Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945
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TWENTY-ONE
The Final Act
IN THE LAST MONTHS of Churchill’s war premiership, his satisfaction about the Nazis’ imminent downfall was almost entirely overshadowed by dismay at the triumph of Soviet hegemony in eastern Europe. He wrote to a Tory MP on March 6, “We are now labouring to make sure that the Yalta Agreement about Poland and free elections is carried out in the spirit as well as in the letter.” In reality, of course, Yalta was flouted in both. Almost daily, news reached Downing Street of savage Soviet oppression in Poland, including the imprisonment of sixteen prominent Poles who had attended a meeting under a safe-conduct from the Red Army, and the deportation to labour camps of thousands of non-Communists. Beria’s NKVD conducted a war of repression against Polish democrats which persisted until the end of the German war, and after. Churchill drafted a fierce cable to Stalin, for which he invited American approval: “All parties were exercised,” he wrote, “about the reports that deportations, liquidations and other oppressive measures were being put into practice on a wide scale by the Warsaw administration against those likely to disagree with them.”
The dying Roosevelt vetoed this message, and thereafter repeatedly rejected Churchill’s imprecations for the United States to adopt a harsher policy towards Moscow. The president proposed a “political truce” in Poland, which the British believed would merely strengthen the Soviet puppet regime. “I cannot agree that we are confronted1072 with a breakdown of the Yalta Agreement,” Roosevelt wrote on March 15. “… We must be careful not to give the impression that we are proposing a halt to the land reforms [collectivisation] imposed by the new Polish government.” A stream of messages followed from Churchill to Roosevelt, emphasising the prime minister’s perception of the urgency and gravity of the Polish situation. Most went unanswered. The British persisted with their efforts, but received scant comfort from Washington, and none from Moscow.
Events on the battlefield had a momentum of their own, which Churchill could not influence. At this very late hour, he made a brief attempt to assert British influence by exchanging Tedder with Alexander. He wrote to his field marshal on March 1, as if this was a done deal: “I have written privately to Eisenhower to tell him that you will be replacing Tedder as Deputy Supreme Commander about the middle of this month and that I propose Tedder shall replace you in the Mediterranean.” The purported justification was that Alexander’s presence in northwest Europe would ease tensions between Eisenhower and Montgomery. In reality, Churchill wanted his favourite to assume control of the entire Allied ground battle for the last phase of the German campaign. The proposal was mistaken from every possible standpoint, not least Alexander’s unfitness for the role. The Americans swiftly quashed it. Churchill received no more satisfaction from Washington when he remonstrated about Eisenhower’s signal to Stalin, assuring him that the Western armies would stay away from Berlin. The Americans were not listening. If their manner towards Churchill was increasingly brusque, on the points of military substance it is impossible to doubt that they were right.
Churchill made one further intervention on strategic bombing policy, which has cast a baleful shadow over the historiography of the Second World War. On March 28, he minuted Portal and the Chiefs of Staff Committee:
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing … I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.
Portal, the standard-bearer of the Royal Air Force, was affronted by these remarks, as well he might have been. He persuaded Churchill to withdraw them, substituting a fresh document which omitted such phrases as “acts of terror.” The new minute began in more pedestrian terms: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so-called ‘area bombing’ of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests …” This sanitised version was signed on April 1. Churchill was anyway in no doubt that he had ordered a halt to area attacks on cities. He was thus dismayed, soon afterwards, to learn that five hundred Lancasters of Bomber Command had devastated Potsdam. Some five thousand civilians were alleged to have perished, because the population had neglected air-raid precautions, supposing that the city’s architectural treasures granted it immunity from bombardment. Churchill wrote crossly to Archibald Sinclair, the secretary for air, and Portal, “What’s the point of going and blowing down Potsdam?” Portal replied that the Luftwaffe’s operational headquarters had been transferred there, and that the attack was “calculated to hasten the disintegration1073 of enemy resistance.”
The truthful answer to Churchill’s question was that a huge force of British heavy bombers existed, and there was deep reluctance to stand them down as long as German resistance continued. The Red Army had begun to fight the last great battle of the European war for Berlin, a few miles from Potsdam. Churchill’s attitude, displayed in his draft note to Portal of March 28, was characteristic in its impulsiveness, even irrationality. Earlier in the war, he had been a committed supporter of area bombing, though once delivered from the desperate predicament of 1940–41 he never shared the exaggerated faith of the airmen that this could win the war. When the great land campaigns began in Italy and France, he lost interest in Bomber Command. Its contribution might be useful, but was plainly not decisive. It may sound flippant to suggest that Britain’s prime minister was oblivious of the operations of hundreds of heavy aircraft, dealing nightly death and destruction to some of the greatest cities in Europe. Yet amid the huge issues crowding in upon him each day, the air offensive receded into the background—as also, it must be said, did the issue of the Nazi death camps and possible RAF operations to impede their activities. In Churchill’s mind, the fate of the Jews was entwined with that of millions of other European captives of Hitler. The best means of securing their delivery was to win the war as swiftly as possible. Amid the deep shock of the scenes at Bergen-Belsen when it was liberated by the British Army in April, the prime minister hastened to dispatch a delegation of MPs and peers to the concentration camp, to take formal heed of its horrors. But even in the light of unfolding evidence of genocide, the prime minister perceived the camps in the broader context of the Nazi tyranny.
So vast was the scale of the war by 1944–45, so diverse its manifestations, that no human being, even Winston Churchill, could address every aspect with the commitment which some modern critics believe should have been expected of him. How could it have been otherwise? He interested himself in a wider range of affairs than any national leader in history. But many things, including air policy in the last year of the war, were neglected. Commanders were left to do as they thought best. The only important bombing controversy to which Churchill seriously addressed himself from 1942 onwards was that concerning the 1944 assault on the French road and rail network before D-Day, which he was persuaded reluctantly to endorse.
Throughout the war, the direction of the strategic air offensive was impeded by the fact that its achievements were shrouded in mystery. The airmen’s extravagant claims could be assessed only through problematic interpretation of aerial photography, with limited assistance from Ultra signal decrypts. In December 1941, Mr. David Butt’s Cabinet Office report caused the prime minister to accept that the RAF’s campaign against Germany, so prodigious in its demands on national resources, was not achieving commensurate results. Thus the decision was made to change policy, to conduct “area bombing” of cities, in place of ineffectual precision attacks on military and industrial targets. “In the full tilt of war,”1074 observed Churchill in old age, “it was the only means of hitting back. I was of course ultimately responsible … But later I was not so sure o
f the effectiveness of the bludgeon.” Until June 1944, however, when great Allied armies became committed to the battlefield, the prime minister found it convenient to promote the view that strategic bombing was making an important contribution to the defeat of the enemy. If it was not, then many people—among whom Stalin was the most important—would have asked whether Britain was playing anything like a large enough part in fighting the war.
In attempting to distance himself from the bombing of Dresden, as Churchill did on March 28, 1945, he ignored his own request to Sinclair at the Air Ministry, just before Yalta, to launch major air attacks in eastern Germany, to assist and impress the Russians, who expressed an eagerness for such support. Dresden had featured for years on Bomber Command target lists. It had been left unscathed only because it was a low priority, and a long haul from British airfields. Throughout the war, none of Britain’s senior airmen showed much aesthetic sensitivity. Portal had advocated heavy bombing of Rome1075 when the city still belonged to Mussolini. Harris had assured the chief of the Air Staff that he had “no false sentiments” about dispatching his bombers against one of the greatest cultural centres in the world. Only American opposition deflected attacks. Churchill’s personal intervention was responsible for causing Dresden, together with Chemnitz and Leipzig, to be pushed up the February target schedule, and largely destroyed on the night of February 13–14. It is unsurprising that no one at Bomber Command headquarters voiced concern about the fate of baroque churches before unleashing the Lancasters.
The prime minister, however, had not thought much before making his own, almost casual request to Sinclair. Throughout the war, a host of matters briefly engaged his attention, then receded. It is implausible, but just possible, that by March 28 he had genuinely forgotten that he had urged the RAF to attack eastern German cities. The key to understanding the destruction of Dresden, so often misinterpreted as a unique atrocity, is that amid daily global carnage, the attack order had much less significance to those responsible than it seems to posterity to have merited.
In the aftermath of Dresden, however, the raid was the subject of widespread comment—and some criticism. Following a press conference at Eisenhower’s headquarters about bombing policy on February 16, an AP correspondent named Howard Cowan filed a dispatch stating: “The Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centres as a ruthless expedient to hastening Hitler’s doom.” This story received prominent play in American newspapers, though it was censored in British ones. U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson demanded an enquiry into Dresden, which prompted Gen. “Hap” Arnold of the USAAF to respond: “We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.” In Britain, though there was no widespread outcry, questions were asked in the Commons by the government’s inveterate critic Labour MP Richard Stokes. For the first time in many months, Churchill addressed himself seriously to the issue of area bombing. He perceived that it was indeed wanton to continue the destruction of great cities, when the Germans were so close to collapse. With his usual instinct for mercy towards the vanquished, he wished to halt the process. This was both right and humane. The prime minister injured himself, however, by attempting in his draft minute to Portal to make this judgement retrospective, to condemn the Dresden decision to which he had been an implicit, if not absolutely explicit, party.
He also gave a formidable hostage to history, by declaring that Bomber Command’s campaign was terroristic. No one in the upper reaches of Britain’s war machine had ever privately doubted that this was so, but ministers and airmen took elaborate pains to avoid acknowledging it. This was not Churchill’s first mention of terror, in the context of bombing. He used the word much earlier, in a memorandum to the War Cabinet in November 1942, about policy towards Italy. “All the industrial centres should be attacked in an intense fashion,” he wrote, “every effort being made to terrorise and paralyse the population.”
In war as in peace, there is unlikely to be much cause for pride in a policy about which it is deemed necessary to deceive one’s own people. The reputations of Churchill and Bomber Command alike were damaged by the exchanges of March–April 1945. The prime minister, who of all men should know, had put his signature to a document, albeit subsequently withdrawn, declaring Britain’s strategic air offensive to have been terroristic. He had then been privy to an administrative sleight of hand designed to suppress this admission of the truth.
Churchill’s writings, dating back to World War I, make plain that he thought air bombardment of civilians barbaric. In the early part of World War II, when Germany had already ravaged half the cities of Europe and Britain had no other plausible means of attacking Hitler’s Reich, he suppressed his instincts and endorsed the bomber offensive. That decision seems both inevitable and justifiable. It is a gross abuse of language to identify area bombing as a “war crime,” as do some modern critics. The policy was designed to hasten the defeat of Germany by destroying its industrial base, not wantonly to slaughter innocents. Yet it remains a blot on the Allied conduct of the war that city attacks were allowed to continue into 1945, when huge forces of aircraft employed sophisticated technology against negligible defences, and German industrial output could no longer much influence outcomes. Both the operational necessity to attack cities—because the RAF was capable of nothing else—and the strategic purpose of such operations were gone. Yet the assault was maintained because, until Churchill’s belated intervention, nobody thought to tell the air forces to stop, or rather to restrict themselves to residual military targets.
Here was a classic example of technological determinism. The weapons existed, and thus they continued to be used. The pity of Churchill’s March 28 memorandum, not least from the viewpoint of some 150,000 German civilians who perished under air attack in 1945, was that it had not been written several months earlier. Yet it is hard not to sympathise with the exhausted old prime minister, bearing the troubles of the world upon his shoulders, for being slow to act. The record of his conduct towards Hitler’s people shows an overarching instinct towards mercy, remarkable in the leader of a nation which had suffered so much at German hands since 1939. Churchill’s 1945 papers contain many charitable reflections and directions about the treatment of Germans. These should be set in the balance against the undoubted excesses of the bomber offensive, and his own responsibility for them.
In the last weeks of the European war, Churchill undertook two more battlefield joyrides. Much to his own satisfaction, he relieved himself in the Siegfried Line on March 3, with an aside to photographers: “This is one of the operations connected with this great war which must not be reproduced graphically.” He performed the same ceremony in the Rhine three weeks later, on a visit to watch Montgomery’s great river crossing with Alan Brooke. As he gazed down upon the vast panorama from a chair set out for him on a Xanten hilltop, he said: “I should have liked to have deployed my men in red coats on the plain down there and ordered them to charge.” Then he added, not without satisfaction: “But now my armies are too vast.” At the sound of aircraft, he sprang to his feet: “They’re coming! They’re coming!” He watched fascinated as the great armada passed overhead, thousands of multicoloured parachutes blossoming forth above the German riverbank. He was hurried unwillingly to the rear by the generals when desultory German shells began to fall. Brooke wrote: “It was a relief to get Winston home1076 safely … I honestly believe that he would really have liked to be killed on the front at this moment of success. He had often told me that the way to die is to pass out fighting when your blood is up and you feel nothing.”
At a lunch at Chequers a few days later, Churchill told his cousin Anita Leslie how much he had enjoyed his outing: “I’m an old man and I work hard1077. Why shouldn’t I have a little fun? At least, I thought it was fun but one has to hate seeing brave men die …” Leslie was driving an ambulance for the Free French. “With childish longing in his voice Winston asked
what the French thought of him. ‘They do like me? They are fond of me? Give them my love.’” If these were the words of a sentimental old man, his flagging interest in daily business reflected the condition of an exhausted one. “The PM is now becoming1078 an administrative bottleneck,” wrote Colville.
There was a last spasm of frustration about his inability to influence military operations. When he learned that Eisenhower had signalled to Stalin that the Anglo-American armies would make no attempt to close upon Berlin, he expressed strong displeasure that such a communication should have been made without reference to the British or U.S. governments. As Russian behaviour rapidly worsened, he urged that the Anglo-American armies should advance as far eastwards as possible and stay there, heedless of agreed occupation zones, until Moscow showed some willingness to keep its side of the Yalta bargain. Meanwhile, Russian paranoia that the West would make its own peace deal with the Germans intensified. Zhukov visited the Kremlin on March 29. Stalin walked to his desk, leafed through some papers, picked one out and handed it to his marshal. “Read this,” he said. It was a report based upon information from “foreign sympathisers” who claimed that representatives of the Western Allies were conducting secret talks with emissaries of Hitler about a separate peace. Berlin’s overtures had been rejected, said the letter, but it remained possible that the German army would open its Western Front to give the Allies passage to Berlin. “What do you think?”1079 asked Stalin, continuing without waiting for Zhukov’s answer: “I do not believe Roosevelt will violate the Yalta agreement. But as for Churchill—that man is capable of anything.”