Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [161]
A study of contemporary newspapers surprises a modern reader, because in contrast to twenty-first-century practise, greater attention was paid to events than to personalities, even that of Churchill himself. He received much less coverage than does a modern prime minister, and little detail about his personal life was revealed outside his inner circle. For security reasons, his travels were often unreported until he had left a given location. His speeches and public appearances were, of course, widely covered, but many days of the war passed without much press reference to the prime minister. While battlefield commanders such as Alexander and Montgomery became household names, other key figures remained almost unknown. Sir Alan Brooke, for instance, whose military role was second in importance only to that of Churchill, was scarcely mentioned in the wartime press.
Above all, accurate prophecy was rendered impossible by the fact that the condition of the enemy, the situation “on the other side of the hill,” remained shrouded in mystery even to war leaders privy to Ultra secrets. Conditions in occupied Europe, as well as the state of Hitler’s war machine, were imperfectly understood in London. It was widely reported that the Nazis were conducting appalling massacres, killing many Jews. But the concept of systematic genocide embracing millions of victims was beyond popular, and even prime ministerial, imagination. Entire books have been written about Churchill and the Holocaust, yet the fundamentals may be expressed succinctly: the prime minister was aware from late 1942 onwards that the Nazis were pursuing murderous policies towards the Jews.
British Jewish leaders sought to urge upon him that their people were being subjected to historically unprecedented horrors. He responded with words of deep sympathy, indeed passion, and in 1944 once urged that the RAF should do whatever was possible to check the slaughter. But he did not himself pursue the issue when told of “operational difficulties”—which meant that the airmen did not believe that attempts to destroy railway tracks in eastern Europe were as useful to the war effort as continuing the assault on Germany’s cities. Churchill, in common with most of the U.S. and British war leaderships, perceived the killing of Jews in the context of Hitler’s wider policy of massacre, which embraced millions of Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks and other races. He believed that the only way to address these horrors was by hastening the defeat of Germany and liberation of the occupied nations. This assumption also guided sentiment among the public, which was told less than the Allied governments knew.
Ignorance about so many issues fed endless speculation, embracing a range of possibilities from the outbreak of peace within months, to indefinitely sustained conflict. When Harold Macmillan became British minister in the Mediterranean, he wrote: “the trouble … is that no one really has any idea615 as to the future course of the war. One minute people rush to an extreme of pessimism—and think it will never end. The next they become so excited by a favourable battle that they regard it as more or less over. And the experts cannot give us any guidance. The better they are, the less willing I find them (I mean men like Cunningham, Tedder and Alexander) to express a view.” A contributor to Punch composed a poem about his own “befuddlement amid one bright star of England.” This struck a chord with Alan Lascelles, assistant private secretary to King George VI, who wrote in his diary: “I suppose that, with the exception of some thirty or forty616 High Esoterics—the War Cabinet and its immediate minions—I get as much illumination on the drear fog of war as anyone in this country. Yet I am befogged, all right.” For a humble citizen to keep going, it was necessary to hope blindly, because