Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [232]
Churchill had been right, in 1942 and 1943, to force upon the Americans campaigns in the Mediterranean, when there was nowhere else they could credibly fight. He told the House of Commons on February 22: “On broad grounds of strategy, Hitler’s decision to send into the south of Italy as many as eighteen divisions, involving, with their maintenance troops, probably something like half a million Germans, and to make a large secondary front in Italy, is not unwelcome to the Allies … We must fight the Germans somewhere, unless we are to stand still and watch the Russians.” But by now there was a lameness about such an explanation. In 1944, Churchill’s Italian vision was overtaken by that of Overlord, a huge and indispensable American conception. After Anzio, even the prime minister himself implicitly acknowledged this, and embraced the prospect of D-Day with increasing excitement. Though his enthusiasm for Mediterranean operations never subsided, he was obliged to recognise that the major battles in the west would be fought in France, not Italy.
In the spring of 1944, Churchill was full of apprehension not only about Overlord, but also about the mood of the British people. Several lost by-elections exposed voters’ lack of enthusiasm for the government, and weariness with the war. After an Independent Labour candidate in West Derbyshire on February 18 defeated the Tory Lord Hartington, who campaigned with the prime minister’s conspicuous endorsement, Jock Colville wrote: “Sitting in a chair in his study854 at the Annexe, the PM looked old, tired and very depressed and was even muttering about a General Election. Now, he said, with great events pending, was the time when national unity was essential, the question of annihilating great states had to be faced; it began to look as if democracy had not the persistence necessary to go through with it, however well it might have shewn its capacity of defence.” In Churchill’s Commons speech of February 22, he delivered a contemptuous jab at his critics, “little folk who frolic alongside the juggernaut of war to see what fun or notoriety they can extract from the proceedings.” Five days later, writing to Smuts, he alluded to such people again: “Their chirpings will presently be stilled855 by the thunder of the cannonade.” On March 25, to Roosevelt, he wrote ruefully, “We certainly do have plenty to worry us, now that our respective democracies feel so sure that the whole war is as good as won.” Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam wrote in April 1944: “In the H of C smoking room856 a new leader is decided upon almost every other day.”
There was much to vex Churchill, the burden made heavier because so few of the difficulties and hazards could be publicly avowed. Countless hours were devoted to Poland. The Polish exile government in London was obdurately opposed to changes in its frontiers—the shift of the entire country a step westward—which Churchill had reluctantly accepted. Its representatives persisted in proclaiming their anger towards Moscow about the Katyn massacres. What adherent of freedom and democracy could blame them? Yet so astonishing was the popularity of Russia in Britain that opinion surveys showed a decline in public enthusiasm for the Poles, because of their declared hostility to Moscow. Again and again, the prime minister urged the exiles to mute their protests. Since Russia would soon possess physical mastery of their country, Soviet goodwill was indispensable to any possibility