It is said that war is a succession of periods of boredom interspersed by the occasional moment of terror. As between “slow-time” and “tank-time” there are few gradations in combat. This may be the experience for many among the rank and file. Not for Churchill. He welcomed constant action.
War almost never happens that way. Rather, there is a cycle of gains, losses, and frustration, right up to the very end and even through the aftermath. War may later appear, as it does in Churchill’s histories, as the unveiling of a heroic plot, reaching a climax. In the moment, however, there was adversity of a different order: less a contest of strength than, increasingly, one of endurance, reminding us of Rudyard Kipling’s advice about dealing with triumph and disaster: “And treat those two impostors just the same.”
There were three general phases of this war: the period from fall 1939 to spring 1940, or the Phony War; the year from June 1940 to June 1941 when Britain fought for its survival, more or less alone; and the subsequent phase beginning with the German attack on the Soviet Union and lasting to the end in 1945.
Near the middle of the second phase, Churchill and the king were amazed, emboldened, yet deeply chastened, by their ordeal. The king, staying at Sandringham, sent his prime minister his
best wishes for a happier New Year, & may we see the end of this conflict in sight during the coming year [1941]. I am already feeling better for my sojourn here, it is doing me good, & the change of scene & outdoor exercise is acting as a good tonic. But I feel that it is wrong for me to be away from my place of duty, when everybody else is carrying on. However I must look upon it as medicine & hope to come back refreshed in mind & body, for renewed efforts against the enemy.
I do hope & trust you were able to have a little relaxation at Xmas with all your arduous work. I have so much admired all you have done during the last seven months as my Prime Minister, & I have so enjoyed our talks together during our weekly luncheons. I hope they will continue on my return as I do look forward to them so much. . . .
It was indeed kind of you to help me with my broadcast on Xmas day, & very many thanks for the Siren Suit.
Churchill replied with a warm yet formal tone that had by now become typical:
I am honoured by Your Majesty’s most gracious letter. The kindness with which Your Majesty and the Queen have treated me since I became First Lord and still more since I became Prime Minister has been a continuous source of strength and encouragement during the vicissitudes of this fierce struggle for life. I have already served Your Majesty’s father and grandfather for a good many years as a Minister of the Crown, and my father and grandfather served Queen Victoria, but Your Majesty’s treatment of me has been intimate and generous to a degree that I had never deemed possible.
Indeed, sir, we have passed through days and weeks as trying and as momentous as any in the history of the English Monarchy, and even now there stretches before us a long, forbidding road. I have been greatly charmed by our weekly luncheons in poor old bombed-battered Buckingham Palace, and to feel that in Your Majesty and the Queen there flames the spirit that will never be daunted by peril, nor wearied by unrelenting toil. This has drawn the Throne and the people more closely together than was ever before recorded, and Your Majesties are more beloved by all classes and conditions than any of the princes of the past. I am indeed proud that it should have fallen to my lot and duty to stand at Your Majesty’s side as First Minister in such a climax of the British story.
—
The spring of 1941 came hard. Churchill was more depressed than usual. The only bright side was his conviction that the course of the war would soon be decided. But the mood shifted by midsummer. One of his favorite phrases—“Keep buggering on”—now prompted a new retort:
“Ah yes, Mr. Prime Minister, but you can’t go on fighting rearguard actions all the time!”
Yes, there was hope. Russia was still in the war, barely, but had begun to show signs of a capacity to persevere for another couple of months, while Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins had told him in March that the United States would soon enter the war.
Clemmie had been unsure. “Jock, do you think we are going to win?” she asked Colville.
“Yes.”
So did Brooke. He recalled that in June he thought that “Russia would not last long, possibly 3 or 4 months, possibly slightly longer” but England was still “safe from invasion during 1941.” Some optimism was still in order.
In August, Churchill traveled to Newfoundland on HMS Prince of Wales for his first wartime meeting with Roosevelt. On the journey he read books by C. S. Forester and watched the film Lady Hamilton. In Placentia Bay the two ships approached each other amid the melodies of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Save the King.” Churchill, in blue naval uniform, saluted, then boarded USS Augusta and approached Roosevelt, with beaming smile, hat, and summer suit, his body being held up by his son Elliott.
“At long last, Mr. President.”
“Glad to see you aboard, Mr. Churchill.”
The two shook hands and then Churchill gave FDR a letter from the king, which read, in part:
This is just a line to bring you my best wishes, and to say how glad I am that you have an opportunity at last of getting to know my Prime Minister. I am sure you will agree that he is a very remarkable man, and I have no doubt that your meeting will prove to be of great benefit to our two countries in the pursuit of our common goal.
The two went belowdecks and got down to business. “I need not tell you,” Roosevelt later wrote to the king, “that we make a perfectly matched team in harness and out—and incidentally we had lots of fun together as we always do.” They dined on smoked salmon, caviar, turtle soup, roast grouse, “coupe Jean d’arc” [sic], broiled spring chicken, buttered sweet peas, spinach omelet, candied sweet potatoes, chocolate ice cream, cookies, and cupcakes. Churchill toasted Roosevelt and Roosevelt toasted the king. They sang hymns chosen by Churchill—“For Those in Peril on the Sea,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”
Churchill delivered a detailed briefing on his return to the king, who sounded impressed with the “very blun[t]” talks. The prime minister also delivered a letter from Roosevelt, written during the conference and extending his regrets that the king, too, was not there to participate. The king must have been relieved, less because he had not taken part or in some way stood watch over the encounter but more because he was aware, like Churchill, of the tremendous necessity of American aid: “Now that Winston has returned, I am going away to Balmoral for a real change. . . . I need it in every way.”
So did Churchill, evidently. Just a few weeks later he bemoaned the state of affairs: “‘The Army won’t fight. . . . The Army always wants more divisions, more equipment.’ Said that he had ‘sacked Wavell,’ and now he would ‘sack Dill and go himself.’ Dill was of no use, little better than Wavell, etc. etc.”
Wavell griped in turn, “Winston is always expecting rabbits to come out of empty hats . . . an unreasonable genius is this Winston.”
Back in Washington, Halifax had reported in November that the American secretary of state, Cordell Hull, “evidently thinks that he may find himself at war with Japan at any time without much notice. I still remain completely sceptical . . . but I am quite prepared to be proved wrong at any moment.” Nearly two weeks later, Churchill was at Chequers with Winant and Harriman. Harriman recalled that “during dinner, at nine o’clock Sawyers . . . would always bring in a small radio, a present from Harry Hopkins. It turned on by lifting the lid.” Churchill, he remembered, “was a bit despondent that evening and was immersed in his thoughts.” On the radio “the news started with unimportant events . . . a number of items about the fighting on the Russian front and on the British front in Libya. . . .”
“Suddenly there was a pause and the announcer said he had a special dispatch. ‘The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbour.’” Churchill remembered that he “did not personally sustain any direct impression, but Averell said there was something about the Japanese attacking the Americans, and, in spite of being tired and resting, we all sat up.”
“What’s this about bombing Pearl Harbour?” Harriman asked.
“Tommy [Thompson, Churchill’s aide] said, no, it was Pearl River.” Harriman disagreed. Then Sawyers, “who had heard what had passed, came into the room, saying, ‘It’s quite true. We heard it ourselves outside. The Japanese have attacked the Americans.’”
Churchill jumped into action after a brief silence. So they would go to war with Japan. “Don’t you think you’d better get confirmation first?” Winant asked. “Good God, you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” Winant proposed a telephone call to the president.
“In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. . . . ‘It’s quite true,’ he said. ‘They have attacked us at Pearl Harbour. We are all in the same boat now. . . . This certainly simplifies things. God be with you.’”
Harriman and Winant “took the shock with admirable fortitude,” Churchill recalled. “In fact, one might almost have thought they had been delivered from a long pain.”
“Fancy the U.S. Fleet being in harbour,” the king wrote in his diary, “when the authorities must have known Japan was already on a war footing.”
—
Churchill proceeded right away to see Roosevelt in Washington and was said to have changed for the better: “The Winston I knew in London frightened me,” Lord Moran remembered. “I used to watch him as he went to his room with swift paces, the head thrust forward, scowling at the ground, the sombre countenance clouded, the features set and resolute, the jowl clamped down as if he had something between his teeth and did not mean to let go. I could see that he was carrying the weight of the world, and wondered how long he could go on like that.” The trip to America rejuvenated him. Yet there, after opening a heavy White House window, he had a small heart attack. “There is nothing serious,” Moran told him. “You have been overdoing things. . . . You’re all right. Forget your damned heart.”
The attack on Pearl Harbor had followed the invasion by Hitler’s armies of the Soviet Union the previous summer. The Soviet Union and the United States were now fully at war. Churchill said with regard to the latter, “[P]reviously we were trying to seduce them. Now they are securely in the harem.” More or less. The addition of two allies carried costs and burdens, as well as benefits. For all the matériel the Americans could provide, much would have to go to the Soviet Union, some no doubt at Britain’s expense; for all the casualties the Soviets took, far exceeding those of the others combined, the moral and political demands their alliance would place upon Britain and the United States would be considerable. The Russians may have “look[ed] like a lot of pigstickers,” according to Dill, but they counted. Coordination was not the least of the difficulties. The Allies needed a common strategy, and the challenge of reaching agreement about that, given vast differences in size, culture, and geography, was formidable. Churchill seemed to work for it harder than anyone. He traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Urals. He was the man in the middle, sensitive to even the slightest (and sometimes not so slight) suggestion that the rulers of the two empires on the rise would gang up against the man leading the one on the ropes—the “Cinderella,” in other words—“from Casablanca to Teheran, by way of Washington and Quebec,” who “fought a series of rearguard actions for British influence, prestige and power.” Churchill’s chosen epithets were more rustic: “I will come anywhere, at any time, at any risk” despite being, as he put it, a “poor little English donkey” with the “great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo.” It was this poor donkey “who was the only one, the only one of the three, who knew the right way home.” He would also describe the donkey as a lion and the buffalo as an elephant, but the point was the same.
The characterizations had more to do with the war than with personal politics. It was up to the Big Three to determine the general plan of the war, and this involved tough compromises. The centerpiece of the war from this point to the end of 1943 was fulfillment of the so-called Mediterranean strategy—securing command over North Africa and driving Italy out of the war, it was hoped, in order to divert sufficient Axis strength to the south so as to make victory on the eastern front more likely while preparing the way, eventually, for victory in the west. Neither Roosevelt nor Stalin was keen on the strategy, and it took all Churchill’s talents of persuasion to drive it through. Stalin accused him of buying time in order to bleed Russians, no matter how well Churchill argued that the Mediterranean strategy would divert critical German strength—particularly aircraft—away from the Russian front. Roosevelt and his generals also protested, but on more theoretical grounds: if there was to be a cross-Channel invasion, it should happen soon. The Mediterranean flank, they said, was a policy of scatterization. It had long been American doctrine to “hit them where they are, not where they ain’t.” Halifax reiterated it in May 1943:
The Americans want us to pledge ourselves to attack Northern France on a certain fixed date next year, whereas our people, while as anxious to do this as the Americans, feel that whether or not it will be a practicable operation depends on how hard we and the Russians can strain and hit the Germans between now and then. For this reason our people want to do everything to knock Italy out of the war.
Getting the Americans to accept that logic was exasperating. Churchill even went so far as to consider some strange alternatives in order to deflect pressure for the cross-Channel invasion—for example, another by way of Portugal and Spain. This produced even worse exasperation in Brooke: “Do you know the Pyrenees? I do. I’ve been all over those tracks as a boy. And if you think we’re going to conduct the invasion of Europe across the Pyrenees, you’re an even bigger fool than I thought you were!”
One of Churchill’s least favorite Americanisms was “overall strategic concept.” His riposte was to champion an “underall strategic concept.” To him strategy was inseparable from experience and the long record of history. Marshall was not impressed: “I told him I was not interested in Drake and Frobisher, but I was interested in having a united front against Japan.” Brooke, as usual, was torn:
He knows no details, has only got half the picture in his mind, talks absurdities and makes my blood boil to listen to his nonsense. I find it hard to remain civil. And the wonderful thing is that ¾ of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other ¼ have no conception of what a public menace he is and has been throughout the war! It is far better that the world should never know, and never suspect the feet of clay of that otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again. . . . Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being.
Internal—here understood as inter-Allied—obstacles once more compounded and complicated external ones. Sometimes it can be hard to say which were more trying for the protagonists. At the time the problems appeared in layers: fronts and more fronts, including the front of high expectations. Churchill in January “confess[ed] to feeling the weight of the war upon me even more than in the tremendous summer days of 1940.” Lunching with the king on February 24, 1942, he said that “Burma, Ceylon, Calcutta, Madras and parts of Australia might well be lost.” A week and a half later he added, “The weight of the war is very heavy now, and I must expect it to get steadily worse for some time to come.” Brooke also admitted to having “had for the first time since the war started a growing conviction that we are going to lose this war unless we control it very differently and fight it with more determination.”
Churchill had just survived a vote of no confidence in the Commons, which had made him “very angry,” according to the king, like “hunting the tiger with angry wasps about him” from the ranks of his “weaker brethren.” To him, it was an unnecessary, though not overly difficult, distraction at an inconvenient moment. The opposition to Churchill has tended to be minimized, even overlooked, in retrospect for obvious reasons, but it was there. It could have sidetracked and possibly overpowered him. Andrew Roberts has argued persuasively that the old Chamberlainites—still influential in framing Tory opinion—stood firmly in Churchill’s way right up to the end of the war, in fact. “Churchill’s position in the Conservative Party was never wholly free from ambiguity, and he was conscious of it.”
A more minor but tiresome problem was the status of the Duke of Windsor. Relations between the two brothers had more or less frozen since the abdication, and the Windsors were left to do as they pleased so long as it was elsewhere. But the war threw up complications, not least because they had to leave France. In addition to coping with their obsession with money, keeping them away from Britain was difficult once they had escaped. The governorship of the Bahamas became the compromise, one that the king fully supported. Halifax thought that “it is quite a good plan that they should go to the Bahamas . . . but I am sorry for the Bahamas.” Chips Channon was another who thought the solution was for the best: “They will adore it, the petty pomp, the pretty Regency Government House, the beach and the bathing; and all the smart Americans will rush to Nassau to play backgammon with Wallis! It is an excellent appointment, and I suggested it two years ago and have been harping upon it ever since.” He was not the only one. At one point later Lascelles, who never stopped mistrusting Churchill on this score, warned him to cease “harping on this problem” at the risk of the king’s health.
The Windsors were not the only royals to worry him. Churchill quashed a parliamentary critic’s attempt to see the appointment of the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s mediocre younger brother, as commander in chief of the army, not an entirely ceremonial position. It was not the first time this duke would attempt to intervene in military matters—it was he, for example, who supposedly prompted the king to urge Chamberlain to dump the unpopular Leslie Hore-Belisha as secretary of state for war back in 1940. The rationale given now for this appointment was Churchill’s being spread too thin and his meddling in military decisions, which seemed, by the beginning of 1942, to be contributing to bleak prospects. It would be better, Leo Amery said, if Churchill were both “Minister of Defence and P.M. only in name” so that his energies could be better focused on the war. Others were less certain. “Hitler may be a self-educated corporal and Winston may be an experienced student of tactics,” noted Colville, “but unfortunately Germany is organised as a war machine and England has only just realised the meaning of modern warfare.” Yet “Hitler seems not only to direct the policy of war, he even plans the details.”
“Yes,” Churchill added, “that’s just what I do.”
The king’s burden extended also to other royals whom he hosted or for whom he otherwise felt responsible. The best known was Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who arrived in Britain in the nick of time with little more than the clothes on her back. In the cases of others like Leopold of Belgium and Paul of Yugoslavia, the difficulties in their own countries also proved too great to surmount as each monarch’s rule succumbed to desperation and defeat. The king may have recalled his father’s experience with the Romanovs—George V had denied them sanctuary. He may have been determined to do better.
—
The war continued to go badly for Britain during the spring of 1942. In April came the so-called Baedeker Raids on cities, it was said, with more history than industry, like Exeter, Bath, Norwich, and York. The king met Marshall and Hopkins, and backed Brooke’s proposed plan to attack German positions by way of Cyprus and Syria. This “resulted in good argument with Winston.”
In June came the German recapture of Tobruk and with it Britain’s fear of losing North Africa. Churchill was dismayed, in part because he got the news while he was again with Roosevelt in Washington. It brought the two closer together but was nonetheless “one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war.” Churchill added: “Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.” In response would come Operation Torch.
The invasion of North Africa presented several difficulties, not least of which was coordination with some unfamiliar and sometimes disagreeable American allies. The above-mentioned saga of the second front need not be recounted here in full; suffice it to say that in addition to the Soviet element, which was paramount, there were persistent difficulties with the Americans. Since entering the war, they naturally demanded a heavier role in making strategic and operational decisions. Who would not have wanted to delay that moment as long as possible, if it was possible to delay at all?
Marshall, Hopkins, and now Admiral Ernest King had returned to London in July. “It will be a queer party,” Brooke predicted, “as Harry Hopkins is for operating in Africa, Marshall wants to operate in Europe, and King is determined to strike in the Pacific!” Then there was the ever more demanding Stalin. That month the chiefs had told Churchill it was important “not [to] lead the Russians to think there is no chance of our attacking this year.” Roberts has explained: “The double negative is instructive. Brooke did not want Stalin to know that there was no hope of a second front in Europe in 1942; however, he did not want the Americans to be told that Sledgehammer [the early plans for the invasion of France] was off the agenda ‘at once.’” The war calculations were almost always zero-sum in this way. As the king later recorded in his diary: “[Churchill] has decided no more convoys to Russia are to be run due to the existing circumstances, which will allow the extra escorts for the Atlantic routes. He wants to tell Stalin the true reason for their stoppage, which is, that if we starve ourselves, we cannot help him with armaments.” Churchill appealed directly to Stalin in person for patience, which he said “was like carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole.”
He flattered the Soviet leader’s sense of Realpolitik. Often overlooked in Churchill’s famous line about Russia being a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma is what he said next: “[B]ut perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” He drew for Stalin a picture of a crocodile, showing its soft belly and hard snout. Stalin liked this.
“If Torch succeeded,” Stalin said, then “everybody will understand.” But the Soviet leader was still seen to be unhappy. On the way back from Moscow, Wavell sat on the floor of the aircraft and wrote a ballad, which ended,
Prince of the Kremlin, here’s a fond farewell,
I’ve had to deal with many worse than you,
You took it though you hated it like hell,
No Second Front in 1942.
The king welcomed Churchill back from his mission: “Your task was a very disagreeable one, but I congratulate you heartily on the skill with which you have accomplished it.”
In addition to the turns in the war, the king was about to suffer a tough personal blow. His younger brother the Duke of Kent was killed in a plane crash a few days later on August 25. The king got the news while at Balmoral during dinner; when the others there saw his distress, everyone assumed Queen Mary had died, but instead it had been her favorite son.
Finally in November the luck all around changed. Churchill arrived for Tuesday luncheon on November 3 “carrying before him a red dispatch box.” He said to the king, “I bring you victory.” The queen “remember[ed] we looked at each other, and we thought, ‘Is he going mad?’ We had not heard that word since the war began.” Added the king: “A victory at last. How good it is for the nerves.” The Battle of El Alamein had been won.
This was the first major military victory since Churchill had become prime minister. It came at just the right moment. The king wrote to him enthusiastically:
I must send you my warmest congratulations on the great Victory of the 8th Army in Egypt. I was overjoyed when I received the news & so was everybody else. In our many talks together over a long period I knew that the elimination of the Afrika Corps, the threat to Egypt, was your one aim, the most important of all the many other operations with which you have had to deal. When I look back & think of all the many arduous hours of work you have put in, & the many miles you have travelled, to bring this battle to such a successful conclusion you have every right to rejoice; while the rest of our people will one day be very thankful to you for what you have done. I cannot say more. At last the Army has come into its own, as it is their victory primarily, ably helped by the forces of the air, & of those that work under the surface of the sea.
I am so pleased that everybody is taking this victory in a quiet & thankful way, though their rejoicing is very deep & sincere.
Churchill replied:
I am deeply grateful to Your Majesty for the most kind and gracious letter with which I have been honoured. I shall always preserve it during the remaining years of my life, and it will remain as a record of the support and encouragement given by the Sovereign to his First Minister in good and dark days alike. No Minister in modern times, and I daresay in long past days, has received more help and comfort from the King, and this has brought us all thus far with broadening hopes and now I feel to brightening skies.
It is needless to me to assure Your Majesty of my devotion to Yourself and Family and to our ancient and cherished Monarchy—the true bulwark of British freedom against tyrannies of every kind; but I trust I may have the pleasure of feeling a sense of personal friendship which is very keen and lively in my heart and has grown strong in these hard times of war.
Some American servicemen attended a tea party at the palace for Thanksgiving. “One young officer, enjoying a whisky and soda, was heard to say, ‘I never get Scotch at the White House. I like this king-racket.’” Roosevelt had written to the king that “on the whole the situation of all of us is better . . . and that, while 1943 will not see a complete victory for us, things are on the up-grade.” The new year, 1943, thus began on an optimistic note. Brooke could not
help glancing back at Jan 1st last year when I could see nothing but calamities ahead. . . .
Horrible doubts, horrible nightmares, which grew larger and larger as the days went on till it felt as if the whole Empire was collapsing round my head. . . . And now! We start 1943 under conditions I would never have dared to hope. Russia has held, Egypt for the present is safe. There is a hope of clearing North Africa of Germans in the near future. The Mediterranean may be partially opened. Malta is safe for the present. We can now work freely against Italy, and Russia is scoring wonderful successes in Southern Russia. We are certain to have many setbacks to face, many troubles, and many shattered hopes, but for all that the horizon is infinitely brighter.
The king continued to worry. “Outwardly one has to be optimistic about the future in 1943, but inwardly I am depressed at the present prospect.”
—
Churchill headed to North Africa in January. He nearly froze during the journey after ordering the heat on his airplane shut off on account of the fumes. Perhaps this was a source of his illness the following month. He developed what may have been his worst-ever case of pneumonia—or it may have been revenge for the style of his journey. Brooke saw him in Marrakesh, for example:
It was all I could do to remain serious. The room . . . was done up in Moorish style, the ceiling was a marvelous fresco of green, blue and gold. The head of the bed rested in an alcove of Moroccan design with a religious light shining on either side, the bed was covered in a blue silk covering with a 6 in[ch] wide lace “entre deux” and the rest of the room in harmony with the Arabic ceiling. And there in the bed was Winston in his green, red and gold dragon dressing gown, his hair, or what there was of it, standing on end, the religious lights shining on his cheeks, and a large cigar in his face!!
Edward Spears has recalled a similar “apparition” from one of their earlier visits to France: it “resembled an angry Japanese genie, in long, flowing red silk kimono over other similar but white garments, girdled with a white belt of like material, [and] stood there, sparse hair on end, and said with every sign of anger: ‘Uh ay ma bain?’”
“I suppose I ought to have said, ‘Uh ay MONG bain?’” Churchill later corrected. He liked ruses, costumes, and disguises, though they made him look like “a figure which might have stepped straight from the world of Walt Disney.” At Casablanca his code name was Mr. P; Roosevelt’s was Admiral Q. “We must mind our Ps and Qs.” The king may have agreed. He sent an anxious letter on February 22:
My dear Winston,
I am very sorry to hear that you are ill, & I hope that you will soon be well again. But do please take this opportunity for a rest . . . you must get back your strength for the strenuous coming months. I missed being able to have a talk to you last Tuesday, & I understand we may not meet next Tuesday either, so I am writing to you instead.
I do not feel at all happy about the present political situation in North Africa. I know we had to leave the political side of Torch to the Americans, while we were able to keep Spain & Portugal friendly during the time the operation was going on. Since then I feel the underhand dealings of Murphy with the French in North Africa, & his contacts with Vichy have placed both America & this country in an invidious position. I know we had to tread warily at the start, but is there nothing we can do now to strengthen Macmillan’s & Alexander’s hands in both the political and military sphere, to make the French sides come together. . . .
I should not think of bothering you with these questions at this moment, but I do feel worried about them, & I would like an assurance from you that they are being carefully watched.
I cannot discuss these vital matters with anyone but yourself.
Churchill’s seven-page-long reply came from his sickbed, where he lay with a temperature of 102 degrees:
I do not feel seriously disturbed by the course of events in North Africa, either political or even military although naturally there is much about both aspects which I would rather have different. . . . It is quite true that we have for this purpose and to safeguard our vital communications, to work with a mass of French officials who were appointed by Vichy; but without them I really do not know how the country could be governed. . . . The irruption of de Gaulle or his agents into this field, especially if forcibly introduced by us, would cause nothing but trouble. . . . It is entirely his fault that a good arrangement was not made between the two French factions. . . . Although I have been hampered by high fever from reading all the telegrams, I think I have the picture truly in my mind, and I wish indeed that I could have given this account to Your Majesty verbally at luncheon.
The king decided not to pursue the matter further, at least not in writing. He confided in his diary: “[T]he P.M. . . . assured me that the N. Afn. Situation was going well. . . . We had to use the French who were there. . . . The Americans will learn through defeat, & the Germans will learn from the 8th Army when they meet in Tunisia.”
On March 23 they resumed their weekly luncheons. Two weeks later Churchill predicted that there would be more success to come. The “Axis,” he said, is “having a ‘Bumkirk’ in Tunisia.” General Alexander had already reported: “The orders you gave me on August 10 1942 have been fulfilled. His Majesty’s enemies, together with their impedimenta, have been completely eliminated from Egypt, Cyrenaica, Libya, and Tripolitania. I now await your further instructions.” The German and Italian forces there surrendered in May. “It is an overwhelming victory,” wrote the king:
I wish to tell you how profoundly I appreciate the fact that its initial conception and successful prosecution are largely due to your vision and to your unflinching determination in the face of early difficulties. The African campaign has immeasurably increased the debt that this country, and indeed all the United Nations, owe to you.
Churchill replied:
No Minister of the Crown has ever received more kindness and confidence from his Sovereign than I have done. . . . This has been a precious aid and comfort to me. . . . My father and my grandfather both served in Cabinets of Queen Victoria’s reign, and I myself have been a Minister under your Majesty’s grandfather, your father, and your self for many years. The signal compliment which your Majesty has paid me on this occasion goes far beyond my deserts but will remain as a source of lively pleasure to me as long as I live.
The king’s telegram to Churchill on this occasion was publicized widely. By May the prime minister was back in Washington. Halifax said, “I have never seen him in better heart or form . . . an amazing contrast to the very tired and nerve-strained PM I saw last August in England.”
The king meanwhile suggested that he pay a visit to the troops in North Africa. Churchill agreed that this was a good idea. So, traveling as “General Lyon” (later he would prefer “General Collingwood”), the king went on his first visit to the army overseas since he had inspected the BEF in France in 1939. He rode in a large Ford that flew the royal standard. Some sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and gave him ovations. He proceeded on to Malta, where the residents hung “rugs and carpets and curtains . . . out of the windows—anything to make a show.” There were so many flowers thrown at him, parts of his white uniform became a multicolored palette. He said he was “the happiest man in Malta today.”
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The next venture was the conquest of Italy. It proved to be much harder and bloodier than most people had expected. As Churchill had once said about a planned attack on Burma: “You might as well eat a porcupine one quill at a time,” and that could also have applied here. The idea was first to take Sicily, then the whole of Italy. His reaction to the American proposal to begin with a more digestible portion—Sardinia, for example—was negative: “I absolutely refuse to be fobbed off with a sardine.” North Africa must act “as a ‘springboard,’ not as a ‘sofa’ to future action.”
The invasion in Sicily began in July and led to the fall of Mussolini. It produced more confusion than outright jubilation. The Allies then fought their way up the country, over and through some of the most difficult, mountainous terrain in Europe. These obstacles were compounded by the ambiguous aspect of Italian partisanship, for it was unclear sometimes who was fighting whom. The Soviets’ mood continued to fester. The Italian struggle prolonged the opening of the second front that Stalin had constantly urged. Churchill did what he could to mitigate the problem, or at least it appeared that way. Brooke regarded this approach to have been “wrong from the very start. . . . We have bowed and scraped to them, done all we could for them and never asked them for a single fact or figure concerning their production, strength, dispositions etc. As a result they despise us and have no use for us except for what they can get out of us.”
At this moment the king, at the suggestion of the Foreign Office, approved a gift from the British people to the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad in the form of a large sword, called the Sword of Stalingrad. Churchill would present it to Stalin at Tehran for the first of the Big Three conferences in November 1943. The king seemed to be pleased with the sword when he saw it, though he merely noted the absence of a date and asked how much it cost. The sword went on tour across England, where large crowds of people waited to see it. Lascelles managed to prevent the king from having it ornamented with bears by informing him that the Russian bear was generally used “by foreign cartoonists . . . to give [Stalin] a sword with bears on it would be like giving the French one ornamented with frogs.” Churchill handed the sword to Stalin in a special ceremony when they met at Tehran. Stalin kissed the sword, said a few gracious words of thanks, and then handed it to Marshal Voroshilov, who dropped it on his toe.
At Tehran, Churchill also praised Roosevelt for preventing “a revolutionary upheaval in the United States in 1933.” He said Stalin “would be ranked with the great heroes of Russian history and had earned the title ‘Stalin the Great.’” He then declared, “I drink to the Proletarian masses.”
Stalin responded, “I drink to the Conservative Party.”
Next they were treated to a bit of entertainment that recalled one of Churchill’s favorite words: imperturbable.
Stalin’s interpreter, Pavlov, had become the victim of a clumsy waiter carrying “an enormous ice-cream perched on a large block of ice in which there burned a candle.” The man’s eyes seemed to be “popping as he looked at Stalin and not the way he was going. . . . He allowed it to tilt more and more dangerously. . . . The guests sat transfixed, trying to guess where it would fall . . . and by the time he reached Pavlov . . . the laws of gravity could be denied no longer and the pudding descended like an avalanche on his unfortunate head. In a moment ice-cream was oozing out of his hair, his ears, his shirt and even his shoes. But his translation never checked.”
The results of Tehran were otherwise mixed. Stalin and Churchill had argued badly over the cross-Channel invasion and other subjects. Churchill got little support from Roosevelt. He felt more and more isolated, “appalled by his own impotence.” The Americans seemed wedded to an invasion taking place during the next six months. Dill took a sober view, having written to Brooke in October: “I do not believe that it was ever possible to make the Americans more Mediterranean-minded than they are today. The American Chiefs of Staff have given way to our views a thousand times more than we have given way to theirs.”
But he added: “P.S. Winston is the most popular foreigner America has ever known, & his influence is great. But there is a grave danger that, with anti-F.D.R. propaganda & perhaps one or two ill-advised remarks by W.S.C., the cry may go up that he is trying to run America as well as Britain.” That risk remained. But the threat of defeat appeared to have passed.
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The king in his Christmas broadcast repeated the note of optimism with which the year had begun. He reminded his countrymen that they ought “not rest from our task until it is nobly ended. Meanwhile within these islands, we have tried to be worthy of our fathers; we have tried to carry into the dawn the steadfastness and courage vouchsafed to us when we stood alone in the darkness.” Hiding in a remote part of the Apennines in Italy, the fugitive soldier Eric Newby heard it on the radio following
a great lunch . . . to the accompaniment of awful whistlings and other atmospherics, [then] the laboured but sincere-sounding voice of the King speaking from Sandringham. . . . “Some of you may hear me in your aircraft, in the jungles of the Pacific or on the Italian Peaks. . . . Wherever you may be your thoughts will be in distant places and your hearts with those you love.”
This had an effect on Newby and his fellow fugitive, “with all the food we had eaten and the wine we had drunk, and the people in the room witnessed the awful spectacle, something which they are unlikely ever to see again, of two Englishmen with tears running down their cheeks.”
The broadcasts evidently had an important function beyond reinstilling faith in the monarchy. “Anyway,” Lascelles has written, “if the foundations are in process of disintegration, the process will not be arrested by turgid royal broadcasts. . . . Our ‘levelling’ process will doubtless follow a steeper gradient . . . but I don’t believe it will ever become a precipice.” Some may have turned away from the monarchy. It would not last forever, Lascelles wrote, but “at the moment I believe it rests on foundations as durable as it ever had.” The king and his country would fight on.