Churchill’s love affair with the continent continued during this period. Lavish foreign breaks in smart hotels or châteaux, where Churchill sought to recharge his batteries and draw vitality and cheer from friends and associates, occurred in places such as Aix-les-Bains, Biarritz, and Cannes. Sometimes he stayed at the Riviera château of actress and socialite Maxine Elliott, painting at nearby Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Baldwin amusingly recalled staying with Winston at Aix-les-Bains in 1934. “He had never seen Mont Blanc, so he was going there, letting the mountains have a peep at him.” Churchill indulged another of his favorite pastimes, cruising in the Mediterranean aboard Lord Moyne’s yacht, painting Greek temples and the battlements of Rhodes. In 1936, he visited Tangier and Marrakech with his paints, as well as Knebworth as the guest of Lord and Lady Lytton. In January 1939, he visited Antibes on what was to be his last proper holiday for some time. Despite his evident enthusiasm for painting, he had a pleasingly modest opinion of his talents, which led him to refuse Sir John Lavery’s request for a picture to exhibit at a “Sea Power” exhibition. He did not think he had painted anything good enough.
At the root of Churchill’s frenetic activity remained the love of his wife, which was as ardent as ever. He was quite often alone; she was off cruising in 1934 with Lord Moyne in the Dutch East Indies, and in November 1938 she was in the West Indies with a commission reporting on conditions in the British colonies. Churchill missed her terribly during these absences. “Do you love me?” he wrote. “I feel so deeply interwoven with you that I follow your movement in my mind at every hour & in all circumstances.”
Churchill sat in the Commons on the fateful day, September 3, 1939, when Europe once more descended into war. It was a day remembered in popular memory for its late-summer sun, the sound of suburban lawnmowers, and the aroma of Sunday lunch, an image of homely normality providing a sharp contrast to the violation signaled by Chamberlain’s doleful radio broadcast announcing that, despite all his efforts, Great Britain was at war with Germany. Shortly after the news came over the airwaves at eleven o’clock, an air raid siren sounded, and with Clementine at his side Churchill went onto the roof of their Pimlico flat and saw a barrage balloon rise into the sky. They made their way to the nearest communal shelter, equipped with a bottle of brandy. The sense of having embarked upon a noble struggle suffused Churchill’s mind as he attended the Commons meeting later that day:
As I sat in my place, listening to the speeches, a very strong sense of calm came over me. . . . I felt a serenity of mind and was conscious of a kind of spiritual detachment from human and personal affairs. The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honor, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation.40
Later, the prime minister Neville Chamberlain summoned him for a conversation.
7
War Machine: The Management of Global Conflict
“WINSTON IS BACK.” This was the signal the Admiralty transmitted to the Royal Navy’s vast network of warships, air stations, and shore bases scattered from Bermuda to Shanghai when Chamberlain brought Churchill back into the Cabinet after an absence of over ten years. Twenty-five years after resigning as First Sea Lord in 1915 following the Dardanelles debacle, Churchill had returned to his first true political love—stewardship of the mighty navy upon which the British Empire’s security rested. “So it was that I came again to the room I had quitted in pain and sorrow almost a quarter of a century before. . . . Once again we must fight for life and honour against all the might and fury of the valiant, disciplined and ruthless German race. Once again! So be it!”1
A global network of sea lanes, and the ability to move resources of food and raw materials as well as troops from one part of the world to another, remained as important as ever to Britain and its empire. Their security depended upon the Royal Navy, “unsurpassed in the world and . . . still the main bulwark of our security,” as Churchill described it.2 The Germans no longer had a High Seas Fleet, and the disparity between the two rival navies was greater than it had been in 1914. But there was one branch of naval warfare in which the Nazis had invested heavily—submarines—and this was to threaten the independence of the British Isles as never before. Together with the advent of air power, the measures by which national strength and national vulnerability were calculated had shifted dramatically. Yet the navy’s work in keeping Britain in touch with its colonies and trading partners overseas, in blockading enemy shores and defending those of Britain, and in enabling the movement of troops and military resources around the world remained as important as ever. The navy remained Britain’s shield against invasion and essential to Britain’s prosecution of military operations overseas, whether across the Channel in France or on the other side of the world in Burma and Hong Kong.
Chamberlain asked Churchill to join his government on September 1, 1939, though it was not until September 3 that it became clear Churchill was to be given the Admiralty and a seat in the newly formed War Cabinet. “This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland,” he told the House on that memorable day. “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defense of all that is most sacred to man.”3 Immediately upon joining the Cabinet, Churchill unleashed a fusillade of ideas and commandments across his own and other government departments, showing the energy and innovation that was to be an inspiration to his countrymen and should have brought fire to the bellies of his less convinced political peers. Right from the start of the war, Churchill’s clarity of vision and confidence marked him out as unique, as did his pronouncements, which were simple, dramatic, realistic, and all embracing.
Yet he remained in this initial phase of the war an outsider with no discernible power base, and long memories of personal and party wrangles—and the failure by many to grasp the horrifying significance of events unfolding in Europe—meant that he was still regarded with suspicion and even contempt. Friends, including Brendan Bracken and David Lloyd George, had advised Churchill not to join Chamberlain’s government if invited to do so, but Churchill could not resist the call when it came. Chamberlain remained very much the ringmaster, Churchill his reluctantly appointed probationer. This did not prevent him from getting stuck in, and thirteen letters to Chamberlain in the first six weeks of war demonstrated Churchill’s trademark habit of allowing all around him the benefit of his advice.
Churchill set about the Admiralty with unrestrained gusto. He organized weekly dinners to get to know his staff and other relevant people, a trick that was repeated later in the war when plans for the invasion of France were gathering pace. At Admiralty House he created an Upper War Room with maps of all shipping movements and throughout the war was followed all over the world by his maps and the naval officer who kept them up to date. He did what was necessary to ensure merchant ships were well protected and employed in convoy, remembering what had transpired in the previous war. He ordered that all ships should have radar fitted and all merchant ships be armed. Reveling in a constant flow of information, Churchill established a Statistical Department under his trusted friend Professor Lindemann, which yielded a ready stream of the most up-to-date information about all aspects of the Admiralty’s business. Like his love of big maps, this innovation gave Churchill a comprehensive picture of all Admiralty activity around the world (a system later taken with him to Number 10 and applied across the range of government activity). On September 14, 1939, he toured the Home Fleet, setting out his stall as a First Lord determined to spend as much time as possible visiting naval installations across the country, seeing what was going on and letting others have a look at him.
His chief dictating secretary wrote that “when Winston was at the Admiralty the place was buzzing with atmosphere, with electricity. When he was away on tour, it was dead, dead, dead.”4 He had the confidence to override the naval opinion of admirals while never disdaining their
advice and constantly sought a daring role for the navy, which, given the essentially unspectacular nature of some of its core roles—convoy escort and blockade—was not entirely realistic. Churchill considered several harebrained schemes, like sending a force into the Baltic, quashed with some difficulty by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound. But genuine knowledge, robust leadership, and a fertile mind are qualities never to be despised in leaders pursuing national survival. Even if some of the ideas were stinkers, most were not, and there were sufficient talented and powerful people surrounding Churchill to ensure that, on the whole, Britain’s strategic decision making throughout the war was of a very high quality, and innovative ideas were developed. Stephen Roskill avers that Churchill’s return to the Admiralty “was warmly welcomed throughout the navy.” He “invigorated the whole administrative machinery of the department and made his personality felt far and wide.”5 But, on the more negative side, Roskill claims, he “diverted to fruitless schemes manpower and materials which were sorely needed for more conventional purposes.”
Churchill’s attention to detail showed no sign of waning, though it was sometimes based on smoke-and-mirrors tactics. His ability to seize upon a detail and pursue it suggested omniscience on his part and might imply an absence of knowledge or attention on the part of others, putting them on their mettle. At Scapa Flow, for example, Churchill noticed that there were no gulls fussing around the dummy warships, meaning they were unlikely to fox German reconnaissance flights. “Pray tell me why . . .” was a familiar opening to a Churchillian enquiry about some relative minutiae, often accompanied by a request to summarize the situation on a single piece of paper. This in itself was important; while Churchill was renowned for not being a good listener, his wife advised those seeking to get through to him that he always took note of things put in writing. He also directed that no decisions from him be considered valid unless expressed in writing. In the opinion of Sir Ian Jacob, military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet and deputy to General Ismay, Churchill’s pursuit of detail across a very wide spectrum could come across as a lack of confidence in his colleagues and military commanders, a few of whom “never recovered from the initial shock of exposure” to his attentions.6 But it kept people on their toes at a time when keeping up to the mark was absolutely crucial. Churchill was well known for using knowledge of a particular detail, or a well-marshaled half-truth, to get his own way while pooh-poohing the schemes of others. Attlee explained how this might be done:
Now and again he would pick up a document with which he wasn’t familiar, and ask questions in the tone of a man who had read the whole thing through several times, and discovered the critical weakness in it. “What about this!”, he would say, glowering around the room. Sometimes we would have to point out to him that the passage he quoted was followed by its refutation and was not a recommendation. If he was in the mood, quite unabashed, he would try another. Or again, he might ignore our observation, and hold forth for ten or fifteen minutes about something that no longer existed. . . . We used to let him get it off his chest, and not interrupt—indeed, it was extremely difficult to interrupt him because not only had he no intention of stopping, but frequently he had no intention of listening. His monologues sometimes went on for very long periods indeed.7
His capacity to focus on detail was very important. Norman Book said it was like a searchlight sweeping round: no one knew when it would settle on them, “So everyone worked like blazes.”8 His greatest war-winning virtue, according to Jock Colville, was his “capacity for picking out essential things and concentrating on them.”9 In the first faltering weeks of war, Churchill’s pedigree as a leader was displayed to the nation. On September 26, 1939 he spoke from the dispatch box for the first time in a decade and cast a rousing spell over the House with a fast-moving account of the war at sea. This was followed by a worldwide radio broadcast in which he summarized the war to date. Though the speech included statistics biased in Britain’s favor, it provided authoritative information prized by the listening public. Harold Nicolson praised a “really amazing” speech that had sounded “every note from deep preoccupation to flippancy, from resolution to sheer boyishness. One could feel the spirits of the House rising with every word.”10 Winston’s tour de force came after Chamberlain had made “his usual dignified statement.” The contrast was apparent for all to see. Though diminished, Chamberlain remained powerful and solidly supported in Parliament, but in elite political circles, opposition to Churchill was evaporating. As the Earl of Crawford, a long-term opponent, put it, “He remains the only figure in the Cabinet with the virtue of constant uncompromising aggressive victory.” In his speech on the first month of war, Churchill demonstrated his oratorical skills. “The British Empire and the French Republic have been at war with Nazi Germany for a month tonight,” he said. “Poland was overrun by the two Great Powers which have held her in bondage for 150 years but were unable to quench the spirit of the Polish nation. The heroic defense of Warsaw shows that the soul of Poland is indestructible and that she will rise again.”11 He forged a link between Britain and the Polish people, their heroism and history. This kind of flourish was central to his speeches and was a skill that few politicians possessed. In his speeches, he would give basic information as well as detail—reporting on destruction wrought by mines, praising the work of the submariners, or singling out the salvage service that had retrieved a million tons of shipping. This gave a great sense of inclusiveness. He reviewed the war situation in Europe, but also in distant places such as Africa, Iran, or South Asia, reassuring the British public that we are “still masters of our fate.” He had an extraordinary “ability to magnify the chances of success while minimizing the possibility of failure.”12
Churchill’s new Cabinet colleagues sought to temper his public pronouncements, especially as he tended to drift far beyond his Admiralty brief and speak as if he were laying out official government policy with regard to the wider war effort. But Churchill resisted any form of censorship even when it was proposed that Sir Samuel Hoare “oversee” his public utterances. A radio broadcast in mid-October 1939 strayed significantly beyond Admiralty turf and onto general policy, allowing Churchill to make (apparently on behalf of the whole government) an unequivocal statement for fighting on regardless, ruling out any possibility of a negotiated peace, which was far from being the unanimous position of all his colleagues. In January 1940, he attracted the ire of the Foreign Office when he said that without Britain and France, the smaller states of Europe would be divided between the “similar barbarisms of Nazidom and Bolshevism.” He was, of course, right, though it pained people to hear things so starkly stated, and at the Foreign Office, Halifax (one of those Christians who should have been thrown to the lions, according to Churchill) gathered a sheaf of adverse press comment from the “tiresome neutrals” with whom it was his job to deal. In March, in an unequivocal and belligerent address broadcast by the BBC, Churchill said that “thoughtless, dilettante, or purblind wordlings sometimes ask us: ‘What is it that Britain and France are fighting for?’ To this I answer: ‘If we left off fighting you would soon find out.’”13
In terms of the navy’s activities, Churchill showed his characteristic impatience, yearning for dramatic victories with which to capture the public imagination. Yet the navy was well prepared for the less spectacular but vital job of blockading Germany and protecting Britain’s far-flung trade arteries. Those moments of naval drama that did come to the public’s attention tended to be entries on the wrong side of the ledger. The destruction of HMS Royal Oak (October 1939), at anchor in the Home Fleet’s defended base at Scapa Flow, cost over eight hundred lives and showed that even “impregnable” bases could be breached by daring and skillful U-boat commanders. The carrier Courageous was lost in the Bristol Channel with over five hundred lives (September 1939). Such losses were an inevitable consequence of the size and visibility of the Royal Navy, the unrivaled extent of its global tasks, and the potency of the enemy.
But they were galling nonetheless.
On the plus side, there were dramatic fillips to morale and battered national pride as well, such as the sinking of the battleship Graf Spee, run to ground and forced to scuttle off Montevideo, and the rescue of British prisoners of war from the Altmark as a result of a daring raid in Norwegian waters. Churchill cast such victories in a dramatic and even a romantic light, speaking of Britain’s naval heritage stretching back to the days of Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh and the continuing globality of British maritime power and endeavor in a struggle of good against evil. Despite intense activity at sea, however, this period of the war gained the misnomer “phony war,” referring to the apparent inactivity that followed the declaration of war in September 1939. It was a misnomer because although some elements of the British military might not have been doing much that was visible, other elements (such as the navy) were extremely active. Alliance diplomacy, war production, and logistics were spheres of constant activity during this period, as was the commitment of troops and RAF squadrons to the defense of France. Furthermore, it was only abject European paralysis in the face of Germany’s diplomatic and military thrusts that allowed this period to appear “phony”: in reality, it was as “phony” as the moment before a tiger pounces upon its prey.
The Norwegian Campaign
Churchill was full of schemes, which he argued for with his customary conviction. As usual, some of the seed he scattered fell on fertile, some on stony ground; and while it could be extremely exasperating for his colleagues, as Clement Attlee remarked, this fertility “kept us on our toes.” Some of the schemes verged on brilliance; others came straight from the mad professor’s laboratory. But overall, Habbakuk—the plan to use icebergs as aircraft carriers—was more than canceled out by the brilliance of Mulberry, the floating harbors that made the D-Day landings possible and that Churchill enthusiastically sponsored, as he did many other new “toys,” from sticky bombs to Hobart’s “funnies” ahead of the Normandy landings. He bombarded the Cabinet with ideas—to mine the Ruhr, to take resolute action in Norwegian waters, to operate in strength in the Baltic. A particular favorite was the desire to cut the Germans (and indeed the Russians) off from supplies of Swedish ore. Churchill became the leading proponent of this plan in the extended Cabinet wranglings that were to follow.
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