by Max Hastings
Beaverbrook had tabled a new motion in the House of Lords calling for a Second Front. Now he allowed himself to be wooed back into government as lord privy seal by Churchill’s private assurance that the invasion was fixed for the following summer. Beaverbrook’s recall exasperated many ministers. Churchill spoke passionately of his friend to W.P. Crozier of the Manchester Guardian: ‘I need him, I need him. He is stimulating and, believe me, he is a big man.’ Sir John Anderson felt it necessary to call the ministerial grumblers to order. ‘He says we must not make things too hard for the PM ‘who is conducting the war with great skill,’ recorded Dalton. ‘The PM was very unhappy during the period when Beaverbrook was not one of his colleagues. He is a sensitive artist, attaching great value to “presentation” and the quality of the spoken word. He likes to have around him certain people, whose responses will not be jarring or unwelcome. He has valued Beaverbrook for this for many years. We must not, therefore, be too particular, even if things are sometimes not done in quite the most regular or orderly way.’ Beaverbrook’s irregularities included, at this time, assisting Randolph Churchill to pay his debts. Though such subsidy certainly did not influence the prime minister’s conduct towards him, it reflected a fundamentally unhealthy relationship, such as Beaverbrook contrived with many of his acquaintance.
The Americans found much more substantial cause for complaint about the prime minister’s behaviour. Transatlantic debate remained dominated by British attempts to regard the Overlord commitment as flexible, and by US insistence upon its inviolability. Given American primacy in the alliance, which was now increasingly explicit, Churchill and Brooke must have known in their hearts that D-Day was almost certain to happen the following summer. But their attempts to suggest otherwise ate deeply into the fretwork of Allied trust. The Americans were wrong in supposing that Churchill’s policy was directed towards ensuring that Overlord never took place at all. The huge and costly infrastructure already being created in Britain to support an invasion of France—not least Churchill’s cherished Mulberry artificial harbours—disproved that allegation. The prime minister’s inconstancy related exclusively to timing, but was none the less injurious for that. As for the British public, Surrey shorthand-writer George King was unimpressed by Churchill’s flowered phrases about the Italian campaign: ‘He says a Second Front is in existence, but I can’t see it myself.’
King’s impatience with the progress of the war was widely shared. The left displayed astonishing venom towards the government. Communist Elizabeth Belsey, a highly educated woman of notable intellectual tastes, remarked in a letter to her husband that the sudden death of Sir Kingsley Wood, the chancellor, ‘will save a piece of rope later on’. In September 1943 she wrote that she and friends ‘amused ourselves making lists of the people who ought to be shot first when the time for shooting comes…[Walter] Citrine, [TUC General Secretary] Morrison, Halifax, [Lord] Londonderry, Lady Astor, [Sir James] Grigg and a heap more’. She was disgusted by the hostility towards Russia displayed by the Polish exile government in London, and exulted at the deaths in a Gibraltar plane crash of its leader, General Sikorski, and the Tory MP Victor Cazalet: ‘no loss…I never did like having that Sikorski person on our side, did you?’
The Russians, of course, welcomed every manifestation of public dissatisfaction with Allied operations. On 6 August, Pravda offered its readers one of its more temperate commentaries:
It would be wrong to belittle the importance of allied military operations – the bombing of Germany by British and American air forces, and the importance of supplies and military material being provided to us. Nonetheless, only four German divisions opposed our allies in Libya, a mere two German divisions and a few Italian ones in Sicily. These statistics suffice to show the true scale of their operations as compared to those on the Soviet–German front where Hitler had 180 German divisions and about 60 divisions of his ‘allies’ in the summer of 1942…The armies of our British and American allies so far have had no serious encounters with the troops of Hitler’s Germany. The Second Front so far does not exist.
What is the Second Front? There is no cause to heed the waffling of certain people who pretend that they don’t know what we are talking about; who claim that there is already not only a second front, but also, a third, a fourth, and probably even a fifth and a sixth front (including the air and submarine campaigns, etc.). If we are to speak seriously about a second front in Europe, this would mean a campaign which, as comrade Stalin pointed out as early as the autumn of 1942, would divert, say, sixty German divisions and twenty of Germany’s allies’.
We know all the excuses used to justify delays…for example, arguments about [Hitler’s] mythological ‘Atlantic Wall’, and the allegedly insoluble shipping problem. The ‘impregnable Atlantic Wall’ exists only in the minds of those who want to believe in such lies…After the success of the big allied landing in North Africa last year, and that of the Allies’ operation in Sicily, it seems ridiculous to cite ‘shipping problems’ where a landing in Western Europe is concerned.
Amid the torrent of Soviet propaganda, bombast and insults, it was hard for British and American ministers and diplomats to know what were Moscow’s real views. Long after the war, Molotov conceded to a Russian interviewer that Stalin was much more realistic than he ever acknowledged to Churchill. The old Soviet foreign minister spoke gratefully of the Italian campaign:
Even such help was serviceable to us. After all, we were not defending England, we were defending socialism, you see. And could we expect them to help the cause of defending socialism? Bolsheviks would have been idiots to expect this! We just needed to be able to press them, to say ‘what villains you are!’…The [British] people of course realized that Russians were fighting while their own country wasn’t. And not only did [the Anglo-Americans] hold back, they wrote and said one thing to us, but did something completely different. This made their own people see the truth and ask their own leaders: why are you playing tricks? This undermined faith in the imperialists. All this was very important to us.
At the end of June 1943, Stalin recalled Ivan Maisky to Moscow, and in August formally replaced him at the London embassy. Stalin told his appointed successor, a thirty-seven-year-old party apparatchik named Feodor Gusev, that Maisky ‘had made himself much too busy trying to justify the English who are sabotaging the opening of the Second Front’. Churchill was dismayed by Maisky’s recall, and unimpressed by Gusev, whose grasp of English was poor and social skills non-existent. At the prime minister’s first meeting with the new envoy, he pushed into the Russian’s unwilling hands a letter he had received from Stalin denouncing the tardy shipments of British supplies, and told him that he refused to accept such an insulting communication. Gusev wrote later: ‘He literally shoved the envelope into my hand, turned away and walked back to his desk.’ When he reported this exchange in some trepidation to Moscow, he was relieved to be told by Molotov: ‘You behaved correctly about the envelope. We consider the return of the envelope simply as another of Churchill’s hysterical gestures…From now on, you are to deliver letters from comrade Stalin and other documents only in Russian. Remember that in Moscow the English only deliver documents to us in English, including letters to comrade Stalin.’ It was six months before Churchill again agreed to receive Gusev.
In Britain in 1943 there were more miners’ strikes than at any time since 1900. The Times editorialised on 3 September, amid another standstill in the pits: ‘The disposition to strike…may have some common origin. There is a too prevalent view that the war is going so well that effort in industry can be relaxed.’
Trades unionist Jack Jones wrote to Brendan Bracken from Cardiff on 3 October 1943:
I think I may claim to know the mind of our workers, who are quite as loyal as the men and women of the Forces. Yet they strike! And at a time when it is more important than ever that they shouldn’t. There may be even more disastrous stoppages through the coming winter.
Time itself induces war-w
eariness and frayed nerves, especially when what one is doing is unspectacular, out of the limelight and monotonous…A gnawing doubt is a sort of match ready to set aflame an undefined resentment against war conditions…What they want to steady them is a tonic. I remember during the last war the tonic effect on the South Wales miners of a visit and talk by L[loyd] G[eorge]…But this war dwarfs the last, and Mr Churchill has had much more on his plate than ever L.G. had…My faith in Mr Churchill’s leadership is greater than ever. But I feel that now his capacity for inspiring others should, if it is humanly possible, be devoted to the steadying and inspiring of the splendid production line of our Home Front.
Churchill’s failure to reach out explicitly to the industrial working class, beyond his national broadcasts and speeches, in part reflected disinclination. He preferred to address himself to the conduct of the war and foreign affairs; and in part also, there was the fact that he had little to say to the factory people which they would wish to hear. He left to Ernest Bevin, in particular, the task of rallying and rousing Labour-voting miners and shop-floor workers. He himself could not offer such people the vision of post-war Britain, and especially of socialist change, on which their hearts and minds were set. Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory lay at the heart of his greatness as a war leader. But for a growing number of his people, in the autumn of 1943 this was not enough.
In that season, between the Italian and Normandy campaigns, he made one of his last attempts to implement an explicitly British strategic initiative, against American wishes. He believed that the eastern Mediterranean offered opportunities for exploitation which Washington was too blind to recognise. He therefore sought to address these with exclusively British forces. The consequence was a disaster, albeit minor in the scale of global war, which emphasised in the most painful fashion Germany’s residual strength, together with the limitations of British power when the United States withheld its support.
* * *
* Chiefof Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander.
FIFTEEN
Sunk in the Aegean
One of the most celebrated movie epics about the Second World War is Carl Foreman’s The Guns of Navarone, based upon the 1957 thriller of that title written by Alastair Maclean. It depicts the landing of a British special forces team on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. After stupendous feats of derring-do, they contrive the undoing of its German defenders, and safe passage for the Royal Navy’s destroyers. Maclean’s heroic fiction was rooted in an extraordinary series of episodes in the eastern Mediterranean in the autumn of 1943 which deserve to be better known to students of the war. This is not, however, because the saga ended in a British triumph, which it certainly did not, but because it provides a case study in folly which was overwhelmingly Winston Churchill’s responsibility. The story deserves rehearsal and analysis, as an example of the consequences of the prime minister’s capacity for rash boldness. If the scale of the campaign was mercifully small, the blunders were many and large. They help to explain why strategists who worked most closely with Churchill sometimes despaired of his obsessions.
Rhodes and the much smaller islands of the Dodecanese to the north lie a few miles off the coast of Turkey, and are inhabited by Greeks. Italy had seized them in 1912. Three years later, France and Britain endorsed this shameless imperialist venture as part of the price for Italian accession to the Allied cause in World War I. The islands, which possessed few merits save their barren beauty and strategic location, had been garrisoned by Italian forces ever since. They first attracted Churchill’s attention in 1940. He believed, surely wrongly, that if the Allies could dispossess the Italians, such a visible shift of power in the eastern Mediterranean would induce Turkey to enter the war. At his behest, British commandos staged an abortive raid in February 1941. During the ensuing two years the islands were recognised as beyond Allied reach. But as the Mediterranean skies brightened, Churchill’s Aegean enthusiasm revived. At Casablanca he urged upon the Americans the importance of seizing Rhodes and the Dodecanese, and tasked his own chiefs of staff to prepare a plan. In addition to troops, landing craft would be necessary, together with American fighters. Twin-engined Lightnings and British Beaufighters were the only planes with the range to provide air support over the Aegean from North African bases. The utmost ‘ingenuity and resource’, urged Churchill, should be deployed to secure the Dodecanese.
Plans were made for two alternative scenarios: the first was a ‘walk in’ to Rhodes with Italian acquiescence; the second was for Operation Accolade, an opposed invasion against German opposition. The priority of Sicily, however, meant that by late summer nothing had been done. John Kennedy wrote on 13 August: ‘We shall have to shut down in the Aegean.’ The War Office assumed that the invasion of Italy, together with the commitment to Overlord, rendered operations there implausible. Instead, however, impending Italian surrender imbued the prime minister’s Aegean ambitions with a new urgency. He remained convinced that an Allied coup there would precipitate Turkish belligerence.
The Americans were uninterested alike in the operation and in the Turks as allies. They believed that British aspirations in the eastern Mediterranean were rooted in old-fashioned imperialism rather than contemporary strategy, and were resolutely opposed to any diversion of resources from Italy, never mind from Overlord. At the Quadrant conference in Quebec in August, they paid polite lip-service to British enthusiasm for an Aegean initiative, but made it plain that whatever Churchill chose to do about Rhodes and the Dodecanese must be accomplished exclusively with the resources available to General Sir Henry ‘Jumbo’ Maitland-Wilson, now Middle East C-in-C in Cairo – ‘his jumbonic majesty’, as Macmillan referred to this large and unimaginative dignitary. In other words, the British were on their own. There would be no USAAF Lightning fighters and precious few landing craft. At a time when concentration of force upon the Allies’ central purposes seemed more important than ever before, US leaders recoiled from an entirely gratuitous dispersal.
The prime minister was undeterred. He pressed Maitland-Wilson to land on Rhodes anyway. The general, not one of his country’s great military thinkers but compliant to Churchill’s wishes, earmarked 4th Indian Division to execute Accolade. Then, however, it was decided that the Indians were needed in Italy. Maitland-Wilson’s cupboard was left almost bare of fighting units. He cabled Eisenhower on 31 August: ‘Any enterprise against Rhodes or Crete except an unopposed walk-in is now impossible.’ The prime minister disagreed. The Germans were everywhere in retreat. On the eastern front they had just suffered devastating defeat at Kursk. They had been expelled from Sicily. Italy was about to quit the war. On every front, Ultra signal decrypts revealed German commanders bewailing their flagging strength in the face of Allied dominance. Surely, in such circumstances, even small forces boldly handled could crush the residual German presence in the Aegean. If operations in the eastern Mediterranean were to be conducted on a modest scale, they held special lustre in the prime minister’s eyes, because speed, dash and a touch of piracy might yield an exclusively British triumph.
Urged on by London, Maitland-Wilson resurrected Accolade, with such rag-bag forces as he could scrape together. On 9 September the prime minister greeted news of the blossoming of his cherished project with a notation: ‘Good. This is a time to play high. Improvise and dare.’ Four days later, he cabled Maitland-Wilson: ‘The capture of Rhodes by you at this time with Italian aid would be a fine contribution to the general war. Can you improvise the necessary garrison?…What is your total ration strength? This is the time to think of Clive and Peterborough, and of Rooke’s men taking Gibraltar…’ The prime minister’s reference to ‘ration strength’ was, of course, a goad designed to remind the C-in-C of the vast number of men under his command, scattered across hundreds of thousands of square miles, and mostly employed on logistical or garrison tasks. Churchill’s stirring appeal to the memory of historic imperial triumphs ignored the fact that now Maitland-Wilson’s troops would face the Germ
an army.
A fundamental doctrinal divide persisted throughout the war: the British liked minor operations, while the Americans, with the marginal exception of MacArthur, did not. US strategic thinking, like that of the Germans, was dominated by a belief in concentration of force. The US Army undertook very few raids such as the British, and Churchill in particular, loved – Vaasgo, Bruneval, Saint-Nazaire, Bardia, Dieppe and many more. Special forces absorbed a dismayingly high proportion of Britain’s most ardent warriors, volunteers attracted by the prospect of early independent action, rather than deferred encounters within the straitjacket of a military hierarchy. Brooke deplored the proliferation of army and Marine commando units. He believed, probably rightly, that their functions could have been as well performed by regular units specially trained for specific tasks. The mushroom growth of British special forces reflected the prime minister’s conviction that war should, as far as possible, entertain its participants and showcase feats of daring to inspire the populace. In this, elite ‘private armies’ fulfilled their purpose. But they ill served the wider interests of the British Army, chronically short of good infantrymen for the big battlefields. Too many of Britain’s bravest soldiers spent the war conducting irregular and self-indulgent activities of questionable strategic value.
Operations in the Mediterranean since 1940 had inspired the creation of a range of exotic units which basked in the prime minister’s support and were led by social grandees or inspired eccentrics, often both. The Special Air Service, Special Boat Squadron, Long Range Desert Group, Popski’s Private Army, Special Interrogation Group and their kin provided much pleasure to the adventurous spirits who filled their ranks, and inflicted varying degrees of inconvenience upon the enemy. In the absence of more substantial forces, when Italy suddenly announced its accession to the Allied cause, Maitland-Wilson turned to one of the ‘private armies’, the Special Boat Squadron, to make the first moves in the Aegean. While its raiders began landing piecemeal on every island they could reach, the Middle East C-in-C dispatched its commander as an emissary to the Italians, to urge that they should turn on their local Germans without delay, and without waiting for British troops.