The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (25 page)

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N
OW IS THE
moment to look in a bit more detail at the lurid series of disasters that traditionally landmark accounts of his pre-1940 career. We need to consider the interaction between Churchill and these events: the extent to which he was responsible—and, indeed, the extent to which they were really disasters. Let us begin with:

The Antwerp Blunder.

Sometimes posterity can be kinder than your contemporaries. In October 1914 the German armies were devouring the Low
Countries. Churchill took it upon himself personally to mastermind the defence of Antwerp—a port so strategically important that Napoleon once called it ‘a pistol pointing at the heart of England’. Afterwards, the media was withering. The
Morning Post
said it was a ‘costly blunder, for which Mr W Churchill must be held responsible’. The
Daily Mail
said it was a ‘
gross example of mal-administration which has cost valuable lives’. It seemed to his cabinet colleagues that the First Lord of the Admiralty had gone nuts—shooting off to Antwerp, prancing around in a cape and a yachting cap while the Germans bombarded him.

At one stage he asked for the right to resign from the cabinet and take up a military command. He wanted to be General Churchill, he told Asquith—a suggestion, Asquith said, that made his colleagues rock with unquenchable laughter.

In the end Antwerp surrendered, and thousands of British troops were captured; Churchill vamoosed to London, where he got a pretty frosty reception from Clementine—since he had missed the birth of Sarah, their third baby. But was it so mad an idea?

Remember what was happening in the autumn of 1914. The Germans were racing towards the Channel ports. The loss of Ostend and Dunkirk would have been disastrous, since it would have been much more difficult to reinforce the troops in Flanders. The point of the Antwerp mission was to persuade the Belgians to hold out for ten days or so—to win a breathing-space and protect the other ports.

As it was, Churchill was able to hang on for six days. But it was enough. The other ports were saved. So let us rate the Antwerp Blunder out of 10. I would say it had a
FIASCO FACTOR
of 2, since it was really a success; and that it had a
CHURCHILL FACTOR
of 9 out of 10, since it is almost impossible to imagine that the Belgians would have stuck it out if he had not been there.

It has always been harder to make any kind of case for:

The Gallipoli Catastrophe.

On the face of things, this was one of the biggest military disasters in a war that had many disasters. By late 1914 the trenches stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel. Churchill was casting around for ways both to use the fleet, otherwise relatively underemployed, and to get round the abbatoir of the Western Front. Where could they go? First they thought of the Baltic, but the Germans were in charge there. Then he hit on the concept that often commended itself to him: the ‘
soft under-belly’. He wanted to attack Germany’s ally, Turkey.

He would use the fleet to ram the Dardanelles—a narrow strait between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea; capture Constantinople; take the Ottomans out of the war; relieve the pressure on Russia; bring in Greece, Bulgaria and Romania on the Allied side—and bingo! (we may imagine Churchill jabbing triumphantly at the map) the way would be clear to attack the Germans from both sides. Things did not go well.

The whole operation was finally wound up in 1916, by which time there had been about 180,000 Allied casualties, most of whom died of disease on the beaches and the promontories of the Gallipoli peninsula, without getting anywhere near Constantinople.

So many Australians and New Zealanders were sacrificed that Gallipoli became a cause of deep and folkloric bitterness and estrangement from the imperial power. The Irish regiments were so mauled that the episode is said to have encouraged the fight for independence. Churchill was effectively sacked by Asquith in May 1915, and went into a complete decline.

‘
I thought he would die of grief,’ said Clementine. ‘I am finished,’ he groaned. Is there nothing to be said for the Dardanelles?

Well, it was at least an attempt to break the stalemate on the Western Front. Someone had to come up with an alternative to ‘
chewing barbed wire in Flanders’, said Churchill—and he was surely right.

He was unlucky in his admirals, one of whom had a nervous breakdown; he was unlucky in his colleagues—notably Lord Fisher, the aged and frog-faced First Sea Lord, who blew endlessly hot and cold and then threw a colossal strop, flouncing out of office at the crucial moment. He was unlucky not to be able to control the timing of the operation, or to launch it with the
élan
it required.

But even if you make allowances for bad luck, we must accept that the whole concept was probably flawed. It seems to rely on a series of heroic assumptions about what would happen if Constantinople was eventually captured; and the surely imponderable outcome of a Balkan campaign. For his wild overoptimism, Churchill must take the blame.

As it was, ships were sunk, admirals dithered, men were machine-gunned on beaches or died of dysentery, and Mustafa Kemal emerged as a hero of the Turkish nation for his role in seeing off the British Empire. We have no alternative but to give the Dardanelles a
FIASCO FACTOR
of 10 and a
CHURCHILL FACTOR
of 10, since it would certainly not have happened without him. It could have worked—if a long series of cards had fallen the right way—but the mesmerising disaster convinced many people that Churchill not only possessed bad judgement, but that he was positively unstable in his vanity: in his desire somehow to engage personally in the conflict.

It says something about his bomb-proof ego that by the end of 1919 he was at it again, in an episode that has become known as:

The Russian Bungle.

Churchill was almost frenzied in his hostility to communism. He thought of it as a plague, a pestilence, a spiritual deformation. He referred to the ‘
foul baboonery’ of Bolshevism, and on 26 November 1918 he had told his constituents in Dundee that ‘
civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims’. It makes you wonder what he had against baboons.

Most people have forgotten that for the first couple of years after the 1917 revolution, Lenin and Trotsky had a pretty shaky hold on power. The country was awash with counter-revolutionaries, White Russians, Americans, French, Japanese, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks and Italians, and a substantial number of British troops—with Churchill cheering them on frantically from the War Office.

After some initial caution, he had decided that the war was winnable, and told a deeply sceptical Lloyd George that the communists were on the run. Encouraged by British officers, funded and supported by Churchill, the White Russians were making conspicuous gains. ‘
Nothing can now preserve Bolshevism or the Bolshevik regime,’ he boasted to Lloyd George. At one stage he wanted to clinch the matter by issuing British troops with a new variety of—you guessed it—poison gas; and by October 1919 he had become so excited by the progress of the anti-Bolshevik generals that he was on the verge of taking himself to Russia.

The tickets were booked; Churchill was about to arrive like a reverse Lenin to proclaim the splendours of democracy. Then, alas, the whole thing went wrong. Trotsky organised a dynamic counter-attack.
‘
I will not submit to be beaten by the baboons!’ Churchill cried—but he was.

The anti-Bolsheviks scarpered. The British troops were ignominiously evacuated. The communist tyranny began in earnest. The baboons went ape.

The great cartoonist David Low produced a portrait of Churchill as an incompetent big-game hunter. ‘
He hunts lions but brings home decayed cats,’ said the caption. Four of the cats have names: Sidney Street, Antwerp Blunder, Gallipoli Mistake and Russian Bungle.

But was it such a bungle? He so nearly succeeded. The anti-Bolshevik General Yudenitch had almost reached Petrograd; Denikin was only 50 miles from Moscow. If he had been able to give the expedition the full-throated support he wanted—if Lloyd George and the cabinet had not been so leery—perhaps he could indeed have strangled communism at birth. Then the peoples of Russia and eastern Europe would have been spared seventy years of tyranny; there would have been no gulags, no Red Terror, no murder of the kulaks, no mass exterminations. He may not have succeeded, but it was unquestionably right to try.

So, the Russian expedition gets:
FIASCO FACTOR
5;
CHURCHILL FACTOR
10. He had the right general idea—which is more than can be said for:

The Chanak Cock-Up.

. . . by which he managed to bring down the government, end the political career of Lloyd George, immolate the Liberal Party that he had joined in 1904 and lose his seat in the process.

In September 1922 a crisis blew up because the armies of
Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) were threatening the British and French garrisons on the Gallipoli peninsula. These were stationed at Chanak, or Canakkale—the town nearest to the ancient site of Troy. Prime Minister Lloyd George was very anti-Turk and pro-Greek, and was keen to launch a kind of Christian war against the Mohammedans. He thought Chanak would be an excellent pretext to biff Johnny Turk.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, Churchill decided to do a U-turn and announce that Lloyd George was right. This was odd, since Churchill was generally rather pro-Turk, like his father. And in foreign policy, as in life, it would be fair to say that he was not motivated by religious considerations of any kind. I am afraid it looks as though his only real reason for wanting a fight with the Turks at Chanak was to avenge the Dardanelles, to erase his personal psychic scar—not a good motive.

Thankfully, both Lloyd George and Churchill managed completely to muff their moment. Churchill issued a portentous press release on 15 September 1922 in which he announced that military action had the support of Canada, Australia and New Zealand—without breaking the news to the governments of those countries. They were not pleased, having no particular zeal to send more men to further Churchill-inspired massacres in the Dardanelles.

The press and public were alarmed. The headline of the
Daily Mail
was ‘
Stop This New War!’, which more or less summed up the mood. The Conservatives decided that they had run out of patience with Lloyd George and Churchill. They met at the Carlton Club to pull the rug out from under the Coalition (and gave birth to the 1922 Conservative Private Members’ Committee). Andrew Bonar Law said Britain could not be the policeman of the world; Baldwin put the boot in.

The Chanak crisis was solved by diplomacy, but the British
government fell, and Churchill was out. We must give Chanak a modest
FIASCO FACTOR
of 4, and a
CHURCHILL FACTOR
of 5, since he shared authorship with Lloyd George. But the political consequences were pretty seismic.

And his recovery was therefore doubly remarkable. When you look at this period—from 1922 to 1924—you really feel that he is an elemental force in British politics, too big to be sunk by the destruction of his Liberal Party, too big to ignore. Soon he was having chats with Baldwin about rejoining the Tories, twenty years after he had deserted them. In November 1924—even though he had just won a large majority—Baldwin reached out to the forty-nine-year-old renegade and made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Dumbfounded, he accepted. ‘
I had the greatest difficulty convincing my wife that I was not merely teasing her,’ he said.

It is widely agreed that Churchill’s Chancellorship—whatever its merits—was blighted by wrongly

Going Back on Gold.

. . . and at the wrong rate. Everyone now accepts that this was a catastrophic error. The value of sterling was pegged back at its pre-war rate of $4.87—which meant the pound was overvalued, with fatal consequences for British industry. Exports became too expensive to compete on world markets. Businesses tried to cut costs by laying off staff or cutting wages. There were strikes, unemployment, chaos—and then the crash of 1929, and still no escape from the punishing regime of the Gold Standard.

In the end the pound was forced off gold in 1931 by a series of speculative attacks on the foreign exchange markets—just as it was prised out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. Churchill
carried the can for the whole disaster, and John Maynard
Keynes wrote a denunciation called
The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill
. It was indeed his decision, and as Chancellor, he cannot escape the blame.

All we can do is enter some crucial mitigating points. First, he was himself instinctively against it. He could see the problem a strong pound would pose for British business and industry. In February 1925 he objected to the plan: ‘
I would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content.’ Before he took the decision, he wrote long memos to his officials asking them if they could explain their support for the Gold Standard; and was much displeased by their woolly answers.

The officials talked vaguely of ‘stability’. But how did that help British manufacturers, if their goods were being priced out of the market? He took to quoting, with approval, William Jennings Bryan’s impassioned 1896 criticism of the Gold Standard: ‘
You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’

He was absolutely right. The trouble was that he was surrounded by a lot of clever people who thought they knew about economics; and they thought the Gold Standard was a frightfully good idea. The most ineffably self-confident of them all was the Governor of the Bank of England, the nattily dressed Montagu Norman. ‘
I will make you the golden Chancellor,’ he told Churchill. But Norman was not alone in his delusions.

The City was for it; the Labour Party was for it; Stanley Baldwin himself thought it would be easier just to get on and do it. In the end Churchill held a famous dinner party at Number 11 Downing Street, on 17 March 1925, and invited Keynes to come and put the contrary point of view. Alas, Keynes had a cold and was off form. Churchill the gold-o-sceptic found himself outnumbered, and reluctantly conceded.