Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [191]
In Algiers, on February 6, he told former Vichyite military leaders that “if they marched with us, we would not concern ourselves with past differences.”713 At last, the British were successful in achieving recognition for de Gaulle in North Africa. General Giraud was replaced as principal French authority by a National Committee of uneasily mingled Gaullists and Giraudists. American distaste for de Gaulle persisted. But Washington grudgingly acknowledged that the Free French, whose soldiers had been fighting the Axis powers while Vichy’s men collaborated with them, must be permitted some share in determining their nation’s future.
At this, the end of Churchill’s Mediterranean odyssey, he mused aloud about the possibility of his own death. Ian Jacob noted his remarks: “It would be a pity to have to go out in the middle714 of such an interesting drama without seeing the end. But it wouldn’t be a bad moment to leave—it is a straight run-in now, and even the cabinet could manage it.” His words were significant, for two reasons. First, he knew as well as any man how plausible it was that he should die on one of his wartime air journeys, as so many senior officers did. Two members of the Casablanca secretariat were killed when their plane was lost on the journey home, news which Brooke ordered to be temporarily withheld from Churchill when it came through on the eve of his own flight to Turkey. General Gott, the Polish general Wladyslaw Sikorski, Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Adm. Sir Bertram Ramsay, and Arthur Purvis, the head of Britain’s Washington purchasing mission, were only the most prominent figures killed on RAF wartime flights—interestingly, hardly any prominent USAAF passengers fell victim to similar misfortunes. Churchill observed, when a North African takeoff was delayed by magneto failure, that it was nice of the magneto to fail on the ground. So indeed it was.
He was right also to perceive that the most critical period of his leadership was at an end. Many dramas still lay ahead, but Britain no longer faced any danger of falling victim to Nazi tyranny. The course was set towards Allied victory. Back in London on February 11, 1943, making a Commons statement about Casablanca, he observed that Great Britain and the United States were formerly peaceful societies, ill-armed and unprepared. By contrast, “they are now warrior nations, walking in the fear715 of the Lord, very heavily armed, and with an increasingly clear view of their own salvation.” Mindful of the resurgent U-boat threat in the Atlantic, he stressed the sea as the principal area of danger. In response to a foolish question about what plans existed for preventing Germany from starting another war, he replied that this would provide fit food for thought, “which would acquire more precise importance when the present unpleasantness has been ended satisfactorily.”
It would be absurd to describe Churchill, in the early spring of 1943, as having become redundant. But after three years in which he had done many things which no other man could, he was no longer vital to Britain’s salvation. If in 1940–41 he had been his nation’s deliverer, in 1942–43 the Americans owed him a greater debt than they recognised, for persuading their president to adopt the Mediterranean strategy. His strategic judgement had been superior to that of America