Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  Gnawing dissatisfaction extended well beyond the confines of the political left. “This nation has become very soft,”493 John Kennedy wrote sadly in his diary on February 23, 1942. “The people do not want to fight for the Empire. Mostly, I suppose, they do not care whether they have an empire or not so long as they have an easy and quiet life. They do not realise that German domination will be very unpleasant … I think something more is wanted on the political side. There is a great lack of any sense of urgency everywhere. We do not know what we are fighting for. The Atlantic Charter is not good enough an ideal up against the fanaticism of the Germans and the Japs.” Officers commanding two army primary training centres told a morale investigator that the great majority of their recruits “lack enthusiasm and interest in the war494 and betray ignorance of the issues involved in it.”

  On March 6, 1942, an editorial in the Spectator declared: “The national fibre is today unmistakably different from what it was in those days of 1940 which the Prime Minister could speak of, in accents which carried universal conviction, as our finest hour. No one can pretend that we are living through our finest hour today.” The writer, like his counterpart on the New Statesman, felt that the British people lacked a core of belief to move them, as the Russian people were moved: “Why do men and women in Britain today wait for inspiration from outside? Why are they listening for a voice? Have we no voice within us? Are we ignorant of what is needed?”

  In May 1942, America’s Fortune magazine published an entire issue about the postwar world. Henry Luce, proprietor of Fortune, invited Britain’s foreign secretary to contribute an article about his own country’s vision. Eden declined, prompting an official in the American Department of the Foreign Office, one C. R. King, to express dismay. It seemed to him a serious mistake to snub Luce. Yet he recognised the problem. Eden had no idea what to say: “I do not know that HMG have formulated (much less announced) any ideas on these problems beyond those that find expression in the Atlantic Charter.” King added that there was wide agreement in the United States “that America will emerge, after total victory495, militarily and economically supreme.” The Economist challenged Churchill in an editorial: “When has the Prime Minister made one496 of his great and compelling speeches on the theme, not of world strategy, but of the hopes and fears of the British people? So long as he is silent, Conservatism, the dominant political attitude in Britain, is silent, and Americans inevitably believe that maybe the Conservatives are out to do nothing but conserve.” The intellectuals’ preoccupation with postwar Britain exasperated the prime minister when he was struggling to find means to avert the destruction of European freedom. But in this matter, his instincts were ill-attuned to those of the public.

  Early in April, Churchill’s honeymoon with Roosevelt was rudely interrupted. The prime minister had planned to go to India, to address its defence and constitutional future, but crises elsewhere made it seem inappropriate for him to leave London and travel so far. Stafford Cripps was dispatched in his stead, with a mandate to discuss with India’s nationalist leaders prospective postwar self-government. Talks quickly collapsed. The Hindu-majority Indian National Congress rejected delay, and insisted upon immediate admission to political power. Cripps reported accordingly to London, and was told to come home. Churchill had expected, and indeed wished, no other outcome. He was content that the gesture had been made, and that it was Cripps who bore the odium of failure.

  On April 11, however, Roosevelt cabled Churchill, urging that Cripps should remain in India and preside over the creation of a nationalist government. The president asserted that American opinion was overwhelmingly hostile to Britain on this issue: “The feeling is almost universally held497 that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British Government to concede to the Indians the right of self-government … [if] minor concessions would be made by both sides, it seems to me that an agreement might yet be found.” Many Americans explicitly identified India’s contemporary predicament with that of their own country before the Revolution of 1776. “You’re the top / You’re Mahatma Gandhi!” wrote Cole Porter euphorically, reflecting the huge enthusiasm of his countrymen for the guru of the Indian independence movement. Such sentiment was wormwood to Churchill. At the best of times, he had little patience with the Indian people. His view was unchanged since he served among them as a cavalry subaltern in the 1890s. Leo Amery, the India secretary, found Churchill “a strange combination of great and small qualities498 … He is really not quite normal on the subject of India.” The prime minister opposed, for instance, granting Indian commissioned officers disciplinary powers over British other ranks. He expostulated against “the humiliation of being ordered about499 by a brown man.”

  Churchill was ruthlessly dismissive of Indian political aspirations when the Japanese army was at the gates. He could scarcely be expected to forget that the Mahatma had offered to mediate Britain’s surrender to Hitler, whom the standard-bearer of nonviolence and Indian freedom described as “not a bad man.” Gandhi in 1940 wrote an open letter to the British people, urging them to “lay down arms and accept whatever fate500 Hitler decided. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls nor your minds.”

  Much worse, however, was the U.S. president’s attempt to meddle with what the prime minister perceived as an exclusively British issue. It would never have occurred to Churchill to offer advice to Roosevelt about the future governance of America’s Philippines dependency. He deemed it rank cant for a nation which had itself colonised the North American continent, dispossessing and largely exterminating its indigenous population, and which still practised racial segregation, to harangue others about the treatment of native peoples.

  Here was an early, wholly unwelcome foretaste of the future. The United States, principal partner and paymaster of the alliance to defeat Fascism, was bent upon exercising decisive influence on the postwar global settlement. Churchill, who thought of nothing save victory and knew how remote this was in April 1942, found Roosevelt’s heavy-handedness irksome. He lost no time in flagging both his determination to stand fast against the Indian National Congress’s demands, and his sensitivity about American meddling. “Anything like a serious difference between you501 and me would break my heart,” he wrote to the president on April 12, “and would surely deeply injure both our countries at the height of this terrible struggle.” Roosevelt’s belief that the day of empires was done would achieve postwar vindication with a speed even he might have found surprising. Britain’s exercise of power over the Indian people between 1939 and 1945 was clumsy and ugly, and Churchill must bear some of the blame. But the prime minister was surely right in believing that a transfer of power in the midst of a world war was wholly unrealistic, especially when the Indian Congress’s attitude to the Allied cause was equivocal.

  The spring of 1942 brought some lifting of Allied spirits, especially after the U.S. Navy inflicted heavy damage on the Japanese in the May 4 Battle of the Coral Sea. Churchill changed his mind yet again about acceding to Russian demands for recognition of their territorial claims on Poland and the Baltic states. “We must remember that this is a bad thing,”502 he told the Cabinet. “We oughtn’t to do it, and I shan’t be sorry if we don’t.” On May 5, British forces landed in Madagascar, seeking to preempt a possible Japanese coup. Churchill wrote to his son, Randolph: “The depression following Singapore503 has been replaced by an undue optimism, which I am of course keeping in proper bounds.” He was much wounded by the criticisms that had fallen upon him since January. Before he made a national broadcast on May 10, he drafted a passage which he subsequently—and surely wisely—omitted to deliver, but which reflected the pain he had suffered in recent months:

  Everyone feels safer now504, and in consequence the weaker brethren become more vocal. Our critics are not slow
to dwell upon the misfortunes and reverses which we have sustained, and I am certainly not going to pretend that there have not been many mistakes and shortcomings. In particular, I am much blamed by a group of ex-ministers for my general conduct of the war. They would very much like to reduce my power of direction and initiative.

  Though I have to strive with dictators, I am not, I am glad to say, a dictator myself. I am only your servant. I have tried to be your faithful servant but at any moment, acting through the House of Commons, you can dismiss me to private life. There is one thing, however, which I hope you will not do; I hope you will never ask me or any successor you may choose to bear the burden of responsibility in times like these without reasonable authority and the means of taking decisions.

  Hugh Dalton wrote on May 12, 1942: “Dinner with [Tory MP] Victor Cazalet, who thinks we cannot possibly win the war with the present PM. He has, however, no good alternative.” King George VI, of all people, suggested to his prime minister at luncheon one day that the burden of also serving as defence minister was too much for him, and enquired gauchely what other aspect of public affairs he was interested in. Yet Churchill’s difficulty henceforward was that the most formidable challenge to his authority came not from his British critics, but from the nation’s overwhelmingly more powerful partner, the United States. When Harry Hopkins addressed MPs at the House of Commons on April 15, he sought to bolster Churchill’s standing by asserting that the prime minister was “the only man who really understands Roosevelt.” But the American also declared bluntly, as Harold Nicolson reported, that “there are many people in the USA505 who say that we are yellow and can’t fight.”

  Dill mused in a letter to Wavell from Washington, “One trouble is that we want everything506 from them from ships to razor blades and have nothing but services to give in return—and many of the services are past services.” A clever British official, Arthur Salter, wrote early in 1942: “It must be accepted that policy will increasingly507 be decided in Washington. To proceed as if it can be made in London and ‘put over’ in Washington, or as if British policy can in the main develop independently and be only ‘coordinated’ with America, is merely to kick against the pricks.” The prime minister led a nation whose role in the war seemed in those days confined to victimhood, not only at the hands of the enemy, but also at those of its mighty new ally. He yearned inexpressibly to recover the initiative on some battlefield. His generals, however, offered no prospect of offensive action before autumn. Amid the deep public disaffection of spring and summer, this seemed to Churchill an eternity away.

  2. Warriors and Workers

  CHURCHILL was reconciled to the fact that Britain’s defeats by Japan were irreversible until the tide of the war turned. Henceforward, recognising American dominance of Far East strategy, he devoted much less attention to the Japanese struggle than to the campaign against Germany. He remained bitterly dismayed by the failures of Auchinleck’s forces in the Western Desert, where a paper comparison of strengths, showing significant British superiority, suggested that victories should be attainable. At a meeting with his military chiefs, he asserted repeatedly: “I don’t know what we can do for that Army508—all our efforts to help them seem to be in vain.” Back in 1941, Cadogan, at the Foreign Office, wrote: “Our soldiers are the most pathetic amateurs509, pitted against professionals … The Germans are magnificent fighters and their Staff are veritable Masters of Warfare. Wavell and suchlike are no good against them. It’s like putting me up to play Bobby Jones over 36 holes. We shall learn, but it will be a long and bloody business.” Yet a year later, there seemed no evidence that the British Army and its commanders had yet “learned.” Cadogan wrote after the Far East disasters: “What will happen if the Germans get a footing here510? Our army is the mockery of the world!”

  Britain’s generals were conscious of their service’s low standing, but deemed it unjust that their own prime minister should sustain a barrage of harassment, criticism and even scorn against it. Especially between 1940 and 1942, they perceived themselves obliged to conduct campaigns with inadequate resources, in consequence of interwar defence policies imposed by the very Conservative Party which still dominated the government—though not, of course, by Churchill himself. Until 1943, and in lesser degree thereafter, the prestige of Britain’s soldiers lagged far behind that of its sailors and airmen. Churchill’s intemperate goading caused anger and distress to naval officers. He often threatened to sack dissenting or allegedly insufficiently aggressive admirals, including Sir Andrew Cunningham, Sir James Somerville of Force H and the Home Fleet’s Sir John Tovey. But even when the Royal Navy suffered severe setbacks and losses, its collective honour and reputation remained unchallenged. The army, meanwhile, enjoyed a more secure social place in British national life than did its U.S. counterpart, and attracted into its smart regiments successive generations of aristocratic younger sons. But it was much less effective as a military institution. For every clever officer such as Brooke, Ismay or Jacob, there were a hundred others lacking skill, energy and imagination.

  Churchill spent much of the first half of the war searching in mounting desperation for commanders capable of winning victories on land. Throughout his own long experience of war, he had been impressed by many heroes, but few British generals. In his 1932 work Great Contemporaries, he painted an unsympathetic portrait of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, principal conductor of the nation’s armies through the World War I bloodbath in France and Flanders:

  He presents to me in those red years511 the same mental picture as a great surgeon before the days of anaesthetics, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him: sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation: entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning. He would operate without excitement, or he would depart without being affronted; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.

  Churchill was determined that no British army in “his” war would be commanded by another such officer. Every general between 1939 and 1945 carried into battle an acute awareness of the animosity of the British people, and of their prime minister, towards the alleged “butchers” of 1914–18. In this baggage, indeed, may be found a source of the caution characteristic of their campaigns. Yet Britain’s military limitations went much deeper than mere generalship. It might have been profitable for Churchill to divert some of the hours he devoted to scanning the countenances and records of commanders instead to addressing the institutional culture of the British Army. John Kennedy expressed the War Office’s bafflement: “We manage by terrific efforts to pile up resources512 at the necessary places and then the business seems to go wrong, for lack of generalship and junior leadership and bad tactics and lack of concentration of force at decisive points.”

  Carl von Clausewitz laid down principles, rooted in his experience of the Napoleonic Wars, based on his perception that all European armies possessed approximately the same quality of weapons, training and potential. Thus, the Prussian believed that outcomes were determined by relative mass, and by the respective skills of rival commanders. If this was true in the early nineteenth century, it certainly was not in the Second World War. Allied and Axis armies displayed widely differing levels of ability and commitment. Superior weapons systems deployed by one side or the other sometimes produced decisive effects. Clausewitz distinguished three elements of war—policy, strategy and tactics. Churchill addressed himself with the keenest attention to the first two, but neglected the third, or rather allowed his commanders to do so.

  Britain could take pride in its distaste for militarism. But its inability to deploy effective armies until a late stage of the Second World War was a grievous handicap. Even competent British officers found it hard to extract from their forces performances good enough to beat the Germans or Japanese, who seemed to the prime minister to try much har
der. Conversely, Axis troops sometimes achieved more, especially in defence, than indifferent generalship by local commanders entitled Hitler or Hirohito to expect. Rommel, who in 1941–42 became a British obsession, was a fine leader and tactician, but his neglect of logistics contributed much to his own difficulties in North Africa. His triumphs over the British reflected the institutional superiority of his little German force as much as his own inspired opportunism. The Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead, a perceptive eyewitness, wrote from the desert in August 1942, in an assessment laid before British readers while the war was still being fought: “Rommel was an abler general than any on the British side513, and for this one reason—because the German army was an abler army than the British army. Rommel was merely the expression of that abler German army.”

  This seems to identify a fundamental Allied difficulty. Eighth Army’s defeats in North Africa in 1941–42, almost invariably by German troops inferior in numbers and armoured strength, certainly reflected inadequate generalship. But they were also the consequence of deeper shortcomings of method and determination. The British public was increasingly conscious of these. Glasgow secretary Pam Ashford wrote on June 24, 1942: “There is a general feeling that there is something wrong514 with our Forces … Mrs. Muir thought it was our generals who were not equal to the German generals, they get out-manoeuvred every time.” Young laboratory technician and former soldier Edward Stebbing wrote, “The feeling is growing that we are having515 our present reverses in Libya and the Far East not merely because of inferiority in numbers and equipment, but also because the enemy are really too clever for us, or rather that we are too stupid for the enemy.”