Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [260]
The British adopted a stubbornly proprietorial attitude to the Italian campaign, long after it had turned sour, and even after the dazzling success of Overlord. Marshall had made his share of mistakes in the course of the war—but so had Brooke and Churchill. Nothing in the summer exchanges between London and Washington justified the prime minister’s condescension towards the U.S. Chiefs. Though Eisenhower is often, and sometimes justly, criticised for lack of strategic imagination, he and Marshall were assuredly right to insist upon the concentration of force in France.
Yet it was hard for Churchill to bow to the relegation of himself and his country from the big decisions. An American political scientist, William Fox, coined the word superpower in 1944. He took it for granted that Britain could be counted as one. The true measure of superpowerdom, however, is a capability to act unilaterally. This, Churchill’s nation had lost. Dismay and frustration showed in his temper. Eden wrote on July 6: “After dinner a really ghastly defence committee954 nominally on Far Eastern strategy. We opened with a reference from W. to American criticism of Monty for over-caution, which W. appeared to endorse. This brought explosion from CIGS.” Brooke wrote in his own diary:
A frightful meeting with Winston955 which lasted until 2 am!! It was quite the worst we have had with him. He was very tired as a result of his speech in the House concerning the flying bombs, he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad-tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody, and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped. I began by having a bad row with him. He began to abuse Monty because operations were not going faster … I flared up and asked him if he could not trust his generals for 5 minutes instead of continuously abusing them and belittling them … He then put forward a series of puerile proposals, such as raising a Home Guard in Egypt to provide a force to deal with disturbances in the Middle East. It was not until midnight that we got onto the subject we had come to discuss, the war in the Far East! … He finished by falling out with Attlee and having a real good row with him concerning the future of India! We withdrew under cover of this smokescreen just on 2 am, having accomplished nothing beyond losing our tempers and valuable sleep!!
Eden commented later: “I called this ‘a deplorable evening,’956 which it certainly was. Nor could it have happened a year earlier; we were all marked by the iron of five years of war.” Accounts like that of Brooke, describing such passages of arms with Churchill, dismayed those who loved the prime minister, both his personal staff and family, when they were later published. The prime minister’s former intimates took special exception to criticisms that his conduct of office was adversely affected by alcohol. The CIGS was coupled with Lord Moran, whose diary appeared in 1966, not only as a betrayer of the Churchillian legend but also as a false witness about his conduct. Yet the two men’s views were widely shared. After listening to the prime minister for a time at a committee meeting, Food Minister Lord Woolton leaned over and whispered to Dalton like a naughty schoolboy: “He is very tight.”957 Exhaustion and frustration probably influenced Churchill’s outbursts more than brandy. But the evidence is plain: in 1944–45 he suffered increasingly from loss of intellectual discipline, sometimes even of coherence.