The war came in September 1939, spellbinding in its seeming stupidity. Hitler, self-mesmerized, had no choice. No one was around to stop him. And perhaps that grandest puppet master of all, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, was egging him on. (Some biographers actually say this, and believe that Stalin was expecting an attack. Whether or not this was so, he made the most of it in the end.) Hitler, too, thought Britain’s promise to Poland was an ill-considered one, and they wouldn’t hold to it. He was wrong. Prime Minister Chamberlain had a moral obligation to Poland, and tried his best to prosecute the war, and then resigned. Grudgingly, he handed over the reins to Churchill. And Churchill’s war cabinet appointed Max Aitken as minister of aircraft production.
He was now an unwilling player, with his asthma and ill health, yet here he would be an almost indispensable one. Within a few months he more then quadrupled the manufacture of aircraft. Each day he was slandered in the House of Commons for duplicity and mismanagement, and he kept going. When the Continental army was forced from Dunkirk in May 1940, he made every effort to retrieve spare airplane parts that were left behind.
There is a story, related by Peter Howard in his book Max the Unknown, of Aitken going to see Churchill and meeting in the foyer a high-ranking naval commander who delightedly told him that a new shipment of steel for his destroyers had arrived. Max said great, and, pulling rank, went in to see Churchill first.
“What’s happening, Max?” Winston asked.
“I just got a great shipment of steel for our planes,” Max said.
“Wonderful news,” Winston beamed.
He was the boy giving his landlady her fifty cents all over again.
There are those who said he did not do what he said he was going to do, and that he fudged the results. Historian Roy Jenkins seems to think this, or at least intimates that Max was not that important. As with almost all of what Jenkins says about Beaverbrook, I am going to disagree.
It is widely suggested that, when he took over as minister of aircraft production, there were five Spitfires in reserve—that is, once the pilots were in the air, five aircraft were left in the hangars.
Four months later, 6,400 aircraft had been built. Where did Aitken get most of the raw materials? From Canada and the States. Where did he get many of the pilots? From Canada as well. He bartered to get machinery and engines from Detroit. When Henry Ford said he would not build engines for belligerents in a war that did not concern the United States, Max used his old connections with Rolls-Royce to get engines and went to the smaller Packard Motor Car Company to build them. Some say that, because of this, he had a hand in jump-starting American production for its own war effort. He spoke of thousands and thousands of planes. Did he fudge the records? Probably—he was Beaverbrook. Did he come up against a bureaucratic wall? Of course, this was England. Was he fighting for England’s life? Absolutely. His arguments would start in cabinet, against one, and then two, and then sooner or later he would be taking on all comers, with poor Churchill trying to keep the peace daily.
“He swept through every department like Genghis Khan—it was remarkable,” said Air Force colonel Moore-Barbazon, member of parliament for Chatham. “He was one of the people Churchill spoke about when he said, ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few!’” (This is not a well-known summation of that famous line.)Was he indispensable? For a little while, a little while as indispensable as Eisenhower or Marshal Zhukov. Did he make enemies? Of course he did, he was . . .
No one was going to mess with Max Aitken. He was the inspired little tough from the town of Newcastle, on the banks of the Miramichi. If he had been intimidated by anyone, he wouldn’t have made it out of Newcastle. That’s the secret that Small Town boys know.
But he kept going. Not only with his aircraft production, but with his intrigues and his papers. In fact, he knew exactly what was being said against the present administration in his papers, and didn’t always do anything to stop it, although he was portrayed as the puppet master of his employees. Churchill and others complained in 1940 of leftists in his employ. The Beaver responded that there may well be, but that didn’t mean he agreed with them. He also complained that he was accosted on both sides: on one for telling his employees what to say, and on the other for not telling them what to say.
During this time certain of his younger friends, including journalist Peter Howard, wrote the pamphlet The Guilty Men, attacking Chamberlain, Baldwin, Lord Halifax, and the rest for the terrible lack of British preparedness. Certainly Beaver approved of this pamphlet. So would most of us. He yelled for metal, tin, and copper—he had people give anything they could to be melted down and used to make his planes. He demanded the gates from former prime minister Baldwin’s estate, and said he would send the police to take them. He must have delighted in this, but he was outvoted in parliament, and Baldwin’s iron gates stayed. (However, Max’s gates and railings at Stornoway House were taken with Max’s blessing.)
CERTAIN NOTES FROM 1940 show what a man of mettle he actually was. Bombers were being built in the United States, pushed across the border to Canada, flown to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and put on ships to England. Those that weren’t sunk by the U-boat packs had to be reassembled at their destination. This to Beaverbrook was a criminal waste of time. He proposed to Churchill and got the go-ahead to hire Canadian, American, and Australian bush pilots to fly these planes across the Atlantic, and he then requisitioned and built an airport in Gander, Newfoundland, to get it done. Members of the British High Command howled at his presumption. Of course. Max went ahead. Of course. This was simply the bravest policy decision concerning aircraft in the Second World War.
He also sought and got a dispersal of aircraft-production centres, to thwart the enemy and lessen its bombing successes, but was unsuccessful in trying to stop air-raid sirens, because, he maintained, they slowed work production.
When his son-in-law, Drogo Montagu, Janet’s second husband (a fighter pilot and son of the Earl of Sandwich), was killed in the Battle of Britain, Max phoned his friend Peter Howard to say that nothing but total victory would ever ensure peace. And he sounded genuinely heartbroken.
He was to break Churchill’s heart too. As Peter Howard records, when First Sea Lord Dudley suggested the French fleet be destroyed to save it from falling into German hands, Churchill was aghast, and asked Max for his opinion on the matter.
“Attack it immediately,” Aitken replied. “The Germans will force the French fleet to side with the Italians in the Mediterranean Sea! They will do it by blackmail. They will threaten to burn Marseilles, or even to burn Paris, if the French do not comply.” For someone who hadn’t wanted war, he certainly understood what had to be done once the game was on. Max later recounted what followed. Churchill gave the order; Churchill wept.
There was another moment recorded by both A.J.P. Taylor and Peter Howard. It came when certain naval officers were considering sending the British fleet to Canada if there was an invasion on British soil. Churchill, after receiving this note from the Naval office, handed it to Aitken. It was Canada they were thinking of sending the fleet to, and Aitken should be informed. But Aitken knew this would look like capitulation to the Americans, whose support they badly needed. Max simply said: “Winston, you can’t do that,” and it was settled.
Though Beaverbrook distrusted the Americans, he realized they were desperately needed, and he would be the man sent to barter with them.
“I’ve come to ask for your help, and I’m going to ask for a lot,” he quipped to the U.S. Senate.
THERE WERE OF COURSE other things not so settled. One was Beaver himself. His unfortunate perversity of temperament, his anger at slights, that stayed with him most of his life, threatened to derail him and the part he played in the war effort. This was his finest hour, but he had to be prodded into staying on duty. It was unconscionable to request retirement so often, even more than Sea Lord Fisher in 1915, and it doesn’t sit well in retrospect. If it is aggravating now to have to read, imagine what it was like for Winston Churchill, who thought Beaverbrook his ablest minister.
“I am placing my entire confidence, and to a large extent the life of the state upon your shoulders,” Churchill wrote to a disgruntled Max in January 1941.
But Max had legitimate concerns. He was awake day and night, was blasted in the House for everything he tried to do, and was not well. And, as always, he was considered an intriguer. Also, he was frightened of the bombs that were dropping. He made no bones about his fear, and so more power to him that he stayed, and remained the most insistent force—except of course for Churchill himself—in wartime Britain. But just as when he was a boy of twelve, he wanted and needed to be his own man, and with Winston as both prime minister and minister of defence, it was hard to be that. Nonetheless, as Churchill wrote of Beaverbrook years later: “He did not fail—this was his hour.” Of course, as Max knew, this was also Winston’s hour. It was his finest hour, and the finest hour of the British people. The only other people at that time to show so much courage were the Russians. But that was to come.
Max here—as usual—is not above criticism. The unfortunate fact is that he never was. That Churchill had to take time out of his busy office to deny his requests for resignation and write countless letters saying his resignation was not accepted, and to try and cajole him into staying, is nothing short of ingratitude on Max’s part. Any disappointment or contradiction of his orders encouraged him to vent his anger and browbeat Churchill, who had too much to worry about already. One has to feel for Churchill here, who was waging a war for the very survival of his country—while certain other countries in Europe gleefully hid up Hitler’s arse.
Max’s relationships with other men of power would always be a double-edged sword, and as he built his planes, he pressed Churchill far too much. Finally, Churchill made Max overall minister of production.
There was an uproar, on a huge scale. Ernest Bevin, a rising star in the Labour Party, and Attlee, who would become Conservative prime minister, were firmly against him, and Max, who for a short time had been a hero with Labour because of his fall 1941 visit to Soviet Russia, where he had signed a pact to send large-scale supplies to their war effort, was now losing influence.
As the crisis surrounding Beaverbrook grew, all during the dark December of 1941 Churchill was facing his own political disasters. Singapore fell to the Japanese. After Pearl Harbor on December 6, the Americans, who had promised much material support, were in need of most of it themselves. Rommel was playing havoc with the British in the North African desert, and the public no longer trusted Churchill as both prime minister and minister of defence. Winston was working twenty-hour days. Sooner or later, if Attlee and others wanted Max gone, and if Max continued to insist on having his own way—as he had from the time he was a schoolboy—Churchill, already fighting rear-guard actions to protect himself, would no longer be able to protect Aitken.
In February 1942, Max defined his authority as minister of production. It would in essence put everything, including shipbuilding, under his control. He would be his own man with everything concerning war production, or no man at all. This was always his way, from the moment he stepped on the train and met Mr. Stairs and tried to sell him a typewriter.
But he was playing with fire here. For Churchill knew that, once gone, Max would this time (for all intents and purposes) be gone for good.
IN THE WINTER OF 1942, after parrying with Aitken for a year or more and now in deep political trouble himself, Churchill felt he had to reshuffle his cabinet. Peter Howard and others state that Winston showed Max two lists. On one, Max was in the cabinet, and on the other, Max was out. Max, looking over the lists, became miffed, and said he wanted out, especially if Attlee was to be deputy prime minister. Churchill felt he had to have Attlee.
Then, in deference to Attlee, Winston chose Stafford Cripps rather than Beaverbrook as leader of the House of Commons.
Preferring Cripps—or anyone else in the realm—was to Max a slap in the face, and a betrayal from an old friend, perhaps the best friend in England he had ever had. More stinging was this: Stafford Cripps had attacked Max’s plans to help the Soviet Union—for, of all things, being too generous. This was one of the achievements of which Max was most proud—having gone to Russia in the depths of the war and signed a pact with Molotov, even having redirected some of England’s own materials from Canada and the United States to help Moscow fight the war. (Because of this, Max would be awarded the Soviets’ Order of Sovorov in 1944.)
Max told Winston that he would not serve in a government with Attlee as deputy prime minister. Attlee had done nothing to deserve this plum, he argued. It has been stated that, at this point, Churchill became exasperated, and told him to repeat his threat of resignation in front of Attlee and Cripps themselves. Max, in his usual huff, took the dare and did just that. Once he had done so, Churchill could no longer pretend he had not, and was forced to accept his resignation. Cripps and Attlee were ecstatic over this, and Churchill was deeply sorry.
Here was the man who had built the Spitfire (with the help of Canada, and among others K.C. Irving and the woods of New Brunswick), which won the battle over the skies of Britain; the man who had ordered and financed the building of the Gander runway, so that bomber planes he had parlayed and fought for could take off and fly the treacherous North Atlantic. Here was the man who had gone to Australian, Canadian, and American bush pilots, some of them women, to get the job done. And all the while he was laughed at and ridiculed for doing so by men who would sleep safer and quieter because he had not relented in his job.
Max believed Churchill had betrayed him. But the war was the most important thing, and victory the most important aim, and Churchill, sinking in the polls at that time, could only be so loyal. (Winston had to face a vote of no confidence later, in July of 1942. This is how he was rewarded by the House of Commons.) Max Aitken in a year and a half had done far more for England than Attlee or Cripps or anyone else in the wartime government, except for Winston himself, would ever do.
When a boy, Max was very good at Birds in a Bush— a game in which one guesses the number of marbles in another boy’s hand. He was so good at it that it seemed almost diabolical. He had also played dice with lumber barons on the Miramichi when he was sixteen. He was always good at games of chance.
He could never sit still. As a child he had listened to his father’s sermons, not at his mother’s side but up in the church balcony, as far away as he could get, fidgeting and wanting to be somewhere else. This eccentric had learned all his disobedience and human insight as a boy of seven—and had relied upon it to help save the Western world. He was now undercut by those who had always listened to sermons and would never wager anything on a game of Birds in a Bush. In a very grave way, those who couldn’t count the number of hairs on the teacher’s moustache, those who had sat in school, and raised their hands, and studied hard had taken their revenge, and congratulated each other that they had done so, while a bewildered Churchill, who cared for him more than he did ten of any others, could do nothing to help.
The Beaver went away to a flat on the first floor of the Evening Standard building.
This was because Stornoway, Gladys’s beloved house, had been bombed in the autumn of 1940.