Winston Churchill's War Leadership (2 page)

Also in the daily budget of locked boxes—in addition to the buff-coloured boxes containing Secret Intelligence material and material from the Joint Intelligence Committee, to which Churchill alone had the key—were files on parliamentary questions that Churchill had to answer, letters for signature, a folder marked “To See” with items that his Private Office thought he would be interested in, a special file from General Ismay with reports from the Chiefs of Staff, and a folder of documents that Churchill himself had marked “R Week-end”: things he wanted to be returned to him at the weekend when he would have more time to study them.

Churchill worked through his boxes every morning, before he got out of bed; every evening, often until late into the night if the material in the boxes made such working necessary; and throughout the weekends— generating a stream of Minutes of his own, seeking information. Often he would mark on a document the instruction “Ismay to explain” or “Prof Lindemann to advise” on some statistic; or, on one occasion at least, the single word “elucidate.”

The pressure of work on any British Prime Minister, let alone a wartime Prime Minister, is formidable. (I once spent an evening watching John Major working his way through his boxes in the flat at Downing Street. As soon as he had finished going through one box, with all its challenges and burdens, another was brought up to him, and so on, from early evening until midnight.) While Churchill’s daily life had to centre upon the demands of the war, he was also conscious of the need to lead as normal and as sustaining a life as possible. One rule he insisted upon from the outset of his premiership: when he had gone to bed at night he was not to be woken up by any news, however bad, except the invasion of Britain.

His pattern of daily life was as fixed as the circumstances of war allowed. Each morning he stayed in bed as long as possible, working and dictating from a wooden tray that had been specially designed to hold his books and papers. He got up only when he was needed at a meeting—usually the Chiefs of Staff in mid-morning or the War Cabinet at noon. He saw no point in rising if there was no need to do so. His Private Office and his typists were used to him working in bed and adjusted their activities accordingly: there was certainly no falling off of effort and productivity. Each afternoon, usually at about five o’clock, he would return to bed, burrow inside the sheets, and have an hour or so of deep sleep before he got up and embarked on his work again, refreshed. By this means he effectively created for himself a two-day working day.

Each night before going to bed, or each morning before getting up, he would read all the main newspapers—nine or ten in all—absorbing the way the public were being informed about the war, studying the editorials, and looking through news items that alerted him to myriad aspects of the daily life of the nation. Did a reduction in the food ration seem to be creating public hostility? A brief request from Churchill to Professor Lindemann, head of the Downing Street Statistical Branch—a branch of Churchill’s inner war-policy grouping containing eight university statisticians— would ascertain the facts of the situation (the ration itself, the reserves of whatever food or other rationed item it was, the supply and import situation). Then Churchill would dictate a Minute to the Minister of Food or some other Ministers concerned, asking for more facts and suggesting an amelioration. Much of the thrust of Churchill’s reading of the newspapers was to reduce hardships and grievances among the public, especially factory workers, servicemen and -women, and their families. Two examples: Reading of a prison sentence imposed on a woman who had compared him to Hitler, Churchill insisted on the sentence being reduced. He did likewise when he read of a group of firemen who had been on duty during a night of severe bombing, and been heavily fined for “looting” some bottles of wine and spirits from a bombed-out pub.

Churchill’s leadership and his moods were closely interwoven. He was not enamoured of harsh words and conflict. On one occasion he told a visitor: “Anger is a waste of energy. Steam, which is used to blow off a safety valve, would be better used to drive an engine.” But the strains of leadership were enormous, and he often turned to anger and petulance. His wife, Clementine, saw this tension in the dire summer of 1940 and was fearless in her criticism; she felt she alone could raise the issue, knowing that her husband had the strength of character to accept blame and to act upon it. On one occasion that summer she warned him that “a devoted friend” in his inner circle had reported to her a decline in his character. After setting out some of the details of what she had heard, including his being “so contemptuous” at conferences “that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming,” she added: “My darling Winston—I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be. It is for you to give the Orders, & if they are bungled . . . you can sack anyone & everyone. Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness & if possible Olympic calm.”

Recalling how she was accustomed to hearing praise from all those who had worked with him, Clementine Churchill told her husband that those to whom she had spoken about his new-found irritability had commented: “No doubt it’s the strain.” There was truth in that. “You must indeed have had a terrible time during the last fortnight,” the British Ambassador in Madrid, Sir Samuel Hoare—a former Conservative Cabinet colleague—wrote to him a week later. The slow pace of vital United States supplies, the imminent collapse of France, and the prospect of a German invasion of Britain were all heavy burdens on Churchill at that time.

Churchill did heed his wife’s admonition, although future setbacks and burdens saw that irascibility return: many wartime diarists give evidence of that. They also reveal his ability, even in difficult times, to assert his charm, his forbearance and his generosity of spirit. General Sir Alan Brooke, who was to record in his diary many moments when Churchill was angry and cantankerous, also saw the thoughtful, calm, courageous side of his character. “Just by ourselves at the end of a long day’s work and rather trying,” Brooke noted on 23 July 1940. “But he was very nice and I got a good insight into the way his brain is working. He is most interesting to listen to and full of marvellous courage considering the burden his is bearing.” The American Ambassador in Britain, Gilbert Winant, later recalled Churchill’s mood immediately after Pearl Harbor, when the two men had been together at Chequers and Churchill feared that the United States would focus all its efforts on the war in the Pacific, and leave Britain to fight in Europe alone: “He knew at that moment that his country might be ‘hanging on one turn of pitch and toss.’ Nevertheless he turned to me with the charm of manner that I saw in difficult moments, and said, ‘We’re late, you know. You get washed and we will go in to lunch together.’”

Churchill’s typists were also to find that, however bad his moods could be in dire moments of the war, he always had words of comfort for them and a ready smile—his “beatific grim,” as Marian Holmes called it. “Don’t mind me,” he would say after an outburst, “it’s not you—it’s the war.” On one occasion, in November 1944, finding Marian Holmes and her colleague Elizabeth Layton working in the Hawtrey Room at Chequers without a fire, he commented, “Oh, you poor things. You must light a fire and get your coats. It’s just as well I came in”— and he proceeded to light the fire himself, piling it high with logs.

“There is no defeat in his heart”: with these words the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies summed up in his diary a central feature—if not the dominant and crucial feature—of Churchill’s leadership. Defeatism, fear, uncertainty, and the attractions of a negotiated or a compromise peace all bedeviled the first six months of the war, and even later months as the recurring crises of the war looked grim for Britain. Even when he could see no way forward, however, Churchill combatted all defeatist tendencies with total determination. When one of his closest friends, “Bendor,” Duke of Westminster, told a group of friends that the war was part of a Jewish and Masonic plot to destroy Christian civilization, Churchill warned in a private letter marked “secret and personal”: “I am sure that pursuit of this line would lead you into measureless odium and vexation. When a country is fighting a war of this kind, very hard experiences lie before those who preach defeatism and set themselves against the will of the nation.”

One fear Churchill had in the summer of 1940 was that the public would find evidence that the government was planning for the possibility of defeat. He was determined to give a lead in eliminating any evidence to that effect. Plans had been put forward by the Foreign Office for the evacuation of the Royal Family and the government (including Churchill) to “some part of the Overseas Empire, where the war would continue to be waged.” As soon as this suggestion reached Churchill, he wrote to one of his trusted advisers: “I believe we shall make them rue the day they tried to invade our island. No such discussion can be permitted.” On the following day Churchill was asked if he would authorize sending the paintings in the National Gallery from London to Canada. His answer was succinct: “No, bury them in caves and cellars. None must go. We are going to beat them.”

Nineteen days after Churchill became Prime Minister, as British troops were falling back towards Dunkirk, the Italian government indicated its willingness to mediate between Britain and Germany, with a view to some form of negotiated peace. Churchill was certain that the only terms Britain could acquire from a triumphant Germany would be those of subordination and servitude. At the least, Germany had intimated that it must be allowed to retain its conquests in the east: Prague and Warsaw were both under German rule. At that very moment, British troops were fighting in France to try to prevent a German victory there, and British airmen were combatting the German air force above French soil. Churchill could not conceive of negotiations doing anything except seal the fate of France, and undermine the British resolve to fight on once France had surrendered. Yet, at four in the afternoon of May 29, in a meeting held in Churchill’s room in the House of Commons, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, told the War Cabinet: “We must not ignore the fact that we might get better terms before France went out of the war and our aircraft factories were bombed, than we might get in three months time.”

Churchill, in the strongest assertion of his war leadership yet seen, or required, opposed this line of reasoning. The notes of the War Cabinet recorded his response: “It was impossible to imagine that Herr Hitler would be so foolish as to let us continue our rearmament. In effect, his terms would put us completely at his mercy. We should get no worse terms if we went on fighting, even if we were beaten, than were open to us now. If, however, we continued the war and Germany attacked us, no doubt we should suffer some damage, but they also would suffer severe losses. Their oil supplies might be reduced. A time might come when we felt that we had to put an end to the struggle, but the terms would not then be more mortal than those offered to us now.” Both Halifax and Neville Chamberlain—whom Churchill had brought into his War Cabinet—saw some merit in saying (as Chamberlain expressed it) “that, while we would fight to the end to preserve our independence, we were ready to consider decent terms if such were offered to us.”

Churchill believed that this willingness to consider “decent terms” was a misreading of the public mood, but he could not know for certain, and he had no veto on any majority decision that might be made against him. At this point in the discussion, however, he had to ask for a break in the War Cabinet meeting—which had already lasted for two hours—to meet, for the first time since he had formed his Government, the twenty-five members of his administration who were not in the inner circle: the Junior Ministers and those Cabinet Ministers who were not in the War Cabinet. That meeting, fixed for six o’clock, had been set up several days earlier. No sooner had these Ministers come into his room in the House of Commons—the War Cabinet having left—than Churchill told them that although Hitler would probably “take Paris and offer terms,” as might the Italians too, he, Churchill, had no doubt whatever “that we must decline anything like this and fight on.”

To Churchill’s surprise, as he spoke the words “fight on,” there was a sudden outpouring of support from the twenty-five Ministers assembled there, in the very room where the discussion about a negotiated peace had just taken place. Churchill was overwhelmed by their spontaneous determination for continuing the fight. It gave him the added strength he needed half an hour later, at the reconvened War Cabinet meeting. Referring to the extraordinary enthusiasm he had witnessed for continuing the fight, Churchill went on to win the argument for continuing to resist the Nazi onslaught, telling the War Cabinet, “He did not remember having ever before heard a gathering of persons occupying high places in political life express themselves so emphatically.”

One of the Ministers present at the six o’clock meeting, Hugh Dalton—who had just been appointed Minister of Economic Warfare—recorded in his diary the words Churchill used in the moments leading up to the sudden demonstration of support for continuing the war. “I am convinced,” Churchill told them, “that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.” Then followed the demonstration of support. Dalton noted in his diary: “Not much more was said. “No one expressed even the faintest flicker of dissent.”

Thus Churchill learned that his determination not to surrender reflected a wider mood. He was certain it would be supported by the nation at large, and he immediately wrote one of the strongest official notes of his war premiership, addressed to all Cabinet Ministers and senior civil servants. Marked “Strictly confidential,” it was a supreme example of his war leadership, putting to those at the apex of power his implacable opposition to defeatism. “In these dark days,” the note read, “the Prime Minister would be grateful if all his colleagues in the Government, as well as high officials, would maintain a high morale in their circles; not minimizing the gravity of events, but showing confidence in our ability and inflexible resolve to continue the war till we have broken the will of the enemy to bring all Europe under his domination. No tolerance should be given to the idea that France will make a separate peace; but whatever may happen on the Continent, we cannot doubt our duty and we shall certainly use all our power to defend the Island, the Empire and our Cause.”