Churchill was told of Germany’s invasion of Russia at eight o’clock on the morning of 22 June 1941. His first comment was, ‘Tell the BBC I will broadcast at nine tonight.’ Throughout the day he prepared his broadcast, consulting with many of his colleagues. There was a widespread feeling that the Russians would be quickly defeated; both Sir John Dill and the American Ambassador John G. Winant, who were at Chequers during the day, expressed the view that Russia could not last six weeks. Others present, including Eden and Sir Stafford Cripps, were of similar mind. Churchill listened to their arguments, then closed the discussion with the words, ‘I will bet you a Monkey to a Mousetrap that the Russians are still fighting, and fighting victoriously, two years from now.’
Churchill was offering odds of 500:1 in favour of Russia fighting on; a Monkey was racing parlance for 500, a Mousetrap was a sovereign. ‘I recorded your words in writing at the time,’ Colville wrote nine years later, ‘because I thought they were such a daring prophecy, and because it was such an entirely different point of view from that which anybody else had expressed.’ It had also been Churchill’s view on the previous day.
Churchill had no doubt what Britain’s response to the German attack on Russia must be. ‘No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism for the last twenty-five years,’ he said in his broadcast that night. ‘I will unsay no word I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, its tragedies, flashes away.’ Hitler hoped to defeat Russia before the winter came and then turn his forces against Britain ‘before the Fleet and air-power of the United States may intervene’. The Russian danger ‘is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe’. Any man or State ‘who fights on against Nazism will have our aid’. It followed therefore ‘that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia’.
Churchill was true to his word. On June 23, to take as much pressure as possible off the Russian front, he authorised a series of intensified bombing raids on German military and naval installations in northern France. This activity, said the Soviet Ambassador, Ivan Maisky, had given ‘satisfaction’ to the Russians. ‘WSC has acted with great rapidity to forestall any two-mindedness in Cabinet and in Parliament,’ Captain Berkeley noted in his diary.
On June 27 the cryptographers at Bletchley broke the Enigma key being used by the German Army on the Eastern Front. Within twenty-four hours Churchill gave instructions that Stalin was to be shown the fruits of this precious military Intelligence; this was done in disguised form so as not to reveal, and thus possibly endanger, its source. The information thus conveyed to Stalin was of the greatest value in enabling his commanders to anticipate, then and in the coming months, some of the most threatening German moves.
As the Germans drove eastward across Russia, Churchill also made plans to try to resist two possible German moves if Russia were defeated. The first danger was what he called an ‘extraordinary assault’ on Britain itself. ‘I am having everything brought to concert pitch by September 1,’ he told Robert Menzies on June 29. The second was the possibility of a German advance through the Caucasus, Turkey and Syria, to Palestine and the Suez Canal. To maximise the defence capacity of the forces in the Middle East, Churchill appointed a Minister of State in Cairo, and sent out Roosevelt’s emissary, Averell Harriman, to examine the best methods of bringing war supplies direct from America to Egypt.
On June 30, with a possible Russian defeat at the forefront of his mind, Churchill gave orders for ‘stern individual resistance’ throughout Britain in the event of a German paratroop landing. He envisaged as many as a quarter of a million German parachute troops being sent in. ‘Everyone in uniform,’ he wrote, ‘and anyone else who likes, must fall upon these whenever they find them and attack them with the utmost alacrity.’ The spirit to be ‘inculcated ceaselessly’ into all ranks, particularly training schools and depots, was,
Let every one,
Kill a Hun.
In a further attempt to try to force German aircraft back from the Russian front, on July 3 the first of a series of British night-bomber raids was launched against the Ruhr and Rhineland. On July 4 Churchill offered to bomb the Russian oilfields in the Caucasus in order ‘to deny oil to the enemy’. The danger of a Russian defeat seemed acute. On July 6 he warned Auchinleck that a Russian collapse might soon alter the balance of forces in the Western Desert ‘to your detriment’ without in any way diminishing the ‘invasion menace’ to Britain itself. In a telegram to Stalin on July 7 he promised, ‘We shall do everything to help you that time, geography, and our growing resources allow.’ On the previous day 400 air sorties had been made against northern France, he told Stalin, while on the same night 250 heavy bombers had struck against Germany: ‘This will go on. Thus we hope to force Hitler to bring back some of his air power to the West and gradually take some of the strain off you.’ Churchill’s telegram ended with an assertion of his conviction, familiar to the British and Americans, ‘We have only to go on fighting to beat the life out of these villains.’
On July 10, in proposing a British naval force to work alongside the Russian Navy in the Arctic, Churchill told his colleagues: ‘The advantage we should reap if the Russians could keep in the field and go on with the war, at any rate until the winter closes in, is measureless. A premature peace by Russia would be a terrible disappointment to great masses of people in our country. As long as they go on, it does not matter so much where the front lies. These people have shown themselves worth backing and we must make sacrifices and take risks, even at inconvenience, which I realise, to maintain their morale.’ Two days later, in Moscow, an Anglo-Soviet agreement was signed, pledging mutual assistance against Germany and no separate peace.
The German bombing raids on Britain continued. So too, in an attempt to derange the German war effort against Russia, did the British bombing of Germany; Frankfurt was bombed on the night of July 7, Wilhelmshaven on July 11, and Hanover on July 14. Speaking at the Mansion House that evening, Churchill declared, ‘We will mete out to the Germans the measure, and more than the measure, they have meted out to us.’ His words were interrupted by loud and prolonged cheering. He continued, with a direct challenge to Hitler, ‘You do your worst, and we will do our best.’ Two nights later, Hamburg was bombed.
On July 19, as German forces reached the half-way point between the German-Soviet frontier and Moscow, Stalin asked Churchill to consider two possible British military landings to take pressure off Russia, one in Norway and the other in northern France. Churchill put both plans to the Chiefs of Staff, but they rejected them as far too risky. Churchill had no doubt that his advisers were right. To attempt a landing in force in northern France, he told Stalin on July 20, ‘would be to encounter a bloody repulse’, while petty raids ‘would only lead to fiascos doing more harm than good to both of us. It would all be over without their having to move, or before they could move, a single unit from your front.’ Churchill added, ‘You must remember that we have been fighting alone for more than a year, and that, though our resources are growing, and will grow fast from now on, we are at the utmost strain both at home and in the Middle East.’ The Battle of the Atlantic, ‘on which our life depends’, as well as the movement of convoys under constant submarine and air attack, ‘strains our naval resources, great though they be, to the utmost limit’.
What could be done was already being done, Churchill told Stalin. British submarines, and a minelayer, were on their way to the Arctic. A British fighter squadron would also soon be on its way. Five days later the War Cabinet agreed to send Russia two hundred fighter aircraft, sixty of which would have to come from British war supplies being manufactured in the United States. These fighters would be sent, Churchill told Stalin, in spite of the fact that it would ‘seriously deplete our fighter aircraft resources’. As Stalin had requested, between three and four million pairs of boots would also be sent, as well as large quantities of rubber, tin, wool, cloth, jute and lead. Where Britain had inadequate stocks, Churchill explained, she would ask the United States to provide. Aid to Russia added an extra dimension of work; the continuing possibility of a Russian defeat brought an extra dimension of worry. The British Minister Resident in the Middle East, Oliver Lyttelton, warned Churchill on July 21 that ‘if Russia collapses soon’ the British might be driven out of Egypt altogether, and forced to fight a defensive battle in Palestine or even Syria.
The last week of July was the hundredth week of the war; despite a slackening of German bomber attacks, five hundred British civilians had been killed that month. To his secretary Elizabeth Layton, Churchill commented during late-night dictation on July 28, ‘We must go on and on, like the gun-horses, till we drop.’ But as August began there was one dramatic lightening of the dangers: as a result of prodigious effort at Bletchley in breaking the German Naval Enigma, it became possible to read all German submarine instructions with few gaps and little delay. Henceforth, trans-Atlantic convoys could be routed away from the submarine packs. In May more than ninety merchant ships had been sunk; in August the figure fell below thirty.
On August 2 Churchill asked Auchinleck, who had been summoned specially to Chequers, if the next offensive in the Middle East could be carried out in September or October. When Auchinleck explained that November was the earliest that his forces would have the necessary two-to-one superiority, Churchill deferred to his commander’s judgment. Then, on August 3, he left Chequers for his first journey outside Britain since the fall of France more than a year earlier. At Thurso, in Scotland, he went on board the Prince of Wales. ‘It is twenty-seven years ago today that Huns began their last war,’ he telegraphed to Roosevelt from on board ship on August 4. ‘We must make good job of it this time.’
Churchill’s destination was Newfoundland, his purpose to meet Roosevelt. On August 7 Clementine wrote to her husband, while he was still on board ship: ‘I do hope my Darling that this momentous journey besides being an impulse to American resolve will rest & refresh you.’ Two days later, reaching Placentia Bay, Churchill left the Prince of Wales to join Roosevelt on board the heavy cruiser Augusta. On the following day Roosevelt attended Divine Service on the Prince of Wales; Churchill had chosen the hymns. That afternoon, for the British, there was a brief expedition ashore, Colonel Jacob noting in his diary, ‘We clambered over some rocks, the PM like a schoolboy, getting a great kick out of rolling boulders down a cliff.’ On August 11 three sets of talks began: between the diplomats present, the Chiefs of Staff, and the President and Prime Minister.
The United States made five main pledges at Placentia Bay. She would give aid to Russia ‘on a gigantic scale’ and would co-ordinate that aid with Britain; she would allocate considerably more merchant ships to take bombers and tanks across the Atlantic to Britain; she would provide a five-destroyer escort for every North Atlantic convoy to Britain, together with a cruiser or other capital ship; she would deliver bombers both to Britain and West Africa using American pilots, many of whom would then stay on to give war training; and she would take over all naval patrol duties as far east as Iceland. There were also two important Anglo-American agreements: both countries would ‘respect the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live’—the document in which this pledge appeared became known as the Atlantic Charter; and Japan would be asked to remove her troops from French Indo-China and stop any further encroachment in the South-West Pacific.
Churchill had drafted a specific warning to be sent to Japan, that if she continued her encroachments, ‘the United States Government would be compelled to take counter-measures, even though these might lead to war between the United States and Japan.’ At Placentia Bay Roosevelt agreed to this, but on his return to Washington decided against any threat of war.
The British team was to some extent disappointed in the results of the discussions. One ‘most distressing revelation’, they told Churchill, was a reduction in heavy-bomber allocations to Britain, owing to American shortages and production difficulties. In addition, one of Churchill’s military staff, Colonel Jacob, wrote in his diary that not a single American Army officer had shown ‘the slightest keenness to be in the war on our side’. But the American naval officers present, Churchill told the War Cabinet on his return, ‘had not concealed their keenness to enter the war’. Even more important, he said, ‘I have established warm and deep personal relations with our great friend.’ That friend had gone so far as to tell Churchill that all American convoy escort vessels had been ordered to attack any German submarine which showed itself, even if it was ‘200 or 300 miles away from the convoy’. Roosevelt had ‘made it clear’, Churchill added, ‘that he would look for an “incident” which would justify him in opening hostilities’.
While Churchill had been crossing the Atlantic to see Roosevelt, Hitler had flown as far east as Borisov, half-way between his East Prussian headquarters and Moscow, to inspect his victorious troops. Might Russia be overrun while the United States was still neutral? On August 25 the War Cabinet minutes recorded Churchill’s fear: ‘He sometimes wondered whether the President realised the risk which the United States was running by keeping out of the war. If Germany beat Russia to a standstill and the United States made no further advance towards entry into the war, there was a great danger that the war might take a turn against us. While no doubt we could hope to keep going, this was a very different matter from imposing our will on Nazi Germany.’
Returning from Placentia Bay, Roosevelt had hastened to assure the American people that the United States was no nearer to war than before the meeting. ‘I ought to tell you,’ Churchill telegraphed to Hopkins, ‘there has been a wave of depression through Cabinet and other informed circles here about President’s many assurances about no commitments and no closer to war etc’. And to Randolph, who was still in Cairo, Churchill wrote on August 29, ‘One is deeply perplexed to know how the deadlock is to be broken and the United States brought boldly and honorably into the war.’ Without an American declaration of war, Churchill told his guests at Chequers on August 30, ‘though we cannot now be defeated, the war might drag on for another four or five years, and civilisation and culture would be wiped out’. If America came in now, the war might end in 1943. Even coming into the war next March might be too late.
There was one initiative Churchill could take: at the end of August, to secure a safe route whereby American war supplies could get to Russia quickly, British and Soviet forces entered Persia. Russia occupied the northern half of the country, including the capital, Teheran, and Britain the southern half, including the oilfields which Churchill had acquired for Britain in 1914. But might the acquisition of this supply route have come too late? By September 1 German troops were less than two hundred miles from Moscow. In a message to Stalin on September 6, Churchill promised to send, from Britain’s own production, one half of the aircraft and tanks for which Russia had asked. He would seek the other half from the United States. Meanwhile, he told Stalin, ‘we shall continue to batter Germany from the air with increasing severity and to keep the seas open and ourselves alive’.
There was a phrase in Churchill’s telegram to Stalin which might have seemed wishful thinking, or mere morale-boosting. The information ‘at my disposal’, he said, ‘gives me the impression that the culminating violence of the German invasion is already over and that winter will give your heroic armies a breathing space’. Churchill added that this ‘was a personal opinion’. But it was not: it derived from a careful scrutiny of the decrypts of Germany’s own top secret radio signals between Berlin and the Eastern Front, which showed that the German Air Force was suffering considerable supply and maintenance difficulties. These decrypts also confirmed other reports that Germany was anxious about the continuing Russian resistance, and that there would be no victory before the winter.
On September 6, having sent his telegram to Stalin, Churchill visited Bletchley, where he told the staff how much they were worth to the war effort. When he learned six weeks later that a shortage of typists there was holding up the work, he minuted, ‘Make sure they have all they want as extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.’ Churchill called the staff at Bletchley ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs—and never cackled’. In his messages to Roosevelt and others, he referred to their tens of thousands of decrypts as his ‘Boniface’, giving them the name of a supposed British agent in the field.
Realising from his most secret source that the Germans were now less certain of defeating Russia before the onset of winter, when conditions would worsen considerably, Churchill pressed ahead with the maximum aid to Russia in the shortest time possible. Beginning on September 20, Russia was sent the whole of Britain’s tank production for the coming week. On the following day Churchill learned from Roosevelt that in the coming nine months the United States would send Britain at least six thousand tanks. ‘Your cheering cable about tanks,’ Churchill replied on the following day, ‘arrived when we were feeling very blue about all we have to give up to Russia. The prospect of nearly doubling the previous figures encouraged everyone.’
If Germany could not defeat Russia before winter, the much-dreaded German invasion of Britain would be impossible that year. Three weeks had already passed since the September 1 deadline for maximum British preparedness. Churchill now offered, if Stalin requested it, to send a substantial British military force to the Caucasus, commanded by Wavell, to help the Russians stave off any German attempt to reach the oil-wells of the Caspian Sea. In the last week of October, however, the Germans’ most secret signals showed that it was not the Caucasus but Moscow that had become their winter objective. In the four days beginning on October 21 Churchill authorised nine separate warnings to be sent to Stalin, based on decrypted German orders giving precise details of German dispositions and intentions on the Moscow front. Stalin had no other source for such crucial facts.
On October 2, having read further German messages brought to him in his locked box, giving details of the gathering of German military and air forces on the Moscow front, Churchill wrote to Colonel Menzies, the head of the British Secret Service: ‘Are you warning the Russians of the developing concentration? Show me the last five messages you have sent to our Missions on the subject.’ In London, Clementine Churchill prepared to launch an Aid to Russia Appeal, which in its first twelve days raised a mass of medical aid, including a million doses of phenacetin, the most effective painkiller then in use. In Moscow, Beaverbrook and Harriman were negotiating a formidable package of military aid, including 1,800 British fighters, 900 American fighters and 900 American bombers over the coming nine months, as well as naval guns, submarine-detection sets, anti-aircraft guns and armoured cars. More than a million metres of Army cloth were to be supplied each month. To get these supplies to Russia, not only the trans-Persian route, but the much quicker and much more dangerous Arctic route would be used.
‘We intend to run a continuous cycle of convoys, leaving every ten days,’ Churchill told Stalin on October 4. The first of these convoys, with twenty heavy tanks and 193 fighters, would reach Archangel on October 12. It did so; eight days later, with German troops only sixty-five miles from Moscow, instructions were given with Churchill’s approval that every tank shipped to Russia should be furnished with three months’ spares ‘whatever sacrifice this might entail’.
To help Russia, and to see British troops in action, Churchill now pressed for two amphibious operations, one against Norway as soon as possible, and the other against Sicily, to follow the hoped-for success of Auchinleck’s imminent offensive in the Western Desert, now planned for mid-November. In both cases the Chiefs of Staff turned the operations down. On October 27, when the Sicily plan was rejected, a senior diplomat, Sir Alexander Cadogan, noted in his diary, ‘Poor Winston very depressed.’ Four days later Churchill wrote to Randolph: ‘The Admirals, Generals and Air Marshals chant their stately hymn of “Safety First”.’ As for himself: ‘I have to restrain my natural pugnacity by sitting on my own head. How bloody!’
Seeking someone who would share his instinct for the maximum possible offensive action, on November 16 Churchill asked General Alan Brooke if he would be willing to succeed Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and the Army’s representative on the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Brooke accepted. Forty-five years earlier his brother Victor, who was killed in action in 1914 during the retreat from Mons, had been one of Churchill’s close Army friends. His brother Ronald, who died prematurely in 1925, had ridden with Churchill into Ladysmith on the night the siege was lifted in 1900. Now a third brother was to be Churchill’s daily companion, adviser, foil and colleague for three and a half years. It was to be an onerous responsibility, but a constructive partnership. ‘I did not expect that you would be grateful or overjoyed at the hard anxious task to which I summoned you,’ Churchill wrote to Brooke on November 18. ‘But I feel that my old friendship for Ronnie and Victor, the companions of gay subaltern days and early wars, is a personal bond between us, to which will soon be added the comradeship of action in fateful events.’
That very morning Auchinleck launched his offensive in the Western Desert against Rommel’s army. By nightfall he had made advances of up to fifty miles towards the British forces besieged in Tobruk. Rommel’s top-secret messages told of serious fuel and tank shortages: not only did Churchill read the decrypts of these messages as sent to him from Bletchley but arranged for summaries of them to be sent daily by secret cypher to Auchinleck. This knowledge enabled Auchinleck to press the offensive even when his own tank resources were badly stretched. On the fifth day of the battle, a German top-secret signal gave details of the sailing of two ships with vital aviation fuel for the German and Italian forces. Twenty-four hours later both ships had been sunk and the fuel supplies of Rommel’s air support drastically curtailed.
On November 29 Auchinleck’s forces reached Tobruk; the siege was over. That same day, at the mouth of the River Don, Russian forces drove the Germans back along the northern shore of the Sea of Azov. There could be no German breakthrough to the Caucasus that winter. The Russian Southern Front had held. On the following day Churchill was sixty-seven; among more than a hundred telegrams and letters which he acknowledged personally was one from Stalin. Four days later, as the front in the Western Desert began to stabilise, he contemplated sending three divisions, 12,000 men in all, to the Russian Southern Front, ‘wherever it may rest’, provided Stalin preferred troops to supplies. The Defence Committee were unwilling, however, to take any troops away from the Western Desert, preferring to press on with the offensive there; Churchill had no option but to defer to their collective will, which the War Cabinet then endorsed. ‘The only thing that matters,’ he telegraphed to Auchinleck on December 4, ‘is to beat the life out of Rommel & Co.’
That week two naval losses in the Mediterranean caused Churchill much distress: the sinking of the Barham, with the loss of more than five hundred men, and the sinking of the Neptune, with only one survivor out of a crew of seven hundred. The loss of Neptune was particularly cruel; she had been struck by a mine at the very moment when, as a result of an Enigma decrypt, she was about to intercept a supremely important supply convoy on its way to Rommel. With these supplies, Rommel was able to avoid the prospect of further retreat. On December 5, however, Churchill learned from another Enigma decrypt that a German air corps had been ordered from Russia to the Mediterranean, to give Rommel the extra air support he had so strongly requested. Britain’s battle in the Western Desert had forced the Germans to withdraw essential units from the East.
This encouraging news with regard to Russia was offset by a flurry of speculation that Japan planned some military action in the Far East. British, Dutch and Siamese territory were all within range of her sea and air forces. Churchill had begged Roosevelt on November 30 to ‘prevent a melancholy extension of the war’ by warning the Japanese that any aggression on British, Dutch or Siamese territory would lead to an American declaration of war. In reply, Roosevelt explained that for constitutional reasons he could not give guarantees to other states, but he urged Churchill to issue a British guarantee on behalf of Siam. Such a guarantee would be ‘whole-heartedly supported by the United States,’ he said, but did not explain what that support would be. British policy, Churchill told the War Cabinet on December 2, ‘is not to take forward action in advance of the United States’.
No public declaration of support for Siam was made, either in London or Washington. But on the morning of Sunday December 7, while at Chequers, Churchill agreed that in the event of a Japanese invasion force approaching Siam, as now seemed likely, British naval and air units would attack the Japanese troop transports. Later that morning he learned that Roosevelt intended to announce in three days’ time, on December 10, that if Japan invaded British, Dutch or Siamese territory, the United States would definitely regard it as a ‘hostile act’ against America. ‘This is an immense relief,’ Churchill telegraphed at once to Auchinleck, ‘as I had long dreaded being at war with Japan without or before the United States.’
It was the ‘strong American Fleet at Hawaii’, the British War Cabinet had been told six weeks earlier, that would ‘restrain’ the Japanese from any ‘major venture’ into the Gulf of Siam. Even so, with substantial Japanese forces now clearly on the move, Churchill telegraphed just after midday to the Siamese Prime Minister: ‘There is a possibility of imminent Japanese invasion of your country. If you are attacked, defend yourself. The preservation of the full independence and sovereignty of Siam is a British interest and we shall regard an attack on you as an attack on ourselves.’
At Chequers that evening Churchill’s dinner guests were Averell Harriman and John G. Winant, the American Ambassador to Britain. As they dined, Japanese aircraft struck at the American Fleet at anchor at Pearl Harbor. For an hour and a half the attackers wheeled over the dockyards, hurling their torpedoes and bombs, and leaving in their wake four battleships destroyed and two thousand Americans dead. At nine o’clock in the evening, British time, Churchill turned on a small wireless set to hear the news. It began with items from the Russian and Libyan fronts, followed, he later recalled, by some few sentences ‘regarding an attack by Japanese on American shipping at Hawaii, and also Japanese attacks on British vessels in the Dutch East Indies’.
A telephone call was put through to Roosevelt. ‘Mr President,’ Churchill asked, ‘what’s this about Japan?’
‘It’s quite true,’ Roosevelt replied. ‘They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.’
A short while later, news reached Chequers from the Admiralty that Japanese forces were attempting to land in Malaya. Britain and the United States had been attacked by the same enemy, and at the same time. The Dutch East Indies and Siam were likewise invaded that day. ‘The enemy has attacked with an audacity which may spring from recklessness,’ Churchill told the Commons on December 8, ‘but which may also spring from a conviction of strength.’ Later that same day the United States Congress voted to declare war on Japan: ‘Today all of us are in the same boat with you and the people of the Empire, and it is a ship which will not and cannot be sunk,’ Roosevelt telegraphed to Churchill as soon as the vote was known.
Fearing that the demands of war in the Pacific would lead to a falling off of American help to Britain, and of America’s hitherto ever-widening participation in the Atlantic convoys, Churchill made plans on December 8 to leave for the United States in two days’ time. Britain would have to be ‘careful’, he told the King, ‘that our share of munitions and other aid which we are receiving from the United States does not suffer more than is, I fear, inevitable’. But Roosevelt was unable to see him for at least a month, and the visit was postponed. Disappointed, Churchill told Roosevelt: ‘I never felt so sure about final victory, but only concerted action will achieve it.’
With the destruction of so many American warships at Pearl Harbor, the Anglo-American naval ascendancy in the Far East had been wiped out. Even with the recent arrival at Singapore of two British warships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, sent there by Churchill before Pearl Harbor in the hope of deterring the Japanese from an adventure southward, the balance of naval power had swung from an eleven-to-ten Anglo-American superiority to an inferiority of four-to-ten. On the evening of December 9 Churchill and his advisers discussed what the two British warships, now so substantial a part of the Allied naval strength, should do. Churchill made two suggestions: either they should ‘vanish into the ocean wastes and exercise a vague menace’, behaving as ‘rogue elephants’, or they should cross the Pacific and join the remnants of the American Fleet at Pearl Harbor.
No final decision was reached: only to ‘reconsider the problem in the morning light’. By morning light, however, the ships themselves had taken the fateful decision, deciding to intercept a Japanese force that was reported to be landing on the Malayan coast. The report was a false one, but it led the two ships under the flight path of Japanese torpedo-bombers returning from an attack on Singapore harbour. In London, it was the morning of December 10, Churchill was in bed working on official papers when the telephone rang at his bedside. It was Dudley Pound. Churchill later recalled: ‘His voice sounded odd. He gave a sort of cough and gulp, and at first I could not hear quite clearly. “Prime Minister, I have to report to you that the Prince of Wales and the Repulse have both been sunk by the Japanese—we think by aircraft. Tom Phillips is drowned.” “Are you sure it’s true?” “There is no doubt at all.” So I put the telephone down. I was thankful to be alone. In all the war I never received a more direct shock.’
Churchill was not alone. Kathleen Hill was in the room when Pound’s telephone call came. ‘I sat in the corner of the room silently and unobtrusively’, she later recalled. ‘When he was upset I used to try to be invisible. When the two ships went down, I was there. That was a terrible moment. “Poor Tom Phillips” he said.’
The loss of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse was a severe blow to Britain; six hundred officers and men had been drowned, and the waters of the Far East opened to an even greater Japanese naval superiority than before. But the impact of the sinkings was offset on the following day when, without any provocation, first Italy and then Germany declared war on the United States. Roosevelt, absorbed by war in the Pacific, had no plans to declare war on Hitler, nor had he done so in the four days following Pearl Harbor. Now it was Hitler himself who brought Germany into a state of war with the United States. Britain no longer had to fear that the bulk of America’s war effort would be directed against Japan, with far less war material available for Britain.
As a result of Hitler’s arrogant declaration, America suddenly became a European belligerent, after more than two years of neutrality. ‘I am enormously relieved at the turn world events have taken,’ Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt on December 11. To Eden, who was on his way to Moscow, Churchill signalled that same day, ‘The accession of the United States makes amends for all, and with time and patience will give certain victory.’
With America now at war with both Germany and Italy, Roosevelt agreed to see Churchill as soon as possible; on December 12 he left London by night train for the Clyde, where he boarded the Duke of York for the journey across the Atlantic. While on board, amid violent gales, he learned each day of successful Russian counter-attacks near Leningrad, Moscow, and the Sea of Azov. ‘It is impossible to describe the relief with which I have heard each successive day of the wonderful victories on the Russian front,’ he telegraphed to Stalin on December 15. ‘I never felt so sure of the outcome of the war.’ Part of Churchill’s relief was the realisation that Hitler was now so tied down in Russia, his armies fighting so far east amid horrific winter conditions, and suffering such enormous casualties, that any plans to invade Britain in 1942 must finally have been set aside.
During Churchill’s storm-tossed journey westward, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. ‘We must expect to suffer heavily in this war with Japan,’ he wrote to Clementine on December 21, ‘and it is no use the critics saying “Why were we not prepared?” when everything we had was already fully engaged. The entry of the United States into the war is worth all the losses sustained in the East many times over. Still these losses are very painful to endure and will be very hard to repair.’ To the Chiefs of Staff, who were on board with him, Churchill commented bitterly that the Americans were more likely to be prepared to land in Europe in 1944 than 1943. ‘The negative in our counsels in the present time is as 10:1. There is therefore no need to fear any excess of venturesome action for 1943 at this stage.’ As for night-bombing, the method favoured by the Chiefs of Staff as the principal means of bringing Germany to its knees, in Churchill’s view it would not by itself be decisive: ‘The force of events will compel a much more complex strategy upon us.’
On December 22, after ten days on board ship, Churchill reached Hampton Roads, then flew to Washington. ‘There was the President waiting in his car,’ he later recalled. ‘I clasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure.’ For three weeks Churchill was to be Roosevelt’s guest at the White House. Their talks began on the first day, with agreement to make plans for a joint Anglo-American landing in French North Africa, ‘with or without invitation’ from Vichy. That same day the British Chiefs of Staff and their American counterparts, the Joint Chiefs, agreed, as a result of considerable persuasion by Pound, Brooke and Portal, and to Churchill’s enormous relief, that the Atlantic-European theatre was the decisive one, that ‘Germany is still the key to victory’ as it had been described during the American-British Staff Conversations in February 1941, and that the defeat of Germany should precede the defeat of Japan.
On December 22, as the discussions between Churchill and Roosevelt continued, Japanese forces landed on the Philippines, driving the American defenders before them. Three days later, after a seventeen-day siege, the British, Canadian and Indian defenders of Hong Kong surrendered to the Japanese. Meanwhile, in Washington, Churchill and Roosevelt continued to plan their joint war strategy: American bombers would operate against Germany from bases in the United Kingdom; American troops would be based in Northern Ireland, liberating the British troops there for service in the Middle East; should the Philippines fall, American troops would be diverted to Singapore; and substantial American forces would be sent to defend Australia. On December 26, with these decisions worked out and agreed to, Churchill addressed both Houses of Congress. ‘I cannot help reflecting,’ he told them, ‘that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own. In that case, this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice.’
That afternoon Churchill and Roosevelt discussed the shipping needs which their decisions had created. In the evening Churchill told the British Chiefs of Staff that he was contemplating an agreement whereby the general direction of the Pacific war would be from Washington, and operations in the Atlantic, Europe and North Africa from London. That night, as he lay in bed in the White House, the room was so hot that he decided to open the bedroom window. ‘It was very stiff,’ he told his doctor, Charles Wilson, on the following day. ‘I had to use considerable force and I noticed all at once that I was short of breath. I had a dull pain over my heart. It went down my left arm.’
Churchill had suffered a mild heart attack. The ‘textbook treatment’, Wilson, later Lord Moran, wrote in his diary, ‘is at least six weeks in bed. That would mean publishing to the world, and the American newspapers would see to this, that the PM was an invalid with a crippled heart and a doubtful future.’ The doctor therefore decided to tell no one, not even his patient. ‘Your circulation is a bit sluggish,’ was all he told him. ‘It is nothing serious. You needn’t rest in the sense of lying up, but you mustn’t do more than you can help in the way of exertion for a little while.’
The conference continued. On the morning of December 27 Churchill discussed with General Marshall, the United States Army Chief of Staff, the question of an Allied Supreme Commander in the Far East. Marshall favoured Wavell. That evening Churchill discussed the same problem with his own Chiefs of Staff. It was agreed that Wavell should be given the job, with an American Deputy. The American action, Churchill telegraphed to his War Cabinet, was ‘broad-minded and selfless’. But one member of Churchill’s negotiating team pointed out privately that the Americans had been ‘very bitter at times in blaming the British when things went wrong’.
From Washington, despite feeling unwell, Churchill travelled by train to Ottawa, where on December 30 he addressed the Canadian Parliament. Recalling the comment of Weygand in 1940 that Britain would soon have its neck wrung like a chicken, he commented, to the delight of his listeners: ‘Some chicken!’ When their laughter had died down he added, ‘Some neck!’ A few minutes later, in the Speaker’s Chamber, the photographer Yusuf Karsh, having plucked the cigar from Churchill’s mouth, took his famous scowling photograph; moments later he took the smiling Churchill, a photograph which Karsh withheld for some years, but which is published on the jacket of this book2 as representing Churchill with all his remarkable resilience and joie de vivre.
Returning to Washington by train, Churchill agreed on New Year’s Day 1942 to a declaration, prepared by Roosevelt, to be issued by the ‘United Nations’, those twenty-six states which were either fighting Germany and Japan, or were under German and Japanese occupation, expressing their determination to secure complete victory over Germany and Japan. ‘The declaration could not by itself win battles,’ Churchill later wrote, ‘but it set forth who we were, and what we were fighting for.’ On the following day Churchill and Roosevelt presided jointly over a meeting to determine the scale of United States war production in 1942 and 1943. Then, on January 5, Churchill flew from Washington to Florida, to recuperate by the sea in a secluded bungalow at Pompano, north of Miami. On his third day at Pompano, Churchill telegraphed to the War Cabinet, ‘Am resting in south on Charles Wilson’s advice for a few days after rather a strenuous time.’
Churchill spent five days in Florida, swimming in the warm sea, and dictating memoranda on war policy, including his opposition to a request by Stalin that the Baltic States be reincorporated in the Soviet Union after the war. Returning to Washington, he and Roosevelt agreed that they should each provide 90,000 troops for a landing in French North Africa, and that in the event of a Japanese advance towards Australia, Roosevelt would send 50,000 American troops to Australia’s defence.
The conference ended on January 12. Roosevelt’s last words to Churchill were, ‘Trust me to the bitter end.’ When two weeks later Churchill congratulated the President on his sixtieth birthday, Roosevelt replied, ‘It is fun to be in the same decade with you.’ Their ally Stalin was also in the same decade; he had just celebrated his sixty-second birthday.
On January 14 Churchill left Washington by flying boat to Bermuda, a four-hour flight, during which he took control of the plane for some twenty minutes. During this time, the pilot later wrote, ‘the Prime Minister asked if he could make a couple of slightly banked turns, which he did with considerable success’. From Bermuda he had intended to go on by sea, but because of the worsening situation in Malaya it was decided to continue by flying boat, a further distance of 3,365 miles and a flight of just under eighteen hours. As the plane approached its destination it was found to be somewhat off-course, approaching within five or six minutes’ flying time of the German anti-aircraft batteries at Brest. ‘We are going to turn north at once,’ Churchill was told as soon as the error was discovered. As the plane approached Plymouth, British radar reported a ‘hostile bomber’ flying in from the direction of Brest. Six fighters were ordered into the air to shoot it down. Their error was discovered just in time, and Churchill returned to Britain safely. He had been away for more than a month.
Two days after Churchill’s return he learned from Wavell, for the first time, that no major defence works had ever been constructed on the northern, landward, side of Singapore Island. All the main defences had been located so as to deal with an attack from the open sea. The Japanese, however, were now advancing overland, approaching the island from the north. Churchill was nevertheless determined that there should be a vigorous defence. The ‘entire male population’, he told the Chiefs of Staff on January 19, should be utilised to build earthworks which could then be fortified. The city of Singapore should be converted into a citadel ‘and defended to the death’. There must be no surrender. ‘Commanders, Staffs, and principal officers are expected to perish at their posts.’
Wavell was no longer under British direction, however. As a result of the Washington agreements, his command came under the control of the United States. Churchill could send only ‘suggestions’, as he explained to Wavell in a telegram on January 20, and he added, ‘I want to make it absolutely clear that I expect every inch of ground to be defended, every scrap of material or defences to be blown to pieces to prevent capture by the enemy, and no question of surrender to be entertained until after protracted fighting among the ruins of Singapore City.’
On January 27, in the Commons, Churchill demanded a Vote of Confidence ‘because’, he told the House, ‘things have gone badly and worse is to come’. The debate lasted for three days; on the third day he told the House: ‘In no way have I mitigated the sense of danger and impending misfortunes—of a minor character and of a severe character—which still hang over us. But at the same time I avow my confidence, never stronger than at this moment, that we shall bring this conflict to an end in a manner agreeable to the interests of our country, and in a manner agreeable to the future of the world.’ Churchill won his Vote of Confidence by 464 to one. As the vote was being taken, it was announced that the Japanese were within eighteen miles of Singapore.
‘Worse is to come’; these had been Churchill’s words. Four days after he had spoken them, the German Submarine Command, as part of an internal security drive, altered its Enigma machine in such a way that the messages sent on it were once again to prove unreadable to British Intelligence, and were to remain unreadable for the rest of the year. When he did learn, at the very moment of Singapore’s distress, of the loss of this precious Intelligence, he could share the dismal knowledge only with a tiny handful of colleagues; less than twenty-five of those working in Whitehall knew the secret of Enigma. What neither Churchill nor they knew was that, to compound the danger, German Naval Intelligence had at that very moment broken the British cyphers carrying most of the Allied signals about the North Atlantic convoys. The Battle of the Atlantic, which the previous autumn seemed to have been won by Britain after considerable earlier losses and hardship, was once again a battle filled with anxiety and danger.
On February 5, as the Japanese forces approached Singapore, even the ability of Burma to resist was cast into doubt. Searching for new alliances and commitments, Churchill proposed flying at once to India, to meet the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and work out an Anglo-Chinese strategy on Burma’s northern border; and to offer India an Assembly to discuss a new constitution, with a view to complete independence after the war. ‘What a decision to take, and how gallant of the old boy himself!’ wrote Eden’s Private Secretary, Oliver Harvey. The episode in Washington led Churchill’s doctor to advise against any such journey. ‘But for his heart,’ Eden told Harvey, ‘there could be no question he was the right one to go.’ Not danger to his heart, however, but a feeling that he must be in Britain when Singapore fell persuaded Churchill not to make the journey.
On the morning of February 14 Wavell informed Churchill that, in the view of their commander, General Percival, the troops in Singapore were ‘incapable of further counter-attack’. Churchill at once gave Wavell authority to instruct Percival to surrender; this took place on the following day. Among those taken prisoner by the Japanese were 16,000 British, 14,000 Australian and 32,000 Indian soldiers. ‘Here is the moment,’ Churchill broadcast that night from Chequers, ‘to display that calm and poise, combined with grim determination, which not so long ago brought us out of the very jaws of death. Here is another reason to show—as so often in our long story—that we can meet reverses with dignity and with renewed accessions of strength. We must remember that we are no longer alone. Three-quarters of the human race are now moving with us. The whole future of mankind may depend upon our action and upon our conduct. So far we have not failed. We shall not fail now. Let us move forward steadfastly together into the storm—and through the storm.’
Colville, who was then in South Africa, serving with the Royal Air Force, commented, ‘All the majesty of his oratory was there, but also a new note of appeal, lacking the usual confidence of support.’ Wrote Harold Nicolson: ‘His broadcast last night was not liked. The country is too nervous and irritable to be fobbed off with fine phrases. Yet what else could he have said?’ What Churchill could not say was that Wavell had told him of the troops fighting not only in Malaya but also in Burma, ‘Neither British, Australians or Indians have shown any real toughness of mind or body.’ This perturbed Churchill immensely, but could no more be conveyed outside his secret circle than could news of the loss of the German submarine codes.
Despite Churchill’s success in the Vote of Confidence, public criticism of the inner direction of the war was growing. To the King, Churchill compared his task to ‘hunting the tiger with angry wasps about him’. The real worries had to be borne almost alone. ‘He said he was tired of it all,’ Captain Richard Pim, the head of Churchill’s Map Room, noted on February 18, ‘and hinted that he was very seriously thinking of handing over his responsibilities to other shoulders.’ On the following day Churchill made Attlee Deputy Prime Minister, but to those who had demanded that he give up his own second post as Minister of Defence, he said, in the Commons on February 24, ‘However tempting it might be to some, when much trouble lies ahead, to step aside adroitly and put someone else up to take the blows—the heavy and repeated blows—which are coming, I do not intend to adopt that cowardly course.’ Two weeks later Clementine wrote to Churchill’s cousin Oswald Frewen: ‘He is so brave. The attacks themselves would not do it, but combined with the grief and tragedy of Singapore, I hope his stout heart will not be broken.’
In public, Churchill’s pugnacity had returned. But his family saw his inner distress. ‘Papa is at a very low ebb,’ Mary wrote in her diary on February 27. ‘He is not too well physically, and he is worn down by the continuous crushing pressure of events.’ There was not much consolation that day, when a successful British commando raid on a German radar station on the Channel Coast revealed, as a result of the successful capture of radar components, that in some respects German radar was more advanced than British. The British public rejoiced in the success of the raid; Churchill knew its dark side, as he knew of so many dangers of which the public had no inkling.
On February 28 Japanese forces invaded Java. In the ensuing naval battle, British losses were heavy. ‘These are as you say days of anguish for Winston, so full of strength & yet so impotent to stem this terrible tide in the Far East,’ Clementine wrote to a cousin that day. Mary noted in her diary that her father was ‘saddened—appalled by events’ and ‘desperately taxed’. It was almost three months since Pearl Harbor. ‘When I reflect how I have longed and prayed for the entry of the United States into the war,’ Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt on March 5, ‘I find it difficult to realise how gravely our British affairs have deteriorated since December 7.’
On the day Churchill sent this telegram, the senior British officer in Burma, General Sir Harold Alexander, who had been the senior officer at the Dunkirk evacuation, gave orders for Rangoon to be abandoned. Three days later the Dutch on Java surrendered and more than 10,000 British and Australian troops were taken prisoner. To help try to redress the growing negative aspects of the war, Churchill asked General Brooke to become Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. He also appointed as Chief of Combined Operations a naval officer, Lord Louis Mountbatten, a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, and the son of Prince Louis of Battenberg, Churchill’s First Sea Lord in 1914. Churchill also proposed that week to fly to see Stalin, either at Teheran, or at the Soviet city of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea, in order to complete the negotiations for an Anglo-Soviet Treaty. ‘And this,’ wrote Oliver Harvey, ‘from a man afflicted with a heart who may collapse at any minute. What courage and what gallantry, but is it the way to do things?’
Nothing came of the proposed visit to Russia. Nor could Churchill offer Stalin the prospect of something for which Stalin had begun to press with vigour: the launching later that year of an Allied amphibious landing in northern Europe that would draw German troops away from the Eastern Front, a ‘second front’. Indeed, on March 8 Churchill received a survey of America’s amphibious-landing potential from Roosevelt, in which the President mentioned June 1944 as the date by which the ‘troop-carrying capacity’ of United States vessels would reach the necessary 400,000 men. By June 1943 it would only be 130,000, insufficient for a major amphibious landing of the sort required in northern Europe, if a thrust was then to be made into Germany itself. For a landing in September 1942, as desired by Stalin, America could provide only 40 per cent of the landing craft and 700 of the 5,700 combat aircraft needed. Little wonder that, a month later, Clementine described her husband as ‘bearing not only the burden of his own country but for the moment of an unprepared America’.
American lack of preparedness was the decisive factor, as Roosevelt himself had made clear, in the inability of the Allies to mount an amphibious attack against northern Europe in 1942. In its place, the bombing of German cities and industry would continue to be the main offensive action against Germany from the west; ‘It is not decisive,’ Churchill told Portal on March 13, ‘but better than doing nothing, and indeed a formidable method of injuring the enemy.’ Enigma decrypts had begun to give details of a new German offensive against Russia planned for the summer. Churchill at once proposed ‘taking the weight off Russia’ by the heaviest British air offensive against Germany ‘which can be produced’. The Chiefs of Staff agreed; but they rejected Churchill’s request that a British air contingent should be sent to Russia to fight ‘side by side’ with the Soviet Air Force when the new German attack began. Fighter aircraft could not be spared from the Middle East, Brooke explained, in case of a renewed German offensive there.
The fall of Singapore was a cause of distress for Churchill; in a speech on March 26 he called it ‘the greatest disaster to British arms which our history records’. But the pace of the Japanese advance was too swift, and Japanese air power too strong, to be halted. On April 3 the Burmese city of Mandalay was bombed and two thousand civilians killed. On April 4, four British warships were sunk and more than five hundred men drowned in a Japanese air attack on Ceylon. On April 6, Japanese forces landed on the Solomon Islands, one of Australia’s Pacific Ocean Mandates. Answering renewed criticism that there had not been sufficient foresight in planning, Churchill told the Commons on April 13, ‘An immense amount of discussion and planning preceded these lamentable events, but study and discussion are not in themselves sufficient to prepare against attack by a superior force of the enemy.’ Four days earlier the American forces on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines surrendered, and 35,000 American troops were taken prisoner; a disaster on the Singapore scale. ‘The best that can be hoped for,’ Churchill told the Commons in Secret Session on April 23, ‘is that the retreat will be as slow as possible.’
Each day brought news of fresh disasters, to confront which Churchill sought at least an hour or two of solitude. ‘I went to Chartwell last week,’ he wrote to Randolph on May 2, ‘and found Spring there in all its beauty. The goose I called the naval aide-de-camp and the male swan have both fallen victims to the fox. The Yellow Cat, however, made me sensible of his continuing friendship, although I have not been there for eight months.’
Throughout April the British convoys to Russia had suffered severe losses, being repeatedly attacked by German bombers based in northern Norway. In one convoy that month only eight of the twenty-three ships reached Russia. One was sunk and the rest forced to abandon their voyage. On May 2, after Roosevelt asked for an increase in the number of convoys, to make up the losses, Churchill replied, ‘I beg you not to press us beyond our judgment in this operation, which we have studied most intently, and of which we have not yet been able to measure the full strain.’
The ‘full strain’ was everywhere being revealed; in Burma, Mandalay surrendered on May 3 and the whole rich country, which Churchill’s father had annexed to the British Empire in 1886, fell under Japanese control. In the Mediterranean, Malta was under severe aerial bombardment. In the Philippines, the American forces on Corregidor Island surrendered on May 6; eight hundred men had been killed during a tenacious defence. On the following day, after a two-day battle, British naval and military forces which had landed on Vichy-controlled Madagascar, to deny the island to the Japanese, entered Diego Suarez, the principal port, forcing the surrender of the Vichy-loyal garrison. These operations, Churchill told the Commons that day, ‘which were not without risks of various kinds, have been carried with great dash and vigour’.
On May 15, speaking at Leeds, Churchill told the vast crowd that had come to hear him: ‘We have reached a period in the war when it would be premature to say that we have topped the ridge, but now we see the ridge ahead.’ One of his secretaries, Elizabeth Layton, who was with him, wrote the next day to her parents: ‘There is no doubt about it at all; people regard him, one and all, as their PM.’ He appealed to the masses, ‘as well as to the brains and the “elite”. And he surely deserves it; he is just as warm-hearted, and one might even say lovable, as he could possibly be.’
That summer Churchill was constantly scrutinising the plans being made for an eventual landing in northern Europe, with the aim of defeating Germany on land. On May 26 he set out his thoughts on the floating piers that would be needed to unload the landing-ships once they had crossed the Channel. ‘They must float up and down with the tide,’ he wrote. ‘The anchor problem must be mastered. Let me have the best solution worked out. Don’t argue the matter. The difficulties will argue for themselves.’
The task was put to the construction engineers Taylor Woodrow. Two concrete harbours, each the size of Dover harbour, had to be constructed in such a way that they could be towed across the English Channel. But no substantial cross-Channel assault could be contemplated while the German Army was still undefeated in North Africa, and while the German power to take the initiative there remained. On the very night of Churchill’s note, Rommel launched an offensive against the British forces in the Western Desert. ‘Retreat would be fatal,’ Churchill telegraphed to Auchinleck. ‘This is a business not only of armour but of will power. God bless you all.’
As the armies of Rommel and Auchinleck battled in the Western Desert, British bombers struck on May 30 at Cologne. It was the first thousand-bomber raid of the war. Much damage was done to German industrial installations, but thirty-nine of the bombers were shot down. There was also an engagement that week of even greater impact on the outcome of the war: in the Pacific, as a result of a joint Anglo-American effort at decrypting Japanese top-secret radio signals, a Japanese invasion fleet on its way to Midway Island, the stepping-stone to Pearl Harbor, was brought to battle on June 4; all four Japanese aircraft carriers were destroyed. With so many war zones, so many captive nations, and so many possible war plans, Churchill decided to cross the Atlantic for a second meeting with Roosevelt.
In the Western Desert, Rommel was pressing forward to Tobruk. The garrison there, Churchill telegraphed to Auchinleck on June 15, should contain as many troops ‘as are necessary to hold the place for certain’. Two days later he left London by train for Stranraer in Scotland; there he boarded the same flying boat he had returned to England in five months earlier.
‘PM in tremendous form,’ Brooke wrote in his diary during the flight across the Atlantic, ‘and enjoying himself like a schoolboy.’ After twenty-six hours in the air, and a refuelling stop in Newfoundland, the flying boat landed at Anacostia Naval Air Base, less than three miles from the White House. After a night at the British Embassy in Washington, he flew by United States Navy plane to New Hackensack, the nearest airfield to Hyde Park, Roosevelt’s home on the Hudson River. Roosevelt awaited him at the airfield and, Churchill later wrote, ‘saw us make the roughest bump landing I have ever experienced’.
Roosevelt then drove Churchill to see his estate overlooking the Hudson. ‘In this drive I had some thoughtful moments,’ Churchill later wrote. ‘Mr Roosevelt’s infirmity prevented him from using his feet on the brake, clutch, or accelerator. An ingenious arrangement enabled him to do everything with his arms, which were amazingly strong and muscular. He invited me to feel his biceps, saying that a famous prize-fighter had envied them. This was reassuring; but I confess that when on several occasions the car poised and backed on the grass verges of the precipices over the Hudson I hoped the mechanical devices and brakes would show no defects. All the time we talked business, and though I was careful not to take his attention off the driving we made more progress than we might have done in formal conference.’
During his talks with Roosevelt at Hyde Park on June 20, Churchill stressed that as ‘no responsible British military authority’ could see any chance of success for a cross-Channel landing in September 1942, the new war zone that autumn should be the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts of French North Africa. Roosevelt agreed; it was the American inability to provide sufficient combat aircraft and landing-craft that made a full-scale assault impossible. Looking even further ahead, the two men also reached an agreement, of the utmost secrecy, whereby the United States and Britain would share ‘as equal partners’ their respective researches into the creation and manufacture of an atom bomb.
That night Churchill and Roosevelt went by Presidential train to Washington, where Churchill was Roosevelt’s guest at the White House. On the following morning, as he and Roosevelt were talking in the President’s study, a pink slip of paper was brought in and handed to the President, who read it, said nothing, then passed it to Churchill. The message read, ‘Tobruk has surrendered, with 25,000 men taken prisoner.’ Churchill did not believe it, and asked Ismay to telephone London. But before Ismay could do so, a second message arrived, from the commander of the British naval forces in the Mediterranean, whose message began, ‘Tobruk has fallen.’
There could be no further cause for disbelief. ‘Defeat is one thing,’ Churchill later wrote, ‘disgrace is another.’ For a few moments no one spoke. Then Roosevelt turned to Churchill with the words ‘What can we do to help?’
As the details emerged during the day it became clear that the number of prisoners taken was closer to 33,000. It was also clear that Rommel was continuing his advance towards the Egyptian border, and might even cross into Egypt. That night Roosevelt offered to send an American armoured division round the Cape to Egypt. To Auchinleck, Churchill telegraphed, ‘Whatever views I may have about how the battle was fought, or whether it should have been fought a good deal earlier, you have my entire confidence, and I share your responsibilities to the full.’
For the second time within two years, Egypt would have to be defended. ‘You are in the same kind of situation,’ Churchill telegraphed to Auchinleck, ‘as we should be if England were invaded, and the same intense drastic spirit should reign.’ That day he learned that American shipping difficulties made it impossible for the promised armoured division to be sent to Cairo, which was itself now endangered by Rommel’s success in crossing the Egyptian frontier. Instead, the Americans now offered 300 tanks and 100 self-propelled howitzers; they would be sent out in two cargo ships specially requisitioned from the Havana sugar traffic.
On the evening of June 23, Churchill left Washington by train for Camp Jackson in South Carolina. There, on the morning of June 24, he watched a battalion of American troops doing a parachute drop. ‘I had never seen a thousand men leap into the air at once,’ he later recalled. That afternoon he watched a brigade of soldiers at a field firing exercise, using live ammunition. He then returned by air to Washington. Then, shortly before midnight on June 25, he boarded his flying boat at Baltimore, telling Hopkins as he shook his hand, ‘Now for England, home, and—a beautiful row.’ He had just learned that there was to be a Vote of Censure against him in the House of Commons. The debate began on July 1, the day on which German forces reached El Alamein, 250 miles inside Egypt and less than 200 miles from Cairo. According to one of Churchill’s severest Labour critics, Aneurin Bevan: ‘The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.’
In his defence, Churchill pointed out that he had to carry the War Cabinet with him ‘in all major decisions’ and that the Chiefs of Staff exercised ‘direct operational control’ over the fighting forces. He asked for ‘no favours’. He had undertaken the office of Prime Minister after defending his predecessor, Chamberlain, ‘to the best of my ability’ at a time when the life of the Empire ‘hung upon a thread’. Churchill added: ‘I am your servant, and you have the right to dismiss me when you please. What you have no right to do is to ask me to bear responsibilities without the power of effective action.’ If the Vote of Censure were defeated, Churchill told the House, ‘a cheer will go up from every friend of Britain and every faithful servant of our cause, and the knell of disappointment will ring in the ears of the tyrants we are striving to overthrow.’
The Vote of Censure failed by 475 votes to 25. Churchill returned to 10 Downing Street where, that same afternoon, he saw Amery’s son Julian, who had just returned from the Western Desert and who urged him to visit the troops there, to improve their morale.
‘Your presence in the battle area would be enough,’ Amery told him.
‘You mean just go round and talk to them?’ Churchill asked.
‘Yes, to the officers and the men,’ Amery replied.
Churchill liked the idea of going to the battle zone; but Eden said he felt the Prime Minister would be ‘in the way’.
‘You mean like a great blue-bottle buzzing over a huge cowpat?’ Churchill asked him.
Cairo it would be; as plans were being made for the journey, another Arctic convoy on its way to Russia was savagely mauled. Of its thirty-four merchant vessels, twenty-three were sunk; only eleven reached Russia. Of nearly six hundred tanks being carried by the convoy to Russia, five hundred were lost. The August and September convoys would have to be abandoned. On July 14 Churchill learned that nearly 400,000 tons of shipping had been sunk in the Arctic and Atlantic in a single week, ‘a rate unexampled in either this war or the last’, he told Roosevelt, ‘and, if maintained, beyond all existing replacement plans.’
Churchill faced these setbacks without panic. Major-General John Kennedy, Director of Military Operations at the War Office, noted in his diary on July 17: ‘Winston certainly inspires confidence. I do admire the unhurried way in which he gets through such a colossal amount of work, and yet never seems otherwise than at leisure. He was particularly genial and good-humoured today. I can well understand how those around him become devoted to him—and dominated by him. I remember Dudley Pound once saying, “You cannot help loving that man”, and I can see the truth of this sentiment.’
President Roosevelt, hoping for some form of limited cross-Channel landing in September 1942, possibly on the Cherbourg Peninsula, sent Hopkins to London in the last week of July with two of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Marshall and Admiral King. But Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff were emphatic that the Cherbourg plan was too small to help Russia and too weak to succeed in holding on to the Peninsula. After three intensive days of discussion, the Americans agreed to abandon the Cherbourg operation, to give the North African landings the priority for 1942, and to try to prepare for a major cross-Channel landing in 1943.
Churchill told Stalin by telegram both about the suspension of the Arctic convoys and the postponement of the cross-Channel landing. Stalin was indignant, all the more so because in South Russia Hitler’s armies had broken through to the Caucasus and were threatening Russia’s principal oil-wells. The British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, stressed the ‘immense advantages’ of an early meeting between Churchill and Stalin, so that Churchill could explain not only the reasons for the changes, but also the plans being made for effective action and help. Churchill decided to fly on from Cairo to Russia. ‘We could then survey the war together and take decisions hand in hand,’ he telegraphed to Stalin on July 31.
For the first time in his life Churchill would be flying in an unpressurised cabin at 15,000 feet, in an American Liberator bomber. To get used to the experience he went to Farnborough late on the evening of July 31 for a special oxygen mask test, asking the expert who would accompany him if the mask could be adapted so that he could smoke his cigar while wearing it. The mask was duly adapted, and on the following night, accompanied by General Brooke and Charles Wilson, Churchill flew from Lyneham airport to Cairo. ‘I think much of you my darling,’ Clementine wrote to him three days later, ‘& pray that you may be able to penetrate & then solve the problem of the Middle East stultifications and frustrations or what is it? This first part of your journey is less dramatic & sensational than your visit to the Ogre in his Den; but I should imagine it may be more fruitful in results.’
As soon as he reached Cairo, Churchill sensed the weariness and lack of drive that had crept into all military planning. He was urged by General Brooke to replace Auchinleck, but hesitated to do so. ‘The PM hates the idea of removing one of his commanders,’ Charles Wilson noted in his diary on August 4. But Churchill finally made up his mind that Auchinleck must go. ‘Exactly what I have always told him from the start,’ was Brooke’s comment. Auchinleck’s command of the Eighth Army would go to General Gott, and his post as Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, to General Alexander. It was Alexander who had brilliantly extracted the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in May 1940, and the British and Imperial forces from Burma in May 1942. Like Churchill he was an Old Harrovian; Churchill felt confidence in what he described to Clementine as ‘his grand capacities for war’. General Gott, however, so Brooke warned Churchill, was said to be ‘tired out’. To test this, Churchill flew to the Eighth Army positions at El Alamein to inspect the positions there and spend time with Gott. ‘He inspired me at once with a feeling of confidence,’ Churchill wrote three weeks later.
Having flown back to Cairo, Churchill informed the War Cabinet of the proposed changes in command. Then, on the evening of August 7, he learned that Gott had been killed in a plane crash: shot down by German fighters while on the same route back to Cairo that Churchill had taken two days earlier. Gott was replaced by General Montgomery, whose aggressive zeal on the eve of the expected invasion of Britain had impressed Churchill in June 1940. Montgomery’s noted abrasiveness was not necessarily a negative factor. ‘If he is disagreeable to those about him,’ Churchill wrote to Clementine on August 9, ‘he is also disagreeable to the enemy.’
During his nine days in Cairo, Churchill visited all the Eighth Army units and addressed them. ‘At one place,’ he told his wife, ‘they nearly all came from Oldham’, his constituency of forty-two years earlier. ‘They showed the greatest enthusiasm.’ Everywhere he was cheered with vigour and listened to with attention, as he spoke of the American tank reinforcements on their way, and the prospects of victory. ‘The more I study the situation on the spot,’ he told Clementine, ‘the more I am sure that a decisive victory can be won if only the leadership is equal to the opportunity.’ On August 10, the day after writing this letter, he sent Alexander a directive, formally dated five days later, setting out the nature of the victory that was required: ‘Your prime and main duty will be to take or destroy at the earliest opportunity the German-Italian Army commanded by Field Marshal Rommel, together with all its supplies and establishments in Egypt and Libya.’ To Ismay he wrote on August 10, ‘I am sure that simplicity of task and singleness of aim are imperative now.’
Shortly after midnight on August 10 Churchill flew eastward from Cairo to Teheran, a journey of 1,300 miles, taking six hours. Once more oxygen masks were needed, as the Liberator flew over the mountains of western Persia. From Teheran he flew northward on August 12 to Moscow, his plane escorted by ten American-built Aircobra fighters that were part of Britain’s Lend-Lease purchases. Late that afternoon, after a ten-and-a-half-hour flight from Teheran, Churchill landed at Moscow. From the airport he was driven to a villa outside the city, where a hot bath and lavish refreshments were waiting, ‘far beyond our mood or consuming powers’, he later recalled. Two hours later he was driven into Moscow, and to the Kremlin.
The Soviet leader was in sombre mood, telling Churchill at the outset of their talk that the Germans were making a ‘tremendous effort’ to get to Stalingrad on the Volga, and to Baku on the Caspian. In the south, the Red Army had been ‘unable to stop the German offensive’. Churchill then explained to Stalin that there could be no cross-Channel landing in 1942; that only two and a half American divisions had yet arrived in Britain; that the twenty-seven divisions which would form the American component of any cross-Channel force could not arrive before December; that the Anglo-American plan was to launch the invasion in 1943; but that in 1943 it might be found that the Germans would ‘have a stronger army in the West than they have now’. At this point, the official British record noted, ‘Stalin’s face crumpled into a frown’.
Churchill told Stalin that if throwing 200,000 men ashore would draw back ‘appreciable German forces’ from the Russian front, ‘he would not shrink from this course on the grounds of loss’. But if it ‘drew no men away and spoiled the prospects for 1943, it would be a great error’. Stalin was contemptuous, telling Churchill, ‘A man who was not prepared to take risks could not win a war’, and he went on to ask why the British were ‘so afraid of the Germans.’ In reply, Churchill spoke of 1940, when Hitler, he said, had been afraid of invading Britain. Had Hitler not been afraid, he Churchill ‘would not be here to tell the tale’.
Stalin was both angry and glum: angry that no cross-Channel landing was in prospect that September, and glum because it looked as if there would be no action whatsoever by Britain and the United States to draw off German troops or aircraft from the swiftly crumbling Eastern Front. Churchill now spoke of the British bombing of Germany. This was already considerable, he said, and would increase. Britain looked upon the morale of the German civilian population ‘as a military target. We sought no mercy and we would show no mercy.’ Britain hoped to ‘shatter’ twenty German cities, as several had already been shattered: ‘If need be, as the war went on, we hoped to shatter almost every dwelling in almost every German city.’
At this point, the record of the meeting noted, ‘Stalin smiled and said that would not be bad’. Churchill’s promise of the massive bombing of German cities ‘had a very stimulating effect upon the meeting, and thence-forward the atmosphere became progressively more cordial’. Churchill then told Stalin that there was another operation being prepared at that very moment, an amphibious landing, details of which he was authorised by Roosevelt to impart. At this, the record noted, ‘Stalin sat up and grinned’. Churchill then gave an account of the North African landings. The ‘second front’ for 1942 would be in North Africa. It could be carried out by seven American and five British divisions, a quarter of those needed to cross the English Channel.
Stalin was pleased and impressed: ‘May God help this enterprise to succeed,’ he said. But on the following day he was again in angry mood, telling Churchill, ‘You British are afraid of fighting. You should not think the Germans are supermen. You will have to fight sooner or later. You cannot win a war without fighting.’ In his reply, Churchill told Attlee on the following day, ‘I repulsed all his contentions squarely but without taunts of any kind.’ When Stalin repeated that the British were not prepared to operate on the Continent because they were afraid of fighting the Germans, Churchill replied, ‘I pardon that remark only on account of the bravery of the Russian troops.’
Churchill sought some means of improving the hostile atmosphere. ‘I then exclaimed,’ he reported to Attlee, ‘there was no ring of comradeship in his attitude. I had travelled far to establish good working relations. We had done our utmost to help Russia and would continue to do so. We had been left entirely alone for a year against Germany and Italy. Now that the three great Nations were allied, victory was certain provided we did not fall apart, and so forth. I was somewhat animated in this passage and before it could be translated he made the remark that he liked the temperament (or spirit?) of my utterance. Thereafter the talk began again in a somewhat less tense atmosphere.’
Churchill and Stalin now discussed war supplies and production. When Churchill asked about the Caucasus front, Stalin called for a relief model and explained on it the Russian defensive plan. That night Stalin gave a banquet for Churchill, who was in a somewhat depressed mood, having just learned of the loss of three warships, eight merchant ships and six aircraft, on a Mediterranean convoy taking supplies from Gibraltar to Malta. ‘The Prime Minister perked up a bit,’ one observer noted, ‘when photographs were taken of him sitting with Stalin on sofas.’ Stalin then invited Churchill to watch a film, but he was tired, and asked to be excused. ‘After a cordial handshake,’ he told Attlee, ‘I then took my departure and got some way down the crowded room but he hurried after me and accompanied me an immense distance through corridors and staircases to the front door where we again shook hands.’ Stalin’s gesture was appreciated. ‘This long walk,’ reported the British Ambassador, ‘or rather trot, for he had to be brisk in order to keep pace with Mr Churchill, is, I understand, without precedent in the history of the Soviet Kremlin in so far as we have impinged upon it.’
Churchill had a final talk with Stalin on August 15, when he told the Soviet leader that, in order to make Germany ‘more anxious about an attack across the Channel’ that summer, there would soon be a ‘serious raid’ by some eight thousand men with fifty tanks, who would stay a night ‘and kill as many Germans as possible’ and then withdraw: ‘a reconnaissance in force’ which could be compared, Churchill explained, ‘to a bath in which you feel with your hand to see if the water is hot’. This was to be the Dieppe raid of August 17.
Stalin then invited Churchill to his apartment in the Kremlin for a farewell drink. The drink turned into a banquet lasting more than six hours. The only tension was during a discussion of the Arctic convoys.
‘Has the British Navy no sense of glory?’ asked Stalin.
‘You must take it from me that what was done was right,’ Churchill replied. ‘I really do know a lot about the Navy and sea-war.’
‘Meaning that I know nothing?’ Stalin remarked.
‘Russia is a land animal,’ Churchill answered. ‘The British are sea animals.’
Stalin fell silent, then quickly recovered his good humour. The rest of the evening was spent in wide-ranging and amicable discussion, including Stalin’s recollection of his visit to London in 1907 to attend a Bolshevik conference. It was 3.15 in the morning before Churchill got back to his villa. An hour and fifteen minutes later he had to leave for the airport, and at 5.30 he was airborne. As he flew southward, Soviet troops were forced out of the Caucasian oil town of Maikop. But the defence lines Stalin had shown Churchill on the relief map still held.
Reaching Cairo on August 17, Churchill had a long talk with Alexander and Montgomery about their coming offensive. On the following day he drove with Alexander and Brooke 130 miles to Montgomery’s headquarters by the sea, at Burg el-Arab. There, after discussing the desert war, he bathed. On the following day there were further discussions as to how to beat Rommel. ‘On the way to bed,’ Brooke noted in his diary, ‘PM took me down to the beach where he was transformed into a small boy wishing to dip his fingers into the sea. In the process he became very wet indeed.’ That day, on the Channel Coast, Canadian forces, with some British and a few American troops in support, landed at Dieppe. The raid, Mountbatten reported to Churchill, was a success; the Germans had been ‘rattled’ by it and ninety-six German aircraft had been shot down. So had ninety-eight British aircraft, but Mountbatten hastened to assure Churchill that ‘thirty pilots are safe’. The lessons learned at Dieppe, Mountbatten told the War Cabinet on August 20, would be ‘invaluable’ in planning the future cross-Channel invasion.
Churchill remained in the Western Desert throughout August 20, swimming in the morning, and then visiting those areas of Montgomery’s defences against which it was known, from the Germans’ own top-secret messages, that Rommel planned an assault. ‘I saw a great many soldiers that day,’ Churchill later recalled, ‘who greeted me with grins and cheers. I inspected my own regiment, the 4th Hussars, or as many of them as they dared to bring together—perhaps fifty or sixty—near the field cemetery in which a number of their comrades had been newly buried. All this was moving, but with it all there grew a sense of the reviving ardour of the Army. Everybody said what a change there was since Montgomery had taken command. I could feel the truth of this with joy and comfort.’
Churchill arrived back in England on the evening of August 24. Clementine and Randolph were at Lyneham airport to welcome him. Back in London was a message from General Douglas MacArthur, who had commanded the American forces in the Philippines, and now, in Australia, awaited the moment when he could launch the reconquest of the lost islands. ‘If disposal of all the Allied decorations were today placed by Providence in my hands,’ MacArthur had told a senior British officer at his headquarters, ‘my first act would be to award the Victoria Cross to Winston Churchill. Not one of those who wear it deserves it more than he. A flight of 10,000 miles through hostile and foreign skies may be the duty of young pilots, but for a Statesman burdened with the world’s cares it is an act of inspiring gallantry and valour.’
***
On 28 August 1942, after top-secret German and Italian messages had been decrypted at Bletchley, three Italian fuel ships, bringing vital fuel oil for the German Air Force in the Western Desert, were sunk. Rommel, desperate not to find himself even shorter of fuel if he delayed any longer, launched his attack on Montgomery’s defences in the Western Desert on August 30. But his fuel shortages were too serious for him to break through the skilfully defended positions on the Alam Halfa ridge, fifteen miles south-east of El Alamein. At last Cairo and Alexandria were beyond his grasp. The tide of war was turning.
At the beginning of September Churchill agreed to send Stalin that month’s Arctic convoy which had earlier been cancelled. Stalin was now willing, for the first time, to provide long-range bomber cover for the convoys once they were east of Bear Island. Another danger was thus diminished.
Each Tuesday Churchill gave a dinner at 10 Downing Street to Generals Eisenhower and Clark, the two Americans who were in charge of the North African landings. On September 12 they were his weekend guests at Chequers, where discussions continued with the British Chiefs of Staff. Churchill’s was the voice of encouragement and confidence; also of exhortation and a concern for detail. He still had to bear the burden of bad news anywhere in the war zones; that day he learned of the loss of thirteen of the forty merchant ships in the September Arctic convoy, even though it had been escorted by seventy-seven warships. The only redeeming features were that forty of the attacking German aircraft had been destroyed by the British naval fighter escort for the loss of only four British fighters, and that only two of the escorts had been sunk.
That week a voice from the past sent Churchill words of encouragement; ‘I am all puffed up with pride at your great achievements, yes, puffed out like an old pouter pigeon,’ his eighty-three-year-old Aunt Leonie wrote on September 14. Churchill replied: ‘It is a great pleasure to me to know that you follow my toils. It seems to me that the tide of destiny is moving steadily in our favour, though our voyage will be long and rough.’ A few days earlier he had received a telegram from Wavell with disappointing news: the hoped-for offensive against the Japanese in Burma would not take place that year. A ‘heavy sick rate from malaria’ and a shortage of British naval escort craft, had combined to curtail Wavell’s plans.
As Churchill read the German top-secret messages about shortages and sickness in the Western Desert, he made sure that the most precise textual versions of these messages, rather than the usual paraphrases, were sent to Alexander, who knew their true source, so that he, Montgomery, and their Intelligence Staffs could assess Rommel’s weaknesses and the best moment to attack. When he travelled, it was to visit munitions factories and military installations. On October 12 he visited the Home Fleet. ‘Your presence with us has been an encouragement and inspiration to all,’ the Commanding Admiral signalled him.
Pressed that October by Eden to give his view on a post-war organisation based upon the Four Great Powers, Churchill was hesitant. ‘It sounds very simple,’ he wrote, ‘to pick out these four Big Powers’—the United States, Britain, China and the Soviet Union. ‘We cannot, however, tell what sort of a Russia and what kind of Russian demands we shall have to face. It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe.’ His own hope for the post-war world, Churchill told Eden, was for a ‘United States of Europe’ excluding Russia, in which the barriers between the nations of Europe ‘will be greatly minimised and unrestricted travel will be possible’. The new Europe would be guarded by an international police force, one of whose tasks would be keeping Russia at bay. He did not want to spend time on these themes, however, telling Eden, ‘Unhappily the war has prior claims on your attention and on mine.’
***
On October 23, from his positions at El Alamein, Montgomery launched his attack on the German-Italian forces. Four things were in his favour: Rommel was in Germany, his forces commanded by the less charismatic General Stumme; the German-Italian forces had betrayed their location, plans and shortages through their own top-secret signals being regularly decrypted; photo-reconnaissance of the enemy’s defensive positions was remarkably effective; and Montgomery’s troops, now well-armed, keen, and confident in their commander, were determined to drive the enemy from Egypt.
On the first day of battle General Stumme was killed and Rommel recalled from Germany. Relentlessly the Allied forces advanced westward. Within three days 1,500 Germans and Italians had been taken prisoner. When Rommel attempted to assemble his forces for a counter-attack on October 27, British bombers pulverised his concentration area, dropping eighty tons of bombs in two and a half hours, with the result, Alexander reported to Churchill, that the counter-attack ‘was defeated before he could even complete his forming up’.
The fighting had been severe: after ten days of battle more than 1,700 British and Allied troops had been killed. But on November 2 Rommel sent a top-secret signal to Berlin to say that his army was no longer able to prevent a tank breakthrough. Nor could he withdraw in an orderly way in view of his lack of motor vehicles and low stocks of fuel. This signal was decrypted at Bletchley and sent to Churchill that same evening. A copy was also sent to Alexander. The decrypt made clear that the moment had come to launch the assault. Within forty-eight hours the British armoured formations had passed through the German front and, Alexander reported to Churchill on November 4, ‘are operating in the enemy’s rear areas. Such portions of the enemy’s forces as can get away are in full retreat, and are being harassed by our armoured and mobile forces and by our Air Forces.’
Later that day Churchill learned that nine thousand enemy prisoners had been taken, and 260 German and Italian tanks either captured or destroyed. On the following day the King wrote to him by hand, ‘When I look back and think of all the many arduous hours of work you have put in, and the many miles you have travelled, to bring this battle to 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.’
On November 4 Churchill had told Alexander that he wanted ‘to ring the bells all over Britain for the first time this war’. To give such an order he would need to know that Montgomery had taken at least 20,000 prisoners. ‘Ring out the bells!’ Alexander telegraphed two days later. ‘Prisoners estimated at 20,000, tanks 350, guns 400, motor transport several thousand’. Churchill was about to give orders for the bells to be rung; two years earlier they would have rung out only if Germany had invaded Britain. But he decided not to do so until the North African landings had taken place on the following day ‘in case’, he explained to Alexander, ‘of some accident which would cause distress’.
Churchill sent this telegram to Alexander on November 7. That same day he sent Stalin a warning, based upon a decrypted German top-secret message, that Hitler, having despaired of capturing the Caspian oil city of Baku, now planned ‘to wreck it by air attack’. Churchill added, ‘Pray accept this from me.’ Stalin did, thanking Churchill for the warning, and taking the necessary measures to combat the danger.
On November 8 British and American troops landed in force at Algiers, Oran and Casablanca. Churchill’s son was among them. ‘Well, here we are, safe and sound in the anchorage to the west of Algiers,’ he wrote to his father that morning. ‘Nearly everything has gone according to plan.’ Everyone felt that it was ‘a real privilege to be taking part in these great events.’ In addition, Randolph reported, ‘All goes well between us and the Americans.’ The naval planner of the British landings was Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who before the war had brought Churchill details of naval deficiencies.
After fierce fighting, in which Vichy French forces tenaciously resisted the Allied effort, all three ports were taken. There was an unexpected bonus in the fact that the Vichy Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Darlan, who was then, by chance, in Algiers visiting his sick son, declared himself for the Allies, and ordered the local Vichy forces to lay down their arms.
Churchill was elated by the success in North Africa. During that night’s dictation, Elizabeth Layton noted, ‘Once he began to bark, then quickly stopped himself and said “No, no; quite all right, quite all right. Tonight you may rejoice. Tonight there is sugar on the cake.”’
On November 9 Churchill told the Chiefs of Staff that in view of the success of the North African landings ‘an entirely new view must be taken of possibilities of attacking Hitler in 1943’; mainland Europe must be attacked from the Mediterranean. Rather than limit the follow-up there to Sicily or Sardinia, as previously envisaged, he wished to plan for the invasion of Italy itself ‘with the object of preparing the way for a very large-scale offensive on the underbelly of the Axis in 1943’, or, ‘better still, the invasion of Southern France’. To the Director of Movements at the War Office he explained two weeks later: ‘I never meant the Anglo-American Army to be stuck in North Africa. It is a springboard and not a sofa.’ Speaking at the Mansion House in London on November 10, he told the Lord Mayor’s Luncheon, ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’
During this speech Churchill noted that in the Western Desert Rommel’s retreating forces had been subjected to ‘blasting attacks’ by the Royal Air Force as they tried to flee along the coast in their vehicles. As he read these accounts, Churchill said, ‘I could not but remember those roads of France and Flanders, crowded, not with fighting men, but with helpless refugees—women and children—fleeing with their pitiful barrows and household goods, upon whom such merciless havoc was wreaked. I have, I trust, a humane disposition, but I must say I could not help feeling that what was happening, however grievous, was only Justice grimly reclaiming her rights.’
Churchill’s speech of November 10 became memorable for one particular sentence in it, ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’ Seldom quoted is his next remark, that, if such a task were ever prescribed, ‘someone else would have to be found’ to carry it out. It was a personal declaration of his belief in Empire, not a political statement that the Empire would never be dissolved. As important, if not more so, Churchill had gone on to say that Britain sought no territorial expansion; her only war aim was to ‘effect the liberation of the people of Europe from the pit of misery into which they have been cast by their own improvidence and by the brutal violence of the enemy.’ As to his own part in the process of war-making, ‘I am certainly not one of those who need to be prodded,’ he told the House of Commons on November 11. ‘In fact, if anything, I am a prod. My difficulties rather lie in finding the patience and self-restraint to wait through many anxious weeks for the results to be achieved.’
On November 11, as the Allies consolidated their hold on French North Africa, Hitler’s forces took over the Unoccupied Zone of Vichy France. Two days later, in the Western Desert, Montgomery’s forces entered Tobruk, which was never again to fall under German control. On November 15 Churchill ordered church bells to ring throughout England to celebrate the victory in the Western Desert. ‘There is still a long road to tread,’ he telegraphed to King Abdullah, whom he had installed as ruler in Amman in 1921, ‘but the end is sure.’