Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [6]
Churchill did heed his wife’s admonition, although future setbacks and burdens saw that irascibility return: many wartime diarists give evidence of that. They also reveal his ability, even in difficult times, to assert his charm, his forbearance and his generosity of spirit. General Sir Alan Brooke, who was to record in his diary many moments when Churchill was angry and cantankerous, also saw the thoughtful, calm, courageous side of his character. “Just by ourselves at the end of a long day’s work and rather trying,” Brooke noted on 23 July 1940. “But he was very nice and I got a good insight into the way his brain is working. He is most interesting to listen to and full of marvellous courage considering the burden his is bearing.” The American Ambassador in Britain, Gilbert Winant, later recalled Churchill’s mood immediately after Pearl Harbor, when the two men had been together at Chequers and Churchill feared that the United States would focus all its efforts on the war in the Pacific, and leave Britain to fight in Europe alone: “He knew at that moment that his country might be ‘hanging on one turn of pitch and toss.’ Nevertheless he turned to me with the charm of manner that I saw in difficult moments, and said, ‘We’re late, you know. You get washed and we will go in to lunch together.’”
Churchill’s typists were also to find that, however bad his moods could be in dire moments of the war, he always had words of comfort for them and a ready smile—his “beatific grim,” as Marian Holmes called it. “Don’t mind me,” he would say after an outburst, “it’s not you—it’s the war.” On one occasion, in November 1944, finding Marian Holmes and her colleague Elizabeth Layton working in the Hawtrey Room at Chequers without a fire, he commented, “Oh, you poor things. You must light a fire and get your coats. It’s just as well I came in”— and he proceeded to light the fire himself, piling it high with logs.
“There is no defeat in his heart”: with these words the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies summed up in his diary a central feature—if not the dominant and crucial feature—of Churchill’s leadership. Defeatism, fear, uncertainty, and the attractions of a negotiated or a compromise peace all bedeviled the first six months of the war, and even later months as the recurring crises of the war looked grim for Britain. Even when he could see no way forward, however, Churchill combatted all defeatist tendencies with total determination. When one of his closest friends, “Bendor,” Duke of Westminster, told a group of friends that the war was part of a Jewish and Masonic plot to destroy Christian civilization, Churchill warned in a private letter marked “secret and personal”: “I am sure that pursuit of this line would lead you into measureless odium and vexation. When a country is fighting a war of this kind, very hard experiences lie before those who preach defeatism and set themselves against the will of the nation.”
One fear Churchill had in the summer of 1940 was that the public would find evidence that the government was planning for the possibility of defeat. He was determined to give a lead in eliminating any evidence to that effect. Plans had been put forward by the Foreign Office for the evacuation of the Royal Family and the government (including Churchill) to “some part of the Overseas Empire, where the war would continue to be waged.” As soon as this suggestion reached Churchill, he wrote to one of his trusted advisers: “I believe we shall make them rue the day they tried to invade our island. No such discussion can be permitted.” On the following day Churchill was asked if he would authorize sending the paintings in the