The Separation (33 page)

Yours sincerely,

Birgit Sawyer (Mrs)

9

Papers of Institut Schweizer fur Neuere Geschichte, Zurich

The letters of A. Woodhurst, British Red Cross, Manchester

November 11,1940 to Miss Phyllida Simpson, 14 Stoney Avenue, Bury, Lanes.
My dear Phyllida,

I’m so glad you came to my office earlier today, to tell me yourself what happened in the ambulance on Saturday night while you were driving back to Manchester. The incident must have been upsetting to both you and Ken Wilson. You are certainly not to blame in any way for having fallen asleep while supposed to be caring for Joe Sawyer. I know how exhausted you must have been. I have nothing but admiration for the dedication you and hundreds of other young Red Cross workers have been showing during the Blitz on our cities.

Be sure that you may come here to speak to me at any time. In the short time he has been working for us, we have all become very attached to Joe.

Yours sincerely,

Alicia Woodhurst

British Red Cross Society - Manchester Branch

10

Extract from Chapter 9 of
The Greatest Sacrifice -British Peacemakers in 1941
by Barbara

Benjamin, published by Weidenfeld Nicolson, London, 1996:

. . .
which is where the Duke of London emerges unexpectedly from his past to stride the world’s stage for a few crucial months. No one man - politician or general or diplomat - did more to affect the course and outcome of the German War than the Duke. ‘If I encounter a man with a mind of his own I see it as my prompt duty to change it for him,’ he once said, describing a condition that he might well have applied to himself. Although a man of apparently unshakeable convictions, the Duke of London was for years considered politically untrustworthy because of his habit of changing sides. In this we can see the first clue to what many people interpreted at the time as an inexplicable volte-face, one which turned out to be the most important and historically significant of the last hundred years. If there had been no war with Hitler’s Germany, the Duke might have remained in the political wilderness for ever, perhaps thought of as a complex, innovative but inconsistent politician who was never able to fulfil his potential. The fact that war came when it did was his making. He rose magnificently to the challenge. Had the war continued and had London led the conduct of the war to the military victory he always promised, one may only guess at the terrible consequences. Because London reversed his policy, though, a real and lasting peace became unexpectedly possible.

In such a way arises the great historical dilemma over which the Duke presided. When is it right to fight?

When is it right to lay down your arms? When the chance arose in 1941 to alter the course of history, it required a man of greatness to know whether that chance should be seized or spurned. The Duke of London, who was half-British, half-American, was born Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill on November 30, 1874, the elder son of Lord Randolph Churchill. His mother was Jennie Jerome, daughter of a businessman from New York City. He built substantial fame and popular support while still young by filing colourful and sensational accounts of British wars in his role as a correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph.
The books later published which were based on these accounts became best-sellers. During his experiences
-
in Cuba, the North-West Frontier of India and in the Sudan - he displayed the first signs of impatience, impetuosity and inconsistency: as a serving officer, in his case with the 31st Punjab Infantry, he should not have been allowed to write for the press. It was only his personal charm and family contacts with the great and the good that enabled him to break the rules so much to his own advantage.

He first ran for Parliament in 1899, unsuccessfully contesting the seat for Oldham. The following year he gained the seat for the Conservatives in a by-election. By 1904 Churchill had fallen out with the Conservative establishment and crossed the floor of the House to become a Liberal. It was the first of many such shifts of political loyalty, a habit that endured for most of his career. A gifted speaker and orator, Churchill made a number of anti-Conservative speeches at this time which members of the Conservative establishment liked to quote back at him many years later when his judgment was so often in question.

Winston Churchill held several of the main offices of state over the next three decades. His first Cabinet appointment, as Home Secretary, was in Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government of 1910. Controversially, as Home Secretary he took a leading personal role in a police siege of two gunmen in East London, putting himself in the line of fire and bringing in armed troops to deal with the problem. It was the first indication that he would allow his reckless nature to colour his political judgment. The second was far more serious and affected the lives of thousands of men. As First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915 he bore personal responsibility for the disaster that occurred in the Dardanelles. Churchill always maintained that the bungled campaign on the Gallipoli peninsula was the collective responsibility of Lloyd George’s cabinet, but history has identified it as an incautious adventure in the familiar Churchillian mould. It seriously damaged his political career and for a time he rejoined the army and served on the Western Front in France. By the end of the Great War, though, Churchill returned to government and was Secretary of State for War. In this position he became an advocate of British intervention to quell the Russian Revolution. In 1941, Josef Stalin was quick to remind Churchill of this by-then inconvenient fact. The breakdown in relations between the United Kingdom and the USSR in the summer of 1941, and the catastrophic consequences when Britain remained neutral during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, are traced by many historians to this solecism by Churchill.

After the Great War he lost two more elections, returning to Parliament only in 1924 as a Constitutionalist member for Epping. The same year he changed political allegiance yet again, returning to the Conservative party and becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer under Stanley Baldwin. As Chancellor he argued repeatedly for reducing Britain’s defence spending, a political stance which his later anti-appeasement arguments totally contradicted. In 1926 he bitterly attacked the leaders of the General Strike, from his office as editor of the officially published
British Gazette.
As he had used soldiers as strikebreakers in 1910, against striking miners and dockworkers, his contribution was seen as unduly threatening.

A ten-year period followed, 1929 to 1939, when Churchill was again out of high office, though he remained a backbench Member of Parliament. He changed his attitude to military spending and became a strenuous advocate of rearmament, being in effect the only voice raised in public to warn of Adolf Hitler’s ambitions. Cynics in the political establishment said then, and continued to say after 1941, that Churchill helped to stir up the war for his own political ends. Indeed, in 1939, on the outbreak of war in September, the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, appointed Churchill for the second time to the Admiralty, a triumphant return to power, recognized as such within the ranks of the Royal Navy. In the first months of the German War, the navy bore the brunt of military operations, which with hindsight is not coincidental.

In spite of the fact that events in Germany from 1936 onwards seemed entirely to have vindicated his militaristic stand, Churchill was by this time regarded by his political contemporaries as unreliable by nature and a warmonger by instinct. Churchill was unpopular with most of the other MPs, few of whom were able to say they trusted him. He appeared to remain popular in the country, but by modern standards the sampling of popular opinion was only approximate at best. Winston Churchill became Prime Minister on May 10, 1940, the day the Wehrmacht marched into the Low Countries. Chamberlain felt obliged to resign because he knew a national government had become necessary and he could no longer count on the support of Parliament. Because experience of high office was essential, only two men were deemed to be qualified to replace him: Churchill or the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Churchill’s disadvantage was his most recent military fiasco: the British had been ignominiously thrown out of Norway by German forces after an adventure in which Churchill’s actions arguably breached Norwegian neutrality. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill enthusiastically engineered the action and so was ultimately responsible for its failure. Halifax’s disadvantage was that he was a peer and therefore sat in the House of Lords. He was also well known for his appeasement policies, a serious drawback in May 1940. In a private meeting at 10 Downing Street between the three men, Churchill opted to say nothing. Breaking the long silence, Halifax eventually yielded. Churchill immediately accepted that the duty fell on him. By the evening he had been asked by the King to form a new government. Churchill’s own reaction, recorded in his post-war account of the war years, was that he felt as if he were walking with destiny, that all his past life had been but a preparation for that hour and trial. So his twelvemonth premiership began, as did the process by which he would take Britain out of the war.

By the late summer of 1940 it would seem that Churchill was in an unassailable position, both within the government and in the country as a whole: in a series of brilliant speeches he stiffened the sinews of the British nation with plainly spoken messages of unshakeable defiance against the German enemy. Neither defeat nor surrender was an option: he was determined to prevail against Hitler’s machinations. Meanwhile his political standing had improved immeasurably. Before the end of 1940 most of the men who served in Chamberlain’s pre-war cabinet, still identified as appeasers, were gone from the government and Churchill commanded almost universal respect and loyalty. By the following May, the fortunes of war had started to swing in Britain’s favour. The Italian army was defeated in Africa. The Battle of Britain had been won. The threat of invasion across the English Channel had receded. The Blitz against British cities was slowly reducing in intensity, with both sides realizing that the bombing of the cities had been a blessing in disguise for the Royal Air Force, which in the meantime built up the strength of both its Fighter and Bomber Commands. The British had cracked the German codes. From decoding those ciphers, and from other intelligence sources, Churchill knew that Germany was planning to launch a huge attack on the Soviet Union. The USA seemed likely to come into the war on the side of the British, later if not sooner.

On the face of it, the war situation looked like a formula for eventual military success, a different prospect indeed from the days of the previous summer, when Adolf Hitler had disingenuously offered peace. To accept Hitler’s terms then, in the state of weakness that existed, would have been to capitulate.

In this more advantageous spring of 1941, thoughts of formulating any kind of peace with Nazi Germany must have been a long way from Churchill’s mind as he contemplated the reports from his Chiefs of Staff. His principal concern at the time, as recorded in his
London Wartime Diaries
(1950), was to persuade the Americans to convert their brand of Britain-favouring neutrality into a full-blooded military alliance that would rid the world first of fascism, then of communism.

The USA, meanwhile, was tormented by the situation in China and Japan. It was by no means certain that President Franklin Roosevelt would be able to swing the USA to Churchill’s assistance. Had the Japanese expanded eastwards, with some kind of provocation against the USA, then Churchill’s plans might well have borne fruit. Japan was in alliance with Nazi Germany, so the USA would have had to come into the German war on Britain’s side.

Instead, after Churchill’s final and most sensational reversal of policy in May 1941, the USA felt itself released from all obligations to the British. Within four weeks of the British armistice, and two weeks before the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, they launched their series of pre-emptive attacks on expansionist Japan and the Japanese-occupied areas of mainland China. When Japan had been defeated, and the Bolshevist threat posed by the Maoist revolution had been crushed, the USA’s opportunistic alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang enabled them to move swiftly on Manchuria and, eventually, across the vast eastern reaches of the Soviet Union.

Churchill always claimed after the event that the destruction of communism was for him a higher priority than the defeat of Nazism, the latter being but a step on the way to the former. There is, however, no real historical evidence that this was the case. All contemporary records reveal Churchill’s obsession both with his own central position within British history and with the relatively straightforward war with Germany.

The infinitely more complex and dangerous war against communism was in effect fought by the Germans invading Russia from the west and the Americans from the east. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union after the cease-fire at the Urals, the two former superpowers then settled into the Third War stalemate. They both collapsed into economic and social stagnation as the incalculable costs of their wars were counted. From this ruin, only Germany so far has recovered - and then only with the aid of the denazification programme from the European Union. For the USA, the half-century of stalemate has been a disaster, still with no solution in sight. At the beginning of the twentieth century the USA was shaping into the newest and perhaps best democracy in the Western world. Instead, because of bad military decisions, corrupt civilian governments and a level of political inwardness that puts pre-war isolationism into the shade, it has become a shaky but authoritarian republic, run in effect by capitalist adventurers and armed militias, and undermined by social dissent, organized crime and a heavily armed populace. By the time the Third War stalemated in the early 1950s, Britain was by contrast in a supreme military alignment with the democracies of Western Europe. With her uncontested access to the oilfields of the Middle East, Britain remains to this day a dominant political and economic power in world affairs. Those who support the Churchill version of history ascribe Britain’s supremacy to the warmonger’s ambitions in the middle of the twentieth century, but they do not, of course, explain his volte-face. For an understanding of that, we have to re-examine the events leading up to the sudden armistice. It was at the beginning of May 1941 that the only recorded meeting took place between Churchill and the young British Red Cross official, J. L. Sawyer.