THE FROCK AND THE BRASS HATS - PART TWO
Political and military relations in the Second World War
THE FROCKS AND THE BRASS HATS – PART TWO
Political Military disagreement was even worse in the Second War than it had been in the First. Criticising a national icon is always risky, attracting as it does intense trolling and death threats. I have had four so far originating from something I have opined about various historical figures – usually written in capital letters in green ink with bits underlined. That I am still here would indicate that the would-be assassins are not very good at map reading. The truth is that nobody is all good or all bad, and while Winston Churchill was on balance a great man whose major contribution to the War was in realising early on that the United States had to be kept on side, and in persuading Roosevelt to implement Lend Lease. That said, we should not, in my view, be blind to Churchill’s flaws.
If Winston Churchill was the man who won the war, as the 1945 election posters said he was, then I would contend that by his constant interference in matters that he did not understand from the outbreak of war onwards, by the sacking of commanders who wouldn’t tell him what he wanted to hear and by his constant search for the easy option, he was the man who was very nearly responsible for us losing it. In November 2002 the BBC carried out a poll to decide who was the greatest Briton ever. Churchill came first. Mind you when we note that Diana ex Princess of Wales and John Lennon were also in the top ten, when Alfred the Great, Henry V, Elizabeth I and the First Duke of Wellington didn’t even get a mention, we can make a fair assessment of the intellectual level of those doing the voting. But to find Churchill on the top of such a list does prove that if you have a mother with contacts, are a persuasive orator, if you can write well, and you get your version of history out before anyone else, if you can bluster and obfuscate then you can get to the top. Churchill is supposed to have said ‘history will be kind to me, for I shall write it’, and he did. There is hope for us all.
It was a bit of a cheek to castigate Chamberlain’s government for Britain’s unpreparedness, when in fact Chamberlain was the first politician in office to propose rearmament – in fact he wanted to fight the 1935 election on a platform of re-armament, but was dissuaded by Prime Minister Baldwin who thought it would not be acceptable to the Labour members of the coalition government. When war broke out in 1939 Churchill was recalled as First Lord of the Admiralty. According to Churchill a joyous signal went round the navy saying ‘Winston’s Back!’ Now nobody has been able to find that signal, not in the Admiralty papers and not in any ships log, and if it ever existed it is much more likely to have been in the vein ‘Winston’s back – God help us’ rather than ‘Winston’s back - hurrah’. The Norwegian campaign, where Churchill sat in the Admiralty operations room personally directing the movement of individual ships and ignoring perfectly good previously thought out plans for action in the event of a German invasion of Norway, was a disaster, very largely thanks to Churchill’s interference and his insistence in putting personal friends, some of whom had not worn uniform for many years, into senior command appointments – nearly always with disastrous results – and it is ironic that it was the shambles of the Norwegian campaign that brought about the resignation of Chamberlain and the propelling to power of Churchill – the very man who had been largely responsible for the nonsense in the first place!
Churchill’s interference in matters that should have been left to professionals did not stop with Norway, he constantly bombarded the British Expeditionary Force with totally impractical suggestions – at one stage General Pownall, Gort’s Chief of Staff, said in his diary ‘the man’s mad’. By 23 May 1940 Calais had been cut off and could be of no further use to the Allies. Its garrison was two regular battalions and one of the better TA battalions. It was agreed that as they could serve no useful purpose they would be evacuated and the Royal Navy sent ships to do just that. Now Churchill took a hand and cancelled the evacuation, personally drafting a signal, full of empty rhetoric, to the garrison commander, Brigadier Nicholson – ‘the eyes of the empire are on Calais’. No they weren’t – the empire couldn’t spell Calais never mind know where it was, and the result was that three battalions which could be ill spared went into the bag and stayed there for five years. Churchill sacked Sir John Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the professional head of the army, because he wouldn’t go along with Prime Ministerial flights of fancy, and replaced him by Alanbrooke, who despite what he says in his diary totally failed to prevent the PM from treating the armed forces in a way that no political leader should be allowed to get away with. This was one occasion when the Generals were completely out intrigued – the admirals and the air marshals did slightly better – and men like Wavell and Auchinleck are thought, by the public at least, to have been failures, while Montgomery is seen as a national treasure. Ever the master of the futile gesture, Churchill ordered Wavell, just as his army was about to clear the Italians out of North Africa, and against all military advice, to despatch fifty-eight thousand troops to Greece, in an utterly pointless campaign which resulted in a disaster, leading to another disaster in Crete.
As a soldier it pains me to say it, but the British Army didn’t win World War Two in the West – the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force prevented us from losing it, and indeed I would maintain that Britain’s greatest contribution to the cause of western democracy was in not losing in 1940/41 although that was no thanks to Churchill, who for all his wonderful and inspiring oratory – which did have a huge effect on morale not just here but in the occupied countries and in the neutral countries too – was very largely out of control at least until America came into the war and supplanted the UK as the leader of the free world.
Churchill did, of course, make positive contributions to the war. He would have a thousand ideas, mostly utterly impracticable, but one that would be brilliant. The task of his staff was to work out which was the brilliant one. The Mulberry Harbour, two prefabricated floating harbours manufactured in Britain and towed across the channel to supply the troops after the Normandy landing in 1944, and PLUTO, a pipeline under the ocean which carried fuel from England across the channel to the troops, were Churchillian concepts, and very useful they were too.