Churchill committed himself fully to supporting preparations for this offensive despite personal anxiety. He presided over a regular meeting of Cabinet ministers and chiefs of staff and reviewed progress on things such as the Mulberry harbors. Fortunately for Churchill’s health, 1944 brought far less foreign travel, the prime minister spending less than two months of the year away from Britain. Those close to him recognized how much had been taken out of him by illness and the monumental demands of his position. While victory moved perceptibly closer during the course of the year, Britain’s purchase in Allied councils waned, as the “Big Three” became more like the “Big Two-and-a-Half.” Churchill worried increasingly about the postwar world and the looming power of Russia but was unable to get Roosevelt to view things in the same way. He also invested considerable energy in Greek affairs, attempting to resist Russian ambitions and end the nascent civil war at the expense of the Communists.
Churchill was able to draw some comfort from the 1944 Dominion heads of government conference in London, which emphasized Commonwealth togetherness despite the many international and regional strains of war all had been subjected to. He was praised for delaying the opening of a second front until the time was right, Dominion governments being as anxious to avoid more Gallipolis or Dieppes as the British government was to avoid more Sommes. Churchill, along with senior British commanders, had been deeply marked by the losses sustained on the Western Front during the First World War and was desperate to avoid a full-scale invasion of a fortified coastline manned by the world’s best soldiers. Commando raids were one thing; putting entire divisions ashore from the sea was quite another. This understandable aversion to casualties also meant that Churchill, along with many others, was naturally drawn to flanking theatres through which a shattering blow might potentially be delivered against the enemy. But events in Italy never moved as swiftly and shatteringly as he earnestly hoped; as he described the Anzio landings, “I had hoped that we were hurling a wild cat onto the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale.”123 The Americans, with their own good reasons, were never convinced of the significance of the kind of operations in the Mediterranean and the Balkans that the British believed had so much potential, seeing the beaches and countryside of northern France as the starting point for the defeat of Hitler’s Germany. For them, the Mediterranean was peripheral, and they were always wary, here as elsewhere, of the specter of British imperialism. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that even America’s vaunted enthusiasm for Overlord was initially based on the understanding of a sufficient buildup of Allied forces in Britain and upon a German collapse. In short: cross-Channel if the Germans happened to crumble in 1942 or 1943; an all-out invasion in 1944 if that did not occur. American impatience to put troops across the Channel is rendered more intelligible when one considers the president’s and General Marshall’s need to “get active” in the European theatre as quickly as possible or risk Admiral King and the navy winning the debate and having the lion’s share of resources committed to the war against Japan.
During the course of 1943, Churchill had been away from Britain for four months and missed nearly half the meetings of Cabinet. Now reestablished in Whitehall and Westminster, he made the planning for D-Day his top priority. When the vast armada of over 7,000 vessels supported by over 11,000 aircraft and carrying a first wave of over 150,000 men and their equipment went in, Churchill was roughly dissuaded from watching the landings, the War Cabinet having to enlist the aid of King George VI in order to restrain him. The fear of massive casualties was not realized, and casualty rates for this, the greatest seaborne invasion of all time, were relatively light. Churchill did set foot in liberated France on June 21, and was on board the destroyer HMS Kelvin as she fired at enemy targets on land after he had pressed her captain to have, as he told Roosevelt, “a plug at the Hun.”124 He returned at Montgomery’s invitation in July, established offshore aboard the cruiser HMS Enterprise and allowed to survey the forward positions from the air.
At this stage of the war, Churchill had less involvement with the British Commonwealth armies than during any of the war’s other major operations. This signaled the fact that not only was America on board, but the need for Churchill had diminished. As he wrote to Smuts, “Our armies are only about one-half the size of the American. . . . it is not so easy as it used to be for me to get things done.” The downsizing of Churchill’s prominence was also due to the fact that the war was going well and its command structures working efficiently. A winning team had been put in place. Eisenhower, for example, was a superlative supreme commander and political general, adept at managing Anglo-American commanders on the ground.
In the Mediterranean theatre, Churchill had one of his pet schemes, a proposed attack on the Ljubljana Gap to reach Vienna before the Russians, flatly rejected by the Americans, though his great interest in the region remained despite the Allied advance toward Germany from the north. On August 10, he flew to Algiers and then onward to Naples, believing that his personal intervention was needed in the affairs of Italy and Yugoslavia. He met Tito and the Ban (the governor of Croatia), “trying to unite all against the Germans.” It was a thankless task, and as he wrote to Clementine, “unhappily Tito is now using the bulk of the ammunition we gave him to fight the Serbs.” In the midst of all this war business he found time to visit the Blue Grotto at Capri and to enjoy a “lovely expedition to the Island of Ischia.” “I thought the Blue Grotto wonderful,” he wrote, and he had “four bathes which have done me all the good in the world.” He even managed to get away and see some more live military action; despite his opposition to Operation Dragoon, Churchill wangled a trip on the destroyer HMS Kimberley to watch the invasion in progress, sailing within a few miles of Saint-Tropez. Churchill found himself “in an immense concourse of ships all sprawled along 20 miles of coast with poor San Tropez in the center.” Churchill was there to “show public support” for what he considered a “well conducted but unrelated [to the wider war] operation.” In fact, he bitterly regretted the loss of resources in Italy caused by this American-inspired campaign. His relish for action was undimmed. On August 26, 1944, while visiting General Alexander’s armies, he was allowed to witness at close quarters the beginning of a new Allied offensive. The party pursued the action by car. From a hilltop village near Florence that had recently been shelled there was “a magnificent view from the ramparts of bygone centuries,” Churchill wrote.125 “The whole front of the Eighth Army offensive was visible.” But with only puffs of smoke visible, he wanted to get closer. They crossed the River Metauro, where “Hasdrubal’s defeat had sealed the fate of Carthage,” he noted. Stopping at a minefield, they found a building held by British troops. “Here one certainly could see all that was possible. The Germans were firing with rifles and machine-guns . . . about five hundred yards away. Our front line was beneath us . . . this . . . was the nearest I got to the enemy and the time I heard most bullets in the Second World War.”126 A photograph captures Churchill observing the fighting from this advanced position, as does the unique painting on the cover of this book. “He absolutely loved it,” Alexander wrote. “It fascinated him—the real warrior at heart.”127
Following this latest trip, Churchill returned to Britain, again in a bad state of repair, suffering from a high fever and a patch on the lung. He was nursed in the Downing Street Annex, though a mere six days later he hauled his seventy-year-old frame off to Canada. On September 5, 1944, he set sail for Quebec on the Queen Mary for the all-important Octagon Conference. It had become Churchill’s primary role in the war to manage the Anglo-American alliance and attempt not only to win the war but to shape the peace that would follow. At the Octagon Conference, Churchill sought to both gain American support for his military plans and secure a massive extension of Lend-Lease. He also sought to strengthen Britain’s role in an alliance increasingly controlled from Washington. In a revealing letter to Clementine, he explained what he hoped to achieve at this conference:
This visit of mine to the President is the most necessary one that I have ever made since the very beginning as it is there that various differences that exist between the Staffs, and also between me and the American COS, must be brought to a decision. We have three armies in the field. The first is fighting under American Command in France, the second under General Alexander is relegated to a secondary and frustrated situation by the United States’ insistence on this landing on the Riviera. The third on the Burma frontier is fighting in the most unhealthy country in the world under the worst possible conditions to guard the American air line over the Himalayas into their very over-rated China. Thus two-thirds of our forces are being mis-employed for American convenience, and the other third is under American Command. The casualties in Burma amounted in the first six months of this year to 288,000 sick and 40,000 killed and wounded. These are delicate and serious matters to be handled between friends with careful and patient personal discussion.128
During the sea voyage, Churchill and the chiefs of staff considered the prospect of transferring resources from the Mediterranean to the Far East, where plans for the reinvasion of Malaya were gaining ground under Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command. Beyond this, the British were thinking about the substantial contribution they wanted to make in the Pacific theatre when events elsewhere permitted, lest the Americans believe that the British contribution to the defeat of Japan had been negligible.
Churchill told the chiefs that Britain’s policy “should be to engage Japanese forces with the maximum intensity, and at the same time to regain British territory.”129 He bemoaned American control over landing ship tanks [sic], the lack of which thwarted his plan to put an army into Istria to bid for Vienna and a stake in Central and Eastern Europe. The landing craft formed part of a “common pool,” he complained, Britain having agreed to concentrate on the construction of other forms of hardware. It was at this conference that Churchill saw the plan for the postwar pastoralization of Germany, a scheme that he and Roosevelt initially approved only to be forced to back down by the Foreign Office and the State Department. As regards the Far East theatre, the Americans were anxious to clear the Burma Road in order to sustain China and build up air bases there for the assault on Japan. Churchill knew how strongly American public opinion felt about China, commenting that “it is almost true to say that the American public would be more concerned if China fell out of the war than if Russia did so.” He did not relish the prospect of a campaign in the Burmese jungle and preferred to strike at the Japanese home islands from Russian Asia, though was persuaded that a forward move in Burma was necessary. The Americans were focused very much on Overlord; Churchill was still keen on the Mediterranean and the increasing need, as he discerned it, to keep Russian influence as far to the east as possible, hence his desire to prevent Tito from seizing Trieste, to be the first to Austria, and to beat the Russians to Berlin. After the Octagon Conference, Churchill was again a guest at the White House, indulging in some fishing at Snow Lodge (though as Lord Moran noted, when relaxing—fishing here, for example, or in Canada the previous August—“he feels he is playing truant”).130 On September 6, he visited Harvard to receive an honorary degree. In his speech, he told the American people that they could “not escape world responsibility” and that the “responsibilities of this great Republic [are] growing.”131
“Churchill, in excellent form,” according to Admiral Cunningham,132 arrived back from the Octagon Conference aboard HMS Renown in late September. Friends and colleagues noted a rejuvenation, and eleven days later he was off again, believing it was essential that he talk to Stalin. Thus on October 7, 1944, he left for another marathon trip to Moscow via the Middle East, accompanied by Anthony Eden. His intention was to get some resolution about how postwar Europe might look. He wanted to reach agreement about Poland, the Balkans, and Greece. His belief in one-to-one diplomacy was unwavering (“What an ineffectual method of conveying human thought correspondence is . . . they are simply dead, blank walls compared to personal-personal contacts”133), as was his burning desire to come to an arrangement with Stalin, especially about the postwar division of spheres of influence in Europe. On these issues of postwar Europe he faced the agony of abandoning the Baltic republics and letting down the Poles. As a result, Stalin withdrew Russian support for the communist guerrillas in Greece, Churchill playing a leading role in saving Greece from communism. When the German army withdrew from Greece in that month, a British occupation force arrived and intervened decisively in the civil war that was brewing between monarchists and communists. At this meeting, Churchill and Stalin drew up their “Naughty Document” on a half sheet of paper, divvying up by percentage British, American, and Russian “influence” in Rumania, Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. “After this,” Churchill wrote, “there was a long silence. The penciled paper lay in the center of the table. At length I said, ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such a manner? Let us burn the paper.’ ‘No, you keep it,’ said Stalin.”134
On October 13, Churchill wrote to Clementine telling her that the conference was going well. “We have settled a lot of things about the Balkans & prevented hosts of squabbles that were maturing.” Churchill was growing to like “the Old Bear” and believed he was making headway—“Now they respect us here & I am sure they wish to work with us—I have to keep the President in constant touch & this is the delicate side.” Churchill’s party left Moscow on October 19. In Cairo, Lord Moran was again forced to summon specialists because Churchill was ill. The physician recorded changes in the prime minister’s mood throughout the war. On this latest trip to Russia, he wrote that he “is less certain of things now than he was in 1940, when the world was tumbling around his ears.” Churchill fretted about Russia in the postwar world—“Good God, can’t you see that the Russians are spreading across Europe like a tide?”135 Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, on the other side he had to face growing American indifference to his warnings. On his trip to America that September, Moran had found him “waiting for the chance to put in a word with the President. One has to seize the occasion,” he had said.136
In November 1944, Churchill visited newly liberated Paris, where he joined General de Gaulle in a procession down the Champs Elysées. In the following month, he was in Greece to try to broker a settlement after he had authorized General Scobie in Athens to open fire on communist guerrillas. His sudden departure for Athens ruined a rare family Christmas at Chequers, Churchill arriving a day late and then announcing he was off the following day, Christmas Eve. This left Clementine in tears. The episode underlined the extent to which Churchill had become public property, as his family well understood, and the extent of his desire to be at the center of affairs, build peace in Europe, and make history. Instead of a well-earned break in the bosom of his family, Churchill found himself at a Boxing Day conference with the various political parties set against the backdrop of incessant gunfire in the streets and a view of the fighting north of Piraeus. He earned little thanks for this Greek intervention and was criticized in the American press. In Parliament in January, however, Churchill vigorously defended his policy and actions. He spoke of the principles for which Britain was striving on behalf of the liberated countries and the “repentant satellite countries.” This principle was “government of the people, by the people, for the people, set up on the basis of free and fair universal elections.”137
Constant overseas travel meant less time for the business of government at home, and this occasioned a stinging rebuke from Attlee. In his letter of January 19, 1945, the deputy prime minister wrote of “the method or rather the lack of method of dealing with matters requiring Cabinet decisions.” It was felt that Churchill should trust colleagues’ views on civil affairs, which, owing to his concentration on war strategy, he had ignored. Attlee also complained that he relied too much on Beaverbrook and Bracken. This was a common criticism, though
no one, not even his close advisers and confidants, ever had him in their pocket. Attlee’s warning reflected growing concern among senior colleagues about the way government was being conducted. Churchill’s lengthy absences and preoccupations elsewhere meant that he was often unable to read Cabinet papers. With things going relatively well in Western Europe and reflecting the greater role of America in Allied affairs, Churchill was far less active on the fighting front than he had been in the first four years of conflict. With the development of a sophisticated inter-Allied command structure, Churchill’s power to sack people diminished. So, too, did his purchase on Roosevelt; from 1943 onward, American advisers thought it was safe to let the president be alone with the prime minister without fear of the former’s head being turned by Churchillian bright ideas or deviations from agreed American strategy. At a staff conference in December 1944, Churchill spoke of how, since Quebec, “events had been the cause of much disappointment. The Germans were holding fast on the Western Front and in Italy, and in Burma the advance was slow.”138 Reinvigoration was necessary.
By this time, inter-Allied conferences tended to be about the postwar world as much as war strategy. In early 1945, Churchill traveled to the Yalta Conference along the familiar Mediterranean route, meeting Roosevelt at Malta on February 1. At Yalta, Churchill pressed for an occupation zone in Germany for the French, for fear America might leave Europe after the war and leave Britain to face the growing menace of Russia alone (Churchill said that he regarded “the restoration of France as one of the great powers of Europe . . . a sacred duty from which Great Britain will never recede”).139 The conference’s two main issues were the establishment of the United Nations and the future of Poland. Churchill did what he could to argue for the Poles, but from a position of weakness. The conference was noted for its cordiality, and Stalin described Churchill flatteringly as a man born once in a hundred years. But beneath the surface, this was a conference about American and Russian ambitions rather than British. The Russians gained more concessions from the Allies, and the Americans were anxious to please them in order to win Russian participation in the war against Japan and in the foundation of the United Nations. The world was changing, and Churchill’s frustration was a barometer of declining British power, in terms of the Allied war effort, and more generally in terms of Britain’s ability to shape world affairs. Churchill was not blind to the auguries. On the journey to Malta, he had been reading Beverley Nichols’s book Verdict on India. Ruminating on its message, he wrote to Clementine:
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