Finest Years (36 page)

Few intellectuals liked Churchill, and he repaid their distaste. He harboured a special animus against the left-wing journalist Michael Foot, one of the authors of
Guilty Men
, the famous 1940 indictment of the pre-war appeasers. Churchill considered it rank hypocrisy, as indeed it was, that the authors should have attacked the ‘men of Munich', when Foot's own Labour Party opposed pre-war rearmament. The intellectuals' preoccupation with post-war Britain exasperated the prime minister, when he was struggling to find means to avert the destruction of European freedom. But in this matter, his instincts were ill-attuned to those of the public. When
Picture Post
devoted an entire issue to ‘
the Britain we hope to build
when the war is over', the magazine received 2,000 letters from readers. Churchill's indifference to the Beveridge Report, which laid the foundations of the Welfare State, on its publication in December 1942 was wholly at odds with the popular enthusiasm that greeted it. Sir William Beveridge himself frequently criticised Britain's wartime governance in print. Before his report was even written, one day when the cabinet was debating the ‘
unsatisfactory attitude of the workers
generally…Archie Sinclair suggested that what we really needed to reassure the public was a victory. Winston summed up by saying that clearly what we wanted is a victory over Beveridge.'

Early in April, Churchill's honeymoon with Roosevelt was rudely interrupted. The prime minister had planned himself to go to India, to address its defence and constitutional future, but crises elsewhere made it seem inappropriate for him to leave London and travel so far. Stafford Cripps was dispatched in his stead, with a mandate to discuss with India's nationalist leaders prospective post-war selfgovernment. Talks quickly collapsed. The Hindu-majority Indian National Congress rejected delay, and insisted upon immediate admission to political power. Cripps reported accordingly to London, and was told to come home. Churchill had expected, and indeed
wished, no other outcome. He was content that the gesture had been made, and that it was Cripps who bore the odium of failure.

On 11 April, however, Roosevelt cabled Churchill urging that Cripps should remain in India and preside over the creation of a nationalist government. The president asserted that American opinion was overwhelmingly hostile to Britain on this issue: ‘The feeling is almost universally held that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British Government to concede to the Indians the right of self-government…[if] minor concessions would be made by both sides, it seems to me that an agreement might yet be found.' Many Americans explicitly identified India's contemporary predicament with that of their own country before the Revolution of 1776. ‘You're the top/You're Mahatma Gandhi!' wrote Cole Porter euphorically, reflecting the huge enthusiasm of his countrymen for the guru of the Indian independence movement. Such sentiment was wormwood to Churchill. At the best of times he had little patience with the Indian people. His view was unchanged since he served among them as a cavalry subaltern in the 1890s. Leo Amery, the India Secretary, found Churchill ‘
a strange combination of
great and small qualities…He is really not quite normal on the subject of India.' The prime minister opposed, for instance, granting Indian commissioned officers disciplinary powers over British other ranks. He expostulated against ‘
the humiliation of being
ordered about by a brown man'.

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 US 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 a continent, dispossessing and largely exterminating its indigenous population, and which still practised racial segregation, to harangue others about the treatment of native peoples.

Here was an early, wholly unwelcome foretaste of the future. The USA, principal partner and paymaster of the alliance to defeat fascism, was bent upon exercising decisive influence on the postwar global settlement. Churchill, who thought of nothing save victory, and knew how remote this was in April 1942, found Roosevelt's heavy-handedness irksome. He lost no time in flagging both his determination to stand fast against the Indian National Congress's demands, and his sensitivity about American meddling. ‘
Anything like a serious difference
between you and me would break my heart,' he wrote to the president on the 12th, ‘and would surely deeply injure both our countries at the height of this terrible struggle.' Roosevelt's belief that the day of empires was done would achieve post-war vindication with a speed even he might have found surprising. Britain's exercise of power over the Indian people between 1939 and 1945 was clumsy and ugly, and Churchill must bear some of the blame. But the prime minister was surely right that to transfer power in the midst of a world war was unthinkable, especially when the Indian Congress's attitude to the Allied cause was equivocal.

The spring of 1942 brought some lifting of Allied spirits, especially after the US Navy inflicted heavy damage on the Japanese in the 4 May Battle of the Coral Sea. Churchill changed his mind yet again about acceding to Russian demands for recognition of their territorial claims on Poland and the Baltic states. ‘
We must remember that
this is a bad thing,' he told the cabinet. ‘We oughtn't to do it, and I shan't be sorry if we don't.' On 5 May, British forces landed in Madagascar, seeking to pre-empt a possible Japanese coup. Churchill
wrote to his son Randolph: ‘
The depression following Singapore
has been replaced by an undue optimism, which I am of course keeping in proper bounds.' He was much wounded by the criticisms that had fallen upon him since January. Before he made a national broadcast on 10 May, he drafted a passage which he subsequently—and surely wisely—omitted to deliver, but which reflected the pain he had suffered in recent months:

Everyone feels safer now
, and in consequence the weaker brethren become more vocal. Our critics are not slow to dwell upon the misfortunes and reverses which we have sustained, and I am certainly not going to pretend that there have not been many mistakes and shortcomings. In particular, I am much blamed by a group of exministers for my general conduct of the war. They would very much like to reduce my power of direction and initiative.

Though I have to strive with dictators, I am not, I am glad to say, a dictator myself. I am only your servant. I have tried to be your faithful servant but at any moment, acting through the House of Commons, you can dismiss me to private life. There is one thing, however, which I hope you will not do; I hope you will never ask me or any successor you may choose to bear the burden of responsibility in times like these without reasonable authority and the means of taking decisions.

Hugh Dalton wrote on 12 May 1942: ‘Dinner with [Tory MP] Victor Cazalet, who thinks we cannot possibly win the war with the present PM. He has, however, no good alternative.' King George VI, of all people, suggested to his prime minister at luncheon one day that the burden of also serving as defence minister was too much for him, and enquired gauchely what other aspect of public affairs he was interested in. Yet Churchill's difficulty henceforward was that the most formidable challenge to his authority came not from his British critics, but from the nation's overwhelmingly more powerful partner, the US. When Harry Hopkins addressed MPs at the House of Commons on 15 April, he sought to bolster Churchill's standing by
asserting that he was ‘the only man who really understands Roosevelt'. But the American also declared bluntly, as Harold Nicolson reported, that ‘
there are many people in the USA
who say that we are yellow and can't fight'.

Dill mused in a letter to Wavell from Washington, ‘
One trouble is that
we want everything from them from ships to razor blades and have nothing but services to give in return—and many of the services are past services.' A shrewd British official, Arthur Salter, wrote early in 1942: ‘
It must be accepted that
policy will increasingly be decided in Washington. To proceed as if it can be made in London and “put over” in Washington, or as if British policy can in the main develop independently and be only “co-ordinated” with America, is merely to kick against the pricks.' The prime minister led a nation whose role in the war seemed in those days confined to victimhood, not only at the hands of the enemy, but also at those of its mighty new ally. He yearned inexpressibly to recover the initiative on some battlefield. His generals, however, offered no prospect of offensive action before autumn. Amid the deep public disaffection of spring and summer, this seemed to Churchill an eternity away.

Churchill was reconciled to the fact that Britain's defeats by Japan were irreversible until the tide of the war turned. Henceforward, recognising American dominance of Far East strategy, he devoted much less attention to the Japanese struggle than to the war against Germany. He remained bitterly dismayed, however, by the failures of Auchinleck's forces in the Western Desert, where paper comparison of strengths, showing significant British superiority, suggested that victory should be attainable. At a meeting with his military chiefs he asserted repeatedly: ‘
I don't know what
we can do for that Army—all our efforts to help them seem to be in vain.' Back in 1941, Cadogan at the Foreign Office wrote: ‘
Our soldiers are the most
pathetic amateurs, pitted against professionals…The Germans are magnificent fighters and their Staff are veritable Masters of Warfare. Wavell and suchlike are no good against them. It's like putting me up to play Bobby Jones over 36 holes. We shall learn, but it will be a long and bloody business.' Yet a year later, there seemed no evidence that the British Army and its commanders had yet ‘learned'. Cadogan wrote after the Far East disasters: ‘
What will happen if
the Germans get a footing here? Our army is the mockery of the world!'

Britain's generals were conscious of their service's low standing, but deemed it unjust that their own prime minister should sustain a barrage of harassment, criticism and even scorn against it. Especially between 1940 and 1942, they perceived themselves obliged to conduct
campaigns with inadequate resources, in consequence of inter-war defence policies imposed by the very Conservative Party which still dominated the government—though not, of course, by Churchill himself. Generals often found themselves licking wounds inflicted by the prime minister at the United Services club in Pall Mall, and more junior ranks at its near neighbour the Army & Navy club—the ‘Rag'—which played an important social role. These were not mere corn exchanges for service gossip, but rendezvous for earnest conclaves. Amid the daily dining-room parade of red-tabbed officers in gleaming Sam Brownes there was a less privileged audience of retired warriors, prone to eavesdrop and solicit employment. These eventually caused ‘Pug' Ismay to decamp to White's club in St James's Street. Its membership was socially grand but strategically insensitive, which enabled him to eat lunches in peace. His table companions ‘had no bright ideas for winning the war, and were careful not to embarrass me by asking questions which it would have been difficult to answer'.

Until 1943, and in lesser degree thereafter, the prestige of Britain's soldiers lagged far behind that of its sailors and airmen. Churchill's intemperate goading caused much anger and distress to naval officers. He often threatened to sack dissenting or allegedly insufficiently aggressive admirals, including Sir Andrew Cunningham, Sir James Somerville of Force ‘H' and the Home Fleet's Sir John Tovey. But even when the navy suffered severe setbacks and losses, its collective honour and reputation remained unchallenged. This was not so of the army. It enjoyed a more secure social place in British national life than did its US counterpart, and attracted into its smart regiments successive generations of aristocratic younger sons. It was much less effective, however, as a military institution. For every clever officer such as Brooke, Ismay or Jacob, there were a hundred others lacking skill, energy and imagination, who nonetheless performed their duties in a cloud of cultural complacency. Their courage was seldom in doubt, but much else was.

Churchill spent much of the first half of the war searching in mounting desperation for commanders capable of winning victories
on land. Throughout his own long experience of war, he had been impressed by many heroes, but few British generals. In his 1932 work
Great Contemporaries
, he painted an unsympathetic portrait of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, principal conductor of the nation's armies through the World War I bloodbath in France and Flanders:

He presents to me
in those red years the same mental picture as a great surgeon before the days of anaesthetics, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him: sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation: entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient, the anguish of relations, or the doctrines of rival schools, the devices of quacks, or the first-fruits of new learning. He would operate without excitement, or he would depart without being affronted; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.

Churchill was determined that no British army in ‘his' war would be commanded by another such officer. Every general between 1939 and 1945 carried into battle an acute awareness of the animosity of the British people, and of their prime minister, towards the alleged ‘butchers' of 1914—18. In this baggage, indeed, may be found a source of the caution characteristic of their campaigns. Yet Britain's military limitations went much deeper than mere generalship. It might have been profitable for Churchill to divert some of the hours he devoted to scanning the countenances and records of commanders, instead to addressing the institutional culture of the British Army. John Kennedy expressed the War Office's bafflement: ‘
We manage by terrific efforts
to pile up resources at the necessary places and then the business seems to go wrong, for lack of generalship and junior leadership and bad tactics and lack of concentration of force at decisive points.'

Clausewitz laid down principles, rooted in his experience of the Napoleonic wars, when he perceived all European armies as possessing approximately the same quality of weapons, training and potential. Thus, the Prussian believed that outcomes were
determined by relative mass, and by the respective skills of rival commanders. If this was true in the early nineteenth century, it certainly was not in the Second World War, when Allied and Axis armies displayed widely differing levels of ability and commitment. Superior weapons systems deployed by one side or the other sometimes produced decisive effects. Clausewitz distinguished three elements of war—policy, strategy and tactics. Churchill addressed himself with the keenest attention to the first two, but neglected the third, or rather allowed his commanders to do so.

Britain could take pride in its distaste for militarism. But its inability to deploy effective armies until a late stage of the Second World War was a grievous handicap. Even competent British officers found it hard to extract from their forces performances good enough to beat the Germans or Japanese, who seemed to the prime minister to try much harder. Conversely, Axis troops sometimes achieved more, especially in defence, than indifferent generalship by local commanders entitled Hitler or Hirohito to expect. Rommel, who in 1941—42 became a British obsession, was a fine leader and tactician, but his neglect of logistics contributed much to his own difficulties in North Africa. His triumphs over the British reflected the institutional superiority of his little German force as much as his own inspired opportunism. The Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead, an exceptionally perceptive eye-witness, wrote from the desert in August 1942, in an assessment laid before British readers while the war was still being fought: ‘
Rommel was an abler general
than any on the British side, and for this one reason—because the German army was an abler army than the British army. Rommel was merely the expression of that abler German army.'

This seems to identify a fundamental Allied difficulty. Eighth Army's defeats in North Africa in 1941—42, almost invariably by German troops inferior in numbers and armoured strength, certainly reflected inadequate generalship. But they were also the consequence of shortcomings of method and determination. The British public was increasingly conscious of these. Glasgow secretary Pam Ashford wrote on 24 June 1942: ‘
There is a general feeling
that there is something wrong with our Forces…Mrs Muir thought it was our generals who were not equal to the German generals, they get out-manoeuvred every time.' Young laboratory technician and former soldier Edward Stebbing wrote: ‘
The feeling is growing that
we are having our present reverses in Libya and the Far East not merely because of inferiority in numbers and equipment, but also because the enemy are really too clever for us, or rather that we are too stupid for the enemy.'

Ivan
Maisky, the Russian ambassador
in London, once observed to Hugh Dalton that he found British soldiers unfailingly stiff and formal, unlike their counterparts of the other services. The army, he suggested, lacked the Royal Navy's and RAF's collective self-confidence. This was so. Gen. Pownall wrote after the Far East disasters:

Our [career officers] regard [war]
as an upsetting, rather exhausting and distinctly dangerous interlude in the happier, more comfortable and more desirable days of peace-soldiering…We need…a tougher Army, based on a tougher nation, an Army which is regarded by the people as an honourable profession to which only the best can gain admittance; one which is prepared and proud to live hard, not soft, in peace. One whose traditions are not based on purely regimental history but on the history of the whole British Army; where the competition is in efficiency, not in games or pipe-blowing and band concerts…Training must be harder, exercises must not be timed to suit meal-times. Infantry shouldn't be allowed to say that they are tired…We must cultivate mobility of mind as well as of body, i.e. imagination; and cut out the great hampering ‘tail' which holds back rather than aids the ‘teeth'.

The regimental system was sometimes an inspirational force, but often also, as was implied by Pownall's remarks, a source of parochialism, an impediment to the cohesion of larger formations. German, American and Russian professional soldiers thought in divisions; the British always of the regiment, the cherished ‘military family'. Until the end of the war, the dead hand of centralised, top-down command
methods, together with lack of a fighting doctrine common to the entire army, hampered operations in the field. Eighth Army's techniques for the recovery of disabled vehicles from the battlefield—a vital skill in maximising combat power—lagged badly behind those of the Afrika Korps. British armoured units, imbued with a cavalry ethos, remained childishly wedded to independent action. In the desert, as in the Crimea a century earlier, British cavalry charged—and were destroyed. This, when since 1940 the Germans had almost daily demonstrated the importance of coordinating tanks, anti-tank guns and infantry in close mutual support.

British unit as well as army leadership left much to be desired. On the battlefield, local elements seldom displayed initiative, especially if outflanked. Troops engaged in heavy fighting sometimes displayed resolution, but sometimes also collapsed, withdrew or surrendered more readily than their commanders thought acceptable. The sybaritic lifestyle of the vast rear headquarters nexus around Cairo shocked many visitors, especially Americans but also including British ministers Oliver Lyttelton and Harold Macmillan. Here, indeed, was a new manifestation of the ‘château generalship' condemned by critics of the British Army in the First World War, and this time focused upon Shepheard's hotel and the Gezireh club.

Sloth and corruption flourished in the workshops and bases of the rear areas, where tens of thousands of British soldiers indifferent to the progress of the war were allowed to pursue their own lazy routines, selling stores, fuel and even trucks for private profit. ‘
Petrol, food, NAAFI supplies
, vehicle engines, tools, tyres, clothing—all rich booty—were pouring into Egypt, free for all who dared,' wrote a disgusted colonel responsible for a network of ordnance depots, who was as unimpressed by the lack of ‘grip' in high places as by the systemic laziness and corruption he perceived throughout the rear areas of Middle East Command. It was a serious indictment of the army that such practices were never checked. Even at the end of 1943, Harold Macmillan complained of the then Middle East C-in-C, Sir Henry ‘Jumbo' Maitland-Wilson, that ‘
The Augean stables
are still uncleaned.' Since shipping shortages constrained all Allied
operations, waste of material and supplies transported at such cost to theatres of war was a self-inflicted handicap. The Allies provided their soldiers with amenities and comforts quite unknown to their enemies. These became an acceptable burden in the years of victory, but bore hardly upon the war effort in those of defeat.

Throughout the conflict, in Britain's media there was debate about the army's equipment deficiencies, tactics and commanders. The government vacillated about how far to allow criticism to go. In December 1941, Tom Wintringham wrote an article for
Picture Post
entitled ‘What has Happened in Libya?' He attacked the army's leadership, tanks and guns. As a result,
Picture Post
was briefly banned both from distribution in the Middle East and from British Council offices worldwide. Few people doubted that what Wintringham said was true. The difficulty was to reconcile expression of realities with the need to sustain the morale of men risking their lives on the battlefield equipped with these same inadequate weapons, and sometimes led by indifferent officers.

In March 1942 the popular columnist John Gordon delivered a withering blast against Britain's service chiefs in Beaverbrook's
Sunday Express
. They were, he said, men who had achieved high rank merely by staying on in uniform in pursuit of ‘cushy billets' after the last war ended in 1918, while their betters earned civilian livings. ‘
All this,' noted a general who read Gordon's rant, ‘has a devastating
effect on army morale. When soldiers are in a tight corner, how can they be expected to fight if they have been led to believe that their leaders are men of straw?'