Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [208]
Even such help was serviceable to us774. After all, we were not defending England, we were defending socialism, you see. And could we expect them to help the cause of defending socialism? Bolsheviks would have been idiots to expect this! We just needed to be able to press them, to say “what villains you are!” … The [British] people of course realized that Russians were fighting while their own country wasn’t. And not only did [the Anglo-Americans] hold back, they wrote and said one thing to us, but did something completely different. This made their own people see the truth and ask their own leaders: why are you playing tricks? This undermined faith in the imperialists. All this was very important to us.
In Britain, in 1943, there were more miners’ strikes than at any time since 1900. The Times editorialised on September 3, amid another standstill in the pits: “The disposition to strike … may have some common origin. There is a too prevalent view that the war is going so well that effort in industry can be relaxed.”
Trades unionist Jack Jones wrote to Brendan Bracken from Cardiff on October 3, 1943:
I think I may claim to know the mind of our workers775, who are quite as loyal as the men and women of the Forces. Yet they strike! And at a time when it is more important than ever that they shouldn’t. There may be even more disastrous stoppages through the coming winter.
Time itself induces war-weariness and frayed nerves, especially when what one is doing is unspectacular, out of the limelight and monotonous … A gnawing doubt is a sort of match ready to set aflame an undefined resentment against war conditions … What they want to steady them is a tonic. I remember during the last war the tonic effect on the South Wales miners of a visit and talk by L[loyd] G[eorge] … But this war dwarfs the last, and Mr. Churchill has had much more on his plate than ever L.G. had … My faith in Mr. Churchill’s leadership is greater than ever. But I feel that now his capacity for inspiring others should, if it is humanly possible, be devoted to the steadying and inspiring of the splendid production line of our Home Front.
Churchill’s failure to reach out explicitly to the industrial working class, beyond his national broadcasts and speeches, in part reflected disinclination. He preferred to address himself to the conduct of the war and foreign affairs; and in part, also, there was the fact that he had little to say to the factory people which they would wish to hear. He left to Ernest Bevin, in particular, the task of rallying Labour-voting miners and factory workers. He himself could not offer such people the vision of postwar Britain, and especially of socialist change, on which their hearts and minds were set. Churchill’s single-minded commitment to victory lay at the heart of his greatness as a war leader. But for a growing number of his people, in the autumn of 1943 this was not enough.
In that season, between the Italian and Normandy campaigns, he made one of his last attempts to implement an explicitly British strategic initiative, against American wishes. He believed that the eastern Mediterranean offered opportunities for exploitation, which Washington was too blind to recognise. He therefore sought to address these with exclusively British forces. The consequence was a disaster, albeit minor in the scale of global war, which emphasised in the most painful fashion Germany’s residual strength, together with the limitations of British power when the United States withheld its support.
FOURTEEN
Sunk in the Aegean
ONE OF THE most celebrated movie epics about the Second World War is Carl Foreman’s The Guns of Navarone, based upon the 1957 thriller of that title written by Alastair Maclean. It depicts the landing of a British special forces team on a Greek island in the Aegean Sea. After stupendous feats of derring-do, they contrive the undoing of its German defenders, and safe passage for the Royal