by Max Hastings
On January 27, amid increasing parliamentary criticism, Churchill faced the Commons. “It is because things have gone badly, and worse is to come, that I demand a Vote of Confidence,” he said. This was a device designed to force his critics to show their hands, or flinch. Having won the subsequent division by a majority of 464 to 1, he walked beaming through the throng in the central lobby on the arm of Clementine, who had come to lend support. But he knew that this outcome represented no ending of his troubles. He was unwell, nagged by a cold he could not shake off. On February 9, Eden’s private secretary Oliver Harvey told his chief that he should be prepared to take over the premiership, and noted in his diary: “I think he is.”455 Beyond the risks inherent in Churchill’s wartime travels, the health of a man of sixty-seven, labouring under huge strains, might collapse at any time. Such a contingency was never far from the consciousness of his close subordinates, who were also dismayed by unsurprising evidence of the strains under which he laboured. Brooke, less than two months in his job as CIGS, told Dalton at dinner on February 10: “Sometimes … the PM is just like a child456 who has lost his temper. It is very painful and no progress can be made with the business.”
Churchill signalled Wavell, newly appointed as Anglo-American supreme commander in the Far East, urging that while the Russians on the Eastern Front and the Americans on Luzon, in the Philippines, were fighting so staunchly, it was essential that the army in Malaya should be seen to give of its best: “The whole reputation of our country and our race is involved.”457 Two days later, on February 11, in response to continuing domestic criticism of his government and Beaverbrook’s desire to resign, he offered Stafford Cripps, whom he despised but who had a large popular following, the Ministry of Supply. Churchill grumbled about Cripps’s demand to sit in the War Cabinet: “Lots of people want to458. You could fill the Albert Hall with people who want to be in the War Cabinet.” Denied a seat, Cripps declined office.
There was a new shock on February 12. The German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau left Brest and steamed at full speed up the English Channel, assisted by fog. Churchill’s secretary Elizabeth Layton entered the Cabinet Room at three p.m. to take dictation, where she found the prime minister “striding up and down, all on edge459. He dictated four telegrams like a whirlwind, and then phoned this and phoned that. I wondered if I should go, and once did slip out, but was recalled. Did another telegram, he marched up and down, talking to himself, a mass of compressed energy. Presently he sat down and said, ‘There’s a bloody great battle going on out there.’ I said, ‘Do you think we might get them?’ He said, ‘Don’t know. We winged ’em, but they aren’t dead yet.’” The navy did not “get them.” The German squadron reached Wilhelmshaven. Ultra informed Churchill that the ships had been severely damaged by mines on the last stage of their passage, but this was small comfort and could not be revealed because of its source. The British people saw only that the Royal Navy and RAF were unable to stop Hitler’s capital ships passing with impunity through British home waters.
Headlines screamed, the public was affronted. The Daily Mirror asked on February 14: “Is it any longer true that we trust the Prime Minister, but do not trust his Government?” The News Chronicle likewise: “Have we not been hypnotised by Mr. Churchill’s personality … into acquiescence in an inefficient war direction?” The Daily Mail wrote that there were two Churchills, “1. The Inspirer of the Nation. 2. The Controller of the War.” The British people were perplexed by the second Churchill, who claimed “that it was the duty of Parliament and Press to maintain the Government with the implication that any weakening of his own position would be a weakening of its cause.” The Mail rejected this view: “No man is indispensable.” Sir William Beveridge wrote a major article for the Times, urging the creation of a “proper” War Cabinet of ministers without portfolios. A Glasgow secretary, Pam Ashford, wrote on March 5: “Defeatism is in the air, and … I feel it too.”460 When Mass Observation quizzed its observers about the prime minister, the opinion-monitoring group was startled by the vehemence of criticism. A London clerk said: “I think it is time he went461. After all, the only connection in which one thinks of Churchill now is with regard to high strategy, whatever that may be. High strategy stinks to high heaven … This view I have confirmed with quite a few people. His speeches are no longer listened to.”
While this attitude was untypically strident, there was a yearning at every level of British society for a defence supremo who could deliver battlefield success, as the prime minister seemed unable to do. Many people sought a new deliverer, an aspiration no less strongly felt because it was unrealistic and unsupported by identification of an appropriate candidate. There was no appetite to change national leaders, but much enthusiasm for delegating Churchill’s military powers. The prime minister said to his old friend Violet Bonham Carter: “I’m fed up … I feel very biteful462 and spiteful when people attack me.” He was constantly urged to add talent to his Cabinet, “but where is the galaxy? I can’t get the victories. It’s the victories that are so hard to get.”
On February 15, Singapore surrendered. This time there was no Dunkirk, no miraculous escape for the garrison. Almost thrice as many imperial troops fell into captivity as in France in 1940. Jock Colville, temporarily removed from Downing Street to train in South Africa as a fighter pilot, heard Churchill’s broadcast addressing the disaster. He was deeply moved: “The nature of his words and the unaccustomed speed463 and emotion with which he spoke convinced me that he was sorely pressed by critics and opponents at home. All the majesty of his oratory was there, but also a new note of appeal, lacking the usual confidence of support … There was something about his voice and delivery which made me shiver.” The broadcast was much less well received than most of Churchill’s performances. In private, the prime minister was angry and depressed. “We have so many men in Singapore464, so many men,” he lamented. “They should have done better.” At a Pacific War Council meeting, he said of the Japanese: “They moved quicker and ate less than our men.”
He suggested to his naval aide, Capt. Richard Pim, that this might be the moment for him to surrender the premiership. Pim said: “But my God, sir, you cannot do that.”465 It is unlikely that Churchill seriously considered resignation, but his despair was real enough. What use was it for him to display a warrior’s spirit before the world if those who fought in Britain’s name then showed themselves incapable of matching his rhetoric? In Norway, France, Greece, Crete, Libya and now Malaya, the British had been beaten again and again. Alan Brooke wrote in his diary: “If the army cannot fight better466 than it is doing at the present, we shall deserve to lose our Empire.”
Some blame attached to Wavell, not for failing to achieve victory, but for declining to avow the inevitability of Singapore’s fall and for not making an uncompromising recommendation to halt reinforcements and evacuate every possible man. Brooke had done exactly this in France in June 1940. The British 18th Division landed at Singapore on January 29, 1942, by which date there was no prospect of saving the campaign. Almost the entire army fell into captivity a fortnight later. It remains hard to understand why Churchill deluded himself that Singapore could be held. Every soldier knew that its fate must be decided in southern Malaya, that the island in isolation was indefensible, and the Chiefs of Staff made this plain to the prime minister on January 21. It was regrettable that commanders on the spot did not adopt a more trenchant tone. While Wavell’s signals about Malaya were unfailingly pessimistic, they did not explicitly acknowledge that Singapore’s demise was inevitable until it was too late to save any portion of its garrison. It was true that he exercised his short-lived command amid draconian signals from Churchill, demanding a last-man, last-round defence. But whereas it should have been possible to hold Crete, Singapore was doomed.
British and imperial forces in Malaya were ill-trained, poorly equipped and badly led at every level. They faced an enemy who commanded the air, but two years later German and Japanese sol
diers displayed extraordinary resilience in the face of vastly stronger air forces than the Luftwaffe deployed in Greece or the Japanese in Malaya. It was the absence of any scintilla of heroic endeavour, any evidence of last-ditch sacrifice of the kind with which British armies through the centuries had so often redeemed the pain of defeats, that shocked Churchill. In Malaya, there was no legend to match that of Sir John Moore’s retreat to Corunna in the Napoleonic Wars, of Rorke’s Drift in Zululand, of the defence of Mafikeng and Ladysmith in the Boer War. The Americans forged a propaganda epic, however spurious, out of their defence of the Bataan Peninsula between December 1941 and April 1942. The British salvaged nothing comparable from Southeast Asia. Their soldiers gave up pitifully easily, 130,000 surrendering after the loss of only around 3,000 killed. The Times of February 16 offered its readers crumbs of comfort for Singapore: “The sacrifice and the suffering and the incomparable gallantry of the defence were not wholly in vain.” This was nonsense. There was only abject defeat, surrender to numerically inferior enemies who had proved themselves better and braver soldiers. It is brutal, but seems valid, to suggest that Malaya might have been defended with greater determination had British, Indian and Australian soldiers known the fate that awaited them in Japanese captivity.
Who could wonder that Churchill should be plunged into despair? “At the back of his mind and unconsciously467, I believe,” wrote Oliver Harvey shrewdly, “the PM is jealous of Stalin and the successes of his armies.” Even if American aid enabled Britain to survive the war, how could the nation hold up its head in the world, be seen to have made a worthy contribution to victory, if its army covered itself with shame whenever exposed to a battlefield? Lack of shipping remained a massive constraint on deployments. John Kennedy wrote: “We have masses of reinforcements468 we cannot move.” At any one moment of 1942, two thousand British and American merchantmen were afloat on the Atlantic shuttle, three or four hundred of them vulnerable to U-boat attack. In peacetime, a cargo ship took an average thirty-nine days to complete a round-trip between Europe and North America. Now, the same rotation took eighty-six days, with forty-three spent in port instead of a peacetime fourteen, mostly waiting for convoys. Dill cabled the Chiefs of Staff from Washington, saying that this seemed a time for the Allies to focus on essentials: security of the British Isles and United States and preventing a junction of German and Japanese forces on the Indian Ocean: “These simple rules might help us469 to stick to things that matter in these difficult days.” Yet, as so often with British generals’ strategic visions, this one was entirely defensive.
Churchill told the Commons on February 24: “The House must face the blunt and brutal fact that if, having entered a war yourself unprepared, you are struggling for life with two well-armed countries, one of them possessing the most powerful military machine in the world, and then, at the moment when you are in full grapple, a third major antagonist with far larger military forces than you possess suddenly springs upon your comparatively undefended back, obviously your task is heavy and your immediate experiences will be disagreeable.” Many MPs nonetheless voiced discontent. James Griffiths, Labour member for the Welsh mining constituency of Llanelli, said that at the time of Dunkirk people had responded to the call. By contrast, “we believe that now there is a feeling of disquiet in the nation. We ought not to resent it.” Commander Sir Archibald Southby, Epsom, spoke of the German “Channel dash” and the fall of Singapore as two events which “shook not only the Government but the British Empire to its foundations. Nay, it would be fair to say that they influenced opinion throughout the world. They produced the most unfortunate reverberations in the United States of America just at a time when harmony and understanding between the two nations was of paramount importance.”
Sir George Schuster, Walsall, said he thought the public wanted to feel that it was being told the truth, and was beginning to doubt this. People had been assured that in Libya the British Army was now meeting the enemy on equal terms. Then, after Rommel’s dramatic comeback, they heard that the Germans had a better antitank gun, that our guns were inadequate to pierce enemy armour. “That was a shock to public opinion. They felt they had been misled.”
During lunch at Buckingham Palace that day, Churchill told the king that Burma, Ceylon, Calcutta, Madras and parts of Australia might well be lost. The defence of Burma had already begun badly. Brooke noted with his customary spleen that some politicians allowed the bad news to show. “This process does not make Cabinet Ministers470 any more attractive,” he wrote to a friend. “But Winston is a marvel. I cannot imagine how he sticks it.” Clementine wrote to Harry Hopkins, “We are indeed walking through the Valley of Humiliation.”471
In consequence of the disasters on the battlefield, Churchill was obliged to make changes in his government, more painful and embarrassing than some historians have acknowledged. Beaverbrook finally resigned. Stafford Cripps was given his seat in the War Cabinet, as lord privy seal and leader of the Commons. For the prime minister, this was a bitter pill. Accepting Cripps was a measure of the weakness of his position. The two men, wrote Eden wonderingly, had “always been as distant as a lion and an okapi.”472 Churchill is alleged to have said of Libya: “There are miles and miles of nothing but arid austerity. How Cripps would like it!”
Cripps was fifty-two, a product of Winchester and New College Oxford, and nephew of the socialist intellectual Beatrice Webb. He became first a research chemist, then a successful commercial barrister. A pacifist in World War I, he was elected as a Labour MP in 1931 and served briefly in Ramsay MacDonald’s government before refusing to join his coalition. A vegetarian and teetotaller, in the 1930s he became converted to Marxism, an uncritical enthusiast for the Soviet Union whose name was often coupled with that of Aneurin Bevan. In 1939, he was expelled from the parliamentary Labour Party after differences with Attlee. When Cripps served in Moscow between 1940 and 1942, Churchill was not displeased to note that Stalin showed much less enthusiasm for the ambassador, and for his company, than his British admirer displayed for the Soviet leader.
In many respects a foolish man, Cripps nonetheless became temporarily an important one in 1942. A fine broadcaster, his commitment both to the Soviet Union and to a socialist postwar Britain won him a large popular following. He spoke passionately, and without irony, of Russian workers “fighting to keep their country free,”473 and of the alliance between “the free workers of England, America and Russia.” Amid the mood of the times, such sentiments struck a powerful chord, contrasting with the stubborn conservatism of many other MPs—and of the prime minister. In a poll that invited voters to express a preference as prime minister if some misfortune befell Churchill, 37 percent of respondents named Eden, but 36 percent opted for Cripps.
Churchill was well aware that his new minister aspired to the premiership. For most of 1942, he felt obliged to treat Cripps as a potential threat to his authority. Amid so many misfortunes, some surprising people supported the lord privy seal’s ambitions. Private conclaves of MPs, editors, generals and admirals discussed Churchill and his government in the most brutal terms. John Kennedy dined at Claridge’s on March 5, 1942, with Sir Archie Rowlands of the Ministry of Aircraft Production and John Skelton, news editor of the Daily Telegraph: “The talk was very much about Winston474 and very critical. It was felt that Winston was finished, that he had played his last card in reforming the government. S[kelton] is very hostile to Winston and thinks Cripps should be put in his place. He feels that we shall lose the whole Empire soon and be driven back on G.B. It is easy to make a case for this.” Averell Harriman wrote to Roosevelt on March 6:
Although the British are keeping a stiff upper lip475, the surrender of their troops at Singapore has shattered confidence to the core—even in themselves but, more particularly, in their leaders. They don’t intend to take it lying down and I am satisfied we will see the rebirth of greater determination. At the moment, however, they can’t see the end to defeats. Unfortunately Singapore shook the Pri
me Minister himself to such an extent that he has not been able to stand up to this adversity with his old vigor. A number of astute people, both friends and opponents, feel it is only a question of a few months before his Government falls. I cannot accept this view. He has been very tired but is better in the last day or two. I believe he will come back with renewed strength, particularly when the tone of the war improves.
The Battle of the Atlantic had taken a serious turn for the worse. In January, the German navy introduced a fourth rotor into its Enigma ciphering machines. This refinement defied British code breakers through the bloody year of convoying that followed. Charles Wilson, Churchill’s doctor, noticed that the prime minister carried in his head every statistical detail of Atlantic sinkings. Nonetheless, Wilson wrote, “he is always careful to consume476 his own smoke; nothing he says could discourage any-one … I wish to God I could put out the fires that seem to be consuming him.” Mary Churchill noted in her diary that her father was “saddened—appalled by events477 … He is desperately taxed.” Cadogan wrote likewise: “Poor old P.M. in a sour mood and a bad way.”478
On March 6, Rangoon was abandoned. The next day, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, urging that the Western Allies should concede to Russian demands for recognition of their 1941 frontiers—which Britain had staunchly opposed the previous year. The Americans demurred, but the prime minister’s change of attitude reflected intensified awareness of the Western Allies’ vulnerability. He was now willing to adopt the most unwelcome expedients, if these might marginally strengthen Russia’s resolve. Amid alarm that Stalin might be driven to parley with Hitler, eastern Poland became expendable. In the same spirit, Churchill cabled Moscow promising that if the Germans employed poison gas on the Eastern Front, as some feared was imminent, the British would retaliate as if such a weapon had been used against themselves. Western fears that Stalin might seek a separate peace persisted for many months.