by Max Hastings
On this occasion Bevin raised the issue of Lord Woolton’s future role in post-war planning. Churchill said crossly that he was just leaving to see Stalin, was preoccupied with other things, ‘and that it was really too much to go into detailed questions at the moment’. Bevin was as angry as the prime minister. There was never a right time to catch Churchill, to discuss matters which did not command his interest. Yet he was so often criticised for declining seriously to address post-war issues that it is salutary to compare his attitude with that of Hitler. The Nazis inflicted crippling economic, social and military damage upon their own empire by setting about forging a new ‘Greater Germany’ while the war’s outcome was still unresolved. Churchill’s single-minded preoccupation with achieving victory may have dismayed his colleagues, but it seems a fault on the right side.
The British people acknowledged him as the personification of their war effort. As the dominance of the US and Soviet Union grew, his rhetoric and statesmanship were the most formidable weapons his flagging nation could wield to sustain its place at the summit of the Grand Alliance. But in the last eighteen months of the war, while he received his share of the applause for Allied victories, he also suffered increasing frustrations and disappointments. At every turn, cherished projects were stillborn, favoured policies atrophied, because they could not be executed without American resources or goodwill, which were unforthcoming. This was by no means always to Britain’s disadvantage. Some schemes, such as the Aegean campaign, were illconceived and unlikely to prosper. But no man less liked to be thwarted than Churchill. Much happened, or did not happen, in the years of American ascendancy which caused the prime minister to fume at his own impotence.
His words remained as magnificent in the years of victories as they had been in those of defeats. He enjoyed moments of exhilaration, because he had a large capacity for joy. But the sorrows were frequent and various. He refused to abandon his obsession with getting the Turks into the war, cabling Eden, en route back from Moscow, that it was necessary to ‘remind the Turkey that Christmas was coming’. He dismissed proposals summarily to depose the king of Italy, saying, ‘Why break off the handle of the jug before we get to Rome and have a chance of securing a new handle for it!’ He told the cabinet one day, amid a discussion about Soviet perfidy in publishing claims in Pravda that Britain had opened unilateral peace negotiations with the Nazis: ‘Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile, you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.’
In those months Churchill’s mind was overwhelmingly fixed upon the Mediterranean campaign. But it would have well served the interests of the British war effort had he also addressed another important issue which he neglected. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, chose this moment to divert the bulk of his increasingly formidable force away from the Ruhr, where Lancasters and Halifaxes had been pounding factories for years, to attack Germany’s capital. This was one of the major strategic errors of the RAF’s war. The Berlin region was certainly industrially important, but it was far from Britain, heavily defended, and often shrouded in winter overcast. This assault continued until April 1944, at a cost in RAF losses that became prohibitive, without dealing the decisive blow Harris sought – and which he had promised the prime minister. Bomber Command lost the ‘Battle of Berlin’.
Much more significant, however, was the respite granted to the Ruhr. Adam Tooze’s important recent research on the Nazi economy has shown that in the autumn of 1943 the Ruhr’s industries lay on the brink of collapse. If Bomber Command had continued its assault, instead of switching targets eastwards, the consequences for Hitler’s war machine might have been dramatic. Allied intelligence about German production was poor. One of Harris’s major mistakes as director of the bomber offensive was failure to grasp the importance of repeating blows against damaged targets. He allowed himself to be misled about his force’s achievements by air photographs of devastated cities.
So, too, did the prime minister. To explain why he left the RAF to its own devices for much of the war, it is necessary to acknowledge how little reliable information was available about what bombing was, or was not, doing to Germany. The progress of Britain’s armies was readily measured by following their advances or retreats on the map; that of the Royal Navy by examining statistics of sinkings. But once the Battle of Britain was won, the RAF’s performance was chiefly judged by assessments, often spurious, produced by its own staff officers. Nobody, including Portal, Harris and Churchill, really knew what bombing was achieving, though soldiers and sailors believed it was much less than airmen claimed. The prime minister had a strong vested interest in thinking the best of British bombing. He trumpeted its achievements to the Americans, and even more to Stalin, to mollify their frustration about the shortcomings of Western ground operations. It would have been a major political embarrassment had evidence emerged that the strategic offensive was doing less than Harris claimed.
Thus, between 1942 and the 1944 controversy about bombing the French rail network ahead of Overlord, Churchill never sought an independent assessment of what Bomber Command was contributing, though it consumed around one-third of Britain’s entire war effort. Harris persuaded the prime minister that his aircraft wreaked havoc, as they did. But dramatic images of flame and destruction in the Reich were unaccompanied by rigorous analysis of German industry, about which intelligence was anyway sketchy and most of the RAF’s data plain wrong. Harris, like his American counterparts, was left free to fight his battle as he himself saw fit, to pursue an obsessive attempt to prove that bombing could win the war without much input of accurate evidence or imagination. This was a serious omission on the part of the prime minister, and a missed opportunity for the Royal Air Force.
In this later period of the war, the fatigue of Churchill’s people grew alongside American and Russian might. The Aegean campaign represented a minor demonstration of British vulnerability, but larger ones lay ahead. In the late autumn of 1943, four issues dominated Britain’s military agenda: the campaign in Italy; the commitment to Overlord; residual possibilities of ambitious adventures in the Balkans; and Operation Buccaneer, a putative amphibious landing in Burma. On 6 November, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr warned from Moscow of Russian fears that the British were still hostile to Overlord. Churchill responded: ‘I will do everything in human power to animate the forward movement on which my heart is set at this moment.’ But the words ‘forward movement’ embraced a range of possible operations, some in the Mediterranean, of which Overlord was only one. Dalton wrote after a cabinet meeting: ‘In an expansive moment Winston told us his apprehensions about the “Over-lord”policy which the Americans have forced upon us, involving a dangerous and time-wasting straddle of our transport and landing craft between two objectives when we might have gone on more effectively in Italy and the Balkans.’
For some weeks Churchill had been pressing for a meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin, which he would dearly have liked to hold in London. It was unsurprising that the Russian leader rejected this notion out of hand, but the British felt snubbed when they learned that the US president was also unwilling to visit their country. Such a rendezvous would play badly with the American electorate in the forthcoming election year, claimed Roosevelt. After some dalliance, Tehran was found a mutually acceptable venue. Churchill sought an advance bilateral summit in Cairo, to which the Americans agreed. He sailed for the Mediterranean on the battlecruiser Renown, accom-panied by his usual entourage and service chiefs, daughter Sarah and son Randolph. Harold Macmillan boarded the great warship at Gibraltar: ‘We were greeted by her owner – or so he seemed – who was finding this an agreeable method of cruising.’ But Churchill was in poor health. Disembarking at Malta, he spent two days in bed at the residence of Lord Gort, the governor.
Gort was no slave to creature comforts. When Ismay visited the
ailing prime minister he was greeted by pathetic solicitations for enhanced rations and a bath: ‘Do you think you could bring me a little bit of butter from that nice ship?…I only want a cupful of hot water, but I can’t get it.’ Churchill’s bedroom overlooked a thoroughfare crowded with chattering Maltese. Moran recorded a touching moment: ‘From the street below came a great hubbub of voices. His brow darkened. He threw his legs out of bed, and striding across the room thrust his head through the open window, bawling: “Go away, will you? Please go away and do not make so much noise.” ’
The chiefs of staff held an unsatisfactory meeting, crowded into the prime minister’s bedroom. A few days earlier, John Kennedy expounded in his diary British policy for the encounter with the Americans: ‘We have now crystallised our ideas as to the strategy to be advocated.’ The Italian campaign should be continued, renewed efforts made to bring Turkey into the war through Allied activism in the Balkans, and the US urged ‘to accept a postponement of Overlord’. The adjutant-general Sir Ronald Adam told a fellow officer: ‘The PM’s stock is not high with the President at the moment, and the latter is being dragged rather unwillingly to Cairo…The PM has now gone very Mediterranean-minded, and the future of Overlord is again in the melting-pot.’
Churchill chafed constantly about the slow progress of Allied operations in Italy. Winter weather had reduced campaigning to a crawl, and the Germans were resisting with their usual determination. ‘The pattern of battle seldom varied,’ wrote one veteran of the campaign, Fred Majdalany. ‘The Germans would hold a position for a time until it was seriously contested: then pull back a mile or two to the next defendable place, leaving behind a trail of blown bridges, minefields and road demolitions…The Allied armies would begin with a night attack – ford a stream or river after dark, storm the heights on the far side, dig themselves in by dawn, and hope that by that time the Sappers, following on their heels, would have sufficiently repaired the demolitions and removed the obstacles to permit tanks to follow up…The Germans, watching these proceedings, would attempt to frustrate them by raining down artillery and mortar fire.’
The prime minister was infuriated that two British divisions had already been withdrawn from the line in advance of their return home to prepare for D-Day. In a minute to the chiefs on 20 November, he complained of Italian operations being compromised by ‘the shadow of Overlord’. He said that Yugoslavia’s partisans, whom he was eager to support more vigorously, were containing more Axis divisions than the British and American armies. He deplored American insistence on 1 May as the date for D-Day, ‘with inflexible rigidity and without regard to the loss and injury to the Allied cause created thereby’. The consequence of this ‘fixed target date’, he said, was that ‘our affairs will deteriorate in the Balkans and that the Aegean will remain firmly in German hands…for the sake of an operation fixed for May upon hypotheses that in all probability will not be realized by that date’. Churchill wanted all available resources directed first towards capturing Rome by January 1944, and second upon taking Rhodes later that month. None of this was likely to find favour with the Americans, nor deserved to.
The British delegation sailed on from Malta to Alexandria, and thence flew to Cairo, arriving on 21 November. Macmillan, seeing Churchill for the first time for some months, perceived his powers diminished, yet still remarkable: ‘Winston is getting more and more dogmatic (at least outwardly) and rather repetitive. One forgets, of course, that he is really an old man – but a wonderful old man he is too…It is amusing to watch how he will take a point and reproduce it as his own a day or two later. He misses very little, although he does not always appear to listen.’
The first meeting of the Sextant conference took place on 23 November, and addressed the Far East. The US contingent was in irritable mood, because prior word of the gathering had leaked to correspondents, increasing the security risk. The British were galled by the attendance of Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, at American insistence. Much attention was given to Chinese issues. The British shared US faith neither in China’s value as an ally nor in the massive commitment to provide aid ‘over the Hump’ of the Himalayas. They had not forgotten that a few months earlier Roosevelt had urged them to cede possession of Hong Kong to Chiang Kai-shek as a ‘gesture of goodwill’. This caused Eden to observe to Harry Hopkins that he had not heard the president suggest any similar act of largesse at American expense. Smuts said emolliently: ‘We are inclined to forget the President’s difficulties. There is a very strong undercurrent against him. The things the Americans do are based partly on ignorance, partly on their determination to get power. We have learned hard lessons in the four years of the war. They have had no hard lessons. Yet we do not want to wait another four years while they learn them.’
The British were right about the intractability of China, but their dismissive attitude increased Anglo–American tensions. Churchill made much of plans to launch Orde Wingate and his Chindits on ambitious deep penetrations in north Burma. The Americans, however, regarded these as reflecting the characteristic British enthusiasm for sideshows at the expense of major operations. They favoured Buccaneer, a big coastal landing in Burma. The British, however, now argued that Mediterranean action, not to mention Overlord, would be fatally compromised by diverting landing craft to the Bay of Bengal.
At the second plenary session on the 24th, Churchill complained vigorously about the loss of Kos and Leros. He also said it was untrue that he favoured unlimited operations in Italy: he was committed to Overlord ‘up to the hilt’. But he sought agreement that Allied armies should aim to reach a line between Pisa and Rimini. Eisenhower addressed the conference on the 26th. He was still only Mediterranean supreme commander, unaware that Overlord would soon become his personal responsibility. He said that he supported British aspirations both in the valley of the Po and the Aegean. ‘He stressed the vital importance of continuing the maximum possible operations in an established theatre since much time was invariably lost when the scene of action was changed.’ This was welcome to Churchill, if not to Marshall.
The conference’s British administrators were at pains to offer hospitality matching that which the Americans had provided at Casablanca in January. But given Britain’s impoverished state, they were embarrassed by their guests’ locust-like response. The assembled throng of officials and service officers accounted for 20,000 cigarettes and seventy-five cigars. Each day, 500 beers, eighty bottles of whisky, twelve of brandy, and thirty-four of gin were consumed. It was decided that at future summits, out of respect for the rationed people of Britain, those attending should at least be asked to pay for their own drinks.
Between sessions, Churchill took Roosevelt to see the Pyramids, and talked enthusiastically to his staff about the warmth of their relationship. Yet Eden described the Cairo conference as ‘among the most difficult I ever attended’. British fortunes in the Far East were at their lowest ebb. Imperial forces were apparently incapable of breaking through into Burma in the face of a numerically inferior Japanese army. Given Roosevelt’s rambling approach to business, ‘W. had to play the role of courtier and seize opportunities as and when they arose. I am amazed at the patience with which he does this…Though the role of attendant listener was uncongenial to him, the Prime Minister played it faultlessly all these days, so that we came through without the loss of any feathers, if not with our tails up.’ But presidential needling of the prime minister was more pronounced than usual. Roosevelt reproached Churchill for allowing Eden to tell the king of Greece not to attempt to return home once his country was liberated until it was plain that his subjects wanted him. This was an odd intervention, given the Americans’ subsequent hostility to the monarch. The British were furious with the president for encouraging Greek intractability.
Churchill lamented to the British delegation Roosevelt’s casual approach to business, observing that while he was ‘a charming country gentleman’, his dilatory habits wasted time. The prime minister and his colleagues were surpri
sed and irked by the Americans’ failure to hold bilateral discussions with them before meeting Stalin. ‘PM and President ought to have got together, with their staffs, before meeting the Russians but that through a series of mischances has not happened,’ mused Cadogan. The British were slow to perceive that such evasion reflected policy rather than ‘mischances’. This would be the president’s first meeting with Stalin. Earlier in the year Roosevelt had sought a meeting with the Soviet leader without Churchill present. When his initiative came to nothing he coolly lied to the prime minister, asserting that the proposal had originated with Moscow, not himself. Roosevelt believed that he could forge a working relationship with Moscow, which must not be compromised by any appearance of excessive Anglo–American amity or collusion. It did not trouble him that to such an end Churchill must be discomfited.
Hopkins bemoaned the prime minister’s ‘bloody Italian war’, and warned Moran: ‘We are preparing for a battle at Tehran. You will find us lining up with the Russians.’ The doctor wrote wonderingly of the American attitude to Churchill: ‘They are far more sceptical of him than they are of Stalin.’ Hopkins’s enthusiasm for the prime minister had diminished, and so too had his influence in his own country. Roosevelt’s secretary wrote pityingly: ‘Poor Harry, the public is done with him. He is a heavy liability to the President.’ The US delegation in Cairo leaked freely to correspondents. The Washington Post was among many newspapers which afterwards disclosed to the American public ‘the reported recalcitrance of Churchill’ towards US strategic wishes. No military agreements between the British and Americans had been reached by 27 November, when Sextant adjourned for the principals to fly on to Tehran.
