Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  On 1 April 1942, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt: ‘I find it very difficult to get over Singapore, but I hope we shall redeem it ere long.’ Instead, however, bad news kept coming. On the 4th a Japanese battle fleet, ranging the Indian Ocean, launched planes to bomb Ceylon. In the days that followed, enemy aircraft sank two Royal Navy cruisers and the carrier Hermes. Mandalay fell, and it was plain that the British must withdraw across the Chindwin river out of Burma, into north-east India. Malta was in desperate straits, under relentless Axis air attack. Convoys to Russia were suffering shocking losses from German air and U-boat attack: PQ13 in April lost five ships out of nine. Only eight ships of twenty-three dispatched in the next convoy reached their destination, fourteen having been turned back by pack ice. Churchill urged Stalin to provide more air and sea cover for the Royal Navy in the later stages of the Arctic passage, but the Russians lacked both means and competence. There was also little goodwill. British sailors and airmen venturing ashore at Murmansk and Archangel were disgusted by the frigidity of their reception. Nowhere, it seemed, did the sun shine upon British endeavours. That spring, Alan Brooke found the prime minister very difficult: ‘CIGS says WSC is often in a very nasty mood these days,’ noted John Kennedy on 7 April.

  Even at this dire period of the war, it was remarkable how many newspaper column inches were devoted to the needs and prospects of post-war reconstruction. This galled the prime minister. He expressed exasperation at having to bother with what he called ‘hypothetical post-war problems in the middle of a struggle when the same amount of thought concentrated on the question of types of aeroplane might have produced much more result’. Yet many ordinary citizens found the war a less rewarding, more dispiriting experience than did Winston Churchill. The present seemed endurable only by looking beyond it to a better future.

  Articles and correspondence constantly appeared in print, addressing one aspect or another of a world without war. As early as 4 September 1940, a letter-writer to The Times named P.C. Loftus urged that ‘this nation not be found unprepared for peace as we were found unprepared for war’. A correspondent signing himself ‘Sailor’ wrote to the New Statesman on 21 February 1942: ‘Men wonder what they are fighting for. The old empty jingoisms about “Freedom” and “Homeland” no longer satisfy. There is a suspicion that all will not be well after the peace—that, after all, we are fighting for property and private interests.’ The prominent socialist intellectual Harold Laski complained of Churchill’s refusal to declare a commitment to social change: ‘He does not seem to see that the steps we take now necessarily determine the shape of the society we shall enter when the war is over.’ A Statesman editorial said: ‘It is difficult to find any alert & active member of the Labour Party who does not believe that the end of the war will find the forces of privilege more strongly entrenched in power than they were at the beginning.’

  Such sentiments, a gnawing dissatisfaction with British society, extended well beyond the confines of the political left. ‘This nation has become very soft,’ John Kennedy wrote sadly in his diary on 23 February 1942. ‘The people do not want to fight for the Empire. Mostly, I suppose, they do not care whether they have an empire or not so long as they have an easy and quiet life. They do not realise that German domination will be very unpleasant…I think something more is wanted on the political side. There is a great lack of any sense of urgency everywhere. We do not know what we are fighting for. The Atlantic Charter is not good enough an ideal up against the fanaticism of the Germans and the Japs.’ Officers commanding two army primary training centres told a morale investigator that the great majority of their recruits ‘lack enthusiasm and interest in the war and betray ignorance of the issues involved in it’.

  On 6 March 1942, an editorial in the Spectator declared: ‘The national fibre is today unmistakably different from what it was in those days of 1940 which the Prime Minister could speak of, in accents which carried universal conviction, as our finest hour. No one can pretend that we are living through our finest hour today.’ The writer, like his counterpart on the New Statesman, felt that the British people lacked a core of belief to move them, as the Russian people were moved: ‘Why do men and women in Britain today wait for inspiration from outside? Why are they listening for a voice? Have we no voice within us? Are we ignorant of what is needed?’

  In May 1942, America’s Fortune magazine published an entire issue about the post-war world. Henry Luce, proprietor of Fortune, invited Britain’s Foreign Secretary to contribute an article about his own country’s vision. Eden declined, prompting an official in the American department of the Foreign Office, one C.R. King, to express dismay. It seemed to him a serious mistake to snub Luce. Yet he recognised the problem. Eden had no idea what to say: ‘I do not know that HMG have formulated (much less announced) any ideas on these problems beyond those that find expression in the Atlantic Charter.’ King added that there was wide agreement in the United States ‘that America will emerge, after total victory, militarily and economically supreme’. The Economist challenged Churchill in an editorial: ‘When has the Prime Minister made one of his great and compelling speeches on the theme, not of world strategy, but of the hopes and fears of the British people? So long as he is silent, Conservatism, the dominant political attitude in Britain, is silent, and Americans inevitably believe that maybe the Conservatives are out to do nothing but conserve.’

  Few intellectuals liked Churchill, and he repaid their distaste. He harboured a special animus against the left-wing journalist Michael Foot, one of the authors of Guilty Men, the famous 1940 indictment of the pre-war appeasers. Churchill considered it rank hypocrisy, as indeed it was, that the authors should have attacked the ‘men of Munich’, when Foot’s own Labour Party opposed pre-war rearmament. The intellectuals’ preoccupation with post-war Britain exasperated the prime minister, when he was struggling to find means to avert the destruction of European freedom. But in this matter, his instincts were ill-attuned to those of the public. When Picture Post devoted an entire issue to ‘the Britain we hope to build when the war is over’, the magazine received 2,000 letters from readers. Churchill’s indifference to the Beveridge Report, which laid the foundations of the Welfare State, on its publication in December 1942 was wholly at odds with the popular enthusiasm that greeted it. Sir William Beveridge himself frequently criticised Britain’s wartime governance in print. Before his report was even written, one day when the cabinet was debating the ‘unsatisfactory attitude of the workers generally…Archie Sinclair suggested that what we really needed to reassure the public was a victory. Winston summed up by saying that clearly what we wanted is a victory over Beveridge.’

  Early in April, Churchill’s honeymoon with Roosevelt was rudely interrupted. The prime minister had planned himself to go to India, to address its defence and constitutional future, but crises elsewhere made it seem inappropriate for him to leave London and travel so far. Stafford Cripps was dispatched in his stead, with a mandate to discuss with India’s nationalist leaders prospective post-war selfgovernment. Talks quickly collapsed. The Hindu-majority Indian National Congress rejected delay, and insisted upon immediate admission to political power. Cripps reported accordingly to London, and was told to come home. Churchill had expected, and indeed wished, no other outcome. He was content that the gesture had been made, and that it was Cripps who bore the odium of failure.

  On 11 April, however, Roosevelt cabled Churchill urging that Cripps should remain in India and preside over the creation of a nationalist government. The president asserted that American opinion was overwhelmingly hostile to Britain on this issue: ‘The feeling is almost universally held that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British Government to concede to the Indians the right of self-government…[if] minor concessions would be made by both sides, it seems to me that an agreement might yet be found.’ Many Americans explicitly identified India’s contemporary predicament with that of their own country before the Revolution of 1776. ‘You’re t
he top/You’re Mahatma Gandhi!’ wrote Cole Porter euphorically, reflecting the huge enthusiasm of his countrymen for the guru of the Indian independence movement. Such sentiment was wormwood to Churchill. At the best of times he had little patience with the Indian people. His view was unchanged since he served among them as a cavalry subaltern in the 1890s. Leo Amery, the India Secretary, found Churchill ‘a strange combination of great and small qualities…He is really not quite normal on the subject of India.’ The prime minister opposed, for instance, granting Indian commissioned officers disciplinary powers over British other ranks. He expostulated against ‘the humiliation of being ordered about by a brown man’.

  Churchill was ruthlessly dismissive of Indian political aspirations, when the Japanese army was at the gates. He could scarcely be expected to forget that the Mahatma had offered to mediate Britain’s surrender to Hitler, whom the standard-bearer of nonviolence and Indian freedom described as ‘not a bad man’. Gandhi in 1940 wrote an open letter to the British people, urging them to ‘lay down arms and accept whatever fate Hitler decided. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls nor your minds.’

  Much worse, however, was the US president’s attempt to meddle with what the prime minister perceived as an exclusively British issue. It would never have occurred to Churchill to offer advice to Roosevelt about the future governance of America’s Philippines dependency. He deemed it rank cant for a nation which had itself colonised a continent, dispossessing and largely exterminating its indigenous population, and which still practised racial segregation, to harangue others about the treatment of native peoples.

  Here was an early, wholly unwelcome foretaste of the future. The USA, principal partner and paymaster of the alliance to defeat fascism, was bent upon exercising decisive influence on the postwar global settlement. Churchill, who thought of nothing save victory, and knew how remote this was in April 1942, found Roosevelt’s heavy-handedness irksome. He lost no time in flagging both his determination to stand fast against the Indian National Congress’s demands, and his sensitivity about American meddling. ‘Anything like a serious difference between you and me would break my heart,’ he wrote to the president on the 12th, ‘and would surely deeply injure both our countries at the height of this terrible struggle.’ Roosevelt’s belief that the day of empires was done would achieve post-war vindication with a speed even he might have found surprising. Britain’s exercise of power over the Indian people between 1939 and 1945 was clumsy and ugly, and Churchill must bear some of the blame. But the prime minister was surely right that to transfer power in the midst of a world war was unthinkable, especially when the Indian Congress’s attitude to the Allied cause was equivocal.

  The spring of 1942 brought some lifting of Allied spirits, especially after the US Navy inflicted heavy damage on the Japanese in the 4 May Battle of the Coral Sea. Churchill changed his mind yet again about acceding to Russian demands for recognition of their territorial claims on Poland and the Baltic states. ‘We must remember that this is a bad thing,’ he told the cabinet. ‘We oughtn’t to do it, and I shan’t be sorry if we don’t.’ On 5 May, British forces landed in Madagascar, seeking to pre-empt a possible Japanese coup. Churchill wrote to his son Randolph: ‘The depression following Singapore has been replaced by an undue optimism, which I am of course keeping in proper bounds.’ He was much wounded by the criticisms that had fallen upon him since January. Before he made a national broadcast on 10 May, he drafted a passage which he subsequently—and surely wisely—omitted to deliver, but which reflected the pain he had suffered in recent months:

  Everyone feels safer now, and in consequence the weaker brethren become more vocal. Our critics are not slow to dwell upon the misfortunes and reverses which we have sustained, and I am certainly not going to pretend that there have not been many mistakes and shortcomings. In particular, I am much blamed by a group of exministers for my general conduct of the war. They would very much like to reduce my power of direction and initiative.

  Though I have to strive with dictators, I am not, I am glad to say, a dictator myself. I am only your servant. I have tried to be your faithful servant but at any moment, acting through the House of Commons, you can dismiss me to private life. There is one thing, however, which I hope you will not do; I hope you will never ask me or any successor you may choose to bear the burden of responsibility in times like these without reasonable authority and the means of taking decisions.

  Hugh Dalton wrote on 12 May 1942: ‘Dinner with [Tory MP] Victor Cazalet, who thinks we cannot possibly win the war with the present PM. He has, however, no good alternative.’ King George VI, of all people, suggested to his prime minister at luncheon one day that the burden of also serving as defence minister was too much for him, and enquired gauchely what other aspect of public affairs he was interested in. Yet Churchill’s difficulty henceforward was that the most formidable challenge to his authority came not from his British critics, but from the nation’s overwhelmingly more powerful partner, the US. When Harry Hopkins addressed MPs at the House of Commons on 15 April, he sought to bolster Churchill’s standing by asserting that he was ‘the only man who really understands Roosevelt’. But the American also declared bluntly, as Harold Nicolson reported, that ‘there are many people in the USA who say that we are yellow and can’t fight’.

  Dill mused in a letter to Wavell from Washington, ‘One trouble is that we want everything from them from ships to razor blades and have nothing but services to give in return—and many of the services are past services.’ A shrewd British official, Arthur Salter, wrote early in 1942: ‘It must be accepted that policy will increasingly be decided in Washington. To proceed as if it can be made in London and “put over” in Washington, or as if British policy can in the main develop independently and be only “co-ordinated” with America, is merely to kick against the pricks.’ The prime minister led a nation whose role in the war seemed in those days confined to victimhood, not only at the hands of the enemy, but also at those of its mighty new ally. He yearned inexpressibly to recover the initiative on some battlefield. His generals, however, offered no prospect of offensive action before autumn. Amid the deep public disaffection of spring and summer, this seemed to Churchill an eternity away.

  TEN

  Soldiers, Bosses and ‘Slackers’

  1 An Army at Bay

  Churchill was reconciled to the fact that Britain’s defeats by Japan were irreversible until the tide of the war turned. Henceforward, recognising American dominance of Far East strategy, he devoted much less attention to the Japanese struggle than to the war against Germany. He remained bitterly dismayed, however, by the failures of Auchinleck’s forces in the Western Desert, where paper comparison of strengths, showing significant British superiority, suggested that victory should be attainable. At a meeting with his military chiefs he asserted repeatedly: ‘I don’t know what we can do for that Army—all our efforts to help them seem to be in vain.’ Back in 1941, Cadogan at the Foreign Office wrote: ‘Our soldiers are the most pathetic amateurs, pitted against professionals…The Germans are magnificent fighters and their Staff are veritable Masters of Warfare. Wavell and suchlike are no good against them. It’s like putting me up to play Bobby Jones over 36 holes. We shall learn, but it will be a long and bloody business.’ Yet a year later, there seemed no evidence that the British Army and its commanders had yet ‘learned’. Cadogan wrote after the Far East disasters: ‘What will happen if the Germans get a footing here? Our army is the mockery of the world!’

  Britain’s generals were conscious of their service’s low standing, but deemed it unjust that their own prime minister should sustain a barrage of harassment, criticism and even scorn against it. Especially between 1940 and 1942, they perceived themselves obliged to conduct campaigns with inadequate resources, in cons
equence of inter-war defence policies imposed by the very Conservative Party which still dominated the government—though not, of course, by Churchill himself. Generals often found themselves licking wounds inflicted by the prime minister at the United Services club in Pall Mall, and more junior ranks at its near neighbour the Army & Navy club—the ‘Rag’—which played an important social role. These were not mere corn exchanges for service gossip, but rendezvous for earnest conclaves. Amid the daily dining-room parade of red-tabbed officers in gleaming Sam Brownes there was a less privileged audience of retired warriors, prone to eavesdrop and solicit employment. These eventually caused ‘Pug’ Ismay to decamp to White’s club in St James’s Street. Its membership was socially grand but strategically insensitive, which enabled him to eat lunches in peace. His table companions ‘had no bright ideas for winning the war, and were careful not to embarrass me by asking questions which it would have been difficult to answer’.

  Until 1943, and in lesser degree thereafter, the prestige of Britain’s soldiers lagged far behind that of its sailors and airmen. Churchill’s intemperate goading caused much anger and distress to naval officers. He often threatened to sack dissenting or allegedly insufficiently aggressive admirals, including Sir Andrew Cunningham, Sir James Somerville of Force ‘H’ and the Home Fleet’s Sir John Tovey. But even when the navy suffered severe setbacks and losses, its collective honour and reputation remained unchallenged. This was not so of the army. It enjoyed a more secure social place in British national life than did its US counterpart, and attracted into its smart regiments successive generations of aristocratic younger sons. It was much less effective, however, as a military institution. For every clever officer such as Brooke, Ismay or Jacob, there were a hundred others lacking skill, energy and imagination, who nonetheless performed their duties in a cloud of cultural complacency. Their courage was seldom in doubt, but much else was.