The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (32 page)

When in August 1942 he went to Moscow to see Stalin, to explain that there would be no second front that year, the Soviet leader taunted him unmercifully. ‘
You British are afraid of fighting. You should not think the Germans are supermen. You will have to fight sooner or later. You cannot win a war without fighting.’

This was pretty nauseating coming from Stalin. The Russian leader was the man who enabled the whole Nazi aggression of 1940 to take place—by authorising the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact, and carving up Poland with Hitler. Stalin had been so shocked and terrified by Hitler’s eventual betrayal, when the Führer turned on Russia and launched Barbarossa, that he went and hid himself for five days in a darkened hut. It goes without saying that Churchill was an infinitely better, braver and greater man. But it rankled to hear such stuff—and the insults were all the more wounding for containing an element of truth.

When it finally came, victory at El Alamein did much to redeem British prestige: the political threat to Churchill abated. He no longer had to worry—incredible as it may seem to us today—that his Labour rival Stafford Cripps could replace him as war premier. Aneurin Bevan’s wounding sarcasm was stilled. The British public were given the victory they craved. But the truth was unmistakable: as the war wore on, Britain counted for less and less.

In 1940 the nation had stood alone—an embattled paladin with her banner raised for freedom. By 1944 Britain was contributing only a fraction of the Allied effort. The Americans were supplying the money, the Russians were getting on with the grisly business of killing the Germans—750,000 of them at the Battle of Stalingrad alone. And so it became Churchill’s function to try physically and personally to assert Britain’s right to respect, to be the lead-lined boxing glove that enabled the country to punch above her weight.

That explains his love of summits, his amazing itineraries during the Second World War. Sir Martin Gilbert has calculated that between September 1939 and November 1943 he travelled 111,000 miles, spending 792 hours at sea and 339 hours in the air—far exceeding the work rate of any other leader. We see his prodigious energy on these trips: a man of almost seventy sitting on his suitcase
before dawn at a cold airfield in North Africa, while his staff try to work out where they are meant to be. We see him bouncing in the unpressurised cargo holds of bombers, his oxygen mask adapted so as to accommodate his cigar. Planes he had used were shot down later, flying the same routes.

On the morning of 26 January 1943 he arrived at the British embassy in Cairo, in time for breakfast. To the amazement of the ambassador’s wife, he asked for a glass of cold white wine. Alan Brooke recorded that

a tumbler was brought which he drained in one go, and then licked his lips, turned to Jacqueline and said, ‘Ah, that is good, but you know, I have already had two whiskies and soda and two cigars this morning’!! It was then only shortly after 7.30 am. We had travelled all night in poor comfort, covering some 2300 miles in a flight of over 11 hours, a proportion of which was at over 11000 ft, and there he was, as fresh as paint, drinking wine on top of two previous whiskies and two cigars!!

While Hitler and Stalin stayed in their bunkers, Churchill would do anything to get to the action. That was why he was so keen to inveigle himself and the King on that boat: to show the world—and especially the Americans—that Britain and the British Empire still counted: because he and the King, the incarnations of that empire, were personally recapturing the Continent. And with the same motive he insisted that British and Canadian forces should have the glory of comprising half those vast invading forces—even if the operation was led by an American, and even though it was the Americans who did most of the eventual fighting.

When he finally got to go over to Normandy—on D-Day plus six, and with the consent of the King—he insisted that the ship he was on
‘
had a plug’ at the Germans. The captain happily complied, and a volley was duly discharged in the general direction of the Nazis. It was a completely abstract exercise; but Churchill was thrilled. He had become First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911—and he had never yet fired a shot from ship.

It was as if he could somehow aggrandise Britain’s military effort by taking part himself—inflating the British contribution with his own presence and prestige. In August 1944 he went to watch the landings at St Tropez; and in the same month he was to be found in Italy, personally firing a howitzer towards Pisa. He picnicked in an Italian castle, with the Germans firing towards him from a distance of 500 yards away.

In December 1944 he launched his entirely personal mission to rescue Greece from communism—in which he succeeded—and gave a press conference in Athens to the sound of shellfire outside. In the spring of the following year he was there in Germany, to see the Allied advance. In early March he came to the Siegfried Line—huge dragon’s teeth of concrete that were meant to serve as an impenetrable frontier, sinister and symbolic guardians of the Fatherland. Churchill inspected these carefully—but somehow it wasn’t enough. He needed to express the full ecstasy of his triumph.

He lined up the generals: Brooke, Montgomery, Simpson, about twenty of them—and one reporter from the
Stars and Stripes
. ‘
Let’s do it on the Siegfried Line,’ said Churchill, and then, to the photographers, ‘This is one of the operations connected with this great war that must not be reproduced graphically.’

He then undid his flies and pissed on Hitler’s defences, and so did his colleagues. As Alan Brooke later wrote, ‘
I shall never forget the childish grin of intense satisfaction that spread all over his face as he looked down at the critical moment.’ To anyone who feels the
smallest disapproval, think of what he had been through. If any dog had the right to mark his new territory, it was Churchill.

A few weeks later he insisted on walking on the German-held side of the Rhine, at a place called Buderich, and then came under fire, with shells exploding in the water about a hundred yards away. The American General Simpson came up to him and said, ‘
Prime Minister, there are snipers in front of you; they are shelling both sides of the bridge; and now they have started shelling the road behind you. I cannot accept responsibility for your being here and must ask you to come away.’

Alan Brooke watched as Churchill put his arms around a twisted girder of a bridge. ‘
The look on Winston’s face was like that of a small boy being called from his sandcastles on the beach by his nurse.’ Churchill was doing what we have seen him do all his life, from the first day he came under fire in Cuba. He was trying to insert himself into the military narrative; and this time his purpose was political.

In manpower and in fighting ability Britain was now dwarfed by Russia and America. As he put it, a small lion was walking between a huge Russian bear and a great American elephant. But he was still there; he was still one of the ‘Big Three’. He was still fighting the war in a way that no other political leader would have dreamed of doing. No other wartime jefe—not Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini—had his compulsive desire to interpolate himself in the battle and to become the story.

By sheer force of personality he asserted his right to equality in the conference chamber, as he struggled with Stalin over the fate of eastern Europe. As long as Churchill had to be given honour and respect, the same could be said for Britain and the empire; or so he imagined. In the end, of course, his priorities were not exactly shared by the British people, or indeed by the British army.

They weren’t as interested as he was in concepts of ‘glory’ or ‘prestige’—and that is perhaps not entirely a bad thing. All sorts of uncomplimentary things have been said about the fighting spirit of the British troops, but the key point is surely this: that they were citizen soldiers from a mature democracy with a long history of free speech. They knew not to have blind faith in the orders they were given; the First World War put paid to that.

They did not go into battle propelled by a horrible ideology of racial supremacy. They did not have Soviet commissars behind them with revolvers, waiting to blow their brains out if they hesitated. Perhaps the paradox is that the very freedoms they enjoyed and fought for made them less vicious as a fighting force. And I wonder whether the Tommy-bashers sometimes take a perverse pleasure in minimising their achievements—rather like the ingrained (and psychologically self-defensive) national pessimism about the England football team.

The British military performance wasn’t as bad as all that. It was rare for the Germans to be beaten by anyone unless outnumbered, and often by a factor of two or three. El Alamein was a significant achievement, in that it made the North Africa landings much easier, and helped divert crucial German air support from Stalingrad; and there were many other great achievements, not least the essential one of fighting on and ending up conspicuously on the winning side.

As someone once said, the English lose every battle but the last. Perhaps they sometimes—though by no means always—lacked a fanatical spirit of semi-suicidal banzai bloodlust; that does not seem to me to be a wholly unattractive defect.

Churchill spoke to the depths of people’s souls when Britain was alone, when the country was fighting for survival—and he reached them and he comforted in a way that no other speaker could have done. His language—stirring and old-fashioned—suited the moment. But as the country neared the end of six long and debilitating
years of war, the people needed a new language, a new vision for a post-war Britain—and that an exhausted Churchill could not find.

—

A
S HE APPROACHED
the general election of 1945, he told his doctor, Lord Moran, ‘
I have a very strong feeling that my work is done. I have no message. I had a message. Now I only say “fight the damned socialists. I do not believe in this brave new world”.’ On the morning of 21 July, four days before the election results were due to be heard, he was in Berlin for a victory parade.

Hitler was dead. The Führer’s bunker was in ruins along with all the other odious apparatus of Nazi rule. Europe could look forward to a new era of peaceful democracy; and everyone knew in their hearts that this was his achievement, and that without his iron resolve, at critical moments, this would not have been possible. This was what he had promised and fought for.

Churchill and Attlee drove in separate jeeps along a line of cheering British troops. Churchill’s Private Secretary, John Peck, soon noticed something peculiar.

‘
It struck me and perhaps others as well, though nothing was said, as decidedly odd that Winston Churchill, the great war leader but for whom we should never have been in Berlin at all, got a markedly less vociferous cheer than Mr Attlee, who—however great his contribution to the coalition—had not hitherto made any marked personal impact upon the fighting forces.’

On the afternoon of 25 July Churchill left the Potsdam conference in Berlin, with both Stalin and Truman confident (publicly and privately) that he would be back as a triumphantly re-elected Prime Minister. The following morning, as the count was nearing completion, he awoke before dawn with ‘
a sharp stab of almost physical pain’.

A hitherto ‘subconscious conviction that we were beaten broke
forth and dominated my mind’. He was right. Labour had won by a colossal margin of 146 seats over all other parties. Churchill and the Conservatives had been routed. The outside world was amazed, and to this day people find it hard to understand how Churchill could have suffered such a rebuke.

Surely it is not surprising at all. Elections are won not on the basis of a politician’s achievements, but on what is promised for the future. It was Churchill who in one of his protean incarnations had helped found the essentials of the welfare state; and in his wartime speeches he outlined the key reforms of the post-war Labour government. But it was Attlee who managed to claim the agenda.

In the very moment of his triumph, Churchill paid a price for his unique status—as a national figure who transcended party. He was after all the man so confident in himself that he had ratted and re-ratted. He was not coextensive with the Conservative Party; and therefore his achievements did not rub off on them. ‘
Cheer for Churchill; vote for Labour’ was the Labour slogan. It worked.

It was perhaps not exactly how he saw it at the time, but there is a sense in which his very defeat was a triumph. He had fought for British democracy, and here it was: the ejection of a great war hero and leader, not by violence but by millions of small and unobtrusive strokes of the pencil.

As Clementine put it, ‘
It may well be a blessing in disguise.’

‘At the moment,’ replied Churchill, ‘it seems quite effectively disguised.’

When someone else suggested that the electorate were guilty of ‘ingratitude’ Churchill said, ‘
I wouldn’t call it that. They have had a very hard time.’ That is what I mean by his greatness of soul.

He had been humiliated in his hour of glory, but Churchill ended the war with the crossover complete. Britain was exhausted and her global status diminished. Churchill was exhausted but with a global
status that no other British politician has ever achieved: a moral giant. Not bad for a man who had been denounced in 1911, by the
Spectator
, as ‘
weak and rhetorical, without any principles or even any consistent outlook upon public affairs’.

A lesser man would have packed it in, and gone off to Chartwell to paint. Not Churchill. He never gave up; he never gave in. He now made a series of interventions that were to shape the world to this day.

CHAPTER 19

THE COLD WAR AND HOW HE WON IT

W
e have seen the room where he was born. Let me take you now to the room where Churchill spent his last few days as wartime Prime Minister. It is a sad sort of place—like the frowsty lounge of a 1920s golf club or hotel. Outside the sun is shining; there are glorious phloxes and roses in the beds; and yet it is a bit Stygian here at the heart of this bogus essay in supersized steel-framed stockbroker Tudor.