Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [236]
SIXTEEN
Setting Europe Ablaze
THE SPRING and summer of 1944 witnessed a flowering, albeit imperfect in the prime minister’s eyes, of one of his most cherished inspirations: resistance movements in occupied Europe and the Balkans. Back in 1940, Churchill famously ordered the minister of economic warfare, Hugh Dalton, to “set Europe ablaze.” This instruction prompted the creation of the Special Operations Executive, a secret organisation charged with promoting resistance—explicitly terrorism, armed action by nonuniformed civilians—everywhere that the Axis held sway. By submarine and small boat, plane and parachute, British-trained agents descended on Europe, and later Southeast Asia, to establish contact with those willing to raise the banner of opposition to tyranny, albeit by means unsanctioned in the Geneva Conventions. Events in France have received most attention from postwar chroniclers, though the partisans in Yugoslavia achieved much greater strategic significance, as Churchill perceived from 1943 onwards.
The men and women of the SOE helped to create one of the enduring legends of World War II. It seemed then, as it still does today, especially heroic to risk torture and death alone, far behind enemy lines. Support for domestic insurrection represented a personal act of faith by the prime minister, which ran contrary to the views of many of his service advisers. He treasured a belief that the peoples of Europe could play an important part in their own liberation, declaring on June 10, 1941: “We shall aid and stir the people of every conquered country to resistance and revolt. We shall break up and derange every effort which Hitler makes to systematize and consolidate his subjugation.” At the prime minister’s behest, a War Office planning document the same month addressed the promotion of resistance movements: “Subjugated peoples must be caused869 to rise against their oppressors, but not until the stage is set. The ‘attack from within’ is the basic concept of such operations—and we should be able to do it in a bigger way than did the Germans. They had but a few Quislings to help them, and we have whole populations. The Patriots must be secretly organised and armed with personal weapons to be delivered to them by air if necessary.”
Churchill anticipated that indigenous peoples would play a major part in their own liberation. If the United States entered the war, he wrote in a minute to Portal, the chief of the Air Staff, on October 7, 1941, there would be “simultaneous attacks by armoured forces870 in many of the conquered countries which were ripe for revolt.” In a paper of June 15, 1942, he cited “rousing the populations” among the first objectives of Allied landings on the Continent. The mission of the SOE was to hasten such ripening and “rousing.” In many books published even in the twenty-first century, accounts of what took place in the attempt to fulfil his vision are heavily coloured by romance. Reality was at least as interesting, but much more complex.
In June 1940, expressing to Canadian premier Mackenzie King his uncertainty about whether France would stay in the war, Churchill wrote: “I hope they will, even at the worst, maintain a gigantic guerrilla.”871 In the event, through the first years of occupation, France and the rest of western Europe remained passive. Acts of violent opposition were sporadic. It took time for the trauma of defeat to be overcome, for like-minded defiant spirits to meet and coalesce into groups. The British were in no condition to offer assistance. Most important, only a tiny minority of people were willing actively to oppose the Germans. In the matter of resistance, as in so much else, Churchill’s heroic enthusiasm struck little resonance with the mood of Europe’s citizens, preoccupied with more humdrum concerns. They needed to feed their families, earn wages,