The Grand Alliance (25 page)

Meanwhile we had ordered the expansion and redeployment of the Air Coastal Command, giving it high priority in pilots and machines. We planned to increase this command by fifteen squadrons by June, 1941, and these reinforcements were to include all the fifty-seven American long-range Catalinas which we expected to receive by the end of April. The denial to us of all facilities in Southern Ireland again exerted its baleful influence on our plans. We pressed forward with the construction of new airfields in Ulster as well as in Scotland and the Hebrides.

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The evil conditions thus described continued, some in an aggravated form. The stranglehold of the magnetic mine was only loosened and kept from closing by triumphs of British science and ingenuity, carried into effect by the ceaseless toil of twenty thousand devoted men in a thousand small craft with many strange varieties of apparatus. All our traffic along the east coast of Britain was under constant menace from German light bombers or fighter aircraft, and was in consequence severely restricted and reduced. The port of London, which in the First World War had been deemed vital to our existence, had been cut down to a quarter of its capacity. The Channel was an actual war area. Bombing raids on the Mersey, the Clyde, and Bristol gravely hampered these sole remaining major commercial ports. The Irish and Bristol Channels were closed or grievously obstructed. Every expert authority, if presented a year earlier with the conditions now prevailing, would have pronounced our plight hopeless beforehand. It was a struggle to breathe.

The very magnitude and refinement of our protective measures – convoy, diversion, degaussing, mine-clearance, the avoidance of the Mediterranean – the lengthening of most voyages in time and distance and the delays at the ports through bombing and the black-out, all reduced the operative fertility of our shipping to an extent even more serious than the actual losses. At the outset the Admiralty naturally thought first of bringing the ships safely to port, and judged their success by a minimum of sinkings.

But now this was no longer the test. We all realised that the life and war effort of the country depended equally upon the weight of imports safely landed.
“Isee,
”I minuted to the First Lord in the middle of February,
“that entrances of ships with
cargo in January were less than half of what they were last
January.”

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The pressure grew unceasingly, and our shipping losses were fearfully above our new construction. The vast resources of the United States were only slowly coming into action. We could not expect any further large windfalls of vessels such as those which had followed the overrunning of Norway, Denmark, and the Low Countries in the spring of 1940. Moreover, damaged shipping far exceeded our repairing resources, and every week our ports became more congested and we fell further behind. At the beginning of March over 2,600,000 tons of damaged shipping had accumulated, of which about 930,000 tons were ships undergoing repair while loading cargoes, and nearly 1,700,000 tons were immobilised by the need of repairs.

Indeed, it was to me almost a relief to turn from these deadly undertides to the ill-starred but spirited enterprises in the military sphere. How willingly would I have exchanged a full-scale attempt at invasion for this shapeless, measureless peril, expressed in charts, curves, and statistics!

Early in January, 1941, we had formed the Import Executive, consisting of the principal importing departments, under the chairmanship of the Minister of Supply, and the parallel body, the Production Executive, under the Minister of Labour. The principal object of the first of these bodies was to grapple with the import situation, to improve the organisation of shipping and transport, and to solve the many intricate problems of labour and organisation arising at the ports. I now worked closely with these powerful bodies, which often sat together, and I sought to concert their action.

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Prime

Minister

to

4 Jan. 41

Minister of Shipping

The Import Executive will explore the whole of this
situation, the development of which was one of the
reasons for calling the said Executive into being. I shall
myself keep in the closest touch with the Import Executive, and will endeavour to give the necessary
decisions. It is hoped that by the more efficient use of
our shipping, its turn-round, port and labour resources,
the tonnage available may be increased beyond the
33,000,000 tons which is all you can at present
foresee. The Ministry of Shipping and the Ministry of
Transport, together with the Ministry of Labour, will
cooperate actively with the Import Executive, and their
work will be effectively concerted by that Executive. In
addition to this, the Admiralty will be asked to concentrate more effort upon the repair of ships, even to some
extent to the detriment of new merchant shipbuilding.

We hope American aid will be forthcoming, and that
greater security will be achieved by our convoys as the
nights shorten and our main reinforcements of
escorting craft come into service.

Prime

Minister

to

23 Jan. 41

Import Executive

I request that you will not consider yourselves bound
by the estimate of losses put forward by the Ministry of
Shipping, or take that as the foundation for future
calculations. The Ministry of Shipping have reached a
total of 5,250,000 tons per annum by taking as their
basis the period since the collapse of France, including
the quite exceptional losses of the Norwegian and
French evacuations. A better alternative method of
calculation would be to take the monthly rate for the
whole year 1940, which is 4,250,000 tons; or, again, for
the whole war, which is between 3,750,000 and
4,000,000 tons, provided the extraordinary evacuation
losses are deducted.

2. It is probably prudent to assume that this rate will
continue. It does not follow, however, that it will not be

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reduced as our improved methods come into play and
the additional destroyers reach the Fleet. Bearing this
in mind, I think it would be safe to work on the monthly
average since the beginning of the war.

My estimate was fully justified by events in the year 1941.

At the beginning of the year, I asked Sir John Anderson, the Lord President of the Council, to make it his particular task to grip and drive forward the plans for harnessing to our warmaking machine the full economic resources of the nation.

Prime

Minister

to

28 Jan. 41

Lord President of the

Council

While the Import and Production Executives necessarily are concerned with the practical handling of the
business committed to them, it is essential that the
larger issues of economic policy should be dealt with by
your committee, and primarily by you. This is in accordance with the drift of well-informed public opinion. You
should, therefore, not hesitate to take the initiative over
the whole field. You should summon economists like
Keynes to give their views to you personally. You
should ask for any assistance or staff you require,
utilising,

of

course,

the

Statistical

Department.

Professor Lindemann and his branch will assist you in
any way you wish, and will also act as liaison between
you and me. I wish you to take the lead prominently
and vigorously in this committee, and it should certainly
meet at least once a week, if not more often.

Will you consult with Sir Edward Bridges on the
above, and let me know how you propose to implement
it.

Anderson bent to this task his energy, mature judgment, and skill in administration. His long experience as a civil

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servant at home, and as Governor of Bengal, had given him a wide knowledge of Government departments and of the official machine. He soon gained the confidence of his Ministerial colleagues, and shaped the Lord President’s committee into a powerful instrument for concerting departmental plans over the whole range of wartime economic policy. As time went on this committee came to exercise on behalf of the War Cabinet a large measure of authority and power of decision in this and other spheres.

Its sure control over economic policy and Home Front problems helped to free me for the military field.

Prime Minister to Sir

22 Feb. 41

Andrew

Duncan,

Minister of Supply

The Prime Minister would be glad if you would bring
the attached notes and diagrams to the attention of the
Import Executive. They have been prepared under the
Prime Minister’s personal direction by Professor Lindemann. They disclose a most grave and as yet unex-plained tendency, which, if it is not corrected, will
hazard the life of Britain and paralyse her war effort.

The Prime Minister does not understand how it is
that, when the sinkings are less (although very serious)
and the volume of tonnage (apart from its routing) very
little diminished, there should be such a frightful fall in
imports.