Finest Years (66 page)

Some illusions persist that the wartime Allies missed opportunities to promote the cause of ‘good Germans' who opposed Hitler, rejecting approaches from such men as Adam von Trott. Yet the British seemed right, first, to assume that any dalliance of this kind must leak, fuelling Soviet paranoia about a negotiated peace; and second, in believing that the anti-Hitler faction was both weak and flawed. Michael Howard has written: ‘
We know that such
“right-minded people” did exist; but the remarkable thing is that…there should have been so few of them, and that their influence should have been so slight.' Howard notes that most of the July 1944 bomb
plotters were fervent nationalists, who cherished grotesquely extravagant ambitions for their country's post-war polity.

If Hitler could be deposed, his domestic foes hoped to persuade the Allies to recognise Germany's 1914 frontiers, and even to deny France the return of Alsace-Lorraine, annexed from her in 1870 and again in 1940. Most of the bomb plotters shared stubbornly right-wing notions about Germany's future governance. Claus von Stauffenberg in May 1944 explicitly embraced a vision based on preserving Germany's union with Austria, retaining the Czech Sudetenland and offering ‘autonomy' to Alsace-Lorraine. The principal objective of most of those who joined the conspiracy against Hitler, as the Foreign Office perceived at the time, was to enlist Anglo-American aid against the Russians. It is easy to understand why post-war Germans sought to canonise the July bomb plotters. But it would have represented folly for Churchill's government to dally with them, and there is no cause for historians to concede them exaggerated respect. A large majority of the 20 July conspirators turned against Hitler not because he was indescribably wicked, but because they perceived that he was leading Germany to defeat.

The historian John Wheeler-Bennett, a friend of Eden who knew Germany intimately, compiled a memorandum for the Foreign Office about the plot. He wrote on 25 July, suggesting that its failure was a blessing. He believed that if Hitler had been killed and ‘Old Army' German generals had then approached the Western Allies seeking to negotiate terms short of unconditional surrender, major embarrassments would have ensued. Oliver Harvey went further, writing in his diary: ‘
I despise the generals
even more than Hitler who deserves better treatment from them.' This surely carried British notions about soldierly duty to perverse extremes. Harvey claimed, after a conversation with Sir Frederick Morgan, that the general agreed ‘
about the necessity of
rooting out the German General Staff and thankful Hitler wasn't bumped off the other day'. Wheeler-Bennett wrote likewise, that ‘
The present purge is
presumably removing from the scene numerous individuals who might have caused us difficulty, not only had the plot succeeded, but also after the defeat of a Nazi Germany.'
This was an extravagantly brutal verdict. But it is certainly true that British and American public opinion might have been plunged into confusion, and Western relations with the Soviets into crisis, if an opportunity had been suddenly presented to end the carnage in Europe through a negotiation with allegedly ‘good' Germans.

That July, in the face of new intelligence reports about the operations of the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Churchill wrote to Eden in the most explicit terms he used during the war about the nature of Nazi action against the Jews: ‘There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world…It is clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death.' Yet once again the British dismissed the notion of bombing the death camp's facilities or transport links, partly on the grounds of inefficacy—that any damage could be readily repaired—and partly on the spurious grounds that deportations of Jews from Hungary, reports of which prompted Churchill's note, appeared to have ceased.

Even at this stage, the scale of Nazi killings eluded British policy-makers. An intelligence officer privy to Ultra decrypts who lectured to senior soldiers in 1944 about Germany's machinery of repression spoke in his briefings of killings in thousands, not millions, and did not explicitly mention Jews. Likewise the November 1943 joint Allied Moscow Declaration, warning of retribution against Germans who participated in ‘wholesale shooting of Italian officers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages or of Cretan peasants, or who have shared in the slaughter inflicted on the people of Poland or in territories of the Soviet Union', omitted Jews.

There seems little doubt that British and American intelligence possessed enough information by late 1944, from Ultra and escaped Auschwitz prisoners, to deduce that something uniquely terrible was being done to the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, if the evidence had been appropriately highlighted. The failure of either government to act has incurred brutal strictures from critics. Yet Churchill, Roosevelt
and their principal subordinates seem to deserve some sympathy for their inadequate responses. First, an instinctive reluctance persisted, both in London and Washington, to conceive a European society, even one ruled by the Nazis, capable of killings on the titanic scale exposed in 1945-46. Second, evidence about the massacre of Jews was still perceived in the context of other known mass killings of Russians, Poles, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Italians and other subject races. The British, especially, were wary of repeating the mistakes of the First World War, when reports of German atrocities were wilfully exaggerated for propaganda purposes. Such exploitation roused post-war anger and cynicism among British people towards their own government.

Finally, given the known limitations of precision bombing even where good target intelligence was available, the case for specific action against the Nazi death machine seemed overborne by the overarching argument for hastening military victory to end the sufferings of all Europe's oppressed peoples. The airmen could be sure that any bombing of the camps would kill many prisoners. It is the privilege of posterity to recognise that this would have been a price worth paying. In the full tilt of war, to borrow Churchill's phrase from a different context, it is possible to understand why the British and Americans failed to act with the energy and commitment which hindsight shows to have been appropriate. Most measured historians of the period recognise a real doubt about whether any plausible air force action would substantially have impeded the operations of the Nazi death machine.

Again and again that summer, Churchill found his aspirations thwarted. He was eager that Britain should have the honour of hosting a summit, after he himself had travelled so far and often to dance attendance on Roosevelt and Stalin. He now proposed as a venue Invergordon in Scotland, arguing that each leader could arrive there by battleship. The King would be able to entertain the ‘Big Three' at Balmoral. Stalin flatly refused to leave Russia. Even when Roosevelt agreed to a bilateral meeting, and after briefly professing
enthusiasm for Invergordon, to Churchill's chagrin he finally decided that the conference should not take place in Britain. The president was unwilling, especially in a US election year, to be seen as the guest of his nation's subordinate partner. A second visit to Quebec was scheduled for September.

Churchill's lonely struggle to save fragments of Polish freedom became ever less rewarding. He allowed himself a surge of hope when Stalin cabled on 23 July, endorsing a ‘unification of Poles friendly disposed towards Great Britain, the USSR and the United States'. Interpreting this—which Eden did not—as a sign that Stalin was willing to accommodate the ‘London Poles' in a new regime, Churchill told Roosevelt: ‘
This seems to be the best
ever received from Uncle Joe.' But the significance soon became clear of Stalin's recognition of Moscow's puppet Polish National Committee, dubbed in London ‘the Lublin Poles'. Stalin was bent on a communist-dominant Polish government, with only token representation of other interests. Under extreme pressure from Churchill, the Polish exile prime minister in London, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, agreed to fly to Moscow. But Mikolajczyk rightly anticipated that obeisance to Stalin would serve no purpose either for himself or for his country's freedom.

On 31 July, with Soviet forces only fifteen miles away across the Vistula, the Polish ‘Home Army' in Warsaw launched its uprising. Through the agonising weeks that followed, Churchill strove to gain access to Russian landing grounds, to dispatch arms to the Poles. The most earnest and humble pleas to Stalin—and in some of Churchill's cables he was indeed reduced to begging—failed to move Moscow. The Russian leader believed that Churchill had deliberately provoked the Warsaw Uprising to secure for the ‘London Poles' the governance of their country. Moscow was determined to prevent any such outcome. The prime minister had certainly since 1940 promoted an ideal of popular revolt, and some SOE officers had encouraged Polish delusions. But he was in no way complicit in the launch of the Warsaw Rising, an explicitly local initiative. Though he sustained his campaign on behalf of Polish freedom for many months to come, he knew how great were the odds against success. If the Americans
were not indifferent, they seemed so both in London and in Moscow. The Red Army stood deep inside Poland, while Eisenhower's forces were far, far away.

Even more serious, from Churchill's viewpoint, was the frustration of his strategic wishes. He made a last, vain attempt to persuade the Americans against a campaign in Burma. Throughout the war, while Churchill was eager that British forces should be seen to regain Britain's colonies in the Far East, his interest in the military means by which this should be accomplished was sporadic and unconvincing. Most of his attention, and almost all his heart, focused upon the German war, even as Slim's imperial army prepared to advance towards the Chindwin frontier of Burma.

Until almost the last day before the landing in southern France on 15 August, Churchill argued doggedly against ‘the
Anvil
abortion', pleading for alternative assaults on the Atlantic coast of France, or in north-east Italy. ‘I am grieved to find that even splendid victories and widening opportunities do not bring us together on strategy,' he wrote to Hopkins in Washington on 6 August. The British failed to perceive that the arguments for getting into southern France were less persuasive in rousing US determination than those for getting every possible man out of Italy.

As Churchill railed in the face of so many difficulties and disappointments, he adopted a familiar panacea: personal activity. In a fashion imbued with pathos, because it marked his transition from prime mover to spectator, he became for some weeks a battlefield tourist. During his travels he conducted some business. But his journeys represented a substitute for implementing policy, rather than a means of doing so. On 20 July he flew to Normandy, where

1.4 million Allied troops were now deployed. On 5 August he again toured the battle zone and met commanders. Both trips delighted him, for he savoured proximity to the music of gunfire as much as ever. He underrated the scale and speed of the developing German collapse in France, and the new strategic opportunities which would follow. He expected months more fighting before Allied troops reached the borders of Germany. Had he understood that dramatic
change in the circumstances of Eisenhower's armies was imminent, with the collapse of German resistance in France, he would probably have remained at hand, to dispatch a flood of imprecatory messages to Roosevelt, Marshall, Eisenhower and Brooke. As it was, however, he departed for the Mediterranean.

On 11 August he landed in Algiers. Summoning De Gaulle for a meeting, he was infuriated when the Frenchman, seething with indignation about the Allies' refusal to grant him authority in his own country, declined to attend. Randolph Churchill, recuperating after a plane crash in Yugoslavia, met his father and heard a stormy denunciation of De Gaulle. Afterwards, in an unusually statesman-like intervention, Randolph urged pity: ‘
After all, he is a
frustrated man representing a defeated country. You as the unchallenged leader of England and the main architect of victory could well afford to be magnanimous.' Churchill wrote to Clementine: ‘
I feel that de Gaulle's France
will be a France more hostile to England than any since Fashoda [in 1898].'

Nonetheless, under relentless pressure from Eden, Churchill supported De Gaulle's cause against the Americans. Before D-Day, Admiral Leahy, Roosevelt's chief of staff who had served as US ambassador to Vichy, told the president that the Allies would find Marshal Pétain their most appropriate French negotiating partner, because of his popularity with his own people. In the weeks following the invasion this delusion was confounded by Resistance fighters who seized power in liberated areas, and displayed overwhelming support for De Gaulle. The men of Vichy were consigned by their countrymen to prison or oblivion. Late in August the general was allowed to return to France, where he became the country's
de facto
ruler. Two months later, albeit with the deepest reluctance, Washington recognised his leadership of a French provisional government.

On 12 August Churchill flew to Italy, where he installed himself in Maitland-Wilson's residence, the Villa Rivalta overlooking the Bay of Naples. He remained in Italy for more than two weeks, bathing several times in the sea, much to his pleasure, and conducting meetings. He continued to fume about the diversion of forces to
France. In those days of mid-August, 100,000 men were being transferred in landing ships from Italy. Offshore in a launch one sunny morning, Churchill found himself hailed by thousands of troops lining the rails of vessels on passage to the Côte d'Azur. He acknowledged their cheers, but wrote in his memoirs: ‘
They did not know
that if I had had my way, they would have been sailing in a different direction.' As for the Italian people, after years of proclaiming the need for firmness, if not harshness, towards Mussolini's nation, the sight of smiling Italian faces now softened his heart, rekindling his lifelong instinct towards mercy.