Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [61]
Yet how could Britain display aggressiveness, a capability to do more than merely withstand Axis onslaughts by bombers and U-boats? Clementine Churchill enquired at lunch one day: “Winston, why don’t we land a million men210 on the continent of Europe? I’m sure the French would rise up and help us.” The prime minister answered with unaccustomed forbearance that it would be impossible to land a million men at once, and that the vanguards would be shot to pieces. Back in 1915, as Lt. Col. Winston Churchill prepared to lead a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers into the trenches, he told his officers, “We will go easy at first211: a little digging and feeling our way, and then perhaps later on we may attempt a deed.” This latter proposition commanded little enthusiasm among his comrades at the time, and even less among his generals a generation later. But, by the winter of 1940, Churchill knew that a “deed” must be attempted in order to sustain an appearance of momentum in Britain’s war effort.
At home, there could be no German invasion before spring. The nation’s city dwellers must bear the blitz, while the Royal Navy sustained the Atlantic lifeline against U-boats and surface commerce raiders. The navy had already suffered heavily, losing since 1939 one battleship, two aircraft carriers, two cruisers, twenty-two submarines and thirty-seven destroyers. More ships were building, but 1941 losses would be worse. Churchill pinned great hopes on the RAF’s offensive against Germany, but as he himself observed on November 1, 1940, “the discharge of bombs is pitifully small.”212 It would remain so for a long time to come. Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir John Dill instructed his director of military operations, Maj. Gen. John Kennedy, to draft a strategy paper on how the war might be won. Kennedy said the best that he could offer was a plan for averting defeat. To make victory possible, American belligerence was indispensable.
Lt. Gen. Henry Pownall attended an army conference addressed by the prime minister in November 1940, and was impressed by his robust good sense: “No more than anyone else did he see clearly213 how the war was going to be won, and he reminded us that for four years in 1914–18 nobody could foretell the final collapse of Germany, which came so unexpectedly … All we could do for the present, as during the Great War, was to get on with it and see what happened … He talked as well as ever, and I was much impressed by the very broad and patient view that he took of the war as a whole.” Churchill expressed the same sentiments to senior RAF officers conferring at Downing Street: “As the PM said goodnight to the Air Marshals214, he told them he was sure we were going to win the war, but confessed he did not see clearly how it was to be achieved.”
A Chiefs of Staff paper on future strategy, dated September 4, 1940, suggested that Britain should aim “to pass to the general offensive in all spheres and in all theatres with the utmost possible strength in the Spring of 1942.” If even this remote prospect was fanciful, what meanwhile was the army to do? Churchill, with his brilliant intuitive understanding of the British people, recognised the importance of military theatre, as his service chiefs often did not. The soldiers’ caution might be prudent, but much of the public, like unheroic Edward Stebbing and his comrades, craved action, an outcome, some prospect beyond victimhood. There was a rueful War Office joke at this time, prompted by the blitz, that Britain’s soldiers were being put to work knitting