Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  “Madam, if you would do me the honor of bringing your husband to dine with me every night, I venture that the war would be over within weeks. He brings me good luck.”

  What Chamberlain thought his First Lord brought him, for the moment he kept to himself. Gout was more than enough for him to be getting on with.

  So they wandered into the night, the two old men, one a son of Birmingham, the other a scion of Blenheim Palace, from different quarters and still set upon their separate ways. One headed home. The other, in his mind's eye, was already in Norway.

  “His Navy. He called it his navy, Horace. Damned if he didn't.”

  “He thinks it's his war, too.”

  “First he wants to invade Ireland. Now bloody Norway.”

  “War, whatever the cost.”

  “Must get his ideas from comic books.”

  “Not a gentleman.”

  “I thought sending him to the Admiralty might keep him at arm's length. Busy in distant places. A second-hand war.”

  “Instead we got a first-hand fool.”

  “But I'll not let him destroy it all, Horace. He killed enough good Englishmen in the Dardanelles. Would destroy half of England in pursuit of his vanity.”

  “And sell the other half to the highest bidder.”

  “I'll not have it, Horace, not have Winston playing his games of war. I'll make you one vow.”

  “Neville?”

  “I swear to you. I will sink the First Lord. Long before he ever gets close to sinking a single German ore ship. Sink Winston, before he sinks us all.”

  November–December 1939.

  War comes in many different colors.

  In late November, a black taxi was driven round the West End of London during the blackout. In its wake it left several acid bombs, four of which exploded in and around Piccadilly Circus. The IRA was blamed. No one was hurt.

  That same weekend, in the forbidden city of Prague and after days of civil unrest, the German security forces raided the homes and dormitories of “intellectuals,” in truth high-school and university students. Some were killed as they tried to flee, the rest were dragged from their beds and taken in their thousands to Ruzyn barracks and the Sparta football stadium. Cold water was flung over them and they were left in the open until the evening. Then 124 high-school and university students were paraded in front of the others, and shot.

  In occupied Poland, the Lord Mayor of Warsaw was arrested and sent to Dachau. Three hundred thousand Polish prisoners had already been sent to labor camps. The German authorities announced that: “The Pole is a servant here and must only serve. Blind obedience and ruthless fulfillment of orders must be enforced. No sentiment is permissible and no exceptions, no consideration, even for any particular Poles whom we know and esteem. We must inject a dose of iron into our spinal columns and never admit the idea that Poland may ever arise again.” Hans Frank, the Governor-General of German Poland, decreed that “all Jews more than twelve years old must constantly, under severe penalties for default, wear an armband with the Shield of David whenever they go out of doors.”

  It had begun.

  Off the coast of Iceland the converted P&O cruise liner Rawalpindi intercepted the two battle-cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The Rawalpindi had four elderly six-inch guns, the Germans a huge array of armaments, including six eleven-inchers. The Rawalpindi did its damnedest, but it was like trying to stop an express train with a pea shooter. Soon all her guns were reduced to twisted metal, her whole bulk was ablaze. Still she pushed home her attack, trying to ram the enemy with the last of her strength. She sank in flames. Only thirty-eight of her crew survived.

  On the other side of the Baltic Sea, the Russians made increasingly threatening gestures aimed at their tiny neighbor, Finland. Soviet propaganda accused the Finns of committing atrocities against Russians and planning to mount an invasion of Russia itself. It was eerily reminiscent of the accusations made by German authorities shortly before the Wehrmacht descended upon Poland.

  And the Germans themselves sowed mines in abundance, sinking many ships, not only British but also those belonging to neutral nations. It was precisely this threat on which Chamberlain chose to concentrate in the first broadcast he delivered to the nation since he had declared war on Germany. It was delivered, on a Sunday, in his typical precious, reedy voice. It began in a mire of platitudes.

  Up to the present, the war has been carried out in a way very different from what we expected. We need not attribute the reluctance of the Germans to begin a great land offensive, or to attempt a series of mass attacks from the air upon this country, to their humanity. We have had plenty of evidence that no considerations of humanity deter them from any form of warfare that they think will bring them some advantage. They must, therefore, have come to the conclusion that at present they would lose more than they would gain by such attacks, and they have preferred to use methods which they think can be employed without serious loss to themselves.

  Only then did platitude turn to passion.

  The latest of these methods—as you all know—is the sowing of a new kind of mine—indiscriminately in our home waters. It matters nothing to them that what they are doing is contrary to international agreements—to which they have subscribed. It matters nothing to them that they are daily blowing up neutral ships as well as British, and thereby drowning or mutilating citizens of countries with which they are not at war. They hope by these barbarous weapons to cut off our supplies from overseas and so squeeze or starve us into submission. You will have no fear that this attempt will succeed.

  At a time of challenge and sacrifice, no one but the most desiccated of cynics could have imagined that his words were aimed at anyone other than the Germans. But, at the end of the broadcast, Sir Horace Wilson was seen to be smiling broadly and exchanging private words of satisfaction with the Prime Minister. And on the day Churchill circulated his paper on Norway to his Cabinet colleagues, they also received copies of the Prime Minister's broadcast. No one could be quite certain who circulated them, but the section concerned with sea mines and neutral countries was underlined in red.

  “Fine, fine speech, Ian—bless 'im. Pity about the missing crown. Not sure he was right to swap it for his naval uniform. Even Kings have to keep up appearances, you know.”

  “Simple. Austere, I thought. Entirely appropriate for a State Opening of Parliament during wartime.”

  “And mercifully short. If he'd run into one of his stutters we could've been there all day.”

  “Steady on, Dickie. Appearances and all…”

  “Got to face up to it, Ian. He's scarcely the fattest cock in the Windsor farmyard.” Dickie shrugged. “Not his fault, he wasn't born to it. Not his fault his brother's a traitor.”

  “Dickie, please!” Ian looked around the House of Commons Dining Room in alarm, fearing they might be overheard.

  “Well, it's true. Why d'you think they sent Windsor back to France?”

  “To…help, I assume.”

  “To get him out of the way. To get her out of the way. Apparently he tells her everything, then she tells everyone else. Hairdresser, skirt-maker, manicurist, anybody who'll offer them a free dinner.”

  “You can't be serious.”

  “Look here, old chap, he's a wrong 'un. Always told you that. So when the war breaks out and he says he's coming back from exile in France, they all panic. Won't send him a plane, hoping he'll simply rot in a French bordello or get lost somewhere on the way back—till bloody Winston sends a destroyer to pick him up at Cherbourg! So the Duke comes back and gets the old cold-shoulder treatment. Queen Mary refuses to see him—her own son. Imagine. Maybe their last chance, and still she won't see him. Tough as old boots, she is. Anyway, there's no car for him, no curtsy for his wretched wife, and nowhere to stay. Even Chamberlain keeps putting him off while they decide what to do, until Winston—always bloody Winston, isn't it?—takes him off for a lunchtime tour of the wretched Admiralty War Room.

  The whole s
hebang's there—you know, top-secret charts, the entire fleet's positions. All laid out for him.”

  “But the Duke is an Admiral of the Fleet, Dickie.”

  “Yes, a Field Marshal and all the rest. That's the bloody trouble. They realize they've got to find him something to do, but as far away from London as it's possible to get. So they get old Bore-Belisha to tell him it's back to France to play mud pies with a reduction in rank to major-general. Nice touch, I thought, getting old Elisha to do it. The commonest little man in the Cabinet. You know, if ever I get dumped on by the System, Ian, I want it done properly—wigs, gowns, ermine, the whole damned caboodle. But a firing squad of one common little Jew?” A moment of silence as they contemplated a future of mixed fortunes.

  “Extraordinarily fine burgundy, Dickie.”

  “Romanée-St-Vivant '65. Very best of the bunch.”

  “Didn't know the Wine Committee was up to this.”

  “They're not. It's a little private supply of mine. Had a word with the Sergeant-at-Arms and asked if he could find me a corner of the cellar to take care of the really good stuff. Can't leave it in the cellar at home, not deep enough, and damned if I'll leave it for bloody Adolf. So I thought we might celebrate the opening of the new session of Parliament with a little treat. After all, might be the last Parliament we're ever going to get.”

  “That bad, eh, Dickie?”

  “Worse. Did you hear the other news today?” Puzzled brow.

  “Russians. Denounced their neutrality treaty with Finland. And you know what that means.”

  “Oh, Christ.” A stretched, half-strangled sigh. “Pass me the bloody bottle.”

  The Russians invaded Finland on the last day of November. No longer was Russia a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. It was ravenous, rapacious, despicable, a universally loathed power which preyed on its neighbors and which had no common interests with England and France, no matter what Churchill had said. As Dickie announced in the Smoking Room, in a voice that was intended to carry to its farthest corners, there was nothing in the least bit enigmatic about another bloody blitzkrieg.

  Burgess choked. He couldn't move without pain. He'd been drinking for a week, an entire days-and-nights week, couldn't even remember when last he'd made it home. It drowned the physical feeling, but inside he ached with torment and humiliation. He felt as if Joe Stalin and the entire Red Army had been stamping across his soul. First Poland, now Finland. Russian tanks once again making war on perambulators.

  He didn't understand why, so he'd got drunk. He hadn't dared go to the Reform or the Garrick, even with their relaxed approach to the rules of engagement, not after a week of sleeping in the same suit. And it had been raining, soul-drenching rain that had lashed down for days as though God himself was joining in the misery. Eventually he'd made it to the Mandrake Club in the basement off Dean Street, his hideaway in Soho where they'd only throw you out if you threw up over people, but he'd got sick with them instead, all these writers and intellectuals pontificating about war and conscience and sacrifice—as if they knew a damned thing about it. Brain-fuckers. No wonder they were the first to get shot in any good revolution. So he'd insulted everyone and stumbled on to a pub in Covent Garden, which had thrown him out after just one whiskey until, by and by, he had found himself beside the river. He gazed down into its angry waters, where flowing tide did battle with storm waters tumbling downstream, and in it seemed to have found something which resembled his soul. He had wanted to get closer. So he had clambered up on Hungerford Bridge, the pedestrian walkway that backed onto the railway line into Charing Cross. He had no thoughts of suicide, in truth had no thoughts at all, but he was in the mood to throw himself off the bridge simply to find out what it felt like. Falling. Drowning. So much like life.

  It had stopped raining for the moment, but the scudding clouds suggested it was nothing but a temporary respite. He was on his own, in the middle of the long, narrow bridge, swallowed up by the night. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette but found only a soggy tobacco stick that refused to light and quickly crumbled in two. Maybe he'd kill himself after all. “And you can go fuck yourself, too,” he muttered, as suddenly he realized he'd been joined by a stranger, some intruder upon his private misery. He turned, to discover a police constable.

  There is something extraordinarily instinctive about the reactions of some homosexuals, a trigger that goes off inside when they meet, an understanding which requires no words, no exchange other than a glance. Burgess thought the constable gave him one of those glances. He was far too drunk to have any reliable instincts, but then again he was also far too drunk to care. If he was going to fall, and drown, maybe he should do it around the cock of a complete stranger. This stranger. Hell, if he'd got it all wrong, he could always throw himself off the bridge after all. Go down…well, going down. Maybe he was about to make the greatest misjudgment of his life. He knew in twenty minutes' time he could be in police custody and wouldn't come out for another ten years, but somehow it didn't seem to matter. It was a solution of sorts, would simplify things. Take away the pain. Suddenly the policeman had become a private angel for Burgess, someone who would take all those impossible decisions out of his hands, and resolve them, one way or another, and he didn't much care which.

  Within thirty seconds of telling the policeman to go fuck himself, Burgess was down on his knees, tearing at the other man's trousers, gambling his life. Within two minutes he was finished.

  They knew they would never meet again—at least, not like this. The policeman buttoned up his fly, straightened his tunic.

  Then he kicked Burgess in the guts, just once, but viciously, and Burgess thought he would never be able to breathe again.

  “One day you're going to get your stupid head beaten in,” the other man muttered, and walked off into the darkness, leaving Burgess clinging to a bridge support.

  As the policeman's footsteps faded into the distance, Burgess was overwhelmed with a sense of self-loathing. He was drunk, groveling on his knees, in a stinking puddle, nowhere to go, and had little idea where he'd been. He was a man who viewed much of the rest of humanity with contempt, who derided their values, yet who had just valued his own life as nothing more precious than a wet-lipped fumble in the dark. He'd always thought he was a man who might help transform this sick, pathetic world, yet right now he was a man who couldn't even help himself—and in the process thought he might have fouled himself, but couldn't even be sure of that. Disgust was welling up inside, bending his body in two, as though he were trying to escape from himself. Suddenly he was retching into the river.

  It was only much later that he was able to pull himself to his feet and stagger home.

  It was the opening days of the worst winter in centuries, when the ice gods attacked on all fronts. Rail points seized, diesel turned solid, coal went short, and water pipes froze and burst, bringing misery to millions. Not that anyone was supposed to notice, since weather forecasts were subject to the strictest censorship. Ice was an enemy, like the Nazis, to be ignored. Britain was shrouded in misery, in frost, and in darkness. The number of deaths on the road rocketed to nearly a thousand a month, and the unemployed still totaled nearly one and a half million.

  Businesses affected by the war were closing or making desperate appeals for support. The Orchard Hotel at Marble Arch ran advertisements proclaiming: “Hitler must not sink this ship, or put the crew out of commission. Rally round! Terms made to suit all nice people.” Elderly matrons pleaded through the classified columns for domestic help—housemaid wanted, good references essential, not over forty-five, any nationality, but no Germans…Everything was for sale or for barter, not just pianos.

  And rationing began to bite—meat, ham, bacon, sugar, gaso-line…although restrictions on electricity and gas were temporarily lifted to fight the cold. They simply put the price up.

  It was, perhaps, an unfortunate time to release a new set of carefully posed photographs of the Queen, taken by Mr. Cecil Beaton, w
hich captured her amongst the marble columns, silk-clad sofas, and glittering crystal chandeliers of Buckingham Palace, resplendent in “a gold dress embroidered with pearls and diamonds,” as The Times reported. The Queen is in good heart, they proclaimed. It might have been better to imply that the suffering was, at least, being shared.

  After a hundred days of war, Britain seemed to have lost the will to fight. The RAF was largely grounded by the weather, the British Expeditionary Force in France did battle armed with shovels in fields that had frozen to rock. Only the Royal Navy seemed keen to pursue the issue of war in the distant gray seas beyond the shores.

  And the United States, it seemed, had no will to fight at all…

  (The Times, Tuesday, December 12, 1939)

  MR. KENNEDY'S ADVICE TO U.S.

  WARNING TO KEEP OUT OF THE WAR

  From our own correspondent

  NEW YORK, December 11

  Mr. Kennedy, United States Ambassador to Great Britain, speaking yesterday at Boston, earnestly warned the United States against getting into the war.

  Speaking extemporaneously at a parishioners' meeting in the church where he was once an altar boy he said: “As you love America don't let anything that comes out of any country in the world make you believe that you can make a situation one whit better by getting into the war. There's no place in the fight for us. It is going to be bad enough as it is.”

  …He said that one of the chief influences that might involve the United States in the war was the American people's “sporting spirit” in “not wanting to see unfair or immoral things done,” but he reiterated: “This is not our fight.”

  But it was Churchill's fight and, at times, it seemed exclusively Churchill's fight. When he presented his proposal to mine the Norwegian coastal waterways to the Cabinet, it was turned down flat. Halifax expressed his horror at the violation of international law implied in an attack on neutral territory, and there was no sign of support for Churchill's eagerness to extend the war. The word “Dardanelles” could be heard muttered in every corner. The most he was able to squeeze from his colleagues was their approval to submit the proposal to the military chiefs for “further study,” a Whitehall euphemism for being told to bugger off. He was isolated and overruled.