Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [10]
As parliamentary criticism of his leadership grew after the fall of Singapore, Churchill confided another of his fears to Roosevelt: “I do not like these days of personal stress and I have found it difficult to keep my eye on the ball.” He could not reveal in Parliament the facts as he knew them: that the Commander-in-Chief Far East’s report on the fall of Singapore told of “the lack of real fighting spirit” among the troops not only in Malaya but also in Burma, where a Japanese attack was expected at any moment. This information had to remain secret from all but the most inner circle, and it had to be kept from the House of Commons, even though it was both an explanation and a “defence” of what had happened. In the course of the war, Parliament had to take many things on trust; some information was conveyed to it in specially convened Secret Sessions, where Churchill spoke with great frankness, but where the usual parliamentary record was not made public. As Churchill told Roosevelt: “Democracy has to prove that it can provide a granite foundation for war against tyranny.”
When, not long after the start of the Japanese war, one of Churchill’s staff brought him some particularly grim news, Churchill commented: “We must just KBO.” The initials stood for “Keep Buggering On.” At other moments of bad news he would burst into a popular music hall song of the First World War, “Keep right on to the end of the road.” He even sang this song to Stalin at a time when his Soviet ally suddenly began to accuse him of not really wanting to see the defeat of Hitler. That song, a member of the British delegation explained to a startled generalissimo, “is Britain’s secret weapon.”
A war leader is only as strong as the information reaching him, and his ability to use that information. A determining factor in Churchill’s war leadership was his use of top-secret Intelligence. Some was provided by agents in the field, some by aerial reconnaissance. Information of crucial importance was also gleaned from careful clandestine reading of telegrams sent to and from neutral embassies in London, and from Signals Intelligence of the most secret sort. Several times each day Churchill and his Chiefs of Staff received what Churchill called his “golden eggs”—the intercepted top-secret German radio communications, including many from Hitler himself, transmitted through the Enigma machine. These messages were decrypted at Bletchley Park, northwest of London, by a staff that was to exceed five thousand before the end of the war.
These “golden eggs”—laid, Churchill once remarked, “by the geese who never cackled,” the staff at Bletchley—gave Churchill and those in the inner circle an insight, unique in the history of modern warfare, into the strategic thinking and tactical intentions of the enemy. Beyond the staff at Bletchley, the number of people privy to the Enigma decrypts was strictly limited: in September 1940 only thirty-one people within the governing instrument in London were aware of their existence or able to take them into account in policy making. When Churchill learned of a dozen others in receipt of this information, he cut most of them out, minuting to the head of the Secret Intelligence Services: “The wild scattering of secret information must be curbed.” Beyond the small group in London—who included King George VI—the others who knew of this most secret source were the land, sea and air commanders-in-chief, to whom the relevant aspects were transmitted, and the Special Liaison Unit officers at the commander-inchiefs’ headquarters, who decoded