Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Ill-advisedly, Churchill appealed against this decision to Roosevelt, while on 26 June the British chiefs of staff reaffirmed in a signal to their counterparts in Washington the ‘unacceptability’ of the redeployment. Marshall remained immovable. On the 28th, Churchill dispatched a note to the president in which he wrote: ‘Whether we should ruin all hopes of a major victory in Italy and all its fronts and condemn ourselves to a passive role in that theatre, after having broken up the fine Allied army which is advancing so rapidly through the peninsula, for the sake of “Anvil”with all its limitations, is indeed a grave question for His Majesty’s Government and the President, with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, to decide.’ He himself, he said, was entirely hostile to Anvil. Next day, Roosevelt rejected Churchill’s message: ‘My interests and hopes,’ he said, ‘centre on defeating the Germans in front of Eisenhower and driving on into Germany, rather than on limiting this action for the purpose of staging a full major effort in Italy.’ Roosevelt added, in the midst of his own re-election campaign, that there were also political implications: ‘I should never survive even a slight setback in “Overlord” if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.’

  Amazingly, Churchill returned to the charge. In a message to Roosevelt on 1 July, after a long exposition of the futility of Anvil—‘The splitting up of the campaign in the Mediterranean into two operations neither of which can do anything decisive, is, in my humble and respectful opinion, the first major strategic and political error for which we two have to be responsible’—he concluded: ‘What can I do Mr President, when your Chiefs of Staff insist on casting aside our Italian offensive campaign, with all its dazzling possibilities…when we are to see the integral life of this campaign drained off into the Rhone Valley?…I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement.’ This was woeful stuff. It was supremely tactless for the prime minister to suggest to the president that, if he had been able to browbeat him face to face, he might have persuaded him to override his own chiefs of staff. To the British chiefs he expressed contempt for their American counterparts: ‘The Arnold-King-Marshall combination is one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen. They are good fellows and there is no need to tell them this.’

  The Americans were unmoved by the barrage of cables from London. The British, with icy formality, acceded to the launch of Anvil—now renamed Dragoon—on 15 August. This was the moment at which Churchill perceived his own flagging influence upon the US president, and thus upon his country. ‘Up till Overlord,’ wrote Jock Colville later, ‘he saw himself as the supreme authority to whom all military decisions were referred.’ Thereafter, he became, ‘by force of circumstances, little more than a spectator’. The prime minister afterwards told Moran: ‘Up to July 1944 England had a considerable say in things; after that I was conscious that it was America who made the big decisions.’

  The British adopted a stubbornly proprietorial attitude to the Italian campaign long after it had turned sour, and even after the dazzling success of Overlord. Marshall had made his share of mistakes in the course of the war—but so had Brooke and Churchill. Nothing in the summer exchanges between London and Washington justified the prime minister’s condescension towards the US chiefs. Eisenhower is often, and sometimes justly, criticised for lack of strategic imagination, though he and Marshall were assuredly right to insist upon the concentration of force in France.

  Yet it was hard for Churchill to bow to the relegation of himself and his country from the big decisions. An American political scientist, William Fox, coined the word ‘superpower’ in 1944. He took it for granted that Britain could be counted as one. The true measure of superpowerdom, however, is a capability to act unilaterally. This, Churchill’s nation had lost. Dismay and frustration showed in his temper. Eden wrote on 6 July: ‘After dinner a really ghastly defence committee nominally on Far Eastern strategy. We opened with a reference from W. to American criticism of Monty for over-caution, which W. appeared to endorse. This brought explosion from CIGS.’ Brooke wrote in his own diary:

  A frightful meeting with Winston which lasted until 2am!! It was quite the worst we have had with him. He was very tired as a result of his speech in the House concerning the flying bombs, he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad-tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody, and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped. I began by having a bad row with him. He began to abuse Monty because operations were not going faster…I flared up and asked him if he could not trust his generals for 5 minutes instead of continuously abusing them and belittling them…He then put forward a series of puerile proposals, such as raising a Home Guard in Egypt to provide a force to deal with disturbances in the Middle East. It was not until midnight that we got onto the subject we had to come to discuss, the war in the Far East!…He finished by falling out with Attlee and having a real good row with him concerning the future of India! We withdrew under cover of this smokescreen just on 2am, having accomplished nothing beyond losing our tempers and valuable sleep!!

  Eden commented later: ‘I called this “a deplorable evening”, which it certainly was. Nor could it have happened a year earlier; we were all marked by the iron of five years of war.’ Accounts like that of Brooke, describing such passages of arms with Churchill, dismayed those who loved the prime minister, both his personal staff and family, when they were published in the next decade. The prime minister’s former intimates took special exception to criticisms that his conduct of office was adversely affected by alcohol. The CIGS was coupled with Lord Moran, whose diary appeared in 1966, not only as a betrayer of the Churchillian legend, but also as a false witness about his conduct. Yet the two men’s views were widely shared. After listening to the prime minister for a time at a committee meeting, Woolton leaned over and whispered to Dalton like a naughty schoolboy: ‘He is very tight.’ Exhaustion and frustration probably influenced Churchill’s outbursts more than brandy. But the evidence is plain that in 1944-45 he suffered increasingly from loss of intellectual discipline, sometimes even of coherence.

  The pugnacity that had served his country so wonderfully well in earlier years became distressing when directed against his own colleagues, men of ability and dedication who knew that they did not deserve to be so brutally handled. Churchill could rouse his extraordinary powers on great occasions, of which some still lay ahead. There would be many more flashes of wit and brilliance. But key figures in Britain’s war leadership, instead of looking directly to him as the fount of all decisions, were now peering over his shoulder towards a future from which they assumed that he would be absent. Eden, craving the succession, chafed terribly when the prime minister seemed unwilling to acknowledge his own political mortality. ‘Lunched alone with W,’ he wrote on 17 July. ‘He was in pretty good spirits. My face fell when he said that when coalition broke up we should have two or three years of opposition and then come back together to clear up the mess!’

  Yet there were still many moments when Churchill won hearts, including that of the Foreign Secretary, by displays of whimsy and sweetness. On 4 August, when Eden called in at Downing Street with his son Nicholas, on holiday from Harrow school, the prime minister surreptitiously slipped into the boy’s hand two pound notes, more than a fortnight’s pay for an army private, with a muttered and of course vain injunction not to tell ‘him’. Churchill’s companions became bored when he recited long extracts from Marmion and The Lays of Ancient Rome across the dinner table at Chequers, but how many other national leaders in history could have matched such performances? He was moved to ecstasies by a screening of Laurence Olivier’s new film of Henry V, not least because he was in no doubt about who was playing the king’s part in England’s comparable mid-twentieth-century epic. His impatience remained undiminished. Driving with Brooke from Downing Street to Northolt, their
convoy encountered a diversion for road repairs. Churchill insisted on lifting the barriers and urging the cars along a footpath. The King himself would never do such a thing, the miscreant declared gleefully, for ‘he was far more law-abiding’.

  As for the war, by late summer 1944 the apprehension which dogged Churchill and his service chiefs through the spring was now supplanted by assurance that Germany’s doom was approaching. But when? On this, the prime minister displayed better judgement than the generals. Until the end of September, they envisaged a final Nazi collapse by the turn of the year. Churchill, by contrast, told a staff conference on 14 July: ‘Of course it was true that the Germans were now faced with grave difficulties and they might give up the struggle. On the other hand, such evidence as there was seemed to show that they intended to continue that struggle, and he believed that if they tried to do so, they should be able to carry on well into next year.’ His view remained unchanged even after the drama of the failed bomb plot against Hitler on 20 July. This highlighted German internal opposition to Hitler—and its weakness.

  Some illusions persist that the wartime Allies missed opportunities to promote the cause of ‘good Germans’ who opposed Hitler, rejecting approaches from such men as Adam von Trott. Yet the British seemed right, first, to assume that any dalliance of this kind must leak, fuelling Soviet paranoia about a negotiated peace; and second, in believing that the anti-Hitler faction was both weak and flawed. Michael Howard has written: ‘We know that such “right-minded people” did exist; but the remarkable thing is that…there should have been so few of them, and that their influence should have been so slight.’ Howard notes that most of the July 1944 bomb plotters were fervent nationalists, who cherished grotesquely extravagant ambitions for their country’s post-war polity.

  If Hitler could be deposed, his domestic foes hoped to persuade the Allies to recognise Germany’s 1914 frontiers, and even to deny France the return of Alsace-Lorraine, annexed from her in 1870 and again in 1940. Most of the bomb plotters shared stubbornly right-wing notions about Germany’s future governance. Claus von Stauffenberg in May 1944 explicitly embraced a vision based on preserving Germany’s union with Austria, retaining the Czech Sudetenland and offering ‘autonomy’ to Alsace-Lorraine. The principal objective of most of those who joined the conspiracy against Hitler, as the Foreign Office perceived at the time, was to enlist Anglo-American aid against the Russians. It is easy to understand why post-war Germans sought to canonise the July bomb plotters. But it would have represented folly for Churchill’s government to dally with them, and there is no cause for historians to concede them exaggerated respect. A large majority of the 20 July conspirators turned against Hitler not because he was indescribably wicked, but because they perceived that he was leading Germany to defeat.

  The historian John Wheeler-Bennett, a friend of Eden who knew Germany intimately, compiled a memorandum for the Foreign Office about the plot. He wrote on 25 July, suggesting that its failure was a blessing. He believed that if Hitler had been killed and ‘Old Army’ German generals had then approached the Western Allies seeking to negotiate terms short of unconditional surrender, major embarrassments would have ensued. Oliver Harvey went further, writing in his diary: ‘I despise the generals even more than Hitler who deserves better treatment from them.’ This surely carried British notions about soldierly duty to perverse extremes. Harvey claimed, after a conversation with Sir Frederick Morgan, that the general agreed ‘about the necessity of rooting out the German General Staff and thankful Hitler wasn’t bumped off the other day’. Wheeler-Bennett wrote likewise, that ‘The present purge is presumably removing from the scene numerous individuals who might have caused us difficulty, not only had the plot succeeded, but also after the defeat of a Nazi Germany.’ This was an extravagantly brutal verdict. But it is certainly true that British and American public opinion might have been plunged into confusion, and Western relations with the Soviets into crisis, if an opportunity had been suddenly presented to end the carnage in Europe through a negotiation with allegedly ‘good’ Germans.

  That July, in the face of new intelligence reports about the operations of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Churchill wrote to Eden in the most explicit terms he used during the war about the nature of Nazi action against the Jews: ‘There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world…It is clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death.’ Yet once again the British dismissed the notion of bombing the death camp’s facilities or transport links, partly on the grounds of inefficacy—that any damage could be readily repaired—and partly on the spurious grounds that deportations of Jews from Hungary, reports of which prompted Churchill’s note, appeared to have ceased.

  Even at this stage, the scale of Nazi killings eluded British policy-makers. An intelligence officer privy to Ultra decrypts who lectured to senior soldiers in 1944 about Germany’s machinery of repression spoke in his briefings of killings in thousands, not millions, and did not explicitly mention Jews. Likewise the November 1943 joint Allied Moscow Declaration, warning of retribution against Germans who participated in ‘wholesale shooting of Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages or of Cretan peasants, or who have shared in the slaughter inflicted on the people of Poland or in territories of the Soviet Union’, omitted Jews.

  There seems little doubt that British and American intelligence possessed enough information by late 1944, from Ultra and escaped Auschwitz prisoners, to deduce that something uniquely terrible was being done to the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, if the evidence had been appropriately highlighted. The failure of either government to act has incurred brutal strictures from critics. Yet Churchill, Roosevelt and their principal subordinates seem to deserve some sympathy for their inadequate responses. First, an instinctive reluctance persisted, both in London and Washington, to conceive a European society, even one ruled by the Nazis, capable of killings on the titanic scale exposed in 1945-46. Second, evidence about the massacre of Jews was still perceived in the context of other known mass killings of Russians, Poles, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Italians and other subject races. The British, especially, were wary of repeating the mistakes of the First World War, when reports of German atrocities were wilfully exaggerated for propaganda purposes. Such exploitation roused post-war anger and cynicism among British people towards their own government.

  Finally, given the known limitations of precision bombing even where good target intelligence was available, the case for specific action against the Nazi death machine seemed overborne by the overarching argument for hastening military victory to end the sufferings of all Europe’s oppressed peoples. The airmen could be sure that any bombing of the camps would kill many prisoners. It is the privilege of posterity to recognise that this would have been a price worth paying. In the full tilt of war, to borrow Churchill’s phrase from a different context, it is possible to understand why the British and Americans failed to act with the energy and commitment which hindsight shows to have been appropriate. Most measured historians of the period recognise a real doubt about whether any plausible air force action would substantially have impeded the operations of the Nazi death machine.

  Again and again that summer, Churchill found his aspirations thwarted. He was eager that Britain should have the honour of hosting a summit, after he himself had travelled so far and often to dance attendance on Roosevelt and Stalin. He now proposed as a venue Invergordon in Scotland, arguing that each leader could arrive there by battleship. The King would be able to entertain the ‘Big Three’ at Balmoral. Stalin flatly refused to leave Russia. Even when Roosevelt agreed to a bilateral meeting, and after briefly professing enthusiasm for Invergordon, to Churchill’s chagrin he finally decided that the conference should not take place in Britain. The president was unwilling, especially in a US el
ection year, to be seen as the guest of his nation’s subordinate partner. A second visit to Quebec was scheduled for September.

  Churchill’s lonely struggle to save fragments of Polish freedom became ever less rewarding. He allowed himself a surge of hope when Stalin cabled on 23 July, endorsing a ‘unification of Poles friendly disposed towards Great Britain, the USSR and the United States’. Interpreting this—which Eden did not—as a sign that Stalin was willing to accommodate the ‘London Poles’ in a new regime, Churchill told Roosevelt: ‘This seems to be the best ever received from Uncle Joe.’ But the significance soon became clear of Stalin’s recognition of Moscow’s puppet Polish National Committee, dubbed in London ‘the Lublin Poles’. Stalin was bent on a communist-dominant Polish government, with only token representation of other interests. Under extreme pressure from Churchill, the Polish exile prime minister in London, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, agreed to fly to Moscow. But Mikolajczyk rightly anticipated that obeisance to Stalin would serve no purpose either for himself or for his country’s freedom.