Churchill 1940-1945

By Max Hastings

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Always mindful of his role as a stellar performer upon the stage of history, he became supremely so after May 10, 1940. He kept no diary because, he observed, to do so would be to expose his follies and inconsistencies to posterity. Within months of his ascent to the premiership, however, he told his staff that he had already schemed the chapters of the book which he would write as soon as the war was over. The outcome was a ruthlessly partial six-volume work which is poor history, if sometimes peerless prose. We shall never know with complete confidence what he thought about many personalities – for instance Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Brooke, King George VI, his Cabinet colleagues – because he took good care not to tell us. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.4)

It is a common mistake to suppose that those who bestrode the stage during momentous times were giants, set apart from the personalities of our own humdrum society. I have argued in earlier books that we should instead see 1939-45 as a period when men and women not much different from ourselves strove to grapple with stresses and responsibilities which stretched their powers to the limit. Churchill was one of a tiny number of actors who proved worthy of the role in which destiny cast him. Those who worked for the prime minister, indeed the British people at war, served as a supporting cast, seeking honourably but sometimes inadequately to play their own parts in the wake of a titan. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.5)

His personal staff’s awareness of the prime minister’s burden caused them to forgive his outbursts of discourtesy and intemperance. Ministers and commanders were less sympathetic. Their criticisms of Churchill’s behaviour were human enough, and objectively just. But they reflected lapses of imagination. Few men in human history had borne such a load, which was ever at the forefront of his consciousness, and even subconsciousness. Dreams drifted through his sleeps, though he seldom revealed their nature to others. What is astonishing is that, in his waking hours, he preserved such gaiety. Although an intensely serious man, he displayed a capacity for fun as remarkable as his powers of concentration and memory, and his unremitting commitment to hard labour. Seldom, if ever, has a great national leader displayed such power to entertain his people, stirring them to laughter even amid the tears of war. 

Churchill never doubted his own genius (subordinates often wished that he would). But there were many moments when his confidence in a happy outcome faltered, amid bad tidings from the battlefield. He believed that destiny had marked him to enter history as the saviour of Western civilisation, and this conviction coloured his smallest words and deeds. When a Dover workman said to his mate, as Churchill passed, “There goes the bloody British Empire,” the prime minister was enchanted. “Very nice,” he lisped to Jock Colville, his face wreathed in smiles. But, in profound contrast to Hitler and Mussolini, he preserved a humanity, an awareness of himself as mortal clay, which seldom lost its power to touch the hearts of those who served him, just as the brilliance of his conversation won their veneration. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.81)

The most damaging criticism of Churchill made by important people was that he was intolerant of evidence unless it conformed to his own instinct, and was intolerant of evidence unless it conformed to his own instinct, and was sometimes wilfully irrational. Displays of supreme wisdom were interspersed with outbursts of childish petulance. Yet when the arguments were over, the shouting done, on important matters he usually deferred to reason. In much the same way, subordinates exasperated hy his excesses in “normal” times – insofar as war admitted any – marveled at the manner in which the prime minister rose to crisis. Bad news brought out the best in him. Disasters inspired responses which compelled recognition of his greatness. Few colleagues  doubted his genius, and all admired his unswerving commitment to waging war. John Martin wrote of “the ferment of ideas, the persistence in flogging proposals, the goading of commanders to attack – these were all expressions of that blazing, explosive energy without which the vast machine, civilian as well as military, could not have been moved forward so steadily or steered through so many setbacks and difficulties.” Churchill conducted the affairs of his nation with a self-belief that was sometimes misplaced, but which offered an elixir of hope to those chronically troubled by rational fears. Amid Britain’s sea of troubles, he represented a beacon of warmth and humanity, as well as of will and supreme courage, for which even the most exalted and skeptical of his fellow countrymen acknowledged gratitude. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.84-85)

In the early stages of the battle, Luftwaffe fighter tactics were markedly superior to those mandated by Fighter Command. But Dowding’s pilots learned fast, and by September matched the skills of their opponents. 

The Royal Air Force, youngest and brashest of the three services, was the only one which thoroughly recognised the value of publicity. The Battle of Britain caused the prestige of the nation’s airmen to ascend to lofty heights, where it remained through the ensuing five years of the war. The RAF gained a glamour and public esteem which never faded. As Churchill always recognised, modern war is waged partly on battlefields, and partly also on airwaves, front pages and in the hearts of men and women. When Britain’s powers were so small it was vital to create an inspiriting legend for the nation, and for the world. To this in 1940 Britain’s airmen contributed mightily, both through their deeds and the recording of them. The RAF was a supremely twentieth-century creation, which gained Churchill’s admiration but incomplete understanding. He displayed an enduring emotionalism about the courage and sacrifices of the aircrews. The men of Bomber as well as Fighter Command were never subjected to the accusations of pusillanimity which the prime minister regularly hurled at Britain’s soldiers, and sometimes sailors. Like the British people, he never forgot that, until November 1942, the RAF remained responsible for their country’s only visible battlefield victory, against the Luftwaffe in 1940. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.92)

For many years after 1945, the democracies found it gratifying to perceive the Second World War in Europe as a struggle for survival between themselves and Nazi tyranny. Yet the military outcome of the contest was overwhelmingly decided by the forces of Soviet tyranny, rather than by Anglo-American armies. Perversely, this reality was better understood by contemporary Americans and British than it has been by many of their descendants. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.146)

In the days following Pearl Harbor, from everywhere save Malaya the war news reaching Churchill briefly brightened. The Royal Navy was faring better in its struggle with Hitler’s U-boats. Auchinleck continued to signal optimistically about the progress of Crusader in the desert. “Consider tide turned,” he reported from Cairo on December 9, and two days later: “We are pressing pursuit vigorously.” The Russians were still holding Moscow, Leningrad and the Baku oil fields. Churchill told the House of Commons on December 8: “We have at least four-fifths of the population of the globe upon our side. We are responsible for their safety and for their future. In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.” 

(Hastings 2009, pp.183)

With the limited capacity available, there was much more scope for American action against the Germans, by supplying Russia and deploying U.S. troops in the west, than against the Japanese in the Pacific. The Asian war required three or four times the freighting effort of the European one, because of the distances involved. A merchant ship could make only three round-trips a year to the Pacific theatre. The “Germany first” strategy thus represented not only strategic sense, but also logistic necessity. Yet, given the much greater popular animosity towards Japan in the United States, it should never be taken for granted. Harold Macmillan observed later of the prime minister: “No one but he (and that only with extraordinary patience and skill) could have enticed the Americans into the European war at all.” This overstated the case. But the U.S. commitment to the western conflict indisputably represented a diplomatic triumph for Britain. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.187)

In the knowledge that Americans, and especially their legislators, were deeply wary of Britain as a suppliant, he said nothing of dependency, real though this was. Instead, he talked of partnership, shared burdens. He flourished his own American parentage: “I shall always remember how each Fourth of July my mother would wave an American flag before my eyes.” He reached his peroration: “Lastly, if you will forgive me for saying it, to me the best tidings of all is that the United States, united as never before, has drawn the sword for freedom, and cast aside the scabbard.” He unsheathed an imaginary blade, and brandished it aloft. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.189)

Gandhi in 1940 wrote an open letter to the British people, urging them to “lay down arms and accept whatever fate Hitler decided. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls nor your minds.”

Churchill was ruthlessly dismissive of Indian political aspirations when the Japanese army was at the gates. He could scarcely be expected to forget that the Mahatma had offered to mediate Britain’s surrender to Hitler, whom the standard-bearer of nonviolence and Indian freedom described as “not a bad man.” Gandhi in 1940 wrote an open letter to the British people, urging them to “lay down arms and accept whatever fate Hitler decided. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls nor your minds.”

Much worse, however, was the U.S. president’s attempt to meddle with what the prime minister perceived as an exclusively British issue. It would never have occurred to Churchill to offer advice to Roosevelt about the future governance of America’s Philippines dependency. He deemed it rank cant for a nation which had itself colonised the North American continent, dispossessing and largely exterminating its indigenous population, and which still practised racial segregation, to harangue others about the treatment of native peoples. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.215)

The narrative of the Second World War presented by most historians is distorted by the fact that it focuses upon what happened, rather than what did not.

The narrative of the Second World War presented by most historians is distorted by the fact that it focuses upon what happened, rather than what did not. Until November 1942, weeks and sometimes months passed without much evidence of activity by British land forces. Between June 1941 and the end of the war, British newspapers and BBC broadcasts were often dominated by reports of the struggle on the Eastern Front, where action appeared continuous. Countless editorials paid tribute to the deeds of “our gallant Russian allies.” This goes far to explain why Russia commanded such admiration in contemporary Britain. Accounts of the eastern fighting were vague and often wildly inaccurate, but they coalesced to create a valid impression of vigorous, hideously costly and increasingly successful action by the Red Army. The battle for Stalingrad, which now began to receive massive coverage, intensified public dismay about the contrast between British and Russian achievements. “Every week of successful defence,” reported the ministry of Information on October 9, 1942, “confirms the popularity of the Russians and there is much uneasiness and unhappiness at the spectacle of our apparent inaction.” 

(Hastings 2009, pp.248)

Above all, accurate prophecy was rendered impossible by the fact that the condition of the enemy, the situation “on the other side of the hill,” remained shrouded in mystery even to war leaders privy to Ultra secrets. Conditions in occupied Europe, as well as the state of Hitler’s was machine, were imperfectly understood in London. It was widely reported that the Nazis were conducting appaling massacres, killing many Jews. But the concept of systematic genocide embracing millions of victims was beyond popular, and even prime ministerial, imagination. Entire books have been written about Churchill and the Holocaust, yet the fundamentals may be expressed succinctly: the prime minister was aware from late 1942 onwards that the Nazis were pursuing murderous policies towards the Jews. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.249)

Churchill’s first impulsive thought for his replacement was Alan Brooke. The CIGS was much 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 judgment. 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. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.258)

It is an outstanding curiosity of the Second World War that two such brilliant men as Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt allowed themselves to suppose that the mere fact of discovering a common enemy in hitler could suffice to make possible a real relationship, as distinct from an arrangement of convenience on specifics, between Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Stalin and his acolytes never for a moment forgot that their social and political objectives were inimical to those of their capitalist Western Allies. British politicians, generals and diplomats were, however, foolish enough to hope that they might achieve some comradeship with the Soviets, without forswearing their visceral loathing for them. Few senior Americans were so confident of U.S. power, and correspondingly less fearful of Soviet ambitions. But the Americans, too – with such notable exceptions as Harriman – harboured delusions about their ability to make friends with the Russians, or at least to exploit U.S. might to bend the Soviet government to their will, which rational assessment of rival national purposes should have dispelled.

(Hastings 2009, pp.266-267)

“Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile, you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.” 

His words remained as magnificent in the years of victories as they had been in those of defeats. He enjoyed moments of exhilaration, because he had a large capacity for joy. But the sorrows were frequent and various. He refused to abandon his obsession with getting the Turks into the war, cabling Eden, en route back from Moscow, that it was necessary to “remind the Turkey that Christmas was coming.” He dismissed proposals summarily to depose the king of Italy, saying, “Why break off the handle of the jug before we get to Rome and have a chance of securing a new handle for it!” He told the Cabinet one day, amid a discussion about Soviet perfidy in publishing claims in Pravda that Britain had opened unilateral peace negotiations with the Nazis: “Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile, you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.” 

(Hastings 2009, pp.342)

The most baleful consequence of resistance was that it represented the legitmisation of violent civilian activity in opposition to local regimes, of a kind which has remained a focus of controversy throughout the world ever since. Not only the Germans, but also many citizens of occupied countries, endorsed the view that “one man’s freedom-fighter is another man’s terrorist.” It is useful to recall that such a man as Portal perceived the SOE’s personnel as terrorists. Though British agents were seldom directly concerned in the more ruthless actions of local groups, it was endemic to the nature of the struggle that partisans armed by London shot prisoners, sometimes wholesale; murdered real or supposed collaborators and members of rival factions; and often supported themselves through institutionalised banditry. A precedent was set by the wartime democracies’ support for irregular warfare which could never be undone. 

It would be an exaggeration to say that the SOE enabled dissident elements of several societies to overthrow their traditional social order. The collapse of the Balkan monarchies was inevitable, cause for lament only to a Victorian sentimentalist such as the prime minister. In western Europe anti-Communist governments, decisively assisted by the presence of Anglo-American armies, were able to prevail in 1944-45. But the impact of the SOE’s aid to resistance movements was significantly greater upon postwar societies than on military outcomes in the struggle against the Germans. Churchill came to recognise this. David Reynolds notes the remarkable fact that, in the six volumes of Churchill’s war memoirs, the SOE is mentioned only once, in an appendix. “Setting Europe ablaze’ had proved a damp squib,” says the historian. It was fortunate for the peoples of many occupied countries that this was so.

(Hastings 2009, pp.383)

The best that can be said about Anglo-American relations in 1944 – and it is a very important best – is that at the operational level, the two nations’ armed forces worked adequately together. Britain and the United States were the only major belligerents to sustain a real collaboration; Germany and Japan, and the Western Allies and Russia, did not. The men on the spot knew it was vital that it should be so. The Americans liked some senior British officers – Portal, Tedder, Morgan, Montgomery’s chief of staff Freddie de Guingand – even if they found it hard to relate to others such as Brooke. Cunningham, for the Royal Navy, observed that he found it easier to get along with America’s soldiers than with her sailors, above all King, the glowering chief of naval operations. The U.S. admiral never forgave the British for rejecting a request for the loan of an aircraft carrier for Pacific operations at a desperate moment in 1942, after the Americans had several times made their own flattops available to support British purposes in the European theatre. But while it is acknowledged that all alliance relationships are profoundly difficult, there remains much cause for admiration and gratitude for the manner in which the U.S. and British armed forces made common cause between 1942 and 1945. Eisenhower, who privately liked the British a good deal less than his geniality caused them to suppose, deserved much of the credit. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.389)

Yet it was hard for Churchill to bow to the relegation of himself and his country from the big decisions. An American political scientist, William Fox, coined the word superpower in 1944. He took it for granted that Britain could be counted as one. The true measure of superpoerdom, however, is a capability to act unilaterally. This, Churchill’s nation had lost. Dismay and frustration showed in his temper. Eden wrote on July 6: “After dinner a really ghastly defence committee nominally on Far Eastern strategy. We opened with a reference from W. to American criticism of Monty for over-caution, which W. appeared to endorse. This brought explosion from CIGS.” Brooke wrote in his own diary:

A frightful meeting with Winston which lasted until 2 am!! It was quite the worst we have had with him. He was very tired as a result of his speech in the House concerning the flying bombs, he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad-tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody, and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped. I began by having a bad row with him. He began to abuse Monty because operations were not going faster … I flared up and asked him if he could not trust his generals for 5 minutes instead of continuously abusing them and belittling them … He then put forward a series of puerile proposals, such as raising a Home Guard in Egypt to provide a force to deal with disturbances in the Middle East. It was not until midnight that we got onto the subject we had come to discuss, the war in the Far East! … He finished by falling out with Attlee and having a real good row with him concerning the future of India! We withdrew under cover of those smokescreen just on 2 am, having accomplished nothing beyond losing our tempers and valuable sleep!!

(Hastings 2009, pp.401-402)

A marked shift in American media sentiment was taking place. Conservative commentators, hitherto bitterly skeptical about British foreign policy, now showed themselves sympathetic to Churchill’s efforts to check the onset of European Communism. The liberal press, however, deplored what it perceived as new manifestations of British imperialism. It is a striking reflection upon the mood of those days that perceived British misconduct in Greece and Italy provoked much more comment and protest in the United States than did Russia’s ruthless handling of its newly occupied eastern European territories. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.425)

He explained the struggle as no one else could, in terms mankind could comprehend and relate to, now as then. Even most American historians, when chronicling the wartime era, are more generous in their use of quotations from the words of Winston Churchill than from those of their own president, Franklin Roosevelt.

In reality, as this book has sought to show, Churchill did not command the respect and trust of all the British people all of the time. But he empowered millions to look beyond the havoc of the battlefield, and the squalor of their domestic circumstances amid privation and bombardment, and to perceive a higher purpose in their struggles and sacrifices. This was, of course, of greater importance in averting defeat in 1940-41 than later, when the Allies were able to commit superior masses of men and materiel to securing victory. Churchill’s rhetoric has played a significant part in causing the struggle against Hitler to be perceived by posterity as “the good war.” He explained the struggle as no one else could, in terms mankind could comprehend and relate to, now as then. Even most American historians, when chronicling the wartime era, are more generous in their use of quotations from the words of Winston Churchill than from those of their own president, Franklin Roosevelt.

 He cherished aspirations which often proved greater than his nation was capable of fulfilling. This, too, has been among the principal themes of this narrative. But it seems inconsistent to applaud his defiance of reason in insisting that Britain must fight on in June 1940, and then to denounce the extravagance of his later demands upon its people and armed forces. The service chiefs often deplored his misjudgements and intemperance. Yet his instinct for war was far more highly developed than their own. If they were often right in pleading that the time was not ripe to fight, left to their own devices they would have been intolerably slow to fight at all. While Brooke was an officer of remarkable qualities, like many soldiers he was a limited human being. He deluded himself in claiming, as he did after the conflict, that Western strategy had evolved in accordance with his own conception. While this may have been so in 1942-43, thereafter the European war was brought to a conclusion in consequence of Soviet exertions aided by American supplies, with significant assistance from the strategic air offensive and Eisenhower’s armies. In the west, major military operations – which means the northwest Europe campaign – conformed to an American design, to which the foremost British contribution was to delay the invasion of the Continent until conditions were overwhelmingly favourable. 

(Hastings 2009, pp.480-481)

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References

Hastings, Max. 2009. Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945. 1st American ed. ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

ISBN 978-0-307-26839-6