Remarkably, Winston was right on target. For on September 9, 1914—the fortieth day after German mobilization—the Kaiser’s overextended army would indeed be turned back at the First Battle of the Marne, forcing it to dig in and wage a war of attrition for the next four years. What Winston failed to foresee, however, was that this stalemate would come after the French offensive faltered, and that the resulting trench warfare would exact horrible costs from both sides. All the same, in 1911 he was the only major British leader who was thinking so far ahead about the catastrophe that awaited the world.23
The fears generated by the Agadir crisis soon faded as cooler heads prevailed. To allow the Germans a face-saving concession, the French handed over some African territory they didn’t care much about anyway. And, after that, many in Britain felt it was safe to go back to business as usual.
But the crisis transformed Winston. Once his imagination had awakened him to the challenges of a European war, he made the subject his constant study. Such a grave threat pushed into the background almost every other problem he had been considering. He had found his great cause in the urgent need to get ready for the coming conflict. It was a cause that he felt he was born to lead. But he couldn’t do it as Home Secretary. The War Office, the Admiralty, the Foreign Office, perhaps even the premiership itself—these were the places where he could serve best if he wanted to prevent the next war or to prepare Britain to win it.
While he plotted his next move, he took a long-deserved holiday with Clemmie at the seashore near Broadstairs, in Kent. One day in early September he went to the beach, armed with pail and shovel. A reporter for the Daily Mirror was in the area and received a tip that the Home Secretary was engaged in unusual activity on the beach. When he found Churchill, he was surprised to see him furiously at work on a series of “stout fortifications and sand castles.” Sheepishly, the Home Secretary explained that it was all for the amusement of his young daughter and other children nearby.
There was an innocent article in the newspaper the next day titled “Mr. Churchill’s Spade Work.” But no one except his friends seemed to understand how seriously he took this work that allowed his hands to shape what he saw in his imagination. When Eddie Marsh read the article, he laughed and wrote a friend, “I wonder if the Germans heard that the Home Secretary was spending his holiday in personally fortifying the South Coast!”24
XXII
ARMADA
The end of September 1911 found Winston traveling to Scotland to visit his constituency and to spend a few days with the prime minister, who was staying at the same house where Margot had taken the family after Violet’s “rock-affair” at Slains Castle in 1908. Loaned to Margot for the early autumn by her brother, Archerfield was a large stone house about twenty miles east of Edinburgh. To the prime minister, its greatest asset was an adjoining private golf course on the seacoast. In 1908 the magazine Country Life had described it as “the best private golf course in the world.”
In recent months Violet had grown fonder of Clemmie, but she still wasn’t entirely reconciled to losing Winston. Her face still lit up when he entered a room, and she had lost none of her desire to enjoy his company in private, pulling him away from others whenever possible so they could talk on their own. The moment he arrived at Archerfield House she swept him out to the nearby links, where, as she later wrote, “we played a lot of golf together in golden autumn sunshine with sea gulls circling overhead.”1
There was a look of expectation in his eyes, and she knew what it meant. Political life was their mutual love, and Winston couldn’t hide from her what he was thinking. In the wake of the Agadir crisis there was talk of a change being made at the Admiralty. He wanted the job, and he knew Asquith wasn’t happy with Reggie McKenna’s performance. The prime minister had recently sent Reggie a written rebuke, criticizing the navy’s slow response to the alert recommended by Sir Edward Grey.
It was obvious that someone needed to shake up the service and prepare it for battle. One of its urgent needs was a modern naval war staff, well organized to meet the operational challenges ahead. The logical choice for the job was Richard Haldane, who had done excellent work for the past six years at the War Office, and who had just been elevated to the peerage.
It was no secret that Lord Haldane, as he was now known, wanted the job. “I felt that I was almost the only person available,” he recalled, “who was equipped to cope with the problem of the Naval War Staff. I think that the Prime Minister held much the same view, but we had been careful to say nothing of impending changes.”2
It was Violet who brought up the subject of the Admiralty. She teased Winston: “Why don’t you ask my advice about it?”
He knew her mind as well as she knew his. “Between Haldane and Winston,” he said, “you are not a judge—you are a barefaced partisan. Your scales are loaded by gross favoritism and emotion. . . . You are thinking how much Winston would enjoy it!”
She was also thinking of how much she would enjoy it. “I longed for Winston to go to the Admiralty,” she recalled, “not only because it would give him his heart’s desire, but because I felt sure that it was there that he would find his true vocation and his greatest self.”3
Her father was inclined to agree. He had been impressed by Churchill’s comments on the German threat, but he also thought it might be safer for everyone if Winston used his battle skills in the service of the navy instead of the Home Office. Working behind the scenes, Violet encouraged her father to make the change. The problem was how to explain it to Haldane. The solution that Asquith devised was clever. He decided to let Churchill and Haldane discuss their merits for the job in a meeting that would involve just the two of them. He was confident that Winston would make the stronger case for himself and soften up his colleague—a good-humored man of ample girth—for the rejection to follow.
Haldane must have known that his hopes for the job were doomed the moment he arrived for the meeting at Archerfield and saw Churchill waiting at the door to greet him, looking as if he belonged in the family. When Asquith left the two men together for their talk, Haldane realized that he had been trapped, and he would afterward describe this episode as the time “the Prime Minister shut me up in a room with [Churchill].”
Haldane did his best to argue his case, pointing out his wealth of experience at the War Office and bluntly casting doubt on Winston’s skills. “I said that, to be frank, I did not think that Churchill’s own type of mind was best for planning out the solution that was necessary for the problem . . . confronting us.” But he was no match for Winston, who had a good response to every point. Knowing his cause was lost, Haldane beat a graceful retreat. “I parted from him at Archerfield in a very friendly spirit,” he recalled.4
On Sunday, October 1, Winston and the prime minister took to the links and were gone for much of the afternoon. Violet was having her tea when she looked up and saw Winston come in with a big smile. He led her outside and told her the good news: “Your father has just offered me the Admiralty.”
She would always remember the look he gave her at that moment. She had never seen him happier. They walked together to the sea in the fading light, and Winston talked excitedly the whole way. He was thrilled not only to have the Admiralty, but also to leave behind the burdens of the Home Office. “Look at the people I have had to deal with,” he said wearily. “Judges and convicts!”
That night Violet opened her diary and described Winston’s reaction to the change: “He is over the moon about it (as it has long been his Mecca in the Cabinet)—& tremendously fired by the scope & possibilities of the office.”5
The one person who was devastated by the news was Reggie McKenna. Asquith was moving him to the Home Office, and he didn’t want to go. He received word of the change on October 10 but spent almost two weeks trying to talk the prime minister out of it. He made a special trip to Archerfield to plead his case, insisting that he was needed at the Admiralty. Asquith was annoyed but tried to reason with him. He asked McKe
nna “if he really thought he was the only person who stood between us & a great European war.” When he couldn’t offer a convincing response, Reggie reluctantly agreed to the change.
“But he minded terribly,” Asquith said of McKenna when he had gone, “& was rather pathetic over it.”6
Four months later McKenna was still complaining, arguing to any and all that he was the better man for the job than Churchill. During a dinner at Number 10 in February he happened to be seated next to Violet and decided to give her an earful, apparently unaware of her devotion to Churchill. In her diary Violet wrote, “McKenna ranted about Winston—to me of all people. He must be mad.”7
Sooner or later, Churchill would most likely have won his coveted job as First Lord of the Admiralty, but given the competition for the position, he was fortunate to have Violet’s voice in her father’s ear.
* * *
Still a month shy of his thirty-seventh birthday, Winston arrived at the Admiralty in Whitehall on October 25, 1911, and took his place as the civilian head of the strongest naval force in the world. With more than five hundred ships and 130,000 men, the Royal Navy was still the pride of the British Empire and the chief instrument of its authority. In addition to the Home Fleet, there were the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Eastern fleets, and the great dockyards scattered across the globe, from Portsmouth at home to Malta, Bombay, Singapore, Sydney, and Hong Kong. It was truly a world navy and could, theoretically, go to war anywhere, but Churchill knew that his job was to make sure that it could fight and win a battle in one particular body of water—the North Sea.
One of his first actions was to have a chart of the North Sea mounted behind his desk, where a staff officer could mark the positions of the German fleet with flags. Every morning Winston studied it, not so much to keep track of the movements, but to learn each inch of the chart by heart, and, as he later wrote, “to inculcate in myself and those working with me a sense of ever-present danger.” This inhospitable stretch of water between Germany and Britain was the area he had to defend at all costs.8
He had reason to be grateful to McKenna for opposing him in 1909 on the dreadnought question and for building more of the giant battleships. Now he was glad to have the larger force, and he was prepared to expand it. And as a way of apologizing for his mistaken assumptions about Germany in the past, he made a point of praising McKenna in public. “We owe much to the foresight and resolution of Mr. McKenna,” he told a Scottish audience in 1912.
While Lloyd George was left to complete the work of passing the landmark National Insurance Act—and to have his name forever associated with health and unemployment insurance—Winston immersed himself in the details of building faster and more potent warships to stop a German armada. The naval work left Lloyd George cold. He began complaining that whenever he saw Winston, he would hear, “Look here, David, I want to talk to you,” which would be followed by a long monologue “about his blasted ships.”9
Though he was no expert on naval tactics, Churchill did know a lot about fighting and understood a basic truth that others often overlooked. In his first year on the job he told an audience at Burlington House in London, “At the Admiralty everything contributes and converges on one single object, namely the development of the maximum war power at a given moment and at a particular point.” In other words, behind all the pageantry and bureaucracy of the Admiralty, the only result that really mattered was the fleet’s ability to confront an enemy with “a few minutes of shattering, blasting, overpowering force.” When dreadnoughts met, the only punch worth throwing was a knockout punch. And, therefore, said Churchill, “the best way to make war impossible is to make victory certain.”
Again, as Violet said of him, “he did nothing by halves.” He didn’t want a war; he knew it would be horrible. “If any of the great civilised and scientific nations of the world become engaged in war,” he warned his Burlington House audience, “they will all be heartily sick of it long before they have got to the end.” But if Germany insisted on building more ships and making more threats, he was now ready to do whatever was required to prevent a fight, or to deliver the knockout blow if necessary.10
The Kaiser and his admirals were given ample opportunity to renounce the arms race. A few weeks before he spoke at Burlington House, Churchill offered the Germans a “naval holiday.” It was a chance for both sides to suspend their shipbuilding programs as a way of slowing the arms race, if not to end it completely. In a wonderful phrase Winston said the holiday would allow the naval rivals to “introduce a blank page into the book of misunderstanding.” But the Kaiser didn’t think there was any misunderstanding. As he saw it, Britain needed to be humbled so that Germany could rise. So he rejected the offer, sending a terse message “that such arrangements would only be possible between allies.”11
Though Winston felt he needed to keep building ships, he was looking for something besides a numerical advantage. Wanting also to maintain superiority in speed and firepower, he made two of the boldest moves of his career. To give his ships greater speed, he wanted them to burn oil instead of coal. And to make sure they could outshoot the Germans, he wanted them armed with a weapon of unsurpassed power. Instead of sticking with the dreadnought’s most advanced 13.5-inch guns, he opted for development of the massive new 15-inch gun that could hit targets up to twenty miles away.
The risks were considerable. For one thing, Britain lacked a reliable supply of oil. To use Winston’s ornate explanation to the Commons, there was an “absence of any fresh supply of liquid fuel indigenous to these islands.” As for the question of firepower, no one knew if the 15-inch gun would work because, as Churchill put it, “no such thing as a modern 15-inch gun existed. None had ever been made.” But he wasn’t deterred. Long before there were any clear signs that the difficulties would be overcome, he bet everything on adopting both innovations.12
Over the next two and a half years he would solve one problem by taking Britain into the petroleum business, arranging for the government to acquire a majority interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British Petroleum—BP). He would tackle the problem of firepower by the simple expedient of going ahead and building the 15-inch guns with nothing more than the fervent hope they would work. If he waited for the proper tests, he would lose at least a year in the process, and he couldn’t wait. “Risks have to be run in peace as well as in war,” he remarked, “and courage in design now may win a battle later on.”
But even as he gambled on what would turn out to be a great success, he could hear the familiar voices of his critics ridiculing him if he failed. He knew, as he later wrote, “No excuse would be accepted. It would all be brought home to me—‘rash, inexperienced,’ ‘before he had been there a month,’ ‘altering all the plans of his predecessors’ and producing ‘this ghastly fiasco,’ ‘the mutilation of all the ships of the year.’ ” He had heard such comments so often in the past that he could easily produce specimens of it on his own that sounded like the real thing.13
But he was as willing as ever to make plans on a grand scale, and to be imaginative and daring when others were content to think small and go slow. Now, however, it wasn’t merely his reputation or the interests of a single department that were at risk. It was the protection of the fleet and the security of the nation. For all of this to be entrusted to the judgment and skill of a young man in his mid-thirties was extraordinary, and Churchill was always aware of that, but never intimidated by it.
McKenna or Haldane would have made sure the Royal Navy was prepared to fight the growing German navy. The difference with Churchill as First Lord was that he meant to make sure the fleet won. Nothing else mattered. To that end, he got rid of incompetent officers, set out the rationale for a naval war staff and began building an efficient one, and made two appointments of crucial significance. The men who would prove to be Britain’s most important admirals in the First World War—John Jellicoe and David Beatty—were given major promotions by Churchill, who went over the heads of mo
re senior admirals to make the changes. Jellicoe became second in command of the Home Fleet, and Beatty was put in charge of the Battle-Cruiser Fleet, which Churchill liked to call “the strategic cavalry of the Royal Navy, that supreme combination of speed and power to which the thoughts of the Admiralty were continuously directed.”
Beatty’s appointment was inspired. Young, handsome, and courageous, he seemed to have the potential to become a twentieth-century Admiral Nelson. Yet when he came to see Churchill one day in late 1911, he was supposedly on the verge of retiring from the service. His speedy rise through the ranks had alienated some of his superiors, who complained that he had come up too fast, and Beatty felt that his career had suddenly reached a dead end. His unconventional views of naval combat and his natural spirit of irreverence had not served him well among the more traditional admirals.
But Churchill warmed to him right away. Looking up from his desk, he greeted him with the words “You seem very young to be an admiral.” Three years his senior, Beatty didn’t miss a beat, firing back, “And you seem very young to be the First Lord of the Admiralty.”
It was significant that Beatty knew how to ride as well as sail. He was a good polo player, which meant a great deal to Churchill, who recalled of him, “He thought of war problems in their unity by land, sea and air. His mind had been rendered quick and supple by the situations of polo and the hunting-field, and enriched by various experiences against the enemy on Nile gunboats and ashore.” Beatty’s service on the Nile appealed to Churchill because of the remarkable coincidence that the young naval officer had fought at the Battle of Omdurman, providing gun support when Winston’s cavalry regiment made their famous charge.14
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