Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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he told Moscow at the end of June, ‘that the govern-ment’s decision to continue the war has gained overwhelming popular support, especially among the working class. The confusion and despondency which I reported in the first days of the war are gone. Churchill’s speeches have played a great part in this…Although Churchill thus far commands the support of the working class, the ruling classes are clearly split…[The faction] headed by Chamberlain is terribly fearful and willing to make peace with Germany on any acceptable terms…these elements are the real “Fifth Column” in England…The problem is that, for all Churchill’s determination to continue the war, he is afraid to split the Conservative Party and rely upon a workers’ coalition.’
Maisky’s view of political divisions in Britain was not entirely fanciful. He was wrong to ascribe leadership of a peace party to Chamberlain, but correct in asserting that some old Chamberlain supporters, as well as a few Labour MPs, remained eager to parley with the Axis. In late June, Labour MP Richard Stokes was among a faction which wanted a negotiated settlement. In a letter to Lloyd George, Stokes claimed to speak for an all-party group of thirty MPs and ten peers. On 28 July, ‘Chips’ Channon MP wrote deploring the news that Chamberlain was stricken with cancer: ‘Thus fades the last hope of peace.’ Lord Lothian, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, telephoned Halifax at about the same time, begging him to say nothing publicly that would close the door to possible negotiated terms. Harold Nicolson expressed relief that Halifax appeared unmoved by Lothian’s ‘wild’ appeal. Raymond Lee wrote after a conversation with a businessman: ‘[He] was very interesting about the City…he…confirmed my belief that the City is ready for appeasement at any time and is a little bit irritated because it has no hold at all on Churchill.’ David Kynaston, distinguished historian of the City of London, notes that Lee gave no evidence for this assertion. But Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, as late as autumn 1940 clung to hopes that Neville Chamberlain would ‘come back into his own’. City grandee Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen expressed a desire that Churchill might be supplanted by Labour’s A.V. Alexander.
Privately, the prime minister expressed concerns about the staunchness of the upper classes. Among some of Britain’s ruling caste, admiration for his dazzling oratory did not confirm his fitness for the premiership. At dinner tables in some great houses, traditional arbiters of power muttered into their soup about the perceived vulgarities, follies and egomania of the chubby cuckoo whom fate had so rashly planted in Downing Street and entrusted with Britain’s destinies. Some people in high places—senior officers as well as politicians—resented his popularity with the public. They failed to perceive how desperately the nation needed to suppose itself led by a superman. How else might its survival be secured?
The House of Commons, through the summer, was swept along by the national mood and Churchill’s stunning speeches. George Lambert, a Liberal MP since 1891, told the House at a secret session on 30 July that he had not heard such oratory since Gladstone. But old Chamberlainites continued to sulk, withholding trust as well as warmth from the prime minister. More than a few Tories still expected his administration to be short-lived, and hankered to identify a credible replacement. ‘Feeling in the Carlton Club is running high against him,’ wrote ‘Chips’ Channon on 26 September. When Chamberlain died in November, it was deemed unavoidable but regrettable that Churchill should be elected in his place as Tory leader. Not until much later in the war did Conservative MPs display towards the prime minister anything of the affection they had conferred upon his predecessor.
Clementine strongly advised him against embracing the inescapably partisan role of Tory leader. He would have enhanced his stature as national warlord by declining. But acceptance fulfilled a lifelong ambition. More important, he knew how fickle was the support of public and Parliament. He was determined to indulge no possible alternative focus of influence, far less power, such as the election of another man as Tory leader—most plausibly Anthony Eden—might create. There remained a small risk, and an intolerable one, that if Churchill refused, the Tories’ choice might fall upon Halifax. It seemed to the prime minister essential to ensure control of the largest voting bloc in the Commons. Subsequent experience suggested that he was probably right. Had he placed himself beyond party, in the dog days of 1942 he might have become dangerously vulnerable to a party revolt.
As autumn turned to winter, the toll of destruction imposed by the Luftwaffe mounted. But so too did government confidence in the spirit of the nation. Some British people seemed to derive an almost masochistic relish from their predicament. London housewife Yolande Green wrote to her mother: ‘I think it’s a good thing that we’ve suffered all the reverses we have this last year for it has shaken us all out of our smug complacency better than any pep talk by our politicians…last weekend we had a nice quiet time in spite of six [air raid] alarms—one gets so used to them they hardly disturb one nowadays.’ By October Churchill, drawing on a great cigar as he sat at the Chequers dining table in his siren suit, was able to observe with equanimity that he thought ‘this was the sort of war which would suit the English people once they got used to it. They would prefer all to be in the front line taking part in the battle of London than to look on hopelessly at mass slaughters like Passchendaele.’
Bombing created mountains of rubble, obliterated historic buildings, killed thousands of people, damaged factories and slowed production. But it became progressively apparent to Churchill and his colleagues that the industrial fabric of Britain stretched too wide to be vulnerable to destruction from the air. The blitz never came close to threatening Britain’s ability to continue the war. The aerial bombardment of cities, which a few years earlier had been perceived by many strategists as a potential war-winning weapon, now proved to have been much exaggerated in its effects, unless conducted with a weight of bombs undeliverable by the Luftwaffe—or, for years to come, by the Royal Air Force.
Millions of British people maintained existences compounded in equal parts of normality inside their own homes, and perils that might at any moment destroy everything around them which they held dear. Almost ninety years earlier, the novelist Anthony Trollope visited the United States during its Civil War. He noted the banalities of domestic life amid the struggle, and suggested with droll prescience: ‘We…soon adapt ourselves to the circumstances around us. Though three parts of London were in flames, I should no doubt expect to have my dinner served to me, if I lived in the quarter which was free from fire.’ In 1940 Lady Cynthia Colville echoed Trollope, observing at breakfast one morning that ‘If one looked on all this as ordinary civilian life it was indeed hellish, but if one thought of it as a siege then it was certainly one of the most comfortable in history.’
Churchill himself was sometimes very weary, especially after striving to arbitrate on a dozen intractable strategic issues, and enduring perceived petulance from MPs in the Commons. ‘Malaya, the Australian government’s intransigence and “nagging” in the House was more than any man could be expected to endure,’ he grumbled crossly one night to Eden. Yet his generosity of spirit seldom weakened, even towards the enemy. For all his frequent jibes at ‘the horrible Huns’, and at a moment when Britain’s very existence was threatened, he displayed no vindictiveness when discussing a post-war vision. ‘We [have] got to admit that Germany should remain in the European family,’ he observed. ‘Germany existed before the Gestapo.’
His energy seemed inexhaustible. That same evening at Chequers on which he likened himself to a swineherd, he conferred with two generals about Home Guard tasks in the event of invasion. He then studied aircraft production charts, which prompted him to marvel aloud that Beaverbrook had genius, ‘and also brutal ruthlessness’. He led his guests for a moonlit walk in the garden, then settled down to quiz an officer newly returned from Egypt about tactics in the Western