Given Churchill’s growing, if undeserved, association with overactivity and a mailed-fist approach to public disorder, it was little surprise that Asquith formed the opinion that he was too much of a firebrand for the Home Office. The soldier in him, Asquith feared, might win out, and he was considered unsuited to the role of conciliator, partly because he talked too much. Besides, Winston was getting restless, mainly because during the course of 1911, his thoughts had turned to the world situation and the defense of the empire during a future war, in particular its naval defenses. It was the Agadir crisis, in which Germany used the gunboat Panther to send a pointed message to the French and the British, that fully alerted Churchill to the true nature of the German menace. From this point on, the security of the British Empire became a dominant theme in his mind, and he even managed to find a Home Office reason—its responsibility for guarding cordite magazines near London—to take emergency precautions. He wrote an extraordinarily percipient and accurate assessment of what the first forty days of a large-scale European war would look like—a military timetable of the German invasion of France and Belgium in 1914 and when it would be halted—which he circulated to the Committee of Imperial Defence.
Given all this, Asquith decided to decouple Churchill from home affairs and let him loose on defense and strategy. The Admiralty, in Asquith’s mind, was lagging behind the organizational developments that had been taking place at the War Office. The Royal Navy did not have a war staff as the army did, and its grand strategic plans were supposedly locked away in the recesses of the most senior admiral’s mind. Incredibly, the Admiralty had no fixed plans to transport and secure a British expeditionary force across the Channel to France in the event of war. This would not do, given the looming threat of war. Things needed to change, and the navy needed to prepare properly to cooperate with the army. Churchill could provide the impetus for these things to happen and, what is more, if he replaced the First Lord, Reginald McKenna (an opponent of the military conversations that Britain had been having with France), he would ensure weighty support for Foreign Secretary Edward Grey’s policy of supporting the Anglo-French entente.
Asquith understood Churchill well, recognizing both his genius and his limitations as a politician. In contrast with the prime minister’s “Roman sense of detachment,”62 Churchill was loquacious and “would in private often develop and air scores of opinions which never matured into conviction or action.” Asquith had ample chance to observe Churchill, and concluded that “Winston thinks with his mouth.”63 “His fault,” Asquith believed, was “that phrases master him, rather than he them. But his faults and mistakes will be forgotten in his achievement.” Asquith recognized Churchill’s matchless worth. “He is a wonderful creature,” he wrote to Venetia Stanley, “with a curious dash of schoolboy simplicity . . . and what someone said of genius—‘A zig-zag streak of lightning in the brain.’”64 Given the evolution of Churchill’s thoughts and interests, it was with delight that he accepted Asquith’s offer of the Admiralty and command of the world’s most powerful weapon at a time when, according to Sir Edward Grey, “the lights were going out all over Europe.”
4
High Office: War on Land and Sea
Being First Lord of the Admiralty brought joy to Winston Churchill’s heart, and between 1911 and 1915 he enjoyed the most fulfilling period of his career—at least, that is, until the unique challenges that faced him in 1940. Barely a decade after leaving the junior officer ranks of the British Army, he was now in command of the Royal Navy. This was the instrument, acknowledged by popular lore and hard military fact, that secured Britain’s interests all over the world and made it the foremost political and military power. “For more than three hundred years,” Churchill told the Commons in March 1913, “we alone amongst the nations have wielded that mysterious and decisive force which is called sea-power. What have we done with it? We have suppressed the slaver. We have charted the seas. We have made them a safe highway for all.”1 The navy secured the British Isles from invasion and enabled Britain to prevent the movement of an enemy’s soldiers or its trade across salt water, the very substance of the Pax Britannica that had settled upon the globe following the decisive victory at Trafalgar in 1815. And it was now at the command of thirty-six-year-old Winston Churchill.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man was Churchill’s view on this turn of events. He believed he was destined to play a defining role in British history, and here he was, called to serve his country in the highest military office just as he had developed the conviction that war was likely and Britain’s independence imperiled by German expansionism and naval ambitions. His final months at the Home Office had seen this conversion from dashing social reformer to steely strategist consumed by the need to man the barricades. Many found his transmogrification from social crusader scorning rumors of war to apostle of increased military spending difficult to countenance. Politicians are rarely allowed to change their spots despite such pragmatism being crucial to their success. Churchill was doubly condemned, not only as a man who could desert his party, but as a man who could desert his principles. But, as he was to claim, he would rather be right than consistent.
Nevertheless, Churchill was supported by powerful colleagues in the Cabinet who were alive to the German menace, and history has shown that his judgment regarding the international situation was entirely sound. He drew close to Foreign Secretary Grey, who shared his concerns about Germany. The prime minister was in no doubt that the Admiralty needed to emulate the War Office in instituting significant internal reform. Churchill was to be the new broom, Asquith calculating that his robust style qualified him for the job of subjecting the highest-spending department to proper control by politicians and bringing it into line with the gloomy foreign policy assessments most closely associated with Grey. Churchill’s view of the world in the three years before war broke out in 1914, and of the Royal Navy’s place in it, was crystal clear. As he told the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in 1911, “The maintenance of naval supremacy is our whole foundation. Upon it stands not the Empire only, not merely the great commercial prosperity of our people, not merely a fine place in the world’s affairs. Upon our naval supremacy stands our lives and the freedom we have guarded for nearly a thousand years.”2
Violet Bonham Carter captured Churchill’s love of the navy and warfare when a guest aboard the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, cruising in the Mediterranean in spring 1912:
As we leaned side by side against the taffrail, gliding past the lovely, smiling coastline of the Adriatic, bathed in sun, I remarked: “How perfect!” He startled me by his reply: “Yes—range perfect—visibility perfect—if we had some six-inch guns on board how easily we could bombard . . .” etc. etc.—and details followed showing how effectively we could lay waste the landscape and blow the nestling towns sky-high.3
But while reveling in military matters, and chiding himself for being “built” in such a manner that war both fascinated and exhilarated him, Churchill was no warmonger. His own experience of war and the ugly, prosaic nature of death in battle ensured this. “Much as war attracts me,” he wrote, “fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations—I feel more deeply every year—I can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms [he was at the German army’s 1909 manoeuvres] what vile and wicked folly & barbarism it all is.”4 Nevertheless, that was no excuse for not being thoroughly prepared should a rival push things to such a point that war became the only option. Then belligerence, defiance, and preparedness were the only mantles. Churchill held to this formula without wavering, as he was to do later in his career when Nazis and then Communists threatened the peace of the world.
Churchill reveled in the work of First Lord of the Admiralty, fighting for more dreadnoughts and the development of the naval air service, tearing around Britain and the Mediterranean visiting ships, shore establishments, and naval air stations. Whether it was examining the technical elements involved in the procurement of a new shell or conducting the empire’s
naval business from aboard the thirty-eight-hundred-ton Admiralty yacht Enchantress (aboard which he spent eight months in his three years as First Lord), Churchill felt hugely fulfilled. He demonstrated his trademark capacity to be involved at all levels of his department’s business, and far beyond. On March 26, 1912, he wrote to Clementine that “the electric turrets of the Invincible have given so much trouble . . . I had them tested as they have never been tested before—making one gun fire 8 rounds in succession. I stayed in the turret myself to see what happened.” Shortly thereafter, he was having himself taken out aboard submarines—“I am getting quite experienced in submarines & the novelty & sense of danger are wearing off. . . . We took the yacht all round the Fleet & the ships looked magnificent. The air is full of aeroplanes, the water black with Dreadnoughts.”5 In his speeches, Churchill made it as clear as possible to the world that Britain would not be outbuilt by any rival power and that an arms race was sheer folly. His speech introducing the naval estimates to the Commons on March 18, 1912, received great applause. In it, he made public a new standard of British naval strength—60 percent above Germany’s. The address was a warning to Tirpitz over the heads of the MPs: for every ship Germany added to her navy, Britain would lay down two. But the speech also made it clear that any reduction would be met by proportional reduction and suggested a building “holiday” in 1913. If this were to happen, Churchill said, “The three ships that she [Germany] did not build would therefore automatically wipe out no less than five British potential super-dreadnoughts, and this is more than I expect them to hope to do in a brilliant naval action.”6
So, with the whirlwind energy for which he was renowned, Churchill set about the Admiralty, innovating, centralizing, interfering, improving, and generally showing the naval world, from top to bottom, that he meant business and did not care if tradition or the top brass were unsettled by his actions. Rigid hierarchy needed to give way to streamlined and intelligent fighting efficiency, and the Board of Admiralty needed to be properly subjected to civilian control. This was hugely important, because Churchill took charge of the Admiralty at a moment of national and international crisis, and of technological and strategic flux. Churchill thought the top ranks of the military were dominated by hidebound, outdated officers to whom the politicians deferred far too easily. Churchill’s low opinion of the upper echelons of the officer corps put him on a collision course with admirals and generals alike. This swelled the ranks of the anti-Churchill lobby and those prepared to voice their grievances when the going got tough for the overbearing young politician. But this did not deter him. He detested blind veneration of the military, and the manner in which political masters were expected to keep out of the business of their nominal military subordinates goaded him to action. The Admiralty, as he saw it, was hopelessly out of date in key departments, not least its strategic direction and leadership, and would be unfit to go to war unless these failings were remedied.
The admirals used the press, and the naval proclivities of the king, to try to thwart Churchill’s reforms. Often, in these important prewar years, Churchill encountered “various degrees of naughtiness among the Seals”7 (the Sea Lords) when he returned from trips away from the Admiralty. It was quite possible that national survival depended upon Churchill’s ability to shape a more modern navy, and he longed for the army and navy to be properly subordinated to civilian politicians and, not surprisingly, saw himself as the most qualified among them. Asquith, once war had begun, summed up Churchill’s attitude: “His mouth waters at the sight and thought of K’s [Kitchener’s] new armies,” and asks, “ ‘Are those glittering commands to be entrusted to dug-out trash bred on the obsolete tactics of 25 years ago?.’”8
Churchill’s task was formidable. In attempting to reform the navy from the top down, he took on a huge, powerful, and largely autonomous institution that had not been shaken by defeat in battle and considered itself exempt from the deliberations of the Committee of Imperial Defence. His card was marked when he insisted upon the removal of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, because of his objections to the formation of a Naval War Staff, the central plank of Churchill’s reform program. This was an entirely necessary, though deeply controversial, move. Illustrating how bad army-navy cooperation was, and how desperately the forces needed civilian direction, was Wilson’s opposition to the army’s plan to transport seven divisions to France should war with Germany break out: on August 23, 1911, the Admiralty had refused to give an assurance that six divisions could be immediately transported to France if needed. Churchill continued to make bold decisions regarding the command of the navy. When war broke out, he prematurely removed Sir George Callahan as commander of the Home Fleet, replacing him with John Jellicoe, later described by Churchill as “the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon.”
Never had a First Lord of the Admiralty taken such hands-on control of the affairs of the navy. Wilson’s replacement as First Sea Lord, Sir Francis Bridgeman, lasted little more than a year before Churchill obliged him to retire. Bridgeman had led those resisting Churchill’s erosion of the powers of the Sea Lords, objecting to his “peremptory orders” and his practice of sending signals to the fleet without the authority of the boards. Churchill’s interference “did him great harm in political as well as naval circles.”9
Though causing consternation in some quarters, his drive through the Admiralty was met with approval from the other ranks as he continued Admiral Jackie Fisher’s policies of improving pay and conditions. Churchill’s robust style also won praise among those favoring larger naval budgets, because he was the most insistent minister when it came to arguing his corner in Cabinet and with the Treasury. His belief that the only way to check German expansion was to show that it could never outbuild the Royal Navy led to what Churchill called “polite but deadly” Cabinet arguments over the 1914–15 estimates. His uncompromising demand for a big navy, and his determination to increase British naval superiority over Germany, became the defining aspects of Churchill the politician during these years. He increased annual spending from £39 million to over £50 million. As was always the case with Churchill, qualities that some hated him for were the very foundation of the success that others admired him for. It was a measure of Churchill’s journey from social reformer to national guardian that his erstwhile partner, Lloyd George, increasingly became his Cabinet foe, and their friendship, so intense until this point, began to cool. Lloyd George thought that Churchill had been seduced by Grey’s “anti-German policy.” Responsible as chancellor for limiting the Admiralty’s spending, he believed that Churchill’s outlook had transformed overnight from little Englander to anti-German warmonger.
Churchill’s thirst for innovation was inexhaustible. The Naval War Staff was established at the start of 1912, with divisions devoted to operations, intelligence, and mobilization. He oversaw a major reorganization of the navy; as he told the Commons in March 1912, “The general principle of naval administration to which we adhere—[is] homogeneity of squadrons; simplicity of types and classes; modernity of material; concentration in the decisive theatres; constant and instant readiness for war; reliance upon gun power; reliance upon speed; and, above all, reliance upon 136,000 officers and seamen, the pride of our race.”10 His partnership with Admiral Fisher “produced a great harvest between 1911 and 1913—especially in the field of ship and weapon design.”11
Importantly, Churchill embraced technological progress at a time of rapid change. He oversaw the fleet’s conversion from coal to oil and negotiated the British government’s acquisition of a majority shareholding in Anglo-Persian Oil (the future BP); he encouraged the submarine service; he set up a cryptography department that was the forerunner of the Government Code and Cypher School; he introduced a new caliber of heavy gun—the fifteen-inch—ordering a division of five fast battleships bearing them; he encouraged research that contributed to the emergence of the tank as a revolutionary weapon; and he supported with enthusiasm the
growth of military aviation and the genesis of the Royal Naval Air Service. As he said in March 1914, addressing a dinner of the Royal Aero Club, “Things are done today which nobody would have thought right or prudent to do twelve months ago or even nine or six months ago.”12 He took up new ideas with enthusiasm and spawned some of his own, from Q-ships to armed merchantmen. Many people sneered at Churchill’s fascination with “toys.” But as Group Captain Ivor Courtney, one of Churchill’s flying instructors, commented, people often saw the importance of them when war came. Critics were then likely to clamor for activity, in contrast to their previous hostility. As a fellow aviator put it shortly after war began, “They have pissed on Churchill’s plant [the Naval Air Service] for three years—now they expect it to bloom in a month.”13
From his final days at the Home Office in 1911, Churchill had been increasingly preoccupied with the need to build a united national front for the clash with Germany that he believed was more than likely to come. He also sought and received Cabinet approval for naval arrangements with France that would enable Britain to withdraw ships from the Mediterranean to home waters in the event of conflict. Between 1911 and 1914, he was often accused of being alarmist, though “he always maintained that it was better to be alarmed before a catastrophe rather than after.”14 As he once put it in the House of Commons, “It is very much better sometimes to have a panic feeling beforehand, and then be quite calm when things happen, than to be extremely calm beforehand and to get into a panic when things happen.”15 He sent letters to the prime minister on all aspects of the fleet and its readiness and supplies, demonstrating his skill at getting lengthy, cogent, well-argued, and informative documents in front of the most important people. It was also indicative of the fact that Churchill believed Asquith had repeatedly promoted him on the basis of their personal correspondence, not just his Cabinet or parliamentary contributions.
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