The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (80 page)

What Churchill said and did created a sense of national unity and purpose which was unprecedented and will probably never be revived. There was, and is for those who are its beneficiaries, something deeply moving about that spirit of 1940. Its lustre will certainly survive the smears applied recently by writers who either dislike its collectivist overtones or are impelled by an urge to whittle away every source of national pride.
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Churchill guided the country through the twelve months between the surrender of France and Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, during which time Britain and its empire alone defied the Axis powers. Throughout this year and for the next four, Churchill spoke and acted as if the empire would outlast the war and continue unchanged thereafter. There was, therefore, an extraordinary paradox in the fact that his greatest stroke of genius was the recognition that Britain’s survival depended ultimately on America, a nation whose rulers and citizens were instinctively hostile towards the British empire.

Not that this mattered greatly in the summer of 1940, when American arms and equipment were desperately needed. As well as the products of American industry, Churchill wanted the goodwill of the United States. Even if America did not fight, and Churchill thought that it would eventually, its moral backing counted for much with those already engaged in the struggle and in the world at large. America’s moral support as well as its weaponry was an assurance that even if Britain could not win single-handed, it could not be beaten.

America took time to swing behind Britain. During June and July 1940 senior officials and commanders favoured conserving America’s resources rather than delivering them to a nation which appeared to be on the verge of defeat. Two months of prevarication followed Churchill’s request for fifty redundant destroyers in return for bases in the West Indies. The deal was finally agreed at the beginning of August after American opinion had faced up to the possible consequences of a Europe dominated by Hitler and Mussolini. There were well-founded fears that the Axis powers might join forces with the ultra-rightwing régimes in the Argentine and Uruguay and foment an anti-American movement among the five million or so South and Central Americans of German, Italian and Japanese descent.
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This prospect also disturbed the British government which, from 1942 to 1944, kept an infantry battalion on the Falklands to forestall a landing by German, Japanese or Argentine forces.
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By the late autumn of 1940, when the chances of a successful German invasion had diminished, Roosevelt and his advisers were at last certain that Britain was now America’s first line of defence. The result was that America became what Britain had been during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, part banker and part armourer, providing the wherewithal for others to make war. There were problems, particularly when the President had to convince the Senate and House of Representatives to pour taxpayers’ dollars into Britain’s war effort. From the beginning of 1941, it was painfully clear that the British government could no longer pay for its requirements. Hitherto, Britain had settled its American bills by borrowing from the deposits of sterling block countries (including India and the colonies), liquidating overseas holdings and selling off gold and dollar reserves. All these assets were soon exhausted and, by June 1941, Britain’s gold and cash reserves had fallen to $150 million and bankruptcy appeared imminent.

Britain’s financial collapse was prevented by the Lend Lease Act which was passed by Congress in February, after the legislators had been shown that Britain had done everything it could to raise the cash needed for its war effort. Lend Lease gave Britain sufficient credit to purchase whatever it required in return for a pledge to repay the debt when the war was over. Similar arrangements were extended to the dominions. In August 1945 the final account was:

The full total of Britain’s, the Commonwealth’s and the empire’s debts was $30,073 million. Not surprisingly, when Lend Lease was first discussed nervous spirits, including Leo Amery and some Foreign Office officials, were horrified by an emergency measure that would inevitably transform Britain from a major creditor nation to one of the world’s biggest debtors.
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And yet without the sinews of war provided by Lend Lease Britain could not have kept up the struggle. Since the fall of France, Churchill had pursued a strategy with three broad aims which were essentially those followed during the Napoleonic Wars: the defence of the home base; keeping open the sea lanes, especially those across the North Atlantic by which the country was victualled and supplied; and the preservation of supremacy in the Mediterranean and Middle East.

The first objective had been achieved on 12 October 1940 when Hitler postponed Operation Sealion, the invasion of Britain. During the previous ten weeks the RAF had retained control over the skies over Britain and the Channel, and destroyed 600 German aircraft. The Battle of Britain had been a close-run thing, particularly during the first fortnight of September when the pool of trained pilots sank to a dangerously low level. There were, however, more than enough aircraft; during 1940 British factories turned out 15,049 machines compared to Germany’s 10,826 and Italy’s 3,257. Britain stayed ahead in this vital area, producing over 20,000 aeroplanes during 1941 while the combined total for Germany and Italy was 15,000.

Hitler finally abandoned the invasion of Britain in January 1941. For the past four months he and his strategists had devoted nearly all their attention and energies to the forthcoming attack on Russia, which was to be the first stage in the fulfilment of the ambition closest to Hitler’s heart, the creation of a vast Nazi empire in the east. The defeat of Britain was of secondary importance and would, he believed, inevitably follow that of Russia. In the meantime, German forces waged a war of attrition against British towns and cities, which were regularly bombed. Simultaneously, an increasing U-boat fleet harried Britain’s maritime supply lines. This last offensive suffered a considerable setback in June 1941, when British codebreakers cracked the Enigma cipher used for signals between the submarines and Admiral von Dönitz’s Paris headquarters. The first phase of the Battle of the Atlantic therefore went Britain’s way, until February 1942, when the Germans revised their code and discovered how to read that used by the Royal Navy for Atlantic operations.

During the winter of 1940–41, British signals intelligence had alerted the government to the possibility of a German spring offensive that would thrust through the Balkans and then possibly roll on towards Syria (then ruled by adherents of the neo-fascist Vichy government which had been set up in France in June 1940), Palestine and the Iraqi oilfields. This thrust would, it was assumed, coincide with an Italian advance into Egypt.

It was imperative that Britain retained command of the Mediterranean so that the Middle East would not be isolated. Naval supremacy was preserved by a sequence of Nelsonian blows. The first was delivered against the powerful French fleet that had taken refuge at Mers-el-Kébir, near Oran. Its commander, Admiral François Darlan, was convinced that Britain faced defeat and there were sound reasons for thinking that he might offer his ships to the Vichy government or Italy. Disregarding the advice of the cabinet and senior staff officers, Churchill ordered the bombardment of the French warships on 3 July.
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At a stroke he had saved the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean, even though the heavy loss of life generated considerable acrimony.

Italy’s naval pretensions were quickly exploded. In November 1940 three Italian battleships were sunk in Taranto harbour by torpedoes fired from carrier-borne aircraft, an operation which aroused considerable interest in Japan. Clever use of deciphered signals enabled a superior force to intercept an Italian squadron off Cape Matapan and sink three cruisers in March 1941.

On land, Italy fared equally badly. Neither its army nor airforce were adequately trained or equipped, and Mussolini’s bombast failed to fire the hearts of his fighting men. After two feeble offensives against Kenya and Somaliland, Italian forces in East Africa were overwhelmed, and Abyssinia was liberated early in 1941 by British, Indian, African and South African units. Prisoners were abundant and lavishly decorated, which puzzled West African troops who ‘found it difficult to understand how an enemy who has put up so little fight could be so bedecked with medals’.
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News of the victories in East Africa was enthusiastically received in the Gold Coast, where memories of Abyssinia’s recent trouncing were still fresh. A black poet celebrated the reversal of fortune:

Run, you Italians,

Leave your ill-gotten conquests;

Fly on the wings of defeat,

For where Britain stands

Your craven armies scatter.
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Italian armies were also in full retreat in North Africa where, by February 1941, Libya was within Britain’s grasp. Following his strategy of wearing down Britain, Hitler committed German troops to this dissolving front and, in April, launched an attack on Greece which was in part intended to cover the southern flank of the invasion of Russia, and in part a means of keeping up the pressure on Britain in the Middle East. Churchill ordered one British and one Anzac division to Greece in what turned out to be a quixotic gesture, although he had dreamed of another Thermopylae in which the Australians and New Zealanders would throw back the Panzers.
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It was the British who were thrown back, first from Greece and then Crete. Further south, General Irwin Rommel’s Panzer corps expelled the British from Libya, encircled Tobruk, and had reached the Egyptian frontier by May. There were two compensations: German subversion in Iraq was thwarted (see
here
) and a mixed force of British, dominion and Free French units overthrew the collaborationist government in Syria.

Events in the Far East and Russia during the second half of 1941 made it absolutely vital that, with American support, Britain held on to every inch of ground in the Middle East. Since September 1939, British policy-makers had been tormented by one question: for how long would the Japanese restrain from seizing the South-East Asian regions they openly coveted? At first, they had proceeded by stealth, putting pressure on the Vichy administration in Saigon, which proved malleable, and the Netherlands government in the Dutch East Indies, which did not. The result was that in July 1941 Indo-China was under virtual Japanese occupation and an airfield was under construction near Tonkin, bringing the whole of Malaya within range of the Imperial Japanese Air Force.

Britain and Australia had temporised. In July 1940, the British closed Burma Road, the major supply route for the Chinese Nationalist army of General Chiang Kai-Shek, and Australia continued to export cereals to Japan, allowing it generous credit.
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As for the defence of the area, Churchill pinned all his hopes on Roosevelt being able to handle what he called ‘the Japanese dog’ in the Pacific. But the United States Pacific fleet, based at Hawaii since May 1940, could provide little protection for Malaya or the Indian ocean, a point stressed during a conference of senior British, American, Dutch and Australian commanders held at Singapore in April 1941. Furthermore, in the absence of a formal alliance, there was no certainty that Congress would accept an attack on British and Dutch colonies as a reason to declare war on Japan, which was tantamount to ‘sending American boys to support tottering colonial empires’. Roosevelt finally relented and planned to announce America’s commitment to British and Dutch territories on 10 December.

The twists and turns of relations between Japan, the United States and Britain were followed in Australia and New Zealand with a mixture of anger and anxiety. As the war in Europe proceeded, Menzies’s government became increasingly panicky about Australia’s defences and whether earlier British pledges would be honoured. He had visited Britain in February 1941 to press the war cabinet for dominion representation in decision-making, and returned convinced that Churchill was too rash and high-handed to be trusted with grand strategy. Menzies was a conceited man and host to many phantoms; he fancied himself as a Commonwealth statesman equal in stature to Smuts, and entertained absurd daydreams of himself as Churchill’s replacement.
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Menzies’s meddlesomeness would not have mattered greatly had it not been for the despatch of Anzac forces to Greece and Crete. ‘Cold-blooded murder’ was how one Australian Labour MP described campaigns in which over 6,000 Anzacs had died. Ugly memories were dredged up of Gallipoli, for which Churchill had traditionally been blamed in Australia as well as Britain. Forthright to the point of tactlessness, the Labour leader, Curtin, resurrected charges that Britain was indifferent to Australia’s safety. In June, he demanded that Britain ‘Scrap the African Empire’ and close the Suez Canal, a measure which could hardly have assisted Australia.
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General Sir Thomas Blamey, the Australian commander in the Middle East, also weighed in with a call for his men to be withdrawn from what he considered the futile defence of Tobruk.
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Blarney also put his finger on an official habit of mind, exhibited by Churchill, which rankled with his countrymen: ‘There was a curious element in the British make-up which led them to look on the dominions as appendages of Britain.’
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The row spluttered on for the next few months, and became known about in Japan, where it prompted the headline, ‘British Empire Crumbling to Pieces’.
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