Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  For a generation after the Second World War, when British perceptions of the experience were overwhelmingly nationalistic, El Alamein was seen as the turning point. In truth, of course, Stalingrad—which reached its climax a few weeks later—was vastly more important. Montgomery took thirty thousand German and Italian prisoners in his battle, the Russians ninety thousand in theirs, which inflicted a quarter of a million losses on Hitler’s Sixth Army. But El Alamein was indeed decisive for Britain’s prime minister. On November 22, he felt strong enough to allow Stafford Cripps to resign from the War Cabinet, relegating him to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Churchill said of Cripps to Stalin: “His chest is a cage, in which two squirrels are at war, his conscience and his career.” Cripps had pressed proposals for removing the direction of the war from the prime minister’s hands. Now, these could safely be dismissed, their author sidelined. His brief imposture as a rival to the national leader was over. In the ensuing thirty months of the German war, though the British people often grew jaded and impatient, never again was Churchill’s mastery seriously questioned.

  As Montgomery’s forces continued to drive west across Libya, the prime minister looked ahead. Fortified by Ultra-based intelligence, he felt confident that the combination of Eighth Army’s victory at El Alamein and the Torch landings ensured the Germans’ expulsion from North Africa. No more than anyone else did he anticipate Hitler’s sudden decision to reinforce failure, and the consequent prolongation of the campaign. In November 1942, it seemed plausible that the entire North African littoral would be cleared of the enemy by early 1943. What, then, for 1943? The Chiefs of Staff suggested Sicily and Sardinia. This prompted a contemptuous sally from Downing Street: “Is it really to be supposed that the Russians676 will be content with our lying down like this during the whole of 1943, while Hitler has a third crack at them?” Churchill talked instead of possible landings in Italy or southern France, perhaps even northwest Europe. Though he soon changed his mind, in November he still shared American hopes for Roundup, a major invasion of the Continent in 1943. He also remained mindful of his commitments to Stalin, and was acutely anxious not to be seen again to break faith. He told the War Office on November 23: “I never meant the Anglo-American Army677 to be stuck in North Africa. It is a springboard and not a sofa.”

  The Americans were unjust in supposing that Churchill always shared the extreme caution of his generals. On the contrary, the prime minister was foremost among those urging commanders to act more boldly. As he told the House of Commons on November 11, “I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded. In fact, if anything, I am a prod. My difficulties rather lie in finding the patience and self-restraint through many anxious weeks for the results to be achieved.” For most of the Second World War, Churchill was obliged to struggle against his military advisers’ fear of battlefield failure, which in 1942 had become almost obsessive. Alan Brooke was a superbly gifted officer, who forged a remarkable partnership with Churchill. But, if Allied operations had advanced at a pace dictated by the War Office, or indeed by Brooke himself, the conflict’s ending would have come much later than it did. The British had grown so accustomed to poverty of resources and shortcomings of battlefield performance that it had become second nature for them to expect the worst. Churchill himself, by contrast, shared with the Americans a desire to hasten forward Britain’s creaky military machine. It was not that Britain’s top soldiers were unwilling to fight. It was that they deemed it prudent to fight slowly. Oliver Harvey noted on November 14, with a cynicism that would have confirmed Stalin in all his convictions: “The Russian army having played the allotted role678 of killing Germans, our Chiefs of Staff think by 1944 they could stage a general onslaught on the exhausted animal.”

  This is an important and piercing insight upon British wartime strategy from 1942 onwards. There was a complacency, here explicitly avowed by Harvey, about the bloodbath on the Eastern Front. Neither Churchill nor Brooke ever openly endorsed the expressed desire of their colleagues to see the Germans and Soviets destroy each other. But they certainly wanted the vast attritional struggle in the east to spare the Western Allies from anything similar. Most nations in most wars have no option save to engage an adversary confronting them in the field. The Anglo-Americans, by contrast, were quarantined from their enemies by eminently serviceable expanses of water, which conferred freedom of choice about where and when to join battle. This privilege was exercised wisely, from the viewpoint of the two nations. The lives of their young men were diligently husbanded. But such self-interested behaviour, almost as ruthless as Moscow’s own, was bound to incur Russian anger.

  The Allied invasion of French colonial Africa provoked a political crisis. By chance, Adm. Jean Darlan, Vichy vice president and foreign minister, was in Algiers when the Americans arrived. He assumed command of French forces which, to the surprise and dismay of U.S. commanders, resisted their would-be liberators with considerable energy, inflicting some 1,400 American casualties. There was then a negotiation, however, which caused Darlan to order his troops to lay down their arms, saving many more American lives. He was rewarded by Eisenhower, Allied supreme commander of Torch, with recognition as France’s high commissioner and de facto ruler of North Africa. The British, unconsulted, were stunned. Darlan had collaborated enthusiastically with the Germans since 1940. It had seemed plausible that he might lead the French navy against Britain—de Gaulle thought so. “La France ne marchera pas,”679 he told Churchill, “mais la flotte—peut-être;” “France will not march [on Britain]. But the fleet—perhaps.” Now, Darlan’s betrayal of Vichy demonstrated his moral bankruptcy. In his new role, he rejected requests for the liberation of Free French prisoners in North African jails, and indeed treated such captives with considerable brutality. Many exiled Frenchmen missed a great opportunity in November 1942 to sink their differences and throw themselves wholeheartedly into the struggle against the Axis. A British senior officer wrote aggrievedly: “Although the French hate the Germans680, they hate us more.” De Gaulle, Britain’s anointed representative of “Fighting France,” was, of course, outraged by the Darlan appointment, as was Eden. The Foreign Office had supported its lofty French standardbearer through many outbursts of Churchillian exasperation, and in the face of implacable American hostility.

  Throughout Churchill’s life, he displayed a fierce commitment to France. He cherished a belief in its greatness which contrasted with American contempt. Roosevelt perceived France as a decadent imperial power which had lacked British resolution in 1940. Entirely mistakenly, given the stormy relationship between de Gaulle and Churchill, the president thought the general a British puppet. He was determined to frustrate any attempt to elevate de Gaulle to power when the Allies liberated France. The Americans had none of the visceral hatred for Vichy that prevailed in London. Since 1940 they had sustained diplomatic relations with Pétain’s regime, which in their eyes retained significant legitimacy. Here was a further manifestation of British sensitivities born of suffering and proximity, while the United States displayed a detachment rooted in comfortable inviolability.

  In November 1942, British political and public opinion reacted violently to Darlan’s appointment. Just as the country was denied knowledge of Stalin’s excesses, so it had been told nothing of de Gaulle’s intransigence. British people knew only that the general was a patriot who had chosen honourable exile in London, while Darlan was a notorious Anglophobe and lackey of the Nazis. When Churchill addressed a secret session of the Commons about the North African crisis on December 10, the mood of MPs was angry and uncomprehending. In private, since Darlan’s appointment on November 8, Churchill had wavered. He disliked the admiral intensely. But he was also weary of de Gaulle’s tantrums. He deemed the solidarity of the Anglo-American alliance to transcend all other considerations. He spoke to the House with remarkable frankness—such frankness, indeed, that after the war much of what he said was omitted from the published record of his speeches to the Commons’ secret
sessions.

  “In war,681” he said, “it is not always possible to have everything go exactly as one likes. In working with Allies it sometimes happens that they develop opinions of their own … I cannot feel that de Gaulle is France, still less that Darlan and Vichy are France. France is something greater, more complex, more formidable than any of the sectional manifestations … The House must not be left to believe that General de Gaulle is an unfaltering friend of Britain. On the contrary, I think he is one of those good Frenchmen who have a traditional antagonism ingrained in French hearts by centuries of war against the English … I could not recommend you to base all your hopes and confidence upon him.”

  He went on to explain to the Commons that Gen. Henri Giraud, whom the Americans thought a more suitable prospective national leader than de Gaulle, had been smuggled out of France by the Allies with the explicit intention that he should assume authority in North Africa. This purpose was confounded only when Giraud was rebuffed by senior French officers on the spot. Averell Harriman wrote: “I have always deemed it tragic that the British682 picked De Gaulle and even more tragic that we picked Giraud.” On December 10 MPs, perhaps impressed by how fully Churchill confided in them, were placated by his arguments. In private, the British government redoubled its efforts to get Darlan removed from office. The Americans rejected London’s proposal—an implausible one—that Harold Macmillan, British resident minister in the Mediterranean, should assume temporary authority in Algiers. Anglo-American relations were still steeped in acrimony on this issue when it was unexpectedly resolved. On December 24, a young French royalist burst into Darlan’s office at the Summer Palace and shot him dead.

  Responsibility for the assassination remains one of the last significant mysteries of the Second World War. The immediate perpetrator, one Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, was hurried before a firing squad two days later. Oliver Harvey, Eden’s private secretary, expressed most undiplomatic dismay about the execution: “It shows how wrong you get if once you compromise with evil683. You find yourself shooting a good man for doing what you should have done yourself.” It was a relief to almost everyone else, however, that Bonnier de la Chapelle was extinguished without revealing details of his plot. That there was a plot is certain. A priest granted Bonnier de la Chapelle absolution for his action before he walked into the Summer Palace, and modern conspiracy theorists have not failed to notice that Brigadier Menzies, chief of the SIS, was in Algiers on Christmas Eve. The historian David Reynolds believes that the British684 were implicated. The most likely explanation, however, is that the killer was incited by a Free French group. Though there is no evidence of de Gaulle’s personal complicity, the ruthless behaviour of his London organisation between 1940 and 1944 makes this credible.

  While Darlan’s murder was ugly, it lifted a heavy shadow from Anglo-American relations. General Giraud was installed in Darlan’s place. After tortured negotiations between Churchill, Eden and de Gaulle in London, the two Frenchmen achieved a grudging and distant accommodation. Macmillan’s attitude reflected that of many British politicians and diplomats: “One comes away, as always after conversations with De Gaulle685, wondering whether he is a demagogue or a madman, but convinced that he is a more powerful character than any other Frenchman with whom one has yet been in contact.” This widely shared view caused most British politicians and diplomats to conclude that de Gaulle must continue to be supported. Churchill kicked against such realism, demanding with extravagant verbosity that the general should be dumped. At the last, however, he sulkily acquiesced. De Gaulle remained recognised by London, though not by Washington, as the principal representative of France in exile.

  On November 29, 1942, Churchill minuted the Chiefs of Staff: “I certainly think that we should make all plans to attack the French coast either in the Channel or in the Bay of Biscay, and that 12 July 1943 should be fixed as the target date.” Throughout this period, he pressed Roosevelt repeatedly to expedite the U.S. buildup in Europe so that the invasion of France could take place in 1943. Astonishingly or even perversely, given his almost unflagging enthusiasm for attacking the supposed “soft underbelly” of the Axis, on December 1 Churchill wrote to Brooke: “It may be that we should close down the Mediterranean activities by the end of June with a view to Round-Up in August.” The U.S. Chiefs of Staff were wholly justified in their belief that their British counterparts were unwilling to execute a 1943 cross-Channel attack. But they did an injustice to Churchill in supposing that he, too, had at this stage closed his mind. In the course of the next year, he vacillated repeatedly.

  Marshall and his colleagues also underrated the professional skill and judgement of Brooke and his team. American practise was founded upon an expectation that means could always be found to fulfil chosen national objectives. Thus, Roosevelt’s Chiefs of Staff decided upon a purpose, then addressed the practical problems of fulfilling it. The British Chiefs, by contrast, forever struggling against straitened resources, declined to endorse any course of action unless they could see how it was to be executed. Such caution irked Churchill as much as the Americans: “I do not want any of your own long-term projects,”686 he often expostulated to Brooke, shaking his fist in the CIGS’s face. “All they do is cripple initiative.”

  In December 1942, it seemed to Britain’s service chiefs that it would be impossible to mass sufficient landing craft to support a D-Day in 1943. Pressure on shipping was unrelenting in every theatre. In addition, there were never enough troops. British relations with the Australian government were further strained in December by Canberra’s insistence that 9th Australian Division should return home from North Africa, even though the threat of a Japanese invasion of Australia had been lifted. Churchill cabled Curtin, the Australian prime minister, that he did not consider this decision “in accordance with the general strategic interests of the United Nations,” but Canberra remained implacable. Curtin’s enthusiasm for leaving his men to fight at British discretion cannot have been enhanced by news that, while only 6 percent of the Allied troops at El Alamein were Australian, they suffered 14 percent of Montgomery’s casualties in the battle.

  And now the two North African campaigns faltered. The Allies were confounded by Hitler’s decision to reinforce the theatre. While this was strategically foolish, it rendered much more difficult the immediate task of the British and U.S. armies. American commanders and troops lacked experience. Though the Allies had numerical superiority in men, tanks and aircraft, the Germans fought with their usual skill and persistence. Alexander was famous for his courtesy and charm in addressing the Americans, but in private he railed at their military incompetence.

  His reservations about Eisenhower’s soldiers were just, but it ill-became a British officer to express them. The British contingent in Ike’s forces, designated as First Army, was led by Gen. Sir Kenneth Anderson. Anderson proved yet another in the long line of his nation’s inadequate field commanders—“not much good,”687 in Brooke’s succinct words of dismissal. Operations in Tunisia dispelled any notion that First Army’s men were entitled to patronise their U.S. counterparts. Eisenhower was more willing than most of his countrymen to hide frustrations about Allied shortcomings, but he wrote in his diary on January 5, 1943: “Conversations with the British grow wearisome688. They’re difficult to talk to, apparently afraid that someone is trying to tell them what to do and how to do it. Their practice of war is dilatory.” A few days later, he added: “British, as usual, are scared someone will take advantage of them even if we furnish everything.” In another entry, he described the British as “stiff-necked.” Richard Crossman of Britain’s Political Warfare Executive thought that “getting on with Americans is frightfully easy689, if only one will talk quite frankly and not give the appearance of being too clever, but v[ery] few English seem to have achieved it.” In North Africa, they were less than impressed by Eisenhower. Though Churchill’s scepticism was later modified by necessity and experience, that winter he was sufficiently irritated by the gene
ral’s perceived blunders to evade fulfilment of Ike’s request for a signed photograph of himself.

  At the beginning of December, the prime minister sketched a design for 1943 based upon his expectation that Tunisia would be occupied by the year’s end, and North Africa cleared of Axis forces a month later. By Christmas, this timetable was wrecked. Eighth Army’s westward advance against Rommel progressed much more slowly than Churchill had hoped in early November. The Russian convoy programme was further dislocated by the need to keep large naval forces in the Mediterranean. The British joint planners, unambitious as ever, favoured making Sardinia the Allies’ next objective. The prime minister dismissed this notion, urging that Sicily was a much worthier target. But he had begun to perceive that a 1943 D-Day in France was implausible.

  Churchill now wanted a conference of the “Big Three,” to settle strategy. He loved summits, a coinage which he invented, not least because he believed that the force of his own personality could accomplish ends more impressive than his nation’s real strength could deliver, in its fourth year of war. But Stalin declined a proposal to meet in Khartoum, saying that he could not leave Moscow. Roosevelt was often less enthusiastic than Churchill about personal encounters. Just as the prime minister hoped for disproportionate results from these, to the advantage of his own country, so the president knew that the wealth and might of the United States spoke more decisively than any words which he might utter at a faraway conference table. But he liked the idea of visiting this theatre of war, and accepted Churchill’s proposal for a meeting to be held in liberated Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast of North Africa.