Churchill (6 page)

In fact he had been working for some months to get the navy into a high state of readiness, and as the buildup to war accelerated, he ordered the navy not to disband after its summer maneuvers but to take up action stations. From the start of the crisis, he was a prominent member of the war party. The issue to him was Belgium and her ports, especially Antwerp. Britain had always been opposed to these ports, aimed like pistols at her coast, being in the hands of a major power, especially France. That was why Britain gave a solemn guarantee of Belgian independence. Now Germany was the threat, and when the right wing of the German army, as part of the “Schlieffen Plan” to subdue France, swung through Belgian territory, Churchill was enthusiastically in favor of Britain sticking to the guarantee—“a mere scrap of paper” as the kaiser bitterly called it. Moreover he persuaded Lloyd George to take the same view and thus prevented the breakup of the government, though he was unable to stop Lord Morley, his friend and mentor, from resigning. When war came Churchill was ready, prepared psychologically and in every way, for what he realized would be the biggest conflict in history. He was like a man who had long schooled himself for a job and was now told to do it. And he had got the vast machine for which he was responsible geared up, too. The war, in many ways, proved a disaster for Churchill. But on his downfall, Lord Kitchener, who had been made chief warlord at the outset, reassured him, “There is one thing, at least, they can never take away from you—when the war began you had the fleet ready.”

The Lessons of Failure

T
hough Churchill entered the Great War readily, if not eagerly, we must remember that he had warned in speech and print that it would be a catastrophe for humanity. He was the only one, apart from that brilliant prophet of the future H. G. Wells, to predict its horrors so clearly. And they proved worse than either supposed. Indeed the first of the two world wars proved the worst disaster in modern history, perhaps in all history, from which most of the subsequent problems of the twentieth century sprang, and many of which continue, fortissimo, into the twenty-first. He saw all these tremendous events from a highly personal viewpoint and portrayed them vividly, seen from close quarters and invested with strong emotion. As with every major event in his life, he told the story as soon as it was over, on an appropriately large scale. A. J. Balfour, who always viewed him with a salty mixture of admiration and vitriol, put it: “Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it
The World Crisis
.”

Even before the book appeared, he had epitomized its monstrous nature in glowing words on a sheet of War Office paper:

At the time, Churchill was too busy to reflect on the horrors of war. He was responsible for 1,100 warships, with more joining them every week from the shipyards. But they were vulnerable. Three cruisers were lost to a U-boat on a single day, September 22, 1914. In October the battleship
Audacious
was sunk and soon after two more cruisers went down in the lost battle of Coronel. Combined loss of life was over four thousand. The failure of the Mediterranean fleet to sink two German warships on their way to Istanbul inspired Turkey to join the war on Germany’s side. On two occasions German warships made hit-and-run attacks on Yorkshire towns. The fact that the navy had enabled the six divisions of Britain’s expeditionary force to be transported without loss of a single man was taken for granted, though it was a notable achievement. Churchill sent fast battle cruisers to the South Atlantic to avenge Coronel, and they did so at the battle of the Falklands, the entire German squadron being sent to the bottom. But that was taken for granted, too. The public demanded to know what the Grand Fleet was doing, and why it had not won an overwhelming victory. Why had there been no Trafalgar? Where was Nelson? The French had saved Paris by their victory at the Marne in early September, but Britain had made no spectacular contribution as yet to victory in the war, which all (except Churchill and Kitchener) believed would be short.

In his frustration, Churchill involved himself in a typical personal adventure. He had already created a naval division for land use and set up a base in Dunkirk, with a naval air squadron, and commandeered Rolls-Royces protected by sheets of steel armor, the earliest version of the tank. When news reached the cabinet that the Belgians were about to surrender Ostend and Antwerp, thus defeating the whole object of Britain’s intervention in the war, it ordered Churchill, a delighted volunteer, to go to Antwerp to take charge. He did so and had a tremendous time, commanding every available man and piece of artillery, improvising, and inventing new weapons. He afterward described it in
The World Crisis
with rhetorical relish. He set up his HQ in the best hotel, went around in a cloak and a yachting cap, and held the city for a week, during which the three chief French Channel ports, essential links between Britain and the expeditionary force, were made secure. But his proposal that he resign his office and be appointed commander on the spot, though approved by Kitchener, was rejected by the cabinet, and he was ordered home. Antwerp fell, and with it two thousand British troops who were killed or taken prisoner, and Churchill was blamed, particularly by the Tories and senior army generals. Clemmie, who had had a baby (Sarah) while her husband was fighting, was also critical. But the prime minister was warm in praise: “He is so resourceful and undismayed, two of the qualities I like best.”

Churchill later wrote that “the weight of the War” pressed “more heavily” on him in the last months of 1914 than at any other time. As the enormous and constantly expanding armies settled down into static, bloody, and horrible trench warfare in Flanders, Churchill feared his nightmare vision was coming true: the vision of an endless, infinitely costly but indecisive war, in which all would lose, none gain, and the only result would be the ruin of Europe and her empires. The navy had painfully succeeded in bottling up Germany, clearing the seas of her surface ships and maintaining British maritime supremacy on the oceans. Otherwise it was unoccupied and denied the chance to strike a vital blow. Admiral Jellicoe, commanding the Grand Fleet, was rendered cautious, perhaps excessively so, Churchill felt, by his knowledge that though he could not win the war by daring, he could “lose it in an afternoon” by one serious misjudgment. How to restore dynamism to the war? He asked Asquith (December 29, 1914): “Are there not other alternatives than sending out armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders? Furthermore, cannot the power of the Navy be brought more directly to bear upon the enemy? ”

One answer was to make more use of Russia’s almost inexhaustible manpower resources by shipping vast supplies of modern weapons, especially heavy artillery, to her Black Sea ports. But this meant knocking Turkey out of the war, or at any rate clearing the Dardanelles to let the British and French munitions ships through. This is what Churchill suggested in a memo to Asquith at the end of 1914. He also offered an alternative: an invasion of Schleswig-Holstein, which Germany had conquered from Denmark in Bismarck’s day. This, he calculated, would bring Denmark, perhaps all the Scandinavian countries, into the war and also open up communications with Russia. But Churchill preferred an assault on Istanbul, which would be easier, given overwhelming Franco-British superiority in the Mediterranean, and bring the Balkan states of Greece, Rumania, and Bulgaria into the war on the Allied side, probably Italy also.

This view was accepted in principle. But now it became clear, at least in retrospect, that Asquith, as prime minister, did not know how to run a war on such a scale. What British prime minister ever had? Aberdeen had made a gruesome mess of British participation in the Crimean War. Pitt had blundered repeatedly in the Continental War against Revolutionary France and Napoleon. Asquith, over six years, had proved a skillful peacetime leader, steering Britain through several crises by his adroit management of the House of Commons and the cabinet. But he had no conception of the right way to win a world war. He could keep the cabinet together and see that general policy orders were given to the services. But then he sat back and wrote amorous letters to his beloved Venetia Stanley or played bridge endlessly at his house, the Wharf. It is clear now that he should have handed over to a younger and more energetic colleague such as Lloyd George, or formed a war cabinet to conduct the actual operations and the mobilization of the economy. He should also have brought the other parties into the government and so united the nation. But he was not willing to do any of those things.

Hence the attempt to seize the Dardanelles, the narrow strip which was the key to the Sea of Marmara and Istanbul, was a disaster. The year before, Churchill had foolishly brought out of retirement Admiral Sir John Fisher, the dynamic force—he was more than a human being—who had created the original Dreadnought and two more classes of capital ships, to replace Admiral Louis Battenberg, forced out by popular prejudice because he was of German blood, as first sea lord. Fisher was now well into his seventies and increasingly arbitrary and childish (his wild letters often ended “Yours till Hell freezes”). He could not make up his mind about the Dardanelles and in the end opposed it. By this time, January 1915, the Germans and Turks had got wind of the scheme and were preparing to kill it on the beaches. There was a foolish tendency, not shared by Churchill, to underrate the Turks as fighting men. With a large contingent of German officers to advise and train them, the Turkish army was formidable. On January 31, Asquith told Fisher, “I have heard Mr. Winston Churchill and I have heard you and now I am going to give my decision . . . The Dardanelles will go ahead.”

If Asquith had then appointed Churchill supremo of the operation (and told him to replace Fisher), the campaign might still have succeeded. But he did no such thing. He was already thinking of forming a coalition with the Tories and knew they would require Churchill’s departure from the Admiralty as part of the price. There were endless arguments about the nature of the naval force and the relative importance of the army in the attack. The admirals were timid. The land commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton, was charming but lacked resolution. There were leaks from the cabinet, which under Asquith had no sense of the absolute need for security, and by the time the operation began at the end of April 1915, the assaulting troops, mainly Australians and New Zealanders, plus Churchill’s naval division, had not a chance. It was a massacre, and the casualties enormous. The divided command insisted on reinforcing failure, thus breaking the most elementary rule of strategy, and the death toll rose. Fisher noisily resigned, and Asquith formed his coalition, moving Churchill, despite his almost tearful protests, from the Admiralty to the nonjob of chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. It was the only time in his life that Clemmie Churchill made a dramatic appeal on behalf of her husband. She wrote to Asquith: “Winston may in your eyes, and in those with whom he had to work, have faults, but he had the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present or future Cabinet possess—the power, the imagination, the deadliness, to fight Germany.” This was true but unavailing: Asquith was beginning to fight for his own political survival and he saw that the sacrifice of Churchill was essential to it. Besides, his noisy and dominating wife, Margot, whose shouted advice was to get rid of Churchill at any cost, told him: “I have never varied in my opinion of Winston I am glad to say. He is a hound of the lowest sort of political honour, a fool of the lowest judgment, and contemptible. He cured me of oratory in the House, and bored me with oratory in the Home.”