6

The Generals

Winston Churchill was a hard taskmaster, particularly for the military chiefs with whom he worked closely. He was demanding, demonstrative, convinced that he was always right, and kept them up half the night. He constantly felt that his generals, admirals and air marshals did not show enough aggressive instinct and that it was him against all of them. Overall, most of them admired him but felt they had the specific knowledge about the situation in the field that meant they were better judges than he was of what was possible and what was impossible. At best, Churchill viewed this as obstructive; at worst, plain defeatist. In one angry outburst in October 1941, he shouted at them: ‘I sometimes think some of my generals don’t want to fight the Germans!’¹ The Chiefs of Staff were all central players in the War Lab. But did Churchill cajole and bully them too much? Did he get the best out of them or did he push them too far? Building the right relationship with his military chiefs would be essential to winning the war. But it certainly would not be easy for Churchill, nor for his chiefs.

Churchill’s military options were limited during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. A stream of minutes still poured forth from his desk, demanding information, suggesting priorities, proposing objectives and calling for innovations. Many of them, as usual, required ‘Action This Day’. But Britain was in a defensive mode and, as Churchill had told the Soviet Ambassador, his principal strategy was just to survive. Nevertheless, his instincts were all for taking the initiative and trying to throw the enemy on the back foot. In July 1940, when the Battle of Britain was about to begin, Churchill ordered the establishment of a top-secret special unit that would encourage sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines, in the hope of generating uprisings against Nazi occupation. This unit was called the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Churchill famously instructed the minister he put in charge, Hugh Dalton, to ‘set Europe ablaze’.

It was an ambitious, aggressive objective but there was little SOE could do to set fire to anything much in 1940. It had limited resources and was hemmed in by sceptical military bosses. But Dalton understood his mission. He said: ‘Regular soldiers are not men to stir up revolution.’ The idea was to drop small groups of well-trained saboteurs and assassins into occupied Europe. These would then act in tiny cells to hit at key targets and create a level of mayhem out of all proportion to their numbers. Churchill had long been keen on guerrilla tactics since he had observed them first hand as a young officer in Cuba and South Africa, where the Boers had used these tactics with great effect. With his lifelong enthusiasm for unorthodox methods of warfare, it is not surprising that he set up something like SOE so early in his premiership. He called it the ‘Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare’ and it was all very exciting cloak-and-dagger stuff.² But did it in reality do any good?

The people of occupied Europe were soon to feel the full force of the Nazi jackboot. Any uprising was met with ruthless and vicious reprisals. Dozens of innocent men and women would be killed for every action taken against the occupying forces. Thousands of others would be sent to concentration camps. Churchill wanted to provide a beacon to inspire and motivate uprisings while providing essential logistical support. The first parachute drops took place into occupied Poland in 1941. Later that year came operations in Norway and Sweden, but it was only in Yugoslavia that SOE could claim a significant impact. Even then, the eminent military historian John Keegan has claimed that SOE was an expensive and misguided failure, costing far more in the loss of innocent lives than it achieved in positive results.³

While Britain’s back was very firmly against the wall, Churchill created two other new military forces with the intention of striking soon against Nazi-occupied Europe. The commandos (the term was first used by the Boers for their forces that struck behind enemy lines) were put under the command of Churchill’s old hero from the First World War, Sir Roger Keyes. The first commando raids were combined operations with SOE against Norway to capture key pieces of Enigma technology in 1941. And, against much opposition, Churchill also insisted on the formation of a new paratroop regiment. The army chiefs argued that with the invasion scare at its height, skilled combat soldiers could not be spared for new units. But Churchill insisted. A call for volunteers went out and several hundred men came forward. Within a year, the core of the 1st Airborne Division had been trained up. Churchill kept up to date with developments in their training and watched a parachute test drop in person in July 1941. SOE, the commandos and the airborne units would all have notable successes later in the war.

With Cherwell’s support Churchill also encouraged the development of a small experimental group to explore new forms of explosives. This was led by two maverick inventors, Major Millis Jefferis and Stuart Macrae, the ex-editor of Armchair Science magazine. Both men were brilliant and radical thinkers who over the next few years came up with a run of remarkable and slightly wacky devices, ranging from tiny booby traps to heavy guns, most of which had improbable names like the Kangaroo Bomb and the Beehive. They devised a magnetic naval limpet mine that was used in several commando raids, a sticky bomb that would attach to armour for five seconds before exploding, and a form of mortar that could fire a ring of bombs in a circular pattern against a U-boat, known as Hedgehog. By the end of the war, thirty-seven U-boats were confirmed as having been sunk with Hedgehog. Jefferis also invented a shoulder-fired anti-tank gun that eventually went into production as the PIAT gun and became the army’s most effective infantry-operated anti-tank weapon. This was just the sort of unconventional, out-of-the-box thinking that Churchill loved to encourage in his War Lab.

Sometimes the work they did went wrong, and on at least one occasion there was an explosion that destroyed part of the unit’s armoury at Whitchurch, near Aylesbury. Needless to say, the War Office and the Ministry of Supply were opposed to such unorthodox experiments and on several occasions tried to close down the whole operation. At one point, Churchill put the group under Ismay’s authority and gave him instructions to keep an eye on it. Later, it came under Cherwell’s direct control. It became known as ‘Churchill’s Toy Shop’, and the Prime Minister loved visiting Whitchurch to see the latest inventions. On one occasion, Churchill was described as being ‘like a small boy on holiday’.⁴

In the summer of 1940, the Mediterranean theatre, including North Africa, was the only location where there was a remote possibility of taking the sort of aggressive action that Churchill longed for. And so campaigning here grew to obsessive proportions in Churchill’s mind. There was a strategic debate about the Mediterranean. The First Sea Lord, Admiral Dudley Pound, proposed abandoning the eastern Med and the long-held British naval base in Alexandria to concentrate on Gibraltar. In July, Churchill vetoed this and decided to reinforce the garrison in Egypt against a likely attack by Italy. Even in this darkest hour, as the battered remnants of the British Army, hauled from the jaws of catastrophe at Dunkirk, desperately reassembled to prepare to defend the country from possible invasion, Churchill persuaded his Chiefs of Staff and the War Cabinet to send men and matériel to Egypt. About half of the best armour in the country, over 150 tanks, along with anti-tank weapons, anti-aircraft guns, field artillery, rifles and ammunition were loaded up. It was a courageous, possibly foolhardy, decision. It is probably a sign that Churchill never really believed that a German invasion was likely. The Ultra decrypts that he read often encouraged him in this view. But it was certainly going against the grain to deplete the national defences at such a critical time. Churchill later wrote that the decision ‘was at once awful and right’, but once he had convinced the other military and civilian chiefs, ‘No one faltered.’⁵ Churchill wanted to get the supplies to Egypt as quickly as possible and proposed sending them through the Mediterranean. Here he was overruled by the service chiefs, who argued that the route posed too great a risk to such a valuable cargo. After a fight, Churchill demurred and the convoy went by the long route around the Cape of Good Hope. It did not arrive in Egypt until the end of September.

As we have seen, the Commander-in-Chief in North Africa General Wavell came back to London in August 1940 to discuss strategy. Churchill was not impressed with him and his taciturn manner and was tempted to replace him. But he had not done so. Wavell returned to his command in Cairo, and he was there to receive the reinforcements when they arrived in September. Churchill then, once again, started to press for immediate action. Wavell insisted on delaying until everything was ready. In early November, reconnaissance aircraft photographed the assembly of the Italian Mediterranean Fleet in the harbour at Taranto. On the 11th, aircraft from the carrier HMS Illustrious attacked the Italian fleet with torpedoes. Three battleships and one cruiser were hit. The resounding success of this attack helped shift the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean in favour of the Royal Navy. This surprise attack upon the Italian fleet in harbour was also the inspiration for the Japanese admirals a year later when planning their assault upon the American Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbor.

During the autumn of 1940, Mussolini invaded Greece and an Italian army launched an attack on Egypt. The invasion of Greece was stalled by the valiant defence of the Greek Army. Then, on 9 December 1940, Churchill at last got his long-awaited land offensive, by what he called the ‘Army of the Nile’. General Richard O’Connor led this modest affair, known as ‘Operation Compass’, with only two Allied divisions. Nevertheless, the offensive was a stunning success. By the time it came to a halt in February 1941, O’Connor had advanced five hundred miles along the North African coast through Cyrenaica in Italian Libya as far west as Beda Fomm. The assault had routed ten Italian divisions, and had captured 125,000 prisoners along with 400 tanks and 1200 guns. The newsreels contained footage of endless lines of Italian prisoners as far as the eye could see. Not surprisingly, Churchill eagerly embraced the good news, which was pretty well the first British triumph of arms on land in the war so far. He wrote to President Roosevelt, and to the Commonwealth prime ministers, as he still needed the support of their armies in the Middle East. But this was just the beginning of the see-saw war in North Africa, which would be the principal theatre of operations for the British Army for the next two years.

It will be remembered that Churchill had done much to foster Roosevelt’s support during the dark days of 1940. This had led to America’s supply of the second-hand destroyers Churchill was so desperate for, along with tanks, artillery and other weaponry, much of which had gone to buttress the army in Egypt. However, before committing himself to more aid, Roosevelt wanted to gauge the British war effort and particularly the determination of the British Prime Minister. In January 1941, he sent his close friend Harry Hopkins as his personal emissary to Britain. Churchill really put himself out to charm Hopkins and spent twelve evenings with him. His schedule was carefully stage managed by Brendan Bracken. There was a visit to Dover to review the defences and Hopkins peered across the narrow Channel to occupied Europe; he toured Britain and saw stout-hearted defenders everywhere, alongside the damage caused by the Blitz; and he even travelled far north to Scapa Flow to inspect the mighty fleet gathered there. He also met the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff.⁶ Churchill did not share with him the secret of Ultra. During his visit, further intercepts came through, suggesting that the German invasion had been called off. But Churchill kept these to himself and instead talked up the threat of invasion, which he knew would have the biggest impact upon the Americans.⁷

Hopkins was enraptured by Churchill and entirely won over. At the end of his visit, he reported back to the President:

I have got a reasonably clear perception not only of the physical defences of Britain, but of the opinions of the men who are directing the forces of this nation. Your ‘former Navy person’ is not only the Prime Minister, he is the directing force behind the strategy and conduct of the war in all its essentials … The spirit of this people and their determination to resist invasion is beyond praise. No matter how fierce the attack may be you can be sure they will resist it, and effectively.⁸

With the Blitz still on and with no end in sight, this was a fascinating verdict on Churchill’s Britain in early 1941.

Roosevelt, reassured, pressed ahead with his support. The Lend-Lease Act passed through Congress. America could now build whatever was needed and lease it to Britain, who would pay up in full after the war was over. Before this, Britain must pay all the debts it could in gold and sell its commercial assets in the United States. It was a tough deal that totally drained the nation’s reserves and in one sense left Britain bankrupt. But it marked a long-term commitment by the United States to Britain’s war effort. It enabled Churchill to keep fighting the war. In a broadcast to America he used the famous phrase: ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ In the House of Commons he claimed that Lend-Lease was a ‘monument of generous and far-seeing statesmanship’. And in a telegram to Roosevelt he wrote: ‘Our blessings from the whole British Empire go out to you and the American nation for this very present help in time of trouble.’ In private, however, he admitted that the sale of Britain’s assets meant that ‘we are not only to be skinned but flayed to the bone’!⁹

The collapse of Mussolini’s armies in both Greece and Libya now drew Hitler into the Mediterranean. In a sense this was a victory for Churchill’s Mediterranean policy. At least he had found somewhere for offensive action to create an impact. But at the time, he once again felt that he was being let down by over-cautious thinking among his army chiefs. Having advanced far into Libya, O’Connor’s offensive was called off because the intelligence coming through Ultra revealed that the Germans were preparing to intervene in Greece. At a meeting in mid-February, Churchill lost his temper with the CIGS, General John Dill, who told him troops could not be spared for Greece. Churchill could not fathom why, after orchestrating this great victory, with 300,000 men and all the supplies he had been sent, Wavell was unable to defend Greece and maintain the offensive campaign in North Africa at the same time. ‘What you need out there is a Court Martial and a firing squad!’ he shouted. Dill remained tight-lipped under the pressure of this Churchillian tantrum, but later he wished that he had replied: ‘Whom do you want to shoot exactly?’ But he didn’t think of this until afterwards.¹⁰

The British intervention in Greece was a sorry affair. Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff ordered Wavell to halt the offensive in Libya and to dispatch troops to Greece. Reluctantly he did so. In April 1941, when the powerful German assault began, the British, Australian and New Zealand troops were both vastly outnumbered and outfought. They were forced back and on 17 April, Churchill sent agreement for their withdrawal in a sort of Greek Dunkirk. About 50,000 of the 62,000 men sent to Greece were evacuated by the Royal Navy, but they left behind most of their guns, tanks and transport. Crete was now reinforced and detailed plans were picked up in Ultra for a German airborne invasion of the island. However, the army and the intelligence people back in London, particularly Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, were desperate not to give away the fact that they had deciphered the German military messages. So the defence of Crete was not reorganised in a way that would have best prepared it for the German assault. General Bernard Freyburg, in command on Crete, was given full access to the Ultra decrypts and details of the planned airborne invasion, but effectively he was told not to act on them. ‘The authorities in England would prefer to lose Crete rather than risk jeopardising Ultra,’ Freyburg said later.¹¹ The New Zealand defenders fought bravely, but in just a few days at the end of May they suffered fifteen thousand men killed, captured or wounded, and Crete was duly lost. For the German invaders, however, success came at a high price. Seven thousand were killed during the assault, and German airborne troops were never again used to assault defended positions.

It is sometimes claimed that these actions in Southern Europe at least delayed Hitler’s assault on Russia, with the key consequence that his armies were unable to capture Moscow before the onset of winter. It’s unlikely in retrospect that they did have this effect. More effective was an SOE-inspired anti-German coup in Yugoslavia. This brought Hitler into the Balkans and prompted his assault on Yugoslavia in order to secure his southern flank. It resulted in years of terror and repression in the Balkans. And it was this action that delayed the start of his assault upon the Soviet Union by a crucial five weeks.

Another consequence of Hitler’s attempt to prop up his ally Mussolini was the despatch to North Africa of General Erwin Rommel, the man Hitler described as the most daring commander in his army. Although initially Rommel had only minimal forces at his disposal, these forerunners of the Afrika Korps soon seized the initiative and rolled back the great British advance across Libya. By the spring, Rommel and his combined German and Italian troops had pushed the British Army right back to the Egyptian border. To add to the humiliation, General O’Connor was captured as the British front collapsed. This presented Churchill with yet another failure of British arms. Only the port city of Tobruk managed to hold out against Rommel’s lightning advance, and was left behind as a a besieged enclave.

Rommel sent messages to Berlin that his troops were exhausted and needed to rest. Two days later, the Ultra decrypts of these messages were in the faded yellow case on Churchill’s desk. Once again, the Prime Minister chafed at the bit and demanded that Wavell launch a fresh assault. Another convoy of supplies, including more than two hundred new tanks, were sent to reinforce the Army of the Nile. This time, though, on Churchill’s insistence, the convoy successfully took the quick route across the Mediterranean. Churchill signalled to Wavell: ‘I have been working hard for you in the last few days … no Germans should remain in Cyrenaica by the end of June.’¹²

On 15 June, Wavell’s new offensive, Operation Battleaxe, was launched. But Rommel had managed to decipher British Army messages sent from Middle East Command. Forewarned, he placed his front-line troops on full alert. They were waiting and ready for Battleaxe. After three days of fighting, Rommel cleverly outmanoeuvred the British and Wavell called off the failed offensive.

Churchill was furious. He felt like he was carrying the whole war effort on his shoulders. It seemed to him that he was facing cautious Chiefs of Staff, admirals who complained about exhausted ships, and generals in the field who lacked the will to fight. He now came to think he should take military command himself. On the other hand, for his generals the constant interference and sending of detailed memos with minute instructions about operational matters was severely wearing them down. Wavell complained to friends about the relentless ‘barracking’ from the Prime Minister. The reality was that Churchill did not have the right generals around him. So he did not appreciate their qualities and they were unable or unwilling to do his bidding. Churchill responded by dismissing Wavell immediately and swapping him with General Claude Auchinleck, who was commander-in-chief in India. Wavell was quickly packed off to Delhi, as Churchill put it, to sit ‘under a pagoda tree’. Ismay, an old friend of Auchinleck, warned the new North African commander about Churchill’s ways. His advice is fascinating. He told Auchinleck:

The idea that he was rude, arrogant and self-seeking was entirely wrong … He was certainly frank in speech and writing but he expected others to be equally frank with him … He venerated tradition but ridiculed convention … His knowledge of military history was encyclopaedic and his grasp of the broad sweep of strategy unrivalled. At the same time he did not fully realise the extent to which mechanisation had complicated administrative arrangements … ‘When I was a soldier’ he would say, ‘infantry used to walk and cavalry used to ride. But now the infantry require motor cars and even the tanks have to have horse boxes to take them into battle.’

Ismay also warned his friend that he would be bombarded by telegrams on every topic, ‘many of which might seem irrelevant and superfluous’. But he was not to be irritated. Churchill was carrying the burden of fighting the whole war on every front, at land, at sea and in the air.¹³ Auchinleck was stepping into the most difficult job in the British Army. Time would tell if Ismay’s advice would bring him more success than his predecessor.

Within days of the failure of Operation Battleaxe, the whole shape of the war changed dramatically. At dawn on 22 June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his invasion of the Soviet Union. For months intelligence reports had predicted the invasion, so Churchill had had plenty of time to think through his position. On the evening of Saturday 21 June, he told his dinner guests at Chequers, including the US Ambassador James Winant, that he was certain the Germans were about to attack Russia. He said he would instantly pledge Britain’s support to Stalin. Winant, who had discussed the matter with Roosevelt, agreed that this would also be the US position. John Colville, his private secretary, took a walk with Churchill in the garden after dinner and asked if supporting his old enemy would put him in a difficult position. Churchill replied that ‘If Hitler invaded Hell he would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil.’¹⁴

In the early hours of the following morning, the news came through of the launch of Operation Barbarossa. That Sunday evening, knowing that he had US backing, Churchill announced the position of the British government on the BBC. It was an emotional broadcast, envisioning the noble defence by impoverished Russians of their beloved homeland against ‘Hitler’s blood-lust’. Churchill declared: ‘Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid.’ He went on, ‘The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples in every quarter of the globe.’¹⁵ Despite a lifetime of personal hostility, and despite all that he had done to undermine the communist state in its early days, the Soviet Union was now Britain’s ally – and that was official.

Ultra intelligence had for many months revealed that German troops were massing along the Soviet border, and Churchill had warned Stalin in a personal note of the possibility of invasion.¹⁶ Stalin had received several other warnings of the imminent attack. But in one of the strangest blunders of the war, he ignored all of them and did nothing to prepare his vast land army or his air force. As a consequence, when Barbarossa was launched, the German military thrust forward with devastating speed. Three million men led the assault on the Soviet Union along a border of 450 miles, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Germans had a total of 120 divisions in three gigantic army groups supported by 3350 tanks. On the first morning, the Luftwaffe attacked the Soviet Air Force while it was still on the ground, destroying many aircraft before they were even able to get airborne. The Soviet Red Army was huge, but no match for the battle-hardened German infantry and panzer divisions. Hundreds of square miles were captured and occupied. One after another, major Soviet cities fell to the Nazi invaders – Minsk, Smolensk, Odessa. Six hundred thousand Russian soldiers were taken prisoner. Hitler spoke of his ‘crusade’ against communism. He called the Soviet state a ‘rotten structure’ that when kicked in would come ‘crashing down’. It looked as though he would be proved right.

In London and Washington, the general feeling was that the Soviet Union would be overwhelmed within a few months. Barbarossa therefore injected a new intensity into the Anglo-Amereican relationship. Now it was time for a face-to-face meeting. On 4 August, amid tight security, Churchill along with his Chiefs of Staff boarded the newest battleship in the Royal Navy, HMS Prince of Wales, at Scapa Flow. Within minutes, the giant battleship slipped its moorings and was soon heading at full speed across the Atlantic. During the voyage, Churchill took his first break of the war. He loved life on board and found time for watching films (particularly historical movies like Lady Hamilton), playing backgammon, and even reading a novel (Captain Hornblower RN by C.S. Forester). On the morning of 9 August, the battleship arrived at Placentia Bay off Newfoundland. It had been decided to meet on ‘neutral’ ground rather than in the United States. President Roosevelt arrived on the American heavy cruiser USS Augusta and Churchill, refreshed after the voyage, crossed to the American ship, where he was piped aboard. Within a few hours, observers were reporting that he and Roosevelt, who had been corresponding now for twenty-one months, were getting on famously.

The meeting at Placentia Bay provided a giant photo opportunity. On Sunday 10 August, Roosevelt visited the Prince of Wales for a church service held on deck. The prayers were carefully selected, as were the hymns, which included ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. The newsreel cameras rolled as the President and the Prime Minister sitting alongside each other led their men in the singing. ‘You would have had to be pretty hard boiled not to be moved by it all – hundreds of men from both fleets all mingled together … It seemed a sort of marriage service between the two navies, already in spirit allies,’ wrote John Martin, one of Churchill’s secretaries, in his diary.¹⁷ The meeting is famous for producing the Atlantic Charter, a joint Anglo-American declaration of principles respecting ‘the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live’. It was a grand proclamation of the moral values of the democracies intended to act as a beacon to those under occupation. Its value was largely symbolic. But important business was also done, in great secrecy, at this momentous meeting.

Roosevelt promised to provide aid to the Soviet Union ‘on a gigantic scale’, and it was agreed to send an Anglo-American mission to Moscow to discuss the USSR’s needs and to propose a summit meeting with Stalin. It was also decided to send a strong note to the Japanese, warning them against further encroachments in the Pacific. Critically, for Churchill, Roosevelt and his naval chiefs agreed to provide escorts for convoys across the Atlantic which, if attacked, would respond by firing on U-boats. And the United States would patrol the Atlantic to the west of Iceland. The two sets of Chiefs of Staff had useful meetings. It was clear there was a gulf between their thinking and that the Americans as yet had no plans in place should they become embroiled in the war. But useful personal contacts were made and the basis for future combined operations was laid. For Churchill, most important of all was the personal time he spent with Roosevelt, building not just a working, professional relationship but a genuine mutual friendship that would be at the heart of the ‘special relationship’ for the next four years.

Churchill returned from Newfoundland to news of further German advances in the Soviet Union. The Wehrmacht now broke through into the giant, open prairie fields of the Ukraine. It seemed unstoppable. On 21 September, the Germans captured Kiev along with two-thirds of a million Soviet prisoners. Hitler called it the ‘greatest battle in world history’. For Churchill, these were bleak times. He worried that if the Soviet Union were defeated, Hitler’s triumphant armies would then turn once more on Britain. Again, he called for offensive action in North Africa, but Auchinleck his new commander told him the army would not be ready until November.

It was essential for Churchill to have the right men around him. Wavell had had to go. And so too would General Dill, whom Churchill thought off as being over-cautious, referring to him as ‘Dilly-Dally’. It was a few months before the right moment came but later in the year he was replaced as Chief of the Imperial General Staff and sent off to Washington where he was to do an outstanding job. The man Churchill chose to replace Dill as CIGS, the army chief, was General Sir Alan Brooke (later Field Marshal Viscount Alanbrooke). Brooke was part of an Ulster Protestant family with a long tradition of service in the army. One of Churchill’s close friends from his army days in India had been Victor Brooke, Alan’s elder brother, who had been killed in 1914. And another brother, Ronald, had ridden with Churchill into Ladysmith to relieve the city during the Boer War. Alan Brooke himself had served with distinction in France in the spring of 1940 and had been put in command of the Home Forces in July 1940, when the possibility of invasion loomed. He had impressed Churchill with the way he had reinvigorated the defences of southern England around a more mobile strategy in order to respond with flexibility if an attack came. With frenetic energy he reorganised units that were still reeling from the loss of France. Churchill liked what he saw and the fact that Brooke had the self-confidence to stand up for himself and argue his case against anyone – including the Prime Minister. Churchill respected this and enjoyed the cut and thrust of debate. ‘When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me. I know these Brookes – stiff-necked Ulstermen and there’s no one worse to deal with than that!’ Churchill is reported to have said about Brooke to his deputy.¹⁸ After a couple of late night sessions talking together, Churchill offered Brooke the top position.

So began one of the central partnerships of Churchill’s War Lab. It endured for three and half years, to the end of the war. They would meet almost daily, and Brooke became Churchill’s principal military adviser. To many outsiders it seemed that their relationship was difficult. They argued fiercely together and the atmosphere often seemed tense. Brooke, like his predecessor, was also infuriated by Churchill’s micro-management and by his meddling in minor tactical details, the stuff which Churchill of course loved. It always seemed that Churchill wanted to control every aspect of every battle plan. He interfered, it seemed to Brooke, without a full understanding of the situation in the field. Furthermore, Brooke was pushed to the brink of exhaustion by the hours Churchill kept. The Prime Minister would often call meetings late at night or even in the early hours of the morning and he always expected everyone to be at their best. But he would have enjoyed a leisurely morning, reading papers and dictating from his bed. The others would have worked a full, stressful day structured around a conventional time frame. Churchill never seemed to have consideration for the strain that others around him were also under.

But Brooke turned out to be the perfect foil to Churchill. He stood his ground against the Prime Minister’s garrulous verbal assaults, and he never accepted a plan or endorsed a policy that he knew was wrong or would needlessly risk the lives of his men. Brooke could be as tough as nails. His nickname in the Cabinet Office was ‘Colonel Shrapnel’. Churchill respected him for this. Although the Prime Minister would often cross-examine and criticise everything put before him, sometimes in an aggressive or bad-tempered way, Brooke knew that the very next day he might hear Churchill eagerly putting forward the same plan as though it were his own. And at heart, Brooke had great admiration for Churchill and for his leadership of Britain. Back in May 1941, before he became CIGS, he had the opportunity to observe Churchill at close quarters and had written: ‘He is quite the most wonderful man I have ever met, and is a source of never ending interest studying and getting to realise that occasionally such human beings make their appearance on this earth. Human beings who stand out head and shoulders above all others.’¹⁹ After the two had been at each other’s throats in some gruelling encounter over the details of a battle plan Brooke would be heard to murmur, ‘That man!’ And then with a sigh to continue, ‘But what would we do without him?’²⁰

Over the years, both men were worn down by the strain of working together. Brooke often found Churchill petty, unfair and irrational, and his ideas wildly unrealistic. Totally against regulations, he kept a diary, which he wrote up late at night. For him, it provided relief from the stress of the day to scribble down his thoughts. Looking at the original diaries, it’s easy to see how he wrote at speed, without much care for grammar or punctuation, almost in a stream of consciousness, to get his feelings off his chest. In one exhausted late-night entry from September 1944, after another bitter row, he recorded:

We had another meeting with Winston at 12.00 noon. He was again in a most unpleasant mood. Produced the most ridiculous arguments that operations should be speeded up … He knows no details, has only got half the picture in his mind, talks absurdities and makes my blood boil to listen to his nonsense … Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent.²¹

But the fact is the tension in this love-hate relationship brought out the best in both men. Brooke was confident enough (just) to put up with Churchill’s bullying. Churchill, for his part, respected Brooke as a supremely professional soldier, from a long line of soldiers, who always had the army’s best interests at heart. And when faced with determined, well-argued opposition, Churchill never overruled Brooke. Churchill’s undisciplined genius was tempered by Brooke’s tough professionalism. It would be a war-winning partnership.

The very morning that Brooke began to work as CIGS, Auchinleck finally launched his offensive in the North African desert. Within days his men had advanced fifty miles, and on 29 November they relieved the siege of Tobruk. Churchill was delighted with their progress. Then intercepted Ultra messages enabled the RAF to locate and sink two vessels bringing vital fuel supplies across the Mediterranean to Rommel’s forces. Churchill had just two ambitions in the closing months of 1941: to bring the United States into the war before the defeat of Stalin’s Russia; and to win a victory in the Middle East. He telegraphed Auchinleck in Cairo: ‘as long as you are closely locked with the enemy, the Russians cannot complain about no second front … the only thing that matters is to beat the life out of Rommel and Co.’²²

Further Ultra decrypts reported that the German Army in Russia was running out of steam, and its commanders were concerned by lengthy supply lines and the ferocity of the Russian resistance. Churchill passed on details from several Ultra reports to Stalin, including an outline of the full German battle plan, which made it clear that the main German objective was not the oilfields of the Caucasus but Moscow itself. Without letting the Soviets know the source of the intelligence, Churchill forwarded message after message to Stalin. ‘Has Joe [Stalin] seen this?’ he would regularly ask Srewart Menzies.²³ The Soviets received high-grade information about German plans that they could not have obtained from any other source.

The first light snows fell in September, but the full force of winter swept across Russia in November. German troops had advanced to within thirty miles of Moscow. Advanced patrols could see the spires of the Kremlin through their binoculars.²⁴ But as the Soviet defence hardened, so the German forces came to a standstill. Then, on 5 December, Stalin did what the Germans had thought was impossible. Using fresh troops from eastern Asia, fully kitted out and trained for winter war, he launched a counter-attack. The German troops, unprepared for the freezing conditions, without winter clothing or suitable weapons, were thrown back. Moscow was saved. And for this winter at least, so was Stalin’s Russia.

The weekend after the counter-attack, Churchill was at Chequers. Now his big worry was that Japan was showing signs of aggression towards British and Dutch territories as well as the independent Siam (now Thailand) in South-East Asia. Churchill got in touch with Roosevelt and they agreed to make it clear that an attack upon Siam would be regarded as an attack upon themselves. On Sunday 7 December, Churchill had just finished dinner with the US Ambassador and Averell Harriman, another American diplomat, when they turned on a small radio to hear the BBC’s nine o’clock news. Churchill himself almost missed the piece that mentioned an attack by the Japanese on American shipping in Hawaii. The butler came in to confirm that he had heard the report also. Churchill immediately called the White House, and after a few minutes Roosevelt came on the line. ‘It’s quite true,’ the President replied. ‘They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We’re all in the same boat now.’²⁵

At this point, the full scale of the daring and unexpected Japanese attack on the US Navy’s giant Pacific Fleet as it lay in harbour was unknown. Later, it became clear that four battleships and over two thousand American sailors had been lost that morning. Moreover, Japanese troops had launched simultaneous attacks upon British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and Siam. The whole world was now at war. But Churchill instantly recognised this as the best news possible, America would at last be Britain’s ally. He later wrote that he realised then

We had won the war … Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. And for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.

With his staff buzzing around him, Churchill retired to bed, where he ‘slept the sleep of the saved and thankful’.²⁶

The following day, Britain declared war on Japan. And then Congress declared war. Roosevelt described 7 December 1941 as a ‘date which will live in infamy’. Churchill immediately made plans to visit Washington, concerned that vital US supplies might now be cancelled in order to pursue the war with Japan. Then, on 11 December, Hitler chose to declare war on the United States. It was an extraordinary decision. Now it was imperative that the two leaders of Britain and the USA, at long last Allies in the war, should get together. On 13 December, Churchill set sail once again for the United States. It would be a long trip.

During the Atlantic crossing, HMS Duke of York was buffeted by heavy storms and made slow progress. En route Churchill received good news of further Soviet counter-attacks in the north at Leningrad and in the south along the Sea of Azov, and bad news of the Japanese attack upon Hong Kong. The long journey and forced inactivity on board gave Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff (the newly appointed Brooke as CIGS was not on this trip) plenty of time to reflect on the global conflict now raging. Churchill wrote three expansive papers on grand strategy. They show remarkable insight into the course the war would actually take. The first focused on the war in North Africa in 1942, arguing that it was essential for the United States and Britain to take control of the Mediterranean. The second was on the war in the Pacific against Japan and correctly foresaw that this would be a maritime struggle followed by a series of island invasions to recapture lost territory. The third addressed the strategic objectives for 1943 and rightly predicted that the conflict on the Eastern Front with the Soviet Union would become the central land conflict of Hitler’s war. Although he correctly predicted several major events over the next few years, Churchill was a little optimistic with the timing of these events: he thought the Allied invasion of occupied Europe would occur in the summer of 1943, rather than June 1944.²⁷

After ten days at sea, Churchill finally reached the United States and flew on to Washington, where Roosevelt met him and invited him to stay in the White House. They immediately began talks, while the British Chiefs of Staff met with their US counterparts, quickly establishing the basis of how they would work together from now on, a system of combined operations that lasted to the end of the war. They also agreed, after considerable pushing by the British, on the ‘Germany First’ principle: that is, American resources would be allocated to the defeat of Germany as the first priority in the global war. In retrospect, this was one of the most important strategic decisions of the war. It could so easily have gone the other way. The Americans were outraged at the unprovoked attack by Japan and were tempted to concentrate on the war in Asia with Europe as a secondary diversion. It was a tribute to Churchill and his team, as well as to the global view of the US leadership, that Germany First became the guiding beacon of the war effort.

Much future planning was debated and agreed during the Washington meetings, and once again Churchill enjoyed several hours each day of premium time with the President. They lunched together daily, usually with Harry Hopkins. Dinner was a more social occasion, with others also present. Churchill wrote that ‘The President punctiliously made the preliminary cocktails himself, and I wheeled him in his chair from the drawing room to the lift as a mark of respect.’²⁸ (Churchill preferred whisky and soda to the President’s cocktails. Roosevelt was amazed at but tolerant of the amount of alcohol Churchill consumed. However, Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, regarded the Prime Minister as something of an alcoholic.) The bond of friendship between the two leaders grew stronger in the weeks that Churchill lived as Roosevelt’s guest in the White House.

On 26 December, Churchill was invited to address both Houses of Congress. He had spent some time polishing his speech and it went down well. The newsreel cameras were there to record one of Churchill’s finest, most assured performances. He began by saying, ‘I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own. In that case, this would not have been the first time you would have heard my voice.’ The laughter at this quip turned into profound applause when, speaking of Japan’s outrageous attack upon Pearl Harbor, he asked, ‘What sort of people do they think we are?’ He spoke about the ‘long, hard war’ ahead and came to a rousing conclusion: ‘It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will for their own safety and for the good of all walk together side by side in majesty, in justice and in peace.’ These final words brought the cheering congressmen to their feet.²⁹

A few hours later, back in the White House, Churchill went to bed but couldn’t sleep. As it was a warm evening he tried to open the window. As he did so, he suddenly felt short of breath. He felt a dull pain over his heart which went down his left arm. He quickly recovered, but the following day he reported the incident with some concern to his doctor, Sir Charles Wilson, who was travelling with him. Wilson instantly recognised that Churchill had suffered a mild heart attack, what he called a ‘coronary insufficiency’. While he examined Churchill with his stethoscope, Wilson thought hard about what to do. The textbook recovery period for this at the time was six weeks in bed. But Wilson knew that if he instructed Churchill to stop work at this critical juncture it would soon get out ‘that the PM was an invalid’ with heart problems. It could be the end of Churchill as an effective war leader. On the other hand, if he ignored it and Churchill had another, potentially fatal, seizure, ‘the world would undoubtedly say that I had killed him through not insisting on rest’.

The doctor decided that as the attack had obviously been mild he would risk it. He told Churchill, ‘There is nothing serious. You’ve been overdoing it.’ When Churchill protested that there was no way he could take a rest now, Wilson replied, ‘Your circulation was a bit sluggish … you musn’t do more than you can help in the way of exertion for a little while.’³⁰ Despite his age (he was now sixty-seven), the immense strain he was under and the vast workload, Churchill kept going at full speed. Later in the war, he suffered further illnesses, but he was never incapacitated by another heart attack. Wilson had made the right call.

A couple of days later, Churchill visited Ottawa and addressed the Canadian Parliament. Again the speech was recorded on film, which captures the power of his oratory. He referred at one point to the French claim in June 1940 that, without France, Britain would have its neck wrung like a chicken in three weeks. ‘Some chicken!’ exclaimed Churchill. As the laughter died down he followed this up with ‘Some neck!’

Churchill did take a short break for a few days in Florida, where he enjoyed swimming in the warm sea. Swimming was something that particularly appealed to the boyish side of Churchill. ‘Winston basks half-submerged in the waters like a hippopotamus in a swamp,’ recorded Wilson in his diary, no doubt relieved that at last a couple of days of relaxation had been squeezed into the schedule.³¹ Then it was back to the White House, and agreement on a declaration that Roosevelt called the United Nations Pact. This was a follow-on from the Atlantic Charter signed the previous August, a further declaration of democratic principles. There were meetings of real substance about industrial output and a Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee was formed. Finally, it was decided to launch an invasion of French North Africa later in the year to help secure the Mediterranean. It was during this series of meetings that Sir John Dill started to forge an excellent relationship with General George Marshall, the US Army’s sturdy and dependable Chief of Staff. When Churchill and the rest of the British team returned to Britain, Dill was left in Washington as head of the Joint Mission, a critical role in the Anglo-American relationship that he enthusiastically and ably fulfilled until his death in late 1944. By then, the man whom Churchill had nicknamed Dilly-Dally had finally proved his worth.

Churchill had been away for three weeks when it was decided business was done and it was time to go home. First he flew to Bermuda in a big Pan-American Boeing Clipper flying boat, and during the flight he took the controls for about twenty minutes. He had not outgrown his fascination with flying. With so many U-boats in the Atlantic and with the urgent need to get back to London, it was then decided that the best option was to continue the journey to Britain in the flying boat. It was an eighteen-hour flight, and towards the end the Clipper drifted slightly off course and dangerously near to the coast of occupied France. It veered north at the last minute and flew towards Plymouth at an angle that made it look like an approaching enemy bomber. Six Hurricanes were scrambled to intercept the Clipper, but fortunately the error was discovered in time and Churchill and his team landed safely.

The following few months saw disaster follow disaster for Britain. The Japanese made dramatic advances in the Far East in their version of the blitzkrieg. On 15 February 1942, the giant fortress at Singapore surrendered (see Chapter 7). It was a humiliating blow to British power and prestige in the East. Churchill described it as ‘the greatest disaster to British arms which our history records’.³² In North Africa, the gains of Auchinleck’s offensive were reversed by Rommel. British troops began to retreat once more, although Tobruk again held out, offering some hope. Churchill worried that the British Army in the Far East and in North Africa did not seem to have the spirit to fight. Then the German Navy changed the configuration of their Enigma machine, which meant it was impossible to decipher their messages for most of the rest of the year. Shipping losses in the Atlantic rose alarmingly. And the convoys carrying supplies to Russia took a terrible battering from German aircraft and battle cruisers operating from northern Norway. As the strain grew, Churchill became very down. ‘Papa is at a very low ebb … worn down by the continuous crushing pressure of events,’ wrote his daughter, Mary, in her diary.³³

With the worsening global situation, Churchill decided to call another conference with Roosevelt in mid-June. This time he flew across the Atlantic in the same flying boat he had used five months before. He spent a couple of days with Roosevelt in his house at Hyde Park, overlooking the Hudson River. On 20 June both men travelled to Washington in the presidential train. They were in a meeting in the White House the following morning when an aide came in and passed a pink slip of paper to the President. He read it, said nothing and passed it to Churchill. It read: ‘Tobruk has surrendered with 25,000 men taken prisoner.’ Churchill was thunderstruck by the news. He had placed so much weight on the North African campaign and now all of his hopes seemed to collapse. He despaired at the failure of the British Army to hold out even against inferior numbers of the enemy, at Singapore and now at Tobruk. He later wrote of this moment: ‘This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war … it had affected the reputation of the British armies … I did not attempt to hide from the President the shock I had received … Defeat is one thing, disgrace is another.’ Roosevelt asked what he could do to help. Churchill replied that he needed more tanks. The President immediately summoned General Marshall to join them and within hours Marshall had come up with a plan to divert three hundred of the newest A4 Sherman tanks to North Africa. Marshall also agreed to send a hundred artillery pieces. These were soon on fast transports across the Atlantic. They would make a real difference to the North African campaign later in the year. It was a magnificent sign of Roosevelt’s friendship for Churchill and of US support for Britain’s fragile war effort.³⁴

A few days later, Churchill returned home from Washington to face a vote of censure in the House of Commons. Constant news of defeats had created rumblings of discontent against his leadership, and this was the second parliamentary vote of no-confidence that year. The debate offered a sounding board for those who wanted to air their criticism, but this was not a time for a change of leader. Churchill won the vote by 475 votes to 25. On the same day, Rommel’s troops reached a small railway station named El Alamein, only eighty miles from Cairo. Here they stopped, for now.

On the suggestion of the soldier son of a colleague who had just returned from Egypt, Churchill decided to visit the troops in the desert to assess for himself the state of the Army of the Nile. After another gruelling flight, this time in an unpressurised, unheated Liberator bomber (Churchill had his oxygen mask specially adapted so he could smoke a cigar while wearing it!), the Prime Minister landed in Cairo. Once again Charles Wilson accompanied him, and he recorded that Churchill arrived ‘in great heart … A great feeling of elation stokes the marvellous machine, which seems quite impervious to fatigue.’³⁵

Churchill soon picked up on the low morale in the 8th Army, and he and Brooke, who also accompanied him on this trip, realised that there must be something wrong with the command of the desert army. After a few days, Churchill decided to replace Auchinleck. He appointed General Harold Alexander as Commander-in-Chief. Alexander was a classic senior officer of the old school, an aristocrat and an ex-Guardsman, not too clever, but always willing. He had a distinguished war record from the Great War and had seemed to sail through life, effortlessly achieving whatever he set out to accomplish, always immaculately dressed and with film-star good looks. He had done well commanding an army corps guarding the evacuation at Dunkirk and was known as a safe pair of highly capable hands. Churchill admired him greatly and was sure he had the diplomatic skills necessary for senior command.

Brooke wanted to appoint General Bernard Montgomery as commander of the 8th Army. But Churchill had reservations about Montgomery and preferred General William Gott, a corps commander who was already in the desert. Brooke regarded Gott as too tired to take on this responsibility and thought Montgomery was more energetic and self-confident. Unusually for Brooke, he gave in to Churchill and agreed to appoint Gott. Then, a couple of days after his appointment, Gott was killed when his plane was shot down by German fighters outside Cairo. Churchill then agreed with Brooke’s recommendation and decided on Montgomery to take command of the 8th Army. It proved to be an inspired choice.

Montgomery (better known as ‘Monty’), who went on to become probably the best-known British general of the Second World War, had a complex personality. He was outwardly very assured, often abrasive towards those around him and keen on self-promotion – he always made himself available for photographers and film cameramen, no matter how busy and tense the situation was. But he was also something of a loner who did not fit in to the relaxed cycle of officer life in the British Army and seldom socialised in the conventional way. He had been a staff officer in the First World War and had learned the vital importance of thorough, detailed planning before combat. In the inter-war period, he was a training instructor for many years and by 1939 he was a highly regarded, all-round professional soldier. He fought well in France in May–June 1940 and impressed Churchill with his aggressive spirit when he was then put in command of a division on the south coast waiting for the anticipated German invasion. But Churchill also found him an awkward man to work with. In many ways, Monty was the opposite of the sort of general Churchill liked. He was cautious, calculating and believed that no offensive action should be taken until an army had built up an overwhelming superiority of men, guns and equipment and could be sure of supremacy in the air. He was lucky to arrive in Egypt just as that was happening. With the new Sherman tanks and field artillery arriving from America, as well as substantial reinforcements, Monty soon enjoyed a superiority of roughly two to one over the Germans and Italians of Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

But Monty was more than just an excellent planner. He electrified his headquarters and had an almost instant impact on the morale of the men. He believed in constant training and the need for physical toughness. He soon had the troops taking daily exercises and endlessly preparing for battle. He also believed a general should live among his men, and his constant visits and pep-talks soon engendered a new fighting spirit. It was Monty who would lead the next decisive phase of the desert war. If he failed, and Rommel broke through to Cairo and the Suez Canal, Hitler’s plan was for the Afrika Korps to link up with the southern flank of the army in Russia and to capture the vast oilfields of the Caucasus and Persia. The stakes could not have been higher.

Brooke felt ‘that at last he [Churchill] is beginning to take my advice’, as the decision to appoint Alexander and Montgomery to their key positions at this crucial moment had largely been his.³⁶ As a result, Churchill at last had the right team in place. He could work well with Brooke as his leading military adviser. And Alexander was the right strategic Commander-in-Chief for the Middle East, and did not interfere with Monty, who was left to make his own operational plans for battle.

The Ultra intelligence coming through about the state of the Afrika Korps was now really making a difference. Montgomery was forewarned about Rommel’s next attack at El Alamein along the Alam Halfa Ridge at the end of August, so he reinforced his troops there. Rommel was unable to break through. By September, more Ultra decrypts helped the RAF to locate and sink about one-third of all the cargo that was sailing across the Mediterranean to reinforce the Afrika Korps, and almost half the Germans’ fuel supplies. Increasingly, the intercepted messages reported how hard pressed the Afrika Korps were. Both sides continued to face each other in the desert, but the 8th Army was rapidly growing in men, equipment and, under Monty’s inspired command, in self-confidence.

On the moonlit evening of 23 October 1942, after a huge artillery barrage, Monty launched his great offensive at El Alamein. His 8th Army consisted of British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian and South African troops. Monty feigned an attack in the south of his forty-mile front, which Rommel believed was the real thing. But his main thrust came in the north. For several days there was heavy fighting with neither side gaining a decisive advantage. But slowly the weight of armour as well as the persistence and determination of Monty and his men began to count. After twelve days, Montgomery wrote in his diary, ‘The dam has burst,’ and Rommel ordered his Afrika Korps to retreat. Harried constantly by the RAF, Rommel orchestrated a brilliant withdrawal along the coastal road, escaping to fight another day. Churchill was elated by the victory. The Battle of El Alamein proved to be a turning point in the war. In total, 8000 Germans and 22,000 Italians were taken prisoner, while 35,000 Afrika Korps and 13,000 Allied soldiers were killed or wounded. Montgomery had shown that the German Army was not invincible and that an Allied victory was a distant but real possibility.

In a speech in London, Churchill at last had some good news to announce. ‘I have never promised anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat,’ he said. ‘Now however, we have a new experience. We have victory – a remarkable and definite victory … This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’³⁷ On 8 November, Anglo-American troops landed in force along the French North African coast in Operation Torch. This was the first truly combined operation of the war and the result of the joint planning that had begun in Washington eleven months before. It was soon evident that the landings had been a success. Rommel was now in full retreat westwards from Egypt and troops from the Torch landings would begin to move east towards Tunisia. On 13 November, Monty’s troops entered Tobruk, the loss of which had so upset Churchill five months earlier. On Sunday 15 November, Churchill ordered the church bells to be rung across Britain. Two years earlier, this would have been the signal that the German invasion had started. Now it was a sign of victory. At long last Churchill’s generals had delivered him a victory that mattered.