6
Guilty Men 1937–45
APPEASEMENTS
The succession to Baldwin as Conservative leader had long been debated, by press lords and others; but since 1931, at latest, it had been clear that Neville Chamberlain would take over, sooner or later. Rivals had come and gone. One fancied candidate in the 1924–9 Government, Sir Douglas Hogg, had instead settled for the Lord Chancellorship.1 That left Chamberlain – unless, of course, anyone thought Churchill worth running. After all, the two of them together had provided the dynamism in the second Baldwin Government, just as Churchill and Lloyd George had in the Asquith Government; though ever since the Carlton Club meeting in 1922 everyone knew Baldwin’s opinion that a dynamic force could be a terrible thing. It is a myth, however, that Churchill, like Lloyd George before him, was excluded as a man of decision by a conspiracy of mediocrity. His own bad decisions were decisive.
In the Baldwinian Conservative Party Churchill simply had too many strikes against him: ambitious, untrustworthy, impetuous, adventurous and tainted with unworthy associates, from Lloyd George to Birkenhead and Beaverbrook. Not only had he clung to Free Trade on rejoining a basically protectionist party, his Chancellorship was subsequently regarded as an electoral disaster. When Churchill withdrew from the shadow cabinet at the beginning of 1931, he was not wantonly throwing away a great chance that would otherwise have come his way in the ordinary course; but his detachment surely sealed his exclusion from the National Government. Once out, Churchill was kept out.
The issue on which Churchill broke with the Conservative leadership, and on which he campaigned throughout the early 1930s, was India. He emerged as the most forceful spokesman for the diehard wing of the Conservative Party, which saw an all-party front-bench conspiracy to sell the British Raj down the river. This was a plausible charge. The commission which the Conservative Government had set up in 1926 to report on Indian government sat under the chairmanship of Sir John Simon, still a Liberal, and included the still obscure Clement Attlee as one Labour member. The Viceroy, Lord Irwin (later Halifax) was a prominent Conservative, a pious High Churchman and a close friend of Baldwin. Irwin’s declaration in October 1929, dangling Dominion status before Indian eyes, was not only agreed with the Labour Government but initially supported by Baldwin in opposition, much to the fury of many of his backbenchers. The Simon Report in 1930 bore the stamp of its chairman, famous for sitting on the fence, with cautious tactical proposals for enlarging the scope of representative government, seeking a consensus that would propitiate not only the Indian princes but Gandhi’s nationalist supporters in the Congress Party, while safeguarding the essentials of British control and calming down the diehards.
Following the report, in 1930 MacDonald convened a round-table conference in London which squeezed concessions out of the princes but was vitiated by the refusal of Congress to participate. In 1931 he tried again. This time Irwin tried direct talks with Gandhi: two holy men foxily striking a deal. Their pact secured Congress’s attendance; Gandhi himself was an unforgettable spectacle amid the London rain in his distinctive white robe and sandals, mocked with racial condescension by the intemperate Churchill. The political crux was that, although MacDonald had, by the time the conference convened, become dependent on Conservative support, his Government would not significantly modify its stance on India. Appeasement remained their strategy for removing causes of avoidable friction and thereby salvaging as much as possible in a changing world where, as the 1931 crisis brought home, Britain could no longer call the shots. Together MacDonald and Baldwin pressed on with their Indian policy, issuing (after a third round-table conference) in the Government of India Act of 1935 one clear testimony to their Government’s National credentials.
In India the provisions in the bill for increased self-government were to some extent undercut by the reluctance of the princely states to join the proposed all-India federation; though once the princes’ stance became clear at Westminster it actually eased the passage of the bill by making it seem less cataclysmic. Throughout, Churchill put himself at the head of the 100 or more Conservative MPs who regularly voted against the Government; the debates occupied 4,000 pages of Hansard. Churchill, moreover, was the main voice in the country of the right-wing India Defence League. Although some of his utterances, warning of intercommunal violence if Britain were to quit India, could be read as prophetic in the light of the bloodshed following independence (and partition) in 1947, Churchill’s perspective was not really forward-looking; it looked back to the imperialist assumption ‘that we are there for ever’. Picking up where the press lords had left off, he made an unmistakable challenge to – if not for – the leadership, reaching a high point at the party conference in October 1934 when the diehards came within a handful of votes of success. Little wonder that Baldwin showed a steely determination not to admit this man into his last cabinet, despite Churchill’s belated overtures of reconciliation; nor that he was ignored when the torch passed smoothly to Chamberlain.
By the time Chamberlain, already sixty-eight years old, finally came into his inheritance it had gone sour. He retained his keen appetite for government business, prodding his ministers relentlessly and poking his nose into their departments. His whole training, however, had been in the administration of complex matters of domestic policy, of which he had an unrivalled grasp. It was his brother Austen, the ex-Foreign Secretary, who had recently told him: ‘Neville, you must remember you don’t know anything about foreign affairs.’ Yet the only Chamberlain to get to 10 Downing Street was to be swamped by an all-embracing international crisis, only resolved in 1945, which saw him off and saw him out. To an extent unparalleled in twentieth-century history, what British politics were about in these years was foreign policy. If Chamberlain was found wanting, it was not on ground of his own choosing.
Chamberlain, however, never asked for sympathy, never acknowledged fallibility. Instead he threw himself into mastering the new brief and, unlike Baldwin, made the prime minister’s office the hub of decision-making in foreign affairs. A favourite civil servant, Sir Horace Wilson, nominally chief industrial adviser to the Government, sat in the office adjoining the prime minister, walked daily with him in the park, and was more of a confidante than any of Chamberlain’s cabinet colleagues. Mistrustful of the career diplomats, Chamberlain used the Downing Street press office for briefings that at times contradicted the Foreign Office, and his evident determination to show who was boss became apparent to foreign ambassadors. It was this sort of friction, rather than acute policy differences, which soon led to a crisis at the Foreign Office.
Good-looking and well-dressed, Anthony Eden had been only thirty-eight – barely into his job as Minister for League of Nations Affairs – when Baldwin found that he desperately needed a new Foreign Secretary at the end of 1935, in place of Sir Samuel Hoare. Eden, with his fastidious mind and grasp of languages, was always a diplomat’s diplomat; he had clean hands and was the darling of the liberal pressure group, the League of Nations Union, which in June 1935 declared the results of its house-to-house ‘peace ballot’, showing massive support for League sanctions against an aggressor – even for military measures. This was fine in principle; but Mussolini’s designs on Abyssinia brought a more practical test. The trouble with Hoare was that the Government, elected in November mouthing pledges of support for the League’s measures to protect Abyssinia, was caught out in December simultaneously planning to partition it instead (the Hoare–Laval plan). Hoare had to go. Eden’s dazzling promotion succeeded in freshening the Government rather than saving Abyssinia. By June 1936, with the League’s credibility in tatters, Chamberlain was openly calling sanctions ‘the very midsummer of madness’. The left-wing press and the League of Nations Union might fume, but their invocations of ‘collective security’ as the means of resisting aggression had a hollow ring in the absence of a willingness to back words with British firepower.
None of this was much to the taste of the new Foreign Secretary; but he was content to describe the substance of his policy as ‘the appeasement of Europe as a whole’, by which he meant what liberal opinion had endorsed since Versailles – the removal of the causes of war by the remedy of justified grievances. Thus Eden acquiesced in Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. True, it was a violation of the Versailles Treaty – but who now defended its one-sided and obsolescent provisions, denying Germany full control of its own territory? True, it had been achieved by force – but who wanted war to take back from Hitler what would otherwise have been conceded to him across the conference table with a handshake from a smiling Eden? Eden’s quarrel was not with appeasement as such, but the advent of a new prime minister meant that Eden was no longer free to play the poor cards in his hand in his own way. Humiliated by the manner in which Chamberlain took the conduct of diplomacy into his own hands, Eden resigned in February 1938, to be replaced by a more compliant successor.
The appointment of Lord Halifax, famous for his conciliation of Gandhi, marked a new phase in the policy of appeasement; but he found one familiar opponent still against him. ‘It is not that our strength is seriously impaired,’ Churchill had said about India. ‘We are suffering from a disease of the will.’ Churchill’s reading of the European situation can be seen in similar terms. Bark at Gandhi, bite Hitler! Yet, it can be argued, a different imperative applied if the maintenance of the British Empire were to be ruthlessly regarded as the top priority by a nation in straitened circumstances. For in that case the logical course was to conclude a deal with the dictators in Europe so as to leave each master race free to exercise its own hegemony, with no questions asked, least of all the tedious questions about freedom and democracy which the League of Nations Union kept maundering on about. This was not, however, the line which Churchill took. Instead, from 1936 he started working with bodies like the Anti-Nazi Council, with its Jewish, left-wing and trade-union supporters, in seeking to rally effective opposition to Hitler’s Germany.
Mussolini’s Italy remained a puzzle. It was harder to know if it should be conciliated, as a realistic strategy for isolating Germany, or opposed as another fascist dictatorship, which was the more ideological response of the left. Both Churchill and the Government wobbled between the two courses.
Rearmament had been Churchill’s consistent theme since 1934. Initially, in a climate where pacifism was often well-regarded if ill-defined, it was possible to dismiss him as a belligerent imperialist. His estimates of relative British and German air strengths, however, were sufficiently well-founded to cause the Government embarrassment, for the reason that Churchill was leaked official secrets by sympathetic public servants. Indeed Baldwin was at one point forced to climb down in the House of Commons. The truth was obscure; with access to the archives historians have suggested that Baldwin’s retraction was itself in error, and that Churchill’s figures were incorrect all along. The fact is that the rearmament programme was seriously begun under Baldwin, pushed along more slowly than Churchill wanted, but more quickly than the Opposition advocated. Defence spending, pegged at about 2.5 per cent of GNP until 1935, increased to 3.8 per cent by 1937.
Labour was only converted by stages to the practical necessity of rearmament. One step came at the Labour Party conference in 1935, when Ernest Bevin, with all the authority of his union’s block vote behind him, reprimanded the sweet-natured pacifist Lansbury for ‘hawking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what to do with it’. At seventy-six, Lansbury was ready enough to resign. Bevin’s shocking remarks signalled an altogether more tough-minded approach; in 1937 he became chairman of the TUC and Dalton chairman of the Labour Party. Together they went a long way in removing any real resistance to rearmament (though parliamentary support for the hated Chamberlain was another matter).
The Government’s perception of Britain’s relative weakness actually made it less likely to take a strong line of the kind that Churchill advocated. Chamberlain, with his long tenure at the Treasury, was acutely aware of the real economic constraints on British rearmament, especially when seen through the spectacles of economic orthodoxy. Simply stepping up orders for aircraft was no good unless there were factories with capacity to produce them; and even so this would divert resources from productive uses – an echo of the old ‘Treasury view’ (‘crowding-out’). Likewise, raising taxes might throttle recovery in the economy, which was Britain’s real strength if war should come. Conversely, borrowing raised the awkward political question why it was right to unbalance the budget for armaments but not for investment in public works; and when the Government launched a defence loan in 1937, it met Labour criticism. In the event, rearmament gave a favourable stimulus to the economy, by increasing demand just when recovery was faltering.
Chamberlain, however, could not be expected to regard defence spending as other than a burden and a waste. Moreover, his sombre mood was reinforced by the Imperial Conference, which made clear that the Dominions had no more stomach for a fight than himself. After all, why should the Australians, with their bitter memories of being sent to Gallipoli by Churchill some twenty years previously, be ready to offer themselves as cannon fodder again? Backed by the Empire and the USA, Britain had only just survived against Germany last time. Without either, how might it turn out next time?
The League of Nations retained a ghostly presence at Geneva but after Abyssinia talk of collective security was meaningless. If Britain and France were to preserve the Versailles settlement, they would have to act themselves. Their failure to do so over the Rhineland was a boost for Hitler; his annexation of Austria into the Reich in March 1938 was another violation of Versailles, another bloodless coup, another blow to the prestige and morale of the western powers. Whatever next? The obvious answer was Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s demands on behalf of the ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland, incorporated into the Czechoslovak republic after Versailles, became the all-absorbing issue during the summer of 1938.
Chamberlain acted desperately to forestall the impulsive Hitler, literally preparing the ground for concession by sending a British mission under Lord Runciman to intervene in the German–Czech border negotiations. Runciman’s findings became the basis of an Anglo-French plan, on the Hoare–Laval model, for the partition of Czechoslovakia, giving Hitler those areas of Bohemia where ethnic Germans were in a majority. After all, was not this in line with the principle of self-determination? And anyway, what could Britain and France do to defend Bohemia? Justifications of Chamberlain’s course were not hard to find, and sympathetic newspapers, notably The Times, warmed to the theme. The alternative was a European war, if Czechoslovakia should resist, backed by its guarantees from France, which would in turn expect support from Britain, just as in 1914. Hence Chamberlain’s crucial role; hence his offer to fly out to meet Hitler in September 1938.
In the jet age, this initiative may seem commonplace. At the time, when a man of seventy who had never been in an aeroplane made his flight to Berchtesgaden, it made a dramatic impact, even on Hitler. Chamberlain, supported by his rolled umbrella and the constant presence of Sir Horace Wilson, now had the bit between his teeth, pioneering not just summit meetings but shuttle diplomacy. Twice Chamberlain flew back and forth, reporting on Hitler’s terms to his colleagues in London, keeping the French Government under Daladier in line, roping in Mussolini, and browbeating the reluctant Czechs. Still Hitler asked for more; war seemed imminent. The prime minister, observing the military precautions in London – trenches and gas masks – went on radio to express his incredulity at the idea of war ‘because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’. Then, in a further dramatic stroke, while Chamberlain was addressing the House of Commons on 28 September, a message from Hitler was brought to him, with an invitation to fly to Germany for a third time – to Munich.
The name Munich has become synonymous with a pejorative sense of appeasement, and with some reason. The two jackbooted dictators received the two western prime ministers for four-power talks (excluding Czechoslovakia itself). The terms were no better than before; but Chamberlain, having undermined any French will to resist, now closed on the deal and presented the bill to the Czechs. They had no option but to cede the Sudetenland to Hitler. Chamberlain thus succeeded in his immediate aim of averting war. Thereby, as Sir John Simon chose to argue, he saved Czechoslovakia; and it is a melancholy fact, cited by later historians, that far more of the Poles for whom Britain ostensibly went to war in 1939 perished in the Second World War than Czechs who were betrayed in 1938. This does not, though, mean that the Czechs were not betrayed. At Munich the fine arguments for appeasement as a process of mutual concession involved Chamberlain in making the necessary sacrifices, not on his own behalf, and not at his own expense, but that of the Czechs.
There was to be no war in 1938 – but what about 1939? Chamberlain took what comfort he could from the written undertaking, which he waved on the tarmac at Heston airport, promising that Hitler would now mend his ways. So Chamberlain quelled his own doubts, believing what he wanted to believe. The cynical idea that he was buying time at Munich, put around by some later apologists, had no part in Chamberlain’s thinking. Instead he invested his policy with his own sense of self-righteousness, seeking a moral as well as a political triumph over his opponents; and this, in a temporary spasm of relief, he achieved. His promise of ‘peace for our time’, which impressed Church leaders, was one which he had to live up to – or rather Hitler had to, or Chamberlain was finished.
What snapped the credibility of appeasement was Hitler’s conduct after Munich, when every point had been stretched in his favour. At the end of 1938 Kristallnacht was a demonstration of the full inhumanity – not yet the full horror – of the Nazi regime’s treatment of the Jews. Then in March 1939 Hitler’s occupation of Prague made a nonsense of all his promises to respect the new (and undefended) Czech frontiers. Even now Chamberlain stumbled deeper into the mire. But Halifax at the Foreign Office showed that he appreciated the difference between Gandhi and Hitler. Halifax saw that appeasement was holed below the waterline and was determined that the whole Government should not go down with the sinking ship. The result of this tension was an extraordinary lurch in policy. Prompted by (ambiguous) signs of Polish will to resist and by (misleading) reports of an imminent German attack. Chamberlain offered a guarantee of Polish independence.
If Czechoslovakia was a faraway country, Poland was further; if Bohemia could not be defended by British troops, no more could Danzig; if the democratic Czech republic had its flaws, the Polish regime was far more suspect. What had changed was the context in which even the prospect of war no longer seemed the worst evil. But Poland made one further issue unavoidable: what about Russia? The left had long called for alliance with the Soviet Union against the fascist powers. The Government had reason to doubt whether the Red Army, still reeling from Stalin’s purges, could so easily be enlisted in defence of the western democracies; but negotiations were belatedly opened in Moscow, only to be pre-empted in August 1939 by the amazing news that Stalin had concluded a pact with Hitler instead – a sort of eastern Munich.
One effect in Britain was to disabuse many people on the left of their simplistic belief that Communists could be relied upon to combat fascists. At the same time the mutual suspicion between the different groups of anti-appeasers was easing. Eden and his admirers, young men mindful of their future in the Government, had initially kept well clear of Churchill; so even Chamberlain’s Conservative critics were not united. Moreover Churchill’s links with the anti-fascist left were complicated by his stance on Spain, where his anti-Communism initially made him wary of supporting the republican cause; and only late in the day did he modify his position. It was one sign that he was ready to generalize his appeal, subsuming his own nostalgic nationalism in a wider ideological conflict. Conversely, on the left, there was talk not only of a popular front as an alternative to the National Government, but even of bringing in Churchill, whose scenario on the Nazi menace had a new verisimilitude. By the summer of 1939, therefore, Chamberlain’s policy was in ruins and his own position was no longer unassailable. The Conservatives now had an alternative leader in Halifax; and Churchill, rising sixty-five, no longer looked ripe for retirement.
FINEST HOUR
Unlike the summer of 1914, few doubted that war was on the way in 1939. Even Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, with its determinedly optimistic view of appeasement, dropped the regular streamer from its front page offering readers a contrary assurance. On 1 September, with the Nazi–Soviet pact in place, Hitler felt free to commit his troops against Poland. A flurry of diplomatic moves momentarily suggested a revival of appeasement, alarming its opponents in all parties; in the House of Commons Chamberlain came under pressure. It was the Tory Leo Amery who called out to Arthur Greenwood, acting as Labour leader while Attlee was ill: ‘Speak for England!’ Chamberlain failed to strike the right note, even in speaking for a country now united on the necessity for war with Germany (not Italy yet). For this was actually his achievement – perhaps the only one, certainly his final achievement – in pursuing his policy to the bitter end. It served as an object lesson to all those who had been sceptical about the need to fight: the bulk of the Conservative Party who had pined for a businesslike deal with Hitler, the Simonite National Liberals with their Nonconformist scruples, those advocates of collective security in the Labour Party who had supposed rearmament dispensable, even fellow-travellers of the Soviet Union who had thought it the vanguard of the struggle against Hitler. Moreover, the Dominions – including South Africa – each decided to enter the war alongside Britain.
This was the second world war for Britain in a generation. Painfully acquired experience, barely twenty years previously, suggested what needed to be done. There would be food rationing, there would be convoys, there would be air-raid sirens and a blackout; moreover, there would be conscription – Labour’s support was now ensured. There would be new Ministries of Food, Economic Warfare, Shipping, Home Security, and (jointly) Labour and National Service, all marking administrative lessons learnt from the First War. But would there also be a coalition government? Not under Chamberlain, the Opposition parties declared. So the reconstruction of the Government was confined to bringing in the dissident Conservatives. Eden went to the Dominions Office. Churchill was the big catch, his own eyes long set on the post of Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence which had been created in 1936. This proved too much for the National Government to swallow and Churchill had to be content with returning, twenty-five years on, to the Admiralty. He sat in a war cabinet of nine, otherwise stuffed with familiar Chamberlainites like Simon, Halifax and Hoare. Like Asquith’s coalition in 1915, this attempt to pack the Government with the prime minister’s cronies turned out to be less clever than it first looked, since it set them up as whipping boys for subsequent failures.
So began the ‘bore war’ – the American term ‘phoney war’ came later – its spirit captured by Evelyn Waugh in Put Out More Flags (1942). Eerily, life went on as normal for many people. To be sure, men of military age started to be called up; some anticipated by enlisting voluntarily; and they had to be trained and equipped. But, when plans for the evacuation of mothers and children from the great cities were hustled into effect, most of them soon returned, with or without authorization, since the threatened bombardment had failed to materialize. There was a sense of anti-climax, which fed the thought that not enough was being done. The ‘old gang’ were still in office; Treasury priorities prevailed; income tax remained at 5s 6d in the pound (27.5 per cent). In fact some big changes were under way. Under the new Ministry of Supply, modelled on the old Ministry of Munitions, production of armaments was stepped up, especially aircraft. Defence spending, which had previously not exceeded 7 per cent of GDP, changed its trajectory in 1939, when it reached 18 per cent, rising in 1940 to 46 per cent – a higher proportion than in Nazi Germany.
The Nazi claim to put guns before butter seemed more plausible at the time. Conversely, the distortions produced by the Nazi war economy were seen as a reason for confidence in Britain’s staying power. Chamberlain had some ground for arguing that ‘the Allies are bound to win in the end and the only question is how long it will take them to achieve their purpose’. But whereas it took years to vindicate this assessment, it took only months to make it seem culpably complacent. Yet a sense of urgency awaited a sense of danger to instil it. For most British people the war was happening off-stage; distraught messengers reported battles in the east – Poland duly overrun by Germany, Finland defeated by Russia. Britain’s first major military intervention did not come until April 1940.
The Norwegian expedition, aimed at ousting German forces from the port of Narvik, was primarily the responsibility of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill. Yet its failure brought immense pressure to bear upon Chamberlain, whose recent claim that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ seemed to miss the point. Subterranean discontent in parliament, suppressed for six months, either patriotically or tactically, now erupted – most dangerously for the Government among its own backbenchers. A number of known critics, old men like Amery, younger figures like Harold Macmillan, were now ready to vote with the Opposition, which steeled Labour to move a censure motion. This was Chamberlain’s moment of truth: would the open confrontation consolidate his wavering support or would the defections be so great as to undermine him?
It was one of very few occasions when a vital issue was settled on the floor of the House of Commons. Amery spoke his lines, cribbed from Cromwell: ‘In the name of God, go.’ This was predictable; what was unpredictable was how many former loyalists would now abstain. Churchill was duly wheeled out in defence of the Government; whereupon Lloyd George, in his last decisive intervention, warned his old colleague not to be ‘converted into an air-raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues’. This nicely distinguished between two potential targets, exonerating the First Lord at the expense of the prime minister. In Chamberlain’s entourage, suddenly taken aback by the hostility they encountered, it was still thought that the Government would be safe if its majority, normally 250, kept above 100. In the event it fell to 80, because 40 rebels voted with the Opposition and 80 others abstained. Thus over a quarter of Chamberlain’s ‘friends’ (the word he used in his final appeal) spurned him.
This was a moral defeat, entailing the reconstruction of the Government, as everyone recognized; yet it should also be remembered that the Chamberlainites were, and remained, the majority. The Opposition leaders refused to enter a coalition under Chamberlain. Halifax, however, would not have encountered the same objection. Churchill knew that he was less welcome to Conservative MPs, but that he had more widespread support across party lines, not only in the House but in the country. He was ready and able, therefore, to force the issue, by silently refusing to support Halifax when Chamberlain convened a meeting between the three of them. It was Churchill who was summoned to Buckingham Palace on 10 May 1940. His own image, later made famous through his war memoirs, was that he was ‘walking with destiny’. But although he was free to form his own Government, he was not free to act exactly as he chose.
Chamberlain stayed. In the new war cabinet of five, he was Lord President of the Council, in effect responsible for coordination of domestic policy, the more so since his protégé, Kingsley Wood, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, was left outside. Churchill’s war cabinet was initially like Lloyd George’s in its size and in its exclusion of departmental ministers; but unlike it in personnel, including party bigwigs rather than brilliant outsiders. Thus Chamberlain, still party leader, was joined by Halifax, the second man in the Conservative Party; while the two Labour places went to the party leader, Attlee, and the deputy whom he had beaten for the leadership, Greenwood. Churchill had learnt the lesson that a coalition worked best if it was stuck together with party loyalties rather than pitted against them. Hence whenever the Churchill Coalition threatened to fracture, it was along party lines; and it was to come apart cleanly at the end of the war.
Churchill had some room for his cronies, notably Beaverbrook, who was given the new Ministry of Aircraft Production, and for ex-ministers who had fallen foul of Chamberlain. Amery got the India Office; Duff Cooper, who had resigned over Munich, was brought back as Minister of Information; Eden had to be content with the War Office – for the moment. The centre of gravity in politics had shifted, with long-lasting effects. The record of a rising Conservative minister like R. A. Butler was blighted, while the prospects of Harold Macmillan, a persistent critic of the National Government on both unemployment and appeasement, were transformed. For the time being, Chamberlain retained the party leadership, and did his best to bring his own backbenchers around to accepting Churchill – who was at first only cheered by Labour. When Chamberlain, gripped with cancer, had to resign in the autumn of 1940, Churchill at last became leader of the Conservative Party. And, once Halifax was eased out of the Foreign Office, the way was clear for Eden’s return, which recognized him also as the heir apparent.
By the end of 1940 the leadership of both the Conservative and Labour parties was settled for the best part of twenty years. Clement Attlee had been lucky to be elected leader of the Labour Party, as rivals like Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton never ceased to reflect. Attlee represented Labour’s first generation of upper-middle-class recruits, faithful to his social background in everything except his politics; educated at public school and Oxford, he had served in the trenches and was known as Major Attlee in the inter-war years. Notoriously a man of few words, he had no personal charisma and was easy to underestimate. Yet Churchill had to accept him in his war cabinet and came to appreciate his mettle; so that, with increasing responsibilities, Attlee’s gift for ruthless chairmanship gave him oversight of the domestic policy of the Coalition, notably through the Lord President’s Committee.
Labour’s other big figure, in every sense, was Ernest Bevin. The leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which he had virtually created, Bevin became Minister of Labour and National Service in 1940. This striking appointment signalled a new era, when the integrated control of the country’s manpower resources – so contentious during the First World War – could be put in the hands of this strongly class-conscious union boss, who had no parliamentary experience. Bevin quickly had to be jobbed into a safe Labour seat, though, already nearly sixty, he never really became at home in the House. Instead he relished the exercise of power, bringing the resources of his capacious experience and his intuitive intellect to bear upon a whole range of political issues, not just those of his department. Within months he had been brought into the war cabinet. The axis which he formed with Attlee was fundamental in running the Labour Party until Bevin’s death. So long as the war lasted, his weight was likewise thrown behind that other fat man, Churchill, ‘representing you might say the other half of the English people and English history’, as the broadcaster J. B. Priestley put it.
The task facing the Coalition, though simple, was hardly easy – hardly possible, some thought in May 1940. Churchill’s strength was that he did not pretend otherwise. Victory was the sole aim which he declared in his first speech to the Commons; ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat’ the sole means of achieving it. His own contribution to winning the war (as Attlee once put it) was mainly to talk about it. Radio meant that Churchill’s voice could reach virtually the whole nation – nine out of ten people were glued to the news – and he read this speech again on the BBC after the 9 o’clock news: the first of several that summer. Something between a growl and a lisp, his distinctive delivery was much imitated in the affectionate retailing of Churchill stories, many of them apocryphal. This was one sign of how effectively, despite his own lingering resentment against the BBC, his personality was projected through radio. In the heightened atmosphere of this crisis his elevated rhetoric, the only sort he knew, was happily matched to the level of events, saving Churchill from the bathos which his style had courted. In the 1930s his set pieces had often sounded dated; in 1940 his words sounded historic.
Or so enough people thought to give him a chance, against any rational assessment of the odds. Not that ordinary people were defeatist; indeed, according to opinion polls, never fewer than three-quarters of the population professed to expect victory. This stubborn populist mood, whether it is called instinctive or bloody-minded, was closer to Churchill’s outlook than the ostensibly better-informed views of sceptics in his own Government, faced with the snowballing collapse of the allied front in Europe, not to mention Mussolini’s entry into the war as Hitler’s jackal. From 10 May 1940 the German blitzkrieg swung into top gear, moving with breathtaking ease through the Low Countries and into northern France, where the British forces found their lines of supply – and retreat – under imminent threat. The swift collapse of France was both a cause and a consequence of the decision at the end of May to withdraw the British expeditionary force, a quarter of a million strong, to the channel port of Dunkirk. This was a humiliating reverse, redeemed only by the success of evacuation in saving almost all the British army (and 100,000 other troops, mainly French). Most troops were transported by the Navy, but this was supplemented by a flotilla of volunteers in small boats, which helped turn Dunkirk into a myth of national deliverance by plucky amateurs when mere professionalism had failed.
Churchill made desperate efforts to induce France to fight on, even talking of constitutional union between the two countries; but the spirit of the hour was sauve qui peut. For the French Government, this pointed to negotiating a peace which left the north under German occupation but the south under the collaborationist Vichy regime; only the stiff-necked General de Gaulle stood out with his Free French followers. For the British Government, Dunkirk demonstrated that defence of Britain was the priority. The next logical step in damage limitation was a negotiated peace which, however unpalatable, might salvage something from catastrophe. In the war cabinet Chamberlain and Halifax both wanted to explore this option; Churchill allowed that it might become necessary, under some other leader, at some other time. His own decision was to fight on; in this he was supported by the two Labour members. The war cabinet did not go back on this commitment, which was indeed the rationale of the Churchill Government.
If Germany were to mount a successful invasion, it would need to establish air superiority over the English Channel before the end of the summer. The relative strength of the two sides was largely determined by what was in the pipeline when Chamberlain left office. But Beaver-brook’s piratical methods in spurring greater efforts in aircraft production, seizing supplies as he needed them in violation of carefully laid plans, yielded short-term results in a situation where the short term might be decisive. He too was brought into the war cabinet.
In the decisive struggle for mastery in the air, Britain had two secret weapons. One was the crucial role played by superior British intelligence, which only came to be publicly appreciated well after the war. The other was what became known as radar. Originally the brainchild of the electrical engineer, Robert Watson Watt, this was a means of using short-wave radio signals to detect the approach of enemy aircraft. From 1935 the system had been developed by the Air Ministry, prompted by its scientific adviser, Sir Henry Tizard, the Rector of Imperial College, London. By September 1939 a chain of radar stations protected the south-eastern flank of Great Britain, thus allowing Fighter Command in 1940 to economize on reconnaissance patrols and to concentrate every available aeroplane on effective interception.
At the time the heroism of young fighter pilots in engaging the Luftwaffe, day by day above the fields of Kent, was what captured the imagination. It was Churchill’s best-remembered speeches which focused these images of 1940 and invested them with his own thrilling sense of history in the making. Rather than minimizing the threat of invasion, he had dramatized it, talking of fighting on the beaches. Once France was lost, it was his term, the Battle of Britain, which made sense of the strategic contest; and he had already projected himself into the future in telling his fellow members of ‘the British Empire and its Commonwealth’ that this would stand as ‘their finest hour’. Certainly many worse ones were yet to come.
In July an opinion poll showed popular approval of Churchill standing at 88 per cent; this figure never fell below 78 per cent until May 1945. He was accepted with all his idiosyncrasies, ostentatiously smoking cigars big enough for any plutocrat, guzzling too much brandy – points which German propaganda fruitlessly put to the British people, who instead joked about Winston as a folk-hero. National unity, in the face of the grimmest threat the country had ever faced, pushed aside ordinary party politics; yet it is hardly too much to say that 1940 brought a political revolution.
The decision to fight on under Churchill, even though Britain and the Dominions now stood alone, was a standing repudiation of Chamberlain and the National Government, its policies and its personnel alike.
Three left-wing journalists from the Beaverbrook stable – one was Michael Foot, a later leader of the Labour Party – seized their chance to publish a polemic of genius, Guilty Men (1940), which gave the indictment its classic form. The eponymous guilty men were held responsible for the country’s present peril: Baldwin for putting electoral popularity ahead of the need for rearmament; Chamberlain for truckling to Hitler; others of the ‘old gang’ for supporting them – Halifax, Simon, Hoare and the rest. Beaverbrook’s role was passed over in silence; so were the inconsistencies of Churchill and the left. This was, in short, a piece of selective myth-making about appeasement, condemned in retrospect as it had never been at the time, providing a story on which supporters of Churchill and the left could complicitly settle for the next twenty years.1
BLOOD AND TEARS
How could Churchill think victory possible? Nobody supposed that this war would be over by Christmas – except on Hitler’s terms, of course. A negotiated peace of any other kind was a chimera, attracting only isolated individuals at the time and a few revisionist historians later; it was simply not on offer from the Nazis. In the mid twentieth century, there was no way of preserving the British Empire on the cheap (Chamberlain’s illusion at Munich); or indeed at all (Churchill’s ultimate disappointment). Instead Britain’s stand in 1940 was to be the means of checking what Churchill, surely accurately, called ‘a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime’, and of rallying a worldwide coalition against it. Newspaper readers were in for a six-year course in elementary geography, learning to find on the map a string of place-names, milestones to a reshaped world: Narvik, Dunkirk, Placentia Bay, Pearl Harbor, Singapore, El Alamein, Stalingrad, Anzio, Arnhem, Yalta, Belsen, Hiroshima.
First, defeat had to be staved off. The line was held in the Battle or Britain; by mid-September it was clear that Hitler would not launch an invasion. He really had missed the bus, though Churchill refrained from putting it that way. Next it was a matter of holding on until, as in the First World War, the USA was brought into the conflict. This hardly looked likely so long as the war was seen as a defence of the British Empire; though there were signs that the reporting of the courage which ordinary British people showed in response to the Nazi threat was producing a more favourable and – above all – democratic image. British propaganda obviously stressed this theme. Roosevelt’s re-election as president in November 1940, for an unprecedented third term, was a hopeful sign; he was ready to give Britain sympathy, though hard cash, let alone armed assistance, was another matter.
Financial caution was now thrown to the winds, the sterling balances were raided, overseas investments were sold off. The vital support of the USA was assured when Britain traded her remaining assets, strategic as much as economic, for war supplies. Churchill called the Lend-Lease agreement of March 1941 ‘the most unsordid act in the history of any nation’, but it was not, as it turned out, the most unprofitable. Since they held most of the cards, the Americans inevitably got the best of the deal economically.1 Churchill was surely right to be gracious about it, however, not only because this was tactful, but because Lend-Lease was simply essential to British survival. It secured an open-ended guarantee of supplies. Churchill and Roosevelt met aboard a warship off the Newfoundland coast (Placentia Bay) in August 1941 and issued the Atlantic Charter. Common post-war aims were stated in vague and lofty terms; the telling point was that the USA, though non-belligerent, was hardly neutral.
Britain’s traditional wartime role was as the paymaster of allies who actually shouldered the biggest share of the fighting. In the American century, this was one of many roles usurped by the USA, and it was Britain which became the client state. With Lend-Lease able to substitute imports from the USA, ordinary British production could be run down, or diverted into war uses, enabling a high level of military mobilization to be achieved (at a price to be paid later, of course). Until 1938 British armed forces had totalled under 400,000. By 1940 over 2 million men were serving (some women too): by 1942 4 million, and in 1944–5 around 5 million – about two out of five men of military age. These were larger numbers, and for longer, than in the First World War; and more of them lived to tell the tale. In exposed positions the carnage was terrible enough – for fighter pilots and the aircrew of bombers, for sailors escorting convoys, for soldiers storming the Normandy beaches. A total of 360,000 British nationals died; but this was markedly fewer than Germany suffered, while the Russian losses were to run into unnumbered millions, leaving traumatic scars which were simply not part of the post-war British experience.
In the first three years of the war, indeed, more British civilians were killed than soldiers, a telling demonstration of the contrast with the First World War, when slaughter was largely confined to the trenches. Now Blighty itself was in the front line. Everyone was issued with a gas mask. Bombing of the great cities had long been expected. This was the aspect of modern warfare which made its prospect so terrible, with predictions of a total breakdown of civilized life. The ports of Plymouth and Portsmouth suffered first. What hit London on 7 September 1940, when the Germans began fifty-eight consecutive nights of bombing, was thoroughly unpleasant for all, fatal for some, devastating for those who lost their families and homes. But it did not lead to general demoralization, still less a quick collapse. ‘The Blitz’ was thus a misnomer; it did not work like lightning at all. The real lesson was that a strategy of bombing relied on attrition as much as trench warfare had. In mid-October a Luftwaffe officer told Goebbels: ‘London is going to be our Verdun of the air.’
As in the First World War, however, deadlock did not inspire a magic remedy; and the defiant sentiment that ‘London can take it’ was not made to yield a strategic insight about the ineffectiveness of indiscriminate bombing. The RAF’s role thus shifted by stages from defence, through fighters in the Battle of Britain, to offence through bombers. Air Marshal Harris was one vigorous champion of a bombing strategy, which simultaneously enhanced the importance of Bomber Command and offered the only means of hitting back against Germany. ‘Bomber Harris’ thus appealed to Churchill’s instincts rather than his intellect. Though both sides denied it, simple revenge was one motive – Cologne for Canterbury – and though London largely escaped the attention of the Luftwaffe after the winter of 1940–41, other British cities were hit. They too showed that they could take it. This did not prevent Britain squandering resources – precious materials, even more precious men – on perilous ‘thousand-bomber’ raids on German cities. US intervention was to reinforce not only allied airpower but the same line of thinking on strategic bombing. The destruction of Dresden at the end of the land war in 1945, wreaking death and destruction in an inferno disproportionate to any military objective, posed a disturbing moral dilemma.
The Navy took up where it had left off in 1918, fighting off U-boats to keep the Atlantic shipping lanes open. Churchill adopted the Germans’ phrase, Battle of the Atlantic, in March 1941, when shipping losses had reached half a million tons a month, approaching 1917 levels. Already Britain was dependent on supplies from the USA – if they could get through. In fact American neutrality gave some shield and by the end of 1941 Atlantic losses had been halved; whereas once the USA became a belligerent the U-boats were uninhibited. Merchant seamen faced terrible odds; 30,000 died in all. During the month of March 1942 over 800,000 tons of shipping were lost – an unsustainable haemorrhage. The left-wing Daily Mirror published a cartoon of a seaman on a raft, with the caption: ‘The price of petrol has been increased by one penny – official.’ It is a mark of the Government’s jumpiness that this sobering comment was the excuse for a threat to ban the Mirror. As late as November 1942, total allied losses again exceeded 800,000 tons in a month, before the rate was halved in the spring, and halved again by the next autumn.
Unlike the war in the air or at sea, British troops had it easy – for the moment. True, once Italy was in the war, it launched an attack on Egypt. The Italians were repulsed by British and Australian troops under the command of General Wavell, who promptly retired to Cairo – leaving an Australian garrison exposed at Tobruk. This sweeping victory at Benghazi at the end of 1940 was was not to be matched throughout the next two years, in any theatre of operations, much to Churchill’s impatience.
Churchill was not only prime minister, chairing a defence committee of the war cabinet which on the whole left the conduct of the war to him: he had also appointed himself Minister of Defence, which bypassed the departmental responsibilities of the three service ministers, and gave him a seat on the joint chiefs of staff committee, alongside the military commanders themselves. In this role, Churchill was not really the architect of British strategy: more like an irrepressibly restless and opinionated patron of a succession of hand-picked architects whose professional judgement he would, at the end of the day, respect. But first he needed to be persuaded in the cut and thrust of argument, preferably deep into the night. The literate but inarticulate Wavell, who would not enter into this game, was found wanting, and was eventually packed off to India, clearing the way for other generals to make their mark in the North African desert. By contrast, from 1941 the prime minister found the perfect foil for his over-bright ideas in Sir Alan Brooke, the (frequently exasperated) chief of the general staff for the rest of the war.
There was little that Britain could do to turn the course of the war in 1941, except hope that its enemies would make mistakes. Luckily they did. Thwarted in the west, Hitler turned east and invaded Russia in June, bringing the Soviet Union into the war. Churchill opportunely seized upon this windfall, ready to welcome any ally and let bygones be bygones. At home the ideological implications were resolved with a little discreet trimming of the official line; and the Communist Party of Great Britain was happy to call off its internally divisive denuciations of an imperialist war, only to begin insistent demands for a second front in western Europe. Meanwhile it was left to the Red Army, in a blood-soaked rearguard action, to hold the line against the hitherto irresistible German forces. Britain’s other stroke of luck was undoubtedly the surprise Japanese attack upon the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, bringing American involvement in a Japanese war, which Britain promptly entered; and as a bonus prompting Hitler and Mussolini to declare war on the USA.
Some kind of Japanese attack had not been wholly unsuspected by British intelligence, which – in one of the war’s most effectively guarded secrets – had achieved partial access to the German system of codes (known as Enigma). This does not mean that Churchill knew in advance of the strike at Pearl Harbor, still less that he risked compromising himself by concealing vital information from Roosevelt. No British deception could have succeeded so well as that of the Japanese. Once allied with the USA, Britain shared the Enigma secret. The code-breakers at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire provided daily decrypts which captured the amateur enthusiasm of the prime minister and in the hands of more expert analysis allowed enemy intentions to be read.
At many critical points this gave the allied commanders an advantage which may well have shortened the war by a year. Another Anglo-American secret, which was to have a similar effect, was the joint development of a technology for nuclear weapons, which could now be pursued in the safety of the New Mexico desert.
By December 1941, with the two superpowers committed against Germany, Churchill knew that his faith in final victory had been vindicated. But not, of course, at once or on the terms he would have liked. Churchill spent the rest of the war making the best of a bad job, which was at any rate better than the worst-case situation he had inherited. Relations with Stalin were henceforth important. The insistent Russian demand was that their allies open a second front in western Europe. Though the Americans showed some interest, any thought of a landing in France seemed premature to those with memories of the Somme. The ill-conceived Dieppe raid in August 1942, in which Canadian troops were massacred in attempting to storm well-defended beaches, reinforced caution. For the rest of the year, the Red Army’s bitter resistance at Stalingrad – their Somme, their Verdun – became the focus of vicarious awe and anxiety. If Russia had to bear the brunt of the war, it was no surprise that it would claim the rewards in eastern Europe, once the Germans were thrown back. By the end of the year this had been achieved, and thereafter, with Stalin increasingly able to call the shots, Churchill had to swallow more than one lesson in appeasement, especially over Poland.
Churchill’s relations with Roosevelt were more than important: they were crucial. Churchill invested his own eloquence and charm in winning Roosevelt’s friendship, but knew it could not be an equal friendship. Decisions on the conduct of the war, now that it was winnable, slipped increasingly into American hands, with the British gamely talking of a special relationship as their claim to a privileged, albeit subordinate, position. With Germany out of the way, Britain’s position as the greatest wholly European power was assured. Other allies, with their exiled governments in London, had a nuisance value, especially France, with its national honour jealously guarded by de Gaulle and his Free French and Resistance supporters. Lecturing de Gaulle (fruitlessly) on the appropriate demeanour for ex-Great Powers to adopt, Churchill confided that he woke up every morning thinking of how he could please President Roosevelt. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill might be spoken of as the Big Three; it was really Two-and-a-Half.
The USA agreed to giving the European war priority over the defeat of Japan. This was good news for Britain, not so reassuring for Australia, which was painfully discovering that a direct Pacific partner-ship with the USA was the future path of realism. Japan’s blitzkrieg replicated the successes of Germany’s. The fall of Singapore in February 1942 was as traumatic in this theatre as Dunkirk had been – and without the compensation of evacuation of the British and Australian defenders, left to suffer in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. If this brought humiliation for the British, for the Australians it brought the prospect of invasion and a revelation of the impotence of imperial defence.
Churchill held himself to blame – and he was not alone in doing so. Moreover, following the loss of Benghazi to the German Afrika Korps under General Rommel, Tobruk fell in June 1942, again with prisoners. This was the low point of Churchill’s leadership; as many people were now dissatisfied with the conduct of the war as satisfied. Yet his own popularity was hardly dented; what he needed, as he well knew, was a victory in the field. This is what General Montgomery, in command of the Eighth Army, provided at El Alamein in October. Rommel was decisively defeated, and his crack German troops finally shown to be no more capable of holding North Africa than the Italians whom they had reinforced. Montgomery did not snatch victory against the odds, that was not his style; instead he had husbanded superior resources until he was confident of maximum success – with minimum casualties. The fact that he was no chateau general, instead living among his men, dressed like them in a beret, was one reason why ‘Monty’ became the British military hero. Coinciding with Stalingrad (the real turning point in the east) and preparing the way for Anglo-American landings against the Vichy position in North Africa, El Alamein had a decisive impact on morale. In England the church bells were suddenly ringing, while Churchill could now stop wringing his hands.
‘It is not the beginning of the end but it may be the end of the beginning,’ Churchill declared in November 1942. With the Mediterranean cleared, landings in Sicily began an Italian campaign in the summer of 1943. The fall of Mussolini, and Italy’s change of sides in September, still left Italy stubbornly defended by German troops. In January 1944 the allied landings at Anzio, behind enemy lines, took the war to mainland Europe but brought no quick or easy results. It was now Germany which stood alone and defiant in Europe. While Stalin controlled the eastern front, a second front in the west was finally opened with the allied landings in Normandy in June 1944. Montgomery, leaving the Eighth Army fighting its way from Italy to Austria, was given command of the British ground forces but was (uneasily) subordinate to the American commander, General Eisenhower, reflecting the fact that the USA provided most of the troops. Indeed, over 1½ million GIs had been stationed in England, sometimes for prolonged periods, in preparation for D-Day.1
Eisenhower succeeded in landing 2 million troops by the end of June, initially on the beaches, later through the channel ports. But his forces had no easy passage. Moreover D-Day signalled new dangers for British civilians, since the Germans had now developed the V1, a flying bomb; and in August 1944 came the V2, a rocket. Whereas the V1 was not too difficult to bring down, at least in daylight, the V2 could not be intercepted, thus increasing the pressure on the allies to capture the launching sites in the Low Countries. The airborne operation at Arnhem in September 1944 was a gamble for quick victory, aimed at securing a bridge on the Rhine; but it proved to be, as one British officer presciently put it, ‘a bridge too far’. There were to be no short cuts. Attempts to force the pace of the allied advance brought a bloody reminder of the tenacity of the German Army, shown in early 1945 by its ability to sustain a counter-offensive in the Ardennes against the Americans – to Montgomery’s personal glee, but to the geopolitical benefit of Stalin, who thus had his chance to reach Berlin first.
When the Big Three met at Yalta, in the Crimea, in February 1945, to settle the shape of the post-war world, the war was not yet over, even though its final outcome was no longer in doubt. Any decisions about the fate of Poland had to be premised on the fact that Stalin already dominated eastern Europe. As long as he kept his hands off other countries, especially Greece, Churchill had shown himself ready to wink at a fairly cynical carve-up of spheres of influence. Free elections were the subject of free pledges, to be honoured later (or not at all, as it turned out, in the Soviet-dominated satellite countries). The ambiguous agreements concluded at Yalta thus left obscure which countries were, in the end, to be ‘betrayed’ and which ‘saved’. While the Big Three (shortly to be depleted by Roosevelt’s death) played old-world power politics, in the new world the more appealing side of the allies’ war aims was displayed through the foundation of the United Nations Organization at a conference in San Francisco, where Eden traded in his League of Nations credentials for the new model. But only in the spring did the allied armies finally close on the Reich – the allied advance from the west, the Red Army from the east, the British Eighth Army from the south. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker and the German forces surrendered in May 1945.
Victory in Europe had been achieved; the flags were hung out in streets up and down Britain. Two sobering developments clouded the jubilation of VE Day. One was the revelation of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. The starving inmates were a spectacle for which British troops liberating Belsen had not been prepared; but soon the images of these gaunt survivors became all too familiar through press photographs and newsreels. And many, above all the Jewish population, had not survived at all. The rumours which had first seeped out about a systematic extermination policy had been difficult to credit, especially in view of the overblown atrocity stones which the British had put about in the First World War. From the end of 1942, however, British propaganda was presenting specific, authenticated allegations about Nazi extermination camps. For all that, seeing was believing.
A second shock that came soon enough lay in the way the Japanese war ended. At VE Day in May 1945 it was still estimated that the war in Asia might last another eighteen months. For Britain’s ‘forgotten army’ in Burma this was galling; for prisoners of war life-threatening; though for the Government it meant some practical relief through a period of phased transition from war to peace. All of this was blown away by the decision to use the nuclear device, which was now ready, against Japanese cities. When a new American president, Truman, consulted with a new British prime minister, Attlee, there was no disagreement on using the new weapon. On 6 August 1945 Hiroshima was bombed, with a devastating loss of life; a few days later a second atomic bomb hit Nagasaki. The immediate result was a Japanese surrender. The Second World War was over and the nuclear age had begun.
WHOSE GOOD WAR?
There was general agreement that this was a ‘good war’. No one now defended the Nazis; no one thought Britain guilty of starting the war – guilty of not starting it sooner, if anything. Few saw how Hitler could have been stopped otherwise; many pacifists in the First World War took a different line in the Second, though conscientious objectors to conscription felt both less impassioned and less persecuted. Moreover many individuals had a good war. The camaraderie of the forces was, for most men who served, not seared by the sordid traumas of trench warfare; equally, fewer took their medals or joined the British Legion afterwards. The war was a significant force for social mobility; for the lucky ones, it was an induced career-break, with opportunities to develop new skills, and allowances made for returning soldiers in achieving professional recognition. Furthermore, it was a good war for those institutions which adapted to its pressures: for Whitehall and Westminster, for the monarchy and the BBC, for the TUC and the Labour Party.
Whether it should be called ‘a people’s war’ – a term that came into use in 1940–41 – depends on how ambitiously that claim is meant. It was partly a description of the blurring of obvious class distinctions brought by a sense of shared crisis. Appeals to ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ were subsequently debased by reiteration; but in the summer of 1940 the authenticity of this emotion can hardly be dismissed. Few stood on their dignity when crammed together in air-raid shelters; queues were a great leveller; there was a common topic of conversation in war news; smart clothes were hardly patriotic in the make-do-and-mend atmosphere. Evacuation of deprived inner-city children, sometimes displacing the comfortable classes from spacious homes, was a shock all round. For the upper classes – Harold Nicolson’s diary brings this out nicely – a whole way of life collapsed; and some of them ruefully welcomed it. Locking the iron gates to the gardens in privileged London squares was suddenly intolerable – and impossible once the iron had gone as scrap for munitions drives. Saving for victory, digging for victory, sewing for victory – this was a war in which everyone could ‘go to it’ and do their bit on ‘the home front’. This went a long way to bridging the gulf in experience and memories which was a legacy of the First World War.
‘A people’s war’, in a more ideologically ambitious sense, meant a radical agenda, seeking to fulfil dreams of a popular front, to win the war by and for socialism. This was the domestic implication of the repudiation of the guilty men and their regime of outdated privilege. Conversely, the left’s indulgence towards Churchill in 1940–41 was based on his obvious readiness to subordinate all other considerations to winning the war. He had not been afraid of ‘war socialism’ in the First World War; nor was he now, though he demanded that every collectivist measure be justified as genuinely for the war. Taunted about his anti-communist record by his private secretary on the eve of the invasion of Russia, Churchill ‘replied that he had only one single purpose – the destruction of Hitler – and his life was much simplified thereby’.
It is not too paradoxical to say that, while the patriots became unexpectedly left-wing, the left became unexpectedly patriotic. George Orwell, whose tract The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) captures this moment well, wrote that the people had picked a leader in Churchill, ‘who was at any rate able to grasp that wars are not won without fighting’, and that later they might pick another, ‘who can grasp that only Socialist nations can fight effectively’. England, ‘the most class-ridden nation under the sun’, was nonetheless a family, with ‘its private language and its common memories’, and ready enough to close ranks at the approach of an enemy – it was ‘a family with the wrong members in control’. The people’s war did not effect the radical changes which people like Orwell anticipated in the winter of 1940–41, but for him Britain was still ‘my country, right or left’.
What happened was that the groundswell making for a people’s war was captured and contained – not simply thwarted – by the surprising resilience of famous British institutions, shaken rigid in 1940, flexible under pressure subsequently. The Times, for example, a newspaper so august that it had often been quoted as the voice of the Government, started printing leading articles about social justice as a British war aim, prompting one Tory MP to call it ‘the threepenny edition of the Daily Worker’. Orwell was one of many left-wingers used by the BBC (an ambiguous phrase, not lost upon him). Whitehall weathered the advent of new masters and new imperatives; Labour ministers eventually became the biggest fans of Britain’s impartial and efficient civil service. There was an affinity of interest here since Labour’s statist policies required more bureaucrats; the post-war civil service, at around 400,000, was three times as big as pre-war.
Big government – of the people, for the people, but not actually by the people – was the theme of the Second World War. Government took on an emergency welfare responsibility with far-reaching effects – milk for babies, a vitamins scheme which gave children concentrated orange juice and cod-liver oil. The effect is difficult to quantify; but the fact that the indices for infant mortality maintained their long-term improvement in the later years of the war is indicative. The claim by Lord Woolton, the businessman brought in as Minister of Food, that the nation had ‘never been in better health for years’ was not nonsense. This seems paradoxical in an era of shortages and queues and regimentation. True, food rationing was the most obvious sign of privation – yet also of ‘fair shares’ in allocating scarce resources. Woolton’s success was built upon sound administration but also a shrewd grasp of public relations (which later made him a very successful chairman of the Conservative Party). He thought that the public would either laugh or cry about rationing; the publicity campaigns of the Ministry of Food therefore enlisted wry humour to leaven the unappetizing national loaf. ‘Points’ in ration books provided a fairly sophisticated alternative currency, capable of substitution on a range of purchases. Those who could afford higher quality goods were better able to manipulate this system, and likewise to buy meals in restaurants, where restrictions were less onerous; but the rich actually experienced a bigger drop in their standard of living than the poor, who had always been rationed by price.
Moreover, the grosser inequalities in purchasing power were eroded at both ends, partly spontaneously, partly by design. More steeply progressive taxation of incomes brought a standard rate of 10s in the pound (50 per cent) from 1942–6, double the pre-war level. For those on lower incomes, a basic diet – albeit humdrum – was not priced out of their reach once food subsidies had been introduced in 1941, stabilizing the official cost-of-living index at 30 per cent above its level at the outbreak of war (20 per cent for food only). Manual workers who were earning £3.50 for a 48-hour week in 1938 were earning £6 pounds for a 53-hour week by 1943. Even allowing for the intervening price rises, this was a big improvement – for those in work. Those who missed out were now the men on military pay, and their families on separation allowances, rather than the unemployed. The number out of work in the UK, still 1 million in 1940, subsequently plummeted to 100,000.
What had transformed the economy was the enormous growth in government expenditure, from £1 billion1 in 1939 to £4 billion in 1941 and £6 billion in 1945 – at its peak around two-thirds of the national income. This mopped up unemployment, just as Keynes had always said it would. Indeed, with a stimulus to demand far greater than he had ever envisaged, the macroeconomic problem had dramatically changed its character – not mass unemployment but inflationary pressure. His General Theory (1936), however, in principle allowed for both. Keynes, as usual, had a plan, initially proposed in his pamphlet How to Pay for the War. He proposed using the fiscal system as a makeweight or balancing factor, adjusting the level of total disposable income to the level of the total resources available for it to purchase, and thus avoiding the inflation caused by an excess of spending power. This was a macroeconomic approach to policy-making, essentially symmetrical in its application, either for stimulating demand or restraining it.
The difference 1940 made was that Keynes was suddenly persona grata at the Treasury, where he was installed for the rest of the war as adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. An adaptation of his strategy for restraining the inflationary effects of excess demand was adopted in the 1941 Budget: through food subsidies and through tax increases, both disguised and undisguised. The disguise was the scheme of ‘post-war credits’, used to withhold compulsory savings. The extension of income tax to newly prosperous workers soon brought the innovation of a pay-as-you-earn (PAYE) system to collect it. Above all, the 1941 Budget was the first to disclose its macroeconomic impact, by presenting experimental national-income estimates, not just accounts for the Government’s own revenue and expenditure. These were tools of economic management on which the Treasury, under Sir Richard Hopkins, adroitly seized. In danger of sinking with the guilty men, widely accused of penny-pinching which had left Britain unprepared, the Treasury instead strapped on a Keynesian lifebelt which took it buoyantly into new waters.
Other historic British institutions regained esteem, partly through a flattering contrast with the evils of totalitarianism. Did not a constitutional monarchy hold together the British Commonwealth, which alone had defied Nazi Germany? The new King, George VI, was a shy man, a heavy cigarette smoker at a time when this showed the common touch (though it shortened his reign). He was much fortified by the strong personality of his consort, Queen Elizabeth; with their two teenage daughters, the royal family projected a wholesome and dutiful image. The King was a family man with his own ration book; by comparison, his elder brother, now Duke of Windsor, was just an exiled playboy. The royal family stayed in London during the Blitz and visited the bombed-out residents of the working-class East End; when the opulent West End was eventually bombed too, and Buckingham Palace itself hit, the Luftwaffe unwittingly reinforced the social solidarity of the capital and completed the rehabilitation of the British monarchy.
Parliament, often dismissed as a mere talking-shop in the 1930s, was treated with elaborate deference by Churchill, who exploited its sense of theatre in his ripe orations. The medium was the message in conveying the primacy of democracy, Westminster-style, as a war aim. Again, Nazi bombing helped fix an image, when the chamber of the House of Commons was destroyed in 1941; a famous photograph, showing Churchill brooding over its smouldering ruins, was worth more than anything staged by the Ministry of Information.
The BBC had a good war. Reith, who had already left before the outbreak of war, found his tenure as Minister of Information terminated in 1940 by Churchill, who resented his own exclusion from broadcasting in the 1930s. Now Churchill made up for lost air-time; his broadcasts after the 9 o’clock news were listened to by half the adult population in 1941. But so were the ‘Postscripts’, given in the same slot by J. B. Priestley, whose reputation was transformed from that of a solid north-country writer to that of a major media personality. He offered a vernacular, populist and broadly left-wing counterbalance to Churchill – with such impact that the BBC’s failure to renew his contract in 1941 provoked an outcry from the left. Though it is true that Priestley’s gift for raising war propaganda to the level of patriotic myth was little appreciated by the Government, the decision does not seem to have been the result of political pressure, as was alleged at the time. The BBC’s reputation for impartiality brought it wide – indeed worldwide – prestige, as listeners tuned in to London to hear the truth about the war. The whole truth? Of course not; and there was more Government pressure behind the scenes than legend had it. Still, it was not a bad record for the official news service of a country at war.
Moreover, the popular appeal of radio was secured by a further relaxation of severe Reithian standards of taste, when the single Home Service of 1939–40 was supplemented by the Forces (later Light) Programme. The singer Vera Lynn, ‘the Forces’ sweetheart’, acquired an enormous following. The misgivings of the Corporation’s Board of Governors – ‘How can men fit themselves for battle with these debilitating tunes in their ears?’ – had to be overcome before the BBC was enabled to make its biggest contribution to the war effort: that of cheering up overworked people already stuffed with overworked propaganda clichés. It was ITMA, the anarchic, fast-paced comedy programme inspired by Tommy Handley, which did this best. It created a cast of characters – like Mrs Mopp, the charlady, asking, ‘Can I do you now, sir?’ – whose catchphrases everyone knew. These became national institutions of a sort, albeit not the sort Reith had planned.
The BBC also found that its audience for classical music and drama doubled. Beethoven, a German, posthumously provided the V-for-Victory theme in the first bar of his Fifth Symphony, much played. At the National Gallery in London, the pianist Dame Myra Hess gave lunchtime recitals which proved a big draw. This incipient interest in the arts was fostered bureaucratically through the establishment of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, later the Arts Council, with Keynes as its part-time chairman, wheedling modest grants from the Treasury even during the years of greatest economic stringency.
There was a parallel wartime demand for all kinds of literature, which was met partly by public libraries and partly by publishers, especially of paperbacks. Penguin was the name to conjure with. The brainchild of Allen Lane, Penguin Books had since 1935 tapped a new market both for reprints from hardback editions and for specially commissioned paper-bound books – usually sold at sixpence in a wide variety of outlets. Penguin Specials, quickly published on current topics, exploited the interest in politics and international affairs; the bias was generally towards the left, though free of the (ill-dissimulated) party line of the Left Book Club. Penguin negotiated a good deal with the Government under wartime paper restrictions, and its publications circulated widely, not least in the armed forces by arrangement with the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, with which Penguin personnel were closely associated. ABCA’s mission to stimulate discussion of current affairs encountered occasional accusations of left-wing bias, not to mention indifference from cynical troops; but once reconstruction became a live topic, it played an important role in shaping informed opinion.
The established institutions of the Labour Movement became the beneficiaries of the increased economic bargaining power of labour and the political salience of progressive ideas. War expanded trade-union membership by 50 per cent, to over 9 million by 1947. The unions gained a wholly new power and status: signalled by the pre-eminence of Bevin. His achievement was the extraordinary effectiveness of British mobilization, monitored through an annual ‘manpower budget’. Bevin used conscription not simply to raise big armies but to put the right men in the forces and keep the right ones working in the mines and at the factory bench; moreover young single women were used as a mobile reserve in filling vacancies, while married women were brought into jobs near their homes. Bevin met criticism early in the war for the sparing way in which he exercised his powers for direction of labour; he appealed to his record in vindication. It is true that until 1944, when a dispute broke out in the Kent coalfield, industrial disputes accounted for only one-third as many days lost as in the First World War and, despite a tight labour market, had been held to the same level as the slump years of the early 1930s. The Ministry of Labour would only issue essential work orders once it was satisfied that factories met welfare criteria along trade-union lines. It was Bevin’s Catering Wages Bill in February 1943, presented as necessary to the war effort, resented by backbench Tories as another piece of socialism by stealth, which occasioned the second significant parliamentary split in the Coalition.
The first – to which it was retaliation – had been in the previous month, when the Commons debated the Beveridge Report. What Beveridge deliberately did in his official report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, was to provide a comprehensive blueprint for post-war welfare policy. What he accidentally achieved was an impact granted by lucky timing, for his report was published on 1 December 1942, within weeks of the victory at El Alamein which so relieved British anxiety about the course of the war. Vague, uplifting rhetoric about war aims was not the point; all the evidence suggests that people wanted something practical and achievable, consolidating the welfare gains of the war. This Beveridge offered. With thirty years’ experience as a social administrator behind him, he showed how poverty could be abolished through a comprehensive and integrated scheme of social insurance. To this he added a plan for child allowances; and he made two further assumptions, necessary to his scheme but not part of it. One was that a national health service would be created; the other that mass unemployment would not be permitted to recur.
The Beveridge Report became an unexpected best-seller, selling over 600,000 copies; a short version was prepared for the forces (though then temporarily withdrawn). Nineteen out of twenty people had soon heard of the Beveridge Plan; it was widely noted abroad; its author became a major public figure; all talk was suddenly focused on post-war reconstruction. Meanwhile, the Government grumpily observed – Attlee and Bevin as much as Churchill – the war had to be won. Hence the cautious reception which the Government gave the Beveridge Plan in the Commons; hence a backbench revolt by nearly a 100 Labour MPs, demanding a more urgent commitment to it. This proved to be a political watershed. Thereafter support for a post-war coalition dropped away; and opinion polls showed Labour well clear of the Conservatives if there were to be an election. The effect of Beveridge was to channel the force for domestic change behind a plan for remodelling the existing National Insurance scheme, as first instituted in 1911.
In the last part of the war, the Labour Party gave institutional form to the unfocused radical impulses of 1940–41. The electoral truce between the parties had not eliminated all contests in by-elections. Labour MPs were replaced with little trouble, most without a contest (though Labour lost Motherwell to the Scottish Nationalists in April 1945). But from 1942 Conservative vacancies produced a crop of unofficial left-wing challengers; not only did they take four seats from the Conservatives between March and June 1942, which could be blamed on Singapore and Tobruk: the subsequent improvement in the war news did not, post-Beveridge, translate into a revival of Conservative fortunes. Candidates of the Common Wealth Party, set up by an idealistic ex-Liberal MP, Sir Richard Acland, achieved by-election upsets during the last two years of the war – clearly because it offered the only opportunity to vote against the now discredited Conservative Party. The full significance of this was not appreciated at the time, and opinion polls were largely ignored; but the signs of a widespread leftward shift are unmistakable in retrospect. The Communist Party, with its close links to the Soviet Union, enjoyed a limited revival; but the impressive successes of the Red Army were read as a more general vindication of planning – both a catchword and a catch-all at this time. Whatever its diverse origins, virtually all this support fell into the lap of the Labour Party, the residuary legatee of Priestley, Beveridge, Keynes, Acland, Stalin and other distinguished non-members.
VE Day signalled the victory which Churchill had promised. His own suggestion of continuing the Coalition until VJ Day was unacceptable to Labour, and the Coalition came to an end in May 1945, its mission completed. Churchill formed a Conservative Government, which he hoped would be returned at the forthcoming general election. Such expectations were widely held, since many people remembered Lloyd George’s triumph in 1918; Labour relied on voters remembering what happened next, a constant theme in its propaganda. Churchill reverted to type as a narrowly partisan campaigner. Afterwards, one of his extravagant claims, that the same Labour colleagues with whom he had worked for five years against Hitler were about to introduce their own Gestapo into Britain, was blamed for losing votes. But, according to the opinion polls, the Conservatives actually gained support during the campaign; in the spring of 1945 they were 20 per cent behind Labour and closed the gap to 8 per cent on polling day in July.
The fact was that, in retrospect, the Conservative Party’s pre-war record on unemployment and appeasement inspired little confidence in their professions of support for the Coalition’s reconstruction agenda. Churchill’s reception suggests that he remained personally popular at home – as a great war leader, at least. The reactions of some members of the armed forces may well have been more sceptical. All the indications are that their votes, cast in special polling stations around the world under better arrangements than in 1918, went heavily to Labour. But the breadth of Labour’s constituency, putting a clear 10 per cent on its pre-war share of the vote, was the key to victory. In London Morrison had courageously staked his credibility on an appeal for cross-class support by standing for the socially mixed suburban seat of Lewisham East, which he won for Labour. The Liberals polled under 10 per cent nationally; even Beveridge failed to win a seat. As the results came in – three weeks after polling day to allow for the forces’ participation – it became clear that Labour had gained nearly 250 seats from its opponents, giving it a clear majority for the first time.