2

Preparation: The War and the Wilderness

Churchill saw the war when it came in August 1914 as an opportunity to prove he could be a great war leader. But he had what might be called a roller coaster of a war. He started in high regard at the Admiralty. And by 1918 he was much respected as one of the leading organisers of the military success that brought victory on the Western Front. But in between he suffered probably the biggest humiliation of his life, and he was closely associated with a failure that haunted him for many years. So deep was his depression at one point in the war that he thought he might never recover from the unpopularity he had generated.

At the beginning of the war, Lord Kitchener was appointed by Asquith as Secretary for War. As we have seen, Churchill had previously criticised elements of Kitchener’s command in the Sudan campaign of 1898, but now the two men, in charge of the two military departments of state, worked closely and effectively together. At this stage, there was no War Cabinet and the government of war continued without dramatic change from the government of peace. Many people believed the war would be a short business, that it would all be ‘over by Christmas’. Neither Kitchener nor Churchill shared this view. Kitchener appealed for a million men to join the army and his face adorned posters that went up across Britain. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers patriotically came forward to do their bit.

During the first few months of the war, the Royal Navy did not perform as well as everyone, and especially Churchill, had expected. Three elderly British cruisers were sunk by a German U-boat while on patrol off Dogger Bank on 22 September with the loss of nearly fifteen hundred men. And far away, along the Pacific coast of Chile, a German battle squadron under the command of Count von Spee sank two further British cruisers with similarly heavy loss of life. Before long, German surface vessels and submarines, U-boats, also began to sink merchant ships in large numbers. This was a challenge to the trade that Britain relied upon for its imports. And the equipment of the Royal Navy was found wanting. Mines sometimes failed to go off and torpedoes went too low in the water, passing harmlessly under the ship being targeted.

Churchill, however, soon committed himself to another campaign. The Germans had been turned back along the river Marne, only a few miles from Paris. The Schlieffen Plan and the strategy of knocking out France before attacking Russia had failed, so the German Army sought out a defensive line in the west. A ‘race to the sea’ began as both sides started to dig in and construct a network of trenches. Churchill wanted to prevent the Germans from occupying the Channel ports in Belgium, and he visited Dunkirk and Antwerp to encourage their garrisons to hold out. The army was too stretched to provide extra men for this and so Churchill committed naval troops and Royal Marines, who also came under Admiralty command. Bizarrely, for a First Lord of the Admiralty who should have been running naval affairs from London, Churchill spent several days in Antwerp trying to rally the defence of the city. He became obsessed with the defence of Antwerp and on 5 October he wrote one of the strangest letters of his life to the Prime Minister. He offered to resign from the Admiralty and the government to take field command in Antwerp as an army general supervising the city’s defence. Fortunately, Asquith rejected the resignation, but Churchill still stayed in Antwerp for another four days. The city surrendered the day after he left.

The incident is revealing. Maybe Churchill was overexcited by the reality of war. Probably his yearning for military command got the better of him. Perhaps he really thought that he could make a difference and turn the course of the war at this crucial point. But his actions certainly displayed a strange lack of judgement and at his relatively young age show that he could be unhinged by military events. The Conservative opposition leaders seized on the incident, which they regarded as near farcical, and Bonar Law thought it showed that Churchill had become mentally unbalanced. Clementine, too, felt for some years that her husband’s sense of proportion had deserted him at Antwerp.

Back at the Admiralty, Churchill was faced with the decision of whom to appoint as the new First Sea Lord to replace Battenberg, who resigned in the face of unpopularity over his German origins. (Of course, these origins were shared by the royal family, who wisely changed their surname to the very British-sounding ‘Windsor’ later in the war. Battenberg himself changed his family name to Mountbatten, and his son would be one of Churchill’s leading generals thirty years later.) Churchill wanted someone aggressive in spirit and decided to bring back the seventy-four-year-old Lord Fisher. It was not a good decision. Fisher proved unpredictable, irascible, and like many senior people of his age, impatient and crotchety when he did not get his way. Churchill remained a great admirer of the elderly Sea Lord, but their disagreements mounted, and Fisher would have a great impact on the next phase of Churchill’s career.

Another development at the Admiralty that had a lasting effect upon Churchill was the rapid progress in code-breaking. Before the war, Naval Intelligence had largely been preoccupied with intercepting enemy cables. But wireless telegraphy spread rapidly in the years before 1914, and the German Navy now had the ability to communicate with its ships at sea by radio in code. Many routine instructions and orders were sent daily by this method. In a lucky break early in the war, the Russians captured a German naval code book and passed it on to the British. The Australians then captured another code book, used by the Germans in communications with their merchant ships. In November 1914, when a third code book was found in a sunken German destroyer, the Admiralty had all it needed to decipher messages between ships at sea and their commanders at home. Churchill already knew the value of breaking enemy codes from his experiences in the Boer War and had forged links with the world of spies and espionage before 1914, so he was excited by this development. A new unit was set up known as Room 40, named simply after the room in the Admiralty where it was located.¹

Churchill became obsessed with the control of the high-grade intelligence that was intercepted and interpreted by the cryptographers in Room 40. Most of the messages sent by the Germans made little sense in themselves, but they could provide vital information when properly analysed and placed into context by intelligence experts. Churchill resisted this and delighted in reading the transcripts ‘raw’, as they were sent. And he permitted very limited distribution of the intelligence outside the Admiralty building. Even the Cabinet was not regularly informed of the decrypts. This made for confusion and a succession of blunders in the first six months of the war. In December 1914, when orders were intercepted that a German naval raiding party was to cross the North Sea and shell mainland Britain, Churchill and his leading advisers at the Admiralty decided to order a naval squadron to intercept the German vessels on their return. The Germans shelled Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, killing or injuring some five hundred civilians, but the Royal Navy squadron missed them on their return in the fog. The press were outraged and demanded to know why the most powerful navy in the world had allowed Britain to be shelled from the sea. ‘Where was the navy?’ asked the Scarborough coroner. Instead of a great triumph caused by the interception of highly useful intelligence, it turned out to be a low point for Churchill who was blamed for the national humiliation.

In January 1915, more ciphers detailing German naval movements in the North Sea were intercepted. This time the Royal Navy was waiting for the German vessels at Dogger Bank. It was the first time two navies equipped with great Dreadnoughts had clashed at sea. Churchill described the excitement of following this action on the charts on the Admiralty’s walls:

There can be few purely mental exercises charged with more excitement than to follow, almost from minute to minute, the phases of a great naval action from the silent rooms of the Admiralty … Telegram succeeds telegram at a few minutes’ interval as they are picked up and decoded … and out of these a picture always flickering and changing rises in the mind, and imagination strikes out around it at every stage flashes of hope or fear.²

The Blücher, one of the German warships, was sunk, there were no significant British losses, the German High Seas Fleet withdrew, and a great victory was proclaimed. In reality, the Royal Navy could have caused far more damage, but the commander thought there were U-boats in the vicinity and failed to press home his attack. The Admiralty had not passed on to him the intercepted message that said the nearest U-boat was forty miles away and well out of the action.

For Churchill, knowledge was power, and he relished the fact that just he and a tiny number of senior officials around him knew what the Germans were saying to each other at any given time. After he left the Admiralty, Room 40 grew and its work improved, and lessons were learned about the best distribution of the intelligence gained. But overall, British Naval Intelligence had a good war, and Churchill was proud of his role in helping to pioneer this. In the 1920s he wrote, ‘Our Intelligence service has won and deserved world-wide fame. More than perhaps any other Power, we were successful in the war in penetrating the intentions of the enemy.’³ And Churchill retained a fascination with code-breaking and the use of what became known as signals intelligence (SIGINT). This would play an even more important role in the next war.

By 1915, it seemed to Churchill that the war had settled into a battle of attrition on land and stalemate at sea. Many millions of men faced each other in a line running from Switzerland to the Channel, now called the Western Front. Machine guns, heavily constructed defensive positions and huge masses of barbed wire prevented either side from advancing. At sea, the Royal Navy had successfully blockaded much of the German Navy in its fortified harbours, from which it did not dare venture out. Churchill argued that torpedoes and mines were to ships at sea what barbed wire and the machine gun were to soldiers trying to advance on land. His whirlwind mind threw out a variety of ideas and innovations to address these problems. They would have a lasting effect on the future face of war.

Churchill was particularly worried about the U-boat menace. At that time the German submarines would use their torpedoes only against the biggest ships but would come to the surface and fire their deck guns to force smaller merchant vessels to surrender. Churchill encouraged the use of decoy ships, or ‘Q-ships’, which looked like cargo vessels and flew the Red Ensign, the Merchant Navy’s flag. However, when a U-boat surfaced, the Q-ship’s sailors, a Royal Navy crew in disguise, threw open various trap doors and shutters to reveal their guns and then engaged the U-boat. Although they enjoyed limited success in sinking U-boats, the Q-ships were the subject of many boy’sown tales of derring-do.⁴

While still at the Admiralty, Churchill also began the process of developing ‘land ships’, giant armoured vehicles with caterpillar tracks that could advance through barbed wire under fire. He suggested to the War Office that the army should develop armoured tractors that could break the deadlock of trench warfare. His ideas were rejected as being ‘not likely to lead to success’.⁵ So, in February 1915, Churchill committed Admiralty funding to the design of these strange vehicles. They were built in great secrecy and were disguised as ‘water tanks for Russia’, soon shortened to ‘tanks’. Later, the army took this programme over and eventually, and still somewhat reluctantly, launched a new era in warfare with the use of the armoured tank at the Battle of the Somme in September 1916. Many people later laid claim to have invented the tank, but a Royal Commission credited Churchill with the ‘receptivity, courage and driving force’ that turned the idea into an effective instrument of war.⁶ For his part, Churchill would never forget that the army had obstructed an idea which he thought could provide a war-winning machine.

He was also concerned about Zeppelins, giant airships from which the Germans could drop bombs on mainland Britain. Churchill wanted to find a way to strike at the Zeppelins so he authorised bombing raids on the Zeppelin bases in Germany. Primitive aircraft of the Royal Naval Air Service launched the first tentative bombing raids on the Zeppelin sheds. Thus, through his encouragement of the art of deception at sea, the development of the tank on land and the beginning of a very primitive form of aerial bombing, Churchill had shown himself very much in support of radical new ideas for warfare, and especially anything that he thought might break the stalemate along the Western Front. He later wrote that the soldiers, sailors, airmen, civilians and inventors who came up with these new ideas ‘were a class apart, outside the currents of orthodox opinion, and for them was reserved the long and thankless struggle to convert authority and to procure action’.⁷ Churchill was already beginning to identify the need for a War Lab of people and new ideas twenty-five years before he would muster his own when he found himself in charge of another war effort.

At the Admiralty, Churchill also sought out strategies by which Britain might take the offensive. He explored the option of attacking Germany’s northern coast in the Baltic, from where an army could drive on Berlin. Then he focused on attacking Turkey, which had come into the war as Germany’s ally at the end of October 1914. Churchill tried to whip up Cabinet enthusiasm for a naval attack in the Dardanelles, the narrow channel that joined the Mediterranean with the Black Sea. The Turkish capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul), was only a few miles further north. Churchill talked ambitiously about sending a naval task force to bombard the forts of the Dardanelles and an army group to land at Gallipoli and march north to knock Turkey out of the war in a single blow. Kitchener supported the plan, but it required a level of coordination between the army and the navy that was way ahead of its time. And not much thought had been given in pre-war planning to amphibious operations to land men on beaches.

After several months of debate, the Dardanelles offensive began with a naval bombardment on the morning of 18 March 1915. On the first day, three British and one French battleship hit mines and sank. It was a dreadful start. From this day on naval commanders concluded that they could never again enter the ‘narrows’ of the Dardanelles or penetrate as far as Constantinople. So, on 25 April, soldiers were landed on the beaches at Gallipoli. Many were Australians and New Zealanders, in a newly arrived force known as the Anzacs. From day one of the campaign things here went wrong also. The Turks had built up their defences over the previous month, and the men who waded ashore under heavy machine-gun fire were able to take only a narrow bridgehead of land. The Turks proved far more effective soldiers than had been anticipated, and despite much bravery and heroism, the whole Gallipoli campaign was soon mired in a similar stalemate to that which characterised the Western Front.

In mid-May, the campaign ushered in a major political crisis. Fisher, the First Sea Lord, had been proving more and more difficult to work with, at times supporting the Dardanelles campaign, then opposing it. He offered to resign on several occasions, but then always carried on regardless. Then on 15 May, he walked out in a huff. He refused to see Churchill and announced he had left for Scotland. Churchill was aghast that anyone could just walk out at a time like this. But this time the resignation was final. This might not have precipitated a political crisis had it not coincided with a scandal on the Western Front, where it was revealed that the army was suffering from a major shortage of shells. Questions were now being asked about the ability of Asquith’s government to manage the war. During several days of crisis meetings it was resolved that Asquith’s Liberal government would be replaced by a Coalition government. Leading Conservatives agreed to join the Cabinet, but the price they demanded was the demotion of their old enemy, Churchill. Lloyd George became Minister of Munitions to sort out the shells crisis. Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, came into government as Minister of the Colonies and his fellow-Tory Arthur Balfour replaced Churchill at the Admiralty. Churchill himself pleaded with Asquith, ‘I will accept any office – the lowest if you like that you care to offer me.’⁸ He was given the relatively humble post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which he accepted because he could remain in the War Council, albeit in a non-executive position.

Churchill was shattered by this turn of events. He felt he had been made a scapegoat and was now unable to influence the course of military events just when the war needed someone with his abilities. The fighting in Gallipoli carried on until the end of 1915, when an evacuation was organised. It cost 140,000 Allied casualties, many of them Anzacs. Conservative enemies blamed Churchill for planning and orchestrating what became known as the ‘Dardanelles fiasco’. In the House of Commons, they would shout ‘Remember the Dardanelles!’ when he got up to speak. With his departure from the Admiralty many observers thought that his political career was over. But there is no doubt that the humiliation was a political matter. The Conservatives had finally got their own back on this pushy, ambitious know-all who had betrayed them ten years before. As far as Great War military disasters were concerned, the Dardanelles campaign was no worse than many others. But Churchill had been made to pay the price for its failure. Although he remained in the War Council, from now on no one listened to his arguments or propositions. He was pretty well ignored.

For the next six months, and for the first time since entering government in 1908, Churchill found himself under-employed. With time on his hands, and unable to exercise his great passion for military affairs, he took up painting, which brought him some sort of solace. His correspondence with Clementine comes almost to a halt during this period – largely because he was at home much of the time and they had no need to write to each other. She provided great support, and he still had Cabinet meetings to attend along with his regular parliamentary duties. For many people, that would have been more than enough. But for Churchill it was a period of immense frustration and, along with the sense of grievance he felt, provoked a profound depression which he called his ‘black dog’.

In the autumn he decided he needed to get away from Westminster for a bit and the next remarkable phase of his extraordinary life unfolded. He resigned from the government and took up a commission in the army, fulfilling his wish to command men in wartime. In November, he arrived in France and spent ten days with the Grenadier Guards, learning for the first time the realities of life in the trenches. He wrote home: ‘Filth and rubbish everywhere, graves built into the defences & scattered about promiscuously, feet and clothing breaking through the soil, water and muck on all sides … the venomous whining & whirring of the bullets which pass overhead.’ But he concluded: ‘I have found happiness and content such as I have not known for many months.’ Later that month he wrote: ‘I am very happy here. I did not know what release from care meant. It is a blessed peace.’⁹ In January, he was appointed lieutenant-colonel and for the next five months the man who had been President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty commanded eight hundred men of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front. A friend from the Liberal Party, Archibald Sinclair, was made his deputy. Churchill’s new unit was made up mostly of Scottish volunteers who had answered Kitchener’s appeal at the beginning of the war. Many of the men were ex-miners, while the officers had been young professionals. They were initially sceptical of their eccentric commanding officer, who wore strange clothes and regularly received hampers of cheese, ham and pies from home. But he showed great interest in the welfare of his men and quickly won their respect and admiration. Morale improved soon after Churchill and Sinclair took command.

For the months he served in the trenches, his unit was stationed in grim, semi-waterlogged trenches around Ploegsteert, near the Belgian border. It was a relatively quiet period on this stretch of the Western Front and casualties were not great. But it was still a dangerous place to be. And just as in his previous combat experiences, Churchill did not hide from danger. Far from it. He seemed almost reckless at times. He surveyed the trenches daily, sometimes from no man’s land. And his letters home reveal several near misses. On one occasion, he had just left a dugout when a shell landed there, killing one officer and wounding several others. He was frequently showered with debris after shells burst near by. Once, a piece of shrapnel big enough to have taken his hand off landed two inches from his wrist.

However, this period of intense soldiering proved a great fillip to Churchill. His daily letters to Clementine from the trenches are particularly intense. He had time to reflect on his political career so far, at one point writing: ‘My conviction that the greatest of my work is still to come is strong within me: & I ride reposefully along the gale.’ But there was also time for regret and frustration. Once, having seen a German aircraft above the trenches, he wrote: ‘There is no excuse for our not having command of the air. If they had given me control of this service when I left the Admiralty, we should have supremacy today.’ When he heard of the progress being made with the development of tanks, he wrote: ‘[H]ow powerless I am! Are they not fools not to use my mind – or knaves to wait for its destruction by some flying splinter.’ On another occasion, when a shell landed close by, he mused: ‘20 yards more to the left & no more tangles to unravel, nor more anxieties to face, no more hatreds & injustices to encounter; joy of all my foes, relief of that old rogue, a good ending to a chequered life, a final gift – unvalued – to an ungrateful country.’¹⁰

For her part, Clementine was worried sick each day that her husband spent in the trenches. ‘I live from day to day in suspense and anguish,’ she wrote. ‘At night when I lie down I say to myself “Thank goodness he is still alive”.’ But she went on giving him support and good advice about his political future. Once, back home on leave, he made a particularly ill-judged speech in Parliament and Clementine wrote: ‘To be great one’s actions must be able to be understood by simple people.’¹¹ It was wise advice and she would come back to it again: Churchill had to think about how others would interpret his actions and his behaviour.

After nearly five months with the Royal Scots, Churchill’s battalion was withdrawn from the front line and was due to be merged with another that had suffered heavy losses. The forty-one-year-old Churchill took this moment to leave the army and return to political life. He had done his bit of soldiering and could feel justifiably proud of his active service, even though he had never had to lead his men over the top in one of the assaults so typical of the Western Front. He had been a popular and devoted commanding officer, and the Royal Scots were genuinely sad to see him leave. Fifty years later, they would provide a guard at his funeral.

Soon after Churchill returned to Westminster, Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of British forces in France, launched his ‘Big Push’ along the river Somme. Churchill was lucky to be out of it. Almost twenty thousand British soldiers were killed and forty thousand wounded on the first day alone. And the battle dragged on for nearly five months, leaving a death toll of British, French and Germans running into several hundred thousand. Churchill was deeply opposed to such futile head-on attacks without an overall superiority in men or guns. And he said so powerfully in the Commons and in the press.

In December 1916, Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime Minister in a reconstituted Coalition government. He tried to bring Churchill back into the Cabinet, but the Conservatives still objected. However, in early 1917, an inquiry cleared Churchill of any blame in the Dardanelles campaign and he began to behave more like his old self again. His speeches in Parliament once more displayed his talents and his understanding of the nature of the war. Churchill’s standing picked up and in July 1917, Lloyd George finally won the argument with his Conservative colleagues and brought Churchill back into the government, in the key role of Minister of Munitions (although still without a place in the central War Cabinet). It was two years since he had been forced to leave the Admiralty. Probably the worst two years of his life.

The Ministry of Munitions was one of the vast new departments of state that had been created during the war. Three million workers were involved in producing and supplying munitions. Churchill, as ever, immersed himself in his new task of spurring on the armaments factories, in order to deliver the most efficient supply of weapons and shells to the front. He went back and forth on countless trips to France, to see his French equivalent and to set up joint munitions programmes, and to visit the front line. The scene of military activity still exerted a magnetic pull on him. He made it clear to Haig that he thought the Germans could not be defeated on the Western Front. But that didn’t stop the British commander from launching another futile offensive at Ypres in the summer and autumn of 1917. By its finish, it had led to even more slaughter and the loss of half a million men killed, wounded or missing.

In early 1918, Churchill began planning for the build-up of huge numbers of tanks and aircraft that he hoped would be used to mount a new style of offensive in 1919. He visited France on many occasions and was staying in a billet near the front line on the night of 20 March when he was awoken at 4.30 a.m. by the sound of a massive artillery barrage. It was the beginning of Germany’s great offensive in the west to try to win the war. A few weeks earlier, Russia had signed a peace treaty with Germany in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, so Germany was now free to rush troops from the Eastern to the Western Front. And Germany had to hurry, because the Americans, who had entered the conflict the previous year but so far had not deployed many men, would soon be arriving in great numbers to tip the balance in the Allies’ favour. Within weeks, the German offensive had rolled the Allied line back several miles. The Germans recaptured in a matter of days all the territory that had so painfully been won from them along the Somme in 1916. Haig prepared to withdraw to the Channel ports.

Lloyd George sent Churchill back to France to assess the situation. Churchill found Haig’s headquarters lacking any sense of bustle or excitement despite the fact that a hundred thousand British soldiers had been killed or captured. In Paris, he was invited by the Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau to visit the front with him. He was more impressed by the determination of the French commanders, especially General Pétain and Marshal Foch, who was appointed commander-in-chief on the Western Front. The line never broke. So the Germans were prevented from turning a breakthrough into a breakout.

Back at the Ministry of Munitions, Churchill slept in his office and worked literally day and night to deliver the ammunition and weapons needed to replace the losses in France, pushing and cajoling industry to increase its output to the limit. By the end of April, the British Army had replacements for every gun, tank and aircraft lost so far during the German offensive. Haig wrote in his diary, ‘He has certainly improved the output of the munitions factories very greatly, and is full of energy in trying to release men for the army and replace them by substitutes.’¹²

By the summer of 1918, the German offensive, which had come within artillery range of Paris, slowly began to run out of steam. Churchill shuttled back and forth to and from France, visiting command posts and gathering information about munitions requirements. On 8 August the British Army launched a counter-attack with two thousand artillery pieces and 456 tanks. German commanders spoke of this as the ‘black day’ for their army. The tide of war at last began to turn. Over the next month, the British and French pushed the Germans relentlessly back in retreat. The static war now became a mobile war. Tanks were used in giant mechanised thrusts to punch their way through enemy lines. Rolling artillery barrages moved forward just in front of the advancing troops. Aircraft flew endless sorties in support of the troops on the ground. By sheer force of arms, the huge British Army (at the time the biggest ever to be sent into battle), along with the French, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and Americans, defeated the German Army in the field. In early November, the Germans sought an armistice. On 10 November, Churchill attended a Cabinet meeting to discuss peace terms, and at 11 a.m. the following day the guns finally fell silent. Churchill was in his office alone and heard people assembling in the streets outside. He saw Trafalgar Square fill with cheering crowds. Clementine, who was heavily pregnant with their fourth child, joined him and they went to Downing Street to congratulate Lloyd George. Churchill later wrote, ‘Victory had come after all the hazards and heartbreaks in an absolute and unlimited form … All [the enemy’s] armies and fleets were destroyed or subdued. In this Britain had borne a notable part, and done her best from first to last.’¹³

Churchill learned several lessons from the First World War that would prove invaluable when it came to leading the country in the Second. He reflected on many of these in his massive history of the war, The World Crisis 1911–1918, which he published in five volumes between 1923 and 1931.¹⁴ Much of what he observed and wrote here became relevant in 1940. His suspicions of the limitations of admirals and generals hiding behind traditions and outdated custom and practice were confirmed. During the Boer War and the Great War, he felt that many military leaders lacked the necessary offensive spirit, and he would later be wary of this. Also, the failures he saw in the Great War confirmed his feeling that policy should clearly be set by politicians and then carried out by the military. He despaired at weak and indecisive political leadership and at any form of government organisation that did not allow clear, unambiguous decision-making to emerge. In wartime, political and military issues come together and Churchill felt that the Prime Minister should be intimately concerned with both setting and implementing military policy. He was also shocked by the fact that generals like Haig became such major public figures that they were virtually unremovable and could carry on with futile assaults despite opposition from their political masters. Churchill relished unorthodox thinking, whether inside the military or outside from civilian scientists or innovators. He thought the vast losses of the Great War were appalling, and avoidable. He would never rule over a government where human life was sacrificed so readily.

In the ten years that followed the end of the Great War, Churchill enjoyed a period of great activity, fame and considerable political success. This book is not the place to go through all the details, but some points have a bearing on his later story. In January 1919, Lloyd George appointed Churchill as Secretary for War and Air – a new position combining the traditional War Office responsibility for the army with responsibility for the growing field of aviation, both military and civil. This revived an enthusiasm in Churchill for flying, which he once again took up, having reluctantly given up lessons several years before. However, in July, he had a near-fatal accident at Croydon aerodrome just after taking off with his instructor. As his plane fell to earth Churchill thought, ‘This is very like Death.’ He was saved by his seat belt and was lucky to walk away from the wrecked plane, although his instructor was unconscious for some time. As before, Clementine and some of his friends pleaded with him to give up such a dangerous hobby. This time he did so for good, although his fascination with flying lasted for the rest of his life.

Churchill’s first post-war political challenge was organising the process of demobilisation. Britain had nearly three and a half million men in arms at the end of the war and now most of them wanted to return home to resume civilian life as soon as possible. There was widespread discontent at how slowly this was being managed, and something resembling a mutiny took place near Calais. Haig suggested that the ringleaders should be shot. Churchill felt the whole issue was more in need of effective industrial-style organisation rather than military discipline and vetoed Haig’s suggestion. Soon he came up with a fairer way to organise demobilisation, with the men who had been in military service the longest being the first to be demobbed, and the wounded given further priority. Within months, several million men had left the forces. The army rapidly made the transition to peacetime and a temporary boom in the economy helped men to find jobs when they got home.

A more tricky problem unfolded in Russia, where British troops were still stationed, supposedly to guard war supplies that had been sent there in 1917 and 1918, both during and after the revolution. Churchill was passionately opposed to communism, as were many members of the propertied classes in the West. He was also deeply upset by the treatment of the Russian aristocracy and especially of the deposed royal family, all of whom had been shot by the communists in 1918. Churchill was outraged at the atrocities committed by the Bolsheviks, who he said ‘hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims’. In contrast to many, he wanted to be magnanimous to the defeated Germans and to make war on the new communist regime, a policy he summed up as ‘Kill the Bolshie, Kiss the Hun’.¹⁵ In 1919, a civil war raged in Russia between so-called ‘White’ forces, who were opposed to the Bolsheviks, and the Red Army of the new regime. In London, the government wavered between committing British troops to the White cause and withdrawing its forces altogether. It was not an edifying spectacle and Churchill gained little credit from being in charge of the army at this time. At one point, Lloyd George told him to abandon his obsession with anti-communism, which, ‘if you will forgive me for saying so, is upsetting your balance’.¹⁶ Finally, as it became clear that the communist forces were about to defeat their opponents, British troops were ordered home. But Churchill would later be remembered by both the communist regime in Moscow and by the Left in Britain as the man who tried to strangle the Soviet Union at birth.

Much nearer to home, the problem of Ireland re-emerged, having been put under the carpet when war came. In 1921, the island was partitioned. The King opened a parliament for Northern Ireland and six of Ulster’s nine counties retained their union with Britain. The status of the southern counties remained uncertain as all the elected Irish MPs were members of Sinn Féin who set up their own government in Dublin. Militants formed the Irish Republican Army and attacked the police and symbols of British rule in Ireland. In response, Churchill agreed to the establishment of the Auxiliaries to help maintain law and order. Better known as the Black and Tans, this mercenary group of ex-soldiers responded to terror with counter-terror and the situation degenerated into a vicious cycle of violence. Eventually, a truce was agreed; and in October 1921 two Irish leaders, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, led a delegation to London to negotiate the terms by which an independent state would be created. Churchill, who was by now Secretary for the Colonies, was one of the team of negotiators representing the British government. The negotiations went on for weeks. Churchill’s total belief in the virtues of the British Empire made it difficult for him to comprehend why the Irish did not want to remain part of this great venture. And he was concerned that an independent Ireland might be a military backdoor that could be opened to Britain’s enemies in a future war. The Irish delegation insisted that Ireland would remain neutral. Churchill was far from convinced. Despite their differences, however, Churchill took to Michael Collins, a soldier who had ordered acts of violence against the British. At one point, Collins told Churchill that there was a price on his head. Churchill responded by showing Collins a copy of the Boer poster that offered a reward for him, ‘dead or alive’.

A treaty was finally agreed after a marathon session ended at three o’clock in the morning of 6 December. It fell to Churchill to sell the Irish Treaty to the House of Commons, where the majority of Conservatives regarded it as a betrayal of imperial rule. After Churchill gave one of his most brilliant parliamentary speeches, the Commons approved the treaty by 302 votes to 60. In Ireland, the treaty was rejected and a bloody civil war broke out, in which Michael Collins was killed. Churchill continued to work hard to negotiate a settlement between the Irish Free State and the Northern Ireland Unionists. His statesmanship did much to end this phase of the conflict and to restore his own reputation, partly healing the scar of the Dardanelles campaign.

As Secretary for the Colonies, Churchill also became involved in remapping the Middle East, a region that was becoming ever more significant in world affairs. At the outbreak of war, the area had been part of the Ottoman Empire. The British had made a series of promises to the Arabs in the Hejaz (now Saudi Arabia) that if they supported the Allies against the Turks, they would receive independence after the war. Simultaneously, British and French diplomats had negotiated a secret treaty in which they agreed to carve up the region after the war into their own spheres of influence. And in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, Britain also promised that a Jewish ‘national home’ would be created in Palestine, as long as this did not harm the rights of the existing Arab population. These three conflicting promises were not only impossible to reconcile at the end of the war, but were to be the root of much trouble in the decades ahead.

In the last year of the war, Britain had enjoyed a considerable military victory when the army under General Allenby conquered the vast area of Palestine, Jordan and Syria. So, a British military administration was left in effective charge of much of the region after the war. Britain and France were granted various ‘mandates’ by the League of Nations to govern until such time as the local populations ‘were able to stand alone’. Churchill was a great admirer of T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, who had helped lead the Arabs in their revolt during the war. In March 1921, the two men led a substantial team on a tour of the region, and Churchill found himself playing the unlikely role of king-maker. At the Cairo Conference, he installed Emir Feisal, who had led the Arab revolt against the Turks alongside Lawrence, as ruler in Iraq. Moving on to Jerusalem, Churchill created a new entity to the east of the river Jordan called Transjordan and installed Feisal’s brother, Abdullah, as ruler. (This royal dynasty still reigns in Jordan to this day.) While in Jerusalem, Churchill met separate delegations of Arabs and Jews. He overruled Arab objections to Jewish settlement on Palestinian land and wished the Zionists good luck in their quest to settle the land. He was excited by the idea of the Jews returning to Palestine and convinced that they would help develop the whole area. He would support the Zionist cause for the rest of his life and never appeared to understand Palestinian Arab objections to the loss of their land.

With the military budget pared right down, in these years Churchill helped the Royal Air Force to make the transition from war to peace. The RAF had been formed out of the alliance of the army’s Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Navy’s Air Service in 1918. But it struggled to find a role under Sir Hugh Trenchard. Churchill used it to quell potential uprisings in Somaliland and Iraq. For a fraction of the cost of sending in a large army troop, the RAF sent a few squadrons to bomb or machine-gun local rebels. The RAF policed sections of the Empire and survived, thankfully, to fight another day in very different circumstances.

In October 1922, Churchill fell ill and had his appendix removed. In those days, this was an operation that necessitated considerable rest and recuperation. While Churchill was recovering, Lloyd George’s government fell and a general election was called. The electorate in Churchill’s constituency of Dundee had changed dramatically following the granting of the vote to just about all men over twenty-one and women over thirty. As a tough working-class city, Dundee had also suffered in the economic downturn that followed the brief post-war recovery. Churchill could manage to visit his constituency only for the last few days of electioneering. He was in pain and unable to stand. He lost the election badly and went into a period of political exile. He had been a firm supporter of Lloyd George’s coalition, but by now was not at all confident about his support for the Liberal Party, which seemed to be in terminal decline against the rise of the Labour Party. His defeat in the election prompted a witty comment that he was now left ‘without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix’.¹⁷

In the hiatus that followed, Churchill for the second time in his political career changed sides. He returned to Parliament two years later as the Conservative MP for Epping in Essex, a constituency he would continue to represent for the next forty years. Maybe he had simply judged the age of the Liberal Party to be over, in which case he was proved right. He was also gently courted by the Conservatives, who felt his powerful oratory was needed on their side of the Commons. Added to this, his hostility to the socialism he believed the Labour Party would introduce encouraged him into the Conservative fold. After the third general election in as many years, in October 1924, Stanley Baldwin became Conservative Prime Minister and offered Churchill the position of Chancellor of the Exchequer. This was not only the second most important office of state, it was the post that Churchill’s father had held nearly forty years before. He was thrilled, and served as Chancellor for the next five years.

Churchill’s spell running the national economy is best remembered for his disastrous decision to return to the Gold Standard, which meant pegging the pound once again to the price of gold. ‘The return to gold’ was a mantra of 1920s politics and most advisers, including the Governor of the Bank of England and the mandarins at the Treasury, recommended it. The problem was that Churchill rejoined the Gold Standard at the pre-war level of parity. John Maynard Keynes, the finest economist of his generation, immediately denounced this decision and wrote a book entitled The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill. He argued that sterling was now seriously overvalued, which would have dire effects on the economy by making exports overpriced. As a result, British industry would inevitably suffer. He correctly predicted that employers would try to cut wages and that unemployment would rise.

Churchill’s five budgets as Chancellor are also interesting because he returned to the ideals of his reforming days by introducing a state-backed contributory pension scheme which would provide an income for men and women over the age of sixty-five. One recent historian has described this as a landmark piece of legislation affecting about fifteen million people and freeing many of them from dependence on the Poor Law.¹⁸ On defence spending he adopted the Treasury line and introduced substantial cutbacks. (He conveniently forgot this when he called for rearmament ten years later.) Certainly, in the late 1920s, the prospect of war seemed remote. Germany was still recovering from its crushing military defeat and subsequent economic chaos. France and Italy were benign. The Soviet Union was inwardly focused. There were tensions in the Far East that prompted spending on a huge naval fortress in Singapore, but Churchill even trimmed the navy’s budget. It would be several years before the Nazi Party began rearming Germany and posing a new threat to British security.

In May 1926, a long-standing dispute in the coal mines, where the owners wanted to reduce wages and increase hours, led to the nation’s first and only general strike. Churchill was bullish in his opposition to the strikers throughout. He took charge of the British Gazette, the government’s mouthpiece, which was still published while the rest of the press went on strike. For ten days he acted like a press baron, printing his own partisan views each morning. He also wanted the newly formed British Broadcasting Company (the forerunner of the British Broadcasting Corporation) to air the government line on the radio. Its general manager, John Reith, refused and insisted it must remain independent. But once the strike was over, Churchill took a conciliatory position, attacking the mine owners and supporting a minimum wage for the miners. Many of his men in the Scots Fusiliers had been miners and he felt for their plight.

During these busy and broadly contented years, Churchill’s private and domestic life took on a form that would continue for many years to come. His income from book writing was considerable, and The World Crisis was well received. It has been described as a ‘Mississippi of rhetoric, sweeping along with great narrative power though little interpretative depth’.¹⁹ His journalism provided further steady income. These earnings, along with his ministerial salary, made him relatively rich. But he was profligate with his own, if not the nation’s, money. He took long holidays in the south of France, where he regularly gambled and lost money in the casinos. He acquired a Rolls-Royce and employed a chauffeur. Meals were washed down with nothing but the finest champagne (vintage Pol Roger). He loved the finest Cuban cigars and smoked several every day. In 1922, he bought Chartwell Manor, a country house with about eighty acres of land, in a beautiful part of west Kent. It took two years to remove the dry rot and rebuild as Churchill wanted it and this cost a small fortune, but in 1924 Winston, Clementine and their four children were finally able to move in. (Their daughter Marigold had died of septicaemia in 1921, leaving Winston and Clementine distraught. Mary was born the following year.) The staff grew to eight house servants and three gardeners. Family life revolved around Winston and his needs and amusements. The large drawing room, with superb views across the Weald of Kent, became his pride and joy. Here, he would write, study and pontificate. He conversed with guests and held meetings with officials. Informal conferences on international finance were conducted here. In the grounds, Churchill drained ponds, built walls and gathered geese, swans and pets. Even feeding the birds was carried out like a military operation.²⁰

At the dinner table, Churchill dominated conversation and guests sat wrapped in a torrent of wit, entertainment, history, politics and anecdote. Often it became a monologue. Only occasionally was Clemmie able to broaden the discussion to bring others into the debate. Churchill presided over his own court, and his courtiers became loyal friends for the next few decades. Professor Frederick Lindemann, an odd and very snobbish Oxford physicist, delighted Churchill by being able to reduce complex scientific ideas to accessible soundbites. Brendan Bracken, MP and businessman, amused Churchill with his witty and indiscreet descriptions of political friends and enemies. Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press baron, was a regular visitor and frequent commissioner of Churchill’s words for the Daily Express. Churchill admired Beaverbrook as a driven man always doggedly determined to achieve what he set out to do. Churchill respected people who stood up to him and he argued furiously with some of his courtiers, especially Beaverbrook, but he never held a grudge and everything was always made up again in the morning. Clemmie put up with most of these friends: she genuinely liked very few, and disliked many. Along with the courtiers, Churchill’s circle included the Bonham Carters, the Duff Coopers, the Sinclairs and other social equals who delighted in being in the presence of such a witty and important figure.

Churchill’s flamboyant, larger-than-life personality, his energetic intervention in the business of other Cabinet members, and his support for the welfare of the working man might well have brought him into conflict with the Conservative leadership before long, as it had in the Edwardian era. But in May 1929 Baldwin was defeated in the general election and Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Party came to power. Churchill feared that a socialist revolution would follow, destroying everything that was good about Britain and her Empire.

In reality Churchill was falling out of sync with the times. He was out of line with most Conservatives as well as the Labour Party. The leading example of this was his dogged opposition to any sort of self-government for India. Churchill was still very much of a Victorian in his mindset about India. He believed the ‘white dominions’ of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and (at this time) South Africa were shining examples of cultural, political and linguistic solidarity, beacons illustrating the virtues of the British Empire. He just could not accept that non-whites would be able to achieve the same level of government as white men. In this he undoubtedly maintained the racist views on which the imperial project had grown and flourished. Some of his other concerns about a self-ruling India are of more relevance to our post-imperial view today. He was worried that there would be violence between Hindus and Muslims; and he predicted that the ‘untouchables’, the lowest Hindu caste, would be a minority totally left out of Indian society and would suffer far more than they did under the Raj. But more than anything, he felt that ceding power in India, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the British Empire, would be the beginning of the end of the imperial venture. In this he was probably right.

For five years, Churchill argued against what became the Government of India Bill. When it finally went through Parliament in 1935, he had virtually no supporters left on his side. He was offensive towards Indians, especially Gandhi, whom he called ‘a seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir’. And he insulted many of his parliamentary colleagues, including MacDonald, Baldwin, Sir Samuel Hoare, and Lord Halifax, who had been Viceroy in India. Once again, contemporaries suggested that he was unbalanced, unreliable and out of touch with the times. He was increasingly seen as out of date and old-fashioned. As one biographer has put it, his message sounded ‘cracked and tinny, like a record played on an Edwardian phonograph’.²¹

This partly explains why, after ten ‘good’ years mostly in government, he was left out of office for the next decade, which became what he called his ‘wilderness years’. And the mood of politics changed from the largely optimistic years of the 1920s to the slump, poverty and divisions of the 1930s. Politicians from across the spectrum called for disarmament and appeasement while Churchill was still pounding his drum as a warlord, making bellicose calls for action.

Increasingly, he turned to the past. His literary output was immense throughout the 1930s. He dictated most of what he wrote and kept at least one and sometimes two secretaries busy from breakfast until well after dinner. He would pace up and down and the prose poured out of him. In 1930, he wrote more than forty features for the press on a wide range of political and social topics. In the same year, he published a delightful, intimate account of his younger days, My Early Life. In 1931, the fifth and final volume of The World Crisis, on the war in the east, was published; and the following year a series of essays entitled Thoughts and Adventures appeared. Then he began a substantial undertaking, a four-volume history of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, which was published from 1933 to 1938. He also had time to produce a series of biographical essays called Great Contemporaries in 1937. And during these years he began an even bigger project. In many ways, his History of the English-Speaking Peoples came to sum up his view of the white British Empire, conjoined with a history of the United States. This project was so vast that it was not completed until the 1950s, although Churchill earned a lot from the initial advances and he was still working on the first phase of the book when he was interrupted by events in 1939. These books and the journalism were vital in sustaining the income Churchill needed to support his extravagant lifestyle, maintain his family and keep up Chartwell. But they also define his view of the past and show how this shaped his attitude towards the present and the future.

The view of history that emerges from the millions of words in these books is fascinating and is the foundation stone of Churchill’s belief in who the British are and what their role in history had been. Churchill did not work like a professional historian. He often started to write (or, rather, dictate) long before he had done much research. He knew the general thrust of his argument. This greatly shocked Maurice Ashley, his research assistant for the Duke of Marlborough biography. But Churchill was always keen to get the facts correct. He reportedly said, ‘Give me the facts, Ashley, and I will twist them the way I want to suit my argument.’²² His books were always very readable: like his speeches, they were akin to free-flowing rivers, full of great stories and vivid characters all borne along by the driving current of narrative. But the central arguments that emerge in his history were like religious dogma to Churchill. He believed passionately in the virtues of the institutions of British government, monarchy and Parliament, supported by the pillars of the great aristocratic families. Along with this went his trust in liberty and freedom as interpreted by the English governing class. He was a great believer in the Whig interpretation of history: that is, England (more so than Britain) had a special destiny among nations. This concept was forged out of centuries of conflict between barons and kings, the violence of the Civil War and the political experiment of Cromwell’s Commonwealth before everything came good in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which brought in the perfect combination of a permanent Parliament and a docile monarchy. England had then taken on the burden of overseas conquests and had set out to defeat continental tyrants. This was where the Duke of Marlborough came in, destroying the ambitions of Louis XIV to rule the continent. Britain (as it had now become) next went on to build an empire that was the most just that had ever been seen, and its people enjoyed the richest and freest democracy the world had ever known. This account largely ignored the process of industrialisation and the progress of science. These were acknowledged as being part of the British genius but were not of particular interest to Churchill in his histories. As long as the nation’s political balance was maintained, Britain had a duty to stand up to tyranny and military rule whenever it threatened personal liberty.

This romantic but also very political interpretation of history underscored most of Churchill’s political ideas, from his views on India and Ireland to his confidence in the Empire. It was central to his opposition to Bolshevism and socialism. It was behind his view of how Britain related to Europe. And it explains his earlier hostility to the Kaiser and to an aggressive Germany. For a man to whom conventional worship meant very little, these beliefs pretty well became Churchill’s religion. And they would be at the heart of his appeal to the nation in 1940.²³

Churchill had the time to develop and express these ideas throughout the 1930s. Although he hoped to be invited back into government when Stanley Baldwin returned to power in 1935, his unpopular stance over India prevented this. And so, with this world view very much on his mind, Churchill began to dwell on the next issue that would come to dominate his thinking and would then take over his life and bring his career to a peak – the rise of Nazi Germany.

As part of the research for his biography of the Duke of Marlborough, Churchill had visited Germany in the summer of 1932 to tour the battlefield at Blenheim, where his ancestor had won his greatest victory. Even then Churchill had been alarmed by the ‘bands of sturdy Teutonic youths’ he saw marching by. A meeting was actually arranged with the leader of the right-wing National Socialist Workers’ Party, Adolf Hitler, in a Munich hotel. But Hitler failed to turn up. The following year, when Hitler and the Nazis were elected to power, Churchill was not immediately concerned. However, he was deeply shocked when Hitler banned all other political parties, and particularly when he outlawed Germany’s Jews from the apparatus of the state, national, local and municipal.

By 1936, Churchill had started to focus ever more of his attention on what he saw happening in Germany. He deplored the growing persecution of the Jews and the bully-boy tactics of the Nazi thugs who intimidated, rounded up and murdered political opponents. He was also deeply worried by German rearmament, about which he started to receive evidence from an unusual source. Churchill had met Desmond Morton on the Western Front in 1916, and Morton was now a neighbour, living only a few miles from Chartwell. He was director of the government’s Industrial Intelligence Unit, and so able to study first-hand secret reports on Germany’s rearmament, which went against the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Morton leaked some of these reports to Churchill, who then used the information in various articles and speeches. There is still debate over whether Morton acted with official sanction or purely on his own initiative.²⁴ But he certainly became a regular member of the Chartwell court, and Churchill acquired reliable evidence of Hitler’s flouting of the Versailles Treaty and Germany’s burgeoning arms industry. He was the first senior statesman in Europe to sound the alarm about the growing threat posed by a resurgent Nazi Germany.

Churchill’s warnings fell on deaf, or at least covered, ears for some time. The general sense in Britain was that the Great War really had been ‘the war to end all wars’. Its memory was still recent and painful. Hundreds of thousands of men had been lost, their names filling long lists on war memorials in every parish and in schools and workplaces across the land. In addition, hundreds of thousands had been physically maimed or psychologically scarred. Huge numbers had been shocked by the futility of the conflict, as is evident in the many anti-war memoirs that came out from the late 1920s onwards. And thousands of pacifists joined groups like the League of Nations Union and the Peace Pledge Union to protest at any form of rearmament. The policies of appeasement and disarmament were genuinely popular among the vast majority of the population, viewed as the best ways to maintain peace.

Yet Churchill was in no sense a warmonger. He had no wish to see a call to arms (although his fascination with warlike subjects remained), and he had long held that the Treaty of Versailles was unfair on the Germans and that they had good reason to reject some of it. Many in Britain felt the same, although very few in France agreed with this. But Churchill was the first to see that Hitler was a demonic leader who had to be stopped, who had to be stood up to. He instinctively knew that appeasing the German Chancellor would not bring his demands to an end and ensure peace; rather, it would encourage him to demand more. The only option was to rearm in order to deter him. Churchill argued that preparation for war was the best way to maintain peace when dealing with a dictator like Hitler.

As events unfolded, Churchill’s lone voice and his predictions of an imminent catastrophe began to make more sense. He was particularly concerned by the growth of the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe. Another whistleblower, Ralph Wigram from the Foreign Office, passed him information about how the German aircraft factories were dramatically increasing output. With the predominant view at the time being ‘the bomber will always get through’, Churchill conjured up a terrifying vision of thousands of incendiary bombs being dropped on British cities and millions of people being killed as a consequence. Hitler and his Nazi cronies protested and denounced Churchill as a warmonger. But in 1935 Baldwin invited him to join a secret sub-committee on Air Defence Research. At the first meeting he attended, Churchill heard about successful tests that were being carried out in the use of radio waves to detect aircraft (see Chapter 5). He was interested but had no idea how significant this invention of radar, as it was later called, would prove to be.

In March 1936, Hitler remilitarised the Rhineland, territory that had been freed of German troops under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. We now know this was a critical moment for the German leader. He gambled that the British and French would not try to prevent him, but he did not yet have an army powerful enough to carry through the reoccupation if opposed. As it was, the British and French governments allowed him to go ahead. With great prescience, Churchill warned the Commons that Hitler would soon be in a position to invade France through Belgium and Holland, and that Britain’s security was further endangered.

Throughout 1936, more visitors came to Chartwell with information about the inadequacies in Britain’s air defences or with news of military unpreparedness. Many were serving officers: Squadron Leader Charles Torr Anderson reported how little was being done to train RAF pilots; Brigadier Percy Hobart brought details of deficiencies in the army’s tank programme. All of these stories of British military weakness were in contrast to what Churchill heard about Germany’s military growth. In truth, Britain had started to rearm, slowly and quietly, and within very limited budget parameters; and designers and manufacturers were working on plans for the next generation of planes and other machines of war. But they would not come into service until the end of the decade. Churchill was convinced it was too little, too late. More needed to be done, quickly. And he continued to say so, repeatedly, in public.

People were finally beginning to listen when in the winter of 1936–7 Churchill dropped to another low point in his yo-yoing career. His natural enthusiasm for the monarchy led him to support King Edward VIII in the abdication crisis that suddenly erupted in December. Churchill badly misjudged the mood of the country and he was shouted down in the House of Commons. It was a humiliating moment. He thought his career was finished. His ‘black dog’ depression returned and sometimes he could not even sleep at night. He also had financial worries and seriously considered selling Chartwell. It was saved for him by the generosity of one of Brendan Bracken’s rich banker friends.

In May 1937, Baldwin resigned and Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister. He pledged to continue the policy of appeasement while encouraging further minor rearmament. There was no way he would readmit Churchill to government. In February 1938, Sir Anthony Eden resigned as Foreign Secretary because he could no longer support the policy of appeasement. Churchill admired him for this but thought the future now looked grim. He told the Commons, ‘I predict that the day will come when, at some point or other, you will have to make a stand, and I pray to God, when that day comes, that we may not find through an unwise policy, we have to make that stand alone.’²⁵

In March 1938, Hitler announced the Anschluss, effectively a German takeover of Austria. Within twenty-four hours, thousands of Austrians who opposed Nazi rule were imprisoned or shot by the Gestapo. Churchill condemned Germany in the House of Commons and called for an alliance against further German aggression. This time many people rallied behind him. Harold Nicolson MP wrote in his diary, ‘Winston makes the speech of his life’.²⁶ But, once again, the governments in London and Paris did nothing.

By now, the Luftwaffe had become far bigger than the RAF, and the Air Staff felt it could no longer guarantee the defence of Britain. But the Cabinet rejected plans to increase spending on RAF defences. Now it was the turn of the Minister for the Air, Lord Swinton, to resign. Churchill despaired further that his warnings were not being listened to.

During the summer of 1938, Hitler started demanding that the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia be incorporated into the growing German Reich. The area had a substantial Czech-German population. This prompted a major diplomatic crisis. Yet again the British and French governments decided they must let Hitler have his way. They did not consult the Czechoslovak government on the matter. In September, Prime Minister Chamberlain shuttled back and forth between Britain and Germany. Along with the French Foreign Minister, Edouard Daladier, Chamberlain ceded every point to Hitler. They believed him when he said that acquiring the Sudetenland was the end of his territorial ambitions. In Munich, at the end of a series of meetings, Chamberlain persuaded Hitler to sign a piece of paper which stated that he had no wish to make war on Britain. The Prime Minister returned to London a hero. At Croydon airport, he waved the piece of paper to cheering crowds. He said he had brought back ‘peace in our time’.

Churchill took a different view. In Parliament, he told MPs:

[W]e have sustained a defeat without a war … we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged … do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we rise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time.²⁷

In response, Chamberlain merely derided Churchill for his lack of judgement.

In March 1939, in blatant disregard of everything he had told Chamberlain six months earlier, Hitler’s army occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain’s reputation and the Anglo-French policy of appeasement were now in tatters. Churchill had been proved right and the tide of events was at last beginning to flow in his direction. He seemed to be the right man to stand up to Hitler. As the government hastily drew up a treaty promising to defend Poland’s integrity, a ‘Bring Back Churchill’ campaign started in the press. Even the Labour Party came round to thinking Churchill should be back in power.

Churchill didn’t have long to wait. Towards the end of August, Germany signed a surprise pact with Stalin’s Russia. The ideological enemies had become military allies. The way was clear for Hitler’s next act. The House of Commons was recalled from its summer recess. On the last day of the month, Churchill was still immersed in his history writing. He confided to a friend: ‘It is a relief in times like these to be able to escape into other centuries.’²⁸

Events at the beginning of September 1939 brought to a climax the many years of appeasement. Churchill’s dire predictions during his wilderness years had come to pass. On Friday the first of September the German Army invaded Poland. The British and French governments both issued ultimatums to Berlin that German forces must withdraw. They had finally drawn a line in the sand after years of letting Hitler get his way. Chamberlain at last recalled Churchill into the government. But then the Prime Minister hesitated. Churchill waited for more than twenty-four hours not knowing what position he would be offered.

At 11.15 a.m. on 3 September, Chamberlain made a radio broadcast to the nation from the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street. He told the British people that Hitler had ignored the government’s ultimatum, and that Britain was ‘once again at war with Germany’. The broadcast featured in many documentary films at the time and has appeared in countless television programmes since.²⁹ It powerfully captures the drama of the moment.

Later that day, Chamberlain formally offered Churchill the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in the newly formed War Cabinet. It was a moment of triumph for the sixty-four-year-old Churchill, who had spent more than ten years out of office and many thought had come to the end of his political career. Returning to government in any capacity would have been exciting, but returning to the Admiralty and the position he had very happily occupied between 1911 and 1915 was a special joy. When Churchill entered the Admiralty building at about six o’clock that evening, he went straight to the office he had worked in when war was declared in 1914. With its dark oak panelling, grand Grinling Gibbons carvings over the fireplace and large portrait of Nelson, it had changed little. Churchill asked, ‘Where is the octagonal table?’ His old table was soon produced. He also asked for the chart box he had used before, and the maps were soon hung up. ‘These are the same charts I used in 1915!’ he exclaimed with evident glee to the officer who would be his naval assistant.³⁰ Churchill’s appointment was for him just reward for years of work calling upon the nation to be prepared for inevitable war with Nazi Germany. But in the mood created by the declaration of war it was a genuinely popular appointment. That evening a message went out to the fleet: ‘Winston is Back’.³¹

The Second World War had begun, but nothing very much happened in Britain. At the time, the first few months were called the Bore War, and they later became known as the Phoney War. Most of the children who had been hastily evacuated over the weekend that war was declared returned home to anxious parents before the month was out. All of the action was taking place on the continent. The German Army invaded Poland from the west and succeeded in conquering the country in less than a month. At the same time, the Red Army invaded from the east. Poland ceased to exist. Hitler committed all of his armoured panzer units and most of his army to Poland, but the French, politically divided and worried about German reprisals, did nothing. They sat behind the mighty defensive wall known as the ‘Maginot Line’, which ran along France’s border with Germany. One British general described it as a ‘Battleship built on land’.³² Meanwhile, the British assembled a small expeditionary force of nine divisions that crossed to the continent in October.

From his office in the Admiralty, Churchill threw himself into war planning. The Royal Navy was still a powerful force in 1939. There was a lot to command and a lot to organise. Once again, he faced a major challenge. He settled into a way of working that would become his style for the next few years of war. He kept everyone on their toes with a barrage of minutes or memos – dictated messages sent to his advisers and colleagues asking for information, cajoling, upbraiding or requesting action. Some were witty, some solemn. Like emails today, they could be misinterpreted by their recipients, as being more fierce or stern than they were intended to be. He sent several of these minutes every day, hundreds every month. Some related to high-level matters of strategy, such as how to deal with the German U-boat threat, or ideas for brand-new initiatives that needed to be explored. Others concerned the smallest details, like the specifics of dealing with mines. Today, Churchill would be known as a ‘micro-manager’. No detail was too small to escape his attention or to avoid his fury if not attended to in a way he considered fit. This led to immense frustration and exhaustion among those who worked closely with him. But the Royal Navy, Britain’s oldest and in many ways most conservative military service, was galvanised by the presence of this human dynamo in the Admiralty. One of his naval aides later described how ‘He practically killed people by overwork, and at the same time inspired people to extreme devotion.’ Kathleen Hill, who had joined him at Chartwell to take down dictation, went with him into government. She later recalled: ‘When Winston was at the Admiralty, the place was buzzing with atmosphere, with electricity. When he was away, on tour, it was dead, dead, dead.’³³

There were many issues to concern Churchill over the first few months of war. Getting the navy on to a war footing was at the top of the ‘to-do’ list. German undersea telephone cables to the outside world were cut on the very first day. A blockade of the German fleet had to be organised and enforced. And Churchill insisted on the need to equip the Royal Navy with radar, which had not been done before the war as a cost-cutting measure.

Just like in 1914, things did not all go well. Part of the fleet was assembled at Scapa Flow, the vast anchorage in Orkney that had been used in the First World War. From here, the fleet could move out to intercept the German Navy if it tried to venture into the Atlantic. Prevailing wisdom was that this anchorage, the holiest of holies for the Royal Navy, was totally secure. But in the early hours of the morning of 14 October, a dark night with high tides and little moonlight, a U-boat managed to sail on the surface of a small channel, past the antisubmarine defences into Scapa Flow. Its commander looked around for the best target and fired four torpedoes at a huge First World War-era Dreadnought at anchorage that night. HMS Royal Oak went down in just eleven minutes and 810 men were lost, including an admiral and, horrifically, 150 boy sailors aged fifteen or sixteen who were sleeping on board. In the chaos that followed, the U-boat slipped back out of Scapa and returned to Germany. Its captain was fêted by Hitler in a triumphant parade down Unter den Linden in Berlin and he became one of the first German heroes of the war, launching the legend of the tough, daring U-boat menace that would haunt Churchill many times over the following years.

Churchill was always moved by losses at sea, and when he was told of the sinking of the Royal Oak it is reported that tears sprang to his eyes. As he wept he muttered, ‘Poor fellows, poor fellows trapped in those black depths.’³⁴ The loss of this great old battleship from another era was a human tragedy, but it did not seriously affect the capability of the Royal Navy. However, it did lead to the repositioning of the fleet to Rosyth on the Firth of Forth. And typical of his concern for detail, Churchill followed every stage of the design and construction of the new sea defences that he ordered to be built at Scapa Flow. Fittingly, these later became known as the ‘Churchill Barriers’.

The loss of the Royal Oak and concern about aerial reconnaissance photography of ships in anchorage or at sea prompted Churchill to look for an imaginative way of deceiving the enemy. This was the sort of challenge he relished. He called for the building of ‘dummy’ ships, constructed out of wood and canvas, which would look just like the real thing in the aerial photos taken by the enemy. He had encouraged something similar when First Lord during the First World War. Again, Churchill was obsessed with detail. When he observed one of the dummy ships on a later visit to Scapa he said no one would fall for it because there were no gulls flying above it, whereas real ships were always surrounded by seabirds. He ordered that scraps of food should be put out of the front and behind to ensure that gulls constantly circled the dummy ships.

In October, having defeated Poland, Hitler offered peace terms to Britain and France. Churchill argued forcefully to his colleagues in the War Cabinet to reject the approach. The Daily Mirror said it was Churchill’s ‘brilliant memorandum’ that stiffened Chamberlain’s proposed reply to Hitler. He also wanted the RAF to bomb the Ruhr industrial area, but this time he lost the argument in the War Cabinet. Some of his colleagues felt that such an action risked provoking Nazi reprisal bombings on England. The Secretary of State for Air even argued that bombing the Ruhr would not be appropriate because it was private property!³⁵

As the months passed, Churchill grew hungry for action, and increasingly frustrated at the negative and passive views in the rest of the War Cabinet. He came up with a plan to drop mines in the Rhine to destroy shipping in one of Germany’s major transport arteries. This idea was opposed first by his Cabinet colleagues and later by the French. Then he spent much time developing a plan to attack Norway and Sweden in order to prevent Swedish iron ore from being exported to Germany. This would have struck a mortal blow to the German war economy. But the prevailing view was that Britain could not assault the integrity of neutral Norway and Sweden. Such lack of offensive spirit among his Cabinet colleagues, many of whom of course had been the leading appeasers throughout the 1930s, began to frustrate Churchill more and more.

After intense debate over many months, he finally persuaded the Cabinet of the need to mount a campaign against Norway. The date was repeatedly put back but was at last scheduled for mid-April 1940. The navy would mine Norwegian waters against German shipping and the army would seize the port of Narvik, from which much Swedish iron ore was exported. But Hitler beat Chamberlain’s government to it. On 9 April he launched a daring invasion of Denmark and Norway in a combined naval and air operation, dropping airborne troops to capture key airfields – the first time this had been attempted.

The British and French governments were taken entirely by surprise. The earlier plan to land in the north at Narvik was switched at the last minute to a landing in Trondheim. This was then changed again to a pincer movement to the north and south of the city. Troops were landed hastily without artillery, anti-aircraft weapons and other essential equipment. The navy also failed to coordinate with the RAF, and in early May a rapid evacuation was ordered. The whole campaign was a horrible reminder of the fiasco in the Dardanelles in 1915. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Edmund Ironside, chafed at the lack of clear direction of the campaign by his political masters and at the muddle that ensued. ‘Always too late. Changing plans and nobody directing,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘[V]ery upset at the thought of our incompetence.’³⁶ These were tough words from the nation’s top soldier.

The Royal Navy lost several ships, including the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, although the Germans also suffered major naval losses, including the battleship Blücher. Churchill was infuriated by the whole episode. He felt it revealed that the British war effort was badly led and lacked any coordinating body powerful enough to make key decisions and then ensure they were followed through. And he was not alone. A two-day debate in the House of Commons was turned by the Labour Opposition into a vote of censure. Many Tories turned against their own leaders, too. Leo Amery, an ex-Cabinet minister, pointed to the front bench and quoted the words Oliver Cromwell had once uttered in Parliament by saying: ‘Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’

Churchill was in a difficult position. He had argued for a campaign against Norway in the War Cabinet for six months. But as First Lord of the Admiralty he had overall responsibility for a campaign in which the Royal Navy had hardly excelled. He could suffer by being closely associated with its failure. But how could he denounce a government of which he was a senior member? He knew that he stood a good chance of taking over from the discredited Chamberlain. Churchill was associated in many people’s minds with pursuing a more rigorous war policy. Chamberlain was still associated with the failed policies of the 1930s. Churchill had already received several approaches and suggestions that he should take over the reins of power.³⁷ On the other hand, if the government fell, he might fall with it. How could he help to bring down the government without bringing himself down with it?

At about ten o’clock on the evening of 8 May, Churchill rose to speak in the Commons to wind up the censure debate. He put on a fine parliamentary performance. Henry Channon MP wrote, ‘One saw at once that he was in a bellicose mood, alive and enjoying himself, relishing the ironical position in which he found himself.’³⁸ Churchill did not betray Chamberlain, and he took full responsibility for the poor performance of the Royal Navy off the coast of Norway. But in a final blaze of oratory, he declared, ‘let pre-war feuds die: let personal quarrels be forgotten, and let us keep our hatreds for the common enemy … At no time in the last war were we in greater peril than we are now and I urge the House strongly to deal with these matters.’³⁹ In the vote that followed, thirty-three Conservatives and other supporters voted with the Opposition and sixty abstained. Chamberlain’s majority of 213 was reduced to 81. As the Prime Minister left the chamber, howls of ‘Go! Go! Go! Go!’ were directed at him.

Confronted by this humiliation, the following day Chamberlain decided that it was time to form a ‘national government’. It was impossible to consider going to the people in a general election with the war at this critical stage. So the Prime Minister asked the Labour Party if they would join his government. Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, consulted with his colleagues, then made it clear that they would not join a Cabinet led by Chamberlain. So the question became: who could lead a government that would command the support of the Labour Party and the whole nation?

Later that day, Chamberlain called Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and Churchill to a meeting at 10 Downing Street. David Margesson, the Conservative Chief Whip, was also present. Halifax was Chamberlain’s natural successor. He was urbane, aristocratic, an eminent Yorkshire landowner, maybe a little aloof, but many thought a natural leader. He was also admired for his sound judgement. Whereas Churchill was thought by many to be impetuous, untrustworthy, unpredictable and difficult to restrain. Furthermore, Halifax had the support of the King. However, Churchill was the one most associated with fighting the war rigorously.

According to Churchill, Chamberlain asked the two men whom he should recommend to the King to replace him after his own resignation. The King was almost certain to follow the advice of his departing Prime Minister. Many years later, in his wartime history, Churchill described what happened next:

I have had many important interviews in my pubic life, and this was certainly the most important. Usually I talk a great deal, but on this occasion I was silent … As I remained silent a very long pause ensued. It certainly seemed longer than the two minutes which one observes in the commemoration of the Armistice.⁴⁰

John Colville, later his private secretary, said that Churchill suspected a trap. If he proposed himself, he might be seen as too pushy. If he said he thought a peer could become Prime Minister, then Chamberlain might go for Halifax. So he stood with his back to Chamberlain, gazed out of the window towards Horse Guards Parade, and held his counsel.⁴¹

Eventually, according to Churchill, Halifax was the first to speak. He said that he felt he could not lead the nation in war from the House of Lords, that he would be in a hopeless position. He suggested Winston was a better choice. Churchill did not demur. Chamberlain took this as agreement to recommend the King should ask Churchill to become Prime Minister.

Churchill’s account was written seven years after the event, and while making a splendid story out of the meeting no doubt has benefited from being recounted a few times. And it gets a few core fundamentals wrong, like the date of the meeting and who was there. On the other hand, Halifax’s diary account of the same meeting, which was written that evening, makes no mention of any long pause. Halifax says that he felt an ache in his stomach at the thought of becoming Prime Minister at such a critical moment and so ruled himself out. He then claims that Churchill, ‘with suitable expressions of regard and humility’, eagerly accepted that he was the right man for the job.⁴²

But that was still not the end of the matter. Chamberlain hesitated before going to the Palace to resign, so Churchill went back to the Admiralty. That evening, he had dinner with a few close colleagues and was described as being ‘quiet and calm’. Later that night, his son Randolph telephoned from his army base to ask what was the latest news. Churchill replied, ‘I think I shall be Prime Minister tomorrow.’⁴³