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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part four in a week-long series of excerpts from Eliot Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. Click here for yesterday's installment.
Perhaps the most important of these activities was a continuous audit of the military's judgment. Lord Ismay, the secretary to the Chiefs of Staff and an indispensable figure in the war machine, recalled in his memoirs that "not once during the whole war did [Churchill] overrule his military advisers on a purely military question." He exercised his control over events, rather, by incessant close questioning of the staffs. Churchill, as his generals often complained, kept a close eye on many matters of military detail, querying not only actions but their larger significance. A good example of this is Churchill's scrutiny of an exercise, called "Victor," which had occurred from 22 to 25 January 1941, under the auspices of the then commander of Home Forces, General Alan Brooke. On 30 March Churchill sent a note to Ismay about victor. It was one in a series of large-scale exercises designed to illuminate the problems of, and prepare for, a German invasion across the Channel. This remained the preeminent military challenge confronting the British, despite their close-run success in the air battles of the fall of 1940, which delayed the invasion threat — forever as it turned out, though no one could know this at the time. Churchill's query went as follows:
The purpose of Churchill's query became clear in the third paragraph:
Clearly, Churchill feared that such exercise assumptions fed an altogether excessive assessment of enemy capabilities, one that if taken seriously could paralyze the British high command and prevent it from acting in any way save defensively. Brooke replied on 7 April, giving the figures noted by Churchill, including estimates of enemy loss rates (10 percent in crossing, 5 to 10 percent on landing), plus the curious assumption that the Germans would sustain themselves with petrol and food captured on British soil. Churchill responded a few weeks later, noting how much more difficult than this the British landings in Greece had proven, and continuing to press his inquiries. British forces had trickled ashore in Greece in March 1941 — under the watchful eye, it must be noted, of the German military attaché, whose country was still at peace with Greece. It took a full month for the British to transport 31,000 lightly equipped soldiers, a force perhaps half the size of the notional German invaders of victor. When the British landed without opposition they still found themselves logistically taxed by the difficulty of simply setting up a base in a foreign country. With that recent experience (admittedly in far rougher terrain and in an undeveloped country) in mind, Churchill found the assumption of the Germans flinging ashore a far larger force in two days, in the teeth of sustained conventional and irregular opposition, to be questionable at the very least. He noted, for example, that on the last two days of the exercise the British were credited with 432 fighter sorties, and the Germans with 1,500 — three times as many sorties, although the Luftwaffe had further to fly than did the Royal Air Force. He inquired about how much warning of this invasion was assumed, and asked (without receiving an answer) why the Germans should have been assumed to capture large quantities of petrol on landing in Britain. Gamely enough, Brooke continued to reply until the exchange ended in mid-May. What is the significance of this episode? It is revealing in what it tells about Churchill's manner of dealing with his subordinates: a relentless querying of their assumptions and arguments, not just once but in successive iterations of a debate. It is noteworthy that the commander in charge of the exercise, Brooke, stood up to Churchill and not only did not suffer by it, but ultimately gained promotion to the post of chief of the Imperial General Staff and chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. It is abundantly clear that Churchill could bear men who disagreed with him, so long as they were neither fools nor silent about it. Churchill conducted his interrogation with an awareness of the broader implications of any technical issue. Indeed, much of his genius for war lay in his ability to link seemingly mundane or routine matters to much broader problems of policy and strategy. So too in the case of exercise victor. "It is of course quite reasonable for assumptions of this character to be made as a foundation for a military exercise. It would be indeed a darkening counsel to make them the foundation of serious military thought." At this very time, the Chiefs of Staff were debating the dispatch of armored vehicles to the Middle East. Churchill was arguing — against the position of several of his military advisers (including the CIGS, Sir John Dill) — that the risks of invasion were sufficiently low to make the tiger convoy worth the attempt. Tiger went through, losing only one ship to a mine and delivering some 250 tanks to the hard-pressed British forces in the Middle East. By no means did Churchill always have it right. Early in the war, for example, he persistently exaggerated the damage done to U-boats by the Royal Navy, although he did so in part as a way of keeping British morale up. More seriously, he initially supported offensive operations against German submarines rather than the sounder course of escorting convoys and picking off the U-boats as they attacked their prey. His persistent attempts to bring Turkey into the war — a policy that absorbed a great deal of diplomatic effort, as well as substantial sums of cash and amounts of military matériel — came to naught. Many of his schemes, and in particular his persistent clamor for operations against northern Norway, could not meet the test of military practicability, and if he is to be faulted it is for pressing them well beyond the point at which their infeasibility had become clear. But it is no less true that Churchill often caught his military staff when they had it wrong. Sir Alan Cunningham, who succeeded Sir Dudley Pound as First Sea Lord, has established a reputation as a critic and victim of Churchill, without Brooke's bile. The Royal Navy's chief historian, S. W. Roskill, quoted approvingly Cunningham's judgment that Churchill was "a bad strategist but doesn't know it, and nobody has the courage to stand up to him." The second part of the statement is demonstrably false; at various points Brooke, Portal, and Cunningham himself all showed just such courage. As for Churchill's technical judgments, which Cunningham deplored, the record shows that his own and his service's naval judgment could prove no less defective than that of his political superior. In the spring of 1944, for example, Churchill beat back a Royal Navy plan, based on a 1 May 1944 paper by the First Sea Lord, "The Empire's Post-War Fleet," for a postwar force based on the bizarre premise that "the basis of the strength of the Fleet is the battleship. . . . This war has proved the necessity of battleships and no scientific development is in sight which might render them obsolete. . . . A heavier broadside than the enemy is still a very telling weapon in a Naval action." Churchill, who had pioneered the development of naval aviation, who had followed closely the dramatic aero-naval battles of the Pacific War, and who had strongly doubted the merits of this view for several years, demurred. The evidence of years of naval warfare seemed overwhelming; Churchill referred as well to a paper by Professor Lindemann that deprecated the ability of the battleship to survive (and, among other things, presciently forecasted the maturation of radio-, television-, and infrared-homing guided bombs). Churchill threw back in the Navy's teeth the judgment that "the laws of nature put the battleship at such a disadvantage compared with the aircraft that I fear it will not survive in the evolutionary race." Throughout the war Churchill had deplored the Navy's preoccupation with a battleship fleet, which persisted even after the entrance of the United States into the war and the destruction of most of the heavy units of the German Navy. It was, as he put it, the result of an obsession with the battle of Jutland, a repetition of which "is certainly never going to happen." Some of the most uncomfortable moments for Churchill's military interlocutors came when he probed the war resources that they had or were claiming. A fine example of this is his reaction to the Royal Navy's submission of its manpower requirements for 1944:
Churchill's questions did not, of course, completely thwart the Navy, which managed to get along with considerably less than half the increase that it had requested. In a similar vein, Churchill regarded the products of the superb British intelligence system with a combination of interest and skepticism rare in political leaders. When the Joint Intelligence Committee suggested in September 1944 that Germany would collapse by December, Churchill disagreed vigorously and, as it transpired, correctly. The intelligence professionals of the JIC had, by this point in the war, access to outstanding information and had had the experience of five years of war in which to sharpen their judgment. After noting that the Germans had suffered approximately a million casualties in the first half of 1944 alone, and pointing to reverses around the circumference of the German position in Central Europe, they argued that Germany would probably not be able to sustain the war to the end of the year. They were proven wrong, as had been their operational colleagues. Churchill's acidic reply to the JIC on 8 September is a masterpiece of critical analysis of an intelligence estimate by a policy maker, beginning with the opening line: "I have now read the Report and have not noticed any fact in it of which I was not already aware." Churchill forecasted the attenuation of Allied logistics, the improvement in German fighting spirit on home ground, the adverse consequences of worsening weather, and concluded with the correct prediction: "It is at least as likely that Hitler will be fighting on the 1st January as that he will collapse before then." This is not to say that Churchill's military judgment was invariably, or even frequently, superior to that of his subordinates, although on occasion it clearly was. Rather, Churchill exercised one of his most important functions as war leader by holding their calculations and assertions up to the standards of a massive common sense informed by wide reading and experience at war. On numerous occasions his queries to the joint planning staffs resulted in answers of which he disapproved and which he could probe sharply. For example, in advance of the invasion of Europe he asked for an evaluation of the military consequences of using chemical weapons in support of the landings. "I want the matter studied in cold blood by sensible people and not by that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists." — This is the fourth in a series of excerpts on Winston Churchill from Eliot A. Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime. Copyright (c) 2002 by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by Permission of The Free Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. |
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hurchill,
of course, served one major function as a war leader by shaping some of
the largest decisions of war: for example, when to launch the invasion
of France, what weight to place on strategic bombing as a means of defeating
Germany, and how much emphasis to put on aid to the Soviet Union. But
undergirding these high-level strategic decisions, on which historians
traditionally lavish a great deal of attention, are other less visible
but no less important activities. They involve decision-making about matters
of detail — important detail, but detail nonetheless.
