After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  I am glad you do not set too much store by the reports of the Scientific Committee. Almost all the food faddists I have ever known have died young after a long period of senile decay. The British soldier is far more likely to be right than the scientists. All he cares about is beef. I do not understand why there should be these serious difficulties about food, considering the tonnages … we are importing. The way to lose the war is to try to force the British public into a diet of milk, oatmeal, potatoes, etc, washed down on gala occasions with a little lime juice.6

  While the bureaucrats and puritans dreamed up their bossy wartime slogans – ‘Wage War on Waste’, ‘Start a Rag Bag!’, ‘Dr Carrot Guards Your Health’7 – Churchill’s brandy-sodden rhetoric and high colour gave different messages to the public. Hitler could dismiss him as ‘a superannuated drunkard supported by Jewish gold’;8 Roosevelt’s first question to his Republican rival Wendell Wilkie, when he returned from a visit to England in February 1941, was to ask (about Churchill): ‘Is he a drunk?’ (Amusingly, when they met, Churchill himself was a little taken aback by the President’s method of making a Martini with sweet and dry vermouth added to lashings of gin.)

  It was Hitler’s sobriety, in the circumstances, which seemed so eerie and Churchill’s drunkenness which was natural in the heightened terror of the times. The London pubs were full during the war. Even so high-minded a foreign visitor as the philosopher Simone Weil, working for the Free French, commented upon the comradely boozy atmosphere of the pubs, and kept a bottle of vodka in her bed-sit. The front page of the Evening Standard for 30 December 1940 had the headline SEVEN LONDON CHURCHES HIT IN FIERCEST LONDON RAID, while a box in the upper right-hand corner of the same page proclaimed ‘NICHOLSON’S GIN It’s Clear, It’s Good’.9

  Robert Bruce Lockhart, civil servant, records: ‘I am drinking far too much – like most people in Whitehall these days. The Ministers are no better; Dalton [Minister of Economic Warfare] has a strong head, drinks hard and has a particular liking for brandy. Brendan [Bracken, Minister of Information] is rarely completely sober after 11 pm, and even Eden takes a man’s full share in the evening. War’s effects on the nerves, I suppose.’10 Churchill, who drank very weak whisky and water throughout the day, on top of the drinks he consumed during and after meals, was an apt figurehead for this gruesome period when the gods of war borrowed the attributes of Bacchus, and the grapes of wrath made mortals drunk.

  In his dress-sense as in much else, Churchill was sui generis, or one could say pre-First World War Bohemian. The Canadian newspapers seemed surprised in 1943 when he arrived in Quebec wearing an unbleached linen suit. Domestically, especially when working late, he wore his self-invented crimson boiler suits, which emphasized that baby appearance on which all remarked. He loved uniforms, and could appear, apparently at whim, in naval caps, or wearing the uniform of any of the armed forces. At Teheran, where Stalin appeared wearing a brand-new and clearly newly designed mustard-coloured uniform with huge epaulettes, Churchill dressed as an Air Commodore. At Potsdam, Churchill was arrayed as a colonel. (In Hansard 1916–18 he is always referred to as ‘Colonel Churchill’.) The scornful remark of Chips Channon, that they might as well have made Caruso the Prime Minister, had a back-firing truth in it; for an operatic, colourful, and inspiring figurehead was precisely what the hour required, rather than a grey career-politician.

  It was also an essential part of Churchill’s character that he was a Victorian. At Bristol University, of which he was Chancellor, he wore the robes which his father Lord Randolph had worn as Queen Victoria’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. On all formal occasions, he wore not a cutaway morning coat but a full frock-coat and tall silk hat, and looked every inch the contemporary of Mr Gladstone or Lord Salisbury. His eating and drinking habits – grouse for breakfast, champagne to drink with dinner, followed by lashings of port and brandy – had little to do with the austere twentieth century. ‘I have always tried to understand the point of austerity’ – a broad grin appeared – ‘though I cannot claim to have seriously practised it’ was his remark upon visiting the shattered monastery of Monte Cassino in 1944. Victorian too were his religious unbelief and his views of the East. ‘He spoke of himself as a link with Queen Victoria,’ his doctor remembered.11 And Isaiah Berlin, who neither unpatronizingly nor inaccurately saw Churchill’s vision of history as ‘vivid historical images – something between Victorian illustrations in a child’s book of history and the great procession painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi Palace’,12 was precisely right when he saw Churchill as a nineteenth-century figure. He saw Roosevelt as a figure whose whole political career, and whose vision of his country and its destiny were based upon a confidence about the future; Churchill, by contrast, in Berlin’s view, was still inhabiting the brightly coloured illustrations of his child’s history book. Both men, Roosevelt and Churchill, had an ‘uncommon love of life’. The difference between them is best summarized in terms of era. ‘Mr Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World; while Mr Churchill for all his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow – despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.’13 More than half a century after Berlin wrote those words, you could go further and change the ‘despites’ to ‘withs’

  In point of fact, Churchill was the nineteenth century’s revenge on the scoffing generation which produced Bertrand Russell’s sceptical philosophy, Lytton Strachey’s anti-heroic essays on Victorian icons, and E. M. Forster’s sub-Wildean belief that it was better to betray your country than your friend. Churchill was not a Christian, and certainly not a believer in a personal deity, but he believed in a sort of Destiny, which was highly comparable to Carlyle’s views of history, rescuing decadent societies by the arrival of a great man – an Odin, a Cromwell, a Mahomet. Churchill saw himself as such a figure in 1940, and most others in Europe shared his view: that was his triumph. He made others share the vision. He meant it when he said, ‘we entered the war for honour’,14 and honour was what he not merely maintained, but summoned up in others.

  In his book The World Crisis, he wrote up his impressions of Clemenceau. The words were penned in 1920, when he was forty-six, but he could have been describing himself as he took office as Prime Minister and steered Britain through the dramas of 1940. ‘Clemenceau embodied and expressed France; as much as any single human being, miraculously magnified, can ever be a nation, he was France … he left me with the impression of a terrible engine of mental and physical power, burning and throbbing in that aged frame.’15

  Churchill’s was not merely going to be the political comeback of a failed Edwardian politician who had made a mess of most of his previous jobs and wanted one last stab at the top job. Nor was it even to be the resistance of one small Northern European power to the advances of a large one. It was the return of the Victorians. He brought back into British life a rhetoric of optimism, a haughtiness of temper, and a humour which had not truly been known since the days of Palmerston and Disraeli. His very language about Hitler – ‘bloodthirsty guttersnipe’ – was that of a Victorian aristocrat whose temper has been tried too far and who now reaches for his riding-crop to deal with the upstart.

  But it was also a moral stand, and that was Victorian too. He combined the colourful speech and eccentric clothes of Disraeli with the fervour of that Gladstone who had hated the Bulgarian atrocities and called for the British people to defend the Christian civilization which had been violated.

  Of the King and Queen, Churchill said: ‘They have the rare talent of being able to make a mass of people realize, in a flash, that they are good.’16 From the beginning, Churchill’s grounds for opposing National Socialism transcended politics or strategy. His speeches enabled people to see the fundamental contrast
between the decent values of Christian civilization, as embodied in the King and Queen, and the sheer brutality of Nazism, with its contempt for the human individual and its lack of concern for freedom. So the old Victorian, with his old Victorian values, returned to fight the Last Battle. The revisionist historians are no doubt right to say that, at various points during 1940 or 1941, the British could have made peace with Germany For all that we know, had they done so, Hitler might have lived out his days like some Teutonic General Franco, and his successor might have handed over Germany to a more liberalizing or democratic regime some time in the 1950s or 1960s.

  Such a fantasy is impossible, however, because it is not what happened. There is such a thing as the mood of an hour. Churchill both awakened it and rode it like a surfer on the ultimate ocean roller. He enlisted the British Commonwealth and Empire for a struggle which would wound it mortally Far from surviving a thousand years, it lasted barely a hundred weeks after Hitler’s death.* The victory was achieved at the cost of alliances with Soviet communism and modern America, which would be the everlasting undoing of the Victorian world. Yet the battle was one of honour. However incapacitating it is today for the British to live with the mythology of 1940, however much it holds them in the past, it is understandable why they cling to it. There was a genuine glory and a dignity to the story of the old hero returning to slay some dragons before, bloodied and weakened, he and his Victorian world sank into the regions of twilight.

  * India anyway. The African Empire lasted until the 1960s.

  28

  From the Battle of Britain to Pearl Harbor

  Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world … will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age …

  This was the extraordinary alternative which Winston Churchill placed before the British people, and the world, in June 1940. Hitler and his regime provided the sticking point, as the ‘brigand power’, with which to compromise would be disaster. That other brigand power, Mussolini’s, had impressed Churchill when they met in 1927, and he was happy for Britain to do deals with the Italian dictator during the 1930s. He sided at first with General Franco in Spain. He developed a warm affection for the mass-murderer Stalin. As for Japan – in his first few weeks in office as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill had opposed any notion that Japan represented a threat to British imperial interests. ‘A war with Japan!’ he had exclaimed with incredulity. ‘But why should there be a war with Japan? I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime … Japan is at the other end of the world. She cannot menace our security in any way.’1 Most British people in 1940, and most Europeans since 1945, have shared Churchill’s instinctual belief that there was something uniquely horrible, even by the standards of other twentieth-century brigands, about the National Socialists; and this was before the wholesale massacre of the Jews had begun. (Not, of course, before their anti-Semitic policy was in practice.)

  Hitler saw England, as he always called Great Britain (most Germans do), as an essentially imperial power. ‘The basic reason for English pride is India. Four hundred years ago the English did not have this pride.’2 He was sure that eventually the English and the Germans would become allies. Even in 1941, after the evacuation of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the exchange of bombing raids between English and German cities in the previous year, he still spoke of the two countries as essential allies. ‘It is quite certain that in future England’s Empire won’t be able to exist without the support of Germany.’3 As he saw matters, the existence of the British Empire, the support for which was the very core of Churchill’s politics, and the politics of almost all English Tories, was incompatible with an American alliance. ‘England and America will one day have a war with one another, which will be waged with the greatest hatred imaginable,’ he predicted, adding with what some would consider prescience: ‘One of the two countries will have to disappear.’4

  The declaration of war by Britain therefore had taken Hitler by surprise. In May 1940 the German army had repeated its victories of 1870: in the earlier war they surrounded the French at Sedan; in 1940 they bypassed the French line. The French were more or less certain to be defeated in the field – if they had stomach for the fight. Within five days, the Germans took Amiens and reached the sea at Abbeville. Paul Reynaud, who in March 1940 had taken over as Prime Minister of France after the defeatist Edouard Daladier, appealed to the new British Prime Minister, Churchill, for help from the air. Passionately Francophile, and caught up in the emotional fervour of the situation, Churchill convened a cabinet meeting at which he asked the C-in-C of Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, to be present.

  It would be difficult to find two men more different from one another than Churchill and Dowding. The one, small, fat, flamboyantly exhibitionist, wearing his emotions on his sleeve, bullying, impulsive, loquacious; the other tall, lean, diffident, intense, pessimistic, introverted. They were both men of iron stubbornness, and the cabinet meeting in May 1940 was perhaps the most crucial that has ever taken place in the history of Britain.

  Dowding was shown into the Cabinet Room which also served as the Prime Minister’s office. Churchill was seated in the middle with other members of the war cabinet and representatives of the services seated around him at the table. There was the Secretary of State for air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, an old friend of Churchill: they had served together on the Western Front in 1915 after Churchill, to escape the bad publicity of Gallipoli, had resigned from the cabinet and commanded the 6th Royal Scots Fusiliers as a Lieutenant Colonel. There was the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall. Churchill was in a state of very high tension. When he was like this, his temper, like Hitler’s, could be explosive, and it was a bold man who checked him. That very morning, Holland had caved in to the Germans, and the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina, with a gasmask slung over her shoulder, had escaped on a Royal Navy vessel and come to continue the government of the Netherlands from a London hotel. The French premier had just been on the telephone, begging for planes. A menacing atmosphere of defeat was hovering in the air. Apart from the future of Europe, the future of Churchill hung in the balance. He had been waiting all his life for this moment of destiny. Only a few military blunders on his part, or a failure of nerve by his colleagues, or by the British people, or a little more audacity by the Germans, and his finest hour would have lasted about three weeks. No one in that room was brave enough to seem to be snatching it from him. Sinclair, the leader of the Liberal party, was Churchill’s friend, and as such wary of his temper. ‘The abuse and insults Winston heaped upon [Sinclair] were unbelievable,’ a colleague recalled. Newall had tried to point out the unrealism of the French request and been snapped at by Churchill. He had sunk into an obedient silence when Dowding entered the room. While Churchill spoke of the planes he was proposing to send to aid the French, the two senior ministers representing the air force remained cravenly silent.

  The previous day, Dowding had prepared a graph of the Hurricane fighter planes which had already been lost over France.

  I got to my feet and taking my graph with me, I walked round to the seat occupied by the Prime Minister. I leant forward and laid the graph on the table in front of him, and I said, ‘If the present rate of wastage continues another fortnight, we shall not have a single Hurricane left in France or in this country’. I laid particular emphasis on ‘or in this country’.5

  Dowding returned to his seat. There was complete silence as Churchill glanced at the graph in front of him. The Air Ministry representatives said nothing in Dowding’s support. It was entirely Hugh Dowding who prevented Churchill, in one of his characteristic rash blunders, from destroying what was left of the Royal Air Force, and thereby guaranteeing certain defeat by the Germans that summer.

  Dowding did not, as is sometimes stated, threaten to resign. He merely presented Chur
chill with the sobering facts. When Churchill had had time to absorb the message of the graph, Dowding spoke, distinctly and with his own quiet eloquence, of the vital need for more supplies, more aeroplanes and more pilots in the defence of Britain – above all, for more pilots. In his own recollections of this momentous cabinet session, Churchill makes no reference to his being checked by Dowding. He merely wrote: ‘The Cabinet gave me authority to move four more squadrons to France.’ Dowding’s comment, when he read Churchill’s memoirs, was: ‘You couldn’t very well expect him to admit that he came within a hair’s breadth of wrecking Fighter Command before the Battle ever started.’6

  Authority was given immediately for a major production of fighter planes – Hurricanes and Spitfires. Such was the speed with which aircraft technology was advancing during the 1930s and early 1940s that the British had done well out of their last-minute approach. Even the latest Messerschmitt fighter plane, the Me 109E, was not nearly as fast as the Spitfire, and many of the Messerschmitts which had been in production since 1936 or 1937 were already way behind the British models. Spitfires at 18,000 feet could fly at 354 miles per hour versus the Messerschmitt’s 334. The Ju 87B ‘Stuka’ bomber was a deadly plane, but the Germans had not yet mastered sufficient fuel technology to be able to keep these magnificent machines in the air for a very long time. By the time they had flown to England most Stukas could only last ten minutes before having to fly home. The fighter planes could last a little longer – maybe half an hour – but they were at a distinct disadvantage against the British fighters, which could land and refuel in mid-battle when fighting over British soil.