Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [9]
After setting out his confidence that a German invasion could be repulsed, Churchill continued: “The Prime Minister expects all His Majesty’s Servants in high places to set an example of steadiness and resolution. They should check and rebuke expressions of loose and ill-digested opinion in their circles, or by their subordinates. They should not hesitate to report, or if necessary remove, any officers or officials who are found to be consciously exercising a disturbing or depressing influence, and whose talk is calculated alarm and despondency. Thus alone will they be worthy of the fighting men, who in the air, on the sea, and on land have already met the enemy without any sense of being outmatched in martial qualities.”
In what was arguably the “finest hour” of Churchill’s leadership, he had successfully challenged defeatist talk. Churchill understood that the British people were determined, despite the mounting dangers, to fight on. He commented on one occasion, with regard to the British character and its soundness in adversity: “The British people are like the sea. You can put the bucket in anywhere, and pull it up, and always find it salt.” In a speech in the House of Commons on 21 November 1940, bluntly describing the difficulties that lay ahead—“the darker side of our dangers and burdens”—Churchill commented: “I know that it is in adversity that British qualities shine the brightest, and it is under these extraordinary tests that the character of our slowly wrought institutions reveals its latent, invisible strength.” In a comment to one of his Private Office about Ernest Bevin, a senior Labour Party figure in his coalition and, as Minister of Labour, the man responsible for the vast wartime workforce, Churchill described him as “a good old thing with the right stuff in him and no defeatist tendencies.” It was Churchill’s own opposition to all forms of defeatism that marked out the first six months of his war premiership and established the nature and pattern of his war leadership.
Churchill had found the will and the strength to challenge defeatism. All his life he had been an opponent of supine surrender. But there were times, especially when there was news of heavy loss of life at sea or in the air, or in the German bombardment of British cities, when Churchill could be cast down and depressed, albeit briefly. In a speech in the House of Commons shortly before he became Prime Minister, he described these spells as “the brown hours, when baffling news comes, and disappointing news.” Yet even when the news was bleak, Churchill found the means to combat depression. In those very “brown hours,” he told the Commons on 8 May 1940—when the battle in Norway was going so badly for Britain, provoking a political crisis with Churchill at its centre—“I always turn for refreshment to the reports of the German wireless. I love to read the lies they tell of all the British ships they have sunk so many times over, and to survey the fools’ paradise in which they find it necessary to keep their deluded serfs and robots.” This attitude was Churchill’s nature. It was also what he recognized as an essential feature of successful war leadership: avoiding depression and despair.
During the many periods that still lay ahead, of setbacks on the battlefield or of the relentless German submarine sinkings of British merchant ships in the Atlantic, Churchill’s “brown hours” were many. The sinking of the British warships Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya three days after Pearl Harbor was one such time. The fall of Singapore in February 1942 was another. But Churchill never allowed such moments to dominate him or to affect him adversely beyond the moment. After the fall