The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  That policy had never changed. As he had a decade earlier, Churchill identified an existential threat to Europe. And, as he had in the mid-1930s, he arrived at the right conclusion at the wrong time. And the British military, as it had been a decade earlier, was in no state to deter the Soviet threat. The final butcher’s bill would include 244,000 British soldiers, airmen, and sailors. Commonwealth nations and other imperial comrades-in-arms suffered another 100,000 dead—Australia, 23,000; Canada, 37,000; India, 24,000; New Zealand, 10,000, and South Africa, 6,000. Militarily, Britain and the Empire were in no shape to fight a new war.13

  Yet this time Churchill’s worries were shared, not dismissed, by Tories and Labour alike. All within HMG knew him to be correct regarding the Russian threat. In any case, Britain in 1945 lacked not only the will to force the issue with the Soviets, it lacked the way: Britain was broke. When in 1940 Lord Lothian told American reporters that Britain was broke, he meant only that London lacked the cash and gold reserves to buy American arms and food. Now, having emerged victorious, London owed $4.3 billion to America and $1.2 billion to Canada. Britain had little to export and faced American tariffs in any event, and, as Churchill repeatedly told his countrymen, half the food consumed on the Home Island had to be imported.

  When Foreign Minister Anthony Eden asked Labourite Ernest Bevin what cabinet position he might seek if Bevin’s Labour Party won a general election, Bevin replied that he hoped for the Exchequer. Eden was stunned: “Whatever for?” he asked. “There’ll be nothing to do there except to account for the money we have not got.” Meat was rationed (horsemeat, not rationed, had lost its stigma), as were cheese, eggs, butter, soap, flour, clothing, and paper. Even a decade later, British high school students performed their math lessons on the backs of old grocery receipts. Petrol, coal, oil—all rationed. Whisky was in short supply, fresh fish, too. The Germans had destroyed or heavily damaged more than 750,000 houses. Public services were paralyzed. London’s lights would not fully function for three more months. Transportation was in disarray, delivery of water and electricity unreliable. On May 11, President Truman summarily cut back Lend-Lease shipments to France, Russia, and Britain. Weeks later, he ceased shipments of American coal to Britain—five hundred thousand tons per month and every ounce desperately needed. The message was clear: Britain would soon be on its own. In this want, the Labour Party saw opportunity. Aneurin Bevan famously observed, “This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.” He assigned responsibility for this state of affairs to the Conservatives, to whose complete extermination as a political party he dedicated his political life.14

  In mid-May, while planning his unthinkable war against Russia, Churchill proposed to Clement Attlee a continuation of the coalition government until Japan was defeated. Attlee agreed, on the condition that Churchill pledge in writing that the interim government would actively pursue reforms in housing, education, and social security. Churchill made the pledge, believing that Attlee would present the document to the annual Labour Party conference under way in Blackpool, where he would carry the day. Instead, the old socialist Harold Laski, that year’s chairman of the conference, opposed Churchill’s plan, and was joined by Ernest Bevin, Hugh Dalton, and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. Attlee, always more conciliator than leader (Eden thought him timid), had no choice but to reject Churchill’s offer. The coalition was dead. Just nine months earlier, Laski had proposed to Churchill the setting up of a “Churchill Fund” to support the Royal Society and the British Museum. “As I look at the Europe Hitler has devastated,” Laski wrote at the time, “I know very intimately that, as an Englishman of Jewish origin, I owe you the gift of life itself.” Churchill expressed his gratitude to Laski but affirmed that he’d prefer a park or playground to be built in his name on the south side of the Thames, “where all the houses have been blown down.” That included Limehouse, Clement Attlee’s constituency. But now, with Hitler dead, Laski and his Labour cohorts had their sights set on nothing less than the remaking of British government and British life. Five years earlier, Labour support had made it possible for Churchill to become prime minister and create the coalition government. Now Labour walked out.15

  On May 23, Churchill motored to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to King George, who asked Churchill to form a caretaker government until elections could be held and the soldiers’ vote from overseas tallied. The elections were scheduled for July 5, the final results to be announced some three weeks later. Churchill had kept to his pledge of nonpartisanship for five years. Now he would assume his partisan demeanor, and few in England could be as partisan as Churchill when he set his mind to it. He had gained the office of prime minister twice, in 1940 and again that day, but neither time through the ballot box. He intended to return to office for a third time, with a mandate from the people.

  He had forewarned Britons of his keenness to wage a verbal war against Labour when in March he told the annual Tory conference, “We have all abstained from doing or saying anything which would be likely to impair the unity of the British people…. In doing this we have endured patiently and almost silently many provocations from that happily limited class of Left Wing politicians to whom party strife is the breath of their nostrils, and their only means of obtaining influence or notoriety.” He pledged to “maintain this patriotic restraint as long as the National Coalition… continues to work together in loyal comrade-ship.” That partnership was no more. He had told Britons: “Our Socialist friends have officially committed themselves—much to the disgust of some of their leaders—to a programme for nationalizing all the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” Labour’s “sweeping proposals,” he warned, “imply not only the destruction of the whole of our existing system of society, and of life, and of labour, but the creation and enforcement of another system or other systems borrowed from foreign lands and alien minds.” He asked:

  Will the warrior return, will the family be reunited, will the shattered houses be restored…? They do not regard themselves as a slum-bred serf population chased into battle from a land of misery and want. They love their country and the scenes of their youth and manhood, and they have shown themselves ready to die not only in defence of its material satisfactions but for its honour…. Let there be no mistake about it; it is no easy, cheap-jack Utopia of airy phrases that lies before us…. This is no time for windy platitudes and glittering advertisements…. This is no time for humbug and blandishments, but for grim, stark facts and figures, and for action to meet immediate needs.”16

  In reply some months later, the novelist, playwright, and Labour’s literary spokesman J. B. Priestley wrote a thirty-four-page pamphlet titled Letter to a Returning Serviceman, in which he warned ex-Tommies to beware “the charmed cozy circle” of home life promised by Churchill. Priestley’s BBC broadcasts throughout the war were as patriotic as Churchill’s, and almost as well known. His audience consisted of those Britons whom Churchill liked to call his yeomanry. They listened to Priestley, and they paid heed when he told them, “Modern man is essentially a communal and cooperating man…. I do not believe in economic liberty…. Economic life is necessarily a communal life.”17 “After the war” had for almost six years been a teasing dream. Churchill had used the phrase in speeches for more than a decade, during the 1930s in collating the mistakes of HMG after the Great War, and since 1940 in reminding Britons that numerous questions—jobs, housing, education—could be addressed only “after the war.” A generation earlier, the soldiers had returned from the Great War to find no plans in place for the peace. They were expected to take up their plows and tools after a four-year absence as if the whole bloody business—where one million men of the Empire had died—had not even taken place. Normalcy had been the byword then, on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1943 Churchill told England:

  War cuts down… on forward planning, and everything is subordinated
to the struggle for national existence. Thus, when peace came suddenly, as it did last time [1918], there were no long carefully prepared plans for the future…. We must not be caught again that way. It is therefore necessary to make sure that we have projects for the future employment of the people and… that private enterprise and State enterprise are both able to play their parts to the utmost.18

  Now, after six years of living in a tightly controlled society, necessary in order to defeat Hitler, the returning soldiers and indeed many Britons saw the need for more sacrifice and planning in order to defeat poverty, remove slums, and improve education and services. Planning (at Churchill’s behest) had since 1941 led to improvements in the high schools, this while under severe wartime stringencies. A Tory, R. A. (“Rab”) Butler, had been the driving force behind the 1944 Education Act, which guaranteed free education for all children through high school. Sarah tried to persuade her father that rationing—on which the prime minister himself had written numerous memos concerning chickens, eggs, and rabbits—had been so well planned that it had resulted in better-fed and better-educated children. Wartime controls had led to a more just sharing of the burdens, and therefore a more just society. Why not continue the planning and shared sacrifice in peace, she asked, in order to build houses, schools, and a better society? Churchill saw things entirely differently, and had said so in March, when he told the Tory conference, “If we are to recover from the measureless exertions of the war, it can only be by a large release from the necessary bonds and controls which war conditions have imposed upon us. No restriction upon well-established British liberties that is not proved indispensable to the prosecution of the war and the transition from war to peace can be tolerated.” He touted the Tories’ Four-Year Plan, a variation of the Beveridge Report, and built on voluntary cooperation between the government and private enterprise. The plan, he claimed, was an undertaking so liberal that even Gladstone and Lloyd George might shrink from it.19

  For Churchill, state domination of planning and the attendant control the state needed to implement its plans were two sides of the same coin, a coin minted by socialists for socialists. This he made clear in his first campaign broadcast, delivered from Chequers on Monday, June 4—with disastrous results. He had spent the weekend preparing the speech, and had shown a draft to Jock Colville, who called it “fighting and provocative,” and to Clementine, who objected vehemently to one phrase in particular that he intended to deploy. He ignored her protests. The BBC allotted him thirty minutes, too little time in Churchill’s estimation. Speaking against the clock for the first time since 1940, he rushed his delivery. After telling listeners that he and the Tories and “many of my Labour colleagues would have been glad to carry on [the coalition]… the Socialist Party as a whole had been for some time eager to set out upon the political warpath, and when large numbers of people feel like that it is not good for their health to deny them the fight they want. We will therefore give it to them to the best of our ability.” So far, so good—Englishmen expected nothing less than his best from their Winston.20

  Churchill went on, paraphrasing the economist Friedrich Hayek from The Road to Serfdom. “My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.”

  Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State…. Look how even today they [Socialists] hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of war-time inflictions and monstrosities. There is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus-boss…. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.

  He laced into Labour’s Herbert Morrison, who had outlined “his plans to curtail Parliamentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolutions of broad principle in the House of Commons.” And he excoriated Sir Stafford Cripps for advocating what amounted to a rubber-stamp role for Parliament in the new socialist state. Then he arrived at the passage Clementine thought hideous:

  I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police…. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.21

  Churchill thundered and roared, confident that Clement Attlee lacked the oratorical skills to respond in kind. Ed Murrow of CBS believed so, offering that Attlee approached a subject “as if elucidating some obscure, unimportant passage in a Latin translation.” The night following Churchill’s Gestapo speech, Attlee—whom Colville described as having “no shred of either conceit or vanity”—took to the airwaves and delivered a devastating reply. Churchill’s object, Attlee declared, was to make “electors understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr. Churchill, the party Leader of the Conservatives…. The voice we heard last night was that of Mr. Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook.” The timid, balding, sometimes fussy Attlee had made himself overnight into a campaign leader. As for Beaverbrook’s role in crafting Churchill’s speech, he had “no hand” in the matter, Colville wrote. Beaverbrook and his newspapers had been “firing vast salvos” of late, which mostly, Colville believed, “miss their mark.” Churchill, trying to cast Attlee as a bogeyman, had also missed his mark, but Attlee, casting Beaverbrook and Churchill likewise, had not.22

  The Beaver put on a relentless, shrill, and clumsy demonstration of loyalty to Churchill in the pages of his Express, but Beaverbrook had never really understood Englishmen and, critically, Englishwomen. The tabloid Daily Mirror, Britain’s largest-selling paper, did. The only large newspaper not controlled by Camrose, Beaverbrook, or Bracken, the Mirror went after the service wives, telling the women of Britain on the eve of the election, “Vote for them!” [the servicemen] who “for five long years… from Berlin to Burma… have fought and are still fighting for YOU…. You know which way your men would march. Vote for them!” Even Churchill loyalists began to doubt their man; Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson: “You know I have an admiration for Winston amounting to idolatry, so I am dreadfully distressed by the badness of his broadcast election speeches…. If I were a wobbler they would tip me over to the other side.” Nicolson’s friend the literary critic Raymond Mortimer also jotted a note to Nicolson, in which he wrote, “I think that Churchill more than anyone else was responsible for the squalid lies in these elections. He started the rot with his talk of Mr. Attlee’s Gestapo.”23

  Churchill’s “favorability rating” as measured by Gallup polls had exceeded 90 percent since El Alamein, but for a brief drop during his January 1944 recuperation in Marrakech and his Christmas 1944 foray to Greece. After V-E day, his favorability numbers dipped into the 80 percent range, a mere bag of shells, for he was the most popular leader in living history, the savior of England. Yet, Gallup’s newfangled computations were inexact. Asked if they had an “overall” favorable impression of Churchill, Britons responded, politely, yes. Thus, as Churchill campaigned up and down and across the land by private train and open auto, delivering ten speeches and broadcasts in the process, he was deeply moved, Eden wrote, by the goodwill and cheering crowds he found along all his routes. Yet, Eden later wrote, “He [Churchill] could not be expected to sense that there was also something valedictory in their message. He would not have been Winston Churchill if he had.”24

  Colville was not optimistic about the election, telling his diary, “Without Winston’s personal pr
estige the Tories would not have a chance. Even with him I am not sanguine of their prospects, though most of their leaders are confident of a good majority.” That was true; Churchill, Eden, and Beaverbrook all believed they would take the House with a majority of perhaps eighty seats, maybe even as many as one hundred. Even Attlee believed the Tories would win, later telling Colville that “there might, with luck, be a Conservative majority of only some forty seats.” Much would depend on the soldiers’ vote, four million strong, and almost 20 percent of the total electorate. Over lunch, Churchill asked General Billy Slim, the hero of Burma, how he thought his troops would vote. “Ninety percent Labour,” Slim replied. Churchill grunted. “What about the other ten percent?” Slim said, “They won’t vote at all.”25

  On July 3, Churchill delivered his final campaign speech at Walthamstow Stadium, a greyhound racing track in East London. After a band warmed up the crowd of 20,000 with “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “Umbrella Man,” Churchill, accompanied by Clementine, took the stage to tremendous cheers. He had no sooner begun speaking when several thousand Labour rowdies scattered throughout the stadium let him have it. “We want Attlee,” they shouted over his words. When he tried to engage them on the topic of free speech—“In a free country like ours…”—they shouted him down with a chorus of boos. “Surely that is not a party question,” said Churchill. He went on: “I want to congratulate London… upon her wonderful record in the war…. Would you like to boo that?” He went after the socialists and their “absurd utopias,” proclaiming that there must be “improvement of human hearts and human heads before we can achieve the glorious Utopia that the Socialist woolgatherers place before us. Now where is the boo party? I shall call them henceforward in my speech the booing party. Everyone have a good boo.” Some in the audience jeered at that. He closed with an election prediction: “I give my entire forgiveness to the booers. They have this to take away with them—I am sure they are going to get a thrashing such as their party has never received since it was born.”26