Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45

There is no objective test by which the moral benefits of attempting to aid Greece can be measured against the cost of subjecting yet another British army to defeat. The official historians of British wartime intelligence have highlighted one misjudgement in the spring of 1941: Churchill and his generals (#litres_trial_promo) failed to perceive, because Ultra signal intercepts did not tell them, that Hitler’s fundamental purpose in the Balkans was not offensive, but defensive. He sought to protect the Romanian oilfields and secure his southern flank before attacking Russia. It is unlikely, however, that even had this been recognised in London, it would have caused Churchill to opt for inaction. Throughout its history, Britain has repeatedly sought to ignore the importance of mass on the battlefield, dispatching inadequate forces to assert moral or strategic principles. This was the course Churchill adopted in March 1941. It has been suggested that Wavell should have resigned, rather than send troops to Greece. But field commanders have no business to make such gestures. Wavell did his utmost to support his nation’s purposes, though he knew that, as commander-in-chief, he would bear responsibility for what must follow. On 7 April, when he bade farewell to Dill as the CIGS left Cairo for London with Eden, he said, ‘I hope, Jack (#litres_trial_promo), you will preside at my court martial.’

The outcome was as swift as it was inevitable. The Germans crushed Yugoslav resistance during two days’ fighting in Macedonia on 6-7 April, then embarked upon a series of dramatic outflanking operations against the Greeks. The Greek army was exhausted and demoralised following its winter campaign against the Italians. Its initial achievement in pushing forward into Albania, which had so impressed the British, represented the only effort of which it was capable. Within days, 62,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops in Greece found themselves retreating southwards in disarray, harried at every turn by the Luftwaffe. A 6 April air raid on Piraeus blew up a British ammunition ship, wrecking the port. The RAF’s little fighter force was ruthlessly destroyed.

Worse, even before the Germans occupied Greece, the Afrika Korps attacked in Libya. On 3 April the British evacuated Benghazi, then found themselves retreating pell-mell back down the coast road eastwards along which they had advanced in triumph two months earlier. By 11 April, when Rommel reached the limit of his supply chain, he had driven the British back almost to the start-line of their Compass offensive. It was fortunate that Hitler had dispatched to Libya too small a force and inadequate logistical support to convert British withdrawal into outright disaster. So much was wrong with the leadership, training, weapons and tactics of Wavell’s desert army that it is questionable whether it could have repulsed the Afrika Korps even in the absence of the Greek diversion. Inevitably, however, Greece was deemed responsible for defeat in Libya.

The desert fiasco brought out both the worst and best in Churchill. He offered absurd tactical suggestions. He chafed at the navy’s failure to bombard Tripoli, Rommel’s supply base—an intolerable risk beneath the German air threat. On land, he urged foolishly: ‘General Wavell should regain (#litres_trial_promo) unit ascendancy over the enemy and destroy his small raiding parties, instead of our own being harassed and hunted by them. Enemy patrols must be attacked on every occasion, and our own patrols should be used with audacity. Small British parties in armoured cars, or mounted on motor-cycles, or, if occasion offers, infantry, should not hesitate to attack individual tanks with bombs and bombards, as is planned for the defence of Britain.’ By contrast, the prime minister was at his best in overruling objections from the chiefs of staff and accepting the huge risk of dispatching a convoy, codenamed Tiger, direct through the Mediterranean to Egypt, instead of by the much safer but longer Cape route, with reinforcements of tanks.

Dill returned from Cairo steeped in gloom. John Kennedy, the DMO, sought to revive his spirits, but the CIGS dismissed reassuring words about the outlook. ‘I think it is desperate (#litres_trial_promo). I am terribly tired.’ Next day Kennedy noted: ‘CIGS is miserable (#litres_trial_promo) & feels he has wrecked the Empire.’ That evening Kennedy, at dinner with a friend, discussed possible evacuation of the entire Middle East. ‘On balance it was doubtful if we gained more than we lost by staying there. Prestige and effect on Americans perhaps the biggest arguments for staying.’ Like most senior soldiers, Kennedy was appalled by events in Greece, and by Britain’s role in the débâcle: ‘Chiefs of staff overawed (#litres_trial_promo) & influenced enormously by Winston’s overpowering personality…I hate my title now, for I suppose outsiders think I really “direct” oper[atio]ns & am partly responsible for the foolish & disastrous strategy which our armies are following.’ The self-confidence of Britain’s senior soldiers was drained by successive battlefield defeats. They felt themselves incapable of opposing Churchill, but likewise unable to support many of his decisions with conviction. They saw themselves bearing responsibility for losing the war, while offering no alternative proposals for winning it. Left to their own devices, the generals would have accepted battle only on the most favourable terms. Churchill, however, believed that operational passivity must spell doom for his hopes both of preventing the British people from succumbing to inertia and persuading the Americans to belligerence.

Following the suicide of the Greek prime minister, Alexander Koryzis, on 18 April, the will of his nation’s leadership collapsed. In London, Robert Menzies wrote after a war cabinet on 24 April 1941: ‘I am afraid of a disaster (#litres_trial_promo), and understand less than ever why Dill and Wavell advised that the Greek adventure had military merits. Of the moral merits I have no doubt. Better Dunkirk than Poland or Czechoslovakia.’ Menzies added two days later: ‘War cabinet. Winston says “We will lose only 5000 men in Greece.” We will in fact lose at least 15000. W is a great man, but he is more addicted to wishful thinking every day.’

Towards the end of April, a young soldier on leave in Lancashire who was visiting housewife Nella Last got up and left the living room as the family tuned to a broadcast by the prime minister. Mrs Last said: ‘Aren’t you going to listen (#litres_trial_promo) to Winston Churchill?’ Her guest demurred, as she recorded in her diary: ‘An ugly twist came to his mouth and he said “No, I’ll leave that for all those who like dope.” I said, “Jack, you’re liverish, pull yourself together. We believe in Churchill—one must believe in someone.” He said darkly, “well, everyone is not so struck.” ’ Mrs Last, like the overwhelming majority of British people, yearned to sustain her faith in the prime minister. Yet it seemed hard to do so on such an evening as this: ‘Did I sense a weariness and…foggy bewilderment as to the future in Winston’s speech—or was it all in my tired head, I wonder? Anyway, I got no inspiration—no little banner to carry. Instead I felt I got a glimpse of a horror and carnage that we have not yet thought of…More and more do I think it is the “end of the world”—of the old world, anyway.’ The poor woman acknowledged that she was unhappy and frightened. ‘Its funny how sick one can get, and not able to eat—just through…fear.’ Harold Nicolson, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Information, wrote: ‘All that the country (#litres_trial_promo) really wants is some assurance of how victory is to be achieved. They are bored by talks about the righteousness of our cause and our eventual triumph. What they want are facts indicating how we are to beat the Germans. I have no idea at all how we are to give them those facts.’

In Greece, the retreating army was much moved by the manner of its parting from the stricken people:‘We were nearly the last British troops they would see and the Germans might be at our heels,’ wrote Lt.Col. R.P. Waller of his artillery unit’s withdrawal through Athens, ‘yet cheering, clapping crowds lined the streets and pressed about our cars…Girls and men leapt on the running boards to kiss or shake hands with the grimy, weary gunners. They threw flowers to us and ran beside us crying “Come back—You must come back again—Goodbye—Good luck.” ’ The Germans took the Greek capital on 27 April. They had secured the country with a mere 5,000 casualties. The British lost 12,000 men, 9,000 of these becoming prisoners. The rest of Wavell’s expeditionary force was fortunate to escape to Crete from the ports of the Peloponnese.

Dill broadcast his gloom beyond the War Office. ‘He himself took (#litres_trial_promo) a depressed view of our prospect in Libya, Syria and even Irak,’ Lord Hankey recorded after a conversation with the CIGS, ‘and said that the German armoured forces are superior to ours both in numbers and efficiency—even in the actual Tanks. He was evidently very anxious about invasion, and seemed to fear that Winston would insist on denuding this country of essential defensive forces. He asked what a CIGS could do if he thought the PM was endangering the safety of the country.’ In such a case he should resign, said Hankey, an increasingly malevolent critic of the prime minister. Dill mused aloud: ‘But can one resign in war?’ It is extraordinary that the head of Britain’s army allowed himself to voice such defeatist sentiments at such a moment in the nation’s fortunes, even to a member of the government such as Hankey was. Yet it would be another six months before Churchill ventured to sack Dill. The general’s limitations reflected a chronic shortage of plausible warrior chieftains at the summit of Britain’s armed forces. It was not that Dill was a stupid man—far from it. Rather, he displayed an excess of rationality, allied to an absence of fire, which deeply irked the prime minister.

On 20 May, three weeks after Greece was occupied, General Kurt Student’s Luftwaffe paratroops began landing on Crete—to face slaughter at the hands of 40,000 British defenders commanded by Major-General Bernard Freyburg. Thanks to Ultra, the entire German plan, and even its timings, were known to the British. On the first day, the battle appeared a disaster for the Germans. The British 14th Brigade defeated them at Heraklion, and the Australians were likewise victorious at Rethymnon. New Zealand infantrymen, perhaps the finest Allied fighting soldiers of the Second World War, held Maleme airfield. But that evening the New Zealanders’ commanders made a fatal mistake, withdrawing from Maleme to reorganise for a counter-attack next day. On the afternoon of 21 May, a fresh battalion of German mountain troops crash-landed there in Junkers transports. Having secured the airfield, reinforcements poured in. Freyburg’s force began to withdraw eastwards. The Royal Navy inflicted heavy losses on the German seaborne reinforcement convoy, but itself suffered gravely. ‘We hold our breath (#litres_trial_promo) over Crete,’ wrote Vere Hodgson on 25 May. ‘…I feel Churchill is doing the same. He did not seem to mind evacuation of Greece, but he will take the loss of Crete very hard.’

As the Germans strengthened their grip on the island and Freyburg received Wavell’s consent to evacuate, the Luftwaffe pounded the British fleet. Two battleships, an aircraft-carrier and many lesser vessels were damaged, four cruisers and six destroyers sunk. Crete became the costliest single British naval campaign of the Second World War. On shore, the defenders lost 2,000 men killed and 12,000 taken prisoner. Eighteen thousand were rescued and carried to Egypt by the navy. Freyburg persuaded Churchill to assert in his post-war memoirs that the campaign had cost the Germans 15,000 casualties. The true figure, well-known by that time, was 6,000, including 2,000 dead. Some 17,500 German invaders had defeated a British and Commonwealth force more than twice as numerous. By 1 June, it was all over.

Strategically, the fall of Crete was a much less serious matter for the British than would have been the loss of Malta. Admiral Cunningham believed that if the island had been held the British would have paid a heavy price for continuing to supply it, in the face of overwhelming German air superiority. It was Hitler’s mistake to allow Student to deploy his parachute division against Freyburg’s garrison, rather than commit the Fallschirmjäger against Malta, Britain’s key Mediterranean island, which the Germans could probably have taken. But Churchill had promised the British people, and the world, that Crete would be staunchly defended. Its loss was a heavy blow to his authority, and even more so to his faith in the fighting power of the British Army. Thoughtful civilians, too, perceived the limitations of their own forces. ‘The difference between (#litres_trial_promo) the capability of the B[ritish] Army when dealing with the Italians and with the Germans is surely too plain to be missed,’ Elizabeth Belsey, a communist living in Huntingdon who was deeply cynical about her nation’s rulers, wrote to her soldier husband. ‘One can detect here and there, especially in Churchill’s speeches, hints that Britain realises the stickiness of her position.’

The prime minister was driven to offer threadbare explanations for the Mediterranean disaster, telling the House of Commons on 10 June: ‘A very great number of the guns which might have usefully been employed in Crete have been, and are being, mounted in merchant vessels to beat off the attacks of the Focke Wulf and Heinkel aircraft, whose depredations have been notably lessened thereby.’ But then he tired of his own evasions, saying: ‘Defeat is bitter. There is no use in trying to explain defeat. People do not like defeat, and they do not like the explanations, however elaborate or plausible, which are given to them. For defeat there is only one answer. The only answer to defeat is victory. If a government in time of war gives the impression that it cannot in the long run procure victory, who cares for explanations ? It ought to go.’

Churchill believed, surely rightly, that Crete could have been held. Yet Freyburg had been his personal choice to lead its defence. The New Zealander, like Gort a World War I VC, was the sort of hero whom he loved. Freyburg was a fine and brave man, but on Crete he showed himself unfit for command responsibility. Many of his troops were fugitives from Greece. The British Army never had the skill which the Germans later displayed for welding ‘odds and sods’ into effective impromptu battle groups. A shortage of wireless sets crippled British communications, and Freyburg’s understanding of the battle. There was little transport to move troops, and the Luftwaffe wrought havoc on such roads as existed. It was possible to argue that the British, Australian and New Zealand combat units on Crete—as distinct from the great ‘tail’, which degenerated into a rabble during the evacuation—fought well. They were baffled and angry when, after savaging Student’s paratroopers, they found themselves ordered to withdraw. Failure on Crete was the responsibility of British—and New Zealand—higher commanders. But the ultimate verdict remained inescapable: once again, an imperial army had been beaten, in a battle conducted on terms which should have favoured the defenders.

Churchill a few months later (#litres_trial_promo) claimed to regret the Greek commitment, which he described to Colville as the only error of judgement his government had made. Wavell should have garrisoned Crete, he said, and advised the Athens government to make the best terms with Germany that it could. But this was a view expressed while Britain was still struggling for survival. In the longer run of history, the nobility of his purpose in Greece commands respect. As Robert Menzies and others perceived, British passivity in the face of the destruction of Greek freedom would have created a sorry impression upon the world, and especially the United States. Nonetheless, events in the Mediterranean dismayed every enemy of Nazism. A Bucharest Jew, Mikhail Sebastian, wrote: ‘Once more Germany (#litres_trial_promo) gives the impression of an invincible, demonic, overwhelming force. The general feeling is one of bewilderment and impotence.’ A German war correspondent, Kurt Pauli, approached some British prisoners near Corinth and struck a posture of chivalrous condescension. ‘You’ve lost the game (#litres_trial_promo),’ he said. Not so, the PoWs replied defiantly: ‘We’ve still got Winston Churchill.’

Was this enough, however? Alan Brooke wrote later of ‘the utter darkness (#litres_trial_promo) of those early days of calamities when no single ray of hope could pierce the depth of gloom’. It was astonishing that the prime minister maintained his exuberance. Robert Menzies wrote: ‘The PM in conversation (#litres_trial_promo) will steep himself (and you) in gloom on some grim aspect of the war…only to proceed to fight his way out while he is pacing the floor with the light of battle in his eyes. In every conversation he inevitably reaches a point where he positively enjoys the war: “Bliss in that age was it to be alive.” (He says) “Why do people regard a period like this as years lost out of our lives when beyond question it is the most interesting period of them? Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?” ’

The near Middle East was only one among many theatres from which bad tidings crowded in upon Britain’s prime minister. On 30 April, Iraqi troops attacked the RAF’s Habbaniya air base outside Baghdad, prompting Churchill and Eden to conclude that they must seize Iraq to pre-empt a German takeover. The Luftwaffe’s blitz on Britain continued relentlessly, and had by now killed more than 30,000 civilians. On 10 May, the demented deputy führer Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland on a personal peace mission which perversely served Nazi propaganda interests better than British. Bewildered people, especially in Moscow and Washington, supposed that some parley between Britain and Germany must indeed be imminent. Fears persisted that Spain would join the Axis. Although foreign exchange was desperately short, the government somehow found the huge sum of $10 million to bribe Spanish generals to keep their country out of the war. The payments, arranged through Franco’s banker Juan March, were made into Swiss accounts. There is no evidence that this largesse influenced Spanish policy, but it represented an earnest of British anxiety about Franco’s neutrality.

On 20 May, Germans began to appear in Vichy French Syria, causing Churchill to decree, once more against Wavell’s opposition: ‘We must go in.’ British, Australian and Free French troops were soon fighting a bitter little campaign against the Vichyites, who resisted. Churchill observed crossly (#litres_trial_promo) that it was a pity they had not displayed the same determination against the Germans in 1940. Pétain’s troops were finally overcome. Britain’s seizure of Iraq and Syria attracted little popular enthusiasm at the time, and has not attracted much interest or applause from historians since. Yet these two initiatives reflected Churchill’s boldness at its best. British actions removed dangerous instability on Wavell’s eastern flank. The diversion of troops caused much hand-wringing in Cairo, but represented strategic wisdom. If the Germans had been successful in their tentative efforts to rouse the Arab world against Britain, its predicament in the Middle East would have worsened dramatically. The most authoritative modern German historians of the war, the authors of the monumental Potsdam Institute series, consider British successes in Syria, Iraq and Abyssinia more important to the 1941 strategic pattern than defeat on Crete. Churchill, they say, ‘was right when he asserted (#litres_trial_promo) that on the whole, the situation in the Mediterranean and the Middle East was far more favourable to Britain than it had been a year earlier’. Yet it did not seem so at the time to the sorely tried British people.

On 23 May, a Friday, the battlecruiser Hood blew up during a brief engagement with the Bismarck. The days that followed, with the German battleship loose in the North Atlantic, were terrible ones for the prime minister. His despondency lifted only on the 27th, when as he addressed the House of Commons he received news that the Bismarck was sunk. Atlantic convoy losses remained appalling. American assistance fell far short of British hopes, and Churchill not infrequently vented his bitterness at the ruthlessness of the financial terms extracted by Washington. ‘As far as I can make out (#litres_trial_promo),’ he wrote to chancellor Kingsley Wood, ‘we are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone.’

The Middle East remained Britain’s chief battleground. Despite success in securing the eastern flank in Syria and seizing control of Iraq, Churchill’s confidence in his C-in-C, never high, was ebbing fast. ‘He said some very (#litres_trial_promo) harsh things about Wavell, whose excessive caution and inclination to pessimism he finds very antipathetic.’ For a few weeks, confidence flickered about a fresh offensive, Battleaxe. Admiral Cunningham was told that if this succeeded, and Wavell’s forces reached Tripoli, the next step would be a landing in Sicily. Such fantasies were swiftly crushed. On 17 June it was learned in London that Battleaxe had failed, with the loss of a hundred priceless tanks. Churchill was exasperated to hear that Wavell wanted to evacuate Tobruk. This was militarily rational, for the port’s logistic value was small, yet seemed politically intolerable. In April Churchill had described Wavell in a broadcast as ‘that fine commander (#litres_trial_promo) whom we cheered in good days and will back through bad’. Now, on 20 June, he sacked the Middle East C-in-C, exchanging him with Sir Claude Auchinleck, C-in-C India, whose seizure of Iraq had been executed with impressive efficiency. Wavell was given the Delhi command only because Churchill feared that to consign him to oblivion would play poorly with the public, to whom the general had been represented as a hero.

Clementine Churchill once wrote contemptuously to her husband about the deposed Middle East C-in-C: ‘I understand he has (#litres_trial_promo) a great deal of personal charm. This is pleasant in civilized times but not much use in total War.’ Too many of the British Army’s senior officers were agreeable men who lacked the killer instinct indispensable to victory. Wavell’s best biographer (#litres_trial_promo), Ronald Lewin, has observed that he seemed destined for greatness in any field save that of high command in battle. It might more brutally be suggested that there was less to Wavell than his enigmatic persona led admirers to suppose. He once said to Pownall: ‘My trouble is that (#litres_trial_promo) I am not really interested in war.’ This was a surprisingly common limitation among Britain’s senior soldiers. It goes far to explain why Winston Churchill was much better suited to his own role than were some of his generals to theirs.

2 The War Machine

It is sometimes suggested that in the Second World War there was none of the mistrust, and indeed hostility, between generals and politicians, ‘brass’ and ‘frocks’, which characterised the British high command in the 1914-18 conflict. This is untrue. Ironside, when he was CIGS in 1939, remarked contemptuously to a staff officer as he set out for a war cabinet meeting: ‘Now I’m going to waste (#litres_trial_promo) a morning educating these old gentlemen on their job.’ Though Churchill was not then prime minister, he was categorised among the despised ‘old gentlemen’.

Lt.Gen. Henry Pownall wrote of Churchill’s cabinet: ‘They are a pretty fair (#litres_trial_promo) lot of gangsters some of them—Bevin, Morrison and above all Beaverbrook who has got one of the nastiest faces I ever saw on any man.’ John Kennedy wrote later in the war: ‘It is a bad feature (#litres_trial_promo) of the present situation, that there is such a rift between the politicians and the services. Winston certainly does not keep his team pulling happily in harness together. It is very wrong of him to keep abusing the services—the cry is taken up by other politicians & it is bad for the Service advisers to be made to feel ashamed of their uniforms.’

Yet the evidence of events suggests that the prime minister’s criticisms of his soldiers were well merited. The shortcomings of the wartime British Army form the theme of a later chapter. By a notable irony, Churchill’s machinery for directing the war effort was much more impressive than the means for implementing its decisions in the field. The war cabinet was Britain’s principal policy-making body, regularly attended by the chiefs of staff as well as by its own eight members—in 1941 Churchill, Attlee, Eden, Bevin, Wood, Beaverbrook, Greenwood and Sir John Anderson. Some 400 committees and sub-committees, of varying membership and importance, devolved from it. Service business was addressed by the chiefs at their own gatherings, usually in Churchill’s absence. Of 391 chiefs of staff meetings in 1941, Churchill presided at only twenty-three, whereas he chaired ninety-seven of 111 meetings of the war cabinet. He also conducted sixty out of sixty-nine meetings of its defence committee’s operational group, and twelve out of thirteen meetings of its supply group.

Formalities were always maintained, with the prime minister addressing ministers and commanders by their titles rather than names. On Churchill’s bad days, his subordinates were appalled by his intemperance and irrationality. But on his good ones—and what an astonishing number of these there were!—his deportment went far to render a war of national survival endurable for those conducting it. ‘When he is in (#litres_trial_promo) the right mood, no entertainment can surpass a meeting with him,’ wrote a general. ‘The other day he presided over a meeting on supply of equipment to allies and possible allies. He bustled in and said “well, I suppose it is the old story—too many little pigs and not enough teats on the old sow.”’

The chiefs of staff met every day save Sunday at 10.30 a.m., in a room beneath the Home Office connected to the Cabinet War Rooms. Sessions customarily continued until 1 p.m. In the afternoons, chiefs worked in their own offices, to which they returned after dinner unless a further evening meeting had been summoned, as happened at moments of crisis, of which there were many. Every Monday evening the chiefs attended war cabinet. The 1914-18 conflict precipitated the beginnings of a historic shift in the balance of decision-making from commanders in the field towards the prime minister and his service chiefs in London. In the Second World War this became much more pronounced. Generals at the head of armies, admirals at sea, remained responsible for winning battles. But modern communications empowered those at the summit of national affairs to influence the conduct of operations in remote theatres, for good or ill, in a fashion impossible in earlier ages. Alan Brooke wrote later: ‘It is a strange thing (#litres_trial_promo) what a vast part the COS [committee] takes in the running of the war and how little it is known or its functions appreciated! The average man in the street has never heard of it.’

For any minister or service chief successfully to influence the prime minister, it was essential that he should be capable of sustaining himself in argument. Churchill considered that unless commanders had stomach to fight him, they were unlikely to fight the enemy. Few found it easy to do this. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, was one of many senior officers who cherished ambivalent attitudes towards Churchill: ‘At times you could kiss (#litres_trial_promo) his feet, at others you feel you could kill him.’ Pound was a capable organiser whose tenure as chairman of the chiefs until March 1942 was crippled, first, by a reluctance to assert his own will against that of the prime minister, later by worsening health. Captain Stephen Roskill (#litres_trial_promo), official historian of the wartime Royal Navy, believed that Pound was never a big enough man for his role. The admiral had doubts about his own capacities, and once asked Cunningham whether he should resign his post. Churchill bears substantial blame for allowing Pound to keep his job when his failing body, as well as inadequate strength of character, had become plain. It was fortunate for the Royal Navy that the admiral had some able and energetic subordinates.

Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the Mediterranean C-in-C who succeeded Pound when he became mortally stricken, was frustrated by his own inarticulacy: ‘I…have to confess (#litres_trial_promo) to an inherent difficulty in expressing myself in verbal discussion, which I have never got over except on certain occasions when I am really roused…I felt rather like a spider sitting in the middle of a web vibrating with activity.’ Soon after Cunningham took up his post at the Admiralty, one Saturday afternoon the telephone rang at his Hampshire home. The prime minister wanted to talk on the scrambler. Cunningham explained that he possessed no scrambler. Churchill said impatiently that a device would be installed immediately. The admiral and his wife were kept awake until engineers finished their task at 1 a.m., when a call was duly put through to Downing Street. The prime minister was by then asleep. Cunningham, considerably cross, was told that the emergency had passed.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, who assumed direction of the RAF in October 1940, was widely considered the cleverest of the chiefs of staff. ‘Peter’ Portal displayed notable diplomatic gifts, especially later, in dealing with the Americans. Like many senior airmen, his principal preoccupation was with the interests of his own service, and above all its bomber offensive. His personality lacked the bright colours, his conduct the anecdotage, which enabled a man to shine at dinner tables or in the historiography of the war, but Ismay’s key subordinate Brigadier Leslie Hollis paid tribute to Portal’s incisive mind and infectious calm: ‘I never saw him (#litres_trial_promo) ruffled,’ said Hollis, ‘even under vicious and uninformed attacks on the Air Force. He would sit surveying the critic coldly from beneath his heavy-lidded eyes, never raising his voice or losing his temper, but replying to rhetoric with facts.’ The army was envious of the skill with which Portal exercised his influence upon the prime minister, often more successfully than the CIGS. Gen. Sir John Dill was liked and respected by his colleagues, but by the summer of 1941 he was deeply scarred by the failures of his service; his fires were flickering, his self-confidence had ebbed. Chiefs of staffs’ meetings throughout 1941-42 were pervaded by consciousness of the army’s inability to deliver victories, and of the prime minister’s consequent disaffection towards its leaders.

Major-General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, throughout Churchill’s premiership his chief of staff as Minister of Defence and personal representative on the chiefs of staff committee, was sometimes criticised as a courtier, too acquiescent to his master’s whims. John Kennedy, for instance, disliked Ismay: ‘I am thankful I have (#litres_trial_promo) so little to do with him…Ismay is such a devotee (#litres_trial_promo) of PM’s that he is a danger. He said the other evening in the club “if the PM came in & said he’d like to wipe his boots on me, I’d lie down & let him do it. He is such a great man everything should be done for him.” This is a dangerous attribute for a man who has such an influence on military advice.’

Yet this was a minority view. Most people—ministers, commanders and officials alike—respected Ismay’s tact and discretion. He perceived his role as that of representing the prime minister’s wishes to service chiefs, and vice versa, rather than himself acting as a prime mover. He never offered strategic advice because he believed, surely rightly, that this would usurp the chiefs’ functions. He was a superb diplomat, who presided over a small staff of which the principal members were Hollis, who had served as a Royal Marine officer aboard a cruiser at the 1916 battle of Jutland, and the brilliant, austere, bespectacled Colonel Ian Jacob, a field marshal’s son. Ismay himself was usually to be found in the prime minister’s anteroom, while the secretariat was based in Richmond Terrace, around the corner from Downing Street. There, Jacob established the Defence Registry, which logged every incoming signal from commanders in the field, including those addressed to the chiefs of staff. Whatever mistakes were made by the British high command, however acute became personal tensions between the prime minister, his generals, admirals and air marshals, throughout Churchill’s war premiership, the highest standards of coordination, staff discipline and exchange of information prevailed between Downing Street and the service ministries.

On the civil side, the prime minister was served by a remarkable group of officials. Cabinet Secretary Sir Edward Bridges preserved an enthusiasm for cerebral diversions, even amid the blitz. He presided over self-consciously intellectual debates in the Downing Street staff mess at supper, such as one in pursuance of the theme ‘Is there any evil (#litres_trial_promo) except in intent?’ Bridges had the additional merit that he was as passionately committed as the prime minister to victory at any cost, and in June 1940 rejected out of hand proposals to establish skeleton Whitehall departments in Canada, against the eventuality of German occupation of Britain.

The Downing Street staff understood, as some outsiders did not, that while the prime minister’s regime might be unusual, it was remarkably disciplined. Minutes were typed and circulated within an hour or two of meetings taking place, even after midnight. The private secretaries—for most of the war Leslie Rowan, John Martin, Tony Bevir and John Colville—worked in shifts through the day and much of the night. ‘The chief difficulty (#litres_trial_promo) is understanding what he says,’ wrote Martin in the early days of his service, ‘and great skill is required in interpreting inarticulate grunts or single words thrown out without explanation. I think he is consciously odd in these ways.’ Colville, as a young patrician—he was the grandson of Lord Crewe—who had also attended Harrow, Churchill’s old school, basked in paternalistic indulgence from his master. His social self-assurance, indeed conceit, enabled him to gossip among potentates at the prime minister’s dinner table without awe, though his role was only that of a humble functionary. As a diarist Colville fulfilled a priceless historical function as chronicler of the prime minister’s domestic routine.

Churchill’s personal followers inspired mistrust outside the ‘secret circle’, and sometimes inside it also. There was frequent criticism of his willingness to indulge old friends and family connections in significant posts. Later in the war, his son-in-law Duncan Sandys made himself deeply unpopular as a junior army minister. Alan Brooke swore that he would resign if, as was rumoured likely though it never became a reality, Sandys was promoted to become Secretary for War. It was often asserted that Beaverbrook, Cherwell and Brendan Bracken were unsuitable intimates for the prime minister, just as important Americans resented Harry Hopkins’s relationship with Roosevelt. Yet in judging Churchill’s chosen associates, the only relevant issue is whether acolytes—the so-called ‘cronies’—improperly influenced his decisions.

Beaverbrook was the most wilful and intrusive. Whether in or out of office, he occupied an astonishing amount of the prime minister’s time and attention. Churchill never appeared to notice Beaverbrook’s physical cowardice, unusual in any member of his circle, and widely remarked by colleagues during the blitz, when as often as possible he retired to the country, and on the long wartime journeys abroad. The press baron exercised notable power as Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940, then as Minister of Supply in 1941. He remained thereafter one of the few civilians to whose views Churchill listened. Beaverbrook made much mischief about personalities. His contempt embraced the entire wartime Commons. ‘In truth it is only (#litres_trial_promo) a sham of a parliament,’ he wrote to Hoare in Madrid in May 1941. ‘The Front Bench is part of the sham. There Attlee and Greenwood, a sparrow and a jackdaw, are perched on either side of the glittering bird of paradise.’ It is easy to identify issues on which Beaverbrook urged the prime minister to do the wrong thing, of which more will be said later. It is much harder to discover a case in which his imprecations were successful.

Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s familiar for a decade before the war, enjoyed ready access, much resented by rivals. But his influence was deemed greater than it was, because the garrulous Bracken boasted so much about it. Fellow ministers and officials were sometimes shocked by the promiscuity with which he addressed the prime minister as ‘Winston’. He and Beaverbrook were dubbed the ‘knights of the bath’ in recognition of the implausible rendezvous they sometimes shared with Churchill. Nonetheless, this clever, elusive Irishman, his bespectacled features surmounted by what looked like a wig of red steel wool, provided Churchill with a useful source of intelligence and gossip about domestic affairs, and served as a successful Minister of Information from July 1941 to 1945. Forty in 1941, Bracken had high intelligence and a remarkable capacity for private kindness. As a pocket press baron himself, owner of the Economist and chairman of the Financial News, he thoroughly understood the demands of the media. He frequently intervened to improve journalists’ access to the services, and to curb the prime minister’s rage when newspapers were deemed to have exceeded the bounds of reasonable criticism. He exercised no influence on strategy, and was seldom present when it was discussed.

Professor Frederick Lindemann, the prime minister’s personal scientific adviser who became Lord Cherwell in June 1941, was the most widely disliked of Churchill’s intimates. His cleverness was not in doubt, but his intellectual arrogance and taste for vendettas bred many enemies. Fifty-five in 1941, Cherwell had inherited a fortune gained from waterworks in Germany. He enjoyed flaunting his wealth before less fortunate scientific colleagues, often arriving for Oxford meetings in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. His habit of crossing roads looking straight ahead, indifferent to oncoming traffic, reflected his approach to issues of state and war. A bachelor and a vegetarian, of strongly right-wing and indeed racist convictions, he was an unselfconscious eccentric. When three of his Cabinet Office staff insisted on being transferred to the Merchant Navy to play a more active part in the war, he was alarmed by the secrets they would take with them to sea. He told them: ‘If you see that (#litres_trial_promo) you are about to be captured, you must kill yourselves immediately!’

When the scientist’s judgement was mistaken, his obstinacy did considerable harm. He campaigned obsessively for aerial mines as a defence against air attack, wasting significant design and production effort. His advocacy of ‘area bombing’ was founded on a misreading of data, and caused him to injure the Royal Navy’s cause in the Battle of the Atlantic. Because Churchill trusted Cherwell, ‘the Prof’s’ errors were disproportionately damaging. The prime minister sometimes abused Cherwell’s statistics to advance rash theses of his own. Ian Jacob described him as a ‘licensed gadfly’. On balance, however, Cherwell’s contribution to Churchill’s governance was positive. It enabled him to support with evidence argument on a vast range of issues.

Among lesser figures, the booming Major Desmond Morton was an able intelligence officer who provided important information to Churchill in his pre-war wilderness years, and exercised considerable influence at Downing Street in 1940. Thereafter, however, Morton became marginalised, with a significant voice only on French matters. Charles Wilson, the prime minister’s physician, who became Lord Moran in 1943, inspired the post-war anger of Churchill’s staff by publishing intimate diaries of his experiences. Jock Colville wrote contemptuously of the self-regarding doctor: ‘Moran was seldom (#litres_trial_promo), if ever, present when history was made; but he was quite often invited to dinner afterwards.’ This was to address a gerbil with an elephant gun. Moran was never a policy-maker, nor even wielded influence. It seems enough that he served Churchill well in his medical capacity, and proved an acceptable companion on the prime minister’s historic journeys.

The ‘cronies’ were viewed by Churchill’s critics as charlatans. Yet each had real merits, above all brains. There were no fools in the prime minister’s entourage, though steadiness of judgement was less assured. None of his chosen associates was a conformist. All were loners who walked by themselves, however readily they embraced social intercourse as a tool of influence. In Whitehall and at Westminster, less gifted men, both in and out of uniform, denounced the false prophets who supposedly led the prime minister astray. Yet most of Churchill’s wilder schemes derived from his own supremely fertile imagination, not from mischief-makers in his inner circle. ‘He always retained unswerving (#litres_trial_promo) independence of thought,’ wrote Jock Colville. ‘He approached a problem as he himself saw it and of all the men I have ever known he was the least liable to be swayed by the views of even his most intimate counsellors.’ In the same fashion, Churchill formed his own judgements of men, favourable or otherwise, and was deeply resistant to the influence of others in adjusting them.

Many misunderstandings of Churchill’s conduct of governance by his contemporaries, including some close to the seat of power, derived from the promiscuity of his conversation. Every day, whether in the company of generals, ministers, visitors or personal staff, he gave vent to impulsive and intemperate judgements on people and plans. These sometimes amused, often alarmed and appalled, even those with long experience of him. Yet his intimates, above all the officers of the war cabinet secretariat, knew that nothing Churchill said was intended as a basis for action, unless subsequently confirmed in writing. They knew that he often spoke merely as a means of helping himself to formulate ideas. It has been remarked that he had an undisciplined mind, the source of a cornucopia of ideas, some brilliant, others absurd. Ismay called him ‘a child of nature’. Yet the most notable aspect of the machine for the direction of Britain’s war was that it was better ordered than that of any other belligerent, notably including those of Germany and later the US. A cynic might suggest that Churchill created a system to protect himself from his own excesses. In remarkable degree, this was successful.

The late spring of 1941 found the British no nearer than they had been six months earlier to perceiving a path to victory. When General Raymond Lee returned to London after a trip to Washington in April, he wrote: ‘The people strike me (#litres_trial_promo)…as being much more solemn than they were in January.’ Churchill’s enthusiasm for special forces and raiding operations derived from his awareness of the need to strive constantly to sustain a semblance of momentum. A story was told to a general by his brother, which achieved wide circulation in the War Office. As a boy, the narrator had been a guest at a game shoot at Blenheim Palace, where Churchill attempted an absurdly long shot at a hare. The boy asked him why he had wasted a cartridge. ‘Young man (#litres_trial_promo),’ replied Churchill blithely, ‘I wished that hare to understand it was taking part in these proceedings.’ The same spirit, addressed to matters of vastly greater import, impelled Churchill in the spring and summer of 1941. The War Office deemed it futile to hold Tobruk after Rommel had bypassed it in April. Only Churchill’s insistence prompted deployment there of an Australian garrison which was soon more numerous than the German force encircling it. But in that season of defeats, the saga of Australia’s infantrymen—the ‘diggers’—withstanding the ‘siege of Tobruk’ was elevated by British propaganda into a serviceable legend.

Military theatre had its limitations, however. Churchill had a grossly exaggerated belief in the power of boldness alone to overcome material and numerical deficiencies. ‘War,’ he wrote, ‘consists of fighting (#litres_trial_promo), gnawing and tearing, and…the weaker or more frail gets life clawed out of him by this method. Manoeuvre is a mere embellishment, very agreeable when it comes off…Fighting is the key to victory.’ Yet the events of 1940-41 showed, and subsequent experience confirmed, that British forces could defeat those of the Wehrmacht only when they were substantially stronger. If Hitler had dispatched to North Africa even a further two or three divisions from his vast order of battle, it is likely that Britain would have been driven from Egypt in 1941. Many senior soldiers thought this outcome likely, though they underrated Rommel’s logistics problems. ‘I suppose you realise (#litres_trial_promo) that we shall lose the Middle East,’ Dill said to Kennedy on 21 June, a remark which emphasised his unfitness for the post he occupied. Kennedy, in his turn, incurred Churchill’s ire merely by mentioning that contingency in his presence. The British were spared from disaster in the Mediterranean in 1941 because Hitler’s strategic priorities lay elsewhere. On 22 June, Germany invaded Russia.

SIX Comrades (#ulink_55e8fca4-d56b-5c7e-a6a9-3c01ecfc0d16)

The German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 transformed the Second World War. The British, through Ultra intercepts, had long been aware of Hitler’s impending onslaught. They persuaded themselves that their intervention in Greece had imposed a delay upon Operation Barbarossa. In reality, a late thaw and German equipment shortages were the decisive factors in causing the assault to take place later than Hitler had wished. The British and American peoples to this day perceive their contribution to the eastern war in terms of convoys heroically fought across the Arctic to Murmansk, bearing massive Western aid. Reality was less simple. In 1941-42, both Britain and the US were desperately short of war material for their own armed forces, and had little to spare for Stalin’s people. For eighteen months after Russia was invaded, the period during which its survival hung in the balance, Western aid was much more marginal than the rhetoric of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt suggested, and ordinary citizens in the West were encouraged to suppose.

In June 1941, the immediate impact of Barbarossa in Britain was surprisingly muted. The shocks of the previous year had imposed an anaesthetising effect. In people’s gratitude at finding themselves still unscathed at their breakfast tables each morning, their island spared from Nazi pillage, many received tidings of this epochal event with surprising insouciance. Edward Stebbing, a twenty-one-year-old soldier whose impatience with the struggle was cited earlier, felt bewildered: ‘There is nothing straightforward (#litres_trial_promo) about this war. In the maze of lies and treachery it is almost impossible to find the truth.’ The Financial Times columnist Lex wrote on 23 June: ‘Markets spent the morning trying to make up their minds whether the German aggression against Russia was a bull or a bear…The majority concluded that whatever happened we could hardly be worse off as a result of Hitler’s latest somersault.’ Here was another manifestation of Churchill’s ‘three-inch pipe’ theory about human emotions. Amid a surfeit of drama and peril, many people took refuge in the sufficient cares of their own daily lives, and allowed a torrent of world news, good and ill, to flow past them to the sea.

Most of Britain’s ruling class, from the prime minister downwards, regarded the Soviet Union with abhorrence. The Russians had rebuffed all British diplomatic advances since the outbreak of war, and likewise London’s warnings of Nazi intentions. Until the day of the German assault, under the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact Stalin provided Hitler with huge material assistance. Only a few months earlier Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, was bargaining with the Nazis, albeit unsuccessfully, for a share of the spoils of British defeat. The extravagance of Soviet demands provided Hitler with a final pretext for launching Barbarossa.

In addressing the history of the Second World War it is necessary to recognise the huge moral compromises forced upon the nations fighting under the banner of democracy and freedom. Britain, and subsequently America, strove for the triumph of these admirable principles wherever they could be secured—with the sometimes embarrassing exceptions of the European overseas empires. But again and again, hard things had to be done which breached faith with any definition of absolute good. If this is true of politics at all times, it was especially so between 1939 and 1945. Whether in dealing with France, Greece, Iraq, Persia, Yugoslavia or other nations, attitudes were struck and courses adopted by the Allies which no moral philosopher could think impeccable. British wartime treatment of its colonies, of Egypt and above all India, was unenlightened. But if Churchill’s fundamental nobility of purpose is acknowledged, most of his decisions deserve sympathy.

He governed on the basis that all other interests and considerations must be subordinated to the overarching objective of defeating the Axis. Those who, to this day, argue that Churchill ‘might have saved the British Empire’ by making a bargain with Hitler, leaving Russia and Germany to destroy each other, ignore the practical difficulty of making a sustainable deal with the Nazi regime, and also adopt a supremely cynical insouciance towards its turpitude. The moral and material price of destroying Hitler was high, but most of mankind has since acknowledged that it had to be paid. In the course of the war the prime minister was repeatedly called upon to decide not which party, nation or policy represented virtue, but which must be tolerated or supported as the least base available. This imperative was never more conspicuous than in Britain’s dealings with the Soviet Union.