After almost six years of total war, Europeans had reached the upland regions. But from Warsaw to Paris, Berlin to Prague, they found themselves not in Winston Churchill’s sunlit pastoral, but in a mutilated, desolate, and blood-drenched landscape. The war had left Europe literally a shambles—a slaughterhouse. In triumph, the victors took measure of the appalling tragedy that had overtaken the Continent since 1939. At least 40 million Europeans had been killed, about equally divided between civilians and armed forces. Poland had paid the highest relative price. More than six million Poles, almost 20 percent of Poland’s prewar population, were dead, including three million Polish Jews. This is a number that defies comprehension. A modern reader might form some idea of the enormity of the Polish slaughter if he imagined picking up the morning newspaper every day for five years and reading that three thousand of his fellow citizens had perished the previous day in a terrorist attack. In Warsaw alone, seven hundred thousand had died, more than worldwide British, Commonwealth, and American battlefield deaths combined. Almost half of Poland’s doctors, dentists, lawyers, and university professors were among the dead. Weeks after the German surrender, Churchill, still furious over the failure of the London Poles to reach some sort of agreement with Stalin in 1944, told the House, “There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess, and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided.” Yet Poland’s biggest mistake was the accident of geography that had placed it between the Wolf and the Bear, and the Bear had prevailed. The Lublin Poles accounted for thirteen of the twenty ministers in the new Warsaw government. The sixteen Polish democrats arrested in late March were found guilty of crimes against the state and packed off to prison. Poland had, in effect, become the seventeenth Soviet republic.1
Meticulous Nazi records soon accounted for another three million murdered Jews, gassed or shot, along with at least one million other “enemies of the state”: Communists, gypsies, and homosexuals. Vichy France had been most accommodating in arresting and handing over to the Germans such undesirables. At least 70,000 of France’s prewar Jewish population of 350,000 (of whom about one-half were naturalized citizens or refugees) were sent to their deaths in the east. Three-quarters of Holland’s 140,000 Jews were likewise trundled east to their deaths. Italy could count almost 350,000 war dead, split about evenly between soldiers and civilians. The French had lost 200,000 men in 1940, but by 1945, the number of civilians who had perished in bombing raids and concentration camps was 400,000. Ongoing civil and guerrilla wars in Greece and Yugoslavia had so far left 150,000 and 1.5 million dead, respectively. Partisans in both countries were still killing each other, a state of affairs that led Churchill, with Tito in mind, to tell Brooke, “When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.”2
Meanwhile, Communist movements grabbed their share of power in Italy and France; the Red Army was or soon would be placing Communists in power in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. Eduard Beneš returned to Czechoslovakia, where he was confirmed as president by a coalition of Democrats and Communists in the National Assembly. The three Baltic states had disappeared within the Soviet empire. Stalin felt that Russia, given its horrific and heroic sacrifice, had earned the right to take what it pleased. Almost eleven million Red Army soldiers were dead or missing; Soviet civilian casualties have never been calculated with exactness; perhaps fifteen million, perhaps as many as twenty million, were killed by bullet, noose, fire, and starvation, fully half of the Continent’s casualties. And still Europeans were dying. Millions of German land mines, from the Oder River to Brittany and Normandy (where six million were buried), were killing civilians at a rate of several hundred a week. Churchill proposed to Brooke that “the Germans find all the mines they have buried, and dig them up. Why should they not? Pigs are used to find olives.” Brooke shared the prime minister’s sentiments but could not resist pointing out to Churchill that pigs were used to find truffles.3
On May 11, the third day of European peace, Churchill cabled President Truman with a request that they jointly invite Stalin to a tripartite meeting at “some unshattered town in Germany” not within the Russian zone of occupation, and that Truman first stop off in London in a display of unity. Churchill pointed out that twice the Americans and British had met Stalin on or near his territory, Churchill four times in all. He further stressed his belief that it was critical that “the American front will not recede from the now agreed upon tactical lines.” Truman’s response was immediate, unsatisfactory, and reminiscent of Roosevelt’s wartime hesitancy. Truman proposed that their respective ambassadors try to persuade Stalin to call for a meeting, and that he and Churchill travel to it separately in order to avoid the appearance of “ganging up” on Stalin. Churchill sent off another cable the next day, telling Truman, as he had Roosevelt, that he was “profoundly concerned about the European situation.” American armies were “melting” away, the French were virtually defenseless, and the Russians had two to three hundred divisions on active duty. “An iron curtain is drawn down upon their [the Russian] front.” Behind it, Poland was isolated, and controlled by Stalin’s Lublin puppets. It would be easy for the Russians, Churchill warned, to drive all the way “to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic.” He again proposed a meeting of the Big Three at the earliest possible opportunity in order to forge “a settlement with Russia before our strength has gone.”4
To Eden, in San Francisco for the opening of the United Nations, he cabled similar sentiments:
TODAY THERE ARE ANNOUNCEMENTS IN THE NEWSPAPERS OF THE LARGE WITHDRAWALS OF AMERICAN TROOPS NOW TO BEGIN MONTH BY MONTH. WHAT ARE WE TO DO? GREAT PRESSURE WILL SOON BE PUT ON US [AT HOME] TO DEMOBILIZE PARTIALLY. IN A VERY SHORT TIME OUR ARMIES WILL HAVE MELTED, BUT THE RUSSIANS MAY REMAIN WITH HUNDREDS OF DIVISIONS IN POSSESSION OF EUROPE FROM LUBECK TO TRIESTE, AND TO THE GREEK FRONTIER ON THE ADRIATIC…. ALL THESE THINGS ARE FAR MORE VITAL THAN THE AMENDMENTS TO A WORLD CONSTITUTION [THE UNITED NATIONS] WHICH MAY NEVER WELL COME INTO BEING TILL IT IS SUPERSEDED AFTER A PERIOD OF APPEASEMENT BY A THIRD WORLD WAR.5
By the end of the month, Stalin and Truman set a tentative date of July 15 for the meeting. Churchill considered that to be a month too late, and he proposed mid-June or early July at the latest. A delay of a month or more, Churchill believed, would allow the Red Army and the Lublin Poles time enough to effectively settle the matter of new Polish borders without Anglo-American input or oversight. But Truman held firm. As well, he sent word to Churchill through former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Joe Davies that he [Truman] wanted to meet with Stalin before the Big Three met. Churchill warned Truman that any such bilateral meeting would be “regrettable” and would raise issues “wounding” to Britain, the Commonwealth, and the British Empire. Truman backed off but held to the mid-July date. The place would be Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin and the Versailles of Prussian princes. The town was heavily damaged but not utterly destroyed.6
Throughout Germany, there was little left “unshattered.” Every major city and most of the larger towns had been completely destroyed—Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and Stuttgart in the south, Breslau in the east. The RAF and American Eighth Air Force had paid a heavy price for these results: 26,000 American and 55,000 British airmen died over Europe. But the air campaign had wiped out twenty-eight major towns of the Ruhr. On the ground, German soldiers paid a far heavier price. More than five million German soldiers, sailors, and airmen had been killed since 1939 in service to Hitler’s vision. Almost two million German citizens had died, as many as six hundred thousand under Allied bombs. The end of the war marked only the beginning of more pain for Germans. Near Berlin—a dead city—squads of German civilians overseen by Allied soldiers dug one hundred thousand graves in anticipation of filling them during the coming winter with the bodies of the frozen and the starved and no doubt thousands more suicides. At least half the German civilian war dead had perished at the hands of the Red Army while fleeing westward early in the year. Within twelve months, most of the Germanic population east of the Elbe—in East Prussia, Poland, the Czech Sudetenland—would be forcibly relocated into the Allied occupation zones, some fourteen million in all as a result of the Yalta agreement to redraw German and Polish borders, and Stalin’s demands at Potsdam that no Germans remain within the new Poland. At least one million died of starvation in the process.
The Germanic population of the former Greater Reich fell to under three million from more than seventeen million before the war. The survivors had to be fed, along with eight million displaced persons within Germany—former slave laborers, of which four million lived in the Soviet zone. Hundreds of thousands of Dutch, French, and Polish displaced persons had to be sent home. And Stalin demanded that tens of thousands of Russian POWs be sent east, along with thousands of White Russians and Cossacks who had made the fatal error of joining the German side. The Western Allies dutifully delivered these Russians later that summer—some with families brought from the Ukraine—to Red Army checkpoints. Many were gunned down before even boarding the trains east; others committed suicide rather than return to face the noose. In his memoirs, Dwight Eisenhower makes mention of these “persecutees” and the “terror” they felt, and the suicides, but no mention of their nationality.7
One million Germans had fled before the Russians and into Montgomery’s zone of occupation, where another million wounded Germans wasted away, with little medicine, little food, and little hope. Montgomery also had to tend to the upkeep of almost two million German soldiers who were now his prisoners and feared falling into Russian hands. In his memoirs, Montgomery wrote: “From their behavior it soon became clear that the Russians, though a fine fighting race, were in fact barbarous Asiatics who had never enjoyed a civilization comparable to the rest of Europe.” He told his diary, “Out of the impact of the Asiatics on the European culture, a new Europe has been born.” Two immediate problems had to be tackled, the feeding of Germans and the containment of the Russians, were they to wander farther westward. Britain could do neither alone. Weeks later, Churchill told the House that it “would be in vain for us in our small Island, which still needs to import half its food, to imagine that we can make any further appreciable contribution in that respect [trying to feed Germans].” And on the mass expulsion of Germans from newly configured Poland, he predicted, “It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain.”8
On May 13 Churchill took to the airwaves, warning Britons:
I wish I could tell you tonight that all our toils and troubles were over. Then indeed I could end my five years’ service happily, and if you thought that you had had enough of me and that I ought to be put out to grass, I tell you I would take it with the best of grace…. There would be little use in punishing the Hitlerites for their crimes if law and justice did not rule, and if totalitarian or police governments were to take the place of the German invaders…. I told you hard things at the beginning of these last five years; you did not shrink, and I should be unworthy of your confidence and generosity if I did not still cry: Forward, unflinching, unswerving, indomitable, till the whole task is done and the whole world is safe and clean.
He also warned of the coming battle with Japan, and repeated his pledge of five years: “We seek nothing.”9
He did not disclose in his broadcast his belief that the Russians were now intent on making Europe unsafe and unclean. Nor could he disclose his favored solution to the Russian threat. That day, May 13, Brooke wrote of Churchill: “He gives me the feeling of already longing for another war! Even if it entailed fighting Russia!” He was. One of the wagers Montgomery recorded in his ledger in 1943 was a £100 bet between himself and George Patton, who gave even odds that “the armed forces of Great Britain will become involved in another war in Europe within ten years of the cessation of hostilities in the current war.” Patton’s bet was looking pretty good even before London streets were swept clean of streamers and rosettes from the V-E day festivities. Churchill now asked the British joint planners to study the feasibility of war with the Russians, code-named Operation Unthinkable. In fact, eight months earlier, the British chiefs had composed a paper for the Foreign Office on the possibility of Russia’s becoming a future adversary. At the time, Brooke wrote, the Foreign Office “could not admit that Russia may one day become unfriendly” and “considered it very remiss” for the chiefs to contemplate war with Britain’s current ally. Yet planning for future military contingencies is the responsibility of military planners. Eden accepted the paper. Still, Brooke told his diary later in May, after revisiting Operation Unthinkable, “The idea is of course fantastic, and the chances for success quite impossible. There is no doubt from now onwards Russia is all powerful in Europe.”10
Of these weeks Churchill later wrote, “I could only feel the vast manifestation of Soviet and Russian imperialism rolling forward over helpless lands.” Almost a decade later, while addressing his Woodford constituency, he let slip that soon after V-E day, he had directed Montgomery “to be careful in collecting the German arms, to stack them so they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued.” No such telegram has been found in official records, but Montgomery, in his memoir, wrote that he protested to London an order that “these [German] weapons should be kept intact.” He does not name the official who issued the order.11
A message Churchill sent to Eisenhower on May 9, however, contains the same sentiment:
I have heard with some concern that the Germans are to destroy all their aircraft in situ. I hope that this policy will not be adopted in regard to weapons and other forms of equipment. We may have great need of these some day. And even now they might be of use, both in France and especially in Italy. I think we ought to keep everything worth keeping. The heavy cannon I preserved from the last war fired constantly from the heights of Dover in this war.12
Neither telegram (if the Montgomery message ever existed) makes clear whether Churchill intended German troops to bear those surrendered weapons.
Churchill, while contemplating a response to the Red Army, hoped for a diplomatic solution, but he planned for war. His fears were well founded, but he failed as he had a decade earlier to correctly read the mood of the British public. For four years, while the Red Army fought valiantly, the British and American people gave it its due. Indeed, the people of both nations had elevated the Red Army and Russians to heroic stature. Churchill had, too, for a year or so after June 1941.
But circumstances had changed, dramatically and dangerously. The Red Army now occupied Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin. In March 1936 Churchill had told the House:
For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries falling into the hands of such a Power…. Observe that the policy of England takes no account of which nation it is that seeks the overlordship of Europe…. It has nothing to do with rulers or nations; it is concerned solely with whoever is the strongest or the potentially dominating tyrant.
That policy had never changed. As he had a decade earlier, Churchill identified an existential threat to Europe. And, as he had in the mid-1930s, he arrived at the right conclusion at the wrong time. And the British military, as it had been a decade earlier, was in no state to deter the Soviet threat. The final butcher’s bill would include 244,000 British soldiers, airmen, and sailors. Commonwealth nations and other imperial comrades-in-arms suffered another 100,000 dead—Australia, 23,000; Canada, 37,000; India, 24,000; New Zealand, 10,000, and South Africa, 6,000. Militarily, Britain and the Empire were in no shape to fight a new war.13
Yet this time Churchill’s worries were shared, not dismissed, by Tories and Labour alike. All within HMG knew him to be correct regarding the Russian threat. In any case, Britain in 1945 lacked not only the will to force the issue with the Soviets, it lacked the way: Britain was broke. When in 1940 Lord Lothian told American reporters that Britain was broke, he meant only that London lacked the cash and gold reserves to buy American arms and food. Now, having emerged victorious, London owed $4.3 billion to America and $1.2 billion to Canada. Britain had little to export and faced American tariffs in any event, and, as Churchill repeatedly told his countrymen, half the food consumed on the Home Island had to be imported.
When Foreign Minister Anthony Eden asked Labourite Ernest Bevin what cabinet position he might seek if Bevin’s Labour Party won a general election, Bevin replied that he hoped for the Exchequer. Eden was stunned: “Whatever for?” he asked. “There’ll be nothing to do there except to account for the money we have not got.” Meat was rationed (horsemeat, not rationed, had lost its stigma), as were cheese, eggs, butter, soap, flour, clothing, and paper. Even a decade later, British high school students performed their math lessons on the backs of old grocery receipts. Petrol, coal, oil—all rationed. Whisky was in short supply, fresh fish, too. The Germans had destroyed or heavily damaged more than 750,000 houses. Public services were paralyzed. London’s lights would not fully function for three more months. Transportation was in disarray, delivery of water and electricity unreliable. On May 11, President Truman summarily cut back Lend-Lease shipments to France, Russia, and Britain. Weeks later, he ceased shipments of American coal to Britain—five hundred thousand tons per month and every ounce desperately needed. The message was clear: Britain would soon be on its own. In this want, the Labour Party saw opportunity. Aneurin Bevan famously observed, “This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.” He assigned responsibility for this state of affairs to the Conservatives, to whose complete extermination as a political party he dedicated his political life.14
In mid-May, while planning his unthinkable war against Russia, Churchill proposed to Clement Attlee a continuation of the coalition government until Japan was defeated. Attlee agreed, on the condition that Churchill pledge in writing that the interim government would actively pursue reforms in housing, education, and social security. Churchill made the pledge, believing that Attlee would present the document to the annual Labour Party conference under way in Blackpool, where he would carry the day. Instead, the old socialist Harold Laski, that year’s chairman of the conference, opposed Churchill’s plan, and was joined by Ernest Bevin, Hugh Dalton, and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. Attlee, always more conciliator than leader (Eden thought him timid), had no choice but to reject Churchill’s offer. The coalition was dead. Just nine months earlier, Laski had proposed to Churchill the setting up of a “Churchill Fund” to support the Royal Society and the British Museum. “As I look at the Europe Hitler has devastated,” Laski wrote at the time, “I know very intimately that, as an Englishman of Jewish origin, I owe you the gift of life itself.” Churchill expressed his gratitude to Laski but affirmed that he’d prefer a park or playground to be built in his name on the south side of the Thames, “where all the houses have been blown down.” That included Limehouse, Clement Attlee’s constituency. But now, with Hitler dead, Laski and his Labour cohorts had their sights set on nothing less than the remaking of British government and British life. Five years earlier, Labour support had made it possible for Churchill to become prime minister and create the coalition government. Now Labour walked out.15
On May 23, Churchill motored to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to King George, who asked Churchill to form a caretaker government until elections could be held and the soldiers’ vote from overseas tallied. The elections were scheduled for July 5, the final results to be announced some three weeks later. Churchill had kept to his pledge of nonpartisanship for five years. Now he would assume his partisan demeanor, and few in England could be as partisan as Churchill when he set his mind to it. He had gained the office of prime minister twice, in 1940 and again that day, but neither time through the ballot box. He intended to return to office for a third time, with a mandate from the people.
He had forewarned Britons of his keenness to wage a verbal war against Labour when in March he told the annual Tory conference, “We have all abstained from doing or saying anything which would be likely to impair the unity of the British people…. In doing this we have endured patiently and almost silently many provocations from that happily limited class of Left Wing politicians to whom party strife is the breath of their nostrils, and their only means of obtaining influence or notoriety.” He pledged to “maintain this patriotic restraint as long as the National Coalition… continues to work together in loyal comrade-ship.” That partnership was no more. He had told Britons: “Our Socialist friends have officially committed themselves—much to the disgust of some of their leaders—to a programme for nationalizing all the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” Labour’s “sweeping proposals,” he warned, “imply not only the destruction of the whole of our existing system of society, and of life, and of labour, but the creation and enforcement of another system or other systems borrowed from foreign lands and alien minds.” He asked:
Will the warrior return, will the family be reunited, will the shattered houses be restored…? They do not regard themselves as a slum-bred serf population chased into battle from a land of misery and want. They love their country and the scenes of their youth and manhood, and they have shown themselves ready to die not only in defence of its material satisfactions but for its honour…. Let there be no mistake about it; it is no easy, cheap-jack Utopia of airy phrases that lies before us…. This is no time for windy platitudes and glittering advertisements…. This is no time for humbug and blandishments, but for grim, stark facts and figures, and for action to meet immediate needs.”16
In reply some months later, the novelist, playwright, and Labour’s literary spokesman J. B. Priestley wrote a thirty-four-page pamphlet titled Letter to a Returning Serviceman, in which he warned ex-Tommies to beware “the charmed cozy circle” of home life promised by Churchill. Priestley’s BBC broadcasts throughout the war were as patriotic as Churchill’s, and almost as well known. His audience consisted of those Britons whom Churchill liked to call his yeomanry. They listened to Priestley, and they paid heed when he told them, “Modern man is essentially a communal and cooperating man…. I do not believe in economic liberty…. Economic life is necessarily a communal life.”17 “After the war” had for almost six years been a teasing dream. Churchill had used the phrase in speeches for more than a decade, during the 1930s in collating the mistakes of HMG after the Great War, and since 1940 in reminding Britons that numerous questions—jobs, housing, education—could be addressed only “after the war.” A generation earlier, the soldiers had returned from the Great War to find no plans in place for the peace. They were expected to take up their plows and tools after a four-year absence as if the whole bloody business—where one million men of the Empire had died—had not even taken place. Normalcy had been the byword then, on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1943 Churchill told England:
War cuts down… on forward planning, and everything is subordinated to the struggle for national existence. Thus, when peace came suddenly, as it did last time [1918], there were no long carefully prepared plans for the future…. We must not be caught again that way. It is therefore necessary to make sure that we have projects for the future employment of the people and… that private enterprise and State enterprise are both able to play their parts to the utmost.18
Now, after six years of living in a tightly controlled society, necessary in order to defeat Hitler, the returning soldiers and indeed many Britons saw the need for more sacrifice and planning in order to defeat poverty, remove slums, and improve education and services. Planning (at Churchill’s behest) had since 1941 led to improvements in the high schools, this while under severe wartime stringencies. A Tory, R. A. (“Rab”) Butler, had been the driving force behind the 1944 Education Act, which guaranteed free education for all children through high school. Sarah tried to persuade her father that rationing—on which the prime minister himself had written numerous memos concerning chickens, eggs, and rabbits—had been so well planned that it had resulted in better-fed and better-educated children. Wartime controls had led to a more just sharing of the burdens, and therefore a more just society. Why not continue the planning and shared sacrifice in peace, she asked, in order to build houses, schools, and a better society? Churchill saw things entirely differently, and had said so in March, when he told the Tory conference, “If we are to recover from the measureless exertions of the war, it can only be by a large release from the necessary bonds and controls which war conditions have imposed upon us. No restriction upon well-established British liberties that is not proved indispensable to the prosecution of the war and the transition from war to peace can be tolerated.” He touted the Tories’ Four-Year Plan, a variation of the Beveridge Report, and built on voluntary cooperation between the government and private enterprise. The plan, he claimed, was an undertaking so liberal that even Gladstone and Lloyd George might shrink from it.19
For Churchill, state domination of planning and the attendant control the state needed to implement its plans were two sides of the same coin, a coin minted by socialists for socialists. This he made clear in his first campaign broadcast, delivered from Chequers on Monday, June 4—with disastrous results. He had spent the weekend preparing the speech, and had shown a draft to Jock Colville, who called it “fighting and provocative,” and to Clementine, who objected vehemently to one phrase in particular that he intended to deploy. He ignored her protests. The BBC allotted him thirty minutes, too little time in Churchill’s estimation. Speaking against the clock for the first time since 1940, he rushed his delivery. After telling listeners that he and the Tories and “many of my Labour colleagues would have been glad to carry on [the coalition]… the Socialist Party as a whole had been for some time eager to set out upon the political warpath, and when large numbers of people feel like that it is not good for their health to deny them the fight they want. We will therefore give it to them to the best of our ability.” So far, so good—Englishmen expected nothing less than his best from their Winston.20
Churchill went on, paraphrasing the economist Friedrich Hayek from The Road to Serfdom. “My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom.”
Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State…. Look how even today they [Socialists] hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of war-time inflictions and monstrosities. There is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus-boss…. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.
He laced into Labour’s Herbert Morrison, who had outlined “his plans to curtail Parliamentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolutions of broad principle in the House of Commons.” And he excoriated Sir Stafford Cripps for advocating what amounted to a rubber-stamp role for Parliament in the new socialist state. Then he arrived at the passage Clementine thought hideous:
I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police…. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.21
Churchill thundered and roared, confident that Clement Attlee lacked the oratorical skills to respond in kind. Ed Murrow of CBS believed so, offering that Attlee approached a subject “as if elucidating some obscure, unimportant passage in a Latin translation.” The night following Churchill’s Gestapo speech, Attlee—whom Colville described as having “no shred of either conceit or vanity”—took to the airwaves and delivered a devastating reply. Churchill’s object, Attlee declared, was to make “electors understand how great was the difference between Winston Churchill, the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr. Churchill, the party Leader of the Conservatives…. The voice we heard last night was that of Mr. Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook.” The timid, balding, sometimes fussy Attlee had made himself overnight into a campaign leader. As for Beaverbrook’s role in crafting Churchill’s speech, he had “no hand” in the matter, Colville wrote. Beaverbrook and his newspapers had been “firing vast salvos” of late, which mostly, Colville believed, “miss their mark.” Churchill, trying to cast Attlee as a bogeyman, had also missed his mark, but Attlee, casting Beaverbrook and Churchill likewise, had not.22
The Beaver put on a relentless, shrill, and clumsy demonstration of loyalty to Churchill in the pages of his Express, but Beaverbrook had never really understood Englishmen and, critically, Englishwomen. The tabloid Daily Mirror, Britain’s largest-selling paper, did. The only large newspaper not controlled by Camrose, Beaverbrook, or Bracken, the Mirror went after the service wives, telling the women of Britain on the eve of the election, “Vote for them!” [the servicemen] who “for five long years… from Berlin to Burma… have fought and are still fighting for YOU…. You know which way your men would march. Vote for them!” Even Churchill loyalists began to doubt their man; Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson: “You know I have an admiration for Winston amounting to idolatry, so I am dreadfully distressed by the badness of his broadcast election speeches…. If I were a wobbler they would tip me over to the other side.” Nicolson’s friend the literary critic Raymond Mortimer also jotted a note to Nicolson, in which he wrote, “I think that Churchill more than anyone else was responsible for the squalid lies in these elections. He started the rot with his talk of Mr. Attlee’s Gestapo.”23
Churchill’s “favorability rating” as measured by Gallup polls had exceeded 90 percent since El Alamein, but for a brief drop during his January 1944 recuperation in Marrakech and his Christmas 1944 foray to Greece. After V-E day, his favorability numbers dipped into the 80 percent range, a mere bag of shells, for he was the most popular leader in living history, the savior of England. Yet, Gallup’s newfangled computations were inexact. Asked if they had an “overall” favorable impression of Churchill, Britons responded, politely, yes. Thus, as Churchill campaigned up and down and across the land by private train and open auto, delivering ten speeches and broadcasts in the process, he was deeply moved, Eden wrote, by the goodwill and cheering crowds he found along all his routes. Yet, Eden later wrote, “He [Churchill] could not be expected to sense that there was also something valedictory in their message. He would not have been Winston Churchill if he had.”24
Colville was not optimistic about the election, telling his diary, “Without Winston’s personal prestige the Tories would not have a chance. Even with him I am not sanguine of their prospects, though most of their leaders are confident of a good majority.” That was true; Churchill, Eden, and Beaverbrook all believed they would take the House with a majority of perhaps eighty seats, maybe even as many as one hundred. Even Attlee believed the Tories would win, later telling Colville that “there might, with luck, be a Conservative majority of only some forty seats.” Much would depend on the soldiers’ vote, four million strong, and almost 20 percent of the total electorate. Over lunch, Churchill asked General Billy Slim, the hero of Burma, how he thought his troops would vote. “Ninety percent Labour,” Slim replied. Churchill grunted. “What about the other ten percent?” Slim said, “They won’t vote at all.”25
On July 3, Churchill delivered his final campaign speech at Walthamstow Stadium, a greyhound racing track in East London. After a band warmed up the crowd of 20,000 with “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “Umbrella Man,” Churchill, accompanied by Clementine, took the stage to tremendous cheers. He had no sooner begun speaking when several thousand Labour rowdies scattered throughout the stadium let him have it. “We want Attlee,” they shouted over his words. When he tried to engage them on the topic of free speech—“In a free country like ours…”—they shouted him down with a chorus of boos. “Surely that is not a party question,” said Churchill. He went on: “I want to congratulate London… upon her wonderful record in the war…. Would you like to boo that?” He went after the socialists and their “absurd utopias,” proclaiming that there must be “improvement of human hearts and human heads before we can achieve the glorious Utopia that the Socialist woolgatherers place before us. Now where is the boo party? I shall call them henceforward in my speech the booing party. Everyone have a good boo.” Some in the audience jeered at that. He closed with an election prediction: “I give my entire forgiveness to the booers. They have this to take away with them—I am sure they are going to get a thrashing such as their party has never received since it was born.”26
That day Churchill instructed the cabinet to prepare legislation for a national insurance plan and a national health service. This was not cynical posturing; Churchill had supported both programs since he put Sir William Beveridge on the case more than three decades earlier. As for the fate of the coal mines, since the General Strike of 1926 he had been much more sympathetic to the miners than to the mine owners. Churchill did not hate Labour programs; he hated the intellectual arrogance of the left—of Bevan, Cripps, and Laski. Churchill, Colville later wrote, was “never anything but hostile to Socialist theory.” He had certainly made that clear during the campaign. In any case, voters were unaware of Churchill’s instructions to the cabinet when they went to the polls on July 5.27
On July 7, Churchill, Mary, Clemmie, Lord Moran, and Colville made for the Basque coast of France near St-Jean-de-Luz for a one-week vacation before Churchill undertook the next order of business: the Big Three conference due to open in Potsdam on the sixteenth. Churchill himself had code-named the conference Terminal, a curious choice given that the final phase of the war against Japan had yet to begin and the atomic bomb, which might hasten the end of the Pacific war, had yet to be tested. Many military men, including Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, who gave odds and took bets, believed it would not work.
Churchill’s valet, Sawyers, made the journey to France, as keeper of the Old Man’s brushes and palettes and paints. It was intended as a beach and painting vacation, and the absence of paperwork and urgent telephone calls ensured an air of quietude. The Old Man spent his mornings swimming about “like a benevolent hippo” off a sandy beach while a squad of French gendarmes dog-paddled around the Great Man to provide a cordon sanitaire between the P.M. and curious locals. So complete was Churchill’s rest and relaxation that he utterly failed to prepare for the Potsdam Conference. To make matters worse, neither had Anthony Eden, who had returned from San Francisco with a duodenal ulcer and, under Lord Moran’s orders, had spent much of June in bed resting. Churchill—with the election always intruding on his thoughts—had no heart for the upcoming Potsdam parley, telling his doctor, “Nothing will be decided at the conference… I shall only be half a man until the result of the poll. I shall keep in the background at the conference.” A report from Max Beaverbrook arrived that lifted Churchill’s spirits; the Beaver now predicted a Conservative majority of one hundred. And although Churchill now believed that he might have lost the service vote, he told Clementine he was quite sure the servicewomen were for him. When Clemmie reminded him that early in his career he had opposed giving women the vote, he replied, “Quite true.”28
On July 15, Churchill, Sawyers, Mary, and Moran flew on to Berlin, while Colville and Clementine returned to London. Attlee and Ernest Bevin also journeyed to Potsdam; it was Churchill’s wish that the British present a unified front to the Americans and especially to Stalin. When Churchill told the House of his desire to bring Attlee to Berlin, a Labour MP called out, “Is the right honourable Gentleman going to take the Gestapo with him?” The Old Man thus arrived at his lodgings in Babelsberg, about six miles from Potsdam, with a hostile House waiting in London, a hostile Stalin waiting in Potsdam, and without any guarantee from President Truman that the Americans were prepared to play hardball with Stalin on the matter of free Polish elections.29
Truman also arrived in Babelsberg on the fifteenth, and took up residence in a grand town house two blocks from Churchill’s residence. Elements of the British, American, and Red armies—out in force—guarded both houses. The next day at dawn—early afternoon in Berlin—the Americans successfully detonated an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. On the seventeenth, before the first plenary session with Stalin, Henry Stimson shoved a piece of paper across a table to Churchill. On it Stimson had scribbled, “Babies satisfactorily born.” Churchill did not understand, until Stimson made clear just what had taken place in New Mexico. Of this news, Churchill later wrote, “Here then was a speedy end to the Second World War, and perhaps to much else besides.” In that moment, Churchill saw no further need to seek Russian help against Japan, and he saw a possible solution to the Soviet tide rolling westward in Europe. The Prof—Lord Cherwell—beheld a way to make this horrific new weapon even more terrible. Knowing that the initial burst of such a bomb would blind anyone who happened to be looking skyward at the moment it detonated, Cherwell advised that preliminary pyrotechnics be set off as the bomb made its descent in order that the optimum number of Japanese were looking skyward at the moment of truth.30
Churchill had anticipated the fate of Japan more than three years earlier. Weeks before the fall of Singapore, with the British Empire reeling from the Japanese blows in the Far East but fully appreciating that the home islands of Japan were the key to the Pacific theater, as much as England was to the European, Churchill communicated to the Chiefs of Staff his strategy: “The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs will bring home in a most effective way to the people of Japan the dangers of the course to which they have committed themselves.” The word “incendiary” jumps from the memo. He does not propose the use of parachute bombs or four-thousand-pound high explosives. He does not envision bringing Japan to bay with commandos, sabotage, or trickery. He goes straight to the most efficient solution. He would set Japan ablaze, literally, for Japanese cities were built of paper and wood. That strategy now fell to Truman to implement.
The first plenary session opened late on July 17 at the Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, originally built for Crown Prince Wilhelm (“Little Willie”). Eden and Alec Cadogan both found Truman to be “quick and businesslike.” And both thought Churchill’s performance was a disaster. Eden: “W. was very bad. He had read no brief & was confused & wooly & verbose.” Cadogan: “Every mention of a topic started Winston off on a wild rampage…. So it was a pretty useless meeting, but these conferences always have their infantile complaints.”31
Several issues were on the Potsdam agenda—a warm-water port for Russia, Russian participation in the Pacific war, the withdrawal of Russian troops from northern Iran, the fate of the German fleet—but only two items were of abiding concern to Churchill: free elections in Poland, and the western Polish border. On the former, Stalin, as he had at Yalta, simply promised free elections—a lie—and Churchill chose to believe him. On the latter, Stalin (and the Lublin Poles) would not budge; the occupation of eastern Germany was a fait accompli, and Stalin was of no mind to withdraw from any part of this fertile swath of conquered territory. Churchill had believed since Tehran that the new Polish frontier should be delineated by the Eastern Neisse River where it fed into the Oder, in compensation for the Poles agreeing to the Curzon Line. Stalin claimed the Western Neisse. More than one million Germans lived between the two rivers, and Stalin and the Lublin Poles demanded they be packed off to Germany, to make room for Polish settlers. Had Churchill and Stalin scrutinized a map at Tehran when they first proposed shifting Poland westward toward the Oder (and checked off their acceptance as they had with the “naughty” memo in October 1944, when they divided the Balkans into spheres of influence), they might have avoided the current predicament. And had Roosevelt displayed resolve at Yalta rather than, as described by Eden, “playing it by ear,” a more concise accord might have been reached. And, had Harry Hopkins been on hand in his role as presidential fixer, he might have guided Truman to more resolve. But Hopkins was an ill man, and he had severed his connection with the U.S. government early in the month. In any case, the Lublin Poles in essence had become the fifth occupier of Germany.
Churchill believed his tête-à-têtes with Stalin would yield results. Eden did not. After Churchill enjoyed a five-hour dinner with Stalin, Eden told his diary: “He [Churchill] is again under Stalin’s spell. He kept repeating ‘I like that man.’ I am full of admiration of Stalin’s handling of him.” Full of foreboding for Poland, Eden wrote a long memo to Churchill, ending it with: “I am deeply concerned at the pattern of Russian policy, which becomes more clear as they become more brazen every day.”32
During the conference, Churchill attended nine plenary sessions, with detours to the usual nightly banquets and to dispiriting one-on-one talks with the Lublin Poles (“Communist creatures,” Eden called them). The Old Man also spent an afternoon in Berlin, where hungry Berliners cheered when he alighted from his automobile in front of Hitler’s Chancellery. Churchill strolled into the crowd. “My hate had died with their surrender,” he later wrote. “I was much moved… by their haggard looks and threadbare clothes.” After a brief tour of Hitler’s bunker and the pit where the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were disposed of, Churchill looked about and declared, “Hitler must have come up here to get some air, and heard the guns getting nearer and nearer.” He also spoke at the opening of the Winston Club, a nightclub and cabaret opened for British servicemen. There he received a cool reception from the gathered troops, who had voted weeks prior in early balloting.33
On the matter of the atomic bomb, Churchill enthusiastically endorsed Truman’s decision to use it. Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed in 1943 that both the U.S. and Britain must approve the bomb’s use. Yet, although a Royal Navy carrier task force was then attached to Admiral Halsey’s Third Fleet, and Churchill was determined to do his part in Japan, the decision to drop the bomb was Truman’s alone to make, by virtue of the overwhelming role America would play in the planned invasion of Japan. When Churchill suggested that the Japanese be forewarned that their country would be as utterly destroyed as Germany and that their only chance to preserve lives and honor would be to surrender now, Truman replied that the Japanese had had lost any claim to honor at Pearl Harbor. Still, the Allies sent an ultimatum—the Potsdam Declaration—to Tokyo in which they guaranteed the Japanese rights of free speech and religious assembly, and promised that they had no intention of enslaving the Japanese or destroying Japan as a nation. The declaration ended with: “We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.” Tokyo ignored the statement.34
Eden later recalled that he and Churchill had discussed the delicate matter of telling Stalin of the atomic bomb, and the more delicate matter of refusing Stalin the “know how” of the bomb’s technology if he asked for it. They advised Truman to inform Stalin before the bomb was dropped on Japan. Truman, in his memoir, Year of Decisions, recalls that on July 24 he “casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian premier showed no special interest.” Truman did not tell Stalin of the “atomic” nature of the new weapon. Churchill and Eden stood a few feet away as Truman spoke with Stalin. As recalled by Churchill, in his memoirs, “I was sure that he [Stalin] had no idea of the significance of what he was being told. Evidently in his immense toils and stresses the atomic bomb had played no part. If he had the slightest idea of the revolution in world affairs which was in progress his reactions would have been obvious…. But his face remained gay and genial and the talk between these two potentates soon came to an end.” But as recalled by Marshal Zhukov in his memoirs, “Stalin did not betray his feelings and pretended that he saw nothing special in what Truman had imparted to him. Both Churchill and many other Anglo-American authors subsequently assumed that Stalin had really failed to fathom the significance of what he had heard. In actual fact, on returning to his quarters after this meeting Stalin, in my presence, told Molotov about his conversation with Truman. The latter reacted almost immediately. ‘Let them. We’ll have to talk it over with Kurchatov and get him to speed things up.’ I realized that they were talking about research on the atomic bomb.”35
Churchill, meanwhile, told Brooke that the new bomb made it “no longer necessary for the Russians to come into the Japanese war, the new explosive alone was sufficient to settle the matter.” Churchill, Brooke told his diary, “was completely carried away” by the news from New Mexico and believed the bomb could “redress the balance with the Russians!” Churchill, “pushing his chin out and scowling,” declared that “now we could say [to Stalin] if you insist on doing this or that, well we can just blot out Moscow, then Stalingrad, then Kiev, then Kuibyshev… Sevastopol etc. etc. And now where are the Russians!!!” Brooke tried to “crush his [Churchill’s] over-optimism” and to “dispel his dreams” based on “the half-baked results of one experiment,” but Churchill stood firm. Yet Britain did not have an atomic bomb, and Truman would have been as shocked as Brooke if Churchill had proposed dropping one on the ally that had made the largest sacrifice in the war against Hitlerism.36
One other matter occupied Churchill at Potsdam—Lend-Lease. He stressed to Truman the British desire—and need—for a continuation of the program; food was in short supply, and London needed assurance that it could parcel out Lend-Lease matériel to European countries on an as-needed basis. “The president said he would do his utmost,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “but of course I knew the difficulties he might have in his own country.” A month later Truman told his closest advisers that “he was dead set against the U.S. adding to its reputation as a Santa Claus; he wanted Lend-Lease cut to a minimum now, liquidated as soon as possible.”37
Churchill left Potsdam without an agreement on Poland. The Red Army was in control of central Europe. Not since 1814, when Russian troops entered Paris, had a Russian army thrust so far west into Europe. With SHAEF decommissioned that week, with Truman sending his armies home and his air forces to the Pacific, and with British troops outnumbered by the Red Army by more than three to one, the fate of not only Eastern Europe but Western Europe rested with Joseph Stalin. It was this state of affairs that led Churchill eight years later to title the sixth and final volume of his war memoirs Triumph and Tragedy.
Churchill returned to London with Mary late on July 25 in order to learn his electoral fate. If Beaverbrook’s optimistic predictions proved correct, Churchill would be going back to Potsdam in a few days. Father, daughter, son, and Clementine dined together that evening in the Storey’s Gate Annexe. Churchill’s brother, Jack, joined the party; Beaverbrook and Bracken dropped by. Churchill retired early (for him), shortly after 1:00 A.M., sanguine in his belief that he would receive his electoral mandate. He later wrote that he awoke just before dawn “with a sharp stab of almost physical pain. A hitherto subconscious conviction that we were beaten broke forth and entered my mind…. The power to shape the future would be denied me. The knowledge and experience I had gathered, the authority and goodwill I had gained in so many countries would vanish.” He slept until nine, late for Churchill, and was in his bath when, shortly after ten, Captain Pim requested he make for the map room, where charts of battlefronts had been replaced by lists of constituencies. Colville, Bracken, and Beaverbrook joined Churchill there. The P.M., attired in his siren suit, sprawled in his chair, cigar in hand, as had been his habit in 1940 while he waited for the howl of the air-raid alarm to announce the fireworks.38
The first results were unfavorable, and the numbers only worsened as the morning wore on. Early reports showed forty-four Labour gains to just one for the Conservatives. Alexander Hancock, a farmer and unknown Independent crackpot who advocated a one-hour workday, had opposed Churchill in Woodford, a new district carved out of Churchill’s old Epping district. The new Epping seat went to a Labourite, and Hancock took 35 percent of the vote in Woodford. Churchill kept his seat, as did Eden. But Bracken lost his, as did Duncan Sandys, Harold Macmillan, and Randolph. The only satisfying news to come over the transom was that Sir William Beveridge and Leslie Hore-Belisha, both Liberals, had lost. Labour took 393 seats in the new Parliament, the Conservatives 213 (down from 585 in 1935). Had not the Liberals, who ran more than three hundred candidates, siphoned away Labour votes, the Tories would have fared even worse. The Liberals in the end won just twelve seats and were reduced to distant third-party irrelevancy. The New York Times declared the Tory defeat “one of the most stunning electoral surprises in the history of democracy.” The London Times held Churchill accountable for his own political demise: “Mr. Churchill himself introduced and insisted upon emphasizing the narrower animosities of the party fight.” The Daily Telegraph attributed the results to “a revulsion of feeling against the government rather than to an excess of support to the Socialist policy.”39
Lunch at the Annexe that day, Mary told her diary, took place “in Stygian gloom.” Sarah “looked beautiful and distressed.” All in the room “looked stunned & miserable.” “Papa struggled to accept this terrible blow—this unforeseen landslide.” At some point, Clementine said of the defeat, “It may well be a blessing in disguise.” To which Churchill replied, “Well, at the moment it’s certainly very well disguised.” Neither his sense of humor nor his dignity deserted him. When Lord Moran wandered onto the scene, Churchill asked, “Well, you know what has happened?” Moran replied that he knew, and added something about the ingratitude of the people. “Oh, no,” Churchill answered, “I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.” Moran had been so sure that Churchill would be given his mandate and that they’d return to Berlin that he had left his luggage there.40
At 6:00 P.M. Churchill ordered drinks and cigars to be brought in for the map room staff. Then he departed the Cabinet War Room—never to return—for Buckingham Palace. At 7:00 P.M. King George accepted Churchill’s resignation, telling his former first minister that “the people were very ungrateful after the way they had been led in the war.” After a brief audience, Churchill left for No. 10, while King George summoned Clement Attlee to form the new government. No crowds gathered outside Buckingham Palace, and the streets of London were as quiet as a country village. A cold light rain fell. The New York Times: “Tonight there were fewer persons at Buckingham Palace for the changing of the Government then there usually are for the changing of the guard.”41
Before the election, a London Times editor informed Churchill that the newspaper was about to advocate two points—that Churchill should campaign as a nonpartisan world statesman and then ease himself into retirement sooner rather than later. “Mr. Editor,” Churchill said to the first point, “I fight for my corner.” And, to the second: “Mr. Editor, I leave when the pub closes.”42
Dinner at No. 10 that evening was a somewhat muted affair, Mary later wrote, but less gloomy than lunch. Uncle Jack was on hand, and Diana and Sarah, and Sarah’s friend Robert Maugham (Somerset’s nephew). Bracken attended, as did Anthony Eden, a remarkable gesture of fealty on his part given that he had learned just five days earlier that his son Pilot Officer Simon Eden, RAF, had been killed in Burma. Clementine took herself off to bed before dinner. The others tried “to say and do the right thing” for Churchill’s sake, with some success. Maugham told Harold Nicolson a few days later that Churchill had accepted his defeat with good grace. When someone at the dinner table said to Churchill, “But you have won the race, sir,” he replied, “Yes, and in consequence I’ve been warned off the turf.”43
Sometime earlier that afternoon, Churchill composed a concession statement, which he sent to the BBC to be read during the nine o’clock news. Brian Gardner, writing in Churchill in Power, called the statement “perhaps the most gracious acceptance of democratic defeat in the English language.” Churchill:
The decision of the British people has been recorded in the votes counted today. I have therefore laid down the charge which was placed upon me in darker times. I regret that I have not been permitted to finish the work against Japan…. It only remains for me to express to the British people, for whom I have acted in these perilous years, my profound gratitude for the unflinching, unswerving support which they have given me during my task, and for the many expressions of kindness which they have shown towards their servant.”44
Friday, July 27, was a day for farewells at No. 10. As Churchill took his leave from the Chiefs of Staff, Alan Brooke found himself “unable to say very much for fear of breaking down. He [Churchill] was standing the blow wonderfully well.” A decade later, when Brooke—by then the 1st Viscount Alanbrooke—edited his diaries for publication, he inserted a line that stands in sharp contrast to his wartime rants against Churchill: “On reading these diaries I have repeatedly felt ashamed of the abuse I had poured on him [Churchill], especially during the latter years.” Then, as if he could not let go, Lord Alanbrooke felt compelled to remind readers that during the latter part of the war “Winston had been a very sick man… with repeated attacks of pneumonia…. This physical condition together with his mental fatigue accounted for many of the difficulties in dealing with him…. I shall always look back on the years I worked with him as some of the most difficult and trying in my life.” Only after enunciating his caveats did the viscount finally add the now oft-quoted tribute to Churchill: “For all that I thank God I was given an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.”45
Eden thought the entire afternoon a “pretty grim affair.” He was the last to leave, having been called into the Cabinet Room by Churchill for a final chat. That night, Eden wrote in his diary: “He [Churchill] was pretty wretched, poor old boy…. He couldn’t help feeling his treatment had been pretty scurvy.” Before Eden left, Churchill looked about and said, “Thirty years of my life have been passed in this room. I shall never sit in it again. You will, but I shall not.”
Eden assured Churchill that “his place in history could have gained nothing” by a return to No. 10 in the postwar years, adding, “That place was secure anyway.” Churchill accepted that, and the two men parted. As Eden left he reflected upon the six war years he had spent in that room, writing that night: “I cannot believe I can ever know anything like it again.”46
Churchill departed No. 10 for Chequers, which the new prime minister had put at his disposal for the weekend. Chartwell was not yet reopened and staffed, and although the Churchills were interested in purchasing a London town house at 28 Hyde Park Gate, they had not yet finalized the transaction. Under other circumstances, Mary later wrote, the weekend would “have been a very cozy jolly party” but “we were all still rather stunned by the events of the previous week.” Ambassador John Winant was on hand, as was Sarah, who had decided to end their long love affair. It had always been more courtly than torrid, but it was doomed in any event by the fact that Winant was a married man and Sarah—aptly nicknamed the Mule—was a very independent woman. She later wrote that it had been an affair “which my father suspected but about which we did not speak.”47
Colville—who now served Attlee—was on hand that weekend in order to help Churchill gather his personal effects. The Prof—Lord Cherwell—had motored out, as had Brendan Bracken. Churchill’s former bodyguards and private secretaries had gone off to Berlin with the new prime minister. No motorcycle dispatch riders roared up the drive; the phones did not ring; the Chiefs of Staff did not report in. Most noticeably, the secret boxes and Ultra decrypts did not appear. “Now there was nothing,” Mary wrote. “We saw with near desperation a cloud of black gloom descend.” To dispel the cloud, they played records on the gramophone—American and French marches, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Noel Gay tune “Run Rabbit Run.” They ran movies, too—The Wizard of Oz was a favorite. They played cards and staged a croquet match, which Churchill watched from the sidelines. The cloud lingered. On Sunday, the twenty-ninth, the clan of fifteen sat down to dinner at the great round table, where they drank a Rehoboam of champagne in a futile attempt to make merry. At some point during dinner, Churchill said “it was fatal to give way to self-pity, that the Government had a mandate” and that “it was the duty of everyone to support them.” Before retiring, they all signed the Chequers guestbook, Churchill last. Underneath his signature he wrote: Finis.48
Churchill and Clementine took up residence at Claridge’s the next day. Two weeks later, on August 14, Churchill hosted a dinner in his Claridge’s suite for Eden and a few Conservative colleagues. Late in the evening, they learned that the Japanese had surrendered. The Americans had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Tokyo had been silent in the days since, but now, as Eden put it, “the six years of ordeal was over.” The dinner companions adjourned to another room, where a wireless was set up. There, they listened as Clement Attlee “barked out a few short sentences, then gave the terms…. The war was over.”
“There was a silence,” Eden wrote. “Mr. Churchill had not been asked to say any word to the nation. We went home. Journey’s end.”
Churchill had by all rights at age seventy reached the sixth and penultimate of Shakespeare’s seven stages of life. The fields and orchards and rose gardens at Chartwell, wild and overgrown after five years of neglect, were in need of his attention, as were the fish ponds, and the fish, and the house itself. Little Winston and the other “wollygogs” needed him, as did Sarah, Mary, Diana, Randolph, and Clementine. Yet he had no intention of becoming Shakespeare’s “slipper’d pantaloon.” He considered his journey by no means over. He was the leader of the opposition, in which role he enthusiastically took his seat in the front row of the opposition bench in the Commons and proceeded to oppose. On his return to the House (still meeting in the Lords’ chamber while the bombed-out Commons was being rebuilt), Conservative MPs leapt to their feet and sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Labourites countered with “The Red Flag.”
Though England’s greatest leader led the opposition, Churchill could not reverse the Labour mandate, and knew it. Labour had pledged to nationalize the Bank of England, the coal and utility industries, railroads, and the steel industry. As Labour in coming months and years created government control boards to manage each industry, bureaucracy became Britain’s fastest-growing industry. Two years after V-E day, Churchill told the House: “A mighty army of 450,000 additional civil servants has been taken from production and added, at a prodigious cost and waste, to the oppressive machinery of government and control. Instead of helping national recovery this is a positive hindrance.” That was one of his gentler rebukes of the socialist experiment. Labour’s showcase priority was the creation of the National Health Service (which came to pass in 1948, with Aneurin Bevan installed as its first minister). Labour proposed free health care, free false teeth, free eyeglasses. Just four months after the election, Churchill told the House:
The queues are longer, the shelves are barer, the shops are emptier. The interference of Government Departments with daily life is more severe and more galling. More forms have to be filled up, more officials have to be consulted. Whole spheres of potential activity are frozen, rigid and numb, because this Government has to prove its Socialistic sincerity instead of showing how they can get the country alive and on the move again.
Sir Stafford Cripps, Churchill declared, “is a great advocate of Strength through Misery.”49
Churchill, sure that the Labour tide would someday ebb, looked beyond England. He intended, with two broad objectives in mind, to transcend British politics and reinvent himself as an international statesman. He sought a special relationship (that he as yet had not explicitly defined) among the English-speaking peoples, including the Americans, and a similar but more crisply defined relationship among Western European countries—his old idea of a United States of Europe. He was, and had always been, a European patriot. Britons had sacked him, but Europeans loved him. This was political capital he began to invest. On November 16, he told an audience in Brussels that in order to prevent another “Unnecessary War” (caused in part, he said, by America’s unwillingness to join the League of Nations and confront German re-armament), “we have to revive the prosperity of Europe: and European civilisation must rise again from the chaos and carnage into which it has been plunged: and at the same time we have to devise those measures of world security which will prevent disaster descending upon us again.” He proposed a “United States of Europe, which will unify this Continent in a manner never known since the fall of the Roman Empire, and within which all its peoples may dwell together in prosperity, in justice, and in peace.”50
Not all in the Tory leadership shared his visions for the future of Britain, of Europe, and even of the Tory party. The voters having thrown out the Conservatives, many in the Tory hierarchy felt it was time for Churchill to step down from the party leadership, to take “a long rest,” as Lord Moran framed it. Churchill should write a history of the war, as only he could. He should paint, travel, and enjoy life. “Prefaced by elaborate protestations of admiration and respect,” some of Churchill’s colleagues began to advance the theme of retirement to Moran. They no longer would tolerate Churchill’s grudging, sometimes cruel, and usually overbearing style of leadership. “In short,” Moran wrote, “with the war behind them the Tory leaders were no longer prepared to stomach [Churchill’s] summary methods.” Churchill had no intention of abdicating the Tory leadership. “A short time ago I was ready to retire and die gracefully,” he told Moran in 1946. Of the new Labour government, Churchill offered to Moran: “Now I’m going to stay and have them out. I’ll tear their bleeding entrails out of them. I’m in pretty good fettle.” It was “the Jerome blood,” Winston said.51
During the first week of January 1946, foreign secretaries and diplomats from around the globe convened in London for the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. Churchill was not among the luminaries. On January 9 he, Clementine, and Sarah boarded the Queen Elizabeth, bound for New York and a two-month vacation in Florida, Cuba, and the eastern United States. Not having yet decided to write his memoir of the war, he worked on his unfinished History of the English-Speaking Peoples during the voyage. But soon after he arrived in Miami, he read recently published essays by Eisenhower’s aide, Captain Harry Butcher, which Butcher had based on his diary entries. Butcher’s tales of Churchill’s late nights and liquid lunches were incomplete, trivial, and not at all flattering to the Old Man, who, not about to take such “history” lying down, summoned his prewar European literary agent, Emery Reves. Butcher (and Elliott Roosevelt, with As He Saw It) helped force the decision; Churchill would write his version of the war.
On January 22, Harry Hopkins, who been hospitalized for more than two months, wrote a short letter to Churchill, in which he signed off with, “Do give my love to Clemmie and Sarah… all of whom I shall hope to see before you go back.” Hopkins’s doctors had been treating him for cirrhosis of the liver, but their diagnosis was wrong. The terrible pain he had suffered for almost a decade was due to hemochromatosis—a metabolic disorder of the digestive tract. His letter to Churchill was the last he wrote. He died a week later. He took to the grave two firm political beliefs. The first was that Britain was the best friend America had and any attempt by America to horn in on British trade would only injure that relationship. His second was that Russia in coming years would become more nationalistic and less inclined to spread communism around the globe. But, regardless of Moscow’s intentions, Hopkins believed America’s “relations with the Soviet Union are going to be seriously handicapped” by differences over “fundamental notions of human liberty—freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of worship.”52
In early February, while Churchill took his ease in the sun, Stalin addressed his party congress and, as recollected by Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “with brutal clarity outlined the Soviet Union’s post-war policy.” Russia would re-arm, Stalin declared, at the expense of producing consumer goods, because “capitalist-imperialist” monopolies guaranteed that “no peaceful international order was possible.” George Kennan, then chargé d’affaires in Moscow, wrote an eight-thousand-word policy paper for the Truman administration that later became known as the “Long Telegram.” In it Kennan predicted that Stalin’s “neurotic view of world affairs” and a tyrant’s fear of political insecurity would result in a Soviet foreign policy that would use “every means possible to infiltrate, divide and weaken the West.”53
Kennan advised a policy of stiff resolve in the face of Soviet belligerence, in part because he believed Russians respected strength, and in part because Russia was exhausted from the war and in no position—yet—to assume a more sinister role on the world stage, other than through proxies (as in Greece and Yugoslavia). Kennan later wrote that had he sent his telegram six months earlier, it would have “raised eyebrows,” and had he sent it six months later, it would have “sounded redundant.” Fundamental to his diplomatic strategy was his belief—held since before Yalta—that Stalin would never grant to the peoples of Soviet-occupied countries such as Poland and Bulgaria democratic rights that were denied Russians. For the West to think otherwise was naive. To “act chummy” with Moscow, or “make fatuous gestures of goodwill” in hopes that Moscow would grant those rights, would gain nothing, partly because “no-one in Moscow believes the Western world” would “stand firm” against Soviet threats. Yet, Kennan also believed the military requirements needed to advance Moscow’s cause were “beyond the Russian capacity to meet. Moscow has no naval or air forces capable of challenging the sea or air lanes of the world.” Kennan’s strategy later became known as “containment” and for more than four decades, it underlay U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union.54
Kennan’s dismissal of Soviet air and naval capabilities put him in Walter Lippmann’s corner in that regard, but neither one saw (as Churchill did soon after the Dresden raid) the coming reality of long-range bombers and rockets. Bernard Montgomery also believed that the Russians were down and out militarily, noting that when “1,700 American and British aircraft” gave “an impressive display of airpower” during a post–V-E day celebration in Frankfurt, the message “was not lost on the Russians” in attendance. Months later, after a visit to Moscow, Montgomery came away believing that “the Russians were worn out” and “quite unfit to take part in a world war against a strong combination of allied nations.” But Churchill was concerned by Moscow’s threat to Europe, not to the entire planet. And although Russia was not a worldwide naval power, neither anymore was Great Britain. Indeed, a naval vacuum existed in the Mediterranean, a vacuum easily filled by Russia if it decided to finally throttle its enemy of two hundred years, Turkey, or extort from Ankara free passage through the Dardanelles. Most worrisome to Churchill was the fact that there was no Western alliance in place to meet a Russian threat. The war was over; America was building new Packards and Chevys and Philco televisions and General Electric washing machines. “Alliance” was still a troublesome if not dirty word to many Americans, especially the Taft Republicans in Washington.55
Three months before Churchill’s Florida vacation, he received an invitation from the president of Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, to deliver a series of lectures at that school. Churchill received many such invitations, but the postscript on this letter was handwritten—by President Truman. In it, Truman reminded Churchill that Missouri was his home state, and he offered to introduce Churchill at the lectures. Truman asked Churchill—whom the president considered to be “the first citizen of the world”—if he’d like to stop off in Washington first and travel to Missouri from there with Truman aboard the presidential train. Churchill accepted the offer with enthusiasm, suggesting one lecture might be more appropriate, as a series would quite tax his speech-writing skills. He had for months sought to articulate his worldview in a speech that would reach the largest possible audience, and here now came the president of the United States with an invitation that, Churchill told Truman, was “a very important act of state.” At noon on March 4, after breakfasting with Truman at the White House, Churchill and Truman made for Union Station. A few White House aides went along on the trip, including Admiral Leahy, press secretary Charlie Ross, and General Harry Vaughan, a beefy, profane, a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking political operative and a Truman crony since the Great War. Truman’s newly appointed special counsel Clark Clifford, thirty-nine and a product of Missouri’s Washington University Law School, also boarded the presidential train for the eighteen-hour run to St. Louis. Drinks were served as soon as the train left the station—scotch for Churchill, which he took with water, telling his hosts that adding ice to liquor was a “barbaric” American custom, as was the American habit of not drinking whisky during meals.56
The meetings between Churchill and Truman in Potsdam the previous July had been brief and formal. Churchill, in fact, came away from Potsdam harboring “deep reservations about Truman,” Clifford later wrote. Churchill himself years later claimed he “loathed the idea of [Truman] taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt.” Yet at Potsdam, Churchill had been preoccupied with the coming election and the Russians. Since then, the Attlee government, not Churchill, had worked with Truman. The president, as Churchill learned during the train journey, was what Americans call a regular guy. He was blunt, honest, and not given in the least to the wily, often facile machinations that Franklin Roosevelt brought to the table. (Some months later, Lord Moran told Churchill he had learned that Roosevelt told his cabinet that if Churchill had one hundred ideas a day, four might be any good. Churchill responded, “It [was] impertinent for Roosevelt to say this. It comes badly from a man who hadn’t had any ideas at all.”) Truman, like Eisenhower and Hopkins, came from simple Midwestern stock. What you saw was what you got. With Hopkins now gone, Churchill could not have asked for a better American friend than Harry Truman. At Potsdam, Admiral King had leaned over to Lord Moran, and said, “Watch the President. This is all new to him, but he can take it. He is a more typical American than Roosevelt, and he will do a good job, not only for the United States, but for the whole world.”57
The rail journey offered the two men a chance to get to know each other. Truman insisted Churchill call him Harry; Churchill agreed with delight, insisting that the president call him Winston. Truman at first demurred, telling Churchill that given his importance to England, America, and the world, “I just don’t know if I can do that.” Churchill: “Yes, you can. You must, or else I will not be able to call you Harry.” Truman replied, “Well, if you put it that way, Winston, I will call you Winston.” Truman told Churchill that he intended to send the battleship USS Missouri accompanied by a naval task force to Turkey, ostensibly to return the body of the Turkish ambassador, Münir Ertegün, who had died in 1944. The president’s real intent, however, was to signal the Soviets that America was prepared to play a significant role in the eastern Mediterranean, a role Britain could no longer undertake alone. The U.S. Sixth Fleet, though not yet identified as such (and a presence in the Mediterranean ever since), was born on the trip to Westminster College. Yet, although Truman was growing increasingly wary of the Soviets, he had by no means settled on an adversarial policy toward them. He had been briefed on Kennan’s long telegram, but he still harbored hopes of working with Stalin. America, its duty done, her boys coming home, was at peace. The Depression was long past. A new era had dawned, later anointed “The Good Times” by journalist Russell Baker. America, with over 400,000 of her boys buried overseas and at home, was in no mood to hear the rattle of sabers.58
As the presidential train rolled past a cyclorama of sleeping towns and darkened farms, Churchill excused himself to work on his speech. He had shown a draft to Secretary of State James Byrnes, who expressed no reservations to Truman, who in turn told Churchill he did not intend to read the final text so that he could tell reporters as much if they asked, which they surely would. But when Churchill emerged from his salon with the finished product, Truman could not resist. After reading it, he called it a “brilliant and admirable statement.” As the president handed it back to Churchill, he predicted it would “create quite a stir.”
During dinner Churchill asked if it was true that Truman enjoyed playing poker. “That’s correct, Winston,” the president replied. Churchill offered that he had first played poker during the Boer War, and suggested the cards be brought out for an evening game. Truman said that he and his colleagues would be delighted to set up the game. Green baize and chips were produced; drinks poured. When Churchill excused himself for a moment, Truman warned his companions that Churchill had played poker for more than forty years, was “cagey,” loved cards, “and is probably an excellent player.” The reputation of American poker was at stake, the president said, adding that he expected “every man to do his duty.” Soon after the first cards were dealt, it became apparent to the Americans that their distinguished guest was not a poker player of distinction; in fact, Clifford pegged him as “a lamb among wolves.” Within an hour Churchill was down almost $300 (£75, more than $3,500 in current dollars), a great deal of money in 1946, more so for an Englishman whose finances, like his country’s, were in a regrettable state. When Churchill again excused himself for a few moments, Truman laid down the law to his four colleagues: They were not to exploit their guest’s obvious lack of poker skills. “But boss,” Harry Vaughan replied, “this guy’s a pigeon!” Thus, during the early morning hours of the day on which he delivered one of the most memorable speeches of the twentieth century, Churchill tried his best to beat his hosts at their own game. He did not fare well.
Spring had come early to Fulton; the day was warm, the windows thrown open in the college gymnasium, where a small stage had been set up. Churchill was to be awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree, and he had dressed for the occasion in his crimson Oxford robes. A television camera was to have been brought in to broadcast the event, but Churchill, fearing that the bright lights would be a distraction, nixed that idea. Instead, a lone Paramount movie camera was set up. Churchill began his address with broad brushstrokes: the United States with its nuclear monopoly now stood at “the pinnacle of power,” and with “an awe-inspiring accountability to the future.” He advised that the nascent United Nations be endowed with an international air force. He believed all men should live in their “myriad cottages” free and without fear. “To give security to these countless homes, they must be shielded from the two giant marauders, war and tyranny.” He spoke in conciliatory terms of the Soviet Union:
A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies. I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin…. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas…. It is my duty however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe.
Then:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw. Berlin. Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
He could not resist telling the audience that although a terrible war had been fought to a successful conclusion, that war need not ever have happened because “no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool.” Although he did not believe the Russians wanted another war, he did believe they sought “the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their powers and doctrines.” Then he arrived at his central message:
If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealths be added to that of the United States with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, all over the globe and in science and in industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure. On the contrary, there will be an overwhelming assurance of security. If we adhere faithfully to the Charter of the United Nations and walk forward in sedate and sober strength seeking no one’s land or treasure, seeking to lay no arbitrary control upon the thoughts of men; if all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association, the high-roads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time, but for a century to come.59
To safeguard the West’s liberties, he proposed a fraternal association of America and Britain, calling that idea “the crux of what I traveled here to say.” He offered specifics, including “the continuance of the present facilities for mutual security by the joint use of all Naval and Air Force bases in the possession of either country all over the world.”60
He had titled his speech “The Sinews of Peace.” Many heard more of a war chant. The reaction was immediate, and not favorable. The Nation, a small, sober, left-wing magazine, said that Churchill had “added a sizeable measure of poison to the already deteriorating relations between Russia and the Western powers,” and added that Truman had been “remarkably inept” by giving Churchill the platform from which to administer his poison. The Wall Street Journal, echoing the isolationist mantra of earlier in the decade, rejected Churchill’s call for an English-speaking alliance, saying that “the United States wants no alliance or anything that resembles an alliance with any other nation.” The New York Times noted that the speech was “received with marked applause in the passages where it dealt with the responsibility of this country to see that another World War was avoided, but the proposal for ‘fraternal association’ brought only moderate handclapping.” In fact, the Paramount movie camera set up to capture the scene caught Harry Truman applauding with vigor during Churchill’s more controversial passages. Churchill had declared himself an Atlanticist, in the Walter Lippmann mode, and Truman liked it.61
Stalin did not, and his reaction was also immediate. He granted an “interview” to Pravda, wherein he took the shrewd position that Churchill, by calling for an English-speaking union, was no less a racist than Hitler, and no less a “war monger.” By arranging the Anglo world against the rest of the world, Stalin claimed, “Mr. Churchill… [is] presenting those nations who do not speak English with a kind of ultimatum—recognize [Anglo-American] superiority over you, voluntarily, and all will be well—otherwise war is inevitable.” The marshal had a point, and one not lost on the French, who had been seeking an understanding with Moscow for two years (de Gaulle had long predicted France and Russia would emerge as the two great postwar European powers). Truman’s response to Churchill’s address was muted. When asked by reporters in Fulton if he had read the speech beforehand, Truman declared he had not. “Much to our relief,” Clifford later wrote, “Churchill… did not contradict” the president. Still, to placate the peanut gallery, Truman forbade Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson to attend a New York reception for Churchill. Yet the arrival of Kennan’s “Long Telegram” just two weeks earlier had set the stage for a reevaluation of U.S. foreign policy, a process Dean Acheson believed necessary although slow in coming about. Churchill had spoken with emotion in contrast to Kennan’s lawyerly white paper, but their messages were similar. In those weeks a new era came into being.62
The Cold War, as it soon came to be known, had had its start before World War Two ended, but soon enough—from Moscow to London to Washington and on around the globe—all agreed that it had been declared on March 5, 1946, by the Citizen of the World Without Portfolio, in Fulton, Missouri. That month, Truman sent Averell Harriman—who just weeks earlier had resigned his Moscow post in hopes of leaving government—to London as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Stalin had not withdrawn Soviet troops from Azerbaijan, in northern Iran, as promised, a circumstance, Truman believed, that “may lead to war.” “I want,” Truman told Harriman, “a man in London I can trust.” Stalin pulled his troops from Iran weeks later, but within the year the Russians shot down a British aircraft that had strayed from one of the three Western air corridors leading to Berlin. The fires of war remained banked, but a banked fire, in English folklore, holds the most heat. From the day Churchill delivered his Fulton speech until more than four decades later, all knew the Cold War could turn hot at any time, through weakness of will, geopolitical overreach, or a cascading series of diabolically unfortunate events. Churchill left Fulton secure in his belief that peace would be guaranteed as long as America maintained its monopoly on nuclear weapons. It could not be guaranteed by a nuclear-armed Britain because the U.S. Congress that year passed the McMahon Act, which dissolved the gentleman’s agreement Churchill and Roosevelt had reached on atomic bombs. Henceforth Washington would share no atomic secrets with London. Harriman thought the law “shameful” given that during the war Britain “had given us everything they had…. Now the Congress of the United States had made it illegal even to exchange information with the British.”63
On September 19, 1946, seven weeks after Truman signed the McMahon Act, Churchill told a Zurich audience, “The atomic bomb is still only in the hands of a State and nation which we know will never use it except in the cause of right and freedom. But it may well be that in a few years this awful agency of destruction will be widespread and the catastrophe following from its use by several warring nations will not only bring to an end all that we call civilization, but may possibly disintegrate the globe itself.”64
He had gone to Zurich not to expressly wax melancholic about the possible doom of Europe in the atomic age, but rather to propose a defense. He told the Zurich audience that the recent war had been fought to prevent a return of “the Dark Ages” and “all their cruelty and squalor,” though he warned, “They may still return.” Then:
Yet all the while there is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted, would as if by a miracle transform the whole scene, and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and as happy as Switzerland is today. What is this sovereign remedy?… I am now going to say something that will astonish you. The first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany…. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany…. We must build a kind of United States of Europe.65
His Fulton speech had marked the postwar renewal of his long-held vision of a special Anglo-American relationship. The 1946 Zurich address marked the start of his active campaign for a united Europe, one that would include Germany but would not necessarily include Britain. Historians ever since have plumbed the seeming paradox of Churchill’s desire for Britain to be in, but not really in, a united Europe. Jock Colville had listened to Churchill’s pronouncements on a united Europe throughout the war and had come to understand the root of the matter: in essence, the Old Man sought European stability such that the Royal Navy (which he presumed would assume its former role in global politics after the war) might roam over the high seas without having to fret potential troubles back home. United Europe, for Churchill, meant global opportunity for England. He had called for a “Council of Europe” in a March 1943 broadcast, and had made mention of a “United States of Europe” in a November 1945 Brussels speech. He sought such an arrangement not only to create a Franco-German bulwark against Soviet transgressions but also to align the interests of Germany and France such that they would never again have reason to go to war against each other. That would benefit both Europe and England. Churchill believed that a robust France living in harmony with a rebuilt Germany would, someday—if time and the Russians did not derail events—form such a buffer. In late 1946, neither nation, alone or together, was in any shape to form a buffer between Russia and Britain. Germany had been conquered, partitioned, and reduced in size, and the rump occupied. In France the Fourth Republic, just wobbling into existence, was conducting a pogrom against all things Vichy, while overseas it was fighting a war in Indochina against Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, who had declared a breakaway republic in the north of Vietnam the year before. Rapprochement with Germany was not high on the French agenda.
The reaction to Churchill’s Zurich address was, as with his Fulton speech, muted at best. Attlee and Labour thought the objectives of European security “would be better achieved through the United Nations.” Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton believed any such movement should be driven by Europe’s Socialists and for Europe’s socialists, an attitude Churchill later derided as “squalid” and “a declaration that if Europe is to unite and Britain is to play any part in such a union, it can only be on a one-party basis—and that party the Socialists.” Ironically, Attlee, on the very day he belittled Churchill’s grand idea, also gave Churchill “Top Secret” reports that showed the Red Army maintained 116 divisions in occupied Europe, enough force, one Ministry of Defence official concluded, to make “a Russian conquest of western Europe” a “practical possibility.” When Churchill sent his son-in-law and champion of the united Europe movement, Duncan Sandys, to France to measure the French reaction to his Zurich speech, Sandys had to tell the Old Man that the French people “were violently opposed” to reconstituting a unified German Reich, although de Gaulle (out of office) “believed firmly in the project.” Yet de Gaulle’s endorsement came with a caveat: although he sought a unity of purpose between Britain and France with a possible role for Germany, the precise part Germany would play in any such arrangement had first to be determined. De Gaulle was not in the least prepared to endorse a resurgent and re-armed Reich.66
Over the next eighteen months, the European unity movement gained momentum, with Churchill pushing from the sidelines. In May 1948 he addressed Europeanists at The Hague:
Since I spoke on this subject at Zurich in 1946, and since our British United Europe Movement was launched in January 1947, events have carried our affairs beyond our expectations…. Great governments have banded themselves together with all their executive power…. Sixteen European States are now associated for economic purposes; five have entered into close economic and military relationship…. Mutual aid in the economic field and joint military defence must inevitably be accompanied step by step with a parallel policy of closer political unity.
He moved on to a vital part of his vision, one not shared by many on both sides of the Atlantic—the inclusion of Germany in this new Europe:
Some time ago I stated that it was the proud mission of the victor nations to take the Germans by the hand and lead them back into the European family, and I rejoice that some of the most eminent and powerful Frenchmen have spoken in this sense. To rebuild Europe from its ruins and make its light shine forth again upon the world, we must first of all conquer ourselves.
On May 5, 1949, ten nations signed the Treaty of London, which brought into being the Council of Europe. That August, after having invested much of his political capital on the issue, Churchill was rewarded with an invitation to Strasbourg and the first session of the Council of Europe Assembly. This was a true, though nascent, European parliament, a congress not of parties but of principles—of the rule of law, free speech, and international cooperation. The Germans were not in attendance, but by the following year, they would be.67
Full vindication for Fulton duly arrived a year later when on March 12, 1947, President Truman, with Greece and Turkey in mind, declared to a joint session of the U.S. Congress that henceforth it would be “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Greece, where a civil war was being fought, and Turkey, Truman argued, needed aid, hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, to prevent their slipping beneath the Communist wave. He did not propose military action, but the threat of force was implicit in his words. The New York Times’s James Reston declared the speech as important as the Monroe Doctrine. The tectonic shift in American foreign policy may have taken Truman only twenty-one minutes to announce, but the ground had been shifting for five years, the final jolt arriving on Friday, February 22, when Lord Inverchapel, the British ambassador, tried to deliver a note to George Marshall, secretary of state for all of thirty days. Marshall had already left Foggy Bottom for the weekend, but his deputy, Dean Acheson, persuaded Inverchapel to leave a carbon copy of the message. The British note was blunt and to the point: having “already strained their resources to the utmost,” the British wished to inform Marshall that all aid to Greece and Turkey would end on March 31. Britain was broke and could no longer maintain any force—or influence—in the eastern Mediterranean.68
The new policy became known as the Truman Doctrine, a bold declaration of America’s intent to guarantee not only the sovereignty of Greece and Turkey, but of nations throughout the world. George Marshall at first thought it unwise. He had learned firsthand doing battle with Churchill during the war that the Balkans were a dangerous place. He had undercut Churchill’s ambitions then; now his own president had picked up Churchill’s mantle. Marshall was not at all convinced that the Russians were the sinister threat their enemies made them out to be, and he was not certain that Moscow posed any threat to Greece or Turkey.
Marshall that week was in Moscow for talks with Molotov on the occupation of Germany and Austria, and the rebuilding of industrial capacity in those conquered states. The war had ended almost two years earlier, yet peace terms regarding the old Reich had yet to be agreed upon between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Marshall had left Washington in an optimistic mood, but by the time he returned home in April, his hopes had evaporated. The Russians, who had stripped Germany and Austria of factories and machines, told Marshall that more would be squeezed from them, the horrific plight of their peoples be damned.
That winter was particularly ferocious, and millions of refugees still roamed central Europe. Each morning in cities and towns throughout Germany and Austria, the frozen bodies of the starved were picked up from streets and alleys by their starving fellow citizens and carted off to communal graves. Stalin, his own country in ruins (as Marshall saw firsthand), would not give an inch, and in fact argued for a delay in the reconstruction of Germany. The German pasture that Stalin (and Henry Morgenthau) had envisioned had come to pass, but far too many millions of people lived there to be sustained. Starvation was the only certainty for millions of Germans. And that was fine with Stalin. The Moscow talks ended in utter disagreement. The Americans and Russians would not meet again for fifteen years. Truman and Marshall did not voice in public the concerns they now harbored about Stalin’s intentions—the Red Army was still considered heroic in America. But the Truman Doctrine served notice of a course correction. It amounted to the Atlantic Charter with muscle, and vindication as well of Churchill’s 1944 Christmas journey to Athens. A week after Truman’s address, Dean Acheson declared: “A Communist dominated Government in Greece would be considered dangerous to United States security.” Although Churchill was not one to say “I told you so,” Lord Moran wrote, “[Churchill’s Mediterranean policy] had been taken over lock, stock, and barrel by the United States.”69
Marshall understood that only the United States possessed the economic might to lift Europe out of the morass. Yet the British and Americans had not helped matters since 1945 by embargoing sales of raw materials to Germany. Without factories, with its steel industry dead, and without raw materials to build new machine tools to outfit new factories, Germany could only descend deeper into ruin. This Marshall now understood. A European economy without a German presence was something akin to an American economy without New York finances and Pennsylvania coal and steel. Yet the British economy, too, was foundering. This deeply troubled Dean Acheson, for Britain was one of just two European countries where citizens believed in their government, where order was maintained, and where old ethnic and wartime scores were not being settled by gun and bomb. The other was Russia, and that, for Acheson, was the problem. It had been a year since Stalin declared his antipathy toward the West; even those Americans who had put Stalin and the Russians on a pedestal now saw the danger. Acheson and a very few others in the State Department believed America had to help Europe, and especially Britain, not only because it was the right thing to do for the nation that had fought alone for almost two years against Hitler, but because a strong Britain and a reinvigorated Europe could only make for a stronger America in the new world order.70
Shortly after Marshall returned from Moscow, Acheson persuaded him to take to the airwaves in order to tell Americans of “the suffering of the people of Europe, who are crying for help, for coal, for food, and for the necessities of life.” Marshall did, warning Americans that “the patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate.” On June 5, while giving the Harvard commencement address, he announced his plan for European recovery, known since as the Marshall Plan. “The initiative,” he stressed, “must come from Europe,” but the dollars would come from America. At a press conference on June 12—three years to the day since he and Churchill had visited the D-day beaches—Marshall cited Churchill’s 1946 Zurich speech calling for a united Europe as one of the influences underlying his belief that Europe would emerge from the ruins a better place. Stalin, always suspecting the Americans of seeking “control” in any transaction, opted out of receiving aid. Soviet satellites, too, opted out on orders from Moscow, including Hungary, where Moscow had engineered a Communist coup in late May. But sixteen nations of free Europe opted in.
Churchill called the Marshall Plan “a turning point in the history of the world.” Almost $13 billion—about 5 percent of yearly U.S. gross domestic product, and 16 percent of the federal budget—would find its way to Europe over the next four years, including more than $1 billion a year to Britain. It was the embodiment of Churchill’s fourth moral principle, In Peace: Goodwill. Churchill had been advocating European solidarity for two years. Marshall’s plan addressed the economic way; now it fell to Europeans to find the necessary political will.71
By 1947 Churchill’s financial status had improved measurably. His daughter Mary later wrote that for the first time in his life, and through the good graces of friends and publishers, “Winston was rich.” Churchill’s revenue stream flowed from two sources. Late in 1945, his friend Lord Camrose hatched what Churchill called a “princely plan” to make Chartwell a national possession. Camrose formed a trust to which he contributed £15,000 and by August 1946 had raised another £80,000 through sixteen other subscribers, enough to purchase Chartwell for almost £45,000 and make a gift of it to the National Trust with an endowment of £35,000. Churchill was granted a life tenancy at £350 per year. Upon his death Chartwell—and the documents, paintings, furniture, and mementos Churchill promised to leave there—was to be opened to the public.72
By late 1946, with the Chartwell transaction complete, Churchill directed his attention and money toward purchasing nearby farms and remodeling his London house at 28 Hyde Park Gate (and the adjoining No. 27, also purchased). A prize Jersey cow arrived at Chartwell, and Landrace pigs, and in 1948 a Land Rover to tour the estates, which during 1947 had grown to almost five hundred acres. German prisoners of war—Churchill called them all “Fritzy”—supplied much of the labor. One of the Germans fell in love with the countryside and a country girl, and chose to marry and make a new life among the Englanders. The prisoners cleared fields and planted legumes; the walled gardens were home to lettuces; the hothouses hosted cucumbers. Peach and nectarine trees were groomed, grapevines trimmed. The apple and pear trees, which Churchill had planted two decades earlier, were tended to. Roses and wisteria were likewise pruned; the pathways through the rose gardens—laid out by Clementine in the 1920s—cleared. The Chartwell tennis court was converted to a croquet lawn; the mistress of the manor no longer had the stamina for tennis, but she enjoyed long croquet matches with visiting friends, including Field Marshal Montgomery, who Colville in coming years described as having become a “mellow, lovable exhibitionist, tamed but lonely and pathetic.” Monty and Clementine had gotten off to a rocky start during Churchill’s recuperation in Marrakech in 1943, when Montgomery presumed to dictate the guest list for dinner to Clementine. It got even rockier when Montgomery, who then served as Chief of the Imperial Staff under Attlee, declared that soldiering was a more honorable profession than politics, at which point Clementine shot back, “How dare you have the ill-bred impudence to say such a thing in my house.” He was soon forgiven. For the next decade, Monty and Clementine passed many afternoons doing battle on the croquet field. The master of the manor did not compete, though he sometimes watched the games.73
Churchill stocked the three fishponds with giant goldfish, which he fed by hand with maggots delivered in tins from London. He attempted to protect his fish from marauding birds by means of a device of his own invention—a floating “pinwheel” of sorts cobbled together from a bicycle wheel outfitted with a series of small mirrors. He explained the mechanics of the contraption to the American journalist Stewart Alsop as they strolled the grounds: as the wheel turned in the breeze, the mirrors, catching the sun’s rays, would emit bright flashes, which presumably would frighten off the birds. “Unfortunately,” Churchill told Alsop, “on this small island the sun hardly ever shines.”74
Chartwell’s fauna continued to multiply. The Australian government sent two red-beaked black swans as a gift; they were joined by three more, the lot of them furiously ill-tempered. The swans coexisted on the lower lake with a pair of Canada Geese (called Lord and Lady Beaverbrook) and two white swans, a female, Mr. Juno, and a male, Mrs. Jupiter, so named, Churchill explained to Lady Diana Cooper, because the sexes were misidentified to begin with. Sundry ducks and “five foolish geese” also made their home on the lower lakes.
Late each morning, Churchill would summon his Scotland Yard protector and announce, “Sergeant, I’m ready for my walk now.” He might ask a typist with a stenographer’s pad to accompany him, in case a thought in need of recording burst forth. Then, as recalled by one of the new typists, Cecily (“Chips”) Gemmell, “he would stomp out wearing this terrible old battered hat with swan feathers sticking out of it” to feed his “poor little birds” from a basket of stale bread that he carried hooked over an arm. By the lakeside “he’d bark, arf, arf, arf, and the swans came running.” He used wads of bread as ammunition with the aim of inciting the birds to battle among themselves, the foolish geese versus the ferocious swans. He was more conciliatory toward defenseless winged creatures. Fearing a decline in native butterflies, he oversaw the creation of a butterfly garden and the conversion of a garden shed to a butterfly farm. At one point he contemplated nourishing the butterflies with fountains that would flow with honey and water, but he thought better of the idea. More Jersey dairy cows arrived, along with ponies. The purchase of one neighboring farm brought in a herd of Shorthorn cattle. And in 1947, a poodle named Rufus II arrived, replacing Rufus I, killed by an automobile. Rufus took his dinner with the family in the Chartwell dining room, from a bowl placed upon a special cloth on the Persian carpet, and next to his master’s chair. The butler always served Rufus before serving their first course to the guests at table.75
In February 1947, Mary married Christopher Soames, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, and assistant military attaché in Paris. The newlyweds took up residence on one of the Chartwell farms, while Churchill began work on his war memoirs there and at 27–28 Hyde Park Gate. By then, Mary later wrote, “Winston now had, if not a veritable kingdom, at least a principality.” Two years later, when Christopher Soames prevailed on his father-in-law to purchase a French-bred Grey, Churchill took up the sport of kings. The horse—Colonist II—proved a champion, winning the Salisbury and Lime Tree stakes in 1949 under Churchill’s colors (his father Randolph’s colors, pink and gray), and six more prestigious races by 1951, when he was put out to stud. Clementine, in a letter to their friend journalist Ronnie Tree, expressed her wonderment at “this queer new facet in Winston’s variegated life. Before he bought the horse (I can’t think why) he had hardly been on a race course in his life. I must say I don’t find it madly amusing.”76
That Churchill could indulge in such extravagances stemmed from the second and ultimately far more powerful financial stream that irrigated his fortunes: the Chartwell Trust, created with Lord Camrose’s help to hold title to Churchill’s personal papers and to shield him from the punishing taxes of the times. Clementine, Lord Cherwell (Prof Lindemann), and Brendan Bracken would serve as trustees, and would be charged with two paramount duties: to sell Churchill’s wartime memoirs, and to make Churchill’s earlier papers available to Randolph when the time came for him to write his father’s official biography, “but not until five or ten years after his death.” The trust, far more than selling Chartwell, made Churchill a rich man. The British film director and producer Alexander Korda (who also donated a full-fledged cinema to Chartwell) paid £50,000 ($200,000) for the film rights to History of the English-Speaking Peoples, a four-volume work that would not be published for another decade. The American publisher Henry Luce paid Churchill £12,000 ($50,000) for the American book rights to his wartime secret-sessions speeches to the House of Commons. Odhams Press ponied up £25,000 ($100,000) for the residual value of his pre-1940 book copyrights. The Second World War, Churchill’s war memoir and history, proved to be a most powerful generator of wealth. Houghton Mifflin agreed to a $250,000 advance for the American book rights; Henry Luce’s Life magazine agreed to pay $1.15 million for the American serial rights. These were princely sums, the equivalent of a modern $12 million. The memoir was to run to six volumes.77
Churchill’s intent was not to write a history of the war but to explore the wartime Anglo-American relationship, and to refute the “rubbish” being written about him by Captain Butcher, Elliott Roosevelt, and left-leaning London newspapers. He oversaw the operation with his usual military precision, with himself as minister of war directing his battalions of literary troopers, who anointed themselves The Syndicate. Captain William Deakin DSO ran the tactical side of the campaign, supported by seven secretaries and typists and a host of current and former Churchill advisers, including Pug Ismay, Field Marshal Alexander, Air Marshal Park, Duncan Sandys, the Wizard Warrior R. V. Jones, Mountbatten’s former Chief of Staff General Sir Henry Pownell, and Emery Reves as agent, fixer, and arbiter of editorial content. The Prof checked statistics and translated arcane scientific data into plain English. Denis Kelly, a young barrister, was charged with cataloging Churchill’s papers, assisted in that task by Chips Gemmell, just eighteen. The volatile Randolph, who his sister Mary later wrote “could pick a quarrel with a chair,” was not part of the team. The key to the entire operation was an extraordinary agreement Churchill struck with the cabinet secretary Edward Bridges. Churchill asked for and Bridges approved that all wartime documents written by Churchill, and replies, be removed to Chartwell for Churchill’s use in preparing the memoirs. HMG would have final approval before publication. This arrangement meant that Churchill, with exclusive access, could cull the complete record at his leisure, whereas under British law the papers would be put off-limits to other historians for more than three decades. Kelly had much to catalog.78
An early Dictaphone was installed at Chartwell to aid the Great Man in the production process. Churchill gave the machine a test run one day after allowing all the typists the day off. But he failed to press the start button. When it failed to record anything, he banished it. Instead, he dictated his work to the typists, a total of almost one and a half million words over seven years. When critics later demeaned the effort as being carried off more by The Syndicate than by Churchill, Denis Kelly replied with words to the effect that a master chef cannot be expected to prepare each course for a grand banquet. The Syndicate indeed furnished Churchill with official documents, letters, telegrams, and the recollections of some of the principals, but Churchill dictated the narrative and assembled the entire work. The first volume, The Gathering Storm, was published in mid-1948, and the final volume, Triumph and Tragedy, came out the United States in late 1953, and in Britain in April 1954. Though in places factually incorrect—by commission as well as omission—the memoir “is an invaluable record,” wrote parliamentarian and Churchill biographer Roy Jenkins, who also called it “the ultimate literary achievement of the outstanding author-politician of the twentieth century.” Churchill’s attitude toward the work, as recalled by Deakin, was “This is not history, this is my case.”79
He prepared his case not only at Chartwell and 27–28 Hyde Park Gate, but on the shores of Lake Léman in Switzerland (August 1946); in Marrakech (New Year’s 1947 and winter 1950–51); at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo (December 1948); at Lake Garda and Lake Carezza for a month; at Beaverbrook’s villa, La Capponcina, at Cap d’Ail (summer 1949); at Reid’s Hotel in Madeira (January 1950); and in Annecy and Venice (1951). He also took time to slip across to America in 1949 in order to promote his book, visit with Bernard Baruch and Harry Truman, and address the students at MIT. With draconian British currency restrictions in place during these years, Churchill and his party often traveled as the guests of his American publishers (who often paid Churchill’s expenses with French francs rather than British pounds) in order to avoid a breach of British currency law.
Churchill’s easel and paints always went along on these trips, but Clementine often did not, although she and Lord Moran hastened to Marrakech when Churchill came down with bronchitis during his 1947 visit there. He enjoyed his painting and basking and swimming on these jaunts, although in a letter to Clementine written from Marrakech before the onset of the bronchitis, he wrote of bleak weather and his fear of catching a cold, adding: “England and politics seem very distant here. I continue to be depressed about the future. I really do not see how our poor island is going to earn its living when there are so many difficulties around us.” He was back in the wilderness, but with two critical distinctions. He now led the opposition, whereas in the 1930s he had been in opposition to his own party. And he believed he would play a vital role as the future played out, if not in Downing Street, then in his beloved House of Commons. Yet, in response to a 1946 birthday toast raised by Bracken, Churchill, after expressing appreciation at having his friends and family by his side, added: “But we are the past.”80
The bronchitis crisis of early 1947 passed without effect, but the taps on Churchill’s shoulders grew more frequent, more varied, and more serious. His brother, Jack, six years his junior and long afflicted with a bad heart, died in February 1947. “As you get older these things seem less tragic,” Churchill told Moran. “In any case there is not much time left.” Jack was buried next to his parents in the little churchyard at St. Martin’s, in Bladon, just a mile south of Blenheim Palace. Later that year, Churchill underwent a hernia operation, in preparation for which and on the advice of his surgeon, who feared a pulmonary crisis might occur while the Old Man was under anesthesia, he promised to quit cigars. He did not. He then promised the surgeon to reduce his alcohol intake by half. This, too, he failed to do, yet apparently to no ill effect. The surgery went well. By 1948, Moran believed Churchill’s arteries were hardening, and the Old Man by then complained regularly of feeling tightness in his shoulders. In August 1949, he lost feeling in his right arm and leg. Moran was summoned from London. He diagnosed a minor stroke, telling Churchill that he had not suffered a hemorrhage but that a “very small clot has blocked a very small artery.” A year later, Moran detected a “disturbance of cerebral circulation.” If hardening of the arteries is a sign of old age, Moran later wrote, “Winston was an old man before he began writing The Second World War.” Churchill believed he should not look too far forward; however much of a future he was to have, it could not be long. But he could always look back, to the days of honor. When asked by Moran’s wife which year of his life he’d want to live over, he replied, “Nineteen-forty every time. Every time.”81
As Churchill’s financial fortunes improved during the late 1940s, those of Britain continued their descent. “Victory,” Churchill told Moran in 1946, “has turned into sack cloth and ashes.” When the Attlee government sent John Maynard Keynes to the United States in 1946 to negotiate a $3.75 billion loan to finance reconstruction, the great economist secured his loan, but on hard terms. Interest was pegged at 2 percent over fifty years (with the proviso that London could skip annual payments in times of economic duress, which it did six times in the coming two decades). This was generous on America’s part. But Washington also insisted that London leave the gold standard and make the pound fully convertible in accordance with the Bretton Woods agreement. * This proved a calamity when in 1949 the Attlee government—under continuing economic pressure, and despite months of denials that it would do so—devalued the pound by 30 percent, from $4.08 to $2.80.
A devalued currency results in that nation’s products becoming cheaper in foreign markets, but Britain had little to export, and very little that Americans wanted. Of Britain’s plight, Churchill told the house in 1950: “Owing to their [the Attlee government’s] follies and wrongful action, a great part of all the loans and gifts we have received from abroad has been spent not upon the re-equipment of our industry, nor upon the import of basic foodstuffs: instead much of this precious aid was lavishly frittered away” on socialist programs. He excoriated Attlee for “[raising] our taxation until it is the highest in the world, and even stands higher today than in the worst years of the war.” Between the loans “and the unparalleled sacrifices exacted from the taxpayers” there was no reason why Britain should not have attained “solvency, security and utopian independence. This has been denied us not only by the incompetence and maladministration of the Socialist Government and their wild extravagance, but even more by the spirit of class hatred which they have spread throughout the land, and by the costly and wasteful nationalization of a fifth part of our industries.”82
That U.S. products were made more expensive in Britain by the pound’s devaluation was of little concern in America: Americans were buying American—GM, Studebaker, Ford, Packard, and Chrysler automobiles, and electric clothes dryers, radios, and televisions. American children rode bright-red Schwinn bicycles, sales of which—as with all American products—benefited from tariffs slapped on European imports. Now that Parker Pen could make pens instead of bomb fuses, it rolled out the Parker “51” pen—the latest in writing tools—which sold out at Gimbels in New York. Housewives who had been forced through war rationing to buy the Hormel company’s Spam—“the taste tickler”—kept buying it. After all, it was easy to prepare as a suitable and delicious main course for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.83
In America, consumption was now a way of life; in Britain, consumption was still a disease that took off old people. Other than shipping their best scotch whisky and linen to America, Britons were not exporting much, not producing much, and not buying much, including British-made Fords or even squat and cheap little Morris Minors. Daimler, Austin, Rolls-Royce, and Humber still produced machines that were virtually handcrafted (Churchill always preferred a Humber), but most Britons could not afford them, and little else for that matter. Ford U.S.A. produced more than 1.1 million motor cars in 1949; Morris Minor produced only 250,000 between 1948 and 1953. Londoners did not experience traffic jams because few Londoners owned automobiles, and those who did found petrol to be in short supply and expensive. Britons stayed home and, as they had for decades, found their entertainment via gramophones and little Bakelite wireless sets.
Americans went on a spending spree while Britons banked their sallow coal fires and pulled on another sweater. Most could not even commiserate over the telephone: fewer than 10 percent of British homes contained one.
When Harold Nicolson attended a January 1947 meeting of the Historic Buildings Committee of the National Trust, he did so wrapped in a greatcoat because there was no heat. Lighting, too, was a matter of chance after Attlee’s government imposed rolling blackouts between 9:00 P.M. and 12:00 A.M. and 2:00 and 4:00 P.M. That winter was one of the worst in memory. Its “most crushing blows fell on Britain,” Dean Acheson later wrote, with blizzards regularly battering the island, with six million out of work, and with rations below wartime levels.84
“Gloom reigned in the bomb-devastated streets of London and the provincial cities,” Jock Colville later wrote of those winter months. “London was grey; life was grey.” By then Colville toiled as private secretary to the Heir Apparent, Princess Elizabeth, just twenty-one. It was a post he accepted with reluctance, spurred on by Churchill, who told Colville, “It is your duty to accept.” Britons depended for sustenance upon millions of food parcels that arrived from the United States and the Commonwealth, including several thousand sent to Buckingham Palace. Princess Elizabeth organized a group of more than one hundred women volunteers who wrapped each parcel and dispatched them to shops and homes throughout the land. Even the royal family carried their clothing ration books that year. Elizabeth had to use her coupons to procure the material for her wedding gown in order to walk down the aisle of Westminster Abbey in November with Philip Mountbatten, her second cousin once removed (and Dickie’s nephew). The currency stringency grew so severe that year that the Attlee government slashed the importing of foods and essential commodities, even going so far as to slap a 75 percent import duty on Hollywood films. Hollywood responded by ceasing all shipments of movies to Britain. England found itself now a pale moon eclipsed by the blazing sun of the United States. “My God!” Nicolson proclaimed to his diary in late 1947. “What the poor people of this country have had to suffer in the last seven years.” Clothing rationing did not end until 1949. Food rationing had fully seven more years to run. Londoners dwelled now in pea-soup fogs—smog, really, a poisonous, stinking by-product of hundreds of thousands of fireplaces burning soft coal and coal gas. Day was almost as dark as night. Britons called it “austerity,” but conditions were not much different from what Americans knew during the Great Depression.85
On November 30, 1947, Colville, after dining with the Churchill family in celebration of the Old Man’s seventy-third birthday, told his diary: “Winston is in a sombre mood, convinced that this country is going to suffer the most agonising economic distress.” The Battle of the Atlantic, Churchill had claimed, was but “a mere pup in comparison.” Had Franklin Roosevelt lived just a few years more, he would have witnessed the complete fulfillment of his strategic vision for imperial Britain and its role in the world. The United Kingdom had been reduced to debtor status, and the Empire, with the departure of Burma, Ceylon, and India by 1948, was vastly reduced in geographical scope. King George remained King, but he had to scrub “Emperor” from the royal stationery.
“Never in his [Churchill’s] life has he felt such despair,” Colville wrote, “and he blamed it on the Government whose ‘insatiable lust for power is only equalled by their incurable impotence in exercising it.’ ” Colville took heart from Churchill’s “phrases and epigrams [that] rolled out in the old way, but I missed that indomitable hope and conviction which characterized the Prime Minister of 1940–41.” For this misery Churchill held Attlee accountable. Over drinks with Chips Channon one evening at Claridge’s, the Old Man said of Attlee: “Anyone can respect him, certainly, but admire—no!”86
In the House Churchill registered his displeasure with the Attlee government regularly and with increasing vehemence. He told Britons that it was not the government’s management of unfolding events within the diminishing empire, but its mismanagement. Of the continuing need of rationing, he said: “What the German U-boats could never do to us has been achieved by our own misguided fellow countrymen through their incompetence, their arrogance, their hordes of officials, their thousands of regulations and their gross mismanagement of our affairs, large and small.” On at least seventeen occasions between 1945 and 1950, he delivered addresses wherein he spoke (with a snarl) of “socialism” and “utopia” in the same breath, often tossing in a “feeble,” “foolish,” “squalid,” or “fantasy” for good measure. He just as consistently reminded his listeners that he had been Lloyd George’s loyal lieutenant when the great Welshman overhauled British social services earlier in the century. Making his case required a nimble performance; here was Winston Churchill—the leader of the Conservative Party—championing the philosophical underpinnings of Labour’s social programs. He was up to the task. It was the heavy-handed implementation of programs, not the programs themselves, he objected to. In July 1946, he told Britons (and three years later told MIT students much the same):
It is 38 years ago since I introduced the first Unemployment Insurance Scheme, and 22 years ago since, as Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, I shaped and carried the Widows’ Pensions and reduction of the Old Age Pensions from 70 to 65. We are now moving forward into another vast scheme of national insurance, which arose, even in the stress of war, from a Parliament with a great Conservative majority. It is an essential principle of Conservative, Unionist, and Tory policy—call it what you will—to defend the general public against abuses by monopolies and against restraints on trade and enterprise, whether these evils come from private corporations, from the mischievous plans of doctrinaire Governments, or from the incompetence and arbitrariness of departments of State.87
Later that year he recycled a line he had used during a March 1945 memorial service for Lloyd George (who had died that month): “We do not seek to pull down improvidently the structures of society, but to erect balustrades upon the stairway of life, which will prevent helpless or foolish people from falling into the abyss. Both the Conservative and Liberal Parties have made notable contributions to secure minimum standards of life and labour. I too have borne my part in this.” Indeed, he had done so, when he had “ratted” to the Liberal Party four decades earlier. By the late 1940s—long after “re-ratting” back to the Tories—he was one of very few Conservatives who could honestly say that he had been in favor of social reforms from the beginning, albeit while sitting on the opposing bench at the time.88
Winston is happy at Chartwell,” Moran told his diary in 1946, “as happy as he can be when the world has gone all wrong.” Churchill could only bear witness from the opposition bench between 1946 and late 1951 as Britain’s knights and castles—India and Burma, its influence in Egypt and Palestine—were swept from the chessboard.89
In early May 1946, Attlee announced his government’s intent to remove all British forces from Egypt, including the Suez Canal Zone. This was a policy Churchill could not consent to, telling the House on May 24: “I assert that it is impossible to keep it [the canal] open, unless British personnel are permanently stationed in the Canal Zone. There may be doubts about our ability to keep it open in the air age, even if we have garrisons and fighter aircraft in that zone. But at any rate without that personnel there is no chance of keeping it open whatever.” Especially galling to Churchill was the fact that Britain owed Egypt £400 million for services rendered during the war when, as Churchill told the House, Egyptian troops did not fight and “the debt which Egypt owes to us is that in two world convulsions she has been effectively defended by Great Britain and not only by this island. The Australians and New Zealanders and South Africans have shed their blood freely to prevent Cairo and Alexandria being looted and ravished, ground down and subjugated, by Italian and German hordes.” To safeguard the Suez, Attlee proposed using one hundred thousand British troops then in Palestine, from where they could respond to a crisis in the Suez. But guarding the canal with troops bivouacked three hundred miles away struck Churchill as ludicrous. As well, British troops in Palestine made easy targets for Zionist terrorists.90
In the House of Commons on August 1, with the Suez and Palestine debates ongoing and civil war likely in India, Churchill delivered something of a valedictory for the British Empire:
Take stock round the world at the present moment; after all we are entitled to survey the whole field. We declare ourselves ready to abandon the mighty Empire and Continent of India with all the work we have done in the last 200 years, territory over which we possess unimpeachable sovereignty. The Government are, apparently, ready to leave the 400 million Indians to fall into all the horrors of sanguinary civil war—civil war compared to which anything that could happen in Palestine would be microscopic; wars of elephants compared with wars of mice. Indeed we place the independence of India in hostile and feeble hands, heedless of the dark carnage and confusion which will follow. We scuttle from Egypt which we twice successfully defended from foreign massacre and pillage. We scuttle from it.91
The entire world, Churchill believed, not only the British Empire, was poised on the brink of great and deadly trials. A week after his speech, over lunch with Clementine and Lord Moran, Churchill predicted another war. “You mean in eight or ten years?” Moran asked. “Sooner,” Churchill replied. “Seven or eight years. I shan’t be here.” He thought it would take the form of a final battle between England, Belgium, France, and Scandinavia against the Russians. “We ought not to wait until Russia is ready,” Churchill offered. “I believe it will be eight years before she has these [atomic] bombs.” He smiled. “America knows that fifty-two percent of Russia’s motor industry is in Moscow and could be wiped out by a single bomb.” He smiled again. “The Russian government is like the Roman Church; their people do not question authority.”92
By the autumn of 1946, Attlee chose to keep British troops in the Canal Zone, where Egyptians resented their presence much as Palestinian Arabs (and many Zionists) resented the British presence in Palestine. The debate over Palestine continued into 1947, when in March Churchill told the House: “One hundred thousand Englishmen [are] now kept away from their homes and work, for the sake of a senseless squalid war with the Jews in order to give Palestine to the Arabs, or God knows who. ‘Scuttle,’ everywhere, is the order of the day—Egypt, India, Burma. One thing at all costs we must preserve: the right to get ourselves world-mocked and world-hated over Palestine.”93
If the British in Palestine could not or would not force a settlement between Arabs and Jews, Churchill advised Attlee to hand over the British Mandate of Palestine—which was costing London eighty million pounds a year—to the United States, which as the world’s greatest power had, in Churchill’s view, inherited such responsibilities but had yet to spend a dollar or send a battalion to Palestine. If not to the United States, Churchill advised passing the mandate to the United Nations, which had been created for such purposes. Churchill believed doing so would help Britain keep its promise to help create a national homeland for Jews, a pledge it could no longer make good on by itself. He also proposed transferring troops that were then serving in Palestine to India, where the bloodshed he had long predicted had begun. It made no sense, Churchill told the House in January 1947, that British troops should stay in Palestine because the Labour government believed their exit “would lead to a terrible quarrel between Jews and Arabs.” Yet in India, “We are told to leave the Indians to settle their own affairs.” Churchill titled his speech “Blood and Shame.”94
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations, which had taken over the British Mandate in May, voted to partition Palestine into two states, Jewish and Arab. Arabs in Palestine rejected the UN solution.* The Jewish state—Israel—proclaimed its independence on May 14, 1948. The next day, three Arab armies—from Transjordan, Syria, and Egypt—attacked. Churchill believed the Arab coalition would “fall to pieces” as soon as it met Israeli forces. It did. Eight months later, on January 26, 1949, with Britain still not having recognized the new Israeli state, Churchill took to the floor of the House to assault the Attlee government’s performance in the Middle East since 1946:
It took another year after I had urged the Government to quit Palestine, if they had no plan, for them to take the decision to go. They took it a year later when everything was more difficult. Great opportunities were cast away. They took it in such a way as to render themselves unable to bring perfectly legitimate pressure to bear upon the United States to leave the sidelines and come into the arena of helpful, and now that it [Israel] has come into being it is England that refuses to recognize it, and, by our actions, we find ourselves regarded as its most bitter enemies.
Like it or not, Churchill told the House, Israel’s statehood marked “an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years.” Then he launched a shocking accusation at Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who throughout the war had served Churchill with absolute loyalty:
All this is due, not only to mental inertia or lack of grip on the part of the Ministers concerned, but also, I am afraid, to the very strong and direct streak of bias and prejudice on the part of the Foreign Secretary. I do not feel any great confidence that he has not got a prejudice against the Jews in Palestine. I am sure that he thought the Arab League was stronger and that it would win if fighting broke out, but I do not suggest for a moment that he wished to provoke war…. but the course he took led inevitably and directly to a trial of strength, and the result was opposite to what I believe he expected it to be.95
It was a grossly unjust remark. As foreign secretary, Bevin had pursued a foreign policy largely in accordance with Churchill’s philosophy of strength through affiliation with America. There had been setbacks in the Middle East, but they were uninvited, and they certainly did not derive from any anti-Semitism on Bevin’s part. But Churchill, liberated from the constraints of the coalition, had embraced his role of leader of the opposition with alacrity, and on occasion with venom. Self-restraint had never been Churchill’s long suit.
In Egypt and Palestine the British had lost prestige. In Asia they were losing everything. In March 1947, Churchill pressed Attlee to clarify the mandate under which the new (and last) viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was to serve. Mountbatten had been given fourteen months to work with Jawaharlal Nehru’s transitional government with the goal of getting Britain out of India, but no one had told him exactly how to do so, or what compromises to make, especially in the matter of splitting Muslim Pakistan from Hindu India. Churchill told the House:
This [interim] government of Mr. Nehru has been a complete disaster…. Thirty or forty thousand people have been slaughtered in the warfare between the two principal religions…. I do not think that the fourteen months’ time limit gives the new Viceroy a fair chance. We do not know what directives have been given to him…. We are told very little. What is the policy and purpose for which he is to be sent out, and how is he to employ these fourteen months? Is he to make a new effort to restore the situation, or is it merely Operation Scuttle on which he and other distinguished officers have been despatched?96