Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Nonetheless, perceptions of the Red Army as braver and more willing for sacrifice than their own soldiers were a source of anger and shame among Churchill’s people, which persisted throughout the summer of 1942. The public could not be told that Stalin’s armies achieved their remarkable feats under draconian compulsion; that if Russian soldiers sometimes displayed more fortitude than British or American ones, this was chiefly because if they flinched they faced execution by their own commanders, a sanction imposed upon hundreds of thousands of Stalin’s men in the course of the war. Debate about British military inertia and failure continued to dominate the press. ‘Reactionary attitudes are spreading,’ complained communist Elizabeth Belsey. ‘The Spectator this week sounds much opposed to the 2nd front. What do all these people suppose Russia is to do without the 2nd Front? Continue fighting with faith instead of oil?’

  Maggie Joy Blunt, a journalist of left-wing sympathies, wrote on 7 August 1942: ‘Why is not Mr Churchill, rather than his critics, standing on the plinth of the Nelson column shouting for a Second Front and demanding greater efforts from every man and woman in the country? The desire to make that effort is there. The people would respond instantly to the right word from Churchill. We have the feeling, strongly, that Powers That Be wish to see Russian might crippled before they will move a finger to help. They do not want Russia to have any say in the peace terms. Capitalist interests are still vastly strong, and the propertied bourgeois, although a minority, have still an enormous influence on the conduct of our affairs and are terrified of the idea of Socialism. Socialism is inevitable.’ Londoner Ethel Mattison wrote to her sister in California on 1 August: ‘When the Anglo-Soviet Alliance was signed, and…the Second Front was one of the main points…[It] rather tended to make people sit back and wait for it. However, the waiting has been so long and the Russians are suffering so terribly that it seems the idea must be pushed into realisation by the force of public opinion. Everywhere you go, in buses, trains and in lifts you hear fragments of conversation in connection with it.’

  The Russian press, unsurprisingly, devoted much space to the Second Front lobby. Pravda carried a story reporting the mass rallies in Britain in support of early action under the headline ‘English people are willing to help their Russian comrades’. It quoted Associated Press correspondent Drew Middleton declaring after a tour of Britain that there was overwhelming public support for an invasion, that shipping difficulties could be overcome, that bombing of Germany was recognised as an insufficient support to Russia. Pravda also described Second Front demonstrations in Canada. Through the months that followed there was much more Moscow press comment on the same theme. On 9 August Pravda headlined: ‘No time to lose—British press on the Second Front’. On 15 August: ‘Time has come to act, say American newspapers’. Next day, a report described a deputation representing 105,000 British workers from seventy-eight companies calling at Downing Street to present a Second Front petition to Churchill. On the 19th, Pravda headlined: ‘English public organisations demand offensive against Germany’, and on the 23rd: ‘We have no right to wait—English trades unions demand opening Second Front’.

  The narrative of the Second World War presented by most historians is distorted by the fact that it focuses upon what happened, rather than what did not. Until November 1942, weeks and sometimes months passed without much evidence of activity by British land forces. Between June 1941 and the end of the war, British newspapers and BBC broadcasts were often dominated by reports of the struggle on the eastern front, where action appeared continuous. Countless editorials paid tribute to the deeds of ‘our gallant Russian allies’. This goes far to explain why Russia commanded such admiration in contemporary Britain. Accounts of the eastern fighting were vague and often wildly inaccurate, but they coalesced to create a valid impression of vigorous, hideously costly and increasingly successful action by the Red Army. The battle for Stalingrad, which now began to receive massive coverage, intensified public dismay about the contrast between British and Russian achievements. ‘Every week of successful defence,’ reported the Ministry of Information on 9 October 1942, ‘confirms the popularity of the Russians and there is much uneasiness and unhappiness at the spectacle of our apparent inaction.’

  Ismay said that he admired Churchill as much for the courage with which he resisted a premature Second Front as for the vigour with which he promoted other projects. He observed that a lesser man might have given in to the vociferous lobbyists. He deplored the public’s inescapable ignorance of the fact that real partnership with the Russians was impossible, given their implacable secretiveness. To understand the British public temper in World War II, it is necessary to recognise how little people knew about anything beyond the visible movements of armies and the previous night’s bomber raids on Germany. Information which is commonplace in time of peace becomes the stuff of high secrecy in war: industrial production figures, weapons shortages, shipping movements and losses, details of aid to Russia or lack of it. Many reports in newspapers, especially those detailing Allied combat successes and enemy losses, were fanciful. The prime minister offered the nation only the vaguest and most general notion of its likely prospects. This was prudent, but obliged millions of people to exist for years in a miasma of uncertainty, which contributed decisively to the demoralisation of 1941-42.

  A study of contemporary British newspapers surprises a modern reader, because in contrast to twenty-first-century practice, greater attention was paid to events than to personalities, even that of Churchill himself. He received much less coverage than does a modern prime minister, partly because little detail about his personal life was revealed outside his inner circle. For security reasons his travels were often unreported until he had left a given location. His speeches and public appearances were, of course, widely covered, but many days of the war passed without much press reference to the prime minister. While battlefield commanders such as Alexander and Montgomery became household names, other key figures remained almost unknown. Sir Alan Brooke, for instance, whose military role was second in importance only to that of Churchill, was scarcely mentioned in the wartime press. Above all, accurate prophecy was rendered impossible by the fact that the condition of the enemy, the situation ‘on the other side of the hill’, remained largely shrouded in mystery even to war leaders privy to Ultra secrets. Conditions in occupied Europe, as well as the state of Hitler’s war machine, were imperfectly understood in London. It was widely reported that the Nazis were conducting appalling massacres, killing many Jews in death camps. But the concept of systematic genocide embracing millions of victims was beyond popular, and even prime ministerial, imagination. Entire books have been written about Churchill and the Holocaust, yet the fundamentals may be expressed succinctly: the prime minister was aware from 1942 onwards that the Nazis were pursuing murderous policies towards the Jews. British Jewish leaders sought to urge upon him that their people were subject to unique and historically unprecedented horrors. He responded with words of deep sympathy, indeed passion, and once urged that the RAF should do whatever was possible to check the slaughter. But he did not himself pursue the issue when told of ‘operational difficulties’—which meant that the airmen did not believe that attempts to destroy railway tracks in Eastern Europe were as useful to the war effort as continuing the assault on Germany’s cities. Churchill perceived the killing of the Jews in the context of Hitler’s wider policies of massacre, which embraced millions of Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks and other races. He believed that the only way to address these horrors was by hastening the defeat of Germany and liberation of the occupied nations. This assumption also guided public sentiment.

  Public ignorance fed endless speculation, embracing a range of possibilities from the war’s ending within months to its indefinite continuation. When Harold Macmillan became British minister in the Mediterranean, he wrote: ‘The trouble…is that no one really has any idea as to the future course of the war. One minute people rush to an extreme of pessimism
—and think it will never end. The next they become so excited by a favourable battle that they regard it as more or less over. And the experts cannot give us any guidance. The better they are, the less willing I find them (I mean men like Cunningham, Tedder and Alexander) to express a view.’ A contributor to Punch composed a poem about his own ‘befuddlement amid one bright star of England’. This struck a chord with Alan Lascelles, assistant private secretary to King George VI, who wrote in his diary: ‘I suppose that, with the exception of some thirty or forty High Esoterics—the War Cabinet and its immediate minions—I get as much illumination on the drear fog of war as anyone in this country. Yet I am befogged, all right.’ For a humble citizen to keep going it was necessary to hope blindly, because evidence for informed optimism was lacking.

  In the first two days of July, Churchill faced a debate on the censure motion tabled against him in the Commons. Sir John Wardlaw-Milne destroyed his own case in the first minutes of his speech by proposing that the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s notoriously thick-headed brother, should become Britain’s military supremo. The House burst into mocking laughter, and Churchill’s face lit up. He knew, in that moment, that he could put his critics to flight. But he was nonetheless obliged to endure a barrage of criticism. Aneurin Bevan spoke with vicious wit: ‘The prime minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.’ Bevan also asserted that arms factories were producing the wrong weapons; that the army was ‘riddled by class prejudice’ and poorly commanded.

  Then he delivered the sort of peroration which disgusted Churchill, but struck a powerful echo with the public: ‘For heaven’s sake do not let us make the mistake of betraying those lion-hearted Russians. Speeches have been made, the Russians believe them and have broken the champagne bottles on them. They believe this country will act this year on what they call the second front…they expect it and the British nation expects it. I say it is right, it is the correct thing to do…Do not in these high matters speak with a twisted tongue.’ In the course of the Confidence debate, MPs voiced valid criticisms of the army’s poor tanks and leadership. Much was said about the RAF’s lack of dive-bombers, to which the British accorded exaggerated credit for German successes. Unsurprisingly, no one hinted that the British soldier was not the equal of his German counterpart, but there were fierce denunciations of the high command and class culture of the army, some of it from MPs less jaundiced than Bevan.

  Americans were impressed that such strictures could be expressed. ‘Polyzoides’ wrote in the Los Angeles Times: ‘The fact that, during one of the most critical periods in the history of the British Empire, there is still freedom of speech and criticism testifies to the greatness of the nation.’ Such high-minded sentiments provided, however, small comfort to the prime minister. Leo Amery wrote: ‘Winston is I think far too inclined to attribute to sheer personal malice the anxiety of various people to know what is really happening and makes no allowance either for the value in a democracy of telling our people the whole truth however unpalatable.’ A housewife diarist, Mrs Clara Millburn, though a warm admirer of Churchill, was nonetheless impressed by the report of Wardlaw-Milne’s performance in the Commons: ‘His speech sounds very good to us at first hearing.’ By contrast, she thought little of Oliver Lyttelton’s opening speech for the government: ‘Everyone seems to want C as PM, but they do not think he has chosen wisely for his Cabinet.’ When the House divided, Churchill won by 475 votes to twenty-five. ‘He is a giant among pygmies when it comes to a debate of this kind, and I think that everybody realizes it,’ wrote Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam, often a sceptic. But he added that if the censure motion had been directed against the Ministry of Supply, he himself would not have voted against it. Next day, Mrs Millburn wrote: ‘It is to be hoped that the PM takes some notice of the criticisms, for one feels some changes are necessary.’

  Churchill’s Commons success did nothing to stifle wide-ranging and bitter criticism of the government’s conduct of the war. The Times, in an editorial on 10 July, though asserting that ‘No responsible body of opinion dreams of changing the national leadership,’ repeated its oft-made demand for a separation of the roles of prime minister and Minister of Defence. The paper returned to the charge on 20 July, observing: ‘A British victory is urgently needed’; and again on the 22nd: ‘All the evidence goes to show that the war machine is both cumbrous and unmethodical.’ In The Times’s letters column, a correspondent named Clive Garcia, writing from the Army & Navy club, spoke of ‘a vicious circle to which we have now grown accustomed: first, disaster; then a debate on the conduct of the war, voicing profound apprehension; then a vote of confidence in the Government…then a pause until the next disaster’. Meanwhile, asserted Garcia, ‘defects in the war machine go uncorrected’.

  Several other letter-writers addressed intelligently and pertinently the inadequacy of British tanks. The Times commented on their strictures:‘The simple question—though the answer may be complex—is how a great and inventive industrial country nearing the end of the third year of War has failed to supply its Army with weapons superior to those employed by the enemy, the nature of which was for the most part known?’ An editorial in the New Statesman on 29 July asserted that the ‘military situation of the [Allies] is graver than at any time since 1940’.

  Within a few minutes of Churchill’s return to Downing Street from the Commons on 2 July, Leo Amery arrived with his son Julian, an army officer just back from Egypt. To the fury of Alan Brooke, who was also present, young Amery—‘a most objectionable young pup’, in the general’s words—painted for the prime minister a picture of the desert army as demoralised, poorly equipped and bereft of confidence in its commanders. This confirmed Churchill’s own views. In an unpublished draft of his war memoirs he characterised the 1942 desert defeats as ‘discreditable’ and ‘deplorable’. In six months, Auchinleck’s forces had been driven back 600 miles. Worst of all, Captain Amery played to the strongest instincts of the prime minister by urging that Churchill should go himself to the Middle East and resolve the situation. ‘The cheek of the young brute was almost more than I could bear,’ wrote Brooke. The CIGS had hoped to travel alone to Egypt to address the army’s difficulties. Now, instead, the prime minister was determined to intervene personally, then fly on to Moscow to confront Stalin.

  But first, there was another visit to London by Hopkins, Marshall and King. Before they arrived, former CIGS Sir John Dill wrote to Churchill from Washington: ‘May I suggest with all respect that you must convince your visitors that you are determined to beat the Germans, that you will strike them on the continent of Europe at the earliest possible moment even on a limited scale, and that anything which detracts from this main effort will receive no support from you at all.’ The general mused tendentiously about a possible landing in France: ‘What does success mean? If invasion ultimately fails tactically but causes diversion from Russian front will it have succeeded?’ Such maudlin reflections were unlikely to increase Churchill’s confidence in Dill, who had gained some personal popularity in Washington because he was thought to favour an early Second Front. ‘Churchill, however, believes the other way,’ wrote vicepresident Henry Wallace. ‘Apparently the ruling class in England is very anxious not to sacrifice too many British men. They lost so many in World War I that they feel they cannot afford to lose more in World War II. They want to wait until the American armies have been sufficiently trained so that losses will be at least fifty-fifty. Dill does not belong to this school of thought.’ It was certainly true that some people in London believed the general had ‘gone native’ in Washington.

  To the prime minister’s annoyance, following Marshall, King and Hopkins’s arrival in London on 19 July, they spent some hours communing with the newly appointed senior US officer in Europe, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, before calling at Downing Street. When Anglo-American discussions began, the visitors repeated their familiar demand for a
1942 beachhead in France. They clung stubbornly to two propositions which the British deemed monstrous. First, they thought that a ‘redoubt’, such as Churchill had briefly favoured in June 1940, might be seized and held in northern France. Second, they considered that even if such an operation failed, the losses—destined to be overwhelmingly British—would be justified by the inconvenience imposed upon the Germans.

  Brooke rehearsed familiar objections. The US chief of the army challenged him bluntly, demanding: ‘Well, how are we going to win this war? You cannot win it by defensive action.’ Churchill formally presented Marshall’s proposal to the war cabinet, which unanimously rejected it. There was little more to be said. The Americans remained deeply unhappy, but knew that they could not impose a scheme dependent almost entirely upon the sacrifice of British lives. Marshall had come to London with a brief from Roosevelt to make this final attempt to reconcile the British to an invasion of France; then, if he failed, to accept the North African plan. On 22 July the president cabled acquiescence in British rejection of an early assault on the Continent. With utmost reluctance, Marshall committed himself to what became the Torch landings of November 1942.

  Now the British were all smiles, and it was the Americans’ turn to sulk. ‘Gil’ Winant, the ambassador, usually mild-mannered, expressed vehement objections to the North African plan. The American visitors spent a final weekend at Chequers, with the prime minister at his sunniest, then returned to Washington, nursing frustration.