Winston Churchill's War Leadership (4 page)

Churchill continued: “Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

Churchill rejected the demand that those who had been at the centre of the pre-war appeasement policy not be rewarded for their pre-war stance. He told the House of Commons: “Every Minister who tries each day to do his duty shall be respected, and their subordinates must know that their chiefs are not threatened men, men who are here today and gone tomorrow, but that their directions must be punctually and faithfully obeyed. Without this concentrated power we cannot face what lies before us.”

One of Churchill’s ministerial appointments— Captain David Margesson as Chief Whip—was particularly criticized by those who wanted to see the pre-war “Men of Munich” excluded from government. Margesson had been both Stanley Baldwin’s and Neville Chamberlain’s Chief Whip, active in helping to keep Churchill out of office and in dragooning the serried ranks of Conservative Members of Parliament to vote against many of his proposals on national defence, including his advocacy of a Ministry of Supply to enable industry to prepare for the eventuality of war. To a Conservative anti-appeasement Member of Parliament who had voiced his opposition to the retention of Margesson, Churchill wrote: “It has been my deliberate policy to try to rally all the forces for the life and death struggle in which we are plunged, and to let bygones be bygones. I am quite sure that Margesson will treat me with the loyalty that he has given to my predecessors.” He added: “The fault alleged against him which tells the most is that he has done his duty only too well. I do not think that there is anyone who could advise me better about all those elements in the Tory Party who were so hostile to us in recent years. I have to think of unity, and I need all the strength I can get.” As to the Chief Whip’s qualities, Churchill wrote, “I have long had a very high opinion of Margesson’s administrative and executive abilities.” Not long after writing this letter, Churchill appointed Margesson to be Secretary of State for War.

At the centre of Churchill’s mental energies as war leader was his belief in himself—in his abilities and in his destiny. While at school, he had gathered a group of boys around him and explained his confidence that one day, far in the future, when London was under attack from an invader, he would be in command of the capital’s defences. As a young soldier he thought that destiny had somehow marked him out, and he expressed that belief on several occasions in letters to his mother. In 1897, on his way to his first action on the northwest frontier of India, he wrote to her: “I have faith in my star—that I am intended to do something in this world.” In 1900, when he was only twenty-six years old but already a participant in three wars and the author of five books, Captain Percy Scott, a naval gunnery expert whom he had met in the Boer War, predicted a remarkable future for him. “I feel certain,” wrote Scott, “that I shall some day shake hands with you as Prime Minister of England; you possess the two necessary qualifications, genius and plod. Combined, I believe nothing can keep them back.” To Violet Asquith, who had spoken cynically about men in general, Churchill remarked a few years later: “All men are worms, but I do believe that I am a glow worm.”

During the first six months of 1916, when Churchill was serving as a battalion commander on the Western Front, a German shell had nearly killed him. Writing to his wife, Clementine, that night, he told her of his innermost feelings on contemplating his extinction. Had the shell fallen a mere twenty yards closer to him, he wrote, it would have been “a good ending to a checkered life, a final gift—unvalued—to an ungrateful country—an impoverishment of the war making power of Britain which no one would ever know or measure or mourn.”

In the first few months of Churchill’s wartime premiership, one of his hardest tasks and greatest achievements was projecting confidence, even at the blackest of times. In the summer of 1940, during the dangerous, long-drawn-out days and nights of the German invasion and conquest of Belgium, Holland and France and the subsequent German aerial bombardment of Britain, Churchill did not see how Britain could avoid defeat. On returning from Buckingham Palace after becoming Prime Minister—as German forces were breaking through the frontiers of the three northern European nations—he told the detective who was with him: “I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best.” An extraordinary feature of his war leadership in those first months, and at other times of crisis, was his ability to hide his doubts and fears from the public. He understood from the outset of his premiership that if he was seen to waiver, public confidence in continuing at war would not be sustained.

The main vehicle by which Churchill sustained that confidence was through his speeches and broadcasts. The twin pillars of his oratory were realism and vision. One complemented the other. When he spoke in Parliament or broadcast to the nation (Parliament having refused to allow his speeches in the House of Commons to be broadcast), he instilled confidence in a way he himself had not anticipated. He made his first public broadcast as Prime Minister at the urging of his predecessor and former opponent, Neville Chamberlain. Those who listened to Churchill’s early broadcasts expected to be told, as indeed they were, that times were dangerous and the future dire. What they did not expect to hear, after the stark warnings, was that the Prime Minister looked forward to something very different from a state of siege.

In his first speech in the House of Commons as Prime Minister, on 13 May 1940, while he was still in the process of forming his government, Churchill began by setting out the dangers that were confronting Britain: “I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I will say, It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. This is our policy.”

Churchill then went on to present the Members of Parliament with his astonishing vision. “You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory. Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”

The words “a monstrous tyranny” highlighted another facet of Churchill’s leadership—his clarity as to the purpose of the war. From the outset of the fighting, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty and a member of Chamberlain’s War Cabinet, he was able to convey to the British public something they overwhelmingly felt within themselves: that it was a just war, a war being fought against evil. Even earlier, at the height of the pre-war debate about whether Nazi Germany could, or should, be appeased, Churchill had understood, and conveyed, that what was at stake was the survival of humane values. “War is terrible,” he had written on 7 January 1939, “but slavery is worse.” From the first months of Nazi rule in Germany, Churchill had spoken out in the House of Commons against the racism of the new regime and the cruel nature of Nazi anti-Semitism. He had argued in 1938 that any appeasement of Germany was a sign not only of British military weakness but also of moral weakness, and that, sooner or later—“and most probably sooner”—both would have to be redressed, since the object of appeasement—to satisfy Hitler by acceding to his territorial demands—would only encourage more and more demands.

When Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons of that moral aspect. He was still a back-bencher, awaiting the call—which came after the debate—to join Chamberlain’s government. Three days earlier, Germany had invaded Poland and seized the Free City of Danzig. “This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland,” Churchill told the House of Commons. “We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war of domination or imperial aggrandizement or material gain: no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish, on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man.”

This speech, reproduced in all the newspapers on the following morning, was a clarion call to those who would have to give up many home comforts to help the war effort and to risk—and sometimes lose—their lives in the battles and aerial bombardments that lay ahead. The speech marked Churchill out as a person—perhaps the only one in government or on its fringes—who saw and clearly expressed the true meaning of Britain’s participation in the war. After entering the War Cabinet later that day, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill returned to this theme on 1 October 1939, in his first wartime broadcast, telling his listeners, “We are the defenders of civilization and freedom.” In his second broadcast, on 12 November 1939, he recognized the nature of the adversary and spoke with both defiance and hope. “The whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism,” he declared. “Men of every race and clime feel that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward move which is their due, and for which the age is ripe. Even in Germany itself there are millions who stand aloof from the seething mass of criminality and corruption constituted by the Nazi Party machine. Let them take courage amid perplexities and perils, for it may well be that the final extinction of a baleful domination will pave the way to a broader solidarity of all the men in all the lands than we could ever have planned if we had not marched together through the fire.”

Churchill’s clear understanding of the issues at stake enhanced his leadership of the nation even before he became Prime Minister. That vision was conveyed both in speeches and broadcasts to the British public and in secret to his closest colleagues in government. On 18 December 1939, he told the War Cabinet: “We are fighting to establish the reign of law and to protect the liberties of small countries. Our defeat would mean an age of barbaric violence, and would be fatal not only to ourselves, but to the independent life of every small country in Europe.” He added that making war might well involve breaches of the rule of law: the issue under discussion was Churchill’s request for the violation by British warships of Norwegian territorial waters, to prevent the passage of Swedish iron ore to Germany along the Norwegian coast. But even if such action were to be authorized, Churchill explained that nothing would be done by Britain that would be accompanied by “inhumanity of any kind.”

As Prime Minister, Churchill reiterated in his public pronouncements his understanding of the moral nature of the conflict. In his “We shall fight on the beaches” speech of 4 June 1940, he spoke of how “large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule.” It was that “odious apparatus” against which he fought, and which the British people understood to be the enemy. It was not “Germany” or the German people, but a perversion of all that was decent, humane, modern and constructive in human society. In May 1941, in a message to the American Booksellers Association, he warned that when the minds of nations could be “cowed by the will of one man,” then civilization was “broken irreparably.” He went on to declare: “A one-man State is no State. It is an enslavement of the soul, the mind, the body of mankind.” Hitler’s “brute will” had imprisoned or exiled the best of Germany’s writers. “Their fault is that they stand for a free way of life. It is a life that is death to meteoric tyrants. So be it. And so it will be.”

Even as Britain faced new attacks and new enemies, Churchill was confident that the justness of the cause would prevail. On 12 December 1941, less than a week after Japan had entered the war by attacking American, British and Dutch possession in the Far East and the Pacific, he told the House of Commons that “when we look around us over the sombre panorama of the world we have no reason to doubt the justice of our cause or that our strength and will-power will be sufficient to sustain it.” Throughout his five years as war leader, Churchill was able to convey the “justice of our cause”— the Allied cause—and, in conveying it, he reflected the belief of the British public. When, on his eightieth birthday, he was praised as having been the “British lion,” he replied with a truer understanding of what his war leadership had been. “It was,” he said, “a nation and a race dwelling all around the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” And, he added: “I also hope that I sometimes suggested to the lion the right places to use his claws.”

Knowing the nature of the enemy and making sure the nation had no doubt of the moral aspect of the conflict were important elements in Churchill’s war leadership. Another aspect was his understanding of the reality of war. He had no illusions about the dangers war posed both to the fighting men and to the civilians on all sides. That knowledge made his war leadership more humane and more sensitive. In one of his early letters to his wife, written within a year of their marriage in 1908, he wrote: “Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations, I feel more deeply every year—& can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms—what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.” During the First World War he had sought to devise policies that would minimize suffering on the battlefield. He had planned the Dardanelles campaign as a means to end the terrible stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front and to bring the war to a speedier conclusion. He had opposed what he described as Britain’s “futile offensives” on the Western Front in 1917, which had culminated in the bloody slaughter at Passchendaele.