Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [130]
Churchill told the Commons on February 24: “The House must face the blunt and brutal fact that if, having entered a war yourself unprepared, you are struggling for life with two well-armed countries, one of them possessing the most powerful military machine in the world, and then, at the moment when you are in full grapple, a third major antagonist with far larger military forces than you possess suddenly springs upon your comparatively undefended back, obviously your task is heavy and your immediate experiences will be disagreeable.” Many MPs nonetheless voiced discontent. James Griffiths, Labour member for the Welsh mining constituency of Llanelli, said that at the time of Dunkirk people had responded to the call. By contrast, “we believe that now there is a feeling of disquiet in the nation. We ought not to resent it.” Commander Sir Archibald Southby, Epsom, spoke of the German “Channel dash” and the fall of Singapore as two events which “shook not only the Government but the British Empire to its foundations. Nay, it would be fair to say that they influenced opinion throughout the world. They produced the most unfortunate reverberations in the United States of America just at a time when harmony and understanding between the two nations was of paramount importance.”
Sir George Schuster, Walsall, said he thought the public wanted to feel that it was being told the truth, and was beginning to doubt this. People had been assured that in Libya the British Army was now meeting the enemy on equal terms. Then, after Rommel’s dramatic comeback, they heard that the Germans had a better antitank gun, that our guns were inadequate to pierce enemy armour. “That was a shock to public opinion. They felt they had been misled.”
During lunch at Buckingham Palace that day, Churchill told the king that Burma, Ceylon, Calcutta, Madras and parts of Australia might well be lost. The defence of Burma had already begun badly. Brooke noted with his customary spleen that some politicians allowed the bad news to show. “This process does not make Cabinet Ministers470 any more attractive,” he wrote to a friend. “But Winston is a marvel. I cannot imagine how he sticks it.” Clementine wrote to Harry Hopkins, “We are indeed walking through the Valley of Humiliation.”471
In consequence of the disasters on the battlefield, Churchill was obliged to make changes in his government, more painful and embarrassing than some historians have acknowledged. Beaverbrook finally resigned. Stafford Cripps was given his seat in the War Cabinet, as lord privy seal and leader of the Commons. For the prime minister, this was a bitter pill. Accepting Cripps was a measure of the weakness of his position. The two men, wrote Eden wonderingly, had “always been as distant as a lion and an okapi.”472 Churchill is alleged to have said of Libya: “There are miles and miles of nothing but arid austerity. How Cripps would like it!”
Cripps was fifty-two, a product of Winchester and New College Oxford, and nephew of the socialist intellectual Beatrice Webb. He became first a research chemist, then a successful commercial barrister. A pacifist in World War I, he was elected as a Labour MP in 1931 and served briefly in Ramsay MacDonald’s government before refusing to join his coalition. A vegetarian and teetotaller, in the 1930s he became converted to Marxism, an uncritical enthusiast for the Soviet Union whose name was often coupled with that of Aneurin Bevan. In 1939, he was expelled from the parliamentary Labour Party after differences with Attlee. When Cripps served in Moscow between 1940 and 1942, Churchill was not displeased