Finest Years (56 page)

Churchill bitterly described the Aegean campaign as the Germans' first success since Alamein. On 21 November he told his wife Clementine in a cable from North Africa: ‘
Am still grieving
over Leros etc. It is terrible fighting with both hands tied behind one's back.' He was, of course, venting frustration that he had been unable to persuade the US to support his aspirations. In his war memoirs he described this as ‘
the most acute difference
I ever had with General
Eisenhower'. He cabled Eden from Cairo, also on 21 November, to suggest that if questions were asked in Parliament about the Aegean, the Foreign Secretary should tell the House defiantly that the hazards of the operation were foreseen from the outset, ‘
and if they were disregarded
it was because other reasons and other hopes were held to predominate over them. If we are never going to proceed on anything but certainties we must certainly face the prospect of a prolonged war.' This was lame stuff, to justify the unjustifiable.

Amazingly, at the meeting of the combined chiefs of staff in Cairo on 24 November, the prime minister renewed his pleas for an invasion of Rhodes. Marshall recalled: ‘
All the British were
against me. It got hotter and hotter. Finally Churchill grabbed his lapels…and said: “His Majesty's Government can't have its troops standing idle. Muskets must flame.” ' Marshall responded in similarly histrionic terms: ‘Not one American soldier is going to die on [that] goddam beach.' The US chiefs remained unwavering, even when Maitland-Wilson joined the meeting to press the Rhodes case. The British, having lost to the Germans, now lost to the Americans as well. In a letter to Clementine on 26 November, Churchill once more lamented the fall of Leros: ‘
I cannot pretend to have
an adequate defence of what occurred.' Indeed, he did not. The Aegean campaign represented a triumph of impulse over reason that should never have taken place. It inflicted further damage upon American trust in the prime minister's judgement and commitment to the vital objectives of the Grand Alliance. It was fortunate for British prestige and for Churchill's reputation that it unfolded at a time when successes elsewhere eclipsed public consciousness of a gratuitous humiliation.

In the eyes of the world, in the autumn of 1943 Churchill's prestige was impregnable. He stood beside Roosevelt and Stalin, the ‘Big Three', plainly destined to become victors of the greatest conflict in the history of mankind. ‘Croakers' at home had been put to flight by the battlefield successes denied to Britain between 1939 and 1942. Yet those who worked most closely with the prime minister, functionaries and service chiefs alike, were troubled by manifestations of weariness and erratic judgement. His government never lacked domestic critics. His refusal seriously to address issues of post-war reconstruction caused widespread dismay. ‘His ear is so sensitively tuned to the bugle note of history,' wrote Aneurin Bevan – for once justly – ‘
that he is often deaf
to the more raucous clamour of contemporary life.' Eden agreed: ‘
Mr Churchill did not like
to give his time to anything not exclusively concerned with the conduct of the war. This seemed to be a deep instinct in him and, even though it was part of his strength as a war leader, it could also be an embarrassment.'

It was irksome for ministers responsible for addressing vital issues concerned with Britain's future to find their leader unwilling to discuss them, or to make necessary decisions. There would be growing difficulties in reconciling the views of the government's Labour and Tory members on post-war policy. Leo Amery wrote of a later meeting: ‘
Winston handled the debate
[on the Town and Country Planning Bill] with considerable skill and impartiality, but the nearer we get to reconstruction the more difficult it will be to keep the team together.' On 29 November 1943, Bevin gained admission to the
prime minister's bedroom, where so many remarkable scenes were played out in a setting sketched by Brooke: ‘
The red and gold dressing gown
in itself was worth going miles to see, and only Winston could have thought of wearing it! He looked rather like some Chinese mandarin! The few hairs were usually ruffled on his bald head. A large cigar stuck sideways out of his face. The bed was littered with papers and despatches. Sometimes the tray with his finished breakfast was still on the bed table. The bell was continually being rung for secretaries, typists, stenographer, or his faithful valet Sawyers.'

On this occasion Bevin raised the issue of Lord Woolton's future role in post-war planning. Churchill said crossly that he was just leaving to see Stalin, was preoccupied with other things, ‘
and that it was really too much
to go into detailed questions at the moment'. Bevin was as angry as the prime minister. There was never a right time to catch Churchill, to discuss matters which did not command his interest. Yet he was so often criticised for declining seriously to address post-war issues that it is salutary to compare his attitude with that of Hitler. The Nazis inflicted crippling economic, social and military damage upon their own empire by setting about forging a new ‘Greater Germany' while the war's outcome was still unresolved. Churchill's single-minded preoccupation with achieving victory may have dismayed his colleagues, but it seems a fault on the right side.

The British people acknowledged him as the personification of their war effort. As the dominance of the US and Soviet Union grew, his rhetoric and statesmanship were the most formidable weapons his flagging nation could wield to sustain its place at the summit of the Grand Alliance. But in the last eighteen months of the war, while he received his share of the applause for Allied victories, he also suffered increasing frustrations and disappointments. At every turn, cherished projects were stillborn, favoured policies atrophied, because they could not be executed without American resources or goodwill, which were unforthcoming. This was by no means always to Britain's disadvantage. Some schemes, such as the Aegean campaign, were illconceived and unlikely to prosper. But no man less liked to be
thwarted than Churchill. Much happened, or did not happen, in the years of American ascendancy which caused the prime minister to fume at his own impotence.

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.'

In those months Churchill's mind was overwhelmingly fixed upon the Mediterranean campaign. But it would have well served the interests of the British war effort had he also addressed another important issue which he neglected. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, chose this moment to divert the bulk of his increasingly formidable force away from the Ruhr, where Lancasters and Halifaxes had been pounding factories for years, to attack Germany's capital. This was one of the major strategic errors of the RAF's war. The Berlin region was certainly industrially important, but it was far from Britain, heavily defended, and often shrouded in winter overcast. This assault continued until April 1944, at a cost in RAF losses that became prohibitive, without dealing the decisive blow Harris sought – and which he had promised the prime minister. Bomber Command lost the ‘Battle of Berlin'.

Much more significant, however, was the respite granted to the Ruhr.
Adam Tooze
's important recent research on the Nazi economy
has shown that in the autumn of 1943 the Ruhr's industries lay on the brink of collapse. If Bomber Command had continued its assault, instead of switching targets eastwards, the consequences for Hitler's war machine might have been dramatic. Allied intelligence about German production was poor. One of Harris's major mistakes as director of the bomber offensive was failure to grasp the importance of repeating blows against damaged targets. He allowed himself to be misled about his force's achievements by air photographs of devastated cities.

So, too, did the prime minister. To explain why he left the RAF to its own devices for much of the war, it is necessary to acknowledge how little reliable information was available about what bombing was, or was not, doing to Germany. The progress of Britain's armies was readily measured by following their advances or retreats on the map; that of the Royal Navy by examining statistics of sinkings. But once the Battle of Britain was won, the RAF's performance was chiefly judged by assessments, often spurious, produced by its own staff officers. Nobody, including Portal, Harris and Churchill, really knew what bombing was achieving, though soldiers and sailors believed it was much less than airmen claimed. The prime minister had a strong vested interest in thinking the best of British bombing. He trumpeted its achievements to the Americans, and even more to Stalin, to mollify their frustration about the shortcomings of Western ground operations. It would have been a major political embarrassment had evidence emerged that the strategic offensive was doing less than Harris claimed.

Thus, between 1942 and the 1944 controversy about bombing the French rail network ahead of
Overlord
, Churchill never sought an independent assessment of what Bomber Command was contributing, though it consumed around one-third of Britain's entire war effort. Harris persuaded the prime minister that his aircraft wreaked havoc, as they did. But dramatic images of flame and destruction in the Reich were unaccompanied by rigorous analysis of German industry, about which intelligence was anyway sketchy and most of the RAF's data plain wrong. Harris, like his American counterparts, was left
free to fight his battle as he himself saw fit, to pursue an obsessive attempt to prove that bombing could win the war without much input of accurate evidence or imagination. This was a serious omission on the part of the prime minister, and a missed opportunity for the Royal Air Force.

In this later period of the war, the fatigue of Churchill's people grew alongside American and Russian might. The Aegean campaign represented a minor demonstration of British vulnerability, but larger ones lay ahead. In the late autumn of 1943, four issues dominated Britain's military agenda: the campaign in Italy; the commitment to
Overlord
; residual possibilities of ambitious adventures in the Balkans; and Operation
Buccaneer
, a putative amphibious landing in Burma. On 6 November, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr warned from Moscow of Russian fears that the British were still hostile to
Overlord
. Churchill responded: ‘I will do everything in human power to animate the forward movement on which my heart is set at this moment.' But the words ‘forward movement' embraced a range of possible operations, some in the Mediterranean, of which
Overlord
was only one. Dalton wrote after a cabinet meeting: ‘
In an expansive moment
Winston told us his apprehensions about the “
Over-lord
”policy which the Americans have forced upon us, involving a dangerous and time-wasting straddle of our transport and landing craft between two objectives when we might have gone on more effectively in Italy and the Balkans.'

For some weeks Churchill had been pressing for a meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin, which he would dearly have liked to hold in London. It was unsurprising that the Russian leader rejected this notion out of hand, but the British felt snubbed when they learned that the US president was also unwilling to visit their country. Such a rendezvous would play badly with the American electorate in the forthcoming election year, claimed Roosevelt. After some dalliance, Tehran was found a mutually acceptable venue. Churchill sought an advance bilateral summit in Cairo, to which the Americans agreed. He sailed for the Mediterranean on the battlecruiser
Renown
, accom-panied by his usual entourage and service chiefs, daughter Sarah and
son Randolph. Harold Macmillan boarded the great warship at Gibraltar: ‘
We were greeted by
her owner – or so he seemed – who was finding this an agreeable method of cruising.' But Churchill was in poor health. Disembarking at Malta, he spent two days in bed at the residence of Lord Gort, the governor.

Gort was no slave to creature comforts. When Ismay visited the ailing prime minister he was greeted by pathetic solicitations for enhanced rations and a bath: ‘Do you think you could bring me a little bit of butter from that nice ship?…I only want a cupful of hot water, but I can't get it.' Churchill's bedroom overlooked a thoroughfare crowded with chattering Maltese. Moran recorded a touching moment: ‘
From the street below
came a great hubbub of voices. His brow darkened. He threw his legs out of bed, and striding across the room thrust his head through the open window, bawling: “Go away, will you? Please go away and do not make so much noise.” '

The chiefs of staff held an unsatisfactory meeting, crowded into the prime minister's bedroom. A few days earlier, John Kennedy expounded in his diary British policy for the encounter with the Americans: ‘
We have now crystallised
our ideas as to the strategy to be advocated.' The Italian campaign should be continued, renewed efforts made to bring Turkey into the war through Allied activism in the Balkans, and the US urged ‘to accept a postponement of
Overlord
'. The adjutant-general Sir Ronald Adam told a fellow officer: ‘
The PM's stock is not high
with the President at the moment, and the latter is being dragged rather unwillingly to Cairo…The PM has now gone very Mediterranean-minded, and the future of
Overlord
is again in the melting-pot.'

Churchill chafed constantly about the slow progress of Allied operations in Italy. Winter weather had reduced campaigning to a crawl, and the Germans were resisting with their usual determination. ‘
The pattern of battle
seldom varied,' wrote one veteran of the campaign, Fred Majdalany. ‘The Germans would hold a position for a time until it was seriously contested: then pull back a mile or two to the next defendable place, leaving behind a trail of blown bridges, minefields and road demolitions…The Allied armies would begin with a night
attack – ford a stream or river after dark, storm the heights on the far side, dig themselves in by dawn, and hope that by that time the Sappers, following on their heels, would have sufficiently repaired the demolitions and removed the obstacles to permit tanks to follow up…The Germans, watching these proceedings, would attempt to frustrate them by raining down artillery and mortar fire.'

The prime minister was infuriated that two British divisions had already been withdrawn from the line in advance of their return home to prepare for D-Day. In a minute to the chiefs on 20 November, he complained of Italian operations being compromised by ‘the shadow of
Overlord
'. He said that Yugoslavia's partisans, whom he was eager to support more vigorously, were containing more Axis divisions than the British and American armies. He deplored American insistence on 1 May as the date for D-Day, ‘with inflexible rigidity and without regard to the loss and injury to the Allied cause created thereby'. The consequence of this ‘fixed target date', he said, was that ‘our affairs will deteriorate in the Balkans and that the Aegean will remain firmly in German hands…for the sake of an operation fixed for May upon hypotheses that in all probability will not be realized by that date'. Churchill wanted all available resources directed first towards capturing Rome by January 1944, and second upon taking Rhodes later that month. None of this was likely to find favour with the Americans, nor deserved to.