Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  ‘Yes. The tide has turned. We find it everywhere.’

  ‘But how foul. How bloody foul!’

  ‘Well, you see, if I may say so, the men hate politicians.’

  ‘Winston a politician! Good God!’

  On 27 October, the prime minister delivered a brilliant speech about his experiences in Moscow. Then he adjourned to the smoking room, and addressed the barman: ‘Collins, I should like a whisky and soda—single.’ After sitting down for a moment, he struggled out of his armchair and returned to the bar. ‘Collins, delete the word “single” and insert the word “double”.’ ‘Then,’ in the words of an MP, ‘grinning at us like a schoolboy, he resumed his seat.’ Here was another of those impish miniatures which help to explain why love for Churchill ran so deep among most of those who worked with him. For all Alan Brooke’s exasperation with his master at this time, he wrote fondly of a scene that winter, as the two men visited the snowbound French front in the Vosges. The prime minister arrived for lunch with De Gaulle ‘completely frozen, and almost rolled up on himself like a hedgehog. He was placed in a chair with a hot water bottle at his feet and one in the back of his chair. At the same time good brandy was poured down his throat to warm him internally. The results were wonderful, he thawed out rapidly and when the time came produced one of those indescribably funny French speeches which brought the house down.’

  But the British people had by now hardened their hearts towards their rulers, even the greatest. Many felt less gratitude to those presiding over victory in the most terrible conflict in history, than implacable resentment against the politicians whom they held responsible for getting them into it in the first place. Even if Churchill had not himself been among the Guilty Men of the thirties, he was now their political standard-bearer. And for all his giant stature as Britain’s war leader, millions of voters sensed that his interest in the humdrum domestic troubles of peace was perfunctory. An anonymous officer of Second Army, fighting in Holland, wrote in the Spectator about the mood of the British soldier under his command: ‘[He] is fighting for the future of the world and does not believe in that future…He asks a lot of the future, but he doesn’t expect to get any of it.’ The writer perceived his men as chronically mistrustful of all authority, institutions and politicians, but Tories most of all: ‘It is, perhaps, encouraging that Tommy, 1944, will not be foozled by facile talk of a land fit for heroes. He wants deeds, not words.’ Few among such men perceived Winston Churchill as the national leader likely to fulfil such hopes once victory came, and his great duty was done.

  TWENTY

  Athens: ‘Wounded in the House of Our Friends’

  German withdrawal from the Balkans precipitated a crisis for Churchill which severely damaged his standing in America, engaged him in bitter political dispute at home, and provided the last perilous military adventure of his life. Experience at the end of World War II demonstrated that it is much more difficult to order the affairs of liberated nations than of defeated ones. This is because it is undesirable, if not impossible, to arbitrate their affairs with the same ruthlessness. If Washington’s twenty-first-century neo-conservatives had possessed a less muddled understanding of the experience of 1944-45, had studied more closely Allied difficulties managing liberated territories in the Roosevelt-Churchill era, they might not have inflicted such grief upon the world in our own times by their blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  In almost every European country freed from German domination, former Resistance groups armed by SOE sought to assert themselves in governance. In France, only De Gaulle’s extraordinary personal authority and the presence of the Anglo-American armies—together with Stalin’s abstention from mobilisation of his followers in a country where political instability might damage Soviet interests—made it possible to contain the communists of the FTP. In neighbouring Belgium, the exiled government which returned from London in September found itself facing a strong challenge from leftwingers, including communist resisters. Having played a modest role in Belgian liberation they now, to the alarm of the authorities, refused to be disarmed. There was anger about the Belgian government’s alleged reluctance to impose retribution upon those who had served the German occupation regime. On 25 November, leftist trades unionists staged a big demonstration in Brussels and appeared bent upon forcing entry to government buildings. Police overreacted, firing on the demonstrators and wounding forty. In the weeks that followed, tensions ran high. The British Army, strongly backed by Churchill, was determined to tolerate neither a threat to its lines of communications to the battlefront, nor any attempted communist takeover. British troops deployed in Brussels in large numbers.

  This action restored a resentful peace, but prompted hostile press comment. American correspondents, especially, deplored the use of force to suppress ‘heroic Resistance fighters’, of whatever political persuasion. Churchill displayed insensitivity in his support for the restoration of long-exiled governments to societies traumatised and radicalised by the experience of occupation. However, American enthusiasm for self-determination underrated both the malevolence of the communists and the danger of anarchy overtaking the liberated nations.

  Meanwhile in the Balkans, as the Germans fell back, in Albania and Yugoslavia communist partisan movements set about seizing control. No other political element was strong enough to stop them, and in Serbia Tito enjoyed direct assistance from the Red Army. ‘Tito is turning very nasty,’ Churchill told Smuts on 3 December. The Yugoslav partisans demanded the expulsion of the British from the Dubrovnik coastal area. At the same time in Eastern Europe, the ‘Lublin Poles’ proclaimed themselves the provisional government of their country, with no offer of participation for the exiled administration in London. All this made Churchill acutely anxious about the future of Greece. In the first days following German withdrawal, arriving British troops were greeted with unbridled enthusiasm. When Eden visited Athens on 26 October, his car was mobbed by cheering crowds. Lord Moyne, accompanying him, said brightly: ‘It is good that there is one country where we are so popular.’

  The Greek honeymoon ended abruptly. Armed factions roamed city streets, amid well-founded reports that communists were slaughtering alleged ‘reactionaries’. The Papandreou government struggled to assert its control of the country while the communists of EAM/ELAS refused to demobilise, and guerrilla bands converged on Athens. The British strove to reinforce their weak forces in the capital, scouring the Mediterranean for men. ‘Everything is degenerating in the Greek government,’ the prime minister wrote to Eden on 28 November, ‘and we must make up our minds whether we will assert our will by armed force, or clear out altogether.’ Two days later, he reached a predictable decision: ‘It is important to let it be known that if there is a civil war in Greece we shall be on the side of the Government we have set up in Athens, and that above all we shall not hesitate to shoot.’

  Next day, 1 December, the six communist and socialist ministers in the Athens regime resigned en bloc, and called a general strike. On the 3rd, frightened and ill-disciplined police fired on a demonstration. One policeman and eleven demonstrators were killed. Furious crowds besieged Athens police stations. The police, like other elements of the Papandreou government’s makeshift security forces, were widely perceived by Greeks as having collaborated with the German occupiers. The historian Mark Mazower has written: ‘Despite Churchill’s belief that he had forestalled a communist attempt to seize power, there is no sign that the uprising in Athens was anything other than a spontaneous popular movement which took the [communist] party leadership by surprise.’ At first, the guerrillas of EAM/ELAS concentrated their fire on Greek government forces. But when they perceived British troops furthering the cause of their rightwing foes, they started shooting at the ‘liberators’.

  The nuances of this situation escaped British commanders on the spot. They merely perceived their authority violently challenged. It should also be noticed, as it was not by most American observers at the time, that all over Greece t
he communists were conducting murderous purges of bourgeois opponents, often along with their families. Churchill was bitterly angry. He assessed the Greek situation, and communist intentions, through the prism of developments in Poland, Albania, Yugoslavia, Belgium.

  The Greek crisis broke while the Belgian one was still making headlines. Churchill was harshly misjudged by Americans, who supposed that he sought an undemocratic outcome in Greece. His mistake was that, for two turbulent months, he conceded to Greek King George II, exiled in London, a veto on constitutional arrangements. So intemperate were Churchill’s expressions of hostility to the communists of EAM/ELAS that Clementine felt moved to write him a note of warning:

  My darling Winston,

  Please do not before ascertaining full facts repeat to anyone you meet what you said to me this morning i.e. that the Communists in Athens had shown their usual cowardice in putting the women & children in front to be shot at. Because altho’ Communists are dangerous, indeed perhaps sinister people, they seem in this War on the Continent to have shown personal courage…

  Your loving & devoted Clemmie

  Clementine’s words were significant, because they reflected widespread public sentiment in Britain as well as America. Allied propaganda throughout the Nazi occupation had made much of the communist role in resistance, portraying EAM/ELAS, like Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia, as heroic freedom fighters. Not only was their contribution to the anti-Nazi struggle exaggerated, but reports of their atrocities, well-known to SOE officers on the ground, were suppressed. Many people on both sides of the Atlantic thus viewed the Greek left in roseate hues.

  Worse, Churchill’s lingering desire to salvage the Greek monarchy, despite overwhelming evidence of its unpopularity, compromised his own authority. Almost all his ministers, including Eden and Macmillan, were unwilling to offer even vestigial support to George II. They were also conscious of the rickety character of the Papandreou regime, an unconvincing foundation for the restoration of democracy. Churchill’s instinct was probably right, that if the Allies had done nothing the communists would have seized Greece with the same ruthlessness they were displaying everywhere else in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. But clumsy diplomacy caused the British to be seen, above all in Washington, as would-be imperialist oppressors of a liberated people. Lincoln McVeagh, the US minister in Athens, criticised the British for ‘handling this fanatically freedom-loving country as if it were composed of natives under the British raj’.

  On 5 December Edward Stettinius, who had just replaced Cordell Hull as US Secretary of State, raised the stakes by publicly criticising British policy in Greece and also in Italy, where the British were at loggerheads with the Americans about whether Count Sforza should be permitted a role in the new Rome government. Stettinius said: ‘We expect the Italians to work out their own problems of government along democratic lines without influence from outside. This policy would apply to an even more pronounced degree with regard to governments of the United Nations* in their liberated territories.’ Whatever the merits of the argument, it was deeply unhelpful of Stettinius, and damaging to Churchill, thus publicly to have distanced the United States from Britain.

  A marked shift in American media sentiment was taking place. Conservative commentators, hitherto bitterly sceptical about British foreign policy, now showed themselves sympathetic to Churchill’s efforts to check the onset of European communism. The liberal press, however, deplored what it perceived as new manifestations of British imperialism. It is a striking reflection upon the mood of those days, that perceived British misconduct in Greece and Italy provoked much more comment and protest in the US than did Russia’s ruthless handling of its newly-occupied East European territories.

  Many American papers asserted the right of Resistance movements, whatever their political complexion, to a voice in the governance of their countries. A State Department opinion survey stated: ‘“Liberal” papers, pleading for a greater representation for Resistance forces, were critical of Churchill’s alleged attempt to maintain a reactionary regime against the wishes of the Greek people.’ William Shirer of CBS urged that the US back up its words by taking action in opposition to British ‘toryism’. The State Department said:

  ‘Substantially universal approval has greeted the proposition that the composition of governments in Italy and in “liberated territories” is an internal affair…Representatives of Greek-American organizations visited the State Department to protest British intervention in Greece…The Department also received numerous letters from organizations and individuals protesting British policy and applauding the United States’s [5 December] declaration.’

  Many American newspapers perceived the Soviets and British as tarred with the same brush, both seeking to impose their selfish wills on free peoples. Isolationists blamed Britain, and explicitly Churchill, for ‘seeking to bury the Atlantic Charter’ with its declared right to self-determination. The North Carolina Raleigh News & Observer, for instance, cited ‘the shooting of Greeks for no greater crime than opposing a Government which seeks to bring back a discredited King’ as being ‘not only a mistake but a tragedy’. There were increasing demands, echoed in Congress, for a revision of Lend-Lease legislation, to link US aid to Britain and Russia with less high-handed foreign policies. The Chicago Sun, urging Lend-Lease revision, observed that ‘Washington has both the right and obligation to let the British government know that we do not propose to aid the enemies of democracy in Italy, Greece, or elsewhere through Lend-Lease or any other means.’

  A Princeton poll in December found that Americans thought Britain likely to be a much less trustworthy post-war ally than China. On 13 December 1944, the US press reported anti-British student protests and marches at Harvard, Radcliffe, Wellesley and Northeastern. In Boston, students waved placards proclaiming: ‘AMERICANS SUPPORT CHURCHILL AS WAR LEADER, NOT TORY’. The protesters issued a statement: ‘We are not against Churchill as a war leader, but against his reactionary policy in Belgium, Italy, and Greece.’ US trades unionists also demonstrated against British policy.

  An attack on the prime minister by H.G. Wells was widely reported. ‘Churchill must go,’ the aged British literary sage wrote in Tribune: ‘Winston Churchill, the present would-be British Fuhrer, is a person with a range of ideas limited to the adventures and opportunities of British political life…Now he seems to have lost his head completely…When the British people were blistered with humiliation by the currish policy of the old Conservative gang in power, the pugnacity of Winston brought him to the fore. The country liked fighting and he delighted in fighting. For want of a better reason he became the symbol of our national will for conflict, a role he has now outlived.’ Thomas Stokes wrote in the Los Angeles Times on 12 December: ‘What we are seeing is the opening of the big battle between the right and the left for the control of post-war Europe. There’s Great Britain on one side and Russia on the other, with the United States as a sort of arbiter or umpire trying to establish some middle course, and being in the difficult position of the harassed liberal who is caught in the crossfire from each side.’

  For Churchill, the only good news coming out of Greece was that the Russians appeared to be holding back. ‘This is good,’ he wrote to Eden, ‘and shows how Stalin is playing the game.’ For once, the prime minister’s optimism was justified. Throughout the unfolding imbroglio in Greece, there was no sign that Moscow sought to meddle. Churchill, indeed, was moved to assert that on this issue he found the Russians much more biddable than the Americans. Stalin acknowledged spheres of influence, however broadly he sought to draw his own. Roosevelt did not.

  On 8 December 1944 there was a stormy Commons debate about Greece, in which Emanuel Shinwell and Aneurin Bevan, men of the left, led the attack on the government. Churchill, who once more chose to remind the House that it could dismiss him if it so wished, won a vote of confidence by 279 votes to thirty. But many MPs remained dissatisfied. Harold Nicolson thought the prime minister misread the mood of the
House, which ‘at its best was one of distressed perplexity, and at its worst of sheer red fury’. Harold Macmillan, who attended the debate, saw the prime minister afterwards in the Downing Street Annexe. He found him tired and petulant: ‘He rambled on in rather a sad and depressed way. The debate had obviously tired him very much, and I think he realised the dangers inherent in the Greek policy on which we are now embarked. He has won the debate, but not the battle of Athens.’

  Churchill seemed to have dug in his heels. He cabled Rex Leeper, British ambassador in Greece, on 10 December: ‘In Athens as everywhere else our maxim is “no peace without victory”.’ Yet Lt.Gen. Ronald Scobie, commanding British troops, signalled that he lacked sufficient men to hold the capital, never mind to enforce the prime minister’s desired disarmament of the guerrillas. Alexander was now Mediterranean C-in-C, having replaced ‘Jumbo’ Maitland-Wilson, who was dispatched to become British military representative in Washington following the sudden death of Sir John Dill. Churchill urged Alexander to find more troops for Greece.

  Relations with the Americans took a sharp turn for the worse. On 5 December, Churchill had signalled to Scobie, urging him to adopt a ruthless policy towards the communist guerrillas: ‘Do not hesitate to fire at any armed male in Athens who assails the British authority or Greek authority…act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress.’ Jock Colville dispatched this message at 5 a.m., when amid exhaustion he forgot to mark it ‘GUARD’—not to be shown to Americans. Admiral Ernest King, on his own initiative and even before hearing of Churchill’s draconian signal, ordered that US shipping should not be used to supply or reinforce the British in Greece. Churchill cabled Harry Hopkins on 9 December: ‘It grieves me very much to see signs of our drifting part at a time when unity becomes even more important, as dangers recede and faction arises.’ Hopkins persuaded King to rescind his order, apparently without reference to Roosevelt. But a Washington Post editorial declared on 9 December: ‘the American people simply do not relish the spectacle of Sherman tanks going into action against the men who held the pass in war-stricken Hellas’. Correspondent Barnet Nover attacked Churchill for his harsh words about the Greek communist guerrillas: ‘What suddenly transformed those patriots into “bandits”?’