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his principal preoccupation was with the interests of his own service, and above all its bomber offensive. His personality lacked the bright colours, his conduct the anecdotage which enabled a man to shine at dinner tables or in the historiography of the war, but Ismay’s key subordinate Brig. Leslie Hollis paid tribute to Portal’s incisive mind and infectious calm: “I never saw him ruffled,”269 said Hollis, “even under vicious and uninformed attacks on the Air Force. He would sit surveying the critic coldly from beneath his heavy-lidded eyes, never raising his voice or losing his temper, but replying to rhetoric with facts.” The army was envious of the skill with which Portal exercised his influence upon the prime minister, often more successfully than the CIGS. Gen. Sir John Dill was liked and respected by his colleagues, but by the summer of 1941 he was deeply scarred by the failures of his service. His fires were flickering, his self-confidence had ebbed. Chiefs of Staff’s meetings throughout 1941–42 were pervaded by consciousness of the army’s inability to deliver victories, and of the prime minister’s consequent disaffection towards its leaders.

Maj. Gen. Hastings “Pug” Ismay, throughout Churchill’s premiership his chief of staff as minister of defence and personal representative on the Chiefs of Staff Committee, was sometimes criticised as a courtier, too acquiescent to his master’s whims. John Kennedy, for instance, disliked Ismay: “I am thankful I have so little to do with him,”270 he said. On another occasion he noted, “Ismay is such a devotee of PM’s271 that he is a danger. He said the other evening in the club ‘if the PM came in & said he’d like to wipe his boots on me, I’d lie down & let him do it. He is such a great man everything should be done for him.’ This is a dangerous attribute for a man who has such an influence on military advice.”

Yet this was a minority view. Most people—ministers, commanders and officials alike—respected Ismay’s tact and discretion. He perceived his role as that of representing the prime minister’s wishes to the service chiefs, and vice versa, rather than himself acting as a prime mover. He never offered strategic advice, because he believed, surely rightly, that this would usurp the Chiefs’ functions. He was a superb diplomat, who presided over a small staff of which the principal members were Hollis, who had served as a Royal Marine officer aboard a cruiser at the 1916 Battle of Jutland, and the brilliant, austere, bespectacled Col. Ian Jacob, a field marshal’s son. Whatever mistakes were made by the British high command, however acute became the personal tensions between the prime minister and his generals, admirals and air marshals, throughout Churchill’s war premiership the highest standards of coordination, staff discipline and exchange of information prevailed between Downing Street and the service ministries.

On the civil side, the prime minister was served by a remarkable group of officials. Cabinet Secretary Sir Edward Bridges preserved an enthusiasm for cerebral diversions, even amid the blitz. He presided over self-consciously intellectual debates in the Downing Street staff mess at supper, such as one in pursuance of the theme “Is there any evil except in intent?”272 Bridges had the additional merit of being as passionately committed as the prime minister was to victory at any cost, and in June 1940 he rejected out of hand proposals to establish skeleton Whitehall departments in Canada, against the eventuality of German occupation of Britain.

The Downing Street staff understood, as some outsiders did not, that while the prime minister’s regime might be unusual, it was remarkably disciplined. Minutes were typed and circulated within an hour or two of meetings taking place, even after midnight. The private secretaries—for most of the war Leslie Rowan, John Martin, Tony Bevir and John Colville—worked in shifts through the day and much of the night. “The chief difficulty is understanding what he says,”273 wrote Martin in his early days of service, “and great skill is