The World at War (19 page)

ARTHUR BOTTOMLEY

Trade-union leader and Walthamstow borough councillor
The recognition that Attlee was Deputy Prime Minister and that Ernest Bevin was in the government, this was an assurance to the mass of the people that fairness would prevail. I think it's only right to say that when history's written up Attlee will be one of the greatest men in history, because quietly and diligently he made all the preparations for helping to win this war. Although nobody can take away from Churchill his great leadership, his inspiration, I don't think Churchill would have been the same man without having as deputy
Clement Attlee, and it's for this reason, in my opinion, the coalition was so successful.

CECIL HARMSWORTH KING

Proprietor of the
Daily Mirror

I don't think he was a great Commander-in-Chief. He was no Marlborough: the Duke of Marlborough was one of Churchill's ancestors but he was the best available, acceptable to the armed forces and experienced in war. He was at his best, I think, in 1940 when he did a terrific job in expressing within suitable words the feelings of the British people, of defiance after the evacuation of Dunkirk. I don't think he was a great Prime Minister, I don't think he really understood much about politics but he was a great personality, a very attractive personality, very self-centred but very attractive, warm and with an immense command of the English language, written and spoken.

RAB BUTLER

Churchill didn't really have a great many intimate friends: some of us were too young to be intimate with him and he missed his early days in the Asquith Cabinet where he was among the towering giants, and his old friend [Liberal statesman John] Morley and others had died. But he had two friends, F E Smith, Lord Birkenhead, and a little later Max Beaverbrook. Then F E Smith died and it left him for rapier work chiefly to Max Beaverbrook, because he liked to have somebody who would stick something into him and then he would reply and call them the most frightful names and say he wasn't going to speak to them again.

AMBASSADOR HARRIMAN

I don't think he was a man that worried. At that time he did what has to be done. I wasn't in Britain very long before he made it very plain to me that all Britain could do was to hold out, and he wanted to be sure that Britain held out. He wanted to hold the Middle East, Singapore. Then there was the fear in the summer of 1940, the battle for Britain in the air, of possible invasion; then there was a fear when I was there in March or April that there might be an attempt to cross the Channel and that disappeared when intelligence came through that Hitler was going to attack Russia. The interesting thing was that both Roosevelt and Churchill on their own informed Stalin of their intelligence information, and Stalin thought that was a trick on our part to get him to mobilise and to provoke Hitler to attack. Stalin was very conscious that in World War One it was the Tsar's mobilisation that caused the German Kaiser to attack Russia, and he wasn't going to have any part of it.

REAR ADMIRAL LORD LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN

Chief of Combined Operations

In October 1941 I was recalled from Pearl Harbor, where I was working with the American Fleet temporarily, to take up the job in charge of Combined Operations by Mr Winston Churchill. The very first day I reported to him he said, 'You are to
prepare for the invasion of Europe for unless we can fight Hitler and beat his forces on land, we shall never win this war. You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft, the techniques to enable us to effect a landing against opposition and to maintain ourselves there. You must take the most brilliant officers from the Navy, Army and Air Force to help, as our planners, to plan this great operation. You must take bases to use as training establishments where you can train the Navy, Army and Air Force to work as a single entity. The whole of the south coast of England is a bastion of defence against the invasion of Hitler – you've got to turn it into the springboard for our attack.' This was October 1941, when the whole of our allies in Europe had been overrun and conquered, the Russians looked like being defeated and the Americans weren't in the war – what a hell of a decision to make, to prepare for the invasion then.

MICHAEL FOOT

Aneurin Bevan, of course, was the strongest and fiercest critic and was the one most resented by Churchill – but he was extremely well informed. Because there were in the conduct of the war and the nature of the weapons many defects and faults that had to be exposed and as Bevan was raising these matters in the House of Commons, more and more information would come to him from sources which proved to be correct. For example the whole way in which tanks were designed: Bevan and Ipswich MP Dick Stokes, who had a great knowledge of the production of weapons, constituted a most formidable criticism in the House of Commons. Again, Churchill didn't like it – Churchill wanted to go to the House of Commons and have statements made with nobody commenting on the statements. Aneurin Bevan said that this was quite contrary to parliamentary procedure and he would insist that when Churchill made these statements the matter should be opened to debate. There were some others on both sides of the House who joined with him in these criticisms but I don't think anybody would doubt that Bevan's criticism was the most formidable and the most sustained, and of course it was carried wider than any of the others. Most of the others were concentrating on individual questions, whereas Bevan broadened his attack to cover the strategy of the government as a whole.

RAB BUTLER

The main opposition to Churchill during his magnificent ten years of office was over the Second Front. But long before that there were murmurings, chiefly over Tobruk, and all this led up to a
vote of censure. The real trouble was having a coalition government: the trouble from the people attacking Churchill was that there were very few people of ability outside it to attack him; they were not strong enough to make an impression on the House. He called Aneurin Bevan a great hulking bully because he feared that by attacking him he might upset the government. This was only part of the characteristic of Churchill, which was that in politics he was nothing like so much a warrior as he was in dealing with warlike preparations. Churchill was always very cautious in politics: he'd had a rough time in his youth, he'd had all the Dardanelles trouble and he didn't like opposition, so he showed a certain amount of anxiety and caution, which those of us who were supporting him felt was quite unnecessary because he had this enormous majority.

ROBERT BOOTHBY

Churchill was most politically anxious in 1942 when Tobruk fell and there was a censure motion moved against his government in the House of Commons. I have never seen him so troubled as he was then. And people were talking quite freely of a possible fall of the government. I was in the Air Force at the time and came up as a Member of Parliament and I met him in the dining room of the House of Commons and he said, 'Are you in favour of the government?' So I said, 'There's no alternative,' and he said, 'Are you in favour of me?' and I said, 'Yes.' And he seized my arm and took me to the Speaker of the House of Commons and said, 'I want Mr Boothby to be called early in the debate, fifth if possible.' And I made one of my most successful speeches. It was made a little easier that Sir Roger Keyes, who had moved the vote of censure, had suggested that the Duke of Gloucester should replace Churchill as Commander-in-Chief. The Duke had been to school with me and I didn't think that it was altogether a very constructive suggestion and I was able to make fun of this and put the House in a lighter mood and make them laugh because it was a moment of great tension. Churchill listened to my speech and he took me to the smoking room and stood me a whisky and drank a toast to what he called, 'the Pegasus wings of my oratory'. I was naturally very pleased, but then he didn't bother to speak to me again, because I'd done my job, until the end of the war when he had another job to do in connection with Europe and appointed me as one of the original members of the Council of Europe. But that was characteristic of Churchill as a man – he used men when he had a particular job, when they'd done the job he dropped them. If they had another job to do, he'd pick them up again. He was pretty ruthless in his dealings with individuals and this idea of tremendous loyalty to old friends is to a large extent fiction. He used men as relentlessly as I think Lloyd George used them in the First World War. And as I think Napoleon used them and probably any great War Minister has to do.

JOHN McCLOY

US Assistant Secretary of War

I think he certainly expressed himself and he did have an influence. He did cause us to postpone some of our major programmes but on the other hand he knew where the strength lay, he knew that the decisive factor was the American intervention and he was supposed to go along. His relations with Mr Roosevelt were very good but he had closer control over the British military thinking. Mr Roosevelt rather allowed General Marshall to dictate the course of the war, and did not participate to the extent that Mr Churchill did in the depths of strategy. Mr Churchill enjoyed this, he liked to get involved, he'd been a solider, he exerted a strong influence, he was a strong personality and highly articulate. It wasn't entirely determinative – he couldn't compel us to everything that he would prefer – but he certainly made his points clear and you knew you'd be in a contest before you prevailed. The chief issue seemed to be about the opening of the
Second Front. Mr Roosevelt was very anxious to get started and have American troops to go ashore and the military people did think we had the capacity. Mr Churchill was very much impressed by the casualties that Britain had suffered in World War One and he didn't want to go through that experience again. One night I was in London before we went ashore on the continent and he asked me to have dinner with him. We went off in a car and he took me up to the Houses of Parliament, this was about one o'clock; he sat down in what was then the House of Lords – the Commons had been destroyed – had the lights turned on and he talked about the loss of an entire British generation. He said, 'I'm only an accident, I'm a sport. All my colleagues are dead – they're buried at Somme or Passchendaele – and we can't endure the loss of another British generation. And I want you to realise that this is something that has to be avoided for everybody's sake.' And suddenly I realised why he had kept me so long. I was only Assistant Secretary of War, but it was because my chief was keen on going ashore promptly and straight across the Channel, and he knew that I was rather close to my chief, Mr Stimson, and he was trying to point out to me what really was his preoccupation.

PROFESSOR VANNEVAR BUSH

Chairman of the US National Defense Research Committee 1940

I don't think anybody ever dominated Roosevelt, not even his wife. But I think Churchill had a great influence on Roosevelt, and quite properly so.

MAJOR GENERAL KENNETH STRONG

Chief of Intelligence to General Eisenhower

Mr Churchill tried to persuade General Eisenhower not to draw on the forces in Italy to help his campaign in France but to leave them in Italy and to get on with the forces he had available. And I remember Eisenhower saying to me, 'You know he's a very cunning old man. When I went to see him and he talked about this, the tears rolled down his cheeks and he said, "You must leave me with these divisions, you can't take them away." I said, "Mr Prime Minister, if indeed you have a political object in keeping the troops there, well, that is all right. You let our bosses in Washington know what it is. But if you are making this suggestion to me on military grounds I must disagree with you – I want to draw on troops from Italy to help my campaign in Europe."' And so in the end Churchill gave way and, like in all these things once he'd given way, he supported Eisenhower right to the end.

MAJOR GENERAL JOHN HARDING

Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Alexander

Churchill and Alexander were very close and very personal, and I think this was probably due to the fact that Alexander epitomised everything that Churchill himself would have liked to have been. He was debonair, he was handsome and alert and lively, amusing and good company, and at the same time he had been a highly successful military commander. On one occasion when Winston was on a visit to Italy in September 1944, he came and had lunch in Alexander's mess and he brought with him a new photograph of himself for Alexander, which he autographed, and after lunch he presented it to Alexander who said, 'Thank you very much indeed, sir, I will take it at once and put it in my caravan,' and he went off, an erect, alert figure in a smart uniform. Winston looked after him with tears in his eyes and said, 'Ah, what a man.' I think there was admiration and affection on both sides.

MICHAEL FOOT

I think Churchill hated Aneurin Bevan during the war, and recognised him as a most serious opponent. Particularly, of course, Aneurin Bevan was out to secure the most successful prosecution of the war – he wasn't opposed to the war at all. But the idea that Churchill and Bevan fought each other with courtesy during the war, that's not the case. Both of them were concerned about the whole future of the world and Aneurin Bevan thought in those later years that Churchill was leading the country in the wrong direction and was failing to exploit the opportunities. For example when Mussolini was overthrown he thought that the way the British government reacted to it added to the whole length of the war. So there was no love lost between them and indeed after 1945 Churchill tried to have his revenge by trying to destroy Aneurin Bevan's reputation. I'm glad to say he failed. It may be that in later years there was some reconciliation because they'd known each other in the Thirties and had been common critics of the Chamberlain government at the time, but during the war years and post-war years they fought with real weapons – it was no fake fight between them.