The invasion of Sicily by Anglo-American forces began on July 9, 1943, and the island was conquered within five weeks. Mussolini was dismissed by the Italian king on July 25, and an armistice was signed on September 7. Admiral Cunningham was soon able to echo General Alexander and report to Churchill and the War Cabinet that the “Italian battlefleet now lies beneath the guns of Malta.” Despite Italy’s defeat, however, German reinforcements and defensive skill significantly lengthened the Italian campaign. On the collapse of Italy (itself a momentous event), Churchill and Roosevelt met at Quebec in August 1943 for the Quadrant Conference, the prime minister accompanied by his daughter Mary as aide-de-camp, an example of the discreet but important support Churchill received from family members. Excited as usual by the prospect of travel, as the Churchills waited for the train to take them to Scotland and Scapa Flow, Churchill strode up and down the platform singing a W. S. Gilbert ballad.113 At Quebec, the differences of opinion between the British and American chiefs of staff came to a head, some Americans believing that the British were shy of fighting in the Western European theater and fixated with Italy and the Mediterranean. Churchill was reluctant to remove British and American divisions from the Mediterranean to contribute to the buildup in Britain for the invasion of France (Operation Overlord) and still harbored schemes for an invasion of Rhodes and for bringing Turkey into the war. The Americans, however, led by General Marshall, insisted that the major strategic objective for 1944 must be the cross-Channel invasion of Europe. It was decided at this conference that the supreme commander for D-Day would be an American, a decision that wounded General Sir Alan Brooke deeply, particularly given the offhand manner in which Churchill, who had promised him the command, carelessly conveyed the news. At this time Churchill was greatly worried by what, in a telegram to Attlee, he called “The increasing bearishness of Soviet Russia.” Worrying about the return flight to Britain of his main lieutenants, he said, “I don’t know what I should do without you all. I’d have to cut my throat. It isn’t just love, though there is much of that in it, but that you are my war machine. Brookie, Portal, you [Eden], and Dickie. I simply couldn’t replace you.”114
Soon another summit beckoned Churchill away from British shores, and he boarded HMS Renown at Plymouth on November 12, 1943, bound for Algiers and then Malta. Churchill had been enraged by the Russians the previous month, to the point that a message about the Arctic convoys had been returned to the Russian ambassador. Another visit to Uncle Joe was required, with an Anglo-Chinese-American conference en route. Churchill met Roosevelt at Heliopolis Airfield in Cairo, and there the Anglo-American planning circus reconvened for the Sextant Conference, which gave primacy to Allied strategy in the war against Japan. The two Western leaders consulted in Cairo with Chiang Kai-shek about the war in the Far East, as well as with Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, supreme allied commander, South East Asia. Churchill considered China and its leader a distraction from the main business of the conference, though was beguiled by Madame Chiang—“I withdraw all unfavourable remarks which I may have made about her,” he wrote to Clementine. Though impressed by Chiang and his wife, he could not bring himself to consider that their influence in his conversations with the Americans was useful and complained of important conversations distracted “by the Chinese story, which was lengthy, complicated, and minor.”115 But for the Americans, China was one of the major keys to the postwar future, and therefore it had to be endured.
The conference agreed that the main thrust in the war against Japan would come in the Pacific, but Churchill harbored dreams of a British-led field action in Southeast Asia gaining a decisive victory over Japanese forces in that region and winning back the lost colonial estates of Britain, France, and Holland. This conference highlighted the divergence of opinion between Churchill and the chiefs regarding British strategy against Japan. Churchill was determined that Britain’s main effort east of Suez should be to liberate colonies conquered by the Japanese and to achieve this by British imperial arms, crucial to rebuilding prestige and ensuring the empire’s survival. The chiefs, however, while understanding Churchill’s point of view, realized that the key to defeating Japan as quickly as possible lay in the Pacific, specifically in the Japanese home islands, and that therefore contributing to American efforts to win in this theatre should be Britain’s main aim, thus foreshortening the war and strengthening Britain’s alliance with the increasingly dominant United States. While the chiefs focused on trying to overcome Admiral Ernest King’s often xenophobic objections to British imperial forces being involved in the Pacific theatre, Churchill expatiated on the benefits of operations such as Culverin, an attack upon Sumatra. Churchill was also driven by his restless desire to make use of the bases and forces that Britain had so laboriously and at such cost amassed in such places as the Middle East, Ceylon, and India.
The battle between Churchill and the chiefs of staff over strategy east of Suez was a drawn-out one. While Churchill was happy to commit forces to the assault on Japan—at one time contemplating building up a bomber force of fifteen hundred aircraft for the purpose—he was adamant that this must not interfere with British-led operations in Southeast Asia and the reconquest of the lost colonies. Churchill would invoke Admiral King’s objections, or support received from Anthony Eden and the Foreign Office, or a positive assessment of what could be achieved in Burma and Malaya by Admiral Mountbatten, or personal correspondence with President Roosevelt in order to try to outmaneuver the chiefs. They, for their part, worked tirelessly to ensure that Churchill’s “Indian Ocean” strategy (“as is known, I consider that all United Kingdom forces should operate across the Indian Ocean and not in the South-West Pacific”) did not blunt Britain’s contribution to the war in the Pacific, to such an extent that Churchill accused them of ganging up on him and withholding crucial information from him—an example of how Churchill was checked, counterbalanced, and sometimes thwarted by Britain’s military hierarchy.
This ongoing debate certainly hampered Britain’s activities in the east of Suez region. As General “Pug” Ismay commented, the “waffling that there has been for nearly nine months over the basic question of our strategy in the Far East will be one of the blackest spots in the record of the British Higher Direction of the War which has, on the whole, been pretty good.”116 When it came to getting Churchill to support them or to abandon a policy of which the chiefs disapproved, Admiral Pound wrote that standing up directly to Churchill brought out the worst in him. It was better to agree in principle and then let evidence accumulate about the impossibility of the scheme. General Sir Alan Brooke acted as a brake on his “passion for premature offensives,”117 and as Ismay noted, “not once during the whole war did he override his military advisers on a purely military question.” Arthur Marder wrote that he rarely failed to accept expert advice even if he thought the admirals “too plodding and lacking sufficient fire.”
In the eastern theatres, while Churchill was intimately involved in plans and discussions, with the chiefs and with the Allies, his imprint was less visible than in Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. This reflects four facts: the first, that specifically British-led operations in Asia and Southeast Asia were often determined by what could be accomplished by the resources that were available; the second, that the war effort of India was in many ways autonomous and not subject to London’s direct control, reflecting the manner in which the Government of India and Indian Army had developed over the centuries; the third, that the chiefs of staff and subordinate commanders often had their way when it came to the direction and execution of operations (one of the reasons for Churchill’s strong support for the new South East Asia Command was because it was his invention and would help wrest control of the war effort in the region from GHQ India); and the fourth, that America dominated in the war against Japan and so ultimately decided strategy—even by its control of resources, which could either make an operation in the east (such as the use of American transport aircraft at crucial mo
ments during key battles in the Burma campaign) or break it (scuppering numerous planned amphibious operations because of the lack of landing craft).
This is an important perspective, because it diminishes Churchill’s role as Britain’s sole strategist of the war, helping us better understand Churchill as a man working with, and having to take account of, others around him, rather than working entirely alone. Churchill was of course the dominant force in developing Britain’s war strategy. But he was not the only force and did not dominate every aspect of British foreign policy and military operations. Admiral Cunningham, talking to Lord Moran about Churchill’s contribution to British strategy after the war, said, “Well, anyway, it did not amount to much.”118 This goes too far, though it gives a sense of the manner in which senior military commanders felt they had been able to shape, channel, or bypass Churchill’s strategic directives, a sign of the healthy balance that was achieved as Churchill, the chiefs of staff, and senior commanders and ministers argued with each other and countered each other as British strategy was hammered out. Unlike in the First World War, military leaders were unable to dominate their civilian masters, but neither were the civilian masters—and the brooding, fertile, and ingenious mind who led them—able to walk over the admirals and generals. Always present was the threat of the chiefs resigning, and this put a brake on Churchill. Meanwhile, his energy and mind for detail and interference provided, in the words of Jock Colville, “guidance and purpose for the chiefs of staff and the Foreign Office on matters which, without him, would often have been lost in the maze of inter-departmentalism or frittered away by caution and compromise.”
Heated discussions and much frustration were generated as British strategy was thrashed out. Churchill drove the chiefs of staff hard, believed that his chivying and ceaseless demands for action helped the chiefs overcome their caution. As he said to Harold Macmillan, referring to the chiefs: “You may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, and the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together—what do you get? The sum of their fears.” The man most frequently exposed to Churchill’s strategic initiatives and arguments—as well as his goading, shouting, and fist shaking—was General Sir Alan Brooke. He poured his woes into his diary. “The wonderful thing is that three-quarters of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other quarter have no conception of what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war!”119 In the cold light of day, Brooke significantly modified this view, while Churchill would wholeheartedly have agreed with the three-quarters of the world’s population to which he referred.
It was in 1943 that Britain’s lessening grip on Allied strategy became manifest, auguring a postwar world in which Britain was to be a distant third behind America and Russia in international affairs. In Cairo, Churchill took Roosevelt to see the pyramids and the Sphinx, having first checked it was possible to get a car close enough so that the president did not have to alight. Churchill was still trying to get the Americans to sign up more fully, through the commitment of resources, to the Mediterranean theatre. One thing that particularly upset Churchill at this time, and exposed both the limits and the wishful thinking of his loftier visions for an English-speaking alliance, was Roosevelt’s refusal to permit them to present a united front to Stalin. Before heading off to Tehran to meet the Russian leader, Churchill had hoped that he and Roosevelt could agree on a common front. But Roosevelt wanted to talk to the Russians on his own, having distinct American policies—regarding the Pacific war and the future of the postwar world—that did not necessarily align with, and in some cases were directly opposed to, British interests and policies. Churchill concealed his disappointment and remained true to his conception of his role in the Grand Alliance, as well as his resolve to let no difference with America jeopardize it. That was the priority; all else was subordinate to it. Roosevelt’s tactics failed to impress Stalin, who disliked his apparent disloyalty to his foremost ally. Lord Moran recorded Churchill’s vexation during this visit. He wrote that the prime minister had a “glimpse of impending catastrophe.” Of Stalin, Churchill said, “I believe man might destroy man and wipe out civilization. Europe would be desolate and I may be held responsible. . . . Why do I plague my mind with these things, I never used to worry about anything.” According to Moran, Churchill asked himself whether Stalin would “become a menace to the free world, another Hitler. . . . The PM is appalled by his own impotence.”120
On December 2, 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt flew back to Cairo, where the Sextant Conference resumed. While Churchill was pleased when Roosevelt agreed that an assault on the Japanese-held Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean was not worthwhile, he could not persuade him to divert precious landing craft for the operation against Rhodes that he cherished. On December 11–12, 1943, Churchill flew to Tunis to stay with General Eisenhower. Here, exhausted, he slept for a full day, though he complained of a splitting headache. He felt so ill that he decided to stay for a rest. Lord Moran telegraphed for assistance and an X-ray machine arrived. Military doctors with appropriate specialties converged from across the Mediterranean theatre. Pneumonia was discovered on the lung, and Churchill suffered a fibrillation of the heart. His physician expected him to die over the weekend, so serious was the attack. “In what better place could I die than here—in the ruins of Carthage?” was Churchill’s brave sally from his sickbed. But he rallied and made a remarkable and speedy recovery. An eighteen-day convalescence period at Marrakech began, and Clementine arrived on December 15. In an illuminating entry, Moran recorded that “the PM received the news of her arrival with considerable emotion, but when I told her later how pleased he had been, she smiled whimsically: ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘he’s very glad I’ve come, but in five minutes he’ll forget I’m here.’”121 During the course of this visit, Churchill was pleased to learn of the sinking of the Scharnhorst and of a delay in removing landing craft from the Mediterranean to Europe for D-Day, which allowed a new amphibious assault upon the Italian coast to be undertaken, two Allied divisions landing at Anzio in January, a surprise invasion within forty miles of Rome. Inspecting French troops with de Gaulle in Marrakech on January 13, Churchill was deeply moved by the cries of “Vive Churchill,” which trumped those of “Vive de Gaulle.”
The strain of wartime travel cannot be overestimated. Captain Richard Pim, who managed Churchill’s mobile map room, calculated that since the outbreak of the war the prime minister had traveled 110,000 miles by ship and plane. The map room was a daily feature of Churchill’s war, enabling him to keep up with progress on all fronts. All the maps were kept up to date, and those surviving bear the marks of a thousand pinpricks, as individual units were marked with colored flags, Churchill seated in a swivel chair in their midst and able to survey the world at war. A commemorative map celebrating his many journeys was published under the title Dunkirk to Berlin: Journeys Undertaken by the Right Honourable Winston S. Churchill OM, CH, FRS, MP in Defence of the British Empire. It showed the wartime journeys on a map, and the methods of travel, which included a BOAC flying boat; RAF Skymaster, Liberator, and York aircraft; the converted liner Queen Mary; the sister battleships HMS Duke of York, King George V, and Prince of Wales; the battle cruiser HMS Renown; and the destroyer HMS Kelvin. Churchill visited Newfoundland for the Atlantic Charter meeting with Roosevelt; went to Washington three times, Quebec twice, and Moscow three times (involving major conferences en route in Cairo and Tehran); Bermuda, Casablanca, Normandy, Italy, and France during the invasion of southern Europe, Greece, and Malta; and, after D-Day, made separate visits to Belgium and Holland, Normandy, Paris, and the Rhine, with a final appearance at Potsdam.
1944 and the Road to Victory
After two months away from Britain, in mid-January 1944, Churchill left Marrakech by aircraft for Gibraltar, feeling well enough to take the controls of the aircraft, thence to England aboard HMS King George V. The full Cabinet met him at P
addington after he had traveled overnight from Plymouth. Two hours after arriving in London, he made a triumphant surprise appearance in the Commons, where a “gasp of astonishment” passed over first the Labour benches when he was seen, then all the MPs were jumping up, shouting, and waving their papers in the air. “Winston very pink, rather shy, beaming with mischief, crept along the front bench and flung himself into his accustomed seat.” “Flushed with emotion,” two large tears rolled down his cheeks.122 At one thirty, he then dined with the king. The year 1944 was to see the epic battle of Monte Casino as the campaign in Italy dragged on, the continuation of the war at sea, the beginnings of imperial recovery in Burma, and telling American victories against the Japanese in the Pacific. It also brought an increase in the Anglo-American strategic bombing offensive after its discussion at Casablanca and Churchill’s explanation to Stalin about its extent. Now the American 8th Air Force was to join Bomber Command in flattening Germany, though the year saw a diversion of resources to target the launch sites of the dreaded V-bombs (buzz bombs) that had begun to menace London and other parts of Britain. The main event of the year, however, was to be the Anglo-American-Canadian invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe (Operation Overlord).
Churchill Page 34