Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  NINIE

  ‘The Valley of Humiliation’

  For most of history, societies have enthused about victorious overseas conflicts, and recoiled from unsuccessful ones. The US declarations of war represented the fulfilment of all Churchill’s hopes since May 1940. Yet 1942 proved, until its last weeks, the most unhappy year of his premiership. It was not only that Britain suffered a further succession of defeats. It was that public confidence in the prime minister’s leadership waned in a fashion unthinkable during the Battle of Britain. Even if it remained improbable that he would be driven from office, he was beset by critics who questioned his judgement and sought to constrain his powers. Between his return from the United States in late January and the battle of Alamein in November, there were no moments of glory, and almost unremitting bad news. The British Empire suffered the heaviest blows in its history, which only the American alliance rendered endurable.

  On the train back to London after his flying-boat landed from Washington, Churchill indulged a last flicker of complacency. He told his doctor: ‘I have done a good job of work with the President…I am sure, Charles, the House will be pleased with what I have to tell them.’ A glance at the day’s newspapers disabused him. He laid down the Manchester Guardian without enthusiasm. ‘There seems to be plenty of snarling,’ he said. In the days that followed, ill tidings crowded forward. Naval losses in the Mediterranean meant that in the forthcoming months Britain could deploy no battle fleet from Alexandria. Amid reports from Malaya that the British Army was falling back routed upon Singapore, Churchill enquired whether there was a case for writing off ‘the fortress’, diverting reinforcements and aircraft elsewhere. His message was passed in error to the Australian representative to the war cabinet, Sir Earle Page – a man ‘with the mentality of a greengrocer’, in Brooke’s scornful phrase – who in turn forwarded it to Canberra. Prime minister John Curtin responded with an indignant cable to Churchill, asserting that to abandon Singapore would be ‘an inexcusable betrayal’.

  Relations between the Australian government and London, never cordial, entered a new phase of acrimony. Churchill valued Australia’s fighting men, but was contemptuous of its weak Labor government. He contrasted Australian pusillanimity – what would now be called ‘whingeing’ – unfavourably with the staunchness of New Zealand. Throughout the war he treated all the self-governing dominions as subject colonies, mere sources of manpower. Dominion politicians visiting London were accorded public courtesy, private indifference. Robert Menzies, the former Australian prime minister who was now opposition leader, commanded respect, but even Menzies had been moved to protest back in 1940, when his government heard of the Dakar operation only on reading about it in the press. The sole imperial figure to enjoy Churchill’s confidence was Field Marshal Jan Smuts, South Africa’s prime minister, a friend since the end of the Boer War. It was Smuts who said: ‘We should thank God for Hitler. He has brought us back to a realization of brute facts…He has, in fact, taken the lid off Hell, and we have all looked into it.’

  Churchill’s impatience with the dominions was understandable. Their governments – with the notable exception of New Zealand – often displayed a parochialism irksome to a British prime minister directing a global struggle for survival. Neither Canada nor Australia, for instance, introduced universal conscription for overseas service until the last stages of the conflict. But Churchill’s condescension towards Canberra and Ottawa was no more likely to please sensitive colonial governments than his absolute dismissal of Indian opinion won friends in the subcontinent. ‘The PM is not really interested in Mackenzie King,’ wrote Charles Wilson about Canada’s prime minister. ‘He takes him for granted.’

  The New Statesman complained: ‘Mr Churchill has been unwilling to give so much as a gracious word to win the support of India and Burma.’ The prime minister’s later reluctance to release scarce shipping to relieve the Bengal famine, which killed some three million people, appalled both the viceroy and Amery, Secretary of State for India. When Amery wished to make a broadcast to explain British policy, the prime minister vetoed it, saying that such action ‘is making too much of the famine and sounding apologetic’. More than any other aspect of his wartime behaviour, such high-handedness reflected the nineteenthcentury imperial vision of Churchill’s youth. As the Far East situation deteriorated, for four months there seemed a real possibility that Australia would be invaded. The Canberra government turned openly to the US for protection, in default of reassurance backed by reinforcements which the threadbare ‘mother country’ could not provide.

  On 27 January, amid increasing parliamentary criticism, Churchill faced the Commons. ‘It is because things have gone badly, and worse is to come, that I demand a Vote of Confidence,’ he said. This was a deliberate device, to force his critics to show their hands, or flinch. Having won the subsequent division by a majority of 464 to one, he walked beaming through the throng in the central lobby on the arm of Clementine, who had come to lend support. But he knew that this outcome represented no ending of his troubles. He was unwell, nagged by a cold he could not shake off. On 9 February Eden’s private secretary Oliver Harvey told his chief that he should be prepared to take over the premiership, and noted in his diary: ‘I think he is.’ Beyond the risks inherent in Churchill’s wartime travels, the health of a man of sixty-seven, labouring under huge strains, might collapse at any time. Such a contingency was never far from his colleagues’ consciousness.

  Churchill signalled Wavell, newly appointed as Anglo-American supreme commander in the Far East, urging that when the Russians on the eastern front and Americans on Luzon in the Philippines were fighting so staunchly, it was essential that the army in Malaya should be seen to give of its best: ‘The whole reputation of our country and our race is involved.’ Two days later, on 11 February, in response to continuing domestic criticism of his government and Beaverbrook’s desire to resign, he offered Stafford Cripps, whom he despised but who had a large popular following, the ministry of supply. Churchill grumbled about Cripps’s demand to sit in the war cabinet: ‘Lots of people want to. You could fill the Albert Hall with people who want to be in the War Cabinet.’ Denied a seat, Cripps declined office. The prime minister fumed amid his frustrations. Brooke, less than two months in his job as CIGS, told Dalton at dinner on 10 February: ‘Sometimes…the PM is just like a child who has lost his temper. It is very painful and no progress can be made with the business.’

  There was a new shock on 12 February. The German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau left Brest and steamed at full speed up the English Channel, assisted by fog. Churchill’s secretary Elizabeth Layton entered the cabinet room at 3 p.m. to take dictation, where she found the prime minister ‘striding up and down, all on edge. He dictated four telegrams like a whirlwind, and then phoned this and phoned that. I wondered if I should go, and once did slip out, but was recalled. Did another telegram, he marched up and down, talking to himself, a mass of compressed energy. Presently he sat down and said, “There’s a bloody great battle going on out there.” I said, “Do you think we might get them?” He said, “Don’t know. We winged ’em, but they aren’t dead yet.” ’ The navy did not ‘get them’. The German squadron reached Wilhelmshaven. Ultra informed Churchill that the ships had been severely damaged by mines on the last stage of their passage, but this was small comfort, and could not be revealed because of its source. The British people saw only that the Royal Navy and RAF were unable to stop Hitler’s capital ships passing with impunity through British home waters.

  Headlines screamed, the public was affronted. The Daily Mirror asked on 14 February: ‘Is it any longer true that we trust the Prime Minister, but do not trust his Government?’ The News Chronicle likewise: ‘Have we not been hypnotised by Mr Churchill’s personality…into acquiescence in an inefficient war direction?’ The Daily Mail wrote that there were two Churchills: ‘1. The Inspirer of the Nation. 2. The Controller of the War.’ The British people were perplexed by the secon
d Churchill, who claimed ‘that it was the duty of Parliament and Press to maintain the Government with the implication that any weakening of his own position would be a weakening of its cause’. The Mail rejected this view: ‘No man is indispensable.’ Sir William Beveridge wrote a major article for The Times, urging the creation of a ‘proper’ war cabinet of ministers without portfolios. A Glasgow secretary, Pam Ashford, wrote on 5 March: ‘Defeatism is in the air, and…I feel it too.’ When the opinionmonitoring group Mass-Observation quizzed its observers about the prime minister, they were startled by the vehemence of criticism of his conduct as warlord. A London clerk said: ‘I think it is time he went. After all, the only connection in which one thinks of Churchill now is with regard to high strategy, whatever that may be. High strategy stinks to high heaven…This view I have confirmed with quite a few people. His speeches are no longer listened to.’

  If this attitude was untypically strident, there was a yearning at every level of British society for a defence supremo who could deliver battlefield success, as the prime minister seemed unable to do. Many people sought a new deliverer, an aspiration no less strongly felt because it was unrealistic, and unsupported by identification of an appropriate candidate. There was no appetite to change national leaders, but much enthusiasm for delegating Churchill’s military powers. The prime minister said to his old friend Violet Bonham Carter: ‘I’m fed up…I feel very biteful and spiteful when people attack me.’ He was constantly urged to add talent to his cabinet, ‘But where is the galaxy? I can’t get the victories. It’s the victories that are so hard to get.’ In a fit of pique about press savaging of the government, information minister Brendan Bracken told parliamentary lobby correspondents that it would be their fault if Britain lost the war.

  On 15 February, Singapore surrendered. This time there was no Dunkirk, no miraculous escape for the garrison. Almost twice as many imperial troops fell into captivity as in France in 1940. Jock Colville, temporarily removed from Downing Street to train in South Africa as a fighter pilot, heard Churchill’s broadcast addressing the disaster. He was deeply moved: ‘The nature of his words and the unaccustomed speed and emotion with which he spoke convinced me that he was sorely pressed by critics and opponents at home. All the majesty of his oratory was there, but also a new note of appeal, lacking the usual confidence of support…There was something about his voice and delivery which made me shiver.’ The broadcast was much less well received than most of Churchill’s performances. In private, the prime minister was angry and depressed. ‘We have so many men in Singapore, so many men,’ he lamented. ‘They should have done better.’ At a Pacific War Council meeting he said of the Japanese: ‘They moved quicker and ate less than our men.’

  He suggested to his naval aide, Captain Richard Pim, that this might be the moment for him to surrender the premiership. Pim said: ‘But my God, sir, you cannot do that.’ It is unlikely that Churchill seriously considered resignation, but his despair was real enough. What use was it, that he himself displayed a warrior’s spirit before the world, if those who fought in Britain’s name showed themselves incapable of matching his rhetoric? In Norway, France, Greece, Crete, Libya and now Malaya, the British had been beaten again and again. Alan Brooke wrote in his diary: ‘If the army cannot fight better than it is doing at the present, we shall deserve to lose our Empire.’

  Some blame attached to Wavell, not for failing to achieve victory, but for declining to avow the inevitability of Singapore’s fall, and to make an uncompromising recommendation to halt reinforcements and evacuate every possible man. Brooke had done exactly this in France in June 1940. The British 18th Division landed at Singapore on 29 January 1942, by which date there was no prospect of saving the campaign. Almost the entire army fell into captivity a fortnight later. It remains hard to understand why Churchill deluded himself that Singapore could be held. Every soldier knew that its fate must be decided in southern Malaya, that the island in isolation was indefensible, and the chiefs of staff made this plain to the prime minister on 21 January. It was regrettable that commanders on the spot did not adopt a more trenchant tone. While Wavell’s signals about Malaya were unfailingly pessimistic, they did not explicitly acknowledge that Singapore’s demise was inevitable until it was too late to save any portion of its garrison. It was true that he exercised his short-lived command amid draconian signals from Churchill, demanding a lastman, last-round defence. But whereas it should have been possible to hold Crete, Singapore was doomed.

  British and imperial forces in Malaya were ill-trained, ill-equipped, and poorly led at every level. They faced an enemy who commanded the air, but two years later German and Japanese soldiers displayed extraordinary resilience in the face of vastly stronger air forces than the Luftwaffe deployed in Greece, the Japanese in Malaya. It was the absence of any scintilla of heroic endeavour, any evidence of lastditch sacrifice of the kind with which British armies through the centuries had so often redeemed the pain of defeats, that shocked Churchill. In Malaya there was no legend to match that of Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna in the Napoleonic wars, of Rorke’s Drift in Zululand, of the defence of Mafeking and Ladysmith in the Boer War. The Americans forged a propaganda epic, however spurious, out of their defence of the Bataan peninsula between December 1941 and April 1942. The British salvaged nothing comparable from South-East Asia. Their soldiers gave up pitifully easily. The Times of 16 February offered its readers crumbs of comfort for Singapore: ‘The sacrifice and the suffering and the incomparable gallantry of the defence were not wholly in vain.’ This was nonsense. There was only abject defeat, surrender to numerically inferior enemies who had proved themselves better and braver soldiers. It is brutal, but seems valid, to suggest that Malaya might have been defended with greater determination had British, Indian and Australian soldiers known the fate that awaited them in Japanese captivity.

  Who could wonder that Churchill should be plunged into despair? ‘At the back of his mind and unconsciously, I believe,’ wrote Oliver Harvey shrewdly, ‘the PM is jealous of Stalin and the successes of his armies.’ Even if American aid enabled Britain to survive the war, how could the nation hold up its head in the world, be seen to have made a worthy contribution to victory, if the British Army covered itself with shame whenever exposed to a battlefield? Lack of shipping remained a massive constraint on deployments. John Kennedy wrote: ‘We have masses of reinforcements we cannot move.’ At any one moment of 1942, 2,000 British and American merchantmen were afloat on the Atlantic shuttle, three or four hundred of them vulnerable to U-boat attack. In peacetime, a cargo ship took an average thirty-nine days to complete a round trip between Europe and North America. Now, the same rotation took eighty-six days, with fortythree spent in port instead of a peacetime fourteen, mostly waiting for convoys. Dill cabled the chiefs of staff from Washington, saying that this seemed a time for the Allies to focus on essentials: security of the British Isles and United States, and preventing a junction of German and Japanese forces on the Indian Ocean: ‘These simple rules might help us to stick to things that matter in these difficult days.’ Yet, as so often with British generals’ strategic visions, this one was entirely negative.

  Churchill told the Commons on 24 February: ‘The House must face the blunt and brutal fact that if, having entered a war yourself unprepared, you are struggling for life with two well-armed countries, one of them possessing the most powerful military machine in the world, and then, at the moment when you are in full grapple, a third major antagonist with far larger military forces than you possess suddenly springs upon your comparatively undefended back, obviously your task is heavy and your immediate experiences will be disagreeable.’ Many MPs nonetheless voiced discontent. James Griffiths, Labour Member for the Welsh mining constituency of Llanelli, said that at the time of Dunkirk people had responded to the call. By contrast, ‘We believe that now there is a feeling of disquiet in the nation. We ought not to resent it.’ Commander Sir Archibald Southby, Epsom, spoke of the German ‘Chann
el dash’ and the fall of Singapore as two events which ‘shook not only the Government but the British Empire to its foundations. Nay, it would be fair to say that they influenced opinion throughout the world. They produced the most unfortunate reverberations in the United States of America just at a time when harmony and understanding between the two nations was of paramount importance.’

  Sir George Schuster, Walsall, said he thought the public wanted to feel that it was being told the truth, and was beginning to doubt this. People had been assured that in Libya the British Army was now meeting the enemy on equal terms. Then, after Rommel’s dramatic comeback, they heard that the Germans had a better antitank gun, that our guns were inadequate to pierce enemy armour. ‘That was a shock to public opinion. They felt they had been misled.’ He also suggested that the public wanted to see fewer civilians ‘getting away with it’ – escaping their share of sacrifice to the war effort – and more discipline in factories.

  During lunch at Buckingham Palace that day, Churchill told the King that Burma, Ceylon, Calcutta, Madras and parts of Australia might well be lost. The defence of Burma had already begun badly. Brooke noted with his customary spleen that some politicians allowed the bad news to show. ‘This process does not make Cabinet Ministers any more attractive,’ he wrote to a friend. ‘But Winston is a marvel. I cannot imagine how he sticks it.’ Clementine Churchill wrote to Harry Hopkins: ‘We are indeed walking through the Valley of Humiliation.’

  In consequence of the disasters on the battlefield, Churchill was obliged to make changes in his government, more painful and embarrassing than some historians have acknowledged. The only agreeable aspect of the reshuffle was the sacking of Lord Hankey, whose rancour had become intolerable. Hankey thereafter became prominent among Churchill’s critics, a would-be conspirator against his continuance in office. Beaverbrook finally resigned. Stafford Cripps was given his seat in the war cabinet, as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the Commons. For the prime minister this was a bitter pill. It was a measure of the weakness of his position that he accepted Cripps. The two men, wrote Eden wonderingly, had ‘always been as distant as a lion and an okapi’. Churchill is alleged to have said of Libya: ‘There are miles and miles of nothing but arid austerity. How Cripps would like it!’