Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire
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Dill had initially been against Greece, but when he was sent out with Eden he changed his mind. Eden had been given extraordinarily wide powers: ‘His principal object will be the sending of speedy succour to Greece. For this purpose he will initiate any action he may think necessary’. He was not to be ‘deterred from acting upon his own authority if the urgency is too great to allow reference home’. Back in London, Kennedy was disconcerted to find that Dill and Wavell had changed their minds, and kept sending telegrams suggesting that there was a fair chance of success. He concluded that they had gone native, and were giving political as opposed to purely military advice, but he found he could not overturn the growing opinion in favour of the project.9
The campaign was also endorsed by Admiral Andrew Cunningham. He thought that there would be great dangers to troop and supply convoys, but he signalled, ‘We are, I am convinced, pursuing right policy and risk must be faced up to’. Later he recorded in his diary that he ‘was against it [Greece]’ but acquiesced for the political reasons put forward by Eden.10
Some months later Churchill told Colville that Greece had been his government’s only mistake in the war to date and in his history of the war he did say that he took ‘full responsibility for the eventual decision’ – but only ‘because I am sure I could have stopped it all if I had been convinced’.11 He also took pains to explain that his decision had been made on the advice of the men on the spot. Rather unfairly in view of the wide powers he had given to him, he told Eden, a week after the decision to go ahead with the campaign had been made, that ‘no one but you can combine and concert the momentous policy which you have pressed upon us’.12 Eden’s position was an uncomfortable one and there is a distinct feeling that he was being set up to carry the can. Churchill further secured his position by ordering an inquiry into whether he had bypassed his professional advisers. That was found not to be the case. During that inquiry Wavell said too that he had ‘never questioned the decision to support Greece … I am sure that our general strategy was correct in the circumstances.’13 Some of the criticism of the Greek adventure, both at home and in Cairo, was of course made in ignorance of Enigma intelligence, and possible German moves against Greece were regarded as no more than bluff.
There were indeed arguments against assisting Greece, even if they are clearer in retrospect than they were at the time. The British Army in Libya could not really afford to shed resources, and the Greeks did not withdraw, as they had agreed to do, from Macedonia to the River Aliakmon, which Britain and Greece were supposed to defend together. Churchill was annoyed. On 13 April he sent a telegram to Wilson: ‘It is impossible for me to understand why the Greek western army does not make sure of its retreat into Greece’.14
On 18 April, the Greek Prime Minister, Korysis, contemplating defeat, committed suicide. On the following day Wavell joined Wilson in Greece and decided on evacuation. They did not tell Churchill. He had already been complaining about lack of information from Wavell and he reiterated his concern about the lack of reports on 19 April. ‘This is not the way the Government should be treated. It is also detrimental to the Service as many decisions have to be taken here …’ He requested ‘a short, daily report on what is happening on the Front of the British and Imperial Army’.15 His position was entirely reasonable, but Wavell and Wilson (the latter not usually prickly) resented the criticism.
The Greek campaign was short and may have been misconceived – although it has been argued that without the 1941 action there would not have been moral authority for the decisive intervention in the Greek civil war in December 1944.16 What is more likely is that the Greek campaign delayed the German onslaught on Russia by five or six weeks, and may have saved Moscow.17 Britain also gained some points in America. She was defending a smaller country that was under attack, and Roosevelt approved.18
Evacuation of Wilson’s forces from Greece began as early as 24 April, just eighteen days after Germany launched her attacks on Greece and Yugoslavia. Although Jumbo Wilson was in tactical control of LUSTRE, it was Wavell who held overall responsibility. He was not assisted by the quality of his staff in Cairo, and he failed to eliminate unsatisfactory officers. Wilson wrote to his wife on 1 May: ‘So ended a military adventure which I hope I will not participate in again. The political considerations overrode the military ones and led us into a gamble based on the uncertain quality of Balkan allies.’19 Some of the withdrawn troops were taken to Crete, a practical decision rather than a strategic one, but a decision that was to lead to yet another disaster.
13
Difficulties with Wavell
In the face of the offensive Rommel opened on 25 March 1941, Churchill consistently sought to reinforce Wavell, in particular in tanks. He was supported by Eden, but opposed by Dill and Kennedy, who pointed to the very great risk that the convoys would not get through the Mediterranean. Brooke, looking at his responsibilities for the defence of Britain, talked of ‘raiding his orchard’. Churchill’s decision was the right one, as Kennedy later acknowledged, but it was a brave one and a lonely one, which he made without military support.
Events were moving fast and horribly badly. On 25 April Rommel entered Egypt. Just a week earlier, as Greece surrendered, the Chiefs of Staff ruled that restoring the Libyan front should have priority over Greece, as Tobruk came under attack, and by the end of the month they had concluded that Crete rather than being a safe fallback position was now itself vulnerable and critically required urgent defence against a background of intelligence reports of imminent German attack from the air.
The principal ground commander in Crete, Major-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC, Churchill’s unlikely suggestion as Wavell’s successor in August of the previous year, did not handle the Battle of Crete perfectly, but Wavell, admittedly burdened by a huge range of responsibilities, had tended to overlook the defence of the island, despite that the fact that its importance had been urged on him since 1940. Churchill certainly thought there was a lack of grip in his handling of Crete and of Greece. He tried to impress both on Wavell and Freyberg the need for stout action. Churchill later said that there was no point in the war when they had such detailed intelligence about German movements. He appears to have passed it on in detail even to local commanders. Freyberg may have been told by Wavell of the existence of Ultra itself. What he was not told was that Hitler was committed to domination of the whole Mediterranean area. Accordingly, even with the information he was being given by Churchill, he could not conceive that a huge airborne attack would be launched on what he regarded as a secondary position.1
More importantly, Freyberg and Wavell had been told by the intelligence chief, Sir Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, that to avoid compromising Ultra, nothing could be done on the basis of information obtained only from that source. Accordingly, although Ultra indicated that Germany’s plans depended on taking Malame aerodrome, Freyberg felt himself unable to reinforce it. ‘The authorities in England’, he said, ‘would prefer to lose Crete rather than jeopardise Ultra’. Looking up from his breakfast at the parachuting Germans, he grunted, ‘Well, they’re on time’.2
Churchill did not know that ‘C’ had given these instructions, and never forgave Wavell and Freyberg for their inaction. But Freyberg does not deserve much sympathy. He acted on his instructions in an unimaginative and inflexible way. Defending the principal aerodrome on Crete would scarcely have compromised his intelligence. Wavell does not seem to have taken pains to clarify the issue.
Greece and Crete, together with Rommel’s spectacular advance in North Africa, were massive blows to British morale. Evelyn Waugh vividly recorded the impact on the troops – and indeed how bitterly he himself was affected. It is difficult to see that Churchill was to blame. The fault lay in the quality of the commanders, and in a poor local command system.
There was a need for wholesale changes at a senior level; but the moves after Greece and Crete were limited. Sir Arthur Longmore, the Air Commander in the Middle East, had made clear his disapprova
l of intervention in Greece. He was sacked in May 1941. After Crete, Andrew Cunningham, Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, was prepared to resign because he had not been given the air cover he had requested. His resignation was not accepted.
Churchill was dismayed by this dismal performance and his mood did not lift when he heard of preparations that Wavell had made for an evacuation of Egypt. Wavell had no immediate withdrawal from Cairo in mind, and on one view, the war could be continued quite effectively from positions further south. Indeed, it would have been negligent not to engage in forward planning. But as so often Wavell failed to keep Churchill advised of what he was really thinking, and to carry the Prime Minister with him. The existence of contingency plans for the evacuation of Egypt had emerged after a magnificent clash between Churchill and General Kennedy, the Director of Military Operations, on 27 April. Churchill bellowed, ‘Wavell has 400,000 men. If they lose Egypt, blood will flow. I will have firing parties shoot the generals’. When the shaken Kennedy responded by mentioning the evacuation plans, he threw petrol on Churchill’s smouldering rage: ‘This comes as a flash of lightning to me. War is a contest of wills. It is pure defeatism to speak as you have done.’ On the following day he ordered revocation of all plans for the evacuation of Egypt which, he said, ‘would be a disaster of the first magnitude to Great Britain, second only to a successful invasion’.3
He would have been even more horrified if he had known, as indeed he did discover a few weeks later, that Wavell had elaborated plans for an even worse case: the conduct of the war from Africa following the defeat not just of Egypt, but of the British Isles.
Kennedy’s memoirs, The Business of War, were published in November 1957, just a few months after those of Brooke, now Lord Alanbrooke. Both books attracted immense interest. Kennedy’s book was serialised in the Evening Standard, under the headline ‘Churchill and the Generals – Who knew best?’ The critical response was divided in both cases, but overall was very much in favour of Churchill. In the Daily Mirror, under the headline ‘Meet General Superman’, Cassandra said that Alanbrooke had jumped from nowhere to ‘the highest literary military pedestal built within living memory’. His editor, Bryant, had poured out on him ‘a sickening, sweetened slime of unending praise’, whereas Churchill was depicted as ‘positively dangerous when it came to the major decisions of the war’. If his story were true, said Alan Tomkins in the Daily Mail, it was remarkable that Britain had won the war.4
In the same paper Henry Fairlie made a much more analytical comment regarding the Kennedy book: Kennedy revealed that Churchill had been the goad of his executives, but more importantly the book showed ‘why the goad was needed’. Kennedy’s book is petulant, self-regarding and self-justifying, containing long extracts from generalised and banal memoranda that contributed little to the prosecution of the war. Churchill would have been surprised at the time to think that both his Director of Military Operations and Chief of the Imperial General Staff had the time and energy to compose lengthy diaries at the end of their working days.
Kennedy was a man of his time and background. He was horrified at a lunch at the Russian Embassy: ‘The Russian officers were as usual a crude lot … [They] ate caviar off their knives; my neighbour held his bread with both hands as he tore pieces off with his teeth. I could not help feeling they were odd allies.’5 He starts from the usual position of a military professional with limited vision who resents the interference of an unqualified outsider; but as the days pass he gradually comes to recognise that it was often the amateur who got things right, and that even if Churchill was sometimes prepared to take a gamble, gambles, rather than dogged staff work, were often what was needed.
Lodged among the criticisms contained in his diaries are innumerable later admissions that it was not the War Office, or Hankey or Menzies, or the other conventional observers who were right, but the unconventional Prime Minister – in regard to reinforcing the Middle East, for example,6 or in his attitude to Wavell towards the end of the latter’s command.7 The observation that ‘we sometimes longed for a leader with more balance and less brilliance’8 reveals less about the PM’s shortcomings than those of his military advisers. Kennedy tries to square the circle by an apologetic disclaimer. ‘[Despite] all the butterflies released by [Churchill’s] limitless fancy … the massive figure of the Prime Minister towers above … all … His glory remains.’9 Alanbrooke backtracked similarly. But they cannot have it both ways. If their final qualifications mean what they appear to, the petty criticisms that precede them, interesting though they are, tend to paint a picture that is inaccurate, misleading and lacking in perspective.
There never was any real affinity between the Churchill and the silent Wavell. Despite the Prime Minister’s own enthusiasm for the verses of the popular Victorian anthologies and his love of the written and spoken word, he could never feel that it was appropriate for a warrior to profess a love of poetry. After the war Wavell was President of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Kipling, Browning, Poetry and Virgil Societies and of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club: pretty remarkable. Churchill said, ‘It may be my fault, but I always feel as if in the presence of the Chairman of a Golf Club’.10
Wavell must have seen that in the days of total war, waged by democracies, the political leaders are the true military leaders, and indeed often have access to intelligence which makes them the best military leaders. But he clung to the notion that war was the business of the soldiers, and did not need to be discussed with the politicians. The idea of a separation between the political command and the professional soldiers died hard, but those who recognised that it had died survived longer in Churchill’s circle. Wavell’s responsibilities as a theatre commander have been emphasised by his supporters. They may have been onerous, but Churchill’s were infinitely greater.
The Prime Minister had to contemplate not only the performance of the generals in North Africa, but also matters at home. Although the threat of invasion of the British Isles had lifted to a degree in the summer of 1940, it had not gone away. General ‘Hap’ Arnold, head of the American Army Air Corps, visited London in April 1941 and found real concern at high levels in London about the chance of a German landing on the south coast. ‘Dill, Beaverbrook, Freeman and Sinclair all believe it can be done and will be tried.’11 As early as 15 February Churchill had been worried about invasion and minuted that a ‘reduction in population in coastal areas should begin now’.12 On 6 May 1941, Dill sent the Prime Minister a formal memo, arguing against further movement of troops to the Middle East. By June it was known that Germany was to launch BARBAROSSA on the Soviet Union, but the CIGS expected that Russia would be defeated within six weeks at most. Churchill took a different view: ‘I bet you a monkey [£500] to a mousetrap [a guinea] that the Russians are still fighting, and fighting victoriously, two years from now.’ No one else thought so.
Dill’s memo of 6 May, ‘The relation of the Middle East to the security of the United Kingdom’, was a lengthy document prompted by Churchill’s declarations regarding the importance of Egypt to the war effort. Churchill’s position may have been partly emotional, but it was severely practical too: an evacuation of Cairo would have been disastrous for morale and for British standing in America. And the Axis forces could not be defeated in the Far East. It was Dill, and not Churchill, who was adhering blindly to traditional doctrine. In his paper, in what was the most fundamental of many clashes between him and the Prime Minister, Dill argued that
[The] loss of Egypt would be a calamity which I do not regard as likely and one which we should not accept without a most desperate fight; but it would not end the war. A successful invasion alone spells our final defeat. It is the United Kingdom … and not Egypt that is vital, and the defence of the United Kingdom must take first place. Egypt is not even second in our order of priority for it has been an accepted principle in our strategy that in the last resort the security of Singapore comes before that of Egypt …13
The ‘accepted pri
nciple’ to which Dill referred had been rejected in the reinforcement of the Middle East, which had already taken place in August 1940, but the difference between Dill and Churchill was more profound than that. Churchill was according to Ismay ‘shaken to the core’ and according to his own account ‘astonished’ to receive the memo. He replied a week later
I gather you would be prepared to face the loss of Egypt and the Nile Valley, together with the surrender or ruin of the army of half of million we have concentrated there, rather than lose Singapore. I do not take that view, nor do I think the alternative is likely to present itself …14
Churchill was wrong about ‘the alternative’. In his history of the war he said that his response to Dill put an end to the matter. It did not. Dill responded by saying that, ‘I am sure that you, better than anyone else, must realise how difficult it is for a soldier to advise against a bold and offensive plan … It takes a lot of moral courage not to be afraid of being thought afraid’. Indeed Dill threatened to resign and to appeal to the War Cabinet if his resignation were not accepted.15
But the minute of 6 May 1941 was flawed, and represented an unthinking adherence to conservative strategy. Dill continued to think that if his views had been accepted, and if he had been supported by the Secretary of State for War of the time, Margesson, things might have gone differently in Singapore.16