Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  On December 9, at last came the moment for the “Army of the Nile,” as Churchill had christened it, to launch its assault. Wavell’s 4th Indian and 7th Armoured divisions, led by Lt. Gen. Sir Richard O’Connor, attacked the Italians in the Western Desert. Operation Compass achieved brilliant success. Mussolini’s generals showed themselves epic bunglers. Some 38,000 prisoners were taken in the first three days, at a cost of just 624 Indian and British casualties. “It all seems too good to be true,” wrote Eden on December 11. Wavell decided to exploit this success, and gave O’Connor his head. The little British army, by now reinforced by the 6th Australian Division, stormed along the coast into Libya, taking Bardia on January 5. At 5:40 a.m. on January 21, 1941, red Very lights arched into the sky to signal the start of O’Connor’s attack on the port of Tobruk. Bangalore torpedoes blew gaps in the Italian wire. An Australian voice shouted: “Go on, you bastards!”

  At 6:45, British tanks lumbered forward. The Italians resisted fiercely, but by dawn the next day the sky was lit by the flames of their blazing supply dumps, prisoners in the thousands were streaming into British cages, and the defenders were ready to surrender. O’Connor dispatched his tanks on a dash across the desert to cut off the retreating Italians. The desert army was in a mood of wild excitement. “Off we went across the unknown country228 in full cry,” wrote Michael Creagh, one of O’Connor’s division commanders. In a rare exhibition of emotion, O’Connor asked his chief of staff: “My God, do you think it’s going to be all right?” It was indeed “all right.” The British reached Beda Fomm ahead of the Italians, who surrendered. In two months, the desert army had advanced four hundred miles and taken 130,000 prisoners. On February 11, another of Wavell’s contingents advanced from Kenya into Abyssinia and Somaliland. After hard fighting—much tougher than in Libya—here, too, the Italians were driven inexorably towards eventual surrender.

  For a brief season, Wavell became a national hero. For the British people in the late winter and early spring of 1940–41, battered nightly by the Luftwaffe’s bombardment, still fearful of invasion, conscious of the frailty of the Atlantic lifeline, success in Africa was precious. It was Churchill’s delicate task to balance exultation about a victory with caution about future prospects. Again and again, in his broadcasts and speeches, he emphasised the long duration of the ordeal that must lie ahead, the need for unremitting exertion. To this purpose he continued to stress the danger of a German landing in Britain: in February 1941, he demanded a new evacuation of civilian residents from coastal areas in the danger zone.

  Churchill knew how readily the nation could lapse into inertia. The army’s Home Forces devoted much energy to anti-invasion exercises, such as Operation Victor in March 1941. Victor assumed that five German divisions, including two armoured and one motorised, had landed on the coast of East Anglia. On March 30, presented with a report on the exercise, Churchill minuted mischievously, but with serious intent: “All this data would be most valuable for our future offensive operations. I should be very glad if the same officers would work out a scheme for our landing an exactly similar force on the French coast.” Even if no descent on France was remotely practicable, Churchill was at his best in pressing Britain’s generals to forswear a fortress mentality.

  But public fear and impatience remained constants. “For the first time the possibility229 that we may be defeated has come to many people—me among them,” wrote Oliver Harvey, Eden’s private secretary, on February 22, 1941. “Mr. Churchill’s speech has rather sobered me,”230 wrote London charity worker Vere Hodgson after a prime ministerial broadcast that month. “I was beginning to be a little optimistic. I even began to think there might be no Invasion … but he thinks there will, it seems. Also I had a feeling the end might soon be in sight; he seems to be looking a few years ahead! So I don’t know what is going to happen to us. We seem to be waiting—waiting, for we know not what.”

  Churchill had answers to Miss Hodgson’s question. “Here is the hand that is going to win the war,” he told guests at Chequers, who included Duff Cooper and General Wladyslaw Sikorski, one evening in February. He extended his fingers as if displaying a poker hand: “a Royal Flush—Great Britain, the Sea, the Air, the Middle East, American aid.” Yet this was flummery. British successes in Africa promoted illusions that were swiftly shattered. Italian weakness and incompetence, rather than British strength and genius, had borne O’Connor’s little force to Tobruk and beyond. Thereafter, Wavell’s forces found themselves once more confronted with their own limitations in the face of energetic German intervention.

  In the autumn of 1940, Hitler had declared that “not one man and not one pfennig” would he expend in Africa. His strategic attention was focused upon the east. Mussolini, with his ambition to make the Mediterranean “an Italian lake,” was anyway eager to achieve his own conquests without German aid. But when the Italians suffered humiliation, Hitler was quite unwilling to see his ally defeated, and to risk losing Axis control of the Balkans. In April, he launched the Wehrmacht into Yugoslavia and Greece. An Afrika Korps of two divisions under Gen. Erwin Rommel was dispatched to Libya. A new chapter of British misfortunes opened.

  Churchill’s decision to dispatch a British army to Greece in the spring of 1941 remains one of the most controversial of his wartime premiership. When the commitment was first mooted back in October, almost all the soldiers opposed it. On November 1, Eden, the secretary for war, cabled from Cairo: “We cannot, from Middle East resources231, send sufficient air or land reinforcements to have any decisive influence upon course of fighting … To send such forces there … would imperil our whole position in the Middle East and jeopardize plans for offensive operations.” These remarks prompted a tirade from the prime minister, and caused Eden to write in his diary two days later: “The weakness of our policy232 is that we never adhere to the plans we make.”

  Passion and disdain: Winston Churchill walking in Whitehall with Lord Halifax in March 1938, when the lofty peer was already foreign secretary and his companion still in the wilderness.

  Outside Downing Street in May 1940

  Blitzkrieg: German columns advancing through France in May 1940

  In Paris on May 31, 1940, with Dill, Attlee and Reynaud

  Disaster and deliverance: Dunkirk

  Invasion fever: Inspecting an unconvincing roadblock.

  Invasion fever: the Mid-Devon Hunt combine business with pleasure by patrolling Dartmoor.

  French warships blaze at Mers-el-Kebir under British bombardment, July 3, 1940.

  The Battle of Britain: Hurricane pilots scramble.

  The cockpit of war in 1940: The filter room at RAF Fighter Command, Bentley Priory

  A classic image, sometimes branded as faked for the benefit of German propaganda, but nonetheless symbolic: A Luftwaffe Heinkel over the London docks in September 1940

  The blitz: A street scene repeated a thousand times across the cities of Britain

  A study in defiance: Churchill portrayed by Cecil Beaton in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street on November 20, 1940

  It seemed extraordinarily unlikely that a mere four divisions—all that could be spared from Wavell’s resources—would make the difference between Greek victory and defeat. Aircraft especially were lacking. With German intervention looming in North Africa, such a diversion of forces threatened Britain’s desert campaign. Kennedy told Dill on January 26 that he would have liked to see the Chiefs of Staff adopt much firmer resistance to the Greek proposal—“We were near the edge of the precipice233 … CIGS said to me that he did not dissent, and considered the limitation placed upon the first reinforcements to be offered to the Greeks to be a sufficient safeguard. This seemed to me to be frightfully dangerous … If the Germans come down to Salonika the whole thing is bound to collapse, and nothing short of 20 divisions and a big air force, maintained by shipping we cannot afford, would be of any use … What we should do is keep the water in front of us. Anything we send to Greece will be lost if the Germans c
ome down.” As so often with the counsels of Churchill’s generals, this view represented prudence. Yet what would the British people, never mind Goebbels, say if the British lion skulked timorous beside the Nile?

  Probably the most significant indication of Churchill’s innermost belief derives from his remarks to Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins early in January. Hopkins reported to Washington on the tenth: “He thinks Greece is lost234—although he is now reinforcing the Greeks and weakening his African army.” Just as the prime minister’s heart had moved him to dispatch more troops to France in June 1940 against military logic, so now it inspired him to believe that the Greeks could not be abandoned to their fate. An overriding moral imperative, his familiar determination to do nothing common or mean, drove the British debate in the early months of 1941. He nursed a thin hope that, following the success of Operation Compass, Turkey might join the Allies if Britain displayed staunchness in the Balkans.

  It is likely that Churchill would have followed his instinct to be seen to aid Greece, even if Wavell, in the Middle East, had sustained opposition. As it was, however, the C-in-C provoked amazement among senior soldiers by changing his mind. When Dill and Eden arrived in Cairo in mid-February on a second visit, they found Wavell ready to support a Greek commitment. On the nineteenth, the general said: “We have a difficult choice, but I think we are more likely to be playing the enemy’s game by remaining inactive than by taking action in the Balkans.” Now, it was Churchill’s turn to wobble. “Do not consider yourself obligated to a Greek enterprise if in your hearts you feel it will only be another Norwegian fiasco,” he signalled Eden on February 20. Dill, however, said that they believed there was “a reasonable chance of resisting a German advance.” Eden said to Wavell: “It is a soldier’s business. It is for you to say.” Wavell responded: “War is an option of difficulties. We go.” On the twenty-fourth, Churchill told his men in Cairo: “While being under no illusions, we all send you the order ‘Full Steam Ahead.’”

  The Greek commitment represented one of Anthony Eden’s first tests as foreign secretary, the role to which he had been translated in December, on the departure of Lord Halifax to become British ambassador in Washington. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, Eden—still only forty-four in 1941—displayed a highly strung temperament, petulance and lack of steel, which inspired scant confidence. An infantry officer in the First World War, endowed with famous charm and physical glamour, he established his credentials as an antiappeaser by resigning from Chamberlain’s government in 1938. Throughout the war, as afterwards, he cherished a passionate ambition to succeed Churchill in office, which the prime minister himself encouraged. Churchill valued Eden’s intelligence and loyalty, but the soldiers thought him incorrigibly “wet,” with affectations of manner which they identified with those of homosexuals. Sir James Grigg, permanent under-secretary at the War Office, and later secretary for war, dismissed Eden as “a poor feeble little pansy,” though it should be noted that Grigg seldom thought well of anyone. In a world in which talent is rarely, if ever, sufficient to meet the challenges of government, it remains hard to identify a better candidate for the wartime foreign secretaryship. Eden often stood up to Churchill in a fashion which deserves respect. But his reports to Downing Street from the Mediterranean in 1940–41 reflected erratic judgement and a tendency towards vacillation.

  Dill, head of the army, remained deeply unhappy about sending troops to Greece. But in the Middle East theatre, Wavell’s was the decisive voice. Many historians have expressed bewilderment that this intelligent soldier should have committed himself to a policy which promised disaster. Yet it does not seem hard to explain Wavell’s behaviour. For months, the Middle East C-in-C had been harassed and pricked by the prime minister, who deplored his alleged pusillanimity. As early as August 1940, when Wavell visited London, Eden described the general’s dismay at Churchill’s impatience with him: “Found Wavell waiting for me at 9am235. He was clearly upset at last night’s proceedings and said he thought he should have made it plain that if the Prime Minister could not approve his dispositions and had not confidence in him he should appoint someone else.” Though this early spat was patched up, the two men never established a rapport. All through the autumn of 1940, bad-tempered signals flew to and fro between Downing Street and Cairo, provoked by the prime minister’s impatience with Wavell’s caution, and his C-in-C’s exasperation with Churchill’s indifference to military realities, as he himself perceived them.

  Again and again Churchill pressed Wavell, and indeed all his generals, to overcome their fears of the enemy, to display the fighting spirit which he prized above all things, and which alone, he believed, would enable Britain to survive. Even after the Libyan battlefield successes of recent months, the C-in-C in Cairo would have been less than human had he not been galled by Churchill’s goading. In 1939 Poland had been left to face defeat alone, for it lay beyond the reach of a British or French army. In 1940 many Frenchmen and Belgians believed themselves betrayed by their Anglo-Saxon ally. In 1941, Britain’s prime minister almost daily urged the peoples of the free world to join hands to contest mastery with the Nazis. Was a British army now to stand ingloriously idle, and watch Greece succumb?

  At a War Cabinet meeting in London on March 7, attended by Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, Churchill’s enthusiasm for the Greek commitment caused him, as so often, to talk roughshod over inconvenient material realities. He asserted, for instance: “We should soon have strong air forces in Greece.” On the contrary, the RAF’s feeble contingent—barely a hundred aircraft strong—was drastically outnumbered by the 1,350 planes of the Axis. Tokenism dominated the subsequent campaign. The British bombed Sofia’s rail yards, in an attempt to hamper German supply movements to Yugoslavia. Yet this night attack was carried out by just six Wellingtons, a force insufficient to convincingly disrupt an exercise on the Aldershot ranges. The nine squadrons committed by the RAF chiefly comprised obsolete and discredited aircraft, Gladiator biplane fighters and Blenheim light bombers. After achieving some early successes against the Italians, faced with modern German fighters such types could contribute nothing. Their destruction also entailed the loss of precious pilots. From January onwards, as the Luftwaffe ranged increasingly assertively over the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy was obliged to operate almost without air cover—and paid the price. By April 14, the RAF in Greece had just forty-six serviceable planes.

  There is no objective test by which the moral benefits of attempting to aid Greece can be measured against the cost of subjecting yet another British army to defeat. The official historians of wartime intelligence have highlighted one misjudgement in the spring of 1941: Churchill and his generals failed to perceive236, because Ultra signal intercepts did not tell them, that Hitler’s fundamental purpose in the Balkans was not offensive, but defensive. He sought to protect the Romanian oil fields and secure his southern flank before attacking Russia. It is unlikely, however, even had this been recognised in London, that it would have caused Churchill to opt for inaction. Throughout its history, Britain has repeatedly sought to ignore the importance of mass on the battlefield, dispatching inadequate forces to assert moral or strategic principles. This was the course which Churchill adopted in March 1941. It has been suggested that Wavell should have resigned, rather than send troops to Greece. But field commanders have no business to make such gestures. Wavell did his utmost to support his nation’s purposes, though he knew that, as commander-in-chief, he would bear responsibility for what must follow. On April 7, when he bade farewell to Dill as the CIGS left Cairo for London with Eden, he said, “I hope, Jack237, you will preside at my court martial.”

  The outcome was as swift as it was inevitable. The Germans crushed Yugoslav resistance during two days’ fighting in Macedonia on April 6–7, then embarked upon a series of dramatic outflanking operations against the Greeks. The Greek army was exhausted and demoralised, following its winter campaign against the Italians. Its initial achievement in
pushing forward into Albania, which had so impressed the British, represented the only effort of which it was capable. Within days, sixty-two thousand British, Australian and New Zealand troops in Greece found themselves retreating southwards in disarray, harried at every turn by the Luftwaffe. An April 6 air raid on Piraeus blew up a British ammunition ship, wrecking the port. The RAF’s little fighter force was ruthlessly destroyed.

  Worse, even before the Germans occupied Greece, the Afrika Korps attacked in Libya. On April 3, the British evacuated Benghazi, then found themselves retreating eastwards pell-mell back down the coast road, along which they had advanced in triumph two months earlier. By April 11, when Rommel reached the limit of his supply chain, he had driven the British back almost to the start line of their Compass offensive. It was fortunate that Hitler had dispatched to Libya too small a force and inadequate logistical support to convert British withdrawal into outright disaster. So much was wrong with the leadership, training, weapons and tactics of Wavell’s desert army that it is questionable whether it could have repulsed the Afrika Korps even in the absence of the Greek diversion. Inevitably, however, Greece was deemed responsible for defeat in Libya.