by Max Hastings
On the afternoon of 19 January, Churchill presided at a chiefs of staff meeting, during which he urged commando landings on the Dalmatian coast, progressively to clear of Germans the islands off Yugoslavia. His hopes for Anzio were soaring. He spoke of forcing the Germans to withdraw into northern Italy, or even behind the Alps. Then Alexander’s armies would be free to pursue towards Vienna, to strike into the Balkans, or swing left into France. Two days later, as the American Maj.Gen. John Lucas’s corps prepared to hit the beaches in Italy, the US Fifth Army staged crossings of the Rapido river south of Rome. Churchill cabled to Stalin: ‘We have launched the big attack against the German armies defending Rome which I told you about at Tehran.’ By midnight on the 22nd, 36,000 British and American troops and 3,000 vehicles were ashore at Anzio, having achieved complete surprise.
Yet through the days that followed, news from Italy turned sour. The Rapido crossings proved a disaster. The Germans snuffed out each precarious American bridgehead in turn. Kesselring acted with extraordinary energy, recovering from his astonishment about Anzio to concentrate troops and isolate the invaders. Four Allied divisions were soon ashore, yet going nowhere. As the Germans poured fire into the shallow beachhead, British and American soldiers manning their foxholes and gun positions found themselves trapped in one of the most painful predicaments of the war. ‘We did become like animals in the end,’ said a soldier of the Sherwood Foresters. ‘You were stuck in the same place. You had nowhere to go. You didn’t get no rest…No sleep…You never expected to see the end of it. You just forgot why you were there.’
Casualties mounted rapidly, and so too did desertions. Nowhere from the beach to the front line offered safety from bombardment. The Luftwaffe attacked offshore shipping with new and deadly glider bombs. ‘It will be unpleasant if you get sealed off there and cannot advance from the south,’ Churchill wrote to Alexander on 27 January. On 8 February he signalled to Dill in Washington: ‘All this has been a disappointment to me.’ It was true that German forces were tied down in Italy which would otherwise be fighting elsewhere. ‘Even a battle of attrition is better than standing by and watching the Russians fight. We should also learn a good many lessons about how not to do it which will be valuable in “Overlord”.’ But these were poor consolations for what was, indubitably, one of the big Allied failures of the war.
Anzio was the last important operation which sprang from the personal inspiration of the prime minister. Without his support, neither Eisenhower nor Alexander could have persuaded the American chiefs of staff to provide means for such a venture. It reflected his passion for what Liddell Hart called ‘the strategy of indirect approach’, the exploitation of Allied command of the sea to sidestep the difficulties of frontal assault amid some of the most difficult terrain in the world. In principle, Shingle was valid. But to an extraordinary degree commanders failed to think through a plan for what was to happen once the troops got ashore. In this, the weakness of the Anzio operation closely resembled that of Churchill’s other notorious amphibious failure, in the Dardanelles in 1915 – as American corps commander Maj.Gen. Lucas suggested before it began. Alexander, as commander-in-chief, must bear responsibility for the inadequacy of strategic planning for Shingle. He and his staff grossly underestimated the speed and strength of the German response, believing that the mere threat to Kesselring’s rear would cause him to abandon the defence of his line at Monte Cassino. They never identified the importance of quick seizure of the hills beyond the Anzio beaches, a far more plausible objective than a dash for Rome. The Americans, always deeply sceptical, displayed better judgement about the landing’s prospects than the British.
Moreover, all operations of war must be judged in the context of the forces available to carry them out. The Allies had insufficient shipping in the Mediterranean to put ashore an army large enough to risk a decisive thrust inland. Lucas has often been criticised for failure to strike towards Rome in the wake of his corps’ successful landing. He was certainly a poor general. But had he done as the fire-eaters wished and pushed hard for the capital, he would have exposed a long, thin salient to counter-attack. The Germans always punished excessive boldness, as they would do a year later at Arnhem. The likeliest outcome of a dash for Rome from Anzio would have been the destruction of Lucas’s corps. As it was, despite the four months of misery which the defenders of the Anzio perimeter now resigned themselves to endure, they were rewarded with belated success.
So bitter was the struggle on the coast, matched by the battle further south for the heights of Monte Cassino, that the Allies experienced little joy in the belated capture of Rome when it came in June 1944. But what took place was preferable to what might have been, had a more daring commander led the Anzio assault. Shingle confirmed the US chiefs of staff in their conviction that Italy offered only poisoned fruits. ‘The more one sees of this peninsula, the less suited it seems for modern military operations,’ wrote Harold Macmillan. The campaign could not be abandoned, but henceforward the Americans viewed it as a liability. They would support no more of Churchill’s adventures, in the Mediterranean or anywhere else.
Events in Italy in the winter of 1943–44 once more highlighted the gulf between the prime minister’s heroic aspirations and the limitations of Allied armies fighting the Germans. ‘I gather we are still stronger than the enemy,’ he signalled to Alexander on 10 February, ‘and naturally one wonders why over 70,000 British and Americans should be hemmed in on the defensive by what are thought to be at most 60,000 Germans.’ He wrote to Smuts on 27 February that his confidence in Alexander was ‘undiminished’, adding sadly: ‘though if I had been well enough to be at his side as I had hoped at the critical moment, I believe I could have given the necessary stimulus. Alas for time, distance, illness and advancing years.’ If the generals of Britain and America had been Marlboroughs or Lees, if their citizen soldiers had displayed the mettle of Spartans, they might have accomplished in the Mediterranean such great deeds as Churchill’s imagination conceived for them. But they were not and did not. They were mortal clay, doing their best against an outstanding commander, Kesselring, and one of the greatest armies the world has ever seen.
Churchill had been right, in 1942 and 1943, to force upon the Americans campaigns in the Mediterranean, when there was nowhere else they could credibly fight. He told the House of Commons on 22 February: ‘On broad grounds of strategy, Hitler’s decision to send into the south of Italy as many as eighteen divisions, involving, with their maintenance troops, probably something like half a million Germans, and to make a large secondary front in Italy, is not unwelcome to the Allies…We must fight the Germans somewhere, unless we are to stand still and watch the Russians.’ But by now there was a lameness about such an explanation. In 1944 Churchill’s Italian vision was overtaken by that of Overlord, a huge and indispensable American conception. After Anzio, even the prime minister himself implicitly acknowledged this, and embraced the prospect of D-Day with increasing excitement. Though his enthusiasm for Mediterranean operations never subsided, he was obliged to recognise that the major battles in the west would be fought in France, not Italy.
In the spring of 1944, Churchill was full of apprehension not only about Overlord, but also about the mood of the British people. Several lost by-elections exposed voters’ lack of enthusiasm for the coalition government, and weariness with the war. After an Independent Labour candidate in West Derbyshire on 18 February defeated the Tory Lord Hartington, who campaigned with the prime minister’s conspicuous endorsement, Jock Colville wrote: ‘Sitting in a chair in his study at the Annexe, the PM looked old, tired and very depressed and was even muttering about a General Election. Now, he said, with great events pending, was the time when national unity was essential, the question of annihilating great states had to be faced; it began to look as if democracy had not the persistence necessary to go through with it, however well it might have shewn its capacity of defence.’ In Churchill’s Commons speech of 22 February he delivered a contemptu
ous jab at his critics, ‘little folk who frolic alongside the juggernaut of war to see what fun or notoriety they can extract from the proceedings’. Five days later, writing to Smuts, he alluded to such people again: ‘their chirpings will presently be stilled by the thunder of the cannonade’. On 25 March, to Roosevelt, he wrote ruefully: ‘We certainly do have plenty to worry us, now that our respective democracies feel so sure that the whole war is as good as won.’ Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam wrote in April 1944: ‘In the H of C smoking room a new leader is decided upon almost every other day.’
There was much to vex Churchill, the burden made heavier because so few of the difficulties and hazards could be publicly avowed. Countless hours were devoted to Poland. The Polish exile government in London was obdurately opposed to changes in its frontiers
– the shift ofthe entire country a step westward – which Churchill had reluctantly accepted. Its representatives persisted in proclaiming their anger towards Moscow about the Katyn massacres. What adherent of freedom and democracy could blame them? Yet so astonishing was the popularity of Russia in Britain, that polls showed a decline in public enthusiasm for the Poles, because of their declared hostility to Moscow. Again and again the prime minister urged the exiles to mute their protests. Since Russia would soon possess physical mastery of their country, Soviet goodwill was indispensable to any possibility that they might share in its post-war governance. Stalin lied flatly to Churchill, asserting that he had no intention of influencing Poland’s internal politics, and that the Poles would be free to choose their own post-war rulers. But in a stream of cables and letters the Soviet warlord vented his own anger, as real as it was base, about the London Poles’ declarations of hostility to the Soviet Union.
It was plain to Churchill that the prospects of a free Poland were slender, and shrinking. Amid the exiles’ rejections of his pleas for realism, his lonely battle to restore the nation to freedom was being lost. In all probability, nothing the Western Allies could have done would have saved Poland from Stalin’s maw. There was one dominant, intractable reality: the Soviet Union’s insistence upon exacting its price for the twenty-eight million Russians who died in the struggle to destroy Nazism. On 3 March, Eden asked Churchill to cable Moscow personally about the case of two Royal Navy seamen, seized in Murmansk after a drunken brawl and sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia. The prime minister wrote to the Foreign Secretary: ‘I cannot send such a telegram which would embroil me with Bruin on a small point when so many large ones are looming up.’ Instead, he suggested to Eden that questions in Parliament might generate useful publicity about the case: ‘A little anti-Russian feeling in the House of Commons would be salutary at the present time.’ When Sir John Anderson wrote to Churchill urging that the Russians should be told of the Allies’ ‘Tube Alloys’ project – creation of the atomic bomb – Churchill scrawled in the margin of Anderson’s minute: ‘On no account.’
Eden wrote in his diary about Poland: ‘Soviet attitude on this business raises most disquieting thoughts. Is Soviet regime one which will ever co-operate with the West?’ A few days later he added: ‘I confess to growing apprehension that Russia has vast aims and that these may include the domination of Eastern Europe and even the Mediterranean and the “communising” of much that remains.’ In Italy, the Soviets refused to deal with the Allied Control Commission, and instead appointed their own ambassador with a mandate to embarrass the Anglo-Americans. It was painful for Churchill, who knew the truth about Stalin’s tyranny and the perils posed by his ambitions, to be obliged to indulge the British people’s romantic delusions, and to echo their gratitude for Russian sacrifices. Even as he was participating in an exceptionally harsh exchange of cables with Moscow on a range of issues, in a BBC broadcast on 26 March he nonetheless paid generous tribute to the Red Army. Its 1943 offensive, he said, ‘constitutes the greatest cause of Hitler’s undoing’. The Russian people had been extraordinarily fortunate to find, ‘in their supreme ordeal and agony a warrior leader, Marshal Stalin, whose authority enables him to combine and control the movements of armies numbered by many millions upon a front of nearly 2,000 miles, and to impart a unity and a concert to the war direction in the East which has been very good for Russia and for all her Allies’. All this was true, but represented only a portion of reality.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, difficulties persisted with the French. Harold Macmillan wrote from Algiers: ‘I would much rather get what we want – if we can – through the French rather than by imposing it on the French. But it is a difficult hand for me to play…the trouble is that neither the President nor the PM has any confidence in De Gaulle.’ Churchill had adopted a jaundiced view ever since, at Brazzaville in the Congo in July 1941, the intransigent general gave an interview to the Chicago Daily News in which he suggested that Britain was ‘doing a wartime deal with Hitler’. Churchill and Eden several times discussed the possibility that De Gaulle was mentally unhinged. The prime minister had become sick to death of his petulance and studied discourtesy. It seemed intolerable that Britain should struggle with Washington on behalf of Free France, which the Americans despised, and be rewarded only with ingratitude from its leader.
During Churchill’s time in North Africa he spent many hours with Macmillan, De Gaulle and other prominent Frenchmen, seeking to sustain a veneer of unity. His efforts were sabotaged by De Gaulle’s unilateralism. At one moment the general ordered the arrest of three prominent Vichyites in Algiers, which provoked an explosion of Churchillian exasperation. British politicians and diplomats exhausted themselves pleading before the prime minister the case for De Gaulle, a habitual offender facing a judge minded to don the black cap. After one exchange, Macmillan wrote: ‘Much as I love Winston, I cannot stand much more.’ Yet two days later, like almost every other close associate of the prime minister, he relented: ‘He is really a remarkable man. Although he can be so tiresome and pig-headed, there is no one like him. His devotion to work and duty is quite extraordinary.’
Churchill’s commitment to restoring France to its rightful position as a great nation never wavered. For this, and for fighting the Americans so staunchly in support of its interests, the British government merited, though never received, its Gallic neighbour’s enduring gratitude. In Quebec the previous year, Eden argued fiercely with Cordell Hull about the virtues of French resurrection: ‘We both got quite heated at one time when I told him we had to live twenty miles from France and I wanted to rebuild her as far as I could.’ Macmillan observed that while Roosevelt hated De Gaulle, Churchill’s sentiments were more complex: ‘He feels about De Gaulle like a man who has quarrelled with his son. He will cut him off with a shilling. But (in his heart) he would kill the fatted calf if only the prodigal would confess his faults and take his orders obediently in future.’ Since this would never happen, however, there were many moments in 1943–44 when, but for Eden’s loyalty to De Gaulle, Churchill would have cut the Frenchman adrift.
Even now, with two million men training and arming in Britain for the invasion, Churchill chose to sustain the dangerous fiction – dangerous, because of the mistrust of himself which it fed among Americans – that Overlord still represented an option rather than an absolute commitment. In February he invited the chiefs of staff to review plans for Jupiter – an assault on north Norway – if the French landings failed. He convened a committee to report to him weekly on the progress of D-Day preparations, and wrote to Marshall on 15 February: ‘I am hardening very much on this operation as the time approaches in the sense of wishing to strike if humanly possible, even if the limiting conditions we laid down at Tehran are not exactly fulfilled.’ The conditional was still there, as it was in a message to Roosevelt which he drafted on 25 March: ‘What is the latest date on which a decision can be taken as to whether “Overlord” is or is not to be launched on the prescribed date?…If…20 or 25 mobile German divisions are already in France on the date in question, what are we going to do?’ This cable, which would have roused the most acute American di
smay, was withheld after prudent second thoughts. But it reflected Churchill’s continuing uncertainty, ten weeks before D-Day.
In the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan wrote: ‘I am much distressed to see a worsening of Anglo–American relations generally since Eisenhower left and I am also not very hopeful of getting any new idea into the PM’s mind at present.’ There was much debate and many changes of heart about Anvil, a prospective landing in the south of France originally scheduled to coincide with the descent on Normandy. The British, having favoured the scheme, now turned sour because of its inevitable impact on Allied strength in Italy. On 21 March Maitland-Wilson signalled, recommending Anvil’s cancellation. After protracted exchanges with Washington, most about landing craft, it was agreed to postpone the operation. Churchill became increasingly sceptical, and finally absolutely hostile. He favoured diversionary landings by commandos on the Atlantic coast of France. He also remained resolute in his enthusiasm for an invasion of Sumatra, exasperating his own chiefs of staff and especially Brooke. They opposed the scheme on its merits, and also knew that the Americans would never provide the necessary shipping. Washington was interested only in an offensive into upper Burma, to open a China passage. This, with deep reluctance, the British finally agreed to undertake.
Churchill’s closest wartime colleagues, above all the chiefs of staff, emerged from the Second World War asserting the prime minister’s greatness as a statesman, while deploring his shortcomings as a strategist. Yet no Allied leader displayed unbroken wisdom. Churchill’s grand vision of the war was superb. Even acknowledging his delusions about the future of the British Empire, he articulated the hopes and ambitions of the Grand Alliance as no other man, including Roosevelt, was capable of doing. His record as a warlord should be judged by what was done rather than by what was said. He indulged many flights of fancy, but insisted upon realisation of very few. The 1943 Aegean adventure was an exception rather than a commonplace. The operation of the British war machine should not be assessed in isolation, but rather by comparison with those of Britain’s allies and enemies, and for that matter against the experience of every other conflict in history. By that measure, Churchill presided over a system of military planning and political governance which was a model for all time.
