Churchill

by Paul Johnson

  These ten points are essential to answering the question: did Churchill save Britain? The answer must be yes. No one else could have done it. This was what was felt at the time by the great majority of the British people, and it has been since confirmed by the facts and documents at our disposal. By the end of 1940 Britain was secure. By the end of 1941 she was clearly on the winning side. Churchill had done it by his personal leadership, courage, resolution, ingenuity, and grasp, and by his huge and infectious confidence. But it must not be thought that he was just a kind of implacable machine making war. He never lost his humanity. His jokes continued and were repeated in ever-widening circles like stones dropped in a pool, until they became the common currency of wartime Britain. People learned to imitate his speech mannerisms. He was referred to on the bus as “Winnie.” Brendan Bracken described how, driving round Hyde Park Corner with Churchill, they came across a man fighting with his wife. The man recognized Churchill, stopped, and took off his hat: “It’s the Guv’nor—are you well, sir?”

  Churchill also punctuated his grim, endless pursuit of the war by curious acts of kindness. On the evening of May 10, 1940, having just taken office, and while forming his cabinet, he found time to offer asylum to the elderly kaiser, once a friend and now in danger of being made Hitler’s propaganda puppet. He was always and thoughtfully generous to former political opponents. By the time of the Battle of Britain, Chamberlain (whom he had insisted on keeping in the government and treating with respect) was ill with terminal cancer. On the day of one of the biggest RAF victories, Churchill telephoned the stricken man to tell him of the number of Nazi aircraft shot down. There is also a record of his taking old Baldwin to lunch and cheering him up. When Beaverbrook, as minister of aircraft production, commandeered everyone’s iron gates to be melted down, he specially confirmed that Baldwin’s gates at Bewdley, his country house, were not to be spared. Churchill found time to cancel the order. He hardly ever cherished a grudge or a grievance or nursed enmity in his heart. He remembered to thank people for their help, too. Before America entered the war, Churchill made a thrilling broadcast on April 27, 1941, which I remember vividly, saying how important American help was, and that it was being provided “in increasing measure.” He ended by quoting Arthur Clough’s lines: For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,

  Seem here no painful inch to gain,

  Far back through creeks and inlets making

  Comes, silent, flooding in, the main.

  And not by eastern windows only,

  When daylight comes, comes in the light,

  In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

  But westward, look, the land is bright!

  This quote had a tremendous impact on the listeners. Before dinner, he telephoned Violet Bonham Carter (née Asquith), who had read him the poem thirty-five years before. He asked, “Did you hear my broadcast? ” “Of course I did, Winston. Everyone listens when you speak.” He reminded her of her reading him the lines so many years before: “And now I have read them to the nation. Thank you!”

  By the end of 1941 Churchill was confident that the war would be won. But there were heavy blows to bear. In some ways the first half of 1942 was the worst period of the war for him, for any disasters due to mistakes could no longer be blamed on anyone else. He blamed himself bitterly for underestimating the power and malevolence of Japan, for allowing two capital ships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, to be sent to sea without air cover, both being sunk with almost all hands, and for the fall of Singapore. There were disastrous reverses in North Africa, where Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps proved, for their numbers, the most successful German army of the entire war. Worst of all there were heavy sinkings of Allied supply ships in the North Atlantic, for which Churchill could not provide the explanation. The truth, we now know, was that Enigma intercepts had been providing information about the positions of U-boats, making them easier to sink, but early in 1942 a change in Nazi coding made this intelligence unavailable for several months, until the Bletchley code breakers caught up.

  The concentration of bad news in 1942 led to the most serious challenge Churchill faced in the entire war. Though often criticized by individual MPs, including one heavyweight, Aneurin Bevan—“a squalid nuisance,” as Churchill described him—he always won the rare debates by enormous majorities or without a vote. However, early in July, the news that Rommel was only ninety miles from Cairo led to a vote of censure proposed by Sir John Wardlaw-Milne, who was described by Harold Nicolson as “an imposing man with a calm manner which gives an impression of solidity.” Hitting hard at Churchill personally, Milne demanded the prime minister be stripped of his position as minister of defense and that it be handed over to “a dominating figure to run the war,” and “a generalissimo to command all the armed forces.” Who was this to be? Milne announced: “the Duke of Gloucester.” This man was the booby younger brother of the king, notorious for his large body and tiny brain. The House shrieked and bellowed with laughter. Churchill was saved—it was the best stroke of pure luck he enjoyed in the war, and remained a delightful national joke for months.

  Shortly after the tide turned again. Churchill got himself a winning general in Africa in the shape of Bernard Montgomery, who (like Nelson) also possessed a gift for turning himself into a national hero. He beat Rommel at the decisive battle of El Alamein in November 1942, and this prepared the way for Allied landings in North Africa, which ultimately brought the surrender of three hundred thousand Germans and Italians in Tunisia—the biggest “bag” of the war. Soon thereafter the Russians won the battle of Stalingrad, with the surrender of Hitler’s entire Sixth Army. The decoded intercepts were renewed, with a consequent sinking of U-boats, freeing the way for enormous numbers of American supplies and troops to reach Britain, preparing for a landing on the Continent.

  By the end of 1942 Churchill, who had been thinking about postwar geopolitics ever since the Battle of Britain had been won, was actively working to create a world capable of containing the power of the Soviet Union. He did this, to the best of his ability, through the summit system, a form of negotiation he loved—the top men face-to-face, surrounded by their staff and experts (he often traveled with eighty people). In 1943 Captain Pim, who ran his map room, calculated that Churchill had already traveled 110,000 miles since the beginning of the war and had spent thirty-three days at sea and fourteen days and three hours in the air, often exposed to real danger. He had to work his aging body hard. He hated having injections, though he joked about them, telling one nurse, “You can use my fingers or the lobe of my ear, and of course I have an almost infinite expanse of arse.” His health was on the whole remarkably good, considering his workload, but he suffered from three strokes or heart attacks, bouts of pneumonia, and other ailments. His doctor, Moran, was (after his patient’s death) criticized by the Churchill family and other doctors for writing a book, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, describing in detail the threats to his life arising from health problems. But historians think he was quite right to do so: it is a vital part of the story. Moran did a first-class job in keeping Churchill alive, helped by the prime minister’s fundamentally strong constitution, amazing powers of recuperation, and will to live. Churchill was indispensable, and those around him did not dare to think of who could take over if he died. The assumption was Eden—an appalling prospect to those familiar with his over-anxiety bordering on hysteria.

  Churchill’s great strength was his power of relaxation. Sometimes he painted, discovering in the process of one summit Morocco, and above all Marrakech, where the superb Mamounia Hotel was much to his taste. He loved having his womenfolk with him—Clemmie and his daughters, Diana, Sarah, and Mary. Sarah had made an unfortunate marriage to a stand-up comic, Vic Oliver, whom Churchill detested, even after he faded from the scene during the war. At a conference in Cairo, Churchill was recounting his worries to the resident minister of the Mediterranean, Harold Macmillan, who told him, “You are lucky. Thing
s are going well, really. Look at Musso.” The Italian dictator was nearing the end of his power. Everything was going wrong. His foreign minister, Count Ciano, who had married Musso’s daughter, had been accused of treason and shot. Churchill reflected on Mussolini’s plight and then said, “Well, at least he had the pleasure of murdering his son-in-law.”

  One aspect of his life Churchill had to neglect during the war was Chartwell. The Nazis knew all about it, and its system of three lakes made it an easy target to identify, night or day. So he was able to visit it only twelve times during the six years of the war, a painful loss. Of course he had Chequers, the beautiful house given to the nation for the relaxation of the prime minister in Lloyd George’s day. Churchill used it especially for top-level military conferences and receiving American envoys like Harry Hopkins and W. Averell Harriman. He had there an excellent cook and a fine cellar and installed a cinema in the Elizabethan gallery. He liked action movies, such as Stagecoach and Destry Rides Again, also a favorite of Lord Beaverbrook, who saw it scores of times. One prize movie Churchill hated was Citizen Kane. He walked out halfway through in disgust. He also improved the art collection, adding a mouse to a painting of a lion then believed to be by Rubens: “A lion without a mouse? I’ll change that. Pray, bring me my paints.” Talk at Chequers went on late into the night. Jock Colville said, “No one comes to Chequers to make up for lost sleep.” But Chequers, too, was regarded as vulnerable to Nazi raiders on nights with a full moon. So he got hold of Ronald Tree, a Tory MP who owned Ditchley, a spacious and beautiful golden stone house in Oxfordshire. Could he and his staff use it on the dangerous weekends? Tree, half American (his money came from the Marshall Field’s department store fortune), with his wife from Virginia, was glad to help. The Churchill circus settled there for a total of fifteen weekends up to March 1942, when the danger from raiders ended. The food was even better than at Chequers, though Churchill once remarked of a sweet course, pushing the plate away, “This pudding has no theme.” It was there also that he objected to a secretary’s saddling him with the typescript of a dictated memo which included a sentence ending with a preposition. It was a grammatical solecism he hated, and he barked, “Up with this I will not put.” He slept in bedroom number one, which has a magnificent four-poster. The house is now a conference center, and I have slept in this bed myself, in Churchillian comfort.

  In the second half of the war, confident in its outcome, Churchill was chiefly preoccupied with keeping as close as possible to the United States while steering it in the direction he wanted to go. He was conscious of the huge superiority of American power but hoped by his ingenuity, powers of argument, and skillful use of his prestige—as when he addressed both houses of Congress—to “punch above my weight,” a phrase he coined. He gloried in the “special relationship,” telling the Commons:The British Empire and the United States have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage. For my own part, looking to the future, I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished. No one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, to broader lands and better days.

  In his dealings with Roosevelt, Churchill had two difficulties. FDR was an anti-imperialist, opposed strongly to Churchill’s evident wish to keep colonies (“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” he said in November 1942). He often suspected Churchill of being guided by imperialist motives when all he wanted was to win the war. But generally, if FDR was oversuspicious of Churchill, he was undersuspicious of Stalin. He had no direct experience of Bolshevism, as Churchill had, and did not hate Communism with every fiber of his being, as Churchill did. In meetings with Stalin, especially at Yalta in January 1945, he blocked Churchill’s attempts to coordinate Anglo-U.S. policy in advance: he did not wish, said Averell Harriman, to “feed Soviet suspicions that the British and Americans could be operating in concert.” Churchill sadly accepted this. As the Red Army began to push the Nazis back in Eastern Europe, he noted:It is beyond the power of this country to prevent all sorts of things crashing at the present time. The responsibility lies with the United States and my desire is to give them all the support in my power. If they do not feel able to do anything, then we must let matters take their course.

  There were, however, many points on which Britain, under Churchill’s leadership, was in a position to influence and even determine events. Where did he succeed, and where did he fail? When was he right and when wrong? He got the Americans to agree to a joint landing in Africa (Operation Torch), which succeeded and led to the surrender of all Axis forces there, as already noted. This was Churchill’s doing and led him in turn to the successful invasions of Sicily and Italy, and the Italian decision to make peace and join the Allies. Compare this, though, with Churchill’s decision to “roll up Italy,” as he put it. He put his old Harrovian friend Field Marshal Alexander, the general he liked most, in charge. But Italy was defended inch by inch by the Germans under Field Marshal Kesselring, the ablest Nazi general of all, and it proved a long and costly campaign. Probably the resources could have been better used elsewhere. Then there was the massive bomber assault of Germany. This was very much Churchill’s campaign, and speaking as one who lived through the war in England, I can testify that it was the most popular of all Churchill’s initiations. It was one reason his popularity remained high even when things were going badly wrong in other parts of the war, for virtually every day BBC radio was able to announce heavy raids on Germany the previous night. The British public rejoiced at these raids, the heavier the better. Churchill never repudiated the bombing campaign, even after the war, whilst it was heavily criticized on both strategic and humanitarian grounds. But he did not dwell on it either, or stress his personal responsibility for initiating and continuing it. The head of Bomber Command, Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris, was made the hero (or villain) of the assault.

  In fact, on February 14, 1942, Harris was directed by the war cabinet that his primary object was the destruction of the morale of German civilians. Churchill wrote this order. The first big raid in accordance with it was on Lübeck on March 28, 1942, the city “burning like kindling,” according to the official report. The first thousand-bomber British raid followed on May 30. Churchill was enthusiastic, for at this date the news was bad and bombing was all he had to show. Altogether, bombing used up 7 percent of Britain’s total manpower and maybe as much as a quarter of the country’s total war production. It killed six hundred thousand German civilians and reduced but could not prevent the expansion of German war production into the second half of 1944. By the end of 1944 bombing was effectively putting the German war economy out of action, but at that point Nazi survival was being decided on the ground anyway. The nearest Harris and Churchill (helped by U.S. air power) came to a strategic victory was on Hamburg, by far the best-protected German city, from July 24 to August 3, 1943. They used the “window” foil device, which confused German radar. On the night of July 27-28, the RAF created temperatures of 800 to 1,000 degrees centigrade over the city, producing colossal firestorm winds. Transport systems of all kinds were destroyed, as were 214,350 homes out of 414,500, and 4,301 out of 9,592 factories. Eight square miles of the city were burned out entirely, and in one night alone up to 37.65 percent of the total population then living in the city were killed. Albert Speer, the war production minister, told Hitler that if another six cities were similarly attacked he could not keep production going. But Britain did not have the resources to repeat raids on this scale in quick succession. The losses in bombers and aircrews were heavy because of Hitler’s concentration of fighter squadrons and air defenses to defend his cities. On the other hand, without the British bombing these assets would otherwise have gone to the eastern front. As a result the Germans lost the air war there: by mid-1943, their air superiority had disappeared, and this was a key factor in the
ir losing the ground war, too. These facts tend to be forgotten by those who assert that it was Russia which really defeated Nazi Germany. Without Churchill’s bombing campaign, the eastern front would have become a stalemate.

  In attacking Germany, Churchill was never held back by humanitarian motives. The destruction of Dresden on the night of February 13-14, 1945, when between 25,000 and 40,000 men, women, and children were killed, was authorized by him personally. The origin of this atrocity was the desire of Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta in January to prove to Stalin that they were doing their best to help the Russian effort on the eastern front. The Russians had particularly asked for Dresden, a communications center, to be wiped out. When Harris queried the order, it was confirmed direct from Yalta by Churchill and Air Chief Marshal Portal. Would Churchill have used the atomic bomb against Germany, had it been available in time? Undoubtedly. The British nuclear weapons project had begun seriously in March 1940, before he took over supreme command. But he accelerated it in June, when the Military Application of Uranium Detonation Committee (or Maud, as it was called, whimsically, after a Kentish governess) was joined by the French team, which brought with them the world’s entire stock of heavy water, 185 kilograms in twenty-six canisters. In the autumn of 1940 Churchill sent a team to Washington headed by Sir Henry Tizard and Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s two leading military scientists, taking with them all Britain’s nuclear secrets in a celebrated “black box.” At that time Britain was ahead of any other nation in the quest for a nuclear bomb, and moving faster. Churchill was asked to authorize production plans for a separation plant by December 1940. In July 1941 he got the Maud Report, “Use of Uranium for a Bomb,” which told him the weapon could be ready by 1943. When America joined the war, Churchill decided that the risk of Nazi raids against a British A-plant was such that it was safer, with the scientific work now complete, for the industrial and engineering work to be done in America. In fact it proved much more difficult, lengthy, and costly than Maud had anticipated. So the first A-bombs were essentially American. If an all-British bomb had been made in time, Churchill would have commanded its use against Germany.