Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  In almost every European country freed from German domination, former resistance groups armed by the SOE sought to assert themselves in governance. In France, only de Gaulle’s extraordinary personal authority and the presence of the Anglo-American armies—together with Stalin’s abstention from mobilizing his followers in a country where political instability might damage Soviet interests—made it possible to contain the Communists of the FTP. Many ex-maquisards were hastily drafted into the new French army, for service under Eisenhower. In neighbouring Belgium, the exiled government which returned from London in September found itself facing a strong challenge from left-wingers, including Communist resistance members. Having played a modest role in Belgian liberation, they now, to the alarm of the authorities, refused to be disarmed. There was anger about the Belgian government’s alleged reluctance to impose retribution upon those who had served the German occupation regime. On November 25, leftist trades unionists staged a big demonstration in Brussels and appeared bent upon forcing entry to government buildings. Police overreacted, firing on the demonstrators and wounding forty. In the weeks that followed, tensions ran high. The British Army, strongly backed by Churchill, was determined to tolerate neither a threat to its lines of communications with the battlefront nor any attempted Communist takeover. British troops deployed in Brussels in large numbers.

  This action restored a resentful peace, but prompted hostile press comment. U.S. correspondents, especially, deplored the use of force to suppress “heroic resistance fighters,” of whatever political persuasion. Churchill displayed insensitivity in his support for the restoration of long-exiled governments to societies traumatised and radicalised by the experience of occupation. However, American enthusiasm for self-determination underrated both the malevolence of the Communists and the danger of anarchy overtaking the liberated nations.

  In Albania and Yugoslavia Communist partisan movements set about seizing control as the Germans fell back. No other political element was strong enough to stop them, and in Serbia Tito enjoyed direct assistance from the Red Army. “Tito is turning very nasty,” Churchill told Smuts on December 3. The Yugoslav partisans demanded the expulsion of the British from the Dubrovnik coastal area. At the same time, in eastern Europe, the “Lublin Poles” proclaimed themselves the provisional government of their country, with no offer of participation for the exiled administration in London. All this made Churchill acutely anxious about the future of Greece. In the first days following German withdrawal, arriving British troops were greeted with unbridled enthusiasm. When Eden visited Athens on October 26, his car was mobbed by cheering crowds. Lord Moyne, accompanying him, said brightly: “It is good that there is one country1001 where we are so popular.”

  The Greek honeymoon ended abruptly. Armed factions roamed city streets, amid well-founded reports that Communists were slaughtering alleged “reactionaries.” The Papandreou government struggled to assert its control of the country while the Communists of EAM/ELAS refused to demobilise, and guerrilla bands converged on Athens. The British strove to reinforce their weak forces in the capital, scouring the Mediterranean for men. “Everything is degenerating in the Greek government,” the prime minister wrote to Eden on November 28, “and we must make up our minds whether we will assert our will by armed force, or clear out altogether.” Two days later, he reached a predictable decision: “It is important to let it be known that if there is a civil war in Greece we shall be on the side of the Government we have set up in Athens, and that above all we shall not hesitate to shoot.”

  The next day, December 1, the six Communist and socialist ministers in the Athens regime resigned en bloc, and called a general strike. On December 3, frightened and ill-disciplined police fired on a demonstration. One policeman and eleven demonstrators were killed. Furious crowds besieged Athens police stations. The police, like other elements of the Papandreou government’s makeshift security forces, were widely perceived by Greeks as having collaborated with the German occupiers. The historian Mark Mazower has written: “Despite Churchill’s belief1002 that he had forestalled a communist attempt to seize power, there is no sign that the uprising in Athens was anything other than a spontaneous popular movement which took the [Communist] party leadership by surprise.” At first, the guerrillas of EAM/ELAS concentrated their fire on Greek government forces. But, when they perceived British troops furthering the cause of their right-wing foes, they started shooting at the “liberators.”

  The nuances of this situation eluded British commanders on the spot. They merely perceived their authority violently challenged. It should also be noticed, as it was not by most American observers at the time, that all over Greece the Communists were conducting murderous purges of bourgeois opponents, often along with their families. Churchill was bitterly angry. He assessed the Greek situation, and Communist intentions, through the prism of developments in Poland, Albania, Yugoslavia and Belgium.

  The Greek crisis broke while the Belgian one was still making headlines. Churchill was harshly misjudged by Americans, who supposed that he sought an undemocratic outcome in Greece. His mistake was that, for two turbulent months, he conceded to the Greek king, George II, exiled in London, a veto on constitutional arrangements. So intemperate were Churchill’s expressions of hostility to the Communists of EAM/ELAS that Clementine felt moved to write him a note of warning:

  My darling Winston1003,

  Please do not before ascertaining full facts repeat to anyone you meet what you said to me this morning i.e. that the Communists in Athens had shown their usual cowardice in putting the women & children in front to be shot at. Because altho’ Communists are dangerous, indeed perhaps sinister people, they seem in this War on the Continent to have shown personal courage …

  Your loving & devoted Clemmie

  Clementine’s words were significant, because they reflected widespread sentiment in Britain as well as America. Allied propaganda throughout the Nazi occupation had made much of the Communist role in resistance, portraying EAM/ELAS, like Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia, as heroic freedom fighters. Not only was their contribution to the anti-Nazi struggle exaggerated, but reports of their atrocities, well-known to SOE officers on the ground, were suppressed. Many people on both sides of the Atlantic thus viewed the Greek left in roseate hues.

  Worse, Churchill’s lingering desire to salvage the Greek monarchy, despite overwhelming evidence of its unpopularity, compromised his own authority. Almost all his ministers, including Eden and Macmillan, were unwilling to offer even vestigial support to George II. They were also conscious of the rickety character of the Papandreou regime, an unconvincing foundation for the restoration of democracy. Churchill’s instinct was probably right, that if the Allies had done nothing the Communists would have seized Greece with the same ruthlessness they were displaying everywhere else in eastern Europe and the Balkans. But clumsy diplomacy caused the British to be seen, above all in Washington, as would-be imperialist oppressors of a liberated people. Lincoln MacVeagh, the U.S. minister in Athens, criticised the British for “handling this fanatically freedom-loving country as if it were composed of natives under the British raj.”

  On December 5, Edward Stettinius, who had just replaced Cordell Hull as U.S. secretary of state, raised the stakes by publicly criticising British policy in Greece and also in Italy, where the British were at loggerheads with the Americans about whether Count Sforza should be permitted a role in the new Rome government. Stettinius said: “We expect the Italians to work out their own problems1004 of government along democratic lines without influence from outside. This policy would apply to an even more pronounced degree with regard to governments of the United Nations in their liberated territories.” Whatever the merits of the argument, it was deeply unhelpful of Stettinius, and damaging to Churchill, thus publicly to have distanced the United States from Britain.

  A marked shift in American media sentiment was taking place. Conservative commentators, hitherto bitterly sceptical about British foreign
policy, now showed themselves sympathetic to Churchill’s efforts to check the onset of European Communism. The liberal press, however, deplored what it perceived as new manifestations of British imperialism. It is a striking reflection upon the mood of those days that perceived British misconduct in Greece and Italy provoked much more comment and protest in the United States than did Russia’s ruthless handling of its newly occupied eastern European territories.

  Many American papers asserted the right of resistance movements, whatever their political complexion, to a voice in the governance of their countries. A State Department opinion survey stated: “‘Liberal’ papers, pleading for a greater representation1005 for Resistance forces, were critical of Churchill’s alleged attempt to maintain a reactionary regime against the wishes of the Greek people.” William Shirer of CBS urged that the United States back up its words by taking action in opposition to British “toryism.” The State Department said: “Substantially universal approval has greeted the proposition1006 that the composition of governments in Italy and in ‘liberated territories’ is an internal affair … Representatives of Greek-American organizations visited the State Department to protest British intervention in Greece … The Department also received numerous letters from organizations and individuals protesting British policy and applauding the United States’s [December 5] declaration.”

  Many American newspapers perceived the Soviets and British as tarred with the same brush, both seeking to impose their selfish wills on free peoples. Isolationists blamed Britain, and explicitly Churchill, for “seeking to bury1007 the Atlantic Charter” with its declared right to self-determination. The Raleigh, North Carolina, News & Observer, for instance, cited “the shooting of Greeks for no greater crime than opposing a Government which seeks to bring back a discredited King” as being “not only a mistake but a tragedy.” There were increasing demands, echoed in Congress, for a revision of Lend-Lease legislation to link U.S. aid to Britain and Russia with less high-handed foreign policies in those countries. The Chicago Sun, urging Lend-Lease revision, observed that “Washington has both the right and obligation to let the British government know that we do not propose to aid the enemies of democracy in Italy, Greece, or elsewhere through Lend-Lease or any other means.”

  A Princeton poll1008 in December found that Americans thought Britain likely to be a much less trustworthy postwar ally than China. On December 13, 1944, the U.S. press reported anti-British student protests and marches at Harvard, Radcliffe, Wellesley and Northeastern. In Boston, students waved placards proclaiming: AMERICANS SUPPORT CHURCHILL AS WAR LEADER, NOT TORY. The protesters issued a statement: “We are not against Churchill as a war leader, but against his reactionary policy in Belgium, Italy, and Greece.” U.S. trades unionists also demonstrated against British policy.

  An attack on the prime minister by H. G. Wells was widely reported. “Churchill must go,” the aged British literary sage wrote in Tribune: “Winston Churchill, the present1009 would-be British Führer, is a person with a range of ideas limited to the adventures and opportunities of British political life … Now he seems to have lost his head completely … When the British people were blistered with humiliation by the currish policy of the old Conservative gang in power, the pugnacity of Winston brought him to the fore. The country liked fighting and he delighted in fighting. For want of a better reason he became the symbol of our national will for conflict, a role he has now outlived.” Thomas Stokes wrote in the Los Angeles Times on December 12: “What we are seeing is the opening of the big battle between the right and the left for the control of postwar Europe. There’s Great Britain on one side and Russia on the other, with the United States as a sort of arbiter or umpire trying to establish some middle course, and being in the difficult position of the harassed liberal who is caught in the crossfire from each side.”

  For Churchill, the only positive news coming out of Greece was that the Russians appeared to be holding back. “This is good,”1010 he wrote to Eden, “and shows how Stalin is playing the game.” For once, the prime minister’s optimism was justified. Throughout the unfolding imbroglio in Greece there was no sign that Moscow sought to meddle. Churchill, indeed, was moved to assert that on this issue he found the Russians much more biddable than the Americans. Stalin acknowledged spheres of influence, however broadly he sought to draw his own. Roosevelt did not.

  On December 8, 1944, there was a stormy Commons debate about Greece, in which Emanuel Shinwell and Aneurin Bevan, men of the left, led the attack on the government. Churchill, who once more chose to remind the House that it could dismiss him if it so wished, won a vote of confidence by 279 votes to 30. But many MPs remained dissatisfied. Harold Nicolson thought the prime minister misread the mood of the House, which “at its best was one of distressed1011 perplexity, and at its worst of sheer red fury.” Harold Macmillan, who attended the debate, saw the prime minister afterwards in the Downing Street Annexe. He found him tired and petulant: “He rambled on1012 in rather a sad and depressed way. The debate had obviously tired him very much, and I think he realised the dangers inherent in the Greek policy on which we are now embarked. He has won the debate, but not the battle of Athens.”

  Churchill seemed to have dug in his heels. He cabled Rex Leeper, the British ambassador in Greece, on December 10: “In Athens as everywhere else our maxim is ‘no peace without victory.’” Yet Lt. Gen. Ronald Scobie, commanding British troops in Greece, signalled that he lacked sufficient men to hold the capital, never mind to enforce the prime minister’s desired disarmament of the guerrillas. Alexander was now Mediterranean C-in-C, having replaced Maitland Wilson, who was dispatched to become the British military representative in Washington following the sudden death of Sir John Dill. Churchill urged Alexander to find more troops for Greece.

  Relations with the Americans took a sharp turn for the worse. On December 5, Churchill had signalled to Scobie, urging him to adopt a ruthless policy towards the Communist guerrillas: “Do not hesitate to fire at any armed male in Athens who assails the British authority or Greek authority … act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.” Jock Colville sent this message at five a.m., when amid exhaustion he forgot to mark it “GUARD”—not to be shown to Americans. Adm. Ernest King, on his own initiative and even before learning of Churchill’s draconian signal, ordered that U.S. shipping should not be used to supply or reinforce the British in Greece. Churchill cabled Harry Hopkins on December 9: “It grieves me very much to see signs of our drifting apart at a time when unity becomes even more important, as dangers recede and faction arises.” Hopkins persuaded Admiral King to rescind his order, apparently without reference to Roosevelt. But a Washington Post editorial declared on December 9: “The American people simply do not relish the spectacle of Sherman tanks going into action against the men who held the pass in war-stricken Hellas.” Correspondent Barnet Nover attacked Churchill for his harsh words about the Greek Communist guerrillas: “What suddenly transformed those patriots into ‘bandits’?”

  A malevolent hand in the U.S. administration leaked Churchill’s draconian directive to Scobie to columnist Drew Pearson, who published it in the Washington Post on December 11. The ensuing anti-British tirade caused Churchill to draw unfavourable contrasts with Moscow’s useful silence. “I think we have had pretty good treatment from Stalin in Greece,” he wrote to Eden, “much better in fact than we have had from the Americans.” The Post editorialised on December 6 that “the use of force carries within it the seeds of its destruction.” On the eighth, a Post article by Marquis Childs argued: “Winston Churchill and the clique around him want to believe that you can put a little paint and a little varnish on the old order and prop it up in place again. It won’t prop. That’s the meaning of the news out of Brussels and Athens … the course that is being followed in Greece and Belgium is the best way to ensure communism in the end.”

  Walter Lippmann wrote in the Washington Post of December 14 that problems had arisen in Gr
eece “because Mr. Churchill is trying to apply the great principle of legitimacy in government without a correct appreciation of the unprecedented condition of affairs which the Nazi conquest and occupation have created.” The problem facing those trying to reconstruct Europe is “how to fuse the legitimacy acquired by Resistance movements with the legitimacy inherited by the old governments.” This was an accurate analysis of Churchill’s dilemma, lacking only an answer to it. Events in Greece, and elsewhere, were critically influenced by the outcome of policies promoted by the prime minister himself through the SOE. It was only possible for ELAS to mount a challenge to the Greek government and its British sponsors because London had provided the Communists with arms.

  Halifax cabled gloomily from the Washington embassy, “Our version of the facts is largely disbelieved.”1013 On the ground in Athens, Scobie’s units faced increasingly violent pressure from ELAS guerrillas. Open insurgency was breaking out. Alexander signalled: “British forces are in fact beleaguered in the heart of the city.” Both Macmillan and Leeper, at the British embassy, believed that Churchill failed to grasp the complexities of the situation. However distasteful were the Communists, the Greek right was at least as much so. Macmillan urged the prime minister to accept that the king—“the real villain of the piece”—must remain exiled in London, while the primate of Athens, Archbishop Damaskinos, should be appointed regent, to reconcile the warring factions. Macmillan had little time for the Greek prime minister: “We do not wish to start the Third World War1014 against Russia until we have finished the Second World War against Germany—and certainly not to please M. Papandreou.” The British in Athens, who perceived a regency as offering by far the best chance of a settlement acceptable to the Greek people, were enraged by the perceived duplicity of the Greek prime minister, who urged George II to reject a regency.