Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [126]
NINE
“The Valley of Humiliation”
1. Critics
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, societies have enthused about victorious overseas conflicts and recoiled from unsuccessful ones. The U.S. declarations of war represented the fulfilment of all Churchill’s hopes since May 1940. Yet 1942 proved, until its last weeks, the most unhappy year of his premiership. It was not only that Britain suffered a further succession of defeats; it was that public confidence in the prime minister’s leadership waned in a fashion unthinkable during the Battle of Britain. Even if it remained improbable that he would be driven from office, he was beset by critics who questioned his judgement and sought to constrain his powers. Between his return from the United States in late January and the Battle of El Alamein in November, there were no moments of glory, and almost unremitting bad news. The British Empire suffered the heaviest blows in its history, which only the American alliance rendered endurable.
On the train back to London after his flying boat landed from Washington, Churchill indulged a last flicker of complacency. He told his doctor: “I have done a good job of work with the President … I am sure, Charles, the House will be pleased with what I have to tell them.” A glance at the day’s newspapers disabused him. He laid down the Manchester Guardian without enthusiasm. “There seems to be plenty of snarling,”449 he said. In the days that followed, ill tidings crowded forward. Naval losses in the Mediterranean meant that in the forthcoming months, Britain could deploy no battle fleet from Alexandria. Amid reports from Malaya that the British Army was falling back routed upon Singapore, Churchill enquired whether there was a case for writing off the “fortress” and diverting reinforcements and aircraft elsewhere. His message was copied in error to the Australian representative to the War Cabinet, Sir Earle Page—a man “with the mentality of a greengrocer,”450 in Brooke’s scornful phrase—who in turn forwarded it to Canberra. Prime Minister John Curtin responded with an indignant cable to Churchill, asserting that to abandon Singapore would be “an inexcusable betrayal.”
Relations between the Australian government and London, never cordial, entered a new phase of acrimony. Churchill valued Australia’s fighting men, but was contemptuous of its weak Labor government. He contrasted Australian pusillanimity—what would now be called “whingeing”—unfavourably with the staunchness of New Zealand. Throughout the war, he treated all the self-governing dominions as subject colonies, mere sources of manpower. Dominion politicians visiting London were accorded public courtesy and private indifference. Robert Menzies, the former Australian prime minister who was now opposition leader, commanded respect, but even Menzies had been moved to protest back in 1940, when his government heard of the Dakar operation only on reading about it in the press. The sole imperial figure to enjoy Churchill’s confidence was Jan Smuts, South Africa’s seventy-two-year-old prime minister. He was a man of notable intellect and good sense, a friend since the end of the Boer War and Churchill’s peer in adventure and experience. It was Smuts, honoured with field marshal’s rank in 1941, who said: “We should thank God for Hitler451. He has brought us back to a realization of brute facts … He has, in fact, taken the lid off Hell, and we have all looked into it.”
Churchill’s impatience with the dominions was understandable. Their governments—with the notable exception of New Zealand’s—often displayed a parochialism irksome to a British prime minister directing a global struggle for survival. Neither Canada nor Australia, for instance, introduced universal conscription for overseas service until the last stages of the conflict. But Churchill’s condescension towards Canberra and Ottawa was no more likely to