Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  The Americans were unmoved by the barrage of cables from London. The British, with icy formality, acceded to the launch of Anvil—now renamed Dragoon—on August 15. This was the moment at which Churchill perceived his own flagging influence upon the U.S. president, and thus upon his country. “Up till Overlord,”952 wrote Jock Colville later, “he saw himself as the supreme authority to whom all military decisions were referred.” Thereafter, he became, “by force of circumstances, little more than a spectator.” The prime minister afterwards told Moran: “Up to July 1944 England953 had a considerable say in things; after that I was conscious that it was America who made the big decisions.”

  The British adopted a stubbornly proprietorial attitude to the Italian campaign, long after it had turned sour, and even after the dazzling success of Overlord. Marshall had made his share of mistakes in the course of the war—but so had Brooke and Churchill. Nothing in the summer exchanges between London and Washington justified the prime minister’s condescension towards the U.S. Chiefs. Though Eisenhower is often, and sometimes justly, criticised for lack of strategic imagination, he and Marshall were assuredly right to insist upon the concentration of force in France.

  Yet it was hard for Churchill to bow to the relegation of himself and his country from the big decisions. An American political scientist, William Fox, coined the word superpower in 1944. He took it for granted that Britain could be counted as one. The true measure of superpowerdom, however, is a capability to act unilaterally. This, Churchill’s nation had lost. Dismay and frustration showed in his temper. Eden wrote on July 6: “After dinner a really ghastly defence committee954 nominally on Far Eastern strategy. We opened with a reference from W. to American criticism of Monty for over-caution, which W. appeared to endorse. This brought explosion from CIGS.” Brooke wrote in his own diary:

  A frightful meeting with Winston955 which lasted until 2 am!! It was quite the worst we have had with him. He was very tired as a result of his speech in the House concerning the flying bombs, he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad-tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody, and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped. I began by having a bad row with him. He began to abuse Monty because operations were not going faster … I flared up and asked him if he could not trust his generals for 5 minutes instead of continuously abusing them and belittling them … He then put forward a series of puerile proposals, such as raising a Home Guard in Egypt to provide a force to deal with disturbances in the Middle East. It was not until midnight that we got onto the subject we had come to discuss, the war in the Far East! … He finished by falling out with Attlee and having a real good row with him concerning the future of India! We withdrew under cover of this smokescreen just on 2 am, having accomplished nothing beyond losing our tempers and valuable sleep!!

  Eden commented later: “I called this ‘a deplorable evening,’956 which it certainly was. Nor could it have happened a year earlier; we were all marked by the iron of five years of war.” Accounts like that of Brooke, describing such passages of arms with Churchill, dismayed those who loved the prime minister, both his personal staff and family, when they were later published. The prime minister’s former intimates took special exception to criticisms that his conduct of office was adversely affected by alcohol. The CIGS was coupled with Lord Moran, whose diary appeared in 1966, not only as a betrayer of the Churchillian legend but also as a false witness about his conduct. Yet the two men’s views were widely shared. After listening to the prime minister for a time at a committee meeting, Food Minister Lord Woolton leaned over and whispered to Dalton like a naughty schoolboy: “He is very tight.”957 Exhaustion and frustration probably influenced Churchill’s outbursts more than brandy. But the evidence is plain: in 1944–45 he suffered increasingly from loss of intellectual discipline, sometimes even of coherence.

  The pugnacity that had served his country so wonderfully well in earlier years became distressing when directed against his own colleagues, men of ability and dedication, who knew that they did not deserve to be so brutally handled. Churchill could rouse his extraordinary powers on great occasions, of which some still lay ahead. There would be many more flashes of brilliance and wit. But key figures in Britain’s war leadership, instead of looking directly to him as the fount of all decisions, were now peering over his shoulder, towards a future from which they assumed that he would be absent. Eden, craving the succession, chafed terribly when the prime minister seemed unwilling to acknowledge his own political mortality. “Lunched alone with W,”958 he wrote on July 17. “He was in pretty good spirits. My face fell when he said that when coalition broke up we should have two or three years of opposition and then come back together to clear up the mess!”

  Yet there were still many moments when Churchill won hearts, including that of the foreign secretary, by displays of whimsy and sweetness. On August 4, when Eden called959 at Downing Street with his son Nicholas, on holiday from school at Harrow, the prime minister surreptitiously slipped into the boy’s hand two pound notes, more than a fortnight’s pay for an army private, with a muttered and of course vain injunction not to tell “him.” Churchill’s companions became bored when he recited long extracts from Marmion and The Lays of Ancient Rome across the dinner table at Chequers, but how many other national leaders in history could have matched such performances? He was moved to ecstasies by a screening of Laurence Olivier’s new film of Henry V, not least because he was in no doubt about who was playing the king’s part in England’s comparable mid-twentieth-century epic. His impatience remained undiminished. Driving with Brooke from Downing Street to Northolt, their convoy encountered a diversion for road repairs. Churchill insisted on lifting the barriers and urging the cars along a footpath. The king himself would never do such a thing, the miscreant declared gleefully, for “he was far more law-abiding.”960

  As for the war, by late summer 1944 the apprehension which dogged Churchill and his service chiefs through the spring was now supplanted by assurance that Germany’s doom was approaching. But when? On this, the prime minister displayed better judgement than the generals. Until the end of September, they envisaged a final Nazi collapse by the turn of the year. Churchill, by contrast, told a staff conference on July 14: “Of course it was true that the Germans961 were now faced with grave difficulties and they might give up the struggle. On the other hand, such evidence as there was seemed to show that they intended to continue that struggle, and he believed that if they tried to do so, they should be able to carry on well into next year.” His view remained unchanged even after the drama of the failed bomb plot against Hitler on July 20. This highlighted German internal opposition to Hitler—and its weakness.

  Some illusions persist that the wartime Allies missed opportunities to promote the cause of “good Germans” who opposed Hitler, rejecting approaches from such men as Adam von Trott. Yet the British seemed right, first, to assume that any dalliance of this kind must leak, fuelling Soviet paranoia about a negotiated peace and, second, in believing that the anti-Hitler faction was both weak and flawed. Michael Howard has written: “We know that such ‘right-minded people’962 did exist; but the remarkable thing is that … there should have been so few of them, and that their influence should have been so slight.” Howard notes that most of the July 1944 bomb plotters were right-wing nationalists, who cherished grotesquely extravagant ambitions for their country’s postwar polity. The principal objective of most of those who joined the conspiracy against Hitler, as the Foreign Office perceived at the time, was to enlist Anglo-American aid against the Russians. It is easy to understand why postwar Germans sought to canonise the July bomb plotters. But it would have represented folly for Churchill’s government to dally with them, and there is no cause for historians to concede them exaggerated respect. A large majority of the July 20 conspirators turned against Hitler not because he was ind
escribably wicked, but because they perceived that he was leading Germany to defeat.

  That July, in the face of new intelligence reports about the operations of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Churchill wrote to Eden in the most explicit terms he used during the war about the nature of Nazi action against the Jews: “There is no doubt963 that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world … It is clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death.” Yet once again, the British dismissed the notion of bombing the death camps’ facilities or transport links, partly on the grounds of inefficacy, that any damage could be readily repaired, and that anyway only the USAAF’s day bombers were capable of the necessary precision, and partly on the spurious grounds that deportations of Jews from Hungary—reports of which prompted Churchill’s note—appeared to have ceased.

  Even at this stage, the scale of Nazi killings eluded British policymakers. An intelligence officer964 privy to Ultra decrypts who lectured to senior soldiers in 1944 about Germany’s machinery of repression spoke in his briefings of killings in the thousands, not the millions, and did not explicitly mention Jews. Likewise the November 1943 joint Allied Moscow Declaration, warning of retribution against Germans who participated in “wholesale shooting of Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages or of Cretan peasants, or who have shared in the slaughter inflicted on the people of Poland or in territories of the Soviet Union,” omitted Jews.

  British and American intelligence possessed enough information by late 1944, from Ultra and escaped Auschwitz prisoners, to deduce that something uniquely terrible was being done to the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, if the right conclusions had been drawn from the evidence. The failure of either government to act has incurred brutal strictures from postwar critics. Yet Churchill, Roosevelt and their principal subordinates seem to deserve some sympathy for their admittedly inadequate responses. First, an instinctive reluctance persisted both in London and Washington to conceive a European society, even one ruled by the Nazis, capable of killings on the titanic scale exposed in 1945–46. Second, evidence about the massacre of Jews was still perceived in the context of other known mass killings of Russians, Poles, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Italians and other subject races. The British, especially, were wary of repeating the mistakes of the First World War, when reports of German atrocities, though real enough, were wilfully exaggerated for propaganda purposes. Such exploitation roused postwar anger among British people towards their own government.

  Finally, given the known limitations of precision bombing even where good target intelligence was available, the case for specific action against the Nazi death machine seemed overborne by the overarching argument for hastening military victory to end the sufferings of all Europe’s oppressed peoples. The airmen could be sure that any bombing of the camps would kill many prisoners. It is the privilege of posterity to recognise that this would have been a price worth paying. In the full tilt of war, to borrow Churchill’s phrase from a different context, it is possible to understand why the British and Americans failed to act with the energy and commitment which hindsight shows to have been appropriate. Temperate historians of the period recognise a real doubt about whether any plausible air force action would substantially have impeded the operations of the Nazi death machine.

  Again and again that summer, Churchill found his aspirations thwarted. He was eager that Britain should have the honour of hosting a summit, after he himself had travelled so far and often to dance attendance on Roosevelt and Stalin. He now proposed as a venue Invergordon, in Scotland, arguing that each leader could arrive there by battleship. The king would be able to entertain the Big Three at Balmoral. Stalin flatly refused to leave Russia. Even when Roosevelt agreed to a bilateral meeting, and after briefly professing enthusiasm for Invergordon, to Churchill’s chagrin he finally decided that the conference should not take place in Britain. The president was unwilling, especially in a U.S. election year, to be seen as the guest of his nation’s subordinate partner. A second visit to Quebec was scheduled for September.

  Churchill’s lonely struggle to save fragments of Polish freedom became ever less rewarding. He allowed himself a surge of hope when Stalin cabled on July 23, endorsing a “unification of Poles friendly disposed towards Great Britain, the USSR and the United States.” Interpreting this—which Eden did not—as a sign that Stalin was willing to accommodate the “London Poles” in a new regime, Churchill told Roosevelt: “This seems to be the best ever965 received from Uncle Joe.” But the significance soon became clear of Stalin’s recognition of Moscow’s puppet Polish National Committee, dubbed in London the “Lublin Poles.” Stalin was bent on a Communist-dominated Polish government, with only token representation of other interests. Under extreme pressure from Churchill, the Polish exile prime minister in London, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, agreed to fly to Moscow. But Mikolajczyk rightly anticipated that obeisance to Stalin would serve no purpose either for himself or his country’s freedom.

  On July 31, with Soviet forces only fifteen miles away across the Vistula, the Polish Home Army in Warsaw launched its uprising. Through the agonising weeks that followed, Churchill strove to gain access to Russian landing grounds to be used to dispatch arms to the Poles. The most earnest and humble pleas to Stalin—and in some of Churchill’s cables, he was indeed reduced to begging—failed to move Moscow. The Russian leader believed that Churchill had deliberately provoked the Warsaw Rising to secure for the “London Poles” the governance of their country. Moscow was determined to prevent any such outcome. The prime minister had certainly since 1940 promoted an ideal of popular revolt, and some SOE officers encouraged Polish delusions. But he was in no way complicit in the launch of the Warsaw Rising, an explicitly local initiative. Though he sustained his campaign on behalf of Polish freedom for many months to come, he knew how great the odds were against success. While the Americans were not indifferent, they seemed so both in London and Moscow. The Red Army stood deep inside Poland, while Eisenhower’s forces were far, far away.

  Even more serious, from Churchill’s viewpoint, was the frustration of his strategic wishes. He made a last, vain attempt to persuade the Americans against a campaign in Burma. Throughout the war, while Churchill was eager that British forces should be seen to regain Britain’s colonies in the Far East, his interest in the military means by which this should be accomplished was sporadic and unconvincing. Most of his attention, and almost all his heart, focused upon the German war, even as Slim’s imperial army prepared to advance towards the Chindwin frontier of Burma.

  Until almost the last day before the landing in southern France on August 15, Churchill argued doggedly against “the Anvil abortion,” pleading for alternative assaults on the Atlantic coast of France, or in northeast Italy. “I am grieved to find that even splendid victories and widening opportunities do not bring us together on strategy,” he wrote to Hopkins in Washington on August 6. The British failed to perceive that the arguments for getting into southern France were less persuasive in rousing U.S. determination than those for getting every possible man out of Italy.

  As Churchill railed in the face of so many difficulties and disappointments, he adopted a familiar panacea: personal activity. In a fashion imbued with pathos, because it marked his transition from prime mover to spectator, he became for some weeks a battlefield tourist. During his travels he conducted some business. But his journeys represented a substitute for implementing policy, rather than a means of doing so. On July 20 he flew to Normandy, where 1.4 million Allied troops were now deployed. On August 5, he again toured the battle zone and met commanders. Both trips delighted him, for he savoured proximity to the music of gunfire as much as ever. He underrated the scale and speed of the developing German collapse in France, and the new strategic opportunities which would follow. He expected months more fighti
ng before Allied troops reached the borders of Germany. Had he understood that dramatic change in the circumstances of Eisenhower’s armies was imminent, with the collapse of German resistance in France, he would probably have remained at hand, to dispatch a flood of imprecatory messages to Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower and Brooke. As it was, however, he departed for the Mediterranean.

  On August 11, he landed in Algiers. Summoning de Gaulle for a meeting, he was infuriated when the Frenchman, seething with indignation about the Allies’ refusal to grant him authority in his own country, declined to attend. Randolph Churchill, recuperating after a plane crash in Yugoslavia, met his father and heard a stormy denunciation of de Gaulle. Afterwards, in an unusually statesmanlike intervention, Randolph urged pity: “After all, he is a frustrated man966 representing a defeated country. You as the unchallenged leader of England and the main architect of victory could well afford to be magnanimous.” Churchill wrote to Clementine: “I feel that de Gaulle’s France will be a France more hostile967 to England than any since Fashoda [in 1898].”

  Nonetheless, under relentless pressure from Eden, Churchill supported de Gaulle’s cause against the Americans. Before D-Day, Admiral Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff who had served as U.S. ambassador to Vichy, told the president that the Allies would find Marshal Pétain their most appropriate French negotiating partner, because of his popularity with his own people. In the weeks following the invasion, this delusion was confounded by French Resistance fighters who seized power in liberated areas, and displayed overwhelming support for de Gaulle. The men of Vichy were consigned by their countrymen to prison or oblivion. Late in August, the general was allowed to return to France, where he became the country’s de facto ruler. Two months later, albeit with the deepest reluctance, Washington recognised his leadership of a French provisional government.