Churchill and…War
Churchill as Coalition War Leader
Ideas may be splendid, but that have to be worked with to be realized.
visions may be dazzling, but they require labor.
by Christopher C. Harmon
FH 99
Christopher C. Harmon presented this talk at Washington Society for Churchill’s meeting on 20 October 1994. He has since offered similar addresses to audiences at the Marine Corps’ Command and Staff College, Hillsdale College in Michigan and, most recently, the World War II Veterans Committee, meeting in Philadelphia on 3 February 1998.
On the morning of Winston Churchill’s first full day as Prime Minister, he met with subordinate ministers. Among Churchill’s chief concerns was whether Sweden could be brought into the war on the Allied side.
Sweden never joined the coalition, of course, but the case pointed to a major problem for Britain: given the power of the Axis of Germany, Austria, and Japan, how could London forge an international coalition that could withstand the aggressors? By war’s end, there were only nine sovereign states on the globe which had not taken sides, and nearly all aligned against the fascists. Even the alliance Italy had with Germany had been broken. Churchill’s greatness in this war is in making Britain the defensible rock, and in building outward a great coalition that could not merely survive but win the war.
We might explore Churchill’s leadership in creating this international coalition in four ways. First, there are his ideas and vision; second, his hard work; third, his pursuit of the neutrals and smaller powers; fourth, the Grand Alliance with the United States and Soviet Russia. Finally, I’ll offer a few closing points.
IDEAS AND VISION
The first stones laid, in this great construction project, were those of ideas. Churchill had to establish the anti-fascist cause as one with political and moral credibility. That only sounds easy. It sounds easy today because it has been done; fascism has been discredited for half a century. Then, it seemed more like the ideology of the future.
Why?
Some people had come to understand the full evils of Russian communism. Disturbed by it, they frankly hoped the new Nazism would be a continental check on the Bolsheviks. Many Conservative Party members thought so. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania probably thought so.
Some people were slow to respond to Churchillian calls for arms because they remained transfixed by the mass death they had seen in Western Europe in their own time. As Churchill wrote‹about pacific, democratic, demoralized France after War One‹every cottage had its empty chair.
Some opinion makers in Europe in the 1930s understood fascism’s viciousness, but whether from fear, or optimism, chose to be dishonest about it. The editor of the powerful London Times, Geoffrey Dawson, admitted privately in 1937 that he was so protective of German feelings that “I spend my nights taking out anything which I think will hurt their susceptibilities and in dropping [in] little things which are intended to soothe them.”
Finally, there were some people in Europe who delayed doing anything about ascendant Nazism because, from their positions of civil responsibility, they coolly judged that chances for preserving their national life and sovereignty were better if they remained aloof from any fray with the fascist powers. Self-preservation was their first, and their only, rule. Strong strains of this approach are evident in the public remarks of Lord Halifax, Neville Chamberlain, and Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies.
One must admit that there was a plausible argument for neutrality, if one judged only by immediate self-interest. But that is just my point. Churchill rarely assessed world political matters solely from self- interest. For him, that was moral and political bankruptcy. Churchill, no less calculating than other leaders, made his calculations on another basis. With Britain behind him he stood up and he stood fast. With time and with Hitler’s attacks, more and more states and governments in exile came to stand with him.
There are two different problems with the neutrals’ and appeasers’ argument to a moral self-interest, and both have to do with how coalitions form or do not form. First, even cynical self-interest may not serve your self-interest. Consider the factual record of this war. If immediate self-interest was the best ground for foreign relations, then Italy in both world wars proved herself the wisest country of all! And that is clearly false. Italy, Finland, the Soviet Union — all these jumped to and fro during World War II, and none profited much from the effort. Second, the so-called pure realists can be as bankrupt as the purely self interested. Take one of today’s brightest minds of the school of hard boiled realists, Colin Gray, a major name in geopolitics. Perhaps you have seen his book War, Peace and Victory, which has a chapter on coalition war. Here are some of the principles he says history teaches to states that are considering joining coalitions for war:
“Identify the side which will win…”
“Intervene sufficiently early in a war so as to make a difference valued highly by new allies, but not so early that undue national effort is required.”
“When in serious doubt [about who will win], stay neutral.”
This admirable intellect has not one word to say in this chapter about the differences between just war and the other kinds, or about high-toned statesmanship and low politics. His advice on these pages is mere Machiavellianism. His guides for coalition warfare are the obvious, shallow ones of the uncourageous neutrals of 1939 and 1940 and 1941. Gray is a man who really believes in national defense and national power. But there is a principle here: power, shorn of moral force, is a hollow and sometimes even an ugly thing.
That is part of the answer to our question of how Churchill created the great coalition. He gave the world a political and moral vision. The vision was that of the democracies standing up against better armed tyrannies and prevailing with moral force until such time as they could win with material force.
The best illustrations of just how far he would go to make that vision tangible may be his proposals for unifying Britain with France and with the USA. In the wake of the war, and the victory, these proposals for joint citizenship seem odd. In fact, when France was falling in 1940 and the suggestion was first made that the British and French peoples should be joined in common citizenship, it struck Churchill as odd. De Gaulle agreed to it, although he thought it was odd. Yet the reality is that these two created a formal proposal, and within days Churchill got aboard a train in London for a trip to France to finalize the pact of mutual citizenship. But before the train could leave, word came that France had fallen. The idea expired on the spot.
Less well known is a similar gesture Churchill made to the United States three years later. At Harvard in 1943, speaking on the theme of “Anglo American Unity,” he raised the prospect that our common tongue might one day develop into a “common citizenship.” He did this again at Fulton, in 1946.
HARD WORK
Ideas may be splendid, but they have to be worked with to be realized. Visions may be dazzling, but they require labor. The second way Churchill built the Grand Alliance was by tremendous personal effort.
Adolf Hitler and the Japanese warlords worked hard but not necessarily at the right things. They did not work with each other. They never met at the uppermost levels, in years of combat and alliance. Is it any wonder that their strategies were uncoordinated? By contrast, Churchill met Roosevelt at ten World War II conferences. They exchanged 1700 letters and cables which they usually drafted personally, in addition to the usual flow of government-to-government messages.
Churchill’s travels were another form of notable exertion. He covered half a million miles during the war. Many trips were by air, the dangers of which were no abstraction; he had already been in two plane crashes. And he was now in his late sixties. His son Randolph, special envoy to Serbia’s leader Tito, was in a wartime crash in Croatia, which he survived. A top British general was killed flying in North Africa, and a prominent purchasing agent sent to America, Arthur Purvis, was killed in a return flight to England in 1941. One part of the British delegation to the Yalta conference in the Crimea was killed when their plane crashed in the Mediterranean. Churchill’s closest call personally came in January 1942 on a return flight home from America in a bomber; six British fighters rose up to intercept the unidentified plane, and only pulled away at the last moment.
Another form of Churchill’s hard work was in the prodigious use of voice and pen. There were streams of formal letters, official communiqués, and international broadcasts.
Since any Churchill Center audience already knows a great deal about Sir Winston’s masterful English, it may be interesting to relate a few anecdotes about his political speeches in his inadequate French. Always the diplomat, always courting a foreign audience, and always up to a challenge, Churchill used his French freely. He made broadcasts in it; he used it on the telephone to speak with Free French forces; he spoke in French to foreign groups who had no English but could use French as an intermediary tongue. He was clumsy with the language, and his accent was poor. Any of us who mangle French (and I do) can enjoy these stories.
Churchill told one French audience: “Be on your guard, because I am going to speak in French…which will put great demands on your friendship with Great Britain.” He told a French theater director translating text for him at the BBC before a broadcast: “What I want is to be understood as I am, not as you are, not even as the French language is. Don’t make it sound too correct.” When he was speaking to some Turkish leaders in French, Anthony Eden cut in, trying to help and WSC snapped: “Will you please stop translating my French into French!” In a speech to a group of Italians, Churchill’s first words were: “I’m going to speak to you today in the French tongue. It’s bad French…the kind of French you speak yourselves.”
THE NEUTRALS AND LESSER POWERS
In forging the coalition, Churchill worked hard for the neutrals and the smaller prizes as surely as he did for great powers like the United States or the Soviet Union.
In political philosophy, as in practical politics, there is a great tension between Empire and Freedom. British policy was to preserve the Empire as surely as it was to fulfill the ideals of liberty and democracy in the Atlantic Charter. From the beginning, Churchill’s many appeals abroad had been phrased not just for the English, and not only generally to the world, but for the dominions and possessions of Britain in their many corners of the globe. And all, or nearly all, responded.
Dominions like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa had no constitutional duty to put up soldiers unless their own soil had been attacked. But they did put up soldiers. In this conflict, Australia gave nearly 30,000 of its young men’s lives, and Canada almost 40,000. India, then moving towards dominion status, yielded 36,000. These figures compare with 271,000 military dead offered up by Great Britain.
The dominions also gave the Grand Alliance materiel. While we all know of America’s Lend-Lease program, at a lower level, “A more modest reciprocal aid programme from the British Empire helped to cover the very great costs of operating large US forces overseas.” Australia gave back to us two-thirds as much in value as we extended her. So did India. New Zealand gave back a still higher ratio. Britain herself returned to us a full sixth of what the Americans gave, or a total of over five and a half billion dollars worth.
Small powers lying outside the British spheres were naturally less cooperative. Why should they be, given Europe’s essential abandonment of Czechoslovakia, and then the destruction of Poland and other small states? This could give little encouragement to neutrals like Norway, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Turkey, and the others. These states Churchill set out to woo, as First Lord of the Admiralty and then as Prime Minister. But the truth is that often, he did not get what he wanted.
Ireland was a faithful dominion in the First World War but a more independent power in the Second. In fact, she was a neutral. The six northern counties of Ulster contributed many officers and troops to the Allies, but the southern twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State denied British appeals for access to ports and airfields, both valuable for the protection of merchant shipping and for the prosecution of war against the U boats.
Churchill coaxed his Irish counterpart, Eamon de Valera, quietly raising the legal argument‹that the Home Rule Treaty and Constitution Act of 1921 and 1922 afforded “in time of war or strained relations with other powers such harbour or other facilities as may be necessary.” No luck. Churchill got rough. He cut off the supply of foodstuffs and fertilizers coming in courtesy of Royal Navy convoys. No change of mood occurred in Dublin. Meanwhile the British worried over reports of German machinations among the Irish. Churchill finally appealed directly to the US to send troops to Eire. When Washington did not move, London was reduced to pleading for a port call in Ireland by US warships.
Iceland was a happier story. Although Iceland feared Germany, it chose to be generous to the British and Americans; both moved in before 1941 ended. Iceland thus helped plug the hole southern Ireland left in the North Atlantic defenses.
Spain, another neutral, was a delicate case, especially during and after Torch, the allied invasion of North Africa in 1942. British and American troops passed through the Straits of Gibraltar. Once they were landed, thoughts turned to whether Germany might punch through the Iberian Peninsula from Southern France and take those straits. But Spain’s continued neutrality was crippling to Hitler’s Mediterranean aspirations.
Turkey lies astride equally critical straits, which join the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, which is to say to Soviet Union. When it was the Ottoman Empire, it was pursued by both sides in World War I, and erred in choosing the Central Powers. Now in World War II the Turkish Republic took the road of extreme caution and remained neutral almost until the bitter end (March 1945). One night in 1944, after dinner at Chequers, private secretary Jock Colville was surprised to see the PM smoking cigarettes‹Turkish cigarettes. Churchill told him they were the only thing he ever got out of the Turks. Later, of course, Turkey became one of the best allies NATO has ever had.
Greece was attacked from the north by Italian forces, and both New Zealand and Britain sent troops to her defense. Greece survived until the Germans moved south in force in April 1941. British forces then had to be evacuated. When the Nazis, in turn, were later forced to withdraw, civil war broke out in Greece. Churchill got on another airplane, spending his Christmas holiday of 1944 in Athens attempting to negotiate an end to the fighting. Greece meant a great deal to the British, not all of it mere trade; Greece was the birthplace of democracy, volunteers like the poet Byron who served in an earlier Greek war, and troop commitments were made to Greece during World War I. Washington, for its part, saw the intervention as meddlesome, and criticized it, making the episode painful for the Prime Minister.
The neutrals sometimes galled Churchill, and he said so, publicly when he thought it necessary. In March, 1940 he made a broadcast on the need for armed cooperation, excoriating those waiting on the sidelines. With Poland’s fate staring at them,” he growled, “there are still “thoughtless dilettante or purblind worldlings, who sometimes ask us: ‘What is it that Britain and France are fighting for?’ To this I answer: ‘If we left off fighting, you would soon find out.’”
When coaxing and criticism did not work, he was not above escalation or coercion, as the case with convoys to Ireland shows. Consider also Norway, early in the war. British occupation of Norway came after failed diplomatic efforts. Unable to remain idle while German transports carried Swedish iron ore south through Norway’s waters, Churchill had those waters mined. And then Britain invaded, but arrived a day or so too late to obstruct a German naval task force doing the same thing.
Norway raises an interesting point on the moral basis of Churchill’s leadership. How could he justify armed action against a neutral? He told the War Cabinet that the moral doctrine of “supreme emergency” justified the action. “Small nations must not tie our hands when we are fighting for their rights and freedom. The letter of the law must not in supreme emergency obstruct those who are charged with its protection and enforcement. It would not be right or rational that the Aggressor Power should gain one set of advantages by tearing up all the laws, and another set by sheltering behind the innate respect for law of their opponents. Humanity, rather than legality, must be our guide.”
This is a difficult argument, but an important one, because Churchill knew that for Britain morale was very affected by whether war policy was moral.
THE GRAND ALLIANCE
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the United States are in a category all their own with respect to this coalition war. They were, for London, the two great prizes.
Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt worked gradually towards de facto partnership for many months before 7 December 1941. By that day, it was evident just how divisive a seemingly simple concept like neutrality can be. American neutrality bore little resemblance to what it had been under the same President in 1936. There was the Atlantic Charter, the common declaration of principles which Roosevelt and Churchill wrote in August, 1941, before the USA was even at war. Churchill wrote later of the Atlantic Charter that it was “astonishing” to see a neutral like the United States make such a common pledge with Britain, then fighting a total war.
He made many arguments to Americans. There were moral appeals, already mentioned. Doubtless he felt FDR had answered him with the “Four Freedoms” speech in January, 1941. Churchill appealed to a mutual sense of danger, as when he argued with Americans that German hegemony could reach well beyond the European continent, whereas survival of the Royal Navy would mean continued safety for America’s Atlantic seaboard. He warned that without Britain and her navy, the Germans would begin to act aggressively against South American republics, which would undermine the Monroe Doctrine and threaten American interests to the South. He tugged upon the strings of sentiment, as when, in appeals to Americans, he would refer to the heritage of his mother, Jennie Jerome of New York.
Once America was in the war, Churchill argued powerfully for his own strategic schemes but was also a helpful ally. He won strategy debates that preceded operations in North Africa, and Sicily and Italy. But as American power grew and U.S. resources outpaced those of the British, Churchill recognized the need to yield more often. Looking back over the Anglo-American wartime record I see tension, and argument, but I fail to see rancor and hostility as an enduring characteristic of either side.
The last word on the spirit of this alliance is an incredible Churchill speech we never hear about. It was a speech by one national leader praising the greater military power of another nation, reflecting such magnanimity toward an ally that most coalition partners could never give it without appearing craven. Stalin could never have uttered it; only as great a man as Churchill would think to write it or dare to give it.
The speech was given in the Albert Hall in London before a gigantic picture of Abraham Lincoln, on American Thanksgiving Day, 1944. The Prime Minister said, in part: “It is your Day of Thanksgiving, and when we feel the truth of the facts which are before us, that in three or four years the peaceful, peace-loving people of the United States, with all the variety and freedom of their life in such contrast to the iron discipline which has governed many other communities‹when we see that in three or four years the United States has in sober fact become the greatest military power, naval, and air power in the world‹that, I say to you in this time of war, is itself a subject for profound thanksgiving.”
By contrast the relationship with Russia was cold, as cold as a bear’s nose. It was calculated, like most alliances, but it was limited to calculation. As late as 1940 Churchill would still vilify Soviet communism as the moral equal of Nazism.Even after 1941 and the alliance between and London, for every smiling reference to “Uncle Joe” we find in the books or newsreels, there was some private expression of continuing reserve, or even contempt.
The Soviet Union did in time acknowledge the Atlantic Charter, but there is little evidence that Churchill believed, as FDR seemed to, that Stalin’s state could be calmed down and coaxed towards reason over time. The feeling Churchill did not have for the Russian chief of state was mutual. Roosevelt saw this, writing Churchill in 1942: “I think you will not mind me being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”
What Washington and London had no difference over was the need to move material aid into Soviet Russia. If the British obsession before 1941 had been how to get America into war, that same year witnessed the birth of a joint Anglo-American obsession: how to keep Russia in the war. We have heard so much so often about the invincible Russian will in the face of invaders that we forget they had given up, only a generation before, in 1917. All partners in the Grand Alliance knew all about that former surrender to German power, and they feared an encore.
And so, Britain and America took unending pains. They sent military supplies, clothing and industrial products they could ill-afford. Most of it went by sea, with predictable losses, enough that the Admiralty begged the Prime Minister to stop the convoys. He would not; coalition strategy required that the losses be accepted. Here is a great example of the difference between a purely military view of war and the wider political one; as George Marshall once said of this aid to Russia, it may have had little operational effect, but a very large political effect.
Strategic bombing is something we often think of in moral terms, or in purely military terms. Yet it too had an important role as a strategy of coalition war. In his first letter to Stalin after Russia had been overrun by the German army in Operation Barbarossa, Churchill promised bomber attacks…not against the invading German army, already out of reach and moving East, but against Germany itself. The explicit purpose was drawing back the German fighter aircraft to defend the homeland, depriving the Nazi advance of its air arm. The British bombers could thus be a kind of decoy, useful for affecting the Eastern Front’s ground campaign and air fighting. Obviously, they also had their central role in a strategy for destroying Germany’s war-making capability.
Over and over again, Churchill telegraphed not merely news but precise details of bombing raids to Stalin, or communicated them in person at their summits. This was true at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the war. In Moscow in August, 1942, for example, Churchill was unable to answer demands for opening a second front in France, but he could tell of recent bombing raids and of yet greater bombing efforts to come. Stalin observed that “…it was not only German industry that should be bombed, but the population too.” Answering, Churchill spoke of German “morale as a military target” and of Allied plans to shatter twenty more German cities. Stalin was then seen to smile — apparently for the first time — in that long meeting. In fact, the longer they talked of bombing the more jovial he became.
What I am suggesting is that, for a long time, bombing was the de facto second front: an aerial front. This was true even though no one called it the second front, or believed it was all they would need. This was true even though Stalin never ceased demanding a second front on the ground. All expected and planned for a front on the ground in the West of Europe; this was a temporary substitute.
The United States sometimes differed with its British partner about the targets of bombing and other air operations, but not about the utility of bombing for coalition war. Early on, a planner named Dwight Eisenhower privately recorded the need for air assaults on Germany almost as if it were a second front: “If we’re to keep Russia in…we’ve got to begin slugging with air at West Europe, to be followed by a land attack as soon as possible.” In a subsequent memorandum, Ike argued that “Defeat of the Russian armies would compel a complete reorientation of Allied strategy. It would practically eliminate all opportunities of defeating Germany by direct action…”
The air plan developed at Yalta in February 1945 identified three purposes for the bomber offensive by the Anglo-Americans: (1) draw off the Luftwaffe; (2) smash the German war economy; (3) ruin German communication routes and troop movements in the East.
That last strategy helped dictate the death sentence of Dresden in February 1945. Dresden was chosen not only because it was one of the last remaining large cities, but because it was a rail and road center lying just behind the German Eastern Front. The allies apparently believed that German armor had arrived at Dresden from Italy and was passing through on the way to the fighting just to the east. In this instance, as in countless others, strategic bombing was playing a part in coalition war.
CONCLUSIONS
The Grand Alliance had historical singularity. For example, it was unusual for the U.S. to bind itself so closely to any other power, even Britain. This partnership was among the closest bilateral relationships between independent powers in all of history. It might also serve as a model alliance. It brought together three global powers, each very different from the others. Here was a joining of unlimited efforts for a limited common purpose.
It was, by war’s end, an enormous alliance: “Great Amalgam” is perhaps more apt a tag than “Grand Alliance.” Wartime coalitions with so many partners cannot be a blissful union. But the whole did survive immense tests; it did last through the war. And then, after victory, it became fractious and discontented. That is very common for alliances.
The final point is that Churchill understood how moral force is a strategic principle and a strategic asset. Many things are necessary in war: logistics, operational skill, sufficient force size… But there’s nothing like being in the right and having morale on your side. And for that, there’s nothing like a clear-eyed statesman who articulates the principles of justice and war. For democracies, that which is moral is often very good for morale.
It is remarkable to consider how often Churchill’s greatness of spirit buoyed up the morale of citizens and soldiers and civil servants during this war. His famous defiance, his occasional anger, his growling invective toward the foe are well known. But what this now obscures is the remarkable optimism he conveyed, helping to draw others into his efforts. Among my favorite illustrations of this is his broadcast in the spring of 1941, when London was being bombed and the Battle of the Atlantic was going badly. Consoling and inspiring his countrymen, in part by anticipating increased help from the United States, he ended the broadcast with this verse:
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright.
And so it was.
————–
Interesting — and somewhat disturbing — to have strategic bombing mentioned on the side of moral force. Dresden was, of course, a key player in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (#69 on the ALA’s 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 hit parade).
