Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Daily pressures upon the prime minister were unrelenting. The war cabinet met 108 times in the ninety-two days between 10 May and 31 July. His black dispatch box contained a pile of papers which seemed never to diminish, ‘a farrago of operational, civil, political and scientific matters’. Overriding War Office objections, he promoted Maj.Gen. Jefferis, a clever soldier engaged in weapons experimental work, and ordered that he should report directly to Lindemann at the Cabinet Office. He insisted that the maverick armoured enthusiast Maj.Gen. Percy Hobart should be given suitable employment, overruling Dill’s objections with the assertion that he should remember that not only good boys help to win wars: ‘It is the sneaks and stinkers as well.’ He harassed the service chiefs in support of one of ‘the Prof’s’ most foolish personal initiatives, aerial rocket deployments against enemy aircraft. Sir Hugh Dowding of Fighter Command wanted his pilots to kill German aircrew who took to their parachutes. Churchill, recoiling from what he perceived as dishonourable conduct, would have none of this. Travelling with Roger Keyes at the end of July, he told the admiral that he had ‘many detractors’ as chief of combined operations. Keyes responded tartly: ‘So had you, but you are now there in spite of it.’ Churchill said: ‘There are no competitors for my job now – I didn’t get it until they had got into a mess.’

  Beyond pressing the urgency of fighter production, Churchill made few tactical interventions in the Battle of Britain, but one of the most justly celebrated took place in the Downing Street cabinet room on 21 June. There was fierce controversy between Lindemann and Sir Henry Tizard, chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, about a suggestion from air intelligence that the Luftwaffe intended to use electronic beams to guide its night raiders to British targets. Tizard dismissed the feasibility of such a technique. Churchill summoned him, together with Lindemann and senior airmen, to a meeting attended by twenty-eight-year-old scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones. It soon became obvious that Jones alone understood the issue. Though awed by finding himself in such company, he said to the prime minister: ‘Would it help, sir, if I told you the story right from the start?’ Churchill was initially taken aback, then said: ‘Well, yes, it would!’ Jones spent twenty minutes explaining how his own researches, aided by ‘Ultra’ German signals decrypted by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park – still fragmentary at this stage of the war – had led him to an understanding of the Luftwaffe’s navigational aids. Churchill, characteristically, found himself paraphrasing in his mind lines from the parodic nineteenth-century folklore collection The Ingoldsby Legends: ‘But now one Mr Jones/Comes forth and depones/That fifteen years since, he had heard certain groans.’

  When Jones finished, Tizard expressed renewed scepticism. Churchill overruled him, and ordered that the young scientist should be given facilities to explore the German beams. Initially much dismayed by Jones’s revelations, he thrilled when the young ‘boffin’ told him that, once wavelengths were identified, the transmissions could be jammed. Jones himself, of course, was enchanted by the prime minister’s receptiveness: ‘Here was strength, resolution, humour, readiness to listen, to ask the searching question and, when convinced, to act.’ The beams were indeed jammed. Jones became one of the outstanding British intelligence officers of the war. Tizard’s career was, alas, virtually destroyed by his misjudgement. He was an old enemy of Lindemann, who now possessed ammunition with which to discredit him. Though a man of exceptional ability who had made a critical contribution to the creation of Britain’s radar defences, never again did Tizard wield important influence. But the ‘beams’ episode showed Churchill at his best: accessible, imaginative, penetrating, decisive, and always suggestible about technological innovation.

  From the summer of 1940 onwards, decrypts of German signals assumed a steadily rising importance to the British war effort. Selected samples codenamed Boniface were delivered to Churchill daily, in a special box to which even the private secretaries were denied a key. The chiefs of staff deplored his direct access to Ultra, arguing that he often derived false impressions from raw intelligence, and misjudged the significance of enemy exchanges. Yet Ultra armed the prime minister for the direction of the war in a fashion unknown to any other national leader in history. It played a critical role in guiding Churchill’s own perceptions of strategy, both for good and ill, and fortified his confidence in overruling commanders.

  The Bletchley Park codebreaking operation, still in its infancy in 1940, was the greatest British achievement of the war, and from 1941 became the cornerstone of its intelligence operations. The Secret Intelligence Service was directed by Brigadier Sir Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, a quintessential officer and gentleman, former president of ‘Pop’ and captain of the cricket XI at Eton, Life Guardsman and member of White’s club. Menzies owed his appointment to Halifax. His record was more impressive as a Whitehall intriguer than as a spymaster. SIS never gained significant ‘humint’ – agent intelligence – about the Axis high command. Before Ultra got into its stride, most of Menzies’s assessments of – for instance – German intentions in 1940–41 were wildly mistaken. He had little to do with the pre-war development of Bletchley Park, but by a skilful coup gained administrative control of its operations. He made it his business to deliver personally to the prime minister the most delectable codebreakers’ delicacies, and in consequence was always a welcome visitor at Downing Street. All national leaders gain a frisson of excitement from access to secret intelligence. This was especially and understandably so of Churchill. Menzies, purveyor of Bletchley’s golden eggs, gained exaggerated credit as owner of the goose.

  Amid the great issues of national defence there were constitutional responsibilities, including regular meetings with the monarch. The King and Queen were ‘a little ruffled’, Jock Colville learned, ‘by the offhand way he treated them – says he will come at six, puts it off until 6.30 by telephone, then comes at seven’. Only a king would dare to resent his prime minister’s tardiness when Churchill had to supervise the creation of the Takoradi aircraft ferry route across Africa to Egypt, visit blitzed airfields, bully the Treasury into paying compensation for private homes destroyed by bombs, and write at length in his own hand to Neville Chamberlain, now stricken with the cancer that would kill him within three months. There were certainly difficulties, the prime minister acknowledged to his predecessor in a letter of 31 August: ‘however when all is said and done I must say I feel pretty good about this war’. But Churchill was exasperated on 10 August when Sir Stafford Cripps, the Moscow ambassador, submitted to him a paper detailing proposals on post-war reconstruction. There would come a time for such things, but it was not the summer of 1940. Only a fool could have thought otherwise.

  Meanwhile, Britain was running out of money. The war was costing £55 million a week, and Washington was implacable in its demands for immediate cash payment for every ton of weapons and supplies shipped across the Atlantic. Kingsley Wood, the chancellor, suggested melting down the nation’s gold wedding rings, which would raise £20 million. The prime minister said that the Treasury should hold back from such a drastic measure, unless it became necessary to make a parade of it to shame the United States. On 16 August he visited Fighter Command’s 11 Group Operations Room, and intently watched progress of the day’s fighting on the huge plotting board. On the way back to Chequers in his car, ‘Pug’ Ismay, his chief of staff, made some remark. Churchill said: ‘Don’t speak to me. I have never been so moved.’ After a few minutes’ silence he leaned forward and said, ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’ Ismay wrote: ‘The words burned into my brain.’ That day, the Combined Intelligence Centre reported its belief that Hitler would make no decision about invasion until the outcome of the air battle became clear. On 24 August the first German bombs fell on outer London, and Fighter Command’s airfields were again badly hit.

  Sunday, 1 September, yet another day when intelligence suggested that invasion might come, passed without incident. On the 3r
d, for the second time the war cabinet met in the new underground Central War Room. Churchill declared it to be ‘lamentable’ that only 500,000 rifles were scheduled to be produced by British manufacturers before the end of 1941. On 5 September he used the same adjective to deplore the ‘passivity’ to which the Royal Navy seemed reduced when it declined to bombard new German batteries at Cap Gris Nez, only twenty miles from the English south coast. He told Cunningham, Mediterranean C-in-C, that the supposed vulnerability of his fleet to Italian aircraft was ‘exaggerated’. He urged the swift construction of landing craft to facilitate the raids on enemy shores he was so impatient to launch.

  A wag in the War Office discovered in the Book of Job a description of a warhorse which the generals thought entirely fitting to their political master: ‘He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage…He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.’ Yet while Churchill never disdained the gestures and symbols of warriorhood, he strove also for substance. Each night, he told Colville, ‘I try myself by court martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground – anyone can go through the motions – but something really effective.’

  It is hard for a historian, as it was for Churchill’s contemporaries, to conceive what it was like for a man to bear sole responsibility for preserving European civilisation. Harold Nicolson wrote of the prime minister’s remoteness from ordinary mortals. His eyes were ‘glaucous, vigilant, angry, combative, visionary and tragic…the eyes of a man who is much preoccupied and is unable to rivet his attention on minor things…But in another sense they are the eyes of a man faced by an ordeal or tragedy, and combining vision, truculence, resolution and great unhappiness.’ Throughout the war there were moments when Churchill was oppressed by loneliness, which only Beaverbrook’s company seemed able to assuage. It was by his personal choice, indeed unflagging insistence, that he delegated to others few of the responsibilities of supreme command. But the thrill and exaltation of playing out his role gave way, at times, to a despondency which required all his powers to overcome. In 1940 he sustained his spirit wonderfully well, but in the later war years he became prone to outbursts of self-pity, often accompanied by tears.

  His personal staff’s awareness of the prime minister’s burden caused them to forgive his outbursts of discourtesy and intemperance. Ministers and commanders were less sympathetic. Their criticisms of Churchill’s behaviour were human enough, and objectively just. But they reflected lapses of imagination. Few men in human history had borne such a load, which was ever at the forefront of his consciousness, and even subconsciousness. Dreams drifted through his sleep, though he seldom revealed their nature to others. What is astonishing is that in his waking hours he preserved such gaiety. Although an intensely serious man, he displayed a capacity for fun as remarkable as his powers of concentration and memory, his unremitting commitment to hard labour. Seldom, if ever, has a great national leader displayed such power to entertain his people, stirring them to laughter even amid the tears of war.

  Churchill never doubted his own genius – subordinates often wished that he would. But there were many moments when his confidence in a happy outcome faltered amid bad tidings from the battlefield. He believed that destiny had marked him to enter history as the saviour of Western civilisation, and this conviction coloured his smallest words and deeds. When a Dover workman said to his mate as Churchill passed, ‘There goes the bloody British Empire,’ the prime minister was enchanted. ‘Very nice,’ he lisped to Jock Colville, his face wreathed in smiles. But, in profound contrast to Hitler and Mussolini, he preserved a humanity, an awareness of himself as mortal clay, which seldom lost its power to touch the hearts of those who served him, just as the brilliance of his conversation won their veneration.

  He was fearless about everything save the possibility of defeat. Hurrying from Downing Street to the Annexe with Colville one day, in his customary uniform of short black coat, striped trousers and white-spotted blue bow tie, they heard the whistle of descending bombs. The young official took cover as two explosions resounded nearby. He rose to observe the prime minister still striding up King Charles Street, gold-headed walking stick in hand.

  Disraeli said: ‘Men should always be difficult. I can’t bear men who come and dine with you when you want them.’ Churchill, with his tempestuous moods and unsocial hours, certainly fulfilled this requirement. The prime minister’s typists were expected instantly to comprehend the meaning of some mumbled injunction such as ‘Gimme “Pug”!’ When taking dictation, they were required to respect every nuance of his precision of language. Alan Brooke was once outraged when Churchill shouted down the telephone to him: ‘Get off, you fool!’ It required intercession by the staff to soothe the general’s ruffled feathers with the explanation that the prime minister, who was in bed when he called Brooke, had been telling Smokey the black cat to stop biting his toes. Jock Colville and the King’s assistant private secretary Tommy Lascelles, lunching together one day, debated ‘whether very great men usually had a touch of charlatanism in them’, and of course they were thinking of the prime minister. Some fastidious souls recoiled from Churchill’s perceived ruthlessness, though US military attaché Raymond Lee applauded him as ‘an unscrupulously rough-and-tumble fighter…perfectly at home in his dealings with Hitler and Mussolini’.

  Churchill was self-obsessed, yet displayed spasms of concern for his intimates just often enough to prevent them from becoming disgusted by his selfishness. After one outburst, he suddenly put his hand on private secretary John Martin’s shoulder and said, ‘You know, I may seem to be very fierce, but I am fierce only with one man – Hitler.’ He expressed regret that he had lacked leisure to get to know Martin at the start of their relationship, back in May.

  He was always happy to reminisce about himself, but had no small talk, in the sense of being willing to display a polite interest in the affairs of others, save those important to the state. He was reluctant even to pretend to pay attention to people who failed to capture his interest. Leo Amery contrasted him with Britain’s First World War leader: ‘Ll[oyd] G[eorge] was purely external and receptive, the result of intercourse with his fellow men, and non-existent in their absence, while Winston is literary and expressive of himself with hardly any contact with other minds.’ ‘Pug’ Ismay shook his head in dismay when the prime minister once wantonly kept an entire ship’s crew waiting half an hour to be addressed by him: ‘It’s very naughty of the PM. It’s this unbridled power.’

  Churchill’s doctor Sir Charles Wilson wrote of ‘the formidable ramparts of indifference which he presents to women’, and which only his wife Clementine and their daughters were sometimes capable of scaling. Clementine – highly strung, intensely moral, sensitive to vulgarity – was often ignored, mauled, taken for granted. Yet beyond her fierce loyalty to her husband she marvellously sustained her commitment to rebuke his excesses, to repair the fractured china of his relationships. On 27 June she wrote a letter which has become justly famous:

  Darling Winston, One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner…My darling Winston – I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be. It is for you to give the Orders & if they are bungled – except for the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury & the Speaker you can sack anyone & everyone. Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness & if possible Olympic [sic] calm…I cannot bear that those who serve the country & your self should not love you as well as admire and respect you. Besides you won
’t get the best results by irascibility & rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality – ‘Rebellion in War Time being out of the question!’ Please forgive your loving devoted & watchful

  Clemmie

  This note, of which the signature was decorated with a cat drawing, she tore up. But four days later she pieced it together and gave it to her husband – the only letter she is known to have written to him in 1940. The country, as much as he, owed a debt to such a wife. More than any other human being, Clementine preserved Churchill from succumbing to the corruption of wielding almost absolute authority over his nation.

  Churchill seldom found a moment to read a book in 1940, but he addressed with close attention each day’s newspapers, windows upon the minds of the British people. His hunger for information was insatiable. Not infrequently he telephoned personally to the Daily Telegraph or Daily Express at midnight to enquire what was their front-page ‘splash’ for next day. One night at Chequers he caused Colville to ring the Admiralty three times in quest of news. On the third occasion, the exasperated duty captain at the other end gave way to invective. The prime minister, overhearing the babble of speech from the other end, assumed that at least a cruiser must have been sunk. He seized the receiver from Colville’s hand, ‘to find himself subjected to a flow of uncomplimentary expletives which clearly fascinated him. After listening for a minute or two he explained with great humility that he was only the Prime Minister and that he had been wondering whether there was any naval news.’