Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Yet as soon as Italy attacked Greece, the prime minister told Dill that ‘maximum possible’ aid must be sent. Neville Chamberlain in March 1939 had assured the Greeks of British support against aggression. Now, Churchill perceived that failure to act must make the worst possible impression upon the United States, where many people doubted Britain’s ability to wage war effectively. At the outset he proposed sending planes and weapons to Greece, rather than British troops. Dill, Wavell and Eden—then visiting Cairo—questioned even this. Churchill sent Eden a sharp signal urging boldness, dictated to his typist under the eye of Jock Colville.

  He lay there in his four-post bed with its flowery chintz hangings, his bed-table by his side. Mrs Hill [his secretary] sat patiently opposite while he chewed his cigar, drank frequent sips of iced soda-water, fidgeted his toes beneath the bedclothes and muttered stertorously under his breath what he contemplated saying. To watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child, so tense is his expression, so restless his turnings from side to side, so curious the noises he emits under his breath. Then out comes some masterly sentence and finally with a ‘Gimme’ he takes the sheet of typewritten paper and initials it, or alters it with his fountain-pen, which he holds most awkwardly half way up the holder.

  On 5 November Churchill addressed MPs, reporting grave shipping losses in the Atlantic and describing a conversation he had held on his way into the Commons with the armed and helmeted guards at its doors. One soldier offered a timeless British cliché to the prime minister: ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’ This, Churchill told MPs, was Britain’s watchword for the winter of 1940: ‘We will think of something better by the winter of 1941.’ Then he adjourned to the smoking room, where he devoted himself to an intent study of the Evening News, ‘as if it were the only source of information available to him’. Forget for a moment the art of his performance in the chamber. What more brilliant stagecraft could the leader of a democracy display than to read a newspaper in the common room of MPs of all parties, in the midst of a war and a blitz? ‘ “How are you?” he calls gaily to the most obscure Member…His very presence gives us all gaiety and courage,’ wrote an MP. ‘People gather round his table completely unawed.’

  Despite Wavell’s protests, Churchill insisted upon sending a British force to replace Greek troops garrisoning the island of Crete, who could thus be freed to fight on the mainland. The first consignment of material dispatched to Greece consisted of eight anti-tank guns, twelve Bofors, and 20,000 American rifles. To these were added, following renewed prime ministerial urgings, twenty-four field guns, twenty anti-tank rifles and ten light tanks. This poor stuff reflected the desperate shortage of arms for Britain’s soldiers, never mind those of other nations. Some Gladiator fighters, capable of taking on the Italian air force but emphatically not the Luftwaffe, were also committed. Churchill was enraged by a cable from Sir Miles Lampson, British ambassador in Egypt, dismissing aid to Greece as ‘completely crazy’. The prime minister told the Foreign Office: ‘I expect to be protected from this kind of insolence.’ He dispatched a stinging rebuke to Lampson: ‘You should not telegraph at Government expense such an expression as “completely crazy” when applied by you to grave decisions of policy taken by the Defence Committee and the War Cabinet after considering an altogether wider range of requirements and assets than you can possibly be aware of.’

  On the evening of 8 November, however, the prospect changed again. Eden returned from Cairo to confide to the prime minister first tidings of an offensive Wavell proposed to launch in the Western Desert the following month. This was news Churchill craved: ‘I purred like six cats.’ Ismay found him ‘rapturously happy’. The prime minister exulted: ‘At long last we are going to throw off the intolerable shackles of the defensive. Wars are won by superior will-power. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.’ Three days later, he cabled Wavell: ‘You may…be assured that you will have my full support at all times in any offensive action you may be able to take against the enemy.’ That same night of 11 November, twenty-one Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers, launched from the carrier Illustrious, delivered a brilliant attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto which sank or crippled three battleships. Britain was striking out.

  Churchill accepted that the North African offensive must now assume priority over all else, that no troops could be spared for Greece. A victory in the desert might persuade Turkey to come into the war. His foremost concern was that Wavell, whose terse words and understated delivery failed to generate prime ministerial confidence, should go for broke. Dismayed to hear that Operation Compass was planned as a limited ‘raid’, Churchill wrote to Dill on 7 December: ‘If, with the situation as it is, General Wavell is only playing small, and is not hurling in his whole available forces with furious energy, he will have failed to rise to the height of circumstances…I never “worry” about action, but only about inaction.’ He advanced a mad notion, that Eden should supplant Wavell as Middle East C-in-C, citing the precedent of Lord Wellesley in India during the Napoleonic wars. Eden absolutely refused to consider himself for such an appointment.

  On 9 December, at last came the moment for the ‘Army of the Nile’, as Churchill had christened it, to launch its assault. Wavell’s 4th Indian and 7th Armoured Divisions, led by Lt.Gen. Sir Richard O’Connor, attacked the Italians in the Western Desert. Operation Compass achieved brilliant success. Mussolini’s generals showed themselves epic bunglers. Some 38,000 prisoners were taken in the first three days, at a cost of just 624 Indian and British casualties. ‘It all seems too good to be true,’ wrote Eden on 11 December. Wavell decided to exploit this success, and gave O’Connor his head. The little British army, by now reinforced by 6th Australian Division, stormed along the coast into Libya, taking Bardia on 5 January. At 0540 on 21 January 1941, red Verey lights arched into the sky to signal the start of O’Connor’s attack on the port of Tobruk. Bangalore torpedoes blew gaps in the Italian wire. An Australian voice shouted: ‘Go on, you bastards!’

  At 0645, British tanks lumbered forward. The Italians resisted fiercely, but by dawn next day the sky was lit by the flames of their blazing supply dumps, prisoners in thousands were streaming into British cages, and the defenders were ready to surrender. O’Connor dispatched his tanks on a dash across the desert to cut off the retreating Italians. The desert army was in a mood of wild excitement. ‘Off we went across the unknown country in full cry,’ wrote Michael Creagh, one of O’Connor’s division commanders. In a rare exhibition of emotion, O’Connor asked his chief of staff: ‘My God, do you think it’s going to be all right?’ It was indeed ‘all right’. The British reached Beda Fomm ahead of the Italians, who surrendered. In two months, the desert army had advanced 400 miles and taken 130,000 prisoners. On 11 February another of Wavell’s contingents advanced from Kenya into Abyssinia and Somaliland. After hard fighting—much tougher than in Libya—here too the Italians were driven inexorably towards eventual surrender.

  For a brief season, Wavell became a national hero. For the British people in the late winter and early spring of 1940-41, battered nightly by the Luftwaffe’s bombardment, still fearful of invasion, conscious of the frailty of the Atlantic lifeline, success in Africa was precious. It was Churchill’s delicate task to balance exultation about a victory with caution about future prospects. Again and again in his broadcasts and speeches he emphasised the long duration of the ordeal that must lie ahead, the need for unremitting exertion. To this purpose he continued to stress the danger of a German landing in Britain: in February 1941 he demanded a new evacuation of civilian residents from coastal areas in the danger zone.

  Churchill knew how readily the nation could lapse into inertia. The army’s home forces devoted much energy to anti-invasion exercises, such as Victor in March 1941. Victor assumed that five German divisions, two armoured and one motorised, had landed on the coast of East Anglia. On 30 March, present
ed with a report on the exercise, Churchill minuted mischievously, but with serious intent: ‘All this data would be most valuable for our future offensive operations. I should be very glad if the same officers would work out a scheme for our landing an exactly similar force on the French coast.’ Even if no descent on France was remotely practicable, Churchill was at his best in pressing Britain’s generals again and again to forswear a fortress mentality.

  But public fear and impatience remained constants. ‘For the first time the possibility that we may be defeated has come to many people—me among them,’ wrote Oliver Harvey, Eden’s private secretary, on 22 February 1941. ‘Mr Churchill’s speech has rather sobered me,’ wrote London charity worker Vere Hodgson after a prime ministerial broadcast that month. ‘I was beginning to be a little optimistic. I even began to think there might be no Invasion…but he thinks there will, it seems. Also I had a feeling the end might soon be in sight; he seems to be looking a few years ahead! So I don’t know what is going to happen to us. We seem to be waiting—waiting, for we know not what.’

  Churchill had answers to Miss Hodgson’s question. ‘Here is the hand that is going to win the war,’ he told guests at Chequers, who included Duff Cooper and General Sikorski, one evening in February. He extended his fingers as if displaying a poker hand: ‘A Royal Flush—Great Britain, the Sea, the Air, the Middle East, American aid.’ Yet this was flummery. British successes in Africa promoted illusions that were swiftly shattered. Italian weakness and incompetence, rather than British strength and genius, had borne O’Connor’s little force to Tobruk and beyond. Thereafter, Wavell’s forces found themselves once more confronted with their own limitations, in the face of energetic German intervention.

  In the autumn of 1940 Hitler had declared that ‘not one man and not one pfennig’ would he expend in Africa. His strategic attention was focused upon the East. Mussolini, with his ambition to make the Mediterranean ‘an Italian lake’, was anyway eager to achieve his own conquests without German aid. But when the Italians suffered humiliation, Hitler was unwilling to see his ally defeated, and to risk losing Axis control of the Balkans. In April he launched the Wehrmacht into Yugoslavia and Greece. An Afrika Korps of two divisions under Erwin Rommel was dispatched to Libya. A new chapter of British misfortunes opened.

  Churchill’s decision to dispatch a British army to Greece in the spring of 1941 remains one of the most controversial of his wartime premiership. When the commitment was first mooted back in October, almost all the soldiers opposed it. On 1 November Eden, the Secretary for War, cabled from Cairo: ‘We cannot, from Middle East resources, send sufficient air or land reinforcements to have any decisive influence upon course of fighting…To send such forces there…would imperil our whole position in the Middle East and jeopardize plans for offensive operations.’ These remarks prompted a tirade from the prime minister, and caused Eden to write in his diary two days later: ‘The weakness of our policy is that we never adhere to the plans we make.’

  It seemed extraordinarily unlikely that a mere four divisions—all that could be spared from Wavell’s resources—would make the difference between Greek victory and defeat. Aircraft were lacking. With German intervention looming in North Africa, such a diversion of forces threatened Britain’s desert campaign. Kennedy told Dill on 26 January that he would have liked to see the chiefs of staff adopt much firmer resistance to the Greek proposal—‘We were near the edge of the precipice…CIGS said to me that he did not dissent, and considered the limitation placed upon the first reinforcements to be offered to the Greeks to be a sufficient safeguard. This seemed to me to be frightfully dangerous…If the Germans come down to Salonika the whole thing is bound to collapse, and nothing short of 20 divisions and a big air force, maintained by shipping we cannot afford, would be of any use…What we should do is keep the water in front of us. Anything we send to Greece will be lost if the Germans come down.’ As so often with the counsels of Churchill’s generals, this view represented prudence. Yet what would the British people say, never mind Goebbels, if the British lion skulked timorous beside the Nile?

  Churchill changed his mind several times about Greece. Probably the most significant indication of his innermost belief derives from remarks to Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins early in January. Hopkins reported to Washington on the 10th: ‘He thinks Greece is lost—although he is now reinforcing the Greeks and weakening his African army.’ Just as the prime minister’s heart had moved him to dispatch more troops to France in June 1940 against military logic, so now it inspired him to believe that the Greeks could not be abandoned to their fate. An overriding moral imperative, his familiar determination to do nothing common or mean, drove the British debate in the early months of 1941. He nursed a thin hope that, following the success of Compass, Turkey might join the Allies if Britain displayed staunchness in the Balkans.

  It is likely that Churchill would have followed his instinct to be seen to aid Greece even if Wavell in the Middle East had sustained opposition. As it was, however, the C-in-C provoked amazement among senior soldiers by changing his mind. When Dill and Eden arrived in Cairo in mid-February on a second visit, they found Wavell ready to support a Greek commitment. On the 19th, the general said: ‘We have a difficult choice, but I think we are more likely to be playing the enemy’s game by remaining inactive than by taking action in the Balkans.’ Now it was Churchill’s turn to wobble. ‘Do not consider yourself obligated to a Greek enterprise if in your hearts you feel it will only be another Norwegian fiasco,’ he signalled Eden on 20 February. Dill, however, said that they believed there was ‘a reasonable chance of resisting a German advance’. Eden said to Wavell: ‘It is a soldier’s business. It is for you to say.’ Wavell responded: ‘War is an option of difficulties. We go.’ On the 24th, Churchill told his men in Cairo: ‘While being under no illusions, we all send you the order “Full Steam Ahead”.’

  The Greek commitment represented one of Anthony Eden’s first tests as Foreign Secretary, the role to which he had been translated in December, on the departure of Lord Halifax to become British ambassador in Washington. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, Eden displayed a highly-strung temperament, petulance and lack of steel which inspired scant confidence. An infantry officer in the First World War, endowed with famous charm and physical glamour, he established his credentials as an anti-appeaser by resigning from Chamberlain’s government in 1938. Throughout the war, as afterwards, he cherished a passionate ambition to succeed Churchill in office, which the prime minister himself encouraged. Churchill valued Eden’s intelligence and loyalty, but the soldiers thought him incorrigibly ‘wet’, with affectations of manner which they identified with those of homosexuals. Sir James Grigg, Permanent Under-Secretary at the War Office, and later Secretary for War, thought Eden ‘a poor feeble little pansy’, though it should be noted that Grigg seldom thought well of anyone. But in a world in which talent is rarely, if ever, sufficient to meet the challenges of government, it remains hard to identify a better candidate for the wartime foreign secretaryship. Eden often stood up to Churchill in a fashion which deserves respect. But his reports to Downing Street from the Mediterranean in 1940-41 reflected erratic judgement and a tendency towards vacillation.

  Dill, head of the army, remained deeply unhappy about sending troops to Greece. But in the Middle East theatre, Wavell’s was the decisive voice. Many historians have expressed bewilderment that this intelligent soldier should have committed himself to a policy which promised disaster. Yet it does not seem hard to explain Wavell’s behaviour. For months the Middle East C-in-C had been harassed and pricked by the prime minister, who deplored his alleged pusillanimity. As early as August 1940, when Wavell visited London, Eden described the general’s dismay at Churchill’s impatience with him: ‘Found Wavell waiting for me at 9am. He was clearly upset at last night’s proceedings and said he thought he should have made it plain that if the Prime Minister could not approve his dispositions and had not confidence in him he sh
ould appoint someone else.’ Though this early spat was patched up, the two men never established a rapport. Churchill wrote down Wavell as ‘a good average colonel…[who] would make a good chairman of a Tory association’. The general displayed remarkable social gaucheness, for instance pitching his camp during visits to London later in the war at the home of ‘Chips’ Channon, one of the most foolish, if richest, men in Parliament. All through the autumn of 1940, bad-tempered signals flew to and fro between Downing Street and Cairo, provoked by the prime minister’s impatience with Wavell’s caution, and his C-in-C’s exasperation with Churchill’s indifference to military realities as he himself perceived them.

  Again and again Churchill pressed Wavell, and indeed all his generals, to overcome their fears of the enemy, to display the fighting spirit which he prized above all things, and which alone, he believed, would enable Britain to survive. It seems necessary to recognise the loneliness of wartime commanders, thrust onto centre stage in a blaze of floodlights. Unlike ministers, most of whom had for years been famous men in the cockpit of affairs, even the highest-ranking of Britain’s soldiers, sailors and airmen had passed their careers in obscurity, unknown beyond the ranks of their own services. Now, suddenly, such a man as Wavell found himself the focus of his nation’s hopes. Even after the Libyan battlefield successes of recent months, the C-in-C in Cairo would have been less than human had he not been galled by Churchill’s goading. In 1939 Poland had been left to face defeat alone, for it lay beyond the reach of a British or French army. In 1940 many Frenchmen and Belgians believed themselves betrayed by their Anglo-Saxon ally. In 1941 Britain’s prime minister almost daily urged the peoples of the free world to join hands to contest mastery with the Nazis. Was a British army now to stand ingloriously idle, and watch Greece succumb?