Winston Churchill's War Leadership (3 page)

The battle against defeatism was not over. On the last day of May, Churchill was shown a seven-page note by the Australian High Commissioner in London, Stanley Bruce, favouring an international conference “to formulate a peace settlement.” Churchill struck out this paragraph, writing in the margin a single word: “No.” Against another point made by Bruce, that “the further shedding of blood and the continuance of needless suffering is unnecessary” and that the belligerents should “cease the struggle,” Churchill wrote the word “Rot.” Where Bruce concluded that negotiations were possible, Churchill commented, “The end is rotten.”

Churchill tried to prevent any suggestion of defeatism, wherever it emerged. In the summer of 1940 the Admiralty devised a scheme—of which I, aged three and a half, was a part—to evacuate British children to Canada and the United States. Churchill opposed this plan. It only went ahead because the meeting at which it was put before the War Cabinet was interrupted by news of the Franco-German armistice, before any formal decision about the evacuees was reached. “A large movement of this kind,” Churchill told the War Cabinet during the discussion, “encourages a defeatist spirit, which was contrary to the true facts of the position and should be sternly discouraged.” The Minister concerned went ahead, regardless.

At that same War Cabinet meeting, convened at a time when rumours of an imminent invasion were gaining momentum, the Cabinet invited Churchill to issue a circular to the heads of all government departments, instructing them to take drastic steps to put a stop to defeatist talk. The War Cabinet had just been told by the Intelligence Services, based partly on intercepted private correspondence, that the publication of the most recent deaths from a German air raid—eleven civilians killed and more than a hundred injured in the Newcastle area— might “have a demoralizing effect in the country.” To combat this mood, the War Cabinet agreed that Churchill himself should draft and sign a message to be sent to more than three thousand people: to all Members of Parliament, Peers, Lord Lieutenants of the counties of the United Kingdom, Lord Mayors and Privy Councillors—the very centre of British governance. The message, which was printed over a facsimile of Churchill’s signature, began: “On what may be the eve of an attempted invasion or battle for our native land, the Prime Minister desires to impress upon all persons holding responsible positions in the Government, in the fighting services or in the civil departments, their duty to maintain a spirit of alert and confident energy.”

After setting out his confidence that a German invasion could be repulsed, Churchill continued: “The Prime Minister expects all His Majesty’s Servants in high places to set an example of steadiness and resolution. They should check and rebuke expressions of loose and ill-digested opinion in their circles, or by their subordinates. They should not hesitate to report, or if necessary remove, any officers or officials who are found to be consciously exercising a disturbing or depressing influence, and whose talk is calculated alarm and despondency. Thus alone will they be worthy of the fighting men, who in the air, on the sea, and on land have already met the enemy without any sense of being outmatched in martial qualities.”

In what was arguably the “finest hour” of Churchill’s leadership, he had successfully challenged defeatist talk. Churchill understood that the British people were determined, despite the mounting dangers, to fight on. He commented on one occasion, with regard to the British character and its soundness in adversity: “The British people are like the sea. You can put the bucket in anywhere, and pull it up, and always find it salt.” In a speech in the House of Commons on 21 November 1940, bluntly describing the difficulties that lay ahead—“the darker side of our dangers and burdens”—Churchill commented: “I know that it is in adversity that British qualities shine the brightest, and it is under these extraordinary tests that the character of our slowly wrought institutions reveals its latent, invisible strength.” In a comment to one of his Private Office about Ernest Bevin, a senior Labour Party figure in his coalition and, as Minister of Labour, the man responsible for the vast wartime workforce, Churchill described him as “a good old thing with the right stuff in him and no defeatist tendencies.” It was Churchill’s own opposition to all forms of defeatism that marked out the first six months of his war premiership and established the nature and pattern of his war leadership.

Churchill had found the will and the strength to challenge defeatism. All his life he had been an opponent of supine surrender. But there were times, especially when there was news of heavy loss of life at sea or in the air, or in the German bombardment of British cities, when Churchill could be cast down and depressed, albeit briefly. In a speech in the House of Commons shortly before he became Prime Minister, he described these spells as “the brown hours, when baffling news comes, and disappointing news.” Yet even when the news was bleak, Churchill found the means to combat depression. In those very “brown hours,” he told the Commons on 8 May 1940—when the battle in Norway was going so badly for Britain, provoking a political crisis with Churchill at its centre—“I always turn for refreshment to the reports of the German wireless. I love to read the lies they tell of all the British ships they have sunk so many times over, and to survey the fools’ paradise in which they find it necessary to keep their deluded serfs and robots.” This attitude was Churchill’s nature. It was also what he recognized as an essential feature of successful war leadership: avoiding depression and despair.

During the many periods that still lay ahead, of setbacks on the battlefield or of the relentless German submarine sinkings of British merchant ships in the Atlantic, Churchill’s “brown hours” were many. The sinking of the British warships
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
off Malaya three days after Pearl Harbor was one such time. The fall of Singapore in February 1942 was another. But Churchill never allowed such moments to dominate him or to affect him adversely beyond the moment. After the fall of Singapore, which he admitted to the House of Commons cast “the shadow of a heavy and far-reaching military defeat,” he went on to tell the parliamentarians: “Here is the moment to display that calm and poise, combined with grim determination, which not so very long ago brought us out of the very jaws of death”—the Dunkirk evacuation. “Here,” Churchill added, “is another occasion to show—as so often in our long story—that we can meet reverses with dignity and with renewed accessions of strength.”

As parliamentary criticism of his leadership grew after the fall of Singapore, Churchill confided another of his fears to Roosevelt: “I do not like these days of personal stress and I have found it difficult to keep my eye on the ball.” He could not reveal in Parliament the facts as he knew them: that the Commander-in-Chief Far East’s report on the fall of Singapore told of “the lack of real fighting spirit” among the troops not only in Malaya but also in Burma, where a Japanese attack was expected at any moment. This information had to remain secret from all but the most inner circle, and it had to be kept from the House of Commons, even though it was both an explanation and a “defence” of what had happened. In the course of the war, Parliament had to take many things on trust; some information was conveyed to it in specially convened Secret Sessions, where Churchill spoke with great frankness, but where the usual parliamentary record was not made public. As Churchill told Roosevelt: “Democracy has to prove that it can provide a granite foundation for war against tyranny.”

When, not long after the start of the Japanese war, one of Churchill’s staff brought him some particularly grim news, Churchill commented: “We must just KBO.” The initials stood for “Keep Buggering On.” At other moments of bad news he would burst into a popular music hall song of the First World War, “Keep right on to the end of the road.” He even sang this song to Stalin at a time when his Soviet ally suddenly began to accuse him of not really wanting to see the defeat of Hitler. That song, a member of the British delegation explained to a startled generalissimo, “is Britain’s secret weapon.”

A war leader is only as strong as the information reaching him, and his ability to use that information. A determining factor in Churchill’s war leadership was his use of top-secret Intelligence. Some was provided by agents in the field, some by aerial reconnaissance. Information of crucial importance was also gleaned from careful clandestine reading of telegrams sent to and from neutral embassies in London, and from Signals Intelligence of the most secret sort. Several times each day Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff received what Churchill called his “golden eggs”—the intercepted top-secret German radio communications, including many from Hitler himself, transmitted through the Enigma machine. These messages were decrypted at Bletchley Park, northwest of London, by a staff that was to exceed five thousand before the end of the war.

These “golden eggs”—laid, Churchill once remarked, “by the geese who never cackled,” the staff at Bletchley—gave Churchill and those in the inner circle an insight, unique in the history of modern warfare, into the strategic thinking and tactical intentions of the enemy. Beyond the staff at Bletchley, the number of people privy to the Enigma decrypts was strictly limited: in September 1940 only thirty-one people within the governing instrument in London were aware of their existence or able to take them into account in policy making. When Churchill learned of a dozen others in receipt of this information, he cut most of them out, minuting to the head of the Secret Intelligence Services: “The wild scattering of secret information must be curbed.” Beyond the small group in London—who included King George VI—the others who knew of this most secret source were the land, sea and air commanders-in-chief, to whom the relevant aspects were transmitted, and the Special Liaison Unit officers at the commander-inchiefs’ headquarters, who decoded them.

During the Cold War decades that followed the Second World War, none of the participants in these Enigma-based decisions were able to refer to them in their memoirs, a ban that also applied to Churchill. Secrecy had to be maintained, as the Enigma machine continued to be used by several post-war governments. As a result, both at the time and even as late as the beginning of the twenty-first century, many major British wartime decisions have been seen as absurd, unintelligible, or as the result of Churchill’s personal interference. For Churchill, his War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff, the Enigma revelations played a crucial role in the process of deciding how to respond and where to strike. Along with its innumerable tactical and strategic benefits, Enigma also revealed some of the innermost decision-making processes of the enemy.

The search for, and achievement of, national unity was another vital aspect of Churchill’s war leadership. From the outset of his premiership, Churchill determined to set aside the hostilities and animosities of the pre-war years. For almost a decade he had been the most outspoken critic of the government of the day, castigating it in Parliament, in public and in print for its neglect of national defence. The country had been as divided as its politicians, and vitriol had been the order of the day. From the first days of Churchill’s war government, however, those who had been his severest critics, and whom he had most severely criticized, became, at his request, colleagues charged with averting defeat and preserving the realm. A few hours before he became Prime Minister, his son, Randolph, asked whether he would achieve the highest place—arguably his father’s ambition for more than thirty years. Churchill replied, “Nothing matters now except beating the enemy.”

When he formed his government on 10 May 1940, Churchill was confronted by near outrage among some of his closest friends and allies for giving high positions to former adversaries, including those who had kept him out of office and had belittled his policies on the eve of war. Churchill was emphatic in his reply. “As for me,” he wrote to one pre-war adversary who had apologized for his role in trying to remove Churchill from Parliament, “the past is dead.” Two days before he became Prime Minister, during the debate in the House of Commons when Chamberlain’s leadership and Churchill’s conduct of the Norwegian Campaign were both under attack, Churchill appealed to his fellow parliamentarians in these words: “I say, let pre-war feuds die; let personal quarrels be forgotten, and let us keep our hatreds for the common enemy. Let Party interests be ignored, let all our energies be harnessed, let the whole ability and forces of the nation be hurled into the struggle, and let the strong horses be pulling on the collar.”

Three months later, as Prime Minister, he was to reiterate this theme with even greater force. After describing the recriminations between France and Britain on the eve of the fall of France as well as the neglect by the pre-war British government to provide an adequate army for fighting on the continent, he told the House of Commons:

I am not reciting these facts for the purpose of recrimination. That, I judge, to be utterly futile and even harmful. We cannot afford it. I recite them in order to explain why it was that we did not have, as we could have had, between twelve and fourteen British divisions fighting in the line in this great battle instead of only three. Now I put all this aside. I put it on the shelf, from which the historians, if they have time, will select their documents and tell their stories. We have to think of the future and not of the past. This also applies in a small way to our own affairs at home. There are too many who would hold an inquest in the House of Commons on the conduct of the Governments—and of Parliaments, for they are in it too—during the years which led up to this catastrophe. They seek to indict those who were responsible for the guidance of our affairs. This also would be a foolish and pernicious process. There are too many in it. Let each man search his conscience and search his speeches. I frequently search mine.