by Max Hastings
The near Middle East was only one among many theatres from which bad tidings crowded in upon Britain’s prime minister. On 30 April, Iraqi troops attacked the RAF’s Habbaniya air base outside Baghdad, prompting Churchill and Eden to conclude that they must seize Iraq to pre-empt a German takeover. The Luftwaffe’s blitz on Britain continued relentlessly, and had by now killed more than 30,000 civilians. On 10 May, the demented deputy führer Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland on a personal peace mission which perversely served Nazi propaganda interests better than British. Bewildered people, especially in Moscow and Washington, supposed that some parley between Britain and Germany must indeed be imminent. Fears persisted that Spain would join the Axis. Although foreign exchange was desperately short, the government somehow found the huge sum of $10 million to bribe Spanish generals to keep their country out of the war. The payments, arranged through Franco’s banker Juan March, were made into Swiss accounts. There is no evidence that this largesse influenced Spanish policy, but it represented an earnest of British anxiety about Franco’s neutrality.
On 20 May, Germans began to appear in Vichy French Syria, causing Churchill to decree, once more against Wavell’s opposition: ‘We must go in.’ British, Australian and Free French troops were soon fighting a bitter little campaign against the Vichyites, who resisted. Churchill observed crossly that it was a pity they had not displayed the same determination against the Germans in 1940. Pétain’s troops were finally overcome. Britain’s seizure of Iraq and Syria attracted little popular enthusiasm at the time, and has not attracted much interest or applause from historians since. Yet these two initiatives reflected Churchill’s boldness at its best. British actions removed dangerous instability on Wavell’s eastern flank. The diversion of troops caused much hand-wringing in Cairo, but represented strategic wisdom. If the Germans had been successful in their tentative efforts to rouse the Arab world against Britain, its predicament in the Middle East would have worsened dramatically. The most authoritative modern German historians of the war, the authors of the monumental Potsdam Institute series, consider British successes in Syria, Iraq and Abyssinia more important to the 1941 strategic pattern than defeat on Crete. Churchill, they say, ‘was right when he asserted that on the whole, the situation in the Mediterranean and the Middle East was far more favourable to Britain than it had been a year earlier’. Yet it did not seem so at the time to the sorely tried British people.
On 23 May, a Friday, the battlecruiser Hood blew up during a brief engagement with the Bismarck. The days that followed, with the German battleship loose in the North Atlantic, were terrible ones for the prime minister. His despondency lifted only on the 27th, when as he addressed the House of Commons he received news that the Bismarck was sunk. Atlantic convoy losses remained appalling. American assistance fell far short of British hopes, and Churchill not infrequently vented his bitterness at the ruthlessness of the financial terms extracted by Washington. ‘As far as I can make out,’ he wrote to chancellor Kingsley Wood, ‘we are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone.’
The Middle East remained Britain’s chief battleground. Despite success in securing the eastern flank in Syria and seizing control of Iraq, Churchill’s confidence in his C-in-C, never high, was ebbing fast. ‘He said some very harsh things about Wavell, whose excessive caution and inclination to pessimism he finds very antipathetic.’ For a few weeks, confidence flickered about a fresh offensive, Battleaxe. Admiral Cunningham was told that if this succeeded, and Wavell’s forces reached Tripoli, the next step would be a landing in Sicily. Such fantasies were swiftly crushed. On 17 June it was learned in London that Battleaxe had failed, with the loss of a hundred priceless tanks. Churchill was exasperated to hear that Wavell wanted to evacuate Tobruk. This was militarily rational, for the port’s logistic value was small, yet seemed politically intolerable. In April Churchill had described Wavell in a broadcast as ‘that fine commander whom we cheered in good days and will back through bad’. Now, on 20 June, he sacked the Middle East C-in-C, exchanging him with Sir Claude Auchinleck, C-in-C India, whose seizure of Iraq had been executed with impressive efficiency. Wavell was given the Delhi command only because Churchill feared that to consign him to oblivion would play poorly with the public, to whom the general had been represented as a hero.
Clementine Churchill once wrote contemptuously to her husband about the deposed Middle East C-in-C: ‘I understand he has a great deal of personal charm. This is pleasant in civilized times but not much use in total War.’ Too many of the British Army’s senior officers were agreeable men who lacked the killer instinct indispensable to victory. Wavell’s best biographer, Ronald Lewin, has observed that he seemed destined for greatness in any field save that of high command in battle. It might more brutally be suggested that there was less to Wavell than his enigmatic persona led admirers to suppose. He once said to Pownall: ‘My trouble is that I am not really interested in war.’ This was a surprisingly common limitation among Britain’s senior soldiers. It goes far to explain why Winston Churchill was much better suited to his own role than were some of his generals to theirs.
2 The War Machine
It is sometimes suggested that in the Second World War there was none of the mistrust, and indeed hostility, between generals and politicians, ‘brass’ and ‘frocks’, which characterised the British high command in the 1914-18 conflict. This is untrue. Ironside, when he was CIGS in 1939, remarked contemptuously to a staff officer as he set out for a war cabinet meeting: ‘Now I’m going to waste a morning educating these old gentlemen on their job.’ Though Churchill was not then prime minister, he was categorised among the despised ‘old gentlemen’.
Lt.Gen. Henry Pownall wrote of Churchill’s cabinet: ‘They are a pretty fair lot of gangsters some of them—Bevin, Morrison and above all Beaverbrook who has got one of the nastiest faces I ever saw on any man.’ John Kennedy wrote later in the war: ‘It is a bad feature of the present situation, that there is such a rift between the politicians and the services. Winston certainly does not keep his team pulling happily in harness together. It is very wrong of him to keep abusing the services—the cry is taken up by other politicians & it is bad for the Service advisers to be made to feel ashamed of their uniforms.’
Yet the evidence of events suggests that the prime minister’s criticisms of his soldiers were well merited. The shortcomings of the wartime British Army form the theme of a later chapter. By a notable irony, Churchill’s machinery for directing the war effort was much more impressive than the means for implementing its decisions in the field. The war cabinet was Britain’s principal policy-making body, regularly attended by the chiefs of staff as well as by its own eight members—in 1941 Churchill, Attlee, Eden, Bevin, Wood, Beaverbrook, Greenwood and Sir John Anderson. Some 400 committees and sub-committees, of varying membership and importance, devolved from it. Service business was addressed by the chiefs at their own gatherings, usually in Churchill’s absence. Of 391 chiefs of staff meetings in 1941, Churchill presided at only twenty-three, whereas he chaired ninety-seven of 111 meetings of the war cabinet. He also conducted sixty out of sixty-nine meetings of its defence committee’s operational group, and twelve out of thirteen meetings of its supply group.
Formalities were always maintained, with the prime minister addressing ministers and commanders by their titles rather than names. On Churchill’s bad days, his subordinates were appalled by his intemperance and irrationality. But on his good ones—and what an astonishing number of these there were!—his deportment went far to render a war of national survival endurable for those conducting it. ‘When he is in the right mood, no entertainment can surpass a meeting with him,’ wrote a general. ‘The other day he presided over a meeting on supply of equipment to allies and possible allies. He bustled in and said “well, I suppose it is the old story—too many little pigs and not enough teats on the old sow.”’
The chiefs of staff met every day save Sunday at 10.30 a.m., in a room beneath the Home Offic
e connected to the Cabinet War Rooms. Sessions customarily continued until 1 p.m. In the afternoons, chiefs worked in their own offices, to which they returned after dinner unless a further evening meeting had been summoned, as happened at moments of crisis, of which there were many. Every Monday evening the chiefs attended war cabinet. The 1914-18 conflict precipitated the beginnings of a historic shift in the balance of decision-making from commanders in the field towards the prime minister and his service chiefs in London. In the Second World War this became much more pronounced. Generals at the head of armies, admirals at sea, remained responsible for winning battles. But modern communications empowered those at the summit of national affairs to influence the conduct of operations in remote theatres, for good or ill, in a fashion impossible in earlier ages. Alan Brooke wrote later: ‘It is a strange thing what a vast part the COS [committee] takes in the running of the war and how little it is known or its functions appreciated! The average man in the street has never heard of it.’
For any minister or service chief successfully to influence the prime minister, it was essential that he should be capable of sustaining himself in argument. Churchill considered that unless commanders had stomach to fight him, they were unlikely to fight the enemy. Few found it easy to do this. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, was one of many senior officers who cherished ambivalent attitudes towards Churchill: ‘At times you could kiss his feet, at others you feel you could kill him.’ Pound was a capable organiser whose tenure as chairman of the chiefs until March 1942 was crippled, first, by a reluctance to assert his own will against that of the prime minister, later by worsening health. Captain Stephen Roskill, official historian of the wartime Royal Navy, believed that Pound was never a big enough man for his role. The admiral had doubts about his own capacities, and once asked Cunningham whether he should resign his post. Churchill bears substantial blame for allowing Pound to keep his job when his failing body, as well as inadequate strength of character, had become plain. It was fortunate for the Royal Navy that the admiral had some able and energetic subordinates.
Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the Mediterranean C-in-C who succeeded Pound when he became mortally stricken, was frustrated by his own inarticulacy: ‘I…have to confess to an inherent difficulty in expressing myself in verbal discussion, which I have never got over except on certain occasions when I am really roused…I felt rather like a spider sitting in the middle of a web vibrating with activity.’ Soon after Cunningham took up his post at the Admiralty, one Saturday afternoon the telephone rang at his Hampshire home. The prime minister wanted to talk on the scrambler. Cunningham explained that he possessed no scrambler. Churchill said impatiently that a device would be installed immediately. The admiral and his wife were kept awake until engineers finished their task at 1 a.m., when a call was duly put through to Downing Street. The prime minister was by then asleep. Cunningham, considerably cross, was told that the emergency had passed.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, who assumed direction of the RAF in October 1940, was widely considered the cleverest of the chiefs of staff. ‘Peter’ Portal displayed notable diplomatic gifts, especially later, in dealing with the Americans. Like many senior airmen, his principal preoccupation was with the interests of his own service, and above all its bomber offensive. His personality lacked the bright colours, his conduct the anecdotage, which enabled a man to shine at dinner tables or in the historiography of the war, but Ismay’s key subordinate Brigadier Leslie Hollis paid tribute to Portal’s incisive mind and infectious calm: ‘I never saw him ruffled,’ said Hollis, ‘even under vicious and uninformed attacks on the Air Force. He would sit surveying the critic coldly from beneath his heavy-lidded eyes, never raising his voice or losing his temper, but replying to rhetoric with facts.’ The army was envious of the skill with which Portal exercised his influence upon the prime minister, often more successfully than the CIGS. Gen. Sir John Dill was liked and respected by his colleagues, but by the summer of 1941 he was deeply scarred by the failures of his service; his fires were flickering, his self-confidence had ebbed. Chiefs of staffs’ meetings throughout 1941-42 were pervaded by consciousness of the army’s inability to deliver victories, and of the prime minister’s consequent disaffection towards its leaders.
Major-General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, throughout Churchill’s premiership his chief of staff as Minister of Defence and personal representative on the chiefs of staff committee, was sometimes criticised as a courtier, too acquiescent to his master’s whims. John Kennedy, for instance, disliked Ismay: ‘I am thankful I have so little to do with him…Ismay is such a devotee of PM’s that he is a danger. He said the other evening in the club “if the PM came in & said he’d like to wipe his boots on me, I’d lie down & let him do it. He is such a great man everything should be done for him.” This is a dangerous attribute for a man who has such an influence on military advice.’
Yet this was a minority view. Most people—ministers, commanders and officials alike—respected Ismay’s tact and discretion. He perceived his role as that of representing the prime minister’s wishes to service chiefs, and vice versa, rather than himself acting as a prime mover. He never offered strategic advice because he believed, surely rightly, that this would usurp the chiefs’ functions. He was a superb diplomat, who presided over a small staff of which the principal members were Hollis, who had served as a Royal Marine officer aboard a cruiser at the 1916 battle of Jutland, and the brilliant, austere, bespectacled Colonel Ian Jacob, a field marshal’s son. Ismay himself was usually to be found in the prime minister’s anteroom, while the secretariat was based in Richmond Terrace, around the corner from Downing Street. There, Jacob established the Defence Registry, which logged every incoming signal from commanders in the field, including those addressed to the chiefs of staff. Whatever mistakes were made by the British high command, however acute became personal tensions between the prime minister, his generals, admirals and air marshals, throughout Churchill’s war premiership, the highest standards of coordination, staff discipline and exchange of information prevailed between Downing Street and the service ministries.
On the civil side, the prime minister was served by a remarkable group of officials. Cabinet Secretary Sir Edward Bridges preserved an enthusiasm for cerebral diversions, even amid the blitz. He presided over self-consciously intellectual debates in the Downing Street staff mess at supper, such as one in pursuance of the theme ‘Is there any evil except in intent?’ Bridges had the additional merit that he was as passionately committed as the prime minister to victory at any cost, and in June 1940 rejected out of hand proposals to establish skeleton Whitehall departments in Canada, against the eventuality of German occupation of Britain.
The Downing Street staff understood, as some outsiders did not, that while the prime minister’s regime might be unusual, it was remarkably disciplined. Minutes were typed and circulated within an hour or two of meetings taking place, even after midnight. The private secretaries—for most of the war Leslie Rowan, John Martin, Tony Bevir and John Colville—worked in shifts through the day and much of the night. ‘The chief difficulty is understanding what he says,’ wrote Martin in the early days of his service, ‘and great skill is required in interpreting inarticulate grunts or single words thrown out without explanation. I think he is consciously odd in these ways.’ Colville, as a young patrician—he was the grandson of Lord Crewe—who had also attended Harrow, Churchill’s old school, basked in paternalistic indulgence from his master. His social self-assurance, indeed conceit, enabled him to gossip among potentates at the prime minister’s dinner table without awe, though his role was only that of a humble functionary. As a diarist Colville fulfilled a priceless historical function as chronicler of the prime minister’s domestic routine.
Churchill’s personal followers inspired mistrust outside the ‘secret circle’, and sometimes inside it also. There was frequent criticism of his willingness to indulge old friends and family connections in significant posts
. Later in the war, his son-in-law Duncan Sandys made himself deeply unpopular as a junior army minister. Alan Brooke swore that he would resign if, as was rumoured likely though it never became a reality, Sandys was promoted to become Secretary for War. It was often asserted that Beaverbrook, Cherwell and Brendan Bracken were unsuitable intimates for the prime minister, just as important Americans resented Harry Hopkins’s relationship with Roosevelt. Yet in judging Churchill’s chosen associates, the only relevant issue is whether acolytes—the so-called ‘cronies’—improperly influenced his decisions.
Beaverbrook was the most wilful and intrusive. Whether in or out of office, he occupied an astonishing amount of the prime minister’s time and attention. Churchill never appeared to notice Beaverbrook’s physical cowardice, unusual in any member of his circle, and widely remarked by colleagues during the blitz, when as often as possible he retired to the country, and on the long wartime journeys abroad. The press baron exercised notable power as Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940, then as Minister of Supply in 1941. He remained thereafter one of the few civilians to whose views Churchill listened. Beaverbrook made much mischief about personalities. His contempt embraced the entire wartime Commons. ‘In truth it is only a sham of a parliament,’ he wrote to Hoare in Madrid in May 1941. ‘The Front Bench is part of the sham. There Attlee and Greenwood, a sparrow and a jackdaw, are perched on either side of the glittering bird of paradise.’ It is easy to identify issues on which Beaverbrook urged the prime minister to do the wrong thing, of which more will be said later. It is much harder to discover a case in which his imprecations were successful.