by Max Hastings
Cripps was fifty-two, a product of Winchester and New College Oxford, and nephew of the socialist intellectual Beatrice Webb. He became first a research chemist, then a successful commercial barrister. A pacifist in World War I, he was elected as a Labour MP in 1931 and served briefly in Ramsay MacDonald’s government before refusing to join his coalition. A vegetarian and teetotaller, in the 1930s he became converted to Marxism, an uncritical enthusiast for the Soviet Union whose name was often coupled with that of Aneurin Bevan. In 1939 he was expelled from the parliamentary Labour Party after differences with Attlee. When he was in Moscow between 1940 and 1942, Churchill was not displeased to note that Stalin displayed much less enthusiasm for the ambassador, and for his company, than his British admirer displayed for the Soviet leader.
In many respects a foolish man, Cripps nonetheless became temporarily an important one in 1942. A fine broadcaster, his commitment both to the Soviet Union and to a socialist post-war Britain won him a large popular following. He spoke passionately, and without irony, of Russian workers ‘fighting to keep their country free’, and of the alliance between ‘the free workers of England, America and Russia’. Amid the mood of the times such sentiments struck a powerful chord, contrasting with the stubborn conservatism of many other MPs – and of the prime minister. In a poll that invited voters to express a preference as prime minister if some misfortune befell Churchill, 37 per cent of respondents named Eden, but 36 per cent opted for Cripps.
Churchill was well aware that his new minister aspired to the premiership. For most of 1942 he felt obliged to treat Cripps as a potential threat to his authority. Amid so many misfortunes, some surprising people supported the Lord Privy Seal’s ambitions. Private conclaves of MPs, editors, generals and admirals discussed Churchill and his government in the most brutal terms. John Kennedy dined at Claridge’s on 5 March 1942 with Sir Archie Rowlands of the ministry of aircraft production and John Skelton, news editor of the Daily Telegraph: ‘The talk was very much about Winston and very critical. It was felt that Winston was finished, that he had played his last card in reforming the government. S[kelton] is very hostile to Winston and thinks Cripps should be put in his place. He feels that we shall lose the whole Empire soon and be driven back on G.B. It is easy to make a case for this.’ Averell Harriman wrote to Roosevelt on 6 March:
Although the British are keeping a stiff upper lip, the surrender of their troops at Singapore has shattered confidence to the core – even in themselves but, more particularly, in their leaders. They don’t intend to take it lying down and I am satisfied we will see the rebirth of greater determination. At the moment, however, they can’t see the end to defeats. Unfortunately Singapore shook the Prime Minister himself to such an extent that he has not been able to stand up to this adversity with his old vigor. A number of astute people, both friends and opponents, feel it is only a question of a few months before his Government falls. I cannot accept this view. He has been very tired but is better in the last day or two. I believe he will come back with renewed strength, particularly when the tone of the war improves.
The Battle of the Atlantic had taken a serious turn for the worse. In January the German navy introduced a fourth rotor into its Enigma ciphering machines. This refinement defied British codebreakers through the bloody year of convoying that followed. Charles Wilson, Churchill’s doctor, noticed that the prime minister carried in his head every statistical detail of Atlantic sinkings. Nonetheless, Wilson wrote, ‘he is always careful to consume his own smoke; nothing he says could discourage anyone…I wish to God I could put out the fires that seem to be consuming him.’ Mary Churchill noted in her diary that her father was ‘saddened – appalled by events…He is desperately taxed.’ Cadogan wrote likewise: ‘Poor old P.M. in a sour mood and a bad way.’
On 6 March, Rangoon was abandoned. Next day, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt urging that the Western Allies should concede Russian demands for recognition of their 1941 frontiers – which Britain had staunchly opposed the previous year. The Americans demurred, but the prime minister’s change of attitude reflected intensified awareness of the Allies’ vulnerability. He was now willing to adopt the most unwelcome expedients if these might marginally strengthen Russia’s resolve. Amid alarm that Stalin might be driven to parley with Hitler, eastern Poland became expendable. In the same spirit, Churchill cabled Moscow promising that if the Germans employed poison gas on the eastern front, as some feared was imminent, the British would retaliate as if such a weapon had been used against themselves. Stalin promptly asked for technical information about both British chemical weapons and counter-measures against them. There is no evidence that the former was forthcoming, but the British strove by every means to convince the Russians of their commitment as allies. Western fears that Stalin might seek a separate peace persisted for many months.
Beyond the great issues on Churchill’s desk, he was obliged to address myriad lesser ones. He warned about the risk of a possible German commando raid, launched from a U-boat, to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, now serving as governor-general of the Bahamas. The Nazis, said the prime minister, might be able to exploit the former king to their advantage. Having inspired the creation of the Parachute Regiment, which carried out its first successful operation against a German radar station at Bruneval on France’s northern coast on 28 February, Churchill pressed for the expansion of airborne forces on the largest possible scale. Four Victoria Crosses were awarded for the Royal Navy’s 28 March attack on the floating dock at Saint-Nazaire. This generous issue of decorations was designed to make the survivors feel better about losses – 500 men killed, wounded or captured. Propaganda made much of Saint-Nazaire. The public was assured that the Germans had suffered heavily, though in reality their casualties were much smaller than those of the raiders. Meanwhile, ministers solicited Churchill about appointments, honours, administrative issues. Such nugatory matters were hard to address when the Empire was crumbling.
Churchill’s obsession with capital ships persisted even in the third year of the war. He asserted that the destruction of the 42,000-ton Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismarck, anchored in a Norwegian fjord where it posed a permanent threat to Arctic convoys, would be worth the loss of a hundred aircraft and 500 men. On 9 March, twelve Fairey Albacores of the Fleet Air Arm attacked the German behemoth, without success. Churchill asked the First Sea Lord ‘how it was that 12 of our machines managed to get no hits as compared with the extraordinary efficiency of the Japanese attack on Prince of Wales and Repulse?’ How not, indeed? Though the RAF made an important contribution to interdicting Rommel’s Mediterranean supply line in 1942, the RAF and Fleet Air Arm’s record of achievement in attacks upon enemy surface ships remained relatively poor until the last months of the war. Churchill thought so, minuting Pound in the following year that it seemed ‘a pregnant fact’ that the Fleet Air Arm had suffered only thirty fatalities out of a strength of 45,000 men in the three months to the end of April. The 1940 attack on Taranto and the 1941 crippling of the Bismarck were the only really impressive British naval air operations of the war.
During the winter of 1941–42, Churchill had become unhappily conscious of the failure of British ‘precision bombing’ of Germany. He was party to the critical change of policy which took place in consequence, largely inspired by his scientific adviser. Lord Cherwell’s intervention about bombing was his most influential of the war. It was a member of his Cabinet Statistical Office staff, an official named David Butt, who produced a devastating report based on a study of British bombers’ aiming-point photographs. This showed that only a small proportion of aircraft were achieving hits within miles, rather than yards, of their targets. Cherwell convinced the prime minister, who was shocked by Butt’s report, that there must be a complete change of tactics. Since, under average weather conditions, RAF night raiders were incapable of dropping an acceptable proportion of bombs on designated industrial objectives, British aircraft must henceforward instead address the smallest aiming point
s they were capable of identifying: cities. They might thus fulfil the twin objectives of destroying plant and ‘dehousing’ workers, to use Cherwell’s ingenuous phrase. No one in Whitehall explicitly acknowledged that the RAF was thus to undertake the wholesale killing of civilians. But nor did they doubt that this would be the consequence, though British propaganda for the rest of the war shrouded such ugly reality in obfuscation, not least from the aircrew conducting bomber operations at such hazard to themselves.
Churchill always considered himself a realist about the horrors and imperatives of war. Yet as recently as 1937 he had proclaimed his opposition to air attacks upon non-combatants, during a Commons debate on air-raid precautions: ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that if one side in an equal war endeavours to cow and kill the civil population, and the other attacks steadily the military objectives…victory will come to the side…which avoids the horror of making war on the helpless and weak.’ Now, however, after thirty months of engagement with an enemy who was prospering mightily by waging war without scruple, Churchill accepted a different view. Bomber Command had failed as a rapier. Instead, it must become a blunt instrument. Operational necessity was deemed to make it essential to set aside moral inhibitions. For many months, indeed years, ahead, bombing represented the only means of carrying Britain’s war to Germany. The prime minister approved Cherwell’s new policy.
On 22 February 1942, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris became C-in-C of Bomber Command. Contrary to popular myth, Harris was not the originator of ‘area bombing’. But he set about implementing the concept with a single-minded fervour which has caused his name to be inextricably linked with it ever since. The first significant event of Harris’s tenure of command was a raid on the Renault truck plant in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. The war cabinet hoped that this would boost French morale, which seemed unlikely when it emerged that more than 400 civilians had been killed. On 28 March, 134 aircraft carried out a major attack upon the old German Hanse town of Lübeck. The coastal target was chosen chiefly because it was easy for crews to find. The closely packed medieval centre was, in Harris’s contemptuous words, ‘built more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation’. The raid left much of Lübeck in flames, and was judged an overwhelming success. Four successive attacks on the port of Rostock in late April achieved similar dramatic results, causing Goebbels to write hysterically in his diary: ‘Community life in Rostock is almost at an end.’ On 30 May, Harris staged an extraordinary coup de théâtre. Enlisting the aid of training and Coastal Command aircraft he dispatched 1,046 bombers against the great city of Cologne, inflicting massive damage.
The chief merit of the ‘Thousand Raid’, together with others that followed against Essen and Bremen, lay less in the injury they inflicted upon the Third Reich—a small fraction of that achieved in 1944—45
—than in the public impression of Britain striking back, albeit in a fashion which rendered the squeamish uncomfortable. Some 474 Germans died in the ‘Thousand Raid’ on Cologne, but on 2 June the New York Times claimed that the death toll was 20,000. Churchill cabled Roosevelt: ‘I hope you were impressed with our mass air attack on Cologne. There is plenty more to come.’
Throughout 1942 and 1943, British propaganda waxed lyrical about the achievements of the bomber offensive. Churchill dispatched a stream of messages to Stalin, emphasising the devastation achieved by the RAF. The British people were not, on the whole, strident in yearning for revenge upon Germany’s civilian population. But many sometimes succumbed to the sensations of Londoner Vere Hodgson, who wrote: ‘As I lay in bed the other night I heard the deep purr of our bombers winging their way to Hamburg…This is a comfortable feeling. I turned lazily in bed and glowed at the thought, going back in my mind to those awful months when to hear noise overhead was to know that the Germans were going to pour death and destruction on us…One cannot help feeling that it is good for the Germans to know what it feels like. Perhaps they won’t put the machine in motion again so light-heartedly.’
Later in the war, when great Allied armies took the field, Churchill’s enthusiasm for bombing ebbed. But in 1942 he enthused about the strategic offensive because he had nothing else. Again contrary to popular delusion, he never found Sir Arthur Harris a soulmate. The airman sometimes dined at Chequers, because his headquarters at High Wycombe was conveniently close. But Desmond Morton was among those who believed that the prime minister thought Harris an impressive leader of air forces, but an unsympathetic personality. Churchill said of Bomber Command’s C-in-C after the war: ‘a considerable commander—but there was a certain coarseness about him’. In the bad times, however—and 1942 was a very bad time—he recognised Harris as a man of steel, at a time when many other commanders bent and snapped under the responsibilities with which he entrusted them.
From the outset, area bombing incurred criticism on both strategic and moral grounds, both inside and outside Parliament. Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and deputy prime minister, was a persistent private critic, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. He stressed the value of bombers in support of ground and naval operations. In the public domain, the New Statesman argued that it was perverse to heap praise on the fortitude of the civilian population of Malta in enduring Axis air attack, without perceiving the lesson for Britain’s own forces attacking Germany. ‘The disaster of this policy is not only that it is futile,’ the distinguished scientist Professor A.V. Hill, MP for Cambridge University, told the House of Commons, ‘but that it is extremely wasteful, and will become increasingly wasteful as time goes on.’ But Hill’s words reflected only a modest minority opinion.
There was a powerful case for accepting the necessity for area bombing. A major British industrial commitment was made to creating a massive force of heavy aircraft. This attained fulfilment only in the very different strategic circumstances of 1944—45. The most pertinent criticism of 1942—43 bombing policy was that the airmen’s fervour to demonstrate that their service could make a decisive independent impact on the war caused them to resist, to the point of obsession, calls for diversions of heavy aircraft to other purposes, above all the Battle of the Atlantic. John Kennedy wrote in May 1942 that the bomber offensive ‘can be implemented only at severe cost to our command of the sea and our military operations on land. I have just been looking at an old paper of [Winston’s], written in Sept.1940, which begins “the Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it…” I am convinced that events will prove this to have been a profound delusion.’
Cherwell supported Harris in resisting calls for the reinforcement of Coastal Command, but they were both surely wrong. Evidence is strong that even a few extra squadrons could have achieved more in fighting the U-boats, a deadly menace well into 1943, than they did over Germany in the same period. But the navy made its case without much skill or subtlety. Admiral Sir John Tovey, C-in-C Home Fleet, denounced the bomber offensive as ‘a luxury, not necessity’. His words infuriated the prime minister, who was also irked by Tovey’s reluctance to hazard his ships within reach of Norwegian-based German air power. He described Tovey as ‘a stubborn and obstinate man’, and was delighted when in May 1943 he was replaced by the supposedly more aggressive Sir Bruce Fraser. The admirals’ difficulty was that while their service’s function of holding open the sea routes to the US, Russia, Malta, Egypt and India was indispensable, it was also defensive. As Churchill said, the fleet was responsible for saving Britain from losing the war, but its ships could not win it. The Admiralty damaged its own case by insisting that the RAF lavish immense effort, and accept heavy casualties, bombing the impregnable U-boat pens of north-west France, and patrolling the Bay of Biscay. The sailors would have done better to emphasise the critical issue of direct air cover for the Atlantic convoy routes, which drastically impeded the operations of German submarines.
Churchill thought better of the Royal Navy as a fighting service than he did of most of its commanders. They seemed relentlessly negative towards his most cherished
projects. He was justifiably angry that, despite repeated encouragement, the navy had failed to master techniques for refuelling warships at sea, thus severely restricting the endurance of capital ships. But, even after the loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse, he remained cavalier about their vulnerability to air attack. Most of his naval commanders were fine professional seamen, whom Britain was fortunate to have. It was galling for them to have their courage implicitly and even explicitly impugned, when they were justly anxious to avoid gratuitous losses of big ships which would take years to replace. Nonetheless, like the generals, the admirals might have shown more understanding of the prime minister’s fundamental purpose: to demonstrate that Britain was willing and able to carry the fight to the fight to the enemy; to do more than merely survive blockeade and air bombardment.
Herein lay the case for the bomber offensive. Churchill seems right to have endorsed this, when Britain’s armed forces were accomplishing so little elsewhere, but mistaken to have allowed it to achieve absolute priority in the RAF’s worldwide commitments. Concentration of force is important, but so too is a prudent division of resources between critical fronts, of which the Atlantic campaign was assuredly one. By a characteristic irony of war, Churchill enthused most about bombing Germany during 1941—42, when it achieved least. Thereafter, he lost interest. In 1943, Bomber Command began to make a real impact on Ruhr industries, and might have achieved important results if the economic direction of Harris’s operations had been more imaginative. In 1944—45, its impact on Germany’s cities became devastating, but American targeting policies enabled the USAAF to achieve the critical victories of the air war, against the Luftwaffe and German synthetic oil plants. The last volume of Churchill’s war memoirs mentions Bomber Command only once, in passing and critically.
