by Walter Reid
It was a strange feature of the 1930s that despite being on the political sidelines, Churchill was kept peculiarly well informed about military developments at home as well as in Germany. A number of courageous individuals risked their careers because of their conviction that he apprehended Britain’s danger more accurately than anyone else. Major Desmond Morton, with whom Churchill had worked in the First War (when Morton survived a bullet through his heart), and who was now at the Industrial Intelligence Centre, monitoring German industrial development, supplied him with the facts which he deployed so effectively to contrast German rearmament with inaction at home. Morton was joined later by Ralph Wigram, who provided Churchill with information from the Foreign Office on German aircraft production. A year later, Squadron Leader Tore Anderson provided great detail on the inadequate personnel and equipment in the Royal Air Force. There were others, such as Brigadier Hobart of the Royal Tank Corps.
Not all the information that came to Churchill did so by unofficial routes. With Baldwin’s approval, The Secretary of State for Air, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, invited Churchill to join the Air Defence Research Sub-Committee in July 1935. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff supplied him with information about the tank programme. The Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence and the Secretary of State for Air allowed him to see secret installations. When Churchill asked Morton in 1929 for classified information, Ramsay MacDonald said, ‘Tell him whatever he wants to know, keep him informed’, and the permission was given in writing and renewed by both Baldwin and Chamberlain. It is far from clear quite what the motives for this liberal policy were: much of the ammunition given to Churchill was immediately directed against the government. It may have been altruism: Baldwin wrote to a friend, ‘If there is going to be a war – and no one can say that there is not – we must keep him fresh to be our war Prime Minister’.6
As Minister of Munitions in the First World War, he had learned much about the material aspects of war. He had worked with the Chief of the US War Industries Board, Bernard Baruch, that six-foot five-inch giant who was the source of information not only on American military production but also on how Churchill could lose a fortune in the Wall Street crash. He was well equipped to understand the significance of the loss of equipment at Dunkirk and the need for American material support thereafter. His unique daily study of the Ultra decrypts meant that he, more than any other war leader, was aware of the detail of the daily progress of the war.
John Peck of his Private Office recorded, ‘I have the clearest possible recollection of General Ismay talking to me about a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff Committee at which they got completely stuck and admitted that they just did not know what was the right course to pursue; so on a purely military matter, they had come to Churchill, a civilian, for his advice. He introduced some further facts into the equation that had escaped their notice and the solution became obvious.’7
Churchill knew more about the detail of intelligence than any other Prime Minister before him and probably since, and set more store by its value than any of his predecessors. He ‘stood head and shoulders above his political contemporaries in grasping the importance of intelligence and harnessing it to his cause’.8 He had been involved in the birth of the modern British intelligence services at the Home Office before the First World War, and in Room 40 at the Admiralty during that war. Between the wars he sought to maintain his connection with the Secret Service and what it learned, and during the Second World War he cherished and jealously guarded all the secrets that the Ultra decrypts provided as a result of breaking the Enigma key. He understood the huge advantage that a detailed study of Ultra gave him – not only in relation to military matters, but also as insight into international relations through a study of diplomatic traffic.
As the volume of available material grew he had to rely on preparatory sifting, but until then he worked through a huge volume of undigested decrypts. He took security of the material extraordinarily seriously. His secretaries were not aware of Ultra, let alone allowed access to it, and the cost in terms of time of his attention to intelligence was immense.9
After the war Churchill complained to Moran that people talked as if all he had done was to put heart into the British people through his magnificent speeches. What he thought far more important was that he had presided over the practical direction of the war. The sheer effort of doing so was incredible. Because of his insistence, as a result of experience in the First World War, on documenting all orders and instructions that he issued, the record of that effort is preserved. The ministerial boxes followed him wherever he might be in the world, in them a special file from Ismay with reports from the Chiefs, together with the Enigma decrypts. All this – and the records of these travels, the packed Engagement Diaries – testifies to the harnessing of dynamic energy. The most frequent reaction to meeting Churchill in those years is a reference to that energy. It was rigorously directed towards just one end. He told a Private Secretary, ‘Each night, before I go to bed I try myself by Court Martial to see if I have done something really effective during the day – I don’t mean merely pawing the ground, anyone can go through the motions, but something really effective’.10
6
The Greatest of the Myths
The War Cabinet initially consisted of Churchill, Chamberlain, Halifax and, for the Labour Party, Attlee and Greenwood: Churchill had one vote out of five. His most momentous battle with his colleagues occurred at the end of May 1940, a battle he chose later not simply to ignore, but rather to deny. In his memoirs, he declared that ‘Future generations may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda’. Strictly speaking the matter was not on any written agenda, but he went on to say that it was not ‘even mentioned in our most private conclaves’.1 That was very far from true. There was an amazing, continuous discussion of these proposals throughout 26, 27 and 28 May 1940.2 Roy Jenkins described the denial of these discussions as ‘the most breathtakingly bland piece of misinformation in all six volumes [of the war memoirs].’3
Churchill would never concede that these deliberations took place, and he would certainly never admit that he himself was not in principle hostile to negotiations. In his wonderful declaration to the House of Commons as Prime Minister he had said: ‘You ask, What is our aim. I can answer in one word: Victory – at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.’ There was indeed no thought in his mind of an ignoble surrender to the Germans. But he was perfectly realistic in these dark days. On 12 June 1940, for example, when he and Ismay were returning from France, and it was clear that Britain would soon be fighting on alone, Ismay confidently said ‘We’ll win the Battle of Britain’. Churchill stared at him and said, ‘You and I will be dead in three months’ time’.4 He had said something similar a few days earlier to Baldwin. He did believe in eventual British victory: he was not made to imagine anything else. But it would probably be victory following invasion of the British Isles, and only after a long war waged from overseas. Against that likely prospect he never ruled out a negotiated peace – provided it was at the right time and on the right terms.
His confidence in eventual victory flowed in part from the fact that, like many others, Churchill took the erroneous view that the Nazi economy was brittle and overstretched and that a sudden collapse like that of 1918 could be expected. Thus he told Roosevelt on 15 June 1940 that he was not looking for an expeditionary force from the United States: indeed he wanted an American declaration for its moral force even more than for the material assistance that it would bring.
As well as believing that the German economy was on the verge of collapse, Churchill, like others, misled himself by thinking that politically the Nazi regime was vulnerable: under the stresses of war the Germans would throw off a leadership which they did not truly support. But this was not enough to encourage him, at this sta
ge, to consider that he should be looking for outright victory. There is much evidence to show that he was not averse to a negotiated peace, provided it was ‘not destructive of our independence’.5 Indeed, he appears even to have been prepared to cede territory. Chamberlain quotes him as saying, ‘If we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies he would jump at it’.6
The difference between Churchill and his two Conservative colleagues in the War Cabinet in the critical discussions at the end of May 1940 was that he felt that the time for negotiation was not yet right, and that it should be postponed until talks could be conducted on more equal terms. On 26 May, pressed by Halifax, he said that he would be prepared to discuss terms, ‘even at the cost of some territory’, provided that matters vital to Britain’s independence were unaffected. By 27 May he indicated he was prepared to accept a peace involving ‘the restoration of German colonies and the overlordship of central Europe’, although he thought that Hitler would be very unlikely to settle for that.
Far from not ruling out the possibility of participating in peace negotiations, then, Churchill saw a negotiated peace as the likeliest way in which the war would end. But the negotiations would take place with an economically broken Germany no longer ruled by Hitler. A total British victory was not realistic or conceivable at that stage in the war and had not even been policy when Britain was allied to France with her strong army.7 ‘Victory at all costs’ was a misleading slogan if it implied, as most people thought it did, the total defeat of Germany.
While Churchill might have made some concessions to Germany for the sake of peace, Halifax was prepared to make substantial territorial concessions to Italy to keep her out of the war. In a conversation with the Italian ambassador on 15 May he dropped hints in regard to Gibraltar, Malta and Suez. In a draft that was omitted from his memoirs, Churchill declared that ‘The Foreign Secretary showed himself willing to go a long way to buy off this new and dangerous enemy [Italy]’.8
Halifax’s position was not Churchill’s. He thought that there was no chance of crushing Germany: it was a question of saving as much as possible of Britain’s sovereignty.9 His Note to the War Cabinet of 27 May 1940 suggested an approach to Mussolini as an intermediary for the purpose of sounding out Germany on peace terms.
This ongoing debate continued until 28 May. That day’s discussions began with a War Cabinet at 11.30 a.m., dealing mainly with operational matters. The substantive discussions of the previous days resumed at 4 p.m. and continued until 5.30. Matters were not going well for Churchill. The French wanted to meet Hitler, and Halifax said that he could not see any objection to this. Although Chamberlain was now tending to shift his position and stress the risks involved in mediation, bickering continued between Churchill and Halifax. The debate had become very heated. The PM accused Halifax of advocating capitulation; ‘[N]ations that went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished’. Halifax responded angrily, saying that nothing he had suggested could even remotely be described as ultimate capitulation. (But remember that the Foreign Office did not abjure the Munich Settlement until 1942.10) The PM said that in any event the chances of decent terms being offered at the present time were a thousand to one against.11 At this stage there was deadlock, and Churchill could have been outvoted.
There was then a break. At six o’clock Churchill addressed a meeting of those Cabinet Ministers who were not in the War Cabinet and to whom, in the press of events, he had not been able to speak. According not only to his own account, but also to Dalton and Amery, the speech he made to them was one of his most powerful: patriotic and effective. Dalton says that it contained the phrase, ‘If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground’. The reception was ecstatic, and buoyed by the support from the wider Cabinet (of whom Halifax had said, ‘The gangsters will shortly be in complete control’) Churchill returned to his four colleagues in the War Cabinet. He told them of the resolve of their colleagues: ‘They had not expressed alarm at the position in France, but had expressed the greatest satisfaction when he had told them that there was no chance of our giving up the struggle. He did not remember having ever before heard a gathering of persons occupying high places in political life express themselves so emphatically.’
The reaction to his speech, in its effect on the War Cabinet, was a pivotal event in world history. ‘Then and there’, said John Lukacs, Churchill ‘saved Britain, and Europe, and Western civilisation.’12
We cannot tell whether Churchill had contrived this coup de théâtre, but shamed by the resolve of their juniors and abandoned by Chamberlain the waverers capitulated without further debate. Halifax made just one final attempt, and suggested Roosevelt as a mediator, rather than Mussolini. Churchill disposed of that very briefly: ‘The Prime Minister thought an appeal to the United States at the present time would be altogether premature. If we made a bold stand against Germany, that would command their admiration and respect; but a grovelling approach, if made now, would have the worst possible effect.’
On the previous day, when Halifax told Cadogan, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, that he could not continue to work with Churchill, Cadogan replied, ‘Nonsense: his rhodomontades probably bore you as much as they do me, but don’t do anything silly under the stress of that.’13
Halifax did not find Churchill congenial. He said of Churchill’s voice that, ‘It oozes with port, brandy and the chewed cigar’. He did not do anything silly, in the sense of resigning, but he had not quite reached the end of his attempts at negotiation. At the very time that Churchill was making his ‘finest hour’ speech, some sort of discussions were going on between Butler, Halifax’s Under-Secretary, and the Swedish minister in London, Bjorn Prytz. The documents relating to this episode are still unreleased, and that fact is highly suggestive of a further attempt by the Foreign Office to see a negotiated settlement. Indeed as late as early July Cadogan reported that Halifax was entertaining hopes of a peace negotiated through the Vatican. Churchill: ‘I hope it will be made clear to the Nuncio that we do not allow any enquiries to be made as to terms of peace with Hitler’.14 Later in that month, after Hitler’s speech of 19 July, the ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, investigated through the intermediation of an American Quaker what German peace terms might be. He was reported as claiming that they were ‘most satisfactory’.15 It was not until the end of the year, when Churchill had strengthened his political position, that he could be confident of hearing no more about seeking terms. Indeed, as late as November in that same year, he himself was still not ruling out the possibility of a negotiated peace. So much for never considering making peace with Germany.
It was a full year before Eden signalled a move away from negotiation in a speech on 5 July 1941 in which he said that ‘We were not prepared to negotiate with Hitler at any time on any subject’. Churchill brought the statement to the attention of the War Cabinet on 7 July 1941 and it was approved and accepted, as a new policy position. Even so, on 27 November 1941 he was minuted as saying at a War Cabinet meeting that ‘We had made a public statement that we would not negotiate with Hitler or with the Nazi régime’; but he thought it would be going too far to say that Britain would not negotiate with a Germany controlled by the army. It was impossible to forecast what form of government there might be in Germany at a time when their resistance weakened and they wished to negotiate.16
The May meetings were the high-water mark of Cabinet rebellion. By January of the following year, the War Cabinet had been expanded in size to eight, four of the members being departmental Ministers. Additionally, Churchill arranged that the leader of the Liberal Party and Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair, should join the War Cabinet when any matter affecting significant political or party issues were involved. Sinclair was a devoted Churchillian, his ADC on the Western Front and almost a second son. He wrote to Churchill in April 1916, expressin
g his ‘longing to serve you in politics – more humbly but more energetically than I have been able to in war.’17 In the Second World War according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Churchill ‘continued to treat Archie as a subaltern and social companion …’ His recruitment was a neat way of turning the balance of power in a War Cabinet which in any event became less significant.
Halifax’s wings were clipped, but Churchill was still conscious that he represented a threat. In his first reshuffle he tried to persuade him to abandon the Foreign Office and take over Chamberlains position as Lord President. Although he failed, he was soon able to send him off to Washington as ambassador, a post he offered on another occasion to Lloyd George: a convenient place for stowing away rivals. When Lloyd George had briefly been considered for the post, Halifax reported that Churchill had felt it would be necessary to cross-examine him first to see whether he had ‘the root of the matter in him … By this he means that any peace terms … offered … must not be destructive of our independence’.18
It is interesting, and indicative of just how far Churchill was from victory at any price or unconditional surrender at this stage that the formula which he proposed to use to establish whether Lloyd George did have the root of the matter in him was no more than the form of words which Halifax had used in the May 1940 Cabinet debate.19
7
The Machinery of Command
The next structural matter to which Churchill turned his attention related to the military direction of the war. As War Minister in the First War he had seen at first hand the paralysing struggles between politicians and professional soldiers, and the strange belief among the latter that even in the conditions of total, twentieth-century war, they composed a privileged and arcane profession with which the politicians had no right to interfere. Churchill had no intention of finding himself in the position of Lloyd George in his dealings with Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Sir Douglas Haig. He said to Boothby: ‘It took Armageddon to make me Prime Minister, but now I am there I am determined that power shall be in no other hands but mine. There will no more Kitcheners, Fishers or Haigs’.1