The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  The first North African campaign under the poetry-loving imperial general Archibald Wavell, who had started his fighting career in the Boer War, went astonishingly well. Out-of-date Italian forces advanced towards out-of-date British ones in Egypt. Then, under General O’Connor, an audacious British (and Indian) blitzkrieg drove them all the way back again, and further. There were extraordinary heroics by British tank crews and Australian riflemen in a sixty-two-day campaign that had begun as a quick raid. By the time it was over in February 1941, the British Empire forces had advanced 500 miles, taking 133,000 men prisoner as well as capturing hundreds of tanks. Yet just when Wavell’s army could have finally finished off the Italians in North Africa, Churchill ordered him to turn instead to help defend the Greeks. They were being attacked by Mussolini’s army too, and had done a brutally effective job in repulsing them. Now, however, the Germans were intent on taking Greece, via Yugoslavia and with the help of their new Balkan allies. Trying to keep Greece in the war, as he had tried to keep France, Churchill told Wavell to send 60,000 men to repel the Germans. Supported by RAF aircraft, which were outnumbered about ten to one – far from the Battle of Britain odds – and equipped with tanks which broke down, the British, Australian and New Zealand troops had no chance. They were quickly and easily beaten and soon had to stage a Mediterranean Dunkirk, without the uplifting politics, retreating to Crete. That island, an important staging post for all sides, was then seized by German parachutists in a daring, bloody and (for Britain) humiliating campaign. Although successful, the losses by the attackers were so great that the Germans never attempted a mass parachute attack again; the point was obviously lost on the Allies, who started training to copy them.

  Meanwhile, as the rest of the British and Commonwealth troops waited at Benghazi in Libya for orders to move forward again and finish off the Italians, a small hitch had occurred. Its name was Erwin Rommel. Rommel was already a German military celebrity and had been sent by Hitler to lead the newly formed Afrika Korps and help hold the Italian line. Wavell’s top brass assumed that in desert conditions, with long supply lines for fuel and water, there was little chance of an early German attack. Within weeks Rommel had charged forward and thrown the depleted British forces into headlong retreat. In just three weeks he took back all the territory O’Connor had won from the Italians and soon had the Australian and other defenders of Tobruk surrounded, beginning a siege which would last for six months. A British counter-attack was smashed using the deadly German ‘88’ anti-aircraft guns as anti-tank weapons. Churchill sacked Wavell and appointed a new commander, an Indian Army man, General Claude Auchinleck, whom he ordered to mount a fresh attack. Auchinleck, who, like Wavell, believed he had nothing like the necessary preparation, refused.

  Rommel meanwhile prepared for another thrust that would throw the British out of Egypt and enable him to move into the oilfields. In theory it would have been a war-winning gambit: for Britain, Cairo was a key location for the whole conflict, linking the Mediterranean, India, oil and Africa. To lose there would have been disastrous. Had Rommel got the tanks and troops he wanted from Hitler, it is entirely possible that this is just what would have happened. However, when he visited the Nazi leader, of whom he was at this stage a devoted fan, Rommel found him strangely distracted and vague about the future of the desert campaign. This was not surprising. Hitler was planning something bigger. In June 1941 he launched 3 million men into his war-losing invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. Four out of five German soldiers who died in the war would die on the Russian front. This gave Britain the first of her two major allies and it ensured that Rommel would never have the tanks, oil, men and equipment he needed to defeat British forces in the Mediterranean. Yet early in 1941 none of that was obvious or preordained. Meanwhile Rommel intended to start by taking Tobruk.

  As is well known, he found this no easy task, and in November a long-awaited British counter-attack was launched that eventually rescued the isolated garrison from its long siege. By now, all around, the shape of the world was shifting. On the same day in December 1941 that Rommel ordered his pull-back, Japan attacked the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor; four days later America entered the war, giving Britain her second and dominating ally. Meanwhile, refreshed and as daring as ever, Rommel launched a counter-attack of his own in May 1942 and captured Tobruk at last, taking 30,000 prisoners with a smaller force of his own. This was humiliating news, made more bitter still for Churchill because the message was passed to him by President Roosevelt while he was visiting him in America. Churchill partly responded by talking up the brilliance and mythical wisdom of Rommel – ‘May I say, across the havoc of war, a great general.’ Rommel became an odd kind of British hero too. Meanwhile, the great general was looking across the havoc of war and seeing the road to Cairo in front of him. All that stood in his way was the last key defensive area in the narrow fighting strip between the sea and the sand, El-Alamein. Auchinleck was standing there, building up his forces for the next battle. We have seen how politics and military strategy constantly clashed. They did again, with bloody results. Churchill now needed a quick victory. His new US allies were leading the joint Anglo-American ‘Torch’ landings further west in French-held North Africa and would eventually come behind Rommel. For Churchill’s own position, British honour and the by now rather ragged reputation of British arms, it was important that Rommel lose to the Old World, not the New.

  This was not the only way in which politics and war-making were entangled. If the Germans had an iconic military hero, so too must the British. Enter, in August 1942, the infuriatingly self-publicizing, rude and occasionally brilliant Bernard Montgomery. Churchill had lost faith in the cautious Auchinleck, as he had in the cautious Wavell. He sacked him and other key generals, men who had not only built up the Eighth Army but also drawn up many of the plans which would be adapted and claimed as his own by Montgomery. Churchill’s second choice – his first was killed in a plane crash – Montgomery was, as a strategist, more cautious still. Protected by his commander, Sir Harold Alexander, ‘Monty’ used his personality and self-confidence to get Churchill’s agreement to an attack even later than that planned by Auchinleck. Replacements have special rights. Other British generals tended to be clipped, traditionalist, formal men of few words. Flamboyant and inspirational, Monty was made for this new age of the celebrity general. He was perfect fodder for the hacks in battledress and the mass-circulation newspapers that would make him a star.

  Rommel wore large British-made goggles on his cap and posed on Panzer tanks. Monty adopted a floppy beret – not his idea, but that of the head of the British army film unit, someone we would now call a spin-doctor – and was photographed with binoculars on a British tank.150 He was brutal in his language, a master at blaming others for any problems while scooping the personal credit for successes. His commander-in-chief, Lord Alexander, is dryly hilarious about him in his restrained memoirs. But Monty became almost as great a hero to his men and the British public as Rommel was in Germany. He cajoled, inspired, mocked and buzzed noisily around in a way no previous British general had. Many of those who worked closely with him seem to have loathed him: General Patton certainly did and, personally, Churchill was no fan. But Monty had that go-and-kill-them spirit he called, obscurely, ‘binge’. Again and again, in the desert and later after the D-Day landings, he would prove very slow in pursuit, and missed good opportunities because of it. He believed in assembling irresistible force and then destroying the enemy: despite the floppy hat and self-publicity, Monty was no cavalier.

  Before El-Alamein he was both quiet and noisy. His noisiness was plain in his public pep-talking and tearing up of any plans for a further withdrawal. Quietly, however, he was taking and adapting Auchinleck’s battle-plan while building up his forces to the point where British superiority in air power, tanks and men was all but overwhelming. He had nearly 200,000 men to Rommel’s 104,000 and he had 950 tanks, many of them new American ones which had bee
n snatched from the US army on Roosevelt’s orders, compared to the 450-strong combined German and Italian tank forces. In terms of effectiveness, his superiority was even greater. Thanks to the Enigma code-breakers, he knew exactly what Rommel was saying to Hitler, often reading German reports before Hitler did. He could have lost the battle even so. He could have been lured into the open and allowed superior German tanks freedom to operate properly. But sheer British firepower made it a hard battle to lose.

  On 23 October 1942 the Eighth Army opened up with a massive artillery barrage, beginning an eleven-day battle hailed afterwards as the turning-point in the war – though the real swivel was occurring at the same time 1,500 miles to the north-east at Stalingrad, a vastly bigger fight. The British made frontal and very bloody advances in a meat-grinder battle which simply shredded the Afrika Korps until Rommel, who had been ill and hurried back from Germany to direct the battle, was forced to disobey Hitler’s ‘victory or death’ order and retreat while he still had an army intact. Montgomery could afford to lose two or three tanks to every Axis tank destroyed and simply keep going; and though the battle had many twists and turns, in essence that is what he did. Refused permission by Hitler to leave North Africa and regroup in Italy, most of the Afrika Korps would eventually be captured after a long pursuit and battles, now involving the Americans too. Churchill and Montgomery would have lost far fewer dead had they delayed the attack until the US army was advancing at Rommel from behind, but that would have been to lose face. (Montgomery’s biographer and some historians counter-argue that El-Alamein was fought ‘early’ to demoralize the Pétain-supporting French forces in Tunisia and so aid the American landings; though motives are hard to prove so long afterwards, it seems a weaker case.)

  The British attack had been launched two weeks before the US fleet and invasion force arrived in North Africa. It was won with all the odds for, not against them. It did not turn the British army into the equal of the German one in making bold tactical advances – German officers thought their opponents slow, pedestrian and easy to second-guess. But it did show that Britain had learned the importance of coordinating air power, strong supply lines and overwhelming force – not to mention the navy, which cut off many of Rommel’s supplies. The victory came like a sudden ray of hope to the British. The BBC news announcer was so excited he forgot the traditional calm neutrality the Corporation expected: ‘I’m going to read you the news, and there’s some cracking good news coming in.’ Though Alexander, as C-in-C, got most of the early credit, Montgomery had soon become a household name and a global celebrity. Churchill ordered church bells to be rung across Britain to celebrate the victory. Montgomery was knighted, and photographed in his becoming-famous beret and rumpled pullover. His vanity would become even greater but his celebrity gave self-belief and encouragement to the Eighth Army throughout the rest of the war, as they slogged after the Germans through North Africa, Sicily and up into Italy itself. With its own newspaper, eccentric clothing and self-mockery, it became a kind of citizens’ army, led by a new kind of populist general. El-Alamein was a great British and Commonwealth victory and was the last of its kind in the main western theatre of war, since from now on the United States was fighting alongside as Britain’s much larger, richer and better-equipped, if younger, brother. Among other things it saved Churchill’s reputation after a low point in the war. As he himself put it, there were only defeats before, and only victories afterwards.

  The worst of the defeats had not, in fact, been either Dunkirk – as we have seen, that was primarily a French defeat – or the surrender of Tobruk. The very worst had been the fall of Singapore, the main bastion of British imperial power in south-east Asia. Famously, the island was not defended to the landward side, where the Japanese armies arrived through Malaya in February 1942. Two great British warships had already been sunk by Japanese aircraft in an attack which owed much to pre-war British training. Moving fast with bicycles and attacking in small boats to cut off British and Australian units, the Japanese quickly took control of Singapore’s water supplies, which meant that the garrison and the population were doomed. Even so, it was a force of 100,000 troops that surrendered to just 30,000 Japanese. Churchill told an old friend that he feared ‘our soldiers are not as good fighters as their fathers were . . . We have so many men in Singapore, so many. They should have done better.’ And Brooke, now commander of the Imperial General Staff, brusquely concluded that if the army could not learn to fight better, then Britain deserved to lose its empire. Montgomery’s victory showed that when British troops had material superiority and inspirational leadership, they could fight just as well as in the Great War. Yet again and again they had been caught out in badly prepared positions, or outwitted by more audacious enemy commanders, and let down by poor equipment. They had also been the victims of politics, not just because of the years of appeasement and lack of investment in the military but because of decisions taken by Churchill himself after the war had begun. Amidst the propaganda and the talking up of victories and the general assumption that, in the end, ‘England’ could not lose, these obvious facts filtered back to the public at home.

  A Soft Dictatorship

  The politics of the war always depended on the fighting of the war. By the end, with Britain victorious, the state had reclaimed respect at home. But before that there was a long journey of grumbling, disappointment and protest. Politics did not stop. It simply twisted into strange shapes, unfamiliar then and forgotten now. Though the state became vastly more important, directing labour, controlling property and ordering the minutiae of everyday life, Parliament itself became less so. For most of 1940–45, so high was Churchill’s public standing that the Commons effectively surrendered its great power of unmaking prime ministers. And though the war coalition, based on the Parliament of 1935, was dominated by Conservatives in raw numbers of MPs, by the end of the war the government was dominated by socialist or at least centre-left views. Somewhere along the way, domestic leadership was ceded by the elected chamber to unelected intellectuals, including Whitehall officials. The Tories had acquiesced in the ousting of Chamberlain and had slowly reconciled themselves to the bull-elephant Churchill. Then they had suffered the post-Dunkirk blow of the ‘Guilty Men’ thesis. Now they found the real government seemed to be barely Tory at all, but just Churchill and a few cronies sitting atop an administration of pro-Soviet ministers, left-wing planners and Christian-commonwealth idealists. How had that happened?

  We have to start with Churchill’s own position. Rightly, he saw himself as a war leader rather than merely a prime minister. He spent far more of his time poring over military maps and closeted with generals than he did thinking about problems of education or health. He was no kind of domestic dictator: contrary to popular myth, he lost argument after argument. He was against clothes rationing but gave way because he was too interested in following the Bismarck chase. He was against the conscription of women in 1941 but was overruled. He was against singing ‘The Internationale’ at formal events when the Soviet Union had entered the war but was ignored. He wanted to ban material he regarded as defeatist, but others thought it fair comment. The famous film based on the cartoonist David Low’s character Colonel Blimp survived an irate attempt by Churchill to have it withdrawn. He was against the appointment of William Temple, a famously leftish churchman, as Archbishop of Canterbury; he failed there too. These are just a few small examples, but they point to a bigger pattern. The plans for post-war reconstruction did involve Tories, mainly of the younger, reformist wing of the party. But they were shaped by a left-wing wind of opinion against which Churchill was almost powerless and which, when he noticed it, he allowed to blow him too.

  This wind did not come from the lungs of political parties. Like the Commons, the party system was in a state of semi-stunned suspension. Labour was firmly part of the wartime coalition. Some of its local parties had opposed the war and called early on for a negotiated peace, but they quickly fell silent. In the Commons itse
lf, Nye Bevan was a lonely if brilliant Labour opponent to Churchill. The communists set up a People’s Convention calling for a popular government and attracted some fellow-travelling support, but switched to full-on patriotic backing of the war effort just as soon as the Soviet Union was invaded and the Moscow line changed. Later in the war, a Christian-leftish party called Common Wealth was created to fight (and to win) by-elections on a platform of public ownership and equality; but this was only a temporary measure until Labour was free to fight again under its own banner.

  Instead, the wind blew from the battlefield defeats and an increasingly common view that Britain remained inefficient and badly organized. The Labour figures who came to dominate the home front were to a man believers in planning and a far bigger state. Clement Attlee gave Churchill loyal support while believing Britain must put forward a ‘positive and revolutionary’ programme for the post-war world, admitting that the ‘old order’ was over. Ernie Bevin, the great trade unionist, had with the direction of Labour a position of power over business, wages and hours no pre-war socialist could have dreamed of. Herbert Morrison, the former boss of London, described by Michael Foot as a ‘soft-hearted suburban Stalin’, had powers as home secretary that made him a national figure. Labour, which had started the coalition with sixteen ministers, ended it with twenty-seven, and completely dominated the cabinet sub-committees dealing with economics and social issues. Everywhere, from the clearing of blitzed cities to the more rational organization of farmland, from the sending of women to factories where output rose to higher wages for aircraft workers and even miners, there was evidence of what a more assertive state could do. Churchill, needing to squeeze every ounce of extra effort from a fully mobilized nation, could hardly complain. Yet the same ministers helping to fight the war were sitting on committees looking forward to national reconstruction along socialist lines.