by Max Hastings
On August 12, Churchill flew to Italy, where he installed himself in Maitland Wilson’s residence, the Villa Rivalta, overlooking the Bay of Naples. He remained in Italy for more than two weeks, bathing several times in the sea, much to his pleasure, and conducting meetings. He continued to fume about the diversion of forces to France. In those days of mid-August, 100,000 men were being transferred in landing ships from Italy. Offshore in a launch one sunny morning, Churchill found himself hailed by thousands of troops lining the rails of vessels on passage to the Côte d’Azur. He acknowledged their cheers, but wrote in his memoirs, “They did not know that if I had had my way968, they would have been sailing in a different direction.” As for the Italian people, after years of proclaiming the need for firmness, if not harshness, toward Mussolini’s nation, the sight of smiling Italian faces now softened his heart, rekindling his lifelong instinct towards mercy.
He met Tito, flown in from Yugoslavia, and feted him considerably. The Communist leader returned to his headquarters so enchanted by the prime minister that some of his partisan comrades were alarmed. Dismissing their warnings of the British leader’s duplicity, the Yugoslav enthused: “It isn’t as simple as you think! Yes, Churchill is an imperialist, an anti-Communist! But you won’t believe it, his eyes were filled with tears when he met me. He almost sobbed, ‘You’re the first person from enslaved Europe I have met!’ Churchill even told me that he had wanted to parachute into Yugoslavia, but he was too old!” One partisan shook his head and muttered to another, “The English are clever969: an escort of warships and naval manoeuvres in honour of the Old Man [Tito], and I see that it’s had its effect on him!”
On August 16, Churchill watched the Dragoon landing from an assault vessel a few miles offshore. In a letter to Clementine, he portrayed the splendour of the armada “all spread along twenty miles of coast970 with poor St. Tropez in the centre.” The invaders met little opposition, and were soon racing northeastward to a linkage with Eisenhower’s armies on September 12. The prime minister spent hours in talks about Mediterranean policy with Macmillan, Maitland Wilson and others. British handling of Italian affairs was unimpressive, and perceived as such by the Americans. Churchill and Eden acquiesced in the return from Moscow of exiled Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, and his inclusion in the Italian government in exchange for its recognition by the Russians. Dogged British resistance to the participation of Count Carlo Sforza, a former foreign minister who had been living in the United States and was esteemed by the Americans, annoyed Washington intensely. London was taken unawares when Marshal Badoglio was ejected from the Italian leadership in June 1944. Thereafter, British struggles to create and sustain a Rome government acceptable to Churchill and his colleagues incurred constant criticism from the U.S. State Department and media. The Americans’ own ideas were naïve, but founded in a commitment to Italian rights of self-determination, which they perceived the British as flouting in their old imperialistic way.
Increasingly Churchill’s attention focused upon Greece, where he perceived serious danger of a Communist takeover. The guerrillas of EAM/ELAS, armed by the SOE, were the best-organised force in the country. As the Germans began to withdraw from southern Greece, Churchill ordered that British troops should be readied to fly into Athens the moment the enemy abandoned the city, to forestall a Communist coup. It was hard to find men, when the Allied armies in Italy had been so much depleted for Dragoon, but forces for Greece, the prime minister insisted, had to be found. Some airborne units were earmarked.
Then he advanced towards the front, dressed in army summer rig with medal ribbons and a solar topee that would have looked absurd on any other man. Alexander drove him to a hilltop on which he could hear small-arms fire, watch machine gunners flail the enemy amid showers of empty cases spinning away into the dust and see tanks grinding into action. The outing provided him with as much happiness as any experience in the last months of the war. He was in the midst of a British army which, if not immediately triumphant, was indisputably predominant, in the company of a general whom he deemed a paladin. Alexander received far fewer reproaches for slow progress than did Montgomery. Churchill blamed the misfortunes of the joyless, bloody Italian theatre exclusively upon the Americans. They, he believed, had stripped Alex’s army of the means with which it might have changed the fate of Europe and spared the Balkans from Soviet domination. Many of those engaged in the struggle, and bearing its sacrifices, shared his opinion. A humble Eighth Army signaller wrote in his diary on August 27, 1944, “I feel sure this is a secondary971 front and therefore being denied the vital necessities of war.”
On August 29, Churchill landed back in Britain with a temperature of 103 degrees, and a patch on his lung which caused his doctors to prescribe another course of antibiotics. He had achieved nothing of substance in the Mediterranean, nor in Normandy, save to assuage a growing sense of his own impotence, and to indulge his passion for witnessing great events. Foreign Office official Oliver Harvey muttered scornfully about the prime minister “fooling about in Italy.”972 Amid the miseries and slaughter inflicted on London by the flying-bomb offensive, Churchill faced greater personal risk at home than in Normandy or the Mediterranean. Though his government had much to do, most of the tasks were uncongenial to him. More and more of his ministers’ time was occupied with preparing for peace. At worst, victory could not be more than a year or two away. The British people looked with eagerness mingled with uncertainty towards a future without war. Yet the prime minister’s interest in domestic matters was spasmodic and perfunctory. David Reynolds notes973 that in Churchill’s memoirs, he makes no mention of the 1944 Butler Education Act, the most important piece of domestic legislation passed during his wartime premiership. Ismay once observed, “The PM can be counted on to score974 a hundred in a Test Match, but is no good at village cricket.” The issues of postwar reconstruction, the mundane concerns of the careworn British people, required ministers to take the field in many village cricket matches.
Winning the war, and securing the place of the British Empire in the new world, were Churchill’s unaltering preoccupations. Because the Americans perceived the prime minister as the embodiment of his country, they failed to recognise that many younger British people, some of them in government, saw as surely as did Roosevelt and his compatriots that the day of empire was done. For those obliged to work with Churchill, difficulties mounted. His flagging health, rambling monologues and refusal to address business which did not stimulate his interest posed great difficulties. Leo Amery complained: “Our Cabinet meetings certainly get more975 and more incoherent, though I notice that there is much more talking by everybody, often simultaneously, than there used to be when Winston held the field entirely by himself … What makes me so tired at Cabinets is the same feeling that one has in a taxi wishing to catch a train with a driver who dawdles and misses every green light.”
The philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin wrote: “Churchill is preoccupied by his own976 vivid world, and it is doubtful how far he has ever been aware of what actually goes on in the heads and hearts of others. He does not react, he acts; he does not mirror, he affects others and alters them to his own powerful measure … His conduct stems from great depth and constancy of feeling—in particular, feeling for and fidelity to the great tradition for which he assumes a personal responsibility, a tradition which he bears upon his shoulders and must deliver, not only sound and undamaged but strengthened and embellished, to successors worthy of accepting the sacred burden.” This seems profoundly true of Churchill’s behaviour in the last months of the war. Two or three years earlier, he had power to shape events as well as popular perceptions of them. Now, the world was going on its way with ever less heed for his grandiose antique vision, though it could still be moved by his words.
Through the autumn, the miseries of Poland provided a running theme, as the Nazis suppressed the Warsaw Rising with familiar savagery. Not only Stalin, but also Roosevelt, resisted Churchill’s impassioned ple
as to press Moscow about the Warsaw Home Army. The Americans wanted Siberian bases for their B-29 bomber operations against Japan, and were unwilling to provoke the Russians about what they perceived as lesser matters. On August 26, the president rejected an appeal from Churchill that the United States and Britain should dispatch a strongly worded joint protest to Moscow about Poland. Roosevelt wrote: “I do not consider it advantageous977 to the long-range general war prospects for me to join with you in the proposed message to Uncle J.” On September 4 the prime minister, still unwell, felt obliged to rise from his sickbed to calm a Cabinet whose members were sincerely angered by events in Warsaw. While he welcomed spontaneous media expressions of dismay, he urged that ministers should remain temperate about Russian behaviour.
Churchill was still ailing when he boarded the Queen Mary at Greenock on September 6, bound for Quebec. Brooke remarked that he seemed “old, unwell and depressed978. Evidently found it hard to concentrate and kept holding his head between his hands.” Conditions belowdecks for most of the crossing were oppressively hot. After the austerities of British diet, on the liner the customary sybaritic fare was provided for the prime minister’s party. Jock Colville described their meals as “gargantuan in scale979 and epicurean in quality; rather shamingly so.” There was the usual glittering table talk, faithfully recorded by the three notable diarists aboard—Colville, Brooke and Moran. The prime minister said that he would not regret980 the loss of any Labour colleague from his government save Bevin, the only one whose character and capacity he esteemed. He lamented the fact that he no longer felt that he had a message to deliver to the British people: “All he could now do was to finish the war981, to get the soldiers home and to see that they had houses to which to return. But materially and financially the prospects were black.”
He found time to read, first Trollope’s Phineas Finn, then The Duke’s Children, which describes a Victorian political grandee’s embarrassments with his offspring. The latter novel can scarcely have failed to prick Churchill, at a time when his own son’s marriage to his wife, Pamela, was breaking up. She had conducted a notable affair with Averell Harriman, a future husband, and was later unkindly described as having become “a world expert on rich men’s bedroom ceilings.” Earlier that year, Churchill982 achieved one of his few moments of intimacy with Brooke, when the two men discussed tête-à-tête over supper their difficulties with their respective grown-up children.
But, while the prime minister struggled to recruit his strength, as usual he spent many hours on the Queen Mary preparing for the summit. He minuted the Chiefs of Staff during their passage that Britain should “not yield central and southern Europe entirely to Soviet ascendancy or domination.” This was, he said, an issue of “high political consequences, but also has serious military potentialities.”983 He expressed distress that the British and imperial armies were nowhere advancing the nation’s standard as he would have wished. One-third of their strength, in northwest Europe, was deployed under U.S. command; one-third in India was about to launch an offensive in Burma, “the most unhealthy country in the world under the worst possible conditions,” merely to appease America’s China ambitions; and the remaining one-third in Italy had been emasculated for Dragoon. Had he known, he said, that the Americans would use their monopoly of landing ships unilaterally to enforce strategy, he would have ensured that Britain built her own. He was appalled to hear that Mountbatten was demanding 370,000 men and 24,000 vehicles from Europe before launching an assault against Rangoon. He still craved an amphibious landing on the Istrian Peninsula, “in the armpit of the Adriatic.”
Churchill arrived in Quebec by overnight train on the morning of September 11, within a few minutes of the president. They drove together from the station to the Citadel. The next day, Colville heard the prime minister say that he would that evening discuss postwar occupation zones in Germany with Roosevelt. The private secretary, knowing Churchill had not studied the relevant papers, offered to read them aloud to him in his bath. This procedure proved only partially successful, because of Churchill’s tendency to submerge himself from time to time, missing key passages of the brief. The prime minister cabled to the War Cabinet in London that the conference had opened “in a blaze of friendship.” There was indeed a blaze of courtesies, but not of agreed policies. In Churchill’s opening exposition of events, he sought to flatter the Americans by saying that the results of the detested Dragoon were “most gratifying.” Roosevelt interrupted him, observing mischievously—even maliciously—that “some of the credit for the conception was due to Marshal Stalin.” Churchill then talked much about Italy, and the merits of striking for Vienna. He seemed oblivious of American boredom and indifference. Cunningham, the first sea lord, thought Roosevelt “looked very frail, and hardly to be taking in what was going on.”
The two leaders wasted considerable time discussing the plan of Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury secretary, for pastoralising postwar Germany. The president, knowing that Churchill was increasingly fearful about how Britain could pay its bills when Lend-Lease ended, said that deindustrialising the Ruhr would remove Britain’s principal competitor in Europe. Great economic opportunities could thus shine upon the British people. This notion prompted a spasm of enthusiasm in Churchill. Cherwell, in one of his baleful interventions, urged the scheme’s merits. On September 15, both leaders formally endorsed the Morgenthau Plan, to the horror of both Cordell Hull and Anthony Eden, who said the British Cabinet would never accept it. Roosevelt quickly recognised that he had made a mistake. The Morgenthau Plan was forgotten—except by Nazi propagandists, when the story leaked. In the last months of the war, many Germans believed Goebbels when he told them that, if they bowed to defeat, they would be condemned to become slave labourers in a peasant economy. The Treasury secretary’s foolish initiative at Quebec motivated some enemies to fight even more desperately than they might otherwise have done, even to the last ditch.
The final formal session of the conference took place on September 16. Churchill proclaimed his commitment to dispatch a major fleet to join the Pacific campaign, as soon as the European war allowed. He made much of this, heedless of the fact that the Royal Navy’s ships were as worn and battered as their crews. They lacked ventilation systems appropriate to Pacific conditions. And carrier operations, the dominant feature of the campaign, were the least impressive British naval combat skill. At the closing press conference of the summit, appearing as usual beside the president, the prime minister trumpeted Britain’s commitment to the Pacific theatre. He prompted laughter among the assembled American correspondents when he said: “You can’t have all the good things to yourselves. You must share.” He then waxed lyrical about the virtues of summitry: “When I have the rare and fortunate chance to meet the President of the United States, we are not limited in our discussions by any sphere … The fact that we have worked so long together, and the fact that we have got to know each other so well under the hard stresses of war, makes the solution of problems so much simpler, so swift and so easy it is.”
This was flummery. In truth, even after two days with Roosevelt at Hyde Park before boarding the Queen Mary in New York on September 20 for the voyage home, Churchill knew how little he had achieved. “What is this conference?” he rumbled to Moran. “Two talks with the Chiefs of Staff; the rest was waiting to put in a word with the President.” The British had been dismayed to note the absence of Harry Hopkins from Quebec. Even when their favourite American sage appeared at Hyde Park, it was plain that Hopkins no longer enjoyed his old intimacy with Roosevelt. Especially in a U.S. election year, he represented baggage which the president did not wish to be associated with, not least because Hopkins was perceived by his countrymen as too susceptible to British special pleading. Now that the British saw that his influence was gone, their old affection ebbed shamelessly. Brendan Bracken dismissed him984 as “weak” and “useless.” Yet there is no reason to suppose985 that Hopkins was moved by pique when he warned Halifax, in Washington, t
hat a Republican victory in the imminent presidential election might serve British interests better than the return of Franklin Roosevelt. To this, the “historic partnership” had descended.
Churchill was in mellow mood on the voyage home, but saw nothing in which to rejoice. The Warsaw Rising was all but over, despite belated and almost entirely unsuccessful arms drops to the defeated Home Army by 110 USAAF Flying Fortresses, which were grudgingly permitted to refuel in Russia. Eden had failed to persuade the Quebec conference to recognise the French National Committee as the nation’s government. Churchill told Colville that following the events of recent years, “my illusions about the French986 have been greatly corroded.” It was another month before de Gaulle’s obvious primacy among his countrymen obliged Washington to relent.
On September 28, back in London, Churchill reported to the Commons. With barely permissible nationalistic hyperbole, he described Normandy as “the greatest and most decisive single battle of the whole war.” He hailed Burma as “the campaign of Admiral Mountbatten,” a slight upon Gen. Bill Slim, the fine commander conducting the British offensive. He sought to make the best of defeat at Arnhem, seeing cause for celebration in an unaccustomed display of boldness by the Allies, even though the airborne assault had failed to secure a Rhine crossing. At the beginning of October, British troops began to move into southern Greece behind the retreating Germans. Churchill made a renewed plea to Roosevelt for the transfer of three U.S. divisions from France to Italy—and received the inevitable refusal.
