Churchill 1940-1945

by Walter Reid

  Churchill inherited Sir Charles Forbes as Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet. On Forbes rested the responsibility of the naval element of defence against invasion. It was a role which he filled uneasily. In the first place, he did not think that it was the navy’s job to occupy such a defensive function. That was the army’s job: the navy would win the war in other ways. Secondly, he strongly opposed the practical implication: the fact that his ships were strung out round the British Isles, their positions known to the Germans. ‘It is most galling that the enemy should know just where our ships … always are, whereas we generally learn where his major forces are when they sink one or more of our ships.’3 An additional result was that British convoys operated with minimal naval cover. This was the period the U-Boat commanders called ‘the Happy Time’, ‘die glücklichen Zeiten’.

  Churchill, as First Lord, had already come across Forbes in the early stage of the war. Forbes had argued that the Fleet should be based at Scapa Flow, and not, as Churchill wished, in the Clyde. He had stood up well to Churchill, and his arguments won the day, but Churchill never liked him. In the navy, too, Forbes had many critics. He did not endear himself to the many colleagues who failed to appreciate the vulnerability of surface vessels to aircraft by complaining about the inadequacy of anti-aircraft gunnery in the service, and his misfortunes in the Norwegian campaign, when the Germans had cracked the naval cipher, meant that he was unfairly known as ‘Wrong Way Charlie’. But he generally did things the right way, and if he had been allowed to support the convoys, or if his views on the threat from the air, which were in advance of his time, had been accepted, many disasters would have been avoided and many lives saved. Later Andrew Cunningham said, ‘How right he was … He was in my opinion quite one of the soundest and best of our war admirals, and was never given credit for his doings. Winston and Brendan Bracken disliked him.’4 Maybe they did, but so did lots of others, and there was no division between the Prime Minister and the Chiefs of Staff on naval deployment in the face of the threat of invasion.

  A more fundamental problem with the Admiralty lay in its wish to abandon the eastern Mediterranean and concentrate on Gibraltar, so that the Atlantic approaches could be guarded. Churchill made a decision of enormous significance. In the face of considerable opposition from Pound he ordered that the fleet be kept at Alexandria, even if Spain and Italy joined the Axis powers. This bold move was part of a strategic shift from the pre-war concept of giving priority to Far Eastern interests, and was endorsed by the decision of the Chiefs of Staff at the beginning of July to hold the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean for as long as possible. Without Church-ill’s initiative, the continued British presence in North Africa, the only active theatre in the early years of the war, would not have been possible. There was to be debate about who was responsible for Britain’s Mediterranean Strategy in the war. Sir Alan Brooke, who became Chief of the Imperial General Staff, claimed to have invented it. But it was overwhelmingly Churchill’s brainchild. It represented the confluence of a number of his decisions and priorities, and keeping the fleet at Alexandria was the first of them.

  Brooke, on the other hand, in the early stages of the war was in charge of the Home Command, and he did his best to resist the transfer of troops out of Britain. His policy was the product of his responsibilities, but if he had prevailed over Churchill’s bolder vision there would have been no engagement with the enemy, no opportunity for British and American troops in North Africa to join hands with the forces in the Western Desert: no alternative to a final and hazardous assault on mainland Europe. There would have been no Mediterranean Strategy, and victory would have been deferred for two years.

  As early as 27 November 1940 Churchill told Colville that he wanted to ‘wage war on a great scale in the Middle East. By next spring I hope we shall have sufficient forces there.’ The Mediterranean war was the result of this vision, which brought together Italy’s weakness, oil interests and opportunism. The boldness of the decision to transfer resources away from the British Isles which were under great threat, and not as convention would suggest to the Far East, was his brave and personal choice.

  The RAF was left alone to a great extent and indeed enjoyed a sort of quasi-independence from Chiefs of Staff control. Dowding was able to resist requests from his allies and from British forces in France that would have involved seriously depleting the limited resources that were being held for the subsequent Battle of Britain. He had told Churchill with the support of the Chiefs of Staff that with fewer than twenty-five squadrons of fighters Britain could not be defended. He knew that Churchill was under huge pressure from the French, but in his view the Battle of France was already lost, and obliging the French further risked losing the war. ‘What I did was to get out of my chair, walk round the Cabinet table, lay down in front of Churchill a graph which I had prepared … I said, “This is my graph of the losses of Hurricanes during the past ten days; it shows that if losses continue at the same rate for the next ten days we shall not have a single Hurricane left in France or in England.” This did the trick and the wastage of fighters was stopped.’5

  Dowding’s strength of character had profound implications for the outcome of the Battle of Britain. Like Harris, he was not popular with his fellows, but Churchill recognised the merits of both men. Harris was appointed to take over Bomber Command after a highly critical report on the leadership of his predecessor, Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, in the 7 November 1941 raids in which thirty-seven aircraft were lost.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, who had been Chief of the Air Staff since 1937, emerged from the Battle of France with diminished authority and was replaced by Sir Charles Portal, who remained in place throughout the war and was a key member of the Chief of Staff Committee.

  At the head of the army, Ironside was Chief of the Imperial General Staff from the outbreak of war until 27 May 1940. During the Battle of France he had gone with Gort, Commander-in-Chief of the Field Force, as the Expeditionary Force was technically referred to, to see General Billotte at Lens. Billotte was with General Blanchard, Commander-in-Chief of the First French Army. Both were in despair. Billotte was a small man. ‘Tiny’ Ironside was six feet four inches tall. (Gort’s nickname was ‘Fat Boy’ because he was slim.) Ironside in frustration finally picked up Billotte by his tunic and shook him like a rag doll. These British generals seem to have been a physical bunch: Spears told Churchill that at an interview with Reynaud on 27 May 1940 ‘I shook the little man, in quite a friendly sort of way of course’. But the French could be physical too: after a telephone conversation with Ironside, Weygand said on one occasion that he would have liked to box the British general’s ears. It was said that he would have had to climb on a chair to do so.

  Ironside’s intellectual ability was limited. It was possibly his sheer size rather than anything else that made Buchan choose him as his model for Richard Hannay. Brooke was not well disposed towards him, though there were not many people to whom he was well disposed. He was recalled from the governorship of Gibraltar in May 1939 to be Inspector-General of Overseas Forces. Sir John French had held this position before the First World War and combined it with the appointment, quasi-tacit, of Commander-in-Chief designate. In Ironside’s case, there was no parallel appointment, not even a tacit one, but he behaved as if it were in the bag, to the extent that he sent his assistant to Aldershot to recruit headquarters staff when war seemed imminent. He was to be disappointed. Hore-Belisha, the reforming Secretary of State for War, had been getting on badly with the CIGS, Gort, and was glad to send him off to France. Gort’s successor as CIGS was Ironside, whom Hore-Belisha had passed over for the appointment, rightly in Ironside’s view, in 1938.

  It was an appointment which Churchill, then at the Admiralty, pressed for, but it was not a good one. It would not have been wise to give him the appointment in 1938 and he was no more suitable two years later. He had never held a staff appointment at the War Office in his life. Churchill had to work with him on the
Norway campaign, when the CIGS was irritated by Churchill’s detailed interventions. After just a year in office Ironside was replaced by Dill and was much happier in his new position as Commander-in-Chief Home Forces. On his dismissal Gort had been shunted off to Gibraltar in April 1941, but just seven months later Churchill had the bizarre notion of reappointing him as CIGS in succession to Dill. A few months later, in March 1942, he considered using him to replace Auchinleck in the Middle East. He was dissuaded by Brooke: Gort was another officer for whom he had little time.

  In command of Home Forces, Ironside’s preparations against invasion consisted substantially of a ‘crust’ along the potential invasion coastlines, with relatively light inland defences ahead of a strong line designed to stop invaders from reaching London or the Midlands. The plans were criticised: they were thought to imply a readiness to yield considerable areas of land near the coast. With limited resources, Ironside really did not have much choice, but Brooke, who was appointed to Southern Command on 26 June 1940, was particularly keen on creating a strong reserve: a notion which Churchill supported, despite the speech about fighting on the beaches. Indeed the PM told the Chiefs of Staff on 28 June 1940 that ‘the battle will be won or lost, not on the beaches, but by the mobile brigades and the main reserve’.6 Churchill’s view was that of many local commanders as well of Brooke.

  The PM toured the south coast defences on 17 June 1940, when he was nobbled by Brooke and accepted that he was the man to defend Britain. Brooke replaced Ironside on 19 June 1940.

  In these heroic days, invasion was not regarded simply as a possibility: it was expected – probably in East Anglia rather than on the south coast. There were, as always, differences between Churchill and his advisers. He was sanguine that nothing would happen as long as the Royal Air Force commanded the skies. The military tended to the view that the Germans might well move before then, possibly in a series of scattered raids. Ironside thought that 9 July was the most likely date, and Churchill was later to speak of a peak of invasion excitement ‘even in high quarters during the first week of July’ though rather disassociating himself from that view.7 In reality he, as much as anyone else, expected invasion daily during the second week of July. Churchill saw the issue of whether or not invasion took place in strategic terms. On Sunday, 14 July he noted perceptively, ‘Hitler must invade or fail. If he fails he is bound to go east, and fail he will.’8

  Early in September 1940, invasion was expected from day to day, almost from hour to hour. On 4 September Eden had highlighted the risk in remarks that were reported in the Times. The Invasion Warning Sub-Committee heard that all leave was to be cancelled in the German Army on 8 September. On 7 September the code word ‘Cromwell’, which was to indicate that invasion was expected, was used – causing considerable confusion among those who inferred that invasion had already taken place. Attempts at pre-emptive bridge destruction were only stopped with difficulty.

  Just three days later in a speech on the BBC, Churchill spoke in ringing terms about the risk of invasion: ‘We must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel and Drake was finishing his game of bowls, or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne.’9 Stirring stuff, but by then he was privately coming to the view that invasion was increasingly unlikely. He found it helpful and indeed necessary however to maintain the notion of immediate national danger. It was good for morale and it kept his Tory enemies at bay.10

  Similarly, and quite a bit later, he found it useful not to share with Roosevelt the fact that invasion was no longer expected. The apprehension of danger might stimulate American assistance.11

  Churchill saw 15 September as ‘the culminating date’ in the Battle of Britain. That view was not entirely the product of hindsight. He had spent the day at the headquarters of No.11 Group, Fighter Command, at Uxbridge, where he had watched the direction of the air battle. In the course of the day, there were echoes of the exchange with Gamelin on 16 May, when he had asked where the strategic reserves were. A similar question to Air Vice-Marshal Park, Commander of No.11 Group about reserves received the reply: ‘There are none’. But by the time Churchill had returned to London and wakened at eight o’clock from his afternoon nap, he was told that 183 German planes had been destroyed with a loss of fewer than 40 British planes. The figures were not wholly accurate, but their message was unmistakable. The Battle of France had been lost; the Battle of Britain had almost certainly been won. But if invasion and defeat were no longer imminent, how, with no allies and with a routed army and unproven commanders, could war be waged against Germany?

  11

  Carrying the War to the Enemy: The Western Desert 1940

  At this stage Churchill’s difficulties with Pound and the other Chiefs of Staff lay principally in the fact that they wanted total concentration on defence of the United Kingdom, while Churchill was looking increasingly for offensive opportunities. He did not believe that the war could be won in any other way. Equally, he was certain that America would not come to Britain’s aid unless Britain were seen to be capable of helping herself. He was aware that the American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, was telling Roosevelt that Britain did not have the stomach for a fight. Kennedy was not the only American pessimist. General Raymond E. Lee, the United States Military Attaché said in September 1940: ‘On a cold-blooded appraisal, one might say that the betting on Britain’s beating off an invasion this fall is now about three to one.’1

  Churchill knew that his personal and political position depended on delivering results. By the end of September 1940, the month in which Dakar – his first offensive operation and an unmitigated disaster – had taken place, 6,954 civilians had been killed and in the first week of October alone, a further 2,000 died.

  Consequently, the moment the imminent risk of invasion had passed – or even before that moment – Churchill wished to see resources moved overseas. Only thus could the Axis be beaten. Only thus would America be convinced that Britain meant business. ‘The completely defensive habit of mind which has ruined the French must not be allowed to ruin all our initiative.’ The offensive spirit was distilled into the various cloak-and-dagger organisations he now set up: a Special Operations Executive, Commandos, paratroops and a Directorate of Combined Operations. These organisations were to be used to make the sort of random strikes that had been a traditional part of British strategy in the eighteenth century. They were also, however, the product of a personal weakness for unconventional warfare that ties in with an exaggerated view of the value of the Boer commandos that Churchill had seen forty years earlier. A favourite target was always Norway; the French Atlantic coast and German islands were also favoured. This scattered opportunism did not appeal at all to conventional military planners. It was the sort of approach that infuriated Brooke when he became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in December of the following year. He saw no merit in what he regarded as an uncoordinated series of adventures. ‘If you’re going to the barbers,’ he expostulated to Churchill, ‘you decide where you’re heading for before you go out the door.’ Churchill in reply was as silly as he sometimes could be: ‘No I don’t’.

  The lack of judgement argument is too glib an explanation for mistakes. From the outset of his political life there had been attacks on his judgement. When, for instance, he became First Lord for the first time, in 1911, the Spectator wrote, ‘He has not the loyalty, the dignity, the steadfastness and the good sense which makes the efficient head of a great office’; and this sort of complaint was the commonest criticism over the years. Chamberlain and Halifax said the same thing, and the point was made most famously, and gently, by Baldwin, in a put-down that he prepared but never used, the story of the fairies that attended Churchill’s birth. They gave him courage, wit, eloquence and every other gift that could be wished for, until the last one said that this would not do, he must have a fault, and she bestowed on him a fatal want of ju
dgement.

  His judgement certainly could sometimes look woefully erratic. In argument and particularly when in opposition he was inclined to throw out a mass of extreme propositions, some of which were simply designed to shock, some of which were not thought through at all, and some of which he would seek to defend to the end. But when he was in a position of authority his approach was quite different. He had learned from the Dardanelles the danger of pursuing a policy on which he did not have the wholehearted backing of his department and his colleagues. His approach a few years later at the Treasury showed just how seriously he had taken that lesson; and when he had supreme power he exercised it with infinite caution. His language and his arguments could still be extreme, but at the end of the exchanges he submitted to unanimous professional advice. In his direction of the war there is nothing in what he did, as opposed to what he said, which reflects a serious lack of judgement.

  When he was occasionally strategically weak, the problem proceeded from a failure to take on board changes in the nature of warfare. He did not recognise the reduced significance of the infantry: he continued to talk of ‘sabres and bayonets’. His concept of ‘fortresses’ like Tobruk and Singapore was consequently flawed. He did not remember how fast modern armies could move: when he criticised the idea of American landings in the south of France, for instance, he talked of the length of their ‘march’ to the front. His ideas about warfare were drawn from earlier centuries and refined by what he had seen of the First World War, and the lessons of that war continued to dominate his thinking and his fears. The nature of the battles in North Africa did not dislodge from his mind the fear of a line of trenches across Europe, and even after D-Day he feared a return to the lines and the wire of 1915.

  There were idées fixes, of which the appeal of northern Norway is probably the best example. There was a determination, after America’s entry into the war, that Britain should do as much as her more powerful ally, not solely so that she had the right to an equal share in the direction of the war, but partly because it was demeaning to do less. As late as April 1945 he complained to Clementine, ‘The only times I ever quarrel with the Americans are when they fail to give us a fair share of opportunities to win glory. Undoubtedly I feel much pain when I see our armies so much smaller than theirs. It has always been my wish to keep equal, but how can you do that against so mighty a nation and a population nearly three times your own?’2 Similarly, strategy was sometimes evolved with an eye to the history books. At Casablanca ambitious, perhaps unrealistic, plans were promoted simply because it was unworthy of two great powers to do less.3