Churchill

Military Genius or Menace?

Stephen Napier

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780750994262
  9780750986847
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750988780
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

'. . . the wonderful thing is that three quarters of the population of this world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the strategists of history, a second Marlborough, and the other quarter have no conception what a public menace he is and has been throughout the war! It is far better that the world should never know and never suspect the feet of clay on that otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again . . . Never have I admired and disliked a man simultaneously to the same extent' Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff

1

CHURCHILL AND BRITAIN PRE-WAR

It was the sombre, weary voice of British Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain that brought the tidings of war to the British people on 3 September 1939:

This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that I could have done and that would have been more successful …

All over the country, those families lucky enough to have a wireless huddled around their sets while the aromas of Sunday roast lunches wafted through the homes of those who could afford them. People were anxious for news to end a national state of tension and foreboding that had persisted since Germany had invaded Poland on 1 September despite the threats by Britain and France to come to the aid of their ally. It had only been just over twenty years since the end of the last war with Germany, a horrendous struggle that lasted four years and had been described as ‘the war to end all wars’. Those who had fought in it and lived, and those who could remember it, looked in speechless horror at each other. Families across the nation now faced once more a threat to their own survival and the potential loss of family members, relatives and friends. Some mothers began to sob quietly, to be comforted by their grim-faced husbands. Across the nation, the eerie quiet was suddenly dispelled by wailing air raid sirens and the people’s fearful mood was replaced by one of terror. Those who already had an air raid shelter or had dug trenches rushed into them for cover, while others ran to the windows to try to see the approaching German planes; everyone scrambled to find their newly issued gas masks. Anti-aircraft crews manned their guns purposely for the first time around London as ground crews struggled to launch their giant silver barrage balloons in time. Fortunately, it was a false alarm but nevertheless provided a harbinger of the war to come.

Despite their fears of war, most people (even those of a religious calling) believed that the declaration of war by Britain was right in the circumstances. The Reverend Dabill:

I have always been a pacifist and have laboured incessantly for peace but there seems to be no alternative. I would rather have war with its vast threat to the future than we should go back on our promise to Poland. There is not room in the same world for our way and the Nazi way. One or the other has to go.¹

War had nearly come in 1938 when Germany had threatened Czechoslovakia and had only been averted by Chamberlain’s last-minute negotiations in Munich with Adolf Hitler. On Chamberlain’s return to England, hundreds of people had gathered at Croydon airport to spontaneously express their relief to the Prime Minister who famously waved a document signed by Germany and declared ‘peace in our time’.

Following the ascendancy of Hitler to power in Germany on 30 January 1933, Germany had begun systematically flaunting the limitations of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on it after the First World War. This took the form of a massive rearmament programme from March 1935 to both build up the armed forces and stimulate German industry after the disastrous effects of the Great Depression. Emboldened by the lack of an Allied response to these violations, Germany set about taking back the territories of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire taken away from it in 1919.

These events in Europe were watched from the United States of America by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been elected President on 4 March 1933. Roosevelt defeated the incumbent Republican President Herbert Hoover and was elected after pledging a ‘New Deal’ for an America suffering acutely in the Great Depression. Despite being strongly focussed on restarting the national economy and creating employment, Roosevelt was not removed from international politics. While Winston Churchill’s warnings during the 1930s about German territorial ambitions are well known, Roosevelt’s interest and actions in international politics are not so apparent in a country that prided itself on its isolationism and a stance of non-intervention in the 1920s and 1930s after the United States had become involved in the last year of the First World War.

As early as May 1933, Roosevelt had outlined his proposed programme of world security and disarmament, which was endorsed by Hitler, but both Germany and Japan subsequently left the League of Nations that year. In 1934, Roosevelt made a declaration at the Geneva disarmament conference appealing for global disarmament, for member countries to adhere to current treaty obligations and asking that no country should send troops across its own borders. In an address to the closing session of the Geneva conference, the US delegation declared, ‘In effect, the policy of the United States is to keep out of war, but to help in every possible way to discourage war.’²

The Great Depression of the early 1930s posed many challenges for the industrialised nations of the world, both domestically and in their international relations. With the rise to power of Hitler, some countries, especially France, were concerned by Germany’s new agenda, while on the other side of the world a war was in progress between Japan and China. Japan, a mountainous series of islands with few natural resources, had wanted to make up for lost time compared with the European powers in becoming a colonial power. This expansion started with the seizure of Manchuria in September 1931. In response to this Japanese aggression, Roosevelt approved an increase in budget funding for new US Navy ships in 1934 on the basis that warships took a long time to construct and that a US Navy fleet would eventually be likely to come into conflict with Japan in the Pacific Ocean. Roosevelt also asked Edgar Hoover at the FBI to investigate all possible Nazis and their sympathisers in the United States.

In the years 1935 to 1939, the US Congress passed four Neutrality Acts, the last three altering the conditions and duration of the original Act of August 1935 which was designed to keep the United States out of a possible European war by banning the shipment of armaments to belligerents. The demand for this legislation arose from the belief of many Americans that the entry of the US into the First World War had been a mistake. Japan subsequently withdrew from the Washington naval treaty in December 1934, claiming it was biased against Japan. When Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935, Roosevelt invoked the 1935 Neutrality Act recently passed by Congress and banned the sales of arms to both belligerent countries. Such was the Democratic Party’s majority in Congress that the Neutrality Act gave the President the necessary powers to invoke the Act without having to refer to Congress.

Having denounced the Treaty of Versailles as unjust and announced the introduction of conscription and a rearmament programme in March 1935, Hitler declared two months later that he was ‘for peace’ and would abide by the Treaty of Locarno, provided other nations did the same. His Foreign Minister, von Neurath, signalled to European diplomats Germany’s intention to reoccupy the demilitarised Rhineland bordering France in order to gauge their likely reaction. The justification given by von Neurath was that it was in response to a Soviet–French pact which Germany saw as a violation of the Locarno Treaty. The British were not unsympathetic to Germany’s position and had planned to begin discussions with Germany in order to reach a general negotiated settlement to resolve many of Germany’s territorial issues and grievances. In mid 1935, Britain and Germany had signed a Naval Agreement which restricted Germany’s navy to a third the size of Britain’s. While favourable to Britain, this treaty actually undid all the naval restrictions of Versailles and permitted the Germans to start a massive shipbuilding programme which included submarines. France was not consulted and strong protests by Winston Churchill in the House of Commons were ignored. Churchill also pointed out that a resurgent German Navy would compel Britain to keep a large part of its fleet in the North Sea, which would limit the Royal Navy’s capacity to counter any Japanese moves in the Pacific.³

On 7 March 1936, a token German force reoccupied the Rhineland. The British did not formally protest (the view was in fact taken by Lord Lothian, the future British Ambassador to the United States, that Germany was reoccupying its backyard) while the French government, which was going through its own financial and political crisis, decided not to mobilise its troops in view of the expense of such an operation. The Germans had been instructed to withdraw in the event of any opposition but none came; nevertheless Hitler is reported to have said:

The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance.⁴

It is notable that the German General Staff were aghast at this blatant act of brinkmanship by Hitler as the German forces were totally unprepared for war. In order to gain combat experience with their newly developed aircraft and tanks, the German Luftwaffe (the Condor Legion) and two armoured units had become involved in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Nationalist leader, General Franco, to ensure that Franco emerged victorious. A communist or socialist Spain or France would have presented a threat to Germany in Western Europe. England, France and the United States officially refused to support the opposition Republicans but this did not stop volunteers travelling to Spain to fight for them. American companies did, however, continue to sell trucks and oil to Franco until this loophole was closed by Roosevelt with the revised Neutrality Act of January 1937.

The reoccupation of the Rhineland came as no surprise to Churchill, who had foreseen this eventuality and had warned of the dangers of Germany’s rearmament and territorial ambitions for many years from the Conservative Party back benches. Churchill had resumed his political career after his stint in the trenches in 1916 but this had been largely unsuccessful. Following the ascension of David Lloyd George as Prime Minister in December 1916, he had been appointed Minister of Munitions in July 1917. After becoming Secretary of State for War in January 1919, Churchill was instrumental in the next few years in the despatch of British troops to Russia and arms to Poland in an effort to prevent the rise of Bolshevism. Losing his seat in the general election of 1922, such was Churchill’s feeling against the socialism of the new Labour Party that he re-joined the Conservatives and was duly elected in 1924 as the MP for Epping in Stanley Baldwin’s government, being made Chancellor of the Exchequer. Churchill served in this position for five years and presided over Britain’s disastrous return to the Gold Standard, which caused deflation, widespread unemployment and industrial unrest that started with the coal miners and culminated in the General Strike of 1926. The Conservative Party was defeated in the general election of 1929 and although Churchill retained his seat he was not offered any senior positions in either the Conservative Party or the National Government formed by Ramsay McDonald in 1931, which left plenty of time for Churchill to write and tour overseas.

To many commentators, however, Churchill was a spent force and increasingly irrelevant. For nearly two years from the spring of 1933, Churchill had doggedly peddled his views on India to the few Conservative MPs left after the election, alienating many in his own party and diminishing his standing in the House of Commons as a whole. Churchill refused to countenance India being granted the status of a dominion or even limited independence. From 1935 onwards, Churchill subjected firstly his own re-elected Conservative government under Baldwin and then the Chamberlain government to a barrage of memoranda, questions and amendments from the back bench, most concerned with the dangers of the rise to power of Hitler in Germany and German rearmament compared with the paltry state of the British armed forces, which had been only slowly rearming since 1934. Churchill described himself as the voice in the wilderness, warning against Hitler and his National Socialism.

After the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Churchill warned on 16 March in the House of Commons:

… here is the Fuehrer, the great leader of the country, who has raised his country so high – and I honour him for that – able to bring home once again a trophy. One year it is the Saar, another month the right of Germany to conscription, another month to gain from Britain the right to build submarines, another month the Rhineland. Where will it be next? Austria, Memel, other territories and disturbed areas are already in view …

We cannot look back with much pleasure on our foreign policy in the last five years. They have been disastrous years …

We have seen the most depressing and alarming changes in the outlook of mankind which have ever taken place is so short a period of time. Five years ago all felt safe … The difference in our position now! We find ourselves compelled once again to face the hateful problems and ordeals which those of us who worked and toiled in the last great struggle hoped were gone for ever.⁵

Churchill worked hard behind the scenes to cultivate a network of contacts and political friends in England and abroad during this time. However, he severely undermined these moves and his reputation with ill-judged support for Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson in a hostile Parliament on 8 December 1936.

The German reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Japanese invasion of China and Italian aggression in Abyssinia led to Roosevelt making a speech in October 1937 regarding the need to economically quarantine aggressor nations. This speech, which reflected a change in position from that of the Geneva disarmament conference three years previously, was not well received domestically in the United States and in certain newspapers. Unlike Churchill, who was on the political sidelines, Roosevelt was able take action by passing legislation such as the Neutrality Acts and make plans in anticipation of future conflicts such as expanding the US Navy’s shipbuilding programme. It is clear that Roosevelt, from early in his presidency, identified an ‘axis of evil’ that existed between Germany, Italy and Japan. His suspicions were no doubt confirmed by the November 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany and Japan which Italy joined a year later.

Following years of agitation and interference in Austrian affairs by Germany and the Austrian Nazi Party for a union or ‘Anschluss’ with Germany, the Austrian Chancellor, Schussnigg, ordered that a referendum be held. Rather than waiting for any unfavourable results, Hitler demanded that all government positions of power be given to members of the Nazi Party under its leader, Seyss-Inquart. Schussnigg resigned and Seyss-Inquart promptly invited the Germans to come and restore order, which they did the next day, 12 March 1938. Hitler followed his Army into Austria and was met by jubilant crowds everywhere; in Vienna three days later, Austria was declared a part of Germany. There was little reaction from Britain and France.

The unopposed union with Austria provided the incentive for Hitler to attempt to reunite other German people living in the new modern nation of Czechoslovakia, which had been created after the First World War. In the north of the country in the Sudetenland was a sizeable German population which had been agitating since 1934 for an autonomous region with the formation of a German Home Front Party. Stories of alleged atrocities against the Sudeten Germans were broadcast by Nazi propaganda whilst Hitler publicly intimidated the Czech President, Dr Benes.

The day after the occupation of Austria, Churchill predicted the next German threat would be towards Czechoslovakia:

To English ears, the name of Czechoslovakia sounds outlandish. No doubt they are only a small democratic State, no doubt they have an army only two or three times as large as ours, no doubt they have a munitions supply only three times as great as that of Italy, but still they are a virile people, they have their rights, they have their treaty rights, they have a fine line of fortresses, and they have a strongly manifested will to live, a will to live freely.

Czechoslovakia is at this moment isolated, both in the economic and in the military sense. Her trade outlet through Hamburg, which is based upon the Peace Treaty, can, of course, be closed at any moment. Now her communications by rail and river to the South, and after the South to the South-East, are liable to be severed at any moment. Her trade may be subjected to tolls of a destructive character, of an absolutely strangling character.⁶

Britain and France were largely apathetic and certainly did not want war. Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler twice in September but Britain and France decided that Benes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Churchill and Britain Pre-War
• 2 The Phoney War and Norwegian Overture
• 3 Fall of France
• 4 The Blitz
• 5 Greek Drama
• 6 Placentia and Anglo-American War Plans
• 7 Pearl Harbor and US Rearmament
• 8 The Struggle for Strategy
• 9 Torch and Casablanca
• 10 Sicily
• 11 Italy and Quebec
• 12 Italian Circus
• 13 Overlord and Burma
• 14 Operation Dragoon
• 15 Race to Berlin/Tube Alloys
• 16 Churchill the Leader
• Notes
• Bibliography