Inferno - Max Hastings [68]
Edward R. Murrow, the great American broadcaster, told his CBS radio audience on 15 September that there was no great outpouring of public sentiment following news that bombs had fallen on Buckingham Palace; Londoners shrugged that the king and queen were merely experiencing the common plight of millions: “This war has no relation with the last one, so far as symbols and civilians are concerned. You must understand that a world is dying, that old values, the old prejudices, and the old bases of power and prestige are going.” Murrow recognised what some of Britain’s ruling caste still did not; they deluded themselves that the struggle was being waged to sustain their familiar old society. The privileged elite among whom Evelyn Waugh lived saw the war, the novelist wrote, as “a malevolent suspension of normality: the massing and movement of millions of men, some of whom were sometimes endangered, most of whom were idle and lonely, the devastation, hunger and waste, crumbling buildings, foundering ships, the torture and murder of prisoners … [which] had been prolonged beyond reason.” Few of Waugh’s friends understood that the “suspension of normality” would become permanent in its impact upon their own way of life.
Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory served his country wonderfully well in 1940–41, but thereafter it would reveal important limitations. He sought the preservation of British imperial greatness, the existing order, and this purpose would not suffice for most of his fellow countrymen. They yearned for social change, improvements in their domestic condition of a kind which seemed to the prime minister almost frivolous amid a struggle for global mastery. The Lancashire housewife Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots’ hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: “Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to ‘destroy’ and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so wrong somehow … [that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.” Mrs. Last was middle-aged, but her children’s generation was determined that once the war was won, money would be found to create a more egalitarian society.
Churchill never defined credible war aims beyond the defeat of the Axis; when the tide of battle turned, this would become a serious weakness of his leadership and a threat to his domestic popularity. But in 1940–41 his foremost challenge was to convince his people that the war could be won. This became more difficult, rather than less, once the Luftwaffe was vanquished: thoughtful people recognised that the nation remained impotent to challenge German dominance of the Continent.
George Barclay, a Hurricane pilot, described an intense discussion between young fliers and senior officers in his airfield mess on Sunday, 29 September 1940, and recorded their conclusions: “The British people are still fast asleep. They haven’t begun to realise the power of our enemies and that they have to give their ‘all’ … That we need dictatorial methods to fight dictators … That we shall eventually win the war, but it will be a hell of a job and more so unless we pull ourselves together.” The message, an eminently sensible one, was that the British must try harder. Many more frustrations, sorrows and defeats lay ahead, and George Barclay himself would lie dead in a desert funeral pyre before Hitler provoked into armed resistance a sufficiency of enemies to encompass his undoing.
1 For