Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  Yet how could Britain display aggressiveness, a capability to do more than merely withstand Axis onslaughts by bombers and U-boats? Clementine Churchill enquired at lunch one day: “Winston, why don’t we land a million men210 on the continent of Europe? I’m sure the French would rise up and help us.” The prime minister answered with unaccustomed forbearance that it would be impossible to land a million men at once, and that the vanguards would be shot to pieces. Back in 1915, as Lt. Col. Winston Churchill prepared to lead a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers into the trenches, he told his officers, “We will go easy at first211: a little digging and feeling our way, and then perhaps later on we may attempt a deed.” This latter proposition commanded little enthusiasm among his comrades at the time, and even less among his generals a generation later. But, by the winter of 1940, Churchill knew that a “deed” must be attempted in order to sustain an appearance of momentum in Britain’s war effort.

  At home, there could be no German invasion before spring. The nation’s city dwellers must bear the blitz, while the Royal Navy sustained the Atlantic lifeline against U-boats and surface commerce raiders. The navy had already suffered heavily, losing since 1939 one battleship, two aircraft carriers, two cruisers, twenty-two submarines and thirty-seven destroyers. More ships were building, but 1941 losses would be worse. Churchill pinned great hopes on the RAF’s offensive against Germany, but as he himself observed on November 1, 1940, “the discharge of bombs is pitifully small.”212 It would remain so for a long time to come. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir John Dill instructed his director of military operations, Maj. Gen. John Kennedy, to draft a strategy paper on how the war might be won. Kennedy said the best that he could offer was a plan for averting defeat. To make victory possible, American belligerence was indispensable.

  Lt. Gen. Henry Pownall attended an army conference addressed by the prime minister in November 1940, and was impressed by his robust good sense: “No more than anyone else did he see clearly213 how the war was going to be won, and he reminded us that for four years in 1914–18 nobody could foretell the final collapse of Germany, which came so unexpectedly … All we could do for the present, as during the Great War, was to get on with it and see what happened … He talked as well as ever, and I was much impressed by the very broad and patient view that he took of the war as a whole.” Churchill expressed the same sentiments to senior RAF officers conferring at Downing Street: “As the PM said goodnight to the Air Marshals214, he told them he was sure we were going to win the war, but confessed he did not see clearly how it was to be achieved.”

  A Chiefs of Staff paper on future strategy, dated September 4, 1940, suggested that Britain should aim “to pass to the general offensive in all spheres and in all theatres with the utmost possible strength in the Spring of 1942.” If even this remote prospect was fanciful, what meanwhile was the army to do? Churchill, with his brilliant intuitive understanding of the British people, recognised the importance of military theatre, as his service chiefs often did not. The soldiers’ caution might be prudent, but much of the public, like unheroic Edward Stebbing and his comrades, craved action, an outcome, some prospect beyond victimhood. There was a rueful War Office joke at this time, prompted by the blitz, that Britain’s soldiers were being put to work knitting socks for the civilians in the trenches.

  Here was one of the foremost principles of wartime leadership which Churchill got profoundly right, yet he often erred in implementation. He perceived that there must be action, even if not always useful; there must be successes, even if overstated or imagined; there must be glory, even if undeserved. Attlee said later, very shrewdly: “He was always, in effect215, asking himself … ‘What must Britain do now so that the verdict of history will be favourable?’ … He was always looking around for ‘finest hours,’ and if one was not immediately available, his impulse was to manufacture one.”

  Churchill addressed the conduct of strategy with a confidence that dismayed many of his commanders, but which had evolved over a lifetime. As early as 1909, he wrote to Clementine about Britain’s generals: “These military men v[er]y often fail216 altogether to see the simple truths underlying the relationship of all armed forces … Do you know I would greatly like to have some practice in the handling of large forces. I have much confidence in my judgement on things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I seem to feel the truth more than in tactical combinations.” While he was travelling to America in 1932, Clementine read G. F. R. Henderson’s celebrated biography of Stonewall Jackson. She wrote to her husband: “The book is full of abuse of politicians217 who try to interfere with Generals in the field—(Ahem!).” Her exclamation was prompted, of course, by memories of his battles with the service chiefs during the First World War.

  Churchill believed himself exceptionally fitted for the direction of armies, navies and air forces. He perceived no barrier to such a role in the fact that he possessed neither military staff training nor experience of higher field command. He wrote in his own history of the First World War:

  A series of absurd conventions became established218, perhaps inevitably, in the public mind. The first and most monstrous of these was that the Generals and Admirals were more competent to deal with the broad issues of the war than abler men in other spheres of life. The general no doubt was an expert on how to move his troops, and the admiral upon how to fight his ships … But outside this technical aspect they were helpless and misleading arbiters in problems in whose solution the aid of the statesman, the financier, the manufacturer, the inventor, the psychologist, was equally required … Clear leadership, violent action, rigid decision one way or the other, form the only path not only of victory, but of safety and even of mercy. The State cannot afford division or hesitation at the executive centre.

  Tensions between his instincts and the judgements of Britain’s professional commanders would characterise Churchill’s leadership. A Polish officer, attending a lecture at the British staff college on principles of war, rose at its conclusion to suggest that the speaker had omitted the most important: “Be stronger.” Yet where might Britain achieve this? As minister of defence, Churchill issued an important directive. Limitations of numbers, he said, “make it impossible for the Army, except in resisting invasion, to play a primary role in the defeat of the enemy. That task can only be done by the staying power of the Navy and above all by the effect of Air predominance. Very valuable and important services may be rendered Overseas by the Army in operations of a secondary order, and it is for these special operations that its organization and character should be adapted.” After a British commando raid on the Lofoten Islands, Churchill wrote to the C-in-C Home Fleet: “I am so glad you were able to find the means219 of executing ‘Claymore.’ This admirable raid has done serious injury to the enemy and has given an immense amount of innocent pleasure at home.” The latter proposition was more plausible than the former.

  Churchill and his military chiefs renounced any prospect of engaging Hitler’s main army. They committed themselves to a strategy based on minor operations which persisted, in substantial measure, until 1944. Pantelleria, the tiny Italian island between Tunisia and Sicily, exercised a baleful fascination upon the War Cabinet. After a dinner at Chequers in November 1940, Churchill fantasised about an assault “by 300 determined men220, with blackened faces, knives between their teeth and revolvers under their tails.” Eden in 1940–41 cherished absurd notions of seizing Sicily: “The Sicilians have always been anti-fascist,” he enthused. A War Office plan dated December 28 called for a descent on the island by two infantry brigades. There was talk of Sardinia, and of the Italian-held Dodecanese Islands. The Chiefs of Staff learned to dread mention of northern Norway in the prime minister’s flights of fancy.

  None of these schemes was executed, save a brief and embarrassingly unsuccessful foray into the Dodecanese, because the practical objections were overwhelming. Even the most modest raid required scarce shipping, which could not sensibly be hazarded within range o
f the Luftwaffe unless air cover was available, as it usually was not. It was hard to identify credible objectives for “butcher and bolt” strikes, and to gather sufficient intelligence to give them a reasonable chance of success. However strongly the prime minister pressed for British forces to display initiative and aggression, the Chiefs of Staff resolutely opposed operations which risked substantial losses in exchange for mere passing propaganda headlines.

  … In the autumn of 1940, Africa offered the only realistic opportunities for British land engagement. Libya had been an Italian colony since 1911, Abyssinia since 1936. Churchill owed a perverse debt of gratitude to Mussolini. If Italy had remained neutral, if her dictator had not chosen to seek battle, how else might the British Army have occupied itself after its expulsion from France? As it was, Britain was able to launch spectacular African campaigns against one of the few major armies in the world which it was capable of defeating. Not all Italian generals were incompetents, not all Italian formations fought feebly. But never for a moment were Mussolini’s warriors in the same class as those of Hitler. North Africa, and the Duce’s pigeon-chested posturing as an Axis warlord, offered Britain’s soldiers an opportunity to show their mettle. If the British Army was incapable of playing in a great stadium against top-class opposition, it could nonetheless hearten the nation and impress the world by a demonstration in a lesser league.

  Britain’s Chiefs of Staff, however, remained sceptical about the strategic value of any big commitment in the Middle East, win or lose. The Suez Canal route to the east was anyway unusable, because the Mediterranean was too perilous for merchant shipping, and remained so until 1943. The Persian oil fields fuelled British military operations in the theatre of Middle East C-in-C Sir Archibald Wavell, but lay too far from home by the Cape route to provide petrol for Britain, which instead relied upon American supplies. It is often forgotten that, in those days, the United States was overwhelmingly the greatest oil producer in the world. Dill advocated reinforcing the Far East against likely Japanese aggression, and remained in his heart an opponent of the Middle East commitment throughout his tenure as head of the army. The CIGS understood the political imperatives facing Churchill, but foremost in his mind was a fear that acceptance of unnecessary new risk might precipitate further gratuitous disaster. The prime minister overruled him. He believed that the embarrassment of inertia in the Middle East much outweighed the perils of seizing the initiative. In the midst of a war, what would the world say about a nation that dispatched large forces to garrison its possessions on the far side of the world against a possible future enemy, rather than engage an actual one much nearer to hand?

  In September 1940, an Italian army led by Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, 200,000 strong and thus outnumbering local British forces by four to one, crossed the eastern Libyan frontier and drove fifty miles eastward into Egypt before being checked. Meanwhile, in East Africa, Mussolini’s troops seized the little colony of British Somaliland and advanced into Kenya and Sudan from their bases in Abyssinia. Wavell ordered Somaliland evacuated after only brief resistance. He remained impenitent in the face of Churchill’s anger about another retreat.

  This first of Britain’s “desert generals” was much beloved in the army. In World War I, Wavell won an MC and lost an eye at Ypres, then spent 1917–18 as a staff officer in Palestine under Gen. Edmund Allenby, whose biography he later wrote. A reader of poetry and prone to introspection, among soldiers Wavell passed as an intellectual. His most conspicuous limitation was taciturnity, which crippled his relationship with Churchill. Many who met him, perhaps over-impressed by his enigmatic persona, perceived themselves in the presence of greatness. But uncertainty persisted about whether this extended to mastery of battlefields, where a commander’s strength of will is of greater importance than his cultural accomplishments.

  On October 28, 1940, the Italians invaded northwestern Greece. Contrary to expectations, after fierce fighting they were evicted by the Greek army and thrown back into Albania, where the rival forces languished in considerable discomfort through the five months that followed. British strategy during this period became dominated by Mediterranean dilemmas, among which aid to Greece and offensive action in Libya stood foremost. Churchill constantly incited his C-in-C to take the offensive against the Italians in the Western Desert, using the tanks shipped to him at such hazard during the summer. Wavell insisted that he needed more time. Now, however, overlaid upon this issue was that of Greece, about which Churchill repeatedly changed his mind. On October 27, the day before Italy invaded, he dealt brusquely with a proposal from Leo Amery and Lord Lloyd, respectively the India and colonial secretaries, that more aid should be dispatched: “I do not agree with your suggestions that at the present time we should make any further promises to Greece and Turkey. It is very easy to write in a sweeping manner when one does not have to take account of resources, transport, time and distance.”

  Yet as soon as Italy attacked Greece, the prime minister told Dill that “maximum possible” aid must be sent. Neville Chamberlain in March 1939 had assured the Greeks of British support against aggression. Now, Churchill perceived that failure to act would make the worst possible impression upon the United States, where many people doubted Britain’s ability to wage war effectively. At the outset, he proposed sending planes and weapons to Greece, rather than British troops. Dill, Wavell and Eden—then visiting Cairo—questioned even this. Churchill sent Eden a sharp signal urging boldness, dictated to his typist under the eye of Jock Colville.

  He lay there in his four-post bed221 with its flowery chintz hangings, his bed-table by his side. Mrs. Hill [his secretary] sat patiently opposite while he chewed his cigar, drank frequent sips of iced soda-water, fidgeted his toes beneath the bedclothes and muttered stertorously under his breath what he contemplated saying. To watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child, so tense is his expression, so restless his turnings from side to side, so curious the noises he emits under his breath. Then out comes some masterly sentence and finally with a “Gimme” he takes the sheet of typewritten paper and initials it, or alters it with his fountain-pen, which he holds most awkwardly half way up the holder.

  On November 5, Churchill addressed the Commons, reporting grave shipping losses in the Atlantic, and describing a conversation he had held on his way into the Commons with the armed and helmeted guards at its doors. One soldier offered a timeless British cliché to the prime minister: “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” This, Churchill told the MPs, was Britain’s watchword for the winter of 1940: “We will think of something better by the winter of 1941.” Then he adjourned to the smoking room, where he devoted himself to an intent study of the Evening News, “as if it were the only source of information222 available to him.” Forget for a moment the art of his performance in the chamber. What more brilliant stagecraft could the leader of a democracy display than to read a newspaper in the common room of MPs of all parties, in the midst of a war and a blitz? “‘How are you?’223 he calls gaily to the most obscure Member … His very presence gives us all gaiety and courage,” wrote an MP. “People gather round his table completely unawed.”

  Despite Wavell’s protests, Churchill insisted upon sending a British force to replace Greek troops garrisoning the island of Crete, who could thus be freed to fight on the mainland. The first consignment of matériel dispatched to Greece consisted of 8 antitank guns, 12 Bofors antiaircraft guns, and 20,000 American rifles. To these were added, following renewed prime ministerial urgings, 24 field guns, 20 antitank rifles and 10 light tanks. This poor stuff reflected the desperate shortage of arms available for Britain’s soldiers, never mind those of other nations. Some Gladiator fighters, biplanes capable of fighting the Italian air force but emphatically not the Luftwaffe, were also committed. Churchill was enraged by a cable from Sir Miles Lampson, British ambassador in Egypt, dismissing aid to Greece as “completely crazy.” The prime minister told the Fo
reign Office: “I expect to be protected from this kind of insolence.” He dispatched a stinging rebuke to Lampson: “You should not telegraph at Government expense224 such an expression as ‘completely crazy’ when applied by you to grave decisions of policy taken by the Defence Committee and the War Cabinet after considering an altogether wider range of requirements and assets than you can possibly be aware of.”

  On the evening of November 8, however, the prospect changed again. Eden returned from Cairo to confide to the prime minister first tidings of an offensive Wavell proposed to launch in the Western Desert the following month. This was news Churchill craved: “I purred like six cats.”225 Ismay found him “rapturously happy.” The prime minister exulted: “At long last we are going to throw off226 the intolerable shackles of the defensive. Wars are won by superior will-power. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.” Three days later, he cabled Wavell, “You may … be assured that you will have my full support at all times in any offensive action you may be able to take against the enemy.” That same night of November 11, twenty-one Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers, launched from the carrier Illustrious, delivered a brilliant attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto, and sank or crippled three battleships. Britain was striking out at the enemy.

  Churchill accepted that the North African offensive must now assume priority over all else, that no troops could be spared for Greece. A victory in the desert might persuade Turkey to come into the war. His foremost concern was that Wavell, whose terse words and understated delivery failed to generate prime ministerial confidence, should go for broke. Dismayed to hear that Operation Compass was planned as a limited “raid,” Churchill wrote to Dill on December 7: “If, with the situation as it is227, General Wavell is only playing small, and is not hurling in his whole available forces with furious energy, he will have failed to rise to the height of circumstances … I never ‘worry’ about action, but only about inaction.”