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minister’s limited comprehension of them. There was an embarrassing moment at Downing Street, when following a Cabinet meeting Randolph Churchill joined a discussion about the army, and shouted, “Father, the trouble is your soldiers won’t fight.”531 Churchill once observed of his son: “I love Randolph, but I don’t like him.”532 It was astonishing that, in the midst of debates about great matters, he indulged his son’s presence, and expected others to do so. On this occasion, however, Randolph’s intervention might have been hyperbolic, but it was to the point. Many British officers perceived their citizen soldiers as lacking the will and commitment routinely displayed by the Germans and Japanese. Underlying the conduct of Churchill’s wartime commanders was a fundamental nervousness about what their men would, or would not, do on the battlefield.

Churchill understood that if British troops were to overcome Germans, they must become significantly nastier. This represented a change of view. In 1940 he favoured civility towards the enemy, reproaching Duff Cooper as minister of information for mocking the Italians: “It is a well-known rule of war policy to praise the courage of your opponent, which enhances your own victory when gained.” Likewise, in January 1942, he declared his admiration for Rommel on the floor of the House of Commons: “a very daring and skilful opponent533 … and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.” Progressively, however, the prime minister came to think it mistaken to suggest that Axis soldiers were honourable foes. Such courtesies encouraged British troops to surrender too readily. As the war matured, Churchill deplored newspaper reports of chivalrous German behaviour: “These beastly Huns534 are murdering people wholesale in Europe and have committed the most frightful atrocities in Russia, and it would be entirely in accordance with their technique to win a reputation for treating British and American soldiers with humanity on exceptional and well-advertised occasions.”

In the spring and summer of 1942, Churchill was right to believe that the British Army’s performance in North Africa was inadequate. Many of his outbursts about the soldiers’ failures, which so distressed Brooke and his colleagues, were justified. It remains debatable whether remedies were available at a time when positions of military responsibility had perforce to be filled from the existing pool of regular officers. Most were captives of the culture to which they had been bred. Its fundamental flaw was that it required only moderate effort, sacrifice and achievement, and produced only a small number of leaders and units capable of matching the skill and determination of their enemies. The army’s institutional weakness would be overcome only when vastly superior Allied resources became available on the battlefield.

At home among the civilians, wartime unity was a considerable reality. The majority of the British people remained staunch. Yet class tensions ran deep. Significant groups, above all factory workers, displayed disaffection. Sections of Britain’s industrial workforce perceived no contradiction between supporting Churchill and the crusade against Nazism while sustaining the class struggle which had raged since the beginning of the century. Strikes were officially outlawed for the duration by the government’s March 1941 Essential Work Order, but legislation failed to prevent wildcat stoppages, above all in coal pits, shipyards and aircraft plants, often in support of absurd or avaricious demands. At the depth of the Depression, in 1932, just 48,000 working days were lost to strikes in the metal, engineering and shipbuilding industries. In 1939, by contrast, 332,000 days were lost; in 1940, 163,000; 1941, 556,000; 1942, 526,000; 1943, 635,000; 1944, 1,048,000; and 1945, 528,000. This was a better record than that achieved in 1917, when stoppages in the same industries cost three million days of production. Nonetheless, it suggests a less than fulsome commitment to the war effort in some factories, also manifested