Winston Churchill's War Leadership (6 page)
Anything that smacked of passivity on the part of his army commanders incurred Churchill’s wrath. Learning at the beginning of November 1941 that nothing “large” was being planned against the German and Italian forces in the Western Desert by Wavell’s successor, Churchill wrote to his former Boer War adversary, General Smuts, then a respected voice in Allied military circles: “I dread the idea of this long delay, when, as we know for certain, the enemy is hard pressed for supplies and would be greatly embarrassed by making exertions.” He continued: “In war one cannot wait to have everything perfect, but must fight in relation to the enemy’s strength and plight. I am appalled at the proposal to remain passive all this time, when the golden opportunity may be lost.” Later, Churchill was to summarize this feeling in a terse comment: “The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelt shorter—‘Paralysis.’”
Churchill’s military advisers did not always see his keenness for action as a virtue. In September 1942, during the North African campaign, General Sir Alan Brooke noted in his diary: “It is a regular disease that he suffers from, this frightful impatience to get an attack launched.” But it was an essential feature of his war leadership, and one that enabled him to drive forward the whole machinery of war-making.
In both the military and political spheres, Churchill dreaded prevarication when the need for decisive action seemed to him imperative. In May 1944, confronted by an Anglo-American dispute over how to agree on the role of the Soviet Union in Romania and Greece, he feared that only Stalin would be the beneficiary of Anglo-American hesitations. When Roosevelt suggested the establishment of “consultative machinery” between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, Churchill replied: “I am much concerned to receive your message. Action is paralyzed if everybody is to consult everybody else about everything before it is taken. Events will outstrip the changing situations in these Balkan regions. Somebody must have the power to plan and act.”
Churchill had always been a believer in the power of the written word—from the time when, as a schoolboy, he would write his mother long letters setting out his requests and point of view and defending his actions. Throughout his political life he was convinced that if he set out an argument clearly, on paper, he might have a chance to influence even the most obdurate of adversaries. These appeals, which are found in the archives of all his political contemporaries from 1900 on, were not always successful, but he believed that the effort should be made and that there should be on record clear, written evidence that, during the war, no stone had been left unturned. One example was his appeal to the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, urging him, on 16 May 1940, not to commit Italy as an active ally of Germany.
Churchill had met Mussolini in Rome in 1925, when Churchill was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, negotiating a settlement of First World War debts with Britain’s former Italian ally. In May 1940, Mussolini was poised to attack France—a “stab in the back” that was to outrage British opinion. Churchill desperately wanted to avert bringing Britain into war with a power that could dominate the Mediterranean and threaten the British position in Palestine, Egypt and on the Suez Canal. He wrote in his letter: “Now that I have taken up my office as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence I look back to our meetings in Rome and feel a desire to speak words of goodwill to you as chief of the Italian nation across what seems to be a swiftly-widening gulf. Is it too late to stop a river of blood from flowing between the British and Italian peoples? We can no doubt inflict grievous injuries upon one another and maul each other cruelly, and darken the Mediterranean with our strife. If you so decree it must be so; but I declare that I have never been the enemy of Italian greatness, nor ever at heart the foe of the Italian law-giver.”
Churchill then gave Mussolini his assessment of the military situation in Europe: “It is idle to predict the course of the great battles now raging in Europe, but I am sure that whatever may happen on the Continent, England will go on to the end, even quite alone, as we have done before, and I believe with some assurance that we shall be aided in increasing measure by the United States, and, indeed, by all the Americas. I beg you to believe that it is in no spirit of weakness or of fear that I make this solemn appeal, which will remain on record. Down the ages above all other calls comes the cry that the joint heirs of Latin and Christian civilization must not be ranged against one another in mortal strife. Hearken to it I beseech you in all honour and respect before the dread signal is given. It will never be given by us.”
Mussolini’s son-in-law, the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, found Churchill’s appeal “dignified and noble,” but Mussolini, excited by the imminent possibility of using Hitler’s assault on France to secure for Italy the French regions of Nice and Savoy, ignored it. The result was the embroilment of the Italian forces in a losing war and the destruction, within three years, of Mussolini’s Fascist regime.
Another Churchill letter, written at the end of 1940, was to be instrumental in gaining Britain the vital supplies needed from the United States in 1941. The appeal was sent when Britain stood alone and vulnerable, facing German military dominance in Europe, offensive air power, and submarine supremacy. Addressed to President Roosevelt, the letter was written after the Canadian industrialist Arthur Purvis, the head of the British Purchasing Mission in the United States, advised Churchill that Roosevelt would be influenced by a full disclosure of Britain’s military, air and naval weaknesses and by a detailed explanation of Britain’s urgent requirements. Churchill worked on this letter for two weeks, including his sixty-sixth birthday on 30 November 1940. It was ready to be sent on December 8.
In this letter to Roosevelt, Churchill set out a blunt and forceful assessment of the situation at the time, in all its bleakness and danger for Britain. His mastery of the written word had become an integral, vital part of his war leadership. A central part of the letter read:
The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies. While we will do our utmost, and shrink from no proper sacrifice to make payments across the Exchange, I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries. We here should be unable, after the war, to purchase the large balance of imports from the United States over and above the volume of our exports which is agreeable to your tariffs and industrial economy. Not only should we in Great Britain suffer cruel privations, but widespread unemployment in the United States would follow the curtailment of American exporting power . . . Moreover, I do not believe that the Government and the people of the United States would find it in accordance with the principles which guide them to confine the help which they have so generously promised only to such munitions of war and commodities as could be immediately paid for.
This letter to Roosevelt led to a turning point in Britain’s ability to remain at war and marked a triumph for a central element of Churchill’s war leadership—the use of the written word to persuade and convince. Within a few months, it led to an increased and much more secure American lifeline for Britain—the Lend-Lease arrangement—whereby Britain was sent everything it required from the United States, but did not have to pay until the war was over.
A third communication that illustrates Churchill’s use of the written word to try to influence events was sent to the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, on 2 April 1941. In it Churchill set out the folly of Japan entering the war on the side of the German-Italian Axis, of which Japan was a part, posing a series of questions, each intended to sow doubts about the possibility of Japan emerging victorious from a war with the United States and Britain. The questions, numbered one to eight, started with a blunt reference to Japan’s senior partner in the Axis: “Will Germany, without the command of the sea or the command of the British daylight air, be able to invade and conquer Great Britain in the spring, summer or autumn of 1941? Will Germany try to do so? Would it not be in the interests of Japan to wait until these questions have answered themselves?”
The second question dealt with Britain’s Atlantic lifeline. “Will the German attack on British shipping be strong enough to prevent American aid from reaching British shores with Britain and the United States transforming their whole industry to war purposes?” Then came a reference to the part that Japan’s German and Italian allies might have in determining the position of the United States. “Did Japan’s accession to the Triple Pact make it more likely or less likely that the United States would come into the present war?” And following up from that question: “If the United States entered the war at the side of Great Britain, and Japan ranged herself with the Axis Powers, would not the naval superiority of the two English-speaking nations enable them to dispose of the Axis Powers in Europe before turning their united strength against Japan?”
The fifth question was designed to remind the Japanese of the position of the weakest member of the Axis, Italy, whose fleet had suffered a serious naval defeat at the Battle of Taranto in November 1940, when three of Italy’s six battleships had been torpedoed from the air by British pilots (a remarkable precursor of Pearl Harbor). Churchill had three points to make in question form: “Is Italy a strength or a burden to Germany? Is the Italian Fleet as good at sea as on paper? Is it as good on paper as it used to be?”
The sixth question drew the Japanese attention to a fact, the affirmation of which could readily be ascertained by the Japanese Intelligence services. “Will the British air force be stronger than the German Air Force before the end of 1941 and far stronger before the end of 1942?” Question seven went to the heart of the nature of the German occupation regimes in Poland, Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium and Holland (and within a few weeks in Yugoslavia and Greece; and within three months throughout the western Soviet Union): “Will the many countries which are being held down by the German Army and Gestapo learn to like the Germans more or will they like them less as the years pass by?”
Churchill’s final question, which was in two parts, drew attention to the centrality of raw materials in war-making: “Is it true,” he asked, “that the production of steel in the United States during 1941 will be seventy-five million tons, and in Great Britain about twelve and a half, making a total of nearly ninety million tons? If Germany should happen to be defeated, as she was last time, will not the seven million tons steel production of Japan be inadequate for a single-handed war?”
Churchill ended his message to Matsuoka: “From the answer to these questions may spring the avoidance by Japan of a serious catastrophe, and a marked improvement in the relations between Japan and the two great sea Powers of the West.” To give added weight to his points, Churchill approved a British bombing raid on Berlin the night Matsuoka would be there. As a result, Matsuoka heard Joachim von Ribbentrop—his German opposite number—express confidence in the defeat of Britain while the two men and their staffs were sitting in an air raid shelter listening to the thud, thud, thud of British bombs above them. Five months later, after Matsuoka had been replaced as Foreign Minister, Churchill asked the British ambassador to Japan to show the new Foreign Minister his “warning letter,” commenting: “It will read better now than it did then.”
Another message that Churchill was keen to see sent, six months later, was also to Japan. His intention was yet again to try to deter Japan from entering the war. He wanted this particular letter to be sent by Roosevelt, and—a week before Pearl Harbor—gave Roosevelt his ideas of what the message should contain. Basing himself on the experience of Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, when Britain and France declined to take a firm stand to force the Germans to remove their troops, Churchill urged Roosevelt to send a clear message to Japan of what the consequences of any Japanese aggression against American, British or Dutch possessions in the Far East would be.
“It seems to me,” Churchill wrote to the President, “that one important method remains unused in averting war between Japan and our two countries, namely, a plain declaration, secret or public, as may be thought best, that any further act of aggression by Japan”— which had already occupied French Indo-China—“will lead immediately to the gravest consequences. I realize your constitutional difficulties, but it would be tragic if Japan drifted into war by encroachment without having before her fairly and squarely the dire character of a further aggressive step. I beg you to consider whether, at the moment which you judge right, which may be very near, you should not say that ‘any further Japanese aggression would compel you to place the gravest issues before Congress,’ or words to that effect.” Churchill told the President that if he agreed to send such a message to Japan, in an effort to deter war, Britain “would of course make a similar declaration or share in a joint declaration, and in any case arrangements are being made to synchronize our action with yours.”
Churchill ended his letter to Roosevelt on a personal note. “Forgive me, my dear friend, for presuming to press such a course upon you, but I am convinced that it might make all the difference and prevent a melancholy extension of the war.” No such American message was sent. At that very moment, the Japanese fleet was already in its final stages of preparation for the torpedo bomb attack on Pearl Harbor and an amphibious landing against the British in Malaya. Churchill did not know these developments. His instinct to make direct appeals, to send messages that were clear and unequivocal, to try to influence the adversary by words and arguments before bombs fell and war broke out was a strong element of his war leadership. He understood the setbacks, the suffering, and the danger to Britain that would follow from any widening of the war, whether by Italy in 1940 or by Japan in 1941.