Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [2]
Sir Edward Bridges, then cabinet secretary, wrote of Churchill between 1940 and 1942: “Everything depended upon him5 and him alone. Only he had the power to make the nation believe that it could win.” This remains the view of most of the world, almost seventy years later. Yet there is also no shortage of iconoclasts. In a recent biography Cambridge lecturer Nigel Knight writes contemptuously of Churchill: “He was not mad6 or simple; his misguided decisions were a product of his personality—a mixture of arrogance, emotion, self-indulgence, stubbornness and a blind faith in his own ability.” Another modern biographer, Chris Wrigley, suggests that Sir Edward Bridges’s tribute to Churchill “may overstate his indispensability.”7
Such strictures seem otiose to those of us convinced that, in his absence, Britain would have made terms with Hitler after Dunkirk. Thereafter, beyond his domestic achievement as war leader, he performed a diplomatic role of which only he was capable: as suitor of the United States on behalf of the British nation. To fulfil this, he was obliged to overcome intense prejudices on both sides of the Atlantic. So extravagant was Churchill’s—and Roosevelt’s—wartime rhetoric about the Anglo-American alliance that even today the extent of mutual suspicion and indeed dislike between the two peoples is often underestimated. The British ruling class, in particular, condescended amazingly towards Americans.
In 1940–41, Winston Churchill perceived, with a clarity which eluded some of his fellow countrymen, that only American belligerence might open a path to victory. Pearl Harbor, and not the prime minister’s powers of seduction, eventually brought Roosevelt’s nation into the war. But no other statesman could have conducted British policy towards the United States with such consummate skill, nor have achieved such personal influence upon the American people. This persisted until 1944, when his standing in the United States declined precipitously, to revive only when the onset of the Cold War caused many Americans to hail Churchill as a prophet. His greatness, which had come to seem too large for his own impoverished country, then became perceived as a shared Anglo-American treasure.
From June 1941 onwards, Churchill saw much more clearly than most British soldiers and politicians that Russia must be embraced as an ally. But it seems important to strip away legends about aid to the Soviet Union, and acknowledge how small this was in the decisive 1941–42 period. Stalin’s nation saved itself with little help from the Western Allies. Only from mid-1943 onwards did supplies to Russia gain critical mass, and Anglo-American ground operations absorb a significant part of the Wehrmacht’s attention.
The huge popularity of the Soviet Union in wartime Britain was a source of dismay, indeed exasperation, to the small number of people at the top who knew the truth about the barbarity of Stalin’s regime, its implacable hostility to the West and its imperialistic designs on eastern Europe. The divide between the sentiments of the public and those of the prime minister towards the Soviet Union became a chasm in May 1945. One of Churchill’s most astonishing acts, in the last weeks of his premiership, was to order the Joint Planning Staff to produce a draft for Operation Unthinkable. The resulting document considered the practicability of launching an Anglo-American offensive against the Russians, with forty-seven divisions reinforced by the remains of Hitler’s Wehrmacht, to restore the freedom of Poland. Though Churchill acknowledged this as a remote contingency, it is remarkable that he caused the Chiefs of Staff to address