Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire Read online

  Churchill 1940–1945

  Churchill 1940–1945:

  Under Friendly Fire

  WALTER REID

  This eBook edition published in 2011 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  First published in 2008 by Birlinn Ltd

  Copyright © Walter Reid 2008

  The moral right of Walter Reid to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 126 2

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  For Callum and Elspeth

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Part I

  1 The War of Words

  2 The Semblance of Power

  3 Domestic Support

  4 The Political Landscape

  5 Preparation

  6 The Greatest of the Myths

  7 The Machinery of Command

  8 The Battle of France

  9 The Constable of France

  10 Sailors, Airmen and Soldiers

  11 Carrying the War to the Enemy: The Western Desert 1940

  12 Greece

  13 Difficulties with Wavell

  14 De Gaulle Flexes his Muscles

  15 The End of Wavell. Auchinleck

  16 The End of Another Desert General

  17 Dilly-Dally and Brookie

  Part II

  18 Westward, Look!

  19 America and Europe

  20 Destroyers for Bases

  21 Lend-Lease

  22 Placentia Bay

  23 Pearl Harbor

  24 ARCADIA

  25 ARCADIA Resumed

  Part III

  26 Political Weakness in 1942

  27 Strategy on the Sea and in the Air

  28 The Alliance’s Teething Problems

  29 London, July 1942. Where to Attack and When

  30 An Indian Interlude

  31 ‘This Bleak Lull’

  32 A Llama and a Crocodile

  33 Second Alamein and TORCH

  34 The French Dimension

  35 Casablanca

  36 De Gaulle at Casablanca

  37 The Strains Intensify

  38 TRIDENT

  39 The First Quebec Conference: QUADRANT

  40 Exasperation in the Aegean

  41 Teheran

  42 Marrakech and de Gaulle

  43 Italy and OVERLORD

  44 ANVIL and the Vienna Alternative

  45 D-Day: De Gaulle Remains Below the Level of Events

  46 The Return to Europe

  47 The Second Quebec Conference

  48 Breakout: Allies at Loggerheads

  49 ‘The Naughty Document’

  50 Allies Accelerating Apart. Christmas in Athens

  51 Yalta

  52 The Disintegration of Unity

  53 Potsdam

  Epilogue

  Appendix I Codenames for Principal Military Operations

  Appendix II Principal War Conferences

  Appendix III Outline Chronology of Churchill’s War

  Bibliographical Note

  References

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  I am most appreciative of the help I received in the course of researching and writing this book and I am very glad to have this opportunity to express my thanks to those named below - and also to very many others who took an interest in the project, joined in stimulating discussions and helped me to crystallise and refine my thoughts.

  Dr Paul Addison of Edinburgh University, where he was until recently Director of the Centre for Second War Studies (now the Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars), and author of the Oxford DNB article on Winston Churchill and of much else, very kindly read the book in draft and discussed it with me at some length. I am very grateful to him for his generous help. The book benefited greatly from his advice on structure and from his reflections on the parabolic course of Churchill’s influence over the war.

  David Reynolds, Professor of International Relations at Cambridge, whose many books include In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, a fascinating work of analysis which sheds much light on the history of the war which Churchill wrote, and the history he took care not to write, also very kindly read the work in draft, gave most welcome advice on structure, and eliminated numerous solecisms. I am grateful to him.

  A number of ideas, encounters, events and discussions combined to prompt me to write this book. Amongst them was a stimulating lecture at the Edinburgh Centre for Second War Studies, as it then was, by Sir Martin Gilbert, who also took an interest in my project at an early stage. Like everyone else who sets out to read or write about Churchill, I am hugely in Sir Martin’s debt.

  There are many others whose help was invaluable. Dr Daniel Scroop is not only a very dear son-in-law but also a distinguished British historian of America with a particular interest in Roosevelt and the New Deal era. The American sections of the book (and other sections too) are much the better for his advice, though he should not necessarily be taken to agree with all aspects of my assessment of FDR.

  I am grateful to Melissa Atkinson of the National Portrait Gallery, to Liz Bowers of the Imperial War Museum for her help with this and earlier books, to Professor Antoine Capet of Rouen University for letting me see both published articles and unpublished papers that illuminate Churchill’s attitude to France, to David Hamill for his interest and support and for improving my ski-ing technique, to Daniel Myers of the Churchill Centre, to Doris Nisbet, as ever, for secretarial and much wider logistic backup, and to Claudia Tscheitschonigg for her friendship and help with translation.

  Dr John Tuckwell commissioned the book, and I am very grateful to him and to Val for their confidence in this and earlier ventures and for their friendship. At Birlinn, Hugh Andrew, despite the demands of presiding over a constantly expanding publishing house, found time to take a personal interest in the book. Andrew Simmons moved the production process forward without apparent effort, and was also great fun to work with. My copy editor, Dr Lawrence Osborn, snuffled out and dug up potential problems with the intuitive genius that separates the truly gifted truffle-hound from the rest.

  My daughters, Dr Julia Reid and Bryony Reid, read the typescript very carefully and with approaches that differed in reflection of their respective disciplines, and made innumerable suggestions that collectively resulted in enormous changes for the better. I am impressed and grateful.

  Last in the order of these acknowledgements, but certainly not in the scale of her contribution, comes my wife, Janet. Her editorial input as always was sensitive and perceptive and reflected her background as a journalist. But my heart-felt gratitude to her goes beyond that to a much wider element of love, support and encouragement. Without her this book – and much else too – would not have happened and life would be much less fun.

  Glenfintaig, June 2008

  Part I

  ‘The good, clean tradition of English politics has been … sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history. This sudden coup by Winston and his rabble is a serious disaster.’

  (R.A. Butler, 10 May 1940.)

  1

  The War of Words

>   There was never any doubt that Churchill would write a history of the Second World War if he lived to see its end. Even if he had not repeatedly said he would, he had never been involved in a military enterprise without recording his experiences, either as a book or in journalism.

  He was proud of the fact that throughout his life he had supported his family and an elevated lifestyle by his pen. Between 1898 and 1958 he wrote fifty-four volumes. By adding in his final speeches, a 1962 compilation of his early articles and eight books published posthumously, he produced seventy-four volumes and, including articles, published letters, speeches and books, a total output of about 15 million words.1

  His first book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, an account of his experiences on the Afghan frontier, was published when he was only twenty-three. He had already written many newspaper articles, describing his experiences as an observer of the Cuban Civil War in 1895. In India, as well as composing his story of the Field Force he was sending reports both to the Daily Telegraph and the Allahabad Pioneer. He was also writing short stories and working on his one novel, Savrola.

  So it went on. In Egypt in 1898 he was writing for the Morning Post and The Times. The articles for the Morning Post, he told his mother, would ‘act as foundations and as scaffolding for my book’. That book, The River War, was published at the end of 1899. By then he was in South Africa, which similarly provided material for publication.

  All of this can be seen as preparation for his remarkable survey of the First World War, The World Crisis. At the Admiralty, Munitions and the War Office, Churchill had been at the centre of the direction of the war, and the history he published between 1923 and 1931 is detailed, remarkably accurate and still very well worth reading. His vivid descriptions and dramatic prose are undergirded by the authority of a mass of statistical data.

  But in another respect, too, The World Crisis foreshadows the still more monumental history of the Second World War. He is the hero as well as the narrator, prompting Arthur Balfour’s celebrated quip: ‘I hear that Winston has written a book about himself and called it The World Crisis’. Churchill appears to be at the centre of events, dominating, directing and controlling them. His vision and his initiatives are those that count.

  In the course of the Second World War he did not disguise the fact that his account of the conflict would be equally subjective. When a companion wondered what history would make of events, he famously replied, ‘I know, because I intend to write the history’. On another occasion he gave the same response, though more elliptically, to the observation that it would be interesting to see what the verdict of history would be: ‘That will depend on who writes the history’.

  These, then, were to be the hallmarks of The Second World War: massive quotation of official documents, supporting a particular and skewed account of the historic events of the years 1940 to 1945. The treatment was to be noble, like the magnificent Gibbonian prose in which the story was told: the pettinesses, confusion, bungling and ignoble squabbling which are so much the essence of history are swept from his sanitised pages to give way to myth, drama and inspiration.

  The Second World War, like The World Crisis, runs to six volumes; but the second series of volumes is bigger than the first: it extends to nearly 2 million words. Something like 12 per cent of these words is contained in appendices, in which official minutes and papers are quoted in part or whole. Churchill’s approach to these papers was very simple: ‘They are mine. I can publish them’. The constitutional position was much more opaque, and all that can be said with certainty is that Churchill was quite wrong. All the same, for a variety of reasons, many of them depending on rules which he himself had drawn up before surrendering office in 1945, he was able to take with him a substantial volume of his ‘own’ minutes and telegrams. He also had the right to consult an even bigger volume of papers, which was left in the government’s hands. Furthermore, although government consent was required to quote from official documents and despite the fact that the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, was anxious to avoid a repetition of the rash of memoirs based on official papers that occurred after the First World War, Churchill was accorded a very special dispensation. The government came to think of his memoirs as having a quasi-official status and representing a statement for the historical record in the interests of the nation.

  There were distortions in his narrative. The war in the Pacific is dealt with very sketchily, and there is no acknowledgement at all that it was Russia which really won the war in Europe. These faults reflect the egotistical nature of Churchill’s project. His account was the sort of story that Julius Caesar told, history created by Great Men, events moulded by titans. When Eisenhower’s naval assistant, Harry Butcher, published his diaries in 1946, Churchill wrote to his old colleague: ‘The Articles are, in my opinion, altogether below the level upon which such matters should be treated. Great events and personalities are all made small when passed through the medium of the small mind.’2

  The archival approach and the self-justifying process came together: because the documentary evidence more readily available consisted of Churchill’s minutes and directives, not the responses to them, the picture that he painted was of events which he galvanised, and in which others’ roles were minimised or completely excluded. This was resented by some, and the reaction of Sir Alan Brooke, later Viscount Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff for most of the war, will particularly be noted later in this narrative. Lord Reith, who had been a disappointing Minister of Information and was no friend of Churchill, complained, ‘Winston prints in his war book innumerable directives and never once lets us see a single answer’.

  In a fascinating piece of scholarly detective work, Professor David Reynolds has revealed the remarkable history of the writing of Churchill’s history.3 Sir Norman Brook, Bridges’ successor as Cabinet Secretary, became less a censor than a co-author, and actively helped, drafting chunks of the narrative. Other public servants also made contributions. The price of government approval was a certain amount of vetting, but political control of the narrative stemmed less from the Labour government, in power when the first volumes appeared, than from Churchill himself. Even in opposition, but particularly when he was in power again after 1951, he distorted the historical record for political reasons.

  In his second ministry he was greatly preoccupied by the tragic sense that the victory of 1945 would be succeeded by another war, even more terrible than the last. Nothing was to be done which might prejudice the chances of avoiding that disaster. Differences with Stalin were minimised, and in particular the tensions in the relationship with America and the increasing divergence of the views of the two allies were almost written out. By the time that the last volumes were appearing, Eisenhower, the wartime Supreme Commander, was President of the United States, and the true nature of Anglo-American relations by the end of the war is accordingly scarcely hinted at.

  There was some criticism of the history as the successive volumes were published. Emmanuel Shinwell adapted Balfour and said that Churchill had written a novel with himself as the chief character. Michael Foot, though generally well disposed, spoke of Churchill ‘clothing his personal vindication in the garb of history’.4 Other criticisms were made, both in regard to detail and to the nature of the books, but they were overshadowed by the vast preponderance of favourable reviews. In so far as criticism was noticed at all, it was largely discredited because it came from those who had never been Churchill’s supporters.

  The publication of the six volumes was the literary phenomenon of the time. Each volume was published in America before Britain, and a series of different editions was published in each country, as well as elsewhere: concurrent Canadian, Australian, Taiwanese and book club editions appeared with translations in almost every language in Europe, including Russian. Editions in the remaining languages of the world followed. Among the various printings which subsequently appeared were paperbacks, and in addition to publication in book for
m, the history was serialised in Britain, America, Australia and other countries. The first volume appeared in forty-two editions of the Daily Telegraph.5 In Britain alone the hardback six volumes were printed in quantities of about 250,000 each, and in the case of the early volumes they sold out within hours.

  Churchill never claimed that his book represented the whole story: ‘I do not describe this as history, for that belongs to another generation. But I claim with confidence that it is a contribution to history which will be of service to the future.’ Those closest to the centre of affairs knew well that Churchill had not been alone in controlling events and that he was justifying himself before history and enhancing his personal role. But no one wished to destroy a myth that flattered not just Churchill, but Britain collectively – and indeed the American allies. The story he told was one of resolve, endurance and heroism. There was a collective collusion in perpetuating the legend that he was creating. To do otherwise would have minimised the nation’s achievement as well as Churchill’s and, particularly in the austere days of post-war Britain when there was little else to celebrate, it would have been close to treachery to question the way in which victory had been won.

  In the years that followed, many studies of component parts have altered views of aspects of the Second World War, but they have done little to dislodge from the popular mind the account of the war as Churchill gave it. It is doubtful now if the Second World War will ever be separated from the aura of heroic unity against evil that separates it from the study of other conflicts in history.

  In Churchill’s lifetime, publications like Brooke’s diaries and those of General Sir John Kennedy made little impact on his reputation or that of his history. One or two publications in America had equally little effect, and his standing there is probably higher now than ever, and certainly higher than it is in his own country. In 1966, Lord Moran published his diaries. As his doctor, he had seen Churchill in his more vulnerable moments and the picture he drew was suggestive of weakness and doubt. In reality, although Churchill had treated Moran with great kindness and drew him into his own household, the doctor was never privy to the real secrets of the war and was not present at the meetings that mattered. Churchill talked incessantly, threw out ideas and thought aloud. Moran recorded what he claimed to have heard, sometimes in suspicious detail. He set out his story at length – although some elements were omitted: he makes no mention of the substantial financial provisions that Churchill made for his family. His account is fascinating and often informative, but is written from a limited perspective.