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EDITOR'S NOTE: This is part five 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.
Knowledge of these messages, sometimes peremptory in tone but always pertinent and timely, quickly spread through the administrative cadres in Whitehall. They did much to confirm the feeling that there was now a strong personal control at the center. This stream of messages, covering so wide a range of subjects, was like the beam of a searchlight ceaselessly swinging round and penetrating into the remote recesses of the administration — so that everyone, however humble his rank or his function, felt that one day the beam might rest on him and light up what he was doing. In Whitehall the effect of this influence was immediate and dramatic. . . . A new sense of purpose and of urgency was created as it came to be realized that a firm hand, guided by a strong will, was on the wheel. The probing did not confine itself to questions of operations or military technology, but extended to matters of seemingly routine administration that, in Churchill's view, bore a larger significance. A fine example of this is the affair of the regimental patches. On 21 November 1942 Churchill, fresh from visiting the 53rd Division, wrote a note to the secretary of state for war reporting that he was "shocked" to learn that an order had been issued by the Army Council (the Army's senior leadership) banning regimental shoulder patches. Both the general
commanding the division and the commander in chief Home Forces expressed
to me their surprise and regret. There is no doubt that it will be extremely
unpopular and tend to destroy that regimental esprit de corps upon which
all armies worthy of the name are founded. I was also told that the Army
Council instruction was accompanied by a notification that no discussion
of it was to be allowed. Who is responsible for this? I fear it is the
Adjutant-General. If so, it would confirm much that I have heard of his
outlook upon the army.I hope you will give directions to cancel the instruction
before great harm is done. Receiving no reply, ten days later Churchill's staff reminded the secretary of state for war of the need to answer this note. Responding the next day, the secretary of state for war, P. J. Grigg, informed the prime minister that the order prohibiting regimental patches for all units save the Guards and Household Cavalry had been sent out a year ago but imperfectly enforced. Moreover, Grigg said, the Board of Trade had declared that the provision of such patches would "mean a serious further reduction of the already inadequate tailoring facilities to civilians." Characteristically, the prime minister then asked the president of the Board of Trade for details of "the actual dimensions of the demand on the tailoring trade" of providing cloth regimental patches for the army. In response, the head of the Board of Trade replied that one of his staff, when asked by the army staff (on 30 November — nine days after the original query from Churchill) whether manufacturing and sewing on regimental patches would be a waste of labor, had indeed replied affirmatively to the army's inquiry, albeit only "in a general sense." The official continued, however, that the Board of Trade had no firm views on what would, after all, be only a minor drain on the tailoring trade's resources: 85,000 yards of cloth in total from a national consumption of eight million yards a week. In short, Churchill discovered that the Army Council had attempted to hide behind an assumed clothing shortage to prop up a decision that was wildly unpopular with the army, as well as with the prime minister and minister of defence. The secretary of state for war next fell back on the argument that it would be adverse to good discipline to reverse a ruling on the basis of the prime minister's intervention. Churchill was not satisfied: the ban on patches had, he learned, been in place for a year, but enforced only in the last few months. Churchill's "Action This Day" response continued the dialogue with some pointed questions: "What is General Paget's [commander in chief Home Forces] explanation of the nonenforcement of this instruction until the order sent out by him in July 1942?" Why were some units favored with permission to wear patches and others not? He concluded: "I can quite see that the difficulty is one into which you have got yourself by making the enforcement of this wrong principle a matter of prestige," and declared that he would be willing to allow some lapse of time before resuming the wearing of patches by line units. Secretary of State Grigg made one last desperate attempt to persuade Churchill to set aside his interest in fostering regimental spirit through the wearing of patches (23 December 1942), only to receive a crushing reply five days later from the prime minister. Churchill noted that the practice of permitting units to wear patches had not hampered discipline, that the regulation stripping them off "ought not to have been settled by the military members [of the Army Council] alone. This was exactly one of those cases which affect morale and nationalist and territorial feelings, in which the parliamentary ministers should have been consulted." Moreover, the new regulations, which would have allowed some units (the Guards and Household Cavalry) to wear patches, but prohibited all others from doing so, would have detrimental effects on army morale. Churchill offered to take the whole matter up at the War Cabinet but concluded, "I trust however that you will not think it necessary to inflict this upon us at so busy a time." Early in the new year, the secretary of state for war submitted a new scheme for reissuing regimental patches to the troops. The case of the regimental patches is a revealing one. At first glance it looks like mere meddling by a military romantic, undermining the military chain of command and looking after details best consigned to soldiers. In fact, however, Churchill's intervention (as much in his capacity as minister of defence as prime minister) shows a far shrewder understanding of war leadership. First, this intervention must be set in the context of his concern for maintaining fighting spirit in an army which had known mostly defeat until this point, and the bulk of which had been inactive in the British Isles for several years — and would remain so for another eighteen months. In keeping up the morale of such an army — which was built, more than that of any other European force, on powerful regimental traditions and identities — the matter of distinctive patches and badges was no trivial matter. Secondly, Churchill realized that in such a mass military the attempt to protect even minor privileges for some units at the expense of others would be injurious to morale. Churchill, despite his aristocratic background, was keenly aware that Britain would become a far more egalitarian country after the war than it had been before it — and he did not find the prospect troubling. Speaking of the products of grammar schools (in American terms, public-school graduates) he said to his private secretary in 1941, "They have saved this country; they have the right to rule it." Even minor discrepancies in privilege were, he well understood, likely to cause discontent in a society transformed by war. Thirdly, Churchill had uncovered at least one bureaucratic subterfuge — an attempt by the Army Council to shift responsibility for an unpopular decision to the Board of Trade — thereby teaching a no doubt uncomfortable lesson to the military officers involved. Finally, it is noteworthy that Churchill did not merely order the restitution of the patches, but followed through, in a sustained exchange during which one argument after another crumbled under sharp questioning. Grigg did not merely yield to superior authority: he gave way in the face of queries to which neither he nor his military subordinates could provide good answers. It should not be thought that Churchill's questioning consisted merely of a bullying interrogation. Churchill's desire to see, test, and probe for himself led to escapades that may appear foolish (such as his crossing of the Rhine with Montgomery), but also to more than one important decision. For example, after a visit to Bletchley Park, home of the British code-breaking service, to see the cryptanalysts, he received a direct plea for assistance from a number of the leading figures working there, including the renowned mathematician Alan Turing. They told the prime minister that their work of breaking German codes was being held up because they were terribly short of staff and even basic supplies. The next day, 22 October 1941, Churchill minuted Ismay in an "Action This Day" memorandum: "Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done." Within several weeks seemingly intractable bureaucratic obstacles had dissolved. Churchill's uneasy relationship with his generals stemmed in large part from his willingness to pick commanders who disagreed with him — and did so violently. The two most forceful members of the Chiefs of Staff, Brooke and Cunningham, were evidence of that. If he dispensed with Dill he did so with the silent approval of key officers, who shared his judgment that the CIGS did not have the spirit to fight the war through to victory. As Ismay and others privately admitted, Dill was a spent man by 1941 and hardly up to the demands of coping with Churchill. "The one thing that was necessary and indeed that Winston preferred, was someone to stand up to him — instead of which Jack Dill merely looked, and was, bitterly hurt." If Churchill were to make a rude remark about the courage of the British Army, Ismay later recalled, the wise course was to laugh it off or to refer Churchill to his own writings. "Dill, on the other hand, was cut to the quick that anyone should insult his beloved Army and vowed he would never serve with him again, which of course was silly." One may compare, by contrast, the recollection of Sir Charles Portal, chief of staff of the Royal Air Force:
Churchill's relationship with Brooke was the most explosive of all his dealings with his military subordinates, but he and Cunningham, the First Sea Lord who replaced the ailing Dudley Pound in 1942, developed a relationship almost as tense. And some of Churchill's field commanders suffered particularly from his impatience, above all Archibald Wavell and Claude Auchinleck, the hapless commanders in the Middle East in 1939-41 and 1941-42 respectively. Although Wavell presided over a successful campaign against the Italians in 1941, his silence in the face of Churchill's barrage of memoranda urging action, together with the failures in Greece and in Libya, doomed him. Like his predecessor Auchinleck found himself axed by Churchill, and in large part for the same reason: an apparent reluctance to engage the enemy. The tension between Churchill and his Middle East commanders stemmed in part from differing perspectives. The prime minister was preoccupied with the sacrifices made to sustain the armed forces in the Middle East, including the dispatch of convoys sent at great risk through the Mediterranean; the local commanders saw chiefly the difficulties in assimilating the new equipment into their forces. Churchill, because of his awareness of the imperatives of coalition warfare — keeping both Russians and Americans convinced that Britain could and would bear its share in defeating the Axis — needed success in the desert. Local commanders saw chiefly the operational task before them, and pleaded for time. Churchill, an avid consumer of intelligence, particularly decrypts of Rommel's communications, knew just how badly off the Afrika Korps was (or claimed to be), which made his irritation at the failure of his commanders to crush the Germans all the more intense and, in retrospect, understandable. They, for their part, were mesmerized by an enemy crowned repeatedly with success. It was not enough, of course, to pick good military leaders: as a civilian war leader Churchill found himself compelled to prod them as well — an activity that occasioned more than a little resentment on their part. Indeed, in a private letter to Auchinleck shortly before the latter assumed command in the Middle East in June 1941, Dill warned of this, saying that "the commander will always be subject to great and often undue pressure from his government." Clearly, Churchill viewed as one of his most important responsibilities the goading of his commanders into action; and if Alan Brooke resented this pressure, he at least responded to it better than did Dill. The permeation of all war, even total war, by political concerns should come as no surprise to the contemporary student of military history, who has usually been fed on a diet of Clausewitz and his disciples. But it is sometimes forgotten just how deep and pervasive political considerations in war are. Take, for example, the question of the employment of air power in advance of the Normandy invasion. In late 1943 and early 1944 the Anglo-American Allies prepared for their greatest operation of the war — the crossing of the English Channel and the invasion of Europe. In this desperate effort, whose success was considered uncertain to the very date of its launching, few preparations counted for more than the deployment of the vast air power of the Allies to prepare the way for the assaulting forces. Not only did the Allies wish to stun the German defenders in the immediate vicinity of the beachhead: they thought it essential to delay, disrupt, and where possible destroy German reinforcements flowing to the bridgehead. Getting ashore might well be costly and difficult, but Allied planners worried no less, and in some respects more, about the potential for German reinforcements swarming to seal off the Normandy landing grounds, and even counterattacking in overpowering force against Allied armies pinned against the coast. Expert opinion split, as it often does, on the most proper use of both the tactical air forces (the shorter-ranged fighters and light and medium bombers of the British and American Allied Expeditionary Air Force) and the heavy bombing forces of the Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command. One group favored the employment of only the tactical air forces against targets in the Normandy area, while the bomber forces would continue their strategic assault on vital targets in the heart of Germany, including synthetic fuel plants and military industry. The best targets for the former would be road bridges and rail lines in western and northern France, to isolate the battlefield. Others proposed a systematic attack on the French rail network, which would prove crucial for the German forces. This second group urged the use of heavy bombers to attack the marshaling yards of the French rail system, on the theory that under repeated attacks it would, after a period of time, simply collapse. This seemingly technical military issue had, however, political ramifications because any attack (but particularly one targeted against French marshaling yards) promised to kill French civilians. Churchill therefore intervened in the bombing debate to secure a promise that French civilian casualties would be held to a bare minimum. "You are piling up an awful load of hatred," Churchill wrote to Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, insisting that French civilian casualties be kept to a maximum of 10,000 killed (versus initial projections of as many as 160,000). Reports were submitted throughout May that listed the number of French civilians killed and (callously enough) "Credit Balance Remaining." By the end of May German reporting indicated that some 6,000 Frenchmen had perished in the bombing — considerably fewer than Churchill had feared. "At the summit, true strategy and politics are one," Churchill wrote in The World Crisis. From a close study of his career, particularly his tenure as prime minister and minister of defence in the Second World War, one may learn just how inextricably the civil-military relationship and the formulation of strategy are intertwined. It reveals as well the power of hard, intelligent questioning, based less on professional expertise than on wide reading and massive common sense — the quality that Carl von Clausewitz described as the bedrock of military genius. Churchill's incessant probing was harnessed to his understanding of the war as a whole. Perhaps nowhere did this become clearer than in his effort, during the war, to mold the peace that would follow the conflict. It is in this light that one may best understand his desperate and unsuccessful arguments with the American high command in 1945. Even as victory approached, he later wrote,
Churchill saw early on the threat posed by Soviet Communism to Eastern Europe. (Already in the summer of 1943 he had informed President Roosevelt that the Soviets were the probable perpetrators of the Katyn Forest massacre of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals.) Therefore he pressed for the alignment of military operations with political action. His pleas for the Allied liberation of Prague and the thrusting forward of Anglo-American armies to Vienna and Berlin rested on a true judgment of the political value of arriving first in the heart of the erstwhile Third Reich. Even so shrewd a political general as Eisenhower failed to grasp this, at the end of March 1945 dismissing Berlin as "no longer a particularly important objective." Churchill achieved only partial successes (for example, through his intervention in the brewing Greek Civil War in 1944-45) in his effort to make the final, convulsive operations of war serve the ends of peace. By the winter and spring of 1945 his hand was weak; barely a quarter of the troops in Western Europe were British or British-controlled, and the Empire's financial, human, and material resources had been stretched to their limits and beyond by five and a half years of struggle. And yet, to a degree remarkable in the annals of war statesmanship, he struggled to have the final operations of the war conform to a broader set of political calculations than those which began the conflict. To these twin gifts — the ability to probe, and the ability to shape a larger vision and fight for it in adverse circumstances — were added the indispensable third, which even his sharpest critics concede to him. This was, of course, a mastery of political rhetoric, an ability to, as John F. Kennedy later put it, "mobilize the English language and send it into battle." He had other political gifts, to be sure. It is insufficiently remarked, for example, how deftly he managed to keep an all-party coalition together throughout the war, despite some bitter conflicts among personalities and in the face of more than one challenge to his authority. Even his speeches contained far more than the ringing perorations that are usually associated with them. It is often forgotten to what extent he described, with remarkable detail, the conduct of the war thus far and, without revealing future plans, the shape of things to come. Concealing no defeats and minimizing no reverses, he realized the importance of keeping as many people as possible "in the picture," as the wartime phrase had it. Still, Churchill's cardinal political virtue was his ability to touch the hearts of men and women with words that reflected his own unique and indomitable spirit. The British people, he later wrote about 1940, had the lion's heart; he was merely privileged to give the roar. He was, uncharacteristically perhaps, overly modest. He had many strengths as a war leader sitting in a Cabinet room or around a table with a handful of advisers. He had, as few men have ever had, the gift of composing trenchant state papers and penetrating memoranda. His art of leadership included, as we have noted, a skill at questioning and challenging professional subordinates that few others have mastered. But all these skills would have availed nothing had they not rested on a courage that, even at the distance of 50 years, is nothing less than magnificent. That indomitable spirit, when coupled with his skills at higher war leadership, made him the greatest war statesman of the century. — This is last 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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Churchill's pen (or, more precisely, his mouth, since he dictated almost
all of his work) emanated, throughout the war, an unstinting stream of
inquiries, probes, and questions to various parts of the government. Norman
Brook, a member of the Cabinet secretariat from 1941 to 1962 and secretary
to the Cabinet from 1947 to 1962, recalled the effects of Churchill's
queries.
