Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

Churchill himself was sometimes very weary, especially after striving to arbitrate on a dozen intractable strategic issues, and enduring perceived petulance from MPs in the Commons. ‘Malaya, the Australian government’s (#litres_trial_promo) intransigence and “nagging” in the House was more than any man could be expected to endure,’ he grumbled crossly one night to Eden. Yet his generosity of spirit seldom weakened, even towards the enemy. For all his frequent jibes at ‘the horrible Huns’, and at a moment when Britain’s very existence was threatened, he displayed no vindictiveness when discussing a post-war vision. ‘We [have] got to admit (#litres_trial_promo) that Germany should remain in the European family,’ he observed. ‘Germany existed before the Gestapo.’

His energy seemed inexhaustible. That same evening at Chequers on which he likened himself to a swineherd, he conferred with two generals about Home Guard tasks in the event of invasion. He then studied aircraft production charts, which prompted him to marvel aloud that Beaverbrook had genius, ‘and also brutal ruthlessness’. He led his guests for a moonlit walk in the garden, then settled down to quiz an officer newly returned from Egypt about tactics in the Western Desert. In both London and Buckinghamshire he received an endless stream of visitors. The exiled Polish prime minister, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, came to request some foreign exchange, and provoked a memorable Churchillian sortie into franglais: ‘Mon général, devant la vieille dame de Threadneedle Street je suis impotent.’ There was always time for Americans. Whitelaw Reid, twenty-eight-year-old London correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, was awed to find himself invited to lunch with the prime minister at Downing Street. Rear-Admiral Robert Ghormley of the US Navy, on a mission to London, was presented with inscribed copies of the four volumes of Churchill’s Life of Marlborough.

The death of Neville Chamberlain on 9 November roused Churchill to one of his most notable displays of magnanimity. His private view of the former prime minister was contemptuous: ‘the narrowest, most ignorant (#litres_trial_promo), most ungenerous of men’. He felt gratitude for Chamberlain’s loyal service as his subordinate since 10 May, and admiration for the courage with which he faced his mortal illness, but none for his record as prime minister. Now, however, he summoned his utmost powers of statesmanship to draft a tribute. He called his private secretary Eric Seal from bed to read it: ‘Fetch the seal from his ice floe.’ Next day, he delivered to the House of Commons a eulogy which forfeited nothing of its power and dignity by the fact that it memorialised a man so uncongenial to him:

In paying a tribute of respect and regard to an eminent man who has been taken from us, no one is obliged to alter the opinions which he has formed or expressed upon issues which have become a part of history; but at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgements under a searching review. It is not given to human beings—happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable—to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong…History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these high hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.

It was a supreme political act, to exhibit such grace towards the memory of a man who had failed the British people, and whom Churchill himself justly despised. Yet by November 1940 he could afford to display generosity. His mastery of the nation was secure. His successful defiance of Hitler commanded the admiration of much of the world. He had displayed gifts of self-discipline and political management such as had hitherto been absent from his career. His speeches were recognised as among the greatest ever delivered by a statesman, in war or peace. All that now remained was to devise some means of waging war against an enemy whose control of the Continent was unchallengeable, and whose superiority over Britain remained overwhelming. For Winston Churchill, the hardest part began when the achievement of ‘the Few’ was already the stuff of legend.

FIVE Greek Fire (#ulink_6433ab99-fe2c-5fae-8f87-1a873a156b84)

1 Seeking Action

In the autumn of 1940, even Churchill’s foes at Westminster and in Whitehall conceded that since taking office he had revealed a remarkable accession of wisdom. He had not become a different person from his old self, but shed the maverick’s mantle. He looked and sounded a king, ‘Ay, every inch a king,’ albeit one movingly conscious that he was the servant of a democracy. In a few months he had achieved a personal dominance of the country which rendered his colleagues acolytes, almost invisible in the shadow of his pedestal. Only Eden and Bevin made much impact on the popular imagination.

Among politicians and service chiefs, however, widespread uncertainty persisted, even if it was discreetly expressed. Though the Germans had not invaded Britain, what happened next? What chance of victory did Britain have? The well-known military writer Captain Basil Liddell Hart saw no prospect beyond (#litres_trial_promo) stalemate, and thus urged a negotiated peace. In September Dalton reported Beaverbrook as ‘very defeatist’, believing that Britain should merely ‘sit tight and defend ourselves (#litres_trial_promo) until the USA comes into the war’. But would this ever happen? Raymond Lee, US military attaché in London, was among many Americans bemused about what President Roosevelt meant when he promised that their country would aid the British ‘by all means short of war’. Lee sought an answer from senior diplomats at his own embassy: ‘They say no one knows (#litres_trial_promo), that it depends on what R thinks from one day to another. I wonder if it ever occurs to the people in Washington that they have no God-given right to declare war. They may wake up one day to find that war has suddenly been declared upon the United States. That is the way Germany and Japan do business. Or, can it be that this is what Roosevelt is manoeuvring for?’

Once the Battle of Britain was won, the foremost challenge facing Churchill was to find another field upon which to fight. In July 1940, Lee was filled with admiration for Britain’s staunchness amid the invasion threat. But he suggested sardonically that if Hitler instead launched his armies eastward, ‘in a month’s time (#litres_trial_promo) England would go off sound asleep again’. Likewise MP Harold Nicolson: ‘If Hitler were to postpone (#litres_trial_promo) invasion and fiddle about in Africa and the Mediterranean, our morale might weaken.’ As long as Britain appeared to face imminent catastrophe, its people displayed notable fortitude. Yet it was a striking feature of British wartime behaviour that the moment peril fractionally receded, many ordinary people allowed themselves to nurse fantasies that their ordeal might soon be over, the spectre of war somehow banished. Soldier Edward Stebbing wrote on 14 November: ‘I have heard (#litres_trial_promo) a good many members of this unit say that they wished the war would end whether we win or lose…almost every day I hear some variations of the same idea, the common reason being that most of us are fed up with the whole business…The government is criticised for its lack of aggressiveness.’

A trades union correspondent wrote to Ernest Bevin from Portsmouth: ‘At our weekly meeting (#litres_trial_promo) last night of delegates representing thousands of workers…the members were very disappointed at your not telling the public that the government intended to prosecute the war more vigorously, and take the offensive, instead of always being on the defensive…We have retired service officers who tell us that we have no leaders. We have not won a battle since the war started and it is for that reason no country will join us, knowing full well that Germany will attack and swallow them, whilst our own government are debating the issue…Our workers’ clubs contain Unionists, Liberals and Labour, all united to push the present government out of office at the first chance, and if something don’t happen soon, the leaders will not be able to hold the workers.’

Yet how could Britain display aggressiveness, a capability to do more than merely withstand Axis onslaughts by bombers and U-boats? Clementine Churchill enquired at lunch one day: ‘Winston, why don’t we land (#litres_trial_promo) a million men on the continent of Europe? I’m sure the French would rise up and help us.’ The prime minister answered with unaccustomed forbearance that it would be impossible to land a million men at once, and that the vanguards would be shot to pieces. Back in 1915, as Lt.Col. Winston Churchill prepared to lead a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers into the trenches, he told his officers: ‘We will go easy (#litres_trial_promo) at first: a little digging and feeling our way, and then perhaps later on we may attempt a deed.’ This latter proposition commanded little enthusiasm among his comrades at the time, and even less among his generals a generation later. But by the winter of 1940 Churchill knew that a ‘deed’ must be attempted, to sustain an appearance of momentum in Britain’s war effort.

At home, there could be no German invasion before spring. The nation’s city-dwellers must bear the blitz, while the Royal Navy sustained the Atlantic lifeline against U-boats and surface commerce raiders. The navy had already suffered heavily, losing since 1939 one battleship, two aircraft-carriers, two cruisers, twenty-two submarines and thirty-seven destroyers. More ships were building, but 1941 losses would be worse. Churchill pinned great hopes on the RAF’s offensive against Germany, but as he himself observed on 1 November 1940, ‘the discharge of bombs (#litres_trial_promo) is pitifully small’. It would remain so for a long time to come. CIGS Sir John Dill instructed his director of military operations, Maj.Gen. John Kennedy, to draft a strategy paper on how the war might be won. Kennedy said the best that he could offer was a plan for averting defeat. To make victory possible, American belligerence was indispensable.

Lt.Gen. Henry Pownall attended an army conference addressed by the prime minister in November 1940, and was impressed by his robust good sense: ‘No more than anyone else (#litres_trial_promo) did he see clearly how the war was going to be won, and he reminded us that for four years in 1914-18 nobody could foretell the final collapse of Germany, which came so unexpectedly…All we could do for the present, as during the Great War, was to get on with it and see what happened…He talked as well as ever, and I was much impressed by the very broad and patient view that he took of the war as a whole.’ Churchill expressed the same sentiments to senior RAF officers conferring at Downing Street: ‘As the PM said goodnight (#litres_trial_promo) to the Air Marshals, he told them he was sure we were going to win the war, but confessed he did not see clearly how it was to be achieved.’

A chiefs of staff paper on Future Strategy, dated 4 September 1940, suggested that Britain should aim ‘to pass to the general offensive in all spheres and in all theatres with the utmost possible strength in the Spring of 1942’. If even this remote prospect was fanciful, what meanwhile was the army to do? Churchill, with his brilliant intuitive understanding of the British people, recognised the importance of military theatre, as his service chiefs often did not. The soldiers’ caution might be prudent, but much of the public, like unheroic Edward Stebbing and his comrades, craved action, an outcome, some prospect beyond victimhood. There was a rueful War Office joke at this time, prompted by the blitz, that Britain’s soldiers were being put to work knitting socks for the civilians in the trenches.

Here was one of the foremost principles of wartime leadership which Churchill got profoundly right, though he often erred in implementation. He perceived that there must be action, even if not always useful; there must be successes, even if overstated or even imagined; there must be glory, even if undeserved. Attlee said later, very shrewdly: ‘He was always, in effect (#litres_trial_promo), asking himself…“What must Britain do now so that the verdict of history will be favourable?”…He was always looking around for “finest hours”, and if one was not immediately available, his impulse was to manufacture one.’

Churchill addressed the conduct of strategy with a confidence that dismayed most of Britain’s generals, but which had evolved over many years. As early as 1909, he wrote to Clementine about Britain’s generals: ‘These military men v[er]y often (#litres_trial_promo) fail altogether to see the simple truths underlying the relationship of all armed forces…Do you know I would greatly like to have some practice in the handling of large forces. I have much confidence in my judgement on things, when I see clearly, but on nothing do I seem to feel the truth more than in tactical combinations.’ While he was travelling to America in 1932, Clementine read G.F.R. Henderson’s celebrated biography of Stonewall Jackson. She wrote to her husband: ‘The book is full of (#litres_trial_promo) abuse of politicians who try to interfere with Generals in the field—(Ahem!).’ Her exclamation was prompted, of course, by memories of his battles with service chiefs during the First World War.

Churchill believed himself exceptionally fitted for the direction of armies, navies and air forces. He perceived no barrier to such a role in the fact that he possessed neither military staff training nor experience of higher field command. He wrote in his own history of the First World War:

A series of absurd (#litres_trial_promo) conventions became established, perhaps inevitably, in the public mind. The first and most monstrous of these was that the Generals and Admirals were more competent to deal with the broad issues of the war than abler men in other spheres of life. The general no doubt was an expert on how to move his troops, and the admiral upon how to fight his ships…But outside this technical aspect they were helpless and misleading arbiters in problems in whose solution the aid of the statesman, the financier, the manufacturer, the inventor, the psychologist, was equally required…Clear leadership, violent action, rigid decision one way or the other, form the only path not only of victory, but of safety and even of mercy. The State cannot afford division or hesitation at the executive centre.

Tensions between his instincts and the judgements of Britain’s professional commanders would characterise Churchill’s leadership. A Polish officer, attending a lecture at the British staff college on principles of war, rose at its conclusion to suggest that the speaker had omitted the most important: ‘Be stronger.’ Yet where might Britain achieve this? As Minister of Defence, Churchill issued an important directive. Limitations of numbers, he said, ‘make it impossible for the Army, except in resisting invasion, to play a primary role in the defeat of the enemy. That task can only be done by the staying power of the Navy and above all by the effect of Air predominance. Very valuable and important services may be rendered Overseas by the Army in operations of a secondary order, and it is for these special operations that its organization and character should be adapted.’ After a British commando raid on the Lofoten Islands, Churchill wrote to the C-in-C Home Fleet: ‘I am so glad (#litres_trial_promo) you were able to find the means of executing “Claymore”. This admirable raid has done serious injury to the enemy and has given an immense amount of innocent pleasure at home.’ The latter proposition was more plausible than the former.

Churchill and his military chiefs renounced any prospect of engaging Hitler’s main army. They committed themselves to a strategy based on minor operations which persisted, in substantial measure, until 1944. Pantellaria, the tiny Italian island between Tunis and Sicily, exercised a baleful fascination upon the war cabinet. After a dinner at Chequers in November 1940, Churchill fantasised about an assault ‘by 300 determined men (#litres_trial_promo), with blackened faces, knives between their teeth and revolvers under their tails’. Eden in 1940-41 cherished absurd notions of seizing Sicily: ‘The Sicilians have always been anti-fascist,’ he enthused. A War Office plan dated 28 December called for a descent on the island by two infantry brigades. There was talk of Sardinia, and of the Italian-held Dodecanese islands. The chiefs of staff learned to dread mention of north Norway in the prime minister’s flights of fancy.

None of these schemes was executed, save a brief and embarrassingly unsuccessful foray into the Dodecanese, because the practical objections were overwhelming. Even the most modest raid required scarce shipping, which could not sensibly be hazarded within range of the Luftwaffe unless air cover was available, as it usually was not. It was hard to identify credible objectives for ‘butcher and bolt’ forays, and to gather sufficient intelligence to give them a reasonable chance of success. However strongly the prime minister pressed for British forces to display initiative and aggression, the chiefs of staff resolutely opposed operations which risked substantial losses in exchange for mere passing propaganda headlines.

In the autumn of 1940, Africa offered the only realistic opportunities for British land engagement. Libya had been an Italian colony since 1911, Abyssinia since 1936. Churchill owed a perverse debt of gratitude to Mussolini. If Italy had remained neutral, if her dictator had not chosen to seek battle, how else might the British Army have occupied itself after its expulsion from France? As it was, Britain was able to launch spectacular African campaigns against one of the few major armies in the world which it was capable of defeating. Not all Italian generals were incompetents, not all Italian formations fought feebly. But never for a moment were Mussolini’s warriors in the same class as those of Hitler. North Africa, and the Duce’s pigeon-chested posturing as an Axis warlord, offered Britain’s soldiers an opportunity to show their mettle. If the British Army was incapable of playing in a great stadium against world-class opposition, it could nonetheless hearten the nation and impress the world by a demonstration in a lesser league.

Britain’s chiefs of staff, however, remained sceptical about the strategic value of any big commitment in the Middle East, win or lose. The Suez Canal route to the East was anyway unusable, because the Mediterranean was too perilous for merchant shipping, and remained so until 1943. The Persian oilfields fuelled British military operations in Middle East C-in-C Sir Archibald Wavell’s theatre, but lay too far from home by the Cape route to provide petrol for Britain, which instead relied upon American supplies. It is often forgotten that in those days the US was overwhelmingly the greatest oil producer in the world. Dill advocated reinforcing the Far East against likely Japanese aggression, and remained in his heart an opponent of the Middle East commitment throughout his tenure as head of the army. The CIGS understood the political imperatives facing Churchill, but foremost in his mind was a fear that acceptance of unnecessary new risk might precipitate further gratuitous disaster. The prime minister overruled him. He believed that the embarrassment of inertia in the Middle East much outweighed the perils of seizing the initiative. In the midst of a war, what would the world say about a nation that dispatched large forces to garrison its possessions on the far side of the world against a possible future enemy, rather than engage an actual one much nearer to hand?

In September 1940 an Italian army led by Marshal Graziani, 200,000 strong and thus outnumbering local British forces by four to one, crossed the east Libyan frontier and drove fifty miles eastward into Egypt before being checked. Meanwhile in East Africa, Mussolini’s troops seized the little colony of British Somaliland and advanced into Kenya and Sudan from their bases in Abyssinia. Wavell ordered Somaliland evacuated after only brief resistance. He remained impenitent in the face of Churchill’s anger about another retreat.

This first of Britain’s ‘desert generals’ was much beloved in the army. In World War I, Wavell won an MC and lost an eye at Ypres, then spent 1917-18 as a staff officer in Palestine under Allenby, whose biography he later wrote. A reader of poetry, and prone to introspection, among soldiers Wavell passed as an intellectual. His most conspicuous limitation was taciturnity, which crippled his relationship with Churchill. Many who met him, perhaps over-impressed by his enigmatic persona, perceived themselves in the presence of greatness. But uncertainty persisted about whether this extended to mastery of battlefields, where a commander’s strength of will is of greater importance than his cultural accomplishments.

On 28 October 1940, the Italians invaded north-west Greece. Contrary to expectations, after fierce fighting they were evicted by the Greek army and thrown back into Albania, where the rival forces languished in considerable discomfort through five months that followed. British strategy during this period became dominated by Mediterranean dilemmas, among which aid to Greece and offensive action in Libya stood foremost. Churchill constantly incited his C-in-C to take the offensive against the Italians in the Western Desert, using the tanks shipped to him at such hazard during the summer. Wavell insisted that he needed more time. Now, however, overlaid upon this issue was that of Greece, about which Churchill repeatedly changed his mind. On 27 October, the day before Italy invaded, he dealt brusquely with a proposal from Leo Amery and Lord Lloyd, respectively India and colonial secretaries, that more aid should be dispatched: ‘I do not agree with your suggestions that at the present time we should make any further promises to Greece and Turkey. It is very easy to write in a sweeping manner when one does not have to take account of resources, transport, time and distance.’

Yet as soon as Italy attacked Greece, the prime minister told Dill that ‘maximum possible’ aid must be sent. Neville Chamberlain in March 1939 had assured the Greeks of British support against aggression. Now, Churchill perceived that failure to act must make the worst possible impression upon the United States, where many people doubted Britain’s ability to wage war effectively. At the outset he proposed sending planes and weapons to Greece, rather than British troops. Dill, Wavell and Eden—then visiting Cairo—questioned even this. Churchill sent Eden a sharp signal urging boldness, dictated to his typist under the eye of Jock Colville.

He lay there in his (#litres_trial_promo) four-post bed with its flowery chintz hangings, his bed-table by his side. Mrs Hill [his secretary] sat patiently opposite while he chewed his cigar, drank frequent sips of iced soda-water, fidgeted his toes beneath the bedclothes and muttered stertorously under his breath what he contemplated saying. To watch him compose some telegram or minute for dictation is to make one feel that one is present at the birth of a child, so tense is his expression, so restless his turnings from side to side, so curious the noises he emits under his breath. Then out comes some masterly sentence and finally with a ‘Gimme’ he takes the sheet of typewritten paper and initials it, or alters it with his fountain-pen, which he holds most awkwardly half way up the holder.

On 5 November Churchill addressed MPs, reporting grave shipping losses in the Atlantic and describing a conversation he had held on his way into the Commons with the armed and helmeted guards at its doors. One soldier offered a timeless British cliché to the prime minister: ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’ This, Churchill told MPs, was Britain’s watchword for the winter of 1940: ‘We will think of something better by the winter of 1941.’ Then he adjourned to the smoking room, where he devoted himself to an intent study of the Evening News, ‘as if it were the only source (#litres_trial_promo) of information available to him’. Forget for a moment the art of his performance in the chamber. What more brilliant stagecraft could the leader of a democracy display than to read a newspaper in the common room of MPs of all parties, in the midst of a war and a blitz? ‘ “How are you?” he calls gaily to the most obscure Member…His very presence gives us all gaiety and courage,’ wrote an MP. ‘People gather round his table completely unawed.’

Despite Wavell’s protests, Churchill insisted upon sending a British force to replace Greek troops garrisoning the island of Crete, who could thus be freed to fight on the mainland. The first consignment of material dispatched to Greece consisted of eight anti-tank guns, twelve Bofors, and 20,000 American rifles. To these were added, following renewed prime ministerial urgings, twenty-four field guns, twenty anti-tank rifles and ten light tanks. This poor stuff reflected the desperate shortage of arms for Britain’s soldiers, never mind those of other nations. Some Gladiator fighters, capable of taking on the Italian air force but emphatically not the Luftwaffe, were also committed. Churchill was enraged by a cable from Sir Miles Lampson, British ambassador in Egypt, dismissing aid to Greece as ‘completely crazy’. The prime minister told the Foreign Office: ‘I expect to be protected from this kind of insolence.’ He dispatched a stinging rebuke to Lampson: ‘You should not telegraph (#litres_trial_promo) at Government expense such an expression as “completely crazy” when applied by you to grave decisions of policy taken by the Defence Committee and the War Cabinet after considering an altogether wider range of requirements and assets than you can possibly be aware of.’

On the evening of 8 November, however, the prospect changed again. Eden returned from Cairo to confide to the prime minister first tidings of an offensive Wavell proposed to launch in the Western Desert the following month. This was news Churchill craved: ‘I purred like six cats (#litres_trial_promo).’ Ismay found him ‘rapturously happy’. The prime minister exulted: ‘At long last we are (#litres_trial_promo) going to throw off the intolerable shackles of the defensive. Wars are won by superior will-power. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.’ Three days later, he cabled Wavell: ‘You may…be assured that you will have my full support at all times in any offensive action you may be able to take against the enemy.’ That same night of 11 November, twenty-one Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers, launched from the carrier Illustrious, delivered a brilliant attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto which sank or crippled three battleships. Britain was striking out.

Churchill accepted that the North African offensive must now assume priority over all else, that no troops could be spared for Greece. A victory in the desert might persuade Turkey to come into the war. His foremost concern was that Wavell, whose terse words and understated delivery failed to generate prime ministerial confidence, should go for broke. Dismayed to hear that Operation Compass was planned as a limited ‘raid’, Churchill wrote to Dill on 7 December: ‘If, with the situation as it is (#litres_trial_promo), General Wavell is only playing small, and is not hurling in his whole available forces with furious energy, he will have failed to rise to the height of circumstances…I never “worry” about action, but only about inaction.’ He advanced a mad notion (#litres_trial_promo), that Eden should supplant Wavell as Middle East C-in-C, citing the precedent of Lord Wellesley in India during the Napoleonic wars. Eden absolutely refused to consider himself for such an appointment.

On 9 December, at last came the moment for the ‘Army of the Nile’, as Churchill had christened it, to launch its assault. Wavell’s 4th Indian and 7th Armoured Divisions, led by Lt.Gen. Sir Richard O’Connor, attacked the Italians in the Western Desert. Operation Compass achieved brilliant success. Mussolini’s generals showed themselves epic bunglers. Some 38,000 prisoners were taken in the first three days, at a cost of just 624 Indian and British casualties. ‘It all seems too good to be true,’ wrote Eden on 11 December. Wavell decided to exploit this success, and gave O’Connor his head. The little British army, by now reinforced by 6th Australian Division, stormed along the coast into Libya, taking Bardia on 5 January. At 0540 on 21 January 1941, red Verey lights arched into the sky to signal the start of O’Connor’s attack on the port of Tobruk. Bangalore torpedoes blew gaps in the Italian wire. An Australian voice shouted: ‘Go on, you bastards!’

At 0645, British tanks lumbered forward. The Italians resisted fiercely, but by dawn next day the sky was lit by the flames of their blazing supply dumps, prisoners in thousands were streaming into British cages, and the defenders were ready to surrender. O’Connor dispatched his tanks on a dash across the desert to cut off the retreating Italians. The desert army was in a mood of wild excitement. ‘Off we went across (#litres_trial_promo) the unknown country in full cry,’ wrote Michael Creagh, one of O’Connor’s division commanders. In a rare exhibition of emotion, O’Connor asked his chief of staff: ‘My God, do you think it’s going to be all right?’ It was indeed ‘all right’. The British reached Beda Fomm ahead of the Italians, who surrendered. In two months, the desert army had advanced 400 miles and taken 130,000 prisoners. On 11 February another of Wavell’s contingents advanced from Kenya into Abyssinia and Somaliland. After hard fighting—much tougher than in Libya—here too the Italians were driven inexorably towards eventual surrender.

For a brief season, Wavell became a national hero. For the British people in the late winter and early spring of 1940-41, battered nightly by the Luftwaffe’s bombardment, still fearful of invasion, conscious of the frailty of the Atlantic lifeline, success in Africa was precious. It was Churchill’s delicate task to balance exultation about a victory with caution about future prospects. Again and again in his broadcasts and speeches he emphasised the long duration of the ordeal that must lie ahead, the need for unremitting exertion. To this purpose he continued to stress the danger of a German landing in Britain: in February 1941 he demanded a new evacuation of civilian residents from coastal areas in the danger zone.

Churchill knew how readily the nation could lapse into inertia. The army’s home forces devoted much energy to anti-invasion exercises, such as Victor in March 1941. Victor assumed that five German divisions, two armoured and one motorised, had landed on the coast of East Anglia. On 30 March, presented with a report on the exercise, Churchill minuted mischievously, but with serious intent: ‘All this data would be most valuable for our future offensive operations. I should be very glad if the same officers would work out a scheme for our landing an exactly similar force on the French coast.’ Even if no descent on France was remotely practicable, Churchill was at his best in pressing Britain’s generals again and again to forswear a fortress mentality.

But public fear and impatience remained constants. ‘For the first time (#litres_trial_promo) the possibility that we may be defeated has come to many people—me among them,’ wrote Oliver Harvey, Eden’s private secretary, on 22 February 1941. ‘Mr Churchill’s speech (#litres_trial_promo) has rather sobered me,’ wrote London charity worker Vere Hodgson after a prime ministerial broadcast that month. ‘I was beginning to be a little optimistic. I even began to think there might be no Invasion…but he thinks there will, it seems. Also I had a feeling the end might soon be in sight; he seems to be looking a few years ahead! So I don’t know what is going to happen to us. We seem to be waiting—waiting, for we know not what.’

Churchill had answers to Miss Hodgson’s question. ‘Here is the hand (#litres_trial_promo) that is going to win the war,’ he told guests at Chequers, who included Duff Cooper and General Sikorski, one evening in February. He extended his fingers as if displaying a poker hand: ‘A Royal Flush—Great Britain, the Sea, the Air, the Middle East, American aid.’ Yet this was flummery. British successes in Africa promoted illusions that were swiftly shattered. Italian weakness and incompetence, rather than British strength and genius, had borne O’Connor’s little force to Tobruk and beyond. Thereafter, Wavell’s forces found themselves once more confronted with their own limitations, in the face of energetic German intervention.

In the autumn of 1940 Hitler had declared that ‘not one man and not one pfennig’ would he expend in Africa. His strategic attention was focused upon the East. Mussolini, with his ambition to make the Mediterranean ‘an Italian lake’, was anyway eager to achieve his own conquests without German aid. But when the Italians suffered humiliation, Hitler was unwilling to see his ally defeated, and to risk losing Axis control of the Balkans. In April he launched the Wehrmacht into Yugoslavia and Greece. An Afrika Korps of two divisions under Erwin Rommel was dispatched to Libya. A new chapter of British misfortunes opened.

Churchill’s decision to dispatch a British army to Greece in the spring of 1941 remains one of the most controversial of his wartime premiership. When the commitment was first mooted back in October, almost all the soldiers opposed it. On 1 November Eden, the Secretary for War, cabled from Cairo: ‘We cannot, from Middle East (#litres_trial_promo) resources, send sufficient air or land reinforcements to have any decisive influence upon course of fighting…To send such forces there…would imperil our whole position in the Middle East and jeopardize plans for offensive operations.’ These remarks prompted a tirade from the prime minister, and caused Eden to write in his diary two days later: ‘The weakness of our policy (#litres_trial_promo) is that we never adhere to the plans we make.’

It seemed extraordinarily unlikely that a mere four divisions—all that could be spared from Wavell’s resources—would make the difference between Greek victory and defeat. Aircraft were lacking. With German intervention looming in North Africa, such a diversion of forces threatened Britain’s desert campaign. Kennedy told Dill on 26 January that he would have liked to see the chiefs of staff adopt much firmer resistance to the Greek proposal—‘We were near the edge (#litres_trial_promo) of the precipice…CIGS said to me that he did not dissent, and considered the limitation placed upon the first reinforcements to be offered to the Greeks to be a sufficient safeguard. This seemed to me to be frightfully dangerous…If the Germans come down to Salonika the whole thing is bound to collapse, and nothing short of 20 divisions and a big air force, maintained by shipping we cannot afford, would be of any use…What we should do is keep the water in front of us. Anything we send to Greece will be lost if the Germans come down.’ As so often with the counsels of Churchill’s generals, this view represented prudence. Yet what would the British people say, never mind Goebbels, if the British lion skulked timorous beside the Nile?

Churchill changed his mind several times about Greece. Probably the most significant indication of his innermost belief derives from remarks to Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins early in January. Hopkins reported to Washington on the 10th: ‘He thinks Greece (#litres_trial_promo) is lost—although he is now reinforcing the Greeks and weakening his African army.’ Just as the prime minister’s heart had moved him to dispatch more troops to France in June 1940 against military logic, so now it inspired him to believe that the Greeks could not be abandoned to their fate. An overriding moral imperative, his familiar determination to do nothing common or mean, drove the British debate in the early months of 1941. He nursed a thin hope that, following the success of Compass, Turkey might join the Allies if Britain displayed staunchness in the Balkans.

It is likely that Churchill would have followed his instinct to be seen to aid Greece even if Wavell in the Middle East had sustained opposition. As it was, however, the C-in-C provoked amazement among senior soldiers by changing his mind. When Dill and Eden arrived in Cairo in mid-February on a second visit, they found Wavell ready to support a Greek commitment. On the 19th, the general said: ‘We have a difficult choice, but I think we are more likely to be playing the enemy’s game by remaining inactive than by taking action in the Balkans.’ Now it was Churchill’s turn to wobble. ‘Do not consider yourself obligated to a Greek enterprise if in your hearts you feel it will only be another Norwegian fiasco,’ he signalled Eden on 20 February. Dill, however, said that they believed there was ‘a reasonable chance of resisting a German advance’. Eden said to Wavell: ‘It is a soldier’s business. It is for you to say.’ Wavell responded: ‘War is an option of difficulties. We go.’ On the 24th, Churchill told his men in Cairo: ‘While being under no illusions, we all send you the order “Full Steam Ahead”.’

The Greek commitment represented one of Anthony Eden’s first tests as Foreign Secretary, the role to which he had been translated in December, on the departure of Lord Halifax to become British ambassador in Washington. In the eyes of many of his contemporaries, Eden displayed a highly-strung temperament, petulance and lack of steel which inspired scant confidence. An infantry officer in the First World War, endowed with famous charm and physical glamour, he established his credentials as an anti-appeaser by resigning from Chamberlain’s government in 1938. Throughout the war, as afterwards, he cherished a passionate ambition to succeed Churchill in office, which the prime minister himself encouraged. Churchill valued Eden’s intelligence and loyalty, but the soldiers thought him incorrigibly ‘wet’, with affectations of manner which they identified with those of homosexuals. Sir James Grigg, Permanent Under-Secretary at the War Office, and later Secretary for War, thought Eden ‘a poor feeble little pansy’, though it should be noted that Grigg seldom thought well of anyone. But in a world in which talent is rarely, if ever, sufficient to meet the challenges of government, it remains hard to identify a better candidate for the wartime foreign secretaryship. Eden often stood up to Churchill in a fashion which deserves respect. But his reports to Downing Street from the Mediterranean in 1940-41 reflected erratic judgement and a tendency towards vacillation.

Dill, head of the army, remained deeply unhappy about sending troops to Greece. But in the Middle East theatre, Wavell’s was the decisive voice. Many historians have expressed bewilderment that this intelligent soldier should have committed himself to a policy which promised disaster. Yet it does not seem hard to explain Wavell’s behaviour. For months the Middle East C-in-C had been harassed and pricked by the prime minister, who deplored his alleged pusillanimity. As early as August 1940, when Wavell visited London, Eden described the general’s dismay at Churchill’s impatience with him: ‘Found Wavell waiting (#litres_trial_promo) for me at 9am. He was clearly upset at last night’s proceedings and said he thought he should have made it plain that if the Prime Minister could not approve his dispositions and had not confidence in him he should appoint someone else.’ Though this early spat was patched up, the two men never established a rapport. Churchill wrote down Wavell as ‘a good average colonel (#litres_trial_promo)…[who] would make a good chairman of a Tory association’. The general displayed remarkable social gaucheness, for instance pitching his camp during visits to London later in the war at the home of ‘Chips’ Channon, one of the most foolish, if richest, men in Parliament. All through the autumn of 1940, bad-tempered signals flew to and fro between Downing Street and Cairo, provoked by the prime minister’s impatience with Wavell’s caution, and his C-in-C’s exasperation with Churchill’s indifference to military realities as he himself perceived them.

Again and again Churchill pressed Wavell, and indeed all his generals, to overcome their fears of the enemy, to display the fighting spirit which he prized above all things, and which alone, he believed, would enable Britain to survive. It seems necessary to recognise the loneliness of wartime commanders, thrust onto centre stage in a blaze of floodlights. Unlike ministers, most of whom had for years been famous men in the cockpit of affairs, even the highest-ranking of Britain’s soldiers, sailors and airmen had passed their careers in obscurity, unknown beyond the ranks of their own services. Now, suddenly, such a man as Wavell found himself the focus of his nation’s hopes. Even after the Libyan battlefield successes of recent months, the C-in-C in Cairo would have been less than human had he not been galled by Churchill’s goading. In 1939 Poland had been left to face defeat alone, for it lay beyond the reach of a British or French army. In 1940 many Frenchmen and Belgians believed themselves betrayed by their Anglo-Saxon ally. In 1941 Britain’s prime minister almost daily urged the peoples of the free world to join hands to contest mastery with the Nazis. Was a British army now to stand ingloriously idle, and watch Greece succumb?

In early March, Eden and Dill flew to meet the Athens government. Their brief from the prime minister was to expedite aid to Greece, where British troops began to land on the 4th, and to incite the Turks to belligerence. Churchill was under few delusions about the risks: ‘We have taken a grave and hazardous decision to sustain the Greeks and to try and make a Balkan front,’ he wrote to Smuts on 28 February. Bulgaria joined the Axis on 1 March. Yugoslavia was threatened. The Turks remained resolutely neutral, and the chiefs of staff anyway feared that Turkey as an ally would prove a liability. Yet now that the British were committed, and amid acute political and diplomatic difficulties, Eden and Dill laboured to give effect to earlier declarations of goodwill. Their reports to London remained unfailingly gloomy. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, commanding the Desert Air Force, was scornful about the haverings of almost all the politicians and senior officers making decisions in the Middle East. ‘Wavell, I think (#litres_trial_promo), is a fine man,’ he wrote, ‘but the rest?!!! They swing daily from easy optimism to desperate defeatism and vice versa.’

At a war cabinet meeting in London on 7 March, attended by Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, Churchill’s enthusiasm for the Greek commitment caused him, as so often, to talk roughshod over inconvenient material realities. He asserted, for instance: ‘We should soon have strong air forces in Greece.’ On the contrary, the RAF’s feeble contingent—barely a hundred aircraft strong—was drastically outnumbered by the 1,350 planes of the Axis. Tokenism dominated the subsequent campaign. The British bombed Sofia’s railyards in an attempt to hamper German supply movements to Yugoslavia. Yet this night attack was carried out by just six Wellingtons, a force insufficient convincingly to disrupt an exercise on Aldershot ranges. The nine squadrons committed by the RAF chiefly comprised obsolete and discredited aircraft, Gladiator biplane fighters and Blenheim light bombers. After achieving some early successes against the Italians, faced with modern German fighters such types could contribute nothing. Their destruction also entailed the loss of precious pilots. From January onwards, as the Luftwaffe ranged increasingly assertively over the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy was obliged to operate almost without air cover—and paid the price. By 14 April, the RAF in Greece had just forty-six serviceable planes.