Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  The prime minister was stunned, humiliated. It seemed unbearable that such news should have come while he was a visitor, indeed a suppliant, in Washington. Roosevelt, perceiving his guest’s despondency, responded with unprecedented spontaneity, generosity and warmth. “What can we do to help?” he asked. After consultation with his Chiefs of Staff, the president briefly entertained a notion of dispatching a U.S. armoured division to fight in Egypt. On reflection, it was agreed instead to send the formation’s three hundred Sherman tanks and one hundred self-propelled guns, for British use. This reinforcement, of quality equipment, was critical to later British victory at El Alamein. Roosevelt’s gesture, which required the removal of new weapons from a U.S. combat formation, prompted the deepest and best-merited British gratitude of the war towards the president.

  The U.S. historian Douglas Porch, one of the ablest chroniclers of the Mediterranean campaigns, believes that Churchill fundamentally misjudged American attitudes towards Britain’s war effort. The prime minister wanted a victory in the Middle East, to dispel U.S. scepticism about British fighting capability. Porch argues, however, that “it was Britain’s beleaguered helplessness582 that evoked most sympathy in Washington and helped to prepare the American people psychologically to intervene in the war.” It was certainly true that Americans pitied British material weakness. Yet an enduring source of U.S. resentment, reflected in polls throughout much of the war, was a belief that the British were not merely poorly armed, but also did not try hard enough. It was one thing for the United States to provide food and arms to a defiantly struggling democracy. It was quite another, though, to see the British apparently content to sit tight in their island, conducting lethargic minor operations in North Africa, while the Russians did the real business, and paid the horrific blood price, of destroying Hitler’s armies.

  It was remarkable how much the mood in Washington had shifted since January. This time, there was no adulation for Churchill the visitor. “Anti-British feeling is still strong,”583 the British embassy reported to London, “stronger than it was before Pearl Harbor … This state of affairs is partly due to the fact that whereas it was difficult to criticize Britain while the UK was being bombed, such criticism no longer carries the stigma of isolationist or pro-Nazi sympathies.” Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana declared sourly that “there was little point in supplying the British584 with war material since they invariably lost it all.” Roosevelt’s secretary William Hassett wrote in his diary: “These English are too aggressive585 except on the battlefront, as assertive as the Jews, always asking for a little more and then still more after that.” Hassett claimed that the president found Churchill “a delightful companion,”586 but added: “With a softie for president, Winnie would put rollers under the Treasury and open Second, Third, or Fourth Fronts with our fighting men.”

  As for the general public, an Ohioan wrote to the White House: “Tell that Churchill to go home where he belongs … All he wants is our money.” An anonymous “mother of three” sought to address Britain’s prime minister from California: “Every time you appear on our shores, it means something very terrible for us. Why not stay at home and fight your own battles instead of always pulling us into them to save your rotten necks?” A New Yorker’s letter to a friend in Somerset, intercepted by the censors, said: “I knew when I saw your fat-headed PM587 was over here that there was another disaster in the offing.” Such views were untypical—most Americans retained warm respect for Churchill. But they reflected widespread scepticism about his nation’s willingness to fight, and doubt whether the prime minister’s wishes matched American national interest. “All the old animosities against the British588 have been revived,” wrote an analyst for the Office of War Information. “She didn’t pay her war debts after the last war. She refuses to grant India the very freedom she claims to be fighting for. She is holding a vast army in England to protect the homeland while her outposts are lost to the enemy.”

  A further report later in the summer detected a marginal improvement of sentiment, but found confidence in the British still much below that of the previous autumn. It noted: “Phrases such as ‘the British always want someone589 to pull their chestnuts out of the fire’ and ‘England will fight to the last Frenchman’ have attained considerable currency.” The OWI’s July survey invited Americans590 to say which nation they thought was trying hardest to win the war. A loyal 37 percent chose the United States; 30 percent named Russia, 14 percent China, 13 percent offered no opinion. Just 6 percent identified the British as most convincing triers. A similar poll the following month asked which belligerent was perceived as having the best fighting spirit. Some 65 percent said America591, but only 6 percent named Britain. The same survey highlighted Americans’ stunning ignorance about the difficulties of mounting an invasion of Europe. A 57 percent majority said they thought the Allies should launch a Second Front “within two to three months.” A similar 53 percent thought that such an operation would have a “pretty good” chance of success, while 29 percent reckoned the odds at fifty-fifty, and only 10 percent feared that an invasion would fail. A remarkable 60 percent of respondents thought not merely that an invasion of France should happen inside three months—they anticipated that it would.

  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote on July 9, 1942, to Stafford Cripps, who had expressed concern about Anglo-American relations: “The dominant underlying feeling is not bad592 … But there is a central difficulty. It is, as I see it, a lack of continuing consciousness of comradeship between the two peoples, not only in staving off an enemy that threatens everything we hold dear, but comradeship in achieving a common society having essentially the same gracious and civilized ends.” Columnist Walter Lippmann expressed similar views to John Maynard Keynes. There was a need, suggested Lippmann, for a new political understanding between Britain and the United States about the future of its empire: “The Asiatic war has revived593 the profound anti-imperialism of the American tradition.”

  The Foreign Office was dismayed by remarks made by the Anglophile Wendell Willkie during a visit to Moscow. He told British ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr that U.S. public opinion towards Britain was shaping “dangerously,” that he, Willkie, was “scared” by it. Not one of the Americans he had met on his journey between Washington and Moscow, from truck drivers to ambassadors, had a good word for British behaviour abroad. He urged that the prime minister should make a speech on postwar policy, showing that he realised that “old-fashioned imperialism”594 was dead. Churchill, of course, had no intention of doing any such thing.

  A July 6 report to the Foreign Office about the British embassy in Washington was almost flagellatory about the American view of Halifax’s mission: “The Embassy … has a quite fantastically low reputation595. It is regarded as snobbish, arrogant, patronizing, dim, asleep and a home of reactionary and generally disreputable ideas.” The report then listed popular American objections to Britain, headed by its class system, which was alienating workers—“the British are going red;” imperialism; “British bunglers in high places: over-cautious, contemptuous of all new ideas and defensively minded, tired old men bored with their own task … British sitting safely in own island with 3.5 million men under arms, Brits always being defeated … Lend-Lease is stripping America to supply the British who have not even paid their [First] war debts … Anti-British sentiment is a part of the central patriotic American tradition … Anglophobia is a proof of vigorous Americanism, socially acceptable in a way anti-Catholicism and anti-semitism are not … All the Roosevelt-haters hate the English because they are held to be popular with the President.”

  British postal censorship reported to the Foreign Office on a cross section of U.S. opinion monitored in mail intercepts. From Newark, New Jersey, a man wrote to a friend in Britain: “Believe me we here are disgusted reading of British retreats and nobody blames the Tommy. We blame the Brass Hats for their inefficiency and being outmanoeuvred by Jerry every time.” On September 11,
a New Yorker wrote in the same vein: “There is no doubt that something is rotten about the British command everywhere … It isn’t always lack of material—it is more often blind stupidity.” Another New Yorker, posted to Australia, wrote to a British friend in Stoke-on-Trent: “English imperialism is responsible for more of our griefs and wars than you can shake a stick at. Incidentally I’m surprised to find that a great many Aussies hate the set-up in England more than I do! You IMPOSSIBLE English!”

  Eden’s parliamentary under-secretary, Richard Law, son of former prime minister Andrew Bonar Law, dispatched an extraordinarily emotional report to the Foreign Office during a visit to America. He claimed that in U.S. Army training camps “anti-British feeling was beyond belief … deliberately inculcated by certain higher officers, notably General [Brehon] Somervell, who mocked that Churchill lacked the ‘sustained excitement’ to execute a cross-Channel attack.” Throughout the higher command of the U.S. Army, claimed Law, anti-British feeling was intense. There was violent jealousy of the prime minister, who was regarded as dominating and bamboozling the president. The American Chiefs of Staff “were about as friendly to the British596 as they would be to the German general staff if they sat round a table with them.” This was an extravagant assessment of Anglo-American tensions. But it illustrates the scale of concern in British official circles in 1942, when the nation’s military reputation was at its lowest ebb.

  Churchill knew that his nation and his soldiers had to be seen to fight. If they could not engage in Europe, they must do so in the Middle East. The long periods of passivity which gripped Eighth Army in North Africa, however necessary logistically, inflicted immense harm upon both British self-esteem and the nation’s image abroad. At a War Cabinet meeting presided over by Attlee, Bevin declaimed theatrically: “We must have a victory!597 What the British public wants is a victory!” When John Kennedy was summoned to Downing Street, the prime minister talked of current operations in North Africa, “then added a dig at the British Army (which unfortunately he can never resist) saying, ‘if Rommel’s army were all Germans [instead of part Italian], they would beat us.’” Later, the DMO reported the conversation to Brooke: “I told him what Winston had said598 about the Germans being better than our troops & he said he must speak to Winston about this. His constant attacks on the Army were doing harm—especially when they were made in the presence of other politicians, as they so often were.” Yet so ashamed was Kennedy, as a soldier, about the fall of Tobruk that for some time he avoided his beloved “Rag”—the Army & Navy Club—to escape unwelcome questions about the army’s lamentable showing.

  While Churchill was in Washington in June, some American newspapers suggested that his government would fall. He was sufficiently disturbed by what he read to telephone Eden from the White House for reassurance that there was no critical threat to his leadership. Nothing important had changed, he was told, but Tory MP Sir John Wardlaw-Milne had tabled a censure motion in the Commons. Public opinion was fragile. “The people do not like him being away599 so much in such critical times,” wrote a naval officer. A Mass Observation diarist, Rosemary Black, deplored Churchill’s absence in America at a time when the British people were enduring so much bad news: “I myself felt pretty disgusted with him600 when I saw a photograph of him enjoying himself at the White House again. If only he’d keep those great gross cigars out of his face once in a way.”

  London voluntary worker Vere Hodgson, bewildered as was the rest of the nation by the fall of Tobruk, wrote crossly in her diary: “The enemy did not seem to understand601 what was expected of them, and failed to fall in with our plans. Grrr! As Miss Moyes says, it makes you see green, pink and heliotrope. I woke up in the middle of Sunday night, and thought of that convoy delivered with so much blood, sweat and losses to Tobruk on Saturday—to fall like ripe fruit into German mouths. I squirmed beneath the bedclothes and ground my teeth with rage.” She added after the prime minister’s broadcast two weeks later: “Mr Churchill’s speech did not contain much comfort602. He dominated us as he always does, and we surrender to his overpowering personality—but he knows no more than any of us why Tobruk fell!”

  George King wrote to his son from Sanderstead in Surrey: “We heard yesterday that we have lost Tobruk603; the same old story—rotten leadership. The Yanks will yet show us how to do the job. The ‘red tabs’ form the only rotten part of the British Army!” Lancashire housewife Nella Last, intensely loyal to Churchill, mused in bewilderment to her diary on June 25, 1942: “Where can soldiers go604 where they have a reasonable chance? Tobruk has gone—what of Egypt, Suez and India? Nearly three years of war: WHY don’t we get going—what stops us? Surely by now things should be organised better in some way. Why should our men be thrown against superior mechanical horrors, and our equipment not standardised for easier management and repair? There is no flux to bind us—nothing. It’s terrifying. Not all this big talk of next year and the next will stop our lads dying uselessly. If only mothers could think that their poor sons had not died uselessly—with a purpose … It’s shocking.”

  A report of the Home Intelligence Division of the Ministry of Information declared: “Russian successes continue to provide605 an antidote to bad news from other fronts … ‘thank God for Russia’ is a frequent expression of the very deep and fervent feeling for that country which permeates wide sections of the public.” Membership in Britain’s Communist Party rose from 12,000 in June 1941 to 56,000 by the end of 1942. The British media provided no hint of the frightful cruelties through which Stalin sustained the Soviet Union’s defence, nor of the blunders and failures which characterised its war effort in 1941–42.

  In informed political and military circles, there was no scintilla of the guilt about Soviet sacrifices that prevailed among the wider public. From Churchill downwards, there was an overwhelming and not unreasonable perception that whatever miseries and losses fell upon the Russian people, the policies of their own government—above all the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact—were chiefly responsible. Brooke wrote disgustedly about British aid to Russia, “We received nothing in return606 except abuse for handling the convoys inefficiently.” John Kennedy expressed bewilderment about public attitudes: “There is an extraordinary and misguided607 enthusiasm for the Russians. Stalin is more of a hero than the King or even Winston.” A naval officer, Commander Andrew Yates, wrote to a friend in America: “Little as I formerly liked him608, the man who killed a million Germans, Jo Stalin, becomes my friend for life.” However, a Ministry of Information official cautioned against exaggerated fears that popular applause for Soviet military prowess equated with a mass conversion to Communism, such as some Tory MPs perceived: “That danger will never come through admiration609 of the achievements of another country, but only through dissatisfaction with our own—dissatisfaction savage enough to cherish a revolutionary programme.”

  Nonetheless, perceptions of the Red Army as braver and more willing to sacrifice than their own soldiers were a source of anger and shame among Churchill’s people, which persisted throughout the summer of 1942. The public could not be told that Stalin’s armies achieved their remarkable feats under draconian compulsion; that if Russian soldiers sometimes displayed more fortitude than British or American ones, this was chiefly because if they flinched they faced execution by their own commanders, a sanction imposed upon hundreds of thousands of Stalin’s men in the course of the war. Debate about British military inertia and failure continued to dominate the press. “Reactionary attitudes are spreading,”610 complained Communist Elizabeth Belsey. “The Spectator this week sounds much opposed to the 2nd front. What do all these people suppose Russia is to do without the 2nd Front? Continue fighting with faith instead of oil?”

  Maggie Joy Blunt, a journalist of left-wing sympathies, wrote on August 7, 1942: “Why is not Mr. Churchill611, rather than his critics, standing on the plinth of the Nelson column shouting for a Second Front and demanding greater efforts from every man and woman in the country? The desire to mak
e that effort is there. The people would respond instantly to the right word from Churchill. We have the feeling, strongly, that Powers That Be wish to see Russian might crippled before they will move a finger to help. They do not want Russia to have any say in the peace terms. Capitalist interests are still vastly strong, and the propertied bourgeois, although a minority, have still an enormous influence on the conduct of our affairs and are terrified of the idea of Socialism. Socialism is inevitable.” Londoner Ethel Mattison wrote to her sister in California on August 1: “When the Anglo-Soviet Alliance was signed612, and … the Second Front was one of the main points … [it] rather tended to make people sit back and wait for it. However, the waiting has been so long and the Russians are suffering so terribly that it seems the idea must be pushed into realisation by the force of public opinion. Everywhere you go, in buses, trains and in lifts you hear fragments of conversation in connection with it.”

  The Russian press, unsurprisingly, devoted much space to the Second Front lobby. Pravda carried a story reporting the mass rallies in Britain in support of early action under the headline: ENGLISH PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO HELP THEIR RUSSIAN COMRADES.613 It quoted Associated Press correspondent Drew Middleton declaring after a tour of Britain that there was overwhelming public support for an invasion; that shipping difficulties could be overcome; that bombing of Germany was recognised as an insufficient support to Russia. Pravda described Second Front demonstrations in Canada. Through the months that followed, there was much more Moscow press comment on the same theme. On August 9 Pravda headlined: NO TIME TO LOSE—BRITISH PRESS ON THE SECOND FRONT. On August 15: TIME HAS COME TO ACT, SAY AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS. The next day, a report described a deputation representing 105,000 British workers from seventy-eight companies calling at Downing Street to present a Second Front petition to Churchill. On the nineteenth, Pravda headlined: ENGLISH PUBLIC ORGANISATIONS DEMAND OFFENSIVE AGAINST GERMANY, and on the twenty-third: WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO WAIT—ENGLISH TRADE UNIONS DEMAND OPENING SECOND FRONT.