by Paul Johnson
Perhaps his greatest contribution to the successful outcome of the war, at this stage, was his insistence on the right timing for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of northwest Europe. This was necessary for the defeat of Germany, and Churchill made sure it worked and was achieved with minimum loss of life for so immense and hazardous an operation. He argued that an opposed air-sea landing against formidable defenses manned by large, prepared German forces was perhaps the most difficult military undertaking of all. With the costly failure of Gallipoli always in his mind, he insisted that D-day should not take place until overwhelming strength was established and there was a near certitude of success. The Russians had asked for the second front to be opened in 1942. The Americans were willing to risk it in 1943. The “dress rehearsal” at Dieppe in 1942, where Allied losses were unexpectedly high, had shown what hazards lay ahead. Churchill’s conditions could not be met until the early summer of 1944. Even so, Overlord might have failed or proved extremely costly had not a highly successful deception plan persuading the Germans that the Normandy landings were a feint and that the real invasion was planned for the Pas de Calais area—another idea of Churchill’s—prevented a massive German counterattack in the early stages. Thanks to Churchill, and his memories of the Dardanelles, Overlord was a dramatic success. He wished to be present on the first day to enjoy his triumph. It was the last major occasion on which his desire to participate in military action manifested itself. All those concerned in the operation were horrified. Indeed, the desire was foolish in the extreme, a grotesque exhibition of the childish side of his nature. But he persisted, despite unanimous opposition from the service chiefs, the cabinet, his own staff, and the White House. In the end it was only the opposition of King George VI, who said that if his prime minister risked his life he must do so himself, which scotched the plan.
The delay occasioned by Churchill’s ensuring the invasion succeeded necessarily meant the Western forces were behind the Russians in pushing into the heart of the Nazi empire. This had grave political consequences. Churchill sought to mitigate them by demanding a full-speed drive to Berlin by the Anglo-American forces. This was supported by Montgomery, the army group commander, who was sure it was possible and would end the war in autumn 1944, with the West in Berlin first. But Eisenhower, the supreme commander, thought it was risky and insisted on a “broad front” advance, which meant that the war continued into the spring of 1945, and that the Russians got to Berlin first—and Prague, Budapest, Vienna, too. In his last weeks of life, FDR, despite Churchill’s pleas, did nothing to encourage Eisenhower to press on rapidly. Montgomery wrote sadly: “The Americans could not understand that it was of little avail to win the war strategically if we lost it politically.” That was exactly Churchill’s view.
But if he was unable to stop Stalin from turning much of Eastern Europe and the Balkans into Soviet satellites, he did snatch one brand from the burning—Greece. He used British troops, against much well-meaning advice, to intervene decisively in the civil war raging there between Communist guerrillas and forces loyal to the Crown. The politics were complex and made it difficult to decide whom to back among the contending loyalist leaders. Eventually Churchill decided in favor of the republican, anti-Communist general Nikolaos Plastiras. He joked, “The evidence shows we must back Plaster-arse. Let us hope his feet are not of clay.” “Tommy” Lascelles, King George VI’s secretary, remarked, “I would rather have said that than written Gray’s Elegy.”
Churchill also saved Persia by negotiating a highly satisfactory deal with the Russians, which enabled the British eventually to reduce their influence to a minimum. He kept a tight grip on the Persian Gulf and its oil fields. Of course, by saving Greece, he also enabled Turkey to stay beyond the reach of the triumphant Soviet forces. What is more, by picking a first-class general and backing him with adequate forces, Churchill also made a major contribution to victory in the Far East. Field Marshal William Slim was, next to Montgomery, the ablest of the British generals produced by the war. His Fourteenth Army was often called “the Forgotten Army,” in contrast to Montgomery’s famous Eighth Army. But it was not forgotten by Churchill. With his encouragement and support it conducted a hard and skillful campaign in Burma, ending in complete victory, which did a great deal to restore British prestige so cruelly damaged by the Singapore disaster. Indeed within four years Britain was able to get back Singapore, Malaya, and Hong Kong. Of course the restoration of Britain’s power in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Far East could not be permanent. But for most of a generation, and in some cases longer, Britain was able to enjoy the economic advantages brought by her investments in Gulf oil, Malay rubber and tin, and the mercantile wealth of Hong Kong. For this, Churchill’s energy, foresight, and ability to seize on the essentials deserve much of the credit.
As the war drew to a close in the early months of 1945, Churchill visibly held back his efforts. His aggressiveness declined. He enjoyed his brief and successful intervention in Greece. But destruction now sickened him. He sent a memo to Harris to slacken off the attack on German cities as opposed to strategic targets, “otherwise,” as he put it, “what will lie between the white snows of Russia and white cliffs of Dover? ” Much of his imaginative energy was spent in trying to get the sick Roosevelt to do the sensible thing. “No lover,” he said, “ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.” The death of FDR, however painful to Churchill, came as a relief, especially as Harry S. Truman, brisk, decisive, much better informed on strategy, proved infinitely easier to deal with. When Churchill was tired, he talked, often off the point. He refused to read his papers. Colville noted on April 26: “The PM’s box is in a ghastly state. He does little work and talks far too long, as he did . . . before his Greek adventures refreshed him.” The businesslike and monosyllabic Clement Attlee, his deputy premier, sent him a sharp memo of complaint. Churchill is credited with many jokes about the Labour Party leader. “Yes, he is a modest man. But then he has so much to be modest about.” “An empty taxi drew up outside the House of Commons, and Mr. Attlee got out.” Sometimes they were mean and savage: “Attler, Hitlee.” One of Attlee’s staff used to whistle, a habit Churchill could not bear. His antipathy to whistling is curiously apt, for Hitler was an expert and enthusiastic whistler: he could do the entire score of The Merry Widow, his favorite operetta. It seems expert whistling by music lovers was a feature of pre-1914 Vienna: Gustav Mahler and Ludwig Wittgenstein were whistler maestros.
Tired as he was, Churchill treated the surrender of Germany with suitable rhetoric and champagne popping. He drank a bottle of his prize 1928 vintage Pol Roger. He was relieved by Hitler’s suicide. He had not relished the prospective task of hanging him. As Beaverbrook said, “He is never vindictive.” His saying had always been—it is one of his best obiter dicta—“In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance. In victory, magnanimity. In peace, goodwill.” Magnanimity came naturally to this generous, jovial old man (he was seventy at the end of the war). Lord Longford, the British minister for postwar Germany, showed notable compassion for the German people. Churchill came up to him at a Buckingham Palace garden party and said, slowly, “I am glad that there is one mind suffering for the miseries of the Germans.”
Churchill wanted to carry on the coalition until Japan surrendered. But the Labour Party refused. So he formed a Tory government, had Parliament (which was now ten years old) dissolved, and reluctantly began an election campaign. He hit hard, or rather fairly hard, for him. The prevailing wisdom was that he hit too hard, and that his anti-Labour speeches, inspired, it was said, by Lord Beaverbrook, did the Tory cause terrible harm. Nothing could be further from the truth. No one took much notice of opinion polls in those days. In fact Gallup had been predicting a Labour victory for some time by the huge margin of 10 percent: a landslide. Churchill had a good case. After all, if his advice had been taken in the 1930s, the war might have been avoided altogether. By contrast, Labour had opposed rearming Britain
right up to the declaration of war. Attlee himself had told the Commons on December 21, 1933, “We are unalterably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament.” Churchill was right to remind voters of these things. There was nothing personal in his criticism. Before the Labour ministers left his government, he gave a party for them and offered a toast. With tears running down his cheeks, he said, “The light of history will shine on all your helmets.” The evidence shows that Churchill’s speeches reduced the Labour lead to 8.5 percent by polling day. There was a delay between polling and the announcement of the results to allow the voters of the overseas forces to be counted. Few, it is thought, voted against Churchill. The vote was against the Tory Party, or rather against the upper classes, the officer class who spoke in clipped accents, wore cavalry breeches, and drank port after dinner. The result was due to be announced on July 26. The night before, Churchill recorded, he was awoken by a presentiment of disaster: “a sharp stab of almost physical pain.” The next day came the news: Labour had won nearly 400 seats, the Conservatives were reduced to 210 seats, and Churchill was out. As he put it:On the night of 10 May 1940, at the outset of the mighty Battle of Britain, I acquired the chief power in the State, which henceforth I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.
Mrs. Churchill’s comment was: “Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise.” To which Churchill replied: “It appears to be very effectively disguised.”
Chapter Seven
Glorious Twilight
Clementine Churchill’s belief that the 1945 defeat might prove a blessing was abundantly justified, in many different ways. First, it spared her husband the agony of presiding over a dramatic but inevitable contraction of Britain’s global power. The country emerged from six years of total war exhausted, impoverished, and emotionally numb. Clement Attlee’s Labour government had no inhibitions about giving India its independence. As Churchill had predicted, the vast country split into Hindu and Moslem halves, accompanied by terrible slaughter. But the disintegration he feared did not take place. Indeed, the emergence of India as a great modern economic power, which he believed would take place under British tutelage, eventually began under Indian leadership a generation after his death. An India becoming rich, which Gandhi was sure would destroy her culture and soul, was to Churchill a welcome prospect, a final justification of British rule. So in this respect he was ultimately proved right, and Gandhi wrong. But he was glad he was spared the duty of setting India free. As usual, however, having fought the legislation through all its stages, he accepted the verdict of Parliament. As he said to Nehru, the new Indian prime minister, “It is now your task to lead to prosperity the India I loved and served.”
He was also spared the pain of presiding over Israel’s birth. A fervent Zionist he remained. Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, the founding fathers, were friends. But he could not bear the savage terrorist campaign waged by Irgun and the Stern Gang and against British troops, which preceded Israel’s formation. “I try to put everything concerning Palestine out of my mind,” he said sadly.
As he saw it, his main global task during his period of opposition was twofold. First to arouse the world, and especially the United States, to the dangers presented by the power of Stalin’s Soviet Union. In America he was universally popular. On March 6, 1946, invited by President Truman, who became a firm friend and a warm admirer, to make a major speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, his home state, Churchill responded with a call to vigilance in response to the Soviet peril. “An iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” he said. Whether he invented the term “iron curtain” is a matter of dispute. He certainly popularized it, as well as “cold war”—“A cold war against Russia has replaced the hot war against Germany,” as he put it. But Churchill equally saw his second task was to promote dialogue across the cold war iron curtain. He wanted summits, as always. A favorite saying of his was “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.” He much resented the accusation that he was a man of war, still more a warmonger. In 1941 he allowed himself to be photographed holding a Thompson sub-machine gun, part of a shipment from America. It was often used against him to illustrate the image of “Gangster Churchill” harped on by Hitler and occasionally by his Labour enemies. But it was a splendid photo, and Churchill loved it. When he made his wartime voyages across the Atlantic by liner, he insisted the lifeboat to which he was assigned be provided with “tommy guns.” “I dread capture more than death,” he said, “and I will go down fighting.”
All the same, he was anxious to lose his reputation for bellicosity. That was why he welcomed the emergence of Ernest Bevin as a tough, resolute, and, if necessary, fierce foreign secretary in 1945, one quite capable of standing up to the Russians and giving them, to use his terminology, “what for.” He also applauded Attlee for his firm handling of Soviet forward moves, especially during the Berlin blockade. He disliked belittling remarks about Attlee (except when he made them himself ). Once, at Chartwell, Sir John Rodgers referred to Attlee as “silly old Attlee.” Churchill exploded:Mr Attlee is Prime Minister of England. Mr Attlee was Deputy Prime Minister during the War, and played a great part in winning the War. Mr Attlee is a great patriot. Don’t you dare call him “silly old Attlee” at Chartwell or you won’t be invited again.
Churchill considered it fortunate that the war in Korea came while Attlee and Labour were still in power. He told a group of Tory MPs early in 1951, “We had no alternative but to fight, but if I had been Prime Minister, they would have called me a warmonger. As it is, I have not been called upon to take so invidious a step as to send our young men to fight on the other side of the globe. The Old Man has been good to me.” Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, MP, was puzzled. “What old man, sir?” Churchill chuckled. “Why, Sir Reginald. Almighty God, the Ruler of the Universe!”
It is likely that the 1945 election result was also a blessing simply in relieving Churchill’s workload. If he had carried on as prime minister without a break, he might not have lived long. That was the medical view. As it was, while attending the House of Commons often and making some memorable speeches, he was able to hand over the main business of the Opposition to younger men: Eden, R. A. Butler, Oliver Lyttelton, and Harold Macmillan. He enjoyed many breaks. He took his painting more and more seriously. After his defeat, Field Marshal Alexander placed at his disposal a superb villa his army had commanded overlooking Lake Como, and Churchill set to, to paint the glorious scenery there. The news of his skill as a landscape painter was spreading. The rich began to collect his work. His canvases fetched high prices in the auction rooms. His excellent book Painting as a Pastime circulated widely and won the approval of the president of the Royal Academy, Sir Alfred Munnings, who wanted anyone of talent to take up painting and thought Churchill a shining example of how high an amateur could rise with proper encouragement and enthusiasm. He contrived to get Churchill elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy Extraordinary. Nothing in Churchill’s life gave him greater pleasure. He sent his pictures to the summer exhibition and always, if he could, attended the annual banquet, often speaking there. He and Munnings had a lot in common, especially love of life and color and detestation of “modern art.” Munnings related: “Mr. Churchill said to me, ‘Alf, if you were walking down Piccadilly, and you saw Picasso walking in front of you, what would you do? ’ ‘Kick his arse, Mr. Churchill.’ ‘Quite right, Alf.’ ”
In addition, Churchill took up racing. Clemmie disapproved: “A rich man’s sport,” she said. “Before he bought the horse (I can’t think why) he had hardly been on a racecourse in his life.” Actually, the idea came from his son-in-law Christopher Soames, who had married his daughter Mary and who loved racehorses. The old idol ization of his father stirred in Churchill’s veins: “I can revive my father’s racing colours.” He
did, and set up a small stud near New-chapel Green, convenient for Lingfield races and not far from Chartwell. He acquired (among others) a gray colt called Colonist II, which won thirteen races for him, including some big ones, and proved a popular bet among working-class punters before going out to stud. Churchill was elected to the Jockey Club in 1950 and loved that, too. Moreover, owning racehorses, far from ruining him, actually made him quite a bit of money.
But the chief activity of the postwar Churchill was writing. This is the main reason Clementine was right to say the 1945 defeat was a blessing in disguise. He had always believed—he said so explicitly in May 1938—“Words are the only things that last for ever.” Between 1941 and 1945 he had performed great deeds. Now he needed to write the words to ensure that the deeds were correctly described and so made immortal. After the 1945 landslide, he buckled down to the immense and daunting task of writing his war memoirs immediately. The work was pressed forward with all deliberate speed and with all the resources of intellect and energy. Despite its immense length—over 2 million words—the great majority of the book was done by the time he returned to power at the end of 1951. It is a disturbing thought that if he had remained in office it might never have been done at all. If, by carrying on with his overwhelming efforts as premier, especially in the disheartening conditions of the postwar world, he had shortened his life, it would certainly not have been done. The world would have lost a masterpiece, and our view of Churchill might now be distinctly different.