Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [117]
Supplies for Russia from both Britain and the United States must be sustained, he said, for only thus “shall we hold our influence over Stalin and be able to weave the mighty Russian effort into the general texture of the war.” He proposed that American troops should be sent to Northern Ireland, to provide an additional deterrent against German landings. By 1943, he said, Britain would be “more strongly prepared against invasion than ever before.” The possibility of a German descent on Britain continued to feature in his calculations. If Russia was knocked out, as still seemed likely, the Nazis could again turn west. Hitler must recognise the urgency of completing the conquest of Europe before America became fully mobilised. Churchill suggested that U.S. bombers should deploy in Britain, to join the growing air offensive against Germany. He expected Singapore to be defended for at least six months.
He interrupted his dictation to tell Kinna to make some sailors stop whistling outside his cabin. This was a distraction and vulgarity which he could not abide—he once said that an aversion to whistling was the only trait he shared with Hitler. Kinna duly retired, but was too nervous of his likely reception to address the offending seamen, who lapsed into silence spontaneously. Oblivious of the towering seas outside, the pitching of the huge ship, Churchill resumed composition of his tour d’horizon. He wanted the Americans to land in French North Africa in 1942. The following year, he anticipated launching attacks against some permutation of Sicily, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France’s Channel or Atlantic coasts or possibly the Balkans. In his memoranda, he made some wild assertions, for instance anticipating that, when the time came to invade the Continent, “the uprising of the local populations for whom weapons must be brought will supply the corpus of the liberating offensive.” But he also looked with imaginative foresight to the creation of improvised aircraft carriers, which would indeed play a key role later in the war, and urged a carrier-borne air assault on Japan.
On December 21, he wrote a long letter to Clementine: “I do not know when or how I shall come back419. I shall certainly stay long enough to do all that has to be done, having come all this way at so much trouble and expense.” He told her that he had no patience with those who denounced Britain’s unreadiness in the Far East: “It is no good critics saying ‘Why were we not prepared?’ when everything we had was already fully engaged.” In this, he was surely justified. Those like Dill, who had favoured reinforcing Malaya at the expense of the Middle East, were mistaken. It would have been absurd to dispatch desperately needed aircraft, tanks and troops to meet a putative threat in the Far East, at the likely cost of losing Egypt to an enemy already at its gates. It is hard to imagine any redeployment of available British resources in the autumn of 1941 which would have prevented disaster. So far-reaching were British weaknesses of leadership, training, tactics, air support and will in Malaya and Burma that the Japanese were all but certain to prevail.
The heavy seas imposed delays which caused Duke of York’s passage to seem to its passengers interminable. Churchill fulminated at the waste of time, but was obliged to concede that he could not subdue the elements. A five-day crossing stretched to nine, then