The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (31 page)

So as I said, I have very reluctantly come to the conclusion that the right thing to do is what normally falls to those at the top on such occasions, namely to remain at home and wait. I hope very much that you will see it in this light, too. The anxiety of these coming days would be very greatly increased for me if I thought that, in addition to everything else, there was a risk, however remote, of my losing your help and guidance. Believe me yours very sincerely George R I.

This elegant royal veto achieved nothing. Churchill forged on. The next day there was a meeting in the Map Room in the Downing Street annexe in Storey’s Gate. Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay was called from his duties, and asked to explain to the King and Churchill how Churchill could be present at D-Day. He did his best to rubbish the idea. The ship would never be nearer than 14,000 yards from the French shore, he said. Churchill wouldn’t be able to see a thing, and frankly he would know less about what was happening than those left behind in London.

Ramsay was then asked to leave the room. When he came back he was told that the plan had been changed. Operation ‘WC’ would go ahead—but with the King as well. Ramsay flipped; or, as Lascelles put it in his diary, ‘
To this the unfortunate man, naturally enough, reacted violently.’

By this stage Churchill could see that it was going to be difficult to get the King on board; so he cut his losses. He announced in ‘his
most oracular manner’ that he would need cabinet approval to allow the King to come with him on the
Belfast
, and he would not be able to recommend that they give it. As he chuntered on, it became clear to Lascelles that Churchill still intended to go himself, and the courtier allowed his features to register his general horror and disapproval.

As the King put it, ‘
Tommy’s face is getting longer and longer.’ Churchill was oblivious, so—with some difficulty—Lascelles interrupted the conversation again, addressing the King.

‘
I was thinking, Sir, that it is not going to make things easier for you if you have to find a new Prime Minister in the middle of Overlord.’

‘Oh,’ said Churchill, ‘that’s all arranged for. Anyhow, I don’t think the risk is 100–1.’

Next Lascelles tried to suggest that Churchill was being constitutionally improper: no minister of the Crown could leave the country without the Sovereign’s consent. Churchill countered jesuitically that HMS
Belfast
didn’t count as abroad, since it was a British man-of-war. Lascelles said it was a long way outside British territorial waters; but it was no use. It was like holding a bull elephant by the tail.

Lascelles left the meeting feeling that ‘
in this instance his naughtiness is sheer selfishness’. Everyone was against it: the staff at Downing Street, Pug Ismay, Clementine—but Churchill was absolutely determined: to smell the cordite, to see the plumes of salt water as the shells and bombs exploded around him in the sea. What was Lascelles going to do?

The only answer was another monarchical missive, he decided. He sat down and drafted
a second and firmer reprimand, from the King to Churchill.

My dear Winston, I want to make one more appeal to you not to go to sea on D day. Please consider my own position. I am a younger man than you, I am a sailor, and as King I am head of all the services. There is nothing I would like better than to go to sea but I have agreed to stay at home; is it fair that you should then do exactly what I should have liked to do myself? You said yesterday afternoon that it would be a fine thing for the king to lead his troops into battle, as in old days; if the king cannot do this, it does not seem right that his Prime Minister should take his place. Then there is your own position. You will see very little, you will run a considerable risk, you will be inaccessible at a critical time when vital decisions may have to be taken, and however unobtrusive you may be, your mere presence on board is bound to be a very heavy additional responsibility to the Admiral and Captain. As I said in my previous letter, your being there would add immeasurably to my anxieties, and your going without consulting your colleagues in the Cabinet would put them in a difficult position which they would justifiably resent.

I ask you most earnestly to consider the whole question again, and not let your personal wishes, which I very well understand, lead you to depart from your own high standard of duty to the State. Believe me your very sincere friend George R I.

The dispute had now become a constitutional crisis. There was only one man who could conceivably have stopped Churchill from going, and that was the King; and in order to get his way George VI was obliged to write twice, and finally to warn Churchill that he was about to violate just about every code of loyalty he possessed: loyalty to the Crown, loyalty to the cabinet, loyalty to the armed services and loyalty to Britain herself. It was heavy stuff.

Finally, on Saturday, 3 June, Churchill climbed down—with much
grumbling. He was entitled to go and watch any battle he saw fit, he protested. He was Minister of Defence. But he sulkily accepted the key point advanced by the King—that it was unfair to prevent the monarch from going to Normandy, and then to go himself and steal the King’s thunder. ‘
That is certainly a strong argument,’ he said.

The episode casts an interesting light on the edginess of the government on the eve of D-Day, and on the evolving relations between ministers and the Crown—it must be one of the few twentieth-century examples of a prime minister being specifically countermanded by the King. In Tommy Lascelles we see the role of ‘them’—the shadowy mandarins and courtiers who take so many of the decisions the politicians are incapable of taking (and do so to this day).

But the really fascinating question is why Churchill cared so much; why he was so utterly determined to put himself again in the front line of battle. There are several obvious answers, and the first is surely that he was nervous about D-Day.

We have the advantage of knowing that the operation was going to be a success. That was far from clear at the time. Alan Brooke thought that it might be ‘
the most ghastly disaster of the whole war’. The weather could so easily have turned bad. Rommel might have suddenly reinforced the target zone. Eisenhower was all set to take responsibility for an evacuation, if things went against the Allies.

This was the amphibious operation for which the Allies had been building up for years; this was their shot at winning back the Continent. And Churchill had previous form when it came to risky amphibious operations. Churchill wanted to be there because burned in his psyche was the memory of Gallipoli—and of all the errors of the Dardanelles the one for which he felt the bitterest remorse, rightly or wrongly, was his failure to go there himself. Now was his chance to exorcise that disgrace, to emulate the practice of his illustrious antecedent in leading his troops personally into battle and to
show the world that he was truly a Marlborough, and not just a Marlborough lite. He needed to be there to make sure that the troops did not just get bogged down, as they had at Gallipoli, and indeed as they had on the Western Front in the First World War.

And then there was another reason for getting in that ship—a motive that will come as no surprise to us by now, and which Lascelles certainly detected. As the royal Private Secretary wrote to sum up the whole affair, ‘The King, in fact, was only trying to save Winston from himself, for the real motives inspiring him to go to sea in
Belfast
are his irrepressible, though now most untimely, love of adventure, and, I fear, his vain, though perhaps subconscious, predilection for making himself “
front page stuff”.’

There, I am sure, Lascelles has judged our man well. Churchill could see the headlines; he could see the photos—standing impervious on the bridge, soggy cigar clamped to his lips, as he called the shots from the
Belfast
’s 12-inch guns; the conductor of the loudest and most explosive overture in the history of ballistics. He could see the way it would look—the man entrusted to give the roar of the British lion; and this time a roar of artillery and not just rhetoric.

That was why he at first endorsed the idea of the King coming too; because that would have been an even bigger story: Britain’s monarch and Prime Minister, dauntless and unbowed by five years of war, directing the recapture of the mainland. That was the ‘front page stuff’ he was after; and in a way it wasn’t just about him and his ego, and what he had achieved. It was about Britain, and her standing in the world.

—

I
N MY INNOCENT
youth I believed that Britain had ‘won the war’ not just through Russian sacrifice and American money, but thanks also to the heroism of the British fighting man. I read ‘Commando’
comics, in which men with woolly hats and supercolossal forearms would lunge at cringing Germans, with a cry of ‘Take that, Fritz’ from their huge jaws and with a candle-flame of bullets bursting from the muzzle of their guns.

I remember vividly being taught by a fine classicist who had himself been imprisoned by the Japanese; and I received the clear impression that the battle of El Alamein was the turning-point in the war. Monty hit Rommel for six, and then Jerry began to take a bit of a pasting, what? So it came as a bit of a shock to read, over the years, what really happened.

It appeared that the battle of El Alamein, at the end of October 1942, was not quite as pivotal to history as I had been led to suppose. Indeed, there were some British historians who were so ungracious as to call it the ‘
unnecessary battle’. Operation Torch was due to happen only a few weeks later—Allied landings to drive the Germans out of North Africa. It seemed that El Alamein wasn’t so much a decisive military victory as a vital political figleaf.

By the autumn of 1942, Britain’s military record was a virtually unbroken series of bungles, evacuations, catastrophes and all-round defeats, often at the hands of forces that were numerically vastly inferior. It was as though the country had entered the Premiership with the reputation of Manchester United and ended up playing like Tunstall Town FC. ‘
I can’t get the victories,’ complained Churchill. ‘It’s the victories that are so hard to get.’

It wasn’t just at Norway, Dunkirk, Greece and Crete where British forces perfected the manoeuvre that might be known as the ‘rabbit’ or headlong scuttle. The year 1942 was even worse, with a dismal series of debacles that began in the Far East with the sinking of the
Prince of Wales
and the
Repulse
. Then there was the fall of Singapore, when Churchill wrote to his generals specifically instructing them to fight to the last man and to choose death before dishonour.

They decided, on the whole, to ignore his advice, and that dishonour was vastly preferable. Rangoon was abandoned. The raids on St Nazaire and Dieppe were much trumpeted for propaganda purposes, but achieved little, for the cost of many lives. Then there was the fall of Tobruk—news of which was handed to Churchill on a pink slip while he was actually sitting with Roosevelt in the White House. He was utterly mortified—especially since he had once again issued his personal and express instructions that the troops should fight to the bitter end.

Once again, British troops had been routed by a much smaller German force. All sorts of possible explanations have been offered for this relative underperformance of Britain—previously regarded as one of the most ferocious and successful military powers the world has ever seen. In his various brilliant meditations on this theme, Max Hastings has been unsparing in his criticisms.

By Hastings’ account, none of the generals appears to have been much cop. Not even Monty deserves a place in the ranks of ‘history’s great captains’. When they were not simply dim, they were too often idle and complacent. They were also risk-averse and had a serious dislike of bloodshed; perhaps understandable, given the memory of the First War, but a disadvantage in a fighting force. The wider officer class contained a large supply of duffers who had joined the military on the grounds that it was a cushy billet and an easier way of living than trying to run a business.

The equipment was substandard, or at least not as good as German equipment; and then there was the awful suspicion that man for man the British just did not have the same kind of fire in their bellies as their foes. As Max Hastings puts it, ‘
Many British officers perceived their citizen soldiers as lacking the will and commitment routinely displayed by the Germans and Japanese.’ Or as Randolph
Churchill shouted, rather unpleasantly, during a 1942 discussion in Downing Street, ‘
Father, the trouble is your soldiers won’t fight.’

Whether this was true or not—and plainly it was a verdict that was at odds with the innumerable acts of individual bravery performed by British troops around the world—the important point was that people believed it to be true. British underperformance became the subject of embarrassment at home, and mockery abroad. In July 1942 a survey of American opinion asked which nation was doing the most to win the war: 37 per cent said the USA, 30 per cent Russia, 14 per cent China and only 6 per cent thought highly of the British and their exertions.

All this was of course gall and wormwood to Churchill, whose whole political
raison d’être
was to boost the prestige of Britain and the British Empire. After the fall of Singapore, Churchill was politically at his lowest point during the war, and may even have contemplated resignation. His frustration was obvious when, in the wake of Singapore, he declared, ‘
We had so many men, so many men. We should have done better.’ When he heard of the fall of Tobruk, he said, ‘
Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.’

His ego had become entirely engaged and identified with British military success—which made it easy for his rivals to torment him. ‘
He wins debate after debate but loses battle after battle,’ said the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan, brutally, in the House of Commons; and indeed, public anxiety became so acute that Churchill’s own domestic position actually became quite shaky.