by Max Hastings
Alan Brooke invoked the authority of the King to dissuade Churchill from viewing the D-Day assault from a cruiser in the Channel. The prime minister felt that he had earned the right to witness this greatest event of the western war: ‘A man who has to play an effective part, with the highest responsibility, in taking grave and terrible decisions of war may need the refreshment of adventure,’ he wrote aggrievedly. Yet, beyond the risk to his safety, Brooke surely feared that, should there be a crisis on the day, Churchill would find it irresistible to meddle. It was for this reason that, since 1942, the CIGS had always sought to ensure that the prime minister was absent from any theatre where a battle was imminent. On the morning of 6 June, had Churchill been aboard a warship in the Channel, he would have found it intolerable to stand mute and idle while—for instance—the Americans struggled on Omaha beach. Commanders striving to direct the battle deserved to be spared from Churchillian advice and imprecations.
Thus he was obliged to content himself with a round of visits to the invasion forces as they prepared for their moment of destiny. ‘Winston…has taken his train and is touring the Portsmouth area and making a thorough pest of himself!’ wrote Brooke ungenerously. The day of 4 June found the prime minister aboard his railway carriage, parked a few miles from the coast in a siding at Droxford in Hampshire, amid a revolving cast of visitors. Eden was irritated by the inconveniences of the accommodation, which had only one bath and one telephone: ‘Mr Churchill seemed to be always in the bath and General Ismay always on the telephone. So that, though we were physically nearer the battle, it was almost impossible to conduct any business.’ Out of earshot of the prime minister, Bevin and the Foreign Secretary chatted amiably, though disloyally, about the possibility of sustaining the coalition government if ‘the old man’ was obliged to retire. Bevin said he could work with Eden as prime minister, so long as the Tory committed himself to nationalising the coal mines, which the unions would insist upon. Smuts joined them, and asked what they had been discussing. When told Bevin’s terms, ‘Socrates’ said crisply: ‘Cheap at the price.’ It was a curiously tasteless discussion for the three men to hold, as a quarter of a million young men prepared to hurl themselves at Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. But it reflected the new mood among Britain’s politicians, looking to a future beyond Winston Churchill.
De Gaulle came, belatedly summoned from Algiers. The prime minister walked down the rail tracks to meet him, arms outstretched in welcome. De Gaulle ignored the offered embrace, and vented his bitterness that he himself was denied a role in the Allied return to his country. Churchill told him that the Americans insisted that his committee should not be granted the governance of liberated French territory. The British must respect US wishes. He urged De Gaulle to seek a personal meeting with Roosevelt, in the hope that this might resolve their differences. The Frenchman later claimed that it was at Droxford Churchill told him that if forced to choose between America and France, Britain would always side with the United States. This was almost certainly false, or at least a wilful exaggeration. But De Gaulle’s bitterness about being denied authority in France, a claim he had striven for four years to justify, confirmed an animosity towards Britain which persisted for the rest of his life. Churchill exchanged cables with Roosevelt about the possibility of sending the Free French leader back to Algiers. In the event, he was allowed to remain. But Anglo-French relations were poisoned to a degree unassuaged by De Gaulle’s subsequent elevation to power.
The Yugoslav partisan leader Milovan Djilas was with Stalin at his dacha outside Moscow when word came that the Allies would land in France next day. The Soviet warlord responded with unbridled cynicism: ‘Yes, there’ll be a landing, if there is no fog. Until now there was always something that interfered. I suspect tomorrow it will be something else. Maybe they’ll meet up with some Germans! What if they meet up with some Germans? Maybe there won’t be a landing then, but just promises as usual.’ Molotov hastily explained to the Yugoslav that Stalin did not really doubt that there would be an invasion, but enjoyed mocking the Allies. On this matter, after the prevarications and deceits of the previous two years, the Soviet leader had perhaps earned his jibe.
By the evening of 5 June, Churchill was back in London. As Clementine departed for bed, she bade goodnight to her husband in his map room below Whitehall. He said: ‘Do you realise that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand young men may have been killed?’ Unlike the Americans with their unshakeable optimism, Churchill had borne the consequences of so many failures since 1940. It would be the crowning misery if British arms now failed to acquit themselves in a manner worthy of this crowning hour.
The D-Day landings of 6 June represented the greatest feat of military organisation in history, a triumph of planning, logistics and above all human endeavour. The massed airborne assault on the flanks which began in darkness, the air and naval bombardment followed by the dawn dash up the fire-swept shoreline by more than 100,000 British, American and Canadian engineers, infantrymen, armoured crews and gunners, achieved brilliant success. In a spirit that would have warmed the prime minister’s heart, as one landing craft of the East Yorkshire Regiment approached the beach at La Brèche, company commander Major ‘Banger’ King read Henry V aloud to his men:
On, on you noblest English!
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof
At Colleville, the local mayor appeared on the sands to welcome the invaders, his person adorned by a gleaming brass fireman’s helmet. At Omaha beach, the US 29th Division landed to meet the most savage resistance of the day. ‘As our boat touched sand and the ramp went down,’ an infantryman recalled later, ‘I became a visitor to hell.’ To Ernest Hemingway, serving as a war correspondent, the guns of the supporting battleships ‘sounded as though they were throwing whole railway trains across the sky’. The invaders fought doggedly through flame and smoke, wire entanglements, pillboxes, minefields and gun positions, to stake out the claims of the Allied armies inside Hitler’s Europe.
Hitler’s Atlantic Wall was breached. Churchill spent the morning of D-Day in his map room, following the progress of the landings hour by hour. To few men in the world did the battle mean so much. At noon, he told the House of Commons: ‘This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complex and difficult that has ever taken place.’ He lunched with the King, returned for the afternoon to Downing Street, then at 6.15 felt able to tell the Commons that the battle was proceeding ‘in a highly satisfactory manner’. Instead of the carnage which Churchill feared, just 3,000 American, British and Canadian troops died on D-Day, together with about the same number of French civilians. By nightfall, in places the invaders had advanced several miles inland, securing perimeters which would soon be linked. A long and terrible struggle lay ahead, as invaders and defenders raced to reinforce their rival armies in Normandy. There were days when more Allied soldiers perished than on 6 June. But the triumph of Overlord was assured.
Critically aided both by Anglo-American deception plans, which kept Hitler in expectation of further landings, and by pre-invasion bombing, the German build-up proved much slower than had been feared. By nightfall on 7 June, 250,000 of Eisenhower’s men were ashore. Three evenings later there were 400,000. Churchill warned MPs of the need to avoid exaggerated optimism. Though ‘great dangers lie behind us, enormous exertions lie before us’. On 10 June, in a cable to Stalin he expressed extravagant hopes about Italy. Alexander, he proclaimed, was ‘chasing the beaten remnants of Kesselring’s army swiftly northwards. He is on their tracks while mopping up the others.’ In truth, such a display of energy, so comprehensive a victory, was entirely beyond Alexander and his armies.
Two days later, on 12 June, Churchill was at last allowed to visit the invasion beachhead in Normandy, an expedition which, of course, he adored. On the way to Portsmouth he sought to tease a companion, Admiral Ernest King, a venture akin to striking a match on an iceberg: ‘Don’t look so glum. I’m not trying to take anything away from the United Stat
es Navy just now.’ He was enchanted by the spectacle of the invasion coast, cabling again to Stalin: ‘It is a wonderful sight to see this city of ships stretching along the coast for nearly fifty miles and apparently safe from the air and the U-boats which are so near.’ Lunching with Montgomery, he expressed surprise that the Norman countryside seemed relatively unscathed: ‘We are surrounded by fat cattle lying in luscious pastures with their paws crossed.’ Before returning to England, the destroyer which carried him fired a few rounds towards German shore positions, at a range of 6,000 yards. He declared his delight at sailing for the first time aboard a ship of the Royal Navy in action.
Back home, a grim welcome awaited. That night, German V1 flying bombs began to fall on London. Churchill stood outside Downing Street, scanning the sky and listening to the growling motors of the ‘doodlebugs’ overhead, whose sudden silence presaged their descent and detonation. They were soon landing close by him. On Sunday, 18 June, a V1 killed sixty people during a service in the Guards’ Chapel, 300 yards from his study. During one noisy night of explosions and anti-aircraft fire, at 2 a.m. he was dictating to his secretary, Marion Holmes. ‘The PM asked if I were frightened. I said “No.” How can one feel frightened in his company?’ The First Sea Lord, Cunningham, was often a critic of the prime minister, but wrote in his diary after a meeting of the anti-flying bomb ‘Crossbow’ Committee on 19 June: ‘[Churchill] was at his best, and said the matter had to be put robustly to the populace, that their tribulations were part of the battle in France, and that they should be very glad to share in the soldiers’ dangers.’
In truth, however, the British people were much shaken by the V1 offensive. They were almost four years older, and incomparably more tired, than they had been during the blitz of 1940. The monstrous impersonality of the doodlebugs, striking at all hours of day and night, seemed a refinement of cruelty. Mrs Lylie Eldergill, an East Londoner, wrote to a friend in America: ‘I do hope it will soon be ended. My nerves can’t take much more.’ Brooke was disgusted by the emotionalism of Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary: ‘He kept on repeating that the population of London could not be asked to stand this strain after 5 years of war…It was a pathetic performance.’ The bombardment severely affected industrial production in target areas. In the first week, 526 civilians were killed, and thereafter the toll mounted. It was a godsend to morale that Rome’s fall and D-Day had taken place before the V1 offensive began. Hitler made an important mistake by wasting massive resources on his secret weapons programme. The V1s and subsequent V2 rockets were marvels of technology by the standards of the day, but their guidance was too imprecise, their warheads too small, to alter strategic outcomes. The V-weapons empowered the Nazis merely to cause distress in Britain. They might have inflicted more serious damage by targeting the Allied beachhead in Normandy.
Macmillan described Churchill one evening at Chequers, around this time: ‘Sitting in the drawing-room about six o’clock [he] said: “I am an old and weary man. I feel exhausted.” Mrs Churchill said, “But think what Hitler and Mussolini feel like!” To which Winston replied, “Ah, but at least Mussolini has had the satisfaction of murdering his son-in-law [Count Ciano].” This repartee so pleased him that he went for a walk and appeared to revive.’ One of Brooke’s most notorious diary entries about the prime minister was written on 15 August:
We have now reached the stage that for the good of the nation and for the good of his own reputation it would be a godsend if he could disappear out of public life. He has probably done more for this country than any other human being has ever done, his reputation has reached its climax, it would be a tragedy to blemish such a past by foolish actions during an inevitable decline which has set in during the past year. Personally I have found him almost impossible to work with of late, and I am filled with apprehension as to where he may lead us next.
Yet if Churchill was indeed old, exhausted and often wrong-headed, he was unchallengeable as Britain’s war leader, and Brooke diminished himself by revealing such impatience with him. The prime minister possessed a stature which lifted the global prestige of his country far beyond that conferred by its shrinking military contribution. Jock Colville wrote: ‘Whatever the PM’s shortcomings may be, there is no doubt that he does provide guidance and purpose for the Chiefs of Staff and the F.O. on matters which, without him, would often be lost in the maze of inter-departmentalism or frittered away by caution and compromise. Moreover he has two qualities, imagination and resolution, which are conspicuously lacking among other Ministers and among the Chiefs of Staff. I hear him much criticised, often by people in close contact with him, but I think much of the criticism is due to the inability to see people and their actions in the right perspective when one examines them at quarters too close.’ All this was profoundly true.
Even in the last phase of the war, when American dominance became painfully explicit, Churchill fulfilled a critical role in sustaining the momentum of his nation. After D-Day, but for the prime minister’s personal contribution, Britain would have become a backwater, a supply centre and aircraft-carrier for the American-led armies in Europe. On the battlefield there was considerable evidence that the British Army was once more displaying its limitations. The war correspondent Alan Moorehead, who served through the desert, Italy and into Normandy, enjoyed a close relationship with Montgomery. His view was noted after the war in terse notes made by Forrest Pogue: ‘By July, the American soldier better than the British soldier. Original English…came from divisions which had been much bled. In first few days [I] went with Br. tanks. They stopped at every bridge because there might be an 88 around.’ These strictures might be a little harsh, but the Americans were not wrong in thinking the British, after five years of war, more casualty-averse than themselves.
In 1944-45 Churchill exercised much less influence upon events than in 1940-43. But without him, his country would have seemed a mere exhausted victim of the conflict, rather than the protagonist which he was determined that Britain should be seen to remain, until the end. ‘So far as it has gone,’ Churchill told the Commons, ‘this is certainly a glorious story, not only liberating the fields of France after atrocious enslavement but also uniting in bonds of true comradeship the great democracies of the West and the English-speaking peoples of the world…Let us go on, then, to battle on every front…Drive on through the storm, now that it reaches its fury, with the same singleness of purpose and inflexibility of resolve as we showed to the world when we were alone.’ And so he himself sought to do.
NINETEEN
Bargaining with an Empty Wallet
For Churchill, the weeks that followed D-Day were dominated by further fruitless wrangles with the Americans. Roosevelt sent him a headmasterly rebuke, drafted by Cordell Hull, for appearing to concede to the Russians a lead role in Romanian affairs, in return for Soviet acquiescence in British dominance of Greece. To the Americans, this attitude reflected the deplorable British enthusiasm for bilaterally agreed spheres of influence. Churchill replied irritably next day: ‘It would be quite easy for me, on the general principle of slithering to the left, which is so popular in foreign policy, to let things rip, when the King of Greece would probably be forced to abdicate and [the communists of] EAM would work a reign of terror…I cannot admit that I have done anything wrong in this matter.’ If Roosevelt proposed to take umbrage about British failure to inform the White House about every cable to Stalin about Greece and Romania, then what of US messages to Moscow concerning Poland, which the British were not made party to? Churchill ended sadly: ‘I cannot think of any moment when the burden of the war has lain more heavily upon me or when I have felt so unequal to its ever-more entangled problems.’
The prime minister still favoured landings on the Atlantic coast of France instead of Anvil and, even more dramatically, a major assault on Istria, the north-east Italian coast beyond Trieste, to take place in September. Brooke was cautious about this, warning that the terrain might favour the defence, and could precipitate a
winter campaign in the Alps. But the chiefs and their master were galvanised by an intercepted 17 June German signal. In this Hitler declared his determination to hold Apennine positions as ‘the final blocking line’ to prevent the Allies from breaking into the north Italian plain of the Po. Here, in British eyes, was compelling evidence of the German commitment to Italy, and thus of the value of contesting mastery there. The Americans—both Eisenhower and the US chiefs—were unimpressed. There followed one of the most acrimonious Anglo-American exchanges of the war.
The British chiefs insisted that it was ‘unacceptable’ for more Allied forces to be withdrawn from Italy. Eisenhower, as supreme commander, reasserted his commitment to the landings in southern France, and even more strongly rejected British notions, propounded in a plan drawn up by Maitland-Wilson as Mediterranean C-in-C, for a drive from north-east Italy to the so-called ‘Ljubljana gap’. On 20 June, Ike wrote to Marshall that Maitland-Wilson’s plan ‘seems to discount the fact that Combined Chiefs of Staff have long ago decided to make Western Europe the base from which to conduct decisive operations against Germany. To authorise any departure from this sound decision seems to me ill-advised and potentially dangerous…In my opinion to contemplate wandering off overland via Trieste to Ljubljana repeat Ljubljana is to indulge in conjecture to an unwarrantable degree…I am unable to repeat unable to see how over-riding necessity for exploiting the early success of Overlord is thereby assisted.’ The American chiefs signalled on 24 June that Maitland-Wilson’s Trieste plan was ‘unacceptable’. They confirmed their insistence that the planned three US and seven French divisions earmarked for Anvil should be withdrawn from Italian operations.