by Max Hastings
Few workers broke ranks during the Dunkirk period. But as the war news improved, they perceived less urgency about the struggle for national survival. “I gather that production535 is not nearly good enough,” wrote Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam in December 1940, “that the work people in airplane and other gov[ernment] factories are beginning to go ca’canny; that the dockers at the ports are giving trouble … communists active—I only hope that much of this gossip is exaggerated, but it is alarming nonetheless.” In September 1941, when Churchill visited the Armstrong-Siddeley factory at Coventry, where Whitley bombers were being manufactured, he was warned that the plant was “a hotbed of communism.” Jock Colville wrote: “I was disgusted to hear that their production tempo536 had not really grown until Russia came into the war.” Nine thousand men at Vickers-Armstrongs in Barrow went on unofficial strike in a dispute over piecework rates. When a tribunal found against them, the strike committee held a mass meeting at a local football ground, and put forward a motion suggesting that the men should resume work “under protest.” This was overwhelmingly defeated, and the dispute dragged on for weeks.
Of eight serious strikes in the aircraft industry537 between February and May 1943, six concerned pay, one was sparked by objections to an efficiency check on machine use, and one by refusal to allow two fitters to be transferred to different sections of the same shop. There were twenty-eight lesser stoppages prompted by disputes about canteen facilities, alleged victimisation of a shop steward, the use of women riveters, and refusal by management to allow collections for the Red Army during working hours. A report on the de Havilland factory at Castle Bromwich noted “a marked absence of discipline538 … slackness … difficulty in controlling shop stewards.” Ernest Bevin reported that the aircraft industry “had failed to improve its productivity539 in proportion to the amount of labour supplies.” A total of 1.8 million working days were lost during 1,785 disputes in 1943, a figure which rose to 3.7 million in 2,194 disputes in 1944.
“Strikes continue to cause much discussion,”540 declared a 1943 Home Intelligence report. “The majority feeling is that strike action in wartime is unjustified … Fatigue and war-weariness, combined with the belief that we are ‘out of the wood’ and victory now certain, are thought by many to account for the situation.” American seamen arriving in Britain were shocked by the attitudes they encountered among dockers. Walter Byrd, chief officer of the U.S. merchantman James W. Marshall, “made very strong criticism of the attitude of stevedores and other dockworkers in the port of Glasgow. He accused them of complete indifference to the exigencies of any situation, however urgent.” Byrd complained to harbour security officers541 that many trucks and tanks were being damaged by reckless handling during off-loading. It was decided to dispatch some shipworkers to work in U.S. yards on British vessels. At a time when passenger space was at a premium, the service chiefs were enraged when these men refused to sail without their wives—and their demand was met: “I do not see why the country sh[oul]d not be mobilized542 and equality of sacrifice demanded,” a senior army officer commented indignantly.
Of all wartime industrial disputes543, 60 percent concerned wages, 19 percent demarcation, and 11.2 percent working arrangements. A strong Communist element on Clydeside was held responsible by management for many local difficulties. Some trades unionists adopted a shameless view that there was no better time to secure higher pay than during a national emergency, when the need for continuous production was so compelling. Those who served Britain in uniform were poorly rewarded—the average private soldier received less than a pound a week—but industrial workers did well out of the war. The Cost of Living Index rose from 88544 in 1939 to 112.5 in 1945, while average wages rose from 106 to 164.
In the coal industry, wage increases were much steeper—from an indexed 109 to 222. But these did nothing to stem a relentless decline in production—by 12 percent between 1938 and 1944—which alarmed the government and bewildered the public. The mines employed 766,000 workers in 1939, 709,000 in 1945. Loss of skilled labour from the pits to the services provided an inadequate explanation for the fall in per capita output, since the German coal industry achieved dramatic increases under the same handicap. The official historians wrote later: “one can hardly overstress the effect545 of the Depression years upon the morale of the mining community … many miners … felt a sardonic satisfaction in finding themselves for once able to call the tune. Their attitude was not antisocial. It was only un-social … We have to consider how far these narrowed and embittered men could be expected to respond to inducements wrung from the authorities by the urgency of war.”
In 1944, three million tons of coal production were lost by strikes. A team of American technical experts who studied Britain’s mining industry reported to the government: “The center of the problem … is the bad feeling546 and antagonism which pervade the industry and which manifests itself in low morale, non-cooperation and indifference. In almost every district we visited, miners’ leaders and mine owners complained of men leaving the mines early, failure to clear the faces and voluntary absenteeism.” The Cabinet decided against publishing this report.
Class divisions sustained notable variations in communities’ health. The southeast had prospered economically in the last years before war came, but other regions remained blighted by the Depression. In 1942, while four babies of every thousand born in southeast England died, seven perished in south Wales, the northwest and the northeast. Measles produced four times as many fatalities among children in the latter areas as in the former, and tuberculosis rates were much higher. A 1943 Ministry of Health study found that 10 percent of a sample of six hundred children were ill-nourished: “Many of the people had lived for years past547 in poverty and unemployment, and had given up the struggle to maintain a decent standard of housekeeping and cooking.” The condition of many children evacuated from blitzed cities shocked those who received them. Of 31,000 registered in Newcastle, for instance, 4,000 were deficient in footwear, 6,500 in clothing. Authorities in Wales reported that among evacuees from Liverpool there were “children in rags,”548 in a personal condition that “baffles description.” Many of the families from which such offspring came perceived the war in less than idealistic terms.
Churchill had much greater faith in the British people than did ministers, which helps to explain his bitterness when they expelled him from office in 1945. Most Conservative politicians were fearful of the working class, conscious of deep popular discontent with the old order. Many voters would never forget the perceived betrayals of the Depression and the prewar foreign policy which had permitted the ascent of Hitler. Thoughtful Tories knew this. Halifax once wrote to Duff Cooper: “We [Chamberlain’s ministers in early 1940] were all conscious549 of the contrast between the readiness of the Nation … to spend £9 million a day in war to protect a certain way of life, and the unwillingness of the administrative authorities in peace to put up, shall we say, £10 million to assist in the reconditioning of Durham unless they could see the project earning a reasonable percentage.”
Many of Britain’s “haves” were acutely nervous of its “have-nots,” especially when popular enthusiasm for Russia was running high. Fear of “the reds,” and of malign consequences from the boost the war provided to their prestige, was a pervasive theme among Britain’s political class. Those with a taste for blunt speaking asserted that Russian Communists seemed to be conducting their war effort more impressively than British capitalists. Self-consciousness about this state of affairs was never far from the minds of either Churchill or his people in 1942–43. A deep, persistent discontent about perceived Western Allied inertia, contrasted with Soviet achievement, prevailed in many of the humblest homes in Britain.
TEN
“Second Front Now!”
ON APRIL 3, 1942, Roosevelt dispatched to London Harry Hopkins and George Marshall, bearing a personal letter from himself to the prime minister. “Dear Winston,” this began, “What Harry and Geo Marshall will
tell you all about has my heart and mind in it. Your people & mine demand the establishment of a front to draw off pressure on the Russians, & these peoples are wise enough to see that the Russians are to-day killing more Germans & destroying more equipment than you & I put together. Even if full success is not attained, the big objective will be. Go to it!”
The mission of Hopkins and Marshall was to persuade the British to undertake an early landing in France. This was the chief of staff of the U.S. Army’s first encounter with Alan Brooke, and each man was wary of the other. They were a match in stubbornness, but little else. The Ulsterman was bemused when Marshall told him that he sometimes did not see Roosevelt for six weeks: “I was fortunate if I did not see Winston for 6 hours.”550 The British were offered two alternative U.S. plans. The first called for a 1943 invasion by thirty U.S. and eighteen British divisions, with the strategic objective of securing Antwerp. Marshall, acutely mindful of the urgency of the Russians’ plight, favoured the second and less ambitious option: an operation to be launched in September 1942 by mainly British forces, supported by two and one-half U.S. divisions—“no very great contribution,”551 as Brooke observed acidly. The American general acknowledged that it might be impossible to indefinitely hold a beachhead on the Continent in the face of a rapid German buildup. He nonetheless considered that the benefits of drawing enemy forces from the Eastern Front at such a critical moment made even a short-lived incursion into France worthwhile.
It was almost intolerably galling for the British, after suffering German bombardment and siege through thirty-one months, for twenty-seven of which the Americans had sat comfortably in the dress circle, that they should now be urged to sacrifice another army in compliance with bustling U.S. impatience for action. Brooke wrote of Marshall: “In many respects he is a very dangerous man552 while being a very charming one!” The CIGS told his staff553 that the highest aspiration of any credible Anglo-American operation in France in 1942 would be to seize and hold the Cherbourg Peninsula across the twenty-mile width of its neck. Measured against the war in the east, said Brooke, where the Russians were fighting across a thousand-mile front, so feeble an initiative would make the Western Allies the laughingstock of the world. John Kennedy commented on Soviet demands for a French invasion: “The extraordinary thing is that the Russians seem554 to have no idea of our real strength. Or if they do, they are so obsessed with their own point of view that they do not care what happens to us.” It was odd that a British general should expect anything else from Moscow. It was much more dismaying, however, to find the Americans prey to the same strategic fantasy, arguing the case for a sacrificial, even suicidal sortie into France, of a kind Japanese samurai might have applauded.
Churchill nonetheless responded enthusiastically to the president’s letter, “your masterly document,” as he called it. “I am in entire agreement in principle555 with all you propose, and so are the chiefs of staff. If, as our experts believe, one can carry this whole plan through successfully, it will be one of the grand events in all the history of war.” Here, the prime minister set the tone for all British dealings with the Americans about the Second Front, as the invasion concept was popularly known—the “First Front” was, of course, in Russia. Though Churchill had not the slightest intention of leading an early charge back into Europe, he enthused to his visitors about the prospect. He accepted the need for Allied land forces to engage the enemy on the Continent, for he knew how dear this objective was to American hearts, especially that of George Marshall. Attlee and Eden joined the prime minister in declaring how warmly they welcomed Washington’s plan. Churchill and his commanders then set about ensuring that nothing should be done to implement it, relying upon the difficulties to make the case for themselves.
In a series of meetings that began at Chequers, Marshall made his pitch. On April 14, he told Churchill and the British Chiefs that “within the next three or four months, we were very likely to find ourselves in the position when we were forced to take action on the continent.” Mountbatten, now a member of the Chiefs’ committee as head of Combined Operations, emphasised the dire shortage of landing craft. The prime minister cautioned that it was scarcely feasible to break off operations in all the other theatres in which Allied troops were engaged. Marshall, unimpressed by Britain’s extravagant commitments, as he perceived them, in the Middle East, observed that “great firmness” would be needed to avoid “further dispersions.”
The American visitors were generously plied with courtesies. They returned to Washington aware that Churchill and his commanders had doubts about a 1942 landing, but wrongly supposing that they were persuadable. Only slowly did Marshall and his colleagues grow to understand that British professions of principled enthusiasm were unmatched by any intention of early commitment. The chief of the army was too big a man to succumb to Anglophobia, as did some of his colleagues. But henceforward this stiff, humourless officer, who concealed considerable passion beneath his cool exterior, had a mistrust of British evasions, verbal and strategic, which persisted for the rest of the war. Churchill’s nation, he considered, was traumatised by its defeats, morbidly conscious of its poverty and obsessed with fear of heavy casualties. The British refused to accept what seemed to the Americans a fundamental reality: that it was worth paying any price to keep Russia fighting.
Throughout the war, the military leaders of the United States displayed a strategic confidence much greater than that of their British counterparts. The fact that Americans were never obliged to face the prospect of invasion of their homeland, still less the reality of bombardment of their cities, removed a significant part of the tension and apprehension which suffused British decision making. American forces endured setbacks abroad, but never the storm of shell at home and abject defeats abroad which characterised British experience for three years. On the issue of the Second Front, Marshall’s judgement was almost certainly gravely mistaken. The 1942 strategic view adopted by Churchill and Brooke was right. But the British damaged their relationship with the chief of staff of the army and his colleagues by persistent dissimulation. There was Churchill’s cable to Roosevelt of April 17, acknowledging American enthusiasm for an early landing in France, and asserting that “we are proceeding with plans and preparations on that basis.”556 As late as June 20 he was writing, albeit amid a thick hedge of qualifications: “Arrangements are being made for a landing557 of six or eight Divisions on the coast of Northern France early in September.” The British prevaricated because they feared that frankness would provoke the Americans to shift the axis of their national effort westward, towards the Pacific. Indeed, Marshall once threatened to do this.
The debate was further complicated by the fact that Marshall’s view accorded with that of the British and American publics. A host of ordinary people responded to the Russians’ plight with a warmth and sympathy absent from the attitudes of British ministers and service chiefs. The New Statesman of February 14, 1942, quoted an army officer who had been a prewar Labour parliamentary candidate: “Everywhere there is a feeling that some groups of people—perhaps Big Business, perhaps the politicians—are thwarting our natural development. A few more Russian victories and Far East defeats may force Westminster to understand that the most deep-seated feeling in England today is one of envy—envy of the Russians, who are being allowed to fight all out.” Envy was surely the wrong word to ascribe to public sentiment, but guilt there was in plenty among British people who felt that their own country was doing embarrassingly little to promote the defeat of the Axis.
On Sunday, March 29, forty thousand people massed in Trafalgar Square for a demonstration in support of a Second Front. Among other speakers, Sunday Express columnist John Gordon addressed the theme: “Strike in Europe now!” In April, the government lost two parliamentary by-elections, one in Rugby to an independent candidate standing on a “Second Front Now” ticket. On May 1 the left-wing weekly Tribune carried an unsigned article by Frank Owen, then undergoing armoured training as a soldier, h
eadlined: WHY CHURCHILL? Its author posed the question: “Have we time to afford Churchill’s strategy?”—meaning the delay to a Second Front. Brooke wrote in his diary, voicing sentiments which would persist through the next two years: “This universal cry to start a second front558 is going to be hard to compete with, and yet what can we do with some 10 divisions against the German masses? Unfortunately the country fails to realize the situation we are in.” The Germans, operating with good land communications and a strong air force, could crush a miniature invasion without significantly depleting the vast Axis army, over two hundred divisions strong, engaged on the Eastern Front.
If Churchill could not escape the slings and arrows of critics ignorant of British military weakness, it was harsh that he also faced a barrage from one man who should have known better. Beaverbrook had resigned from the government allegedly on grounds of exhaustion. The shrewd civil servant Archie Rowlands believed, however, that the press lord perceived Churchill’s administration failing, and wished to distance himself from its fate. Since Beaverbrook’s visit to Moscow, this archcapitalist had become obsessively committed to Stalin’s cause, and to British aid for Russia. His newspapers campaigned stridently for the Second Front, intensifying the pressure on Churchill.
Visiting New York as a semiofficial emissary of the British government, Beaverbrook addressed an audience of American newspaper and magazine publishers on April 23. He told them, “Communism under Stalin has won the applause and admiration of all the western nations.” He asserted that there was no persecution of religion in the USSR, and that “the church doors are open.” He urged: “Strike out to help Russia! Strike out violently! Strike even recklessly!” Here was rhetoric that went far beyond the courtesies necessary to placate Stalin and encourage his people, and which flaunted Beaverbrook’s irresponsibility. Yet when Churchill telephoned the next day from London, instead of delivering the stinging rebuke which was merited, he sought to appease the erratic press baron by offering him stewardship of all Britain’s missions in Washington. Happily this proposal was rejected, but it reflected Churchill’s perception of his own political beleaguerment.