Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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earnest of British anxiety about Franco’s neutrality.
On 20 May, Germans began to appear in Vichy French Syria, causing Churchill to decree, once more against Wavell’s opposition: ‘We must go in.’ British, Australian and Free French troops were soon fighting a bitter little campaign against the Vichyites, who resisted. Churchill observed crossly that it was a pity they had not displayed the same determination against the Germans in 1940. Pétain’s troops were finally overcome. Britain’s seizure of Iraq and Syria attracted little popular enthusiasm at the time, and has not attracted much interest or applause from historians since. Yet these two initiatives reflected Churchill’s boldness at its best. British actions removed dangerous instability on Wavell’s eastern flank. The diversion of troops caused much hand-wringing in Cairo, but represented strategic wisdom. If the Germans had been successful in their tentative efforts to rouse the Arab world against Britain, its predicament in the Middle East would have worsened dramatically. The most authoritative modern German historians of the war, the authors of the monumental Potsdam Institute series, consider British successes in Syria, Iraq and Abyssinia more important to the 1941 strategic pattern than defeat on Crete. Churchill, they say, ‘was right when he asserted that on the whole, the situation in the Mediterranean and the Middle East was far more favourable to Britain than it had been a year earlier’. Yet it did not seem so at the time to the sorely tried British people.
On 23 May, a Friday, the battlecruiser Hood blew up during a brief engagement with the Bismarck. The days that followed, with the German battleship loose in the North Atlantic, were terrible ones for the prime minister. His despondency lifted only on the 27th, when as he addressed the House of Commons he received news that the Bismarck was sunk. Atlantic convoy losses remained appalling. American assistance fell far short of British hopes, and Churchill not infrequently vented his bitterness at the ruthlessness of the financial terms extracted by Washington. ‘As far as I can make out,’ he wrote to chancellor Kingsley Wood, ‘we are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone.’
The Middle East remained Britain’s chief battleground. Despite success in securing the eastern flank in Syria and seizing control of Iraq, Churchill’s confidence in his C-in-C, never high, was ebbing fast. ‘He said some very harsh things about Wavell, whose excessive caution and inclination to pessimism he finds very antipathetic.’ For a few weeks, confidence flickered about a fresh offensive, Battleaxe. Admiral Cunningham was told that if this succeeded, and Wavell’s forces reached Tripoli, the next step would be a landing in Sicily. Such fantasies were swiftly crushed. On 17 June it was learned in London that Battleaxe had failed, with the loss of a hundred priceless tanks. Churchill was exasperated to hear that Wavell wanted to evacuate Tobruk. This was militarily rational, for the port’s logistic value was small, yet seemed politically intolerable. In April Churchill had described Wavell in a broadcast as ‘that fine commander whom we cheered in good days and will back through bad’. Now, on 20 June, he sacked the Middle East C-in-C, exchanging him with Sir Claude Auchinleck, C-in-C India, whose seizure of Iraq had been executed with impressive efficiency. Wavell was given the Delhi command only because Churchill feared that to consign him to oblivion would play poorly with the public, to whom the general had been represented as a hero.
Clementine Churchill once wrote contemptuously to her husband about the deposed Middle East C-in-C: ‘I understand he has a great deal of personal charm. This is pleasant in civilized times but not much use in total War.’ Too many of the British Army’s senior officers were agreeable men who lacked the killer instinct indispensable to victory. Wavell’s best biographer, Ronald Lewin, has observed that he seemed destined for greatness in any field save that of high command in battle. It might more brutally be suggested that there was less to Wavell than his enigmatic persona led admirers to suppose. He once said to Pownall: ‘My trouble is that I am not really interested in war.’ This was a surprisingly common limitation among Britain’s senior soldiers. It goes far to explain why Winston Churchill was much better suited to his own role than were some of his generals to theirs.
2 The War Machine
It is sometimes suggested that in the Second World War there was none of the mistrust, and indeed hostility, between generals and politicians, ‘brass’ and ‘frocks’, which characterised the British high command in the 1914-18 conflict. This is untrue. Ironside, when he was CIGS in 1939, remarked contemptuously to a staff officer as he set out for a war cabinet meeting: ‘Now I’m going to waste a morning educating these old gentlemen on their job.’ Though Churchill was not then prime minister, he was categorised among the despised ‘old gentlemen’.
Lt.Gen. Henry Pownall wrote of Churchill’s cabinet: ‘They are a pretty fair lot of gangsters some of them—Bevin, Morrison and above all Beaverbrook who has got one of the nastiest faces I ever saw on any man.’ John Kennedy wrote later in the war: ‘It is a bad feature of the present situation, that there is such a rift between the politicians and the services. Winston certainly does not keep his team pulling happily in harness together. It is very wrong of him to keep abusing the services—the cry is taken up by other politicians & it is bad for the Service advisers to be made to feel ashamed of their uniforms.’
Yet the evidence of events suggests that the prime minister’s criticisms of his soldiers were well merited. The shortcomings of the wartime British Army form the theme of a later chapter. By a notable irony, Churchill’s machinery for directing the war effort was much more impressive than the means for implementing its decisions in the field. The war cabinet was Britain’s principal policy-making body, regularly attended by the chiefs of staff as well as by its own eight members—in 1941 Churchill, Attlee, Eden, Bevin, Wood, Beaverbrook, Greenwood and Sir John Anderson. Some 400 committees and sub-committees, of varying membership and importance, devolved from it. Service business was addressed by the chiefs at their own gatherings, usually in Churchill’s absence. Of 391 chiefs of staff meetings in 1941, Churchill presided at only twenty-three, whereas he chaired ninety-seven of 111 meetings of the war cabinet. He also conducted sixty out of sixty-nine meetings of its defence committee’s operational group, and twelve out of thirteen meetings of its supply group.
Formalities were always maintained, with the prime minister addressing ministers and commanders by their titles rather than names. On Churchill’s bad days, his subordinates were appalled by his intemperance and irrationality. But on his good ones—and what an astonishing number of these there were!—his deportment went far to render a war of national survival endurable for those conducting it. ‘When he is in the right mood, no entertainment can surpass a meeting with him,’ wrote a general. ‘The other day he presided over a meeting on supply of equipment to allies and possible allies. He bustled in and said “well, I suppose it is the old story—too many little pigs and not enough teats on the old sow.”’
The chiefs of staff met every day save Sunday at 10.30 a.m., in a room beneath the Home Office connected to the Cabinet War Rooms. Sessions customarily continued until 1 p.m. In the afternoons, chiefs worked in their own offices, to which they returned after dinner unless a further evening meeting had been summoned, as happened at moments of crisis, of which there were many. Every Monday evening the chiefs attended war cabinet. The 1914-18 conflict precipitated the beginnings of a historic shift in the balance of decision-making from commanders in the field towards the prime minister and his service chiefs in London. In the Second World War this became much more pronounced. Generals at the head of armies, admirals at sea, remained responsible for winning battles. But modern communications empowered those at the summit of national affairs to influence the conduct of operations in remote theatres,