10

Victory and Defeat

On 15 May 1942, an aerial reconnaissance Spitfire was flying fast and high across the Baltic. Over the northern end of the forested island of Usedom, the pilot noticed a mass of new construction around what looked like an airfield. He turned his cameras on and took a series of photographs of the ground below. When they got back to the aerial photography interpretation centre located in a big country house at Medmenham in Buckinghamshire, the photo interpreters tried to work out what was going on. Medmenham was to aerial photography what Bletchley Park was to code-breaking. An unlikely group of academics, scientists, archaeologists and air force types had been assembled and were building up a detailed analysis of everything that was happening in occupied Europe. By constantly comparing new photos with previous ones, they were able to plot the building or extension of every new factory, every new stretch of road or railway, and every new gun emplacement across Europe. But the strange shapes in the photos taken along the Baltic coast, which included circular embankments, left the interpreters puzzled. It was decided to keep a close watch on developments in this place called Peenemünde.

Many months passed before reports started coming in to British Intelligence about long-range rockets being developed at Peenemünde. In the Oslo Report, the document that had been left on the window sill of the British Consulate in Oslo in November 1939, there had been references to the development of rocket technology. Now this suddenly seemed far more threatening and real. In April 1943, the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Chiefs of Staff thought that Churchill should be made aware of the intelligence reports. Churchill agreed to establish a group to investigate and assess the threat. Duncan Sandys, his son-in-law and an expert on weapons development, was put in charge of the investigation, code-named ‘Operation Crossbow’.

Sandys and his team visited Medmenham and studied the aerial photographs, and went through the intelligence reports, some of which had come from the Polish Resistance. But none of it seemed to make much sense and there was an intense debate as to what the German scientists were up to. Then, in late June, a Mosquito photo reconnaissance aircraft made another pass across Peenemünde at high altitude. The day was clear and sunny and when the photographs were developed they revealed what seemed to be the answer to the mystery. The Mosquito had managed to photograph two rockets lying on their transporters alongside a tower structure. By measuring the shadows and knowing the exact time of day the photos had been taken, the interpreters were able to calculate that the rockets were thirty-eight feet long and that they were being assembled inside some sort of launch site.

On the evening of 29 June, Churchill chaired a high-level meeting of the Cabinet Defence Committee. Sandys and his team reported their fears that a form of long-range missile was being constructed. General Brooke, who was present, noted in his diary: ‘Arrived at conclusion that definite threat exists.’¹ However, Lord Cherwell, who was also in attendance, was sceptical. He fiercely disputed that any sort of liquid fuel could have been developed as a propellant, and said that no rocket could be made to carry a sufficient payload to cause serious damage. On both these points he was proved entirely wrong. He argued that the Germans were probably developing some form of jet-propelled pilotless flying bomb. In this he was to be proved right. What the scientists in London did not know for sure was that the Germans were experimenting with the production of two new types of bomb at Peenemünde. The first, made by a team headed by the brilliant German rocket scientist Werner von Braun, was the A-4 ballistic missile, a rocket which could carry a one-ton payload over a distance of 90–130 miles at over 2000 m.p.h. Several of these missiles had already been successfully launched. Meanwhile, General Dornberger of the German Army, who was running the research station, was also developing a prototype cruise missile for the Luftwaffe, which was launched from a hundred-yard-long ramp.

For some time, the British research teams would be confused by the fact that the Germans were developing these two separate and distinct technologies simultaneously. There was considerable difference of opinion between the British scientists as to what was happening at Peenemünde, and as ever with Cherwell this soon became personal in his sharp criticism of Sandys. But at the key meeting on 29 June, Churchill sided with Sandys rather than Cherwell and authorised the heavy bombing of Peenemünde along with detailed surveillance of all of northern France within 130 miles of London to try to find launch sites for the secret weapons. The group agreed that London was the most likely target, and plans were laid in utmost secrecy for the mass evacuation of children and pregnant women in the event of the use of the terror weapons. It must have seemed that just as one threat to Britain’s survival from the U-boats in the Atlantic had been defeated, another, potentially even more deadly threat had appeared.

In June, Hitler himself visited Peenemünde to inspect the progress of the experimental rocket research. He was delighted by what he saw. He believed that the use of these new weapons could turn the course of the war and he told his military chiefs that London would be flattened and Britain forced to capitulate. The date on which the attacks would begin was set for 20 October 1943. Hitler said that tens of thousands of the missiles would be used.

The debate on the scale of the threat continued in London with widespread divergence of views. The home security people believed the warheads could contain ten or even twenty tons of high explosive and were fearful of catastrophic damage to the capital. Cherwell continued to argue that nothing on this scale was technically possible. Churchill later wrote that listening to the opposing arguments, ‘it might have seemed at times that the two protagonists were divided as to whether the attack by the self propelled weapons would be annihilating or comparatively unimportant’.²

On the night of 17 August, 571 heavy bombers hit Peenemünde. The bombing caused widespread destruction. More than seven hundred scientists and workers were killed, including Dornberger’s deputy, who had designed the engine for the A-4 rocket. Forty of the bombers were shot down by enemy fighters. It was a high rate of loss, but the German research had been set back by several critical months. Furthermore, the Germans now decided to relocate this scientific work. Some of it was transferred to underground factories in the Harz Mountains. The work on the A-4 was relocated to an SS artillery range near Blizna in Poland. But it was the flying bombs, the prototype cruise missiles, that would be used first against Britain.

Assisted by reports coming in from the French Resistance, the scientists worked out what the launch sites for these new flying bombs looked like. Each site contained three buildings, the first about 260 feet long and 10 feet wide. It was here that the German engineers constructed the ramp from which the missile was fired. The other two buildings were smaller and always occupied the same relative positions to the long, thin building. In them the missiles were assembled, armed and fuelled. After scouring aerial photographs of the northern French coast, dozens of potential sites were identified by the photo interpreters at Medmenham. In each one, the ramp was being lined up to point exactly in the direction of London. A total of ninety-six of these sites were then bombed and destroyed. All of this further delayed the start of the flying bomb offensive. The first attack was made a week after D-Day, on 13 June 1944, nearly eight months after Hitler had said the missiles would be launched. Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, named the missiles ‘Vergeltungswaffe’ – literally ‘retaliation’ or ‘vengeance weapons’ for the invasion. The flying bomb became known in Britain as the ‘V-1’, with the ‘V’ standing for ‘vengeance’. Eisenhower wrote later that if the Germans had got the V-1s operating six months earlier, as Hitler had planned, then they could have caused havoc with the preparations for D-Day. He even went as far as to say: ‘“Overlord” might have been written off.’³

As it was, Londoners now experienced a second Blitz. In the next five weeks about three thousand V-1s were fired at the capital. It was a terrible experience to be under these flying bombs. Londoners heard the buzz of their engines as they flew over, hence their popular names ‘buzz bombs’ and ‘doodle-bugs’. Next the engine would cut out and everything fell silent for a few seconds. Then the bomb crashed to the ground, causing a huge explosion. The suspense was appalling. The flying bombs could come over at day or night and regardless of the weather. They were impersonal, indiscriminate killers and made people feel helpless as there was nothing they could do to defend themselves except run for the shelters if there were enough time.

At first it seemed as if there were little defence against the flying bombs once they had been launched. They were difficult to shoot down from the air because of their speed and small size. If an interceptor fighter aircraft got close enough to shoot at one, the fighter would probably be destroyed in the massive explosion that followed. The fastest RAF fighters, Spitfires and Tempests, stripped down to add a few extra miles per hour to their speed, were just about able to catch the jet-propelled flying bombs out over the Channel, and occasionally a brave pilot was able to get close enough to tip one with his wing, so as to deflect it off course and send it crashing into the sea. More effective was a new form of radar known as ‘SCR-584’ that was developed by scientists at the Radlab, a specialised unit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in America. This system could track a flying bomb and fire anti-aircraft shells automatically, bypassing manual operation of the guns. Churchill personally intervened to get this system shipped from America in significant numbers. Combining SCR-584 with new proximity fuses that ignited when the anti-aircraft shells were near to the bomb was the most effective way of striking at the V-1s. Another ingenious way of reducing their impact was by letting it be known that many of the bombs were overshooting London and landing to the north of the city. This piece of disinformation resulted in the Germans resetting the controls of the V-1s to crash to land earlier. This meant that hundreds of flying bombs landed harmlessly in the fields of Sussex or Kent and never reached London.

By the end of August, only one in seven of the flying bombs fired against London was getting through. Of the total 8500 bombs launched against London, a total of 2400 landed somewhere in the South-East. By September, the threat from the V-1s had virtually come to an end as the advancing armies had overrun most of the launch sites in northern France. However, 24,000 civilians were killed or seriously injured and 750,000 homes were damaged during the V-1 flying bomb offensive.

However, just as one threat faded, the second V-weapon began to land on London. These rocket missiles were propelled by the combustion of alcohol and liquid oxygen. Controlled by gyroscopes, they flew up to a height of about fifty miles before heading back to earth in a huge parabola. They had a range of about two hundred miles and the entire journey took just three or four minutes. Their one-ton warhead was about the same as that fitted to the V-1. After the plot on his life on 20 July 1944, Hitler put Himmler and the SS in charge of all his special weapons projects. The SS rushed through the readying of the rockets and the first one landed on Chiswick in west London on the evening of 8 September. There was absolutely no defence against this silent and deadly weapon, known as the ‘V-2’, other than to destroy the launch sites. As the Allied armies advanced through France and Belgium, most of the launch pads were moved to Holland, many near The Hague. The Germans thought the Allies would not want to bomb the Dutch capital. However, British and American bombers constantly harassed the known launch sites and the missile production centres. This reduced the number of missiles being produced from the intended number of nine hundred per month to roughly half of this. In total, over thirteen hundred V-2 rockets were fired on England and a slightly larger number were fired on Belgium, mostly on the giant port of Antwerp after the Allied armies had captured it. About five hundred reached London and over nine thousand civilians were killed or seriously injured. The V-2 threat was not finally lifted until the last launch sites were captured in March 1945.

The debate about the effectiveness of the V-weapons intensified after the war when Albert Speer, the German Minister of Munitions, said that they had been a massive waste of resources. Speer argued that if all the expertise and materials that had gone into flying bomb and rocket production had instead gone into the development of more fighter aircraft then the bombing offensive against Germany might have been defeated. In this sense, Hitler’s obsession with his secret weapons that he thought could yet win the war was a stroke of luck for the Allies. But this new rocket missile technology was clearly a harbinger of things to come, and as the war came near to its end the Americans and Soviets raced to capture as much of the German rocket technology as possible. The United States launched Operation Paperclip, in which they rounded up many German scientists. Werner von Braun and his team preferred to surrender to the Americans rather than the Russians, and under Paperclip they were taken to White Sands in New Mexico, where a new US rocket research establishment was created. In the decades that followed, von Braun and his brilliant engineers played a key role in the American space programme. Twenty-seven years after the first ballistic missile had been launched from Peenemünde, Apollo 11 astronauts walked on the moon.

With the war in its final phases, and with the Americans and Soviets taking on the major roles in defeating Hitler in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific, Churchill’s status clearly diminished. But there were still major disputes with his military commanders over how best to use the resources they had. The biggest disagreement arose over plans for the deployment of Britain’s armed forces in the Far East. At the heart of the argument between Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff were two different approaches as to how best to defeat the Japanese. Churchill wanted to keep the core of the British effort in the Indian Ocean, directed at amphibious operations against Sumatra and further east towards Malaya and Singapore. The Chiefs of Staff wanted the limited British war effort in the Pacific to be lined up alongside the Americans. They produced powerful arguments to show that victory would come sooner if the ships of the Royal Navy, the aircraft of the RAF and the soldiers of the British Army were assembled in Australasia to fight along the left of the main American advance in the South-West Pacific and ultimately towards Japan. Churchill and the War Cabinet took a political view that British interests would be best served if British forces liberated the territories that had been lost in 1941 and 1942. This would help re-establish British power in the region as it had been before the war. The Chiefs of Staff took a more pragmatic view on how best to strike at the Japanese, recognising Britain’s junior relationship in this American-dominated theatre. Churchill, as so often in his life, was more interested in maintaining British power and prestige in India than, in this case, advancing through lands he had barely heard of.

The dispute grew to a head in March 1944, three months before Overlord. In his diary, Brooke described several difficult and tense meetings with Churchill. After one such he wrote: ‘Now that I know him well episodes such as Antwerp and the Dardanelles no longer puzzle me. But meanwhile I often doubt whether I am going mad or he is really sane.’ Then, a few days later, he wrote of ‘heated discussions’ with Churchill and of a ‘desperate meeting’. He was clearly at the end of his tether. Interestingly, later that day, Churchill invited Brooke to dinner. The CIGS thought he was going to be sacked for his outspoken opposition. Instead, Churchill was quite charming and clearly wanted to make up for some of the ‘rough passages of the day’. But the disagreement was a deep one and would not go away. After one Chiefs of Staff meeting, all the secretaries and minute-takers were asked to leave the room and the leaders of Britain’s military machine discussed between themselves the possibility of a group resignation. Again Brooke wrote: ‘I am shattered by the present condition of the PM. He has lost all balance and is in a very dangerous mood.’⁴ General Ismay, the linchpin between Churchill and his War Cabinet, on the one hand, and his Chiefs of Staff, on the other, felt impelled to write to the Prime Minister that the division of opinion was so great there was talk of mass resignation. In Ismay’s undoubtedly correct view, ‘A breach of this kind, undesirable at any time, would be little short of catastrophic at the present juncture’ so close to D-Day.⁵

The argument seems an arcane one now, and it is difficult to imagine why the passions aroused should have been so intense. No doubt it was partly because of the general state of exhausted tension and stress felt by Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff. The campaign in Italy was going badly and the run-up to D-Day made this one of the most decisive moments in the war. And at the time, of course, no one could know that the war in the Pacific would end so soon after the end of the war in Europe. It was generally felt that the conflict against Japan would continue at least into the summer of 1946 and that strategic decisions affecting that theatre were of vital significance. But it is difficult now to have much sympathy for either side in the dispute. Churchill, his Cabinet and the Foreign Office had all failed to spot the huge changes that had taken place in South-East Asia, where powerful anti-colonial movements had been unleashed by the Japanese successes. The prospect of restoring Britain’s pre-war authority in the region was pure chimera. And the idea of landing troops in Sumatra now seems absurd. On the other hand, the soldier’s job was to do whatever his political chiefs demanded, and Brooke’s rigid hostility seems out of proportion and character. Even his supporters have not defended him in this quarrel.⁶

Churchill did as he often did at times of crisis and appealed to Roosevelt, who responded by telling him to concentrate on the Indian Ocean. After the Battles of Midway and the Coral Sea, the US Navy was already in command of much of the vastness of the Pacific, and later in the year it would win a decisive victory against the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. Churchill felt his case had been strengthened by the President’s view and he wrote a paper outlining his position on future Pacific strategy that he asked the Chiefs of Staff to approve. Brooke wrote: ‘We cannot accept it as it stands, and it would be better if we all three resigned rather than accept his solution.’⁷ The crisis was defused only when the US Joint Chiefs of Staff announced there were no plans for a major amphibious operation in South-East Asia that year. Both Churchill’s grand plan for Sumatra and the Chiefs of Staff’s pro-American strategy were redundant. General William Slim would go on to win a considerable victory over Japanese land forces in Burma, so by the time the Pacific question next entered the frame it would be in completely different circumstances.

The crisis marks the lowest point in Churchill’s relationship with Brooke and the Chiefs of Staff. Churchill was utterly exhausted by the unrelenting struggle of the war. After one meeting, Brooke wrote: ‘He kept yawning and saying he felt desperately tired.’ After another: ‘PM aged, tired and failing to really grasp matters. It is a depressing sight to see him gradually deteriorating. I wonder how long he will last, not long enough to see the war through I fear.’⁸

But Churchill did recover his strength and his spirits, as he had done before. Only a month later, after dinner at Chequers, he took Brooke aside and told him how much he valued him. Brooke later reflected:

Considering the difficult times I had had recently with Winston I appreciated tremendously his kindness in passing on these remarks to me … He was an outstanding mixture, could drive you to complete desperation and to the brink of despair for weeks on end, and then would ask you to spend a couple of hours or so alone with him and would produce the most homely and attractive personality. All that unrelenting tension was temporarily relaxed … and you left him with the feeling that you would do anything within your power to help carry the stupendous burden he had shouldered.⁹

Churchill knew he could not push his military chiefs to resignation at this critical moment of the war. A brutal confrontation had been avoided and his charm had once again worked, for now.

The triumph of D-Day and the successful landing of men and matériel in Normandy were great boosts to Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff. One of the most complex and ambitious operations of the war had been a success and, despite a heavy storm in mid-June, Port Winston at Arromanches continued to operate as a floating harbour, receiving vast numbers of men and huge quantities of supplies. But the good news of the landings was soon followed by disappointing news as the Allies failed to extend their bridgehead in the way that had been hoped. Monty’s troops took until the second week of July to capture the French city of Caen, only ten miles inland. Monty claimed his strategy was to draw the German armour to the east, around Caen, and so allow the Americans to break out in the west. After a slow start, the Germans sent heavy reinforcements to this front, including two crack SS panzer divisions from the Eastern Front, and tried repeatedly to split the bridgehead and throw the Allies back into the sea. Both sides refused to give an inch. The high, thick hedgerows that were common in Normandy made ideal conditions for defenders. By the end of June, one million soldiers were facing each other in bitter fighting. Monty tried to use his infantry to break through in an assault code-named ‘Epsom’ and then his armour in an attack code-named ‘Goodwood’. But each attempt brought a tougher German defensive response. By mid-July, a total of eight panzer divisions, six of them elite SS units, were facing Monty’s British and Canadian troops around Caen. It became clear to many that the German tanks, especially the massive sixty-ton Tiger, were far superior to the Allied armour. And the German artillery, particularly the much-feared 88mm gun, which was used as an anti-tank weapon, was superior to any artillery piece in the Allied arsenal.

In the circumstances, it might have been expected that Churchill would give vent to his frustrations at the slowness of the offensive, as he had done earlier in the war with Wavell and Auchinleck, by demanding action and pestering his field commanders with instructions and briefs. But Brooke managed to keep Churchill at arm’s length from Monty, who was left to carry on with his operational planning unhindered by interventions from the Prime Minister. Churchill was also no doubt acutely aware of Monty’s popularity with the public, which was at a different level to that of his previous generals. Unfortunately, no breakout came and it was Eisenhower who grew increasingly frustrated by Monty’s lack of progress. The tension between the two commanders grew from this point and lasted right on to the battle of the memoirs and reputations in the post-war period.

When the breakout did finally take place in the last week of July, the American First Army commanded by General Bradley led the way in Operation Cobra. After a heavy air bombardment, the US VII Corps launched the assault near St Lô. Monty’s strategy of tying down the German armour in the east now paid off as there were still fourteen German divisions gathered around Caen, leaving only eleven weakened divisions facing fifteen American divisions in the west. Once the German line began to crumble, the American Sherman tanks were ordered in and their crews began to liberate town after town as they sped onwards. On 1 August, the US Army reorganised in Normandy and Bradley brought in General Patton to lead the newly created 3rd Army. Renowned for his aggressive spirit, Patton brought a new dynamism just when the breakout was gathering speed. A key bridge was captured intact at Pontauban, and Patton’s men raced across it and fanned out into Brittany. Some of them advanced fifty miles in four days. Hitler ordered his commanders to give no ground, as he had done at Stalingrad, and replaced some of his senior generals. Rommel, who had done so much to hold up the Allied advance in Normandy, was severely wounded by an RAF attack upon his staff car. His career was over. Restrained by lack of fuel and ammunition, constantly harried from the air, and now prevented from making tactical withdrawals to reorganise in strength, the German troops still fought on. Especially tenacious were the fanatical SS panzer grenadiers whose ferocious support for their Fuehrer was only hardened after news got out of the unsuccessful bomb plot against his life. But no army, no matter how determined, could triumph against the overwhelming odds the Germans now faced. Every tank they lost was a permanent loss. For the Allies, every tank lost was replaced by two or three more within days.

Hitler, suspicious of all his army commanders after the plot against him, ordered General von Kluge, Rommel’s replacement, to counter-attack. This he could do only reluctantly by moving his armour westwards. The counter-attack, inevitably, failed and now von Kluge’s armour was deep inside an Allied encirclement as Patton’s tanks raced eastwards towards the Loire and the Seine. The Canadians then broke through and advanced south while Patton turned north. The remnants of the German Army were surrounded. Some got away through the Falaise ‘gap’, but the bulk of Hitler’s Army Group West was destroyed. Like the British Army at Dunkirk, the Germans had to abandon a lot of their heavy equipment. Ten thousand German soldiers had been killed and fifty thousand were taken prisoner. More than two thousand panzers had been lost. Twenty-seven divisions had ceased to exist. Von Kluge wrote a note to Hitler saying the war was as good as lost. Then, knowing he would be blamed for the defeat, he committed suicide. Four days after the collapse at Falaise, on 25 August, the German garrison in Paris surrendered. It was the culmination of a huge Allied victory.

Typically, Churchill seized every opportunity to visit the battlefront. He spent some time in Normandy in July and August, observing for himself the landscape of war, and eagerly followed the news of the breakout. He was concerned by the growing American hostility towards Monty. And there were still arguments over the planned landings in the south of France, now called ‘Operation Dragoon’. Churchill did not want troops taken from the advance in northern Italy for a mission that he regarded as entirely unnecessary. Of 250,000 men in the 5th Army under General Alexander in Italy, roughly 100,000 would be taken away for Dragoon. Churchill knew that the advance through Italy and then the plan to cross the Alps and head towards Vienna would be slowed right down by diverting troops to the Côte d’Azur. This time his Chiefs of Staff agreed totally with him. Churchill appealed to Roosevelt to cancel the operation. The President again refused Churchill’s plea and stood by his Joint Chiefs, who maintained their faith in the landings. On 5 August, Churchill spent more than six hours at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Portsmouth, trying to persuade him to cancel the operation. Eisenhower’s aide-de-camp, Captain Harry Butcher, recalled that ‘Ike said “No”, continued saying “No” all afternoon, and ended saying “No” in every form of the English language at his command.’¹⁰

Six days later, Churchill flew to Italy to see the situation there for himself. He met with Marshal Tito, the leader of the Partisans in Yugoslavia, who had maintained an epic and brilliant struggle against the German occupying forces, supported by SOE. Churchill found Tito a curious but impressive figure and was pleased to hear that he was not committed to a communist future for Yugoslavia. Churchill then went on to witness the landings in southern France. He watched the shore bombardment from the British destroyer HMS Kimberley. For Churchill, the event was the great anticlimax he had predicted, and he noted that ‘not a shot was fired either at the approaching flotillas or on the beaches’. His return was so uneventful that he even borrowed a novel from the ship’s captain that he sat down and read. He wrote to Clementine that it was one of the best he had read in years.¹¹ Churchill travelled on to Naples, where he combined talks about the future of Italy with several swimming expeditions along the coast. The Mediterranean sunshine and the bathing refreshed his spirits. He returned to London rested and in good health.

Once again in the war, the victory in Normandy raised the question: what next? How should the Allies pursue their drive eastwards in what they hoped would be the final operation of the war? There were two views on this. Montgomery wanted to go for a single thrust of some forty divisions to strike forwards by the Ardennes, through the Ruhr and across the plains of northern Germany to Berlin. He wanted to lead this himself and so go down in history as the Allied general who won the war in Europe. Eisenhower, on the other hand, favoured a broader, two-pronged assault upon Germany, with Monty driving his forces to the north and a southern, American force heading below the Ardennes and crossing into Germany along the Saar River. This dispute between the two commanders, who were already not on the best of terms, grew in intensity over the weeks. Monty did not like being overruled. But Eisenhower was in command and the Americans were calling the shots. They would not accept that a British general could command US troops in such a key operation. Neither Churchill nor his Chiefs of Staff could do anything to prevent Eisenhower from getting his way.

In September, Monty launched his own highly imaginative thrust, code-named ‘Operation Market Garden’. He intended to use a sequence of airborne drops to seize a series of key bridges across Holland right up to the Rhine. A relief column would then speed across country to link all the captured bridges and propel the Allies right into Germany itself. All the remaining V-2 launch sites would be captured and new ports would be opened up to the Allies to supply the advancing armies. It was an ambitious attempt to bring the war to a speedy end. Much of the plan was brilliantly executed. American paratroopers captured bridges at Eindhoven, Grave and Nijmegen. Unfortunately, alongside the last bridge to be seized by the British 1st Airborne at Arnhem, the Germans had located a rest camp for two SS panzer divisions that had been pulled out of the line. Photo reconnaissance had identified that these elite German units were in the vicinity, but the British commanders refused to adapt their plan. The British paratroopers, known as the ‘Red Devils’ and commanded by Colonel John Frost, conducted a heroic defence of the bridge. But the land troops failed to reach them and this led to the collapse of Monty’s daring plan. The bridge at Arnhem is now remembered as the ‘bridge too far’. With the failure here went all hope of a fast strike into Germany and the end of the war by Christmas.

In September, Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff travelled again to Quebec to meet Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs for what proved to be the last Anglo-American summit of the war, code-named ‘Octagon’. By this time, most of Churchill’s attention was focused not so much on finishing the war, the result of which was by now a foregone conclusion, but on the post-war world and his fears of a dominant Russia. As the Red Army advanced west, beyond the borders of the Soviet Union, the question arose as to who should take over liberated territories. The first instance in which this became acute was in Poland. In the month before Octagon, the Polish Resistance rose up against the German occupation as the Red Army approached Warsaw. Their intention was to overthrow German rule and replace it with an independent Polish government based around the leadership in exile in London. The Germans responded by putting down the uprising with ferocious brutality. The Red Army now paused on the Vistula River, only a few miles from Warsaw, but Stalin ordered his soldiers not to intervene. He wanted his own communist supporters in the Polish Committee of National Liberation to take control, so he was happy to see the Poles who supported the London democrats massacred. Churchill and the Cabinet, along with public opinion in much of the West, were outraged by Stalin’s refusal to help the Polish rebels. After all, Britain had gone to war in 1939 to defend Poland, and Churchill felt a particular responsibility for the country. He pleaded with Stalin to intervene. The Soviet leader said this was impossible – his troops needed time to regroup. There was nothing that British or American forces could do to aid the rebels as Warsaw was too far away to permit direct military intervention. All that could be done was for the Allied air forces to drop in supplies to assist the rebels. But no supply aircraft that could fly to Warsaw had the range to make it back, so they would have to land at a Soviet airfield to refuel and return. Stalin absolutely prohibited this. Churchill was furious. The entire War Cabinet fumed and protested to Stalin. Still, he did nothing. For sixty-three days, the Polish Resistance fighters held off the German onslaught armed only with rifles and small arms. In the end 200,000 Poles were slaughtered by the Nazis in an orgy of violence. Stalin had allowed the free Polish Resistance movement to be destroyed so that he could hand Poland over to his own stooges.

For Churchill, this rang alarm bells about the possibility of a post-war Europe divided between East and West. At Quebec, it was clear that Roosevelt was far less concerned about this. The two leaders, along with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, discussed and agreed the details for the next phase of the war. In Europe, Eisenhower’s plan for a two-pronged assault on Germany was endorsed. In Italy, the Americans now raised no objections to an advance across the Alps and into southern Europe. Churchill talked about his plan to liberate Vienna. In the Far East, Churchill wanted to assure the Americans of the British commitment to play its role in the defeat of Japan. He was again thinking about the post-war era and wanted Britain to have earned the right to restore its possessions that had been captured by Japan. He did not want these to be handed back by a peace treaty; he wanted to win them back by force of arms. However, the Americans were deeply suspicious of Britain’s imperial intentions in the Pacific. The US military chiefs wanted to see Burma recaptured as this was vital to supplying China. But Admiral King, who had never been much of a friend to Britain, saw the naval war in the Pacific as an exclusively American affair. In the end, the President overruled his own admiral and agreed that the Royal Navy could contribute to the defeat of Japan. But General Marshall pointed out that the United States now had enough heavy bombers to carry out the bombing of Japan. It seemed that once Germany had been defeated, the RAF’s role in the Far East would be limited to operations in Burma and the Indian Ocean. It was estimated that the war against Japan would continue for about eighteen months after the defeat of Germany.

At Octagon, Churchill’s relationship with Roosevelt was much cooler than it had been earlier in the war. His friend and intermediary Harry Hopkins, who had done so much to help cement relations between Britain and the United States since 1941, had fallen out with the President and was not present in Quebec. Churchill spent a couple of days with Roosevelt at his home in Hyde Park after the summit, and then left for home.

Once the Octagon meetings had set the war strategy for the next six to twelve months, there was little in reality for Churchill to do as a warlord. It was up to the generals now to defeat Hitler in the West and to continue the advance towards Japan in the Pacific. But Churchill became even more concerned with the growing power of the Soviet Union as the Red Army looked set to liberate more of Eastern Europe. So, in October, he decided to pay another visit to ‘Uncle Joe’ in Moscow. Roosevelt was facing an election in November and could not travel, but he approved of the visit.

On 9 October, Churchill arrived in Moscow and late that evening he had his first meeting with Stalin. Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, was with him. Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, accompanied Stalin. Apart from the two translators, it was just these four men who met together late at night in the Kremlin. They talked about Poland and about Greece, and Churchill made it clear that he wanted to avoid civil wars in the countries of Europe over who should be in power after the war. The conversation was frank and was going well, so sensing this opening meeting was a good moment for business, Churchill suggested the two leaders try to settle their affairs in the Balkans. He said he had a ‘naughty document’. Churchill proposed a simple breakdown of spheres of interest: Romania should be 90 per cent Soviet and 10 per cent British; Greece 90 per cent British-American and 10 per cent Soviet; Yugoslavia and Hungary both 50–50; and Bulgaria 75 per cent Soviet and 25 per cent British-American. While this was being translated, Churchill wrote it out on a piece of paper. There was a pause. Then Stalin reached for a blue pencil and put a big tick on the piece of paper. A long silence followed. Then Churchill said: ‘Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people in such an offhand manner? Let us burn the paper.’ Stalin replied: ‘No, you keep it.’¹²

Churchill was pleased with this exchange, although it led to much haggling between Eden and Molotov in the following days. Churchill was also delighted with the rapport he once again developed with Stalin in the face-to-face meetings that followed over the next ten days. There was agreement on nearly all the military issues. And there were discussions about the possibility of breaking up Germany after the war. Despite Stalin’s joke a year before at Teheran about executing the top Nazis, the Soviet leader now firmly supported the idea of public trials of the Nazi leadership after the war was won. Only the issue of Poland continued to divide the two leaders. The pro-Western Polish politicians came to present their case to Churchill and Stalin in Moscow. Then the Soviet-backed team did the same. Churchill and Eden had no time for these pawns of Stalin. They thought, correctly, that the Polish communists were just repeating parrot-like a script that had been written for them by the Soviets. After one speech by the Polish communist leader, Churchill caught Stalin’s look and saw ‘an understanding twinkle in his expressive eyes, as much as to say, “What about that for our Soviet teaching!”’¹³ Despite days of negotiations, the future frontiers and government of Poland were left unresolved.

Nevertheless, in the course of these meetings, Churchill and Stalin built up almost a friendship. More than anything else, they were united in their struggle to defeat Nazism. One evening they attended the Bolshoi Ballet, and when they appeared in the Royal Box together they received a long, rapturous reception from the audience. At several late-night sessions, many toasts were drunk to each other and to the joint interests of the British and Russian people. At one point, someone described the two leaders along with Roosevelt as the ‘Holy Trinity’. Stalin responded by saying: ‘If that is so, Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies around so much.’¹⁴ But despite the bonhomie, deep disagreements about the shape of the post-war world divided the two men. And however jovial Stalin might be in Churchill’s presence, he would still ruthlessly pursue his own interests when it came to it.

Churchill continued to travel. He spent some time in Cairo on his return from Moscow. In November, he attended a parade down the Champs Elysées in Paris with Charles de Gaulle amid wildly cheering crowds. Meanwhile, the war was not going well. Churchill had refused to believe various intelligence reports that Germany would be defeated by the end of the year. He was right. In Italy, the advance came to a halt for the winter in the Apennine Mountains. In France, in mid-December, Hitler’s armies launched one final surprise counter-attack in the Ardennes with ten panzer divisions in what came to be called the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ as German troops created a huge salient, or bulge, in the Allied line. The intention was to divide the British and American armies and strike at Antwerp. But the Germans never completely broke through. Their tanks were awesome weapons but, desperately short of fuel, the Germans could not afford to run them for long. This, along with a heroic stand by US soldiers at the major crossroads at Bastogne, defeated this last attempt by Hitler’s armies to reverse the course of the war. But in the midst of a cold winter, further major campaigning had to be postponed to the spring.

Churchill felt a strong affinity for Greece, as British soldiers had fought and died there trying to defend the country in 1941. When the Germans withdrew their garrison in October 1944, a flying column of SAS troops entered the country and raced to Athens, where they were rapturously received as liberators. But the people of Greece were in a desperate state after four years of brutal German occupation. Many now went over to support ELAS, the communist nationalist movement, despite British attempts to install King George and a government led by Prime Minister George Papandreou. During December, the tensions erupted into civil war in Athens. Churchill ordered the British commander, General Ronald Scobie, to fire on the communists in order to maintain order. This sided Britain with the royalists in the civil war and looked like interference in a foreign state’s internal politics. In the United States, it was seen as an attempt by Britain to sustain its power in the region and was widely denounced. Churchill once again felt he had to intervene in person. On the afternoon of 24 December, he decided to fly to Athens that night. At home, Clementine was preparing an eagerly anticipated family Christmas, beginning with a children’s party that evening. Despite being so used to last-minute changes of plan, she was deeply upset by her husband’s decision to leave. This was one of the few times in the whole war when she burst into ‘floods of tears’ and was ‘laid low’ by Winston’s stubbornness.¹⁵

Churchill arrived in Athens on Christmas Day and had to be given an armed escort through the dangerously divided city, where British troops were still engaged in street fighting with the communists. It was decided that he would be safest on board HMS Ajax in Piraeus harbour. Here he met Archbishop Damaskinos, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, a tall, impressive man who had once been a champion wrestler. To Churchill, Damaskinos seemed to have the authority to preside over matters. Churchill suggested calling a meeting of all rival groups on the following day, to be chaired by Damaskinos. The Patriarch agreed. The meeting was held in the Greek Foreign Ministry at 6 p.m. on Boxing Day. It was bitterly cold and there was no heating. A few hurricane lamps cast an eerie glow upon the scene. But all parties, including the communists, turned up for the roundtable talks. After opening the talks, Churchill and the British delegation then withdrew and left the tough negotiating to the Greeks themselves. A couple of days later, it was agreed that Churchill should ask the Greek King, who was in exile in London, to appoint the Archbishop as Regent. When he returned home, Churchill persuaded King George in an all-night session of the wisdom of this course of action. Damaskinos subsequently became Regent and the effective ruler of Greece. A truce was signed with the communists in January. Churchill was pleased that he had helped to save Greece from communist subjugation. He was convinced that, having defeated fascism in Europe, the next threat would be that of communism. In this he was way ahead of most Western leaders and was already anticipating the divisions of the Cold War. He saw Europe now made up of countries that would either fall under the ‘heel’ of communism or be saved for the West. He was convinced that he had done the right thing for Greece and would still try his best to rescue Poland.

In February 1945, the Big Three met once again, this time at the old Livadia summer palace of the tsars at Yalta in the Crimea. Roosevelt, who had been re-elected President at the end of 1944, was exhausted by the journey. In the group photos taken at Yalta he looks haggard and drawn. Churchill, too, was exhausted by the years and months of relentless pressure. In one sense, the meetings at Yalta were the high water mark of Allied wartime collaboration. Stalin confirmed that he would join the war against Japan within three months of the defeat of Hitler. The Allied military leaders discussed what support they could give each other, and the Soviets formally requested bombing the cities behind the German lines in the East. This was one of the factors, as we have seen, that led to the destruction of Dresden by British and American heavy bombers. On the other hand, Yalta also represents the beginnings of the Cold War. Stalin was suspicious of Anglo-American plans for the United Nations Organisation that had been drawn up at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington. It was proposed there would be a consultative General Assembly, to which all nations could belong, and a Security Council. This Security Council would have the teeth that the failed League of Nations never had, with authority to order executive action on behalf of the UN, even to the extent of going to war on its behalf. Stalin thought the Soviet Union could easily be outvoted by Britain and America in such a body, and that the status the USSR had won by playing the major role in the defeat of Hitler was not reflected in the UN structure. It was agreed that various Soviet republics could also join the UN, and that each of the great powers would have a veto over Security Council resolutions.

There was still further dispute over the governance of Poland. Churchill again explained that this was a matter of ‘honour’ for Britain. Stalin explained that it was a matter of ‘security’ for him. Russia had been attacked twice in the last thirty years through the ‘Polish corridor’. It must not be allowed to happen again. By this he clearly meant that he wanted control of the Polish government. And it was ‘security’ that underpinned Stalin’s strategy for the whole of Eastern Europe. Churchill feared that Stalin wanted to create a buffer of satellite states. In the end, Roosevelt and Churchill largely gave in to Stalin’s demands for a new border with Poland, which was now moved westwards. In compensation, Poland’s border with Germany was shifted further west, into what had been German territory. Stalin agreed to free elections in Poland and he signed a Declaration on Liberated Europe that pledged support for reconstruction based on free elections. For now, the Western leaders took Stalin at his word.

It was agreed to divide Germany into four zones of military occupation: Soviet, American, British and, later, French. There was an argument over reparations. Stalin insisted on massive reparations, partly to compensate for the vast destruction caused by the German armies in the Soviet Union. Here, 32,000 factories were in ruin, 50,000 miles of railway track had been destroyed, 1710 towns had been devastated and about 100,000 collective farms had been burned to the ground. But Stalin also believed in reparations as a form of punishment and as a symbol of a victor’s rights. The Western leaders thought that reparations had prevented Germany from recovering after the First World War. They took a more pragmatic view and wanted to restore Germany, not destroy it, after this war. Eventually, a compromise was agreed.

Yalta revealed major fissures in the Grand Alliance that had been held together by the common objective of defeating Hitler. Churchill was increasingly suspicious of Soviet post-war ambitions. Roosevelt, on the other hand, thought that collaboration with the Soviets was the only way of preventing post-war disputes. Churchill was pained by Roosevelt’s attitude towards him at Yalta. In chummying-up to Stalin, the President seemed to be distancing himself from his old ally and friend.

After the summit, Churchill passed through Athens. This time, he was able to ride through the streets in an open-top car amid cheering crowds where only a few weeks before vicious street fighting had taken place. He went on to Alexandria in Egypt, where he had lunch with Roosevelt. Churchill noted how frail the President looked. After lunch Churchill said farewell to his friend. It was the last time he would see him.

In March, the Allied armies launched their final attack upon the Third Reich. The Rhine had been a barrier to the invasion of Germany since Roman times. Now it was the last major obstacle facing the Allies. Eisenhower was again in overall command. Monty and the 21st Army Group were to cross the Rhine in the north, between Cleves and Düsseldorf, and head across the German plain to Hamburg and the Baltic. Bradley and the 12th Army Group were to cross the river further south. It was a combined boat, air and land operation, the largest single offensive since D-Day. There were forty bridges across the Rhine. Nazi engineers planned to destroy all of them, but in a lucky break in early March, the US 9th Armored Division captured one bridge intact at Remagen. Tens of thousands of men and hundreds of tanks poured across it. Hitler was so furious when he heard of the failure to blow up the bridge that he sent out Gestapo squads to execute all those responsible. Later in the month, Patton launched an attack across the Rhine at Oppenheim. As in Sicily, Patton was determined to be ahead of Monty, and his men crossed the river one day before those of his British rival. Further north, Monty launched a massive artillery bombardment, followed by attacks with heavy bombers, against the German defenders who were dug in along the eastern bank of the river. On the night of 23 March, British commandos led the crossing at Wessel in armoured amphibious vehicles called ‘Buffaloes’.

Churchill, always keen to be an observer at these big military shows, asked to join Monty at his headquarters for the crossing. Brooke, who accompanied him, was not happy. He wrote in his diary: ‘All he will do is to endanger his life unnecessarily and to get in everybody’s way and be a damned nuisance to everybody. However nothing on earth will stop him!’¹⁶ They arrived at Monty’s forward HQ on the evening of the attack, delighted to be on German soil. After dinner, Monty retired to bed and Churchill and Brooke went for a walk in the moonlight. A few miles away, a furious battle was taking place. The two men took this moment to look back over the struggles they had been through together. Churchill told his leading general how much he appreciated him. It was a moment of personal warmth on the fringes of the last great battle of the war involving British soldiers.

On the morning of 24 March, Churchill and Brooke were escorted to the top of a hill to watch the huge airborne landing behind German lines at Wessel. Called ‘Operation Varsity’, this was the biggest air drop since D-Day. The vast air armada, with over 1700 transport planes and 1300 gliders, took two hours to pass. Churchill was as thrilled to watch this huge military operation as he had been to observe the battle at Omdurman, when the British Army attacked at Khartoum, nearly fifty years before. The little boy in him who had enjoyed playing with his toy soldiers was still there. War was still a romantic and heroic escapade for Churchill, despite everything he had lived through. The following day, Churchill and Brooke even managed to cross the Rhine in a landing craft and stood for a few minutes on the eastern bank, examining the German defences. Back on the western bank, they scrambled about on the remains of the bridge at Wessel when they came under sniper fire. Then some shelling opened up near them. General Simpson, the local American commander, said he could no longer take responsibility for Churchill’s presence and ordered him to leave the battlefield. Brooke remembered that ‘The look on Winston’s face was just like that of a small boy being called away from his sandcastles on the beach by his nurse! … Thank heaven he came away quietly, it was a sad wrench for him, he was enjoying himself immensely.’¹⁷

The Rhine crossing was a great military success. Within days, American and British troops, supported now by French soldiers, were striking hard into Germany. Eisenhower’s northern and southern thrusts joined up, having encircled the Ruhr and its powerful defences. The German western front was collapsing.

Churchill’s position in the spring of 1945 was difficult. He still had the personal prestige and status of a giant, the man who had led Britain from the abyss and was now one of the Big Three. But Britain was very much the junior partner in the alliance. The Soviet Union now had the largest army in history, and its enormous suffering in the war, estimated recently at about twenty-seven million dead, left Stalin with a legitimate claim to superpower status in the post-war world. Meanwhile, the United States was ending the war as the greatest industrial power in history. Its economy had more than doubled during the war. Its factories had become the ‘arsenal of victory’, producing the guns, ships, planes and tanks that had won the war. Nearly 50 per cent of all the world’s goods were manufactured in America. There was no question that the United States would be a post-war superpower. Britain, however, was technically bankrupt. The only way it could have authority in world affairs after the war was as an ally of the United States. Churchill had to persuade Roosevelt that the new enemy was going to be the Soviet Union, and steps had to be taken to stand up to Stalin in what the Prime Minister saw as the inevitable East–West divide after the war. However, Roosevelt saw the future differently. He thought he could get along with Stalin and that the United Nations would be the agency of peace. In the end, Churchill’s view was proved right. He had correctly foreseen the tensions of the imminent Cold War. Roosevelt’s vision died with him.

Over the next month, Churchill continued to be agitated by the Soviet attitude to the end of the war in Europe and by the lack of progress on Poland’s future. It was clear to him that the Soviets had no intention of implementing free elections there, as had been agreed at Yalta. Churchill wanted to put pressure on Stalin and tried to persuade Roosevelt to side with him. But the President did not want to antagonise Stalin and suggested a truce. There was a further dispute when the Soviets accused the Western Allies of negotiating a separate peace treaty with Germany. Roosevelt worked hard to resolve these issues. On 12 April, he sent a telegram to Churchill, saying: ‘I would minimise the general Soviet problem as much as possible.’¹⁸ A few hours after sending this message, Roosevelt collapsed. He never regained consciousness and died a few hours later. When he heard the news, Churchill felt he had been struck a physical blow. Although their views had diverged over recent months, Roosevelt had been the great ally who had supported Britain’s war effort from the beginning. They had established an almost daily correspondence. They had enjoyed nine separate meetings and had spent about 120 days in close personal contact.

But Churchill decided not to attend Roosevelt’s funeral. This was particularly surprising bearing in mind his enthusiasm for getting on a plane and travelling almost anywhere. It was even more remarkable bearing in mind the opportunity it offered to meet with the new President and to try to influence his thinking. Churchill claimed he was under pressure to remain in London during these last days of the war. But that had never stopped him before. The only conclusion to be drawn is that he felt seriously let down by the President over recent months. Foreign Minister Eden attended the funeral on his behalf.

In accordance with the American constitution, the Vice-President, Harry S Truman, immediately succeeded to the presidency. ‘I feel like I’ve been struck by a bolt of lightning,’ he told a colleague. Despite his ill health, Roosevelt had kept Truman woefully in the dark about key strategic and political developments in the war. Roosevelt had only two private meetings with his Vice-President in the five months since the election. Now, Truman had to go on a crash course in foreign and military affairs. Interestingly, he soon took up Churchill’s view, believing that reconciliation with the Soviets was impossible because of their bully-boy tactics, and within months of taking office he became forcefully anti-Soviet.

In the meantime, for a variety of reasons, Eisenhower had decided not to try to capture the German capital. First, Berlin was well inside the Soviet zone of military occupation as agreed at Yalta, and it was more appropriate for the Red Army to capture the city that was only thirty-five miles from their front line. Second, he did not see Berlin as a major objective. He wanted to smash through to the centre of Germany, where he believed the Nazi government was planning to move. And finally, despite the German collapse, Eisenhower guessed that there would still be a ferocious battle for the capital of Hitler’s Reich. So he approached Stalin directly and suggested Allied troops should halt on the river Elbe. Churchill was deeply opposed to this and wanted Western troops to seize the prize of Berlin. He thought this would leave the West in a stronger position in any post-war conflict. But Marshall and the American Joint Chiefs backed their field commander. No matter how much the Brits protested, they were going to finish off the war their way. And military rather than political priorities prevailed.¹⁹

It was Stalin who ordered the last assault on Hitler’s capital. On 16 April, the final offensive began. Two and a half million men in the Red Army had assembled along the banks of the Oder and Neisse rivers. Facing them were 700,000 German troops. Many of them were poorly equipped. They included boys from the Hitler Youth and old men fighting to defend Hitler’s capital from what they saw as the Bolshevik hordes. With them were the last Nazi die-hards. They all fought with a grim fanaticism. Stalin set off his two leading commanders, Marshals Zhukov and Koniev, in a race to battle their way into Berlin and win the accolade of taking the final German surrender.

On the morning of 20 April, the Allies launched their last ‘thousand-bomber’ raid against Berlin. When it was over, Hitler emerged from his bunker one last time to give medals to the defenders of the city. His hopes were placed in the fanatical determination of teenage boys. But the newsreel cameras caught the desperate twitch in his hands. The two huge Soviet armies advanced into the suburbs of Berlin, district by district, then street by street, then house by house. The fighting was as intense as Eisenhower had feared. The Soviet tanks that had led the Red Army fifteen hundred miles from Stalingrad to Berlin were no good in the urban environment and could be taken out at close range with primitive, easy-to-use weapons. German civilians hid in their cellars. SS execution squads roamed the city in search of deserters. Hundreds of thousands of German women were raped by Soviet soldiers as they advanced through the city. Hitler and his entourage in their bunker under the Reich Chancellery still believed there were armies waiting to rescue them. There were none. As the Red Army finally closed in on the centre of the city, Hitler at last accepted defeat. On the afternoon of 30 April, he shot himself. Churchill was having dinner when his private secretary, John Colville, brought him the news. According to German radio, Hitler had died ‘fighting with his last breath against Bolshevism’. Churchill commented dryly: ‘Well, I must say, I think he was perfectly right to die like that.’²⁰

The fighting went on for a few days longer. The Red Flag was suspended from the top of the Reichstag, the symbol of Hitler’s capital, in time for the great socialist parade of May Day. Three hundred thousand Russian soldiers lost their lives in the Battle of Berlin. A few days later, Hitler’s generals tried to negotiate terms. They were told that only unconditional surrender of all German armies on every front was acceptable.

On 2 May, German forces in Italy surrendered. On 4 May, Montgomery, at his headquarters on Luneburg Heath, received the surrender of all German forces in north-western Germany, Denmark and Holland. That evening, Churchill called the Chiefs of Staff to the Cabinet Room in Downing Street and thanked them for all they had done. Then he shook their hands, one by one. Brooke noted he had tears in his eyes.²¹ On 7 May,the German High Command finally signed a document of unconditional surrender. The guns at last fell silent. The war in Europe was over. Late that evening, Churchill called in Elizabeth Layton, one of his secretaries, to type up his dictation of the speech he would broadcast. ‘Hullo, Miss Layton,’ he said, ‘well the war’s over, you’ve played your part.’²²

The following day, Tuesday 8 May, was proclaimed Victory in Europe or VE Day. Huge crowds gathered in London. At 3 p.m., Churchill broadcast the news of the surrender to the people of Britain and around the world. ‘We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing,’ he said. ‘But let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued.’ He ended the short broadcast with the words: ‘We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad. Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King.’ On the words ‘Advance, Britannia’, Churchill’s voice broke with emotion. That evening, he appeared on a balcony overlooking Whitehall, where vast crowds had assembled. The cheering was intense. ‘God bless you all,’ he said to the people below, ‘this is your victory.’ The crowd roared back: ‘No – it’s yours.’²³ Churchill also appeared with the King and Queen on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. The huge crowds once again cheered rapturously. It was almost five years to the day since Churchill had been appointed Prime Minister.

Churchill was still severely agitated by Soviet actions in the territories they had liberated, or captured, at the end of the war. On 12 May, he sent a message to President Truman using a phrase he would later make famous. He wrote: ‘An iron curtain is drawn upon their [the Russian] front. We do not know what is going on behind.’²⁴ He feared that Stalin was imposing his own puppet governments in all the states of Eastern Europe. A conference was called for the victorious powers. They agreed to meet in Potsdam, outside devastated Berlin, in July.

Meanwhile, it was clear that the days were numbered for the coalition government Churchill had led for five years. The Labour Party took the view that, with Germany defeated, it was now time for a general election. After all, with all-party agreement, there had not been one for nearly ten years. Churchill himself argued that Japan should be defeated first, and nothing should detract from this major objective. However, everyone still expected that this would take another eighteen months. Attlee decided that the country could not wait that long and withdrew the Labour Party from the government. So, on 23 May, Churchill tendered his resignation to the King. He agreed to form a caretaker government until the election could be held on 5 July and all the votes from soldiers serving overseas counted. With the war in the Far East still raging, the campaigning began.

So great had been the burden of running Britain’s war machine that Churchill had almost completely ignored domestic politics during his five years in office. He had been happy to leave the Home Front to Attlee, his deputy. And Churchill had not wanted to make promises about conditions after the war that he felt he could not deliver. He was very conscious that the promise to build ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ after the First World War had backfired upon Lloyd George. So Churchill had completely failed to pick up on the sea change that had taken place in the thinking of the British people. He was revered as a war leader but in conventional politics he was seen as hopelessly old-fashioned. The country had made a major shift to the left. There was a strong feeling that, after all people had been through, there could be no return to the depression and misery of the 1930s. Men and women across Britain wanted full employment, better housing, national healthcare and social security. Many had thought long and hard about the future, even if Churchill had not. The Beveridge Report, which called for a welfare state to look after British citizens ‘from the cradle to the grave’, had sold 635,000 copies. Penguin Specials had debated every aspect of the future shape of Britain and had sold millions. Even inside the military, groups like the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) had encouraged political debate about the post-war world and here, as elsewhere, a broad socialist perspective often prevailed. Churchill had been opposed to ABCA on the grounds that it would be bad for military discipline.²⁵ But now he looked old, tired and a leftover from an older Britain as he took up the mantle of leading the Conservative Party in the election campaign. Also, a remark in a party political broadcast that likened Labour Party tactics to those of the Gestapo in seeking to introduce a socialist state was very ill-judged and did him great harm.

Polling duly took place in early July, but because of the time it would take to collect and count the three million votes from army, navy and air force personnel around the world, the result would not be announced until the end of the month. Meanwhile, on the 15th, Churchill travelled to Potsdam for the end-of-war Big Three meeting. The next morning, he met President Truman for the first time and was impressed, even though Truman was still desperately new to the complexities of inter-power politics. Accompanying the novice President was his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, who had been sworn in only three days before leaving for Europe. Before the formal sessions began, Churchill toured the ruins of Berlin. Outside the Chancellery building a small crowd of Berliners gathered. To Churchill’s surprise, they cheered him. Already allegiances were changing.

When the conference began, Stalin again pledged his commitment to join the war against Japan. And agreement was swiftly reached on the military occupation of Germany in four separate zones. But there was still disagreement over the Polish borders and reparations. Then, on the 17th, extraordinary news arrived. The Americans had successfully carried out the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert. Reports said the explosion was ‘brighter than a thousand suns’. Truman and Churchill were told and immediately realised that this new weapon of war entirely transformed the struggle against Japan. US military planning was for an invasion of Japan some time between November 1945 and spring 1946. Nearly two million men would be involved. General Marshall feared that casualties would be extremely high. On Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Japanese soldiers had fought almost literally to the last bullet. And many had chosen suicide over surrender. Churchill was convinced that Truman would use the atom bomb and the war would be over in a matter of weeks. This meant that they no longer needed the Soviets to join in the war against Japan. The question was, how were they to explain this to Stalin?

Truman decided to tell the Soviet leader about the new bomb in person at the end of the session on 24 July. He walked across the room and casually informed Stalin that the United States now had a new weapon. Stalin knew all about the development of the atomic bomb through his spy network. He replied equally casually: ‘Good, I hope the United States will use it.’ Truman thought Stalin had not understood. But Uncle Joe realised immediately the significance of what he had been told. That evening, he instructed Molotov to speed up the development of the Soviet bomb.

The following day, Churchill flew back to London and the conference was put on hold while he awaited the results of the general election. Some party estimates suggested that the Conservatives would win with a majority of between fifty and eighty seats. On the morning of 26 July, Churchill followed the news of the results in his Map Room. One after another safe Conservative seat fell to Labour. By midday, it was becoming clear that the Labour Party had won a landslide victory. The decision of the British people was absolutely clear. Churchill was out.

Clementine was secretly relieved. After more than five years of relentless pressure, she wanted Winston to have a break rather than face the overwhelming challenges of managing the peace. Churchill, on the other hand, was utterly devastated by the news of his defeat. He could not understand how the very people he had led to victory, and who had cheered and mobbed him a few weeks before, had now rejected him. He was seventy years old. This might be the end of his political career. At lunch, Clementine told her husband that the result ‘may well be a blessing in disguise’. Churchill replied: ‘At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.’²⁶ Churchill resigned that evening and Attlee, with a majority of 146, formed a Labour government. It would be one of the truly great reforming governments in British history.

On 6 August, an atom bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It exploded with the force of 13,000 tons of TNT. The heat it generated was so intense that it melted bricks and roof tiles, and incinerated human beings so completely that nothing remained of them except light outlines on scorched pavements. About a hundred thousand civilians died within hours. Thousands more died of radiation poisoning over the next few months and years. On 8 August, Stalin declared war on Japan and the Red Army entered Manchuria and then Korea, at that time a part of Japan. On 9 August, with minimal strategic need, a second atom bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The following day, the Japanese Emperor announced his intention to surrender. Terms were agreed shortly after and the Japanese surrender was formally signed a few weeks later on board the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo harbour. The Second World War was over. The atomic age had begun. On that same day, Churchill at last took off on a holiday.