Winston Churchill's War Leadership (7 page)

Face-to-face negotiations were another feature of Churchill’s conduct of war policy. Five years after the war he was to coin the word “summit” for what were to become the regular, high-level meetings of Heads of State and an essential feature of détente. In 1940, among his first acts as Prime Minister, Churchill made three visits to France to meet the French leaders and to attempt to strengthen their will to remain at war. These visits took place as the German army was pushing deep into France. They involved uncomfortable and risky journeys by air, and they meant leaving his command post in London. Churchill believed, however, that the power of personal intervention could be crucial, and that it would be wrong not to try to bolster French resolve by his presence and his arguments. In the end, the overwhelming power of the German army and air force could not be resisted, nor was Churchill able before the fall of Paris to persuade Roosevelt to stiffen French resolve by an American declaration. But the efforts he made to cross over to France, to put his points as forcefully as he could to the French leaders, set a pattern of direct involvement in negotiations at the highest level that became a hall-mark of his war leadership.

In August 1941, while the United States was still neutral, Churchill went by sea—on the ill-fated
Prince of
Wales
—to the coast of Newfoundland to meet Roosevelt, the first of their many war conferences. Roosevelt never made the journey to Britain. Rather, it was Churchill who made more long journeys to conferences and essential discussions than any other war leader. Later in the war, Churchill met Roosevelt at Casablanca and Malta, first to work out a common war policy, and then a common peace policy in advance of meeting Stalin. Twice Churchill flew to Moscow to talk directly to Stalin. He also travelled to Teheran and Yalta, with Roosevelt, to discuss every aspect of inter-Allied policy with Stalin: the first two meetings of the Big Three.

These journeys, long and arduous even by air, took a great deal out of Churchill physically, but he knew the importance of putting the British case to those who would have the power actually to accede to it. The meetings with Stalin were not a success, despite a considerable effort by Churchill to defer to Stalin’s needs. Churchill’s repeated efforts to persuade Stalin to allow Poland to have democratic elections after the war appeared to succeed at Yalta, but then Stalin reneged on his promise. With the Red Army the master of Warsaw, there was nothing more that Churchill could do. But he had expended many hours arguing the case for an independent post-war Poland with the Soviet leader, and he had spent as many hours trying to convince the Polish government in London to make concessions. He hoped to get some agreement with the Soviets that would guarantee Polish sovereignty, a Poland that would lose its eastern provinces (its eastern third) to the Soviet Union but would gain a large slice of the industrial region of eastern Germany and the southern half of East Prussia. Churchill put the arguments for some form of territorial compromise with infinite patience—and, when that patience was sorely tried, with considerable irritation— to the Polish leaders, who had set their hearts against any concessions to the Soviet Union, even in return for the prospect of regaining Polish independence.

Again and again, in face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders, Churchill sought to use his powers of persuasion. Among those with whom he had substantial talks while on his travels were the Polish commander-in-chief General Wladyslaw Anders, the Chinese Nationalist leader, General Chiang Kai-shek, and the two heads of the French national movement, General Charles de Gaulle and General Henri Giraud. Among other leaders to whom Churchill travelled—and it was almost always Churchill who had to make the journeys—was Ismet Inönü, the President of Turkey, whose neutrality Churchill strongly encouraged, to prevent a Turkish accommodation with Germany that would endanger Britain’s military position in the Middle East. In seeking to create a post-war Yugoslavia that would not be dominated entirely by the communists, Churchill had talks in Italy with the former ruler of Croatia, Dr. Ivan Subasic, and the Yugoslav Communist leader, Marshal Tito, at whose headquarters, in the German-occupied Balkans, Churchill’s son, Randolph, was serving.

At Christmas 1944, learning of the intensity of the civil war that had broken out in Greece even as the German troops were withdrawing, Churchill abandoned his family celebrations and flew to Athens, where, amid the sound of gunfire, he successfully brokered an agreement between the communist and non-communist factions. This was an extraordinary journey, which he undertook in the belief that his personal intervention had a greater chance of success than that of ambassadors and emissaries or telegraphic exhortations from afar.

Another type of journey that Churchill made was also an integral part of his war leadership: the visits to the men and women in the front line of action and danger. In the summer of 1940 he visited the pilots at their airfields during the Battle of Britain and the British coastal areas awaiting invasion. In 1942, after his visit to the sailors of the Home Fleet, the fleet admiral reported: “Your presence with us has been an encouragement and inspiration to us all.” In 1943 his appearance at the Roman amphitheatre in Carthage was a tonic for the hundreds of troops crowded into that ancient structure. It was not only British forces Churchill inspired by his presence. When inspecting Czech and Polish troops in Britain, he had words of encouragement that their tormented countries would be liberated. Before the Normandy landings he visited troops of all the nations that would be participating, including the Americans and the Canadians.

After the Normandy landings Churchill twice visited the forward lines, his V-sign, ever-present cigar and cheery grin welcomed with loud cheers. It was a pleasant, unexpected surprise that the Prime Minister had come to see them. “I know how much you enjoy getting near the battle,” wrote the commander of an artillery regiment that Churchill visited during his second Normandy excursion, “but also I would like to tell you how tremendously pleased, heartened and honoured every soldier was by your visit. It means very much to them that you should wish to come and see them at work in their gun pits.” Churchill was later a witness of the American landings off the South of France, of the fighting in Italy along the River Po, and of the Allied parachute crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. The victorious troops also saw him come among them in Berlin after the German surrender.

Given the enormous complexity of making war, any successful war leader must have the ability to choose subordinates who take responsibility for the actual fighting. Once chosen, the leader must support them in their planning and, when those endeavours fail as a result of weariness or incompetence, the leader must have the strength of purpose to replace them with someone more effective. During the Second World War, to ensure the right men in the right place at the right time sometimes involved hurting many sensitivities of rank, status and popularity. Lord Halifax, Churchill’s rival for the premiership in May 1940 and a Tory grandee, was reluctant to give up the Foreign Office, but Churchill had little confidence in his strength of purpose at the centre of the diplomatic web, and sent him instead to be Ambassador to Washington and appointed Anthony Eden in his place. Eden was one of those closest to Churchill. It was to Eden that Churchill confided, in December 1940, about the period six months earlier as France fell and Britain awaited invasion: “Normally I wake up buoyant to face the new day. Then I woke up with dread in my heart.” On the day the war in Europe ended, Eden wrote to Churchill: “It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you this day could not have been.”

Those “worst days” had lasted a long time, and put a heavy strain on all those involved in the conduct of the war. Churchill found the physical and mental resources to bear that strain, despite several severe illnesses. He could not replace himself, and followed the advice he gave to one of his secretaries, basing himself on a First World War example: “We must keep working, like the gun horses, till we drop.”

Two of the most difficult wartime decisions Churchill had to make in regard to appointments were the removal, first, of General Sir Archibald Wavell and then of General Sir Claude Auchinleck from command in North Africa. In both cases Churchill felt that the initial drive of the commander had faded and that a more energetic commander was needed. As General Ismay recalled after the war, “I think there was a very general impression in Whitehall that Wavell was very tired.” After Wavell had been defeated by Rommel, Eden noted, he “had aged ten years in the night.” As for Auchinleck, the general himself was anxious to lay down his active command after his sustained exertions, a course of action approved by General Brooke. Those not in possession of the facts and the recommendations reaching Churchill felt that the dismissals of Wavell and Auchinleck were petty or vindictive. But in both cases he acted on advice and on his belief that change was in the immediate and urgent interest of the prosecution of the war.

The third officer to be given the crucial North Africa command was General Bernard Montgomery (following the death in a plane crash of the general actually chosen to succeed Auchinleck). Montgomery had impressed Churchill in 1940, during the Prime Minister’s inspection of coastal defences on the eve of what was thought to be a German invasion, by his pugnacious attitude to what could be done if German troops were seen offshore (if they were able to reach the shore, Montgomery was prepared to consider the use of poison gas against them). When Montgomery was appointed to command in the Western Desert, Churchill wrote to his wife that, in the new commander, “we have a highly competent, daring, energetic soldier, well-acquainted with desert warfare.” Clementine Churchill had heard that Montgomery had created animosities in military circles: “If he is disagreeable to those about him,” Churchill replied, “he is also disagreeable to the enemy.” And to Montgomery himself, Churchill soon sent a message of praise for the fighting in North Africa: “Tell him how splendid we all think his work has been.”

It was not only the military sphere that Churchill closely monitored. He was always quick to encourage those whose work he regarded highly. At the centre of all strategic deception plans (including “The Man Who Never Was” in the Mediterranean deception in 1943, and the bogus First United States Army Group deception leading the Germans to expect the 1944 Normandy landings to come from elsewhere), Churchill had full confidence in the innocuously named London Controlling Centre and its chief, Colonel John Bevan. Bevan’s professionalism and attention to detail required no prodding from Churchill and received none. Another of those whose work Churchill admired was the British diplomat Ronald Campbell, who had been at his side during his dramatic visits to France in June 1940. On receiving a report from Campbell, then the senior British diplomat in Belgrade, in April 1941, while Campbell was working to drive a wedge between Yugoslavia’s pro-German Regent, Prince Paul, and those Ministers in the Yugoslav government known to be hostile to Germany, Churchill telegraphed Campbell approvingly: “Continue to pester, nag and bite. Demand audiences. Don’t take NO for an answer.” This advice was very much Churchill’s own prescription for himself, and he was pleased to see it reflected in the actions of another. Nor did he neglect to praise Campbell for what he regarded as a remarkable mission. “Greatly admire all you have done so far,” he wrote. “Keep it up by every means that occur to you.”

“Continue to pester, nag and bite” summed up Churchill’s own method of war leadership. To one of his commanders-in-chief he had a further exortation: “Improvise and dare.”

One of the more contentious of Churchill’s wartime appointments was that of Lord Beaverbrook, a wealthy Canadian businessman who had arrived in Britain before the First World War, created a newspaper empire, and become a newspaper Baron in the process. Beaverbrook was regarded by many in public life as an opportunist and a schemer. Churchill knew him well and recognized great virtues among great faults. When Churchill first wanted to bring Beaverbrook into the government in April 1940, Neville Chamberlain had said no. But Churchill, aware of the terrible shortage of aircraft, and of fighter aircraft in particular, judged that the ruthlessness that marked Beaverbrook out in the newspaper world, and even in his personal relationships, could be used to vital effect in accelerating the manufacture of aircraft when Britain’s need was dire and Germany’s destructive powers were at their height. “Now that the war is coming so close,” Churchill wrote to Beaverbrook on 24 May 1940, “the object must be to prepare the largest number of aircraft”—and this Beaverbrook did, as Minister of Aircraft Production. Other government departments found Beaverbrook’s methods dictatorial and rapacious, but they served the need of the hour, and Churchill supported him. “Your work during the crisis at MAP [the Ministry of Aircraft Production] in 1940,” Churchill wrote to him later in the war, “played a decisive part in our salvation.”

Beaverbrook also provided Churchill with the moral support of his presence and energy at several moments of crisis. Twenty-five years earlier, when Churchill had left Britain and the turmoil of politics to seek active military duty on the Western Front, Beaverbrook, who was then Chief Canadian Press Representative at the Front, had shown Churchill the hand of friendship and encouraged him not to despair of a return to political life and influence on war policy. In the days immediately before Churchill became Prime Minister, when the British naval initiative in Norway was foiled by the Germans, and Churchill was much criticized, Beaverbrook had again been supportive. Twice in the early months of Churchill’s war premiership, first at the fall of France, and then at the moment of the terrible decision to bombard the French fleet at Oran to prevent it from falling into German hands, Beaverbrook had been at Churchill’s side. On one occasion, when Churchill could not see how the situation in France might be redeemed, he spent the night at Beaverbrook’s house in London, talking through the crisis and gaining strength from his friend’s determination. The choice of senior colleagues was often a two-way exchange of this sort: Churchill could inspire them to great efforts and achievements, and they could give Churchill support and confidence when he had his moments of doubt.