The new German naval law of May 1912 confirmed Germany’s intention to challenge British supremacy, and this fact slowly sank into the public mind and that of the Opposition. At a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence on July 11, 1912, Churchill argued that “the whole character of the German fleet shows that it is designed for aggressive and offensive action of the largest possible character in the North Sea or North Atlantic” and that it was designed for fleet action, not to protect trade routes or colonies. His knowledge of maritime strategy was important in winning the argument to concentrate major vessels in British waters, thus denuding the Mediterranean of sufficient assets to maintain British supremacy there. As he argued, “It should not be supposed that mastery of the seas depends on the simultaneous occupation of every sea. On the contrary it depends upon ability to defeat the strongest battlefleet or combination which can be brought to bear.”16 As he wrote to Haldane in May 1912, “The actual point has been settled long ago by brute force of facts. We cannot possibly hold the Mediterranean or guarantee any of our interests there until we have obtained a decision in the North Sea. . . . It would be very foolish to lose England in safeguarding Egypt.”
Owing to the nature of his career, family life had to fit around work, a common enough practice and one made easier by the support of servants and a wife who was capable on the home front. Separation had been a theme in Winston and Clementine’s relationship from its first weeks. “My darling I do so want your life to be a full & sweet one. I want it to be worthy of all the beauties of your nature. I am so much centred in my politics that I often feel I must be a dull companion to anyone who is not in the trade.”17 Churchill’s engagement with his children was loving but often fleeting. After an evening together, he wrote to Clementine that “I have just seen the PK [Puppy Kitten]. She is flourishing and weighs 10 tons! The nurse says she has written to you about the perambulator. Will you settle what is to be done?” In April 1912, after a flying visit to see the children, he wrote that “both chicks are well and truculent. Diana & I went through the Peter Rabbit picture book together and Randolph gurgled.” His immense reserves of energy and interest meant that even in such a lofty position and with such an all-consuming approach to work, he found time for family, hobbies, and flights of fancy. In June 1912, he was taking dancing lessons and suggesting to Clementine that they form a dancing club for their friends in winter.
Churchill recognized the difficulties that his career raised in his marriage and never lost the habit of articulating the depth of his love for his wife and the extent of his reliance upon her. But his work rarely, if ever, suffered because of family constraints. Two letters of October 1913 illustrate the twin pillars of his life. One told Clementine “how lucky I have been—not very gifted where Kats are concerned—I find by right divine the first & best.” The very next day, however, he demonstrated his capacity for insensitivity and his obsession with work, blithely reporting on a day spent in aircraft around Sheerness—despite his wife’s loathing of his aerial exploits. But it brought out the Unrepentant Toad in him, for he adored flying, and he told her that “it has been as good as one of those old days in the S. African war, & I have lived entirely in the moment, with no care for all these tiresome party politics & searching newspapers, & awkward by-elections, & sulky Orangemen, & obnoxious Cecils and little smugs like Runciman.” Clementine hated his aerial expeditions because flight was so dangerous, and Churchill was in fact a senior Cabinet politician, not a stunt man. She did her very best, with various blandishments, to wean him off flying. After he’d confessed to a stint in the air in May 1914, she wrote that she “felt too weak & tired to struggle against it—It is like beating one’s head against a stone wall. . . . Goodbye my Dear One—Perhaps if I saw you, I could love and pet you, but you have really been so naughty that I can’t do it on paper—I must be ‘brought round’ first.”
Fundamentally, Churchill was aware of his pretensions and was able to get the measure of his own character, even its less appealing facets—even if he made little or no effort to reform. As he wrote to his wife on November 3, 1913, “at times, I think I could conquer everything—& then again I know I am only a weak vain fool.” As for the flying, Churchill very reluctantly gave way to his wife, as well as to financial sound sense, given the high cost involved in insuring himself. He moaned to Clementine in June 1914 about the premiums, listing political strain, short-lived parentage, “& of course flying” as reasons why the insurers priced him so highly. On June 6, with some caveats, he agreed to give it up, having “been up” over 140 times and become enthralled by “this fascinating new art.”
From 1911 until 1914, Churchill was completely absorbed in naval affairs and matters of national security, though he had occasion to act on the domestic scene when the simmering issue of Irish Home Rule acquired a military dimension. Having become a committed militarist in his new office, his erstwhile bedfellows on the social reform front were left behind, and in consequence, Churchill became isolated from a promising group of admirers and possible followers. This was a shame, particularly when Churchill’s reputation (deserved or not) prevented people from understanding his politics. It was clear that with increasing ministerial responsibility, Churchill was becoming more “progressive” on issues such as Irish Home Rule. His experience at the Colonial Office with regard to the postwar settlement of South Africa’s problems had provided an excellent object lesson. Reconciliation in South Africa influenced him on Ireland, and he believed that the Irish, as well as the Boers, could “take their place—in a true and indissoluble Union of Empire.”18 In this belief, he not only showed a commendable desire to conciliate and meet the demands of nationalists at least halfway. He also displayed a romantic vision of the British Empire, held throughout his life, that simply did not take account of the opposition to it felt by other people. Speaking in Belfast in February 1912, he tried to square the aspirations of Irish nationalists with the interests of the British Empire: “Would not the arrival of an Irish parliament upon the brilliantly lighted stage of the modern world be an enrichment and an added glory to the treasures of the British Empire?”19 The fact was that many Irish Catholics, as was the case with the Boers, were, ultimately, irreconcilable, because they were not in favor of British influence in their affairs and did not want to merge their autonomy in what Churchill called “the wider liberties of the British Empire.”
Churchill’s instinct—that an Irish parliament was the right objective—was clearly correct, even if his hopes of an autonomous Ireland remaining happily within the empire club were not to be realized. When asked in the spring of 1908, “Is Mr. Churchill in favor of Home Rule, meaning an Irish Parliament for the management purely of Irish affairs?” his answer had been, “Yes. Subject to the Imperial Parliament.” As First Sea Lord, he toured the country talking about sea power and national security but was also, with the encouragement of the prime minister, the government’s main advocate of Irish Home Rule. He was working for an accommodation with the Irish nationalists, particularly at a time when national and imperial unity was so important given the German menace.
Churchill thought his support for Irish Home Rule would revive his liberal credentials. The Irish nationalists, who were key supporters of the Liberal government in the House of Commons, were attempting to cash in on their pivotal parliamentary position by pressing for Home Rule. Churchill’s support for Home Rule and his willingness to use the navy to help deal with opponents who acted outside the law enraged Unionists. Churchill ran the gauntlet and visited Belfast in the face of violent protests in January 1912, his life, not for the last time, put at risk by his desire to be on the front line. Clementine bravely accompanied him, and they were greeted by a hostile crowd of ten thousand people outside the Grand Central Hotel. There were further dangers, much closer to home; in the House of Commons chamber, he was struck by the Speaker’s copy of the Standing Orders, which drew blood and was thrown by an Ulster MP after Churchill had mockingly waved his handkerchief
at the Opposition. The abuse he received over his stand on Ireland was equal to any he ever received, and the damage to his reputation lingered for years.
Determined to ensure that Ulstermen opposed to Home Rule did not hijack the latest Home Rule bill, he ordered the 3rd Battle Squadron to waters off Belfast, in case arms depots were attacked by Ulster Volunteers or in case troops had to be transported from the south to the north. On March 19, 1914, Churchill told the vice admiral commanding the 3rd Battle Squadron to “proceed at once at ordinary speed to Lamlash,” while HMS Gibraltar and Royal Arthur were “to proceed at once to Kingstown Ireland to embark tomorrow 550 Infantry equally divided and to proceed to Dundalk.” Two days later, he approved an order to embark field guns on HMS King Edward VII, the squadron’s flagship. Whatever Churchill’s real intent, and although his move received Cabinet approval, he was portrayed as a callous warmonger seeking to provoke the Ulster Volunteers into action that British forces could then smash. Though cast as the villain of the piece, Churchill made it clear that he was standing against “rebellion, organized, avowed, applauded . . . against the ordinary workings of our legislature.”20 The episode appeared to underline Churchill’s capacity for finding the wrong way to go about things. While this course of action was considered too soft by some of his Cabinet colleagues, his enemies chose only to highlight the martial aspects of his policy. In reality, Churchill was seeking an honorable path out of the malaise. A conference on Home Rule was summoned by the king in July 1914 and a bill put to Parliament. But then war came, and on September 15, 1914, Asquith announced that the Home Rule bill had been suspended.
War
As 1914 unfolded, Churchill remained vigilant regarding the need to prioritize naval construction. He had to fight hard to keep his Cabinet colleagues onside and to secure the funds necessary for building new ships. “I have had another long dose of Winston today and am rather late,” Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley following a crisis over naval estimates.21 On March 17, 1914, Churchill introduced his naval estimates in the Commons. The Telegraph called his two-and-a-half-hour speech “the longest and perhaps the most weighty and eloquent speech to which the House of Commons have listened during the present generation.” His message was simple. Other Great Powers were building advanced navies. The empire and the trade of the world and wealth won by Britain over the centuries had to be protected. And this would cost money. “We have got all we want in territory, but our claim to be left in undisputed enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, largely acquired by war and maintained by force, is one which often seems less reasonable to others than to us.”22
Churchill relished the prospect of war with Germany—if peace could not be preserved. When on July 28, it seemed as if war might be averted at the last moment, he said moodily to Asquith that it looked as if they were in for “a bloody peace” after all. Venetia Stanley wrote that he had “got on all his warpaint.”23 As war became imminent, Churchill put into effect the Admiralty’s war plans. At the Grand Review of the Fleet at Spithead in July 1914, over four hundred Royal Navy vessels of all classes had massed together, the ultimate symbol of British naval power and intent should war come. It was, in Churchill’s words, “the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world.” On July 28, a letter captured his conflicting thoughts: “Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that? The preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity. Yet I would do my best for peace, nothing would induce me wrongly to strike the blow.”24 On this fateful day, as news was awaited from the continent, Churchill strolled in St. James’s Park and watched a pair of black swans and their cygnets. Two of the navy’s three battle fleets were still at Portland following the Spithead Review, and on the following day, Asquith gave his permission for the First Battle Fleet to move from Portland to its battle station in the North Sea, the “vast concourse of warships,” as Churchill wrote, passing “safely through the Straits of Dover without lights on the night of 29 July.”25 “We may now picture this great Fleet,” he was later to write in The World Crisis, “with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought.”26 On July 31, he told Clementine that “at any moment now the stroke may fall,” though his letter also touched on domestic concerns, including his consternation that the month’s household expenses had topped £175.
Beaverbrook and F. E. Smith were dining with him at Admiralty House on August 1, when they heard that Germany had declared war on Russia. “He was not depressed, he was not elated; he was not surprised. . . . He went straight out like a man going to a well-accustomed job. In fact he had foreseen everything that was going to happen so far that his temperament was in no way upset by the realization of his forecast.”27 As the British ultimatum to Germany expired at midnight on the evening of August 3–4, 1914, Margot Asquith saw Churchill at Downing Street: “I saw Winston Churchill with a happy face striding towards the double doors of the Cabinet room,” she recorded.28 And who could blame him? While some always found Churchill’s relish for war tasteless, it was a quality his country sorely needed in the unprecedented trials that were to come. As he told the National Liberal Club, the government entered into the war “with a full realization of the sufferings, losses, disappointments, vexations and anxieties, and of the appalling and sustaining exertions which would be entailed upon us by our action. The war will be long and sombre.”29 Now that it had come, Churchill relished it. He was exhilarated. A few months into the conflict, Margot Asquith heard him say, “My God! This, this is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling—it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that!”30 In August 1914, he had the Royal Navy as prepared as possible for a struggle that would probably be a lengthy one. Over a thousand vessels, in ports and on sea lanes across the globe, were under his command. At the center of this unrivaled armada were fifty-three battleships, representing the Royal Navy’s superiority over the German fleet.
Now that the moment had come to put plans into action, Churchill did so with zest and excitement. Without fuss, the navy transported six divisions of the British Expeditionary Force to France within two weeks of Britain’s going to war. As well as escorting troopships and merchantmen, the navy assumed its time-honored role as a blockade force. By the end of September, 50,000 Indian troops had been safely delivered from Bombay and Karachi to Marseilles, and by mid-October, 25,000 Canadians had crossed the Atlantic without loss. “This was a period of great anxiety to us,” Churchill wrote. “All the most fateful possibilities were open. We were bound to expect a military descent on our coasts . . . or a naval raid into the Channel to cut down the transports, or a concentrated submarine attack upon those vessels crammed with men.”31
Blockade was an effective means of waging economic warfare, though Churchill hungered for more tangible and glorious military achievements, a product of his impatience, his love of the dramatic action, and his weather eye on the annals of history. He was also infected with the naval traditions of his country, the Nelsonian spirit, and the desire to “engage the enemy more closely” at any given opportunity heavily emphasized in schoolrooms and popular literature. This was a weakness on Churchill’s part, as the exercise of sea power does not necessarily require brutal engagement with the enemy’s battle fleet. Strangling the enemy by blockade and interdicting its merchant shipping was less dramatic, but by guaranteeing safe global communications and contact with the army in France while denying Germany imports and confining its vaunted battle fleet to its home ports, the Royal Navy was doing its job. Churchill was not alone in his hunger for decisive action; it was the core of the navy’s tradition and planning, and the navy still had an impractical obsession with attacking Germany’s northern seaboards, including those in the Ba
ltic. It also had “unrealistic expectation of a Nelsonian pitched battle that the Germans would offer and lose.”32 The Battle of Heligoland in late August kept the High Seas Fleet cautiously in its harbors, however, glowering at the Grand Fleet across the North Sea.
Churchill’s desire to be in control made him more involved in the day-to-day running of the fleet than had been the case with any previous First Lord of the Admiralty, and as the head of the navy, he was associated with failure as well as success. The early months of war brought a series of naval blunders. Matters were not always helped by Churchill’s intrusion into the operational sphere or by indifferent staff work. The escape of German battleships from the Adriatic to Constantinople and the bombardment of Hartlepool and Scarborough (December 1914) were bad for the navy’s prestige, only somewhat offset by British victories at the battles of the Falklands (December 8, 1914) and Dogger Bank (January 24, 1915). The problem was that in the early months of the war, the Admiralty suffered from some appalling breakdowns of communication, and Churchill’s personal involvement with detailed orders sent to fleet units gave him more association with these errors than he need have had. In the operation that failed to catch the Goeben and Breslau, the orders were written in Churchill’s own hand. But they were not passed through the War Staff and served to exacerbate the crossed wires of command that enabled these two valuable ships to escape from under the Royal Navy’s nose. There were then the orders designed to remove the “live-bait squadron”—a collection of elderly cruisers operating off the German coast—from unacceptable danger. They were enacted too late, and the ships were consequently destroyed, another example of the incompetence of the Naval War Staff and a measure of Churchill’s inability to make it fit for purpose. Nevertheless, Churchill’s instinctive lust for action was tempered, as the months passed, by recognition that to enforce inaction on the enemy was a great strategic achievement in itself.
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