by Max Hastings
Many misunderstandings of Churchill’s conduct of governance by his contemporaries, including some close to the seat of power, derived from the promiscuity of his conversation. Every day, whether in the company of generals, ministers, visitors or personal staff, he gave vent to impulsive and intemperate judgements on people and plans. These sometimes amused, but often alarmed and appalled, even those with long experience of him. Yet his intimates, above all the officers of the War Cabinet Secretariat, knew that nothing Churchill said was intended as a basis for action, unless subsequently confirmed in writing. They knew that he often spoke merely as a means of helping himself to formulate ideas. It has been remarked that he had an undisciplined mind, the source of a cornucopia of ideas, some brilliant, others absurd. Ismay called him “a child of nature.” Yet the most notable aspect of the machine for the direction of Britain’s war was that it was better ordered than that of any other belligerent, notably including those of Germany and later the United States. A cynic might suggest that Churchill created a system to protect himself from his own excesses. In remarkable degree, this was successful.
The late spring of 1941 found the British no nearer than they had been six months earlier to perceiving a path to victory. When Gen. Raymond Lee returned to London after a trip to Washington in April, he wrote, “The people strike me278 … as being much more solemn than they were in January.” Churchill’s enthusiasm for special forces and raiding operations derived from his awareness of the need to strive constantly to sustain a semblance of momentum. A story was told to a general by his brother which achieved wide circulation in the War Office. As a boy, the narrator had been a guest at a game shoot at Blenheim Palace, where Churchill attempted an absurdly long shot at a hare. The boy asked him why he had wasted a cartridge. “Young man,”279 replied Churchill blithely, “I wished that hare to understand it was taking part in these proceedings.” The same spirit, addressed to matters of vastly greater import, impelled Churchill in the spring and summer of 1941. The War Office deemed it futile to hold Tobruk after Rommel had bypassed it in April. Only Churchill’s insistence prompted deployment there of an Australian garrison, which was soon more numerous than the German force encircling it. But in that season of defeats, the saga of Australia’s infantrymen—the “diggers”—withstanding the “siege of Tobruk” was elevated by British propaganda into a serviceable legend.
Military theatre had its limitations, however. Churchill had a grossly exaggerated belief in the power of boldness alone to overcome material and numerical deficiencies. “War,280” he wrote, “consists of fighting, gnawing and tearing, and … the weaker or more frail gets life clawed out of him by this method. Manoeuvre is a mere embellishment, very agreeable when it comes off … Fighting is the key to victory.” Yet the events of 1940–41 showed, and subsequent experience confirmed, that British forces could defeat those of the Wehrmacht only when they were substantially stronger. If Hitler had dispatched to North Africa even a further two or three divisions from his vast order of battle, it is likely that Britain would have been driven from Egypt in 1941. Many senior soldiers thought this outcome likely, though they underrated Rommel’s logistics problems. “I suppose you realise that we shall lose the Middle East,”281 Dill said to Kennedy on June 21. Kennedy, in his turn, incurred Churchill’s ire merely by mentioning that contingency in his presence. The British were spared from disaster in the Mediterranean in 1941 because Hitler’s strategic priorities lay elsewhere. On June 22, Germany invaded Russia.
SIX
Comrades
THE GERMAN INVASION of Russia on June 22, 1941, transformed the Second World War. The British, through Ultra intercepts, had long been aware of Hitler’s impending onslaught. They persuaded themselves that their intervention in Greece had imposed a delay upon Operation Barbarossa. In reality, a late thaw and German equipment shortages were the decisive factors in causing the assault to take place later than Hitler had wished. The British and American peoples to this day perceive their contribution to the eastern war in terms of convoys heroically fought across the Arctic to Murmansk, bearing massive Western aid. Reality was less simple. In 1941–42, both Britain and the United States were desperately short of war matériel for their own armed forces, and had little to spare for Stalin’s people. For eighteen months after Russia was invaded, the period during which its survival hung in the balance, Western aid was much more marginal than the rhetoric of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt suggested and ordinary citizens in the West were encouraged to suppose.
In June 1941, the immediate impact of Barbarossa in Britain was surprisingly muted. The shocks of the previous year had imposed an anaesthetizing effect. Largely due to people’s gratitude at finding themselves still unscathed at their breakfast tables each morning, their island spared from Nazi pillage, many received tidings of this epochal event with surprising insouciance. Edward Stebbing, a twenty-one-year-old soldier whose impatience with the struggle was cited earlier, felt bewildered: “There is nothing straightforward about this war282. In the maze of lies and treachery it is almost impossible to find the truth.” The Financial Times columnist Lex wrote on June 23: “Markets spent the morning trying to make up their minds whether the German aggression against Russia was a bull or a bear … The majority concluded that whatever happened we could hardly be worse off as a result of Hitler’s latest somersault.” Here was another manifestation of Churchill’s “three-inch pipe” theory about human emotions. Amid a surfeit of drama and peril, many people took refuge in the sufficient cares of their own daily lives, and allowed a torrent of world news, good and ill, to flow past them to the sea.
Most of Britain’s ruling class, from the prime minister downwards, regarded the Soviet Union with abhorrence. The Russians had rebuffed all British diplomatic advances since the outbreak of war, and likewise London’s warnings of Nazi intentions. Until the day of the German assault, under the terms of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact Stalin provided Hitler with huge and material assistance. Only a few months earlier Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, bargained with the Nazis, albeit unsuccessfully, for a share of the spoils of British defeat. The extravagance of Soviet demands provided Hitler with a final pretext for launching Barbarossa.
In addressing the history of the Second World War, it is necessary to recognise the huge moral compromises forced upon the nations fighting under the banner of democracy and freedom. Britain, and subsequently America, strove for the triumph of these admirable principles wherever they could be secured—with the sometimes embarrassing exceptions of the European overseas empires. But again and again, hard things had to be done which breached faith with any definition of absolute good. If this is true of politics at all times, it was especially so between 1939 and 1945. Whether in dealing with France, Greece, Iraq, Persia, Yugoslavia or other nations, attitudes were struck and courses adopted by the Allies which no moral philosopher could think impeccable. British wartime treatment of its colonies, of Egypt and, above all, India, was unenlightened. But, if Churchill’s fundamental nobility of purpose is acknowledged, most of his decisions deserve sympathy.
He governed on the basis that all other interests and considerations must be subordinated to the overarching objective of defeating the Axis. Those who, to this day, argue that Churchill “might have saved the British Empire” by making a bargain with Hitler, leaving Russia and Germany to destroy each other, ignore the practical difficulty of reaching a sustainable deal with the Nazi regime, and also adopt a supremely cynical insouciance towards its turpitude. The moral and material price of destroying Hitler was high, but most of mankind has since acknowledged that it had to be paid. In the course of the war, the prime minister was repeatedly called upon to decide not which party, nation or policy represented virtue but which must be tolerated or supported as the least base option. This imperative was never more conspicuous than in Britain’s dealings with the Soviet Union.
Between 1917 and 1938, Churchill sustained a reputation as an implacable f
oe of Bolshevism. Yet in the last years before attaining the premiership, he changed key, displaying a surprising willingness to reach out to the Russians. In October 1938, against Chamberlain’s strong views, he urged an alliance with Moscow, and counselled the Poles to seek an accommodation with Stalin. This line did as much to raise his standing with British Labour MPs as it did to lower it among Tories. In September 1939, he urged Chamberlain to perceive the Soviet advance into Poland as a favourable development: “None of this conflicts with our main interest283, which is to arrest the German movement towards the East and South-East of Europe.” In a broadcast a fortnight later, he said: “That the Russian armies should stand284 on this line [in Poland] was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.” In January 1940, it is true, he became an enthusiastic supporter of Finland, then beset by the Russians. He once enquired about the possibility of bombing Soviet oil fields at Baku, in the Caucasus, to stem fuel deliveries to Germany. Excepting this interruption, however, Churchill showed himself willing to make common cause with the Russians, if they would share the burden of defeating Hitler. This was probably because, even in 1939–40 before France fell, he could not see how else victory was to be accomplished.
He was at Chequers on that June Sunday morning when news came of Barbarossa. He immediately told Eden, a house guest, of his determination to welcome the Soviet Union as a partner in the struggle, then spent the rest of the day roaming restlessly under hot sunshine, refining themes and phrases for a broadcast. He communed with Beaverbrook and Sir Stafford Cripps, the Moscow ambassador who chanced to be in Britain, but did not trouble to summon the Cabinet. When at last he sat before the BBC microphone that evening, he began by acknowledging his own past hostility towards the Soviets: “The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.” But then he asserted, in bold and brilliant terms, Britain’s commitment to fight alongside Stalin’s Russia:
The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies flashes away. I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray—ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, the return of the bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.
I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking Prussian officers, its crafty agents expert from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and a safer prey.
I have to declare the decision of His Majesty’s Government … Any man or state who fights on against Nazi-dom will have our aid … We shall give whatever aid we can to Russia and the Russian people … The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free people in every quarter of the globe.
Not for the first time in the war, Churchill’s words received the acclaim of most British people, while inspiring doubts among some Tory MPs and senior officers. Repugnance towards the bloodstained Soviets ran deep through the upper echelons of British society. Leo Amery, the India secretary, recoiled from making common cause with Communists. Col. John Moore-Brabazon, minister of aircraft production, was rash enough to publicly assert a desire to see the Germans and Russians exterminate each other. Jock Colville described this as “a sentiment widely felt.”285 Lieutenant General Pownall complained about the limp-wristed attitude which he perceived in approaches towards the Russians by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the diplomats of his department. “They think they are dealing with normal people286. They are not. Russians are orientals and need treating quite differently and far more roughly. They are not Old Etonians …” Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam observed with curious detachment: “I don’t suppose that the ‘conquest’287 of Russia will take very long. And what then—presumably either Hitler will make some kind of peace offer based upon our acceptance of the ‘New Order,’” or he will try his hand at an invasion here or push on in the [Middle] Eastern theatre.” Headlam thought Churchill’s posture tactically sensible, but like many other people found himself unable to anticipate a happy ending without the Americans. He fell back upon hopes of loftier assistance: “One feels that God is on our side288—that’s the great thing.”
Among the British left, however, and the public at large, enthusiasm for Churchill’s declaration of support for Russia was overwhelming. Independent Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, an almost unflagging critic of Churchill’s leadership, nonetheless congratulated him on his welcome to the Russians as comrades in arms: “It was an exceedingly clever statement, a very difficult one to make, but made with great wisdom and strength.” Surrey court reporter George King wrote: “I glory in all this289. I have always had a soft spot for the Russians, and never blamed them for their dislike of us. We gave them good cause in the years after the last war … Thank God for Russia. They have saved us from invasion this year.” Londoner Vere Hodgson wrote on June 22: “The Russians have not been too nice290 to us in the past, but now we have to be friends and help one another … So we have got one fighting ally left in Europe. I felt my morale rising.” She added in the following month, with notable sagacity: “Somehow I think Stalin291 is more a match for Hitler than any of us … he looks such an unpleasant kind of individual.” It was never plausible that, in order to defeat Hitler, British people would have been willing to eat one another, but the Russians did so during the siege of Leningrad. Indeed, they endured incomparable horrors between 1941 and 1945, which spared the Western Allies from sacrifices such as Britain’s prime minister might not flinch from, but his people certainly would have.
British Communists, many of whom had hitherto been indifferent to the war, now changed tune dramatically. Some, like Mrs. Elizabeth Belsey, henceforward matched impassioned admiration for Mother Russia’s struggle with unremitting scorn for Britain’s leaders. She wrote to her soldier husband:
I was agreeably surprised … that Churchill received Russia292 so promptly into the circle of our gallant allies. I had thought he might either continue his own war, ignoring Russia’s, or clear out & let Russia hold the baby. On mature reflection, I realise that the course he took was for him the only realistic one. His speech disgusted me … The damnably sloppy picture he drew of the Russians “defending their soil,” and the even-atheists-pray-sometimes attitude towards Soviet women! And the way in which every single speaker on the subject makes it quite frankly clear that whereas we supported Greece for the Greeks, Norway for the Norwegians, Abyssinia for the Abyssinians and so on, we are now supporting Russia solely for ourselves … And as for Churchill’s personal record! Who’s going to remind him of his statement that if he had to choose between communism & fascism he wasn’t sure he’d choose communism?
Churchill derived Micawberish satisfaction from the fact that Hitler’s lunge eastward signified that “something had turned up.” But he shared with his generals a deep scepticism about Russia’s ability to withstand the Wehrmacht. A year earlier, tiny Finland had humiliated the Red Army. British national pride argued that it was wildly implausible for Russia to repulse Hitler’s legions, where the combined might of the French and British armies had failed to do so in 1940. Pownall wrote on June 29: “It’s impossible to say how long Russian resistance293 will last
—three weeks or three months?” The best that Britain’s service chiefs sought from the new Eastern Front, following the launching of Barbarossa, was that the Russians might hold out until winter. British troops continued making preparations against a German descent on the home shore, partly because there was no other credible occupation for them. Pownall expressed scepticism: “I don’t believe Winston is at heart294 a believer in invasion of this country. Of course he can’t say that, because everyone would then immediately slacken off.”
Much of the British Army—a substantially larger part than that deployed in the Middle East—stayed in Britain, where it would remain for three more years, to the chagrin of the Russians and later also of the Americans. Of some twenty-five infantry and four armoured divisions at home, only perhaps ten were battleworthy. There was no purpose in shipping formations to the Middle East, or for that matter to Britain’s eastern empire, any faster than they could be equipped with tanks, antitank guns, automatic weapons and artillery. All these things remained in short supply. It was considered necessary to sustain production of weapons and aircraft known to be obsolete, because introduction of new designs imposed delays that seemed unacceptable. A host of ill-equipped, half-trained, profoundly bored British soldiers lingered in their own country month after month, and eventually year after year, while much smaller numbers of their comrades fought abroad. Alan Brooke, C-in-C Home Forces, complained how difficult it was to hone units to fighting pitch when they lacked the stimulus of action.
Moreover, the overwhelming bulk of the RAF’s fighter strength continued to be deployed in southern England, conducting “sweeps” over northern France which were deemed morally important, but cost the RAF far greater losses than the Luftwaffe—411 pilots between June and September, for 103 Luftwaffe aircraft shot down (though the RAF claimed 731). Generals and admirals fumed at this use of air resources. Fighters were of priceless value in the Middle East and over the Mediterranean. When Admiral Cunningham was told that he was to become a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, he responded tartly that he would rather be given three squadrons of Hurricanes. “Why the authorities at home295 apparently could not see the danger of our situation in the Mediterranean without adequate air support passed my comprehension,” he wrote. There was a further difficulty, which would handicap the RAF for the rest of the war: the Spitfire and Hurricane were superb interceptors, ideal for home defence, but had very limited fuel endurance. The farther afield the war extended, the more severely Britain suffered from lack of long-range fighters. The Royal Navy lacked good carrier aircraft until American types became available in 1944–45. The large home deployment of fighters was justified by the Chiefs of Staff on the grounds that if Hitler launched an invasion, the RAF would play the critical role in national defence. It nonetheless seems an important strategic mistake that Britain retained extravagantly large air forces on domestic airfields—seventy-five squadrons of day fighters against thirty-four in the whole of the Middle and Far East in late 1941—even after most of the Luftwaffe had departed for the Eastern Front. Britain remained heavily overinsured against invasion well into 1942, at important cost to its overseas battlefield forces.