Winston S. Churchill: Never Despair, 1945

The Marrakech revisions had now been printed, and had themselves been sent to the critics whose points had led to them. On February 1 Emery Reves telephoned to say that Book I as revised ‘is absolutely perfect’.¹¹⁰⁰ Isaiah Berlin was also more content. ‘I have read the latest batch of proofs with close attention,’ he wrote, ‘and greatly welcome the result—particularly such changes and rearrangements as I have noticed.’ More even than the opening chapters, Berlin added, which had seemed to him ‘to get off to a slow start’, the later chapters now set the ‘tempo and the rhythm’ for the whole work, which was, more than ever, ‘a literary and political masterpiece’.

‘You did, I recollect, order me to be quite candid,’ Berlin reminded Churchill.¹¹⁰¹ Churchill had accepted Berlin’s suggestion substantially to recast the second and third chapters. He also accepted advice from Christopher Soames, not to ascribe the Polish seizure of Teschen in 1938 to Polish ‘baseness in almost every aspect of their collective life’. ‘Was the gallant defence of Warsaw not an aspect of their collective life?’ asked Soames, and he added: ‘The seizure of Teschen was a vile act perpetrated by the Polish Government. Munich was a despicable act perpetrated by the British Government. But nobody blames the British people for it.’ Churchill agreed to replace ‘baseness’ by ‘faults’, and ‘collective life’ by ‘Governmental life’.1102

While working at his war memoirs, Churchill received from his cousin Sir Shane Leslie a book, still in proof, about their American grandfather, Leonard Jerome. It came as a shock to read something so different in style and content to his own. ‘The whole story of the Aylesford divorce is intolerable,’ Churchill wrote.¹¹⁰³ ‘There are many other references to my father and mother which I have noticed and resent,’ he added, and he went on to explain, in a passage which he decided to delete before the letter was sent:

All the society gossip which fills the latter part of the book is, in my opinion, utterly unworthy of your literary reputation. I object very much to any reference being made to my father and mother’s financial affairs. If you wish to unfold these petty details of a past generation, I trust you will confine it to your own family. I certainly could not allow any of my letters to appear in such a book.

‘I am earnestly hoping,’ Churchill ended, ‘that you will not think of publishing this book which will do you no good, will only pander to the vulgar and which, in its present form, I could never forgive.’¹¹⁰⁴

Shane Leslie promised to make the changes Churchill wished. ‘I am afraid my error has lost me your affection,’ he wrote.¹¹⁰⁵ Churchill responded at once, and all was forgiven. ‘I am most grateful to you,’ he telegraphed, and signed his telegram: ‘Affectionately, Winston.’¹¹⁰⁶ But when the book was published, Churchill was again distressed, writing in rebuke:

I have begun to read your book and want to tell you at once I do not like the Introduction which suggests that I only took the trouble to find out about our Grandfather when I had to do a broadcast for America. Can you not manage to leave me out of this?

It is a pity to make out that the family were engaged in ‘unending bewailment’ at the loss of their fortunes. They were left much better off than most people.

I have no objection to your quoting, on page 8 of the Introduction, what I actually said on July 15, 1941.¹¹⁰⁷

I think the expression on page 14—‘the maternal pit from which he was digged’—most unpleasant.

The story attributed to me on page 15 about my Father being remembered as ‘Winston’s father’ is utterly untrue. I never spoke in such disrespectful terms of him. I should have thought the biography I have written proved the reverence with which I regarded him.

Throughout the years when he was writing his memoirs, Churchill’s principal contact with his American publishers was Walter Graebner, with whom he had struck up a friendship after their first meeting in the autumn of 1945. It was Graebner who protected him from the cruder efforts of Time-Life to publicize the memoir-writing process. In reading the draft of an article which Time-Life wished to publish in the spring of 1948, to coincide with the publication of volume 1 in the United States, Graebner telegraphed to New York: ‘It is most important that you omit the whole section on trust taxes and salary, as publication of this would wreck our relations. We didn’t even read this to Churchill because I know he would have insisted that the whole story be killed.’ Graebner added: ‘Can you change the title to Churchill at Work? He hates that name Winnie.’ Churchill was also ‘very annoyed’, Graebner reported, ‘at the references to the bed and to the table on the stomach, so please delete,’ and he ended his telegram: ‘If you could work in a sentence some place mentioning Churchill’s enormous vitality and intensive work, there would be less chance of a blow-up when he sees the story in print.’¹¹⁰⁹

Help and encouragement reached Churchill from participants in the historical events he was describing, first from Sir Robert Vansittart and then from Anthony Eden. ‘The sweep of the Munich chapters is tremendous,’ Eden wrote, ‘and I think unchallengeable.’¹¹¹⁰

Plans were meanwhile being made for Volume 2, and the documents assembled. ‘Full justice must be done to the other side,’ Churchill minuted to his four principal helpers—‘our own secret circle’ he called them.¹¹¹² In a letter to Lord Ismay about the need to challenge various hostile opinions of the Greek and Western Desert policies in 1941, subjects on which Ismay had provided him with notes, Churchill wrote: ‘You must understand that it is no part of my plan to be needlessly unkind to the men we chose at the time, who no doubt did their best.’¹¹¹³

At the end of April 1948 Churchill received a second payment from Lord Camrose, £35,000 due on the delivery of his second volume.¹¹¹⁴ Three days later Jock Colville, after dining at Chartwell, noted in his diary how he, Mary Soames and her husband Christopher ‘saw an exceptionally good film called To Be Or Not To Be, and dined most agreeably. Winston, who had been busy all day painting a red lily against the background of a black buddha, switched from art to Operation “Tiger”.’¹¹¹⁵ This operation, the attempt to send tanks by convoy through the Mediterranean in 1941, was at that moment part of the work in hand at Chartwell, Commodore Allen having just sent Churchill a set of all the original Cabinet papers, telegrams and minutes.¹¹¹⁶

After dinner Churchill talked of the visit he and Colville had made to the Rhine in March 1945. Colville noted:

He was scathing about Monty’s self-advertising stunts and said he presumed British soldiers would soon have to be called ‘Monties’ instead of ‘Tommies’.

Speaking of the Anglo-American disputes over the question of a Second Front in the Cotentin in 1942, Winston said, ‘No lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt.’¹¹¹⁷

To his four principal memoir helpers, Churchill wrote on May 19, when sending them the first rough chapters of volume 3: ‘Please do everything you can to fill them in,’ and he added: ‘Meanwhile I welcome any aid.’¹¹¹⁹ ‘I have been much hunted lately,’ he explained that day to his neighbour, Major Marnham, ‘but am hoping to get a little freedom in June.’¹¹²⁰

On May 21 Churchill was in Westminster Abbey to unveil the memorial to the Commandos, the Submarine Service, the Airborne forces and the Special Air Service. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘we have our faith that the universe is ruled by a Supreme Being and in fulfilment of a sublime moral purpose, according to which all our actions are judged. This faith enshrines, not only in bronze but forever the impulse of these young men, when they gave all they had in order that Britain’s honour might still shine forth and that justice and decency might dwell among men in this troubled world.’¹¹²¹

Churchill’s words, wrote Major-General Laycock two days later, were ‘words which only you could have composed and spoken. All of us are grateful to you, and, particularly, I think, the mothers and widows whose sorrow you have made easier to bear.’¹¹²²

Returning to his war memoirs, on May 24 Churchill minuted to Bill Deakin, about the notes Deakin had prepared on the coup d’état in Belgrade in April 1941: ‘Can we have also a paragraph on Hitler’s fury at the Yugoslav volte-face? He must have been vy much vexed.’¹¹²³

In a second note to Deakin about the Yugoslav coup d’état, this time concerning the Soviet perspective, Churchill wrote:

Now we see them at the moment of the Serb crisis, apparently unconscious of what was loading up against them. One flash of sentiment and that merely a grimace—their expression of goodwill towards Yugoslavia at the moment of its destruction. The only deviation into sentiment from cold-blooded, crafty, unmoral, subhuman calculation of self-interest, all founded on wrong data and stupid & erroneous beyond description.

Here we are at the end of March, 1941, with Hitler massing his forces to destroy Russia, and these foolish commissars, the Kremlin gang, let the whole Balkans go to pieces. Our feeble intervention, such as it was, gained them five weeks in which Hitler lost the necessary time to take Moscow before the winter.1124

On May 25 Commodore Allen presented Churchill with a chronology and documents of the ill-fated Dakar expedition in September 1940, when he had been much criticized. Allen was sending these materials, he wrote, ‘after discussion with the First Sea Lord’.¹¹²⁵ On May 26 Churchill was again in London, where he made a short speech at the laying of a new foundation stone in the House of Commons.¹¹²⁶

On June 2 the first volume of The Second World War was published in the United States. That day, there was a lunch at the Savoy in Churchill’s honour, given by the Conservative Party. ‘“The Boss” was in gentlest of moods,’ wrote Henry Channon in his diary, ‘and made a mild, almost apologetic speech, which was yet not devoid of point and wit. I was very near to him and watched his easy smile and wet blue eyes that always look as if he had been crying.’ During his speech, Channon noted, Churchill made it clear ‘that he expects to win the Election “next year”, or early in 1950, with a “three-figure” majority. His reception was tepid, but not in the least unfriendly—though gone is the rapture of yesteryear. I think that the Party resents both his unimpaired criticism of Munich, recently published, and his alleged pro-Zionist leanings.’¹¹²⁷

Clementine Churchill’s health continued to give her husband considerable concern; he wanted so much to be able to comfort her, and to be with her when the spells of tiredness and depression overcame her. On June 15, after she had been away for two weeks’ recuperation, he wrote to her from Chartwell:

The publication of Churchill’s memoirs in the United States had caused immediate offence to many Poles, who resented phrases such as ‘ingratitude over the centuries has led them through measureless suffering’, ‘squalid and shameful in triumph’, ‘too often led by the vilest of the vile’, and ‘two Polands: one struggling to proclaim the truth and the other grovelling in villainy’.¹¹³⁰ On July 6 Brendan Bracken sent Churchill these phrases, as sent to him by Count Raczynski, the former Polish Ambassador to London. These passages, noted Bracken, ‘deeply offended the Poles in Britain, but they remain deeply devoted to you’.¹¹³¹

Churchill at once arranged with Cassell to make sure that these phrases did not appear in the British edition, which was yet to be published. On July 12 Denis Kelly informed him that the corrections had been made.¹¹³² Six days later Churchill wrote to Sir Edward Marsh: ‘I am much distressed about this Polish passage and have cut it to rags in the English volume. It was written in a feeling of anger against the behaviour of the present Polish Government and the temporary subservience of the Polish people to them.’¹¹³³

In Britain, Volume 1 of Churchill’s memoirs was now being serialized in the Daily Telegraph. ‘May I say how much I have been enjoying your memoirs in the Telegraph,’ Lloyd George’s widow, formerly Frances Stevenson, wrote on June 23, ‘particularly the exposure of pre-war Governments.’1134 As well as writing about past Governments, Churchill continued to seek to expose the Government of the day. He was again helped in preparing his speeches by Reginald Maudling, who later recalled:

I have never met, and I am sure I shall never meet, a man cast in the same mould. Perhaps it was an age of titans—Bob Menzies, for example, or Smuts. Perhaps one is merely deluding oneself in thinking that the personalities then were on a larger scale than one meets today. But whatever the truth or falsehood of the generality, Winston stood alone. There was a power, a vision and a magic about the man which I have encountered nowhere else.¹¹³⁵

Churchill had agreed that summer to speak to a Conservative fête at Luton Hoo. ‘It would be very kind of you,’ he wrote to Maudling on June 17, ‘to get something ready for me for the Luton Hoo meeting. Of course, the Agricultural Charter will be out in the morning papers, and that will require ten minutes or so. Generally speaking, I should take the Brighton Conference speech as a foundation and make a restatement of our position a year later, which has so much improved from a Party standpoint. I think the broad principles should be reaffirmed. I should like very much to have something of yours to work on.’¹¹³⁶

Churchill spoke at Luton Hoo on June 26, warning his listeners that there would be ‘no recovery from our present misfortunes until the politicians whose crazy theories and personal incompetence have brought us down, have been driven from power by the vote of the Nation’. Once that was done, there would be ‘a bound forward in British credit and repute in every land’.¹¹³⁷

Returning from Luton Hoo, Churchill embarked upon as uninterrupted a summer as he could create, to press ahead with his war memoirs, spurred by the enthusiastic reception of the first volume. He recognized from the start that his was not a definitive account, writing to Eisenhower about some of the controversial episodes of 1943 and 1944 with which he would deal: ‘However there are matters on which only another generation can pronounce.’¹¹³⁸

I exerted myself a great deal to bring about this battle which was the hope I had set before myself all the time in Operation Tiger. Alas, I could not pull it off. Wavell did his very best, but the delays in getting the Tiger Cubs into action were heartrending, and due to petty causes like air coolers etc.

I had hoped to fight this battle before the end of May. Rommel was then at his last impetuous gasp. Every round he had to fire, every can of petrol he had to use were his last heart beats. There he lay at Sollum with a thousand miles of communications behind him and all his hitherto successful bluff remaining to be called. In rear of him was an army with road, rail and sea communications, three or four times as strong and with more than three hundred brand-new tanks. Tobruk lay behind him to menace his life-line and it is incredible to me why this was not achieved.

An extensive battle towards Sollum and a grab on his tail from Tobruk would have spelt utter ruin. I cannot conceive why this could not be done. Rommel’s glory was built up on our incompetence just as his armies were sustained by his captures of our petrol and ammunition.

Presently comes the battle of June 18. Wavell tried a great deal. He not only flew up but flew out to the Desert Flank, where our Armoured Division had gone astray, in order to bring it back. Meanwhile General Messervy (I think anyhow there was a Mess in it) retired before he could get back to him.1139 The battle was broken off. Losses were about equal, and thereafter from June 18 to October 15, about four months, nothing was done on this front. This proves how weak Rommel was and how he hung on by his eyelids. All that was necessary, even if the battle was muddled, was to go on fighting him and forcing him to fire his ammunition and use up his petrol. But no. For my sins I appointed the great General Auchinleck, who naturally wanted to play for a sitter no matter what was lost in every other direction.¹¹⁴⁰

Since June 24, the Soviet occupation forces in Eastern Germany had imposed a road and rail blockade on all movement into and out of Berlin. On July 10, Churchill spoke in his constituency in support of Ernest Bevin’s firm response. Bevin, he said, ‘was right to speak for a united Britain’, except for the Communist fifth column ‘and those connected with them’, but they had ‘no power to make us change our national purpose’.¹¹⁴² On the day Churchill spoke, President Truman wrote to him from the White House of how Churchill could ‘look with satisfaction upon your great contribution to the overthrow of Nazism & Fascism in the World’. Truman added: ‘“Communism”, so called, is our next great problem. I hope we can solve it without the “blood and tears” the other two cost.’¹¹⁴³

Churchill’s mood was now much influenced by the deepening crisis over Berlin. ‘Clare says you were depressed and pessimistic about the Russians and the future,’ Churchill’s cousin Oswald Frewen wrote on July 20, after talking to his sister Clare Sheridan.¹¹⁴⁴ That night Churchill was able, at least on the surface, to cast aside care, as Henry Channon witnessed at dinner in a private room at Claridge’s:

People stood up and clapped as Winston and Mrs Churchill passed through. We were about twenty-two, and an agreeable party, but not the one that I should myself have given for Winston. Not sufficiently distinguished. I was between my sister-in-law Patsy Lennox-Boyd, who was sweet, and Mrs Churchill, who looked most distinguished: beside her Lady Kemsley seemed almost naked. Winston entered like royalty, and bowed a little and made himself charming….

At the end of dinner the men remained behind and Gomer Kemsley appointed himself spokesman and tried to draw out Winston (I have long known of their hostility). But the great man needed no prompting: he was gay, he was grave, he was witty, he was provocative, and in the highest spirits, but he admitted, indeed insisted, that never before in our history had the position of England been so precarious….

When asked by Gomer if he did not admire Attlee he replied, ‘Anyone can respect him, certainly, but admire—no!’1145

On the following day, July 21, Churchill wrote to Attlee about the feelings of his Conservative colleagues, as the Soviet grip tightened on Berlin, of ‘anxiety about the state of our defences and resources, both Britain and Allied, on which of course we have not been given any information’.¹¹⁴⁶ To Eisenhower, who had decided not to stand for the Presidency that year, Churchill wrote:

I am deeply distressed by what we see now. There can be no stable peace in the world while Soviet Imperialism is rampant and Asia on the Elbe. I am strongly of the opinion that waiting upon events to find the line of least resistance will not provide a means of escape for the poor world and the horrors which threaten it. I feel there should be a settlement with Soviet Russia as a result of which they would retire to their own country and dwell there, I trust, in contentment. It is vital to the future that the moment for this settlement should be chosen when they will realise that the United States and its Allies possess overwhelming force.

‘That is the only way,’ Churchill added, ‘of stopping World War Number Three.’¹¹⁴⁷

Churchill referred to Berlin when he spoke in the House of Commons on July 31. His speech was in protest against the Indian Government’s attempts to annex the predominantly Muslim state of Hyderabad, and against the British Government’s refusal to intervene to uphold the provisions of the Indian Independence Act which guaranteed the independence of Hyderabad as a state. During his speech, in which he clashed angrily with Attlee, Churchill declared, of Hyderabad:

…it is at present a sovereign independent State. It has a perfect right, as such, to apply for admission to UNO. It has 17 million inhabitants; it has a long history, and a long corporate identity. Of the 54 Member States of the United Nations, 39 have smaller populations, 20 have smaller territory and 15 have smaller revenue.

We are told that Hyderabad is surrounded by Indian territories, that it is completely land-locked, that it has no access to the sea. But such considerations have nothing to do with the right of independence. Switzerland is completely land-locked, and has no access to the sea, but has maintained its independence for hundreds of years. Austria and Czechoslovakia, also, are States which have no access to the sea, but their independence has never been treated lightly by the British House of Commons.

Since when are the rights of States to independence to be impugned or compromised by the fact that they are land-locked? I say that Hyderabad has an absolutely indefeasible status of independence, and that it is fully entitled to membership of the United Nations organisation if accepted by that body and, still more, is entitled to lay its case before that body and appeal for its support and mediation, especially when a breach of the peace may be involved.

…a very harsh blockade has been imposed on Hyderabad by the Central Government of India, a blockade which, in many aspects, is similar to that which the Soviet Union are now throwing around Berlin, except that the numbers of helpless people are far greater—17 million compared with 2½ million—and also because several very harsh features have been introduced into it, such as the prevention of the supply of medicines, drugs and hospital equipment. The Prime Minister, as I happen to know from interchanges we have had, contradicts this, but I would suggest that he should search more fully for his facts.1148

Churchill now prepared for a second journey abroad. Not Morocco, but southern France was his autumn choice. He was intending to publish much that bore on current arguments, such as his instructions to Mountbatten in 1943 to prepare for a cross-Channel landing. He would publish these instructions, he said, ‘because our American friends all make out that I was the inveterate foe of any descent on the Continent’.¹¹⁴⁹

On August 17 Churchill received a bank draft for one million French francs, from Time-Life International, ‘in accordance’, as its Paris business manager wrote to one of Churchill’s secretaries, ‘with the arrangements with which you are familiar’.¹¹⁵² This once more enabled Churchill to travel abroad free from financial constraints. He left for Aix-en-Provence on August 22, together with his wife, his daughter Mary and his son-in-law Christopher Soames. During Churchill’s stay, it was explained in a press notice issued from Chartwell, he would ‘continue to work on his War Memoirs’, living at Aix as ‘the guest of Life and the New York Times’.¹¹⁵³ Before leaving, Churchill arranged for seven daily newspapers, and four Sunday newspapers, to reach him by air on the day of publication.¹¹⁵⁴ ‘If the situation deteriorated to a point affecting my personal safety,’ Churchill wrote to Sir Stuart Menzies, ‘I should be very glad if you would send me a message advising me to come home in the following terms: “Zip—Menzies”.’¹¹⁵⁵

Churchill’s last message before setting off was a telegram to Willy Sax in Switzerland, which read: ‘Please send six tubes of white tempera to Aix-en-Provence.’¹¹⁵⁶ ‘I hope the sun will shine in Aix,’ wrote Jock Colville, in inviting Churchill to his wedding, ‘and that you will find many agreeable subjects to paint.’¹¹⁵⁷

On the day before leaving for France, Churchill was angered to learn from Attlee that the British Government would not support the establishment of a European Assembly, as proposed by Bidault at The Hague on July 20, and as so strongly urged by Churchill as an essential step towards United Europe. Ernest Bevin’s view, Attlee reported, was that ‘he could not for the time being commit himself’.1158 Now that the Belgian and French Governments had both proposed ‘a practical form of action’ by setting up a European Assembly, Churchill replied, ‘I venture to hope that His Majesty’s Government will find it possible to place themselves more in line with Western European opinion upon an issue which they themselves have already done much to promote.’¹¹⁵⁹

23Writing the Memoirs, 1948

23
Writing the Memoirs, 1948