Churchill and the King

by Kenneth Weisbrode

  At Tehran, Churchill also praised Roosevelt for preventing “a revolutionary upheaval in the United States in 1933.” He said Stalin “would be ranked with the great heroes of Russian history and had earned the title ‘Stalin the Great.’” He then declared, “I drink to the Proletarian masses.”

  Stalin responded, “I drink to the Conservative Party.”

  Next they were treated to a bit of entertainment that recalled one of Churchill’s favorite words: imperturbable.

  Stalin’s interpreter, Pavlov, had become the victim of a clumsy waiter carrying “an enormous ice-cream perched on a large block of ice in which there burned a candle.” The man’s eyes seemed to be “popping as he looked at Stalin and not the way he was going. . . . He allowed it to tilt more and more dangerously. . . . The guests sat transfixed, trying to guess where it would fall . . . and by the time he reached Pavlov . . . the laws of gravity could be denied no longer and the pudding descended like an avalanche on his unfortunate head. In a moment ice-cream was oozing out of his hair, his ears, his shirt and even his shoes. But his translation never checked.”

  The results of Tehran were otherwise mixed. Stalin and Churchill had argued badly over the cross-Channel invasion and other subjects. Churchill got little support from Roosevelt. He felt more and more isolated, “appalled by his own impotence.” The Americans seemed wedded to an invasion taking place during the next six months. Dill took a sober view, having written to Brooke in October: “I do not believe that it was ever possible to make the Americans more Mediterranean-minded than they are today. The American Chiefs of Staff have given way to our views a thousand times more than we have given way to theirs.”

  But he added: “P.S. Winston is the most popular foreigner America has ever known, & his influence is great. But there is a grave danger that, with anti-F.D.R. propaganda & perhaps one or two ill-advised remarks by W.S.C., the cry may go up that he is trying to run America as well as Britain.” That risk remained. But the threat of defeat appeared to have passed.

  —

  The king in his Christmas broadcast repeated the note of optimism with which the year had begun. He reminded his countrymen that they ought “not rest from our task until it is nobly ended. Meanwhile within these islands, we have tried to be worthy of our fathers; we have tried to carry into the dawn the steadfastness and courage vouchsafed to us when we stood alone in the darkness.” Hiding in a remote part of the Apennines in Italy, the fugitive soldier Eric Newby heard it on the radio following

  a great lunch . . . to the accompaniment of awful whistlings and other atmospherics, [then] the laboured but sincere-sounding voice of the King speaking from Sandringham. . . . “Some of you may hear me in your aircraft, in the jungles of the Pacific or on the Italian Peaks. . . . Wherever you may be your thoughts will be in distant places and your hearts with those you love.”

  This had an effect on Newby and his fellow fugitive, “with all the food we had eaten and the wine we had drunk, and the people in the room witnessed the awful spectacle, something which they are unlikely ever to see again, of two Englishmen with tears running down their cheeks.”

  The broadcasts evidently had an important function beyond reinstilling faith in the monarchy. “Anyway,” Lascelles has written, “if the foundations are in process of disintegration, the process will not be arrested by turgid royal broadcasts. . . . Our ‘levelling’ process will doubtless follow a steeper gradient . . . but I don’t believe it will ever become a precipice.” Some may have turned away from the monarchy. It would not last forever, Lascelles wrote, but “at the moment I believe it rests on foundations as durable as it ever had.” The king and his country would fight on.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Victory

  Nineteen forty-four: General Brooke visited Sandringham in January. He and his companion found the house empty and were directed to a smaller one nearby.

  At the gate we were stopped by a policeman who after examining our identities turned on a series of little magic blue lights on either side of the avenue up to the house. . . . [In] the drawing room . . . I found the Queen alone with the two princesses. . . . The older of the two princesses also came along to assist in entertaining me, whilst the younger one remained on the sofa reading Punches and emitting ripples of giggles and laughter at the jokes.

  He met the king privately and observed that he “displays the greatest interest and is evidently taking the greatest trouble to keep himself abreast of everything.” After a couple of days he concluded:

  It has been a most interesting experience, and one which has greatly impressed me. The one main impression that I have carried away with me is that the King, Queen and their two daughters provide one of the very best examples of English family life. A thoroughly closely knit and happy family all wrapped up in each other. Secondly I was greatly impressed by the wonderful atmosphere entirely devoid of all pomposity, stiffness or awkwardness.

  —

  Churchill was less cheerful. “[T]his world (‘this dusty and lamentable ball’) is now too beastly to live in. People act so revoltingly that they just don’t deserve to survive.” On March 14 he and the king had been dining at Number 10 when the air-raid warning sounded, and all went down to the shelter. Churchill “kept dodging out and coming back to say no one must move.” But the king was “in terrific form—obviously enjoying himself to the limit—and very animated.”

  A week later they heard the report of the queen’s brother, David Bowes-Lyon, who was posted in Washington with the Political Warfare Executive, Britain’s Washington spy post (whose name, incidentally, he was said to have invented). “Anglo-American relations,” he estimated, “had now reached their lowest level. . . . The reasons for this were not caused by any incidents, nor were they a temporary slump caused by election tactics. The reason was fundamental: the Americans now realised their immense power.”

  With the Americans as allies, the asymmetry of this alliance had become more evident, and only appeared to grow. “The British had pushed the world round for the last hundred years and now the Americans were going to do it,” he added, and “we crawl too much to the Americans. Recent telegrams of the P.M. to F.D.R. have been almost nauseating in their sentimental and subservient flattery.” Churchill, however, continued to insist on making the alliance work, even if it meant more policy sacrifices. Despite the “lot of fretfulness,” as Churchill had characterized similar talks to the king back in August 1943, everything would be all right.

  By May of the following year, collaboration had begun to pay off. Brooke felt he could “[t]hank heaven the Italian attack is going well . . . we have proved Marshall and the American Chiefs of Staff were all wrong arguing that the Italians would retire before we could attack them. . . . First Stalingrad . . . secondly Tunisia . . . thirdly the Dnieper River Bend.” Churchill later called this moment the war’s “supreme climax,” the point at which victory became a question of timing. The Allies controlled the Mediterranean, half of Italy, and a renewed eastern front. Now was the moment to set “the keystone of the arch of Anglo-American co-operation,” the long-awaited invasion of France: Operation Overlord. Some people had expressed reservations. One was Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts. “Slim Jan,” the South African premier, was also known as Churchill’s “surrogate uncle” whose “mind moved majestically amid the vagaries of Fortune.” Smuts was an old adversary in the Boer War who had nevertheless helped to spare his life. He was now one of the tiny handful to whom Churchill listened almost unconditionally.

  Smuts shared his concerns over the timing and viability of the operation with the king, whose concurrence was noted back in October: “Smuts is not happy about ‘Overlord’ & is doing his best to convince Winston that we must go on with W’s own strategy of attacking the ‘under belly’ of the Axis.” He “agree[d] with S. about all this. If you have a good thing stick to it.”

  The king repeated this in a letter to Churchill and proposed th
at the three of them meet over dinner with the likely expectation that, as per custom, “old Smuts, sitting like an owl on its perch, would hop down and play an always predominant part.” Churchill sent a tart reply accepting the invitation, adding, “There is no possibility of our going back on what is agreed. Both the U.S. Staff and Stalin would violently disagree with us.” The three worked through their misgivings and reached a consensus. Their meeting served to confirm Churchill’s position but also the king’s and Smuts’s priority: “that Italy has got to be secured at all costs, before Overlord.”

  Churchill had told Brooke that he wanted him to command the invasion. He reneged after Roosevelt pushed hard for Marshall, only to change his mind in favor of Eisenhower—a crushing blow to Brooke, who told Churchill, simply, that he was “disappointed.” In January 1944, Eisenhower arrived and drew a sketch of the Overlord plan for the king. This was followed, in May, by a full preview. It was the anniversary of the coronation, but the king insisted the regalia not be on display. Lascelles was apt, quoting William Pitt the Younger: “This is neither a fit time nor a proper subject for the exhibition of a gaudy fancy or the wanton blandishments of theatrical enchantment.”

  The king, Smuts, Churchill, and the various commanders gathered at headquarters, which was then located in St. Paul’s School. Churchill, in his greatcoat, and the king sat in armchairs, while everyone else sat at school desks facing a large map set up on the stage. Eisenhower began the briefings, followed by several other commanders, the best of which was given, Ismay said, by Montgomery—St. Paul’s had been his school, after all. At the end, the king spoke without notes. Exactly what he said is not recorded, but in the archives there is this draft:

  I have known of the existence of this Operation ever since it was first mooted and I have followed all its preparations very carefully. I have heard and seen reports from my P.M. as Minr. of Defence, & from the Supreme Comdr. . . .

  This is the biggest Combined Operation ever thought out in the world. But it is much more than this. It is a Combined Opn. of 2 Countries, the United States & British Empire. As I look around this audience of British & Americans I can see that you have equally taken a part in its preparation. I wish you all success & with God’s help you will succeed.

  “Thus all was arranged,” according to Churchill, “and the march which had begun at Lake Chad ended through Paris at Berchtesgaden.”

  There would be more obstacles to overcome before that, but there now arose one that few had anticipated, at least in its intensity.

  When I attended my weekly luncheon with the King on Tuesday, May 30, His Majesty asked me where I intended to be on D Day.

  I replied that I proposed to witness the bombardment from one of the cruiser squadrons. His Majesty immediately said he would like to come too. He had not been under fire except in air raids since the Battle of Jutland, and eagerly welcomed the prospect of renewing the experiences of his youth.

  Churchill was sympathetic. “What fun,” he said, “to land with the troops on D-Day and perhaps get there ahead of Monty!”

  This became perhaps the only serious break between the two in the course of the war. In the king’s version, as recorded in his diary, he “asked W. where he would be on D day or rather the night before & he told me glibly he hoped to see the initial attack from one of the bombarding ships. I was not surprised & when I suggested that I should go as well (the idea has been in my mind for some time) he reacted well.”

  When Lascelles got wind of the idea, he did not take it seriously. Then he panicked. He told the king that “His Majesty’s anxieties would be increased if he heard his Prime Minister was at the bottom of the English Channel” and insisted he dissuade Churchill from succumbing to such “sheer selfishness, plus vanity.” The king then sent the following letter:

  My dear Winston,

  I have been thinking a great deal of our conversation yesterday, and I have come to the conclusion that it would not be right for either you or I to be where we planned to be on D Day. I don’t think I need emphasise what it would mean to me personally, and to the whole Allied cause, if at this juncture a chance bomb, torpedo, or even a mine, should remove you from the scene; equally a change of Sovereign at this moment would be a serious matter for the country and Empire. We should both, I know, love to be there, but in all seriousness I would ask you to reconsider your plan. Our presence, I feel, would be an embarrassment to those responsible for fighting the ship or ships in which we were, despite anything we might say to them.

  So, as I said, I have very reluctantly come to the conclusion that the right thing to do is what normally falls to those at the top on such occasions, namely, to remain at home and wait.

  As Stamfordham had once instructed King George V, “It [is] the duty of a constitutional monarch to act on his Prime Minister’s advice but not to make promises.” The king therefore chose an appeal to Churchill’s friendship over his office. Churchill did not see matters that way. He responded that as minister of defense he had a duty to observe the invasion in person and that the risk to him was small in any event. Lascelles took a similar line, in reverse, namely that Churchill, like any minister, needed the king’s permission to travel abroad, to which Churchill replied that he would be on board a British navy ship the entire time, and therefore did not need permission. Lascelles said the ship would travel beyond British territorial waters. And so it went. Finally, the king wrote to Churchill:

  I want to make one more appeal to you not to go to sea on D Day. Please consider my own position. I am a younger man than you, I am a sailor, and as King I am the head of all these Services. There is nothing I would like better than to go to sea, but I have agreed to stay at home; is it fair that you should then do exactly what I should have liked to do myself? You said yesterday afternoon that it would be a fine thing for the King to lead his troops into battle, as in old days; if the King cannot do this, it does not seem to me right that his Prime Minister should take his place. . . . I ask you most earnestly to consider the whole question again, and not let your personal wishes, which I very well understand, lead you to depart from your own high standard of duty to the State.

  Lascelles threatened to involve Smuts, and the king even suggested he drive personally to Portsmouth to prevent Churchill from boarding ship. Neither proved necessary. After some delay and with more than a little annoyance, Churchill backed down. His explanation and his tone are noteworthy, for this was the only time during the course of the war that the king succeeded in countermanding one of his wishes outright.

  Sir, I cannot really feel that the first paragraph of your letter takes sufficient account of the fact that there is absolutely no comparison in the British Constitution between a Sovereign and a subject. If Your Majesty had gone, as you desire, on board one of your ships in this bombarding action it would have required the Cabinet approval beforehand. . . . On the other hand, as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence I ought to be allowed to go where I consider it necessary to the discharge of my duty. . . . I rely on my own judgment, invoked in many serious matters, as to what are the proper limits of risk which a person who discharges my duties is entitled to run. I must most earnestly ask Your Majesty that no principle shall be laid down which inhibits my freedom of movement when I judge it necessary to acquaint myself with conditions in the various theatres of war. Since Your Majesty does me the honour to be so much concerned about my personal safety on this occasion, I must defer to Your Majesty’s wishes, and indeed commands. It is a great comfort to me to know that they arise from Your Majesty’s desire to continue me in your service. Though I regret that I cannot go, I am deeply grateful to Your Majesty for the motives which have guided Your Majesty in respect of

  Your Majesty’s humble and devoted servant and subject.

  So came D-Day, the “sixth hour of the sixth day of the sixth month” of 1944. Churchill entered the House of Commons to speak to the members, who had been waiting anxiously for him to arr
ive. They cheered when they saw him, and again when he asked them to recognize the liberation of Rome. He then proceeded to inform them that “an immense armada of upwards of 4,000 ships, together with several thousand smaller craft, crossed the Channel.” He told them of the landings by air and by sea, on the beaches and behind enemy lines. He then reported that “[t]he fire of the shore batteries has been largely quelled. . . . So far the Commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan. And what a plan!” The king broadcast at 9:00 p.m.:

  Four years ago, our Nation and Empire stood alone against an overwhelming enemy, with our backs to the wall. Tested as never before in our history, in God’s providence we survived the test; the spirit of the people, resolute, dedicated, burned like a bright flame, lit surely from those Unseen Fires which nothing can quench.

  Marshall, General Hap Arnold, Smuts, and the British chiefs of staff visited the king for an after-action report that lasted, thanks to Churchill’s verbosity, until 2:00 a.m. He had resigned himself to watching the departing troops from port. A few days later, he would be allowed to visit them. “How I wish you were here!” he wrote to Roosevelt after having ridden in a torpedo boat and singing “Rule Britannia” with some officers. He “had a jolly day on Monday on the beaches and inland. . . . After doing much laborious duty we went and had a plug at the Hun from our destroyer, but although the range was 6,000 yards he did not honour us with a reply.” The king followed, sailing across the Channel amid the dense traffic, and then was greeted in France by General Montgomery. “It was most encouraging to know that it was possible for me to land on the beaches only 10 days after D Day.” He was seen to be extremely happy. “If ‘Action Stations’ had been ordered, he would have been happier still.”