Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [11]
During the Cold War decades that followed the Second World War, none of the participants in these Enigma-based decisions were able to refer to them in their memoirs, a ban that also applied to Churchill. Secrecy had to be maintained, as the Enigma machine continued to be used by several post-war governments. As a result, both at the time and even as late as the beginning of the twenty-first century, many major British wartime decisions have been seen as absurd, unintelligible, or as the result of Churchill’s personal interference. For Churchill, his War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff, the Enigma revelations played a crucial role in the process of deciding how to respond and where to strike. Along with its innumerable tactical and strategic benefits, Enigma also revealed some of the innermost decision-making processes of the enemy.
The search for, and achievement of, national unity was another vital aspect of Churchill’s war leadership. From the outset of his premiership, Churchill determined to set aside the hostilities and animosities of the pre-war years. For almost a decade he had been the most outspoken critic of the government of the day, castigating it in Parliament, in public and in print for its neglect of national defence. The country had been as divided as its politicians, and vitriol had been the order of the day. From the first days of Churchill’s war government, however, those who had been his severest critics, and whom he had most severely criticized, became, at his request, colleagues charged with averting defeat and preserving the realm. A few hours before he became Prime Minister, his son, Randolph, asked whether he would achieve the highest place—arguably his father’s ambition for more than thirty years. Churchill replied, “Nothing matters now except beating the enemy.”
When he formed his government on 10 May 1940, Churchill was confronted by near outrage among some of his closest friends and allies for giving high positions to former adversaries, including those who had kept him out of office and had belittled his policies on the eve of war. Churchill was emphatic in his reply. “As for me,” he wrote to one pre-war adversary who had apologized for his role in trying to remove Churchill from Parliament, “the past is dead.” Two days before he became Prime Minister, during the debate in the House of Commons when Chamberlain’s leadership and Churchill’s conduct of the Norwegian Campaign were both under attack, Churchill appealed to his fellow parliamentarians in these words: “I say, let pre-war feuds die; let personal quarrels be forgotten, and let us keep our hatreds for the common enemy. Let Party interests be ignored, let all our energies be harnessed, let the whole ability and forces of the nation be hurled into the struggle, and let the strong horses be pulling on the collar.”
Three months later, as Prime Minister, he was to reiterate this theme with even greater force. After describing the recriminations between France and Britain on the eve of the fall of France as well as the neglect by the pre-war British government to provide an adequate army for fighting on the continent, he told the House of Commons:
I am not reciting these facts for the purpose of recrimination. That, I judge, to be utterly futile and even harmful. We cannot afford it. I recite them in order to explain why it was that we did not have, as we could have had, between twelve and fourteen British divisions fighting in the line in this great battle instead of only three. Now I put all this aside. I put it on the shelf, from which the historians, if they have time, will select their documents and tell their stories. We have to think of the future and not of the past. This also applies in a small way to our own affairs at home. There are too many who would hold an inquest in the House of Commons on the conduct of the Governments—and of Parliaments, for they are in it too—during the years which led up to this catastrophe. They seek to indict those who were responsible for the guidance of our affairs. This also would be a foolish