Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  Moreover, all operations of war must be judged in the context of the forces available to carry them out. The Allies had insufficient shipping in the Mediterranean to put ashore an army large enough to risk a decisive thrust inland. Lucas has often been criticized for failure to strike swiftly towards Rome in the wake of his corps’ successful landing. He was certainly a poor general. But had he done as the fire-eaters wished and dashed for the capital, he would have exposed a long, thin salient to counterattack. The Germans always punished excessive boldness, as they did nine months later at Arnhem. The likeliest outcome of a dash for Rome from Anzio would have been the destruction of Lucas’s corps. As it was, despite four months of misery which the defenders of the Anzio perimeter now resigned themselves to endure, they were rewarded with belated success.

  So bitter was the struggle on the coast, matched by the battle farther south for the heights of Monte Cassino, that the Allies experienced little joy in the capture of Rome when it came in June 1944. But what took place was preferable to what might have been had a more daring commander led the Anzio assault. Shingle confirmed the U.S. Chiefs of Staff in their conviction that Italy offered only poisoned fruits. “The more one sees of this peninsula853, the less suited it seems for modern military operations,” agreed Harold Macmillan. The campaign could not be abandoned, but henceforward the Americans viewed it as a liability. They would support no more of Churchill’s adventures, in the Mediterranean or anywhere else.

  Events in Italy in the winter of 1943–44 once more highlighted the gulf between the prime minister’s heroic aspirations and the limitations of Allied armies fighting the Germans. “I gather we are still stronger than the enemy,” he signalled to Alexander on February 10, “and naturally one wonders why over 70,000 British and Americans should be hemmed in on the defensive by what are thought to be at most 60,000 Germans”—in reality there were 90,000. He wrote to Smuts on February 27 that his confidence in Alexander was “undiminished,” adding sadly: “Though if I had been well enough to be at his side as I had hoped at the critical moment, I believe I could have given the necessary stimulus. Alas for time, distance, illness and advancing years.” If the generals of Britain and America had been Marlboroughs or Lees, if their citizen soldiers had displayed the mettle of Spartans, they might have accomplished in the Mediterranean such great deeds as Churchill’s imagination conceived for them. But they were not and did not. They were mortal clay, doing their best against an outstanding commander, Kesselring, and one of the greatest armies the world has ever seen.

  Churchill had been right, in 1942 and 1943, to force upon the Americans campaigns in the Mediterranean, when there was nowhere else they could credibly fight. He told the House of Commons on February 22: “On broad grounds of strategy, Hitler’s decision to send into the south of Italy as many as eighteen divisions, involving, with their maintenance troops, probably something like half a million Germans, and to make a large secondary front in Italy, is not unwelcome to the Allies … We must fight the Germans somewhere, unless we are to stand still and watch the Russians.” But by now there was a lameness about such an explanation. In 1944, Churchill’s Italian vision was overtaken by that of Overlord, a huge and indispensable American conception. After Anzio, even the prime minister himself implicitly acknowledged this, and embraced the prospect of D-Day with increasing excitement. Though his enthusiasm for Mediterranean operations never subsided, he was obliged to recognise that the major battles in the west would be fought in France, not Italy.

  In the spring of 1944, Churchill was full of apprehension not only about Overlord, but also about the mood of the British people. Several lost by-elections exposed voters’ lack of enthusiasm for the government, and weariness with the war. After an Independent Labour candidate in West Derbyshire on February 18 defeated the Tory Lord Hartington, who campaigned with the prime minister’s conspicuous endorsement, Jock Colville wrote: “Sitting in a chair in his study854 at the Annexe, the PM looked old, tired and very depressed and was even muttering about a General Election. Now, he said, with great events pending, was the time when national unity was essential, the question of annihilating great states had to be faced; it began to look as if democracy had not the persistence necessary to go through with it, however well it might have shewn its capacity of defence.” In Churchill’s Commons speech of February 22, he delivered a contemptuous jab at his critics, “little folk who frolic alongside the juggernaut of war to see what fun or notoriety they can extract from the proceedings.” Five days later, writing to Smuts, he alluded to such people again: “Their chirpings will presently be stilled855 by the thunder of the cannonade.” On March 25, to Roosevelt, he wrote ruefully, “We certainly do have plenty to worry us, now that our respective democracies feel so sure that the whole war is as good as won.” Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam wrote in April 1944: “In the H of C smoking room856 a new leader is decided upon almost every other day.”

  There was much to vex Churchill, the burden made heavier because so few of the difficulties and hazards could be publicly avowed. Countless hours were devoted to Poland. The Polish exile government in London was obdurately opposed to changes in its frontiers—the shift of the entire country a step westward—which Churchill had reluctantly accepted. Its representatives persisted in proclaiming their anger towards Moscow about the Katyn massacres. What adherent of freedom and democracy could blame them? Yet so astonishing was the popularity of Russia in Britain that opinion surveys showed a decline in public enthusiasm for the Poles, because of their declared hostility to Moscow. Again and again, the prime minister urged the exiles to mute their protests. Since Russia would soon possess physical mastery of their country, Soviet goodwill was indispensable to any possibility that they might share in its postwar governance. Stalin lied flatly to Churchill, asserting that he had no intention of influencing Poland’s internal politics, and that the Poles would be free to choose their own postwar rulers. But in a stream of cables and letters, the Soviet warlord vented his own anger, as real as it was base and monstrously hypocritical, about the London Poles’ declarations of hostility to the Soviet Union.

  It was plain to Churchill that the prospects of a free Poland were slender, and shrinking. Amid the exiles’ rejections of his pleas for realism, his lonely battle to restore the nation to freedom was being lost. In all probability, nothing within the power of the Western Allies would have saved Poland from Stalin’s maw. There was one dominant, intractable reality: the Soviet Union’s insistence upon exacting its price for the twenty-eight million Russians who died in the struggle to destroy Nazism. On March 3, Eden asked Churchill to cable Moscow personally about the case of two Royal Navy seamen seized in Murmansk after a drunken brawl and sentenced to penal servitude in Siberia. The prime minister wrote to the foreign secretary: “I cannot send such a telegram which would embroil me with Bruin on a small point when so many large ones are looming up.” Instead, he suggested to Eden that questions in Parliament might generate useful publicity about the case: “A little anti-Russian feeling in the House of Commons would be salutary at the present time.” When Sir John Anderson wrote to Churchill urging that the Russians should be told of the Allies’ “Tube Alloys” project—creation of the atomic bomb—Churchill scrawled in the margin of Anderson’s minute: “On no account.”857

  Eden wrote in his diary about Poland: “Soviet attitude on this business858 raises most disquieting thoughts. Is Soviet regime one which will ever cooperate with the West?” A few days later he added: “I confess to growing apprehension that Russia859 has vast aims and that these may include the domination of Eastern Europe and even the Mediterranean and the ‘communising’ of much that remains.” In Italy, the Soviets refused to deal with the Allied Control Commission, and instead appointed their own ambassador with a mandate to embarrass the Anglo-Americans. It was painful for Churchill, who knew the truth about Stalin’s tyranny and the perils posed by his ambitions, to be obliged to indulge the British people’s romantic delusions, and to echo
their gratitude for Russian sacrifices. Even as he was participating in an exceptionally harsh exchange of cables with Moscow on a range of issues, in a BBC broadcast on March 26 he nonetheless made a generous tribute to the Red Army. Its 1943 offensive, he said, “constitutes the greatest cause of Hitler’s undoing.” The Russian people had been extraordinarily fortunate to find, “in their supreme ordeal and agony a warrior leader, Marshal Stalin, whose authority enables him to combine and control the movements of armies numbered by many millions upon a front of nearly 2,000 miles, and to impart a unity and a concert to the war direction in the East which has been very good for Russia and for all her Allies.” All this was true, but represented only a portion of reality.

  Meanwhile, elsewhere, difficulties persisted with the French. Harold Macmillan wrote from Algiers: “I would much rather get what we want860—if we can—through the French rather than by imposing it on the French. But it is a difficult hand for me to play … the trouble is that neither the President nor the PM has any confidence in de Gaulle.” Churchill had adopted a jaundiced view ever since, at Brazzaville in the Congo in July 1941, the intransigent general gave an interview to the Chicago Daily News in which he suggested that Britain was “doing a wartime deal with Hitler.” Churchill and Eden several times discussed the possibility that de Gaulle was mentally unhinged. The prime minister had become sick to death of his petulance and studied discourtesy. It seemed intolerable that Britain should struggle with Washington on behalf of Free France, which the Americans despised, and be rewarded only with ingratitude from its leader.

  During Churchill’s time in North Africa, he spent many hours with Macmillan and de Gaulle and other prominent Frenchmen, seeking to sustain a veneer of unity. His efforts were sabotaged by de Gaulle’s unilateralism. At one moment, the general ordered the arrest of three prominent Vichyites in Algiers, which provoked an explosion of Churchillian exasperation. British politicians and diplomats exhausted themselves pleading before the prime minister the case for de Gaulle, a habitual offender facing a judge minded to don the black cap. After one exchange, Macmillan wrote: “Much as I love Winston861, I cannot stand much more.” Yet two days later, like almost every other close associate of the prime minister’s, he relented: “He is really a remarkable man. Although he can be so tiresome and pig-headed, there is no one like him. His devotion to work and duty is quite extraordinary.”

  Churchill’s commitment to restoring France to its rightful position as a great nation never wavered. For this, and for fighting the Americans so staunchly in support of its interests, the British government merited, though never received, its Gallic neighbour’s enduring gratitude. In Quebec the previous year, Eden argued fiercely with Cordell Hull about the virtues of French resurrection: “We both got quite heated at one time862 when I told him we had to live twenty miles from France and I wanted to rebuild her as far as I could.” Macmillan observed that while Roosevelt hated de Gaulle, Churchill’s sentiments were more complex: “He feels about De Gaulle863 like a man who has quarrelled with his son. He will cut him off with a shilling. But (in his heart) he would kill the fatted calf if only the prodigal would confess his faults and take his orders obediently in future.” Since this would never happen, however, there were many moments in 1943–44 when, but for Eden’s loyalty to de Gaulle, Churchill would have cut the Frenchman adrift.

  Even now, with two million men training and arming in Britain for the invasion, Churchill chose to sustain the dangerous fiction—dangerous because of the mistrust of himself which it fed among Americans—that Overlord still represented an option rather than an absolute commitment. In February he invited the Chiefs of Staff to review plans for Jupiter—an assault on northern Norway—if the French landings failed. He convened a committee to report to him weekly on the progress of D-Day preparations, and wrote to Marshall on February 15: “I am hardening very much on this operation as the time approaches in the sense of wishing to strike if humanly possible, even if the limiting conditions we laid down at Tehran are not exactly fulfilled.” The conditional was still there, as it was in a message to Roosevelt which he drafted on March 25: “What is the latest date on which a decision can be taken as to whether ‘Overlord’ is or is not to be launched on the prescribed date? … If…20 or 25 mobile German divisions are already in France on the date in question, what are we going to do?” This cable, which would have roused the most acute American dismay, was withheld after prudent second thoughts. But it reflected Churchill’s continuing uncertainty, ten weeks before D-Day.

  In the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan wrote: “I am much distressed to see864 a worsening of Anglo-American relations generally since Eisenhower left and I am also not very hopeful of getting any new idea into the PM’s mind at present.” There was much debate and many changes of heart about Anvil, a prospective landing in the south of France originally scheduled to coincide with the descent on Normandy. The British, having favoured the scheme, now turned sour because of its inevitable impact on Allied strength in Italy. On March 21 Maitland Wilson signalled, recommending Anvil’s cancellation. After protracted exchanges with Washington, most about landing craft, it was agreed to postpone the operation. Churchill became increasingly sceptical, and finally absolutely hostile. He favoured diversionary landings by commandos on the Atlantic coast of France. He also remained resolute in his enthusiasm for an invasion of Sumatra, exasperating his own Chiefs of Staff and especially Brooke. They opposed the scheme on its merits, and also knew that the Americans would never provide the necessary shipping. Washington was interested only in an offensive into upper Burma, to open a China passage. This, with deep reluctance, the British finally agreed to undertake.

  Churchill’s closest wartime colleagues, above all the Chiefs of Staff, emerged from the Second World War asserting the prime minister’s greatness as a statesman, while deploring his shortcomings as a strategist. Yet no Allied leader displayed unbroken wisdom. Churchill’s grand vision of the war was superb. Even acknowledging his anachronistic delusions about the future of the British Empire, he articulated the hopes and ambitions of the Grand Alliance as no other man, including Roosevelt, was capable of doing. His record as a warlord should be judged by what was done rather than by what was said. He indulged many flights of fancy, but insisted upon realisation of very few. The 1943 Aegean adventure was an exception rather than a commonplace.

  If, as those who worked with him believed, in 1944–45 he was no longer what he had been in 1940–41, this is not to be wondered at. Smuts told Eden after a lunch of the prime minister’s: “He may be mentally the man he was865, he may be, but he certainly is not physically. I fear he overestimates his strength and he will wear himself out if he is not careful.” The wise old South African, of whom Churchill mused that he was what he thought Socrates must have been like, took care to say this within earshot of the prime minister. Ismay was wryly amused by the sternness with which Smuts often urged on Churchill the care of his health, admonishing him for overstaying his bedtime. The prime minister responded “rather like a small boy866 being sent off by his mother.”

  For all Churchill’s exhaustion and ill health, his personal fearlessness persisted. He loved to watch the Luftwaffe’s occasional night attacks from a Whitehall roof. “The raids are very fine867 to look at now,” he wrote to Randolph, who was in Yugoslavia, on April 4, “because of the brilliant red flares which hang seemingly motionless in the air, and the bright showers of incendiaries … sometimes I go to Maria’s battery [Mary Churchill’s antiaircraft position] and hear the child ordering the guns to fire.” This was a lovely line. On March 4, Jock Colville described the prime minister on a Saturday at Chequers:

  Late at night868, after the inevitable film, the PM took his station in the Great Hall and began to smoke Turkish cigarettes—the first time I have ever seen him smoke one—saying that they were the only thing he got out of the Turks. He keeps on referring to the point that he has not long to live and tonight, while the gramophone played the Marseillais
e and Sambre et Meuse, he told Coningham, Harold Macmillan, Pug, Tommy and me that this was his political testament for after the war: “Far more important than India or the Colonies or solvency is the Air. We live in a world of wolves—and bears.” Then we had to listen to most of Gilbert and Sullivan on the gramophone, before retiring at [three a.m.].

  A mooted Easter meeting with Roosevelt on Bermuda was aborted because the president was ill—indeed, his health never recovered from the strains of the Tehran conference. Brooke, Moran and others anyway opposed any further long flights by the prime minister. His desire to see Roosevelt was driven more by restlessness and exaggerated faith in his own persuasive powers than by any real need for a summit. On April 4, 1944, Churchill told the House of Commons that 197,005 of the United Kingdom’s people had perished since the war began in September 1939. This figure omitted many others who were posted merely as missing, but would never come home. The public, and even some of those closest to power, perceived the war as entering its final phase. Churchill himself never succumbed to such a delusion, above all in the shadow of Overlord. Another hundred thousand Britons had yet to die before victory would be won. He had to rouse himself, and his people, for new exertions.