The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (21 page)

Churchill said that there was no point in holding on to large chunks of Nigeria, and that he was all in favour of pulling out. Churchill certainly believed in the empire—and annexed a bit of Kenya when he was there in 1907. But he did that with a pencil, rather than a Maxim gun. He did not hold with wars of conquest, or wars of aggression—and no such aim can possibly be ascribed to the British in either 1914 or 1939.

He was indeed responsible for the build-up of the navy in the years immediately preceding the Great War; and quite right. But he didn’t go into politics as a militarist. In 1901 his maiden speech caused a good deal of Tory tut-tutting, because it seemed to be so
oddly pro-Boer. ‘
If I were a Boer, fighting in the field,’ he said, ‘and if I were a Boer, I hope I should be fighting in the field . . .’ I say, said the Tory benches, rolling their eyes. He wishes he were fighting against us, does he?

From the outset he was sniffy about excessive military expenditure—just like his father before him—and by 1908 he was campaigning against more spending on Dreadnoughts—so as to be able to spend more on social programmes. When he got to the Admiralty he certainly changed his tune on defence spending: like all ministers, he was captured by the need to boost his department; and by then the problem of German expansion was obvious. But it was Churchill who tried to slow down the race to war. He was the one who proposed naval ‘holidays’—a moratorium on both sides in the building of battleships.

Even on the brink of war, it was he who tried to go over and persuade the German naval supremo, Admiral von Tirpitz, to cool it. The Foreign Office wouldn’t let him go. On the very eve of catastrophe he was to be found arguing for a meeting of European leaders—what he would later call a summit—to sort things out.

Churchill neither yearned for war, nor gloried in slaughter. When he came back from the trenches in 1916—having seen unimaginable horrors—he spoke to the Commons with the ashen disgust of a Wilfred Owen or a Siegfried Sassoon. He had seen the squalor and the graves dotted higgledy-piggledy in the trenches. It had been his task to write to the widows of those who were killed. He had seen the metronomic rhythm of killing. ‘
What is going on, while we go away to dinner or home or bed?’ he asked his fellow MPs. ‘Nearly 1000 men—Englishmen, Britishers, men of our race—are knocked into bundles of bloody rags.’

Churchill never wanted another war; he had seen enough. In 1919, as Secretary of State for War, he tried to trim military budgets
by instituting the ten-year rule: that the British government would act on the assumption that there would not be another war in Europe for ten years. When he was Chancellor, in the 1920s, he again campaigned against spending on defence; and this time he had the direct authority to make the cuts. Indeed, by the late 1930s the Chamberlainites were still (unfairly) trying to blame him for the country’s lack of readiness.

By the late 1930s he was of course urging his colleagues to spend more on defence, to match the expansion of the Luftwaffe. But you could not conceivably describe his attitude as bellicose, or lip-smacking, or warmongering. He spoke as a Cassandra, as one who had glimpsed a charnel-house of the future. In the Czech crisis of 1938, after Eden had resigned, he spent a night unable to sleep. ‘
I saw the daylight slowly creep in through the windows, and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of death.’

Historians will continue to debate the causes of the First World War, and the truth is that no European power emerges well from that catastrophic episode. What we can safely say is that Winston Churchill was not one of the culprits, and that the blame lies substantially—though of course by no means entirely—with Germany, and with German militarism and expansionism. Whatever happened at Sarajevo in 1914 was no excuse for an attack by the Kaiser on Belgium and France. Britain had absolutely no choice but to follow the rules of 500 years of foreign policy—and try to prevent a single power from dominating the continent.

The Second World War was caused almost exclusively by a maniacal German leader, and a paranoid desire for revenge. They are flying in the face of the evidence, those polemicists who posit some moral equivalence between Churchill and the Kaiser, or Churchill and Hitler. Churchill tried to avert war. He fought against it.

One of the most interesting and attractive features of his mind is
that he spent much energy not only trying to avoid war, but in producing innovations—technical and scientific—to try to minimise its impact on the human frame.

War is the father of many things, but in Churchill’s case, compassion was the mother of invention.

CHAPTER 13

THE SHIPS THAT WALKED

I
t feels weird walking through the wood this afternoon—and in a way that is because it is so easy. There is nothing to stop me. I just lift the wire loop on a makeshift gate and I am strolling through the haunted grove.

The birds are in good voice, the trees are pushing out their tender leaves. There isn’t a soul in sight. I am here at Ploegsteert wood in southern Belgium, not far from the French border; and as I meander over the mossy forest floor I think of how things might have looked a hundred years ago.

This wood was once famous in Britain. Almost every newspaper reader would have known the name—or rather the name the soldiers gave it. This was Plugstreet, on the Western Front. A century ago the trees were shot to stumps, the branches shredded, the birds silent, the soil contaminated with explosive and other toxins. This was where Lieutenant Colonel Churchill came out on his nocturnal prowlings, terrifying the rest of the patrol by making a noise like a ‘baby elephant’. I can see the remains of the trenches they might have snuck through on their way to the front, now full of black and
slimy water. They would have tiptoed to the edge of the mutilated wood, and then on some nights their commanding officer would have gone on—sometimes alone—to no man’s land, and the very edge of the German lines.

That’s no man’s land, there. I can work out from my map where it was—an absurdly narrow strip running north–south through the fields. On one side there are some of those famous Belgian Blanc Bleu cows, with the
dikbil
, the double buttock that makes for the finest steaks. The far field is ploughed, a heavy brown corduroy that has been sown with whatever Brussels has decided pays the most this year. Between them is a little metalled track that leads—according to my map—to the German lines. I decide to get back in the old Toyota.

It is time to perform a military manoeuvre, a feat that it took Churchill and the British army five terrible years to achieve. I am going to do it in not much more than a minute. I fire up the people carrier. I engage drive. A quick swig of Stella for the nerves—and we’re trundling slowly forward.

First I am bouncing over some ruts; now we’re on the tarmac. I must be doing 15 miles an hour, now 20, 25. I am going over the trenches and the craters; I am passing irresistibly through the barbed wire. The shells, the bullets—nothing can stop the lunging Toyota and its 2.49-litre power plant.

On either side of the lines, weary and broken men are peering from their muddy foxholes and staring at each other with a wild surmise, then breaking into whoops. And then we have done it, almost before you can register the achievement. I have reached the German lines; and as they struggle to react I am through them—slicing effortlessly past the reserve lines and the hospital tents, and the terrified Germans are grabbing their rifles in panic and stampeding from the latrines.

I give a little toot of triumph, and quite unmolested I execute a U-turn. I leave the Kaiser’s army and drive back from east to west, the same 500 pathetic yards, towards Ploegsteert wood. On the way back I stop somewhere in the middle. I park on the verge and go out into the ploughed field. This is the bit where no human being could venture and survive.

Here’s why. There’s one here, and here, and here. Every ploughing season thousands of fragments of ancient and rusty metal make their way to the surface from the past.

This one looks like a bit of fuse, a large knob that is corroded into a cancer of iron and rust and still amazingly heavy. This could be some shell casing, and some more here. I don’t know what they are but they eloquently explain why neither side could win. There is no cover beyond the wood, just these wide fields under open Flemish sky.

No matter how much pluck or spunk or ‘gallantry’ they showed, the young men were cut to pieces every time. They happened to be here at a moment of asymmetry in the evolution of warfare, when mankind had lately invented metal projectiles that could penetrate human flesh, from a distance, with huge velocity and explosive power. No one had yet come up with a defence. For three awful years the position was unchanged.

You can imagine Churchill’s frustration as he saw his men dying—with not an inch of territory to show for it. As soon as he got here he tried to find out what had happened to his plan.

In November 1915 he wrote a long memo to the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, in which he unburdened himself of all sorts of tactical proposals. Some of his ideas sound frankly a bit whacko. He wanted men to be issued with special shields, made of steel or composite, that reached from the helmet to the hips. He
proposed that they should form up on the edge of the trench, lock shields, and march forwards, fifteen abreast. He seemed unaware that he was asking twentieth-century soldiers to advance towards machine guns in a defensive posture that was well known to Greek hoplites.

He suggested that soldiers be equipped with oxyacetylene torches—of a kind he had seen cutting through sheet metal in the docks—in order to make their way through the barbed wire. It was not clear what he thought would happen if the gas tank was hit by a bullet. But his main interest was in what he described as a new type of vehicle. He said they were ‘
moveable machine gun cupolas as well as wire smashers’, and that they were capable of ‘traversing any ordinary obstacle, ditch, breastwork or trench’. There were about seventy of such experimental vehicles already being built, he informed General French.

Sir John should go and see them, he urged. ‘
The spectacle of such a machine cutting wire entanglements has only to be witnessed to carry conviction. It resembles the reaping operations of a self-binder’—by which he means a primitive version of what we would now call a combine harvester.

Alas, Sir John never had the chance to inspect this mutant farm machinery. He was sacked by Asquith, who was beginning to panic, not surprisingly, at the lack of progress being made under his leadership. So in January 1916 Churchill tried again.

He took his paper—with its proposal for a new type of armoured combine harvester—to French’s successor, Douglas Haig—a man who is traditionally blamed for much of the paralysis in British strategy. Haig seemed interested. A little later Churchill was asked to go to the British Operational Division at St Omer, to explain his ideas. The general there said he had heard from Haig that there were some
new contraptions being devised by the Admiralty, for use in trench warfare.

Did Churchill know anything about it? He certainly did. Indeed, he could have been forgiven for being stupefied and appalled by the continued slowness of the army top brass to pick up his idea. It was over a year earlier, in December 1914—when he was still at the Admiralty—that he had first grasped the nightmare of the stalemate, with trenches and barbed wire stretching intermittently from Switzerland to the Channel.

Churchill had been partly inspired by the science fiction of H. G. Wells, and his description of ironclad ‘
landships’. On 5 January 1915
he wrote to Asquith, suggesting that it was time for some kind of technological breakthrough. We needed a machine that could deal with the trenches, he said; and if we didn’t develop one, the Germans certainly would. Asquith responded quite quickly, for him, and asked the War Office to look into it.

The army formed a committee to investigate the matter, and decided that any such machine would just sink under the weight of its own armour. Too impractical; dismissed.

There matters might well have rested, with unthinkable consequences. But Churchill did not let it drop. He was at the Admiralty, remember. He was in charge of ships, not the tactics of the army. This was theoretically none of his business. But on 18 January 1915 he wrote to his colleagues at the Admiralty with what sounded like a bizarre request. He wanted an experiment performed.

Someone—he did not specify who—was to take two steam rollers and yoke them together with long steel rods, ‘
so that they are to all intents and purposes one roller covering a breadth of at least 12 to 14 feet’. Then he wanted his officials to go and find a ‘handy’ site, near London, and dig about a hundred yards of trenches, as they did in
France. The ultimate objective, he said, was to allow the monster machine to run along the length of the trenches: actually on top of them, with a giant wheel on either lip. The objective would be to ‘crush them all flat and bury the people in them’.

This is Churchill at his dizzying best. There are flaws in his idea. What if the two rollers are running at different speeds, or in different gears? Surely the rods would just snap or shear? He hasn’t worked out that the machine will need a single engine. But you can almost hear the crunching of his giant mental cogs as he grips the problem; and the problem of grip.

The mud, he is thinking now. The hellish seas of mud. The machine will slip and slide unless . . . aha . . .

‘
The rollers of these machines will be furnished with wedge-shaped ribs or studs, which can be advanced beyond the ordinary surface of the wheel when required, in order to break the soil on each side of the trench and accentuate the rolling process.’ It’s like peering through a telescope at some distant nebula, and seeing the clouds of interstellar gas as they resolve and harden into a planet.

An idea was being born. Perhaps without even knowing it, he was describing caterpillar tracks. All it needed, he concluded, ‘was a big enough pair of steam rollers and an unscaleable bullet-proof house for the crew’. He signed off with a superbly peremptory order that the whole thing should be achieved within two weeks: ‘WSC’.