by Max Hastings
2. The War Machine
IT IS SOMETIMES suggested that in the Second World War there was none of the mistrust and indeed hostility between generals and politicians, “brass” and “frocks,” which characterised the British high command in the 1914–18 conflict. This is untrue. Ironside, when he was CIGS in 1939, remarked contemptuously to a staff officer as he set out for a War Cabinet meeting, “Now I’m going to waste a morning261 educating these old gentlemen on their job.” Though Churchill was not then prime minister, he was categorised among the despised “old gentlemen.”
Lt. Gen. Henry Pownall wrote of Churchill’s Cabinet, “They are a pretty fair lot of gangsters262 some of them—Bevin, Morrison and above all Beaverbrook who has got one of the nastiest faces I ever saw on any man.” John Kennedy wrote later in the war: “It is a bad feature of the present situation263, that there is such a rift between the politicians and the services. Winston certainly does not keep his team pulling happily in harness together. It is very wrong of him to keep abusing the services—the cry is taken up by other politicians & it is bad for the Service advisers to be made to feel ashamed of their uniforms.”
Yet the evidence of events suggests that the prime minister’s criticisms of his soldiers were well merited. The shortcomings of the wartime British Army will be addressed below. Here, it will only be remarked that Churchill’s machinery for directing the war effort was much more impressive than the means for implementing its decisions on the battlefield. The War Cabinet was Britain’s principal policy-making body, regularly attended by the Chiefs of Staff as well as by its own eight members—in 1941 Churchill, Attlee, Eden, Bevin, Wood, Beaverbrook, Greenwood and Sir John Anderson. Some four hundred committees and subcommittees, of varying membership and importance, devolved from it. Service business was addressed by the Chiefs at their own gatherings, usually in Churchill’s absence. Of 391 Chiefs of Staff meetings in 1941, Churchill presided at only 23, whereas he chaired 97 of 111 meetings of the War Cabinet. He also conducted 60 out of 69 meetings of its Defence Committee’s operational group, and 12 out of 13 meetings of its supply group.
Formalities were always maintained, with the prime minister addressing ministers and commanders by their titles rather than names. On Churchill’s bad days, his subordinates were appalled by his intemperance and irrationality. But on his good ones—and what an astonishing number of these there were!—his deportment went far to render a war of national survival endurable for those conducting it. “When he is in the right mood264, no entertainment can surpass a meeting with him,” wrote a general. “The other day he presided over a meeting on supply of equipment to allies and possible allies. He bustled in and said ‘well, I suppose it is the old story—too many little pigs and not enough teats on the old sow.’”
The Chiefs of Staff met every day save Sunday at 10:30 a.m., in a room beneath the Home Office connected to the Cabinet War Rooms. Sessions customarily continued until one p.m. In the afternoons, the Chiefs worked in their own offices, to which they returned after dinner unless a further evening meeting had been summoned, as happened at moments of crisis, of which there were many. Every Monday evening, the Chiefs attended War Cabinet meetings. The 1914–18 conflict precipitated the beginnings of a historic shift in the balance of decision making from commanders in the field towards the prime minister and his service chiefs in London. In the Second World War, this became much more pronounced. Generals at the head of armies, and admirals at sea, remained responsible for winning battles. But modern communications empowered those at the summit of national affairs to influence the conduct of operations in remote theatres, for good or ill, in a fashion impossible in earlier ages. Alan Brooke wrote later: “It is a strange thing265 what a vast part the COS [committee] takes in the running of the war and how little it is known or its functions appreciated! The average man in the street has never heard of it.”
For any minister or service chief successfully to influence the prime minister, it was essential that he should be capable of sustaining himself in argument. Churchill considered that unless commanders had the stomach to fight him, they were unlikely to fight the enemy. Few found it easy to do this. Adm. Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, was one of many senior officers who cherished ambivalent attitudes towards Churchill: “At times you could kiss his feet266, at others you feel you could kill him.” Pound was a capable organiser whose tenure as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff until March 1942 was crippled, first by a reluctance to assert his own will against that of the prime minister and, later, by worsening health. Capt. Stephen Roskill, the official historian267 of the wartime Royal Navy, believed that Pound was never a big enough man for his role. The admiral had doubts about his own capacities, and once asked Cunningham whether he should resign his post. Churchill bears substantial blame for allowing Pound to keep his job when his failing body, as well as inadequate strength of character, had become plain. It was fortunate for the Royal Navy that the admiral had some able and energetic subordinates.
Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham, the Mediterranean C-in-C who succeeded Pound when he became mortally stricken, was frustrated by his own inarticulacy: “I … have to confess to an inherent difficulty268 in expressing myself in verbal discussion, which I have never got over except on certain occasions when I am really roused … I felt rather like a spider sitting in the middle of a web vibrating with activity.” Soon after Cunningham took up his post at the Admiralty, one Saturday afternoon the telephone rang at his Hampshire home. The prime minister wanted to talk on the scrambler. Cunningham explained that he possessed no scrambler. Churchill said impatiently that a device would be installed immediately. The admiral and his wife were kept awake until engineers finished their task at one a.m., when a call was duly put through to Downing Street. The prime minister was by then asleep. Cunningham, considerably cross, was told that the emergency had passed.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, who assumed direction of the RAF in October 1940, was widely considered the cleverest of the Chiefs of Staff. “Peter” Portal displayed notable diplomatic gifts, especially later, in dealing with the Americans. Like many senior airmen, his principal preoccupation was with the interests of his own service, and above all its bomber offensive. His personality lacked the bright colours, his conduct the anecdotage which enabled a man to shine at dinner tables or in the historiography of the war, but Ismay’s key subordinate Brig. Leslie Hollis paid tribute to Portal’s incisive mind and infectious calm: “I never saw him ruffled,”269 said Hollis, “even under vicious and uninformed attacks on the Air Force. He would sit surveying the critic coldly from beneath his heavy-lidded eyes, never raising his voice or losing his temper, but replying to rhetoric with facts.” The army was envious of the skill with which Portal exercised his influence upon the prime minister, often more successfully than the CIGS. Gen. Sir John Dill was liked and respected by his colleagues, but by the summer of 1941 he was deeply scarred by the failures of his service. His fires were flickering, his self-confidence had ebbed. Chiefs of Staff’s meetings throughout 1941–42 were pervaded by consciousness of the army’s inability to deliver victories, and of the prime minister’s consequent disaffection towards its leaders.
Maj. Gen. Hastings “Pug” Ismay, throughout Churchill’s premiership his chief of staff as minister of defence and personal representative on the Chiefs of Staff Committee, was sometimes criticised as a courtier, too acquiescent to his master’s whims. John Kennedy, for instance, disliked Ismay: “I am thankful I have so little to do with him,”270 he said. On another occasion he noted, “Ismay is such a devotee of PM’s271 that he is a danger. He said the other evening in the club ‘if the PM came in & said he’d like to wipe his boots on me, I’d lie down & let him do it. He is such a great man everything should be done for him.’ This is a dangerous attribute for a man who has such an influence on military advice.”
Yet this was a minority view. Most people—ministers, commanders and officials alike—respected Ismay’s tact and discretion.
He perceived his role as that of representing the prime minister’s wishes to the service chiefs, and vice versa, rather than himself acting as a prime mover. He never offered strategic advice, because he believed, surely rightly, that this would usurp the Chiefs’ functions. He was a superb diplomat, who presided over a small staff of which the principal members were Hollis, who had served as a Royal Marine officer aboard a cruiser at the 1916 Battle of Jutland, and the brilliant, austere, bespectacled Col. Ian Jacob, a field marshal’s son. Whatever mistakes were made by the British high command, however acute became the personal tensions between the prime minister and his generals, admirals and air marshals, throughout Churchill’s war premiership the highest standards of coordination, staff discipline and exchange of information prevailed between Downing Street and the service ministries.
On the civil side, the prime minister was served by a remarkable group of officials. Cabinet Secretary Sir Edward Bridges preserved an enthusiasm for cerebral diversions, even amid the blitz. He presided over self-consciously intellectual debates in the Downing Street staff mess at supper, such as one in pursuance of the theme “Is there any evil except in intent?”272 Bridges had the additional merit of being as passionately committed as the prime minister was to victory at any cost, and in June 1940 he rejected out of hand proposals to establish skeleton Whitehall departments in Canada, against the eventuality of German occupation of Britain.
The Downing Street staff understood, as some outsiders did not, that while the prime minister’s regime might be unusual, it was remarkably disciplined. Minutes were typed and circulated within an hour or two of meetings taking place, even after midnight. The private secretaries—for most of the war Leslie Rowan, John Martin, Tony Bevir and John Colville—worked in shifts through the day and much of the night. “The chief difficulty is understanding what he says,”273 wrote Martin in his early days of service, “and great skill is required in interpreting inarticulate grunts or single words thrown out without explanation. I think he is consciously odd in these ways.” Colville, as a young patrician—he was the grandson of Lord Crewe—who had also attended Harrow, Churchill’s old school, basked in paternalistic indulgence from his master. His social self-assurance, indeed conceit, enabled him to gossip among potentates at the prime minister’s dinner table without awe, though his role was only that of a humble official. As a diarist, Colville fulfilled a priceless historical function as chronicler of the prime minister’s domestic routine.
Churchill’s personal followers inspired mistrust outside the “secret circle,” and sometimes inside it also. There was frequent criticism of his willingness to indulge old friends and family connections in significant posts. Later in the war, his son-in-law Duncan Sandys made himself deeply unpopular as a junior army minister. Alan Brooke swore that he would resign if, as was rumoured likely though it never became a reality, Sandys was promoted to become secretary for war. It was often asserted that Beaverbrook, Cherwell and Brendan Bracken were unsuitable intimates for the prime minister, just as important Americans resented Harry Hopkins’s relationship with Roosevelt. Yet in judging Churchill’s chosen associates, the only relevant issue is whether acolytes—the so-called cronies—improperly influenced his decisions.
Beaverbrook was the most wilful and intrusive. Whether in or out of office, he occupied an astonishing amount of the prime minister’s time and attention. Churchill never appeared to notice Beaverbrook’s physical cowardice, unusual in any member of his circle, and widely remarked by colleagues during the blitz, when as often as possible he retired to the country, and on long wartime journeys abroad. The press baron exercised notable power as minister of aircraft production in 1940, then as minister of supply in 1941. He remained thereafter one of the few civilians to whose views Churchill listened. Beaverbrook made much mischief about personalities. His contempt embraced the entire wartime Commons. “In truth it is only a sham of a parliament,”274 he wrote to Hoare in Madrid in May 1941. “The Front Bench is part of the sham. There Attlee and Greenwood, a sparrow and a jackdaw, are perched on either side of the glittering bird of paradise.” It is easy to identify issues on which Beaverbrook urged the prime minister to do the wrong thing, of which more will be said later. It is much harder to discover a case in which his imprecations were successful.
Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s familiar for a decade before the war, enjoyed ready access, much resented by rivals. But his influence was deemed greater than it was, because the garrulous Bracken boasted so much about it. Fellow ministers and officials were sometimes shocked by the familiarity with which he addressed the prime minister as “Winston.” He and Beaverbrook were dubbed the “knights of the bath” in recognition of the implausible rendezvous they sometimes shared with Churchill. Nonetheless, this clever, elusive Irishman, his bespectacled features surmounted by what looked like a wig of red steel wool, provided Churchill with a useful source of intelligence and gossip about domestic affairs and served as a successful minister of information from July 1941 to 1945. Forty in 1941, Bracken had high intelligence and a remarkable capacity for private kindness. As a pocket press baron himself, owner of the Economist and chairman of the Financial News, he thoroughly understood the demands of the media. He frequently intervened to improve journalists’ access to the services, and to curb the prime minister’s rage when newspapers were deemed to have exceeded the bounds of reasonable criticism. He exercised no influence on strategy, and was seldom present when it was discussed.
Professor Frederick Lindemann, the prime minister’s personal scientific adviser who became Lord Cherwell in June 1941, was the most widely disliked of Churchill’s intimates. His cleverness was not in doubt, but his intellectual arrogance and taste for vendettas bred many enemies. Fifty-five in 1941, Cherwell had inherited a fortune gained from waterworks in Germany. He enjoyed flaunting his wealth before less fortunate scientific colleagues, often arriving for Oxford meetings in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. His habit of crossing roads looking straight ahead, indifferent to oncoming traffic, reflected his approach to issues of state and war. A bachelor and vegetarian, of strongly right-wing and indeed racist convictions, he was an unself-conscious eccentric. When three of his Cabinet Office staff insisted on being transferred to the merchant navy to play a more active part in the war, he was alarmed by the secrets which they would take with them to sea. He told them: “If you see that you are about to be captured275, you must kill yourselves immediately!”
When the scientist’s judgement was mistaken, his obstinacy did considerable harm. He campaigned obsessively for aerial mines as a defence against air attack, wasting significant design and production effort. His advocacy of “area bombing” was founded on a misreading of data, and caused him to injure the Royal Navy’s cause in the Battle of the Atlantic. Because Churchill trusted Cherwell, “the Prof’s” errors were disproportionately damaging. The prime minister sometimes abused Cherwell’s statistics to advance rash theses of his own. Ian Jacob described him as a “licensed gadfly.” On balance, however, Cherwell’s contribution to Churchill’s governance was positive. It enabled him to support with evidence arguments on a vast range of issues.
Among lesser figures, the booming Maj. Desmond Morton was an able intelligence officer who provided important information to Churchill in his prewar wilderness years, and exercised considerable influence at Downing Street in 1940. Thereafter, however, Morton became marginalised, with a significant voice only on French matters. Charles Wilson, the prime minister’s physician who became Lord Moran in 1943, inspired the postwar anger of Churchill’s staff by publishing intimate diaries of his experiences. Jock Colville wrote contemptuously of the self-regarding doctor: “Moran was seldom, if ever276, present when history was made; but he was quite often invited to dinner afterwards.” This was to address a gerbil with an elephant gun. Moran was never a policy maker, nor did he even wield influence. It seems enough that he served Churchill well in his medical capacity, and proved an acceptable companion on the prime min
ister’s historic journeys.
The “cronies” were viewed by Churchill’s critics as charlatans. Yet each had real merits, above all brains. There were no fools in the prime minister’s entourage, though steadiness of judgement was less assured. None of his chosen associates was a conformist. All were loners who walked by themselves, however readily they embraced social intercourse as a tool of influence. In Whitehall and at Westminster, less gifted men, both in and out of uniform, denounced the false prophets who supposedly led the prime minister astray. Yet most of Churchill’s wilder schemes derived from his own supremely fertile imagination, not from mischief-makers in his inner circle. “He always retained unswerving independence of thought,”277 wrote Jock Colville. “He approached a problem as he himself saw it and of all the men I have ever known he was the least liable to be swayed by the views of even his most intimate counsellors.” In the same fashion, Churchill formed his own judgements of men, favourable or otherwise, and was deeply resistant to the influence of others in adjusting them.