The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

  Churchill, his family, his colleagues, and his cronies were prepared to meet whatever came their way via Berlin. If Britons were not yet prepared, Churchill intended that they soon would be.

  It is impossible to exaggerate the influence of World War I on the opening battles of World War II. Afterward, Churchill wrote that it was “a joke in Britain to say that the War Office is always preparing for the last war.” That was also true of soldiers, and it was equally true of statesmen—even the Führer was preoccupied with the trench fighting of 1914–1918. Churchill was no exception. During the Great War he had learned certain precepts of modern warfare, including one of immense significance: tactical breakthroughs were impossible, because whenever a position was in peril, it could be swiftly reinforced. The continuous front had never broken. And another lesson learned: nothing in that war had happened quickly.10

  In the current war, everything was happening quickly—too quickly—and none of it good. German panzers were smashing all the old strategic and tactical paradigms. Britain’s survival depended upon finding the weaknesses in the Nazi strategy, and then exploiting them. This would be Churchill’s ultimate problem. His immediate problem was political: Conservative MPs, who held 432 of the 607 seats in the House, dominated Parliament. The source of this problem lay in the country’s last general election, five years earlier. Misled by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who had assured Parliament that England’s defenses were more than adequate, Britain had elected a House of Commons top-heavy with irreconcilable pacifists and die-hard appeasers. Since then, the country’s mood had turned 180 degrees, but in their hearts, the Conservative majority remained loyal to the memory of Baldwin and the disastrous policies of Neville Chamberlain, even though they had led England to this fearful pass.

  The new P.M., though a Tory himself, had been their gadfly throughout the 1930s, a vehement opponent of their “Splendid Isolation,” which they defined as “a plea for the detachment of Britain from Continental quarrels.” Again and again he had warned of the Nazi menace, demanding larger defense budgets. The fact that subsequent events had proven him right and them wrong did not endear him to them. An embittered R. A. (“Rab”) Butler (an appeaser and Chamberlain loyalist) called Churchill “a half-breed American” and “the greatest adventurer in modern political history.” That Friday, the tenth, Butler denounced “this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble.” Another Conservative MP wrote Stanley Baldwin—who had described Churchill as part of “the flotsam and jetsam of political drift thrown up on the beach”—that “the Tories don’t trust Winston. After the first clash of war is over it may well be that a sounder Government may emerge.” A civil servant noted, “There seems to be some inclination in Whitehall to believe that Winston will be a complete failure and that Neville will return.” The pacifist editor Max Plowman wrote: “Perhaps Winston will win the war. Perhaps he won’t. How anybody could expect him to, I don’t know, in view of his unparalleled record in losing everything he puts his hand to.”11

  The permanent secretariat at No. 10 Downing Street, who knew Churchill only as a critic of his predecessors, despaired. For as long as the private secretaries there could remember, Baldwin or Chamberlain had been in power. They were mostly Tories themselves, young gentlemen working in what had been, until then, a comfortable private home, where everything went smoothly and quietly, with messengers summoned at the tinkle of a bell, clean towels and ivory brushes in the cloakroom, and everything, as one of them put it, “reminding the inhabitants that they were working at the very heart of a great empire, in which haste was undignified and any quiver of the upper lip unacceptable.” Everything about Churchill’s reputation horrified them. Jock Colville wrote in his diary that Churchill’s rise “is a terrible risk, and I cannot help feeling that this country may be manoeuvred into the most dangerous position it has ever been in.” Later Colville recalled that “in May 1940 the mere thought of Churchill as Prime Minister sends a cold chill down the spines of the staff at No. 10 Downing Street…. Seldom can a Prime Minister have taken office with the Establishment so dubious of the choice & so prepared to have its doubts justified.” Quite apart from the fortunes of war, already darkening England’s prospects for survival, Churchill’s government was being launched in very rough political waters.12

  They swiftly calmed. “Within a fortnight,” Colville wrote, “all was changed.” Churchill arrived on the scene like a summer squall at a sailboat regatta. Whitehall was galvanized, and the office at No. 10 was pandemonium. Bells were ringing constantly, telephones of various colors were being installed in every nook at No. 10, and the new prime minister was attaching maroon labels demanding “Action This Day” or green ones saying “Report in Three Days” to an endless stream of directives that were being dictated to typists in the Cabinet Room, the P.M.’s bedroom, and even his bathroom, with replies expected within minutes. Ministers, generals, and senior civil servants appeared and departed within minutes. Working hours began early each morning and ended after midnight. “The pace became frantic,” another private secretary, John Martin, recalled. “We realized we were at war.”13

  Chamberlain had been cold and orderly; Churchill, John Martin recalled, was “a human dynamo.” In the words of Sir Ian Jacob: “His pugnacious spirit demanded constant action. The enemy must be assailed continuously: the Germans must be made to ‘bleed and burn.’ ” Churchill appointed himself his own minister of defence, thereby assuring that he himself, working through Major General Ismay, would manage the Chiefs of Staff, conducting the war day by day, even hour by hour. Yet Churchill always took care to pass his wishes to the generals through Ismay, whose “loyalty to his seniors and juniors was absolute” such that, in turn, he was never shy about telling Churchill just what the generals and their Joint Planning Staff thought of his suggestions—often, not much, which led Churchill to call the JPS “the whole machinery of negation.” Ismay’s loyalty to Churchill did not insulate him from prime ministerial outbursts any more than did the allegiance of others on the Old Man’s staff. After one contentious meeting with the Chiefs of Staff, he let loose on the “pusillanimity and negative attitude” displayed by the chiefs, “and you are one of the worst,” he declared to the indignant Ismay. After another unsatisfactory meeting with his COS and Ismay, Churchill told Colville, “I am obliged to wage modern warfare with ancient weapons.”14

  Sir Ian Jacob recalled that as deferential as Ismay was to his boss and the Chiefs of Staff, Churchill learned quickly that Ismay never allowed the usual feelings of protocol to stand in the way of speed and efficiency of work. “He was without vanity,” Jacob later recalled, “and inspired in all those who worked with him the same spirit of loyalty he in such great measure possessed.” At about 9:30 each morning (if Churchill hadn’t kept Ismay up most of the night), Ismay and Churchill met, the Old Man usually in bed, the early editions of the newspapers strewn hither and yon, the air saturated with the stale aroma of cigars. At these briefings Churchill passed along any memos he had dictated the night before. Most were brief queries or suggestions; some were strongly worded opinions. A memo signed in red ink meant Churchill wanted action. A memo signed in red ink, and affixed with the slip “Action This Day,” was the prime ministerial equivalent of a five-alarm fire.15

  As Ian Jacob later observed, Churchill was “determined to be No. 1 and to use all the political powers of a No. 1 directly.” In front of his place at the cabinet table he placed a square of cardboard bearing a quotation from Queen Victoria during the Boer War: “Please understand that we are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.”16

  The impact of all of this on his civil service secretariat was enormous. The journalist Virginia Cowles wrote: “The whole of 10 Downing Street throbbed with an energy it had not seen since the days of Lloyd George.”17

  Parliament was another matter. On his third day in office, Churchill rose in the House of Commons for the first time as prime minister and invited the members to affirm his new gov
ernment. Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary: “When Chamberlain enters the House he gets a terrific reception, and when Churchill comes in the applause is less.” The P.M.’s statement was brief but eloquent; it was then that he said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” His peroration was, as usual, a taking of the ramparts by words alone, and, as usual, it was dismissed by his detractors in the Commons and by his enemies in Berlin as typically Churchillian hyperbole, misplaced given unfolding events in France, and perhaps delusional. It was in fact a solemn oath, a statement of literal intent, which admitted to no ambiguity: “You ask, what is our aim? I answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realized; no survival for the British Empire” and all it has stood for, “no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward toward its goal.” Labour and Liberal MPs cheered. Many Tories sat silent; they were still fuming over Churchill’s ascendancy to No. 10. The historian Laurence Thompson noted: “Conservative anger that the wrong man had been shot over Norway continued for many months.”18

  The campaign for Norway had lasted two months, from early April until early June. By late May, southern and central Norway had been abandoned by British and Norwegian forces, although Narvik, Norway’s northernmost ice-free port, had been cleared of Germans by British troops, who, if reinforced, were poised to strike toward the Swedish iron-ore fields so critical to Hitler. Thus to interdict Swedish war shipments had been the objective of the March plan (code-named Wilfred) to lay mines in Norwegian waters. But Wilfred was scotched by Chamberlain and Halifax for fear of offending Norway and Sweden. Narvik (and the million tons of iron ore stored there) had been Churchill’s main objective from the start, but by early June, events in France dictated that the cause be abandoned. The evacuation did not go well. On the afternoon of the eighth of June, 1940, the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious—fleeing Norway with as many aircraft and men as she could carry—was intercepted in the Norwegian Sea by the German battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst. Glorious, and two escorting destroyers, were sunk by gunfire in just over two hours, with the loss of more than 1,500 officers and men of the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and Royal Air Force. Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty when the Norwegian adventure began, and prime minister when it ended, had already taken responsibility for the disastrous outcome. For much of the remainder of the war, the loss of Glorious and the specter of Gneisenau and Scharnhorst moved Churchill at times to dubious naval strategy. He was still coming to terms with modern naval warfare, and not entirely successfully; the success of the German battle cruisers and the vulnerability of Glorious seemed to imply that fast, heavy ships still ruled the waves. In fact, aircraft carriers, if deployed properly, posed a mortal threat to battle cruisers. Hitler, meanwhile, pocketed the Norwegian and Swedish ore, but would pay heavily for those prizes; during the next four years, more than 160,000 of his best troops remained in Norway awaiting the return of the English. Other than shooting Norwegian patriots and chasing down the occasional British commando, more than twelve priceless Wehrmacht divisions would miss the war. Churchill, in turn, became obsessed with returning to Norway, and during the next four years drove his military chiefs to distraction with what Sir Alan Brooke called “his mad Norwegian plans.” Hitler, in fact, read Churchill’s ambitions exactly.19

  Because Churchill well understood that criticism of his career centered on his history of questionable strategic judgments and his notoriety for being willing to change sides, his chief political concern was reconciliation with the House, and he made a major effort to do so. He invited Chamberlain into his government both as lord president of the council and leader of the House, and sent him a note: “No one changes houses for a month.” Beginning on May 13, his third day in office, he began working at No. 10 afternoons while his predecessor leisurely moved out upstairs, but during those early weeks, he conducted most of HMG’s business from Admiralty House, using its drawing room, with its furniture carved with dolphins (“the fish room,” he called it), for cabinet meetings. He could scarcely ignore the issues that had divided him and the appeasers for seven years, but his references to them were light, even bantering; introducing one appeaser to his wife, he beamed as he said, “Oh, yes, my dear, he has the Munich medal with bar.” He would have been happy to see the last of his foreign secretary and a major appeaser, Lord Halifax, but he kept him in the Foreign Office for the present. This put Churchill in an awkward position with those who had backed him during the lean years and now wanted all “the old crowd” thrown out, but he was adamant. “If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future,” he said, and, later, “No one had more right than I to pass a sponge across the past. I therefore resisted these disruptive tendencies.”20

  Inevitably politics determined his cabinet choices. He had to form a government with all parties represented, and he hadn’t much time. Most senior posts were filled by May 13. Clement Attlee (lord privy seal), Arthur Greenwood (cabinet minister without portfolio), and Ernest Bevin (minister of labour) came from the Labour benches. Bevin’s inclusion testified to the true nature of the coalition; he was a former teamster, the son of a domestic servant and unknown father, and most assuredly not one of Churchill’s crowd. From the Liberals, Archibald Sinclair, Churchill’s longtime friend and second in command of Churchill’s battalion in the trenches, went to the Air Ministry. From Churchill’s own camp, Sir John Anderson, a Chamberlain appointee, stayed on as Home Secretary. Leo Amery, Churchill’s old friend from Harrow (and sometimes his critic) as well as a pugnacious anti-Chamberlain rebel, was given the India secretariat. Anthony Eden went to the War Office. Only one appointment hit a snag. The problem wasn’t political. Churchill wanted Lord Beaverbrook as minister of aircraft production. The King objected. That was understandable: Beaverbrook was a highly controversial figure, objectionable in many ways. However, Churchill was going to need a lot of airplanes soon, and he knew this man had the drive and the ruthlessness to get them one way or another. Beaverbrook, he told Jock Colville, was “twenty-five percent thug, fifteen percent crook and the remainder a combination of genius and real goodness of heart.”21

  The King bowed to his judgment. Churchill did settle one score. Sir John Reith, minister of information and creator of the modern BBC, had barred him from the BBC during the 1930s and, after the war’s outbreak, intrigued against him. Churchill fired Reith on May 12 and replaced him with Alfred Duff Cooper, who had quit Chamberlain’s government in protest against the Munich Agreement. Churchill soon found new duties for the appeaser Reith, at the Transport Ministry. The War Cabinet—“the only ones,” he said, “who had the right to have their heads cut off on Tower Hill if we did not win”—comprised five men: himself, Chamberlain, Attlee, Halifax, and Greenwood.22

  In the country, where his popularity was soaring, his conciliatory manner toward those who had scorned him was remarked upon and widely praised. Few noticed how he quietly put the greatest possible distance between himself and the most objectionable of them. Sir Samuel Hoare was sent as ambassador to Spain, Lord Harlech to South Africa, Lord Swinton to the African Gold Coast, Malcolm MacDonald to Canada, and, before the year was out, Halifax to the United States. Presently he would use this very effective maneuver to banish the Duke of Windsor, a sometime admirer of the Third Reich, an admiration as narrow and shallow as he was. But Churchill could not banish their abiding doubts of his abilities. On the day Churchill told Halifax he would remain at the Foreign Office, Halifax wrote in his diary, “I have seldom met anyone with stranger gaps of knowledge, or whose mind worked in greater jerks. Will it be possible to make it work in orderly fashion?” Then Halifax answered his own question with such profound understatement as to call into question whether he truly grasped Britain’s plight: “On this much depends.”23

  At the outset, Churchill lat
er wrote, “no fresh decision was required from me or my colleagues.” Plan D was in operation, British troops had reached the Dyle River, and so, the new prime minister wrote, he did not “in the slightest degree wish to interfere with the military plans”; instead, he merely “awaited with hope the impending shock.” The War Cabinet authorized the detention of enemy aliens living in Britain, debated the wisdom and morality of bombing German territory, and approved messages from the P.M. to President Roosevelt and Mussolini. Roosevelt’s answer was cordial but disappointing. Churchill had asked for the “loan of 40 or 50 old” U.S. destroyers; the President explained that to honor the request would violate Congress’s Neutrality Acts. Il Duce, in reply to Churchill’s suggestion to stay out of the fray, was rude. Italy, he bluntly replied, was an ally of Nazi Germany.24

  The world’s eyes were on the Low Countries across the Channel. The British were following this front with special anxiety, aware of the threat to England should the Nazis establish bases that close to Britain. Enemy successes there were spectacular but not really alarming. In the Netherlands 4,000 Nazi parachutists and German infantrymen captured key bridges over the Meuse River and forced a Dutch surrender after the Luftwaffe’s terror bombing of Rotterdam, which destroyed 25,000 homes and massacred more than 1,000 (not the 30,000 claimed by the Dutch government, a figure that terrified Britons). Meantime, in Belgium, German airborne troops and specially picked paratroopers had crossed the Albert Kanaal and seized the country’s mighty Fort Eben-Emael. Nazi infantry then turned southward to take Liège from the rear.25