Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire

by Walter Reid

  Phillips concocted a high-handed recommendation that America should try to bring the Indian politicians together in order to push forward an agreed programme for independence. Throughout 1943 Churchill had to spend a lot of time and effort in resisting the Declaration on Colonial Policy which the State Department tried to impose. The Viceroy had complained to the War Cabinet in January that there was little prospect of disposing of American ‘ill feeling, misunderstanding and prejudice’ because ‘the element in that country which has any real understanding of … major colonial problems is very small’.4

  Churchill did not point out the discrepancy between FDR’s racial liberalism in other people’s countries and his attitude at home, where he made no great efforts to resist southern Democrats who were opposed to racial integration. It was Roosevelt who had insisted that the work forces in the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps, for example, be segregated by race. Of course the WPA and the CCC would not have been supported by Congress in desegregated form, but the fact remains that FDR did not find it difficult to compromise on what might have been thought to be a major issue of principle.

  Indians who came to Britain could vote there, but only a tiny minority of blacks in America had effective voting rights. Registration was almost impossible, and even by 1964 only 6 per cent and 19 per cent of voting-age blacks in Mississippi and Alabama respectively were on the rolls.5 President Johnson attempted to address the problem with the National Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed various devices that had been used to deny blacks the vote and gave the Federal government powers to ensure that registration took place. Parts of the Act are however only temporary, and it has been necessary to renew them on each occasion when they were due to expire. The last renewal, effective until July 2031, took place in July 2006. The renewal bill passed through the Senate unanimously, but was not unopposed in the House of Representatives.

  After the Quebec Conference in 1943, a guest at a lunch which Roosevelt gave for Churchill was Mrs Helen Ogden Mills Reid, the Vice President of the New York Herald Tribune and a hostile critic of British India. After lunch she raised the matter of India with Churchill. He replied, ‘before we proceed any further, let us get one thing clear. Are we talking about the brown Indians of India, who have multiplied alarmingly under benevolent British rule? Or are we speaking of the red Indians in America, who, I understand, are almost extinct?’ There was no further discussion of India.6

  At Placentia Bay Churchill had been bounced into the Atlantic Charter, and Britain had failed to realise the full significance of the Charter’s reference to ‘oppressed peoples’. Preoccupied with strategy, Churchill tended to isolate himself from the day-to-day impact of such presumption, although Amery, as Secretary of State for India, found himself obliged to bite his tongue and tolerate much of it, rather than offend Britain’s paymasters. Eden was unimpressed by the vague, ill-connected liberalism of the American administration. There was little contact between the President and Secretary of State Hull; for Eden it was ‘a mad house’. He was concerned by FDR’s ‘cheerful fecklessness’ in ‘disposing of the fate of many lives’. He was ‘a conjuror, skilfully juggling with balls of dynamite, whose nature he failed to understand’.7

  One has a certain amount of sympathy with Eden. He was a man of good, liberal principles, but he remained sceptical about the efficacy of doctrinaire idealism as a means of regulating world affairs. As Foreign Secretary he wanted to have a foreign policy, not just because that is what Foreign Secretaries do, but also because he saw a real risk that when the war ended, the post-war situation would be a dangerous one, in which Britain would be able to exercise little influence, and in which Europe would be dominated by America, a resurgent Germany or by Russia. For most of the war Churchill was too absorbed in winning it to feel that time could be taken to fight with allies over what was to happen afterwards, and as an able, sensitive and intelligent diplomat, Eden’s relationship with the Prime Minister was frustrating.

  31

  ‘This Bleak Lull’

  On 1 July 1942 Churchill faced a debate on a further motion of confidence. The debate lasted two days. Of course he won the debate – by 475 votes to 25 – but the opposition he faced was real, and greater than the figures suggest.

  In his history, Churchill acknowledged his political weakness: ‘I had now been twenty-eight months at the head of affairs, during which we had sustained an almost unbroken series of military defeats, galling links in a chain of misfortune and frustration to which no parallel could be found in our history. It is indeed remarkable that I was not in this bleak lull dismissed from power, or confronted with demands for changes in my methods, which it was known I should never accept’. A remarkable admission in the aftermath of victory.

  But the admission did not reveal to what an extent he was confronted by demands for changes in his methods. In Parliament, in the July Confidence debate, Bevan alleged that Churchill was filtering the advice of the Chiefs of Staff, choosing what the War Cabinet should know and what they should not. Churchill denied that, but Harold Nicolson described Bevan’s performance as ‘a brilliant offensive, pointing his figure in accusation, twisting and bowing’.1 ‘The Prime Minister’, Bevan said, ‘wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate’. Nicolson said that despite the vote at the end of the debate, ‘the impression left is one of dissatisfaction and anxiety, and I do not think it will end there’. A few weeks later he spoke approvingly of Cripps and his attitude, ‘probably wholly disinterested and sincere’.2 A more informed and more accurate take on the interplay of the War Cabinet and the Chiefs came on another occasion from Ernest Bevin. He told Churchill that he ‘shouldn’t come asking the Cabinet for its opinion on matters about which they knew nothing and which were too serious to be settled by amateur strategists’.3

  Immediately after the debate, prompted by Julian Amery, just back from the Western Desert, the embattled Prime Minister decided to go out to Cairo. Bevin tried to dissuade him, saying that he would be in the way. Churchill: ‘You mean like a great blue-bottle buzzing over a huge cowpat?’ As he made his plans to leave, an Arctic convoy reached Russia arriving with only eleven of its merchant men left out of thirty-four. Five hundred of the six hundred tanks it carried were lost. In a single week in the Arctic and the Atlantic nearly 400,000 tonnes of shipping had been lost, a figure unmatched at any time in Britain’s history. Losses on this scale could not continue. Bracken told Moran that the Prime Minister had to ‘win his battle in the desert or get out’.4

  On his return to London from the second Washington Conference, Churchill returned also to the subject of war in the Western Desert. By now, but not hitherto, Ultra material was providing Auchinleck with good detailed information. Until then Rommel had enjoyed a better tactical intelligence.

  In these days Rommel enjoyed a status that modern military historians would not allow him and it did not help the desert generals that their opponent was regarded as exceptionally able as well as unusually gallant. Churchill referred to him in the Commons in more generous terms than he would use of one of his own commanders: ‘We have a very daring and skilful opponent, and may I say across the havoc of war, a great general’.

  If Rommel’s advance had been unchecked, a coordinated campaign in North Africa would have been impossible, and Allied landings on mainland Europe would have been delayed until perhaps Stalin had control of the whole of the western continental land mass. But the defensive positions that Auchinleck and his Chief of Staff, Major-General Gorman-Smith, established held, and Rommel’s offensive stalled.

  That was far from evident at the time: what was clear to Auchinleck was that his army was exhausted and demoralised and he had insufficient reserves to allow him to advance.

  The main purpose in going to the Middle East was to see Auchinleck, the general who could not find time to come home to see the Prime Minister and Min
ister of Defence. It is all very well to portray Auchinleck as the ultimate, uncompromising professional. In this war, generals needed to be something more than that. They had to work with politicians; they had to an extent be politicians. Auchinleck’s successor, Montgomery, knew that: he understood what Churchill wanted, and he kept him informed. He gave very great attention to political and public relations matters. Before he was carried away by notions of grandeur, he knew exactly how to work on Churchill. So, in a much more gentlemanly way, did Alexander. Auchinleck and Wavell did not understand the need to do so.

  Of course, Auchinleck’s delays were based on sound and humane considerations, and on succeeding him, Montgomery also delayed action; but what mattered was that the Auk failed adequately to explain his reasons for delay or to give any indication that he was actively preparing for a time when he would set the desert aflame. If he failed to tell Churchill what he was doing, he could not really be surprised that he was ultimately disposed of. Dill, Ismay and Brooke all told him to be conciliatory but he remained infuriatingly unresponsive, close to the edge of insubordination. Later, in his interviews with David Dimbleby he made much of the lack of training his troops had received, but he did not adequately explain this to Churchill.5 He could even be evasive about the materiel at his disposal.

  At a time when Churchill was, remarkably patiently, sending repeated requests to Auchinleck for information to which he was reasonably entitled, the general sent his staff officers a copy of a letter from the Duke of Wellington to the Secretary of State for War:

  My Lord

  If I attempt to answer the mass of futile correspondence that surrounds me I should be debarred from the serious business of campaigning.

  I must remind your Lordship – for the last time – that so long as I retain an independent position I shall see that no officer under my Command is debarred by the futile drivelling of men quill-driving in your Lordship’s Office from attending to his first duty which is, and always has been, so to train the private men under his Command that they may, without question, beat any force opposed to them in the field.

  I am, my Lord,

  Your Obedient Servant

  Wellington

  Auchinleck added: ‘I know this does not apply to you, but please see to it that it can never be applied to you or to anyone working under you.’6 He had no notion of just how anachronistic these self-important views were. Wellington’s circumstances were very different.

  In the Dimbleby interviews Auchinleck said that he simply had to disregard Churchill’s interventions, which were ‘a disturbing influence on a chap like myself who the whole day and night was concentrating on one thing and determined to get the best of out of it … I didn’t want any encouragement to put everything I had into beating the Germans.’7

  When Churchill travelled to Cairo, he was clear that something needed to be done about the nature of the Middle East command. In the aftermath of the fall of Tobruk, ‘I was politically at my weakest’, and wanted a dramatic victory. He himself had not yet decided on dismissing the Commander-in-Chief. But Brooke thought he should be moved, and the Prime Minister was certainly coming round to that view.

  Churchill was not alone in being unhappy about the army’s performance. In the War Office it was felt that Auchinleck’s days had been numbered ever since he announced on 21 June that he would not stand at Sollum. Kennedy, the Director of Military Operations, was so ashamed of the army’s performance that he stopped lunching at his usual club. Parliament was also dissatisfied, and Brooke too said, ‘It was quite clear that something was radically wrong.’

  Churchill’s intention, rather than to sack Auchinleck, was to confine him to his duties as Commander-in-Chief, putting another general in charge of Eighth Army.8 Brooke’s preferred choice for the role, not a wise one, was Ritchie, who had been his Chief of Staff in France. Ritchie might have been a good Chief of Staff, but was not a good commander. If not Ritchie he wanted another favourite. Brooke had always had a high opinion of Montgomery – higher than of Gott, whom he thought exhausted. Brooke and Montgomery had been fellow instructors at Camberley and it had been Brooke who secured Montgomery’s immediate appointment as Commander of 3rd Division when it went to France as part of Gort’s field force.

  Churchill’s preference was Gott –‘They don’t call him “Strafer” for nothing’. He flew out to see Gott at El Alamein, and was reassured by the experience. Alexander also appealed to Churchill, but Brooke regarded Alex’s best role as providing a barrier between Churchill and the Army Commander.

  Once in Cairo, Churchill became convinced that Auchinleck could not simply be moved sideways. He had to be moved from the theatre. The dismissal was badly handled. Brooke allowed Churchill to effect it, while constitutionally it was his responsibility. When the dismissal came it was not even done face-to-face, but by letter. Churchill said later, rather unconvincingly, ‘Having learned from past experience that that kind of unpleasant thing is better done by writing than orally [better for whom?], I sent Colonel Jacob with … the letter’. Jacob said that he felt ‘as if I were just going to murder an unsuspecting friend’. Auchinleck ‘opened the letter and read it through two or three times in silence. He did not move a muscle and remained outwardly calm and in complete control of himself … I could not have admired more the way in which General Auchinleck received me and his attitude throughout. A great man and a fighter.’9 But one who was not prepared to use political skills. If he had gone to meet Churchill in Cairo, rather than requiring the elderly Prime Minister to visit him in the spartan surroundings of his desert headquarters he might have retained his position.

  Moran saw Auchinleck shortly afterwards. ‘Auchinleck sat with his forearms resting on his thighs, his hands hanging down between his knees, his head drooping forward like a flower on a broken stalk. His long, lean limbs were relaxed; the whole attitude expressed grief; the man was completely undone.’10 Along with Auchinleck out went Generals Corbett, Dorman-Smith and Norrie. The extent of the purge at the highest levels was remarkable.

  Churchill now offered Auchinleck’s command to Brooke. Poor Brooke agonised over the tempting offer and, to his very great credit, declined it for two very unselfish reasons. First, he felt that he could work with Churchill better than anyone else was likely to and, secondly, he did not want to appear to have come out to Cairo to engineer Auchinleck’s removal and grab his job. By the time Churchill came to write his memoirs he had forgotten about the offer to Brooke, which must have been hurtful.11 Alexander was given the Middle East command. Brooke, true to form, was not impressed by Alex’s intellect. At Staff College Alex had not been regarded as particularly bright, but he had a good First War when he attracted considerable admiration, and later he acquitted himself extremely well at Dunkirk. He was polished, debonair, brave and diplomatic. As Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, he performed adequately, and proved very diplomatic in his relations with the Americans. His performance in Italy was slow, but he never faced dismissal because, unlike Wavell and Auchinleck, he kept his Prime Minister very fully briefed.

  Churchill’s first choice of army commander for Eighth Army, Gott, was frustrated just a day later, when Gott was shot down as he flew back to Cairo. He escaped from the plane but when he courageously went back to rescue his companions he was killed in the explosion. Churchill then accepted Brooke’s recommendation of his protégé, Montgomery. Brooke was happy to think that Alex would let Monty have his head. He did.

  Churchill did not underestimate Auchinleck’s abilities. Later he told Harold Nicolson about his decision to remove Auchinleck. It was a terrible thing to have to do. ‘He took it like a gentleman but it was a terrible thing. It is difficult to remove a bad general at the height of a campaign: it is atrocious to remove a good general.’12 He wanted to retain Auchinleck with the Middle East command split in two, Alexander in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and Auchinleck in Persia and Iraq.

  His plans for Auchinleck’s redeployment were however frustrated by a r
emarkable revolt from the normally docile members of the War Cabinet. They objected to the division of Middle East command. They met twice on 7 August to discuss Churchill’s proposals and to rebuff them on both occasions. They did not want to create the impression that a command had been established just to let Auchinleck down lightly. They wanted someone to blame. That was understandable, but even Churchill, probably Auchinleck’s biggest critic, knew that was unfair and simplistic. Auchinleck’s principal fault was simply that he never adjusted to what Brooke described in his diary as ‘a regular disease that [Churchill] suffers from, this frightful impatience to get an attack launched’.

  But the War Cabinet’s worries were academic: they thought the offer to Auchinleck too generous: but he thought it too mean and indicated that he would not accept it, even if Churchill had been able to make it. Perhaps his failure to continue to serve his country emphasises his disdain for political control.

  32

  A Llama and a Crocodile

  In the midst of the more pressing issues with which Churchill had to deal at Cairo, he required to spend time with de Gaulle, who seized repeatedly on instances of ‘flagrant violations of French sovereignty’, ‘insults to France’, and ‘new Fashodas’. In May 1942 there had been problems over IRONCLAD, an attempt to seize Vichy-occupied Madagascar. Because of memories of Dakar – and the general impossibility of working with him – the general was kept in the dark and was predictably furious. As usual, the unfortunate Anthony Eden had the job of trying to repair the damage with de Gaulle, who now threatened to withdraw his base to the Soviet Union. As always, he saw any movement against a French colony as part of a British plan for imperial expansion.