Winston Churchill's War Leadership (8 page)

Among his choice of officials to do the essential work he depended on was his long-time friend Professor Frederick Lindemann (whom Churchill created Baron Cherwell during the war). From the earliest days of Churchill’s war premiership, he gave Lindemann access to the most secret aspects of the war, with a view to using his mathematical and statistical expertise to examine the information reaching him from all government departments in the sphere of production, manufacture, and the projected needs and performances of every facet of Britain’s war needs. As head of Churchill’s Statistical Branch, Lindemann and the small team working under him provided Churchill with an independent assessment of the working of the war machine. On an almost daily basis during the times of greatest crisis, Churchill would send Lindemann his requests. A typical one, dated 24 May 1940, read: “Let me have on one sheet of paper a statement about the Tanks. How many have we got with the Army? How many of each kind are being made each month? How many are there with manufacturers? What are the forecasts? What are the plans for heavier Tanks?”

Lindemann and his team provided Churchill with the information he needed to enable him to follow up with the relevant government departments and, where necessary, to accelerate action. Sometimes Churchill felt the need to stimulate Lindemann himself to greater efforts. On 3 June 1940, he minuted to him: “You are not presenting me as I should like every few days, or every week with a short clear statement of the falling off or improvement in munitions production. I am not able to form a clear view unless you do this.”

Not only did Lindemann give Churchill the ability to look with an independent eye on the workings of production and manufacture but he also undertook to supervise and accelerate work on new inventions and to examine— using material provided through Enigma—the actual strength of the German air force. The two men were good friends. Lindemann spent almost every weekend with Churchill and travelled with him to a number of overseas conferences. As one of the few people with constant access to the Prime Minister, he was a source of strength in times of setback and difficulty.

Other officials, less well known than Lindemann, played their part in ensuring the smooth working of the machine and in overcoming difficulties. Each of them was an integral part of the complex mosaic that made up Churchill’s war leadership. In Washington Arthur Purvis worked tirelessly to secure the munitions of war and other war supplies desperately needed by Britain. His daily telegraphic exchanges with London and his ability to persuade the United States administration—including Roosevelt’s closest advisers—to fulfill Britain’s urgent needs have no place in most of the history books of the period, or indeed in most of the Churchill biographies, but for the first year of Churchill’s premiership Purvis was a central pivot in ensuring the success of Churchill’s determination to remain at war and to wage war effectively. At the very moment when Churchill sought to reward Purvis with a knighthood, the Canadian was killed in a plane crash while on his way to join Churchill and Roosevelt in Newfoundland.

Among the other little-known pillars of Churchill’s war leadership was General M.G.H. Barker, whom Churchill had appointed Vulnerable Points Adviser in August 1940 as the threat of invasion intensified. As with several of those whose work was crucial at a time of danger, Churchill gave instructions that Barker “should work under me in my capacity as Minister of Defence.” This authority enabled Barker to ensure that troops, weapons and equipment were sent to the areas most vulnerable to German invasion at any given date and at the shortest notice—depending on the state of the tide and the moon and on Intelligence indications—without becoming ensnared in conflicting interests of a dozen different government departments. Churchill scrutinized all Barker’s proposals and endorsed them without complaint, noting on most “Proceed as proposed.”

Another officer Churchill brought within his own orbit as Minister of Defence and provided with research facilities only a few miles from Chequers was Major Millis Jefferis. Churchill had first noted Jefferis’s abilities a month before he became Prime Minister, when Jefferis had blown up key railway bridges behind German lines in Norway. In giving Jefferis considerable powers and authority in August 1940, Churchill minuted, “I regard this Officer as a singularly capable and forceful man who should be brought forward to a higher position.” When the Army Council resisted Jefferis’s advancement in rank before his time (he was 150th on the list of majors in the Royal Engineers), Churchill wrote in protest to the Chief of the Army Staff, “Surely it is important to bring able men forward in war time, instead of referring entirely to seniority.”

Jefferis was to work for the rest of the war as head of a special defence establishment, directly under the Minister of Defence. This establishment was the scene of extensive rocket research throughout the war. From time to time Jefferis took his rockets and bombs to Chequers to demonstrate them to the Prime Minister. By the end of the war, he had been promoted to major-general and knighted.

Churchill’s ability to find, encourage and sustain individuals who he knew would make a significant contribution to the war effort was an important feature of his war leadership. One of the most remarkable of these characters, for whom Churchill had to fight tenaciously, was a retired major-general, Percy Hobart, who before the war had been one of the main figures in the development of tank warfare. In 1936 Hobart had gone to see Churchill—then in the political wilderness—in search of a more vigorous tank policy. Hobart, who was unpopular among the officials in the War Office, had been retired in March 1940 and refused reinstatement. In October 1940 he was serving as a private in the Home Guard. Churchill was surprised that Hobart’s talents were not being used and pressed for his re-employment. That was not an easy task, particularly when the Chief of the Imperial Staff, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, informed Churchill that Hobart had on various occasions during his military career been “impatient, quick tempered, hot headed, intolerant and inclined to see things as he wished them to be instead of as they were.”

Churchill was not deterred, writing to Dill about Hobart in a Minute that resonates with the flavour of Churchill’s mind and perceptions:

I am not at all impressed by the prejudices against him in certain quarters. Such prejudices attach frequently to persons of strong personality and original view. In this case General Hobart’s original views have been only too tragically borne out. The neglect by the General Staff even to devise proper patterns of tanks before the war has robbed us of all the fruits of this invention. These fruits have been reaped by the enemy, with terrible consequences. We should therefore remember that this was an officer who had the root of the matter in him, and also vision . . .

We are now at war, fighting for our lives, and we cannot afford to confine Army appointments to persons who have excited no hostile comment in their career. The catalogue of General Hobart’s qualities and defects might almost exactly have been attributed to most of the great commanders of British history. Marlborough was very much not the conventional soldier, carrying with him the goodwill of the Service. Cromwell, Wolfe, Clive, Gordon, and in a different sphere Lawrence, all had very close resemblance to the characteristics set down as defects. They had other qualities as well, and so I am led to believe has General Hobart.

This was a time, Churchill added, “to try men of force and vision and not to be exclusively confined to those who are judged thoroughly safe by conventional standards.” As Churchill wished, Hobart was re-employed. Just as Jefferis made a substantial contribution to the weaponry of war, so Hobart designed an array of armoured vehicles (known as “Hobart’s funnies”) that made a major contribution to the Normandy landings.

There were others in Churchill’s confidence whose judgment he trusted and whose presence he welcomed during times of crisis, men who were to be a sustaining part of his war leadership. One was Desmond Morton, his liaison with governments in exile, including the Poles, Dutch and Belgians, and with De Gaulle. Morton was also a link between Churchill and the Intelligence services. As Secretary of State for War, Churchill had appointed Morton to his first Intelligence post in 1919. Even closer to Churchill was Brendan Bracken, a political ally during the anti-appeasement battle, whom Churchill appointed Minister of Information. At the many weekends spent at Chequers, when work and relaxation combined, Lindemann and Bracken were often overnight guests, able to enhance the free flow of ideas that so often led to action. Churchill also gained strength from two Americans in London, both of whom were frequently with him at Chequers and on his journeys to the bombed cities: Roosevelt’s emissary, Averell Harriman, and the American Ambassador, Gilbert Winant. Harriman accompanied Churchill on several of his overseas journeys and provided a link between Churchill and Roosevelt over a wide range of military and international needs. “I have made great friends with him,” Churchill wrote of Harriman in a private letter to his son, Randolph, “and have the greatest regard for him. He does all he can to help us.”

Forming an indispensable adjunct and support to Churchill’s war leadership were the Ministers he appointed to his Cabinet, as well as the Ministers of State and Ministers-Resident overseas. Several of these Ministers were brought in by him from outside the political world. He sought, and found, those who were able to carry out most effectively the departmental tasks he had to delegate, and he delegated with confidence, regularly scrutinizing their work but seldom feeling the need to interfere in it. Later he wrote of Lord Leathers, his Minister of War Transport—a post Churchill established in May 1941 to amalgamate the often conflicting needs of the Ministry of Shipping and the Ministry of Transport: “Leathers was an immense help to me in the conduct of the war. It was very rarely that he was unable to accomplish the hard tasks I set. Several times, when all staff and departmental processes had failed to solve the problems of moving an extra division or trans-shipping it from British to American ships, or of meeting some other need, I made a personal appeal to him, and the difficulties seemed to disappear as if by magic.”

Another Minister whose work sustained Churchill throughout the war was Oliver Lyttelton (later Lord Chandos). First as a member of Churchill’s Defence Secretariat at the Ministry of Defence, in charge of all liaison with munitions production, then as Minister of Trade, and finally as Minister of State in the Middle East, he brought his formidable qualities as an industrialist to the task of war organization. Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys was also a pillar of strength, serving first on the Defence Secretariat as liaison with the Home Defence and Air Raid Precautions departments, and later as the person in charge of ascertaining the facts about German flying-bomb and rocket-bomb research and devising countermeasures. It was the Chiefs of Staff who suggested Sandys for the post, and Churchill accepted their advice.

The qualities of Churchill’s war leadership were shown in his appointments, and they were sustained by the men he appointed.

One essential feature of Churchill’s war leadership was his ability to act with decision and, if necessary, with ruthlessness. During the interwar years the Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk—who had played a crucial part in the Turkish defences at Gallipoli—noted in the margin of his copy of Churchill’s First World War memoirs, against a passage describing the lack of decision-making at a crucial moment of the Gallipoli campaign, the Turkish saying: “History is ruthless to those who lack ruthlessness.” Did Churchill possess such ruthlessness? In a letter to the Prime Minister, Asquith, in May 1915, as her husband was being forced to stand down from the Admiralty, Clementine Churchill wrote: “If you throw Winston overboard you will be committing an act of weakness and your Coalition Government will not be as formidable a War machine as your present Government. Winston may in your eyes & in those with whom he has to work have faults, but he has the supreme quality which I venture to say very few of your present or future Cabinet possess, the power, the imagination, the deadliness to fight Germany.”

How far did such “deadliness” show itself in the Second World War? In June 1940 the War Cabinet authorized the detention without trial of tens of thousands of German-born “enemy aliens,” fearing they might serve as a pro-German fifth column in the event of an invasion. Many of those arrested were German opponents of Nazism who had found refuge in Britain. Others were German Jews, recent refugees from Nazi racial prosecution, but the prospect of invasion seemed so imminent that there was no time to examine individual cases. One of those arrested and interned was a German-Jewish refugee, Eugen Spier, who from 1936 to 1939 had helped finance the Focus, an all-Party group that Churchill set up to discuss the Nazi danger and to make it more widely known. These swift and widespread internments have been commented on as an example of Churchill’s ruthlessness. Less publicized is Churchill’s wish to avoid these draconian measures. “Many enemy aliens,” he told the War Cabinet as the plan was going ahead, “had a great hatred of the Nazi regime, and it was unjust to treat our friends as our foes.” Churchill put forward another idea, to form all able-bodied anti-Nazi aliens into a Foreign Legion for training and eventual use as garrison troops overseas, possibly in Iceland, which Britain had just occupied. But the War Cabinet insisted on internment, and Churchill had no veto on its decisions and deferred to the arguments of the Minister responsible, Sir John Anderson—formerly a member of Neville Chamberlain’s Cabinet—who insisted that the internment was essential and urgent.

One of the most ruthless British wartime acts, certainly in terms of loss of life, was the decision in July 1940 to open fire on the warships of the French fleet then at anchor in the French North African port of Oran, after the Germans had insisted, as part of the Franco-German Armistice agreement, that all French warships be transferred to German control. Desperate to prevent these ships from becoming part of a German invasion fleet, Churchill offered the French admiral the choice of scuttling them or sailing them to a British or a neutral port for the duration of the war. If the admiral refused, Churchill decided that the ships would have to be sunk or disabled. For much of July 3, negotiations with the French admiral continued, but when it became clear, from an intercepted French naval signal, that the admiral would continue to refuse the British terms, the British warships outside Oran opened fire and more than 1,250 French sailors, Britain’s allies of only a few weeks earlier, were killed.