Churchill Defiant: Fighting On 1945–1955

Exactly a week remained before Churchill was due to fly to London. Every day that passed without news from New Mexico with precise details of the bomb test was an agony to him. There were plenary sessions on Thursday and Friday, but still no additional information came in. At half past four on Saturday, Churchill was about to leave for the Cecilienhof when Stimson arrived with the full report. This was the document the Prime Minister had been waiting for since Tuesday; everything depended on its contents. But no sooner had he begun to read than an aide reminded him that if he did not go now, he would be late for his 5 p.m. meeting. Following the day’s talks, Stalin was due to host a party for all of the conference’s participants, and Churchill naturally was expected to attend.

As the report was of the highest secrecy, Stimson had shown the single copy personally to each individual on his list, beginning with Truman. There was no question of his leaving the document for Churchill to study later, so it was agreed that he would return to the Prime Minister’s villa in the morning. Churchill reluctantly handed the report back to Stimson. Impatient to resume reading, he found the evening that followed interminable.

It was not until 11 a.m. on Sunday that Stimson reappeared and Churchill at last had a chance to study the report in full. The details of the atomic bomb gripped him: the lightning effect equal to that of seven suns at midday; the vast ball of flame which mushroomed to a height of more than ten thousand feet; the cloud which shot upward with immense power, reaching the substratosphere in about five minutes; the complete devastation that had been wrought within a one-mile radius. Immediately, Churchill saw that this was the card he had been hoping for. The bomb completely altered the balance of power with the Soviets. Stalin’s vast armies were negligible compared to it. Truman no longer had to worry about Stalin’s willingness to fight the Japanese, and Churchill hoped that that would translate into real support for some tough bargaining to get a viable settlement in Europe. He rushed over to see Truman, both to discuss a speedy end to the war in the Pacific and to confirm that the Americans were not intending to share the bomb’s secrets.

Churchill spoke excitedly of the bomb to his physician, Lord Moran, the following morning. He swore the doctor to secrecy and assured him that it had come just in time to save the world. Again, at lunch, he laid out the new situation to Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, Eden, and other key members of the British delegation. Referring to the sudden shift in the diplomatic equilibrium, Churchill thrust out his chin and scowled. He spoke of threatening to blot out Russian cities if the Communists refused to behave decently in Europe. But for all his talk of bullying Stalin with the bomb, Churchill’s aim was not to start another war. As he had told Eden early on, he believed that the right bargaining counter might make it possible to secure a ‘peaceful agreement’. He calculated that Stalin did not want war any more than he did, only the fruits of war, which the Soviets felt they had earned by their signal contribution to the defeat of Hitler. If Stalin could not be persuaded to settle, it might be best, as Churchill had previously told Truman, at least to know where they stood with him – and to know it sooner rather than later.

Churchill’s optimism about what he would be able to achieve with both his fellow leaders provoked intensely sceptical reactions from British colleagues. There was sentiment in the British camp that Truman (who controlled the bomb, after all) would never provide the backing Churchill needed, that Stalin would simply shrug off any real or implied threat, and that the details in the report from New Mexico might yet prove to have been exaggerated. Still, Churchill had found reason to hope, and to him that was all that mattered. On Monday night he called Lord Beaverbrook, who had had a hand in shaping the Conservatives’ electoral strategy, for the most up-to-date predictions. Churchill had come to Potsdam empty-handed; now that he had what he believed was the basis of a real negotiation, nothing must be allowed to interfere. Beaverbrook told his friend that the Conservatives were expected to win, though perhaps by a smaller majority than first predicted.

Having proposed at the outset that the leaders take their time moving towards the most difficult questions, Churchill was ready to step up the pace and intensity of the talks. But the moment was still not right for what he saw as the climactic confrontation about Soviet intentions in postwar Europe. That, he believed, must wait until the British election results were known and the people had affirmed their confidence in him. Fresh from having submitted himself to their judgement, he would be in an optimal position to demand free elections in the territories liberated by the Russians.

He managed to put off the sharpest exchanges of the conference until Tuesday, 24 July, the eve of his departure. Speaking of reports from Romania and Bulgaria, he charged that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended in those countries. Until this point in the talks Stalin had been inclined to speak in a low, controlled tone of voice, but Churchill had succeeded in arousing his ire, and he shot back, ‘Fairy tales!’ A fierce dispute about the veracity of Churchill’s claims followed. There was a good deal of pique and perspiration on the Soviet side of the large round table, which was covered with a dark red felt cloth and arrayed with offerings of pungent Russian cigar -ettes. Both Molotov and Eden grew indignant on behalf of their respective masters. Eventually Stalin declared that his and Churchill’s views were so far apart that the discussion ought to be broken off –for now.

After everyone rose, Churchill watched anxiously as Truman walked over to Stalin. Churchill and Truman had previously agreed that at the close of that day’s session the President would tell Stalin about the bomb and the plan to use it on the Japanese. (In fact, Stalin’s spies had already notified him of the successful test blast, but neither Churchill nor Truman knew that.) There was high tension as Churchill looked on from a distance of about five yards. He longed to see Stalin’s reaction, but he was also watching Truman. What would the President do if pressed for technical information? Would he agree to a meeting of American and Soviet experts? Truman had said in advance that he would not, but Churchill was aware that there had been no firm promise and that Truman did not yet perceive the Soviet threat as he did. Both participants in the silent scene were acting: in an effort to seem as casual as possible, Truman had left his own interpreter behind and depended on Stalin’s man to translate his remarks, while Stalin made a point of appearing by turns genial and nonchalant.

Later, as the leaders waited for their cars, Churchill found himself beside Truman. He inquired how the conversation had gone. Truman reported that Stalin had not so much as asked a question. Stalin had said only that he was glad to hear the news and that he hoped they would make good use of the new weapon against Japan.

In any event, the information had been conveyed, and every element was finally in place for the dramatic confrontation Churchill expected would occur after a forty-eight-hour intermission. He was in buoyant spirits when he dined with Lord Mountbatten, the Supreme Commander in South-East Asia. Churchill again had much to say about the bomb and his plans for the future, though Mountbatten wondered whether the Prime Minister might not be assuming too much about the election outcome. That Churchill may have had deep doubts of his own is suggested by a disturbing dream he had that night. Six nights after he and Stalin had talked of death and succession, he dreamed that he too had died. He could see his corpse laid out beneath a sheet in an empty room. The face and body were draped, but the feet that stuck out were recognizably his own. On Wednesday morning, as he prepared to attend a final brief meeting with Stalin and Truman, he feared the dream meant that he was finished.

To all outward appearances his confidence had been restored by the time of the ninth plenary session. At a quarter past twelve, when Truman adjourned the meeting until 5 p.m. on Friday, Churchill added crisply that he hoped to be back. His mood on the flight home with his daughter was one of certainty that he would soon return to complete what he had begun. In London, Churchill went to Buckingham Palace to report to the King on the talks thus far and on the changes in the international situation that the bomb had wrought. Before Churchill retired for the evening at the Annexe facing St James’s Park, he was pleased by the political gossip that even Labour headquarters was predicting a Conservative majority. Fittingly, he intended to monitor the figures from the Map Room, where once he had tracked the unfolding of the Allied victory over Hitler. Family members and close friends had been invited to sit with him as numbers streamed in throughout the day on 26 July.

Churchill went to bed on Wednesday night convinced that those numbers would favour the Conservatives. Sometime before daybreak, he awakened suddenly with a stabbing pain that told him the election was lost and the power to shape the future would be denied him. In anguish, he rolled over and slept until nine. About an hour later, Churchill was in his bath when he learned from an aide that his premonition of disaster was being amply confirmed by the early poll figures.

After he had dressed in a blue one-piece zip-up siren suit, he went to his Map Room. Over the next few hours, Churchill, surrounded by charts of constituencies and of the most recent state of the election, reacted to the news of each Labour gain by silently, stoically nodding his head. He complained only of the heat and the want of air. The Conservatives were out. Churchill had been returned in his constituency, Woodford. But overall there had been a Labour landslide, and Britain was to have a new prime minister.

Mrs Churchill, tall, silvery-haired, with proud posture and a profile said to resemble a ship’s prow, suggested to her husband that the outcome of the election might prove to be ‘a blessing in disguise’.

He replied, ‘At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.’ It was inconceivable that he had been cut off altogether from Potsdam. Initially, he insisted he would wait to take his dismissal from the House of Commons, as he was entitled to do. Then in his pride he declared that nothing would induce him to go back to Potsdam, though he was not yet ready to resign immediately either.

He spoke vaguely of stepping aside on Monday, though that would mean asking Stalin and Truman to wait in Germany until he made up his mind. Finally, Churchill accepted that under the circumstances he really had no choice but to resign at once – and let the talks go on without him. All of his great plans, everything he had so carefully set up, must remain unrealized.

Some twenty-four hours after he had raced to Buckingham Palace to speak to the King of his hopes, Churchill returned to tender his resignation. The King offered him the Order of the Garter but Churchill declined the high honour in the belief it would be wrong to accept it after what he saw as a public rebuff of his leadership. He drafted a statement to be read aloud to the nation on the BBC at 9 p.m. He stated that as a consequence of ‘the decision of the British people’, he had laid down the charge which had been placed upon him in darker times.

Thursday was devoted to immediate concerns. The next morning, he awakened to the realization of what the people’s decision meant for him personally. In years past, Churchill had been known to declare that in war one can only be killed once, but in politics many times. Politicians, he once wrote, expect to fall and hope to rise again. In the face of staggering rejection, numerous setbacks and many apparent dead ends, obstinacy had kept Churchill pounding on when fainter spirits might have given up. ‘No’ was an answer he had repeatedly refused to accept. ‘Unsquashable resilience’ had long been among his defining characteristics. He had justly been said to have more lives than a cat and to have survived as many arrows as legend planted in the flesh of Saint Sebastian.

This time, everything seemed different to him, and it was his age that made it so. By most estimates the magnitude of the Labour victory, a majority of 146 seats in the House of Commons, suggested that the Conservatives could not hope to return to power for at least a decade. Some people went so far as to say that Labour was in for a generation. For Churchill, as for his party, there was no avoiding the likelihood that by the time he had another chance at the premiership – if he ever did – he would be at least eighty.

Throughout the day, as he said goodbye to some of the people who had worked most closely with him during the war, he seemed absorbed by the idea that a comeback was impossible. The previous night he had briefly thought the new Labour Government might be turned out soon enough, but the final numbers left no such hope. After a farewell meeting with his Cabinet, he lingered privately to talk to Eden. Churchill expressed confidence that the Conservative heir apparent would surely sit in the Cabinet Room again.

‘You will,’ Churchill said with more than a dash of bitterness, ‘but I shall not.’

Churchill once observed that a man’s only real necessities in life are food and a philosophic temperament. All day Saturday at Chequers, which he had yet to vacate, he appeared remarkably cheerful and controlled, but after dinner and a film screening, his mood darkened noticeably. Attlee had returned to Potsdam a day later than scheduled and the talks resumed that very night at ten. The new Big Three worked at the conference table in the Cecilienhof until after midnight.

Cut off from all that forever, it seemed, Churchill sat into the night listening to Gilbert and Sullivan and other recordings on his gramophone.

II Face Facts and Retire London, 1945 (#litres_trial_promo)

During the war, Churchill had always slept with the key to the Cabinet boxes. He kept it on his watch chain. Suddenly, the key was gone. There were no more boxes, no constantly ringing phones, no telegrams requiring his immediate attention. From the first, he found it impossible to adjust to a new tempo of life. It was as if his heart was still pounding at the maximum rate, though his body had been forced to a standstill. Previously, Clementine Churchill had doubted that he could survive the intense demands on his time and energy. The question now was whether he could live without them.

Churchill returned to London on Monday, 30 July. While Clementine supervised the removal of their possessions from 10 Downing Street, the couple took up temporary residence in a sixth-floor penthouse at Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair. Long prone to bouts of depression, Churchill worried about sleeping near a balcony at a time when he was haunted by what he described as ‘desperate thoughts’.

A sense of incompleteness gnawed at him. He could hardly believe that other hands had taken over with Stalin when it was he, Churchill, who had established a relationship with the Soviet leader, understood him, and saw what needed to be done. Not for the first time in his life, Churchill despaired that his peculiar powers and gifts were being wasted.

The shift in his political fortunes had left him feeling hurt, humiliated, and confused. Because he had cast the election as a referendum on his conduct of the war, he was tortured by the idea that the outcome had called his record into question. Though he was no stranger to rejection, he had never developed the thick skin that is so useful to a politician. No analysis of the Labour vote prevented him from interpreting the numbers as a personal disgrace. No references to an overall leftward swing in British politics, to the public’s desire for a better material life after the war, or to festering public resentment of previous Conservative leaders’ failure to prepare adequately for the struggle against Hitler were capable of lessening the blow to Churchill’s ego.

For all that, he was able to make light of his defeat, as when he sang an old music hall song to the doorman at Claridge’s:

I’ve been to the North Pole

I’ve been to the South Pole

The East Pole, the West Pole

And every kind of pole

The barber’s pole

The greasy pole

And now I’m fairly up the pole

Since I got the sack

From the Hotel Metropole.

Sometimes, others sang to him. On 1 August, six days after the Conservative rout, the new Labour-dominated Parliament assembled to elect the Speaker of the House of Commons. The chamber was packed and tensions ran high as, flushed with victory, the ‘new boys’ on the Labour benches taunted and jeered at the Conservatives sitting across from them. At a quarter to one, when everyone else was in place, Churchill made his much-anticipated entrance. With chin up, he sauntered to his seat on the Opposition front bench. Conservatives greeted him with raucous cheers. One Tory began to sing ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and others heartily joined in.

Labour countered with their party anthem, ‘The Red Flag’. In boisterous spirits, a Labour member dashed to the front to pretend to conduct what a witness likened to ‘the chorus of birds and animals sometimes to be heard in a Disney film’. Some of the newcomers did not really know the words and struggled to improvise. Meanwhile, whenever the Labour majority threatened to drown the Conservatives out, the latter raised their voices.

At Chequers the previous weekend, Churchill had made it clear that he hoped to go on leading the Opposition and the party as long as Conservatives wished him to and as long as his strength held. The cheers from the Tory benches suggested that he had his party’s unanimous support. The British people might have rejected him, but the warm emotional reception accorded him by fellow Conservatives left him in no doubt that they at least wanted him as their leader.

Sadly, as he had done at the time of his electoral tour, he misconstrued the meaning of those cheers. Now, as then, the fact that people were grateful to their wartime prime minister did not necessarily mean that they wanted him to remain in power during what promised to be very different circumstances.

Hardly had Churchill left Westminster after his debut as Opposition leader when a trio of Conservative heavyweights met to find a way to manoeuvre him out of the job. The driving force in the effort was Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranborne, leader of the Opposition peers. The fifty-one-year-old heir to the 4th Marquess of Salisbury was a grandson of the prime minister Lord Salisbury and a cousin of Churchill’s wife. His politically prominent family had been advising monarchs since the sixteenth century and one ancestor had been instrumental in the accession to the English throne of James VI of Scotland. In the Conservative Party as well, the Cecils (pronounced to rhyme with ‘whistles’) were noted as kingmakers and power-brokers. They had had a long and complicated relationship with the Churchill family. ‘Your family has always hated my family,’ Winston was known to grumble, at which Cranborne would ‘laugh uproariously’ in response. In 1886, the prime minister Lord Salisbury had been responsible (at least as Winston saw it) for the political ruin of Winston’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the second surviving son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. In the 1930s, Cranborne himself had done much to obstruct Winston’s career despite the fact that both men opposed the policy of appeasement. Nevertheless, Winston had long found it impossible to decide whether he admired the Cecils or resented them on his late father’s behalf. Salisbury had been kind to Winston when he was in his mid-twenties, and Winston later dedicated a book to him. Winston had enjoyed friendships with Cranborne’s uncle, Hugh Cecil, who served as best man at Winston’s wedding, as well as with, however improbably, Cranborne himself. He adored Cranborne’s wife, Betty, whose acerbic conversation he prized, and through the years he and Cranborne had managed rigorously to keep their political differences in one compartment and their private friendship in another.

Known familiarly by his boyhood nickname, Bobbety, Cranborne was tall and gaunt, with a long nose and protruding teeth. A speech impediment caused his r’s to sound like w’s and he spoke at the breakneck speed characteristic of his family, who were famous for their ability to utter more words in a minute than most people can in five. He was an ugly man, slightly bent and often shabbily dressed, whose great personal charm caused many women to find him immensely attractive. He was an invalid and a hypochondriac, whose frail frame housed a will of iron. And he was a political powerhouse, who, like other Cecils before him, preferred to operate behind the scenes, often so subtly that it was difficult to perceive his hand in events. Invisibility appealed to him because he prided himself on basing his actions not on the dictates of personal ambition, but on duty and principle. Since he ostensibly wanted nothing for himself, he had a reputation in party circles for ‘objectivity’ that gave his pronouncements particular weight. Past disagreements notwithstanding, Cranborne warmly acknowledged the greatness of what Churchill had done in the war. He marvelled, as he later said, that in 1940 Churchill ‘did not talk of facing the realities: he created the realities’. Now that victory had been secured, however, Cranborne maintained that Churchill ought to ‘face facts and retire’ without delay. Had not Churchill himself taken a similar view of Cranborne’s grandfather in the twilight of his career?

During the war, the Tory party had been allowed to disintegrate on almost every conceivable level. Churchill was not a party man and never had been, and from the time he became the party’s leader in 1940 he had shown no interest in overseeing its affairs. As a consequence, by 1945 there was no management, no organization, and no programme. Lacking specific policies, Tories had fought the general election on the aura of the Churchill name and record. In the wake of overwhelming defeat, there was broad agreement that Conservatism needed to be drastically rethought. In Cranborne’s view, the effort needed to begin immediately under younger leadership. Anthony Eden had long been his ‘horse’ in the political race. From the outset, Cranborne’s career in politics had been closely tied to Eden’s. Cranborne started out as Eden’s parliamentary private secretary, and Eden and he grabbed headlines together in 1938 when they resigned as Foreign Secretary and Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs respectively in protest at the Chamberlain Government’s appeasement of Mussolini.

The description of Cranborne as Eden’s under secretary belied a more intricate relationship. Cranborne was Eden’s most powerful political supporter. Cranborne did not himself aspire to the premiership; influence was what he was after, and he viewed an Eden Government as the best way to secure it. As a politician, Eden benefited from the prestige of a connection to the house of Cecil, as well as from Cranborne’s superior intellect and cunning. Cranborne was also the nervier by far. He often quietly but insistently pressed Eden to act as Eden almost certainly would never have dared on his own. Eden, whose theatrical good looks and sartorial elegance contrasted sharply with Cranborne’s less photogenic appearance, attended the meeting on 1 August 1945 to discuss Churchill’s future.

Also present was Britain’s Ambassador to the US, Lord Halifax, who had returned from Washington on leave the previous day. When Chamberlain resigned in 1940, Halifax had been his choice to replace him as prime minister, as well as that of King George VI and much of the Conservative Party, but Halifax had declined in favour of Churchill. (Halifax calculated that the public clamour for Churchill was so great that any other appointment would inevitably be overshadowed by his looming presence in the Government. Halifax took consolation in the judgement that Churchill’s character flaws made it likely that his tenure would be brief.) When Churchill became prime minister, he returned the favour by shipping Halifax off to Washington lest he re-emerge as a political rival.

For Churchill, who could be as passionate about fighting off real and potential rivals for power as he was about fighting the war, there had been an additional advantage to replacing Halifax as Foreign Secretary with Anthony Eden. As the Conservative Chief Whip James Stuart later observed, Churchill ‘knew he could bully Anthony … but not Halifax’. By exiling him to the US, Churchill lowered the curtain on Halifax’s political career. Five years later, Halifax was one of those who believed the time had come for Churchill to bow out, and by his reckoning, Churchill was fortunately not one of those individuals whose sole interest in life is his work. There were many activities that afforded him much pleasure, but that he had had little time to pursue during his premiership. Among other things he was an author and painter, and Halifax believed he might actually welcome a chance to be free of the burdens of leadership and retire of his own accord.

Eden thought he knew Churchill’s mood better. Cranborne, as well, was far from optimistic that Churchill would willingly step down, and his strategy was to ease him out of power. Churchill had been asked to go to New Zealand to be honoured for his war service, and Cranborne was determined that he accept that invit ation, as well as many similar ones that were sure to follow from around the world. While Churchill was abroad, Eden would run the party in his stead. Halifax was set to see Churchill at 5 p.m. that day, and Eden was to dine with him after that. Cranborne urged both visitors to press Churchill to go to New Zealand, and generally to entice him with the joys of retirement. Halifax readily agreed, but Eden hesitated.

This was partly a matter of propriety on Eden’s part, partly a matter of self-preservation. He flinched at the unseemliness of trying to push Churchill aside in open pursuit of his own interests. He did not wish to appear vulgarly ambitious. Was that not among the very qualities in Churchill that had long repelled him and many others? At the same time, Eden longed to lead the Opposition and he did not want to do or say anything to provoke Churchill to turn against him at this late date and to name another successor. During the war, Churchill had been known to taunt him with the names of other ‘possibles’ – Oliver Lyttelton, John Anderson, Harold Macmillan. By Eden’s lights, the wait to succeed Churchill had been long and excruciating, and he did not want to jeopardize his position before the handover actually took place. But Cranborne was insistent, and as had often been the case between the two friends, Eden reluctantly gave in to the stronger will.