In the first week of October a further 2,000 people were killed in London and several other cities by German bombing. But in a speech in the Commons on October 8 Churchill pointed out that at the existing rate of destruction it would take ten years for half of the houses of the capital to be destroyed. But 'quite a lot of things are going to happen to Herr Hitler and the Nazi regime before ten years are up'. As to the homes that had been destroyed, 'we will rebuild them more to our credit than some of them were before. London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham may have much more to suffer, but they will rise from their ruins, more healthy, and, I hope, more beautiful'.
On the day of this speech by Churchill, his son Randolph entered Parliament as a Conservative MP, after an uncontested by-election. He arrived at Westminster at an historic moment in his father's political career. Neville Chamberlain having left the War Cabinet because of his rapidly deteriorating health, Churchill was asked to become Leader of the Conservative Party, the Party for which he had first entered Parliament forty years earlier, during the reign of Queen Victoria, but which after four years he had then left for the next two decades.
Clementine wanted her husband to decline the Party Leadership. Her argument, their daughter Mary has recalled, was 'that he was called by the voice of the whole nation, irrespective of Party', and that by accepting nomination he would 'affront a large body of opinion'. But Churchill needed Party colleagues for his work and was to feel 'sustained through some tough times', his daughter wrote, 'by the assurance of their solid support'. On October 9 he accepted the Leadership. On the following day his grandson Winston, Randolph's son, was born, his mother Pamela being then at Chequers. Churchill commented during his next visit there that if the Germans were to bomb Chequers that weekend they could kill 'three generations at one swoop. Probably they don't think I am so foolish as to come here.' Noted Colville, 'He does not object to chance, but feels it a mistake to be a victim of design.' Churchill therefore decided to spend the weekends nearest to the full moon, when Chequers would be most easily visible from the air, at a house further from London, and one better protected by trees, Ditchley Park, north-west of Oxford.
Churchill's comments to his guests at the weekend were lively and informal. On October 13 he told them, 'A Hun alive is a war in prospect.' He also commented 'that this was the sort of war which would suit the English people once they got used to it. They would prefer all to be in the front line taking part in the battle of London than to look on hopelessly at mass slaughters like Passchendaele.' He had arranged, when shells were in short supply, for anti-aircraft guns to fire loud blank-charges, 'to avoid discouraging silence for the population'. The blanks would also confuse the Germans 'by the flashing on the ground' and at the same time make them 'less aware of our attacking fighters'.
The German air raids continued; on October 14, when Churchill was dining in a small room specially shuttered at the back of 10 Downing Street, a bomb fell on the Horse Guards Parade. He at once ordered his butler, cook and servants to put the whole meal in the dining room, leave their kitchen and go into the basement shelter. Three minutes later a second bomb, falling fifty yards away in the yard on the Treasury side of the building, destroyed the kitchen altogether. Churchill's staff had been saved by his foresight. Two days later another bomb fell in the yard, killing four people sheltering in a Treasury basement. On October 17, as the civilian death-toll in London alone reached ten thousand, in the smoking-room of the Commons an MP pressed Churchill to institute reprisals. He replied: 'This is a military and not a civilian war. You and others may desire to kill women and children. We desire (and have succeeded in our desire) to destroy German military objectives. I quite appreciate your point. But my motto is "Business before Pleasure".'
On October 21 Churchill learned that the 500th British merchant ship had been sunk, a total of more than two million tons of lost shipping. 'This preys on the PM's mind greatly,' Colville noted. That day, in the Atlantic, German aircraft attacked two merchant-shipping convoys coming from Canada, sinking seventeen ships in one and fourteen in the other. That night, as bombs fell on London, Churchill broadcast to France from the underground Central War Rooms, telling his listeners that, in London, 'we are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes.'
As for France, Churchill declared, 'never will I believe that her place among the greatest nations of the world is lost for ever'. Frenchmen must rearm their spirits before it was too late: 'Presently you will be able to weight the arm that strikes for you.' Britain sought one thing only, 'to beat the life and soul out of Hitler and Hitlerism. That alone, that all the time, that to the end. We do not covet anything from any nation except their respect.' His broadcast ended: 'Good night, then; sleep to gather strength for the morning. For the morning will come. Brightly will it shine on the brave and true, kindly on all who suffer for the cause, glorious upon the tombs of heroes. Thus will shine the dawn. Vive la France! Long live the forward march of the common people in all the lands towards their just and true inheritance, and towards the broader and fuller age.'
Throughout that week and the next, the German bombing of Britain was severe. In the last week of October, more than eight hundred civilians were killed in Britain, including fifty Londoners sheltering under a railway arch which received a direct hit, bringing the month's death toll to more than six thousand. The greatest danger lay in a German invasion being launched at this moment of continuous and destructive bombardment. On October 27, however, a German top-secret radio message, sent by Enigma to the German forces gathered at the Channel ports for the invasion of Britain, instructed them 'to continue their training according to plan'. The message was immediately picked up by a radio listening-post in Britain and decrypted at Bletchley within hours. Those who then interpreted the message concluded that invasion could hardly be imminent if 'training' was still to continue.
On October 28, photographic reconnaissance, an essential arm of Intelligence, detected a considerable movement of German shipping eastward, away from Britain. This, combined with the previous day's message, was decisive. Hitler had no plan to invade Britain that month, nor, with winter weather imminent, could he possibly have any such plan for the next four to five months at least. At Chequers on November 2, Colville, who did not know the reason, noted in his diary that Churchill 'now thinks invasion is off'.
Churchill's relief was considerable; but on October 28, the day of the second encouraging clue that Hitler had no immediate plans to invade Britain, Mussolini's forces invaded Greece, and Italian aircraft bombed Athens. 'Then we must bomb Rome,' was Churchill's immediate response, in a note to the new Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal. In fact, it was military targets in Naples that were bombed three days later, when Berlin was also attacked. 'The discharge of bombs on Germany is pitifully small,' was Churchill's comment.
With the threat of invasion no longer imminent, Churchill did his utmost to find men, aircraft, arms and ammunition for Greece, to which Britain had given a guarantee in March 1939. Eden emphasised the danger of sending too much from Egypt, lest the Italians tried to advance even closer to Cairo. But on November 3, the day on which the first British troops landed in Greece, Churchill exhorted him to 'grasp the situation firmly, abandoning negative and passive policies and seizing the opportunity which has come into our hands'. Churchill added, '"Safety First" is the road to ruin in war, even if you had the safety, which you have not.' On the following day Churchill warned the War Cabinet, 'If Greece was overwhelmed it would be said that in spite of our guarantees we had allowed one more small ally to be swallowed up.'
The Joint Planners and the Chiefs of Staff both approved 'leaving Egypt thin for a period' in order to help Greece. Like Churchill, they recognised that the many shortages in war supplies could not be allowed to halt measures judged essential for war policy. But there were hopeful pointers, military and political, as well as harsh ones. On November 3, for the first time in nearly two months, no German bombers flew over London. 'Evidently they do not like the reception they got here,' Churchill commented on the following day, 'or the retaliation on Berlin.' On November 5 Roosevelt was elected President for a further four-year term. Then, on the morning of November 6, the headquarters of the German 16th Army sent top-secret instructions to the relevant commander that part of the apparatus for equipping invasion barges in Belgium and northern France 'should be returned to store', leaving behind only what was needed for 'exercises'. This instruction was picked up and decrypted at Bletchley Park; Churchill was handed a copy of it in the locked box, to which he alone had the key, on the evening of November 6. Hitler would be turning elsewhere for his next conquest.
There was further good news for Churchill on November 7; military supplies for Egypt were carried by five British warships the whole length of the Mediterranean, as he had been urging for some time. A day later he learned that the Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, General Wavell, had completed a plan to drive the Italian Army out of Egypt. 'I purred like six cats,' Churchill later recalled. 'At long last,' he told his advisers, 'we are going to throw off the intolerable shackles of the defensive. Wars are won by superior will-power. Now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.' Henceforth Churchill had to seek a delicate balance between the war supplies needed for Egypt and those needed for Greece; there were not enough for both, yet both had to be defended. He had also to make sure that Britain's cities had adequate anti-aircraft defence; on November 8, alerted to a shortage of anti-aircraft guns in Coventry, where the city's munitions factories had already been bombed sixteen times, he gave instructions to strengthen Coventry's anti-aircraft defences. These instructions were carried out at once; he had affixed one of his special bright red 'ACTION THIS DAY' labels to them.
***
On November 11 the public was elated when British naval air forces launched an attack with aerial torpedoes on the Italian Fleet at anchor at Taranto; three of Italy's six battleships were sunk. It was Britain's first naval victory of Churchill's Premiership. He at once sent an account of it to Roosevelt, whose Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, suggested taking immediate precautionary measures to protect Pearl Harbor, where he considered that 'the greatest danger will come from aerial torpedoes'. Knox was right: the Japanese also learned the lesson of Taranto. A year later their torpedo bombers were to find a fleet at anchor when they struck at that same Pearl Harbor.
On the night of Britain's victory at Taranto, Churchill was preparing a Parliamentary obituary of Neville Chamberlain, who had died on the previous day. His speech was a moving attempt to understand all Chamberlain had striven for. 'It is very good,' Kathleen Hill told him after he had dictated it to her, to which he replied, 'Well, of course I could have done it the other way round.'
Churchill told the House that it had fallen to Chamberlain, in one of the supreme crises of the world, 'to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.'
On November 14 Churchill was one of the pall-bearers at Chamberlain's funeral in Westminster Abbey. Returning to Downing Street, and to the war, he telegraphed to Wavell, 'Now is the time to take risks and strike the Italians by land, sea and air.' Then, having finished lunch, he set off by car for his second weekend at Ditchley Park. The car had not been on its way for five minutes when Churchill, working his way through the urgent material which one of his Private Secretaries had given him on his departure, read the most recent Air Intelligence estimate of forthcoming German bomber targets. It seemed almost certain that a heavy raid was in prospect that very night. Its target was not yet known; but several earlier reports had suggested that the next big raid would be on London. Churchill at once told his driver to turn round and take him back to Downing Street. He was not going to spend the night 'peacefully in the country', he told the Private Secretary, 'while the metropolis was under heavy attack.'
Not London, in fact, but Coventry was the target for that night. Had this been known, every possible effort would have been made, according to the established pattern, to send fire-fighting appliances and civil defence help to the threatened city. No attempt was ever made, as was alleged many years later, to protect any source of Intelligence regarding the air raids by denying the target-city whatever defences and help could be sent to it. But for some days there had been conflicting indications about the target of the next big raid. Not only London, but also the Thames Valley, the Kent or Essex coasts, Coventry, and Birmingham, had each been mentioned as the possible target. The Air Ministry Intelligence estimate in which Churchill was told that the raid was definitely to be that night also noted that the target was 'probably in the vicinity of London'. Added to this estimate was a note that if later information were to indicate 'Coventry, Birmingham or elsewhere' it was hoped that instructions for counter-measures would still be got out in time.
On returning to Downing Street to await the raid on London, Churchill gave instructions for the women members of his staff to be sent home. Later he sent two of his duty Private Secretaries to a deep air-raid shelter in Piccadilly with the words 'You are too young to die'. He then waited impatiently for the raid to begin, first in the underground Central War Rooms and then on the Air Ministry roof.
At ten minutes to four that afternoon, Air Intelligence was informed that the beams for that night's bombing had been detected; they were pointing at Coventry. British bombers were at once sent off to bomb the airfields from which the attack would come, while a continuous fighter patrol, at times of a hundred fighters, was maintained over Coventry itself. Three and a half hours later three hundred German bombers struck. It was the heaviest raid yet on a munitions centre. The city's anti-aircraft defences, so recently strengthened as a result of Churchill's initiative, and alerted now by the Air Ministry's warning, kept the attacking aircraft very high. The fire density of the anti-aircraft barrage, likewise alerted, was greater than that yet put up on any one night over London. But as well as the damage done to the munitions factories, a fire-storm was created in the city centre, 568 civilians were killed, and the cathedral destroyed.
The renewed German bombing offensive continued for a week, with 484 civilians being killed in London and 228 in Birmingham. Thanks to the success of Signals Intelligence, the beams were identified on each occasion, and defensive measures taken in advance, as indeed had been done at Coventry. But the weight of bombs dropped was heavy; in London seven hospitals were among the buildings hit. Retaliation was swift; Berlin was bombed on November 16 and Hamburg two days later, when 233 German civilians were killed.
***
'Winston flogs on, wildly but with the same genius,' Captain Berkeley had written in his diary on November 12. 'He is virtually a dictator and it is only seldom some brave Minister rebels. The Chiefs of Staff, at any rate, are quite subservient and wholly engaged in ways and means.' Two weeks later, Churchill told Eden that never in his life had he felt more equal to his work. On November 30 he celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday. 'Very few men in history have had to bear such a burden as you have carried in the last six months,' Eden wrote to him that day. 'It is really wonderful that at the end of it you are fitter & more vigorous, and better able than ever to guide & inspire us all.'
Much inspiration and guidance were still needed; on December 8, in a raid which killed eighty-five civilians, German bombers destroyed part of the House of Commons. But two days later Churchill was able to announce the success of Wavell's offensive in the Western Desert; more than five hundred Italian soldiers had been taken prisoner. Within twenty-four hours the number of prisoners had risen to seven thousand, three Generals among them. 'One has a growing feeling,' Churchill telegraphed to Field Marshal Smuts, 'that wickedness is not going to reign.'
On December 16 Churchill exhorted Wavell to do his utmost 'to maul the Italian Army and rip them off the African shore to the utmost possible extent.' On the following night, after discussing Churchill's 'qualities and defects' with two other civil servants, Captain Berkeley wrote in his diary: 'If only there were just a few more anything like him! Even the spectacularly successful campaign in Egypt would probably never have been launched if he had not ceaselessly urged Wavell on. Thank heavens he has been proved right.'
On December 18, on a visit to his old school at Harrow, Churchill wept as the boys sang their rousing patriotic songs. To Eden he spoke on the following night of the dark days of the summer: 'Normally I wake up buoyant to face the new day. Then I awoke with dread in my heart.' Although the months of desperation were now over, a long and difficult struggle lay ahead.
Churchill was ever searching for ways of influencing events. On December 23 he sent a private message to Pétain and Weygand at Vichy, urging them to forsake their German yoke and set up the standard of French revolt in North Africa, with British military support, and offering to enter into secret Staff talks. That same night he broadcast to the Italian people, telling them of his faith that the day would come 'when the Italian nation will once more take a hand in shaping its own fortunes'.
On the following day, December 24, after wishing his staff 'a busy Christmas and a frantic New Year', Churchill left for Chequers to spend Christmas with his family; while there he followed his own injunction to his staff, dictating several minutes; but eventually he lent himself to the festive atmosphere. After dinner, noted Colville, 'the shorthand writer was dismissed and we had a sort of sing-song until after midnight. The PM sang lustily, if not always in tune.' When Sarah's husband, Vic Oliver, now billed as 'England's Favourite American Comedian', played Viennese waltzes, Churchill 'danced a remarkably frisky measure of his own in the middle of the room'.
Returning to London on December 28, Churchill at once pressed the Chiefs of Staff to examine the possible capture of the Italian island of Pantelleria, between the Tunisian coast of Africa and Sicily. Its capture 'would be electrifying', he wrote, 'and would greatly increase our strategic hold upon the Central Mediterranean. It is also a most important step to opening the Narrows to the passage of trade and troop convoys, whereby so great an easement to our shipping could be obtained.' The Joint Planning Committee examined the idea, as did the Chiefs of Staff, but only to dismiss it; it would be easy to seize the island, but too costly to hold and supply it afterwards. Churchill deferred to their reasoning.
***
On the night of December 29 German bombers made a heavy incendiary-bomb raid on London's docks and railway stations. Eight Wren churches were among the hundreds of buildings destroyed. 'They burned a large part of the City of London last night,' Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt on the following evening, 'and the scenes of widespread destruction here and in our provincial centres are shocking; but when I visited the still-burning ruins today the spirit of the Londoners was as high as in the first days of the indiscriminate bombing in September, four months ago.' On the advice of the British Embassy in Washington, this paragraph was not sent to the President, for fear, the Embassy explained, 'that it might revive the defeatist impression of some months ago'.
Relations with Roosevelt had reached a difficult point, almost a breaking point. Many of Churchill's most urgent requests for war supplies had failed to win the President's approval. Britain's inability to pay was proving a serious stumbling-block. Arms purchases for December, January and February amounted to $1 billion; but her gold reserves and dollar balances had been so depleted by a year of war expenditure as to total only $574 million. The Americans had offered to provide the equipment for ten British divisions, but, Churchill told his War Cabinet colleagues, wanted $257 million paid in advance out of these rapidly dwindling gold reserves. Roosevelt had gone so far as to send an American warship to the Simonstown naval base near Cape Town to collect the $50 million of Britain's gold reserves held in South Africa.
Churchill's first instinct was to protest vehemently. Such a move, he wrote in a draft letter to Roosevelt which in the end he held back, 'would wear the aspect of a sheriff collecting the last assets of a helpless debtor'. It was 'not fitting that any nation should put itself wholly in the hands of another'. The message as finally sent on the last day of 1940 was firm but conciliatory. Britain needed to know how America would want to be paid, and to know soon. Two days after sending this appeal, Churchill learned that a ship with seven and a half million American cartridges had sunk after a collision with another ship in its convoy. This 'grievous blow', as Churchill called it, almost offset the relief and pleasure at another victory by Wavell, the capture on January 4 of the Libyan port of Bardia, taking 45,000 prisoners and capturing 462 heavy guns. Two days later Wavell reached the outskirts of Tobruk.
As the public learned of a victory, Churchill learned of danger; a top-secret German Air Force message decrypted and shown to him on January 9 suggested that preparations were being made for a German invasion of Greece. So far, the Greeks had managed to halt the Italian attack, and to drive the invader back across the Albanian border. But once Germany were to intervene the whole balance of power in the Balkans, the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean would change. Even neutral Turkey might throw in its lot with Germany, as it was being pressed to do. Once more Britain would have to move resources from Wavell's victorious army, which would then be in jeopardy, to the defence of an ally; 'the prosecution of the campaign in Libya must now take second place' was how Churchill expressed it to his colleagues. Eden agreed.
All Britain's war plans now depended upon the attitude of the United States towards payment for arms supplies. On January 8 Roosevelt's emissary Harry Hopkins reached Britain; two days later Churchill spent three hours alone with him at Downing Street. A friendship began that day which was to grow rapidly, with incalculable benefits for Britain. From the outset Churchill was as frank with Hopkins as he was with his closest advisers. 'He thinks Greece is lost,' Hopkins reported to Roosevelt, 'although he is now reinforcing the Greeks-and weakening his African Army.' Hopkins added that Churchill was in 'close touch' with Pétain, with a view to encouraging a Vichy French move against the Germans in North Africa.
Churchill took Hopkins to Ditchley for the weekend, where the two men discussed Britain's needs. One of Churchill's advisers told Hopkins that anything less than twenty-four million tons of war supplies and sixteen million tons of food 'would definitely have a deleterious effect on our war effort'. Even as Churchill and Hopkins talked, Roosevelt was announcing the financial solution; the United States would build what Britain needed and then lease it to her, on a rental basis, with payment to be delayed until after the war. But before this Lend-Lease arrangement came into force, Britain must pay all the debts she could in gold, and by the sale of British commercial assets in the United States. It was a hard bargain, depriving Britain of what was left of her economic strength, but it constituted an American commitment to the long-term provision of Britain's war needs. Congress would still have to approve, and that would take time, but the principle of help had been laid down. Roosevelt had been in earnest when he had declared in his annual end of the year radio broadcast, 'We must be the great arsenal of democracy.'
Travelling with Churchill in Scotland, on January 17 Hopkins heard him tell a Glasgow audience, 'My one aim is to extirpate Hitlerism from Europe.' That evening, at dinner, Hopkins told the assembled company, 'I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return?' He would, he said, be quoting a verse from the Bible, 'Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.' Hopkins paused, then added quietly, 'Even to the end.' Churchill wept; the American emissary's words, wrote one of those present, 'seemed like a rope thrown to a drowning man'.
Churchill took Hopkins to Dover, to see the gun batteries there and to look across the Channel to the cliffs of German-occupied France. If he had to make a speech after German forces had landed in Britain, Churchill told his guest, he would end with the words, 'The hour has come; kill the Hun.' But in fact a German top-secret radio signal sent by Enigma machine, and decrypted at Bletchley on January 12, had confirmed that invasion was no longer a German design; this particular message was an instruction to the German wireless stations which would have been needed to organise the movement of equipment for any invasion, that they were not to be manned after January 10.
On January 22 Churchill gave the Commons details of a Production Executive which had been created to 'ginger up' production, and an Import Executive to streamline the distribution of Britain's imports. 'This great nation is getting into its war stride,' he said. 'It is accomplishing the transition from the days of peace and comfort to those of supreme, organised, indomitable exertion.' That same day Australian and British forces under Wavell entered Tobruk, capturing 25,000 Italian soldiers. Churchill's mood was benign; at Chequers five days later Colville noted in his diary, 'The PM has throughout been at his most entertaining and shown the sunniest side of his disposition.' At dinner on the previous evening he had told his guests, including Hopkins, that 'he hated nobody and didn't feel he had any enemies-except the Huns, and that was professional!'
In all, Hopkins spent twelve evenings with Churchill; in his report to Roosevelt he stressed that Churchill was not only Prime Minister, 'he is the directing force behind the strategy and the conduct of the war in all its essentials. He has an amazing hold on the British people of all classes and groups. He has particular strengths both with the military establishment and the working people'. From Chequers, Hopkins went to London, where he concluded two agreements, one whereby American aircraft-carriers would transport aircraft to Britain 'in case of urgent need', and one for the pooling of British and American Intelligence in 'enemy-occupied countries'. That same day, January 27, a Staff Conference opened in Washington to determine 'the best methods' whereby the British and American armed forces could defeat Germany, 'should the United States be compelled to resort to war'. The aim of the talks was to secure 'unity of field command' in the event both of strategic and tactical joint operations. Their conclusion was emphatic: even in the event of war breaking out in the Pacific, the Atlantic-European theatre would still be the decisive one, once Germany and the United States were at war.
As Hopkins prepared to return to Washington, the Americans sent Britain the Japanese equivalent of the German Enigma machine, a Purple machine on which tens of thousands of top-secret Japanese diplomatic, consular, naval and merchant-shipping radio signals, received by listening posts in Britain and overseas, could be decrypted. This machine, accompanied by two American Signals Intelligence experts, was taken to Bletchley. Henceforth two nations, one at war and the other at peace, were to act in concert as if they were both at war.
During a final weekend at Chequers, Hopkins produced a large box of gramophone records, 'all American tunes or ones with an Anglo-American significance', Churchill's Principal Private Secretary, Eric Seal, wrote home. 'We had these until well after midnight, the PM walking about, sometimes dancing a pas-seul, in time with the music. We all got a bit sentimental & Anglo-American, under the influence of the good dinner & the music. The PM kept on stopping in his walk, & commenting on the situation-what a remarkable thing that the two nations should be drawing so much together at this critical time, how much we had in common etc.'
In the Western Desert the westward advance continued. At the battle of Beda Fomm in the first week of February, 130,000 Italians were taken prisoner. By February 8 all of Cyrenaica was in British hands. That same day the Lend-Lease Bill was passed in the House of Representatives by 260 to 165 votes. Only the Senate vote remained. In a radio broadcast on February 9, his first for five months, Churchill spoke of a 'mighty tide' of American sympathy, goodwill and effective aid that had 'begun to flow' across the Atlantic. His message to Roosevelt, he said, was 'Put your confidence in us. Give us your faith and your blessing and, under Providence, all will be well. We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.'
From Field Marshal Smuts in South Africa came the message, 'Every broadcast is a battle.' Churchill now planned, he wrote to the Chiefs of Staff Committee on February 11, to turn Cyrenaica into 'the beginning of a Free Italy', ruled by Britain under a Free-Italian flag and serving as the starting point of 'a real split in Italy and anti-Mussolini propaganda'. Four or five thousand Italian troops could be trained and based there, 'sworn to the liberation of Italy from the German and Mussolini yoke'. The day after Churchill set down this plan for discussion with the Chiefs of Staff, a German General, Erwin Rommel, arrived in Tripoli with instructions to drive the British out of Cyrenaica.
The German plan to conquer Greece was also advancing; many of its operational orders were sent by top-secret cypher and decrypted at Bletchley. For Churchill and his closest advisers, the priority of the despatch of British military help to Greece was hard to decide. The needs of the Western Desert could not easily be set aside. But Eden wanted to send help to Greece, and was supported both by Wavell, with whom he visited Athens at the end of February, and by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Dill. Churchill was inclined to caution. 'Do not consider yourself obligated to a Greek enterprise if in your hearts you feel it will only be another Norwegian fiasco,' he telegraphed to Eden and Wavell on February 20. 'If no good plan can be made please say so. But of course you know how valuable success would be.'
At the War Cabinet on February 24 Churchill asked all six Ministers, Attlee, Bevin, Greenwood, Kingsley Wood, Beaverbrook and Sir John Anderson, to express their views. All six were in favour of sending military assistance to Greece. 'While being under no illusions,' Churchill telegraphed to Eden, 'we all send you the order "Full Steam Ahead".'
Even more than Greece and the land battle, the German submarine successes in the Atlantic were becoming a cause of deep concern; it was the Battle of the Atlantic that threatened to close Britain's food and supply life-line. One of Churchill's staff, reporting a particular convoy disaster on February 26, called it 'distressing'. Churchill replied: 'Distressing! It is terrifying. If it goes on it will be the end of us.' In the three months beginning in March, half a million tons of Allied shipping were sunk by German air attack. Every day Churchill was presented with the most recent statistics of these sinkings; what cargoes had gone down, what escorts had been lost, what was still on its way. 'How willingly would I have exchanged a full-scale invasion,' he later wrote, 'for this shapeless, measureless peril, expressed in charts, curves, and statistics. This mortal danger to our life-line gnawed my bowels.'
At Chequers on March 1 Churchill told the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, that the German sinking of merchant ships was 'the supreme menace' of the war. 'The PM in conversation will steep himself (and you) in gloom,' Menzies wrote in his diary. But on the following night he noted: 'Churchill's course is set. There is no defeat in his heart.'
***
On March 3, as an unexpected reminder that the British position in North Africa might not be as secure as was thought, German aircraft dropped mines into the Suez Canal, closing it completely for a week. A day after the mines had been dropped, the first British troops left Egypt for Greece. Under a plan devised by Eden, Wavell and Dill, Australian and New Zealand troops would follow, to take up a defensive position on the Aliakmon Line. To Eden's consternation, the Greek Commander-in-Chief changed this plan, announcing that the British and Commonwealth troops would be sent to the northern frontier. Despite the dangers posed by this, Eden told Churchill, in a personal message, that he did not see 'any alternative to doing our best to seeing it through'.
Churchill thought otherwise; if Germany were to send an ultimatum to Greece, he told the War Cabinet on March 5, the Greeks would find it 'impossible to carry on the struggle' and there would be 'little or nothing which we could do to assist them in time'. The War Cabinet agreed, but, still in Athens, Eden and Dill were determined to live up to Britain's promise of support, as was Wavell in Cairo. As if to underline this determination, the Greeks now agreed to allow all Allied forces to be sent as originally planned to the Aliakmon Line, less exposed than at the frontier. A final War Cabinet decision was to be taken on March 7. In front of the Ministers was a telegram from Eden, then in Cairo, which stated: 'To have fought and suffered in Greece would be less damaging to us than to have left Greece to her fate.' Wavell agreed with him, said Eden, as did Smuts, who had just arrived in Cairo from South Africa.
The combined advocacy of Eden, Dill, Wavell and Smuts was decisive. At the War Cabinet on March 7 the first Minister to speak was Ernest Bevin, who supported military assistance to Greece. Churchill then said that in his view 'we should go forward with a good heart'. Robert Menzies, who was present, agreed with Churchill; it was a far cry from Australia's rejection of the Chanak commitment in 1922. There was no dissent; more than 60,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops were put under orders to sail from Egypt to Greece. That night Colville noted in his diary: 'The PM much happier. His mind is relieved now that a great decision has been irrevocably taken.' Churchill was also relieved to learn that night that in Washington, Hopkins told him over the telephone, the Senate had passed the Lend-Lease Bill by 60 votes to 31. 'Thank God for your news,' Churchill telegraphed to Hopkins on the following day, and to Roosevelt he wrote, 'Our blessings from the whole British Empire go out to you and the American nation for this very present help in time of troubles.'
For the period ending in six months' time, Britain had been appropriated $4.736 billion to continue 'resisting aggression'. This was the amount already owed by Britain for the arms, munitions, aircraft and shipping being produced in the United States for that period. Even so, Churchill pointed out privately to his colleagues, the forced sale of Britain's assets in the United States meant that 'we are not only to be skinned, but flayed to the bone', while at the same time the ship-building aspect of the American programme was 'less than half of what we need'. The German Navy's top-secret radio signals were at this time being sent by an Enigma key that could not be broken at Bletchley, with the result that the Germans had a crucial advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic.
'The sinkings are bad and the strain is increasing at sea,' Churchill explained to Roosevelt on March 10. A week later a special envoy, sent by Roosevelt to London, Averell Harriman, was invited to Chequers. Like Hopkins, he was in Roosevelt's confidence; like Hopkins, he was determined to ensure that Britain's needs were met. 'We accept you as a friend,' Churchill told him. 'Nothing will be kept from you.' Within three weeks of Harriman's arrival, Roosevelt agreed to put ten United States naval cutters at Britain's disposal for convoy duties.
On March 19 Churchill was Harriman's host at dinner at 10 Downing Street. During dinner there was a heavy air raid on London; Churchill took Harriman on to the Air Ministry roof to see it. 'A fantastic climb it was,' wrote Eric Seal, 'up ladders, a long circular stairway, & a tiny manhole right at the top of a tower.' That night more than five hundred Londoners were killed.
***
The Germans now made their final plans to invade Greece, and to make an alliance with Yugoslavia. On March 22 Churchill sent Dr Cvetković, the Yugoslav Prime Minister, a long and impassioned appeal to remain neutral, and thus to preserve Yugoslavia's true independence. 'There are only 65,000,000 malignant Huns,' Churchill told him, 'most of whom are already engaged in holding down Austrians, Czechs, Poles, and many other ancient races they now bully and pillage. The peoples of the British Empire and the United States number nearly 200,000,000 in their homelands and British Dominions alone.' This appeal failed; two days later Dr Cvetković travelled to Berlin and signed a pact with Hitler. Churchill at once approved the efforts of Special Operations Executive to rally anti-German opinion in Belgrade, and instructed the British Embassy there to do all in its power to warn the pro-German elements of the folly of their path. 'Continue to pester, nag and bite,' he told the Ambassador, Sir Ronald Campbell, on March 26. 'Demand audiences. Don't take NO for an answer. Cling on to them, pointing out Germans are already taking the subjugation of the country for granted.' That night the anti-Germans seized power in Belgrade. 'Yugoslavia has found its soul' was Churchill's comment.
Setbacks and successes crowded in upon one another: that March there was a sharp increase in German air raids over Britain, with 4,259 civilians killed. But in the last week of March, guided by the comprehensive reading of the Italian Army's top-secret radio messages, British forces defeated the Italians in both Eritrea and southern Ethiopia. That same week, also guided by the successful decrypting of high-grade Italian cypher messages, and helped by the British air forces recently arrived in Greece, the Royal Navy sank three Italian heavy-cruisers and two destroyers off Matapan. But in a single week 60,000 tons of Allied merchant shipping was sunk in the Atlantic; at the end of the month the cruiser York was sunk in the Mediterranean, though with the loss of only two of her crew of more than six hundred.
During the last week of March, as a result of Britain's ability to read the Japanese top-secret diplomatic telegrams, Churchill was able to follow the travels and talks of the Japanese Foreign Minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, in Rome, Berlin and Moscow. While in Berlin, Matsuoka was pressed, on Hitler's authority, to agree to a Japanese attack on British possessions in the Far East as soon as possible. An attack on Singapore, he was told, would be a decisive factor in the 'speedy overthrow of England'. Reading Matsuoka's own top-secret account of this German pressure, Churchill decided to send him a message, which Matsuoka could read during his return journey to Japan through Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway. The message contained eight questions designed to make Japan pause before committing its fleets and armies against Britain; questions, Churchill wrote to Matsuoka, which seemed to 'deserve the attention' of the Japanese Government and people. The questions read:
1. Will Germany, without the command of the sea or the command of the British daylight air, be able to invade and conquer Great Britain in the spring, summer or autumn of 1941? Will Germany try to do so? Would it not be in the interests of Japan to wait until these questions have answered themselves?
2. Will the German attack on British shipping be strong enough to prevent American aid from reaching British shores, with Great Britain and the United States transforming their whole industry to war purposes?
3. Did Japan's accession to the Triple Pact make it more likely or less likely that the United States would come into the present war?
4. If the United States entered the war at the side of Great Britain, and Japan ranged herself with the Axis Powers, would not the naval superiority of the two English-speaking nations enable them to dispose of the Axis Powers in Europe before turning their united strength upon Japan?
5. Is Italy a strength or a burden to Germany? Is the Italian Fleet as good at sea as on paper? Is it as good on paper as it used to be?
6. Will the British Air Force be stronger than the German Air Force before the end of 1941 and far stronger before the end of 1942?
7. Will the many countries which are being held down by the German Army and Gestapo learn to like the Germans more or will they like them less as the years pass by?
8. Is it true that the production of steel in the United States during 1941 will be 75 million tons, and in Great Britain about 12½, making a total of nearly 90 million tons? If Germany should happen to be defeated, as she was last time, would not the 7 million tons steel production of Japan be inadequate for a single-handed war?
'From the answers to these questions,' Churchill added, 'may spring the avoidance by Japan of a serious catastrophe, and a marked improvement in the relations between Japan and the two great sea Powers of the West.' As an added inducement to caution, Sir Charles Portal had already given instructions, he told Churchill, 'that a heavy attack should be made on Berlin on the night that we expect Matsuoka to be there'.
Churchill was under no illusions about Japanese intentions. 'Let me have a report,' he minuted to Ismay a month later, 'on the efficiency of the gunners and personnel managing the 15-inch batteries and searchlights at Singapore.' Were they, he asked, fitted with radar? The defences at Singapore were to be made efficient, but no new forces were to be sent out, and no fighter aircraft could be spared. This was made clear by the Defence Committee in answer to an Australian request for the immediate despatch of British naval and air reinforcements to Singapore. But in the event of a 'serious, major attack' by Japan on Australia, Churchill remarked, 'we would abandon everything to come to their help that, however, 'did not mean that we would give up our great interests in the Middle East on account of a few raids by Japanese cruisers'. The painstaking build-up of Britain's military strength in the Middle East could not be jeopardised.
For several months the German Army had been building up its forces along the German-Soviet border. To coerce Yugoslavia into concluding its pact with Germany, some of these forces had been moved into the Balkans. When the pact was signed, an order was given for these forces to return to the Soviet border. After the overthrow of the pro-German Government in Belgrade, Hitler, cheated of an acquiescent Yugoslavia, made plans to invade; as part of his plan he countermanded an earlier order to transfer three Panzer divisions to the Soviet border. This countermand was sent by a top-secret radio message; Churchill read it as soon as it was decrypted at Bletchley. As it showed clearly that the Germans had been engaged in a build-up of their forces on the Soviet border, he decided to send the information to Stalin. 'Your Excellency will readily appreciate the significance of these facts,' Churchill commented. To disguise their most secret source, he pretended that they came from a 'trusted agent'.
Churchill knew that once Hitler conquered the wheatfields of the Ukraine and overran the oilfields of the Caucasus he could devote all his resources to the invasion of Britain; Russia's ability to resist and to survive a German attack was clearly a crucial British interest. He therefore arranged for Stalin to be sent any further indications of German troop concentrations in the East. Meanwhile, starting on April 2, it was in the Western Desert that the Germans were taking the initiative, with Rommel driving Wavell's forces back towards the Egyptian border. Also reaching Churchill from April 2, a series of decrypts of German top-secret messages made it clear that a German invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia was imminent. Reading decrypts of these messages, Churchill at once informed the new Yugoslav Prime Minister, General Simovic, disguising his source by describing it as 'our agents' in France and 'our African Army Intelligence'. On April 5 further decrypts revealed that the attack was timed for the following day. This information was also passed on to the Yugoslav leaders.
On April 6, Palm Sunday, German bombers struck at Belgrade; several thousand civilians were killed in one of the most ferocious bombing raids of the war. The Greek port of Piraeus was also bombed; six ships with British military supplies were sunk before a seventh ship, with two hundred tons of high explosives on board, received a direct hit and blew up, devastating the port. An eighth ship, bringing essential supplies for a Greek explosives factory, was sunk at sea. When Churchill spoke in the Commons on April 9 he was greeted by cheers, but his news was bad; German forces had entered Salonica that morning.
Churchill wanted alertness maintained throughout Britain; on April 8 he instructed Bridges to ensure that there was no 'serious break' in Ministerial work over Easter. Ministers were responsible, he wrote, for being on the telephone 'at the shortest notice' and should take their holidays in rotation: 'I am told that Easter is a very good time for invasion.' German bombing raids over Britain had continued since the beginning of the year; on April 9 it was officially announced that nearly 30,000 British civilians had been killed in air raids since the start of the war. On April 11 another raid on Coventry led to serious setbacks in aircraft production. On the following night Churchill travelled by train to Bristol with Clementine, Mary, Averell Harriman, Ismay and Colville, for an honorary degree ceremony; he had been Chancellor of the university for the past fifteen years. In a railway-siding just outside the city, he and his entourage slept in the train, waiting for the dawn. While it was still dark they were woken up by the noise of a massive air raid on Bristol itself.
That morning Churchill visited the scenes of devastation; he was shocked and moved. Although the people in the bombed parts of the city looked 'bewildered', Colville noted in his diary, they were 'thrilled at the sight of Winston who drove about sitting on the hood of an open car waving his hat'. Ismay wrote after the war, in a letter to Churchill: 'At one of the rest centres at which you called there was a poor old woman who had lost all her belongings, sobbing her heart out. But as you entered, she took her handkerchief from her eyes and waved it madly about shouting "Hooray, hooray".' Back at Chequers that evening, Churchill learned that Roosevelt was prepared to extend American naval patrols in the Atlantic to the 25th meridian, and report to Britain the location of any 'aggressor ships or planes' that the patrols located. Thus the grim sights of the morning were offset that same night by a feeling of growing American involvement.
On April 13 German forces occupied Belgrade; in Greece, German troops began their attack on the Aliakmon Line; in distant Iraq, the pro-German Rashid Ali, who had seized power in Baghdad ten days earlier, besieged the Royal Air Force base at Habbaniya, and threatened Britain's Middle Eastern oil supplies. In Libya, Rommel's forces were approaching Tobruk. On April 16 the Belfast dockyards were bombed, and considerable damage done to the city itself, 675 civilians being killed. On the following night 450 German bombers struck at London; it was one of the heaviest raids on the capital; 1,180 people were killed and more than two thousand seriously injured.
***
On April 17, after eleven days of struggle against overwhelming odds, the Yugoslav Army surrendered to the Germans. On the following day, in Athens, the Greek Prime Minister committed suicide. The British War Cabinet had already agreed that once its troops in Greece could no longer hold the Aliakmon Line they should be withdrawn from Greece altogether, and go to Crete, thus creating a fifth war zone in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Asked by the Air Force Commander, Middle East, which of the five war zones should be given priority for his fighter forces, Churchill replied, with the approval of the Chiefs of Staff, 'Libya counts first, evacuation of troops from Greece second, Tobruk shipping unless indispensable to victory must be fitted in as convenient, Iraq can be ignored, and Crete worked up later.'
The evacuation of British forces from Greece began on April 24. For seven days German dive-bombers struck at the troop transports. Several thousand troops were killed, 650 on board two destroyers that had previously rescued them from the sea. In all, 50,000 men were evacuated, but a further 11,500 were taken prisoner. 'I am afraid you have been having a very worrying time lately,' the fifteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth wrote to Churchill on April 23, 'but I am sure things will begin to look up again soon.' Four days later, at this bleakest of times for Britain since the previous summer, Churchill broadcast from Chequers with confidence in the final outcome. 'No prudent and far-seeing man can doubt,' he said, 'that the eventual and total defeat of Hitler and Mussolini is certain, in view of the respective declared resolves of the British and American democracies.' The British Empire and the United States had 'more wealth, more technical resources, and they make more steel, than the whole of the rest of the world put together'. They were determined 'that the cause of freedom shall not be trampled down, nor the tide of world progress turned backwards, by the criminal Dictators.' That night at dinner when the Director of Military Operations at the War Office, General Kennedy, suggested that Britain might have to evacuate Egypt, Churchill was so 'infuriated', another of those present noted, that 'we had some trouble calming him down'.
Churchill realised that Egypt might well be lost, though he expected the troops there to fight to the last man. 'Anyone who can kill a Hun or even an Italian has rendered a good service,' he wrote in a Directive for the Defence of Egypt on April 28. Four days later he warned Roosevelt that if Egypt were lost, to continue the war against a Germany triumphant in Europe and the greater part of Asia and Africa would be 'a hard, long and bleak proposition'. Churchill pressed Roosevelt for an immediate American declaration of war. 'You alone can forestall the Germans in Morocco,' he wrote. The situation for Egypt was hazardous. 'Personally I think we shall win, in spite of the physical difficulties of reinforcing by tanks and air. But I adjure you, Mr President, not to underrate the gravity of the consequences which may follow from a Middle Eastern collapse. In this war every post is a winning post, and how many more are we going to lose?'
The German bombing of Britain had continued with undiminished ferocity; on May 2 Churchill visited the bombed areas of Plymouth. In five days of raids on Liverpool twenty merchant ships were sunk. Yet in public Churchill maintained his mood of confidence, telling the Commons on May 7 that when he looked back over the perils that had been overcome, and remembered all that had gone wrong and also all that had gone right: 'I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, let it rage. We shall come through.'
On May 10, in the heaviest German air raid of the Blitz of 1941, more than 1,400 civilians were killed, most of them in London. Among the buildings destroyed was the Chamber of the House of Commons. 'The Huns obligingly chose a time when none of us was there,' Churchill told Randolph, who was then serving in Cairo as an Official Spokesman at General Headquarters. To his chauffeur, who drove him from the Annexe to see the burnt-out Chamber, Churchill remarked, 'I shall never live to sit in the Commons Chamber again.'
For three nights the glow of fires lit the London sky. But on the night of this devastating raid Churchill learned that the United States would make available to Britain a third of its pilot-training facilities. A week later the Italian forces in Italian East Africa surrendered, and Rommel's troops were pushed back thirty miles. But Churchill and his closest advisers knew from the Germans' own top-secret radio signals that it was against Crete that the main German effort was now poised. The attack on Crete began on May 20. As the battle there raged, in the North Atlantic the Prince of Wales and the Hood joined in the pursuit of the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen.
Churchill awaited at Chequers the news of both the island and the ocean battles. It was there, in the early hours of May 24, that he learned of the sinking of the Hood, with the loss of 1,500 men. Three days later, a few moments after he had finished speaking to the House of Commons, meeting at nearby Church House because the Chamber had been bombed to rubble, he was handed a piece of paper and rose again, to tell the House: 'I have just received news that the Bismarck is sunk.' Nearly two thousand German sailors had perished.
That same day, Wavell ordered the evacuation of Crete. Despite a brilliant and tenacious Allied defence, German air power, based in Greece, had proved the decisive factor in the outcome of the battle, during the course of which more than four thousand of the defenders had been killed, many blown to pieces by German 500-lb bombs. During the four days of evacuation, 16,500 men were taken off, but as German air attacks on the embarkation ports intensified, five thousand men had no option but to surrender. In the battle at sea, more than two thousand officers and men of the Royal Navy were killed; other Allied naval forces also suffered heavy losses.
In search of solitude Churchill spent the evening of June 1 at Chartwell. He quickly recovered his buoyancy, and was relieved to learn that Roosevelt had agreed both to the American occupation of Iceland, thereby liberating the British troops there for service in the Middle East, and to the despatch of British war supplies to Egypt on ships flying the American flag. These supplies included 200 tanks from American Army production, 24 anti-aircraft guns, 700 ten-ton trucks, ammunition, and water-supply equipment.
On June 6, at an airfield in southern England, Churchill was further cheered as he watched the first Flying Fortress from the United States make a safe and welcome landing. There was also good news two days later, when Allied forces advanced into Vichy-held Syria. 'I feel more sure than ever,' he wrote that day to his son, 'that we shall beat the life out of Hitler and his Nazi gang.' The fighting on Crete, he told the Commons on June 10, had attained 'a severity and fierceness which the Germans have not previously encountered in their walk through Europe'.
That day Churchill was shown an Intelligence study of the most recent top-secret German radio signals, giving the exact dispositions of a considerable number of German units now massed along the Soviet border. He decided to send the information to Stalin; it was transmitted on June 11. On the following day Churchill told the Dominion and Allied representatives in London: 'We shall break up and derange every effort which Hitler makes to systematise and consolidate his subjugation. He will find no peace, no rest, no halting-place, no parley.' Though he could not say so, his transmission of German military secrets to Stalin was part of this plan. 'The stars in their courses proclaim the deliverance of mankind,' he told the American people in a broadcast on June 12. 'Not so easily shall the onward progress of the peoples be barred. Not so easily shall the lights of freedom die.' Even if Hitler invaded Britain, he had told the Dominion and Allied representatives on the previous day, 'we shall not flinch from the supreme trial.'
On June 15 Wavell launched a new offensive against Rommel in the Western Desert, but after an initial success, was forced to withdraw for the loss of a hundred tanks. Once more, for the second time in three weeks, Churchill went to Chartwell to be alone. In the previous two months, half a million tons of merchant shipping had been sunk, and there had been virtually no successes. Yet on June 18, after Churchill's return from Chartwell, Colville found him in 'good spirits he was 'now busy considering where next we could take the offensive'. Seeking a 'fresh eye' in the Middle East he decided to replace Wavell, who had wanted to remain on the defensive in Cyrenaica. His choice of successor was Auchinleck, who had attracted his favourable attention by his prompt and efficient action in sending troops from India to Basra at the time of Rashid Ali's revolt in Iraq. It was Auchinleck who would devise the next plan of attack in the Western Desert. 'I think you are wise to make change,' Wavell telegraphed to Churchill on June 22, 'and get new ideas and action on many problems in Middle East, and am sure Auchinleck will be successful choice.'
That weekend Churchill was at Chequers. Diligent monitoring of the Germans' own Enigma messages had made it clear, to those in Churchill's secret circle, where the next blow would fall. 'The PM says a German attack on Russia is certain,' Colville noted in his diary on June 21, 'and Russia will assuredly be defeated.' That night, as Churchill slept, German troops crossed the Soviet border.
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