Finest Years (34 page)

Who could wonder that Churchill should be plunged into despair? ‘
At the back of his mind
and unconsciously, I believe,' wrote Oliver Harvey shrewdly, ‘the PM is jealous of Stalin and the successes of his armies.' Even if American aid enabled Britain to survive the war, how could the nation hold up its head in the world, be seen to have made a worthy contribution to victory, if the British Army covered itself with shame whenever exposed to a battlefield? Lack of shipping remained a massive constraint on deployments. John Kennedy wrote: ‘
We have masses of
reinforcements we cannot move.' At any
one moment of 1942, 2,000 British and American merchantmen were afloat on the Atlantic shuttle, three or four hundred of them vulnerable to U-boat attack. In peacetime, a cargo ship took an average thirty-nine days to complete a round trip between Europe and North America. Now, the same rotation took eighty-six days, with fortythree spent in port instead of a peacetime fourteen, mostly waiting for convoys. Dill cabled the chiefs of staff from Washington, saying that this seemed a time for the Allies to focus on essentials: security of the British Isles and United States, and preventing a junction of German and Japanese forces on the Indian Ocean: ‘
These simple rules
might help us to stick to things that matter in these difficult days.' Yet, as so often with British generals' strategic visions, this one was entirely negative.

Churchill told the Commons on 24 February: ‘The House must face the blunt and brutal fact that if, having entered a war yourself unprepared, you are struggling for life with two well-armed countries, one of them possessing the most powerful military machine in the world, and then, at the moment when you are in full grapple, a third major antagonist with far larger military forces than you possess suddenly springs upon your comparatively undefended back, obviously your task is heavy and your immediate experiences will be disagreeable.' Many MPs nonetheless voiced discontent. James Griffiths, Labour Member for the Welsh mining constituency of Llanelli, said that at the time of Dunkirk people had responded to the call. By contrast, ‘We believe that now there is a feeling of disquiet in the nation. We ought not to resent it.' Commander Sir Archibald Southby, Epsom, spoke of the German ‘Channel dash' and the fall of Singapore as two events which ‘shook not only the Government but the British Empire to its foundations. Nay, it would be fair to say that they influenced opinion throughout the world. They produced the most unfortunate reverberations in the United States of America just at a time when harmony and understanding between the two nations was of paramount importance.'

Sir George Schuster, Walsall, said he thought the public wanted to feel that it was being told the truth, and was beginning to doubt
this. People had been assured that in Libya the British Army was now meeting the enemy on equal terms. Then, after Rommel's dramatic comeback, they heard that the Germans had a better antitank gun, that our guns were inadequate to pierce enemy armour. ‘That was a shock to public opinion. They felt they had been misled.' He also suggested that the public wanted to see fewer civilians ‘getting away with it' – escaping their share of sacrifice to the war effort – and more discipline in factories.

During lunch at Buckingham Palace that day, Churchill told the King that Burma, Ceylon, Calcutta, Madras and parts of Australia might well be lost. The defence of Burma had already begun badly. Brooke noted with his customary spleen that some politicians allowed the bad news to show. ‘
This process does not
make Cabinet Ministers any more attractive,' he wrote to a friend. ‘But Winston is a marvel. I cannot imagine how he sticks it.' Clementine Churchill wrote to Harry Hopkins: ‘
We are indeed walking
through the Valley of Humiliation.'

In consequence of the disasters on the battlefield, Churchill was obliged to make changes in his government, more painful and embarrassing than some historians have acknowledged. The only agreeable aspect of the reshuffle was the sacking of Lord Hankey, whose rancour had become intolerable. Hankey thereafter became prominent among Churchill's critics, a would-be conspirator against his continuance in office. Beaverbrook finally resigned. Stafford Cripps was given his seat in the war cabinet, as Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the Commons. For the prime minister this was a bitter pill. It was a measure of the weakness of his position that he accepted Cripps. The two men, wrote Eden wonderingly, had ‘
always been as distant
as a lion and an okapi'. Churchill is alleged to have said of Libya: ‘There are miles and miles of nothing but arid austerity. How Cripps would like it!'

Cripps was fifty-two, a product of Winchester and New College Oxford, and nephew of the socialist intellectual Beatrice Webb. He became first a research chemist, then a successful commercial barrister. A pacifist in World War I, he was elected as a Labour MP in 1931 and served briefly in Ramsay MacDonald's government before
refusing to join his coalition. A vegetarian and teetotaller, in the 1930s he became converted to Marxism, an uncritical enthusiast for the Soviet Union whose name was often coupled with that of Aneurin Bevan. In 1939 he was expelled from the parliamentary Labour Party after differences with Attlee. When he was in Moscow between 1940 and 1942, Churchill was not displeased to note that Stalin displayed much less enthusiasm for the ambassador, and for his company, than his British admirer displayed for the Soviet leader.

In many respects a foolish man, Cripps nonetheless became temporarily an important one in 1942. A fine broadcaster, his commitment both to the Soviet Union and to a socialist post-war Britain won him a large popular following. He spoke passionately, and without irony, of Russian workers ‘
fighting to keep their country free
', and of the alliance between ‘the free workers of England, America and Russia'. Amid the mood of the times such sentiments struck a powerful chord, contrasting with the stubborn conservatism of many other MPs – and of the prime minister. In a poll that invited voters to express a preference as prime minister if some misfortune befell Churchill, 37 per cent of respondents named Eden, but 36 per cent opted for Cripps.

Churchill was well aware that his new minister aspired to the premiership. For most of 1942 he felt obliged to treat Cripps as a potential threat to his authority. Amid so many misfortunes, some surprising people supported the Lord Privy Seal's ambitions. Private conclaves of MPs, editors, generals and admirals discussed Churchill and his government in the most brutal terms. John Kennedy dined at Claridge's on 5 March 1942 with Sir Archie Rowlands of the ministry of aircraft production and John Skelton, news editor of the
Daily Telegraph
: ‘
The talk was very much
about Winston and very critical. It was felt that Winston was finished, that he had played his last card in reforming the government. S[kelton] is very hostile to Winston and thinks Cripps should be put in his place. He feels that we shall lose the whole Empire soon and be driven back on G.B. It is easy to make a case for this.' Averell Harriman wrote to Roosevelt on 6 March:

Although the British are
keeping a stiff upper lip, the surrender of their troops at Singapore has shattered confidence to the core – even in themselves but, more particularly, in their leaders. They don't intend to take it lying down and I am satisfied we will see the rebirth of greater determination. At the moment, however, they can't see the end to defeats. Unfortunately Singapore shook the Prime Minister himself to such an extent that he has not been able to stand up to this adversity with his old vigor. A number of astute people, both friends and opponents, feel it is only a question of a few months before his Government falls. I cannot accept this view. He has been very tired but is better in the last day or two. I believe he will come back with renewed strength, particularly when the tone of the war improves.

The Battle of the Atlantic had taken a serious turn for the worse. In January the German navy introduced a fourth rotor into its Enigma ciphering machines. This refinement defied British codebreakers through the bloody year of convoying that followed. Charles Wilson, Churchill's doctor, noticed that the prime minister carried in his head every statistical detail of Atlantic sinkings. Nonetheless, Wilson wrote, ‘
he is always careful
to consume his own smoke; nothing he says could discourage anyone…I wish to God I could put out the fires that seem to be consuming him.' Mary Churchill noted in her diary that her father was ‘
saddened – appalled by events
…He is desperately taxed.' Cadogan wrote likewise: ‘
Poor old P.M.
in a sour mood and a bad way.'

On 6 March, Rangoon was abandoned. Next day, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt urging that the Western Allies should concede Russian demands for recognition of their 1941 frontiers – which Britain had staunchly opposed the previous year. The Americans demurred, but the prime minister's change of attitude reflected intensified awareness of the Allies' vulnerability. He was now willing to adopt the most unwelcome expedients if these might marginally strengthen Russia's resolve. Amid alarm that Stalin might be driven to parley with Hitler, eastern Poland became expendable. In the same spirit,
Churchill cabled Moscow promising that if the Germans employed poison gas on the eastern front, as some feared was imminent, the British would retaliate as if such a weapon had been used against themselves. Stalin promptly asked for technical information about both British chemical weapons and counter-measures against them. There is no evidence that the former was forthcoming, but the British strove by every means to convince the Russians of their commitment as allies. Western fears that Stalin might seek a separate peace persisted for many months.

Beyond the great issues on Churchill's desk, he was obliged to address myriad lesser ones. He warned about the risk of a possible German commando raid, launched from a U-boat, to kidnap the Duke of Windsor, now serving as governor-general of the Bahamas. The Nazis, said the prime minister, might be able to exploit the former king to their advantage. Having inspired the creation of the Parachute Regiment, which carried out its first successful operation against a German radar station at Bruneval on France's northern coast on 28 February, Churchill pressed for the expansion of airborne forces on the largest possible scale. Four Victoria Crosses were awarded for the Royal Navy's 28 March attack on the floating dock at Saint-Nazaire. This generous issue of decorations was designed to make the survivors feel better about losses – 500 men killed, wounded or captured. Propaganda made much of Saint-Nazaire. The public was assured that the Germans had suffered heavily, though in reality their casualties were much smaller than those of the raiders. Meanwhile, ministers solicited Churchill about appointments, honours, administrative issues. Such nugatory matters were hard to address when the Empire was crumbling.

Churchill's obsession with capital ships persisted even in the third year of the war. He asserted that the destruction of the 42,000-ton
Tirpitz
, sister ship of the
Bismarck
, anchored in a Norwegian fjord where it posed a permanent threat to Arctic convoys, would be worth the loss of a hundred aircraft and 500 men. On 9 March, twelve Fairey Albacores of the Fleet Air Arm attacked the German behemoth, without success. Churchill asked the First Sea Lord ‘how it was
that 12 of our machines managed to get no hits as compared with the extraordinary efficiency of the Japanese attack on
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
?' How not, indeed? Though the RAF made an important contribution to interdicting Rommel's Mediterranean supply line in 1942, the RAF and Fleet Air Arm's record of achievement in attacks upon enemy surface ships remained relatively poor until the last months of the war. Churchill thought so, minuting Pound in the following year that it seemed ‘
a pregnant fact
' that the Fleet Air Arm had suffered only thirty fatalities out of a strength of 45,000 men in the three months to the end of April. The 1940 attack on Taranto and the 1941 crippling of the
Bismarck
were the only really impressive British naval air operations of the war.

During the winter of 1941–42, Churchill had become unhappily conscious of the failure of British ‘precision bombing' of Germany. He was party to the critical change of policy which took place in consequence, largely inspired by his scientific adviser. Lord Cherwell's intervention about bombing was his most influential of the war. It was a member of his Cabinet Statistical Office staff, an official named David Butt, who produced a devastating report based on a study of British bombers' aiming-point photographs. This showed that only a small proportion of aircraft were achieving hits within miles, rather than yards, of their targets. Cherwell convinced the prime minister, who was shocked by Butt's report, that there must be a complete change of tactics. Since, under average weather conditions, RAF night raiders were incapable of dropping an acceptable proportion of bombs on designated industrial objectives, British aircraft must henceforward instead address the smallest aiming points they were capable of identifying: cities. They might thus fulfil the twin objectives of destroying plant and ‘dehousing' workers, to use Cherwell's ingenuous phrase. No one in Whitehall explicitly acknowledged that the RAF was thus to undertake the wholesale killing of civilians. But nor did they doubt that this would be the consequence, though British propaganda for the rest of the war shrouded such ugly reality in obfuscation, not least from the aircrew conducting bomber operations at such hazard to themselves.

Churchill always considered himself a realist about the horrors and imperatives of war. Yet as recently as 1937 he had proclaimed his opposition to air attacks upon non-combatants, during a Commons debate on air-raid precautions: ‘
I believe,' he said, ‘that if
one side in an equal war endeavours to cow and kill the civil population, and the other attacks steadily the military objectives…victory will come to the side…which avoids the horror of making war on the helpless and weak.' Now, however, after thirty months of engagement with an enemy who was prospering mightily by waging war without scruple, Churchill accepted a different view. Bomber Command had failed as a rapier. Instead, it must become a blunt instrument. Operational necessity was deemed to make it essential to set aside moral inhibitions. For many months, indeed years, ahead, bombing represented the only means of carrying Britain's war to Germany. The prime minister approved Cherwell's new policy.