Churchill 1940-1945

by Walter Reid

  Prior to becoming Prime Minister, Churchill had already been able to use his position as First Lord of the Admiralty to deploy an unusual degree of control over the war as a whole, but he had not been impressed by the machinery he was required to use. War direction was in the hands of the Ministerial Committee for the Co-ordination of Defence, initially chaired by Chamberlain, but then by Churchill in his role as First Lord. A Chiefs of Staff Committee already existed, but met separately. The Chiefs of Staff did not like Churchill’s style and he, for his part, was aware that they could always appeal over his head to the Prime Minister.

  The system was inefficient and muddled. It was much improved by the model that he now established as Prime Minister, combining the premiership with the Ministry of Defence. This was a novel departure, and Churchill implemented it with great expedition. His appointment as Minister of Defence was made in the very first round of ministerial appointments on 11 May 1940, along with just his seven most senior colleagues.2 The assumption of this dual role addressed the criticism made of the Chamberlain government that no one Minister had responsibility for prosecuting the war. Churchill had given the matter much thought before his becoming Prime Minister had even been a real prospect. The War Office, which he disliked even more than the Foreign Office,3 was now reduced to administrative functions. The Ministerial Co-ordination Committee was abolished.

  As Minister of Defence he presided over a non-existent Ministry. It consisted of him, Prime Minister under a different name, and a very small staff. It was a fiction, but a fiction that critically allowed him to overcome the service resistance to political direction that had bedevilled Lloyd George’s conduct of the First World War. The fictional Ministry was reinforced by Lindemann’s Statistical Branch, which Churchill brought with him from the Admiralty, and which was a device for appraisal and statistical evaluation.

  The Chiefs of Staff Committee now met with Churchill, as Minister of Defence, on a daily basis, and a modus vivendi between the military and the political was established that had never existed before. It was certainly not without its tensions – Churchill strongly believed in ‘creative tension’ – and the Chiefs of Staff were frequently infuriated by his rudeness, advocacy of hare-brained schemes and predilection for testing arguments by prolonged and heated opposition. He sought to assess the validity of his own arguments by forcing them on his interlocutors at very great length, appearing to register no valid opposition. In his history of the war, Churchill is said to have represented the proceedings of his meetings with the Chiefs of Staff as ‘A monologue only occasionally interrupted by what were no more than distant voices and echoes’; but that is an oversimplification. What really took place was ‘an incessant dialogue between Churchill and his military advisers, and with his political advisers too.’4

  Churchill, said David Stafford, talking about intelligence matters, but in words which have a more general application, ‘leaned heavily on his advisers and listened to them carefully, but never allowed himself to be imprisoned by them. By temperament acutely aware of the deadly power of institutional inertia and déformations professionnelles, he always valued independent and trusted sources …’5

  In a post-war interview with Francis Williams, Attlee was asked whether Churchill had too much control over the strategic planning of the war. He said that was not the case: ‘Winston was the driving force, a great War Minister … but there was quite a lot of discussion at the Defence Committee’. He conceded that there could be a great deal of disagreement, but was asked if in the event Churchill had his way. He said that that was often the case. ‘But there were quite a lot of occasions when he didn’t. He’d get some idea he wanted to press, but after we had considered it the rest of us would have to tell him that there was no value in it.’

  Attlee went on to say, ‘Winston was sometimes an awful nuisance … but he always accepted the verdict of the Chiefs of Staff when it came to it, and it was a great advantage for him to be there driving them all the time … we always accepted their professional advice. Even Winston did after a struggle. We never moved on a professional matter without them.’6 But he made a hugely significant caveat – ‘But you needed someone to prod the Chiefs of Staff.’ It is of crucial importance to remember this when one reads the diaries and memoirs of the military men.

  It was a system that no one would have devised or sought to justify, and it worked remarkably well. Of course the generals were none the worse for prodding. The easiest way not to lose a battle is not to fight it. When Churchill was told that Hitler constantly interfered with his generals, his unrepentant reaction was to say ‘I do the same’.7 Churchill may have been at fault in not putting more pressure on the professionals. Even a commentator as critical of Churchill as Liddell Hart acknowledges that ‘his minutes from 1940 on show him as being usually in advance of his official military advisers and executants’ and he goes on to wonder why the PM did not push them ‘along faster or replace them with more forward-thinking men’.8

  He was more than a galvanising and inspiring catalyst in the discussions of the Chiefs of Staff. They were so burdened and preoccupied by practical considerations that lay below the level of true strategy that they were not often able to discuss that subject.9 Churchill, taking the grander view, brought to the Chiefs of Staff a scale of vision that they individually and collectively lacked.

  He also brought to his meetings with the Chiefs the great advantage of his compendious knowledge of the intelligence reports. The scale of the material he had studied meant that he could form a much broader appreciation of events than they. Intelligence was indeed one of the weapons he and they used in their battles. As Churchill insisted on his own direct access to the products of Bletchley Park he was at a great advantage against the Chiefs, whose information was at second hand. Accordingly, the Chiefs sought to establish the Joint Intelligence Committee as the repository and distributor of intelligence material with the responsibility for ensuring that intelligence underpinned strategy and operations. Eventually the JIC did come to fulfil that role, but not without some mistakes along the way, and not for some time. Until it had acquired sufficient skills and resources, Churchill was frequently able to outflank the Chiefs because of his command of intelligence. He was well aware of this and took pains not to be controlled. Reports were not ‘to be sifted and digested by the various Intelligence authorities’: they were to go straight to him via Desmond Morton.10 It was not until the spring of 1941 that in this respect ‘the Chiefs were able to battle with Churchill on a level playing field’.11

  The system worked well in part because of the diplomacy of Major-General Hastings (‘Pug’) Ismay, who headed the skeletal defence office, supported by Colonel Leslie Hollis and Colonel Ian Jacob (both later major-generals). Ismay’s role was critical and had two functions: he was Churchill’s principal staff officer, an executive post, but he was also, as a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, involved in the formulation of policy. He had to maintain the metaphysical distinction between the two positions. Churchill once asked him his views on a decision of the Chiefs, which he had communicated to the Prime Minister. Ismay said that if his services were to be valued, the Prime Minister must never ask that question. ‘And he never did.’12

  Under these three men there were a Joint Planning Committee and the Joint Intelligence Committee, which both evolved plans of their own and evaluated those put to them by the Chiefs of Staff Committee. The whole thing was fairly fluid and organic.

  Having established himself as Minister of Defence, Churchill appointed two sub-committees of the non-existent Defence Committee: Defence Committee (Operations) and Defence Committee (Supply). The former was the key one, consisting of Churchill, Attlee and the three Service Ministers, with the Chiefs of Staff always in attendance. The War Cabinet was supposed to be served by the Defence Committee (Operations) and the Defence Committee (Supply) but increasingly left the Prime Minister and the Chiefs of Staff to get on with things and came to play little part in the d
irection of the war. Initially its Defence Committee, consisting of Attlee, Beaver-brook and the three Service Ministers, met frequently, but the meetings took place progressively less often. The Service Ministers themselves played largely administrative roles.

  The army representative on the Chiefs of Staff Committee consisted of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Ironside was succeeded by Dill as CIGS in May 1940 and Alan Brooke succeeded Dill in December 1941. The navy’s representative was initially Dudley Pound, who was succeeded as First Sea Lord by A.B. Cunningham in September 1943. For the Royal Air Force, Newall was succeeded by Portal in October 1940.

  The changed approach at the centre of the direction of the war was dramatic. There are many descriptions of the sheer physical force that Churchill brought to bear, striding from room to room, summoning queues of Ministers and civil servants, demanding Action this Day on the famous red cards, ending the leisurely practices of peacetime and expecting the same total commitment to winning the war that he himself evinced.

  He ruled from the start that his orders would be given in writing, and that only written orders were to be regarded as having his authority. His output is staggering – in its size, but in many other respects as well. Those who regard Churchill as little more than a bombastic orator should study what he wrote. Perhaps the most outstanding feature is the grasp of detail, a grasp that could be reflected in a highly intricate dissection of technical issues, but which could also extend to the no less detailed review of huge strategic issues examined at very great length in panoramic surveys. Smaller subjects were also taken in – smaller subjects that mattered to individuals: an unfairness, an abuse, a misuse of power by lowly officials.

  He was particularly sensitive, patrician though he was, to injustices imposed for reasons of class or prejudice. There is always a profound sense of humanity. In the darkest of days and working crippling hours he found time to write letters of condolence and sympathy to a widow or mother of whom he had heard, often hardly known to him, and the tender, thoughtful messages he sent must have meant much to the recipients.

  He found time to pursue some pet subjects. He was always interested in feeding the people and achieving a fair distribution of food resources. The Egg Production Scheme received a lot of idiosyncratic attention and it was noted that ‘[a]lthough rabbits are not by themselves nourishing, they are a pretty good mitigation of vegetarianism’.13

  When Lloyd George attacked Churchill in the House of Commons on 7 May 1941 for being surrounded by yes-men, rather than people who would stand up to him and say, ‘No, no, no’, the Prime Minister expostulated to his oldest political ally in some frustration, ‘Why, goodness gracious, has he no idea how strong the negative principle is in the constitution of the British war-making machine? The difficulty is not, I assure him, to have more brakes put on the wheels; the difficulty is to get more impetus and speed behind it.’14 The minutes and memoranda were the attempt to generate that impetus and speed. The drive that lies behind them, the precision of the carefully chosen language in which they are couched, their logic and persuasiveness are the evidence of a powerful, disciplined and amazingly well-stocked mind.

  Very soon his immediate entourage and his civil servants resigned themselves to this new regime and even found themselves swept up in its stimulating current. Initially there were reservations and complaints; and some reached Clementine. Typically, she thought it wise to relay the complaints to her husband. She wrote a letter on 23 June 1940, had second thoughts and tore it up, only to rewrite it a few days later, burdening Churchill, in these inordinately stressful days with reports that his manner was described as ‘rough, sarcastic and over-bearing’. As Sir Martin Gilbert has pointed out, ‘This was the same man who had been described three weeks earlier as “a mountain of energy and good nature”, and within the following few weeks as “in wonderful spirits … full of offensive plans” and “most genial” ’.15 On the very day that Clementine wrote her letter Colville described Churchill lying in bed, gazing affectionately at his cat, Nelson, and murmuring, ‘Cat, darling’.16 She asked him to use his powers with ‘urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm’. It was an unnecessary letter at such a time, not thoughtless – far from that – but ill advised. Her husband was working eighteen hours a day to stave off defeat.

  Churchill’s self-confidence was not dented. He had achieved a great deal. He had become Prime Minister at a time when his abilities were indispensable. Despite great political weakness he had secured his position for the moment. He had improved on the machinery of waging war which had been so ineffective in 1914–18. But he had a tiny and inefficient army, which was being swept off mainland Europe and his only ally was about to sue for peace.

  8

  The Battle of France

  In parallel with consolidating his position and constructing machinery for the direction of the war, every minute of Churchill’s day was devoted to addressing the question of how to avoid imminent military defeat. Three weeks after he came into office he asked the Chiefs of Staff for an assessment of Britain’s chances. There was little to reassure him in their reply. They reported on 26 May, concluding only on balance that Britain might survive; and even that depended on some fairly dodgy assumptions regarding the maintenance of the link with North America and keeping the RAF and the supply of aircraft to it in business. Churchill expected an invasion in which he would die in a heroic last stand. ‘Take one with you’ was to be the slogan.

  All that lay between Britain and that invasion was France. His first military task therefore was to try to rally the French against the Germans with the support of the British Expeditionary Force. By the time he arrived on the scene there was in truth little he could do, and spur-of-the-moment attempts to galvanise the weak and demoralised British troops into last-minute activity irritated the army. Henry Pownall, for example, Chief of Staff to the Expeditionary Force, reacted furiously to Churchill’s peremptory demand on 23 May for a counterattack by eight divisions from three different armies at an hour’s notice: ‘The man’s mad’.1

  But what the British army could do in France was pretty insignificant. It was a tiny force. Nothing on a substantial scale had been planned and by the end of 1939 only five regular British divisions had arrived in France. In the spring of 1940 eight territorial divisions were sent; but their experience had been limited to guard duties. The War Office did not even have up-to-date maps of France and some divisions were not equipped with knives, forks and mugs.

  The Battle of France would not be won or lost by Britain; indeed Britain’s role could only be marginal. Churchill had to encourage France to try to save herself – both for her own sake and for the sake of her ally. At the cost of an enormous injection of energy – physical and emotional – he did all he could for France, the country he loved so much and whose history he knew so well,2 and in which he chose to spend so much time, the country which he had first visited in 1883 at the age of nine, driving with his father through the Place de la Concorde, when he saw the monuments of Alsace and Lorraine draped in black crêpe after their annexation by the Germans thirteen years before.

  From France he sent an urgent telegram to the War Cabinet on 16 May asking them, against the advice they were being given by Dowding, to allow six more squadrons to be used ‘not for any local purpose, but to give the last chance to the French army to rally its wavering strength. It would not be good historically if their requests were denied and their ruin resulted … I must have answer by midnight in order to encourage the French. Telephone to Ismay at embassy in Hindustani’.3 Beyond that, Churchill had to accept Dowding’s advice, rejecting repeated requests from the French, even one as late as 16 June, when Jean Monnet flew to London (de Gaulle, who was with Monnet and, exceptionally, spoke in English, told Churchill, ‘I think you are quite right’).4

  Britain and France had made a formal, mutual commitment that neither would make a separate peace. As the last days of French liberty ebbed away, the French had to confront
this undertaking again and again. It soon became clear that both Pétain and Weygand were for an armistice and against continuing the war from, for instance, North Africa. Towards the end of May, France began to talk of asking for terms through Italy. While they awaited Britain’s response to such an initiative, Daladier, the latest in a series of Foreign Ministers, panicked at the prospect of Italy’s joining Germany in the war against France: he prepared a draft telegram offering substantial colonial concessions. Britain’s lengthy and anxious Cabinet discussions on the same subject of looking for terms concluded on 28 May, with a firm but far from inevitable decision against treating. Daladier was informed, and his telegram was not sent.

  Despite his later denunciation of ‘the Italian jackal … trying to pick up an empire on the cheap’, Churchill’s attitude to Mussolini at the moment had to be eminently flexible. He made it known to Italy that if she were to remain neutral, she would be entitled to participate in eventual peace negotiations as a victorious co-belligerent. Unattracted by this distant reward, Italy joined the war on 10 June. France was on the brink of the surrender which was to follow just two days later, but already, and while still Britain’s ally, obstructed Churchill’s attempts to attack the new enemy. Ismay reported to Churchill that the French would not allow the RAF units still in France to take off on bombing raids against Italy. Churchill raised the matter at once with Reynaud and Weygand. They claimed that there was a misunderstanding, but the following morning Ismay was told that the French had now placed farm carts on the runway to make it impossible for British bombers to attack France’s enemies.

  Ahead of French capitulation the Prime Minister shuttled indefatigably backwards and forwards from England to France, trying to put heart into his allies. He made no less than six exhausting trips across the Channel, always at some risk of being shot down. Two of the visits involved overnight stays.