A summer’s day, 1886. The sunlight falls brightly across the nursery floor of a rather grand house in a smart street in London. Two boys are playing with their toy soldiers on the floor. The younger of the two plays in a desultory way. His heart is not in the game. His elder brother, on the other hand, is the very picture of concentration and seriousness. He moves his soldiers with utmost care and attention. He commands an army of nearly fifteen hundred troops. They are all perfectly painted in the colours of the British Army. Different regiments stand out clearly in their smart field uniforms. And they are properly organised into an infantry division with a cavalry brigade on the flank. There are artillery pieces as well: eighteen field artillery guns and a few heavy pieces for assaulting solid fortresses. The older boy has arranged his troops into a perfect formation of attack.
This afternoon the two boys’ father comes to pay a visit. He is a very important man, a leading politician. Indeed, he has just been appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative government. Hence, he is always very busy and has little time for his sons; nevertheless, they adore him. On this occasion the father spends a full twenty minutes in the nursery, studying the impressive scene of an army ready to launch an assault upon its foe. At the end of his inspection, he asks his eldest son if he would like to go into the army when he grows up. Winston Churchill replies at once: yes, he would love to. It would be splendid to command a real army. After this day, the young Winston’s education will be focused on getting him into the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, where he will learn the technical details of the profession of arms. The boy’s obsession and fascination with his toy soldiers had, as he later wrote, ‘turned the current’ of his life. Winston Churchill would grow up to be a soldier.1
August 1898. The boy is now a distinguished young officer in one of the elite cavalry regiments of the British Army, the 4th Hussars. The only trouble is that the 4th Hussars are stationed in southern India. And there is no action in southern India. Seeking out the thrill of military combat, the twenty-three-year-old subaltern arranges a transfer to the army led by Sir Herbert Kitchener that is mounting an expedition into the Sudan. Churchill is temporarily enlisted with the 21st Lancers, who are part of this vast Anglo-Egyptian army of twenty-five thousand men that is slowly travelling down the west bank of the river Nile, teasing out an engagement with the Muslim Dervish army near Khartoum. He is enthralled by the magnificent sight of this advancing army with its five brigades, each of three or four infantry battalions, marching in open columns across the sandy desert, along with its artillery and transport, supported by a flotilla of grey gunboats sailing down the Nile. The 21st Lancers patrol the flank and scout ahead for the enemy.
On 1 September the Dervish army is sighted, fifty thousand strong, assembling in huge phalanxes. At dawn on the following day, battle ensues. Churchill watches the early stages of the battle from the top of a ridge while passing reports back to his commanding officers. As the sun slowly comes up he is exhilarated by the experience: ‘Talk of Fun! Where will you beat this! On horseback, at daybreak, within shot of an advancing army, seeing everything and corresponding direct with Headquarters.’
The battle that follows sees a modern, well-equipped nineteenth-century army engage with a massed force of local tribesmen. The shells and bullets of British howitzers, Maxim guns and carbine rifles tear into the Dervish soldiers, creating huge, deadly swaths in their ranks. The result is a foregone conclusion. Within hours, the Anglo-Egyptian army wins a tremendous victory. But the Dervishes are tough, well-trained and highly motivated soldiers. Later that morning, as the 21st Lancers escort the infantry towards the enemy capital, they come under fire from their right flank. The trumpets and bugles sound the order first to ‘Trot’, then to ‘Wheel Right’, then to ‘Charge’, and the Lancers carry out a manoeuvre they have long trained for, a cavalry charge at full gallop and in close order against an enemy line. Churchill, leading his troop of some twenty-five men, rides right through the line of Dervish defenders, riflemen and spear carriers. But the line holds. Turning around on the other side, Churchill finds himself isolated and surrounded by ferocious Dervishes. He shoots at least three men at close range, rallies his troop and they regroup. Then they open rapid fire on the enemy, who cannot survive this enfilade. In twenty minutes the action is over. The Dervishes withdraw along a wadi, a sunken riverbed, carrying their wounded with them. Churchill is unscathed but counts his losses. His troop has done well, but his regiment of 310 officers and men has lost 5 officers and 65 men killed and wounded in just a few minutes.
Churchill has taken part in the last great cavalry charge in history, at the Battle of Omdurman. Noble and magnificent though it might have seemed, charging across the desert to the echo of hoofs and the clatter of reins, the officers with their swords raised, in reality the cavalry charge was a futile act on the fringes of the battle. It contributed nothing to the enemy’s defeat and only inflicted losses of nearly one man in four on the 21st Lancers – far higher than those suffered by any other British unit that day. However, the event was covered with glory and the Lancers won three Victoria Crosses that morning. Churchill later described the battle in a way that encapsulates how many people saw wars on the fringes of the empire in the late nineteenth century: as good sport. He wrote, ‘This kind of war was full of fascinating thrills … No one expected to be killed … [T]o the great mass of those who took part in the little wars of Britain in those vanished light-hearted days, this was only a sporting element in a splendid game.’2
Afternoon, 1 June 1944. A small group gathers in the Map Room located at the heart of the underground War Rooms, a top-secret bunker constructed for government leaders in what is called the Downing Street Annexe. The group discusses plans for the D-Day invasion, which everyone knows is now only a few days away. The King is at this briefing, along with his private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles. The Prime Minister is also present, as well as a few top military figures. At the meeting the Prime Minister presses his desire to be present at the landings on the Normandy coast. He wants to be on board HMS Belfast, the flagship of the naval commander of the British fleet at this historic moment. It is agreed that there are risks associated with this: the ship could be bombed, hit by shells or struck by a mine. The largest amphibious landings in history will be taking place only a few thousand yards away.
The Prime Minister asks the King if he would like to be present also, and to lead his troops into battle, like monarchs in olden days. Lascelles is utterly horrified at the idea, feeling that neither the King nor the Prime Minister should put his life at such appalling risk. His face grows longer and longer. Eventually he speaks up and asks how the King would feel if he had to find a new prime minister during the middle of the D-Day landings. The Prime Minister dismisses this possibility, but the King argues that it is foolish of him knowingly to put himself in the face of such danger in what is a ‘joy ride’. The Prime Minister replies that during the course of the war he has flown to the United States and the Middle East, and has crossed the Atlantic many times: sometimes he needs to take risks in order to carry out his duties.
The King leaves the meeting and returns to Windsor. On the following day, he resolves to instruct the Prime Minister not to witness the D-Day landings in person. He writes him a letter in which he claims: ‘you will see very little, you will run a considerable risk, you will be inaccessible at a critical time when vital decisions might have to be taken; and however unobtrusive you may be, your mere presence on board is bound to be a heavy additional responsibility to the Admiral & Captain’. Later that day, the Prime Minister relents and reluctantly accepts the instruction of his sovereign not to travel to the battlefront.3
This story is again so typical of Winston Churchill. His generals and admirals are about to launch the long-awaited invasion of Europe. It has taken years to prepare for this moment. The assault on Fortress Europe will be one of the decisive moments of the Second World War, and one of its fiercest battles. And Churchill wants to be at the centre of it. He wants to witness the action. He wants to see the dawn bombardment, observe the landings, maybe even set foot on the beaches. He argues that leaders of men at times of war sometimes need ‘the refreshment of adventure’ and that his ‘personal interest’ is ‘stimulated by direct contact’ with events. Although he offers the King the chance of being there too, in truth Churchill wants to lead the troops into battle himself. Just as he did at Omdurman. Just as he did when he laid out his toy soldiers as a boy.
Man and boy, soldiering and military history were part of Churchill’s make-up, embedded in his DNA. For five years, from 1940 to 1945, he would oversee an extraordinary out-pouring of radical new ideas and fabulous new inventions in a sequence of events rich with brilliant but wacky boffins, remarkable mavericks and frustrated war chiefs. This would be Churchill’s War Lab.
War is the mother of invention. A cliché, but true.
And no war generated more incredible ideas, more technical advances and more scientific leaps than the Second World War.
In the cauldron of ideas that simmered throughout that conflict, new inventions ranged from jet engines to roll-on/roll-off ferries, from flying wings to floating tanks, from miniature radios to guided missiles. Winston Churchill immersed himself in the work of his engineers and inventors, his soldiers, sailors and airmen, imprinting his own personality on the machines that were created in his name. Like no other British prime minister at a time of war, Churchill relished military debate and immersed himself in the work of the code-breakers and scientific mavericks who were needed to get the best out of Britain’s sometimes low-key war effort. As a result of his encouragement, these men and women would eventually have a real impact on the outcome of the war.
The Second World War was fought as much by scientists, or ‘boffins’, as they were often known, as by soldiers, sailors and airmen. New ways of thinking, of approaching and assessing a question in the science known as Operational Research were applied to challenges facing the RAF, the British Army and the Royal Navy. Operational Research applied scientific method to solving problems ranging from finding the optimum setting for depth charges, to the search pattern aircraft should follow when hunting U-boats, to the most effective way of siting and firing anti-aircraft guns. A tiny device only a few centimetres long and invented at Birmingham University, the cavity magnetron, opened up revolutionary new possibilities for short-wave radar. This could be used to guide bombers to their targets and to track the conning tower of a U-boat from dozens of miles away. In many ways the cavity magnetron was a war-winning invention; certainly it was hailed as such by the Americans when it was first shown off in Washington. And, of course, harnessing the power of the atom in the massive Manhattan Project, which employed some 120,000 scientists and workers, was literally a war-winning discovery. Science would also help to crack the codes used in top-level enemy communications, and would help to guide shells towards aircraft in the skies. One leading scientist said during the war that ‘there is hardly a phase of the national life with which scientists are not associated’ and that you could ‘hardly walk in any direction in this war without tumbling over a scientist’.4
Churchill took a keen interest in the application of science to the technology of war. It is the underlying contention of this book that his encouragement of science and of new ways of approaching military challenges was at the core of Britain’s final victory in the long struggle of the Second World War. At one point the head of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, remonstrated with Churchill about a new approach the Prime Minister was championing.
‘Are we fighting this war with weapons or slide rules?’ Harris asked.
Churchill replied, ‘That’s a good idea; let’s try the slide rule for a change.’5
Churchill was a dynamo who generated energy (and heat) at the heart of government. Often his senior officers resented his interference. General ‘Pug’ Ismay repeatedly had to mediate in rows between the Prime Minister and his service chiefs. One intimate noted that, without this control on his actions, ‘Winston would have been a Caligula or worse, and quite properly [would have] had his throat cut.’ His involvement was not restricted to matters of grand strategy: although he always had strong views on these, he would also involve himself in detailed tactical battlefield questions. Within a few weeks of taking over at 10 Downing Street, a visitor was astonished to hear Churchill having a phone call with a local field commander, arguing whether the ‘brigadier … at Boulogne nearly 100 miles away was doing the right thing in resisting the Germans at one end of a quay or the other’.6
Churchill could be petulant and sometimes even childish. He constantly felt frustrated by what he perceived as the lack of drive in the military leaders who reported to him. He thought it was his job to bring vim and vigour to their deliberations and new ideas to their thinking. Once he remarked that taking an admiral out and having him shot would do a great deal ‘to encourage the others’. He said that one of his leading generals was more suited to running a golf club than an army of fighting men. At one point, his wife Clementine reluctantly wrote to him that ‘there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues and subordinates because of your rough, sarcastic and over-bearing manner’. But the pace of work quickened when Churchill was around. And most of those forced to work with him accepted that there were more pluses than minuses in his leadership.
Churchill became Prime Minister on the evening of 10 May 1940. Earlier that same day Hitler had launched his armies against Holland, Belgium and France. That evening, as a mighty battle raged on continental Europe, Churchill might have been justified in feeling overawed, even overwhelmed, by the role he had just taken up. Instead, he sensed that his ‘whole life had been a preparation for this hour and this trial’, and felt exhilarated that he was, in his famous phrase, ‘walking with destiny’.7
The first two chapters of this book look at the key elements of Churchill’s early life that prepared him for leadership in May 1940. He served in several regiments of the British Army both as a young man and in the trenches in 1915–16. He had regularly come under fire in combat. As a politician, he was President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, First Lord of the Admiralty at the beginning of both world wars, and Minister of Munitions at the end of the first. During his so-called ‘wilderness years’ in the 1930s he honed his ideas about history and what he called England’s ‘special destiny’. All of this helped to shape the man who became Prime Minister at the age of sixty-five in Britain’s hour of crisis.
Chapters 3 and 4 look in detail at his leadership during the critical year when Britain stood largely alone, until first the Soviet Union and then the United States turned a European conflict into a world war. The next four chapters step out of the chronology to look thematically at Churchill’s relationships with the scientists who played leading roles in the war, alongside his generals, his admirals and his air marshals. As we shall see, these scientists who advised him along with the military chiefs were core members of his War Lab. Chapter 9 picks up the chronology of the war at the beginning of 1943, as Churchill returns from the Casablanca Conference with President Roosevelt, and at the events that lead up to Operation Overlord, the invasion of Northern Europe. Chapter 10 looks at Churchill’s role during the final year of the war, while the concluding chapter offers a brief assessment of his wartime leadership.
Every new book on Churchill has to justify its existence in the crowded market place of Churchilliana. This one has emerged out of years of making television programmes about the Second World War and meeting some of the key participants in that war. It comes from a realisation that, although the Allies certainly did not have a monopoly on good science and technology (far from it), the application of this scientific approach under Churchill’s encouragement contributed significantly to their ultimate victory.
My father was a government defence scientist who had been recruited into the RAF straight out of university in 1942. He certainly regarded himself as a boffin, one of the ‘backroom boys’. Looking back now, I suppose he left me with a lasting interest in the relationship between science, technology and war. So, Churchill’s War Lab presents a new take on the remarkable years of Churchill’s war leadership. It is partly about the technology of war, partly about how Churchill was forged into the sort of war leader he was, and partly about how he inspired the mavericks and innovators to go out and influence the course of the Second World War. Many of the characters who appear in this book deserve books of their own. But Churchill himself rightly occupies centre stage throughout.
Taylor Downing
October 2009