Winston's War

by Michael Dobbs

  Yet not for the first time, it was Hitler and his war machine that came to Churchill's rescue.

  In early December the pocket-battleship Graf Spee arrived in the southern Atlantic intent on preying upon the rich traffic in the sea lanes off the River Plate. Instead of discovering defenseless merchantmen, however, she ran straight into a British task force. The Exeter, the Ajax, and New Zealand-manned Achilles were much more lightly armed than the Graf Spee, but they confronted her nonetheless. On the early morning of December 13 a battle began in which all four ships fought and maneuvered inside thick clouds of camouflaging oil smoke. An hour and twenty minutes later, the Exeter was crippled. She had been hit more than a hundred times by the Graf Spee's huge guns, her bridge was destroyed and her forward guns out of action. She was burning fiercely amidships; many of her crew were dead. The other British ships had also been hit, but so had the Graf Spee. Her commander, Captain Langsdorff, decided to withdraw to the neutral port of Montevideo, three hundred miles away, only to discover that the battle was not yet over. The British ships, despite their serious damage, limped in pursuit like bloodied hounds.

  In Montevideo, the Graf Spee faced a desperate dilemma. She could stay only seventy-two hours—otherwise under the rules of neutrality she would be interned for the duration of the war. Yet outside the port lay a British pack, wounded but still desperately dangerous. And by seeking refuge in Montevideo, the Graf Spee had thrown away all element of surprise and maneuverability. She would run headlong into the waiting enemy.

  As Langsdorff deliberated, the world took the battle to its heart. The harbor at Montevideo was mobbed by crowds, the world's media flew in journalists to report on the hour-by-hour developments, radio links were set up. The Battle of the River Plate was about to become the first modern media battle.

  For the first time in weeks, the headlines in the British press were dominated not by doom and depression but by news that the Germans were at bay and the British flag was flying tattered but high. For four days the nation watched, and waited.

  As soon as Langsdorff had unloaded his wounded, he tried to squeeze more time out of the Uruguayans. He failed. Seventy-two hours was it, and all of it. He would not allow his ship to be interned, to wallow in some foreign backwater as a rotting symbol of Nazi failure, yet neither would he risk having the pride of the German Navy blown to pieces before the mocking eyes of the world. There was only one way out—which was not a way out at all. At sunset on December 17, with only a skeleton crew, the Graf Spee weighed anchor and made its way six miles into the estuary of the River Plate. Spotter planes flew overhead, reporting back to the waiting ships of the Royal Navy. A resumption of battle seemed imminent but, before the British ships could engage her, Langsdorff himself decided the fate of the Graf Spee. Scuttled her. Blew her guts out. Destroyed her with his own hand. She burned, then listed, and finally sank.

  Two days later, in the privacy of a Montevideo hotel room, Captain Langsdorff blew out his own brains.

  The Royal Navy—Winston's Royal Navy—had won the first great engagement of the war.

  Chamberlain flew back to Heston and into a world that was the color of cold steel. It was the same airport he had used on his return journey from Munich, but this time there were no crowds, no cheering throng tussling to lay palm leaves in his path, no summons to share the spotlight on the palace balcony. There was only Horace Wilson, struggling beneath his overcoat to retain some trace of body heat.

  “You heard it?” Wilson inquired as the Prime Minister stepped down the ladder from the De Havilland. No pleasantries.

  “Why didn't you stop him?” Chamberlain snapped.

  “I was in the country, knew nothing about it until I turned on the radio. Winston's like Hitler. Mounts his attacks at weekends.”

  “While my back is turned. How dare he? Damn him! I freeze for days in French fields inspecting the front line and he wallows in his glory like a pig in his sty.”

  “Nevertheless…”

  “He made it sound as if he'd fired the guns himself. Sunk the Graf Spee all on his own.”

  “Nevertheless…”

  “Lies. He lies through his teeth. One whiskey and he's away, exaggerating, inventing. Conjuring up mythical U-boats he claims to have sent to the bottom.” The shallow breaths came forth in swirling clouds of condensation as they walked the short distance to the terminal. Chamberlain's pace was slower than normal, as though he were afraid of slipping on ice.

  “Nevertheless,” insisted Wilson, “we can't retract a word he said. The press and public loved it.”

  “What?”

  “And his announcement that the first Canadian troops had arrived.”

  “The Devil take him! What's that got to do with the Admiralty? Did they swim here, for God's sake? Can't he keep his interfering fingers from grabbing any morsel of good news?”

  “Not in his nature.” Chamberlain was white, a mixture of fury and exhaustion. The intense cold of France had dogged him, cut to his bones, he wasn't a young man any more and his resistance to physical hardships was noticeably on the wane. Yet he had persevered, motoring hundreds of miles along the front over several days to greet the troops and consult with his generals, uttering no word of complaint, only to discover he had been stabbed in the back—because that was what it felt like. The body of an exhausted politician is sustained by praise, yet now Winston had stolen it, grabbed it all for himself, and the applause still clung to the ice in the wind.

  “I can't stand this any longer. He's got to go,” Chamberlain declared, his breath escaping in a rush, as though it were his last.

  Wilson considered this for a moment, then stopped. They had not quite reached the terminal building and the frost had climbed right through the soles of his feet and was eating every one of his toes, yet something more important than his comfort seemed to have gripped him.

  “We can't. Not now. Not yet, at least.”

  Chamberlain turned on him but Wilson continued, cutting off the inevitable protests.

  “We're at war, and so far as the general public is concerned Winston appears to be almost the only Minister fighting it. In Whitehall he may be something of a joke, but in the country he's a figure of defiance. Destroy him, and you destroy any chance of continuing the fight.”

  “But don't you understand, I don't want to fight!” Chamberlain exploded.

  “But you can't make a peace either, not now, not if you want to survive in office.”

  “Sometimes I wonder whether—”

  “So you need to reassert your authority. Not a direct broadside aimed at him, but perhaps more of a shot across the bows. Get him to think twice, watch his back. Let him know he's living on borrowed time.”

  “And how do you suppose I am to achieve that considerable miracle?” Chamberlain demanded from the middle of a swirling, frost-nipped cloud of anger.

  “Send for Leslie.”

  Oh, but what a convenient target Leslie Hore-Belisha would prove to be. Ebullient, unorthodox, obnoxious, frequently insensitive, openly ambitious, and inexcusably innovative. Innovative—the Secretary of State for War! And always with a smile for the cameras.

  And, of course, he was Jewish. Not that Chamberlain particularly held that against him, or even disliked him for it. The Prime Minister's anti-Semitism was not of a vigorous kind, he really didn't care too much about the whole issue, it was rather like his antipathy for twentieth-century symphonies—except you could never switch Leslie Hore-Belisha off, or even turn down the volume. Yet for others, the Minister of War was a white nigger. An undesirable, a man of different orientation, an outsider who had forced his way past the palace guards and had erected his cooking pots in the marble hallways of the mighty. In the words of Truth (proprietor: Sir Joseph Ball), he was “a minor man whose most conspicuous talent is for getting his photograph into the newspapers"—and particularly those newspapers run by his co-religionists which operated in the “Jew-owned gutters of Fleet Street.”

  He had made o
ther uncomfortable enemies, particularly amongst the Army General Staff. They had spent weeks bickering more and more venomously about the concrete pillboxes necessary to extend the defenses of the Maginot Line across the unfortunate gap behind Belgium which the British Army had to defend. Hore-Belisha said that a pill-box could be constructed in three days; the General Staff said it took three weeks and were incandescent when he refused to believe them. So around the mess tables of the British Expeditionary Force in France, the name of Hore-Belisha was spat out like pips in the pudding. And many of the pips landed on the table of the King. He was, after all, the most senior military figurehead in the land. He had a role, a right to intervene—a duty, even. And the King would not tolerate a War Secretary who had sided openly with his brother Edward during the Abdication crisis, and who had added error to that insult by being the first to visit the Windsors in exile. Damn him. George wasn't anti-Semitic, of course not. He just didn't like the man. Anyway, George was fed up with the muttering suggesting he was colorless and weak.

  So the King summoned the Prime Minister. He complained, and suggested that a man like Hore-Belisha was not appropriate for his office. In doing so, he was out of order—the monarch's job was to be seen but rarely heard—yet what was the point in being King if he couldn't take a view about His Own Ministers? And there were plenty of other voices nagging Chamberlain. So, in turn, and just before Christmas, the Prime Minister summoned Leslie Hore-Belisha.

  “How are things, Leslie?”

  “Magnificent.”

  “Any problems? Worries?”

  “Nothing that a few more millions for my Army couldn't sort, Prime Minister.”

  So, he didn't know, hadn't caught on. Poor sap. But Chamberlain was not a man to be bullied or hectored into any action he thought unworthy; he liked to take his own good time for such things.

  “Just wanted you to know how grateful I am, Leslie. Difficult—almost impossible task you've got. Admire your dedication, truly I do.”

  “Why, that's…extraordinarily kind of you, Prime Minister.”

  “Yes. Just wanted to let you know. Before you disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “To celebrate Christmas. You do celebrate Christmas, don't you, Leslie?”

  The boiler was called Beelzebub. Covered in soot, he carried on in life largely unappreciated, squeezed into the airless basement of the old school and surrounded by a puddle of coke. Beelzebub had been one of West Bromwich's finest, circa 1890, but those days were long since past. He had a personality all his own. He stood no nonsense. He grumbled, groaned, strained, he indisputably did his best, yet still he was asked to do more. That happened when there were ten degrees of frost outside. He began to feel unappreciated. He had a pressure gauge at the very top, like a Cyclopic eye that watched all the comings and goings in the basement of the old school, and when the caretaker approached for the fourth time that day with a frown and a large spanner, Beelzebub shuddered. The caretaker poked him in the eye, then poked him again and still didn't seem to care for what he saw, so in frustration took his large spanner and hacked at Beelzebub's main steam pipe—at which point Beelzebub decided he had finally had enough. A large slug of calcium that had been clinging for years to the inside of his pipework broke loose and fell into the main regulator valve. Beelzebub shuddered, and then he died.

  Which was great news for Jerry. The old school—near the main Royal Signals depot at Blandford Forum—had been requisitioned as a temporary home for Jerry's battalion, and with the passing away of Beelzebub and the lack of immediate alternatives amongst the crowded but frozen camps in the Dorset countryside, his entire company was given two days' leave, the first in more than two months. Five hours later, still in his army fatigues with his new sergeant's stripes fresh upon his sleeve, he was sitting with Sue at a table in the Royal Gardens restaurant in Bournemouth. He'd called to make the reservation as soon as he had heard of the leave, and his timing had proved immaculate—it was Friday, three days before Christmas, and the entire community of Bournemouth seemed to want to celebrate its survival in the Phoney War. He'd got the last table.

  So they sat and held hands by candlelight, exchanging lives. Jerry talked of how in the morning he was being trained to be a radio operator, and how every afternoon he was being instructed to yell and stick his bayonet into bales of straw lying motionless on the ground. He said this greatly heartened him. During the last war he had never known a German to lie still on the ground while a British soldier stuck a bayonet in his guts, but perhaps Army Intelligence had discovered a new way of simply terrifying German soldiers to death. It was a considerably more comforting thought than the alternative—that the War Office still couldn't tell a bayonet from a butter knife. Then Sue began to talk of what she termed her stay-behind plans, of how, in the event of an invasion, she wanted to organize a group that would continue the fight behind the lines. Ordinary folk, with everyday jobs and duties, who would spot the opportunity for a little havoc in the event of an occupation. The Cock-up Club, she called it with a coy smile. Jerry was concerned, but she explained how she had already identified several possible resisters. Harold, the postman, a veteran of the Boer War as well as the last, who could carry messages without suspicion. The lady doctor, who knew not only how to cure but many different ways to cause acute discomfort, even to kill—she claimed to be able to put an entire regiment out of action for forty-eight hours if she could get near their water supply. The garage mechanic who reckoned he could make a working rifle out of a rusted bike.

  “People get shot for that,” Jerry whispered.

  “I'm told that in Poland and Czechoslovakia people are getting shot for doing nothing at all.”

  “It won't come to that.”

  “It will if your Army can't tell the difference between a bayonet and a butter knife,” she retorted. “If there's an invasion, Jerry, this place will be one of the first to be occupied. And if that happens"—she squeezed his hand—"well, I suspect it means you probably won't be around any more. That's what goes on in war, isn't it? There aren't any simple or safe options. We all have our different battles to fight.”

  “But even so, my love—”

  “It's too late, Jerry. I've already got Mr. Woolton—you know, the local builder? He's putting up a new clubhouse at the football ground. I've already persuaded him to build a little hiding hole between the changing rooms—a sort of store room cum safe house. The football crowd would give us excellent cover. He's done all the work himself, poor fellow, and he's over sixty with bad lumbago, so I can't go and tell him it's all been a waste of time and blisters, can I?”

  “You are a remarkable lady.”

  “You forget, I'm a postmistress. I see them all. They come to my counter and talk. Those who gossip and complain about rationing or the blackout and the fact that Harold was an hour late with the post the other day in the middle of a blizzard. And those who simply get on with things. Who get ready.” Jerry sucked at his pipe, but it was dead, had died as he had listened, fascinated and not a little frightened. “You know, Sue, I love you very much. But you shouldn't be telling me this. Need-to-know, and all that.”

  “And it's the last time I'll ever mention it to you, Jerry. But you do need to know. Just in case.”

  “Just in case of what?”

  “Well…just in case.”

  She squeezed his hand once more, very tightly.

  Suddenly, the head waiter was at their elbow, hopping distractedly from one foot to the next, crouching low. “Ah, the menu. Time to order, darling,” Jerry announced.

  “No, sir. I'm sorry, sir, but…” the waiter began, in an accent that suggested something south of Rome. Behind his shoulder hovered two officers, a captain and a colonel. Ordnance Corps. Backroom boys. Waste-bin wallahs. “This is the last table, sir, and these two gentlemen—two officers…I'm afraid I must ask you to let them have it.”

  “Why?”

  “Rank, dear chap,” the colonel barked. “One of the per
ils of war.” He smiled beneath a thin moustache.

  “But I booked. Made a reservation. Did you make a reservation?”

  “Don't be insolent, Sergeant.” The smile had disappeared, the moustache shot out like a sharpened pencil. The officer turned to Sue. “I beg your pardon, miss, but we're on war duty—I assume your companion is on leave? We've got to be back in the office in an hour, very little time to eat, hate to do it, but war is damnable. Have to hurry. Perhaps we might buy you a drink to sort of…smooth the passage?”

  “I don't think so, Colonel.”

  “Well, as you will.” The waiter was bent almost double in humiliation. “I'm so sorry—miss—sir.” Jerry rose from his chair, fire in his eyes. “If you think—” Sue cut him short. “Other battles to fight, darling. Eh?”

  “Double up, Sergeant. Time's wasting,” the officer barked.

  Jerry was going to hit him, Sue knew that, so before he could react she had taken his hand and squeezed it once again, still harder, digging in her nails until they hurt. “We're going, Colonel, but one question first, if I may?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you know the difference between a butter knife and a bayonet?”

  “A butter knife and a b…? Not sure I understand the question.”

  “No, that's what I thought.” She gathered up her handbag. “Oh, and by the way, Colonel, one final, very feminine thought.” She drew herself close to him, so close he could feel her breath on his face. “Real men don't pull rank. They pull magnificent women. Like me.”