Churchill’s Most Difficult Decisions

Like to welcome everyone. Not really a surprise to see so many people

who are interested in one way or another in Winston Churchill. I want

to recognize Ron Luke, who is the president of the local Churchill society,

who has made the visit by Alan Packwood possible.

I want to recognize Arthur Nicholson say yes here. Another

Churchill author who is driven from Houston to be able to be with us this afternoon.

And I want to welcome the first visit by Tom Ricks, who

is the famous military columnist for The New York Times.

This brings me to my introduction to Ellen Packwood. But I want to preface

it by saying that it brought memories back of a book that was published as

a result of a conference here at the University of Texas in nineteen ninety one.

It seems like it’s about a quarter of a century ago, but in a very long time.

This was when Robert Blake, Lord Blake, was a visiting professor

in the English department, because the chairman of the English department thought that he

had written the greatest biography written in any language wasn’t about Churchill’s,

about Disraeli, but it was while Lord Blake was here that we got the idea

in the early 1990s that the time was right for a reassessment

of Churchill. In other words, a question of the myth of Churchill versus

the reality of Churchill, the personality and the historic figure. So

we managed to invite a lot of people who were all the

foremost authorities in their own field to give. But one example, Field Marshal

Michael Carver, who was a student of Churchill’s military strategy.

Now, we thought by making a reassessment of Churchill that this would

be very useful for the general public as well as for fellow historians. But we

had no idea how this conference was going to turn out, because some people

are very, very critical of Churchill. But believe it or not, the conclusion that

was reached at the end of the conference was that Churchill was a great man

after all. So, Alan,

we want to welcome you. Alan is from Churchill College,

Cambridge. He is the director of the Churchill Archives, which

is one of the foremost archives in Britain, including the Thatcher

papers, as well as Churchill Papers. And you could go on and on.

Alan, we look forward to hearing your assessment of Churchill.

OK. Well, Roger, thank you very much for that kind introduction. And I should start by saying SNAP

because I brought my own copy of your book with me to get

you to sign it. And I have to say, I think that that conference back in

opening up churches, studies and churches scholarship. It coincided,

as you know, really with the the opening up of the Churchill archive.

So it is a real pleasure to be here. Churchill famously

said you can’t make a good speech on iced water. So I was delighted

to say that we have sherry. I thought it might be useful for me

to start with just a few words, a few quick words of context about Churchill College

and the Churchill Archive Center. So Churchill College is located in

the University of Cambridge, and it’s the first of the modern Cambridge colleges to be

built. It was built as the National and Commonwealth Memorial to Sir Winston,

British National and Commonwealth Memorial to Sir Winston. But unusually for a memorial built during

his lifetime and built with at least his nominal involvement, he gave

his name to the trust, which raised the money for the college. And he came to the site

on the 17th of October 1959, before anything had been built and

planted to trees and ocana Mulberry. And he also made what was one of his

last public speeches, setting out his vision for the college that was going to bear his

name. And interestingly, that vision was that the college should in particular

train scientists, technologists, engineers, because Churchill, of

course, was someone who always took a keen interest in the potential of science.

And I think what this shows is him at the end of this long life and career, still looking

to the future, may also have been influenced, of course, by the fact that the Russians had just put Sputnik

up in space. The Churchill Archive Center comes a little bit later.

We’re built in 1973. Once it’s known that Churchill’s papers are

going to come to the college and it may interest you to know that we’re an American foundation. Really.

And when you come into the archive center, the first thing that you see on the wall of our Jock Colville Hall

is the names of our original founders and donors. And they’re all American,

especially former American ambassadors to the United Kingdom or their

families and foundations. And that’s, I think, is because the archive center

is the closest thing in the United Kingdom to one of your great American presidential libraries.

It’s founded on that sort of a model. So it was a model that these individuals readily understood.

We dont have any tradition of any such tradition of presidential libraries in the UK.

And in fact, especially in France of American audiences. And I like to say that we are now

the equivalent of four American presidential libraries,

because in addition to the papers of Sir Winston Churchill, as Roger has just

ended, we also have those of Margaret Thatcher, which we have opened up to nineteen eighty nine

and we’re about to open nineteen ninety the last year of their premiership. We have the papers of Sir

John Major, which we’re in the process of cataloging, and we’re just waiting on the arrival

of the papers of Gordon Brown. But even that is actually

just the start of a much bigger endeavor, because from the beginning the idea

within the archive center has been to gather around Winston Churchill, the papers of

his great contemporaries and great successes. And we’re now one of the biggest repositories in the United

Kingdom for modern personal papers, politicians, diplomats,

military leaders and scientists of the Churchill era and beyond, largely

British. But one Russian in that we have the papers of Vassily Mitrokhin

and the famous KGB archivist who spent 12 years copying

out the names of KGB operatives and KGB operations and

whose papers were famously exfiltrated from Russia by our intelligence services.

So the real strength of the archive center is, I hope you can see, is in the body

of material that’s been assembled for researchers under one roof. And our mission

is a very simple one. It’s to preserve this material for future generations, but it’s also

to make it as available and accessible as possible. Exactly the same as the mission of the

Harry Ransom Center here. Course, our core collection of the personal papers of Sir Winston Churchill,

huge collection, some two and a half thousand boxes, estimated one million items

and literally starting from the very. Beginning with his childhood letters and his school reports

and of course, you’ll all know that his school reports were not particularly good. This is one example. His

first school, St George’s School in outskirts. From March, April, 1884.

So Churchill is nine years old. And here you can see the headmaster as written conduct has been exceedingly

bad. He’s not to be trusted to do any one thing. And then at the bottom, under general

conduct you’ve got very bad is a constant trouble to everybody. And he’s always in some

scrape or other. The truth, of course, is that he was a an aristocratic

Victorian child used to having the run of Blan in Palace. This was a very strict Victorian

boarding school with a headmaster who used to cane his young charges till they bled. And so the

two didn’t meet. And I think what you’re seeing here really is the first manifestation of that sort

of famous Churchillian will and stubbornness. He he refused to fall in with school

ways. He also had a great ability to recover from setbacks.

It’s that sort of never give in mentality and to turn adversity to his advantage.

And this just allows me to show you one of my favorite documents in the collection. This is January 1932.

Churchill is in New York. And in December 1931 in New York, he is run down by a motorcar

on Fifth Avenue, making the classic British mistake of looking the wrong way as he goes across.

His response to this is to summon a local doctor, Otto Piccata, to his bedside at the

Waldorf Astoria Hotel. And I think you can almost hear Churchill dictating this

prescription to pick art, which for those of you at the back reads. This is to certify

that the post accident convalescence of the honorable Winston Churchill necessitates

the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at mealtimes.

The quantity is naturally indefinite, but the minimum requirements would be 250 cubic centimeters.

And you can see that Churchill has written at the top here. Keep on hand, of course.

Don’t need to tell this audience that the reason he needs to keep this on hand is that this is prohibition

era New York. So here is Churchill using his accident to overcome prohibition.

That’s a bit lighthearted, of course, within the archive. We also have some truly iconic

documents and you dont get more iconic than his great wartime speeches

and broadcasts. And of course, many of you will know that the way Churchill worked

is that he would dictate the duty secretary would set down his words, first of all, in normal

typescript like this. And he would then go through making annotations, alterations, corrections,

and of course, where those drafts survive, as they often do, gives you a real insight into his

thought processes and allows you to see how he’s crafting his oratory. Then when the speech

is in its final format, it’s taken away by the duty secretary and typed out it about this sort

of size so that it fits comfortably into his jacket pocket or into his hand, but then

set out on the page in this blank verse format. His office called it

speech form. Others called it some form, as in the Book of Psalms.

But you can see why he did it. Because, of course, what it what it does is it gives

him the ribbon. It gives him the pauses. It gives him the emphasis

for those great speeches. And what you’re looking at here is the key space key page

from his address to parliament on the 20th of August, 1940, at the height of the Battle

of Britain, where he refers to the R.A.F. and says and you can see he’s flagged it up for emphasis.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

What it, of course, shows is, although, you know, he is rightly remembered as a great orator, he

was really first and foremost a writer. He’s an orator who prepares extremely

carefully. And that, of course, brings me onto my main subject for today, and that

is Churchill’s war leadership. And I would say that few figures are

better known or more instantly recognizable than Winston Churchill.

He’s the scowling bow tie bulldog with the famous V for victory

salute and the omnipresent cigar who turned the British wartime establishment on its head

and whose oratory gave the lion’s roar that imbued the British people with the will to fight. That’s

Churchill, the icon. That is the Churchill that is today celebrated

on the British £5 note. And if you look at the British by pound note, you’ll see

you’ve got the key quote there. I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat from Churchill’s

first address to the houses of Parliament on the 13th for May 1940. And if you look closely,

you’ll see that the hands of Big Ben on the clock face are set to freedom, which is the very moment

that he delivered those words. And of course, in that speech,

his first speech as prime minister, he famously promised victory. Victory at

all costs victory in spite of all terror. Victory, however long

and hard the road may be yet. Of course, behind the icon

was a man. And behind the rhetoric, a question how

how could Churchill seek to deliver that promised victory? His six minute speech on the 13th from May 1940

was an oratorical masterpiece, but it contained no details of strategy

or policy. So what what were the key decisions? What was the strategy? How

was it devised? What I wanted to do with my book was to write

an archivists book to strip away the layers of hindsight and subsequent

interpretation and to look at Churchill’s leadership in the moment, because it is

perhaps a self-evident thing to say. But while waging war, Churchill and his contemporaries

didn’t know how it was going to turn out. And it’s an approach that’s perhaps best illustrated by a quote

from a memoir by John Martin, a civil servant who joined Churchill’s in a team as private

secretary in the spring of 1940. And when reflecting on those momentous

days, Martin was prepared to admit that with the luxury of hindsight, they may have formed

the finest hour. But that was not how they’d seemed at the time. Then,

he wrote, they had been a time of agony piled on agony. And I think this brings

me to my first serious point, which is that we need to remember that Churchill was often

waging war not from a position of strength, but from one of weakness.

Now, he famously wrote of his assumption of the premiership that I felt

as if I were walking with destiny and that all my past life had been but a preparation

for this hour and for this trial. But it’s easy for us to forget that there were many

in the British establishment and among the political elite who didn’t share that confidence

from the outbreak of war. Churchill had been back in Neville Chamberlain’s war cabinet as first

lord of the Admiralty, the civilian minister in charge of the British Navy, the role he played at the beginning of the First

World War. But he was felt by many to be an opportunist and a maverick.

He’d first entered the British cabinet in nineteen eighty eight, the age of just 33, and over the course

of the next twenty years he’d served in many of the major offices of the British state. But

it had been a rollercoaster ride. And in the decade leading up to the outbreak of war, he’d

been excluded from high office. To some of his political figures so sorry, some

of his political contemporaries, he was a reactionary figure, a figure who had told the suffragettes

that he would not be henpecked, who had championed the costly Gallipoli campaign

in World War One. And, of course, who had dismissed Gandhi as a half naked

fuckir. Some had even dismissed his calls for rearmament in

the face of Hitler’s growing power as a cynical ploy designed to undermine Prime Minister’s

Baldwin and Chamberlain. Though, of course, it was a campaign that had gained him the support of large sections

of the press and the public after the Munich crisis of 1938. The pressure built

on Chamberlain said that he had to bring Churchill back into his war cabinet. But Churchill’s long

and controversial career, with its changes of party, had made him enemies on both sides

of the House of Commons. He was a man who had started as a conservative, switched to the Liberals

in 1984, only to switch back to the Conservatives again 20 years later.

In 1924, allegedly allowing him to remark that anyone can

rat. But it takes a certain ingenuity to rewrite

such suspicions. Rivalries and jealousies on both sides of the chamber were only

exacerbated by Churchill’s forceful personality, a combustible mix of eloquence, self-confidence

and energy with a tendency to dominate. That did not always make him a congenial colleague.

This is the man who told his friend Violet Bonham Carter at an Edwardian dinner party. My dear,

we are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glow worm. And

this morning I was lucky enough to be able to spend a couple of hours in

the ransom center looking at some of your collections here, including the papers of

George Bernard Shaw, who had a long correspondence with Winston Churchill. And

in that in an undated letter, which is probably written about 1946,

you have a great a great quote from George Bernard Shaw, who’s staring at me from the opposite end of the room.

And George Bernard Shaw wrote. You have never been a real Tory, a foundation

of democracy and a very considerable dash of the author and artist.

And the training of the soldier has made you a. Hominum that the blimps and the

Philistines and the stick in the muds have never understood and always dreaded

and now going into the Second World War. The wonderfully

named general Sir Edmund Ironside, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, observed in his diary

that Churchill’s physique must be marvelous. But I cannot think that he would make a good prime minister.

He has not got the stability necessary for guiding the others. And Jock Colville,

private secretary and Downing Street in Downing Street under Chamberlain, who would like to become a great friend

and confident of Churchill, was equally damning. Writing in his diary that Churchill’s

verbosity and restlessness make a great deal of unnecessary work, prevents any

real practical planning from being done and generally cause friction. Leo Kennedy,

diplomatic editor of The Times in his diary for the Fourth of May 1940, wrote

There There’s a drive against Chamberlain. I can’t quite see who can advantage justly take his place.

Curiously enough, what is really needed is that Winston should be made to take a rest.

He’s overdoing himself and taking the strain by stoking himself unduly with champagne, liquors, etc.

Dines out and dines well. Almost every night sleeps after luncheon. Then to the House of

Commons, then a good and long dinner, and doesn’t resume work at the Admiralty till after 10 p.m.

and goes until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. He’s got into the habit of calling conferences and subordinates

after 1:00 a.m., which naturally upsets some of the admirals who are men of sound habits.

Now, six days later, of course, Churchill was prime minister and Alexander Dugin, senior civil servants

in the Foreign Office in his diary entry for the 9th of May, doubted that we would get a better prime

minister than Neville Chamberlain. And I think we forget too easily that Churchill wasn’t elected

prime minister. He was there because the Labor Party would no longer serve under Neville Chamberlain

in a national coalition. And because Lord Halifax, the conservative foreign secretary, was

not willing to try and lead a wartime government from the House of Lords rather than the Commons,

it was a Westminster coup from which Churchill emerged as the only leading conservative

with the popular credibility and political ability to form a government. Conservatives being the largest

party in the House. And in spite of Churchill’s feelings of destiny, this did not mean

that he inherited a strong position. Quite the contrary to form his national coalition,

he had to offer places in his war cabinet to the labor leaders Clement Atlee and Arthur Greenwood

to keep his own Conservative Party onside. He had to give the two remaining seats to Chamberlain,

his predecessor, and Halifax, his main rival. So as he looked out around

that famous cabinet table, he was not looking out on friendly faces or his

own appointees. So how did Churchill respond to this? Well, he strengthened his

position by making himself not just prime minister, but also minister

of defense, which meant that the chiefs of staff, the military commanders now reported directly

to him instead of to the service ministers. He downgraded the role of the first

Lord of the Admiralty, the secretary of state for war and the secretary of state for air by demoting them from

the cabinet. And he made it very clear that he was now going to play the direct

role in managing operations. In essence, he was going to be

a chief executive, not a chairman. And the key, of course, is that

the key change is that Churchill is now putting himself at the center of

the machine. He’s bringing together the war cabinet secretariat that serves the minister of defense,

where the Downing Street machine with his own advisers and he’s welding them into one

inner circle. He was no longer one oversized wheel, putting a stress on the system

from the outside. He was now the engine driving the whole vehicle. This meant, of

course, that the system could now be designed around him and was therefore now better able to accommodate him

and his rather eccentric work habits. The change in tone was summed

up, I think, by these little red stickers action this day,

and that the Prime Minister would attach to key minutes and telegrams. But it was a system

that was immediately tested by military crisis. Churchill becomes prime minister on the 10th

of May 1940, which is the very day that Hitler launches his blitzkrieg offensive against France

and the low countries. Neither the new prime minister nor any of his inner circle could have anticipated

how quickly that military situation would deteriorate. Their whole strategy

was predicated on the fact that the French army, assisted by the much smaller British

expeditionary force and supported by the RAAF from Royal Navy, would be able to hold the Germans

in Belgium and northern France. When German armor, supported by dove bombers,

comes crashing through the RDM forest, simply bypassing the defense. You know, line, the whole

plan unravels, opening up a huge gap in the allied flank so that within days,

just within days, the situation is desperate. Of course, Churchill is still constructing his cabinet.

He’s had no time at all to bet in. But now he’s faced with a hugely difficult dilemma.

On the one hand, he wants to fight and he has publicly declared in parliament that he will

fight and he clearly feels a duty to support his ally. On the other, he realizes

that every man killed boats. Suncor, most crucially, fighter planes shot down over France

is not going to be available for the defense of Britain. So in the book, I look at how he navigates this crisis.

And one of my conclusions is that he does so much more consulted civilly and much more

politically than he’s often given credit for, because against this bleak backdrop,

it’s inevitable that French requests for further British support should intensify. Prime

Minister raino visits London on Sunday, the 26 of May, and he paints a grim picture of the French

inability to carry on by land, sea or air before proposing that the allies ask Mussolini

for terms that would ensure Italy’s non belligerency before being that that will then free up troops

from southern France to come up and join the fight in the north. Churchill reports on

this conversation to the war cabinet at 2:00 p.m. on the 26 of May, causing Cadigan

to note in his diary that raino doesn’t say that France will capitulate. But all

his conversation goes to show that he sees no alternative. And it’s no

coincidence that Lord Halifax, who’s still in the cabinet now as Churchill’s foreign secretary,

chooses this moment to raise the question of whether Britain should use the French initiative

to investigate possible peace terms from Italy. It’s a discussion which then continues

over the course of the next three days in several subsequent war cabinet meetings. And these are

debates, of course, that have been the subjects of a book by John loo- Catch a Play, and which are at the heart

of the new movie featuring Gary Oldman. They occur at a most vulnerable moment and they threatened

to derail Churchill’s whole stated policy of waging war. I

think Churchill’s response to the crisis shows him exploiting to the full his power to

convene the meetings and control the agendas, because in effect, what he does over the course of the next

two days is to hold two parallel series of war cabinet meetings. He

restricts the discussions about an approach to Mussolini quite deliberately to a very

small group. The five members of the war cabinet supplemented from the twenty seventh of May

by Alexander Cadigan, an Archibald Sinclair, the latter in his capacity as leader of the Liberal

Party and therefore a key coalition partner. And that group holds three separate

meetings to thrash out the issue in Admiralty House on the 26 of May in Downing Street

on the 27 foot in the Prime Minister’s room at the House of Commons on the twenty eighth.

They do not those meetings, interestingly, don’t take place underground in the cabinet war rooms as the movie Darkest

Hour suggests. Why would they? The bombing hasn’t started yet. And

but these then are the six men on whom that decision rests.

Chamberlain, Churchill’s predecessor as prime minister, still leader of the majority Conservative Party.

Halifax, the powerful foreign secretary. Clement Atlee, leader of the Labor

Party. And Arthur Greenwoods, his deputy.

Alex Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberal Party, and Alexander Cadigan, the only civil

servant to present with the sole exception of Sinclair, who’d served with Churchill in the trenches

in World War 1 and thereafter as his personal military secretary. This was not a group of natural

allies for Churchill. As I stated a moment ago, it’s a war cabinet forced upon him by expediency

and the need to maintains national unity. He’s not yet had time to assert his own

authority and appoint his own people. Just think of the constant pressure that these men are under.

Suffering the claustrophobia of sitting almost constantly in smoke filled rooms, interrupted

only by the latest desperate news from the front, but by managing the meetings,

by separating the political and military agendas. Churchill allows this group, the politicians,

to focus on the key political issue. And he also contains the damage that might have been

caused, had discussions about possible peace terms taking place within a larger body.

Now, the records of these 10 smaller meetings show

a less black and white debate than is portrayed in the movie. Halifax

wanted to explore the possibility of mediation in order to avoid bloodshed, but he was

only prepared to go so far in ceding British independence. Churchill feared that any

expiration of terms was a slippery slope and that Britain was likely to get a better deal after she had demonstrated

her resolve and capacity to fight. But faced with a dire military situation, he has

to be careful to take his colleagues with him. And so he allows the issues to be talked out

at great length. Sometimes acrimoniously. You have to remember, at this point, Churchill doesn’t

know how many troops they’re going to get off the beaches at Dunkirk. In the end, they managed to get away with

three hundred and thirty eight thousand. But the initial estimates are that they might be lucky

to get away with fifty thousand. The support of

Atley and green-wood Sinclair and ultimately Chamberlain for Churchill’s position

proves vital in countering Halifax’s proposal, as was the information that the

Prime Minister was waiting for from his chiefs of staff, a key reports confirming

that Britain would be able to fight with a reduced army and that the Navy and Air Force could

defend the islands as long as aircraft production and civilian morale

could be maintained. And ultimately, as long as we have the support of the United States,

Churchill’s final ploy on the afternoon of the twenty eighth of May, once he had that report from

the chiefs of staff, was to break the smaller war cabinet discussion halfway through to call his

first meeting of all his ministers outside of the war cabinet. He doesn’t have to take the tube

as the two meetings both take place in his parliamentary office and to my mind, suggesting that he needed his

resolve stiffening by others at this key moment does him a disservice. He was always

going to fight if he could. And instead, seizing the moment, he addresses this wider

group with a stirring X temporary speech in which he outlines the serious nature of the crisis and

pledges to go down choking in his own blood rather than countenance surrender.

It’s a bravura performance which wins an ovation from a hardened and usually cynical political audience.

But more crucially, it wins their support for his policy of continuing to wage war.

Leo Amer., secretary of state for India, a near contemporary of Churchill’s and not an uncritical friend,

was at that meeting, and he recorded in his diary that Churchill’s speech left

all of us tremendously heartened by Winstons resolution and grip of things. He is

a real war leader and one whom it is worthwhile serving under. And when the

war cabinet meeting resumed at 7 pm immediately after Churchill’s speech, it was clear that he’d

effectively won the argument against any expiration of negotiations. The timing of

his intervention had been critical, and he played his hand well, keeping his cabinet together and preparing

his government for the collapse of their ally. Yet with the Battle of Britain and the blitz about to be unleashed, he

cannot have seen it at the time as a turning point. At the time, he was simply trying to find a way

to keep fighting. And it is British weakness in the aftermath of the fall of France

that influences Churchill’s war strategy going forward. Churchill had promised victory,

but again, how was he going to deliver it? From September 1940,

London is being hammered by the blitz from the 7 4 September. It is bombed for 76

nights consecutively, accepting only the second of November. And no

one at the time knows whether a modern city can survive such a sustained

and heavy bombardment from the air. Both Churchill and his chief of staff is may describe a visit

to a London site by the Prime Minister. They put it in slightly different locations, and

when Churchill’s car arrives at the scene, it’s quite clear from both accounts that he doesn’t

know how he’s going to be received. It’s clearly a moment of some tension. The arrival

of the prime minister quickly attracts a large crowd and he doesn’t know how they’re going to react with their grief

and anger be directed against him and the establishment for leading them into such peril and for failing

to provide better protection. Instead, according to his May good old Winny, they cried.

We thought you’d come and see us. We can take it. Give it him back. And in Churchill’s

account, he notes, how is how? As he departed, a harsher mood swept over this

haggard crowd, giving them back. They cried and let them have it, too.

I undertook forthwith to see that their wishes were carried out, and this promise was

certainly kept. Alas, for poor humanity. Now, no

doubt Churchill told this story because it chimed with his own attacking instincts in a way. This

is the real underground movement. But it’s one thing to commit yourself to waging war. It’s another

thing to actually deliver a British offensive in 1940. Churchill’s options are severely limited.

How is he going to give it back? How do you take the fight to the enemy? Britain cannot fight in mainland

France other than with small scale commando operations or special operation executive

raids both, of course, of which Churchill encourages. We can bomb Germany

and Churchill starts authorizing bombing raids from the moment he is in Downing Street. But Britain lacks

strength, and it’s clearly going to take time to build up the RAAF bomber forces while the Luftwaffe

can hit London and Britain far more easily and effectively. I argue that one

theater where he can take the fight to the enemy, where he does have an army,

where he does have a fleet is the Mediterranean, especially once the Italians are in

the war after June. Churchill is a lifelong imperialist and he’s certainly not ready

to cede the British position in Malta or Egypt and Palestine. He also knows

the Mediterranean fare too well and he chooses it as a viable battleground.

It’s a decision which is a logical one, I think, seen within the context of 1940. But it’s

one that also carries huge implications for the future of the Second World War,

because once you commit to fighting in the Mediterranean, it’s going to be difficult to get out,

especially once the Germans move down, as they inevitably do into Yugoslavia and

Greece. And if you divert resources to the Mediterranean, you are inevitably doing

that at the expense of the other of other theaters. General Dell, as chief

of the Imperial General Staff, argues for the defense of Singapore, reminding Churchill

that has always been the priority for British policy to guarantee the defense of Australia

and New Zealand, something that Churchill himself has clearly signed up to in the past. But

the prime minister now argues that we have to fight the actual war in front

of us, not the hypothetical battle with Japan. That may not come. And besides,

he argues, if the Japanese try and attack Britain in the. East, they will have

to go through the American Pacific fleet, which therefore ultimately guarantees British security.

Unfortunately, as you all know, the Japanese come to the same conclusion and provide their own answer.

In my book, I look at the whole question of fighting with allies because, of course, Churchill

is desperate for allies. And I look at how he came to co-create the

Atlantic charter in an attempt to move the Americans closer to war. Only then to suddenly

and unexpectedly find himself in alliance with the Soviet Union after the German

invasion and in June 1941. It’s a period that I think is perhaps

best summed up by two quotations, both recorded in his diary by John

Colleville on Churchill’s courtship of the American president.

Kovel records in a saying No lover ever studied every whim of

his mistress as I did. Those of President Roosevelt,

while in his justification for his support of the Soviet Union after the German invasion, and Churchill

apparently remarked, If Hitler invaded, hell, I would at least make a favorable

reference to the devil in the House of Commons. And

interestingly, just this morning, again, here in your excellent in this excellent center, looking in the

papers of Eddie Marsh, who’d served as Churchill’s private secretary earlier in his career, I found

this Churchill quote, apparently about Roosevelt in America on a scrap of

I’m in favor of kissing him on both cheeks, but not on all four.

But the truth is, of course, that Churchill had no choice

but to almost simultaneously in these months embrace the principles of the 1941

Atlantic charter and the real politique of the 1942 Anglo’s

Soviet treaty, even though it’s clear right from the beginning that they’re going to pull in opposite directions.

He doesn’t know how long the Russians will hold. He doesn’t know how long the Americans will wait before

coming into the conflict. He’s embraced the devil and cross the deep blue sea. He’s shown himself

willing to travel politically and ideologically in order to start constructing this grand alliance.

This is someone who was an arch anti Bolshevik from 1917. But there’s also very little doubt

that his personal preferences and priorities lie in the West with the United States.

But it’s also clear that the American and Soviet attitudes to the postwar settlement, and especially to the fate

of the Balkan and East European countries that border on Russia are going to be very different

in 1941. These problems are hypothetical and they’re subordinated to the need to obtain

military victory. But as the war progresses, Churchill inevitably finds himself

caught between the contrasting attitudes of his two allies to the defeated nations

have the right to determine their own form of government. Should Poland be forced to cede territory to the Soviet Union

against her will? How might a policy of assigning spheres of influence in Balkan countries be

reconciled with the clauses of the charter opposing territorial aggrandizement and interference?

Churchill was clearly aware of these challenges in 1941, but in the short term he knew

he needed both the United States and Russia. His heart yearned to bring the Americans into the conflict.

His head knew that he had to keep the Soviets there, and we focused so much on

war was and how bleak some of the middle periods were for Churchill.

The fall of Singapore in February 1942 had the power to do the Prime Minister real

time, real harm. It coincided with a renewed offensive by ronnell in the North African desert

and with the escape of German battleships in the channel. It looks as though it looked as though Britain was being

outfought and outmaneuvered in every theater. British public opinion was outraged

kadugli and feagles it to be the blackest period yet of the war. And Churchill later conceded

that it was certainly not strange that public confidence in the administration and its conduct

of the war should have quavered. And I think you can see his strength for feeling in

some of the contemporary telegrams. This is a telegram that he sends to General Wavell,

the fare to commander in the Far East on the 10th of February, 1942.

And he says here. There must at this stage be no fault of saving

the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs.

The 18th Division has a chance to make its name in history. Commanders and senior officers should die

with their troops. The honor of the British Empire and the British Army is at stake.

And of course, few days later, Singapore capitulates and Churchill backs away from this hard line.

But it certainly gives a sense, I think, of, you know, how how much he feels

the loss of Singapore, which remains the largest British military capitulation in history.

Indeed, he now found himself criticized from all sides to the prime minister of Australia,

John Curtin. The loss of Singapore was an inexcusable betrayal. And viewed from

Australia and New Zealand, Britain should have done more to secure Singapore’s defense. Yet, as the war

cabinet noted on the 16th of February, as soon as Singapore had fallen, in retrospect,

it now seemed a pity that we’d sent the 18 division. Churchill was simultaneously

vulnerable to the charges of not having done enough to reinforce Singapore. And of only having

sent reinforcements when it was too late for them to be effective. The same was clearly true

of his decision to send the battleship Prince of Wales, which was sunk by Japanese air attack along with HMS

Repulse on the 10th of December. And of course, it’s a subject for Arthur Nicholson’s book.

Not only had the prime minister insisted on the ship’s dispatch, but he’d also chosen to publicise

the fact as a deterrent to Japan and as a reassurance to Australia and New Zealand.

So my book then looks at how he manages the crisis. And I would argue that he manages it by facing

down the growing opposition in the British press and parliament, by allowing debates and

by calling a confidence vote in his government. But he also cleverly

restructures his war cabinet. He brings in the socialist politician, Stafford Cripps,

the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, whose growing popularity was threatening to undermine Churchill

and by making Crips leader of the House and so responsible for managing government business. He

ties him into his own administration. He bowed to pressure to create a new ministry of

production, but he definitely avoids all attempts and calls to strip him of his role

as minister of defense and time and time again. I think when you look in detail at key moments

like this during the war, you see how tactical and political. Churchill could be.

But of course, all of that meant nothing. If Britain didn’t have victories in the field. And up to the summer of 1942,

we’d been defeated in Norway and France and Greece and now in the Far East. Churchill sacks

General Orkin LEC in the summer of 1942 because he believes that the 8th Army has become

demoralized. But he also does it because he needed at that moment to send a

strong signal to both the Americans and the Russians that Britain could and would

fight in the Mediterranean. Roosevelt and Stalin a both now pushing for a second front in France.

But Churchill feels he needs to finish what has been started in the Mediterranean, and he’s rightly skeptical

about doing something too early or too small scale in northern Europe.

A theme running throughout the book is that Churchill’s key decisions have to be seen

as the products of the specific time, place and context in which they’re made.

So, for example, the policy of unconditional surrender must be seen in the context

of the Casablanca conference that coined it in January 1943. The insistence

on the complete surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan, even if their regimes changed, has

been criticized by some for potentially prolonging the war and by undermining internal resistance

within those countries to their fascist regimes. But in early 1943, in the

absence of a second front in France, Churchill and Roosevelt needed to send a strong signal

to Stalin, who had not attended the meeting in Morocco, and they needed to send a signal that they would not

seek a separate peace with Hitler with only limited gains in North Africa and no

easy end to the war yet in sight. They also wanted a message that would bolster domestic morale

while simultaneously sending a clear response to the horrific information that was now emerging

about Nazi atrocities against the Jews. The decision to travel to

Athens for Christmas in 1944 to broker a peace between warring

nationalist and communist factions must be seen in the light of the agreements negotiated

between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow two months earlier, in which the Soviet leader had

apparently agreed to Greece remaining a British sphere of influence to Churchill,

who had not become the king’s first minister, to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. The communist insurgency

was more than a local difficulty. It was a litmus test of Russian good faith, and it

was about preserving British influence in the Mediterranean, for which, of course, Churchill had been fighting since

was never happier than when in the midst of the crisis. Conversely, what he hated

was periods of inactivity. And I think you can see that most clearly in the months

running up to D-Day, the diaries of Generals Alan Brook and Alexander Cadigan

for the first half of 1944 record their personal frustrations with the prime minister

and do so in terms that often reflect on his declining physical and mental health. So

Brooks speculated that the prime minister might not last three months. He was failing fast, was dull,

lifeless and missing the main points. And at other times it seemed as if Churchill lost all balance

so that Brooke felt as though he were chained to the chariot of a lunatic.

But interestingly, Churchill did not take to his bed and have a nervous breakdown. As one

recent movie would have you believe, his response instead was to seek

the stimulus of action. So on the 16th of May 1944,

he asks Admiral Ramsay, the architect of the Naval Overlord operation, to draw up a plan.

This plan would have seen Churchill landed on the beaches on D-Day. The plan

was that he was going to embark on HMS Belfast on D minus one transfer to a destroyer

and then, if safe, make a short tour of the beaches. Now, of course, Ramsay

does this because Churchill’s commanded him to do it. But the last thing that he or

Eisenhower or any of the military commanders want is Churchill anywhere near the front line

on D-Day. But constitutionally, there’s only one person who can order Churchill not to go.

And that’s the key. And of course, Churchill knows that. So he uses a royal audience at the end of

May, 1944 to say to George the six. Well, Your Majesty, wouldn’t it be great

as if in days of old, the king and his first minister could lead their armies over into battle

together? Of course, King George, the six, a former naval man himself, is initially swept away with all

of this, but inclined to agree. But then immediately told by Alan

Lascelles, his private secretary, that no way, that’s a

constitutional crisis. And not only can you not go, but you’re going to have to tail Churchill

that he can’t go. Even then, it takes two letters

from the king. This is the second one handwritten on Buckingham Palace paper on the 2nd of

June, 1944, before Winston grudgingly defers to Your Majesty’s

wishes and even commands.

So my final chapter in my book looks at why Churchill

fought the 1945 general election at all and having decided to fight

it against his wife’s advice, why he chose to fight it so badly.

Exhaustion clearly played a part, but it is not the whole answer. I think

he lost partly because he was a fighter and could not stop fighting.

The very thing that made him such an effective war leader on the international front caused

him to misjudge the public mood on the home front, because on the homefront he should have played

the chairman’s role. He should have stayed above the political fray and presented himself

as the national savior, the candidate of unity, the man to finish the job, which was exactly

what the Conservative Party expected him to do. Instead, he said he was not ready to be put

on a pedestal and he threw himself into vicious political attacks on the Labor Party.

So why? In part, I think this is a return to his political roots. Churchill

had been a passionate opponent of socialism throughout his political career. Even in his most radical phase

as a young liberal politician in 1988, he’d castigated socialism as a barren philosophy

that sought to pull down wealth, destroy private interests, kill enterprise, assail the preeminence of the individual,

exalt the rule rather than the man, and attack capital as conservative chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s.

He’d led the government’s opposition to the general strike. Now, Leo Amory felt in his diary that there was

no getting around the fact that he Churchill is essentially a mid-Victorian wig

and means to fight the election on the purely negative tack of the socialist bogey. It was

a conviction that I think must have been strengthened by Churchill’s current view of the

international scene, where he saw communist forces seeking to install themselves in Albania,

Greece, Italy, Poland and Yugoslavia, where he feared a consequent loss

of democratic freedoms. The rhetoric and language he’d use to condemn the aspirations

and actions of the communists in Greece was still fresh in his mind and on his tongue.

Churchill was also finally free from the constraints of coalition and able to respond

to some of his most vociferous critics on the left. People like Aneurin BEVAN and Harold Laski,

whom he felt had been sniping at him and undermining his foreign policy and his premiership.

It may have been a big leap to argue as he tried to do, that the British parliamentary Labor Party would lead

an extra blee to Soviet style communism. But I think in that election in 1945,

Churchill was seeking to present two alternative visions for the future of Britain,

and this went to the heart of why he’d become prime minister and why he’d waged war for five long years.

In his speech to the Conservative Party conference in March 1945, he had acknowledged the need

for state regulation and control in wartime as a means to a specific end. But once

that end was reached. Control for control’s sake is senseless. He’d been fighting

to preserve British independence and the empire, but also British liberties. Rather than

break with the past, he was looking for continuity. Thus, in his final election broadcast,

he looked back to the Britain of September 1939, arguing that it was already peopled

by a far stronger, healthier, better breds, better lads, better housed and better educated

race. That had been the case before the First World War. In his view, Britain did not need

a brave new world. She needed to be able to return and pick up where she’d been forced to leave off.

When his doctor, Lord Moran, told him that there were two opposing ideas in the

country, and that universal gratitude to him was tempered by the notion that he was not

keen on this brave new world business. Churchill replied The desire for a new world

is nothing like universal. Gratitude is, of course. He was completely wrong.

Ultimately, Churchill fought and lost the campaign on the principles he believed in using the only

methods he knew. He didn’t have the patience, time or energy to adapt his tactics.

And as Anthony Eden said at the time, he would not have been Winston Churchill if he had faced

with a multitude of challenges. Churchill couldn’t always make the right decisions. Course, in many cases

there were no right decisions, only different outcomes or potentially difficult and damaging.

He was often playing a weak hand with few resources. His preferred response was to live

in the moment to prioritize, debate and then act upon the evidence in front of him.

Many of those who worked most closely with him spoke about his ability to find and focus on what was most

important. And Lord Moran recalled Clementine, telling him that Winston always saw things in

blinkers. His eyes are focused on the point he is determined to attain. He sees

nothing outside, that being Churchill gambled that one success would lead to another.

This was about seizing the moment. The key to victory was to keep moving forward. So

one battle at a time. That was how Winston. Waged war, nor did he pretend it was otherwise.

Speaking to the Commons on the 27 February 1945 in the aftermath of the Altar conference,

he reflected on his role. And he said in nineteen forty to forty one,

when we in this islands were all alone, an invasion was so near the actual steps we ought to

take. Seems plain and simple. If a man is coming across the sea to kill you, you do

everything in your power to make sure that he dies before he finishes his journey. That may be difficult

and painful, but it is at least simple. Now we enter into a world of imponderables,

and it’s every stage occasions for self-questioning arise. It is a mistake to look too

far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at

a time. I argued that it was by keeping his eyes fixed on strengthening the individual links

that Churchill helped to forge the chain, which led to victory. Thank you.