Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire

by Walter Reid

  Dill was never as robust in confronting Churchill as Alanbrooke would be, but he was not a pushover. He understood Churchill and respected him, but he could never accept the violence of Churchill’s style of constructive confrontation. Churchill expected the fury and temper of these exchanges to be forgotten as soon as they were over, as they would be after a clash in the House of Commons. Dill could not react in this way, and he was particularly touchy when his professional loyalties were attacked. In 1940, when he returned to the War Office after a long meeting, his Director of Military Operations ‘saw that he was agitated. He said: “I cannot tell you how angry the Prime Minister has made me. What he said about the army tonight I can never forgive … He asked me to wait and have a drink with him after the meeting, but I refused and left Anthony [Eden] there by himself” ’.17 To be fair to Dill, what he had to deal with at the time was WORKSHOP, a rather wild plan of Sir Roger Keyes which greatly appealed to the Prime Minister for the occupation of the island of Pantellaria, between Sicily and Libya.

  At this point in the war Churchill felt that his role had been critical in staving off defeat in 1940 and that equally he had to continue to take the initiative and override the negativism of his professional advisers. On WORKSHOP he and Keyes were more or less alone, and he was prepared to bulldoze the project through the Defence Committee in the face of opposition from all concerned. Even Eden was against it. Fortunately for Churchill WORKSHOP was postponed, first temporarily as a result of a false report about a German attack on Spain, and then permanently, when Germany attacked Greece.18

  Press and Parliament were rarely docile at any stage in the war and the defeats in Greece and Crete stirred up criticism of the government. There was a two-day debate in the Commons, on Crete more than Greece, which culminated in a vote on 7 May: a comfortable win for Churchill, 447 votes for him, and just 3 against. The figures, as in all such votes during the war, overstate support for the government. There were powerful, critical speeches from Lloyd George, Hore-Belisha and others. A considerable victory was pretty inevitable but there was muttering in the background. Churchill tried to lower expectations:

  I have never promised anything or offered anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat, to which I will now add our fair share of mistakes, shortcomings and disappointments, and also that this may go on for a very long time, at the end of which I firmly believe – though it is not a promise or guarantee, only a profession of faith – that there will be complete, absolute and final victory.19

  Ismay thought it impossible to run a war when so much time had to be devoted to justifying one’s actions in the House of Commons, and Churchill, who did not consider that there had been any errors or miscalculations from London, had to spend much time in preparing for the debate. He spoke for a full hour and a half, and permitted himself to point out that the House did not have the right to information on tactical matters, and to complain that Hitler did not call on the Reichstag to explain the loss of the Bismarck and that Mussolini did not have to apologise for his reverses in Africa.20

  As late as 10 June, Harold Nicolson and Duff Cooper were frustrated by Churchill’s belief, which they considered erroneous, that anxiety about the war was confined to the House of Commons.21 The idea of a country united behind the Prime Minister was a retrospective myth, except at one or two key moments.

  Wavell made another mistake. In May 1941 there was revolt in Iraq, a British client state, and the Prime Minister, Rashid Ali, attempted to defect to Germany. Iraq was within Wavell’s sphere of command. He took the view that he had insufficient resources with which to intervene, and urged negotiation. Churchill overruled the man on the spot and the revolt was indeed speedily crushed.

  Wavell’s uncooperative stance (‘I have consistently warned you that no assistance could be given to Iraq from Palestine … My forces are stretched to the limit everywhere … I do not see how I can possibly accept military responsibility’) contrasted badly with the offer from Auchinleck, the commander in India, of five infantry brigades for Basra. This received Churchillian approval: ‘Your bold and generous offer greatly appreciated’. In the following month, the same sort of situation arose in Vichy French Syria. Churchill’s insistence on action proved sound. Syria was subdued and the result of the two operations, Churchill claimed, was to put an end to German threats to the Persian Gulf and India.

  The damage Wavell did himself in Churchill’s eyes was immense and lasting. Wavell told Churchill that ‘Your message [about Iraq] takes little account of realities’. Churchill’s response, unsurprisingly, was to consider dismissing Wavell immediately for insubordination; but he decided to await the outcome of the next offensive in the desert, BATTLEAXE. Churchill’s directive to Wavell that he should proceed with EXPORTER, the invasion of Syria and Lebanon which began on 8 June, was marvellous: ‘And should you feel yourself unwilling to give effect to it, arrangements will be made to meet any wish you may express to be relieved of your command.’22

  The bravura of the instruction to Wavell to get on with things or go shows how shaky the Commander’s position had become. But it also gives an exaggerated impression of Churchill’s strength and of his freedom of movement. At one stage, for instance, Dill and Eden went to the length of threatening simultaneous resignation in support of Wavell. Those who complained, like Hankey, that Churchill exercised dictatorial powers, knew nothing of the battles he had to fight to get his way.

  14

  De Gaulle Flexes his Muscles

  Relations with de Gaulle as 1941 began were still reasonably good. There were of course always countless events which would cause him offence. He had, for instance, been irritated by British attempts to detach Weygand from Vichy and encourage him to take up arms in North Africa. But the essentially cordial relationship with the general was emphasised in January when both parties weathered the storm that followed from the arrest by Britain of Vice-Admiral Muselier on the suspicion, which turned out to be based on false evidence, that he was pro-German. (Muselier was a serial source of embarrassment, sometimes to de Gaulle as well as to the British: there were no less than three ‘Affaires Museliers’.)

  By May de Gaulle had, however, become increasingly angry as it became evident that Britain would neither intervene herself nor assist Free French forces to intervene in Syria, a country within France’s sphere of influence, where Germany was using airfields. It was worse than that: throughout the Levant, Britain tended to treat the Vichy officials with courtesy – and indeed with a good deal more affection than they had for the Free French.

  General Louis Spears, who had been Churchill’s personal representative to Paul Reynaud, the French Prime Minister in 1940, and who was appointed on 28 June that year as head of the ‘Spears Mission’, with the role of liaising with de Gaulle, had as much as anyone to do with the general’s position as leader of the Free French. In the dying days of the Battle of France he had not been impressed by Reynaud and he saw de Gaulle as the man who could sustain French resistance to Hitler – and this despite de Gaulle’s lowly military rank and the fact that he was not in government at the time. Spears had no idea how de Gaulle would be received in England, but he organised a theatrical exit from France for him. De Gaulle went to the airport ostensibly just to see Spears off, but at the very last moment he was pulled aboard the aircraft to join him.

  Spears was now in the Middle East as Churchill’s representative. He shared the general’s contempt for Vichy and tended to support his stance on the Levant. In his memorandum, The Free French, Vichy and Ourselves, Spears wrote ‘Our painstaking attempts to propitiate the Vichy government might, conceivably, make a dispassionate observer conjure up the picture of a well-meaning person bent on feeding a lettuce to a rabbit while it is being chased around its cage by a stoat’. Spears was an old friend of Churchill and was allowed a large degree of critical freedom.

  Churchill was himself increasingly coming to the conclusion that further parley with Vichy was a waste of time. He accelerated in this di
rection when Syria came to be seen in a different light after the eruption of rebellion in Iraq. Churchill saw that, whatever Vichy’s sensibilities, Syria was a jumping-off ground for air domination of Iraq and Persia and could not be allowed to remain unchallenged.

  Despite what de Gaulle owed to Spears – or probably because of it – the relationship between the two men was a difficult one. De Gaulle did not see himself simply as part of Britain’s paraphernalia for defeating Hitler. He saw himself as the representative of a world power. He had grave suspicions that Britain would take advantage of the war to extend her sphere of influence in the French Empire in the Middle East. Britain had indeed made certain promises of independence, in order to fuel anti-Vichy sentiments, but Churchill had no intention of trying to acquire bits of the French Empire.

  By the spring of 1941, Spears had come to the conclusion that de Gaulle was more interested in the narrow question of the Free French in Syria and Lebanon than in the allied cause as a whole, and thereafter he was overtly hostile to de Gaulle. He concluded that de Gaulle should be replaced and possibly even imprisoned. In view of the fact that the Vichy authorities in Syria had allowed German planes to refuel there on their way to Iraq, he was much in favour of the invasion of Syria and the Lebanon, EXPORTER.

  EXPORTER, in which the Free French were the larger partner, began on 8 June 1941. Churchill loftily told de Gaulle that ‘[A]t this hour when Vichy touches fresh depths of ignominy, the loyalty and courage of the Free French save the glory of France’. De Gaulle replied in a no less elevated tone, ‘Whatever happens the Free French are decided to fight and conquer at your side as faithful and resolute allies’. That was a high-water mark of fraternal amity. Almost immediately, de Gaulle’s paranoid antennae began to twitch at suggestions of a lack of reference by the British to their Free French comrades, leniency towards Vichy and above all a fear of the transfer of the Lebanon and Syria to Britain. His suspicions of British imperial ambitions were a persistent part of his mindset, which took no cognisance of the fact that Britain was more than fully occupied in fighting for her life.

  The outcome of EXPORTER was an armistice with Syria signed by Jumbo Wilson on 14 July 1941, which de Gaulle said, ‘amounted to a pure and simple transference of Syria and Lebanon to the British’. De Gaulle blamed Spears for British policy in the area in its entirety. He was less than fair; even Spears thought the terms of the armistice went too far. De Gaulle was hugely overreacting to what was a very minor matter in the context of holding together the only alliance that could restore liberty to France. He wanted the French soldiers who surrendered in the Middle East to have the chance of joining him or of being imprisoned, but Britain had not abandoned the idea of working with Vichy, which they still saw as the legitimate government of France, and allowed the Frenchmen the alternative, to which they were legally entitled, of being repatriated to France. As usual the vote for Free France was disappointing: 37,500 of them chose to go home, as against a mere 6,000 who wished to fight alongside the Free French.

  What de Gaulle did now, which was so often to be part of his tactics, was to launch the most violent of attacks on the hapless British representative on the spot, in this case the Minister of State in Cairo, Oliver Lyttelton. Lyttelton recorded, ‘There was nothing for it but what women call “a scene”, and a scene we certainly had’.1 De Gaulle handed Lyttelton a paper ‘which could only be read as terminating alliance between Free French and Great Britain’. It is hardly surprising that Spears wanted him locked up.2

  So the first great Anglo-de Gaulle confrontation broke out. Spears was present at the interview: he was wholly taken aback by what he saw and for the rest of the war de Gaulle’s loyalest British ally became his most outspoken critic. In no time at all Jumbo Wilson, the local British Commander, was threatening to impose martial law; and de Gaulle, for his part, was threatening to break the alliance with Britain.

  If the negotiations between Britain and Vichy caused de Gaulle problems, they were nothing compared with the problems he himself caused by his so-called ‘Brazzaville Manifesto’ on 16 June, which set up the French Empire Defence Council, which amounted pretty well to a declaration of war on Vichy. Britain, it will be recalled, was not at war with Vichy. De Gaulle violently denounced the armistice with Vichy, which had settled the conflict in Syria. The Foreign Office asked the British press not to make mention of the manifesto, but de Gaulle went more public still and sent a note to Roosevelt via the United States Consul in Leopoldville.

  At the end of August he returned to Brazzaville and gave an interview to George Weller of the Chicago Daily News. He made various proposals to the Americans about dealing with French colonies and offering the United States air and naval bases. The Foreign Office was furious and was well aware that de Gaulle had kept them in the dark precisely to emphasise the independence of his Empire Defence Council. Why, he asked, did Britain not break with Vichy and recognise his government? ‘What, in effect, England is doing is carrying on a war-time deal with Hitler, in which Vichy acts as a go-between’. Britain was happy to see Vichy remain in power as that kept the French fleet away from Hitler. ‘What happens, in effect, is an exchange of advantages between hostile powers which keeps the Vichy government alive as along as both Britain and Germany are agreed that it should exist’.3

  Britain was horrified by the interview and by an enormous volume of reports that came back to Churchill of de Gaulle’s hostile statements and Anglophobic remarks in Brazzaville and in Syria. Churchill himself was more tolerant of de Gaulle at this stage and understood that ‘he had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet. He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance’.4

  All the same, Churchill agreed with the Foreign Office that an attempt should be made to rein de Gaulle in, and on 10 November wrote to him asking him to come back from Africa to London. On this occasion de Gaulle complied. That was not to be his usual response to such requests.

  Churchill’s patience was increasingly eroded by the diplomatic chaos that flowed in the general’s wake. Part of the trouble was that de Gaulle, without political experience, was increasingly playing a political role; but that does not go very far towards excusing his conduct. Churchill wondered whether the general had gone off his head. Eden, who had moved to the Foreign Office and entered the War Cabinet in December 1940, when Halifax was shunted off to Washington, was trying to avoid a complete breach of relations, but even he had his doubts. He conceded that ‘it may well be that we shall find that de Gaulle is crazy; if so, he’ll have to be dealt with accordingly. If, however, he shows indications of repentance, I hope you will not under-estimate your power to complete the cure’.5 When de Gaulle reached London, he received a cold welcome letter from Churchill: ‘Until I am in possession of any explanation you may do me the honour to offer, I am unable to judge whether any interview between us would serve a useful purpose’.

  De Gaulle and his Free French continued to be a pain in Britain’s neck. Harold Nicolson, profoundly Francophile and later referred to as the Member for Paris because of his unofficial but accepted role in representing French interests in the Commons, was in 1941 at the Ministry of Information. He gives a good description of de Gaulle at this stage. He lunched with him at the Savoy.

  He has the taut manner of a man who is becoming stout and is conscious that only the exercise of continuous muscle power can keep his figure in shape. I do not like him. He accuses my Ministry of being ‘Pétainiste’. ‘Mais non!’ I say, ‘Monsieur le Général.’ ‘Enfin, Pétainisant.’ ‘Nous travaillons,’ I said, ‘pour la France entière.’ ‘La France entière,’ he shouted, ‘C’est la France libre. C’est MOI!!!’6

  A month later Nicolson was again at lunch with de Gaulle. ‘I sit bang opposite to de Gaulle and had much talk with him. I dislike him less than I did at first. He has tired, ruminating but not unkindly eyes. He has curiously effeminate hands (not feminine hands but effeminated hands without arteries or muscles)’.7
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br />   De Gaulle, three-quarters statesman and one-quarter figure of fun, as Roy Jenkins described him (some would say the proportions were generous), was at this stage in the war only one of a number of minor French players on the periphery of the main arena of events. By the end of the war he had come to be synonymous with the image of the France that had resisted the Germans. That was a role for which he was always avid, but for the moment there were other and more likely contenders. Churchill claimed in his history to have identified de Gaulle, even before the fall of France, as l’homme du destin, but in the course of the war he certainly described him in other ways, once as a female llama surprised in her bath. After Cadogan met de Gaulle for the first time at 10 Downing Street, he reported to his Foreign Office colleagues that ‘I can’t tell you anything about de Gaulle except that he’s got a head like a pineapple and hips like a woman’.8 He was a great French patriot, but with a flawed sense of how France’s interests could best be served. His efforts may not actually have delayed the liberation of his country, but they certainly did not accelerate it. He had more affection for France than for his fellow Frenchmen.

  Until October 1942, when the Germans occupied the nominally independent part of France, Vichy was technically a legitimate regime and a neutral country. Britain more or less respected this convention. America accepted it much more wholeheartedly. Partly for this reason and partly because Roosevelt simply did not like the man, the United States was hostile to de Gaulle and to British-backed Free French operations. Churchill overestimated French hostility to the occupying Germans, just as he overestimated German hostility to Hitler. Thus he excoriated the French regime that had surrendered, and sought to stimulate resistance to it. During his excursion to Canada in the course of the Washington visit at Christmas 1941, he spoke to the Canadian House of Commons, referring to Pétain and Lavalle as having ‘fawned’ over Hitler and as now lying ‘prostrate at the foot of the conqueror’. Some Frenchmen, however, ‘would not bow their knees, and under de Gaulle, continued to fight at the side of the allies’. The Gaullists enjoyed ‘increasing respect by nine Frenchmen out of every ten throughout the once happy, smiling land of France’. These sentiments, voiced at the time when the Free French were occupying the Vichy islands of St Pierre and Miquelon, contrasted sharply with US Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s pedantic indignation about the attack on the islands.