Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  The Luftwaffe continued its night blitz on Britain for months into 1941, maintaining pressure upon the obstinate island at minimal cost in aircraft losses. It was long indeed before the British themselves felt secure from invasion. Home defence continued to preoccupy Churchill and his commanders. He suffered spasms of renewed concern, which caused him to telephone the Admiralty and enquire about Channel conditions on nights thought propitious for a German assault. But the coming of autumn weather, and the Luftwaffe’s abandonment of daylight attacks, rendered Britain almost certain of safety until spring. Churchill had led his nation through a season which he rightly deemed critical for its survival.

  Across the Atlantic, a host of Americans were dazzled by his achievement. Nazi propagandists sought to exploit a famous photo of Churchill wielding a tommy gun to suggest an image of Britain’s prime minister as a gangster. But instead the picture projected an entirely positive image to Roosevelt’s nation. Over there, what counted was the fact that the weapon was made in the United States. Americans were shown the leader of Britain putting to personal use a gun shipped from their country, and they loved it. By September 30, a Gallup survey showed that 52 percent of Americans favoured giving assistance to Churchill’s people, even at risk of war. Time’s cover story on September 30, 1940, “The Battle of Britain,” declared that

  Winston Churchill so aptly and lovingly symbolizes Great Britain’s unwillingness to give up when apparently cornered … There is an extraordinary fact about English democracy—namely, that at almost any given time some English leader turns out to be a perfect symbol of his people. At the time of Edward VIII’s abdication, Stanley Baldwin was the typical Englishman. At the time of the Munich crisis, Neville Chamberlain was pathetically typical. But as of the fourth week of September 1940, Winston Churchill was the essence of his land. The three men are as dissimilar as fog, rain and hail, which are all water. But the country they ruled has changed. This England is different … [Churchill] is a Tory, an imperialist, and has been a strikebreaker and Red-baiter; and yet, when he tours the slums of London, old women say: “God bless you, Winnie.”

  A few weeks later, by American readers’ acclamation, Churchill became Time’s Man of the Year.

  One evening at Chequers, in an irresistibly homely metaphor, he compared himself to “a farmer driving pigs190 along a road, who always had to be prodding them on and preventing them from straying.” He professed that he “could not quite see why he was so popular.” For all his undoubted vanity, almost everything that he had to tell the British people was bleak. His public confidence masked private uncertainty which goes far to explain his caution about government appointments and dismissals in 1940. For more than a decade, he had been an outcast, clinging precariously to a handhold on the parapet of power. Though from May 1940 he acted the part of prime minister with supreme outward conviction, it was many months before he became assured of his own authority. “For something like a year191 after he took office, Winston had no idea of his political strength among the voters, which is a mercy,” observed his aide Maj. Desmond Morton.

  Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, displayed in his reports home an increasing enthusiasm for Churchill: “One can now say confidently,”192 he told Moscow at the end of June,

  that the government’s decision to continue the war has gained overwhelming popular support, especially among the working class. The confusion and despondency which I reported in the first days of the war are gone. Churchill’s speeches have played a great part in this … Although Churchill thus far commands the support of the working class, the ruling classes are clearly split … [The faction] headed by Chamberlain is terribly fearful and willing to make peace with Germany on any acceptable terms … these elements are the real “Fifth Column” in England … The problem is that, for all Churchill’s determination to continue the war, he is afraid to split the Conservative Party and rely upon a workers’ coalition.

  Maisky’s view of political divisions in Britain was not entirely fanciful. He was wrong to ascribe leadership of a peace party to Chamberlain, but correct in asserting that some old Chamberlain supporters, as well as a few Labour MPs, remained eager to parley with the Axis. Lord Lothian, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, telephoned Halifax in July, begging him to say nothing publicly that would close the door to possible negotiated terms. Harold Nicolson expressed relief that Halifax appeared unmoved by Lothian’s “wild” appeal193. Raymond Lee wrote after a conversation with a businessman: “[He] was very interesting about the City194 … he … confirmed my belief that the City is ready for appeasement at any time and is a little bit irritated because it has no hold at all on Churchill.”

  Privately, the prime minister expressed concerns about the staunchness of the upper classes. Among some of Britain’s ruling caste, admiration for his dazzling oratory did not confirm his fitness for the premiership. At dinner tables in some great houses, traditional arbiters of power muttered into their soup about the perceived vulgarities, follies and egomania of the chubby cuckoo whom fate had so rashly planted in Downing Street, and entrusted with Britain’s destinies. Some people in high places—senior officers as well as politicians—resented his popularity with the public. They failed to perceive how desperately the nation needed to suppose itself led by a superman. How else might its survival be secured?

  The House of Commons, through the summer, was swept along by the national mood and Churchill’s stunning speeches. George Lambert, a Liberal MP since 1891, told the House at a secret session on July 30 that he had not heard such oratory since Gladstone. But old Chamberlainites continued to sulk, withholding trust as well as warmth from the prime minister. More than a few Tories still expected his administration to be short-lived. They hankered to identify a credible replacement for Churchill. “Feeling in the Carlton Club195 is running high against him,” wrote “Chips” Channon on September 26. When Chamberlain died in November, it was deemed unavoidable but regrettable that Churchill should be elected in his place as Tory leader.

  Clementine strongly advised him against embracing the inescapably partisan role of Tory leader. He would have enhanced his stature as national warlord by declining. But acceptance fulfilled a lifelong ambition. More important, he knew how fickle was the support of public and Parliament. He was determined to indulge no possible alternative focus of influence, far less power, such as the election of another man as Tory leader—most plausibly Anthony Eden—might create. There remained a small risk, and an intolerable one, that if Churchill refused, the Tories’ choice might fall upon Halifax. It seemed to the prime minister essential to ensure control of the largest voting bloc in the Commons. Subsequent experience suggested that he was probably right. Had he placed himself beyond party, in the dog days of 1942 he might have become dangerously vulnerable to a party revolt.

  As autumn 1940 turned to winter, the toll of destruction imposed by the Luftwaffe mounted. But so too did government confidence in the spirit of the nation. Some British people seemed to derive an almost masochistic relish from their predicament. Londoner Mrs. Yolande Green wrote to her mother: “I think it’s a good thing that we’ve suffered196 all the reverses we have this last year for it has shaken us all out of our smug complacency better than any pep talk by our politicians … last weekend we had a nice quiet time in spite of six [air-raid] alarms—one gets so used to them they hardly disturb one nowadays.” By October Churchill, drawing on a great cigar as he sat at the Chequers dining table in his coverall, was able to observe with equanimity that he thought “this was the sort of war which would suit197 the English people once they got used to it. They would prefer all to be in the front line taking part in the battle of London than to look on hopelessly at mass slaughters like Passchendaele.”

  Bombing created mountains of rubble, obliterated Wren churches, killed thousands of people, damaged factories and slowed production. But it became progressively apparent to Churchill and his colleagues that the industrial fabric of Britain stretched too wid
e to be vulnerable to destruction from the air. The blitz never came close to threatening Britain’s ability to continue the war. The aerial bombardment of cities, which a few years earlier had been perceived by many strategists as a potential war-winning weapon, now proved to have been much exaggerated in its effects, unless conducted with a weight of bombs undeliverable by the Luftwaffe—or, for years to come, by the Royal Air Force.

  Millions of British people maintained existences compounded in equal parts of normality, inside their own homes, and perils that might at any moment destroy everything around them which they held dear. Almost eighty years earlier, the novelist Anthony Trollope visited the United States during its civil war. He noted the banalities of domestic life amid the struggle, and suggested with droll prescience: “We … soon adapt ourselves198 to the circumstances around us. Though three parts of London were in flames, I should no doubt expect to have my dinner served to me, if I lived in the quarter which was free from fire.” In 1940 Lady Cynthia Colville echoed Trollope, observing at breakfast one morning that “if one looked on all this199 as ordinary civilian life it was indeed hellish, but if one thought of it as a siege then it was certainly one of the most comfortable in history.”

  Churchill himself was sometimes very weary, especially after striving to arbitrate on a dozen intractable strategic issues and enduring perceived petulance from MPs in the Commons. “Malaya, the Australian government’s intransigence200 and ‘nagging’ in the House was more than any man could be expected to endure,” he grumbled crossly one night to Eden. Yet his generosity of spirit seldom weakened, even towards the enemy. For all his frequent jibes at “the horrible Huns,” and at a moment when Britain’s very existence was threatened, he displayed no vindictiveness when discussing a postwar vision. “We [have] got to admit that Germany201 should remain in the European family,” he observed. “Germany existed before the Gestapo.”

  His energy seemed inexhaustible. That same evening at Chequers on which he likened himself to a swineherd, he conferred with two generals about Home Guard tasks in the event of invasion. He then studied aircraft production charts, which prompted him to marvel aloud that Beaverbrook had genius, “and also brutal ruthlessness.” He led his guests for a moonlit walk in the garden, then settled down to quiz an officer newly returned from Egypt about tactics in the Western Desert. In both London and Buckinghamshire, he received an endless stream of visitors. There was always time for Americans. Whitelaw Reid, the twenty-eight-year-old London correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, was awed to find himself invited to lunch with the prime minister at Downing Street. Rear Adm. Robert Ghormley of the U.S. Navy, on a mission to London, was presented with inscribed copies of the four volumes of Churchill’s biography of Marlborough.

  The death of Neville Chamberlain on November 9 roused Churchill to one of his most notable displays of magnanimity. His private view of the former prime minister was contemptuous: “the narrowest, most ignorant202, most ungenerous of men.” He felt gratitude for Chamberlain’s loyal service as his subordinate since May 10, and admiration for the courage with which he faced his mortal illness, but none for his record as prime minister. Now, however, he summoned his utmost powers of statesmanship to draft a tribute. On November 12, he delivered to the House of Commons a eulogy which forfeited nothing of its power and dignity by the fact that it memorialised a man so uncongenial to him:

  In paying a tribute of respect and regard to an eminent man who has been taken from us, no one is obliged to alter the opinions which he has formed or expressed upon issues which have become a part of history; but at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgements under a searching review. It is not given to human beings—happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable—to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong … History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.

  It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these high hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.

  It was a supreme political act, to exhibit such grace towards the memory of a man who had failed the British people, and whom Churchill himself justly despised. Yet by November 1940, he could afford to display generosity. His mastery of the nation was secure. His successful defiance of Hitler commanded the admiration of much of the world. He had displayed gifts of self-discipline and political management such as had hitherto been absent from his career. His speeches were recognised as among the greatest ever delivered by a statesman, in war or peace. All that now remained was to devise some means of waging war against an enemy whose control of the Continent was unchallengeable, and whose superiority over Britain remained overwhelming. For Winston Churchill, the hardest part began when the achievement of “the few” was already the stuff of legend.

  FIVE

  Greek Fire

  1. Seeking Action

  IN THE AUTUMN of 1940, even Churchill’s foes at Westminster and in Whitehall conceded that, since taking office, he had revealed a remarkable accession of wisdom. He had not become a different person from his old self, but shed the maverick’s mantle. He looked and sounded a king, “ay, every inch a king,” albeit one movingly conscious that he was the servant of a democracy. In a few months, he had achieved a personal dominance of the country which rendered his colleagues acolytes, almost invisible in the shadow of his pedestal. Only Eden and Bevin made much impact on the popular imagination.

  Among politicians and service chiefs, however, widespread uncertainty persisted, even if it was discreetly expressed. Though the Germans had not invaded Britain, what happened next? What chance of victory did Britain have? The well-known military writer Captain Basil Liddell Hart saw no prospect beyond stalemate203, and thus urged a negotiated peace. In September Dalton reported Beaverbrook as “very defeatist,” believing that Britain should merely “sit tight and defend ourselves204 until the USA comes into the war.” But would this ever happen? Raymond Lee, U.S. military attaché in London, was among many Americans bemused about what President Roosevelt meant when he promised that their country would aid the British “by all means short of war.” Lee sought an answer from senior diplomats at his own embassy: “They say no one knows205, that it depends on what R thinks from one day to another. I wonder if it ever occurs to the people in Washington that they have no God-given right to declare war. They may wake up one day to find that war has suddenly been declared upon the United States. That is the way Germany and Japan do business. Or, can it be that this is what Roosevelt is manoeuvring for?”

  Once the Battle of Britain was won, the foremost challenge facing Churchill was to find another field upon which to fight. In July 1940, Lee was filled with admiration for Britain’s staunchness amid the invasion threat. But he suggested sardonically that if Hitler instead launched his armies eastward, “in a month’s time206 England would go off sound asleep again.” Likewise MP Harold Nicolson: “If Hitler were to postpone invasion207 and fiddle about in Africa and the Mediterranean, our morale might weaken.” As long as Britain appeared to
face imminent catastrophe, its people displayed notable fortitude. Yet it was a striking feature of British wartime behaviour that the moment peril fractionally receded, many ordinary people allowed themselves to nurse fantasies that their ordeal might soon be over, the spectre of war somehow banished. Soldier Edward Stebbing wrote on November 14: “I have heard a good many members208 of this unit say that they wished the war would end whether we win or lose … almost every day I hear some variations of the same idea, the common reason being that most of us are fed up with the whole business … The government is criticised for its lack of aggressiveness.”

  A correspondent wrote to Ernest Bevin from Portsmouth:

  At our weekly meeting last night209 of delegates representing thousands of workers … the members were very disappointed at your not telling the public that the government intended to prosecute the war more vigorously, and take the offensive, instead of always being on the defensive … We have retired service officers who tell us that we have no leaders. We have not won a battle since the war started and it is for that reason no country will join us, knowing full well that Germany will attack and swallow them, whilst our own government are debating the issue … Our workers’ clubs contain Unionists, Liberals and Labour, all united to push the present government out of office at the first chance, and if something don’t happen soon, the leaders will not be able to hold the workers.