Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Soviet historians in modern times have continued to heap scorn upon the shortfalls of Western assistance. In 1978 Victor Trukhanovsky wrote: ‘The deliveries were curtailed not so much by the difficulties of escorting convoys…as Churchill and British historians like to claim, as by the fact that in Britain there were influential circles which did not like the alliance with the USSR and hindered the normal development of relations between the two allies. Their influences affected the stance adopted by Churchill.’ Although in reality shortages of weapons and shipping, together with Soviet intransigence, were the principal inhibiting factors, it was true that few senior figures in Britain wanted the Soviet Union to emerge strengthened from the war. Extravagant early assurances given to Moscow by both Washington and London were broken. Churchill’s promise to dispatch twenty, even forty British air squadrons to support the Red Army went unfulfilled. There were readily identifiable reasons for this. But Stalin saw only one reality: that while his own nation was engulfed in battle, blood and destruction, Britain remained relatively unscathed and America absolutely so.

  Churchill was too wise to waste much consideration upon the moral superiority of Britain’s position over that of the Soviet Union. All that now mattered to the British and Americans was that the three nations shared a common commitment to the defeat of Nazism. Nonetheless, it was hard to achieve even basic working relationships. Whatever courtesies Stalin accorded to such grandees as Churchill, Eden, Hopkins, Harriman and Beaverbrook, and whatever Soviet secrets he himself occasionally revealed to them, humbler Allied officers and diplomats were refused the most commonplace information. They were exposed to unremitting discourtesy on good days, to contemptuous abuse on bad ones. British and American sailors landing at Murmansk and Archangel suffered insults and humiliations. A later head of the British military mission to Moscow, Lt.Gen. Brocas Burrows, had to be replaced at the Soviets’ insistence after their hidden microphones caught him describing them as ‘savages’.

  The prime minister and his colleagues, like Roosevelt and Marshall, knew that Russia must be given assistance because, to put the matter bluntly, each Russian who died fighting the Germans was one less Englishman or American who must do so. But it would have been asking too much to expect the Westerners to like the Russians. Policy made it essential to pretend to do so, just as Stalin sometimes offered a charade of comradeship. But the Soviets behaved as brutes alike to their own people and to the Western Allies. Only the idealists of the left, of whom there were many in wartime Britain, though rather fewer in America, sustained romantic illusions about Mother Russia. They were fortunate enough never to glimpse its reality.

  Back in Cairo on 17 August, Churchill briefly lapsed into exhaustion. After a rest, however, he quizzed Alexander about the prospective desert offensive, which there were hopes of launching in September. On the 19th, he drove 120 miles through sandy wastes landmarked with supply dumps and wired encampments to visit Montgomery at his headquarters and inspect troops. This was an outing which he thoroughly enjoyed. He claimed to detect a new mood among officers and men. His imagination surely ran ahead of reality, for the new regime had been in place only a week. But a perception of change buoyed his spirits. He slept in the plane back to Cairo, then attended a conference, dined, and sat chatting to Brooke in the warm night air on the embassy lawn until 2 a.m. He commissioned the ambassador’s wife, Lady Lampson, to undertake a shopping expedition on behalf of Clementine and himself, buying Worth scent, Innoxa and Chanel face cream, fifteen lipsticks—and silk to make the delicate underwear in which he loved to clothe himself.

  A signal arrived from Mountbatten, describing the raid on Dieppe that had taken place that day. Of 6,000 men engaged, mostly Canadian, a thousand had been killed and 2,000 taken prisoner. More than a hundred aircraft had been lost in fierce air battles with the Luftwaffe. Yet the chief of combined operations reported, absurdly: ‘Morale of returning troops reported to be excellent. All I have seen are in great form.’ It was some time before Churchill fully grasped the disastrous character of the raid. Lessons were learned about the difficulties of attacking a hostile shore. Inflated RAF claims masked the reality that the Germans had that day shot down two British aircraft for every one which they themselves lost. Once more, a sense of institutional incompetence overlay the débâcle. The invaders bungled the amphibious assault in every possible way, while the Germans responded with their accustomed speed and efficiency. After almost three years of war, Britain was incapable of conducting a limited surprise attack against an objective and at a moment of its own choice. Mountbatten was successful in evading responsibility, much of which properly belonged to him—back in May, he had boasted to Molotov about ‘his’ impending operation. But leaders and planners had failed at every level. Incredibly, General Sir Archie Nye, acting CIGS in Brooke’s absence, was unaware that the raid was taking place. It is scant wonder that Churchill lacked confidence in his commanders, and remained morbidly fearful that Britain’s war-making instruments were doomed to break in his hand.

  Only Beaverbrook, still banging a drum for the Second Front, seemed unchastened by the experience of Dieppe. His Evening Standard asserted that the shipping problems of an early invasion could be overcome if the chiefs of staff displayed more guts, declared the raid to have been a near-victory, and editorialised on 21 August 1942: ‘The Germans cannot afford any more Dieppes either on land or in the air…Two or three simultaneous raids on a large scale would be too much for the three solitary Panzer divisions in France.’ No general or minister doubted that such calls to arms were delivered at Beaverbrook’s explicit behest. The pressures upon the prime minister not merely for action, but for success, were now greater than at any time since he assumed office.

  THIRTEEN

  The Turn of Fortune

  Churchill’s purge of desert generals was greeted in Britain with unsurprising caution. So many newly promoted officers had been welcomed as Wellingtons, only to be exposed as duffers. The Times’s military correspondent observed that commanders in the Middle East ‘have changed so frequently that the subject can now be approached only with tempered enthusiasm’. Through the months that followed, the British media displayed a wariness close to cynicism about Eighth Army’s prospects. A Times editorial on 26 August observed that neither the RAF’s bomber offensive nor the raid on Dieppe had ‘relieved the continuing sense of an inadequacy in the British military achievement at a time when our allies face a supreme crisis’. Journalist Maggie Joy Blunt wrote in her diary on 19 August, expressing dismay about Dieppe: ‘While I grumble young Russia waits in agony for our Second Front. Here in England we are divided, despondent and without faith, ruled by old men, governed by money. The old fears, the old distrust are deeply rooted.’ Such gloom was not confined to civilians. Brooke wrote later: ‘When looking back at those days in the light of after events one may be apt to overlook those ghastly moments of doubt which at the time crowded in on me.’

  Churchill, who read newspapers avidly, cannot have gained much pleasure from their cynicism about the command changes. However, he returned to London on 24 August still exhilarated by what he had seen in the desert and by the perceived success of his visit to Stalin. His boundless capacity for optimism was among his greatest virtues, at a time when those around him found it easier to succumb to gloom. On the night of 30 August, Rommel, desperately short of fuel, attacked at Alam Halfa. The British, forewarned by Ultra, inflicted a decisive repulse on the Afrika Korps. The prime minister now became passionately anxious that Montgomery’s own offensive should be launched before the American North Africa landings, provisionally scheduled for October. There was fresh trouble with Washington, where Marshall was urging Roosevelt to limit the scale of Torch, and to omit Algiers from its objectives. Churchill feared that he would have to defy medical advice and fly once more to see the president. Only on 3 September did Roosevelt accede to Churchill’s imprecations, which were supported by US generals Dwight Eisenhower and Mark Clark in London. Torch was to p
roceed on 8 November, with landings at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers.

  But while Allied warlords nursed private excitement about the prospect of great happenings, the public and body politic perceived only continuing inactivity. Churchill indulged an outburst of selfpity on 24 September, telling Alan Brooke that he, the prime minister, ‘was the only one trying to win the war, that he was the only one who produced any ideas, that he was quite alone in all his attempts, no one supported him…Frequently in this oration he worked himself up into such a state from the woeful picture he had painted, that tears streamed down his face!’

  It was inevitable that, having insisted upon assuming sole responsibility for direction of the war, Churchill should bear blame for the weaknesses which caused the armed forces so often to be seen to fail. Public dissatisfaction with Britain’s wartime government attained its highest pitch during the last weeks before a dramatic change of fortune. Many ministers and generals, who readily accepted that only Churchill could be Britain’s prime minister, were nonetheless convinced that he should divorce the premiership from the ministry of defence, delegating operational control of the war. But to whom? The mooted candidates were almost as unsuitable as had been the Duke of Gloucester. Leo Amery told Dill, home on leave, that he favoured appointing Wavell as ‘super-chief of staff…Dill agreed, but said nothing could get Winston to face up to it however bad the present arrangement may be.’ This exchange says little for the judgement of either man, but much about the mood in Whitehall towards the prime minister. Even Eden, Churchill’s most trusted colleague, was convinced that he should relinquish the ministry of defence.

  Churchill later described September and October 1942 as his most anxious months of the war. Amery complained after a cabinet wrangle: ‘It is an awful thing dealing with a man like Winston who is at the same moment dictatorial, eloquent and muddle-headed.’ Beaverbrook, unswervingly mischievous and disloyal, told Eden on 8 October that the prime minister was ‘a “bent” man, and couldn’t be expected to last long…The future belonged to A.E.’ Influential Canadian diplomat Humphrey Hume Wrong, in London on a fact-finding mission, wrote in his diary: ‘The dominance of Churchill emerges from all these talks. Cripps on the shelf, Attlee a lackey, Bracken the Man Friday of Churchill. It isn’t as bad as the political gossips make out, but it’s bad enough.’ On 17 October John Kennedy, who had been ill, attended a cabinet committee meeting with Churchill. ‘He sat down and glowered all round, everybody waiting to see if he was in a good temper. He pressed the bell and told the sec[retar]y he had come without a handkerchief. His detective came in with one in an envelope. W. took it out & blew his nose & looked all round again. Then he got up & and spent a minute or two in adjusting the electric fire. Then sat down & glowered all round again. Then lit his cigar & took a sip from his tumbler of iced water…Then he saw me and with a twinkle in his eye…said “Glad to see you are better.” Then to business.’

  If Churchill’s person was in Downing Street, his spirit was far away, in the drifting sands of Egypt. Montgomery was training troops, making plans, stockpiling ammunition, readying his new Sherman tanks. The foxy little general insisted upon launching Eighth Army’s offensive according to his own timetable, heedless of the prime minister’s impatience. A critical contribution to his campaign was already being made at sea. Guided by Ultra decrypts, the RAF and Royal Navy inflicted a series of devastating blows on the Italian tankers and supply ships fuelling and feeding the Afrika Korps. By late October, even before Eighth Army began its assault, the German logistical predicament in Egypt was desperate. The prime minister knew this from his Boniface decrypts, and dispatched a barrage of anxious, sometimes threatening, signals to Alexander. A British army strongly superior in men, tanks, guns and planes must surely be capable of defeating an enemy known to be almost immobilised for lack of fuel.

  The operational value of Ultra material on the battlefield depended heavily on the receptiveness of individual commanders, and the quality of their intelligence chiefs. Some generals and admirals were astonishingly indifferent to the bounties they were offered. Montgomery was the first British desert general to employ a topclass intelligence officer, in the person of Oxford academic Brigadier Bill Williams, and to heed his counsel. Ultra played a key role in enabling Montgomery to defeat Rommel’s thrust at Alam Halfa. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord until 1943, often used intelligence poorly, most notoriously during the PQ17 Arctic convoy battle. By contrast, the Admiralty’s submarine tracking room was brilliantly conducted, and played a decisive role in the Battle of the Atlantic. In 1942, however, Bletchley’s inability to crack the U-boat cipher rendered Allied convoys appallingly vulnerable. November saw the worst losses of the war: some 721,700 tons of Allied shipping were sunk. Then, suddenly and dramatically, the codebreakers achieved another breakthrough, and once more provided the Royal Navy with means to track U-boat positions. From December onwards, convoys could again be routed away from the submarine wolfpacks. Thanks overwhelmingly to intelligence, the tide of the Atlantic battle, as well as of the Mediterranean campaign to interdict supplies to Rommel, turned decisively against Germany.

  Montgomery launched his attack at Alamein on 23 October. Brendan Bracken said: ‘If we are beaten in this battle, it’s the end of Winston.’ This was histrionic: within a fortnight the Torch landings far behind Rommel’s front would have rendered the German position in Egypt untenable. That is why Correlli Barnett, Douglas Porch and others have described Alamein as ‘the unnecessary battle’. But it was a desperately necessary one for the self-esteem of the British people. Bracken’s words reflected the prevailing mood among even the prime minister’s most loyal supporters. Churchill had presided over so many failures. There must be a success—a British success. Some post-war strategists have argued that if Montgomery had merely waited for Torch, he could then have fallen upon Rommel’s retreating army in the open, and achieved a far more devastating and less costly victory. But this was never a credible political option for Eighth Army—nor for the prime minister.

  On the night of 23 October, he attended a dinner for Eleanor Roosevelt at Buckingham Palace. A courtier wrote:

  Winston was like a cat on hot bricks, waiting for the news of the start of Alexander’s offensive in Egypt. This…had begun at 8pm our time, and I had to go out in the middle to get the news by telephone from No. 10. After a brief interval, nothing would content Winston but to go to the telephone himself. His conversation evidently pleased him, for he walked back along the passage singing ‘Roll Out The Barrel’ with gusto, but with little evidence of musical talent. This astonished the posse of footmen through which he had to pass. I wondered what their Victorian predecessors would have thought had they heard Dizzy, or Mr G[ladstone], singing ‘Knocked ’em in the Old Kent Road’ in similar circumstances.

  Back in June, Auchinleck had chosen to halt his retreat and defend a line at El Alamein. South of a narrow stretch of desert, there less than forty miles wide, hills rendered the position impervious to flank attack. In contrast to most North African battlefields, there was little room for manoeuvre: it was necessary for an attacker to batter a path by frontal assault through minefields, wire, deep defences. In August, when Rommel attacked, these circumstances profited the British. Seven weeks later they enabled 104,000 Germans and Italians to mount an unexpectedly staunch defence against 195,000 British troops and overwhelming firepower. Gen. Georg Stumme, acting as Axis commander during Rommel’s absence on sick leave, was killed in the first days. Rommel returned. For almost a week, the British pounded and hammered at his positions. Churchill and the British people held their breath. The first news was good—but so it had often been before, to be followed by crushing disappointments. The British no longer dared to anticipate victory. One minister, Amery, wrote on 26 October: ‘I am terribly anxious lest even with our superior weight of tanks and artillery and aircraft it might yet prove another Passchendaele, and we spend ourselves in not quite getting through.’

  Churchill beca
me seriously alarmed when, on the 28th, Montgomery paused and regrouped. He dispatched a threatening minute to Brooke: ‘It is most necessary that the attack should be resumed before Torch. A standstill now will be proclaimed a defeat. We consider the matter most grave.’ British armies had been here so often before. Auchinleck had achieved comparable successes, only to see them crumble to dust. Then, on 2 November, Montgomery launched his decisive blow, Operation Supercharge. ‘How minute and fragile one felt, trapped in this maelstrom of explosive fury!’ wrote a bewildered young British platoon commander. ‘When we moved forward we scuttled like mice across the inhospitable sand…ready to sway and flatten ourselves to earth if a shell burst nearby…We were being fired upon. Though this was the very meaning of war, I felt a sense of outrage and betrayal. Someone had blundered. How could the chaos conceivably resolve itself into a successful attack? Yet all the major battles of history must have seemed like this, a hopeless shambles to the individual in front, with a coherence only discernible to those in the rear.’

  Montgomery’s men broke through. Ultra revealed to the British that Rommel considered himself beaten, and was in full retreat. Churchill rejoiced. At a Downing Street lunch he gleefully told guests, including MP Harold Nicolson: ‘There is more jam to come. Much more jam. And in places where you least expect it.’ After this coy hint at Torch, across the same lunch table he told Brendan Bracken to order the nation’s church bells rung. When the proposal met doubts, he agreed to delay until 15 November, to ensure that no accident befell Allied arms. Thereafter, he was determined that the British people should recognise just cause for celebration.