Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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this stage of the war – had led him to an understanding of the Luftwaffe’s navigational aids. Churchill, characteristically, found himself paraphrasing in his mind lines from the parodic nineteenth-century folklore collection The Ingoldsby Legends: ‘But now one Mr Jones/Comes forth and depones/That fifteen years since, he had heard certain groans.’
When Jones finished, Tizard expressed renewed scepticism. Churchill overruled him, and ordered that the young scientist should be given facilities to explore the German beams. Initially much dismayed by Jones’s revelations, he thrilled when the young ‘boffin’ told him that, once wavelengths were identified, the transmissions could be jammed. Jones himself, of course, was enchanted by the prime minister’s receptiveness: ‘Here was strength, resolution, humour, readiness to listen, to ask the searching question and, when convinced, to act.’ The beams were indeed jammed. Jones became one of the outstanding British intelligence officers of the war. Tizard’s career was, alas, virtually destroyed by his misjudgement. He was an old enemy of Lindemann, who now possessed ammunition with which to discredit him. Though a man of exceptional ability who had made a critical contribution to the creation of Britain’s radar defences, never again did Tizard wield important influence. But the ‘beams’ episode showed Churchill at his best: accessible, imaginative, penetrating, decisive, and always suggestible about technological innovation.
From the summer of 1940 onwards, decrypts of German signals assumed a steadily rising importance to the British war effort. Selected samples codenamed Boniface were delivered to Churchill daily, in a special box to which even the private secretaries were denied a key. The chiefs of staff deplored his direct access to Ultra, arguing that he often derived false impressions from raw intelligence, and misjudged the significance of enemy exchanges. Yet Ultra armed the prime minister for the direction of the war in a fashion unknown to any other national leader in history. It played a critical role in guiding Churchill’s own perceptions of strategy, both for good and ill, and fortified his confidence in overruling commanders.
The Bletchley Park codebreaking operation, still in its infancy in 1940, was the greatest British achievement of the war, and from 1941 became the cornerstone of its intelligence operations. The Secret Intelligence Service was directed by Brigadier Sir Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, a quintessential officer and gentleman, former president of ‘Pop’ and captain of the cricket XI at Eton, Life Guardsman and member of White’s club. Menzies owed his appointment to Halifax. His record was more impressive as a Whitehall intriguer than as a spymaster. SIS never gained significant ‘humint’ – agent intelligence – about the Axis high command. Before Ultra got into its stride, most of Menzies’s assessments of – for instance – German intentions in 1940–41 were wildly mistaken. He had little to do with the pre-war development of Bletchley Park, but by a skilful coup gained administrative control of its operations. He made it his business to deliver personally to the prime minister the most delectable codebreakers’ delicacies, and in consequence was always a welcome visitor at Downing Street. All national leaders gain a frisson of excitement from access to secret intelligence. This was especially and understandably so of Churchill. Menzies, purveyor of Bletchley’s golden eggs, gained exaggerated credit as owner of the goose.
Amid the great issues of national defence there were constitutional responsibilities, including regular meetings with the monarch. The King and Queen were ‘a little ruffled’, Jock Colville learned, ‘by the offhand way he treated them – says he will come at six, puts it off until 6.30 by telephone, then comes at seven’. Only a king would dare to resent his prime minister’s tardiness when Churchill had to supervise the creation of the Takoradi aircraft ferry route across Africa to Egypt, visit blitzed airfields, bully the Treasury into paying compensation for private homes destroyed by bombs, and write at length in his own hand to Neville Chamberlain, now stricken with the cancer that would kill him within three months. There were certainly difficulties, the prime minister acknowledged to his predecessor in a letter of 31 August: ‘however when all is said and done I must say I feel pretty good about this war’. But Churchill was exasperated on 10 August when Sir Stafford Cripps, the Moscow ambassador, submitted to him a paper detailing proposals on post-war reconstruction. There would come a time for such things, but it was not the summer of 1940. Only a fool could have thought otherwise.
Meanwhile, Britain was running out of money. The war was costing £55 million a week, and Washington was implacable in its demands for immediate cash payment for every ton of weapons and supplies shipped across the Atlantic. Kingsley Wood, the chancellor, suggested melting down the nation’s gold wedding rings, which would raise £20 million. The prime minister said that the Treasury should hold back from such a drastic measure, unless it became necessary to make a parade of it to shame the United States. On 16 August he visited Fighter Command’s 11 Group Operations Room, and intently watched progress of the day’s fighting on the huge plotting board. On the way back to Chequers in his car, ‘Pug’ Ismay, his chief of staff, made some remark. Churchill said: ‘Don’t speak to me. I have never been so moved.’ After a few minutes’ silence he leaned forward and said, ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’ Ismay wrote: ‘The words burned into my brain.’ That day, the Combined Intelligence Centre reported its belief that Hitler would make no decision about invasion until the outcome of the air battle became clear. On 24 August the first German bombs fell on outer London, and Fighter Command’s airfields were again badly hit.
Sunday, 1 September, yet another day when intelligence suggested that invasion might come, passed without incident. On the 3rd, for the second time the war cabinet met in the new underground Central War Room. Churchill declared it to be ‘lamentable’ that only 500,000 rifles were scheduled to be produced by British manufacturers before the end of 1941. On 5 September he used the same adjective to deplore the ‘passivity’ to which the Royal Navy seemed reduced when it declined to bombard new German batteries at Cap Gris Nez, only twenty miles from the English south coast. He told Cunningham, Mediterranean C-in-C, that the supposed vulnerability of his fleet to Italian aircraft was ‘exaggerated’. He urged the swift construction of landing craft to facilitate the raids on enemy shores he was so impatient to launch.
A wag in the War Office discovered in the Book of Job a description of a warhorse which the generals thought entirely fitting to their political master: ‘He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage…He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.’ Yet while Churchill never disdained the gestures and symbols of warriorhood, he strove also for substance. Each night, he told Colville, ‘I try myself by court martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground – anyone can go through the motions – but something really effective.’
It is hard for a historian, as it was for Churchill’s contemporaries, to conceive what it was like for a man to bear sole responsibility for preserving European civilisation. Harold Nicolson wrote of the prime minister’s remoteness from ordinary mortals. His eyes were ‘glaucous, vigilant, angry, combative, visionary and tragic…the eyes of a man who is much preoccupied and is unable to rivet his attention on minor things…But in another sense they are the eyes of a man faced by an ordeal or tragedy, and combining vision, truculence, resolution and great unhappiness.’ Throughout the war there were moments when Churchill was oppressed by loneliness, which only Beaverbrook’s company seemed able to assuage. It was by his personal choice, indeed unflagging insistence, that he delegated to others few of the responsibilities of supreme command. But the thrill and exaltation of playing out his role gave way, at times, to a despondency which required all his powers to overcome. In 1940 he sustained his spirit wonderfully well, but in the later war years he became prone to outbursts of self-pity, often accompanied by tears.
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