by Walter Reid
26
Political Weakness in 1942
If the heart attack that resulted from the tussle with a stiff window in Washington had been a fatal one or if a scrambled fighter had brought down his seaplane when he came back from America, Churchill would still have been rated as a very great Prime Minister. He had stifled pressure for a humiliating negotiated peace. He had kept Britain in the war, alone until America had thrown her strength into the struggle. He had ensured that the United States gave priority to the European war which was Britain’s principal concern. Even if he had died after just nineteen months in office, it is certain that Britain would still have been safe.
All that was evident at the time. What was not certain in the spring of 1942 was Churchill’s own safety and security at a political level. While it was inconceivable that the Allies could be defeated, how victory was to be won was far from clear, and how long the war might continue was equally wrapped in gloomy doubt. In the desert, as Roosevelt had pointed out to Churchill at ARCADIA, Rommel was doing better than Auchinleck. The war at sea was going disastrously badly for Britain, and Germany was romping across mainland Europe.
On 15 February Singapore surrendered in the most humiliating of circumstances: 130,000 British and Commonwealth troops went into captivity and Britain’s prestige in the Far East never recovered. Churchill had learned just weeks earlier that Singapore had no substantial landward defences. ‘I ought to have known. My advisers ought to have known and I ought to have been told, and I ought to have asked.’1 When he did come to appreciate the state of Singapore’s defences, he queried with the Chiefs of Staff whether the imminent loss of Singapore should be accepted, and troops moved to defend Burma. Curtin, the Australian Prime Minister, heard of this and said that evacuation of Singapore would be regarded as ‘an inexcusable betrayal’.
Curtin had already been a nuisance, writing in the newspapers on 27 December 1941 that ‘Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links with the United Kingdom’. His intervention in January was decisive; and contrary to what Churchill said ‘a purely military decision should have been’, the 18th British Division went to Singapore (not, it transpired, to save it but to surrender). Churchill was to blame his concentration on the North African theatre for allowing himself to take his eye off Singapore.
In truth, what happened flowed directly from the conscious switch in Britain’s priorities from the Far East to the Middle East a year before. Dill had sought to continue the traditional emphasis on the former (‘In the last resort the security of Singapore comes before that of Egypt’). In doing so, according to Ismay, he shook Churchill to the core. Dill lost the battle, though he now consoled himself with the reflection that history would have been different if his views had prevailed. But the loss of Singapore did not affect the outcome of the war. If, on the other hand, Britain had been thrown out of North Africa and the Middle East in 1941, the Allies would have had great difficulty in fighting a European war.
That point did not register with the public or Parliament. In December 1941 the Conservatives had already been worried about the possibility of the fall of Singapore, and Nicolson reported that they were ‘angry with Winston’.2 In January 1942 Macmillan recorded that the House of Commons was in the sort of mood it had been in before the Norway debate. On 16 February 1942 Nicolson detected a shift against the government: ‘I fear a slump in public opinion which will deprive Winston of his legend’. A statement in a Sydney newspaper was repeated in the London papers: ‘If Singapore falls, Churchill will fall with it’. Churchill was tired, disheartened and suffering from a cold; he told Eden ‘the bulk of the Tories hated him, that he had done all he could and would only be too happy to yield to another’.3 Brooke found him depressed by the mood in the House, and the King said that the Prime Minister was angry and felt that he ‘was hunting the tiger with angry wasps around him’.4 A far cry from the picture of a country united round its leader.
Amery, at the India Office, and at odds with Churchill because of his refusal to make concessions to nationalism, told the Chief Whip, James Stuart, that it was ‘his duty to be really frank with Winston’ about the ‘discontent in the Party’.5 Stuart was not keen to be the bearer of unwelcome news, and Churchill was in any event well aware of the lack of enthusiasm in the Conservative Party. It was all particularly painful as he saw himself returning from a triumphant and historic meeting with Roosevelt in Washington.
He felt compelled to strengthen his position by demanding a vote of confidence in the House of Commons on 29 January. He made one of his most impressive speeches and won the House over with a majority of 464 to 1. He worked on his speech until the very last minute – indeed he was five minutes late in setting off for the House – and in it he elaborated on the constitutional position he had created for himself, working with the Chiefs and submitting the policies he arrived at on their advice for the approval of the War Cabinet. It was an arrangement that provided him with substantial protection. Opposition to Churchill was split in that while some wanted his powers diminished, others, notably Sir Roger Keyes, argued that the Prime Minister was hamstrung because he insisted on taking the advice of the Chiefs of Staff. The contradiction did not go unnoticed. ‘Chips’ Channon described the debate as ‘One of the great days in parliamentary history’.6 The debate put an end to proposals that Churchill’s influence over the Chiefs of Staff should be reduced by the appointment of a separate Minister of Defence.
But although there was for the moment no more talk of a defence supremo or the alternative, a Combined General Staff with an independent Chairman, Churchill’s standing was damaged all the same. Critical speeches in the Lords by Hankey and particularly Chatfield, a former Minister of Defence, were telling: there was criticism of the Defence Committee, the extent of Churchill’s authority and his working habits. There had to be a new direction of the war effort, ‘instead of the burden resting on a single pair of shoulders, however broad, however able, whatever confidence we may have in these shoulders … I can assure your Lordships that I have had representations made to me by those that work in Whitehall that the hours they have to work are perfectly intolerable. It does not lead to efficiency. Nobody is at his best in the Middle Watch …’7
Churchill was well aware that the outcome of the vote did not secure his future and his position remained precarious. ‘I am like a bomber pilot’, he said. I go out night after night and I know that one night I will not return.’8 Cripps and others advocated a War Planning Directorate, operating independently of the Chiefs of Staff and taking pressure off them. Churchill would have none of that. He was ‘resolved to keep my full power of war-direction … I should not of course have remained Prime Minister for an hour if I had been deprived of the office of Minister of Defence’.9 The austere, unbending Cripps had in fact, and rather strangely, emerged as Churchill’s main rival. By June 1942 he told Tory malcontents, and there was never any shortage of them, that he foresaw ‘a joint government consisting of Oliver Lyttelton, Anthony Eden and himself. He implied that in due course Churchill would be pushed aside, because he did not understand the home front. He did not deny that Churchill was the best for the strategic war period.’10
A long, sad letter to Roosevelt of 5 March 1942 dealing with the shortage of shipping begins, ‘When I reflect how I have longed and prayed for the entry of the United States into the war, I find it difficult to realize how gravely our British affairs have deteriorated by what has happened since December seven [sic]. We have suffered the greatest disaster in our history at Singapore, and other disasters will come thick and fast upon us.’11
Brooke reflected the mood of these months in his diary entry for 31 March 1942: ‘The last day of the first quarter of 1942, fateful year in which we have already lost a large proportion of the British Empire, and are on the high road to lose a great deal more of it!’12 In his Secret Session speech on 23 April, Churchill gave a remarkably full and candid account of the circumstances surrounding th
e fall of Singapore. ‘[O]ur affairs’, he said, ‘are not conducted entirely by simpletons and dunderheads as the comic papers try to depict …’ He refused the Royal Commission which some were demanding.13
Parliamentary attacks were not generated by Singapore alone. The Prime Minister’s conciliatory approach to Russia also caused disaffection. Acquiescence in an extension of Russia’s frontiers attracted opposition from both anti-appeasers, generally on the left, and anti-Soviets, generally on the right. The whole issue generated tensions between Churchill and Eden, who differed in their general approach towards Russia, following the same fault-line in the Conservative Party.14
Harold Nicolson had been sacked by Churchill in July 1941, but held no grudges. In his diary of 22 April 1942 he recorded that Malcolm MacDonald, who had been lunching with Churchill and reported the ‘bomber pilot’ remark, had been appalled by the slump in the Prime Minister’s popularity. ‘A year ago he would have put his stock at 108, and today, in his opinion, it is as low as 65. He admits that a success will enable it to recover. But the old enthusiasm is dead forever. How foul is public life and popular ingratitude!’ On the following day, with the House in Secret Session, Nicolson recorded that Cripps, who had just returned from India, was received with more acclaim than Churchill.
Even if Churchill personally would survive, there was still a great measure of unhappiness with the performance of the government as a whole. In the Confidence debate, Emmanuel Shinwell said that he wished there could be two votes of confidence, one in the Prime Minister and the other in the government. There was a feeling that too many members of the government were doing nothing to justify their continued presence. When Stafford Cripps returned from his subsequent mission to Russia (Churchill had not wanted him back: he was ‘a lunatic in a country of lunatics’ and it would be a pity to move him15), he made his joining the government contingent on the removal of some of the ‘old gang’.
Churchill could not simply ignore all this and concentrate on the conduct of the war. When he complained to Captain Pim, who was in charge of the Map Room, that he was seriously thinking of resigning, Pim had given the opinion that most of the noise was being made by those who hoped to benefit from a reshuffle.16 A limited reshuffle had indeed been made on 4 February 1942; but after the fall of Singapore he had to go further. He was obliged to sacrifice the Secretary of State for War, Margesson, who had not really done anything wrong, and to bring Cripps into the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House, the latter appointment in particular recognising his popularity. In doing so he was acknowledging the need to be seen to do something to address domestic issues. At long last, he was also able to take the opportunity of getting rid of numbers of the Men of Munich – not as an act of vindictiveness, but rather because they had continued to be disloyal and to make themselves troublesome. Kingsley Wood was demoted, replaced by Oliver Lyttelton. James Grigg came in as Secretary of State for War in place of Margesson. Attlee received the title of Deputy Prime Minister.
And so the January Vote of Confidence, which was forced by discontent on the Tory right, resulted in a Cabinet move to the left. Rab Butler thought the new Cabinet was far too short of Conservatives. Under pressure Churchill was obliged to set up an ‘India Committee’, but behind the scenes he intrigued to sabotage Cripps’ Indian Mission, by convening one of the very rare meetings of the full Cabinet, which was dominated by the Conservative Party, and by communications to the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. Linlithgow was no fan of Cripps, whom he referred to as ‘Sir Stifford Craps’. (That was deliberate. It was a genuine slip of the tongue that caused Indira Gandhi, handing round nibbles at her wedding, to invite Sir Stafford to help himself to some potato cripps.17) On 12 April 1942 Roosevelt made an early incursion into British imperial policies and wrote privately to Churchill, proposing that Cripps stay in India until a Nationalist government had been set up. Churchill was greatly angered and proposed to keep the correspondence from the Cabinet. ‘Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart …’18
For the moment Beaverbrook remained in the Cabinet, although when he had been appointed, Clementine Churchill, in Mary Soames’s words, ‘blew up’. But he continued his incessant threats of resignation, and shortly carried them out in order to campaign for a Second Front. He had been superb as Minister of Aircraft Production, but he could still be a frightful nuisance.
In the House of Commons Churchill faced savage attacks from Bevan’s stinging oratory, and in Tribune from Frank Owen under the pseudonym of ‘Thomas Rainsborough’.
His vulnerability had been hinted at a full year earlier when the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, visited London. He attended a Cabinet Meeting, after which he asked Eden ‘Has no one in this Cabinet a mind of his own?’ He was unimpressed by Churchill’s conduct of the war, partly because Australians had been sent to Greece against his advice, and there was intrigue among Menzies, Hankey, Lord Simon and Lloyd George. They wanted a stronger War Cabinet, with more effective men in it, and the Prime Minister’s wings clipped so that he could no longer dominate the Chiefs of Staff.
On 29 April 1941, during Menzies’s prolonged stay in England, Churchill faced critical questions in the House of Commons from some of the usual enemies. He was asked by Geoffrey Mander whether he would consider appointing a small Supreme War Cabinet consisting of non-Departmental Ministers and whether he would consider inviting statesmen ‘of the calibre of Mr Menzies’ to sit in it. His answer was commendably uncompromising: ‘No, Sir’.19 There was never any real possibility of Menzies, an Australian, replacing Churchill (although the possibility of Smuts’ appointment in the event of Churchill’s death had been canvassed in 1940 and approved by the King20), but the dissatisfaction that was expressed by influential figures near the centre of power shows that Churchill’s continued tenure of 10 Downing Street was not taken for granted. And all that had taken place in 1941: the degree of criticism and dissatisfaction of 1942 was very much greater.
27
Strategy on the Sea and in the Air
Things were not going well on the oceans. The toll on the Arctic convoys continued, and Admiral Tovey, who was in charge of the Home Fleet, argued strongly against their continuation. His stock had been high after the sinking of the Bismarck, but this stand angered the Prime Minister, and matters did not improve. He not only misread the enemy’s intentions when the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen broke out of Brest, but also wanted more ships to deal with the breakout than Churchill (wrongly) thought he needed. Tovey had already crossed swords with Churchill when he demanded more long-range aircraft for the Battle of the Atlantic, and it was hardly surprising that the Prime Minister felt it was time to replace him.
There were few admirals for whom Churchill had much regard, and this is reflected in the fact that his choice as a replacement was Andrew Cunningham, not a man with whom the PM was comfortable. The appointment did not go ahead. It was indeed a reflection of ABC’s sturdy independence that he responded to the offer of the job by saying that he would only take it if Tovey fell dead on his bridge.1
Churchill did not give up. He proposed that the shift should go ahead as part of a larger reshuffle, but it was flatly blocked by Pound, who said that Tovey’s displacement would affect the navy’s confidence in the Admiralty. After some further kerfuffles there was a game of musical chairs at a slightly lower level.
Pound thought that his role in the matter had come close to ending his career. When Cunningham called on him in April 1942 he found the First Sea Lord ‘in great distress … Winston was thinking of getting rid of him and putting Mountbatten in as 1st Sea Lord’.2 Cunningham said that he told Pound ‘to glue himself to his chair’ and that he did just that, but the whole story is suspect. Churchill respected Pound, and talked of him as the best sailor in the navy; he genuinely liked him and regarded him as a friend and not just an adviser. Although for various reasons he had an exaggerated view of Mountbatten’s abilities, the latter wo
uld have been quite unacceptable to the service – and probably in the last resort to Churchill too. Charming though Mountbatten might be, his rank of vice-admiral was an acting one only, to allow him to operate as Director of Combined Operations. His substantive rank was only that of post captain, and his very limited experience did not begin to qualify him for appointment as First Sea Lord.
The navy attributed a large part of the losses in the Battle of the Atlantic to the fact that they did not receive the degree of cover from the RAF that they needed. Pound and A.V. Alexander, the First Lord, were not a strong team, and could not prevail over Churchill or over the strategic bombers, led by Harris and Cherwell. Some of the faults were those of the navy itself: when Cripps proposed a ‘super C-in-C’ to take control of the battle in its entirety, Pound opposed the idea with the familiar service argument that it would conflict with the whole principle of naval control. Again the navy was wrong to press for heavy bombing of the pretty well indestructible U-Boat bases in France, and probably also in their insistence on air patrols over the Bay of Biscay which would have been better used out in the Atlantic. But the net effect of the conduct of the battle was that by the end of 1942 U-Boats were being built faster than they were being sunk.
It is argued that the battle would have been shorter and its effects less costly if Churchill had responded more favourably to requests for, for instance, escort ships and aircraft fitted with centimetric radar, and had listened to the plea of the Minister of War Transport, Lord Leathers, that the security of Britain’s sea communications should be given the highest priority for allocation of men and materials. The problem with arguments of this sort is that they are so often ex parte. Churchill’s responsibility was to adjudicate between competing claims. Thus he had to listen to America’s need for escort vessels, which Pound came to recognise was 70 per cent greater than Britain’s. The Prime Minister concluded that Bomber Command’s requirement for new radar allocation was greater than the navy’s. There are two views – at least – on the offensive policy of strategic bombing, but it simplifies issues crudely to suggest that Churchill imperilled the safety of Britain’s sea communications by allowing himself to be persuaded by Cherwell and Harris that the use of aircraft to drop bombs on Germany should have priority over protecting the convoys.