Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [48]
But Churchill was exasperated on August 10 when Sir Stafford Cripps, the Moscow ambassador, submitted to him a paper detailing proposals on postwar reconstruction. There would come a time for such things, but it was not the summer of 1940. Only a fool could have thought otherwise. Meanwhile, Britain was running out of money. The war was costing £55 million a week, and Washington was implacable in its demands for immediate cash payment for every ton of weapons and supplies shipped across the Atlantic. Kingsley Wood, the chancellor, suggested melting down the nation’s gold wedding rings, which would raise £20 million. The prime minister said that the Treasury should hold back from such a drastic measure, unless it became necessary to make a parade of it, to shame the United States. On August 16, he visited Fighter Command’s 11 Group operations room, and intently watched progress of the day’s fighting on the huge plotting board. On the way back to Chequers in his car, “Pug” Ismay, his chief of staff, made some remark. Churchill said: “Don’t speak to me160. I have never been so moved.” After a few minutes’ silence, he leaned forward and said, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.” Ismay wrote, “The words burned into my brain.” That day, the Combined Intelligence Centre reported its belief that Hitler would make no decision about invasion until the outcome of the air battle became clear. On August 24, the first German bombs fell on outer London, and Fighter Command’s airfields were again badly hit.
Sunday, September 1, yet another day when intelligence suggested that invasion might come, passed without incident. On the third, for the second time the War Cabinet met in the new underground Central War Rooms. Churchill declared it to be “lamentable” that only 500,000 rifles were scheduled to be produced by British manufacturers before the end of 1941. On September 5, he used the same adjective to deplore the “passivity” to which the Royal Navy seemed reduced when it declined to bombard new German batteries at Cape Gris-Nez, only twenty miles from the English south coast. He told Cunningham, Mediterranean C-in-C, that the supposed vulnerability of his fleet to Italian aircraft was “exaggerated.” He urged the swift construction of landing craft, to facilitate the raids on enemy shores which he was so impatient to launch.
A wag in the War Office discovered in the book of Job a description of a warhorse which the generals thought entirely fitting to their political master: “He paweth in the valley161, and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage … He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.” Yet while Churchill never disdained the gestures and symbols of warriorhood, he strove also for substance. Each night, he told Colville, “I try myself by court martial162 to see if I have done anything effective during the day. I don’t mean just pawing the ground—anyone can go through the motions—but something really effective.”
It is hard for a historian, as it was for Churchill’s contemporaries, to conceive what it was like for a man to bear sole responsibility for preserving European civilisation. Harold Nicolson wrote of the prime minister’s remoteness from ordinary mortals. His eyes were “glaucous, vigilant, angry163, combative, visionary and tragic … the eyes of a man who is much preoccupied and is unable to rivet his attention on minor things … But in another sense they are the eyes of a man faced by an ordeal or tragedy, and combining vision, truculence, resolution and great unhappiness.” Throughout the war, there were moments when Churchill was oppressed by loneliness, which only Beaverbrook’s company seemed able