Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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as Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940, then as Minister of Supply in 1941. He remained thereafter one of the few civilians to whose views Churchill listened. Beaverbrook made much mischief about personalities. His contempt embraced the entire wartime Commons. ‘In truth it is only a sham of a parliament,’ he wrote to Hoare in Madrid in May 1941. ‘The Front Bench is part of the sham. There Attlee and Greenwood, a sparrow and a jackdaw, are perched on either side of the glittering bird of paradise.’ It is easy to identify issues on which Beaverbrook urged the prime minister to do the wrong thing, of which more will be said later. It is much harder to discover a case in which his imprecations were successful.
Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s familiar for a decade before the war, enjoyed ready access, much resented by rivals. But his influence was deemed greater than it was, because the garrulous Bracken boasted so much about it. Fellow ministers and officials were sometimes shocked by the promiscuity with which he addressed the prime minister as ‘Winston’. He and Beaverbrook were dubbed the ‘knights of the bath’ in recognition of the implausible rendezvous they sometimes shared with Churchill. Nonetheless, this clever, elusive Irishman, his bespectacled features surmounted by what looked like a wig of red steel wool, provided Churchill with a useful source of intelligence and gossip about domestic affairs, and served as a successful Minister of Information from July 1941 to 1945. Forty in 1941, Bracken had high intelligence and a remarkable capacity for private kindness. As a pocket press baron himself, owner of the Economist and chairman of the Financial News, he thoroughly understood the demands of the media. He frequently intervened to improve journalists’ access to the services, and to curb the prime minister’s rage when newspapers were deemed to have exceeded the bounds of reasonable criticism. He exercised no influence on strategy, and was seldom present when it was discussed.
Professor Frederick Lindemann, the prime minister’s personal scientific adviser who became Lord Cherwell in June 1941, was the most widely disliked of Churchill’s intimates. His cleverness was not in doubt, but his intellectual arrogance and taste for vendettas bred many enemies. Fifty-five in 1941, Cherwell had inherited a fortune gained from waterworks in Germany. He enjoyed flaunting his wealth before less fortunate scientific colleagues, often arriving for Oxford meetings in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. His habit of crossing roads looking straight ahead, indifferent to oncoming traffic, reflected his approach to issues of state and war. A bachelor and a vegetarian, of strongly right-wing and indeed racist convictions, he was an unselfconscious eccentric. When three of his Cabinet Office staff insisted on being transferred to the Merchant Navy to play a more active part in the war, he was alarmed by the secrets they would take with them to sea. He told them: ‘If you see that you are about to be captured, you must kill yourselves immediately!’
When the scientist’s judgement was mistaken, his obstinacy did considerable harm. He campaigned obsessively for aerial mines as a defence against air attack, wasting significant design and production effort. His advocacy of ‘area bombing’ was founded on a misreading of data, and caused him to injure the Royal Navy’s cause in the Battle of the Atlantic. Because Churchill trusted Cherwell, ‘the Prof’s’ errors were disproportionately damaging. The prime minister sometimes abused Cherwell’s statistics to advance rash theses of his own. Ian Jacob described him as a ‘licensed gadfly’. On balance, however, Cherwell’s contribution to Churchill’s governance was positive. It enabled him to support with evidence argument on a vast range of issues.
Among lesser figures, the booming Major Desmond Morton was an able intelligence officer who provided important information to Churchill in his pre-war wilderness years, and exercised considerable influence at Downing Street in 1940. Thereafter, however, Morton became marginalised, with a significant voice only on French matters. Charles Wilson, the prime minister’s physician, who became Lord Moran in 1943, inspired the post-war anger of Churchill’s staff by publishing intimate diaries of his experiences. Jock Colville wrote contemptuously of the self-regarding doctor: ‘Moran was seldom, if ever, present when history was made; but he was quite often invited to dinner afterwards.’ This was to address a gerbil with an elephant gun. Moran was never a policy-maker, nor even wielded influence. It seems enough that he served Churchill well in his medical capacity, and proved an acceptable companion on the prime minister’s historic journeys.
The ‘cronies’ were viewed by Churchill’s critics as charlatans. Yet each had real merits, above all brains. There were no fools in the prime minister’s entourage, though steadiness of judgement was less assured. None of his chosen associates was a conformist. All were loners who walked by themselves, however readily they embraced social intercourse as a tool of influence. In Whitehall and at Westminster, less gifted men, both in and out of uniform, denounced the false prophets who supposedly led the prime minister astray. Yet most of Churchill’s wilder schemes derived from his own supremely fertile imagination, not from mischief-makers in his inner circle. ‘He always retained unswerving independence of thought,’ wrote Jock Colville. ‘He approached a problem as he himself saw it and of all the men I have ever known he was the least liable to be swayed by the views of even his most intimate counsellors.’ In the same fashion, Churchill formed his own judgements of men, favourable or otherwise, and was deeply resistant to the influence of others in adjusting them.
Many misunderstandings of Churchill’s conduct of governance by his contemporaries, including some close to the seat of power, derived from the promiscuity of his conversation. Every day, whether in the company of generals, ministers, visitors or personal staff, he gave vent to impulsive and intemperate judgements on people and plans. These sometimes amused, often alarmed and appalled, even those with long experience of him. Yet his intimates, above all the officers of the war cabinet secretariat, knew that nothing Churchill said was intended as a basis for action, unless subsequently confirmed in writing. They knew that he often spoke merely as a means of helping himself to formulate ideas. It has been remarked that he had an undisciplined mind, the source of a cornucopia of ideas, some brilliant, others absurd. Ismay called him ‘a child of nature’. Yet the most notable aspect of the machine for the direction of Britain’s war was that it was better ordered than that of any other belligerent, notably including those of Germany and later the US. A cynic might suggest that Churchill created a system to protect himself from his own excesses. In remarkable degree, this was successful.
The late spring of 1941 found the British no nearer than they had been six months earlier to perceiving a path to victory. When General Raymond Lee returned to London after a trip to Washington in April, he wrote: ‘The people strike me…as being much more solemn than they were in January.’ Churchill’s enthusiasm for special forces and raiding operations derived from his awareness of the need to strive constantly to sustain a semblance of momentum. A story was told to a general by his brother, which achieved wide circulation in the War Office. As a boy, the narrator had been a guest at a game shoot at Blenheim Palace, where Churchill attempted an absurdly long shot at a hare. The boy asked him why he had wasted a cartridge. ‘Young man,’ replied Churchill blithely, ‘I wished that hare to understand it was taking part in these proceedings.’ The same spirit, addressed to matters of vastly greater import, impelled Churchill in the spring and summer of 1941. The War Office deemed it futile to hold Tobruk after Rommel had bypassed it in April. Only Churchill’s insistence prompted deployment there of an Australian garrison which was soon more numerous than the German force encircling it. But in that season of defeats, the saga of Australia’s infantrymen—the ‘diggers’—withstanding the ‘siege of Tobruk’ was elevated by British propaganda into a serviceable legend.
Military theatre had its limitations, however. Churchill 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. Manoeuvre is a mere embellishment, very agreeable when it comes off…Fighting is the key to victory.’ Yet the events of 1940-41 showed,