September 6, 2015

Finest Hour 168, Spring 2015

Page 31

By Michael McMenamin


ATD125 Years ago

Spring 1890 • Age 15

“I Had Built up Such Hopes about You”

In early June, Lady Randolph sent the most disapproving letter young Winston ever received from her. After telling her son she would not be coming down to see him at Harrow (“I have so many things to arrange about the Ascot party next week that I cannot manage it”), she got straight to the point.

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Your report, which I enclose is as you see a very bad one. You work in such a fitful inharmonious way that you are bound to come out last…. Dearest Winston, you make me very unhappy—I had built up such hopes about you & felt so proud of you—and now all is gone…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 wished. It is that thoughtlessness of yours which is your greatest enemy….

His mother’s letter greatly distressed Winston (“My own Mummy I can tell you your letter cut me up very much.”) but he owned up to the gist: “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.” He assured her, however, that all was not lost: “[T]here is plenty of time to the end of term and I will do my very best in what remains.”

100 Years ago

Spring 1915 • Age 40

“He Is in Paris with His Mistress”

Spring 1915 marked Churchill’s political nadir as he was made a scapegoat for the Royal Navy’s failure to force the Dardanelles Straits and the Army’s subsequent defeat by the Turks on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Yet [as shown in FH 166], Churchill had not proposed the Dardanelles operation, but the War Council approved it.

It is now commonly accepted that Churchill was unfairly made the scapegoat for the disaster that followed. Indeed, he was exonerated in 1917 by the Report of the Dardanelles Commission. What the Commission did not consider, however, was which men were most responsible for making Churchill the scapegoat. There were three. In order of importance, they were Lord “Jackie” Fisher, whom Churchill himself had, perhaps improvidently, selected as First Sea Lord in October 1914; Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative Party; and the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.

While initially skeptical of forcing the Dardanelles, the seventy-four year old Fisher became an enthusiastic supporter when on 11 March, the Admiralty learned from intercepted German messages that the Turkish forts at the Dardanelles were seriously short of ammunition and would remain so for several weeks. Indeed, the aging Fisher—who had never commanded men or ships in battle—offered to go at once to the Dardanelles and take command of the naval forces there. Fisher maintained his enthusiasm right up until he did not.

When he learned on 18 March that two British battleships had been sunk by mines that day in the Royal Navy’s first attempt to force the Dardanelles, Fisher dispatched four more battleships to the scene and told the War Council a loss of twelve battleships was to be expected in the operation. The next day Fisher learned that the head of Naval Intelligence, Captain William “Blinker” Hall, had, without authorization, sent a letter through British emissaries to the Turks guaranteeing to pay four million pounds if they agreed to a peace with Great Britain or allowed free passage for British ships through the Dardanelles. The First Sea Lord was beside himself at the possibility of being deprived of a glorious victory. As Hall later wrote:

“It was one of those moments when dropped pins are supposed to be heard. Then Mr Churchill turned to Lord Fisher.…‘D’you hear what this man has done? He’s sent out people with four millions to buy a peaceful passage! On his own!”.

“‘What!’ shouted Lord Fisher, starting up from his chair. ‘Four millions? No, no. I tell you I’m going through tomorrow. Cable at once to stop all negotiations….We’re going through.’”

In the event, the Navy did not “go through,” either then or later. When the British army landings at Gallipoli bogged down in late April, Fisher attempted to rewrite history by claiming that “he was against the Dardanelles and had been so all along.” Churchill wrote to Asquith that Fisher “has agreed in writing to every executive telegram on which the operations have been conducted; and had they been immediately successful the credit would have been his.”

Fisher had already shown signs of mental instability. Further evidence of instability came when Asquith sent Churchill to Paris on 5 May to assist in negotiations designed to bring Italy into the war on the side of the Allies. Fisher knew nothing of these negotiations but, when Clementine Churchill invited him to lunch at Admiralty House, the increasingly dotty First Sea Lord told Churchill’s wife, “You are a foolish woman. All the time you think Winston’s with Sir John French, he is in Paris with his mistress.” As Martin Gilbert wrote, Clementine “was stung by such a wounding remark. It was for her a sure sign that Fisher’s mind was unbalanced. She reported all this to her husband on his return, fearing that Fisher might break down. The Admiral, she later recalled, was “as nervous as a kitten.”

Fisher resigned on Saturday, 15 May, citing the Dardanelles and Gallipoli as a reason, and promptly sent an anonymous message—in his own distinctive handwriting—to opposition leader Bonar Law advising him of this. Bonar Law—whose hatred for Churchill had remained unabated since the 1912 Home Rule debates—confronted Lloyd George with Fisher’s resignation and threatened an all-out Conservative attack on the Liberal government’s prosecution of the war unless Churchill were sacked. Lloyd George proposed a Coalition government and Bonar Law agreed, his only proviso being that Churchill not have any responsible position in it. Lloyd George went next door to 10 Downing Street and persuaded Asquith to dump Churchill and form a Coalition government in what the Welshman described in his memoirs as “an incredibly short time.”

Unknown to Lloyd George, a principal reason he was able to persuade Asquith so quickly on such a momentous decision was that the Prime Minister was not capable of making rational political judgments at that time. He was heartsick. The previous Friday, 14 May, his long-time love interest, Venetia Stanley, whom he had intensely pursued for more than nine months—and to whom in multiple indiscreet letters, he had repeatedly violated the Official Secrets Act by disclosing political and military secrets—had advised him she was marrying another and would no longer write to him. “This is too terrible, no hell could be so bad,” he wrote to her that night.

Meanwhile, Churchill was summarily booted from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty and, later that year, chose to leave politics to fight in the trenches, convinced that, like his father’s, his political career was finished at a young age.

75 Years ago

Spring 1940 • Age 65

“This Was Their Finest Hour”

In spring 1940, as in spring 1915, the British faced another naval and military failure in which Churchill played a major role. Churchill had recommended mining Norwegian waters and occupying the Norwegian port of Narvik the previous September. Prime Minister Chamberlain and the War Cabinet, however, did not authorize such action until the second week in March.  Chamberlain claimed in a speech on 2 April that Hitler “had missed the bus.” In fact the Nazis were on an express train. On 8 April, before Britain could land troops in Norway, the German Army occupied Denmark and landed troops at six points on the Norwegian coast, including Narvik. As Churchill wrote on 10 April, “we have been completely outwitted.”

While British troops were subsequently landed at various places on the Norwegian coast several days later, most were forced by German troops to withdraw by the end of the month.

Unlike 1915, however, Churchill ultimately was not blamed for the fiasco. On 8 May, when he attempted in the House debate on Norway to “take complete responsibility for everything that has been done at the Admiralty,” Lloyd George replied that Churchill “must not allow himself to be converted to an air-raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues.”

By 10 May, Chamberlain was out as Prime Minister and Churchill was in. At the same time, Hitler had invaded Holland, Belgium, and France. On 16 May, German troops broke through and around the Maginot line. Churchill flew to France only to find that the French had no plans for a counterattack. On 20 May, after learning that President Roosevelt would not let Great Britain have fifty obsolete destroyers, Churchill wrote FDR, reminding him that while his government would never surrender, he could not speak for subsequent governments if Britain “was left by the United States to its fate.” In that event, he admonished FDR not to be “blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the fleet.”

During this last week in May, Churchill was also successfully beating back a determined effort by his own Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, to accept Mussolini’s offer to negotiate a general peace with Germany.

By 3 June, Britain had evacuated from Dunkirk more than 224,000 British and 111,000 French troops. On 8 June, Churchill decided to send no more aircraft to France because, as he told the French Prime Minister, it would ruin Britain’s ability “to continue the war.” On 17 June, a new French government asked Germany for an armistice.

The next day, Churchill told the House of Commons that “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war…. Let us brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

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