by Max Hastings
ELEVEN
Camels and the Bear
CHURCHILL TRAVELLED TO the Middle East in austere and dangerous discomfort. “What energy and gallantry of the old gentleman,”630 marvelled Oliver Harvey, “setting off … across Africa in the heat of mid-summer.” This was true enough, but masked the reality that for the rest of the conflict, Churchill was much happier in overseas theatres than amid the drabness of Britain, where he found scant romance and increasing pettiness and complaint. Though he cherished a vision of fortress Albion, its reality became increasingly uncongenial. Before his departure, the prime minister discussed with Eden whether another minister should join his party: “He felt the need for company, especially in Moscow.”631 Here was a glimpse of Churchill’s loneliness when he faced great challenges. He yearned for the comradeship of some peer figure, such as Beaverbrook or Smuts, in whom he could confide, with whom he could exchange impressions and jokes. This time, however, it was decided that he should take in his entourage only civil servants and soldiers, Alan Brooke foremost among them. They would be joined for the Moscow leg by Averell Harriman, whose presence was designed to ensure Russian understanding that what the British asserted, the Americans endorsed; and by Sir Archibald Wavell, who had served in Russia in 1919 and spoke the language.
They travelled aboard a Liberator bomber which possessed virtues of performance—range, speed and altitude—but none of the luxuries of the Boeing Clipper. Somewhat to the embarrassment of Britain’s airmen, the safety of the prime minister was entrusted to a young Atlantic ferry pilot named Bill Vanderkloot, who hailed from Illinois. Vanderkloot was deemed to possess temperament, navigational skills and long-range experience which no available home-grown British pilot could match. The American admirably fulfilled expectations. His plane, however, was a cramped and unsuitable conveyance for an elderly man upon whose welfare, in considerable degree, the hopes of Western civilisation rested. It was so noisy that Churchill could communicate with his fellow passengers only by exchanging notes. The flight was long and cold. They made an African landfall over Spanish Morocco, then struck a course which took them well inland before turning east over the desert, flying high and using oxygen. In his mask, wrote one of the plane’s crew, Churchill “looked exactly as though he was in a Christmas party disguise.”632 He sat in the copilot’s seat, reviving a host of youthful memories as they approached Cairo: “Often had I seen the day break on the Nile,”633 during Kitchener’s campaign against the Dervishes in 1898. Once on the ground, he began a long, painstaking grilling of soldiers and officials about the desert campaign, the army and its commanders.
All that he saw and heard confirmed his instincts back in London. Ever since 1939, visitors to Egypt had been dismayed by the lassitude pervading the nexus of headquarters, camps, villas, hotels and clubs that lay along the Nile. An air of self-indulgent imperialism, of a kind that confirmed the worst prejudices of Aneurin Bevan, persisted even in the midst of a war of national survival. “Old Miles [Lampson, British ambassador to Egypt]634 leads a completely peacetime existence, a satrap,” wrote Oliver Harvey scornfully. “He does no work at all.” The habits and complacency of peacetime also prevailed in many military messes. In 1941 Averell Harriman, no ascetic, was shocked by the indolence and luxury he saw around him on his first visit to Cairo. A year later, too many gentlemen still held sway over too few players. The former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, passing through Egypt, perceived a “lackadaisical” attitude to the war, which was “painful.” Auchinleck had repeatedly disappointed Churchill’s hopes. The good soldiers in the Middle East were tired. A staff officer wrote from Egypt in July 1942: “There seem to me to be too many people635 at home who have had no war—through no fault of their own—and too many people out here who have had too much war.”
The desert army continued to suffer grave technical and tactical deficiencies. The cavalry ethos still dominated armoured operations, despite the frequent failures of British tanks’ attempts to destroy German ones. “The Auk’s” formations seemed unable to master the Afrika Korps’ art of using antitank guns to stop British armour before committing its own panzers. The shoddiness of British industrial production was exposed when home-built tanks were off-loaded in Egypt. Their bolts proved to have been only hand-tightened at the factories, and most had been inadequately packed and loaded for ocean passage. Weeks of labour were necessary in the workshops of the Nile Delta before armoured vehicles were fit for action. American Grant tanks, which now equipped some British armoured units, mounted a 75mm sponson gun capable of destroying German panzers, but were otherwise outmatched by them. New Shermans were still in transit from the United States.
Auchinleck’s troops had been outfought again and again. British defeats in 1940–41 had been attributable to circumstances beyond commanders’ control: prewar neglect, lack of air support and German superiority. The failures of late 1941 and 1942, however, reflected culpable weaknesses. The two ablest airmen in Cairo, Arthur Tedder and Arthur “Maori” Coningham, talked frankly to Churchill and Brooke about their perceptions of the army’s shortcomings. Colonel Ian Jacob noted in his diary during the Cairo visit that there had been “far too many cases of units surrendering636 in circumstances in which in the last war they would have fought it out … The discipline of the Army is no longer what it used to be … There is lacking in this war the strong incentive of a national cause. Nothing concentrate has replaced the old motto ‘For King and Country.’ The aims set before the people … are negative, and it still does not seem to have been brought home … that it is a war for their own existence.” War correspondent Alan Moorehead agreed:
In the Middle East there was, in August637, a general and growing feeling [among the troops] that something was being held back from them, that they were being asked to fight for a cause which the leaders did not find vital enough to state clearly. It’s simply no good telling the average soldier that he is fighting for victory, for his country, for the sake of duty. He knows all that. And now he’s asking, “For what sort of victory? For what sort of a post-war country? For my duty to what goal in life?”
If this was indeed true—and Moorehead knew the desert army intimately—then the prime minister himself deserved some of the blame. It was he who, despite the urgings of ministers, refused to address himself to “war aims,” a postwar vision. Instead, he held out to British soldiers the promise of martial glory, writing to Clementine from Cairo: “I intend to see every important unit638 in this army, both back and front, and make them feel the vast consequences which depend upon them and the superb honours which may be theirs.” In supposing such things to represent plausible or adequate incitements for citizen soldiers, Churchill was almost certainly mistaken. But it was not in his nature to understand that most men cared more about their prospects in a future beyond war than about ribbons and laurels to be acquired during the fighting of it.
In Churchill’s eyes the first priority in Egypt was, as usual, to identify new commanders. By August 6, after discussion with Smuts, whom he had asked to meet him in Cairo, he had made up his mind to sack Auchinleck. The general received his dismissal ungraciously639, and harboured bitterness for the rest of his life. Dill blamed Churchill for the Middle East C-in-C’s failure, claiming that the prime minister “had ruined Auchinleck … he had dwarfed him just as he dwarfs and reduces others around him.” This charge says more about Dill’s limitations as a shop steward for unsuccessful British generals than about the prime minister’s. Of course Churchill had harried Auchinleck. It has been suggested above that the general’s failure in part reflected institutional weaknesses in the British Army. But “the Auk” had been the man in charge through a succession of operations abysmally conducted by subordinates of his choice. British failure to defeat the Afrika Korps at Gazala in May–June 1942 reflected gross command incompetence. It was surely right to dismiss Auchinleck.
Churchill’s first impulsive thought for his replacement was Alan Brooke. The CIGS was mu
ch moved by the proposal, but wisely and selflessly rejected the chance of battlefield glory. He perceived himself as indispensable at the War Office—and he was right. The prime minister’s next choice was Lt. Gen. William “Strafer” Gott, who had gained a reputation for dashing leadership from the front, but in whom Brooke lacked confidence. Since 1939, the prime minister had been convinced that Britain’s armed forces lacked leaders with fire in their bellies. He sought to appoint to high command proven warriors, heroes. In this, he was often mistaken. Steely professionalism was lacking, rather than conspicuous personal courage. Many of Churchill’s favourite warriors lacked intellect. Gott commended himself to the prime minister because he had made a name as a thruster, yet it is unlikely that he was competent to command Eighth Army. But fate intervened: en route to Cairo to receive his appointment, Gott’s plane was shot down and he was killed. Instead, Brooke’s nominee, Sir Bernard Montgomery, was summoned from a corps command in England to head Eighth Army. Churchill had met Montgomery on visits to his units, and was impressed by his forceful personality, if not by his boorish conceit. But, in accepting his appointment to the desert, the prime minister was overwhelmingly dependent on the CIGS’s judgement. Gen. Sir Harold Alexander, a brave, charming but unassertive Guardsman who had recently presided over the British retreat from Burma, was appointed C-in-C Middle East. The prime minister, who found “Alex” congenial and reassuring, expected him to play a far more important role in shaping future operations than Montgomery. Several senior subordinate officers were also earmarked for sacking and replacement.
Having set in motion wholesale change at the top, Churchill departed from Cairo on the most taxing stage of this epic excursion. He was to meet the Soviet Union’s warlord, and deliver the unwelcome news that the Western Allies had determined against launching a Second Front in 1942. After a brief stopover in Tehran, on August 12 he made a ten-and-a-half-hour flight to Moscow, accompanied by his personal staff and Averell Harriman. A few hours after landing, Churchill was summoned to the Kremlin. He asked Harriman to accompany him: “I feel things would be easier if we all seemed to be together. I have a somewhat raw job.”
In truth, and as surprisingly few historians show recognition of, Stalin was already aware of all that Churchill feared to tell him. Whitehall and Washington were alike deeply penetrated by Communist sympathisers. Among the most prominent, John Cairncross served as Lord Hankey’s private secretary with access to War Cabinet papers until Hankey’s sacking in 1942, when he was transferred to Bletchley Park. Anthony Blunt served in MI5, while Guy Burgess and Kim Philby worked for SIS. Donald Maclean had access to key Foreign Office material, especially concerning research on the atomic bomb. In the U.S. government—which was anyway lax about securing its secrets from the Russians—Harry Dexter White worked for Henry Morgenthau, Nathan Silvermaster for the Board of Economic Warfare, and Alger Hiss for the State Department. Harry Hopkins talked with surprising freedom, though surely not ill intent, to a key NKVD agent in the United States. Throughout the war, a mass of British and U.S. government reports, minutes and decrypted Axis messages was passed to Moscow by such people, through their controllers in London and Washington. As a result, before every Allied summit the Russians were vastly better informed about Anglo-American military intentions than vice versa. So much material reached Stalin from London that he rejected some of it as disinformation, plants by cunning agents of Churchill. When Kim Philby told his NKVD handler that Britain was conducting no secret intelligence operations in the Soviet Union, Stalin dismissed this assertion with the contempt he deemed it to deserve. Molotov and Lavrenty Beria, the Soviet intelligence and secret police chief, frequently concealed from their leader accurate intelligence which they believed would anger him.
Yet in August 1942, Stalin was thoroughly briefed about Western Allied strategy, thanks to the highly placed Soviet agents. He had been told of the fierce Anglo-American arguments about the Second Front. On August 4, Beria reported:
Our NKVD resident in London640 sent the following information received from a source close to the English General Staff: A meeting about the second front took place on 21 July 1942. It was attended by Churchill, Lord Mountbatten, General Marshall and others. General Marshall sharply criticized the attitude of the English … He insisted that the second front should be opened in 1942 and warned that if the English failed to do this the USA would have to reconsider sending reinforcements to Great Britain and focus their attention on the Pacific. Churchill gave the following response to General Marshall: “There is not a single top general who would recommend starting major operations on the continent.” A further meeting on the second front took place on 22 or 23 July 1942. This was attended on the English side by Churchill, Mountbatten and the chiefs of staff; on the American side by Marshall, Eisenhower and others. The participants discussed a plan for the invasion of the continent which has been developed by English and American military experts … English chiefs of staff unanimously voted against and were supported by Churchill who declared that he could not vote against his own chiefs of staff. NKVD resident in London also reported the following, based on information from agents which had been also confirmed earlier by a source close to American embassy: on 25 July the British war cabinet agreed that there should be no second front this year.
A further August 12 NKVD intelligence brief to Stalin included a note on the prime minister’s political position: “Churchill departed for the USSR641 in an atmosphere of growing domestic political crisis. The intensification of fighting on the Soviet-German front has had a marked effect on British public opinion … Source believes Churchill will offer a number of concessions to the Soviet Union BERIA.” Russian access to such insights should not be taken to mean that Stalin was always correctly informed. For instance, several times during the war, NKVD agents reported to Moscow supposed parleys between the Western Allies and the Nazi leadership. On May 12, 1942, Beria passed to Stalin a report from the London resident on German attempts to start separate negotiations with the English: “We know from a reliable source642 that an official from the German embassy in Sweden has flown to England from Stockholm on board a civilian aircraft.” Like other such claims, this one was fallacious, but it fuelled Soviet paranoia. NKVD information was entirely accurate, however, about Britain’s position on the Second Front. Moscow was told that the prime minister’s objections did not derive, as Stalin had supposed, from political hostility to the USSR, but instead from pragmatic military considerations.
Stalin had always displayed intense curiosity about Churchill, for a quarter of a century the archfoe of Bolshevism. In June 1941, the Russian leader was surprised by the warmth with which Britain’s prime minister embraced him as a cobelligerent. In the intervening fourteen months, however, little had happened to gain Stalin’s confidence. Extravagant Western promises of aid had resulted in relatively meagre deliveries. The Times editorialist waxed lyrical on January 6, 1942, about the flow of British supplies to support the alliance with the Soviets: “The first result of this collaboration has been the splendid performance of British and American tanks and aeroplanes on Russian battlefields.” This was a wild exaggeration of reality, based upon sunshine briefings of the media and Parliament by the British government. Not only were targets for shipments of aircraft and tanks to Russia unfulfilled, but much of the material dispatched was being sunk in transit.
Convoy PQ16 was the target of 145 Luftwaffe sorties, and lost 11 of its 35 ships. In July, when 26 out of 37 ships carrying American and British supplies were lost with PQ17, 3,850 trucks, 430 tanks and 250 fighters vanished to the bottom. Following this disaster the Royal Navy insisted on cancelling all further convoys for the duration of the Arctic summer and its interminable daylight. Churchill, pressed by Roosevelt, reinstated the September convoys and began moving supplies through Iran, where the British and Russians now shared military control. But the only important reality, in Moscow’s eyes, was that aid consignments lagged far behind both Allied promises and Ru
ssian needs. Even more serious, the British had vetoed American plans for an early Second Front.
It is implausible that Stalin would have displayed a sentimental enthusiasm for his British allies, any more so than for any other human beings in his universe. He would never have acknowledged that his nation’s predicament was overwhelmingly the consequence of his own awesomely cynical indulgence of Hitler back in 1939. But Russia’s sense of outraged victimhood was none the less real for being spurious. The Soviets sought to bludgeon or shame the British and Americans into maintaining supply shipments and landing an army in Europe at the earliest possible date. Russia was counting her dead in the millions while the British cavorted in North Africa, paying a tiny fraction of the eastern blood sacrifice. In August 1942, Rostov-on-Don had fallen, Germany’s armies were deep in the Caucasus and almost at the gates of Stalingrad. Posterity knows that Hitler had made a fatal mistake by splitting his principal summer thrusts in pursuit of the strategically meaningless capture of Stalin’s name-city. The tide of the eastern war would turn decisively by the year’s end. But Russians at the time could not see beyond cataclysm. They knew only that their predicament was desperate. They could no more regard Churchill’s people as comrades-in-arms than might a man thrashing in a sea of sharks look in fellowship upon spectators cheering him on from a boat.