Young Titan

by Michael Shelden

  Winston couldn’t bear to follow her progress in the sky. With his gaze fixed on the ground, he paced the field anxiously the whole time she was gone.

  When the plane landed, she emerged with her hair blowing in all directions and her cap in hand. She had almost lost the cap on takeoff when it came loose in the wind. Smiling, she said of the flight, “It was beautiful!”

  Winston shook his head. “I have been on thorns ever since you went up,” he said.

  As they walked away from the field, he kept repeating, “Never again!”

  Writing to Jennie afterward, Clemmie let her mask of bravery slip. “It was a wonderful sensation,” she said, “but a very terrifying one. . . . It felt such a frail structure & every moment I thought we should be dashed to the ground.”14

  Her worries about the flying machines increased as winter approached and Winston kept going back up in various models—some of them new and untried—and in all kinds of weather. He was slowly learning how to fly, but he also wanted a better idea of what the planes could do when conditions were less than ideal—as was bound to be the case in war. On one occasion he was in a seaplane that made a landing in the Thames estuary in a driving rain with winds blowing fifty miles an hour.

  Much of his flying was done from an airfield in Kent at Eastchurch, near Sheerness, where he would mingle with the other pilots as they tinkered with their machines before taking off. In his leather flying jacket and airman’s cap, he was almost indistinguishable from the others, and he always made an effort to fit in, behaving more like a junior officer than the First Lord. Once aloft, when he was able to look around from this area at altitudes of a few thousand feet, he learned something invaluable. In an age when such aerial views were rare, he was able to give himself a tour of the naval battlefield he would have to defend in case of war—the waters separating England from the French and Belgian coasts. On clear days he could see the outline of those coasts and study them carefully. It would give him an advantage over so many other commanders content to rely on maps and surface views.

  Though he didn’t start the process of developing the navy air wing, he did throw so much support behind it that he was able to make it independent from the army wing. The Royal Naval Air Service was his creation, and he turned it into a first-class force with some of the best airmen in the world. He also rechristened a new kind of plane—one that used floats to take off and land on the water. “Hydroaeroplanes,” everyone had been calling them. “That’s a beastly word,” he said when he first heard it. Turning to a group of flyers, he announced, “Let’s give them a better name. Let’s call them seaplanes.”15

  Because he didn’t need to fly solo to accomplish most of his goals in the air, his instructors conspired to keep shifting him from pilot to pilot, and to avoid having anyone take responsibility for sending him up alone. “No one will risk letting him solo,” one instructor told another. “If anything happened to [Churchill], the career of the man who had allowed him a solo flight would be finished.”16

  In November he began flying with a young pilot of twenty-six who had only a year of experience, and who had already suffered a tragedy in his training. In April he had accidentally killed another airman, who was helping him start his plane and didn’t get out of the way in time. The propeller struck the man, who died from his injuries two hours later. An inquest cleared the pilot of any wrongdoing.

  The pilot’s name—Captain Wildman-Lushington—may not have inspired confidence in some, but Churchill liked him and trusted him. They went flying together several times at Eastchurch in a plane with dual controls. On Saturday, November 29, they spent about three hours in the air together, and his instructor said he “showed great promise.” At five hundred feet he took over the controls and flew the plane for an hour. That night they dined together on board the Enchantress, which was anchored in Sheerness harbor.

  On Tuesday afternoon, December 2, Churchill was at the Treasury in a meeting with Lloyd George when a messenger gave him a note. He opened it and stared in disbelief at the news. His new instructor had been killed earlier that day in a crash at Eastchurch. The plane had stalled on its approach, and he fell to earth, breaking his neck. He had just been engaged, and Churchill wrote a note of sympathy to the young woman. (Fifty years later she wrote his official biographer, “What a mercy for England that Sir W’s flight was not the fatal one.”)17

  At home, Winston found Clemmie distraught, her mind tormented by thoughts that Winston might have been the one who died. It was from that moment that she began telling him what he had told her, “Never again!” Other friends chimed in. “Why do you do such a thing as fly repeatedly?” asked F. E. Smith. “Surely it is unfair to your family, your career & your friends.”18

  Two days after the fatal crash Churchill did take the sensible precaution of instructing Eddie Marsh to check on his life insurance policy, which was in the amount of £10,000. Was he covered in case of an accident in the air? To everyone’s relief, the family lawyer wrote back immediately, “I am of the opinion that the policies cover the risk of death caused by accident in connection with aviation.”19

  But that was cold comfort to Clemmie, who would spend the next few months trying in vain to get her husband to stop flying. He considered it his duty to fly from time to time, but as he later admitted, “I continued for sheer joy and pleasure.” Suspecting as much, she tried to frighten him with melodramatic accounts of her bad dreams, and her fear that every time a telegram arrived, “I think it is to announce that you have been killed.” She ended one letter to him, “Goodbye Dear but Cruel One.”

  She would complain of his reckless fascination with planes to anyone who would listen. At a dinner party that took place just before the war broke out in 1914, she shared her concerns with an elderly, white-haired novelist sitting next to her. He was so sympathetic that she confided to him that the First Lord had finally relented a little after learning that she was now pregnant with their third child. Writing of the dinner shortly afterward, Thomas Hardy noted, “Mr & Mrs Winston Churchill came. I had her next me. He has promised her not to fly again till after a certain event [the birth], but he won’t promise never to fly again.”20

  XXV

  COUNTDOWN

  On a damp November morning in 1913 a burly man in a bowler hat stood at the entrance of the Ritz hotel in London waiting for a taxi. He had dark eyes, a long black mustache, and a distinctly foreign air. He might have been a Continental banker on holiday or a diplomat in town negotiating a minor treaty. But he didn’t have any important business to conduct today. It was his last day in London, and he was free to spend it as he pleased. When the taxi arrived, the doorman helped him get in and told the driver to take his passenger to Harrods.

  There, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand—heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—whiled away the morning wandering happily through the great emporium, picking out a few gifts to be sent home. He attracted little notice from the other shoppers, most of whom probably wouldn’t have known who he was anyway. There had been a few articles in the press about his private visit to Britain as guest of His Majesty the King, but hardly anyone paid much attention to such things. There were only two foreign potentates who could cause a real stir in London—the Kaiser or the Czar. The rest were just hazy figures in magazine pictorials of crowned heads and their families.1

  Yet, in little more than seven months, the death of this unremarkable shopper would start a chain of events that would topple empires and kill millions. The crowned heads seemed to have been looking for an excuse to win a little glory in a brief but spectacular clash of arms, and Franz Ferdinand’s assassination by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, would provide the necessary spark. Great armies and navies would mobilize, ultimatums would be sent, and then—as Jacky Fisher predicted—Armageddon. But on this ordinary November day in 1913, among the well-stocked shelves of Harrods, the idea that this one man could start a world war would have seemed laughable.

  What was more diff
icult to dismiss was Germany’s continuing preparation for war. Who was their target? France? Russia? Britain? Did the Germans really think that they could send their battleships into the North Sea and sweep the British fleet off the map? For many in Britain, the idea of these two highly civilized nations staging a naval Armageddon, with one group of dreadnoughts blasting away at the other, was almost unthinkable, especially now that both sides had enough of these well-armed leviathans to make a conflict seem insane to any reasonable person.

  Looking back at the determined push for more dreadnoughts in 1909, or the panic started by the little Panther’s arrival at Agadir, many were now thinking that the dangers had been exaggerated, and that the time had arrived to bring the arms race to an end—or at least to slow it to a manageable crawl. Let the diplomats sort it out, the thinking went, so that Britain can concentrate on defusing some of the ticking time bombs at home. Women needed to be able to vote, workers needed to be able to earn a decent living, the poor needed a way to escape the misery of the slums, and the old problem of Irish Home Rule needed to be settled peacefully.

  A landmark book of 1913, The Six Panics, by Francis Hirst, editor of The Economist, dismissed the arms race as much ado about nothing and wondered why the Liberals “pandered to the guilty passion for naval and military extravagance.” It was time, Hirst argued, for Liberals to go back to the good work of promoting peace and prosperity. Lord Loreburn—recently retired from the Liberal Cabinet—gave his support to The Six Panics, declaring confidently, “Time will show that the Germans have no aggressive designs against us, nor we against them; and then foolish people will cease to talk of a future war between us, which will never take place.”2

  Seeing the pendulum swing, David Lloyd George seized the opportunity to command a new “peace offensive.” He decided that his earlier flash of belligerence in the Agadir crisis had been politically unwise, and he now hastened to show Hirst and other Liberal opinion-makers that he had learned his lesson and was returning to his antiwar roots. On New Year’s Day 1914 he fired the first metaphorical shot in this new offensive. In an interview published that day by the Daily Chronicle the chancellor made it clear that he was weary of having to find more and more money for armaments and was leaning toward a return to the time-honored Liberal principle of retrenchment.

  The threat that had seemed so ominous in 1911 was no longer a cause for concern, he said. Relations with Germany were “infinitely more friendly than they had been for years.” Both sides better understood the other’s concerns, he insisted, and “sanity has now been more or less restored on both sides of the North Sea.” He thought there was little chance of a naval war between the two powers because the Germans now understood that they couldn’t win such a fight. As he expressed it, “Even if Germany ever had any idea of challenging our supremacy at sea, the exigencies of the military situation must necessarily put it completely out of her mind.”

  So, under these new circumstances, he had come to the only logical conclusion. It was time, he announced, to stop the “feverish efforts” to add to the Royal Navy’s already overwhelming strength. Indeed, in his view, it was dangerous to continue the expansion, because it would “wantonly provoke other nations.” He conceded that Germany was continuing its military expansion but believed that they had a legitimate excuse. “The country has so often been invaded, overrun and devastated by foreign foes that she cannot afford to take any chances in that direction.”3

  There was no evidence to support Lloyd George’s sunny view of Anglo-German relations, nor his assumption that the Kaiser’s admirals wouldn’t go to war in the North Sea. But he wanted to believe these things because there was much he admired about Germany, and there were many reasons why he thought reason would prevail. Politically, at this point, there was little advantage to him to say anything else. But it is worth noting that he would argue almost the same view more than twenty years later when he went to Germany to visit Hitler, then returned to tell the readers of the Daily Express that the growing military of the Third Reich was merely a defensive force.

  “What Hitler said at Nuremberg is true,” wrote Lloyd George in 1936. “The Germans will resist to the death every invader of their own country, but they have no longer the desire themselves to invade any other land.” In the aftermath of his chat with Hitler—whom he praised as “the George Washington of Germany”—Lloyd George even managed the audacious feat of reversing himself to repeat himself when he declared, “The establishment of a German hegemony in Europe, which was the aim and dream of the old pre-war militarism, is not even on the horizon of Nazism.”4

  As in 1914, when he was eager to discount that “old pre-war militarism,” so in 1936 he was equally quick to discount the prospect of widespread Jewish persecution by the Nazis. “The German temperament takes no more delight in persecution than does the Briton,” he explained, “and the native good humour of the German people soon relapses into tolerance after a display of ill-temper.”5

  For good measure, on his way out of Germany in 1936, Lloyd George would warn the Nazi leaders Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop to be wary of Churchill, “who had no judgment.”6

  * * *

  While Lloyd George was promoting his new, more understanding view of German militarism at the beginning of 1914, Winston and his family—including Jennie—were spending their holidays on the southwest coast of France at a chateau belonging to the Duke of Westminster. There were several other guests present, and one of them, Francis Grenfell, kept a diary while he was there. It makes fascinating reading because it contains some revealing comments from Churchill in this crucial period leading up to war. A soldier, Grenfell had obvious reasons for sounding Winston out on the prospects for war, but they were also old friends and had much to discuss. Grenfell’s brother Robert fought with Churchill at Omdurman and was killed there. (Francis himself would die in 1915, but not before distinguishing himself in battle and winning the Victoria Cross.)

  At lunch on Christmas, Churchill was harshly critical of Lloyd George, which was an unusual thing for him. Among other names he called him “a peasant with peasant’s ideas.” Churchill had been counting on Lloyd George to support his efforts to keep ahead of the German navy, but by the end of 1913 he knew that the chancellor was trying to undermine those efforts, and that many others in the Cabinet were lining up to do the same.

  In fact, the very next day a messenger arrived at the chateau with a Cabinet memorandum from Lloyd George, written on December 24. It was a clear statement of opposition to Winston’s plans for four new battleships. The number would have to be reduced, he insisted.7

  “To commit the country,” wrote the chancellor, “to new expenditure of millions, unless it is abundantly clear that it is necessary in order to maintain the security of our shores, would . . . lay the Government open to a serious charge of extravagant folly.”8

  Winston knew now that he would have an explosive fight on his hands. If two leading Cabinet members went head-to-head over an issue of this importance, it was likely that one of them would end up yielding or resigning. Winston wasn’t going to yield.

  “Very pensive and moody all day,” Grenfell wrote of Churchill. “Worked in evening but hardly spoke a word at dinner and sat all of a heap.”

  But then, in typical style, Winston suddenly came to life late in the evening and began to talk in great detail about the kind of war that was coming, and the best way to fight it. What others sometimes saw in him as depression was often simply the intense concentration of his brooding mind. From time to time these retreats into himself—and the grinding of his mental gears, when he couldn’t see a clear way forward—would cast a cloud over him, and then he would suffer bouts of what he called his “Black Dog.”

  When the words began to flow from the newly energized Winston, Francis Grenfell followed it avidly and later tried to recapture some of it in his diary: “W. then talked freely about Franco-German war—which he thinks is bound to come.” Churchill wasn’t sure how the wa
r would start, but he believed that Britain was certain to get involved because “we could never see France crushed by Germany.” He knew the French dreaded the fight, but also that their lack of respect for the Kaiser’s military abilities gave them one great hope—“the Germans might suffer from unexpected reverses if [the] German Emperor tries to run things himself.”

  As for Britain, Winston said, “The action of England depends on 4 or 5 men.” Presumably, he considered himself one of those men, because he was sure of the best way for the army to enter the fight. “England should be on a flank,” he said, “so that the command can be separate [from the French], and the communication maintained with the sea.”

  But, to win, the leaders of the fight needed men who knew how to fight. And that was still something of a problem with the navy, he told Grenfell. He was astonishingly candid, and more than a touch arrogant for someone who had fought as a soldier, but not as a sailor. “The Navy are very bad at War. Their one idea is to fight bull-headed. For example, if 3 ships meet 4 German [ships], the Navy would go bull-headed instead of collecting 7 or 8 other ships.”9

  What men like Lloyd George—who had never been in battle—failed to understand was that in the event of war the navy would have to do much more than contend with the German fleet in open seas—an immense challenge in itself. It would also have to protect that vulnerable army flank on the Continent with ships that could cruise offshore and fire their guns far inland. The regular British Army was small compared to the German army, which could field millions of men. An expeditionary force—as Churchill had argued in his first year as an MP—couldn’t possibly defeat a Continental force on its own. But if it went to the assistance of the French, fighting on the flank nearest the sea, it might help to turn the tide of a battle. If not, the Royal Navy could always come to the rescue. But only, Churchill reasoned, if its command of the seas was vastly superior to that of any other navy.