Winston Churchill's War Leadership (9 page)
For Churchill, a lifelong friend of the French people, this course was horrendously difficult to take, although dictated by the urgent needs of war and survival. It had one unexpected and beneficial result: it convinced President Roosevelt—despite the belief of his ambassador, Joseph Kennedy (the father of John F. Kennedy), to the contrary—that the British really were determined to fight on, and that any war material sent to Britain would not be allowed to fall into German hands as a result of an armistice. It had been his hope, Churchill told the House of Commons during the Oran debate, “that our terms would be accepted without bloodshed.” When Churchill finished his statement, in which he told the House, “We shall not fail in our duty, however painful,” the whole House rose to its feet to cheer. It was the first such demonstration of his premiership. Churchill wept, and as he left the chamber he was heard to say to a fellow Member: “This is heartbreaking to me.”
Churchill’s ruthlessness was tempered with compassion. Throughout the war, Churchill was disturbed and distressed when it came to high casualty lists, whether of soldiers or civilians. At the time of the Normandy landings he dreaded a heavy loss of life and did his utmost to devise means of minimizing the casualties among the landing forces. Before the landings he confided to an American visitor, John J. McCloy, Roosevelt’s Under-Secretary for War: “If you think I’m dragging my feet, it is not because I can’t take casualties; it is because I am afraid of what those casualties will be.” Churchill went on to explain to McCloy that many of his contemporaries had been killed in what he called the “hecatombs” of the First World War, and that he himself was “a sort of ‘sport’ in nature’s sense as most of his generation lay dead at Passchendaele and the Somme.” Churchill added: “An entire generation of potential leaders had been cut off and Britain could not afford the loss of another generation.”
During the pre-Normandy preparations, Churchill was uneasy about the heavy Anglo-American bombing of railway marshalling yards and railway bridges in northern France because of the high French and Belgian civilian casualties. When the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, insisted that this bombing was essential if the landings were to go ahead, Churchill put the matter to Roosevelt. Churchill stressed that the civilian casualties, sometimes several hundred in a single raid, were too high and that some limit should be set, per raid. If the estimate of civilian deaths was above a certain number, Churchill advised, the raid should not take place. Roosevelt declined to set any limit, however, and the raids continued. In all, more than five thousand French and Belgian civilians were killed, but the effective disruption of German communications in a great arc around the beachhead was a boon to the Allied landings—and to the eventual liberation of France and Belgium. Churchill commented to Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, the British air commander-in-chief and Eisenhower’s deputy, “You are piling up an awful load of hatred;” but, with Roosevelt’s intervention, Churchill’s hesitations had to be set aside.
In 1940 Churchill had authorized the bombing of German cities—then on a small scale—as the one means of waging war on Germany, whose armies were masters of Europe. As the British, and later Anglo-American, bombing raids intensified, he was uneasy at the high civilian casualties and became an advocate of targeted strategic bombing, as opposed to “terror” bombing. The subsequently controversial Anglo-American bombing raid on Dresden was approved not by Churchill but by the British Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, during Churchill’s absence on his way to the Yalta Conference at the beginning of February 1945. When Churchill was given the first detailed account of the raid, he was appalled, minuting to the Chiefs of Staff Committee: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, although under other pretexts, should be reviewed.” The destruction of Dresden, Churchill added, “remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforth be more strictly studied.” Only later did he learn that it was an urgent Soviet request to disrupt accelerated German troop movements through Silesia that had led to the bombing raid on Dresden.
Reflecting on the first half of the twentieth century, and on the destructiveness of aerial bombardment by all sides during the Second World War, Churchill commented in 1953: “On the whole I would rather have lived through our lot of troubles than any of the others, though I must place on record my regret that the human race ever learned to fly.” The pervasiveness of aerial destruction, and the destructiveness of all forms of warfare, was, despite Churchill’s hesitations and those of many others, a cruel but integral part of modern war. Churchill had seen the horrors of war at first hand and had written much about it since his time as a soldier at the end of the nineteenth century. J.M. Keynes called
The World
Crisis
—Churchill’s history of the First World War—“a tractate against war.”
The preservation and enhancement of democracy was an integral part of Churchill’s war leadership, a vision of the world that would follow an Allied victory. Upholding democratic values, both in Britain and throughout post-war Europe, where democracies had been submerged by Fascism and Nazism, became a task and a call. “It was Parliament,” Churchill told his fellow parliamentarians—many of whom were serving officers—that constituted “the shield and expression of democracy,” and it was in Parliament that “all grievances or muddles or scandals, if such there be,” should be debated.
Churchill recognized the dangers to Britain’s war effort of the sort of parliamentary criticism, within the framework of Britain’s parliamentary democracy, that might give comfort to the enemy. With this aspect of free speech in mind, he told the House of Commons in 1942, during a no-confidence motion that was decisively defeated: “If democracy and Parliamentary institutions are to triumph in this war, it is absolutely necessary that Governments resting on them shall be able to act and dare, that the servants of the Crown shall not be harassed by nagging and snarling, that enemy propaganda shall not be fed needlessly out of our own hands, and our reputation disparaged and undermined throughout the world.”
At the beginning of 1942, while Churchill was in Bermuda on the way back to Britain after his first wartime visit to the United States, he set out in a public speech his thoughts on the importance of democracy, both in regard to the war then at its height and as a pointer to how the post-war world ought to look. “These ideas of parliamentary government,” he said, “of the representation of the people upon franchises, which extend as time goes on, and which in our country have reached the complete limits of universal suffrage, these institutions and principles constitute at this moment one of the great causes which are being fought out in the world.” Churchill had no illusions about the weaknesses of democracy, but, as he went on to explain: “With all their weakness and with all their strength, with all their faults, with all their virtues, with all the criticism that may be made against them, with their many shortcomings, with lack of foresight, lack of continuity of purpose, or pressure only of superficial purpose, they nevertheless assert the right of the common people— the broad mass of the people—to take a conscious and effective share in the government of their country.”
Churchill was to return to this theme in public, and in the House of Commons, on several occasions during the war. When, in August 1944, he was in Italy, he was asked to advise on the system of government to replace Mussolini’s Fascist regime, which had ruled Italy for more than twenty years. “It is said,” Churchill told the Italian people, “that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” and he went on to ask rhetorically, “What is freedom?” There were, he answered, “one or two quite simple, practical tests by which it can be known in the modern world in peace conditions,” and he set out those tests in the form of seven questions that the Italian people should answer if they wanted to know whether they had replaced fascism by freedom:
Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day?
Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent?
Are their courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free from all association with particular political parties?
Will these courts administer open and well-established laws, which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice?
Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as for Government officials?
Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted?
Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and striving to bring up a family, free from the fear that some grim police organization under the control of a single Party, like the Gestapo, started by the Nazi and Fascist parties, will tap him on the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment?
As much as the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, which had been drafted by Roosevelt and the Americans but signed also by Churchill, these questions were a mark and proof of the ultimate objective of Churchill’s war leadership: faith in democracy, the need to preserve democracy, and the hope of returning democracy to those countries that had been deprived of it by the victories of totalitarianism. As Churchill told the House of Commons in December 1944, four months after his questions to the Italian people and at a time when democracy had come under grave threat in liberated Greece in the form of a civil war: “Democracy is no harlot to be picked up in the street by a man with a Tommy gun. I trust the people, the mass of the people, in almost any country, but I like to make sure that it is the people and not a gang of bandits from the mountains or from the countryside who think that by violence they can overturn constituted authority, in some cases ancient Parliaments, Governments and States.”
It was to avert a Communist takeover in Greece, and the replacement of a tyranny dictated from Berlin by one dictated from Moscow, that Churchill had flown to Greece at Christmas 1944 and negotiated between the Greek forces led by Archbishop Damaskinos and those rival Greek forces directed from afar by the Soviet Union. Churchill’s presence made a powerful impact, as did his advocacy, and agreement was reached whereby Greece’s democratic system would be maintained. Churchill had also opposed the creation in Greece of a dictatorship of the right, which was one of the possibilities being mooted in London. “I do not like setting up dictators as a result of using British troops in action,” he wrote on the day before his arrival in Athens. “I am a believer in constitutional processes. Of course if the Greeks agree among themselves that the Archbishop is the best man to head the new government as Prime Minister it might make a very good solution; but to make him dictator of Greece to get round an awkward political corner is entirely contrary to the guiding principles on which I act.”
Seven months after his dramatic journey to Athens, Churchill’s faith in democracy was borne out by events closer to home. In July 1945 the Conservative Party in Britain was defeated at the General Election, and Churchill, who in May 1945 had become Prime Minister of a Conservative caretaker government following Hitler’s defeat and the ending of the all-Party coalition, was out of office. He accepted the verdict of the electorate, telling one of those who spoke of the “ingratitude” of the British people: “I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.” Following the election defeat, Churchill became Leader of the Opposition and, working within the parliamentary system he had espoused all his life, led his Party to victory in 1951. One of the underlying strengths of his war leadership—his determination to see the victory of democracy over dictatorship—served to bring him back to power with another full national agenda, including an attempt to avert a nuclear war by means of a renewal of conferences and discussions at the highest level with Stalin’s successors. As he told a group of senators and congressmen in Washington in June 1954: “Communism is a tyrant but meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” His war leadership had confirmed his belief that war, however justified it might be, was for the combatants (in his phrase of 1909) “vile wicked folly & a barbarism,” that statesmen had a duty to try to avert.
Between 1936 and 1939 Churchill had believed that a European war could be averted by the unity and strength of all threatened states. That unity had not been created, nor had those who were most in danger built up sufficient armaments to be able to deter an aggressor by themselves. From 1946, when he spoke at Fulton, Missouri, about the “Iron Curtain,” Churchill used his experience of the pre-war years, and his knowledge of how hard it had been in wartime to secure victory as a result of pre-war neglect, to advocate direct talks with the new adversary, the Soviet Union. These discussions should be held at the highest level, he said, and be based on Anglo-American (and, in due course, European) unity and strength, to secure an amelioration of international tensions. In both war and peace his leadership bore the hallmarks of clarity of vision, strength of purpose, and faith in the ultimate victory of decency and goodwill.
The comments of those who saw Churchill in action at close quarters during the war give an insight into his leadership qualities during those five hard years. From these contemporary remarks, made in the first year and a half of his premiership when the dangers were greatest— remarks that Churchill himself never saw—I have chosen sixteen that reflect his qualities in all their variety, and mark out his leadership as something rare among the twentieth-century war leaders: “galvanizing people at all levels,” “a manifestly humane person,” “no rigidity of mind,” “nothing can frighten him,” “a gentle, almost paternal smile,” “ready as always with confident advice,” “ceaseless industry,” “strength, resolution, humour, readiness to listen,” “a wonderful tonic,” “enough courage for everybody,” “really he has got guts,” “in wonderful spirits, and full of offensive plans,” “innately lovable and generous,” “amazing grasp of detail,” “full of the most marvellous courage, considering the burden he is bearing,” and, in tandem with this last and at the centre of all Churchill’s leadership struggles and decisions, “carrying the heaviest burden of responsibility any man has ever shouldered.”