Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s familiar for a decade before the war, enjoyed ready access, much resented by rivals. But his influence was deemed greater than it was, because the garrulous Bracken boasted so much about it. Fellow ministers and officials were sometimes shocked by the promiscuity with which he addressed the prime minister as ‘Winston’. He and Beaverbrook were dubbed the ‘knights of the bath’ in recognition of the implausible rendezvous they sometimes shared with Churchill. Nonetheless, this clever, elusive Irishman, his bespectacled features surmounted by what looked like a wig of red steel wool, provided Churchill with a useful source of intelligence and gossip about domestic affairs, and served as a successful Minister of Information from July 1941 to 1945. Forty in 1941, Bracken had high intelligence and a remarkable capacity for private kindness. As a pocket press baron himself, owner of the Economist and chairman of the Financial News, he thoroughly understood the demands of the media. He frequently intervened to improve journalists’ access to the services, and to curb the prime minister’s rage when newspapers were deemed to have exceeded the bounds of reasonable criticism. He exercised no influence on strategy, and was seldom present when it was discussed.

  Professor Frederick Lindemann, the prime minister’s personal scientific adviser who became Lord Cherwell in June 1941, was the most widely disliked of Churchill’s intimates. His cleverness was not in doubt, but his intellectual arrogance and taste for vendettas bred many enemies. Fifty-five in 1941, Cherwell had inherited a fortune gained from waterworks in Germany. He enjoyed flaunting his wealth before less fortunate scientific colleagues, often arriving for Oxford meetings in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. His habit of crossing roads looking straight ahead, indifferent to oncoming traffic, reflected his approach to issues of state and war. A bachelor and a vegetarian, of strongly right-wing and indeed racist convictions, he was an unselfconscious eccentric. When three of his Cabinet Office staff insisted on being transferred to the Merchant Navy to play a more active part in the war, he was alarmed by the secrets they would take with them to sea. He told them: ‘If you see that you are about to be captured, you must kill yourselves immediately!’

  When the scientist’s judgement was mistaken, his obstinacy did considerable harm. He campaigned obsessively for aerial mines as a defence against air attack, wasting significant design and production effort. His advocacy of ‘area bombing’ was founded on a misreading of data, and caused him to injure the Royal Navy’s cause in the Battle of the Atlantic. Because Churchill trusted Cherwell, ‘the Prof’s’ errors were disproportionately damaging. The prime minister sometimes abused Cherwell’s statistics to advance rash theses of his own. Ian Jacob described him as a ‘licensed gadfly’. On balance, however, Cherwell’s contribution to Churchill’s governance was positive. It enabled him to support with evidence argument on a vast range of issues.

  Among lesser figures, the booming Major Desmond Morton was an able intelligence officer who provided important information to Churchill in his pre-war wilderness years, and exercised considerable influence at Downing Street in 1940. Thereafter, however, Morton became marginalised, with a significant voice only on French matters. Charles Wilson, the prime minister’s physician, who became Lord Moran in 1943, inspired the post-war anger of Churchill’s staff by publishing intimate diaries of his experiences. Jock Colville wrote contemptuously of the self-regarding doctor: ‘Moran was seldom, if ever, present when history was made; but he was quite often invited to dinner afterwards.’ This was to address a gerbil with an elephant gun. Moran was never a policy-maker, nor even wielded influence. It seems enough that he served Churchill well in his medical capacity, and proved an acceptable companion on the prime minister’s historic journeys.

  The ‘cronies’ were viewed by Churchill’s critics as charlatans. Yet each had real merits, above all brains. There were no fools in the prime minister’s entourage, though steadiness of judgement was less assured. None of his chosen associates was a conformist. All were loners who walked by themselves, however readily they embraced social intercourse as a tool of influence. In Whitehall and at Westminster, less gifted men, both in and out of uniform, denounced the false prophets who supposedly led the prime minister astray. Yet most of Churchill’s wilder schemes derived from his own supremely fertile imagination, not from mischief-makers in his inner circle. ‘He always retained unswerving independence of thought,’ wrote Jock Colville. ‘He approached a problem as he himself saw it and of all the men I have ever known he was the least liable to be swayed by the views of even his most intimate counsellors.’ In the same fashion, Churchill formed his own judgements of men, favourable or otherwise, and was deeply resistant to the influence of others in adjusting them.

  Many misunderstandings of Churchill’s conduct of governance by his contemporaries, including some close to the seat of power, derived from the promiscuity of his conversation. Every day, whether in the company of generals, ministers, visitors or personal staff, he gave vent to impulsive and intemperate judgements on people and plans. These sometimes amused, often alarmed and appalled, even those with long experience of him. Yet his intimates, above all the officers of the war cabinet secretariat, knew that nothing Churchill said was intended as a basis for action, unless subsequently confirmed in writing. They knew that he often spoke merely as a means of helping himself to formulate ideas. It has been remarked that he had an undisciplined mind, the source of a cornucopia of ideas, some brilliant, others absurd. Ismay called him ‘a child of nature’. Yet the most notable aspect of the machine for the direction of Britain’s war was that it was better ordered than that of any other belligerent, notably including those of Germany and later the US. A cynic might suggest that Churchill created a system to protect himself from his own excesses. In remarkable degree, this was successful.

  The late spring of 1941 found the British no nearer than they had been six months earlier to perceiving a path to victory. When General Raymond Lee returned to London after a trip to Washington in April, he wrote: ‘The people strike me…as being much more solemn than they were in January.’ Churchill’s enthusiasm for special forces and raiding operations derived from his awareness of the need to strive constantly to sustain a semblance of momentum. A story was told to a general by his brother, which achieved wide circulation in the War Office. As a boy, the narrator had been a guest at a game shoot at Blenheim Palace, where Churchill attempted an absurdly long shot at a hare. The boy asked him why he had wasted a cartridge. ‘Young man,’ replied Churchill blithely, ‘I wished that hare to understand it was taking part in these proceedings.’ The same spirit, addressed to matters of vastly greater import, impelled Churchill in the spring and summer of 1941. The War Office deemed it futile to hold Tobruk after Rommel had bypassed it in April. Only Churchill’s insistence prompted deployment there of an Australian garrison which was soon more numerous than the German force encircling it. But in that season of defeats, the saga of Australia’s infantrymen—the ‘diggers’—withstanding the ‘siege of Tobruk’ was elevated by British propaganda into a serviceable legend.

  Military theatre had its limitations, however. Churchill had a grossly exaggerated belief in the power of boldness alone to overcome material and numerical deficiencies. ‘War,’ he wrote, ‘consists of fighting, gnawing and tearing, and…the weaker or more frail gets life clawed out of him by this method. Manoeuvre is a mere embellishment, very agreeable when it comes off…Fighting is the key to victory.’ Yet the events of 1940-41 showed, and subsequent experience confirmed, that British forces could defeat those of the Wehrmacht only when they were substantially stronger. If Hitler had dispatched to North Africa even a further two or three divisions from his vast order of battle, it is likely that Britain would have been driven from Egypt in 1941. Many senior soldiers thought this outcome likely, though they underrated Rommel’s logistics problems. ‘I suppose you realise that we shall lose the Middle East,’ Dill said to Kennedy on 21 June, a remark which emphasised his unfitness for the post he oc
cupied. Kennedy, in his turn, incurred Churchill’s ire merely by mentioning that contingency in his presence. The British were spared from disaster in the Mediterranean in 1941 because Hitler’s strategic priorities lay elsewhere. On 22 June, Germany invaded Russia.

  SIX

  Comrades

  The German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 transformed the Second World War. The British, through Ultra intercepts, had long been aware of Hitler’s impending onslaught. They persuaded themselves that their intervention in Greece had imposed a delay upon Operation Barbarossa. In reality, a late thaw and German equipment shortages were the decisive factors in causing the assault to take place later than Hitler had wished. The British and American peoples to this day perceive their contribution to the eastern war in terms of convoys heroically fought across the Arctic to Murmansk, bearing massive Western aid. Reality was less simple. In 1941-42, both Britain and the US were desperately short of war material for their own armed forces, and had little to spare for Stalin’s people. For eighteen months after Russia was invaded, the period during which its survival hung in the balance, Western aid was much more marginal than the rhetoric of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt suggested, and ordinary citizens in the West were encouraged to suppose.

  In June 1941, the immediate impact of Barbarossa in Britain was surprisingly muted. The shocks of the previous year had imposed an anaesthetising effect. In people’s gratitude at finding themselves still unscathed at their breakfast tables each morning, their island spared from Nazi pillage, many received tidings of this epochal event with surprising insouciance. Edward Stebbing, a twenty-one-year-old soldier whose impatience with the struggle was cited earlier, felt bewildered: ‘There is nothing straightforward about this war. In the maze of lies and treachery it is almost impossible to find the truth.’ The Financial Times columnist Lex wrote on 23 June: ‘Markets spent the morning trying to make up their minds whether the German aggression against Russia was a bull or a bear…The majority concluded that whatever happened we could hardly be worse off as a result of Hitler’s latest somersault.’ Here was another manifestation of Churchill’s ‘three-inch pipe’ theory about human emotions. Amid a surfeit of drama and peril, many people took refuge in the sufficient cares of their own daily lives, and allowed a torrent of world news, good and ill, to flow past them to the sea.

  Most of Britain’s ruling class, from the prime minister downwards, regarded the Soviet Union with abhorrence. The Russians had rebuffed all British diplomatic advances since the outbreak of war, and likewise London’s warnings of Nazi intentions. Until the day of the German assault, under the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact Stalin provided Hitler with huge material assistance. Only a few months earlier Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, was bargaining with the Nazis, albeit unsuccessfully, for a share of the spoils of British defeat. The extravagance of Soviet demands provided Hitler with a final pretext for launching Barbarossa.

  In addressing the history of the Second World War it is necessary to recognise the huge moral compromises forced upon the nations fighting under the banner of democracy and freedom. Britain, and subsequently America, strove for the triumph of these admirable principles wherever they could be secured—with the sometimes embarrassing exceptions of the European overseas empires. But again and again, hard things had to be done which breached faith with any definition of absolute good. If this is true of politics at all times, it was especially so between 1939 and 1945. Whether in dealing with France, Greece, Iraq, Persia, Yugoslavia or other nations, attitudes were struck and courses adopted by the Allies which no moral philosopher could think impeccable. British wartime treatment of its colonies, of Egypt and above all India, was unenlightened. But if Churchill’s fundamental nobility of purpose is acknowledged, most of his decisions deserve sympathy.

  He governed on the basis that all other interests and considerations must be subordinated to the overarching objective of defeating the Axis. Those who, to this day, argue that Churchill ‘might have saved the British Empire’ by making a bargain with Hitler, leaving Russia and Germany to destroy each other, ignore the practical difficulty of making a sustainable deal with the Nazi regime, and also adopt a supremely cynical insouciance towards its turpitude. The moral and material price of destroying Hitler was high, but most of mankind has since acknowledged that it had to be paid. In the course of the war the prime minister was repeatedly called upon to decide not which party, nation or policy represented virtue, but which must be tolerated or supported as the least base available. This imperative was never more conspicuous than in Britain’s dealings with the Soviet Union.

  Between 1917 and 1938, Churchill sustained a reputation as an implacable foe of Bolshevism. Yet in the last years before attaining the premiership he changed key, displaying a surprising willingness to reach out to the Russians. In October 1938, against Chamberlain’s strong views he urged an alliance with Moscow, and counselled the Poles to seek an accommodation with Stalin. This line did as much to raise his standing with British Labour MPs as to lower it among Tories. In September 1939 he urged Chamberlain to perceive the Soviet advance into Poland as a favourable development: ‘None of this conflicts with our main interest, which is to arrest the German movement towards the East and South-East of Europe.’ In a broadcast a fortnight later, he said: ‘That the Russian armies should stand on this line [in Poland] was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.’ In January 1940, it is true, he became an enthusiastic supporter of Finland, then beset by the Russians. He once enquired about the possibility of bombing Russian oilfields at Baku in the Caucasus, to stem fuel deliveries to Germany. Excepting this interruption, however, Churchill showed himself willing to make common cause with the Russians if they would share the burden of defeating Hitler. This was probably because he could not see how else this was to be accomplished.

  The prime minister was at Chequers on that June Sunday morning when news came of Barbarossa. He immediately told Eden, a house guest, of his determination to welcome the Soviet Union as a partner in the struggle, then spent the rest of the day roaming restlessly under hot sunshine, refining themes and phrases for a broadcast. He communed with Beaverbrook and Sir Stafford Cripps, the Moscow ambassador who chanced to be in Britain, but did not trouble to summon the cabinet. When at last he sat before the BBC microphone that evening, he began by acknowledging his own past hostility towards the Soviets: ‘The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twentyfive years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.’ But then he asserted, in bold and brilliant terms, Britain’s commitment to fight alongside Stalin’s Russia:

  The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies flashes away. I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray—ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, the return of the bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.

  I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey.

  I have to declare the decision of His Majesty’s Government…Any man or state who fights on against Nazi-dom will have our aid…We shall give whatever aid we can to Russia and
the Russian people…The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free people in every quarter of the globe.

  Not for the first time in the war, Churchill’s words received the acclaim of most British people, while inspiring doubts among some Tory MPs and senior officers. Repugnance towards the bloodstained Soviets ran deep through the upper echelons of British society. Leo Amery, the India Secretary, recoiled from making common cause with communists. Col. John Moore-Brabazon, Minister of Aircraft Production, was rash enough publicly to assert a desire to see the Germans and Russians exterminate each other. Jock Colville described this as ‘a sentiment widely felt’. Lt.Gen. Pownall complained about the limp-wristed attitude he perceived in approaches towards the Russians by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the diplomats of his department. ‘They think they are dealing with normal people. They are not. Russians are orientals and need treating quite differently and far more roughly. They are not Old Etonians.’ Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam observed with curious detachment: ‘I don’t suppose that the “conquest” of Russia will take very long. And what then—presumably either Hitler will make some kind of peace offer based upon our acceptance of the “New Order”, or he will try his hand at an invasion here or push on in the [Middle] Eastern theatre.’ Headlam thought Churchill’s posture tactically sensible, but like many other people found himself unable to anticipate a happy ending without the Americans. He fell back upon hopes of loftier assistance: ‘One feels that God is on our side—that’s the great thing.’