Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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and patricians accustomed to regard servants as mere extensions of the furniture.
He inspired more equivocal sentiments in his ministers and service chiefs. They were obliged to endure his monologues, and sometimes rambling reminiscences, when it would have been more useful for him to heed their reports and – so they thought – their opinions. ‘Winston feasts on the sound of his adjectives,’ wrote Charles Wilson, ‘he likes to use four or five words all with the same meaning as an old man shows you his orchids; not to show them off, but just because he loves them. The people in his stories do not come to life; they are interred in a great sepulchre of words…So it happens that his audience, tired by the long day, only wait for the chance to slip off to bed, leaving Winston still talking to those who have hesitated to get up and go.’
His changeability, sometimes on matters of the utmost gravity, exasperated those who themselves bore large responsibilities. Ian Jacob observed: ‘No one could predict what his mind would be on any problem.’ It was galling for an exhausted general or administrator, denied the prime minister’s powers of choosing his hours, to hear that Churchill could not discuss vital matters in the afternoon, because a note bearing the sacrosanct word ‘Resting’ was pinned to his bedroom door. Then the hapless officer or minister found himself summoned to do business at midnight or later.
The most damaging criticism of Churchill made by important people was that he was intolerant of evidence unless it conformed to his own instinct, and was sometimes wilfully irrational. Displays of supreme wisdom were interspersed with outbursts of childish petulance. Yet when the arguments were over, the shouting done, on important matters he usually deferred to reason. In much the same way, subordinates exasperated by his excesses in ‘normal’ times – insofar as war admitted any – marvelled at the manner in which the prime minister rose to crisis. Bad news brought out the best in him. Disasters inspired responses which compelled recognition of his greatness. Few colleagues doubted his genius, and all admired his unswerving commitment to waging war. John Martin wrote of ‘the ferment of ideas, the persistence in flogging proposals, the goading of commanders to attack – these were all expressions of that blazing, explosive energy without which the vast machine, civilian as well as military, could not have been moved forward so steadily or steered through so many setbacks and difficulties’. Churchill conducted the affairs of his nation with a self-belief which was sometimes misplaced, but which offered an elixir of hope to those chronically troubled by rational fears. Amid Britain’s sea of troubles, he represented a beacon of warmth and humanity, as well as of will and supreme courage, for which most of even the most exalted and sceptical of his fellow countrymen acknowledged gratitude.
A widespread illusion persists that in 1940 Churchill broadcast constantly to the British people. In reality he delivered only seven speeches through the BBC between May and December, roughly one a month. But the impact of these was enormous upon a nation which in those days clung to its radio receivers as storm-bound sailors once lashed themselves to the masts of their ships. There were no advancing British armies to follow on the map, no fleets reporting victories. Instead the prime minister’s rolling periods, his invincible certainties in a world of raving tyrants, anchored his people and their island.
Few interventions of his own that summer were more significant than that which he made on 23 August, at the height of the perceived peril of German invasion. Britain’s threadbare defences were further denuded by the dispatch to Gen. Sir Archibald Wavell’s Middle East Command of 154 priceless tanks, to resist the anticipated Italian assault on Egypt. Besides the armour, forty-eight twenty-five-pounder guns, twenty Bofors, 500 Brens and 250 anti-tank rifles were sent. This was one of Churchill’s most difficult decisions of the war. Eden and Dill deserve credit for urging it, at first in the face of the prime minister’s doubts. It is impossible that they could have made such a commitment without a profound, almost perverse, belief that Hitler would not risk invasion – and perhaps also a recognition that Britain’s defence rested overwhelmingly on the Royal Navy and RAF rather than the army.
It is not surprising that an ignorant civilian such as ‘Chips’ Channon should have written on 16 September of expecting ‘almost certain invasion’. It is more remarkable that Britain’s military commanders and intelligence chiefs shared this fear, supposing that a massive German descent might take place without warning. Amphibious operations, opposed landings where port facilities are unavailable, do not require mere mechanical transfers of troops from sea to shore. They rank among the most difficult and complex of all operations of war. Two years of planning and preparation were needed in advance of the return to France of Allied armies in June 1944. It is true that in the summer of 1940 Britain lay almost naked, while four years later Hitler’s Atlantic Wall was formidably fortified and garrisoned. In 1940 Britain lacked the deep penetration of German wireless traffic which was attained later in the war, so that the chiefs of staff had only the patchiest picture of the Wehrmacht’s movements on the Continent.
Nonetheless it remains extraordinary that, at every suitable tide until late autumn, Britain’s commanders feared that a German army might arrive on the southern or eastern coast. The navy warned – though the prime minister disbelieved them – that the Germans might achieve a surprise landing of 100,000 men. The most significant enemy preparation for invasion was the assembly of 1,918 barges on the Dutch coast. Hitler’s military planners envisaged putting ashore a first wave of three airborne regiments, nine divisions – and 125,000 horses
– between Ramsgate and Lyme Bay, a commitment for which available shipping was wholly inadequate. Another serious problem, never resolved, was that the Wehrmacht’s desired initial dawn landing required an overnight Channel passage. It would be almost impossible to embark troops and concentrate barges without attracting British notice. The German fleet, never strong, had been gravely weakened by its losses in the Norwegian campaign. The defenders would be granted at least six hours of darkness in which to engage German invasion convoys, free from Luftwaffe intervention. The Royal Navy deployed around twenty destroyers at Harwich, and a similar force at Portsmouth, together with powerful cruiser elements. Channel invasion convoys would have suffered shocking, probably fatal losses. Once daylight came, German pilots had shown themselves much more skilful than those of the RAF and Fleet Air Arm in delivering attacks on shipping. The defending warships would have been badly battered. But for a German amphibious armada, the risk of destruction was enormous. The Royal Navy, outnumbering the German fleet ten to one, provided that decisive deterrent to Sealion.
The British, however, with the almost sole exception of the prime minister, perceived all the perils on their own side. Dill, the CIGS, seemed ‘like all the other soldiers…very worried and anxious about the invasion, feeling that the troops are not trained and may not be steady’. Brooke, as C-in-C Home Forces, wrote on 2 July of ‘the nakedness of our defences’. The Royal Navy was apprehensive that if German landings began, it might not receive adequate support from the RAF. Admiral Sir Ernle Drax, C-in-C Nore, expressed himself ‘not satisfied that…the co-operation of our fighters was assured’.
The service chiefs were justified in fearing the outcome if German forces secured a beachhead. Alan Brooke believed, probably rightly, that if invaders got ashore, Churchill would seek to take personal command of the ground battle – with disastrous consequences. In the absence of a landing, of course, the prime minister was able to perform his extraordinary moral function. The British generals’ fears of an unheralded assault reflected the trauma which defeat in France had inflicted upon them. It distorted their judgement about the limits of the possible, even for Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Churchill, by contrast, was always doubtful about whether the enemy would come. He grasped the key issue: that invasion would represent a far greater gamble than Germany’s 10 May attack in the West. Operation Sealion could not partially succeed. It must achieve fulfilment, or fail absolutely. Given Hitler’s mastery of the Continent,