Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [110]
While great men discussed affairs of state at Downing Street or Chequers, below stairs the staff gossiped about the Master in the fashion of every patrician household. “Oh, Miss, you’ll never guess what he did next …,”397 Nellie the Downing Street parlour maid would say to Elizabeth Layton, one of the prime minister’s three typists. Mrs. Landemore the cook was a fount of tittle-tattle about the British aristocracy, while Sawyers, the prime minister’s valet, dispensed among the staff glasses of wine diverted from the dining room. Every Friday afternoon, or sometimes on Saturday morning, a column of three big black cars stood waiting by the garden gate of Downing Street to waft the prime minister to Chequers at breakneck speed, his journey hastened by police outriders and sirens. Unless he took with him in the car some visitor with whom he wished to converse, he customarily dictated to a typist all the way. Arrived at his destination one day, he said to Elizabeth Layton: “Now run inside and type like HELL.”398 The staff late shift were seldom released to their beds before three a.m.
Churchill was exultant when, on September 8, Roosevelt issued a “shoot first” order to U.S. warships in the Atlantic, dramatically raising his nation’s stakes against Germany’s U-boats. But two weeks later, when Eden dined with the Churchills and Oliver Lyttelton, the Middle East minister of state just back from Cairo, Eden noted: “Winston was depressed at outset399, said he felt that we had harsh times ahead.” The prime minister knew from intercepted Japanese diplomatic traffic that Tokyo was winding down its foreign missions and evacuating nationals from British territory. Sir Stewart Menzies, “C,” showed him a cable from Berlin to Tokyo, in which Hitler’s staff assured the Japanese that “in the event of a collision between Japan400 and the United States, Germany would at once open hostilities with America.” After Churchill was glimpsed by Bletchley code beakers one Saturday, visiting their dank, hutted encampment, four of the most senior staff wrote to him personally, appealing for more resources. This prompted an “Action This Day” note to “C”: “Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority.”401
On October 20 Churchill told the Defence Committee that “he did not believe that the Japanese would go to war with the United States and ourselves.” After many months in which he had wilfully exaggerated the prospect of America entering the war, the chances of such a development were now greater than he avowed. It may be that, following so many disappointments, he did not dare to hope too much. The terrible, nagging fear persisted that Tokyo might launch a strike only against British possessions, without provoking the United States to fight. The views of the British and American governments were distorted by logic. Both possessed strong intelligence evidence of an impending Japanese assault. Yet it remained hard to believe that the Tokyo regime would start a war with the United States that it could not rationally hope to win.
The dispatch of a naval battle squadron to the Far East, supposedly to deter Japanese aggression, was the prime minister’s personal decision, and reflected his anachronistic faith in capital ships. Likewise, the squadron’s commander, Adm. Tom Phillips—ironically, one of Churchill’s severest critics in the Admiralty—was his own choice, and a poor one, because Phillips’s entire war experience had been spent in shore-based staff appointments. Churchill likened the prospective impact of British battleships in the Far East to that achieved by the presence of Hitler’s Tirpitz in Arctic