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of postwar planning. Churchill said crossly that he was just leaving to see Stalin, was preoccupied with other things, “and that it was really too much to go into detailed questions at the moment.”811 Bevin was as angry as the prime minister. There was never a right time to catch Churchill to discuss matters which did not command his interest. Yet he was so often criticised for declining to seriously address postwar issues that it is salutary to compare his attitude with that of Hitler. The Nazis inflicted crippling economic, social and military damage upon their own empire by setting about forging a new “Greater Germany” while the war’s outcome was still unresolved. Churchill’s single-minded preoccupation with achieving victory may have dismayed his colleagues, but it seems a fault on the right side.

The British people acknowledged him as the personification of their war effort. As the dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union grew, his rhetoric and statesmanship were the most formidable weapons which his flagging nation could wield to sustain its place at the summit of the Grand Alliance. But in the last eighteen months of the war, while he received his share of the applause for Allied victories, he also suffered increasing frustrations and disappointments. At every turn, cherished projects were stillborn, favoured policies atrophied, because they could not be executed without American resources or goodwill, which were unforthcoming. This was by no means always to Britain’s disadvantage. Some schemes, such as the Aegean campaign, did not deserve to prosper. But no man less liked to be thwarted than Churchill. Much happened, or did not happen, in the years of American ascendancy which caused the prime minister to fume at his own impotence.

His words remained as magnificent in the years of victories as they had been in those of defeats. He enjoyed moments of exhilaration, because he had a large capacity for joy. But the sorrows were frequent and various. He refused to abandon his obsession with getting the Turks into the war, cabling Eden, en route back from Moscow, that it was necessary to “remind the Turkey that Christmas was coming.”812 He dismissed proposals summarily to depose the king of Italy, saying, “Why break off the handle of the jug813 before we get to Rome and have a chance of securing a new handle for it!” He told the Cabinet one day, amid a discussion about Soviet perfidy in publishing claims in Pravda that Britain had opened unilateral peace negotiations with the Nazis: “Trying to maintain good relations814 with a communist is like wooing a crocodile, you do not know whether to tickle it under the chin or beat it on the head. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.”

In those months, Churchill’s mind was overwhelmingly fixed upon the Mediterranean campaign. But it would have well served the interests of the British war effort had he also addressed another important issue which he neglected. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, chose this moment to divert the bulk of his increasingly formidable force away from the Ruhr, where Lancasters and Halifaxes had been pounding factories for years, to attack Germany’s capital. This was one of the major strategic errors of the RAF’s war. The Berlin region was certainly industrially important, but was also far from Britain, heavily defended and often shrouded in winter overcast. This assault continued until April 1944, at a cost in RAF losses that became prohibitive, without dealing the decisive blow Harris sought—and which he had promised the prime minister. Bomber Command lost the “Battle of Berlin.”

Much more significant, however, was the respite granted to the Ruhr. Adam Tooze’s important recent research815 on the Nazi economy has shown that, in the autumn of 1943, the Ruhr’s industries lay on the brink of collapse. If Bomber Command had continued its assault, instead of switching targets eastwards, the consequences for Hitler’s war machine might have been dramatic. Allied