Lloyd George was determined to keep his Coalition Government together in peace as in war. But many Liberals wished to return to the Party politics of 1914, and to Asquith's leadership. Lloyd George called a General Election for early December; it was up to each Liberal to decide whether to support Asquith or stay with Lloyd George. Churchill emerged in the election campaign as a leading Liberal advocate of maintaining the Coalition. He was also one of the few Coalition politicians who opposed a harsh peace with Germany.
In an attempt to preserve as many Liberal concepts as possible in the new Government's policies, Churchill urged Lloyd George to consider a heavy tax on all war profits. 'Why should anybody make a great fortune out of the war?' he asked him on November 21, ten days after Germany's surrender. 'While everybody has been serving the country, profiteers & contractors & shipping speculators have gained fortunes of a gigantic character.' His proposal was that the Government should 'reclaim everything above, say, £10,000 (to let the small fry off)', and thus substantially reduce Britain's war debt from the coffers of the war profiteers.
On November 26, in a speech to his constituents at Dundee, Churchill warned of the dangers of Bolshevism: 'Civilisation is being completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities and the corpses of their victims.' Churchill's listeners cheered; but they heckled loudly when, in the same speech, he advocated a moderate peace. To a former Liberal MP who protested at this call for leniency he wrote on December 4, 'I do not consider that we should be justified in enforcing any demand which had the effect of reducing for an indefinite period the mass of the working class population of Germany to a condition of sweated labour and servitude.'
Returning twice to Dundee, Churchill called for radical measures at home; for the nationalisation of the railways, for the control of monopolies 'in the general interest', and for taxation levied 'in proportion to the ability to pay'. He also supported the idea of 'a permanent League of Nations to render future wars impossible'. The main task of such a League would be to prevent secret armaments. 'Altogether I think the chances of a great majority are very good,' he wrote to Clementine on December 13, 'and it is not impossible that it may be the greatest majority ever yet recorded at a British election.'
Polling day was December 14. The results were not announced for two weeks, to enable the soldiers' votes to be counted. 'I hope,' Churchill wrote to Lloyd George two days before the results were known, 'you will endeavour to gather together all forces of strength & influence in the country & lead them along the paths of science & organisation to the rescue of the weak & poor.'
The election result was a triumph for Lloyd George, whose Coalition Liberals won 133 seats. The Coalition Conservatives won 335 and the Coalition Labour 10; a total of 478 seats for Lloyd George, the majority of them his former Conservative foes. The Asquith Liberals were reduced to twenty-eight and Asquith himself defeated at East Fife. Labour won sixty-three, and Sinn Fein, a new feature of Westminster politics, seventy-three. The Sinn Fein MPs wanted immediate independence for Ireland; in protest at the continuation of British rule they refused to take their seats at Westminster, and formed their own assembly in Dublin. Churchill was returned with what the main Dundee newspaper called 'an immense majority' of 15,365, though it was not as he had hoped the largest ever recorded, or anywhere near it.
Lloyd George wanted Churchill to go to the War Office to take charge of the massive task of demobilisation. At the Ministry of Munitions he had been responsible for three million workers. The number of soldiers to be brought home was nearly three and a half million. Churchill hesitated; he wanted to be First Lord again. 'My heart is in the Admiralty,' he wrote to Lloyd George on December 29. 'There I have long experience, & any claim I may be granted in public goodwill will always rest on the fact that "The Fleet was ready".' He would also like the Air Force to be put with his Admiralty responsibilities. 'Though aeroplanes will never be a substitute for armies,' he argued, 'they will be a substitute for many classes of warship.'
Lloyd George insisted that Churchill go to the War Office, where another urgent and difficult task awaited him. Four months had passed since the murder of Captain Cromie in Petrograd. Bolshevik rule had been consolidated throughout central Russia. But by the end of December there were more than 180,000 non-Russian troops within the frontiers of the former Tsarist Empire, among them British, American, Japanese, French, Czech, Serb, Greek and Italian. Several anti-Bolshevik armies, amounting to more than 300,000 men, looked to these troops for military and moral support, and depended on their governments for money and guns. The Bolsheviks were everywhere being pressed back towards Moscow.
The arms which Britain had sent to Russia in 1917 and 1918, to be used against Germany, had been handed over to the anti-Bolshevik forces for use against the usually poorly armed Bolsheviks. British troops, sent originally to guard those arms, had become involved in the civil war not only as advisers but as participants. Churchill had not been responsible in any way for these decisions. It was not until the last day of 1918 that he found himself involved in Britain's policy towards Russia; on that day Lloyd George invited him to attend a meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet called specially to formulate British policy against the Bolsheviks.
He was 'all for negotiation' with the Bolsheviks, Churchill told the meeting, 'but he considered there was no chance of securing such a settlement unless it was known we had the power and the will to enforce our views'. If the Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik Russians 'were ready to come together we should help them'. Otherwise Britain should use force 'to restore the situation and set up a democratic government'. Bolshevism represented only a fraction of the Russian people. It would be 'exposed and swept away' by a General Election held under Allied auspices.
Lloyd George wished to limit Britain's involvement to helping those former Tsarist territories in the Baltic and the Caucasus that were 'struggling to be independent from Russia,' telling the meeting that he was 'definitely opposed' to British military intervention inside Russia itself. But with the approval of Balfour and Milner, British troops had not only been sent to the Caucasus and Baltic regions many months earlier, but were already helping three Russian anti-Bolshevik armies inside Russia; in North Russia, in Siberia, and in South Russia. There were in fact already seven British Generals holding military commands on Russian soil, with 14,000 British troops under their scattered commands.
***
In sending Churchill to the War Office, Lloyd George agreed that he should also be in charge of Britain's air policy, so that his formal appointment, made on 9 January 1919, was that of Secretary of State for War and Air. He had already entered into his duties, at a moment of extreme tension; the Army for which he was now responsible was deeply discontented. In the week before his arrival at the War Office there had been widespread demonstrations demanding immediate demobilisation. On January 8, for the second day running, angry troops reached Whitehall. At one o'clock they tried to see Lloyd George at Downing Street but were diverted to Horse Guards Parade, where they were met by the Commanding Officer of the London District, General Feilding. The war was over, they shouted. Why should they return to France? Others were refusing to go to Russia.
It was the day before Churchill's formal appointment as Secretary of State for War. He went at once to Horse Guards Parade.
'How many troops have we to deal with them?' he asked Feilding.
'A battalion of Guards and three squadrons of Household Cavalry,' was the reply.
'Are they loyal?' asked Churchill.
'We hope they are.'
'Can you arrest the mutineers?'
'We are not certain.'
'Have you any other suggestions?'
There were no other suggestions.
'Then arrest the mutineers.'
***
Churchill, watching from a window, expected firing to break out at any moment. But the soldiers allowed themselves to be surrounded and then gave themselves up. Determined to defuse a tense and volatile situation, Churchill sought a scheme that would be fair, and seen as fair. Hitherto only those men who already had offers of work in Britain were being demobilised. A soldier who had served for only four months, but had an industrial job awaiting him, could go home at once. A soldier who had served for four years, but had no job to go home to, must stay in uniform.
On January 12, four days after the Whitehall mutiny and three days after his appointment, Churchill announced his new scheme. Those who had served in France longest would be released first. All men who had enlisted before 1916 would be demobilised at once. All men over forty, however recent their enlistment, would be allowed home at once. All those who had served for two years or less would have to wait until those who had served longer had been released. In the demobilisation of those who joined in 1916 or after, priority would be given to those who had been wounded. 'It was one of the best things I did,' Churchill told a friend thirty-five years later.
The fairness of Churchill's scheme was at once acclaimed, but he had also to ensure that Britain would have enough men to establish an Army of Occupation on the Rhine. To do this, he proposed retaining conscription for the million men needed in Germany. Lloyd George, who was in Paris for the first stage of the Peace Conference, protested at the retention of any form of conscription, and at the size of the proposed occupation force. As the German Army was to be demobilised, he told Churchill in a telephone message on January 21, 'it is absurd to retain so big an army.'
Churchill crossed to France to explain to Lloyd George the reason why so many men would be needed. During luncheon he told Lloyd George that the Army of Occupation must be strong enough to 'extract' from the Germans 'the just terms which the Allies demand'. Such an army must be 'strong, compact, contented, well-disciplined' if Britain were not to be 'tricked of what we have rightfully won'. Henry Wilson, who was present, noted in his diary, 'Churchill put the case with tact, and clearly.' Before the lunch was over, Lloyd George had agreed to what Churchill proposed. A million men were to be conscripted in time of peace.
Meanwhile Churchill's demobilisation plan was proceeding smoothly. By January 31 more than 950,000 officers and men had returned home. That day, however, Churchill learned that a mutiny had broken out in Calais, among five thousand troops who had earlier been sent back to France from England under the original scheme. They were demanding to be sent back again to England and to be demobilised. Haig, having surrounded their camp with machine-guns and arrested three ringleaders, informed Churchill that it was essential for the ringleaders to be shot.
Churchill acted at once to stop Haig carrying out the executions. 'Unless there was serious violence attended by bloodshed and actual loss of life,' he telegraphed, 'I do not consider that the infliction of the death penalty would be justifiable.' Public opinion would only support the death penalty, Churchill added, 'when other men's lives are endangered by criminal or cowardly conduct'.
There was another urgent problem on Churchill's desk on January 31, a request from Henry Wilson for an immediate decision about the British troops in Russia. The 13,000 British troops in North Russia and the 1,000 in Siberia were isolated and ill-equipped. Wilson wanted them reinforced at once. Other British troops, at Batum on the Black Sea, were already being reinforced. But there was no Cabinet policy, and no guidance from Lloyd George, who was at that very moment proposing to open negotiations with the Bolsheviks on Heybeli Island in the Sea of Marmara.
Churchill opposed these negotiations. During his first week at the War Office he had telegraphed to the two senior British officers in North Russia, General Maynard and General Ironside: 'It would be better to risk a few thousand men (though there would be no risk if the railway could be put right) than to allow the whole fabric of Russo-Siberian resistance to Bolshevism to crumble. What sort of a Peace (!) should we have if all Europe & Asia from Warsaw to Vladivostok were under the sway of Lenin?'
Lloyd George still favoured conciliation rather than intervention. While in Paris he had obtained the support of Woodrow Wilson for the invitation to the Bolsheviks to peace talks on Heybeli Island. Churchill had learned of this decision when he reached Paris on January 23, hoping to obtain Lloyd George's support for his demobilisation scheme. On the following morning he told Lloyd George that 'one might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks'.
Responsible now for maintaining in Russia the British forces sent there by his predecessors, Churchill wanted a clear decision one way or another. 'It seems to me most urgent,' he wrote to Lloyd George on January 27, 'for us to frame and declare our policy. "Evacuate at once at all costs" is a policy. It is not a very pleasant one from the point of view of history. "Reinforce and put the job through" is a policy; but unhappily we have not the power-our orders would not be obeyed, I regret to say.'
Churchill was under no illusions as to the difficulty of fighting in Russia, or the cost of maintaining a large force there, or the possibility of British troops becoming influenced by Bolshevik ideas. He therefore advised Lloyd George, in his letter of January 27, to end all direct British military intervention, and to begin the withdrawal of all British forces. Churchill wanted those at Murmansk and Archangel to be withdrawn as soon as the ice had melted in July. With regard to Siberia and South Russia, he wanted Britain to tell the anti-Bolshevik forces there 'that they have got to shift for themselves, that we wish them well, but that all we can do is to give them moral support', in the form of such British volunteers 'who are ready to serve in these theatres', and material support, in the form of money, arms and supplies.
Churchill also advised Lloyd George that no British regular or conscript troops should be sent to Russia. With regard to arms and supplies, a quota should be fixed 'now'. With regard to British volunteers, the Government should give 'no guarantee' of their numbers. If the anti-Bolshevik forces were defeated by the Bolsheviks 'or throw up the sponge, we should of course withdraw and disinterest ourselves in all that may follow'.
Churchill meant what he said about withdrawing British troops from Omsk. 'Our policy in Siberia is too nebulous,' he wrote to Henry Wilson on January 29, '& our prospects too gloomy.' Even when, on February 6, two of his most senior military advisers urged him to send arms and equipment to the anti-Bolshevik armies, he cautioned them: 'It is highly important to know what the Russians can & will do for themselves. If they put up a real fight, we ought in my view to back them in every way possible. But without them it is no good our trying.'
On February 12 Churchill pointed out to the Cabinet that the Bolsheviks were getting stronger every day. In South Russia, General Denikin's army 'had greatly deteriorated'. The anti-Bolshevik leader on the Don, General Krasnoff, and the ruler of Siberia, Admiral Kolchak, were both discouraged; indeed, 'there was complete disheartenment everywhere.' If Britain were going to withdraw her troops 'it should be done at once'. If she were going to intervene, then she should 'send larger forces there'. His personal belief was that 'we ought to intervene'. But he awaited the Cabinet's decision, and would carry it out.
Lloyd George told the Cabinet that half a million men would be needed to make intervention effective. It was necessary to consult President Wilson, whose troops were also in Siberia and North Russia, and who was due to leave Paris in three days' time. If, Churchill told a second Cabinet on February 12, the President's decision was to declare war on the Bolsheviks, then British forces could play their part. But he still felt that the 'only chance of making headway against the Bolsheviks' was by the Russian armies themselves. If Britain could not support them 'it would be far better to take a decision now to quit and face the consequences, and tell these people to make the best terms they could with the Bolsheviks'.
Britain, Churchill said, was trying 'to animate the wavering hands of the Russian forces', but he had no illusions as to how wavering those hands were or how small were the prospects of victory for the half a million anti-Bolshevik Russian troops. On the morning of February 14 he left London for Paris, as the Cabinet's emissary to ask President Wilson and Clemenceau what policy the Paris Peace Conference powers wished to pursue with regard to Russia. The journey was inauspicious; during the drive from Dieppe to Paris with Henry Wilson, their car was in an accident which smashed the windscreen. The two men reached Paris cold and wet at three in the afternoon. Four hours later they were present at a meeting of the Council of Ten called specially by Clemenceau to decide on Russian policy.
For three days Churchill was at the centre of the discussions. Hankey, who was present, referred to the way in which he opened the proceedings 'with great moderation'. Woodrow Wilson wanted all foreign troops in Russia, including his own, to be withdrawn. When Churchill suggested that volunteers should be allowed to go, and that arms, tanks, aeroplanes and munitions should be sent to the Russian anti-Bolsheviks, Wilson doubted if volunteers would go, and said that in some areas the supplies would be 'assisting reactionaries'. He then sailed for home, leaving Colonel House to represent him. On February 15 Churchill proposed that the Council should at least examine what the military problems of intervention might be. He was supported by the Italian and Japanese Foreign Ministers, but no decision was reached, even about a mere enquiry. On the following day he telegraphed to Lloyd George that when the Council met the next day he would ask it to set up a commission 'to prepare, out of the resources that are available, a war plan against the Bolsheviks'.
Lloyd George was enraged. The only plan to be considered, he replied by telegram, was that of sending equipment and arms to the anti-Bolshevik forces, who must do all their fighting themselves. 'An expensive war against Russia,' he warned, 'is a way to strengthen Bolshevism in Russia and create it at home.' If Britain were committed to war 'against a continent like Russia, it is the road to bankruptcy and Bolshevism in these islands'. Not only did Lloyd George send this telegram to Churchill; he arranged for a copy to go to Colonel House.
By 'planning war against the Bolsheviks', Churchill replied to Lloyd George, he did not mean making war, but only assembling 'in a comprehensive form, possible means and resources for action', and submitting them in a report to the Council. When the Council met on February 17 it did indeed agree to this; a report would be prepared. But Colonel House insisted that the report must be informal and unofficial. There was to be no Allied policy decision, either on intervention, or on withdrawal. All that was decided was that each country must seek the views of its own military advisers.
Churchill returned to London that night. On reaching Downing Street shortly after midday on February 18, he found that while Lloyd George would in no way countenance direct British military intervention in Russia, he was 'quite willing', Churchill told Henry Wilson 'to help the Russian armies, provided it is not too costly'. Indeed, Churchill added, the Prime Minister was 'entirely in opposition to the cutting off of supplies from Kolchak, Denikin & Co as he considered that since we called them into the field for our own purposes in the German War we were bound to help them in this way'.
Lloyd George told Churchill that no more British troops would be sent to Russia. Those troops already in Russia would be withdrawn. Volunteers already in South Russia could stay. Aid to the Siberian and South Russian anti-Bolshevik forces would continue, but must not be too expensive. Two days after his return from Paris, Churchill was the principal guest at the Mansion House. In his speech he declared: 'If Russia is to be saved, as I pray she may be saved, she must be saved by Russians. It must be by Russian manhood and Russian courage and Russian virtue that the rescue and regeneration of this once mighty nation and famous branch of the European family can alone be achieved.' The aid which Britain could give to the Russian armies, 'who are now engaged in fighting the foul baboonery of Bolshevism', could be given by arms, munitions, equipment, and 'technical services raised upon a voluntary basis'. There would be no British military intervention. 'Russia must be saved by Russian exertions, and it must be from the heart of the Russian people and with their strong arm that the conflict against Bolshevism in Russia must mainly be waged.'
Churchill's task now was to withdraw the 14,000 British troops from Russia, and to sustain the anti-Bolshevik forces with supplies and volunteers; up to 2,000 technical assistants and instructors who specifically volunteered for service in Russia. When, on February 21 Lloyd George rebuked him for the expense that would be incurred by what he called 'your Russian policy', Churchill wrote such an angry reply that he decided in the end not to send it. In it he wrote: 'You speak of my "Russian policy". I have no Russian policy. I know of no Russian policy. I went to Paris to look for a Russian policy. I deplore the lack of a Russian policy, which lack may well keep the world at war for an indefinite period and involve the Peace Conference and the League of Nations in a common failure. All I am doing is carrying on from day to day, guided by such indications as I receive from the War Cabinet, for whose decisions I naturally have no responsibility beyond my departmental duty.'
All the British troops in Russia, Churchill pointed out, had been sent before his appointment to the War Office. 'So far I am not responsible for sending a single man to Russia.' This was true; but in the public eye, Churchill, an outspoken public critic of Bolshevism and its excesses, was already being seen as the leader of an anti-Bolshevik crusade. In March, after a Communist seizure of power in Budapest, a member of the Cabinet Secretariat, Dr Thomas Jones, noted, 'Churchill grew very hot and prophesied vast and immediate disaster as a result of the dilatoriness of the Peace Conference.'
To ensure that the troops in North Russia could leave safely, for they were exhausted, ill-equipped and constantly being attacked, Churchill persuaded Lloyd George to authorise a small 'Rescue Force' to go to their assistance. He was keen that this force should take with it, and use, a new poison gas that had been developed in the last months of the war. 'I should very much like the Bolsheviks to have it,' he told his advisers. When, in April, the last French forces left Odessa, he was angry at what he saw as a premature abandonment of Denikin in South Russia. 'Winston says he will seriously consider resignation before submitting to ignominious withdrawal,' one Cabinet Minister noted. Churchill's own comment was acerbic, 'After conquering all the Huns-tigers of the world-I will not submit to be beaten by the baboons!'
Churchill had no doubt that of 'all the tyrannies in history', he told an audience in London that April, 'the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the most destructive, the most degrading'. The atrocities committed under Lenin and Trotsky were 'incomparably more hideous, on a larger scale, and more numerous than any for which the Kaiser is responsible'. That same month he was scandalised when the Government decided to send back to Russia half a million soldiers who had been taken prisoners-of-war by the Germans and were now in Allied custody. Angrily he wrote to his military advisers: 'Whereas we could have made out of these an army of loyal men who would have been available to sustain the defences of Archangel and Murmansk or to aid General Denikin and Kolchak, we are now I presume simply sending a reinforcement of 500,000 trained men to join the armies of Lenin and Trotsky. This appears to me to be one of the capital blunders in the history of the world.'
Fearful of Communism triumphant in Eastern Europe and Asia, Churchill pressed the Government to help put Germany back on its feet by food and a lenient attitude to reparations, writing to Lloyd George on April 9 that his policy, though in all probability too late to be implemented, could be easily expressed, 'Feed Germany; fight Bolshevism; make Germany fight Bolshevism'. When Asquith's daughter Violet asked him what his Russian policy was, he replied even more succinctly, 'Kill the Bolshie, Kiss the Hun.'
By the last week of April the Russian anti-Bolshevik forces in North Russia and Siberia had made such considerable advances that there was even a possibility of their linking up. Churchill at once proposed that the 14,000 British troops in North Russia, whose evacuation through the still-frozen Arctic would not be possible for at least another two months, should, together with the 3,500 men who had recently volunteered to join them, help the local anti-Bolsheviks to 'make a good punch' towards Kolchak's Siberian army. The point of contact could be the town of Kotlas. The local British commanders, General Knox in Siberia and General Maynard at Murmansk, were keen to take part and confident of success. The War Office General Staff proposed a detailed scheme.
Lloyd George agreed to the British forces in North Russia advancing. But on May 18 the local Russian soldiers who would have had to take part in the advance on Kotlas mutinied. The senior British officer at Archangel, General Ironside, shot fifteen of them in order to end the mutiny.
On May 29 Churchill gave the Commons an account of the efforts being made to help the anti-Bolsheviks in North Russia and Siberia. In North Russia, British volunteers were arriving at Archangel and a British naval flotilla was moving southward on the River Dvina 'well armed with guns'. In Siberia, Kolchak's forces were fighting 'with British ammunition and rifles'.
After Churchill's speech a Conservative MP, Samuel Hoare, wrote to congratulate him on 'all you have done in the matter of Russia'. The Labour Daily Herald took another view, denouncing the 'gambler of Gallipoli' for having made a second throw of the dice, 'the new war in Russia'. Churchill cast about for every means to help the anti-Bolsheviks, pressing Lloyd George to recognise Kolchak's government in Siberia, as a gesture of moral support. But the Cabinet rejected his proposal. The Kotlas plan remained; on June 6 Ironside was making plans to advance along the Dvina to Kotlas in a month's time. Bolshevik morale was bad, he reported, 'A strong push will upset everything.' On June 10 Henry Wilson explained Ironside's plan to Lloyd George, who made 'no objection'. On June 11 the War Cabinet approved it.
When, six days later, disturbing news came from Siberia that Kolchak's most westerly army had been defeated, Curzon, Milner and Austen Chamberlain at once called an emergency War Cabinet, at which Churchill urged that the advance to Kotlas should still be tried 'even though the plan for joining hands with Admiral Kolchak was no longer feasible'. No decision was reached. Nine days later Ironside began his advance, capturing 300 Bolshevik soldiers on the first day. Then another mutiny broke out among a battalion of Russian troops forming part of his reserve. Three British and four Russian officers were murdered.
When the War Cabinet met on July 9 it was not the armies, however, but nature, that decided the outcome. The River Dvina, no longer swollen by the melting snows or spring rains, had fallen below the level needed by the Royal Navy flotilla to remain in operation. The flotilla withdrew to Archangel to avoid being stranded. The Kotlas expedition could not continue. Later, when Lloyd George mockingly told Churchill that the attempt to link up with the anti-Bolsheviks at Kotlas had 'failed', Churchill replied bitterly, 'It was never attempted.'
***
Churchill was Secretary of State for Air as well as for War; Clementine was uneasy at her husband holding the two offices. 'Darling,' she had written that March, 'really don't you think it would be better to give up the Air & continue concentrating on what you are doing at the War Office? It would be a sign of real strength to do so, & people would admire it very much. It is weak to hang on to two offices-you really are only doing the one. Or again, if you swallow the two you will have violent indigestion.'
It would be a 'tour de force' to do the two jobs, Clementine continued, 'like keeping a lot of balls in the air at the same time. After all, you want to be a Statesman, not a juggler.' Churchill had no intention of giving up his Air portfolio. At the same time, he had taken up flying again, despite a near accident in June when the aeroplane he was piloting had to make an emergency landing at Buc aerodrome near Paris. His new flying instructor was the Commandant of the Central Flying School, Colonel Jack Scott, an air ace who had shot down thirteen German aircraft in the war, despite having damaged his legs so badly in a flying accident that he had to be lifted into his cockpit each time he flew.
On July 18, after a full day working at the War Office, Churchill and Scott drove to Croydon aerodrome for one of their routine training flights. The aeroplane had dual controls. As usual Churchill took the machine off the ground himself, but when he had risen to seventy or eighty feet the aeroplane began to lose speed, and to fall. Scott took over the controls but could do nothing. 'We were scarcely ninety foot above the ground,' Churchill later recalled, 'just the normal height for the usual side-slip fatal accident, the commonest of all'. The aeroplane fell swiftly downward. 'I saw the sunlit aerodrome close beneath me, and the impression flashed through my mind that it was bathed in a baleful yellowish glare. Then in another flash a definite thought formed in my brain, "This is very likely Death". And swift upon that I felt again in imagination the exact sensation of my smash on the Buc aerodrome a month before. Something like that was going to happen NOW!'
The aeroplane struck the ground. Churchill was thrown forward but his safety belt held him; it broke only when the force of the crash was over. Streams of petrol vapour rushed past him from the engine, but in the few seconds before the aeroplane hit the ground, Scott had managed to switch off the engine, preventing an explosion. Churchill was safe but bruised. Scott, knocked unconscious, soon recovered. Churchill's friends and relatives were shaken and angered by the risk he had taken. 'I feel dreadfully for Clemmy,' his cousin Lady Londonderry wrote to him. 'I really think it rather evil of you-but I do hope you have not been hurt.'
Churchill again agreed to give up flying. Although he would never obtain a pilot's licence, Clementine would have peace of mind.
***
Three days after Churchill's air crash, the Russian regiment holding General Maynard's Onega front in North Russia mutinied, handing over its front line positions to the Bolsheviks. When the War Cabinet met on July 25 it was decided that the British troops in North Russia, Siberia and the Caucasus must be withdrawn. Except for the advisers with Denikin in South Russia, the intervention was over. Bitterly Churchill told his colleagues, 'The anti-Bolsheviks might collapse within the next few months, and then the Lenin or Trotsky empire would be complete.'
On July 28 the last 700 American troops left Archangel. That day Churchill was with Lloyd George at Chequers. Henry Wilson was also there. 'Winston very excited & talked of resigning,' he wrote in his diary. At the Cabinet on the following day Churchill asked that Denikin should continue to receive food and munitions for the next six months, as well as up to 2,000 volunteers to supervise his stores and transport, and pilots to teach his aviators to fly. The Cabinet agreed that he should be sent 'one more packet' of supplies.
On August 16 Churchill left England with Clementine for a five-day visit to Cologne, and to the British Army on the Rhine. On his second day in Germany, he learned that the situation in Russia was changing again, and changing dramatically; the anti-Bolshevik Russian armies were once more advancing. Along the Black Sea coast, Denikin had driven the Bolsheviks from Nikolaiev and Kherson, and was poised to enter Odessa; the anti-Bolsheviks were in command of the Black Sea. Along the Baltic coast, General Yudenitch was advancing rapidly on Petrograd. Returning to London, Churchill asked for enough munitions to be sent to Denikin to enable him to wrest all of South Russia from the Bolsheviks. Lloyd George said no, pointing out that the Cabinet had agreed that once Denikin had been sent 'one more packet', Britain would let the Russians 'fight out their own quarrels' at their own expense.
A day after Lloyd George's rebuff to Churchill, Denikin entered Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, of which he was now the master. Realising that this vast territory was probably the limit of what the anti-Bolshevik forces could conquer and hold, Churchill proposed a negotiated peace; the Bolsheviks would be asked to accept a non-Bolshevik South Russia with Kiev as its capital, and Denikin would be asked to accept Bolshevik rule centred on Moscow. Once an agreed dividing line was reached between the two forces, Britain would sponsor negotiations between Denikin and Lenin. To this end, Churchill cautioned restraint on the part of the British forces in South Russia, telegraphing on September 20 to the senior British officer with Denikin's forces, General Holman, 'I think it inadvisable that British airmen should be used in present circumstances to bomb Moscow.'
Learning that same day that Denikin's troops had entered Kursk, only three hundred miles south of Moscow, Churchill wrote at once to Lloyd George, urging that Britain support Denikin now 'by all means in our power', and to encourage the Baltic Germans to participate in Yudenitch's attack on Petrograd. 'Nothing can preserve either the Bolshevik system or the Bolshevik regime,' he told Lloyd George. 'By mistakes on our part the agony of the Russian people may be prolonged. But their relief is sure. The only question is whether we shall desert them in the crisis of their fate.'
Lloyd George begged Churchill to 'let Russia be for at least 48 hours' and to devote his energies to preparing the Army Estimates, as cuts in expenditure were essential. 'I have found your mind so obsessed by Russia,' he wrote on September 22, 'that I felt I had good grounds for the apprehension that your great abilities, energy and courage were not devoted to the reduction of expenditure.' He added, 'I wonder if it is any use my making one last effort to induce you to throw off this obsession which, if you will forgive me for saying so, is upsetting your balance.'
In his reply that same day, Churchill wrote: 'I may get rid of my "obsession" or you may get rid of me: but you will not get rid of Russia: nor of the consequences of a policy which for nearly a year it has been impossible to define. I must confess I cannot feel a sense of detachment from the tragical scene.' Churchill's obsession was his belief that the whole fate of Russia was in the balance, and that it was possible with a clear plan to topple tyranny. But on the day of his letter to Lloyd George, 400 Polish troops were evacuated from Archangel, and all remaining British troops were withdrawn into the inner defences of the city, preparatory to embarking for home.
On September 24 Britain recognised the independence of Lithuania, but on the following day the War Cabinet rejected any further British commitment to the Baltic States, and urged them to make peace with the Bolsheviks. 'Winston doesn't like that,' one Cabinet Minister wrote in his diary, 'and argues that the Front is one.' The plan Churchill now favoured, he wrote that day to the War Cabinet, was 'to make war upon the Bolshevists by every means in our power, with a coherent plan on all fronts at once', until either the Bolsheviks were defeated or a 'general peace' was negotiated between the warring parties.
On October 4 Denikin's armies began to advance towards Moscow on a broad front; Yudenitch was within fifty miles of Petrograd; in Siberia, Kolchak had begun to move westward again. Learning this, Churchill pressed the War Cabinet to do everything in Britain's power to help these forces at their moment of renewed advance and vigour. 'The Bolsheviks are falling and perhaps the end is not distant. Not only their system but their regime is doomed. Their military effort is collapsing at almost every point on the whole immense circle of their front, while communications, food, fuel, and popular support are all failing within that circle.'
Churchill now wanted Britain to press Poland to attack the Bolsheviks from the west, and to ask the Baltic states to delay as long as possible making their peace with Lenin. The War Cabinet had no intention of following such a course. On October 6 Denikin's troops entered Voronezh, only 300 miles from Moscow, but two days later the War Cabinet insisted that the final 'packet' of munitions and supplies to Denikin must not exceed £14,500,000, and must come wherever possible out of existing War Office stocks. This packet was being sent, Churchill had to inform Denikin, 'on the condition that it would be the last'. That day the last British troops left Murmansk, followed a week later by those at Archangel. The remaining 550 British troops in Siberia were under orders to leave by mid-November. The 144 British military personnel in the Baltic would leave by the end of the year. At the moment of potential triumph for the anti-Bolshevik forces, British involvement in their fate was coming to an end.
On October 13 Denikin entered Orel, 250 miles south of Moscow. That same day Yudenitch cut the Petrograd-Moscow railway and advanced to within thirty-five miles of Petrograd. 'The Bolshevik system was from the beginning doomed to perish in consequence of its antagonism to the fundamental principles of civilised society,' Churchill wrote to the War Cabinet a day later. The system and the regime would perish 'beneath the vengeance of the Russian nation'. Had it been possible earlier to establish peaceful relations with the Bolsheviks, 'we should have been building on a perishing foundation'.
As Denikin began his final assault on Moscow on October 15, Churchill told Lloyd George that he wanted to leave London for Russia. Once in Russia, he was prepared to 'help Denikin mould the new Russian Constitution'. Lloyd George was not against the idea. 'Winston would go out as a sort of Ambassador,' Henry Wilson noted in his diary.
On October 17 Churchill informed Yudenitch that the War Office was sending him tanks, aeroplanes, rifles, and equipment for 20,000 men. Four hundred Russian officers who had been under training in Britain would leave at once on a British steamship, which would also carry most of the supplies. If Petrograd were captured, Churchill told Curzon that day, it would be 'with British munitions and the aid of the British Fleet'.
Churchill's confidence was complete. 'There are now good reasons for believing that the tyranny of Bolshevism will soon be overthrown by the Russian nation,' he told his constituency chairman on October 18. Britain would use her influence to build up 'a New Russia on the broad foundation of democracy and Parliamentary institutions'. On the following day Churchill discussed with his advisers sending a British General to Yudenitch 'for the entry into Petrograd the General would leave Britain on October 23 'to prevent excesses in the event of victory'. But that very day, launching a counter-attack, Trotsky drove Yudenitch from his point closest to the city.
As rapidly as they had risen, the fortunes of the anti-Bolsheviks waned. In South Russia, Denikin's forces came to a halt, their bases suddenly and unexpectedly attacked by an anarchist army led by Nestor Makhno. Taking advantage of Makhno's activities, the Bolsheviks recaptured Orel. Denikin was in retreat. In Siberia, Kolchak fell back eastward again, to Omsk. Churchill's hopes of going to Russia as an emissary of democracy were ended; but he had no intention of abandoning the anti-Bolsheviks. On October 31 the Cabinet discussed the death of more than a hundred British sailors on a British warship bombarding Bolshevik positions in the Gulf of Finland. A Cabinet Minister noted, 'Winston pleads that it may go on bombarding until the ice. PM against.'
On November 3 Yudenitch gave up his attempt to capture Petrograd and retreated to Estonia. Three days later Churchill spoke in the Commons of Lenin's 'demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian State and nation depended'. After his speech Balfour went up to him and said, 'I admire the exaggerated way you tell the truth.'
As Denikin's forces gave up the advance on Moscow, Churchill asked the Cabinet in vain for them to be sent further supplies. His plan to finance a special Russian Army Corps for Yudenitch was likewise unsuccessful. His sole Ministerial authority with regard to Russia remained what it had been all year; to organise the British withdrawal. On November 1 the last British troops had sailed from Vladivostok. A month later Kolchak's army collapsed and the Admiral fled yet further eastward, leaving behind a million rounds of mostly British ammunition for the Bolsheviks to use against him. On November 30 Churchill celebrated his forty-fifth birthday amid the collapse of all his hopes for a Russian democratic revival.
By the end of November Denikin had abandoned half of South Russia to the Bolsheviks. The Poles, whom he despised, far from helping him restore his line, advanced deep into the Ukraine. 'The last chances of saving the situation are slipping away,' Churchill wrote to Lloyd George on December 3. 'No action whatever is being taken by us to induce Poland to make her weight tell on the Front, or to arrange matters between Denikin and Poland. Very soon there will be nothing left but Lenin and Trotsky, our vanished 100 millions, and mutual reproaches.'
Churchill now begged Denikin to come to a peaceful arrangement with Poland. 'Believe me my friend I understand your difficulties,' he telegraphed on December 11, 'and I pursue only one object, namely, the destruction of the Bolshevik tyrannies which menace the ignorant, thoughtless and tired out nations.' On the following day, as the Bolsheviks entered Kharkov, Denikin's forces fled southward in disarray towards the Black Sea.
'It is a delusion to suppose that all this year we have been fighting the battles of the anti-Bolshevik Russians,' Churchill wrote to the War Cabinet on December 15. 'On the contrary, they have been fighting ours; and this truth will become painfully apparent from the moment they are exterminated and the Bolshevik armies are supreme over the whole vast territories of the Russian Empire.' That day the Bolsheviks entered Kiev. Nine days later, in Siberia, they were in possession of most of Irkutsk, to which Kolchak had fled. On December 26 General Knox sailed from Vladivostok. That same day General Holman telegraphed from South Russia for help in evacuating 800 of the 2,000 members of the British mission to Denikin. On December 31 Churchill ordered the evacuation of the British forces at Batum, on the Black Sea.
Churchill had lost his long rearguard struggle to help the anti-Bolsheviks overthrow the Moscow regime. To many in Britain, particularly to the Labour Party, his 'private war on Russia' was a repetition of previous excesses. In the London evening Star, a young New Zealand cartoonist, David Low, portrayed him as a big-game hunter, gun in hand, with six dead cats at his feet*. The title was 'Winston's Bag'. Four of the dead cats were labelled: 'Sidney St.', 'Antwerp Blunder', 'Gallipoli Mistake' and 'Russian Bungle'. The two remaining cats had no name. 'Winston hunts lions and brings back cats' was the caption.
***
Over the New Year holiday, Churchill was a guest at Sir Philip Sassoon's house at Lympne, on the south coast, a luxurious retreat. Lloyd George was also among the guests, as was the newspaper proprietor Lord Riddell. Churchill was at work that weekend, as so many others, on his war memoirs; he had just learned that he was to receive £5,000 from The Times for the serial rights, the 1990 equivalent of £75,000, and was soon to receive more than double this for serialisation in the United States. For the past year he had been dictating chapters to his shorthand writer Harry Beckenham.
'I had a long talk with Winston about his book,' Riddell wrote in his diary. 'He says he has written a great part of the first volume. He proposed to dictate 300,000 words, and then cut down the matter and polish it up. He added that it was very exhilarating to feel that one was writing for half a crown a word! He went upstairs to put in two or three hours' work on the book. When he came down, I said to LG, with whom I had been talking, "It is a horrible thought that while we have been frittering away our time, Winston has been piling up words at half a crown each." This much amused LG.'
In mid-January, while Lloyd George was in Paris for the Supreme Allied Council, working on the final terms of the Treaty of Versailles, he summoned the Cabinet to meet in Paris. The Peace Conference had decided to invite the Bolsheviks to discuss trade between Russia and Western Europe. Churchill was still determined to obtain support for Denikin's rapidly retreating armies. 'At times he became almost like a madman,' Frances Stevenson wrote in her diary on January 17. That afternoon Henry Wilson found Churchill in a 'very uncertain mood', talking about whether or not to resign.
'My sweet Clemmie,' Churchill wrote two days later to his wife, 'I would so much rather have spent these days in the basket instead of loafing around here.' Back in London, on January 25 he published an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald in which he wrote of Lenin's 'diabolical' purpose. 'All tyrants are the enemies of the human race,' he declared. 'All tyrannies should be overthrown.' Nine days later, however, on learning that Denikin was likely to be driven into the sea if he went on fighting, he urged the anti-Bolshevik leader to give up the fight, to seek a place of refuge for his soldiers and followers, and to open negotiations with the Bolsheviks for a small territorial area in which his followers might settle.
'Great changes are taking place in the character and organisation of the Bolshevik government,' Churchill told Denikin. 'In spite of the hellish wickedness in which it was founded and has been developed, it nevertheless represents a force of order.' Those at the helm 'are no longer mere revolutionaries but persons who, having seized power, are anxious to retain it and enjoy it for a time. They are believed earnestly to desire peace, fearing no doubt if war continues to be devoured later by their own armies.' A period of peace, coupled with commercial reorganisation, 'may well prepare the way for the unity of Russia through a political evolution.'
Churchill's call for compromise fell on deaf ears. To Denikin, the violence and divisions of civil war made the concept of Bolshevik 'evolution' sound bizarre. Four days after Churchill advocated negotiations between Denikin and the Bolsheviks, the Bolsheviks entered Odessa. Thousands of Denikin's followers were shot. The remnant escaped by sea to the Crimea. That same day, in Siberia, Kolchak was taken by the Bolsheviks from his prison cell and shot.
The last standard-bearers of the intervention were being withdrawn; on March 5 Churchill authorised General Holman to quit Denikin's side and leave Russia altogether. Churchill now favoured a cordon sanitaire of which Germany would be part, writing to one of his military advisers on March 10, 'In my view the objective which we should pursue at the present time is the building up of a strong but peaceful Germany which will not attack our French allies, but which will at the same time act as a moral bulwark against the Bolshevism of Russia.'
Of the anti-Bolshevik forces who had stayed on in North Russia after the British withdrew, Churchill wrote on March 23, 'I think that they did all that men could do, holding on month after month with no hope in the world, and everybody wishing to make their peace with the Bolsheviks.' On the following day he left England for a two-week holiday in France. He too now saw a negotiated peace as the only way forward, writing, as he was crossing the Channel, to Lloyd George, 'I should be prepared to make peace with Soviet Russia on the best terms available to appease the general situation, while safeguarding us from being poisoned by them.' He added: 'I do not of course believe that any real harmony is possible between Bolshevism & present civilisation. But in view of existing facts a cessation of arms & a promotion of material prosperity are inevitable: & we must trust for better or worse to peaceful influences to bring about the disappearance of this awful tyranny and peril.'
On March 27 the last of Denikin's troops evacuated their main supply base, the port of Novorossiisk. When the Bolsheviks entered the town later that day they found a vast quantity of British stores; most of Britain's 'final packet' to the anti-Bolsheviks had become the property, and arsenal, of those whose defeat it had been intended to secure. Denikin reached the Crimea with 35,000 troops, his anti-Bolshevik campaign over. Learning on March 29 that General Holman's mission had been safely evacuated, Henry Wilson wrote in his diary: 'So ends in practical disaster another of Winston's military attempts. Antwerp, Dardanelles, Denikin. His judgement is always at fault, & he is hopeless when in power.' But as at the Dardanelles, effective power had in fact been denied Churchill in his efforts to use the changing military position in Russia to Britain's advantage.
At Mimizan, on the French Atlantic coast, Churchill was staying at a villa belonging to his friend the Duke of Westminster, where he hunted wild boar and painted, with General Rawlinson as his companion. It was four and a half years since Rawlinson had taken over from him at Antwerp; exactly two years since he had visited Rawlinson's headquarters at the height of the German break-through in 1918. 'The General and I,' he wrote to Clementine on March 29, 'discuss the various battles of the war without cessation in the intervals of painting and riding. I have not done a scrap of work. This is the first time such a thing has happened to me. I am evidently "growing up" at last.'
On March 31 the War Cabinet decided 'to invite General Denikin to give up the struggle'. One Cabinet Minister noted, 'Winston fortunately abroad.' But Churchill refused to allow these matters to vex him, writing from Mimizan to Lloyd George, 'I am having a complete holiday and trying to forget about all the disagreeable things that are going on.' In the second week of May, the Polish Army drove the Bolsheviks from Kiev. In the Crimea, Denikin's successor General Wrangel was holding off a strong Bolshevik attack.
Churchill wanted a British initiative, not as a participant in the struggle, but as a mediator, telling a Conference of Ministers on May 28, 'The British Government should offer to the Soviet Government their wholehearted co-operation in concerting a peace between the Soviet Government on the one hand and General Wrangel and the Polish Government on the other.' The Crimea would become a temporary asylum for the anti-Bolsheviks 'for at least a year'. Those refugees who wished would be allowed to return to Russia under an amnesty. The Bolsheviks would agree to cease interference and agitation in Afghanistan, Persia and the Caucasus, as well as Bolshevik propaganda in Central Europe and Britain. In return, Britain would recognise Bolshevik Russia.
Even as Churchill set out his plan for a negotiated peace, Wrangel advanced from the Crimea to attack the Bolsheviks in South Russia. Churchill shared the Cabinet's view that the General had forfeited any claim to further British assistance.
***
Lloyd George now sought Churchill's help over a newly emerging peril, the growing challenge to British rule in Ireland by force and terror. Following the death of sixteen Catholics and Protestants during a violent sectarian clash on June 16, he asked Churchill to join a Cabinet Committee charged with the 'suppression of crime and disorder' in Ireland. His own view, Churchill told Henry Wilson on June 25, was that the situation in Ireland would not be made better 'by the kind of methods the Prussians adopted in Belgium'.
Churchill was quickly repelled by Sinn Fein's acts of terror. On July 1 he suggested to his advisers at the War Office that if a large number of Sinn Feiners were drilling, with or without arms, and could be located and identified from the air, 'I see no objection from a military point of view, and subject of course to the discretion of the Irish Government and of the authorities on the spot, to aeroplanes being despatched with definite orders in each particular case to disperse them by machine-gun fire or bombs, using of course no more force than is necessary to scatter and stampede them.'
It was not only in Ireland that air power was being used to maintain control. Six days after this Irish proposal, Churchill informed the Cabinet that in an uprising in distant Mesopotamia, 'the enemy were bombed and machine-gunned with effect by aeroplanes which co-operated with the troops'. Churchill had strongly deprecated the use of troops, however, by General Dyer in India, when 300 unarmed Indians had been shot during a riot at Amritsar. Churchill insisted on Dyer receiving no further military employment, and in the Commons on July 8 he defended the condemnation passed on Dyer by a War Office commission. The shooting was 'a monstrous event'. There was 'one general prohibition' which could be made when dealing with riots and civil strife. 'I mean a prohibition against what is called "frightfulness". What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country. We cannot admit this doctrine in any form. Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopoeia.'
In Ireland, as the Sinn Fein murders continued, Lloyd George asked Churchill's friend General Tudor to set up what Henry Wilson called 'a counter-murder association a force later known, because of the colour of its uniform, as the Black and Tans. Churchill 'evidently had some lingering hope of our rough handling of the Sinn Feins', Wilson wrote in his diary on July 12. Two days later, Churchill's concerns swung sharply away from Ireland as Bolshevik troops, having pushed the Poles out of Kiev and the western Ukraine crossed into the predominantly Polish-speaking regions of Galicia and White Russia, forcing the Poles to evacuate Vilna, a city with more than 80,000 Polish inhabitants. Churchill wanted immediate action against this onrush of Bolshevik power, writing to Bonar Law: 'All my experience goes to show the advantage of attacking these people. They become very dangerous the moment they think you fear them. It is like taming a tiger-or rather a mangy hyena!'
While awaiting a Cabinet decision on what could, or should, be done to help Poland, Churchill prepared a list of resources which he wanted to send to the Poles, among them aeroplanes, guns and technical advisers. On July 26 the United States announced that it would equip and maintain ten Polish divisions for the duration of the war. Two days later, in an article in the Evening News entitled 'The Poison Peril from the East', Churchill described Poland as the 'lynch-pin' of the Treaty of Versailles. It was 'from the point of view of securing and preserving our world peace that the case of Poland must be considered'. But he understood that no British troops could go to Poland's aid; after five years of war the British people did not want any more war, they had learned 'too much of its iron slavery, its squalor, its mocking disappointments, its ever-dwelling sense of loss'.
It was for Germany, Churchill wrote, 'to build a dyke of peaceful, lawful, patient strength and virtue against the flood of red barbarism flowing from the East'. The Times immediately protested at the 'unconstitutional impropriety' of such an appeal, pointing out that Germany was the defeated nation about to pay reparations, and having lost considerable territory at Poland's expense. Lord Derby wrote to Lloyd George from Paris, 'Winston's hint of an alliance with Germany to fight the Bolshevists has made the French mad!' But Churchill had not suggested British or German military intervention.
On August 4 the Red Army advanced to within a hundred miles of Warsaw. Churchill hurried to see the Prime Minister as soon as he learned of the threat to the Polish capital. Lloyd George was in the Cabinet Room with two emissaries from Lenin, sent to negotiate a trade agreement, Leonid Krassin and Lev Kamenev. As Churchill waited outside the Cabinet Room, Lloyd George sent him a note, 'I told Kamenev & Krassin that the British fleet would start for the Baltic in three days unless they stopped their advance.' This British ultimatum was delivered on the sixth anniversary of Britain's declaration of war on Germany. When the Cabinet met half an hour later it accepted what Lloyd George had done. But it was clear that no army could be sent to help Poland. 'Again it was August 4,' Churchill later recalled, 'and this time we were impotent. Public opinion in England and France was prostrate. All forms of military intervention were impossible. There was nothing left but words and gestures.'
The Red Army continued to advance on Warsaw. On August 6 the head of the British Mission there, who had earlier been sent to Warsaw to persuade the Poles to negotiate with the Bolsheviks, telegraphed to London for the immediate despatch of 20,000 French and British troops, excluding any who might be affected 'by Bolshevik or Sinn Fein propaganda'. But two days later the French leaders came to London to tell Lloyd George that they were unwilling to send troops. It was agreed that France would send arms and munitions to Poland. Britain's contribution would be 'boots, clothes, saddlery'.
On August 13 the Red Army was only twelve miles from Warsaw. The British Government had abandoned any intention to support Poland, or to be involved in its fate. That day Churchill left London for Rugby, where he played polo. While he was at Rugby he drafted a long appeal to Lloyd George to do everything possible to prevent Poland being 're-absorbed in the Russian system'. As he was writing his appeal he learned that the Poles, having taken the military initiative, were driving the Russians back, and had already captured 63,000 Russian prisoners, 200 guns and a thousand machine-guns. Churchill wrote on top of his appeal for British action, 'Happily superseded by events.' Then, echoing Pitt at the Guildhall in 1805, he added, 'Poland has saved herself by her exertions & will I trust save Europe by her example.'
***
On August 13, the day the Red Army was only twelve miles from Warsaw, five British officials were murdered in Iraq, where Churchill, as Secretary of State for War, was responsible for civil as well as military control. For two weeks the Cabinet discussed what should be done; Churchill saw no reason to retain control in Iraq if the result was to be military entanglement, but he was overruled. 'Now that the Cabinet have definitely decided that we are to plough through in that dismal country,' he wrote to Lloyd George on August 26, 'every effort must be made to procure vigorous action and decisive results.' His friend General Haldane, the Commander-in-Chief in Iraq, was confident of being able to quell the revolt within three months.
Pursuing the Cabinet's policy to stay in Iraq, despite the growing rebellion, Churchill had already arranged for two air squadrons to join the two already there. On August 29 he suggested they should be equipped with mustard-gas bombs 'which would inflict punishment upon recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them'. But extra troops were not readily available. 'We are at our wits' end to find a single soldier,' he wrote to Lloyd George on August 31, and he added: 'There is something very sinister to my mind in this Mesopotamian entanglement, coming as it does when Ireland is so great a menace. It seems to me so gratuitous that after all the struggles of the war, just when we want to get together our slender military resources and re-establish our finances and have a little in hand in case of danger here or there, we should be compelled to go on pouring armies and treasures into these thankless deserts.'
On September 1 Churchill left London with Clementine for Mimizan, where he had spent his holiday the previous March. 'I am here having a little sunshine and change,' he wrote to his constituency chairman a week later, 'which I badly needed after all these years of increasing racket and worry, and after the chilling July and August which we suffered in England.' Churchill always loved the sun: 'In a properly constituted existence like yours (and mine),' he had written to Lloyd George a month earlier, 'each day brings its own diversions, provided only there is sunshine.'
After two and a half weeks in France, Churchill returned for six days to London, where he was warned by Henry Wilson that the Black and Tans in Ireland were carrying out 'indiscriminate reprisals'. Churchill's sympathy was on the side of those who were trying to maintain the peace. 'Naturally everything will be done to prevent violent, harsh or inhumane action by the troops,' he told Wilson on September 18, 'but the greatest help in this respect will be given by the Irish population of towns where troops are quartered if they not only abstain from murdering the soldiers and officers by treacherous means, but also render the assistance which is easily in their power to give, for the detection of the actual criminals.'
On September 22, at three towns in southern Ireland, the local police, Wilson wrote in his diary, 'marked down certain Sinn Feiners as actual murderers or instigators & then coolly went & shot them without question or trial. Winston saw very little harm in this.' Two days later a member of Tudor's staff, Captain Shore, travelled from Dublin to tell Churchill that reprisals were taking place as a matter of Army policy. Churchill took Shore to see Lloyd George at Downing Street, where he again explained the reprisal policy. Lloyd George gave it his approval; the murder of policemen, he told Churchill, Bonar Law and Fisher, 'can only be met by reprisals'.
That night Churchill left England for Italy, to paint at Amalfi. From there he travelled to Cassis, in the South of France, again to paint. While he was away he wrote to his cousin Shane Leslie, whose home was on the Ulster border, to remind him that when Leslie had asked what advice Churchill would give to Sinn Fein, his reply had been, 'Quit murdering and start arguing.' The moment the murders ceased, Churchill wrote to Leslie on October 2, the Irish question 'will enter upon a new phase, and I shall not be behindhand in doing my utmost to secure a good settlement'. On October 11 Churchill returned to London. Five days later, in a speech to his constituents at Dundee, he denounced the Bolsheviks and Sinn Fein in equal measure.
In the third week of November, Churchill saw copies of several dozen intercepted telegrams, sent from the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow to the Bolshevik negotiators in London. One of the main instructions in the telegrams was the spending of money to stimulate industrial unrest in Britain. Churchill decided to insist that until the Bolsheviks cancelled this instruction, no trade agreement should be signed. Lloyd George pointed out that an end to such propaganda was part of the agreement; once the agreement was signed the incitements would stop.
On November 17 Churchill asked the Cabinet to break off the talks with the Bolsheviks until the incitement ceased. If no such decision were reached on the following day, he would resign. His friend F.E. Smith, recently ennobled as Lord Birkenhead, urged him not to. 'You would cut yourself adrift,' he warned, 'perhaps permanently, certainly for a very long time, from the Coalition, which on every other point you support nobody else would resign from the Cabinet and the public would not regard it as a vital point of principle.
Churchill accepted his friend's advice. The negotiations continued, as did the secret instructions for subversion. Churchill remained in the Cabinet, having secured a specific note in the minutes on November 18 'that no Cabinet Minister was fettered as regards anti-Bolshevik speeches'. That night he went to Oxford, where he denounced the evils of Communism: 'My view has been that all the harm and misery in Russia have arisen out of the wickedness and folly of the Bolshevists, and that there will be no recovery of any kind in Russia or in Eastern Europe while these wicked men, this vile group of cosmopolitan fanatics, hold the Russian nation by the hair of its head and tyrannise over its great population. The policy I will always advocate is the overthrow and destruction of that criminal regime.'
***
At the beginning of November, studying the reports from Ireland on the reprisal policy of the Black and Tans, Churchill wrote to the Cabinet that some of the reprisals were 'discreditable' even when the provocation was great. 'Many foolish and wrong things' were likely to be done which the authorities would not be able to ignore. But he did not feel that it was right to punish the troops when, 'goaded in the most brutal manner and finding no redress, they take action on their own account'. To help suppress Sinn Fein acts of terror he wanted every male in Ireland to carry an identity card. 'Sweeps and roundings up in large areas' would then be more effective.
On November 9 the Director of Intelligence at Scotland Yard told Churchill that a Sinn Fein cell in Glasgow had decided there should be kidnapping reprisals in Britain for the reprisals in Ireland; among those to be kidnapped were Churchill and Lloyd George. Churchill was warned not to go to Scotland 'for the next few days or weeks'. He was also provided with a personal armed bodyguard, Detective Sergeant Walter Thompson.
In Ireland, violence intensified. On November 15 four British officers were seized by armed men while on a train, taken away, and never seen again. Two days later the Black and Tans carried out a reprisal raid in Cork, killing three men. In retaliation, Sinn Feiners raided several Dublin hotels and houses in the early morning of November 21, killing fourteen men, including six British officers, some of whom were pulled out of bed and shot dead in front of their wives. Later that day, in a reprisal for the Dublin killings, soldiers opened fire at a football crowd which contained several gunmen, and nine people were killed.
On November 25 Churchill was at Westminster Abbey with Lloyd George at a memorial service for the six officers murdered in Dublin. Three days later seventeen Black and Tan officers were ambushed near Macroom; sixteen were killed. At the Cabinet on December 1, Churchill warned that there were insufficient troops to control the whole of Ireland, and advised that 'we should select areas and concentrate our forces there.' Eight days later the Cabinet agreed to declare martial law in four counties in southern Ireland. Anyone found with arms in the martial law areas, Lloyd George told the Commons, would be tried by Court Martial. The penalty for carrying arms would be death.
On December 10, after a soldier of the Black and Tans had been killed in Cork, much of the commercial centre of the city was burned down as a reprisal. At an emergency Cabinet that evening Churchill suggested that if the Sinn Fein MPs were to meet in Dublin, where they had set up their own Parliament in 1919, and were to show 'an attitude bent on peace', then Britain should offer a month's truce. On December 15 he appealed in the Commons for an end to violence: 'Let murder stop, let constitutional dominion begin, let the Irish people carry the debate from the squalid conditions in which it is now being pushed forward by the Irish murder gang.'
'And by the Government,' called out one of the few remaining Irish Nationalist MPs at Westminster.
'Let them carry this debate into the field of fair discussion,' Churchill continued. Parliament was the place to do this. Then 'they will instantly find that there will be a relief of all those harsh and lamentable conditions which are bringing misery upon Ireland'.
At a special Cabinet meeting on December 29 Lloyd George proposed a one or two months' truce. Churchill supported him. As Secretary of State for War he realised the mounting financial burden of Britain's military involvement in Ireland and Iraq. There were also British garrisons on the Rhine, and in Turkey at both Constantinople and Chanak. He had already proposed that Britain come to terms with the Turkish national leader Mustafa Kemal 'and arrive at a good peace with Turkey'. This would not only ease Britain's position in the Middle East, where Turkey was in a position to stir up anti-British feeling, but would 'recreate that Turkish barrier to Russian ambitions which has always been of the utmost importance to us'.
On December 4 Churchill had again urged Lloyd George to come to terms with Turkey. 'The desire you have to retain Mosul, & indeed Mesopotamia, is directly frustrated by this vendetta against the Turks,' he wrote. An anti-Turkish policy was perpetuating 'terrible waste & expense' in the Middle East, making 'cheaper solutions' impossible. Nine days later he had suggested in Cabinet that Britain should withdraw altogether from northern and central Iraq 'to a line covering only Basra and the Persian oilfields on the Karun River', relinquishing control over Mosul and Baghdad, and returning them to Turkey. The Cabinet rejected his proposal.
Churchill was losing his enthusiasm for the War Office, where he had become responsible for commitments in which he did not believe, such as in Iraq, and for policies of military suppression, such as in Ireland, where his part had become limited to that of the provider of men and arms, and where his appeals for an end to the killing and the start of negotiations had fallen on deaf ears. He wanted a change; that autumn there had been talk of sending him to India as Viceroy.
Still seeking economies in Iraq and Palestine, on December 31 Churchill suggested, and the Cabinet agreed to, setting up a Middle East Department, to bring the administration of what Churchill had called 'these thankless deserts' under a single authority. Hitherto four departments of state had overlapped in duties and policy; the India Office, the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Colonial Office. The new department would be under the Colonial Office; Lord Milner, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, would be its chief.
That New Year's Eve, Churchill and Lloyd George were again among the guests at Philip Sassoon's house at Lympne. Lord Riddell, who was present, commented on Churchill's 'wonderful verbal memory' as, 'with much gusto', he 'regaled us by reciting numerous music-hall songs and other verses, which he remembered with little effort, although he had not heard many of them for years'. It was not only singing that took place that weekend; Lloyd George needed Churchill's administrative skills to reduce British military expenditure in the Middle East. On the morning of 1 January 1921 he asked Churchill if he would be willing to succeed Milner as Colonial Secretary, and also take charge of the new Middle East Department, with responsibility for Iraq and Palestine.
Churchill's views on Zionism were well known. A year later, in an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, denouncing those Russian Jews who had taken a leading part in the imposition of Communist rule on Russia, he had called Zionism an 'inspiring movement', telling his readers, 'If, as may well happen there should be created in our own lifetime, by the banks of the Jordan, a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event will have occurred in the history of the world which would from every point of view be beneficial; and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.'
Churchill asked for a week to think over the offer of the Colonial Office. Returning to Lympne on January 7, he accepted. That same day he embarked on his seventh Cabinet post. He was forty-six years old.
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