by Max Hastings
The autumn of 1941 was one of many wartime seasons which must be viewed without the benefit of hindsight about what followed. British prospects everywhere seemed bleak. An American diplomat who spent ten days in Scotland returned to report to his embassy: “The attitude of the people he had been with393, most of them big industrialists and realists in their points of view, is that the British are now losing the war, and that it is ridiculous to talk about subduing the German Army by bombing cities inside Germany … The German Army … must be beaten somehow or other on the ground, or the war is lost.” Churchill agreed. “It will not be possible for the whole British Army394 (other than those in the Middle East) to remain indefinitely inert and passive as a garrison of this island against invasion,” Churchill wrote to Ismay on September 12. “Such a course, apart altogether from military considerations, would bring the Army into disrepute. I do not need to elaborate this.”
Moscow regarded the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt with its accustomed paranoia. A Soviet biographer of Churchill, writing more than thirty years later, asserted that at Placentia Bay, “plans were worked out to establish395 Anglo-American domination of the post-war world. The leaders of Britain and the USA were drawing up these plans while the USSR was bearing the brunt of the war and America had not yet entered it.” Stalin, in desperate straits, wanted thirty thousand tons of aluminium, together with four hundred planes and five hundred tanks a month from Britain. Churchill told Ambassador Maisky that Moscow would have to be content with half these quantities, and look to the Americans for the rest. On September 15, Stalin demanded that twenty-five British divisions should be sent to the Russian front via Iran or Archangel. He had already asked Harry Hopkins to solicit Roosevelt to dispatch an American army to Russia. Hopkins, suitably amazed, said that even if the United States entered the war, it was unlikely that she would send soldiers to fight in the Caucasus.
It was a measure of Churchill’s anxiety to appease Moscow that he agreed in principle to send British troops to Russia. He speculated wildly that Wavell, a Russian speaker, might command such a force. To try to assist the Russians and fail, he declared, was better than to make no attempt. He was flailing. On October 23, the notion was formally abandoned. Stalin complained that badly crated British aircraft were arriving “broken” at Archangel. The British hoped against hope that dire Russian threats to seek a separate peace were as much bluff as their own mutterings about launching a Second Front.
As Britain’s merchant fleet suffered relentless attrition in the Atlantic, Food Minister Lord Woolton briefed the Cabinet on the necessity to ration canned goods. Churchill murmured in sorrowful jest: “I shall never see another sardine!” In reality, of course, he suffered less than any other British citizen from the exigencies of war, and occasionally professed embarrassment that he had never lived so luxuriously in his life. If his energy was somewhat diminished by age, he had less need than ever before to trouble himself about personal wants, which were met by his large staff of domestics and officials. No ministerial colleague enjoyed his privileges in matters of diet, comfort and domestic and travel arrangements. Eden, as foreign secretary, waxed lyrical about being offered a slice of cold ham at a Buckingham Palace luncheon, and oranges at the Brazilian embassy. Every wartime British government diarist fortunate enough to travel, including the most exalted ministers and generals, devoted much space to applauding the food they enjoyed abroad, because the fare at home was so dismal.
The prime minister seldom ate in other people’s houses, but enjoyed an occasional meal at Buck’s Club. He sometimes attended gatherings at the Savoy of the Other Club, the dining group he and F. E. Smith had founded in 1910. There, more often than not, he sat beside Lord Camrose, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, a friend who vainly coveted a government job. One night in the autumn of 1941, he slipped out of Downing Street with Eden and Beaverbrook to dine at the Ritz. Reminiscing, he said he would like to have his old First World War colleagues Balfour and Smith with him now. Beaverbrook suggested that, if Churchill had played his cards better, he might have become prime minister in 1916. Churchill said that the worst moment of his life came when Lloyd George told him that there was no place for him in the new Cabinet.
The housekeepers at both Downing Street and Chequers were issued with unlimited supplies of Diplomatic Food Coupons for official entertaining. These enabled Churchill and his guests to indulge a style unknown to ordinary citizens. The costs of Chequers rose dramatically in the Churchill years from those of Neville Chamberlain, matching the expansiveness of the hospitality. The Chequer Trust’s solicitor agreed with Kathleen Hill, Churchill’s secretary, in January 1942 that “the Food Account was very high.”396 The family made a modest cash contribution to compensate the trustees for the Churchills’ private share of the house’s cost, including paying a quarter of the bill for a little Ford car used by Clementine.
Privileged though the family’s domestic circumstances might be, the prime minister’s wife often found it no easier than her humbler compatriots to purchase acceptable food. This caused dismay to insensitive visitors. Once in the following year, when Eleanor Roosevelt and other Washingtonians were guests in the No. 10 Annexe, Mrs. Churchill apologised for the fare: “I’m sorry dear, I could not buy any fish. You will have to eat macaroni.” Henry Morgenthau noted without enthusiasm: “Then they gave us little left-over bits made into meat loaf.” By contrast, some of Churchill’s guests recoiled from his self-indulgence at a time when the rest of the country was enduring whale steaks. One night when Churchill took a party to the Savoy, Canadian premier Mackenzie King was disgusted that his host insisted on ordering both fish and meat, in defiance of rationing regulations. The ascetic King found it “disgraceful that Winston should behave like this.”
Churchill’s wit served better than his hospitality or the war news to sustain the spirit of his colleagues. At a vexed Defence Committee meeting to discuss supplies for Russia, he issued Cuban cigars, recently arrived as a gift from Havana. “It may well be that these each contain some deadly poison,” he observed complacently, as those so inclined struck matches. “It may well be that within days I shall follow sadly the long line of your coffins up the aisle of Westminster Abbey—reviled by the populace as the man who has out-borgiaed Borgia!” Eden, arriving for a Chequers weekend, was shown upstairs by Churchill, who himself lit his guest’s bedroom fire. The foreign secretary wrote a trifle cattily: “I know no-one with such perfect manners as a host—especially when he feels like it.”
While great men discussed affairs of state at Downing Street or Chequers, below stairs the staff gossiped about the Master in the fashion of every patrician household. “Oh, Miss, you’ll never guess what he did next …,”397 Nellie the Downing Street parlour maid would say to Elizabeth Layton, one of the prime minister’s three typists. Mrs. Landemore the cook was a fount of tittle-tattle about the British aristocracy, while Sawyers, the prime minister’s valet, dispensed among the staff glasses of wine diverted from the dining room. Every Friday afternoon, or sometimes on Saturday morning, a column of three big black cars stood waiting by the garden gate of Downing Street to waft the prime minister to Chequers at breakneck speed, his journey hastened by police outriders and sirens. Unless he took with him in the car some visitor with whom he wished to converse, he customarily dictated to a typist all the way. Arrived at his destination one day, he said to Elizabeth Layton: “Now run inside and type like HELL.”398 The staff late shift were seldom released to their beds before three a.m.
Churchill was exultant when, on September 8, Roosevelt issued a “shoot first” order to U.S. warships in the Atlantic, dramatically raising his nation’s stakes against Germany’s U-boats. But two weeks later, when Eden dined with the Churchills and Oliver Lyttelton, the Middle East minister of state just back from Cairo, Eden noted: “Winston was depressed at outset399, said he felt that we had harsh times ahead.” The prime minister knew from intercepted Japanese diplomatic traffic that Tokyo was winding down its
foreign missions and evacuating nationals from British territory. Sir Stewart Menzies, “C,” showed him a cable from Berlin to Tokyo, in which Hitler’s staff assured the Japanese that “in the event of a collision between Japan400 and the United States, Germany would at once open hostilities with America.” After Churchill was glimpsed by Bletchley code beakers one Saturday, visiting their dank, hutted encampment, four of the most senior staff wrote to him personally, appealing for more resources. This prompted an “Action This Day” note to “C”: “Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority.”401
On October 20 Churchill told the Defence Committee that “he did not believe that the Japanese would go to war with the United States and ourselves.” After many months in which he had wilfully exaggerated the prospect of America entering the war, the chances of such a development were now greater than he avowed. It may be that, following so many disappointments, he did not dare to hope too much. The terrible, nagging fear persisted that Tokyo might launch a strike only against British possessions, without provoking the United States to fight. The views of the British and American governments were distorted by logic. Both possessed strong intelligence evidence of an impending Japanese assault. Yet it remained hard to believe that the Tokyo regime would start a war with the United States that it could not rationally hope to win.
The dispatch of a naval battle squadron to the Far East, supposedly to deter Japanese aggression, was the prime minister’s personal decision, and reflected his anachronistic faith in capital ships. Likewise, the squadron’s commander, Adm. Tom Phillips—ironically, one of Churchill’s severest critics in the Admiralty—was his own choice, and a poor one, because Phillips’s entire war experience had been spent in shore-based staff appointments. Churchill likened the prospective impact of British battleships in the Far East to that achieved by the presence of Hitler’s Tirpitz in Arctic waters, “a threat in being.” Just as the Americans absurdly overrated the deterrent power of deploying a mere thirty-six U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) B-17 bombers in the Philippines, so the prime minister failed to grasp the fact that, with or without Admiral Phillips’s squadron, British forces in the Far East were woefully deficient in strength and leadership.
The British director of naval operations, Capt. Ralph Edwards, wrote in his diary when the battleship commitment was made:
Another Prayer from the prime minister402, who wishes us to form a squadron of “fast, powerful modern ships—only the best to be used” in the Indian Ocean. This, he avers, will have a paralysing effect on the Japanese—why it should, the Lord alone knows … This, mind you, at the same time as he wishes to form a force at Malta, reinforce the Mediterranean, help Russia and be ready to meet a break-out by the Tirpitz. The amount of unnecessary work which that man throws on the Naval Staff would, if removed, get us all a month’s leave … If only the honourable gentleman were to confine himself to statesmanship and politics and leave naval strategy to those properly concerned, the chances of winning the war would be greatly enhanced. He is without doubt one of history’s worst strategists.
Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, reporting dispatch of Prince of Wales, Repulse and the carrier Indomitable: “There is nothing like having something that can catch and kill anything.”403 This was a bizarre assertion, after two years of war had demonstrated both the vulnerability of capital ships and the shortcomings of the Fleet Air Arm.
In almost all respects, during the Second World War the Royal Navy showed itself the finest of Britain’s three fighting services, just as the U.S. Navy was the best of America’s. Axis submarines and air attack inflicted heavy losses, but British seamen displayed consistently high courage and professionalism. The navy’s institutional culture proved more impressive than that of the army, perhaps also of the RAF. The Battle of the Atlantic was less visible and glamorous than the Battle of Britain, but preservation of the convoy routes was an equally decisive achievement. The sea service’s chronic weaknesses, however, were air support and antiaircraft defence. From the beginning to the end of the war, the Fleet Air Arm’s performance lagged far behind that of the U.S. Navy’s air squadrons, partly because of inadequate aircraft, partly because the British did not handle them so well, and partly because there were never enough carriers. Churchill served the navy’s interests poorly by failing to insist that the RAF divert more long-range aircraft to maritime support operations, and especially to help protect the Atlantic convoys.
As autumn turned to winter, there seemed little cause for optimism at sea, in the air, or on land. Shrewd old Field Marshal Smuts cabled Churchill from South Africa in considerable dismay on November 4: “I am struck by the growth of the impression here and elsewhere that the war is going to end in stalemate and thus fatally for us.” Many Americans perceived the British sitting idle behind their Channel moat, waiting for the United States to ride to their rescue. Averell Harriman wrote a personal letter to Churchill from Washington: “People are wondering why you don’t do something offensively404. In my opinion it is important that more should be said about what you are doing.” The diplomat urged energetic media promotion of the RAF’s bomber offensive, and of the Royal Navy’s convoys to Russia.
Smuts, meanwhile, believed that Russia was being beaten, and that the United States was still determined to avoid belligerence. This view was widely shared in London. Britain’s army vice chief of staff remained fearful of a German invasion of Britain, and baffled about how his own side might win the war: “Whatever may happen on the Russian front405, it is only by successful invasion of these islands that Hitler can definitely win the war … I wish we had so clear an idea of how we could win. At present we cling rather vaguely to a combination of dissatisfied populations, lowering of morale amongst Germans and German troops, blockade and somewhat inaccurate bombing at night … America … seems further removed now from coming into the war than she was last April.”
Yet there is evidence that Churchill’s personal view was shifting towards an expectation of U.S. belligerence. He asserted to Lord Camrose at the Other Club on November 14 that he was confident the Americans would soon be in the war. Camrose was sufficiently impressed406 to write to his son, repeating the prime minister’s words. On the nineteenth, Churchill told guests during a lunch407 at Downing Street that he expected to land the second of four possible “prizes.” The first would be U.S. entry into the war without involving Japan; the second would be America’s accession as an ally, matched by that of Japan as an enemy; the third would be that neither country entered the war; and the fourth, that Japan became an enemy, while the United States remained neutral. Yet to others, even those privy to secret intelligence of Japanese movements, the prime minister’s hopes seemed ill-founded.
Churchill strove to provide cause for Americans to modify their impression of British passivity. Briefing Commodore Lord Louis Mountbatten on his new role as “chief adviser” to Combined Operations, which soon became translated into overall command, the prime minister said: “Your whole attention is to be concentrated on the offensive.” This was another of the periods when he enthused about a possible descent on Norway, heedless of the intractable reality that its coastline was beyond British fighter range. Eden expressed dismay about this plan to his private secretary: “A.E. is much perplexed408—he feels as I do so many of W.’s gorgeous schemes have ended in failure … a false step—a faulty short-cut—would set us back years.”
The prime minister often felt oppressed by the perceived pettiness and petulance of Parliament. In the House on November 11, 1941, he faced a barrage of questions and supplementaries: first about alleged Italian atrocities in Montenegro, then about the government’s apparent unwillingness to allow the RAF to bomb Rome. When he answered evasively, Sir Thomas Moore, MP for Ayr, demanded: “Does my right hon. friend really think it wise to provide a hide-out for this rat Mussolini?” The prime minister responded: “I think it would be as well to have confidence in the decisions of the Government, whose sole desire is to inflict the maximum of injur
y upon the enemy.” Another MP drew attention to shortages of equipment, described in Lord Gort’s recently published dispatch on the 1940 campaign in France. Churchill brusquely rejected calls for an enquiry. He might have suggested that such matters came under the heading of archaeology, rather than conduct of the war.
Another member demanded information about the precise composition of the prime minister’s party at the Placentia Bay meeting, and asked, “whether in view of the fact that we are fighting for our existence, he will consider removing from Government service all persons of German education and of German origin.” Churchill invited the questioner to be explicit. This the MP declined to do, but the House readily comprehended the enquiry as an attack upon Lord Cherwell. Other MPs then raised questions in which Cherwell was named. “The Prof” was widely perceived as a pernicious influence upon the prime minister. MPs who did not dare to attack Churchill himself instead vented their frustrations upon his associates. The prime minister defended Cherwell, but he bitterly resented being obliged to do so.
Such exchanges filled twelve columns of Hansard, and caused Churchill to return to Downing Street in dudgeon. Who could blame him? How pettifogging seemed the issues raised by MPs, how small-minded the pinpricks of their criticisms, alongside the great issues with which he wrestled daily. If self-pity about the intrusions of democracy is in some measure common to all national leaders in war or peace, such carping became infinitely irksome to the leader of a nation struggling for survival against overwhelming odds.