Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  Beaverbrook’s subsequent Second Front campaign, of which more will be said below, was irresponsible and disloyal. He displayed naïveté or worse in his extravagant eulogies of the Soviet Union, ignoring and even denying the bloodstained nature of Stalin’s tyranny in a fashion Churchill never stooped to. Alan Brooke was among those who harboured lasting bitterness about the commitments which Beaverbrook made in Moscow, which he considered irresponsibly generous. Yet as minister of supply, Beaverbrook grasped a fundamental point that more fastidious British politicians, generals and officials refused to acknowledge. Whatever the shortcomings of Russia as an ally, the outcome of the struggle in the east must be decisive in determining Britain’s fate. The North African campaign might loom large in British perceptions and propaganda, but was of negligible importance alongside Stalin’s war. If Hitler overwhelmed Russia, he might become invincible in Europe even if America later entered the war.

  Until March 1942, when the Germans awoke to the importance of interdicting Allied supplies and strongly reinforced their air and naval forces in northern Norway, convoys to Russia were almost unmolested, and only two British ships were lost. Churchill appointed Beaverbrook chairman of a new Allied Supplies Executive, to plan and supervise deliveries. Yet even with his support, shipments remained modest. The British dispatched obsolescent Hurricanes, many of which arrived damaged; U.S.-built Tomahawk fighters, which the Russians found unreliable, and for a time grounded; together with tanks and Boyes antitank rifles, which the British Army recognised as inadequate. The second so-called PQ convoy to Russia sailed only on October 18, 1941, the third on November 9. In their desperation, the Russians came as near as ever in the war to displaying gratitude. A Soviet admiral said later: “I can still remember with what close attention305 we followed the progress of the first convoys in the late autumn of 1941, with what speed and energy they were unloaded in Archangel and Murmansk.”

  Lord Hankey, however, wrote with malicious satisfaction about the perceived hypocrisy of Beaverbrook’s enthusiasm for arming Russia, when as minister of supply he was responsible for the shortcomings of British tank production: “Now I have to bring to light the fact306 that he is building nothing but dud tanks when he is vociferously appealing to the workers to work all day and all night to produce for Russia innumerable Tanks—all dud Tanks.” The Russians valued the Valentine, which coped with the conditions of the Eastern Front much better than the Matilda, which was also shipped in quantity. But they quickly grasped that most of the weapons dispatched from Britain were those its own forces least wanted. They scarcely helped themselves by contemptuously dismissing British offers of technical instruction. The new users’ unfamiliarity caused much equipment to be damaged or destroyed. Several Russian pilots killed themselves by attempting to take off without releasing their Tomahawks’ brakes.

  When large-scale American supplies reached Russia in 1943–44, these exercised a dramatic influence on the feeding and transport of the Red Army. The Russians soon lost interest in tanks and planes, which they preferred to build for themselves, seeking instead American trucks, boots, technical equipment, aluminium and canned meat. It is arguable that food deliveries narrowly averted starvation in Russia in the winter of 1942–43. U.S. shipments eventually totalled £2.5 billion, against Britain’s £45.6 million. Allied aid is thought to have contributed 10 percent to the Soviet war effort in 1943–44—but only 5 percent in 1942, and a negligible proportion in 1941. Chris Bellamy, among the best-informed Western historians307 of the Soviet Union’s war, suggests that while such a contribution seems marginal, when the Soviet Union hung close to defeat it may have been decisive.

  In 1941–42 the British and Americans cannot realistically be blamed for dispatching so little to Russia, because both weapons production and shipping were inadequate to meet their own needs. The relevant point is merely that there was a chasm between Anglo-American rhetoric and the real Western contribution. In the first year after Barbarossa was launched, of 2,443 tanks promised by the Western powers only 1,442 arrived on time, together with 1,323 of 1,800 aircraft. During this period, the Russians were themselves producing two thousand tanks a month—most of notably higher quality than those shipped to Murmansk and Archangel. The Red Army sometimes lost a thousand tanks a week on the battlefield.

  By the autumn of 1941, the tension between popular enthusiasm in Britain for Stalin’s people and contempt for the Russians in some parts of the war machine was imposing intense pressure on the prime minister. An Observer columnist suggested that Russia’s entry into the war fed Britain’s instinctive complacency: “The effect upon us psychologically308 is unhealthy. We have found a short cut to victory … We settle back to read with satisfaction how our air offensive against Germany is helping our great Soviet ally. With Russia and U.S.A. on our side, now surely all will be well.” Edward Stebbing, discharged from the army and working as a laboratory technician, wrote in October: “My main feeling is one of bitter309, flaming anger at the inertia of our government … our help to Russia has been almost negligible.”

  Even as Stebbing was penning his angry reflections, the prime minister warned Middle East Command of “the rising temper of the British people310 against what they consider our inactivity.” To his son, Randolph, in the Middle East, he described on October 31 the sniping of his critics in Parliament and Beaverbrook’s frequent threats of resignation: “Things are pretty hard here311 … The Communists are posing as the only patriots in the country. The Admirals, Generals and Air Marshals chant their stately hymn of ‘Safety First.’ … In the midst of this I have to restrain my natural pugnacity by sitting on my own head. How bloody!” Gen. John Kennedy wrote in his diary in September: “The fundamental difficulty is that altho312 we want the Germans to be knocked out above all, most of us feel … that it would not be a bad thing if the Russians were to be finished as a military power too … The CIGS constantly expresses his dislike of the Russians … The Russians on their side doubtless feel the same about us.”

  Pownall, Dill’s vice chief, wrote in October: “Would that the two loathsome monsters313, Germany and Russia, drown together in a death grip in the winter mud.” Oliver Harvey, at the Foreign Office, was astonished by the strength of ill will towards Moscow within the government: “The Labour ministers314 … are as prejudiced as the P.M. against the Soviets because of their hatred and fear of the Communists at home.” Churchill himself, according to the diplomat, was prone to spasms of doubt about how far aid to Russia was cost-effective: “After his first enthusiasm, he is now getting bitter as the Russians become a liability and he says we cannot afford the luxury of helping them with men, only with material.”

  Yet Churchill recognised how fortunate his nation had been thus far to wage war at relatively small cost in lives compared to those lost by Poland and France, not to mention Russia. He marvelled: “In two years struggle with the greatest military Power315, armed with the most deadly weapons, barely 100,000 of our people have been killed, of which nearly half are civilians.” Such a cool assessment of what would, in other times, have been deemed a shocking “butcher’s bill,” helps to explain his fitness for the nation’s leadership. Robert Menzies, when still Australian prime minister, noted this: “Winston’s attitude to war is much more realistic316 than mine. I constantly find myself looking at ‘minor losses’ and saying ‘there are some darkened homes.’ But he is wise. War is terrible and it cannot be won except by lost lives. That being so, don’t think of them.”

  Churchill, once more desperate for military theatre, urged the War Office to accelerate plans for raids on the Continent. “The Army must do something317—the people want it,” he told John Kennedy and the director of military intelligence during a lunch at Downing Street. “Surely this [is] within our powers—The effects might be enormous—The Germans engaged in Russia—now [is] the time.” Kennedy wrote: “Winston is in a difficult position318. He is hard pressed politically to take action while Russia is struggling so desperately. He keeps saying
‘I cannot hold the position.’ The difficulty is that with a disaster the position may be harder to hold.” News from the Eastern Front was unremittingly grim. The Red Army’s losses were appalling. A great swath of Stalin’s empire had already fallen to Hitler. Churchill, after a meeting with his generals on October 11, bade them farewell with a mournful headshake: “Yes, I am afraid Moscow is a gone coon,”319 he said, padding off along the Downing Street passage towards his afternoon nap.

  The Soviet Union had not the smallest moral claim upon Britain. Even if Churchill had stripped his own nation’s armed forces and dispatched heavier shipments to Murmansk after Barbarossa was launched, the impact on the early Eastern Front campaigns would have been small. As it was, the Chiefs of Staff were dismayed by the impact of aid to Russia upon British tank and aircraft strengths in the Middle and Far East, which were anyway grievously inadequate. Worse, American deliveries to Britain were significantly cut so that Roosevelt could meet his own commitments to Stalin. Given the weakness of British arms in 1941, it was unrealistic to suppose that Churchill could have done much more. In 1942, however, a yawning gap opened between British and American undertakings, and quantities of matériel delivered. It was ironic, of course, that the boundlessly duplicitous Soviets should thereupon have proclaimed, and even sincerely harboured, moral indignation towards Britain and the United States. But the principal reality of subsequent military operations would be that Russians did most of the dying necessary to undo Nazism, while the Western powers advanced at their own measured pace towards a long-delayed confrontation with the Wehrmacht.

  For many years after 1945, the democracies found it gratifying to perceive the Second World War in Europe as a struggle for survival between themselves and Nazi tyranny. Yet the military outcome of the contest was overwhelmingly decided by the forces of Soviet tyranny, rather than by Anglo-American armies. Perversely, this reality was better understood by contemporary Americans and British than it has been by many of their descendants.

  SEVEN

  The Battle of America

  1. Strictly Cash

  THROUGHOUT 1941, even after torrents of blood began to flow across the plains of Russia, Churchill’s foremost priority remained the enlistment of the United States as a fighting ally. As he followed the fortunes of Britain’s desert battles, the pursuit of the Bismarck, the Atlantic convoy struggle, the campaign in Greece and the faltering bomber offensive, his American vision dominated the far horizon. Unless or until the United States joined the war, Britain might avert defeat, but could not aspire to victory. Among Churchill’s priceless contributions to Britain’s salvation was his wooing of the United States, when many of his compatriots were rash enough to indulge rancour towards what they perceived as the fat, complacent nation across the Atlantic. “I wonder if the Americans realise how late320 they are leaving their intervention,” wrote John Kennedy in May 1941, “that if they wait much longer we may be at the last gasp.” In a notable slip of the tongue, a BBC announcer once referred to the threat of “American” rather than “enemy” parachutists descending on Britain.

  It would be hard to overstate the bitterness among many British people, high and low, about the United States’ abstention from the struggle. The rhetoric of Roosevelt and Churchill created an enduring myth of U.S. generosity in 1940–41. Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, wrote of “rushing vast quantities of weapons321 to Britain in the summer of 1940.” In truth, however great the symbolic importance of early U.S. consignments, their practical value was small. American-supplied artillery and small arms were obsolete, and made a negligible contribution to Britain’s fighting power. Aircraft deliveries in 1941 were moderate both in quantity and quality. The fifty old destroyers loaned by the United States in exchange for British colonial basing rights were scarcely seaworthy: just nine were operational at the end of 1940, and the rest required long refits. Only from 1942 onwards, when Britain received Grant and Sherman tanks, 105mm self-propelled guns, Liberator bombers and much else, did U.S. war matériel dramatically enhance the capabilities of Churchill’s forces.

  Moreover, the guns, tanks and planes shipped across the Atlantic didn’t represent American largesse, because until the end of 1941 these were cash purchases. Under the terms of the Neutrality Act imposed by Congress, no belligerent could be granted credit. For the first two years of the war the United States reaped huge profits from arms sales. “The United States Administration is pursuing322 an almost entirely American policy, rather than one of all possible aid to Britain,” Eden wrote to Churchill on November 30, 1940. Roosevelt anticipated British bankruptcy and adopted the notion of “loaning” supplies, which originated with New York’s Century Association, before Churchill asked him to do so. But the president was furious when Lord Lothian, in October 1940 still British ambassador in Washington, told American journalists: “Well, boys, Britain’s broke. It’s your money we want.” There is doubt whether the ambassador used these exact words, but the thrust of his remarks was undisputed.

  Roosevelt told Lothian there could be no suggestion of American subsidy until Britain had exhausted her ability to pay cash, for Congress would never hear of it. He might have added that the British adopted the same attitude to Finland, when that country was fighting the Soviets in 1940. London insisted on cash terms for such scanty war supplies as Britain dispatched. Now, on America’s part, there was a widespread belief in British opulence, quite at odds with reality. Amid the Battle of Britain, the U.S. administration questioned whether Churchill’s government had honestly revealed its remaining assets. Washington insisted upon an audited account, a demand British ministers found humiliating. Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on December 7, 1940, saying that if Britain’s cash drain to the United States continued, the nation would find itself in a position in which “after the victory was won with our blood323 and sweat, and civilization saved and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.”

  In responding to Churchill, Roosevelt never addressed this point, and his evasion was significant. He acknowledged a strong U.S. national interest in Britain’s continued resistance, displaying extraordinary energy and imagination in moving public and congressional opinion, but not in its postwar solvency. American policy throughout the war emphasised the importance of strengthening its competitive trading position vis-à-vis Britain, by ending “imperial preference.” The embattled British began to receive direct aid, through Lend-Lease, only when the last of their gold and foreign assets had been surrendered. Many British businesses in America were sold at firesale prices. The Viscose rayon-manufacturing company, the jewel in the overseas crown of the Courtaulds company and possessing assets worth $120 million, was knocked down for a mere $54 million, because Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau insisted that the cash should be realised at a week’s notice. New York bankers pocketed $4 million of this sum in commission on a riskless transaction. Shell, Lever Brothers, Dunlop Tire and British insurance interests were alike compelled to sell off their U.S. holdings for whatever American rivals chose to pay. The governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, wrote in March 1941: “I have never realised so strongly as now324 how entirely we are in the hands of American ‘friends’ over direct investments, and how much it looks as if, with kind words and feelings, they were going to extract these one after another.”

  The British government exhausted every expedient to meet U.S. invoices. The Belgian government in exile lent £60 million worth of gold which had been brought out of Brussels, although their Dutch and Norwegian counterparts refused to sell gold for sterling. An American cruiser collected from Cape Town Britain’s last £50 million in bullion. Lend-Lease came with ruthless conditions constraining British overseas trade, so stringent that London had to plead with Washington for minimal concessions enabling them to pay for Argentine meat, vital to feeding Britain’s people. Postwar Brit
ish commercial aviation was hamstrung by the Lend-Lease terms. If Roosevelt’s behaviour was founded upon a pragmatic assessment of political realities and protection of U.S. national interests, only the imperatives of the moment could have obliged Churchill publicly to assert its “unselfishness.” Whatever U.S. policy towards Britain represented between 1939 and 1945, it was never that. “Our desperate straits alone325 could justify its terms,” wrote Eden about the first round of Lend-Lease.

  Most of the British anyway did not care for their transatlantic cousins. Anti-Americanism was pronounced among the aristocracy. Halifax, whom Churchill dispatched to Britain’s Washington embassy in December 1940, told Stanley Baldwin: “I have never liked Americans, except odd ones326. In the mass I have always found them dreadful.” Lord Linlithgow, a fellow grandee who was viceroy of India, wrote to commiserate with Halifax on his posting: “The heavy labour of toadying327 to your pack of pole-squatting parvenus! What a country, and what savages those who inhabit it!” Halifax told Eden that he had proposed him as an alternative candidate for the ambassadorship: “I only said that I thought you might hate it328 a little less than myself!”

  Installed at the embassy, the former foreign secretary endured much suffering in the service of Britain, not least during a visit to a Chicago White Sox game in May 1941, at which he found himself invited to eat a hot dog. This was too much for the fastidious ambassador, who declined. During a trip to Detroit329, he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes by a group calling itself “The Mothers of America.” Oliver Harvey, Eden’s private secretary, described the aloof Halifax’s performance in his role as “pretty hopeless—the old trouble of being unable330 to make real personal contacts … All business in the U.S.A. is now transacted by telephoning and ‘popping-in,’ both of which H can’t abide. He only goes to see the President on business—and naturally usually to ask for things—he has never got onto a more intimate chat basis with him.” Dalton related a mischievous story that Halifax broke down and wept soon after his arrival in Washington, “because he couldn’t get on with these Americans.”331