Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [76]
The Chiefs of Staff met every day save Sunday at 10:30 a.m., in a room beneath the Home Office connected to the Cabinet War Rooms. Sessions customarily continued until one p.m. In the afternoons, the Chiefs worked in their own offices, to which they returned after dinner unless a further evening meeting had been summoned, as happened at moments of crisis, of which there were many. Every Monday evening, the Chiefs attended War Cabinet meetings. The 1914–18 conflict precipitated the beginnings of a historic shift in the balance of decision making from commanders in the field towards the prime minister and his service chiefs in London. In the Second World War, this became much more pronounced. Generals at the head of armies, and admirals at sea, remained responsible for winning battles. But modern communications empowered those at the summit of national affairs to influence the conduct of operations in remote theatres, for good or ill, in a fashion impossible in earlier ages. Alan Brooke wrote later: “It is a strange thing265 what a vast part the COS [committee] takes in the running of the war and how little it is known or its functions appreciated! The average man in the street has never heard of it.”
For any minister or service chief successfully to influence the prime minister, it was essential that he should be capable of sustaining himself in argument. Churchill considered that unless commanders had the stomach to fight him, they were unlikely to fight the enemy. Few found it easy to do this. Adm. Sir Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, was one of many senior officers who cherished ambivalent attitudes towards Churchill: “At times you could kiss his feet266, at others you feel you could kill him.” Pound was a capable organiser whose tenure as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff until March 1942 was crippled, first by a reluctance to assert his own will against that of the prime minister and, later, by worsening health. Capt. Stephen Roskill, the official historian267 of the wartime Royal Navy, believed that Pound was never a big enough man for his role. The admiral had doubts about his own capacities, and once asked Cunningham whether he should resign his post. Churchill bears substantial blame for allowing Pound to keep his job when his failing body, as well as inadequate strength of character, had become plain. It was fortunate for the Royal Navy that the admiral had some able and energetic subordinates.
Adm. Sir Andrew Cunningham, the Mediterranean C-in-C who succeeded Pound when he became mortally stricken, was frustrated by his own inarticulacy: “I … have to confess to an inherent difficulty268 in expressing myself in verbal discussion, which I have never got over except on certain occasions when I am really roused … I felt rather like a spider sitting in the middle of a web vibrating with activity.” Soon after Cunningham took up his post at the Admiralty, one Saturday afternoon the telephone rang at his Hampshire home. The prime minister wanted to talk on the scrambler. Cunningham explained that he possessed no scrambler. Churchill said impatiently that a device would be installed immediately. The admiral and his wife were kept awake until engineers finished their task at one a.m., when a call was duly put through to Downing Street. The prime minister was by then asleep. Cunningham, considerably cross, was told that the emergency had passed.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, who assumed direction of the RAF in October 1940, was widely considered the cleverest of the Chiefs of Staff. “Peter” Portal displayed notable diplomatic gifts, especially later, in dealing with the Americans. Like many senior airmen,