Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [3]
I am surprised how few historians seem to notice that many things which the British and Americans believed they were concealing from the Soviets—for instance, Bletchley Park’s penetration of Axis ciphers and Anglo-American arguments about launching a Second Front—were well-known to Stalin, through the good offices of Communist sympathisers and traitors in Whitehall and Washington. The Soviets knew vastly more about their allies’ secret policy making than did the British and Americans about that of the Russians.
It is fascinating to study public mood swings through wartime British, American and Russian newspapers and the diaries of ordinary citizens. These often give a very different picture from that of historians, with their privileged knowledge of how the story ended. As for sentiment at the top, some men who were indifferent politicians or commanders contributed much more as contemporary chroniclers. The diaries of such figures as Hugh Dalton, Leo Amery and Lt. Gen. Henry Pownall make them more valuable to us as eyewitnesses and eavesdroppers than they seemed to their contemporaries as players in the drama.
Maj. Gen. John Kennedy, for much of the war the British Army’s director of military operations, kept a diary which arguably ranks second only to that of Gen. Sir Alan Brooke for its insights into the British military high command. On January 26, 1941, in the darkest days of the conflict, Kennedy expressed a fear that selective use of accounts of the meetings of Britain’s leaders might mislead posterity:
It would be easy by a cunning8 or biased selection of evidence to give the impression for instance that the P.M.’s strategic policy was nearly always at fault, & that it was only by terrific efforts that he is kept on the right lines—and it would be easy to do likewise with all the chiefs of staff. The historian who has to deal with the voluminous records of this war will have a frightful task. I suppose no war has been so well documented. Yet the records do not often reveal individual views. It is essentially a government of committees … Winston is of course the dominating personality & he has in his entourage and among his immediate advisers no really strong personality. Yet Winston’s views do not often prevail if they are contrary to the general trend of opinion among the service staffs. Minutes flutter continually from Winston’s typewriter on every conceivable subject. His strategic imagination is inexhaustible and many of his ideas are wild and unsound and impracticable … but in the end they are killed if they are not acceptable.
These observations, made in the heat of events, deserve respect from every historian of the period. Another banal and yet critical point is that circumstances and attitudes shifted. The prime minister often changed his mind, and deserves more credit than he sometimes receives for his willingness to do so. Meanwhile, others vacillated in their views of him. Some who revered Churchill in the first months of his premiership later became bitterly sceptical, and vice versa. After Dunkirk, Britain’s middle classes were considerably more staunch than some members of its traditional ruling caste, partly because they knew less about the full horror of the country’s predicament. History perceives as pivotal Britain’s survival through 1940, so that the weariness and cynicism which pervaded the country by 1942, amid continuing defeats, are often underrated. Industrial unrest, manifested through strikes especially in the coalfields and in the aircraft and shipbuilding industries, revealed fissures in the fabric of national unity which are surprisingly seldom acknowledged.
This book does not seek to retell the full story of Churchill at war, but rather to present a portrait of his leadership from the day on which he became prime minister, May 10, 1940, set in the context of Britain’s national experience. It is weighted towards the first half of the conflict, partly because Churchill’s contribution was then much greater than it became later, and partly because I have sought to emphasise