Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [261]
The pugnacity that had served his country so wonderfully well in earlier years became distressing when directed against his own colleagues, men of ability and dedication, who knew that they did not deserve to be so brutally handled. Churchill could rouse his extraordinary powers on great occasions, of which some still lay ahead. There would be many more flashes of brilliance and wit. But key figures in Britain’s war leadership, instead of looking directly to him as the fount of all decisions, were now peering over his shoulder, towards a future from which they assumed that he would be absent. Eden, craving the succession, chafed terribly when the prime minister seemed unwilling to acknowledge his own political mortality. “Lunched alone with W,”958 he wrote on July 17. “He was in pretty good spirits. My face fell when he said that when coalition broke up we should have two or three years of opposition and then come back together to clear up the mess!”
Yet there were still many moments when Churchill won hearts, including that of the foreign secretary, by displays of whimsy and sweetness. On August 4, when Eden called959 at Downing Street with his son Nicholas, on holiday from school at Harrow, the prime minister surreptitiously slipped into the boy’s hand two pound notes, more than a fortnight’s pay for an army private, with a muttered and of course vain injunction not to tell “him.” Churchill’s companions became bored when he recited long extracts from Marmion and The Lays of Ancient Rome across the dinner table at Chequers, but how many other national leaders in history could have matched such performances? He was moved to ecstasies by a screening of Laurence Olivier’s new film of Henry V, not least because he was in no doubt about who was playing the king’s part in England’s comparable mid-twentieth-century epic. His impatience remained undiminished. Driving with Brooke from Downing Street to Northolt, their convoy encountered a diversion for road repairs. Churchill insisted on lifting the barriers and urging the cars along a footpath. The king himself would never do such a thing, the miscreant declared gleefully, for “he was far more law-abiding.”960
As for the war, by late summer 1944 the apprehension which dogged Churchill and his service chiefs through the spring was now supplanted by assurance that Germany’s doom was approaching. But when? On this, the prime minister displayed better judgement than the generals. Until the end of September, they envisaged a final Nazi collapse by the turn of the year. Churchill, by contrast, told a staff conference on July 14: “Of course it was true that the Germans961 were now faced with grave difficulties and they might give up the struggle. On the other hand, such evidence as there was seemed to show that they intended to continue that struggle, and he believed that if they tried to do so, they should be able to carry on well into next year.” His view remained unchanged even after the drama of the failed bomb plot against Hitler on July 20. This highlighted German internal opposition to Hitler—and its weakness.
Some illusions persist that the wartime Allies missed opportunities to promote the cause of “good Germans” who opposed Hitler, rejecting approaches from such men as Adam von Trott. Yet the British seemed right, first, to assume that any dalliance of this kind must leak, fuelling Soviet paranoia about a negotiated peace and, second, in believing that the anti-Hitler faction was both weak and flawed. Michael Howard has written: “We know that such ‘right-minded people’962 did exist; but the remarkable thing is that … there should have been so few of them, and that their influence should have been so slight.” Howard notes that most of the July 1944 bomb plotters were right-wing nationalists, who cherished grotesquely extravagant ambitions for their country’s postwar polity. The principal objective of most of those who joined the conspiracy against Hitler, as the Foreign Office perceived at the time, was to enlist Anglo-American aid against the Russians. It is easy to understand