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Thursday, August 20, 2009

Churchill's War: Only one man instinctively knew what battered Britain needed

Hastings forthcoming book, Sept '09 on a flawed Churchill winning the war.

by Max Hastings

Amid sinking morale, no one understood better than Churchill the British people's hunger for action - and glory. But his audacious schemes to deliver it led only to fiasco and defeat.
Daily Mail article

He was a titan, a warlord extraordinary and indomitable in the face of history's most ruthless tyranny. Without Winston Churchill, Britain would have sued for peace with Hitler.

Next month sees the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, and the Mail is marking the occasion with a major two-week series by Max Hastings, our finest war historian.

Today, in part three, he tells how Churchill knew that only military triumphs would lift the spirits of Blitz Britain. But first he had to convince his generals.

At lunch one day in the second year of the war, Clementine Churchill inquired of her illustrious husband: 'Winston, my darling, why don't we land a million men on the continent of Europe? I'm sure the French would rise up and help us.'

Given that the French had abjectly thrown in the towel only months before and that Allied invaders would be certain to be shot to pieces by the Germans before they even touched land, her analysis was distinctly awry.

Politely, Churchill, with unaccustomed forbearance rather than his usual irascibility, explained this to her.

But behind her seemingly na've question was a more serious one. The reverse of Dunkirk had been put to one side, the Battle of Britain had been fought and won, and the prospects of a German invasion were receding.

But what happened next? Britain was hunkering down behind her defences. What was Winston going to do?

Few experts thought Britain had any chance of victory over the Germans. The military writer Captain Basil Liddell Hart saw no prospect beyond stalemate, and thus urged a negotiated peace. The challenge facing Churchill was how to keep the fight going.

But, all around him, morale was flagging. As long as Britain appeared to face imminent catastrophe, its people displayed notable fortitude. Yet it was a striking feature of British wartime behaviour that the moment peril fractionally receded, many people allowed themselves to nurse fantasies that the war would soon be over.

A soldier recorded how many of his unit were fed up with having nothing to do.

'They wish the war would simply end, whether we win or lose.' Others wanted action. A trade unionist called on the government to prosecute the war more vigorously, to take the offensive soon, or the workers would kick the government out of office.

Churchill knew full well the difficulty he was in. The nation's city-dwellers were bearing the Blitz and the Royal Navy was sustaining the lifeline of supplies from across the Atlantic by battling wolf packs of German U-boats. This was a time to wait and see.

But something had to be done to sustain an appearance of momentum in Britain's war effort. There was a wounding joke going round, prompted by the Blitz, that all Britain's soldiers were doing was knitting socks for the civilians in the trenches.

Churchill, with his intuitive understanding of the British people, recognised the importance of military theatre, as his service chiefs often did not. The generals tended towards caution and prudence, but much of the public craved action, an outcome, some prospect beyond victimhood.

Here was one of the foremost principles of wartime leadership which Churchill got profoundly right. He perceived that there must be action, even if not always useful.

There must be successes, even if overstated or even imagined. There must be glory, even if undeserved.

'He was always looking around for "finest hours",' said Clement Attlee, the deputy prime minister, 'and if one was not immediately available, his impulse was to manufacture one.'

Knowing there was no prospect of engaging Hitler's main army, he committed himself to a strategy based on minor operations. He sent commandos to raid the Lofoten Islands in Norway, which he claimed did 'serious injury to the enemy and has given an immense amount of innocent pleasure at home'. The latter proposition was more plausible than the former.

Pantellaria, a tiny Italian island between Tunis and Sicily, also exercised a baleful fascination on him and he fantasised about an assault 'by 300 determined men, with blackened faces, knives between their teeth and revolvers under their tails'.

There was talk too of seizing Sicily, Sardinia and the Italian-held Dodecanese islands.

Few of these schemes were executed, largely because the chiefs of staff resolutely opposed operations that risked substantial losses in exchange for mere passing propaganda headlines. But Churchill did get his way with a concerted drive against Hitler's allies, the Italians, in North Africa.

This pitched British forces against one of the few major armies in the world they were capable at that time of defeating. Not all Italian generals were incompetents, not all Italian formations fought feebly. But never for a moment were Mussolini's warriors in the same class as those of Hitler.

This was essentially second-division stuff. If the British Army was incapable of playing in a great stadium against world- class opposition, it could nonetheless hearten the nation and impress the world by a demonstration in a lesser league.

North Africa, and Mussolini's pigeon-chested posturing as an Axis warlord, offered Britain's soldiers an opportunity to show their mettle.

Not that the chiefs of staff were particularly keen even on this. They were sceptical about the strategic value of any big commitment in the Middle East, win or lose. The prime minister overruled them. He believed that the embarrassment of inertia much outweighed the perils of seizing the initiative.

'If a "finest hour" is not available, his impulse is to manufacture one'

Churchill constantly incited the C-in-C of his Middle East Command, General Sir Archibald Wavell, to take the offensive against the Italians in the Western Desert. But Wavell stalled, insisting he needed more time.

When finally the general committed himself to attack, Churchill 'purred like six cats' and was 'rapturously happy', according to his chief of staff, 'Pug' Ismay.

'At long last we are going to throw off the intolerable shackles of the defensive,' Churchill proclaimed. 'Wars are won by superior willpower. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.'

Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers were sent to attack the Italian fleet and sank three battleships. Britain was striking out.

He pressed Wavell for more action and was dismayed by the man's reticence.

'General Wavell is only playing small, and is not hurling in his whole available
forces with furious energy,' he complained. He had no rapport with the introspective and taciturn Wavell, a man he thought would make 'a good chairman of a Tory association' but was capable of little else.

But then, to Churchill's surprise, Wavell delivered. In a sustained attack on the Italians in Libya, he advanced 400 miles and took 130,000 prisoners. For the British people, battered nightly by the Luftwaffe's bombardment, still fearful of invasion, the victory was precious.

The euphoria was short-lived. British successes in Africa promoted illusions that were swiftly shattered when Hitler stepped in after the Italians' humiliation. He sent an Afrika Korps under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to the desert, and a new chapter of British misfortunes opened.

Churchill always thought he knew better than his generals. He believed himself exceptionally fitted for the direction of armies, navies and air forces, even though he possessed neither military staff training nor experience of higher field command.

Blitz Britain: Churchill knew that only military triumphs would lift spirits

He addressed the conduct of military strategy with a confidence that dismayed most of the senior military figures around him. Tensions between his instincts and the judgments of Britain's professional commanders would characterise his leadership.

In his over- eagerness, he made serious mistakes, one of which had taken place at the time of the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940 and put hundreds of thousands of British lives unnecessarily at risk.

Even as British troops were fleeing home from the beaches of Dunkirk in that miraculous evacuation, the French were pleading with him to send over reinforcements.

Desperate to encourage the French government not to surrender, he felt duty-bound to agree and made wildly fanciful pledges of military aid.

Three divisions of largely Canadian troops were ordered across the Channel from England to set up a redoubt in Brittany, from which, he hoped, the French might be inspired to fight back against the Germans.

His generals were appalled by the decision, which threatened to negate the extraordinary deliverance of Dunkirk. Yet Churchill persisted in his illusion that a British foothold on the Continent could be maintained.

Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill's favourite general, was blunt with his master. 'It was impossible to make a corpse feel,' he said of the French resistance to the Germans. After a lengthy wrangle, the prime minister finally agreed that the soldiers he had just sent to France should turn round and come home.

Another major evacuation took place from ports such as Cherbourg, Brest and Saint-Nazaire - a second 'Dunkirk', as it were. It was just as disorderly an affair as the first a few weeks earlier, and there were losses, notably the sinking of the liner Lancastria at a cost of at least 3,000 lives.

But the vast majority managed to escape back across the Channel. Brooke's intervention to change Churchill's mind saved 200,000 men from death or captivity. It could, though, have cost the Allies as many soldiers as the later disasters in Greece, Crete, Singapore and Tobruk put together.

It was Churchill's extravagant sense of honour - his duty, as he saw it, to the French - that had led him into this grave blunder. It was important to him to be seen to be doing the right thing. 'The only guide to a man is his conscience,' he once said. 'The only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.

At every turn, he perceived his own words and actions through the prism of posterity. 'He nothing common did or mean,' he would often say, quoting the poet Andrew Marvell's lines on the execution of Charles I.
Seldom has a great actor on the stage of human affairs been so mindful of the verdict of future ages, even as he played out his own part and delivered his lines.

And it was not just his own honour he saw at stake. Attlee recalled how Churchill was always asking himself: 'What must Britain do now so that the verdict of history will be favourable?'

In search of that favourable verdict, a year later, he repeated his mistake of 1940 by committing British troops to the defence of Greece, which was under attack by German forces.

It was one of the most controversial decisions of his wartime premiership and was a serious misjudgment on his part. The problem with the expeditionary force that Churchill dispatched to Greece in 1941 with a cheery 'full steam ahead' was that it was not large enough to make a difference.

Experts reckoned 20 divisions would be needed to stop the Germans overrunning the country. Churchill sent four - and he took them from the desert, thus weakening the campaign there.

He was letting his heart rule his head again. He knew Greece was lost, but he felt the Greeks could not be abandoned to their fate. However, the moral benefits of attempting to aid Greece had to be measured against the cost of subjecting yet another British army to defeat.

At a war cabinet meeting in London, he rode roughshod over inconvenient material realities. He asserted, for instance: 'We should soon have strong air forces in Greece.'

In fact, the RAF had a feeble contingent of barely 100 aircraft against 1,350 planes of the Axis. Their virtual destruction within a very short space of time left the Royal Navy's Mediterranean fleet without any air cover, with disastrous results.

As for the fighting on the ground, throughout its history Britain has repeatedly sought to ignore the importance of mass on the battlefield, dispatching inadequate forces to assert moral or strategic principles.

'Winston is a great man, but he is addicted to wishful thinking'

It is what is happening in Afghanistan now. It is the course Churchill adopted in March 1941.

The outcome was as swift as it was inevitable. The Germans outflanked the Greek army and within days, 62,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops found themselves retreating southwards in disarray, harried at every turn by the Luftwaffe.

The Germans took Athens. They had secured the country with a mere 5,000 casualties. The British lost 12,000 men, 9,000 of these becoming prisoners. The rest of the expeditionary force was fortunate to escape to Crete.

Worse, even as the Germans were occupying Greece, Rommel's Afrika Korps attacked in Libya, forcing the British forces to retreat, giving up virtually all the miles of desert they had captured just two months earlier. Churchill responded with absurd tactical suggestions and impossible orders.

The fiasco was down to him. With his overpowering personality, he had bullied his commanders into agreeing to operations they suspected would be disastrous. He distrusted their innate caution, but on this occasion they were right.

Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister, sat in on a war cabinet meeting and concluded: 'W is a great man, but he is more addicted to wishful thinking every day.'

Crete was next to fall to the Germans - 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops beaten by a force less than half its size. Out at sea, the Royal Navy, without the air cover that had been sacrificed in Greece, took a pounding from the Luftwaffe and lost four cruisers and six destroyers.

Two battleships and an aircraft carrier were damaged. It was the costliest single British naval campaign of World War II.

Churchill had promised the British people, and the world, that Crete would be staunchly defended. Its loss was a heavy blow to his authority, and even more so to his faith in the fighting power of the British Army, which he felt, rightly, should have held the island.

The commander was poor. A shortage of wireless sets crippled communications.

Some soldiers fought well, but others turned into a rabble during the evacuation.

But the ultimate verdict remained inescapable - once again, an imperial army had been beaten, in a battle conducted on terms which should have favoured the defenders. The country reacted badly.
Lancashire housewife Nella Last was tuning in to one of Churchill's broadcasts at home when a young soldier who was on leave and staying with her got up and left the living room.

She remonstrated with him. 'Aren't you going to listen?' she asked. 'We believe in Churchill - one must believe in someone.' He said darkly: 'Well, not everyone is so struck by him.'

Mrs Last, like the overwhelming majority of British people, yearned to sustain her faith in the prime minister. Yet it seemed hard to do so on such an evening as this when the news was so bad. She was unhappy and frightened, and for once Churchill's voice was not helping.

'Did I sense a weariness and foggy bewilderment as to the future in Winston's speech? I got no inspiration - no little banner to carry. Instead I felt I got a glimpse of a horror and carnage that we have not yet thought of. More and more I think it is the end of the world - of the old world, anyway.'

Harold Nicolson, parliamentary under-secretary at the Ministry of Information, wrote: 'All that the country really wants is some assurance of how victory is to be achieved.

'They are bored by talks about the righteousness of our cause and our eventual triumph. What they want are facts indicating how we are to beat the Germans. I have no idea at all how we are to give them those facts.'

The prime minister was driven to offer threadbare explanations for the Mediterranean disaster. He came clean to the House of Commons. 'Defeat is bitter,' he said. 'There is no use in trying to explain defeat. The only answer to defeat is victory.

'If a government in time of war gives the impression that it cannot in the long run procure victory, who cares for explanations? It ought to go.'

Churchill a few months later claimed to regret the Greek commitment, as an error of judgment. But in the longer run of history, the nobility of his purpose in Greece commands respect.

If he had done nothing, then British passivity in the face of the destruction of Greek freedom would have created a sorry impression upon the world, and especially the United States.

Nonetheless, events in the Mediterranean dismayed every enemy of Nazism. A Bucharest Jew, Mikhail Sebastian, wrote: 'Once more Germany gives the impression of an invincible, demonic, overwhelming force.'

Those around Churchill were dismayed too. Sir Alan Brooke, the army chief, wrote later of 'the utter darkness of those calamities when no single ray of hope could pierce the depth of gloom'.

The late spring of 1941 found the British no nearer than they had been six months earlier to perceiving a path to victory. When the military attachÈ at the American embassy returned to London after a trip to Washington, he was struck by a change in mood. 'The people strike me as being much more solemn than they were a few months ago.'

The events of 1940-41 had shown that the military theatre to which Churchill was so partial had its limitations. He had a grossly exaggerated belief in the power of boldness alone to overcome material and numerical deficiencies. 'War,' he wrote, 'consists of fighting, gnawing and tearing, and the weaker or more frail gets life clawed out of him by this method. Fighting is the key to victory.'

Yet belligerence alone was not enough. British forces could defeat those of Germany only when they were substantially stronger.

And they would not - could not - be stronger until the United States joined the war. But when would that be, if ever? President Roosevelt seemed, even to his own diplomats in London, to change his mind daily.

Churchill knew where his real task now lay. At Chequers he told his guests one evening: 'Here is the hand that is going to win the war.' He extended his fingers as if displaying a poker hand: 'A Royal Flush - Great Britain, the Sea, the Air, the Middle East . . .' Then he declared his ace, ' . . . and American aid.'

Extracted from Finest Years: Churchill As Warlord published by HarperPress on September 3, 2009, at £25. To order a copy for £22.50 (inc p&p) call 0845 155 0720.