by Max Hastings
A signal arrived from Mountbatten, describing the raid on Dieppe that had taken place that day. Of six thousand men engaged, mostly Canadian, a thousand had been killed and two thousand taken prisoner. More than a hundred aircraft had been lost in fierce air battles with the Luftwaffe. Yet the chief of Combined Operations reported, absurdly: “Morale of returning troops reported to be excellent. All I have seen are in great form.” It was some time before Churchill fully grasped the disastrous character of the raid. Lessons were learned about the difficulties of attacking a hostile shore. Inflated RAF claims masked the reality that the Germans had that day shot down two British aircraft for every one which they themselves lost. Once more, a sense of institutional incompetence overlay the debacle. The invaders bungled the amphibious assault in every possible way, while the Germans responded with their accustomed speed and efficiency. After almost three years of war, Britain was incapable of conducting a limited surprise attack against an objective and at a moment of its own choice. Mountbatten was successful in evading responsibility, much of which properly belonged to him—back in May, he had boasted to Molotov about “his” impending operation. But leaders and planners had failed at every level. Incredibly, Gen. Sir Archibald Nye, acting CIGS in Brooke’s absence, was unaware that the raid was taking place. It is scant wonder that Churchill lacked confidence in his commanders, and remained morbidly fearful that Britain’s war-making instruments were doomed to break in his hand.
Only Beaverbrook, still banging a drum for the Second Front, seemed unchastened by the experience of Dieppe. His Evening Standard asserted that the shipping problems impeding an early invasion could be overcome if the Chiefs of Staff displayed more guts, declared the raid to have been a near victory, and editorialised on August 21, 1942: “The Germans cannot afford any more Dieppes either on land or in the air … Two or three simultaneous raids on a large scale would be too much for the three solitary Panzer divisions in France.” No general or minister doubted that such calls to arms were delivered at Beaverbrook’s explicit behest. The pressures upon the prime minister not merely for action but for success were now greater than at any time since he assumed office.
TWELVE
The Turn of Fortune
CHURCHILL’S PURGE OF desert generals was greeted in Britain with unsurprising caution. So many newly promoted officers had been welcomed as Wellingtons, only to be exposed as duffers. The Times’s military correspondent observed that commanders in the Middle East “have changed so frequently that the subject655 can now be approached only with tempered enthusiasm.” Through the months that followed, the British media displayed a wariness close to cynicism about Eighth Army’s prospects. A Times editorial on August 26 observed that neither the RAF’s bomber offensive nor the raid on Dieppe had “relieved the continuing sense of an inadequacy in the British military achievement at a time when our allies face a supreme crisis.” Journalist Maggie Joy Blunt wrote in her diary on August 19, expressing dismay about Dieppe: “While I grumble young Russia waits656 in agony for our Second Front. Here in England we are divided, despondent and without faith, ruled by old men, governed by money. The old fears, the old distrust are deeply rooted.” Such gloom was not confined to civilians. Brooke wrote later: “When looking back at those days657 in the light of after events one may be apt to overlook those ghastly moments of doubt which at the time crowded in on me.”
Churchill, who read newspapers avidly, cannot have gained much pleasure from their scepticism about the command changes. However, he returned to London on August 24 exhilarated by what he had seen in the desert and by the perceived success of his visit to Stalin. His boundless capacity for optimism was among his greatest virtues, at a time when those around him found it easier to succumb to gloom. On the night of August 30 Rommel, desperately short of fuel, attacked at Alam Halfa. The British, forewarned by Ultra, inflicted a decisive repulse on the Afrika Korps. The prime minister now became passionately anxious that Montgomery’s own offensive should be launched before the U.S. North African landings, provisionally scheduled for October. There was fresh trouble with Washington, where Marshall was urging Roosevelt to limit the scale of Torch, and to omit Algiers from its objectives. Churchill feared that he would have to defy medical advice and fly once more to see the president. Only on September 3 did Roosevelt accede to Churchill’s imprecations, which were supported by U.S. generals Dwight Eisenhower and Mark Clark in London. Torch was to proceed on November 8, with landings at Casablanca, Oran and Algiers.
But while Allied warlords nursed private excitement about the prospect of great happenings, the public and body politic perceived only continuing inactivity. Churchill indulged an outburst of self-pity on September 24, telling Alan Brooke that he, the prime minister, “was the only one trying to win the war658, that he was the only one who produced any ideas, that he was quite alone in all his attempts, no one supported him … Frequently in this oration he worked himself up into such a state from the woeful picture he had painted, that tears streamed down his face!”
It was inevitable that, having insisted upon assuming sole responsibility for direction of the war, Churchill should bear blame for the weaknesses which caused the armed forces so often to be seen to fail. Public dissatisfaction with Britain’s wartime government attained its highest pitch during the last weeks before a dramatic change of fortune. Many ministers and generals, who readily accepted that only Churchill could be Britain’s prime minister, were nonetheless convinced that he should divorce the premiership from the ministry of defence, delegating operational control of the war. But to whom? The mooted candidates were almost as unsuitable as had been the Duke of Gloucester. Leo Amery told Dill, home on leave, that he favoured appointing Wavell as “super–chief of staff … Dill agreed659, but said nothing could get Winston to face up to it however bad the present arrangement may be.” This exchange says little for the judgement of either man, but much about the mood in Whitehall towards the prime minister. Even Eden, Churchill’s most trusted colleague, was convinced that he should relinquish the ministry of defence.
Churchill later described September and October660 1942 as his most anxious months of the war. Amery complained after a Cabinet wrangle: “It is an awful thing dealing with a man661 like Winston who is at the same moment dictatorial, eloquent and muddle-headed.” Beaverbrook, unswervingly mischievous and disloyal, told Eden on October 8 that the prime minister was “a ‘bent’ man, and couldn’t be expected662 to last long … The future belonged to A.E.” Influential Canadian diplomat Humphrey Hume Wrong, in London on a fact-finding mission, wrote in his diary: “The dominance of Churchill emerges663 from all these talks. Cripps on the shelf, Attlee a lackey, Bracken the Man Friday of Churchill. It isn’t as bad as the political gossips make out, but it’s bad enough.”
If Churchill’s person was in Downing Street, his spirit was far away, in the drifting sands of Egypt. Montgomery was training troops, making plans, stockpiling ammunition, readying his new Sherman tanks. The foxy little general insisted upon launching Eighth Army’s offensive according to his own timetable, heedless of the prime minister’s impatience. A critical contribution to his campaign was already being made at sea. Guided by Ultra decrypts, the RAF and Royal Navy inflicted a series of devastating blows on the Italian tankers and supply ships fuelling and feeding the Afrika Korps. By late October, even before Eighth Army began its assault, the German logistical predicament in Egypt was desperate. The prime minister knew this from his Boniface decrypts, and dispatched a barrage of anxious, sometimes threatening, signals to Alexander. A British army strongly superior in men, tanks, guns and planes must surely be capable of defeating an enemy known to be almost immobilised for lack of fuel.
The operational value of Ultra material on the battlefield depended heavily on the receptiveness of individual commanders, and the quality of their intelligence chiefs. Some generals and admirals were astonishingly indifferent to the bounties they were offered. Montgomery was the first British desert commander t
o employ a top-class intelligence officer, in the person of Oxford academic Brig. Edgar Williams, and to heed his counsel. Ultra played a key role in enabling Montgomery to defeat Rommel’s thrust at Alam Halfa. Adm. Sir Dudley Pound, first sea lord until 1943, often used intelligence poorly, most notoriously during the PQ17 Arctic convoy battle. By contrast, the Admiralty’s Submarine Tracking Room was brilliantly conducted, and played a decisive role in the Battle of the Atlantic. In 1942, however, Bletchley’s inability to crack the U-boat cipher rendered Allied convoys appallingly vulnerable. November saw the worst losses of the war: some 721,700 tons of Allied shipping were sunk. Then, suddenly and dramatically, the code breakers achieved another breakthrough, and once more provided the Royal Navy with means to track U-boat positions. From December onwards, convoys could again be routed away from the submarine wolf packs. Thanks overwhelmingly to intelligence, the tide of the Atlantic battle, as well as of the Mediterranean campaign to interdict supplies to Rommel, turned decisively against Germany.
Montgomery launched his attack at El Alamein on October 23. Brendan Bracken said: “If we are beaten in this battle, it’s the end of Winston.”664 This was histrionic: within a fortnight the Torch landings far behind Rommel’s front would have rendered the German position in Egypt untenable. That is why Correlli Barnett, Douglas Porch and others have described El Alamein as “the unnecessary battle.”665 But it was a desperately necessary one for the self-esteem of the British people. Bracken’s words reflected the prevailing mood among even the prime minister’s most loyal supporters. Churchill had presided over so many failures. There must be a success—a British success. Some postwar strategists have argued that, if Montgomery had merely waited for Torch, he could then have fallen upon Rommel’s retreating army in the open, and achieved a far more devastating and less costly victory. But this was never a credible political option for Eighth Army—nor for the prime minister.
On the night of October 23, he attended a dinner for Eleanor Roosevelt at Buckingham Palace. A courtier wrote:
Winston was like a cat on hot bricks666, waiting for the news of the start of Alexander’s offensive in Egypt. This … had begun at 8 pm our time, and I had to go out in the middle to get the news by telephone from No. 10. After a brief interval, nothing would content Winston but to go to the telephone himself. His conversation evidently pleased him, for he walked back along the passage singing “Roll Out the Barrel” with gusto, but with little evidence of musical talent. This astonished the posse of footmen through which he had to pass. I wondered what their Victorian predecessors would have thought had they heard Dizzy, or Mr. G[ladstone], singing “Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road” in similar circumstances.
Back in June, Auchinleck had chosen to halt his retreat and defend a line at El Alamein. South of a narrow stretch of desert, there less than forty miles wide, hills rendered the position impervious to flank attack. In contrast to most North African battlefields, there was little room for manoeuvre: it was necessary for an attacker to batter a path by frontal assault through minefields, wire and deep defences. In August, when Rommel attacked, these circumstances profited the British. Seven weeks later, they enabled 104,000 Germans and Italians to mount an unexpectedly staunch defence against 195,000 British troops and overwhelming firepower. Gen. Georg Stumme, acting as Axis commander during Rommel’s absence on sick leave, was killed in the first days. Rommel returned. For almost a week, the British pounded and hammered at his positions. Churchill and the British people held their breath. The first news was good—but so it had often been before, to be followed by crushing disappointments. The British no longer dared to anticipate victory. One minister, Amery, wrote on October 26: “I am terribly anxious lest even with our superior weight667 of tanks and artillery and aircraft it might yet prove another Passchendaele, and we spend ourselves in not quite getting through.”
Churchill became seriously alarmed when, on October 28, Montgomery paused and regrouped. He dispatched a threatening minute to Brooke: “It is most necessary that the attack should be resumed before Torch. A standstill now will be proclaimed a defeat. We consider the matter most grave.” British armies had been here so often before. Auchinleck had achieved comparable successes, only to see them crumble to dust. Then, on November 2, Montgomery launched his decisive blow, Operation Supercharge. “How minute and fragile668 one felt, trapped in this maelstrom of explosive fury!” wrote a bewildered young British platoon commander. “When we moved forward we scuttled like mice across the inhospitable sand … ready to sway and flatten ourselves to earth if a shell burst nearby … We were being fired upon. Though this was the very meaning of war, I felt a sense of outrage and betrayal. Someone had blundered. How could the chaos conceivably resolve itself into a successful attack? Yet all the major battles of history must have seemed like this, a hopeless shambles to the individual in front, with a coherence only discernible to those in the rear.”
Montgomery’s men broke through. Ultra revealed to the British that Rommel considered himself beaten, and was in full retreat. Churchill rejoiced. At a Downing Street lunch he gleefully told guests, including MP Harold Nicolson: “There is more jam to come669. Much more jam. And in places where you least expect it.” After this coy hint at Torch, across the same lunch table he told Brendan Bracken to order the nation’s church bells rung. When the proposal met doubts, he agreed to delay until November 15, to ensure that no accident befell Allied arms. Thereafter, he was determined that the British people should recognise just cause for celebration.
Brooke wrote in his diary: “If Torch succeeds we are beginning to stop losing this war.”670 Early on Sunday, November 8, Allied forces landed in North Africa. Eisenhower’s command was initially small, half the size of Montgomery’s—107,000 men, 35,000 of them British. But the symbolic significance of this first commitment of American ground troops on a non-Pacific battlefield was immense. Though the invaders encountered some fierce resistance from Vichy forces, all the beachheads were swiftly secured. Churchill cabled congratulations to Marshall, adding wryly: “We shall find the problems of success not less puzzling though more agreeable than those we have hitherto surmounted together.” The Times wrote of the prime minister’s performance at the annual Mansion House dinner on November 10: “A sense of exaltation pervaded Mr. Churchill’s speech671. It was the speaker’s due. In the toil and sweat and tears to which he summoned his country he has borne a leader’s share.” Dalton wrote on November 12: “The self-respect of the British Army672 is on the way to being re-established. Last week … a British general was seen to rush in front of a waiting queue at a bus stop and to leap upon the moving vehicle. One onlooker said he would not have dared to do this a week before.”
Alexander and Montgomery became Britain’s military heroes of the hour, and indeed of the rest of the war. The former was especially fortunate to find laurels conferred upon him, for his talents were limited. Hereafter, Alexander basked in Churchill’s favour. He conformed to the prime minister’s beau ideal of the gentleman warrior. While forces under his command would endure many setbacks, they never suffered absolute defeat. Montgomery was a much more impressive personality, a superb manager and trainer of troops, the first important British commander to display the steel necessary to fight the Germans with success. Montgomery’s conceit was notorious. In one of his proclamations in the wake of a victory, he asserted that it had been achieved “with the help of God.” In the United Services Club, an officer observed sardonically that “it was nice Monty had at last mentioned673 the Almighty in dispatches.” Yet Churchill and Brooke knew that diffidence and modesty are seldom found in successful commanders. Montgomery had few, if any, of the attributes of a gentleman. This was all to the good, even if it rendered him less socially congenial to the prime minister than Alexander. Gentlemen had presided over too many British disasters.
“Monty’s” professionalism was allied to a shrewd understanding of what could, and could not, be demanded of a British citizen army in whose ranks the
re were many men willing to do their duty, but few who sought to become heroes. He does not deserve to rank among history’s great captains, but he was a notable improvement upon the generals who had led Britain’s forces in the first half of the Second World War. A carapace of vanity armoured him against prime ministerial harrowing of the kind that so wounded Wavell and Auchinleck. In the autumn and winter of 1942, it was the newcomers’ good fortune to display adequacy at a time when the British achieved a formidable superiority of men, tanks and aircraft.
“We are winning victories!”674 exulted London charity worker Vere Hodgson on November 29. “It is difficult to get used to this state of things. Defeats we don’t mind—we have all developed a stoical calm over such things in England. But actually to be advancing! To be taking places! One has an uneasy sense of enjoying a forbidden luxury.” Aneurin Bevan said nastily that the prime minister “always refers to a defeat or a disaster as though it came from God, but to a victory as though it came from himself.” Throughout the war, Bevan upheld Britain’s democratic tradition by sustaining unflagging criticism of the government. To those resistant to Welsh oratory, however, his personality was curiously repellent. A dogged class warrior, he harried Churchill across the floor of the Commons as relentlessly when successes were being celebrated as when defeats were lamented. Bevan drew attention to the small size of the forces engaged at El Alamein and to the dominance of Commonwealth troops in Montgomery’s army. His figures were accurate, but his scorn was at odds with the spirit of the moment, which was full of gratitude, as was the prime minister. At a Cabinet meeting on November 9, Churchill offered the government’s congratulations to the CIGS and secretary of state for the army’s performance. This was, wrote Brooke sourly later, “the only occasion on which he expressed publicly675 any appreciation or thanks for work I had done during the whole of the period I worked for him.”
