a man who had failed the British people, and whom Churchill himself justly despised. Yet by November 1940 he could afford to display generosity. His mastery of the nation was secure. His successful defiance of Hitler commanded the admiration of much of the world. He had displayed gifts of self-discipline and political management such as had hitherto been absent from his career. His speeches were recognised as among the greatest ever delivered by a statesman, in war or peace. All that now remained was to devise some means of waging war against an enemy whose control of the Continent was unchallengeable, and whose superiority over Britain remained overwhelming. For Winston Churchill, the hardest part began when the achievement of ‘the Few’ was already the stuff of legend.

  FIVE

  Greek Fire

  1 Seeking Action

  In the autumn of 1940, even Churchill’s foes at Westminster and in Whitehall conceded that since taking office he had revealed a remarkable accession of wisdom. He had not become a different person from his old self, but shed the maverick’s mantle. He looked and sounded a king, ‘Ay, every inch a king,’ albeit one movingly conscious that he was the servant of a democracy. In a few months he had achieved a personal dominance of the country which rendered his colleagues acolytes, almost invisible in the shadow of his pedestal. Only Eden and Bevin made much impact on the popular imagination.

  Among politicians and service chiefs, however, widespread uncertainty persisted, even if it was discreetly expressed. Though the Germans had not invaded Britain, what happened next? What chance of victory did Britain have? The well-known military writer Captain Basil Liddell Hart saw no prospect beyond stalemate, and thus urged a negotiated peace. In September Dalton reported Beaverbrook as ‘very defeatist’, believing that Britain should merely ‘sit tight and defend ourselves until the USA comes into the war’. But would this ever happen? Raymond Lee, US military attaché in London, was among many Americans bemused about what President Roosevelt meant when he promised that their country would aid the British ‘by all means short of war’. Lee sought an answer from senior diplomats at his own embassy: ‘They say no one knows, that it depends on what R thinks from one day to another. I wonder if it ever occurs to the people in Washington that they have no God-given right to declare war. They may wake up one day to find that war has suddenly been declared upon the United States. That is the way Germany and Japan do business. Or, can it be that this is what Roosevelt is manoeuvring for?’

  Once the Battle of Britain was won, the foremost challenge facing Churchill was to find another field upon which to fight. In July 1940, Lee was filled with admiration for Britain’s staunchness amid the invasion threat. But he suggested sardonically that if Hitler instead launched his armies eastward, ‘in a month’s time England would go off sound asleep again’. Likewise MP Harold Nicolson: ‘If Hitler were to postpone invasion and fiddle about in Africa and the Mediterranean, our morale might weaken.’ As long as Britain appeared to face imminent catastrophe, its people displayed notable fortitude. Yet it was a striking feature of British wartime behaviour that the moment peril fractionally receded, many ordinary people allowed themselves to nurse fantasies that their ordeal might soon be over, the spectre of war somehow banished. Soldier Edward Stebbing wrote on 14 November: ‘I have heard a good many members of this unit say that they wished the war would end whether we win or lose…almost every day I hear some variations of the same idea, the common reason being that most of us are fed up with the whole business…The government is criticised for its lack of aggressiveness.’

  A trades union correspondent wrote to Ernest Bevin from Portsmouth: ‘At our weekly meeting last night of delegates representing thousands of workers…the members were very disappointed at your not telling the public that the government intended to prosecute the war more vigorously, and take the offensive, instead of always being on the defensive…We have retired service officers who tell us that we have no leaders. We have not won a battle since the war started and it is for that reason no country will join us, knowing full well that Germany will attack and swallow them, whilst our own government are debating the issue…Our workers’ clubs contain Unionists, Liberals and Labour, all united to push the present government out of office at the first chance, and if something don’t happen soon, the leaders will not be able to hold the workers.’

  Yet how could Britain display aggressiveness, a capability to do more than merely withstand Axis onslaughts by bombers and U-boats? Clementine Churchill enquired at lunch one day: ‘Winston, why don’t we land a million men on the continent of Europe? I’m sure the French would rise up and help us.’ The prime minister answered with unaccustomed forbearance that it would be impossible to land a million men at once, and that the vanguards would be shot to pieces. Back in 1915, as Lt.Col. Winston Churchill prepared to lead a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers into the trenches, he told his officers: ‘We will go easy at first: a little digging and feeling our way, and then perhaps later on we may attempt a deed.’ This latter proposition commanded little enthusiasm among his comrades at the time, and even less among his generals a generation later. But by the winter of 1940 Churchill knew that a ‘deed’ must be attempted, to sustain an appearance of momentum in Britain’s war effort.

  At home, there could be no German invasion before spring. The nation’s city-dwellers must bear the blitz, while the Royal Navy sustained the Atlantic lifeline against U-boats and surface commerce raiders. The navy had already suffered heavily, losing since 1939 one battleship, two aircraft-carriers, two cruisers, twenty-two submarines and thirty-seven destroyers. More ships were building, but 1941 losses would be worse. Churchill pinned great hopes on the RAF’s offensive against Germany, but as he himself observed on 1 November 1940, ‘the discharge of bombs is pitifully small’. It would remain so for a long time to come. CIGS Sir John Dill instructed his director of military operations, Maj.Gen. John Kennedy, to draft a strategy paper on how the war might be won. Kennedy said the best that he could offer was a plan for averting defeat. To make victory possible, American belligerence was indispensable.

  Lt.Gen. Henry Pownall attended an army conference addressed by the prime minister in November 1940, and was impressed by his robust good sense: ‘No more than anyone else did he see clearly how the war was going to be won, and he reminded us that for four years in 1914-18 nobody could foretell the final collapse of Germany, which came so unexpectedly…All we could do for the present, as during the Great War, was to get on with it and see what happened…He talked as well as ever, and I was much impressed by the very broad and patient view that he took of the war as a whole.’ Churchill expressed the same sentiments to senior RAF officers conferring at Downing Street: ‘As the PM said goodnight to the Air Marshals, he told them he was sure we were going to win the war, but confessed he did not see clearly how it was to be achieved.’

  A chiefs of staff paper on Future Strategy, dated 4 September 1940, suggested that Britain should aim ‘to pass to the general offensive in all spheres and in all theatres with the utmost possible strength in the Spring of 1942’. If even this remote prospect was fanciful, what meanwhile was the army to do? Churchill, with his brilliant intuitive understanding of the British people, recognised the importance of military theatre, as his service chiefs often did not. The soldiers’ caution might be prudent, but much of the public, like unheroic Edward Stebbing and his comrades, craved action,
an outcome, some prospect beyond victimhood. There was a rueful War Office joke at this time, prompted by the blitz, that Britain’s soldiers were being put to work knitting socks for the civilians in the trenches.

  Here was one of the foremost principles of wartime leadership which Churchill got profoundly right, though he often erred in implementation. He perceived that there must be action, even if not always useful; there must be successes, even if overstated or even imagined; there must be glory, even if undeserved. Attlee said later, very shrewdly: ‘He was always, in effect, asking himself…“What must Britain do now so that the verdict of history will be favourable?”…He was always looking around for “finest hours”, and if one was not immediately available, his impulse was to manufacture one.’

  Churchill addressed the conduct of strategy with a confidence that dismayed most of Britain’s generals, but which had evolved over many years. As early as 1909, he wrote to Clementine about Britain’s generals: ‘These military men v[er]y often fail altogether to see the simple truths underlying the relationship of all armed forces…Do you know I would greatly like to have some practice in the handling of large forces. I have much confidence in my judgement on things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I seem to feel the truth more than in tactical combinations.’ While he was travelling to America in 1932, Clementine read G.F.R. Henderson’s celebrated biography of Stonewall Jackson. She wrote to her husband: ‘The book is full of abuse of politicians who try to interfere with Generals in the field—(Ahem!).’ Her exclamation was prompted, of course, by memories of his battles with service chiefs during the First World War.

  Churchill believed himself exceptionally fitted for the direction of armies, navies and air forces. He perceived no barrier to such a role in the fact that he possessed neither military staff training nor experience of higher field command. He wrote in his own history of the First World War:

  A series of absurd conventions became established, perhaps inevitably, in the public mind. The first and most monstrous of these was that the Generals and Admirals were more competent to deal with the broad issues of the war than abler men in other spheres of life. The general no doubt was an expert on how to move his troops, and the admiral upon how to fight his ships…But outside this technical aspect they were helpless and misleading arbiters in problems in whose solution the aid of the statesman, the financier, the manufacturer, the inventor, the psychologist, was equally required…Clear leadership, violent action, rigid decision one way or the other, form the only path not only of victory, but of safety and even of mercy. The State cannot afford division or hesitation at the executive centre.

  Tensions between his instincts and the judgements of Britain’s professional commanders would characterise Churchill’s leadership. A Polish officer, attending a lecture at the British staff college on principles of war, rose at its conclusion to suggest that the speaker had omitted the most important: ‘Be stronger.’ Yet where might Britain achieve this? As Minister of Defence, Churchill issued an important directive. Limitations of numbers, he said, ‘make it impossible for the Army, except in resisting invasion, to play a primary role in the defeat of the enemy. That task can only be done by the staying power of the Navy and above all by the effect of Air predominance. Very valuable and important services may be rendered Overseas by the Army in operations of a secondary order, and it is for these special operations that its organization and character should be adapted.’ After a British commando raid on the Lofoten Islands, Churchill wrote to the C-in-C Home Fleet: ‘I am so glad you were able to find the means of executing “Claymore”. This admirable raid has done serious injury to the enemy and has given an immense amount of innocent pleasure at home.’ The latter proposition was more plausible than the former.

  Churchill and his military chiefs renounced any prospect of engaging Hitler’s main army. They committed themselves to a strategy based on minor operations which persisted, in substantial measure, until 1944. Pantellaria, the tiny Italian island between Tunis and Sicily, exercised a baleful fascination upon the war cabinet. After a dinner at Chequers in November 1940, Churchill fantasised about an assault ‘by 300 determined men, with blackened faces, knives between their teeth and revolvers under their tails’. Eden in 1940-41 cherished absurd notions of seizing Sicily: ‘The Sicilians have always been anti-fascist,’ he enthused. A War Office plan dated 28 December called for a descent on the island by two infantry brigades. There was talk of Sardinia, and of the Italian-held Dodecanese islands. The chiefs of staff learned to dread mention of north Norway in the prime minister’s flights of fancy.

  None of these schemes was executed, save a brief and embarrassingly unsuccessful foray into the Dodecanese, because the practical objections were overwhelming. Even the most modest raid required scarce shipping, which could not sensibly be hazarded within range of the Luftwaffe unless air cover was available, as it usually was not. It was hard to identify credible objectives for ‘butcher and bolt’ forays, and to gather sufficient intelligence to give them a reasonable chance of success. However strongly the prime minister pressed for British forces to display initiative and aggression, the chiefs of staff resolutely opposed operations which risked substantial losses in exchange for mere passing propaganda headlines.

  In the autumn of 1940, Africa offered the only realistic opportunities for British land engagement. Libya had been an Italian colony since 1911, Abyssinia since 1936. Churchill owed a perverse debt of gratitude to Mussolini. If Italy had remained neutral, if her dictator had not chosen to seek battle, how else might the British Army have occupied itself after its expulsion from France? As it was, Britain was able to launch spectacular African campaigns against one of the few major armies in the world which it was capable of defeating. Not all Italian generals were incompetents, not all Italian formations fought feebly. But never for a moment were Mussolini’s warriors in the same class as those of Hitler. North Africa, and the Duce’s pigeon-chested posturing as an Axis warlord, offered Britain’s soldiers an opportunity to show their mettle. If the British Army was incapable of playing in a great stadium against world-class opposition, it could nonetheless hearten the nation and impress the world by a demonstration in a lesser league.

  Britain’s chiefs of staff, however, remained sceptical about the strategic value of any big commitment in the Middle East, win or lose. The Suez Canal route to the East was anyway unusable, because the Mediterranean was too perilous for merchant shipping, and remained so until 1943. The Persian oilfields fuelled British military operations in Middle East C-in-C Sir Archibald Wavell’s theatre, but lay too far from home by the Cape route to provide petrol for Britain, which instead relied upon American supplies. It is often forgotten that in those days the US was overwhelmingly the greatest oil producer in the world. Dill advocated reinforcing the Far East against likely Japanese aggression, and remained in his heart an opponent of the Middle East commitment throughout his tenure as head of the army. The CIGS understood the political imperatives facing Churchill, but foremost in his mind was a fear that acceptance of unnecessary new risk might precipitate further gratuitous disaster. The prime minister overruled him. He believed that the embarrassment of inertia in the Middle East much outweighed the perils of seizing the initiative. In the midst of a war, what would the world say about a nation that dispatched large forces to garrison its possessions on the far side of the world against a possible future enemy, rather than engage an actual one much nearer to hand?

  In September 1940 an Italian army led by Marshal Graziani, 200,000 strong and thus outnumbering local British forces by four to one, crossed the east Libyan frontier and drove fifty miles eastward into Egypt before being checked. Meanwhile in East Africa, Mussolini’s troops seized the little colony of British Somaliland and advanced into Kenya and Sudan from their bases in Abyssinia. Wavell ordered Somaliland evacuated after only brief resistance. He remained impenitent in the face of Churchill’s anger about another retreat.

  This first of Britain’s ‘dese
rt generals’ was much beloved in the army. In World War I, Wavell won an MC and lost an eye at Ypres, then spent 1917-18 as a staff officer in Palestine under Allenby, whose biography he later wrote. A reader of poetry, and prone to introspection, among soldiers Wavell passed as an intellectual. His most conspicuous limitation was taciturnity, which crippled his relationship with Churchill. Many who met him, perhaps over-impressed by his enigmatic persona, perceived themselves in the presence of greatness. But uncertainty persisted about whether this extended to mastery of battlefields, where a commander’s strength of will is of greater importance than his cultural accomplishments.

  On 28 October 1940, the Italians invaded north-west Greece. Contrary to expectations, after fierce fighting they were evicted by the Greek army and thrown back into Albania, where the rival forces languished in considerable discomfort through five months that followed. British strategy during this period became dominated by Mediterranean dilemmas, among which aid to Greece and offensive action in Libya stood foremost. Churchill constantly incited his C-in-C to take the offensive against the Italians in the Western Desert, using the tanks shipped to him at such hazard during the summer. Wavell insisted that he needed more time. Now, however, overlaid upon this issue was that of Greece, about which Churchill repeatedly changed his mind. On 27 October, the day before Italy invaded, he dealt brusquely with a proposal from Leo Amery and Lord Lloyd, respectively India and colonial secretaries, that more aid should be dispatched: ‘I do not agree with your suggestions that at the present time we should make any further promises to Greece and Turkey. It is very easy to write in a sweeping manner when one does not have to take account of resources, transport, time and distance.’