Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  On 31 July, with Soviet forces only fifteen miles away across the Vistula, the Polish ‘Home Army’ in Warsaw launched its uprising. Through the agonising weeks that followed, Churchill strove to gain access to Russian landing grounds, to dispatch arms to the Poles. The most earnest and humble pleas to Stalin—and in some of Churchill’s cables he was indeed reduced to begging—failed to move Moscow. The Russian leader believed that Churchill had deliberately provoked the Warsaw Uprising to secure for the ‘London Poles’ the governance of their country. Moscow was determined to prevent any such outcome. The prime minister had certainly since 1940 promoted an ideal of popular revolt, and some SOE officers had encouraged Polish delusions. But he was in no way complicit in the launch of the Warsaw Rising, an explicitly local initiative. Though he sustained his campaign on behalf of Polish freedom for many months to come, he knew how great were the odds against success. If the Americans were not indifferent, they seemed so both in London and in Moscow. The Red Army stood deep inside Poland, while Eisenhower’s forces were far, far away.

  Even more serious, from Churchill’s viewpoint, was the frustration of his strategic wishes. He made a last, vain attempt to persuade the Americans against a campaign in Burma. Throughout the war, while Churchill was eager that British forces should be seen to regain Britain’s colonies in the Far East, his interest in the military means by which this should be accomplished was sporadic and unconvincing. Most of his attention, and almost all his heart, focused upon the German war, even as Slim’s imperial army prepared to advance towards the Chindwin frontier of Burma.

  Until almost the last day before the landing in southern France on 15 August, Churchill argued doggedly against ‘the Anvil abortion’, pleading for alternative assaults on the Atlantic coast of France, or in north-east Italy. ‘I am grieved to find that even splendid victories and widening opportunities do not bring us together on strategy,’ he wrote to Hopkins in Washington on 6 August. The British failed to perceive that the arguments for getting into southern France were less persuasive in rousing US determination than those for getting every possible man out of Italy.

  As Churchill railed in the face of so many difficulties and disappointments, he adopted a familiar panacea: personal activity. In a fashion imbued with pathos, because it marked his transition from prime mover to spectator, he became for some weeks a battlefield tourist. During his travels he conducted some business. But his journeys represented a substitute for implementing policy, rather than a means of doing so. On 20 July he flew to Normandy, where

  1.4 million Allied troops were now deployed. On 5 August he again toured the battle zone and met commanders. Both trips delighted him, for he savoured proximity to the music of gunfire as much as ever. He underrated the scale and speed of the developing German collapse in France, and the new strategic opportunities which would follow. He expected months more fighting before Allied troops reached the borders of Germany. Had he understood that dramatic change in the circumstances of Eisenhower’s armies was imminent, with the collapse of German resistance in France, he would probably have remained at hand, to dispatch a flood of imprecatory messages to Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower and Brooke. As it was, however, he departed for the Mediterranean.

  On 11 August he landed in Algiers. Summoning De Gaulle for a meeting, he was infuriated when the Frenchman, seething with indignation about the Allies’ refusal to grant him authority in his own country, declined to attend. Randolph Churchill, recuperating after a plane crash in Yugoslavia, met his father and heard a stormy denunciation of De Gaulle. Afterwards, in an unusually statesman-like intervention, Randolph urged pity: ‘After all, he is a frustrated man representing a defeated country. You as the unchallenged leader of England and the main architect of victory could well afford to be magnanimous.’ Churchill wrote to Clementine: ‘I feel that de Gaulle’s France will be a France more hostile to England than any since Fashoda [in 1898].’

  Nonetheless, under relentless pressure from Eden, Churchill supported De Gaulle’s cause against the Americans. Before D-Day, Admiral Leahy, Roosevelt’s chief of staff who had served as US ambassador to Vichy, told the president that the Allies would find Marshal Pétain their most appropriate French negotiating partner, because of his popularity with his own people. In the weeks following the invasion this delusion was confounded by Resistance fighters who seized power in liberated areas, and displayed overwhelming support for De Gaulle. The men of Vichy were consigned by their countrymen to prison or oblivion. Late in August the general was allowed to return to France, where he became the country’s de facto ruler. Two months later, albeit with the deepest reluctance, Washington recognised his leadership of a French provisional government.

  On 12 August Churchill flew to Italy, where he installed himself in Maitland-Wilson’s residence, the Villa Rivalta overlooking the Bay of Naples. He remained in Italy for more than two weeks, bathing several times in the sea, much to his pleasure, and conducting meetings. He continued to fume about the diversion of forces to France. In those days of mid-August, 100,000 men were being transferred in landing ships from Italy. Offshore in a launch one sunny morning, Churchill found himself hailed by thousands of troops lining the rails of vessels on passage to the Côte d’Azur. He acknowledged their cheers, but wrote in his memoirs: ‘They did not know that if I had had my way, they would have been sailing in a different direction.’ As for the Italian people, after years of proclaiming the need for firmness, if not harshness, towards Mussolini’s nation, the sight of smiling Italian faces now softened his heart, rekindling his lifelong instinct towards mercy.

  He met Tito, flown in from Yugoslavia, and fêted him considerably. The communist leader returned to his headquarters so enchanted by the prime minister that some of his partisan comrades were alarmed. Dismissing their warnings of the British leader’s duplicity, the Yugoslav enthused: ‘It isn’t as simple as you think! Yes, Churchill is an imperialist, an anti-Communist! But you won’t believe it, his eyes were filled with tears when he met me. He almost sobbed, “You’re the first person from enslaved Europe I have met!” Churchill even told me that he had wanted to parachute into Yugoslavia, but he was too old!’ One partisan shook his head and muttered to another: ‘The English are clever: an escort of warships and naval manoeuvres in honour of the Old Man [Tito], and I see that it’s had its effect on him!’

  On 16 August, Churchill watched the Dragoon landing from an assault vessel a few miles offshore. In a letter to Clementine he portrayed the splendour of the armada ‘all spread along twenty miles of coast with poor St. Tropez in the centre’. The invaders met little opposition, and were soon racing north-eastward to a linkage with Eisenhower’s armies on 12 September. The prime minister spent hours in talks about Mediterranean policy with Macmillan, Maitland-Wilson and others. British handling of Italian affairs was unimpressive, and perceived as such by the Americans. Churchill and Eden acquiesced in the return from Moscow of exiled communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, and his inclusion in the Italian government in exchange for its recognition by the Russians. Dogged British resistance to the participation of Count Carlo Sforza, a former foreign minister who had been living in the US and was esteemed by the Americans, annoyed Washington intensely. London was taken unawares when Marshal Badoglio was ejected from the Italian leadership in June 1944. Thereafter, British struggles to create and sustain a Rome government acceptable to Churchill and his colleagues incurred constant criticism from the US State Department and media. The Americans’ own ideas were naïve, but founded in a commitment to Italian rights of selfdetermination, which they perceived the British as flouting in their old imperialistic way.

  Increasingly Churchill’s attention focused upon Greece, where he perceived a serious danger of communist takeover. The guerrillas of EAM-ELAS, armed by SOE, were the best-organised force in the country. As the Germans began to withdraw from southern Greece, Churchill ordered that British troops should be readied to fly into Athens the moment the enemy abandoned the city, to f
orestall a communist coup. It was hard to find men, when the Allied armies in Italy had been so much depleted for Dragoon, but forces for Greece the prime minister insisted that there must be. Some airborne units were earmarked.

  Then he advanced towards the front, dressed in army summer rig with medal ribbons and a sola topee that would have looked absurd on any other man. Alexander drove him to a hilltop from which he could hear small-arms fire, watch machine-gunners flail the enemy amid showers of empty cases spinning away into the dust, see tanks grinding into action. The outing provided him with as much happiness as any experience in the last months of the war. He was in the midst of a British army which, if not immediately triumphant, was indisputably predominant, in the company of a general whom he deemed a paladin. Alexander received far fewer reproaches for slow progress than did Montgomery. Churchill blamed the misfortunes of the joyless, bloody Italian theatre exclusively upon the Americans. They, he believed, had stripped Alex’s army of the means with which it might have changed the fate of Europe and spared the Balkans from Soviet domination. Many of those engaged in the struggle, and bearing its sacrifices, shared his opinion. A humble Eighth Army signaller wrote in his diary on 27 August 1944: ‘I feel sure this is a secondary front and therefore being denied the vital necessities of war.’

  On 29 August, Churchill landed back in Britain with a temperature of 103° and a patch on his lung which caused his doctors to prescribe another course of M & B drugs. He had achieved nothing of substance in the Mediterranean, nor in Normandy, save to assuage a growing sense of his own impotence, and to indulge his passion for witnessing great events. Foreign Office official Oliver Harvey muttered scornfully about the prime minister ‘fooling about in Italy’. Amid the miseries and slaughter inflicted on London by the flying-bomb offensive, Churchill faced greater personal risk at home than in Normandy or the Mediterranean. Though his government had much to do, most of the tasks were uncongenial to him. More and more of ministers’ time was occupied with preparing for peace. At worst, victory could not be more than a year or two away. The British people looked with eagerness mingled with uncertainty towards a future without war. Yet the prime minister’s interest in domestic matters was spasmodic and perfunctory. David Reynolds notes that in Churchill’s memoirs he makes no mention of the 1944 Butler Education Act, the most important piece of domestic legislation during his wartime premiership. Ismay once observed: ‘The PM can be counted on to score a hundred in a Test Match, but is no good at village cricket.’ The issues of post-war reconstruction, the mundane concerns of the careworn British people, required ministers to take the field in many village cricket matches.

  Winning the war, and securing the place of the British Empire in the new world, were Churchill’s unalterable preoccupations. For those obliged to work with him, difficulties mounted. His flagging health, rambling monologues and refusal at cabinet meetings to address business which did not stimulate his interest, posed great difficulties. Leo Amery complained: ‘Our Cabinet meetings certainly get more and more incoherent, though I notice that there is much more talking by everybody, often simultaneously, than there used to be when Winston held the field entirely by himself…What makes me so tired at Cabinets is the same feeling that one has in a taxi wishing to catch a train with a driver who dawdles and misses every green light.’

  The philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin wrote: ‘Churchill is preoccupied by his own vivid world, and it is doubtful how far he has ever been aware of what actually goes on in the heads and hearts of others. He does not react, he acts; he does not mirror, he affects others and alters them to his own powerful measure…His conduct stems from great depth and constancy of feeling—in particular, feeling for and fidelity to the great tradition for which he assumes a personal responsibility, a tradition which he bears upon his shoulders and must deliver, not only sound and undamaged but strengthened and embellished, to successors worthy of accepting the sacred burden.’ This seems profoundly true of Churchill’s behaviour in the last months of the war. Two or three years earlier, he had power to shape events as well as popular perceptions of them. Now, the world was going on its way with ever less heed for his grandiose antique vision, though it could still be moved by his words.

  Through the autumn, the miseries of Poland provided a running theme, as the Nazis suppressed the Warsaw Rising with familiar savagery. Not only Stalin, but also Roosevelt, resisted Churchill’s impassioned pleas to press Moscow about the Warsaw Home Army. The Americans wanted Siberian bases for their B-29 bomber operations against Japan, and were unwilling to provoke the Russians about what they perceived as lesser matters. On 26 August the president rejected an appeal from Churchill that the US and Britain should dispatch a strongly-worded joint protest to Moscow about Poland. Roosevelt wrote: ‘I do not consider it advantageous to the long-range general war prospects for me to join with you in the proposed message to Uncle J.’ On 4 September the prime minister, still unwell, felt obliged to rise from his sickbed to calm a cabinet whose members were really angered by events in Warsaw. While he welcomed spontaneous media expressions of dismay, he urged that ministers should remain temperate about Russian behaviour.

  Churchill was still ailing when he boarded the Queen Mary at Greenock on 6 September, bound for Quebec. Brooke remarked that he seemed ‘old, unwell and depressed. Evidently found it hard to concentrate and kept holding his head between his hands.’ Conditions below decks for most of the crossing were oppressively hot. After the austerities of British diet, on the liner the customary sybaritic fare was provided for the prime minister’s party. Jock Colville described their meals as ‘gargantuan in scale and epicurean in quality; rather shamingly so’. There was the usual glittering table talk, faithfully recorded by the three notable diarists aboard—Colville, Brooke and Moran. The prime minister said that he would not regret the loss of any Labour colleague from his government save Bevin, the only one whose character and capacity he esteemed. He lamented the fact that he no longer felt that he had a message to deliver to the British people: ‘all he could now do was to finish the war, to get the soldiers home and to see that they had houses to which to return. But materially and financially the prospects were black.’

  He found time to read, first Trollope’s Phineas Finn, then The Duke’s Children, which describes a Victorian political grandee’s embarrassments with his offspring. The latter novel can scarcely have failed to prick Churchill, at a time when his own son’s marriage to his wife Pamela was breaking up. She had conducted a notable affair with Averell Harriman, a future husband, and was later unkindly described as having become ‘a world expert on rich men’s bedroom ceilings’. Earlier that year, Churchill achieved one of his few moments of intimacy with Brooke, when the two men discussed tête-à-tête over supper their difficulties with their respective grown-up children.

  But, while the prime minister struggled to recruit his strength, as usual he spent many hours on the Queen Mary preparing for the summit. He minuted the chiefs of staff during their passage that Britain should ‘not yield central and southern Europe entirely to Soviet ascendancy or domination’. This was, he said, an issue of ‘high political consequences, but also has serious military potentialities’. He expressed distress that the British and imperial armies were nowhere advancing the nation’s standard as he would have wished. One-third of their strength, in north-west Europe, was deployed under US command; one-third in India was about to launch an offensive in Burma, ‘the most unhealthy country in the world under the worst possible conditions’, merely to appease America’s China ambitions; and the remaining one-third in Italy had been emasculated for Dragoon. Had he known, he said, that the Americans would use their monopoly of landing ships unilaterally to enforce strategy, he would have ensured that Britain built her own. He was appalled to hear that Mountbatten was demanding 370,000 men and 24,000 vehicles from Europe before launching an assault against Rangoon. He still craved an amphibious landing on the Istrian peninsula, ‘in the armpit of the Adriatic’.<
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  Churchill arrived in Quebec by overnight train on the morning of 11 September, within a few minutes of the president. They drove together from the station to the Citadel. Next day, Colville heard the prime minister say that he would that evening discuss post-war occupation zones in Germany with Roosevelt. The private secretary, knowing Churchill had not studied the relevant papers, offered to read them aloud to him in his bath. This procedure proved only partially successful, because of Churchill’s tendency to submerge himself from time to time, missing key passages of the brief. The prime minister cabled to the war cabinet in London that the conference had opened ‘in a blaze of friendship’. There was indeed a blaze of courtesies, but not of agreed policies. In Churchill’s opening exposition of events, he sought to flatter the Americans by saying that the results of the detested Dragoon were ‘most gratifying’. Roosevelt interrupted him, observing mischievously—even maliciously—that ‘some of the credit for the conception was due to Marshal Stalin’. Churchill then talked much about Italy, and the merits of striking for Vienna. He seemed oblivious of American boredom and indifference. Cunningham, the First Sea Lord, thought Roosevelt ‘looked very frail, and hardly to be taking in what was going on’.

  The two leaders wasted considerable time discussing the plan of Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary, for pastoralising post-war Germany. The president, knowing that Churchill was increasingly fearful about how Britain could pay its bills when Lend-Lease ended, said that de-industrialising the Ruhr would remove Britain’s principal competitor in Europe. Great economic opportunities could thus shine upon the British people. This notion prompted a spasm of enthusiasm in Churchill. Cherwell, in one of his baleful interventions, urged the scheme’s merits. On 15 September both leaders formally endorsed the Morgenthau Plan, to the horror of both Cordell Hull and Anthony Eden, who said the British cabinet would never accept it. Roosevelt quickly recognised that he had made a mistake. The Morgenthau Plan was forgotten—except by Nazi propagandists, when the story leaked. In the last months of the war, many Germans believed Goebbels when he told them that if they bowed to defeat they would be condemned to become slave labourers in a peasant economy. The Treasury Secretary’s foolish initiative at Quebec motivated some enemies to fight even more desperately than they might otherwise have done, in the last ditch.