The memory of the second world war remains a central feature of the self-image of the British people, even in the 21st century. This, in its turn, is dominated by the personality of Winston Churchill. We have been told more about him than any other human being in history.
Yet much remains opaque, because Churchill wanted it thus. Always mindful of his stellar role upon the stage of history, he became supremely so after accepting the premiership on May 10 1940. He kept no diary because, he observed, to do so would be to expose his follies and inconsistencies to posterity. His war memoirs are poor history, if often peerless prose. We shall never know with confidence what he thought about Roosevelt, Eisenhower, King George VI, and his cabinet colleagues because he took care not to tell us.
In setting out to write a new book about Churchill at war, I sought no revelations. Instead, I wished to explore his extraordinary personality in the context of his relationships with the British people, their army, the Russians and Americans. We know that he was the greatest war leader Britain has ever had. Most of his difficulties in fulfilling that role lay in the divide between his own heroic ambitions and the limited abilities of his nation to fulfil them.
When Churchill accepted office, hours after Hitler launched his blitzkrieg in France, few contemporaries doubted his genius. But fears about his character persisted. That he would draw his sword to lead a charge was not in doubt. However, whether the outcome would be a triumph to match Blenheim and Waterloo or instead a catastrophe seemed less assured.
By May 19 1940, it was plain that the allied forces in France faced disaster. General Sir Edmund Ironside, head of the army, told Anthony Eden, the secretary for war: “This is the end of the British empire.” Eden noted: “Militarily, I did not see how he could be gainsaid.”
Churchill bore no responsibility for allied defeat. Some in high places reserved recriminations, first, for his refusal thereafter to face reality – as they perceived it – by seeking terms from Hitler; and, second, for reinforcing failure by sending more troops to France in June. The latter represented his biggest, yet least noticed, mistake of 1940.
Only the stubborn insistence of General Sir Alan Brooke, the force’s commander, overcame the rash impulsiveness of the prime minister and forced him to assent to their evacuation. Almost 200,000 men who would otherwise have been lost were able to escape from the ports of north-western France while the Germans were preoccupied with finishing off the French army. I have called this a second Dunkirk, no less miraculous and decisive than the first.
A key point of that story, and indeed of Churchill’s conduct of the war, is that he possessed an exaggerated faith in boldness. He believed this alone could determine battlefield outcomes. Himself a man of dauntless physical courage, he perceived British history as a pageant in which again and again British pluck had prevailed, often against odds. It was a source of despair to his commanders that he sought to resurrect the spirit of Crécy and Agincourt against Hitler’s Wehrmacht, probably the most formidable fighting force the world has seen.
After Dunkirk, more than a few members of the ruling class thought the only rational course was to make peace. There was also some defeatism lower in the social scale. A woman named Muriel Green, who worked at her family’s Norfolk garage, described in her diary a game of tennis on May 23 1940 with a grocer’s roundsman and a schoolmaster. The roundsman said: “I think they’re going to beat us, don’t you?” “Yes”, said the schoolmaster, adding that as the Nazis were very keen on sport, he expected “we’d still be able to play tennis if they did win”. Green wrote: “J said Mr M was saying we should paint a swastika under the door knocker ready. We all agreed we shouldn’t know what to do if they invade. After that we played tennis, very hard exciting play for two hrs, and forgot all about the war.”
Churchill, of course, was visibly exalted by Britain’s predicament. On June 15 1940 at Chequers, the PM’s official country residence, private secretary Jock Colville described how, as tidings of gloom crowded in, Churchill displayed the highest spirits, “repeating poetry, dilating on the drama of the present situation ... offering everybody cigars, and spasmodically murmuring: ‘Bang, bang, bang, goes the farmer’s gun, run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.’”
In the early hours of the morning, when US ambassador Joseph Kennedy telephoned, the prime minister unleashed a torrent of rhetoric about America’s opportunity to save civilisation. Then he held forth to his staff about Britain’s growing fighter strength, “told one or two dirty stories”, and departed for bed at 1.30am, saying to his staff, “Goodnight, my children.” At least some of this must have been masquerade but it was a masquerade of awesome nobility.
Britain had not the smallest chance of winning the war in the absence of American participation, which remained unlikely. Yet Churchill and his supporters believed that the consequences of accepting defeat were so absolute that it was essential to fight on. This conviction, however admirable, demanded a suspension of reason that some important people could not achieve. Captain Ralph Edwards, director of naval operations at the Admiralty, wrote in his diary on June 23: “Our cabinet with that idiot Winston in charge changes its mind every 24 hours ... I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that we’re so inept we don’t deserve to win & indeed are almost certain to be defeated. We never do anything right.”
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| Churchill in Scarborough, 1939 |
MP Harold Nicolson wrote at this time of Churchill’s remoteness from ordinary mortals. His eyes were “glaucous, vigilant, angry, combative, visionary and tragic ... the eyes of a man who is much preoccupied and is unable to rivet his attention on minor things ... But in another sense they are the eyes of a man faced by an ordeal or tragedy, and combining vision, truculence, resolution and great unhappiness.” Churchill delegated to others few of the responsibilities of supreme command but the exaltation of playing out his role gave way, at times, to a despondency that required all his powers to overcome.
He was intensely vulnerable to sentiment. One day in his car he saw a queue outside a shop and told his detective to get out and discover what people were waiting for. When the inspector returned and reported that they hoped to buy seed for pet birds, his private secretary recorded: “Winston wept.”
He never doubted his own genius, though subordinates sometimes wished he would. He believed that destiny had marked him to be the saviour of western civilisation, and this conviction infused his every word and deed. But he preserved an awareness of himself as mortal clay, which seldom failed to move his intimates.
Paradoxically, Churchill’s strategic problems began in earnest after the 1940 crisis passed and the Battle of Britain was won. What could the nation do next? It would be disastrous for civilian morale, not to mention American opinion, if the British simply manned their beach defences. Clement Attlee, deputy prime minister, said later, very shrewdly: “[Winston] was always, in effect, 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.”
But where to fight, given that the British army was incapable of engaging the Wehrmacht in Europe? Churchill’s policy between 1940 and 1944 was dominated by a belief in the importance of military theatre. 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. It was uncommonly fortunate for the British that Mussolini had joined the war. The Italian army confronted the British on the borders of its African empire. In 1940-1941, British morale briefly soared amid striking victories in Libya and Ethiopia.
From April 1941 onwards, though, the British army suffered a procession of defeats that continued until November 1942. It is hard to overstate the distress that these inflicted on the prime minister. As disaster followed disaster in Libya, Greece, Crete, Malaya, Burma and then at Tobruk, his confidence sagged not only in his commanders but in the army. He became increasingly dismayed, even embittered, by its failure to match his great vision. “We had so many men in Singapore, so many men”, he lamented after the fall of the great naval base in February 1942. “They should have done better.”
ANNIVERSARY EVENTS
War and remembrance
There are a series of events across Britain to mark the 70th anniversary – here’s a selection of the best, writes John Sunyer.
National Gallery, London
Dame Myra Hess performed in morale-boosting concerts at the National Gallery during the second world war. The gallery celebrates her achievements with some concerts on October 6.
www.nationalgallery.org.ukBBC Archive, online
BBC wartime radio broadcasts, photographs and previously unseen documents are now online. Broadcasts include Richard Dimbleby reporting on Neville Chamberlain’s return after signing the Munich agreement, and King George VI’s radio address to the nation after war was declared. The archive also illustrates the reality of war for ordinary people. One broadcast advises the public not to try out gas masks in the oven or behind a car exhaust.
www.bbc.co.uk/archiveRAF Museum, London
The RAF Museum in Hendon is hosting a Battle of Britain weekend on September 12-13, with an open-air “living history” festival celebrating the airmen who defended the country from German air attack in 1940.
www.rafmuseum.org.ukImperial War Museum, Duxford, London and Manchester
The three war museums are marking the anniversary with new displays. Duxford Goes to War (until December 31) shows how the airfield prepared for the war and how it changed during the conflict. London’s Outbreak (until September 2010) examines how the second world war shaped the lives of those involved in the political negotiations and their aftermath. Captured: The Extraordinary Life of Prisoners of War is at the Manchester museum until January 3.
www.iwm.org.uk
It was a bitter pill to acknowledge, as he often did, that Hitler’s Wehrmacht was a vastly more effective fighting machine than the British one. In his diary, Major General John Kennedy recorded a 1942 conversation in which the prime minister talked frankly of “the Germans being better than our troops”. Churchill’s conduct of the second half of the war, and especially his determination to delay D-Day in France until the last possible moment, reflected a conviction that British, and American, soldiers could defeat Germans only when they met on the most favourable terms.
The navy and air force proved the most effective of Britain’s forces. British and American armies for the rest of the war required a handsome superiority of men, tanks and air support to beat Germans. A large part of the story of Britain in the second world war, it seems to me, is of Churchill seeking more from his nation’s warriors than they were capable of delivering. Most men were doggedly willing to do their duty. But after 1940, neither the country nor the army proved capable of ascending the heroic summits the prime minister aspired to.
After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Britain’s military and political leaders took refuge in the reality that the Eastern Front became the decisive theatre. Every Russian who died was one less British or American soldier who must do so. British diplomat Oliver Harvey wrote in his diary on November 14 1942: “The Russian army having fulfilled the allotted role of killing Germans, our chiefs of staff think by 1944 they could stage a general onslaught on the exhausted animal.”
Such cynicism became institutionalised at the top of the war machine. The Americans professed exasperation about this perceived British pusillanimity but themselves became party to it. In July 1943, when Britain had been at war for four years and the US for 20 months, just eight western allied divisions were fighting the Germans – in Sicily, where they lost a mere 6,000 killed. The Red Army, meanwhile, was engaged in the titanic confrontation at Kursk, which eventually involved 4m men on the two sides and cost half a million lives. Even in 1944-1945, seldom less than two-thirds of the German army was engaged in the east. The Russians did most of the dying essential to destroy Nazism, only belatedly assisted by British and American land forces.
By 1944-1945, with Russian and American dominance of the Grand Alliance painfully apparent, Churchill seemed to his colleagues old, exhausted and often wrong-headed. Yet he possessed a global stature that lifted Britain’s prestige beyond that conferred by its shrinking military contribution. Jock Colville wrote: “Whatever the PM’s shortcomings may be, there is no doubt that he does provide guidance and purpose ... which, without him, would often be lost in the maze of inter-departmentalism or frittered away by caution and compromise. Moreover he has two qualities, imagination and resolution, which are conspicuously lacking among other ministers and among the chiefs of staff.”
By this time, however, the British people were bent upon installing a new order. Gratitude for Churchill’s achievement as war leader did nothing to dispel their conviction that he was not the man to create the social revolution so many sought. Harold Nicolson was shocked one day to notice graffiti in a station lavatory that read, “Winston Churchill is a bastard.” When he remarked upon it to an RAF officer, the man shrugged: “Yes. The tide has turned. We find it everywhere,” adding apologetically, “Well, you see, the men hate politicians.”
His job was done. Believing Britain great, for a brief season he had been able to make her just sufficiently so to emerge from the war among the victors, the defining achievement of his premiership. But it was beyond his powers to deflect the nation’s eclipse amid the dominance of the two new superpowers.
So great was Churchill’s bitterness about Stalin’s imposition of a new Soviet tyranny in eastern Europe that in the last weeks of his premiership he ordered the chiefs of staff to draft a plan for Operation Unthinkable, an offensive by 47 allied divisions and the remains of Hitler’s armies, to expel the Russians from Poland. He was swiftly forced to realise that this was a fantasy. Stalin’s people had borne the chief burden of defeating the Nazis and were now bent upon their rewards. No credible Anglo-American action could make good the tragically flawed restoration of European freedom.
Churchill’s most notable wartime achievement was to exercise the powers of a dictator without casting off the mantle of a democrat. “Pug” Ismay, his chief of staff, once found him bemoaning the bother of preparing a speech for the House of Commons, and obviously apprehensive about its reception. The soldier said emolliently: “Why don’t you tell them to go to hell?” Churchill retorted: “You should not say those things. I am the servant of the House.” It remains a source of wonder and pride that such a man led Britain through the second world war more than half believing this.
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