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PIMLICO 403
CHURCHILL A Life Martin Gilbert was born in London in 1936. After two years' National Service he read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1962 he was elected to a Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, and in the same year became one of the research assistants to Randolph Churchill, then writing the first two volumes of his father's official biography. On Randolph's death in 1968, Gilbert was asked to complete the biography. The eighth and final volume was published in 1988. In addition to these narrative volumes, Gilbert has continued to edit the multi-volume documentary series of Churchill's letters and documents. He has also published, as part of the biography, Churchill: A Photographic Portrait (also available in Pirnlico). In addition to his Churchill work, Gilbert has been a pioneer in the design and publication of historical atlases, and has written a general history of the Holocaust, one-volume histories of the First and the Second World War, and a three-volume history of the twentieth century. He was knighted in 1995.
CHURCHILL A Life
Martin Gilbert
PIMLICO
Published by Pimlico 2000 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Copyright© Martin Gilbert 1991 Martin Gilbert has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann Ltd 1991 Pirnlico edition 2000 Pimlico Random House, 20Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, New South Wales 2061, Australia Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand Random House (Pty) Limited Endulini, Sa Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 www.randomhouse.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-7126-6725-3 Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham pic, Chatham, Kent
For Natalie, David and Joshua
Contents
l 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ll 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
Illustrations List of Maps Preface Acknowledgements
ix
xxi
Childhood Harrow Towards the Army Second Lieutenant In Action To Omdurman and beyond South Africa: Adventure, Capture, Escape Into Parliament Revolt and Responsibilities The Social Field Home Secretary At the Admiralty The Coming of War in 1914 War Isolation and Escape In the Trenches 'Deep and Ceaseless Torments' Minister of Munitions At the War Office Colonial Secretary Return to the Wilderness At the Exchequer Out of Office The Moment of Truth No Place for Churchill
l 19 35 51 75 85 107 133 167 193 211 239 263 277 309 331 361 375 403 431 455 467 491 535 571
XV XVll
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
26 From Munich to War 27 Return to the Admiralty 28 Prime Minister 29 Britain at Bay 30 The Widening War 31 Planning for Victory 32 Illness and Recovery 33 Normandy and Beyond 34 War and Diplomacy 35 'Advance, Britannia!' 36 'An Iron Curtain' 37 Mapping the Past, Guiding ,the Future 38 Prime Minister in Peacetime 39 Recovery, Last Ambition, Resignation 40 Last Years Maps Index
603 623 645 679 701 735 763 777 803 829 843 871 899 915 943 961 983
Illustrations
Section One l. Churchill aged five 2. Lord Randolph Churchill 3. Lady Randolph Churchill 4. Churchill's nanny, Mrs. Everest 5. In a sailor suit, aged seven 6.Jack, Lady Randolph and Winston (aged fifteen) 7. Second Lieutenant, commissioned 20 February 1895 8. Cavalry officer in India, 1897 9. Conservative candidate, 1899 10. On the way to South Africa, October 1899 II. With fellow-journalists on the way to South Africa 12. Prisoner of the Boers, Pretoria, 18 November 1899 13. Escaped prisoner-of-war, Durban, 23 Decemberl899 14. Lieutenant, South African Light Horse, 24 December 1899 15. His first article about his escape, 30 December 1899 16. London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, published 5 April 1900 17. On active service, 1900 18. Member of Parliament, elected 1 October 1900 19. Lecture poster, for a lecture on 29 November 1900 20. With his uncle Lord Tweedmouth 21. Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies 22. With Ed ward Marsh at Malta, October 1907 23. Revisiting the Mahdi's Tomb, December 1907 24. Campaigning as a Liberal at Manchester, 24 April1908 25. Arriving at a levee at StJames's Palace, 6 July 1908 26. Clementine Hozier at the time of her engagement
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
27. Arriving at St Margaret's, Westminster, 12 September 1908 28. A German newspaper celebrates Churchill's wedding 29. President of the Board of Trade, 1908 30. With the Kaiser, 17 September 1909 31. With Clementine, 11 December 1909 32. Visiting a labour exchange, 1 February 1910 33. At the siege of Sidney Street, 3January 1911 34. With his wife and one-year-old son, summer 1912 35. On board the First Lord's yacht Enchantress, 30 January 1913 36. With Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, 1913 37. Returning after piloting a flying boat, 23 February 1914 38. On the eve of war, 1914 39. A family portrait, 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war 40. Listening to Lord Kitchener speaking at the Guildhall, 9July 1915
Section Two 41. With Lord Lansdowne and Lord Curzon,July 1915 42. With Balfourin Whitehall, July 1915 43. With the officers of his battalion headquarters, March 1916 44. Visiting a munitions factory, Glasgow, 7 October 1918 45. At Lille, 28 October 1918, watching a march-past 46. In Paris, March1919 47. Inspecting British troops, Cologne, August 1919 48. Cartoon by Strube, Daily Express, 8 September 1919 49. Cartoon by Low, Evening Standard, 21 January 1920 50. Cartoon by David Wilson, Passing Slww, 14 February 1920 51. At the Pyramids, 20 March 1921 52. The Cairo Conference, March 1921 53. With Lloyd George and Lord Birkenhead, 10 February 1922 54. In Dundee for the General Election, 12 November1922 55. Dictating to his secretary, 6 March 1924 56. The loser doffs his hat, Westminster, 20 March 1924 57. Being driven to Buckingham Palace, 7 November 1924 58. Driving himself to the House of Commons, 1925 59. With Austen Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, 1925 60. At 10 Downing Street during the General Strike, 1926 61. Hunting wild boar near Paris, 1927 62. On the way to deliver his fourth Budget, 24 April1928 63. Bricklaying with Diana and Mary, Chartwell, 3 September 1928 64. On the way to Canada, 3 August1929 65. Leaving a nursing home in London, 10 October 1932
ILLUSTRATIONS
660 Leaving London with Clementine, 25 September 1934 670 With Lloyd George, 20 November 1934 680 Cartoon of Churchill's 'bee in his bonnet', 28 November 1934 690 With Lord Halifax, 29 March 1938 700 Leaving Downing Street during the Czech crisis, 10 September 1938 7lo With Stefan Lorant at Chartwell, 3 February 1939 720 At Chartwell, 3 February 1939 73o In his study, Chartwell, 3 February 1939 740 At his desk, Chartwell, 3 February 1939 750 Working at his upright desk, Chartwell, 3 February 1939 76o Co-pilot, Kenley, 16 April1939
Section Three 770 Speaking outside the Mansion House, 24 April1939 780 A cartoon in the Star, 5July 1939 790 A cartoon by Strube in the Daily Express, 6 July 1939 800 A cartoon by E.HoShepard in Punch, 12 July 1939 810 'What price Churchill?' : a poster in the Strand, 24 July 1939 820 Painting in France, 20 August 1939 830 Walking with Eden to the House of Commons, 29 August 1939 84o Leaving Morpeth Mansions with Mrs Hill, 4 September 1939 850 First wartime broadcast, 1 October 1939 860 A German cartoon sent to Churchill in October 1939 870 At the Supreme War Council, Paris, 5 February 1940 880 Six hours before becoming Prime Minister, 10 May 1940 890 Cartoon by Low, 14 May 1940 900 Supreme War Council, Paris, 31 May 1940 91. During an inspection of harbour defences at Dover, 28 August 1940 920 With Clementine, inspecting bomb damage, 25 September 1940 930 Viewing the bomb damage, 25 September 1940 940 Welcoming Harry Hopkins to London, 10January 1941 950 At Bristol after the air raid of 12 Aprill941 960 Talking to a woman whose home had been destroyed, 12 April1941 970 Watching the first Flying Fortress, 6 June 1941 98o At work on the train, June 1941 990 Hymn singing with Roosevelt, Placentia Bay, 10 August 1941 1OOo Entertained by pilots, Manston aerodrome, 25 September 1941 10 lo Addressing Congress, Washington, 26 December 1941
XI
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
I 02. At the controls, returning by flying boat from Bermuda, 16January 1942 I 03. Listening to the Soviet national anthem, Moscow airport, 13 August I 942 I 04. With Stalin in the Kremlin, I 6 August 1942 105. With dose-range weapons crews, 1 I May 1943 106. Sailors respond to the V-sign, Staten Island, 11 May 1943 107. In the Roman amphitheatre at Carthage, I June 1943 108. At Eisenhower's headquarters, Algiers, 3June I 943 109. With Clementine at Quebec, August I 943 I I 0. Amid the bomb damage, Malta, 19 November I 943
Section Four I I I. At Teheran, with Stalin and Roosevelt, 19 November I 943 I I 2. Recuperating at Tunis, Christmas I 943 I I 3. With Eisenhower, Tunis, Christmas I 943 I I 4. Inspecting bomb damage to Kitchener's statue, 2 I February I 944 I 15. Inspecting American troops in Britain, 23 March 1944 I I 6. Watching a British artillery barrage, Normandy, 2 I July 1944 117. Watching German aircraft overhead, Normandy, 22July 1944 I 18. With British troops, Normandy, 22July 1944 1 I 9. With Tito, at the Villa Rivalta, Naples, 26 August 1944 120. With General Alexander in Italy, 26 August 1944 121. At Yalta with Roosevelt, 4 February 1945 122. At Yalta with Roosevelt and Stalin, 9 February 1945 123. In Athens, with Archbishop Damaskinos, 14 February 1945 124. At the Fayyum oasis with Ibn Saud, I 7 February I 945 125. At the Siegfried Line, 4 March I 945 126. Picnicking on the west bank of the Rhine, 26 March I 945 127. Attempting to drive along Whitehall, VE Day, 8 May 1945 128. Electioneering west of London, 23 June 1945 129. Electioneering in his constituency, 26June 1945 130. Visiting the ruins of Hitler's chancellery, 16 July 1945 131. With President Truman at Potsdam, 16 July I 945 132. Taking the salute, Berlin,-21 July I 945 133. Close up of the victory parade, Berlin, 21 July I 945 134. At an merican military cemetery, Namur, 15 July 1945 135. At Chart well, working on his war memoirs, 29 April I 947 136. Weeping at an ovation, The Hague, 7 May 1948 137. On horseback, 27 November 1948 138. At his election headquarters, Octoberl951
ILLUSTRATIONS
139. At Windsor Castle, in his Garter robes, 14June 1954 140. Reaching Washington, with Eden, 25June 1954 141. Escorting Queen Elizabeth II to her car, 4 April1955 142. Painting in the South of France, 1957
xiii
List of Maps
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.
Southern England, 1874-97 Southern England from 1897 Visits to the New World, 1895-1961 Ireland British India The North-West Frontier of India, 1897 South Africa, 1899-1900 Durban to Ladysmith Egypt, the Sudan and East Africa Europe, 1914-18 The Dardanelles and Gallipoli, 1915 The Western Front In training, 1915 Battalion Commander, 1916 Ploegsteert village, 1916 Russia: the intervention, 1919-20 The Middle East Chanak, 1922 Western Europe, 1939-45 Normandy, 1944 Crossing the Rhine, March 1945 Britain at War, 1939-45 Whitehall The Western Desert, 1940-43 The Mediterranean Central and Eastern Europe, and Italy, 1939-45 European journeys South of France
Author's Note to the Second Edition A year after the publication of this book in 1991, an abridged version was issued which inevitably conveyed less in its 662 pages than the full picture which I tried to present within these 959 pages. The bringing back into print of this fuller version will enable readers once more to range in detail over the full span of Churchill's career, his thoughts, aspirations and actions.
Martin Gilbert 7 January 2000
Preface
It is my aim in these pages to give a full and rounded picture of Churchill's life, both in its personal and political aspects. His career has been the subject of countless books and essays, in which he has sometimes been cavalierly, sometimes harshly, judged. I have sought to give a balanced appraisal, based on his actual thoughts, actions, achievements and beliefs, as opposed to the many misconceptions that exist. The record of Churchill's life is a particularly full one, for which a vast mass of contemporary material survives. It is therefore possible, for almost every incident in which he was involved, to present his own words and arguments, his thinking, his true intentions, and his precise actions. My own researches began in October 1962, when I started work as the junior member of Randolph Churchill's research team, a year after he had been asked by his father to undertake the writing of a multi-volume biography, and edition of supporting documents. At the time of his death in 1968, Randolph Churchill had taken his father's story up to the out break of war in 1914. I was asked to continue his work. My own final volume, the eighth in the series, ended with Churchill's death at the age of ninety. The official biography, as it has become known, set out in detail the story of Churchill's life based upon five main sources, each of which I have returned to for this one-volume account; from these sources I have also drawn much new material, particularly for Churchill's earlier years, up to the First World War. The first of these sources is Churchill's own enormous personal archive of political, Ministerial, literary and personal correspondence, now at Churchill College Cambridge.Thiscontains private and public correspon dence spanning the whole of his ninety years. The second source is his wife Clementine's papers, including the many hundreds ofletters which her husband wrote to her from the time of their
xviii
CHURCHILL: A LIFE
marriage in 1908 until his last years. This is under the custody of Churchill's daughter, Lady Soames, and gives a remarkable picture of every aspect of Churchill's personality. The third source is the Government archive of Churchill's two Premier ships, and of his official Ministerial work, which began in December 1905, and continued until his retirement from public life in April 1955. This archive, located at the Public Record Office at Kew, contains all the War Cabinet and Chiefs of Staff discussions for the Second World War, as well as the papers of his eleven Ministries during those years, and of the War Council on which he served in 1914 and 1915. The fourth source is the private archives, some of them substantial, others fragmentary, of his friends, colleagues and opponents; those who had been in contact with him at different times throughout his life. These materials are to be found in many archives, libraries and private collec tions, in Britain and abroad. They show how he struck his contemporaries: what they said about him among themselves; how some detested him, and how others, from his earliest years, saw him as a person of exceptional qualities, and as a future Prime Minister. The fifth source, which I myself built up during thirty years, is the personal recollections of Churchill's family, his friends and his contempo raries. These recollections come from people in all walks of life, among others from the pilots who taught him to fly before the First World War and the officers and men who served with him on the Western Front in 1916. I was fortunate to meet, and to get to know, his literary assistants of the pre- and postwar years, including Maurice Ashley, Sir William Deakin and Denis Kelly; his Private Secretaries, among them Sir Herbert Creedy, who was with him in 1919, and members of his Second World War Private Office, including SirJohn Martin, SirJohn Peck and SirJohn Colville; also Anthony Montague Browne, who was with him from 1953 to 1965. As Churchill's biographer, I was particularly fortunate to have been able to see him from the perspective of his secretaries, among them Kathleen Hill, who joined him in 1936, Elizabeth Layton and Marian Holmes, who worked with him during the Second World War, and Elizabeth Gilliatt, Lady Onslow,Jane Portal and Doreen Pugh, who were with him in his later years. So much of Churchill's life was spent at Chartwell; Grace Hamblin, who worked there since 1932, has been a guide to those years. Several million words drawn from these five sources are edited and annotated in the volumes of documents published (and still being pub lished) for each of the volumes of the multi-volume biography. I have set out to provide enough material in this single volume for readers tojudge for themselves Churchill's actions and abilities during his remark-
PREFACE
xix
ably long career. It was a career often marked by controversy and dogged by antagonism; for he was always outspoken and independent, and ex pressed his views without prevarication, criticising those whom he thought were wrong with a powerful armoury of knowledge, and with vivid, adept and penetr ting language. Churchill's involvement in public life spanned more than fifty years. He had held eight Cabinet posts before he became Prime Minister. When he resigned from his second Premiership in 1955 he had been a Parliamen tarian for fifty-five years. The range of his activities and experiences was extraordinary. He received his Army commission during the reign of Queen Victoria, and took part in the cavalry charge at Omdurman. He was closely involved in the earlY. development of aviation, learning to fly before the First World War, and establishing the Royal Naval Air Service. He was closely involved in the inception of the tank. He was a pioneer in the development of anti-aircraft defence, and in the evolution of aerial warfare. He foresaw the building of weapons of mass destruction, and in his last speech to Parliament proposed using the existence of the hydrogen bomb, and its deterrent power, as the basis for world disarmament. From his early years, Churchill had an uncanny understanding and vision of the future unfolding of events. He had a strong faith in his own ability to contribute to the survival of civilisation, and the improvement of the material well-being of mankind. His military training, and his natural inventiveness, gave him great insight into the nature of war and society. He was also a man whose personal courage, whether qn the battlefields of Empire at the turn of the century, on the Western Front in 1916, or in Athens in 1944, was matched with a deep understanding of the horrors of war and the devastation of battle. Both in his Liberal and Conservative years, Churchill was a radical; a believer in the need for the State to take an active part, both by legislation and finance, in ensuring minimum standards of life, labour and social well-being for all citizens. Among the areas of social reform in which he took a leading part, including drafting substantial legislation, were prison reform, unemplbyment insurance, State-aided pensions for widows and orphans,a permanent arbitration machinery for labour disputes, Staie assistance for those in search of employment, shorter l).ours of work, and improved conditions on the shop and factory floor. He was also CJt{ advo cate of a National Health Service, of wider access to education, of the taxation of excess profits, and of profit-sharing by employees. In his first public speech, in 1897, three years before he entered Parliament, he looked forward to the day when the labourer would become 'a shareholder in the business in which he worked'.
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
At times of national stress, Churchill was a persistent advocate of conciliation, even of coalition; he shunned the paths of division and unnecessary confrontation. In international affairs he consistently sought the settlement of the grievances of those who had been defe ted, and the building up of meaningful associations for the reconciliatio1,1 of former enemies. After two world wars he argued in favour of maintaining the strength of the victors in order to redress the grievances of the vanquished, and to preserve peace. It was he who first used the word 'summit' for a meeting of the leaders of the Western and Communist worlds, and did his utmost to set up such meetings to end the dangerous confrontations of the Cold War. Among the agreements that he negotiated, with patience and understanding, were the constitutional settlements in South Africa and Ireland, and the war debt repayment schemes after the First World War. A perceptive, shrewd commentator on the events taking place around him, Churchill was always an advocate of bold, farsighted courses of action. One of his greatest gifts, seen in several thousand public speeches, as well as heard in his many broadcasts, was his ability to use his exceptional mastery of words, and love oflanguage, to convey detailed arguments and essential truths; to inform, to convince, and to inspire. He was a man of great humour and warmth, of magnanimity; a consistent and life-long liberal in outlook; a man often turned to by successive Prime Ministers for his skill as a conciliator. His dislike of unfairness, of victimisation, and of bullying-whether at home or abroa.d- was the foundation-stone of much of his thinking. Churchill's public work touched every aspect of British domestic and foreign policy, from the struggle for social reform before the First World War to the search for a summit conference after the Second. It involved Britain's relations with France, Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union, each at their most testing time. His finest hour was the leadership ofBritain when it was most isolated, most threatened and most weak; when his own courage, determination and belief in democracy became at one with the nation. Martin Gilbert, Merton College, Oxford 23January 1991
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to all those who, over the past thirty years, have given me their recollections of Churchill.Those who are quoted in this volume were generous both with their time and their memories. I should like to thank Valentin Berezhkov, HaroldJ. Bourne, Sir John Colville, Ivon Courtney, Sir William Deakin, Sir Donald MacDougall, Robert Fox, Eve Gibson, Elizabeth Gilliatt, Grace Hamblin, Pamela Harriman, Kathleen Hill, Mar ian Holmes, Patrick Kinna, Elizabeth Layton,James Lees-Milne, Brigadier Maurice Lush,JohnJ.McCloy,Jock McDavid, Malcolm MacDonald, Vis count Margesson, Sir John Martin, Trevor Martin, Anthony Montague Browne, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, Sir John Peck, Captain Sir Richard Pim, Doreen Pugh and Lady Williams of Elvel Qane Portal). My most grateful thanks, for both insights and material over many years, are to Churchill's children; Sarah Lady Audley, Lady Soames, and Randolph Churchill, my predecessor as biographer. In addition to those who helped me with recollections, I am grateful to all who answered my historical queries for this volume, or who provided me with extra documentary material. My thanks for this help go to Patricia Ackerman, Archivist, Churchill College Archives Centre; J.Albrecht, Ligue Suisse pour la Protection de Ia Nature; Larry Arnn, Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy; Jeanne Berkeley; Alan S. Baxendale; Dr David Butler; Julian Challis; Robert Craig; Henry E. Crooks; Michael Diamond; Dr Michael Dunnill; Felicity Dwyer, Researcher, Daily Express; Nicholas P. Eadon; Linda Greenlick, ChiefLibrarian,jewish Chronicle; Irene Morrison, Scottish Tourist Board; David Parry, Department of Photographs, Imperial War Museum; Gor don Ramsey; Andrew Roberts; James Rusbridger; Matthew Spalding; Ken Stone, Metropolitan Police Historical Museum; Jonathan de Souza; Lord Taylor of Hadfield; Professor Vladimir Trukhanovsky; Mrs
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
M.E.Vinall, Personnel and Administration Manager, Evening Standard; Frank Whelan, researcher, Sunday Call-Chronicle; and Benedict K.Zobrist, Director, Harry S.Truman Library, Independence, Missouri. I am also grateful, for the use of previously unpublished Churchill material, to the British Library Manuscript Collections, Christie's Auction Rooms, the Hollinger Corporation, A. Rosenthal, Chas W Sawyer, John R. Smethurst, The Times Archive, Blenheim Palace Archive, and the Na tional Trust Collection. For copyright permission to t;eproduce the photographs, I should like to thank World Wide Photos Inc (number 5); the Radio Times Hulton Picture Library (numbers 6, 12, 21, 30, 63, 64, 72, 73, 74, 75,88 and 136); Odhams Press (9); J. Bowers, Pretoria, (11); the Bettman Archive (14); Longmans Green (16); Syndication International, Photo Division, Daily Mirror(24, 25, 57, 60and81);DieWoche (28); Elliot and Fry(29), The Press Association (33, 36, 40, 55, 56, 77 and 129); Daily Sketch (37); Taller (38 and 83); London News Agency Photo (41, 58); Major-General Sir Edmund Hakewill-Smith (43); Imperial War Museum (44,45, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103,104, 112, 113, 118, 121,122,123, 126and 127); The Trustees of the Low Estate ( 49 and 89); Central Press Photos, Ltd (53); G. M. Georgoulas(51); KeystonePress(59,90,94, 102,128, 130and 140);The Topical Press Agency Ltd (61); Times Newspapers Ltd (62); Associated Press Ltd (65, 68,70 and 84); Stefan Lorant (71); Fox Photos (76 and 85); Daily Express (79); Punch (80); H. Roger Viollet (87); United Press Inter national (95, 106 and141);J.J.Moss (105); War Office Photograph, pho tographer Captain Horton (114); Thomas Dalby (116); Viscount Montgomery Collection (117 and 125); Donald Wiedenmayer (119); Earl Alexander Collection (120, 132 and 133); Signal Corps Photo (131); Photo Heminger (134): Life Photo, photographer N.R. Farbman (135); Emery Reves (142). The remaining photographs are from the Broadwater Col lection at Churchill College, Cambridge. For their help in scrutinising the text and making important suggestions as to its content, I am exceptionally grateful to Sir David Hunt, Adam O'Riordan and Edward Thomas, each of whom has given me the benefit of his wide knowledge and critical scrutiny. Helen Fraser, Laura Beadle and the many others involved at William Heinemann in publishing this book, have always been helpful and encouraging, at the different and at times difficult stages of production; the copyediting and proofreading were expertly done by Lisa Glass and Arthur Neuhauser; Rachelle Gryn assisted in the discovery of important facts; Kay Thomson carried out myriad secretarial duties. As with all my previous Churchill work, I am indebted to my wife Susie, for her contribution at every stage, and to every page.
1
Childhood Winston Churchill was born in 1874, halfway through the Victorian Era. That November, his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, then less than seven months pregnant, had slipped and fallen while walking with a shooting party at Blenheim Palace. A fewdays later, while riding in a pony carriage over rough ground, labour began. She was rushed back to the Palace, where, in the early hours of November 30, her son was born. The magnificent palace at Blenheim was the home of the baby's grand father, the 7th Duke of Marlborough. On his father's side he was a child of the British aristocracy, descended both from the 1st Earl Spencer and from the distinguished soldier John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, commander of the coalition of armies that had defeated France at the beginning of the eighteenth century. On his mother's side he had an entirely American lineage; her father, LeonardJerome, then living in New York, was a successful stockbroker, financier and newspaper proprietor. A century earlier his ancestors had fought in Washington's armies for the independence of the American Colonies. Almost a year before Churchill's birth, his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been elected to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for Woodstock. This small borough, of which Blenheim was a part, had scarcely more than a thousand electors; it had long been accus tomed to send members of the Ducal family, or their nominees, to West minster. In January 1877 Churchill's grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, was appointed Viceroy of Ireland, with Lord Randolph as his private secretary. The two-year-old boy travelled with his parents to Dublin, together with his nanny, Mrs Everest. When Churchill was four, Ireland suffered a severe potato famine, and an upsurge of nationalist ferment led by the Fenians. 'My nurse, Mrs Everest, was nervous about the Fenians,' he later wrote. 'I gathered these were wicked people and there was no end to what they would do if they
2
CHURCHILL: A LIFE
1879
had their way.' One day, when Churchill was out riding on his donkey, Mrs Everest thought that she saw a Fenian procession approaching. 'I am sure now,' he later reflected, 'that it must have been the Rifle Brigade out for a route march. But we were all very much alarmed, particularly the donkey, who expressed his anxiety by kicking. I was thrown off and had concussion of the brain. This was my first introduction to Irish politics!' As well as his nanny, the young boy acquired a governess while in Dublin. Her task was to teach him reading and mathematics. 'These complications,' he later wrote, 'cast a steadily gathering shadow over my daily life. They took one away from all the interesting things one wanted to do in the nursery or the garden.' He also recalled that although his mother took 'no part in these impositions', she had given him to under stand that she approved of them, and 'sided with the governess almost always'. Fifty years later Churchill wrote of his mother: 'She shone for me like the Evening Star. I loved her deariy - but at a distance.' It was with his nanny that he found the affection which his parents did not provide. 'My nurse was my confidante,' he later wrote. 'Mrs Everest it was who looked after me and tended all my wants. It was to her I poured out my many troubles.' In February 1880 Churchill's brother Jack was born. 'I remember my father coming into my bedroom at Vice-Regal Lodge in Dublin & telling me (aged 5) "You have a little brother",' he recalled sixty-five years later. Shortly after Jack's birth the family returned to London, to 29 Stjames's Place. There, Churchill was aware of the final illness of Disraeli, the former Conservative Prime Minister. 'I was always sure Lord Beaconsfield was going to die,' he later wrote, 'and at last the day came when all the people I saw went about with very sad faces because, as they said, a great and splendid Statesman who loved our country and defied the Russians, had died of a broken heart because of the ingratitude with which he had been treated by the Radicals.' Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, died when Churchill was six years old. At Christmas 1881, just after his seventh birthday, Churchill was at Blenheim. It was from there that his first surviving letter was written, posted on 4January 1882. 'My dear Mamma,' he wrote, 'I hope you are quite well. I thank you very very much for the beautiful presents those Soldiers and Flags and Castle they are so nice it was so kind of you and dear Papa I send you my love and a great many kisses Your loving Winston.' That spring Churchill returned to Blenheim for two months. 'It is so nice being in the country,' he wrote to his mother that April. 'The gardens and the park are so much nicer to walk in than the Green Park or Hyde Park.' But he missed his parents, and when his grandmother went
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to London, he wrote to his father, 'I wish I was with her that I might give you a kiss.' It was Mrs Everest who looked after the two brothers at Blenheim.'When we were out on Friday near the cascade,' Churchill wrote to his mother shortly before Easter, 'we saw a snake crawling about in the grass. I wanted to kill it but Everest would not let me.' That Easter Mrs Everesttook the two boys to the Isle of Wight, where her brother-in-law was a senior warder at Parkhurst prison. They stayed at his cottage at Ventnor, overlooking the sea. From Ventnor, Churchill wrote to his mother, 'We had a Picnic we went to Sandown took our dinner on the Beach and we went to see the Forts & Guns at Sandown there were some enormous 18 ton Guns.' That autumn Churchill was told that he was to be sent to boarding school. 'I was,' he later wrote, 'what grown-up people in their off-hand way called "a troublesome boy". It appeared that I was to go away from home for many weeks at a stretch in order to do lessons under masters.' He was not 'troublesome' to everyone, however; Lady Randolph's sister Leonie found him 'full of fun and quite unselfconscious' when he stayed with her. The boarding school was St George's, near Ascot. Churchill was sent there four weeks before his eighth birthday. Term was already half over; his mother took him there that first afternoon. The two of them had tea with the headmaster. 'I was preoccupied', he recalled nearly fifty years later, 'with the fear of spilling my cup and so making "a bad start". I was also miserable at the idea of being left alone among all these strangers in this great, fierce, formidable place.' Unhappiness at school began from the first days. 'After all,' Churchill later wrote, 'I was only seven, and I had been so happy with all my toys. 1 had such wonderful toys: a real steam engine, a magic lantern, and a collection of soldiers already nearly a thousand strong. Now it was to be all lessons.' Severity, and at times brutality, were part of life at StGeorge's. 'Flogging with the birch in accordance with the Eton fashion,' Churchill later wrote, 'was a great feature of the curriculum. But I am sure no Eton boy, and certainly no Harrow boy of my day,' - Churchill was at Harrow from 1888 to 1892-'ever received such a cruel flogging as this Headmas ter was accustomed to inflict upon the little boys who were in his care and power. They exceeded in severity anything that would be tolerated in any of the Reformatories under the Home Office.' Among the boys who witnessed these floggings was Roger Fry. 'The swishing was given with the master's full strength,' he later wrote, 'and it took only two or three strokes for drops of blood to form everywhere and it continued for 15 or 20 strokes when the wretched boy's bottom was a mass of blood.' Churchill himself was later to recall how during the floggings the rest of the boys sat quaking, listening to their screams'.
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
1882
'How I hated this school,' he later wrote, 'and what a life of anxiety I lived for more than two years. I made very little progress at my lessons, and none at all at games. I counted the days and the hours to the end of every term, when I should return home from this hateful servitude and range my soldiers in line of battle on the nursery floor.' Churchill's first holiday from St George's, after a month and a half at school, was at Christmas 1882. Home was now another house in London, 2 Connaught Place, on the north side of Hyde Park, where his parents were to live for the next ten years. 'As to Winston's improvement,' his mother wrote to his father on December 26, 'I am sorry to say I see none. Perhaps there has not been time enough. He can read very well, but that is all, and the first two days he came home he was terribly slangy and loud. Altogether I am disappointed. But Everest was told down there that next term they mean to be more strict with him.' Lady Randolph also told her husband that their elder son 'teases the baby more than ever'; to remedy this 'I shall take him in hand'. She ended her reference to her eight-year old son, 'It appears that he is afraid of me.' Churchill's first school report was a poor one. His place in the form of eleven boys was eleventh. Under Grammar it read, 'He has made a start,' and under Diligence, 'He will do well, but must treat his work in general, more seriously next term.' The report ended with a note by the Headmas ter, 'Very truthful, but a regular "pickle" in many ways at present - has not fallen into school ways yet but this could hardly be expected.' Anxiety at school went hand in hand with ill-health, which was another cause of concern to his parents. 'I'm sorry poor little Winston has not been well,' Lord Randolph wrote to his wife from the South of France on New Year's Day 1883, 'but I don't make out what is the matter with him. Itseems we are a sickly family & cannot get rid of the doctors.' Four days later he wrote again: 'I am so glad to hear Winny is right again. Give him a kiss from me.' To cure whatever was wrong with the boy, the doctor advised a week by the sea, at Herne Bay. Back at StGeorge's, Churchill repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked his mother to visit him. Before term ended there was sports day. 'Please do let Everest and jack come down to see the athletics,' he wrote, 'and come down your self dear. I shall expect to see you and Jack & Everest.' Lady Randolph did not take up her son's invitation, but there was a consolation. 'My dear Mamma,' he wrote to her when the sports day was over, 'It was so kind of you to let Everest come down here. I think she enjoyed her-self very much,' and he added, 'Only 18 more days.' In Churchill's report that term there was praise for his History, Geog raphy, Translation and General Conduct. The rest of the report was less complimentary: Composition was 'very feeble', Writing 'good- but so
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terribly slow', Spelling'about as bad as it well can be'. Under Diligence was written; 'Does not quite understand the meaning of hard work- must make up his mind to do so next term.' His place in the Division of nine boys was ninth; his place in the Set of thirteen was thirteenth. That summer, while Churchill was at school, his grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, died. In deep mourning, Lord Randolph sought solace in travel. As Churchill himself was later to write, in his biography of his father, 'Lord Randolph hurried away with his wife and son to Gastein.' This visit, to one of the most fashionable spas of the Austro Hungarian Empire, was Churchill's first visit to Europe. On the way there, father and son passed through Paris. 'We drove along together through the Place de Ia Concorde,' he told the citizens of Metz sixty-three years later. 'Being an observant child I noticed that one of the monuments was covered with wreaths and crepe and I at once asked him why. He replied, "These are monuments of the Provinces of France. Two of them, Alsace and Lorraine, have been taken from France by the Germans in the last war.The French are very unhappy about it and hope some day to get them back." I remember quite distinctly thinking to myself, "I hope they will get them back".' After he returned to St George's, the quality of Churchill's work was in contrast with his conduct. 'Began term well,' his report read, 'but latterly has been very naughty! -on the whole he has made progress.' According to the next term's report, History and Geography were'sometimes exceed ingly good'. The headmaster commented, 'He is, I hope, beginning to realize that school means work and discipline,' and he added, 'He is rather greedy at meals.' In February 1884 Lord Randolph announced his intention of standing for Parliament for Birmingham, as Woodstock was among the hundreds of family boroughs about to be abolished. By going to an overwhelmingly radical area, he was intent on showing that 'Tory Democracy' was more than a slogan. In March the headmaster's wife visited the Midlands. 'And she heard,' Churchill wrote to his mother, 'that they were betting two to one that Papa would get in for Birmingham.' This was the first of Churchill's letters in which politics appears. The rest of the letter was about a school outing: 'We all went to a sand pit the other day and played a very exciting game. As the sides are about 24 feet high, and a great struggle, those who got out first kept a fierce struggle with the rest.' Churchill's next school report showed that, while he was certainly clever, he was also extremely unhappy. History and Geography were both 'very good, especially History'. But Conduct was described as 'exceedingly bad. He is not to be trusted to do any one thing', and his lateness for morning
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
1884
school, twenty times in the forty day term, was described as 'very disgraceful'. The pages of the report-card reveal Churchill's torment, 'Is a constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape or other,' and, 'He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere.' But even the head master of St George's could not fail to notice that the nine-year-old boy had 'very good abilities'. The following term Churchill's letters to his mother show how lonely he felt in that predominantly hostile world. 'It is very unkind of you,' he wrote early in june, 'not to write to me before this, I have only had one letter from you this term.' That summer term his school work was again praised; Grammar, Music and French were all 'good', History and Geography were 'very good'. His General Conduct was described as 'better- but still troublesome'. The headmaster commented, 'He has no ambition - if he were really to exert himself he might yet be first at the end of Term.' When Churchill was nine and a half, his father gave him Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. 'I remember the delight with which I de voured it,' he later wrote. 'My teachers saw me at once backward and precocious, reading books beyond my years and yet at the bottom of the form . They were offended. They had large resources of compulsion at their disposal, but I was stubborn.' His school report that summer also gave evidence of continual problems with regard to discipline, com menting under Diligence: 'Fair on the whole. Occasionally gives a great deal of trouble.' What that trouble was, the report did not say, but another St George's boy, Maurice Baring, who arrived at the school shortly after Churchill left, wrote in his memoirs that Churchill had been flogged 'for taking sugar from the pantry, and so far from being penitent, he had taken the Headmaster's sacred straw hat from where it hung over the door and kicked it to pieces'. This defiance had already become a legend. That autumn Churchill suffered from yet another bout of ill-health. The Churchill family doctor, Robson Roose, who practised both in Lon don and in Brighton, suggested that his health would improve if he went to a school by the sea; he suggested the school in Brighton at which his own son was a pupil. Roose offered to keep a watching eye on the boy. 'As I was now supposed to be very delicate,' Churchill later recalled, 'it was thought desirable that I should be under his constant care.' The new boarding school was run by the two Thomson sisters at 29 and 39 Brunswick Road, Brighton. Term began in September 1884. 'I am very happy here,' he wrote to his mother at the end of October.Two days later he wrote again, 'I have been very extravagant, I have bought a lovely stamp-book and stamps, will you please send a little more money.'
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On November 30 Churchill celebrated his tenth birthday. Three days later his father left England for India, where he stayed until March 1885, absorbing himself in the problems of the sub-continent; he expected to be made Secretary of State for India if the Conservatives returned to power. His family saw him off. 'I should like to be with you on that beautiful ship,' Churchill wrote after his return to school. 'We went and had some hotel soup after you went, so we did not do amiss. We saw your big ship steaming out of harbour as we were in the train.' That winter Lady Randolph's sister Clara wrote to the boy's American grandmother, 'Winston has grown to be such a nice, charming boy.' From his new school, however, his mother was sent in mid-December an alarm ing letter written by one of the Thomson sisters, Charlotte. She had just been called to see Churchill, who, she wrote, 'was in a trouble that might have proved very serious'. Charlotte Thomson went on to explain: 'He was at work in a drawing examination, and some dispute seems to have arisen between him and the boy sitting next to him about a knife the tutor had lent them for their work. The whole affair passed in a moment, but Winston received a blow inflicting a slight wound in the chest.' Dr Roose was able to assure Miss Thomson that the boy 'is not much hurt, but that he might have been'. This was not the first time, Miss Thomson added, that complaint had been made of the other boy, who had a passionate temper. His parents would be asked to take him away from the school. Writing about the stabbing to her husband, Lady Randolph commented rather unsympathetically, 'I have no doubt Winston teased the boy dreadfully- & it ought to be a lesson to him.' Churchill returned to London for a few days with Dr Roose. It was then that Lady Randolph learned that the penknife with which her son had been stabbed 'went in about a quarter of an inch', but, she added in her letter to Lord Randolph, 'of course, as I thought, he began by pulling the other boy's ear'. 'What adventures Winston does have,' Lord Randolph wrote to his wife - from Bombay. 'It is a great mercy he was no worse injured.' The first term at Brighton ended a week before Christmas. No doubt in part because of the disruption caused by the stabbing incident, Churchill did not do too well, coming bottom of the class in French, English and Mathematics. The report noted, however, that he had shown 'decided improvement in attention to work towards the latter part of the term'. Churchill later wrote: 'This was a smaller school than the one I had left. It was also cheaper and less pretentious. But there was an element of kindness and of sympathy which I had found conspicuously lacking in my first experiences.' Churchill spent the Christmas holidays of 1884 in London. His mother found it difficult to cope with him. 'I shall have Jack back before Christ-
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
1884
mas,' she had written to her sister Clara shortly before the holiday, 'as I could not undertake to manage Winston without Everest - I am afraid even she can't do it'. Churchill returned to Brighton on 20 January 1885, writing to his mother on the following day: 'You must be happy without me, no screams from Jack or complaints. It must be heaven on earth.' Three days later he told her of a school success, 'I have been out riding today and rode without the leading rein and we cantered.' As at Ascot, so now at Brighton, Churchill was eager for his mother to visit him. One opportunity was the school play. 'I shall expect to see you,' he wrote at the end of January, 'and shall be very disappointed indeed if I do not see you, so do come.' Lady Randolph did go, taking the five-year old Jack with her.'They were so happy together,' she wrote to her husband on the following day, '& Winny was wildly excited but I thought he looked very pale & delicate. What a care the boy is.' Her letter continued, 'He told me that he was very happy, & I think he likes the school.' That term's report spoke of 'very satisfactory progress'. In English, French and Classics, in the class of ten, Churchill had come fourth. Under Conduct, however, he was placed twenty-ninth out of twenty-nine. Back at school after the holiday, there were many reminders of Lord Randolph's growing fame. 'I have been out riding with a gentleman,' Churchill wrote to his father that May, 'who thinks that Gladstone is a brute and thinks that "the one with the curly moustache ought to be Premier".' The driver of the electric railway that ran along the sea front had gone so far as to say 'that Lord R. Churchill would be Prime Minister'. Churchill was learning to swim, he wrote to his mother that month, and 'getting on capitally'. He was also enjoying riding. As to study, 'Iam getting on with my French and Latin but am rather backward with Greek.' He was, however,.ho nto gp on to school at Winchester..'so will try and work. it up'. The ten-year-old boy was excited that summer when he read an article about his father in the Graphic. It was, he informed his mother, 'very good indeed'. There was a photograph 'of Papa in the library with all the photographs and the ink-stand'. Six days later the Liberal Government was defeated in the House of Commons and Gladstone resigned. A new government was formed by the Conservative Leader, Lord Salisbury; Churchill's father was appointed Secretary of State for India. Churchill's third term at Brighton came to an end that July. Although under Conduct he still came bottom of his class, thirtieth out of thirty, his position in the academic subjects was high. He was first in the Classics class of nine, and third in French. 'Very marked progress during the term,' Charlotte Thomson wrote. 'If he continues to improve in steadiness and application, as during this term, he will do very well indeed.' That summer
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Churchill and his brother spent their holiday at Cromer by the North Sea. Their parents were again on holiday elsewhere. 'Do come and see us soon,' Churchill wrote to his mother in mid-August.Six days later he wrote again, 'Will you co·me and see me?' Lady Randolph did not respond to her son's appeal, but she did arrange for a. governess to give him lessons during the holidays. This was not to his. liking. 'I am not enjoying myself much as the lessons always tie me down,' he wrote to his mother on August 25. Eight days later he wrote again:'The weather is fine. But, I am not enjoying myself very much. The governess is very unkind, so strict and stiff, I can't enjoy myself at all.'The only solace was that in a few days' time his mother would come down for ten days. 'Then I shall be able to tell you all my troubles.' Ill-health had marred the holiday. At first, a rash on his legs had forced him to go about in a donkey-carriage. Most recently, he explained, his temper had been 'not of the most amiable, but I think it is due to the liver as I have had a bilious attack which thoroughly upset me, my temperature was 100 once instead of 98 & 2/5 which is normal'. Back at Brighton for the autumn term, Churchill read in the local newspaper that his father had made a speech in the town. 'I cannot think why you did not come to see me, while you were in Brighton,' he wrote. 'I was very disappointed but I suppose you were too busy to come.' As Secretary of State for India, Lord Randolph had authorised a military expedition against King Theebaw of Burma, who, having long refused to halt attacks on British traders and merchant ships, had imposed a Customs fine on a British trading company. Within ten days Mandalay had been occupied and the King taken prisoner. The future of Burma had now to be determined in the Cabinet room at 10 DowningStreet.Lord Randolph, his son later wrote, 'was for annexation simple and direct'. Despite Lord Salisbury's hesitations, Lord Randolph's view prevailed; on 1 January 1886, as what he called 'a New Year's present to the Queen', Burma was annexed to the British Empire. The Conservative Government was defeated in the Commons on 26 January 1886. The subsequent General Election, while securing Lord Randolph a seat in Parliament, gave the Irish Nationalists the balance of power at Westminister. Gladstone, nailing the Liberal flag to the mast of Irish Home Rule, formed a Government with Irish Nationalist support. The young Churchill, his finances once more in difficulties, is said to have remarked, 'We're out of office, and they're economising on me.' That March, pneumonia brought the eleven-year-old Churchill almost to death's door. His temperature rose to 104. Lady Randolph hurried to Brighton, followed by her husband. 'I am in the next room,' Dr Roose
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
1886
wrote to Lord Randolph on the evening of Sunday March 14, 'and shall watch the patient during the night- for I am anxious.' At midnight that Sunday the continued high temperature alarmed the doctor, 'indicating exhaustion' he told Lord Randolph at six on the following morning. 'I used stimulants, by the mouth and rectum, with the result that at 2.15 a.m. the temp had fallen to 101, and now to 100, thank God!' Roose added, 'I shall give up my London work and stay by the boy today.' By midday on Monday March 15 Churchill's temperature had risen again. 'We are still fighting the battle for your boy,' Roose wrote to Lord Randolph at one o'clock that afternoon.'His temperature is l 03 now but he is taking his nourishment better and there is no increase oflung mischief. As long as I can fight the temp and keep it under 105 I shall not feel anxious.' The crisis continued but Roose was confident that the danger could be averted. 'Nourishment, stimulants and close watching will save your boy,' he wrote in his 1 p.m. bulletin, and he added, 'I am sanguine of this.' At eleven that evening Roose sent Lord Randolph another note: 'Your boy, in my opinion, on his perilous path is holding his own well!The temp is 103.5 at which I am satisfied, as I had anticipated l 04!' There would be no immediate cause for anxiety for at least twelve hours, 'so please have a good night, as we are armed at all points!' The danger was not over. 'We have had a very anxious night,' Roose reported on the following morning, 'but have managed to hold our own.' The boy's pulse still showed 'good power, and the delirium· I hope may soon cease and natural sleep occur'. The left lung was still uninvolved. They could expect another twenty-four hours of'this critical condition'. Roose added in a postscript, 'I have given you a statement of fact, your boy is making a wonderful fight and I do feel please God he will recover.' By the morning of Wednesday March 17 Churchill was through the worst. 'Winston has had 6 hours quiet sleep,' Roose reported. 'Delirium has now ceased. Temp: 99, Pulse. 92, Respiration 28. He sends you and her ladyship his love.' Churchill was also eager to see Mrs Everest, who was waiting for the first opportunity to be with him. The doctor advised against this, however. 'Forgive my troubling you with these lines,' he wrote to Lady Randolph later on March 17, 'to impress upon you the absolute necessity of quiet and sleep for Winston and that Mrs Everest should not be allowed in the sick room today - even the excitement of pleasure at seeing her might do harm! and I am so fearful of relapse knowing that we are not quite out of the wood yet.' · Learning that the worst was over, Lady Randolph's brother-in-law Moreton Frewen wrote to her on March 17: 'Poor dear Winny, & rhope it will leave no troublesome after effects, but even if it leaves him delicate
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for a long time to come you will make the more of him after being given back to you from the very threshold of the unknown.' Slowly the boy recovered. His father went to Brighton twice to see him, once in March with grapes, and again in April when he brought him a toy steam engine. It was a time of considerable controversy for Lord Ran dolph. Gladstone had pledged the Liberal Government to introduce -a Home Rule Bill, aimed at setting up a Parliament in Ireland with power to transact all exclusively Irish business. Lord Randolph's efforts were devoted to attacking and preventing the Bill, stressing the unease of the Irish Protestants at what would be a predominantly Catholic administra tion. On May 8The Times printed a letter which he had written to a member of the Liberal Party in Glasgow. in which Lord Randolph declared that if the Liberal Government were to impose Home Rule on the Protestants of Ireland, 'Ulster will fight; Ulster will be right.' This phrase became a rallying-cry of the Protestants in the North. By July Churchill was well enough to return to school. He was excited by the coming General Election. 'I hope the Conservatives will get in,' he wrote to his mother, 'do you think they will?' His father had already faced the electors, on July 2. 'I am very glad Papa got in for South Paddington by so great a majority. I think that was a victory!' Lord andolph had polled 2,576 votes, as against 769 cast for his opponent. The election result centred upon the part to be played by Joseph Cham berlain, and his seventy-seven fellow breakaway Liberals, who, opposing Home Rule for Ireland, called themselves Liberal Unionists and sup ported the Conservatives. With that alliance Lord Salisbury formed his second administration. A new political party, the Conservative and Unionist Party, was in the making; fifty-three years later Churchill was to become its Leader. Lord Randolph, who had greatly encouraged the Liberal Unionist breakaway, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was thirty-seven years old. Churchill, who had closely followed the election and its after math, was proud of his father's achievement. He was also happy at Brigh ton. 'I got gradually much stronger in that bracing air and gentle surroundings,' he later wrote. 'I was allowed to learn things which inter ested me: French, History, lots of Poetry by heart, and above all Riding and Swimming. The impression of those years makes a pleasant picture in my mind, in contrast to my earlier schoolday memories.' Looking back at his Brighton days six years later, while he was a schoolboy at Harrow, Churchill's reflections were more prosaic. 'I have often thought of Miss Thomsons,' he wrote to a fellow-pupil, '&have arrived at the conclusion that many of the rules & most of the food were utterly damnable. Far be it for me however to speak ill of either Miss
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
1886
Kate or Miss C. as I have always "cherished the most affectionate remem brances of both"-still, haifa sausage- ugh!!!' In one of his letters in the summer of 1886 Churchill told his mother, 'I am very sorry to say that I am bankrupt and a little cash would be welcome.' This was not his first appeal for money, nor was it to be his last; indeed, as his requests for more money began to proliferate, his mother's letters filled with complaints about his financial extravagance. He was also becoming more and more interested in the world outside school; that September he told his mother of the Brighton municipality's expenditure of £19,000 to enlarge the Parade, 'I think it is a great waste of money.' In the money values of 1990, it was £750,000. Churchill's letter about excessive public spending was written four days before Lord Randolph, speaking at Dartford in Kent, pledged himself to reduce Government expenditure. He was also working that autumn on plans to alter the basis of taxation in order, his son later wrote, to apply 'much more closely than his predecessors that fundamental principle of democratic finance-the adjusting of taxation to the citizen's ability to pay'. That winter the son's need for his father's love was again disappointed. On November I 0, three weeks before his twelfth birthday, he wrote to him, 'You never came to see me on Sunday when you were in Brighton.' This was the second time his father had been in Brighton but had not gone tosee him. In preparing his first budget, Lord Randolph sought to persuade both the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary of State for War to reduce their spending for the coming year, in order to further the cause of a more equitable taxation system, and to frustrate what his son was later to call 'an ambitious foreign policy supported by growing armaments'. On December 20, when it became clear that the two Service Ministers were unwilling to cut their respective departmental spending, Lord Randolph wrote to Lord Salisbury, 'I do not want to be wrangling and quarrelling in the Cabinet, and therefore must request to be allowed to give up my office and retire from the Government.' As soon as Salisbury received this letter, he treated it as a letter of resignation and accepted it. Lord Randolph was devastated. He had intended his letter as a warning shot, perhaps the decisive shot, in his battle against the Admiralty and the War Office, not as a letter of resignation abruptly ending his career. The deed was done; Lord Randolph was no longer Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was never to present a budget nor return to the Cabinet. Twenty years later Churchill published a detailed account of his father's resignation. 'Of course he hoped the others would give way,' he wrote. 'Undoubtedly he expected to prevail.' His father's mistake was to have 'overlooked the anger and jealousy that his sudden rise to power had excited'.
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The twelve-year-old boy was soon to experience that mood of public anger. As Lady Randolph explained in February 1887 to her husband, who was then in Morocco, 'Winston was taken to a pantomime at Brighton where they hissed a sketch of you- he burst into tears- & then turned furiously on a man- who was hissing behind him- & said "Stop that row you snub nosed Radical"!!!' Lord Randolph was so delighted at his son's loyalty that he arranged for him to be given a gold sovereign. 'We all of course looked forward to his reconquest of power,' Churchill later wrote. 'We saw as children the passers-by take off their hats in the streets and the workmen grin when they saw his big moustache.' That summer Churchill fought a valiant battle to be allowed to go to London at the time of Queen Victoria's Jubilee. It took him three letters to his mother to achieve his object. This was the first:
My dear Mamma, Miss Thomson doesn't want me to go home for the Jubilee and because she says that I shall have no place in Westminster Abbey and so it is not worth going. Also that you will be very busy and unable to be with me much. Now you know that this is not the case. I want to see Buffalo Bill & the Play as you promised me. I shall be very disappointed, disappointed is not the word I shall be miserable, after you have promised me, and all, I shall never trust your promises again. But I know that Mummy loves her Winny much too much for that . Write to Miss Thomson and say that you have promised me and you want to have me home. Jack entreats you daily I know to let me come and there are seven weeks after the Jubilee before I come home. Don't disappoint me.lf you write to Miss Thomson she will not resist you. I could come home on Saturday to stay till Wednesday. I have got a lot of things, pleasant and unpleasant to tell you. Remember for my sake. I am quite well but in a torment about coming home, it would upset me entirely if you were to stop me. This letter was posted from Brighton on June 11. A second letter followed within twenty-four hours, 'I hope you will not disappoint me. Uncertainty is at all times perplexing. Write to me by return post please!!!' Churchill now enclosed a draft which he had prepared of the letter he wanted his mother to send Miss Thomson. 'Could you allow Winston to come up to London on Saturday the 18th for the Jubilee,' it read. 'I should like him to see the procession very much, and I also promised him that he should come up for the Jubilee.'
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CHURCHILL: A LIFE
1887
Churchill's draft letter made no mention of Buffalo Bill. But in his letter to his mother, he reminded her again of this aspect of his return to London. The show was to be at Earls Court, presented by Buffalo Bill Cody himself, with large numbers of Indians, cowboys, scouts, settlers and Mexicans. His second letter ended, 'For Heavens sake Remember!!!' His third letter, sent on June 15, was shorter: 'I am nearly mad with suspense. Miss Thomson says that she will let me go if you write to ask for me. For my sake write before it is too late. Write to Miss Thomson by return post please!!!' Churchill's persistence was rewarded. Lady Randolph did as her son wished, and he went up to London, to celebrate the fiftieth year of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne. It was clearly a boisterous visit. 'I hope you will soon forget my bad behaviour while at home,' he wrote to his mother on the day after his return to Brighton, 'and not to make it alter any pleasure in my summer Holidays.' He went on to point out that two other boys who had gone up to London returned even later than he had. As for his work: 'I am getting on capitally in Euclid. I and another boy are top of the school.' Four days later he reported that he was also getting on 'capitally' in Greek and Latin. In a letter on July 5 he reported the opinion of one master 'that I am getting on much better in my Greek'. This was important as 'Greek is my weak point & I cannot get into Winchester without it, so I am very glad I have made a start'. Churchill hoped to spend his summer holidays in Paris 'or somewhere on the continent'. He suspected that his mother had an extra plan for him. 'My darling,' he wrote to her three weeks before the holidays were to begin, 'I hope you don't intend to make my Holidays miserable by having a Tutor.' She did; the tutor was to be his Greek master, the twenty-four year-old James Best. Churchill was somewhat assuaged. 'Now as he is a Master here,' he wrote to his mother, 'and I like him pretty well I shall not mind him at all, on one condition viz. "Not to do any work". I give up all other conditions except this one.' Churchill added: 'I never have done work in my holidays and I will not begin now. I will be very good if this is not forced upon me and I am not bothered about it.' Lady Randolph was determined her son should study during the holi days. But he was becoming skilled at putting his own point of view. 'I promise you I will be a very good boy indeed in the Holidays,' he wrote on July 14. 'Only do let me off the work because I am working hard this term & I shall find quite enough to do in the holidays. I am never at a loss for anything to do while I am in the country for I shall be occupied with "Butterflying" all day (I was last year). Do let me try it for a week.' Even if the tutoring was only for one hour a day, he told his mother, 'I shall feel
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that I have got to be back at a certain time and it would hang like a dark shadow over my pleasure'. But tutoring here was to be, though part of Churchill's holiday that summer was again spent with jack and Mrs Everest on the Isle of Wight. On his return to Brighton he learned that his parents were to send him, not to Winchester, for which he had been preparing, but to Harrow. His earlier ill-health made Harrow more attractive, as it was on a hill. That autumn the headmaster, Dr Welldon, wrote to Lord Randolph, 'You may rely upon my placing him in a House where his health will be carefully watched.' Churchill was pleased by the decision. 'I am very glad to hear that I am going to Harrow & not to Winchester,' he wrote to his father. 'I think I shall pass the entrance examination, which is not so hard as Winchester.' In Arithmetic, 'we are doing "Square Root" and have quite mastered Decimal fractions & Rule of three'. He was learning a second group of Greek verbs. At the end of term he would be playing Martine in Moliere's Medecin Malgre Lui. He was also learning his part in an extract from a Greek play, The Knights by Aristophanes, 'in which there are only two characters one of whom is myself. In preparation for the preliminary examination for Harrow, Churchill persevered with his Greek verbs, making steady progress. On his own initiative he wrote for advice to a boy who had been with him at Brighton and had gone on to Harrow. 'He wrote back & told me all about it,' Churchill informed his mother. As the examination drew near, his spirits rose, 'I am hoping to have the success that is due to a long term of hard work.'Jack and Mrs Everest were at Brighton, which also raised his spirits. The result was remarkable: in the first six papers he took, he came first in four, English History, Algebra, Ancient History and Bible History, and second in Geography. Two weeks later he came second in Arithmetic. As the examinations continued, Lord Randolph went down to Brighton and took his son out to tea. His thirteen-year-old son was already planning his Christmas entertainment. 'We will not have a Christmas tree this year,' he wrote to his mother on December 13. 'But I think a good 3 guinea Conjuror and a Tea and amusements and games after tea would answer better.' For three guineas, Churchill pointed out, the conjuror 'gives ventriloquism and an hours good conjuring'. He would get 'a lot of addresses this time' of boys to invite. On the following day Churchill's Christmas party planscame to nought. His parents were leaving for Russia in five days' time and would be away until February. 'I am very disappointed that I must spend my holidays without you,' he wrote to his mother on hearing the news from Miss Thomson, 'But I am trying to make the "Best of a bad job". We shall not
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1887
be able to have a party of course.' Returning to London, he spent his Christmas holidays without his parents. 'It is very dull without you,' he wrote to his mother on December 26. He also told her that he had won two school prizes, for English and for Scripture. That Christmas, Mrs Everest was taken ill with diphtheria. 'It is very hard to bear,' Churchill wrote to his mother on December 30, 'we feel so destitute.' He and Jack had left Connaught Place and were being looked after by Dr Roose at 45 Hill Street, off Berkeley Square. Four days later the two boys were taken to Blenheim, where they stayed for a week. 'It has done them good,' their grandmother, the dowager Duchess, wrote to Lord Randolph on 8 January 1888, '&I keep Winston in good order as I know you like it. He is a clever Boy & really not naughty but he wants a firm hand. Jack requires no keeping in order.' From Blenheim, the two boys returned to London, to stay with the Duchess at 46 Grosvenor Square. They were taken to see the new Gilbert and Sullivan, HMS Pinafore and to the pantomime Puss in Boots. But a governess was in attendance from ten till seven each day, and the Duchess discouraged too many evening outings. 'I fear Winston thinks me very strict,' she wrote to Lord Randolph on January 19, 'but I really think he goes out too much & I do object to late parties for him. He is so excitable. But he goes back to school on Monday. Meantime he is affectionate & not naughty.' He was also much concerned about Mrs Everest, 'Woomany' as he called her. 'It might have been so much worse ifWoomany had died,' he wrote to his mother, who was still in Russia. In a letter written to await his mother in London, Churchill asked for 'a good Latin-English & a good English-Latin dictionary'. A week later he asked for a Greek Lexicon. He had begun Virgil, 'which I like', and also Herodotus in the original Greek. He was confident he would do well in the Harrow entrance examination. 'I hear that Algebra is an extra subject and so I hope to score in that, as I am very fond of it.' By the end of term he would know the first book of Euclid 'perfectly, which will be more than I shall want. They only require Arithmetic, Vulgar Fractions & Decimal fractions & Simple & Compound Interest, which I know.' He had also made further progress in languages: 'I have learnt some Greek irregular verbs & a lot of French. I do so want to get in.' In February, Churchill wrote to his mother, 'I am working hard for Harrow.' He was 'not very good at Latin verse but it is oflittle importance, prose being the chief thing in which I am rapidly improving'. He was learning the geography ofthe United States. 'When I come home you must question me.' He was also reading novels; when Rider Haggard sent him a copy of his latest book, Allan Quatermain, Churchill wrote back that he liked it betterthan King Solomon's Mines. 'It is more amusing,' heexplained.
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Nine days before the Harrow entrance examination, Churchill told his father he was 'getting through the 2nd Book of Virgil's Aeneid all-right, I like that better than anything else'. He had finished another group of Greek verbs: 'Ihope I shall pass. I think I shall.' Churchill's confidence was not misplaced. On March 15 he sat, and passed, the Harrow entrance examination. But it had been a nerve-racking experience. When Churchill left Harrow by train for London, Charlotte Thomson informed Lord Randolph, he had 'a severe attack of sickness'. She had been worried about the effect of his 'nervous excitement' on his work and her fears had been realised. 'He has only just scraped through,' she wrote, having been 'terribly upset' after the morning examinations. It was the Latin translation that had been the problem; Churchill assured Miss Thomson 'over and over again', she told Lord Randolph, 'that he had never translated Latin into English so of course he could not do the piece of prose set on the paper. As I knew that he had for more than a year been translating Virgil and for much longer Caesar, I was rather surprised by the assertion but of course I did not contradict him.' 'Ihave passed,' Churchill wrote to his mother from Brighton on March 16, 'but it was far harder than I expected.' The Latin translation had been 'very, very hard' as was the Greek translation. There had been no Greek Grammar 'in which I had hoped to score' and no French. He was 'very tired now but that does not matter now that I know I have passed. I am longing to go to Harrow, it is such a nice place- beautiful viewbeautiful situation- good swimming bath- a good gymnasium- & a carpentering shop & many other attractions.' There was yet another attraction to Harrow, 'You will often be able to come & see me in the summer, it is so near to London you can drive from Victoria in an hour & 15 minutes or so.' Churchill's last month at Brighton was filled with thoughts of going home. 'I want to have Easter with you, tremendously,' he wrote on March 27. But that Easter his mother was again away from home; in vain he pleaded with her, 'Do come home soon.'
2 Harrow
Churchill entered Harrow School in April 1888. As at StGeorge's and at Brighton he was a boarder, seeing his parents only in the holidays, if then. 'I like everything immensely,' was his comment in his first letter home, written three days after his arrival. In his second letter, written the next day, he was proud that one of the masters had told him his entrance paper in Arithmetic was 'the best'. During his first month at Harrow, Churchill joined the school cadet force, and, he told his mother, 'attended my drills punctually'. He also went with the cadet force to Rickmansworth, where there was a mock battle with Haileybury School. 'As I had not got a uniform I only carried cartridges,' he wrote home. 'I carried I 00 rounds to give away in the thick of the fight, consequently my business enabled m'e to get a good view of the field. It was most exciting, you could see through the smoke the enemy getting nearer & nearer.' The Harrow boys were beaten, however, '& forced to retire'. In his first essay at Harrow, Churchill wrote about Palestine in the time of John the Baptist, when the land 'lay at the feet of the Roman, who was then at the apex of his glory'.Of the Zealots, he wrote that they were 'always ready for a rebellion, ready to risk their lives, their homes, their all for their country's freedom'. As to the Pharisees: 'Their faults were many. Whose faults are few? For let him with all the advantages of Christianity avouch that they are more wicked than himself, he commits the same crime of which he is just denouncing them.' Churchill was learning to shoot with the Martini-Henry rifle, the one used by the army. He was also learning a thousand lines of Macaulay for a form prize. 'Anyone who likes to take the trouble to learn them can get one,' he explained to his father, 'as there is no limit to the prizes.' On this occasion it was a thousand lines of The Lays of Ancient Rome which secured him a prize.
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1888
Churchill still yearned for his mother's visits, but sometimes they led to unhappiness of their own. 'Don't be cross with me any more,' he wrote at the end of June. 'I will try and work, but you were so cross to me you made me feel quite dull. I have kept my room quite tidy since you came.' And he added: 'Do come down Mamma on Saturday. I am not lazy & untidy but careless & forgetful.' Lady Randolph did not visit her son that Saturday. He expected her to do so a week later, however, when he was singing in the school choir as a treble. 'I rank as one of the prominent trebles,' he explained,'& am in what is called the nucleus of the choir. Of course I am so young that my voice has not yet broken and as trebles are rare I am one of the few.' Despite this attraction Lady Randolph did not go down for Speech Day. Churchill had to be content with a visit from his aunt Lady Fanny Marjoribanks, whose son was also at Harrow and whose husband was a rising star on the Liberal benches. The school songs Churchill sang on Speech Day roused his enthusiam 'The stirring patriotism these versesevQked,' hisson Randolph later wrote, 'abided with him forever and was the mainspring of his political conduct.' When, at the height of the Blitz in 1940, Randolph accompanied his father to Harrow for the annual school songs, Churchill told him, 'Listening to those boys singing all those well-remembered songs I could see myself fifty years before singing those tales of great deeds and of great men and wondering with intensity how I could ever do something glorious for my country.' Churchill himself was later to recall, in a speech to the boys at Harrow in October 1945, how he had also been 'much attracted' by the kettle drum. Again and again he thought, 'If only I could get hold of this on one of these fine evenings.' But he was never allowed that opportunity. 'So I gave up that ambition and transferred my aspirations to another part of the orchestra. I thought, "If I cannot have the kettle-drum I might try to be the conductor". There was a great deal in the gestures, at any rate.' That could not be arranged either, while he was at Harrow, 'but eventually, after a great deal of perseverance, I rose to be conductor of quite a considerable band. It was a very large band and it played with very strange and formidable instruments, and the roar and thunder of its music resounded throughout the world.' As part of the regular allowance of breaks, Churchill looked forward to going home for a weekend in July. But he was forced to stay at school. It was not that he was 'in any way wilfully troublesome', Henry Davidson, the assistant master, explained to Lady Randolph, 'but his forgetfulness, carelessness, unpunctuality, and irregularity in every way, have really been
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so serious, that I write to ask you, when he is at home to speak very gravely to him on the subject'. There were further complaints to come. 'Winston, I am sorry to say, has, if anything got worse as the term passed,' Davidson explained. 'Constantly late for school, losing his books, and papers and various other things into which I need not enter- he is so regular in his irregularity that I really don't know what to do; and sometimes think he cannot help it.' If he was not able to 'conquer this slovenliness', Davidson warned, 'he will never make a success of a public school'. It was very serious indeed that he had acquired 'such phenomenal slovenliness'. He had 'such good abilities' but these would be 'made useless by habitual negligence'. And yet, Davidson added, 'I ought not to close without telling you that I am very much pleased with some history work he has done for me.' That term Churchill was awarded a form prize for English History. A new challenge in the autumn term was a school prize for reciting a thousand lines of Shakespeare. Churchill's letters to his parents show how eager he was to win it, but he lost it by only twenty-seven marks, telling them, 'I was rather astonished as I beat some twenty boys who were much older than I.' Then, just before his fourteenth birthday, he wrote with pride of winning a history prize for the second term running. He had also come top in Roman History and was doing well at Greek and Latin. At home over the Christmas and New Year, Churchill's throat was swollen and his liver 'still bad', he wrote to his mother, who was again travelling during his holiday. Medicine six times a day, he added, 'is a horrible nuisance'. As he recovered he was told by Dr Roose that he must go to the seaside to recuperate fully. Once more he went to the Isle of Wight with Mrs Everest. Back at school, however, ill.ness continued to impede his progress. In March he told his mother he was 'far from well & am in bed because I can hardly stand'. His solace was a visit from Mrs Everest. 'I do not know how the day would have passed but for Woomany,' he told his mother. Churchill's qualities did not go unnoticed. In April, Welldon decided to take him into his own House, writing to Lord Randolph, 'He has some great gifts and is, I think, making progress in his work.' Lord Randolph had sent his son a bicycle. 'I rode eight miles with it,' he wrote to his father in May, 'it is a beautiful little machine.' He enjoyed his new House, telling his mother, 'All the boys are so kind and nice.' But illness again intervened when he fell off the bicycle and was concussed; he had to spend a week in bed. Once more Mrs Everest hurried down to Harrow, but Churchill wanted his mother to be with him. 'Can't you come instead?' he asked. 'I was rather disappointed at not seeing you as I fully expected to.' The fall had been a serious one. 'I am very tender all over my body,' he told his
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1889
mother, 'but feel cheery and not a bit dull, the time passes very quickly. Especially when I can have visitors.' His best piece of news was that the hospital nurse had gone 'and so I am alone with Woomany'. As he recovered from his concussion, Churchill asked his father to come down for Speech Day. 'I don't think that you will be asked to make a speech,' he sought to reassure him. 'In fact I should think it will be very improbable.' Churchill added, 'You have never been to see me & so everything will be new to you.' It was more than a year since Churchill had entered Harrow. Lord Randolph did at last go down; while he was there he told Welldon he wanted his son to go into the Army Class, instead of the regular classes. Because the Army Class entailed extra lessons on the military subjects needed to enter a military academy, Churchill would have no opportunity to continue with those subjects taken by boys who wished to go to university, as he already hoped to do. Churchill's results that term were such that there was no reason he should not eventually pass the University entrance examination. But Lord Randolph was emphatic that his son go into the Army, and therefore into the Army Class. Many years later Churchill reflected on his father's decision, recalling a visit of inspection which he had made one holiday to see his son's collection of nearly fifteen hundred toy soldiers. 'All the troops were arranged in the correct formation of attack. He spent twenty minutes studying the scene - which was really impressive - with a keen and captivating smile. At the end he asked me if I would like to go into the army. I thought it would be splendid to command an army, so I said "Yes" at once: and immediately I was taken at my word.' Churchill added, wryly: 'For years I thought my father with his experi ence and flair had discerned in me the qualities of military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar.' Welldon arranged for Churchill to take the Army Class examination. He did badly in mathematics, making it difficult for him to contemplate going on to Woolwich, the academy for cadets seeking commissions in the Royal Artillery or Royal Engineers. Instead he would have to prepare for Sandhurst, the academy for would-be infantry and cavalry officers. 'I have joined the "Army class",' he wrote to his mother at the end of September. 'It is rather a "bore" as it spoils your half Holiday: however we do French & Geometrical drawing which are the two things which are most necessary for the army.' As Churchill began the extra work which being in the Army Class entailed, he urged his mother to write to him. 'It is more than a fortnight since I heard from you,' he complained at the beginning of October. 'In fact I have only had one letter this term. It is not very kind darling Mummy to forget all about me, not answer my epistles.' One of Churchill's letters
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to his mother, a month before his fifteenth birthday, was dictated to a school friend. 'Milbanke is writing this for me,' he explained, 'as I am having a bath.' Many years later other shorthand writers were to take dictation while Churchill the Prime Minister was in his bath. Milbanke, who was killed in action in 1915 at Gallipoli, during the landing at Suvla Bay, was nearly two years Churchill's senior. 'When my father came down to see me,' Churchill later recalled, 'he used to take us both to luncheon at the King's Head Hotel. I was thrilled to hear them talk, as if they were equals, with the easy assurance of one man of the world to another. I envied him so much. How I should have loved to have that sort of relationship with my father! But alas I was only a backward schoolboy and my incursions into the conversation were nearly always awkward or foolish.' Alone with his friends Churchill was far from inhibited or over whelmed. 'Like other boys at Harrow,' another older boy, Murland Evans, later recalled, 'I was greatly attracted by this extraordinary boy. His commanding intelligence, his bravery, charm, and indifference to ugly surroundings, vivid imagination, descriptive powers, general knowledge of the world and of history-gained no one knew how, but never disputed -and above all that magnetism and sympathy which shone in his eyes, and radiated from a personality which - even under the severe repression of our public school system- dominated great numbers around him, many of whom were his superiors in age and prowess.' Speaking of his future, Churchill told his aunt Lady Rodney, 'If I had two lives I would be a soldier and a politician. But as there will be no war in my time I shall have to be a politician.' He had become a voracious reader. One boy, finding him curled up in a chair reading, asked to see the book. It was Carlyle's French Revolution. But from his father there seemed little encouragement; Churchill's cousin Shane Leslie later re called that when the boys staged plays at horne Lord Randolph would remark, 'I shall preserve a stony and acid silence.' That winter Churchill was put on 'report' by Welldon; each week his masters had to give an account of his progress. Even when it became clear that his progress was satisfactory and that the masters had 'no complaint' Welldon kept him on report. 'It is a most shameful thing that he should keep me on like this,' Churchill wrote to his mother, urging her to come down and speak to the headmaster direct. 'Please don't be afraid of him, because he always promises fair & acts in a very different way. You must stick up for me because, if you don't nobody else will.' A week after his fifteenth birthday Churchill wrote proudy to his mother, 'I am working very hard.' So hard, in fact, that despite the extra work of the Army Class, he got his Remove into a higher division of the
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1889
fourth form. 'We were delighted to hear you had your remove,' his mother wrote on the eve of leaving for Europe yet again,'& do hope you will continue to work. You ought to feel much encouraged & full of ambition.' Churchill had begun to study English under a master who taught it with enthusiasm and skill, breathing life into the normally dull topic of sentence construction. The master was Robert Somervell, 'a most delightful man', Churchill later wrote, 'to whom my debt is great'. Somervell's method, Churchill recalled, was to divide up a long sentence into its component clauses 'by means of black, red, blue and green inks', and teaching it almost daily as 'a kind of drill'; by this method 'I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence- which is a noble thing'. 'I am getting on capitally in my new form,' Churchill reported to his mother in january 1890. 'Papa said he thought singing was a waste of time, so I left the singing class and commenced drawing.' He studied drawing for an extra hour each week, in the evening, telling his mother that he had been drawing 'little landscapes & bridges & those sort of things' and was about to begin shading in sepia. An unexpected letter of encouragement came from his grandmother Duchess Fanny, who wrote: 'Am pleased to see you are beginning to be ambitious! You have a great example of industry in your dear father & of thoroughness in work.' The Army Class, Churchill complained to his father that spring, 'takes me away from all the interesting work of my form & altogether spoils my term'. Nine-tenths of the boys in the Army Class would in any case go to a crammer before their Army Exam. All of them disliked the Army Class because 'it made them come out low in their form'. Harrow was 'a charm ing place but Harrow & the Army Class don't agree'. His protest was of no avail. In May, Churchill began learning German. 'Ugh,' he wrote to his mother. 'Still I hope to be able to "Sprechen ze Deutche"one of these days.' This hope was never to be realised. Half way through the summer term of 1890, Churchill was confronted by parental anger. His father had sent him five pounds, and had not received a thank-you letter until a week later. His half-term school report was also disappointing.These two facts combined to produce a formidable letter from his mother. 'You work in such a fitful inharmonious way,' she wrote, 'that you are bound to come out last -look at your place in the form!' Her letter continued: 'Dearest Winston you make me very unhappy- I had built up such hopes about you & felt so proud of you- & now all is gone. My only consolation is that your conduct is good & that you are an affectionate son- but your work is an insult to your intelligence. If you would only trace out a plan of action for yourself & carry it out & be determined to do so - I am sure you could accomplish anything you
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wished.' There was more advice to come. 'The next year or two,' she warned, '& the use you make of them, will affect your whole life-stop and think it out for yourself & take a good pull before it is too late.' Churchill made an effort to defend himself. The thank-you letter to his father had been written that same evening, he explained, but because of the lateness of the hour he had been forced to give it to someone else to post. 'He I suppose forgot & did not post it until several days had elapsed.' As to his bad report: 'I will not try to excuse myself for not working hard, because I know that what with one thing and another I have been rather lazy. Consequently when the month ended the crash came I got a bad report & got put on report etc, etc. that is more than 3 weeks ago, and in the coming month I am bound to get a good report.' There was plenty of time until the end of term 'and I will do my very best in what remains'. The crisis passed; Churchill's work improved and his parents' anger was assuaged. That autumn he began to smoke, provoking further criticism. 'Darling Winston,' his mother wrote in September, 'I hope you will try & not smoke. If only you knew how foolish & how silly you look doing it you would give it up, at least for a few years.' There was to be an inducement to giving up smoking, 'I will get Papa to get you a gun & a pony.' Churchill deferred to his mother's advice. He would give up smoking 'at any rate for six months'. That September Duchess Fanny had further advice: 'Take care of yourself & work well & keep out of scrapes & don't flare up so easily!!!' As Churchill approached his sixteenth birthday, he followed with alarm the spread of an influenza epidemic that, after ravaging much of Europe and Asia, spread, briefly, to Britain. The epidemic became the subject of a poem he wrote, in twelve verses, that was published in the Harrovian magazine. One verse read, O'er miles of bleak Siberia's plains Where Russian exiles toil in chains It moved with noiseless tread, And as it slowly glided by There followed it across the sky The spirits of the dead. Another verse referred to the two German provinces he had visited with his father seven years earlier, Fair Alsace and forlorn Lorraine, The cause of bitterness and pain In many a Gallic breast,
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1890
Receive the vile, insatiate scourge, And from their towns with it emerge And never stay nor rest. The final verse rejoiced that Britain had not been as terribly affected as the Continents, and expressed his pride in the British Empire,
God shield our Empire from the might Of war or famine, plague or blight And all the power of Hell, And keep it ever in the hands Of those who fought 'gainst other lands, Who fought and conquered well. As his sixteenth birthday approached, Churchill worked on his Army preliminary examination. Curiously insensitive to the strains of such work, his mother let it be known that she was not satisfied with his progress. 'I hear that you are greatly incensed against me!' he wrote. 'I am very sorry. But I am very hard at work & I am afraid some enemy hath sown tares in your mind.' He had already explained that his earlier problems had arisen 'on account of my being put under a master whom I hated & who returned that hate'. He was now being taught 'by masters who take the greatest interest in me & who say that I have been working very well. If you will take my word of honour to the effect that I am working my very best, well & good, if not- I cannot do anything more than try.' It was from one of his mother's friends, Lady Wilton, who signed her letters to him 'your deputy mother', that Churchill now received words of affection and encouragement. 'I'm sorry you have so much hard work before you,' she wrote ten days before his sixteenth birthday, 'but- if you face it-it will gradually appear less hard-& I'm sure you'll pass well.' The examination was to take place on December 10. 'I expect you will distin guish yourself,' Lady Wilton wrote in a second letter, adding, 'I will rejoice in it'. In Geography, Churchill would have to answer questions about one particular country; which country, none of the boys knew. On the night before the exam he wrote the names of each of the twenty-five possible countries on scraps of paper, put them into his hat, closed his eyes, and drew one out. 'New Zealand was the one,' he wrote to his mother, 'and New Zealand was the first question on the paper.' This good luck, combined with Churchill's hard work over many months, was effective. He passed the examination in all subjects. 'I am very pleased to hear the good news,' Duchess Fanny wrote to him when the results were known. 'I hope it will
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encourage you to continue to exert & distinguish yourself & make us all proud of you.' . Churchill and Jack spent the New Year of 1891 at Banstead, a house which Lord Randolph had rented near Newmarket racecourse. As their parents were yet again abroad, Mrs Everest looked after them. 'We have slaughtered many rabbits,' Churchill reported to his mother. 'About eleven brace altogether. Tomorrow we slay the rats.' His main effort at Banstead with Jack was to build a 'Den', a hut made of mud and planks, with a straw floor.Surrounded by a ditch which served as a moat, the Den was defended with a home-made elastic catapault that fired apples at any would-be intruder. Churchill took charge of the defences, using his brother Jack, and his two cousins, the five-year-old Shane Leslie and the six-year-old Hugh Frewen, sometimes as allies to be drilled and defended, sometimes as enemies to be repulsed. Back at Harrow, Churchill continued to be troubled by ill-health, writ ing to his mother in May of how he had strained his abdomen, felt considerable pain, and was 'frightened'. His teeth were also giving him trouble. 'Poor old man,' Mrs Everest wrote, 'have you tried the heroin I got you- get a bottle of Elliman's embrocation & rub your face when you go to bed & tie your sock up over your face, after rubbing for a 1/4 of an hour, try it I am sure it will do you good.' To his mother Churchill signed himself, 'Your tooth-tormented - but affectionate son.' Her advice was that he should brush his teeth more often. From Mrs Everest came a warning about not going swimming in the Harrow pool as 'the wind is still east & treacherous'. Her kindly advice was continuous. 'Be sure,' she wrote that summer, 'you don't attempt to get into the train after it moves off dear. I always feel uneasy about that because you stand at the Book Stall reading & forget your train. Do be careful there's a dear boy.' That May, Churchill also told his mother he had been in the 'deuce of a row' at school. To his father, who was in South Africa, he explained how he and four other boys, while out walking, had discovered a disused factory.'Everything was in ruin and decay but some windows yet remained unbroken; we facilitated the progress of time with regard to these, with the result that the watchman complained to Welldon, who having made enquiries and discoveries, "swished" us.' It was not this episode, however, but another fault, that led to a further parental complaint. 'Mamma is in despair about your spending so much money,' Mrs Everest wrote in the second week of June. 'She is greatly troubled about it, she says you are always asking her for more money.' In his defence Churchill explained to his mother that he had to pay his repeated dentist bills and taxi fares to the dentist, as well as 'an old bicycle debt' and the 'window smashing stupidity'.
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1891
Churchill had been made a Lance Corporal in the school cadet force. There had been a 'sham fight' which he had enjoyed immensely, he told his father. 'I took the opera glasses you gave me and through them scrutinised the foe.' He was suffering that summer from pain in his gums.'I am notable to go out,' he wrote to his father, 'as I am tormented with toothache which has now turned to an abscess, so my face is swelled to twice its normal size.' From Mrs Everest came advice about his teeth, 'Don't eat too many of those nasty pickles, they are poisonous things.' One tooth would have to go; it was finally extracted in London under the supervision of a leading authority on the use of anaesthetics in dental surgery. 'I remembered nothing,' Churchill told his mother, 'but went to sleep & snored throughout the whole perfor .mance.' Churchill hoped to spend a week that summer at Banstead, in his Den. But Mrs Everest explained that 'the reason Mamma cannot have you home is the house is to be full of visitors for the race week'. He went instead to London, staying with Duchess Fanny at 50 Grosvenor Square. While he was in London his mother's friend Count Kinsky took him to the Crystal Palace, where they saw a fire-brigade drill specially performed in the presence of the German Emperor, William II. 'There were nearly 2,000 firemen & 100 engines,' Churchill told his brother. The Emperor wore a helmet 'of bright brass surmounted by a white eagle nearly six inches high, a polished steel cuirass & a perfectly white uniform with high boots'. After the march-past, Kinsky took Churchill out to dine. 'Very tolerable dinner,' he told jack. 'Lots of champagne which pleased your loving brother very much.' Welldon had suggested that Churchill go to France to improve his French for the Army examination. Churchill begged his mother to let him stay in England. 'I shouldn't see Jack nor you, nor Everest at all.' As for the examination: 'Really I feel less keen about the Army every day. I think the Church would suit me much better.' After much correspondence and heated argument it was agreed that he would not have to go to France; a governess would suffice. 'I can't tell you how happy I am that I am not to go abroad for the holidays,' he wrote to his mother. From Banstead came a letter from jack; the Den was 'very hard to approach for huge thistles & stinging nettles are all round about, and the ditch is empty of water'. His French lessons over, Churchill set to work to clear the Den and make it defensible again. 'Here I am at Banstead,' he wrote to his father at the end of August, 'leading what to me is an almost ideal existence.' The two brothers 'have been happy as kings riding and shooting', Lady Randolph wrote to her husband in mid-September, 'and lately they have had great fun building a house. We had tea there today'. Shortly before he had to return to school for the autumn term, Churchill had a bilious
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attack, and remained in London for two extra days. Welldon demanded a letter of explanation. 'Don't say anything about the theatre,' Churchill warned his mother, 'or that would make him rampant. Merely say I looked tired & pale from the journey (as indeed I did) & that, combined with the fact that you wanted me to see a doctor induced you to "Keep me back".' That term Churchill dropped German and began Chemistry. 'It is very interesting,' he told his brother,'& when I come home I will show you many wonders.' His mother was anxious to find a tutor who would travel abroad with him in the next holidays. 'On the whole he has been a very good boy,' she explained to Lord Randolph, 'but honestly he is getting a bit too old for a woman to manage. After all he will be seventeen in two months and he really requires to be with a man.' The 'woman' was Mrs Everest, to whom Churchill was as devoted as she to him. 'Fancy having a room all to yourself,' she wrote at the end of September, 'but my dearest Boy do let me impress it upon you to be careful of your fire & candle at night. Don't go to sleep and leave it burning by your bedside.' He should work hard that term, she advised, not only to please his parents but to 'disappoint some of your relations who prophesy a future of profligacy for you'. Churchill did not depend only on his mother for his luxuries. 'I am going to sell my bicycle for a bulldog,' he wrote to her that term. 'I have known him some time & he is very tame & affectionate.' His father had told him he used to have a bulldog at Eton, 'so why not I at Harrow?' Work that term went well. 'Mr Welldon told me since his return he has worked very hard,' Lady Randolph told her husband in October. But from Mrs Everest came a protest. 'I think you are awfully extravagant to have spent 15/- in one week,' she wrote, 'some families of six or seven people have to live upon 12/- a week. You squander it away & the more you have the more you want & spend.' Her letter ended:'My poor sweet old precious lamb how I am longing for a hug-although you are not perfect I do love you so very much & I do so want you to have more discretion & judgment about spending your money. You do everything at random my Pet without thinking & it is a growing evil & unless you try & cure yourself of it you will have to suffer severely later on.' That term Churchill had his first letter published; a two-sentence appeal for more convenient opening hours for the school library, it appeared in the school magazine, theHarrovian, on 8 October 1891. Six weeks later, in a much longer letter, he urged that greater use be made of the school gymnasium for special events. 'It is time there should be a change,' he wrote, 'and I rely on your influential columns to work that change.' A week before his seventeenth birthday, Churchill went to London for the day. A postscript to his next letter home contained a reference to the
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1891
opposite sex. 'It was awfully bad luck having to go,' he wrote to his mother, just as I was making an impression on the pretty Miss Weaslet. Another 10 minutes and ... !?' During that day in London, Churchill learned that Mrs Everest was to leave Lady Randolph's employ.Jack was now eleven and a nanny was no longer needed. 'I do not feel very happy &cannot sleep,' Mrs Everest wrote to Churchill. 'But I suppose there must be something to bring us to our end.' He must remember, she added, to wear a coat 'this wet weather'. As for his younger brother: 'Please don't tell Jackie about my going away he will be so unhappy poor darling. What a cruel world this is.' Distressed at Mrs Everest's imminent departure, Churchill protested vigorously on Jack's behalf. It was eventually arranged that she would work for their grandmother, Duchess Fanny, at Grosvenor Square, where the two boys would still see her. A week after his seventeenth birthday, Churchill wrote to his mother to say that he once more refused to go to France, this time during the Christmas holidays to learn French with a family in Rouen. The family had been chosen by Welldon. If he went, he explained, he would miss his father's homecoming from South Africa. If forced to go, 'I will do as little as I can and the holidays will be one continual battle.' Lady Randolph was not pleased by this threat. 'My dear boy,' she replied, 'I feel for you in every way & can quite understand your anxiety & desire to be at home for Xmas, but quite apart from other considerations, the tone of your letter is not calculated to make one over lenient. When one wants something in this world, it is not by delivering ultimatums that one is likely to get it. I tell you frankly that I am going to decide not you.' Churchill did not give up the argument. 'You say that "You tell me frankly", very well Mamma I only told you frankly my intentions. You say it is for you to decide. I am required to give up my holidays- not you, I am forced to go to people who bore me excessively- not you.' He was 'very much surprised and pained to think that both you & Papa should treat me so, as a machine. I should like to know if Papa was asked to "give up his holidays" when he was at Eton.' Towards the end of his letter, which covered three pages, Chur_chill wrote: 'I am more unhappy than I can possibly say. Your unkindness has relieved me however from all feelings of duty.' Lady Randolph was now much angered. 'I have only read one page of your letter,' she replied, 'and I send it back to you- as its style does not please me.' Upset, Churchill answered that he would never again write her a letter 'of any length, as in my letter's length I can perceive a reason for your not reading it'. He added: 'I expect you were too busy with your parties and arrangements for Christmas. I comfort myself by this.'
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Both Welldon and Lady Randolph were emphatic that Churchill should study French in France that holiday. It was arranged that the recently appointed Modern Languages master at Harrow, Bernard Minssen, would accompany him, and that he would stay with Minssen's parents at Versailles. 'Mr Minssen will do everything for him, if he is docile and industrious,' Welldon wrote to Lady Randolph, 'but he will not let him waste his time and, if he is idle, he must be sent home.' Churchill would be allowed to accept only three social invitations a week, and Minssen would supply 'such pocket money as is necessary'. Churchill stayed at Versailles for a month. 'The food is very queer,' he wrote to his mother in his first letter. 'But there is plenty, & on the whole it is good.' Minssen's parents were being 'very kind' to him. 'Of course,' he added, 'I would give much to return, if you wish it I will come tomorrow - but considering all things I am prepared to stay my month.' From Mrs Everest came a letter of encouragement: 'Cheer up old Boy, enjoy yourself & try to feel contented. You have very much to be thankful for, if only you consider, & fancy how nice it will be to be able to parlez vous francais.' Life at Versailles did not prove too burdensome. Three of Lady Randolph's friends invited Churchill to meals; one of them, the Austro Hungarian railway magnate Baron Maurice de Hirsch, took him to the morgue under one of the bridges over the Seine, to see the corpses which had been dragged out of the river that day. 'Only 3 Macabres- not a good bag,' Churchill reported to his mother. As his month at Versailles came to an end Churchill hoped to persuade his parents to let him have a week off school, in order to be with his father, whom he had not seen for more than eight months. But it was not to be. 'The loss of a week now,' his father wrote from London in mid-January, 'means your not passing, which I am sure you will admit would be very discreditable & disadvantageous.' Father and son would still have 'a few days together' before school began, Lord Randolph noted, and after that the Easter holidays 'will soon be upon us, tho I must say I hope you will work like a little dray horse right up to the summer examination, only about four months off.' Churchill worked extremely hard throughout the early monthsof 1892. He also began preparing for the school fencing cup. Money problems continued to beset him. 'I am getting terribly low in my finances,' he wrote to his mother in February. 'You say I never write for love but always for money. I think you are right but remember that you are my banker and who else have I to write to?' In March, Lady Randolph went to Monte Carlo. 'I am very sick with you for going away like that,' Churchill wrote. He was only a few days away from the fencing competition. He was even more 'terrified', he told her,
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1892
to learn that she had been robbed of her purse at the Casino, 'for at the same moment I inust put in a request for "un peu plus d'argent" '. He also had good news to impart: 'I have won the fencing. A very fine cup. I was far and away first. Absolutely untouched in the finals.' . Churchill was now preparing for the Public Schools fencing champion ship, but when he asked his father to come to Aldershot to watch him, Lord Randolph replied, 'It is Sandown races which I must go to.' As to Churchill's continual requests for money, 'If you were a millionaire,' his father complained that March, 'you could not be more extravagant.' Were he to get into the Army 'six months of it will see you in the Bankruptcy Court'. In his defence, Churchill pointed out that he had to pay each week for his own teas and breakfasts, for fruit, and for Saturday night biscuits; these alone used up his parents' allowance of a pound a week.This expla nation, accurate in itself, did not entirely assuage his mother. 'Your wants are many,' she wrote at the beginning of May,'& you seem a perfect sieve as regards money.' That month Churchill won the Public Schools fencing championship. 'His success,' wrote the Harrovian, 'was chiefly due to his quick and dashing attack, which quite took his opponents by surprise.' Preparation for the Army exam was now continuous. 'I am working awfully hard,' he told his mother, 'without rotting I have done at least 10 hours today.' But the work was in vain; when he took the Sandhurst entrance examination that july he failed. The minimum marks needed to enter the Cavalry were 6,457; Churchill obtained 5,100. Of the 693 candidates he came 390th. The results were not entirely discouraging; in English History he was eigh teenth out of more than four hundred candidates who took the paper. 'I think your marks & place very creditable for your first try,' wrote his Army Class tutor, Louis Moriarty. Churchill would have to take the examination again. 'If he fails again,' Lord Randolph wrote to Duchess Fanny, 'I shall think about putting him in business.' Using his Rothschild connection 'I could get him something very good.' In the summer of 1892 Lord Salisbury's Conservative Government was defeated, and·Gladstone once more became Prime Minister. Although Lord Randolph had long been excluded from Conservative counsels, it was thought, Churchill later recalled, that in opposition he would regain his Parliamentary ascendancy: 'No one cherished these hopes more ar dently than 1.' Such hopes were illusions. 'Although in the past little had been said in my hearing,' Churchill later wrote, 'one could not grow up in my father's house, and still less among his mother and sisters, without understanding that there had been a great political disaster.'
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That August, at Banstead, Churchill startled his father by firing a double-barrelled gun at a rabbit which had appeared on the lawn right under his window. 'He had been very angry and disturbed,' Churchill recalled. 'Understanding at once that I was distressed, he took occasion to reassure me. I then had one of the three or four long intimate conversa tions with him which·are all I can boast.' Lord Randolph explained to his son that older people, absorbed in their own affairs, were not always considerate towards the young 'and might speak roughly in sudden annoyance'. He then began to talk 'in the most wonderful and captivating manner about school and going into the Army and the grown-up life which lay beyond. I listened spellbound to this sudden complete departure from his usual reserve, amazed at his intimate comprehension of all my affairs. Then at the end he said, "Do remember things do not always go right with me. My every action is misjudged and every word distorted.So make some allowances.'' ' That autumn jack joined his brother at Harrow, as he worked to take the Army exam again. 'I suppose,' wrote Lady Randolph that September, 'I have made too much fuss over you & made you out a sort of paragon. However it will be all right if you put your shoulder tfl the wheel this time.' Even the headmaster was helping. 'Welldon is very nice,' Churchill told his mother. 'He makes me do proses for him every evening and looks over them himself with me; a thing hitherto unheard of, as he of course is very pressed for time.' The examination was to take place at the end of November, a day before Churchill's eighteenth birthday. 'His work this term has been excellent,' Welldon told Lord Randolph. 'He understands now the need of taking trouble, and the way to take it, and, whatever happens to him, I shall consider that in the last twelve months he has learned a lesson oflife-long value.' Welldon added, 'It is due to him to say that of late he has done all that could be asked of him.' When the results were announced Churchill was devastated to learn that he had failed again. All his marks had improved, but not sufficiently; he had obtained 6,106, only 351 short of the pass mark. In Chemistry he had come eighth out of 134 candidates. As Welldon had warned Lord Ran dolph, the standard, because of a rise in the permitted age of admission, was 'likely to be very high'. From his mathematics tutor, C.H.P. Mayo, came words of encouragement, 'A gain of900 marks in so short a time is very pleasing and must make you feel confident about the examination in June.' That November, Lord Randolph's elder brother Blandford, 8th Duke of Marlborough, died suddenly at Blenheim, at the age of forty eight. Blandford's son, Churchill's cousin Sunny, was now Duke of
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1892
Marlborough. He was not quite twenty-one. Were Sunny to die before having a son, Lord Randolph would become Duke of Marlborough, and Churchill, as the heir to the Dukedom, would be Marquess of Blandford. Churchill was now eighteen. He still had to pass a third examination if he was to enter the Army. He was to take this third exam, not at school, but at a special crammers. His nine years as a schoolboy and a boarder at St George's, Brighton and Harrow had been a predominantly unhappy time, 'a sombre grey patch on the chart of my journey', he later called it. 'It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, and of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purpose less monotony.' All his contemporaries, he later wrote, and even younger boys, 'seemed in every way better adapted to the condition of our little world. They were far better at both games and at the lessons. It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race.' 'I am all for the Public schools,' was Churchill's comment in 1930, 'but I do not want to go there again.'
3 Towards the Army: 'A fresh start'
On 11 January 1893, diligent readers of The Times learned, from a small news item, that the elder son of Lord and Lady Randolph Churchill had 'met with an accident' on the previous afternoon. 'No bones were broken,' the newspaper reported, 'but he was very much shaken and bruised.' He had in fact fractured his thigh, though in the year before the first use of X-rays this was not known; indeed, it did not become known for seventy years, when this same thigh was X-rayed after a fall in Monte Carlo in 1963. While seeking to evade his brother and a cousin during a holiday chase on his grandmother's estate in Bournemouth, Churchill, trapped on a bridge over a chine, and looking for a way to evade capture, had seen the slender top of fir tree and jumped on to it. His grip failed him and he plunged down the ravine. It had been a twenty-nine-foot fall, on hard ground. For three days he lay unconscious. Then, in considerable pain, he was taken up to London. 'The doctors say I shall not be cured for two months yet,' he wrote to Jack in the first week of February. 'I pass the greater part of my time in bed.' For the last month of his recuperation Churchill went back to the south coast, this time to Brighton, to the house of the 8th Duke of Marlborough's widow, Duchess Lily. She was 'kindness personified' he wrote to his father. While at Brighton he befriended a young Army officer, Hugh Wyllie; twenty-three years later Wyllie, then serving on the Western Front, was killed by a shell on the Menin road. At the beginning of March, Churchill began work at Captain James's, a crammers in Lexham Gardens, in West London. 'I have issued orders,' James wrote to Lord Randolph, 'for your son to be kept at work and that in future he is to do the full hours. I had to speak to him the other day about his casual manner. I think the boy means well but he is distinctly
a
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1893
inclined to be inattentive and to think too much of his abilities.' Churchill had been 'rather too much inclined up to the present,' James wrote, 'to teach his instructors instead of endeavouring to learn from them, and this is not the frame of mind conducive to success.'James had been particularly annoyed when his new pupil 'suggested to me that his knowledge of history was such that he did not want any more teaching in it! The boy has very many good points in him but what he wants is very firm handling.' That Easter, Churchill returned to Brighton. 'I am very glad to have Winston with me,' Duchess Lily wrote to Lord Randolph, 'for I have grown really fond of the boy. He has lots of good in him - and only needs sometimes to be corrected, which he always takes so smartly and well.' While at Brighton, Churchill had sent a telegram to his father warning of an outbreak of fever at Harrow. He was worried that his brother might be in danger of catching it. 'Papa was so angry with you for telegraphing to him in that stupid way,' Lady Randolph wrote in rebuke. 'Of course we all know about the fever from Jack & from Mr Welldon- & in any case to write was quite enough. You take too much on yourself young man, & write in such a pompous style. I'm afraid you are becoming a prig!' Among Duchess Lily's dinner guests while Churchill was at Brighton was A.J. Balfour, the future Conservative Prime Minister. Lady Randolph was somewhat nervous of her son's social life. 'I don't want to preach dear boy, but mind you are quiet & don't talk too much & don'tdrink too much.' Churchill now followed his father's own speeches carefully, later recalling with sadness that 'he seemed to be hardly holding his own'. He hoped the time would eventually come when he would be able 'come to his aid', and he encouraged his father with enthusiastic comments on his speeches. 'If you will let me say so,' he wrote after reading the text of one such speech in The Times, 'I thought it better than anything you have done so far.' He also became a frequent visitor to the House of Commons, always able because of his father to find a place inthe Distinguished Strangers' Gallery. At lunch and dinner parties given by his parents in the spring of 1893, Churchill met two future Liberal Prime Ministers, Lord Rosebery and H.H. Asquith. On April21 he was in the Gallery when Gladstone wound up the second reading of the Home Rule Bill. 'The Grand Old Man,' he later recalled, 'looked like a great white eagle at once fierce and splendid. His sentences rolled forth majestically and everyone hung upon his lips and gestures, eager to cheer or to deride.' After a dinner at Grosvenor Square at the end of May, Churchill's uncle Edward Marjoribanks, then Liberal Chief Whip, spent half an hour ex plaining to him how the Liberals would overcome the opposition of the House of Lords.'I wish you had been there to answer him,' Churchill wrote to his father, who was at a public meeting in Bradford, 'as I am sure there
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was an answer though I could not think of it.' The Liberals were in fact unable to find a means of overcoming the Peers, who defeated the Home Rule Bill by 419 votes to 41. 'Overcoming the Peers' was to be Churchill's own battle cry fifteen years later. A newly
"fflil t:t; f!II'C Will
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Ltuucm Slides lrtJmPIItXQ..'olish border, Churchill suggested that 'Poland might move westward, like soldiers taking two steps left close'. Russia would acquire the eastern third of Poland, and Poland would move westward into Germany. 'If Poland trod on some German toes,' Churchill said, 'that could not be helped, but there must be a strong Poland. This instrument was needed in the orchestra of Europe.' Churchill then took three matches and demonstrated what he had in mind; the Polish eastern frontier moving westward to the old Curzon Line, and the Polish western frontier moving westward to the River Oder. Stalin was pleased. At the next full session of the conference, Stalin spoke strongly against any postponement of the cross-Channel landing beyond May. On the following day Churchill's advisers told him that the only suitable moon periods at that time were the five days after May 8, and the five days after June 10. At a private meeting with Stalin on themorningofNovember 30, Churchill explained once more his reasons for wanting to persevere in Italy. The removal of the four British divisions from Italy for 'Overlord' had left the troops still in Italy 'somewhat disheartened' and 'we had not been able to take full advantage of Italy's collapse'. But he went on to point out that the removal of those troops 'also proved the earnestness of our preparations for "Overlord" '. At the full session of the conference that
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afternoon, it was agreed that the May date for 'Overlord' should stand. The Italian campaign had become a side-show, albeit one in which Ger man divisions would be forced to engage in continual battle. That night Churchill was host at the third dinner of the conference. As it was his sixty-ninth birthday there were toasts from start to finish. In one of them Churchill raised his glass and said, 'I drink to the Proletarian masses', whereupon Stalin raised his glass, 'I drink to the Conservative Party.' Churchill told Stalin, 'England is getting pinker,' to which Stalin replied, 'It is a sign of good health.' On the following day the conference discussed Russia's post-war frontier and Poland's acquisition of German territory as compensation. Churchill was prepared, he said, to tell the Poles 'that the plan was a good one and the best they were likely to get, and that His Majesty's Government would not argue against the Soviet Government at the peace table'. He was 'not going to break his heart', Churchill said with some emphasis, 'about the cession of parts of Germany to Poland', or about the cession of the city of Lvov, which Stalin claimed, to Russia. Poland would have to accept the Curzon Line, first proposed by Britain in 1920, thereby excluding the eastern third of the country which Poland had acquired in 1921 after defeating the Russian Bolshevik forces. The Poles, Churchill added, 'would be wise to take our advice; they were getting a country 300 miles square', and he was 'not prepared to make a great squawk about Lvov'. Poland could also get part of East Prussia. Whether they would agree to these gains and losses was doubtful; the minutes recorded Churchill's words:'Weshould never getthe Poles to say they were satisfied. Nothing would satisfy the Poles.' But he would put it to them that they should accept. As to Germany, all were agreed that she should be broken up into a number of smaller States; Churchill stressed the need for the 'isolation' of Prussia. He also proposed making the States of southern Germany part of a Danubian Confederation centred around Bavaria, Austria and Hung ary; 'a broad, peaceful, cow-like confederation', he described it. By the end of the Teheran Conference Stalin got the Anglo-American cross-Channel landing and the Soviet Union's western frontier exactly as he wished. On December 2 Churchill flew back to Cairo, where he tried to persuade the Turkish President, Ismet Inonii, to enter the war. Once Turkey joined the Allies, Churchill believed that Bulgaria, Roumania and Hungary, each hitherto loyal to Germany, 'might fall into our hands', and the next Big Three conference 'might be held in Budapest!' But Inonii resisted all blandishments; Turkey, like Argentina, was not to enter the war until just before the final defeat of Germany. On December 9 Churchill was again feeling unwell. 'He was looking very tired,' Brooke noted in his diary, 'and said he felt very flat, tired, and
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1943
with pains across his loins.' He was so tired that after his bath he did not have the energy to dry himself, but lay on the bed wrapped in his towel. But each day he held several meetings with experts and advisers, discuss ing aid to the partisans in Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania, and the possibility of regaining control of the Dodecanese. Among those who dined with him was julian Amery, who had been working behind German lines in Albania. After dinner on December 10, Amery wrote to his father, reporting Churchill's reply to a question about his future travel plans, 'I am the victim of caprice, and travel on the wings offancy.' An hour later Churchill was off again, by air to Tunisia, an eight-and a-half-hour flight, which ended at the wrong airport. 'They took him out of the plane,' Brooke later recalled, 'and he sat on his suit-case in a very cold morning wind, looking like nothing on earth. We were there about an hour before we moved on, and he was chilled through by then.' The correct destination was an airfield forty miles away, near Carthage, where Eisenhower was waiting. Churchill had intended to fly on from there to Italy, to visit British troops. But he was worn out. 'I am afraid I shall have to stay with you longer than I had planned,' he told Eisenhower. 'I am completely at the end of my tether and I cannot go on to the front until I have recovered my strength.' Churchill remained in bed throughout December 11. On the following morning his temperature was 101. A pathologist was flown from Cairo and a portable X-ray machine from Tunis; Churchill had pneumonia. He remained in bed, but continued to see visitors and to dictate telegrams to his shorthand writer Patrick Kinna. The doctors protested about the volume of work being done, Kinna later recalled, 'but to no avail'. On the night of December 14 Churchill's heart began to show signs of strain. Lord Moran feared that he was going to die. Churchill himself was philosophical, telling Sarah, 'If I die, don't worry- the war is won.'
32
Illness and Recovery
On 15 December 1943, as Churchill lay ill at Carthage, Brigadier Bedford, a heart specialist, arrived from Cairo. 'He is giving digitalis to calm the heart,' noted Macmillan. Later that day Lieutenant-Colonel Buttle, an expert on the new antibiotic sulphonamide, M & B, was flown in from Italy. 'I had a long talk with him,' Macmillan wrote, 'and begged him to be firm and forbid telegrams or visitors.' That evening Churchill summoned Lord Moran and told him: 'I don't feel well. My heart is doing something funny- it feels to be bumping all over the place.' He had suffered a mild heart attack, 'what is called "fibrillation",' Macmillan noted in his diary on the following day. 'It was not very severe but has alarmed them all.' On December 16 Professor John Scadding, a specialist in chest diseases, was flown from Cairo. Churchill's pulse was steadier and his lung clearing. As he lay in bed, weak but cheerful, he asked Sara)l to read to him. Their choice wasJane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. On December 17 Clementine arrived at Carthage to be with her hus band. That evening they dined alone. It was nearly six weeks since they had last seen each other. After dinner they were joined by Sarah and Randolph. Lord Moran was rather fussed that the talking went on too long, but, Clementine wrote to Mary, 'Papa showed no sign of fatigue, and once or twice when I got up to go to bed, he would not let me go.' During the night, Churchill suffered a second mild heart attack. 'Papa is very upset,' Clementine told Mary on December 18, 'as he is beginning to see that he cannot get well in a few days and that he will have to lead what for him is a dreary monotonous life with no emotions or excitements.' Churchill continued to receive visitors, though only one at a time. He also discussed by telegram with the Chiefs of Staff the proposed amphib ious landing at Anzio, on the Italian coast just south of Rome. On December 23 both Eisenhower and Alexander came to see him, to discuss details of the landing. Its aim was to lead to the capture of Rome,
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and an advance northward to the Pisa-Rimini line. On December 24 Churchill left his bed for the first time in two weeks, for a Christmas Eve conference with Alexander and several other Generals, Admirals and planners, about how to provide the landing-craft for Anzio in time for the target date of January 20. Even this, he telegraphed to the Chiefs of Staff shortly after midnight, meant a month's delay in sending some of the 'Overlord' landing-craft to Britain. Then, on Christmas Day, five Commanders-in-Chief, summoned by telegram, converged on Carthage to make the final plans for Anzio, the importance of which was stressed at the outset by Eisenhower, who still felt strongly, as he told the gath ering, 'that the right course was to press on in Italy, where the Germans were still full of fight'. Nothing was to be allowed to interfere with the May date for 'Overlord'. But the Anzio landing had now become the next major Allied operation of war, and Churchill's Christmas Day conference, which he attended in his dragon dressing-gown, set the seal on its importance, retrieving what could be retrieved of the Italian campaign. Admiral SirJohn Cunningham was confident that he could put the men ashore. A successful landing, all were agreed, would lead not only to the rapid capture of Rome, but to the destruction of a 'substantial part' of the German forces in Italy. 'We cannot afford to go forward leaving a vast unfinished business behind us,' Chur chill telegraphed to Roosevelt when the conference ended. 'If this oppor tunity is not grasped we must expect the ruin of the Mediterranean campaign of 1944.' Churchill entertained the five Commanders-in-Chief to Christmas lun cheon, his first meal out of bed since he had been taken ill. 'The doctors are quite unable to control him,' his Principal Private Secretary, John Martin, wrote home that day, 'and cigars etc have now returned. I was amazed to find him dictating their bulletin.' As well as dictating the doctors' bulletin, Churchill dictated a resume for the Chiefs of Staff, and for Roosevelt, of all the military decisions taken at the morning's confer ence. That night he had a long talk with Macmillan about the French National Committee. He was angered that de Gaulle had turned against several former senior Vichy officials who had agreed some time earlier to work with the Allies, and was unwilling even to see him. Macmillan urged him to do so. 'Well, perhaps you are right,' Churchill said. 'But I do not agree with you.' Then, Macmillan noted in his diary, 'He took my hand in his in a most fatherly way and said: "Come and see me again before I leave Africa, and we'll talk it over". He really is a remarkable man. Although he can be so tiresome and pigheaded, there is no one like him. His devotion to work and duty is quite extraordinary.'
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On the morning of December 27 Churchill flew from Carthage to Marra kech. Despite his doctors' worries about the danger of his flying above 10,000 feet in order to cross the mountains, and the need to use an oxygen mask for much of the flight, Air Commodore Kelly, the senior Air Force medical officer in North Africa, who especially accompanied Churchill, later recalled that 'the PM was in great form'. By late afternoon he was at the Villa Taylor, which was to be his home for the next eighteen days. Learning from Roosevelt on December 29 that the President approved the Anzio landing, Ohurchill telegraphed: 'The sun is shining today, but nothing did me the same good as your telegram showing how easily our minds work together on the grimly simple issues of this vast war.' Alexan der had told him that the initial landing would be made by one British and one American division. 'I am glad of this,' he told Roosevelt. 'It is fitting that we should share equally in suffering, risk and honour.' On December 31 Eisenhower and Montgomery reached Marrakech, to discuss the 'Overlord'· plans with Churchill. That day he told Clementine, 'I am not strong enough to paint.' For New Year's Eve, wroteJock Colville, who had returned to Churchill's Private Office after two years in the Royal Air Force, 'Punch was brewed, the PM made a little speech, the clerks, typists and some of the servants appeared, and we formed a circle to sing Auld Lang Syne.' On New Year's Day 1944 Churchill went into his wife's room more cheerful. 'I am so happy,' he said, 'I feel so much better.' That day he drove with Montgomery to a spot two hours away where they had a picnic lunch, then drove on into the mountains to a viewpoint which Churchill remem bered from his holiday in 1936. 'The General was in the highest spirits,' he later recalled. 'He leapt about the rocks like an antelope, and I felt a strong reassurance that all would be well.' On january 4 Churchill telegraphed to Stalin, whose troops had just driven the Germans back across the 1939 Russo-Polish frontier, congrat ulating him on this advance, and telling him that everything was now going 'full blast' for 'Overlord'. Montgomery, he added, 'is full of zeal to engage the enemy and of confidence in the result'. That day Churchill learned that there would be a shortage of landing-craft at Anzio once the actual landing had been effected, as all but a third were to be withdrawn for 'Overlord' before the inevitable counter-attack could be repulsed. He at once proposed flying from Marrakech to Malta, to discuss the question with Alexander. Instead, Alexander persuaded him to allow an American and a British senior officer, General Bedell-Smith and General Gale, both of whom knew all the details, to come and see him at Marrakech. They were able to assure him that the withdrawals would be phased in such a way as to avoid danger.
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The Anzio commanders and their planning staffs flew to Marrakech on January 7 for a fmal two-day discussion. 'Everyone is in good heart,' Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt when the meetings were over, 'and the resources seem sufficient. Every aspect was thrashed out in full detail by sub-committees in the interval between the two conferences.' Each morning Churchill worked; then, if the weather was good, he went for a lunchtime picnic. On January 12 de Gaulle was his guest; Churchill urged him to try to avoid such actions against former Vichy supporters as would create 'so wide a schism in France that the resultant friction in any territory that might be liberated would hamper our military operations and therefore be a matter of concern to us.' At one moment, when de Gaulle was being obstinate, Churchill said to him: 'Look here! I am the leader of a strong, unbeaten nation. Yet every morning when I wake my first thought is how can I please President Roosevelt, and my second thought is how can I conciliate Marshal Stalin. Your situation is very different. Why then should your first waking thought be how you can snap your fingers at the British and Americans?' Churchill's friend Louis Spears had earlier remarked that the hardest cross Britain had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine; but all went well enough that day for de Gaulle to invite Churchill to review the French troops of the Marrakech garrison, and on the morning of January 13 the two men stood side by side on the saluting-base. After the parade Churchill drove off for another of his picnics. 'Winston was in a heavenly mood,' one of those present wrote, 'very funny and very happy.' On the following day Churchill left Marrakech by air for Gibraltar, where he went on board the battleship King George V. During the voyage he spent more than an hour in the Gunroom answering questions from the Midshipmen, one of whom wrote to his parents: 'He seemed amaz ingly well & has terrific personality which seems to radiate from him.' To Colville, who like himself had been at Harrow, Churchill confided that day that the lines in one of the school songs, 'God give us bases to guard and beleaguer', had always inspired him, despite the fact that he 'detested football'. Shortly before midnight the battleship reached Plymouth. The King had sent his own train to bring the Prime Minister to London. 'Unlike the previous homecomings,' recalled Churchill's PrivateSecretary,John Peck, 'there were no political, strategic or diplomatic dramas- the atmosphere was one of immense relief that the PM was back alive and well and truly in control of events.' There was to be no relaxation, however, in Churchill's schedule; reaching London on the morning of January 18 he was in the House of Commons two hours later for Prime Minister's Questions, then, at noon, in his room at the Commons, gave the War Cabinet an account
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of his travels, leaving his room, Colville noted, 'ilt 1.28, to lunch with the King at 1.30'. Hoping for a rapid success at Anzio, on January 19 Churchill suggested to the Chiefs of Staff two follow-up operations. One was a 2,000-strong commando force for the Dalmatian Coast, 'to go round and clean up every single island the Germans have occupied, killing or capturing their garrisons'. The other was an advance.into northern Italy, forcing the Germans to withdraw behind the Alps, so that it would then be 'open to us to turn left into France, or to pursue the Germans towards Vienna, or to turn right towards the Balkans'. Such plans depended upon a rapid success at Anzio, where the landings began in the early hours of January 22. When Alexander reported that immediately after the landing he had sent out 'strong-hitting, mobile patrols' to make contact with the Germans, Churchill replied:'Am very glad you are pegging out claims rather thm digging in beach-heads.' But within four days it became clear that the Germans were determined, and able, to trap the landing forces at the beach-head, and that there would be no quick breakthrough, and no early link-up with the mass of the Allied armies to the south. 'The Germans are fighting magnificently,' Churchill told a friend during an evening at the Other Club on January 27. 'Never imagine they are crashing. Their staff work is brilliantly flexible. They improvise units out of unrested remnants and those units fight just as well as the fresh ones.' By January 28 it was clear that Anzio had failed in its purpose. 'The situation as it now stands,' Churchill telegraphed to Sir John Cunningham, 'bears-little relation to the lightning thrust envisaged at Marrakech', and to the Chiefs of Staff he confided on January 29: 'We hoped to land a wild cat that would tear the bowels out of the Boche. Instead we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.' Two days later, as the two senior American generals involved, Mark Clark and John Lucas, consoli dated the bridgehead, Churchill told the War Cabinet that Anzio had now become 'an American operation, with no punch in it'. Nor did he have any means of influencing the American Joint Chiefs, who on February 3 decided to transfer fighter aircraft from the Mediterranean to China, on the assumption that the Allied role in Italy would henceforth be purely defensive. Churchill was distressed by this; the assumption of the defensive in Italy 'is I think disastrous', he told the Chiefs of Staff on February 3. 'I never imagined that Alexander would not be free to push on to the north and break into the Po Valley.' To bring the armies in Italy to a standstill, he warned, 'would be most short-sighted and would simply enable the enemy to transfer divisions rapidly from North Italy to oppose the "Overlord" landing'.
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To help the cross-Channel landing, the largest amphibious enterprise of all time, Churchill now presided over an 'Overlord' Committee of the War Cabinet, whose task was to ensure that nothing was neglected or delayed. His 'fiery energy and undisputed authority dominated the pro ceedings,' Ismay later recalled.'The seemingly slothful or obstructive were tongue-lashed; competing differences were reconciled; priorities were settled; difficulties which at first appeared insuperable were overcome; and decisions were translated into immediate action.' British weapons were to be dropped in Poland; as the Red Army drew ever nearer it was in Britain's interest, Churchill told the Defence Committee on February 3, that Poland should be 'strong and well-supported. Were she weak and overrun by the advancing Soviet armies, the result might hold great dangers in the future for the English-speaking peoples.' Stalin was a master of deception; on February 5 he assured Churchill that 'of course Poland would be free and independent and he would not attempt to influence the kind of Government they cared to set up after the war'. On the following day Churchill urged the Polish Government in London to accept these assurances, and to cede Eastern Poland to Russia in return for German territory in East Prussia, Silesia and on the Baltic coast of Pomerania. Ten days later, at a meeting on February 16, he told the Polish Government leaders, in the words of the transcript of the discussion: 'The Poles must rejoice at the advance of the Russian armies, dangerous though this might be to them, since it was their only hope of liberation from the Germans. There was no reason to suppose that Russia would repeat the German desire to dominate all Europe. After the war Great Britain and the United States of America would maintain strong forces, and there were good hopes of the world settling down into a peace of thirty or forty years which might then prove much more lasting.' But if Poland rejected the proposed borders and took up a position against the Russians, he 'doubted whether the United States would be ready to go on fighting in Europe for several years to liberate Warsaw. It was no use expecting us to do more than we could.' Churchill argued in vain; the Polish Government in London was only prepared to consider ceding territory to Russia if it could have an assur ance that an all-Party Government would be established in Poland as soon as she was liberated. Stalin would give no such assurance. He already had his own Polish nominees for an all-Communist Government waiting in the wings, ready to be installed in the first town to be liberated. On February 22 Churchill gave the Commons a survey of the war. In answer to criticisms of the bombing of German cities, he explained that the Anglo-American bombingof Germany was 'our chief offensive effort at the
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present time'. Since the war began, 38,300 British pilots and aircrew had been killed and more than ten thousand aircraft lost. But in the previous forty-eight hours, nine thousand tons of bombs had been dropped on Germany. 'The air power was the weapon which both marauding States selected as their main tool of conquest,' Churchill told the House. 'This was the sphere in which they were to triumph. This was the method by which the nations were to be subjugated to their rule. I shall not moralise further than to say that there is a strange, stern justice in the long swing of events.' Air power, as well as Russia's increasingly clear determination to domi nate Eastern Europe despite Stalin's recent promises, was on Churchill's mind at Chequers on March 4, when he told his guests that he did not have long w live, but that he had a political testament for after the war, 'Far more important than India or the Colonies or solvency is the Air. We live in a world of wolves-and bears.' The latest evidence of Stalin's attitude to an indepen dent Poland, Churchill told the War Cabinet two days later, suggested 'he was unlikely to be influenced by argument'. On March 10 Churchill warned Stalin that Russian treatment of Poland 'will prove to be a touchstone and make all sorts of far more important things far more difficult'. And in a covering message to the British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, he commented, 'Appeasement has had a good run.' It was now less than three months before the cross-Channel landings. As well as presiding over the weekly 'Overlord' Committee of the War Cabi net, Churchill had regular talks with Eisenhower and his Chief of Staff, General Bedell Smith, with whom he examined every aspect of the land ings, among them the artificial harbours, the airborne assault, the naval bombardment, and the air support. 'I am satisfied that everything is going on well,' he telegraphed to Marshall on March 11. By a diligent reading of enemy top-secret cypher messages and other Intelligence reports, British staffs had built up a comprehensive picture of the location and size of every German unit in northern France. By a successful British plan of deception, devised by Colonel John Bevan and his staff at the Central War Rooms, the Germans were led to believe that the main assault would come somewhere between Dieppe and Calais. It was once more the Germans' own top-secret messages that, painstakingly decrypted, revealed that they had fallen for the deception. The true landing-point, the Normandy coast, was kept secret from them. So too was the one condition for the landing laid down by the Chiefs of Staff: if, at the date chosen for the assault, the Germans had twenty mobile divisions in France capable of being sent to reinforce their troops at the beach-head, the whole operation would be called off.
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To decide what to do if there were indeed twenty German mobile divisions in France on the date chosen, Churchill proposed flying to Bermuda for a discussion with Roosevelt. But while Lord Moran protested in vain that it was 'all wrong' that the Prime Minister should go, Roosevelt's . doctors were successful in persuading the President, who was suffering from a heavy cold, not to risk the journey. Churchill was relieved. 'The PM this morning confessed he was tired,' Cadogan wrote in his diary on March 21. 'He is almost done in.' In Italy, the Anzio beach-head was still encircled by the Germans; the main Allied forces, then fifty miles to the east, were unable to reach them because of a tenacious German defence at Monte Cassino. There was now no chance of the capture of Rome that spring, or of any exploitation farther north. The only remaining point of pressure on Germany that year, in the west, would be Normandy. On March 23 Churchill went with Eisenhower on a two-day inspection of the American troops in Britain who would be taking part in the Nor mandy landings. Returning to Chequers, he worked for two days on his first broadcast for exactly a year. 'The PM seemed very tired but sweet tempered and solicitous,' Marian Holmes noted in her diary at the end of the first day. In his broadcast, made from Chequers on the evening of March 26, Churchill, who knew how dose Germany now was to developing a rocket bomb, spoke of possible new 'forms of attack' from Germany. But, he declared, 'Britain can take it. She has never flinched or failed. And when the signal is given, the whole circle of avenging nations will hurl themselves upon the foe and batter the life out of the cruellest tyranny which has ever sought to bar the progress of mankind.' Many of those who listened to Churchill's broadcast could sense that he was tired. 'People seem to think that Winston's broadcast last night was that of a worn and petulant old man,' Harold Nicolson noted in his diary. Worn he certainly was; two days later Brooke noted in his diary after a Staff Conference: 'We found him in desperately tired mood. I am afraid that he is losing ground rapidly. He seems quite incapable of concentrating for a few minutes on end, and keeps wandering continuously. He kept yawning and said he was feeling desperately tired.' Exhaustion, too, emerged; on March 29, after the Government had been defeated on a clause in the Education Bill, as a result of a Conservative backbench revolt in favour of equal pay for men and women teachers, Churchill insisted on a vote of confidence. 'He looked tired, wounded and barely audible,' noted Henry Channon. In the smoking-room, Nicolson told him that it had been excessive to insist the rebels swallow their vote. Could not some other method be devised to humble them? 'No. Not at all,' Churchill replied. 'I am not going to tumble round my cage like a wounded canary. You
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knocked me off my perch. You have now got to put me back on my perch. Otherwise I won't sing.' The vote was taken on March 31. 'The Governm--nt got its majority of over 400,' Colville noted in his diary, 'and the PM was radiant. I thought it was cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.' Churchill was already on the move again, travelling by train overnight to Yorkshire, for a visit to the British troops training for theNormandy landings. One of the demonstra tions he was shown was a lorry swimming through water. On April 7, Good Friday, Churchill spoke to all the senior British and American officers involved in the Normandy plan. Wrote Brooke, 'He was looking old and lacking a great deal of his usual vitality.' Commented the Director of Military Operations at the War Office, General Kennedy: 'Winston spoke without vigour. He did not look up much while he spoke. There was the usual wonderful flow of phrases, but no fire in the delivery. I thought he was going to burst into tears as he stepped down to sit beside Eisenhower and Monty and the Chiefs of Staff while the officers filed out of the room. But I afterwards heard that members of the audience who saw him on that day for the first time were tremendously impressed and inspired.' Churchill was physically exhausted. 'Struck by how very tired and worn out the PM looks now,' Colville noted in his diary on Aprill2. Churchill was greatly disappointed that week to learn from Alexander, who had flown back to London, that the Anzio beach-head, although secure, could still not be linked up with the main army in Italy, nor could a new attempt to do so be started for another month. Nevertheless, he was able to ensure that no further troops would be withdrawn from Italy. 'Although the fighting at the bridge-head and on the Cassino front has brought many disappointments,' Churchill told General Marshall on Aprill2, 'you will I trust recognise that at least eight extra German divisions have been brought into Italy down to the south of Rome and heavily mauled there'. The Enigma decrypts, Churchill pointed out, showed that Hitler had been saying 'that his defeats in South Russia are due to the treacherous Badoglio collapse of Italy which has involved thirty-five divisions'. 'At any rate,' Churchill added, 'I believe that our action in Italy has played a large part in rendering possible the immensely important ad vances made in South Russia, which as a further benefit are convulsing the Satellites'. Churchill now addressed the question of what the Allied object in Italy should be, telling Marshall, in support of a renewed British plea for landing-craft to be transferred at once from the Pacific to the Medi terranean: 'At the moment my own position is as follows. We should above all defeat the German army south of Rome and join our own armies. Nothing should be grudged for this. We cannot tell how either the Allied
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or enemy armies will emerge from the battle until the battle has been fought. It may be that the enemy will be thrown into disorder, and that great opportunities of exploitation may be open. Or we may be checked, and the enemy may continue to hold his positions south of Rome against us with his existing forces. On the other hand,he may seek to withdraw some of his divisions to the main battle in France. It seems to me we must have plans and preparations to take advantage of the above possibilities.' If the advance to Rome were successful, Churchill told Marshall, 'I would not now rule out either a vigorous pursuit northward of the beaten enemy nor an amphibious cat's-claw higher up to detain him or cut him off.' Plans and preparations ought to be contrived 'to render possible' either an amphibious landing north of Rome or the South of France landing 'in one form or another'. If thirty-four German divisions could be keptin the western Mediterranean theatre, he explained, 'the forces there will have made an immense contribution to "Overlord"'. Churchill then told Marshall that he had 'hardened very much upon "Overlord"', and was 'further fortified by the evident confidence of Eisenhower, Brooke and Montgomery'. As the plans for the cross-Channel attack proceded, Churchill was worried about the scale of French civilian casualties likely to be caused by the planned bombing of railway lines and railjunctions in northern France prior to the attack. Such casualties were estimated at between twenty and forty thousand. 'Considering that they are our friends,' Churchill wrote to Eisenhower, 'this might be held to be an act of very great severity, bringing much hatred on the Allied Air Forces.' Eisenhower agreed to reduce the scale of the bombing, but even so it was severe, and at least five thousand French civilians were killed. Churchill worked both to ensure the success of the Normandy landings, and to mitigate the severity of the bombing of northern France. Those who worked closest with him were aware of the great strains upon him. 'PM, I fear, is breaking down,' Cadogan noted in his diary after a War Cabinet on April 19. 'He rambles without a pause and we really got nowhere.' Cadogan added: 'I am really fussed about the PM. He is not the man he was twelve months ago, and I really don't know if he can carry on.' But carry on he did, and once again with renewed energy. In a debate on April21, on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in which he looked forward to India being a self-governing Dominion after the war, his speech showed 'more vigour' than oflate, Colville noted. The month of May opened with a British protest to Russia, whose forces had entered Roumania and begun the widespread arrest of anti-Commu nist as well as Fascist leaders. The Russians at once complained about
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British interference, leading Churchill to tell Eden on May 2, 'Never forget that Bolsheviks are crocodiles.' And when further unjustified complaints arrived from Moscow a week later about alleged British interference in Roumania, Churchill told the War Cabinet that these complaints 'led him to despair of the possibility of maintaining good relations with Russia'. In Greece also he feared that a showdown was approaching because of 'Communist intrigues'. 'We ought to watch this movement carefully,' he warned Eden on May 4. 'After all, we lost 40,000 men in Greece and you were very keen on that effort at that time. I do not think we should yield to the Russians any more in Greece.' Recurring weariness was now a regular feature of Churchill's day. 'He looked very old and tired' was Brooke's comment on May 7. Churchill told Brooke that evening, Brooke noted in his diary, that he could still sleep well, eat well, 'and especially drink well, but that he no longer jumped out of bed the way he used to, and felt as if he would be quite content to spend the whole day in bed'. Brooke added, 'I have never yet heard him admit that he was beginning to fail.' Churchill was sixty-nine. On May 10 he reached the fourth anniversary of his Premiership; more than two hundred weeks of responsibility and worry. Above all was the frightening spectre of the Normandy landings. To an American visitor, John J. McCloy, the Under Secretary for War, Churchill confided, 'If you think I'm dragging my feet, it is not because I can't take casualties, it is because I am afraid of what those casualties will be.' He then told McCloy of the large number of his contemporaries who had been killed in what he called the 'hecatombs' of the First World War. He himself was 'a sort of "sport" in nature's sense as most of his generation lay dead at Passchendaele and the Somme. An entire British generation of potential leaders had been cut off and Britain could not afford the loss of another generation.' On May 12 Churchill left London for three days of inspection of the assembling troops. To Eisenhower, who came with him for part of the journey, he had already stressed the need for extra vehicles to cater for the Free French Division which had been added to the landing force. In his appeal, Churchill pointed out that at the Anzio beach-head 125,000 men and 23,000 vehicles 'only got twelve miles' before being brought to a halt by the Germans. Churchill's vigilance and drive were a crucial com ponent of the war-making capacity of Britain. 'Whatever may be the PM's shortcomings,' Colville noted on May 13, 'there is no doubt that he does provide guidance and purpose for the Chiefs of Staff and the Foreign Office on matters which, without him, would often be lost in the maze of inter-departmentalism, or frittered away by caution and compromise. Moreover, he has two qualities, imagination and resolution, which are
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conspicuously lacking among other Ministers and the Chiefs of Staff.' At the final briefing for senior officers on May 15, General Kennedy noted in his diary that Churchill spoke 'in a robust and even humorous style, and concluded with a moving expression of his hopes and good wishes. He looked much better than at the last conference, and spoke with great vigour, urging offensive leadership, and stressing the ardour for battle which he believed the men felt.' On May 20 Churchill received a clear indication that the Germans would not have the additional twenty divisions in Western Europe which would have meant that the Normandy landings would have to be called off. Helped by British military supplies parachuted to them, Tito's partisans were holding down twenty-five German divisions in Yugoslavia, where Randolph was then serving as one of the British liaison officers with Tito. A further twenty-three German divisions were being engaged in Italy, where Alexander had renewed the offensive on May 14 and finally taken Cassino. Further German divisions were waiting on the Channel Coast near Boulogne for what was believed by the Germans, thanks to successful deception, to be the true target of the cross-Channel assault. The size and location of all these divisions were known through the German top-secret messages being decrypted every day at Bletchley, through agents, and through the ever-vigilant eyes of Air Force reconnaissance aircraft. Churchill's daughter Sarah was then serving with the Photographic Reconnaissance Interpretation Unit at Medmenham, west of London. When he spoke in the Commons on May 24, Churchill again seemed tired. 'His charm and humour were unabated,' Harold Nicolson wrote to his sons, 'but the voice was not thunderous and three times Members called out to him to "Speak up!".' Five days later, in reply to a request to have his portrait painted, he replied with a wry humour, 'I am afraid I can make no promise in wartime, and will hardly be worth painting unless the war stops soon.' During May 24 Churchill was told of a shortage of naval pumping equipment needed to raise the concrete caissons of the Mulberry harbour in order to tow them across the Channel. This crucial element in the assault had to be solved at once. It was Churchill who suggested calling upon the pumping resources of the London Fire Brigade. On the last weekend before the Normandy landings, Churchill was at Chequers. There, he learned that Randolph had just escaped, with Tito, from a German parachute attempt to capture the Partisan headquarters. On May 28 Churchill wrote to Randolph: 'We have a lovely day at where we live from time to time, and all is fair with the first glory of summer. The war is very fierce and terrible, but in these sunlit lawns and buttercup meadows it is hard to conjure up its horrors.' On the following day, reading
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of the high French civilian deaths as the Allied bombing of French railway junctions intensified, Churchill wrote to the air commander, disagreeing that the 'best targets' had been chosen. 'You are piling up an awful load of hatred,' he wrote. Alexander now reported that the troops at Anzio had joined with the main army in Italy; all was now ready for the advance to Rome. 'How lucky it was,' Churchill telegraphed to him on May 31, 'that we stood up to our United States Chief of Staff friends and refused to deny you the full exploitation of this battle!' As Alexander prepared for the battle of Rome, Admiral Ramsay was put in command of all naval forces in the Channel. On the following day,June 2, Churchill left London by train to visit troop assembly points in southern England. On June 3 he watched troops at Southampton embarking on their landing-craft; on the following day he visited more troops as they embarked. After he returned to the train, Marian Holmes noted in her diary, 'he looked anxious, but he was amiable'. On the evening of June 4 Churchill returned to London, to No.IO Annexe. 'Went into PM at 10.30 pm and didn't emerge until 3.45 am,' Marian Holmes wrote in her diary. 'He drives himself too hard and he nearly fell asleep over the papers.' During the night's work Churchill went along the corridor to his Map Room. While he sat there in his chair, looking up at the maps, the news was brought in that Rome had been captured. It had been hoped to launch the Normandy landings on June 5, but bad weather had forced a postponement of one day. During June 5 it became clear from decrypted German top-secret messages that, because of this bad weather, the Germans no longer expected a cross-Channel attack during the next four or five days. Rommel had even gone on leave that day to Germany. The Allied knowledge that this was the German calculation was a factor in Eisenhower's decision to cross on the following day, despite a poor weather forecast. Churchill had no visitors on the morning of June 5. As he dictated to his secretaries, he was brought a note from Clementine, who wrote, 'I feel so much for you at this agonising moment- so full of suspense, which prevents one from rejoicing over Rome!' 'Tonight we go,' Churchill tele graphed to Stalin on the afternoon of June 5. 'We are using 5,000 ships, and have available 11,000 aircraft.' Churchill and Clementine dined alone on the night of June 5. Then he went to the Map Room for a last look at the Allied and German disposi tions, the latter revealed largely by Enigma decrypts. Before going to bed, Clementine joined him in the Map Room. His concerns were with those who in a few hours' time would be approaching the beaches of German-
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occupied France, of Hitler's much-vaunted Fortress Europe. 'Do you realise,' he told her, 'that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand men may have been killed?'
33 Normandy and Beyond
As Churchill slept in the early hours of 6June 1944, the first glider-borne troops landed in Normandy. When he woke up, he was told that these landings had been un.opposed. He spent most of the morning in his Map Room, the landings being plotted for him as the news came in. At midday he went to the Commons, where he told a hushed and expectant House, 'This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever taken place.' He returned to the House that evening, to say that all was proceeding 'in a thoroughly satisfactory manner'. By the following morning the last of the German opposition on the beaches had been overcome; in the first twenty-four hours' fighting, three thousand troops had been killed. 'We had expected to lose 10,000 men,' Churchill tele graphed that day to Stalin. The public was exhilarated by the initial successes, so much so that when Churchill spoke in the Commons on june 8 he felt the need to advise MPs to give 'strong warnings against over-optimism' when they spoke in their constituencies, and to combat the idea 'that these things are going to be settled with a run'. Great dangers lay behind, but 'eno_rmous exertions lie before us'. On June 9 Churchill learned of the extent of those exertions, when he was told that although the British and American forces had linked up their beach-heads, the Americans were already twenty-four hours behind schedule, and that heavy German opposition had been encoun tered 'along the whole British front'. Indeed the British line had remained virtually static for twenty-four hours, and Caen, the vital objective for that day, was as yet beyond their grasp. Worst of all, insufficient land had been liberated to set up air-strips, with the result that all air support had to come from bases in England. This was a blow, leading Churchill to wonder whether the Allies might not have to be content for some time to come with securing the Cherbourg and Brest Peninsulas, and no more; 'the smaller and larger lunette', he called them.
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Despite a tenacious German defence, nearly 400,000 men were ashore by midday on June 10. 'One united heave,' Churchill telegraphed that day to Tito, 'and we may be freed from the agonies of war, and the menace of tyranny.' In Italy, Alexander was driving northwards the remains of twenty-three German divisions. In Russia, Stalin had launched the first phase of his promised summer offensive. On the morning of June 12, Churchill's train took him to Dover, where he crossed the Channel by destroyer, then transferred to the barge of the Admiral commanding the British naval forces at the beach-head, Admiral Vian of Cossack fame. On board the barge, he sang a song he had learned during his schooldays at Harrow. It was about the Spanish Armada and in it were the lines,
But snug in her hive, the Queen was alive, And Buzz was the word in the Island. The sailors listened, but to Churchill's disappointment, he told the boys of Harrow seven years later, 'not one of them knew the words'. From the barge, he clambered on to an American amphibious army truck which ran him up the beach at Courseulles. Montgomery met him at the beach and drove him by jeep to his headquarters chateau at Cruelly, five miles inland and about three miles from the front. The chateau had been heavily bombed the night before. 'I told him,' Churchill later wrote, 'he was taking too much of a risk if he made a habit of such proceedings. Anything can be done once or for a short time, but custom, repetition, prolongation, is always to be avoided when possible in war.' Returning to Courseulles, Churchill saw a German air raid on the harbour. Then here-embarked in Vian's barge and sailed along the shore, watching landing-craft unloading lorries, tanks and gP'l.S. West of Hamel he saw an artificial harbour being prepared, with its c....,sons, wave-dampeners and floating piers. Close by was a monitor with }4-inch guns, firing inland. 'Winston said he had never been on one of His Majesty's ships engaging the nemy and insisted on going aboard,' Brooke, who was with him, noted in his diary. 'Luckily we could not climb up owing to seaweed on the bilges, as it would have been a very noisy entertainment had we succeeded. Then we returned to our destroyer and went right back to the east end of the beach where several ships were bombarding the Germans.' As the destroyer was about to turn, Churchill said to Vian, 'Since we are so near, why shouldn't we have a plug at them ourselves before we go home?' 'Certainly,' Vian replied, and within a few moments all his guns were firing on the coast. 'We were of course well within the range of their artillery,' Churchill later wrote, 'and the moment we had fired Vian made
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the destroyer turn about and depart at the highest speed. We were soon out of danger and passed through the cruiser and battleship lines. This is the only time I have ever been on board a naval vessel when she fired "in anger"- if it can so be called. I admired the Admiral's sporting spirit.' On the three-hour sea voyage back to Portsmouth, Churchill slept. When he returned to London he was told that 13,000 German soldiers had already been taken prisoner. That evening, however, while Churchill was dining with Clementine and Mary, Captain Pim came in to report that the first German flying bombs were on their way. During the night twenty seven were despatched across the Channel. Four reached London, and two people were killed.Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff decided to divert aircraft needed for Normandy to bomb the launching-sites, of which sixty-seven had been identified byJune 14, but bad weather over the Calais area impeded the counter-attacks. On the following night, fifty flying bombs exploded in the London area. When one of Churchill's Private Secretaries, Christopher Dodds, left the Annexe with John Peck to see if anything was visible, 'we met the PM who had already been out to see for himself. It was an episode, Dodds later recalled, 'exemplifying the PM's energy and (hair-raising!) disregard for personal danger'. Churchill's comment, in a telegram to Stalin, was, 'We had a noisy night.' On June 18, sixty-three service personnel and fifty-eight civilians were killed when a flying bomb fell on the Guards Chapel during a church service. That night, at a Staff Conference, and on the following night at a specially convened War Cabinet Committee, Churchill and his advisers discussed the measures needed to prevent public panic.'He was at his best,' the First Sea Lord, Admiral Cunningham, noted in his diary, 'and said the matter had to be put robustly to the populace, that their tribulations were part of the battle in France, and that they should be very glad to share in the soldiers' dangers.' It was agreed that when the flying bombs came, as they did at every hour of the day and night, the air-raid sirens should be sounded as little as possible. 'The PM said one must have sleep,' Cunning ham noted, 'and you either woke well-rested, or in a better land!' More than half a million Allied soldiers were ashore in Normandy. But still the Germans held Caen. In London, 526 civilians had been killed by the end of the first week of the flying-bomb attacks. Almost permanent conferences were being held in Churchill's Map Room to determine the best means of countering the attacks; of 700 flying bombs sent over in the first week, two hundred had been shot down by anti-aircraft guns and fighters. To reduce the danger of one method of defence impeding the other, Churchill proposed that the fighters should have a 'free run' by day and the anti-aircraftt guns by night. The new weapon was an ever-present danger; while dictailing a telegram to Roosevelt onJune 20, about post-war
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Anglo-American oil policy, Churchill broke off his line of argument to tell the President, 'At this moment a flying bomb is approaching this dwelling.' After continuing his dictation a few moments longer he added, 'Bomb has fallen some way off.' An acrimonious dispute now arose between the British and Americans. It had its origins in the Italian war zone. Four French and three American divisions were about to be taken away from Alexander's army in Italy for the landing in the South of France, planned for August 15. On June 15 the Joint Planning Committee in London, on the basis of the German Army's own top-secret signals, had advised the British Chiefs of Staff that the South of France landing would be a less effective blow to the German forces than renewing the advance in Italy at full strength, and launching an amphibious landing at the head of the Adriatic, to be followed by an advance into northern Yugoslavia. At a Staff Conference on June 22 Churchill supported this recommendation, telling the Chiefs of Staff that, on the basis of the top-secret information available of Germany's own plans, an amphibious landing 'at the head of the Adriatic in the Trieste area' would be more effective than a South of France landing in drawing German divisions away from Normandy. It was clear from the Enigma decrypts that the Germans would not defend the South of France with any real zeal, but they would defend the passes leading from Italy to Austria with tenacity, sending down more and more forces to prevent an Allied breakthrough from the south. Alexander was eager to continue his attack northward through Italy. General Maitland Wilson, commanding the British Forces in the Middle East, was keen to carry out an amphibious landing at the head of the Adriatic, and strike eastward, first to Zagreb, then towards Austria and the Danube. Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff pressed Roosevelt and the American Chiefs for an amphibious landing at the head of the Adri atic. OnJune 28 their view seemed to be reinforced by a top-secret German naval signal, sent early that day and decrypted at Bletchley the same morning: a directive from Hitler himself which made it clear that he intended to hold the Apennines at all cost. 'And now we have the most marvellous information,' Brooke noted in his diary, 'indicating clearly the importance Hitler attaches to northern Italy.' It would be a 'grave strategic error', Brooke, Portal and Cunningham telegraphed to the American Chiefs of Staff later that day, 'not to take advantage of destroying the German forces at present in Italy and thus drawing further reserves on to this front'. That day Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt to remind him of'how you spoke to me at Teheran about !stria'. He also sent Roosevelt a copy of the
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decrypted German naval signal. But on the following day Roosevelt re jected the Adriatic plan, telling Churchill that for 'purely political considerations' in the United States he would never survive 'even a slight setback' in Normandy if it became known 'that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans'. Churchill hastened to point out that the new plan had nothing to do with the Balkans. At the Teheran Conference 'you emphasised to me the possibilities of a move eastward when Italy was conquered, and specifically mentioned !stria. No one involved in these discussions has ever thought of moving armies into the Balkans; but !stria and Trieste in Italy are strategic and political positions, which you saw yourself very clearly might exercise profound and widespread reactions, especially now after the Russian advances.' Roosevelt proposed putting the dispute to Stalin. Churchill was against this, pointing out that on a 'long-term political view' Stalin might well prefer the British and Americans to do their fighting in France 'and that East, Middle and southern Europe should fall naturally into his control.' Churchill decided to go to see Roosevelt to put the Adriatic plan to him in person. On June 30 he gave orders for both his flying boat and his Lancaster bomber to be made ready for a flight across the Atlantic. But Roosevelt had made up his mind; the South of France landing would go ahead, and Alexander's army in Italy must therefore be reduced in strength. 'What can I do Mr President,' Churchill telegraphed on July 1, 'when your Chiefs of Staff insist on casting aside our Italian offensive campaign, with all its dazzling possibilities, relieving Hitler of all his anxieties in the Po basin (vide Boniface), and when we are to see the integral life of this campaign drained off into the Rhone Valley in the belief that it will in several months carry effective help to Eisenhower so far away in the north?' Churchill added, 'I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement.' Roosevelt would not change his mind. Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff, and their two senior military commanders in the Mediterranean, were forced to abandon their preferred strategy. Alexander would not be allowed to exploit a known German weakness, and a classic opportunity. It was a low ebb in the Anglo-American wartime relationship. By June 28 the number of Allied soldiers killed since the Normandy landings had reached 7,704, of whom 4,868 were American, 2,443British and 393 Canadian. In-London the flying bombs had exacted a heavy toll; in the first sixteen days' bombardment 1,935 civilians had been killed. On June 30 Churchill and his wife spent the day visiting anti-aircraft units active in the battle against the flying bomb. Elizabeth Layton noted, 'It
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really was rather fun, Master and Mistress sitting amid the corn, cameras snapping on every side, rather anxious Generals rushing about.' 'Is there anything on the cards?' asked Churchill, but no bombs came over. On the following day he learned that_ Soviet forces, advancing along. the whole Eastern Front, had in a single battle near Bobruisk killed 16,000 German soldiers and taken 18,000 prisoners. 'This is the moment,' he telegraphed to Stalin, 'to tell you how immensely we are all here impressed with the magnificent advances of the Russian Armies which seem, as they grow in momentum, to be pulverising the German Armies which stand between you and Warsaw, and afterwards Berlin.' Churchill added that in Normandy more than three-quarters of a million troops were now ashore, and 50,000 Germans had been taken prisoner. 'The enemy is bleeding on every front at once, and I agree with you that this must go on to the end.' On July 6 the flying-bomb death toll reached 2,752. It was a weapon, Churchill told the Commons that day, 'literally and essentially indiscrimi nate in its nature, purpose and effect'. That night, because of the danger of flying bombs, the Staff Conference was held in the underground Central War Rooms. 'There is no doubt the PM was in no state to discuss anything,' Andrew Cunningham wrote in his diary, and he added, 'Very tired and too much alcohol.' Eden, who was also present, called it a 'deplorable evening'. When Churchill began to criticise Montgomery, noting that even Eisenhower had called him 'over-cautious', Brooke lost his temper at Churchill's criticism. When the meeting was over Churchill returned above ground to the Annexe, for his nightly dictation. 'PM in mellow mood and quite chatty for him,' noted Marian Holmes. 'Loads of work and got to bed finally at 3.40 am.' In search for some possible means of retaliation that might force the Germans to call off the flying-bomb attacks, Churchill dictated a minute that night to the Chiefs of Staff about the possible use of gas. 'I should be prepared to do anything,' he wrote, 'that might hit the Germans in a murderous place. I may certainly have to ask you to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would be requiring constant medical attention. We could stop all work at the flying bomb starting points.' Churchill had in mind mustard gas 'from which nearly everyone recovers'. He would use it only if 'it was life or death for us' or if it would 'shorten the war by a year'. To this end it might even be used on the Normandy beach-head. 'It is absurd to consider morality on this topic,' he wrote, 'when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the
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bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing, as she does between long and short skirts for women.' It would be several weeks or even months, Churchill added, 'before I shall ask you to drench Germany with poison gas'. In the meantime he wanted the matter studied, he wrote, 'in cold blood by sensible people, and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists which one runs across, now here, now there'. The enquiries were made. It emerged that the Air Staff had already made plans for one-fifth ofBritain's bomber effort to be employed on dropping gas, if such a form of warfare were decided on. But the military experts to whom Churchill remitted the question doubted whether gas, of the essentially non-lethal kind envisaged by Churchill, could have a decisive effect, and no gas raids were made. 'Clearly,' he commented, 'I cannot make headway against the parsons and the warriors at the same time.' News had just reached London of the mass murder in specially-designed gas chambers of more than two and a half millionJews at Auschwitz, which had hitherto been identified only as a slave-labour camp. In early July it became clear that more than half a million Hungarian Jews were in the process of being deported to their deaths there. When the Zionist leader Dr Chaim Weizmann appealed to Eden for the bombing of the railway lines to the camp, Eden showed his appeal to Churchill, who minuted that same day, July 7, 'Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary.' Weizmann also asked for the strongest possible public protest. 'I am entirely in accord with the biggest outcry possible,' was Churchill's immediate response. The outcry was made at once, in the form of considerable press coverage of the killings, and radio broadcasts from London to the Hungarian railway workers, warning them that they would be considered war crimi nals if they continued to participate in the deportations. Within forty-eight hours the Hungarian Government forced the German authorities in Hungary to end the deportations. More than a hundred thousand Jews had been saved. Before news of the halt to the Hungarian deportations was known, Churchill rejected a Gestapo offer to 'negotiate' the release of a million Hungarian Jews in return for trucks, food and money. The offer was a ruse by the Gestapo, intended to give theJews of Hungary a false hope of rescue, at the very moment when more than 400,000 of them were being deported to their deaths; it was 'a naked piece of blackmail on threats of murder', Churchill told Eden on July 11. As for the murder of Jews by the Nazis, he added: 'There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and
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most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, includ ing the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved.' On July 10 Allied forces entered Caen; that day Brooke found Churchill 'in good and affable mood'. But there was distressing news later that day from the Home Front: ten thousand houses had already been destroyed in one month of flying-bomb attacks, Churchill told Stalin, 'as compared with 63,000 during the whole of the 1940/41 blitz'. He was quite prepared, he told the flying-bomb committee of the War Cabinet that evening, to 'threaten the heaviest possible scale of gas attack on Germany if the indiscriminate attack on London was not stopped'. But he was not con vinced that the 'present scale' of the attack on London justified such a serious step'. On July 18 Churchill learned from his Intelligence experts that the Germans had developed an even more effective weapon than the flying bomb; a rocket which could carry a bomb weighing more than eleven tons, capable of a speed of 4,000 miles an hour, and able to reach London within four minutes of being launched from northern Europe. The flying bomb, or V-1, with its aeroplane engine and wings, was ten times slower, and much easier to intercept, than this new rocket-propelled bomb, known as the V-2. As well as the rocket danger, there was an ever-present political worry: as Soviet forces crossed into central Poland, Churchill wanted a meeting with Roosevelt and Stalin, to try to preserve some form of democratic government for Poland. 'I would brave the reporters of Washington or the mosquitos of Alaska!' he told Roosevelt, in trying to persuade the President to agree to a meeting. He also suggested the Scottish port of Invergordon. 'The weather might well be agreeable in Scotland at that time,' he wrote. But Roosevelt, after initial keenness, declined, worried about the coming Presidential election. 'As you know,' he told Churchill, 'domestic problems are unfortunately difficult for three months to come.' In Normandy! ajoint Anglo-American offensive was poised to break out of the bridgehead. Relieved by the prospect of an accelerated advance through northern France, Churchill flew to Cherbourg on July 20, was shown an unfinished flying-bomb site that had been aligned on Bristol, and visited the landing-beaches. While Churchill explored the scenes of victory, Hitler, at his headquarters more than a thousand miles to the east, was injured by a bomb placed under the table on which he was studying a
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battle map. An Army plot to kill him had failed; terrible retribution was wreaked on all who had taken part in it, or had shown sympathy to those who wished to see him removed from power. Major Ewald von Kleist, who had visited Churchill at Chartwell in 1938, was arrested; the letter which Churchill had written to him, at Kleist's request, was found among his papers. Kleist was executed. Rommel, recovering from an Allied fighter attack on his car inNormandy, and distantly involved in the plot, was given the choice of execution or suicide. He chose suicide. Continuing his visit to the Normandy beach-head, Churchill slept that night on board the light-cruiser Enterprise. On july 21 he called on Mont gomery at his headquarters at Blay, visited a field hospital and a field bakery, and, at an artillery battery near Villers Bocage, 'had rounds fired', its regimental history noted, 'until he was satisfied that he understood the gun drill'. The history added, 'He gave great joy to the batmen and cooks and fatigue men of 276 Battery by stopping his car on the way back and having his photograph taken with them.' After Churchill had left, the regiment's commanding officer wrote to him:'I know how much you enjoy getting near the batt\e, but I would like to tell you how tremendously pleased, heartened and honoured every soldier was by your visit. It means very much to them that you should wish to come and see them at work in their gun pits.' Churchill slept that night again aboard the Enterprise.Then he returned to shore, lunched with Montgomery, made a tour of the landing-strips in the battle area, and was given a flight in a captured German aircraft. That evening he flew back to Britain, where he learned that Stalin had estab lished a Polish Committee of National Liberation at Lublin, on what was intended to be Polish soil after the war. The Polish Government in London was excluded from this Committee. It was of the 'utmost importance', Churchill telegraphed at once to Roosevelt, 'that we do not desert the orthodox Polish Government'. The 'great hope' was 'fusion of some kind between Poles relying on Russia, and Poles relying on USA and GB'. On july 31, with Red Army units only fifteen miles from Warsaw, the Poles rose in revolt against the German occupation forces. For many Poles the hope was to establish an independent Polish authority in the capital before the Russians arrived. On August 4, German forces, amounting to a division and a half, began to attack the insurgents, and the Hermann Goering Division was summoned from Italy, together with two SS Divi sions. That day, Russian air activity over Warsaw ceased. Churchill, who had just agreed to a Polish request to drop ammunition and supplies-into the city, appealed to Stalin to help the Poles. Stalin refused to help, replying derisively about the ability of the Poles to resist. Yet Polish resistance was to continue for more than a month.
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On August 4 . Eisenhower lunched with Churchill and outlined a proposal for the cancellation of the South of France landing due to begin in eleven days' time, and for switching the forces assembled for it to Brittany. This change of plan would bring substantial Allied forces to the flank of the armies in Normandy. On August 5 Churchill flew to France, intending to put the American plan to Montgomery, whose own offensive would thereby be much enhanced. But as his plane reached the Cherbourg Peninsula it was recalled to Britain; fog on the landing-strip at which he was expected had caused the preceding plane to crash and all its occupants had been killed. Churchill flew back to southern England, to Eisenhower's 'Advance Command Post' at Portsmouth, where it quickly emerged that Eisenhower had unexpectedly changed his mind, and now wanted the South of France landing to go ahead as planned, but that his Chief of Staff, General Bedell-Smith, still favoured a Brittany landing. Churchill at once appealed to Hopkins to seek Roosevelt's approval for the Brittany plan. On the following morning, while awaiting a reply from Hopkins, he flew back to Normandy, to try once more to put the plan to Montgomery. But on reaching Montgomery's new headquarters in the Foret de Cerisy, he found that the battle there was at its height, and sensing the tension, cut short his visit after an hour and returned to Britain. Awaiting Churchill when he reached the Annexe was a telegram from Hopkins. Although he had not yet heard from Roosevelt, he was certain that the President's answer 'will be in the negative'. That afternoon, the British joint Staff Mission in Washington put the case for the Brittany plan to the American Chiefs of Staff. 'We could not budge them,' they reported back to London. A day later, Roosevelt telegraphed to Churchill that he wanted no change of plan. The Brittany landing was dead; the South of France landing would go ahead as planned. In Italy, as a result of the build-up for the South of France landing, Alexander's army had been reduced by seven divisions. Yet he still took the offensive, and on August 10 forced the Germans to withdraw from Florence. That night Churchill flew from London to Algiers, on his way to Italy. He wanted to be with Alexander, to see something of the battle, and to discuss the many problems now besetting the Mediterranean oper ations. 'I do hope you will get a little rest with the brush as well as with the binoculars,' Oliver Lyttelton wrote to him. While in Algiers, Churchill had a long talk with Randolph, who was still in pain as a result of a plane crash while making a second journey to partisan-held Yugoslavia, and suffering also from the blow of a disinte grating marriage. 'No reference was made by either of us to family matters,' Churchill wrote to Clementine. 'He is a lonely figure by no means recovered as far as walking is concerned. Our talk was about politics,
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French and English, about which there was plenty of friendly badinage & argument.' Randolph urged his father to reverse his recent refusal to meet de Gaulle. 'After all,' he wrote a few days later, 'he is a frustrated man representing a defeated country. You as the unchallenged leader of England and the main architect of victory can afford to be magnanimous without fear of being misunderstood.' From Algiers, Churchill flew to Naples, where he was General Maitland Wilson's guest at the Villa Rivalta, overlooking the Bay. While there he received an appeal from the Poles still fighting in Warsaw, and still denied help by Stalin. 'They implore machine guns and ammunition,' Churchill telegraphed to Stalin from Naples on August 12. 'Can you not give them some further help, as the distance from Italy is so very great?' Stalin declined. That day twenty-eight British and Polish pilots made the fourth 1,400-mile round trip from southern Italy to Warsaw. Three planes were lost. The nearest fully operational Soviet airstrip to Warsaw was less than fifty miles away. During August 12 Churchill received Tito at the Villa Rivalta, urging him to establish a democratic system in Yugoslavia 'based on the peasants'. In the afternoon he went by Admiral's barge to a small beach where he bathed in the waters of a hot spring. On the return journey he was recognised by two convoys of troops preparing for the South of France landing. As he passed the cheering troops he sent them a message wishing them well. 'They did not know,' he later wrote, 'that if I had had my way they would be sailing in a different direction.' That night Churchill received an invitation from Roosevelt for a meet ing in Quebec in September, without Stalin. Churchill accepted. On the following day he went by boat to Capri, to view the Tiberius rock over which the Roman Emperor had thrown his victims, and to see the Blue Grotto, by wht:>se azure waters he was entranced. Then, guarded by a dozen American military policemen, he undressed on the rocks and swam. During lunch ina restaurant on the island he was 'in holiday mood', wrote one of the Englishmen present, 'and talked about chewing-gum defacing the features, demonstrated how to light a cigar without interrupting his conversation, and enquired about the arrangements for the Capri water supply'. Returning to Naples, he presided over a conference between Tito and his fellow Yugoslav leader Dr Ivan Subasic, the Ban of Croatia, persuading them to accept a 'fusion and cessation' of the civil war. On August 14 Churchill again swam, this time at a point beyond Cumae in the open sea. After he had made a V-sign, on leaving, to an enthusiastic group of Italians at the pier, Churchill asked one of the Englishmen on board: . 'D'you think they like that?'
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'Yes, though I believe the sign also has an improper connotation in Mediterranean lands.' 'I know that, but I have superseded that one- V for Victory.' After returning to Naples for lunch, Churchill flew to Corsica. There, in Ajaccio harbour, he boarded the Royal Scotsman, a former merchant ship carrying six assault landing-craft. That night, while he slept on board, eleven Allied divisions landed in Southern France. At eight in the morning of August 15 he transferred to the destroyer Kimberley, which steamed towards the coast, where shortly after midday 'we found ourselves in an immense concourse of ships,' Churchill wrote to Clementine, 'all sprawled along twenty miles of coast with poor St Tropez in the centre. It had been expected that the bombardment would continue all day, but the air and the ships had practically silenced the enemy guns by 8 o'clock. This rendered the proceedings rather dull.' Churchill looked at 'the panorama of the beautiful shore with smoke rising from many fires started by the shelling, and artificial smoke being loosed by the landing troops and the landing-craft drawn up upon the shore'. But it was from 'a long way off, and he was disappointed. Had he known beforehand what the conditions would be, he told Clementine, he would have requested a picket boat and gone 'with perfect safety very much nearer to the actual beaches'. Opposition in the air was light, at sea there was none, and on land very little and very brief. In terms of what the Americans had expected of these landings, a massive switch of German forces from northern France, they were the greatest failure of the war in the West. Churchill told the King, 'Your Majesty knows my opinion of the strategy, but the perfect execution of the plan was deeply interesting.' Returning to Naples by sea, on the morning of August 16 Churchill studied a series of German top-secret messages about the imminent Ger man withdrawal from Greece. He at once obtained the approval of the Chiefs of Staff to send a British military force to Athens at the earliest possible moment to forestall the Greek Communists there. Then, after communicating this decision to Roosevelt, he went for another swim, this time off the island of Procida. 'We have had altogether four bathes,' he wrote to Clementine, 'which have done me all the good in the world. I feel greatly refreshed and am much less tired than when I left England.' On August 17 Churchill drove through the devastated town of Cassino, and then flew over the monastery which, as the main German fortification, had been pulverised by Allied bombardment. Then he flew north to Alexander's headquarters at Siena. As the weather was too bad to visit the front \"lith any chance of seeing anything, for three days he visited the troops in the rear areas. Near Livorno he fired the first shot of a howitzer
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that had been set on a German artillery position north of Pisa. On August 20, the weather having improved, Alexander took Churchill to a forward artillery observation point about two miles from the front line, on the Arno River. Then he flew back to Naples, where dinner was enlivened by a German aircraft making repeated low-level attacks on the port before it was brought down and destroyed by naval gunfire. Churchill's thoughts were still on the folly of denuding Alexander's army for the South of France landing. With half of what had been taken away, he later wrote, the Allies 'could have broken into the Valley of the Po, with all the gleaming possibilities and prizes which lay open towards Vienna. That evening Alexander maintained his soldierly cheerfulness, but it was in a sombre mood that I went to bed. In these great matters, failing to gain one's way is no escape from the responsibility for an inferior solution.' On August 21 Churchill flew from Naples to Rome for a day of discus sion about the proposed British military expedition to Greece. 'Winston in very good heart,' Macmillan noted that night. On the following after noon the discussion was about the political future of Italy. 'Winston was like a dog worrying at a bone,' Macmillan wrote. 'But his peculiar method does succeed in eliciting the truth.' Churchill argued in favour of 'a steady process of relaxation of control' in Italy, which should no longer be an occupied enemy state, but a 'friendly co-belligerent'. 'We finally broke up at 7 pm,' Macmillan wrote, 'all but Winston com pletely exhausted.' That night after dinner Churchill had a long talk with Brigadier Maurice Lush of the Allied Control Commission, who found the Prime Minister cheerful, 'for he was, next day, continuing his participation in the battle with Alex and his men.' Churchill told Lush that he 'hoped so much to take part in the first stages of an autumnal breakthrough' which would enable Alexander 'to swing to the right, overcome Austria, and so alter history'. Then, Lush later recalled, 'he gave me a cheerful "good night" at 2 am'. On the following day Churchill telegraphed to the Chiefs of Staff that if Alexander could break through into the Po Valley, 'I certainly contem plate a move into the Adriatic.' And to Smuts he confided two days later that he still hoped Alexander's army would reach 'the great city', Vienna. 'Even if the war comes to a sudden end, there is no reason why our armour should not slip through and reach it as soon as we can.' He had told Alexander that in the event of the war ending suddenly he should 'be ready for a dash with armoured cars'; Vienna was the prize. On August 23 Churchill flew from Rome to Alexander's headquarters at Siena, where he authorised the establishment of a Jewish Brigade Group to fight as an integral part of Alexander's army. 'This will give
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great satisfaction to the Jews when it is published,' he wrote, 'and surely they of all other races have a right to strike at the Germans as a recognis able body.' On the following day he visited the New Zealand Division. On August 25, as he worked at Alexander's headquarters, de Gaulle entered Paris. That day Alexander launched a new assault on the German defences, Churchill went with him to a high point overlooking the battle zone. 'The whole front of the Eighth Army offensive was visible,' he later wrote. 'But apart from the smoke puffs of shells bursting seven or eight thousand yards away in scattered fashion, there was nothing to see.' Then, after a picnic, the two men went further forward, to an old castle overlooking a valley. 'Here one certainly could see all that was possible,' Churchill recalled. 'The Germans were firing with rifles and machine guns from thick scrub on the farther side of the valley, about five hundred yards away. Our front line was beneath us. The firing was desultory and inter mittent. But this was the nearest I got to the enemy and the time I heard the most bullets in the Second World War.' On August 27 Churchill flew back to Naples for two days' more talks about the impending British expedition to Greece. He also wrote a message to the Italian people, setting out what he called 'one or two quite simple, practical tests, by which one could answer the question 'What is freedom?' There were in fact seven questions, which were 'the title deeds on which a new Italy could be founded'. The questions were:
Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day? Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent? Are their courts ofjustice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free of all association with particular volitical parties? Will these courts administer open and well-established laws which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice? Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as Government officials? Will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted? Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and trying to bring up a family, free from the fear that some grim police organisation under the control of a single Party like the Gestapo,
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started by the Nazi and Fasci-t Parties, will tap him on the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment? These questions, The Times commented, contained words 'both of encour agement and warning'. They also contained the essence of Churchill's political philosophy. That day Churchill left Naples by air for London, having to fly first to Rabat, where, as thunderstorms were reported further north, he spent the night. Then, on the morning of August 29, he flew from Rabat to London. During the flight he was taken ill, his temperature rising to 103. It was pneumonia again. Two nurses were called in, a lung specialist took blood tests and X-rays, and M & B was administered. 'It would be a tragedy if anything were to happen to him now,' Sir Andrew Cunning ham, who saw him that night, wrote in his diary. 'With all his faults (&he is the most infuriating man) he has done a great job for the country, & beside there is no one else.' As Churchill recovered, slowly, in bed at the Annexe, the Germans had lost control of much of northern France, and had been driven back across the Belgian border. 'How wonderful it is to see our people leaping out at last after all their hard struggles,' he telegraphed to Montgomery, recently promoted Field Marshal, on September 2. In Italy that day, Alexander's forces entered Pisa and pierced the Gothic Line defences, but were con fronted by eight new German divisions sent hastily to stop any further thrust northward. As an answer to the one question that mattered in the Italian campaign, 'Who is containing whom?', Italy continued to be a drain on German resources. The Warsaw insurgents were still fighting against impossible odds, and without Soviet help. On September 3Churchill suggested to Roosevelt that they should both tell Stalin that, if he did not at least allow British and American aircraft to use Soviet air bases near Warsaw to ferry in help to the insurgents, Britain and America 'would take certain drastic action in respect of our own supplies to Russia'. But Roosevelt did not want to upset Stalin, from whom, unknown to Churchill, he was even then asking permission to use Soviet air bases in Siberia as staging-posts for American bombing raids against japan. Churchill was so angered by the Soviet refusal to help Warsaw that on September 4, despite a recurrence of fever, he left his sick bed in the above-ground Annexe and descended to the Central War Rooms. The whole War Cabinet shared his anger. But they were reluctant to do anything to break up still further the already fragile working of the alliance, limiting their protest to a collective telegram to Stalin, stating that the Soviet action in denying help to Warsaw 'seems to us at variance with
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the spirit of Allied co-operation to which you and we attach so much importance both for the present and for the future'. The Warsaw uprising was being systematically and savagely crushed and thousands of Poles executed. It was to be more than four months before the Russians entered the capital. On the morning of September 5 Churchill left London by train for Greenock, on the Clyde; that afternoon he boarded the Queen Mary. A nurse, Dorothy Pugh, and a penicillin expert, Brigadier Whitby, were both on board. During the voyage Churchill learned that those American servicemen on board, who were going on leave, were having to lose a week's leave because of the week's wait at Greenock for Churchill to come on board. He at once telegraphed to Roosevelt to ask if the week could be made up to them. 'It would be a pleasure to me if this could be announced before the end of the voyage and their anxiety relieved,' Churchill wrote. Roosevelt agreed. Churchill was not feeling well; as a result of his visit to Italy he had been advised to continue a course of malaria pills for another two weeks, and these pills seemed to upset him. On September 8, after a Staff Conference on board, Brooke wrote of how Churchill 'looked old, unwell and de pressed. Evidently found it hard to concentrate and kept holding his head between his hands.' At the conference Churchill warned the Chiefs of Staffs of his concern that their proposal to divert forces from Italy to the Far East, a proposal based on the assumption that a German collapse was likely before the end of 1944, was based on a dangerous assumption, as 'German garrisons were showing stout resistance at most of the ports'. The Americans had failed to take St Nazaire and had been checked at Nancy. The Germans were also putting up a 'stout resistance' in the forts around Antwerp, 'a port we badly needed'. That day, as the Queen Mary continued westward, British forces entered Brussels. But other news bore out Churchill's warning: German forces were holding Boulogne, Calais and Dunkirk, and had retaken Metz. In the east, Stalin's advance knew no such setbacks; on September 9 Soviet forces entered Bulgaria, and on the following day Bulgaria surrendered. Roumania had already abandoned Germany and joined the Allies. The Russians now had the prospect of a rapid advance through the Balkans and into Hungary. On September l 0 the Queen Mary reached Halifax. From there a twenty hour train journey took Churchill to Quebec, where Roosevelt's train was awaiting him on an adjoining track. During their first day in Quebec, September 12, they learned that American forces had crossed the German frontier west of Aachen. But a message from London that day reported,
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accurately, that 'enemy resistance increases as Allies approach German frontier'. Roosevelt now agreed that there would be no further withdrawals from Alexander's army. The Americans were even willing to let Alexander have the landing-craft needed for an Istrian landing. Churchill was greatly relieved. 'He had always been attracted by a right-handed movement with the purpose of giving Germany a stab in the Adriatic armpit,' he told the conference. 'Our objective should be Vienna.' On September 13 Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Mor genthau, spoke of a post-war Germany that would be allowed no industry at all. The Ruhr would be closed down. The shipyards would be disman tled. At first Churchill was ill at ease with this. 'I'm all for disarming Germany,' he told Morgenthau, 'but we ought not to prevent her living decently. There are bands between the working classes of all countries, and the English people will not stand for the policy you· are advocating. I agree with Burke. You cannot indict a whole nation. What is to be done should be done quickly. Kill the criminals, but don't carry on the business for years.' In reporting Morgenthau's plan in a telegram to the War Cabinet two days later, however, Churchill wrote, 'I was at first taken aback at this, but I consider that the disarmament argument is decisive and the beneficial consequences to us follow naturally.' Part of the economic benefit to Britain of a 'pastoral' Germany would be that Britain would have to supply Germany with much of its industrial needs, thus stimulating British indus try. On September 15 Churchill and Roosevelt signed an agreement 'looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricul tural and pastoral in its character'. This agreement was rejected by the State Department in Washington before it could even be discussed by the War Cabinet in London. On September 17, while Churchill was still in Quebec, three airborne divisions, British and American, including a Polish Parachute Brigade, 35,000 men in all, parachuted behind German lines in Holland, with the object of seizing a bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem. As the battle began, Churchill left Quebec by train for Hyde Park, where he was Roosevelt's guest for two days. Clementine was with him; in a letter to Mary she wrote of how the President 'with all his genius, does not-indeed cannot (partly because of his health and partly because of his make-up)-function round the clock, like your father. I should not think his mind was pinpointed on the war for more than four hours a day, which is not really enough when one is a supreme war lord.' Churchill and Roosevelt discussed the atom bomb, which, they were told, would 'almost certainly' be ready by August 1945. That week it had
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taken 2,600 sorties, and the loss of more than a hundred planes, to drop 9,360 tons of high explosive bombs on Germany; one atom bomb, carried in a single plane, would be the equivalent of at least 20,000 tons of high explosive. The two men rejected a suggestion that 'the world should be. informed' about the atom bomb with a view to an international agreement regarding its use. They also decided that when the bomb was finally available 'it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender'. Churchill was not certain that the atom bomb would need to be used. During the last day of the discussions at Quebec he had thought it 'quite possible' that the current 'heavy, sustained and ever-increasing' bombing of Japanese cities by the Americans 'might cause Japan to throw up the sponge'. People stood up to heavy bombardment if they thought it would 'sooner or later' come to an end. 'There could be no such hope for Japan.' All they could look forward.to was 'an ever-increasing weight of explosives on their centres of population'. Leaving Hyde Park on September 19, Churchill took the night train to New York, where on the following morning here-embarked on the Queen Mary. 'PM in excellent form,' noted Cunningham, '& most interesting about his time at the Admiralty in the last war.' Much of Churchill's work on the voyage was to prepare the speech he would make on his return. 'Work with a vengeance,' Marian Holmes wrote in her diary on September 24. 'PM dictated a further 2,000 words of speech. I got the best view of his behind that I have ever had. He stepped out of bed still dictating, and oblivious of his all-too-short bed jacket. Anyway, he was in a kind and conciliatory mood, and I felt the waves of his approval.' On September 26 the Queen Mary reached Greenock, where john Peck was waiting with the most recent and urgent telegrams. The worst news was from Arnhem; the attempt to seize and hold a bridge over the Rhine had failed; l ,400 of the 35,000 troops involved had been killed. Travelling south overnight, Churchill's train stopped at Rugby to pick up another urgent pouch; it contained the grave news that the last resistance of the Polish patriots in Warsaw was being overcome, and savage reprisals were being carried out against tens of thousands of Poles in the city. At ten in the morning the train reached London. An hour and a half later Churchill was in the Commons to answer Prime Minister's questions. The fate of the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities was raised; the Government, he said, were 'resolved to do their utmost to prevent Nazi criminals finding refuge in neutral territory from the consequences of their crimes'. The war in the Far East was also on his mind that day; in a telegram to Stalin he explained that the eventual opening of a Russian front against Japan
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'would force them to burn and bleed, especially in the air, in a manner which would vastly accelerate their defeat'. Churchill now decided to go to see Stalin; that night he asked Portal to prepare a flight schedule to Moscow. He had a number of reasons for being on his travels again so soon. Fearing the financial and physical burden on Britain of a long war against Japan, he wanted to persuade Stalin to declare war on Japan as soon as Germany was defeated. He also wanted to discuss the political future of Yugoslavia and Greece, which he hoped to exclude from Communist control, and of Poland, where he was personally and morally committed to the establishment of a freely-elected Government. 'I cannot conceive that it is not possible,' he had told the Commons that day, 'to make a good solution whereby Russia gets the security which she is entitled to have, and which I have resolved that we shall do our utmost to secure for her, on her Western frontier, and, at the same time, the Polish nation have restored to them that national sover eignty and independence for which, across centuries of oppression and struggle, they have never ceased to strive.' Before leaving for Moscow, Churchill twice took Clementine to the theatre; on October 3 to Shaw's Anns and the Man and on the following night to Shakespeare's Richard III, both with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Sybil Thorndike. On his return to the Annexe on October 4 he learned that British forces had successfully entered Greece, landing at Patras, on the Gulf of Corinth, from which the Germans had withdrawn. In Poland, however, to Churchill's intense distress, after so many hours trying to help them, the Warsaw insurgents had at last been crushed. 'When the final Allied victory is achieved,' he told the Commons on October 5, 'the epic of Warsaw will not be forgotten. It will remain a deathless memory for the Poles, and for the friends of freedom all over the world.' Two days later, with the political future of Poland high among his concerns, Churchill left London by air for Naples, where he learned .that Alexander's armies were now 'stuck in the Apennines with tired forces' and could not spare any men for an amphibious landing at the head of the Adriatic. After four hours in Naples he flew to Moscow where, shortly after midday on October 9, his plane landed at the wrong aerodrome, took off again, and then landed at the airport where Maisky, Vishinsky and a guard of honour awaited him. He was driven to Molotov's dacha, which had been put at his disposal. That same evening Churchill was driven from the dacha into Moscow, a forty-five minute drive. In his first talk with Stalin, he reaffirmed his earlier acceptance, at Teheran, of the Curzon Line as Russia's eastern frontier. Churchill promised to 'bring pressure to bear' on the Poles to do
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likewise.The discussion then turned to Southern Europe and the Balkans. Britain had a 'particular interest' in Greece, Churchill told Stalin, but Roumania was 'very much a Russian affair'. He did not want to use the phrase 'dividing into spheres', Churchill said, 'because the Americans might be shocked', but as long as he and Stalin 'understood each other' he could explain it to the Americans. Churchill then produced what he described to Stalin as 'a naughty document'. On this were listed the 'proportional interest' of Russia and Britain in five countries. For Roumania, Churchill suggested 90 per cent Russian interest and 10 per cent British. For Greece, he proposed 90 per cent British 'in accord with USA' and 10 percent Russian. Yugoslavia and Hungary were both listed as fifty-fifty, and Bulgaria as 75 per cent to Russia and 25 per cent to 'the others'. Stalin studied the list and then, Churchill later recalled, 'took his blue pencil and made a large tick upon it, and passed it back. After this there was a long silence. The pencilled paper lay in the centre of the table.' Eventually Churchill said: 'Might it not be thought rather cynical if it seemed we had disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an off-hand manner? Let us burn the paper.' 'No, you keep it,' was Stalin's reply. The discussion turned to Turkey, where Churchill told Stalin he was in favour of Russia having free access through the Dardanelles to the Medi terranean 'for her merchant ships and ships of war'. Russia, he said, had a 'right' and also a 'moral claim' to this, which he would support. Churchill then asked Stalin not to encourage Communist participation in the civil war in Greece or to 'stir up' Communism in Italy. Stalin agreed. Speaking of Togliatti, whom Churchill had met in Rome in August, Stalin com mented that he was 'a wise man, not an extremist, and would not start an adventure in Italy'. Churchill did not get back to the dacha until3.10 in the morning. He had been travelling and working continuously for sixty hours, sleeping only while travelling.'I gave him some papers,' noted Marian Holmes, who expected dictation, 'but he said he couldn't work.' Sleeping soundly, Churchill woke on the morning of October 10 and stayed in bed, dictating. Then, shortly after midday, he drove back to the Kremlin, where Stalin was host at a luncheon that lasted four hours. At the end of the meal Churchill announced, 'I'm going back to the embassy for my Young Lady'. He was then driven to the British Embassy, asked Elizabeth Layton to join him in his car, and told her as they drove back to the dacha, 'Ithink I'll dictate in the dark.' Along the twenty-three-mile route, armed guards stood to attention and saluted as they passed.
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Churchill wanted to send Stalin a formal note of their discussion about the Balkans. 'These percentages which I have put down,' he explained, 'are no more than a method by which in our thoughts we can see how near we are together, and then decide upon the necessary steps to bring us into full agreement.' If published, the percentages might be considered 'crude, and even callous', but they might serve as a 'good guide for the conduct of our affairs', which, if managed well, might prevent 'several civil wars and much bloodshed' in the countries concerned.Churchill added, 'Our broad principle should be to let every country have the form of Government which its people desire.' No ideology should be imposed on any small State. 'Let them work out their own fortunes during the years that lie ahead.' Harriman, who was in Moscow as Roosevelt's emissary to the talks, and to whom Churchill showed this letter, said he was certain both Roosevelt and Hull would 'repudiate' it. The letter was therefore never sent, despite its assertion of the principle of self-determination. On October II Chur chill remembered that Albania had been omitted from the list of percent ages. He therefore proposed fifty-fifty, the same division as for Yugoslavia and Hungary. But for Hungary, Molotov had insisted upon a drastic change in Russia's favour, from fifty-fifty to 80-20. To this Eden had agreed. In a telegram to the War Cabinet, Churchill explained that the percent ages were 'only an interim guide for the immediate post-war future', and would be 'surveyed' by the Great Powers, including of course the United States, when they met at the armistice or the peace table to make 'a general settlement of Europe'. In the event, no Peace Conference took place. Except in Greece, the degree of control exercised by Russia was to be determined, not by the percentages in Churchill's 'naughty document', but by the arrival of the Soviet Army and its political commissars. The Rus sians, Churchill told the War Cabinet, were 'insistent in their ascendancy' in Roumania and Bulgaria, 'both Black Sea countries'. That evening Churchill entertained Stalin to dinner at the British Embassy, across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. When Churchill remarked that his hostile attitude to the Italian people had changed because of the enthusiastic welcome they had given him on his recent visit, Stalin commented that the same crowd had supported Mussolini. The dinner went on until four in the morning, so late that Churchill slept at a house in the city which Stalin had set aside for him at 6 Ostrovskaya Street. 'I have had very nice talks with the Old Bear,' Churchill wrote to Clement ine on October I3. 'I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us here & I am sure they wish to work with us.' In the evening, at the Spiridonovka Palace in central Moscow, Churchill and Stalin had a long talk with the leading members of the Polish Govern-
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ment in London, whom Churchill had urged to fly to Moscow during his visit, and whom he begged to accept the loss of pre-war territory in return for participation in the Communist-dominated National Liberation Com mittee which Stalin had established at Lublin. The London Poles would not accept the Curzon Line. When Churchill proposed that they accept it subject to the final agreements of a Peace Conference, it was Stalin's turn to refuse; the Poles must accept the new line without conditions. At this point, the minutes of the meeting recorded, Churchill made 'a gesture of disappointment and hopelessness'. Later that night, as the sky of Moscow was lit with rockets celebrating the entry of Soviet forces into the Latvian capital of Riga, Churchill and Stalin again met the Lublin Polish leaders at the Spiridonovka Palace. Dutifully, they echoed Stalin's sentiments. Two days later Churchill tele graphed to the King: 'The day before yesterday was "all Poles day". Our lot from London are, as your Majesty knows, a decent but feeble lot of fools, but the delegates from Lublin seem to be the greatest villains imaginable.' On October 14 Churchill had a two-hour talk with the Lon don Poles at the British Embassy. When the Prime Minister of the 'London Poles', Stanislaw MikolaJczyk, said that Polish public opinion would not accept the loss of the eastern territories, Churchill replied: 'What is public opinion? The right to be crushed!' Of course nothing could prevent Poland from declaring war on Russia, but by doing so Poland would lose the support of the other powers. Still Mikolajczyk would not accept the Curzon Line. During a ninety minute talk that afternoon at the house on Ostrovskaya Street, Churchill could not persuade him to do so. As for Britain, Churchill told him, she was 'powerless in the face of Russia' with regard to the future Polish Government. But he then went to see Stalin in the Kremlin, to propose a compromise formula; the London Poles would accept the Curzon Line, in return for fifty-fifty participation in the future Government of Poland. After an hour of discussion, Stalin agreed. The onus was now on Churchill to persuade the London Poles to concede the frontier. That night Stalin went with Churchill to the Bolshoi Theatre. They arrived after the start of the evening's programme, the first act ofthe ballet Giselle, had already begun. It was only when the lights went up for the interval that the audience saw Churchill, whereupon, he reported to the King, there was at once a 'prolonged ovation'. Then, when Stalin came into the box and stood at his side, there was 'an almost passionate demonstration'. The interval was followed by two hours' singing and dancing by the Red Army Choir. 'I noticed the PM thoroughly enjoying the songs,' noted Marian Holmes, 'and beating time to them with his hands. Stalin didn't change his personal expression at all.'
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From the Bolshoi Theatre, Churchill returned briefly to the town house before going to the Kremlin for a discussion with Stalin on military matters. The Soviet Army did not intend to advance into western Yugo slavia, Stalin said, but would prefer to link up with Alexander in Austria, at which Churchill promised that Alexander would push forward to Vienna 'as soon as possible'. On the morning of October 15, Churchill woke up in great discomfort, the victim of a violent attack of diarrhoea. That afternoon he again received the London Poles, and asked them to accept the formula to which Stalin had agreed the previous afternoon. But they refused to accept the loss of the city of Lvov, which lay just to the east of the Curzon Line. Churchill lost his temper with them, pacing up and down the room and declaiming; 'I will have nothing more to do with you. I don't care where you go. You only deserve to be in your Pripet Marshes. I shall indict you.' Oliver Harvey noted in his dairy, 'A painful scene to witness, the PM so right and the Poles so foolish -like the Bourbons expecting everything to come back to them.' Before the meeting ended Churchill proposed a compromise. He would go to see Stalin and appeal to him 'in the interests of Anglo-Soviet relations' and for the effect of such gesture upon 'world opinion' towards Russia, to let the Poles keep Lvov; but he would only make this appeal on the condition that, if Stalin rejected it, the Poles would agree to accept the Curzon Line without amendment. The Poles refused. That afternoon Churchill developed a fever. No more meetings could be held that day. As his temperature rose above 100, two doctors and two nurses were summoned from Cairo. But on the following morning the temperature was back to normal and the summons was countermanded. The fever, Churchill explained to Clementine, 'came from the tummy and not from the chest, and I am now quite well again'. On the afternoon of October 16 he returned to the Kremlin with a Curzon Line formula devised by Eden, and acceptable to the London Poles, that would describe the disputed line not as a 'frontier' but a 'demarcation line'. For two hours Churchill tried to persuade Stalin, but in vain. 'The Prime Minister used all possible arguments,' Eden telegraphed to the War Cabinet, 'but was unable to move him.' For one more day Churchill shuttled between the London Poles and Stalin, to whom he forcefully put their case. But Stalin now made it clear that whatever formula might be devised about the frontier, as far as the future Polish Government was concerned, it was his Lublin nominees who would have the majority. On October 17 Churchill and Stalin had a final, six-hour conference, from ten that evening until four in the morning. Still trying to find some
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basis for an agreement between Stalin and the London Poles, Churchill persuaded Stalin to accept the phrase 'basis for frontier' rather than 'frontier' in describing the Curzon Line. But on the political predomi nance of the Lublin Communist Poles, Stalin would still not give way. The London Poles could participate, but no longer as equals. Discussing the future of Germany, Churchill told Stalin that the Ruhr and the Saar should be 'put permanently out of action', and Germany's metallurgical, chemical and electrical industries stopped 'for as long as he had a word to say, and he hoped for a generation at least'. Stalin did not demur. When Churchill then said that Germany should be 'deprived of all her aviation', Stalin agreed that 'neither civil nor military flying should be allowed' and that all training schools for pilots should be forbidden. Churchill also told Stalin that he would like to see Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary form a 'separate grouping', a Customs union with no trade or commercial barriers. On one point, central to Churchill's purpose in going to Moscow, there was hardly any discussion and no dispute; Stalin agreed that, 'on the day the German armies are destroyed', Russia would declare war on Japan. 'We must remember the supreme value of this in shortening the whole struggle,' Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt shortly before leaving Moscow. At seven on the evening of October 18 Churchill had one last meeting with the London Poles, but failed to persuade them t accept the final formula to which Stalin had agreed, even though he reported Stalin's willingness to appoint the Prime Minister, Mikol£ticzyk, as head of a Polish Government of National Unity; but only if the Curzon Line were to be the border, and Lvov were to become a Soviet city. Many hours of negotiation had failed. Henceforth, the London Poles were effectively excluded from the fate of their country. That night Stalin gave Churchill a farewell dinner in the Kremlin. It lasted six hours, until two in the morning. During dinner news arrived that Soviet forces had entered Czechoslovakia, and Moscow was again illumi nated by multi-coloured rockets. That morning, Stalin went to Moscow airport to see Churchill off. As Churchill had not yet arrived, he waited in the rain. Then, in a short farewell ceremony, Churchill informed Stalin's interpreter, Vladimir Pavlov, that he had been awarded an honorary CBE. The new Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for such Pavlov had become, had 'been privy', Churchill explained, 'to the most deadly secrets of State'. His insignia would follow later. Stalin then went on board Churchill's plane, where he was shown the Prime Minister's travelling comforts, then left the aircraft to stand on the tarmac waving his handker chief as the plane took off.
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From Moscow, Churchill flew to the Crimea, a five-hour flight, dined at the airport near Simferopol, and then flew on through the night, for a further six hours, to Cairo. On the following morning he flew to Naples, a seven-hour flight involving a wide westerly detour via Benghazi to avoid flying over Crete, which was still held by the Germans. At Naples he spent the day at the Villa Rivalta; among his requests was that more of the soldiers in Italy be allowed to go to Britain on leave, now that, with the liberation of most of France, it was possible for them to travel by train from Marseilles to Paris and then on to Le Havre. On the morning of October 22 Churchill flew from Naples to London, arriving in the afternoon after a six-and-a-half-hour flight; his total flying time from Moscow had been more than twenty-four hours. Met at the airport by Clementine, he was driven to Chequers, where Sarah and Diana were among those waiting to welcome him. 'He looks none the worse for his journeys,' John Martin wrote to Randolph, 'and seems to me to have returned from Moscow fitter and in better spirits than he has been for a longtime.' On October 27, in giving an account of his Moscow visit to the Com mons, Churchill said, 'I have not hesitated to travel from court to court like a wandering minstrel, always with the same song to sing, or the same set of songs.' His aim was 'the unity of the Allied Powers'. Harold Nicolson, who heard him speak, wrote to his sons later that day: 'A few months ago he seemed ill and tired and he did not find his words as easily as usual. But today he was superb. Cherubic, pink, solid and vociferous.' Five days later Churchill once more tried to persuade the Polish Gov ernment in London to accept the Curzon Line, go to Moscow to tell Stalin, and then participate in the deliberations of the Lublin Poles. When the Poles said that they would want 'assurances' that they could still deal with Polish territories east of the Curzon Line, Churchill told them, 'This is nonsense, a pure utopia!' Cadogan noted in his diary: 'PM knocked them about badly- and rightly. Finally gave them forty-eight hours in which to say "Yes" or "No". Think that's right.' Twenty-four hours later the Poles said 'No'. Churchill's long search for a compromise had been in vain. Churchill was now looking towards the coming of peace 'in March, April or May', he told the Commons on October 31. If the Labour Party wished to withdraw from the Coalition once Germany was defeated, t,tlthough it would be a matter of regret to many people, it would not be one of 'reproach or bitterness'. A General Election would then be called and the country could return to Party politics. He had a 'clear view', Churchill said, that it would be wrong to continue the present Parliament 'beyond the
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period of the German war', and in a powerful defence of the system of Government he had supported and participated in for half a century, he told the House: 'The foundation of all democracy is that the people have the right to vote. To deprive them of that right is to make a mockery of all the high-sounding phrases which are so often used. At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. No amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly palliate the overwhelming importance of that point. The people have the right to choose representatives in accordance with their wishes and feelings.' That evening Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary, 'I have never admired Winston's moral attitude more than I did this morning.'
34
War and Diplomacy
Among the problems with which Churchill was confronted on his return from Moscow was the future of Palestine. Several months earlier he had refused to implement the decision of the 1939 Palestine White Paper, which envisaged an Arab veto on all Jewish immigration from May 1944; this White Paper had greatly aroused his anger at the time. On 4 Novem ber 1944, two weeks after his return from the Crimea and Cairo, he lunched at Chequers with Dr Weizmann, the Zionist leader. During their discussion, Churchill told Weizmann that if the Jews could 'get the whole of Palestine' as their State it would be 'a good thing', but if it came to a choice between no State at all and a Palestine partitioned into two States, one Arab and one Jewish, 'then they should take the partition'. In his desire to further the cause of Jewish statehood, Churchill advised Weizmann to go at once to Cairo, to discuss the future of Palestine with the new Minister of State in the Middle East, Lord Mayne, one of his closest friends, with whom he had talked in Cairo two weeks earlier, and whose well-known dislike of Zionism, Churchill explained to Weizmann, was now 'a thing of the past'. Mayne had 'changed and developed' in the last two years, Churchill told the Zionist leader. Weizmann at once prepared to leave for Cairo; but was too late. Within twenty-four hours, Mayne was dead; gunned down with his driver by two Jewish terrorists. Churchill was deeply shocked; but he opposed reprisals. Pressed by the Colonial Secretary to suspend at once all Jewish immigration to Palestine, he refused to do so. He also refused to appoint, as Mayne's successor, either of two suitable nominees, because he knew they were hostile to Zionism. But in the debate on Mayne's murder he told the Commons: 'If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past. If there is to be
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any hope of a peaceful and successful future for Zionism, these wicked activities must cease, and those responsible for them must be destroyed root and branch.' There was, Churchill told the Commons, an avenue of hope: 'I have received a letter from Dr Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organisation-a very old friend of mine-who has arrived in Palestine, in which he assures me that Palestine Jewry will go to the utmost limit of its power to cut out this evil from its midst.' Weizmann had appealed to the Jewish population 'to render all necessary assistance to the authorities in the prevention of terrorist acts, and in the eradication of the terrorist organisation'. Moyne's murderers, members of the extremist Stern Gang, were ex ecuted in Cairo, the scene of their crime. The Jewish Agency and the British authorities in Palestine joined forces in tracking down other members of the Stern Gang and their caches of arms. Churchill's support for Jewish statehood in Palestine remained firm and uncompromising. In the weeks immediately following his return from Moscow, Churchill acted to uphold his 'percentages' agreement with Stalin. Learning in the first week of November that the head of the British Military Mission in Roumania had protested about the extent of Russian control there, he wrote to Eden, 'We have only a ten per cent interest in Roumania, and are little more than spectators.' Unless care were taken, 'we shall get retaliation in Greece, which we still hope to save'. Every liberated or 'subverted' country, Churchill explained to Eden a week later, was 'seething with Communism'. All were linked together 'and only our influence with Russia prevents their actively stimulating this movement, deadly as I conceive it to the freedom of mankind'. On November 10 Churchill was on his travels again, flying to Paris, which he had last seen shortly before its fall in 1940. On November 11, the Armistice Day of the Great War, he drove as General de Gaulle's guest to theArcdeTriomphe,wheretheylaidwreathsattheTombof theUnknown Soldier before taking the salute at an hour-long march-past. 'He had a wonderful reception,' Brooke wrote in his diary, 'and the Paris crowd went quite mad over him.' Four days later Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt that he had re-established 'friendly private relations' with de Gaulle, and that he had 'a considerable feeling of stability' in France 'in spite of Communist threats'. The French politicians he had met had impressed him. 'I hope you will not consider that I am putting on French clothes while I say this.' To help de Gaulle internally, Churchill instructed Ismay to send two thousand rifles and one hundred Sten guns 'as fast as possible' to the French Ministry of the Interior, 'for the purpose of arming the police'.
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-'By far the most lucid, comprehensive and authoritative account of Churchill that has been offered in a single volume. It furnishes a crown to Gilbert's already prodigious labours.' Philip Ziegler, Daily Telegraph Martin Gilbert's highly acclaimed, one-volume Churchill: A Life is a story of adventure. It follows Winston Churchill from his earliest days to his moments of triumph. Here, the drama and excitement of his story are ever-present, as are his tremendous qualities in peace and war, not least as an orator and as a man of vision. Martin Gilbert gives us a vivid portrait, using Churchill's most personal letters and the recollections of his contemporaries, both friends and enemies, to go behind the scenes of some of the stormiest and most fascinating political events of our time, dominated by two world wars, and culminating in the era of the Iron Curtain and the hydrogen bomb. 'One of the greatest histories of our time.' Margaret Thatcher 'A stupendous book. He has told the truth.' A.J.P. Taylor 'Fresh insights and raw information abound in this superb volume.' Daily Express 'A tour de force.' John Major 'A wonderful book. Very moving and also very convincing.' Harold Macmillan 'Genuinely riveting ... Genius, courage, generosity, humour and imagination shine through. The narrative is compulsively interesting.' Robert Silver, Financial Times
Photograph: Churchill at the door of Admiralty House on the morning of . 4 September 1939 , his first full day at the Admiralty since the summer of 1915 . His keys, including the key to the Cabinet boxes , are on the chain hanging down from his waistcoat pocket; his gas mask is by his right foot. ©Corbis Design: Ekhorn ISBN 0-7126-6725-3
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