Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [222]
So, too, did the prime minister. To explain why he left the RAF to its own devices for much of the war, it is necessary to acknowledge how little reliable information was available about what bombing was, or was not, doing to Germany. The progress of Britain’s armies was readily measured by following their advances or retreats on the map; that of the Royal Navy, by examining statistics of sinkings. But, once the Battle of Britain was won, the RAF’s performance was chiefly judged by assessments, often spurious, produced by its own staff officers. Nobody, including Portal, Harris and Churchill, really knew what bombing was achieving, though soldiers and sailors believed it was much less than airmen claimed. The prime minister had a strong vested interest in thinking the best of British bombing. He trumpeted its achievements to the Americans, and even more to Stalin, to mollify their frustration about the meagre scale of Western ground operations. It would have been a major political embarrassment had evidence emerged that the strategic air offensive was doing less than Harris claimed.
Thus, between 1942 and the 1944 controversy about bombing the French rail network ahead of Overlord, Churchill never sought an independent assessment of what Bomber Command was contributing, though it consumed around one-third of Britain’s entire war effort. Harris persuaded the prime minister that his aircraft wreaked havoc, as they did. But dramatic images of flame and destruction in the Reich were unaccompanied by rigorous analysis of German industry, about which intelligence was anyway sketchy and most of the RAF’s data plain wrong. Harris, like his American counterparts, was left free to fight his battle as he himself saw fit, to pursue an obsessive attempt to prove that bombing could win the war without much input of accurate evidence or imagination. This was a serious omission on the part of the prime minister, and a missed opportunity for the Royal Air Force.
In this later period of the war, the fatigue of Churchill’s people grew alongside American and Russian might. The Aegean campaign represented a minor demonstration of British vulnerability, but larger ones lay ahead. In the late autumn of 1943, four issues dominated Britain’s military agenda: the campaign in Italy; the commitment to Overlord; residual possibilities of ambitious adventures in the Balkans; and Operation Buccaneer, a putative amphibious landing in Burma. On November 6, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr warned from Moscow of Russian fears that the British were still hostile to Overlord. Churchill responded: “I will do everything in human power to animate the forward movement on which my heart is set at this moment.” But the words “forward movement” embraced a range of possible operations, some in the Mediterranean, of which Overlord was only one. Dalton wrote after a Cabinet meeting: “In an expansive moment Winston told us816 his apprehensions about the ‘Overlord’ policy which the Americans have forced upon us, involving a dangerous and time-wasting straddle of our transport and landing craft between two objectives when we might have gone on more effectively in Italy and the Balkans.”
For some weeks, Churchill had been pressing for a meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin, which he would dearly have liked to hold in London. It was surprising that the Russian leader rejected this notion out of hand, but the British felt snubbed when they learned that the president was likewise unwilling to visit their country. Such a rendezvous would play badly with the U.S. electorate in the forthcoming election year, claimed Roosevelt. After some dalliance, Tehran was found a mutually acceptable venue. Churchill sought an advance bilateral summit in Cairo, to which the Americans agreed. He sailed for