Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Max Hastings
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I have to declare the decision of His Majesty’s Government…Any man or state who fights on against Nazi-dom will have our aid…We shall give whatever aid we can to Russia and the Russian people…The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free people in every quarter of the globe.
Not for the first time in the war, Churchill’s words received the acclaim of most British people, while inspiring doubts among some Tory MPs and senior officers. Repugnance towards the bloodstained Soviets ran deep through the upper echelons of British society. Leo Amery, the India Secretary, recoiled from making common cause with communists. Col. John Moore-Brabazon, Minister of Aircraft Production, was rash enough publicly to assert a desire to see the Germans and Russians exterminate each other. Jock Colville described this as ‘a sentiment widely felt’. Lt.Gen. Pownall complained about the limp-wristed attitude he perceived in approaches towards the Russians by Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the diplomats of his department. ‘They think they are dealing with normal people. They are not. Russians are orientals and need treating quite differently and far more roughly. They are not Old Etonians.’ Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam observed with curious detachment: ‘I don’t suppose that the “conquest” of Russia will take very long. And what then—presumably either Hitler will make some kind of peace offer based upon our acceptance of the “New Order”, or he will try his hand at an invasion here or push on in the [Middle] Eastern theatre.’ Headlam thought Churchill’s posture tactically sensible, but like many other people found himself unable to anticipate a happy ending without the Americans. He fell back upon hopes of loftier assistance: ‘One feels that God is on our side—that’s the great thing.’
Among the British left, however, and the public at large, enthusiasm for Churchill’s declaration of support for Russia was overwhelming. Independent Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, an almost unflagging critic of Churchill’s leadership, nonetheless congratulated him on his welcome to the Russians as comrades-in-arms: ‘It was an exceedingly clever statement, a very difficult one to make, but made with great wisdom and strength.’ Surrey court shorthand-writer George King wrote: ‘I glory in all this. I have always had a soft spot for the Russians, and never blamed them for their dislike of us. We gave them good cause in the years after the last war…Thank God for Russia. They have saved us from invasion this year.’ Londoner Vere Hodgson wrote on 22 June: ‘The Russians have not been too nice to us in the past, but now we have to be friends and help one another…So we have got one fighting ally left in Europe. I felt my morale rising.’ She added in the following month, with notable sagacity: ‘Somehow I think Stalin is more a match for Hitler than any of us…he looks such an unpleasant kind of individual.’ In this she was entirely right. It was never plausible that, in order to defeat Hitler, British people would have been willing to eat other. But the Russians did so during the siege of Leningrad. Indeed, they endured many worse things between 1941 and 1945, which spared the Western Allies from choices such as the British prime minister never flinched from, but his people did.
British communists, many of whom had hitherto been indifferent to the war, now changed tune dramatically. Some, like Mrs Elizabeth Belsey, henceforward matched impassioned admiration for Mother Russia’s struggle with unremitting scorn for Britain’s leaders. She wrote to her soldier husband:
I was agreeably surprised…that Churchill received Russia so promptly into the circle of our gallant allies. I had thought he might either continue his own war, ignoring Russia’s, or clear out & let Russia hold the baby. On mature reflection, I realise that the course he took was for him the only realistic one. His speech disgusted me…The damnably sloppy picture he drew of the Russians ‘defending their soil’, and the even-atheists-pray-sometimes attitude towards Soviet women! And the way in which every single speaker on the subject makes it quite frankly clear that whereas we supported Greece for the Greeks, Norway for the Norwegians, Abyssinia for the Abyssinians and so on, we are now supporting Russia solely for ourselves…And as for Churchill’s personal record! Who’s going to remind him of his statement that if he had to choose between communism & fascism he wasn’t sure he’d choose communism?
Churchill derived Micawberish satisfaction from the fact that Hitler’s lunge eastward signified that ‘something had turned up’. But he shared with his generals a deep scepticism about Russia’s ability to withstand the Wehrmacht. A year earlier, tiny Finland had humiliated the Red Army. British national pride argued that it was wildly implausible for Russia to repulse Hitler’s legions, where the combined might of the French and British armies had failed to do so in 1940. Pownall wrote on 29 June: ‘It’s impossible to say how long Russian resistance will last—three weeks or three months?’ The best that Britain’s service chiefs sought from the new eastern front, following the launching of Barbarossa, was that the Russians might hold out until winter. British troops continued making preparations against a German descent on the home shore, partly because there was no other credible occupation for them. Pownall expressed scepticism: ‘I don’t believe Winston is at heart a believer in invasion of this country. Of course he can’t say that, because everyone would then immediately slacken off.’
Much of the British Army—a substantially larger part than that deployed in the Middle East—stayed in Britain, where it would remain for three more years, to the chagrin of the Russians and later also of the Americans. Of some twenty-five infantry and four armoured divisions at home, only perhaps ten were battleworthy. There was no purpose in shipping formations to the Middle East, or for that matter to Britain’s Eastern Empire, any faster than they could be equipped with tanks, anti-tank guns, automatic weapons and artillery. All these things remained in short supply. It was considered necessary to sustain production of weapons and aircraft known to be obsolete, because introduction of new designs imposed delays that seemed unacceptable. A host of ill-equipped, half-trained, profoundly bored British soldiers lingered in their own country month after month, and eventually year after year, while much smaller numbers of their comrades fought abroad. Alan Brooke, C-in-C Home Forces, complained how difficult it was to hone units to fighting pitch when they lacked the stimulus of action.
Moreover, the overwhelming bulk of the RAF’s fighter strength continued to be deployed in southern England, conducting ‘sweeps’ over northern France which were deemed morally important, but cost the RAF greater losses than the Luftwaffe—411 pilots between June and September, for 103 Luftwaffe aircraft shot down (though the RAF claimed 731). Generals and admirals chafed at this use of air resources. Fighters were of priceless value in the Middle East and over the Mediterranean. When Admiral Cunningham was told that he was to become a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath, he responded tartly that he would rather be given three squadrons of Hurricanes. ‘Why the authorities at home apparently could not see the danger of our situation in the Mediterranean without adequate air support passed my comprehension,’ he wrote. There was a further difficulty, which would handicap the RAF for the rest of the war: the Spitfire and Hurricane were superb interceptors, ideal for home defence, but had very limited fuel endurance. The further afield the war extended, the more severely Britain suffered from the absence of long-range fighters. The Royal Navy lacked good carrier aircraft until American types became available in 1944-45. The large home deployment of fighters was justified by the chiefs of staff on the grounds that if Hitler launched an invasion, the RAF would play the critical role in national defence. It nonetheless seems an important strategic mistake that throughout 1941-42 Britain retained extravagantly large air forces on domestic airfields—seventy-five squadrons of day fighters against thirty-four in the whole of the Middle East in late 1941—even after most of the Luftwaffe had departed for the eastern front. Britain remained heavily over-insured against invasion well