Alone, 1932-1940

by William Manchester

  Franklin Roosevelt later said: “Winston has fifty ideas a day, and three or four are good.” He was no crank; when he hit the jackpot it was the mother lode. Although the Germans were the first to produce the magnetic mine, their very success demonstrated that his conception had been sound. Most of his schemes were politely discussed and then dropped. The difficulty was that his Admiralty staff was dealing with genius, with a man who thought in cosmic terms, and that the price for some of these excursions was beyond the grasp of career naval officers.

  So it was with “Catherine,” named after Catherine the Great, “because,” he explained, “Russia lay in the background of my thought.” Churchill introduced this proposed operation to his closest advisers in a five-page outline on September 12, Britain’s tenth day at war. Unlike the rest of the Admiralty, Churchill had stopped speculating over where the Kriegsmarine would strike next and instead considered a Royal Navy counteroffensive. Thinking defensively, his admirals had assumed that if they could keep U-boat sinkings of Britain-bound merchantmen to a minimum and blockade enemy ports, they would have done their job, leaving it up to the soldiers to do theirs. But the first lord was taking a very different line. He was talking about a naval strategy which had never entered their minds, and as he talked, they wished it hadn’t entered his. The command of the Baltic Sea, as he later pointed out in his memoirs, was “vital to the enemy. Scandinavian supplies, Swedish ore, and above all protection against Russian descents on the long undefended northern coastline of Germany—in one place little more than a hundred miles from Berlin—made it imperative for the German Navy to dominate the Baltic.” Moreover, as he had noted earlier, an “attack upon the Kiel Canal” would render “that side-door from the Baltic useless, even if only at intervals.”48

  Churchill was contemplating an imaginative—and perilous—action: the seizure of the entire Baltic, the Reich’s only sea link with Norway, Finland, and especially Sweden, the Ruhr’s chief source of iron ore. He knew it would be difficult, but no one could doubt that success would bring Hitler to his knees. His source of raw materials for tanks, artillery, mortars, and rifles would be cut off.

  A critical challenge lay in the narrow waters joining the North Sea and the Baltic; navigation of them by a strong fleet would attract swarms of Luftwaffe bombers. Winston had already discussed possible solutions with the Admiralty’s director of naval construction. “It would… be necessary,” he noted in his September 12 memorandum, “to strengthen the armour deck so as to give exceptional protection against air attack.” He planned to commit two British battleships (“but of course 3 would be better”) with fifteen-inch guns; “their only possible antagonists” would be the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, “the sole resources of Germany” in the battleship class. Both would be destroyed by the heavier guns of the British battleships, which would outrange them and “would shatter them.” Escorting them, and shielding them, would be a dozen vessels yet to be built, “mine bumpers,” he called them, with “a heavy fore end to take the shock of any exploding mine.” Confiding only in Pound, he set down the five-page précis of his plan, marked “Most Secret.” He wrote: “I commend these ideas to your study, hoping that the intention will be to solve the difficulties.” Distribution of Catherine was confined to eight copies, “of which all except one,” he wrote, “will be destroyed after the necessary examination has been made.”49

  Pound commented: “There can be little doubt that if we could maintain control of the Baltic for a considerable period it would greatly enhance our prestige.” But the first sea lord saw difficulties. If the Soviet Union became a Nazi ally, the operation was doomed. The “active cooperation of Sweden” in providing a base, repair facilities, and oil must be assured, and the British ships committed must be expendable, “such that we can with our Allies at that time win the war without [them], in spite of any probable combination against us.” Winston scrawled, “I entirely agree.” To him Catherine had become “the supreme naval offensive open to the Royal Navy.” Others receiving Winston’s presentation studied it seriously and thought it feasible if… And then they, too, saw problems. The decisive problem was air power. Even admirals who underrated it had to consider the Luftwaffe threat. Battleships could be taken into the Baltic, but RAF fighters could not accompany them; the ships would be under constant, heavy attack from land-based enemy aircraft. Churchill dismissed the Luftwaffe. He wrote Roosevelt: “We have not been at all impressed by the accuracy of the German air bombing of our warships. They seem to have no effective bomb sights.” In any event, he held, the ship’s antiaircraft gunners could eliminate the air threat.50

  He convinced no one. The support for Catherine, never strong, faded away. Moreover, it seems not to have occurred to Winston that the Nazis could occupy Denmark, move heavy artillery to the shore, and lay mines in the Kogrund Channel. Catherine died a slow, quiet, expensive death. Apart from preempting the time of Britain’s best naval minds, twelve million pounds was spent on special equipment for the battleships’ escorts. Churchill was disappointed, but because the entire plan had been highly classified he faced no barrage of criticism. Indeed, his reputation at the Admiralty shone as brightly as ever. The general verdict among the sea lords and other senior officials was that Catherine had been brilliantly conceived, that it could have ended the war if successful, but that too much had been at stake—and the ice too thin for skating.

  Slowly the Admiralty came to realize that while the first lord might be dissuaded from this or that, he never lost because he never quit; his mind had many tracks, and if one was blocked, he left it and turned to another, the very existence of which was unknown until he chose to reveal it. Admiral Fraser, the flag officer responsible for naval construction, later wrote how Winston stunned him by asking him point-blank: “Well, Admiral, what is the navy doing about RDF?” Fraser was tongue-tied. Radar was the most closely guarded secret in the British military establishment, roughly comparable to America’s Manhattan Project three years later. “A number of able officers were working on the problem,” Fraser later wrote, “but to make any real progress a high degree of priority—especially in finance—was essential.”51

  Fully developed RDF had been a casualty of Chamberlain’s cuts in military spending. England should have had a long lead with this extraordinary defensive weapon; Englishmen had discovered and perfected it, and Zossen didn’t even know it existed. Yet not a single vessel in the Royal Navy had been equipped with it. After a long silence Churchill said, “Well, Admiral, it is very important,” and later sent Fraser an instruction that all British warships, particularly “those engaged in the U-boat fighting,” be provided “with this distinguishing apparatus.” Fraser wondered how Churchill, a backbencher until the day England declared war on Germany, had heard about RDF. His bewilderment would have deepened had he known that Winston’s knowledge of radar dated from July 25, 1935—within twenty-four hours of Robert Watson-Watt’s completion of experiments proving that the distance and direction of approaching aircraft could be pinpointed by using radio waves.52

  If all the views of Churchill’s months at the Admiralty are pooled—Winston seen in the letters, diaries, memoirs, and recollections of those who worked under him then and were close enough to reach informed judgments—a striking portrait emerges. It is distorted as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is distorted, complex and defying proportion but recognizable as the powerful image of an emerging warlord. The approval or disapproval of the witnesses is essentially irrelevant. They see him differently because he is different to each, possessing a plural, kaleidoscopic personality. His guise depends upon the man confronting him, and what he wants that man to see.

  The first sea lord outranks the others and is closest to him. His admiration for Churchill is almost unqualified. No one in the Royal Navy can launch a direct attack on the first lord because Sir Dudley Pound, a great sailor and a man of absolute integrity, will deflect the blow. Pound’s loyalty is reinforced by the first lord’s popularity in
the fleet. Captain S. W. Roskill, the distinguished naval historian, challenges this popularity, noting that “There was not one Admiral in an important sea command… whom Churchill, sometimes with Pound’s support, did not attempt to have relieved.” But admirals are not the fleet. Below decks, support for the first lord is strong. The ratings admire a fighter; they have heard of his concern for their welfare, which is genuine, and see him as a stimulating, inspiring first lord. Winston’s constituency, then, is solidly behind him.53

  He needs that support because a warlord, by definition, is a man with enemies. His natural aggression, curbed in peacetime, a stigma only a year earlier, is now a virtue. He cannot compromise, nor should he. Leaders in battle are guided less by reason than by instinct. He has always distrusted Eamon de Valera, and now in the War Cabinet he proposes that England reclaim her former bases in Eire, by force if necessary. Even Pound knows that the navy has no use for the bases and can easily deny them to the Germans. Churchill is wrong. Nevertheless, Englishmen approve, remembering: Churchill stood up to the IRA. Sir Andrew Cunningham, the RN’s Mediterranean commander in chief, protests the first lord’s repeated interference in tactical issues, telling him not only what to do, but how to do it. Commanders in chief in other theaters have the same grievance but wisely remain silent. Cunningham wins little sympathy in England. Churchill has shown him who’s in charge. Winston has issued an order—“Plan R”—for strengthening the defenses at Scapa Flow. Contracts are signed. Nothing happens. He issues a general order to the Admiralty, reminding all hands of the time lag since Plan R was approved, and asks: “What, in fact, has been done since? How many blockships sunk? How many nets made? How many men have been in work for how many days? What buildings have been erected? What gun sites have been concreted and prepared? What progress has been made with the run-ways of the aerodrome? I thought we settled two months ago to have a weekly report…. Up to the present I share the Commander-in-Chief’s anxieties about the slow progress of this indispensable work.”54

  That is on a Monday. On Tuesday Scapa is a hive of construction activity. R. D. Oliver, the officer responsible for Plan R, recalls: “With his backing it was amazing how bureaucratic obstruction melted.” The impression: Churchill gets things done.55

  In the House of Commons he consistently overstates the number of Nazi U-boats destroyed. His old adversaries make much of that, but this is war; facts are its first casualties. Leaders exaggerate the enemy’s losses and inflate their own triumphs. To do otherwise would be interpreted, in the eyes of his people and his foes, as a sign of weakness. Donald McLachan, who understands this, writes afterward: “The First Lord had a morale role to play. The Navy was the only Service which was fully engaged at the time; it must not be discouraged by too rigorous a method of assessing ‘kills’; it was essential that the nation should have some sense of action and success and achievement; and the only material that was readily available at that time came from the U-boat war. It was essential to make the most of what was happening [though] in the process truth suffered.” Significantly, in less than a year the RAF will play faster and looser with its kill figures, but its records will go virtually unchallenged. There is no Churchill at the Air Ministry to incite critics.56

  Nevertheless Churchill is disqualified, by temperament, from waging an effective campaign against U-boats. He has known from the beginning that if Britain loses the duel with Nazi submarines she cannot survive. The high priority he gives to converting trawlers into antisub vessels and his emphasis on destroyer production will contribute to the Admiralty’s eventual success. The difficulty is that all this is defensive, and he is comfortable only when carrying the war to the enemy. He overrates the asdic. Worse, he withdraws destroyers from convoys to form “hunting groups” or “attacking groups,” directing them to seek and destroy U-boats. This is “aggressive,” he argues; convoy duty, on the other hand, is “passive.” He minutes to Pound—who agrees—that “Nothing can be more important in the anti-submarine war than to try to obtain an independent flotilla which could work like a cavalry division.” He is dead wrong; weakening convoys to permit offensive sweeps fails on both counts—no U-boats are sunk, and their elusive commanders, seizing opportunities while the destroyers are looking for them elsewhere, penetrate convoys with alarming results. Yet Churchill will stick to his “hunt ’em down” strategy after he becomes prime minister. Not until 1942, when the effectiveness of the convoy strategy has been demonstrated beyond all doubt, does he accept it without reservation.57

  Meetings of the full cabinet, the War Cabinet, and the Land Forces Committee engage him in frequent and often lengthy colloquies with men against whom he has been waging parliamentary guerrilla warfare for the better part of a decade. He bears no grudges—“The only man I hate is Hitler,” he says, “and that’s professional”—but some of his adversaries are less generous. Although the year since Munich should have humbled them, humility is a rare virtue among men of this class, especially at this time. Sam Hoare was first lord in 1936 and 1937; he cannot evade some of the responsibility for the neglect of Scapa’s defenses, without which Lieutenant Commander Prien’s feat would have been impossible. Yet if Hoare has ever suffered a pang of guilt, no one has heard him acknowledge it. In the first days of the war he was heard describing Churchill as “an old man who easily gets tired,” a judgment which would startle those at the Admiralty trying to match the old man’s pace. According to John Reith, whom Chamberlain brings into the government as minister of information, the prime minister says Churchill’s reputation is “inflated,” largely “based on broadcasts.” Reith, who would have prevented those broadcasts if Winston hadn’t been a minister, agrees, and notes in his diary that there is “no doubt” about how the P.M. “feels about Churchill.” Early in the war Hoare tells Beaverbrook that at meetings Winston is “very rhetorical, very emotional, and, most of all, very reminiscent.” Actually, the Cabinet Papers show that Churchill, like everyone else at the time, is trying to understand what is happening in Poland.58

  blitz · krieg… [G, lit., lightning war, fr. blitz lightning + krieg war]….

  So the word appears in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, presented as a term borrowed from the German. The anonymous journalist who first used it in an English periodical clearly agreed. “In the opening stage of the war,” he wrote in the October 7, 1939, issue of War Illustrated, “all eyes were turned on Poland, where the German military machine was engaged in Blitz-Krieg—lightning war—with a view to ending it as soon as possible.” In fact, the term “lightning war,” like the concept itself, was of British origin. The bloody stalemate of 1914–1918 had bred pacifism and isolationism among civilians. Professional soldiers—and one statesman, Churchill—agreed that a reprise of trench warfare, with its adumbrations of stalemate and lethal attrition, was unthinkable.

  They doubted, however, that it could be abolished; like Plato they believed that only the dead have seen the end of war. Therefore, men like Major General J. F. C. Fuller and Captain Basil Liddell Hart, searching for an alternative, studied Great War engagements in which tanks had been used successfully. Working out the theoretical possibilities of a totally mechanized offensive, they evolved the doctrine of mobile warfare, combining tanks and tactical aircraft. Commenting on the Wehrmacht’s Polish campaign Liddell Hart wrote: “When the theory had been originally developed, in Britain, its action had been depicted in terms of the play of ‘lightning.’ From now on, aptly but ironically, it came into worldwide currency under the title of ‘Blitzkrieg’—the German rendering.”59

  It might also have been christened guerre d’éclairs, for in Paris Colonel Charles de Gaulle, working independently, as always, had reached the same conclusion: “la fluidité” would be imperative on battlefields of the future and must be achieved, for “the sword is the axis of the world.” But neither England nor France was interested in military innovation between the wars. Victors rarely are. Professional soldiers are wedded to tradition and resent
change; politicians and the public flinch at the prospect of slaughter.60

  The Conseil Supérieur had dismissed de Gaulle as an eccentric; Fuller, who had a knack for rubbing people the wrong way, was forced into early retirement; Liddell Hart was regarded as an entertaining writer with beguiling but impractical ideas.

  Colonel Heinz Guderian, an enthusiastic reader of Fuller and Liddell Hart, was luckier. In the years before the Republic of Germany became the Third Reich, Guderian’s superiors, like their fellow generals in England and France, were skeptical of mobile warfare. But he was among the ablest officers in the Reichswehr, the Wehrmacht’s precursor, and so they threw him a sop—command of an armored battalion. He had no tanks, only automobiles with canvas superstructures identified by cardboard signs, PANZER or PANZERWAGEN, and aircraft had to be imagined. Then came Hitler. Like Churchill, the new Reich chancellor was fascinated by technical innovation. He first visited army maneuvers in the spring of 1933, and while other spectators were amused by Guderian’s performance, Hitler instantly grasped its possibilities. He cried: “That’s what I need! That’s what I want!”61

  Later Goebbels tried—with considerable success—to convince the world that every German division invading Poland was armored. Actually only nine were; the other forty-seven comprised familiar, foot-slogging infantrymen, wearing the same coal-scuttle helmets, the same field gray uniforms, and equipped much as their fathers had been on the Somme, in Flanders, and in the Argonne. That does not slight them; the Führer’s soldiers were the best fighting men in Europe, and their morale was now at fever pitch. But it was the panzers which were terrifying. Each of Guderian’s divisions was self-contained, comprising two tank regiments, self-propelled guns, and supporting units—engineers, reconnaissance companies, antitank and antiaircraft batteries, signalmen, and a regiment of infantry—transported on trucks or armored half-tracks. The Poles prayed for rain; commentators talked about “General Mud,” as though World War II might be called off because of bad weather. But God wasn’t riding at the Poles’ stirrups that golden month. In 1870 and 1914 men in spiked helmets had talked of Kaiserwetter. Now it was Hitlerwetter, and Guderian’s men found the dry, rolling plains of Poland ideal for maneuver.