Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Of all wartime industrial disputes, 60 per cent concerned wages, 19 per cent demarcation, 11.2 per cent working arrangements. A strong communist element on Clydeside was held responsible by managements for many local difficulties. Some trades unionists adopted a shameless view that there was no better time to secure higher pay than during a national emergency, when the need for continuous production was so compelling. Those who served Britain in uniform were poorly rewarded—the average private soldier received less than a pound a week—but industrial workers did well out of the war. The Cost of Living Index rose from eighty-eight in 1939 to 112.5 in 1945, while average wages rose from 106 to 164. The highestpaid men, handling sheet metal on fuselage assembly in aircraft factories, received £20-£25 a week, though £12 was nearer the average for a sixty-hour week. Average civilian weekly earnings in July 1944 were just over £6.

  In the coal industry, wage increases were much steeper, from an indexed 109 to 222. But these did nothing to stem a relentless decline in production—by 12 per cent between 1938 and 1944—which alarmed the government and bewildered the public. The mines employed 766,000 workers in 1939, 709,000 in 1945. Loss of skilled labour from the pits to the services provided an inadequate explanation for the fall in per capita output, since the German coal industry achieved dramatic increases under the same handicap.

  Absenteeism was rife among the British mine workforce, rising from 6.4 per cent in 1938 to 8.3 per cent in 1940; 12.1 per cent in 1943; 16.3 per cent in 1945. Almost half of those missing were reckoned to have downed tools by choice. In addition, miners’ strikes accounted for half of all working days lost to industrial disputes in 1943, two-thirds in 1944. Almost everything was wrong with the coal industry: poor management, a high accident and disease rate, rail transport problems and stubborn miners’ resistance to mechanisation. Early in 1941, according to the official wartime history of British coal, ‘it became necessary to bring home to the industry the urgency of production’. The Essential Work (Coalmining) Order was introduced, providing a guaranteed wage, but banning absenteeism. In July 1942 a despairing government took operational control of the industry. Yet still production languished, and stoppages persisted.

  A report by the Ministry of Fuel and Power said in 1942: ‘The mining community, more than all other industrial groups…tends to see present events in the light of the history of their own community and their own experience…Underlying the feeling against the owners and suspicion of the miners’ leaders is a more general attitude of disbelief in the statements of those in authority.’ Here was the core of the problem: alienation of miners, especially in south Wales, from the purposes of government, and even from Britain’s war. The official historians wrote later: ‘One can hardly overstress the effect of the Depression years upon the morale of the mining community…many miners…felt a sardonic satisfaction in finding themselves for once able to call the tune. Their attitude was not antisocial. It was only un-social…We have to consider how far these narrowed and embittered men could be expected to respond to inducements wrung from the authorities by the urgency of war.’

  In 1944, three million tons of coal production were lost by strikes. A team of American technical experts who studied Britain’s mining industry reported to the government: ‘The center of the problem…is the bad feeling and antagonism which pervade the industry and which manifests itself in low morale, non-cooperation and indifference. In almost every district we visited, miners’ leaders and mine owners complained of men leaving the mines early, failure to clear the faces and voluntary absenteeism.’ The cabinet decided against publishing this report.

  Class divisions sustained notable variations in communities’ health. The south-east had prospered economically in the last years before war came, but other regions remained blighted by the Depression. In 1942, while four babies of every thousand born in south-east England died, seven perished in south Wales, the north-west and the north-east. Measles produced four times as many fatalities among children in the latter areas as in the former, and tuberculosis rates were much higher. A 1943 Ministry of Health study found that 10 per cent of a sample of 600 children were illnourished: ‘many of the people had lived for years past in poverty and unemployment, and had given up the struggle to maintain a decent standard of housekeeping and cooking’. The condition of many children evacuated from blitzed cities shocked those who received them. Of 31,000 registered in Newcastle, for instance, 4,000 were deficient in footwear, 6,500 in clothing. Authorities in Wales reported that among evacuees from Liverpool there were ‘children in rags’, in a personal condition that ‘baffles description’. Many of the families from which such offspring came perceived the war in less than idealistic terms.

  At the opposite end of the social spectrum a Conservative MP, Thomas Dugdale, noted that many of his colleagues, conscious of the punitive taxes which the propertied classes were now paying and the shrunken wealth of their own kind, were disgusted by ‘the exceedingly high wages being paid to war workers…the many reports of slackness, absenteeism etc in the factories’. Cuthbert Headlam asserted bitterly that the left was fomenting class war: ‘From the way men like J.B. Priestley speak, one might imagine that nothing was being done for the great mass of the population and this country was preserved solely for an idle crowd of parasites who never lifted a finger for the public good.’ On 24 February 1942, Lt.Col. Rayner, Tory MP for Totnes, complained in the Commons that the response of the British people to two fanatical enemies was inadequate: ‘We are not showing ruthless purpose today. Hundreds of thousands of people are not pulling their weight. Slackness is widespread, sacrifice in many directions is most remarkable by its absence, and vested interests of one sort and another are still acting as a brake on our war activities.’ Labour MPs, in turn, resented such slights on workers, and believed that employers and managers were largely to blame. Aneurin Bevan and fifteen other MPs voted against Regulation 1AA, introduced by Ernest Bevin, the labour minister, which imposed penalties upon those instigating unofficial strikes.

  Churchill himself was always reluctant to join attacks on the industrial workforce. ‘We are told how badly labour is behaving,’ he said in a debate on war production on 29 July 1941,

  and then a lot of people who never did a day’s hard work in their lives are out after them…People speak of workmen getting £6, £7, or £8 a week and not giving a fair return to the State…I come to the remark of my hon. Friend the Member for Kidderminster [Sir John Wardlaw-Milne], who said that ‘our people are only working up to 75 per cent of their possible efficiency.’ 75 per cent of what?…I take as the datum line the three months after Dunkirk. Then, it will be admitted, our people worked to the utmost limit of their moral, mental and physical strength. Men fell exhausted at their lathes, and workmen and working women did not take their clothes off for a week at a time. Meals, rest and relaxation all faded from their minds…There are certainly…reasons why we cannot wholly recapture and maintain indefinitely the intense personal efforts of a year ago…If we are to win this war…it will be largely by staying power. For that purpose you must have reasonable minimum holidays for the masses of workers.

  Churchill suggested that the conditions of manual workers had worsened in consequence of their wartime diet: ‘Except for our Fighting Services, we have been driven back to a large extent from the carnivore to the herbivore. That may be quite satisfactory to the dietetic scientists who would like to make us all live on nuts, but undoubtedly it has produced, and is producing, a very definite effect upon the energetic output of the heavy worker. We want more meat in the mines and the foundries, and we want more cheese.’ He noted left-wing attacks on Ernest Bevin, Minister for Labour: ‘He makes mistakes, as I do, though not so many or so serious—he has not the same opportunities…And if you tell me that the results he produces do not compare with those of totalitarian systems of government and society, I reply by saying “We shall see about that when we get to the end of the story.” ’

  Churchill had much great
er faith in the British people than did many of his ministers, which helps to explain his bitterness when they expelled him from office in 1945. Most Conservative politicians were fearful of the working class, conscious of deep popular discontent with the old order. Many voters would never forget the perceived betrayals of the Depression and the pre-war foreign policy which had permitted the ascent of Hitler. Thoughtful Tories knew this. Halifax once wrote to Duff Cooper: ‘We [Chamberlain’s ministers in early 1940] were all conscious of the contrast between the readiness of the Nation…to spend £9 million a day in war to protect a certain way of life, and the unwillingness of the administrative authorities in peace to put up, shall we say, £10 million to assist in the reconditioning of Durham unless they could see the project earning a reasonable percentage.’

  Many of Britain’s ‘haves’ were acutely nervous of its ‘have-nots’, especially when popular enthusiasm for Russia was running high. Fear of ‘the reds’, and of malign consequences from the boost the war provided to their prestige, was a pervasive theme among Britain’s political class. Those with a taste for blunt speaking asserted that Russian communists seemed to be conducting their war effort more impressively than British capitalists. Self-consciousness about this state of affairs was never far from the minds of either Churchill or his people in 1942-43. A deep, persistent discontent about perceived Western Allied inertia, contrasted with Soviet achievement, prevailed in many of the humblest homes in Britain.

  ELEVEN

  ‘Second Front Now!’

  On 3 April 1942, Roosevelt dispatched to London Harry Hopkins and the chief of the army, bearing a personal letter from himself to the prime minister. ‘Dear Winston,’ this began, ‘What Harry and Geo Marshall will tell you all about has my heart and mind in it. Your people & mine demand the establishment of a front to draw off pressure on the Russians, & these peoples are wise enough to see that the Russians are to-day killing more Germans & destroying more equipment than you & I put together. Even if full success is not attained, the big objective will be. Go to it!’

  The mission of Hopkins and Marshall was to persuade the British to undertake an early landing in France. This was the US chief of the army’s first encounter with Alan Brooke, and each man was wary of the other. They were a match in stubbornness, but little else. The Ulsterman was bemused when Marshall told him that he sometimes did not see Roosevelt for six weeks: ‘I was fortunate if I did not see Winston for 6 hours.’ The British were offered two alternative US plans. The first called for a 1943 invasion by thirty US and eighteen British divisions, with the strategic objective of securing Antwerp. Marshall, acutely mindful of the urgency of the Russians’ plight, favoured the second and less ambitious option: an operation to be launched in September 1942 by mainly British forces, supported by 21/2US divisions—‘no very great contribution’, as Brooke observed acidly. The American general acknowledged that it might be impossible indefinitely to hold a beachhead on the Continent in the face of a rapid German build-up. He nonetheless considered that the benefits of drawing enemy forces from the eastern front at such a critical moment made even a short-lived incursion into France worthwhile.

  It was almost intolerably galling for the British that after suffering German bombardment and siege through thirty-one months, for twenty-seven of which the Americans had sat comfortably in the dress circle, they should now be urged to sacrifice another army in compliance with bustling US impatience for action. Brooke wrote of Marshall: ‘In many respects he is a very dangerous man while being a very charming one!’ The CIGS told his staff that the highest aspiration of any credible Anglo-American operation in France in 1942 would be to seize and hold the Cherbourg peninsula across the twenty-mile width of its neck. Measured against the war in the east, said Brooke, where the Russians were fighting across a thousandmile front, so feeble an initiative would make the Western Allies the laughing stock of the world. John Kennedy commented on Soviet demands for a French invasion: ‘The extraordinary thing is that the Russians seem to have no idea of our real strength. Or if they do, they are so obsessed with their own point of view that they do not care what happens to us.’ It was odd that a British general should expect anything else from Moscow. It was much more dismaying, however, to find the Americans prey to the same strategic fantasy, arguing the case for a sacrificial, even suicidal sortie into France, of a kind Japanese samurai might have applauded.

  Churchill nonetheless responded enthusiastically to the president’s letter, ‘your masterly document’, as he called it. ‘I am in entire agreement in principle with all you propose, and so are the chiefs of staff. If, as our experts believe, one can carry this whole plan through successfully, it will be one of the grand events in all the history of war.’ Here the prime minister set the tone for all British dealings with the Americans about the Second Front, as the invasion concept was popularly known—the ‘First Front’ was, of course, in Russia. Though Churchill had not the slightest intention of leading an early charge back into Europe, he enthused to his visitors about the prospect. He accepted the need for Allied land forces to engage the enemy on the Continent, for he knew how dear was this objective to American hearts, and especially that of George Marshall. Attlee and Eden joined the prime minister in declaring how warmly they welcomed Washington’s plan. Churchill and his commanders then set about ensuring that nothing should be done to implement it.

  They relied upon the difficulties to make the case for themselves. In a series of meetings that began at Chequers, Marshall made his pitch. On 14 April he told Churchill and the British chiefs that ‘within the next three or four months, we were very likely to find ourselves in the position when we were forced to take action on the continent’. Mountbatten, now a member of the chiefs’ committee as head of combined operations, emphasised the dire shortage of landing craft. The prime minister cautioned that it was scarcely feasible to break off operations in all the other theatres in which Allied troops were engaged. Marshall, unimpressed by Britain’s extravagant commitments, as he perceived them, in the Middle East, observed that ‘great firmness’ would be needed to avoid ‘further dispersions’.

  The American visitors were generously plied with courtesies. They returned to Washington aware that Churchill and his commanders had doubts about a 1942 landing, but wrongly supposing that they were persuadable. Only slowly did Marshall and his colleagues grow to understand that British professions of principled enthusiasm were unmatched by any intention of early commitment. The US chief of the army was too big a man to succumb to anglophobia, as did some of his colleagues. But henceforward this stiff, humourless officer, who concealed considerable passion beneath his cool exterior, had a mistrust of British evasions, verbal and strategic, which persisted for the rest of the war. Churchill’s nation, he considered, was traumatised by its defeats, morbidly conscious of its poverty and obsessed with fear of heavy casualties. The British refused to accept what seemed to the Americans a fundamental reality: that it was worth paying any price to keep Russia fighting.

  Throughout the war, the military leaders of the United States displayed a strategic confidence much greater than that of their British counterparts. The fact that Americans were never obliged to face the prospect of invasion of their homeland, still less the reality of bombardment of their cities, removed a significant part of the tension and apprehension which suffused British decision-making. American forces endured setbacks abroad, but never the storm of shell at home and abject defeats abroad which characterised British experience for three years. On the issue of the Second Front, Marshall’s judgement was almost certainly gravely mistaken. The 1942 strategic view adopted by Churchill and Brooke was right. But the British damaged their relationship with the chief of the army and his colleagues by persistent dissimulation. There was Churchill’s cable to Roosevelt of 17 April, acknowledging American enthusiasm for an early landing in France, and asserting that ‘we are proceeding with plans and preparations on that basis’. As late as 20 June he was writing, albeit amid a t
hick hedge of qualifications: ‘Arrangements are being made for a landing of six or eight Divisions on the coast of Northern France early in September.’ The British prevaricated because they feared that frankness would provoke the Americans to shift the axis of their national effort westward, towards the Pacific. Indeed, Marshall once threatened to do this.

  The debate was further complicated by the fact that Marshall’s view accorded with that of the British and American publics. A host of ordinary people responded to the Russians’ plight with a warmth and sympathy absent from the attitudes of British ministers and service chiefs. The New Statesman of 14 February 1942 quoted an officer who had been a pre-war Labour parliamentary candidate: ‘Everywhere there is a feeling that some groups of people—perhaps Big Business, perhaps the politicians—are thwarting our natural development. A few more Russian victories and Far East defeats may force Westminster to understand that the most deep-seated feeling in England today is one of envy—envy of the Russians, who are being allowed to fight all out.’ Envy was surely the wrong word to ascribe to public sentiment, but guilt there was in plenty, among British people who felt that their own country was doing embarrassingly little to promote the defeat of the Axis.

  On Sunday, 29 March, 40,000 people massed in Trafalgar Square for a demonstration in support of a Second Front. Among other speakers, Sunday Express columnist John Gordon addressed the theme ‘Strike in Europe now!’ In April the government lost two parliamentary by-elections, one in Rugby to an independent candidate standing on a ‘Second Front Now’ ticket. On 1 May the left-wing weekly Tribune carried an unsigned article by Frank Owen, then undergoing armoured training as a soldier, headlined: ‘Why Churchill?’ Its author posed the question: ‘Have we time to afford Churchill’s strategy?’—meaning the delay to a Second Front. Brooke wrote in his diary, voicing sentiments which would persist through the next two years: ‘This universal cry to start a second front is going to be hard to compete with, and yet what can we do with some 10 divisions against the German masses? Unfortunately the country fails to realize the situation we are in.’ The Germans, operating with good land communications and a strong air force, could crush a miniature invasion without significantly depleting the vast Axis army, over 200 divisions, engaged on the eastern front.