by Max Hastings
Germany triumphs in both west and east. Blazing shore facilities on Crete in May 1941.
Germany triumphs in both west and east. One of some three million Russian soldiers who surrendered to the Wehrmacht during the first year of Operation Barbarossa
Friendship of state. Harry Hopkins and his host pose outside Downing Street on January 10, 1941, with Brendan Bracken behind
Friendship of state. FDR and Churchill at Placentia Bay on August 10, the president leaning on the arm of his unlovable son Elliot
War in the desert. British troops advance through a minefield.
War in the desert. Some of the tens of thousands of Italian prisoners who fell into British hands during Wavell’s Operation Compass
Civilian chroniclers of the wartime experience: Vere Hodgson
Civilian chroniclers of the wartime experience: George King in Home Guard battle dress
Whitehall diarists: Sir John Kennedy
Whitehall diarists: Sir Alexander Cadogan
Whitehall diarists: Harold Nicolson
Clockwise from top left: Charles Wilson, Lord Moran; Hugh Dalton; Leo Amery; Cuthbert Headlam; Oliver Harvey; Lt. Gen. Sir Henry Pownall
Working on his train, with a secretary’s “silent” typewriter at hand to take dictation
Viewing new aircraft with (left to right) Lindemann, Portal and Pound
Jock Colville’s September 1941 farewell to Downing Street gathering, on the steps to the garden. Front row, left to right: Colville, Churchill, John Martin, Tony Bevir; (back row, left to right) Leslie Rowan, “Master” John Peck, Miss Watson, Commander “Tommy” Thompson, Charles Barker
Return from Arcadia: Churchill briefly at the controls of the British plane that brought him home from Washington in January 1942
One of the many impassioned Second Front rallies held in Britain’s cities in 1942–43
Beyond the great issues on Churchill’s desk, he was obliged to address myriad lesser ones. He warned about the risk of a possible German commando raid, launched from a U-boat, to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, now serving as governor-general of the Bahamas. The Nazis, said the prime minister, might be able to exploit the former king to their advantage. Having inspired the creation of the Parachute Regiment, which carried out its first successful operation against a German radar station at Bruneval, on France’s northern coast, on February 28, Churchill pressed for the expansion of airborne forces on the largest possible scale. Four Victoria Crosses were awarded for the Royal Navy’s March 28 attack on the floating dock at St.-Nazaire. This generous issue of decorations was designed to make the survivors feel better about the losses—five hundred men killed, wounded or captured. Propaganda made much of St.-Nazaire. The public was assured that the Germans had suffered heavily, though in reality their casualties were many fewer than those of the raiders. Meanwhile, ministers solicited Churchill about appointments, honours and administrative issues. Such nugatory matters were hard to address when the Empire was crumbling.
Churchill’s obsession with capital ships persisted even in the third year of the war. He asserted that the destruction of the 42,000-ton Tirpitz, anchored in a Norwegian fjord where it posed a permanent threat to Arctic convoys, would be worth the loss of a hundred aircraft and five hundred men. On March 9, twelve Fairey Albacores of the Fleet Air Arm attacked the German behemoth, with clumsy tactics and no success. Churchill asked the first sea lord “how it was that 12 of our machines managed to get no hits as compared with the extraordinary efficiency of the Japanese attack on Prince of Wales and Repulse?” How not, indeed? Though British aircraft made an important contribution to interdicting Rommel’s Mediterranean supply line in 1942, the RAF and Fleet Air Arm’s record of achievement in attacks upon enemy surface ships remained relatively poor until the last months of the war. Churchill thought so, minuting Pound in the following year that it seemed “a pregnant fact”479 that the Fleet Air Arm had suffered only 30 fatalities out of a strength of 45,000 men in the three months to the end of April. The 1940 attack on Taranto and the 1941 crippling of the Bismarck were the only impressive British naval air operations of the war.
During the winter of 1941–42, Churchill had become unhappily conscious of the failure of British “precision bombing” of Germany. He was party to the important change of policy which took place in consequence, largely inspired by his scientific adviser. Lord Cherwell’s intervention about bombing was his most influential of the war. It was a member of his Cabinet Statistical Office staff, an official named David Butt, who produced a devastating report based on a study of British bombers’ aiming-point photographs. This showed that only a small proportion of aircraft were achieving hits within miles, rather than yards, of their targets. Cherwell convinced the prime minister, who was shocked by Butt’s report, that there must be a complete change of tactics. Since, under average weather conditions, RAF night raiders were incapable of dropping an acceptable proportion of bombs on designated industrial objectives, British aircraft must henceforward instead address the smallest aiming points they were capable of identifying: cities. They might thus fulfil the twin objectives of destroying factories and “dehousing” workers, to use Cherwell’s ingenuous phrase. No one in Whitehall explicitly acknowledged that the RAF was thus to undertake the wholesale killing of civilians. But nor did they doubt that this would be the consequence, though British propaganda for the rest of the war shrouded such ugly reality in obfuscation, not least from the aircrew conducting bomber operations at such hazard to themselves.
Churchill always considered himself a realist about the horrors and imperatives of war. Yet as recently as 1937, he had proclaimed his opposition to air attacks upon noncombatants, during a Commons debate on air-raid precautions: “I believe,480” he said, “that if one side in an equal war endeavours to cow and kill the civil population, and the other attacks steadily the military objectives … victory will come to the side … which avoids the horror of making war on the helpless and weak.” Now, however, after thirty months of engagement with an enemy who was prospering mightily by waging war without scruple, Churchill accepted a different view. Bomber Command had failed as a rapier. Instead, it must become a blunt instrument. Operational necessity was deemed to make it essential to set aside moral inhibitions. For many months, indeed years ahead, bombing represented the only means of carrying Britain’s war to Germany. The prime minister approved Cherwell’s new policy.
On February 22, 1942, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris became C-in-C of Bomber Command. Contrary to popular myth, Harris was not the originator of “area bombing.” But he set about implementing the concept with a single-minded fervour which has caused his name to be inextricably linked with it ever since. The first significant event of Harris’s tenure of command was a raid on the Renault truck plant in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. The War Cabinet hoped that this would boost French morale, which seemed unlikely when it emerged that more than four hundred civilians had been killed. On March 28, 134 aircraft carried out a major attack on the old German Hanse town of Lübeck. The coastal target was chosen chiefly because it was easy for crews to find. The closely packed medieval centre was, in Harris’s contemptuous words, “built more like a fire-lighter481 than a human habitation.” The raid left much of Lübeck in flames, and was judged an overwhelming success. Four successive attacks on the port of Rostock in late April achieved similar dramatic results, causing Goebbels to write hysterically in his diary, “Community life in Rostock is almost at an end.” On May 30, Harris staged an extraordinary coup de théâtre. Enlisting the aid of training and Coastal Command aircraft, he dispatched 1,046 bombers against the great city of Cologne, inflicting massive damage.
The chief merit of the “Thousand Raid,” together with others that followed against Essen and Bremen, lay less in the injury they inflicted upon the Third Reich—a small fraction of that achieved in 1944–45—than in the public impression of Britain striking back, albeit in a fashion which rendered the squeamish uncomfortable. Some 474
Germans died in the “Thousand Raid” on Cologne, but on June 2 the New York Times claimed that the death toll was 20,000. Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “I hope you were impressed482 with our mass air attack on Cologne. There is plenty more to come.”
Throughout 1942 and 1943, British propaganda waxed lyrical about the achievements of the bomber offensive. Churchill dispatched a stream of messages to Stalin, emphasising the devastation. The British people were not, on the whole, strident in yearning for revenge upon Germany’s civilian population. But many sometimes succumbed to the sensations of Londoner Vere Hodgson, who wrote: “As I lay in bed the other night483 I heard the deep purr of our bombers winging their way to Hamburg … This is a comfortable feeling. I turned lazily in bed and glowed at the thought, going back in my mind to those awful months when to hear noise overhead was to know that the Germans were going to pour death and destruction on us … One cannot help feeling that it is good for the Germans to know what it feels like. Perhaps they won’t put the machine in motion again so light-heartedly.”
Later in the war, when great Allied armies took the field, Churchill’s enthusiasm for bombing ebbed. But in 1942 he enthused about the strategic offensive because he had nothing else. Again contrary to popular delusion, he never found Sir Arthur Harris a soulmate. The airman sometimes dined at Chequers, because his headquarters at High Wycombe was conveniently close. But Desmond Morton was among those who believed that the prime minister thought Harris an impressive leader of air forces, but an unsympathetic personality. Churchill said of Bomber Command’s C-in-C after the war: “a considerable commander—but there was a certain coarseness about him.”484 In the bad times, however—and 1942 was a very bad time—he recognised Harris as a man of steel, at a time when many other commanders bent and snapped under the responsibilities with which he entrusted them.
From the outset, area bombing incurred criticism on both strategic and moral grounds, both inside and outside Parliament. Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and deputy prime minister, was a persistent private critic, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. He stressed the value of bombers in support of ground and naval operations. In the public domain, the New Statesman argued that it was perverse to heap praise485 on the fortitude of the civilian population of Malta in enduring Axis air attack, without perceiving the lesson for Britain’s own forces attacking Germany. “The disaster of this policy486 is not only that it is futile,” the distinguished scientist Professor A. V. Hill, MP for Cambridge University, told the House of Commons, “but that it is extremely wasteful, and will become increasingly wasteful as time goes on.” But Hill’s words reflected only a modest minority opinion.
There was a powerful case for accepting the necessity for area bombing. A major British industrial commitment was made to creating a massive force of heavy aircraft. This attained fulfilment only in the very different strategic circumstances of 1944–45. The most pertinent criticism of 1942–43 bombing policy was that the airmen’s fervour to demonstrate that their service could make a decisive independent impact on the war caused them to resist, to the point of obsession, calls for diversions of heavy aircraft to other purposes, above all the Battle of the Atlantic. John Kennedy wrote in May 1942 that the bomber offensive “can be implemented only487 at severe cost to our command of the sea and our military operations on land. I have just been looking at an old paper of Winston’s, written in Sept. 1940, which begins ‘the Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it …’ I am convinced that events will prove this to have been a profound delusion.”
Cherwell supported Harris in resisting calls for the reinforcement of Coastal Command, but they were both surely wrong. Evidence is strong that even a few extra squadrons could have achieved more in fighting the U-boats, a deadly menace well into 1943, than they did over Germany in the same period. But the navy made its case without much skill or subtlety. Admiral Sir John Tovey, C-in-C Home Fleet, denounced the bomber offensive as “a luxury, not necessity.” His words infuriated the prime minister, who was also irked by Tovey’s reluctance to hazard his ships within reach of Norwegian-based German airpower. He described Tovey as “a stubborn and obstinate man,”488 and was delighted when in May 1943 he was replaced by the supposedly more aggressive Adm. Sir Bruce Fraser. The admirals’ difficulty was that, while their service’s function of holding open the sea routes to the United States, Russia, Malta, Egypt and India was indispensable, it was also defensive. As Churchill said, the fleet was responsible for saving Britain from losing the war and played a more distinguished part than either of Britain’s other services in 1942, but could not win it. The Admiralty damaged its own case by insisting that the RAF lavish immense effort, and accept heavy casualties, on bombing the impregnable U-boat pens of northwest France in and patrolling the Bay of Biscay. The sailors would have done better to emphasize the issue of direct air cover for the Atlantic convoy routes, which drastically impeded the operations of German submarines.
Churchill thought better of the Royal Navy as a fighting service than he did of most of its commanders. They seemed relentlessly negative towards his most cherished projects. He was justifiably angry that the admirals had ignored repeated urgings to master techniques for refuelling warships at sea, thus severely restricting the endurance of capital ships. But, even after the loss of Prince of Wales and Repulse, he remained cavalier about their vulnerability to air attack. Most of his naval commanders were fine professional seamen, whom Britain was fortunate to have. It was galling for them to have their courage implicitly and even explicitly impugned, when they were merely anxious to avoid gratuitous losses of big ships which would take years to replace. Nonetheless, like the generals, the admirals might have shown more understanding of the prime minister’s fundamental purpose: to demonstrate that Britain could carry the fight to the enemy, and to do more than merely survive blockade and air bombardment.
Herein lay the case for the bomber offensive. Churchill seems right to have endorsed this, when Britain’s armed forces were accomplishing so little elsewhere; but he was mistaken to have allowed it to achieve absolute priority in the RAF’s worldwide commitments. Concentration of force is important, but so too is a prudent division of resources between critical fronts, of which the Atlantic campaign was assuredly one. By a characteristic irony of war, Churchill enthused most about bombing Germany during 1941–42, when it achieved least. Thereafter, he lost interest. In 1943, Bomber Command began to do serious damage to Ruhr industries, and might have achieved important results if the economic direction of Harris’s operations had been more imaginative. In 1944–45, its impact on Germany’s cities became devastating. But more intelligent American targeting policies enabled the USAAF to achieve the critical victories of the air war, against the Luftwaffe and German synthetic oil plants. The last volume of Churchill’s war memoirs mentions Bomber Command only once, in passing and critically.
On April 1, 1942, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt: “I find it very difficult to get over Singapore489, but I hope we shall redeem it ere long.” Instead, however, bad news kept coming. On the fourth a Japanese battle fleet, ranging the Indian Ocean, launched planes to bomb Ceylon. In the days that followed, enemy aircraft sank two Royal Navy cruisers and the carrier Hermes. Mandalay fell, and it was plain that the British must withdraw across the Chindwin River out of Burma, into northeast India. Malta was in desperate straits, under relentless Axis air attack. Convoys to Russia suffered shocking losses from German air and U-boat attack. PQ13 in April lost five ships out of nine. Only eight ships of twenty-three dispatched in the next convoy reached their destination, fourteen having been turned back by pack ice. Churchill urged Stalin to provide more air and sea cover for the Royal Navy in the later stages of the Arctic passage, but the Russians lacked means and competence. There was also little goodwill. British sailors and airmen venturing ashore at Murmansk and Archangel were disgusted by the frigidity of their reception. Nowhere, it seemed, did the sun shine upon British endeavours, and the prime mini
ster’s spirits suffered accordingly: “CIGS says WSC is often in a very nasty mood these days,”490 noted John Kennedy on April 7.
Even at this dire period, it was remarkable how many newspaper column inches were devoted to the needs and prospects of postwar reconstruction. This galled the prime minister. He expressed exasperation at having to bother with what he called “hypothetical post-war problems491 in the middle of a struggle when the same amount of thought concentrated on the question of types of aeroplane might have produced much more result.” Yet many ordinary citizens found the war a less rewarding, more dispiriting experience than did Winston Churchill. The present seemed endurable only by looking beyond it to a better future.
Articles and correspondence constantly appeared in print, addressing one aspect or another of a world without war. As early as September 4, 1940, a letter writer to the Times named P. C. Loftus urged that “this nation not be found unprepared for peace as we were found unprepared for war.” A correspondent signing himself “Sailor” wrote to the New Statesman on February 21, 1942: “Men wonder what they are fighting for. The old empty jingoisms about ‘Freedom’ and ‘Homeland’ no longer satisfy. There is a suspicion that all will not be well after the peace—that, after all, we are fighting for property and private interests.” The prominent socialist intellectual Harold Laski complained of Churchill’s refusal to declare a commitment to social change: “He does not seem to see that the steps492 we take now necessarily determine the shape of the society we shall enter when the war is over.”
