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state of things. Defeats we don’t mind—we have all developed a stoical calm over such things in England. But actually to be advancing! To be taking places! One has an uneasy sense of enjoying a forbidden luxury.” Aneurin Bevan said nastily that the prime minister “always refers to a defeat or a disaster as though it came from God, but to a victory as though it came from himself.” Throughout the war, Bevan upheld Britain’s democratic tradition by sustaining unflagging criticism of the government. To those resistant to Welsh oratory, however, his personality was curiously repellent. A dogged class warrior, he harried Churchill across the floor of the Commons as relentlessly when successes were being celebrated as when defeats were lamented. Bevan drew attention to the small size of the forces engaged at El Alamein and to the dominance of Commonwealth troops in Montgomery’s army. His figures were accurate, but his scorn was at odds with the spirit of the moment, which was full of gratitude, as was the prime minister. At a Cabinet meeting on November 9, Churchill offered the government’s congratulations to the CIGS and secretary of state for the army’s performance. This was, wrote Brooke sourly later, “the only occasion on which he expressed publicly675 any appreciation or thanks for work I had done during the whole of the period I worked for him.”

For a generation after the Second World War, when British perceptions of the experience were overwhelmingly nationalistic, El Alamein was seen as the turning point. In truth, of course, Stalingrad—which reached its climax a few weeks later—was vastly more important. Montgomery took thirty thousand German and Italian prisoners in his battle, the Russians ninety thousand in theirs, which inflicted a quarter of a million losses on Hitler’s Sixth Army. But El Alamein was indeed decisive for Britain’s prime minister. On November 22, he felt strong enough to allow Stafford Cripps to resign from the War Cabinet, relegating him to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Churchill said of Cripps to Stalin: “His chest is a cage, in which two squirrels are at war, his conscience and his career.” Cripps had pressed proposals for removing the direction of the war from the prime minister’s hands. Now, these could safely be dismissed, their author sidelined. His brief imposture as a rival to the national leader was over. In the ensuing thirty months of the German war, though the British people often grew jaded and impatient, never again was Churchill’s mastery seriously questioned.

As Montgomery’s forces continued to drive west across Libya, the prime minister looked ahead. Fortified by Ultra-based intelligence, he felt confident that the combination of Eighth Army’s victory at El Alamein and the Torch landings ensured the Germans’ expulsion from North Africa. No more than anyone else did he anticipate Hitler’s sudden decision to reinforce failure, and the consequent prolongation of the campaign. In November 1942, it seemed plausible that the entire North African littoral would be cleared of the enemy by early 1943. What, then, for 1943? The Chiefs of Staff suggested Sicily and Sardinia. This prompted a contemptuous sally from Downing Street: “Is it really to be supposed that the Russians676 will be content with our lying down like this during the whole of 1943, while Hitler has a third crack at them?” Churchill talked instead of possible landings in Italy or southern France, perhaps even northwest Europe. Though he soon changed his mind, in November he still shared American hopes for Roundup, a major invasion of the Continent in 1943. He also remained mindful of his commitments to Stalin, and was acutely anxious not to be seen again to break faith. He told the War Office on November 23: “I never meant the Anglo-American Army677 to be stuck in North Africa. It is a springboard and not a sofa.”

The Americans were unjust in supposing that Churchill always shared the extreme caution of his generals. On the contrary, the prime minister was foremost among those urging commanders to act more boldly. As