Advance Britannia: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1942-1945
Author: Alan Allport
Date: 2026-01-06 00:00:00+00:00
Description: The author of Britain at Bay—which The Wall Street Journal said may be “the single best examination of British politics, society, and strategy [from 1938 to 1941] that has ever been written”—picks up his sweeping social history in 1942, when what was once a regional war has become an intricate, globe-spanning conflict, with profound consequences for the British Empire and for a British people already exhausted after more than two years of fighting. “The Japanese, gone berserk, have struck in the Pacific, joined up with the Axis, declared war on us,” one British soldier wrote in his diary. “So
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

ALSO BY ALAN ALLPORT

Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War

Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939–1945

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938–1941

A Borzoi Book

First U.S. Edition Published by Alfred A. Knopf 2026

Copyright © 2025 by Alan Allport

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Published by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Profile Books Ltd, in 2025.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2025947438

ISBN: 978-0-451-49476-4 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-0-451-49477-1 (ebook)

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Cover images: (left to right) D-Day, Operation Overlord, Normandy, France, 6/6/1944. James Mapham/No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit/Keystone/Getty Images; Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower, 5/12/1944. Capt. Horton/ Imperial War Museums/Getty Images; V-E Day, 5/8/1945. Russell Westwood/Popperfoto/Getty Images; (toned paper) Patstock/Getty Images.

Cover design by Ariel Harari, based on an original design by Jenny Carrow
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Contents

Epigraph

Dedication

Maps

A Note on Money

A Note on Britishness

Introduction: Imperial Nightmare

PART ONE: We Are Going to Lose This War

1. Cataract of Disaster

2. Have You Not Got a Single General in That Army Who Can Win Battles?

3. What the British People Wants Is a Victory

4. I Am the Only One Trying to Win the War

PART TWO: Appurtenances of Democracy

5. Gone with the Want

6. Safe Passage

7. States of Terror

8. Mediterranean Cranks

9.‘People in England Must Do Something – This Is Their Empire’

PART THREE: Running Out of Steam

10. England Is a Village

11. Master Plans

12. Are We Never to Be Free of Damage or Death?

13. Kill Boche, Terrify Boche

PART FOUR: I Sometimes Wonder Who Did Win This War

14.What a Small Nation We Are

15. The Thought of Him Was Like Home and Safety

16. To Beat the System

17. ‘…Only in the End to Achieve Nothing’

Photographs

Bibliography

Notes

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Index

A Note About the Author

_154569606_

Deo gratias Anglia redde pro victoria

Dedicated to the people of Liverpool, and in particular Stanley Brian Allport, born 12 May 1941

Maps

The Eastern Mediterranean, 1942–4

The North Atlantic, 1942–3

Bomber Command Targets, February 1942–May 1945

The Indian Ocean in Crisis, 1942

Allies Launch the ‘Second Front’, 1944–5

Assam and Burma, 1944–5

A Note on Money

Throughout the period discussed in this book, the currency system used in the United Kingdom was based on pounds, shillings and pence, written as ‘£ s. d.’ – for example, £3 16s. 6d. There were twelve pence in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound.

From March 1940, the value of the pound throughout the Second World War was pegged at $4.03. This remained unchanged until September 1949, when the post-war government devalued it to a new fixed rate of $2.80. Not until March 1973, with the demise of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, was the pound ‘floated’ freely against the US dollar and other international currencies, as it had been back in the 1930s.

It is impossible to apply a one-size-fits-all conversion of 1940s wages and prices into modern terms because the costs of goods and services have inflated at different rates in the intervening years. As a rough guide, by the end of the war an adult male industrial worker was earning (including his bonuses and overtime) a pre-tax average of £6 1s. 4d. a week. His female counterpart earned £3 3s. 2d. These amounts were, respectively, 76 per cent and 94 per cent higher than they had been just before the war – though the real income gain of working-class families between September 1939 and August 1945 was rather more modest than this might suggest, because of the considerable increase in the cost of living and in rates of indirect and direct taxation during the same period. Fluctuations in the cost of individual retail goods usually depended on whether they were subject to rationing and/or government price control. Thanks to hefty state subsidies, the cost of a four-pound loaf of bread remained fixed at about 9d. for the duration of the war.

One of the things that characterised the British middle class of the 1940s – the ‘workers by brain’ rather than ‘hand’, as Clause IV of the Labour Party’s constitution used to have it – was that a family’s income was calculated in terms of the annual salary of the male head-of-household rather than any weekly earnings. Before the war, a sum of £250 or more per annum was customarily regarded as the minimum level of income necessary to maintain a middle-class standard of living. But by 1945 that line had become very blurred. The war had narrowed considerably the gap between white-collar and blue-collar incomes, while at the same time goods and services traditionally associated with a middle-class lifestyle had either become a good deal more expensive (for example employing a full-time domestic servant) or, in the case of something like private motoring, effectively impossible.

A Note on Britishness

The British Empire of the 1940s did not possess homogeneous sea, land or air forces. The Royal Navy (RN), the British Army and the Royal Air Force (RAF) were the principal fighting forces raised in the United Kingdom, and they and their complementary women’s auxiliary services – the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) – overwhelmingly relied upon personnel recruited and conscripted in the British Isles. The governments of the quasi-independent Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) maintained their own autonomous navies, armies and air forces, and during the war these Dominion formations increasingly began to operate as distinct entities – so, for example, a ‘First Canadian Army’, led by a Canadian general, served alongside the Second British Army in the 1944 Normandy campaign. The government of India managed an Indian Army which, while overwhelmingly composed of rank-and-file soldiers from the subcontinent itself, was mostly officered by white men born in the UK or with British ancestry. British colonies such as Rhodesia, Nigeria and Malaya had self-defence formations drawn from the local populations which were mostly commanded by white Europeans.

That said, there was nothing formally barring a Dominion or colonial subject – especially a white one – from travelling to the UK to join the Royal Navy, British Army or Royal Air Force. Many men and women from across the empire did, in fact, do just this between 1939 and 1945. National identities throughout the mid-twentieth-century British world were considerably more porous than we might imagine today. A person born in 1920 in (say) Darwin or Kingston might consider themselves to be just as ‘British’ as they were Australian or Jamaican.

This already abstruse picture was further complicated after spring 1940 by the attachment to the British armed forces of navies, armies and air forces loyal to the émigré governments of European states which had been occupied by the Axis powers – Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and so on. The men and women serving in these forces were under no illusions that they had become ‘British’, nor did they wish to be considered so. But they were usually outfitted with British-supplied uniforms, vehicles and weapons, and integrated into British military command structures.

From late 1942 onwards, British and imperial forces often served in theatres of war alongside those of other Allied nations, most especially those of the United States of America. High-level Allied formations in the later stages of the war were sometimes composed of units with several different national origins, though their putative labels did not necessarily convey this. For example, the ‘US Fifth Army’ which landed at Salerno, Italy, in September 1943 included a British corps which itself had three US Army Ranger battalions temporarily attached to it.

All of which is to say that I am fully aware that my use in this book of the adjective ‘British’ to describe military formations and personnel organised and commanded by the government in London is a very unsatisfactory one which does not capture their granular complexity. My excuse is a need for textual brevity. Where it has seemed useful to do so, Advance Britannia uses the term ‘Crown Forces’ to describe large-scale military formations composed of a mixture of British, Dominion, Indian, colonial and/or émigré units.

Introduction: Imperial Nightmare

‘My ideal is narrow and limited. I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour.’[1]

All through dinner on the evening of Sunday, 7 December 1941, Winston Churchill had been uncharacteristically quiet. He remained just as distracted when a radio was brought into the dining room at his country residence, Chequers, for the nine o’clock news. The usually loquacious prime minister seemed ‘tired and depressed [and] immersed in his thoughts, with his head in his hands’, as one of his guests that weekend, the American special envoy Averell Harriman, put it later.[2] As the radio bulletin went on, the prime minister did not seem to be paying much attention. The war news that night did not, admittedly, seem very interesting at first. The BBC announcer spoke of more fighting on the Eastern Front and in Libya. Nothing new. But right at the end of the bulletin – due to a bizarre editorial decision at Broadcasting House, it had been left as the very last item – the newsreader told his audience: ‘Japanese aircraft have raided Pearl Harbor.’

Harriman and one of his fellow guests, the American ambassador John Winant, ‘looked at one another incredulously’.[3] Not everyone knew what or where Pearl Harbor was, let alone its significance as the Hawaiian base of the US Pacific Fleet. Churchill’s aide-de-camp, Tommy Thompson, suggested that perhaps the BBC announcer had been talking about China and had said ‘Pearl River’. But then the prime minister’s valet, Frank Sawyers, came into the room. ‘It’s quite true,’ he said. ‘We heard it ourselves outside. The Japanese have attacked the Americans.’ Churchill remained impassive, not appearing to have taken in what had just been said. Only after a long pause did he seem to stir from his long, silent self-absorption. He raised his head, announced to the group, ‘We shall declare war on Japan,’ rose to his feet and headed for the door.

Before Churchill could reach a telephone, Winant suggested that the prime minister confirm the news with the White House: it might not do to declare war on another Great Power solely on the evidence of a domestic servant, even one as reliable as Sawyers. Churchill conceded the point and a call was put through to Washington. President Roosevelt quickly came on the line. It was all ‘quite true’, he told Churchill. The American Pacific Fleet had been attacked. The United States was at war.

After the two leaders had spoken for a few minutes, Churchill’s principal private secretary, John Martin, pulled his boss aside to give him some additional news. A Japanese troop convoy in the South China Sea which had been spotted by an RAF reconnaissance aircraft the day before had begun disembarking invasion forces on the north-eastern beaches of the British colony of Malaya. Churchill had been thinking about the mysterious convoy all evening, hence his gloomy reticence at the dining table. Now its destination and purpose were made clear. Whether to declare war on Tokyo was, it turned out, a moot point. As the president said: ‘We are all in the same boat now.’[4]

Throughout Britain that Sunday evening, other politicians and diplomats reacted with the same stunned disbelief. ‘We’re all astounded over Japan,’ wrote Oliver Harvey, senior aide to foreign secretary Anthony Eden, in his diary. ‘She must have gone mad.’[5] Harold Nicolson, the writer and aesthete who was serving as a junior minister in the wartime government, admitted to being ‘dumbfounded’. The Japanese action seemed ‘as insane as Hitler’s attack on Russia’.[6] ‘The Japs are in,’ wrote Hugh Dalton, Churchill’s minister of economic warfare. The surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor, not preceded by any formal declaration of war, would, he thought, ‘unite the Americans in one great warlike fury’. But the entry of Japan on to the Axis side would ‘lengthen the war by two years. We must now begin to make plans for 1946.’[7]

Millions of ordinary Britons were also taking in the news. Edie Rutherford, a Sheffield housewife, wondered at the ‘impudent little yellow men’ who had attacked the United States with such effrontery. ‘Just like their sauce,’ she thought: ‘I hope USA won’t use our kid glove methods but will go for JAPAN quick and hot.’ At a hospital in Woolwich, south London, Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) orderly Henry Novy noted that few of his comrades had much sympathy for their new allies under assault by ‘the bloody little yellow monkeys’ in the Pacific. ‘It’ll do the bloody Americans good’ was the consensus among the RAMC men. Meanwhile, in Bromley, Kent, diarist George Springett recorded his neighbour’s opinion that ‘They’re all mad. Well, let USA ’ave a taste of what we’ve ’ad – see ’ow they like it! They ain’t ’ad nothing to put up with.’[8]

The news was also percolating out to the wider British world at war. Major-General Henry Pownall was in Cairo, en route to Singapore, where he would become British commander-in-chief in the Far East, when he heard what had happened. ‘From our point of view it saves a lot of bother that the war should start in this fashion,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Our nightmare has always been that we should find ourselves at war [with Japan] with the Americans hanging back.’ Nonetheless, with his own ill-prepared command in Malaya already under attack, Pownall conceded that ‘I can’t say that I think this is a convenient time to have it out with Japan.’[9] Meanwhile, encamped somewhere in the vast Libyan desert hundreds of miles west of Cairo, Private Reg Crimp, serving with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, heard the news on the radio. ‘The Japanese, gone berserk, have struck in the Pacific, joined up with the Axis, declared war on us,’ he wrote that night. ‘So the Yanks are now our comrades in arms, and the whole world’s ablaze.’[10]

*

For the American people, December 1941 was the opening month of the Second World War. But for the United Kingdom it was just the twenty-eighth month of a conflict in which over 100,000 British servicemen and civilians had already been killed and the country had already experienced multiple military disasters, the collapse and capitulation of allies, deadly aerial bombardment, maritime blockade and the prospect of invasion and occupation. Pearl Harbor was not a beginning, but merely the latest episode in a bloody drama that seemed likely to go on and on for years to come – a gloomy prospect for a people already familiar with blackouts, bombing, austerity and the immense physical and psychic fatigue of war.

Indeed, there was something existentially wearying about the thought that there was now scarcely a place left on the globe not caught up in the fighting. Edward Stebbing, an ex-soldier living in Essex, wrote in his diary after Pearl Harbor: ‘So now the whole world, with negligible exceptions, is at war, and the prospect, which had begun to look a little brighter, now seems darker. One feels that it would be pleasant to be an Eskimo or a member of some other uncivilised community which does not know war.’[11] Kathleen Hey, a shop assistant in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, tried to hold back a private fear ‘that this war will never be won, it will come to a standstill from sheer exhaustion’.[12]

Churchill had not even been a member of the British government on that distant Sunday morning back in September 1939 when the whole tragic saga had begun. It was his predecessor Neville Chamberlain who had declared war on Nazi Germany in response to Adolf Hitler’s attack on Poland. Chamberlain, with his severe corvine silhouette and starched Edwardian wing collars, is a distant, antique, unattractive figure to modern eyes. He had become premier in spring 1937, and during the first two and a half years of his administration he had tried and failed to persuade Hitler to seek territorial redress in Europe through diplomacy rather than violence – a policy of ‘appeasement’ which posterity would condemn as a mixture of naïveté, timidity and fatalism. Yet Chamberlain’s views have generally been misunderstood. He abhorred war, but he was not a pacifist. Even at the height of his appeasement campaign, he always accepted that there were certain vital national interests for which his country must and would fight if necessary – the defence of British territory and the empire’s lines of communication and the preservation of Britain’s ‘liberties’ and its way of life. He was, after all, just one of a very small number of democratic statesmen who ultimately declared war against Hitler as a matter of principle.

Chamberlain went to war in September 1939 in a mood of gloom. This was not because he expected Nazi Germany to defeat Britain or its ally France. On the contrary, he always believed that if it came to a straight fight, then so long as it could withstand any initial Nazi ‘knockout blow’ the Anglo–French alliance, with its massive global reserves of money, manpower and industrial potential, would surely win. His fear, rather, was that it would not be a straight fight – that a war with Germany would not remain a geographically restricted affair.[13] His senior military advisors in the British Chiefs of Staff Committee (COS) had been warning about this ever since Hitler’s rise to power. If a war with the Third Reich extended beyond two years, then

Italy and Japan would seize the opportunity to further their own ends and in consequence the problem we [would] have to envisage is not that of a limited European war, but of a world war…without overlooking the assistance we should hope to obtain from France and possibly other allies, we cannot foresee the time when our defence forces will be strong enough to safeguard our territory, trade and vital interests against Germany, Italy, and Japan simultaneously.[14]

If such a truly world war began in which the British Empire was faced with a grand coalition of enemies on the European mainland, across the Mediterranean Sea and throughout the Indian and Pacific oceans, then Chamberlain still believed his country would probably win in the end, especially with aid from across the Atlantic. But the struggle would prove so exhausting that even a triumphant Britain, having spent all its reserves of wealth and strength in the cause of victory, would emerge relegated to the status of a second-class power.[15] That is why he had been so reluctant to get into another major war in the first place. ‘I must in any given situation,’ he wrote, ‘be sure in my own mind that the cost of war is not greater than the price of peace.’[16]

Having failed to avert war in September 1939, Chamberlain still clung to the hope for months afterwards that the conflict could be limited. ‘My policy continues to be the same,’ he wrote to his sister Ida that October: ‘Hold on tight. Keep up the economic pressure, push on with munitions production and military preparations with the utmost energy, take no offensive unless Hitler begins it. I reckon that if we are allowed to carry on this policy we shall have won the war by the spring.’[17]

Germany had built up an impressive modern mobile army and air force. But its economy was fundamentally fragile and (so Chamberlain hoped anyway) Hitler’s hold on power was precarious. If the western Allies could buy time, then the Nazi Third Reich might collapse from within – perhaps there would be a popular revolution, perhaps a court putsch. Either way, some more reasonable figure might emerge from the chaos to replace Hitler and a compromise settlement could be brokered.

It nearly worked. Hitler, too, understood that time was not on his side. Temperamentally drawn to an all-or-nothing strategy at the best of times, by spring 1940 the German dictator had decided that he must act with speed and boldness or else lose the war. He chose to mount a knockout blow in the west, thrusting his Panzergruppen, the small but well-equipped tank and motorised infantry vanguard of the German Army, through the Belgian Ardennes woodland to outflank the Franco-British armies on the frontier. By all rights, his plan should not have succeeded. His own generals expected it to fail. The much-vaunted Blitzkrieg (lightning war) of 1940 was an expression not of confidence but of desperation – of the need to try anything, no matter how reckless, to bring the war to a rapid end on Nazi terms.

Anglo-French incompetence turned what ought to have been an Allied victory into catastrophe. The German tanks broke through in the Ardennes. The Franco-British armies scattered in confusion. Britain’s ground forces on the continent, representing almost all the empire’s trained white soldiery, fell back to the Channel coast and were nearly annihilated in what was probably the one occasion in the war in which the UK faced the possibility of total military defeat at a single stroke. As it was, the Royal Navy got most of the troops back to England. France was left prostrate and alone. Its government capitulated on 22 June 1940. It exchanged belligerence with Germany for the sullen collaborative demi-alliance of the ‘Vichy’ regime.

By this point, Churchill, who had served for the first eight months of the war as First Lord of the Admiralty, had replaced the now-discredited and terminally ill Chamberlain as prime minister. The emergency meant the end of the ‘National’ government which had been in power since 1931 and which had been dominated by Churchill’s own Conservative Party. It had been supplanted by a much broader coalition which included members of the opposition Labour and Liberal parties in key ministerial positions. Churchill had created an inner executive War Cabinet with, at first, five members: Churchill himself, Chamberlain, the foreign secretary Lord Halifax, the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee and his deputy, Arthur Greenwood. The new War Cabinet briefly debated (at Halifax’s insistence) and then rejected the possibility of peace talks at the height of the Dunkirk crisis. Hitler’s vague overtures to discuss terms were ignored.

In fact, notwithstanding the debacle in France, Britain’s short-term situation was less desperate than it seemed. The Germans had no simple way to subdue the United Kingdom. Hitler’s core military strength lay in his Panzergruppen. He lacked the specialised air-sea power necessary to conquer an island. The remaining months of 1940 and the first of 1941 certainly did not lack for drama: a daylight campaign against RAF airbases in southern England known as the Battle of Britain; a night-time bombardment of London and other port and industrial cities – ‘the Blitz’ – that killed more than 40,000 civilians; and a submarine blockade of the British Isles called the Battle of the Atlantic. But only the last of these was ever truly dangerous strategically, and while the Royal Navy’s ability to protect Britain’s merchant shipping was seriously stretched for a year, the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) simply had too few submarines or ‘U-Boats’ to properly exploit its window of opportunity.

Hitler’s situation in spring 1941 seemed transformed. Yet in many ways his victories the previous year had not fundamentally resolved his empire’s basic dilemma. He now controlled most of continental Europe either directly or through obedient proxies. This was territory with a total population of 290 million people and a peacetime Gross Domestic Product (GDP) exceeding that of the British Empire and the United States put together. But Europe’s pre-war economy had been organised around a steady flow of maritime inputs from overseas, and these were now inaccessible due to the Royal Navy’s control of the sea lanes. Thrown into economic dysfunction, the Nazi-occupied continent was barely capable of keeping its citizens fed, let alone producing munitions orders for its German conquerors. The acquisition of western Europe had not resolved Hitler’s basic material problem but in many ways had made it worse.[18]

Frustrated by his inability to finish a war in the west he had only half-won, Hitler began to look to the resource-rich USSR instead. Stalin had, since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, been cautiously complicit in the German seizure of continental hegemony. Either he could be elevated to the status of full partner in the new European order, or – more likely, given Hitler’s murderous conspiracy fantasies about ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ – the Soviet regime would be the next victim of the Panzergruppen. Another all-or-nothing play beckoned in the east.

*

‘People ask me how we are ever going to win this war,’ the dying Chamberlain wrote in one of his last letters to his sister Hilda: ‘I suppose it’s a very natural question, but I don’t think the time has come to answer it. We must just go on fighting as hard as we can in the belief that some time – perhaps sooner than we think – the other side will crack.’[19]

Germany’s failure to subdue the United Kingdom by air and sea power after the fall of France meant that in spring 1941 there was little imminent prospect of Britain losing the war. That, though, was not the same thing as having a plausible theory of victory. Britain was not, perhaps, ‘alone’, as its national mythology would insist later. Even leaving its own vast overseas empire aside, it had inherited in the wake of Hitler’s continental conquests the considerable personnel of the European émigré armies and navies and air forces: the Poles, the Czechs, the Norwegians, the Dutch, and so on. But the fact remains that it was the only Great Power nation-state still fighting Germany. And in the absence of a major ally like France, there was no realistic likelihood of sending another British Army back to the European mainland. All Churchill could really do, then, was to follow Chamberlain’s vague prescription: try as many things as possible and hope that one or more of them worked. The RAF’s night bombers were dispatched to attack Germany’s industrial plant. A covert organisation, Special Operations Executive (SOE), was formed to encourage resistance and subversion efforts in occupied Europe. Amphibious ‘commando’ forces were raised for morale-boosting hit-and-run raids against the enemy coastline. The naval blockade went on. It was better than doing nothing. But it was a placeholder for a true strategy.

The fighting, meanwhile, was now expanding geographically, just as Chamberlain had always feared it would. Italy, buoyed up by France’s imminent collapse, had opportunistically declared war on the Allies on 10 June 1940. So far as defeating France was concerned it was an otiose gesture, but it had important implications for the wider war against Britain. The Mediterranean and Red seas now became battle zones, which stretched the RN’s already lean resources and closed the fast maritime route to India via Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. As a result of Italian belligerence, British ships sailing from the United Kingdom were required to round the Cape of Good Hope to reach Egypt, adding an additional 20,000 miles to every voyage and absorbing at a stroke one-quarter of the British merchant marine’s carrying capacity.[20]

Benito Mussolini’s intervention in the war did provide a brief fillip to British confidence in winter 1940–41 when the tiny, highly mobile British Nile garrison routed a much larger but clumsily led Italian force which had imprudently invaded Egypt from Libya. This disaster, though, prompted Hitler to send his own reinforcements across the Mediterranean, and the Deutches Afrikakorps (DAK), led by an ambitious major-general called Erwin Rommel, quickly exposed the British force in the Western Desert to its own embarrassments. Defending Egypt from Rommel was going to mean building a much larger garrison in North Africa. With the bulk of British Army troops in early 1941 still pinned in southern England in case of German invasion, however, most of the soldiery for this new force – eventually dubbed Eighth Army – would have to come from the rest of the empire.

Eighth Army stopped Rommel’s Panzers reaching Cairo in 1941. But building it came with political costs. The need to expand Crown Forces in the Mediterranean and Middle East had implications for Britain’s relationship with its colonial periphery: not just the Dominion governments, which wanted a much greater say in where their forces would be deployed for imperial defence, but also with India, which was expected to supply the most troops of all. The UK was fast accruing a moral as well as literal debt to the Raj which, in the long run, would surely demand some renegotiation of Britain’s terms of rule.

The war went on. Unbeknownst to the Germans, the British had pulled off a major signals intelligence coup just before the fall of France by figuring out how to read the enemy’s military radio traffic encrypted using the supposedly unbreakable ENIGMA system. By early 1941, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, about fifty miles north-west of London, could read most of the daily traffic generated by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) and was making inroads into Army (Heer) and Kriegsmarine messages too. The intelligence this generated (known to the tiny number of politicians and military commanders privy to its secrets as ULTRA) would, in time, offer unprecedented insight into the enemy’s order of battle and strategy. But, as the British would also discover to their chagrin, knowing what the Germans were up to and being able to do anything about it were altogether different things. Possession of the complete enemy battle plan for the invasion of Crete in May 1941 thanks to ULTRA did not prevent the British forces on the island from being thrown into chaotic evacuation anyway.[21]

On 22 June 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union – another event predicted by GC&CS, though Stalin refused to listen to Churchill’s warnings. Operation BARBAROSSA, as the Nazis dubbed it, was a military operation of a scale dwarfing that of their attack in the west the year before. The war’s centre of gravity shifted sharply eastwards. What this new front presaged for Britain was hard to say at first. If the Panzergruppen could perform a rapid knockout blow against the Red Army as they had done against the French – and in the first weeks of the campaign, as the German tanks rattled eastwards, taking Soviet city after Soviet city, the gloomy British chiefs of staff were giving Stalin a few months at most – then Hitler, having secured his supplies of grain and oil, would presumably resume his aerial Blitz on London and try to cow Churchill’s government into new peace talks. On the other hand, if the USSR could hold out, then Britain had gained a powerful co-belligerent.

Whether it had also gained an ally was less clear. The two countries had a long history of ideologically-fuelled suspicion. ‘I must confess to the most profound mistrust of Russia,’ Chamberlain had once said. ‘I distrust her motives which seem to me to have little connection to our idea of liberty.’[22] Churchill was no less instinctively hostile. He had once pledged himself to the ‘overthrow and destruction of that criminal regime’ in the Kremlin.[23] Until Hitler’s double-cross, the USSR had offered unapologetic support to the Nazi war effort. It had itself forcibly occupied eastern Poland and the Baltic States, consumed a thick slab of Romania and made aggressive war against Finland. The Labour Party members of the coalition government were just as leery of Stalin as Churchill was. But the logic of Hitler’s war-making meant that the British leader and the Russian dictator now had to develop a working relationship, whether either of them much liked it or not. It was Churchill, as it had once been Chamberlain, who was now forced to accommodate himself to the unpalatable prospect of appeasing a foreign tyrant.

*

The prime minister’s real hope had always been the United States, not the USSR. Five days after he had assumed his premiership, in the midst of the German assault through the Ardennes, Churchill had written personally to President Roosevelt asking for Washington to urgently provide ‘everything short of actually engaging armed forces’ to Britain – specifically mentioning forty or fifty destroyers, several hundred modern aircraft, anti-aircraft guns and ammunition and steel. Churchill promised Roosevelt that ‘we shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same’.[24] The president responded the following day. He said that he would give ‘every possible consideration to the suggestions made in your message’, but offered no firm commitments about ships, aircraft or munitions, and studiously avoided the whole matter of payments.[25] It was a message full of abstract sympathy and lacking any concrete commitments – a characteristic beginning to the relationship of the two men as heads of government. Churchill complained privately about ‘those bloody Yankees’.[26]

There was nothing new about Britain wanting to buy supplies from the United States. It had been doing so ever since the start of the war, though precious few goods of any direct military application had as yet arrived in the British Isles in May 1940, or would do so for another year to come – a testament to how unprepared the American economy still was for the mass production of tanks, bombers and warships.[27] Were the conflict with Germany to be a long one, however, the British Chiefs of Staff Commitee was emphatic: the maintenance of a flow of American supplies into Britain ‘on a substantial scale’ would represent ‘an indispensable condition to the successful conduct of the war’.[28]

The problem in the long run would be how to pay for them. Other trade partners which used the pound or pegged their currencies to it could be satisfied for the duration of any conflict with frozen accounting-book credits known as the ‘sterling balances’. The United States, however, expected immediate payment for its goods in dollars or gold. And by the end of 1940, Britain’s commitments to US manufacturers had already reached $10 billion, a sum far greater than its ability to pay in hard currency even had the UK liquidated all its American capital assets.[29] Chamberlain had always feared that reliance on the United States in another European war would end with a situation such as this, with British wealth and power steadily leeching across the Atlantic. ‘Heaven knows I don’t want the Americans to fight for us,’ he had told his sister Ida in January 1940. ‘We should have to pay too dearly for that.’[30] In September, Roosevelt did agree to the transfer of fifty old US Navy destroyers to the British and Canadians as a token gesture of support. But these vessels, totally unsuitable for transatlantic escort duties, added nothing to British maritime security (though nine coastguard cutters sent later were more useful) while the deal had to be sweetened by Britain handing over ninety-nine-year leases on territory in Newfoundland and the Caribbean. The Americans seemed to have got the better end of this nugatory ‘gift’.

In fact, in September 1940 the Roosevelt administration had still not definitely decided whether to provide any aid to Britain on a large scale. FDR’s chief military advisors, Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Harold Stark, still wanted to see firm evidence that the British could hold out against Hitler until 1941. There was little sense of any shared kinship or ideological sympathy between the two countries, at least as far as most senior American military commanders were concerned. They had been tutored for decades to regard the British Empire with wariness and suspicion as a potential enemy, not an ally.[31] Only in December 1940, with the Battle of Britain won and his own third election as president secured, did Roosevelt decide to overrule his advisors’ cautions and back the British.

The Lend-Lease Act, signed into US law the following March, at last relieved the British Treasury’s looming dollar insolvency by waiving the need for immediate payment on all future expert orders to the UK. This made the long-term continuation of the war plausible. But it was far from a solution to all Britain’s financial problems. Lend-Lease did not cover the massive number of export orders that had been already placed in the United States. So far as those were concerned, the Americans still expected hard currency payment in full. Throughout spring 1941, US warships continued to make their way to South Africa to collect what was left of the imperial gold bullion reserve.

A bigger question remained unanswered: what America would expect in return for its Lend-Lease largesse. The Act said only that repayment – the ‘consideration’ – could take any form which the president felt ‘satisfactory’.[32] Lord Halifax, now the British ambassador in Washington, approached Roosevelt in April 1941, suggesting that ‘the true and only consideration [FDR] should ask for all the goods that are to be lease-lent to us is simply that we should go on fighting’. Halifax’s argument was that even though the United States regarded Hitler as an existential threat to its own national security, it had so far declined to become an active belligerent in the war and had left the actual business of defeating the Nazis to the British Empire. The least the British ought to expect in return for this considerable division of labour was the writing-off of the debts it would incur in the process.

FDR, with his typically vague bonhomie, appeared to accept Halifax’s logic.[33] But the US Treasury and State Department did not. In July 1941, the British were presented with a draft of a ‘Mutual Aid Treaty’ clarifying the terms of Lend-Lease, including the expected consideration. Its Article VII said that ‘the terms and conditions upon which the United Kingdom receives defense aid from the United States of America…shall provide [after the war] against discrimination in either the United States of America or the United Kingdom against the importation of any produce originating in the other country’.[34]

As Churchill’s ministers could see immediately, this innocuous-sounding proposal had ominous consequences for post-war British trade. Britain had adopted an ‘imperial preference’ tariff system in 1932 protecting domestic and colonial markets from foreign, principally American, competitors. Maintaining these tariff walls after the war appeared to be vital if British manufacturers were to recover lost export ground in the unfamiliar circumstances of peace. The United States was demanding that imperial preference would have to be sacrificed to compensate for Lend-Lease. Alexander Cadogan, the Foreign Office permanent under-secretary, called it ‘impertinent blackmail’.[35] Even Churchill worried that ‘we are not only to be skinned but flayed to the bone’.[36]

*

His great hope throughout 1941 was that, sooner or later, the United States would enter the war in its own right, and that when it did the ad hoc Lend-Lease arrangement would be replaced with a much more comprehensive – and magnanimous – system of full Anglo-American resource-pooling. By attacking the American Pacific Fleet, the Japanese had, as Churchill put it, ‘certainly simplified things’. Hitler would settle the matter for good four days later by his own declaration of war against the United States. There was one global war now, Allies against Axis.[37]

During the dark days of the Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940, Churchill had promised the British people that ‘in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might’ would ‘step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old’. That promise had been delivered at last. The United States, with its huge population and massive financial and industrial resources, would henceforth no longer be merely a benevolent but distracted spectator of the European war but a full-fledged participant. ‘There is great satisfaction and relief that America is “at last in with us”,’ the British Ministry of Information’s Home Intelligence morale survey reported on 8 December 1941.[38] A follow-on report a few weeks later added: ‘it is now felt that American man and machine power supplies the “necessary means to certain victory” ’.[39] According to a poll run by the sociological survey group Mass-Observation, 63 per cent of Britons were glad to see America in the war. ‘We now have another strong ally’ was the feeling among the majority.[40]

As Churchill would famously put it in his war memoirs:

So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France…after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force.[41]

Yet those words were written with half a decade’s worth of post-war hindsight. At the time, the inevitability of victory did not seem nearly so obvious. The Americans might be ‘in’, but for all their resources it did not seem as though they would be in a position to do much about winning the war for a while. They had been caught totally napping by the Japanese, which did not instill a great deal of confidence in their belligerent capabilities. ‘They’re not educated for war,’ one of Mass-Observation’s respondents complained. ‘You think they’re nice Johnnies, nice suits, nicely brushed hair. But they’re not soldiers. They want shoving.’[42]

Indeed, the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor had elicited a certain amount of ‘malicious glee’ in Britain, as Home Intelligence put it. During the winter of 1940–41, Americans had listened to news of the Blitz on London and other British cities through their radios as they sat at firesides and dinner tables thousands of miles away from danger and privation, sympathising with the plight of their English-speaking cousins while doing precious little about it. Now it was the Yanks who were scampering to the air-raid shelters for a change.[43] The British would have had to be saints not to experience a little schadenfreude at this turn in fortunes. ‘They should have bombed New York…a few good bombs on the guts of them will do them all the good in the world,’ one unsympathetic Briton said. ‘The most yellow-bellied lot I’ve ever seen,’ offered another.[44]

The end of America’s ‘dithering and buggering about’ also raised a more practical concern.[45] Would Lend-Lease supplies be reduced as the United States looked to its own needs first? At the beginning of December, the British government had introduced a ‘points’ system as part of the overall food rationing scheme, which allowed householders to obtain a certain number of additional tinned foods, dried fruits, cereals and biscuits. Most of these items came from America. Would the number of monthly points allocated per head now be reduced as the quantity of transatlantic food imports was throttled back? ‘It occurs to me that our points scheme may not last long,’ worried Edie Rutherford on 10 December. ‘USA will have so much to do now that maybe she won’t be able to can food for us as well as her own people.’[46]

This was not an idle fear. On the night of 8 December 1941, the US Army suspended the transfer of all Lend-Lease aid to Britain. Within four days, 12,000 railroad carriages full of supplies previously bound for Europe were accumulating alongside the quays of New York City, the dockside authorities forbidden to load them on to ships.[47] It was partly Churchill’s fear that Lend-Lease might unravel completely that prompted him to rush to meet personally with Roosevelt in Washington DC within a few weeks of the Japanese attack. The issue was not finally clarified until the end of December, when FDR ordered all foreign aid shipments to resume without interruption on New Year’s Day 1942.[48]

Even then, many things that the British had hitherto been taking for granted now seemed less certain. At the time of Pearl Harbor, American dockyards had been working on 7 million deadweight tons of new merchant shipping for completion in 1942. Most of this enormous commercial fleet had been laid down to replace British-flagged vessels lost to U-Boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. Now the US services intended to appropriate the great majority of it for themselves. Henceforth Britain’s needs in shipping – and much else – were going to be subordinated to the requirements, and sometimes the whims, of the Americans.[49] Despite Churchill’s hopes, there was no indication that Lend-Lease and its troubling ‘consideration’ was going to be replaced by a more generous Allied cooperative scheme. If anything, the Americans seemed more grudging of and sceptical about British needs than ever.

*

America’s entry into the war had not taken place under nearly the circumstances Churchill would have liked. He had hoped throughout 1940 and 1941 that the United States would go to war with Germany and Italy. He had never wanted it to go to war with Japan. Expanding the conflict into the Pacific and Indian oceans had only created a whole new series of torturous problems for the British Empire. The Japanese, after all, had only attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in order to prevent it from interfering in their main goal, the conquest of the European colonies in Southeast Asia. A vast and vulnerable new theatre of conflict had opened up for the British, one that was thousands of miles away and which they were entirely unprepared to fight.

On 10 December 1941, Britain experienced its own Pearl Harbor when the only two Royal Navy capital ships in eastern waters, the newly completed battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the veteran battlecruiser HMS Repulse, were sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers off the coast of Malaya. The news reached Parliament in London at almost the same time as Germany’s declaration of war on the United States was announced. ‘The House is depressed. I have a feeling our nerves are not as good as they were in July 1940,’ Harold Nicolson noted gloomily:

The main factor of this declaration (which should have filled us with the springing hope and aroused tumults of exultation) is ignored. We take it flatly. The loss of the Prince of Wales has numbed our nerves…

I am full of faith. We simply can’t be beaten with America in. But how strange it is that this great event should be recorded and welcomed here without any jubilation. We should have gone mad with joy if it had happened a year ago.[50]

Much worse was to follow. Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) troops in Malaya and Borneo gained a firm lodgement, pushing back the colonial defenders. Burma was invaded on 14 December. Hong Kong was besieged and surrendered on Christmas Day with 11,000 British Commonwealth troops taken prisoner. To Sir Alexander Cadogan, the news was ‘frightful. Singapore is going to be a bloody disaster.’[51] Leo Amery, the secretary of state for India, worried that ‘somehow these Japs have asserted a sort of hypnotic moral superiority over us’.[52]

Singapore, the supposedly invulnerable ‘Gibraltar of the East’, capitulated to the Japanese on 15 February 1942. Over 85,000 British Commonwealth troops surrendered. The whole British position in Southeast Asia, once thought impregnable, had collapsed in barely two months. ‘One feels terribly depressed – more depressed, I think, than after Dunkirk,’ wrote one Tory backbench MP. ‘To be beaten and humiliated in this way by Asiatics is almost more than a Victorian Englishman can stand.’[53] The genteel, liberal but unmistakably white supremacist conceits upon which the Eastern Empire had been built seemed to be crumbling. The prime minister, as quintessential a Victorian Englishman as any still alive, could only offer a slim reassurance to his BBC audience that ‘This is one of those moments when the British race and nation can show their quality and their genius…when it can draw from the heart of misfortune the vital impulses of victory.’[54]

Oliver Harvey thought after hearing the speech that ‘in his usual style [Churchill] painted a magnificent backcloth’ for Singapore’s surrender. ‘But it didn’t meet the point which is that nobody believes the government machine is working efficiently.’[55] ‘Not very good,’ thought Cadogan.[56] John (‘Jock’) Colville, Churchill’s former assistant private secretary, who was undergoing pilot training for the RAF in South Africa, heard the broadcast in a café in Pretoria. ‘All the majesty of his oratory was there,’ he thought, ‘but also a new note of appeal lacking the usual confidence of support…there was something about his voice and delivery which made me shiver.’[57] To Harold Nicolson, the speech’s attempt to revisit the spirit of 1940 missed the mark. ‘The country is too nervous and irritable to be fobbed off with fine phrases.’[58]

In public, Churchill counselled optimism. In private, his confidence in his country’s fighting ability was deeply shaken. ‘When I reflect,’ he wrote privately to President Roosevelt, ‘how I have longed and prayed for the entry of the United States into the war, I find it difficult to realise how gravely our British affairs have deteriorated…since 7 December.’[59]

The British Empire was collapsing East of Suez and there was no guarantee that the Americans would willingly lift a finger to get it back. Roosevelt’s anti-imperialist sentiments had been made clear at his first meeting with the British prime minister at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, back in August 1941. The president’s son, Elliott Roosevelt, recalled later Churchill’s ‘neck reddening’ as his father had lectured him on the necessity of tariff-free trade for international peace. And FDR had gone on: ‘I can’t believe that we can fight a way against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.’

Churchill, the younger Roosevelt recollected, had looked ‘apoplectic’ at this.[60] The meeting had culminated in the announcement of the ‘Atlantic Charter’, a series of anodyne enough anti-Axis war aims which nonetheless included a joint US-UK commitment to ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’.[61] While Roosevelt had probably only been thinking about occupied Europe when he drafted this commitment, it did not take long before people back in Britain as well as across the empire were asking, as the Daily Herald put it, whether ‘it meant dark races as well’.[62] The prime minister was required to issue a disclaimer on his return to Parliament that the Charter’s remit covered only territories occupied by the Nazis, ‘quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the regions and peoples which owe allegiance to the British Crown’.[63]

A good deal of soppy sentimentality has crept into retellings of the wartime Churchill–Roosevelt relationship that has obscured their fundamental difference in outlook. The two men certainly shared much in common in background and temperament. Both were scions of successful patrician dynasties, born to wealth and privilege and an expectation of power. They were filled with confidence, ambition, ability and a habit of getting their own way. They loved language, literature and history. During their several wartime meetings they exchanged gifts, cracked jokes, teased one another and drank together long into the evening.[64]

Their ambitions for the war, however, were quite different. The prime minister’s goals were essentially reactionary. He wanted to preserve and restore the antebellum global structure as far as was possible, partly from natural inclination, mostly because to do so would work to the advantage of British power. He regarded the president’s understanding of imperial problems to be founded on the naïve sentimental anti-colonialism of American Revolutionary myth rather than a firm grounding in fact.[65]

But if Churchill was instinctively Burkean, Roosevelt was a thoroughgoing Robespierre, a world revolutionary. He had little affection for the pre-war international system and none whatsoever for the British Empire, which he regarded as an eighteenth-century anachronism, absurd where it was not unjust. To FDR, the war was an opportunity to sweep away the rotten old global order and spread the values of liberal New Deal Americanism. And he was not prepared to let ‘a real old Tory of the old school’, as he privately described Churchill, interfere with this ambition.[66] If he had anything to do with it, the war would end not with the conservation of the corrupt vistas of the past but with a blank canvas upon which weighty Rooseveltian brush strokes could be applied.[67]

In theory, the British and American governments were to be co-equals in all things within their new alliance. In practice, it was obviously only a matter of time before America’s vastly greater financial and industrial resources would translate into superior land, sea and air power. When that happened, Churchill’s voice would necessarily diminish. ‘If there is to be a partnership between the United States and Britain, we are, by every right, the controlling partner,’ the Chicago Tribune argued bluntly as early as 10 January 1942. ‘We can get along without them. They can’t get along without us.’[68]

Thanks to Pearl Harbor, Britain was at war across the globe. An immense aggregate of hostile armed force of the kind once feared by Chamberlain was complete and arrayed against Churchill’s empire from the St Lawrence to the Nile Valley to the South China Sea. A war on these terms, even with the United States as an ally, was going to take far longer to win than a war confined just to Europe and the Middle East. A longer, total global war would end with a redistribution of international state power in far more lasting and profound ways than a limited regional conflict would have done. In the long run, the United States would be the main beneficiary of such a redistribution, with perhaps the USSR as runner-up. The British Empire would be among the biggest losers regardless of whether it was on the winning side or not. Eden warned the War Cabinet that ‘we may sink to the level of a second-class power with all that implies…[an] agonizing collapse from which we should emerge as a European Soviet State or the penurious outpost of an American pluto-democracy’.[69]

*

All that was for the future, however. Churchill’s more immediate concerns at the beginning of 1942 were to avoid losing the war and to stay in power; the prospects for both seemed far from secure. On 21 January, Rommel’s Italo-German forces in Libya launched a sudden attack on Eighth Army. British operations in the Western Desert of North Africa had been one of the few Allied success stories of the second half of 1941. In mid-November, the commander-in-chief in the Middle East, General Claude Auchinleck, had executed a major offensive called Operation CRUSADER. It had pushed the Axis forces in Libya back 500 miles and relieved the vital port of Tobruk after a 241-day siege. Two of Rommel’s corps commanders had been killed and a third captured. The Germans had lost 340 tanks and 332 aircraft.[70] On 30 November, Churchill’s sixty-seventh birthday, he had spoken of the ‘astounding battle’ that had just taken place in Libya and cabled Auchinleck: ‘I cannot help feeling that we are forging steadily ahead.’[71]

The jubilation was short-lived. Rommel, though pummelled, had been able to withdraw from Tobruk in good order. Now he hit back at the Crown Forces, which were tired and vulnerable at the end of an overextended supply line. By 6 February, the British had abandoned most of the Cyrenaican real estate they had just captured and were digging in at a coastal hamlet called Gazala only a few dozen miles west of Tobruk. Churchill was vexed. ‘The reputation of the British Army now lies unhappily very low,’ he told Auchinleck. ‘We do not seem to be able to fight the enemy on even terms or man to man.’[72] Not that the Royal Navy was doing much better. Three of its battleships and an aircraft carrier had just been sunk or rendered hors de combat in the Mediterranean. British naval support for Eighth Army was, for the time being, non-existent.

As news of these defeats filtered back to Britain, people began to ask why their armed forces still seemed so unready for war after more than two years of fighting. ‘The truth of the matter is that we are still sadly lacking in war material and people,’ complained Sir Cuthbert Headlam, a Newcastle MP and an important figure in the northern Tory shires: ‘Not unreasonably, people are beginning to wonder why this should be so…Winston is too cocksure of himself and thinks he can go on carrying everything on his own back, and I don’t think the House of Commons will stand for this indefinitely.’[73]

On 12 February, George Harvie-Watt, Churchill’s parliamentary private secretary and his eyes and ears on the backbenches, warned him that the House was ‘perturbed’ by the war news and that ‘the usual critics…have raised their heads again and are now talking about a drastic reorganization of the Government’.[74]

That same day there was a naval fiasco in the English Channel which was even more humbling to British pride than the defeats in the South China Sea and the Mediterranean. Two small German battleships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which had been in Brittany since early 1941, had managed to pass eastwards through the Straits of Dover in broad daylight en route to their home base at Kiel. The Admiralty had long suspected such a ‘Channel Dash’ might take place. But thanks to bad weather, incautious procedures and blown equipment fuses, air and submarine reconnaissance units that ought to have spotted the ships’ departure from Brest saw nothing. The British were totally unaware of the German move until Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were sighted nearing the straits.

Hitler, when approving the operation, had told his naval commanders that ‘I do not believe the British are capable of making and carrying out lightning decisions.’ The response to the German move was a testament to his lack of faith in his enemies’ powers of military improvisation. Artillery fire from coastal batteries was desultory and inaccurate. A hurried attack by motor torpedo boats was easily rebuffed. Worst of all, a whole squadron of Swordfish biplane torpedo bombers was lost in a brave but futile assault on the German ships, with thirteen of their eighteen crew members killed. By dusk on the evening of 12 February, the enemy squadron was off the West Frisian islands and beyond the greatest danger. It fell to Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord, to inform an ‘incredulous and dismayed’ Churchill by telephone that the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had escaped. The prime minister was silent for a moment. Then he said simply: ‘Why?’ Pound began offering an account of the day’s catalogue of failure. But Churchill had already put the phone down.[75]

The Channel Dash was a cruel humiliation. For the first time in several hundred years, the king’s enemies had been able to take one of their fleets through the Dover Straits unimpeded by any effective British resistance. ‘Nothing more mortifying to the pride of sea-power has happened in home waters since the 17th century,’ said The Times.[76] ‘The event will deeply wound our prestige which has already been hammered and hacked by a long succession of failures,’ agreed the Daily Herald: ‘it will hearten our enemies and depress our friends’.[77] Invidious comparisons were made between the fates of the Kriegsmarine’s Brest squadron and that of HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse off Malaya. The German vessels had enjoyed a massive friendly air umbrella protecting them from enemy torpedo bombers. The British ships had not.

‘There is a general sense of irritation and unease,’ Hugh Dalton wrote in his diary. ‘All governments are judged by success and we aren’t having much at present.’[78] This no longer seemed like a mere spell of bad luck, but evidence of profound systemic failure in the national war effort. ‘There is a very marked decline in public confidence,’ Home Intelligence noted. ‘The public is said to be profoundly disturbed and angry…[the Channel Dash], which has been described as “the most bitter failure of the whole war”, appears to have caused not only shock, bewilderment and anger, but also a feeling of humiliation and disgrace.’[79] Cadogan called 12 February ‘the blackest day, yet, of the war’. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had ‘cockily steamed out of Brest and up the Channel in broad daylight and…we have been unable to knock any paint off them. We are nothing but failure and inefficiency everywhere…I am running out of whisky and can get no more drink of any kind. But if things go on as they’re going, that won’t matter.’[80]

The public’s faith in its leadership was shaken, too. Even staunchly Tory newspapers now openly criticised the prime minister. On 13 February, the Daily Mail ran what Conservative MP Henry ‘Chips’ Channon called ‘a violently anti-Churchill, anti-government leader’.[81] Nothing like it had ever been seen in the Mail before. ‘When Mr. Churchill’s government took office in May 1940, we believed a new start had been made,’ the paper growled,

No government in history has enjoyed such wholehearted support from Parliament, Press, and people. This confidence survived Dunkirk, Greece, Crete, and Rommel’s success in Libya. Why? Because all the reverses of 1940 and 1941 were accepted as the legacy of the short-sightedness and incompetence of previous governments…

But we are now in 1942. The disaster of Singapore cannot be placed on any other shoulders than those of Mr. Churchill and his colleagues…There is something wrong in our direction of the war.[82]

Home Intelligence noted that for the first time ‘the main weight of public criticism seems to be directed against the Government, and no longer excludes the Prime Minister’.[83] No one was immune from the nation’s censure – not even the man in Downing Street who had previously been regarded as beyond reproach.

On 6 March, three weeks after the surrender in Malaya, Averell Harriman wrote to Roosevelt:

I have been worried about the Prime Minister…although the British are keeping a stiff upper lip, the surrender of their troops at Singapore has shattered confidence to the core even in themselves but, more particularly, in their leaders. They don’t intend to take it lying down…at the moment, however, they can’t see the end to defeats.

According to Harriman, ‘astute people, both friends and opponents’ of Churchill thought his government only had a few months left.[84]

Some thought it had less than that. On 19 March the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the British Army, wrote in his diary that ‘Winston is drawing near unto his end.’ He had it on good authority that Churchill ‘won’t last much longer as PM’.[85]

Part One

We Are Going to Lose This War

1

Cataract of Disaster

‘The British Empire,’ Admiral George Ballard suggested in his 1927 book Rulers of the Indian Ocean,

may be roughly divided into an occidental half – including the British Isles – and an oriental; which are held together commercially and strategically by the Imperial lines of communication across the Indian Ocean; the whole being kept in contact with foreign lands throughout the East by the trade routes traversing the same water-space. If those connections are cut, the two halves of the Empire will fall apart as surely as night follows day.[1]

By the eve of the Second World War, two-thirds of the 13.4 million square miles of territory and four-fifths of the 491 million people of the British Empire were to be found in the vast arc of territory circumscribing and defining the Indian Ocean. It was an arc that stretched from Simonstown in South Africa up the East African coastline to Aden on the Arabian Peninsula; then around the Indian subcontinent and the Bay of Bengal to the Andaman Sea and the Malacca Strait; and finally southwards to Perth on the shores of western Australia.[2] The waters that defined it were a British lake. One-quarter of all the empire’s trade passed through the Indian Ocean.[3] British-flagged freighters, tankers and tramp steamers plied their lonely course across this ‘imperial Clapham Junction’ day after day, year after year.[4] Burmese rice sustained the hungry populations of southern and eastern India, Ceylon and East Africa. Coal from Bengal kept tender engine bunkers full across the Middle East. Phosphates from Christmas Island enriched the soils of Australia and New Zealand.[5] The Abadan oilfields in the Persian Gulf supplied the petroleum needs of the whole eastern world. British Malaya generated three-quarters of the global supply of natural rubber and two-thirds of tin.[6] Keeping the Indian Ocean’s conduits of raw materials, finished goods and people secure was the single most vital task of empire east of Suez.

A tiny coterie of white European soldiers, sailors, government officials, businessmen and diplomats directed this transoceanic imperial marketplace. By the 1930s, the world of the British East was starting to look, from the viewpoint of the home country, as out of date – quaintly ridiculous at best, offensive and oppressive at worst. It was a world of Punch, frangipani and sandalwood, thunderboxes and bathing jars, punkah fans, curry tiffin, orchids, gekkos, calling cards, rugger with the boys from the office and whisky stengahs in stiff, sweat-stained dinner jackets. Daily life in Calcutta for the Raj’s white patrician class was still ‘dressing for dinner, races, bridge, cocktail parties’.[7] Underlying this way of life was an obsession with ‘PWR’ – the Prestige of the White Race. It was upon the rock of PWR – rarely spoken out loud but completely understood – that the claim to British suzerainty over the Indian Ocean ultimately rested.[8] ‘Face’, as the writer Jan Morris suggested, ‘was all-important’ to the governance of the Eastern Empire: ‘If the brown and yellow peoples thought them invincible, [the British] reasoned, invincible they would remain: and so assiduously did they propagate this self-image that they had long come to believe in it themselves.’[9]

During the 1920s and 1930s there were signs that this self-assured, potent, conceited imperial civilisation was heading for trouble. Union organisers had begun to surreptitiously proselytise among the masses of plantation workers, coal miners and rice farmers, appealing to them to become sensible of their own power. In March 1937, 6,000 miners at the Batu Arang colliery in Malaya downed tools and formed a revolutionary soviet, halting the colony’s coal deliveries and encouraging another 100,000 workers in mines and rubber estates across the west coast to strike in sympathy.[10]

This industrial dissent was brutally smashed by armed troops. But even truncheons, legal curbs on trade unions and police spies could not crush new ideas altogether. An awakening sense of nationalist consciousness, fanning out from the South Asian subcontinent to all parts of the Indian Ocean world, was beginning to intrude on the bridge-playing, incense-scented idyll of the British East. PWR no longer seemed quite as permanent and uncontestable as before. The British fought back, using all the instruments of law and violence available to them. Over 80,000 Indians were arrested for political offences in the early 1930s, while strikes and protests across the Raj were broken up with gunfire and batons, leaving scores of dead.[11] For all that, though, hardly anyone, British or otherwise, had an inkling of just what a ‘cataract of disaster’ lay ahead around the next bend.[12]

Even the outbreak of European war in September 1939 did not, at first, greatly threaten the security of the British East. The only viable entry point for German forces into the Indian Ocean was south round the Cape of Good Hope. There were a few scares, to be sure. The heavy cruisers Graf Spee and Admiral Scheer made brief sorties into Indian Ocean waters. A few German merchantmen hastily converted into auxiliary cruisers were able to prey on commercial traffic east of Durban. The most successful of these, Atlantis, sank or captured over 100,000 tons of shipping before being hunted down by the Royal Navy. But these were nuisances rather than a serious menace.

Fascist Italy’s declaration of war in June 1940 introduced new threats to the Indian Ocean area. The Italians possessed a naval base at Massawa in Eritrea with submarines, destroyers and torpedo boats. But low fuel supplies in Massawa prevented their navy, the Regia Marina, from mounting a sustained assault on British shipping off the Horn of Africa, and in April 1941 the port was captured anyway. By then a new threat to Egypt had arrived in the form of Rommel’s Deutsches Afrikakorps, but the British – more logistically secure in North Africa thanks to Australian wheat and Persian gasoline – were rapidly reinforcing their Suez garrison too. For now, at least, they could hold the line.

The western barriers might be secure, but what about the eastern? In spring 1941 the Japanese Empire remained neutral in the European war, though it had formally allied with Germany and Italy the previous September. The temptation for Japan to exploit the weakness and distraction of the European powers in Southeast Asia by seizing their imperial territories, rich with the oil, rubber and metals Japan needed for its own war effort in China, was obvious. Japan, though a colonial power in its own right, and a ruthless, predatory one at that, saw itself as the victim in the East – encircled, persecuted, humiliated by the English-speaking nations. It did not relish the prospect of war with Britain, let alone the United States, which was expected to intervene in any attack on Southeast Asia. But it was resolved to it as the only alternative to its imagined capitulation.[13]

Any assault into the Indian Ocean from the east would first mean besieging and taking the island of Singapore – ‘the pivot of the whole British defence in that part of the world’, according to The Times.[14] Preparations for its defence against a Japanese attack had been going on since the end of the First World War. A great naval base costing £60 million had been completed in 1938. Twenty-one square miles large, the Singapore base boasted the largest dry dock in the world and enough stored fuel to furnish the entire Royal Navy for six months. Batteries of fifteen-inch naval guns looked out on the South China Sea to thwart amphibious landings. Any landward approach to Singapore would have to come down the Malayan peninsula; and this, at least according to Victor Bayley, author of the 1941 book Is India Impregnable?, could not succeed because ‘no army can march down the thousand miles of tropical jungle which covers the [Malayan] peninsula…it is a sheer impossibility’.[15]

But even before the outbreak of war in Europe, it had proven impracticable to spare enough vessels to create a permanent Eastern Fleet based in Singapore. With the Royal Navy pitted against the German and Italian fleets thousands of miles away by 1941, the prospect of capital ship reinforcement was even bleaker. Nor were the air and ground defences of Malaya in anything close to satisfactory shape. These facts were there for anyone who chose to see them. Many, invested in the myth of PWR, preferred not to. Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, commander-in-chief in the British Far East for most of 1941, dismissed the threat of the Japanese. He had seen their troops guarding the frontier in Hong Kong and they were ‘sub-human specimens dressed in dirty grey uniform’ who could not possibly ‘form an intelligent fighting force’.[16]

By the autumn of 1941, then, the war in Europe had only dimly impinged on the thoughts of the 28,000 white British residents of Malaya, happily convinced of the invulnerability of their own fortunate world. They read sympathetically of faraway bombed-out cockneys. They held whip-rounds to purchase Spitfires and played ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ on ukuleles. Some men did resign their posts to return home and join the armed services; most, though, were sternly instructed that their duty was to stay out East with their firms. Local militia units like the Federated Malay States and Straits Settlements Volunteer Forces drilled, though not with any great deal of urgency. Amateur firemen and Air Raid Precautions (ARP) wardens practised with stirrup pumps and stretchers. Rehearsal blackouts were half-heartedly attempted.

Back in Britain, the German bombers might be terrorising the East End. But in Singapore, St Andrews Cathedral, Raffles Hotel and the Cathay Building still stood unthreatened. At night, the Filipino jazz bands played and Cantonese torch singers crooned in the teeming dance halls. Lady Diana Cooper, perhaps the chicest socialite of the age, arrived in Singapore in September 1941 accompanying her husband Duff, who had been appointed Churchill’s minister resident in the Far East. The city was ‘pretty, feminine, rococo,’ she wrote years later, ‘so graceful and flimsy with its frail pink and robin’s egg blue arcades and quays garlanded with nameless fruit and flowers and paper intricacies’. Singapore had been lulled ‘into a euphoric coma’, she thought. ‘One might have been behind the Sleeping Beauty’s briar roses.’[17]

*

For middle-class Britons in Singapore – and almost all the white people in the British East were middle-class by design – life was a far cry from that of dull, democratic 1930s Britain. ‘It is a truism in Singapore that the European, however insignificant in education and background, does only those things for himself, like bathing, dressing, eating, which he cannot throw across to his staff,’ observed Australian journalist Ronald MacKie. ‘Shoes are cleaned, clothes laid out, studs and cuff-links put into shirts, suspenders fixed to socks; car doors are opened and shut, an umbrella is there to shelter him for five yards if he is caught in the rain.’ To arrive from the United Kingdom was to become a tuan – a master – and enjoy a ‘bloodless revolution in day-to-day living’ governed by ‘the power to have every demand gratified by shouting “boy” ’.[18]

Every wealthy European home had its Chinese amah (maid), Malay syce (chauffeur) and Indian kebun (gardener), with the master and mistress’s instructions communicated in a clipped imperative patois of Malay. Beyond the household there were, as the journalist Ian Morrison put it, ‘the relaxations of the club, a beautiful climate and a lovely landscape, an adequate salary and regular leave, good communications, a status unchallenged by native aspirations, and work that was interesting and rarely strenuous’.[19] The European standard of comfort in Malaya was uniformly luxurious, one chaperoned and cossetted experience after another.[20] Engineer Douglas Bailey thought that the resident British quickly became ‘dizzy at the giddy height’ of their splendid lives. ‘Women,’ he observed, ‘who, back in England, would have scrubbed their back doorstep weekly and travelled by bus or gone afoot, found themselves sitting beside members of society, mixing it with Malay Royalty, driving around in fine cars and giving orders to servants.’[21]

The novelist W. Somerset Maugham, a frequent visitor to Singapore between the wars, described the ‘nonchalant and careless air’ of the ruling British in their speeding motor cars and rickshaws, deploying their authority ‘with a smiling unconcern’.[22] Such a life satisfied ‘a latent instinct in us all, the desire to dominate,’ thought MacKie:

In the West, the clerk, the commercial traveller, the shop assistant are unseen, unheard, insignificant units in the general scheme of things; but from the moment they put their feet ashore at Tajong Pagar they are members of a powerful junta whose word is law. They are tuans with money, a car, cheap servants and membership of clubs where only their own colour kind are allowed. For the first time in their lives they have power, power to order and counter-order…[the tuan] is very conscious of his dignity and lives in a state of permanent intoxication, of self-created grandeur.[23]

For the tuans and their mems who came out from Britain to Malaya to serve in the colonial police force and the Eastern Cadetship of the Imperial Civil Service, or to work for the European banks and oil companies and merchant houses, all this power and comfort rested on PWR. Lording it over the 5.2 million Chinese, Malay and Indian peoples of British Malaya was the sine qua non of eastern empire. On the peninsula’s west coast rubber plantations, a paramilitary culture of discipline according to strict racial hierarchies was observed. Tamil workers had to take their hats off to the white managers, address them as ‘sir’ and parade at regular musters and roll calls where they were barked at by Ceylonese overseers.

Nothing encapsulated the physical and psychic separation of whites from ‘Asiatics’ in Malaya so much as the unbridgeable distance between the all-European Singapore Cricket Club at one end of the Padang sports field at the heart of the city and the Singapore Recreation Club, reserved for mixed-race ‘Eurasians’, at the other. Even the richest non-Europeans could not fully penetrate the barriers of race. At the Malay College Kuala Kangsar, ‘the Eton of the East’, the scions of high-born Malay families learned Latin, practised squash and deportment and trained for minor positions in colonial government. The merchant princes of Malaya’s Straits Chinese community, enjoying the privilege of full British citizenship, sent their children to Oxford and Cambridge and the Inns of Court as apprentices in the proconsular apparatus of empire. But they had no illusion that even their most fortunate of sons would ever enjoy full equality of status with the Europeans. Even the fabulously wealthy Sultan of Johor, who was pandered to by obsequious British resident ‘advisors’, caused a stir in 1930 when he married the white widow of his former physician, an artisan’s daughter from Stirlingshire.

Paying for the tuan’s luxury was the poppy. Tin, tea, textiles, oils, spices, rubber and opium: together they had all made the British East. But the greatest of them all was opium. Indeed, without it there probably would have been no empire east of Suez in the first place.[24] The British Empire at the beginning of the Second World War did not just tolerate the narcotics business; it ran it. Any curious visitor to Singapore could stop by ‘The House of Tiny Tin Tubes’ located on Pepys Road at the foot of Bukit Chandu (Opium Hill) in the city’s Queenstown district. At this state-of-the-art facility, built in 1931, black treacly opium paste, previously strained and boiled at a processing factory on nearby Keppel Road, was packed into small tin cylinders and dispatched northwards to satiate the junkies of Malaya. Over 450,000 of its inch-long tubes, each containing two hoons (about 0.75 grams) of opium, were manufactured and sold every day for about the same price as three-quarters of an ounce of pipe tobacco back in Britain. Great lengths were taken to prevent the 100-odd million tubes shipped out from Pepys Road annually from being reused with illegal non-government chandu. Nothing perturbed the imperial authorities more than the thought of Malaya’s 300,000 addicts – one in four of the local Chinese population – getting a fix without a kickback to the Treasury.[25]

Opium acted as a vital emollient in the management of the British colonial labour force. Many of Malaya’s three-quarters of a million industrial workers in the 1930s were Chinese migrants, mass-imported by contractors to swelter wretchedly in coal and tin mines in which the occupational death rate due to accidents could reach 60 per cent. The stupefying relief of chandu made such a life bearable. From the employers’ point of view, turning Chinese workers into addicts also offered the bonus of indebting them to the company, placing them in a condition of hapless near-permanent bondage. In the British Asian world, it was not religion which was the opium of the masses, but opium.[26]

The Victorians had been unembarrassed by their narco-colonialism. So far as they were concerned, the poverty and destruction it wrought were nothing compared to the virtues of liberal free trade. By the 1920s, however, dope-peddling on an industrial scale did not fit with the British self-conception that they were a gentle and philanthropic people. In January 1925, therefore, the British minister responsible for League of Nations affairs, Viscount Cecil, announced at a meeting of the Geneva Opium Conference that his government intended to work towards the suppression of prepared opium use across all British colonies.[27] A series of regulatory actions followed. In Singapore it became, for instance, illegal to buy chandu without a doctor’s note justifying its use for health reasons.[28]

The problem, though, was that such high-mindedness existed in tension with the income that opium guaranteed, at a time when colonial governments were strapped for cash. Malaya prided itself on being a wholly self-financing colony. But much of the credit for this lay with its chandu sales. On the eve of the Second World War, one-quarter of the Malayan Straits Settlements’ income was derived directly from its opium monopoly. Weaning the colony off its drug habit at a time of depressed trade and volatile rubber prices was not going to be easy.[29]

*

At the outbreak of the European war, Churchill had said that it would be a ‘mad enterprise’ for the Japanese to ever attack Singapore.[30] He still maintained that view in summer 1941.[31] Japan would not attack the British Empire; and if it did attack, it would not at first attack Singapore; and if it did attack Singapore, the island could hold out for months until reinforcements arrived; and in any case, any attack on Singapore would likely trigger the military intervention of the United States, which would alter all calculations entirely. Until the final weeks of 1941, he resisted all attempts by the chiefs of staff and representatives from the Dominion governments to have more military reinforcements sent to the British East to deter possible Japanese aggression. Tanks and aircraft were needed in the Middle East and the USSR, active rather than speculative battlefronts. Trying to deter a hypothetical war might cause the loss of an all-too-real one.

Much of this was sensible. Given that no one could know for sure what Japan would do (including the members of its own government, who did not commit to war until the late autumn of 1941), it was not unreasonable to assume the best and keep reinforcements flowing to more pressing theatres. It is not clear anyway that the military supplies sent to the Soviet Union could have been redirected to Southeast Asia, due to shipping constraints.[32] Churchill was right that if war did spread to the British East, the United States would become involved and grand strategy would be entirely revised anyway.

But Churchill was also bluffing himself. He was convinced that Singapore Island was a mighty fortress, capable of holding off anything but a ‘large Japanese army with siege train and ample supplies of ammunition and engineering stores’ for at least half a year;[33] in reality, no such fortress existed. There were no prepared earthworks, minefields, searchlights or pillboxes to oppose an amphibious assault on the landward side of the island. Along its seventy-five-mile perimeter, there was scarcely a single strand of barbed wire.[34] True, the naval base had its batteries of fifteen-inch guns, at least some of which could be turned to fire inland. But they were equipped with armour-piercing rather than high-explosive shells – useful against Japanese battleships, not so useful against Japanese infantrymen. To be fair to Churchill, his delusion about Fortress Singapore seems to have been shared by his chiefs of staff. Certainly, none of them ever saw fit to disabuse him of it on the several occasions the defence of the island came up in meetings in 1941. As Churchill put it in his memoirs: ‘I ought to have known. My advisers ought to have known and I ought to have been told, and I ought to have asked.’[35]

In fact, various tough questions ought to have been asked about Singapore in 1941. Was there any point in committing large amounts of military resources to defending it anyway? The key to the island was the naval base, but maintaining it for future offensive operations against Japan meant more than just clinging on to Singapore Island, or even the Malayan peninsula. To prevent the base from being neutralised by enemy air attack, all the territory within a roughly 300-mile radius would have to be kept out of Japanese hands. That included much of the Netherlands East Indies, which the Dutch were in no position to defend properly in 1941, never mind the British.[36]

Malaya had value, to be sure: its mines and plantations earned vital dollars for the British sterling area.[37] Holding the Straits of Johor kept the Japanese from launching naval raids into the Indian Ocean. Losing these would be a bitter pill to swallow, but it would not be a fatal one. The lines of communication to India and Australia could be protected from bases further west. If Singapore could not be defended properly, perhaps it was best not to try to defend it at all.

But emotional capital was at stake. Vast sums of money had been spent on the naval base between the wars. To abandon it without a serious fight would be a humiliation for the government of the day, regardless of whether it was really of any use or not.[38] And what of the Australians and New Zealanders? They had been repeatedly assured that Britain would spare no sacrifice to defend them – London ‘could never stand by and see a British Dominion overwhelmed by a yellow race’, Churchill had insisted.[39] But the defence of Australia and New Zealand had become inextricably linked in their peoples’ minds with the defence of Malaya.[40] There was no inherent reason: Singapore was, after all, 2,000 miles from Darwin. But the connection was there, and any sign of abandoning the straits would have provoked fury from the Dominions. ‘Singapore has got to be held, for to lose it may mean losing Australia, if not New Zealand,’ noted Henry Pownall. ‘I don’t mean losing them to the Japanese, but to the Empire, for they will think themselves let down by HMG.’[41] The Prestige of the White Race was what mattered – and, like opium, it was a hell of a drug.

*

War arrived in Singapore in the early hours of Monday, 8 December 1941.[42] The city could scarcely have been less prepared. No one was manning ARP headquarters. Despite warning by radar, the streets below the raiders were brilliantly lit. No blackout had been properly rehearsed, and the municipal employee with the key to turn off the electric power could not be found.[43] Bombs fell in the Raffles Place shopping arcades and Chinatown, killing sixty-one people. Thousands of Singaporeans turned out after dawn to gape at the burning buildings and the broken turf on the Padang.[44] ‘A languid, lazy, and lackadaisical world’, as one Raffles College student put it, had been given notice its end was coming.[45]

This was shocking enough, but a far more stupefying disaster was just days ahead. On Wednesday afternoon, rumours spread across the city that ‘Force Z’ – the King George V–class battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, both of which had arrived at the naval base on 2 December, to much fanfare – had been sunk off the coast of eastern Malaya by Japanese bombers. BBC radio confirmed the news that evening. ‘I still remember the chill sense of calamity which was caused by the loss of those two ships,’ wrote Ian Morrison afterwards: ‘It was worse than calamity. It was a calamity which had the premonition of further calamity…blown clear away at one fell swoop was one of the main pillars on which our sense of security rested.’[46]

The only Royal Navy capital ship squadron in the Far East was gone. It was the single worst British naval disaster of the war. Eight hundred and forty sailors were killed, including Force Z’s commander, Admiral Sir Tom Phillips. Churchill has long been the historians’ whipping boy for what happened, and it is true that he had originally proposed the creation of Force Z. In late August 1941, the prime minister had suggested the Admiralty send a ‘small but very powerful and fast force’ to Singapore. A larger balanced fleet that could plausibly rebuff a Japanese attack, the kind that the naval base had originally been built for, was out of the question. But perhaps a squadron like Force Z might at least act as a political deterrent.[47]

In that sense, then, Churchill’s fingermarks were all over the plan. But the idea that, in the event of hostilities, Prince of Wales and Repulse would steam heedlessly into the Gulf of Siam without adequate air cover never occurred to him. The decision to speed northwards to aggressively seek out and destroy a Japanese invasion fleet had been that of the Admiralty and Phillips himself – a ‘dramatic, almost reckless’ expansion of Force Z’s original mission.[48]

Bad luck, as it turned out, doomed the two ships as much as bad strategy. Prince of Wales’s state-of-the-art anti-aircraft (AA) fire control radar, which had worked so well in Atlantic conditions, became unserviceable in Malaya’s tropical humidity. On the day of the Japanese attack, a single catastrophic torpedo hit on her port propellor shaft, crippled her steering, shut down her electrical power and flooded her with thousands of tons of seawater, leaving her almost defenceless. The older Repulse held out longer, dodging nineteen torpedoes before finally succumbing to a fatal aerial pincer attack. It was a poignant if futile demonstration of courage, recognised as such by the victors. The day after the two ships went under, a Japanese plane dropped a wreath at the site of the battle as a nod to the bravery of Force Z’s officers and seamen.

Japanese ground forces, meanwhile, had landed on the coast of eastern Malaya and crossed the Thai–Malay border to the west.[49] Lieutenant-General Yamashita Tomoyuki, commander of the Japanese Twenty-Fifth Army, believed that speed and aggression rather than weight of numbers or depth of logistics would decide the fate of Malaya. He had deliberately gambled on leaving behind one of his divisions from the invading force to keep it fast and lean. He was willing to push his advance southwards faster than his lines of communication could extend, trusting that his units could supply themselves from captured enemy materiel.[50] Contrary to popular belief, Yamashita’s troops started the campaign with no more experience of jungle fighting than their British opponents, but they were seasoned veterans of the war in China. Plus, Yamashita had brought 265 light and medium tanks with him, rightly expecting that they would be critical to maintaining rapid progress down the Malay Peninsula.[51]

Yamashita, who was going to prove himself to be one of the most formidable Axis generals of the war, was a physically imposing man of bull-like build. His opposite number, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Malaya, could scarcely have been a more different physical specimen. Over six feet tall and permanently stooped, with protruding front teeth, a weak jaw and a noticeable lisp, he represented the cartoon cliché of a knock-kneed upper-class English twit. Percival’s unprepossessing form has likely contributed to the assumption that he was hopelessly out of his depth in Malaya. Ian Morrison, who met him, thought Percival had ‘considerable personal charm’ but was ‘a completely negative person, with no vigour, no colour, and no conviction’.[52] Duff Cooper warned Churchill that for Percival ‘it is all a field day at Aldershot…he is always waiting for the umpire’s whistle to cease-fire’.[53]

Still, Percival was fit, active, bright, determined and unflappable. His personal bravery could not be doubted: he had received a Military Cross for combat action on the Somme, where he had been badly wounded.[54] As an intelligence officer in West Cork during the Irish War of Independence between 1919 and 1921, Percival was loathed by the local Catholic population for his brutal interrogation methods. The IRA had put a £1,000 price on his head. After leaving Ireland, Percival had been a staff officer rather than a field commander. But in the late 1930s he had been posted to Malaya for twenty months, and so he was no stranger to its unique defence problems. Indeed, he had written to his superiors at length before the war, warning about the danger of a Japanese land attack on the Singapore naval base. Percival was not going to distinguish himself in the campaign to come, but it is unfair to place all the blame for what happened to Malaya on him personally. The failure was systemic. As the military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet later put it, ‘If we had had our best general out there it would have made no difference.’[55]

Percival had ten infantry brigades (six Indian, two Australian and two mixed British-Malay) at the outset of the campaign, to Yamashita’s six – but pre-war estimates had calculated that any sound defence of Malaya would need at least fifteen.[56] His strategic dilemma was that, while he enjoyed overall numerical superiority over the Japanese, he had no way of being able to take advantage of this by concentration of force. Only limited troops could be put in the north of the peninsula, where the enemy were likely to land first. The destruction of Force Z meant that the Japanese could always threaten to cut off British troops on the Thai border by an amphibious invasion further south. But abandoning the north and focusing on the defence of Johore and Singapore Island was not an option either; that would mean ceding the RAF’s many northern airfields to the Japanese Air Force and putting the naval base in such danger from bombing as to make it unusable. Percival had little choice but to scatter his troops across his command area. Plus, he had no tanks. Indeed, many of his Indian troops had never even seen one.[57]

The 14,000 officers and men of the 11th Indian Infantry Division, defending a prepared position at Jitra in the Kedah Sultanate in north-west Malaya, stood athwart the main Japanese line of advance. The encounter at Jitra from 11 to 13 December 1941 has been described by military historians as ‘an appalling setback’ and ‘a disgrace’. An attacking force of fewer than 1,500 Japanese infantry, supported by a single tank company, ploughed its way through the defenders in a matter of hours. The surviving troops of the division were forced to flee in disarray southwards on the trunk highway – ‘a pitiful sight’, according to one observer.[58]

Jitra demonstrated what were to be depressingly consistent features of the British campaign in Malaya over the weeks to come. Crown Forces had been trained to fight static, highly choreographed First-World-War-style battles. They could put up a decent enough fixed defence against an enemy attacking head-on. But, if overrun or outflanked, they quickly crumbled and panicked. British-led troops were wretched at night fighting and bewildered and frightened by the jungle. ‘It was utterly different from the fighting in Africa, where the spaces were wide and open and you could see your enemy,’ as one veteran of the Western Desert war put it: ‘In this jungle fighting, the first you knew of his enemy was when he fired at you from out of a thick clump of bushes fifty yards away. You did not know where he was. He might be to the side of you, behind you, up a tree actually above you.’[59]

Yamashita’s chief of staff had estimated that the enemy troops at Jitra ought to be able to hold out for three months if they fought well. In fact, they collapsed in fifteen hours. The victorious Japanese gorged themselves on stockpiles of food and military equipment left by the fleeing defenders – ‘Churchill supplies’, as they soon dubbed them.[60]

The collapse at Jitra meant that all the other defending brigades in the north had to withdraw too, to avoid being surrounded. This required them to abandon the RAF’s northern airfields – not that there were many RAF planes left by this stage. The imperial air defence of Malaya at the start of the campaign had consisted of four squadrons of Brewster Buffalo fighters, inferior to the latest Japanese designs like the Ki-43 ‘Oscar’, and ninety or so level and torpedo bombers, including such superannuated museum pieces as the Vickers Vildebeest biplane, which had first flown in 1928. Japanese bombing and strafing on the first day of the attack eliminated most of this force while they were still parked on the runways. Thereafter the invaders possessed almost total air superiority. The RAF’s last hurrah of the campaign was a daylight attack by two squadrons of Vildebeests on a Japanese amphibious force at Endau, south-eastern Malaya, on 26 January 1942. The languorous torpedo bombers, with no adequate escort, were savaged by enemy fighters.

Yamashita’s troops continued to demolish much larger British forces. To be sure, not everything went their way. A few thousand survivors of Jitra, hastily reorganised into ad hoc brigades, were able to hold up the Japanese at Kampar on New Year’s Eve – even now, a well-organised defence with fierce artillery support could deliver an unexpectedly nasty rebuttal. But everything fell apart again at Slim River on 7 January – ‘a fiasco’, according to one chronicler of the campaign – when 1,000 Japanese infantry and thirty tanks broke 11th Indian Infantry Division a second time in the space of a few hours, capturing about 3,000 prisoners in exchange for barely 150 casualties of their own.[61] The Japanese were experts at hooking around prepared British positions and building roadblocks to their rear, cutting off the confused defenders from their own supply lines.

Debacle after debacle, as well as a growing sense that their superior officers had no idea what they were doing, began to paralyse Malaya’s defenders. The ‘general atmosphere of ill preparation…indecision and sheer tactical incompetence seems as suffocating now as it was demoralising to the troops at the time’, historian David Fraser wrote years later.[62] An obsession with spies, fifth columnists and enemy soldiers dressed as native civilians – a mania characteristic of an army in disintegration – now preoccupied unit intelligence officers. It did not help that most newly arrived British military personnel had no idea how to distinguish Malay, Chinese and Japanese faces. A few individual units, such as the 2nd Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, better trained in jungle warfare than was typical, fought well to the end. For most of the Crown rank and file, however, the focus of the campaign had by this point become not victory but how to get out of Malaya alive.

Kuala Lumpur fell to the Japanese on 11 January. The British had abandoned it and its non-white citizens to their fate four days earlier, burning what they could. Fifty-one million cigarettes, $50,000 worth of whisky and 800 tons of meat are said to have been consigned to the flames. What was left was ceded to the mob.[63] ‘The streets were knee-deep in boxes and cardboard cartons and paper. Looters could be seen carrying every imaginable prize away with them,’ Ian Morrison wrote later:

Here was one man with a Singer sewing-machine over his shoulder, there a Chinese with a long roll of linoleum tied on to the back of his bicycle; here two Tamils with a great sack of rice suspended from a pole, there a young Tamil struggling along with a box of the best Norwegian sardines. Radios, rolls of cloth, tins of preserved food, furniture, telephones, carpets, golf clubs…one man had even brought an ox-cart into town and was loading it up in the main street outside Whiteways.[64]

To the south, the trunk highway through Johore and across the causeway on to Singapore Island had become choked with refugees and soldiers fleeing the Japanese advance. Some of the army lorries, it was noted by witnesses, were packed high with plunder, including carpets, rattan chairs, golf clubs, tennis rackets and caged birds.[65] On the island itself, many white residents had maintained a breezy dispassion about the campaign, despite the air raids and the rumours of defeats to the north. In the early weeks it had still been possible to play cricket on the Padang and sing church hymns and attend tea dances at Raffles as though nothing unexpected were occurring. Now this blasé attitude gave way to a sobering urgency. The population of the island doubled to a million. Up-country evacuees told stories of ‘panic, breakdown, idiocy, lack of defence and of discipline, native police running amok and looting whisky’.[66] Herds of Bali cattle wrangled from the mainland grazed surreally on the Royal Singapore Golf Course.[67]

By this point, Churchill had finally been informed that ‘Fortress Singapore’ did not exist. ‘It never occurred to me for a moment’ that there were no landward defences, he said, horrified. What, he complained to the chiefs of staff, ‘is the use of having an island for a fortress if it is not to be made into a citadel?’[68] But the point was moot: the question was what to do now. The prime minister was inclined to accept Singapore as doomed. On 21 January he proposed redirecting reinforcements away from the Johore Strait to somewhere they might be more useful, such as Burma, which the Japanese had also invaded in December. Whether or not this was militarily sound, imperial politics intervened to quash the idea. John Curtin, the Australian prime minister, was informed by his minister resident in London that Churchill was considering abandoning Singapore. A ferocious telegram was dispatched to Downing Street saying this would be an ‘inexcusable betrayal’ of his countrymen and women. The failure for many years to separate the fate of Singapore with the fate of their own country in the minds of Australians now bore bitter fruit. Churchill backed down. No proper discussion about military priorities even took place.[69]

Troops kept arriving in Singapore, even as the campaign entered its last days. The 18th Infantry Division, a Territorial Army unit recruited predominantly in Cambridgeshire and East Anglia, had been rounding the South African Cape en route to the Middle East by convoy when the Japanese attacked Malaya. It had been immediately diverted to Singapore, along with an Indian infantry brigade and 9,000 Indian and Australian replacement troops, most of whom were arriving from basic training camps. These reinforcements started disembarking in mid-January. Whatever advantage they might have afforded Percival if they had been sent before the campaign opened was moot, for they were precious little use now. The 18th Division was trained and equipped for open warfare in the Western Desert, not jungle fighting. It arrived in Singapore in confusion, lacking its artillery or transport. The men had little time even to acclimatise to the humid local environment before being thrown into the battle. Troopships were still pulling up to the quaysides on 13 February, by which time Singapore was shrouded in black smoke from continual air raids, and the naval base for which the whole campaign was being fought was a burning shambles, having been demolished by the Royal Navy.

On 31 January, sappers blew up the causeway across the Johore Strait. The headmaster of Raffles College, hearing the noise, asked his students what had happened. A young student called Lee Kuan Yew – later Singapore’s first prime minister – supposedly replied: ‘That’s the end of the British Empire.’[70]

‘Always, when I think of Singapore during its final days,’ wrote Ian Morrison afterwards, ‘I think of the fires and the clouds of smoke that hung over the city.’[71] The last RAF aircraft were evacuated to Sumatra on 9 February. Japanese warplanes now roamed at will above Singapore’s streets. Bodies accumulated along the roadways, unmourned and uncollected. In the basement of the Cathay Cinema, a sprawling Art Deco building only opened to the public two years before, rich and poor civilians huddled together, rather like the Londoners on Tube station platforms they had once seen in newsreels of the Blitz. Others met in Raffles Place to consume the city’s alcohol supply, which was being hurriedly destroyed to deny it to the Japanese. Gangs of uniformed stragglers and deserters wandered Singapore, freely looting and drinking. One soldier wrote:

Never before have so many

Been fucked about by so few

And neither the few nor the many

Have fuck all idea what to do.[72]

The first of 13,000 Japanese assault troops had forded the Johore Strait in barges on the night of 8 February. By 13 February, they had captured the city’s reservoirs. In one of many valiant though doomed last stands, a company of Malay volunteers fought off massed Banzai charges on Bukit Chandu, in the shadow of the House of Tiny Tin Tubes, until it was overwhelmed. The imperial defenders crammed on to the southern part of Singapore Island were now running low on food, water, petrol and ammunition. Churchill knew the campaign was doomed but flirted with the idea of a brutal last stand to save imperial face. There should be ‘no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population’, he insisted by telegram. ‘The whole reputation of our country and of our race is at stake.’[73] It would have been a pointless massacre and he was persuaded to drop the idea. Percival was given permission to surrender once he deemed the situation truly hopeless.[74]

After consulting with his senior commanders on the morning of 15 February, Percival decided to seek a ceasefire. He met with Yamashita that afternoon at Singapore’s Ford motor assembly plant, a cheerless buff-coloured factory building a few miles outside the city centre. The British commander made some hollow attempts to discuss terms. Yamashita, eventually growing irritated with these procrastinations, leaned his massive bulk on his sword and demanded to know if the British were surrendering. After a pause, Percival said yes. The campaign was over.

*

The photographs of Percival and his staff officers, ‘wan and exhausted, look[ing] more like curates or schoolmasters than fighting soldiers’, loping disconsolately into captivity in their Brodie tin helmets and khaki drill shorts, remain perhaps the most indelible images of the campaign.[75] The colonial overlords towering on reed-thin legs over their short, scruffy captors had capitulated, completely and humiliatingly. An Asian army had defeated the Herrenvolk, a fact that was lost on no one with a stake in white supremacy. Hitler, learning the news of Singapore’s fall, declined to send a congratulatory message to his Japanese allies. Britain’s discomfiture was very much to Germany’s advantage. But ‘one must regret it,’ the Führer told his generals. ‘For it’s the white race which is the loser.’[76] The people of West Cork were less restrained. They remembered Percival’s time in Ireland bitterly. Tom Barry, the former deputy IRA commander of the Southern Division, dispatched a telegram to the defeated general mockingly congratulating him on his efforts.[77]

The ignominy for Britain lay not just in the lopsided balance of forces – over 130,000 imperial troops had surrendered during the campaign, 85,000 in Singapore alone, to a Japanese force of barely 50,000 – but in the shameful abdication of responsibility that white residents had demonstrated as their world had collapsed around them. The legitimacy of PWR had rested on the patriarchal conceit that the colonisers would always protect the colonised from harm. Yet when push had come to shove, most of the Europeans had fled with scarcely a look behind them.

When the island of Penang, the oldest British colonial possession in Southeast Asia, was on the brink of falling to the Japanese in early January, the entire white population was quietly shepherded on to rescue vessels guarded by a cordon of troops.[78] Any distinction of race in the selection of evacuees was officially denied by the British government, but everyone in Malaya knew perfectly well that the colonisers ‘had ratted out of Penang’, as Ian Morrison put it. They ‘had thought of saving no skins but their own, and left the Asiatics to their fate at the hands of the Japanese as if they didn’t give a damn what happened to them’.[79]

Much the same had happened as the Japanese approached the Johore Strait. In the final days, a flotilla of little ships had left Singapore harbour, bound for the Dutch East Indies, India, Ceylon, Australia and South Africa. Most of those aboard – about 7,000 of 10,000 women and children – were the colony’s white residents.[80] No compulsory evacuation had been ordered. But this introduced a tacit discrimination by wealth, for only those with the means to purchase outbound tickets had been able to leave. Dominion governments made it clear to the Colonial Office their unwillingness to resettle non-white evacuees. Australia refused, despite much pressure, to accept more than a few dozen Chinese refugees.[81]

Singapore’s Chinese population, many of them refugees from the Sino–Japanese War, had fought stubbornly in the campaign – not out of any special love for the British, but because they knew what the consequences would be if the Japanese took over.[82] Those consequences quickly followed Percival’s capitulation. Yamashita’s personal role in what took place in Singapore after the surrender is disputed. Unusually among Japanese generals, he had taken steps during the campaign in Malaya to prevent his own troops committing atrocities against civilians, and had punished those of his officers and men who were caught departing from these instructions. Some were executed.[83] In his post-war memoirs, even Percival praised Yamashita’s efforts for maintaining law and order after the surrender.[84]

Nonetheless, it was the victorious general who ordered the ‘severe disposal’ of alleged Chinese fifth columnists in the days immediately following 15 February, and it was in Yamashita’s name that the sinister sook ching – ‘purification by elimination’ – now took place across the captured territories. No one knows how many civilians were murdered in the ensuing terror. Perhaps 25,000 people in Singapore and across southern Malaya died, most of them Chinese. Young, educated men – teachers, lawyers, doctors – regarded as being politically dangerous were the principal targets, though no one was entirely safe.[85] The violence was improvised, random, obscene. At Alexandria Hospital in the city, around 400 medical staff and patients were killed, many bayoneted in their beds, while the troops smashed up the radiological equipment. Mass rape became routine across the captured territories, tacitly condoned by Japanese officers to encourage aggression in their men. ‘It varied according to the character of individual soldiers,’ recalled two survivors in a 1946 memoir: ‘Some did it sadistically and brutally…some did it indifferently, as men answering mere calls of nature; some shame-facedly, mindful perhaps of the mothers who had borne them and the wives who were suckling their young in Japan.’[86]

Around 45,000 British and Australian uniformed personnel, and a few thousand civilian internees, were marched off to the Changi military complex, six square miles at the eastern tip of Singapore Island. Some were taken to the newly built prison there, others to the same barracks they had occupied as armed soldiers just weeks before.[87] Yamashita prevailed upon his men to treat the prisoners solicitously,[88] but the Japanese authorities had never anticipated having to feed, shelter and guard such a huge number of captives. Its prisoner policy in the months after the surrender was more confused and improvisational than intentionally oppressive. Prisoners at Changi recalled later that the conditions there were initially not too bad, though food was short. Discipline was mostly administered by the British themselves rather than the Japanese. Theatrical performances, education classes and sports were organised to pass the time, and deaths were few. Arthur Lane, a twenty-year-old private in the Manchester Regiment, would recall the ‘sulphur rice’ rations at Changi with disgust, but mostly remembered the first weeks as being ‘boring; nothing to do apart from sunbathing, playing football, and just dozing wherever we felt like doing so’.[89]

It was not to last. Even before the fall of Singapore, and regardless of Yamashita’s orders, atrocities had taken place against Allied POWs. In Johore in late January, about 150 Australian and Indian troops had been massacred after surrendering by IJA forces frustrated at their lengthy and effective resistance.[90] In June 1942, the major US naval victory at the Battle of Midway made it clear that Japan faced a tough, protracted war. The official line from Tokyo regarding prisoner treatment hardened. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo ordered that a ‘mistaken idea of humanitarianism’ must not be allowed to get in the way of exploiting the labour value of prisoners, regardless of Japan’s obligations under the Geneva Conventions.[91] Yamashita was no longer in a position to raise objections, whether he had wished to or not, for that same month he was ordered to an obscure rear garrison command in Manchuria, probably punishment for his success in Malaya by the jealous Tojo.[92]

Over the next three years, the fortunes of Percival’s former troops varied enormously. Those who remained at Changi saw their food and medical supplies steadily dwindle. Contact with the outside world was scant and the Japanese refused to cooperate with efforts of the International Red Cross to visit the camp. Nonetheless, military order and morale at Changi largely held up. The prisoners had opportunities to supplement their feeble rations with food they grew or purchased. Violence inflicted by the captors was less common than elsewhere. The death rate only began to seriously rise in the final months of the war, when conditions began to deteriorate.[93]

But many thousands of Allied prisoners held at Changi did not remain there for long. They found themselves scattered across the Japanese Empire over the next few years, from Taiwan and Korea to Java and the South Sea Islands, performing forced labour in mines, fields and factories. For most of these unfortunate men, the circumstances of captivity were much grimmer than at Changi. The bleakest of all destinations was one of the work camps on the 258-mile Thai–Burma ‘Death Railway’, in which perhaps 14,000 Allied POWs (and twenty times as many Burmese, Indian, Chinese and Malay workers) died from starvation, disease or the brutality of the guards.[94]

*

On 27 February, the ‘Eastern Strike Force’, a motley collection of five cruisers and nine destroyers of the British, Australian, American and Dutch Navies, sortied into the Java Sea to try to intercept an approaching Japanese invasion convoy. It met an Imperial Japanese Navy escort squadron of four cruisers and fourteen destroyers; the Battle of the Java Sea, which followed, was the first major surface engagement of the Pacific War. The Japanese had not fought such a battle since the Russo–Japanese War thirty-seven years before. But their crews were well trained and their ships superbly armed, with twice as many eight-inch guns as the Allies, as well as huge three-ton oxygen-enriched surface-fired torpedoes.[95] For seven hours, the Allied ships attempted courageously to break through the Japanese screen and reach the troop transports. Two of the Eastern Strike Force cruisers and three destroyers, including HMS Electra and HMS Jupiter, were sunk. No enemy losses occurred.

The heavy cruiser HMS Exeter, which back in 1939 had helped destroy the German raider Admiral Graf Spee, took an eight-inch shell in her aft boiler room and had to disengage under a protective smoke screen. Two days later, the Japanese cruiser force caught up with her as she limped westwards towards Colombo and finished her off. One of Exeter’s escorting destroyers, HMS Encounter, nobly ignored an order to make for safety and instead stopped to pick up survivors. Enemy shell fire shattered Encounter, she was set ablaze and foundered. About 400 men of both vessels spent the next twenty hours in oily water atop flimsy rafts and floats before being rescued by a Japanese destroyer which had returned to the site of battle at some risk to its own safety – a rare incident of maritime chivalry in an otherwise ugly war.[96]

Singapore was gone. Now, with the destruction of the Eastern Strike Force demonstrating the final collapse of Allied naval power in Southeast Asia, Java was open to invasion (it surrendered on 12 March) and the Malay Barrier to the Indian Ocean sundered. For the first time since the eighteenth century, the Royal Navy had lost supremacy in the Bay of Bengal. A chiefs of staff memorandum spelled out the stark new strategic situation. Any chance of ultimately defeating Japan (and for that matter Germany) depended upon maintaining intact the Indian Ocean supply lines. With the fall of the Malay Barrier, the Japanese would ‘soon have a clear run’ at these. Japan, the chiefs noted, ‘could raise overwhelming internal security problems in India…and threaten our communications to the Middle East, Burma, and Australia’.[97]

Japanese raiders would be able to disrupt the Lend-Lease route to the Soviet Union via Persia and the Abadan oil supply network. The Vichy French authorities in Madagascar might decide to throw in their lot with the Axis and offer them the use of the port of Diego Suarez, the perfect base for raids on the troop convoys sailing to Egypt up the East African coast.[98] It was Ceylon, though, that was the most immediate concern. Weakly defended, it looked to be the next target for Japanese expansion, having become, as historian Ashley Jackson puts it, ‘the Allied center of gravity in a moment of crippling weakness’.[99]

Fortunately for the British, the Japanese were so surprised by the scale of their own success that they were struggling to figure out how to exploit it. Hitler had vaguely raised the idea of a joint Axis drive on the Indian Ocean with the Japanese ambassador in December 1941, and the Tokyo planning staffs had speculatively war-gamed a Ceylonese invasion. But at the beginning of March 1942, Tojo ruled out a major westward offensive until the American carriers in the Pacific had been dealt with. Instead, the Kido Butai (main Japanese aircraft carrier force) would raid the Bay of Bengal in an attempt to locate and destroy the British capital ships still operating out of Colombo.[100]

Vice-Admiral Sir James Somerville arrived in Ceylon on 26 March to take over command of those ships. On paper, he had been granted an impressive force: five battleships, three aircraft carriers and eleven cruisers. In reality, most of the cruisers and all but one of the battleships (HMS Warspite) were unmodernised First World War antiques, ‘in various states of disrepair’.[101] ‘I’ve not a ship at present that approaches what I should call a proper standard of fighting efficiency,’ he complained in a letter to his wife.[102] Two of his carriers were recently built but only modest in striking power, with a combined attacking force of just fifty-seven aircraft (most of them Fairey Albacore biplanes), far smaller than that of the full Kido Butai. Had Force Z not been pointlessly squandered in the Gulf of Siam in December, Somerville’s battle fleet would have been more formidable. As it was, he had to work with what little he had been given.

Somerville had two important advantages. One was that instead of vulnerable Colombo he could operate out of a newly supplied anchorage at Addu Atoll in the Maldives (‘Port T’), which was unknown to the Japanese. The other was that British cryptographers had just broken JN 25B, the main Japanese naval cipher. Based upon decoded intercepts, Somerville was warned that an IJN force, probably led by two aircraft carriers, would attack Ceylon on around 1 April. An enemy raiding party of that size would have about the same number of strike aircraft as Somerville; any engagement would be between equals. He sortied out of Port T to lie in wait for the Japanese 100 miles south of Ceylon.

1 April came and went, and no enemy force appeared. Disappointed, Somerville withdrew back to Port T to refuel. The signals intelligence he had received, while not altogether wrong, had been inaccurate in two key respects. The first error was that it put the date of the Japanese raid four days too early. The second was that it was not merely two Japanese carriers raiding Ceylon but almost the entire Kido Butai – five carriers, four battleships and about 275 aircraft. It was extremely lucky that the first error accompanied the second; if the Japanese had shown up as Somerville expected on 1 April, they would have blundered straight into his vastly outnumbered force. What would have happened is anyone’s guess. Japanese aerial reconnaissance discipline was poor, and the Fairey Albacore had radar-assisted night-strike capability. It’s possible that Somerville might have been able to launch an ambush in the darkness and sink one or two of the Japanese carriers while getting away: a British Coral Sea or Midway. More likely, though, his entire Eastern Fleet would have been summarily destroyed, with incalculable consequences for the prosecution of the war. Churchill had already chastised Somerville for excessive caution and would do so again. The British admiral did not show any of that caution in spring 1942. Indeed, he behaved far more boldly – and recklessly – than Tom Phillips had done with the doomed Force Z. Fortunately, this time the naval gods were with the Admiralty.[103]

Thanks to signals intelligence errors, then, there was no great clash of steel in the Indian Ocean. The Kido Butai sent its planes to bomb Colombo and the naval base at Trincomalee and destroyed port facilities and a couple of dozen aircraft on the ground. At sea, twenty-three Allied merchant ships were sunk during the raid, as well as two heavy cruisers and an old light aircraft carrier, HMS Hermes, which Somerville had detached from his main fleet. Satisfied enough with the results, the Japanese withdrew to Indonesia. Somerville, now aware of just what a lucky escape he had had, prudently pulled the Eastern Fleet all the way back to East Africa to await the next round.[104]

But there would not be one. In May, the British decided to eliminate the threat of Madagascar by invasion. Diego Suarez fell after two days, and although the Vichy authorities put up a stubborn resistance, the island eventually surrendered in November. While this was going on, a small squadron of Japanese long-range submarines conducted a six-week campaign off the East African coast, damaging the British battleship HMS Ramillies and sinking 90,000 GRT (Gross Registered Tons) of merchant shipping.[105] But the raiding experiment was not repeated. In any case, the security of the Indian Ocean had been decided 6,700 miles to the east of Colombo, at Midway Island in the central Pacific; on 4 June the US Navy sank most of the Kido Butai, including three of the carriers that had raided Ceylon back in April.[106] The immediate threat had passed – less because of anything the British had done, though, than by the fortunate placement of some American armour-piercing bombs.

Not that this was any great relief at that moment. Because by June 1942, the British were in the midst of a crisis – perhaps the greatest of their entire imperial history, stretching from Egypt to north-east India – and one that threatened to shatter the empire entirely.

2

Have You Not Got a Single General in That Army Who Can Win Battles?

On 9 March 1942, General Sir Alan Brooke became chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee – the body that represented the professional heads of the armed forces and gave advice to the prime minister on the highest levels of military strategy.[1] Brooke had replaced the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, whose physical and mental vigour were in decline and who in fact only had one more year to live.[2] According to the peacetime principle of Gubbins’s turn, the chairmanship ought technically to have gone after Pound to the RAF’s representative on the committee, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff (CAS). But given that the British Army was by far the largest of the fighting forces engaged against the Axis powers in early 1942, it was felt prudent, not least by Portal himself, that Brooke, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, should take charge. ‘Went off all right,’ Brooke, a compulsive diarist, noted laconically that evening. ‘Both Portal and Pound played up very well.’[3] He had had a dizzyingly rapid promotion. Brooke had only been appointed CIGS two months before. Now he had become Churchill’s principal military advisor for all land, sea and air forces. It was an appointment he had considerably mixed feelings about. To become CIGS was to reach the pinnacle of a British Army officer’s career. But it meant probably abandoning any further hope of a field command – and to lead troops in battle was surely what soldiering was all about. It also meant having to deal with the prime minister.

Churchill had taken the opportunity while appointing Brooke to also add Lord Louis Mountbatten, the king’s forty-one-year-old second cousin, to the COS Committee to represent ‘Combined Operations’ (commando and other special forces units) on an equal footing with the army, navy and air force. Brooke found this annoying. ‘Dickie’ was a charming courtier and might have ‘energy and drive’, the CIGS conceded. But he interfered in matters that were not his proper concern or about which he clearly failed to understand the fundamentals. In Brooke’s view, Mountbatten had been foisted on the chiefs of staff mainly because he was one of Churchill’s favourites (he ‘frequently wasted both his time and ours’, Brooke fulminated later).[4] The relationship between the new COS chairman and the prime minister had begun in irritation. It was going to maintain much the same character for the next three years.

The Churchill–Brooke partnership is one of the most consequential psychodramas of the Second World War, as fascinating to outsiders as any bad but improbably functional marriage.[5] The two men had much in common. There was something deeply un-English about each of them. Brooke was the scion of an aristocratic West Ulster family which had traditionally played a leading role in the region; his nephew would serve as prime minister of Northern Ireland for twenty years. He had been born in Gascony and lived in France for the first sixteen years of his life. His native tongue was French, English just one more language he acquired along his way, no differently than German, Urdu and Persian.

Both Brooke and Churchill embodied powerful, sometimes unnerving strength and urgency. The novelist Anthony Powell, a staff officer during the war, recalled the ‘extraordinary current of physical energy, almost of electricity’ which accompanied the CIGS as he arrived at the War Office.[6] ‘Hurry, man, hurry!’ Brooke would bark at a general in the Whitehall corridors who showed insufficient alacrity at responding to his summons.[7] Both Churchill and Brooke could be frightening. The latter was nicknamed ‘Colonel Shrapnel’ (though certainly not to his face) by War Office staff for his mercurial temper. Even the most formidable of battlefield commanders learned to dread a dressing-down from the brooding figure of the CIGS, who would glare at them from behind thick tortoise-shell glasses. In committee meetings Brooke might bark ‘I FLATLY DISAGREE’ when responding to some suggestion he regarded as contemptibly stupid, snapping a pencil in rage to punctuate the point. ‘Men admired, feared, and liked him, in that order perhaps,’ as one of his peers put it.[8]

But while Churchill and Brooke could both intimidate, there was otherwise little resemblance in their personalities. If the prime minister was temperamentally a Cavalier, then Brooke was a Roundhead. It is not coincidental that Churchill had entered the British Army as an aristocratic cavalryman while the CIGS had been a career artilleryman. The PM enjoyed the company of charismatic rogues, pirates and adventurers; Brooke despised them as corrupt cronies who connived about the antechambers of the Churchillian court. Churchill’s thinking was instinctive, Brooke’s methodical. The prime minister was childish, impatient, sulky. The CIGS had the single-mindedness and composure necessary to succeed at a hobby like bird photography, his abiding private passion. Both men appreciated how indispensable each of them was to the war effort. Neither, though, ever felt that he really understood the other, and each was cognisant of the other’s ambivalence towards him. ‘Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent,’ Brooke wrote of his political master in September 1944.[9]

Brooke claimed at one point to love Churchill, though he did not much like him. Churchill’s feelings about the CIGS were even more muted. ‘Don’t you think Brooke is pretty good at his job?’ the prime minister’s doctor, Lord Moran, once asked Churchill. ‘He has a flair for the business’ was as much of a grudging acknowledgement as Moran could tease out of his patient.[10] Aside from a few cursory mentions, Brooke is entirely absent from the Churchillian war memoirs. This greatly distorted the way his importance to British strategy-making was understood by the public in the years after the war. It also infuriated the retired CIGS, leading him, unwisely, to authorise a biography of his own, written by Sir Arthur Bryant, full of vitriolic asides about Churchill taken from the wartime diaries.

Sir Dudley Pound, the dashing old sea dog, flag captain of the Grand Fleet at Jutland, was much more to Churchill’s taste as a colleague on the Chiefs of Staff Committee. But by early 1942, Pound was sixty-four and enervated by crippling osteoarthritis as well as a slowly developing brain tumour which would soon kill him. He often appeared to be dozing off at meetings (‘like an old parrot asleep on his perch’, thought Brooke uncharitably). Worse than this, though, Pound as COS chair acquiesced too easily to Churchill’s wishes.[11] It was not just Brooke who could see that this was dangerous. The prime minister was a monster of self-ego, but sufficiently self-aware to realise how risky it was to be surrounded by yes men. He knew he needed someone to argue with, to push back, to vex him, to test the (many) weaknesses of his arguments. He certainly got all those things with Brooke. ‘When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do?’ Churchill once said incredulously. ‘Thumps the table harder and glares back at me!’ Brooke was thoroughly unawed by the prime minister, offering the sort of disputatious discipline Churchill required and subconsciously sought. This ‘thick-necked Ulsterman’ would be the British leader’s essential, if often unhappy, partner in victory over the next three years.[12]

*

On the day that Brooke chaired his first COS meeting, the Japanese marched into Rangoon. The fall of the capital and chief port of Burma was arguably much more damaging to the British war effort than the loss of Singapore had been a month before. The Crown Colony of Burma was the principal exporter of rice to much of the Indian subcontinent and East Africa. It was a major source of oil and timber. Moreover, it lay on the flank of Assam, the easternmost (and, in early 1942, largely undefended) frontier province of the Raj. The ‘Burma Road’ (actually a combination of rail and road) extending from the warehouses of Rangoon via Myitkyina to Kunming in China was the only ground route across the lower Himalayas able to carry Anglo-American supplies to Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist armies. Interrupting this route would have grave consequences for the war in China, which was tying down large numbers of IJA troops.

But Britain’s pre-war fixation with Singapore meant that the defence of this enormous country of river valleys, highlands, teak forests, mangrove swamps and rice paddies had been ignored. Burma itself had been ignored. According to the financial secretary of the colonial government, its European occupiers ‘sought at all costs to forget they were there’.[13] It was perhaps, in a competitive field, the worst-run colony in the British Empire. It also, not coincidentally, had some of the most toxic politics. The Burmese people, the majority ethnic population who lived mostly in the Irrawaddy River Basin, resented the British occupation for its crass exploitation (one pre-war intelligence report described them as ‘one of those peoples who do not fully appreciate the benefits of British rule’.)[14] But the Burmese also resented the presence of the large Indian and Chinese émigré communities who in the early twentieth century had been drawn to this ‘Wild East’ of opportunity to fill every role, from contract labourer to petty trader to doctor and lawyer. Rangoon was half made up of Chittagonian migrants, ‘an Indian city with a bit of China thrown in, run by Scots and Irishmen’, as one resident put it.[15]

Burmese nationalists had responded to this influx by becoming not merely anti-British but murderously xenophobic. Peasant revolts against the colonial authorities in the 1930s quickly spawned anti-immigrant lynch mobs, which in turn were brutally put down by the imperial gendarmerie, recruited mostly from the non-Burmese native peoples of the country, the Kachin, Shan and Karen. There were a lot of old scores to settle in Burma. It was clear enough that if the Japanese ever marched in, the Burmese would use such an invasion as an opportunity to wreak revenge on the country’s immigrant communities. U Saw, Burma’s prime minister, was in Portugal en route to Rangoon when the Pearl Harbor attack took place. He decided to quietly stop off at the Japanese consulate in Lisbon to offer Tokyo his services should its armies consider invading his country. Alas for him, the British were reading the Japanese diplomatic ciphers and packed Saw off into internment in Uganda.[16]

The Japanese had not begun the war with any intention of conquering all Burma.[17] Their original plan was to occupy the extreme southern province of Tenasserim, but the rout of imperial forces in Malaya suggested that the British East was more fragile than Tokyo’s planners had dared to suppose. So in mid-January 1942, the two divisions of Lieutenant-General Shōjirō Iida’s 15th Army were ordered to advance westwards from the Thai border towards Rangoon. Only a couple of brigades of Indian Army infantry were available in southern Burma to meet them. The story was much as it had been at Jitra and Slim River a few weeks before: inexperienced troops trained for open warfare, lacking proper aerial reconnaissance of the enemy, outflanked and panicked in small unit ambushes by a disciplined enemy full of ‘driving charge’ (Kirimomi Sakusen.) The RAF did rather better than it had done in Malaya, though that is not saying much. But, supplied only with ancient, cast-off Hurricanes, it was overwhelmed by the larger and better-equipped Japanese Air Force. Rangoon was soon being bombed without interference. In Burma’s worst air raid of the war, 1,500 residents of the city were killed in a twenty-minute bombardment – more fatalities than in any single twenty-four-hour period during the London Blitz.[18]

The only serious geographical obstacle between the Burmese capital and the invading 15th Army was the Sittang River. On 23 February, the main railway bridge across it, half a mile long, was blown up by British engineers – but because of miscommunication typical of the campaign, most of the defending Indian Army troops were stranded on the wrong bank. Those who were not summarily captured had to swim the river in disorder, abandoning all their heavy equipment along the way. The Japanese in any case soon found a crossing further north and were delayed at most a week.

Rangoon was abandoned on 7 March. The police and civil authorities had fled some days before, along with most of the 25,000-strong European community. In scenes depressingly similar to those in Singapore back in February, the colonial city collapsed into looting, arson and lawless, drunken despair. Bibulous soldiers, escaped convicts and armed robbers haunted streets strewn with piled-up bodies, rats and refuse. The British demolished whatever dockside and oil facilities had not already been smashed in the bombing, an example of a scorched-earth policy pursued aggressively across Burma that would impoverish and embitter the country for decades after the war. One mournful colonial official doubted ‘whether we will ever be able to hold our heads very high’ on the Irrawaddy again.[19]

Once Rangoon was gone, defending the rest of Burma was neither practical nor, in baldly strategic terms, worth the cost. The Burma Road was severed from its supply source on the Bay of Bengal. Chinese troops in Burma (whom the British later scapegoated for the loss of the campaign) withdrew northwards. As for the remaining British-Indian forces and those civilians who had not yet been able to escape by ship, train, car or bullock cart, the only remaining option was to flee on foot or small boat to India – either along the Arakan coast to Chittagong or via the Chindwin River Valley to Manipur.[20] Around 400,000 people negotiated this gruesome retreat before the arrival of the monsoon in mid-May made further escape impossible. Most of the trekkers were Indian workers and their families, laden with whatever belongings they could carry. As many as 80,000 of them perished from disease, malnutrition and exhaustion along the jungle tracks and mountainous dirt trails. The perquisites of white supremacy prevailed even during this societal collapse. The small number of European trekkers were steered on to the best routes with porters, while the Indians had to wait their turn. Many made it to Assam only to perish in squalid, inadequately supplied refugee camps.[21]

In just six months, Britain’s entire imperial position in the eastern Indian Ocean had collapsed. An invasion of Ceylon or India, or both, appeared to be only a matter of time. In Bombay, the public mood was described by the authorities as ‘bordering on panic’. The governor of the United Provinces thought there were ‘very few people in the towns who believe that the Allied forces can win the war’.[22]

*

They were not the only ones. ‘During the last fortnight,’ Brooke wrote after Burma’s fall,

I have had for the first time since the war started a growing conviction that we are going to lose this war unless we control it very differently and fight it with more determination…it is all desperately depressing. Furthermore, it is made worse by the lack of good military commanders. Half our Corps and Divisional commanders are totally unfit for their appointments, and yet if I were to sack them I could find no better![23]

As professional head of the British Army, Brooke felt obligated to defend his subordinates from Churchill’s complaints about their inadequacy. War Cabinet meetings during this period were peppered with jibes at Brooke from the prime minister like: ‘Have you not got a single general in that army who can win battles?’[24] And yet secretly Brooke had little more faith in its leaders. He had, it seemed, reached the pinnacle of his military career at just the moment when the institution to which he had devoted his life had lost the ability to win a campaign.

‘I suppose this Empire has never been in such a precarious position throughout its history,’ Brooke wrote on 7 April, just as the Eastern Fleet was abandoning the Bay of Bengal to the Kido Butai and withdrawing to Kenya. ‘We may pull through this time,’ he added. ‘But I wish I could see more daylight as to how we are to keep going through 1942!’[25] What had gone wrong? Brooke’s explanation was civilisational. The British, he thought, had gone soft. He would fulminate often to his staff about the ‘low quality of our people, the lack of ideas, the sloppy thinking encouraged at the universities’ and the ‘general softness and pleasure-seeking of the pre-war years’. Writing to General Archibald Wavell, the commander-in-chief in India, Brooke argued that ‘we are not anything like as tough as we were in the last war. There has been far too much luxury, safety first…our one idea is to look after our comforts and avoid being hurt in any way.’ Wavell agreed, blaming ‘softness in education and living’ for the disasters in Malaya and Burma.[26]

Churchill agreed too. He subscribed to a similar theory of generational decline to explain what had gone wrong in the war so far. Perhaps, he argued, all the nation’s men of talent had been killed in the trenches of the Western Front. Speaking to his old friend Violet Bonham Carter a few days before Malaya fell, the prime minister admitted his ‘dreadful fear that our soldiers are not as good fighters as their fathers were’. There were ‘so many men in Singapore, so many men,’ Churchill muttered to Bonham Carter. ‘They should have done better.’[27]

To others who had witnessed the collapse of the British East, however, the real problem was a ruling class obsessed with derelict fantasies of Victorian white supremacy and ignorant of the profound transformations the world was going through. To R. H. C. MacKie, the British in Singapore had been ‘content with the past, repugnant to change, impervious to the present’. They had, he said, clung to a mental framework in which ‘authority was an assured thing at the end of a big stick waved at primitive tribes with rings in their noses’.[28] Such dusty thinking had been incapable of appreciating the growth of nationalist consciousness among the colonised. The tuans had been left bewildered by the consequences of this ignorance once the empire faced an existential crisis from outside its borders.

The British in 1942 were having to deal with the uncomfortable reality that many of the people they ruled appeared to be uninterested in remaining within the beneficent bosom of the empire. During the Singapore campaign, the seeming indifference of Malayans to what was happening to the colony under Japanese attack had been a point of imperial outrage. Accusations about a ‘Malay fifth column’ had been flung about wildly. In truth, few Malays had actively assisted the Japanese. Nor, though, had they felt much need to resist them either. Why should they have done? The British had never seriously tried to inculcate a sense that the colony belonged to them too.[29] During their retreat southwards towards Singapore, the British had destroyed whatever property they could not take with them. The local people had been abandoned to their fate. Douglas Bailey, a civil engineer, recalled a Malay man watching petrol pumps being blown up and asking: ‘does this mean that our protectors are deserting us?’ None of the departing Europeans could look him in the face.[30] It is little wonder that Malays watching white civilians being marched off into internment camps from the Singapore Padang after the surrender did so ‘half-drugged with disillusionment’.[31]

Some of the formerly colonised were not just indifferent to empire’s collapse, but jumped at the chance to assist in bringing it down. Two days after Singapore’s fall, the Japanese assembled a group of 45,000 Indian Army POWs at the sports stadium in the city’s Farrer Park. There, a young, charismatic intelligence officer, Major Fujiwara Iwaichi, addressed the Indian captives, offering them an opportunity to avoid a prison camp and instead join a new ‘Indian National Army’ (INA), to be led by a Sikh soldier, Mohan Singh. This INA, Fujiwara said, would fight alongside the Japanese to liberate India from the British.[32] The initial response among the POWs was mixed. A few volunteered enthusiastically. Some rejected the whole idea. Most took a wait-and-see attitude. Within a few months, however, whether because they had been won over to the cause, or simply because they wished to avoid the travails of incarceration, about 40,000 of the 70,000 or so Indian prisoners captured in Malaya had agreed to join the INA. By the beginning of September, Singh was in command of a full INA division of 17,000 men.[33] A similar 12,000-man ‘Burma Independence Army’ (BIA) had been raised in that colony and had even taken part in the military campaign against the British. Its performance in battle had been indifferent, but the BIA men had meted out as much violence as possible against any Indians and Karens they had been able to get hold of.[34]

Perhaps most worrying of all for the British was the vanishing of that aura of invincibility which had sustained imperial control over the Indian Ocean for so long. A new truculence born of the prospect of British collapse was in the air, overturning hesitations about anti-colonial resistance. On 11 March, Punjabi troops on Christmas Island, a speck of British territory about 200 miles south of Java, killed their white commanding officer and four other soldiers. A similar mutiny was only thwarted by chance on the nearby Cocos Islands in May. One of the ringleaders of that revolt, Bombardier Gratien Fernando, had convinced himself that an all-out anti-colonial insurrection was about to break out across the whole Indian Ocean. ‘I felt that if I succeeded, I might do things that would revolutionise the war effort in the East,’ he said later. ‘I firmly believe in Asia for the Asiatics. I am in sympathy with Japanese war aims.’[35] Apprehended, taken back to Ceylon, tried for mutiny and sentenced to death, Fernando died in defiance, having told the prison chaplain before his hanging that ‘loyalty to a country under the heel of a white man is disloyalty’.[36] So far as he was concerned, the Second World War was a battle for freedom against tyranny, and his own death proved it.

*

Meanwhile, 2,700 miles west of Bombay, another foundation stone of the British East also appeared to be about to crumple from the blows of foreign invaders and internal discontent.

‘Of no country did the British demand more than they did of Egypt during the war, and of no country’s interests were they less considerate,’ wrote Mohamed Naguib, the first post-colonial president of that country, in the 1950s. ‘They expected Egyptians to behave as loyal allies while being treated as conquered subjects.’[37] If Burma had any rival for the most badly ruled of all Britain’s colonies on the eve of the Second World War, then it was perhaps Egypt – although it was not, technically speaking, a British colony at all. Egypt in 1939 had its own king, parliament, flag and representative seat in the League of Nations: all the paraphernalia of sovereignty, but with none of the substance.

In principle, power in Egypt resided with the nineteen-year-old King Farouk I, tenth ruler of the Muhammad Ali dynasty, who lived in a lavish French-built neo-rococo palace at Abdine in the centre of Cairo. In reality, any decision of real national significance was taken at the British ambassador’s residence within the exquisite embassy compound on the banks of the Nile. Periodically, a Rolls-Royce escorted by two motorcycle outriders would emerge from that embassy’s gates. In its back seat was the true pharaoh of Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, His Majesty King George VI’s diplomatic representative in Cairo. Lampson, a six-feet-five-inch man-mountain with a bulbous nose and irascible manners, presided over Farouk’s country – and Farouk too, or ‘the boy’ as he called him with unconcealed scorn.[38]

The British had occupied Egypt in 1882 and had been promising to leave ever since. Under the terms of the 1936 Anglo–Egyptian Treaty, they had, in theory, withdrawn all their permanent troops aside from a small force to garrison the Suez Canal. But the treaty also gave the British the right to defend the canal from hostile foreign attack. So after the Italian invasion in September 1940, the occupiers had expanded their military presence, amassing the empire’s most powerful fortress base outside of the United Kingdom itself. By 1942, up to 1,000 British Commonwealth soldiers and 5,000 tons of supplies were arriving in Egypt every day to fight the Axis armies in Cyrenaica.[39]

Bizarrely, though, the Kingdom of Egypt remained technically neutral in all this. Lampson had no objection to such a legal fiction; indeed, he preferred it that way. Keeping the Egyptians neutral meant that they would have no voice at the eventual peace conference. So far as he was concerned, the war was really none of their business. Of course, in reality the war was very much a matter for the Egyptians, and by early 1942 their country was being radically destabilised by it in ways that would ultimately hasten Britain’s colonial exit. A handful of elite Egyptians were getting rich as the value of the nation’s cotton crop soared thanks to wartime demand for textiles. Inflationary pressure, though, was putting the price of bread far beyond the means of millions of peasants. As for Farouk’s own army, it was exiled over 1,000 miles from the battlefields in Sudan. There its officers, such as Naguib and his colleague Gamal Abdel Nasser, seethed at their dishonourable fate and plotted the downfall of the occupiers.

British power could be felt everywhere in wartime Cairo. The British Army ruled from the parade ground of the Kasr El Nil Barracks and the General Headquarters (GHQ) Middle East complex, a vast block of commandeered apartment buildings surrounded by sentries and barbed wire. The British social elite mixed at Groppi’s coffee shop, the Turf and Gezira Clubs and the Long Bar of Shepheard’s Hotel. British imperial Other Ranks were excluded from such patrician cloisters and had their fun instead in the Sharia-el-Berka, the city’s red-light district, where they could get a water buffalo steak with egg and chips or find entertainment in one of the city’s tenement brothels. Bored Tommies on leave amused themselves by tormenting the resident population – the ‘wogs’ as they were known, in one of the unloveliest coinages of all imperial English. The contempt shown towards ordinary Egyptians debased everyone in the end.[40] ‘What a bunch they are!’ wrote Harry Wilson, a normally thoughtful soldier-diarist, after being placed on ‘wog chasing’ duty at his unit’s supply dump: ‘A weirder assortment of humanity can hardly be imagined. Filthy, illiterate, stupid (except for low cunning) and very often infected with disease, they look less like men than animals which have degenerated in captivity. They have to be treated like slaves, not out of cruelty but because they have the slave mentality. They are bone lazy.’[41]

Stealing tarboosh hats, beating up penurious street vendors, smashing up cinemas and throwing beer bottles at the projectionists – this random sadism was all part of the ‘high spirits’ of British soldierly life in wartime Cairo. It is hardly any wonder that the local population came to regard any white body clad in khaki with a mixture of fear and hatred.

Lampson treated King Farouk scarcely any better than his country’s troops treated the Cairo stallholders. Farouk, to be sure, does not emerge on the page of history as a very edifying figure. A puerile, spoiled, petulant libertine, he played cruel practical jokes on his courtiers, hoarded a cornucopia of belongings from sports cars to Fabergé eggs, and treated attractive women as discardable playthings. But Lampson made no attempt to educate the young monarch in the practical or spiritual duties of kingship, his neglect no doubt assisting Farouk’s moral corruption.

One of the few ways in which Farouk could express his hatred of Lampson, ‘the Professor’, as he called him, was to surround himself with openly pro-Axis courtiers, especially Italians. In February 1942, this flirtation with fascism provoked a showdown at the Abdine Palace. Farouk fired his Anglophile prime minister, Hussein Sirri Pasha, and proposed as a replacement Aly Maher Pasha, a former premier whom Lampson had seen off back in June 1940 for his pro-Mussolini views. It was a fraught moment for a political crisis. Rommel’s Italo-German force (Panzerarmee Afrika) was on the move in Cyrenaica, while news of the disasters in Malaya and Burma had filtered westwards and was inflaming anti-British views on Cairo’s streets.[42]

Lampson responded to Farouk’s removal of Hussein Sirri Pasha by demanding that he appoint instead another former prime minister, Mostafa Nahas. Nahas, ironically, was a leading member of the Wafd Party, which had been founded in 1919 to oppose the British occupation of Egypt. But by 1942, the Wafd’s leaders had accommodated themselves to the status quo. Lampson saw Nahas as a far safer pair of hands. In fact, he hoped Farouk would reject his demand, giving him the excuse to depose the wretched young sovereign once and for all and replace him with the more conciliatory former regent Mohammed Ali Tewfik. Eden, back in London, gave Lampson the green light. It was, he said, ‘essential to clinch the matter this time’.[43]

On the evening of 4 February 1942, 600 British troops with tanks and armoured cars surrounded the Abdine Palace. Lampson and General Robert Stone, accompanied by six heavily armed British officers, approached the palace’s gates. They shot the lock off with a revolver, marched inside the compound and demanded to see Farouk. When the ashen-faced king emerged, Lampson accused him of treason to Egypt and shoved a document of abdication under his nose. Farouk pleaded to be given another chance. Lampson was inclined to refuse, but he knew that Stone (who was worried about an anti-British uprising breaking out across Egypt) would disapprove. With regret, then, Lampson retracted his abdication demand. Farouk sullenly agreed to accept Nahas as prime minister. The British party withdrew from the palace. Lampson and Stone were unaware that while they had been talking, Farouk’s three giant Albanian bodyguards had been hiding behind curtains with pistols drawn, ready to shoot them dead if the king was harmed.

Lampson received a congratulatory telegram from Eden afterwards. But he fretted that ‘we [still] have a rotter on the throne…if things go badly for us he will be liable to stab us in the back’.[44] Other Britons were appalled at the ambassador’s high-handedness. General Stone wrote a letter of apology to Farouk. A press blackout was ordered in Cairo about what had happened. But too many Egyptians had seen the armed British column descending on Abdine for the news to be suppressed for long. The brazen illegality of this near-coup gave new energy to the nationalist cause across Egypt. The Wafd, worried that Lampson’s sponsorship of Nahas had tarnished it, doubled down on its own anti-British rhetoric. In Sudan, Naguib and Nasser felt the humiliation keenly. The latter would later date the creation of the young officers’ revolutionary movement, which one day would oust Farouk and the British from Egypt, to the Abdine outrage. The Professor’s brutal tutorial in power had profound repercussions in the years to come.

*

If the British were getting nervous in Cairo, it was because the military situation across the region was deteriorating rapidly. In the first eighteen months of the war in the Mediterranean, the Royal Navy had acquitted itself well against the Italians.[45] In November 1940, a British night-time carrier-borne air raid on the Regia Marina’s anchorage at Taranto had disabled three Italian battleships. In a surface action off Cape Matapan at the southern tip of Greece the following March, the British had sunk three Italian heavy cruisers and badly damaged another battleship.

These victories afforded the RN a psychological superiority throughout the rest of 1941 rather bigger than the crude balance of forces might have suggested. Following Matapan, the Regia Marina declined to send any further naval expeditions into the eastern Mediterranean; the British fleet based in Alexandria was thus able to guarantee a mostly uninterrupted flow of reinforcements and materiel to the besieged garrison at Tobruk. The presence of British Commonwealth forces in Tobruk abutting Rommel’s coastal road of supply back to Tripoli made them impossible to ignore. No further Axis progress eastwards towards the Nile was possible while they were there.

Local naval superiority in late 1941 also allowed the British to maintain the island of Malta as a viable base of operations against the maritime route that brought gasoline and shells from Europe to Rommel’s tanks in Africa. Torpedo and level bombers, submarines and two cruiser forces sallying from the capital Valetta’s Grand Harbour savaged Italian merchantmen. In November 1941, 59,000 GRT of Axis shipping bound for Libya were sunk and 62 per cent of Italo-German supplies sent to the Mediterranean seabed.[46] Libya was, in effect, besieged. The German naval staff, predictably, blamed their allies for the ‘inexcusable blunder’ of the Maltese threat.[47]

But the British advantage in the region was coming to an end. At the end of September, Hitler began redeploying U-Boats from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. By early November there were already ten of them operating east of Gibraltar; by 1 January 1942 there would be twenty-three, with three more on the way. The Mediterranean, the Kriegsmarine high command told U-Boat commander-in-chief Karl Dönitz, was henceforth to be ‘the main theatre of operations’ for his submarine force.[48] This was, as Dönitz knew, a foolish redirection of effort away from the Atlantic, the only battlefield that mattered so far as the submarine war was concerned. But in the short term, the arrival of Dönitz’s U-Boat aces was a nasty surprise for the British Mediterranean fleet. On 13 November, the carrier HMS Ark Royal was sunk by a German submarine. Ten days later the battleship HMS Barham, victor of Matapan, took three torpedoes amidships and was torn apart when fire reached her main magazine. Eight hundred and sixty-two sailors died, more than went down with the Prince of Wales and Repulse.

That same month, Albert Kesselring was appointed overall German commander in the Mediterranean, with the brief of neutralising Malta and re-establishing the Axis marine supply route to Tripoli. ‘Smiling Albert’ was given the temporary loan of a 400-aircraft-strong air corps from the Eastern Front to achieve this. Night air raids on Malta began, a foretaste of the long ordeal to come in 1942. The threat of air attack, plus losses in Italian minefields, required the depleted Royal Navy cruiser forces based in the Grand Harbour to withdraw. The loss of Ark Royal meant it was harder than ever to ferry aircraft to the island. Supplies stopped getting to Malta, and its offensive capabilities shrank accordingly. Italian convoys to Tripoli now made it to North Africa unmolested. The siege of Libya was over; Rommel got his gasoline again. The most desperate phase of the siege of Malta was beginning.

Making a bad situation worse, in December, in the kind of audacious ‘Boy’s-Own-Adventure’ feat which the British tended to regard as their own exclusive speciality, six Italian frogmen penetrated the defences of Alexandria harbour and attached torpedoes to the battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and Valiant. The torpedoes exploded, crippling both vessels, which eventually needed extensive dry dock repair outside Egypt. The British Mediterranean fleet was, for the time being, hors de combat. No possibility of replacement for the battleships was likely in the foreseeable future. Every available vessel that could be found was already being sent east of Suez to defend the Indian Ocean. The Royal Navy could no longer suppress the Axis supply lines in the Mediterranean. Worse, it could not defend its own.

All this helps to explain why, after briefly seizing Cyrenaica in Operation CRUSADER, the British Eighth Army lost most of it again when a reinvigorated Panzerarmee Afrika thrust back up the coast road and recaptured the port of Benghazi on 29 January 1942. For the British, now left holding the line at Gazala just west of Tobruk, the loss of Benghazi so soon after its capture was not just an embarrassment but a strategic stumble. If the Germans and Italians were going to try to take Malta, controlling the island’s airspace would be critical. But to defend Malta, and the supply convoys that it so desperately required, the RAF had to operate from the airfields around Benghazi. Western Cyrenaica needed to be retaken again, and quickly.

*

The problem was that Rommel’s opposite number, General Auchinleck, was not really in a position to try. ‘The Auk’ had arrived in Cairo in July 1941. His predecessor as Middle East commander-in-chief, General Archibald Wavell, had achieved brief glory with victories against the Italians in Egypt and Ethiopia, but he had never been much to Churchill’s personal liking – far too donnish and gnomic for the prime minister’s taste – and a string of defeats in Greece, Crete and Libya had persuaded the PM that it was time for a new man in Egypt. Auchinleck had served well in Norway in May 1940 and had been a capable commander-in-chief in India. He had impressed Churchill with the alacrity with which he had dispatched Indian troops to suppress a pro-Axis revolt in Iraq in spring 1941. He seemed like the man for the task.

All went well at first. Tall, redheaded, with striking blue eyes and the tawny complexion of a soldier who had spent years under the tropical sun, Auchinleck was ‘strikingly handsome’ and possessed an easy in-person charm entirely lacking in Wavell.[49] The Auk was smart, self-effacing, hard-working and thoughtful. As a progressive voice in India’s military corridors, he had equalised pay and conditions between white and indigenous officers and had been quietly sympathetic to the country’s nationalist aspirations. The Auk was known to be intensely loyal to his subordinates. Men such as Lieutenant-General Neil Ritchie, whom Auchinleck appointed to command Eighth Army in November 1941, admired him hugely.[50]

But Churchill’s hopes that the Auk would be a dashing buccaneer of a general in the mould of Rommel proved in vain. On 26 February 1942, as the front line settled down around Gazala, the prime minister telegraphed his Middle East commander-in-chief: ‘I must now ask what are your intentions. According to our figures you have substantial superiority in the air, in armour, and in other forces over the enemy…the supply of Malta is causing increasing anxiety.’[51] Churchill wanted an offensive into western Cyrenaica no later than mid-April. Auchinleck promptly responded: ‘it is clear that we can NOT have a reasonable numerical superiority [i.e. a two-to-one advantage in tanks] before 1 June and that to launch a major offensive before then would be to risk defeat in detail and possibly endanger the safety of Egypt.’[52]

Brooke had already warned the Auk that Churchill would expect rapid action, and that if he could not provide it then he must at the very least be diplomatic in explaining why. But Auchinleck, it turned out, was every bit as maladroit at handling the prime minister as Wavell had been. His blunt refusal to attack Rommel irritated the British leader. On 8 March, Churchill asked him to return to London to explain the reasoning behind the delay. When Auchinleck said he could not possibly leave his post, Churchill countered by sending the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Nye, and the Lord Privy Seal, Stafford Cripps, who were on their way to Delhi, to grill him in Cairo en route. Unfortunately for Churchill, the move backfired: Nye and Cripps reported back to London that they agreed with the commander-in-chief. Eighth Army was receiving new weapons and equipment and needed time to train. The offensive in North Africa must wait. The prime minister became more apoplectic still. Auchinleck must go, he told Brooke. The CIGS talked his boss round, but he too was finding the Auk’s recalcitrance annoying. ‘I do not think you realise how difficult [Churchill] is to handle at times,’ Brooke wrote to Auchinleck on 31 March. The Cairo commander-in-chief had complained about ‘unpleasant’ telegrams he had been receiving from Churchill. As Brooke informed him, the original draft versions had been even more unpleasant. Only with great effort had he persuaded the PM to tone them down.[53]

Who was right, Churchill or the Auk? The prime minister, to be sure, had a completely unrealistic view of the colossal logistical difficulties of desert warfare, particularly in an age of petrol-thirsty tanks and vehicles. The Victorian cavalry subaltern still seemed to imagine that every soldier not actually present on the front line with rifle and bayonet was malingering. ‘Pray explain, CIGS,’ he would say to Brooke at War Cabinet meetings, ‘How it is that in the Middle East 750,000 men always turn up for their pay and rations, but when it comes to fighting only 100,000 turn up! Explain to us now exactly how the remaining 650,000 are occupied!’

Churchill, Brooke noted, ‘could never understand, or at any rate refused to do so’ that those three-quarters of a million men were scattered over a vast operational theatre stretching from Somaliland to Persia, and that many of them were necessary to the properly functioning support of a modern mechanised force like Eighth Army.[54] If Rommel’s achievements in 1941 had shown anything, it was that crude weight of numbers mattered very little in desert fighting compared to factors like firepower, mobility, supply, high morale and coherent leadership.

Churchill’s ‘pugnacious spirit demanded constant action’, as Colonel Ian Jacob, a military attaché to the War Cabinet, put it. ‘The enemy must be assailed continuously; the Germans must be made to “bleed and burn”.’[55] This led him to airily dismiss the time it took to acclimatise and train fresh troops for combat service in the Western Desert. ‘Ram [1st Armoured Division] in if useful at earliest without regard for future,’ the prime minister wrote to Auchinleck in November 1941, just a few days after the formation had disembarked in Suez. ‘Close grip upon the enemy by all units will choke the life out of him.’ Most seasoned commanders thought that troops newly arrived from Europe needed at least three months in Egypt before they were ready to be sent into battle.[56]

Auchinleck, as a lifelong Indian Army officer used to operating in logistically challenging terrain, refused to ignore the dull realities of soldiering, even if that annoyed Churchill. ‘As you know, we are under much pressure from the usual quarter to do the usual thing,’ he wrote to Ritchie on 7 March. ‘You realise the urgency behind this pressure as well as I do, but I am determined not to be forced into action which would, in my opinion, be most dangerous at present.’[57] Eighth Army had been denuded of experienced fighting troops by the demands of the East Asian war. The 70th Infantry Division, heroes of Tobruk, had been sent to garrison India. The 6th and 7th Australian Divisions had been ordered home at the behest of Canberra. Promised reinforcements had been withdrawn. The 18th Infantry Division had been en route to Suez when it had been redirected (to its doom) to Singapore instead. Air support had dwindled as four of the Western Desert Air Force’s six light bomber squadrons headed eastwards.

But one wonders if Auchinleck’s hesitations were also due to a fundamental lack of faith in the army that he led, especially its armoured component. ‘The enemy’s cruiser tanks are better than ours,’ he wrote on 21 March. ‘The leadership and training of his armoured formations is probably still better than ours.’[58] He believed that British tank units were incapable of matching German ones without at least a two-to-one advantage in numbers. ‘I am not satisfied with the standard of leadership of the unit commanders of the Royal Armoured Corps,’ he complained to Brooke. Many officers chosen to command armoured regiments were ‘clearly not fitted mentally or by training to take command in modern war’.[59] Of course, Brooke himself – not to mention Churchill – privately shared some of these concerns. But Auchinleck appeared paralysed into inaction by his doubts.

It was Auchinleck’s disadvantage that as a ‘Sepoy General’ who had spent most of his career in India he lacked the long-standing personal connections with other senior British Army officers which might have alleviated some of his fears about their fitness for command. But there is a sense from his correspondence in 1942 that the long years in India had transformed his mindset in a more fundamental way too. At the end of the day, Auchinleck just did not think the fate of the Middle East was that important to the war’s outcome. It was certainly not important enough to warrant taking huge risks. ‘If I had to choose now between losing India and giving up the Middle East, I would not hesitate,’ he told Brooke on 3 May:

I believe that we can still hold India without the Middle East, but that we can not for long hold the Middle East without India…As to our projected offensive in Libya, I fully realise its desirability from the political and strategical point of view, but it must be admitted that the material value to be had from it, so far as it may affect the course of the war, is small at present.[60]

Perhaps he was right. But this was not likely to endear him to a prime minister who had staked his political fortunes on the battle for the Nile.

*

‘The delays you contemplate will seal the fate of Malta,’ Churchill grimly assured Auchinleck on 1 March.[61] The situation on the island was turning desperate by early spring.[62] March and April 1942 were Malta’s worst months of the entire war. Kesselring’s bombers flew 12,000 sorties, dropping 6,000 tons of bombs – one-third of all the explosive tonnage dropped on Greater London during the Blitz, but concentrated here on the town of Valetta and the Admiralty dockyards on either side of the Grand Harbour, which together composed perhaps just three-quarters of a square mile. By April, there were on average nine air-raid alerts a day. The air and ground defences, though initially formidable, could not keep up. By mid-month, just six operational RAF fighters were defending Malta’s airspace. All the island’s airbases were put out of operation and the harbour was wrecked. More than 15,500 buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged. One thousand people were dead and another 4,500 wounded. Kesselring was able to inform Berlin that Malta had been, for the time being anyway, neutralised as a threat.[63]

The sentimentalisation of Plucky Little Malta in the British memory of the war has obscured the fact that the island in the 1930s was a discontented colony in which loyalty to the distant king-emperor was by no means assured. A brief twelve-year experiment with self-government had ended in 1933 with the dissolution of the bicameral parliament, the suspension of the Maltese constitution and the resumption of direct rule from Whitehall. The sticking point had been the triumph of the pro-Italian Nationalist Party at the polls, which, the British authorities believed, was conniving with Mussolini to separate Malta from British control and turn it over to the fascists. This was overheated, but it produced a ‘fancy bit of despotism’ which stung even the island’s Anglophile elite.[64] The use of Italian was banned in schools and law courts. With war looming in 1939, the British felt they had to throw a sop to Maltese pride by introducing a new constitution, but it delegated power so firmly in the governor’s hands that few were conciliated. ‘They were a decent, civilised lot,’ a Maltese woman later remarked of the British military-civilian residents, ‘But I honestly can’t remember a single thing they ever did for us…every road they built went to one of their bathing clubs or a polo field; every one monument was of a British admiral or a British statesman. They were so rich and we were so poor, and yet they were miserly towards us.’[65] It was fortunate, perhaps, for London that Italy’s brutal invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 had discredited Mussolini’s regime in the eyes of most islanders.

Politics aside, pre-war British administrators assumed that the Maltese would panic and bolt if the bombs ever started to fall in Valetta. As it turned out, Malta’s population, despite (or because of) being mostly poor, illiterate, deeply religious and culturally conservative, tolerated wartime hardships on behalf of an empire it was not very fond of that would have been regarded as unendurable back in the United Kingdom. By mid-April, much of the dockyard area of the Grand Harbour resembled a lunar landscape, with a four-inch layer of limestone dust coating the rubble. The streets impassable, ferrymen rowed across from Valetta, the harbour waters greasy with stagnant oil and debris from sunken vessels, to hand over small quantities of food and kerosene and collect the bodies. Life in Malta’s cramped public shelters during that unusually cold and wet spring was a daily and nightly torment. This was partly deliberate policy – the colonial authorities, as obsessed with avoiding ‘shelter syndrome’ as their counterparts back in London had been during the Blitz, deliberately refused to make them too comfortable to discourage people from residing in them permanently. ‘They were nothing but pest holes,’ one Maltese resident recalled, ‘with infants crying, and people moaning, and praying and vomiting with fear, and others snoring away in their deck chairs with cotton stuffed in their ears. There were lice everywhere and fleas as big as your fist…there weren’t any rats. There wasn’t enough room for them.’ What was even worse was the experience of bombardment. ‘With every explosion the ground shook so much that one would have thought that the shelter was made of cardboard.’ The women in the shelters prayed in desperation, ‘but all seemed in vain. There was no indication that the air-raid would ever stop. In fact, the terrifying noise got even worse. The ground trembled and you could see the expression of terror on everyone’s faces.’[66]

By the end of April, the Maltese were slowly starving to death. Siege rations were mostly a watery stew ladled out in soup kitchens and a few ounces of bread a day, with perhaps a little canned fish and olive oil. Fresh water grew scarce on an island with no rivers or lakes. There was scant oil for heating or electricity generation. Only a small convoy with food and other essential goods had made it through the aerial gauntlet in January. None made it in February. Two ships struggled into the Grand Harbour in March but were set on fire by Axis bombs before most of their cargoes could be unloaded. No ships made it in April. Malta’s governor warned London that without immediate food relief the island would have to capitulate by summer.

On 15 April 1942, King George VI awarded the George Cross to the entire people of Malta ‘for a heroism and devotion that will long be famous’. This extraordinary mass bestowal was not unappreciated by the Maltese, but it probably went down better back in Britain than it did on the island itself. Some Maltese had the distinct impression that it was the UK’s way of offering a sentimental parting gift before the island’s inevitable surrender. Others would have preferred a few Spitfires, not to mention some tins of corned beef, than a scrap of ribbon. Hobz, mux George Cross (Bread, not George Cross) was to be found scrawled on the ruins of many bombed buildings.[67]

Given Malta’s parlous situation by the end of April, it was fortunate for the British that German strategic incoherence, as so often throughout the war, asserted itself at the critical moment to save the day. Even a casual glance at a map showed Malta’s importance at the crossroads of the central Mediterranean. Taking the island, then, ought to have been an Axis priority. It would have been easy enough for the first twelve months of the Mediterranean War. It certainly should have been the target of Goering’s paratroopers (Fallschirmjäger) in May 1941 rather than the strategically irrelevant island of Crete. But nothing was done, and in the second half of that year all German attention was redirected towards the Soviet Union. It did not help that Rommel, who betrayed little sense of the significance of naval warfare, showed no enthusiasm for the project, despite the havoc being done to his supply lines by Malta’s ships and aircraft.

Kesselring, a far shrewder strategist, could see at once on his appointment to the Mediterranean theatre that Malta was critical to success in North Africa. He also understood that there was no point in securing air superiority over the island unless it was immediately followed up by an invasion; an intense bombardment campaign could only be sustained for so long, and Malta’s defences would soon recover. But getting Hitler interested in the project proved to be much tougher than it ought reasonably to have been. The Führer had been horrified by the losses sustained by his paratroopers in Crete and showed little confidence in the abilities of any invading Italian force. Mussolini for his part was keener on the plan, but the Regia Marina’s planners baulked at the prospect, emphasising their own lack of amphibious transportation and the challenge of ‘one of the greatest concentrations of defensive power in the world’. Echoes of Taranto and Cape Matapan still haunted them.

At their personal meeting on 30 April in Obersalzberg, the German and Italian leaders finally authorised what was dubbed Operation HERKULES. A joint force of 30,000 paratroopers (two-thirds of them the elite Fallschirmjäger) and 70,000 Italian seaborne troops would assault Malta. But Hitler and Mussolini decided to hold off on HERKULES until Panzerarmee Afrika, now preparing for a ground offensive in Cyrenaica, captured Tobruk first. Kesselring knew this was to get Axis priorities in the Mediterranean exactly backwards, but he could do nothing but wait on events. It was up to Rommel now.[68]

*

GHQ Middle East in Cairo was fully aware that Panzerarmee Afrika was likely to attack Eighth Army’s Gazala position in late May, thanks to its own intelligence efforts as well as top-secret ULTRA decrypts arriving from London. Auchinleck was unruffled; indeed, he welcomed Rommel’s move. For one thing, it gave him an excuse to ignore Churchill’s endless entreaties to stage his own offensive. For another, it meant that Ritchie, Eighth Army’s commander, would get to fight a defensive battle on terms the Auk felt were far more favourable to the British.

There were reasons for cautious confidence. Eighth Army’s 126,000 troops outnumbered Rommel’s 90,000.[69] Ritchie had 849 tanks organised into two armoured divisions (1st and 7th) and two tank brigades.[70] These included 167 of the brand-new American Grant tank, which boasted a 75mm sponson gun more powerful than anything carried by Panzerarmee Afrika’s Panzer IIIs and IVs. Rommel could call on only 561 tanks, of which 220 were lighter Italian types.[71] The British had also just received 116 models of the new six-pounder anti-tank gun, which finally had the penetrative power to breach the armour of the heaviest German armoured vehicles. In the air, admittedly, things did not look so good. The Luftwaffe now had the latest model F version of the Bf-109, which was superior to any British single-seat fighter in the Mediterranean, and the Italian Macchi C.202 was almost as good. All the same, the British force ought on paper to have been more than adequate enough to halt Rommel in front of Tobruk.

Ritchie had deployed his troops at the Gazala position in a forbidding-looking defensive line stretching forty-five miles southwards from the coast. Seven ‘boxes’ of infantry supported by tanks, artillery and anti-tank guns squatted like fortified islands along the line, surrounded by belts of barbed wire and dense minefields. Each was piled high with enough food, water and ammunition to fight without relief for at least a week. Behind them, in addition to a few smaller boxes to defend key road positions leading to Tobruk, were the two armoured divisions. Auchinleck and Ritchie could not decide whether the Germans would attempt a frontal assault up the coast road into one of the northern boxes, or else swing southwards and hook around the southernmost box, defended by a Free French brigade at an old Italian fort called Bir Hakeim. Either way, they were confident that the counter-attacking armoured divisions would blunt the initial German advance and the box line would hold, preventing Rommel getting the supplies he would need to sustain his front-line panzers. ‘There will be hard fighting, as there was before,’ the Auk signalled to Churchill on 22 May. ‘I have great confidence in our troops and in our dispositions. I have a firm hope of victory and pray that it may lead to greater things.’[72]

But everything about the British plan flew in the face of what ought to have been so painfully learned about desert warfare since 1940. CRUSADER and the other great encounters of the Western Desert had highlighted, first, the need for concentration of effort at the point of decision; second, the value of speed of movement as the battlefield environment rapidly changed; and third, how vital it was for all arms of the land forces – tanks, infantry and artillery – to fight as a coordinated whole. All these lessons were disregarded at Gazala. The infantry in the boxes were static, a Maginot Line stuck in the sand when desert fighting was best conceived of in fluid naval terms. They were too far apart to provide assistance to one another if under attack – the Free French at Bir Hakeim were twenty miles away from their nearest neighbors, 150th Brigade. The artillery was divvied up in penny packets rather than massed. The armoured divisions in the rear were to fight an entirely separate battle from the infantry stockaded in the boxes. Worse than that, though, they were not to fight as concentrated armoured divisions at all, but rather broken up into their constituent brigades. Unless Eighth Army could demonstrate a briskness in its response to events which so far in the war it had entirely failed to exhibit, its units risked being picked off and defeated in detail by the Germans and Italians.

Auchinleck seems to have understood at least some of the dangers. He urged Ritchie on 20 May that ‘you should not break up the organisation of either of the armoured divisions’. The Eighth Army commander’s response that he had no intention of doing this evidently reassured the Auk – or else he just felt uncomfortable pressing the matter further.[73] Auchinleck was too diffident, one might even say too nice, to ruthlessly impose his will on Eighth Army. This might not have been so very disastrous if it had possessed the homogeneous cohesion of the German forces in Panzerarmee Afrika. But Eighth Army was a motley multinational hodge-podge of Crown and foreign émigré troops – some pre-war regulars, some hostilities-only conscripts – few of whom had ever previously trained, let alone fought together. It looked powerful on paper, but Eighth Army in spring 1942 added up to much less than the sum of its parts.

Auchinleck’s relationship with Ritchie, his former chief of staff, was particularly dysfunctional. The Auk did not want to overrule his subordinate but could not stop offering ‘suggestions’. Ritchie was a solid career soldier but had had no prior experience in high command before his appointment to Eighth Army. He was junior to some of his own corps commanders, who made it clear that they were going to choose which orders to follow. Most of all, he could not wean himself off Auchinleck’s advice, and Auchinleck could not wean himself off giving it. As the official history of the campaign puts it, the Middle East commander-in-chief was left ‘in the tantalizing position of feeling that he knew what ought to be done and at the same time of not wishing to cramp Ritchie’s style by telling him how to do it’.[74] Churchill on one uncharitable occasion had remarked that Auchinleck’s predecessor, Wavell, reminded him of a suburban golf club secretary.[75] At his worst, the Auk could be like a mild-mannered, well-meaning but dithering president of a fractious debating society. The British would have been better off with a more obnoxious commander-in-chief.

*

Rommel attacked in the early hours of 27 May.[76] He feinted northwards, but the real attack was in the south. Four mobile divisions – two Panzer, one ‘light’ mechanised infantry, and the Italian Ariete armoured formation – hooked below Bir Hakeim, throwing up a massive dust cloud exacerbated by the warm khamsin winds of the Western Desert. They collided with 7th Armoured Division’s brigades and twenty-four hours of confused tank-versus-tank combat ensued in almost zero visibility, ‘like fighting a battle inside a bag of unmixed cement’, as one historian has put it.[77] By the following day Rommel’s men had mostly had the best of the individual engagements and had even overrun 7th Armoured’s headquarters and briefly captured its commanding general. But the situation did not look good for Rommel. His tank commanders had been unnerved by their encounter with the British Grants, which were so thickly armoured the German shells often simply bounced off them. More gravely, his advance into the British rear area, abandoning his own supply lines along the way, had left him effectively surrounded. ‘Big scale battle is raging in the Middle East,’ wrote Brooke in London. ‘The Auk should be able to get the better of it, and has great chances in pushing a counter stroke home.’[78] Auchinleck himself tasted victory. ‘You now seem to have got [Panzerarmee Afrika] where you always wanted it,’ he cabled Ritchie. ‘Well done you!’[79]

In a desperate bid to reacquire contact with his own supply lines, Rommel pulled his tanks westwards into a depression which became known as ‘the Cauldron’ and attacked from the rear against 150th Infantry Brigade’s box. Panzerarmee Afrika’s core formations were in an extremely vulnerable state: here was the opportunity Eighth Army had to end the Rommel legend once and for all. But, as had been demonstrated in so many other campaigns across the world since 1940, the British Army’s decision-making cycle remained far too slow and inflexible to take advantage of the situation. The infantry stayed in their boxes, observing events rather than contributing to them. The armoured divisions continued to fight as a collection of piecemeal brigades. Their counter-attacks were shrugged off. The 150th Infantry Brigade fought stubbornly, but finally collapsed on 1 June. German sappers had already cleared paths through the minefields and re-established a supply link for the Panzers.

The British made a major assault on the Cauldron on the night of 5 June. Rommel by now had had plenty of time to prepare his defences. As so often in the past, British tanks unsupported by infantry ran into a wall of devastating anti-tank fire. The assault was an ‘unmitigated disaster’, according to historian Niall Barr.[80] It was the depressingly old story of defeat: Dunkirk, Crete, Malaya, Burma all over again. To the south, the Free French brigade at Bir Hakeim put on a magnificent defence until 11 June when, facing the prospect of annihilation, its commanding general ordered his men to break out and head eastwards. Bir Hakeim was a stirring chapter of defiance and a fresh beginning for France’s military reputation after the humiliations of 1940. But in the absence of relief from the rest of Eighth Army, the result there was never in any doubt. The fall of the southernmost box meant that the Gazala front as a whole was now untenable. After a further fruitless counter-attack against the Cauldron, Ritchie ordered a general withdrawal on 14 June. ‘Rommel certainly seems to be getting the better of Ritchie and to be out-generalling him,’ Brooke wrote gloomily back in London.[81]

The question was now what to do about Tobruk. Churchill was emphatic in his cables to Auchinleck: on no account must the port, which thanks to the previous year’s siege had acquired a considerable symbolic importance, be taken. The Auk’s response was a masterpiece of ambiguity. He had ‘no intention whatever’ of giving up Tobruk, he promised the prime minister. But at the same time, he also had no intention of fortifying it for a siege either. He insisted that the new front line he had ordered Ritchie to construct would hold, but he could not explain what he would do if it didn’t.[82] In fact both Middle East commanders had decided back in January – and communicated their decision to London – that it would be pointless trying to hold Tobruk again in a lengthy siege, given the loss of British naval superiority in the central Mediterranean. They had received no objection.[83] Churchill had either forgotten this or was no longer interested. He and the War Cabinet insisted that ‘as many troops as are necessary to hold the place for certain’ be immediately garrisoned.[84] Auchinleck ordered a motley force of 33,000 men, including two brigades of inexperienced South African infantry, into Tobruk.

It was hopeless. Tobruk’s fortifications had been dismantled following CRUSADER: its minefields dismantled, its anti-tank guns moved to Gazala, its anti-tank ditches allowed to fill up with sand so that they ‘would hardly have interfered with the progress of a garden roller’.[85] Major-General Hendrik Klopper, the South African commander of the ill-fated garrison, had no experience of front-line command. Nor had his staff officers. The disorganised troops milled around inside the town without knowledge or purpose. One-quarter of them were support personnel who barely knew one end of a rifle from the other. Panzerarmee Afrika reached Tobruk’s outskirts on 17 June and quickly assaulted the town with massed and brutal Luftwaffe support. The resistance was perfunctory, the outcome inevitable. In the early hours of 21 June Klopper signalled Cairo that the garrison would either try to break out or would ‘resist to the last man and the last round’.[86] Evidently, he soon changed his mind. Later that morning he ordered the white flag to be raised over Tobruk. Its defenders had not even managed to destroy the 1,400 tons of gasoline gathered in one of the town’s bulging supply dumps, which now filled Rommel’s empty petrol tanks.[87]

*

Churchill, who had arrived in the United States on 19 June for the Second Washington Staff Conference, was sitting in President Roosevelt’s study at the White House when a telegram was passed into FDR’s hands. He handed it over to the prime minister wordlessly. TOBRUK HAS SURRENDERED, it said. Churchill’s chief staff officer, Lieutenant-General Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, was present; he said later it was the first time he had ever seen his boss wince.[88] ‘I could not believe it,’ Churchill wrote in his memoirs:

This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war. Not only were its military effects grievous, but it had affected the reputation of the British armies. At Singapore 85,000 men had surrendered to inferior numbers of Japanese. Now in Tobruk a garrison of 33,000 seasoned [sic] soldiers had laid down their arms to perhaps one-half of their number.

If this was typical of the morale of the Desert Army, no measure could be put upon the disasters which impended in Northeast Africa. I did not attempt to hide from the President the shock I had received. It was a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.[89]

In Berlin, Hitler immediately promoted Rommel to the rank of Generalfeldmarschall, at fifty years old the Third Reich’s youngest (though the Desert Fox told his wife that he would have preferred another reinforcement division).[90] German propagandists, able to make hay with the war news, were told to take the line that ‘We can’t imagine a better enemy than Churchill, since he has done such a good job of leading the British Empire into collapse that he is for us the best guarantee of the elimination of Britain’s claim to world power.’[91]

For South Africa’s prime minister, Jan Smuts, the surrender of Klopper’s two brigades was a political as well as a military disaster. Smuts had gone to extraordinary efforts to cajole his unenthusiastic Dominion into participating in the war in the first place. The debacle in Cyrenaica appeared to have confirmed all the scathing charges by nationalist Afrikaners that the lives and freedoms of their country’s young men would be squandered by Churchill in new Gallipolis.[92]

In Britain, Home Intelligence described Tobruk’s fall as ‘the greatest single blow to public confidence since Singapore’. Assurance that Britain would ultimately win the war was still strong, the report added hastily. But ‘as regards our immediate prospects [it has] been considerably shaken’ – and ‘a slight increase in war-weariness, not unmixed with defeatism, is reported’.[93] DISASTER AT TOBRUK was the banner headline of the Daily Mirror on 22 June. ‘We had been led to expect so much and have got so little,’ its leader column bemoaned. ‘The public will want to know why the tidings are hard and how came they to be heavy. In short, what is the mystery of Libya? The nation demands an answer.’[94] The Daily Herald was harsher still.

Professional mincers of words were still debating in yesterday morning’s newspapers whether our latest withdrawal in Libya should be called a defeat or a disaster. Before the morning was over still darker tidings had solved the problem for them…

Disaster is the word; a grave humiliating disaster to British arms…what grieves and exasperates the common citizen is that once again he has been misled by official over-optimism. The Libyan coastal road is beginning to resemble that flowery aisle of delusion, the garden path.[95]

Four days after Klopper raised the white flag, a parliamentary by-election was held in Maldon in Essex following the death of the sitting Tory MP. Neither the Labour nor Liberal Parties put up a candidate in accordance with the wartime electoral truce. The Conservative nominee, then, should have been a shoo-in. Instead, Tom Driberg, a left-wing journalist who was running as an independent, effectively anti-coalition government protest candidate, won with a 6,000-vote majority. In the final days of the campaign, Driberg had made great play of Tobruk’s loss and the culpability of the country’s leadership. Maldon was the fourth formerly Conservative seat lost to an independent in a string of by-election defeats since March. The significance of the size of Driberg’s majority in the wake of the news from the Middle East was not lost on anyone. Given the suspension of normal party politics, by-election upsets were one of the few ways in which the public could signal their dissatisfaction with the government. The nation, clearly, was unhappy. A whiff of revolutionary gunpowder was in the air.

Sir John Wardlaw-Milne, a much-respected Tory backbencher, tabled a Commons motion that ‘this House…has no confidence in the central direction of the war’. The debate on the motion was scheduled to begin on Wednesday, 1 July, after Churchill’s return from Washington. Parliament held its breath. ‘The opposition to Winstonian control is gathering force,’ wrote Sir Cuthbert Headlam.[96] Chips Channon was characteristically blunter. ‘When Winston was made Prime Minister I said it was the end of England; and so it seems. Now perhaps this shoddy government is doomed: it may go.’[97]

*

On the evening of 22 June, Rommel made a formal request to Berlin to abandon the plan that he must pause after capturing Tobruk in order to allow Malta to be taken. Rommel wished instead he be allowed to pursue Ritchie’s broken Eighth Army deep into Egypt. The supply booty captured at Tobruk would allow Panzerarmee Afrika to reach Cairo or Alexandria in ten days against minimal opposition, he promised. Kesselring was unconvinced. But the chaotic structure of Axis authority meant he had no power to compel Rommel to stick to the original agreement.[98] The issue was moot because the Führer had decided that a historic opportunity beckoned. ‘Fate has presented us, Duce, with a chance that will never recur a second time,’ Hitler wrote to Mussolini on 23 June. ‘The whole oriental edifice of the British Empire’ was ripe for destruction.[99] In May 1940, the Germans had hesitated in front of Dunkirk and allowed the British Expeditionary Force to escape.[100] The Führer was determined not to make the same mistake again. Advance units of Panzerarmee Afrika reached the outskirts of Mersa Matruh, about 140 miles inside Egypt, by nightfall on 25 June.

By this point, the road to Alexandria was one gigantic traffic jam as the shattered and confused elements of Eighth Army fled eastwards from the battlefield – a rout which went down in military lore as the ‘Gazala Gallop’. Alan Moorehead, the Daily Express’s war correspondent, watched ‘countless lorries crammed with exhausted and sleeping men’ pouring up the desert highway:

The vehicles were pressed bonnet to tailboard, all coming back from the front, all full of desperately weary men who slept piled on one another oblivious of the discomfort and the jolting. The traffic crawled eastward slowly, an immense lizard over a hundred miles in length…there seemed to be no end to it. We asked ourselves, ‘Is the whole army in retreat?’[101]

Auchinleck, admitting the turn of events since the start of the Gazala battle had been ‘disastrous’, offered his resignation to Brooke and Churchill.[102] The prime minister, motivated more by the likely political consequences of firing his commander-in-chief mid-crisis rather than by any lingering confidence in the Auk, insisted he stay on. Ritchie, though, would have to go. Rather than appoint a replacement, Auchinleck decided to take command of Eighth Army himself. Approving the decision, the prime minister added his usual unhelpful coda that ‘every fit male should be made to fight and die for victory…you are in the same kind of situation as we should be if England were invaded and the same intense drastic spirit should reign’.[103]

Before he was sacked, Ritchie had ordered fractured retreating units of Eighth Army, plus a New Zealand infantry division released from garrison duties in Syria, to hold at Mersa Matruh to try to buy time. When Rommel’s forces blundered into them on 26 June, the defence held well at first. But the position was too exposed to avoid an inevitable enemy envelopment, and Auchinleck ordered a general withdrawal on the night of the 27th. In the confusion, though, the order only reached one of the two defending corps. Half the army woke up on the morning of the 28th to discover the other half had vanished. Some of the remaining troops managed to break out before being overwhelmed, but the Germans took 6,000 prisoners in this latest debacle. It was not an episode to foster any renewed confidence in Eighth Army command.

One hundred and fifty miles to the east in Alexandria, the British fleet raised its anchors and departed the city, with demolition gangs preparing to blow up the dockyards. Outside Cairo, the roads leading to Palestine were choked with fleeing civilian vehicles, with eastbound trains packed solid. The Egyptian capital was in a full-blown ‘flap’. It was Singapore and Rangoon all over again. The RAF’s HQ decamped for Ismailia; so did the Royal Navy operations staff. Sardonic observers noted how many Cairo shop owners had begun quietly decorating their front windows with German and Italian national colours. Prime Minister Nahas, whom the British had just gone to such extraordinary pains to have appointed, secretly drafted a letter to Rommel assuring him that the Wafd Party’s sympathies had always really been with the Axis. British officers began carrying loaded pistols with them.[104]

On Wednesday, 1 July – the day that the no-confidence debate against Churchill’s government started, and the day Rommel began his assault on the last remaining British defensive position at an unremarkable railway stop called El Alamein sixty miles west of the Nile – the skies above British Army GHQ were cloaked with plumes of smoke from burning pyres of paperwork. ‘Ash Wednesday’, it came to be remembered in Cairo lore. ‘All day a group of privates shovelled piles of maps, lists of figures, reports, estimates, codes and messages into four blazing bonfires,’ recalled Moorehead. ‘I went into one office and the floor was covered in ashes and the smell of burning rag hung over the whole building.’ Only Ambassador Lampson refused to join in the panic. He ordered the white railings around the embassy to be defiantly repainted.[105]

German radio broadcast a message in Arabic to the women of Alexandria and Cairo: ‘get out your frocks. We’re on our way.’[106]

3

What the British People Wants Is a Victory

On the last day of June 1942, a Berlin news communiqué reported breathlessly that Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika was about to attack the British position at El Alamein, which it described as ‘the last enemy stronghold before Alexandria’.[1] The BBC had for several days been referring to something called the ‘Alamein Line’, behind which, it was said, General Auchinleck proposed to defend the Nile. Those Eighth Army troops who had found themselves unceremoniously dumped at this obscure railway platform surrounded by miles of empty and featureless sand and scrub, the monotony of its landscape broken only by flat limestone rocks and the occasional camel thorn bush, might reasonably have wondered where exactly the ‘stronghold’ was. Alamein was no Maginot Line; it was a long stretch of nothing much at all. The troops who were about to defend it, a mixture of exhausted survivors of the Gazala battles and raw rear-echelon squaddies rushed to the front line from as far away as Palestine and Persia, did not feel like they represented much of an obstacle to Rommel.

The El Alamein position is often described by historians as a ‘bottleneck’ in the Western Desert battlefield. To be sure, it presented a narrower front than anything that the two sides had fought over before. Forty miles south of the coastline was the 700-foot escarpment wall of the Qattara Depression, an inland ocean of salt flats and quicksand impassable to vehicles and off limits to Panzerarmee Afrika. Rommel was not going to be able to exercise the kind of grand southward hook around Eighth Army’s left flank which he had performed at Gazala. Still, forty miles is not nothing. And on 1 July 1942, Eighth Army entirely lacked the means to defend this substantial stretch of terrain adequately.[2] Nor had the position been pre-seeded with fortifications other than a few essays in barbed wire and landmine placement immediately around the railway station.

It was here, on the coast, that Auchinleck placed three brigades of South African troops plus the remnants of 7th Armoured Division. South of Alamein proper was a shallow crease in the landscape called Ruweisat Ridge, and just in front of the western tip of Ruweisat a small depression called the Deir el Shein, into which the 18th Indian Brigade was deployed. Further south still, where broken rocks and soft sand made the going for vehicles trickier, Auchinleck placed the New Zealand survivors of Mersa Matruh and a fragmented mixture of other infantry and armoured troops. It was not much of a front by which to defend the British Empire in the Middle East, but it was all the Auk had left.

Panzerarmee Afrika’s forward reconnaissance units came in sight of the Alamein position on 30 June.[3] Rommel, contemplating this last obstacle before the delta, proposed to handle it as he had done Mersa Matruh: penetrate the inevitable gaps in the ragged British line and panic the defenders into withdrawal. The following morning, he sent his 90th Light Division into the flat corridor between Alamein and Ruweisat, hoping to find a back way to reach the sea and cut off the coastal road and rail line. Meanwhile, 15th and 21st Panzer were sent to probe the western end of Ruweisat and perhaps break into any empty space to the south-east. As the two Panzer divisions approached the Ruweisat Plateau, however, they were discomforted to receive incoming fire from the Deir el Shein on their flank. This was the first inkling the Germans had of 18th Indian Brigade’s presence on the battlefield. The depression would have to be cleared before they could make any further progress.

The brigade – a mixture of Sikh and Nepalese infantry, plus a Territorial battalion of the Essex Regiment – had only just arrived from security detail in Mosul and hadn’t previously fought against Rommel’s men. Two-thirds of its troops had never seen action of any kind. Cooks, orderlies, drivers and batmen would have to fight alongside the rifle infantry. Reinforced by some desultory field guns and a few obsolete Matilda II tanks, they now attempted to defend the ill-prepared Deir el Shein position from the two veteran armoured divisions of Panzerarmee Afrika. The Germans demanded a surrender which was ignored. Heavy shelling was followed by waves of infantry attack and then repeated assaults by Panzer IIIs and IVs. The 2nd/5th Essex Regiment was at the crux of the onslaught. By 5 p.m., all the Matildas had been knocked out and most of the depression was overrun. At 7 p.m., the brigade’s survivors were ordered to make a break for it to avoid capture. The Deir el Shein was in German hands and the 18th Indian Brigade no more. But its resistance had cost Rommel eighteen precious tanks and blunted his advance for twenty-four hours.[4]

Meanwhile, 90th Light Division had fared no better. Running into unexpectedly heavy artillery fire from the South Africans, even the German divisional war diary admits that a panicked rout was prevented only by the quick actions of the command staff. The attempt to cut behind the Alamein position to the coast had to be abandoned for the day.[5]

On 2 and 3 July, Rommel tried again. He sent in the tanks to clear Ruweisat Ridge of its defenders, but the Panzers failed, and an Italian thrust to the south ran into the New Zealanders, with the result that what was left of the elite Ariete armoured division was destroyed. By this point, Panzerarmee Afrika had just twenty-six functional tanks left and the effective strength of its three German divisions combined was barely 2,000 bone-weary men. They had been fighting virtually non-stop since 26 May and had just made a 350-mile advance in ten days. Most of their supplies were gone. They were subject to the round-the-clock attentions of the RAF’s Western Desert Air Force operating from nearby Nile airbases, while their own Luftwaffe air support had vanished.[6]

Even as unrealistic a taskmaster as Rommel realised this was no good. The attack was suspended, and Axis forces dug in to await food, ammunition and reinforcements trickling in from Tripoli. For the British, the breathing space was critical. Much closer to its own supply depots, Eighth Army could rebuild far faster than the Germans and Italians at Alamein. Auchlinleck could now properly consolidate the position and reconstruct his formations.

The First Battle of Alamein, as it would become known, would go on for another three weeks until the end of July. Trying to seize the initiative, the Auk launched a series of maladroitly orchestrated counter-offensives of his own, which made little impression on Rommel’s front line and showed that the British Army had a long way to go if it was to defeat elite Axis forces on even terms. The fighting fizzled out in the end in the scorching summer heat, but the battle’s outcome had been decided in its first three days; indeed, probably in its first twenty-four hours. First Alamein was to be overshadowed in the British memory of the war by the grander and less consequential Second Battle of Alamein in October and November under Bernard Montgomery. But Second Alamein’s ending, though not a foregone conclusion, was never going to result in total Allied defeat. First Alamein was the only engagement to take place at that flyblown railway stop that could have genuinely gone either way.

Indeed, 1 July 1942 was the final day on which, if events had worked out differently, Britain could conceivably have gone on to lose the Second World War.[7] The delay at the Deir El Shein alone ‘hopelessly prejudiced’ any prospect of Rommel’s advance continuing, as one of his staff officers conceded later.[8] Had 18th Indian Brigade crumbled that Wednesday morning, or the South African artillery fire proved less devastating to Rommel’s 90th Light Infantry, Auchinleck would probably have had to abandon the Alamein position, just as he had done at Mersa Matruh the week before. And this time, there would have been nowhere else left to dig in west of the Nile. Egypt would have had to have been abandoned.

What this would have meant for the war’s outcome is hard to say, but it would have been a disaster far greater than that of Singapore, Burma and Gazala combined. It would have probably meant the end of Churchill’s government at home, and it would certainly have led to the writing of altogether darker chapters of the war. Auchinleck is largely forgotten today compared to his showy successor as commander of Eighth Army. But as the just-about victor of First Alamein, he earned the rare distinction among British generals of fighting a battle which might have ended up saving his country.

Not that Churchill was grateful. ‘The Eighth Army under Auchinleck had weathered the storm’ was as much praise as he could muster in his memoirs.[9] Rommel, writing shortly after the battle, was more generous. Auchinleck had ‘[taken] the initiative himself and executed his operations with deliberation and noteworthy courage’.[10] Much would be made afterwards of the supposed demoralisation of Eighth Army under Auchinleck. There were serious problems of organisation, training and welfare, to be sure. But dispirited troops would not have fought as they did in the first days of July at First Alamein. Historian Correlli Barnett provided an appropriate peroration in his 1960 history of the war in Libya and Egypt. ‘Auchinleck had won a historic battle,’ he wrote: ‘It had been as desperate, difficult and gallant as Wellington’s repulse of Napoleon at Waterloo, but for Auchinleck there was no Blucher with forty thousand fresh men to come up on the flank and turn defeat into rout. Nevertheless Auchinleck had saved the Middle East with all that implied for the general course of the war. It was the turning point.’[11]

*

Though it was not obvious to anyone at the time on either side, 1 July 1942 was the high-water mark of Rommel’s Deutsches Afrikakorps. It is not a bad moment in the narrative, then, to reflect a little on the German general who commanded it and who continues to loom in the British memory of the war.

When giving his account to Parliament of the fighting in Cyrenaica back in January, Churchill had offered an unusual personal tribute to then General der Panzertruppe Erwin Rommel. ‘We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.’ It was a compliment he was to repeat in his war memoirs eight years later.[12] Goebbels, who had long taken an interest in the propaganda value of one of the Third Reich’s most charismatic commanders, was giddy when he heard the news. ‘They [the British] are making him one of the most popular generals in the entire world,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘That’s perfectly all right with us.’[13]

The ‘Rommel Effect’ was apparent across the English-speaking world in 1942. Time magazine splashed the Desert Fox on its cover in June, his handsome visage portrayed hovering ominously over the Suez Canal. Auchinleck was compelled to write an Eighth Army order of the day in which he complained that ‘our friend Rommel is becoming a kind of magician or bogey man to our troops, who are talking far too much about him…P.S. I am not jealous’. Needless to say, these protestations availed Auchinleck little – and their subject was sufficiently delighted by them to keep a translated copy of the Order in his personal papers.[14]

So was Rommel the magician his friends and enemies imagined? Certainly, he was said to possess a charmed Fingerspitzengefühl (‘feeling in the fingertips’) about where the key moment of decision would be on the battlefield. Few commanders in the modern age have been so determined to leap personally into the action. Rommel would tour his army’s positions in his Fieseler Storch spotting aircraft, sending notes to those units he thought were demonstrating insufficient haste. His physical courage was not in dispute. He was almost killed on at least three occasions in North Africa.[15]

Where Rommel was not, frequently, was back in his own headquarters where decisions piled up, unmade. Kesselring saw this first-hand when he briefly led a corps of Panzerarmee Afrika when its own general was captured. ‘I then learnt the difficulties of a commander whose hands are tied,’ he wrote later, ‘by subordination to a headquarters that issues no orders and cannot be reached.’[16] Being present in battle allowed Rommel on a few occasions to make decisions that swung the initiative. But it was not a healthy practice, literally or figuratively. He had exhausted himself by mid-1942 and his poor physical condition meant that he had to take a disastrously timed leave of absence from North Africa in the autumn.

More importantly, though, his methods flew in the face of what were supposed to be Wehrmacht best practices.[17] The German operational art of war has been defined as Auftragstaktik, allowing subordinates the flexibility to execute broad goal-defined orders on their own initiative. Whether Auftragstaktik ever amounted to a coherent doctrine is disputed by historians, but the point here is that Rommel certainly didn’t follow it.[18] He was an interfering micromanager who insisted on making relatively trivial decisions that would have been better left to his junior officers.[19] One wonders if there was something of the midlife crisis about his determination to play the platoon commander rather than the general. Perhaps it was a response to the ‘château general’ style of the First World War. Perhaps it was the ego of a fifty-year-old man wanting to pretend he was still twenty-five. Either way, it betrayed an unhelpful distrust of the men he led. Cheerfully willing to ignore orders from Berlin that did not suit his fancy, Rommel would brook no similar independence of thought among his own officer cadre. A ‘strongly developed spirit of contrariness and occasional pigheadedness’ made him difficult to get along with. He was admired by the men around him, but not necessarily liked.[20]

Rommel’s alleged sixth sense that told him when and where to strike owed less to any supernatural instincts than to superb Axis intelligence assets in North Africa. In late 1941, Nazi cryptographers broke the radio code used by Colonel Bonner Fellers, the US State Department’s military attaché in Cairo, and they were able to pass along to Rommel the well-informed assessments of British capabilities and intentions the colonel regularly sent back to Washington. At the tactical level, Panzerarmee Afrika possessed in Captain Alfred Seebhom and the men of Strategical Intercept Company 621 the best interpreters of battlefield-level traffic analysis on any side in the war. Rommel was able to use these priceless sources of information to inform his decisions throughout the first half of 1942. But that June, the British realised Fellers’s code was compromised and warned the Americans, while a month later, at First Alamein, Seebhom’s unit strayed imprudently close to the front line and was captured. Rommel’s top-tier intelligence sources had gone, and with them much of his ability to read his enemy’s mind.[21]

Much of the German commander’s reputation for genius in the Western Desert really reflected the superb quality of the troops he led in Panzerarmee Afrika – including some fine Italian units such as the Ariete and Littorio armoured divisions and the Folgore paratroopers, none of whom received any credit from Rommel. It also reflected the failures of the enemy opposite him. British blunders saved Rommel from the folly of his own actions several times. He should have been crushed in the Gazala Cauldron at the end of May 1942, but Ritchie fumbled the counter-attack. He blindly crashed into Eighth Army’s position at Mersa Matruh the following month and the leading units of Panzerarmee Afrika might have been destroyed had the British been capable of taking advantage of their fabulous opportunity.[22] For Churchill, much of the value in building up the Rommel Myth in 1942 was to distract attention from the persistent shortcomings of his own country’s troops and commanders. Attributing German success to the febrile brain of a twentieth-century Hannibal avoided asking awkward questions about British performance.

It is striking to compare the British willingness to collaborate with Goebbels in constructing a personality cult around Rommel with their indifference towards an Axis commander who really did deserve such plaudits in 1942: Yamashita Tomoyuki. Rommel and Yamashita were both driven generals facing long odds and desperate logistical straits. The difference is that, in the end, Yamashita took Singapore and Rommel did not take Cairo. It is hard not to escape the conclusion that the British white-supremacist imagination simply lacked the space to credit an Asian general with the creativity of independent thought it was willing to lavish upon a racially unthreatening Desert Fox.

An objection to this would be that Yamashita was a talented general but a wicked man – the instigator of various ghastly atrocities carried out against civilians and POWs – whereas Rommel was the quintessential Good German, the chivalric Saladin of a ‘war without hate’ in the desert. Both men’s ultimate fates were tied up in these judgements. The Japanese commander was hanged in September 1945 for mass murders carried out by his troops in the Philippines, while Rommel had been ordered to commit suicide a year earlier for his supposed role in the Wehrmacht’s anti-Hitler conspiracy plot. Whether Yamashita deserved to be executed for what his men did need not detain us here.[23] The issue, rather, is whether Rommel earned the very different treatment he received in post-war Anglophone culture. It is hard to imagine anyone in 1951 making a film about Yamashita to parallel Henry Hathaway’s The Desert Fox, in which brooding matinee idol James Mason played the eponymous general as the apolitical victim of a Nazi system he quietly detested.

There is, in fact, no evidence that, at least until the last few weeks of his life, Rommel was ever anything than a dutiful servant of his Führer. The personal relationship between the two men was key to his success, for as the scion of a middle-class Württemberg family rather than one of the patrician Prussian dynasties dominant in the German officer corps he could not otherwise have risen so far and so fast. Hitler saw his protégé as the template for a new kind of Third Reich general, a product of the Aryan Volksgemeinschaft inculcated in solid National Socialist principles. If their relationship could be stormy at times, well, so can all affairs of the heart.

As for his personal complicity in war crimes, Rommel was unique among the Nazi high commanders in that he never served on the Eastern Front. He was detached by an accident of geography from the main killing fields of the Holocaust. If large numbers of civilians were never murdered under his watch, that is in part because fate never put their lives at his mercy. For two years, the fortunes of war sent him to a barren theatre of conflict in which the battlefield was almost entirely denuded of all living things, let alone people.

But no general of a criminal regime was ever likely to escape complicity in atrocities. Troops of Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division killed unarmed Senegalese Tirailleur prisoners in France in 1940. There are accounts of him personally interceding in North Africa to prevent the similar execution of captured enemy soldiers – but then the same was true of Yamashita.[24] More significantly, the Nazi apparatus of mass murder would have been extended to the whole of the Middle East under Rommel’s watch had he won the campaign in 1942, and there is no evidence that he would have raised the slightest objection. An SS Einsatzkommando killing squad had already crossed the Mediterranean and Jews in Libya and Tunisia were being arrested, deported, used for slave labour and executed.[25] The German propaganda machine was preparing for slaughter on a vastly greater scale should Axis forces reach the Nile and Palestine by disseminating viciously anti-Semitic Arabic pamphlets and radio broadcasts.[26] There is no reason to believe that Rommel would have lifted a finger to try to prevent the Holocaust in the Middle East; his career is testament to the idea that virtue owes as much to accidents of fate as it does to intent.

In the end Rommel never got to the Pyramids, let alone the Wailing Wall, and maybe there was never much realistic likelihood he would. His strategic vision was curiously naïve: he would simply keep attacking the enemy forces in front of him until he won. His understanding of air power was limited and of naval power virtually non-existent. Of logistics, supremely important in an environment as hostile to the presence of large armies as North Africa, he was as ignorant as a swan. When Kesselring implored him to take Malta in early 1942 before pressing on into Egypt to try to ease Panzerarmee Afrika’s supply woes, Rommel ignored him – and perhaps the best thing that can be said about that decision is that his logistical situation was so bad that Malta may not have mattered either way.[27]

The problem was not primarily his supply convoys, many of which got through. The problem was that the main Axis ports in North Africa were located at a vast road distance from the front line, and moving military materiel to the forward troops required large numbers of vehicles the Germans and Italians did not have. Only the construction of a coastal railroad could have transformed the situation, and Rommel was far too impatient to wait for that. Instead, he resolved to steal from the enemy what he could not import himself. This required him to keep winning all the battles, and he did for a long time; but even an army as clumsy as Britain’s in 1942 could not help but win something eventually. When it did, at Alamein in July, the mobile war became one of fixed positions and Panzerarmee Afrika was doomed.[28]

Long before then, though, the point of the German intervention had been forgotten. Rommel had been sent to Africa in February 1941 to lead a Sperrverband, or blocking detachment, to prevent the British overrunning Tripolitania and to cause as much nuisance as possible. He proceeded to lead his enemies on a merry dance for the next half a year. This represented a fine investment by Hitler: just one Panzer and one light mechanised division with limited air support tying up much larger British imperial resources across the Mediterranean. But as Rommel’s legend grew, so did his and the Führer’s ambitions, and the German investment in the Mittelmeer grew correspondingly. The movement of U-Boats from the Atlantic to Italian bases in the second half of 1941 was a major, misconceived redirection of strategic effort. The Luftwaffe’s expanding role in the Mediterranean came at the cost of air power on the critical Eastern Front (on 27 December 1941, at the height of the Battle for Moscow, the Germans had 1,650 combat aircraft in western Europe and the Mittelmeer and only 1,563 in Russia).[29]

The sunk costs in North Africa would only worsen the following year. By that point Hitler was luxuriating in fantasies of Alexandrian empires (‘by the end of 1943 we will pitch our tents in Tehran, in Baghdad, and on the Persian Gulf,’ he told Albert Speer) wildly disconnected to Panzerarmee Afrika’s stalled prospects on the battlefield.[30] A campaign which had begun as a cheap and useful diversion of the enemy’s effort was fated to end with the collapse of an army a quarter-million strong.

*

While the bonfires of paperwork burned in Cairo and Rommel’s tanks battered away at 18th Indian Brigade, 3,500 miles away in Westminster the House of Commons, on Wednesday, 1 July 1942, settled in to hear the debate on Sir John Wardlaw-Milne’s motion. Churchill himself was present in the chamber. The stakes were high. As he knew, if things went badly, he could be out of office by the end of the day. Wardlaw-Milne was ‘an imposing man with a calm manner which gives the impression of solidity’, thought Harold Nicolson.[31] Old enemies of the government like the firebrand left-wing Labour MP and brilliant orator Aneurin Bevan were just waiting for their chance to deliver a coup de grâce.

In many respects, the situation Churchill faced at that moment was not very different to that which had brought down Chamberlain in May 1940. Indeed, it was worse. Chamberlain had at least been a popular leader of his own party, and his fall had been genuinely and bitterly regretted by many Tory MPs. Churchill was much less liked on the Conservative backbenches. Some Tories had still not forgiven him for overthrowing his predecessor. They suspected that he was not really a Conservative at all – which of course he had not been in a literal sense between 1904 and 1924. He was certainly not leading a Conservative government any longer. Most of the reliable old party hands who had once dominated Chamberlain’s War Cabinet were gone by mid-1942. Traditional Tories had become uneasy at propping up an administration in which politicians such as themselves hardly featured.

Two men were in a strong position to bring down Churchill any time they wished. One was Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, and since early 1942 deputy prime minister within the War Cabinet. Attlee might not have seemed like much of a threat to Churchill, or indeed anyone else, at first glance. It was his misfortune that in an age of larger-than-life politicians he bore an unmistakable resemblance to Daily Express cartoonist Sidney Strube’s ‘Little Man’, a timid, put-upon suburban clerk. Attlee’s diffident, laconic personality contrasted with the big personalities surrounding him in the War Cabinet – the prime minister most obviously, but also his own devoted lieutenant, the bullish, ebullient minister of labour Ernest Bevin. As a result, he was habitually underestimated. He was ‘a Snowdon surrounded by Mount Blancs’, according to one MP’s jibe.[32] An indifferent and uninspiring speaker in the Commons, Attlee made little impression on the wartime mass consciousness. The chiefs of staff thought him a bland yes man. Hugh Dalton called him a ‘poor little rabbit’.[33]

All this was to mistake lack of style for lack of substance. There was steel beneath the meek exterior. It was not an accident that in December 1915, then Captain Attlee of the South Lancashire Regiment had been given the job of commanding the rearguard at the evacuation of Suvla Bay in the Dardanelles; nor that he had carried out this vital, complex and treacherous assignment without a hitch. Many of Attlee’s rivals who dismissed him for his Pooterish demeanour would come to regret their hasty condescension. What Attlee lacked in charisma he more than made up for in tenacity, an ability to get things done without distraction or drama, and a lack of sentimentality which could become ruthlessness when necessary.

Attlee certainly had motives for bringing Churchill down. He found working with the prime minister often intensely frustrating. He regarded Churchill’s Victorian attitudes towards imperial questions like the future of India as absurd, his methods of doing business in the War Cabinet infuriating, and his strategic judgement often wildly at variance with reality. And Attlee was well aware that his role within the coalition government was not universally popular within his own party. Labour’s backbench MPs had always had the sneaking suspicion that their leaders were more comfortable cosying up to Tories than advancing the cause of socialism. Harold Laski, an outspoken member of Labour’s policymaking National Executive Committee (NEC) and a persistent gadfly to Attlee, had argued in April that ‘the immense support that the Labour movement has brought to Mr. Churchill has not resulted in any measures for the future of the workers’. A motion moved by Bevan a few days later at the annual party conference to withdraw from the electoral truce – which would have effectively ended the coalition – had only been defeated by 60,000 votes out of 2.5 million cast.[34]

The other man who was in a position to finish Churchill’s premiership should he choose was his fellow Conservative Anthony Eden, the War Cabinet’s foreign secretary. Eden was just forty-five at the time of the Tobruk debate and the closest mid-century Westminster came to a matinee idol. Eden cut a dash in modish well-cut suits and his trademark silk-brimmed black Homburg; society columnists gushed about his chiselled features and a parted pencil moustache that would not have disgraced the upper lip of Clark Gable. As a decorated war hero and the son of a baronet with an 8,000-acre estate sprawling across County Durham and Northumberland, he had impeccable Tory patrician credentials. But Eden was also popular among his Labour colleagues in the War Cabinet and he was by far the wartime general public’s preferred choice for an alternative prime minister should one be needed. When Churchill’s coalition had been created in May 1940, many Britons had taken it for granted that it would only be a matter of time before the experienced but venerable prime minister gave way for this dynamic younger colleague.

Like Attlee, Eden chafed against the prime minister’s idiosyncratic methods, his determination to have the last word on major foreign policy matters, and his exclusion of the rest of the War Cabinet from military decision-making. ‘I am much troubled about the present methods of conducting the war, and am in some doubt what I should do,’ Eden had told his friend Viscount ‘Bobbety’ Cranborne in spring 1942. ‘I really feel that I would much rather be out of the Government than continually accepting responsibility for decisions of which I know nothing.’[35] Resigning his post in protest at the Tobruk debacle would have done enormous damage to Churchill; perhaps even brought him down.

The atmosphere in the Commons as the censure debate opened on 1 July was, then, unsurprisingly excitable. Wardlaw-Milne started well, arguing that the prime minister should cease to be minister of defence and hand over day-to-day conduct of the war to someone else. But then he fluffed it. Harold Nicolson thought that for all his veneer of gravitas he was ‘rather an ass’ and his growing influence in the Commons had ‘caused his head to swell badly’. Sure enough, Wardlaw-Milne quickly proceeded to make a bizarre suggestion: the new minister of defence should be the king’s younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester – an affable and hard-working royal, but hardly the sort of man to lead or inspire a nation at war. ‘A wave of panic-embarrassment’ passed over the House at this freakish proposition.[36] Chips Channon ‘saw Winston’s face light up as if a lamp had been lit within him…He was saved and he knew it.’[37]

Worse was to come from Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, co-sponsor of the motion. Keyes had played a signal part in the Norway debate in May 1940 which had brought down Chamberlain, but his moment as kingmaker had passed. A ‘very dull speaker’ according to Nicolson, he rambled on into lunchtime as the energy in the Commons chamber gradually dissipated. Argument went on until the small hours of the morning, by which time almost everyone had left.

Churchill’s critics gained some momentum back the following day when Bevan launched a ‘brilliant offensive’ against the prime minister, who was sitting glowering opposite.[38] His attacks ranged widely. The British should invade France rather than blundering about in Egypt, Bevan said. Modern-minded Free French and Polish generals should be put in charge of the nation’s ground forces in place of hidebound home-grown Blimps (if a young Rommel had joined the British Army, he alleged, he would never have risen higher than sergeant). As for Churchill, Bevan scorned that he was better at winning parliamentary debates than battles.

Churchill responded with a ninety-minute defence of his administration. He did not make the mistake of denying the disasters that had haunted the year so far. Indeed, he spelled them out in painful detail. But he argued that the turning point was near and that the House needed to allow him to complete the remit for victory he had been given in May 1940 – or choose another leader. ‘The duty of the House of Commons is to sustain the Government or change the Government. If it cannot change it, it should sustain it.’[39] When the final vote came in, the government had a comfortable majority of 450. The Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky had been watching in the Visitors’ Gallery. The prime minister had won ‘a brilliant victory’.[40]

How had he pulled it off? To Maisky, the tug of party discipline, the feebleness of his opponents, and a fear that a show of discord would undermine Britain’s international standing had ultimately come together to save Churchill. His critics had not been able to decide among themselves what exactly it was they wanted. Wardlaw-Milne had said that Churchill should stop interfering with military decisions. But Keyes had wanted him to interfere more. Some MPs had wanted the prime minister to stand down as minister of defence. But Bevan (of all people) had said that was a terrible idea. Labour MPs had condemned the government for imprisoning strikers; Keyes had wanted more of them locked up. Hardly anyone who had spoken against the government during the debate had been able to bring themselves to outright demand Churchill’s resignation – indeed, Keyes had said that that would be ‘a deplorable disaster’.[41] Lacking any coherent alternative policy to propose, let alone an alternative leader, Churchill’s critics had sounded like carping spectators rather than an informed body of dissenters. It is perhaps testament to how unimpressive a body they had been that the chamber’s only Communist Party MP, Willie Gallacher, hardly a traditional friend to the prime minister, had ended up voting with the government. If the rebels were not able to win him over, it was no wonder they flopped.

Crucially, Attlee and Eden had remained loyal. The Labour leader often found Churchill personally annoying, but he was still convinced that he was the best, indeed only man capable of doing the job of winning the war. More practically, Attlee feared that if Labour undermined Churchill and the coalition collapsed, the public would blame it for putting party politics above country at a moment of national crisis. If Labour deposed the prime minister people would say that ‘the party had slipped out of responsibility when things looked black’.[42] Attlee took for granted, as did practically everyone else in 1942, that when a post-war election eventually came Churchill would be returned to power. The wartime coalition, then, represented his and Bevin’s great chance to influence government social and economic reform according to Labour’s values. Attlee had no sense yet that he was embarked on some triumphant democratic socialist ‘Road to 1945’. He wanted to make policy hay while the sun shone.[43]

As for Eden, his dilemma was that, cast early as Malcolm to Churchill’s Duncan, he was never quite able to bring himself to play Macbeth instead. He was far too susceptible to Churchill’s charm to wield any dagger. On several occasions during the war, his aides watched him depart the Foreign Office and cross Downing Street angrily determined to have it out with ‘Winston’ once and for all, only for him to return calmed and quiescent.[44] Churchill also dropped hint after hint that the crown prince might inherit the throne very soon. ‘It will not be long before you are in control,’ he had whispered in Eden’s ear in November 1941.[45] Churchill was an old man in irregular health. The smart thing for Eden to do seemed to be to wait and be anointed prime minister (probably sooner rather than later) rather than risk an unpredictable rebellion. Little did Eden know in July 1942 that he was going to be waiting for another thirteen years.

The key difference between the Tobruk debate and the Norway debate in May 1940 which had brought down Chamberlain was that this time there was no Churchill waiting in the wings to become prime minister. Anyone wanting to succeed the PM would need to obtain the king’s invitation and the confidence of a majority of the House’s MPs. None of the disgruntled ex-ministers, reactionary backwoodsmen and card-carrying members of the left-wing awkward squad willing to speak out in July 1942 had the slightest chance of accomplishing either of these things. ‘Once more Churchill has triumphed and he will presumably lead us on to our doom,’ wrote Channon after the debate. ‘Always wrong about everything…words, words, follies – foolishness – why has England so taken him to her heart?’ Yet he had voted with the government in the end anyway. What, he asked, was the alternative?[46]

Still, Churchill was hardly out of the woods yet. Twenty-five MPs had voted for censure, and thirty more had abstained – not nearly enough to finish him, but not so few as could be idly dismissed. Maisky thought ‘he shouldn’t get carried away’, for ‘the overwhelming majority in the House is in a very anxious and critical mood’.[47] His wife Clementine’s worries were not assuaged. ‘If the situation at the Front does not improve, who knows what may happen?’[48]

There was the rub. Britain had not won a battle for a long time. Panzerarmee Afrika was sixty miles from Alexandria. Malta was still imperiled. Nothing appeared to have gone right for as long as anyone could remember. ‘We must have a victory. What the British public wants is a victory!’ Bevin bellowed to the rest of the War Cabinet.[49]

During the Tobruk debate, much of the discussion had turned on points of increasingly obscure and rococo detail about tanks, anti-tank guns and aircraft.[50] An assertion had been made again and again that production inefficiency and qualitative inferiority of weaponry were responsible for the empire’s military hardships. The government had tacitly accepted the charge.

In fact, the United Kingdom had been comfortably outproducing Germany in most categories of military equipment since at least the fall of France. In 1941, Britain had built 4,841 armoured fighting vehicles to the Third Reich’s 3,790, and 20,094 aircraft to its 11,776. The ratio of advantage in 1942 would be almost as great.[51] There were, to be sure, problems with some obsolete and poorly performing British vehicles and equipment. But then the same was no less true of German kit, not to mention Italian and Japanese. It had been Panzerarmee Afrika, facing Grant tanks, which had been at a technological disadvantage.

Britain was not losing battles in 1942 because of a lack of good weapons. It was losing them because Crown Forces were overstretched fighting too many enemies simultaneously in too many theatres of war; because British troops were still not well trained enough; and because Britain still did not have good enough military commanders. None of these problems was irreparable. But fixing them would not be easy.

*

Three weeks after the Tobruk debate, the American members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee (CCS) flew to England for a meeting with their British counterparts at Chequers. George Marshall, the leader of the delegation, was not a happy man. He had come to Chequers to press for a definite British commitment to an invasion of France in 1942 – a so-called ‘Second Front’ (the first front being the Eastern one). Marshall’s plan, codenamed SLEDGEHAMMER, was to land between six and nine divisions on the Cherbourg Peninsula no later than 15 October. He thought he had obtained provisional agreement from the British about SLEDGEHAMMER back in April. When the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, had visited Washington at the end of May, FDR had published a communiqué saying that ‘full understanding [has been] reached with regard to the urgent task of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942’. But on 8 July, Churchill had cabled Roosevelt to say that having considered the matter in detail, ‘no responsible British general, admiral, or air marshal is prepared to recommend SLEDGEHAMMER as a practicable operation in 1942.’[52] Marshall felt tricked. Now he had come to Chequers to tell the British that if they would not cooperate on SLEDGEHAMMER, the US would stop focusing on Europe as the primary theatre of the war and begin deploying forces to the Pacific instead.

The very existence of the CCS Committee was an expression of how differently war strategy was being managed in the post–Pearl Harbor world.[53] Up to this point, Churchill had been able to make Allied plans largely as he wished. The British chiefs of staff had always had their say, while the Dominions and the émigré powers had been consulted at times, accommodated now and then, and even appeased once or twice. But their leaders had never held a permanent place at the decision-making table. Even alliance with the Soviet Union had not interfered much with Churchill’s ability to shape the western war as he chose. The Eastern Front was, after all, a long way away.

Now, thanks to America’s entry into the war, his country was in formal partnership with a state powerful enough to demand at least an equal say in all future strategy. The CCS was the result: a supreme decision-making body for the Anglo-American coalition. Its permanent seat was in Washington, with a ‘Joint Staff Mission’ in the American capital representing the British chiefs for routine matters. When critical decisions had to be made, however, Brooke and his COS colleagues Portal, Pound and Mountbatten were to meet directly with their US counterparts: Marshal, Admiral Ernest King, whom Roosevelt had appointed as Chief of Naval Operations in place of Harold Stark shortly after Pearl Harbor, and Lieutenant-General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, commander of the US Army Air Forces (USAAF).[54] The two heads of government would usually attend the big meetings too. By midsummer 1942, two full-scale CCS conferences had already taken place in Washington: one (Arcadia) immediately after Pearl Harbor, and another in June. At the latter, Marshall had thought the Second Front strategy for 1942 had been confirmed. Now he wanted to know why the British were backtracking.

Marshall had set out his rationale for a Second Front as soon as possible in a memorandrum to Roosevelt shortly after Pearl Harbor. ‘Through France passes our shortest route to the heart of Germany,’ he wrote: ‘a British-American attack through Western Europe provides the only feasible method for employing the bulk of the combat power of the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia in a concerted effort against a single enemy.’[55] For Marshall, there was never anything particularly complicated about the rationale for invading France as soon as practicable. Concentration of force was an American military tradition going back to the Civil War. The most straightforward way to defeat the Third Reich appeared to be to drive as quickly as possible on Berlin. All other operations were at best ancillary, at worst a distraction.

The alarming condition of the Red Army added extra urgency to his case. The Germans had been halted in front of Moscow a few days before Pearl Harbor. But Leningrad was still besieged, and a Soviet offensive in spring 1942 to try to recapture Kharkov had ended in disaster. A second major summer offensive in Russia by the Wehrmacht seemed inevitable. The USSR had so far defied those foreign sceptics who thought it would collapse. But its situation remained precarious.

It’s not coincidental that 1942 was the peak year of an extraordinary wave of Russophilia which swept across the English-speaking world. ‘Stalin is more of a hero than the King or even Winston,’ noted Brooke’s assistant Sir John Kennedy.[56] British newsreel audiences were compelled by the images of the Red Army fighting Hitler’s Panzers against seemingly overwhelming odds. They were shamed by their own country’s apparent inactivity. True, valuable war materiels were being sent to the USSR by regular convoys which had to negotiate the route from Scotland around the northern tip of German-occupied Norway to the Soviet Arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel. These perilous expeditions, through freezing, submarine-infested waters, had by the end of the war cost the Allies over eighty merchantmen and sixteen warships. They were noble, but the public remained dissatisfied. What the USSR surely needed was a western ground offensive to take the pressure off the Red Army. Popular demands in Britain for a Second Front grew correspondingly. On 24 May, a meeting of over 50,000 people in Trafalgar Square endorsed ‘by acclamation’ the demand for an immediate invasion of France to assist the Soviets.[57] At another packed public meeting the following month to commemorate the first anniversary of BARBAROSSA, the audience applauded ‘like baying wolves at every mention of the Second Front’.[58] According to a Mass-Observation poll, 62 per cent of Britons were in favour of invading Europe immediately.[59]

Marshall had first presented SLEDGEHAMMER to the British in a meeting in London in April. It was the first occasion he and Brooke had met. The CIGS was underwhelmed by the general and the plan. The Americans, he wrote, ‘had not begun to realise what all the implications were’ of an opposed landing in Normandy against greatly superior enemy forces. As for his US counterpart, he was ‘a pleasant and easy man to get on with, rather over-filled with his own importance…I should not put him down as a great man.’[60] Brooke’s views would not change for the next three years. He found Marshall personable enough to get on with and rather admired his courtly demeanour – ‘there was a great charm and dignity about him,’ Brooke wrote after the war – but he judged the American lacking in intelligence and imagination.[61] Not that the feeling was unreciprocated. Marshall had recently met and befriended Brooke’s predecessor as CIGS, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, who had crossed the Atlantic to head the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington. The new man in Whitehall compared poorly. ‘He may be a good fighting man [but] he hasn’t got Dill’s brains’ was Marshall’s verdict on meeting Brooke.[62]

Arguments about the Second Front – when it should happen and whether it was a good idea in the first place – would occupy much of the time of the CCS Committee throughout 1942 and 1943 until Operation OVERLORD, the ‘D-Day’ invasion of Normandy, finally became the official and undisputed Allied plan. From the first, the Americans were the Second Front’s unqualified champions, the British – Churchill and Brooke principally – far more hesitant, seeming to agree on certain occasions, only to get cold feet a few weeks later. Elaborate explanations have been proffered to explain their unwillingness to commit to a cross-Channel attack. Was it the blood-soaked ghosts of the Somme and Passchendaele that haunted them? Churchill’s desire to vindicate his 1915 Gallipoli strategy with another, triumphant Mediterranean expedition? A theoretical preference for the ‘indirect approach to war’, as advocated by pop strategist Captain Liddell Hart? A sneaky desire to use American power to buttress British imperial interests in the Near East rather than defeat Germany? After the war, Churchill, not surprisingly, was highly sensitive to the charge that he had ever had doubts about OVERLORD, and he devoted much space in his memoirs to refuting that allegation (bending the evidence a little to do so).

In fact, there is no reason to think that either the prime minister or the CIGS were inherently opposed to the idea of a Second Front in 1942 on the grounds of colonial skullduggery or Churchill’s battle with his own past. After all, nobody in London wanted the war to go on any longer than it had to. It was in Britain’s interest for Germany to be defeated as quickly as possible. The more protracted the conflict, the more the empire’s wealth and power would drain away. Churchill, indeed, had been nagging his chiefs of staff on precisely this point since coming into office. The Americans’ idea that he had permanent cold feet about a cross-Channel invasion was quite wrong.

But the British war effort in 1942 was in crisis in the Middle East and Indian Ocean. To Churchill and Brooke, it seemed folly to embark on some major new expedition in Europe without stabilising the fighting fronts elsewhere first. At this stage they had no objection to a build-up of American forces in the United Kingdom in order to launch a full-fledged cross-Channel invasion in mid-1943 – a plan tentatively known as ROUNDUP. But SLEDGEHAMMER would be at best a distraction from the main effort, at worst a disaster. Even Marshall had to admit that it was more likely to be a ‘sacrifice in the common good’ to temporarily distract the Wehrmacht from the Eastern Front than a viable bridgehead for a continental campaign. And given that the US Army was still barely mobilised and on the wrong side of the Atlantic, it was Crown Forces that he expected to die gloriously for the cause – not exactly a selling point.

It is also worth keeping in mind Churchill and Brooke’s fears about the inadequacy of their own troops. The CIGS had been a corps commander at Dunkirk in May 1940 and had seen for himself how formidable Hitler’s army could be. All the miserable experiences since – in Greece, Crete and the Western Desert – had only reinforced his opinion that the western Allied armies could not hope to take on the Germans until they enjoyed significant numerical superiority. Weakening the Wehrmacht on the continent by months and perhaps years of bombing, blockade and subversion looked to be an essential precondition for any successful Second Front. The Americans just did not seem to understand this.[63]

As it was, when Marshall came to Chequers in July threateaning to shift US troops to the Pacific if SLEDGEHAMMER was cancelled, he was bluffing, and the British knew it, because they had been tipped off by the president’s roving ambassador Harry Hopkins. Churchill had already quietly resolved the issue face to face with Roosevelt at a meeting at the latter’s family estate at Hyde Park, New York, in June. The prime minister had figured out that FDR much preferred to work through private channels, and that the best way to appeal to him was not through the formal apparatus of the CCS Committee but by a face-to-face conversation like the one at Hyde Park, or through one of his trusted personal intermediaries like Hopkins. It was clear to Churchill that any enthusiasm FDR had for a 1942 invasion was political, not strategic. The president badly wanted to get American troops into combat with the Germans before the congressional midterm elections in November. Where exactly this took place was of no great consequence to him.

In that case, suggested Churchill, why not land US forces in French North Africa instead? A plan for this, codenamed GYMNAST, had been mooted at the start of the year but then set aside. Roosevelt was persuaded to revive it. It probably helped that he had been with Churchill when the stunning news of Tobruk’s surrender had arrived back in June; the precariousness of Britain’s position in the Middle East could hardly have been signalled more clearly. Roosevelt told Marshall that he could go to the UK one last time to try to talk the British into SLEDGEHAMMER, but if they were still unconvinced he would employ his constitutional authority as commander-in-chief to insist on GYMNAST. Hopkins whispered to Churchill and Brooke to hold their ground. After three days of futile argument, Marshall folded. The Americans would be going to Morocco and Algeria in 1942.

Brooke was not especially enthusiastic about GYMNAST, but it was still a lot better than SLEDGEHAMMER. Marshall took his defeat with phlegmatic dignity and resolved to argue for ROUNDUP in 1943. Others in Washington were less gracious. To Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, ‘a fatigued and defeatist government which had lost its initiative’ was blocking the initiatives of ‘a young and vigorous nation whose strength had not yet been tapped’. An obscure US lieutenant-general who had been earmarked to command SLEDGEHAMMER said that the decision to cancel it marked nothing less than ‘the blackest day in history’. He had no idea that in a few days he would be selected to lead the Allied invasion of French North Africa, the appointment that was to begin his inexorable rise to world celebrity as ‘Ike’ Eisenhower.

4

I Am the Only One Trying to Win the War

Stalin had every right to be furious at the abandonment of a cross-Channel invasion in 1942, given Roosevelt’s pledge to Molotov in April. In fact, it’s unlikely that the Soviet dictator ever really thought SLEDGEHAMMER was going to happen. The broken promise, however, gave him something to get indignant about. Churchill decided that in the interests of alliance comity it would be a good idea to go to Moscow to explain the new western strategy and repair any damage. He would take Brooke with him. The pair could stop off in Cairo en route to review the state of Eighth Army. The CIGS was not happy at this. He had been about to leave for Egypt to confer with Auchinleck privately, and would now have to do so with the prime minister breathing down his neck.

At sunrise on 4 August, a Consolidated B-24 ‘Liberator’ bomber converted into a rudimentary passenger aircraft approached Cairo after a 2,000-mile nocturnal journey from Gibraltar over desert and sea, much of it within range of enemy aircraft. ‘There in the pale, glimmering dawn, the endless winding silver ribbon of the Nile stretched joyously before us,’ wrote Churchill in his memoirs. He had first visited Egypt exactly forty-four years earlier as a fresh-faced cavalry subaltern preparing to ride with Lord Kitchener against the Mahdi’s dervishes.

‘Often had I seen the day break on the Nile. In war and peace I had traversed by land or water, almost its whole length…never had the glint of daylight on its waters been so welcome to me.’

Now, for once, he could relish being ‘the man on the spot’ rather than waiting on news in Whitehall. ‘This was exhilarating,’ said Churchill. Brooke, who had just arrived in Cairo himself via a stop-off in Malta, would no doubt have described the prime minister’s presence using rather different language.[1]

Auchinleck had been personally commanding Eighth Army since late June in addition to his main role as GOC Middle East, a job which involved a vast range of responsibilities far beyond the fighting in the Western Desert. Clearly, there was a need to give Eighth Army to someone else. Churchill and Brooke were appalled to hear that the Auk’s preference was his own chief of staff, Thomas Corbett, a man described as ‘uniquely stupid’ by acerbic junior officers in Cairo.[2] Auchinleck further dismayed the prime minister by declaring that he would not consider any counter-attack against Rommel until at least mid-September. After a couple of days in Cairo, Churchill was persuaded that just creating a new Eighth Army leader was not enough. Middle East Command itself needed a shake-up. At that moment it stretched all the way from Alamein to the border of Afghanistan. Its responsibilities had to be divided. The Auk was offered leadership of a new independent Persia and Iraq Command, which would remove him from Cairo and was clearly a demotion. According to Brooke, he ‘behaved like an offended film star’ at the news and turned it down flat. The CIGS accepted the resignation without much regret. Brooke was weary of defending Auchinleck from the prime minister’s barbs when in truth he no longer had any confidence in him either. [3]

Brooke, to his astonishment, was then himself offered Auchinleck’s old post as commander-in-chief in Cairo. ‘This made my heart race very fast!’ he confided in his diary. To oversee the battle against Rommel was ‘the finest command’ he could have ever hoped for. Brooke had been one of the British Expeditionary Force’s generals in France and Belgium in 1940 and had been instrumental in getting the army to safety at Dunkirk. The thrill of operations in the field would be incomparably more satisfying to him than the desiccated routine of Whitehall staff work, but he had to say no. The excuse he gave Churchill was that he knew nothing about desert warfare. In fact, this had nothing to do with it (Brooke was about to recommend a general to lead Eighth Army who had never fought in the desert either). The truth was that he did not trust anyone else to be able to constrain Churchill’s impetuous and dangerous strategic impulses. With ‘heart-gnawing regret’ the CIGS declined the offer. Perhaps he hoped that he might eventually lead ROUNDUP one day instead. If so, he was to be cruelly disappointed.[4]

Middle East Command went instead to General Sir Harold Alexander – in some ways a curious decision. ‘Alex’s’ two principal roles in the war so far had been to command the rearguard at Dunkirk and the doomed defence of Burma – both spectacular defeats. Other generals’ careers would have been ruined by such an inauspicious portfolio, but Alexander stood out for two reasons, one of which was his astonishing personal bravery. He had been the last Briton off the beach at Dunkirk. In Burma, he appalled his own staff on one occasion by languidly declining to take cover when his car was strafed by a Japanese fighter. This coolness, bordering on hauteur, had a useful calming effect on the men under his command. Alex was known to be a safe pair of hands, a general who appeared constitutionally incapable of being rattled. The Middle East could do with such a man after the traumas of 1942.

The other thing that distinguished Alexander was his fathomless patrician charm. He was the quintessential gentleman-soldier, immaculately turned out from his brilliant-red general’s cap band down. He possessed an effortless to-the-manor-born conviviality which the Americans he encountered found either delightful or infuriating. Churchill, a fellow Old Harrovian, worshipped him. Brooke was less impressed. Alex seemed to represent the British Army’s preference for ‘character’ over professional seriousness. ‘Charming as he is, he fills me with gloom,’ the CIGS wrote on one occasion: ‘a very, very small man who cannot see big.’[5] Indeed, no one had ever accused Alexander of being a scholar like Wavell. Some who whispered that he was not very bright may have been right, but his job in the Middle East was not to theorise about war. It was to reassert calm and confidence after the muddle of the past year, to protect his Eighth Army commander from Churchill’s interference, and not to interfere in operational decision-making himself as the Auk had done far too often. These things Alex was ideally suited for.[6]

The man initially chosen to be Alexander’s field commander was Lieutenant-General William ‘Strafer’ Gott, who had led one of Eighth Army’s two corps at Gazala and First Alamein.[7] In Churchill’s eyes, Gott had many of the same qualifications as Alexander: another old Harrovian from a prestigious regiment, he was young, dashing, brave and popular with his men. Eden (an old comrade from the Rifle Brigade) was a firm advocate. Brooke worried he was tired and out of ideas. But the issue was never put to the test because on 7 August Gott’s plane was shot down on a routine flight to Cairo and the general killed (Churchill had flown the same route the day before; the Luftwaffe may have been attempting to assassinate the prime minister on faulty intelligence).[8] With the post vacant again, Brooke was able to put forward his preferred candidate: Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery, at that moment defending the English Home Counties from what was by this point in the war a very unlikely German attempt at invasion. Monty was summoned to Cairo as Churchill and Brooke left for Moscow.

As Churchill’s plane flew northwards over the Volga Delta, he ‘pondered on my mission to this sullen, sinister Bolshevik State I had once tried so hard to strangle at its birth, and which, until Hitler appeared, I had regarded as the mortal foe of civilised freedom. What was it my duty to say to them now?’[9] Molotov and a massed assembly of diplomatic staff, journalists, photographers, military bandsmen and punctiliously accoutered guards of honour were waiting for him in Moscow. The British party’s designated residence during the stay, a dacha just outside the city, was ‘prepared with totalitarian lavishness’.[10] It was also almost certainly bugged, a point which Churchill’s aides tried and failed to remind him of during some of his more intemperate rants over the next few days. The prime minister seemed to take delight in goading whoever was listening by being as rude about his hosts as possible.

Churchill stayed in Moscow four nights and met Stalin four times. ‘He is an outstanding man, there is no doubt about that,’ noted Brooke, ‘But not an attractive one. He has got an unpleasantly cold, crafty, dead face, and whenever I look at him I can imagine his sending off people to their doom without ever turning a hair. On the other hand there is no doubt that he has a quick brain.’

Stalin seemed willing ‘to face facts even when unpleasant’, thought the CIGS, whereas his own boss never seemed ‘anxious to face an unpleasantness until forced to do so’. All the same, it was a fraught moment in which to tell the Soviet leader that no cross-Channel attack was coming in 1942. The Germans had opened their major offensive of the year six weeks before. Two Wehrmacht army groups were advancing towards the Volga and the Caspian to seize the Caucasian oilfields and cut off the Lend-Lease supply route from Persia. Rostov had fallen on 23 July and the Don crossed two days later. Axis units would be in the outskirts of Stalingrad in a week. Flying northwards from Baku on his way to Moscow, Brooke had been perturbed to see scarcely a single defensive measure in place below aside from one half-dug anti-tank ditch. ‘The back door seemed to be wide open for the Germans to walk through,’ he observed.[11]

Stalin’s behaviour during his meetings with Churchill initially baffled the British party. On the first day, he took the news about the cancellation of SLEDGEHAMMER without much emotion, and seemed guardedly pleased about the idea of the replacement North African invasion. The prime minister was relieved. But at dinner late the following evening, the Soviet leader fulminated about broken promises and accused the British of cowardice. Churchill, one of his aides recorded, was left with the expression of an ‘angry and outraged bullfrog’.[12] The third meeting, at a nineteen-course Kremlin banquet, began more hopefully. But as the evening and its endless toasts dragged on, Churchill, sensing Stalin was deliberately ignoring him, grew bored and irritated. ‘He was like a bull in the ring maddened by the pricks of the picadors,’ thought Cadogan.[13] The prime minister had to be dissuaded from packing up and leaving Moscow entirely, but it began to dawn on his aides that Stalin’s changes of mood were more performative than real. Churchill was advised to start using his own charisma on ‘Uncle Joe’. Sure enough, the final meeting went much better. Stalin, more cordial now than at their previous encounters, invited Churchill into his private residence to meet his daughter Svetlana. The two statesmen feasted cheerfully on suckling pig until the early hours as they compared the military acumen of Marlborough and Wellington.

As Churchill left Moscow on the morning of 16 August, then, the trip seemed to have gone quite satisfactorily. Stalin was reconciled to the substitution of GYMNAST for SLEDGEHAMMER. Wavell, one of the prime minister’s entourage, composed a vers d’occasion on the plane back which ended

Prince of the Kremlin, here’s a fond farewell;

I’ve had to deal with many worse than you,

You took it, though you hated it like hell

No Second Front in 1942.[14]

Churchill was delighted with his own ability to charm the Soviet leader. It augured well for the many negotiations he knew were still to come. In reality, Stalin was a good deal less taken with the prime minister than the latter realised. Churchill, Stalin said afterwards to one of his aides, was a ‘dangerous bourgeois statesman’ who was secretly hoping to do a deal with the Nazis to destroy the Soviet Union.[15] The prime minister was making the same mistake that Chamberlain had made about Hitler back in 1938. He was hardly the first westerner to grossly underappreciate the depths of Stalin’s murderous paranoia. But just as Chamberlain’s naïveté had transformed the lives of millions, so would Churchill’s.

*

When describing SLEDGEHAMMER to Molotov earlier in the year, Roosevelt had cheerfully supposed that the operation might cost 120,000 lives, a price FDR was apparently happy to pay to keep the Soviets in the alliance – the bulk of those lives would, after all, have been those of British soldiers, not American.[16] That this talk of high casualties was not merely idle fearmongering was confirmed on a smaller scale on 19 August, when an Anglo-Canadian assault force landed on the steep shingle beaches of the ancient Norman town of Dieppe.

The ultimate purpose of Operation JUBILEE, the most ambitious attempt so far to take the war back to the Germans on the far side of the English Channel, remains disputed.[17] It was meant to be a ‘butcher and bolt’ raid in which the attacking forces would seize the town with thunderclap surprise, smash up everything they could not steal, and withdraw to England before the Germans could respond. It would test the hardening castellations of Hitler’s Festung Europa (Fortress Europe). It would allow the British Commonwealth’s air, land and sea forces to rehearse a coordinated amphibious attack under authentic battle conditions. It would give the Canadians, frustrated at their inactivity in the United Kingdom, a taste of action. It may also have been a ruse to try to ‘pinch’ a four-rotor ENIGMA enciphering machine or some of the codebooks and cryptographical paraphernalia desperately needed at Bletchley Park. Whatever it was, it was Churchill’s idea of war-fighting – full of brio, bloody-mindedness and bravado.

The Essex Scottish and Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (RHLI) regiments hit the beach just before dawn, exactly as scheduled. But already something was ‘terribly wrong’, according to RHLI Captain Denis Whitaker: ‘Everything was intact! We expected a town shattered…we thought we would see a lot of damage to the seafront buildings from the shelling. There was no sign of bombing. The window panes were glittering, unbroken, in the reflection of the sun’s first rays.’[18]

The troops had been reassured that a devastating air and sea bombardment of Dieppe would neutralise the German defences before they even reached the beach. But thanks to last-minute changes, none of it happened. Flank attacks by raiding parties on the German high ground east and west of the town had failed too, which meant that Dieppe’s main beach was still dominated by overlooking enemy machine gun and artillery batteries. Worse still, the new heavy ‘Churchill’ tanks, supposed to arrive along with the infantry, were late. As the Canadian infantry disembarked they were inundated with German bullets and shells.

Within an hour of the first assault boats reaching the shore, JUBILEE had clearly failed. The Canadians could not advance beyond the beach’s sea wall. When the Churchills finally showed up, half of them got stuck in the shingle, while the rest could not progress into the town because of anti-tank obstacles. But partly from a breakdown in communications with the command ships, and partly from a mystifying insistence on reinforcing defeat, the reserve forces lying offshore were ordered in anyway. Three hundred and sixty-nine officers and men of Royal Marine ‘A’ Commando were among them. Sergeant Jim Hefferson’s landing craft smashed on to the beach without opposition, but then, as he recalled later, ‘As we lowered the ramp, our right section and part of the centre section were wiped out by machine-gun fire…there were bodies everywhere with a wide-yard river of blood on the edge of the sea. Craft and tanks were burning, planes diving over, and the mortar fire was throwing large stones everywhere off the shingle.’[19]

Sixty-six ‘A’ Commando Royal Marines were killed or captured on the beach and many more lost their lives aboard assault craft. The Essex Scottish and the RLHI suffered even worse casualties. Just over 1,100 of them had departed from England the day before. Two hundred and sixty-nine made it back. By the time orders for a general withdrawal were belatedly completed on 19 August, over 4,000 British Commonwealth personnel were dead, wounded, or in captivity. The 2nd Canadian Infantry Division was shattered and would not see action again for two years. No ENIGMA equipment had been successfully ‘pinched’. Scarcely a dint had been made in Festung Europa.

‘It was a costly but not unfruitful reconnaissance-in-force,’ Churchill argued later in his memoirs:

Tactically it was a mine of experience. It shed revealing light on many shortcomings in our outlook. It taught us to build in good time various new types of craft and appliances for later use…above all it was shown that individual skill and gallantry without thorough organisation and combined training would not prevail, and that team work was the secret of success. This could only be provided by trained and organised amphibious formations. All these lessons were taken to heart.[20]

Whether a one-day butcher-and-bolt raid like Dieppe bore any real resemblance (and therefore relevance) to a sustained invasion attempt like Operation OVERLORD two years later can be doubted. Certainly, JUBILEE was a salutary example of how relying on everything to go absolutely right during a complicated mission was to invite disaster. But it would be nice to think that the Whitehall planning staffs could have come to that realisation without the need to spray quite so much Canadian and British blood all over the Normandy shingle.

What Dieppe did do was dampen popular enthusiasm in Britain for an immediate Second Front. Back in May, George Orwell had reported to the American magazine Partisan Review ‘endless talk’ about such an operation.[21] Once the Canadian casualty figures from JUBILEE were released, the public’s appetite for action shrivelled up fast. Eagerness to attack the Germans had ‘become mingled with “a considerable dread” of its cost, and people appear content “to leave the decision to those who know” ’, reported Home Intelligence.[22] The press, sensing the change of mood, suspended its Second Front propaganda campaign.[23] As with Tobruk and its effect on FDR, Churchill paradoxically had gained some leverage in disaster.

*

Bernard Law Montgomery was at his home in Reigate, Surrey on the morning of 8 August 1942 when he received the telephone call from the War Office telling him that he was going to Egypt to command Eighth Army. His immediate concern on hearing the news was what was to become of his son David, then fourteen and enrolled at Winchester College. David had been left motherless in 1937, when Montgomery’s wife Betty had died suddenly from septicemia. The general’s final hours in England, then, were spent in planning for the boy during his father’s absence. David’s old prep school headmaster was made his guardian as well as the executor of Monty’s will should the need arise. He was entrusted with all decision-making for David – with one iron exception. ‘His grandmother is Lady Montgomery [in] County Donegal,’ the general’s written instructions went: ‘She is an old lady and quite unable to take charge of anyone. She will want David to go and stay in Ireland for his holidays. On no account is he to go. She is a menace with the young.’

Bernard Montgomery’s preoccupations that day – the touching solicitousness with which he made preparations for his son, combined with an ‘almost pathological urge’ to keep his own mother out of the picture – are instructive.[24] No British general of the Second World War was so clearly a candidate for the psychiatrist’s couch as the future victor of Alamein. While Alexander was all insouciant blue-blooded charm, Monty was a basket case of neuroses. His notorious character – rude, suspicious, conceited, bullying, deeply unlikeable to many who encountered him, an idol to others – was a product of the circumstances which had moulded him: misery in childhood, tragedy in adulthood, and a career spent dogged by the never-spoken but always deadly insinuation that he was Not Quite a Gentleman.

Monty was yet another Ulster Scots general, though from a much-impoverished imperial-service family. His father, Henry, an Anglican Church of Ireland minister, took the post of Bishop of Tasmania in 1889, when Bernard was two, to help pay off the family’s groaning estate debts. For the next eleven years Henry was mostly absent from the family home, and care for the children was entrusted to his terrifying wife, Maude. ‘She longed to control both people and events [and] developed a passion for order and method, all governed by a strict routine,’ said one of Bernard’s brothers, and if that sounds rather like the subsequent command style of her most eminent child, it was not an inheritance he cared to recognise. Maude physically and emotionally abused her offspring to an extent that was shocking even in austere Victorian families. It left Bernard with an undying hatred for her and a profound sense of rejection that left him an emotional cripple for the rest of his life. He went to Sandhurst in 1907 partly to spite his mother and partly to avoid following his father’s footsteps into the Church.

Monty almost died from a bullet wound to the lung in October 1914 at Ypres, his grave literally dug for him at the casualty dressing station. The wound probably saved his life, taking him out of the front line for the remainder of the war and into staff HQ, where he excelled. Montgomery spent the interwar years in colonial commands and Camberley Staff College, where he gained a reputation as a talented if strict instructor. His ten-year marriage to Betty was the great joy of his life – and had she lived longer she might have been able to undo some of the emotional damage wrought by his mother. As it was, after her untimely death the general retreated back behind his iron carapace.[25]

His uncongenial manners made Monty deeply unpopular among most of his peer officers. But Brooke, who had taught alongside him at Camberley, had become a mentor, and found him a divisional command with the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1939. The following May, during the retreat to Dunkirk, Montgomery’s well-trained division performed a highly difficult sideways move while in contact with the enemy, plugging a gap in the front line and probably saving the whole British perimeter from collapse. It was the greatest act of generalship of his life and earned Monty a corps command back in England for the next two years, until Gott’s death at the hands of the Luftwaffe gave Brooke a chance to finally promote his protégé to army-level responsibility.

At dawn on 13 August 1942, Montgomery arrived by staff car from Cairo at the El Alamein position, giving the men of Eighth Army a first glimpse of the new general – his ‘narrow foxy face’, ‘small, light spare body’ and aura of wiry, alert energy reminding at least one soldier of a Jack Russell terrier.[26] Monty wasted no time in making himself unbearable to Auchinleck’s old guard. He treated the departing commander-in-chief with undisguised contempt and cancelled all the Auk’s standing orders without looking at them. Monty told Churchill that Auchinleck had been intending to retreat down the Nile and had neither written nor distributed any plans of defensive action. All this was quite untrue, and after the war Montgomery was forced to retract the accusation in his memoirs.[27] One of his first acts as Eighth Army commander was to protect the Alamein position against Rommel’s last desert offensive, and he did so using precisely the same operational sketch Auchinleck had prepared for just such an eventuality.[28]

The Desert Fox embarked on what became known as the Battle of Alam el Halfa in August 1942 with an uncharacteristic lack of enthusiasm.[29] He was ill, worried about his parlous supply situation, and doubted whether Panzerarmee Afrika was strong enough any longer to break through to the delta. But he knew American Lend-Lease supplies of new armour would be arriving in Egypt in September, and suspected that this was his last chance to fight a mobile battle before losing the initiative for good. The plan was virtually a duplicate of Gazala: sweep south at night, try to get round the main infantry front line, then dig in with anti-tank guns to destroy the clumsy, piecemeal British armoured counter-attacks that would surely follow.

But things were different this time.[30] The presence of the Qattara Depression restricted Rommel’s avenue of advance. There could be no grand circumventing of the British line at Alamein. Eighth Army had enough divisions by now to form a continuous front rather than rely on the infantry boxes of old with their great gaps in between. Rommel would have no choice but to batter a path through rather than outflank. The balance of signals intelligence now favoured Montgomery, the first British desert general to get plentiful ULTRA intelligence and to know what to do with it.[31] Monty understood what the Axis leader was planning and with what strength, while Rommel, who could no longer rely on the Bonner Fellers messages nor the tactical insight of Strategical Intercept Company 621, was hazy about where exactly the British positions lay and how many tanks they had. What he did know was that with his own air force strength badly denuded, the RAF would dominate the coming battlefield. ‘[Panzerarmee Afrika] will attack once again in order to finally destroy the enemy,’ Rommel signalled to his men on the opening night of the offensive, 30 August. He suspected it would do no such thing.[32] Montgomery, meanwhile, was cheerfully untroubled by doubt. Woken in the early hours to be told the German attack had begun, he muttered ‘excellent, excellent,’ rolled over, and went back to sleep.[33]

Alam el Halfa went wrong for Rommel from the start. His tanks got stuck in the southern minefields and were pounded by RAF bombers guided at night by a shower of brilliant target indicator flares. The two British armoured brigades screening the southern flank of the battlefield retired in good order towards Alam el Halfa Ridge, to the south-east of Ruweisat. The Germans pursued them, to be met by a devastating hail of fire from anti-tank guns and British tanks dug into cover. For the first time, Eighth Army successfully resisted the temptation to squander its strength in brave but suicidal cavalry-style charges. By the morning of 2 September Rommel understood he had lost the battle, but he lacked the fuel even to rapidly withdraw to a safer position. This meant a day’s further torment at the hands of the RAF’s medium bombers and fighter-bombers.

By the time Panzerarmee Afrika had straggled back to its starting line, it had lost fifty tanks and – even more important – about 400 of its unarmoured supply vehicles. Eighth Army had lost a slightly greater number of tanks, but at this stage of the campaign it could more than afford to. Three hundred brand-new ‘Shermans’ with 75mm turret-mounted guns were already on their way to Egypt from Ohio. ‘Your business seems to have gone remarkably well,’ Churchill cabled Alexander on 6 September.[34] For once, the prime minister had reason to be pleased with his desert generals. When he reported to the House of Commons on his journey to Cairo and Moscow on 8 September, he could do so in the context of a battlefield victory. It was all very different from two months earlier. ‘He took the wind so completely out of [his critics’] sails that they tore up their notes and remained seated,’ a delighted Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West.[35] The parliamentary crisis, as well as the Egyptian crisis, was passing.

*

Churchill had fired all his previous desert generals because of their tardiness in attacking Rommel. Now Montgomery, in his turn, refused to launch his planned autumn offensive, LIGHTFOOT, until he was good and ready. Just a few days after the end of Alam el Halfa, Brooke was already predicting that ‘my trouble now will be to stop Winston from fussing Alex and Monty and egging them on to attack before they are ready. It is a regular disease that he suffers from, this frightful impatience to get an attack launched!’[36] He was right. The prime minister was almost immediately firing off telegrams to Alexander complaining about Montgomery’s excessive caution. He wanted an offensive in Egypt before the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa, now rechristened Operation TORCH, was scheduled to take place in early November.[37]

Churchill demanded that Brooke, as Alexander’s boss, explain the delay at Alamein, on one occasion chasing down the hapless CIGS while he was trying to snatch a few precious off-duty hours game-shooting. At a memorable meeting that September, the prime minister harangued Brooke with an extraordinary lachrymose eruption of self-pity, protesting bitterly that he ‘was the only one trying to win the war, the only one who produced any results’.[38] But Churchill’s prima donna antics were ultimately contained. Frustrated though he was, the prime minister would never dream of berating Alex as he had routinely done Auchinleck. Alexander defended Montgomery in Cairo just as staunchly as Brooke was doing in Whitehall, something for which Monty, true to form, showed a total lack of gratitude. Most importantly, this pause in the action was at least taking place in the context of Rommel’s drubbing at Alam el Halfa. ‘A victorious battle makes amends for much delay,’ the prime minister conceded in a cable to Alex on 23 September, adding: ‘whatever happens we shall back you up and see you through’.[39]

Montgomery was entirely justified in being cautious, because while his army might be awash with shiny new kit it remained brittle. At the end of the Alam el Halfa battle, two infantry brigades with armoured support had attempted to exploit the vulnerability of Panzerarmee Afrika by attacking across its supply lines.[40] But their assaults were badly choreographed and the brigades, roughly handled by the defending Italians, suffered almost 1,000 casualties with little to show for their sacrifice. Holding prepared ground as at First Alamein and Alam el Halfa was one thing. But LIGHTFOOT would require a general offensive against a veteran enemy, expertly dug in: an altogether more daunting prospect. Victory would demand the successful employment of complex combined arms tactics and precisely timed air–ground cooperation. Both would require intricate preparatory staff work and lengthy troop training, which would take time.

Rommel, meanwhile, was glumly entrenched on a settled front line behind half a million landmines (most of them British in origin, the looted spoils of the Gazala Gallop) awaiting a set-piece infantry and artillery-focused battle of a kind he had never had to fight before. He did not have the tanks or the gasoline to plan a manoeuvre engagement. Indeed, he had to distribute his remaining armour in penny packets along the front line because he no longer possessed the petrol to wield a powerful unitary tank strike force – it was Panzerarmee Afrika now which had to ignore the desert war rule about concentration of effort. Most of his Luftwaffe support was grounded for lack of aviation fuel. His men were on half rations, many of them sick with dysentery and jaundice.

The Axis supply situation in the Mediterranean was as bad as it had been twelve months earlier. Tipped off by ULTRA, Allied submarines and aircraft (now including the Egypt-based US Ninth Air Force, equipped with B-25 medium and B-24 heavy bombers) were easily locating Rommel’s convoys and sinking up to one half of all Panzerarmee Afrika’s oil and vehicles before they reached North Africa.[41] The supply route up the coast road to Alamein was as long as ever and constantly pounded by Allied air interdiction strikes. Rommel could not even make a tactical withdrawal back to a more defensible position like the Libyan–Egyptian frontier, which would have shortened his supply route by 450 kilometres, because most of his troops lacked the transport to get there. The Desert Fox personally was at his physical breaking point with high blood pressure and a liver infection. On the Führer’s personal orders, he returned home on leave on 22 September to recuperate.

Many of the air and sea strikes against Rommel’s convoys were once again taking place from bases on Malta. Just as Kesselring had predicted, the island’s offensive power had quickly recovered from its spring hammering once the Luftwaffe had been redirected to fight over southern Russia and Libya. The food and fuel situation remained desperate, and getting supply vessels there intact was still a chancy proposition. In August, the biggest convoy yet, codenamed PEDESTAL, with three escorting aircraft carriers and two battleships, ran the gauntlet from Gibraltar, and only five of the fourteen merchant ships made it. The last of them, the heavily damaged tanker Ohio, engineless, listing crazily, decks awash with seawater, had to be virtually carried into the Grand Harbour by two destroyers, to the cheers of the Valetta crowds.

Ohio’s 10,000 tons of kerosene and diesel, plus the coal and food delivered by the other PEDESTAL freighters, guaranteed Malta’s survival until November, by which point the whole Mediterranean war had anyway transformed beyond recognition. Had the starving island surrendered in August or September it probably would have come too late to make much difference to the outcome of the fighting in North Africa. But it would have been a profound psychological defeat for the Allies all the same after they had invested so much emotional capital in Malta’s defence. The end of the siege came just in time.

*

Montgomery scheduled LIGHTFOOT to begin at precisely twenty minutes to ten in the evening on 23 October 1942.[42] It had been meticulously planned. A massed barrage of over 800 guns would cover the advance into the northern Axis minefields of XXX Corps, made up of four infantry divisions. Once a path through the mines had been cleared and a salient in the enemy front line established, the three armoured divisions of X Corps would move into the newly carved-out space to guard against a likely counter-attack by the Panzers. While XXX Corps’ infantry ‘crumbled’ away at the salient’s boundaries to widen it, any of Rommel’s tanks which made an appearance would be dispatched by X Corps’ Shermans and Grants and the infantry’s now-abundant six-pounder anti-tank guns. Further south, XIII Corps with one armoured and two infantry divisions would feint a diversionary attack to pin the Axis forces there.

Montgomery sought to have total control of the battlefield. Round-the-clock close air support and interdiction sorties would hammer Panzerarmee Afrika from the skies, while Allied fighters would dominate the airspace above the ground troops to prevent any Luftwaffe interference. Eighth Army trained for weeks in rear-area mock-ups of the Alamein front. Battle drills were exhaustively rehearsed. An elaborate deception scheme deploying hundreds of wood-and-canvas ‘tanks’, a fake water supply pipeline and railway line, and even phony latrines was put in place to fool the Germans and Italians into thinking the main effort would be in the south. By 23 October, every man in Eighth Army had been briefed to know exactly what he was supposed to do when the big day came. Monty’s ‘master plan’ accounted for every eventuality – or so it seemed, anyway.

When the artillery opened fire exactly on schedule, at 9.40 p.m., it was the loudest noise ever heard in Africa. Some men’s ears began to bleed with the pressure. Some became hysterical in fear. Reginald Crimp was in a motorised infantry battalion of X Corps waiting to advance. ‘The guns nearby crash incessantly, one against another, searing the darkness with gashes of flame,’ he wrote in his diary: ‘Those farther up and down the line rumble wrathfully and convulse the northern and southern horizons with ceaseless flashings and flickerings. Groups of Jock infantry, in shorts and shirts and tin hats, with bayonets fixed, begin filtering forward…poor devils – I don’t envy them their night’s work.’[43]

It was a nice piece of gallows humour to name an operation that started with a massive mine-clearing exercise as ‘Lightfoot’. All night, engineers of XXX Corps, some using prototype electrical mine detectors, others relying on the tried-and-tested method of poking at the sand with a bayonet, carved out paths two tank-widths wide through the desert. By morning on 24 October a salient had been tentatively established and British armour, directed by white-gloved Military Policemen, was flowing forward through the cleared corridors.

But already the friction of war was interfering with Monty’s foolproof plan. Not all the minefield paths had been made completely safe, choking up the armoured advance in a disorganised and vulnerable traffic jam. The X Corps tank commanders who managed to get through were wary of advancing too far in front of their own infantry in case they ran up against the lethal German anti-tank guns. Their caution, however, made it impossible for the infantry to begin ‘crumbling’ the enemy. Each corps blamed the other for the delay. To the south, XIII Corps’ diversionary attack was faring no better. A drearily familiar sense of woe began to hang over Eighth Army’s stumbling efforts. General Lumsden, commanding X Corps, prevailed on Montgomery to cancel the offensive entirely. Monty (whose low expectations of Lumsden had been confirmed) refused, but for the moment he did not know what else to do.[44]

It was fortunate for Eighth Army that the Panzerarmee Afrika high command was in disarray at just this vital moment. Rommel had left General Georg Stumme in charge while he recuperated in Germany. On the morning of 24 October, Stumme went forward to see what was happening at the front line, came under enemy fire, and promptly keeled over from a fatal heart attack. Rommel arrived back at Alamein the following night to find that in the absence of clear orders the Axis assaults on the Allied salient had been desultory. Furious that the opportunity to exploit the British muddle was being squandered, he ordered his tanks to launch ferocious repeated counter-attacks. Reg Crimp’s battalion found itself pinned down and running out of ammunition at the edge of the salient. ‘The enemy tanks, convinced of our weakness, resume their attack,’ he scribbled in his diary:

Quite a hubbub ensues: the brittle rasping and spitting of the machine-guns; mortar bombs feeling over, whispering gently, and crashing suddenly; solids [armour-piercing shells] blasting by like express trains, leaving groaning, feverish tumults of vacuum in their wake; and the mewing and squealing chorus of the 25-pounder shells as they arch down over our heads. Our own six pounders are mute. But the barrage saves us again. The panzers are forced to withdraw.[45]

On 26 October, with forward progress clearly stymied, Montgomery decided to throw out the original plan for another. The ‘crumbling’ effort would now focus specifically on the northern part of the salient where XXX Corps’ 9th Australian Division had achieved the most success. Meanwhile, four of the attacking divisions, including three armoured divisions, would be withdrawn from the front line to rest and form a fresh reserve for a second assault, dubbed SUPERCHARGE. In effect the battle would be rebooted. For several days, the fighting lulled.

In London, it appeared to be grinding to a halt. On the morning of 29 October, Brooke was met with a ‘flow of abuse’ from Churchill about the lack of progress. ‘What is your Monty doing now, allowing the battle to peter out?’ the prime minister demanded of the CIGS. Brooke got involved in an ill-tempered spat with Eden at the day’s chiefs of staff meeting, when the foreign secretary repeated these grumblings about Eighth Army’s commander. In the end, the old Afrikaner warhorse Jan Smuts, who always attended Churchill’s grand strategy meetings when visiting London, calmed the prime minister and Eden down, and ‘the temperamental film stars’, as Brooke scornfully described the two politicians, dropped the matter.[46] The CIGS had stubbornly shielded his protégé from the politicians, but privately he was less confident and wondered, too, if Montgomery was blowing it. On the eve of the battle, Brooke had confided in his diary: ‘[LIGHTFOOT] may be the turning point of the war…or it may mean nothing. If it fails I don’t quite know how I shall bear it.’[47]

SUPERCHARGE opened at one in the morning on 2 November with an even more intense artillery barrage than had preceded LIGHTFOOT. The 2nd New Zealand Infantry Division advanced in the darkness to clear a new path through the minefields while a reorganised X Corps readied itself to try to break through the enemy line once and for all. Rommel, identifying the danger, threw in his last Panzer reserves in the afternoon. The two sides ground brutally against one another for the next twenty-four hours. Eighth Army and Panzerarmee Afrika both experienced withering casualties as the battlefield filled with smashed tank chassis. But the British could afford to trade tank for tank; the Axis could not. By the morning of 3 November, Rommel was down to thirty operational armoured vehicles. He had already cabled Hitler requesting permission to retreat, a reasonable proposal under the circumstances. It was rejected by the Führer with predicable vacuity, entreating Rommel’s troops instead to choose victory or death. By the afternoon the decision was being taken out of both men’s hands, as Italian units started to flee the battlefield. By evening, the Desert Fox decided to ignore his cruel and pointless instructions and ordered a general withdrawal.[48] The coastal road westwards towards Tobruk became a dusty confused tangle of Axis soldiers and vehicles, a Gazala Gallop in reverse.

Most of the Italian infantry lacked the transport to get very far and were swiftly captured. The mobile German core of Panzerarmee Afrika with 70,000 veteran troops, though, did manage to extricate itself, thanks in part to a timely series of rainstorms which temporarily paralysed the Desert Air Force, and partly due to muddle and lethargy among the pursuers – an indication that Eighth Army still had a lot to learn. But retreat was all they could do for now. By 8 November, Rommel and his remaining men had evacuated Mersa Matruh and were chasing towards the Libyan frontier. The Second Battle of Alamein was over, and the campaign for Egypt was won.

*

At 5 a.m. on 8 November, 2,000 miles west of Mersa Matruh at Fedala, near Casablanca in Morocco, soldiers of the US Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, the first wave of Operation TORCH’s 35,000-man-strong Western Task Force (commanded by a pugnacious American major-general called George Patton), stepped from landing craft on to African soil for the first time. Their invasion convoy had sailed all the way from Hampton Roads, Virginia, luckily without interference from patrolling North Atlantic U-Boats. A few hours earlier and 500 miles to the east, TORCH’s two other fleets, originating from Gibraltar, had begun parallel landings of troops in Algeria – 39,000 Americans at Oran, and a mixed Anglo-American force of 33,000 troops at the territory’s capital, Algiers. The astonished Vichy colonial garrisons across French North Africa responded to these sudden intrusions on their neutrality with little resistance. By six o’clock on the first evening, Algiers had surrendered with little bloodshed.

Hitler received word of TORCH while travelling from Berlin to Munich to give his annual address to the Old Party Comrades at the Löwenbräukeller, scene of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. The news alarmed him. First there had been the report of Rommel’s retreat from Alamein. Now, with the appearance of American armies on the far-left flank of North Africa, the Axis position in the southern Mediterranean appeared to be collapsing. His foreign minister, von Ribbentrop, begged the Führer to consider putting out peace feelers to Stalin via the Soviet embassy in Sweden.

But in Hitler’s speech later that evening, he brusquely dismissed any possibility of a negotiated settlement to the war. Rommel’s defeat was dealt with in a single contemptuous sentence: ‘[the British] have advanced somewhere in the desert; they’ve already advanced a few times and have had to pull back again’. Hitler quickly turned to a theme he much preferred talking about: the responsibility of ‘international Jewry’ for Germany’s misfortune. He reminded his audience that he had prophesied back in 1939 that if the Jews conspired to bring about a war against Germany, the result would be their own extermination. ‘I’ve always been laughed at as a prophet,’ he said. ‘Of those who laughed then, countless ones are no longer laughing today. And those who are still laughing, will also perhaps not be doing so before long.’[49] In the previous 100 days, the period between First and Second Alamein, the death camps in Poland had secretly murdered almost 1.5 million Jews.[50]

In London, Churchill burst into tears on hearing the news that the TORCH landings had succeeded with scarcely a hitch. He even found time at the 9 November War Cabinet meeting to congratulate the CIGS: thinking back later, Brooke could recall this was the only occasion during the war when the prime minister ever shared any gratitude for the work he had done.[51] The following evening, Churchill spoke at the Lord Mayor of London’s Mansion House. ‘We have a new experience. We have victory,’ he told the audience. Already the ‘brilliant’ General Montgomery had defeated Rommel at Alamein (for the time being, at least, there was no more ‘your Monty’). But the success at Alamein had been just ‘a prelude and a counterpart’ to ‘the momentous enterprise’ taking place at the other end of the Mediterranean. ‘Now, this is not the end,’ Churchill counselled. ‘It is not even the beginning to the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’[52]

It was certainly not the end of the war in North Africa. Oran and Casablanca fell to American troops on the day of Churchill’s speech. Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson, commander of the British forces at Algiers, was soon advancing towards Bône in the hopes of crossing the Tunisian border and reaching Tunis before any Axis forces could get there. But Hitler, furious at the Vichy government’s failure to offer any stiff resistance to the TORCH invasion, had already decided to act. Within hours of the Allied landing in Morocco and Algeria, Wehrmacht troops were marching into previously unoccupied southern France. Advance German units of what was to become 5th Panzerarmee had started arriving via airlift in Tunis. Rommel was speeding westwards to join them in a last North African redoubt. The fighting on the southern Mediterranean shore was going to grind on until May 1943.

But all that was for the future. On hearing the news of Montgomery’s victory on 4 November, Churchill had immediately proposed ringing the church bells across Britain, which (other than Christmas Day) had been silenced since Dunkirk to preserve them as an emergency invasion warning system. He was prevailed upon to wait until it was clear TORCH too had definitely been a success. On Sunday, 15 November, the good news seemed assured enough to go ahead.

So the bells tolled; or they didn’t. The experience in many parishes proved to be rather underwhelming, local efforts clearly hampered by so many trained campanologists being absent on war business. Perhaps the eleven days that had passed since the first news of Alamein had also undercut the excitement a little. Anthony Heap in London ‘heard one or two bells chiming as we lay in bed drinking our morning tea, but they sounded very dim and distant’.[53] In Derbyshire, May Smith did not hear her own little church bell at all. ‘I think it’s very premature to start all this,’ she wrote. ‘We shall look silly if we get pushed back again now. Have nothing against a gladsome peal over the wireless, but not all this universal merry-making.’[54] Home Guard Major Rodney Foster in Hythe, Kent, also thought the whole exercise thoroughly unwise. ‘It will cause slacking,’ he scolded. It was in any case ‘a feeble show’ in his parish.[55] In Dewsbury, Yorkshire, Kathleen Hey ‘listened in vain…the bellringers must be at the war’. But she was moved anyway, if still hesitant to trust that the Allied tide had truly turned: ‘What a long time since we first heard the good news. These last ten days seem – looking back – like a hundred. And even now one can scarcely believe that we may really let go and celebrate a victory – we have had so many false starts before.’[56]

*

In his memoirs, Churchill wrote, apparently in a last-minute addition to his account of the battle: ‘It may almost be said, Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.’[57] It was to become one of his most frequently quoted aperçus about the war, though not everyone would necessarily have agreed with it. Certainly, the survivors of the Battle of the River Plate, the Battle of Britain, Operation COMPASS, Taranto, Cape Matapan, the sinking of the Bismarck, and CRUSADER – to name but a few British successes that preceded October 1942 – might have had good reason to take umbrage.

As for those Eighth Army troops who had fought so valiantly and successfully in July under Auchinleck, but for one reason or another had not participated in the later battle: they were now written out of the Alamein saga. Indeed, the exclusion of anything pre-Montgomery from the storied history of Eighth Army was formalised as early as August 1943 when the Africa Star campaign decoration was announced. Only soldiers who had served in Eighth Army after 23 October 1942, the starting date of LIGHTFOOT, would be entitled to wear the bar on the Star bearing that formation’s now-famous name. Auchinleck raised a protest at this, pointing out that Eighth Army had come into formal existence more than a year before Second Alamein and had done plenty of hard fighting before anyone in the Western Desert had even heard of Montgomery. It was ‘not altogether just’ to erase that story. Brooke, despite being Monty’s mentor, agreed and added his own supporting minute to Auchinleck’s complaint. The government committee handling such petitions declined to do anything. Intervening would ‘create a precedent’, and that would never do.[58]

Second Alamein is Britain’s most famous land victory of the Second World War. But it was an end of the beginning in more senses than one. It was the last major battle of the war in the west fought exclusively by Crown Forces – and even then, US Lend-Lease aid and air power had a lot to do with its outcome. The victory laurels would henceforth always have to be shared with the Americans. It was also the last battle in which the traditional system of automatic Dominion deferment to British metropolitan leadership could be taken for granted in London. Shortly after Rommel’s retreat, 9th Australian Division, which had played such a vital role in keeping LIGHTFOOT from collapsing, was withdrawn from the Middle East by Canberra to fight in New Guinea.[59] The 1st South African Division was disbanded around the same time for reconversion into an armoured division. Dominion participation in British military campaigns would continue, but on a more negotiated basis. When the Canadians fought in Normandy in 1944, they did so as an autonomous national army.[60]

Despite its fame, there has always been a suggestion that the British make too much of Alamein and that its place in the military annals is undeserved. Three charges have been laid against its significance. The first is that it was a hopelessly lopsided encounter between two grossly mismatched sides, virtually over before it even began. After all, Montgomery was in a far better position in October 1942 than Auchinleck had been in July. Indeed, his Eighth Army on the eve of Second Alamein enjoyed a bounty of equipment, much of it American, that previous British desert commanders could scarcely have believed possible. Monty had 220,000 troops, 1,029 tanks, 892 artillery pieces and 1,252 serviceable combat aircraft. Against this Rommel could only muster 108,000 men, 548 tanks – many of them of indifferent quality – 552 guns and about 400 serviceable planes of the Luftwaffe and Italian Air Force.[61] Eighth Army had had seven weeks of relative quiet to rest and train with commodious local supply arrangements, while Panzerarmee Afrika went hungry and grew sick thousands of miles from its base. The enemy could only guess at Montgomery’s intentions, while he was now receiving daily decrypts of German signals traffic almost as fast as the Germans could decode them themselves.

Yet Eighth Army only had a roughly two-to-one material advantage over Panzerarmee Afrika, significantly less than the three-to-one superiority routinely cited in military doctrine as a prerequisite for victory in attack. And greater numbers is hardly everything in war; at Gazala, Auchinleck’s army, fighting a defensive battle, had also been bigger than Rommel’s, but it had profited the Auk nothing in the end. The cost of Second Alamein should not be casually dismissed. Much was subsequently made by the thankful British themselves of the battle’s low overall casualty figures – 2,350 men dead, 2,260 missing (most of these subsequently discovered to have been killed in action) and 8,950 wounded.[62] That averaged out at just over 1,000 casualties a day over the battle. Compared to the butcher’s bill of the opening day alone of the 1916 Battle of the Somme, on which 57,470 British troops had been killed or wounded, Alamein seemed cheap at the price – its mercifully low death toll testament to the care with which British generals now treated their men’s lives.

But the comparison is misleading, because by 1942 many fewer soldiers were in direct combat with the enemy than had been the case at the Somme. Looked at more closely, the casualty figures for those men in the greatest danger at Second Alamein are sobering. The 51st (Highland) Infantry Division, for instance, suffered 2,827 casualties during the battle, but these were almost entirely experienced by just 6,750 riflemen in its nine infantry battalions. The 7th Territorial Battalion of the Black Watch had lost one in three of its officers and Other Ranks by the end of the battle.[63] Indeed, as SUPERCHARGE began, Montgomery was uncomfortably aware that Eighth Army was fast running out of intact infantry battalions.[64] The British obviously chose to fight Second Alamein under the most advantageous circumstances to themselves that they could create, but the human cost was not inconsiderable and victory by no means inevitable. Even if defeat had meant at worst a continued stalemate in front of the Nile, it would have been a crushing morale blow to the Allied war effort after so many previous disappointments, and a fillip to fading Axis hopes.

The next charge against Second Alamein is that it was a pointless battle. The whole Axis position in the southern Mediterranean was about to be outflanked by TORCH. Once Anglo-American forces landed in French North Africa, Rommel would surely have had no choice but to abandon his defensive line in Egypt and retreat to Libya. Montgomery attacked an enemy who was about to withdraw anyway.

In fact, we have no idea what Rommel would have done had Eighth Army not stirred from its positions in October 1942. Perhaps he would have stayed put and left 5th Panzerarmee to deal with TORCH. Perhaps he would have left his immobile Italian divisions at Alamein as a screen and sent his Deutsches Afrikakorps veterans speeding westwards to smash into Eisenhower’s green troops. Even after being mauled in Operations LIGHTFOOT and SUPERCHARGE, Rommel’s men were going to give the inexperienced TORCH divisions a rough treatment in early 1943. Imagine the carnage among the Allied units in Tunisia had they faced undamaged German forces. The Vichy troops in Morocco and Algeria would probably have made much stouter effort to resist TORCH had Rommel not just been defeated in Egypt a few days earlier.

More importantly, declining to fight at Alamein would have been a disaster for British self-confidence and credibility. Churchill’s leverage in negotiations with the United States and the Soviet Union was already weakening by October 1942. So visible a demonstration of the empire’s unwillingness to take risks in the greater Allied cause – especially while the Red Army was bleeding to death at Stalingrad – would have finished Churchill’s standing. None of his strategic demands would have been taken seriously by FDR or Stalin again. His critics at home, stiffened and reinforced in their complaints at his war management, would have renewed their assaults on the government. And the British Army would never have built up the belief in itself to defeat the Germans in Italy and France. The Alamein dead were a sacrifice that had to be made to restore British morale on the battlefield, quell disquiet on the home front and extend national relevance in diplomatic decision-making.

The last charge against Second Alamein is that everything that went on in North Africa was ultimately just not very important in the big picture of the war. Four German divisions were serving in Panzerarmee Afrika in October 1942, while at that same moment the Third Reich had 179 divisions fighting on the Eastern Front. As a result of LIGHTFOOT and SUPERCHARGE, the Axis suffered just over 2,100 fatalities and 30,000 troops taken prisoner.[65] By contrast, at least 280,000 Wehrmacht troops were killed in the fighting in the USSR in the autumn and winter of 1942, and when Stalingrad fell in February 1943, another 110,000 Axis soldiers were captured.[66] The war in Egypt was by this measure a footnote to the drama taking place on the Russian steppe. The journalist Herbert O’Neill, writing as ‘Strategicus’ in the Spectator, argued the year after Alamein that events in Russia were of ‘incomparably greater importance’ than anything Eighth Army had managed to accomplish.[67]

North Africa’s irrelevance to the outcome of the war – and the irrelevance of the western theatre in general compared to the Eastern Front – remains a popular take on the war in the Anglophone world.[68] As an argument, it rests upon what historian Phillips Payson O’Brien has called a ‘fixation on primitive variables’, in particular on an unwritten assumption that it is land fighting which is all that ultimately matters in deciding a war’s outcome, and that campaigns at sea and in the air are only ever ancillary to it.[69] In fact, Nazi Germany invested far more in naval and air power than land power. And during 1942, its sea and air assets were increasingly sucked into the battle for the Mittelmeer. By the end of Second Alamein, nineteen of the Luftwaffe’s fifty-one bomber groups were operating in the Mediterranean. By January 1943, it was twenty-three.[70]

The same story was true for Hitler’s U-Boat force. Already by December 1941, one-quarter of the active German submarine fleet was in the Mediterranean, a commitment which remained a significant drag on the Kriegsmarine’s ability to mount an offensive against Allied convoys in the North Atlantic.[71] In fact, the original idea in Berlin had been to transfer two-thirds of U-Boat strength to the Mediterranean, and only Admiral Dönitz’s horrified protests and the practical obstacles to such a dramatic redeployment had forced a watering-down of this plan.[72]

It is in any case meaningless to assess the period 23 October to 4 November 1942 without considering what came after it. The Desert Fox’s final expulsion from Egypt accompanied by the TORCH landings provoked Hitler into expending still more strength in the southern Mediterranean in a hopeless attempt to stabilise the theatre. Seven and a half fresh divisions, including two well-equipped Panzer divisions, were sent to Tunisia as 5th Panzerarmee – divisions Rommel would have given his back teeth to have a few months earlier when he might have done something useful with them. Instead, in May 1943, what was left of them, plus the remnants of Panzerarmee Afrika, duly surrendered in Tunis. Over 238,000 enemy troops, 100,000 of them German, capitulated at ‘Tunisgrad’, twice as large a prisoner haul for the Allies as at Stalingrad. True, the unexpectedly protracted Tunisian campaign delayed the invasion of Sicily and Italy and probably put back the cross-Channel Second Front by a year. But the British and Americans were going to have to fight those quarter of a million Axis troops somewhere. It was much easier to do it in North Africa, where the enemy was handicapped by a fragile supply chain, than in Campania or Normandy.[73]

Had Rommel been captured at Second Alamein, then perhaps Hitler would have given up on North Africa there and then. As it was, Monty only got the Desert Fox’s second-in-command, Wilhelm von Thoma. He made the most of the ‘bag’ anyway. The night he was taken prisoner, General von Thoma found himself invited to British headquarters as the army commander’s personal dinner guest. After their meal, Monty cleared the plates from the table, produced a map of the battlefield and prodded his dinner companion to offer thoughts about the next stages in the campaign. ‘Come on, what would you do, von Thoma?’ the victor of Alamein cheerfully demanded.[74] The captive guest, who had hardly had the easiest of days as it was, must have inwardly yearned for the serenity of a prison camp. On hearing the story Churchill said, ‘Poor von Thoma. I, too, have dined with Montgomery.’[75]

In truth, while the prime minister came to laud Monty because of his fame and achievements, he never particularly liked him nor cared for his methods. Churchill would have much preferred a Rommel-type as general of his armies. The Desert Fox’s drive, panache, preference for ‘Action This Day’ and indifference to such dull realities as logistics were far more to the PM’s taste than Montgomery’s fussiness. Churchill had sought in vain to find a Rommel of his own in the Western Desert throughout 1941 and 1942. None had emerged, though for the rest of the war he would keep searching for one in other theatres, equally without success.

The prime minister was hardly alone in finding the hero of Alamein personally unendurable. Montgomery was crass, conceited and blithely unappreciative of the support he received from his subordinates, not least from his thankless chief of staff ‘Freddie’ de Guingand, who would spend much of the war repairing the damage wrought by his bosses’ rhinoceros charges through protocol. As a general, Monty was blind to any needs other than his own. One of the serious deficiencies in his military education was that he never attended the pan-service Imperial Defence College between the wars. The IDC might have afforded him a much greater awareness of the air force’s and navy’s perspective on events. Montgomery’s unwillingness to consider any requirements other than those of the troops under his direct command was to become a serious limitation on his wartime success as an operational commander.[76]

What especially irked his peers was Monty’s insistence that everything that happened on his watch did so as part of a fabled ‘master plan’. This was clearly nonsense. Halfway through Second Alamein, Montgomery abandoned LIGHTFOOT and came up with entirely new operational orders. There was nothing discreditable about this. Indeed, it spoke well of an army commander that he could improvise to adapt to changing circumstances on the battlefield.[77] Monty had even said as much in a letter to Brooke on 1 November, on the eve of SUPERCHARGE: ‘battles do not go as one plans’.[78] But after Alamein he had a ‘noxious insistence’ that everything that had happened during the battle had gone exactly as he had predicted it – so ‘obviously untrue’, as even his sympathetic post-war biographer Nigel Hamilton admitted, that it could only be the product of a ‘quasi-paranoid streak of self-justification’.[79] The same obsessive need to impose order where none existed would pursue him through his battles in Sicily, Italy, France, Holland and Germany. There was something frankly wrong with Montgomery, something that only a herorically dedicated psychiatrist might ever have figured out, and it is fortunate that the Allied war effort was never hindered too greatly by whatever Freudian turmoil was taking place inside his head.

But Montgomery was the right man for the job in 1942, and while Auchinleck has never received fair credit for all he accomplished in the Western Desert, Churchill and Brooke were correct to replace him when they did. Eighth Army under the Auk was clannish, cliquish and disunited. Key decisions were negotiated by disputative councils of war rather than laid down by a commander-in-chief with an overall grand schema. Often, in the heat of battle, divisional and corps commanders would flatly refuse to follow orders they disliked. ‘Bellyaching’ was rampant. Montgomery brought all that to an end. He transformed Eighth Army’s command culture for the better. He was not nearly so pleasant to work with as Auchinleck. But by August 1942 the Desert Army did not need a nice commander, it needed an effective one.[80]

Instead of trying to be a knock-off Rommel to please Churchill, Montgomery chose a style of warfare that suited the troops of a democratic citizen-soldier army. Ever since Dunkirk, the British Army had been beseeched to adopt the German tactics of 1940 – to fight in a supposedly ‘modern’ way. Montgomery fought Second Alamein not as a replay of the Blitzkrieg in the Ardennes but as a battle of 1918 – of infantry working in close coordination with devastating artillery and air firepower to grind down the enemy in unhurried, ruthless attrition, limiting casualties wherever possible by replacing human bodies with machinery. It worked. Rommel had no idea how to counter that sort of war-making. He wanted the British to keep doing what they had always previously done – dash around the battlefield getting obligingly shot up by his anti-tank guns. It might be said that Montgomery was the greatest First World War general Britain ever produced. Second Alamein became the template for most of the subsequent British battles of the war’s western theatre – a rigorously managed, cautious, set-piece affair employing a strategy of ‘colossal cracks’ against the enemy. Such a style of fighting rarely produced any spectacular initial results. But by playing on the Allied coalition’s massive material advantages, it invariably produced a victory in the end.[81]

In a democratic age, Montgomery understood the importance of brand-building.[82] To Eighth Army’s smart set, the Guards, Greenjackets and yeomanry officers, Monty’s hamming it up for the cameras and glad-handing with the troops was vulgar showmanship. They were right: it was vulgar showmanship, all of it – his dishevelled but recognisable non-uniform ‘uniform’, his mildly absurd let’s-hit-Rommel-for-six Orders of the Day, the cigarettes he handed out to squaddies on the roadside. But it worked. Even Eighth Army men who could see Monty for the bullshitter he was enjoyed the spectacle anyway.

And Monty reached out to the ordinary citizen-soldier in a way none of his predecessors had ever done or really tried. He went to great lengths to make sure every man in Eighth Army understood the plan of action ahead. He was the first British general for as long as anyone could remember who did not blame the troops themselves for their misfortunes. There was none of Brooke’s or Wavell’s despairing talk about them all being ‘soft’. Twenty-two-year-old private Jim Fraser, who drove the army commander’s personal command tank, recalled that his boss’s first approach to soldiers he met in the desert was to say something like: ‘I’m Monty, your new commander. I’ve studied your track record, there’s nothing wrong with you. You are a fine body of men; the problem in the past has been leadership; that will now end. Together I will lead you to victory.’[83]

Monty told his men that it was the generals who had been the problem and he was therefore the solution. This was conceited, but at least it was not contemptuous. For all his undoubted personal awfulness, Montgomery understood that he was leading an army of modern civilians in temporary uniform, not eighteenth-century Hessian peasants. He was the first Eighth Army commander to ‘grip’ his heterogeneous force with a sense of singular authority and, eventually, develop within it the pride of a swaggering corps d’elite.

The results were clear. Throughout the second half of 1942, Eighth Army’s desertion rate and cases of NYD(N) – psychological illness – declined rapidly. Censors’ reports noted that letters home reflected a gathering self-confidence in the army. ‘There was always a stir along the road when the general drove past,’ Alan Moorehead wrote: ‘a black beret on his head, his lean ascetic face looking always intent and preoccupied.’[84] Auchinleck had been far too modest and diffident a man to engage in such gauche grandstanding. Maude Montgomery’s little boy was unencumbered by any such considerations of dignity.

Rommel’s defeat was the capstone to this. Bevin had been right: at the end of the day, what the people had needed was a victory. Montgomery, for all his faults, had given them one.[85]

*

On New Year’s Day 1943, Brooke took a moment to reflect on how he had felt just twelve months before, ‘when I could see nothing but calamities ahead’. Then, Hong Kong had just fallen; Singapore and Burma were in peril; Egypt was threatened; the USSR was collapsing; India and Australia and the whole Middle East were apparently vulnerable. ‘Wherever I looked I could see nothing but trouble,’ he wrote. But now!

We start 1943 under conditions I could never have dared to hope. Russia has held, Egypt for the present is safe. There is hope of clearing North Africa of Germans in the near future. The Mediterranean may be partly opened. Malta is safe for the present. We can now work freely against Italy, and Russia is scoring wonderful successes…we are certain to have many setbacks to face, many troubles, and many shattered hopes, but for all that the future is infinitely brighter.[86]

Even to instinctual pessimists like Brooke, it was increasingly obvious by the beginning of 1943 not only that Britain was safe from defeat, but that the Allies were going, eventually, to win the war.

What was not so clear was how and when exactly it would end, or how much and how many would have to be sacrificed along the way to make this happen. For the rest of this story, it is the timing and circumstances of victory which necessarily become our main subject. Each mattered a great deal. Because together they would determine the kind of world that would be left when Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo were finally gone; the place that Britain would hold in it; and the kind of country its people would live in once the lights finally came on again.

Part Two

Appurtenances of Democracy

5

Gone with the Want

The scene: the dinner table in the house above the grocer’s shop at 37 Heckmondwike Road, Dewsbury, Yorkshire. The date: 3 December 1942, a month since Second Alamein. The subject: Social Insurance and Allied Services – the 300-page government White Paper on benefit reform better known as ‘the Beveridge Report’ – published two days ago. The mood: ‘rowdy’.

Bert Preston, proprietor: ‘It’s scandalous. Where’s the money coming from? Don’t I pay out enough? You [his female audience at the table] don’t know – you don’t have taxes to pay. I wish I was a munitions worker drawing £7 a week and little to pay out. It’s such as me that drops in [pays] for it.’

Edna Naylor, family member (when she can finally get a word in): ‘It’s a delightful fancy. But I doubt it can ever get realised.’

Margaret Preston, Bert’s wife: ‘I think it’s sensible. There were rows when the Old Age Pensions were started – “the country’s to be ruined” – but we’re still going strong and who would want to abolish OAPs now?’

Bert: ‘I’m saying nowt about the OAP. It’s this other. Where is the brass [money] coming from? Out of such as me!’

‘By tea-time,’ noted Kathleen Hey, Margaret’s sister and the recording angel of this exchange, ‘he had calmed down to just grumbling.’[1]

The source of this dinner-table commotion was the proposal in Sir William Beveridge’s eponymous report to do away with all the byzantine existing layers of social welfare provision in Britain and to replace them with a single compulsory, universal ‘National Insurance’ scheme of flat rate contributions and benefits administered by a single Whitehall Ministry of Social Security. This would offer provisions for unemployment, temporary incapacity to work through sickness, permanent disability and retirement. There would be ‘cradle to grave’ accommodation of special circumstances during an average citizen’s life – from marriage and maternity grants to widowhood and separation allowances to a death benefit to cover burial expenses. Everyone, ‘from duke to dustman’ as the Daily Mirror had it, would participate.[2] It would be funded by a trio of inputs – contributions deducted from an employee’s pay packet (their National Insurance ‘stamp’); a portion provided directly by employers; and the state.

Social Insurance and Allied Services was, according to the Home Intelligence department, the single most-discussed topic across Britain in the first week of December 1942 – surpassing even the news of the fighting in Tunisia and Stalingrad. Within a month, Sir William’s close-print, two-shilling snooze, with long disquisitions on administrative costs and the problem of Industrial Assurance Societies, had become an unlikely bestseller. When the government put out an abridged threepenny version, total sales reached 600,000. ‘I’ve been up the last three days and nights reading the first chapter of a book called Gone with the Want by that stout fellow Beveridge,’ said Tommy Handley in the BBC radio comedy ITMA.[3] A copy eventually somehow reached Hitler. It was discovered in his Berlin bunker after the war, annotated in an unidentifiable hand as ‘an especially obvious proof that our enemies are taking over national socialistic ideas’.[4]

The Beveridge Report had arrived as part of the British national conversation at a propitious moment. Second Alamein, TORCH and the imminent Soviet victory at Stalingrad appeared to have settled the question of whether the war would be won. The only issue now was when. Soon, people thought. Allied battlefield success had replaced the pessimism of twelve months earlier with a bracing confidence that the end of the war couldn’t be so far away after all. Seven out of ten Britons polled in December 1942 thought it would be over no later than mid-1944. Almost half of them thought the war would be won sooner than that – by Christmas 1943 at the latest.[5] There was, then, an urgency to thinking about post-war policy that had not been in the air even a few months before. Reconstruction had been an issue vaguely floating around the fringes of national life since the very beginning of the conflict. But until now it had had an unreal, abstract quality to it. Suddenly the question of what the UK should look like after Hitler had become very pressing indeed. What kind of world were the British fighting for anyway?

*

To help us understand that, let us take a closer look at the home front of late 1942 – shabby, worn-out, irritable and dog-eared after three years of fighting, but also, thanks to the profoundly new circumstances created by the war, fired with a new irreverent, if sporadic, vigour.

The Blitz of September 1940 to May 1941 had been the high drama of the home front war, a moment of epic national crisis bringing ‘fear, excitement, desperation and the random immediacy of death’ to millions of ordinary people, and inducing in even the most prosaic soul ‘an almost ecstatic sense of transcendence of self and immersion in a mystic whole’.[6] But all that was long over. The period from the end of the Blitz to December 1943 was the least dangerous in the entire war for British civilians.[7] No longer was Blitzed London the plucky beating heart of global resistance to Nazism. The war had moved on; the capital barely saw a single enemy aircraft. Life, as one Civil Defence worker complained to journalist J. L. Hodson in spring 1942, was ‘dull now’. Londoners were ‘bored and critical’.[8]

For the residents of unlucky provincial towns, previously untouched by bombs, there were occasional shocking reminders that the dangers had not all gone away. In April and May 1942 came Hitler’s so-called ‘Baedeker Blitz’, a campaign of attacks on cities with little military importance but famous architectural, cultural or historical traditions – Bath; Norwich; York; Exeter; Canterbury.[9] It was intended as revenge for RAF Bomber Command’s recent ‘terror attacks’ on Lübeck and Rostock. (‘There is no other way of bringing the English to their senses,’ Goebbels wrote in his diary as the Baedeker raids commenced. ‘They belong to a class of human beings with whom you can only talk after you have first knocked out their teeth.’)[10]

By the time the two-month Baedeker campaign ended, over 850 civilians had been killed and several celebrated English buildings had been left in ruins, including Exeter Cathedral’s thirteenth-century Chapel of St James and York’s late-medieval Guildhall. But even as an exercise in wanton destruction, the Baedeker Blitz was a failure. Most of the historic buildings in the targeted towns survived. Many British civilians saw the switch to unprotected targets as proof of German weakness rather than as evidence of their own vulnerability – ‘they dare not come where they know they will get a hot reception’.[11] Even Nazi propagandists grew queasy about such vandalism, improvising spurious military excuses for the whole sordid exercise.

On the whole, the Luftwaffe stuck to ‘tip and run’ nuisance raids in these mid-war years. Small numbers of fast fighter-bombers would sweep in at low level, mostly against coastal towns like Dover, Lowestoft and Torquay. After scattering a few bombs and strafing the streets, the raiders would disappear before the air defences could respond. Such attacks shook people up but caused few casualties and did little damage, though they still served as a reminder to the British that they could not relax their guard. No one knew for sure if a major bombing offensive would begin again against London or other major targets. The national Civil Defence organisation had to be kept correspondingly strong. Indeed, by 1942 it was larger, better equipped and more professionally trained than it had ever been during the months of the Blitz, following generous infusions of cash and manpower by central government to fix the many shortcomings. Over 1,300 ambulances were on hand in London (two and a half times as many as in 1941) and the number of rescue squads had almost trebled since then to 1,367. Shelter accommodation was now available for 5.5 million of the capital’s citizens, including 64,000 beds in eight recently completed ‘deep shelters’ burrowed thirty yards below the city streets.

By mid-1942, 304,000 working-age men and 80,000 women were in full-time employment across the national Civil Defence organisation, the National Fire Service (another wartime innovation) and the police force. One and a quarter million more Britons were performing part-time roles. All had been issued uniforms, helmets and standardised equipment, and been properly trained.[12] This was a hefty allocation of the nation’s resources, especially when the available labour pool was fast drying up. The Civil Defence services were almost as big as the Royal Navy.[13] It is worth keeping this in mind when considering whether the German Blitz ‘failed’ during the war. While it did not cow the British into surrender, throughout 1942–3 the Germans were able to impose a major cost on the United Kingdom’s resources for only a relatively trivial investment of their own. Simply by keeping open the threat that they might resume a big bombing campaign, they forced the British to maintain a huge and expensive apparatus that mostly sat unused.[14]

Richard Titmuss, the historian of wartime social services, described the intangible toll of this constant threat on British peace of mind:

A state of readiness became almost a permanent feature of life…a long and wearisome period during which, for the most part and for most people, nothing happened. But all the time there were threats; of bombs, of gas, of sabotage, of invasion and, at the end, of new and unsuspected horrors. At no time did the workers in the post-raid, evacuation and hospital services know when the next attack might come, whether it would be by night or day, what form it would take, which city would suffer, how severe destruction would be, or how long it would last. In these sectors, the enemy held the initiative almost to the end.[15]

If the likelihood of military defeat was fading, what remained was the dreary residue of war – fatigue, deprivation, squalor. The year 1942 represented the nadir of British wartime austerity. Food imports were now three-quarters their pre-war level.[16] There was always enough to eat to sustain normal life, but what ended up on people’s plates was monotonous and often unappetising: potatoes (endless potatoes); root vegetables; seasonal fruit; fish (salted or tinned); powdered eggs and milk; canned meats of obscure origins and doubtful flavour. ‘I am so thoroughly sick of vegetables that I have made up my mind: I will not look at a potato, a cabbage or a carrot after the war,’ pledged one Hertfordshire woman in December 1941.[17] Sauces, spices, sweets – all the piquant stimulants which had flirted with the pre-war palate seemed to have vanished. Instead there were ersatz ‘Victory’ dishes pushed by the government: jam made from carrots; mock-bananas fashioned from mashed parsnips; steak and kidney pie minus the steak and kidney. Christmas goose made way for mutton, and butter (scandalously) for margarine.[18] For the daring or desperate there were more aberrant delicacies – whale meat, eels, wild birds, horseflesh.[19]

Beer was unrationed but heavily watered down, improving sobriety but taking away much of the calorific benefit for manual workers. Tea, at least, remained cheap (subsidised at tuppence a pound) and reasonably available with a personal ration of two ounces a week. This was a war-winning necessity, because even leaving aside clichés about Keeping Calm and Having a Cuppa beneath the bombs, millions of poorer British women relied on tea’s psychoactive stimulants to get them through a working day in which they might surrender much of their food rations to their husbands and children.[20] The ‘National Wholemeal Loaf’, unwrapped, unsliced, at least a day old on purchase, of 85 per cent extraction, compared to the 70 per cent extraction of pre-war white bread, was the symbol of all that was grey and mushy and dyspeptic about mid-war life. No one starved; but nor did anyone feel they were eating enough. Half of all men and one-third of women polled in 1943 felt that they could not buy sufficient food to stay healthy.[21]

Still, at least you could get food. The same was not the case for soap, toothpaste, teacups, razor blades, torch batteries and dozens of other household items once cheap and ubiquitous but now vanishingly rare. In the absence of a reliable supply of new clothes, furniture, carpets, wallpaper, cutlery and pots, consumers were simply having to make do and mend with what few bits and pieces they still had and hope they would not wear out before the end of the war. According to a Board of Trade survey in 1943, three-quarters of women trying to buy a saucepan were unable to find one on sale at any price.[22] When something was for sale, it meant queuing – often, for working people (especially women), in lieu of taking a lunch break, as shop hours rarely extended beyond factory hours. Or it might have to be done during the brief periods on Saturday afternoons when working mothers would otherwise be able to get a brief rest from their domestic chores. Queues might be ‘better than fights’, as one housewife conceded, but ‘they favour people with leisure at the expense of people with long hours and probably heavy work’.[23]

War consumed free time, often in pointless, boring, wearisome ways. There was the nightly routine of putting up the blackout curtains, and then taking them down again in the morning. There was ‘fire-watching’ duty at business and industrial premises, a compulsory chore for millions of people at least once a week after 1941. For men there was the Home Guard – drills, inspections, the blancoing of kit and polishing of boots, hours of tedious sentry duty. With all inessential private motoring proscribed for the duration, ‘travel’ meant walking, cycling (though shortages of rubber spare tubes complicated that) or public transport. Catching a bus meant more queues, and, if you missed the last one before the 9 p.m. curfew, you risked being stranded in a town centre, miles from some isolated dormitory or billet. Trains, meanwhile, were expensive, dirty, overcrowded and habitually late when they were not cancelled entirely, with civilian passenger services frequently delayed to make way for military and goods traffic.[24]

By 1943, men were performing an average of 52.9 paid working hours a week and women 45.9 hours. The rewards were good but the costs, both physical and emotional, were profound. Employment-related stress, fatigue or ‘overstrain’ were common. Workplace conditions, though much better regulated than before the war, could still be unsanitary and hazardous. Factories were liberal in their use of dangerous chemicals and carcinogenic materials like asbestos. In 1942, one in every twenty-three workers nationally was involved in an industrial accident. In some precarious industries, such as the production of munitions, which required the handling of potentially lethal explosives, the accident rate was much higher. By the end of the war, one in four coal miners had been a victim of a serious incident at work involving either death or disablement for at least three days – a figure that bears comparison with the one in ten servicemen who died or were wounded during hostilities.[25]

Hundreds of thousands of young women had been conscripted to work in remote aircraft and ordnance factories, far from their homes and families. Crammed into dismal hostels with barbed-wire fences keeping out any male guests, the war factory girls lay on their bunk beds after their shifts desperately trying to stave off the tedium. ‘If a statistician took the trouble to record how many times the word “browned-off” was used in a munitions factory,’ wrote Diana Murray Hill in her 1944 autobiographical war-work novel Ladies May Now Leave Their Machines, ‘he’d get so browned-off himself that he’d give it up.’ This was a condition Hill defined as being ‘totally, and without any reservations, bored’:

bored with turning handles, bored with seeing the same old faces around you…bored with the same old dried peas and rissoles made of leftovers that you know you are going to get in the canteen…bored with night shift; bored with day shift; bored with getting into the works bus and with going to bed at the same time and getting up again at the same time to come to work again – in fact thoroughly and whole-heartedly BROWNED OFF.[26]

This was a world of eleven-hour shifts complemented by the petty penitentiary tyranny of supervisors-cum-guards: cloakrooms locked, lavatories periodically searched for ‘malingerers’, and constant wheedling injunctions by the management to meet quotas and improve output figures.[27] The war regulated day-to-day existence in Britain in a way never known before. Churchill was leading a massive, intrusive, consolidated Jacobin state, one in which every aspect of an ordinary citizen’s life was intricately scrutinised. One wit compared living in wartime Britain to incarceration in a particularly earnest and wearisome reformatory school.[28] The Man from the Ministry decided how you spent your workday and whom you worked for; what you did in your spare time; what you ate; how you dressed; what you got to know about the war and what you did not; when you could speak your mind and when you were enjoined to stay silent. When it was not the Whitehall mandarin who had you under surveillance, it was the factory foreman.

To be sure, the government preferred to cajole rather than compel, reserving its considerable statutory powers only for use in the last resort and always exhorting people to ‘do the right thing’ voluntarily. Still, a sense that life in wartime Britain was physically oppressive, emotionally deleterious and spiritually impoverishing seems to have been widespread by 1942. ‘Restrictions, discomforts, official supervision that smacks of fascism – these we suffer but do not enjoy,’ wrote Edward Relton (later killed on active service) in the Spectator. ‘Nor do we discuss them. But they are felt.’[29]

*

Working people, then, were hungry, unkempt, smelly and worn out, both emotionally and bodily. Yet – and this needs emphasis – they were nonetheless working. The crucial economic fact of the Second World War was that it ended unemployment, which had been at the centre of the British national conversation for a generation. In July 1939, 1.27 million people had been officially listed as out of work; by mid-1943, the figure was down to 60,000.[30] In the space of a decade, Britain had gone from a country with millions of working-age men and women surplus to requirements to one with a chronic labour shortage.[31]

As might be expected, the biggest growth in employment had taken place in economic sectors directly associated with the war effort – in particular, the metals, engineering, vehicle and shipbuilding industries, which went from having 2.59 million full-time-equivalent employees in 1938 to 4.65 million in 1942.[32] Wartime expansion was most obvious in those regions dominated by the Victorian staple industries of coal, steel and textiles: north-west and north-east England, south Wales, the industrial belt of lowland Scotland and Belfast – all the formerly ‘Distressed Areas’ of 1930s lockouts and dole queues.

Tyneside, for instance, had been the pallid, hungry face of the 1930s Slump. Back then, half the workers in the region’s engineering trade had been out of work; four out of five in shipbuilding. But by the middle of the war, such firms as Vickers-Armstrongs, Reyrolles and Parsons, on the brink of receivership ten years earlier, were operating twenty-four hours a day on twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. The Royal Ordnance Factory at Birtley was now employing thousands of local women on shell case contracts for the Ministry of Supply. The demand for ships was such that in 1942 Newcastle’s Low Walker yard, closed since 1931, was reopened to build freighters. Millions of pounds of modernised machinery, cranes and tools were bought and fitted across all of Tyneside’s yards. Swan Hunter built eighty-four warships for the Admiralty totalling more than a quarter of a million tons.[33]

With more work for manual labourers came more pay. Between 1938 and 1945, average weekly industrial earnings in Britain increased by 80 per cent from 53s. 5d. to 96s. 1d. The biggest earners were, naturally enough, skilled craftsmen essential to war industry – sheet-metal workers, toolmakers, boilermakers – who by the end of the war were taking home pay packets that would have seemed astonishing by 1930s standards: an average of between £6 and £7 per week, with extremes of up to £15.[34] The biggest relative gains, however, were made by previously marginalised workers. Average weekly industrial earnings for women increased between 1938 and 1945 by 94 per cent. If they were still being paid less than men, the gap had at least narrowed. The war also levelled out some of the tiered hierarchy of working-class employment between the formally skilled at the top (the ‘aristocracy of labour’) and the unskilled at the bottom.[35]

A lot of these wage gains were soaked up by higher rates of income tax, imposed on working-class employees for the first time, partly in the form of ‘post-war credits’ to be repaid at an unspecified date in the future – essentially a compulsory interest-free loan to His Majesty’s Government to help pay for the war. The inflationary rise in the cost of living also flattened wage increases. By 1943 the weekly budget for a typical working-class family was 44.5 per cent more expensive than it had been five years before. All the same, the combination of the rise in wage rates, the increase in hours worked and the participation of almost everyone in the labour force who was willing and able to contribute meant that by V-E Day average real income for the British working-class man and woman would be about 7 per cent higher than it had been in 1939. The war, in short, would be good for the masses.[36]

Not just income rose; prestige did too. In the 1930s, Britain’s steel mills, shipyards and coal mines had been symbols of privation, obsolescence and pity; now, thanks to the wartime emergency, they were the buzzing arsenals of a democracy in arms. One of the war’s major social consequences was the creation of a self-conscious, confident, truly national working class across the United Kingdom.[37] The old regional, sectarian and occupational differences that had once loomed so large in the lives of manual workers and their families, dividing and estranging, would never be so meaningful again. New identities knitted together working people across the country. Union membership, for one. By 1944, 8.2 million Britons belonged to a trade union – almost twice as many as a decade before. The Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) alone enrolled almost a million members, one-third of them women.[38] Ernest Bevin, TGWU stalwart and Churchill’s minister of labour, could say without fear of contradiction that ‘without our people, this war cannot be won, nor can the life of the country be carried on’. By ‘our people’ everyone knew whom he was talking about.[39] The war put the working class at the solid centre of the British national imagination.[40]

*

For the one in five Britons who considered themselves middle-class, it was a rather different story. The British middle class experienced all the wartime privations described above, but with far fewer tangible compensations to provide some sense that the sacrifice was worth it. Cost-of-living increases tended to hit them harder than the working class since the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the housing costs they paid and the entertainments they consumed were less likely to be subsidised or price-controlled by the government. The middle class had been used to a significantly richer, more diverse diet before the war, so while the average daily calorie intake for the working class changed hardly at all from 1939 to 1945, and in some cases rose, for the families of non-manual labourers it fell by one-quarter.[41] The writer Mollie Panter-Downes was an indefatigable chronicler of the bourgeois women of 1940s Britain, and her short stories quiver with fantasies of long-lost meals – of ‘thick steaks sitting on beds of fried onions, cakes topped with a Mont Blanc of whipped cream, and black cherry jam on hot, flaky croissants’.[42] Tasty food, or the absence of it, could become an almost erotically charged obsession.

To be sure, some middle-class workers in managerial and scientific jobs important to war industry did well. Draughtsmen, laboratory technicians, chemists, engineers – these occupations flourished. But on the whole, salaried employees and people whose income derived from retail profits, professional fees, dividends, rent and investments lost out between 1939 and 1945. Either their businesses shrivelled up due to shortages of clients or consumer products to sell (the fate of many small shopkeepers) or, without trade union representation, they simply lacked the collective clout to bargain for pay rises in line with those on the factory floor. At the same time, income tax hikes hit white-collar incomes hard. In general, the better-off you had been in 1938, the worse the wartime changes in tax rates were for you. Anyone earning a very respectable middle-class annual salary of between £1,000 and £2,000 on the eve of the war would have been turning over just 17 per cent of it to the Inland Revenue. By 1945, the taxman was getting over twice as big a share as that.[43]

The ranks of the armed and auxiliary forces were disproportionately made up of middle-class men and women. White-collar workers were far less likely than manual labourers to be excluded from conscription by reserved occupation status. Montgomery’s Eighth Army was composed to a very large degree of shopkeepers, bank clerks, confectioners, teachers, travelling salesmen and undergraduates. The officer class was almost entirely middle-class. So too were RAF aircrew. Soldiers, sailors and airmen were among the biggest financial losers of the war. By the beginning of 1942, a married British Army private was paid just twenty-one shillings a week, with his wife receiving an additional 21s. 6d. directly from the government and 6s. 6d. for each of her children. As a War Office report conceded, given the rise in the cost of living, this sum was totally inadequate to maintain a middle-class household. Many servicemen’s wives had to take a full or part-time job, often while looking after young families, move in with their parents, or simply accrue debt and hope for better times to come.[44]

From the middle-class point of view, then, the war had turned the world upside down in all sorts of unpleasant, indeed outrageous ways. For a droll account of what it felt like to be on the receiving end of this we have few better sources than Marghanita Laski’s 1944 comic fantasy Love on the Supertax, an inverted parody of the famous Walter Greenwood Slump–era novel Love on the Dole.[45] Laski’s story follows the travails of ‘Lady Clarissa’, a duke’s daughter who dreams of escaping her family’s destitution through romance with an extravagantly paid factory worker. Her salvation appears to arrive in the form of ‘Sid’, a Communist Party organiser from St Pancras. But the cruelty of class differences dooms their liaison. Sid’s proletarian family cannot look past Clarissa’s inability to drop her aitches, slurp her soup, or drink tea from the saucer. ‘If it’s not asking too much, what exactly is your father’s trade union?’ Sid’s mother inquires archly. ‘Well, he used to be a member of the 1922 Committee,’ is all Clarissa can come up with. Ultimately the nobleman’s daughter is cast out of the fleshpots of St Pancras to return to her West End grind.[46]

It never quite got as bad as that in real life. But the war did undoubtedly appear to be producing winners and losers, and those who found themselves among the unhappy latter group tended to be from the more privileged side of pre-war life, and were scarcely consoled by the thought that their privation was making the world a fairer place. One of the most pervasive myths of the 1940s is that divisions within the British class system blurred as the nation pulled together as one in a common cause, buoyed along by a ‘profound spirit of egalitarianism’.[47] On the contrary: differences between classes sharpened during the war. It was not class distinction which grew weaker but class deference.[48] Working-class people became more certain than ever that they were working-class, and fundamentally different in their manners and mores from the middle class. But they were no longer nearly so embarrassed about it. As Bevin put it, ‘the inferiority complex amongst our people’ dissipated.[49] The war emboldened ordinary working men and women to look their supposed betters square in the eye. Many in the middle class interpreted this unprecedented absence of deference among the workers as an epidemic of ‘rudeness’, insult being added to the injury of national income levelling.[50] Impudent factory workers with fat pay packets and their braying wives and children were, it seemed, now lording it over those who ought rightfully to be their social superiors.

*

The security and confidence the war had brought to the manual labouring class is important for understanding what the majority of working people in Britain wanted out of it once it was over – and what they feared. Wartime life was dreary and threadbare and exhausting, but it had put food on people’s tables (even if the food was for the moment endless potato fritters) and money in people’s pockets. What the working class wanted was to preserve the monetary gains they had already made while being given the freedom to spend their new income within a plentiful consumer economy free of rationing and controls. What they feared was losing what they had won.

Their nightmare was a repeat of what had happened after the First World War: an economic boom during and immediately after hostilities turning to slump and masses of workers driven back to the dole queues for a generation. This still seemed a frighteningly real prospect in the war’s middle years. When Gallup asked in July 1943, ‘Do you think after the war there will be jobs for all who want to work?’, only one-third said yes; almost half, no. In another poll later that year, most Britons thought that job shortages would be the single most urgent problem after the war.[51] Mass-Observation’s signal publication on reconstruction, The Journey Home, published in 1944 but based on fieldwork from a year before, included plenty of anecdotal evidence of the half-cynical, half-anguished fears of wartime employees that their good days were about to come to an end. A group of middle-aged industrial workers (who remembered the cruel years of the early 1920s very clearly) predicted the post-war future as follows:

‘Probably get a grant of £20 and afterwards the dole.’

‘I’ll be flung out on me beam ends.’

‘I’ll be finished. Don’t suppose I’ll ever get another job.’

‘My job will be finished. Just like that.’[52]

Whether any post-war government could or would do anything to prevent this – no matter who was in charge – was unclear. The Journey Home noted a marked popular preoccupation with the power of ‘them’, the ubiquitous and invincible agents of reaction who were expected to try to quash any effort at improvement in the lives of ordinary people. ‘The belief that the few are keeping a tight hold on the reins of power…big business, Conservative (and Labour) leaders…old men and the “old gang” ’ was said to be common and growing.[53] ‘Hope, doubt, despair come flashing, flickering, darkening,’ was how the novelist J. B. Priestley put the mid-war mood. ‘To-day you say: “We must do it ourselves.” Tomorrow you may be saying again: “They won’t do anything, and we’ll have to put up with it.” ’[54]

It was into this milieu of hope, doubt, impatience and apprehension that the tireless (and tiresome) university don, civil servant, mischief-maker, shameless grandstander and reactionary radical Sir William Beveridge strode at the end of 1942.

Churchill once described Beveridge as ‘an awful windbag and a dreamer’. It was not a partisan view; his wartime Labour colleagues completely agreed.[55] Sir William, conceited and haughty, had a talent for irritating people. Above all he irritated Ernest Bevin, who, much to his subsequent regret, had invited Beveridge to come to work for him on assuming office at the Ministry of Labour in May 1940. Sir William quickly made it clear that in his view he could run the ministry rather better than his boss. It was partly for that reason that in June 1941 Bevin asked Beveridge to chair a new committee looking at possible post-war reforms to social services. The offer was inspired neither by charity nor friendship; in fact the idea was to tuck Sir William away in an obscure corner where he could direct his undoubted talents to producing some useful but minor reform proposals.

Beveridge was at first inclined to turn the offer down. His qualifications for the task were not in dispute. Erstwhile director of the London School of Economics, and former Master of University College, Oxford, he was an experienced civil servant who, three decades earlier, had worked with a young Churchill at the Board of Trade to draw up the original proposals for National Insurance. His interests had since moved on to the more abstruse mysteries of the trade cycle, however, which he had been busy researching with a recent Oxford undergraduate called Harold Wilson, and he no longer thought that ‘welfare was up his street’. Still, he was desperate to contribute to the war effort in one way or other, and better opportunities had all come to nothing. Social services it would have to be. Tears, it was said, flowed from Beveridge’s eyes as he regretfully accepted Bevin’s request.[56]

Once he began examining the issue with his customary zeal, however, Beveridge began to see the radical possibilities of reform to social services. The folkloric version of the 1940s is that Sir William invented something called ‘the welfare state’. He did no such thing. It had already existed in Britain for over thirty years before the Beveridge Report, and as a share of national income it was almost as large by the late 1930s as it would be ten years later.[57] Four out of five people in Chamberlain’s Britain were covered, directly or indirectly, by one or more of the nation’s various social insurance or pension schemes, and total expenditure on social services ran to £431 million, more than double total defence expenditure in the mid-1930s.[58] Beveridge himself recognised in 1942 that ‘provision for most of the many varieties of need…has already been made in Britain on a scale not surpassed and hardly rivalled in any other country of the world’ and that the United Kingdom already possessed ‘a system of social security better on the whole than that can be found in almost any other country’.[59]

It was, however, a procedural mess. The system had evolved through generations of legislation without any overarching logic. Eligibility, benefit rates, funding and administration all varied depending on the type of social service in question. A superfluity of ministries oversaw it. Many of the neediest fell through its multiple cracks. Deserving people (housewives, children, domestic servants, agricultural workers, low-paid white-collar workers, the self-employed) were ineligible for basic benefits. ‘Means tests’ to assess eligibility, intrusive and therefore much hated, were applied very differently from place to place. Absurdities had accrued over the years as schemes had come to overlap. If an unemployed father with a wife and two children fell ill, for example, his weekly income automatically dropped from thirty-eight shillings to eighteen, despite his expenses remaining the same or more. Private assurance companies, which complemented and, in some cases, administered state allowances, were known to charge outrageous, predatory fees in return for very marginal benefits.

The patchwork nature of this existing ‘system’ meant it followed no guiding philosophy. Beveridge determined he would impose one. Moreover, he decided his report would not restrict itself merely to observations about benefits. A rational social security system, in his view, could only function if key assumptions about other aspects of the economy were also agreed upon. As 1942 went on, rumours began to spread up to the Cabinet about the growth of Beveridge’s ambitions. Ministers worried. What exactly was he up to? Attempts were made to quietly rein him in before it all became public and a potentially embarrassing mess ensued.

But Beveridge would not be reined in. Indeed, he had the bit solemnly and smugly between his teeth. A savvy appreciator of the power of the media, he gave interviews to the News Chronicle and The Times hinting at the radical proposals in his report and muttering darkly that the government wasn’t taking reform seriously enough. He was profiled in Picture Post magazine. He appeared on the BBC’s radio panel show The Brains Trust. By the autumn of 1942, a buzz was in the air. Parliamentary questions were laid down asking when this so-called ‘Beveridge Report’ MPs had heard about would be published. Brendan Bracken, the minister of information, and an accomplished showboater himself, recognised a hot property when he saw one. The report was getting people excited and might be good for morale. Instead of trying to quieten Beveridge, he thought, why not amplify him? Social Insurance and Allied Services was therefore launched to the public with the full blaze of official promotion on 1 December 1942, four weeks after Second Alamein.

The single, comprehensive National Insurance scheme Beveridge proposed in his report to replace the patchwork of current benefits was an ambitious extension of what already existed, but it was not in and of itself revolutionary. Where Social Insurance and Allied Services veered into uncharted territory (far beyond his original remit, exactly as the Cabinet had feared) was in its three ‘assumptions’ about other aspects of government policy. These, Beveridge demanded, must be met for his new social security system to work.

The first was a system of family allowances – the figure suggested was eight shillings per child per week – which Sir William argued was inherently desirable on eugenic grounds to halt the country’s declining birth rate. Assumption number two was a comprehensive medical system free at point of treatment – a national health service – which would act preventatively to keep employees fit for work and therefore making contributions to the scheme. Assumption number three was a government commitment to maintaining as close to full employment as possible (Beveridge reckoned anything below an 8.5 per cent national unemployment rate was close enough). Without this last guardrail, he argued, the system would quickly exhaust its own funds as payouts exceeded contributions.

To call these three demands merely ‘assumptions’, as Beveridge knew perfectly well, was like calling the Second World War a dispute over borders. The full employment commitment alone would involve a wholesale cross-party reshaping of post-war economic policy, yet Beveridge insisted that there were no possible half-measures. It was his whole system or nothing.

At first glance, it might seem that what Beveridge was proposing was a gift to the Labour Party. In fact, the British Left was initially divided over Sir William’s plan.[60] Its author was no socialist. Beveridge aimed, in good Gladstonian liberal fashion, to reward responsibility and punish indolence. National Insurance was intended merely to provide a bare subsistence level of income – a ‘national minimum’ – and no more. ‘Income for idleness, however caused, [cannot] come from a bottomless purse,’ Beveridge wrote in his report, a passage that drew the admiring attention of Lincolnshire grammar schoolgirl and grocer’s daughter Margaret Hilda Roberts.[61] Beveridge’s workers would be encouraged to exercise thrift and initiative to improve their circumstances by their own actions.

Labour critics further pointed out that the universal flat-rate contribution and compensation scheme Beveridge was proposing might avoid the stigma of charity but was inherently a system of regressive taxation.[62] Others questioned the model’s internal cohesion. A national flat-rate programme could not rapidly adjust to changes in the cost of living and took no account of the drastic differences in housing expenses in different parts of the United Kingdom. It could not be guaranteed, therefore, to provide a subsistence income everywhere.[63] Sir William, wanting to keep costs low, had argued for deferring the full roll-out of his old age pension system for twenty years. This was criticised by some Labour supporters as unacceptably miserly. The trade unions were at first adamantly opposed to family allowances, seeing them as a threat to the free collective bargaining principle – even Attlee had once called them ‘an attack upon wages’.[64] And some socialists saw any accommodation with the ancien régime of private property as ‘a regressive capitalist placebo’.[65] During a Labour Party debate on social security in May 1942, MP Fred Montague characterised such proposals as merely ‘obtaining dividends out of a capitalism which is moribund’.[66]

It is important to remember that Churchill’s Conservative Party had a perfectly respectable record of its own on social security reform. It had done most of the running on the matter between the wars, introducing all the major extant legislation on unemployment assistance, pensions and health insurance. (The last Labour government’s best-known contribution to policy, meanwhile, had been to try to slash dole benefits by 10 per cent as a crisis cost-cutting measure, a decision which had ripped the party apart.) The Conservative Reconstruction Committee chaired by R. A. (‘Rab’) Butler had recently made Tory proposals for a comprehensive social welfare system that rather resembled Beveridge’s own.[67] Certainly, a lot of Conservative backbenchers baulked at Sir William’s plan. Butler feared that to many of his colleagues its author was ‘a sinister old man who wishes to give away a great deal of other people’s money’.[68] But if Conservative parliamentary members were not all singing from the same hymn sheet when it came to Sir William’s social revolution at the end of 1942, neither were those on the opposite side of the House.

The British Tory Party of the first half of the twentieth century was a formidable instrument for the obtaining and maintaining of power. It had proven remarkably adept at reinventing itself to accommodate changing national mores, junking obsolete values while appropriating fresh ones. It had won a commanding number of seats in two ‘khaki’ elections in 1900 and 1918, had remained the dominant force in government throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and enjoyed huge parliamentary majorities and wholesale popular support since 1931. There was therefore no inherent reason to think, on the day Social Insurance and Allied Services was published, that the Labour Party would necessarily be the main beneficiary of what it contained. The Conservatives might well have become the party of Beveridge. How did they fluff it so badly?

*

A formal parliamentary debate on the report was scheduled for mid-February 1943. The Cabinet had to decide what the official coalition government line was going to be. Churchill, for his part, was not innately opposed to Beveridge’s findings,[69] though he understood the depth of opposition to it in some quarters of his own party and wanted to take things slowly. He was also worried that the Americans might have second thoughts about Lend-Lease if it seemed that the US taxpayer would be asked to underwrite a British journey ‘half-way to Moscow’ (as Beveridge had mischievously characterised his Report in an interview with the Daily Telegraph). More fundamentally, Churchill was uninterested in discussing post-war reconstruction with a war yet to be won, seeing the debate on the report as an irritating distraction from matters of strategy and diplomacy. In any case, domestic politics no longer stirred his interest. By 1943, the young Edwardian Liberal who had introduced labour exchanges and minimum wages in low-paid industries was long gone.

For the senior Labour members of the Cabinet (Attlee, Bevin and the home secretary, Herbert Morrison), the issue was more complicated. Whatever they might have thought about the individual merits of Beveridge’s proposals, there were bigger stakes at play. If the coalition broke up through infighting about reconstruction issues they would be out of government, and they were still convinced at this point that Labour would lose a general election. Their continued participation in the wartime coalition might prove their only realistic opportunity to further the democratic socialist agenda. Beveridge was forcing a political debate on Labour that it would prefer to defer for the present – he ‘seemed to think the war ought to stop while he put his plan into effect,’ complained Attlee.[70] The Labour leaders decided, then, to try to reach accommodation with Churchill.

The Cabinet would present a compromise position in the Commons debate. While accepting the Beveridge Report as ‘an essential part of any post-war scheme of national betterment’, and undertaking to draw up the necessary framework for its implementation while the war continued, it would leave the actual passage of legislation and a full costing of the plan to a post-war government: ‘we should get everything ready for them and leave them a free hand to take up or reject a scheme which will be perfected in itself,’ as Churchill succinctly fudged.[71]

It was not an unreasonable position to take. The problem came when Sir John Anderson, the Lord President of the Council (and thus responsible for the overall war economy), rose from the government benches to open the debate on 16 February. He could barely disguise his lack of enthusiasm. Anderson’s ‘lugubrious remarks’ gave the distinct impression that the Beveridge Report was to be quietly shelved as soon as decency allowed.[72] ‘Pompous John’, as he was known, had set the tone for the whole debate. Things would only get worse for the government.

Labour’s backbench MPs understood rather better than their own party leaders in the Cabinet that the Beveridge Report had acquired a symbolic importance in the public mind that had less to do with its specific proposals than with showing the sincerity with which post-war problems would be addressed. They themselves had plenty of reservations about the fine details of the scheme, but to concentrate exclusively on its flaws was to miss the point – which was to champion what ‘Beveridge’ as a mood had come to represent in the public consciousness: a seriousness about defending wartime economic gains and improving on them.[73]

Labour’s parliamentary party decided therefore to table an amendment demanding the immediate implementation of all Beveridge’s proposals. ‘Beveridge now’ was officially adopted as the Labour Party line, meaning that Attlee and his frontbench colleagues would, embarrassingly, have to defy their own whip to oppose the amendment and support the government. Morrison gamely tried to square the circle, giving a fine closing speech appealing to his backbench colleagues not to jeopardise the coalition. He was listened to in respectful silence and then completely ignored. Many Labour MPs had never cared for their party’s participation in Churchill’s administration in the first place, and were not only willing to test the wartime coalition to destruction but glad to do so. Beveridge himself was watching it all from the Commons Lobby with a look of malignant glee on his face. He told Harold Nicolson: ‘I am having the fun of my life…my two previous reports led to the fall of two ministers. This one may bring down a government.’[74]

In the end, the Labour amendment was defeated, guaranteed by the sheer number of backbench Tories who could be safely relied upon to back Churchill. But ninety-seven Labour MPs, almost the entire parliamentary party outside the government, had voted for it, making it the Left’s biggest rebellion of the war so far. For the party’s leadership it was a humiliation. A furious Morrison complained to Attlee that their colleagues had turned the Labour Party into a ‘suicide club’.[75] Bevin was so angry that he even considered disaffiliating the TGWU from Labour, and refused to attend parliamentary party meetings for a year afterwards.[76]

So far as the public was concerned, the defeat of ‘Beveridge Now’ confirmed that the whole thing had ended with a government stitch-up. Home Intelligence reported that national opinion was overwhelmingly ‘disappointed, cynical, or angry’ at the attempt to ‘shelve or kill’ the report – ‘vested interests have won again’ was the bitter refrain.[77] What made things still worse was that a summary of Social Insurance and Allied Services prepared for Forces discussion groups by the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) was shortly afterwards shelved when the Ministry of Information got cold feet. All the forces of reaction appeared to be trying to thwart the people’s will. The Journey Home called the apparent quashing of Beveridge the ‘culminating disappointment’ of a year of ‘pessimism and apathy’.[78]

Sensing that a gesture might be necessary, Churchill, ill with pneumonia at the time of the debate, rallied to make a radio broadcast in March on post-war reform. Making no specific reference to Beveridge, he proposed a four-year plan, including a national health service, a comprehensive social security system, housing and education reform, and also lower taxes – a bit of something for everyone with no particular details. Like all his radio addresses, it attracted a large audience, but the reaction to it was tepid. Churchill had ticked off all the appropriate boxes but convinced few of his sincerity or enthusiasm for the issue.[79]

*

On its publication in November 1942, the Beveridge Report was ‘welcomed with almost universal approval’ across Britain. The British Institute of Public Opinion recorded 86 per cent support for its proposals.[80] Mass-Observation found the response to the report ‘very favourable’, with a seven-to-one majority supporting its passage into law as soon as possible.[81] It was attractive to working people (and even many Britons among the lower middle class) not because they thought a better world was coming in 1942, but precisely the opposite: because they took for granted that the war’s end would be followed by an immediate economic slump and that Beveridge’s universal provisions for unemployment were going to at least offer them some security. In that sense, Social Insurance and Allied Services was preparation for the wrong sort of post-war world and the wrong sort of post-war problems. Britain, with its booming mid-century economy and tight labour market, was not going to experience mass unemployment again until the 1970s. A crisis that would bedevil it after the war was inflation, and Sir William had nothing to say about that.

What the report did or did not include looked moot anyway within a few months, because the February 1943 Commons debate appeared to confirm the public’s suspicion that ‘they’ would quash it. Far from being a celebratory moment in the midst of a ‘People’s War’, the Beveridge episode only seemed to provide evidence to millions of disillusioned Britons that powerful vested interests would always roll back progress in the end. The war was understood not as a time of ‘everyone pulling together’, whatever the propaganda films might be saying, but of classes jockeying for position; of competing interest groups staking out their claims to rightfully enjoy the fruits of victory within a moral economy of sacrifice. What ‘Beveridge’ seemed to represent in the year after Alamein was not a brighter future for the working class, but its inevitable betrayal and defeat.

The leaders of both main parties appeared complicit in the suppression of the report. Churchill and Attlee had, after all, voted the same way. Yet in the end, and rather to its own surprise, Labour benefited hugely from Britain’s Beveridge moment in the winter of 1942–3. Indeed, if one looks back at the wartime Gallup polls (to which few politicians were paying any attention), one can see that it was not long after the Beveridge debate that the party definitely took first place in national popularity, and this was the position it would maintain all the way until its general election victory two years later.[82]

Labour benefited from what happened that winter while the Conservative Party did not because of its unique place inside and outside the wartime government. It was able to share in the coalition’s success when things were going well, but equally able to distance itself when they were not.[83] It was Labour’s MPs whom people remembered as trying to stand up to ‘them’ in the Beveridge debate. Young reform Tories like Quintin Hogg had heaped elaborate praise on the report; that was quickly forgotten. ‘Pompous John’ Anderson’s distaste for it was not. The Conservatives, led by a man more interested in directing armies than planning for the future, had turned a resolutely tin ear to the public’s voice. Quite unnecessarily, they ceded the mandate of change to their opponents in February 1943. In two years, they would pay the price.

6

Safe Passage

On 10 November 1942, convoy SC-107, or what was left of it, arrived in Liverpool after seventeen days crossing the North Atlantic. It had been a dismal voyage.[1] Over three dozen merchant ships – predominately British-flagged, but with representatives of the American, Greek, Norwegian, Dutch and Swedish merchant fleets too – had started out from the waters off St John’s, Newfoundland, accompanied by a Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) escort group of one destroyer and four corvettes. SC-107 had not been much of an armada. Most of the ships were creaking tramp steamers, salt-smeared, rust-stained, some almost forty years old, their gaudy pre-war paint schemes now cloaked in drab grey. Their leaky boilers could barely manage more than nine knots in good conditions. Groaning under the excessive weight of wartime cargoes in the North Atlantic squalls of late autumn, they struggled to keep station (position) in a convoy even at the designated minimum speed of seven and a half knots, the pace of a casual bicyclist. To the thirteen U-Boats of Wolf Pack Veilchen (Violet) waiting for SC-107 along a 150-mile patrol perimeter some 400 miles to the north-east of Newfoundland, the convoy was made up of practically stationary targets.[2]

For the first hours of its journey, SC-107 could at least rely on air patrols operating from Labrador aerodromes. Its calvary began at mid-afternoon on 1 November when it entered the air gap, or ‘Black Pit’, the 600-mile stretch of ocean south of Greenland’s Cape Farewell, which in November 1942 remained too far from shore to provide reliable air cover. The high-frequency direction-finding equipment (HF-DF, known as ‘Huff Duff’) mounted in two of the convoy’s vessels had already identified over two dozen likely U-Boat fixes. Vielchen’s first success, just after 9 p.m. that evening, was against Empire Sunrise, a London-registered steamer of 7,459 tons carrying a further 10,000 tons of steel and timber. She was struck on her starboard side by a torpedo that punctured a ten-foot-wide gash in her waterline.

Over the next seventy-two hours, Empire Sunrise was followed by another fourteen victims: Dalcroy; Rinos, Hartington, Empire Leopard, Empire Antelope, Maritima, Mount Pelion, Parthenon, Hahira, Jeypore, Empire Lynx, Hatimura, Hobbema and finally Daleby, out of West Hartlepool, a 4,640-ton tramp, US-built Lend-Lease tanks lashed to her deck, her holds packed with grain and motor parts, which was hit by one of a spread of four torpedoes fired at 7.40 p.m. on 4 November. Throughout these miserable hours the Canadian escorts, outnumbered and ill-equipped, their crews keen but inadequately trained, had simply been overwhelmed. Captain Thomas Fea, master of the Stockport, the rescue ship assigned to SC-107, was a veteran of the Atlantic crossings and no wide-eyed innocent when it came to the brutalities of U-Boat warfare. Even he described what he saw on that voyage as ‘heartbreaking’: ‘Attacks by enemy submarines were incessant…it seemed to me just a succession of ships being torpedoed and sinking, and a constant stream of survivors…two steamers, names unknown, were blown to pieces before our eyes.’[3]

With every torpedo strike came the muffled thud of impact: the shrill clanging of alarm bells and blasts of steam whistles, the incandescent glare of distress rockets and starshell flares, followed by the sinister rending and grating of steel plates as their rivets popped and they buckled beneath the waterline. Merchantmen carrying buoyant cargoes might take hours to sink, affording their crewmen plenty of time to negotiate cramped interior corridors and hatchways to reach the lifeboats and safety. On these fortunate ships, all hands, or nearly all, lived to sail again. Other ships were less lucky. Empire Leopard, carrying thousands of tons of zinc ore, was struck by a torpedo on the port side of her engine room. Her thin bottom plates immediately collapsed, water deluged inside, and she foundered in barely twenty seconds, taking the lives of all but four of forty-one men aboard. ‘Men’? Boys, really, in many cases. Five of Empire Leopard’s dead were teenagers: Harry Cox, William Foster, Edward Havler, David Hutton and George Sharp. For reasons of brevity their names will have to represent all the 142 merchant mariners of SC-107 who died in three days and nights of torment.

Only nineteen merchantmen reached the Mersey on 10 November 1942.[4] Veilchen had sent 82,800 tons of shipping to the Atlantic bottom, as well as 32,400 tons of general cargo and thousands more of metals, fuel oil, grain, ores, military vehicles and ammunition. It was the worst experience that a North American convoy had undergone in fourteen months. SC-107’s fate led to bitter, and for the most part grossly unfair, accusations by the Admiralty as to the competence of the RCN. The fact that two U-Boats had been sunk by Canadian-crewed bombers patrolling SC-107’s route off Labrador was small compensation for the convoy’s ravaging. The escort group itself had achieved no kills. The only submarine in the Veilchen Wolf Pack which had been a casualty of events on the waterline was U-132, which inadvertently destroyed itself when it strayed too close to the sinking freighter Hatimura, loaded with almost 800 tons of high explosives. The British Indian steam tramp had suddenly exploded, producing one of the loudest man-made non-nuclear noises the world has ever known, shattering U-132’s pressure hull and killing all her crew.

SC-107’s ordeal was just the start to an exceptionally grim month at sea for the Allies. By the end of that November, Axis submarines in all waters had sunk 126 Allied ships for a total of 802,160 tons. November 1942 was the single worst month of the whole war at sea.[5] Cumulative Allied shipping losses from all causes that year had already reached a horrifying 7.44 million tons, almost twice as high as in 1941.[6] The destruction of British-owned tonnage in 1942 was especially bad. During the first nine months of the year, even after accounting for new construction, requisitions and charters, there was a net loss of 1.34 million tons of British-flagged dry cargo and tanker vessels. By the end of 1942, that figure had risen to 1.92 million tons. The British-flagged Merchant Navy finished the year one-fifth smaller than it had been at the start of the war.[7]

The implications of this for goods entering the United Kingdom looked alarming. Before the war, Britain had imported 55 million tons every year. In 1942, only 22.9 million made it to British ports. The prospects for 1943 looked even gloomier. Consumption of many imported foods and raw materials had been slashed through rationing and government controls to try to compensate for the shortfall. Even so, inventories of some key items were starting to show worrying shortages. Petroleum reserves in the United Kingdom were one-quarter lower than the year before. Stocks of wheat were only two-thirds what they had been in June 1941.[8] A fortnight after the remnants of SC-107 staggered into Liverpool Bay, Sir Oliver Lyttelton, minister of production, crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to Washington DC to persuade President Roosevelt to immediately commit 7 million tons of American shipping to British import needs in 1943. If these could not be found, he warned, Britain would have to compromise its war production just to feed its people.

Churchill sent a letter to Roosevelt himself on the last day of October imploring American action. It was ‘horrible,’ the prime minister wrote, to view the carnage being wrought in the North Atlantic at that moment. ‘The spectacle of all these splendid ships being built, sent to sea crammed with priceless food and munitions, and being sunk – three or four every day – torments me day and night.’ And there would be worse to come: ‘Next year there will be many more U-Boats, and they will range far more widely. No ocean passage will be safe.’[9]

Churchill was right about the increasing number of U-Boats. Already in November 1942, the Kriegsmarine had 162 of them available for operations in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean, over twice as many as it had had just twelve months before. By May 1943 it would have 207 operational in those areas, 118 on patrol at sea, with many more undergoing construction or training in the Baltic.[10]

Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler’s principal submariner since the start of the war, and from January 1943 onwards commander-in-chief of the entire Kriegsmarine, had always argued that with a fleet of such a size he could destroy the British war economy. For years he had had to wait, frustrated, as U-Boat manufacture was sidelined to make way for some alternative production priority or other, while the few submarines he did have were frittered away in the peripheral combat zones of the Mediterranean and the Arctic rather than concentrated in the decisive theatre of action. Now, as 1942 ended, it looked as though U-Boot-Krieg would finally be given its chance in the Atlantic. Hitler, granting Dönitz an audience in late summer, agreed that Allied merchant shipping losses must surely already be unsustainable. The situation, he prophesied, would get still worse for the British and Americans with the arrival of a new generation of ‘revolutionary’ U-Boats capable of faster submerged speeds.[11]

*

Perhaps it is not surprising that the high drama of the Battle of the Atlantic produced some of the most redolent passages in Churchill’s post-war memoirs. It was ‘the dominating factor all through’ the conflict, he wrote in the fifth volume, Closing the Ring (1951): ‘Never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere, on land, at sea, or in the air, depended ultimately on its outcome, and amid all other cares we viewed its changing fortunes day by day with hope or apprehension.’[12] In an earlier volume he had written that the U-Boat peril was ‘the only thing that ever really frightened me during the war’.[13] Churchill’s reminiscences stressed the contingency of the battle’s outcome. Only in late spring 1943, he argued in Closing the Ring, had Dönitz’s submariners finally been beaten, and the Atlantic lines of communication secured.[14] Perhaps, Churchill suggested, it could all have gone very differently had Hitler only understood earlier the fragility of the Allied position at sea. ‘The U-boat attack was our worst evil,’ he wrote in The Hinge of Fate (1950). ‘It would have been wise for the Germans to stake all upon it.’[15]

Popular accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic ever since have tended to lean into this touch-and-go narrative. Stephen Roskill’s official four-volume narrative of the war at sea, published in 1957, suggested that ‘in the early spring of 1943 we had a very narrow escape from defeat in the Atlantic’.[16] More recently a bestselling history has argued in similar vein that ‘it could so easily have been otherwise…Allied losses in the Atlantic reached such an alarming level that for a while it looked as though the U-Boats were on the verge of severing Britain’s lifeline, a prospective catastrophe.’[17]

It makes for a gripping story with heroes and villains and a cliffhanger ending. The problem is that it is not true. The Battle of the Atlantic’s outcome never hung by a thread. Not only did the Allies not lose it; they were never going to lose it, no matter what the Germans did. Dönitz was already losing in November 1942 even when all seemed so black for Britain.[18] ULTRA nudged the result along in the right direction and saved lives, to be sure, but it was not decisive. If Bletchley Park had never deciphered a single encoded U-Boat message, the Allies would still have won the Battle of the Atlantic. It was not a David and Goliath encounter with victory snatched against the odds. Dönitz’s ambitions were doomed from the outset. The British really were facing a shipping crisis at the end of 1942; that much is true. But it was a political, not a military, crisis, and so its solution also lay in politics.

To say all this is not in any way to forget the sacrifices of those who fought. Something like 36,200 sailors of the various Allied navies and 36,000 Allied merchant mariners were killed in the U-Boat wars.[19] Thousands suffered for tens or hundreds of hours in oil-slicked, frigid waters waiting for a rescue which sometimes never came. Men drowned, died of exposure and frostbite, were incinerated in fire. Every person who sailed across the Atlantic in wartime, whether their ship ever encountered a German submarine or not, still had to go through the torment of dangerous uncertainty. These are not costs to blithely dismiss. My grandfather spent five days and nights in an open lifeboat off the coast of West Africa as the result of a U-Boat’s torpedo. Had he died, as several of his crewmates did, this book would never have been written.

To say the Allies were always going to beat Dönitz’s U-Boats does not mean they did not have to fight them all the same. Victory may have been inevitable, but it still had to be enacted; the Germans were not going to concede by default. It is a testament to the courage, patience and professionalism of sailors like those of SC-107 that their sacrifices were never going to be in vain. The real disgrace is that 27,000 young German U-Boat personnel – three-quarters of those who were drafted into that service – were killed in a ‘suicidal enterprise’ that by the end of the war Dönitz knew perfectly well was a forlorn hope even as he continued to dispatch them to their deaths. One-third of U-Boats were destroyed on their first patrol and their mostly teenage crew members rarely even saw an enemy merchant ship, let alone got the chance to sink one, before they died.[20]

*

Shipping capacity was an essential precondition for Allied victory in the Second World War in a way that was never true for a continental state like Germany. The United Kingdom, the principal geographical base for Allied operations in Europe after June 1940, was an archipelago that depended upon maritime imports of food and raw materials to feed its soldiers and workers and manufacture its war goods. The British Empire relied on sea communications to maintain its diplomatic, military and economic coherence. The United States of America was separated from the Old World by two oceans and incapable of effective power projection without a means to transport its products and fighting forces. The Soviet Union was, like Germany, a continental state, but from June 1941 until the end of the war it needed constant injections of western Allied materiel to keep its army and air force in the field. All of these had to come by sea.

The wartime Allied powers had the capital, manpower and local political control to exploit most of the world’s factories, mills, mines, plantations, forests, oilfields, paddy fields and prairies for their own use, but none of the goods produced in these sites of global industry could be usefully deployed elsewhere without cargo holds to take them there. The effects of an enemy-imposed cleaving of maritime communication lanes can be seen most dramatically in the fate of imperial Japan. In 1945 the Japanese still controlled enormous swathes of resource-rich territory across Southeast Asia. Thanks to a devastating campaign of blockade by Allied submarines, surface warships and aircraft, however, their merchant fleet had become incapable of carrying goods back to the imperial metropole. Most of the Japanese Army was marooned thousands of miles from their empire’s home islands, powerless to influence the final battles there.[21] In theory, at least, this could have been the United Kingdom’s fate too.

What mattered, in short, was shipping tonnage, but calculating how much of it was needed, and where, and for what, and anticipating requirements for the month to come, or the year to come, was an extraordinarily complicated matter. Allied transport capacity was defined in the crudest terms by the amount of merchant tonnage the alliance’s member states controlled. When the enemy sank ships, its capacity contracted; when new ships were built, it expanded.

It was never that simple, however. Carrying capacity could be reduced by more ways than just physical destruction. Wasteful practices in dock loading and unloading and inland transportation lowered import totals. The Allied armed forces requisitioned tonnage for their own purposes, reducing civil importing potential. Convoying merchant vessels was an excellent way of protecting them from harm, but a very inefficient way of getting their cargoes where they needed to be. A convoy had to travel to its destination no faster than the slowest vessel within it could manage; all its ships had to depart and arrive together, which strained port infrastructure at both ends of the journey. Rerouting a convoy out of harm’s way when U-Boats were located saved lives and tonnage, but also added days to the voyage, so reducing the number of additional journeys its ships could make. Ships also needed repair – sometimes because of enemy attack, but also through the ‘maritime’ damage which occurred when they were taken through rougher seas than they had been designed to withstand while carrying cargoes they had never been intended to transport.

Carrying capacity could be raised by means other than shipbuilding. Production methods could be rationalised to require fewer inputs by, for example, simplifying the design of war weapons. Import substitutes could be introduced – during the war the British sharply reduced their imports of wheat and began growing it themselves. Consumption could be restricted by rationing and controls. Not all new tonnage had to be built from scratch: enemy ships could be confiscated, neutral ships chartered.

It was a hard enough task for the Allies to calculate how much shipping they needed; for the Germans, calculating how much they needed to sink was an even more prodigious one. It was also a task that they never really applied themselves to with any sustained commitment. U-Boat warfare was in a sense nothing new: guerre de course strategy (attacking the enemy’s economy rather than its armies) had a long history. But it was one that the German armed forces, schooled in the Clausewitzian axiom of the decisive land battle, knew little about in 1939. The Kriegsmarine naval staff were therefore at something of a loss as to know where to start quantifying a theory of victory. Dönitz’s own analysis of the problem at least had the merit of simplicity. The task, as he saw it, was to sink Allied merchant tonnage wherever it could be found. It was ‘immaterial where any one ship is sunk’, he said, ‘for it must ultimately be replaced by new construction’; what mattered was the simple mathematics of ‘the preponderance of sinkings over new construction’. Whittle away at the net size of the enemy’s global shipping pool and his war-making ability would inevitably erode.[22]

So far, so good. But how much tonnage sunk would suffice? In May 1942, Dönitz’s best guess was that the British Empire and United States would launch 8.1 million tons of new shipping capacity by the end of the year and 10.3 million further tons in 1943. His back-of-the-envelope calculation, then, was that to prevent the Allied shipping pool from getting larger, the Axis needed to sink an average of at least 700,000 tons a month (anything beyond that break-even point would shrink total Allied capacity). The Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine surface fleet would do some of the work of destruction, as would the Italians and the Japanese. Dönitz’s ‘Grey Wolves’, however, would have to manage most of the burden.[23]

*

How close did this theory of victory resemble the actual situation?[24] Throughout the Second World War, there were four months in which the Allies lost more than 700,000 tons of shipping from all causes, all of them in 1942 – March (834,164), May (705,050), June (834,196) and November (807,794). There were another seven months, between April 1941 and March 1943, in which they came quite close, losing more than 600,000 tons.[25] Nineteen forty-two represented, then, the worst year of the Allies’ fortunes at sea, the nadir of their battle for tonnage, and the point in the war at which Dönitz came closest to succeeding. In the ten months from February to November 1942, the Allies lost just over 7 million cumulative tons of ships – about one-third of their total losses in the entire conflict.

Most of these losses in 1942 were not suffered by convoys like SC-107. Nor were they inflicted by U-Boat ‘Wolf Packs’ like Veilchen. Indeed, to understand the Battle of the Atlantic we need to set aside images of massed attacks against convoys, spectacular though they sometimes were. The single most effective tactic available to Dönitz from the beginning of the war to its end was to send off his U-Boats individually to pick off independently sailing, unescorted merchant ships in one-on-one encounters. Between September 1939 and the end of 1942, for every ton of shipping sunk in convoy, the Germans sank two and a half tons of shipping travelling ‘alone’.[26] Only in the final years of the war did convoys become the principal target of the U-Boats. That was not because Dönitz preferred it that way, but because by that point he had no choice. It is not a coincidence that those were also the years of greatest German failure.

What made 1942 outstanding for the U-Boats was that until late summer of that year they enjoyed an exceptionally target-rich environment off the eastern coast of the Americas. The whole stretch of seaboard from Boston to Trinidad was not only thick with ships but also had no effectively organised convoy routing or anti-submarine warfare (ASW) defence. Before Pearl Harbor, Dönitz’s men had been forbidden from attacking neutral US-flagged vessels in American waters. As soon as American belligerence was announced, however, he immediately sent five U-Boats to the western Atlantic in what was dubbed Operation PAUKENSCHLAG (‘Drumbeat’ – probably a nod to the perennial German fascination with native Americans). Their first victim was sunk on 11 January 1942, south-east of Nova Scotia. Over the next eight months, Dönitz ordered 184 patrols to American coastal waters. These U-Boats sank 609 vessels of 3.1 million tons in all, out of a total 5.4 million tons lost by the Allies globally during the same period. It was the single worst slaughter of ships in the whole war. Almost all of them lost were sailing independently.

It remains something between a mystery and a scandal why the United States entered the war without any plans for a comprehensive coastal convoy system. The British had been convoying as many of their own coastal vessels as they could since September 1939 and the benefits had long been clear. But prevailing American ASW doctrine emphasised aggressive anti-submarine patrolling rather than passive escorting. The British had already tried this approach and shown it to be futile. Their experience was there for anyone who cared to look. The Chief of US Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest King, chose not to look. Roosevelt’s naval Caesar, who has been described as ‘insanely vain and a megalomaniac’ by one historian, possessed a manner so forbidding that it was said he shaved with a blowtorch.[27] King is often labelled an Anglophobe but that perhaps misses the point, for throughout the war he got on fine with British admirals, whom he did not view as professional rivals. His real bête noire was the US Army, which he regarded with an unconcealed disdain verging on hatred. Defending coastal convoys would require close cooperation with the USAAF, which in 1942 was still institutionally part of the army. That was enough to damn the whole idea so far as King was concerned.

The result was that the U-Boats could pick and choose victims as they pleased, often with astonishing audacity. On the night of 11 April 1942, the tourist crowds in the hotels and restaurants of Jacksonville Beach, Florida, had a spectacle laid on for them when U-123, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Reinhard Hardegen, put a torpedo into the starboard side of the 8,000-ton tanker Gulfamerica five miles offshore. Gulfamerica’s cargo of 101,000 barrels of Texan furnace oil, bound for New York, quickly ignited, producing a menacing red glow across the evening sky. Through his binoculars, Hardegen watched in fascination as American holidaymakers gathered on the beach to gawp back at him. ‘All the vacationers had seen an impressive special performance at Roosevelt’s expense,’ he gloated in his log. The lights of Jacksonville Beach, still shining brilliantly four months after America’s entry into the war, had helped silhouette the doomed tanker against the western horizon as U-123 had gone in for the kill. Tourists in Virginia Beach, Virginia, would enjoy a similar macabre drama two months later when a pair of US-flagged freighters were dispatched by torpedoes in broad daylight within sight of the busy boardwalk.[28]

The toll inflicted on tankers like Gulfamerica sailing from Texas, Mexico, Venezuela and the Caribbean to the north-east coast ports during PAUKENSCHLAG was particularly savage. One hundred and forty-three of them were lost in American waters.[29] It was a period in which Dönitz’s hunters ‘ravaged…almost uncontrolled’, said Churchill later.[30]

Dönitz’s problem, like Rommel’s, was that a strategy which relied for success on the enemy’s incompetence would only work so long as they carried on being incompetent. Even the Americans under King could not keep it up forever. By mid-April 1942, the U-Boats’ ‘Happy Time’ (Glückliche Zeit) was already coming to an end. The US Navy had finally been convinced through force of circumstances into establishing a crude system of daylight escort off the US east coast and a rudimentary air reconnaissance routine had been put in place using a mixture of military and civilian volunteer aircraft. The U-Boats responded by moving their operations south-eastwards into the Caribbean. For a time, they could still pick off ships sailing independently there. By July, however, a proper convoy network had at last been organised across all the western hemispheric trade routes. Even the Atlantic shore towns had by now been cajoled into abandoning their idiotic resistance (on the grounds that it would hurt the tourist trade) to blackout regulations. On 28 September, Dönitz reported to Hitler that PAUKENSCHLAG patrols were ‘no longer sufficiently profitable’, and he was withdrawing his men to other hunting areas. Some went to the West African coastline off Freetown and Cape Town. Most, though, were redeployed to the Black Pit to operate in Wolf Packs against the North Atlantic convoys.[31]

On the face of it, convoys might have seemed a richer potential target than successive individual vessels. Why spend your time seeking out one ship travelling alone when you could locate and attack fifty of them packed enticingly together? Tactically, however, the opposite was true. Even a weak escort was better than no escort at all. SC-107’s escort was exceptionally weak. The decision to launch Operation TORCH in early November 1942 had required the Allied navies to withdraw 160 destroyers and corvettes from normal commercial convoying duties to protect the troopships and supply vessels heading for North Africa instead.[32] The result was that Canadian Escort Group C4, which accompanied SC-107 most of the way to Liverpool, was seriously under-strength. One of its destroyers had been sunk back in September and not replaced. Two of its corvettes had been withdrawn for repairs. It only had two ships equipped with up-to-date microwave radar sets (capable of spotting a surfaced U-Boat from about three miles away) and one of those sets broke down halfway through the journey. Escort Group C4 was outnumbered more than three to one by the thirteen submarines of the Veilchen Wolf Pack and the three other passing U-Boats which opportunistically joined it in the attack on SC-107. In November 1942 Dönitz’s men could still operate for hundreds of miles in a mid-ocean zone free of Allied air interference.

The result on paper ought to have been the complete destruction of SC-107, or something close to it. Yet the actual results fell far short of that. Just eight of the sixteen U-Boats arrayed against SC-107 hit anything. Two of them were responsible for almost half the total tonnage sunk.[33] The point about escorts is not that they represented a genuine threat to the U-Boats themselves in November 1942 – that would come later. But they could still disrupt their attacks quite effectively. A submarine under observation by an escort had to break off engagement with the convoy and submerge, slowing it down dramatically. Escorts made it difficult for Wolf Packs to launch coordinated night attacks on the surface. The Canadians travelling with SC-107 could not stop all the U-Boats getting through, but they and other escorts could at least make convoy battling an inefficient means of accruing sunk tonnage. On average, each submarine involved in the attack on SC-107 was responsible for just over 5,000 tons of Allied shipping lost. To put that into perspective, during early summer 1942 a single PAUKENSCHLAG U-Boat, U-158, had sunk over 62,000 tons of shipping in the Gulf of Mexico on one individual patrol. The return on investment of attacking convoys was terrible even when everything went right; and usually it didn’t.

What needs to be emphasised is that things went unusually – almost uniquely – badly for SC-107 during what was already an awful month for the Allies. Most convoys on the Labrador–Liverpool route suffered far fewer losses. Indeed, most of them suffered no losses at all. Between September and December 1942, thirty-four convoys travelled eastwards across the North Atlantic and thirty-two westbound. Of those sixty-six convoys, only twenty-four lost any ships. In just one case – westbound ONS-154 – did the number of ships sunk approach anything like that of SC-107’s losses. Or, to put it another way: given that in 1942 there were about fifty merchant vessels in every convoy, the sixty-six convoys of those four months added up to about 3,300 individual transatlantic crossings. Only ninety-three of those crossings were cut short by a sinking. Ninety-seven per cent of them proceeded successfully.[34] Uneventful crossings make for duller reading than eventful ones. It’s hardly surprising that they feature less prominently in popular accounts of the Battle of the Atlantic, but they are far more illustrative of the typical convoy experience.

Dönitz did not have these statistics, however, and believed he was doing much better in the tonnage war than he really was. He failed to subject the over-optimistic after-action reports of his U-Boat commanders to any rigorous intelligence scrutiny. This may have been because of a misplaced respect for his men’s integrity; or else it was just wishful thinking. Either way, the result was that his estimates for Allied tonnage losses were consistently inflated by 40 per cent. In November 1942, for instance, accepting uncritically such claims, he believed that the Allies had lost 937,000 tons in the Atlantic alone. The actual loss was 658,000.[35] He was told that SC-107 had lost twenty-three ships, not the fifteen that had actually been sunk.[36] He believed he was exceeding his 700,000-ton target each month. In fact, it was slipping away from him.

That target, furthermore, was itself a fantasy because Dönitz had grossly underappreciated how productive the United States’ shipbuilding industry would be once the country’s economy became mobilised for war. To be fair, his estimate for new Allied tonnage in 1942 (8.1 million tons) turned out to be close to the mark – it was in fact a little higher than the Allies were capable of (7.47 million tons) because of unexpected production delays in American yards due to PAUKENSCHLAG’s supply chain disruptions. But even that slightly disappointing production figure was still almost enough to cancel out the exceptionally bad losses of 1942. In 1943, moreover, the Allies built 13.58 million commercial shipping tons, 30 per cent more than Dönitz had imagined possible. To keep pace with that kind of production rate, it would not have been enough for the Axis powers to sink 700,000 tons of Allied ships a month. They would have needed to sink 1.1 million.[37] They never came even close to that.

Some Kriegsmarine staff had an inkling by late 1942 that the campaign was going nowhere. One of their draft appreciations of the strategic outlook written that September noted that the submarine campaign could not ‘have a decisive effect on the war in the sense of the total defeat of the enemy’. This was altogether too bracing a statement of reality for the Third Reich’s leadership to take in. The sentence did not make it into the final report.[38]

*

What of the British prime minister’s remark that the U-Boat war was ‘the only thing that ever really frightened’ him during the war? This is an example of the historiographical curse of the Well-Known Churchill Quotation. It is real – but the context in which it was written matters. It comes from ‘Ocean Peril’, a chapter of Their Finest Hour, the second volume in the memoir series. ‘Ocean Peril’ was only a late addition to that volume. It covered a subject that did not greatly engage Churchill any longer by 1949 and which had to be urged on him by his naval advisor Gordon Allen, who pointed out that rather little had been said about the Battle of the Atlantic so far in the prime ministerial recollections.[39] The campaign was safe in the past and so Churchill had little to lose (and much to gain in dramatic tension) by playing up its precarity. Also, his comment specifically referred only to the early period of the battle. Just one page afterwards, Churchill added, crucially, that

the losses inflicted on our merchant shipping became most grave during the twelve months from July 1940 to July 1941, when we could claim that the British Battle of the Atlantic was won. Far heavier losses occurred when the United States entered the war before any convoy system was set up along their eastern coast. But then we were no longer alone.[40]

In fact, by August 1941 Churchill was confident that the U-Boat threat had been largely dealt with. ‘The corner [has] been turned,’ he told Ismay.[41] The Atlantic war would continue to have its highs and lows but he never returned to it again with the same sense of urgency. There is, for instance, surprisingly little correspondence on the subject between Churchill and Roosevelt. In 616 items of communication that went back and forth between the two men between January 1942 and mid-1943, the Battle of the Atlantic was only mentioned sixteen times and usually in passing.[42] Churchill did not dispute that defeating the U-Boats was important. But he was far more sanguine about the inevitability of Allied victory over them than his memoirs suggested later.

One indicator of this was his preference for using heavy four-engine bombers for strategic attacks on German city targets rather than for maritime reconnaissance.[43] It has become a commonplace in histories of the Battle of the Atlantic that the RAF’s refusal to take the oceanic air gap problem seriously was one of the Allies’ greatest blunders of the war. The argument goes that had more Very Long Range (VLR) heavy bombers like the American-built Consolidated B-24 ‘Liberator’ been seconded to maritime patrolling as soon as they became available to the British in late 1941, then the Black Pit would have been eliminated six to twelve months earlier than it actually was. This would not only have saved ships and lives, but in maximalist versions of the argument it might even have allowed the invasion of north-west Europe to take place in summer 1943 rather than a year later.[44]

It is an intriguing proposition, but it becomes more and more dubious the further the details are dug into. There were simply not that many suitable heavy bombers available anywhere in 1941 and 1942. To obtain VLR capability (a marine patrol endurance of at least 2,400 miles) production-standard Liberators had to be stripped of much of their heavy factory-installed equipment. The Americans, who had designed the B-24 to be a heavy bomber, not a maritime reconnaissance aircraft, were not keen to hand their precious commodities over to the British if they were to be, as they saw it, misused. Britain’s own heavy bombers would not have been suitable for the VLR role without extensive and time-consuming modification. Maritime piloting and navigation were of a very different character from operating over land and required different training. Planes and crews could not simply be switched from one role to another at will. Any such decision would have involved laborious and uncertain opportunity costs.

Furthermore, the wartime Admiralty was not as monomaniacally fixated on the air gap as post-war accounts tend to assume: indeed, the RN can be accused just as much as the RAF of not taking the problem seriously enough. Had RAF Coastal Command (which was under the Royal Navy’s operational control) received more heavy bombers in 1942, it probably would not have used them in the mid-Atlantic at all. They would have been sent to patrol the Bay of Biscay, looking for U-Boats going to and from their bases in western France. Later, these search-and-destroy missions wreaked havoc. But in 1942 they were mostly failures. The problem was that Allied planes still lacked aircraft-mounted centimetric air-to-surface vessel (ASV) radar sets which could detect surfaced U-Boats from long range at night. These did not become available in large quantities until 1943.[45] Small escort carriers or CVEs (‘jeep carriers’ as the Americans called them) sailing with escort groups were as vital to closing the air gap as VLR aircraft. But when they first became available in 1942 they proved to be so useful for other things besides trade protection, such as supporting amphibious landings, that the RN rarely sent them to the Black Pit. Only the following year would CVEs start to regularly feature as convoy escorts.[46] More air resources, used earlier, might have saved some ships and lives. But they would not have changed the outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic. It’s not clear they would have even speeded it up that much.[47]

*

At the start of the war, Dönitz communicated with his U-Boats at sea using a particular form of ENIGMA enciphering known by the British as ‘Dolphin’. Between June and August 1941, Bletchley Park’s ‘Hut 8’, responsible for naval signals traffic, finally made some progress in decrypting Dolphin. The following six months of the Atlantic battle went especially poorly for Dönitz’s U-Boats, and while there are a number of reasons for that, most of them having nothing to do with cryptanalysis, it’s undeniable that the breaking of Dolphin did help the Allied cause. For instance, only three North Atlantic convoys in the second half of 1941 suffered major losses of more than six merchant ships sunk.[48]

In February 1942, however, Dönitz, ignorant of Bletchley’s work but suspicious enough to tighten up security just in case, abandoned Dolphin and introduced additional parts to the ENIGMA machine to increase exponentially the complexity of its ciphers. The new U-Boat variant, dubbed ‘Shark’, was unreadable in Hut 8. It even defeated the electromechanical computers known as ‘bombes’ designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, which had previously been able to reduce the cipher’s complexity to manageable proportions. Throughout almost the rest of 1942, U-Boat signals traffic was secure. Only in December, thanks to clues gleaned from captured German codebooks and some mechanical adaptation of the bombes, was Hut 8 able to gain a glimpse into Shark. There were setbacks in March and full knowledge of the new cipher would take a year, but by late spring 1943 Bletchley was again reading most of Dönitz’s instructions to his U-Boat skippers.

How much did any of this matter to the way the Battle of the Atlantic played out?[49] It is undeniable that the period in which Hut 8 was locked out of Shark in 1942 coincided with some of the worst tonnage losses of the whole war. What is less clear is whether being able to read U-Boat ENIGMA during those months would have made much difference. The principal value of deciphering Dolphin in the second half of 1941 had been that it had allowed the Admiralty to detour transatlantic convoys out of the path of Wolf Pack patrol lines. But most of the ships sunk during the PAUKENSCHLAG period in 1942 were not crossing the Atlantic, they were not organised into convoys, and they were not being attacked by Wolf Packs. U-Boats operating alone could maintain radio silence, denying the Bletchley plotters the location material they needed to work on. Even a full ability to read Dönitz’s traffic during the first eight months of 1942 would not significantly have altered the nature of the battle off the Americas.[50]

After September 1942, the focus of German operations did return to Atlantic convoy battles using Wolf Packs, so the signals chatter began again. But by this point there were so many simultaneous U-Boat patrols in the Black Pit that it would have been difficult to reroute convoys even if Bletchley had had the means to try. The North Atlantic was simply too crowded with hostile spying eyes. The solutions of 1941 no longer suited the situation.

A new solution had to be found. The one the Allies decided on was a radical, even on the face of it foolhardy, reversal of tactics. Instead of trying to steer convoys around Wolf Packs, the Admiralty decided to deliberately steer into them – indeed, to consciously encourage the U-Boats to attack them. The reason for this doctrinal rethink was that by late spring 1943 the tactical balance was shifting: convoy battles were becoming more dangerous for the Germans than they were for the Allies. The air gap had at last been bridged by a combination of more land-based VLR patrol aircraft and escort carriers. The CVEs were further complemented by old grain freighters and oil tankers hastily converted into what were called ‘MAC Ships’, each with half a dozen or so Fairey Swordfish bombers on its flat runway deck. The faster, better-armed and more seaworthy ‘River’ class of corvettes now began to replace their older Flower class sisters. Huff-Duff and centimetric radar were becoming standard equipment in escorts. So too were better ASW weapons, such as the Hedgehog spigot mortar, which fired projectiles several hundred feet ahead of the ship, and thus avoided a problem with depth-charges that they could only be dropped directly over a U-Boat, in the blind spot of an escort’s ‘ASDIC’ sonar system. Escorts could now not only disrupt submarine attacks on merchant ships, but locate the U-Boats before they were in a position to attack and, with air support, sink them.

The result was convoys like SC-130, which left Halifax on 11 May and arrived in Liverpool a fortnight later without a single loss despite having been attacked by twenty-five U-Boats along the way, three of which had been destroyed and a fourth badly damaged. Overall, May 1943 was a disaster for the Germans at sea. Of fifteen North Atlantic convoys, twelve reached their destinations without any casualties. Over 99.99 per cent of ship crossings that month were successful.[51] Across all global theatres, the Kriegsmarine lost forty-one U-Boats with only 299,428 tons of sunk merchant shipping to show for it. Among the dead of the battle for SC-130 was twenty-one-year-old watch officer Peter Dönitz, son of the admiral. Whether or not this personal tragedy influenced the older man’s decision, on 24 May Dönitz realised he could not force his crews to endure this any longer. He ordered them to break off North Atlantic attacks and move southwards, where their prospects for sinking enemy ships would be much poorer but their chances of survival much better – at least for the time being.[52]

Perhaps the single most useful thing the cracking of Shark did was to identify an embarrassing and costly flaw in Allied signals security. Hut 8 discovered that German naval intelligence (B-Dienst) had been reading the convoy communications cipher used by the British, Americans and Canadians for many months. The Allies immediately switched to a different, unbroken cipher, and B-Dienst lost its insight into convoy routing, never to regain it. The cryptological balance of advantage swung permanently away from the Germans.

*

The Battle of the Atlantic did not end in May 1943. Dönitz started a new campaign that summer west and south of the Azores, regions where Allied air power was still relatively ineffective.[53] However, the greater distances from the French ports that this involved meant his attack U-Boats had to receive refuelling and resupply assistance from so-called ‘Milk Cow’ support submarines. Their movement orders were successfully intercepted by Bletchley Park, allowing Allied ships and aircraft to mount devastating ambushes of the Milk Cows and the U-Boats they were restocking – a genuinely important use of ULTRA at sea in 1943 that has never received the attention it deserves.[54]

In early 1944, Dönitz rerouted his boats back to their old hunting grounds west of Ireland. But by then his fleet was not only dwindling in numbers but ageing too, the Type VII boats which were its mainstay having not received any major upgrades since the start of the war. German hopes in the Atlantic were increasingly vested in technological leaps that might transform the tactical situation – acoustic homing torpedoes, ‘snorkel’ tubes allowing U-Boats to run their faster diesel engines while submerged, and above all the Type XXI submarine with its greatly enhanced underwater endurance. The last of these bears comparison with the V-2 ‘Wunderwaffen’ ballistic missile in terms of the prodigious costs it soaked up, the unrealistic expectations placed upon it, and the lacklustre results it achieved.[55] In the final seventeen months of the war, the Germans sank just 300,000 total tons of merchant shipping in the North Atlantic, considerably less than they had been able to average in a single month back in 1942. While obsessing about finding that one superweapon which might win them the campaign, the Germans never paid any serious attention to thwarting or even understanding the technology the Allies were using against them. They were unaware of the existence of HF-DF until the final year of the war and never put much thought into counter-measures against ASDIC, even though they had captured examples of it back in 1940. Dönitz did not have the slightest idea that his Shark codes were being read daily.[56]

The outcome of the Battle of the Atlantic was never really in doubt, provided the Allies responded to German moves with reasonable common sense and did not make too many stupid moves of their own. This does not mean that the campaign was inconsequential. It forced the Allies to build warships and aircraft for trade protection that would have been usable for other things. About one-third of all British naval construction during the war ended up being devoted to the ASW campaign. Most of it was not completed until after mid-1943, by which time the threat had greatly diminished anyway. The U-Boat problem forced the Admiralty to scrap its ambitions to focus on big capital ships in the final years of the war. After autumn 1941, only two full-size fleet carriers (HMS Implacable and Indefatigable) were completed before V-E Day, and all the four planned Lion-class battleships were cancelled.[57] This had implications for long-term British naval power.

The imports crisis of late 1942 also needs to be understood in terms of declining British influence. Seventy per cent of the tonnage lost to the U-Boats that year was British-controlled. So while the US-flagged merchant fleet grew in 1942 by 4 million tons, the British-flagged fleet shrank by almost 2 million.[58] In theory this distinction should not have mattered for the purposes of fighting the war, because in early 1942 a Combined Shipping Adjustment Board (CSAB) had been established to pool all Allied mercantile resources and divvy them out according to mutually agreed needs. In practice, the Americans ignored the CSAB and continued to use their own ships as they saw fit. This explains Sir Oliver Lyttelton’s urgent mission to Washington DC in November 1942. The problem was not absolute Allied capability to provide enough shipping for British imports; the tonnage existed, at least theoretically. The problem was whether it would be used for that reason – because the decision whether to do so or not now lay largely in American hands. Dönitz’s predations in 1942 were not winning the war for Germany; they were diminishing Britain’s logistical autonomy.

Roosevelt, characteristically, told Lyttelton and Churchill that they could have whatever they needed. Just as characteristically, he then forgot to tell anyone else in his own administration what he had just promised. It therefore came as a nasty shock to the British at the beginning of 1943 to discover that none of the plans being made by the American federal authorities, either military or civilian, was factoring in a large-scale commitment to British imports. There were plenty of stakeholders within Roosevelt’s orbit, from his chiefs of staff downwards, for whom the president’s off-the-cuff gestures of beneficence meant very little. The personal consumption quotas of British civilians ranked very low with them in the list of American priorities.[59]

The problem the Allies were really having by the end of 1942 was not a shortage of ships as such, but a superfluity of aspirations as to how they could be used: a problem of success, not failure. By seizing the initiative from the Axis powers, the Allies now faced the more logistically demanding requirements of offensive action. In late 1942, the Americans were committed to two large-scale amphibious operations half a world apart, in the Solomon Islands and French North Africa, thousands of miles from each other, as well as from the continental United States. Each of these operations ended up demanding far more shipping than was originally expected: TORCH’s appetite for tonnage over winter 1942–3 exceeded planning calculations almost twofold.[60] Both of them placed enormous strains on Allied maritime capacity. Something had to give. So far as the US joint chiefs were concerned, that ‘something’ could be British food rations.

After a second emergency mission to Washington in March 1943, this time by foreign secretary Anthony Eden, bearing an even more theatrical missive from Churchill (‘we cannot live from hand to mouth…British ships will have to be withdrawn from their present military service even though our agreed operations are crippled or prejudiced’), Roosevelt agreed to overrule Marshall and King and honour his commitment to British imports.[61] The immediate crisis for the United Kingdom’s economy was over. The defeat of the U-Boats in the Black Pit two months later further eased the strain on shipping capacity.

But the affair underlined to the British their own diminishing authority within the Anglo–American alliance. Power ultimately required a capability for independent action. The British, thanks to the Battle of the Atlantic, were losing theirs by the end of 1942. They were, in fact, well on the road to becoming, as historian Kevin Smith puts it, ‘a junior partner…subservient to its increasingly unsympathetic senior colleague’.[62] Churchill, in a memorandum to his War Cabinet colleagues in July 1942, had said that the war should not be fought ‘on the basis that the British should make a greater sacrifice of their pre-war standard of living than the American people’.[63]

Such uniformity of burden-sharing within the Allied alliance may or may not have been a worthy goal. But twelve months after Pearl Harbor, it no longer represented the facts of the matter. Such sacrifices as the British were expected to make for the greater good would henceforth be determined not by a principle of co-equal standing with the Americans, but by the adventitious whims of the US commander-in-chief.

It had another consequence too, far more tragic and perhaps just as important for the future of the British imperial system. Churchill decided in January 1943 to free up shipping space for domestic imports by reducing the number of mercantile sailings to the Indian Ocean to a maximum of only forty vessels a month, essentially halving them.[64] This augmented the United Kingdom’s import levels by perhaps 2 million tons by the end of the year, easing the need to draw down British stockpiles or rely on the United States quite so much.[65] It also helped to aggravate a growing regional food crisis across the Indian Ocean which by the end of 1943 would place hundreds of millions of people from Africa to India in danger of starvation, a danger which in the latter case became fully realised. Just as the Americans took a dim view of the importance of ration levels in the United Kingdom, so Churchill regarded the well-being of the empire’s brown subjects with even greater detachment. ‘They must learn to look after themselves,’ he said.[66] After the war, they did just that.

7

States of Terror

On the night of 5–6 March 1943, RAF Bomber Command attacked Essen in the Ruhr Valley.[1] Of the 442 aircraft which set out from England, 303 of them four-engine heavy bombers (‘heavies’), 362 successfully identified the target, the Krupps factory works at the centre of the town. They dropped 1,014 tons of incendiaries and high explosives on it. One hundred and sixty acres of Essen’s built-up area were gutted in the subsequent fire, and several hundred more were badly damaged. Over 5,000 houses were totally destroyed or badly damaged, and 50,000 people made homeless. Four hundred and eighty-two Germans were killed and 1,400 injured. It was the heaviest loss of life from a single British air raid so far in the war. Fourteen RAF aircraft and their crews failed to make it home.[2]

There was nothing new about British aircraft dropping bombs on the Ruhr. They had been doing it for almost three years; since the night of 15–16 May 1940, to be precise. The prospect of destroying Germany’s most concentrated industrial region – 1,000 square miles of factories, mines and mills in a dense cluster of overlapping towns with 4 million inhabitants – had haunted the dreams of British air power enthusiasts since the war’s outbreak. So far, however, those visions had been fantastically disconnected from any actual capability. In the first raid on the Ruhr in May 1940, a single German civilian had been killed, a dairyman called Franz Romeike, who had been walking to the lavatory in his back garden when a bomb fell next to him.[3] In total, the RAF had managed to kill eight people during all its raids on Essen in 1940.[4] The raid on the night of 5–6 March 1943 indicated that things were now going to be different. British bombing had begun as farce. It was to transform into both spectacle and tragedy.

After years of delays, Bomber Command finally had enough aircraft to do serious sustained damage to German cities. By the midpoint of 1943 it would possess 978 heavies immediately available for operations, 444 of them Avro Lancasters, the best strategic night bomber of the war.[5] By the end of 1943, the wartime Ministry of Aircraft Production had for the first time since the outbreak of hostilities almost met its annual heavy bomber production quota.[6] The RAF had been able to pull off symbolic one-off raids in 1942 – most famously the ‘thousand bomber’ attack on Cologne in May – but it had lacked the depth of reserves to keep up a continuous campaign against a single target region. Now it could.

It had also secured night navigation equipment and target-marking methods to allow it to hit its aiming points in the darkness with reasonably consistent accuracy for the first time. The most important new electronic aid was the ‘Oboe’ air-mounted transponder, which picked up and sent back radar pulse signals originating in England that allowed a navigator to calculate his distance from the target. When Oboe worked properly – which in its early days it often didn’t – the navigator could position his aircraft on its final swoop over the target within a few hundred yards of the exact ground aiming point, regardless of any cloud cover or the industrial smog-haze which habitually blanketed the Ruhr. Oboe’s chief drawback was that its range was limited and altitude-dependent. In order to receive a signal as far away as Essen, a transponder-equipped aircraft needed to be flying at a height of at least 28,000 feet, far beyond the capabilities of a bomb-laden Lancaster.

Fortunately, the two-engine de Havilland Mosquito fighter-bomber, the remarkable ‘wooden wonder’, had just become available in small numbers at the beginning of 1943 and was more than able to reach such an altitude. Since 1942, Bomber Command had been developing a specialist ‘Pathfinder Force’ (PFF) unit of picked crews trained to fly ahead of the main force and mark the bombing target with flares. Thanks to Oboe and the Pathfinders, 153 of the heavies which attacked Essen on 5–6 March 1943 dropped their bombs within at least three miles of the aiming point. If this was not exactly ‘precision’ bombing, it was still a huge advance on anything that had been previously possible.

The 5–6 March Essen raid marked the opening volley of the Battle of the Ruhr, which would continue for the next 141 nights. For over four months in 1943, Bomber Command aircrew would make the 500-mile journey in darkness from their airbases in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the Fenlands to the Ruhr – soon dubbed ‘Happy Valley’ – and then (at least if they were lucky) back home again. A week after attacking Essen, the RAF returned and did it again (killing another 322 Germans), before twice repeating the feat in April. Essen was the single most bombed town in Germany in the first half of 1943. Its coal mines, engineering works, foundries, locomotive sheds, coking plants and hot rolling mills were at the centre of the German heavy industry, but the 370-acre Krupp steelworks, employing over 40,000 people, was more than an industrial target. It was the symbol of Teutonic militarism itself, ‘the heart of the horn-skinned Siegfried’.[7] If Krupp iron had built Bismarck’s Germany and earned Essen riches and fame, its citizens were now paying the price in blood and fire. During six major raids throughout spring and early summer of 1943, Essen was at the receiving end of a total of 7,338 tons of bombs, nine times more than had been dropped on Coventry during the Blitz. Over 2,000 of its townspeople were killed and 7,119 of its houses destroyed.[8]

When Bomber Command was not over Essen it was usually raiding other Ruhr towns – Duisberg, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Bochum, Gelsenkirchen, Krefeld, Mulheim – or, a little further afield, such cities as Cologne, Münster and Aachen. Occasional forays as distant as Stettin, Munich and Pilsen in Bohemia dispersed the pattern to keep the Germans guessing. No individual town in Happy Valley was dealt quite the same protracted punishment as Essen, but some individual raids in 1943 caused huge death tolls. A single attack on Wuppertal-Barmen on 29–30 May killed 3,400 of its residents and burned out four-fifths of the town centre in a massive uncontrolled blaze – probably the first ‘firestorm’ that the RAF ever generated, although on a modest scale compared to what was to come. A raid on Cologne, the most devastating the city experienced in the war, killed 4,377 people – three times as many as those Londoners who died in the worst air raid of the Blitz.[9]

From her bedroom window in the south-eastern suburbs of Cologne, Rosalie Schüttler was able to watch, night after night, what she called the RAF’s ‘cruel game’ over the Ruhr throughout spring 1943. As the months drew on with no respite from the bombers or effective German counter-measures to stop them, she wondered to herself if the Nazi authorities had simply decided to ‘sacrifice the Rhineland’ to the British.[10] The propaganda chief Josef Goebbels, a Ruhr native himself and the new plenipotentiary minister for Reich civil defence, visited Essen in April and noted afterwards that the damage was ‘colossal and, indeed, ghastly’.[11] Shortly afterwards he spoke at a mass rally in Berlin’s Sportpalast arena promising vengeance for the British ‘terror-bombing’ (Bombenterror) of the Ruhr. Churchill and other British leaders, he said, had ‘betrayed their own blood at the behest of Jewish rabble-rousers and agitators’. But, Goebbels promised, ‘the hour of retaliation will come!’[12]

In Britain, news of the first big raid on Essen was received with ‘tremendous satisfaction’ according to the Ministry of Information’s Home Intelligence network.[13] The ‘smashing’ new air offensive was ‘widely discussed and enthused over’, with the hope that it might ‘hasten Germany’s collapse’. The only note of disquiet was a ‘tinge of pity’ reported in some regions for the women and children of the Ruhr. The general mood nonetheless seemed to be that civilians must necessarily suffer in a war like this: after all, the British had done so too.[14] The damage inflicted on Essen on the night of 5–6 March was given widespread publicity in photographs released to the press by the Air Ministry. These illustrated the new and brutal efficiency of British air power. They also raised the question as to whether national bombing policy, which the government had always insisted avoided attacks on civilians, had changed.

In the week after the 5–6 March raid, the under-secretary of state for air, Harold Balfour, assured the House of Commons that ‘our [bombing] objectives are, as they always have been, industry, transport, the war industry of our enemy’. Richard Stokes, a Labour backbencher who had spoken out against strategic bombing many times already, asked how this assurance could be squared with the government’s announcement that scores of acres of the built-up residential area of Essen had been destroyed. Surely it was the case that German people, not German factories, were now the target. Balfour answered:

War is cruel and destructive, and the destruction of property and cities is inevitable, but again, I give the assurance that there is no change in our policy, that our purpose is to destroy Germany’s industry, transport and war industry and war potential, and that we are not wantonly bombing women and children for the sake of so doing.[15]

*

The British are deeply invested in the idea of themselves as innocents. In the first volume of this history, I called it the Shire Folk myth – the idea that the British are fundamentally a gentle, ‘little’, Hobbit-like people, modest in their ambitions, full of good-humored common sense, with a knack for amateur initiative (and a genius for ‘muddling through’), a stubborn resolve beneath their superficially mild and indolent character and, above all, a deep revulsion at violence. The British like to think of their role in the Second World War as illustrative of this Shire Folk national character. It is popularly imagined as a story of Jack slaying the Giant – with victory snatched against the odds not through a native talent for killing, but by gumption, guile, inventiveness and sheer bloody-minded defiance.[16]

With a little shoehorning here and there, the first couple of years of the war can be made to fit this interpretation of events. After all, between 1939 and 1941 the people of the United Kingdom were the victims of violence more often than the prosecutors of it. British military expeditions during the period were mostly failures. From summer 1940 until May 1941, the British homeland was under sustained aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe. By the end of 1941, about 44,650 British civilians had been killed by enemy air action.[17] Only 4,404 Germans had died as a result of the largely ineffectual Allied (at this stage almost entirely British) counter-bombing of the Third Reich.

After January 1942, however, the calculation began to shift – slowly at first, but with gathering pace in the final years of the war. The British continued to suffer fatal casualties, of course; by the end of the war, almost 16,000 additional British civilians are believed to have died under enemy bombs, rocket projectiles (V-1s) and ballistic missiles (V-2s). The equivalent figure for Germany during the same period is much harder to calculate because of the breakdown of civil government in the twilight months of the Third Reich. A low-to-mid-range estimate, however, would be that from January 1942 until V-E Day, about 400,000 people across Germany – including Reich civilians, Wehrmacht personnel, foreign forced labourers and prisoners of war – were killed as a result of enemy aerial bombardment.[18]

To put it another way, in the first half of the Second World War about ten British civilians were killed by bombing for every German civilian, whereas in the second half twenty-five Germans were killed for every Briton. The war from 1942 onwards was much more about British people killing German people than the other way round. The Shire Folk turned out to be rather good at it – much better than the Germans were at killing them, though that was certainly not for want of trying.

None of this was an accident. The pre-war RAF had busied itself with ‘colonial policing’ duties in the Middle East, East Africa and the Northwest Frontier, bombing and machine-gunning natives into submission. Such tactics, however, had only ever been a draft exercise in the use of air power on the geographical margins, a subtropical prologue. In a European conflict, it was always understood that the full resources of the industrial state would be mobilised for strategic bombing on a far grander scale. British planners had long been anticipating such a campaign against Germany.

RAF Expansion Scheme ‘M’, announced in November 1938, called for the creation of a force of eighty-five metropolitan bomber squadrons to be operational by the end of March 1942, all of which would be equipped with four-engine heavy bombers capable of carrying at least 4,000 pounds of bombs.[19] The Short Stirling, the first of these ‘heavies’, made its maiden flight in May 1939. The Avro Manchester, forerunner to the more famous Lancaster, did so in July, the Handley Page Halifax following in October.[20] Thirty-seven new airfields were built in the United Kingdom between 1934 and 1938, primarily as a base for these heavy bomber squadrons.[21] By the first Christmas of the war, the government had already committed £109 million for the expansion of aircraft-manufacturing plants and the construction of so-called ‘shadow factories’ to build airframes, engines and bombs.[22]

Chamberlain’s government insisted that the bombs from these aircraft would never be intentionally dropped on German civilians. It was ‘settled policy’, it explained in September 1939, that the RAF would ‘confine bombardment to strictly military objectives’. Or at least, it added, that would be its policy in this new war so long as ‘those same rules [were] scrupulously observed by all opponents’.[23] No one in the Air Ministry ever really expected such a self-denying ordinance to last forever, but the need to accommodate neutral opinion required some initial restraint in bombing methods. ‘We obviously cannot be the first to “take the gloves off”,’ the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall, observed. But come off they surely would, sooner or later.[24]

Within just a few months of the war’s outbreak, the Air Ministry was already anticipating the need for at least 1,000 tons of magnesium powder a year to build up a stockpile of 9 million incendiary bombs. In fact, by the end of the war, RAF Bomber Command had used 80 million (196,000 tons) of them to burn every city in Germany between the Rhine and the Vistula to ashes.[25] The strategic bombing campaign would, in many respects, turn out to be Britain’s single greatest strategic, economic and moral investment of the Second World War. This chapter is concerned with its midpoint, when after years of false starts and failures the tremendous national effort put into bombing finally appeared to be producing results – as well as troubling new ethical questions. One thing is clear. No one on the ground amid the cinders of Essen could say, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’ They knew what they were doing. They had known it from the very beginning.

*

The man who sent the raiders to Essen was Air Marshal Arthur Travers Harris – ‘Bert’ to his friends and close colleagues, ‘Bomber’ to the public, ‘Butcher’ to the airmen who flew for him.[26] In February 1942 he had been appointed Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) of RAF Bomber Command, a position he held for the rest of the war. Harris was forty-nine at the time and had been in the Royal Air Force for a quarter-century. A large man with a grave and disapproving air, he had a physical presence that was notoriously intimidating. Flying Officer Peter Tomlinson, who was to become one of Harris’s closest wartime aides, recalled at their first meeting his new master peering at him over the top of black half glasses with ‘a rather severe look’.[27]

‘Severe’ was one way of describing Harris. Others who liked him less than Tomlinson might have chosen other words – gruff; stubborn to excess; rudely opinionated; bullying; blunt to the point of insolence with superiors with whom he disagreed; essentially joyless – though, like many men who fundamentally lack a sense of humour, he was fond of tiresome practical jokes at other people’s expense. Upon arriving at Bomber Command headquarters in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, Harris was told that his official residence was as yet unavailable because the wife of the outgoing AOC-in-C, Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse, had been given special dispensation from the Air Ministry to remain there until May due to her ill health. Harris took one look at Lady Peirse, decided there was nothing wrong with her, and wrote to the ministry telling them to give her her marching orders. She was out within a fortnight. He had started as he meant to go on.

Harris’s command style was just as brusque, peremptory and remote. He rarely left High Wycombe to meet the aircrew whom he sent into battle over Germany night after night. This left him open, as it had Sir Douglas Haig at the Somme and Passchendaele, to accusations that he was callously uncaring about the fate of his men – a so-called ‘château general’. That was not quite fair. Harris was certainly a harsh taskmaster. In his moral universe, there were those who were up to snuff and those who were not; ‘rabbits’ and ‘weaker sisters’ who failed to show sufficient moral fibre in the face of the enemy could expect nothing but short shrift.[28] Bert was no less sparing on himself, however, indulging in just two weekend leaves between February 1942 and V-E Day and drowning with patent medicines the painful duodenal ulcer which resulted from this stress and overwork.[29] If he was often reluctant to meet his men face to face, this was less a matter of indifference to their fate and more the fear, like Haig’s, that such an emotional attachment would imperil his own moral courage. Harris secretly loved the ‘old lags’ in his Command even as he ordered them to their deaths night after night – an ethical ordeal he felt was unavoidable if Britain was to win the war.

Harris was not responsible for deciding British bombing policy, only for carrying it out. Policy was decided at the highest political level by the Defence (Operations) Subcommittee of the War Cabinet, under the advice of the Air Ministry, where Harris’s immediate superior was the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. Both men had been senior officers in the RAF throughout the interwar years and had commanded air policing operations in the British Empire. Their imperial experiences had been quite similar, but their discrete use of language to describe how air policing worked says much about their contrasting personalities and their attitudes to the moral syntax of modern war.

In 1924, Harris had reported to Whitehall on bombing as a tool of effective and cheap coercion in Iraq. ‘Within forty-five minutes,’ he wrote, ‘a full-sized [Iraqi] village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.’ The Air Ministry regarded this passage as altogether too candid about the brutalities of colonial policing. Harris was unrepentant,[30] later arguing (as Chief Air Officer for Palestine and Transjordan in 1938), that he could extinguish the Arab Revolt with just ‘one 250-pound bomb or 500-pound bomb in every village that speaks out of turn…the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand’.[31]

Portal, describing his own colonial policing effort in Aden in 1934, took a rather different tone. ‘The aeroplane,’ he wrote, ‘seems to have been regarded [by the locals] as the quite impersonal agent of government control, and by merely playing the part of constable on his beat, ready to check disobedience of the law but otherwise displaying no force or animosity against the tribes…eventually produced a good-humored submission.’ The campaign he was describing was, it is worth noting, one that involved the use of twenty-eight tons of high explosive bombs, 40,000 machine gun rounds and 26,386 incendiary bombs. Even so, Portal insisted that Aden’s tribesmen showed ‘a praiseworthy sense of humour’ in the face of this onslaught from the skies.[32]

Although born in Cheltenham, Harris spent several years of his youth in Mashonaland and regarded himself thereafter as a transplanted Rhodesian. Whether or not this colonial-adjacent identity had anything to do with it, he had a very un-English disregard for the anaesthetising cant that his countrymen automatically adopted whenever they had to describe the morally unconscionable actions they had taken. As Max Hastings put it, Harris ‘never took the precaution of cloaking what he was doing in the formal circumspection and manners’ expected of a tasteful Englishman. Was Harris beastly? If so, he was always honest about it. It was that, perhaps, which established his reputation as a monster when the men whose actual policies he only carried out have been forgotten or forgiven by history.[33]

*

Bombing policy for 1943 was set at the CCS Committee meeting in Morocco – the famous ‘Cabalanca Conference’ – a few weeks after the TORCH landings in North Africa. The two air armadas based in England, Harris’s Bomber Command and the USAAF Eighth Air Force led by Major-General Ira Eaker, were to carry out a common Allied strategy against Germany dubbed the ‘Combined Bomber Offensive’ (CBO). The ‘Casablanca directive’ agreed by the CCS Committee on 21 January 1943 began: ‘Your primary object will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.’

Having defined what it called this ‘general concept’, the directive went on to list a hierarchy of targets that included submarine construction yards, the German aircraft industry, transportation hubs and oil plants.[34] In June, the policy was further tweaked by the CCS Committee into what became known as the POINTBLANK directive, whereby Harris and Eaker were informed that the ‘first priority’ of the CBO was now the German fighter force and the aircraft industry that supported it. However, the exact relationship of this new ‘first priority’ to the broader ‘primary object’ laid out at Casablanca remained undefined, and reconciling the competing claims of the two documents would have been a challenge for a professor of logic, let alone an air force commander.[35]

The ambiguity was not accidental. Harris, who had had the opportunity to revise the draft of the POINTBLANK directive before it was formally adopted, had deliberately introduced as much of it as possible. In his 1947 memoir Bomber Offensive, he recalled that the Casablanca directive’s vague wording had given him ‘a very wide range of choice…to attack pretty well any German industrial city of 100,000 inhabitants and above’.[36] He did not even mention POINTBLANK in Bomber Offensive, which suggests how much weight he accorded it. Harris wanted as imprecise a directive as possible. That way, he could ignore the interference of the combined chiefs and the politicians and all the bombing ‘experts’ whose targeting theories cluttered his in-tray, and instead continue to faithfully pursue a mission he actually believed in – the mission he had inherited on his arrival in High Wycombe in February 1942 that Bomber Command’s operations should be ‘focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and, in particular, of the industrial workers’.[37] Sometimes known as the ‘area bombing directive’, it remained Harris’s lodestar for the rest of the war.

Put at its simplest, ‘area bombing’ meant dropping bombs across a large two-dimensional ground space rather than concentrating them into a small one. As Harris pointed out acerbically in Bomber Offensive, the RAF had actually begun area bombing in this most general sense at the start of the war; it had just not done so on purpose.[38] Not until late 1941 did it begin to dawn on the Air Ministry that the ‘precision’ bombing of small specific industrial targets (a factory, say, or an oil refinery), which it thought it had been doing for the previous two years, had in reality simply resulted in the area bombing of large sections of the German countryside. This had killed a few of the Reich’s cows but accomplished very little else. The navigational and targeting tools available to the RAF in 1941 precluded hitting anything as small as an individual building with any accuracy, especially at night, when it was much safer to fly in enemy airspace.

Since the only kind of attack the RAF could practically achieve was area bombing, the Air Ministry had decided to forgo its attempts at precision bombing for the time being and instead concentrate their efforts on the wide aerial bombardment of targets that might do the enemy some actual harm. This could only mean German towns and cities. Or, more precisely, the concentrations of densely packed workers’ housing at the centre of German towns and cities. This was area bombing in its more target-specific sense, and its principal weapon would be the incendiary bomb, which, for most of the war, meant the four-pound Mark I aluminium-magnesium thermite bomb developed by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI).

It is often assumed that deliberate British area bombing began with Harris’s appointment at High Wycombe in 1942. In fact, experiments with incendiaries had begun long before then. The first explicit order to area-bomb a German town had been issued against Mannheim in December 1940 in retaliation for the destruction of Coventry a month earlier, and the only reason that this raid made no subsequent impression on popular memory was its total failure. In July 1941, the Air Ministry had ordered that three-quarters of all the RAF’s bombing efforts should henceforth be ‘heavy, concentrated and continuous area attacks [against] large working-class and industrial areas’ of German towns.[39] The area bombing directive of February 1942 was issued a week before Harris took over at High Wycombe. It was merely an emphatic restatement of a policy which had, in practice, been in place for some time.[40] It was Portal, not Harris, who wrote in a clarifying note to his new Bomber Command AOC-in-C that ‘the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories…this must be made quite clear if it is not already understood’.

What Harris did do was put the policy into practice in a way no previous RAF commander had ever attempted. He believed in it with a conviction unshared by any of his superiors or peers and never lost faith in its efficacy. Later in the war this was to bring him into conflict with men like Portal, who had changed their minds. But to be clear, if in February 1942 Harris had resisted the War Cabinet’s order to area-bomb German cities, he would have been sacked and someone else would have been appointed in his place to do it. Harris’s sin, if that is what it was, was to take his instructions seriously and carry them out with ruthless efficiency.

The February 1942 area bombing directive told Harris what to do; it was less clear about what it thought this would accomplish. It was not, for example, a direct attack on German industry. As Portal’s note specified, the targets were not to be factories per se. Essen was unusual among German industrial towns in that the Krupps Works were right at its heart. It was more common for factories, steelworks, oil refineries and the like to be located at the outskirts of built-up areas. Area bombing was not about destroying machinery or warehouses. It was about obliterating the houses at the centre of German towns, along with the workers and families who lived in them.

This, the policy’s advocates argued, would have two effects. One was that it would reduce German industrial production by making it difficult or impossible for workers to reach their places of work – whether because they or their families were dead or injured, because they had been made homeless, or because they were unable to move about their towns due to the collapse of local infrastructure and utilities. To some experts who had studied the Blitz, this seemed a better way to attack German industry than trying to hit actual factories, which were too small to identify from the air at night. In May 1941, the Ministry of Economic Warfare told the RAF, based on surveys of British experience under German bombs, that ‘loss of output…through absenteeism and other dislocation consequent upon the destruction of workers’ dwellings and shopping centres is likely to be as great as, if not greater than the production loss which we can expect to inflict by heavy damage [to factories]’.[41]

The other effect would be on German morale, which would officially remain a primary object – at times the primary object – of the British bombing campaign from 1942 until the eve of D-Day. Given its importance, it is perhaps surprising that the government was so cagey about what ‘morale’ meant and so casual about how to measure it. Was ‘morale bombing’ supposed to produce a political effect, by provoking dissatisfaction with the Nazi regime and perhaps eventually resistance and revolt? Or was it more about creating an economic effect, undermining the German people’s enthusiasm and willingness to stay working in the bombed-out areas? The British never made this clear, either to themselves or to anyone else – including the Americans, who remained bemused about British strategic aims until the end of the war.[42] A serious inquiry into enemy morale would have demanded detailed contributions from comparative sociology and psychology. Why, for instance, was German morale expected to collapse under bombing when British morale had not done so during the Blitz? All the government chose to offer in response to this reasonable question were saloon-bar clichés about the differences in Anglo/German national character.[43]

Portal was so embarrassed about the flimsiness of British bombing theory that when he pitched the idea of a 6,000-strong heavy bomber offensive to the other chiefs of staff in November 1942, all he would say about German morale was that it was ‘a subject on which opinions differ widely’. He had ‘no doubt’, however, that bombing would have a ‘profound’ effect on it.[44] Nor did Harris have much substantial to say on the subject. In an article for the RAF Journal in 1943 he suggested that perhaps German workers would fail to have the same fortitude as British ones if attacked hard enough. This was not exactly staking a resounding claim. In a private letter shortly after the war, Harris conceded that morale bombing, in the sense of trying to produce some sort of attitudinal change in the Germans, had been ‘totally unsound’.[45] To both Portal and Harris, ‘morale’ in 1942 was a convenient placeholder for a policy still in a protean form: a slightly more sophisticated way of saying that dropping lots of bombs on German towns would surely have some effect, yet to be determined.

There were reasons for the Air Ministry not to inquire too deeply into the nature of what a morale campaign entailed. By 1943, the Nazi authorities were loudly accusing the British of ‘terror attacks’ (Terrorangriffe) against unarmed men, women and children. They distributed to the world press photographs of bombed-out schools, hospitals and churches; they described the RAF crews as ‘air pirates’ and ‘bandits’; they charged the British with barbarism.[46] The British government, no less vehemently, rejected these accusations. ‘The Royal Air Force has never indulged in pure terror raids,’ Viscount ‘Bobbety’ Cranborne insisted in February 1944.[47] Yet the uncomfortable reality was that ‘morale bombing’ was ‘terror bombing’, even if hardly anyone in the RAF wanted to admit it. Otherwise, it would make no sense. An Air Staff paper in September 1941 conceded that breaking the morale of the Germans would require making them ‘conscious of constant personal danger…and the fear of death’.[48] Three hard years later, in August 1944, Air Commodore Sidney Bufton, Director of Bombing Operations, agreed that any successful attack on German civilian morale needed ‘to provoke a state of terror…of such density that there is created in the mind of the individual the conviction that if he is in the area to be attacked his chances of escaping death or serious injury are remote’.[49]

This is not something anyone, with perhaps the exception of Air Marshal Harris himself, was ever willing to spell out too matter-of-factly.

*

When it came to area bombing, there were three separate shades of opinion. There were those who regarded it as better than doing nothing; those who regarded it as worse than doing nothing; and those who regarded it as the best thing to do of all. Most senior officers in the RAF, including (after some back-and-forth on the matter) Portal, probably fell into the first group. To them, precision bombing of specific enemy economic systems still represented the ne plus ultra of air power. Area bombing was merely a regrettable interregnum through which the Command would have to pass until technical conditions allowed it to precisely attack more worthwhile targets in Germany. The February 1942 directive was a temporary waypoint to the final destination, and would eventually be superseded.

British experiments in precision attacks continued after Harris assumed command. On 17 April 1942, twelve Lancasters performed a low-level day raid on the U-Boat diesel engine sheds in Augsburg. Six months later an even more ambitious trial was attempted when ninety-four Lancasters flying in near-treetop-height formation just before dusk attacked the Schneider works at Le Creusot, deep in central France. In both cases, however, the results fell far short of hopes. The Augsburg bombing was accurate, but the loss rate was exorbitant – only five of the Lancasters made it home. At Le Creusot, the German defences were caught by surprise and only one aircraft was lost – but subsequent photo-reconnaissance reports showed that almost every aircraft’s bomb load had missed the main target. There was no way to justify such high-risk operations if the results were going to be as disappointing as that. A return to large-scale precision bombing still seemed far off.

Those who thought area bombing worse than doing nothing included the British Army and the Admiralty, both of which regarded heavy bombers as the proper ancillary instruments of their own campaigns in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. To them, strategic bombing was just one of Churchill’s wasteful indulgences. The Americans were equally unimpressed with what Harris was doing. They entered the war convinced that precision bombing was already a practicable reality, thanks to their Norden bombsight, an ingenious mechanical computer that could take flight conditions into account in order to fine-tune an aircraft’s final approach to the aiming point. The Norden, however, had to be used by day, which meant exposing bombers equipped with it to interception by single-engine fighters. The Americans thought that their daylight raids would succeed where British and German ones had failed in 1940 and 1941 because their heavy bombers, principally the Boeing B-17 ‘Flying Fortresses’, could fly safely through enemy airspace in large, tight, ‘combat box’ formations with interlocking defensive fire from their many machine guns. Battering their way through contested skies, with the Norden system guiding their aim, the Americans expected to be able to deliver precisely targeted bomb loads. Their original planning document, AWPD-42, identified 177 specific industrial locations in Germany to destroy, which, with bureaucratic exactitude, they calculated could be done by dropping 132,090 tons of bombs on them in 66,045 sorties.[50]

The RAF rolled its collective eyes at this but did not want to press its scepticism too far, worrying that if it made too good a case, Roosevelt might become disillusioned with the whole idea of bombing Germany and move all the American heavies to the Mediterranean or even the Pacific. Hence the Casablanca directive, and its concept of a Combined Bomber Offensive: bombing was to be ‘round the clock’, with the Americans precision bombing by day and the British area bombing by night. Portal was placed in nominal charge, but in practice the RAF and the USAAF chose their own targets and devised their own tactics. Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force sent liaison staff to one another’s headquarters (Eaker established himself at Bushey Hall in Hertfordshire, less than twenty miles from High Wycombe) and maintained a cordial relationship. Occasionally the two air forces even cooperated on a specific mission. Otherwise, they left each other alone to pursue their individual vendettas against the Germans.[51]

Harris got on with Eaker well personally but was totally unpersuaded by the case for precision bombing. Even in spring 1941, before he became Bomber Command’s AOC-in-C, he had complained about the then vogueish RAF attempts to target the German oil industry. ‘Bombing oil plants’, he announced, ‘does not kill Boche.’[52] In April 1943 he developed his thoughts on the matter in more detail in a letter to Lord Trenchard, one of the founders of the RAF. ‘I do not believe in “panacea” targets, e.g., oil, rubber, ball bearings,’ Harris wrote. The problem as he saw it was that

specialising on one such means that the enemy concentrates all his defences, and nothing else in Germany including morale and housing is likely to suffer. If the ‘panacea’ fails all is lost…a fortnight after we were told Germany was nearly on the rocks for oil she staged the biggest campaign in history [Operation BARBAROSSA] using billions of gallons. Not even the ‘oily boys’ attempted to laugh that off. They just hid their heads for a spell and now raise the same song again.[53]

Advocates of precision bombing argued that twentieth-century industrial economies were so complicated that ‘chokepoints’ existed within the system which, if successfully identified, targeted and throttled could paralyse the whole edifice. Harris’s argument was exactly the opposite. It was because modern industrial economies were so complicated that they possessed the flexibility to respond creatively to attacks on chokepoints by adjusting their productive methods. Only a simultaneous attack on the entire system could overwhelm its capability for adaptation and self-repair.

Harris resisted all attempts to divert his bombers from the main effort. For instance, he was entirely unmoved by the case for mounting a low-level precision raid on the Ruhr dams in spring 1943 which the Air Ministry believed would have a ‘paralysing effect’ on the region’s industrial output.[54] Harris called the draft plan ‘tripe of the wildest description…[there is] not the smallest chance of it working’.[55] To the AOC-in-C it was a foolish diversion of resources. Experienced crews would have to be withdrawn from normal operations to train for the mission as an elite squadron; a special weapon, a drum-shaped back-spinning depth-charge colourfully though inaccurately described as a ‘bouncing bomb’, would have to be developed at great expense. Harris on this occasion was overruled, however, and Operation CHASTISE, as it became known, was carried out on the night of 16–17 May 1943. Wing Commander Guy Gibson led his newly formed 617 Squadron over the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams, destroying the first two. CHASTISE was an exercise in spectacle. The Air Ministry understood its public relations potential and within hours of the Lancasters’ return it rushed to get the world press dramatic photographs of the destruction that had been wrought across western Germany from the floodwaters. ‘No more sensational feat has been accomplished in this war’, concluded the Daily Mail. Thirty-four survivors of the raid were decorated for valour, with Gibson receiving the Victoria Cross. In public, Harris had no qualms about associating himself with the glamour of the RAF’s ‘Dam Busters’. He told the newspapers: ‘we had high hopes, but the immediate results…were far beyond our expectations’.[56] In private, he continued to regard the whole exercise as a costly distraction from the real business of the CBO (fifty-three out of 133 participating aircrew had been killed). ‘I have seen nothing’, Harris wrote in an internal memo in December 1943, ‘to show that [CHASTISE] was worthwhile.’[57]

Harris’s uncompromising views about area bombing would increasingly marginalise him within the RAF’s senior ranks. He was an air power maximalist. Harris saw area bombing not as a preparation for an eventual cross-Channel invasion of Europe, but as an alternative to it. The ‘proper manner’ of using air power, he told Churchill in 1942, would be to ‘knock Germany out of the war’ completely rather than merely as a ‘subsidiary weapon in the prosecution of vastly protracted and avoidable land and sea campaigns’. Harris believed area bombing could bring victory by itself. It was ‘imperative’, he wrote, ‘to abandon the disastrous policy of military intervention in the land campaigns of Europe’, and so avoid repeating the bloody errors of the Somme and Passchendaele.[58] This was a vision of the bomber not merely as an accessory to classical ideas of land and sea power, but as transformative of them.

It was not Churchill’s view. The prime minister’s relationship to the British strategic bombing offensive can be described as one of early-war enthusiasm, tempered by rapid disillusionment, sporadic opportunistic mid-war re-engagement, and an embarrassed disavowal and denial at the end, followed by a great silence afterwards. Churchill’s The Second World War has less and less to say on the bombing war with each passing volume, and the entire campaign is summarised in the final book in a single hurried paragraph which hardly measures up to the enormous investment his government had made in Harris’s force.[59] Temperamentally simpatico, the two men enjoyed spending time together during the war, and Harris was to be a good friend to Churchill in his dotage.[60] But the prime minister made no mention of Bomber Command in his victory speech on 13 May 1945. The omission reflected his desire by the end of the war to forget that he had ever laid up any hopes in bombing at all.

Churchill’s attitude to the air offensive was shaped, as were so many other of his strategical ideas, by the United States. In late 1940, before American intervention, when bombing seemed one of the few ways that Britain could hit back at Germany, he had been an enthusiast. It is from this period that his most effusive statements of confidence in the campaign were made, the kind which are now etched into the Bomber Command memorial in Green Park – ‘the fighters are our salvation but the bombers alone provide the means of victory’.[61] He had chafed at early-war caution about targeting practices and urged the RAF to bomb more indiscriminately as vengeance for the Blitz. ‘We have seen what inconvenience the attack on the British civilian population has caused us, and there is no reason why the enemy should be freed from all such embarrassments.’[62]

After Pearl Harbor, however, Churchill’s interest in bombing became more capricious. The results of the campaign in 1941 had fallen far short of Bomber Command’s promises. More importantly, once the Americans were involved, new theories of victory were available. An amphibious invasion of north-west Europe was no longer a pipe dream. ‘In the days when we were fighting alone, we answered the question: “How are you going to win the war?” by saying: “We will shatter Germany by bombing”,’ he reminded the Cabinet in July 1942. However, he went on, the war had transformed since then. ‘The enormous injuries inflicted on the German Army and manpower by the Russians, and the accession of the manpower and munitions of the United States, have rendered other possibilities open.’[63]

This is not to say that he abandoned all interest in bombing. As chairman of the War Cabinet Defence (Operations) Subcommittee he approved without demur the area bombing directive of February 1942. Harris’s belligerency appealed to Churchill’s own aggressive tastes. He far preferred the thought of using aircraft offensively against the enemy’s homeland than in a passively defensive role such as maritime reconnaissance. The AOC-in-C understood the value of a spectacle and was sporadically able to restore Churchill’s enthusiasm by an incendiary coup de théâtre. The prime minister crowed to Roosevelt after the 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne that the RAF was ‘blasting Hitler from behind while he is grappling with the Bear [i.e. the USSR]’.[64] Disappointment soon set in again, however. At his meeting with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942, Churchill promised the Soviet leader devastating raids on Berlin, which Harris was then unable to deliver. The fact that there were perfectly sound operational reasons for this failed to placate the prime minister.[65] ‘An entirely new view must be taken of the possibilities of attacking Hitler in 1943,’ Churchill wrote that November. Bombing, he said, had, for the moment anyway, ‘petered out’.[66]

By the midpoint of the war Churchill seems to have come to regret the massive investment that had been made in a strategic bombing campaign. But he also understood that earlier decisions committing these vast resources could not simply be unmade, and he was dismissive of attempts to blithely switch bombers to other targets without thinking through the consequences. When pressed by Attlee to use the bombing force in the land campaigns against Rommel and the Japanese, Churchill responded:

Everybody would like to send Bomber Command to India and the Middle East. However, it is not possible to make any decisive change…it is no use flying out squadrons which sit helpless and useless when they arrive. We have built up a great plant here for bombing Germany, which is the only way in our power of helping Russia.[67]

It is not quite right to say that Churchill ever disavowed what Harris was doing, at least not until the final months of the war, when he rather loftily waved away his personal responsibility for the area bombing campaign. Nevertheless, except perhaps for a few months in late 1940, he never shared Harris’s maximalist ambitions about what bombing alone could achieve. To Churchill it was only ever a useful political, operational, even rhetorical tool.

*

In spring 1943, the skies over the Ruhr were the most heavily defended in the world. Happy Valley had almost 400 heavy Flakartillerie (Flak) batteries, each boasting between six and eight large-calibre artillery pieces – two in five of all the big anti-aircraft guns in the Reich, an ‘astronomical’ number to have to confront night after night.[68] There were 2,000 light and heavy Flak guns defending Essen alone.[69] An Avro Lancaster was a gigantic receptacle of bombs, aviation spirit, compressed oxygen and human frailty, all encased in a light alloy skin two-hundredths of an inch thick. Even flying through the 100-foot-diameter sphere of a shrapnel burst could cause steel fragments to lacerate the fuselage, sparking a devastating engine fire or puncturing skin, tissue and organs. If an unfortunate bomber was spotted and ‘coned’ by the radar-guided searchlights below, a direct hit might follow which would annihilate everything and everyone inside.

Getting to and from the Ruhr in early 1943 meant traversing the ‘Kammhuber Line’, a box grid of German night fighters radio-directed on to the British heavies by radar-assisted ground-control teams. Harris’s aircraft were poorly equipped to defend themselves. The Lancaster had just eight Browning machine guns firing rifle-calibre .303-inch rounds with an effective range of 1,000 yards. The 20mm and 30mm cannons of a German night fighter like the Bf-110G were capable of ripping a wing off a heavy bomber with just a few hits. All the RAF turret gunners could realistically do with their feeble armament was to scare off the odd marauding Kammhuber hunter who got too close.

The Battle of the Ruhr was a duel of electronic devices and counter-devices, the backroom boys on each side trying to subvert the gadgets of the other. German ‘Freya’ and ‘Wurzburg’ radars tracked the British raiding streams from their initial formation over southern England across the North Sea to Holland and across the Rhineland skies. The British heavies were equipped with jamming devices such as ‘Mandrel’, which interfered with these German detection systems, and ‘Tinsel’, which broadcast amplified engine noise to disrupt night fighter radio communications with Luftwaffe ground stations. Since these devices could themselves betray the bombers’ position, the boffins could be too clever for their (or rather the airmen’s) own good.

An RAF aircrew’s best defence while in the bomber stream was to lurk in the blackness, hoping that any pursuers would fail to see the telltale orange flames belching from the bomber’s four engine exhausts. If spotted, they could ‘corkscrew’ madly in a series of wild aerial manoeuvres that might hopefully throw the hunter off – a survival tactic that was officially deprecated in a memorandum by Harris because it reduced bombing accuracy.[70] But the chances of surviving once a night fighter latched on to you were poor. There was a reason why airmen were eighteen times more likely to be killed than just injured on Bomber Command operations. Either they survived a mission entirely unharmed, or they never came back from it at all.[71]

Night fighters and Flak were not the only dangers. Ice-frozen engines and ailerons could bring an aircraft down. A fuel leak might mean ditching in the frigid, choppy North Sea with uncertain rescue. A navigational error in poor visibility could send a bomber careening into an unseen hillside. Survival rates on any individual night of the war varied dramatically depending on a host of factors – weather, surprise, sheer good or bad luck. In the RAF raid on Oberhausen on 14–15 June 1943, for instance, seventeen out of 197 Lancasters were shot down or crashed – over 8 per cent of the attacking force. On the other hand, when Duisberg was raided on 26–27 March, only six aircraft out of 455 failed to return home.

On average, the loss rate per operation during the Battle of the Ruhr was just under one in twenty bombers. But a Bomber Command aircrewman was expected to fly thirty operations (‘ops’) before completing his first tour, after which he would be put on a spell of training or other non-operational duties before returning to complete a second tour of another twenty ops. The actuarial odds against him soon stacked up. An aircrewman only had a one-in-four chance of making it through his first tour unscathed and a one-in-ten chance of walking away from both. Such bitter arithmetic was not known precisely – Portal made sure that it was not widely circulated – but the diminishing chances of survival were clear enough to anyone paying attention.[72] RAF area bombing missions were intended to destroy German civilian morale. It is as well to ask, however, how the morale of Harris’s men held up under circumstances which seemed to doom them to, at best, a prisoner of war camp and at worst obliteration within a ‘chrysanthemum of fire’ 15,000 feet above Westphalia.[73]

All RAF aircrewmen were volunteers. They were young, fit and disproportionately likely to have received a secondary education, either at a private fee-paying institution or a grammar school. This meant that although most of them were flight sergeant NCOs rather than commissioned officers, they were drawn from much the same recruitment pool as the British Army’s platoon and company commanders. The armed forces had an ambivalent attitude to men of middle-class social standing and higher-than-average intelligence and aptitude. On the one hand, they were considered less prone to ‘hysteria’, which was judged the hallmark of the duller, more emotionally plastic (usually working-class) Other Ranks. On the other hand, there was the elite prejudice about the ‘softness’ of modern youth which we have already heard from the mouths of Churchill and Brooke. Reporting on squadron morale in May 1943, Air Chief Marshal P. B. Joubert complained that ‘The vast majority [of airmen] had been born and brought up in conditions of security – a policeman at the end of the street to keep order…a benevolent government to insure them against the heavier blows of fate.’ Gone, he said, were the ‘tough and riotous’ men of the previous generation, products of ‘a rougher, more robust period, where cruder virtues flourished in the place of refinement and comfortable living’, who had thankfully lacked the moral imagination to feel real fear.[74]

High Wycombe was alert to symptoms of declining aircrew morale. The Pathfinder Force had its origin in the problem of ‘creep-back’, a phenomenon by which aircraft in the bombing stream dropped their payloads increasingly earlier along the line of approach to the target. Excessive creep-back was responsible for Bomber Command’s often erratic bomb pattern results. The suspicion was that it was caused by bomb aimers and their comrades wanting to be finished with their hazardous runs into the target as fast as possible, regardless of accuracy. There were persistent concerns too about ‘boomerangs’ – aircraft returning from sorties before reaching the target, ostensibly for reasons of damage or mechanical failure, but sometimes, it was whispered, because the crew had been too nervous to continue. Boomerang rates in one Bomber Command Group reached 17 per cent in autumn 1943, a level which provoked an official inquiry. Seventeen crews, it turned out, had aborted their missions at least three times each in a two-month period of operations.[75]

Harris, a veteran flyer himself and a man unencumbered by progressive views on the human condition, took a dim view of all this. He only grudgingly accepted the idea of a fixed operational tour at all, believing that ‘in war officers and men [should be] entirely at the disposal of their commanders’.[76] He was a pitiless proponent of branding aircrew who appeared to have lost their nerve (‘weaklings and waverers’) with the appellation ‘Lack of Moral Fibre’ (LMF), a disciplinary rather than a medical judgement which meant removal from operational duties, loss of the coveted aircrew badge, reduction in rank, and transfer to the most thankless and menial of ground station tasks.[77]

What is striking is not that the LMF punishment existed but how rarely it needed to be applied. The RAF destroyed most of the records relating to the matter after the war, perhaps intentionally. But it seems that from 1939 to 1945 around 1,000 men were dismissed from flying duties in Bomber Command on grounds of LMF, with another 6,000 or so temporarily or permanently grounded for other psychological reasons.[78] This was a surprisingly small proportion of the 150,000 men trained as wartime aircrew. The problem for the historian, then, is not that a relatively small number of Bomber Command aircrew refused to continue flying or were deemed unfit to do so, but that the great majority of them carried on doing so quite voluntarily in the face of horrendous personal risk.

What kept them going? The reserves of emotional, intellectual and physical stamina required of bomber aircrew were remarkable. Men had to remain focused and efficient while cramped in freezing gun turrets and pilots’ seats for hour after hour, staring into the inky void looking for navigational markers or the subtle grey shadows against cloud that indicated the position of night fighters. Bombing operations demanded special cognitive and moral qualities. ‘Bombing is technical, a matter of knowledge and experience, not of setting your jaw and rushing in,’ said Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, who completed an extraordinary 102 wartime operations and received the Victoria Cross for ‘sustained fortitude’ rather than any individual act of heroism. Rather than derring-do, it was discipline, teamwork and an ability to withstand the cumulative pressures of a tour that were at a premium among bomber crews. Reckless bravery, which might have been appropriate in other theatres of the war, was officially discouraged in Bomber Command, as it was judged likelier to lead to the loss of an expensive aircraft and its trained crew than any gain of operational advantage.[79]

Peer pressure and self-consciousness – a young man’s fear of seeming weak in front of his comrades, especially given the humiliating threat of being branded LMF – must have played their part. A belief in the righteousness of the war and a loyalty to king, country and empire may also have had something to do with the willingness to endure, particularly for those aircrew hailing from the Dominions and colonies (most of them from Canada and Australia) and the occupied European territories who made up almost half of the Bomber Command force and for whom the defence of the United Kingdom was a somewhat abstract cause. There was, too, professional pride and the excitement of taking part in a complex, prestigious and hopefully decisive military campaign. A veteran wing commander in late 1942 suggested that

the average aircrew personnel are simple and, to a certain extent, selfish. A large number of them boost up their morale by the simple but often effective saying it won’t happen to me. I must admit my own personal experience was that this somewhat unintelligent outlook was far more comforting while on the job than the rather saner course of taking a mathematical view of one’s chances.[80]

One RAF medical officer who closely studied the phenomenon believed that the first five or so operations in a bombing tour, while objectively the most dangerous of all because of inexperience, were also relatively easy to get through psychologically because the novice aircrewman was sustained by his plentiful banks of courage, enthusiasm and determination. Somewhere between his eighth and fifteenth trip, he began to appreciate what he was up against and a personal crisis ensued. Assuming he was not killed during this crisis, it ebbed as his tour reached the twentieth or so mission mark. But the cumulative effects of tension and fatigue built up again in the final missions, which the crewman endured in silent agony as he wondered if his luck might suddenly falter just as he was on the brink of safety.[81]

What such a crisis looked like for any individual aircrewman varied greatly – from exaggerated or withdrawn behaviour, risk-taking, a lack of focus and short-temperedness to eye strain, shaking, weeping and facial sores (Guy Gibson developed a large carbuncle on his face before the Dam Busters attack). The pubs of York, Lincoln and Cambridge bore testament to the alarming consumption of alcohol by some off-duty bomber aircrewmen. Station medical officers were left to deal with the epidemiological consequences of the Command’s sky-high venereal disease rate, four times greater than among ground personnel.[82] Some men were helped through their crises by sympathetic medical staff. Others sought solace from wives, sweethearts and comrades. Many confronted their demons alone. Some were vanquished by them.

*

On 27 May 1943, while the Battle of the Ruhr was still at its height, Harris wrote to his six group commanders:

The importance of HAMBURG, the second largest city in Germany with a population of one and a half million, is well known and needs no further emphasis. The total destruction of this city would achieve immeasurable results in reducing the industrial capacity of the enemy’s war machine. This, together with the effect on German morale, which would be felt throughout the country, would play a very important part in shortening and winning the war.[83]

Since 1939, Hamburg had been attacked by Bomber Command ninety-eight times, but so far to very little effect. Its importance to the Reich’s war-making ability was indisputable. The city’s Blohm & Voss shipyard had built the battleship Bismarck and over 200 U-Boats. It was on the POINTBLANK target list, so attacking it would keep the Americans happy. Destroying Hamburg, Harris thought, would be a ‘tremendous show’.[84] But there were serious challenges. It was beyond Oboe’s range; its Flak defences were formidable, with sixty-four batteries of heavy guns;[85] and its civil defence organisation, seasoned by the ineffectual raids of the past, was among the best-trained in Germany.

Still, Bomber Command had two new technical advantages it thought would overcome these defences. One was H2S, a ground-scanning centimetric radar set, small and light enough to be taken into battle. It produced an image of the landscape beneath an aircraft which might otherwise be obscured by darkness, clouds, smoke or haze. The image was somewhat primitive, so for the best results a target needed prominent physical features. The broad sixty-mile stretch of the Elbe leading from the North Sea to Hamburg was ideal. The other advantage was ‘Window’, bundles of short, thin paper strips backed with aluminum foil which, when scattered from the bomber stream, would scramble the Germans’ night fighter radar.[86]

The attack on Hamburg, Operation GOMORRAH as Harris dubbed it with a vengeful Old Testament flavour redolent of other big Bomber Command ventures, lasted ten days.[87] The first British night raid (24–25 July) did widespread damage to the central and north-western areas of the city, killing about 1,500 people, but the overall effect was limited. A seven-mile creep-back from the aiming point meant that bombs were not densely concentrated. This was something High Wycombe intended to fix next time round.

The afternoon after this first British raid, the Eighth Air Force took a turn. Unlike the RAF, the Americans specifically aimed at the Blohm & Voss yard and an aero-engine factory. The results, however, were as disappointing as the British attack the night before. Clouds of smoke from the RAF raid lingered, partly obscuring the aiming points. Ten of the ninety B-17s were destroyed by Flak and enemy fighters. A follow-up American day raid took place on 26 July. Losses were fewer this second time, but a combination of navigational problems and boomerangs meant that only fifty-four aircraft reached the target. One of Hamburg’s power stations was rendered inoperable for a month; otherwise, the bombing was scattered, and damage limited. It was a typically underwhelming experience for the USAAF in 1943, and further evidence for the Americans that the daylight precision bombing of Germany was not going to be nearly as easy as its planners had hoped. Targets were easier to see during the day, but so too were bombers.

On the night of 27–28 July, the British came back. Seven hundred and eighty-seven aircraft bombed Hamburg, all but seventy-four of them four-engine heavies. The Pathfinder marking fell about two miles east of the intended aiming point, but this did not matter too much: Hamburg was a big city and there was plenty of it to burn out. The majority of the 2,326 tons of bombs carried by the raiders crashed down into an area of just four square miles with almost no creep-back. Barely an hour passed between the first bomb’s fall and the last. Technically, such a concentrated effort was almost flawless. Its effect would be apocalyptic.

The residents of Hammerbrook, Hamm and Borgfelde, the Hamburg districts encompassed within Bomber Command’s doomed rectangle, were mostly working-class shipyard employees and dock labourers and their families. They lived in cramped, six-storey nineteenth-century tenement blocks divided by narrow streets and alleyways. There were a lot of children. July 1943 had been very hot in Hamburg, with low humidity and little rain. Everything in the city was extremely dry. When the high-explosive ordnance dropped by the first bombers smashed in doors and windows and roofs, the furniture and timber joists and floors that were exposed inside the buildings were ideally combustible for the incendiaries. The Luftwaffe had done something like this to British cities in 1940, but its efforts had been amateurish compared to Bomber Command’s grand study in annihilation.

For some time before GOMORRAH, the Air Ministry had been absorbed with the problem of how to consume a German city by fire.[88] Its operational research department, known as RE8, had done extensive testing to see what the maximally effective combination of bomb types might be to provoke a massive conflagration. Much care and skill had gone into the inquiry. Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, by 1943 in exile in the United States, had been drafted in to offer advice on the composition of German buildings. Fire Brigade staff with experience of the Blitz were asked to consider fires from an arsonist’s point of view. What would be the best way to disrupt the effort to put them out?

Researchers noted that under the right conditions of temperature and wind speed, small individual fires might be encouraged to merge to form a single uninterrupted blaze – a ‘firestorm’ as it was dubbed – feeding on all the available oxygen and sucking in everything flammable around it. Hamburg was judged to have ‘outstanding’ potential for such a firestorm attack. A density of 25,000 four-pound incendiaries per square mile, complemented by heavier phosphorus and benzol gel bombs to reach more inaccessible nooks, was calculated to be the optimum formula – it would, as the planners put it, ‘yield good dividend’. Enormous 4,000-pound ‘cookies’ capable of penetrating many feet of concrete and soil could be dropped to crack water mains. Delayed-action anti-personnel bombs mixed in with the incendiaries could kill firefighters and civil defence crews as they struggled to manage the initial incidents.

Bomber Command was not new to the business of firestorms. It had tried creating them several times before, but on those previous occasions its ambitions had always been foiled by inaccurate aircraft navigation, bad target-marking, scattered bombing patterns, bad weather or efficient German counter-measures. In the early hours of 28 July 1943, RE8’s tireless and meticulous efforts finally paid off.

The firestorm that was to destroy central Hamburg began at 1.20 a.m., hours after the last RAF bomber had departed the scene. It reached its crescendo at about 3 a.m. and only began to ebb about ninety minutes later when there was nothing left to burn. During those three hours, the best modern estimates suggest that perhaps 18,400 people were killed within a twelve-square-mile area.[89] About one in eight of them were children.

‘The screams of the burning and dying are unforgettable,’ fifteen-year-old Hamburg resident Herbert Brecht wrote later. ‘When a human being dies, he screams and whimpers…not at all bravely and not as beautifully as in a film.’[90] Kate Hoffmeister, a nineteen-year-old milliner, watched the asphalt melt in the street as she and her aunt fled the fires: ‘There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still lying alive but stuck…they must have rushed on to it without thinking. Their feet had got stuck and then they had put out their hands to try to get out again. They were on their hands and knees screaming.’[91]

The dead of Hamburg were later discovered in many grotesque forms. Some mummified bodies shrank and blackened to miniature size. Others appeared quite unburnt, though all their clothes – though not, oddly, their shoes – had disintegrated in the heat. The main cause of death was suffocation. Thousands of people sheltering in the city’s tenement basements were asphyxiated as the oxygen was slowly sucked out of their lungs by the greedy blaze above. Baked a brownish colour by the heat, many of these dead were found in the following days sitting in chairs or on the floors of the shelters, looking as though they had peacefully fallen asleep. Others, though, were piled up in disorderly compositions around the exit doors, their last moments evidently consumed in panic as they tried, futilely, to escape through passageways blocked by rubble. All that was left of some of Hamburg’s citizens was a puddle of coagulated black fat or a skein of ash. People at street level who had been sucked into the firestorm as the winds reached a hurricane force powerful enough to rip trees from their roots sometimes left behind not even a shred of charred tissue or viscera with which to be identified.[92]

There was a third British raid on Hamburg two nights later. This destroyed the suburb of Barmbek. A large department store collapsed and 370 people sheltering in its basement were killed by carbon monoxide fumes that leaked in from a burning coke store. The bombers could not re-create an inferno on the same scale as the one on Wednesday morning, however. A final raid on 2–3 August was scattered by violent thunderstorms and did little damage. No one will ever know how many people died in Hamburg during Operation GOMORRAH. Somewhere between 37,000 and 42,000 seems a low-end estimate.[93]

If the purpose of military violence is to kill the enemy, the bombing of Hamburg had been the single most efficient operation staged by the British since the war began. In fact, in terms of killing Germans, those ten days of national effort would never be surpassed. Even Dresden in February 1945 would not measure up to what GOMORRAH achieved. The British had finally done what the disciples of air power had been dreaming about ever since the Wright Brothers took to the air over Kitty Hawk. They had destroyed a city by fire.

*

From a technical point of view, Hamburg was a Bomber Command triumph. H2S had proved its ability to offer accurate target-marking. Window had rendered the German night fighter and Flak defences almost totally ineffective. Indeed, the German Kammhuber defence system had collapsed so completely that an entirely new night fighter network had to be established in its place, one that was to give the British bombers much trouble in the future. Out of 3,095 British sorties during four nights of raiding, only eighty-seven aircraft had failed to return home. This was a loss rate of fewer than 3 per cent, much better than during the Battle of the Ruhr.

The spectacular aerial photographs of Hamburg’s smoldering ruins were the best advertising High Wycombe had ever had. The Air Ministry’s director of intelligence revelled in ‘the complete wipe-out of a residential area by fire’ for the first time. ‘May it long continue!’ Even the Americans were impressed. Robert Lovett, an assistant secretary at the US War Department, wrote that ‘the pasting Hamburg got must have been terrific’. Harris told Portal that Bomber Command was now ‘on the verge of a final show-down’ with the Nazis. Given the right tools, he could, he said, ‘push Germany over by bombing this year’.[94] In fact, although he had no way of knowing it yet, the Hamburg firestorm would be the pinnacle of Harris’s war. For him, the final twenty-two months of the conflict would be defined not by even greater triumphs but by a spiral of frustration and disappointment.

In Hamburg, the clear-up began.[95] An ad hoc army including Wehrmacht and SS personnel, Hitler Youth, foreign forced labourers, POWs and concentration camp inmates was drafted in to put out fires, repair utilities, clear streets of rubble and locate, extract and when possible identify the dead. By early September, the remains of 26,409 of them had been recovered amid the swarms of rats and flies multiplying in the summer heat, ‘insolent and fat’. In some cases, all that was left of the city’s dead were bones in a bucket; in others, a watch or a wedding ring had to suffice. Rumours abounded across Germany that a quarter of a million people had been killed. The Nazi authorities sealed off much of Hamburg to control the flow of information. The flow of refugees could not be so easily stopped. In the first few days of August, 900,000 people fled. The regional Gauleiter spoke of a ‘psychosis’ taking hold. Civilians angry about stories of official corruption and incompetence attacked Nazi Party officials in the street.

Across Germany as a whole, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS intelligence agency responsible for monitoring popular morale, warned that all ‘feeling of security’ had collapsed. Residents of Berlin and Munich lived in fear that they might be the next to be ‘Hamburgered’. The Luftwaffe chief of staff Hans Jeschonnek thought that the news of the surrender of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad five months earlier had been ‘trifling’ compared to the shock of Hamburg. Goebbels privately admitted that Germans were ‘gripped by a panic-struck terror of the English air force’.[96] The air war, he thought, was ‘a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads’. A few hours before the firestorm, news had arrived that Mussolini had been toppled from power in fascist Italy. The possibility of a similar political revolution in Germany set off by fear of bombing could not be dismissed.

But the shock wore off, as shock always does. Albert Speer, the Reich’s economic chief, had warned Hitler that all arms production in Germany would end if six more cities were successively dealt the same kind of blow as Hamburg. Whether or not that was true, such a feat was beyond Bomber Command’s ability in mid-1943. People began drifting back to the city as it became clear that the raids would not be repeated. By the end of November, its population was almost back to pre-GOMORRAH size even though almost two-thirds of its housing stock had been destroyed or badly damaged. Returnees were billeted in prefabricated buildings and tents. Rail transport and other utilities and services were restored. Output at Blohm & Voss was higher than ever by the end of 1943, and the city’s overall economic activity had returned to around four-fifths of its pre-GOMORRAH level. Area bombing could cause enormous human suffering and material destruction. What it could not yet do, at least in 1943, was overcome the terrible resilience of a modern industrial society.

Back in Britain, people received the news of GOMORRAH with ‘complete satisfaction’. The Germans were finally ‘getting what they asked for’. Home Intelligence reported widespread curiosity and hope that the enemy might finally throw in the towel in the face of such devastation: ‘people conclude that flesh and blood cannot indefinitely stand up to what the Germans are getting’.[97] The Daily Mirror looked forward to another fifty German towns being ‘Hamburgered’. The Movietone newsreel reporting the raid positively gloated that the second city of the Reich had been ‘liquidated’ by Bomber Command. Only the Daily Express introduced a note of defensiveness in its coverage, pointing out that aircrews ‘take no pleasure in attacking other than military personnel’, but quickly adding that the people of Hamburg themselves were to blame for their own suffering: ‘The population should have cleared out…now they must accept the consequences.’[98]

There remained in mid-1943 a good deal of confusion in the British public’s mind about the exact nature of national bombing policy, a factual and ethical muddle which the Cabinet, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Information did nothing to dispel, and indeed encouraged with a series of misleading and contradictory statements. The central residential area of Hamburg had clearly been destroyed. There was no mistaking that from the after-raid photographs distributed to the newspapers. It was hard to square such a fact, though, with the government’s claim that German civilians were not being deliberately attacked. ‘There is no indiscriminate bombing,’ Attlee insisted in the Commons at the height of the Battle of the Ruhr. Bombing was only of targets ‘which are most effective from the military point of view’.[99] The result was a mess of indignant confusion in the minds of most people. The British were not behaving barbarically as the Germans had done against Warsaw and Rotterdam and Coventry. But the Germans had started it. And this was total war, in which people had to die and cruel things had to happen. And anyway, they deserved it.

Harris found the government’s equivocation irritating. It ought to be ‘unambiguously and publicly stated’, he wrote to the Air Ministry in October 1943, that Bomber Command’s aim was ‘the destruction of German cities [and] the killing of German workers’, not as ‘by-products of attempts to hit factories’ but as their principal aim.[100] His concern was less about offering transparency to the public than about the morale of his aircrews. If the government continued to insist that the RAF was carrying out precision bombing, then Bomber Command’s men, who knew perfectly well this was not the case, might infer that they were doing something furtive, even shameful.

Sir Arthur Street, under-secretary of state, responded smoothly to Harris with a fine mixture of Whitehall sophistry and cynicism. He observed that neither the Casablanca nor the POINTBLANK directive explicitly mentioned attacks on civilians as policy. It was morale that was the target, not civilians. The British would not attack any German city which did not contain military installations and was making no contribution to the Nazi war effort. The fact that there was no German city in 1943 that fitted this description so far as the RAF was concerned was mere detail. The important thing was that in principle there might be groups of German civilians who were out of bounds. That was enough. Conscience was satisfied. There were echoes here of what Harold Balfour had said in the Commons to Richard Stokes. No one could accuse the British of ‘wantonly bombing women and children for the sake of so doing’ because ‘wantonly’ implied doing it for no reason. But they could always come up with a reason if they tried hard enough. Wanting to win the war was surely a reason. Street, perhaps recognising the humbug contained within his own answer, ended the exchange with Harris on a more practical note. It was, he said, ‘desirable to present the bomber offensive in such a light as to provoke the minimum of public controversy and so far as possible to avoid conflict with religious and humanitarian opinion’.[101]

There the matter, for the time being, rested.

Perhaps Britain’s civilians preferred not knowing for certain what was going on. It made the moral problem much simpler, after all. Home Intelligence summarised what it thought was the majority view in summer 1943: ‘we appreciate the need for the liquidation of Hamburg, but for heaven’s sake don’t remind us of what we are doing’.[102]

As for Harris’s aircrewmen who had flown over the doomed enemy city, they did not enjoy the luxury of retreating into ignorance or pedantry. They had had a grandstand view of the chaos and destruction being wrought by their bombs. ‘It was as if I was looking into what I imagined was an active volcano,’ one of them said later: ‘There were great volumes of smoke, and mentally I could sense the great heat. Our actual bombing was like putting another shovelful of coal into the furnace.’[103] Smoke had filled cockpits. Heavy bombers had returned from Hamburg covered in soot and smelling of roast meat. The airmen had done what they had been ordered to do, and they had done it well. They had every reason to be professionally satisfied with the results of GOMORRAH.

As for what it had meant – well, that was a matter for each of them to ponder in his own time. ‘After our first Hamburg trip, my navigator and I cycled to Huntingdon and took a boat out on the river,’ one pilot recalled years later. ‘We drifted quietly downstream and Nick said: what about those poor sods under those fires. I couldn’t think of anything to say. We drifted quietly on.’[104]

8

Mediterranean Cranks

‘Beckoned warmly by the president we clustered closely round the two actors. The scene was irresistibly like a Sunday-school treat with the children gathered at the feet of their two schoolmistresses.’[1] It was noon on Sunday, 24 January 1943. Alan Moorehead, along with the other members of the Allied press corps, had been brought in great secrecy to the resort town of Anfa, Morocco, about three miles south of Casablanca, to a luxurious millionaire’s retreat (packed with sculptures, portraiture and what Moorehead described as a ‘staggering library’ of pornography) to hear Churchill and Roosevelt report on the outcome of the latest Anglo-American strategic conference, codenamed Symbol. The British and American leaders and their combined chiefs of staff had, it was now revealed, been in closed session in Casablanca for ten days. ‘We squatted in a semicircle on the wet grass,’ Moorehead recalled,

admirals, generals, diplomats and cabinet ministers perched among the flowerbeds and the orange trees behind. A brilliant sun flowed down and it caught the fixed bayonets of the American sentries who paced along the flower-hung garden walls around the villa. Aircraft kept passing back and forth overhead. Churchill, a little troubled by the sun, kept his dark hat cocked over his forehead; Roosevelt turned his tremendous smile onto the gathering.

The American president and British prime minister spoke for an hour. Most of what they had to say was breezily uninformative. The western Allies were committed to maintaining the offensive against the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. They would staunchly continue to aid Soviet Russia and China. Their land, sea and air forces would persist in relentlessly grinding down the ‘munitions and materials’ of the Axis enemy. None of this was surprising. But then Roosevelt chose, almost in a fit of absence of mind it seemed to the press onlookers, to say something interesting. ‘Some of you Britishers know the old story,’ he began:

We had a General called U. S. Grant. His name was Ulysses Simpson Grant, but in my, and the Prime Minister’s, early days he was called ‘Unconditional Surrender’ Grant. The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan. That means a reasonable assurance of future world peace. It does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.[2]

‘He then went on as though he did not understand how important a statement he had made,’ Drew Middleton, the New York Times’s correspondent, said later. Churchill appeared to him to be ‘considerably surprised’ by what had just happened.[3] The president afterwards insisted that the demand for ‘unconditional surrender’ had indeed been his own unrehearsed creation. ‘The thought popped into my mind…and the next thing I knew I had said it,’ he told Harry Hopkins.[4] For several years after the war, Churchill stuck to this story too. ‘The first time I heard that phrase used it was from the lips of President Roosevelt,’ he told the House of Commons in July 1949; ‘[it] was not brought before me to agree to in any way before it was uttered.’[5]

None of this was true. Roosevelt’s notes for the press conference, prepared in advance, explicitly mentioned the phrase ‘unconditional surrender’ twice. The American leader had discussed the issue with his chiefs of staff two weeks beforehand,[6] and Churchill had been kept fully informed of these discussions. Four days before the 24 January press conference, the prime minister telegraphed his ministers in London asking if they approved of an unconditional surrender statement being made public at the end of Symbol. They had all said yes. Indeed, they thought it would be useful to remind the Axis powers of the ‘rough stuff coming to them’.[7] This was duly recorded in the Cabinet Office files, and it was brought to Churchill’s attention while he was writing his account of the Casablanca Conference in The Hinge of Fate. ‘Memories of the war may be vivid and true but should never be trusted without verification’ was how Churchill explained the discrepancy.[8]

All this after-the-fact misremembering was not perhaps surprising, because once the war was over Roosevelt’s demand for unconditional surrender at Casablanca became one of its most notorious decisions – among the most ‘unnecessary and unwise’ of the whole conflict, according to some historians.[9] The criticism began even while the fighting was still going on. In 1943 the Economist called unconditional surrender ‘obvious nonsense’ and ‘an unworkable policy’ which it predicted would leave ‘a great vacuum into which Goebbels will pour unimagined horrors to stimulate German resistance’. A Chiefs of Staff Committee report in 1944 warned that Roosevelt’s demand was being used by Nazi propagandists ‘to convince the Germans that the loss of the war would be infinitely worse than their present sufferings’.[10]

After the war Marshall, Eisenhower and FDR’s former secretary of state Cordell Hull all distanced themselves from Roosevelt’s decision. In 1949, Ernest Bevin, by then foreign secretary, complained in Parliament that the unconditional surrender demand had left the Allies ‘with a Germany without law, without a constitution, without a single person with whom we could deal’. (He added, quite untruthfully, that the first he had heard about Roosevelt’s plan back in January 1943 was when he had read about it in the newspapers.)[11] FDR’s ‘ultimatum written in blood’ was blamed for unnecessarily prolonging the war by undermining the convictions of anti-Nazi plotters in the Third Reich’s inner circles. It left, the critics said, defeated Germany prostrate and defenceless, and Stalin the sole beneficiary of the power vacuum east of the Elbe.[12]

The British had certainly not entered the Second World War with an expectation that the Germans would ever surrender unconditionally. Victory, if and when it came, was expected to be in the form of a 1918-style armistice and peace talks. This assumption faltered as the war went on and early hopes faded that Hitler’s domestic political support was fragile. The ‘moderate’ Nazis who might unseat him in a coup never showed up. In November 1941, Churchill, discussing the issue with the War Cabinet, opposed any direct approaches to German dissidents. ‘Absolute silence’ on the matter was crucial, he told Eden, to avoid the merest hint in Washington or Moscow that Britain’s commitment to the war was less than total. Even so, at this stage Churchill did not rule out bargaining with Wehrmacht generals if they actually did overthrow Hitler.[13]

Whether offering the German people what we could now call an off-ramp would have shortened the war is impossible to say. The vast majority of the Volksdeutsche, when it came down to it, fought to the bitter end. According to interrogation of Wehrmacht POWs, this had more to do with fear of conquest by the Soviet Union than anything the western powers ever said or did.[14] Attempts by the German Resistance to kill Hitler continued after Roosevelt’s statement at Casablanca. The two assassination plots which had the greatest chance of success (von Schlabrendorff’s and von Gersdorff’s, both in March 1943) failed only because of the Führer’s uncanny luck. It remains a curious if moot question whether Churchill and Roosevelt would have modified the hardline position they had just laid down if either of these attempts on Hitler’s life had succeeded. The more famous von Stauffenberg plot a year later was conducted with an incompetence that justified the British government’s low opinion of the conspirators. In any case, Himmler’s SS had such a lock on the institutions of the Third Reich by July 1944 that even the elimination of its head of state would probably not have made much difference to the Nazi determination to fight usque ad mortem for ten more months.

The unconditional surrender demand was well received by the mass of British people in January 1943. Indeed, according to Home Intelligence, the only note of dissent was that it didn’t go far enough. The Germans needed ‘beating, slaughtering and bombing’, not opportunities to raise the white flag.[15] So for reasons of buttressing home front morale alone, FDR’s statement may have been worth it. Yet it remains puzzling that the British government casually agreed to a policy which in many ways conflicted not just with their country’s grand strategic interests but with the very methods it was using to fight the war. It is hard to square a refusal to negotiate with the Germans with RAF Bomber Command’s ‘morale bombing’ tactics, the success of which rested implicitly on the idea that the Third Reich might be compelled to sue for peace. Given that it was to Britain’s benefit to end the war in Europe as quickly as possible, before the empire’s wealth and strength were spent, it is peculiar that His Majesty’s Government brusquely ruled out the possibility of less than absolute German surrender. The likelihood of anything coming from negotiations with a post-Hitler regime may have been small. But why substitute a small chance for no chance at all?

*

Perhaps what the unconditional surrender decision reflected most of all was Churchill’s growing subordination to the unpredictable whims of the American president. Lord Lyttelton once remarked of Roosevelt that ‘he allowed his thoughts and conversation to flit across the tumultuous and troubled scene with a lightness and an inconsequence which were truly frightening in one wielding such power. He appeared to me to be the least methodical of men.’[16] FDR cultivated ambiguity.[17] He grinned affably but kept his own counsel. He preferred to commit as little to paper as possible, which assisted his habit of telling people in person whatever they wanted to hear at that given moment. Only later would they discover that no one had acted on such vague whispered promises. ‘You never quite know when you’ve got him, or whether he will not slip through your fingers,’ as Lord Halifax put it.[18] FDR’s bland bonhomie over scotch and martinis did not necessarily translate into policy.

No one left Casablanca with a greater sense of baffled frustration than the president’s army chief of staff, George C. Marshall. He had arrived intending to ‘win’ the debate at Symbol, as he felt he had not ‘won’ at the Allied conferences in 1942. In fact, he departed Morocco in bemusement and irritation, sensing that somehow – in a manner he still did not quite understand – he had once again been cheated by Churchill and Brooke and let down by his own commander-in-chief.

The main business at Symbol had not been the terms of peace but where the western Allies should strike next once all of North Africa had been occupied. Would there be a cross-Channel attack in 1943? Marshall emphatically thought there should be. He had been cajoled into abandoning his SLEDGEHAMMER plan for 1942 in favour of TORCH. He had arrived at Casablanca determined not to lose ROUNDUP the same way. He was adamant that American ground forces were not going to become sucked into ‘interminable’ operations in the Mediterranean.[19]

Yet business at Casablanca closed without any such agreement. Instead, the final CCS Committee report committed the British and Americans to an invasion of Sicily, codenamed HUSKY, as soon as the enemy had been defeated in Tunisia. ROUNDUP was not cancelled for 1943 – or not quite. The report agreed that there might be a ‘return to the continent’, meaning France, before the end of the year. But this would only happen if it looked possible to ‘take advantage of German disintegration’ on the Eastern Front.[20] That was a very speculative pledge. No definite plans in the Mediterranean had been agreed beyond HUSKY, but Marshall could already see to his dismay that once Allied ground troops were overlooking the Strait of Messina there would be a powerful urge to keep the momentum going in the central Mediterranean and cross over to Calabria at the toe of the Italian boot. If a major campaign began on the Italian mainland, the possibility of ROUNDUP in 1943 would be smaller than ever.

Marshall may have left Morocco unhappy, but Sir Alan Brooke did not. ‘We have got practically all we hoped to get when we came here!’ the CIGS crowed in his diary after Symbol. His private opinion of the American delegates – ‘charming people to work with’ but jejune, narrow-minded and unimaginative; Marshall himself, equipped with ‘practically no strategic vision’, capable of nothing but ‘clumsy criticism’ of well-laid British plans – had apparently been confirmed.[21]

How had Marshall been so hoodwinked? ‘We came, we listened, we were conquered,’ General Albert Wedemeyer, one of his chief aides, grumbled.[22] ‘We were overwhelmed by the British.’[23] Churchill’s chiefs of staff had arrived in Casablanca having already formulated a more or less coherent policy in favour of HUSKY. Marshall enjoyed no such support from the Chief of Naval Operations or the president for ROUNDUP. King was focused exclusively on the Pacific. He was happy enough to endorse a Sicilian expedition because it would reopen the trans-Mediterranean shipping route. This would free up Allied cargo carrying capacity, tonnage which King could redeploy for the Solomon Islands campaign. As for Roosevelt, his strategic views remained wholly political. He wanted American ground forces continuously engaged against the Germans somewhere in 1943 so he could buttress support for the war back home. So far as he was concerned, Sicily was as good a place to fight the Nazis as any.

At the opening of Symbol, Churchill had laid out a post-Tunisia plan to ‘strike at the under-belly of the Axis’ in southern Europe.[24] As is the case with a lot of the prime minister’s phraseology, it is hard to pin down when precisely he first began talking so animatedly about this ‘soft underbelly’ in the Mediterranean, but by the time of Casablanca he was throwing the metaphor about with enthusiasm.[25] Marshall was convinced neither by the military logic of this so-called underbelly route to Berlin nor by the sincerity of its advocates. He suspected, as the War Department put it, that the British were ‘motivated more largely by political than by sound strategic purposes’ – in other words, that Churchill and his deputy Brooke were playing at imperial politics, seeking to use American troops to carve out a Mediterranean sphere of influence for London at the expense of the wider aim of winning the war.[26]

Churchill has been described as a lifelong ‘Mediterranean crank’, and it is true that there was something about its clear warm waters which did seem to stimulate the wilder imaginings of his strategic mind.[27] In particular, at the beginning of 1943 the prime minister was gripped by the possibility of wooing Turkey into the anti-Axis alliance, which he believed would transform the whole war in southern Europe. Immediately after Casablanca he and Brooke met the Turkish president, İsmet İnönü, in a new round of this futile courtship. Later that year, as we will see, he would throw away 600 British lives in its forlorn pursuit.

That said, the idea that the British were scheming to build new empires in the Mediterranean frankly credits them with a greater forte for cynical calculation than they were capable of. Churchill and Brooke’s enthusiasm for Mediterranean operations may have been wrong-headed, but it was founded on military, not political, considerations. Equally, their hesitations about ROUNDUP in 1943 were mostly about the mundane logistical predicaments of combined arms warfare – above all, the shortage of shipping tonnage and specialist landing craft as yet available to the Allies, as well as the slower than planned build-up of US forces in England thanks to Dönitz’s renewed U-Boat offensive in the North Atlantic. These were intractable problems at the time of Casablanca, as even Marshall had to concede.

At the end of the day, it was neither Brooke nor Churchill nor any other Briton who decided that the Allies would fight in the Mediterranean rather than France in 1943. It was Adolf Hitler. Had the Germans given up on North Africa after Second Alamein and TORCH, the whole campaign would probably have been over by Christmas 1942. Marshall initially thought ‘two to three weeks’ of fighting would suffice.[28] But Hitler did not give up. Indeed, he sent a whole new Panzer army to Tunisia. If anyone had become a Mediterranean crank, it was the Führer. For Rommel the irony must have been unbearable. Back when the Deutsches Afrikakorps had been battling away in the Western Desert and even a single reinforcing division might have tipped the odds, Hitler had remained aloof. Now, having just demonstrated at Stalingrad a mulish inability to know when to cut his losses, he was prepared to waste over 100,000 well-equipped troops in a campaign that was already lost before it began.

What this meant for the Allies in the immediate term was that the battle for Tunisia would not end until mid-May 1943. Only then would the large American and British land, sea and air forces assembled in the Mediterranean – the only significant body of men capable of offensive action in the west – be freed up to do something else. There was simply no time to redeploy them to the United Kingdom and then carry out an attack against France before the end of September, after which deteriorating weather conditions in the Channel would rule out any further amphibious operations in that part of the world for at least the next six months.

Once Tunisia was taken, then, the choice facing the Allies was not Normandy (ROUNDUP) or Sicily (HUSKY); it was to do something else in the Mediterranean in the remainder of 1943 or do nothing for a year – and that was barely a choice at all. Quite apart from anything else, the fragile politics of diplomacy with Stalin ruled out the idea of the British and Americans sitting idle for so long. Even the thwarted Marshall could see that.

*

From the point of view of the average British or American soldier, it was just as well that Hitler inadvertently foreclosed any possibility of a D-Day descent on Normandy a year early. An invasion of France in summer 1943, against a much stronger, relatively intact Wehrmacht, would have been a much crueller ordeal, with a far less certain outcome, than the battle that actually took place. The fact that the Tunisian campaign dragged on for six months might, then, be described as a blessing in disguise. But if so (to quote Churchill in a different context), it was very effectively disguised.

The Allies certainly tried to end the campaign quickly, the British making a bid to finish the job in late December 1942.[29] The plan was to push First Army’s 6th Armoured Division up the Medjerda River Valley to Tebourba, just twenty miles from Tunis. To do this, however, it was necessary to take the high ground to the south-west of Tebourba, and in particular a massif known as Longstop Hill. A battalion of the Coldstream Guards captured the twin peaks of Longstop in two gruelling night-time battles fought in driving rain, only to see them lost again to German counter-attacks. Defeat at Longstop was followed by torrential winter squalls which continued spasmodically for the next eight weeks and made progress impossible. ‘The ground turned to mud,’ observed Alan Moorehead, who after Symbol had become embedded with First Army,

and it was the mud of African extravagance, thick, sticky and bottomless. The dead were buried in mud and the living were in it up to their knees. They were wet to the skin all day and all night. They had mud in their hair; mud in their food. When the mud dried it set like iron and had to be beaten off the boots with a hammer or a rifle-butt. Before the astonished eyes of the commanders tanks went down to their turrets in mud.[30]

Tunisia was already proving itself a very different combat environment from the Western Desert. The days of fighting on pancake sands where even the slightest undulation on the desert floor marked a major obstacle were over. Much of Tunisia was, like Tebourba, hill country, with abrupt ridges and dips, rises, gullies and passes – in other words a defender’s paradise of hidden strongholds and ambush points. The Germans seeded the mountainsides with entrenched machine gun and mortar positions carefully chosen to provide mutually supporting fields of fire. Even when their troops were at first driven off, Wehrmacht officers became highly proficient at scratching together ad hoc formations (Kampfgruppen) to be flung back at the Allies to recapture lost ground before it could be properly consolidated.

It didn’t help that First Army’s commander, Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson, was a typical product of the interwar British Army staff college system: a dutiful and hard-working but unimaginative man lacking that enigmatic quality so important to successful commanders of the Second World War, ‘grip’. Anderson’s deficiencies were commonly recognised (Patton called him ‘earnest but dumb’) and he was quickly put out to pasture once the campaign was over, but in late 1942 there had been no one else on hand.[31] Eisenhower, as theatre commander-in-chief in Algiers, might have better imposed his own will on events in Tunisia, but he was distracted by the fractious Anglo-US-French politics of TORCH. Ike was further inhibited by his own lack of battlefield experience and an innate irresolution which would prove slow to fade.

In early February 1943, Rommel and the survivors of Alamein (a force now dubbed Heeresgruppe Afrika) arrived in southern Tunisia, closely pursued by British Eighth Army. The combination of the old hands from Rommel’s Western Desert campaign and the 5th Panzerarmee commanded by General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim meant that about 180,000 troops, 105,000 of them German, were now defending what was left of Axis North Africa, a rough quadrilateral about sixty miles wide and 150 miles deep.[32] They were outnumbered more than two to one and could expect no further reinforcements. Their supply situation was described by von Arnim as ‘catastrophic’, for Allied surface vessels, submarines and aircraft could now brutally interdict all air and sea traffic across the ‘death route’ from Italy to Tunis.[33] Victory for the Axis was out of the question. Delaying defeat until autumn might, however, not be.

With the weather modestly improving, the Desert Fox demonstrated a flash of his old piratical zeal by attacking First Army, which had become strung out on an ungainly north–south axis across the Dorsal Mountains. On 18 February two of his veteran Panzer divisions, depleted in strength but highly experienced, descended on the US II Corps at Kasserine Pass and bludgeoned the Americans into a disorganised and embarrassing flight (their commander, Major-General Lloyd Fredendall, a protégé of Marshall whom Eisenhower had previously ‘praised to the skies’, slept peacefully in his command tent while his men were being massacred sixty miles away).[34] Alexander sneered to Brooke that ‘soft and fat’ rookie GIs had melted away – not exactly a generous commentary given the British performance at Gazala a year before.[35]

This was in any case no Gazala, for after five days Rommel abandoned the offensive. His younger self might have driven on to Algiers. Now, plagued by illness, he lacked the necessary energy and force of will. Moreover, he was conscious that Montgomery was approaching to the south-east. On 6 March Rommel switched fronts and assaulted Eighth Army at Medenine, where, however, with plentiful forewarning thanks to ULTRA intelligence, the British were ready to receive the Axis advancing forces with dug-in tanks and anti-tank guns. The result was a replay of Alam Halfa a year before. Heeresgruppe Afrika, having pointlessly lost more than fifty of its precious Panzers, retreated twenty-five miles northwards to the Mareth Line. This was a narrow, naturally strong defensive position hemmed in by the Matmata Hills on one side and the coast on the other. Medenine was Rommel’s last hurrah in Africa. On 8 March he was evacuated back to Germany and von Arnim took overall command.

If Medenine (‘an absolute gift’, as Montgomery cackled) had been Alam Halfa redux, then Eighth Army’s assault on the Mareth Line, which began on 16 March, had echoes of Second Alamein – a ponderous set-piece battle which achieved its limited goal of pushing back the Germans and Italians while failing to trap and destroy them, and which went considerably less to plan than its commander later pretended.[36] The initial British assault was an ill-conceived frontal charge by a single unsupported infantry brigade ordered to cross a mine-strewn killing ground in heavy rain. Unsurprisingly, the attack failed, with heavy casualties. An armoured left hook to envelop the enemy through the Tebaga Gap in the mountains went slower than it ought to have done because of traffic jams and communication foul-ups. After nine days of bloody resistance, Heeresgruppe Afrika withdrew in good order to Wadi Akarit, an even narrower front than Mareth, flanked this time by impassable salt marshes. This would also have to be breached, and another time-consuming and painful set-piece assault began on 5 April. Once again, the Axis troops slipped away before total defeat to take yet another stand at Enfidaville. On each of these occasions, Montgomery blamed all mistakes on the inadequacies of his subordinates. Seasoned Western Desert formations like the 50th (Tyne Tees) Infantry Division were traumatised by their ordeal in Tunisia. Their men neither liked nor trusted their army commander ever again.[37]

In late April, the momentum of the advance shifted back to Anderson’s First Army, reinforced with some of Montgomery’s best armour and infantry. Churchill tanks of the North Irish Horse mounted an outlandish charge up the slopes of Longstop Hill and retook it on 23 April – a triumph of British gearboxes as well as soldierly courage. The Churchills at Longstop found themselves engaging fifty-four-ton ‘Tigers’ (PzKpfw VIs), the most famous tanks of the war, a couple of dozen of the first examples of which had been sent by Berlin to reinforce Tunisia. While the frontal armour protection of both vehicles was about the same, the Churchill’s six-pounder (57mm) main weapon was outclassed by the Tiger’s 88mm, and British crews had to rely on a lucky shot to disable an opponent’s track or jam a turret. The ultimate British answer to the Tiger was not the Churchill but the QF seventeen-pounder anti-tank gun, which also arrived in small numbers in Tunisia fresh from the factory, and which would eventually be mounted to outstanding effect on the US-built Sherman tank. Thus a new generation of heavy weaponry started to be deployed to fight the last two years of the war, weapons which would make the tanks and guns of 1940 and 1941 look flimsy by comparison.

On 7 May, Tunis fell. Five days later, von Arnim and over a quarter of a million remaining Axis troops in North Africa, including a handful of veterans of the original Deutsches Afrikakorps who had debouched into Libya with Rommel twenty-seven months before, laid down their arms for the last time. ‘Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over,’ Alexander cabled to Churchill. ‘All enemy resistance has ceased. We are masters of the North African shores.’[38]

*

Brooke heard Alex’s news in the White House Oval Office. He was in Washington with Churchill attending the opening session of Trident, the second great Anglo-American conference of 1943. The CIGS recalled that he had been in the same room almost a year earlier when he had been handed the telegram announcing Tobruk’s surrender. ‘I wandered through the last eleven months with all their anxieties, hopes, disappointments and worries,’ Brooke wrote in his diary. ‘And now! At last the first stage of my proposed strategy accomplished in spite of all the various factors that have been trying to prevent it.’[39] One of those ‘various factors’ was Marshall, whose modest gentlemanly qualities Brooke continued to regard with a patrician respect, but who remained, so far as the CIGS was concerned, an irredeemable military dullard – ‘quite incapable of grasping the objects of our strategy’.[40]

Much was to be decided at Trident, not all of it, as we shall see, to Brooke’s liking. But HUSKY at least was confirmed as the next step.[41] The invasion of Sicily would be the most ambitious Allied operational plan yet – a landing of 180,000 British, Canadian and US troops across twenty-six invasion beaches supported by over 1,350 Allied warships and 4,900 aircraft.[42] TORCH had encountered only scattered resistance from Vichy French troops. This time the Allies would be invading an Axis homeland, and fierce opposition was guaranteed. There were at least 200,000 Italian troops on the island and two German Panzerdivisionen with 160 tanks.[43] Reinforcements were inevitable once the Allies landed. The US Army had no recent experience of making an opposed amphibious assault. The British Army did, but most of it had been an education in what not to do.

Eisenhower remained in overall charge as Mediterranean generalissimo, with Alexander as C-in-C of the newly designated 15th Army Group, which consisted of British-Canadian Eighth Army under Montgomery and the upgraded ‘US Seventh Army’ under Patton, who had replaced the ineffectual Fredendall as commander of American forces in the theatre. In practice, with Eighth Army the bigger of the two armies and Alex habitually deferring to his headstrong subordinate, HUSKY was to be Monty’s show. The legend of Montgomery and Patton’s wartime rivalry derives largely from their few weeks of parallel command in Sicily. Neither general emerges from the encounter with much credit, but there was little ‘grip’ even at the highest levels of command in Sicily. Alexander, fearless, amiable, but habitually lazy, failed to direct either of his generals as to their distinct operational objectives on the island (‘no one gets any orders, and we all do what we like’ is how Montgomery described Alex’s command style).[44] This was something that would have created opportunities for confusion and strife even if two less disputatious men than Monty and Patton had been in charge.

HUSKY marked not just the largest Allied amphibious operation to date, but also the first large-scale use of US and British airborne troops. Churchill had ordered the creation of a 5,000-man airborne force back in June 1940 in response to the spectacular achievements of the German Fallschirmjäger on Holland and the Belgian fortresses on the Albert Canal. British experiments in small parachute-landed raiding parties had taken place throughout 1941 and 1942, but none on the scale of the earlier German operations. By early 1943, it seemed to such gadflies of the British press as Captain Basil H. Liddell Hart that that moment for a big Allied airborne offensive had long since arrived. He lambasted the army in the Daily Mail for its lack of imagination in not using massed airborne troops to trap von Arnim in Tunisia. Whether this dubiously informed media criticism bore any weight in the subsequent planning for HUSKY is unclear, but the Sicilian invasion was certainly seen by enthusiasts of airborne warfare as an opportunity to prove its credentials – with concerns about inadequate training, especially of the pilots whose critical job would be to transport the troops to their targets, quietly suppressed.[45]

Shortly after midnight on 10 July 1943, HUSKY opened with the landing of two British airborne brigades – one glider-borne infantry, one paratrooper – tasked with capturing bridges just beyond the invasion beaches that the main Allied forces were due to assault a few hours later.[46] Both brigades accomplished their missions, but in doing so they demonstrated just how perilously exposed airborne troops were to the vagaries of weather and human error. Over seventy of the British gliders, released from their towing aircraft too soon, at low altitude and in a howling gale, crashed into the Mediterranean. Another fifty-nine were strewn irregularly across the Sicilian countryside. Only twelve landed accurately. The British paratroopers, meanwhile, were badly shot up en route to their jump zone by nervous Allied anti-aircraft gunners who misidentified the planes flying overhead as Luftwaffe. High casualties in both bridge battles were attributed afterwards to landing too close to the assigned objectives. This was an odd conclusion to derive, given how haphazardly many of the airborne troops had been scattered across the battlefield. Nonetheless, airborne planners resolved to avoid the problem in future by choosing landing zones further away from their mission targets. It was a ‘lesson’ that contributed to failure on a massive scale at Arnhem a year later.[47]

The seaborne landings also demonstrated that the Allies still had a lot to learn about the execution of complex combined operations. Landing craft were dispersed miles apart, many delivered to entirely the wrong beaches. Most arrived late, with individual units mixed confusingly together. Fiftieth Infantry Division’s commander afterwards described the meticulous hours he had spent planning assault locations as ‘a pure waste of time’.[48] Fortunately for the seven Allied divisions that landed, such Italian defenders as they encountered on the beaches did not interest themselves in taking advantage of the chaos. Almost to a man they turned heel and fled for the interior. It was an indication that many of Mussolini’s soldati were unwilling to risk their lives any further for him.[49]

Eighth Army had landed at the south-eastern point of the Sicilian triangle, with US Seventh Army on its left flank. Between the Allied beachheads and the Strait of Messina lay the massive cone of Mount Etna. Any advance, then, would have to go round it, and the choice was either to squeeze past the volcano’s eastern side along the marshy, narrow Plain of Catania, or else take the longer, hillier detour to the west. Montgomery chose Catania. Things went well enough to begin with. The important resupply ports of Syracuse and Augusta were captured by 11 July, but then the impetus stalled as the British and Canadians encountered German armour blocking the coast road. His frontal route suddenly uninviting, Montgomery, perhaps thinking of Mareth, proposed a left hook. He would split off two infantry divisions and an armoured brigade from the bulk of Eighth Army and these would make for Nicosia. This, though, might leave his forces on the Catanian Plain too weak to make any further progress. It would also play havoc with the Americans’ plans by cutting across their agreed route of advance.[50] Alexander, acquiescent to his subordinate’s ‘master plan’, shrugged. At theatre command HQ, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder was alarmed. Monty, he said, ‘thinks of himself as Napoleon’, before bluntly concluding: ‘he is not’.[51]

There was indeed no Austerlitz in Sicily. The terrain alone forbade it. The island was even more vertiginously formidable than Tunisia. Sheer ridges and steep dips created inviting reverse-slope positions for German mortars and field artillery, invisible to advancing troops. Terraced peach and pear orchards and vineyards were divided up by rambling white stone walls that offered perfect ambush sites. Any motorised approach had to proceed along single-lane dirt roads, easily mined and blocked with demolition charges. There was no possibility of surprise, for Allied boots and tyres threw up clouds of chalky dust visible for miles around. There were fewer flies than in North Africa, but the stabbing heat was no less unrelenting. ‘A cock crows down in the valley and the tintabulation of sheep bells comes from the next stubble field,’ wrote Neil McCallum, a subaltern attached to the Gordon Highlanders who was badly wounded during the campaign: ‘Yesterday we pursued the elusive enemy. After fifteen miles of marching we climbed a hill to be confronted by another…far away last night we saw what might be shell or mortar fire. It did not matter. Everyone was more concerned with blistered feet.’[52]

As the British and Canadian front snarled up, Patton, who had initially accepted his exclusion from the main advance with uncharacteristic resignation, now pressed Alexander to be released from his holding action on the left flank of Eighth Army so as to reintroduce some momentum to the Allied offensive.[53] He was granted permission to launch a tentative ‘reconnaissance’ mission north-westwards. This turned into a full-fledged cavalry-style charge towards Palermo, which fell to the Americans on 22 July. The seizure of Palermo had less to do with any strategic purpose than with generating newsreel images to glorify US Seventh Army and its strutting leader, but Patton’s blood was now up. American troops and tanks turned eastwards, capturing Nicosia on the 28th.

Eighth Army was also pressing on Catania by this point, and the German commander in Sicily, General Hans Hube, seeing the end approaching, requested permission to begin an orderly withdrawal from the island. That in itself was unremarkable. What was remarkable was that Berlin, for once, acceded to his request without complaint. Hube proceeded to safely evacuate over 110,000 troops and 14,000 vehicles back to the Italian mainland. There would be no ‘Messinagrad’ to match ‘Tunisgrad’. Patton grabbed bragging rights by getting his men into the island’s capital ahead of the British on the night of 16 August. The failure of the Allies’ sea and air forces to prevent the German withdrawal from Sicily proved awkward to explain afterwards. Admittedly, it would have been no easy feat – the Strait of Messina bristled with Flak guns and coastal artillery – but the fact that the Allies had not even drawn up a plan to interdict such an evacuation was quite an oversight. There was at least the consolation that the Luftwaffe in the Mediterranean had been smashed. The Germans had lost over 600 aircraft in the doomed defence of Sicily, including 200 advanced single-engine fighters, a priceless commodity by 1943.[54]

*

HUSKY also finished off Mussolini. In the early hours of 25 July, the Fascist Grand Council voted to ask Italy’s King Victor Emanuel III to reassume the constitutional powers he had ceded to Il Duce back in 1925. The king immediately did so and appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio, a former chief of the general staff, as the new prime minister. Mussolini was placed under ‘protective state custody’, effectively close arrest. He spent the next month being shuttled back and forth between various secret locations until he was deposited at a ski lodge in the central Apennines. It was there that a German commando squad swooped in in mid-September and spirited the down-at-heel dictator back to Germany, from where he became the proxy satrap of a fascist state in northern Italy.

The radio communiqué from Rome announcing the change of leadership on 26 July stated defiantly: ‘The war continues. Italy keeps faith to its pledged word.’ The plotters even had the army shoot a few anti-war protestors for good measure.[55] No one inside or outside the country believed any of it for a moment, and quite rightly. Almost as soon as the coup was over, Badoglio sent three generals to Lisbon to sound out the Allies about covert armistice negotiations. In principle, the British and Americans had committed themselves at Casablanca to accept nothing less than unconditional surrender, but Churchill suggested to Roosevelt that they should ‘not be too particular’ about dealing with any post-Mussolini government, ‘even if it is not all we should like’, so long as it could ‘deliver the goods’. FDR agreed.[56] For his part, Hitler, furious about his old comrade’s toppling, appointed Rommel to a new army group command headquartered at Lake Garda and began the movement of Wehrmacht troops to Italy to reinforce the survivors of the Sicilian campaign.

All this caught the Allies as much by surprise as the Germans. Even as HUSKY began, they had still not agreed what (if anything) to do next in the Mediterranean once Sicily was captured. Eisenhower, as theatre C-in-C, had merely been directed by the UK-US chiefs of staff to perform ‘such operations in exploitation of HUSKY as are best calculated to eliminate Italy from the war and to contain the maximum number of German forces’.[57] Landing troops on the Italian mainland would be as big a psychological step as a military one. The campaigns in North Africa and Sicily had both had clearly defined geographical endpoints. Theoretically, an invasion of Italy could go on all the way until the Allies reached Berlin. It was just the kind of ‘interminable’ commitment at which the Americans had always baulked.

Nonetheless, even an arch-sceptic like Marshall could see that Mussolini’s fall created opportunities. If the Allies responded to surrender overtures from Rome quickly enough, they might be able to grab much of the peninsula without a fight. American airmen were especially keen to get hold of the Foggia airfields network on the Apulian Plain because it would be a perfect base from which to launch heavy bomber attacks on strategic targets in southern Germany and the Balkans. The Ploeşti oil refineries in Romania, which supplied much of the Third Reich’s petroleum needs, were a priority target for General Arnold’s USAAF. But the closest usable airbase in summer 1943 was at Benghazi, 940 miles away from Ploeşti. A major American raid on the Romanian refineries mounted on 1 August resulted in fifty-three of the 177 attacking B-24s failing to return. Little damage was done to the target. Raiding from Foggia would cut two-fifths of the flying time to Ploeşti, reduce airframe and aircrew losses, and (hopefully) improve results. Marshall was persuaded. On 26 July, he ordered Eisenhower to plan for an amphibious landing in the vicinity of Naples, to be codenamed AVALANCHE.[58]

All this was confirmed with the British at the First Quebec Conference (Quadrant) from 17 to 24 August. Marshall was emphatic, however, that all further Mediterranean operations, including AVALANCHE, would enjoy American blessing only insofar as they assisted the success of the upcoming cross-Channel invasion of France. He was determined not to delay the Second Front a moment longer. At Trident, Marshall had at last got the British to agree on a definite deadline of 1 May 1944 for ROUNDUP – now relabelled, more portentously, OVERLORD. An Anglo-American planning staff (COSSAC) had been appointed to begin drawing up the details. Marshall was insistent: all other Allied projects would henceforth be subordinate to OVERLORD’s needs. To hammer the point home, Marshall forced Brooke to agree that seven Allied divisions, fifteen bomber squadrons and half the landing craft in the Mediterranean would be redeployed to the UK to be available for OVERLORD no later than November 1943.[59]

In theory the British had signed off on all of this. But neither Churchill nor his CIGS had really come to terms yet with the idea of OVERLORD über alles. They continued to propose strategy in defiance of their conference commitments. The prime minister argued to the Americans that they should keep the Germans guessing on both flanks of Europe. They ought to be able ‘to use our left as well as our right hand’, as he put it later in The Hinge of Fate. ‘Events would decide whether we should thrust across the Channel or follow our luck in the Mediterranean, or do both.’[60]

This neutral, keep-all-our-options-open language was misleading. In the first half of 1943 Churchill had had a genuinely open mind on the matter. Now he had begun to succumb to a serious case of Mediterranean crankery. The prime minister’s view was no longer that the soft underbelly ought to be one option among several. It was that Italy was by far the best axis of advance. A week after the start of HUSKY, and two months after Trident, he was representing to his own chiefs of staff that ‘I have no doubt myself that the right strategy for 1944’ would be ‘Maximum post-HUSKY certainly to the Po, with an option to attack westwards in the south of France or northeastwards towards Vienna, and meanwhile to procure the expulsion of the enemy from the Balkans and Greece’.[61]

This was not remotely what Churchill and Brooke had agreed with Marshall in Washington in May or were about to re-agree in Canada in August. The American conception of AVALANCHE was of a strictly limited operation to advance as far north as Rome – and no further – to gain Foggia and tie down German divisions that could otherwise be sent to France in 1944. Yet here was Churchill conjuring up scenes of Allied tanks streaming northwards through the Brenner Pass and paratroopers descending on Salonika. US secretary of war Henry Stimson, visiting London at this time, caught a suggestive whiff of the mood and warned Roosevelt that the British were ‘frankly at variance’ with OVERLORD.[62]

After V-E Day, Churchill’s defenders argued that his preference for a Mediterranean strategy in 1943 was meant as an opening move in the Cold War long game. Their argument was that early western Allied thrusts in Dalmatia and Istria would have liberated the Balkans and central Europe from the Germans before the Red Army could get there and so would have denied these territories to Stalin in the post-war division of spoils. In fact, there is little evidence that Churchill was thinking along such lines at the time. When Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, the chief British liaison officer to the partisans in Yugoslavia, met the prime minister in Cairo in December 1943 he reported that Tito’s men were the ones to back militarily but that the result might be a Soviet-dominated Belgrade once the Germans were beaten. ‘Do you intend to make Yugoslavia your home after the war?’ Churchill asked Brigadier Maclean. ‘Neither do I. And that being so, the less you and I worry about the form of government they set up, the better.’[63]

If there was any political calculation going on in 1943, it was probably that the Mediterranean was a predominantly British theatre of war and likely to remain one for some time. OVERLORD, as everyone knew, would be dominated by the Americans from the beginning. They simply had more troops available to send to France. Churchill was already aware by the time of Quadrant that Roosevelt was eager to meet with Stalin, ideally in bilateral talks without the British being present. The prime minister could feel himself being edged out of the grand strategic conversation. Maintaining the western Allied focus on the Mediterranean would, if nothing else, keep his own country’s efforts and his own counsel more relevant.

*

Eighteen days passed between the capture of Messina and the first Allied troops landing on the Italian shore on 3 September 1943. The delay was to some extent unavoidable for logistical reasons. But it also reflected reckless procrastination on the part of the new government in Rome and dissent between Whitehall and Washington about what to do next. Although it had been Roosevelt who had pushed for the unconditional surrender policy at Casablanca, it was Eden at the British Foreign Office (a diehard when it came to the wickedness of Italian fascism) who now insisted most vehemently that there should be no compromises with the Badoglio regime. Part of the problem was that no one had ever quite defined what exactly ‘unconditional surrender’ meant. Was it merely the capitulation of all hostile armed forces? Or did it also require the enemy polity to dissolve itself?[64]

While the Allied governments dithered over what terms to offer Badoglio, the Italians, calculating with a heedless indifference to reality that they could play the Germans off against the British and Americans, sought to buy time. They assumed that once they made a deal with the Allies, Hitler would immediately withdraw his forces well north of Rome. To be fair, that was indeed more or less the advice that Rommel and General Alfred Jodl, the Wehrmacht chief of staff, were giving their Führer at the time. They recommended that the Germans defend Italy no further south than a line from Pisa to Rimini. Badoglio also underestimated just how much Hitler had been infuriated at the Italian government’s betrayal of Mussolini. Vowing that ‘the Jews and the rabble’ in Rome must pay, the German leader intended to send a sharp message to any other Axis satellite states that were thinking of jumping ship.[65] Badoglio’s slowness to act would cost his country dearly.

Eighth Army troops crossed the Strait of Messina on 3 September.[66] They met little resistance; but Reggio Calabria was 320 miles from Foggia and over 400 from Rome. What was really going to matter was the success of AVALANCHE, the amphibious landing at the Gulf of Salerno, just thirty miles south-east of Naples (and under 170 from Rome) by the US Fifth Army. This was actually a mixed Allied force of four American and three British divisions under US Lieutenant-General Mark Clark. Clark’s troops began landing at Salerno shortly after 3 a.m. on the morning of 9 September. The previous evening, they had heard BBC radio announce an armistice with Italy. The choice of Salerno for AVALANCHE was a calculated risk. It would involve landings scattered across a thirty-mile amphitheatre of a bay at the very limits of Allied air cover. Much would depend on whether the newly friendly Italian armed forces could assist them against the Germans.

In fact, Clark’s troops were disembarking into a country in chaos. Badoglio and his ministers had fled Rome as soon as the armistice was declared, giving no advice to their military commanders about what to do next. The result was that over the next few hours the Germans were able to swiftly secure the Italian capital and all lines of communication along the peninsula and disarm Italy’s stunned soldiery both in the homeland and across the eastern Mediterranean. Kesselring’s men massacred anyone who dared defy them. The German commander had six veteran Panzer and motorised infantry divisions in the vicinity of Salerno, and as soon as Fifth Army made landfall he threw them into a furious counter-offensive from the high ground.

For the next week the fate of AVALANCHE remained precarious. At one point the Germans got to within two miles of the beaches. There were whispers of a new Dunkirk. Officers expecting imminent capture began burning their maps and documents.[67] Norman Lewis, a British intelligence subaltern attached to one of the American divisions, described ‘outright panic’ among a ‘rabble of shocked and demoralised soldiery’ with ‘ineptitude and cowardice spreading down from the command’.[68] Only naval gunfire and air support saved Clark’s beachhead. On 16 September, with Eighth Army advancing from the south, Kesselring halted the attack and withdrew from the bay. Montgomery (who was not in the least upset about coming very visibly to the rescue of an American general) led his men to the Foggia airfields on 28 September, and the King’s Dragoon Guards in Fifth Army had the honour of driving first into Naples on the morning of 1 October. Alexander signalled London that he expected Allied troops to reach Rome no later than 7 November.

In fact, three days after the Allies reached Naples, Kesselring obtained permission from Hitler to defend Italy in the south, not the north. He had been unimpressed with the Allied performance in Sicily and at Salerno and had successfully persuaded the Führer that aggressive resistance could keep the British and Americans out of Rome in 1943.[69] The Germans dug in on the Volturno River just north of Naples and poured in reinforcements. By the end of October, they had twenty-five divisions across Italy. Allied progress towards Rome abruptly stopped.

Perhaps no other campaign of the Second World War was to be so dominated by the facts of geography and climate as the crawl up the Italian boot over the next twenty months – facts that had been long available to anyone in possession of a good school atlas. The interior of the peninsula was dominated by the Apennine Mountains, some peaks of which reached 9,500 feet. The only viable lines of advance for motorised troops were along the coastal roads – Highways Six and Seven on the Tyrrhenian Sea and Highway Sixteen on the Adriatic. Of these, however, only the first two led to Rome, and Highway Seven, the most direct route to the capital, had been rendered impassable by the Germans flooding the Pontine Marshes. So Highway Six it had to be. But this led through the Liri Valley, the southern entrance to which was dominated by the 1,700-foot heights of Monte Cassino with its venerable Benedictine Abbey. Monte Cassino would have to be taken before any advance to Rome could continue. Kesselring was very aware of this, which is why he made the heights the central feature of his ‘Gustav Line’ fortifications stretching across the peninsula from the Garigliano to the Sangro rivers. ‘The Tommies will have to chew their way through us, inch by inch,’ a defending German paratrooper wrote home. ‘We will surely make hard chewing for them.’[70]

*

On 24 October, Alexander submitted a review of the situation in Italy which Eisenhower considered alarming enough to pass on to the American and British heads of government. ‘The obvious present German intention is to hold a line south of Rome where the country favors defense, and allows no scope to the deployment of our superiority in armour or artillery,’ it surmised:

Coming bad weather will limit the employment of our air forces…enemy troops may be tired, but they can be relieved by formations from the north. There are indications that this is being done now. We have neither the formations nor the shipping to do so. It would therefore appear that we are committed to a long and costly advance to Rome, a ‘slogging match.’[71]

Churchill allowed his scepticism about OVERLORD its greatest public airing of the war. ‘I will not allow the great and fruitful campaign in Italy to be cast away and end in a frightful disaster for the sake of crossing the Channel in May,’ he told Eden.[72] He wrote to Roosevelt pleading that ‘at all costs we must win Rome and the airfields to the north of it’. Eisenhower and Alexander had to be given ‘what they need to win the battle for Italy, no matter what effect is produced on subsequent operations’. He meant OVERLORD of course.[73] Churchill was particularly keen to have the ‘lawyers’ agreement’ signed at Trident to withdraw seven divisions from the Mediterranean suspended.[74]

Roosevelt was having none of it. The invasion of Italy had achieved almost all its limited purposes so far as he and the other Americans in Washington were concerned: the fascist surrender; the Foggia airbases; a port (Naples) to supply them; and a large diversion of German defensive power to defend against a major assault in the south that was not, in fact, coming.[75] This was what they had signed up to. As a bonus, Sardinia and Corsica had been liberated in September without serious opposition. Capturing Rome would have been nice symbolically as the first Axis capital to fall to the Allies; but if it was not to be, at least not in 1943, then so be it. FDR had often failed to support his army chief of staff, but now he rallied to Marshall’s aid. With Roosevelt, as always, it was about politics. His focus was on the upcoming meeting with Stalin in Tehran in November. The Soviet leader cared a lot about OVERLORD and not one jot about Italy. That, so far as FDR was concerned, settled it.

At Tehran, Churchill would get a minimal concession of a delay of OVERLORD by one month in order to keep enough landing craft in the Mediterranean to carry out a small amphibious landing close to Rome to outflank the Monte Cassino defences and hopefully revivify the advance northwards. This was the Anzio offensive (Operation SHINGLE) of January 1944 which bogged down almost immediately and made no impression whatsoever on the strategic situation in Italy.[76] The campaign lingered on, its more talented and ambitious commanders drifting away – Eisenhower and Montgomery were among the first to leave, both recalled to England in December 1943 (Monty had always been baffled and irritated by Italy, a ‘dog’s breakfast’ of a campaign without any clear objective).[77] The theatre soon acquired a reputation as a retirement home for mediocre generals. After OVERLORD the Americans lost interest in the Mediterranean entirely, except insofar as they could direct their strength there to support operations in France.

The Italian campaign has been described by one historian of the conflict as ‘tactically the most absurd and strategically the most senseless of the whole war’.[78] Other verdicts have been no less dismissive: it was ‘a needlessly costly sideshow…justified by no defensible military or political purpose,’ and a ‘totally unnecessary’ exercise which killed a lot of Allied soldiers but ‘played little role in defeating Germany. If anything it delayed the end of the war.’[79] This raises a question whether British military involvement in the Mediterranean from autumn 1943 onwards represented, as Correlli Barnett once put it, ‘a growing obsession’ more than ‘the rational pursuit of strategy’.[80] Was the Italian campaign good soldiering or Churchillian crankery?[81]

Taking the war to Italy in summer 1943 brought down Mussolini. Churchill had earlier predicted that the very visible fall of the German people’s most important ally would cause ‘a chill of loneliness’ to descend on them ‘and might be the beginning of their doom’. That, as it turned out, was to greatly overstate the matter. Still, Hitler’s anger at his ally’s ousting and his fear of losing economic resources in the Balkans seem to have stimulated a Mediterranean crankery within the Führer that was greater than anything Churchill ever exhibited. The Germans soon dispatched new garrisons across occupied southern Europe – not just into the peninsula itself but also Greece and Yugoslavia – all of which could have been used somewhere else to more purpose. Roosevelt at one point complained that an Italian campaign would end in mere ‘attrition’.[82] He was right. But he was overlooking the fact that the whole Allied grand strategy of the war was attritional. The Germans had to be ground down somewhere. For ten months, between the end of HUSKY and the beginning of OVERLORD, there was nowhere much else in the west to do it except Italy.

Not that the peninsula represented the ideal place to fight, at least in the way the British Army had been trained to do it. Montgomery handed over Eighth Army in December 1943, but for the remainder of the campaign in Italy his former troops continued to fight in the manner their old commander had laid down for them in North Africa and Sicily. Indeed, the doctrinal blueprint first trialled by Monty at Second Alamein, that of ‘colossal cracks’, remained the essential British way of war in every European battleground until V-E Day. The formula meant elaborate, carefully planned set-piece operations. Armour and infantry, supported by massive artillery and air bombardments, battered away at the enemy’s frontal defences, perhaps with the occasional threat of a left or right ‘hook’ thrown in.

As a way of war it emphasised mechanical firepower, which the Anglo-Americans had in abundance by 1944. ‘Colossal cracks’ was well suited to the conscript army of office boys and van drivers and grocers’ assistants which Britain had assembled after Dunkirk in that it did not demand too much sophistication or sacrifice of the lads at the ‘sharp end’. Generally speaking, it worked – eventually. But it was sluggish, a bit clumsy, rather clichéd and predictable (especially in Italy, where geography channelled attacks into foreseeable lines of advance), and it made huge demands on an infrastructural net which in southern Europe barely existed. As the director of military training for 15th Army Group pointed out in December 1943, British tactical methods were ‘thorough and methodical’ but also ‘slow and cumbersome’. He added: ‘Our troops fight well in defense and our set-piece attacks are usually successful, but…through lack of enterprise in exploitation we seldom reap the full benefit of them.’[83] There was much to be said for Monty’s way of making war. But it was very imperfectly suited to a slog up the Italian boot.

All that said, if Badoglio had conducted the peace negotiations in summer 1943 with more sagacity and less craven self-interest, it is possible that the Italian state might have had the wherewithal to defend itself against the Wehrmacht at least long enough for the Allies to reach Rome by October. Perhaps they might even have got to the Pisa–Rimini line. The rewards of this, in political terms alone, would have been considerable. Invading Italy in September 1943 did not work out; but it was, perhaps, worth a try.

Continuing to try to take the less and less important prize of Rome in spring 1944 after the front line in Italy had consolidated looks more dubious in hindsight. So does the decision to advance beyond Rome once it fell. By then, it was obvious to everyone that the Italian campaign had achieved all it realistically ever would. No amount of freezing, blood-soaked misery on the Emilia-Romagna Plain over the winter of 1944–5 would alter that.

*

Brooke was just as frustrated as Churchill by American indifference towards Italy after Salerno. ‘It is becoming more and more obvious that our operations are coming to a standstill,’ he complained in his diary in October 1943. The Mediterranean was being abandoned in favour of what he called ‘very problematical’ cross-Channel plans.[84] By having to withdraw seven divisions from Italy (due to ‘American shortsightedness’), the Allies were leaving the campaign there ‘emasculated’ and throwing potential victory away for the sake of a ‘nebulous’ Second Front in France. This was about as OVERLORD-sceptical – not to mention Americophobic – as Brooke ever became. His journal entries during the winter of 1943–4 gave free vent to his frustration at ‘the limitations of Marshall’s brain’ and ‘the impossibility of making him realise any strategical situation or its requirements’.[85]

After the war the former CIGS ascribed some of this overheated rhetoric to ill health and the stress brought on by his enormous workload. His aversion to OVERLORD in autumn 1943 may also have had an element of sour grapes to it. Brooke was still reeling from the tremendous disappointment of learning that he would not, as he had been encouraged to believe, be commander of the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy. The misunderstanding was entirely Churchill’s fault and it is not an episode that reflects well on him. On three occasions in June and July 1943, the prime minister had promised Brooke that the command in France would be his.[86] The prospect ‘gave me one of my greatest thrills during the war’, Brooke wrote. ‘I felt that it would be the perfect climax to all my struggles to guide strategy.’[87] The CIGS had turned down Churchill’s offer of command in the Middle East back in August 1942 because at the time he had felt that only he could control the prime minister’s dangerous impulses at a critical moment of the war. Now, with victory much more certain, Brooke reckoned it was safe to leave the handling of Churchill to someone else and to crown his soldierly career by leading the Allied armies on to Berlin.

Had Brooke been a bit more cautious, he would have realised that command of OVERLORD had never been Churchill’s to dispense. The Americans would surely want to have a say in such an important matter, and given that US troops would inevitably predominate in the Normandy campaign it was rash for the CIGS to assume that Roosevelt would ever agree to a non-American commander of the OVERLORD armies. As it was, the matter was predictably and brusquely resolved at the Quadrant Conference in August 1943. FDR made it clear to Churchill that he expected Marshall to command OVERLORD. Despite his promises to Brooke, the prime minister acquiesced without a fight. The CIGS found out almost as an afterthought. ‘Not for one moment,’ Brooke complained later, ‘did [Churchill] realise what this meant to me…he offered no sympathy, no regrets at having had to change his mind, and dealt with the matter as if it were one of minor importance!’[88] It was the greatest professional defeat of his life, and he seems never to have forgiven Churchill for it. Brooke’s diary entries for the final twenty months of the war become significantly more acidic on the matter of the prime minister’s shortcomings. It was scant consolation to the CIGS that in the end Marshall was going to be disappointed too as he was supplanted in his turn by Eisenhower.

Brooke’s splenetic mood in the final months of 1943 needs to be understood in the context of this personal unhappiness about his own future command prospects. He also differed strongly with Churchill about where exactly the Allied focus ought to be in the Mediterranean. For Brooke, Italy was the prize; he was much less interested in operations east of the peninsula. The prime minister’s ‘Balkan ghosts in the cupboard’ only made the job of advocating for an advance up the Apennine spine of Italy harder so far as Brooke was concerned. And what he called Churchill’s ‘Rhodes madness’ was to inspire a tragic coda to the Allies’ ‘Mediterranean Year’.[89]

The Dodecanese campaign of September–November 1943 is largely forgotten in the British memory of the war. That may be because it was a rare strategic defeat in the final two years before V-E Day, although of course so was Arnhem, which is scarcely obscure. Arnhem at least had a heroic last-stand grandeur to it, though, while the Dodecanese was a miserable affair throughout. It is worth recalling all the same. It made no difference to the outcome of the war, but it did indicate – thirteen years before Suez – that the British had already lost any capability to act independently of the United States.[90]

‘The surrender of Italy gave us the chance of gaining important prizes in the Aegean at very small cost and effort,’ Churchill began his Dodecanese chapter in Closing the Ring:

Rhodes, Leros, and Cos were island fortresses which had long been for us strategic objectives of a high order in the secondary sphere. Rhodes was the key to the group…It seemed to me a rebuff of fortune not to pick up these treasures. The command of the Aegean by air and by sea was within our reach. The effect of this might be decisive upon Turkey, at that time deeply moved by the Italian collapse. If we could use the Aegean and the Dardanelles, the naval short-cut to Russia was established. There would be no more need for the perilous and costly Arctic convoys, or the long and wearisome supply line through the Persian Gulf.[91]

And so on, and so on. All of this was built on an assumption of Turkish belligerence which was entirely a product of the prime minister’s fecund imagination. The Turks had already concluded, rationally enough, that they had nothing to gain, and much to lose, by entering the war. Ankara had rebuffed the British approaches after Casablanca and would continue to do so until the issue became strategically irrelevant.[92] The idea that promising the Turks the Dodecanese Islands would have decisively altered their thinking was based on no evidence at all – even leaving aside what the islands’ residents would have had to say about it.

And Rhodes, Leros and Cos were hardly ‘island fortresses’ in any meaningful modern sense. Even if the Allies had successfully captured them, they would have been useless as forward bases until the air and sea threat from the Greek mainland had been eliminated. They would have been pure liabilities, a trio of besieged Maltas demanding constant aid without contributing a thing strategically. The American chiefs of staff had already dismissed any campaign in the Dodecanese as ‘an eccentric operation…involving enormous resources in an area remote from our bases of supply while holding little promise of prompt and decisive results’.[93]

Churchill was too besotted with the idea to listen. On 9 September, the day after the Italian surrender, he urged General Henry ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, Alexander’s successor as Middle East commander-in-chief, to rush British detachments to the Dodecanese to liaise with their Italian garrisons before the Germans could respond. ‘Improvise and dare,’ he proclaimed.[94] The key would be Rhodes, the only island with military airfields and the location of the largest Wehrmacht force in the region, the ‘Rhodes Assault Division’. The German troops were well outnumbered by a 40,000-man Italian garrison on the island, but the local command staff had received no orders or information from Rome and were unsure what to do when they heard about the surrender. A small British delegation parachuted in on 9 September and met with the Italians to encourage them to switch sides, but they had to admit that no major Allied reinforcements could arrive for at least a week.

The Germans, by contrast, acted swiftly and brutally. By 13 September they had seized Rhodes’s main harbour and its airfields and disarmed most of the stunned Italians. British detachments eventually landed on Cos, Leros and Samos. But the Italians they encountered there were demoralised and ill-equipped and it was clear that without urgent air, ground and naval support the Allies could not hold out long in the face of likely German retaliation. This began on 3 October when German paratroopers assaulted Cos, overrunning a battalion of the Durham Light Infantry before massacring over 100 Italian officers as punishment for their decision to fight on the Allied side.

Eisenhower had already been clear with Wilson and the prime minister that he had no resources to spare for the Dodecanese. Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on 7 October imploring him to overrule Ike. ‘I beg you to consider [Rhodes] and not let it be brushed aside and all these possibilities lost to us…I feel that we may easily throw away an immense but fleeting opportunity.’[95] Churchill wanted landing craft and long-range American Lockheed P-38 ‘Lightning’ fighters. FDR had been gently evasive when previously disregarding the prime minister’s entreaties. Now he responded curtly. ‘I am opposed to any diversion [from Italy]’, FDR wrote. ‘The American chiefs of staff agree.’[96] Churchill tried again with more effusive prose. Roosevelt was not having it. The balance of power within the CCS Committee had altered a good deal since the British triumph at Casablanca nine months before. The Americans were not interested in the Dodecanese and would do nothing to salvage the campaign no matter what the British said. The outcome was therefore inevitable. The Germans took Leros on 16 November, capturing 3,200 British troops. Samos was abandoned before its garrison could also be lost.

All told, the campaign cost one-third of the British fleet in the Aegean, a veteran infantry brigade group and several hundred special forces troops. Brooke thought that Churchill’s obsession with Rhodes had pointlessly damaged his relationship with the president.[97] The two leaders were certainly never quite the same together again. ‘I was grieved that the small requests I had made for strategic purposes almost as high as those already achieved should have been so obdurately resisted and rejected,’ was the former prime minister’s epitaph to the debacle in his memoirs.[98]

That was one way of looking at it. Another, arguably more accurate way was that the Dodecanese was ‘a case study in audacity’ based on a ‘shoestring strategy’ in which courage could never compensate for inadequate resources, inchoate planning and the apathy of allies.[99]

9

‘People in England Must Do Something – This Is Their Empire’

‘GHOST ARMY RAIDS JAPS’ was the headline of the Daily Herald on the morning of 21 May 1943. After ‘one of the most daring commando raids of the war’, a British-led column had re-emerged safely on the Indian frontier, completing a trek of over 1,000 miles through the Burmese jungle interior, ‘smashing communications and harassing the enemy’ along the way. ‘JUNGLE ARMY SURPRISE JAPS’ was the way the Daily Mail’s front page put it.

This expedition was remarkable for several reasons. For one thing, ordinary British soldiers – ‘working men from Merseyside and Wigan’, many of them ‘middle-aged mill workers’ of ordinary fitness and fighting skill – had been transformed by hard training into a ‘bearded, bloodshot crowd of toughs’ capable of ‘stalk[ing] the Japanese in the heart of the jungle’. For another, the raid had been supported by air-dropped food and equipment, still a highly experimental supply method. Allied transport aircraft had parachuted rations, ammunition and medicine to the British column as it progressed through enemy territory, along with personal mail and a range of idiosyncratic requested items which made for entertaining press copy – among them a monocle, false teeth, a kilt and one of the lesser-known novels of Trollope. The most outstanding feature of the raid, however, had been the man who led it, for the unlikely wilderness heroes of this Ghost Army had been commanded by a ‘long haired, dreamy eyed, forty-year-old soldier’ by the name of Lieutenant-Colonel Orde Wingate, and it was his ‘remarkable personality’ which, the newspaper accounts suggested, had in no small measure been responsible for the operation’s success.

Wingate was ‘odd’, the Mail readily conceded. Indeed, it was his very eccentricity which was appealing about him. No respecter of orthodoxy or the rule book, he was ‘not the conventional regular army officer’ at all. Wingate, British newspaper readers were assured, ambled around the jungle wearing a battered pith helmet, because he did not

give a hoot about appearance when he is off duty. He will slope around with his fair hair curling over his neck, his hands clasped behind his back…He will talk to you for an hour without pausing then shamble off in his squeaking shoes without even saying good night. If you go to his room you will find him pacing up and down, stripped, dictating reports and stopping every now and then to sniff an orchid.

The very name Wingate would ‘have a special place in the annals of this war’, for he was ‘typical of the soldier-adventurers who seem to be thrown up by Britain in every conflict’. His distant family relationship to T. E. Lawrence was played up. The latter had been Lawrence of Arabia. Was this peculiar young martial prophet now to be Wingate of Burma?[1]

None of this media attention was an accident. Several war correspondents had accompanied Wingate’s expedition as far as the Chindwin River, including an official photographer, Captain Tony Beauchamp, whose pictures of the ‘Chindits’, as they were now dubbed, reached British newspapers in July. The photos of these unkempt, masculine imperial adventurers – hirsute, slouch-hatted, bare-chested – provoked a second round of excited press publicity.[2] A long account of the Chindit mission written by the journalist Charles J. Rolo was published in the United States in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in October and was developed into a book, Wingate’s Raiders, in February 1944.

For the Indian Army Public Relations (IAPR) department, the successful return of the Chindits from enemy territory after their slash-and-burn mission represented a much-needed triumph. Ever since the Japanese conquest of Burma all it had had to work with were stories of defeat. Now it had an honest-to-goodness morale-boosting victory on its hands, and a ready-made hero as well. It was a story of pure British derring-do – ‘sheer physical adventure, with a Wellsian blend of modern science’ as The Times put it – which demonstrated that the enemy were not jungle supermen after all, but could be beaten if a visionary, orchid-sniffing maverick like Wingate was given his chance.[3]

Given Churchill’s propensity for military eccentrics, it is likely that Wingate would have come to the prime minister’s attention eventually. But the Chindit leader was taking no chances. As soon as he returned from Burma, he sent his private report on the expedition – officially known as Operation LONGCLOTH – to Downing Street via the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery. Churchill was predictably animated by Wingate’s Boy’s Own prose and his entreaties against the hidebound stupidity of GHQ India which corresponded with the prime minister’s own prejudices. ‘I consider Wingate should command the Army against Burma,’ Churchill wrote to Ismay on 24 July. ‘He is a man of genius and audacity…no mere question of seniority must obstruct the advance of real personalities to their proper stations in war.’[4]

Wingate was summoned back to London. He dined with Churchill on the night of 4 August and within thirty minutes the prime minister was convinced that he was dealing with ‘a man of the highest quality’.[5] Although he had only been back in the United Kingdom a few hours, Wingate was half-requested, half-ordered, to immediately accompany the prime minister to the Quadrant Conference on RMS Queen Mary which was sailing from the Clyde in the morning, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was to be, as an amused Brooke put it, a ‘museum piece’ to impress the Americans, thrown hastily in the baggage along with the Dam Busters leader Guy Gibson.[6]

In fact, at Quadrant Wingate did much more than entertain the US delegation; he charmed and persuaded them. He was deemed ‘a breath of fresh air’ by the Americans and, in Marshall’s words, the ‘best bet’ for British leadership in Burma.[7] By the end of the conference, the lieutenant-colonel had been promoted to acting major-general. His Chindit force – officially the Long-Range Penetration Group (LRPG) – was now promised a massive expansion in size, gifted its own private American air force, and thrust spectacularly into the centre of all Allied plans east of the Chindwin in 1944.

*

To understand why the LONGCLOTH expedition – which for all its psychological and political success had been, in purely military terms, a costly failure – had been transformed in just a few months from a minor experimental stunt to the template for all future Allied operations in Burma, we need to consider the vexed Anglo-American politics of summer 1943. For much of the previous year, the British had been too nervous about their whole position in the Indian Ocean to spare many thoughts for taking the offensive against the Japanese. The Kido Butai’s raid on Ceylon in April 1942 and the near-destruction of Admiral Somerville’s Eastern Fleet had been a nasty shock. For a time, just three under-strength battalions of a few hundred men each protected the 1,000-mile border between Burma and India’s north-eastern frontier province of Assam.[8] But the destruction of four of the Kido Butai’s aircraft carriers by the US Navy at Midway in June relieved the amphibious threat to the Bay of Bengal, and the exhausted IJA was in no shape to invade India even after the monsoon ended in October. By the beginning of 1943, then, it was possible for the British to start considering how best to take the offensive in Burma – and whether, more importantly, it was worth it.

There was little appetite in Whitehall for a campaign in the Burmese hinterland. Churchill’s eye was fixed squarely on distant Singapore. He believed the entire effort in the Far East ought to be focused on regaining the lost fortress-city and so washing away the humiliating stain of Percival’s capitulation in February 1942. In any case, however, ‘Germany First’ remained the priority. If it came down to a choice between sending resources to the Far East or to the Mediterranean – and it surely would – then so far as the prime minister was concerned the latter would always take precedence.

The Americans, though, were emphatic about the need to reacquire northern (Upper) Burma. They did not care about the lost colony itself, but they cared very much about its neighbour across the Himalayas, China. The Roosevelt administration was the ‘most fervent, energetic and deep-pocketed supporter’ of Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT movement – partly because of Sichuan’s usefulness as a base of operations for a planned strategic bombing onslaught against Japan, but mostly as a means to secure America’s post-war role as China’s premier patron and trade partner.[9] The Japanese capture of the Upper Irrawaddy in spring 1942 had severed the Burma Road. This meant that for the time being the only way to get US Lend-Lease aid to KMT forces on the far side of the ‘the Hump’ (as the Himalayas were known) was by air from India. This was a hazardous and inefficient method of delivery. Lieutenant-General Joseph Stilwell, the principal US advisor to Chiang, wanted to recreate a land link across the Hump by building a new 680-mile road from Ledo in Assam to Mong-Yu on the Chinese frontier. To secure the right flank of his pioneer army, Stilwell wanted British forces in north India to drive on to Myitkyina in Upper Burma.[10]

To say London was unenthusiastic about this proposed overland campaign back to the Irrawaddy is to put it mildly. It was not just that Upper Burma included some of the most ferociously difficult terrain in the world, although that was certainly part of it: any expedition advancing across the Chindwin from India would have to negotiate 100 miles of pestilential rainforest highlands with peaks up to 12,000 feet high and no roads.[11] It was also that Churchill had no faith in the Indian Army which would be required to mount this arduous sally.[12]

The prime minister’s attitude towards the Raj was peculiar and paradoxical. He revered India as an abstract instrument of British power while detesting everything about it in practice. During the 1930s, he had expended vast amounts of political capital resisting, futilely, the rather mild reforms proposed in Stanley Baldwin’s Government of India Act (Baldwin thought his former colleague ‘quite mad’ on the subject).[13] Yet Churchill seems neither to have especially liked India nor to have shown any interest in the many profound changes it had undergone since he had briefly lived there as a subaltern in the 1890s. We will return to the matter of Churchill and race shortly. What is worth noting here is that he distrusted the British institutions of British India, and the Britons associated with them, almost as much as he did the Indians. The machinery of the Raj was to Churchill a ‘welter of lassitude and inefficiency’. The Indian Army was a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’, blundering and untrustworthy, its native soldiers amateurish and disloyal, their leaders contemptible ‘sepoy generals’ like Auchinleck, who had failed him in the Western Desert. That these canards were grossly insulting to the many thousands of Indians who had already sacrificed their lives for the British Empire in this war was beside the point. The prime minister ‘hates India and everything to do with it’, Wavell remarked to Lord Linlithgow, governor-general (viceroy) from 1936 to 1943.[14]

Churchill’s feelings about the Indian Army were hardly assuaged by the miserable fate of the first tentative attempt at an Allied counter-offensive in Burma, the Arakan operation of winter 1942–3.[15] The original plan had been to distract the Japanese by advancing 14th Indian Division down the region’s long Mayu coastal peninsula while two other brigades, one British, one Indian, launched an amphibious assault directly against the island of Akyab, with its important airfields. But the landing craft needed for the seaborne attack on the Japanese-held port were all surrendered to TORCH’s needs, and only the overland offensive took place as planned. The division’s approach was ponderous, allowing plenty of time for the enemy to reinforce the Arakan’s defences.

On 6 January 1943, 14th Indian Division’s forward units reached the fishing village of Donbaik, only about ten miles from Akyab. There all progress ceased. The Japanese at Donbaik were dug in within well-concealed, mutually supporting timber-and-earth blockhouses and protected by a tidal creek with banks nine feet high. For the next two months, nine Anglo-Indian brigades battered away pointlessly at the Japanese defences, trying to pull off a set-piece ‘colossal cracks’ victory which was never going to work in such a logistically challenging environment. By April, with the start of the monsoon imminent and the Japanese counter-attacking on the Allied flank, the whole expedition on the Mayu Peninsula was forced to retire back to India in bloodied ignominy for fear of its line of retreat being cut off.

Churchill was incensed. ‘The campaign is one of the most disappointing and indeed discreditable which has occurred in this war,’ he complained to Brooke. ‘The whole British Army in India is being brought into disrepute by the thoroughly bad conduct of these operations.’[16] Lieutenant-General Noel Irwin, who had planned and led the failed offensive, blamed his men. As a regular British Army officer, he had inherited all the traditional Sandhurst scorn for sepoy soldiers and their European commanders. Now, to try to save his own reputation, he gave his dyspeptic malice full vent. It was ‘the inability of troops to fight’ which had doomed the Arakan operation, he wrote. ‘Scandalous conduct and cowardice in the face of the enemy’ had been the norm. Indian soldiers were ‘obviously scared of the Jap’.[17] Churchill had no quarrel with this low assessment of imperial forces, but neither did he have any further confidence in the commanding general in Burma. Irwin had been importunate enough to share some of his complaints at a press conference in Calcutta. This was too indiscreet to go unpunished. He was promptly relieved.[18]

*

Irwin’s sacking was just the start of a thorough reshuffling of command in India in 1943. Wavell was made the new viceroy in place of Linlithgow. His old post as commander-in-chief of the Indian Army went back to Claude Auchinleck, whom Churchill had found wanting as a front-line general in the Middle East but had always admired as an organiser of men. The Auk quickly made it clear, however, that he was no less reluctant to rush headlong into new offensives than he had been in the Western Desert in 1942. Given the debacle in the Arakan, he argued that no new major land operations should be mounted in the Bay of Bengal until 1944 or 1945 at the earliest. Churchill found this unacceptable. How, he asked, could he placate ‘the deepest suspicions in the United States that we are only playing and dawdling with the war in this theatre’ in the absence of any offensive action?[19]

One can imagine, then, what a breath of fresh air the arrival of Wingate’s report was to the prime minister. Here – finally! – was a man with the courage to take the war back to the Japanese and who also possessed the martial qualities, panache and indifference to convention to be able to carry it off. Wingate’s Chindit expedition (officially 77th Indian Infantry Brigade), subdivided into eight columns of about 400 soldiers apiece, each man carrying a seventy-pound pack, had trudged to the eastern bank of the Irrawaddy as far as Mongmit, 200 miles from Assam, and back again to India. Along the way, the Chindits had met and mastered monsoon-saturated rainforest, glutinously muddy peaks, thick elephant grass and snake- and leech-infested swamps. They had set off explosive charges on the Myitkyina–Mandalay railway and battled with innumerable Japanese patrols. In his report on LONGCLOTH Wingate told a crisp adventure story full of picaresque detail calculated to appeal to Churchill, including the scatological consequences of a high-roughage diet of army biscuits (‘personally I have never passed better stools,’ he assured the prime minister). This was warfare as Churchill had always preferred it: plucky Brit stuff on the fringes of the imperial imagination.

It did not hurt that Wingate, who had never previously served in the subcontinent, shared Churchill’s low opinion of the Indian Army and the Raj more generally – he would describe the latter to the Americans at Quadrant as a dumping ground for failed sons of the British upper class, or as he put it ‘the largest unemployed relief organisation in the world’.[20] All setbacks during the 1943 Chindit expedition were ascribed to the failures of Indian Army officers and the slothful, unimaginative British authorities east of Suez. Wingate’s barbs were numerous and vicious. The Military Training Directorate in India had taken ‘not the slightest interest’ in LONGCLOTH; many officers assigned to him had demonstrated ‘abysmal ignorance’ of their job; Wingate regarded Gurkhas as ‘worse than useless’. Yet in spite of the miserable resources that he had been granted and the ‘Lilliputian thinking’ of his detractors in India, Wingate argued that he had nonetheless proved the viability of long-range penetration tactics in Burma. LONGCLOTH had been a small-scale experiment; the objective now was to vastly expand the Chindit force and Wingate’s own authority.[21]

What Wingate offered to Churchill, then, was a way to take the war to Upper Burma as the Americans were demanding, while sidelining an Indian Army which both men fundamentally distrusted. At Quadrant, Wingate was offered a new Chindit LRPG of six brigades to plan an ambitious raid into the Burmese hinterland (codenamed THURSDAY) to take place in early 1944. He would have twenty-five infantry battalions, seventeen of them British – a complement of 26,500 troops all told, plus extensive US air support. This new expedition would answer not to GHQ India but to the newly created South East Asia Command (SEAC), led by that favoured son of royalty and enfant terrible Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had started the war as a captain and now found himself at forty-three an acting full admiral. The existing Indian authorities would be excluded from all preparations for the THURSDAY campaign other than recruitment, training and logistical support behind the lines. The Indian Army would be relegated to the status of a mopping-up garrison force, traipsing behind Wingate’s victorious (and mostly European) Chindits towards the Irrawaddy Plain.

*

That, at least, was Churchill’s plan. Others in the summer of 1943 observed the record of Wingate’s past performances as well as his future proposals more acerbically. Had LONGCLOTH been quite the triumph its leader proclaimed?[22] Three thousand officers and men had crossed the Chindwin into Burma in February. Fewer than 2,200 of them had emerged from the rainforest back across the Indian frontier in June, many of them walking skeletons permanently incapacitated by beriberi and malaria. As for what they had achieved while in Burma, Major Bernard Fergusson, who had commanded one of its columns, was guarded, to say the least: ‘Not much that was tangible,’ he admitted later:

We blew up bits of railway, which did not take long to repair; we gathered some useful intelligence; we distracted the Japanese from some minor operations, and possibly from some bigger ones; we killed a few hundreds of an enemy that numbers eighty millions; we proved that it was feasible to maintain a force by supply dropping alone.[23]

Even the last of these points was disputed by Major-General ‘Joe’ Lentaigne, one of Wingate’s future brigade commanders and eventually the leader of the whole LRPG, who considered the LONGCLOTH expedition’s air supply arrangements ‘very sketchy’.[24] More fundamentally, there were real limitations to what even a successful hit-and-run unit like the Chindits, lightly equipped and incapable of holding ground, could accomplish in the absence of cooperation with a conventional combined arms force. The 77th Brigade has been described pointedly as ‘an engine without a train’.[25] Its problem was the same as that of all special forces units. When its operations complemented those of larger, more traditional formations, it could be genuinely useful. When it was tasked with substituting for traditional formations, it might be able to make a big, exciting splash for a breathless press but it was incapable of any truly substantial results.

As Auchinleck pointed out in a telegram to the Quadrant planners on 19 August, the proposed expansion of the Chindit force would make it difficult to mount any conventional operations in Burma at all. Because of Wingate’s demand that he be afforded British rather than imperial battalions, 70th Infantry Division – one of the few well-trained and -equipped British Army divisions in India, and a fighting formation that had served with distinction during the 1941 siege of Tobruk – would have to be broken up, losing its artillery and engineering components as well as its cohesion, corporate memory and esprit de corps along the way. Two further divisions would have to be cannibalised for manpower. These reorganisations would have all kinds of unfortunate consequences for the new Anglo-Indian Fourteenth Army now forming in Assam.

Wingate responded to Auchinleck with characteristic verve and insolence. Ever since the fall of Singapore, conventional British units had been, he said, ‘worsted and made fools of’ by the Japanese due to ‘faulty methods’. There were ‘a million men under arms’ already in India, he claimed – a grossly misleading bit of mathematics, but one designed to appeal to Churchill, who was also fond of coming up with spurious calculations of army inefficiency based on manipulation of the statistics. The Chindits during LONGCLOTH, he went on, had ‘seen many more Japanese…than normal infantry had seen of this enemy in years’. It was time to abandon failed methods and try something new, and Wingate could offer boldness of vision over what seemed like bureaucratic sclerosis and diffidence. He also had the advantage of being personally present in Quebec to make his case. On 23 August, the Joint Planning Staff gave its recommendation to overrule Auchinleck, follow Wingate’s plan and break up 70th Division. ‘It is probably true to say’, suggests one of Wingate’s biographers, ‘that in the whole course of the Second World War, no junior military commander enjoyed a personal political success comparable.’[26]

*

Meanwhile, what of the ‘worthless and probably disloyal’ Indian Army which Churchill and Wingate had rubbished so glibly?[27] By the time of the Quadrant Conference it was about 2 million men strong all told, 817,000 of whom were trained soldiers organised into seventeen divisions. Of the fighting troops, one-quarter were garrisoned in the Mediterranean and Middle East and the remainder (twelve divisions) in India.[28] This meant that in the four years since the start of the war the Indian Army had expanded almost tenfold.[29] Such rapid growth had come in very handy for the British Empire in 1941 and 1942 when it had been desperate for riflemen in the Western Desert, but it had happened at a steep qualitative cost. Selectivity in recruitment, training (especially of officers), equipment, weaponry and welfare had all been scattered to the wayside. Some newly raised first-line Indian Army units in 1940 had been scarcely better equipped for war than the British Home Guard. The result, once the Indian Ocean became a theatre of conflict the following year, had been a series of disasters culminating in the debacle in Arakan in early 1943. Irwin blamed that defeat on the ‘rather unwilling band of raw levies’ he had commanded. Churchill had not been inclined to disagree.[30]

In fact, there was no great mystery to the state of the Indian Army in mid-1943. What the ordinary jawan or Indian private soldier needed was the same thing the British squaddie had needed a year before, when he too had been in the doldrums: better kit, more up-to-date training, greater attention to conditions of service (especially pay and rations), reassurance that his family members back at home were being taken care of, more competent and inspiring leadership, and above all a powerful motivating reason to fight. Once intelligent and sympathetic attention started to be paid to these issues by the British military authorities, and (crucially) resources were thrown at them too, the result was transformative. An army which had seemed obsolescent at the outbreak of the war – a creaking Victorian mercenary relic – was destined to become a powerful, technologically sophisticated combined arms force, and moreover ‘a truly national army’ for India, ‘serving an emerging nation increasingly conscious of and confident in its own destiny, and fighting for its own defence and prerogatives’.[31]

A start was made in May 1943 when a War Cabinet committee chaired by Attlee (taking advantage of Churchill’s absence in Washington) decided to fix the Indian Army’s size at fifteen field divisions for the war’s duration. With further expansion capped, the disruptive problem of ‘milking’ existing formations of officers and men to create cadres for new ones could end. In June, shortly before taking over as viceroy, Wavell created an Infantry Committee to examine the army’s poor combat performance in Burma. Its most important recommendation was thorough, specialised and standardised jungle warfare training for all troops.[32]

This directive was carried out, along with a raft of other changes, when Auchinleck became commander-in-chief again in the post-Arakan shake-up. Whatever the Auk’s other limitations, his competence as an administrator had never been in doubt, nor his tireless commitment to India and the Indian Army ‘in every fibre of his being’.[33] It is a pity that his record as an ineffectual Western Desert general has overshadowed his work as a powerful military reformer in New Delhi. Under Auchinleck’s watch, discipline across the Indian Army was tightened up, but at the same time medical and welfare care was improved, as was provision for soldiers’ dependants. District boards were created across India to assist the wives and children of jawans while the male head of household was on active service. Better living and recreational conditions were set up at military camps. An Indian Army Catering Corps was established, and daily rations given greater calorific and nutritional value with more animal proteins, fresh vegetables and fruits – important when many recruits were seriously underweight on enlistment due to endemic underfeeding in civilian life.[34] Inequalities of pay and authority between European and Indian officers, an old and pointed grievance, was finally settled after much wrangling.[35]

Good soldiering needs motivation: a cause for which to risk body and soul, whether that cause be king, country, God, the proletariat – or just the well-being of one’s best mate in the next shell hole. For some armies, providing motivation was relatively straightforward. The wartime British Army could rely on a strong foundation of popular patriotic sentiment and public confidence in the justice of the conflict. Even in the UK, though, the War Office found it necessary in 1941 to introduce ‘citizenship education’ for the rank and file to encourage a greater sense of ideological commitment to the cause.[36]

In British India, the motivation problem was much more complicated. The politics of the subcontinent had been dominated for twenty years by the campaign of the Indian National Congress (INC), led by Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, for swaraj (independence).[37] India’s sense of its own subjugation did not lend itself to much enthusiasm for a war of ‘freedom’. As Amery conceded in late 1943, ‘of all the [Allied] nations, none has felt less moral incentive to cooperate in the prosecution of the war than India’, because ‘the Indian war effort…is pretty frankly a mercenary undertaking so far as the vast majority of Indians are concerned…we have to reckon all the time with strong forces which, if not positively pro-Japanese, are certainly anti-British, or at best are indifferent.’[38]

The British-led Indian Army had always sought to insulate itself from ‘political’ (nationalist) India by recruiting heavily from among poor peasant families in the rural Muslim and Sikh-majority provinces of the country’s north-west, especially the Punjab. Not only were the peoples there considered to be especially hardy and suited to the soldiering life – members of the ‘martial races’, as the rigidly caste-based colonial mindset had it – but they were also assumed to be antipathetic to the Hindu-dominated INC. What the British wanted were illiterate peasant jawans unmoved by the appeals of ideology who would point their bundooks (rifles) at whomever they were ordered to without asking any questions.

By 1942, however, the traditional recruiting grounds had been all but exhausted of volunteers. The army was having to look elsewhere, especially to the densely populated Madras presidency. Recruiting men from the Hindu-majority south was a novelty in itself, and that was as nothing compared to the idea of recruiting officers from the south. Yet the British had little choice: the supply of European ‘King’s commissioned officers’ (KCOs) was totally inadequate to lead the expanded wartime army, so hostilities-only ‘Indian commissioned officers’ (ICOs) would have to fill the gaps. By 1945 there would be over 8,000 of these ICOs, and the ratio of European to Indian officers across the whole army, which had been ten to one at the start of the war, had fallen to just over four to one. The typical ICO was well educated, urbane, middle- or upper-class, Hindu and very likely sympathetic to Gandhi, Nehru and swaraj.[39] Political India could no longer be excluded from the Indian Army.

What the inevitable heightening of nationalist sentiment in the ranks would mean to the Indian Army’s imperial loyalties was unclear. As disaster followed disaster in early 1942, and the prestige of the empire plummeted, British authorities worried what the ordinary jawan would conclude from all this. Auchinleck, while still in command in Egypt, was keenly aware that one-quarter of his men, almost 200,000 of them, were Indian. ‘What the attitude of the troops will be if [Japan conquers India] is doubtful, to say the least of it,’ he warned Brooke: ‘Magnificently as they have fought till now, often under great handicaps, they may not stand the strain of so hard a test on their loyalty, which is, as you know, not to England but largely to their officers.’[40]

Once returned to New Delhi as commander-in-chief, the Auk sought to tread a fine line on the national question. Josh (‘enthusiasm’) groups were formed in many units to try to instill a greater sense of purpose among ordinary Indian soldiers. Josh group leaders were warned to steer clear of anything smacking of imperial propaganda, however. The primary motivation they were to present to the jawans was not loyalty to their king-emperor but detestation of the enemy. Josh groups were to ‘build in every Indian soldier the knowledge and firm faith that the Japanese and everyone who represents the Japanese are his own personal enemies’. Whether this worked is hard to say. The brutality of actual combat with IJA forces in Burma, during which quarter was rarely offered by either side and not expected in return, would certainly generate plenty of mutual race hatred.[41]

*

From the start of the conflict, the British had sought to appease nationalist sentiment by dangling the prospect of major post-war constitutional changes for India, but what exact form these changes might take was unclear. Would they fully satisfy the demand for swaraj? And what, if anything, would be conceded now? The 1935 Government of India Act had nodded vaguely towards the eventual establishment of Dominion status for the subcontinent without proffering any details or timetable. It had managed to anger both the INC’s leaders, who felt it went nowhere near far enough (Nehru called it ‘a charter of slavery’) and also diehard reactionaries like Churchill, for whom it went far too far (‘a monstrous monument of shame built by pygmies’ was his verdict.)

At the outbreak of war, most INC leaders accepted the urgency of fighting fascism,[42] but they demanded immediate swaraj for India as the price of their collaboration. The British were unmoved. As a result, the INC resigned in protest from the seven provincial executives (created in the 1935 reforms) which it controlled. Churchill was not too displeased about this. After all, provincial government continued to function in the Muslim-majority regions of India dominated politically not by the INC but by Muhammad Ali-Jinnah’s Muslim League, which, while nationalist, was more anti-Hindu than anti-British. Indeed, so far as Churchill was concerned, there was much to be said for Indian politics being effectively suspended for the duration while the viceroy and commander-in-chief in New Delhi got on with fighting the war.

He was unlucky, however, that Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first (and last) American president to take a personal interest in British India. Roosevelt interpreted the colonial politics of South Asia rather as a subtropical reprise of 1776. Whether this was a keen insight, or (as Churchill saw it) a woefully jejune understanding of what was really going on in the Raj built on sentimental anti-imperial dilettantism, is open to debate. Either way, the American president was much too important to have his opinions ignored. In early 1942, FDR urged Churchill to offer concessions to the nationalists to resolve the political impasse in India. The prime minister had no choice but to make a gesture.

The result was the dispatching of Sir Richard Stafford Cripps to India in March 1942. Cripps was an extraordinary bundle of contradictions – a profoundly Christian Old Wykehamist and rich Middle Temple barrister who nonetheless preached Marxist class war and had been expelled from the Labour Party for his overly pro-Soviet views. Teetotal, vegetarian, brilliant, energetic, schoolmasterly and insufferably self-confident, his manners and personality were almost calculated to irritate Churchill, who quipped that Cripps had ‘all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire’.[43] Still, he was sincerely committed to the war effort, and the prime minister could see the advantage of utilising a talented freelancer of the Left. Cripps had been sent to Moscow as Britain’s ambassador in 1940, and it was popularly believed in Britain, on rather shaky grounds, that he had been somehow responsible for bringing Russia on to the Allied side of the war the following year. As a result, on his return to London in January 1942 he found himself an unlikely national hero.

Cripps’s aura of abstemiousness and his maverick position outside the two big political parties fitted the disgruntled popular mood of 1942. He began to be spoken of as a possible alternative prime minister. Cripps rather fancied the idea himself. Attlee found such a prospect almost as dismaying as Churchill, and both men were eager to see this gadfly dispatched thousands of miles away from London again as soon as possible. The mission to New Delhi seemed an obvious fit for Cripps’s talents. His sympathy for the nationalist cause in India was well known and he was a personal friend of Gandhi and Nehru. If Cripps could solve the India problem, so be it; if not, it might at least knock a bit of the stuffing out of him.

Once in New Delhi, Cripps laid out the new offer he had brought to the nationalists. In return for cooperation with the war effort, select Indian leaders would immediately be admitted to the viceroy’s executive council. Furthermore, full Dominion status would be granted to India at the end of hostilities, with a right of secession from the Commonwealth open to a popular vote. But there were catches. For the time being, the Indian Army would remain under full British control; and, in an obvious gesture to Jinnah, all signatories to the deal would have to agree that no region of British India could be forced to join a single post-war INC-dominated state.

Cripps marshalled all the skill of a Middle Temple rhetorician to sell the deal, but he could not persuade Gandhi and Nehru. They wanted immediate unconditional self-government and were horrified by the prospect of the ‘vivisection’ of India through sectarian partition.[44] On 9 April Cripps told Churchill his mission had failed, and that he was returning to London. The prime minister was not too disappointed. He had never liked the proposals Cripps had taken to New Delhi in the first place; and Roosevelt, whose interest in Indian affairs was at best sporadic, had been sufficiently satisfied by Britain’s effort to drop the matter for the time being. It did not hurt that the saintly Cripps had been found wanting.[45]

After Cripps left, Gandhi and Nehru felt that the British needed a sharp reminder of the perils of ignoring their movement’s power. On 8 August they announced the ‘Quit India’ campaign of ‘mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale’.[46] The British authorities reacted with unexpected speed; the Raj’s political intelligence branch had been anticipating trouble ever since the collapse of the talks. Tens of thousands of the INC’s leaders, starting with Gandhi and Nehru, were immediately arrested and would spend the rest of the war behind bars.[47] Its organisational offices were closed, and its newspaper presses seized. The idea was to nip the protest in the bud, but it backfired spectacularly. The British appeared to be acting like despots. A wave of spontaneous popular anger erupted. With the main INC men in jail, ‘Quit India’ had become leaderless. But that made it all the more chaotic and febrile. Industrial workers, students and peasants all turned out to demonstrate. Protests turned to sabotage and violence. Police and railway stations, courts, revenue posts and telegraph offices burned. Railway lines were ripped up, trains derailed, telephone poles toppled. After a few days the viceroy warned Churchill that India was seeing

the most serious rebellion since that of 1857, the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed for reasons of military security…mob violence remains rampant over large tracts of the countryside and I am by no means confident that we may not see in September a formidable effort to renew this widespread sabotage of our war effort.[48]

That summer the Raj trembled. Coal and food supplies were badly disrupted. Construction of the vast new military infrastructure that Wingate and the Fourteenth Army were building in Assam was delayed. The Tata iron- and steelworks, largest in the British Empire, had to close due to a mass walkout. Only by the beginning of September was it clear that ‘Quit India’ was not going to be a repeat of the great mid-Victorian insurrection that had broken the East India Company and haunted the British imagination for a century. The unrest was limited mostly to north-eastern India. Jinnah denounced it, calling the protests an INC ploy to establish a Brahmin Raj. The Indian Communist Party, which since the invasion of the USSR in June 1941 had deprecated any action which impeded the war effort, condemned Quit India too. In the absence of a pan-nationalist consensus, the unrest sputtered out in mid-September.

Repression played its part too. Fifty-seven army battalions assisted the police in putting down protests, often brutally. Robert Niblett, a district magistrate in the United Provinces, wrote in his diary of a ‘white terror’ conducted by the military. Reprisals were ‘the rule of the day’ during Quit India, with soldiers dispatched on ‘errands of destruction’.[49] Troops burned recalcitrant villages, flogged protestors and, when ordered to do so, fired into the crowds. Casualty figures are disputed, but somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500 people were shot dead by the British authorities during August 1942, which made the Raj a more active theatre of the war at that moment than North Africa.[50] Crucially, Indian Army troops followed their orders without demur. Morale across the ranks was described as remaining ‘steadfast’ all summer,[51] and no mutinies or serious acts of insubordination within the army took place. The rank and file turned out to be indifferent or hostile to Quit India’s appeal.[52] The military authorities were careful not to take a position one way or another on the bigger independence question. The army was simply there, they argued, to preserve public order and protect state and private property. Staunchly nationalist but middle-class ICOs could at least accept the logic of that.

Paradoxically, most wartime Indian officers chose to remain professionally aloof from politics during the war, even though they privately held ‘intense anti-British feelings’. They rationalised their loyalty to the Raj in temporary, transactional terms. The Japanese threat to India was real and needed to be dealt with before the national question. An independent post-war India was going to need an army with a trained officer corps; the British might as well provide that training. That such an India would emerge from the war seemed more and more an inevitability after the Cripps Mission. His promises had not been accepted and in theory were no longer on the table. What he had said could not be unsaid, however.

*

One of the ways the Indian Army monitored morale among its rank and file was a careful examination of the letters going back and forth between soldiers and their families at home. By spring 1943, postal censors were noticing a troubling trend in this correspondence: anxiety about rising costs and shortages of goods back in India, especially the price of food. ‘Everything is very dear,’ one soldier’s wife wrote from the Punjab. ‘The creditors are troubling me…I have mortgaged all my ornaments. I am in a crisis…your children have been starving continuously for three days.’[53] ‘Every domestic requirement has become scarce and expensive,’ the father of another jawan complained. Commonplace essentials – wheat, rice, cooking and heating oil, grain, cloth – had reached exorbitant prices across the country.

The British authorities were at first inclined to write all this off as an exaggeration. Relatives were surely just angling to have remittances from their husbands’ and sons’ army pay increased. After a while, however, even the hardest-faced military censor was forced to concede that something serious was going on. There was a ‘painfully urgent tone’ to these increasingly desperate cries for help. ‘I have not a single pie to purchase foodstuffs,’ a Punjabi wife wrote to her husband in September (a pie being enough money to buy a few dozen grains of rice). ‘The children are crying with hunger, and I am bewildered with trying to feed them.’[54] The evidence was there, at least for anyone who wanted to see it: an inflationary crisis in wartime India was turning into a hunger crisis.

There are three ways for a state to get the money it needs to fight a war: it can tax it, it can borrow it or it can print it. The United Kingdom was fortunate enough to be able to rely overwhelmingly on the first two of these options during the Second World War. Only 5 per cent of the UK’s wartime debt had to be paid for by increasing the amount of money in circulation. Strict rationing and a mixture of price controls, subsidies on key goods, and compulsory savings programmes kept consumer spending low while real (taxable) income increased for most workers. Inflation stayed manageable. A sophisticated, centralised, popularly respected bureaucracy was able to keep profiteering, hoarding and the black market within bounds. Social peace was maintained.[55]

Key to this was the ability of the Bank of England to defer paying its wartime obligations to colonies like India by running up ‘sterling balances’ in London instead – essentially writing an inexhaustible series of IOUs to its creditors to be settled not in the normal manner by summarily exporting goods or bullion or selling off British-owned assets, but by a vague promise to repay the debt (on terms to be chosen by the UK) at some time after victory.

Between 1942 and 1944, the cumulated cost of running India’s war came to £1.25 billion of which the United Kingdom was liable for almost exactly half, or £613 million. But London simply wrote off its share as an accounting book debit labelled ‘recoverable war expenditures’. In the immediate term, India was stuck with the whole bill – including all the expenses accrued by the Indian Army fighting in the Mediterranean and Middle East. In this way, the sterling balances allowed the British public to avoid much of the short-term financial burden of their war by offloading it on to the empire’s indigent peasantry. To Indian economists this was a gross ‘abuse’ of imperial power which was likely to have ‘disastrous’ consequences for the Raj. Not that voicing such complaints out loud was necessarily wise. One Indian academic criticised the sterling balance system in the press and was promptly sentenced to two years in prison for sedition.[56]

Given its burden, the government of India had no choice but to print billions of rupees to keep pace with the British Empire’s galloping war spending. The amount of currency in circulation in India almost quadrupled between 1939 and 1944,[57] yet wages remained mostly static. The result was inflation coupled with a rapid shrinking of real income. By November 1942, average wholesale prices in Calcutta were roughly double what they had been at the start of the war. Some goods had reached fantastically expensive prices; one hundredweight of wire nails which had cost eight and a half rupees before the conflict were now going for 325. Most importantly, food cost a lot more. In Travancore, at the southern tip of India, the price of rice doubled throughout 1941,[58] and that of fruit and vegetables in Bombay had reached ‘prohibitive levels’ by the following year. A maund of wheat (about 80lb) in the Punjab was almost twice as expensive in 1942 as it had been in 1939.[59]

New Delhi’s answer to all this was to preach a language of austerity borrowed from the United Kingdom, of ‘making do’ and ‘cutting back’. Such a prescription was all very well in a wealthy country like England, in which most citizens could reduce their personal consumption of necessities like food, fuel and clothing without going hungry, cold or unclothed. It made little sense in a poor country in which the vast majority of people lived at the ‘margins of viable existence’ to begin with. One in three Indians before the war were already regularly consuming fewer calories than they needed for their basic daily energy requirements.[60] How on earth could they voluntarily cut back any further?

The whittling away of ordinary Indians’ already meagre purchasing power through inflation is critical to understanding the ‘Bengal famine’ of 1943–4, in which perhaps 1.5 million people died directly of starvation (out of a regional population of 60 million) and 3 million more, weakened by malnutrition, succumbed to infectious diseases like smallpox, cholera and malaria. Even before the famine in Bengal, India was already facing a national food emergency – partly the result of a series of poor harvests, but mostly because of Whitehall’s financial structuring of the imperial war effort. Then a series of regional disasters, some natural, some man-made, combined with tardy, incoherent and sometimes callous policymaking in Calcutta, New Delhi and London to turn what had begun as a hunger problem into a mass human catastrophe, and produce what Amery called ‘the worst blow we have had to our name as an Empire in our lifetime’.[61]

In October 1942, a cyclone tore through the Bengal region, killing tens of thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of cattle. It also flooded the crucial aman winter rice crop up to forty miles inland.[62] What was left was then attacked by fungal spores spread by the high winds. For Bengalis, rice was the staple of life. It made up four-fifths of the local diet. The failure of the harvest portended calamity.[63] Even before the cyclone, inflationary pressures had been drastically hiking up the price of rice in Bengal. In March, one maund, which had cost nine rupees at the start of the war, had reached 100 rupees in some districts. Bengal’s normal annual harvest of 9 million tons was barely enough to keep the population alive even in good times.[64] Now, as winter 1942–3 approached, there was probably only half the usual amount of rice to hand. The first signs of outright famine were noted in the Midnapur district in December.[65]

The tragedy that unfolded over the next eighteen months was assisted by confused and misapplied state power at every level. Back in March, anticipating a potential Japanese attack on Bengal from Burma, the British authorities had ordered over 45,000 small peasant-owned boats in the region to be confiscated to deny the invaders means of transport.[66] This not only imperilled the livelihoods of thousands but broke up local food transportation networks. Bengal’s provincial bureaucracy, Muslim-led, had always had an uneasy relationship with the region’s mostly Hindu rice merchants. When the food shortages began, the government concluded that they were being caused by venal profiteers withholding rice stocks from the market. It focused its energies not on food relief but on trying to discover secret caches of rice, almost all of which proved to be imaginary.[67] Attempts at provincial price control and rationing were half-baked, and concentrated on Calcutta rather than the neglected countryside. Some individual district officers, charities and energetic private citizens tried to fill the gap by organising relief efforts of their own. But without the resources of government, there was little they could do.[68]

In theory, food could be imported from elsewhere in India. But even the subcontinent’s ‘fat’ provinces, which typically produced a large surplus of grains and pulses for export – Sind, Punjab, the United Provinces, Orissa – were experiencing food distribution crises of their own in winter 1942–3, fuelled by India’s high inflation. The loss of Burma to the Japanese had cut off about 15 per cent of the subcontinent’s total peacetime rice supply, most of which typically went to its western and southern regions. In December 1941, the viceroy’s central government had granted each provincial authority the power to control the movement of food across its borders. As famine began to devour Bengal, the other provinces, fearing they would be next, banned cereal and rice exports.

This was the moment when a dynamic New Delhi administration might have prevented the gathering disaster by using its reserve powers to enforce an all-India food control programme. The British Raj had, on the whole, managed this sort of thing quite well in the past. Thanks to prompt early action by the central authority, India had not experienced a major loss of life due to famine since the 1890s. But in 1942–3, timidity and complacency won out. Linlithgow, an impassive six-foot-five Scots Tory described by Nehru as ‘solid as a rock and with almost a rock’s lack of awareness’, was an experienced and well-meaning viceroy. But he was unimaginative and wholly without any sympathetic understanding of the lives and problems of ordinary Indians.[69] His administration took Calcutta’s word for it that the problem in Bengal was one of local speculative hoarding. With the summer shocks of Quit India still reverberating, Linlithgow was in no mood to get into a battle with the provincial governments over control of food supplies. In any case, he believed, quite wrongly as it turned out, that a nationwide rationing and distribution system was beyond his government’s means.[70]

By summer 1943, the catastrophe playing out in the Bengali countryside was becoming obvious even to British troops sheltered in well-supplied army cantonments. ‘After sunset a dull low moaning sound started up and seemed to go on all night,’ wrote one soldier in his diary: ‘I asked one of the Indians what this was and he said that it was coming from the Indian villages around us. He said it was the sound of people dying from hunger. What a dreadful place this is.’[71]

In Calcutta, tens of thousands of hollow-eyed, skeletal men, women and children – ‘dusty scarecrows, bloated bellies, shrivelled limbs’ – were drifting in from the countryside, many collapsing and dying on the city pavements in front of passers-by. With fuel prioritised for the military, the local authorities had to dispose of the bodies by digging mass burial pits and throwing corpses into rivers and canals. Carts trundled through the alleyways collecting the dead in great heaps. Islands of bloated bodies floated down the Hooghly, tangled in water hyacinths, picked over by vultures. Meanwhile, life for the city’s wealthy went on – dances, drinking, sumptuous meals. At the best hotels, ‘seventeen-course dinners are being served today while lean, emaciated faces can be seen staring wistfully through the windows’.[72]

It was not until 2 July that the provincial governor (conceding that in previous reports he may have ‘erred in the direction of understatement’) warned Linlithgow that ‘Bengal is rapidly approaching starvation.’ Without immediate outside relief, he could no longer guarantee internal security.[73] At this the viceroy was prodded into approaching London for help. The War Cabinet took up the issue on 4 August. Amery linked the problem with the ‘enormous demands’ being made upon India as a source of military supplies and troops for the imperial war effort. He warned his colleagues that the Raj ‘was being strained almost to breaking point’. He seconded Linlithgow’s appeal for an immediate shipment of half a million tons of wheat and urged the Cabinet ‘to treat this as a very serious situation’.

His colleagues were unimpressed. The consensus view around the Cabinet table was that hoarding, not a physical deficiency of food, was the problem. Speculators should be exhorted by ‘good propaganda’ to release their hidden stocks of rice. As for shipping, there was no case for reversing the cuts to Indian Ocean trade made in January. Perhaps a ‘token shipment’ of 50,000 tons of Australian wheat could be made? (In the end this was cancelled too.) Otherwise ‘no further action should be decided upon at the present time’, though the secretary of state was invited to raise the matter again in the future.[74] In his diary Amery fulminated about being ‘fobbed off’ by ministers consumed with ‘nonsense talk’ about India. Lord Cherwell (Frederick Lindemann), the prime minister’s scientific advisor, was the worst, Amery considered – but then, ‘like Winston, [he] hates India’.[75]

*

Churchill’s particular role in the tragedy unfolding in Bengal demands attention here. In recent years, the debate about the famine has focused on the person of the prime minister and the extent to which he can be held directly to blame for what happened to India in 1943–4. The case made against him is a grave one. The government Churchill led ‘had available the ships and food surpluses to alleviate the famine but through a mixture of atavistic race hatred for Indians and an obsessive desire to prosecute the war whatever the cost, the prime minister willingly and knowingly consigned millions of innocents to their deaths’.[76] To Churchill, colonial subjects were, it is claimed, ‘worth saving only if they made a direct contribution to the war effort…the rest were dispensable’.[77] The Bengal famine was, in short, ‘no less a result of public policy than was the gassing of the Holocaust victims in Europe’.[78]

These are damning allegations. What to make of them? That Churchill was a racist – and not just by twenty-first-century metrics but those of his own era – and that he held a particular animus for Indians is so well documented as to be a matter of fact, not debate. Churchill’s biographer Andrew Roberts, who could hardly be accused of harbouring a lifelong prejudice against his subject, has all the same noted that the wartime prime minister

was more profoundly racist than most…racial assumptions occupied a prime place both in his political philosophy and in his views on international relations. He was a convinced white – not to say Anglo-Saxon – supremacist and thought in terms of race to a degree that was remarkable even by the standards of his own time. He spoke of certain races with a virulent Anglo-Saxon triumphalism which was wholly lacking in other twentieth-century Prime Ministers.[79]

To Churchill, Indians were ‘the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans’. The loss even of millions of lives in Bengal would not ultimately matter because its people continued to breed ‘like rabbits’. At one point in June 1944, during Cabinet discussions about the future of Ceylon, Churchill ‘ventilate[d] his emotions of disgust at anything that could extend self-government to brown people’.[80]

Many of the most offensive Churchillian calumnies about Indians (like those above) were made to Amery and recorded in his diary. His defenders have therefore waved them away as examples of the prime minister’s ‘penchant for making outrageous comments that he didn’t really mean in order to shock or tease’ his humourless fellow Old Harrovian.[81] All one can say to that is that if Churchill’s hatred of Indians was a comedy routine, he was certainly committed to performing it, and not just to Amery. He told R. A. Butler that Indians (‘the baboos’) were ‘gross dirty and corrupt’.[82] He told Attlee that an independent subcontinent would be ruled by a ‘Hindoo priesthood machine’.[83] Several examples exist of such tossed-off Churchillian racial bigotry in the private papers of those who knew him. There is a point, presumably, at which persistently expressing such opinions in order to get a rise out of your audience reveals more about you than it does about them.

The real question is not whether the prime minister was a racist (he was) but rather the extent to which his prejudices informed his decision-making. Arthur Herman has argued that ‘far from seeking to starve India, Churchill and his cabinet sought every way to alleviate the suffering without undermining the war effort’.[84] At the War Cabinet meeting on 24 September, for instance, Amery recorded that ‘Winston was prepared to admit that something should be done’ to get food to India.[85] Most importantly, Churchill installed Wavell as viceroy in October 1943 in place of the ineffectual Linlithgow. ‘Every effort’, the War Cabinet’s directive to the new governor-general read, ‘must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local [food] shortages.’[86] During 1944, the new viceroy would receive 660,450 tons of wheat shipped from elsewhere in the Allied world.[87] This supposedly proves that ‘British policy towards the famine was to send whatever could be spared whenever possible’.[88]

Did Wavell see it that way? His arrival in New Delhi in late 1943 was undoubtedly a breath of fresh air. Almost immediately he travelled to Calcutta to witness the famine at first hand, something Linlithgow had never thought to do. He and Lady Wavell visited a relief centre and were visibly moved at the sight of the emaciated and dying.[89] Wavell was no bleeding-heart liberal in matters of war or politics. He had been wounded at Ypres in 1915, exchanging the sight in one eye for the Military Cross. As Indian Army commander-in-chief in summer 1942 he had ruthlessly suppressed Quit India. He regarded Gandhi as ‘rather malignant’ and the Raj’s native peoples as at a ‘tiresome stage of adolescence’, quite incapable of self-government,[90] but he also believed that the country he ruled over as the king-emperor’s representative was in deep crisis in 1943, and that the United Kingdom had to exert itself to the utmost to end this disaster – out of paternalistic imperial duty as well as self-interest.

The new viceroy added much-needed mettle to what had previously been the central government’s flabby response to the famine. He mobilised the Indian Army for famine relief. Soon military trucks were convoying rations into remote Bengali villages (food had previously been piling up at Calcutta railway stations, undeliverable to the countryside because of a lack of road transport). Soldiers handed out clothing and cooking utensils and taught peasants used to a rice-only diet how to prepare flour-based meals.[91] Wavell ensured that a proper price control and rationing system was finally enforced in Calcutta. Most importantly, he prescribed an India-wide food control programme to pool and deliver resources to areas most in need, overriding the short-sighted protectionism of the provinces.[92] The aman rice harvest in winter 1943–4 was a good one. By spring 1944, the worst of the emergency in Bengal was over.

The viceroy feared, however, that India still teetered on the edge of a national food disaster. He understood the toxic relationship between war-induced inflation and scarcity, insisting, with the support of Auchinleck and Mountbatten, that London had to supply 1 million tons of wheat from overseas to increase stocks and drive down prices. On 9 February 1944 Wavell sent a telegram to Churchill: ‘I warn His Majesty’s Government with all seriousness that if they refuse our demands, they are risking a catastrophe of far greater dimensions than [the] Bengal famine.’ If the empire could not provide the wheat, he urged, the War Cabinet should ask the American government or else appeal to the Washington-based United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) which had been established in November. The War Cabinet’s failure to act ‘would be regarded here…as utterly indefensible’.[93]

The War Cabinet duly failed to act. Churchill had never really wanted to appoint Wavell as viceroy in the first place, and was now horrified to discover he was a ‘wretched sentimentalist’ when it came to Indians and likely to be ‘the greatest failure’ of any viceroy in history.[94] The PM had decided that any major food shipments to the subcontinent were impossible, for they would have to come at the expense of British imports, and this would cause ‘much suffering’ in the UK. He was certainly not prepared to allow UNRRA to get involved in Indian affairs, which might shed a distressing public light on the scale of government failure in the Raj.[95] Instead, he drew up an ‘Indian foodgrains committee’ dominated by famine-sceptics like Cherwell and the minister of war transport, Lord Leathers, which offered Wavell 50,000 tons of wheat.[96] Wavell was incensed to discover that the promises in his original Cabinet directive had been worthless. ‘I really think they are crazy at Whitehall, or else they never trouble to read one’s telegrams.’[97]

Brooke took up Wavell’s cause at a War Cabinet meeting on 20 March (‘one of the worst…with Winston in one of his worst moods’ the CIGS noted).[98] He pointed out that 200,000 tons of wheat could be sent to India right away in spare shipping space which the military had decided not to use. Churchill was ‘obviously very annoyed’ at this, thought Amery, but Brooke stood his ground. The prime minister had no choice but to concede. ‘This is better than nothing but it will make Wavell very angry,’ thought the Indian secretary of state.[99] He was right. Wavell’s problems were accumulating again in spring 1944. Bad weather had destroyed much of the wheat crop in the Punjab, and in April an ammunition ship exploded in Bombay’s harbour, killing over 500 people and destroying 40,000 tons of warehoused food grains. The viceroy suspected that only the threat of his resignation would overcome the War Cabinet’s ‘astonishing lack of imagination’ on the matter of India.[100]

It was this whispered threat on 26 April, plus a warning from Mountbatten that without prompt aid he would have to begin prioritising military cargo space for wheat, which finally provoked Churchill into asking Roosevelt for help. After several weeks of silence from Washington, the prime minister was ‘turned down flat’ by FDR.[101] The problem had been kicked back to London. The Cabinet spent summer 1944 ‘fiddling and procrastinating’ about it. But Wavell now had the chiefs of staff on his side, for they recognised that without an adequate food reserve India could not be used as a base of military operations in the coming winter. In October 1944, Whitehall finally agreed to an extra 300,000 tons of food – ‘after HMG had twice said no imports were possible at all’, the viceroy noted.[102]

It is very hard to look back at this story and read it as either Churchill or his Cabinet ‘sending whatever could be spared’ with any sort of good faith or imaginative sympathy for the human crisis in India. Wavell got two-thirds of what he wanted by the end of 1944, but only after mobilising all the military and civilian pressure he could muster in Britain and the Raj to overcome obdurate resistance. Summing up his first year as viceroy, Wavell wrote that ‘I have found HMG’s attitude to India negligent, hostile, and contemptuous to a degree I had not anticipated.’[103]

*

Was the Bengal famine a genocide, as it has been most provocatively alleged?[104] The 1948 United Nations definition of that crime – an ‘act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ – demands a level of malicious premeditated design absent in Bengal in 1942 and 1943. Many of the proximate causes of the disaster which unfolded in India in those years were man-made, and the response from the imperial authorities to the onset of famine was certainly characterised by gross incompetence and, to begin with, a glib lack of urgency. But no one in the British imperial administration actually set out to murder several million Indians. Comparisons between events in the Bay of Bengal and Poland in 1943 are facile and unhelpful.

Was Churchill personally to blame? He did not conjure up the cyclone of October 1942 any more than anyone else did. He did not spread the fungal spores which subsequently ravaged Bengal’s rice crop. His government in London, kept in the dark by the Raj authorities, remained largely unaware of what was happening in India until August 1943, by which time the best opportunity to prevent death on a massive scale had already passed. The logistical complexities of shipping relief foods across the Indian Ocean, as well as the opportunity costs for Allied military operations, should not be idly ignored.

That said, it simply will not do to dismiss Churchill’s role in what happened with a regretful wave towards the abstract urgencies of ‘the war effort’. This has been a popular move among his defenders in recent years. ‘The Allies never had enough shipping…Churchill was not in a position to suddenly release [it] to take food to Bengal even if had wanted to. Not in the middle of a life and death struggle in which the lives of millions of Britons and those of their allies were at stake.’[105] Fighting the war, we are told, ‘remained the principal concern’ of the British government, and everything else had to be subordinated to that.[106]

That the Allies never had enough shipping to do everything they would have wished is true enough, but there are a couple of problems with that defence. One is that Wavell always thought ‘the war effort’ an excuse. ‘I have never believed that the tonnage required to enable me to deal properly with our food problem would make any real difference to operations in the West or here,’ he told Amery. ‘A dozen ships would do the trick.’[107] As the former commander-in-chief in the Middle East he presumably had some idea what he was talking about.

Another is that Churchill was perfectly prepared to prioritise civilian over military needs when he was minded to. When, at the beginning of 1943, the prime minister asked Roosevelt to divert 7 million tons of American shipping for the United Kingdom’s import requirements – deploying an urgency in his prose that was altogether lacking when he made the request on India’s behalf the following year – he did so knowing quite well that military operations would be affected. The US chiefs of staff objected for that very reason. FDR agreed to Churchill’s plea, and the transatlantic movement of American troops for a cross-Channel invasion was slowed down as a result. Reasonable people can disagree among themselves about whether this was a defensible trade-off or not. The point is that it was a trade-off – there was nothing sacrosanct about ‘the war effort’ on that occasion. Churchill was prepared to let fewer GIs cross the Atlantic and delay the Second Front to avoid even a modest diminution in the British food supply, one that would have left the national diet duller than ever before but would not have presaged mass hunger or anything close to it. The issue was never the absolute priority of ‘fighting the war’; it was which human beings mattered more.

There is no getting away from the fact that Churchill just did not think keeping a few million indigent Indian peasants alive was a very pressing cause. He admitted as much in the War Cabinet in September 1943 when discussing the relative merits of sending food to India versus storing it for post-liberation relief in Greece. ‘The starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis [was] less serious than sturdy Greeks.’[108] Indians who were ‘actually fighting or making munitions’ or otherwise engaged in militarily useful activities might receive some consideration. The rest were expendable.[109] In April 1945, when food supplies were being rushed to the Netherlands, Wavell noted acerbically that ‘a very different attitude [exists] towards feeding a starving population when the starvation is in Europe’.[110]

Churchill never seems to have shared with Wavell or Amery much sense of noblesse oblige – paternalistic and infantilising, perhaps, but no less sincerely held – towards the Indian masses. His belief that Indians were ‘ungrateful’ to the British for all that had been done for them during the war was one of the most peculiar themes in his memoirs. He began his chapter on the Cripps Mission in The Hinge of Fate with the extraordinary statement that ‘No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the peoples of Hindustan…carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small Island.’[111] He never understood how the sterling balances worked to the UK’s advantage and remained convinced even in 1950 that they had been and remained an outrageous imposition on his own country.

On the matter of the famine, Churchill was quite unaffected by a patriarchal guilt which haunted other of his countrymen. The poet Clive Branson, a sergeant serving in the Royal Armoured Corps in India in 1943, watched in impotent horror at the nightmare playing out around him, writing in his diary: ‘the ordinary, decent people in England must do something – this is their Empire’.[112] Indeed, as news of the famine trickled back to Britain that autumn the popular response was a pricking of imperial fraternal conscience. Home Intelligence summarised the popular view as ‘the blame must rest with us…how can we plan to feed Europe when our own people in Bengal are starving?’.[113] Churchill never thought of a Bengali peasant as one of his ‘own people’, and therein lay the problem. Anyone convinced that the prime minister strove as hard as he possibly could to relieve India’s famine should ask themselves this: do they honestly think he would have ever accepted with a contrite shrug that 1 million men, women and children in, say, the Home Counties must starve to death because of the greater needs of the war effort?[114]

The problem with focusing exclusively on Churchill’s personal sins is not that it is unfair to him: it is that doing so lets the rest of the British people off the hook. The prime minister did not invent the sterling balances. He was not the architect of the structural inequalities in the British Empire that made it possible to contemplate mass suffering and death in the Indian subcontinent with relative equanimity. That the vast resources of that empire could be mobilised urgently to feed millions of people when the will was there was illustrated in 1943 by the Cairo-based Middle East Supply Centre, led by the superb Australian organiser Robert Jackson.[115] Deploying material and imaginative capital to India on a similar scale was never an impossibility. It was a choice.

Inasmuch as the Bengal famine was a British crime, then, it was a systemic rather than a personal crime, and one for which every privileged imperial subject, not just the prime minister of the United Kingdom, bore some responsibility. It was ‘a dark stain on the administration of India’, as Robert Lyman has written:

It is reasonable to argue that the real reason why India was fighting – the defence of India and its people – was shamefully neglected by the [British] Indian government. Bengal in 1943 may be explicable as an event, but it was also unconscionable, irreparably damaging Britain’s moral right to govern…

The self-evident organizational skill and centralizing authority that even then was being used to design a system to build effective lines of communication into Assam and Bengal to sustain the fighting armies being built up could also have been directed to preventing famine, regardless of the military challenge presented by the Japanese.

It was in the lack of will to do so that the British were ‘found wanting’.[116]

Part Three

Running Out of Steam

10

England Is a Village

‘He gave us the fatal news. He didn’t have to ask for silence. We all stood there stunned – even the babies and the children were hushed. I don’t think we even discussed it with one another. We just went home too unhappy to speak.’[1] It was an otherwise unremarkable evening in June 1942, and the 750 or so residents of six villages in Breckland, an isolated sandy heathland straddling the Norfolk–Suffolk border, had been summoned to a public meeting in one of the local schools’ playgrounds. There they had just been told that their community – of which their families had been an uninterrupted part for hundreds of years and whose permanent existence they had always taken for granted – was to be broken up by government fiat within a month.

The man delivering the fateful message that night was Lieutenant-General Kenneth Anderson, soon to be the commander of Allied forces in the TORCH expedition, but who at this moment was still in charge of home defence for East Anglia. Anderson got to the point quickly. The British Army, he said, was badly in need of training before it went to war against the Germans again in north-west Europe. It would need large practice grounds which maintained realistic live-fire conditions. Civilians could not, for obvious reasons, be allowed in these dangerous battle-school areas. ‘The last thing anyone wants to do is turn Englishmen from their homes,’ insisted Anderson. But that was precisely what the government was going to do.

Eighteen thousand acres of Breckland had been assigned by Whitehall to the new Stanford ‘Principal Training Area’ (PTA). As part of this process all the existing residents of the area would have to be summarily relocated. Was this legal? Quite so, under the exhaustive powers granted to the government in Article IV of the 1939 Defence Regulations. Ideally, Anderson went on, it was hoped that the local population would cooperate with the authorities in the interests of the national war effort. If they did not, he hinted, they would have to leave anyway, if need be by force. Lord Walsingham, a superannuated county dignitary, pleaded with the Breckland villagers to accept the situation with stoic inevitability. They must show ‘fortitude and courage’.[2]

‘The war had taken our husbands and now our homes and way of life was to go,’ wrote Vera Czeres, headmistress of the school at which the meeting was taking place, years later. ‘Perhaps that wasn’t so much amongst all the carnage and loss, but it was too much for us to ignore.’[3] Brecklanders made up a tight-knit community, so parochial that their dialect was impenetrable to other East Anglians. Anyone living more than a few miles away was regarded as a ‘furriner’. Some of the families could trace their local roots back over 500 years. Plague, Reformation, civil war, industrialisation – none of these had made any serious impression on life in this obscure, innocent backwater of the Fens. Now all that had been written off with the scrawl of a bureaucratic pen in London.

In a matter of weeks 132 cottages, sixteen farmhouses, three schools, two pubs and several churches had been appropriated by the military authorities. The evacuation itself when it came was later described as an ‘absolute shambles…no arrangements were made, no nothing’. Farming stock had had to be disposed of at fire sale prices. Many elderly residents had had no friends or relatives to turn to for lodgings or assistance. Compensation was set by the Treasury at a miserable average of £12 per person, often delivered in the form of a cheque, a payment method some of the recipients had never even seen before. A few stubborn souls tried to resist eviction until the last minute and had to be cajoled into leaving virtually at bayonet point. Most residents, however, sadly acquiesced, locking up their homes one final time on their mornings of departure and pocketing their front door keys in the expectation – which, they later insisted, had been guaranteed by the army as a condition of their cooperation – that they would be allowed to return once the wartime emergency was over.

The Brecklanders’ experience in 1942 was by no means unusual. In all, some 14.5 million rural acres – 15 per cent of the nation’s total area – and 25 million square feet of industrial and storage space were requisitioned across the United Kingdom during the Second World War in what has been described as the greatest ‘uncontrolled land grab’ by the British state since 1066.[4] The War Office alone acquired about 580,000 of these acres to create its battle training areas, which included half of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, over 30,000 acres of the Brecon Beacons in Wales and the sprawling Lulworth Ranges on the south coast of Dorset.[5] Compulsory land requisition for training purposes reached as far as eastern Scotland and pastoral Northumberland.[6]

His Majesty’s Government’s energies did not end there. During the war it embarked on a fortress-building spree of a like which had not perhaps been seen in Britain since the raising of the Iron Age hill forts two dozen centuries earlier. Over 28,000 pillboxes and gun emplacements and hundreds of miles of anti-tank ditches were hurriedly chiselled out along the coastline. Beaches were seeded with mines and anti-tank obstacles and hemmed off from curious civilians by barbed-wire battlements. Inland, from Somerset to Essex and north to the Firth of Forth, ‘stop lines’ were demarcated by bollards and machine gun posts to try to slow the Nazi invaders’ path to the industrial heartland. In the East Riding of Yorkshire alone, more than 100,000 concrete posts were hammered into fields to serve as anti-glider obstacles. Air-raid shelters were dug, searchlight and anti-aircraft batteries and Royal Observer Corps (RAC) air watching posts constructed. Landmarks were effaced. Fearing that they would serve as useful navigational waypoints for German bombers, the authorities hid the Cerne Abbas Giant and the Uffington White Horse from overhead sight with blankets of turf camouflage – the subterfuge proving so effective in the case of the Anglo-Saxon White Horse that it was accidentally ravaged by a passing tank on manoeuvres in 1943.[7]

The war saw what the secretary of state for air, Archibald Sinclair, called ‘the most gigantic civil engineering and building programme ever undertaken’ in Britain, the concreting over of 33,000 country acres (much of it prime farming land) to create a network of airfields for the RAF and USAAF – a project so vast that had the materials been used instead to build a road from London to Beijing, it would have been thirty feet wide.[8] While Allied bombers flew from these bases to Germany, so German bombers flew to the UK to drop over 73,000 tons of ordnance, further reorganising the national landscape by violence. Fourteen million tons of debris had to be cleared in London alone, much of it eventually ending up dumped in Hackney Marshes and filling up basins along Regent’s Canal (London Zoo’s car park today sits atop a massive pile of Blitz detritus).[9]

Hundreds of country houses and their estates were seconded to government use between 1939 and 1945. They were transformed into temporary hospitals, dormitories, training schools and POW camps. Some of these repurposed properties would become internationally famous as a result of their wartime use, such as, for example, an unprepossessing Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire called Bletchley Park. Southwick House, just north of Portsmouth, was afforded lasting post-war recognition for having served as General Eisenhower’s headquarters during the 1944 Normandy campaign. Blenheim Palace, meanwhile, hosted the wartime security service (MI5), Longleat had an American military hospital built in its grounds, and Highclere Castle in Hampshire – better known to early-twenty-first-century TV audiences as ‘Downton Abbey’ – became an ad hoc billet for evacuated children.

Where buildings could not be requisitioned, they were created from scratch. Everywhere, Whitehall raised up supply dumps, vehicle and barrage balloon parks, mines and factories on what had previously been greenfield sites. Some of these wartime projects were on an enormous scale. Three ‘Central Ammunition Depots’ in Wiltshire, Shropshire and Cumberland, each capable of holding hundreds of thousands of tons of shells, were carved out of the landscape with subterranean bunkers and networks of paved roads and light railway lines. The Royal Navy Propellant Factory site at Caerwent in South Wales was even bigger, a 1,580-acre site (as large as Bangor) producing 150 tons of cordite a week for Britain’s warships.[10] The Ministry of Supply built a factory in the Alyn Valley in Flintshire to manufacture mustard gas shells; it was later used to test uranium isotopes as part of Britain’s protean atomic bomb research programme. Phosgene gas was the speciality of the Rocksavage works in Cheshire. The top-secret Chemical Defence Experimental Station at Porton Down in Wiltshire manufactured 5 million anthrax-filled cattle cakes for Bomber Command to drop on Germany to wipe out its cow herds.[11] This plan never took place, but in 1942 Gruinard Island in the Outer Hebrides was test-seeded with anthrax to see what would happen, and the despoiled island had to be deemed out of bounds to all human and animal life for the next seventy years.

*

‘England’, the journalist C. Henry Warren declared in 1941, ‘is a village.’[12] The evocation of the nation at war as essentially rural rather than urban was a conceit shared across the political spectrum, from High Tories like Arthur Bryant to the socialist and pacifist Vera Brittain (‘England for me,’ she wrote shortly after the Battle of Britain, ‘means the fields and lanes of its lovely country.’)[13] For Bryant as well as Brittain, the England of the imagination was an essentially static idyll of a place – its lanes, meadows, hedgerows, copses, brooks and ponds all features of a dreamy, semi-mythical ‘Deep’ land in which ancient and modern were inextricably connected, and in which an authentic, peaceful, well-ordered and above all unchanging way of life was playing out.[14] As the poet Herbert Read suggested, also in 1941, the English countryside was ‘exactly what we are fighting for – a green and pleasant land, a landscape whose features have been moulded in liberty, where every winding lane and irregular building is an expression of our national character’.[15]

It is all the more ironic, then, that while these paeans to a timeless Eden were being written the national landscape was undergoing revolutionary change. The Second World War saw the British countryside briskly, often ruthlessly, reorganised and rationalised. Fields were combined, meadows and grazing land put to the plough, hedgerows uprooted, streams straightened, bracken and scrub cleared, canals cut, forests planted and felled (two-thirds of the nation’s mature woodlands were cut down for timber during the war), marshes drained and expanses of heath and wasteland reclaimed – not always skilfully or without damaging long-term consequences for local wildlife and plant life. By the end of six years of war, Britain’s pastoral, locally organised, mostly insolvent and definitely demoralised farming economy had metamorphosed into a confident, mechanised, centrally controlled and increasingly chemically dependent national industry dominated not by the husbandry of sheep, pigs and cattle but by the growing of arable crops.[16]

If this transformation was ‘an expression of national character’ as Read put it, then what it expressed was less a sentimental attachment to tradition than a clear-eyed willingness by the state to smash up old verities in the pursuit of national goals. Whitehall-directed committees told the nation’s wartime farmers what they could and could not grow and what they must and must not plough – and who, by right of ‘efficiency’, ought to be allowed to work the land, and who ought not. Tenancies that had been passed down by families for generations, but now regarded as obstructive to best practices, were revoked. Occasionally this was done with violence.

Those who had to surrender land and property for state use during hostilities did not always get them back unspoiled. Farmers complained throughout the war of the vandalism of military units – of trampled crops, ripped-up fences, broken gates, deep ruts in fields gorged by tank tracks and the impact of artillery shells, livestock killed and poultry and eggs ‘liberated’ by troops on chevauchée. Whether by carelessness or malice, soldiers departing billets at Egginton Hall in Derbyshire left all the bathroom taps running, inflicting such horrendous flood damage that the whole building later had to be demolished. Country house interiors in Sussex and on the Isle of Wight were gutted in bonfires started by overly enthusiastic military celebrants. Aggrieved landlords surveying the damage afterwards could lodge official protests and demand compensation, but they often received short shrift. ‘We have had enough complaints from you,’ one army claims officer wrote to the owner of Lawrence Castle in Devon’s Haldon Hills, which had been taken over for use as an observation post. ‘If we have any more we shall take the whole place.’ What, he added, ‘do you expect from a conscript army? We have the power.’[17]

At least the owners of Lawrence Castle got their property back at the end of the war, however ruined its floors and stairs might have been by the tramp of army-issue hobnail boots. Others were not so lucky. Between the wars, the Fairey aviation company had acquired about 100 hectares of market garden land around a quiet Middlesex hamlet called Heathrow, which they planned to develop as a private airfield for test flights. In 1944, however, the government commandeered the lot as part of a 620-hectare compulsory takeover. No compensation was offered to the company for twenty years: Sir Richard Fairey described the loss of the site as ‘utterly calamitous’ to its later fortunes.[18] In theory, an American airbase was to be built at Heathrow, but no such base appeared, and cynics guessed that the government, having eyed up the land as a suitable location for London’s post-war airport, had simply used its emergency wartime powers in order to avoid the tiresome strictures of a peacetime planning inquiry. Heathrow was turned over to the Ministry of Civil Aviation in 1946 and work on its runways began a year later – destroying in the process, though without much attention, what had been a small but prosperous fruit and vegetable industry across west Middlesex.[19]

The Breckland residents evicted in 1942 remained adamant for years that General Anderson had promised that their homes would be returned to them after the war, and Home Office files on the matter do indeed mention ‘definite assurances’ that this had been the case. However, such pledges made not a whit of difference in the end. In 1947, the War Office decided to permanently annex the Stanford training area and it remains Ministry of Defence property to this day, an eerily preserved pocket of 1940s English life, its dusty country lanes and overgrown, gorse-speckled fields having proven useful over the years as exterior locations for period television shows such as Dad’s Army.[20]

If wartime England was indeed a village, as C. Henry Warren claimed, it is worth considering what kind of village it was. Was it the sort of chocolate-box hamlet depicted in H. V. Morton’s In Search of England (already in its twenty-sixth edition by autumn 1939) – a prelapsarian haven of carefully husbanded good order? Or was it more like one of the lost villages of Breckland (West Tofts, Langford, Buckenham Tofts, Stanford, Sturston, Tottington) – a place savagely transformed by the exigencies of war? And never mind the English: what about everyone else? The United Kingdom in the 1940s was, as it remains, a multinational state. Regional attitudes and identities were always in creative and destructive tension with more expansive notions of ‘Britishness’ defined in geographical and ethnic terms.[21] The war imposed itself on the people of Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland just as much as on the English. In some ways, the conflict bound the four nations of the British Isles closer together than ever before. In others, it accelerated the centripetal forces which would be testing unitary Britannia to destruction by the beginning of the twenty-first century.

*

At the outbreak of the war, the UK imported two-thirds of all the calories its people consumed. Only one in twenty adult British citizens was employed in the agricultural and fishing sectors.[22] This was bound to be a factor in the way the British fought the war. Popular accounts tend to have it that it was an undesirable, even dangerous situation to be in; that it compared poorly to the circumstances in, say, Germany, which enjoyed much greater food self-sufficiency in 1939; and that the conflict happily ended such precarious national reliance on food imports, mainly thanks to the furious Digging for Victory of an army of gumboot-and-breeches-clad, headscarf-accessorised Land Girls.[23]

That is an entirely wrong impression. Throughout the Second World War, the British continued – wisely – to rely in the main on food they bought or acquired from abroad. Even in 1944, at the peak of domestic farming output, 56 per cent of nationally consumed calories derived from overseas.[24] It is sometimes said that British wartime food imports were cut by half during the war,[25] but this is a misleading statistic because it lumps together animal foodstuffs with those intended for human consumption. If fodder (mostly maize) is taken out of consideration, then overall wartime import tonnage fell only by a rather more modest one-quarter.[26] Even that does not tell the whole story, however, because the importation of many foodstuffs into Britain between 1939 and 1945 actually went up, not down. Cheese imports almost doubled; meat imports increased by nearly one-fifth. Most of the latter was due to the bulk purchase (or Lend-Lease gifting) of canned meats, especially tins of Argentinian corned beef and American spiced ham or ‘SPAM’, both of which became ubiquitous, if not universally loved, essentials of the British wartime kitchen table. But lamb imports, mainly from New Zealand, went up too. Crucially, the calorific value of each ton of imported food increased during the war by an average of one-quarter. Britain stopped buying cheap bulky foreign goods like wheat, fruit and vegetables, which could be grown at home easily enough. It purchased instead protein-dense products, often dried, powdered or, in the case of meats, frozen.[27] Food imports, in other words, were more rationalised than cut.

Had the supply of food to the UK ever been seriously imperilled by enemy action, then this might have been a dangerous strategy. That, however, was never the case. There was the occasional brief (and hyperbolic) scare in Whitehall during the crisis months of the Battle of the Atlantic, but even in 1941, a gloomy year for shipping, only 730,000 of the more than 15 million tons of food brought to Britain by sea failed to arrive.[28] ‘Sacrifices in taste were made. But there was never any real fear of hunger among the population.’[29] The UK never remotely approached the kind of brutal famine conditions experienced in late-war Greece or the Netherlands, let alone 1943 Bengal.

With reasonable assurance of food security, then, it made eminent sense for an industrialised country with a large merchant fleet to rely predominantly on imports to feed its people, since this freed up the civil workforce to devote its time and skills more productively to the war effort rather than to growing crops or husbanding animals. The contrast with wartime Germany is not nearly so flattering to the Reich as people tend to assume. A typical family in Düsseldorf or Dresden in 1939 relied on a home-grown (and profoundly dreary) diet of potatoes and Schwarzbrot planned by a government obsessed with calorific autarky. To be sure, no enemy blockade could directly threaten this domestic food supply, but the German farming sector which produced it was labour-intensive and technologically backward, and would become still more so during the war.[30] By 1942, almost one in three workers in Germany (including POWs and foreign forced labourers) were committed to agriculture. The equivalent figure for the UK at that time was 6 per cent. The opportunity costs of this imbalance for the Nazi war economy were profound. Germany in 1942 had twice the resident population of Britain, but the engineering workforces in both countries were about the same size. Millions of Hitler’s workers, especially women, who might otherwise have been employed producing Focke-Wolf engines and anti-aircraft guns instead found themselves growing rye in East Prussia and tending Kartoffeln fields in Franconia.[31]

None of which is to say that the British agricultural sector was in good shape on the outbreak of war. The country’s farmers had had a miserable couple of decades. By 1934, the price of wheat had fallen to 20s. 9d a quarter, one-quarter of what it had been fourteen years earlier.[32] Wheat had never been so cheap in Britain since the 1600s. The price plunge, driven by foreign competitors, might have been great for consumers but was a disaster for producers.[33] Modest attempts were made to manipulate the depressed market with subsidies, tax relief and import duties by the National Government’s Ministry of Agriculture (an interwar ‘grave of political expectations’, according to Malcolm Muggeridge), but little was achieved.[34]

Arable farmers responded, rationally enough, by switching to more profitable animal husbandry, but the typical British interwar farm was small, debt-laden and technologically obsolete: in no position, in other words, to invest, let alone experiment or innovate. Few farmers had access to piped water, fewer still electricity. With wages falling, 10,000 workers a year were drifting from the shires to the towns and cities, where they could enjoy weekly pay packets for manual labour twice as big as on the land.[35] The interwar prime minister Stanley Baldwin, in moments of bucolic reverie from the security of SW1, would blithely pronounce on the beauties of the British countryside – the cheerful tinkle of hammers on anvils, the scrape of scythes against whetstones. The truth about Merrie England was a good deal starker. The nation’s farms were poor, squalid and glum.

It is all the more remarkable, then, that within six years Britain’s agricultural output had transformed, more profoundly and at a faster pace than at any time since the start of the Industrial Revolution.[36] The most urgent need was to provide a substitute for all that previously imported foreign wheat. In 1939, Britain only had 11.8 million acres of arable land under the plough, compared to 17.3 million acres of grass and pastureland. Four years later those figures had been almost exactly reversed – to 17.3 million and 11.4 million acres respectively. The amount of tillage soil specifically devoted to wheat had doubled.[37] Just over 4.2 million harvested tons of wheat, barley and oats had become 7.6 million tons. By 1943 the potato crop was almost twice as big as it had been in 1939. Less pastureland meant fewer animals, and so a veritable massacre on pork and poultry farms ensued. By 1943 there were almost 30 million fewer British chickens and 2.2 million fewer pigs than pre-war numbers. Cows were spared – but strictly for milk production, not beef.

It was all a remarkable turnaround, though it is perhaps worth noting that even in the bumper harvest year of 1943, the UK still received almost half of its wheat from overseas. How it had been accomplished was less a matter of increased productivity (the wheat yield per acre in 1943 was only 7 per cent higher than it had been before the war and was soon to fall again) than simply a consequence of farming more land with a bigger labour force.[38] True, the emergency did see widespread mechanisation across British agriculture. Lend-Lease American combine harvesters arrived on farms for the first time in large numbers, along with Dagenham-made Fordson N tractors, and the use of fertilisers like potash (supplied in part by the Soviet Union) and synthesised ammonium sulphate (manufactured in Canada) doubled. However, the big efficiencies in method – hybrid seeds, herbicides, selective breeding – were still years away in 1945.[39]

In charge of the transformative process in England and Wales were sixty-two County War Agricultural Executive Committees – CWAECs or ‘War Ags’ – which were responsible at the local level for ensuring that Whitehall’s national instructions on food production were observed.[40] They enjoyed almost limitless emergency powers over the individual farmers in their districts: to direct how land ought to be cultivated or used, to take possession of property or equipment deemed idle and, if necessary, to dispossess by force of law existing tenants found wanting. Between 1941 and 1943 they and their agents in about 500 district subcommittees drew up an exhaustive land survey of all England and Wales: something akin to a twentieth-century Domesday Book. This categorised existing farmers by merit on an ABC scale. Those in the ‘A’ category (about two-thirds) had nothing to worry about; ‘B’ farmers were judged capable of improvement; and any ‘recalcitrant or hopelessly inefficient’ unfortunates who received a ‘C’ designation – roughly one in twenty – were given due warning that their time might be soon up. In all, 2,700 English and Welsh farmers were completely dispossessed of their tenancies during the war and evicted. Most resigned themselves to such a fate, though there were stories of anguished suicides. A handful of the displaced would not go gently. The most notorious case was that of George Walden, shot dead by Hampshire police after barricading himself inside his farmhouse with a shotgun. The agricultural journalist A. G. Street, who wrote a novel loosely based on Walden’s tragic story, Shameful Harvest (1952), called him a victim of ‘Nazi methods’.[41]

To be sure, dominated as they were by Tory gentry with large farming concerns of their own, the War Ags were capable of overzealousness, obtuseness and, occasionally, corruption (one dispossessed East Yorkshire tenant was shocked to find himself replaced by the brother of a CWAEC board member).[42] By the end of the war, farmers’ rights organisations had identified over 300 cases of dubious evictions.[43] On the whole, though, the system worked. Of the several hundred thousand acres of land appropriated, the vast majority had been abandoned by their non-resident owners or were being palpably underused. Most CWAECs offered reasonable advice and much practical assistance, and only engaged a magistrate as an absolute last resort. What is significant is that British farmers, a notoriously individualistic lot, generally decided to cooperate with the new regime. This was partly because they felt under a patriotic obligation to do their bit; partly because the instructions they were receiving made a lot of sense; but mostly because, for the first time in a generation, British agriculture was awash with money. Arable land use had become ‘immensely more profitable’ than before the war, thanks to government intervention. By 1942, farmers, enjoying guaranteed prices and markets, had roughly doubled their pre-war net incomes. Under the circumstances it’s hardly surprising that (as Street characterised it sourly) the yeoman had become a ‘yes-man’ with a ‘meek acceptance’ of his subordination to Whitehall war socialism.[44]

Some of the new wealth made its way into labourers’ pockets. By summer 1943, the national minimum weekly wage for full-time male farm work had been set at sixty-five shillings (compared to an average income of thirty-seven shillings at the start of the war) and, with generous overtime rates, many farm workers were earning much more than this; they were also newly eligible for unemployment relief. Labour organisation helped to buttress this new job security; membership of the National Union of Agricultural Workers roughly tripled during the war. So, despite the military call-up, the exodus from the countryside ended.[45] The total farming workforce by the end of 1943 had increased from a pre-war figure of 711,000 to 805,000. This included 40,000 or so Italian prisoners of war, the majority of whom were more than happy to have exchanged the vicissitudes of battle for the more comfortable surroundings of a British farm billet. There were also around 170,000 casual workers from other industries who did stints at weekend and summer farm camps to get some country air and pick up a little extra pay.[46]

The most famous wartime arrivals into the countryside were members of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) – the ‘Land Girls’ – of whom about 84,000 were employed in British agriculture by Christmas 1943. Though its uniform of fawn corduroy breeches or khaki-coloured dungarees, a green jersey and a squashy brown trilby hat were nationally iconic by mid-war, the WLA was never officially one of the women’s auxiliary services, and so its members lacked all the concomitant duties and benefits. A land girl could technically leave the job at any time, though she might find herself immediately directed to other, less agreeable work. Equally, for much of the war she received a lamentably low rate of pay (twenty-eight shillings a week, with up to twenty-one shillings reserved for board and keep by the farmer’s wife); no holidays, paid or unpaid; no travel allowance; and no promise of a post-war resettlement gratuity. ‘We were treated badly. After paying for my digs, I had so little left I had to save for weeks to buy a book,’ one Gloucestershire volunteer later remembered. ‘I feel that we were neglected. No one seemed to take any notice of us,’ recalled another from Dorset.[47] About one in four WLA women worked on dairy farms, with another 6,000 seconded to the Timber Corps as ‘Lumber Jills’. Some caught rats (the record haul for two Lincolnshire Land Girls was 12,000 of them in a year), while many others spent up to fifty hours a week threshing – noisy, dirty and physically gruelling, albeit vital, work.[48]

The public attitude to Land Girls was curious. Women were hardly unknown to British agriculture: 93,000 of them had been employed full- or part-time in 1939, making up 13 per cent of the total workforce,[49] and roughly two-thirds of WLA volunteers were from rural districts, which suggests that at least some of them brought pre-war farming experience to the job. All the same, popular belief had it that the land girl was exclusively a creature of the town – ‘a relatively spoilt and gently-nurtured girl [used to] silk stockings and high-heeled shoes, pretty frocks and jaunty hats’ – a canard that the WLA’s own quasi-official chronicler, the novelist Vita Sackville-West, encouraged in her 1944 book on the organisation.[50] If the main point of such caricature was to belittle (and for some to articulate fears that women farm workers would depress wages while contributing little of value), it may also have been a way to compare the false values of louche urban femininity with the restorative qualities of country ways. ‘These city girls become purified by their work on the land,’ Beverley Nichols wrote in the Sunday Chronicle; ‘they have learned the beauty of the soil.’[51]

*

The waging of war has filled the valleys with work and wages. Boys swagger in the streets with pocketfuls of money. Omnibuses crowded with women and girls rumble to and fro between the scattered mining villages and the concentrated munition factories…the expulsive power of a new experience has dimmed the memories of the nineteen-thirties.[52]

Wales and Scotland, though each constitutionally in quite different relationships to the rest of the United Kingdom, nevertheless shared much in common in 1939. Both had proud sovereign traditions to look back on, which added an extra piquancy to their relationship with distant Whitehall. On the other hand, their nationalist frustrations had been ameliorated from the beginning of the nineteenth century by a fruitful participation in Britain’s twin modernising projects of empire and industrialisation. Victorian heavy industry – coal-mining in Wales, shipbuilding and iron and steel production in Scotland – had come to dominate the native economies, which meant that the collapse of those sectors in the 1930s Slump had hit the Celtic periphery of the UK especially hard. In 1934, the number of tons of shipping built on the Clyde had fallen to 56,000, compared to an annual production record of 757,000 in 1913. Almost seven in ten registered workers in the Glasgow shipbuilding industry were out of work before the war, as were most of the Welsh miners in the valleys of Brecknockshire and Monmouthshire.[53]

One consequence of this was that the onset of a second world war had been greeted less with horror – neither urban Scotland nor Wales, unlike the English south-east, was likely to be in the immediate sights of the Luftwaffe – than with nervous anticipation as to what the switch to a militarised economy would mean for these ‘distressed areas’. By 1941, the answer was clear: war might be awful, but it was delivering working men and their families from what one observer in the Rhondda called ‘the sufferings of enforced idleness’.[54] A pre-war surplus of miners on the Welsh coalfaces had so reversed itself as to become instead a serious labour shortage, and one which statutory pay increases and production bonuses, even the recall of trained men from HM Forces, could do little to alter. Eventually Bevin’s Ministry of Labour had no choice but to conscript teenagers (his ‘Bevin Boys’) for pit work. Six wartime Royal Ordnance Factories were set up in South Wales, the largest, Bridgend, employing 35,000 workers at its peak. The expansion of women into the Welsh regional workforce was especially spectacular. By 1944, 219,000 women were in full-time employment, compared to 94,000 before the war.[55]

In Scotland, meanwhile, Clydebank returned to an average wartime production tally of 493,000 shipbuilding tons a year. The Clyde firms ended up constructing almost 1,000 Royal Naval vessels and over 500 merchant ships during the war. By 1943, five hulls a week were being launched from Scottish yards,[56] and such mills as Bairds, Frederick Braby and Colville’s, which had been on the brink of receivership in the mid-1930s, were making 1.9 million tons of steel annually. There was unrelenting demand for other ferrous Scottish products (iron tubes, forgings and stampings, castings, wire, metal rope),[57] and the Dundee jute industry received a generous fillip from the inexhaustible wartime demand for sandbags.[58] The Ministry of Aircraft Production, keen to exploit Scotland’s geographical distance from German bomber bases, also made a heavy investment in the region. Over 100,000 Scots, male and female, worked in factories, producing both wing components and aero engines (such as at the Rolls-Royce site at Hillington which manufactured Merlins for Spitfires and Lancasters), and an aluminum rolling mill was opened at Falkirk in 1944. Scottish workers were in such demand by the midpoint of the war that tens of thousands, mostly young women, were soon heading southwards by government diktat for factories in the English Midlands – 500 a week at the height of the diaspora.[59] The Highlands and Islands also saw an outflow of population as young men and women from crofting and fishing families sought better opportunities in industrial Scotland and England. But the war was good for traditional communities too; modern roads were built in the Shetlands and Orkneys to service military installations and port facilities, and Scottish farmers growing crops and tending animals on hilly, marginal soil were eligible for new government grants and subsidies.[60]

Economic benefits had come in the previous world war, but they had been overshadowed in Wales and Scotland by the shocking human cost of the war. Probably one in ten able-bodied Scotsmen had died in the calvaries of Flanders and Picardy; over 35,000 Welshmen had never returned from the slaughters of Mametz Wood or Passchendaele. This time, the Celtic regiments were largely spared that kind of trauma. The nearest equivalent was probably the mass capitulation of the 51st (Highland) Infantry Division at Saint-Valery-en-Caux in June 1940, which condemned 10,000 Scots to imprisonment in Silesia for the balance of the war, but five years of captivity, however physically and emotionally dulling, were not the same thing as being mown down on the Somme.

If battlefield casualties were much reduced in this war, Scottish and Welsh civilians were all the same exposed to danger in a way they had not been from 1914 to 1918. The shipyards, naval fuelling depots, storage and docking facilities and munitions factories of the Clyde ports and the Lower Swansea Valley were inevitable Blitz targets once the Luftwaffe began to range further afield. Still, deaths due to enemy action tended to be concentrated over short bursts of time, and overall were lower as a proportion of population than in England. Of the 984 Welshmen and -women killed in bombing raids during the Second World War, 227 of them died over three vicious nights in Swansea in February 1941.[61] Nine hundred and five residents of Glasgow and Clydebank were killed in a series of raids in March 1941, not far short of half the total Scottish wartime death toll of 2,250.[62] For some Scottish cities, the loss of life was lower but the duration of the threat more sustained. Aberdeen suffered more major air raids (thirty-two) than anywhere else in Scotland, the worst of these taking place in April 1943, when two dozen German aircraft freely bombed and machine-gunned pedestrians at twilight, killing 120 of them. Factoring in another 300 false alarms that the Granite City had to endure demonstrates how the ‘arithmetic of stress’, as Richard Titmuss put it, has to be counted against any wartime economic gains.[63]

*

Day-to-day life in the six counties of Northern Ireland was, in many ways, uniquely uninterrupted by the war. There was no military conscription and no compulsory direction of industrial employment: very little, in fact, of the sort of state management of life that became routine in Great Britain. Ulster was the only part of the United Kingdom with a land frontier with a neutral power. The existence of that sparsely populated and not very diligently policed 170-mile border meant that a vast and profitable smuggling economy siphoned southern Ireland’s unrationed butter, eggs, cheese, bacon, jam, chocolate and cigarettes northwards. British troops stationed in Ulster to guard against a possible German flank invasion – there were 100,000 of them by spring 1941 – posted food parcels back to their families on the austere mainland while remarking on the curious peacetime atmosphere of Belfast, barely 150 miles from Blitzed Liverpool. Northerners looking to escape the war completely could go on summer holiday to Donegal; or they could take an excursion to Dublin, where the city streetlights continued to blaze defiantly at night even as bombers criss-crossed Europe’s skies.

Certainly, those in Ulster who had spotted that the province was well within range of German aircraft operating from France thought that their fellows were living in a fool’s paradise. The Luftwaffe’s four major raids on Belfast in April and May 1941 were an infernal wake-up call which ended with over 1,000 citizens dead, and it exposed, among other things, the city’s ruinously poor ARP preparations. This crisis passed soon enough, however, and the Germans did not reappear in the skies over Antrim and Down in any great numbers for the rest of the conflict. Ulster complacently, even smugly, returned to being ‘only half in the war’, as its attorney general, John MacDermott, put it in 1942.[64]

Yet there was also a sense in which life in Ulster had not been changed by hostilities with Germany because the province had always been on a wartime footing – legally, psychologically and morally. Northern Ireland had, after all, been operating under emergency law since its severing from the twenty-six independent counties of the Irish Free State in 1922. Long before the invasion of Poland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) had been authorised to impose curfews, perform political censorship, make unwarranted searches and seizures and enforce detention without trial of Northern Ireland’s citizens in a manner impossible to imagine in peacetime Great Britain. If England, Wales and Scotland were now also under the martial law conditions of a wartime siege, then in a sense they had simply caught up with normality in Ulster.

Indeed, to many among the 800,000-strong Protestant community of Northern Ireland, this new war with the Nazis was a sideshow, a passing distraction from the far more spiritually urgent struggle they had been fighting with papal power for centuries. Ulster’s Catholic population was only half the size of their own, but it formed, at least as the more extreme Protestants saw it, a treacherous enemy within who must be constantly reminded of their subordination to Orange authority. Northern Ireland, alone of all the United Kingdom’s regions, enjoyed self-government in 1939. Its parliament at Stormont Castle was dominated by a Unionist Party which regarded its principal mission as the ruthless maintenance of a permanent Protestant ascendancy throughout the six counties.

It was thanks to this state-sponsored atmosphere of distrust and repression that Catholic disloyalty to the British Crown in Northern Ireland was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overt expressions of sedition were comparatively few and feeble. In the opening months of the war, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) mounted a desultory bombing campaign on the mainland, but this quickly ran out of steam. Its Ulster units occasionally attacked police barracks and officers, most notoriously killing a pair of RUC constables (a father of ten and a father of nine) over two bloody days in April 1942, for which a nineteen-year-old IRA section leader was soon afterwards hanged. Éamon de Valera’s southern Irish government, however, keen not to provoke the British, took as firm a line against terrorist activity as Stormont did. Dublin exercised all its considerable emergency wartime powers to suppress illegal cross-border movements, and most IRA personnel spent the Second World War jailed or interned in the North or the South.[65] All the same, Northern Ireland remained the only region of the United Kingdom in which popular support for the war could not be taken for granted. The presence of large numbers of British troops was not just to guard against German invasion; it was also to dissuade any elements of the nationalist community from thoughts of revolt.[66]

Fear of further antagonising the Catholic community lay at the root of Whitehall’s decision not to extend any wartime military call-up to Northern Ireland. ‘Nothing’, the Civil Service warned, ‘should be done to provoke rebellion’ in such a politically sensitive area of the country.[67] In principle, Unionists railed against this exception, seeing it as an insult to their province’s fealty to the Crown, though in practice they blew hot and cold on the matter. They were, after all, far from eager themselves to see Ulster’s Catholics trained in the use of modern weaponry or (worse still) raised to the status of national heroes. When James Magennis from the slums of Catholic West Belfast won the Victoria Cross for taking part in a daring midget submarine attack on a Japanese heavy cruiser in Singapore harbour in the dying days of the war, the municipal authorities in his home city could scarcely conceal their embarrassment about the thought of having to honour him.[68]

Ulster’s Union Jack–waving patriots were perfectly free to volunteer for HM Forces should they choose, of course, but it was telling that enlistment figures for the province always lagged far behind the national average. In December 1940, even in the midst of the great wartime crisis period for British arms, the number of new enlistees from Northern Ireland was just 600. The rate would drop even further in 1941.[69] Membership in Ulster’s Home Guard provoked more enthusiasm, but joining it demanded little personal risk, and since it was organised through the RUC’s reserve section – the notorious ‘B-Specials’, dominated by Orangemen – it functioned in practice less as an anti-invasion militia than as a well-armed anti-Catholic gendarmerie. Despite the War Office’s expressed desire not to allow British forces to become embroiled in ‘religious animosities’, nothing was done by London to correct this. Hardly any of Ulster’s Catholics volunteered for the original ‘Dad’s Army’, and any who did were soon harassed out of it.[70]

Churchill would complain to Roosevelt in 1943 of able-bodied Ulstermen wandering the streets of Belfast ‘with their hands in their pockets’, uninterested in joining up.[71] The province’s overall lackadaisical attitude to the war effort vexed the government in London. Northern Ireland certainly possessed an industrial base of some military value. Harland & Wolff was the largest shipyard in Europe, and the Short Brothers aerospace company had a factory in Belfast that built Britain’s first operational four-engine heavy bomber, the Stirling, as well as a large flying boat, the Sunderland, which proved crucial in the Battle of the Atlantic. By the mid-war period, 280,000 workers across the province were engaged in war-related employment – just over half of them in agriculture, almost 50,000 in engineering, motor vehicle and aircraft production, 30,000 in linens and textiles, and 18,000 in shipbuilding.[72]

Productivity in Ulster’s war industries was nevertheless poor. Waste, chronic absenteeism, corruption and an atrocious labour–management relationship generated disappointing output figures and shop-floor unrest. Though Northern Ireland possessed only 2 per cent of the United Kingdom’s workforce, it accounted for one in ten of all the nation’s wartime working days lost to strikes. The worst was in spring 1944, when a clash over wage rates at Harland & Wolff spread to Short Brothers, resulting in a six-week walkout involving 36,000 workers across the province. Five shop stewards were arrested; the RUC, convinced that some papal conspiracy must be behind the unrest, interrogated the men closely about their religious proclivities. Stormont had to step in eventually to negotiate a resolution before it turned into a full-scale provincial general strike.[73] On the mainland, the Sunday Pictorial called the dispute ‘a disgrace to Britain and the Empire’.[74] Significantly, Northern Ireland was the one region of the country which did not experience a return to full employment as a result of the war. One in twenty Ulster workers was on the dole in 1943 – a fraction of the figure from ten years before, to be sure, but still ten times worse than in the rest of the UK.[75] ‘As a people we are not well disciplined to withstand the stress of total war,’ MacDermott conceded.[76]

*

Northern Ireland’s failure to mobilise to anything like the same extent as the rest of the country did not portend well for its future. At the outbreak of war it was, after all, a constitutional experiment still less than twenty years old, and not one that was necessarily bound to last. Chamberlain had mused in the late 1930s that a united Ireland was some day inevitable.[77] His successor, who as a young politician before the Great War had pushed for pan-Irish Home Rule and had been pelted with rotten fish heads in Belfast for his trouble, came into office feeling little differently. In June 1940, Churchill made it clear to De Valera that he was willing to reopen the matter of partition if that was the price of Ireland’s entry into the war on the Allied side.[78]

In the end those negotiations went nowhere, but the prime minister still continued to complain about the ill-use of Ulster’s manpower and industry. Prompted by Churchill in spring 1941, Bevin demanded that Stormont provide a thorough audit of the province’s resources.[79] The following year Westminster privately complained of the ‘deplorable weakness’ of the Northern Ireland authorities in the face of industrial unrest.[80] In a speech to the Commons in February 1943 the minister of labour laid bare the issue of Ulster’s shortcomings: ‘I know of no [other] place in the country’, he said, ‘which has had the aircraft business almost thrown at its feet as Northern Ireland…yet the output has been nothing like what [we] hoped it would be.’[81] The war appeared to be illustrating Ulster’s lack of commitment to the United Kingdom and, perhaps, its unsuitability for future membership.

In the event, though, the war went much better for Ulster’s Unionists than they might have expected. That was partly due to the appointment at Stormont in spring 1943 of Sir Basil Brooke as prime minister, the first chief executive in possession of some real enterprise and imagination that Northern Ireland had ever had.[82] Brooke widened his Cabinet to include members of the Northern Ireland Labour Party; put the province on friendlier terms with HM Treasury; created a non-sectarian public trust to tackle Ulster’s woeful housing shortage; and even introduced some state funding for Catholic schools.[83] What mattered most, however, was the contrast between Northern Ireland and independent southern Ireland, which to Churchill’s fury remained steadfastly neutral to the very end of hostilities. In his victory speech on 13 May 1945 he fulminated at De Valera’s willingness five years earlier to ‘frolic with the Germans’ while the fate of the Allies still hung in the balance. Ulster’s ‘loyalty and friendship’ had been all the more crucial, the prime minister went on, not least because of its geographical importance in the Battle of the Atlantic.[84] De Valera’s decision in 1948 to withdraw from the Commonwealth and declare ‘Eire’ a republic reinforced the differences between North and South, and guaranteed the constitutional place of Northern Ireland within the UK. Attlee’s government responded to Dublin with an Ireland Act which made explicit for the first time that partition would never be undone without the consent of Stormont.[85] War had, it seemed, rendered permanent the Protestant hegemony in Ulster under the banner of the Union Jack.

Wales and Scotland, too, had their ‘Britishness’ renegotiated during the war, though in subtler and more complicated ways. The peoples of Great Britain certainly experienced a great national reintroduction to one another through the conflict’s churning of population. Around 200,000 peacetime English residents moved to Wales in the first two years of the war, the majority of them children evacuated from urban Lancashire (though some internal evacuees left Cardiff and Swansea for rural Glamorgan). Catholics from the Liverpool slums thus found themselves billeted with nonconformist middle-class North Walians; even if all spoke English – and just under 100,000 Welsh speakers were monoglot in 1939 – the divergence of accents alone could make for mutual incomprehension.[86] Most of Scotland’s 175,000 evacuees to the countryside were from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee, producing a culture clash which was a reminder that ‘Scottishness’ was not a straightforward concept.[87] Military units were less regionally distinct in this world war, and Scots in the armed and auxiliary services generally served alongside other Britons regardless of putative cap badge. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders became known as the Argyll and Bolton Wanderers because of the multitude of Englishmen in it.[88]

The presence of large numbers of foreign and émigré troops in the United Kingdom during the war also helped to break down parochial barriers. Americans (about 3 million passed through the UK during the war all told) and Canadians (half a million) were the commonest of all, though individual regions had their own distinct friendly ‘invasions’.[89] Most of the 38,000 Poles serving in western Europe were stationed in Scotland prior to D-Day defending the North Sea coastline. Religious and political tensions emerged between local Presbyterians and Communists on the one hand and the Catholic, fiercely anti-Soviet newcomers on the other; but 10,000 wartime marriages between Polish soldiers and Scottish women suggest a distinct degree of fraternisation.[90] What long-term effect (if any) the presence of so many non-Britons in the UK had is hard to say. It may have reminded the wartime Scots, Welsh, English and Irish of their comparative familiarity with one another compared to the mysterious world of Abroad.

Saunders Lewis, co-founder of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru (PC), called the evacuation of English children to his homeland ‘one of the most horrible threats’ to its cultural integrity that had ever been proposed.[91] Both PC and the Scottish National Party (SNP), founded in 1934, struggled to hit the right note at the outbreak of war. The sense that England’s difficulty might be Wales’s and Scotland’s opportunity prompted some staunch Celtic nationalists to make comments which were going to age very poorly. Professor J. E. Daniel, PC’s president at the outbreak of the war, called the conflict ‘a clash of rival imperialisms from which Wales…has nothing to gain’.[92] Douglas Young, a talented young classicist and the SNP’s leader in Aberdeen, argued in a letter in August 1940 that the Nazis would ‘look around for aborigines to run Scotland’ in the event of a successful invasion, with the strong implication that nationalists like himself would fit the bill rather well. He was later imprisoned for failing to register for military service.[93]

Such opinions were never likely to win many hearts across the mainstream Welsh and Scottish populations, and so both nationalist parties moderated their views as the war went on, criticising the English authorities instead for acts of cultural abuse and condescension. For instance, at the outbreak of hostilities the BBC stopped broadcasting programmes in Welsh, provoking some sharp protests, and when the service eventually resumed it did so at only half its pre-war weekly length.[94] The Corporation’s writers had to be reminded on occasion that ‘England’ was not an acceptable synonym for ‘Britain’. The appropriation of agricultural property for War Office use could also rankle, given the long history of English land theft across the Celtic fringe. ‘They drove us into the mountains, and now they’re driving us out of the mountains,’ as one aggrieved farmer in the Brecon Beacons put it.[95]

But the overall rise in prosperity brought by the war, along with its obvious moral rectitude in the eyes of most people, more than cancelled out any parochial complaints at the time. The conflict ended with a greater degree of political and economic integration across the United Kingdom than ever before. The victorious Labour Party in July 1945 was supreme not just in England, but in Wales and Scotland too.[96] Attlee was even more dismissive of nationalist ambitions than Churchill; Labour, having acquired centralised power, had no intention of giving it up.[97] The UK emerged from the conflict a far more coherently ‘national’ economic (rather than imperial) unit than it had been six years earlier.[98] Welsh nationalism ‘seemed to be as dead as the druids’ in 1945.[99] Its Scottish counterpart appeared almost as defunct.

The war, then, ushered in three or four prosperous decades in which British unity seemed self-evident and the condescending (and mostly English) elite could look upon regional nationalism as a curious relic of the past, an antique hobby for eccentrics. In the late 1940s Scotland and Wales enjoyed an industrial renaissance, exemplified by such initiatives as the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board (the brainchild of dynamic wartime secretary of state Tom Johnston) and the new Port Talbot steelworks in Swansea Bay. The conflict had breathed new life into the weary Victorian staple industries of coal, steel and shipping, and artificially extended their dominance within the economies of Scotland and Wales. That meant, though, that when the crash came, as it was bound to sooner or later, it would hit traditional Scottish and Welsh working-class communities all the harder, and perhaps prod their members to question, in a way they might otherwise not have done, what benefit they were really enjoying from participation in a post-imperial and increasingly post-industrial United Kingdom.

Furthermore, as Kenneth Morgan once observed, ‘the quintessential images of the war, and of what the country felt it was defending, were essentially timeless English concepts’.[100] It was the Dome of St Paul’s lit by searchlights and the Kentish Weald overflown by Spitfires that people pointed to after 1945 as epitomising what the Second World War had been about. The Great War’s two central British figures had been the (very) Welsh David Lloyd George and the (very) Scottish Sir Douglas Haig. Where were their Celtic equivalents in this second struggle of arms? Churchill was culturally sui generis and Attlee very English in a Pooterish sort of way. Montgomery was Anglo-Irish, but not obviously so to the casual observer. Brooke was a son of the Ulster gentry but hardly anyone had heard of him. The memory of the Second World War was just not going to feel as distinctively Scottish or Welsh (let alone Northern Irish) as it would feel English, and it would never matter quite so much to the UK’s population beyond England. Leaning heavily on memories of the war as the acme of shared Britishness was always, therefore, going to be an inadequate response to the revived challenge of Celtic nationalism in the final years of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first. Vera Lynn had not sung ‘There’ll Always Be a Scotland’; nor had bluebirds ever been spotted over the White Cliffs of Pembrokeshire.

11

Master Plans

‘There seems little doubt that the conditions under which the troops are at present fighting are the worst yet experienced. All day long German shells and mortars pound the ruins…movement by day is impossible…the situation is not improved by the number of dead who lay unburied.’[1] By 21 March 1944, the sixth day of Operation DICKENS, better known to history as the Third Battle of Monte Cassino, it was becoming glumly obvious to Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, commander of the New Zealand Corps, that his latest offensive was floundering.[2]

Ever since January, when Mark Clark’s Fifth Army had reached the entrance to the Liri Valley, his troops had bivouacked under the malevolent watch of the sixth-century abbey on the massif overlooking the Roman market town of Cassino. The heights commanded Highway 6, the road to Rome. No further progress towards the Italian capital was possible until they were taken. Twice already the Allies had tried to storm them and had been bloodily rebuffed. Believing, wrongly as it turned out, that German paratroopers were garrisoning the monastery buildings, the British and Americans had pulverised them in an aerial bombing raid on 15 February and again (with twice the tonnage of bombs) one month later. Kesselring’s Fallschirmjäger had taken this as an invitation to move into what was left and had found to their great satisfaction that the rubble churned up in the bombings had actually made the abbey’s precincts more formidable than ever.

Operation DICKENS had come tantalisingly close to succeeding all the same. On the morning of its second day, a company of Gurkhas took ‘Hangman’s Hill’, a bare outcrop of rock just 200 yards from the monastery summit and a perfect jumping-off point for a final assault. The problem was to get reinforcements and supplies up to Hangman’s Hill along the snake-like pathway that led down to the valley basin. Anyone moving up the barren mountainside in daylight was exposed to relentless mortar and sniper fire. The Germans, understanding the developing threat, clung on tenaciously to control of the town (‘a chaotic and almost impassable maze of ruins, rubble, and craters’ after two months of artillery barrages) as a way to distract the Allied efforts against the abbey. The house-to-house, room-to-room, cellar-to-cellar fighting in Cassino was described in the official history as ‘a struggle in a lunatic giant’s rubbish-heap’.[3] The town was ‘a vision of the end of the world’, according to one of Freyberg’s Kiwis. It looked ‘as if it had been raked over by some monster comb and then pounded all over the place by a giant hammer’.[4]

All this time the Gurkhas stayed on Hangman’s Hill, sheltering from German artillery fire and the bitter March elements in boulder-built, tarpaulin-covered ‘sangars’ or foxholes. They had no blankets or greatcoats and only the barest reserves of food and ammunition. Water came from a rain-filled shell hole which turned out to contain a dead mule. Medical support consisted of a few bandages, a pair of scissors and a pocket-knife. The only reinforcements able to reach the Gurkhas for a week were a few dozen bedraggled and exhausted men of the Essex Regiment and Rajputana Rifles. On 18 March, the leading tanks of a New Zealand armoured assault on the other side of the mountain got within 900 yards of the monastery, and this seemed momentarily to betoken a breakthrough. But the tanks had been sent up unsupported by infantry and so the Germans were able to pick them off one by one with Panzerschreck bazookas and mines. ‘Panic’ gripped the survivors, according to the defenders’ account – ‘turrets were torn open, the crews poured out and sought safety in headlong flight’.[5]

On 23 March Freyberg conceded that the battle was lost and sent search parties to retrieve the men off Hangman’s Hill. It took another two days to get them all down. Four hundred and thirty-one infantrymen of the New Zealand Corps were dead or missing and 1,277 wounded as a result of DICKENS. Probably every other man who made it up to Hangman’s Hill became a casualty. The Allies, repulsed, returned to ‘a passive state of sustained awfulness’ in the shadow of the abbey. Freyberg’s tattered New Zealand Corps was pulled out of the line and Lieutenant-General Władysław Anders was informed that he and his Polish II Corps would have the dubious privilege of making up the vanguard of the fourth Allied attempt to take Monte Cassino.[6]

*

On the night of 24 March, as the last of the Gurkhas were being extracted from Hangman’s Hill, 793 RAF Bomber Command heavies set off from airfields in northern and eastern England to attack Berlin, in what was the sixteenth major raid on the city since November.[7] It became known later in air force lore as ‘the night of the strong winds’. Unexpectedly violent air currents gusting up to 120mph broke up the bomber stream and scattered aircraft all across the skies of northern Germany. Bombs fell everywhere. Over 120 towns and villages in the Reich reported damage. In Berlin itself, 150 people were killed and 20,000 more were made homeless, but no major damage was done to any industrial premises. By morning on the 25th, seventy-two of the heavies had not returned home, marking a 9 per cent loss for the night.

Adding these aircraft to the 428 other four-engine bombers which had already been destroyed on missions to the German capital over the past five months, this meant that since the start of the ‘Battle of Berlin’ 3,500 RAF aircrew had failed to get back to England from a Berlin raid and were either dead or in a POW camp.[8] Such attritional carnage could not go on. Bomber Command would never, in fact, attack Hitler’s capital on the same scale as 24 March 1944 again. The Battle of Berlin was over. ‘Berlin won,’ the commander of 5 Group conceded. ‘It was just too tough a nut.’[9]

Harris had begun the campaign the previous November still flush with confidence from the victory at Hamburg. Area bombing on a scale never previously possible seemed likely to ‘knock Germany stiff’, as he telegraphed the combined chiefs of staff meeting in Quebec in August. Portal egged Harris on to ‘Hamburger’ Berlin. Churchill, too, had long been pressing for more heavy attacks on the German capital. In December, Harris claimed that with his Lancaster force alone he could render Berlin and other major German cities uninhabitable and produce ‘a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable’ by the beginning of April 1944 – one month before OVERLORD was due to begin.[10]

The AOC-in-C’s assurance was not, on the face of it, misplaced. By winter 1943–4 he had far more trained crews and four-engine airframes available than ever before. The disruption caused by Window over Hamburg had neutralised the German Kammhuber Line night fighter defences. The firestorm generated by GOMORRAH had shown how devastating Bomber Command’s increasingly sophisticated use of incendiaries could be. The RAF was capable of ever tighter and more concentrated bombing patterns – it was possible now to marshal 800 aircraft over a target in as little as ten minutes. To give Berlin the same treatment as Hamburg seemed technically achievable; it would be a ‘shattering and possibly even a decisive blow to the enemy…the Germans were waiting in horrified suspense for this to happen’.[11]

As it turned out, however, it was impossible to reproduce a cataclysm on the Spree that winter on the same scale as Hamburg. For one thing, Berlin was just so much bigger: sprawling over 340 square miles, it was capable of absorbing much more damage than any other German city. It was also beyond the range of the RAF’s Oboe navigational aid. Hamburg had been too, but unlike the Hanseatic port Berlin lacked the distinctively identifiable geographical features required for accurate use of H2S air-to-ground radar. Further, the Reich capital was defended by a veritable fortress of Flak and searchlight batteries,[12] and Luftwaffe night fighter defences had been reorganised in the wake of their failure during GOMORRAH. Electronic counter-measures had been introduced to minimise Window, while the Kammhuber Line’s box grid had been abandoned in place of the ‘Tame Boar’ (Zahme Sau) system – ground controllers assembling a swarm of interceptors to attack the bomber stream simultaneously. The long flight to Berlin and back (at least a 1,150-mile round trip) gave the Germans plenty of time to figure out the route Harris’s men were taking every night. By the end of the battle, one in five RAF planes in each raid was having to be used in diversionary tactics in a desperate attempt to draw the night fighters away from the main force.

Berlin certainly took a hammering. The RAF dropped around 30,000 tons of bombs on it during the battle, half of them incendiaries. Over 9,000 Berliners were killed and another 800,000 made homeless – half in a single forty-eight-hour period during the particularly destructive twin raids of 22–23 and 23–24 November. Large swathes of Charlottensburg, Tiergarten and Spandau were laid waste.[13] The neoclassical government ministries along Unter den Linden were burned out one by one, Hitler’s Reich Chancellery was left a smoking ruin, but no city-wide firestorm ever got going. Winter cloud cover meant that Harris’s bomb aimers could rarely see the Pathfinders’ ground target markers, and photo reconnaissance was poor (of thirty-seven attempts to get after-action bomb damage photos of Berlin during the battle only two were successful).[14] The city’s economic output, never as important to the Nazi war effort as the Ruhr’s anyway, was disrupted but continued.[15] The morale of Berliners remained steady. Hitler’s capital, ‘though wounded’, as one of the bombing campaign’s official historians put it, ‘was still a going concern’.[16]

On 30–31 March Harris sent 786 heavies on one last big raid for the month, this time against Nuremberg. The unexpectedly cloudless sky that night offered the German night fighters a perfect view by bright moonlight of the bomber stream. Ninety-five RAF aircraft were destroyed, Bomber Command’s worst loss for a single operation in the whole war. Nuremberg was virtually undamaged.[17] This disaster settled the matter. On 14 April, the area bombing of Germany peremptorily ceased, and Harris’s Command was transferred to Eisenhower’s control to assist with the invasion of France.

*

These twin failures, to take Cassino and destroy Berlin, represented the last gasps of Churchill’s hope to end the war in 1944 on British terms. It had been a pretty feeble hope for some time, but with its passing, OVERLORD became not just a likelihood but a certainty. Back in November, the prime minister had accompanied Roosevelt to Tehran for a conference with Stalin (codenamed Eureka), the first occasion FDR had met the Soviet dictator. Stalin arrived in the Persian capital expecting the two western leaders to make common cause. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that on the question of the Second Front it was he and Roosevelt who were simpatico and Churchill the isolated dissenter.

Stalin spoke ‘softly, briefly, to the point’, the British party’s Russian interpreter noted. He was ‘completely in command of facts and statistics, hardly ever looking at a note’. His brief to the two western leaders was simple. ‘Hit [Germany] where the distance to Berlin is the shortest. Don’t waste time, men or equipment on secondary fronts.’[18] This is precisely what Roosevelt and Marshall wanted to hear and Churchill and Brooke did not. The Red Army’s victories at Stalingrad in February and Kursk in August – the latter inflicting fifteen times as many casualties on the Wehrmacht as the Sicilian campaign – had left the British and Americans slightly in awe of Stalin’s ‘military brain of the very highest calibre’, as the CIGS (hardly given to hyperbole when it came to the strategic skills of others) put it later.[19] His full-throated endorsement of a cross-Channel invasion at Eureka practically settled the matter by itself.

The final conference report approved by the combined chiefs of staff was emphatic. ‘OVERLORD and ANVIL [a complementary invasion of southern France, originally to take place at the same time] are the supreme operations for 1944,’ it read. ‘Nothing must be carried out in any other part of the world which hazards the success of these two operations.’ OVERLORD would begin no later than June. Only some stunning, strategically transformational victory in the seven months beforehand could possibly change that. Neither Harris nor Freyberg could pull such a victory off. The AOC-in-C had promised Churchill that he could ‘wreck Berlin from end to end’ and force a German surrender if he was given free rein to use his bomber force against the German capital that winter.[20] Instead, he had come close to wrecking his own Command. As for the Mediterranean, that had already been squeezed of any lingering strategic energy by the time Monte Cassino (or what was left of it) finally fell to Anders’s Poles on 18 May and the road to Rome was opened at last. The Italian capital was liberated on 4 June 1944. A year earlier, this would have been one of the decisive triumphs of the war. Now it occupied the newspaper headlines for precisely forty-eight hours before it was relegated to a back-page story by the Allied landings in Normandy.

Churchill’s anxiety about OVERLORD reflected his and Brooke’s old misgivings about whether the Anglo-American armies were really up to the challenge of besting the Wehrmacht in an engagement on the scale of Kursk’s – ‘I think of the beaches of Normandy choked with the flower of American and British youth,’ the prime minister confessed to Eisenhower, ‘the tides running red with their blood.’[21] Casualty estimates for the invasion were certainly fearsome. During spring 1944, field hospitals across southern England were being prepared to receive at least 30,000 men from across the Channel. A projection in February was that one in seven of the Anglo-Canadian troops who landed on the first day would be killed or wounded, 3,000 of them drowned.[22]

But more fundamentally, Churchill’s resistance to OVERLORD expressed his unease about leading a Great Power which was now at a point of irreversible exhaustion after more than four years of total war. The signal factor constraining the war-making potential of every combatant between 1939 and 1945 was the size of its labour force.[23] The United Kingdom’s population was only one-third of the United States of America’s and one-quarter of the Soviet Union’s. By the end of 1943, the UK was militarised to its limits. It was already conducting simultaneous major land campaigns on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean (each demanding extensive maritime and air support), while fighting the Battle of the Atlantic and waging the strategic bomber offensive and operating a fully mobilised war economy and arming and supplying large Crown armies. It simply did not have the man- and womanpower to fight yet another major land campaign.

Indeed, a coolly rational audit of the Allied war effort on the eve of OVERLORD might have concluded that now was the moment for the United Kingdom to start winding down its contribution to the alliance rather than ramping it up further. The decisive British role in Germany’s defeat had been to keep the war going for a year after the fall of France without any other direct Great Power assistance, and then to provide enough of a distraction in the following two years to attenuate the Axis onslaught against the Soviet Union and allow the United States to tap into its vast belligerent capabilities without enemy interference. That role was now completed. Under the circumstances, it would not have been unreasonable to wearily hand over most of the responsibility for the ground fighting in north-western Europe to the US Army, and to consign the British place in that campaign to that of a massive aircraft carrier and supporting harbour.

That was never going to happen though: not just because of the sting that it would have applied to imperial amour propre, but because Churchill had to ensure a proportionate British blood sacrifice on the Second Front to maintain his own relevance in the victory negotiations that were coming.[24] Important decisions still had to be made about the post-war world – occupation policies, spheres of influence, revised frontiers, the treatment of war criminals, new political and financial institutions to replace the old. British interests would be at stake and would have to be asserted and defended. Britain needed most urgently of all to establish what the terms of continued Lend-Lease aid were going to be during the period that would almost certainly exist between the defeats of Germany and Japan – ‘Stage II’ of the war as it had become called. The UK’s negotiating position for Stage II would be fatally weakened if it offered any impression to the American public that it was sitting back during the final march on Berlin to let the GIs do all the fighting and dying. A British effort de sang was required in France.

The country’s commitment to OVERLORD was correspondingly very large. The Royal Navy would provide three-quarters of the warships (including four battleships) and four-fifths of the landing craft. Almost half of the aerial armada of 11,590 planes would be RAF-controlled. The British were allotted two of the five invasion beaches (GOLD and SWORD) and assisted with amphibious transport and assault support on the other three (the American UTAH and OMAHA and the Canadian JUNO). Four in ten of the troops landing on D-Day itself were British. The UK’s total commitment to the Normandy campaign in its first month was thirteen divisions (eight infantry, four armoured, one airborne) – equal to that of the Americans – plus another four independent brigades. Britain’s infrastructural investments in the invasion were vast. To take just one example, the two artificial ‘Mulberry’ harbours alone – with their ten miles of steel roadways which were towed across to Normandy immediately after D-Day to help get reinforcements, vehicles and supplies to the front line – took 45,000 workers and cost £25 million.[25]

This immense British effort was rewarded in the OVERLORD leadership structure. Overall command of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) was always going to be American – Churchill’s irresponsible promises to Brooke notwithstanding – though it was Eisenhower, not Marshall, in the end who got the nod. Ike’s deputy, however, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, was British, as were the commanders of the invasion’s naval and air components, respectively Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay and Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory. Most significantly of all, Montgomery would be ground commander of all Allied forces on D-Day itself and more than two months thereafter. He would also be the architect of the plan to assault the beaches, build a bridgehead and break out of it.

Monty had not been anyone’s first choice. Churchill ‘had never been very fond’ of the victor of Second Alamein, as Brooke conceded, but ‘When things went well he put up with him.’[26] Had he been able to freely pick the OVERLORD ground commander, Churchill would have chosen Alexander. So would Eisenhower. Even Brooke, very much Monty’s mentor, was mostly indifferent on the matter.[27] Montgomery, though, was now the great British celebrity general of the war, the only ‘red tab’ to have successfully made an impact on the country’s popular imagination since Wavell back in 1940. After returning from Italy, he had packed mess halls and factory canteens across the UK imparting morale-boosting pieties to star-struck audiences. His ‘lean, intent face’, framed by his now-trademark tankman’s beret, appeared on posters exhorting the public to make one final push of effort.[28] Monty was not the professionals’ preference, but he was the people’s, and therefore, it seemed, the only military man capable of mobilising the mass enthusiasm necessary to finish the job and win the war. His total unsuitability for an all-arms coalition campaign, in which it might be valuable to exercise a little tact now and then when dealing with subordinates and allies, would just have to be priced in.

Britain’s major contribution to the opening drama of the Second Front had bought it all the senior command places for OVERLORD with the single exception of the top job. The question, though, was how long the country could keep it up. The UK’s parlous manpower situation had been made clear to the War Cabinet in a review in October 1943. Churchill and his colleagues were told that to meet all the demands being made by the armed forces and civil ministries for personnel in 1944, 1.2 million more men and women would have to be drafted into the military and war economy labour force. But they did not exist. There was no one left in Britain to mobilise. In fact, it was forecast that the United Kingdom was going to have 150,000 fewer working-age people by the end of the year to come, thanks to the demographic imbalance between older and younger cohorts.[29] How, then, was the UK possibly going to scrape together enough soldiers and workers for the D-Day campaign?[30]

The only answer was to remove just over half a million personnel from the munitions, aircraft production and naval shipyard industries, as well as 83,000 from Civil Defence. Some of these could be transferred into the armed forces – the final allocations were 244,000 for the army and 110,000 for the Royal Navy and RAF. By this vast game of musical chairs, Britain could just about field its share of the OVERLORD expedition. But there was a catch. The war in Europe needed to end by December 1944. If it did not, there was no way of being able to keep up HM Forces’ strength simultaneously in north-west Europe, Italy and Burma in 1945. Britain’s armies would start to disintegrate from lack of replacements. The war economy would falter. Britain would have no choice but to appeal to the United States for assistance and accept a big loss of negotiating clout in the victory conferences. The War Cabinet had essentially placed a giant national bet that the Nazis would be finished by Christmas 1944. It would be up to Montgomery to try to make good on it.

Speed, however, was antithetical to Monty’s whole way of fighting a war. Ever since Second Alamein he had been the man of the methodical ‘master plan’ and painstakingly choreographed set-piece battles. He would ‘not have any failures’, he said, because he would ‘not launch [an attack] until I am ready’.[31] Getting ‘ready’ had advantages. It hedged risk, maximised the Allies’ overwhelming firepower, logistical and intelligence advantages over the Germans, and (hopefully) minimised casualties. It took time, though, time which Britain did not have. Much of the controversy about the campaign for north-west Europe in the second half of 1944 has to be understood as a product of the tension between competing military and political priorities of caution and haste.

*

Montgomery presented his master plan for OVERLORD at his old school, St Paul’s in Barnes, in a briefing on 15 May attended by the king and Churchill. The invasion on D-Day would take place along a fifty-mile stretch of Normandy coastline, from Les Dunes de Varreville at the eastern base of the Cotentin Peninsula to Ouistreham at the mouth of the River Orne, just north of the major Norman city of Caen. The Baie de Seine had been identified by the original staff planning team (COSSAC) as the optimal site for the bridgehead back in 1943. It was less heavily defended than the coastline further east from Le Havre to Calais and also (just) within range of tactical air support from bases in southern England.

Surprise on the morning of the invasion was vital and was to be facilitated by a series of elaborate deception schemes known collectively as Operation BODYGUARD. In the early hours before the troops landed, flotillas of small boats would sail out of Newhaven heading for points on the French coast east of the OVERLORD beaches in the hope that they would be spotted and misidentified by German radar operators. Heavy bombers meanwhile would spoof on radar the existence of large vessels in the Strait of Dover by dropping Window chaff between the English coast and Calais.

Eight divisions would land on D-Day: five infantry and three airborne. The boundary line between American and British Commonwealth forces was fixed at the coastal town of Port-en-Bessin, with US troops to its west and the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group to its east. Reinforcements would be hastened to the beaches as fast as possible. The Mulberry harbours, one in the American sector, one in the British, would help to shuttle troops, weapons, trucks and ammunition directly to UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO and SWORD, at least until such time as the US forces could capture the port of Cherbourg.

If all went well – which would depend on a whole host of factors, not all of them in the Allies’ control – there would be an equivalent of seventeen divisions ashore by the end of the fourth day of the invasion (D+4), twenty-six by D+20 and thirty-nine by D+90.[32] These forces would be used to establish a ‘good lodgment’ stretching from the Atlantic seaside town of Grandville eastwards to Argentan, then northwards to Caen: basically, a pocket encompassing most of Lower Normandy. Such a spacious bridgehead was needed, among other things, for airfields to be used by the RAF and USAAF tactical air forces. Montgomery counselled aggression at his briefing; the Allies would have to ‘blast their way on shore’ and then ‘penetrate deep inland, and quickly’ in order to ‘gain space rapidly’ and ‘peg out claims well inland’. Once these pegs had been sunk, the invading armies would break out of Normandy and drive on to Paris.[33]

To Churchill and Brooke it still all seemed a disturbing, and perhaps unnecessary, gamble. On the evening before the invasion, the CIGS wrote of his uneasiness about what was to come the morning afterwards: ‘it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war…I wish to God it were safely over’.[34] Churchill spent the hours before D-Day ‘much on edge’, according to his naval aide-de-camp Charles ‘Tommy’ Thompson. ‘He could hear the tramping of [the poet A. E.] Housman’s ghostly legions – soldiers marching, all to die’. ‘Do you realise,’ he told his wife, Clementine, ‘that by the time you wake up in the morning 20,000 men may have been killed?’[35]

The prime minister had recently complained to the Foreign Office that OVERLORD had been ‘forced upon us by the Russians and by the United States’.[36] It seemed entirely possible that a British Army, the last the country was capable of fielding in this war, was about to be massacred. To be fair, he was hardly alone in his pessimism. Eisenhower’s staff was contemplating the possibility of 60 per cent total casualties on D-Day, which would be equivalent – and more – to the first day of the Battle of the Somme.[37] Ike himself famously composed a bulletin to be broadcast if the invasion was defeated on the beaches in which he took personal responsibility for the disaster. Only Montgomery seemed serenely untroubled by doubt as the last hours ticked away.

And in the end, Monty was right: for D-Day, 6 June 1944, went amazingly well considering the vast number of moving parts involved and the myriad ways it could have ended in chaos and horror – a tribute to the years of meticulous staff work that went into it, as well as an admittedly large slice of good luck.[38] The Allies achieved almost total operational surprise. The BODYGUARD decoys in the Channel did not, in the end, make that much of a difference, but the Wehrmacht was caught unprepared anyway. The poor weather in early June (which had also forced a twenty-four-hour postponement of the invasion) seemed to the Germans to preclude any major amphibious landings.[39] Rommel, who at the beginning of 1944 had been appointed commander of Seventh Army in Normandy and Fifteenth Army east of Le Havre, was not at his post, having taken the opportunity to go on leave in Germany. Many of his generals were also absent at a conference to war-game a possible future Allied attack. Even the last-minute alarm by the chief intelligence officer at OB West (Wehrmacht headquarters for western Europe) made little difference on the morning of D-Day. The first that most German commanders knew of what was happening on 6 June was when they heard reports of Allied paratroopers landing in the hours just before dawn – or in some cases saw them drifting down into the compounds of their own headquarters.

Thanks to this surprise and total naval and air superiority, not a single troop-carrying vessel in the naval armada was lost. The Germans succeeded in sinking just one Allied warship, a Norwegian destroyer, on 6 June. The Luftwaffe only managed 300 sorties over Normandy (compared to 14,600 made by the Allied air forces) on the first day, and many of its aircraft were either shot down en route to the beaches or forced to jettison their bombs. They made, in any case, no impression on events.[40]

The three parachute and glider-borne divisions (the 6th British Airborne in the east, the 82nd and 101st US Airborne in the west) all landed more or less where they were supposed to on the invasion flanks. The fact that some of the American paratroopers missed their drop zones has become an important part of D-Day lore, but the operational significance of this has been much exaggerated.[41] Conditions at the five beach landing sites varied. In no case, however, were any of the Allied attacks defeated, nor did defeat ever seem likely. On each beach, combat engineers and amphibious assault vehicles were able to clear the many mines, pillboxes, tank traps and other obstacles which constituted Hitler’s iron and concrete ‘Atlantic Wall’, allowing tanks to get off the sand and shingle to accompany the infantry inland (one of the chief problems which had stymied the Dieppe raid in 1942). By dusk, there were more than 150,000 Allied troops onshore in a cumulative eighty-square-mile pocket of liberated territory.

Total casualties for D-Day were between 9,000 and 10,000, of which one-quarter occurred at OMAHA, the only beach where the preparatory air and naval bombardment of the German defences failed and the American invading forces received a much rougher handling than elsewhere.[42] Considering how many men had crossed the Channel that day in an expedition of profound complexity and risk, these were reassuringly small losses. Stalin, in his congratulatory telegram to Churchill, described D-Day as a success on ‘a grandiose scale’ – though whether ‘grandiose’ was a poor translation from the original Russian or a sly dig at the British and Americans was as unclear then as it is now.[43]

*

Along the column of tanks I see palls of smoke and tanks brewing up with flames belching forth from their turrets. I see men climbing out, on fire like torches, rolling on the ground to try and douse the flames…The tank twenty yards away from us is hit, flames shoot out of its turret, I see a member of its crew climbing out through the flames, he is almost out, putting one foot onto the rim to jump down, he seems to hesitate and falls back inside. Oh Christ!

This was Jack Thorpe, a driver in ‘C’ Squadron of the 2nd Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, watching his comrades burn as his and the other regiments of the British 11th Armoured Division attempted vainly to scale Bourguébus Ridge, south of Caen, six weeks after D-Day on the afternoon of 18 July 1944.[44]

To the infantryman of the Second World War, exposed to mortar and machine gun fire with only a woollen uniform to protect him, a fellow soldier encased behind inches of steel plating might have seemed to epitomise privilege on the battlefield, but a tank could be a fragile, frighteningly vulnerable thing. A single high-velocity armour-piercing shot from an enemy gun penetrating into its confined interior space ricocheted madly about, smashing up and pulping all metal or muscle it encountered. If such a shell ignited the tank’s stored ammunition or fuel then the vehicle would ‘brew up’, as the expression had it, for what followed seemed to onlookers like a ghastly parody of a kettle reaching its boil. Tanks burned with ‘their own grotesque poignancy’, wrote yeomanry officer David Holbrook in one of the most compelling literary accounts of the campaign, Flesh Wounds:

The flames are explosively fierce yet are tightly contained in the hollow steel shell…

From the turret, black smoke alternating with intense flame thunders forth in a monstrous jet. But then from time to time the smoke is forced into huge expelled puffs by the exploding shells within…a burning tank looked like a dying dragon, vomiting up the life within it in black gouts…a red and white glower would roll in the eyes of the dead monster, the hatch holes, through which the crew had entered, never to emerge again.[45]

Tank crewmen caught in this inferno would be reduced to charcoal and powdered ash and charred bones. Bodies sometimes broiled in the heat so that puddles of fat seeped from beneath burnt-out tank chassis, great iridescent clouds of flies attaching themselves to the welcome feast.[46]

The eighteenth of July 1944 was the opening day of Operation GOODWOOD, the biggest tank battle of the Normandy campaign. An entire British corps of three armoured divisions had hoped to storm the heights surrounding Caen in one bold stroke before advancing into the rolling, open wheatfields of Calvados that stretched south all the way to Falaise and Argentan. The operation, named after the second most prestigious meet in the English horse-racing calendar, was intended as a demonstration of speed and panache. The time had come, Montgomery wrote in his diary five days before GOODWOOD began, ‘to strike really heavy blows to knock loose the present enemy shackles [that were] hemming us in’. Monty promised Brooke ‘a real showdown…the possibilities are immense’. ‘My whole eastern flank’, he told Eisenhower, ‘will burst into flames.’[47]

Montgomery was right about the flames, but not quite, alas, in the way he meant. For as the tanks of 11th Armoured Division, the vanguard of the attacking British corps, approached Bourguébus Ridge on 18 July the incendiary ‘fun’, as one crewman put it, began. Entrenched German self-propelled and anti-tank guns on the high ground began picking off the sluggish and exposed British vehicles advancing up the hill one by one: ‘I saw Sherman after Sherman go up in flames and it got to such a pitch that I thought that in another few minutes there would be nothing left.’ The official historian of the 23rd Hussars described the near-annihilation of his regiment as follows: ‘With no time for retaliation…almost in one minute, all tanks were hit, blazing and exploding. Everywhere wounded or burning figures ran or struggled painfully for cover, while a remorseless rain of armour-piercing shot riddled the already helpless Shermans.’

‘All too clearly,’ the account concludes, ‘we were not going to break through that day.’[48] Indeed they were not. The first day of GOODWOOD ended with 126 tanks of 11th Armoured Division destroyed or incapacitated, over half its starting strength. Bourguébus Ridge remained in German hands at dusk. The operation staggered on for another forty-eight hours until it was ended by torrential rain. By its completion, the British armoured corps in Normandy had lost 400 tanks from an initial complement of 750. In fact, any chance of a breakthrough had passed by the end of the first day.[49] Even Montgomery’s unrelentingly self-satisfied post-war memoirs concede that GOODWOOD ‘came to a standstill’.[50]

Yet on the afternoon of 18 July, even as 11th Armoured Division was being chewed up on Bourguébus Ridge, Brooke received a message from Monty’s headquarters calling the day’s operations ‘a complete success’ and ‘the situation very promising’. A press release on the 18th, duly repeated in The Times the following morning, asserted baldly that the British attack had ‘broken through’ the enemy lines. That evening, Montgomery told Eisenhower he was ‘well satisfied’ with the outcome,[51] but when Ike discovered the considerable gap between Monty’s version of GOODWOOD and the course of actual events, he was said to be ‘blue as indigo’ with fury. The attack had been preceded by a massive air, naval and ground bombardment, and yet it had produced an advance of a mere seven miles. If the Allied march on Berlin was to require this sort of investment in ordnance, Eisenhower protested aloud, he was going to need 1,000 tons of bombs to gain every mile of ground.[52]

By 18 July 1944, or D+42, the OVERLORD campaign was already badly behind schedule. Bourguébus Ridge was supposed to have been taken in the first few days after the beach landings. Argentan, about forty miles south of SWORD, which according to the original plan ought by now to be comfortably enclosed within the Allied lodgement, remained far behind the enemy front line. The total area of liberated French territory was barely one-fifth of what had been expected.[53] All the exuberance of D-Day’s initial success seemed to have dissipated in the scorching heat of the Normandy high summer. Tedder, whose relationship with Montgomery stretched back to the Western Desert days and who by 1944 was counted among the great general’s fiercest critics, blamed the delay on him and urged Eisenhower to find another ground commander. Churchill, no great fan himself, was equally dissatisfied with Allied progress in Normandy, and had made it clear to Eisenhower that no one – no one – in the British high command occupied so sacrosanct a place that they could not be removed should SHAEF see the need.

In the end, Ike decided to leave Montgomery in place, but not without complaining bitterly to Brooke about his subordinate’s ‘stickiness’.[54] The newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic were also expressing doubts by mid-July. The Times wondered whether the British Army’s problem was that ‘it did not always by speedy manoeuvre exploit the opportunities’ it had created.[55] A correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune wrote that progress in Normandy had now ‘fallen far short’ of what SHAEF had promised, and such headlines as ‘AMERICANS AND BRITISH MAKING A VICE OF OVERCAUTION’ were starting to appear in US newspapers.[56] Coalition comity was wearing thin as assured victories failed to materialise.

*

What had gone wrong? Two things, primarily: bad weather and poor, but nevertheless complicating, German strategy. On 19 June (D+13), the Channel was assaulted by the worst summer storm in forty years. Gale-force winds and waves eight feet high battered the Normandy coast. Eight hundred Allied vessels were beached, sunk or smashed to splinters. The Mulberry harbour off the GOLD position at Arromanches was damaged, and the American Mulberry at OMAHA wrecked irreparably. No troops, vehicles or stores could be landed while the sea gods raged for three days. This cost the Allies an immediate 140,000 tons of supplies. More ominously, it gummed up the disembarkation schedule on the beachhead for weeks afterwards. The British already had two fewer brigades ashore in France before the storm than they had originally hoped; after it abated, they found themselves three divisions short. The pace of OVERLORD inevitably slowed. Even the capture of Cherbourg on 29 June made little difference because the harbour facilities had been so systematically destroyed by the German garrison before their surrender that the port was essentially unusable until mid-August. Operations had to be delayed and pared down to accommodate the unexpected lacuna of soldiers and tanks. Offensive plans had to be tempered to new realities.[57]

Even before this logistical bottleneck developed, though, perverse decision-making in Berlin had begun to destabilise Allied assumptions. Montgomery had always understood that the Germans were going to fight hard for Normandy from the first hours of the invasion, which, as he had said at the St Paul’s briefing, would have to be ‘defeated on the beaches’, and so by D+2, he predicted, the Wehrmacht would be treating OVERLORD as ‘an overriding menace requiring the concentration of all available formations that can be spared’. The Germans, in other words, would be throwing everything they could muster as the Allies clung to the coastline. Thanks to ULTRA intelligence, SHAEF knew that there were four Panzer divisions close to the beach landing areas and at least another six near enough to Normandy to arrive for a ‘full-blooded counter-attack’ from D+6 onwards. The first week of the landings would therefore be critical as the Desert Fox tried to reproduce the Allied armies’ 1940 disaster at Dunkirk.[58] Montgomery anticipated that the nodes of the crisis would be Carentan in the US sector, Caen in the British and Canadian sector, and Bayeux at the juncture between the two, the last of these three likely to be Rommel’s ‘obsession’ throughout.

If the Allies could weather Rommel’s onslaught, however, Montgomery’s assumption was that as time went on – and certainly after a month of fighting – the Wehrmacht would tacitly concede the battle for the beaches and slowly withdraw to more defensible terrain further inland – to the high ground east of the River Dives, for example, some eight miles from Caen at its closest point.[59] From these outer bastions, it was argued, the Wehrmacht would continue to launch mobile counter-attacks through the summer, as it steadily fed troops back to the Seine and the Loire to build strong river-line fortifications which it might be able to hold for the remainder of the year. OB West’s goal, in short, would be to preserve its own army while keeping the British and Americans as far away from the Reich as possible until the end of 1944. That, at least, seemed the logical thing for the Germans to do as the greatest long-term obstruction on the road to Berlin. It is what the Allied commanders themselves would have done, were their positions reversed.

It is also, more or less, what Rommel and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, commander-in-chief at OB West, would have done if the decision had been up to them. It was not up to them, however; it was up to Hitler, and as the Führer made clear in a message to Seventh Army shortly after D-Day, there was to be ‘no question of fighting a rearguard action nor of retiring to a new line of resistance. Every man shall fight or fall where he stands.’ Hitler told Rommel that Normandy would be won by ‘holding fast tenaciously to every square foot of soil’.[60] Von Rundstedt remonstrated against this plan on 2 July and was sacked for his troubles, and the Desert Fox would likely have followed him that summer had he not been badly injured by a Spitfire strafing run on 17 July and relieved of his duties (and removed from this world in October) by the Nazi state’s internal intrigues.[61]

In summary, then, by about D+10 Montgomery was already facing a quite different operational situation from the one he had expected in his original planning. Rather than engaging in an intense but short battle for the beaches, followed by a German tactical withdrawal into the Norman hinterland, his invading force was instead penned in against the coast by a ferocious enemy defence recklessly unwilling to concede even a yard of ground. German reinforcements were not being held back in a strategic reserve to be available for large-scale counter-attacks but were instead being thrown into the front-line melee to plug the gaps. There was to be no orderly German retreat to fight another day. Everything the Wehrmacht had in Normandy was going to stay there until it was annihilated.[62]

In the long term, this would be as disastrous a decision for the Reich as the choice to stand and fight in Tunisia a year earlier. It would cost Nazi Germany half a million troops, 3,500 guns and 1,500 tanks, and would require the Wehrmacht to hurriedly abandon all the rest of France once Normandy was inevitably lost. It would be a decision that probably ended the war faster than otherwise would have been the case. It certainly ended the Battle of France faster: the Allies ended up getting to Paris ten days ahead of their pre-D-Day expectation.

Those victories, however, lay in the future. All that anyone stuck in the OVERLORD pocket in June and July 1944 knew was that the battle was not going at all the way they had been told it would. This was true all along the front line, but especially so on the eastern (left) flank of the bridgehead where the British and Canadians were dug in.[63] The Germans had not withdrawn from Caen or its outskirts but were clinging on to them with ever more fanatical tenacity, long after there was any realistic strategic value to doing so. By the end of June, there were 725 German tanks and self-propelled guns cluttered around Caen in seven and a half Panzer divisions; at that moment, it was the most formidable concentration of Axis armoured power anywhere in the world.[64] Committing such irreplaceable assets to a fight taking place within the range of Allied land, sea and air power was deeply unwise. That was scant consolation, however, to any tank crew trying to charge up Bourguébus Ridge.

The British and Canadian armies in Normandy found themselves in a six-week mincing machine of a battle, ground against some of the most well-equipped, experienced and – in the case of such units as the 12th SS Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) Panzer Division – terrifyingly motivated troops Nazi Germany had to offer. Instead of fighting far to the south and south-east of Caen by the end of June, in the relatively flat open countryside between the Orne and the Dives, 21st Army Group was still struggling to take Caen itself, whether by direct assault or an enveloping pincer from east or west. The northern part of the city finally fell on 10 July, but the south bank was not cleared for another ten days. Even then, the road to Falaise stubbornly remained in German hands. Montgomery’s disastrous GOODWOOD campaign was supposed to have dealt with that.

The German strategy for defensive war was well established by summer 1944. The Wehrmacht relied on solidity in depth, with any ‘front line’ comprising a mere scattering of sacrificial delaying outposts intended to absorb as much of the opening Allied bombardment as possible while holding the actual strength of its defensive forces further back in a concentric series of ever more formidable belts. At GOODWOOD, the Germans arranged their two armoured corps in four linear positions ten miles deep, with a fifth and final reserve of eighty tanks, including Tigers, available for counter-attacks. Each defensive belt was sown with minefields and other lethal impedimenta, with self-propelled and anti-tank gun emplacements dug in on the flanks to provide enfilading fire as the Allies advanced. Topography was expertly exploited to keep weapons and vehicles out of sight of enemy artillery spotters. Wehrmacht infantry, prolifically equipped with heavy machine guns, sheltered in trenches and fortified pillboxes. Even when these positions initially failed, the Germans excelled at throwing together improvised units capable of launching immediate counter-assaults which could exploit the enemies’ confusion and exhaustion to retake ground just lost. They were ‘masters of chaos on the battlefield’, as one historian has put it.[65] What they wanted above all was a tumbling, fluid, unpredictable fight, one in which local initiative and spontaneity were at a premium.[66]

If the Germans brought mercurial uncertainty to a fight, Montgomery’s army in 1944 sought to impose scripted, mechanical predictability upon it. Twenty-First Army Group’s way of war emphasised crushing long-range firepower, whether provided by warships, aircraft or (most of all) the heavy, medium and field guns of the Royal Artillery. The sheer weight of concentrated high-explosive shellfire that the British Army could lay down on its enemies had grown exponentially in the two years since Second Alamein. In Egypt in October 1942 there had been nineteen guns per mile of front line; at GOODWOOD there were 162.[67] The attack on 18 July 1944 was preceded by a three-hour fusillade from sea, land and air that has been calculated as equivalent to the dropping of eight one-kiloton nuclear weapons on the German front line.[68] Fifty-four-ton Tiger tanks were tossed upside down in this hurricane of explosions as though made of cardboard. Men were deafened, driven to nervous breakdowns, even compelled to suicide. A rolling barrage accompanied the British tanks and infantry as they advanced, the idea being to so stupefy, maim and kill the enemy troops ahead of them as to reduce their job to one of seizing ground and mopping up the few bewildered survivors.

When this sort of plan worked, it worked very well. The problem was that when, as at GOODWOOD, it worked only imperfectly, or not at all, the results could be grim for the British. The firepower holocaust that engulfed the German lines on 18 July annihilated some units but left others untouched, and the defensive belts further back suffered few casualties. Montgomery demanded his set-piece attacks be fought on very narrow fronts – the GOODWOOD advance took place across just 2,000 yards, a fifth of the size of a typical First World War battlefield. This certainly allowed for concentration of effort, but also meant the troops had to attack frontally with little room for manoeuvre.[69]

An Allied barrage impeded the movements of the attacking units by gouging out great craters in the landscape and throwing up clouds of dust and smoke. Cooperation between infantry and tanks went smoothly when units had an opportunity to train together before the battle, but when they did not ‘marry up’ like this beforehand the result was often confusion.[70] The British Army’s single biggest problem in 1944 was its inability to act with speed and dynamism to exploit any initial taking of ground. Even successful attacks frequently stalled because the artillery lacked the range and fire-plan to carry on supporting the advance. When the battle script ran out, no one on the British side knew how to improvise new lines or cared to. The result was that the Germans were either able to counter-attack or to slip away unmolested.[71]

Montgomery, whether from some deep psychological need for control or sheer instinctual cussedness, would always insist afterwards that the Normandy campaign had gone entirely as he expected it to. ‘I never once’, he assured the readers of his memoirs, ‘had cause or reason to alter my master plan.’[72] It is hard to take this very seriously. By mid-July 1944 the battle had transparently diverged in important ways from the forecasts he had made at St Paul’s school two months earlier, and he was now undoubtedly feeling under pressure from above. Having promised so much at his pre-invasion briefings, very little had, it seemed, yet been delivered. Mincing-machine fights cost lives, and ahead of D-Day the War Office had estimated that the second month of operations in Normandy would cost the British Army just over 9,000 infantry casualties. In fact, between 4 July and 9 August it lost 21,775 infantrymen killed and wounded.[73] Twenty-First Army Group could not keep haemorrhaging troops at this rate for long.

Perhaps it was this that tempted Montgomery to dangle extravagant but ultimately unfulfillable promises of a big breakthrough in front of his superiors. Did he genuinely think his armoured corps would get to Falaise during GOODWOOD? It is hard to know, for his comments up and down the command chain were a patchwork of ambiguity. Brooke and Eisenhower got one story, British Second Army’s commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Miles Dempsey, got another one, and Major-General ‘Pip’ Roberts, commander of the ill-fated 11th Armoured Division, a third. For Monty to introduce such uncertainty on the eve of battle can hardly have been helpful, and he later admitted in his memoirs to having been altogether ‘too exultant’ in his press briefing ahead of the operation. This he defended by claiming that he could not then reveal his true intentions to the public. Letting his fellow generals in on them might presumably have been useful, however.[74]

Whatever it was meant to achieve, GOODWOOD turned into a chaotic, unnecessarily bloody mess. Still, inasmuch as it was part of a new and probably unplanned Allied strategy in Normandy to wear the Wehrmacht down to destruction, it did achieve something.[75] Twenty-First Army Group’s attack was repulsed, but it tied down four enemy Panzer and infantry corps in the process.[76] British losses were heavy, but the Germans suffered grievously too, and after the battle their position looked a lot bleaker. ‘The moment is fast approaching when this overtaxed front line is bound to break up,’ von Rundstedt’s successor at OB West, Field Marshal Hans von Kluge, concluded on 21 July. By the end of GOODWOOD, the Hitlerjugend Panzer Division had been reduced to a total sum of fifteen operational tanks.[77]

During GOODWOOD, most German attention was naturally focused on the eastern side of the bridgehead, freeing the US First Army to prepare a breakout offensive of its own, further west, largely without interference. This operation, codenamed COBRA, began on 25 July, five days after GOODWOOD ended. It smashed the German lines at Saint-Lô and speedily unravelled the entire enemy position facing them. US armoured divisions, released at last from the constrictive bocage hedgerow countryside of north-western Normandy, raced first south to Avranches, gateway to Brittany, before swinging eastwards towards Falaise and Argentan with the remnants of the Wehrmacht’s Seventh Army fleeing just ahead of them. Twenty-First Army Group took advantage of this transformational development with its own hastily organised offensive, known as BLUECOAT, the largest single British operation in the campaign. This protected COBRA’s left flank by advancing into the mountainous uplands of ‘Swiss Normandy’ in the province’s interior. BLUECOAT went far more smoothly than GOODWOOD, not least because, this time, there was excellent infantry–armour cooperation. The British Army in France was gaining tactical nous and confidence.

Hitler, predictably, responded to COBRA and BLUECOAT by demanding a full-scale counter-attack by his remaining Panzer units. This was launched against the advancing Americans at Mortain. Just as predictably, it failed, squandering the Wehrmacht’s residual tank strength and whatever time remained for it to escape from Normandy. The forces facing the British and Canadians south of Caen were now crumbling. If 21st Army Group could push southwards to meet the Americans at Falaise, they could close the trap on what was left of the retreating Germans. The Canadians and Poles took the lead with support from a British tank brigade, seizing Falaise itself on 16 August. Within three days they had narrowed the remaining passage between themselves and the Americans to just a couple of hundred blood-soaked yards, through which enemy troops continued to flee in panicked disarray for the next forty-eight hours.

The Battle of the ‘Falaise pocket’ ended on 22 August. Some 70,000 German troops – the residue of nineteen divisions – were dead or captured. ‘There was hardly room for my vehicle to pass between the gruesome piles of bodies of men and horses,’ recalled a driver attached to Montgomery’s staff afterwards. The stench of the decomposing corpses in the summer heat at Falaise, riddled with maggots and garlanded by flies, could be smelled for miles around. Bulldozer crews spent weeks shovelling dead men and animals into mass graves.[78]

*

A week before the Falaise pocket closed, Churchill, on one of his Mediterranean expeditions, had watched from the bridge of the destroyer HMS Kimberley as soldiers of the American 45th Infantry Division landed in the Bay of St Tropez. This was ‘D-Day’ of Operation DRAGOON, the renamed, much-delayed Allied invasion of southern France.[79] ‘The proceedings were rather dull,’ he wrote to Clementine later. The prime minister had wanted to get as near as possible to the landing site, but the destroyer’s captain was under firm Admiralty instructions not to approach closer than 10,000 yards. ‘As far as I could see or hear not a shot was fired either at the approaching flotillas or on the beaches,’ he recorded later in Triumph and Tragedy. ‘There seemed to be nobody there.’[80] A bored Churchill retired to his cabin with a copy of Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel. It had been a ‘well-conducted’ operation, he told his wife, but also an ‘irrelevant’ one.[81]

In fact, DRAGOON was anything but irrelevant. It liberated most of southern France in four weeks at low cost. More importantly, it proved to be vital in keeping Eisenhower’s armies running throughout the locust months of 1944 when supplies arriving at the Normandy beaches were at their most meagre. Forty per cent of the food, ammunition and stores which reached SHAEF between August and December came through the port of Marseilles.[82] Churchill, though, had opposed DRAGOON from its inception and could never be convinced of its value. He had wanted to divert its resources to breathing new life into the Italian campaign. In the eyes of his critics, however, this was akin to trying to reanimate a corpse, for after the brief excitement of the capture of Rome in June, the central Mediterranean theatre had once again become bogged down. Clark’s Anglo-American armies were stuck in front of Kesselring’s new trans-peninsular nightmare, the ‘Gothic Line’, the fortified zone running roughly from Pisa to Rimini. The prime minister had urged Roosevelt to agree to DRAGOON’s landing craft being used to perform a right hook around the Gothic Line by invading Istria at the head of the Adriatic. This, he insisted, would allow the Allies to drive through the Alps via the Ljubljana Gap and straight into Austria. Alexander promised Churchill that if his forces were not diluted for DRAGOON there would be ‘nothing to stop us marching straight to Vienna’.[83]

FDR told Churchill flatly that this was not going to happen. Churchill was enraged. ‘We have been ill-treated,’ the prime minister told his chiefs of staff (‘we’ doing a lot of work on this occasion, for not all of them had ever thought the Istrian plan was a good idea). Churchill in his exasperation drafted a number of vitriolic telegrams to the American president venting his feelings, before being persuaded, though only with some difficulty, to destroy them before sending them. ‘The Arnold-King-Marshall combination is one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen’ was one Churchillian comment that nonetheless found its way into an official memorandum at one of the British staff committees of the period. Unsurprisingly, it was omitted when the rest of the document was later reproduced in Triumph and Tragedy, the concluding volume of Churchill’s official history.[84]

If summer 1942 marked the prime minister’s moment of greatest political vulnerability during the war, summer 1944 probably saw him at his lowest personal ebb. His relationship with Roosevelt was deteriorating and his strategic counsel becoming increasingly irrelevant. He may have put a brave face on it, but he just could not summon the same emotional investment in OVERLORD as in earlier campaigns. He had uncharacteristically little advice to offer about the summer stalemate in France other than to use mustard gas on the Normandy battlefield and ‘drench Germany’ with toxins by air – both ideas which horrified the chiefs of staff, whom he accused of sounding like ‘parsons’ and ‘psalm-singing, uniformed defeatists’.[85] Demoralised, angry, sullen and ill, he was sleeping too little and drinking too much. At a Defence Subcommittee conference on 6 July, he was not only ‘maudlin, bad tempered, and vindictive’, as Brooke put it, but openly intoxicated – indeed, this was probably the only occasion during the war when Churchill turned up to an official meeting visibly drunk.[86] After returning from the Mediterranean at the end of August, he caught pneumonia for the third time since 1940. After four years of Herculean labours, time appeared to be catching up on the sixty-nine-year-old prime minister. The CIGS wondered how much longer he could possibly go on.[87]

In the rest of Britain, however – or at least those parts beyond range of the new V-weapon attacks – midsummer 1944 was a glorious moment promising, it seemed, imminent victory. After their rout at Falaise, the Germans had gone into full flight. On 19 August, the Resistance forces in Paris rose in open revolt against the city’s Wehrmacht garrison. Franco-American divisions raced to the Seine, and after six days the German municipal governor, defying Hitler’s orders to burn Paris to the ground, surrendered it to the Allies. Eisenhower’s forces were now advancing into open space. On 2 September, four years and three months after frantically departing Belgium, the British Army crossed its frontier again, Brussels becoming the second liberated Allied capital the following day. On 4 September, the 11th Armoured Division reached Antwerp, the largest port in Europe, and captured the city with all its harbour facilities largely intact (though the city’s viable use as a supply conduit for the logistically stretched Allied armies would take far longer than expected). Even the Italian front seemed to be moving again. On 25 August Operation OLIVE began, Eighth Army’s attempt to slice through the Gothic Line along the Adriatric coast, seize the Romagna Plain and thrust northwards towards the Alps.

The news from the Eastern Front was just as momentous. Stalin had agreed at Tehran to launch a major offensive to coincide with OVERLORD. This operation, BAGRATION, began on 22 June, on the third anniversary of the German invasion. Over 1.6 million Soviet troops, supported by almost 4,000 tanks, hurled themselves at the central German front line in Belarus and promptly broke it. Twenty-eight Wehrmacht divisions were destroyed and the best part of half a million troops – about one-quarter of the entire Axis army in the east – were killed, wounded or captured. The disaster for the Reich at Falaise was here reproduced as catastrophe.

The Red Army surged forward. On 13 July it crossed the pre-war Polish frontier. On 23 August an anti-Axis coup in Bucharest deposed the incumbent fascist regime and the new government denounced the alliance with Germany, declared for the Allies, and offered Stalin an immediate ceasefire. The hope of the plotters was clearly to spare their country a Soviet occupation, but Romania’s change of mind had come rather too late for that: Red Army troops poured in and dictated a peace with the new administration very much on the USSR’s terms. Bulgaria, which, though an Axis partner, had never formally been at war with the Soviet Union, was next on Stalin’s list. His troops reached the frontier on 8 September. The Finns also now quit the war, though their experience was somewhat luckier than that of the Balkan states. Stalin, remembering the trouncing the Red Army had received back in the Winter War, was prepared to compromise in Finland’s case rather than risk another embarrassing defeat in the far north. In return for some border territory, reparations and the rehabilitation of the Finnish Communist movement, Helsinki avoided the permanent tramp of Russian boots.

‘Of all the amazing and unbelievable things to have happened in this war, the sight of Jerry taking to his heels is the most unbelievable,’ thought Kathleen Hey at the end of August.[88] Ipswich engineer Richard Brown reflected similarly a week later as British tanks rolled into Brussels. Five years of war had passed. It was ‘a big slice out of one’s middle age’, he thought:

on the other hand, it doesn’t seem so very long ago since that Sunday morning when we heard Chamberlain make his historic announcement…we’ve been through quite a bit of various experiences since then: excitement, torpidity, apprehension, concern, relief, gritting of teeth, tightening of belts, patience, expectancy and now, delight.[89]

By late August, according to Home Intelligence, those Britons thinking the war would be over by Christmas were being counted ‘among the cautious’. October, or even earlier, remained the most popular guesses.[90] A week later, this ‘wave of optimism’ had grown still higher. ‘The great majority believe the war is nearly over…many think it only a matter of weeks now, some of days. People are laying bets, looking out flags, planning celebrations.’[91] Edward Stebbing noted on 5 September that products were increasingly being sold in red, white and blue packets, presumably to cash in on the imminent victory celebrations. Members of the Home Guard were told they no longer needed to report for regular duty. The government announced that the blackout, a fixture of national life since the start of the war, was to be partly repealed on 17 September in some parts of the country and replaced by a less demanding ‘dim-out’. ‘It has been such an integral part of the war’, Stebbing recorded in his diary, ‘that now it is ended one feels that the war itself must be on the verge of ending.’[92] Sir Alan Brooke, who was in a much better position to know, did not disagree. The Germans, he wrote, ‘cannot last very much longer’.[93]

*

This sense that the war in Europe might be over in a few weeks if the Allies could just keep up the tempo of their summer advance is vital in understanding what happened next. On 10 September, Montgomery received official sanction from Eisenhower to launch a major offensive into southern Holland, to begin in seven days. This new operation was dubbed MARKET GARDEN.[94] The idea was to drop three airborne divisions – the American 82nd and 101st, veterans of Normandy, and the British 1st Airborne, which had not fought since Sicily – along a sixty-four-mile road corridor from the Allied front line to the town of Arnhem in Gelderland, on the German border. This was the ‘MARKET’ element of the plan. ‘GARDEN’ would be a rapid advance up that corridor by British XXX Corps, the plan being for its tanks to reach Arnhem within seventy-two hours of their start time, ideally sooner. Arnhem was a bridging point across the Lower Rhine and thus the last major geographical obstacle between the Allies and the North German Plain. After taking Arnhem, XXX Corps would continue towards the Ijsselmeer, cutting off all the Wehrmacht troops in western Holland, while the rest of British Second Army would pour into the German interior. If all went well, Montgomery suggested, the Allies could be in Berlin in three weeks.[95]

‘Had the pious teetotalling Montgomery wobbled into SHAEF with a hangover, I could not have been more astonished than I was by the daring venture he proposed,’ Lieutenant-General Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th US Army Group, remarked of his first learning of MARKET GARDEN.[96] This was no meticulous set-piece Monty master plan but a mad dash into uncertainty. In XXX Corps’ path lay a succession of major water barriers, including the very wide Maas, Waal and Rhine Rivers. The airborne forces would have to capture intact the bridges across these rivers (as well as several additional canals) to keep the advance on schedule, and, if defended, the Dutch cities of Eindhoven and Nijmegen could prove challenging obstacles. Furthermore, XXX Corps’ 20,000 vehicles would be advancing up a single-lane country road – easily blocked and with dangerously open flanks.[97] Arnhem, the ultimate objective, lay on high ground on the northern bank of the Rhine, and would present an excellent defensive position if it was attacked from the low-lying ‘polder’ (flood plain) to its south.

The expectations placed upon the troops were unprecedented. The battlefield was at the extreme range of the RAF’s tactical fighter-bomber squadrons, so there would only be very limited close air support of the kind which had proven so vital in Normandy; and airborne units would be landing deeper inside enemy territory than ever before. British 1st Airborne, which was tasked with taking Arnhem and its road bridge, would have to hold out unreinforced for much longer than the paratrooper and glider forces at the start of OVERLORD. For MARKET GARDEN to succeed, then, every single one of its elements would have to work, and this was something that had never previously happened in any Allied assault. Little allowance had been made for the inevitable vagaries of war – the chance events that can cause even the most cautious of plans to stumble. Montgomery’s plan was hardly cautious. Bradley said it was ‘one of the most imaginative’ he had ever contemplated; this might have been a polite way of saying it was one of the most foolhardy.[98]

What on earth had come over the usually ultra-cautious Monty? On 1 September, he had been officially relieved as ground commander of all Allied forces in north-west Europe. This came as no surprise: it had always been accepted that as the number of divisions in France grew, so SHAEF’s command structure would evolve. Even so, it was a wounding personal blow, one that even a simultaneous promotion to field marshal could not ameliorate. Monty had been left commanding just the British and Canadians, who were a shrinking proportion of the total Allied force on the Western Front. Bradley now commanded an army group of his own that was larger than Monty’s. US troops on the continent outnumbered British Commonwealth troops three to one by early autumn 1944, a ratio that would inevitably widen with every passing month. Montgomery was all too aware of the manpower crisis in store if the Germans did not surrender by Christmas. The longer the war went on, the more the distinctively British contribution to the Allied cause would diminish, and with it Montgomery’s own importance.

One can perhaps understand, then, the temptation to try to finish the whole thing off at a moment when the enemy seemed incapable of organised resistance. MARKET GARDEN would represent a particular kind of victory wrapped in a Union Jack, for if Second Army took the lead in what Montgomery described to Eisenhower as ‘one really powerful and full-blooded thrust towards Berlin’, then the Americans would be left with the relatively unglamorous job of following on behind to cut off the Reich’s industrial basin in the Ruhr.[99]

Sir Miles Dempsey, in command of Second Army, had his doubts. ‘It is clear’, he wrote on 9 September, ‘that the enemy…appreciates the importance of the area Arnhem-Nijmegen. It looks as though he is going to do all he can to hold it.’[100] The Allied advance which had begun at Falaise and continued so frenetically over the summer was finally slowing by early September as the Germans retreated to their own frontiers. That the defences on the frontiers of the Reich were hardening was evident to all – or at least to those who wanted to see it.

Lieutenant-General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, who would command the airborne element of the operation, was also wondering if his forces were being asked to do too much, too quickly, with too little help. He and Dempsey agreed that an advance towards the German town of Wesel would be preferable to one towards Arnhem, for the former attack would require one fewer major river crossing and would be easier for the American ground forces to support. By choosing the Dutch town as the objective, Browning famously remarked that the Allies might be going ‘a bridge too far’. But when it came down to it, neither he nor anyone else in the 1st Allied Airborne Army was going to offer any serious objections to MARKET GARDEN. The airborne force had been sitting idle in England throughout the summer’s high drama. Unless it soon undertook an operation that exploited its unique air-landing capability, it was likely to be broken up to provide ground reinforcements. Institutional survival was at stake.

Montgomery does not seem, in any case, to have been in the mood to listen to objections to his bold plan. By September 1944 his profile as a commander was ebbing, and he now spent most of his time at his advance tactical headquarters rather than 21st Army Group’s main HQ, and rarely spoke to SHAEF or the Americans. Two years earlier, in Egypt, he had pioneered close air–ground cooperation, but now he had little direct contact with air commanders. MARKET GARDEN was presented to the RAF and USAAF as a finished plan to be carried out rather than a basis for discussion and advice. Drawn up in great hurry by men with little experience of airborne operations, it had no regard for any of the enormous practical difficulties involved: loosing more than three divisions of troops deep into enemy territory, and then keeping them reinforced, supplied and supported with only a limited fleet of transport aircraft.[101] Montgomery flatly refused to pay any attention to the concerns of Prince Bernhard, commander of the Free Dutch forces, that it would be very difficult to operate tanks on a narrow rural highway across the flooded polder land of the southern Netherlands. Bernhard may not have been a military genius, but he did presumably know something about his own country that might have been worth heeding.[102]

MARKET GARDEN was sloppily conceived, and perhaps the only surprising thing about it is how close it came to succeeding. The airborne landings which began on 17 September went almost entirely according to plan despite being much more complicated than the parachute and glider drops on D-Day. The first day’s ground advance by XXX Corps also finished on schedule. Within those first twenty-four hours of apparent success, however, came errors that were to ultimately doom the whole enterprise. In particular, the airborne forces failed to secure all the bridges that the ground troops would need to progress – those at Nijmegen and Arnhem most crucially of all.

The failure at Arnhem would later be attributed to the RAF for not choosing a landing zone closer than eight miles from the town, but 1st Airborne Division’s planning seems to have been at least equally to blame. Only two of the division’s nine infantry battalions were tasked with advancing on Arnhem bridge, and they made their way there independently, squandering the advantage of concentration of force. In the event, only the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, under Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost, actually achieved its objective, and he and his men were obliged to hold out in the town for three days and four nights until finally overwhelmed. Frost’s commanding officer, Major-General Robert ‘Roy’ Urquhart, had no previous experience in airborne operations before MARKET GARDEN, nor had his men ever previously practised multi-battalion manoeuvres. There was an amateurishness about the management of the British airborne troops throughout the whole operation which was unworthy of the valour of the rank and file.[103] It is indeed worth asking why the least experienced of the three Allied airborne divisions was sent furthest into enemy territory, where it was at the greatest danger of being surrounded and destroyed. Was it because some of Monty’s planners already feared that MARKET GARDEN was going to fail, and they wanted to avoid the disgrace (surely one which would have catastrophic diplomatic consequences) of losing an American division while under British command?[104]

All the airborne troops, as well as XXX Corps, encountered greater German resistance than they had been led to expect. A two-division SS Panzerkorps was in the Arnhem area re-equipping after its losses in Normandy. Much was later written about its unfortunate appearance on the battlefield; a British intelligence officer attached to Browning’s staff told dark conspiratorial tales that he had tried to warn his superiors about its presence and had been imperiously silenced.[105] The truth is that the senior Allied planners had known about the SS troops in Arnhem for some time; they had simply judged them unlikely to offer any major opposition. This was not quite as harebrained as it sounded, for neither of the SS Corps’ putatively ‘Panzer’ divisions had more than a few operational tanks to its name when MARKET GARDEN began, and in fact most of the tanks encountered by Allied forces during the operation belonged to other German units. What really stymied the advance was the makeshift Kampfgruppen units that the Wehrmacht was so expert at throwing together from the dribs and drabs of rear-area personnel and remnant formations.[106] MARKET GARDEN was a chaos battle, an exercise in frantic military improvisation. The Germans were good at those; the Allies were not.

Montgomery had asked XXX Corps to do something fundamentally at odds with the way British ground forces had been trained – as much by him as by anyone else – ever since Second Alamein. Racing up a narrow route of opposed advance with little staff preparation, no artillery support, and heedless of the danger on the flanks was utterly alien to the British way of fighting in 1944. The British Army was capable of a lot of things by that point in the war, but it was incapable of embracing risk.[107]

Even so, by 23 September XXX Corps had managed to reach the south bank of the Lower Rhine opposite Arnhem. This was thanks in part to the incredible decision by the Germans not to destroy Nijmegen bridge when they had the chance, but by the 23rd any hope of an Allied advance over the Rhine had passed. The priority was instead to evacuate those remaining troops of 1st Airborne Division still holding out on the river’s north bank, along with the fragments of an independent Polish parachute brigade which, delayed by bad weather, had only arrived on the battlefield two days earlier and had been promptly cut to pieces. In the end, over 2,000 British and Polish troops were ferried to safety in what turned out to be the standout success of the whole operation. Six and a half thousand prisoners had nevertheless been left behind in the Arnhem pocket. 1st Airborne Division played no further part in the war. It was the only Allied formation of divisional size that the Germans destroyed in the entire campaign that followed D-Day.

MARKET GARDEN formally ended on 25 September. Montgomery was supposed to have afterwards judged it ‘ninety per cent successful’. If he ever did say that, he was, technically, correct. By its end, the Allies were in possession of all the territory they had set out to capture, only Arnhem excepted. Whether this slender, sixty-mile salient in the front line jutting north-eastwards towards nowhere in particular had been worth the cost of 11,850 Allied casualties was a rather different matter, of course.[108] Its capture certainly complicated the German task of defending the unliberated four-fifths of the Netherlands. But not by much.

The real question is how much difference it would have made to the war’s outcome if XXX Corps had got to Arnhem on time. And again, the answer is: not much. Eisenhower had approved Montgomery’s plan, but he had never really bought into the idea that it was going to get the Allies to Berlin in 1944, no matter how successful the result. At most, he probably thought MARKET GARDEN would nudge the northern flank up towards the German frontier in conjunction with Bradley’s progress further south.[109] The fact was that the Allies simply did not have the supplies to drive into Germany in September 1944, and they would not have them until Antwerp was turned into a functioning port. Even if there had been a breakthrough on the Rhine, Dempsey’s Second Army would have run out of petrol long before it advanced far into the Reich, and if it had ploughed on regardless on such a narrow front it would soon have found itself isolated and defeated. It is perhaps a blessing that it never got the chance to destroy itself in pursuit of what must ultimately be described as Montgomery’s great wartime folly.

*

On 28 September, after returning to London from the Second Quebec Conference, Churchill reviewed the progress of the war in the Commons. He put as brave a face as he could on MARKET GARDEN (a ‘superb feat of arms’ which had achieved an ‘all-important forward bound in the North’), but it was now clear that all those midsummer fancies about a quick Allied victory in Europe had been grotesquely optimistic. The prime minister warned his listeners not to be ‘carried away into premature expectations of an immediate cessation of the fighting’. He would not hazard a guess when the end would come; perhaps, he still hoped, in 1944. But ‘no one, and certainly not I, can guarantee that several months of 1945 may not be required’.[110]

His announcement, according to Home Intelligence, ‘came as a great shock to many’. The defeat of MARKET GARDEN was ‘generally regarded as a serious setback’, with ‘those who thought the war as good as won being particularly dismayed by this evidence of the strength and determination of German opposition’.[111] By mid-October, it was describing ‘a further drop in spirits’ on the British home front. ‘The great majority are resigning themselves to the war lasting well into next year.’[112] ‘We all thought the war was so nearly over,’ Muriel Green, a young factory worker in Somerset, wrote in her diary in late September, ‘and now we hear of such sacrifice of lives it makes me miserable. I suppose we are taking victory so much for granted it makes such disasters seem worse.’[113]

The fighting in Holland had not ended. Rather, it had shifted to the necessary but grimly unglamorous work of broadening the MARKET GARDEN salient and clearing both banks of the Scheldt Estuary of enemy forces to make Antwerp a usable port.[114] Several divisions of the German Fifteenth Army had been trapped along the Scheldt during the Allies’ summer advance into Belgium, and they now represented a besieged garrison of formidable strength able to use the canals, ditches and narrow dykes and causeways across the flooded polder to their best advantage. The job of clearing the Scheldt was given to First Canadian Army, which, despite its name, was always a fluid pan-Allied formation including, at this time, one Polish, one American and two British divisions. Clearing the Scheldt was a dangerous and tortured job across saturated terrain too wet for conventional vehicles to cross but not wet enough to allow for full-scale amphibious assaults. In its ferocity and misery it resembled the island-hopping battles taking place simultaneously in the central Pacific. As on Saipan and Iwo Jima, so on the Beveland Peninsula, where flamethrowing armoured personnel carriers had to burn out concrete emplacements full of enemy troops fighting to the last. German resistance went on until early November, but even then it took another three weeks to sweep the Scheldt of naval mines. The first cargo-carrying vessel did not reach Antwerp until 28 November. While a logistical godsend for the future, this was far too late to allow for another major offensive until 1945.

The news elsewhere from the continental fighting fronts was no better. The US First Army was grinding itself into bloodied exhaustion in trying and failing to take the Hürtgen Forest, a nightmare of pneumonia, frostbite and trench foot within a murky, snow-laden vista appropriate to a Grimm fairy tale which ended up costing perhaps 55,000 American casualties. Further south, Patton’s drive on Alsace-Lorraine halted at the German ‘Siegfried Line’ or Westwall, his tanks having used up the last of their fuel. In Italy, Operation OLIVE had not lived up to Alexander’s hopes.[115] Initially, and most unexpectedly, a Canadian corps had broken through the German defences, but no armour had been prepared to exploit this feat, and so the enemy had been able to plug the breach. By October, Eighth Army was settling into its most wretched winter of the war, exposed to the elements beneath the Gothic Line, which still stubbornly stood athwart any advance towards the Po Valley. Even the Red Army had paused its westward advance on the borders of East Prussia.

The British had staked everything on ending the war in 1944, and lost. Now the manpower consequences of that failed wager would have to be settled.[116] ‘I do not see how we can fight two wars at the same time,’ Montgomery wrote to Brooke in October, remonstrating against a plan to strip him of two divisions and an armoured brigade which were to be sent to India. In fact, the British Army was trying to fight not two but three wars at the same time – in Holland, Italy and Burma – when it could hardly manage one. The reinforcements for the Bay of Bengal were cancelled, but Montgomery had to lose formations anyway. Since D-Day, each division of his 21st Army Group had lost in battle an average of 7,500 men, about 40 per cent of its strength. In Italy, Eighth Army’s situation was even worse; its divisions had suffered 10,750 casualties apiece.[117]

As a result of this ‘wastage’, the British Army was now so short of trained infantrymen for its line rifle companies that it had to resort to the drastic expedient of breaking up existing formations simply in order to maintain a bare minimum of divisions in the line. In the United Kingdom, three reserve divisions (the 76th and 77th Infantry and the 9th Armoured) were cannibalised for replacements. Among Montgomery’s forces, one infantry division (the 59th) was dissolved completely and another (the 50th) reduced to a nucleus of training staff. In the Mediterranean, two armoured divisions (the 1st and 10th) were disbanded, and each infantry battalion in Italy reduced in strength by one company. Eighteen thousand soldiers trained for anti-tank and anti-aircraft duties in Eighth Army were hurriedly re-mustered into the infantry. It still was not enough; not nearly enough.[118]

Britain would enter the final year of the war as a nation advancing across enemy territory but retreating in wealth, strength and authority. It was a declining Great Power – still capable of winning battles, but facing an irreparable loss of its global influence.

12

Are We Never to Be Free of Damage or Death?

‘I heard one of the flying bombs for the first time last night,’ wrote Edward Stebbing in his diary on 27 June 1944. ‘I hope it is the last.’ The V-1 had swept in low across the Essex landscape with a tremendous tremolo powerful enough to set the walls of Stebbing’s lodging house vibrating. Then, quite abruptly, its engine had cut out. ‘I thought our last hour had come,’ he wrote. He had hidden under the bedclothes, waiting for the end, but was surprised, even faintly disappointed, to hear only a dim anticlimactic thud many miles away (‘I had expected a deafening roar.’) Stebbing lay awake all night listening to other explosions in the distance. His landlady was still in shock the following morning. ‘I think it’s a coward’s trick,’ his aunt declared later that day. ‘They don’t seem to be getting the better of them,’ Stebbing’s sister worried. ‘The strain’, the young man concluded, ‘seems to be telling on many people.’[1]

By 1944 Londoners had had their fill of being bombed. They had, to be sure, enjoyed a recent reprieve from it, certainly in comparison with the Germans. There had not been a single major air raid on the British capital in 1942, and only five relatively minor ones in 1943. But those Londoners who had feared that their city’s luck could not hold out forever had turned out to be right. The twenty-first of January 1944 marked the start of the ‘Baby’ Blitz, dubbed Operation STEINBOCK by the Germans.[2] The Luftwaffe had observed with cool professional interest the RAF’s progress in night-time target-marking in its own attacks on the Reich’s cities. Now they hoped to emulate this increasing British accuracy by using flare-dropping pathfinder bombers of their own. Sir Arthur Harris’s Battle of Berlin was at its peak, and Hitler felt it important to impress upon Germany’s besieged citizens that Londoners, too, were being forced to ‘take it’.

Throughout that February, there were seven major air raids on London which killed 961 civilians in total and seriously injured another 1,712. These were British casualty figures that had not been experienced since the ‘Big’ Blitz of 1940–41. Massive 1,000-kg parachute mines were mixed in with the incendiaries to shatter water and sewage pipes and knock out railway viaducts and bridges. A block of flats collapsed in Chelsea after one direct hit, killing and maiming many residents; in Battersea, about 3,000 houses were destroyed or rendered uninhabitable during STEINBOCK.[3]

The death toll was less a reflection of German power in 1944 than British complacency. Göring’s air force no longer really had the manned bomber strength to mount a serious strategic offensive against the United Kingdom. The biggest raid of the entire campaign involved 447 sorties of mostly twin-engine Luftwaffe medium bombers dropping 268 tons of bombs, only thirty-two tons of which landed on London. To put that in context, by this point in the war the RAF could routinely dispatch over 500 four-engine heavies to Berlin in a single night to drop ten times as many tons of bombs as that.[4]

Londoners, though, had got out of the habit of taking air-raid warnings seriously. Many had ignored the first sirens in late January and early February, and the result was, to begin with, heavy casualties. Once it was clear that STEINBOCK was going to be an extensive campaign, the capital’s residents were forced to resume the wearisome business of sheltering. Initially the authorities wanted to avoid a repeat of the rush to the Tube stations, as had happened in 1940, but the old appeal of subterranean flight was too strong. At the Oval, the crowd broke through a police cordon and hundreds flocked on to the Underground platforms, and on 23 February the government conceded defeat and reopened all the stations to shelterers again. One hundred and fifty thousand Londoners slept in the Tube during the worst period of the Baby Blitz – 20,000 went to Piccadilly Circus station alone – reproducing troglodytic scenes not witnessed in the capital since the Battle of Britain.[5]

STEINBOCK petered out in late spring. The Luftwaffe did not have the depth of reserves to endure the heavy attrition of British radar-assisted night fighter and anti-aircraft defences. By March, one in twelve of the attacking aircraft was being shot down each night. The Germans switched instead to attacking the Channel ports to try to disrupt preparations for OVERLORD – an equally futile gesture, as it turned out.[6]

The point had been made, though: while the war’s outcome might now be obvious, the Germans were not going to go down without an increasingly brutal fight. Vengeance for the RAF’s destruction of the Reich’s cities – Vergeltung – was to be the enemy’s leitmotif in 1944 and 1945. As the likely start date of OVERLORD crept closer in early summer, Londoners began to worry about what Hitler might do in retaliation. It was widely whispered that poison gas attacks would begin against British civilians.[7] Other rumours circulated. In Essex, in late January, Edward Stebbing noted in his diary talk of a Nazi secret weapon, some kind of radio-controlled bomber that could be flown over London without a crew.[8] A month later, Churchill publicly confirmed that the Germans were indeed preparing ‘new means of attack on this country’ which might include rocket planes.[9]

D-Day came and went on 6 June without any immediate German response. More than a week passed. People breathed a sigh of relief. Then, in a furious forty-eight-hour burst beginning on 15 June, south-eastern England was bombarded with 150 bizarre-looking projectiles – thirty-foot-long marrows with cigar-shaped pulse jet engines mounted on top of them. They cruised parallel to the ground at about 2,000–3,000 feet while emitting a sound variously described by witnesses as ‘a grating sinister growl [increasing] to a most menacing roar’ and ‘a disagreeable splutter, like an aerial motor bicycle in bad running order’.[10] In this opening salvo seventy-three of these missiles reached London, whereupon, as if at some predetermined point, their engines were observed to cut out, they fell silently to the ground and exploded.[11] In the Commons the home secretary, Herbert Morrison, announced that the missiles were what he called ‘pilotless aircraft’ being launched from sites along the French Channel coast. German radio confirmed the news. The missiles, the enemy declared, were the first examples of the ‘Vengeance Weapon 1’ (Vergeltungswaffe 1), or V-1. The implication of that numbering system was that there might be other, even more dangerous vengeance weapons still in preparation.[12]

Early rumours about the V-1 had not been quite accurate, for as it turned out it was not a radio-controlled weapon at all, but rather flown along a pre-set heading using a crude compass and gyroscope-aiming system and programmed to fall to earth when a wind-driven odometer mounted on its nose reached a certain pre-calculated distance. The eerie buzzing sound emitted by its pulse jet inspired its early nickname of the ‘bumble bomb’ (‘doodlebug’, the canonical monicker, was a later creation). Londoners quickly came to appreciate that while the V-1’s in-flight droning might be sinister, it was when that noise ceased that it was time to run and take cover. ‘I must admit that these things have put my nerves on edge more than ordinary raids,’ wrote Stebbing on 19 June: ‘I suppose the novelty of them, the devilish ingenuity, has something to do with it. It is with a mixture of fear and curiosity that we look up at almost every plane that goes over, half-expecting it to be a pilotless one.’[13] George Orwell, writing in Tribune in late June, scoffed at the idea that there was anything especially cruel or barbaric about this new robot weapon (‘after what we have been doing to the Germans over the past two years,’ he pointed out, ‘this seems a bit thick’). Still, Orwell conceded that there was something ‘exceptionally unpleasant’ about the V-1 all the same, because

unlike most other projectiles, it gives you time to think. What is your first reaction when you hear that droning, zooming noise? Inevitably, it is a hope that the noise won’t stop. You want to hear the bomb pass safely overhead and die away into the distance…in other words, you are hoping that it will fall on somebody else. So also when you dodge a shell or an ordinary bomb – but in that case you have only about five seconds to take cover and no time to speculate on the bottomless selfishness of the human being.[14]

The V-1 campaign continued throughout the summer, climaxing in early August when a record of ninety-seven ‘incidents’ was recorded in the capital in one single twenty-four-hour period, and it was said that from some vantage points in London as many as nine of the missiles could be observed in the air simultaneously. The city’s southern boroughs were hit worst of all, with Croydon, Wandsworth and Lewisham reporting 15 per cent of all explosions in the London Civil Defence Region. A few rogue V-1s during this period veered off course as far as Shropshire,[15] but all areas of the capital and the Home Counties remained vulnerable. A single V-1 that hit the Guards’ Chapel at Wellington Barracks in Westminster during a Sunday morning service on 18 June collapsed the church’s concrete roof and killed 121 members of the congregation. Sixty-six American servicemen and nine civilians died when another destroyed a row of residences off Chelsea Bridge Road. In Edenbridge, Kent, a low-flying V-1 struck a tree and was deflected on to a house being used by London County Council to billet evacuated mothers and infants. Twenty-two babies were killed (all of whose mothers, in the back of the building, survived).

Because doodlebugs could strike at any time of day, they sometimes caught out large numbers of working Londoners in the street, shopping in the morning before their shifts or during their lunch breaks. One V-1 cut out at lunchtime just over Waterloo Station, went into a shallow dive northwards across the Thames and exploded at the junction of Aldwych and Kingsway in between the BBC’s Bush House and the Air Ministry building. It was a sunny, late-June day in an otherwise wet summer, and people were outside enjoying the good weather. Five curious young WAAFs at Adastral House who had leaned from an upstairs window to watch the missile’s flight path were sucked into the street by the explosion and dashed to pieces on the ground below. ‘I saw the body of my friend,’ a BBC staff member wrote later; ‘she was naked, stripped of clothes and killed by the blast. Another girl I knew came into the building helped by a friend – blood spurting from her wrist and a deep gash in one eye.’ Ronald Hyde, the news editor of the Evening Standard, who was walking back to Fleet Street after lunch, remembered seeing trees stripped of their leaves by the blast, garlanded instead with human flesh.[16]

V-1s were not, at least by the standard of 1944 aviation, so very fast, cruising at about 340mph, and were incapable of taking evasive action if attacked. In principle, then, they should not have been too hard to shoot down. The problem was that their very low-altitude flight paths made attacking one in a manned aircraft a challenging commission even for an experienced pilot. Furthermore, large-calibre anti-aircraft guns, designed to fire at high-altitude bombers, struggled to traverse fast enough to hit such rapidly approaching targets as they hugged the horizon. The bigger issue was that destroying or destabilising a V-1 in the air over London was almost as dangerous to the people and property below as letting it hit the ground of its own accord. Any effective counter-measures, then, needed to take place as far from the city as possible. This raised the question of whether London’s AA guns, searchlights and barrage balloons should be moved southwards and eastwards. Choosing to re-site almost the entire anti-aircraft protection of the British capital was not a decision to be taken lightly. If the Germans were to begin a new and manned Blitz, Londoners would be left dangerously exposed.

A staff conference chaired by Churchill in mid-June mulled over the issue and finally deemed the risk acceptable. The barrage defences were secretly relocated, first to the North Downs, then, a month later, further out to the Thames Estuary and the Channel coast. Initially the results were unimpressive because of the continued problem of targeting a low-flying V-1 with a conventional shell, but American-supplied proximity fuses, which did not require a direct hit to work, began arriving in Britain in great quantities in August. By the end of the month, over three-quarters of all V-1s crossing the coastline were being destroyed by artillery fire, and all but a few of those which made it through the barrage were quickly dispatched by the RAF.[17] Twenty-First Army Group, breaking out of Normandy, also now overran the weapon’s launching sites on the Somme, and the number of ‘incidents’ in the capital plummeted in the first week of September. Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law, who had been given responsibility for handling enemy missile attacks on Britain, held a press conference on 7 September to confidently announce that ‘except possibly for a few last shots, the Battle of London is over’.[18]

His timing was unfortunate. At about twenty minutes to seven the following evening, a mysterious explosion ripped through Staveley Road in Chiswick, destroying eleven houses, badly damaging another fifteen and killing three people, including a three-year-old girl. Bystanders came from miles around to gawp at the thirty-foot crater in the middle of the street. No V-1 or manned bomber aircraft had been seen or heard before the explosion. Another near-identical incident took place that same evening in Epping, though this time with no casualties. Over the ten days that followed, sixteen further unexplained explosions occurred across the London Civil Defence Region, and another six in Essex. They continued into October at a rate of about two per day in the capital alone.

Morrison made no statement in the Commons. The press was silent. Gossip had to substitute for the absence of government information. Rumours about a second, even more sophisticated and deadly German vengeance weapon had been doing the rounds for some time. In late July, Ipswich engineer Richard Brown had written in his diary about a supposed ninety-ton ‘V-2’ rocket with a ten-ton warhead capable of crossing the Atlantic and reaching the United States. Thousands of these V-2s, he wrote, were in storage in Denmark.[19] Within twenty-four hours of the Chiswick explosion, the Ministry of Home Security was already recording ‘strong rumours’ across the city that a German rocket had been responsible.[20] Still, no official word came until 10 November, when Churchill finally admitted what everyone had already been suspecting for two months – that Britain was under bombardment by Vergeltungswaffe 2. London now had the dubious distinction of not only being the first city in the world to be attacked by a pilotless cruise missile, but also of being the inaugural target of the first supersonic ballistic missile.

The real V-2 was less impressive than Mr Brown’s lurid estimate. Its warhead was nine times smaller than his prediction and its maximum range of just 200 miles meant that it was barely capable of reaching London from a launching site in The Hague, let alone New York. But with a maximum speed of 3,500mph it was not only much too fast to be intercepted, but could not even be observed in flight. There was no possible way of giving civilians warning to take shelter. The only telltale indicators of a V-2 attack, other than the explosion itself, were a thin silver streak of ‘frozen lightning’ sometimes observable far off in the eastern sky, and a curious double bang as the sound of the blast was followed a split second later by a sonic boom (the latter clearly audible over thirty miles away from the impact point). Some attack survivors also reported feeling a pressure wave striking them immediately before the explosion, or some vaguer premonitory sense of impending doom. V-2s, as one Walthamstow woman put it, were ‘bombs with slippers’, demurely presenting themselves to Londoners with almost no advance notice of their arrival.[21]

As the capital’s summer of V-1 came to an end, then, so its autumn and winter of V-2 began. This time London’s eastern boroughs (Ilford, West Ham, Barking), as well as Essex and East Anglia, were the principal targets.[22] Six explosions a day were occurring across the city by November.[23] Many rockets landed in open country and caused no great loss of life or damage to property. Occasionally, though, a V-2 struck the middle of a crowded street or a packed building. The single worst incident of the whole campaign occurred at lunchtime on Saturday, 25 November 1944, at the Woolworth’s branch in New Cross High Street, Deptford. Hundreds of people were inside: schoolboys and -girls buying their sweets rations, housewives drawn by a rumour that the tin saucepans they would need to make Christmas dinner (an extraordinarily hard-to-find domestic item by the last winter of the war) would be on sale. Council labourers who had just collected their pay at the nearby town hall were spilling over on to the pavement, chatting. The cleaners from the Southern Railway station had clocked off early to get some tea.

Within a fraction of a second of the V-2 striking the building, the bodies of dozens of women and children were already being flung haphazardly through the shop’s windows on to the A2 main thoroughfare to Dover. A moment afterwards, the whole five-storey Woolworth’s edifice swelled up and collapsed on those still caught inside. A Number 53 bus that had been passing by at the instant of impact came to a halt with the driver and all the passengers inside staring dumbly ahead of them, all dead, killed instantaneously by the blast wave. It took three days and nights for rescue parties to pick their way through the rubble at New Cross to retrieve all the corpses. For a week, a stream of mortuary vans arrived and departed the incident site, unable to keep up with the gathering pile of cadavers and body parts. One hundred and sixty-eight people had been killed, one in five of them under the age of eighteen. Twenty-three of the dead were too mutilated to be identifiable.[24]

*

The final V-2 rocket to successfully hit the United Kingdom (the last of 1,115) landed at the back of a house in Orpington in Kent in the late afternoon of 27 March 1945. Eric Millichamp, who was sitting in his front room, survived, but his thirty-four-year-old wife, Ivy, had just walked into the kitchen to boil a kettle for tea. She was killed instantly by the blast, becoming, as a result, the last of the 60,595 British civilians who died due to enemy bombardment during the Second World War.[25] Two days later, the final V-1 to elude British counter-measures hit the village of Datchworth in Hertfordshire. No one was harmed. The capture of the French launch sites the previous September had ended the main doodlebug Blitz against London, but the Germans had improvised by air-launching V-1s from manned bombers flown along the North Sea coast, allowing them to attack a wider geographical range of targets, albeit less intensely or accurately. During a brief onslaught in December 1944 against the industrial north-west, a V-1 had landed on Oldham in Lancashire on Christmas Eve, killing twenty-seven people.[26] The last flying bombs of the war had been dispatched from sites in Holland alongside a few remaining V-2s.

Of the two V-weapon types, the German Army’s V-2 was by far the more ambitious and technologically consequential.[27] All the principal Allied powers scrambled to obtain examples of V-2s in the immediate post-war period and, more importantly still, the scientists who had built them. Over 120 former Nazi aeronautical and missile experts were quietly squirrelled away to Fort Bliss in Texas under the leadership of Wernher von Braun, who had designed and co-developed the V-2 and would go on to create the Saturn V launch vehicle that took the Apollo astronauts to the Moon – a triumph of liquid-fuel rocketry manifestly built upon his practical experience while working for Hitler. The V-2 was certainly the most expensive weapons programme the Reich had invested in, requiring up to 26,000 man-hours of labour to build every working model. The final development and production costs of von Braun’s dream to ‘aim at the stars’ (but sometimes hit London) bore comparison to that of the Manhattan Project.[28]

The V-1, designed, constructed and launched under the imprimatur of the Luftwaffe, was a comparatively cheap and primitive weapon. Albert Speer was contemptuous of its technological crudity, but it caused the British much more trouble than the V-2 ever did at about one-fiftieth of the unit labour cost.[29] Just over 10,500 doodlebugs and 1,400 V-2s were launched against the United Kingdom between June 1944 and March 1945. Between them they inflicted 33,442 British civilian casualties, of which 8,938 were fatalities. V-1s were responsible for seven in ten of those dead and wounded. In other words, the humble flying bomb was over seventeen times more efficient at killing and maiming Britons than the V-2.[30] Its 850-kg warhead did not cause as deep a crater on impact as that of the supersonic rocket, which meant that it rarely harmed underground water or gas mains. A V-1 explosion nevertheless produced a far bigger surface blast which damaged buildings across a wider area – roofs torn off and doors ripped out of their frames, sometimes half a mile from the impact point, with clouds of lacerating flying glass slicing open limbs and faces for hundreds of yards around. Entire streets of brick-built Victorian back-to-backs in the inner metropolitan slums could be knocked over, seemingly effortlessly, by the shock wave of a single exploding V-1. Between the start of the war and May 1944, 84,600 houses in London had been rendered uninhabitable by enemy action. In the 107 days of the main V-1 offensive, the flying bombs added 25,000 more to this total. At their peak they were destroying or damaging 21,000 houses in the city every day.[31]

Psychologically, too, the V-1 presented a severer test to Londoners’ nerves. ‘The doodlebugs were so much more terrifying than anything that had come along up till that time because they were supernatural, they were uncanny, they were almost science fiction,’ wrote north Londoner Odette Lesley after the war. She recalled her ‘horror and disgust’ at seeing men pushing women and children aside to get down the steps of Warren Street Tube station as the V-1s hummed above.[32] As they had done in the Big Blitz and during the STEINBOCK offensive, so the capital’s citizens once again descended underground for shelter en masse. Tube stations hosted an average of 75,000 to 80,000 people every night in summer 1944. In July, the government even opened five of the eight ‘deep’ shelters which had been sunk thirty yards below street level in the construction spree of 1941 and had been sitting mostly empty ever since.

Prior to the V-1’s appearance, London had been enjoying a modest return to its pre-war population size. With the start of the flying bomb offensive, over 300,000 people were officially evacuated northwards and westwards again. Half a million more were given financial assistance to relocate themselves more informally. Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS) volunteers who assisted the evacuees in their host lodgings commented that while the children all behaved much the same as they had in 1939 and 1940, the adults seemed ‘windier’ this time round – more panicky and discouraged. Half of Londoners reported finding the V-1 attacks harder to bear than the bombs of the past. ‘It’s not like the old Blitz,’ one said. ‘People are just getting down and disheartened.’[33]

Paradoxically, the very absence of any warning to a V-2 attack, or any way of being able to intercept the rockets, made them less frightening. Londoners sought consolation in fatalism. ‘If it’s going to hit you, you’ll probably be dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it,’ as one put it.[34] V-2 attacks were fewer and caused less disruption to everyday life since there was no reason to break off work to seek shelter. If you lived to hear an explosion, then you knew you were already safe. When a rocket landed close to the Granada cinema in Tooting during a matinee performance, breaking windows and shaking the building’s walls to its foundations, 300 people at first rushed to the exits. But after getting outside and realising the danger was passed, most of them went back in to see the end of the film.[35] The number of people sleeping nightly in Tube stations fell to just 18,000 in October. By the end of 1944, almost half a million Londoners who had been evacuated in the summer had returned home.[36]

The Germans would perhaps have been better-off had they junked the V-2 and focused on the flying bomb; better still for them if they had abandoned the whole notion of V-weapons in the first place and stuck to building the conventional tanks and aircraft their fighting troops in continental Europe so desperately needed. The doodlebug may have been a more efficient weapon than the supersonic rocket, but it was still never likely to enforce a British surrender, nor even significantly disrupt their ability to make war.

There was, then, something nastily gratuitous about the final Vergeltung Blitz on London – the pointlessness of the violence adding to its cruelty and a sense of resentful anger towards an enemy so obviously beaten yet refusing to bring the killing on both sides to an end. The second half of 1944 was the bloodiest six-month period of the whole war for the British, as the V-weapon assault on the homeland coincided with intensifying military operations in France, Holland and Italy. There were fears it could get even worse before the whole thing was over. The government suspected that V-1s and V-2s would be used to carry biological agents, and one-quarter of a million doses of botulinus toxin antidote were secretly imported from Canada just in case.[37] Herbert Morrison was so alarmed at the fall in morale in London due to flying bomb attacks that he asked the War Cabinet in July to consider authorising retaliatory poison gas attacks on Germany.[38] In hindsight, indeed, it is surprising that the final months of the Second World War did not see a mutual exchange of chemical and biological weapons on the battlefield and against civilians on the home fronts.[39]

London by the end of 1944 was a city full of tired, morose, anxious, angry, sullen people. In 1940, it had seemed faintly lyrical and romantic to defy the Germans and to imagine oneself dying heroically for king and country. No one wanted to do that any longer when the outcome of the conflict was so increasingly obvious and close. ‘Are we never to be free of damage or death?’ wrote one anguished Londoner during the V-Blitz. ‘Surely five years is long enough for any town to have to suffer.’[40] No one felt especially ‘plucky’ any longer; everyone was sick of Keeping Calm and Carrying On.

*

The British newspapers in the last winter of the war were filled with reports of the V-Blitz, though they had to be coy about the precise location of where the missiles were striking in order not to leak useful targeting information back to the Germans. There was, however, one alternative story sensational enough to drive even the doodlebugs and the rockets from the front pages for a little while. The trial of the ‘Cleft Chin Murderers’, Karl Hulten and Elizabeth Jones, which began at the Old Bailey on 16 January 1945, was described by the barrister of one of the accused as the ‘first really big murder trial since the start of the war’. It provoked widespread press attention and public comment. A public seat at Hulten and Jones’s trial was one of the hottest tickets in London that winter.[41]

George Orwell, writing about the case in 1946 in his Tribune essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’, thought that it had epitomised the psychological climate of late-war London. Hulten and Jones had, as Orwell reminded his readers, committed their crimes ‘to the tune of V-1, and were convicted to the tune of V-2’.[42] He was not quite right about the chronology,[43] but Orwell’s broader point was incisive enough. What had otherwise been the shabby and pointless killing of an invalided Dunkirk veteran and father of two working as an unlicensed taxi driver in Hammersmith had become a point of fixation in early 1945 because it felt to so many people as though the culprits and the crime exemplified the emotional and moral state (and decay) of the capital – and the nation – as the war reached its climax.[44]

Karl Hulten was a twenty-two-year-old Swedish-born private soldier in the American 101st Airborne Division who, by late autumn 1944, had been on the run from the US Military Police in London for several months after deserting his unit. In London, Hulten spent his days and nights aimlessly slumming around the city’s cheaper quarters, sneaking into cinemas, hanging around run-down cafés and pubs and consorting with a petty demi-monde cast of small-time criminals, black-marketeers, prostitutes and fellow deserters. On the evening of 3 October he had met, most fatefully, Elizabeth (Betty) Maud Jones, an eighteen-year-old would-be cabaret dancer from Glamorgan, Wales.

Jones’s whole unfortunate life up to that point had been shaped by a war which had broken out when she was just thirteen. Initially left in her mother’s care after her father enlisted, she had been sent to a girls’ reform school after running away from home several times and committing a series of minor thefts. Aged sixteen, she had been married off to a soldier friend of the family who had beaten her up on her wedding night. Not long afterwards, he had shipped off overseas. Jones never saw him again; he would eventually be reported missing in action at Arnhem. By then, however, she had already moved from Glamorgan to London. There Jones had tried her hand, first as a barmaid, waitress and usherette, and then, though apparently not to any great success, as a striptease artist in the Piccadilly clubs – ‘that square mile, with its dawdling crowds of men, its ever-busy taxis, its blatant appetites, its easy money, its noise and bright lights behind dark doors,’ as the Daily Mirror put it censoriously during her trial. In London Jones had renamed herself ‘Georgie Grayson’, dyed her hair blonde, affected an American accent and retreated into a fantasy world of make-believe Hollywood glamour. She desired, she told one of her friends, ‘to do something exciting like becoming a gun moll, like they do in the States’.[45]

It’s not hard to imagine the effect that a charming sociopath like Hulten would have had on this guileless provincial youth. He introduced himself to Jones as ‘Lieutenant Ricky Allen’ (he had purchased a fake US Army officer’s uniform) and hinted that he had been sent to Britain by the Chicago mob. In fact, before the war Hulten had had a conventional working-class life as a husband and father in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his wife and child were still residing there, oblivious to his desertion or his criminal activities in London.

In the several days which followed their meeting, Hulten and Jones carried out a short and miserable career as a sort of penny-packet Bonnie and Clyde. Driving around Berkshire in a US Army truck which Hulten had stolen, the pair knocked over a lone woman cyclist and robbed her of her purse containing five shillings and a few clothing coupons. Afterwards they drummed up a scheme to break into a country pub at gunpoint, but Hulten chickened out at the last moment, much to Jones’s confusion and irritation. Arriving back in London, they picked up an eighteen-year-old woman hitchhiking on the Edgware Road. Hulten attacked her with a crowbar and almost drowned her.

On 6 October, Hulten shot taxi driver George Heath (owner of the celebrated cleft chin by which his corpse was later identified) as he and Jones sat in the back of the victim’s cab. They stole five pounds and a silver cigarette case and lighter from the dead man before dumping his body. Later, Jones told the police that she had been ‘surprised there was not a loud bang’ when the gun went off. Evidently the reality of murder had not lived up to her pulp-novel expectations. Hulten afterwards took her to the White City greyhound races in Heath’s Ford V8 saloon cab. It was his foolish decision to keep driving around the capital in the stolen vehicle which swiftly led to the police identifying him as the probable murderer on 9 October. After he was arrested, ‘Lieutenant Allen’ promptly gave ‘Georgie’ up (the pair still did not know each other’s real names), and once in custody they each dictated statements blaming the other for everything that had happened. It was a ‘pitiful and sordid’ story, as Orwell put it, motivated by the ‘utmost callousness’ of two contemptible fantasists.[46]

The couple were convicted and were sentenced to hang, the US authorities having waived their right to try Hulten in one of their own military courts. He duly went to the gallows, but Jones was reprieved by the home secretary one day before her scheduled execution and her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment (she eventually served nine years). This proved to be the most controversial element of the case. An angry, jeering crowd gathered outside Pentonville Prison on the morning of Hulten’s death demanding that Jones ought rightly to die too. ‘You let the girl go but you let the man hang, it’s a damned shame!’ shouted Violet Van der Elst, a well-known vocal opponent of capital punishment, who had arrived clad head to toe in widow’s black and who had tried, unsuccessfully, to ram the prison gates with a commandeered dust cart.

Hulten and Jones were certainly not alone in committing murder in wartime London.[47] There had already been the RAF aircraftman Gordon Cummins, who had been hanged at Wandsworth in June 1942 for the brutal killing and mutilation of four women. There had been Harry Dobkin, the ‘Blitz Butcher’, who had been executed a year after Cummins when the dismembered and mummified remains of his wife had been discovered hidden in the ruins of a bombed Baptist chapel in Vauxhall. There had been the ‘Elephant Boys’, a south London gang who had killed an RN officer by repeatedly running him over and dragging his body beneath their getaway car after a botched smash-and-grab raid on a jewellers’ shop. The crimes of some wartime London murderers were not yet known about in late 1944. Kensington accountant John Haigh had already killed one young man – disposing of the corpse in a drum of sulphuric acid – and within a year he would dispatch his victim’s parents too. John Christie of 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill, who was to become one of the most infamous serial killers in post-war Britain, was already exploiting his position as a wartime special police constable to lure women back to his house where he could gas, rape and strangle them. His second victim, Muriel Eady, was killed on 7 October 1944 – one day after Hulten and Jones murdered George Heath.[48]

For one commentator in the Sunday People, the whole Cleft Chin case illustrated not just the depravity of two pathetic youths but ‘a disease of the age’, in which young Britons brought up on ‘gangster stories of the most lurid and filthy type’ had come to ‘glorify murder and glamourise vice’.[49] ‘We have let some of our moral standards slip badly,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, opined in one of his wartime radio addresses. In his view there was, across Britain, after several years of war, ‘less care for honesty, less shame at dishonesty, than there was’.[50] The Bishop of Norwich warned that ‘we are in danger of our national character rotting at the root,’ arguing that a ‘decay of personal standards’ had set in across the country thanks to the conflict.[51]

These were not just ecclesiastical complaints. By 1944, a widespread moral panic had set in about the rise of lawlessness and depravity in Britain and the decline of core national institutions like marriage, the family and the community as a result of the stresses of war. Much of this anxiety – about class, race, the Americanisation of British culture, juvenile delinquency, sexual profligacy, young women flouting conventional standards of probity and decency, illegitimacy, adultery, divorce, disrespect for authority, law-breaking, unfettered violence – had figured in the Cleft Chin case and would contribute to the public’s lurid fascination with it. The wartime generation is extolled today as exemplifying Britain at its best. That is certainly not how it seemed in 1944 as the V-missiles were falling on London. The paradox was this: the war was finally nearing a victorious end after years of sacrifices and toil, but British society seemed more fragile, more corrupted, more imperilled than ever before.[52]

*

By 1944, the police statistics alone were damning.[53] During the last year of peace, 303,771 indictable offences had been committed across England and Wales.[54] By the fifth year of the war this figure had increased by more than a third to 415,010. The number of people found guilty of larceny by 1944 had risen by 31 per cent compared to the annual pre-war tally; of breaking and entering, 41 per cent; of receiving stolen goods, 44 per cent. Most disturbingly, in a country that prided itself on being a ‘peaceable kingdom’ of law-abiding gentleness, crimes of violence against the person (murder, manslaughter and serious assault) had increased by 11 per cent, while serious sexual offences, including rape, were up by 39 per cent. Much the same pattern was observable in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

True, the total of all non-indictable (magistrates’ court) offences across the nation had fallen, but that was mainly due to the far fewer number of traffic offences and charges of public drunkenness being committed than before the war. By 1944, hardly anyone had access to a private motor vehicle with petrol any longer, while getting hold of hard liquor had become a distinct challenge. So far as most other non-indictable categories were concerned, including minor assault, petty theft and breaches of railway regulations (chiefly non-payment of fares), convictions were sharply up. Moreover, all this was taking place at a time when many young men, usually the chief perpetrators of crime in any society, were on military service overseas. Large numbers of Britons who could normally be presumed to be law-abiding were, it seemed, suddenly demanding the attention of the police. Convictions of women almost doubled during the war.[55]

None of these statistics included offences against the nation’s Defence Regulations, comprising a whole new category of lawlessness occasioned by the war. The most common of these were violations of the night-time blackout rules, of which there were 73,831 successful prosecutions in English and Welsh magistrates’ courts in 1944 alone (all told, perhaps as many as one in fifty people ended up being found guilty of violating the blackout procedures during the war). The next biggest category of Defence Regulation offence was a breach of food and consumer goods controls – in other words, participation in the black market. Over twelve months beginning in September 1943, the Ministry of Food successfully prosecuted 25,168 violations of its wartime rules and, as the government conceded, these must have represented a tiny fraction of all the mostly undetected abuses.[56]

‘Black marketeering’ could mean anything from ration book fraud – a housewife falsely declaring one of her books lost or stolen, say, in order to receive a second one – to retail graft, like a shopkeeper dishonestly inflating the number of coupons he had received from customers in his declarations to the ministry. It could also involve counterfeiting; the keeping of unregistered livestock; the smuggling into the UK of undeclared goods; or the reselling of scarce, usually stolen commodities – anything from tea and eggs to furniture to silk stockings, all available, as the customary wink-and-nod explanation had it, because they had ‘fallen off the back of a lorry’.

The extent to which the wartime black market was a small-scale venture perpetrated by petty one-off opportunists or what The Field magazine called ‘an enormous, highly efficient and totally unscrupulous organization’ was disputed. In 1944, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Philip Game, stressed to the public that the ‘somewhat lurid descriptions…of super-criminals controlling a vast organization with widespread tentacles’ popular in the press remained totally unsubstantiated.[57] All the same, some black-market operations clearly took place on a large, well-organised and highly profitable scale. At the end of 1944, one gang operating in Leeds and Manchester which was broken up by the police was accused of selling goods worth £20,000 and fencing 150,000 ration coupons. Another prosecution in Harrogate that year uncovered dozens of bolts of stolen cloth valued at £64,000 which had been cut up into small sections and sold illegally to the public for home tailoring. Almost fifty purchasers of this cloth were identified and prosecuted; they included several local civil servants and respectable business professionals.[58]

Looting, especially of homes and buildings which had suffered enemy bomb damage, was a wartime crime with a particular emotional sting to it, violating as it did so many essential bonds of community trust. It had reached a peak in 1941 during the ‘Big’ Blitz, when there were 2,508 successful prosecutions of looters throughout England and Wales, but even in 1944 there were 561 proceedings against looting which resulted in a conviction. Thousands of houses with their doors, windows and roofs broken open by V-1 blasts across south London that autumn were easy and tempting pickings for the city’s thieves, the more professional of whom showed up at incident sites in imitation furniture vans to efficiently cart away the victims’ valuables – chairs, carpets, clocks, jewellery, crockery. One repair worker who arrived at a London council estate just after a doodlebug attack was said to have absconded with an attaché case containing £333 in bank notes, leaving its owner lying seriously injured on the ground and his wife dead beside him. Periodic reminders by furious judges and magistrates that looters could be legally shot (a technically accurate but unrealistic threat) seem to have made little impression on the worst recidivists.[59]

An outbreak of bigamy was perhaps one of the war’s more unexpected criminal challenges. People were moving around the country as never before, not always using a consistent identity: according to one estimate in 1945, half a million Britons were using stolen or forged ID cards.[60] This made the establishment of secret second – and third, and fourth – families much easier than it had been in peacetime. Furthermore, the prospect of receiving multiple marital allowances from the War Office was a temptation for women to acquire a stable of soldier-husbands. ‘This wicked crime is spreading in this country with dismaying speed,’ as one judge put it. By 1945, charges of bigamy represented 11 per cent of all the cases on the Old Bailey’s calendar, while at Winchester Assizes that year a whole day had, unprecedentedly, to be devoted to prosecuting the crime. Concerns about bigamy had risen to such heights by the end of the war that a printed warning was being included with all civil marriage forms.[61] The newspapers had little difficulty in finding individual blackguards about whom they could write with salacious indignation – men like Edrick Albert Findon, a twenty-four-year-old private soldier who masqueraded as an army and RAF officer while marrying two women; or the battery sergeant-major with seven children who, it transpired, lived in marital harmony in St Albans during the week with one spouse while decamping to Leicester at the weekends with an entirely different one.

Bigamy’s particular insidiousness was that, as the Daily Mirror put it, it ‘destroyed the core of domestic responsibility’ – that kernel of societal cohesion under attack from all the forces of disorder summoned up by the war. But was it merely a symptom of a more fundamental decline in civic morality of all kinds? Britons were ‘drifting around, picking up new lives without a thought for the old ones’, as one censorious observer described it. Evidence of a deeper moral crisis was there for anyone who cared to see it. All the metrics of conventional respectability looked bleak by the end of the war. The rate of illegitimate births in the UK had more than doubled. The number of women reported seeking treatment at official government clinics for venereal disease had, by 1943, increased by almost three-quarters from the peacetime figure. Convictions for serious crimes committed by juveniles in England and Wales had risen from 30,835 in 1939 to 40,554 by 1944. Petitions filed for divorce during the same period more than doubled; those specifically citing adultery had increased from 4,731 before the war to over 12,000 (rising to 17,091 of them by 1945).

A ‘distemper of dishonesty’ was plaguing Britain, Sir Gerald Dobson, the Recorder of London, claimed. ‘People have lost sight of the distance between right and wrong. Morals have been weakened to the point of being extinguished.’ Sir Harold Scott, Game’s successor as Metropolitan Police commissioner, worried about a ‘slackening of moral fibre’ brought on by the war.[62] ‘I am full of foreboding about the youth of the future,’ the rector of Desford told an ‘Aid Britain Crusade’ meeting in Leicester in February 1944, in what was a characteristic jeremiad of the time. The evils of the late wartime nation – absent fathers, negligent working mothers, oversexualised teenage ‘good time girls’ brazenly consorting with soldiers – were making a mockery of victory. ‘What kind of a Britain’, he demanded, ‘can be made out of this debauchery?’[63]

*

Into this moral panic stepped Betty Jones, aka Georgie Grayson, the bleach-blonde Piccadilly stripper, would-be Chicago gun moll and murderess. She was tailor-made to appeal to the anxieties of respectable newspaper readers in late-war Britain, and the press took every opportunity to enlist her as Exhibit A in their critiques of the moral state of the nation. As Matthew Grant has said, ‘she stood as a symbol of womanhood that had rejected the established norms of wartime society’ through her brazen sexuality, her lawlessness and her cheap Americanised values.[64] Yet she could be equally portrayed not as an active agent of decline but as a passive child victim of wartime social and cultural forces which had corrupted her generation: a girl ‘who couldn’t call her life her own’, in the Evening Standard’s words.[65] Her case, according to the Sunday Express, had focused attention on the ‘problem of young girls loose in London’.[66] Betty Jones was useful because she could be whoever you wanted her to be – harlot, race traitor or vulnerable, betrayed youth.

As the newspapers were keen to remind their readers, Jones was also a war widow – and betrayer – of no less than a hero of Arnhem. Her infidelity with an American serviceman even as her husband was still officially missing in action coincided with all sorts of wider popular fears in 1944 and 1945 about the wreckage done to the nation’s marriages by the long-term absence of menfolk overseas and the residence in Britain of an army of well-paid, glamorous, lothario GIs. The Americans had begun arriving in the United Kingdom in early 1942 as part of the build-up for OVERLORD and the daylight strategic bombing campaign. Their numbers had fluctuated sharply – the peak figure of 1.65 million on the eve of D-Day having fallen to just 400,000 by V-E Day – and they had always been geographically concentrated in East Anglia (home to most USAAF bases), the West Country and Lancashire rather than distributed evenly across the country. As the BBC commented in February 1944, though, ‘today the United States uniform is, in many parts of Great Britain, as familiar as, if not more familiar, than our own’. London, though it hosted relatively few Americans in permanent residence, was the centre of US military leave activity. Kingsley Martin in the New Statesman called the friendly American invasion of the capital and the nation ‘one of the great social experiments of the war’.[67] The GIs had brought with them strange accents, Coca-Cola, chewing gum and above all money – an American private soldier’s generous pay afforded him about three times the disposable income of his British equivalent. Which meant they had also brought trouble.

By the beginning of 1944, Piccadilly, Betty Jones’s future place of employment, had become a key fulcrum point of national anxiety. The American Red Cross ‘Rainbow Corner’ club on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue attracted not just cash-laden GIs and USAAF airmen on leave but a seemingly inexhaustible supply of full-time and casual prostitutes – ‘Piccadilly Commandos’ – who parted the troops from their US government pay in nearby shop doorways, alleyways and the courtyard of Shepherd’s Market. Anxiety about what Orwell called the ‘seething swarms of drunks and whores’ in W1 was as much medical as moral. The US military authorities complained to the British government that the venereal disease rates among their troops stationed in the UK had become 50 per cent higher than that of soldiers still on the other side of the Atlantic. This prompted a new Defence Regulation, 33B, which required the compulsory inspection and treatment of suspected VD carriers.[68]

About 130,000 of the GIs in Britain by the eve of OVERLORD were African American.[69] The US military had imported to the UK a system of overt racial segregation which confined these men to their own units and public spaces; in the febrile atmosphere of wartime, this was calculated to cause conflict. White and black GIs openly fought one another, sometimes in large numbers and sometimes with lethal violence. At Bamber Bridge in Lancashire in June 1943, a white Military Policeman (MP) shot and killed an African American private in the back following an altercation at a local pub; later, troops at the dead man’s military base exchanged gunfire with American MPs who had shown up at their camp gates with an armoured car. The following year, three people, including the landlady, were killed when Black GIs opened fire on American MPs inside a pub in Kingsclere, Devon.

The British did not at first quite know what to make of the newly arrived African Americans. Theirs was, after all, a country in which almost everyone was white, and in which hardly anyone outside of a few small port communities had ever personally seen a black or brown face before. Most of the Black GIs hailed from the Jim Crow Southern states, where any behaviour seen as ‘uppity’ was likely to get an African American man swiftly lynched, so they came to Britain well drilled in the need to behave impeccably in all-white towns and villages. Their polite and respectful conduct around the locals often contrasted starkly and favourably with the dissolute cavalierism of white GIs. For that reason, many Britons sympathised with the plight of African American soldiers, stood up for them when they were being bullied by their own countrymen, and refused to cooperate (despite pressure from the War Office) with demands for the formal segregation of pubs and cinemas.

In Britain we remember these episodes fondly because they redound to our own credit, but we can be a bit too self-congratulatory. Racial discrimination was hardly alien to the wartime United Kingdom, even if it was usually carried out more discreetly and informally than the heavy-handed US approach.[70] Unofficial ‘colour bars’ had long excluded non-white patrons from British bars, hotels and theatres. The sight of black servicemen, American or otherwise, in the company of white women provoked long-standing national fears about miscegenation.[71] The London press spread lurid and exaggerated stories about legions of underage girls carrying illegitimate ‘black babies’. White British servicemen in their cups were capable of harassing and attacking interracial couples just as keenly as the most bigoted GI. Stanley Hodges, an RAF aircraftman from the West Indies, was arrested after one violent altercation with Scottish soldiers who objected to him and other ‘black bastards’ dancing with white girls.[72]

White American suitors might have been more racically acceptable, but they were seen as importing the fake values of their gimcrack civilisation to a vulnerable Britain, turning the heads of otherwise ‘good girls’ by their glamour, flattery and free-and-easy spending. To young British women ‘brought up on the cinema,’ a Home Office report warned in 1945,

who copied the dress, hair styes and manners of Hollywood stars, the sudden influx of Americans, speaking like the films, who actually lived in the magic country…at once went to the girls’ heads. The American attitude to women, their proneness to spoil a girl, to build up, exaggerate, and to act with generosity and flamboyance, helped to make them the most attractive boyfriends.[73]

These girls might already have a British soldier boyfriend serving overseas; might indeed have a British soldier husband. By 1944, anxiety among troops stationed abroad that their wives and sweethearts were being unfaithful with foreign troops in the UK, especially Americans, was having a serious morale effect in theatres of war. Soldiers in the Middle East were, according to postal censors’ reports, ‘asserting in strong terms that they have lost all faith in women…disillusion is widely expressed’. The War Office’s official report on wartime morale later concluded that ‘no disease was more infectious than the anxiety and depression arising from the topic’ of infidelity among service wives.[74]

What would they do once they returned? British Army psychiatrist T. F. Main worried that ‘the feeling of being cheated – sexually, economically, emotionally – might give rise to [an] angry desire to destroy all womanhood’.[75] Soldiers had, after all, been conditioned in violence and instructed in the use of deadly weaponry. Parallel to the public’s wartime anxiety about the false British female was that of the brutalised and murderous British male. The journalist James Lansdale Hodson commented in September 1944 that ‘paratroops have been trained as all-in wrestlers and boxers, and Dacoits who can kill by the quick twist of a chord. Yet we shall expect all these lads to be well-behaved and docile after the war.’[76]

The prospect of millions of angry, feral ex-warriors returning home to wreak vengeance on their faithless girlfriends and spouses (not to mention the men who had cuckolded them) only deepened the anxiety that Britain had crossed a moral tipping point. The fact that the country was also awash with small arms and ammunition was hardly reassuring. When thirty-two-year-old Royal Army Service Corps driver Edward William Jones, a veteran of the North African and Italian campaigns, discovered that his wife was having an affair with another man in spring 1945, he returned to his hometown of Bedford and promptly shot dead the boyfriend with a Sten gun.[77] Odysseus, demobbed from the Trojan War, had slain Penelope’s suitors on arrival back in Ithaca; the British squaddie could be just as unforgiving.

*

Reviewing this sad catalogue of crimes and follies, it is tempting to throw up one’s hands in despair and dismiss the whole idea of a British wartime ‘Blitz Spirit’ as a pious fraud – particularly given the saccharine-sticky banalities it is usually deployed to defend. Yet of course in the end society did not disintegrate, however gloomy things must have sometimes looked in the winter of 1944–5. Indeed, a careful examination of the evidence suggests that ‘the people’ in wartime were a good deal more cohesive, small-c conservative and morally robust than they might have appeared at the time.

Take crime, for instance. Yes, its rates had increased during the war, but they had risen even faster during the 1930s and would plateau around 1950, remaining stable for most of the rest of that decade. Perhaps some of the increase might have been due to what criminologist Herbert Mannheim would call ten years after V-E Day a ‘general cheapening of all values’ along with the ‘loosening of family ties’ and a ‘weakened respect for the law, human life and property’.[78] Some of it was perhaps sheer opportunism. The wartime police force was undermanned and overburdened with extra duties; committing crime had never been easier. The temptation to steal small personal items was far greater in an age of rationing and austerity. As one judge remarked, few people would have bothered to purloin a shirt off a washing line in 1939; but after six years of war and the disappearance of all but a few categories of clothes in the shops, the idea had acquired a distinct attraction. In the case of some crime categories, for example sexual offences, the wartime increase in reported incidents may have been partly due to a greater willingness by the victims to come forward. For all the violence visited on its people and which they had visited on others, Britain in 1945 remained a country in which murder remained highly exceptional.[79]

Between 1940 and 1945, 300,000 more children were born out of wedlock in Britain than in the equivalent period before the war, but about one in three children in the late 1930s had been conceived before a later marriage. In fact, the wartime fall in premarital pregnancies legitimised by a ‘shotgun wedding’ almost exactly matched a wartime rise in illegitimate births. What was happening, in other words, was not so much a change in sexual behaviour as an artificial change in the way that couples and families could respond to an unplanned premarital pregnancy. Before the war, the new father would have been expected to ‘do the decent thing’ and to marry his girlfriend – either enthusiastically or under duress. Now, with so many young men in the Forces being dispatched to different parts of the country or overseas at short notice, it was harder for them to legitimise a son or daughter before birth in good faith – or, in some cases, easier for them to be able to wriggle out of having to do it at all. Not only were women aged twenty and under not behaving more promiscuously, they were actually less likely to experience a premarital conception than they had been before the war (they were, after all, pretty busy doing other things). It was the ‘enforced degree of physical separation of the sexes’ due to military service that was the primary cause of the wartime illegitimacy spike, the registrar general for England and Wales concluded.[80]

Increases in cases of bigamy and marital breakdown have to be understood in the context of the 1937 Matrimonial Causes Act, the consequences of which were just coming into effect as the war began. This had introduced some modest relaxation in constraints on divorce, but it remained a difficult and expensive process, particularly where no particularly egregious and demonstrable offence (such as adultery) had taken place, or where one partner refused to cooperate. One of the perks of military service life was that HM Forces would pay legal costs if a soldier, sailor, or airman and his wife wished to legally separate, so long as it was the serviceman who instigated the divorce. The spike in divorce cases in the mid-1940s, then – it reached a peak in 1947 – may have been partly due to the stresses of war, but it probably also had something to do with couples who had long wanted to end their marriage finally having an opportunity to do so (with the supposed ‘adultery’ of the wife a mutually agreed connivance).

Some bigamy cases likewise were not stories of predation and betrayal but of the mid-century British fumbling their way, however inarticulately, towards a new understanding of what the parameters of marriage ought to be. There was, for instance, ‘Robert’, a ‘tough-looking’ London soldier of twenty-nine whose prosecution was examined by the Daily Mirror in January 1945.[81] Robert was a father of two who had been sent to Scotland at the beginning of the war. Long absence from his wife had caused their marriage to irretrievably break down, and in 1942 she had successfully applied for, and received, a separation allowance. Robert, though, had by this time met an Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) girl, and in January 1944 he had married her. She had given birth to his child that November. ‘Is Robert a dyed-in-the-wool scoundrel?’ asked the Mirror doubtfully. His second wife was unmoved by the supposed crime committed against her: ‘he was a model husband, always very good and kind to me…if he can get a divorce from his legal wife, I would like to marry him properly. His first wife has finished with him.’ The pair had not, she insisted, slept together until after their marriage.

For some, it seems, sex outside of marriage remained as taboo as ever, but there was also an increasingly popular sense in the Britain of 1944 that men and women ought not to be condemned to remain in loveless marriages for the whole of their lives. Some acts of bigamy, then, ought to be seen as products of frustration rather than deceit, committed by people who still revered marriage as the benchmark of respectability, but did not feel morally bound to continue in an unhappy partnership that only persisted because an inflexible and costly legal system refused to release them from it. The war, by shaking up people’s lives as never before, offered them a glimpse of a happier future that they could only hope to reach by legal transgression. Wartime bigamy could be, in its own cockeyed way, not an expression of contempt for marriage or its place in a stable society, but a reminder of just how essential an institution it remained in British national life.

13

Kill Boche, Terrify Boche

On the night of 18–19 April 1944, RAF Bomber Command attacked the marshalling yards at Juvisy-sur-Orge south-east of Paris. If Sir Arthur Harris had had his way, the raid would never have taken place: his British Lancaster and Halifax ‘heavies’ would have been dropping bombs on a German city. But the AOC-in-C was no longer in strategic direction of his own planes or aircrew. Four days earlier, control of both Harris’s Bomber Command and the American Eighth Air Force had formally passed to General Eisenhower’s SHAEF headquarters. Ike intended to employ both air armadas not for the continued bombing of the Reich, as Harris and his USAAF counterpart Lieutenant-General Carl Spaatz wanted, but rather for ‘softening up’ enemy transportation links in northern France in anticipation of Operation OVERLORD.[1]

This ‘transportation plan’ was largely the creation of Professor Solomon ‘Solly’ Zuckerman, an Oxford zoologist who had become the scientific director of the air power operational research unit attached to SHAEF. Zuckerman argued that OVERLORD’s success would hinge on destroying in advance the French road, rail and river lines of communication to the Atlantic and Channel coasts, impeding the Wehrmacht’s reinforcement of the front line after the D-Day invasion. Harris called it ‘a panacea plan’ devised by a civilian ‘whose peacetime forte is the study of the sexual aberrations of the higher apes’.[2] But, for the time being, the decision was out of his hands.

Over the seven weeks following the raid on Juvisy-sur-Orge, Bomber Command would make sixty further large-scale attacks on other transportation plan targets, dropping over 63,000 tons of bombs on them – a greater aerial onslaught against the territory of an ally, France, than the Germans had managed against an enemy, Britain, during the 1940–41 Blitz.[3] High explosives and incendiaries did not, of course, distinguish between friend and foe. Between them, the British and American air forces managed to kill over 25,000 French civilians from April to June 1944, the same number of fatalities as in the upcoming firestorm raid on Dresden.[4]

Transportation raids continued after D-Day, but once the ground campaign in Normandy began the Anglo-American heavy bomber forces had a new job: tactical close air support for the Allied armies. A Lancaster designed for area bombing from three miles in the air was an awfully blunt instrument to use above a battlefield where the two opposing armies might be divided by less than 1,000 yards of ground. Harris was sceptical about the wisdom of the whole idea, but he acceded to SHAEF’s wishes. On 7 July, 450 heavy bombers attacked Caen in support of the offensive to take, belatedly, that stubborn hub of German resistance on the Allied left flank. Excessive caution led to fiasco. The ‘bomb-line’ was fixed too far from the Anglo-Canadian front line, which meant that all the Wehrmacht infantry and tanks in the forward area were missed – though Caen itself, with all its magnificent Norman architecture, was pulverised very efficiently. (What survived of the city after this first levelling was finished off on 18 July by another raid at the start of GOODWOOD.) On 14 August, Bomber Command was called in to assist 21st Army Group’s advance towards Falaise. This time, in their eagerness not to miss the main body of German troops, the Pathfinders dropped their target markers short. Seven per cent of the RAF’s bombs fell on the luckless Canadian and Polish infantry below, killing dozens and wounding hundreds.[5]

As it turned out, the greatest part of Bomber Command’s effort in summer 1944 was not in Normandy at all but against the V-weapon launch and production sites further east along the Channel coast – the NOBALL campaign. The British had been hearing whispers about a German rocket programme based at a Baltic test facility at Peenemünde from as early as 1942. The following August, Bomber Command launched a major attack on the place, killing about 180 German engineers (and many more Russian and Polish POW forced labourers) and prompting the Wehrmacht to disperse its manufacturing operations into underground factories. This was but one raid. When the V-1 barrage against London began in mid-June 1944, Eisenhower, under pressure from the War Cabinet, told the bomber chiefs to make NOBALL missions top priority. For the next three months, 86,000 tons of Allied bombs – 40 per cent of Bomber Command’s total effort that summer – were dropped on NOBALL-related targets, mostly on suspected V-1 ‘ski-jump’ launch sites in France and Belgium.[6]

Harris’s view of all this is not hard to guess. Hoping to destroy ‘a few flying bombs’ by risking the lives of crews in his ‘hard-pressed and hopelessly underarmed bombers’ was, he said, a miserable waste of effort, ‘and nothing that can be said on that subject is likely to convert me’.[7] Most of Harris’s judgements on the value of wartime target systems remain open to debate, but on this occasion it seems he was indisputably right. The attacks on fixed concrete ‘ski-jumps’ were futile since the Germans had already abandoned them in favour of launching V-1s from well-camouflaged mobile ramps. By the end of September, fortunately for the Allies, the issue had become moot as they had captured most of the Channel coast and so put London out of range of all but a few air-launched V-1s. No comparable effort to NOBALL was attempted to stop the V-2s over the winter. Their threat was considered less imperative, and in any case it was almost impossible to identify and target the V-2’s tiny temporary launch sites.

*

On 14 September 1944, Eisenhower released the Allied strategic bomber forces from SHAEF’s control. Harris had chafed under what he saw as five months of misdirection of effort. Now he hoped to return to the Reich’s airspace to finish off the area bombing offensive and win the war from the air. ‘The vast damage that had been done in [1943] showed,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘that if the available bomber forces – ourselves and the Americans – went on and developed the weight of attack that was by then possible, Germany would then without a shadow of doubt be knocked right out in a few months.’[8] Harris wrote to Churchill on 30 September suggesting it was time to ‘knock Germany finally flat’. The prime minister responded the following day that he was ‘all for cracking everything’ against Germany. The AOC-in-C had apparently received a Churchillian blessing to resume his area bombing campaign much as he had left it back in April.[9]

RAF Bomber Command would be returning to German skies under vastly more advantageous circumstances than it had enjoyed a year earlier, because the Luftwaffe day and night fighter force had collapsed. This had been almost entirely thanks to the USAAF’s efforts in the first four months of 1944. Carl Spaatz had taken over an American Eighth Air Force in crisis. Its attempts at long-distance daylight penetration of German airspace in 1943, relying on well-armed but ponderous formations of American heavy bombers to blast their way through the enemy’s fighter screen, had clearly failed. Spaatz saw that the answer was long-range, high-powered fighters accompanying the bombers into German airspace. The fighter escorts could engage and destroy the Luftwaffe interceptors and establish daylight air superiority so the bombers could range free as they saw fit. Fortunately for him, a new generation of USAAF fighters was just at that moment arriving in England with the endurance, speed and manoeuvreability to fly to Germany, fight on even terms with the Luftwaffe and fly back. Most important of these was the P-51 ‘Mustang’, which, fitted with external fuel tanks, possessed an operational range extending all the way to Vienna.

Spaatz’s new counter-force strategy began with a seven-day, 6,200-sortie assault in late February 1944 against German aircraft assembly plants. The Eighth Air Force lost 158 bombers and the Fifteenth, operating from Italy, eighty-nine. During this ‘Big Week’, however, one-third of the Luftwaffe’s entire single-engine fighter force were destroyed and one-fifth of its pilots killed for only trifling American fighter casualties. A pattern had been established which would continue for three months. The actual damage done in any of these raids to the German aerospace industry was less important than the attrition to the defending fighter force which had had to rise up on each occasion to meet the bombers and escorts in combat.

In mid-May, notwithstanding the demands of SHAEF’s transportation plan, Spaatz was given permission to make some experimental attacks on German synthetic oil plants. He believed that the Third Reich’s oil supply was its true economic ‘bottleneck’ vulnerability. Oil plants were targets vital and vulnerable enough that the Luftwaffe felt compelled to defend them with maximum effort, not only hastening the destruction of the German fighter force but using up its very stock of aviation fuel in the process. American bomber losses per sortie briefly peaked in April, then plummeted as the German air defences crumbled away irrecoverably. By D-Day, thanks to Spaatz’s counter-force strategy, the Third Reich had lost control of the skies over its own territory. The hollowing-out of the Luftwaffe’s fighter defence screen in early 1944 would turn out to be the single greatest contribution American air power would make to winning the European war.

The British benefited from this campaign in two ways. For one, their heavy bombers could fly routine daylight operations again for the first time since 1940. Between June and August 1944, Harris’s men performed 17,580 day-sorties – over one-third of RAF Bomber Command’s total effort during those ninety-two days – with only fifty-nine aircraft losses.[10] For another, the collapse of the Luftwaffe’s day fighter force had baleful implications for its night fighter force too. Thanks to Spaatz’s raids, by June the Reich’s production of avgas was less than a third of what it had been three months earlier.[11] Less aviation fuel meant less flying time for both experienced night fighter crews and – crucially – trainees. German accident rates rose as inexperienced pilots and navigators were thrown hastily into night-time combat missions. Successful interceptions of British aircraft fell as rookie radar operators struggled to master their increasingly complex equipment. As a result, by autumn 1944, while German factories were still cranking out night fighters, Bomber Command’s losses had fallen dramatically, from the 6 or 7 per cent typical of major night raids during the Battle of Berlin to just 1 or 2 per cent.[12]

Harris, then, had every reason for confidence as he resumed the bombing of Germany in September 1944, but two problems remained. The first was that Spaatz, committed to oil targets, abjured any interest in city bombing. The Americans had, by this point, become the senior partners in the Combined Bomber Offensive, with Spaatz now commanding over 5,000 heavies (three times as many as Harris) and 5,000 day fighters. Once he had broken the Luftwaffe by day, the USAAF commander could increasingly fight his own bombing war without reference to what the British did.

The second problem, more ominous for Harris, was that Portal had lost interest in city bombing too. The CAS had, long ago, been the author of the 1941 and 1942 directives that initiated the whole experiment in ‘morale’ attacks, but he had always seen the strategy as a temporary expedient for as long as precision bombing remained unachievable or disproportionately hazardous. Unlike Harris, he had never been a true believer, and now Portal felt that it was right for Bomber Command to return to selective targeting. Its aircraft could fly in daylight again, at least sometimes, and when flying at night its aiming techniques had become exact enough that hitting a small ground target was feasible. Harris had had the chance to prove area bombing’s inherent value in the Battle of Berlin and had failed. It was, said Portal, ‘little more than a waste of time’ to keep pounding Germany’s cities to rubble expecting something dramatic to happen.[13]

There remained no consensus, however, as to what Allied bombers ought to be attacking. Spaatz favoured oil. Portal and Sidney Bufton, the RAF’s director of bombing operations, had by now also been converted to the cause of the ‘oily boys’, as Harris dismissively called them. On the other hand, Eisenhower’s deputy Tedder had been impressed by the results of Zuckerman’s transportation plan in France, and his was an influential voice arguing to translate that offensive to Germany’s road, rail and river networks instead. The final CBO directive, issued on 1 November, included both: the first priority of the Anglo-American bomber forces was to be Germany’s oil industry, it declared, and the second priority German lines of communication. Only when ‘weather or tactical conditions’ were ‘unsuitable’ for oil and transportation missions were operations to be directed any longer at ‘important industrial areas’ – i.e. the cities which Harris thought were still the best targets.[14]

The November 1944 CBO directive would remain the basic blueprint for the Allied bomber campaign for the remaining six months of the war. It was not quite as opaque as POINTBLANK, but it did offer enough interpretive scope for Spaatz and Harris to pursue their different war methods. For the American, the directive was an invitation to destroy the German oil industry, something he proceeded to accomplish with aplomb. Bomber Command’s AOC-in-C meanwhile continued to area-bomb cities. He argued that he would try to attack oil and transportation targets whenever it was feasible to do so, as per the directive, but that weather and tactical conditions above Germany in winter 1944–5 generally ruled out such operations.

Harris’s force had now reached its apotheosis in destructive power. He had under his command over 1,500 four-engine bombers available for main-force operations on any given night, plus over 200 twin-engine Mosquitos capable of performing crucial target-marking, diversionary and night fighter interception missions.[15] Each Lancaster on an area bombing mission typically carried a payload of one 4,000-pound high-explosive ‘cookie’ along with ninety-six thirty-pound phosphorus and benzol gel incendiary bombs. On impact with the ground the latter would produce a lance of flame fifteen feet long which was hot enough to melt through brick.

Targeting had become far more sophisticated. Highly experienced ‘master bombers’ from the Pathfinder Force (PFF) squadrons now acted as choreographer-instructors during attacks, circling their aiming points while providing real-time radio commentaries to assist and correct the course of each incoming wave of aircraft. Illuminators and other marking devices no longer had to be dropped directly on to the target itself but could be offset slightly to avoid their becoming obscured by rising smoke from the fires. Updated versions of the H2S air-to-ground radar offered higher-resolution images of the landscape below bomber aircraft. A new radio navigation device, ‘Gee-H’, a replacement for the cruder ‘Gee’ system the RAF had been using since 1942, was more accurate than its predecessor and harder for the Germans to jam. Even under poor weather and visibility conditions, Harris’s men now had a much better chance of finding and hitting their targets in a concentrated time and space window, avoiding the creep-back that had previously handicapped efforts to set a massive fire.

In mid-October 1944, over the space of forty-eight hours, the British and American air forces dropped 9,000 tons of bombs on Duisburg and Harris had enough Lancasters spare to immolate Brunswick on the same two nights. Düsseldorf, Bochum and Gelsenkirchen were all destroyed in November, and Hagen, Karlsruhe and Ulm obliterated in December. Nuremberg, previously a target of persistent frustration for Bomber Command, was finally dealt with in the New Year, with its castle, its Rathaus and its whole medieval city centre turned to ash. Then it was Hanover’s turn. Then Munich’s. Then Stuttgart’s.

In late January 1945, Bomber Command was instructed to target a number of eastern German cities, including Dresden.[16] Given that this was the raid which in the public mind would forever epitomise Sir Arthur Harris’s way of making war, it is ironic that he, alone of all Allied decision-makers, was not very keen on carrying it out. It was Churchill who lit the touchpaper that was eventually to consume Dresden by proposing to the Air Ministry, just before he left for the Yalta Conference, that ‘basting the Germans’ on the Eastern Front would assist the Red Army’s offensive towards Berlin. Cold Warriors on the Anglo-American side later had it that the Dresden raid originated in a Soviet request at Yalta. Whether such a request ever occurred (the record is disputed), it is clear that even before the conference met, Harris had already been ordered to perform ‘a severe blitz’ on the city, along with Berlin, Leipzig and Chemnitz.[17] The idea was to hamper movements of German troops fleeing the Russians who might be making their way to a (as it turned out entirely fictional) ‘last redoubt’ in the Bavarian Alps.[18] Churchill may also have had in mind the diplomatic capital to be gained by laying on a spectacular demonstration of firepower so close to the Soviet lines.[19] The presence of masses of refugees in the city was not only known about, it was welcomed, as likely to contribute to the confusion.

Portal, Tedder, Spaatz (whose bombers would also be taking part in the attacks) and George Marshall were notified of the plan, and all agreed to it. The only dissident voice was Harris’s. This was not because of any consideration for Dresden’s doomed populace, but rather his concern over the very long distance his crews would have to fly, as well as High Wycombe’s lack of information about the city’s Flak defences. Contrary to many post-war claims, Dresden was not irrelevant to the Reich’s war effort – the Ministry of Economic Warfare listed it in twenty-second place in importance of all German cities – but Harris had so far avoided it because of its perilous distance from England and because (in a further irony) its industries lacked relevance to the oil and transportation priorities Portal kept chivvying him about. Before ordering the attack, Harris double-checked his own orders with the Air Ministry. It was Whitehall’s confirmation that sealed Dresden’s fate. The RAF’s bombers began a firestorm which consumed much of the baroque city on the night of 13–14 February. The death toll would be the subject of many years of politically charged argument but is now estimated to have been about 25,000.[20]

The more one looks at the experience of Germany’s cities during the final eight months of the war, however, what becomes clear is that there really was nothing anomalous about the raid on Dresden, other than the chance conditions that made it somewhat more horrible than usual. Much the same sort of scourging was happening on a regular basis all across Germany that winter. In February, in addition to Dresden, Bomber Command annihilated Wiesbaden, Goch, Kleve (claimed afterwards to be the most-ruined small town in Germany), Dortmund, Worms and Mainz. The raid on Dortmund was, as it happened, the RAF’s single biggest of the war, with 1,108 Lancasters, Halifaxes and Mosquitos dropping 4,851 tons of bombs.

On 23 February, Bomber Command attacked the little town of Pforzheim, nestled in three river valleys on the north-eastern rim of the Black Forest.[21] The conditions on that night were excellent. Pforzheim was uncloaked by cloud and brilliantly illuminated by a three-quarters moon. Because of the absence of any major Flak defences, Harris’s Lancasters were able to approach at an unusually low altitude – as little as 5,000 feet in some cases. The first of 1,825 tons of bombs started falling at 7.50 p.m. Within twenty-two minutes, every bomber had dropped its payload on to the target’s medieval town centre, made up of narrow, winding alleyways and closely packed sandstone terraced houses. Strong air draughts followed by an ice-cold winter storm front pumped oxygen into the fires. By a little before midnight, all the separate blazes were coalescing into a single conflagration sucking in air at hurricane speeds while the temperature grew hot enough to liquify steel. It was a firestorm of the kind which had consumed Dresden a few days before. Pforzheim, as the German writer Jörg Friedrich put it later, was ‘boiling into lava as if struck by the cyclopean fists of another geologic era’.[22] Over 83 per cent of the city’s urban centre (1.7 square miles) was destroyed that night. As for the dead, there were reckoned to be 17,000, or one in four of the municipal population, a greater percentage than at Dresden. Yet Pforzheim’s fate was to make nothing like the same impression in the post-war popular consciousness as Dresden’s.[23] The official four-volume history of the RAF strategic bombing campaign would devote precisely one clause of one sentence of one footnote to it.[24]

On 11 March, Essen’s agonising Götterdämmerung concluded with a massive raid that raked over the cinders of Krupps’ steelworks one last time before the US Army marched into what was left of the city a few hours later. A week afterwards, perhaps 5,000 Würzburgers died when the capital of the old imperial principality was consumed in a seventeen-minute apocalypse. Hildesheim joined it on 22 March. Then Paderborn. Then Plauen. Last of all was Potsdam, the royal seat of the Hohenzollerns – and so perhaps a fitting target for the finale to Bomber Command’s five-year assault on Prussian militarism. Potsdam was wrecked from end to end on the night of 14–15 April. The winter residence of the Brandenburg electors, the baroque garrison church in which Frederick the Great had been buried, and – alas for historians – the Prussian War Ministry, with its irreplaceable records of Bismarck’s and the Kaiser’s army: all went up in smoke. Along with 5,000 Potsdamers.

In all, throughout the final three months of 1944 and the first four months of 1945, Bomber Command dropped 344,000 tons of high explosives and incendiaries on Germany. That was more than in all the preceding sixty-one months of the war combined. As a TNT-equivalent, it was akin to Harris’s men dropping seventeen Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on the Reich.[25] The Nazi state was in far too much of a shambles by that stage of the war to keep accurate accounts of the dead, but by one estimate 82,000 Germans died in air raids in the final five months of the war.[26] Just in the ‘ordinary’ month of March 1945 alone, in which none of the canonical firestorms took place, at least 13,000 people were killed in major raids, and that figure – twenty-three times the number of Britons who had died in Coventry in November 1940 – is almost certainly a serious underestimate.[27]

The RAF’s last bombs of the European war fell on Kiel on the night of 2–3 May. Eighteen civilians were killed. Thirteen airmen – most of them on their second operational tours – died when two Halifaxes collided over the city. That near-parity in German and Bomber Command fatalities was a throwback to the earliest days of the campaign. It was also a reminder of the inherent risks, even in the dying days of the war, of flying large formations of fragile explosives-laden aircraft in darkness over hostile skies with only primitive navigational equipment to guide them.

The youngest of the crewmen killed that night was Flight Sergeant Desmond Greenwood, aged twenty, the son of Gilbert and Kitty Greenwood of Middlesbrough in Yorkshire. He was buried in the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission cemetery in Kiel, along with 982 other Allied servicemen, most of them Bomber Command aircrew whose bodies were recovered from crash sites across Schleswig-Holstein, the Frisian Islands and other parts of north-western Germany. Greenwood’s resting place is identified by a two-foot-six-inch-high Portland masonry headstone identical to that marking the grave of twenty-six-year-old Flight Lieutenant William Barton, from Ferring in Sussex, the son of Frank and Elsie Barton. Flight Lieutenant Barton, along with two other crew members of his Bristol Blenheim N6184, was shot down by Flak and killed on 4 September 1939 while attacking Wilhelmshaven. He is buried in another British cemetery in the small village of Sage, about 120 miles south-west of Greenwood’s last resting place in Kiel. Barton and Greenwood’s fates bookend 2,069 days of war during which Bomber Command lost a total of 47,268 aircrew on operations, most of them while flying over Germany.[28] Both headstones – ‘mean on detail but rich in dignity’ – include short personal inscriptions chosen by the parents.[29] Barton’s reads:

in proud & treasured memory
of my darling only child.

until we meet. mother

Greenwood’s inscription says:

we were not there to say good bye
but in our hearts you will never die

*

Harris’s last order of the day was dispatched across Bomber Command a week after the Kiel raid. ‘Your task in the German war is now completed. Famously have you fought. Well have you deserved of your country and her Allies.’[30] The AOC-in-C’s battle with the Germans was over, but his battle with the Whitehall establishment raged on. On 1 June, Harris wrote a long, livid screed of complaint to Portal protesting that the ground crews and staff of Bomber Command who had not served outside the United Kingdom during the war would receive no other decoration than the general Defence Medal.[31] If that were the case, Harris declared, he himself was going to decline any other ‘decoration, award, rank, preferment or appointment, if any such is contemplated’. Having made this declaration, it was with some embarrassment that Harris discovered two weeks later that he was being awarded the GCB in the King’s Birthday Honours list. Public refusal of this would smack of lèse-majesté, but Harris told Portal that he could ‘neither forget nor forgive the affront and the injustice that has been done to my people’. The Achilles of High Wycombe would shortly afterwards retire from the Royal Air Force to spend the next five years sulking in his tent in South Africa.[32]

It is important to note that Harris’s complaint about the medals was not about the treatment of his aircrew, all of whom were due to receive the 1939–1945 Star and, in most cases, the Air Crew Europe Star or (if they had begun operational flights after D-Day) the France and Germany Star.[33] These decorations were considered at the time an entirely satisfactory recognition of their wartime service. True, none of them explicitly mentioned Bomber Command, but that was the way of the Second World War’s theatre decorations, which did not generally distinguish between the branches of the armed forces in which their recipients had served. The reason for this is not hard to figure out. It would have been invidious to create an exclusive campaign medal for Bomber Command and not, say, for the Royal Navy’s submarine service, or the Commandos, or the behind-the-lines agents of SOE, or the unexploded bomb (UXB) sections of the Royal Engineers, or half a hundred other groups of servicemen and -women with equally sympathetic claims for special treatment.[34]

The assertion, starting in the late 1980s, that Bomber Command’s aircrew had been robbed of ‘their rightful medal’ after the war by a hand-wringing liberal elite in Whitehall had much less to do with Harris’s original complaint on behalf of his ground staff than with changes in the national conversation during the Thatcher years about identity, patriotism and the legacy of the Churchillian-imperialist past. Sympathetic right-wing newspapers took up the claims of newer and more politically strident veterans’ organisations that aircrew had been cheated of their due recognition because of a post-war ‘culture of official squeamishness’ ashamed of what had been done to Hamburg and Dresden.[35] The result was that in 2013 – by which time all the senior participants in the original controversy were long dead – a Bomber Command clasp was made available for surviving aircrew veterans to affix to their 1939–1945 Stars. This, the activists said, had at last righted the great wrong done at the end of the war, but Bomber Command’s ground and staff personnel were still not eligible for the new decoration. The clasp fixed a problem that had never needed fixing while at the same time failing to address the injury that had so excised Harris in the first place.[36]

The absence of an aircrew medal specifically for Bomber Command was an artificial grievance concocted many years after the fact. It is true, though, that as the war came to an end some of the senior politicians who had ordered the strategic bombing offensive to commence back in 1940 and had approved the switch to area bombing in 1942 began to edge away from any responsibility for it – and Churchill was as guilty of this as anyone. Six weeks after the Dresden raid, he drafted a minute to the CAS querying whether there was much more to be gained from bombing German cities ‘simply for the sake of increasing the terror’ and for ‘mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive’. Portal had serious doubts of his own about the efficacy of area bombing by this time, but he rightly demanded that this extraordinary display of prime ministerial sanctimony be withdrawn and rewritten. After all, Churchill had more than anyone else been responsible for the decision to aggressively area-bomb Germany’s cities. Whether or not the strategy had been right or good, it had his fingerprints all over it.[37]

The prime minister took Portal’s point and rewrote the ‘wanton destruction’ minute, but his disengagement from the campaign continued. When Potsdam was bombed in mid-April, he sent another memorandum to the secretary of state for air bluntly demanding ‘what was the point?’.[38] The absence of any mention of Bomber Command in Churchill’s victory speech a week after V-E Day stung Harris keenly. The prime minister’s later war memoirs made perfunctory references to the bomber war in 1944 and 1945, but it was self-evidently a subject upon which he no longer wished to dwell. The bombing of Dresden did not rate a single mention in The Second World War, and when, in 1950, Churchill was asked by a historian of Bomber Command what he remembered of the decision to attack that city, he said it had entirely slipped his memory. Surely, he offered, it had been the Americans who had wanted Dresden destroyed?[39]

All that one can say in Churchill’s defence is that his former deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee, did not behave much better. In a Sunday Times profile in 1960, Attlee implied that he had always disapproved of area bombing and had wanted the RAF to attack ‘military targets’. Harris wrote to the former Labour leader shortly afterwards, pointing out that that was certainly not the view that he had expressed in the War Cabinet at the time. A public retraction of this falsehood, Harris suggested, would be both seemly and legally prudent. Attlee bridled at such a ‘discourteous and peremptory’ demand and did nothing.[40]

*

Area ‘morale’ bombing of German residential areas and the industrial workers and their families who lived there became the RAF’s de facto strategy in mid-1941 and was given official sanction in February 1942. It remained Bomber Command’s principal way of war until a five-month hiatus starting in April 1944; then in autumn it resumed, albeit in a more qualified way, until V-E Day. It was the most distinctive contribution Britain made to the war with the Third Reich. Throughout, it was an imperial and global campaign. Commonwealth airmen formed nearly half of Harris’s force, the Royal Canadian Air Force commanding its own operational Bomber Command group (6 Group) based in Yorkshire with some fifteen squadrons, all organised, paid for and to some extent administered by the Ottawa government.[41] Another seventeen squadrons were officially Australian, Polish, French, New Zealand and Czech. Many other thousands of aircrewmen and ground crew and staff from outside the United Kingdom served in RAF blue during the war, including 6,000 Afro-Caribbean volunteers from the British West Indies, several hundred of whom flew on Bomber Command operations. Four Group’s commanding officer was a New Zealander; Eight Group (the Pathfinder Force) was led by an Australian. Harris himself emotionally identified far more as Rhodesian than as English.

This gathering of peoples was only part of the story, however, since the area bombing campaign further comprised a vast mobilisation of capital, manpower and raw materials only accomplishable by an advanced industrial trading nation able to draw on the resources of most of the rest of the world via long and complex supply chains.[42] About 60 per cent of the aluminium from which Harris’s heavy bombers were constructed came from Canada, which sourced its bauxite from mines in British Guyana;[43] the magnesium in the incendiary bomb cases they carried was extracted in Texas from Gulf of Mexico saltwater.[44] A fully bomb-laden Lancaster needed about 2,000 gallons of high-quality 100-octane aviation spirit to be able to fly to Berlin and back, all of which had to come via Lend-Lease from the United States, where they had been originally refined from Venezuelan and Caribbean crude oil. Over the space of nine days during Operation GOMORRAH in July 1943, it took 2 million gallons of the stuff – plus 70,000 gallons of engine oil and 5,000 gallons of coolant – to put 7,000 airmen, 4,500 tons of bombs, 10 million rounds of .303-inch machine gun ammunition, 15 million litres of oxygen, twenty-seven tons of food and 8,000 pints of coffee (beans from Kenya, sugar from Cuba) 15,000 feet above Hamburg.[45] Bombing was an act of intensely militarised liberal-capitalist globalisation.

It also represented a huge investment of the war-making ability of the United Kingdom. At the peak of national mobilisation in mid-1943, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Aircraft Production together had about 3.6 million workers – one in five of the total available civil workforce – under their direct or indirect control.[46] By the end of the war, Britain had built 29,011 medium and heavy bombers totalling 397 million pounds of structure weight, half the Ministry of Aircraft Production’s wartime output.[47] A Lancaster bomber was by mid-twentieth-century standards one of the most complicated pieces of machinery ever conceived. It had 55,000 separate parts, three miles of electrical wiring, and was equipped with generators powerful enough to illuminate a multi-storey building.[48] Even at its most efficient, it took the manufacturer A. V. Roe 20,000 man-hours to build one. Each cost the taxpayer £31,985: enough money to buy an entire street of London townhouses. The actual price once government subsidies and capital grants are factored in was probably double that.[49] Simply repairing all the heavy and medium bombers damaged in operations during the war ran up a bill of £122 million.[50]

A late-war bomber station was a small town typically thrown up over what had only a few years before been pastureland, moor or marshes. It comprised not just hangars and runways and control towers and workshops and barracks, but also the resources necessary for the occupational, hygienic, sartorial, culinary, medical, disciplinary, recreational and spiritual needs of up to 2,300 permanent residents. Its electrical plant had to provide for a peak demand of 5,000 kilowatts; 132,000 tons of cement and stone chipping ballast were needed to build the main runway, and fifty miles of drains had to be laid underneath it to remove the millions of gallons of rainwater that would otherwise collect on the paved surface. Bomber Command had 125 of these stations.[51]

These are just illustrative examples. All told, totting up the expense of the aircraft, the bombs, the fuel, the factories, the spare parts, the facilities, the training and welfare responsibilities for probably 450,000 active-duty personnel (150,000 of them aircrew) and all the other thousands of incidentals, the bomber war probably ended up costing Britain about £2.78 billion, or one-eighth of its total wartime defence outlay.[52] In labour force terms, an estimate by the official survey of the British bombing campaign was that the campaign had demanded about 7 per cent of the United Kingdom’s total war effort, the figure rising to perhaps 12 per cent in 1944 and 1945. If anything, these calculations understated the investment.[53]

The original decision to bomb Germany’s industrial cities had been made by Churchill’s incoming War Cabinet in May 1940 as an emergency response to the invasion of France and the Low Countries. It was expected to be a short campaign that would have immediate beneficial consequences for the Allies in the land battle. It ended up making no difference at all to France’s fate, but the bombing continued anyway, finally reaching a scale that would have surely shocked the men who had originally agreed to it had they known the firepower they were unleashing. The last peacetime RAF expansion scheme had imagined a force of eighty-five heavy bomber squadrons with perhaps 1,360 four-engine aircraft in total; Britain ended up building more than ten times as many heavies as that. One cannot help but wonder whether Churchill, Chamberlain, Halifax, Attlee and Greenwood fully understood what they were putting in motion in May 1940 and whether, if they had, they would have ordered it regardless.

*

What difference did area bombing make to winning the war? Up to the end of 1942, it is hard to argue that it made any difference at all. It did not even kill that many people – not Germans, anyway. The retributory counter-bombing of Germany during the Blitz of 1940–41 probably gave Britons under aerial attack from the Luftwaffe some courage to fight on. Bombing may also have offered the Soviets in 1941 and 1942 reassurance that their western allies were not entirely sitting on their hands during the German onslaught on the Eastern Front. In practical terms, though, by the end of 1942 the air campaign was still not a credible one. The RAF had become capable of an occasional area raid (Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne) that the Reich was required to take seriously, but by December, all that Bomber Command’s efforts had amounted to was a loss of perhaps 2.5 per cent of German war production. Remarkably, at that stage of the war more RAF aircrew were still being killed annually on operations than German civilians were being killed by their bombs.[54]

Area bombing began to inflict significant sustained damage on German cities from the Battle of the Ruhr in spring 1943 onwards. Second Alamein and Stalingrad had been won by then: in other words, the outcome of the war was probably already settled. For this reason, it must be admitted that all the area bombing that Britain did for the next two and a half years was, strictly speaking, unnecessary. The UK could have chosen to carry on fighting the war in a different way without any risk of allowing a German victory – though winning might have taken longer, and more people might have died in the process.[55]

Any grand strategic rethink in 1943 would, however, have run afoul of the constraints of what economists call path dependency. Enormous, irreplaceable sums of money and millions of working hours had already been invested over many years in a logistical apparatus of aircraft and aero-engine and bomb factories, airfields, flight training schools and other resource-intensive infrastructure across the UK and the British Empire. This bombing-industrial complex, necessary to put fleets of Lancasters into the air above German cities, could not be straightforwardly repurposed for other war-making efforts in any cheap or timely way. It may be that by the beginning of 1943 the British wished in hindsight that they had not built their massive bombing machine. It might have been better if they had not; but Britain had made its bombing bet and it was stuck with it for good or ill.

Sir Arthur Harris hoped that his campaign would defeat Germany on its own and make a ground invasion of north-western Europe unnecessary. In those terms, the campaign obviously proved a failure. Harris conceded as much in Bomber Offensive, though he insisted that the problem had not been his maximalist ambition: it had been bureaucratic sabotage. ‘There was no reason at all’, he wrote,

why we should not have been as ready for the offensive in 1943 as in 1944 except that we did not get the men, aircraft, and equipment when we asked for them, and we were always being diverted from the main offensive by the demands of other services…without these diversions the result would have been the inevitable and total collapse of Germany and there would have been no need for the invasion.[56]

This argument, which ignored all the enormous practical constraints on the expansion of the bomber force in the war’s early years, was not taken very seriously by anyone else, even in 1947 when Bomber Offensive was published, and it looks still more threadbare eighty years on. It was, in any case, a counter-factual – a curiosity to ponder, perhaps, but unhelpful in deciding on the value of bombing as it had actually been carried out. In his official Despatch on War Operations, written a few months after V-E Day, Harris argued that even though his greatest goal had not been met (thanks to the mischief of others), the bombing effort in the final three years of the war had all the same made a critical contribution to the defeat of Germany. He defended especially his practice of area city bombing over other methods. ‘I maintained, and I contend that the experiences of this war have proved, that apart from a very small number of targets of special importance, the enemy’s sinews of war were to be found in his industrial cities.’[57]

Both the American and the British official studies of the bombing war published in the late 1940s came to a very different conclusion. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), a massive project eventually producing over 300 volumes of intensive research into both the European and Pacific wars, submitted in its overall report on the campaign against Germany that it had been the bombing of synthetic oil production, transportation and (starting in October 1944) Ruhr steel production which had ‘all achieved results fully up to expectations and in many cases above them’. City bombing, by contrast, had had ‘little effect on production’ before July 1944, and while it had been conducted on a more spectacular scale for the remaining months of the war, its value had been consistently outmatched by bombing of specific target systems.[58] The British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU) was a mere cottage industry product compared to its vast American counterpart, a reflection of the UK’s hand-to-mouth state in 1945. But it came to similar conclusions as the USSBS, differing only in that it laid more stress on the successful disruption of transportation than of oil production. At least until the final winter of the war, the BBSU said, area bombing had only had an ‘irritant effect’ on the German economy.[59]

None of this was particularly surprising given that the intellectual spirit behind the BBSU was Harris’s old rival Solly Zuckerman, the creator of the transportation plan. Indeed, neither the British nor the American surveys had been conducted in a spirit of coolly objective critical inquiry. Both were intensely political projects, and in the case of the USSBS, some of the reports crafted by duelling investigators ended up flatly contradicting one another.[60] Nonetheless the summary conclusions of the USSBS and BBSU would become the basis for most later critiques of the bombing war both on practical and moral grounds.

The British philosopher A. C. Grayling drew on both these surveys to argue in his 2006 account of the CBO, Among the Dead Cities, that the RAF’s great failure – militarily and morally – had been to abjure target-specific bombing. ‘It was precision bombing not area bombing that had an impact,’ Grayling proposed – ‘on oil certainly, and on the movement of coal from the mines to the industrial plants that needed them.’[61] Had the RAF adopted such methods in 1942 or 1943, it

might have reduced the capacity of Germany’s war industries far earlier than the actual efforts by the Eighth US Air Force did – and as area bombing did not – thus perhaps genuinely shortening the war…all this would have been achieved without the deliberate targeting of civilians…the Allies could accordingly have maintained moral standards throughout.[62]

American-style bombing of target-specific systems had caused some civilian casualties, Grayling conceded, but they had been unintentional, collateral deaths – regrettable, but indirect, and thus morally sanctionable in war. They had not been the point of the bombing in the same way as area attacks.

The Canadian historian Randall Hansen came to similar conclusions in his 2009 book The Fire and the Fury. Area bombing before the end of 1943 had been useless: its only saving grace from Hansen’s point of view was that it had been conducted in a state of ignorance. The RAF did not yet have the means to know that their strategy ‘was not delivering the goods’. Throughout 1944 and 1945, however, the evidence of area bombing’s failure became available to anyone who wanted to see it. Harris at that point could have chosen better and more ethical options for the remainder of the war. He chose not to. Oil and transportation precision attacks ‘played a direct role in Germany’s post-summer 1944 implosion’ and were ‘kept on the agenda by the Americans’ but ‘opposed by Harris’. Moreover, while ‘before 1945 Spaatz tried wherever possible to avoid killing German civilians…Harris killed them deliberately and with equanimity’. The American campaign, according to Hansen, was informed by ‘a deep and abiding moral concern’ for the lives of non-combatants which respected the traditional boundaries of wartime behaviour (jus in bello); Harris trampled all over those boundaries without even gaining anything tangible for it.[63]

Area bombing’s shortcomings are easy to tot up. It did not end the war by itself; nor did it destroy the German war economy by itself. Reich war production continued to steadily increase until about mid-1944; only then did it falter, going by the fourth quarter of the year into a steep and irrecoverable collapse – this timing corresponding with the beginning of large-scale oil and transportation attacks. If ‘morale’ bombing is to be taken as a campaign aimed at the enemy’s will to continue the fight, it appears to have had little to no effect on most ordinary Germans. At no time did the Reich’s population show any signs of displaying acts of mass insubordination or resistance such as those that brought down the Kaiser’s regime in November 1918. Hitler’s government fell in the end because of military defeat, not revolution.

It is possible, as the economic historian Adam Tooze has proposed, that Harris’s Battle of the Ruhr in early 1943 had a disproportionately damaging effect on Reich production because of the region’s importance as a source of basic inputs of steel and coking coal for the rest of the German economy. This, though, is disputed by other historians; in any case, Harris’s attention in the second half of the year switched to the German capital, and no one questions that the Battle of Berlin was a costly waste of effort.[64] The bombers did not return to the Ruhr’s skies again until late September 1944, by which time Germany was about to lose the war anyway.

Absenteeism from war production, which planners of area bombing had presumed would be one of the major benefits of attacking workers’ housing and the means of normal civic life, failed to transpire. In October 1944, only 2.5 per cent of lost production man-hours in Germany were attributable to air raids. What the Allies had not anticipated was the Reich’s ability and willingness to rely more and more on an imported labour force disciplined in semi- or full-slave conditions, one which could be coerced with a brutal efficiency which more than compensated for any absences from the factory floor of ethnic Germans. In 1944, while one in four Reich citizens were absent from work at any one time, only 3 per cent of Russians, Poles and Ukrainians were.[65]

Being bombed provoked anxiety, fear, exhaustion and resignation, but it also drew the German population and the Nazi Party closer together in the Reich’s last days as the former increasingly grew to depend on the welfare organisations of the latter. Bombing also reinforced what seemed to be a brutal reality: Hitler’s fate and Germany’s had become irrevocably intertwined. It was, paradoxically, just as the regime began to fail that party and people finally became one, and large numbers of the Volk who had never previously considered themselves Nazis began to ‘share in their Führer’s apocalyptic vision of “victory or annihilation” ’.[66]

Yet it would be strange to think that dropping 1 million tons of bombs on the urban areas of an advanced industrial state would not do something to it, and indeed, area bombing did have important effects on Germany’s economy and society, though not always in ways that were easy to quantify. It forced the Germans to disperse their manufacturing efforts out of the cities across the Reich. In the short term this made bombing less effective, but it also hindered the Germans’ ongoing process of rationalising war production (the principal reason why output continued to climb until 1944) and increased the need for – and the vulnerability of – long transportation supply chains which would later be an important target for Allied bombs.[67] It required Albert Speer, Hitler’s assembly line Svengali, to devote more production to consumer goods than he would have wished in order to meet the needs of those who had been bombed out of their homes.

Area bombing imposed at least two other important opportunity costs on the Reich economy. Starting in 1941, and peaking around 1943, it required the Reich to respond with an enormous active and passive air defence effort which caused a concomitant distortion of the Nazis’ military economy. Bombing necessitated a vast output of single-engine day fighters, two-engine night fighters and heavy anti-aircraft guns to protect Germany’s skies, plus the creation of a domestic army of firefighters and rescue and aid workers. It used up resources that could have been employed on the battlefronts elsewhere. In effect, it conjured up a ‘Second Front’ long before the western Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy.[68]

It also forced the Germans from summer 1943 onwards to begin plans to move much of their industrial war effort underground, where it would be safe from bombing. Ninety-three million square metres of subterranean factory floor were conceived as part of this pharaonic project which relied for its labour force upon expendable slave workers from concentration camps. In the end, not much of it was ever completed aside from facilities to produce V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets, such as the notorious Mittelwerk GmbH factory in Thuringia in which perhaps 20,000 people died of mistreatment or were deliberately murdered. In November 1944, however, 52 million square metres of underground space were being carved out for future relocation of war industry.[69]

In addition to diverting enemy energies and resources in these ways, what area bombing did was to create conditions in which the consequences of later synthetic oil and transportation bombing were more intensely felt than they otherwise would have been. The complementary bombing campaigns, British and American, have to be understood as a holistic effort, each dynamically reinforcing the effects of the other.[70] Starting in 1943 with the Battle of the Ruhr, night area bombing slowly but irreversibly placed greater and greater stresses on Nazi Germany’s economy and society. In early 1944, thanks to the success of Spaatz’s counter-force strategy against the Luftwaffe, effective bombing became possible in daylight hours for the first time too; new vulnerabilites were discovered and older ones aggravated.[71] A German crisis point was finally reached in the second half of 1944, not just in the air but on land and sea as well. Hitler’s Reich had proven stubbornly capable of absorbing enormous amounts of punishment, but there was a limit even to its ability to endure harm without consequences. In the final six to eight months of the war the sheer weight of ordnance dropped by both Allied air forces by day and night reached its peak. All at once, the accumulation of damage from the many different types of assault taking place against Germany finally began to break down its economy’s previously remarkable capacity to respond flexibly to individual threats and to repair itself.

It is possible, as one of the official British historians of the campaign concluded, that if Harris had transitioned his force to attacks on oil and transportation targets with greater enthusiasm at the end of 1944 then the final German collapse might have come sooner.[72] Portal had certainly pressed for this in a duel of correspondence between the Air Ministry and High Wycombe that winter. ‘I have at times’, the CAS wrote to Harris in mid-November, ‘wondered whether the magnetism of the remaining German cities has not in the past tended as much to deflect our bombers from their primary objectives as the tactical and weather difficulties which you describe.’[73]

Harris defended his targeting decisions, but Portal continued to prod him on the matter until on 18 January 1945 the former, whose patience (never an abundant personal trait) was evidently exhausted, told his superior that if he had lost confidence in decision-making at Bomber Command HQ it was time to find a new AOC-in-C. Portal chose to back down – he understood, whatever the merits of Harris’s case, that sacking him at this point in the war would be a political disaster – and merely concluded that ‘I am very sorry that you do not believe in [the directive] but it is no use my craving for what is evidently unattainable. We must wait until after the war before we can know for certain who was right.’[74]

Yet Harris’s supposed refusal to attack oil plants that winter has been much exaggerated by his critics. A detailed post-war study by the chiefs of staff suggested that in the period between October and December 1944 – about ninety days and nights – there were just three days and seven nights in which weather and visibility conditions were suitable for Bomber Command to attack synthetic oil targets in Germany, but Harris chose to attack a city instead. That meant ten operations out of the 119 flown during the period. He may have been unenthusiastic about the CBO’s directive but he obeyed it and Portal had no real grounds to remove him.[75]

Indeed, as Harris pointed out to Portal, as the war entered its final months area and system-specific bombing raids were becoming increasingly indistinguishable in terms of function. Railway marshalling yards were usually located in the centre of towns and cities, so a ‘transportation’ raid invariably did a lot of damage to nearby workers’ housing as well, while a city area bombing raid generally destroyed transportation facilities in addition to housing. The Ruhr towns contained coke-oven plants producing benzol crucial to the Reich’s late-war oil supply. Many of Harris’s ‘area’ raids in late 1944 were damaging such plants besides residential districts.[76]

This overlap between late-war area and system-specific bombing needs to be emphasised given how much ethical significance has been invested in their difference by critics like Grayling and Hansen. Most of the USAAF’s ‘precision’ raids were nothing of the kind. The American Air Force’s director of weather calculated that there were an average of only thirty-one days in a year when visibility above a German target was absolutely clear.[77] As a result, just 14 per cent of Eighth Air Force raids in the final four months of 1944 took place in the ‘fair to good’ visibility conditions which allowed for visual bombing with the USAAF’s fabled Norden bombsight.

Using the Norden guaranteed that one in four USAAF bombs would hit their target, which was not exactly forensic precision. On most raids, with weather conditions ruling out the Norden, the Americans could not even manage that. They settled for partly or entirely instrument-aided bomb-aiming instead, employing their own version of H2S air-to-ground centimetric radar, known to them as ‘H2X’. American aircrews were less intensely trained in its use than Harris’s men, and therefore rather less accurate with it. Of 20,416 tons of ordnance dropped by the Americans on three German synthetic oil plants during the war, over half were aimed entirely using H2X, and only one in twenty of those bombs landed close to the aiming point. This was considerably worse than the RAF’s night-time accuracy against the same targets (12.6 per cent).[78]

American ‘precision’ bombing of transportation targets was still more an exercise in decorous euphemism. Between September 1944 and the end of the war, the USAAF putatively dropped 194,928 tons of bombs on German marshalling yards, two-thirds of them aimed by H2X. One in fifty of the radar-aimed bombs was judged to have landed within 1,000 yards of the aiming point.[79] It does not take a giant leap of imagination to work out where the rest of them ended up. It was, indeed, this very lack of accuracy which encouraged the Americans to invest more in incendiaries. The USAAF ended up dropping 27 million of the four-pound thermite-magnesium type on Germany.[80] By 1944, it was an open secret within the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces that attacking a city’s ‘marshalling yards’ was, in all but name, area bombing it. The USAAF’s later history of H2X bombing conceded with admirable frankness (though not for public circulation) that ‘neither visual nor radar bombing ever achieved pin-point bombing; both methods were, in effect, methods of area bombing’.[81]

It is doubtful that the average Westphalian or Franconian Bürger and his family on the receiving end of an Allied aerial barrage ever felt it mattered very much whether they were being attacked in what was technically an ‘area’ or a ‘precision’ raid. Nor can we imagine them caring especially whether their ordeal was a result of British deliberation or American indifference and carelessness. It requires a retreat into the sheerest semantic pedantry to see much ethical difference between the two approaches as they were actually carried out.[82]

*

Area bombing was not illegal in the Second World War, or at least not obviously so. Article Twenty-Four of the Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare drawn up by an international commission at The Hague in 1923 had forbidden ‘aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population…or of injuring non-combatants’. But these rules were never formally adopted by any of the governments which had sent representatives to create them, including Great Britain’s.

There was, then, no agreed body of international law, custom or convention on the matter of strategic bombing at the outbreak of war in September 1939, certainly none which had kept up with the huge technological developments in aviation since the first Hague rules for warfare had been pronounced in the 1890s. The Air Ministry’s view by the end of that year was that the German bombing of Poland had freed the RAF from any legal restraints on its own actions other than ones it chose to follow for its own self-interest: ‘our action is now entirely governed by expediency i.e. what it suits us to do’.[83] The post-war Allied International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg decided for understandable reasons not to pursue the matter too thoroughly. Area bombing as practised by Britain between 1941 and 1945 would now clearly be unlawful under the 1977 Protocol to the Geneva Conventions – a matter for jurists, though, not historians.

Was area bombing immoral all the same? Perhaps not. Maybe the nature of the wartime emergency and the Nazi threat was so dire, and the need to bomb so compelling as a result, that military necessity overrode all restrictions on behaviour.[84] Maybe by the 1940s the practices of modern industrial warfare had blurred the nature of what it meant to be a ‘combatant’ or a ‘non-combatant’ so much that all traditional distinctions between the two groups had become irrelevant. Maybe a consequentialist totting-up of harm done versus results achieved was the best way of understanding the morality of the bombing war rather than a strict deontological rule. Maybe Germany under the Nazis was sunk into such moral squalor that only a merciless but regenerative purging by fire could save the civilised world from it and it from itself. These are all respectable views.

Were the Germans appropriate objects of pity? The experiences of civilians under Harris’s bombs almost defy belief. Take those of the people of Pforzheim on the night Bomber Command came to destroy their city in February 1945. Johanna Stöber was finishing dinner when the air-raid sirens went off. She went to shelter in the basement. ‘A thunderous roar broke loose,’ she recalled, ‘a floodtide of blows, noise and smashing glass. The lights went out. The ceiling caved in. The chimney door burst open and we were showered with a hail of stones, dust, soot and sand. Mouths, eyes and noses were immediately bunged up with dirt. I moaned: “Jesus. Jesus.” Another woman cried: “Dear God, help us!” ’

She and her fellow shelterers crawled over the rubble on their stomachs to reach a window and escape the cellar:

The bright light outside, on the street, was dazzling. White-hot sparks pattered on the cobbles like rain. A huge burning plane tree straddled the road. A maze of electric wires hindered my progress. The way was blocked by walls of flame. An incredible firestorm and whirlwind raged in all directions, sometimes towards me, sometimes away from me. My coat flapped like a flag and the ground was scorching hot.

At that moment, an incendiary bomb exploded a few yards in front of her. ‘I entered a dazzling, greenish-white hell. I screamed!’ Her legs and clothes were covered in phosphorus. She was on fire.[85]

As it turned out, Stöber would be one of the lucky ones. Though badly burnt, she lived. Thousands of less fortunate Pforzheim residents asphyxiated in their basement shelters as the firestorm drained out all the oxygen. Others, seeking escape from the heat, jumped into the city’s rivers and either drowned or died of hypothermia in the frigid winter water – the choice for many unfortunate citizens was to burn or freeze. Afterwards, those who emerged alive from their shelters had to orient themselves within the strange new lunar landscape on the surface. ‘Where were there still any streets?’ asked one survivor. ‘You had to climb over rocks and timber and then you’d suddenly see – in an open space or in the windowless storefront of the Palace Cafe – the bloated, unclothed, skeletal remains of the female shop workers, charred by the dozens.’ Identifying the bodies of the dead could be challenging when all that had emerged from the firestorm was a pile of ashes or a carbonised stump of a torso. Returning to her family’s shelter on Saturday morning, Hermine Lautenschlager recognised the bent metal handle of a handbag, sitting in its usual place on the family bench, as the entire worldly remains of her sister. Afterwards, they found a scrap of her dress too.[86]

Pforzheim had seen fires before this one. In June 1933, a mountain of offending literature, combed from libraries and bookshops, had been set ablaze by SA thugs in its market square. Local lower-middle-class artisans had always been a reliable Nazi constituency. Pforzheim had shown itself to be ‘browner’ than most German cities in the last free elections of March 1933, and Hitler had visited shortly after he declared himself the country’s dictator, to wildly enthusiastic crowds. Pforzheim’s synagogue had been razed to the ground in the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 and twenty-three Jewish residents sent to Dachau. Two hundred of its remaining Jews, those who had been unable to flee before the war made escape impossible, had been rounded up by police decree in October 1940 and transported to a holding camp in southern France. Almost all of them would later be sent to Poland to be killed.

Pforzheim was never rated by the Allies as an industrial target of high importance, though that does not mean it had no relevance at all to the Nazi war economy. The city’s famous jewellery and watch-making workshops were turned over to manufacture fuses for artillery shells and other precision weapons components. Coerced foreign labourers, deportees and prisoners – French, Belgians, Russians, Italians – were corralled into Pforzheim’s war factories under the approving gaze of the residents. The Gestapo held British-trained SOE agents and French Resistance operatives in Pforzheim prison throughout the war, where they were routinely tortured before execution. On 30 November 1944, less than three months before the firestorm, twenty-six resisters were shot in the back of the neck just outside the city by an SS death squad, just one incident in what later became known as the ‘Black Forest blood week’ (Schwarzwälder Blutwoche).

In February 1945, Pforzheim was packed with unarmed men, women and children, many of them refugees from the war zones and other bombed towns. Most of the children were too young to have ever formed an opinion about the world they found themselves in. Of the adults, some were no doubt indifferent to politics or quietly opposed to the Nazi regime. Others, equally, will have been long-time National Socialists; some of them had no doubt already committed plenty of atrocities in Hitler’s name, and even on the brink of national defeat they were still ready and willing to die for the Führer’s crusade of racial annihilation. Who among the RAF’s victims deserved to live and who to die? Harris’s bombs did not distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. Disentangling the knot of culpability is surely beyond our power.

Whether one thinks area bombing was morally wrong or not depends on how seriously one takes the customary restrictions on jus in bello in the western European Christian tradition. It is very hard to look at the conventional demands of discrimination and proportionality in jus in bello – that there is a duty ‘not only to refrain from direct and intentional attacks on civilians, but also to take responsibility for protecting civilians from harm’ – and square them with the RAF’s area bombing policy in any way that does not do violence to language, logic or good faith.[87] Sir Arthur Harris’s unambiguously stated goal throughout the war was to ‘bring masonry crashing down on the top of Boche, to kill Boche, and to terrify Boche’. By ‘Boche’ he was quite clear that he meant German civilians. He did all these things with enthusiasm and success and the full authority and encouragement of the British government and the British people.[88]

After Hamburg’s firestorm in 1943 the city’s police president wrote of streets ‘covered with hundreds of corpses. Mothers with their children, youths, old men, burnt, charred, untouched and unclothed, naked with a waxen pallor like dummies in a shop window, they lay in every posture, quiet and peaceful or cramped, the death-struggle shown in the expression on their faces.’[89] Eight hundred years of Christian ethical thought scream to us that you do not do this.

But to claim that there was another method besides area bombing, a better method, a cleaner method that would have both ended the war faster and also avoided the mass killing of civilians in Hamburg and Pforzheim and Dresden and dozens of other places across Germany, is trying to have it both ways in a manner the evidence will simply not, in the end, sustain. Two unpalatable truths have to be set next to one another: area bombing was immoral according to all traditional understandings of civilised warfare and it very probably brought Hitler and his annihilationist regime down faster than any other war-making method that was practical and available. It would be much easier to know what to think about Arthur Harris’s war if it had been a failure. But it wasn’t. That is our predicament.

Part Four

I Sometimes Wonder Who Did Win This War

14

What a Small Nation We Are

Tuesday, 19 December 1944 was not a good day for the Allies. Seventy-two hours earlier, four divisions of Omar Bradley’s 12th US Army Group defending a quiet sector of the Western Front in Belgium had been suddenly assailed by a massive German offensive. Three enemy armies equipped with over 1,400 tanks, tank destroyers and self-propelled guns had bludgeoned themselves against the Americans in an attempt to break through to Antwerp and the River Meuse and reconjure the kind of chaotic Blitzkrieg magic that had benefited the Wehrmacht so spectacularly back in May 1940. Hitler’s preparations had been made with the greatest secrecy. Bletchley Park and the other components of Allied intelligence, for once, had entirely failed to join the dots. Eisenhower’s senior commanders were afflicted with a dangerous complacency which had caused them to understate or dismiss such warnings as they had received. Bradley had said just a few days earlier that an enemy attack in Belgium was ‘only a remote possibility’;[1] Montgomery had dismissed the idea there was any offensive fight left in the Germans at all.[2]

During the first three days of the attack, dubbed by the Germans Wacht am Rhein (‘Watch on the Rhine’), the American defenders on a forty-mile front had been largely swept aside and thousands of ill-supplied and bewildered GIs bundled into POW cages. By the 19th, the Germans were stampeding towards the town of Bastogne, the hub of the forested Ardennes road network, from which, if seized, they could advance in multiple directions into the interior of France and towards the Channel coast, just as they had done in 1940. The US First Army, which had borne the brunt of the initial German assault, had scattered in confusion, its headquarters command fleeing westwards in disorder, ‘paralysed in the face of disaster’.[3] At that moment it seemed distinctly possible that the whole Allied line in the west just might fracture and collapse.

Yet Winston Churchill, for one, was preoccupied with other matters that day. His focus was not on Belgium at all. It was on Athens, 1,300 miles to the south-east. There was good reason for this. Two British brigades led by Lieutenant-General Sir Ronald Scobie, packed into less than two square miles of the Greek capital, were fighting a desperate defensive action against a surrounding force of tens of thousands of Communist insurgents. British field artillery pieces on the Acropolis were shelling the city beneath them. RAF Spitfires and rocket-firing Beaufighters were strafing the streets. A few days before, Field Marshal Alexander, who had recently been appointed Supreme Commander of Allied forces in the Mediterranean, had visited Scobie (sniper bullets pinging against the sides of Alex’s vehicle as he made the drive into Athens) and warned him of the ‘grave situation’ he was in. ‘Your sea port is cut off,’ Alexander told Scobie. ‘Your airport can only be reached by tank or armoured car, you are outnumbered, your dumps are surrounded, and you have three days’ ammunition.’[4] Churchill had earlier sent his own message to Scobie by telegram: ‘do not hesitate to fire at any armed male in Athens…do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress’. The British general on the spot was to ‘hold and dominate’ the city – ‘without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary’.[5]

On returning to his HQ from Athens, Alexander was sufficiently alarmed by what he had seen to immediately divert one British infantry division from Italy to rescue Scobie’s men and to put another division on standby to cross the Adriatic as soon as possible. These reinforcements would arrive too late, however, to save the defenders of RAF Kifissia, just north of Athens, who were overwhelmed by an insurgent attack on the night of the 19th. Fifty-seven RAF personnel were killed and wounded in the fighting and another 563 taken prisoner, many of whom would die of neglect and mistreatment in the days ahead. It was the only occasion in the war in which a defended RAF theatre headquarters was captured by the enemy.[6]

What was going on in Greece was no sideshow skirmish. By the time the Battle of Athens finally ended in early January 1945, over 80,000 British military personnel were involved – far more than were fighting against Wacht am Rhein in Belgium at the same moment. Yet this brutal little conflict in the Aegean has been largely forgotten in the UK’s history of the Second World War while the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ has not, even though Britain’s role in the latter was comparatively minor.

The Greek drama of the winter of 1944–5 produced one of the last great wartime parliamentary challenges to Churchill’s coalition government. On 8 December, Commons backbenchers hostile to the British presence in Athens demanded a debate which became, in effect, a vote of confidence in the coalition. Churchill won, as he always won these things, by a handsome enough majority of 279 votes to thirty, but Harold Nicolson afterwards thought he had not ‘caught the mood of the House’, which was one, at best, of ‘distressed perplexity’, and ‘sheer red fury’ at worst.[7] Harold Macmillan spoke to the prime minister following the debate and thought him ‘exhausted and petulant…he rambled on in rather a sad and depressed way’.[8] Attlee and Bevin, who had somewhat uneasily supported the government line, found themselves under attack by their fellow Labour MPs at the party conference shortly afterwards. The dispute offered further evidence if any were needed that the four-year-old coalition was not likely to hold up much longer.

For most ordinary Britons there was, according to Mass-Observation, ‘a general feeling of confusion, indignation, and disquiet’ about their country’s role in Greece that winter.[9] British troops, it seemed, had been sent to eastern Europe to crush a popular anti-Nazi movement just because the government in London did not care for the type of political system they wanted to introduce in their own land.[10] One M-O diarist thought that the Battle of Athens had provoked ‘more anti-Government feeling than in any part of the war to date. Nobody seemed to regard the matter as anything else but disgraceful.’ Churchill overall remained very popular as wartime prime minister, but in one Gallup poll only 43 per cent of Britons agreed specifically with his Greek policy, and 38 per cent opposed it.[11] ‘The next time we get a V-1 or V-2 round these parts, well, I shall think we deserve it,’ one Londoner remarked to Mass-Observation. ‘It makes you feel ashamed of your country.’[12]

*

If Wacht am Rhein was part of the endgame of Hitler’s war, the Battle for Athens represented an opening move in a new and far more unpredictable contest. Military policy for the Allies by the end of 1944 was no longer just about defeating the Axis but about staking out positions for the post-war struggle to come. The stupendous Red Army victories earlier in the summer had left the Soviet Union in control of or on the verge of occupying most of eastern and southern Europe – the Baltic States, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia. The first three of these had been wholly or partly surrendered to the USSR in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in summer 1939. The almost two years of Nazi–Soviet quasi-alliance which had followed that agreement were now an embarrassing footnote to the war to which London preferred not to draw attention. Yet it was impossible to entirely ignore them, because Stalin was insistent that when victory came the USSR was going to re-establish eastern Europe not along the borderlines of September 1939 but along the much more agreeable frontiers of June 1941. Indeed, with Red Army troops now a little over 300 miles from Trieste and less than half that from Vienna, it seemed distinctly possible by the end of 1944 that Stalin would not only acquire his old eastern buffer zone at the end of the war but de facto control over all the ancient Habsburg lands and a swathe of Germany as well.

This would place a Russian leader in his most powerful position in Europe since Tsar Alexander I in 1815. The USSR would be ‘the only important military and political force in Europe’, as the alarmed American diplomat Charles Bohlen put it; the rest of the continent would be reduced to ‘impotence’.[13] What was disconcerting to Churchill was that despite the urging of State Department officials like Bohlen, President Roosevelt appeared to have no interest in offering a long-term military counter-force to the Soviets on the eastern side of the Atlantic. It is important to remember that in mid-1944 any idea of a permanent US base system in western Europe, let alone a peacetime entrenching alliance like NATO, seemed very far-fetched indeed given the FDR administration’s desire for rapid post-war withdrawal back to the Americas. US troops would be redeployed to the Pacific as soon as possible after the defeat of Germany and occupation duties in Europe would last only as long as necessary – one year or two at most.[14] ‘Do please don’t ask me to keep any American forces in France. I just cannot do it!’ FDR told Churchill in February: ‘I would have to bring them all back home. As I suggested before, I denounce and protest the paternity of Belgium, France and Italy. You really ought to bring up and discipline your own children.’[15]

All that mattered so far as Roosevelt was concerned was Soviet participation in his planned post-war international organisation, the ‘United Nations’. If the price for that was Moscow’s control of half (or more) of Europe, the American president seemed unperturbed. Indeed, FDR evinced a confidence in his ability to appeal to Stalin’s better instincts that seems almost touchingly naïve today: ‘I think’, he had told Churchill in 1942, ‘that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he will not try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.’[16]

If, then, the British were to be essentially abandoned by the Americans at the end of the war, it seemed crucial to Churchill to try to reach some kind of pragmatic agreement with Stalin about spheres of territorial influence on the European continent while the wartime alliance was still ongoing and relations between the two powers were still relatively good. Not that this would be easy. Moscow’s negotiating position was by far the stronger. London would have to scramble for what it could get.

Poland, for instance, looked like a lost cause. By 1944, the Soviets were making it clear that once the Germans were thrown out they intended to annex into the USSR most of the eastern Polish territory they had occupied in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact at the start of the war, including the cities of Vilnius, Lviv and Grodno. The Poles would have to make do with a vague promise of territorial compensation in the west at Germany’s expense. Moreover, any post-war Polish state would be expected to maintain friendly relations with the USSR. Since its conquest in 1939, Poland had been officially represented in the Allied ranks by a staunchly anti-Communist government in exile based in London, but the Soviets had broken off contact with these ‘London Poles’ in mid-1943 and in early summer 1944 they had established their own far more acquiescent ‘Polish Committee of National Liberation’ in Lublin. The ‘Lublin Poles’ were clearly being groomed by the Kremlin to take over the country once the Germans were defeated.[17]

Relations between Moscow and the London Poles were bad enough to begin with in autumn 1944, but they deteriorated even further when the Red Army declined to support the uprising of the ‘Polish Home Army’ Resistance group in Nazi-controlled Warsaw. The USSR insisted that its dissipated ground forces were in no position to offer the Home Army any help, though Soviet tanks had already reached the Vistula by the beginning of August. Molotov condemned the revolt as a ‘purely adventuristic affair’ and refused even to provide airbases for RAF and USAAF aircraft to make long-range supply drops to support the Polish insurgents. Without the assistance it needed, Warsaw’s Home Army was swiftly and brutally crushed by the Germans. This meant little for the outcome of the war, but it did mean that a powerful armed force within Poland’s borders that was loyal to the London émigré government rather than Stalin’s Lublin proxies had perished: a very convenient development from the Soviet point of view. The western Allies suspected cynical realpolitik had more to do with Moscow’s unwillingness to aid the Warsaw revolt than lack of military capability.

Poland’s ill-starred prospects were a sore point for the British, who had, after all, gone to war with Germany in the first place to defend Polish sovereignty. Cryptographers working in Warsaw had done important foundational work in cracking ENIGMA in the 1930s; by 1944, Polish forces were fighting hard alongside British Commonwealth troops in north-western Europe and Italy. But as Churchill bluntly but quite accurately said to the prime minister of the London Poles, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, in January 1944, sovereignty was not the same thing as territorial inviolability. ‘We never’, Churchill pointed out, ‘entered the war for the eastern frontiers of Poland.’ The Poles’ stubborn, doomed stand against Moscow appealed to Churchill’s more sentimental instincts. He described Mikołajczyk and his ministers as ‘a decent but feeble lot of fools’ in a letter to the king.[18] Sympathies aside, however, Churchill had no intention of letting the Poles scupper a wider Anglo-Soviet agreement over the fate of Europe. If he would not accept his ‘cold bath’, the prime minister warned Mikołajczyk, he would be abandoned, and his country’s cause would be allowed to become ‘little more than a grievance and a vast echoing cry of pain’.[19]

Both Churchill and Mikołajczyk participated in the ten-day Anglo-Soviet conference in Moscow in October 1944 dubbed Tolstoy (not exactly the most impenetrable of codenames). Churchill had brought the Polish leader along to see if a compromise deal could be thrashed out over his homeland’s future. Mikołajczyk, however, declined to bend the knee to Stalin, much to Churchill’s irritation, and no agreement either about post-war Poland’s land frontiers or its political constitution could be reached. The prime minister’s negotiations with Stalin over the fate of other states in central and south-western Europe seemed to go better. He proposed, and the Soviet leader agreed, that Britain and the USSR would divvy up informal control over individual countries after the war on a percentage basis: Romania would be 90 per cent within the USSR’s orbit, Greece would be 90 per cent within Britain’s; Bulgaria would lie three-quarters in the Soviet sphere, and Yugoslavia and Hungary would be split fifty-fifty. Later, Molotov haggled into the night at great length with a weary Anthony Eden over these figures, eventually raising the Bulgarian and Hungarian percentages to four-fifths Soviet.

What exactly these percentages meant in practical terms was left undefined. Churchill was at something of a loss to explain precisely what the deal meant when he telegraphed the details to the other members of the War Cabinet (who had not been prewarned about it) a few days later. His ‘naughty document’, as he called it later, was not mentioned again at any diplomatic meeting. Indeed, after presenting it to Stalin, Churchill had suggested that it was so cynical that it ought perhaps to be burned: the Soviet leader shrugged and told him he could keep it. It goes without saying that nothing ever came of Britain’s supposed 20 per cent share in the fates of Bulgaria or Hungary, let alone its even thinner slice of influence over Romania. How could it? What mattered was the practical exercise of power, not the nocturnal scribblings of half-inebriated statesmen. The Red Army controlled those countries after the Germans left, not the British Army. (Only Yugoslavia, which to some extent ended up liberating itself, was ultimately able to cock a snook at both its prospective overlords.)

To be fair to Churchill, he had recognised as much long before he arrived in Moscow (‘the Russians will take whatever they want in Romania whatever we say,’ he had told Eden back in July).[20] He regarded his real prize at Tolstoy as Stalin’s agreement not to interfere in the political future of Greece. Whether the Soviet leader ever actually intended to do so is unclear. None of his troops were in the Hellenic Peninsula at the beginning of October 1944. The road from Sofia to Athens was long and treacherous, and British air and sea power in the Aegean would, for once, play a significant role if it came to a military stand-off between east and west. The USSR could always lean on Turkey if it wanted access to the Mediterranean, but by seeming to concede something he had never really wanted in the first place Stalin was able to drive a harder bargain elsewhere while yielding little. In defending the ‘naughty document’ Churchill could argue that he had at least spared one country in south-eastern Europe from Communist rule. Whether it was seemly for a British prime minister to haggle over the fates of millions like a stallholder in the agora was a different matter, of course. If what Churchill was practising was ‘realism’, then fair enough; but it was the sort of ‘realism’ that Chamberlain had practised in Munich in 1938 and never been forgiven for.

*

Stalin had agreed not to interfere in events in Greece; that did not mean the British cause there would inevitably prevail. The Greeks themselves would have something to say about that. The situation on the day the Germans abandoned Athens, 12 October 1944, was a confused and fractious one. The anti-Nazi Resistance movement in Greece had always been an uneasy coalition of Communist and non-Communist groups, with the Moscow-backed Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS) representing by far the single largest, most disciplined and best-equipped force. SOE had maintained the working truce between ELAS and the sundry other royalist, republican and anti-Communist Resistance factions as long as it could. But a year earlier this had broken down completely and for several months the anti-German forces had openly fought one another as well as the occupiers. Agents of the British military mission to Greece had been told to ‘sit on the fence and smile’ as the Resistance groups engaged in this bloody fratricide.[21]

About all that Greece’s factional Resistance fighters could agree on is that hardly any of them were keen to see the exiled King George II return to his throne. George was a staunch Anglophile, but his sullen, paranoid and reactionary demeanour had not won him any favours with the British Foreign Office, which rather liked the idea of ditching him and instead installing the far more popular Archbishop of Athens, Damaskinos Papandreou, as regent of Greece once the Germans left. The main obstacle to this was Churchill, who had a deeply irrational soft spot when it came to kings and an instinctive anti-clerical aversion to Damaskinos – a ‘pestilent priest’ and ‘a survival from the Middle Ages’. As soon as the first British troops had reached Athens, then, forty-eight hours after the Germans had quit, Churchill made sure that the Greek king’s prime minister, Georgios Papandreou, was dispatched to the capital to form a provisional government. Papandreou proposed the disbanding of all the Resistance groups to create a new national army under his own authority, an initiative that the Communists would clearly find unacceptable. That, for Churchill, was the point. With Stalin’s guarantee of non-involvement in his back pocket, he was itching to see a showdown between ELAS and a royal government backed up with British arms which could settle the political future of Greece once and for all. It was vital, he told Eden, to ‘assert our will by armed force’ among the Hellenes ‘or clear out altogether’.[22]

On 3 December, the Greek Communists declared a general strike and mobilised a mass demonstration in Athens against the new regime. As many as 200,000 protestors marched to the city’s central square, which abutted the royal palace and parliament building. What happened next would be subject to years of controversy, but the balance of evidence seems to be that Papandreou’s police opened fire on the crowd, killing dozens of protestors. ELAS promptly rose up in open revolt. British troops initially remained neutral but within days they were under attack from ELAS snipers and ordered to return fire. Scobie’s besieged squaddies, far from enjoying the beatitudes of garrison duty behind the lines as they had perhaps expected, were instead facing a full-fledged insurgency. Scobie promised Churchill that he would ‘do [his] utmost to crush this sinister attempt at a coup d’etat by any means necessary’.[23] Some of the British troops in Greece were less sure of what they were doing there. ‘I wish I knew what was going on here,’ wrote Harry Wilson, an Irish cipher clerk attached to 23 Armoured Brigade:

[Athens] resembles Dublin during the trouble – cordoned-off buildings, barricades, and armed men in the street…it’s a strange street that has banners welcoming ‘Our Brave Allies’ at both ends and, in the middle, the British Headquarters looking like a besieged fort…

I’m in such a state of ignorance that if a Greek approached me I wouldn’t know whether to greet him, run away from him or shoot him dead…I joined up to fight the Germans and here I am fighting the Greeks. Why?[24]

This was a kind of counter-insurgency fighting from the past and of the future: very different from the sort of battles taking place along the Gothic Line or in the Ardennes forests at that moment, but familiar enough to the British Army from the 1920s and 1930s, and soon to become wearily routine again in the ‘small wars’ of post-1945 Palestine, Indonesia, Malaya and Cyprus. Although heavy weapons were used in Athens, often with devastatingly indiscriminate force, it was mostly a war of shadows, of snipers and booby-traps and Molotov cocktails hurled by assailants who a moment afterwards had merged indistinguishably into the civilian population. The Greek capital in 1944 was swimming with small arms and explosives and men and women trained in their use, and, in their frustration and bitterness, both sides committed war crimes – taking and shooting hostages, mistreating prisoners, violating truces, targeting non-military buildings. The British helped Papandreou’s government recruit over 15,000 National Guardsmen for ‘security duties’, some of whom were former Nazi collaborators with their own private scores to settle with ELAS. They proved to be extremely efficient at gathering information during prisoner interrogations, though British officers had to learn not to inquire too thoroughly into the methods being employed.[25]

If Scobie had expected to swiftly crush the insurgency, it proved far more formidable than he had anticipated. Alexander told Churchill that the British garrison was ‘beleaguered’ and urgently needed more reinforcements.[26] Troops soon arrived from Italy, and by Christmas Eve, thanks in part to the replacement of the ineffectual Scobie by a more capable brigade commander, the British had gained the upper hand in Athens. Churchill, in reckless mood, and perhaps anticipating that this could be the last occasion he might ever have to get shot at, decided to go to Greece to take a look for himself. Eden was to come too. (‘Hell! I was looking forward to a quiet family Christmas,’ the foreign secretary griped in his diary.)[27] The prime minister’s personal Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport aircraft, which accommodated as many personal luxuries as could be crammed into it, touched down at Kalamaki airfield on the early afternoon of 25 December.[28] A convoy of armoured cars ferried Churchill’s party through bullet-scarred, sniper-haunted streets to the coast, where they decamped on to the light cruiser HMS Ajax. In the distance, a flight of Beaufighters obligingly strafed an ELAS stronghold in the hills above Athens, ‘diving with all their cannons blazing’. To the prime minister’s aide, Jock Colville, they seemed ‘to be having a very pleasant time’.[29]

Archbishop Damaskinos was summoned to Ajax to parley, and to everyone’s surprise, above all his own perhaps, Churchill warmed to him immediately. The archbishop turned out not to be a sour medieval prelate after all but an amusing and convivial realist who made little secret of his hatred for Communism (‘a very remarkable man’, Churchill told Parliament later, ‘towering up, morally as well as physically, above the chaotic scene’). Having arrived in Greece determined to plead the king’s cause, the prime minister now promptly forgot all about George II and agreed that a clerical regency would indeed be the best solution. The British party spent two days of negotiations in Athens with ELAS delegates, accompanied by the thump and crackle of distant mortar and rifle fire, by the end of which a compromise peace was agreed. Papandreou resigned and Damaskinos took over an all-party Greek coalition government. Churchill flew home to break the news to King George that he would have to wait a little longer to reassume his throne – eighteen months, as it turned out.[30]

Churchill also addressed the Commons after he got back to London. Much had happened in the six weeks since that first bruising no-confidence debate on Greece; the prime minister could now boast to MPs that ‘the cease fire has sounded and the rejoicings of the people of Athens have once again acclaimed the liberating British troops’.[31] Colville thought him ‘in great form, both witty and combative…rhetorically it was the best effort I have heard him make since 1941 or even 1940’.[32] In the final division, just seven recalcitrant diehards voted against the government. Even so, the public had clearly been unsettled by accounts of British troops exchanging gunfire with anti-Axis Resistance forces, Communist or not. The ELAS guerrillas had long been proclaimed heroic freedom fighters in Allied propaganda. Had that all been a lie? What did Greece’s domestic affairs have to do with Britain anyway? ‘Their government is their own business,’ as one middle-aged female Mass-Observer put it, another arguing that British troops ‘shouldn’t lose their lives in some silly little scrap that doesn’t matter’.[33] This was not what the war was supposed to be about. The Greek crisis faded from the press headlines in early 1945 as the fighting ended and more agreeable news began arriving from Germany. It was nevertheless an indicator that with the battle against Nazism winding down, the public was going to take an increasingly disputatious view of the prime minister’s foreign policy.

Stalin had said and done nothing while the drama in Athens was unfolding, fatally undermining ELAS’s ability to resist. Churchill could celebrate a successful defence of a Balkan country from Communism. But he had also established a precedent that the first Allied power to reach a formerly Axis-occupied country got to choose its future political system. That was a principle that suited the Soviet dictator perfectly well.

*

As events reached their climax in Athens, so the Wacht am Rhein offensive stuttered to a close in Belgium. The Battle of the Bulge was one of the last examples of that particularly German approach to war-making in the first half of the twentieth century – tactical ingenuity in the service of strategic vacuity. Hitler’s Panzers had done a spectacular job of breaking through the American lines in the opening days of the campaign, but what was it all in the service of? Even his commanders did not seem to know. The goal was probably the same as it had been in May 1940: break through and see what happens next. Four years before, and over the same ground, the Germans had pulled this off, thanks in good part to the Wehrmacht facing a combat-inexperienced enemy. By now, though, the Allied divisions in Belgium had been grinding grimly towards the Reich ever since D-Day and knew their business well. This was not Sedan in 1940; it was not even Kasserine in 1943.

After a few days of hesitation and alarm, then, the front in Belgium began to stabilise. The Germans failed to take the key Bastogne crossroads, and American reinforcements were deployed with impressive speed: 60,000 US troops were thrown into the line in one single twenty-four-hour period.[34] Poor weather had initially kept the Allied air forces grounded, but on 23 December the clouds parted and over the next five days British and American bombers and fighter-bombers flew 16,000 sorties, pulverising those German tanks which had not already been abandoned by their crews after running out of fuel. On 3 January 1945, even Hitler conceded the battle was lost and ordered his troops withdrawn from the Belgian salient so they could be redeployed to defend against an imminent Soviet offensive in East Prussia. Wacht am Rhein probably shaved a few weeks off the length of the European war thanks to its waste of German resources, and its ultimate victims were the Reich’s own citizens. The Ardennes offensive delayed the crossing of the Rhine and made Eisenhower’s chastened forces wary of plunging too rapidly into western Germany. At the same time, though, it weakened the Wehrmacht’s defences in the east. Within two weeks of first attacking the etiolated German front line in East Prussia and Silesia on 12 January, the Red Army had advanced 300 miles from the Vistula to the Oder. Thanks to the Battle of the Bulge, many more German civilians – men, women and children – found themselves subject to Soviet occupation with all its unrestrained vengeance.

Hitler had hoped his western offensive would sow dissension between the British and Americans. He needn’t have bothered; Montgomery was more than capable of doing that by himself. On 20 December 1944, Eisenhower had temporarily assigned 21st Army Group’s commander to lead the US First and Ninth Armies, which had been separated from the main body of American troops by the German salient. Monty did a credible enough job shoring up the northern Allied front and then counter-attacking. Establishing ‘grip’ in a cautious, controlled set-piece battle was, after all, what he did best.

However, on New Year’s Eve he wrote an extraordinarily incautious letter to Eisenhower. Under the circumstances, Montgomery said, might it not be a good idea for him to reacquire control of all the Allied ground forces as he had enjoyed up till September? Ike had demonstrated admirable restraint in the face of these sort of provocations by Monty before. This time it was too much. He drafted a letter of his own to the combined chiefs of staff asking, in effect, for them to choose between sacking Monty or himself. Eisenhower was no fool. He knew that Anglo-American political realities alone would guarantee that if it came to this choice he would stay and Montgomery would go. Churchill, who had never been especially fond of Monty anyway, would have been more than happy to see his beloved Alexander transferred from Italy to become 21st Army Group’s new commander. Only the intervention of Freddie de Guingand prevented Ike’s letter being sent to the combined chiefs. De Guingand forced his boss to write a grovelling message of apology to Ike, describing himself as being the American general’s ‘very devoted subordinate’.[35]

That might have been the end of it, were it not for the fact that Monty then gave a press conference on 7 January 1945 while de Guingand was ill with appendicitis and so unable to control his superior’s behaviour. The text of the address Montgomery gave to the press, which had been pre-vetted, was mostly innocent enough. He praised Eisenhower and the ‘brave fighting men of America’ at some length, but his US counterpart, Bradley, who had led most of the actual fighting in the Bulge campaign, went unmentioned, and Montgomery’s supercilious tone gave the distinct impression to the journalists present that so far as the British field marshal was concerned it was he, and he alone, who had saved the Allies in Belgium. As a result, what had been a private dispute at the highest command levels now became a matter of open transatlantic media speculation. Eisenhower, perhaps feeling he had already wasted enough time on such foolishness, did not press the matter further, but Monty’s witless remarks (which he admitted regretting later) deepened the rifts between the British and American leaders in SHAEF. Much energy would be wasted in the final months of the war in such petty intriguing between irascible, jealous high-ranking soldiers.

*

It was not Montgomery’s glibness that caused the chief breakdown in Anglo–American relations over the last winter of the war. It was Churchill’s policy in Greece. There had always been a sense in the highest US political and military circles, dating all the way back to the old arguments about TORCH and ROUNDUP, that Britain was more interested in empire-building in the Mediterranean (and using American money and arms to do it) than defeating the Germans. For the most part this credited the British with more Machiavellian guile than they were capable of mustering; their foreign policy was far more desultory and improvised than that. But the outbreak of violence in Athens in December 1944, and London’s clear determination to support the royalist factions in Greece, triggered those old suspicions again and provoked a new outbreak of American anti-colonial high-mindedness. Lincoln MacVeagh, the US minister in Athens, decried Churchill’s handling of Greece and its ‘fanatically freedom-loving’ people ‘as if it were composed of natives under the British Raj’.[36]

Bureaucratic misfortune intensified the breach. The prime minister’s signal to Scobie that he should treat Athens as a ‘conquered city’, which had been intended for British eyes only, was accidentally passed on to the Americans. An outraged State Department official leaked it to the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, who published an article about it on 11 December. The US media needed little excuse to pander to populist Anglophobic tastes. William Shirer of CBS accused London of ‘Toryism’ in the Balkans; anti-British student protests took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and other college towns. Lord Halifax warned the Foreign Office that the British version of events in Greece was ‘largely disbelieved’ in America.[37] A counter-blast from the other side of the Atlantic came from the Economist on 30 December. It warned the British government that a ‘policy of appeasement’ towards the Americans would do no good; Britannia needed to look to her own imperial needs. ‘There is’, the article read, ‘still a great deal of wishful thinking in Britain, even in the highest quarters, to the effect that good behaviour on our part will procure some great prize such as an Anglo-American alliance.’ However, ‘it is as well to be brutally frank: there is no more possibility of [that] than of an American petition to rejoin the British Empire’.[38]

An ‘orgy of recrimination’ between US and UK newspapers followed this ramping-up of the feud, according to the State Department in Washington. It noted from recent polling results that a third of Americans were dissatisfied with the way in which the Grand Alliance was functioning, and those who specifically blamed Britain for this outnumbered those who blamed the USSR three to one.[39]

Anglo–American relations were deteriorating as the war in Europe entered its last months. Harry Hopkins, who had always been a good friend to the British, no longer enjoyed the same fraternal intimacy with Roosevelt, and his health was failing anyway. Admiral William Leahy, FDR’s military chief of staff, had replaced Hopkins as the president’s closest confidant and he had an altogether less sentimental view of British–US affairs. In November 1944, the chief of the British Joint Staff Mission, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, died in Washington of aplastic anaemia. Dill was not a success in the role of CIGS earlier in the war, but the decision to appoint him to the American post in late 1941 turned out to be a fortuitous one, for he and General Marshall developed a close personal friendship, and the man Churchill had once dismissed as ‘Dilly Dally’ ensured that the CCS Committee worked effectively even in the most fraught days of the battle against the Axis powers. Once Dill was gone from the Potomac, Britain no longer had an influential advocate at the hub of American power.[40]

But if these personal losses were unfortunately timed, the fact is that the comity between London and Washington was bound to weaken anyway as the war came to an end. For all of Churchill’s gush about the natural unity of the English-speaking peoples, the transatlantic alliance between the two Great Powers had always been to some degree a marriage of expedience. The British had needed US support to defeat Hitler in 1940 and 1941, and the Americans had needed the British Empire to remain outside of Axis hands as a base of forward operations. While the existential threat to both of them had remained, the partnership had operated very effectively. By late 1944 that threat no longer seemed nearly so compelling, and it was increasingly self-evident to the Americans that the British needed them far more than they needed the British. This did not mean that the relationship between the two was over: far from it. What it did mean, however, was its re-establishment now on quite different terms – no longer an alliance of near-equal Great Powers but one of patron and client, senior and junior partner. What irked the Americans about Greece in December 1944 was not so much the specifics of London’s actions: after all, the USA was about to embark on a furious programme of anti-Communism itself. It was the fact that they represented some of the last tiresome motions of an independent British foreign policy.

The disequilibrium in Anglo–American power was starkly represented by the overwhelming late-war importance of Lend-Lease to the UK economy. By 1944 Lend-Lease imports possessed an annual value of £2.6 billion, which effectively boosted Britain’s national output by 20 per cent. Over one-quarter of the empire’s military materials – tanks, ships, trucks, guns, small arms, ammunition and so on – were coming from the United States. The Sherman medium tank, the ‘Liberty’ cargo vessel and the Douglas C-47 ‘Dakota’ transport aircraft had all become ubiquitous elements in the Commonwealth arsenal.[41] Certainly, the Lend-Lease process was not all one-way. British and imperial reciprocal aid to the United States – ‘Reverse Lend-Lease’ as it was sometimes called – included Spitfire and Mosquito combat aircraft, engines and engine parts, vehicles, rubber, petroleum, field hospitals, the loaning of the superliners RMS Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary for transatlantic troop movements, and food and lodgings for American forces stationed in the UK, Australia and India. All this added up: reciprocal aid to the US in 1944 totalled £800 million, which meant that the British were devoting about the same share of their GDP to supporting their allies as the Americans. There was little question, though, that US Lend-Lease was far more essential to the British economy by 1944 than vice versa. The weaning process in the reconversion to peace was likely to be a painful one.

The beauty of the original Lend-Lease deal in 1941 had been its vagueness, which had allowed Roosevelt to get it through a sceptical Congress without too many difficult questions being asked, but this also meant that none of its parameters had ever been defined: how much it would involve, how long it would last, what the British could do with the goods they received and, most importantly, what they would be expected to pay back to the Americans as ‘consideration’ for their trouble. Arguments about the size and form of the consideration stretched all the way back to the original signing of the Anglo–American Mutual Aid Treaty in 1942. As the volume of material crossing the Atlantic had exponentially increased by the end of the war, so had the conviction among some Americans that the wily British – surely exaggerating their claims of impecuniousness – were exploiting their gullible, well-meaning cousins.[42]

By 1944, the economic mood of the US Congress had become one of penny-pinching. Washington’s politicians were increasingly obsessed with corruption and waste in high places and accordingly sceptical about what they saw as the Roosevelt administration’s profligate generosity towards America’s allies. British requests for specific Lend-Lease items were scrutinised more critically than before – far more so, incidentally, than the long lists of demands presented to the Americans by Moscow. A Senate committee chaired by a hard-faced Missourian called Harry S. Truman held over 400 public meetings on war-related government expenditure. Truman hinted darkly that the US taxpayer was being taken for a ride by Churchill and that FDR ought to wield Lend-Lease as an instrument with which to prise the British from their valuable global oil and mineral rights.[43] In opinion polls, seven in ten Americans indicated that they wanted the British to pay back the entire value of Lend-Lease aid once the war was over.[44]

Under the circumstances, then, the deal on ‘Stage II’ Lend-Lease that was finally brokered in Washington in November 1944 by Lord Halifax and the economist and Treasury advisor John Maynard Keynes seemed surprisingly good. In the first year after the defeat of Germany (but before the defeat of Japan, which was not expected to happen for another eighteen months to two years after V-E Day) the UK would receive $5.5 billion in aid, divided roughly equally between military and non-military supplies. This was not far short of the British negotiators’ opening request. On the other hand, the Americans had been unwilling to budge on a long-standing ban on the UK using Lend-Lease goods in manufacturing for re-export – a concession that Churchill thought, wrongly, he had wrung out of Roosevelt at their meeting in Quebec in September. The British argued that this was the only way they could revive their almost vanished export sector and so earn the dollars they would need both to stabilise the post-war balance of trade and to service the massive war debt they had accrued in the Allied cause. The Americans were unmoved. Lend-Lease was strictly a matter of wartime necessity; what happened to the British economy when the war was over was of no concern to them. As the incoming US secretary of state Edward Stettinius put it, his people were not willing to treat their allies as ‘pensioners for an indefinite period’.[45]

What was worse was that the Stage II agreement merely represented an understanding, not a binding treaty. The amounts and types of supplies to be sent to the UK remained subject ‘to the changing conditions of war’, as the Americans put it in their press release announcing the decision.[46] In other words, the British remained as reliant as ever on US goodwill and, above all, on the temperamental whims of the enigmatic and mercurial occupant of the Oval Office. By the end of 1944, it was by no means certain that the president who had just secured an unprecedented fourth term in office would finish it out. Roosevelt was visibly ailing. In Quebec Churchill privately thought he looked ‘very frail’. Jock Colville, who had never met him before, noted how subdued the president was, his eyes glazed.[47]

The FDR who greeted Churchill and the British delegation for their meeting with Stalin at Yalta in the Crimea five months later (after a 6,000-mile trip from Washington) was in even worse shape – ‘waxen cheeked’ and ‘looking ghastly’ with a sagging jaw, drooping shoulders and vacant stare.[48] The prospect of Roosevelt’s dying alarmed Churchill. This was not because their relationship was any longer a particularly close one. FDR rarely responded to the prime minister’s letters by 1945, and when he did it was with little of the puckish, teasing bonhomie which had once characterised their correspondence. The imbalance of power between the two men was now undisguised. At Quebec, Churchill griped that he had spent most of the conference, like some piteous courtier, simply trying to ‘put in a word with the President’,[49] and Roosevelt clearly wanted to avoid any further bilateral meetings between them. Churchill had tried to arrange one in Malta immediately before the Yalta Conference, but FDR had deliberately postponed his arrival to make this impossible. The genuine friendship, such as it had ever existed, was largely gone; the president now found Churchill’s manner boring and restricted their communications as much as possible to one of cool, clipped formality.

Still, FDR was at least a known quantity, which was more than could be said of his new vice-president and likely successor, Harry S. Truman, he of the cheese-paring Senate investigations into Lend-Lease. However much Anglo–American relations might be floundering in the twilight days of the Roosevelt administration, they could get even worse if this austere-looking man of uncertain opinions found himself in charge in the White House. All told, then, for Churchill Yalta was a depressing experience – a reminder, should he have needed it, of the dwindling of his country’s power and of his own influence in the five years since he had first assumed high office. ‘What a small nation we are!’ Churchill had observed back at Tehran, sitting ‘with the great Russian bear on one side of me with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo’.[50] That sense of his gathering irrelevance had become even stronger by the time the three reconvened in Crimea. The Yalta Conference was, among other things, an acknowledgement that the post-Hitler global order was going to be a bipolar matter organised according to the interests and demands of Moscow and Washington. The Second World War had become, in effect, the War of the British Succession.

It may have been because of his diminishing relationship with the dying US president that Churchill left Yalta more convinced than ever of Stalin’s essential trustworthiness and of his own ability to charm ‘that great and good man’, as he described the Soviet leader to Eden.[51] ‘Stalin I’m sure means well to the world and Poland,’ Churchill told his War Cabinet on returning from the Crimea – a claim which an old trade union hand like Bevin, who had more practical experience than the prime minister when it came to dealing with Communists, looked upon with appropriate scepticism. Perhaps realising how much he had started to sound like his predecessor after Munich, Churchill remarked to his junior ministers a few days later: ‘poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.’ [52]

History has been altogether more forgiving of Churchill’s appeasement of the Soviet dictator than of Chamberlain’s of the Nazi one. Whether that is fair or not the reader can judge, but it is perhaps worth noting that both British leaders committed much the same essential error by mistaking personal conviviality for sincerity of purpose. After Churchill’s summits with Stalin in Moscow in 1944 and Yalta in 1945 he came away feeling that he had definitely talked round ‘the Old Bear’, as he put it later to his wife. ‘I like him the more I see him. Now they respect us here and I am sure they wish to work with us.’[53] Stalin’s own feelings on the matter give a rather different impression. ‘We fucked this England!’ he would say to his flunkeys in the Kremlin when he wanted to raise a laugh.[54]

*

At Yalta, along with much high-minded discussion about the right of liberated states like Poland to hold free and fair elections – very little of which ever came to anything – the Allies also mapped out the final stages of the war in Europe. The Red Army’s offensive on the Vistula had already begun by February 1945. The Anglo-American armies needed to clear the west bank of the Rhine of remaining Wehrmacht opposition and then prepare for their amphibious crossing of that river at multiple points, after which they could envelop what remained of the industrial Ruhr while striking eastwards across the North German Plain. No firm agreement was yet reached about whether it was the Anglo-Americans or the Soviets who should take Berlin. Since Hitler’s capital lay 300 miles within the planned USSR occupation zone of Germany, however, there seemed little point in sacrificing tens if not hundreds of thousands of British, Canadian and US lives in order to capture a symbolic city which was eventually going to be surrendered to Stalin anyway. Eisenhower was more worried about rumours that the Nazis were planning to establish a final redoubt in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps and fight to the last man in that forbidding southern terrain. The outcome of the European war might no longer be in question, but there was considerable gloom all the same about how long it was going to take to finish off the Germans – perhaps intensified by the disappointment of MARKET GARDEN back in September and the unexpected ferocity of Wacht am Rhein before Christmas. No one, American, British or Russian, expected the fighting to be over earlier than July 1945; an eventual capitulation in the autumn or early winter seemed more likely.[55]

Twenty-First Army Group’s assault on the Reichswald Forest west of the Rhine, Operation VERITABLE, began on 8 February 1945, just as the Yalta deliberations were coming to an end.[56] With Antwerp and the Scheldt already in friendly hands, the supply issue on the Western Front had been finally mastered, but in terms of manpower the Anglo-Canadian armies were running on empty. Labour force decisions predicated on a December 1944 end date to the war now precluded the possibility of any further major reinforcements from home. Field units were being broken up and cannibalised and rear-area formations furiously ‘combed out’ for infantry officer and NCO replacements just to keep the critical mass of the army in being. A quarter of a million troops were earmarked for transfer from the Italian front to Germany, but a newly chastened Montgomery knew that none of this was going to be enough. For reasons of sheer logistics alone, he needed to be scrupulous about avoiding unnecessary friendly casualties in these final operations. This would be difficult enough in the face of a Wehrmacht now fighting on well-fortified home soil, but while the mood of some of the defenders had turned to ‘utter apathy’ in these final days, as one Allied intelligence report put it, for other Germans there seemed to be a ‘savage determination’ to resist to the end.[57]

VERITABLE began with a 1,200-gun fusillade – the largest British artillery bombardment of the war – plus devastating complementary air raids by strategic and tactical bombers. With hardly any Luftwaffe aircraft to worry about any more, and increasingly fewer serviceable Panzers in the field, British anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns could be spared to join field guns, mortars and machine guns in the deluges of highly concentrated firepower known as ‘Pepperpots’. The effect on the targets was sobering even to those who were merely observing. An ‘almost overwhelming smell of spent explosive hung like a cloud’ over the Reichswald Forest after the British bombardment, as the historian of the East Lancashire Regiment described it later: ‘Trees lay smashed and shattered; their broken branches strewn about, leaving stumps standing like grotesque scarecrows to discourage invaders.’ With so much Allied shrapnel flying about, it was calculated that one in five of 21st Army Group’s artillery casualties was actually the result of friendly fire.[58]

The campaign on the west bank of the Rhine lasted over a month. British and Canadian troops advanced cautiously in improvised cut-down tank chassis known as ‘Kangaroos’. Flamethrowers were ruthlessly employed to burn out defenders from wooded ridges and fortified farmsteads. The spring thaw and the deliberate flooding of low-lying polder added to the difficulties of such man-made obstacles as minefields, anti-tank ditches and barbed wire; this was Passchendaele with the added misery of sub-zero temperatures. Lieutenant-General Brian Horrocks, who had accompanied Montgomery all the way from Alamein to Germany as commander of XXX Corps, described Operation VERITABLE as a battle of ‘mud, more mud, and still more mud’.[59]

German opposition varied sharply in quality and fervour. Many defending units were now composed of teenage and elderly Volkssturm levies, indifferently trained and equipped, and rather more enthusiastic about sheltering in a POW camp than dying for their Führer. The Germans still had some elite units to spare, however, and threw in the remnants of five veteran tank, Panzer-Grenadier (motorised infantry) and Fallschirmjäger divisions to defend the west bank. The paratroopers in particular fought with a hopeless ferocity that deserved to be attached to a better cause. One trooper of the British 11th Armoured Division called VERITABLE ‘a slow, miserable, and costly operation’. For all of the Allies’ massive technological advantages by this stage of the war, ground still ultimately had to be taken by the footsloggers of the Poor Bloody Infantry (PBI). Khaki battledress was scant protection against MG-42 bullets and 81mm mortar fragments.

Organised resistance west of the Rhine ended on 10 March, thanks to VERITABLE and a simultaneous American operation to the south, GRENADE. About 90,000 German troops had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner, but 21st Army Group had suffered 15,500 casualties of its own, most of them British and concentrated in its infantry rifle companies. The 53rd (Welsh) Infantry Division alone had experienced 2,445 casualties. An opposed crossing of the Rhine (a quarter of a mile wide at the Dutch border) could be expected to produce an even grislier Allied death toll, particularly as early intelligence estimates suggested an enemy force of almost 60,000 troops defending the east bank.

Montgomery’s strategy for the last set-piece British operation of the European war was, then, characteristically large, complex and reliant on a superabundance of mechanical firepower. It had two components, PLUNDER and VARSITY. PLUNDER was the ground attack. Two corps would assault the Rhine along a twelve-mile front in landing craft, amphibious caterpillar-tracked ‘Buffalo’ personnel carriers and water-navigable tanks, with the enemy pulverised beforehand by the now-standard massive artillery and air close support plan. Meanwhile, a two-division airborne assault force committed to VARSITY would disrupt the German defences on the east bank and secure key bridges. H-Hour for the opening river crossing was set before dawn on 23 March.

For the ground troops, at least, it ended up being something of an anticlimax.[60] The Germans had shot their bolt west of the Rhine just as they had done in Normandy the year before; by tenaciously holding on to every scrap of ground during VERITABLE they had left nothing behind to reconstitute a new front line once the battle was lost. There was no longer much left to defend the Reich, and Montgomery’s divisions crossed the Rhine largely unopposed. One can scarcely blame the field marshal for an excess of caution given the British Army’s experiences over the previous six months, but even before his first troops had reached the far shore of the Rhine the grand strategic significance of the crossing had already been undermined by the US First Army’s opportunistic seizing of a Rhine bridge at Remagen further south. That American success two weeks before had transformed PLUNDER into something of an extravagant, unwieldy, over-theatrical performance: a hammering ‘colossal crack’ against a peanut of a defence.

VARSITY, for its part, was mostly an excuse to give the British paras something to do in these final weeks of the war and to redeem the concept of airborne warfare after the embarrassment of Arnhem. By performing the drop in daylight at slow flying speeds and low altitude, concentration and accuracy were achieved in the troop landing pattern – a technically impressive performance, but one which meant that, ironically, the operation ended up costing the British Army many unnecessary casualties it could ill afford. Only eighty-eight of the 416 British gliders that participated in the drop were undamaged by enemy anti-aircraft fire; one-quarter of the pilots were killed or wounded.[61]

Churchill had insisted on observing PLUNDER in person, which irritated Brooke, who privately complained about the prime minister’s insistence that he ‘endanger his life unnecessarily and get in everybody’s way and be a damned nuisance’.[62] The threat to Churchill’s personal safety was no exaggeration. Jock Colville, accompanying the prime ministerial party to the Rhine, was almost blown to pieces when a German 88mm shell landed ten yards away from him.[63] Churchill seemed slightly jealous of Colville’s near-death experience, adding weight to Brooke’s suspicion that there was at least part of the old warrior hoping to be killed with Nelsonian panache at this moment of final victory – a martyrdom that would relieve him of facing the prosaic disappointments he knew were coming.[64] Churchill took adolescent delight in watching the unfolding action and in ostentatiously urinating in the great German river. This was spectating rather than decision-making, however, and only illustrated how passive the prime minister’s role in the war had now become. Brooke, for his part, enjoyed motoring around the Rhine in a Buffalo and reflecting on how impossible such a moment had seemed five years earlier, when he had been a corps commander in Belgium watching the British line crumble to nothing.

With the Allies across the Rhine, large-scale organised resistance in the western Reich ended. For the Americans, British and Canadians, the remaining weeks of the European conflict were spent rushing across the North German Plain to grab as much territory as possible before the Soviets could beat them to it. This was a nervous time for the average squaddie. Having, it seemed, survived the war by some miracle, he had absolutely no intention of getting his head blown off just days before the surrender by a fanatical teenage Hitler Youth member hiding in a thicket with a Panzerfaust rocket. No infantryman was going to indulge his platoon commander’s bloody fantasy about snatching a Military Cross in the last moments. When troops encountered final pockets of opposition now, they hunkered down and waited at a safe distance for the tanks and the fighter-bombers to saturate their foes with fire.

Twenty-First Army Group had at least been spared the pain of trying to take Berlin, delighting the ordinary soldiery if not its commander. On 28 March Eisenhower, on his own authority, had cabled Stalin telling him that he was leaving the German capital to the Red Army. US forces now headed southwards towards the Alps in search of the chimerical Nazi ‘final redoubt’. The Canadians moved into the Netherlands. British Second Army’s unglamorous but necessary task on the American flank was to seize Hanover, Hamburg and Bremen, and then dash for Schleswig-Holstein to prevent any Soviet attempt to ‘liberate’ Denmark.

On the afternoon of 12 April 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia, while sitting for a portrait, President Roosevelt, who had complained of having a ‘terrific headache’, suddenly slumped forward in his chair, unresponsive. He lingered for perhaps an hour more but never recovered consciousness and was finally declared dead of a brain hemorrhage. His last message to Churchill, a short, no-fuss statement regarding humanitarian food aid for the Dutch, had arrived in London earlier that day. The prime minister did not receive the news until returning to Downing Street from dinner at midnight.[65] ‘It is really a disaster,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife the following day:

I feel deeply for Winston, and this afternoon it was really evident from his manner [announcing the death in the Commons] that it was a real body-blow. Under that bloody American Constitution, they must now put up with the Vice-President who was actually chosen because he was a colourless and harmless man…I have not yet heard any man say one good word in his favour.[66]

At the memorial service at St Paul’s on 17 April, Churchill was observed standing at the cathedral doors bare-headed, weeping uncontrollably. The relationship between the transatlantic leaders had long lost its boyish intimacy, but there is no reason to be too cynical about this display. The prime minister was a sentimental, lachrymose man at the best of times. Perhaps, thinking back to his recent experience on the Rhine, he was envying Roosevelt’s death at the brink of triumph. ‘He had brought his country through the worst of its perils and the heaviest of its toils,’ Churchill said of FDR in his Commons tribute. ‘Victory had cast its sure and steady beam upon him.’[67] The president had been infuriatingly opaque at times, but he had generally made decisions to Britain’s benefit in the end. What the new man in the White House, Harry Truman, whom Churchill had never so much as met, would be like was impossible to say. Most people in Whitehall shared Nicolson’s dismay. Truman’s ascension was ‘a terrible blow for us’, thought Eden; the new president ‘knows nothing’.[68] The prime minister’s instinct was to rush to New York for the funeral to meet Truman straight away, but he was reluctantly persuaded to leave it to his foreign secretary, who was heading across the Atlantic anyway to discuss the founding charter of the United Nations Organisation in San Francisco. Churchill’s first encounter with ‘Haberdasher Harry’ would have to wait for three months.

By late April, the Germans were in full retreat in northern Italy as well as Germany. The fighting in the peninsula had long ceased to have any grand strategic meaning, but honour alone required Eighth Army to conduct one final offensive of the war to clear the Po Valley of enemy troops and push towards Veneto and the Alpine passes; there was also the more practical consideration that the western Allies wanted to reach Trieste before Tito’s Communist partisans got there from Yugoslavia.[69] On 29 April, the British entered Padua. With organised resistance now largely at an end, the German commander in Italy agreed to an instrument of surrender which was to take effect seventy-two hours later.[70] Eighth Army’s three-and-a-half-year journey from Alamein was ended.

On 1 May, Hitler’s death was announced by his successor as Führer, Admiral Dönitz, from the Nazi state’s last-stand headquarters in Flensburg, a few miles from the Danish border. Hitler had laid down his life the previous day, the Flensburg radio announcer claimed, ‘fighting with his last breath against Bolshevism’. Churchill heard the news in the middle of dinner. Mussolini had died at the hands of anti-fascist partisans in Milan in the last week of April. Roosevelt, Il Duce, now Hitler: wartime enemies as well as friends were rapidly exiting the stage. ‘Well, I must say I think he was perfectly right to die like that,’ Churchill said when he heard of the Führer’s supposed end. His dinner companion Lord Beaverbrook, a former War Cabinet minister, the owner of the Daily Express and one of the prime minister’s most long-standing cronies, made it clear that he (correctly) did not believe a word of it.[71] The British public was sceptical too. One in four of them surveyed by Mass-Observation said they thought Hitler was still alive. ‘They’ve got him hidden away somewhere, to bring him out again in ten years time…and start the business all over again.’[72]

Twenty-First Army Group reached the Danish border on 2 May, beating the Red Army to it by about twelve hours. Montgomery found himself facing the last German field armies of any significance in western Europe, and so to his delight he was in a position to accept their surrender at his command tent on Lüneburg Heath in Lower Saxony in the early evening of 4 May. It was one final personal triumph over the Americans. In Flensburg Dönitz, still Kriegsmarine commander despite his recent political elevation, ordered all U-Boats to cease hostilities and return to base. This did not prevent U-2336 (which had failed to receive the signal) from torpedoing the Montreal-registered steam merchant Avondale Park just after eleven at night on 7 May in the Firth of Forth. Two of her crew members, chief engineer George Anderson and donkeyman (engine operator) William Harvey, died as she foundered – the last two British fatalities of the Battle of the Atlantic. Their deaths came within hours of the definitive worldwide German surrender, agreed at Eisenhower’s HQ in Reims, taking effect.

Tuesday, 8 May 1945, was declared Victory in Europe (V-E) Day and a bank holiday. It began with some muddle across Britain; many people had not heard the announcement on the BBC the night before and had turned up for work in the morning as usual, only to be sent away at the factory gate or office door. In the north of England heavy rain dampened any immediate excitement. After lunch, however, crowds had started to make their way to the centre of the country’s big cities. In London, Piccadilly ‘was already a seething mass of people’ by early afternoon, according to schoolteacher Gladys Langford. ‘People were everywhere – on shop fronts, up lamp standards, singing and shouting.’[73] At 3 p.m. the crowds briefly quietened to hear Churchill’s formal radio announcement, broadcast on outdoor loudspeakers. ‘The German war’, he said, ‘is at an end.’ He briefly recounted the events of the preceding six years. Hitler’s Reich, after years of ‘intense preparation’, had

hurled herself on Poland at the beginning of September 1939, and in pursuance of our guarantee to Poland, and in common action with the French Republic, Great Britain and the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations declared war against this foul aggression.

After gallant France had been struck down we from this Island and from our united Empire maintained the struggle single-handed for a whole year until we were joined by the military might of Soviet Russia and later by the overwhelming power and resources of the United States of America.

Finally almost the whole world was combined against the evildoers, who are now prostrate before us…

A gasp, it was said, rose from the crowd in Whitehall at this phrase.[74] Churchill went on:

We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our tasks both at home and abroad.

Advance Britannia! Long Live the Cause of Freedom! God Save the King![75]

15

The Thought of Him Was Like Home and Safety

A lone Spitfire appeared out of nowhere and performed a victory roll overhead. ‘We didn’t get it,’ said George MacDonald Fraser, future Flashman author, but then a twenty-year-old lance corporal in an infantry section of a Cumbrian battalion of the Border Regiment serving in central Burma. The sight of a British combat aircraft in that part of the world was rare enough. But any victory roll always came after a fight, not before one – and Fraser’s company’s attack on the Japanese-held village in front of them hadn’t begun yet. While he and his comrades were trying to figure out what it meant, an officer – ‘he must have been a new arrival, and a right clown,’ thought Fraser – ran out in front of the whole company and shouted excitedly ‘Men! The war in Europe is over!’ There was

a long silence, while we digested this, and looked through the heat haze to the village where Jap might be waiting, and I’m not sure that the officer wasn’t waving his hat and shouting hip, hooray. The silence continued, and then someone laughed, and it ran down the extended line in a great torrent of mirth, punctuated by cries of ‘Git the boogers oot ’ere!’ and ‘Ev ye told Tojo, like?’ and ‘Hey, son, is it awreet if we a’ gan yam?’

Well, he must have been new.[1]

Five thousand miles away in London the crowds were dancing in the streets, but Tuesday, 8 May 1945, was just another day so far as British troops in the Bay of Bengal were concerned. ‘Our resources for making merry are scanty enough at this time,’ wrote Major Alfred Doulton at the headquarters of IV Corps in Pegu, north-east of Rangoon. ‘There is conspicuously little inclination on the part of the gayer members of the mess to indulge in an outburst of revelry. The clerks are similarly subdued.’ Peter Collister of the Gloucestershire Regiment was in Calcutta that day, his infantry battalion having recently been pulled out of the front line after suffering a mauling in Burma. The troops tried to make the best of it with a party. But the mood turned uglier as the night drew on and ‘the dance floor area, littered with broken bottles, began to resemble a battlefield at dawn’. In Kandy, Ceylon, Wing Commander Alan Campbell-Johnson celebrated at a restaurant with half a dozen friends, but so far as they were concerned the real good news of the week had been the taking of Rangoon on 2 May, not the rather more abstract feat of V-E Day. In a POW camp in Kanchanaburi in Thailand, meanwhile, Lieutenant Alan Raven, who had been captured when Singapore fell, heard the news via a clandestine radio kept hidden by a fellow prisoner. Any elation had to be kept absolutely secret for fear of the guards discovering the radio and killing its owner. ‘Work proceeded as usual’ that day, he recalled.[2]

In his V-E Day broadcast on the BBC, Churchill said: ‘we may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing. But let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued.’[3] The British were left in a curious position now Hitler was dead and the Nazis finished. Their war with Japan had always been an incidental conflict, forced upon them back in December 1941 by Tokyo’s mad gamble to exploit the distractions going on in distant Europe to seize territory in Southeast Asia. For a few months in early 1942, while it had seemed as though British hegemony in the Indian Ocean might be on the brink of collapse, with catastrophic consequences for the UK’s situation in Europe as well as Asia, the Japanese war had been the focus of attention. That crisis had passed soon enough, however, and after the Americans’ twin victories at Midway in June 1942 and Guadalcanal the following February, it became increasingly obvious both that the Allies were going to win the Pacific War and that the United States was going to be able to do almost all the work of defeating Japan by itself. British participation in this secondary conflict was, then, strictly speaking optional and unnecessary. Some Americans flatly wanted the British to stay out of it. Admiral King, for one, was emphatic that he did not wish to see a single Royal Navy vessel operate in the central Pacific.

The British felt that they had to fight the Japanese all the same. Partly this was about imperial prestige. In the opening rout in East Asia they had lost a swathe of territory – Hong Kong, Malaya, Borneo, Burma. They could, if they wished, simply wait for these colonies to be returned to them in the peace settlement after Japan was defeated by the Americans, but reacquiring them solely through the efforts of the USA would be no way to re-establish confident white rule east of Calcutta. And anyway, would the Americans let them go back so easily? As Churchill warned the chiefs of staff in May 1944, in the absence of an independent British campaign to recapture Malaya, Washington might feel ‘with conviction “we won the victory and liberated these places, and we must have the dominating say in their future and derive full profit from their produce”.’[4]

The other motive for spirited British participation in Japan’s defeat was the need to keep US Lend-Lease supplies flowing to the UK once the European war was over. Stage II aid after V-E Day would greatly ease Britain’s economic transition from war to peace. To justify it to Washington there would need to be an active imperial role in the Pacific campaign. From the British point of view, there was, in fact, a lot to be said for Stage II dragging on as long as possible. A distant quasi-war with lots of American economic assistance but without the debilitating burden of total military mobilisation was not an undesirable state to be in. Indeed, since Allied planners in May 1945 were anticipating Japanese resistance lasting until the end of 1946 or even 1947, a long Stage II seemed a distinct and agreeable likelihood.

For most ordinary people in the United Kingdom, however – certainly those without loved ones serving in Fourteenth Army or incarcerated in Japanese POW camps – there was little emotional enthusiasm for this far-off coda of a war. Most Britons had never been to India or Singapore, let alone Burma. Few of them could give two hoots about what happened to these exotic picture-book places after the war. According to a 1942 poll at the time of the Cripps Mission, while one-third of people in the UK wanted India to have immediate self-government, only one in fifty thought it should never get it.[5] Churchill would famously say at the Mansion House in London later that year that he had ‘not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’. But judging by the divided public response to the speech, it was not at all clear that the majority of his countrymen felt the same way.[6]

By 1945, only the rarest British servicemen showed much keenness about being sent east of Suez. The typical soldier’s reason for fighting the war had always been to protect his country from the Germans. That unwritten contract with the British state expired on V-E Day. Now he just wanted to go home. ‘Burma’s one little square I’m not being pushed into,’ wrote Harry Wilson from Loutraki in Greece; ‘I’ve no intention of getting my tonsils slit by a squint-eyed Jap. I’ve strength enough for one war but not two.’[7]

As for those British troops unfortunate enough to be in India and Burma in spring 1945, it’s not surprising that victory in Europe was all a little beside the point. Germany’s defeat seemed unlikely to lessen Japan’s determination to fight to the bitter end by a single day. Rangoon had been captured; but the Burmese capital was an awfully long way from Singapore, let alone Tokyo. Indeed, in the midst of Burma it was easy enough to forget that a place like Europe even existed. ‘It is disconcerting’, Fraser wrote, ‘to find yourself soldiering in an exotic Oriental country which is medieval in outlook, against a barbarian enemy given to burying prisoners up to the neck or hanging them by the heels for bayonet practice’; a place where you could

wake in the morning to find your carelessly neglected mess-tin occupied by a spider the size of a soup-plate, watch your skin go white and puffy in ceaseless rain the like of which no Westerner can imagine for sheer noise and volume, gape in wonder at huge gilded pagodas silent in the wilderness, and find yourself taken aback at the sight of a domestic water-tap, because you haven’t seen such a thing for months.[8]

Brian Aldiss, another author-veteran of the campaign, wrote of the countryside around Assam that

to the confusion of whatever prehistoric calamity had thrown up this maze of small mountains and valleys, nature had added entangling forest. Every hill, valley, re-entrant, and salient was covered with vegetation which, although from a distance it looked little more than knee-high scrub…on closer acquaintance proved to be a riot of thorn, bamboo, and towering trees.

East of Assam was a quarter of a million square miles of teak forests and noisome mangrove swamps and rice paddies and 12,000 feet of elevation, a country of poisonous snakes and tigers and mosquitos and leeches, with terrain so unbroken by man’s presence it could take rested troops all day to hack through just a few miles of primeval steaming jungle. One British soldier found the sable darkness and shrieking cacophony of the Burmese hinterland so frightening that he would comfort himself by listening to the mechanical ticking of his watch, a reminder that he was still living in the twentieth century and not the prehistoric past. ‘It was 9.30,’ he remembered. ‘That meant that in England it was three o’clock in the afternoon…people back home were either finishing lunch or having tea, or perhaps in cinemas or crowding the high street; whilst here was I, wrapped in my blanket and lying among the decayed vegetation of a Burmese jungle.’[9]

*

Major-General Orde Wingate had returned to India from the Quadrant Conference in autumn 1943 determined to impose his own fanatical sense of order on this alien landscape. He had brought with him a remit from the combined chiefs of staff to plan and launch into Burma a second and much bigger Chindit operation, THURSDAY, as soon as possible. THURSDAY was to complement and support the simultaneous advance of Stilwell’s mixed Chinese-American force from Ledo to the town of Myitkyina on the Upper Irrawaddy River.[10] Capturing Myitkyina with its important airbase would shore up Allied control of northern Burma, allow an extension of the Ledo Road towards China, and considerably shorten the USAAF’s flying time across the Hump. Wingate’s job was to dominate the 500-mile north–south corridor between Myitkyina and Mandalay, so preventing the Japanese from moving reinforcements to block Stilwell by river or rail.

Wingate had decided that the Chindits would operate differently in Burma this time. During LONGCLOTH, his small force had remained constantly on the move, conducting ad hoc guerrilla operations against the enemy’s lines of communications. THURSDAY’s greatly expanded LRPG would instead establish three fortified strongholds in the Burmese interior – ‘Broadway’, ‘Piccadilly’ and ‘Aberdeen’ – in locations large and flat enough to allow for the landing and take-off of C-47 transport planes. These well-defended, self-sustaining strongholds would serve as supply and reinforcement hubs from which Chindit columns could march and fight across a wide swathe of enemy territory. They would also act, as Wingate put it in his usual colourful prose, as ‘a machan [raised shooting platform] overlooking a kid tied up to entice the Japanese tiger’ – in other words, as baited traps to draw in and destroy enemy formations. Ultimately, as a good Plymouth Brethren, Wingate’s confidence in these new tactics rested on Old Testament zeal. He quoted with approval the Book of Zechariah’s injunction to ‘turn you to the strong hold, ye prisoners of hope: even to day do I declare that I will render double unto thee’.[11]

There were soon problems, however. Although two of THURSDAY’s three vanguard brigades would be airlifted to their stronghold sites, there were not enough planes to take all three. The 4,000 men of 16th Infantry Brigade under Brigadier Bernard Fergusson would have to march 360 miles to their designated stronghold (Aberdeen) before commencing operations – an exhausting trek across some of the most difficult terrain in the world, reproducing all the agonies of the previous year’s LONGCLOTH expedition. Just before the campaign began, a photo-reconnaissance mission discovered that someone had felled logs all over the Piccadilly site, making it unusable for glider air-landing. Wingate immediately jumped to the conclusion that his operational secrecy had been compromised, and it was only with some difficulty that he was talked out of cancelling THURSDAY entirely (the logs turned out to be the unwitting work of Burmese teak foresters, not the Japanese, who had no idea the Chindits were coming). Piccadilly was necessarily abandoned as a stronghold location and the troops scheduled to land there were switched to Broadway instead.

The first gliders set down at Broadway on the night of 5 March.[12] Within a week, 9,000 Chindits with all their stores and equipment (plus anti-aircraft and field artillery batteries and 1,500 mules) had been dispatched to the middle of Burma with minimal Japanese interference. Wingate spent mid-March flying between his brigades and British Fourteenth Army headquarters at Comilla in north-eastern India, urging on his subordinates and barracking his superiors for (or so he claimed) withholding aircraft and reinforcements. It was on one of these back-and-forth expeditions on the evening of 24 March that his plane crashed into a hillside, killing everyone on board. His body was never found. ‘Orde Wingate is no more,’ Richard Rhodes James, the cipher operator of 111th Infantry Brigade HQ, remembered thinking when he heard the news. ‘What will happen to us? Our master is gone and we, his masterpiece, are now ownerless.’[13]

Many military leaders have exhibited eccentricities. Few have generated so much speculation as to whether they were literally insane. Even Wingate’s admirers had from time to time wondered if there was something deeply disturbed, even broken, about this intense young warrior-monk. ‘Personal contact with Wingate was a bewildering experience,’ recalled Rhodes James: ‘The untidy wispy beard, the atrocious hat, the harsh ungracious voice which sounded like the grating of stone against stone. I remember considering seriously with my brother officers the question: is he mad?’[14] ‘A lunatic shit’ was another, pithier character assessment.[15]

Some of Wingate’s foibles – eating raw onions, walking around with an alarm clock tied to his wrist, entertaining visitors while stark naked, scrubbing himself with a dry brush – had an affected, performative quality to them. Such quirks were odd but usually harmless enough, though occasionally his grandstanding could have disastrous consequences. Travelling through Egypt en route to India from Quebec, he decided on a whim to drink water from a flower vase and promptly caught typhoid, laying him up for weeks. At other times, however, Wingate’s behaviour was suggestive of a man in the grip of a serious personality disorder. His character during LONGCLOTH veered back and forth with alarming unpredictability. Sometimes he was the epitome of calm confidence, at others withdrawn and indecisive, and at others still brutal in his martinet obsession with discipline. Contrary to King’s Regulations, he physically struck fellow officers and men, and at least in one case imposed a flogging on a sentry who had fallen asleep.[16] Wingate was notorious for ‘black dog’ depressions. One of these led him to attempt suicide in a Cairo hotel room in 1941 by slitting his throat with a rusty machete.

Wingate had a messianic vision of his own destiny. Whether that was a product of his strict Plymouth Brethren upbringing or evidence of delusionary grandeur is something for the theologians and psychiatrists to debate. He certainly ‘lacked humanity’, according to John Masters, commander of one of the Chindit brigades during THURSDAY. ‘He thought in great terms and worked for great ends…for that huge majority which is less than great he had little sympathy.’[17] Wingate had had no way of knowing how swiftly and violently his life was to be cut short in March 1944. But perhaps a man who conceived of himself in such operatic terms would not have been displeased about the way the curtain fell.

Operation THURSDAY was to continue until the end of August, but the remains of its story can be dealt with briefly enough. Rhodes James was right to intuit that the Chindit idea relied on Wingate’s bottomless reserves of charisma and energy. With his death, all enthusiasm for LRPGs soon evaporated. Command of the THURSDAY expedition passed to the senior brigadier in the field, who had never cared much for Wingate personally nor his theories of war-making. Overall strategic direction of THURSDAY fell to Stilwell. The southern strongholds had to be abandoned as unsustainable, and a new one, ‘Blackpool’, was created further north. But this too quickly fell victim to furious Japanese attacks and had to be given up. In creating such traps to tempt the Japanese tiger, Wingate had never figured out how his lightly armed troops were going to withstand prolonged assaults by much better-equipped opponents. In any case, Stilwell despised the British and deprecated all guerrilla tactics, and now chose to use the Chindits in a regular infantry role for which they had neither the necessary heavy weapons support nor the numbers. In late June they successfully captured the town of Mogaung, assisting Stilwell’s siege of nearby Myitkyina, but they took heavy casualties in the process which they could ill afford. By the end of summer, the last malaria- and dysentery-ridden survivors of Wingate’s original force had been airlifted back to India. The following year, Mountbatten formally disbanded the whole LRPG formation. ‘There is no need for Chindits’ any longer, he said.[18]

Not long before his death, Wingate had submitted a proposal to the SEAC commander for post-THURSDAY operations which was so outlandish that even one of his most sympathetic biographers can only ascribe it to a lapse in judgement brought on by overwork and ill health.[19] Wingate proposed to Mountbatten creating a Chindit legion of twenty-five brigades with ‘100,000 infantry of good calibre’ to mount a series of air-dropped and -supplied leaps to Hanoi (750 miles from Assam) and Bangkok (900 miles) and then, potentially, into China itself. To have carried this off would have required, including support troops, a minimum sum of something like thirteen infantry divisions, plus more transport aircraft than the Allies possessed in the whole world.[20] Mountbatten, generally a supporter and patron of Wingate, either never read this fantastical scheme or was too embarrassed to mention it again.

The Chindit concept made solid contributions to Allied victory in Burma. It proved the viability of radio-coordinated air supply and the importance of hard, realistic training. Most of all, it demonstrated in that dismal period after the long 1942 retreat from Burma and the disastrous first Arakan expedition that the Japanese were not supermen and could be beaten in the jungle. The concept of a behind-the-lines hit-and-run expeditionary force was perfectly sound in and of itself, but only so long as it was understood – and this is something Wingate never did – that its role ought to be supplementary to the operations of the main force. The Chindit leader believed, as enthusiasts for ‘special operations’ so often do, that his irregular tactics had rendered all other conventional military doctrines obsolete and that LRPGs could replace the main force. Given Wingate’s erratic, even self-destructive state of mind, it was perhaps for the best that he did not live to see his cultish faith in the Chindit way of war exposed so cruelly in summer 1944.

*

The greatest single assistance that Wingate may have provided to the Allied cause was to convince certain overconfident Japanese generals that their troops could also operate in forbidding terrain without regard for supply lines. The architect of what would become Operations Ha-Go and U-Go, Lieutenant-General Renya Mutaguchi, commander of Japan’s 15th Army, was impressed by Wingate’s fluid movement across the heavily forested hill country between India and Burma during LONGCLOTH. He resolved to reproduce such manoeuvres in a major offensive of his own, one that would, he hoped, first secure the British base at Imphal in north-eastern India for the Japanese, and then make possible a full-scale invasion of Bengal. Mutaguchi’s assault on Imphal in the spring of 1944 was to be the severest military test of the Raj since the rout in Malaya and Burma two years before. In the end, though, Mutaguchi was no more able to suspend the basic principles of logistics than Wingate had been. His offensive would be an epic demonstration of endurance and courage, but ultimately it would see the best Japanese troops in Southeast Asia dash themselves to destruction against a well-equipped, retrained, thoroughly revitalised and superbly led Indian Army.

Mutaguchi’s petition to his superiors in late 1943 was simple. Japan, he argued, had lost the initiative everywhere in the Indian and Pacific oceans. If it remained solely on the defensive, the material might of the Americans and British must ultimately overwhelm it. The Japanese had to go on the offensive somewhere, and India, he suggested, was the point of greatest Allied vulnerability. Its conventional forces had proven incapable of withstanding Japanese opposition in 1942 and 1943, and the Quit India protests had shown how politically febrile the mood across the subcontinent was.

To exploit this grass-roots nationalism, Mutaguchi had a new and potentially powerful ally. The first anti-British ‘Indian National Army’ recruited after the surrender of Singapore had been disbanded at the end of 1942 because of squabbles between its leaders and the Tokyo government, but the idea had been revived with fresh energy when the former INC leader and Axis collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose had arrived in Japan from Germany (via U-Boat) in summer 1943. Bose had quickly recruited 45,000 Indian volunteers to form a second, better-organised INA. Its first active infantry division was ready to accompany Mutaguchi’s troops across the Chindwin in early 1944. A dramatic defeat of imperial forces in Assam at the hands of Indian, as well as Japanese, soldiers might well be inflammatory enough to spark a pan-Raj insurrection.

That was the idea anyway. Not everyone was convinced. ‘The Mutaguchi Plan is full of fond hopes,’ the Japanese chief of staff in Burma wrote caustically in his diary:

[It] goes like this: the Army crosses the Chindwin River and goes over the mountains where there is no road, with as much ammunition and food as it can carry. And when rations run out, food and ammunition are to be gained in Imphal and supplied to the divisions, using as much transportation as necessary gathered there. Such an operation might have been possible in the spring of 1942. But now…this plan is senseless.

‘Mutaguchi would fling his troops anywhere if he thought it would bring him publicity. How they are supplied he only thinks about afterwards,’ another general commented dismissively.[21] But the commander of 15th Army had a prophet-like single-mindedness of purpose not unlike that of Wingate. It could be as attractive to Mutaguchi’s superiors as the Chindit leader’s self-confidence had been to Churchill. On 7 January 1944, he received formal approval from Tokyo for an attack on Imphal, codenamed U-Go. It would be preceded by a diversionary assault along the Arakan coast, Ha-Go, which, if all went well, would panic the British into committing all their reserves too far south to influence the main battle in Assam.

To be fair to Mutaguchi, the vulnerability of the British position on the Burmese frontier at Imphal was not imaginary. Assam was so physically isolated from the rest of India that during the worst of the annual monsoon season it might as well have been on the moon. Every armoured car, artillery piece, ration pack and round of ammunition unloaded in Bombay faced a journey to Imphal equivalent of that from London to Moscow. At the outbreak of war there had been a total absence of any adequate modern infrastructure to handle this. The only railway line leading into the region had been a single-track affair built to handle the modest peacetime requirements of Darjeeling’s tea planters, not a mechanised army in wartime.

As Indian Army commander-in-chief, it had been Auchinleck’s lot in 1943 to tackle this logistical challenge, one several times greater than anything Eisenhower faced organising Operation OVERLORD – and the Auk had to accomplish his task with neither the interest nor the sympathy of the British prime minister. Thanks to 1.5 million civilian pioneers labouring in gruelling, malarial-ridden back country, however, by the end of 1943 an advanced industrial infrastructure had been carved out of the primordial forest and mountainside – roads, railways, oil depots and pipelines, wharves and cranes, warehouses and supply dumps and, critically, all-weather airfields to allow transport aircraft to circumvent the formidable geography. On the eve of U-Go, one in ten of all the RAF’s planes (and eighteen squadrons of the USAAF) were in India and Burma, most of them air-ferrying cargoes to the front line. The situation in Assam, then, was far better for the British by the beginning of 1944 than it had been at the time of the retreat from Burma. Even so, Imphal remained a long way from Calcutta. Defending it from a major assault would be a heroic challenge for Fourteenth Army.[22]

A Thermopylae lay ahead in Assam, and Britain’s Leonidas would be Lieutenant-General William ‘Bill’ Slim.[23] Slim’s name has become so synonymous with the wartime Burma story that it is worth recalling that in 1945 hardly anyone in the UK had even heard of this stoutly built, square-faced, granite-chinned officer, so pedestrian-looking that, as MacDonald Fraser put it, ‘he might have been a yard foreman who had become managing director’.[24] The film Burma Victory, released in November 1945, lavished attention on Mountbatten and Wingate but relegated Fourteenth Army’s commander to a walk-on part in its final ten minutes. Churchill barely mentioned the 1944 Burma campaign at all in his fifth section of his war memoirs, Closing the Ring. It was only after complaints from Fourteenth Army veterans that he grudgingly devoted a short section in the follow-up volume, Triumph and Tragedy, to the final battles in Burma – with Slim granted a few passing references.[25] ‘Uncle Bill’ was never Churchill’s sort of general. He had neither Alexander’s aristocratic polish nor Wingate’s mad glint in the eye. ‘This is a very heavy blow for me,’ the prime minister said when he heard the news of the Chindit leader’s death, ‘you know how much I have counted on this man of genius.’ His few wartime mentions of Slim were absent of any similar affection or respect. ‘I cannot believe that a man with a name like [that] can be much good’ was about as much as Churchill had to say on the matter.[26]

It has to be admitted that on the eve of U-Go there was little reason to think that an ironmonger’s son and grammar-school boy from Birmingham was destined to become one of the war’s great captains. In the 1920s and 1930s, Slim had had a respectable but unexceptional career in regimental, staff and training roles in the Indian Army. This lack of distinction may have saved his reputation and perhaps even his life, for if Slim had been a more high-flying senior officer in 1942 he would probably have served with Percival in Singapore and his war would have ended in a Japanese POW camp. As it was, the outbreak of conflict east of Suez found Slim in a divisional role in Iraq. His appointment to lead a corps command in Burma in March 1942 under the overall direction of Alexander was a poisoned chalice of a promotion. By the time Slim arrived at his new headquarters on the Irrawaddy, Rangoon had already fallen, his scattered ad hoc defensive force was in confused retreat, and the campaign was lost. His job was one not of defeating the Japanese, as he had originally been led to suppose, but of conducting as orderly a fighting withdrawal as possible back to India before the monsoon made such a retreat impossible. This Slim achieved with quiet efficiency, but Alexander got all the press credit afterwards.

Back in Bengal, Slim was given a freshly constituted Anglo-Indian corps (XV Corps). But his new army commander, Noel Irwin, made little secret of his contempt for sepoy generals, and he took Slim’s troops under his personal direction in the first Arakan campaign of winter 1942–3. It was a disaster. Seventeen British-led battalions were routed by six Japanese. Slim was once again belatedly required to take command of a fighting retreat, and once again he accomplished this without fuss. Once the campaign was over, Irwin tried to fix the blame for the whole debacle on his subordinate, relieving Slim of his corps command – only to discover later the same day via telegram from London that he himself had been dismissed by Churchill. Whatever else may be said about Irwin, he did not lack a sense of humour. On hearing the news, he immediately cabled Slim: ‘you’re not sacked – I am.’

Churchill, flush from the revivifying news of LONGCLOTH in late 1943, would have liked to appoint Wingate to replace Irwin at the head of what was now rebranded as ‘Fourteenth Army’, but Brooke talked him out of that hair-raising idea and the vacated post went instead, somewhat by default, to XV Corps’ commander. Slim had by now survived two failed campaigns in Burma and he was forming definite ideas of his own about how to fight and beat the Japanese. However, the sparsity of resources reaching his army, the need to modernise Assam’s logistical lifeline to Bengal, and the transfer of units to Wingate’s THURSDAY force (a sheer waste of good troops in Slim’s opinion) meant he knew no major conventional offensive could take place until late 1944 at the earliest. Furthermore, by February that year intelligence from advance reconnaissance patrols and radio chatter picked up by Bletchley Park’s outstation in Delhi were all indicating that it was the Japanese who were planning to make the first move. Slim prepared Fourteenth Army accordingly.

*

The opening blow of 1944 came in the Arakan, that seasoned morass of British misfortune.[27] Early on 4 February, cloaked by a dawn mist, a 6,000-strong Japanese task force suddenly descended on the rear headquarters area of the 7th Indian Infantry Division, which, along with another Indian division, the 5th, had been probing cautiously a few dozen miles along the Burmese coastline. It was the start of a classic Japanese infiltration thrust to outflank and cut the enemy supply line, conducted with great speed and secrecy. It was intended to produce an equally classic British response: a panicky withdrawal to protect the line of communication back to the Brahmaputra which would rapidly degenerate into a rout. Lieutenant-General Tadashi Hanaya, commander of Ha-Go, expected the whole affair to be over in ten days.

In fact – and a first indication that this campaign would deviate from those of 1942 or 1943 – Slim ordered the men of his two surrounded divisions to stand fast rather than retreat. Relief, he promised them, was on the way. Four defensive ‘boxes’ were formed in the rear area of the main Allied force, of which the most important was the so-called ‘Admin Box’ at the maintenance base and supply dump at Sinzweya. Hundreds of soldiers from the Indian Army’s administrative ‘tail’ – clerks, muleteers, drivers, laundrymen, orderlies – suddenly found themselves front-line troops, crammed into a Burmese Alamo barely 1,200 yards in diameter. For the Japanese, overrunning the rear-area boxes now became the primary task of the campaign. For almost three weeks they assailed them in a series of increasingly desperate rifle, bayonet and grenade charges. Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand and conducted with a disregard on both sides for any of the politer conventions of European warfare. When the Admin Box’s field hospital was captured, all its medical staff and patients were promptly murdered by Japanese troops in cold blood.

Nevertheless, Slim’s besieged garrisons held Hanaya’s troops off, greatly assisted by Lend-Lease M3 Lee-Grant tanks with 75mm guns and two inches of forward steel plating that could shrug off any Japanese shell. Heavy armour was a sign that this Arakan campaign was going to be different from the old. Another was air support. C-47 Dakotas flew 714 supply sorties to the Allied defenders, parachuting in thousands of tons of ammunition and food, including a beer supply for the wounded. Once, single-engine fighter aircraft such as the Ki-43 ‘Oscar’ and Ki-44 ‘Tojo’ had ruled the skies over Burma. Now their Japanese pilots were outnumbered, and their machines outclassed, by the likes of the Spitfire Mark VIII, which had begun arriving in the Indian Ocean theatre in late 1943. With air superiority established, Hawker Hurricane fighter-bombers (‘hurri-bombers’) were free to roam above the rear-area Japanese lines of supply blasting away at anything they saw below – bridges, trucks, mule trains. By late February, Hanaya’s men were starving outside the intact British boxes. Ha-Go was suspended, and 5th and 7th Indian Divisions were relieved by reinforcements flown in from Imphal. It was, wrote Slim, ‘a victory, a victory about which there could be no argument,’ and one all the more poignant for being fought on the site of so many previous humiliations.[28]

Still, Ha-Go had never been intended as anything other than a demonstration feint on the flank, and it had achieved some strategic purpose in drawing off two British divisions from Assam, which remained the Schwerpunkt of Mutaguchi’s 1944 offensive. The significance of Assam to Japanese plans became clear on 4 March, when the first of 100,000 troops emerged (accompanied by 12,000 horses and mules, 30,000 oxen and 1,000 elephants) from the Burmese jungle to assault the British defenders at Imphal.[29] Slim had been tipped off they were coming, but had been led to expect a battle commencing no earlier than 15 March, and as a result many of his troops were still out of position and severely bloodied in the opening days.

Mutaguchi’s plan was complex. He had divided up his force into several columns. The first of these to arrive at the battlefield would attack the Imphal Plain from the south and south-east to attract British attention and strength in those directions. The main effort, however, would come later, and it would be directed about fifty miles to the north of Imphal, towards Kohima, a hamlet bestriding two sharp ridges in the isolated Naga Hills. If the Kohima road was cut, Imphal’s land communications would be sundered to the rest of India. Even worse for the British, the rail terminus and supply depot at Dimapur, thirty miles to Kohima’s north-west, would lie open to seizure. Mutaguchi’s army could gorge itself on masses of looted ‘Churchill stores’ at Dimapur while the link between Assam and Stilwell’s Ledo Road would be broken. At a minimum, all Allied plans for an offensive into Burma in 1944 would be disrupted; at best, the destruction of Fourteenth Army might spark insurrection in Bengal. For the plan to work, however, all its intricate pieces would have to slot into place in precisely the right order. This would require Mutaguchi’s field commanders to follow their orders with a discipline that was poorly inculcated in IJA staff culture. It would all need to be done quickly, too. Not only were his troops carrying barely enough ammunition and food for a few weeks’ fighting, but once the monsoon hit in late spring all their supply tracks back into Burma would become seas of mud.

From the Japanese point of view, it all started fairly well.[30] True, there was, disappointingly, no outright panic among the defenders, but they showed enough dithering and clumsiness on their retreat back towards Imphal to suggest that this might still be the blundering, fragile British-Indian Army of old. Slim had not appreciated how strong the northern branch of Mutaguchi’s attack would be, and so when an entire Japanese division suddenly appeared on the outskirts of Kohima at the end of March, there was little standing between it and Dimapur. However, the divisional commander of this critical northern attack, Kōtoku Satō, who hated his superior as only a Japanese general could, ignored Dimapur’s vulnerability and, in violation of all Mutaguchi’s orders, concentrated his entire energy on taking Kohima. It was the single most fatal error in the campaign. Slim considered Satō such a blockhead that he ordered the RAF not to attack his headquarters lest he be killed, and the Japanese forced to appoint someone more capable.

The six-week Battle of Kohima, which included a fortnight of outright siege, came to be rightly remembered as Fourteenth Army’s most epic trial, a Stalingrad of rattan and orchids 5,000 feet above sea level. Initially, only one under-strength infantry brigade and a smattering of line-of-communications troops defended the Kohima position, this motley garrison outnumbered perhaps five to one. They sweltered in soupy humidity during the day before being chilled to the bone at night. Three Victoria Crosses were later awarded for acts of gallantry at Kohima, all posthumous, one to an eighteen-year-old warrant officer from the Punjab. Every scrap of land around the village was contested to the death, including most famously the British resident district commissioner’s tennis courts, which became blanketed by bloated and festering corpses under a grotesque mass of feasting bluebottles. ‘The place stank,’ one witness wrote afterwards of Kohima: ‘the ground everywhere was ploughed up with shellfire and human remains lay rotting…men retched as they dug in…the stink permeated one’s clothes and hair.’[31] Soldiers on both sides fought, ate, drank, bled and shat in slimy shallow slit trenches barely separated in places by a no-man’s-land of more than a few yards.

Even hardened British and Indian soldiers who despised the Japanese had to grudgingly commend their astonishing courage in combat (Slim conceded that the enemy was a ‘very good soldier…a very brave soldier’.)[32] It was a reckless courage, though, squandered using tactics so unimaginative that, as one Fourteenth Army veteran put it, any competent Boy Scout could have improved on them. They relied on the same formula as in 1942 and 1943: ‘jitter’ raids at night to spook the defenders into opening fire (wasting their ammunition and giving away their positions) and massed infantry charges by day. The Japanese well understood the psychological advantage of sowing confusion and alarm in the minds of their opponents, but after more than two years of being at the receiving end of these tactics, the British and Indian forces had come to understand and expect them and had even learned effective counter-moves.

Fourteenth Army troops now dug in and did not panic. They did not shoot until the last minute. Whenever possible, they relied on mechanical firepower to devastate the bunched-up waves of attackers. The Japanese would throw all their available troops into an assault to maximise sheer mass at the point of impact. This tactic worked well enough if the enemy broke in fear, as they had done in earlier battles, but if they did not it meant there were no reserves on which to draw. Screaming Banzai bayonet charges might have been unnerving, but they also gave the defenders plenty of warning about the direction of the attack. Fourteenth Army troops continued to admire the suicidal audacity of their opponents. By the end of the struggle for Kohima, they were also coming to view them with puzzlement and pity. They had, it seemed, learned nothing after two years of war in Burma, and were paying the price.

Slim relied on air supply to keep the Kohima garrison going at the summit of the crisis. Parachute drops to such a small and isolated location were never easy and some Japanese troops accidentally received ‘Churchill stores’, but enough materiel got into the right hands to stave off a collapse. Thanks to Satō’s inaction, there was time to bring up Fourteenth Army’s reserve corps to secure Dimapur, and its troops marched southwards to break the siege of Kohima on 18 April. It took over a month to eliminate the remaining Japanese troops nested in the Naga Hills, but on 22 June the road to Imphal was reopened. Although Imphal itself had been subjected to furious and repeated attack by the rest of Mutaguchi’s 15th Army throughout April, Slim had been able to withdraw most of his troops to a thirty-mile-long unforested plateau, where his advantage in artillery, armour and air power could be demonstrated most efficiently. British and American supply planes flew in 19,000 reinforcements while evacuating 43,000 ‘useless mouth’ non-combatants and 13,000 wounded. Fourteenth Army grew stronger and more confident in their Imphal redoubt while the Japanese outside shivered, starved and died.

On 5 July, Mutaguchi finally ordered the dwindling survivors of U-Go to retreat back to Burma. As defeat had engulfed his army, so he had increasingly refused to listen to intelligence reports warning of oncoming disaster and had retreated into self-exculpatory rages at his subordinates. The monsoon had now been deluging Assam for weeks and the line of communication back to the Chindwin was a barely discernible morass. What was left of 15th Army disintegrated over the course of the next several weeks along what the Japanese troops called ‘the bleached bones road’ to Mandalay as collective discipline failed utterly and each unit scrambled as best it could to escape the enemy and reach food and shelter – a reprise in reverse of the British rout in spring 1942. By the time it was over, perhaps 68,000 of Mutaguchi’s men had become casualties, two-thirds of his starting force, with at least 30,000 of them killed or dead of disease, malnutrition and exhaustion (vast maggoty armies of larvae consumed the bodies as they fell).[33] All the Japanese Army’s heavy weaponry was abandoned on the way, its pack animals having long since been eaten. Bose’s INA division, into which such propagandistic hopes had been invested, had already crumbled apart. Its presence had made no impression whatsoever on the loyalty of Indian Army troops at Imphal, who despised their former comrades in the INA as Jiffs (deserters).[34] By the end of U-Go four times as many of Bose’s men had fled the field or given themselves up as had died in battle.

The human cost of defending Imphal and Kohima had been 17,500 casualties, the highest experienced by Fourteenth Army in a single battle so far,[35] but Auchinleck and Slim’s long-standing interest in tropical medicine helped to cap the death total. The jungles of Assam and Burma were a terrible place to be an injured man. Wounds would not heal properly in the festering humidity. Sepsis would set in after a few hours. Simply to haul a comrade back to a clearing station a few miles from the front line might take a team of eight fit soldiers a whole day, so prompt air evacuation from Assam to rear-area hospitals ended up saving many lives. Most debilitating of all, however, were not combat injuries but the effects of disease. In 1943, for every British and Indian combat casualty in the SEAC theatre there had been 120 men incapacitated by malaria. In 1944, thanks to more effective prophylactic measures and forward treatment facilities, that ratio dropped to only one in twenty. It would fall even further in the final months of the war.[36] Reducing the threat of malaria meant, among other things, that Slim could maintain his advance into Burma in pursuit of Mutaguchi during the monsoon without his force experiencing an epidemiological collapse. By the time the rains ceased in November 1944, Fourteenth Army was on the west bank of the Chindwin building the largest pontoon bridge in the world, ready to take the war back to the Japanese.

*

The problem, though, was that over the summer the strategic situation in East Asia had changed profoundly. The Japanese armies in China had launched an offensive of their own (the largest, in fact, organised by Tokyo anywhere during the war) and it had proven far more successful than Ha-Go and U-Go. Japanese troops had smashed through the KMT defences in Hunan and Guangxi provinces and overrun a vast swathe of southern Chinese territory, including all the airbases being set up by the USAAF for use by B-29 Superfortress strategic bombers. It was an operational victory that had come much too late in the war to alter in any way Japan’s dire strategic predicament, but what it did do was render irrelevant all that laborious American effort to fly supplies by air across the Hump and build the Ledo Road. Stilwell, whose inability to get along with anyone, including his nominal superior Chiang Kai-Shek, had by now become legendary, was recalled to the USA in October 1944 – perhaps the clearest expression of Washington’s disenchantment with the Burma-China-India theatre.

If things were going badly for the Allies in China, however, they were going magnificently in the central Pacific. In 1944, the US Navy and US Marines broke through the perimeter of Japanese island fortresses – first by taking the Gilbert chain, then the Marshalls, and then, in August 1944, the Marianas. Saipan and Tinian Islands in the Marianas were close enough to the Japanese metropole to launch B-29 raids from them. An inaugural air bombardment of Tokyo was mounted from the Marianas on 24 November. By then, plans were already under way to continue the navy’s ‘island-hopping’ advance with expeditions to seize Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In addition, a flank-thrust to liberate the Philippine Islands had also begun. Precisely where all this was going to end (an invasion of the enemy homeland itself?) was still unclear at the end of 1944. What was certain was that the war against Japan was going to be won in the central Pacific, not China – and certainly not Burma.

For Churchill and the British chiefs of staff, who had only ever really been interested in operations in the hinterland of Burma because the Americans had insisted on them, this meant that Slim’s campaign had now lost much of its political as well as strategic relevance. Washington’s attention had shifted eastwards. The prime minister had always thought that ‘going into swampy jungles to fight the Japanese’ was ‘like going into the water to fight a shark’, but had hitherto half-heartedly endorsed attempts to liberate the Burmese interior because Roosevelt had wanted them; Wingate’s fleetingly brilliant presence on the scene had also briefly piqued his excitement.[37] The Chindit leader’s death, coupled with the collapse of American interest in Burma, closed the matter so far as Churchill was concerned. All further British efforts in the Indian Ocean, he thought, ought to be directed towards an amphibious attack on Singapore. It would, he said, be ‘an ill day for Britain if the war ends without our having made a stroke to regain’ the great imperial city. As a prelude to this, a maritime expedition ought to be launched to seize the northern tip of Sumatra (codenamed CULVERIN). Perhaps Rangoon too could be taken by sea, but as for the rest of Burma, the Japanese troops there should simply be left to ‘rot away’.[38]

The chiefs of staff agreed that conquering Upper and central Burma was a waste of energy, but they had no interest in CULVERIN or any other amphibious attack across the Indian Ocean. In their view, Britain ought to shift its strategic focus to Australia. Either British, Indian and Commonwealth divisions should mount a north-westward advance from Darwin through the Dutch East Indies towards Borneo; or else a Royal Navy fleet of battleships and fleet carriers should join the US island-hopping campaign in the central Pacific. This latter idea was especially dear to Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, who had succeeded Dudley Pound as First Sea Lord on the latter’s death in October 1943. The Royal Navy’s largest vessels had had little to do in Europe and the Mediterranean since Italy’s surrender, so building a powerful Pacific task force would re-concentrate popular attention on Britain’s senior service (useful in the post-war budgetary wars to come) and perhaps remind the Americans of the UK’s usefulness.

Churchill was unconvinced of the merits of either of these plans. His rows with the COS about Pacific strategy in 1944 would be among the most ill-tempered of the whole war. Brooke wrote of their meeting with the War Cabinet on 8 March that Cunningham was ‘so wild with rage’ at the prime minister ‘that he hardly dared let himself speak’. Churchill had asked Eden and Attlee to plead the case for CULVERIN; their arguments, thought Brooke, were ‘so puerile that it made me ashamed to think they were Cabinet ministers’. The mood on both sides became so inflammatory that Churchill threatened to overrule the COS and implement policy using his constitutional authority as minister of defence. The chiefs threatened to resign en bloc if he did. It was the only occasion during the war when either of these drastic measures was seriously contemplated.[39] The prime minister, recognising perhaps what a catastrophe it would be to lose all his most senior military advisors on the eve of OVERLORD, relented.

In hindsight, it is a little hard to understand why Pacific strategy-making generated as much heat as it did. Whether the British went to Sumatra or Borneo or anywhere else was not going to make much difference to the outcome of the war against Japan. It was probably an expression of how stressed these men all were after five years of high-stakes cumulative decision-making that a relatively marginal matter could bring the relationship between the prime minister and his chiefs to the brink of collapse. Certainly, if what was in the balance was the need to impress the Americans, none of it ended up counting for much. The USA no longer needed the British to defeat the Japanese. Indeed, British ‘assistance’ in the final months of the Pacific war was to be something of a burden to them.

Slim, thousands of miles from Whitehall’s conference tables, saw the issue very differently. He doubted, rightly as it turned out, that there would ever be enough landing craft available in the Indian Ocean to mount a major amphibious assault like CULVERIN while the Japanese were still capable of offering serious resistance. The only way to conquer Burma was to do it the hard way, from top to bottom – overland across the Chindwin and then down the Irrawaddy to the delta. If the enemy were defeated in Upper Burma, then their defences in Lower Burma would collapse too. Whether retaking Burma made sense at a grand strategic level was beyond Slim’s concern as a mere army-level commander. If it was going to be done, though, he believed strongly that his troops were the only ones who could do it, and moreover they had earned the right to do it. Capturing Rangoon was as much a covenant with Fourteenth Army’s fallen as a military goal.

What followed in Burma between December 1944 and May 1945 was a campaign fought with some sleight of hand and more in defiance of orders than in strict adherence to them.[40] The task given to Slim’s army at the Octagon Conference in Quebec was to capture all of Burma north of Mandalay during the upcoming campaign season – but no more. He originally proposed to do this by fighting the Japanese on the Shwebo Plain between the Chindwin and the Irrawaddy, working on the assumption that that was where he would find the bulk of the Japanese army. Unfortunately, intelligence reports at the end of 1944 suggested that the enemy was not going to be so obliging. The Japanese had withdrawn east of the Irrawaddy towards Mandalay itself. A frontal attack on that city, then, would require the whole of Fourteenth Army to make an opposed crossing of one of the widest natural tank traps in the world on a very narrow, vulnerable front.

The original plan (CAPITAL) was therefore discarded and a more complicated and ambitious one put in its place. Slim would divide the two corps of his army. One of them (XXXIII Corps) was to proceed as before towards the north-west of Mandalay as a feint to draw its Japanese garrison’s attention. The other, IV Corps, would only appear to be accompanying XXXIII Corps. In fact, it would discreetly pivot towards a smaller town, Meiktila, seventy miles further south, through which ran the main railway line from Rangoon to Mandalay. Take Meiktila, and Mandalay, severed from its line of supply and communication, would fall quickly enough. Then so would Rangoon. If Slim’s troops were able to outpace the monsoon they could conquer the whole of Burma in a single campaign.

This reconceived plan (EXTENDED CAPITAL) went considerably beyond the original remit given to Fourteenth Army at Quebec.[41] This Slim chose not to tell his superiors, calculating that it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission. After all, the coup of a Japanese collapse across Burma would surely absolve him of any mischief. Pulling off EXTENDED CAPITAL, however, would need considerable skill and a measure of luck. Fourteenth Army’s logistical limitations (the Irrawaddy was 600 miles from a friendly railhead) meant that only so many combat troops could be put into the front line east of the Chindwin, leaving the Japanese, however denuded after U-Go, with a numerical advantage in the field. IV Corps’ march to Meiktila would have to be conducted with great secrecy and finely judged timing. The Irrawaddy Plain upon which much of the fighting would take place, with its scorching, prairie-like grasslands punctuated by copses of dry deciduous forest, was of a totally different character from the jungles of Assam. It would therefore require new fighting methods, and, as ever in Burma, the ticking clock of the annual monsoon, due to arrive in late spring, imposed its own non-negotiable deadline.

Both of Slim’s corps would have to cross the Irrawaddy, an even more dauntingly challenging obstacle than the Chindwin, given that it was 4,000 yards wide in places, poorly mapped and had dangerously strong currents. By comparison, Montgomery’s Rhine crossing (accompanied by a logistical apparatus Fourteenth Army could only have dreamed of) was a piece of cake. XXXIII Corps made it across the Irrawaddy first. Ostentatiously waving its matador’s cloak, it provocatively challenged the Japanese in Mandalay in order to distract attention from its sister formation’s furtive movements to the south. The deception effort to hide IV Corps’ march on Meiktila was elaborate, resembling, though on a much-reduced budget, the effort to confuse the Germans about the site of the OVERLORD landings. Fake radio chatter was broadcast for the enemy to eavesdrop; dummy supplies were parachuted to non-existent troops. It worked. Only as IV Corps approached its target in late February did the Japanese begin to realise that they had been deceived.

None of this made the taking of Meiktila easy. Its garrison was 13,500 strong and determined to fight to the last man. Burma is not a theatre that one associates much with urban warfare, but the taking of Meiktila involved classic street-by-street, house-by-house fighting with all the associated dangers and miseries of a battle in a built-up area – snipers, ambushes, booby traps. Japanese troops hidden in slit trenches acted as human mines, ready to detonate 500-pound bombs if an Allied tank approached them. Badly wounded IJA soldiers made last stands at field hospitals with sharpened bamboo poles. In the aftermath of the fighting, hundreds of bodies were discovered in tunnels and bunkers, some men having been buried alive in bombardments, others having chosen to commit suicide in the darkness. It took four days to subdue Meiktila, after which IV Corps found itself briefly under siege as Japanese reinforcements arrived in a desperate bid to retake the town. Only on 29 March did the enemy finally give up.

Meanwhile, XXXIII Corps was busy capturing Mandalay. The most formidable obstacle ahead of it was King Thibaw’s old palace complex, a kind of Buddhist Monte Cassino with thirty-foot-high brick walls atop an earthen embankment seventy feet wide at its base. Tank shells and howitzers could make little impression on this stout medieval fortress, so the USAAF flew in twin-engine B-25s armed with 2,000-pound delayed-action bombs which they skipped, Dam Buster style, across the moat. Even after a lucky hit breached the battlements, however, Slim thought the prospects of a frontal assault still too forlorn to attempt. He was organising a commando raid through the sewers to try to seize the front gates when the garrison finally surrendered on 20 March.

These victories had been accomplished almost entirely with aerially delivered supplies, principally through the benefices of American air power. Throughout EXTENDED CAPITAL the Allied air forces performed an average of 7,000 sorties a day parachuting and air-landing 1,200 tons of materiel to Fourteenth Army, 90 per cent of everything it received. Three-quarters of these air supplies arrived courtesy of the USAAF, and the availability of American transport aircraft (never something Slim could take for granted) became perhaps the central logistical challenge facing Burma’s liberators. Mountbatten did able work from Ceylon negotiating with the Americans to keep Fourteenth Army’s aerial supply train functioning.

With central Burma in Allied hands after the fall of Mandalay and Meiktila, it was only a matter of time before Japanese control of the rest of the country collapsed. Unfortunately, time was precisely what Slim no longer had. It was 320 miles from Meiktila to Rangoon, and he had barely a month to reach it before the onset of the monsoon would turn the Irrawaddy Delta into a swamp and grind his mechanised formations to a halt. A frantic gallop southwards therefore ensued, through often bitterly contested enemy territory, in seething heat and humidity and wild pre-monsoon storms which made air supply flights hazardous. Fourteenth Army troops went on half rations to maintain the Blitzkrieg pace.

On 1 May, a fortnight earlier than anticipated, the skies opened. George MacDonald Fraser was with the 17th Indian Infantry Division (the ‘Black Cats’) in Pegu, fifty-seven miles north-east of Rangoon, when it happened. ‘I was in the act of bending over the brew-tin, stirring in the leaves,’ he remembered,

when the first big drops landed in the boiling water, and I looked up in the gathering dusk at a sky that had suddenly turned dark grey and seemed to be descending slowly…

If you haven’t seen the monsoon burst, it’s difficult to imagine. There are the first huge drops, growing heavier and heavier, and then God opens the sluices and the jets of a million high-pressure hoses are being directed straight down, and the deluge comes with a great roar, crashing against the leaves and rebounding from the earth for perhaps a minute – after that the earth is under a skin of water which looks as though it’s being churned up by buckshot.[42]

With all streams in spate and all bridges down, Fourteenth Army, so tantalisingly close to its goal, could progress no further. Then came bittersweet news: it did not matter anyway. With the end of the war in Europe imminent, enough landing craft had finally been assembled in the Bay of Bengal to make possible one of the amphibious expeditions Churchill had been talking about since 1942. Granted the incongruous gothic codename DRACULA, it had sailed from India on 27 April and arrived off Rangoon five days later to discover a city empty of Japanese troops. They had fled a week before; Rangoon was taken without a shot fired. Slim’s men had been spared what might have been an ugly battle, but they had also been denied the glory of capturing Burma’s capital. ‘Soldiers have a strong primitive sense of fairness,’ observed Fraser. For the oldest sweats in his company, ‘it seemed like a betrayal’.[43]

*

Rangoon was in a miserable state. The damage the evacuating British had done in 1942 had never been repaired, and more recent Allied bombing had further smashed things up. In their final hours before withdrawing, the Japanese had diligently and maliciously destroyed anything they could not loot, so that barely a pane of glass or a doorknob remained intact anywhere in the city. The municipal prison had been set on fire and those inmates who had escaped a swift bayoneting had retreated into banditry. Even St Philomena’s Convent, which had been commandeered into an IJA hospital, had been blown up by the departing garrison, killing 400 wounded Japanese soldiers inside. Rangoon had no food, no electricity, no kerosene. With the public sewage system broken down, the streets were knee-deep in filth. Tuberculosis, scabies and leprosy were rampant. The condition of the ragged survivors was as desperate as in Warsaw or Manila.[44]

Beyond the city, the killing was not over. About 70,000 starving, disease-ridden Japanese troops remained at large upcountry, and as they tried to flee to Malaya they were hunted down by the Allies with mechanical ruthlessness. In the Pegu Yomas Hills astride the Sittang River (the location of the first British military disaster in Burma back in 1942), some survivors of the Japanese 28th Army attempted a mass breakout eastwards in July. As more than 17,000 men – ‘tatterdemalions with rotting feet, calves swollen to elephantine size with beri-beri, eyes burning with fever, thighs dripping with the excrement of dysentery’ – approached the river crossing they were set upon by pre-positioned British field guns and hurri-bombers. Detailed plans for the withdrawal had been captured days earlier and a trap prepared. Perhaps 6,000 Japanese troops escaped the massacre.[45] No quarter was requested, and none given.

Few people back in Britain were paying much attention. The news of Rangoon’s fall was reported in The Times on Friday, 4 May. It was the sixth most important story that day after the capture of Hamburg, Albert Speer’s broadcast from Flensburg conceding Germany’s defeat, the final stages of the Soviet siege of Berlin, the United Nations conference in San Francisco and the capitulation of Trieste.[46] For the British, Burma in 1945 was a sideshow of a sideshow. How much had the campaign all been worth it in the end? The advance from the Chindwin to Rangoon cost 71,000 British and Commonwealth casualties, of which about 3,000 were fatalities.[47] It had inflicted a huge defeat on a large Japanese garrison army without shortening the war in East Asia by as much as a single day. Tokyo could not have withdrawn its troops in Burma back to defend the home islands even if it had wanted to, so wretched was the Japanese maritime logistical situation by 1945. Churchill was correct to observe that they could have been left to rot away, just as the Americans had left blockaded enemy garrisons at Rabaul and Truk to ‘wither on the vine’. The rehabilitation of the British Army’s reputation may have slightly eased the post-war transfer of power from coloniser to colonised in the Bay of Bengal, but it is impossible to know for sure. It certainly did not delay it. By 1948, India, Ceylon and Burma were all independent states. Singapore, meanwhile, which only returned to imperial control by peace treaty, not reconquest, remained British until 1963.

The victory in Burma was mostly an Indian one.[48] From its creation, Fourteenth Army had always been the most cosmopolitan of the Crown field forces, and by the start of EXTENDED CAPITAL manpower shortages back in the UK meant that its quota of British troops was smaller than ever. Of the ten imperial divisions which eventually crossed the Irrawaddy, seven were Indian, two African and only one exclusively British.[49] The Indian Army had grown unrecognisably in size, mechanical power, skill and confidence since the start of the war. Functionally crippled in 1939 as a matter of policy – Indian units had always been forbidden artillery and other heavy weaponry because the jawans were not trusted to use them only against the enemy – after six years it had become a modern, technologically first-rate field force. It was Indian tank crews, increasingly commanded by Indian officers, who drove US-built Shermans along artificial roads of hessian and bitumen into Rangoon. Auchinleck and Slim had helped create a magnificent instrument of war which, once its task of defeating the Japanese was completed, ceased to remain in British hands for very long.[50]

Slim would be the only wartime army-level commander other than Montgomery to succeed in the course of time to the War Office as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Comparisons between the two men are probably invidious, but certainly irresistible. Both took over demoralised mid-war field forces and achieved battlefield success with them. Both understood that conscript citizen-soldiers had to be handled differently than peacetime volunteers, and took care over the welfare and lives of their men. Both made mistakes in command and were forced to change plans mid-operation. The signal difference is that only one of them, Slim, had the humility to admit this afterwards. Fourteenth Army’s leader was confident enough to delegate a considerable amount of authority to his corps and divisional commanders – he really had no choice given the basic problems of communication and control in as primitive an environment as Burma – upon whom he later lavished praise. It is hard to imagine Viscount Montgomery of Alamein writing of Miles Dempsey, or Brian Horrocks, for example, as Slim did of Major-General David ‘Punch’ Cowan, commander of 17th Indian Infantry Division, that ‘to watch a highly skilled, experienced, and resolute commander controlling a hard-fought battle is to see, not only a man triumphing over the highest mental and physical stress, but an artist producing his effects in the most complicated and difficult of all the arts’.[51] Slim did not always treat his subordinates with as much tact as he ought to have done, but when he occasionally rubbed them up the wrong way, he had the presence of mind to defuse the tension with a grace that would have been quite beyond Monty.[52]

Twenty-First Army Group’s commander had problems that Fourteenth Army’s commander did not – most of all, an intrusive and highly opinionated prime minister close at hand. Slim enjoyed the 4,000-mile-distant indifference of Whitehall; but he also had to manage a scratch-built polyglot army permanently at the back of the queue for supplies and reinforcements. What he accomplished with that army was unmatched by any other British general in the Second World War. Some of Slim’s peers won defensive battles which were just as hard fought as Kohima. Others ground out attritional offensive victories in the ‘colossal cracks’ style – in the Western Desert, Italy, France and Germany. The capture of Meiktila and Mandalay, though, was the only mobile offensive battle won by British arms during the Second World War, a battle in which cunning and speed rather than weight of firepower proved the decisive factor. It was the only battle, in other words, which compared in its audacity and pace with the German Blitzkrieg through Belgium and France in May 1940. Slim was the nearest Britain came to having a Guderian or a Rommel in its ranks, and he not only lacked those men’s considerable professional failings but was an altogether better human being to boot. Montgomery was widely respected by his soldiers without always being especially liked. Slim was liked; moreover, he was trusted. Perhaps Fraser puts it best. Slim was, he thought,

the only man I’ve ever seen who had a force that came out of him, a strength of personality that I have puzzled over since, for there was no apparent reason for it…his delivery was blunt, matter-of-fact, without gestures or mannerisms, only a lack of them…

There was no exhortation or ringing clichés, no jokes or self-conscious use of barrack-room slang…he was telling us informally what would be, in the reflective way of intimate conversation. And we believed every word – and it all came true…

‘The thought of him,’ Fraser wrote, ‘was like home and safety.’[53]

*

The Americans no longer cared about Burma by May 1945, but they did care about taking Okinawa, which meant that the British had to care about it too. So while Slim’s men were marching into Rangoon, the largest and most powerful fleet ever assembled in the history of the Royal Navy was in the East China Sea bombing Japanese airbases. Not since 1782 had Britain sent the main body of its naval strength so far from home waters.[54] Churchill never had any great enthusiasm for this ‘British Pacific Fleet’ (BPF). But the Admiralty had arm-twisted him into offering Roosevelt its services at the Octagon Conference, and rather to the prime minister’s disappointment, FDR had immediately accepted the offer (rather than, as he hoped, reviving discussion of his own pet project, the CULVERIN landings in Sumatra). Admiral King, however, loathed the idea of the British intruding on his all-American effort in the central Pacific, and initially sought to relegate the BPF to secondary operations off the Philippines. When that bid failed, he at least managed to commit the British to an agreement that their fleet would operate self-sufficiently and independently from the Americans; King no doubt hoped that this would be a logistical feat beyond their means.

After warm-up raids against the Palembang oil refineries on Sumatra, Task Force 57, as it was officially dubbed, joined Admiral Raymond Spruance’s US Fifth Fleet on 15 March 1945.[55] At its heart were four fleet carriers, each equipped with US-built Grumman Avenger bombers.[56] Two fast battleships of the King George V class (HMS King George V and HMS Howe) were also there to provide big-gun firepower just in case the remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s surface fleet should sally out. By 1945, though, the era of the battleship was manifestly coming to an end, and a more realistic role for the KGVs was to act as anti-aircraft platforms protecting the carriers. They bristled with 20mm, 40mm and two-pounder AA batteries. It was the sort of Far East fleet which Tom Phillips could have only dreamed about as he steered HMS Prince of Wales towards her doom back in December 1941. The massive American shipbuilding programme since then, however, meant that even this mighty flotilla was only a quarter of the size of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz’s total US carrier force in the central Pacific. Britain had already ceded its first-rank naval power status to its ally.

King’s opposition to the British presence in the Pacific was the product of a constitutionally disagreeable nature, but he had a point about the BPF. There were always going to be serious difficulties using ships designed for winter North Atlantic squalls in the tropics. Many British vessels lacked proper ventilation, and their crew were miserably afflicted with boils, sunstroke and prickly heat. Thanks to trapped engine heat in their hangars, the decks of the aircraft carriers became so hot in the Pacific that hoses had to be trained on the sailors’ feet to stop them burning.

Operating the BPF over 3,500 miles away from its main base (Sydney) with a ration strength of 30,700 personnel would also represent an unprecedented challenge.[57] American task forces had elaborate fleet trains of specialist merchant ships to provide them with a stream of fuel, munitions, fresh water, provisions, mail and other paraphernalia that allowed them to stay on station in an oceanic battle zone for weeks at a time. The RN, which had traditionally enjoyed the luxury of an elaborate worldwide base network, had little experience of such large fleet trains. The version it cobbled together for the BPF in 1945 was a miserable simulacrum of the US type, comprising forty-one slow, worn-out, overcrowded freighters, many of them crewed by reluctant neutrals. The British were particularly maladroit at refuelling at sea. Unlike their American counterparts, their tankers could not steam alongside their warships but had to trail their hoses astern, an ‘awkward, un-seaman-like business’, as a BPF admiral admitted.[58]

Had Nimitz stuck strictly to King’s injunction not to assist the British logistically, the BPF might well have fallen apart after a few weeks, but the central Pacific commander-in-chief had a job to do and was happy for all the help he could get and chose to interpret the rules of cooperation loosely. Off-the-books assistance which did not get reported to Washington was fine. ‘They will give you help unofficially,’ the BPF’s commander wrote to London, ‘but are terrified of showing anything on paper or by signal.’ US ship messes were dry; the gift of a few bottles of Scotch whisky could do wonders whenever the British needed spare parts or supplies.[59] For its part, the RN tried hard to make it clear that they were not in the Pacific to try to tell the Americans how to do their job. Distinctive British methods were abandoned, with the BPF adopting American code and signalling practices to avoid any confusion. Its men even swapped their tropical whites for US-style khaki working uniforms to try to blend in.

Nimitz had good reason to welcome the BPF because his own fleet was facing unprecedented challenges by early 1945. The Japanese carrier force was long sunk, and even the enemy’s big surface ships (including the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built) no longer represented a major threat, given the overwhelming strength of US naval air power. In their desperation, however, the Japanese had raised a volunteer force of suicide pilots to deliberately fly explosives-packed aircraft into American warships – the notorious Kamikaze (‘Divine Wind’) squadrons. The first Kamikaze attacks had been launched at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944 and their effectiveness was immediately obvious: a manned missile could be steered more accurately to its target, was harder to shoot down with Combat Air Patrol (CAP) interceptors or AA fire, and often did more damage than a conventional bomb or torpedo. With no need to conserve fuel for a return journey, a Kamikaze also had much longer range than a normal manned bomber. At Leyte Gulf, Nimitz had lost an escort carrier to a suicide attack, with three other carriers badly damaged. It was likely that the Kamikaze effort would be much greater when the Allies launched Operation ICEBERG, the attack on Okinawa (clearly a stepping-stone towards an invasion of Japan proper), and the Japanese position became existential.

The British participated in ICEBERG in two stints, from 26 March to 20 April and (following an interim stay in the Philippines to resupply) again from 4 May to 25 May. The BPF’s task was to guard the left flank of the invasion fleet by attacking Japanese airbases on Formosa (Taiwan) and the Sakishima Islands. British offensive air power was handicapped by carrier design decisions made years earlier. It had always been assumed that the RN’s flat tops would be operating in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, well within range of large, land-based enemy aircraft. Any British carrier, then, had to be capable of absorbing a lot of punishment. Flight decks were correspondingly armoured (typically three inches of steel plating) and below-decks hangars closed and compartmentalised to prevent the spread of fire. The necessary trade-off was in aircraft carrying capacity. Most British fleet carriers could hold between forty-four and fifty-two Fleet Air Arm (FAA) aircraft, and even the most commodious of them, HMS Indefatigable, could manage only sixty-nine. By comparison, a US Navy Essex-class fleet carrier could carry ninety planes.

The flipside to this was that a Kamikaze hit which might cripple an American carrier with its unarmoured deck and spacious open-sided hangars would do correspondingly little damage to its RN counterpart. The most serious incident during the BPF’s operations off Formosa happened late on the morning of 4 May, when an A6M ‘Zero’ fighter crashed into HMS Formidable. Kamikazes often attacked alone, hugging the ocean surface to avoid radar contact until the last minute, so that they were only spotted visually a few thousand yards from their target – 3,000 yards in this case – leaving barely seconds to react. A ‘huge cone of converging yellow balls’ from the fleet’s AA batteries began to hammer away at the Zero, but its pilot was undeterred, successfully releasing a 500-pound bomb on to Formidable’s flight deck before slamming into it himself. There was a great flash of light and resounding shudder felt throughout the ship. ‘All we could see was the outline of her hull,’ wrote an RN officer observing from another vessel. ‘And rising from it from stem to stern was an enormous pall of black angry smoke, belching furiously as huge red tongues of flame shot upwards every time something else caught fire.’[60]

Eight ratings were killed, another thirty-six badly burnt and injured, and eleven FAA aircraft destroyed. The damage to Furious appeared incapacitating at first sight. In fact, though, all the deck had suffered was a sixteen-square-foot dent which, with the application of some quick-drying cement and steel patches, was flightworthy again within six hours. It is salutary to compare this with the experience of the USS Bunker Hill, hit by two Zeroes under similar circumstances on 11 May. The American ship’s flimsy teak flight deck was penetrated in several places and devastating gasoline fires spread in the vulnerable open workshop spaces below, killing in all 396 sailors and airmen and wounding another 264. Bunker Hill had to retire to the US Navy yard in Puget Sound and saw no further wartime action. ‘When a Kamikaze hits a Limey carrier it’s just a case of “Sweepers, man your brooms”,’ commented an admiring American liaison officer.

Rather less impressive was the FAA’s accident record throughout ICEBERG. The British carrier fleet only lost twenty-six aircraft in combat, but another seventy-two were destroyed when no enemy was present, sixty-one of these due to deck crashes. The Supermarine Seafire fighter, a modified version of the Spitfire flown by Indefatigable’s flight groups, was the chief culprit. The victor of the Battle of Britain had never been designed to withstand the rough handling of a carrier landing, and its fragile undercarriage frequently collapsed when slamming on to a moving deck. While the US Navy carriers lost one in four of their total aircraft complement during ICEBERG, the RN flat tops lost one in three. It is not surprising that the British were happy to switch from Seafires to more robust American maritime fighter types like the Grumman Hellcat and the Vought Corsair.[61]

*

In mid-July, after refitting in Australia, the BPF rejoined the US fleet to begin attacks on airbases in the Japanese homeland. Nimitz had good reason to welcome it back; thanks to Kamikaze losses among his own flat tops off Okinawa, the hardier British carriers now made up one-quarter of his naval aviation force. They would be needed if Operation OLYMPIC, the projected invasion of the southernmost of the Japanese home islands, was to take place as scheduled at the beginning of November. This would be a preliminary to CORONET, an even bigger assault on the Kantō Plain of Honshu Island, tentatively proposed for 1 March 1946.

The carrier fleet would not be the only British Commonwealth contribution to the invasion of Japan. Churchill had already promised that ten squadrons of RAF, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand four-engine heavy bombers – ‘Tiger Force’ – would be transferred from Europe to the Pacific to participate in the incendiary attacks on Japanese cities already being carried out by the USAAF’s B-29 Superfortresses. By late July, some of Harris’s veteran Lancaster crews had departed the UK for Canada, where their aircraft were being specially modified for in-flight refuelling capability before their transfer to their new operational bases on Okinawa.

A ‘Commonwealth Corps’ of three divisions – one British, one Canadian, one Australian – had also been offered to the Americans to participate in CORONET. Montgomery’s old command, 3rd Infantry Division, had been earmarked as the British contribution to this corps. Not long after V-E Day, plans were already under way to dispatch it across the Atlantic so that it could be re-equipped with US weapons and vehicles (General Douglas Macarthur, who would command CORONET, had insisted on homogeneity within his invasion force). The old sweats of the 3rd Infantry Division – in such regular battalions as the 1st Suffolks and 2nd East Yorks – had been through Dunkirk and D-Day. In early summer 1945 they were looking forward, not unreasonably, to a swift repatriation from Germany and a return to civilian life. It must have come as quite a surprise to be told that, no, they were not going home after all, but were in fact heading halfway across the world to take Tokyo instead.

In the end, neither OLYMPIC nor CORONET ever happened. On 6 August the Americans dropped the world’s first nuclear weapon, ‘Little Boy’, on the city of Hiroshima, followed three days afterwards by the second, ‘Fat Man’, on Nagasaki. The two atomic attacks, plus the Soviet declaration of war on Japan on 8 August, and a veiled Allied assurance that the imperial system might be spared if Tokyo would agree to an immediate surrender, were enough to persuade Emperor Hirohito’s Cabinet finally to capitulate on 12 August. The news was formally transmitted to the Allies two days later.

The decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan was not a British one, and so it falls outside the scope of this story. Legally, however, and perhaps morally too, this should not have been the case, and that does form a significant coda to it.

It was, after all, the UK which had established the world’s first state-funded nuclear weapons programme, codenamed ‘Tube Alloys’, in September 1941.[62] Indeed, the British lead in atomic fission research at that point had been so marked that, shortly before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had suggested to Churchill that their two countries establish a joint programme on terms of equal partnership. It was the sort of deal the British would have jumped at later in the war, but at the time the prime minister, perhaps not yet understanding the significance of Tube Alloys, had replied tardily and vaguely, and so the opportunity had been lost.[63] FDR, not wishing to see the United States fall behind, convened his own working committee to examine nuclear weapons research. In mid-1942 this became the Manhattan Project, under the overall direction of Major-General Leslie R. Groves. By December that year the Americans had already produced the first working nuclear reactor in Chicago and were busy building a massive plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to manufacture weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, as well as a laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico (‘Project Y’) to design and build atomic bombs under the leadership of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Tube Alloys, meanwhile, which had been handed over to ICI for future development, had hardly progressed at all. As its envious chief scientist Wallace Akers put it, it had already become a ‘minor and spare-time occupation’ in comparison with the lavishly resourced Manhattan effort.[64] By 1942 Britain was spending about £500,000 a year on atomic weaponry, the United States more than twenty times as much.[65] Sir John Anderson, who had been placed in political charge of Tube Alloys, warned Churchill that Britain’s ‘pioneering work’ was ‘a dwindling asset’, and that ‘unless we capitalise it quickly, we shall be outstripped’. The task of developing an independent British Bomb was becoming futile; the country simply did not have the resources to spare during a total war. The best bet for the UK would be to try to get in on the American programme on whatever terms it could achieve.[66]

On the face of it, Churchill played a poor hand well. At the Quadrant Conference in August 1943 he persuaded FDR to sign an understanding formalising the pooling of atomic information between the two powers. Both leaders also agreed that the UK and USA would each hold a veto on any use of a future Allied Bomb against an enemy state. The first members of the British scientific mission to Los Alamos, many of whom were actually European émigrés, began arriving in December 1943. They included Otto Frisch, who successfully calculated the amount of uranium required for the Hiroshima Bomb; Niels Bohr, the Danish Nobel laureate who acted as something of a father-confessor to Oppenheimer; and Klaus Fuchs, who revealed Los Alamos’s existence to the Soviets. Exactly what difference the British made to the Manhattan Project’s success is an open question. Groves called it ‘helpful but not vital’, but he conceded that without it, the Bomb probably would have not been ready to use in August 1945.[67] A year earlier, at their last meeting at the president’s home in Hyde Park, New York, Churchill and FDR had drawn up an aide-memoire agreeing that full Anglo–US nuclear cooperation would continue after the war unless both parties mutually agreed to end it.

So far, so good. The problem was that both the Quadrant and Hyde Park documents were presidential executive orders, not Acts of Congress, and Roosevelt, as was his way, did not bother letting anyone else in his administration know just what he had committed the United States to (the American copy of the 1944 aide-memoire ended up getting misfiled).[68] After FDR died in April 1945, Truman made it clear to the British that he did not feel particularly bound by anything his predecessor had said. On 2 July, Churchill formally extended the Americans permission to drop the Bomb on Japan. He did it without consulting his own chiefs of staff or the War Cabinet, or inquiring where and when precisely it was going to be used. Truman had not sought this permission and there is little reason to think he would have behaved any differently had he not received it. The British heard about the bombing of Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August the same way everyone else in the world did, by listening to the news from America. It was no longer really any of their business.

16

To Beat the System

Just as they had learned about the start of the nuclear age by radio barely a week earlier, so the British heard of Japan’s surrender in a BBC broadcast – the news delivered this time by the prime minister himself – in the first minutes of Wednesday morning, 15 August 1945. ‘The last of our enemies is laid low,’ he said. ‘Peace has once again come to the world. Let us thank God for this great deliverance and his mercies. God save the King!’[1] Wednesday and Thursday were declared public holidays on the same model as V-E Day. It was decided, though, to hold the State Opening of Parliament on 15 August as planned. As a result, George VI’s procession on Wednesday morning from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in an open-topped landau, escorted by the Household Cavalry, took on the coincidental but welcome aspect of a parade for ‘Victory-over-Japan’ (V-J) Day, cheered on in late-summer drizzle by tens of thousands of revelling Londoners.[2]

Once the King’s Speech was delivered at a little after 4 p.m., the Commons reassembled in St Stephen’s Hall to hear the prime minister formally announce the Japanese surrender to Parliament. The news was given to MPs in very much the same manner with which they had received the announcement of Germany’s surrender three months before. One detail was different, however. It was not Winston Churchill making the announcement this time; it was Clement Attlee. Twenty days earlier, having lost the United Kingdom’s first general election in a decade, Churchill had tendered his resignation to the king. ‘A very sad meeting,’ George VI recorded in his diary. ‘I told him I thought the people were very ungrateful.’[3] A few minutes after Churchill had left Buckingham Palace came a moment of dry bathos that would later befit an Ealing comedy: Attlee, who in such a film would have been played by the likes of Raymond Huntley, or perhaps a young Alec Guinness, showed up at the palace gates in a little Hillman sedan, driven by his wife (and notoriously accident-prone chauffeur), Violet. Within minutes he had become Britain’s third, and as it turned out, last, prime minister of the Second World War.

‘Mr. Attlee does not look to me like a man who is hungry for power,’ Stalin had remarked in a wry aside to Churchill at the Potsdam Conference the day before the election result had been announced.[4] The Soviet dictator was not alone in finding the Labour Party leader’s ascent to power unlikely. Few democratic transformations have been so unanticipated in British history as that of 26 July 1945. In Taunton, factory worker Muriel Green called the news that Labour had won 393 out of 640 Commons seats ‘a staggering surprise…I simply jumped up and down with joy and excitement.’ In Sheffield, Edie Rutherford wrote that ‘everyone is suffering from shock…[the] Tories from the shock of surprise at not getting in; others at shock of getting in’.[5] Mass-Observation summarised the general reaction to the result as ‘sheer amazement’.[6]

Most Tory-leaning newspapers had confidently predicted a Conservative victory, albeit one with a reduced majority for Churchill’s party. Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express told its readers to expect a Tory majority of over sixty seats.[7] The Daily Mail warned Labour supporters on the eve of the result to ‘accept an adverse verdict’ and not to sulk ‘like spoiled children’ when the announcement of their defeat was made. Even anti-Tory papers like the Liberal Manchester Guardian and News Chronicle had forecast at best a hung Parliament, with another Conservative-led coalition government to follow.[8] Conservative Central Office cautiously expected a favourable majority for the party of between fifty-six and eighty seats.[9]

On the face of it, there had been sound reasons to expect a Conservative victory. The Tories held 361 seats, meaning that Labour would need a formidable swing in the national vote to stand any chance of recalibrating the parliamentary balance, and the Conservatives’ leader remained overwhelmingly popular as prime minister, perhaps more so than at any time in the war so far. Polls in April and May 1945 put personal support for Churchill at 91 per cent and 83 per cent respectively.[10] There was also the precedent of the last ‘khaki election’, held in December 1918 at the end of the First World War. David Lloyd George’s Conservative-dominated coalition government had been decisively returned to office with 521 seats, their Liberal opponents losing 236 MPs in a rout which had destroyed the old Gladstonian establishment once and for all. Lloyd George had campaigned as ‘the man who won the war’. Churchill could do likewise. ‘People won’t throw out Winston Churchill,’ Stalin had assured Truman at Potsdam. It was simply a matter of ‘self preservation’. The new US president agreed.[11]

By the evening of 26 July, however, it was clear that Churchill had indeed been thrown out, and by an astonishing margin. Labour had taken 227 new seats, allowing it to form its first-ever majority administration. The Conservatives meanwhile had lost 172, shrinking their place in the Commons to a miserable rump of 189. The 10.7 per cent vote swing away from the Tories to Labour was the largest that had taken place in Britain since the Act of Union in 1800. Eighteen Labour gains occurred in constituencies which had dutifully returned a Tory MP in every previous election for over a century.[12] Ancient Tory strongholds across the boroughs and shires – the likes of Dover, Winchester, Chislehurst, Buckingham and Hitchin – fell. In Birmingham Sparkbrook, Leo Amery, who had held the constituency since its creation in 1918, had guessed in early July that he might receive 12,000 votes to his Labour opponent Percy Shurmer’s 10,000. ‘The quiet voter, especially the women’s, and the soldier’s vote may have just kept me in,’ he wrote in his diary. In fact, Shurmer got over 14,000 votes and Amery fewer than 8,500.

The great West Midlands city embodied, as it turned out, the epitome of Tory woe. All of Birmingham’s constituencies had previously been represented by Conservative MPs; now ten of them had gone to Labour, including the Birmingham West seat once held by Joseph and Austen Chamberlain. Only three municipal seats had stayed blue.[13] Elsewhere, rising stars within the Tory ranks had found themselves unceremoniously turfed out of the Commons. Churchill’s former parliamentary private secretary and wartime minister of information, Brendan Bracken, lost at Paddington North; Harold Macmillan, a Conservative prime minister in waiting, was defeated at Stockton.[14] Churchill’s son Randolph had been gifted the Commons seat of Preston unopposed in a 1940 by-election and the prime ministerial dauphin defended it five years later with a surprising amount of energy, given his habitual laziness and insobriety. He lost by 3,000 votes anyway.[15]

For some Conservatives, the election of a socialist government betokened a kind of Bolshevik Armageddon in the Home Counties. It was ‘a worse catastrophe than if we had lost the war’, said one ex–bank manager to Mass-Observation. ‘I’m left speechless with horror,’ agreed an upper-class woman. ‘Never in my wildest dreams did I think such a thing could happen.’ Another woman woke in terror on the night the results came in, mistaking a thunderstorm for an air raid by Stalin’s bombers. ‘Have the Russians begun?’ she was heard to cry out.[16]

It was not just Tories who were surprised by the scale of Labour’s win. Even many members of the victorious People’s Party had expected the Conservatives to romp home. Running for re-election in South Shields, Labour MP James Chuter Ede was certain in the final days of the campaign that he was going to lose. ‘The logic of arithmetic convince[s] me I am out,’ he wrote in his diary. In fact, he increased his vote share by over 11 per cent. ‘I began to wonder’, he wrote on the evening of Labour’s great national breakthrough, ‘if I should wake up to find it all a dream.’[17] The party’s senior leadership had been pessimistic to a man in the run-up to 26 July. Given Churchill’s personal popularity, Herbert Morrison had considered it ‘suicide’ to fight an election so close to the end of the war, while Hugh Dalton had worried that Labour was on the verge of being ‘cast into the wilderness for another generation’.[18] Ernest Bevin had been so convinced his ministerial career was over that he had booked a holiday cottage in Cornwall for late July in order to enjoy a well-deserved rest.[19]

Attlee himself had thought the Conservatives might at best be reduced to a majority of about forty seats.[20] On receiving his new prime minister at Buckingham Palace, the king noted that the Labour leader seemed ‘very surprised’ to be kissing hands with the sovereign.[21] A couple of days later Attlee flew to Potsdam to take up the vacated British seat among the ‘Big Three’. When he got there, Molotov quizzed him suspiciously. The old Bolshevik found it hard to believe that a man capable of overthrowing Winston Churchill genuinely hadn’t known the result until the votes were counted.[22]

*

In fact, it had been the conviction of Attlee and his right-hand man, Bevin, that Churchill would be returned as prime minister by popular acclaim when the war was over that had deterred them for so long from breaking up the coalition. By spring 1945, the thirty-seventh Parliament of the United Kingdom had been well into its tenth year. No previous Parliament had sat as long in Westminster since the days of Charles II. Under normal circumstances there would have been a general election generating a replacement long before. Unlike in the United States, however, which adhered to an unaltered calendar of congressional and presidential elections throughout the Second World War, the British government postponed the statutory dissolution of Parliament in November 1940 with a twelve-month Prolongation Act, and this was repeated year after year as the war went on without much comment or controversy.

By 1945, though, that decade-old Parliament was looking decidedly threadbare, and the country’s democratic deficit was widening. Neither Chamberlain, the prime minister who had originally taken Britain into the war, nor his successor had been directly elected by the people. Eight million Britons, 15 per cent of the population, had reached the age of twenty-one since the start of the conflict. Most were serving in the armed forces or working in war industry. Hardly any of them had ever had an opportunity to vote. This could not go on forever. In November 1944, when the fifth Prolongation Act was put before the House, Churchill made it clear that he hoped it would be for the last time.

It was within the power of the Labour Party to bring the Parliament to an end any time it liked; all it had to do was resign from the governing coalition. And by spring 1945, many Labour MPs were keen to do exactly that. Rank-and-file Labour backbenchers had always been suspicious of their leadership’s connivance in office with a reactionary old Tory like Churchill. Issues such as the Greek crisis had resharpened partisan divisions over the winter of 1944–5. Still, the risks of leaving the coalition, which was genuinely popular among voters, were great. If Labour appeared to be prematurely reintroducing factional politics before the war was won, it might be accused of putting party before country and suffer the consequences at the ballot box. If the coalition was to end, then, the timing of its dissolution was crucial.

In early October 1944, Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC) decided that the party would continue to work with Churchill so long as Germany remained to be beaten, but it made no guarantees about what would happen once the war in Europe was over, even if Japan (as now looked more and more likely) was still undefeated at that point.[23] An election would not anyway seriously interfere with the fighting of a distant war in the Pacific in which Britain was only a secondary co-belligerent. Churchill, for his part, would have preferred to keep the coalition going until Japan’s defeat, if not longer. He liked working with men like Attlee and Bevin – rather more than he liked working with many of his fellow Tories, as it happened. Still, above all Churchill wanted to carry on being prime minister. If Labour insisted on ending the coalition and forcing an election, he wanted it to happen while his personal popularity was still at its height and could be most efficiently mobilised for the Conservative Party’s cause.

For that reason, ten days after V-E Day, Churchill presented his Labour colleagues in the War Cabinet with a choice. They could commit to keeping the coalition going until the Japanese surrendered, however long that took; or else Parliament could be dissolved at once and an election held as soon as possible. Attlee and Bevin had actually connived in the drafting of this letter, hoping that the NEC, which would have the final say in Labour’s decision, would baulk at the prospect of a snap election on unfavourable terms and allow the status quo to continue. But the plan backfired. On 19 May, Herbert Morrison took advantage of Attlee’s absence at the United Nations meeting in San Francisco to persuade the NEC, which had convened in Blackpool in advance of the annual party conference, to reject Churchill’s offer.[24] Labour made a counter-offer: postpone the dissolution until October, by which time the administrative machinery required to hold an election would be in better shape.

Churchill refused to take the bait. He knew that a new electoral register, which would probably be more favourable to his opponents, would be in place by October; plus he suspected that Labour was playing for time, hoping that the nation’s enthusiasm for its prime minister would have dissipated somewhat by autumn. On 23 May, Britain’s wartime leader for almost exactly five years submitted his resignation to the king, and the coalition he had created after the fall of Chamberlain in spring 1940 was at last dissolved. George VI immediately reappointed Churchill to lead an all-Conservative caretaker ministry which would keep things ticking over until the votes could be counted and a new Parliament convened.[25]

No British election of the modern era has been conducted under circumstances quite as slapdash and chaotic as those of summer 1945. The existing electoral register was hopelessly out of date. Thirty-eight million civilians had changed address during the war, many more than once; their paperwork had often not kept up.[26] Complaints about errors and omissions on the register were a constant theme of the campaign. Churchill himself, it turned out, had been accidentally disenfranchised.[27] The populations of constituencies which had had roughly equal numbers of voters back in 1935 had come to be wildly different thanks to the vicissitudes of war. Some had swollen unmanageably; Hendon, Middlesex, now had over 200,000 eligible voters. Others, including Clement Attlee’s Limehouse division in London’s East End, had shrunk dramatically. There was no time to sort any of this out other than to add a couple of dozen additional seats in some especially bloated counties – thus Churchill ended up running for re-election in an entirely new constituency, Woodford, carved from his old and much-enlarged seat of Epping. There were approximately 3 million service voters, many of them outside Europe, who represented a unique problem for the ballot counters. It was decided that while almost all residents of the United Kingdom would cast their votes on Thursday, 5 July, the ballot boxes would then be sealed and put away for three weeks until all the service postal votes had been collated too.[28]

It was not a nice election. Platitudes about wartime unity very quickly went out of the window. The People newspaper called it ‘the bitterest general election’ for years and ‘one of the grubbiest’.[29] Probably its most famous moment came on the night of 4 June, during the first of the Conservative Party’s several radio broadcasts on the BBC, when Churchill suggested that to maintain their planned socialist institutions Labour’s leaders would have to ‘fall back on some form of Gestapo’. To many of Churchill’s listeners it seemed an extraordinary accusation, given that just a few weeks earlier the prime minister had been in coalition with exactly these same men. Afterwards, 69 per cent of people in a Gallup poll agreed that it had been a bad speech.[30]

It was, however, hardly the only time in the campaign that one side would charge the other with Nazi sympathies or methods. Labour had been accusing the Tories of crypto-fascism for years. Its official party handbook for candidates at the 1945 election claimed that the Conservatives had been ‘coddling and appeasing their friends Hitler and Mussolini’ throughout the 1930s; in another election broadcast, the Labour MP Philip Noel-Baker bluntly suggested that before the war ‘the Tories helped the Axis’. Stafford Cripps, now restored to the Labour whip, accused the Conservatives of ‘getting nearer and nearer the Führer ideas’. Meanwhile, the Conservatives sneered at the NEC chairman Harold Laski as ‘the Gauleiter’.[31] The point about Churchill’s miscalculation is not that it was an unprecedented breach of decorum in an otherwise respectful national conversation. Smears had been flying thick and fast from both sides long before Churchill invoked Himmler’s secret police. It was that he, specifically, was not supposed to say those sorts of things. As a national figurehead, Churchill was meant to be above the gutter language of partisan politics, and therein lay the sin. ‘It was wicked,’ one man told Mass-Observation. ‘I’ve always respected the old chap, but this is such a lump of muck. You’d think he thought we were kids to be scared of the dark.’[32]

On the day of polling, turnout was relatively low at about 73 per cent of eligible voters. But this can probably be ascribed to the disruptions of war more than a lack of interest.[33] Certainly, there was little evidence of apathy among the voters.[34] Speakers like Churchill, Attlee, Bevin and Eden regularly packed the hustings, and even relatively unknown candidates addressed big crowds. Barbara Betts, better known in later life as Harold Wilson’s minister Barbara Castle, was competing for the first time for a parliamentary seat in Blackburn. She remembered ‘every seat occupied’ in the town’s St George’s Hall when she spoke on the eve of the poll: ‘they were lining the walls, they were hanging over the balconies, and there was a sort of unbelievable buoyancy in the atmosphere’.[35] Over 13 million national newspapers, one for every three adults in the country, were bought every day during the campaign, most of them taking stoutly partisan editorial lines.[36] Just under half the adult population listened in to the BBC’s party political broadcasts; only ITMA got a bigger audience.[37] Whatever else may be said about the 1945 election, the British were definitely paying attention.

In East Fulham, where Mass-Observers kept up an in-depth account of the election, local people were asked what the most pressing issue was to them. The results were:

Housing: 48 per cent

Employment: 15 per cent

Social Security: 9 per cent

Health: 1 per cent[38]

Prior to D-Day, fear of a post-war slump and the mass unemployment that would accompany it had been uppermost in Britons’ minds. Now it was becoming increasingly obvious that the problem at the end of the war was going to be a labour shortage, not a surfeit of it. ‘Beveridge’ had been the issue of 1942 and 1943. By 1945 the voters had other concerns. Labour’s election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, did not mention Sir William by name at all – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that he was busy running as a Liberal Party candidate in Berwick-upon-Tweed, where he would lose. Labour also relegated consideration of social security reform to a single paragraph well towards the end of the manifesto. It was the Conservatives, in fact, who devoted rather more space to the issue in their equivalent document, Winston Churchill’s Declaration of Policy to the Electors, though offering proposals more or less identical to Labour’s. Let Us Face the Future had just as little to say about health reform. The coalition government had published a White Paper in February 1944 proposing the creation of a post-war national health service, but the idea had provoked little discussion and a year later it remained a relatively minor public policy issue. It is a little strange in retrospect that the two signature achievements of the post-war Attlee government which are lauded most today, the welfare state and the NHS, were not considered especially high priorities either by the voters or by Labour itself in 1945.

As in East Fulham, however, housing was a priority across Britain – not surprising in a country in which two residences out of every seven had been destroyed or damaged by enemy action during the war, in which there had been virtually no new construction since 1939, and to which over 4 million demobilised men and women would soon be returning, looking for a home for themselves and their families.[39] ‘Home is the best word in the English language,’ said the former Evening Standard editor Michael Foot, running for a Labour seat in Plymouth. ‘We shall not have won the peace until every citizen in Devonport and every citizen of England has a good roof over his head.’[40] Although both parties placed great emphasis on their housing policy during the campaign, there is evidence that Labour did a rather better job at this and was more trusted on the issue. Many Labour candidates had been on the housing committees of their local councils during the war and could speak to the matter with some authority.[41]

In theory, housing should have been a friendly issue for the Conservatives: the interwar National Government had an impressive record on slum clearance. Nineteen out of every twenty Tory candidates duly mentioned housing in their election addresses, but they struggled to articulate exactly what Conservative Party policy actually comprised.[42] In Gallup polling, for every five people who said they trusted the Conservatives more on housing, eight said they preferred Labour.[43] It was not a vast difference, but it may have mattered at the margins. Strategically, this reflected a more general and widespread lack of Churchillian ‘grip’ on the Conservative Party message during the election. Not only had the prime minister never run a national campaign such as this one, but he had always maintained a rather ambivalent attitude towards his own status as a Tory.[44] Who the Conservatives needed at their head in summer 1945 was a loyal, efficient, dutiful party manager like Stanley Baldwin; the man they had instead was the exciting and world-famous but maverick and undisciplined Winston Churchill.[45]

*

‘I must confess I found the event of Thursday rather odd and queer, especially after the wonderful welcomes I had received from all classes,’ Churchill wrote to his old friend Lord Quickswood a few days after his defeat. There had been, he thought, ‘something pent up in the British people after twenty years which required relief’. [46] On the night of the election count he had not felt so coolly detached from it all. When Clementine had suggested that his leaving office might be a blessing in disguise, the gloomy premier replied: ‘At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.’[47] Labour had declined to put up a candidate against Churchill in Woodford. But an independent, Alexander Hancock, had run against the prime minister, and while he had never had a serious chance of actually taking the seat, he had all the same garnered a surprisingly large one-quarter of the vote, a genuine shock to the old campaigning warhorse. Later, in his memoirs, Churchill ascribed his party’s defeat to the effects of the war on its institutions. ‘Practically all the agents of the Conservative Party had found war work,’ he argued in Triumph and Tragedy:

The core of the Labour Party was at that time the trade unions…they all did work on the home front which no one else could have done, and at the same time they maintained – and who could blame them? – their party affiliations; and once our mortal danger had passed these increasingly took on a partisan character. Thus, on the one side there had been complete effacement of party activities, while on the other they ran forward unresisted.

‘This is not a reproach,’ insisted Churchill, despite pretty clearly implying that the election had been lost because one side had put country before party and the other had not.[48] Other Conservatives blamed the media, especially the BBC, as well as the more generally pernicious influence of a left-leaning intelligentsia. The party chairman, Ralph Assheton, claimed afterwards that ‘the flow of [anti-Tory] propaganda never ceased’.[49] Particular suspicion was directed towards the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), a citizens’ education programme introduced in 1941 to infuse listless squaddies with some sense of what they ought to be fighting for. Socialistic lecturers, it was darkly hinted by Conservatives, had filled the men’s heads with Fabian claptrap, and as a result an army of zombies in battledress had voted out their wartime leader.[50]

None of these explanations holds much water. Undoubtedly the Tory Party apparatus had atrophied during the war; so, to some extent, had Labour’s. But it remained one of the most impressive election-winning machines in democratic history, and it certainly entered the campaign with a more robust treasury than Labour, spending an average of more than twice as much per candidate (though Attlee’s party may have targeted its money more effectively).[51] Conservatives’ complaints afterwards that they were disadvantaged by systematic media bias rang a little hollow, given the enthusiastic support they had enjoyed from the mass-market Daily Express, Daily Mail and Daily Sketch. Folk memories of the influence of left-leaning speakers like J. B. Priestley on the BBC need to be put in context. Priestley’s Postscripts, which had had a vaguely progressive lilt, had ceased to air on the Home Service way back in October 1940 after complaints from Conservatives, and it is not clear in any case how coherently his listeners had ever received them. Tony Crosland later remembered two middle-aged Tories lapping up Priestley’s every word during the Battle of Britain, ‘blissfully unconscious of any real Left tendency’, and with their party allegiances totally untroubled by the message they were hearing.[52]

As for ABCA, whatever the aspirations of its lecturers might have been, it seems for most soldiers to have been more an opportunity for a smoke-break and a crafty game of cards than any serious reflection on the nation’s political order. ‘Most officers dutifully recited the pamphlets as if they were Army Council instructions,’ recalled the novelist Anthony Burgess, then an Army Education Corps sergeant. ‘The men did not understand, and they were bored.’[53] More to the point, most servicemen and -women did not vote anyway in 1945. Of about 4.5 million eligible voters in uniform, only 2.9 million applied to have their names put on the service register, and of these just 1.7 million actually cast a ballot in the end. This was out of more than 25 million total civilian voters. The Forces vote probably did go mostly to Labour – not because of ABCA, but because most service personnel were young men, and they made up the party’s core support base. The fact is, Attlee would have won the election handsomely even if not a single soldier, sailor or airman had taken part.[54]

*

Needless to say, once Labour had recovered from its shock at the scale of its own victory, it offered a very different account of what had just happened. It dismissed the idea that mere party management or fashionable rhetoric or the petty grievances of idle soldiers awaiting demob had had anything to do with Labour’s big win. The People’s Party had succeeded, rather, because the men and women of Britain had at last embraced democratic socialism. They had ‘proclaimed their will and their policy with an emphasis which will hearten the lovers of freedom and social justice throughout the Earth’, declared Labour’s official newspaper the Daily Herald.[55] Labour argued that its victory was the expression of a fundamental change in the national temperament over the previous six years. The people had fought a People’s War; now they expected their reward to be a profound and permanent alteration to national life. They had rejected the discredited laissez-faire conservatism of the ‘Hungry Thirties’ and chosen instead the modern, planned, democratic socialist society spelled out in Let Us Face the Future. According to the Fabian novelist Margaret Cole, there had been a ‘gradual awakening of millions of ordinary people to the fact of their own importance, abilities and responsibilities’.[56] Nor was this merely a transient victory, but an irreversible one. Labour’s politics were here to stay.[57]

This interpretation would prove enduring – a good deal more enduring, as it turned out, than the Labour Party in actual government. Historians have generally seen what happened in Britain in 1945 as the expression of a revolutionary popular mood and a profound leftward shift in the political alignment of the country. ‘Labour’s victory was a tangible result of the People’s War,’ is how Selina Todd put it. ‘The voters’ aspirations testified to a transformation in the relationship between the state and the people.’[58] They wanted ‘a world in which there would be greater opportunities for all, where inherited wealth and privilege would count for less, where there was greater social justice’, according to William Harrington and Peter Young. ‘These were infectious, heady feelings…there was hardly a person in the country who at some point had not found himself caught up and involved.’[59] Some historians came to detest everything about this supposed ‘1945 Revolution’. But they never doubted that it had occurred.[60]

Was this actually the case?

Across the UK in July 1945, Labour candidates received 11,992,292 votes, 47 per cent of all ballots cast, for which the party was rewarded with 393 MPs, or 61 per cent of all Commons seats. Conservative and Ulster Unionist candidates, as well as ‘national’ Liberal and Labour candidates closely allied with them, received 9,960,809 votes, 40 per cent of all ballots cast, for which they achieved 213 seats, or 33 per cent of the Commons total.[61] One immediate thing to note, then, is the enormous technical advantage which the first-past-the-post system gave Attlee’s party on the day of decision. It took an average of 46,764 votes nationwide to put a Conservative coalition MP into Parliament, but only 30,515 votes to elect a Labour MP. Labour’s support was much more efficiently distributed geographically than that of the Tories, and the scale of its parliamentary success was artificially inflated as a result.

Perhaps Churchill’s party had no right to complain about this: after all, it too had previously benefited from the byzantine arithmetic of first-past-the-post.[62] It is nonetheless worth observing that in this ‘1945 Revolution’, more people voted for non-Labour parties than for Labour. Even if we spread the net more generously to imagine a broadly ‘pro-socialist’ voting bloc – in other words, including along with Labour votes the votes cast for the Communists, the Scottish Nationalists and the various independent left-wing parties too – that would make for just over 12 million ballots in favour of socialism against 11.94 million against. That was a slim majority with which to assert a mandate for radical change.[63] The British were hardly speaking with a single voice at the end of the Second World War.

Indeed, looking back at 1945, what is far more striking than the positive enthusiasm for Attlee’s party is the nation’s much more pointed rejection of the Conservatives. About 15 million votes – three-fifths of all those cast – were cast against the Tory-led coalition.[64] It is not so much that Britons were voting eagerly for Labour as they were abandoning a government led by Churchill. Labour, to some extent, was just the fortunate beneficiary of a wave of hostility directed towards the Tories. The real puzzle, then, is less why Attlee got elected and more why the man who had most decidedly ‘won the war’ in 1945 – and who, it is important to remember, remained enormously popular – was unable to replicate Lloyd George’s achievement twenty-seven years earlier and translate these advantages into electoral victory.

The 1918 precedent turned out to be irrelevant. So much was different in 1945. The sudden end of the First World War had come as a shock to the British; for several months in spring 1918 it had even looked as though it was the Germans who were going to win. The electorate had, then, gone to those hustings that year still in a belligerent mood. ‘Hang the Kaiser’ had been the watchword of the day. Public debate had centred less on domestic policy and more on the fate of imperial Germany and its alleged war criminals. Lloyd George and his coalition allies had made hay out of accusing Liberal and Labour MPs of being soft on the barbarous Hun.

By contrast, the inevitability of Nazi Germany’s defeat had been obvious to everyone long before V-E Day. The electorate in July 1945 was far more interested in reconstruction issues than in how to treat the enemy. Hitler was already dead, and there was no question but that the Germans had grievously suffered as a result of their own wickedness. The newsreels of the grim ashes of Hamburg made that self-evident. In 1918, Lloyd George’s coalition had included all the men who had governed the country for the previous two years; in 1945, Churchill was pitted against former colleagues like Attlee, Bevin and Morrison, highly experienced ministers who had become household names in their own right and who could justifiably take a big share of the credit for victory. Labour’s patriotic credentials were impeccable (sixty-four of its candidates were serving in uniform) and the party was emphatic that it wanted to see the complete defeat of Japan.[65]

Many Tories had thought the personal fame and popularity of their leader would be the most effective card they had to play. The party manifesto had been written as a personal letter from him to the voters and the word ‘Conservative’ did not feature in it once (‘Labour’, meanwhile, appeared forty-eight times in Let Us Face the Future). Churchill was pitched as a British – indeed imperial – leader who transcended petty partisan differences in the national interest. This narrative had its successes. Some voters did indeed see the election as a plebiscite on Churchill’s wartime leadership and cast their ballots accordingly. In East Fulham, Mass-Observation noted that personal loyalty to the prime minister was the single most frequently mentioned justification for supporting the Tories. ‘Churchill got us through this war and I’d feel rather hurt if he wasn’t asked to carry on’; ‘we can’t let him down – he didn’t let us down;’ and so on. This tended to be despite his being Conservative Party leader, however, than because of it. As one thirty-five-year-old woman in Southwark said: ‘they’ll vote for him, not the Tory Party. I’m quite sure the Tory Party’s got nothing to do with it.’[66] Nor did everyone feel that any personal gratitude they may have owed to Churchill for what he had done in the war obliged them to support his party. Nor yet did it mean that he was necessarily considered the best Tory to lead the country in peace. In a March 1945 poll, more people preferred Eden as prime minister of a new all-party governing coalition to Churchill.[67]

The unpopularity of the Tories in 1945 is often ascribed to memories of the Hungry Thirties and the pre-war Conservative Party’s allegedly wretched performance in tackling the menace of high unemployment.[68] Too much can be made of this. Voters old enough in 1945 to have had mature recollections of the MacDonald and Baldwin years were also those least likely to support Attlee. Those aged over forty-nine in 1945 went 53 per cent Tory; those aged thirty to thirty-nine were evenly split. The only birth cohort which decisively supported Labour (by two voters out of three) was made up of Britons born between 1916 and 1924 – in other words, precisely those citizens least likely to have any personal adult memories of the epoch of the Jarrow March and Love on the Dole.[69] It was these, mostly first-time voters, composing about 20 per cent of the electorate, who made up the vanguard of Labour’s victory in 1945. In short, Attlee was swept into power by a revolt of youth against age.[70] Rather few people were persuaded to change their voting allegiance in 1945. Some who had chosen not to vote before the war did so now; some pre-war Conservatives declined to vote at all, but not many of them went so far as to switch to supporting Labour.[71]

What these figures suggest is that the blackening of the Conservative brand by the end of the Second World War was not all due to folk legends of the Slump. It had at least as much to do with hostility built up during the war itself towards those in positions of national authority, for whom the Tories formed an instinctive, if not always coherent, proxy. ‘People feel, in a vague and muddled way,’ thought Harold Nicolson, ‘that all the sacrifices to which they have been exposed…are all the fault of “them” – namely the authorities or the Government. By a totally illogical process of reasoning, they believe that “they” means the upper classes or the Conservatives.’[72]

It was young voters, after all, who had been most exposed to the haw-hawings of clueless patrician officers, the screams of officious NCOs, the nosy-parker intrusions of factory foremen and all the other soul-crushing petty humiliations and inconveniences of wartime life. During the election campaign, the War Office’s morale expert John Sparrow (later Warden of All Soul’s, Oxford) visited British troops in India and Burma to compile a report on the mood of the Army in the Far East. He noted a sardonic sentiment which he had already observed among soldiers in north-western Europe and the Mediterranean: a ‘barrier of mistrust and even hostility towards authority’ which had caused the men to persuade themselves ‘that “they” could perfectly well improve the conditions and shorten the period of service overseas if they wished, and that it is lack of interest and selfishness that prevents them from doing so’.[73]

As Sparrow observed, it would be naïve not to expect this mood of high umbrage to eventually have political ramifications. The British Army in 1945 was hardly on the brink of mutiny, but it was quite eager to vote against its sergeant-majors – or rather the apparatus of power which those sergeant-majors anyway represented (‘to beat the system – now that would be something!’ as one anonymous Welsh Guardsman put it).[74] Such a disposition to ‘give them a good kicking’ seems to have been a popular one among the young at that moment.[75] In East Fulham, 43 per cent of Labour voters indicated that their chief reason for supporting the party was because it was ‘for the working class’ and against ‘them who make vast profits’ (by comparison, only 6 per cent mentioned nationalisation of industry as a principal motivation).[76]

The Labour Party had served in the governing coalition for more than five years, but the perception, however unreasonable, that it had been both inside and outside the wartime government played to its great advantage in 1945. Attlee, Bevin and Morrison got credit for their management of the more popular aspects of the home front, while at the same time rebellious Labour backbenchers got credit for voicing popular frustration when the government did unpopular things like back-pedalling on Beveridge in 1943. Tory backbenchers also rebelled against Churchill now and again, yet they remained villainously associated with ‘them’.

Most members of the polite Jacquerie of summer 1945 identified as working-class. Critically, though, and for the first time ever, Attlee’s party was able to muster support from a significant slice of the middle class too. Estimates as to the size of this slice have varied quite a bit, but somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of white-collar employees appear to have voted Labour in 1945. The party’s message was especially attractive to salaried clerical workers, technicians, teachers and younger professionals – the subaltern class, whether in military uniform or out of it. They too had suffered the cheap tyrannies of ‘them’ in service and civilian life and wanted their revenge.[77]

The Baldwinian hegemony between the wars had rested on the electoral unity of the middle class and disunity of the working class. About half of skilled and unskilled manual labourers had regularly supported the Conservatives in the 1930s. Baldwin’s party had expertly marketed itself as the vessel of ‘the public’ while presenting Labour as the voice of squabbling factionalism, concerned only with advancing the narrow interests of a small segment of the unionised workforce. What the war did was to reverse this, at least temporarily, by recasting Labour as the party of ‘the people’ and the Tories as the defenders of jealous ‘vested interests’. For the first time ever, most of the British proletariat consolidated behind a single party. About seven in ten working-class men and women voted for Attlee.[78]

Meanwhile, the middle-class vote fractured in a way not seen for a quarter-century. In absolute terms, the number of bourgeois Labour voters in 1945 was not that big, but there were enough of them to tip the balance in a swathe of marginal seats in London and the Home Counties. The leafier boroughs of the capital had hitherto been Tory strongholds. Now, forty-eight of London County’s sixty-two constituencies returned a Labour MP, a net increase for the party of twenty-one. This strategy of expanding Labour’s power beyond its traditional East End heartland was exemplified by Herbert Morrison’s decision to abandon his safe Hackney seat for the more affluent and challenging constituency of East Lewisham in south-east London. Thanks to political nous, some luck and a big dollop of party cash, Churchill’s former home secretary pulled it off. By the time the final vote was counted he had converted a former Tory majority of 6,500 into a Labour one of 15,200. The People’s Party had infiltrated the privet-bush suburbs at last.

In retrospect, the real mystery of Attlee’s surprise victory is why it was ever a surprise at all. Between June 1943 and the end of the war, Gallup had asked voters seven times whom they would support if a general election were held tomorrow, and on each occasion Labour had been ahead of the Tories by between twelve and eighteen points.[79] The electoral truce between the two big parties had meant that they had contested no mid-war by-elections, but the Conservatives had had to defend ten constituencies since the beginning of 1944 because of vacancies caused by death or resignation, and despite the absence of a Labour competitor they had lost three of these and had held some of the others only by the skin of their teeth.[80]

Two of the three lost by-elections – Skipton and Chelmsford – had been won by candidates of ‘Common Wealth’, a party of disaffected socialists of a libertarian bent of which the Balliol-educated barrister baronet Sir Richard Acland was the most prominent.[81] What was more significant than the short-lived success of this slightly cranky protest movement, however, was that on every occasion a candidate of the left had triumphed over a Tory. Had an official Labour man or woman been permitted to stand at those three by-elections, they, and not independent candidates, would most likely have won them. In other words, here was more evidence, for those who wished to see it, of widespread national disaffection with the Conservative Party from which, in the end, Labour was bound to benefit the most.

That few people, whether Labour or Tory, had seen that coming in advance probably speaks to the scepticism with which opinion polling, only recently introduced in the late 1930s from the United States, was still viewed by the British political establishment. In fact, an even more significant polling result had come in just prior to the election. According to Gallup, by June 1945 84 per cent of people had already made up their minds about how they were going to vote.[82] So much of the sound and fury of the campaign, then, proved beside the point. Labour’s victory had already been settled. Indeed, Labour would probably have won a general election held any time after Second Alamein. It had just not realised it.

*

‘We are the masters at the moment!’ Sir Hartley Shawcross, Labour MP for St Helens, would say gloatingly to the Tory opposition benches the year after Attlee’s great victory – and, he added, ‘not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come’.[83] In fact, despite the enormous Labour achievement in 1945, its time in office would be relatively brief. In the February 1950 general election, Labour lost seventy-eight seats and Attlee was left clinging on to power with a Commons majority of just five MPs. The country went to the polls again in October 1951, and this time Churchill’s Conservatives edged out Labour, returning to government with a seventeen-seat majority. Labour’s working-class support had held up fairly well on both occasions – indeed, in the 1951 election it garnered 13.94 million votes to the Conservatives’ 13.7 million – but its votes were distributed much less geographically efficiently than in 1945, and the peculiarities of first-past-the-post had turned against it. Plus, many in the small but important cohort of middle-class protest voters who had secured suburban constituencies like Morrison’s East Lewisham for Labour six years earlier had defected back to the Tories.[84]

Far from cementing Labour in power for a generation as Shawcross had suggested in the heady aftermath of victory, the khaki election at the end of the Second World War had merely produced a brief interregnum in what was otherwise solid mid-century Tory rule. The observation made shortly before the election by a future chairman of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, Bill Anstruther-Gray – ‘we shall get kicked out, but we’ll be back’ – proved more prescient than Shortcross’s boast.[85] Following their 1951 return to power, Anstruther-Gray’s party, initially under the leadership of Churchill and then, after his retirement in 1955, successively Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, would remain the party of government for the next thirteen years. This was a strange thing to happen in a country that had supposedly gone through a profoundly leftward shift as a result of the war.

It may be, as commentators have often remarked, that while Attlee’s party was formally thrown out of power in 1951, most of its policy changes were preserved by the Conservative administrations that followed – that the spirit of the 1945 swing to the left persevered even if the Labour government did not. Which is true enough so far as it goes. After all, neither Churchill nor any of his immediate successors attempted to dismantle the signal achievements of Attlee’s ministers: the Beveridge-reformed welfare state, the NHS, the nationalisation of major industries, the enhanced role of the trade unions in industrial policy and the pursuit of full employment through Keynesian demand management.[86]

But if it is a truism that post-war Conservative governments were quite left-wing, it also needs highlighting just how centrist (if not downright right-wing) Attlee’s government turned out to be. Its ambitions to run the British economy on permanently planned wartime lines were largely abandoned by 1948, as controls gave way to fiscal macroeconomic management.[87] The sanctity of free collective bargaining in the minds of trade union leaders ruled out any kind of industrial wages policy. The share of national income spent on Labour’s post-war welfare state was little higher than it had been under Chamberlain’s in 1938.[88] Rather than operating as democratic socialist collectives as some of the party’s more idealistic members had once imagined, the post-war nationalised industries ended up mostly resembling the kind of public corporations like the BBC which Baldwin’s Conservatives had created between the wars. Middle-class, Tory-voting professionals accommodated themselves to their new role as state employees smoothly enough. Adversarial ‘us and them’ relationships between management and the shop floor flourished undisturbed. The new National Health Service was organised around large teaching hospitals, run by a consultant class permitted to treat their private fee-paying patients in state-owned premises, rather than the democratically controlled ‘health centres’ reformers had once imagined.

Homosexuality and abortion remained illegal in Britain under Labour. Divorce was still difficult. The 1944 Education Act, enacted under the coalition government but put into practice by Attlee’s government, enshrined a two-tier system of state education in which the bulk of resources and opportunities flowed to middle-class children, while some form of Christian celebration became a mandated part of every state-school curriculum for the first time. One of Labour’s keystone pre-war policies had been a programme of massive land nationalisation which, had it ever taken place, might have genuinely shaken up the feudal social structure of the British countryside. Instead, the party reverted in the late 1940s to subsidies to existing landowners to produce cheap home-grown food, leaving the agricultural working class as subordinate to the squirearchy as ever.[89]

So far as the empire went, Labour duly oversaw the independence of India, Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka and the Mandate of Palestine, departures from direct British control which likely would have happened no matter which party had been in power. The remainder of the country’s overseas possessions were considered a quite different issue, however. Morrison said that giving independence to any of Britain’s African colonies would be ‘like giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shotgun’. So far from rapidly decolonising the continent, Attlee thought about creating a vast British-led African army that could carry out the role of national power projection in the 1950s previously performed by India’s jawans.[90] Labour remained far more empire- than Europe-oriented. When Attlee’s Cabinet received an invitation in 1950 to join a new European Coal and Steel Community, which would in time become the foundation of the EU, it brusquely dismissed the idea: it would, they said, upset the miners in Durham too much.[91]

Labour was enthusiastic about maintaining a warrior state at home as well as abroad. Conscription, originally introduced in 1939 as an emergency measure, continued long into the peace. The government kept defence spending at 10 per cent of GDP, far higher than it had been even as Chamberlain rearmed against Hitler.[92] False teeth on the NHS and strategic bombers – these were what Clem Attlee’s Britain was about.[93] The prime minister approved the development of an independent British nuclear deterrent in 1947, though he declined to inform the rest of his own Cabinet about this. Such secrecy was another characteristic of the wartime British state which Labour proved happy to pursue into the Cold War. In addition to preserving a network of clandestine institutions like GC&CS (renamed Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ in 1946) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Attlee rubber-stamped the practice of the counter-intelligence agency M15 monitoring politicians, civil servants, journalists and other public figures suspected of Communist disloyalty. Systems of covert surveillance continued without interruption long into the peace.

In 1946, contemplating with gloom the new socialist regime in Westminster, Evelyn Waugh briefly considered fleeing Britain for Ireland, writing to a friend that ‘England as a great power is done for…the cutting down will start at the top until only a proletariat and a bureaucracy survive’.[94] In fact, despite these and other dark prophecies from conservative middle-class writers like Angela Thirkell and Colm Brogan that Labour’s victory betokened the triumph of an aggressive levelling Jacobin regime, none of Attlee’s senior ministers had any desire to topple the pillars of established national life. They were products of a moderate social reform movement; their maximal ambition never extended beyond some modest improvements in the condition, opportunities and status of the working class. Jock Colville considered Attlee much more snobbish about his old public school, Haileybury, than Churchill had ever been about Harrow.[95] Bevin may have been the illegitimate child of a Devonshire laundress and Morrison the son of an alcoholic south London policeman, but any government which included men like Cripps, Dalton (whose father had tutored King George V) and John Strachey (grandson of a baronet) could hardly have been described as proletarian.

In hindsight, what is most striking about Britain after the Second World War is not its supposed leftward turn, but how sentimentally attached it still was to its ancient hierarchies and inequalities.[96] For the British, the war had not brought military defeat and occupation as it had in most of continental Europe, and they had not had to undergo any of the concomitant soul-searching that might have followed such a national trauma. All Britain’s traditional institutions of power – the monarchy, the Church of England, Parliament, the armed forces, the county squirearchy, the civil service, the City, the ancient universities, the Inns of Court, the BBC, the Fleet Street press – had not merely survived the crisis: they had been legitimated by it.[97] The essential framework of national life had endured with only modest alterations. The vast majority of people in power remained white, male, monied and well-connected, getting to know one another through public school or Oxbridge or one of the army’s elite regiments. The Savoy Grill, Claridge’s and The Ritz remained open for business. The annual Eton and Harrow cricket fixture at Lord’s was scheduled as usual, as were Royal Ascot, the Henley Regatta, the Boat Race and the Varsity Match. Formal dinners and full academic dress remained compulsory at Oxford colleges; ancient dons still tottered around their quads, much as they had done in Edward VII’s reign. For many years after the war, schoolchildren continued to celebrate Empire Day. Cinema audiences continued to stand for ‘God Save The King’. Debutantes continued to be presented at Buckingham Palace. Bewigged judges at the Old Bailey continued to sonorously announce sentences of death by hanging.[98]

‘Any war’, Oliver Harvey had predicted back in 1937, ‘will bring vast and unknown social changes – win or lose.’[99] Three years later, as France collapsed and invasion loomed, Arthur Bryant had gloomily prophesied a Bolshevik putsch; George Orwell, a good deal more eagerly, had done the same. In a survey taken in March 1941, Mass-Observation had asked ordinary people what they expected the war’s consequences would be for British society. Nine per cent had predicted socialism; thirteen per cent dictatorship. One in twenty expected a revolution. Very few anticipated no change at all.[100] Perhaps what was most surprising of all when victory finally came was how British society had remained, in so many ways, unaltered. The rougher edges had been smoothed off its social divides a little, perhaps; yet Britain in 1945 was still complacently a land of rich and poor, gentlemen and players, ins and outs.

To later historians like Angus Calder, this continuity represented a betrayal of the radical possibilities which the war had briefly opened up. Labour had had no stomach to take advantage of ‘a new and radical popular spirit…a ferment of participatory democracy’ which it had allowed to wilt through inattention.[101] Yet the truth is that for all of their mild wartime rebelliousness, the British in arms had always remained pretty respectful of the status quo; and even after electing a socialist government, they had remained ambivalent about what kind of relationship they wanted with the state, and how desirable a collectivist New Jerusalem would really be. This helps to explain why Labour’s time in office proved to be rather short-lived despite its ‘revolution’, and the Attlee government’s impression on national life less profound than might have been expected in the heady hours of 26 July 1945.

Mass-Observation three years earlier had already detected an earnest popular ‘desire for a simple life’ after the war – ‘a move away from responsibilities into an individual and private peace’.[102] The popular folk heroes of the war were chaotic Little Men bumbling their way through an impersonal system, the likes of George Formby and Will Hay. A similar kind of quietist, modestly anarchic behaviour found echoes in Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944) and A Matter of Life and Death (1945), both films strongly associating eccentricity with Englishness. For many Britons, ‘it was precisely the defence of the untidy, ramshackle, customary pluralism of British social life’ celebrated in these fantasies ‘that for many people seems to have made the war worth fighting’.[103]

In short, by the end of the Second World War the British people had become rather tired of being bossed around. What many of them wanted more than anything was to be left alone once the fighting was done. This was inevitably going to conflict with the priorities of an interventionist state, however benign its intentions. The war encouraged the British to make contradictory, even unreasonable demands: they wanted security and freedom: a welfare state to look after them and the government to mind its own business. The war’s forced regimentation, the intrusions of the machinery of government into day-to-day life, the identity cards and ration books and ‘papers please’ culture – all these were grudgingly accepted as necessary for defeating Nazism. But they generated a strong countervailing response to have done with all busybodies and red tape as soon as it was over.[104] The Fabian economist G. D. H. Cole’s survey of working-class attitudes towards social welfare at the time of the Beveridge Report revealed a strong popular resentment of form-filling, nosy-parker bureaucrats and puritanical appeals to duty, sobriety and thrift. These were all things that were to prove unfortunately characteristic of Labour’s New Jerusalem at its worst.[105]

The desire that a People’s War should be followed by a People’s Victory, in other words, turned out to be only one strain of popular thinking that emerged once the fighting was done, and by no means the dominant one.[106] Many Britons felt that they had fought the war for personal freedom of choice, the necessity of dissent, and a right to retreat afterwards into solitude, introspection and privacy. A language of quixotic patriotic nonconformism existed alongside that of People’s War’s collectivism, and while it did not prevail at the ballot box in 1945, it proved, in the long run, to be both electorally very powerful and much easier for the Tories to exploit than Labour.[107] Even as Attlee drove to Buckingham Palace, the road back to an essentially conservative (and Conservative) country – the road to 1951 – beckoned.

17

‘…Only in the End to Achieve Nothing’

‘The news today about “Atomic bombs” is so horrifying one is stunned,’ J. R. R. Tolkien, Oxford’s Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, wrote to his son Christopher on 9 August, 1945:

The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world! Such explosives in men’s hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all inmates of a gaol and then saying that you hope ‘this will ensure peace’.[1]

For Tolkien, the dropping of ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima and ‘Fat Man’ on Nagasaki had confirmed a repugnance for modern aerial warfare which he had held with mounting conviction since the start of the war. On an October night the year before, he had listened from the front doorstep of his house on Northmoor Road as a ‘skywide Armada’ of over 1,000 RAF bombers had droned across the Oxfordshire skies heading for some unknown destination in Germany.[2] ‘The noise is terrific,’ Tolkien had written to Christopher as the fleet of aircraft passed overhead, ‘the biggest for a long time…by the time that this reaches you somewhere will have ceased to exist and all the world will have known about it and already forgotten it.’[3]

The bombing aeroplane represented to Tolkien everything that was profane about the twentieth century. Moloch’s ingeniuous aerial machinery had been mobilised even more efficiently by the Allies than the enemy to conduct slaughter after indiscriminate slaughter. ‘It would not be easy for me to express to you the measure of my loathing for the [RAF],’ Tolkien admitted to Christopher, who, much to his father’s dismay, was undergoing pilot training. ‘My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, “for the liberation of the Shire”.’ Still, Tolkien added, he felt nothing but ‘admiration, gratitude, and above all pity’ for young British men like his son who through no fault of their own had found themselves serving in Air Force blue for the duration of the conflict. ‘It is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain.’[4]

Tolkien, an old soldier of the Western Front, had no opposition to the conflict against Nazi Germany in principle (though he had not the slightest interest in the far-off war with Japan). That ‘ruddy little ignoramus’ Adolf Hitler – ‘a vulgar and ignorant little cad’ – had to be stopped, and Tolkien dutifully did his wartime bit for king and country, serving as an ARP warden in Oxford, hosting an evacuee family, and delivering lectures to naval and air cadets.[5] But as the war went on and the sum total of human torment accrued, he became more and more pessimistic about what would follow the Allied victory and less and less sure what its purpose would ultimately be. The world had been debased and degraded by the accumulation of technological violence even in an ostensibly good cause. ‘The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly,’ he wrote to Christopher in January 1945:

[The] destruction of what should be (indeed is) the common wealth of Europe…wealth the loss of which will affect us all, victors or not. Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable [German] refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour.

What Tolkien called the ‘the first War of the Machines’ was by early 1945 drawing to its ‘final inconclusive chapter’. The defeat of the Nazis was to be welcomed. But the conflict was all the same leaving ‘everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines’.[6]

It was during the Second World War that the bulk of Tolkien’s three-volume The Lord of the Rings cycle, perhaps the single most influential British cultural artefact of the second half of the twentieth century, was written. As it was composed in the midst of mass violence, it is hardly surprising that it is a war story steeped in a pensive sadness that mirrored its author’s complex attitude to the conflicts he had witnessed in real life as soldier and civilian. The Lord of the Rings is a tale ‘of loss and longing [and] a lament for a world that has passed even as we seem to catch a last glimpse of it’. Even though its megalomaniacal villain is ultimately defeated, the celebration of his fall is tinged with tragedy.[7] With the dissolution of the One Ring in the final book of the trilogy, much of the magic of Middle Earth drains away forever, and the post-war world which Tolkien only briefly sketches out in the final chapters is evidently a duller and more quotidian place. The homecomings of The Lord of the Rings are coloured by anticlimax, irony, even bitterness. ‘I think that “victors” never can enjoy “victory” – not in the terms that they envisaged,’ Tolkien wrote to a reviewer in 1956, ‘and in so far as they fought for something to be enjoyed by themselves (whether acquisition or mere preservation) the less satisfactory will “victory” seem.’[8]

Tolkien was emphatic that his high fantasy story contained no ‘allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever’ and that its origin in the wartime and immediate post-war period was a mere accident.[9] It would certainly be fatuous to reduce as sophisticated a work as The Lord of the Rings to a mere ‘political tract’ or to impose upon it a series of clumsily literal analogies which its author never intended.[10] That said, ‘hints of correspondence between our history and the history of Middle Earth are fairly frequent’ within the book, as Tolkien’s biographer Tom Shippey for one recognised. At the very least, its timeliness must have contributed to its enormous appeal on publication.[11] The three volumes which make up The Lord of the Rings were all published in Britain between 1954 and 1955, in the final months of Churchill’s peacetime Conservative ministry and only shortly after the end of dairy and meat rationing – in other words, still very much in the shadow of Hitler’s war. Tolkien’s earliest readers ‘had had the Second World War as a central part of their [life] experience’; they saw embodied in his epic tale ‘the truth of their own experience’, whether its author had consciously willed it or not.[12] It seems neither coincidental nor inappropriate that the signal British literary product of the 1940s is pervaded by the moral problem of war, and that Tolkien’s highly equivocal views about the price of victory even at the end of a righteous crusade against evil haunt its conclusion.

*

‘I first heard about the atomic bomb on the nine o’clock news in a Bournemouth hotel,’ a young woman serving in the WAAF wrote to Mass-Observation a few weeks after the destruction of Hiroshima. ‘The lounge was full of old ladies and retired Indian Army colonels, which made it seem even more unreal.’[13] Other Britons recalled a ‘rather sick, horrible feeling’ and a ‘shock and bewilderment’ little different to Tolkien’s: ‘I had naïvely imagined that scientists had discovered the worst types of destruction in the V-1 and the V-2.’[14] One Mass-Observer recalled acerbically ‘how much we talked in the early years about our bombers attacking only military objectives’.[15] Some Britons were unmoved. ‘The Bomb wasn’t used enough on Japan. No-one [here] has the slightest sympathy for the dirty little yellow creatures.’[16] As far as the Bradford mother of one serviceman was concerned, ‘my son’s life is infinitely more precious to me than those of a million Japs’.[17]

Nineteen forty-five was not a year to encourage much faith in the essential goodness of the human condition. On 15 April, British troops of the 11th Armoured Division had reached Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony.[18] During the final months before the German surrender, tens of thousands of prisoners in Auschwitz and other extermination camps in Poland had been force-marched to Bergen-Belsen as the Todeslager network in the east had been overrun by the Red Army. They were given no proper food and water supplies or medical care. Many who arrived in Lower Saxony were already dying of dysentery, typhus and typhoid when they got there. By the time British soldiers reached the camp, perhaps 50,000 starving, sickly people were crammed into a facility designed for one-third of that number. Tens of thousands of corpses lay unburied in heaps. Among the recent dead was fifteen-year-old Anne Frank, who had succumbed to typhus after arriving from Auschwitz in February or March.

The BBC’s Richard Dimbleby reported from Bergen-Belsen on 19 April:

Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live…A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.[19]

A ‘Bengal Famine Mixture’ of rice and sugar which Wavell had used to feed India’s starving in 1943 was hurriedly re-created and distributed to give to ex-inmates whose digestive systems were too weak for British Army rations.[20] Even after liberation, thousands of former prisoners continued to die. Newsreel footage of Bergen-Belsen reached UK audiences a week after Dimbleby’s broadcast. A Mass-Observer eavesdropped on two women outside a cinema on Kilburn High Road which was showing the footage:

‘Horrible. Have you seen the film?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Well, you should go. It’ll do you good. It’ll make you think.’

‘Well, how did it make you feel?’

‘It made me feel sick and angry.’

‘Why angry?’

‘Because I feel we could have prevented a lot of it.’[21]

Information about the German atrocities in Poland had been common knowledge for some time in Britain. Back in December 1942, Eden had told the Commons, based on Resistance reports across occupied Nazi territory, that ‘the German authorities…are now carrying into effect Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe’.[22] But in general, the government had always chosen to play down specific references to Jewish suffering when describing Nazi atrocities, worrying that the majority of the British public would be unmoved because of their own latent prejudices.[23] Harold Nicolson thought people quickly got ‘bored’ of Nazi atrocity stories.[24] The BBC had initially sat on Dimbleby’s report, demanding third-party corroboration that the Bergen-Belsen story was true, until the reporter threatened to resign.[25] Over half of the victims discovered at the camp had been Jewish, but the newsreel commentary purposely omitted all but a few mentions of this, focusing instead on the tiny number of British nationals among the prisoners.[26]

The Bergen-Belsen story certainly intensified a British desire for revenge against the Germans. The Daily Express sponsored an exhibition of photos from it and another liberated camp, Buchenwald, in Trafalgar Square in early May 1945. ‘I feel we ought to shoot every German,’ one visitor commented: ‘there’s not a good one amongst them.’ A middle-aged woman suggested that castrating prisoners of war was the only way forward for humanity: ‘destroy the German race once and for all’.[27] Germany was ‘a plague spot’ full of ‘vermin…they ought to be put right out of existence’. Over one in four Britons polled that spring thought Allied policy towards their defeated enemy should be vengeful, with a disproportionately large number of women in particular seeking some kind of exterminationist punishment. (‘I wish we could clear them off the face of the Earth.’)[28]

Given the sheer accumulation of human misery in 1945, it is perhaps not surprising that the post-victory mood across the UK was distinctly deflated. Mass-Observation’s survey suggested that 57 per cent of people in the immediate aftermath of the war felt ‘depressed’, with just one in three declaring themselves ‘cheerful’. As one Briton put it: ‘the devastation of a continent isn’t peace but only the cessation of war…conscription and the armaments race must go on’.[29] The continuation of most of the day-to-day inconveniences and deprivations of wartime, with little consolatory sense any longer that these sacrifices were being made in a noble cause, made for a gloomy country in late 1945. A young accountant in Sheffield wrote:

I had imagined that it would be a glorious thing to tear down the blackout, to see restrictions being lifted, and to feel life coming back to normal. The realization has been a very different thing…food has become more scarce, clothes rationing has become not a whit less severe, and the [call-up] of youths is still continuing.

‘I feel rather depressed,’ said a twenty-four-year-old in Worcestershire. ‘While the war was on there somehow seemed to be an urgency – an importance – about everything one did, and a feeling of comradeship and working together…it is very difficult to carry that feeling over into the post-war period.’[30] There was, thought Mass-Observation, a ‘feeling of sheer blind weariness and fed-upness at continued shortages, discomforts, uncertainties’.[31] According to a working-class housewife in Fulham, ‘the women in the queues in the North End Road’ were as one in saying that life was worse now than when the war was on:

You’ve got to spend half the bloody day queueing to make a meal, and then they’ll only let you have one pound of potatoes and they make it a condition that you buy the greens as well…things are getting harder instead of getting easier, all because [food’s] going abroad to feed them bloody Germans to make them strong again so that they’ll plot another war.[32]

*

The war had cost Britain £4.6 billion, or just under one-fifth of its national wealth. This included £1.2 billion of lost physical capital – ships, premises, machinery, goods.[33] In Greater London alone, 116,000 houses had been destroyed by bombing or damaged beyond repair; a visitor to St Paul’s could stroll for half a mile east of the cathedral without encountering a single standing structure (some sites around the Barbican would not be rebuilt until the early 1970s).[34] The British merchant marine in 1945 was one-third smaller than it had been six years earlier.[35] The Royal Navy had lost five battleships and battlecruisers, eight aircraft carriers and twenty-eight cruisers in the line of duty during the war. In the first three years of peace alone, a further ten battleships, thirty-seven aircraft carriers and twenty cruisers would be consigned to the scrapyards.[36] In 1939 the British fleet had been the largest in the world; by 1945 it was dwarfed by the US Navy. The RAF at the end of the war was less than one-seventh the size of the USAAF.[37]

Britain had accrued a total external debt of £4.2 billion in war expenses, including £1.3 billion owed to India and £500 million to Egypt and other Middle Eastern states as ‘sterling balances’.[38] Two-fifths of the UK’s overseas business assets were gone.[39] ‘Invisible’ export earnings from shipping charges and foreign dividends were half what they had been before the war. Visible exports were only four-tenths of pre-war value. At the same time, external spending, mainly on defence, was five times greater than it had been in 1938.[40] The British balance of payments on V-J Day was precarious enough to portend disaster. The UK was importing seventeen times more from the United States than it was exporting back.[41] On 13 August, two days before the Japanese surrender, Keynes warned Attlee’s Cabinet that the country faced a total balance of payments shortfall of £2.1 billion, £1.35 billion of which was being made up temporarily by US Lend-Lease support. But if the Americans decided to halt that aid, Britain would be ‘virtually bankrupt’ and facing ‘a financial Dunkirk’.[42]

Seven days later, Truman sent a curt note to London telling Attlee that he was doing exactly that with immediate effect. The sudden cessation of Lend-Lease ‘was a great shock’, the prime minister recalled later: ‘the tap was turned off at a moment’s notice’.[43] Alexander Cadogan thought it augured ‘stark ruin’.[44] Stage II of the war, which the British had imagined and hoped would last for at least a year (ideally two), permitting some gradual return to economic normality, had ended after barely three months. Keynes, who had been diagnosed with heart problems in the late 1930s, had already exhausted his body in gruelling transatlantic shuttles during the war as he argued Britain’s case in Washington and negotiated the terms of the ‘Bretton Woods’ post-war world financial system. Now he was tasked with one final duty for his country: convincing the Americans to ease the UK’s transition from Lend-Lease with a large grant-in-aid, or, failing that, a dollar loan on favourable terms. In the US capital, Keynes delivered a series of brilliant disquisitions on Britain’s economic plight which Truman’s Treasury Department officials listened to in an awed silence. Then they presented him with an offer overlooking everything he had just said. Instead of the $6 billion grant the British government had hoped for, it would have to settle for a $3.75 billion loan (plus a bill of $650 million to resolve all remaining Lend-Lease obligations), payable over fifty years at 2 per cent interest. Keynes returned to the UK just before Christmas 1945, having done the best he could, and died a few months later from a heart attack.

Nineteen forty-six would be a difficult year for Britain. Demobilisation of the armed forces was taking far longer than anyone had expected. On New Year’s Day, four out of five of the country’s wartime servicemen were still in uniform, including most of the twenty-six-year-old ‘militiamen’ who had been originally called up by Neville Chamberlain six years earlier and had now sacrificed a large portion of their youth to national service. The government pleaded shortages of transportation for men in the Middle East and India and the need for an orderly economic transition to peace. Bored squaddies and aircraftmen peeling potatoes in Peshawar were unappeased. In January 1946, over 50,000 British Army and RAF personnel protesting slow demob went on strike across an arc of insubordination stretching from Egypt through India to Malaya. More mini-mutinies followed; paratroopers based near Kuala Lumpur refused to attend parade, while tradesmen at the giant British Army base on the banks of the Suez Canal downed tools.[45]

At home, an austere ‘home front’ continued to operate even in the absence of war. In July, thanks in part to a poor harvest, bread was rationed for the first time. The winter of 1946–7 was the worst in memory. Weeks of blizzards and ice storms brought road and rail transportation to a halt. Coal ran short; power stations ceased operating. Potato sales had to be controlled after warehouse stocks were decimated by frost. When the thaw came in March 1947, hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were damaged by flooding. The basic petrol ration, briefly reintroduced after V-E Day, was stopped again. Paper was in such short supply that magazines were closed down and newspapers reduced to a few pages. Bacon and meat rations were cut below even wartime levels. Cigarettes and tobacco grew scarce. Average calorie intake by 1947 was lower than it had been in 1944.[46] Mass-Observation found Britons ‘resigned and vaguely bewildered’ by the state of the post-war nation, with about half of people expecting things to get worse rather than better. Labour supporters consoled themselves that ‘I suppose [we’ve] got to put up with it.’ Tories considered Britain ‘utterly hopeless, finished’.[47]

One of the conditions the Americans had demanded for the dollar loan was that the pound would be made fully convertible into other currencies no later than a year following the signing of the deal. On 15 July 1947, that deadline expired. Hugh Dalton, now Attlee’s chancellor of the exchequer, had been warning his colleagues for some time that they were burning through their loaned dollars too quickly. On the day convertibility became possible, people across the world immediately rushed to change their pounds into US currency, draining away the Bank of England’s already meagre currency reserves. By the end of August, $970 million of the Anglo-American loan had funnelled back across the Atlantic to Washington DC. Attlee had to plead with the Americans to suspend convertibility.[48] Had Truman’s government not grudgingly agreed to do this, Britain would have soon been unable to buy the US wheat its people needed to eat. An emergency ‘famine food’ plan had already been drawn up to fend off possible national starvation; it would have closed schools and sent children into the fields to bring in the harvest.[49] Once sterling was restored to safety behind exchange controls in autumn 1947, the immediate crisis passed and these doomsday contingencies could be shelved. But the pound’s fundamental weakness remained a chronic drag on British post-war recovery. In September 1949, Dalton’s successor as chancellor, Sir Stafford Cripps, accepted the inevitable and devalued the pound against the dollar by over 30 per cent. That, alongside Marshall Plan aid and a general improvement of the worldwide trade situation, finally restored the balance of payments to a manageable state. It had been a humiliating journey all the same, underlining the pound’s new-found subordination to the dollar as the world’s preferred currency.

Abroad, notwithstanding the Attlee government’s enthusiasm for empire, the first six years after the war were characterised by an unseemly policy of scuttle and scatter. British troops temporarily standing in for the French in Indochina and the Dutch in the Netherlands East Indies were so stretched for manpower that they briefly had to rearm Japanese POWs and employ them in security details. British units throughout Southeast Asia found themselves fighting the same nationalist guerrillas with whom they had once been in coalition against the Japanese just a few months before. In the battle of Surabaya, Java, in November 1945, over 30,000 Crown Forces, supported by tanks, RAF fighter-bombers and an offshore naval bombardment, swept the city in a series of clashes against Indonesian partisans. The engagement was a British victory, but its bloodiness convinced London to abandon the Dutch colonisers to their fate.[50] A similar attempt to hold Palestine in the face of pugnacious Jewish and Arab resistance ended at midnight on 14 May 1948, with the Mandate authorities surrendering their powers to the United Nations and the remaining British garrisons in Jerusalem and Haifa fleeing the scene. A year before, India and Pakistan had achieved independence after a hurried British departure that was immediately followed by massive inter-communal violence. In 1948, Ceylon and Burma left the British Empire too – Burma, that very colony that Slim’s Fourteenth Army had just spent so much blood to reconquer. As for the Dominions, they retained membership of the Commonwealth, sentimental attachment to a common Anglophone history and culture, and, in the case of Australia and New Zealand anyway, important trade dependencies. But in terms of entangling security arrangements it was clear that with the war over they would henceforth look primarily towards Washington rather than London.[51]

*

Churchill, surveying the scene from the Commons chamber in 1951, bewailed the fact that the six years that had followed the war had

marked the greatest fall in the rank and stature of Britain in the world, which has occurred since the loss of the American colonies two hundred years ago. Our Oriental Empire has been liquidated, our resources have been squandered…our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember.[52]

His own second premiership, which began later that year, did little to reverse the direction of imperial withdrawal. In 1954, Britain agreed with the new Egyptian Republic to hand back its military base at the Suez Canal. When Anthony Eden finally acceded to the premiership on Churchill’s retirement a year later, his mishandling of Egyptian affairs provoked the Suez Crisis, which put to an end not just his own career but any remaining British Great Power amour propre in the Middle East. Back in 1942, Eden had told his fellow War Cabinet members that ‘we have to maintain our position as an Empire and a Commonwealth [for] if we fail to do so we cannot exist as a world power…if we fail to do that, we shall have fought this war to no purpose’.[53] Yet if Eden’s Suez fiasco had demonstrated anything, it had been the UK’s inability to any longer conduct a foreign policy independent of the approval of the United States. Britain was abandoning its own overseas bases while accepting the permanent presence of American sailors and airmen on its home soil, that conversion of the United Kingdom to ‘Airstrip One’ already foreseen in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shortly after the war, Averell Harriman, Churchill’s dinner guest back on the night of Pearl Harbor, had gloated that ‘England is so weak she must follow our leadership. She will do anything that we insist upon.’[54] By 1956 the relationship of the two countries had firmly been established as one of patron and client.

Seven years after Suez, following a dinner to honour the memory of pilots killed in the Battle of Britain, Noël Coward wrote that ‘the peace we are enduring is not worth their deaths’. England, he thought, had become ‘a third-rate power, economically and morally. We are vulgarised by American values…the England those boys died for has disappeared. Our history, except for stupid, squalid social scandals, is over.’[55] It was around this time that Churchill, close to death, is supposed to have told his private secretary, Anthony Montague Browne, that ‘I have worked very hard and achieved a great deal, only in the end to achieve nothing.’[56]

Yet even as Coward and Churchill came up with these laments, Britain was in the middle of the greatest sustained period of economic growth in its history. Once the pound and the balance of trade had stabilised in 1949, it had found itself in a strong position to enjoy the benefits of an extraordinarily favourable world trade climate. Rationing ended; controls were relaxed; prosperity returned. The main macroeconomic effect of the war had been to discredit the protectionist mantras of old, including the imperial preference tariffs about which Churchill’s Cabinet had fretted so much back in 1942. Thanks to institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (all partly the work of Keynes), the global economy boomed, and Britain with it.[57] From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, the UK enjoyed an average annual growth rate of 2–3 per cent, considerably better than anything it had been capable of before the war. Its real GDP doubled. Unemployment remained low. Wages outpaced inflation. The working-class standard of life was transformed by this increase in national wealth. Luxuries that in 1939 had been generally enjoyable only by the middle class – a family home for a young couple and their children; a private car; labour-saving kitchen and household appliances; foreign holidays; a secondary and even university education – became commonplace for manual workers.[58] By all the conventional metrics of human happiness, life in Britain was much better-off than it had ever been by the early 1960s, even as Coward and Churchill were wondering aloud what the war had all been for.

To be sure, relatively speaking, the United Kingdom had lost ground against its main economic competitors, and it would continue to do so. In 1951, Britain’s national income had still been twice that of the Federal Republic of Germany and two and a half times that of France. Within ten years, that advantage had disappeared as both countries overtook the UK. In that limited, technical sense, Chamberlain’s prediction had proved right: a world war had indeed accelerated Britain’s relative decline in the international ranking of wealthiest nations. But that decline had been going on since at least the 1870s, it had systemic causes that had nothing to do with the war, and it would have carried on at some pace or other whether there had been a war or not. What Chamberlain had not anticipated was how much wealthier the world as a whole was going to be in the aftermath of a global conflict, and how much Britain was going to benefit from that general increase in wealth in absolute terms.[59] The UK was not ‘bankrupted’ by the war, as is often casually suggested; it experienced a short-term dollar liquidity problem which had been mostly resolved by 1949. The end of Lend-Lease could have been handled more astutely by the Americans. But it had still been a fabulous deal for the British on aggregate, allowing them to fight the war while never having to pay back more than a fraction of the goods they had received.[60] It is absurd to suggest, as one recent polemic puts it, that for Britain the war was followed by little more than ‘the clammy draughts of economic weakness and political failure’.[61] For a few years immediately after the war, the British were quite poor. Then they became much richer than they had ever been, and they stayed much richer.

Certainly, the empire had vanished by the mid-1960s. But it had been bound to vanish eventually anyway – the paradox of a liberal state subjugating foreign peoples in an age of popular nationalism could not have been sustained forever, war or no war – and most people in the UK were much better-off in a world without it, morally no less than economically. The curious thing about the empire is that it stuck around rather longer than might have been expected.[62] In reconstituted British Malaya, the boozy, clubbish atmosphere of PWR lingered well into the post-war era. During the second Churchill administration the Colonial Office expanded its staff; there were even plans to build an impressive new building opposite Parliament Square.[63] What is striking in retrospect about the British decolonisation process is not that it happened, but how much it was conducted on terms favourable to the UK, and how few violent repercussions there were for metropolitan politics or society. Thanks to the devaluation of the pound and the attritional power of inflation, the British only ended up having to pay about half of their enormous sterling balance obligations to India (if any wartime fiscal arrangement was predatory, it was this, not Lend-Lease).[64] The retreat from empire did not produce the same domestic trauma for Britain as France’s withdrawal from Indochina and Algeria. The superannuated colonial colonels did not attempt violent putsches against a state it felt had betrayed them, but instead retired meekly to Eastbourne and Tunbridge Wells. That the imperial sunset generated so little controversy is ultimately a reflection of how marginal it had always been within the national imagination. Churchill may have felt he was fighting the Second World War to prop up the empire. Few of his fellow countrymen and -women evidently did.

Post-war Britain had to get used to being a ‘normal’ country again, as it had been before industrialisation and empire. This turned out not to be such a terrible thing after all. Protected by the US nuclear arsenal and their own (nominally) independent atomic deterrent, safe within the folds of the NATO alliance, the British, secure, prosperous and at peace, discovered that normality had its perks. Having stumbled rather accidentally into world-class power status in the first place, they had returned to their more natural condition, and most of them could, as it turned out, live with that perfectly well.[65]

The British people – and the people of the British imperial world beyond the United Kingdom itself – fought the Second World War longer than almost any other. They went to war not because they were compelled into it, as the Soviets and the Americans were, still less because they desired the idea of a violent struggle, but simply because they thought it was the right thing to do. If the war against Japan never quite inspired the same degree of popular emotion, the war against Hitler’s Third Reich was fought from beginning to end with almost total national commitment. In April 1945, Mass-Observation asked people ‘What do you yourself think we are fighting for?’ and the most popular answers were:

Freedom and democracy 31 per cent

Anti-Nazism 25 per cent

Self-preservation 16 per cent

Peace 9 per cent

‘Freedom and the liberty of others.’ ‘We don’t want anything out of it, except to live in our own way and that others should live in theirs.’ ‘Stop Hitler’s aggression and taking other countries.’ ‘To stop all this cruelty. To live and let live.’[66] These were the typical responses. Overwhelmingly, it seems there were two things the British people wanted after the war: for their children to have a better life than they had had, and to be able to live without fear. So far as the first of these was concerned, the post-war world would turn out to be an unqualified success. The second would be more complicated. Nineteen forty-five marked the start of the atomic age and the spectre of human mass extinction through nuclear annihilation. The eighty post-Hiroshima years can hardly be described in retrospect as having been absent of fear. On the other hand, Britain did not experience another major ‘hot’ war. In the thirty-one years from 1914 to 1945, over a million citizens of the United Kingdom died fighting Germany and its allies, and the British twice faced the possibility of enemy invasion and the destruction of their national independence and way of life. Thanks to the destruction of Hitler’s regime and the security structures established in the aftermath of his defeat, no such national disaster recurred again in the eight decades that followed the Second World War. That was a powerful vindication of the war in and of itself.

*

Sir Winston Churchill died on the morning of Sunday, 24 January 1965, at his home in Hyde Park Gate in London, aged ninety.[67] His state funeral six days later was not only the grandest of its type in British history but one of the greatest international media events that had ever yet taken place, with an estimated 350 million people across the world watching on television. ‘It felt’, wrote Richard Crossman, minister of housing in Harold Wilson’s government and one of the official attendees at St Paul’s, ‘like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’ The continuation of rationing into the early 1950s and the national service call-up until 1960 had extended the mental atmosphere of the Second World War well beyond V-J Day, and Churchill’s death seemed to many to mark a transitional moment from the Britain of the 1940s to something new. Brooke had died two years earlier. The war’s other great captains – Attlee, Portal, Alexander, Slim – were soon gone too. Montgomery lived until 1976, Eden until 1977. Sir Arthur Harris, perhaps out of sheer bloody-mindedness, survived them all, dying in 1984 at the age of ninety-one, unrepentant to the last.

Writing in the Sunday Telegraph in January 1965, the novelist and journalist Colin MacInnes hoped that the death of the former prime minister would ‘finally liberate us from our obsession with “the war” ’.[68] Whether this would have been to the good or ill, it certainly did not happen. The Second World War would remain, as Robert Tombs has put it, ‘the most enduringly important event in modern English and British history’.[69] It was being mythologised even before it ended, and it would stay a reference point of inexhaustible fascination for the generations of Britons born after 1945. For someone like myself who grew up in the Britain of the 1970s and 1980s, it was simply ‘the war’ – and all conversations seemed inevitably to return to it sooner or later. Everyone in their mid-fifties and older had lived through it as an adult and had their own particular fractured memories of it. To my grandparents it had self-evidently been the most consequential six-year period of their lives, and the fact that it still played such an outsized role in their understanding of the world, as well as in the national culture we were surrounded by, seemed both inevitable and entirely appropriate. The Blitz, the blackout, Anderson shelters, Lord Haw-Haw, doodlebugs, Make Do and Mend, Dig for Victory, ration books, gas masks, Spitfires, Tommy guns, the Home Guard, Biggin Hill, Dunkirk, El Alamein, Monte Cassino, Monty, Rommel, ‘Lily Marlene’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ – all these things were woven into the fundamental fabric of what it meant to be British.

The core of the war’s popular mythology had been composed in a furiously creative ten-or-so-year stretch starting in 1950, when most of the iconic black-and-white British war films had been made – motion pictures like The Wooden Horse (1950), The Cruel Sea (1953), Malta Story (1953), The Sea Shall Not Have Them (1954), Reach for the Sky (1956), A Town Like Alice (1956), The One That Got Away (1957), Ice Cold in Alex (1958), Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), Dunkirk (1958) and Sink the Bismarck (1960), all of which later became standard Sunday afternoon television fare.[70] Actors like John Mills, Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, James Donald and Stanley Baker seemed to have existed in an endless celluloid retelling of the war. In 1955 alone, three of the most iconic films of the lot were released: The Cockleshell Heroes, The Dam Busters and The Colditz Story – respectively, and significantly, examples of all the classic subgenres: a commando story, an RAF ‘special ops’ story and a POW story.

The Dam Busters was (almost) the only British film ever made about the strategic bombing offensive, and it was certainly the only one to ever achieve lasting purchase in the nation’s consciousness. In retrospect it is not hard to see why.[71] Operation CHASTISE, unlike most late-war RAF Bomber Command missions, raised few uncomfortable questions about the ethics of attacking non-industrial targets or killing non-combatants.[72] The Dam Busters told the story of one unrepresentative mission in a way that allowed the British public to remember the bombing war as it preferred to – as clinical, triumphant and morally unambiguous. It also privileged charming eccentricity and passionate nonconformism over the dreary, suffocating hand of bureaucracy. Barnes Wallis (Michael Redgrave), the inventor who designed the ‘bouncing bomb’, was portrayed not as the highly successful lead designer of one of the great global arms industry corporations, a man who had received massive state financing and assistance during his distinguished career, but rather as a whimsical daydreaming prophet, denigrated and dismissed by an army of sneering, narrow-minded civil servants.[73]

In situating the memory of the strategic bombing campaign in the form of a one-off, almost commando-style operation, privileging individual heroism, ingenuity and quirky character, The Dam Busters helped to shape the narrative of Britain’s war around covert, small-unit, behind-enemy-lines actions rather than the industrial grind of total mass conflict. Phillips Payson O’Brien has called this ‘the Myth of the Plucky Brit’ – that the Second World War was won not by the ruthless mobilisation of enormous material force but by cunning, inspired amateur brilliance, and dauntless against-the-odds courage.[74] The Shire Folk virtues, in other words. It is that version of the war that remains overwhelmingly popular in British mass culture today: the war of Bletchley Park’s boffins, SOE’s spies, the escapees of Colditz and the Special Air Service, rather than (say) the firebombing of German cities or the mass production of convoy escorts. Actually, Britain won the Second World War not because its people were plucky and Hobbit-like, but because they proved to be very good at the cold-blooded application of immense state-directed violence. It is understandable that they have never really wanted to dwell too much upon this.

*

One hundred and sixty-seven British men, women and children were killed, on average, every day during the 2,174 days that the Second World War lasted – seven an hour, for almost six years. It was a national death toll only half that of the Great War, but this time over 60,000 of the victims were civilians. As in all wars, the dead had to be collected, identified, interred and memorialised. There were fewer missing and unidentifiable military bodies in this world war than in the previous one, and the authorities did their best to try to find out what had happened to personnel whose fates remained a mystery, particularly the 31,000 Bomber Command crews who had disappeared over the North Sea or continental Europe. In Germany, the RAF’s Missing Research and Inquiry Service (MRES) interviewed often hostile locals, scoured Nazi death records (Totenlisten) compiled during the war, dug up suspected crash sites and used infrared photography, dental records and bone analysis to evaluate surviving personal possessions and corporeal remains.[75] But when large-scale investigatory efforts were ended in 1948, there were still over 7,000 missing soldiers, sailors and airmen with open case files, and they simply had to be declared ‘presumed dead’.[76]

It was decided that the precedent of the First World War would be maintained and that the vast majority of the military dead would be buried in Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) cemeteries located, so far as possible, close to the places they had lost their lives.[77] By the late 1950s the IWGC had constructed 559 new cemeteries worldwide, about half of them in Normandy. The largest, in Bayeux, completed in 1952, included over 4,100 Crown Forces graves (338 of them unidentified) plus a memorial stone with the names of 1,800 men whose bodies had never been found.[78] The location of many of these cemeteries within former enemy territory or in decolonised states like Burma which were now hostile to Britain caused distress for surviving friends and relatives. Many of them were far too distant from the UK to make the possibility of a family pilgrimage practical or economical, especially in the absence of any public subsidy. For several years, the government refused even to provide free passage for next of kin to visit European cemeteries.

For civilians killed in aerial bombardment, interment generally involved much less formality or consideration for the individuality of every victim as in the IWGC’s protocols. Bodies and body parts had often been hurriedly warehoused in the immediate aftermath of air raids, with municipal undertakers left to sort out bags of unidentifiable torsos and limbs. Unlike soldiers, civilians did not wear identity discs; in an era before DNA testing, it was often impossible to learn who they had been. Wealthier families could petition to have the last remains of their known loved ones released to them for private burial, but single-plot graves were deprecated as an ‘extravagant practice’ when charged to the public purse. Often, fearing the sanitary consequences of leaving bodies unburied, the local authorities simply resorted to quickly dug, anonymous mass graves. After the destruction of Coventry’s city centre in November 1940, over 400 of the victims were interred in long trenches stacked three-deep. The dead of the Clydebank and Belfast Blitzes were similarly placed in communal plots, provoking ecclesiastical rows about the mixing-up of Catholic and Protestant cadavers. The several mass funerals in Coventry were impressive public spectacles – ‘a strange, simple, and moving service at the graveside’, the Manchester Guardian called one of them – but elsewhere the process was more understated, even furtive.[79] Information about precisely which targets had been damaged in enemy raids was sometimes deliberately withheld in the press so as not to afford the Luftwaffe useful intelligence. This could leave grieving families with the feeling that their community’s sacrifice had been ignored.

Before 1945, there was some discussion about whether the civilian dead of this People’s War ought to be given a distinction and prominence equal to that of military personnel killed in action, but little came of this in the end. Astonishingly, even today there is still no civic monument to the victims of the London Blitz in the English capital. In fact, even the memorialisation of the military dead was ultimately tacked on to the existing commemorative apparatus of the Great War. The Cenotaph did double duty as a site of national mourning for both world wars. ‘Remembrance Sunday’, chronologically closely associated with Armistice Day, became the official day for commemoration of the two wars. There was no interment in Westminster Abbey of an Unknown Warrior of 1939–45 to lie alongside his Great War comrade. The First World War, with its far greater national death toll, retained a gravity and solemnity in British memory which its successor never quite acquired. Indeed, as the initial shock of the Second World War wore off in the late 1940s and its public remembrance became far more nostalgic, sentimental, even celebratory, any continued presence of sorrow in popular memory seemed jarring, almost unseemly. Individuals for whom the war had resulted in traumatising personal loss lacked a framework of collective ritual to process their emotions. They found themselves without a vocabulary of shared grief. Guilt, especially among survivors, was not uncommon.

In the years that followed the war, those left behind – wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers – were left to mourn the dead as best they could. Mid-century Britain was not a place in which the uncontrolled expression of feeling was encouraged. It was sternly inculcated in people that to ‘give in’ to one’s emotions was to betray the dead. People felt under an obligation to control and suppress their grief so as not to let down those they had lost, or indeed the country as a whole. Whether this was healthier in the long run than our practice today of de-stigmatising, even wallowing in emotion, is hard to say – the generation of 1945 would no doubt find our modern preoccupation with trauma, our obsession with ‘closure’, undignified and debilitating. But for family members who had made a tacit decision not to discuss those who had died in the war there remained a great psychic absence that could last for the whole of their lives.

Each person had to decide for themselves how to honour the memories of those they had lost. Sometimes the dead had helped make provision for this in advance. Flight Sergeant George William Wilson was a bomb aimer with the RAF’s 576 Squadron at Elsham Wolds in north Lincolnshire. On the night of 12 May 1944, his Lancaster, codenamed ND403, took off on a navigational exercise. It did not return to base the following morning. The RAF was never able to ascertain what happened to it or its seven crewmen. No wreckage was ever discovered; none of the bodies ever found. The aircraft and its crew are still officially listed as missing, an explanation of their fates still a blank page waiting, perhaps one day, to be filled in. George was twenty-five when he flew on his last mission. A year earlier, he had written a letter to his wife, Constance, which was to be posted to her only in the event of his death. ‘We had a rum sort of courtship, all ups and downs,’ it said,

But the ups were oh so terribly sweet. I always told you that you kissed better when you had tears in your eyes. Our marriage my sweet one was sudden to me, but I never thought it would be as nice. I never regretted it and I was always proud of you…Anyway darling, perhaps it’s better to say that I’m writing this just in case anything did happen to me, I don’t think it will but one can never tell these days. Also darling, I have a feeling that maybe you think I didn’t appreciate you. I did, but I just wasn’t of a very romantic nature, but I loved you all the time. I wouldn’t wish you to stay single, darling, there is no reason why you should not marry again, you will still be young and beautiful. If you do marry again, you ought to have children. They mean everything to a happy marriage. Bring them up to be honest and true…

Cheerio my darling, keep smiling, I did love you even as I do in death.

Your loving hubby,

George W.[80]

Constance did as her husband asked; she remarried, she had children, and she lived a long and happy life. She kept the letter George had written to her until the day she died. It was marked on the cover simply: NEVER THROW AWAY.

1. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the deck of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales during their inaugural meeting in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, August 1941. Behind Churchill, two of FDR’s principal wartime advisors – Admiral Ernest King and General George C. Marshall, US Army Chief of Staff – cast a wary eye.

2. General Arthur Percival (far right), accompanied by British and Japanese staff officers, marches under a flag of truce to negotiate the surrender of Singapore Island on 15 February 1942. The image of defeated British officers shocked the colonial world.

3. Japanese tanks and infantry cross a makeshift bridge as they invade Burma, spring 1942. The fall of another colony to the Japanese so soon after the loss of Hong Kong, Borneo and Malaya badly compromised the ‘Prestige of the White Race’ in British Asia.

4. Sir Miles Lampson (left), the British High Commissioner in Egypt, confides with Mostafa Nahas, leader of the Wafd Party, shortly before the war. Lampson’s determination to have the amiable Nahas reappointed Egypt’s prime minister in February 1942 led him to a confrontation at gunpoint with the country’s king Farouk I.

5. General Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of British forces in the Middle East (July 1941 to August 1942). Defeated at Gazala then victorious at First Alamein, Auchinleck arguably saved Egypt in 1942 but was sacked for his troubles by Churchill.

6. General Erwin Rommel, commander of the Deutsches Afrikakorps and all Italo-German forces in North Africa 1941–43. To Churchill, the ‘Desert Fox’ was a ‘very daring and skillful opponent’, though Rommel’s own colleague Albert Kesselring was less impressed.

7. Churchill and Stalin share a sofa and a joke at their first face-to-face meeting in Moscow, August 1942. Between them, FDR’s envoy W. Averell Harriman grins nervously; the USSR’s foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov (far right) is in unusually affable form. The smiles were not to last: Churchill was in Moscow to tell the Soviets that there would be no Anglo-American ‘Second Front’ in France in 1942.

8. The British War Cabinet, October 1941. Back: Arthur Greenwood, Ernest Bevin, Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Kingsley Wood. Front: Sir John Anderson, Churchill, Clement Attlee and Anthony Eden. Of Churchill’s seven ministers, only Wood (out of the War Cabinet in February 1942 and dead the following year) was a traditional Conservative loyalist. Tory MPs complained that the prime minister might be their party’s leader, but the government he led hardly represented them at all.

9. A ruined street near the Grand Harbour, Malta. The British island colony was the most heavily bombed place in the world in the first half of 1942. The Maltese people’s courage during their long siege drew the world’s admiration and led to a collective award of the George Cross for bravery, though some starving islanders grumbled that they would have preferred bread to medals.

10. General Bernard Montgomery, commander of Eighth Army from August 1942, watches his latest master plan unfurl from the turret of his personal command tank. Only Churchill made a bigger impression on the British wartime psyche than ‘Monty’, although his peer commanders (British and American alike) were rarely fans. ‘He thinks of himself as Napoleon’, one muttered: ‘he is not’.

11. One of Rommel’s Panzer crews surrender to an advancing British soldier during the Second Battle of Alamein, October 1942. ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory; after Alamein we never had a defeat,’ Churchill was to later say, quite untruthfully.

12. Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Churchill’s loyal though often unhappy military advisor. ‘When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do?’ Churchill said of Brooke. ‘Thumps the table harder and glares back at me!’

13. Sir William Beveridge, economist and social reformer whose eponymous report on national insurance schemes in December 1942 would provide a blueprint for the postwar welfare state. Beveridge boasted that his scheme would take Britain ‘half-way to Moscow’.

14. Hut 6 at the top-secret Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, where cryptographers successfully decoded messages from the Germans’ supposedly unbreakable ‘ENIGMA’ machines.

15. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, commander-in-chief of RAF Bomber Command. ‘Bomber’ Harris became the implacable public face of the RAF’s controversial ‘area bombing’ campaign against the Reich’s workers and their families, although the policy itself was the responsibility of the War Cabinet.

16. The seven air crew of a four-engine Avro Lancaster disembark after a successful ‘op’ in April 1943, while the ground crew examine the aircraft. The Lancaster was the outstanding heavy night bomber of the war. Each plane took 25,000 man-hours to build and could carry up to 14,000 pounds of bombs to its target.

17. British soldiers scurry across the rubble of Catania, Sicily, August 1943. The Sicilian campaign was the Allies’ first stepping-stone back towards the European mainland, but the Germans’ skillful resistance and successful evacuation of the island raised questions about whether British and American fighting methods were too sluggish and risk averse.

18. Orde Wingate, whose spectacular behind-the-lines operation in Burma with his small ‘Chindit’ raiding force in spring 1943 won him the admiration of Churchill, promotion to major-general, and a chance to lead an even bigger force against the Japanese in 1944. A genius to some, a madman to others, Wingate’s style of charismatic, religiously infused leadership was a strange throwback to the Victorian era in the midst of a war of machines.

19. A starving family from the Bengali countryside arrived in Calcutta in search of food, c. 1943. Natural disaster, a ‘scorched earth’ policy on the frontier of Burma, exploitative British financial structures and callousness in Whitehall combined to produce a mid-war famine which killed perhaps 4.5 million Indians.

20. Sir Stafford Cripps (left) chats with his old friend, the Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi, during the ‘Cripps Mission’ to discuss the Raj’s political future in spring 1942. Cripps hoped to use his skills as a Middle Temple barrister to persuade Gandhi and other leaders of the Indian National Congress to compromise with the Churchill government for the sake of the war effort. Despite the smiles, he would leave the subcontinent disappointed.

21. The American oil tanker SS Pennsylvania Sun burns after being struck by U-Boat torpedoes in the Gulf of Mexico, 15 July 1942. During the first eight months after Pearl Harbor, the German submarine service extracted a fearsome toll from mostly unescorted merchant ships off the coast of North America.

22. Members of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) – the co-called ‘Land Girls’ – return from ploughing the fields of a Surrey farm in March 1941. By the mid-war period, 84,000 WLA volunteers were at work across the British agricultural sector.

23. Tanks of British 11th Armoured Division advance towards the Dutch town of Gemert, 26 September 1944. The leading vehicle, a Sherman ‘Firefly’ with a 17-pounder anti-tank gun, was one of the few Allied tanks capable of taking on the fearsome heavy German ‘big cats’ like the Tiger and Panther one-to-one.

24. Rescue crews sift through wreckage in the wake of a V-1 missile attack on a row of houses in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell, London, in July 1944. Unmanned enemy ‘vengeance weapons’ like the V-1 ‘doodlebug’ and the supersonic V-2 were never able to reproduce the death and destruction of the ‘Big Blitz’ of 1940 and 1941.

25. A statue of justice stares impassively out at the ruins of Dresden, Saxony, after the Anglo-American air raids of 13–15 February 1945 which killed perhaps 25,000 people and largely destroyed the seventeenth-century Baroque city. No other single episode in Britain’s war against Nazi Germany would become as notorious, although in many respects the bombing of Dresden was unremarkable. One week later, the RAF would kill almost as many Germans in a mostly forgotten firestorm raid on Pforzheim.

26. The American Red Cross club known as ‘Rainbow Corner’ in Piccadilly Circus was a hub for GIs on leave in London throughout the second half of the war. The wartime American military presence in Britain provoked curiosity, excitement, anxiety, and outrage in equal measures.

27. British paratroopers guard a street in Athens in December 1944 during the height of the pro-communist insurgency in the city. Over 80,000 British troops became embroiled in the bloody aftermath of post-occupation Greece; Churchill’s campaign against the Greek communists generated protest back in Britain and in the United States.

28. Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, alongside his wife Violet, celebrates his surprise general election landslide in July 1945. To the couple’s left is Labour’s Deputy leader, Herbert Morrison, who had masterminded the successful campaign but whose secret scheme to remove Attlee and make himself prime minister came to nothing in the end.

29. Revellers celebrate in London on Victory-over-Japan (V-J) Day, 15 August 1945. Though the war had ended, the austerity conditions of the home front would continue for another half a decade – but in the long run, the postwar years were to be ones of unprecedented national prosperity.

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Tim Luckhurst, ‘ “An Unworkable Policy Which Encourages the Enemy to Fight to the Last Gasp”: The Depiction in British and American Newspapers of the Allied Policy of Unconditional Surrender for Germany, 1943–1945’, Journalism Studies, vol. 16, no. 6, 2015

John Martin, ‘The State Directed Food Production Campaign and the Farming Community, 1939–45’, Family & Community History, vol. 17, no. 1, 2014

Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘England, Britain and the Audit of War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 7, no. 1, 1997

C. C. Newton, ‘The Sterling Crisis of 1947 and the British Response to the Marshall Plan’, The Economic History Review, vol. 37, no. 3, 1984

Phillips Payson O’Brien, ‘East Versus West in the Defeat of Nazi Germany’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 2000

John F. O’Connell, ‘Closing the North Atlantic Air Gap: Where Did All the British Liberators Go?’, Air Power History, vol. 59, no. 2, 2012

Mancur Olsen, ‘The Economics of Target Selection for the Combined Bomber Offensive’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, vol. 107, no. 628, 1962

Richard J. Overy, ‘Making and Breaking Morale: British Political Warfare and Bomber Command in the Second World War’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 26, no. 3, 2015

W. Hays Parks, ‘ “Precision” and “Area” Bombing: Who Did Which, and When?’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1995

Utsa Patnaik, ‘Mr. Keynes and the Forgotten Holocaust in Bengal, 1943–44: Or, the Macroeconomics of Extreme Demand Compression’, Studies in People’s History, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017

Henry Pelling, ‘The 1945 General Election Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal, vol. 23, no. 2, 1980

John Ramsden, ‘ “A Party for Owners or a Party for Earners?” How Far Did the British Conservative Party Really Change After 1945?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 37, no. 1, 1987

John Ramsden, ‘Refocusing “The People’s War”: British War Films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 33, no. 1, 1998

John Ramsden, ‘Winston Churchill and the Leadership of the Conservative Party, 1940–51’, Contemporary Record, vol. 9, no. 1, 1995

Duncan Redford, ‘The March 1943 Crisis in the Battle of the Atlantic: Myth and Reality’, History, vol. 92, no. 1, 2007

Sonya O. Rose, ‘Girls and GIs: Race, Sex, and Diplomacy in Second World War Britain’, The International History Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 1997

Sonya O. Rose, ‘Race, Empire and British Wartime National Identity, 1939–45’, Historical Research, vol. 74, no. 184, 2001

Sonya O. Rose, ‘Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II Britain’, American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 4, 1998

Ronald Schaffer, ‘American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German Civilians’, The Journal of American History, vol. 67, no. 2, 1980

Brian Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages: The County War Agricultural Committees in England, 1939–45’, Rural History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2007

Richard Sibley, ‘Essay in Labour Statistics: The Swing to Labour During the Second World War, When and Why?’, Labour History Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 1990

‘Cost of the British Social Services, 1938–1952’, Social Security Bulletin (United States Government), February 1954

Tom Spicer, ‘Eat, Drink, and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die: British Food Situation and Public Reaction During World War II’, Historia, vol. 13, 2004

Lewi Stone, ‘Quantifying the Holocaust: Hyperintense Kill Rates During the Nazi Genocide’, Science Advances, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019

David Stubbs, ‘A Blind Spot? The Royal Air Force (RAF) and Long-Range Fighters, 1936–1944’, Journal of Military History, vol. 78, no. 2, 2014

Penelope Summerfield, ‘Education and Politics in the British Armed Forces in the Second World War’, International Review of Social History, vol. 25, no. 2, 1981

John Swift, ‘Randolph Churchill and the General Election in Preston, 1945: Bucking the Trend’, Northern History, vol. 48, no. 1, 2011

Mark B. Tauger, ‘The Indian Famine Crises of World War II’, British Scholar, vol. 1, no. 2, 2009

Hugh Tinker, ‘A Forgotten Long March: The Indian Exodus from Burma, 1942’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 1975

J. D. Tomlinson, ‘The Iron Quadrilateral: Political Obstacles to Economic Reform under the Attlee Government’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 1995

Hugh Toye, ‘The First Indian National Army, 1941–42’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 1984

Richard Toye, ‘Churchill and Britain’s “Financial Dunkirk” ’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 15, no. 4, 2004

Richard Toye, ‘From “Consensus” to “Common Ground”: The Rhetoric of the Postwar Settlement and Its Collapse’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 48, no. 1, 2012

Richard Toye, ‘Winston Churchill’s “Crazy Broadcast”: Party, Nation, and the 1945 Gestapo Speech’, The Journal of British Studies, vol. 49, no. 3, 2010

Thomas Webb et al., ‘ “We Cows Are in a Very Serious Predicament”: Constructions of Land Girls and Cattle in Britain in the Second World War’, Gender & History, vol. 34, no. 1, 2022

Chapters of Books

Paul Addison, ‘The Impact of the Second World War’, in Paul Addison et al., eds., A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939–2000, London, Blackwell, 2005

Duncan Anderson, ‘Slim’, in John Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991

Stephen Badsey, ‘Culture, Controversy, Caen and Cherbourg: The First Week of the Battle’, in John Buckley, ed., The Normandy Campaign 1944: Sixty Years On, London, Routledge, 2006

John Baxendale, ‘ “You and I – All of Us Ordinary People”: Renegotiating “Britishness” in Wartime’, in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill, eds., Millions Like Us? British Culture in the Second World War, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1999

Christopher M. Bell, ‘The View from the Top: Winston Churchill, British Grand Strategy, and the Battle of the Atlantic’, in Marcus Faulkner et al., eds., Decision in the Atlantic: The Allies and the Longest Campaign of the Second World War, Lexington, KY, University of Kentucky Press, 2021

Brian Bond, ‘Alanbrooke and Britain’s Mediterranean Strategy, 1942–1944’, in Lawrence Freedman et al., eds., War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard, London, Clarendon, 1992

Raymond Callahan, ‘Did Winston Matter? Churchill and the Indian Army, 1940–1945’, in Alan Jeffreys et al., eds., The Indian Army, 1939–47: Experience and Development, London, Routledge, 2012

A. E. Campbell, ‘Franklin Roosevelt and Unconditional Surrender’, in Richard Langhorne, ed., Diplomacy and Intelligence During the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985

Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, London, HarperCollins, 2023

Michael Carver, ‘Montgomery’, in John Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991

John Charmley, ‘Churchill’s Roosevelt’, in Ann Lane et al., eds., The Rise and Fall of the Grand Alliance, 1941–45, London, Palgrave, 1995

David Clampin, ‘ “Our Lovely Countryside”: Capturing the Image of Britain at War in Commercial Advertising, 1939–1945’, in Ann Murray, ed., Constructing the Memory of War in Visual Culture Since 1914: The Eye on War, London, Routledge, 2018

James S. Corum, ‘The Luftwaffe in Normandy’, in John Buckley, ed., The Normandy Campaign 1944: Sixty Years On, London, Routledge, 2006

Sebastian Cox, ‘The Dresden Raids: Why and How’, in Paul Addison et al., eds., Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago, IL, Ivan R. Dee, 2006

Alex Danchev, ‘Being Friends: The Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Making of Allied Strategy in the Second World War’, in Lawrence Freedman et al., eds., War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard, London, Clarendon, 1992

Robin Edmonds, ‘Churchill and Stalin’, in Robert Blake et al., eds., Churchill, New York, W. W. Norton, 1993

Jeffrey Fear, ‘War of the Factories’, in Michael Geyer et al., eds., The Cambridge History of the Second World War: Volume 3, Total War: Economy, Society and Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017

Kent Fedorowich, ‘The Evacuation of Civilians from Hong Kong and Malaya/Singapore, 1939–42’, in Brian P. Farrell et al., eds., Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited, Singapore, Marshall Cavendish International, 2002

William Foot, ‘Impact of the Military’, in Brian Short et al., eds., The Front Line of Freedom: British Agriculture in the Second World War, London, British Agricultural History Society, 2006

David Fraser, ‘Alanbrooke’, in John Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991

W. J. R. Gardner, ‘An Allied Perspective’, in Stephen Howarth et al., eds., The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945: The 50th Anniversary International Naval Conference, Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 1994

Sarvepalli Gopal, ‘Churchill and India’, in Robert Blake et al., eds., Churchill, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996

John Gooch, ‘ “Hidden in the Rock”: American Military Perceptions of Great Britain 1919–1940’, in Lawrence Freedman et al., eds., War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard, London, Clarendon, 1992

John Greenacre, ‘ “When Opportunity Arises”: British Airborne Operations in the Mediterranean 1941–1944’, in Andrew Hargreaves et al., eds., Allied Fighting Effectiveness in North Africa and Italy 1942–1945, Boston, MA, Brill, 2014

Jose Harris, ‘Did British Workers Want the Welfare State? G. D. H. Cole’s Survey of 1942’, in Jay Winter, ed., The Working Class in Modern British History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983

Jose Harris, ‘Great Britain: The People’s War?’, in David Reynolds et al., eds., Allies at War: The Soviet, American, and British Experience, 1939–1945, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1984

Jose Harris, ‘Political Ideas and the Debate on State Welfare, 1940–45’, in Harold Smith, ed., War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1986

Peter Howlett, ‘The Wartime Economy, 1939–1945’, in Roderick Floud et al., eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume 3, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004

Rob Johnson, ‘The Indian Army and Internal Security: 1919–1946’, in Kaushik Roy, ed., The Indian Army in the Two World Wars, Boston, MA, Brill, 2012

Clifford Kinvig, ‘General Percival and the Fall of Singapore’, in Brian P. Farrell et al., eds., Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited, Singapore, Marshall Cavendish International, 2002

Richard M. Leighton, ‘U.S. Merchant Shipping and the British Import Crisis’, in Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions, Washington DC, Center of Military History, 1987

Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, ‘ “Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine”: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942’, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2007

Arthur Marwick, ‘World War II and Social Class in Great Britain’, in A. C. Duke et al., eds., Britain and the Netherlands, The Hague, Springer Dordrecht, 1977

Ralph Mavrogordato, ‘Hitler’s Decision on the Defense of Italy’, in Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions, Washington DC, Center of Military History, 1987

Mungo Melvin, ‘The German Perspective’, in John Buckley, ed., The Normandy Campaign 1944: Sixty Years On, London, Routledge, 2006

George Peden, ‘Financing Churchill’s Army’, in Keith Neilson et al., eds., The British Way in Warfare: Power and the International System, 1856–1956, London, Routledge, 2016

Brian Holden Reid, ‘Alexander’, in John Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991

David Reynolds, ‘Churchill and the British “Decision” to Fight on in 1940: Right Policy, Wrong Reasons’, in Richard Langhorne, ed., Diplomacy and Intelligence During the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985

Jürgen Rohwer, ‘Radio Intelligence and Its Role in the Battle of the Atlantic’, in Christopher Andrew et al., eds., The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century, London, Palgrave, 1984

Brian Short et al., ‘ “The Front Line of Freedom”: State-led Agricultural Revolution in Britain, 1939–45’, in Brian Short et al., eds., The Front Line of Freedom: British Agriculture in the Second World War, London, British Agricultural History Society, 2006

Keith Simpson, ‘Percival’, in John Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991

Michael Simpson, ‘Superhighway to the World Wide Web: The Mediterranean in British Imperial Strategy, 1900–45’, in John B. Hattendorf, ed., Naval Policy and Strategy in the Mediterranean: Past, Present and Future, London, Routledge, 2000

Penny Summerfield, ‘The “Levelling of Class” ’, in Harold L. Smith, ed., War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1986

Geoffrey Warner, ‘The Impact of the Second World War upon British Foreign Policy’, in Brian Brivati et al., eds., What Difference Did the War Make?, London, Cassell, 1995

Akashi Yoji, ‘General Yamashita Tokoyuki: Commander of the Twenty-Fifth Army’, in Brian P. Farrell et al., eds., Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited, Singapore, Marshall Cavendish International, 2002

Books

Fredrick Aandahl et al., eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, The Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943, Washington DC, US Government Printing Office, 1958

Richard Acland, How It Can Be Done, London, MacDonald, 1943

Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War, London, Pimlico, 1994

Peter Adey et al., Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz, London, Bloomsbury, 2016

Elena Agarossi, A Nation Collapses: The Italian Surrender of September 1943, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000

Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the British Empire, London, Abacus, 2008

Louis Allen, Burma: The Longest War 1941–45, London, Orion, 1984

Alan Allport, Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War 1938–1941, London, Profile; New York, Knopf, 2020

Alan Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939–1945, London, Yale University Press, 2015

Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War, London, Yale University Press, 2009

Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy Upon World War II, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1961

Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944, New York, Henry Holt, 2008

Douglas Bailey, We Built and Destroyed, London, Hurst & Blackett, 1944

Simon Ball, Alamein, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016

Simon Ball, The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949, New York, HarperPress, 2009

Stuart Ball, ed., Parliament and Politics in the Age of Churchill and Attlee: The Headlam Diaries, 1935–1951, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999

John Barnes, ed., The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries 1929–1945, London, Hutchinson, 1988

Corelli Barnett, The Desert Generals, London, Allen and Unwin, 1960

Corelli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War, New York, W. W. Norton, 1991

Niall Barr, Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein, New York, Overlook, 2005

Brian Barton, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, Belfast, Ulster Historical Foundation, 1995

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945, London, Belknap, 2005

Antony Beevor, Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge, New York, Viking, 2015

Antony Beevor, The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II, New York, Viking, 2018

C. B. A. Behrens, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War, London, HMSO, 1955

Amy Helen Bell, Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London, London, Yale University Press, 2024

Christopher M. Bell, Churchill and Sea Power, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014

Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, Cmnd. 6404, London, HMSO, 1942

John Bew, Citizen Clem, London, Riverrun, 2017

Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2002

Patrick Bishop, Air Force Blue, London, HarperCollins, 2017

Alexander Fitzgerald-Black, Eagles Over Husky: The Allied Air Forces in the Sicilian Campaign, 14 May to 17 August 1943, Warwick, Helion, 2018

Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939–1942, New York, Random House, 1996

Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942–1945, New York, Random House, 1998

Brian Bond, ed., Chief of Staff: The Diaries of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall, vol. 2: 1940–1944, London, Archon Books, 1974

Timothy Bowman, ed., The Military Papers of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, vol. 1: 1940–42, Stroud, Army Records Society, 2021

Andrew Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: Linchpin of Victory, 1935–1942, Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 2017

Carl Boyd and Akihiko Yoshida, The Japanese Submarine Force and World War II, Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 1995

Paul Brassley, The Real Agricultural Revolution: The Transformation of English Farming, 1939–1985, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2023

Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997, New York, Vintage, 2010

British Bombing Survey Unit, The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939–1945, London, Frank Cass, 1998

Stephen Brooke, Labour’s War, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992

Stephen Brooks, ed., Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy, Stroud, Army Records Society, 2008

John Buckley, British Armour in the Normandy Campaign, London, Routledge, 2004

John Buckley, Monty’s Men: The British Army and the Liberation of Europe, London, Yale University Press, 2013

Stephen Bungay, Alamein, London, Aurum, 2002

Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God, New York, Grove, 1987

John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya 1880–1941, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979

By Air to Battle: The Official Account of the British First and Sixth Airborne Divisions, London, HMSO, 1945

Peter Caddick-Adams, Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013

Peter Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives, New York, Overlook, 2012

Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, London, Pimlico, 1991

Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain, 1939–1945, London, Jonathan Cape, 1969

Raymond Callahan, Triumph at Imphal-Kohima: How the Indian Army Finally Stopped the Japanese Juggernaut, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2017

Christy Campbell, Target London: Under Attack from the V-weapons During WWII, New York, Little, Brown, 2012

David Cannadine, In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004

David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999

David Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000

John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo–American Special Relationship 1940–57, London, Harcourt, 1995

Natacha Chevalier, Food in Wartime Britain: Testimonies from the Kitchen Front (1939–1945), London, Routledge, 2020

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2: Their Finest Hour, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3: The Grand Alliance, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4: The Hinge of Fate, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 5: Closing the Ring, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6: Triumph and Tragedy, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002

Robert M. Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2005

Peter Clarke, The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps, 1889–1952, London, Allen Lane, 2002

Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana, London, Bloomsbury, 2009

David H. Close, The Greek Civil War, London, Routledge, 1995

D. H. Cole, Imperial Military Geography, London, Sifton Praed, 1937

Margaret Cole, The General Election of 1945 and After, London, Faber, 1945

Basil Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom, London, HMSO, 1957

Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, London, Penguin, 2013

John Rupert Colville, The Fringes of Power, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1985

James Colvin, Eighth Army Versus Rommel: Tactics, Training and Operations in North Africa 1940–1942, Warwick, Helion, 2020

John Connell, Auchinleck: A Critical Biography, London, Cassell, 1959

Mark Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II, London, I. B. Tauris, 2001

Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War, New York, Pearson Longman, 2004

Allan Converse, Armies of Empire: The 9th Australian and 50th British Divisions in Battle 1939–1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011

Tim Cook, The Necessary War, vol. 1: Canadians Fighting the Second World War 1939–1943, Toronto, Penguin Canada, 2015

Alan W. Cooper, The Dam Buster Raid: A Reappraisal, 70 Years On, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2013

Diana Cooper, Trumpets from the Steep, London, Hart-Davis, 1960

Matthew Cooper, The German Air Force 1933–1945: An Anatomy of Failure, London, Jane’s, 1981

Andrew Corbett, Supreme Emergency: How Britain Lives with the Bomb, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2022

David Cowan, Politics of the Past: Inter-war Memories and the Making of British Popular Politics, 1939–2009, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024

Ben Cowell, The British Country House Revival, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2024

Nicholas Crane, The Making of the British Landscape, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017

R. L. Crimp, Diary of a Desert Rat, London, Pan, 1974

Janet Brennan Croft, War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien, London, Praeger, 2004

Robert Crowcroft, Attlee’s War: World War II and the Making of a Labour Leader, London, I. B. Tauris, 2011

Noel Crusz, The Cocos Islands Mutiny, Fremantle, WA, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001

Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries 1939–1945 Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2001

John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World, London, Red Globe Press, 1998

Norman Davies, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939–1945, New York, Viking, 2007

Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell: All Propaganda Is Lies 1941–1942, London, Secker & Warburg, 1998

Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell: I Have Tried to Tell the Truth 1943–1944, London, Secker & Warburg, 1998

Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell: Smothered Under Journalism, 1946, London, Secker & Warburg, 1998

Len Deighton, Bomber, New York, Harper & Row, 1970

Patrick Delaforce, The Battle of the Bulge: Hitler’s Final Gamble, London, Longman, 2006

Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East ca. 1600–1950, Boston, MA, Brill, 2012

Carlo D’Este, Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily, 1943, New York, Dutton, 1988

Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy, New York, Harper Perennial, 1991

Peter Dewey, War and Progress: Britain 1914–1945, London, Routledge, 2017

David Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, O.M., 1938–1945, London, Cassell, 1971

Jonathan Dimbleby, The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016

Jonathan Dimbleby, Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein – the Battle That Turned the Tide, London, Profile, 2013

Colin Dobinson, AA Command: Britain’s Anti-Aircraft Defences of World War II, London, Methuen, 2001

Alan Dobson, US Wartime Aid to Britain 1940–1946, London, Routledge, 1986

Richardson Dougall, ed., Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference), 1945, vol. 2, Washington DC, US Government Printing Office, 1960

John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York, Pantheon, 1987

David Dutton, Anthony Eden: A Life and Reputation, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996

Bernard Edwards, The Decoys: A Tale of Three Atlantic Convoys, 1942, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2016

David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War, London, Penguin, 2011

David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, London, Allen Lane, 2018

David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006

John Ellis, Cassino: The Hollow Victory: The Battle for Rome January–June 1944, London, Aurum, 2003

L. F. Ellis et al., Victory in the West, vol. 1: Battle of Normandy, London, HMSO, 1962

Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in Twentieth-Century England, London, Longman, 2011

Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal, New Delhi, Government of India Press, 1945

Graham Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race, New York, Basic Books, 2013

Brian P. Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, Stroud, Tempus, 2005

Jonathan Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019

Bernard Fergusson, Beyond the Chindwin, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2009

John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency, London, Bloomsbury, 2020

Geoffrey G. Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011

Steven Fielding et al., England Arise!: The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995

Richard Finlay, Modern Scotland: 1914–2000, London, Profile, 2003

Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, New York, Basic Books, 2001

Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008

Richard B. Frank, Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937–May 1942, New York, W. W. Norton, 2020

Noble Frankland, History at War: The Campaigns of an Historian, London, Giles de la Mare, 1998

David Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them: The British Army in the Second World War, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1983

George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, New York, Vintage, 1992

David French, Raising Churchill’s Army, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000

Graham Freudenberg, Churchill and Australia, Sydney, Macmillan, 2008

Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008

J. F. C. Fuller, The Second World War 1939–1945, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948

G. H. Gallup, ed., The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain 1937–1975, vol. 1: 1937–1964, New York, Random House, 1976

Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain 1939–1945, London, Headline, 2005

W. J. R. Gardner, Decoding History: The Battle of the Atlantic and Ultra, London, Macmillan, 1999

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 13: The Coming of War, 1936–1939, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2009

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 14: At the Admiralty, September 1939–May 1940, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2011

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 15: Never Surrender, May 1940–December 1940, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2011

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 16: The Ever-Widening War, 1941, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2011

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17: Testing Times, 1942, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2014

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 18: One Continent Redeemed, January–August 1943, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2015

Martin Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 19: Fateful Questions September 1943 to April 1944, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2017

Martin Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20: Normandy and Beyond, May–December 1944, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2018

Martin Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21: The Shadow of Victory, January–July 1945, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2018

Martin Gilbert, The Day the War Ended: May 8, 1945 – Victory in Europe, New York, Henry Holt, 1995

Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941, London, Heinemann, 1983

Ian Gooderson, A Hard Way to Make a War: The Allied Campaign in Italy in the Second World War, London, Conway, 2009

Gabriel Gorodetsky, ed., The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943, London, Yale University Press, 2015

Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945, London, Macmillan, 1964

Matthew Grant, Citizenship, Sexual Anxiety and Womanhood in Second World War Britain: The Case of the Man with the Cleft Chin, London, Routledge, 2013

A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, London, Walker, 2006

Matthew Green, Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages, London, W. W. Norton, 2022

Paul Greenhough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–1944, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982

Eric Grove, The Defeat of the Enemy Attack upon Shipping, 1939–1945, Aldershot, Ashgate (for the Navy Records Society), 1998

Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, Boston, MA, Da Capo, 1983

H. Duncan Hall, North American Supply, London, HMSO, 1955

Nigel Hamilton, Monty: The Making of a General: 1887–1942, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1981

Bryn Hammond, El Alamein, London, Osprey, 2012

Richard Hammond, Strangling the Axis: The Fight for Control of the Mediterranean During the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020

W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, The British War Economy, London, HMSO, 1949

Michael I. Handel, War, Strategy and Intelligence, London, Routledge, 1989

Randall Hansen, Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942–1945, New York, Dutton Caliber, 2010

William Harrington et al., The 1945 Revolution, London, Davis-Poynter, 1978

Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2005

Arthur Harris, Despatch on War Operations: 23rd February 1942 to 8th May 1945, London, Routledge, 1995

Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998

Kenneth Harris, Attlee, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982

Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, New York, Random House, 2002

Stephen Hart, Colossal Cracks: Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in Northwest Europe, 1944–45, Mechanicsburg, PA, Stackpole Books, 2007

John Harvey, ed., The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey 1941–1945, London, Collins, 1978

Max Hastings, Bomber Command, London, Pan Macmillan, 2010

Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill 1940–1945, New York, Knopf, 2009

Phil Haun, ed., Lectures of the Air Corps Tactical School and American Strategic Bombing in World War II, Lexington, KY, University of Kentucky Press, 2020

R. P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW Camp, Singapore, 1942–5, London, Routledge, 2003

Simon Heffer, ed., Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries, vol. 2: 1938–43, London, Hutchinson, 2022

Kathleen Hey, The View from the Corner Shop, London, Simon & Schuster, 2016

F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion, London, I. B. Tauris, 2018

David Holbrook, Flesh Wounds, Staplehurst, Spellmount, 2007

Richard Holmes, The World at War: The Landmark Oral History, London, Ebury, 2007

Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars: And Other Essays, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984

Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of the Two World Wars, London, Temple Smith, 1972

Michael Howard, Grand Strategy, vol. 4: September 1942–August 1943, London, HMSO, 1970

Michael Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in The Second World War, London, Greenhill, 1993

George F. Howe, United States Army in World War II, Mediterranean Theater of Operations: Northwest Africa, Seizing the Initiative In the West, Washington DC, Office of the Chief of Military History, 1957

Peter Howlett, Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War, London, HMSO, 1995

Stuart Hylton, Their Darkest Hour: The Hidden History of the Home Front 1939–1945, Stroud, Sutton, 2001

Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War, London, Bloomsbury, 2006

William Jackson et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 6, part 3: Victory in the Mediterranean: November 1944 to May 1945, London, HMSO, 1988

Kevin Jefferys, The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics 1940–1945, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1991

Kevin Jefferys, ed., Labour and the Wartime Coalition: From the Diary of James Chuter Ede, 1941–1945, London, Historians’ Press, 1987

Charles Jellison, Besieged: The World War 2 Ordeal of Malta, 1940–1942, Lebanon, NH, University Press of New England, 1985

Martin Johnes, Wales Since 1939, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012

Elizabeth Johnson et al., eds., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 24, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012

John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris, London, Penguin, 1994

David M. Kennedy, The American People in World War II: Freedom from Fear, part 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003

Paul M. Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945: Eight Studies, London, Fontana, 1984

Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, New York, W. W. Norton, 2001

Yasmin Khan, India at War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015

Warren Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, vol. 1: Alliance Emerging, October 1933–November 1942, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984

Warren Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, vol. 2: Alliance Forged, November 1942–February 1944, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984

Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991

S. Woodburn Kirby et al., The War Against Japan, vol. 4: The Reconquest of Burma, London, HMSO, 1965

Martin Kitchen, British Policy Towards the Soviet Union During the Second World War, London, Palgrave, 1986

Yvonne M. Klein, ed., Beyond the Home Front: Women’s Autobiographical Writing of the Two World Wars, New York, NYU Press, 1997

Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, Redwood City, CA, Stanford University Press, 1954

Sarah Kovner, Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2020

Kit Kowol, Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024

David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–1951, London, Walker, 2008

Arthur Lane, Empire Soldier, Stockport, Nesa News Publishers, 2004

Marghanita Laski, Love on the Supertax, London, Cresset, 1944

Michael D. Leigh, The Evacuation of Civilians from Burma: Analysing the 1942 Colonial Disaster, London, Bloomsbury, 2014

Ronald Lewin, The Chief: Field Marshall Lord Wavell, Commander-in-Chief and Viceroy, 1939–1947, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980

Norman Lewis, Naples ’44, New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2024

Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978

Keith Lowe, Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg, 1943, London, Scribner, 2007

Robert Lyman, A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma and Britain 1941–45, London, Osprey, 2021

Oliver Lyttelton, The Memoirs of Lord Chandos, London, Bodley Head, 1962

Robert Mackay, The Test of War: Inside Britain 1939–1945, London, Routledge, 1998

S. P. MacKenzie, Politics and Military Morale: Current Affairs and Citizenship Education in the British Army, 1914–1950, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992

R. C. H MacKie, This Was Singapore, London, Hale, 1950

Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches, London, Penguin, 2009

Hermann Mannheim, Group Problems in Crime and Punishment, London, Routledge, 2013

Arthur Marder et al., Old Friends New Enemies, vol. 2: The Pacific War 1942–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990

Andrew Marr, The History of Modern Britain, London, Pan, 2008

Daniel P. Marston, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign, London, Praeger, 2003

Arthur Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace and Social Change, 1900–1967, New York, Little, Brown, 1968

Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945, London, Penguin, 2003

Mass-Observation, The Journey Home, London, John Murray, 1944

Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare: 1943–1944, Washington DC, Center of Military History, 1994

Evan Mawdsley, The War for the Seas: A Maritime History of World War II, London, Yale University Press, 2019

Neil McCallum, Journey with a Pistol: A Diary of War, London, Gollancz, 1959

R. B. McCallum et al., The British General Election of 1945, London, Routledge, 1964

Kelli McCoy, ed., Milestone Documents in American History: Exploring the Primary Sources That Shaped America, Dallas, TX, Schlager Group Inc., 2020

Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998

Leo McKinstry, Attlee and Churchill: Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace, London, Atlantic Books, 2019

Frank McLynn, The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph, 1942–45, London, Yale University Press, 2010

Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, New York, Basic Books, 2021

Martin Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, London, Cassell, 2007

Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, London, Penguin, 1990

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Potsdam), Germany and the Second World War, 13 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990

Helen D. Millgate, ed., Mr Brown’s War: A Diary from the Home Front, Stroud, History Press, 1998

Lennox A. Mills, British Rule in Eastern Asia, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 1942

Marc Milner, Battle of the Atlantic, Stroud, History Press, 2011

Marc Milner, Stopping the Panzers: The Untold Story of D-Day, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2017

Alan S. Milward, The Economic Effects of the Two World Wars on Britain, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1970

C. J. C. Molony, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 5: The Campaign in Sicily, 1943 and the Campaign in Italy, 3rd September 1943 to 31st March 1944, London, HMSO, 1973

Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2016

Penderel Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973

Alan Moorehead, The Desert War: The Classic Trilogy on the North Africa Campaign 1940–43, London, Aurum, 2017

Alan Moorehead, Montgomery, London, Coward-McCann, 1946

Kenneth O. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005

Martin K. A. Morgan, Down to Earth: The 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Normandy, Atglen, PA, Schiffer Military History, 2004

Jan Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat, London, Faber & Faber, 1980

Ian Morrison, Malayan Postscript, London, Angus & Robertson, 1943

Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989

Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, New York, Basic Books, 2011

Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015

Robert N. Murray, Lest We Forget: Experiences of World War II West Indian Ex-service Personnel, Nottingham, Turnaround Distribution, 1996

Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938–1939: The Path to Ruin, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984

Robin Neillands, The Dieppe Raid: The Story of the Disastrous 1942 Expedition, Bloomington, IN, University of Indiana Press, 2005

Nigel Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson: The War Years, 1939–1945, New York, Atheneum, 1966

Lucy Noakes, Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020

Jonathan Oates, Attack on London: Disaster, Riot and War, Barnsley, Wharncliffe, 2009

Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019

T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence, London, HMSO, 1955

Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2015

David O’Keefe, One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe, London, Icon, 2022

Philip Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War: Politics, Economic Mobilisation and Society, 1939–45, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013

David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919–1939, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990

Richard J. Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945, New York, Viking, 2022

Richard J. Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945, London, Penguin, 2014

Frank Owen, The Fall of Singapore, London, Penguin, 2001

Mollie Panter-Downes, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, Bath, Persephone, 2009

H. M. D. Parker, Manpower, London, HMSO, 1957

Robert Payne, The Marshall Story: A Biography of George C. Marshall, New York, Brick Tower Press, 2015

G. C. Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Henry Pelling, Britain and the Second World War, London, Collins, 1970

F. W. Perry, The Commonwealth Armies: Manpower and Organisation in Two World Wars, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988

Ian Philpott, The Royal Air Force, An Encyclopedia of the Inter-War Years, vol. 2: Rearmament 1930–1939, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2006

Ben Pimlott, ed., The Second World War Diaries of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45, London, Cape, 1986

I. S. O. Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 2: The Germans Come to the Help of Their Ally, 1941, London, HMSO, 1956

I. S. O. Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 3: British Fortunes Reach Their Lowest Ebb, London, HMSO, 1960

I. S. O. Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 4: The Destruction of the Axis Forces in Africa, London, HMSO, 1966

Douglas Porch, The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004

Michael Postan, British War Production, London, HMSO, 1952

Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2010

Robin Prior, Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914–1945, London, Yale University Press, 2022

Henry Probert, Bomber Harris: His Life and Times, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2016

Francis Pryor, The Making of the British Landscape, London, Penguin, 2011

Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party, London, Vintage, 2011

Sudip Kar Purkayastha, ed., Bengal Famine: An Unpunished Genocide – A Commentary on Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s Panchasher Manwantar, Delhi, Vitasta Publishing, 2021

Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia, New York, Basic Books, 2016

John Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, 1940–1957, London, Longman, 1995

John Ramsden, The Dam Busters: A British Film Guide, London, I. B. Tauris, 2002

R. A. Ratcliffe, Delusions of Intelligence: Enigma, Ultra, and the End of Secure Cyphers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006

Simon Read, Dark City: Crime in Wartime London, Shepperton, Ian Allan, 2010

Tony Redding, Bombing Germany: The Final Phase, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2015

Barry Renfrew, Wings of Empire: The Forgotten Wars of the Royal Air Force, 1919–1939, Stroud, History Press, 2015

Chris Renwick, Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State, London, Penguin, 2018

David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, London, Penguin, 2005

David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945, New York, Random House, 1995

Sebastian Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality: Airborne Warfare, Air Power and the Failure of Operation Market Garden, London, Robert Hale, 2011

Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, New York, Viking, 2018

Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994

Andrew Roberts, The Holy Fox: A Biography of Lord Halifax, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991

Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses Who Led the West to Victory in World War II, London, Penguin, 2009

Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, London, Yale University Press, 2007

N. A. M. Rodger, The Price of Admiralty: A Naval History of Britain, 1815–1945, New York, W. W. Norton, 2025

Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004

Niall Rothnie, The Baedeker Blitz: Hitler’s Attack on Britain’s Historic Cities, Shepperton, Ian Allan, 1992

Kaushik Roy, Sepoys Against the Rising Sun: The Indian Army in Far East and South-east Asia, 1941–45, Boston, MA, Brill, 2016

Trevor Royle, Orde Wingate: A Man of Genius, 1903–1944, Barnsley, Frontline Books, 2010

Trevor Royle, A Time of Tyrants: Scotland and the Second World War, Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2011

Allan A. Ryan, Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice, and Command Accountability, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2012

Vita Sackville-West, The Women’s Land Army, London, Michael Joseph, 1944

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Allies Against the Rising Sun: The United States, the British Nations, and the Defeat of Imperial Japan, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2009

Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, London, Pearson, 2014

Richard S. Sayers, Financial Policy, 1939–45, London, HMSO, 1956

Jonathan Schneer, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet, New York, Basic Books, 2015

Ronnie Scott, ed., The Real ‘Dad’s Army’: The War Diaries of Colonel Rodney Foster, New York, Viking, 2011

Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma: The Battle for the Code, London, Phoenix, 2001

Robert C. Self, Neville Chamberlain: A Biography, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006

Robert C. Self, ed., The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, vol. 4: The Downing Street Years, 1934–1940, London, Routledge, 2005

Robert Paul Shay, British Rearmament in the Thirties, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1977

Ben Shephard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945, London, Pimlico, 2006

Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, New York, Enigma Books, 2008

Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, London, Houghton Mifflin, 2001

Brian Short, The Battle of the Fields, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2014

Brendan Simms, Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War, New York, Basic Books, 2021

Viscount Slim, Defeat into Victory, London, Cassell, 1956

E. D. Smith, Victory of a Sort: The British in Greece, 1941–46, London, Robert Hale, 1988

Graham Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain, London, I. B. Tauris, 1987

Kevin Smith, Conflict Over Convoys: Anglo–American Logistics Diplomacy in the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002

Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory, London, Routledge, 2000

May Smith, These Wonderful Rumours! A Young Schoolteacher’s Wartime Diaries, 1939–1945, London, Virago, 2012

Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X: How Bletchley Park Helped Win the War, London, Biteback, 2011

Edward Smithies, Crime in Wartime: A Social History of Crime in World War II, London, Unwin Hyman, 1982

William Stadiem, Too Rich: The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk, London, Parkway, 2009

Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–45, New York, Basic Books, 2015

Edward Stebbing, Diary of a Decade, 1939–50, Lewes, Book Guild, 1998

Strength and Casualties of the Armed Forces and Auxiliary Services of the United Kingdom, 1939–1945, Cmnd. 6832, London, HMSO, 1946

Dietmar Suss, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Endured Aerial Destruction in World War II, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014

Daniel Swift, Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Christopher Sykes, Orde Wingate: A Biography, London, Collins, 1959

A. J. P. Taylor, England 1914–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1965

Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York, Harper Perennial, 2005

Tea on Service, London, The Tea Centre, 1947

John Terraine, Business in Great Waters: The U-Boat Wars, 1916–1945, London, Leo Cooper, 1989

John Terraine, The Right of the Line, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1985

Pat Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018

Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012

Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, London, HarperCollins, 1995

Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War, London, John Murray, 2003

Christopher G. Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978

Andrew Thorpe, Parties at War: Political Organization in Second World War Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009

Phil Tinline, The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares, London, Hurst, 2022

Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, London, HMSO, 1950

Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010, London, John Murray, 2014

Daniel Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016

Daniel Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, 1942–1947, London, Allen Lane, 2020

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin, 1994

Robert Tombs, The English and Their History, London, Vintage, 2016

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, New York, Penguin, 2008

Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, New York, Henry Holt, 2010

Richard Toye, The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013

Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern War, 1900–1918, London, Allen and Unwin, 1987

H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944, New York City, Enigma Books, 2000

Carl Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1990

Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, London, Routledge, 1999

Carol Twinch, Women on the Land: Their Story During Two World Wars, Cambridge, Lutterworth Press, 1990

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (European War), Washington DC, 1945

Mauren Waller, London 1945: Life in the Debris of War, London, St Martin’s Press, 2005

R. N. Walling, Singapura Sorrows, Singapore, Malaya Publishing House, 1931

Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, New York, Basic Books, 2015

Paul Ward, Britishness Since 1870, London, Routledge, 2004

Philip Warner, Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier, London, Cassell, 2001

Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945, London, Cassell, 1999

Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939–1945, 4 vols, London, HMSO, 1961

Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000, London, Macmillan, 2002

Mark K. Wells, Courage and Air Warfare: The Allied Aircrew Experience in the Second World War, London, Routledge, 1995

David Fairbank White, Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006

C. Henry Warren, England Is a Village, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1941

Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–1965, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005

Wendy Webster, Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill, New York, W. W. Norton, 2021

Jerry White, The Battle of London 1939–45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire, New York, Vintage, 2023

Charles Williams, Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman, London, Biteback, 2019

Cat Wilson, Churchill on the Far East in the Second World War, London, Palgrave, 2014

Alan F. Wilt, Food for War: Agriculture and Rearmament in Britain Before the Second World War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001

Sandra Koa Wing, ed., Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War, London, Profile, 2009

Ian S. Wood, Britain, Ireland and the Second World War, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010

Philip Woods, Managing the Media in the India–Burma War, 1941–1945, London, Bloomsbury, 2022

Guy Woodward, Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015

Robin Woolven, ed., The London Diary of Anthony Heap, 1931–1945, Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2017

Richard Worrall, The Ruhr 1943: The RAF’s Brutal Fight for Germany’s Industrial Heartland, London, Osprey, 2021

Jeremy A. Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2019

Mark Zuehlke, Tragedy at Dieppe: Operation Jubilee, August 19, 1942, Vancouver, Douglas & McIntyre, 2014

Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002

Dissertations

John D. Alexander, ‘Justice in Warfare: the Ethical Debate over British Area Bombing of German Cities in World War II’, PhD diss., Boston University, 2014

Craig Armstrong, ‘Tyneside 1939–1945: A Study of the Regional Impact of Total War’, PhD diss., University of Northumbria, 2004

William S. Carter, ‘Anglo–Canadian Wartime Relations, 1939–1945: RAF Bomber Command and No. 6 (Canadian) Group’, PhD diss., McMaster University, 1989

Rex Cording, ‘The Other Bomber Battle: An Examination of the Problems That Arose Between the Air Staff and the AOC Bomber Command Between 1942 and 1945 and Their Effects on the Strategic Bomber Offensive’, PhD diss., University of Canterbury, 2006

John Fahey, ‘Britain 1939–1945: The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2004

John Robert Peaty, ‘British Army Manpower Crisis 1944’, PhD diss., King’s College University of London, 2000

Seumas Spark, ‘The Treatment of the British Military War Dead of the Second World War’, PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2009

Joseph Strange, ‘Cross-Channel Attack, 1942: The British Rejection of Operation SLEDGEHAMMER and the Cherbourg Alternative’, PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1984

Erin M. K. Weir, ‘The Nazi Submarine Blockade: A Near Victory of Economic Warfare?’, MA diss., University of Calgary, 2007

Websites

The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/joint-press-conference-with-prime-minister-churchill-casablanca

Armoured Aircraft Carriers in World War II https://www.armouredcarriers.com/

Bayeux War Cemetery, CWGC https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/cemetery-details/2033300/bayeux-war-cemetery/

The Churchill Project, ‘Were “Soft Underbelly” and “Fortress Europe” Churchill Phrases?’ https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/soft-underbelly-fortress-europe/

Rob Davis, http://robdavistelford.co.uk/webspace/raf_bc/

Jason Evans, ‘How a Welsh Teenager Became a Violent Killer, Preying on Random men and Women for Thrills’, Walesonline.uk 25 June 2023, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/elizabeth-jones-cleft-chin-murder-27150667

Brian P. Farrell, ‘Pound, Sir (Alfred) Dudley Pickman Rogers’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://www.oxforddnb.com/

German Propaganda Archive https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/rsi36.htm

Arthur Herman, ‘Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine Would Have Been Worse’, The Churchill Project, 13 October 2017, https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/churcills-secret-war-bengal-famine-1943/

James Holland, ‘The Tragedy of the Bengal Famine’, 12 February 2025, https://substack.com/home/post/p-156998580

Scott Horton, ‘Churchill’s Dark Side: Six Questions for Madhusree Mukerjee’, Harper’s Magazine, 4 November 2010, https://harpers.org/2010/11/churchills-dark-side-six-questions-for-madhusree-mukerjee/

‘How the First Report from Belsen Concentration Camp Shocked the World’, BBC, 22 October 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-63317358

Martin Langfield, ‘The Aldwych V-1 blast: June 30, 1944’, The Secret Fire, https://secretfire.wordpress.com/the-aldwych-v-1-blast-june-30-1944/

John Martin, ‘Dig for Victory: Britain’s WW2 War on Hunger’, History Extra, 17 March 2022, https://www.historyextra.com/membership/dig-for-victory-campaign-ww2-food-shortages-how-britain-coped/

Hugh Martyr, ‘V-Weapons Campaign’, World War II Database https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=340

Zareer Masani, ‘Churchill and the Genocide Myth’, The Critic, December 2020, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-2020/churchill-and-the-genocide-myth/

‘Ivy Mildred Croughton Millichamp’, Find a Grave https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/30641125/ivy-mildred-millichamp

Robin J. Moore, ‘Hope, Victor Alexander John, Second Marquess of Linlithgow’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://www.oxforddnb.com/

The National Archives, ‘Land and Property Requisitioned for War in the 20th Century’, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/land-requisitioned-war/

Phillips Payson O’Brien, ‘The Myth of the Plucky Brit’, The Critic, October 2021, https://thecritic.co.uk/the-myth-of-the-plucky-brit/

Conal O’Donnell, ‘Breckland Exodus-The Forced Evacuation of the Norfolk Battle Area 1942’, WW2 People’s War, 11 November 2004, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/62/a3258362.shtml

‘Richard Dimbleby Describes Belsen’, BBC, 3 June 2024, https://www.bbc.com/videos/c87z7p0j3g5o

Kirsten Tait, ‘Aberdeen Blitz: Remembering When Bombs Rained Down on the Granite City’, STV News, 21 April 2023, https://news.stv.tv/north/aberdeen-blitz-remembering-when-bombs-rained-down-on-the-granite-city-during-world-war-two

Naidu Ratnala Thulaja, ‘Opium and Its History in Singapore’, Singapore Infopedia, https://www.nlb.gov.sg/

U-Boat.net http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/

Gary Willis, ‘The Battle for Land “In the National Interest” During Britain’s Second World War’, On History, April 2021, https://blog.history.ac.uk/2021/04/the-battle-for-land-in-the-national-interest-during-britains-second-world-war/

George Wilson, Letter to His Wife, International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/1227

Guy Woodward, ‘Rotten Fish and Belfast Confetti’, OUP Blog, 30 January 2015, https://blog.oup.com/2015/01/winston-churchill-northern-ireland-second-world-war/

‘Lest We Forget New Cross’, The Woolworth’s Museum, https://www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk/1940s-remembernewcross.htm

Notes

Introduction: Imperial Nightmare

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 13: The Coming of War, 1936–1939, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2009, p. 886 (3 November
1937).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 16: The Ever-Widening War, 1941, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2011, p. 1576 (7 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 16, p. 1577 (7 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Brendan Simms, Hitler’s American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and Germany’s March to Global War, New York, Basic Books, 2021, pp. 124–5; Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3: The Grand Alliance, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002, pp. 739–40.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

John Harvey, ed., The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey 1941–1945, London, Collins, 1978, p. 71 (8 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Nigel Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson: The War Years, 1939–1945, New York, Atheneum, 1966, p. 194 (7 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Ben Pimlott, ed., The Second World War Diaries of Hugh Dalton, 1940–45, London, Cape, 1986, p. 331 (7 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Koa Wing, ed., Our Longest Days: A People’s History of the Second World War, London, Profile, 2009, p. 104 (7 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Brian Bond, ed., Chief of Staff: The Diaries of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall, vol. 2: 1940–1944, London, Archon Books, 1974, p. 62 (9 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

R. L. Crimp, Diary of a Desert Rat, London, Pan, 1974, p. 59 (8 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Edward Stebbing, Diary of a Decade, 1939–50, Lewes, Book Guild, 1998, p. 118 (8 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Kathleen Hey, The View from the Corner Shop, London, Simon & Schuster, 2016, pp. 110–11 (8 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Alan Allport, Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War 1938–1941, London, Profile; New York, Knopf, 2020, p. 124.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Williamson Murray, The Change in the European Balance of Power, 1938–1939: The Path to Ruin, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 159.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Michael Howard, The Continental Commitment: The Dilemma of British Defence Policy in the Era of the Two World Wars, London, Temple Smith, 1972, p. 133.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Robert. C. Self, Neville Chamberlain: A Biography, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006, p. 362.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Robert C. Self, ed., The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, vol. 4: The Downing Street Years, 1934–1940, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 456 (letter to Ida, 8 October 1939).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, New York, Penguin, 2008, p. 383.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Self, ed., The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, vol. 4, p. 551 (letter to Hilda, 14 July 1940).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

N. A. M. Rodger, The Price of Admiralty: A Naval History of Britain, 1815–1945, New York, W. W. Norton, 2025, pp. 407–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

For ENIGMA and ULTRA see John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorized History of GCHQ, Britain’s Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency, London, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 163–266; F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993; Michael Smith, The Secrets of Station X: How Bletchley Park Helped Win the War, London, Biteback, 2011; R. A. Ratcliffe, Delusions of Intelligence: Enigma, Ultra, and the End of Secure Cyphers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006; Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Enigma: The Battle for the Code, London, Phoenix, 2001.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Self, Neville Chamberlain, p. 366.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

David Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 26.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 15: Never Surrender, May 1940–December 1940, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2011, pp. 45–6 (15 May 1940).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Warren Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, vol. 1: Alliance Emerging, October 1933–November 1942, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 38–9 (16 May 1940).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

John Rupert Colville, The Fringes of Power, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1985, p. 136 (19 May 1940).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

H. Duncan Hall, North American Supply, London, HMSO, 1955, p. 212.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

National Archives, London (hereafter ‘NA’) CAB 66/11/42 Future Strategy, 4 September 1940.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, The British War Economy, London, HMSO, 1949, p. 232.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Self, ed., The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters, vol. 4, p. 492 (letter to Ida, 27 January 1940).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

John Gooch, ‘ “Hidden in the Rock”: American Military Perceptions of Great Britain 1919–1940’, in Lawrence Freedman et al., eds., War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard, London, Clarendon, 1992, pp. 156, 172.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Kelli McCoy, ed., Milestone Documents in American History: Exploring the Primary Sources That Shaped America, Dallas, TX, Schlager Group Inc., 2020, p. 1669.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Hall, North American Supply, p. 297.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Richard S. Sayers, Financial Policy, 1939–45, London, HMSO, 1956, p. 407.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

David Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, O.M., 1938–1945, London, Cassell, 1971, p. 431 (2 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 16, p. 372 (20 March 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Or almost: the USSR remained neutral so far as Japan was concerned and would, as it turned out, remain so until 8 August 1945. But in early 1942 this seemed more to the Allies’ advantage than not.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 62, 8 December 1941.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 64 (Appendix), 24 December 1941.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex (hereafter M-O) File Report 1095, ‘Opinion on America’, February 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Churchill The Second World War, vol. 3, p. 742.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

M-O File Report 1095, p. 7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 64 (Appendix), 24 December 1941.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

M-O File Report 1095, p. 6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

M-O File Report 1095, p. 6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Wing, ed., Our Longest Days, p. 106 (10 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Simms, Hitler’s American Gamble, pp. 166, 373.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Simms, Hitler’s American Gamble, p. 379.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

C. B. A. Behrens, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War, London, HMSO, 1955, p. 284.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 196 (11 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 433 (10 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

John Barnes, ed., The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries 1929–1945, London, Hutchinson, 1988, p. 773 (13 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Stuart Ball, ed., Parliament and Politics in the Age of Churchill and Attlee: The Headlam Diaries, 1935–1951, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 294 (8 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17: Testing Times, 1942, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2014, p. 257 (15 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Harvey, ed., The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 95 (15 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 434 (15 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 258 (15 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 212 (16 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 348 (5 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Wm. Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 121.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941, London, Heinemann, 1983, p. 1163.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Daily Herald, 16 August 1941, p. 1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

House of Commons Debates (hereafter HC Deb) 9 September 1941, vol. 374, col. 69.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, New York, Viking, 2018, p. 700; Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 3–22.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Churchill’s attitude to the United States was privately founded, at least in the early stages of the war, on ‘disillusion and suspicion’ as well as confidence. See David Reynolds, ‘Churchill and the British “Decision” to Fight on in 1940: Right Policy, Wrong Reasons’, in Richard Langhorne, ed., Diplomacy and Intelligence During the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 166.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, London, Penguin, 2005, p. 52.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Christopher G. Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 119–20.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana, London, Bloomsbury, 2009, p. 18.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo–American Special Relationship 1940–57, London, Harcourt, 1995, p. 59.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Douglas Porch, The Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theater in World War II, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, p. 253.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 16, pp. 1528, 1531 (30 November 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Robin Prior, Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain, 1914–1945, London, Yale University Press, 2022, p. 371.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Ball, ed., Parliament and Politics in the Age of Churchill and Attlee, pp. 289–90 (22 January 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 243 (12 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, pp. 713–14.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

The Times (London), 14 February 1942, p. 5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Daily Herald, 14 February 1942, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Pimlott, ed., The Second World War Diaries of Hugh Dalton, p. 370 (17 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 72, 18 February 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 433 (12 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Simon Heffer, ed., Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries, vol. 2: 1938–43, London, Hutchinson, 2022, p. 728 (13 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Daily Mail, 13 February 1942, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 72, 18 February 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 357 (6 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries 1939–1945 Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2001, p. 240 (19 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

1. Cataract of Disaster

Jeremy Black, ‘Midway and the Indian Ocean’, Naval War College Review, vol. 62, no. 4, 2009, p. 134.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

D. H. Cole, Imperial Military Geography, London, Sifton Praed, 1937, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–1945, London, Belknap, 2005, p. 106.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War, London, Bloomsbury, 2006, p. 270.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Behrens, Merchant Shipping and the Demands of War, p. 261.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

G. C. Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 215; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 33. Note that in what follows, ‘British Malaya’ or ‘Malaya’ will be used as a loose collective term for what was in 1941 a constitutionally complicated collection of Crown territories – the Federated and Unfederated Malay States, plus the ‘Straits Settlements’ which included the Crown Colony of Singapore.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 193.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 127.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Jan Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat, London, Faber & Faber, 1980, p. 450.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 40–41, pp. 66–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945, New York, Viking, 2022, pp. 71–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

The phrase comes from one of Churchill’s speeches to the Commons at the height of the Battle of Britain. Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 15, p. 690 (20 August 1940).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 173.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

The Times (London), 16 August 1941, p. 5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 77.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York, Pantheon, 1987, p. 99.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Diana Cooper, Trumpets from the Steep, London, Hart-Davis, 1960, p. 106.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

R. C. H. MacKie, This Was Singapore, London, Hale, 1950, pp. 25–6. For 1930s British life in Malaya and Singapore see John G. Butcher, The British in Malaya 1880–1941, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979; Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the British Empire, London, Abacus, 2008.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Ian Morrison, Malayan Postscript, London, Angus & Robertson, 1943, pp. 28–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Butcher, The British in Malaya, p. 133.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Douglas Bailey, We Built and Destroyed, London, Hurst & Blackett, 1944, p. 128.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Allen, Plain Tales from the British Empire, p. 516.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

MacKie, This Was Singapore, pp. 219–21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Carl Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade, London, Routledge, 1999, p. xiii; Hans Derks, History of the Opium Problem: The Assault on the East ca. 1600–1950, Boston, MA, Brill, 2012, p. 102.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

R. N. Walling, Singapura Sorrows, Singapore, Malaya Publishing House, 1931, pp. 33–6; Naidu Ratnala Thulaja, ‘Opium and Its History in Singapore’, Singapore Infopedia https://www.nlb.gov.sg; Carl Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1990, p. 215.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Trocki, Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy, pp. 143–5; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Harumi Goto-Shibata, ‘Empire on the Cheap: The Control of Opium Smoking in the Straits Settlements, 1925–1939’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2006, p. 65.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Thulaja, ‘Opium and Its History in Singapore’.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Lennox A. Mills, British Rule in Eastern Asia, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 1942, p. 81.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 14: At the Admiralty, September 1939–May 1940, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2011, p. 401 (21 November 1939).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

See his exchange with Dill in Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 16, p. 660 (13 May 1941); also p. 967 (21 July 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Andrew Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters: Linchpin of Victory, 1935–1942, Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 2017, p. 248. For a contrary view see Sean McMeekin, Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II, New York, Basic Books, 2021, p. 418.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Prior, Conquer We Must, pp. 416–17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 137.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4: The Hinge of Fate, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002, p. 73.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, p. 214.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 33.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, p. 221.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

NA CAB 65/14/20 War Cabinet Conclusions, Confidential Annexes, 8 August 1940.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Graham Freudenberg, Churchill and Australia, Sydney, Macmillan, 2008, pp. 225–30.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Bond, ed., Chief of Staff, p. 67 (20 December 1941).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Just a few hours after the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor on the other side of the International Date Line.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Frank Owen, The Fall of Singapore, London, Penguin, 2001, p. 36.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Morrison, Malayan Postscript, p. 42.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 117.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Morrison, Malayan Postscript, p. 52.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, p. 386.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, p. 405.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Thailand, though nominally neutral for another month, was already a helpless Japanese puppet state.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Akashi Yoji, ‘General Yamashita Tokoyuki: Commander of the Twenty-Fifth Army’, in Brian P. Farrell et al., eds., Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited, Singapore, Marshall Cavendish International, 2002.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 114; Brian P. Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, Stroud, Tempus, 2005, Appendix 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Morrison, Malayan Postscript, p. 157.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Keith Simpson, ‘Percival’, in John Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991, pp. 270–71.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Clifford Kinvig, ‘General Percival and the Fall of Singapore’, in Farrell et al., eds., Sixty Years On, p. 241.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 111; Kinvig, p. 261.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

For what follows on the 1942 Malaya campaign see Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore; Jonathan Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 193–200; Richard B. Frank, Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia–Pacific War: July 1937–May 1942, New York, W. W. Norton, 2020, pp. 332–84; David Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them: The British Army in the Second World War, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1983, pp. 244–65.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 111.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 195.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Morrison, Malayan Postscript, p. 96.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 118.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 197.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them, p. 247.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 124.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Morrison, Malayan Postscript, pp. 108–109.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 129–30.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Cooper, Trumpets from the Steep, p. 131.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 131.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 106 (19 January 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Prior, Conquer We Must, pp. 419–21; see also Freudenberg, Churchill and Australia, pp. 363–71. The expression ‘inexcusable betrayal’, which Curtin would probably not have agreed to, was composed by foreign minister H. V. Evatt, who was writing in the prime minister’s absence from Canberra.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 130.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Morrison, Malayan Postscript, p. 183.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 132, 137–40.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 236 (10 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 249 (14 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, p. 454.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–1944, New York City, Enigma Books, 2000, p. 181.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Tom Farrell, ‘An Irishman’s Diary’, The Irish Times, 15 February 1997.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Kent Fedorowich, ‘The Evacuation of Civilians from Hong Kong and Malaya/Singapore, 1939–42’, in Farrell et al., eds., Sixty Years On, pp. 134–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Morrison, Malayan Postscript, p. 61.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Fedorowich, ‘The Evacuation of Civilians’, pp. 142–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 121.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, p. 418.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, p. 427.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Yoji, ‘General Yamashita Tokoyuki’, p. 198.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 187.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 209.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 148.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

Yoji, ‘General Yamashita Tokoyuki’, pp. 198–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

Sarah Kovner, Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2020, p. 55; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 338–9; R. P. W. Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience: The Changi POW Camp, Singapore, 1942–5, London, Routledge, 2003; Arthur Lane, Empire Soldier, Stockport, Nesa News Publishers, 2004, pp. 34–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

Frank, Tower of Skulls, p. 367.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90

Kovner, Prisoners of the Empire, p. 56.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91

Yoji, ‘General Yamashita Tokoyuki’, p. 200.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92

Havers, Reassessing the Japanese Prisoner of War Experience, pp. 166–7; Kovner, Prisoners of the Empire, p. 66.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 93

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 405.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94

This was a torpedo type the Royal Navy had invented in the 1920s but given up on.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95

Evan Mawdsley, The War for the Seas: A Maritime History of World War II, London, Yale University Press, 2019, pp. 189–91.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96

NA CAB 79/18/21 Chiefs of Staff Committee Meeting Minutes, 17 February 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97

Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, pp. 498–504.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98

Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War, p. 271.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99

Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, pp. 505–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 100

Warspite had been launched in 1913 but extensively refitted to modern standards in the 1930s.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 101

Correlli Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War, New York, W. W. Norton, 1991, p. 863.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 102

Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, pp. 610–17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 103

Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely, p. 864.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 104

Carl Boyd and Akihiko Yoshida, The Japanese Submarine Force and World War II, Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 1995, p. 90. Throughout this book, when ‘tonnage’ is mentioned in relation to commercial freighters it is, unless otherwise stated, a reference to GRT or Gross Registered Tons, a measure of the enclosed volume of a ship’s hull below the upper deck.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 105

One of the four Japanese fleet carriers sunk at Midway, Kaga, had not participated in the Indian Ocean raid.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 106

2. Have You Not Got a Single General in That Army Who Can Win Battles?

In addition to the service chiefs, Churchill’s chief staff officer, Lieutenant-General Sir Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, served as the COS Committee secretary. The prime minister’s personal relationship with the service chiefs was complicated. Formally, in his role as minister of defence, he presided over a Defence (Operations) Subcommittee of the War Cabinet which included the COS Committee, the civilian service ministers, the deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee, and eventually the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. As the war went on, however, Churchill increasingly sidelined this body and made policy instead at ad hoc ‘staff conferences’ attended by himself, the chiefs of staff (including Ismay) and a few ministers chosen for the occasion. Gilbert, Finest Hour, pp. 322–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Brooke was made a peer with the title Baron (later Viscount) Alanbrooke in 1945 and is often referred to by that name in historical accounts of the period. But to avoid anachronism he will be referred to in this volume as ‘Brooke’ throughout.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Danchev and Todman, War Diaries, p. 237 (9 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Danchev and Todman, War Diaries, p. 236 (5 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

There are many pen-portraits of Churchill’s wartime leadership style. Some I have found particularly useful are Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain, 1939–1945, London, Jonathan Cape, 1969, pp. 89–98; Max Hastings, Winston’s War: Churchill 1940–1945, New York, Knopf, 2009; Rodger, The Price of Admiralty, p. 403; Daniel Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, 1937–1941, London, Allen Lane, 2016, pp. 364–9. For Brooke see Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, pp. xi–xxvi; David Fraser, ‘Alanbrooke’, in Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2010, p. 60.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Fraser, ‘Alanbrooke’, p. 211.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. xv.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 590 (10 September 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. xix.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Brian P. Farrell, ‘Pound, Sir (Alfred) Dudley Pickman Rogers (1877–1943), naval officer’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography https://www.oxforddnb.com/

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. xvi.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

For the situation in Burma in 1941 see Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 81–105.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 102.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 87.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Jeremy A. Yellen, The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2019, p. 128.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

For what follows on the 1942 Burma campaign see Louis Allen, Burma: The Longest War 1941–45, London, Orion, 1984, pp. 1–91; Frank, Tower of Skulls, pp. 454–86; Robert Lyman, A War of Empires: Japan, India, Burma and Britain 1941–45, London, Osprey, 2021, pp. 53–152.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Michael D. Leigh, The Evacuation of Civilians from Burma: Analysing the 1942 Colonial Disaster, London, Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 82.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 158.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Hugh Tinker, ‘A Forgotten Long March: The Indian Exodus from Burma, 1942’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, 1975.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 186.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia, New York, Basic Books, 2016, pp. 258–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, pp. 243–4 (31 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 226 (2 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 245 (7 April, 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939–1945, London, Yale University Press, 2015, pp. 102–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 211 (12 February 1942). In fact, plus ca change; British commanders in 1914 had made exactly the same complaint that the men in the ranks were not as tough as their fathers had been. See Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern War, 1900–1918, London, Allen and Unwin, 1987.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

MacKie, This Was Singapore, p. 27.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them, p. 249.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Bailey, We Built and Destroyed, p. 45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 147.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Hugh Toye, ‘The First Indian National Army, 1941–42’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 1984; Raghavan, India’s War, pp. 282–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Raghavan, India’s War, p. 290.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 170–71.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Noel Crusz, The Cocos Islands Mutiny, Fremantle, WA, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001, p. 121.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Crusz, The Cocos Islands Mutiny, p. 184.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

William Stadiem, Too Rich: The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk, London, Parkway, 2009, pp. 182–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997, New York, Vintage, 2010, p. 18.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

I. S. O. Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 2: The Germans Come to the Help of Their Ally, 1941, London, HMSO, 1956, p. 223.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded, pp. 146–50.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Imperial War Museum Department of Documents (hereafter IWM D) 4709 80/5/1, Harry Wilson.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Although Rommel’s army in the Western Desert is generally described in English-language histories as the Deutches Afrikakorps, the DAK was technically only one small part of it. To the Italians, who made up the greatest number of its troops, it was known as Gruppo Corazzato Africa.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Stadiem, Too Rich, p. 201.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Stadiem, Too Rich, p. 205.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

For what follows on the 1942 naval campaign in the Mediterranean see Mawdsley, The War for the Seas, pp. 286–303.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

I. S. O. Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 3: British Fortunes Reach Their Lowest Ebb, London, HMSO, 1960, p. 107.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (Potsdam), Germany and the Second World War, vol. 3, Oxford, Clarendon, 1990, p. 718.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

John Terraine, Business in Great Waters: The U-Boat Wars, 1916–1945, London, Leo Cooper, 1989, pp. 453–4, p. 513.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Alan Moorehead, The Desert War: The Classic Trilogy on the North Africa Campaign 1940–43, London, Aurum, 2017, p. 308.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 236.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 315 (26 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Timothy Bowman, ed., The Military Papers of Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, vol. 1: 1940–42, Stroud, Army Records Society, 2021, p. 348 (27 February 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, p. 380 (31 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 279 (10 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Gilbert, Finest Hour, p. 326.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 16, p. 1506 (25 November 1941); Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 3, p. 153.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, pp. 360–61 (7 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, p. p. 369 (28 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, p. 366 (15 March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, pp. 394–5 (3 May 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Prior, Conquer We Must, p. 371.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

For the 1942 Battle of Malta see Charles Jellison, Besieged: The World War 2 Ordeal of Malta, 1940–1942, Lebanon, NH, University Press of New England, 1985; Richard J. Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945, London, Penguin, 2014, pp. 496–510; Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 259–65.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, pp. 655–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Jellison, Besieged, p. 15.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Jellison, Besieged, p. 17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Jellison, Besieged, pp. 177–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Jellison, Besieged, p. 182.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, p. 659; Overy, Blood and Ruins, pp. 463–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 157.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

The British Army in 1942 continued the unhelpful practice of functionally dividing its armour into slower, heavier ‘Infantry’ tanks (for infantry support) organised into brigades and lighter, faster ‘Cruiser’ tanks (for exploitation) organised into divisions.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Prior, Conquer We Must, pp. 374–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, p. 427 (23 May 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, p. 423 (20 May 1942), p. 430 (23 May 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 3, p. 285.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Ronald Lewin, The Chief: Field Marshal Lord Wavell, Commander-in-Chief and Viceroy, 1939–1947, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980, p. 207.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

For the May–June campaign in North Africa see Correlli Barnett, The Desert Generals, London, Allen and Unwin, 1960, pp. 145–93; Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, pp. 158–74; Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them, pp. 297–318; Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 265–85.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 269.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 261 (28 May 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, p. 440 (28 May 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Niall Barr, Pendulum of War: The Three Battles of El Alamein, New York, Overlook, 2005, p. 15.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 265 (14 June 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Prior, Conquer We Must, p. 379.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

Barnett, The Desert Generals, pp. 161–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 795 (15 June 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Barnett, The Desert Generals, p. 164.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 3, pp. 271–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

Prior, Conquer We Must, p. 380.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

Jonathan Dimbleby, Destiny in the Desert: The Road to El Alamein – the Battle that Turned the Tide, London, Profile, 2013, p. 272.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4: The Hinge of Fate, p. 477.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, p. 710.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90

German Propaganda Archive, https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/rsi36.htm.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91

Karen Horn and David Katz, ‘The Surrender of Tobruk in 1942: Press Reports and Soldiers’ Memories’, Scientia Militaria, vol. 44, no. 1, 2016.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 90, 23 June 1942. My emphasis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 93

Daily Mirror, 22 June 1942, p. 3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94

Daily Herald, 22 June 1942, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95

Ball, ed., Parliament and Politics, p. 321 (23 June 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96

Heffer, ed., Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, p. 809 (23 June 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97

Both Kesselring and Rommel were in theory under the control of the Italian high command, but neither took that subordination particularly seriously. Plus, Rommel, who was now of equal rank to Kesselring, had always been empowered to make direct appeals to Hitler.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, pp. 707–10.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99

Not least because of a panic attack by a German divisional general called Erwin Rommel.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 100

Moorehead, The Desert War, pp. 524–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 101

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, p. 470 (23 June 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 102

Bowman, ed., Military Papers, p. 474 (24 June 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 103

Dimbleby, Destiny in the Desert, pp. 287–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 104

Moorehead, The Desert War, p. 522.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 105

Dimbleby, Destiny in the Desert, p. 287.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 106

3. What the British People Wants Is a Victory

Liverpool Echo, 30 June 1942, p. 4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Barnett, The Desert Generals, p. 195.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

For the First Battle of Alamein see Barr, Pendulum of War, pp. 69–184.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Barr, Pendulum of War, p. 78; Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 3, pp. 340–41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Barr, Pendulum of War, p. 81.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 3, p. 343.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

For that reason alone it ought to be celebrated just as Battle of Britain Day is on 15 September. What 1 July is remembered for in British military history is, of course, the far grimmer opening day of the Battle of the Somme twenty-six years earlier.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Bryn Hammond, El Alamein, London, Osprey, 2012, p. 52.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, p. 532.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Simon Ball, Alamein, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 98.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Barnett, The Desert Generals, p. 217.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 3, p. 256.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Peter Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives, New York, Overlook, 2012, p. 260.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 261.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 489.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 271.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Technically the Wehrmacht included all the Third Reich’s armed forces, including the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine, though informally it is often used in English to refer specifically to the German Army (Heer).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

For a discussion see Robert M. Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2005.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Antulio J. Echevarria II, ‘El Alamein, 1942: Rommel’s Anti-Climax’, Infinity Journal, IJ Special Edition, ‘Strategic Misfortunes’, October 2012.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 495.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Ferris, Behind the Enigma, pp. 246–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, p. 713.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

For a discussion see Allan A. Ryan, Yamashita’s Ghost: War Crimes, MacArthur’s Justice, and Command Accountability, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2012.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 272.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, ‘ “Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine”: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942’, Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2007.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Dimbleby, Destiny in the Desert, p. 289; Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 143.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, p. 717.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Richard Hammond, Strangling the Axis: The Fight for Control of the Mediterranean During the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 107–26.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 193; Boyd, The Royal Navy in Eastern Waters, p. 245.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 252.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 231 (1 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

John Bew, Citizen Clem, London, Riverrun, 2017, p. 17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Bew, Citizen Clem, p. 18.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Martin Pugh, Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party, London, Vintage, 2011, p. 266; Leo McKinstry, Attlee and Churchill: Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace, London, Atlantic Books, 2019, pp. 303–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 724.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 231 (1 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Heffer, ed., Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, p. 815 (1 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 231 (1 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

HC Deb 2 July 1942, vol. 381, cols. 527–40.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Gabriel Gorodetsky, ed., The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932–1943, London, Yale University Press, 2015, p. 439 (2 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

HC Deb 1 July 1942, vol. 381, col. 247.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

McKinstry, Attlee and Churchill, p. 304.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War, London, Pimlico, 1994, p. 142.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

David Dutton, Anthony Eden: A Life and Reputation, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996, p. 225.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Dutton, Anthony Eden, p. 223.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Heffer, ed., Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, p. 817 (2 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Gorodetsky, ed., The Maisky Diaries, p. 439 (2 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 744.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Harvey, ed., The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 133 (Harvey, 22 June 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Particularly dive bombers, a curious obsession in Britain at the time given that the infamous German Ju-87 ‘Stuka’ was long obsolete by 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

O’Brien, How the War Was Won, p. 42.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 934 (8 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Alex Danchev, ‘Being Friends: The Combined Chiefs of Staff and the Making of Allied Strategy in the Second World War’, in Freedman et al., eds., War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

King was also commander-in-chief of the US fleet, an unprecedented concentration of naval authority in a single man. Admiral William Leahy, Roosevelt’s personal representative as chief of staff to the commander-in-chief, also joined the CCS Committee in July 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Joseph Strange, ‘Cross-Channel Attack, 1942: The British Rejection of Operation SLEDGEHAMMER and the Cherbourg Alternative’, PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1984, p. 470.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Hastings, Winston’s War, p. 246.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

The Times (London), 25 May 1942, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Calder, The People’s War, p. 298.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

M-O File Report 1297, ‘Second Front Feelings’, June 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 246 (9 April 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 247.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Andrew Roberts, Masters and Commanders: The Military Geniuses Who Led the West to Victory in World War II, London, Penguin, 2009, p. 141.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Brian Bond, ‘Alanbrooke and Britain’s Mediterranean Strategy, 1942–1944’, in Freedman et al., eds., War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

4. I Am the Only One Trying to Win the War

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, pp. 562–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 289.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 296 (8 August 1942). As it turned out, Auchinleck’s war was far from over. He would return to India as commander-in-chief in 1943 and play an important role in the subsequent defeat of the Japanese in Burma.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, pp. 293–4 (6 August 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 473 (18 November 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Brian Holden Reid, ‘Alexander’, in Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Gott’s nickname was yet another product of the British officer corps’ penchant for weak puns. Gott Strafe England (‘God Punish England’) had been a popular German hate slogan in the First World War.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 283.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, p. 585.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, p. 586.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, pp. 300–301 (13–14 August 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 753.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 472 (15 August 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 474 (15 August 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Carlton, Churchill and the Soviet Union, p. 102.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Daniel Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, 1942–1947, London, Allen Lane, 2020, p. 203.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

For Dieppe see Robin Neillands, The Dieppe Raid: The Story of the Disastrous 1942 Expedition, Bloomington, IN, University of Indiana Press, 2005; David O’Keefe, One Day in August: Ian Fleming, Enigma, and the Deadly Raid on Dieppe, London, Icon, 2022; Mark Zuehlke, Tragedy at Dieppe: Operation Jubilee, August 19, 1942, Vancouver, Douglas & McIntyre, 2014.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Zuehlke, Tragedy at Dieppe, p. 276.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Neillands, The Dieppe Raid, p. 242.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, p. 628.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

George Orwell, ‘London Letter’, Partisan Review, July–August 1942 (written 8 May 1942), in Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell: All Propaganda Is Lies 1941–1942, London, Secker & Warburg, 1998, p. 305.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 100, 1 September 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Charles Williams, Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman, London, Biteback, 2019, p. 509.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Nigel Hamilton, Monty: The Making of a General: 1887–1942, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1981, pp. 562–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

He also inherited from Betty two stepsons from her first marriage, one of whom was captured at Mersa Matruh and later made an audacious escape back to Allied lines, much to Montgomery’s relief.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars: And Other Essays, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 214.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Michael Carver, ‘Montgomery’, in Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals, p. 154. In 1953 Auchinleck’s former deputy chief of staff threatened to sue Churchill for libel for his account of this in his memoirs. The issue was eventually settled by a clarifying footnote in the subsequent editions. See Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 356–60.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Barnett, The Desert Generals, p. 238.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Strictly speaking the Second Battle of Alamein, but since that monicker is usually reserved for the engagement of 23 October–11 November the alternative title will be used to avoid confusion.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

For Alam Halfa see Barr, Pendulum of War, pp. 218–52.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Ferris, Behind the Enigma, p. 253–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Dimbleby, Destiny in the Desert, p. 336.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Dimbleby, Destiny in the Desert, p. 338.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 1161 (6 September 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 241 (9 September 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 319 (8 September 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Much of Roosevelt’s initial enthusiasm for TORCH had been that it would bring American combat troops into action against the Germans before the November congressional midterms. In the event, planning delays meant that TORCH could not take place until five days after the election, an outcome FDR accepted with forbearance (the Democratic Party lost seats in the House and Senate but maintained control of both).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 324 (24 September 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 1228 (23 September 1942). Brooke had edited and watered down the cable however.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Technically Panzerarmee Afrika had now been redubbed Deutsch-Italienische Panzerarmee, but the earlier name will be retained in the narrative to avoid confusion.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 254.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

For Second Alamein see Barr, Pendulum of War, pp. 307–405; Stephen Bungay, Alamein, London, Aurum, 2002; Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, pp. 291–303; Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 309–25; Prior, Conquer We Must, pp. 440–55.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Crimp, Diary of a Desert Rat, pp. 145–6 (23 October 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Montgomery sacked Lumsden immediately after the battle’s end.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Crimp, Diary of a Desert Rat, p. 155 (28 October 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 335 (29 October 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 333 (23 October 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Hitler subsequently ratified the decision, reluctantly. Given Rommel’s propaganda-driven prestige back in Germany he could do little else.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, New York, W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 539–40.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Lewi Stone, ‘Quantifying the Holocaust: Hyperintense Kill Rates During the Nazi Genocide’, Science Advances, vol. 5, no. 1, 2019.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 340.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 1376 (10 November 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Robin Woolven, ed., The London Diary of Anthony Heap, 1931–1945, Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2017, p. 409 (15 November 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

May Smith, These Wonderful Rumours! A Young Schoolteacher’s Wartime Diaries, 1939–1945, London, Virago, 2012, p. 301 (15 November 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Ronnie Scott, ed., The Real ‘Dad’s Army’: The War Diaries of Colonel Rodney Foster, New York, Viking, 2011, p. 200 (15 November 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Hey, The View from the Corner Shop, p. 197 (15 November 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, p. 740; Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 309.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Bungay, Alamein, p. 290.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Freudenberg, Churchill and Australia, pp. 446–51.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Barr, Pendulum of War, p. 408. In fact, Canadian manpower limitations meant that First Canadian Army was always a polyglot international force including by necessity metropolitan British, Polish, Dutch, Belgian and Czech units. Its ‘Canadianness’ was as much a political imperative as a military one.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 292. My thanks to Andreas Biermann for additional information regarding Axis aircraft strength.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Barr, Pendulum of War, p. 404.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Bungay, Alamein, p. 265.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 300.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Barr, Pendulum of War, p. 404.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 263.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Ball, Alamein, p. 176.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

See e.g. Norman Davies, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939–1945, New York, Viking, 2007.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Phillips Payson O’Brien, ‘East Versus West in the Defeat of Nazi Germany’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 23, no. 2, 2000, p. 92.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Ball, Alamein, p. 178.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, p. 348.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, p. 832.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 666–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Hamilton, Monty: The Making of a General, pp. 846–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 761.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 334.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Hamilton, Monty: The Making of a General, p. 802.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Bungay, Alamein, p. 245.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Hamilton, Monty: The Making of a General, p. 606.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

James Colvin, Eighth Army Versus Rommel: Tactics, Training and Operations in North Africa 1940–1942, Warwick, Helion, 2020, pp. 204–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Barr, Pendulm of War, p. 410.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Ball, Alamein, p. 81.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 300.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Moorehead, The Desert War, p. 783.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, pp. 302–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 355 (1 January 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

5. Gone with the Want

Hey, The View from the Corner Shop, p. 199 (3 December 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Daily Mirror, 2 December 1942, p. 1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Juliet Gardiner, Wartime: Britain 1939–1945, London, Headline, 2005.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography, Oxford, Clarendon, 1998, pp. 420–21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

G. H. Gallup, ed., The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain 1937–1975, vol. 1: 1937–1964, New York, Random House, 1976, p. 69 (December 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Jose Harris, ‘Great Britain: The People’s War?’, in David Reynolds et al., eds., Allies at War: The Soviet, American, and British Experience, 1939–1945, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1984, p. 250.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence, London, HMSO, 1955, p. 677.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Jerry White, The Battle of London 1939–45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire, New York, Vintage, 2023, p. 180.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

They received their name from the boasts of a German Foreign Office propagandist that the Luftwaffe was going to attack every building in Britain which was marked with three stars in Baedeker’s travel guidebooks. There is no evidence that such a targeting principle was actually used. Niall Rothnie, The Baedeker Blitz: Hitler’s Attack on Britain’s Historic Cities, Shepperton, Ian Allan, 1992, p. 131.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

John Terraine, The Right of the Line, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1985, p. 730.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 83, 6 May 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 186–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

H. M. D. Parker, Manpower, London, HMSO, 1957, pp. 481–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Todman, Britain’s War: Into Battle, p. 519.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, London, HMSO, 1950, p. 324.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Excluding animal feeds. David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War, London, Penguin, 2011, p. 172.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Natacha Chevalier, Food in Wartime Britain: Testimonies from the Kitchen Front (1939–1945), London, Routledge, 2020, p. 52.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Andrew Marr, The History of Modern Britain, London, Pan, 2008, p. 55.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Tom Spicer, ‘Eat, Drink, and Be Merry for Tomorrow We Die: British Food Situation and Public Reaction During World War II’, Historia, vol. 13, 2004, p. 48.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

For a late-1940s paean to wartime tea see various, Tea on Service, London, The Tea Centre, 1947.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Spicer, ‘Eat, Drink, and Be Merry’, p. 49; Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 76. With the exception of children, many of whom were receiving subsidised meals, including milk, at school for the first time, people were not healthier during the war. See David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, London, Allen Lane, 2018, pp. 225–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Robert Mackay, The Test of War: Inside Britain 1939–1945, London, Routledge, 1998, p. 182.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Chevalier, Food in Wartime Britain, p. 95.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Calder, The People’s War, p. 318.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Geoffrey G. Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil: Remaking the British Working Class, 1939–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 122; Calder, The People’s War, pp. 431–43; Strength and Casualties of the Armed Forces and Auxiliary Services of the United Kingdom, 1939–1945, Cmnd. 6832, London, HMSO, 1946.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Yvonne M. Klein, ed., Beyond the Home Front: Women’s Autobiographical Writing of the Two World Wars, New York, NYU Press, 1997, pp. 148–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Klein, ed., Beyond the Home Front, p. 147.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Mackay, The Test of War, p. 172.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Spectator, 2 April 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Peter Dewey, War and Progress: Britain 1914–1945, London, Routledge, 2017, p. 299.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

All statistics in this section from Peter Howlett, Fighting with Figures: A Statistical Digest of the Second World War, London, HMSO, 1995.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Part-time workers counted statistically as half a full-time worker each.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Craig Armstrong, ‘Tyneside 1939–1945: A Study of the Regional Impact of Total War’, PhD diss., University of Northumbria, 2004.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Penny Summerfield, ‘The “Levelling of Class” ’, in Harold L. Smith, ed., War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1986, pp. 187–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Dewey, War and Progress, p. 299.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Dewey, War and Progress, p. 300; Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 122.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, p. 384.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 126.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999, pp. 139–40.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Paul Brassley, The Real Agricultural Revolution: The Transformation of English Farming, 1939–1985, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2023, p. 93.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, p. 45; Mollie Panter-Downes, Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes, Bath, Persephone, 2009, p. 105.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Dewey, War and Progress, pp. 300–301.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 256.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

The author was the niece of Attlee’s bête noire on the Labour NEC, Harold Laski.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Marghanita Laski, Love on the Supertax, London, Cresset, 1944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Kenneth O. Morgan, Twentieth-Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 53.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Arthur Marwick, ‘World War II and Social Class in Great Britain’, in A. C. Duke, et al., eds., Britain and the Netherlands, The Hague, Springer Dordrecht, 1977.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Arthur Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace and Social Change, 1900–1967, New York, Little, Brown, 1968, p. 227.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 531.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Gallup, ed., The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, p. 79 (July 1943), p. 85 (December 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Mass-Observation, The Journey Home, London, John Murray, 1944, p. 46.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Mass-Observation, The Journey Home, p. 20.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

J. B. Priestley, ‘Preface’ to Richard Acland, How It Can Be Done, London, MacDonald, 1943, pp. 5–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Kevin Jefferys, The Churchill Coalition and Wartime Politics 1940–1945, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1991, p. 119.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Chris Renwick, Bread for All: The Origins of the Welfare State, London, Penguin, 2018, p. 218.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Social security public expenditure in the late 1930s was 8.2 per cent of national income; by 1948–9 it had only risen to 10.7 per cent. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, p. 244.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, p. 233; Robert Paul Shay, British Rearmament in the Thirties, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1977, p. 297.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, Cmnd. 6404, London, HMSO, 1942, pp. 5–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Jefferys, The Churchill Coalition, p. 122.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, p. 12. This was one of the passages which the future prime minister thought had ‘a Thatcherite ring to it’. Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power, London, HarperCollins, 1995, p. 120.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, p. 242.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Stephen Brooke, Labour’s War, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 147. Beveridge had foreseen this problem himself but had been unable to come up with a solution.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Brooke, Labour’s War, p. 149.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Jose Harris, ‘Political Ideas and the Debate on State Welfare, 1940–45’, in Harold Smith, ed., War and Social Change: British Society in the Second World War, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1986, p. 251.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Brooke, Labour’s War, p. 160.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Harris, ‘Political Ideas and the Debate on State Welfare’, p. 242.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Jefferys, The Churchill Coalition, p. 122.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Jefferys, The Churchill Coalition, p. 119.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Pugh, Speak for Britain!, p. 268.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Martin Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 18: One Continent Redeemed, January–August 1943, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2015, p. 440 (15 February 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Kevin Jefferys, ed., Labour and the Wartime Coalition: From the Diary of James Chuter Ede, 1941–1945, London, Historians’ Press, 1987, p. 119 (16 February 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Brooke, Labour’s War, p. 147.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 282 (18 February 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Bew, Citizen Clem, p. 297.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

Robert Crowcroft, Attlee’s War: World War II and the Making of a Labour Leader, London, I. B. Tauris, 2011, p. 149.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 125, 25 February 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Mass-Observation, The Journey Home, p. 11.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Richard Toye, The Roar of the Lion: The Untold Story of Churchill’s World War II Speeches, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 203–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Addison, The Road to 1945, p. 217.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

M-O File Report 1538, ‘First Reactions to the Beveridge Report’, December 1942.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 343.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

John Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, 1940–1957, London, Longman, 1995, p. 39. This was the same position that the Conservatives themselves had been in in the Liberal-led war coalition from 1915 to 1918.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

6. Safe Passage

For SC-107’s story see Bernard Edwards, The Decoys: A Tale of Three Atlantic Convoys, 1942, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2016.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Three other independently operating U-Boats participated in the attacks on SC-107. See U-Boat.net, http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Edwards, The Decoys, p. 115.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Several ships had broken off from the convoy to make port in Iceland, and one, the Dutch freighter Titus, had departed SC-107 early to make its way independently to Liverpool.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted: 1942–1945, New York, Random House, 1998, p. 767.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Terraine, Business in Great Waters, p. 1003.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Howlett, Fighting with Figures, pp. 184, 187. Of vessels 1,600 tons and over. ‘British-flagged’ includes vessels of the United Kingdom and its Dominions and colonies and foreign vessels in requisition and bareboat charter. It does not include wartime British-controlled vessels in time-charter but remaining under foreign flag.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Hancock and Gowing, The British War Economy, pp. 357–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, pp. 1340–41 (31 October 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, p. 403.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, pp. 9–10.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 5: Closing the Ring, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002, pp. 20–21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2: Their Finest Hour, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002, p. 718.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 5, p. 19.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, p. 165.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, p. 165.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Jonathan Dimbleby, The Battle of the Atlantic: How the Allies Won the War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. ix, xxiv.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Duncan Redford, ‘The March 1943 Crisis in the Battle of the Atlantic: Myth and Reality’, History, vol. 92, no. 1, 2007.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

David Fairbank White, Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2006, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Dimbleby, The Battle of the Atlantic, p. xix; Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, p. 705.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

O’Brien, How the War Was Won, pp. 416–19.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, p. 328.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, p. 329.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

For the course of the Battle of the Atlantic see Marc Milner, Battle of the Atlantic, Stroud, History Press, 2011.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

April 1941, February 1942, April 1942, July 1942, August 1942, October 1942 and March 1943. Terraine, Business in Great Waters, p. 1004.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Eric Grove, The Defeat of the Enemy Attack upon Shipping, 1939–1945, Aldershot, Ashgate (for the Navy Records Society), 1998, Table 14. ‘Alone’ meaning sailing independently from the outset of its voyage or else having detached itself intentionally or through misadventure from a convoy.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Rodger, The Price of Admiralty, pp. 480–82; Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939–1942, New York, Random House, 1996, p. 904.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

U-Boat.net, http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/; David M. Kennedy, The American People in World War II: Freedom from Fear, part 2, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 143.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, pp. 1410–13.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, p. 145.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, p. 9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Edwards, The Decoys, p. 33.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

U-Boat.net, http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/. U-402 sank four ships totalling 24,400 tons and U-522 sank three totalling 14,645 tons.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, pp. 767–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, p. 403.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, p. 46.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Erin M. K. Weir, ‘The Nazi Submarine Blockade: A Near Victory of Economic Warfare?’, MA diss., University of Calgary, 2007, p. 72.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 6, p. 334.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 202.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 2, p. 719. My emphasis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Christopher M. Bell, ‘The View from the Top: Winston Churchill, British Grand Strategy, and the Battle of the Atlantic’, in Marcus Faulkner et al., eds., Decision in the Atlantic: The Allies and the Longest Campaign of the Second World War, Lexington, KY, University of Kentucky Press, 2021, p. 27.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

W. J. R. Gardner, ‘An Allied Perspective’, in Stephen Howarth et al., eds., The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945: The 50th Anniversary International Naval Conference, Annapolis, MD, Naval Institute Press, 1994, p. 520.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Tim Benbow, ‘Brothers in Arms: The Admiralty, the Air Ministry, and the Battle of the Atlantic, 1940–1943’, Global War Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2014.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

John F. O’Connell, ‘Closing the North Atlantic Air Gap: Where Did All the British Liberators Go?’, Air Power History, vol. 59, no. 2, 2012.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Milner, Battle of the Atlantic, p. 149.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Christopher M. Bell, ‘Air Power and the Battle of the Atlantic: Very Long Range Aircraft and the Delay in Closing the Atlantic “Air Gap” ’, Journal of Military History, vol. 79, no. 3, 2015, pp. 708–10.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Christopher M. Bell, Churchill and Sea Power, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 254–82.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

These were SC-42, SC-44, and SC-48.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

For ULTRA and the Battle of the Atlantic see W. J. R. Gardner, Decoding History: The Battle of the Atlantic and Ultra, London, Macmillan, 1999.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Jürgen Rohwer, ‘Radio Intelligence and Its Role in the Battle of the Atlantic’, in Christopher Andrew et al., eds., The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the Twentieth Century, London, Palgrave, 1984, p. 166.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, p. 769.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Dönitz’s other son Klaus was killed in action on a surface torpedo boat in May 1944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

In October 1943, Allied aircraft began operating patrol aircraft from the Azores, closing this southern ‘air gap’.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Milner, Battle of the Atlantic, pp. 152–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, pp. 707–10.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Rodger, The Price of Admiralty, p. 570.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Weir, ‘The Nazi Submarine Blockade’, p. 61; Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, p. 279. Work completed on a single battleship, HMS Vanguard, the Royal Navy’s last, which was not commissioned until 1946.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Richard M. Leighton, ‘U.S. Merchant Shipping and the British Import Crisis’, in Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions, Washington DC, Center of Military History, 1987, p. 202.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Kevin Smith, Conflict Over Convoys: Anglo–American Logistics Diplomacy in the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Behrens, Merchant Shipping, pp. 312–14.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Leighton, ‘U.S. Merchant Shipping’, p. 214.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Smith, Conflict Over Convoys, p. 239.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 980 (21 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Behrens, Merchant Shipping, p. 320.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Smith, Conflict Over Convoys, p. 156.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Smith, Conflict Over Convoys, p. 163.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

7. States of Terror

For the 1943 Ruhr bombing campaign see Terraine, The Right of the Line, Chapter 63; Richard Worrall, The Ruhr 1943: The RAF’s Brutal Fight for Germany’s Industrial Heartland, London, Osprey, 2021. For the Combined Bomber Offensive more generally see Mark Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II, London, I. B. Tauris, 2001; Max Hastings, Bomber Command, London, Pan Macmillan, 2010; Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2005; Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 237–409; Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany 1939–1945, 4 vols, London, HMSO, 1961.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, London, Penguin, 1990, pp. 365–6; Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–45, New York, Basic Books, 2015, p. 346.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Middlebrook and Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, p. 43.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Stargardt, The German War, p. 122.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

British Bombing Survey Unit, The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939–1945, London, Frank Cass, 1998, p. 41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Michael Postan, British War Production, London, HMSO, 1952, pp. 484–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 257.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 7, pp. 24–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Middlebrook and Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, pp. 403–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Stargardt, The German War, pp. 349–50.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Matthew Cooper, The German Air Force 1933–1945: An Anatomy of Failure, London, Jane’s, 1981, p. 298.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Stargardt, The German War, p. 352.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 127, 9 March 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 128, 16 March 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

HC Deb 11 March 1943, vol. 387, col. 955. My emphasis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Allport, Britain at Bay, pp. 3–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

O’Brien, Civil Defence, p. 677. Excludes civilians killed overseas and Merchant Navy deaths. Includes 967 civilians killed in Northern Ireland throughout the whole war, the great majority of whom would have been killed in 1941.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 9/I, pp. 475–6. The Third Reich is defined here as including Austria, annexed in 1938, and other territories that became part of Germany proper before and after the start of the war. Higher-end estimates have reached as many as 600,000. On the other hand, Overy, The Bombing War, p. 476, suggests ‘only’ 353,000 deaths. The US Army Air Force was responsible for some of those deaths. But since the RAF’s Bomber Command dropped a greater tonnage of ordnance on Germany than the USAAF Eighth Air Force in every year of the war, and its missions were directed to a greater extent against densely packed concentrations of housing at the centre of cities – ‘area bombing’ – it is reasonable to assume that the biggest share of those German deaths were inflicted by the British. By one estimate RAF Bomber Command killed three German civilians for every one killed by the USAAF. See Randall Hansen, Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942–1945, New York, Dutton Caliber, 2010, p. 284.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Ian Philpott, The Royal Air Force, An Encyclopedia of the Inter-War Years, vol. 2: Rearmament 1930–1939, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2006, p. 45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

The Manchester was designed as a twin-engine bomber, but it was soon realised that it was grossly underpowered for the heavy payload it was required to carry to Germany. In mid-1940, its two (unreliable) Rolls-Royce Vulture engines were swapped out for four Rolls-Royce Merlins on a pair of slightly longer wings, and the resulting modified aircraft, redubbed the Lancaster, was found to be so much more effective that it was put into mass production and the original Manchester discontinued from service.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Terraine, The Right of the Line, pp. 74–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

John Fahey, ‘The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2004, p. 147.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Andrew Corbett, Supreme Emergency: How Britain Lives with the Bomb, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2022, p. 36.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Allport, Britain at Bay, pp. 449–50.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Fahey, ‘The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, pp. 328–30; Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, p. 267.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Tami Davis Biddle, ‘Bombing by the Square Yard: Sir Arthur Harris at War, 1942–1945’, The International History Review, vol. 21, no. 3, 1999.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Henry Probert, Bomber Harris: His Life and Times, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2016, p. 112.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 286.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 244.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919–1939, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990, p. 154.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Barry Renfrew, Wings of Empire: The Forgotten Wars of the Royal Air Force, 1919–1939, Stroud, History Press, 2015, p. 226.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Renfrew, Wings of Empire, p. 230.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 245.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 4, pp. 153–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 4, p. 158. Perhaps it was a fortunate coincidence that Harris’s personal staff officer, Harry Weldon, was a former philosophy Fellow at Magdalen.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 168.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 4, p. 144.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 89.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 4, p. 137.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 4, p. 144; vol. 1, p. 324.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 258. My emphasis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

See Fahey, ‘The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, p. 91; Overy, The Bombing War, p. 310.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Richard J. Overy, ‘Making and Breaking Morale: British Political Warfare and Bomber Command in the Second World War’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 26, no. 3, 2015, p. 380.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 4, p. 262.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 396. The RAF Journal article, which was written with Harris’s usual pugnacity, was bowdlerised by the Air Ministry before publication.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Dietmar Suss, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Endured Aerial Destruction in World War II, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 63, 81.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

House of Lords Debates (hereafter HL Deb) 9 February 1944, vol. 130, col. 750.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Arthur Harris, Despatch on War Operations: 23rd February 1942 to 8th May 1945, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Rex Cording, ‘The Other Bomber Battle: An Examination of the Problems that Arose Between the Air Staff and the AOC Bomber Command Between 1942 and 1945 and their Effects on the Strategic Bomber Offensive’, PhD diss., University of Canterbury, 2006, p. 358.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Phil Haun, ed., Lectures of the Air Corps Tactical School and American Strategic Bombing in World War II, Lexington, KY, University of Kentucky Press, 2020, Appendix A.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 309.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 144.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 311.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 2, p. 289.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 324.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Daily Mail, 18 May 1943, pp. 2, 4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Alan W. Cooper, The Dam Buster Raid: A Reappraisal, 70 Years On, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2013, p. 202.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Terraine, The Right of the Line, p. 656.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 480–81; Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6: Triumph and Tragedy, New York, RosettaBooks, 2002, pp. 639–40.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Probert, Bomber Harris, pp. 168–70.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 15, p. 762 (3 September 1940).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 15, p. 1027 (2 November 1940).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 981 (21 July 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 471 (1 April 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 304.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 299, 310; Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 1, p. 368.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 17, p. 541 (16 April 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Cooper, The German Air Force 1933–1945, p. 299; Worrall, The Ruhr 1943, p. 29.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Friedrich, The Fire, p. 45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 325.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Rob Davis, http://robdavistelford.co.uk/webspace/raf_bc/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Mark K. Wells, Courage and Air Warfare: The Allied Aircrew Experience in the Second World War, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 127.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Connelly, Reaching for the Stars, p. 67.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Edgar Jones, ‘LMF: The Use of Psychiatric Stigma in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War’, Journal of Military History, vol. 70, no. 2, 2006, p. 443.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Wells, Courage and Air Warfare, p. 129.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 118.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Jones, ‘LMF’, p. 446. For more on LMF see Dan Ellin, ‘A “Lack of Moral Fibre” in Royal Air Force Bomber Command and Popular Culture’, British Journal for Military History, vol. 6, no. 3, 2020.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Jones, ‘LMF’, p. 452.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Francis, The Flyer, p. 128.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Terraine, The Right of the Line, p. 797.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Francis, The Flyer, pp. 111–12.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Patrick Bishop, Air Force Blue, London, HarperCollins, 2017, p. 258.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

Martin Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, London, Cassell, 2007, p. 95. For Operation GOMORRAH, in addition to Middlebrook see Keith Lowe, Inferno: The Fiery Destruction of Hamburg, 1943, London, Scribner, 2007.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, p. 97.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, p. 84.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

‘Window’ had been available to the RAF since early 1942, but the War Cabinet had vetoed its use because of fears that the Germans would copy it. Only once it was believed that the latest British radar was immune to such counter-measures had Harris been permitted to deploy his new novelty. In fact, as it later turned out, the Germans had known about the principle of Window all along. They had already created a chaff system of their own which they had feared to use out of concern that the British would copy them. Michael I. Handel, War, Strategy and Intelligence, London, Routledge, 1989, pp. 151–4. Churchill later claimed that Window was used at ‘about the right time’, which is debatable; it has been estimated that had it been first employed at the beginning of the Battle of the Ruhr then 286 bombers – one-quarter of the operational force – could have been saved from destruction.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

The 1,000-bomber raid on Cologne was MILLENNIUM; THUNDERCLAP was an unrealised plan which formed the basis for the Dresden raid in February 1945.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

For RE8’s efforts see Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 328–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 334. Older works suggest figures of up to 40,000 but these are now regarded as unreliable because they conflate fatality figures from other raids in the GOMORRAH period.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, p. 269.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90

Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, pp. 266–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91

Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, pp. 270–72.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 335; for a discussion see Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 7, p. 50. Lowe, Inferno, gives a figure of 45,000, p. 294.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 93

Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 336–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94

For the effects of GOMORRAH in Hamburg, Stargardt, The German War, pp. 368–71; and Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 434–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95

Like most Germans, Goebbels insisted throughout the war on describing Crown Forces as ‘the English’.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 148, 3 August 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97

Connelly, Reaching for the Stars, p. 101.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98

Peter Gray, ‘A Culture of Official Squeamishness? Britain’s Air Ministry and the Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany’, Journal of Military History, vol. 77, no. 4, 2013, p. 1367.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99

Connelly, Reaching for the Stars, pp. 115–16.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 100

Cording, ‘The Other Bomber Battle’, p. 353.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 101

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 150, 17 August 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 102

Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, p. 244.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 103

Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg, p. 368.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 104

8. Mediterranean Cranks

Moorehead, The Desert War, p. 730.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/joint-press-conference-with-prime-minister-churchill-casablanca. My emphasis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Richard Holmes, The World at War: The Landmark Oral History, London, Ebury, 2007, p. 346.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, pp. 837–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

HC Deb 21 July 1949, vol. 467, col. 1596.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy Upon World War II, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1961, p. 12; Elena Agarossi, A Nation Collapses: The Italian Surrender of September 1943, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 23.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

NA CAB 65/37 War Cabinet Conclusions, Confidential Annexes, 20 January 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, p. 838.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

A. E. Campbell, ‘Franklin Roosevelt and Unconditional Surrender’, in Richard Langhorne, ed., Diplomacy and Intelligence During the Second World War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 219.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Tim Luckhurst, ‘ “An Unworkable Policy Which Encourages The Enemy to Fight to The Last Gasp”: The Depiction in British and American Newspapers of the Allied Policy of Unconditional Surrender for Germany, 1943–1945’, Journalism Studies, vol. 16, no. 6, 2015, pp. 890–94.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

HC Deb 21 July 1949, vol. 467, col. 1585.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Thomas Fleming, The New Dealers’ War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Within World War II, New York, Basic Books, 2001, p. 466–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Luckhurst, ‘ “An Unworkable Policy” ’, p. 889; Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 121, 173.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Stargardt, The German War, p. 461. Stalin took every subsequent opportunity to criticise the Anglo-American unconditional surrender decision although in practice he too assumed Nazi Germany would have to be totally defeated.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 122, 4 February 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Oliver Lyttelton, The Memoirs of Lord Chandos, London, Bodley Head, 1962, pp. 296–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Hastings, Winston’s War, p. 195.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Roberts, The Holy Fox, p. 287.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare: 1943–1944, Washington DC, Center of Military History, 1994, p. 22.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Fredrick Aandahl et al., eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, The Conferences at Washington, 1941–1942, and Casablanca, 1943, Washington DC, US Government Printing Office, 1958, p. 796.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Danchev and Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 364 (20 January 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, p. 106.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Roberts, Masters and Commanders, p. 338.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Robert Payne, The Marshall Story: A Biography of George C. Marshall, New York, Brick Tower Press, 2015, p. 193.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

The Churchill Project, ‘Were “Soft Underbelly” and “Fortress Europe” Churchill Phrases?’ https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/soft-underbelly-fortress-europe/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Michael Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War, London, Greenhill, 1993, p. 24.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Simon Ball, The Bitter Sea: The Struggle for Mastery in the Mediterranean 1935–1949, New York, HarperPress, 2009, p. 179.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History, New York, Enigma Books, 2008, p. 658.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

For the 1943 campaign in Tunisia see Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them, pp. 344–59; Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 370–414.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Moorehead, The Desert War, p. 680.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 382.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

George F. Howe, United States Army in World War II, Mediterranean Theater of Operations: Northwest Africa, Seizing the Initiative in the West, Washington DC, Office of the Chief of Military History, 1957, pp. 363–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 407; Hammond, Strangling the Axis, pp. 148–72.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Ball, The Bitter Sea, p. 200.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 392.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them, p. 352.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Allan Converse, Armies of Empire: The 9th Australian and 50th British Divisions in Battle 1939–1945, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 152.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

I. S. O. Playfair, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 4: The Destruction of the Axis Forces in Africa, London, HMSO, 1966, p. 459.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 402 (12 May 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 406 (18 May 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

For the 1943 Sicilian campaign see Carlo D’Este, Bitter Victory: The Battle for Sicily, 1943, New York, Dutton, 1988; Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 415–51.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 302.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 340.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

D’Este, Bitter Victory, p. 338.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

John Greenacre, ‘ “When Opportunity Arises”: British Airborne Operations in the Mediterranean 1941–1944’, in Andrew Hargreaves et al., eds., Allied Fighting Effectiveness in North Africa and Italy 1942–1945, Boston, MA, Brill, 2014, pp. 75–6; Sebastian Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality: Airborne Warfare, Air Power and the Failure of Operation Market Garden, London, Robert Hale, 2011, p. 50.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Elements of the US 82nd Airborne Division also landed in Sicily that night.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 425; Greenacre, ‘ “When Opportunity Arises” ’, p. 77.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Prior, Conquer We Must, p. 492.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 342.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

D’Este, Bitter Victory, pp. 327–30.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 420.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Neil McCallum, Journey with a Pistol: A Diary of War, London, Gollancz, 1959, p. 152.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

D’Este, Bitter Victory, pp. 330–31. It may be that Patton was nervous about challenging Alexander’s authority because he already suspected Eisenhower wanted to sack him. Montgomery himself had earlier advised Patton to ignore any of Alex’s orders he disliked!

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

For the air war over Sicily see Alexander Fitzgerald-Black, Eagles Over Husky: The Allied Air Forces in the Sicilian Campaign, 14 May to 17 August 1943, Warwick, Helion, 2018.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Ball, The Bitter Sea, pp. 228–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 18, p. 2060 (26 July 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War, p. 38.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, p. 157–60.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 456. These were the US 1st and 9th Infantry, the US 2nd Armoured, the US 82nd Airborne, the British 50th and 51st Infantry, and the British 7th Armoured divisions.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, pp. 791–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 18, p. 1965 (19 July 1943). My emphasis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War, p. 45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches, London, Penguin, 2009, p. 402.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Porch, The Path to Victory, p. 463.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 273.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

For the 1943 Italian campaign see Ian Gooderson, A Hard Way to Make a War: The Allied Campaign in Italy in the Second World War, London, Conway, 2009; Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 487–521.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 354.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Norman Lewis, Naples ’44, New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2024, pp. 17–18. Lewis’s diary-memoir is a poignant chronicle of the difficulties the Allied Military Government or AMGOT would face administering the starving and crime-ridden titular city for the next two years.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Ralph Mavrogordato, ‘Hitler’s Decision on the Defense of Italy’, in Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions, Washington DC, Center of Military History, 1987, pp. 319–20.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944, New York, Henry Holt, 2008, p. 236.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Martin Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 19: Fateful Questions September 1943 to April 1944, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2017, p. 632 (24 October 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

According to Lord Moran, quoted in Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 19, p. 654 (26 October 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 19, p. 658 (26 October 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 19, p. 655 (26 October 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, pp. 157–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

For the Anzio campaign see Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 526–45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 275.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

J. F. C. Fuller, The Second World War 1939–1945, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948, p. 265.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Kennedy, The American People in World War II, pp. 171, 176; Phillips Payson O’Brien, ‘The Myth of the Plucky Brit’, The Critic, October 2021, https://thecritic.co.uk/the-myth-of-the-plucky-brit/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Barnett, Engage the Enemy More Closely, p. 369.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

For a discussion see Gooderson, A Hard Way to Make a War, pp. 319–28; Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 653–60.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Prior, Conquer We Must, pp. 487–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 358.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 462 (25 October 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 465 (1 November 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 420 (15 June 1943), p. 427 (7 July 1943), p. 429 (14 July 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 420 (15 June 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 442 (15 August 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, pp. 458–9 (7–8 October 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

For the 1943 Dodecanese campaign see Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 471–4, and Prior, Conquer We Must, pp. 509–19.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 5, pp. 255–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91

Ball, The Bitter Sea, pp. 192–4. Turkey eventually declared war on the Axis powers on 23 February 1945 in order to satisfy one of the conditions for founding membership of the United Nations Organisation. No Turkish forces ever saw combat.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92

Michael Simpson, ‘Superhighway to the World Wide Web: The Mediterranean in British Imperial Strategy, 1900–45’, in John B. Hattendorf, ed., Naval Policy and Strategy in the Mediterranean: Past, Present and Future, London, Routledge, 2000, p. 67.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 93

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 19, p. 92 (9 September 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 19, p. 399 (7 October 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95

Prior, Conquer We Must, p. 512.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 459 (8 October 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 5, pp. 280–81.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98

Ian Gooderson, ‘Shoestring Strategy: The British Campaign in the Aegean, 1943’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 2002.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99

9. ‘People in England Must Do Something – This Is Their Empire’

Daily Herald, 21 May 1943; Daily Mail, 21–5 May 1943; The Times (London), 21 May 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

The neologism ‘Chindit’, a mangling of ‘Chinthe’, the name of the griffin statues which traditionally protected Burmese temples, was popularised by the Daily Express’s Alaric Jacob after a conversation with Wingate. See Christopher Sykes, Orde Wingate: A Biography, London, Collins, 1959, p. 436.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

The Times (London), 24 May 1943; Philip Woods, Managing the Media in the India–Burma War, 1941–1945, London, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 55–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 18, p. 2039 (24 July 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 5, p. 93.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 436 (4 August 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Thorne, Allies of a Kind, p. 297.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Lyman, A War of Empires, p. 215.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Lyman, A War of Empires, p. 13.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Thorne, Allies of a Kind, p. 226.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Michael Howard, Grand Strategy, vol. 4: September 1942–August 1943, London, HMSO, 1970, p. 83.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Raymond Callahan, ‘Did Winston Matter? Churchill and the Indian Army, 1940–1945’, in Alan Jeffreys et al., eds., The Indian Army, 1939–47: Experience and Development, London, Routledge, 2012.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Cat Wilson, Churchill on the Far East in the Second World War, London, Palgrave, 2014, p. 94.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 18, p. 2039 (24 July 1943); Wilson, Churchill on the Far East, p. 116; Sarvepalli Gopal, ‘Churchill and India’, in Robert Blake et al., eds., Churchill, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996, p. 464.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

For the First Arakan campaign see Lyman, A War of Empires, pp. 200–218.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Gilbert, ed., The Churchill Documents, vol. 18, p. 1361 (21 May 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Allen, Burma, p. 114.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 274–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Trevor Royle, Orde Wingate: A Man of Genius, 1903–1944, Barnsley, Frontline Books, 2010, p. 263.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Frank McLynn, The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph, 1942–45, London, Yale University Press, 2010, p. 83.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Royle, Orde Wingate, p. 255.; NA WO 106/4648 77th Indian Infantry Brigade in Burma: Report on Operations by Brigadier O. C. Wingate, February–June 1943; NA CAB 106/171 Notes of a Lecture on the ‘Chindits’: Long Range Penetration Groups in Burma 1943–1944, by Major-General W. D. A. Lentaigne, c.1946. My thanks to George Wilton for assistance obtaining these documents.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

For LONGCLOTH see Allen, Burma, pp. 127–49; McLynn, The Burma Campaign, pp. 139–58.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Bernard Fergusson, Beyond the Chindwin, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2009, p. 240.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

NA CAB 106/171, p. 3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Allen, Burma, p. 147.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Sykes, Orde Wingate, pp. 458–62.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Barnes, ed., The Empire at Bay, p. 946 (7 October 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Lyman, A War of Empires, pp. 699–700.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Kaushik Roy, Sepoys Against the Rising Sun: The Indian Army in Far East and South-east Asia, 1941–45, Boston, MA, Brill, 2016, p. 33.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Callahan, ‘Did Winston Matter?’, p. 63.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Lyman, A War of Empires, p. 677.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Raymond Callahan, Triumph at Imphal-Kohima: How the Indian Army Finally Stopped the Japanese Juggernaut, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2017, pp. 58–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

John Connell, Auchinleck: A Critical Biography, London, Cassell, 1959, p. 765.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food, London, Penguin, 2013, pp. 412–14.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 448.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded, pp. 279–81.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

For wartime India in general see Yasmin Khan, India at War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015; Raghavan, India’s War.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Raghavan, India’s War, pp. 346–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Tarak Barkawi, ‘Culture and Combat in the Colonies: The Indian Army in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 41, no. 2, 2006, p. 331.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Bowman, ed., The Military Papers, pp. 393–4 (3 May 1942). My emphasis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Tarak Barkawi, ‘Peoples, Homelands, and Wars? Ethnicity, the Military, and Battle Among British Imperial Forces in the War Against Japan’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 46, no. 1, 2004, pp. 157–9; Bailey and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 379.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Gandhi was far more ambivalent about armed resistance to Japan, and this was one of the main points of disagreement between himself and Nehru.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Jonathan Schneer, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet, New York, Basis Books, 2015, p. 117.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Peter Clarke, The Cripps Version: The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps, 1889–1952, London, Allen Lane, 2002, p. 305.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

In November 1942 Cripps became minister of aircraft production and held that post until the end of the war. He served in Attlee’s post-war Labour government as resident of the Board of Trade (1945–7) and chancellor of the exchequer (1947–50).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947, London, Pearson, 2014, pp. 388–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Nehru was like Churchill an Old Harrovian, and while in prison he kept a picture of his old school in his cell. Marr, The History of Modern Britain, p. 82.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Rob Johnson, ‘The Indian Army and Internal Security: 1919–1946’, in Kaushik Roy, ed., The Indian Army in the Two World Wars, Boston, MA, Brill, 2012, p. 382.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Sarkar, Modern India, p. 396.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 248.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Johnson, ‘The Indian Army and Internal Security’, p. 383.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 249.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Raghavan, India’s War, p. 348.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Khan, India at War, pp. 203–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

George Peden, ‘Financing Churchill’s Army’, in Keith Neilson et al., eds., The British Way in Warfare: Power and the International System, 1856–1956, London, Routledge, 2016, p. 289.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Utsa Patnaik, ‘Mr. Keynes and the Forgotten Holocaust in Bengal, 1943–44: Or, the Macroeconomics of Extreme Demand Compression’, Studies in People’s History, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017; Raghavan, India’s War, pp. 339–48.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Raghavan, India’s War, p. 347.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Mark B. Tauger, ‘The Indian Famine Crises of World War II’, British Scholar, vol. 1, no. 2, 2009, p. 188.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Andrew J. Grajdanzev, ‘India’s Wartime Economic Difficulties’, Pacific Affairs, vol. 16, no. 2, 1943, pp. 200–204.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Khan, India at War, p. 201.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Collingham, The Taste of War, p. 142.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 252–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal, New Delhi, Government of India Press, 1945, p. 10.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Cormac Ó Gráda, Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 58.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Collingham, The Taste of War, pp. 146–7. See Tauger, ‘The Indian Famine Crises’, for a critique of Amartya Sen’s famous claim that there was no shortage of rice in Bengal in 1942–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine and the End of Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Raghavan, India’s War, p. 353.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Collingham, The Taste of War, p. 148.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Robin J. Moore, ‘Hope, Victor Alexander John, Second Marquess of Linlithgow’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://www.oxforddnb.com/

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Collingham, The Taste of War, p. 147.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Khan, India at War, p. 214.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Bayly and Harper, p. 288; Khan, India at War, pp. 206–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II, New York, Basic Books, 2011, p. 139; Barnes, ed., The Empire at Bay, p. 910.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, pp. 141–2; NA CAB 65/35/21 War Cabinet Conclusions, 4 August 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Barnes, ed., The Empire at Bay, p. 933 (4 August 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

David Campion, ‘Review of “Churchill’s Secret War” ’, History, vol. 39, no. 3, 2011.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Scott Horton, ‘Churchill’s Dark Side: Six Questions for Madhusree Mukerjee’, Harper’s Magazine, 4 November 2010, https://harpers.org/2010/11/churchills-dark-side-six-questions-for-madhusree-mukerjee/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Patnaik, ‘Mr. Keynes and the Forgotten Holocaust’, p. 204.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Andrew Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994, p. 273.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Roberts, Eminent Churchillians, pp. 275–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Zareer Masani, ‘Churchill and the Genocide Myth’, The Critic, December 2020, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/december-2020/churchill-and-the-genocide-myth/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Richard Toye, Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made, New York, Henry Holt, 2010, p. 236.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

Toye, Churchill’s Empire, p. 222.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Arthur Herman, ‘Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine Would Have Been Worse’, The Churchill Project, 13 October 2017, https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/churcills-secret-war-bengal-famine-1943/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Barnes, ed., The Empire at Bay, p. 943 (24 September 1943). ‘But very strong on the point that Indians are not the only people who are starving in this war,’ Amery added.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 19, p. 421 (8 October 1943). My emphasis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, p. 238.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 787.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 295–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, pp. 231, 243.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90

Paul Greenhough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: The Famine of 1943–1944, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 136–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91

Collingham, The Taste of War, p. 150; Henry Knight, Food Administration in India, Redwood City, CA, Stanford University Press, 1954, pp. 187–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92

Penderel Moon, ed., Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 54–5 (9 February 1944); Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, pp. 220–21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 93

Barnes, ed., The Empire at Bay, p. 993 (4 August 1944), p. 950 (5 November 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94

Collingham, The Taste of War, p. 151.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95

Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, pp. 220–21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96

Moon, ed., Wavell, p. 59 (11 March 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 533 (20 March 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98

Barnes, ed., The Empire at Bay, pp. 971–2 (20 March 1944); Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, p. 227.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99

Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, p. 229; Moon, ed., Wavell, p. 49 (16 January 1944), p. 61 (24 March 1944), p. 67 (25 April 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 100

Martin Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20: Normandy and Beyond, May–December 1944, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2018, p. 348 (1 June 1944); Moon, ed., Wavell, p. 73 (4 June 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 101

Moon, ed., Wavell, p. 75 (19 June 1944), p. 76 (24 June 1944), p. 92 (11 October 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 102

Moon, ed., Wavell, p. 93 (20 October 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 103

See e.g. Sudip Kar Purkayastha, ed., Bengal Famine: An Unpunished Genocide – A Commentary on Syama Prasad Mookerjee’s Panchasher Manwantar, Delhi, Vitasta Publishing, 2021.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 104

James Holland, ‘The Tragedy of the Bengal Famine’, 12 February 2025, https://substack.com/home/post/p-156998580.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 105

Herman, ‘Absent Churchill’.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 106

Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War, p. 229.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 107

Barnes, ed., The Empire at Bay, p. 943 (24 September 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 108

Moon, ed., Wavell, p. 19 (24 September 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 109

Moon, ed., Wavell, p. 123 (9 April 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 110

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 4, p. 260.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 111

Khan, India at War, p. 213.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 112

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 155, 21 September 1943; no. 156, 26 September 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 113

The question is of course moot because it never would have come to that. The people of Kent and Hampshire had democratic agency. The people of Bengal did not.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 114

Collingham, The Taste of War, pp. 126–32.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 115

Lyman, A War of Empires, pp. 340–41. My emphasis.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 116

10. England Is a Village

Conal O’Donnell, ‘Breckland Exodus – The Forced Evacuation of the Norfolk Battle Area 1942’, WW2 People’s War, 11 November 2004, https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/62/a3258362.shtml.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

For the story of the Stanford PTA see Matthew Green, Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages, London, W. W. Norton, 2022, pp. 218–53.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

O’Donnell, ‘Breckland Exodus’.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Gary Willis, ‘The Battle for Land “In the National Interest” During Britain’s Second World War’, On History, April 2021, https://blog.history.ac.uk/2021/04/the-battle-for-land-in-the-national-interest-during-britains-second-world-war/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

The National Archives, ‘Land and Property Requisitioned for War in the 20th Century’, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/land-requisitioned-war/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Green, Shadowlands, p. 223.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Francis Pryor, The Making of the British Landscape, London, Penguin, 2011, p. 584.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

HC Deb 29 February 1944, vol. 397, col. 1275; William Foot, ‘Impact of the Military’, in Brian Short et al., eds., The Front Line of Freedom: British Agriculture in the Second World War, London, British Agricultural History Society, 2006, p. 134; Marianna Dudley, ‘Traces of Conflict’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (2013).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Nicholas Crane, The Making of the British Landscape, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017, p. 489.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Crane, The Making of the British Landscape, pp. 478–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare, New York, Random House, 2002, p. 88.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

C. Henry Warren, England Is a Village, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1941.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 200.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

For ‘Deep England’ see Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, London, Pimlico, 1991, pp. 182–3; Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 218.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

David Clampin, ‘ “Our Lovely Countryside”: Capturing the Image of Britain at War in Commercial Advertising, 1939–1945’, in Ann Murray, ed., Constructing the Memory of War in Visual Culture Since 1914: The Eye on War, London, Routledge, 2018, p. 23.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Brian Short et al., ‘ “The Front Line of Freedom”: State-led Agricultural Revolution in Britain, 1939–45’, in Brian Short et al., eds., The Front Line of Freedom: British Agriculture in the Second World War, London, British Agricultural History Society, 2006, p. 1; Brassley, The Real Agricultural Revolution, p. 5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Foot, ‘Impact of the Military’, p. 138; Ben Cowell, The British Country House Revival, London, Boydell Press, 2024, p. 8; Brian Short et al., ‘ “The Front Line of Freedom” ’, p. 14.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

The Fairey group struggled on through innumerable consolidations and mergers until it collapsed in receivership in 1977. The two decades it had to wait to be compensated for the Heathrow site was arguably one factor in the company’s post-war instability.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Pryor, The Making of the British Landscape, pp. 629–30.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Green, Shadowlands, p. 234.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

John Baxendale, ‘ “You and I – All of Us Ordinary People”: Renegotiating “Britishness” in Wartime’, in Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill, eds., Millions Like Us? British Culture in the Second World War, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1999; Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–1965, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 19–54.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 38.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

See e.g. John Martin, ‘Dig for Victory: Britain’s WW2 War on Hunger’, History Extra, 17 March 2022, https://www.historyextra.com/membership/dig-for-victory-campaign-ww2-food-shortages-how-britain-coped/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Collingham, The Taste of War, p. 90; Alan F. Wilt, Food for War: Agriculture and Rearmament in Britain Before the Second World War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 224.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

See e.g. Gardiner, Wartime, p. 144.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine, p. 172.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine, pp. 173–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Howlett, Fighting with Figures, pp. 83, 197.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Brian Short, The Battle of the Fields, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2014, p. 403.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Collingham, The Taste of War, pp. 155–63.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, pp. 252–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

A unit of measure equal to twenty-eight pounds.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Calder, The People’s War, p. 419.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989, p. 198.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Short, The Battle of the Fields, p. 37.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

John Martin, ‘The State Directed Food Production Campaign and the Farming Community, 1939–45’, Family & Community History, vol. 17, no. 1, 2014.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

For the following section all statistics from Howlett, Fighting with Figures.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Brassley, The Real Agricultural Revolution, p. 93.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Collingham, The Taste of War, p. 92.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Scotland had thirty-nine Agricultural Executive Committees (AECs) which functioned in a similar way to the Anglo-Welsh War Ags, though their statutory powers were not identical. In Northern Ireland the province’s Ministry of Agriculture performed by itself much the same role. Short, The Battle of the Fields.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Short, The Battle of the Fields, p. 220.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Brian Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages: The County War Agricultural Committees in England, 1939–45’, Rural History, vol. 18, no. 2, 2007.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Collingham, The Taste of War, p. 96.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Short, ‘War in the Fields and Villages’, p. 237.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Calder, The People’s War, p. 427.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 46.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Carol Twinch, Women on the Land: Their Story During Two World Wars, Cambridge, Lutterworth Press, 1990, pp. 101–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Vita Sackville-West, The Women’s Land Army, London, Michael Joseph, 1944, pp. 95–8; Calder, The People’s War, pp. 428–9; Gardiner, Wartime, pp. 448–52.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Howlett, Fighting with Figures, p. 46.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Sackville-West, The Women’s Land Army, p. 183; Thomas Webb et al., ‘ “We Cows Are in a Very Serious Predicament”: Constructions of Land Girls and Cattle in Britain in the Second World War’, Gender & History, vol. 34, no. 1, 2022.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Rose, Which People’s War?, p. 213.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Martin Johnes, Wales Since 1939, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012, p. 7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Trevor Royle, A Time of Tyrants: Scotland and the Second World War, Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2011, p. 14.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Johnes, Wales Since 1939, p. 7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Johnes, Wales Since 1939, pp. 10–13.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Royle, A Time of Tyrants, p. 1990; Richard Finlay, Modern Scotland: 1914–2000, London, Profile, 2003, p. 182.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Royle, A Time of Tyrants, p. 190.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Finlay, Modern Scotland, p. 179.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Finlay, Modern Scotland, pp. 182–6; Royle, A Time of Tyrants, pp. 191–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945, London, Penguin, 2003, p. 7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Johnes, Wales Since 1939, p. 17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Royle, A Time of Tyrants, pp. 149, 153.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, p. 322; Kirsten Tait, ‘Aberdeen Blitz: Remembering when Bombs Rained Down on the Granite City’, STV News, 21 April 2023, https://news.stv.tv/north/aberdeen-blitz-remembering-when-bombs-rained-down-on-the-granite-city-during-world-war-two.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Gardiner, Wartime, pp. 380–82; Brian Barton, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, Belfast, Ulster Historical Foundation, 1995, p. 52.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Ian S. Wood, Britain, Ireland and the Second World War, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp. 101–37.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Allport, Britain at Bay, pp. 17–28; Philip Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War: Politics, Economic Mobilisation and Society, 1939–45, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013, p. 1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Barton, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, p. 58.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Wood, Britain, Ireland and the Second World War, p. 189. In the end Magennis found himself alienated from both of Ulster’s sectarian communities and moved to Yorkshire.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Gardiner, Wartime, p. 384.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Gardiner, Wartime, p. 385.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Guy Woodward, ‘Rotten Fish and Belfast Confetti’, OUP Blog, 30 January 2015, https://blog.oup.com/2015/01/winston-churchill-northern-ireland-second-world-war/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, p. 127.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Wood, Britain, Ireland and the Second World War, p. 180.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, p. 120.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, p. 127.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

Wood, Britain, Ireland and the Second World War, p. 179.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Allport, Britain at Bay, p. 17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Wood, Britain, Ireland and the Second World War, pp. 27–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Wood, Britain, Ireland and the Second World War, p. 173.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Barton, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, p. 51.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Wood, Britain, Ireland and the Second World War, p. 119.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

He would lead Stormont until 1963, becoming Northern Ireland’s longest-serving prime minister (the post was abolished in 1973).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

Barton, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, pp. 54–7; Wood, Britain, Ireland and the Second World War, p. 190.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Guy Woodward, Culture, Northern Ireland, and the Second World War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 185–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Ollerenshaw, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, p. 229.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

Johnes, Wales Since 1939, p. 21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

Finlay, Modern Scotland, pp. 175–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

Finlay, Modern Scotland, p. 179.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945, New York, Random House, 1995, p. xxiv; Tim Cook, The Necessary War, vol. 1: Canadians Fighting the Second World War 1939–1943, Toronto, Penguin Canada, 2015, p. 37.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

Royle, A Time of Tyrants, pp. 232–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90

Johnes, Wales Since 1939, p. 16.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91

Johnes, Wales Since 1939, p. 25.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92

Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, p. 72.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 93

Johnes, Wales Since 1939, p. 21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94

Johnes, Wales Since 1939, p. 26.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95

The 1945 Scottish Labour manifesto included a commitment to home rule, probably a reaction to some SNP by-election success towards the end of the war, which the party promptly forgot about following its landslide victory. Paul Ward, Britishness Since 1870, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 152.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96

Richard Weight, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000, London, Macmillan, 2002, pp. 125–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97

See Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98

Weight, Patriots, p. 125.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99

Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘England, Britain and the Audit of War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 7, no. 1, 1997, p. 151.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 100

11. Master Plans

John Ellis, Cassino: The Hollow Victory: The Battle for Rome January–June 1944, London, Aurum, 2003, p. 259. For the Battles of Monte Cassino, in addition to Ellis see Peter Caddick-Adams, Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013; Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 521–62.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

The New Zealand Corps, created in February 1944, consisted of the 2nd New Zealand Infantry Division, the 4th Indian Infantry Division and the 78th (British) Infantry Division. It was disbanded after DICKENS.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

C. J. C. Molony, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 5: The Campaign in Sicily, 1943 and the Campaign in Italy, 3rd September 1943 to 31st March 1944, London, HMSO, 1973, p. 806.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Ellis, Cassino, p. 228.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Caddick-Adams, Monte Cassino, p. 198.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Ellis, Cassino, p. 285. Anders’s corps was mostly made up of former Polish POWs and Gulag inmates in the USSR who had been transferred to British authority by the Soviets via Iran in 1943.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Middlebrook and Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, p. 484.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

This figure does not include bombers which crashed on returning to England nor bombers lost on missions to other cities during the period. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 7, p. 90.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 268.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 338–40.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 235.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 7, p. 89.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 7, p. 94; Middlebrook and Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, pp. 453–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 262.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, p. 602.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Noble Frankland, ‘Some Reflections on the Strategic Air Offensive, 1939–1945’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, vol. 107, no. 2, 1962, p. 102.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Middlebrook and Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, p. 487.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Roberts, Masters and Commanders, p. 445.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 483 (28 November 1943).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Terraine, The Right of the Line, p. 552. Harris might have responded that he qualified this claim with ‘if the USAAF will come in on it’, which it did not. But there was never any realistic chance of the Americans participating in the Battle of Berlin, and in any case Harris argued in a letter to the Air Ministry on 7 December that his Lancaster force alone was capable of destroying Berlin and ending the war.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Roberts, Masters and Commanders, p. 461.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, pp. 367–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Hancock and Gowing, The British War Economy, p. 438.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

David French, Raising Churchill’s Army, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 244.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, pp. 362–3; L. F. Ellis et al., Victory in the West, vol. 1: Battle of Normandy, London, HMSO, 1962, p. 72; Postan, British War Production, p. 283.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy, New York, Harper Perennial, 1991, p. 561.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 316.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Alan Moorehead, Montgomery, London, Coward-McCann, 1946, p. 188.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Hancock and Gowing, The British War Economy, p. 453. This turned out to be optimistic; Britain’s working population in 1944 fell in the end by 215,000.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

F. W. Perry, The Commonwealth Armies: Manpower and Organisation in Two World Wars, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Stephen Hart, ‘Montgomery, Morale, Casualty Conservation and “Colossal Cracks”: 21st Army Group’s Operational Technique in North-West Europe, 1944–45’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 19, no. 4, 1996, p. 139.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Ellis et al., Victory in the West, vol. 1, p. 80.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Stephen Brooks, ed., Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy, Stroud, Army Records Society, 2008, pp. 99–103.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 554 (5 June 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20, p. 377 (5 June 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 393.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 330.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

For the Battle of Normandy see John Buckley, Monty’s Men: The British Army and the Liberation of Europe, London, Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 47–207; D’Este, Decision in Normandy; L. F. Ellis et al., Victory in the West, vol. 1; Fraser, And We Shall Shock Them, pp. 443–69; John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris, London, Penguin, 1994.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

The invasion was originally due to take place on 31 May, but the date was pushed forward at the beginning of May to allow time for extra preparations. Only two windows in June had suitable tide and moonlight combinations: 5–7 June and 18–20 June. The weather on 5 June was prohibitively bad but had improved enough by the following day to allow the attack to go ahead. It is as well that it did. Had the Allies waited until the second window in June the attack would have coincided with the worst summer Channel storm in living memory.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Terraine, The Right of the Line, p. 632; James S. Corum, ‘The Luftwaffe in Normandy’, in John Buckley, ed., The Normandy Campaign 1944: Sixty Years On, London, Routledge, 2006, p. 136.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

For the experience of one regiment see Martin K. A. Morgan, Down to Earth: The 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Normandy, Atglen, PA, Schiffer Military History, 2004.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 330. Figures are inexact because subsequent casualty calculations did not always distinguish between killed and wounded on D-Day itself and on subsequent days.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6, p. 23.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Buckley, Monty’s Men, p. 105.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

David Holbrook, Flesh Wounds, Staplehurst, Spellmount, 2007, p. 131.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded, p. 247.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Brooks, ed., Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy, pp. 201–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy, pp. 213–15.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy, p. 216; Buckley, Monty’s Men, p. 109; D’Este, Decision in Normandy, p. 501.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2016, p. 229.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Brooks, ed., Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy, pp. 217–18.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

D’Este, Decision in Normandy, p. 554.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Ellis et al., Victory in the West, vol. 1, p. 304.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, pp. 574–5 (26 and 27 July 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

The Times (London), 25 July 1944, p. 4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Ellis et al., Victory in the West, vol. 1, p. 353.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

D’Este, Decision in Normandy, p. 321, Ellis et al., Victory in the West, vol. 1, pp. 272–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Brooks, ed., Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy, pp. 100–102.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Brooks, ed., Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy, p. 102.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

D’Este, Decision in Normandy, pp. 107–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Three days after being wounded (the day GOODWOOD sagged to an end) disgruntled Wehrmacht officers tried and failed to assassinate Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters. In the brutal Gestapo investigation that followed, Rommel, convalescing back in Germany, was identified as a somewhat ambivalent fellow-traveller in the outer circles of the conspiracy. Given the choice between a court martial, a common criminal’s execution and a concentration camp for his family on the one hand, or a cyanide pill and a hero’s funeral on the other, the most indefatigable of Britain’s wartime enemies chose the latter on 14 October.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Stephen Badsey, ‘Culture, Controversy, Caen and Cherbourg: The First Week of the Battle’, in John Buckley, ed., The Normandy Campaign 1944: Sixty Years On, London, Routledge, 2006.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

‘Left’ and ‘right’ in a military position are defined in rather the same way as theatre stage directions, from the perspective of someone standing in the middle of the friendly formation looking out towards the ‘audience’ (enemy). By being on the eastern side of the Normandy bridgehead looking southwards, the British and Canadians were on its left flank. From the German point of view, they were on the front line’s right flank.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

John Buckley, British Armour in the Normandy Campaign, London, Routledge, 2004, p. 122; Montgomery of Alamein, The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery, p. 232.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Marc Milner, Stopping the Panzers: The Untold Story of D-Day, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2017, p. 306.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

French, Raising Churchill’s Army, p. 240; d’Este, Decision in Normandy, p. 535.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

French, Raising Churchill’s Army, p. 255.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 522.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

French, Raising Churchill’s Army, p. 258.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

French, Raising Churchill’s Army, p. 265.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Mungo Melvin, ‘The German Perspective’, in John Buckley, ed., The Normandy Campaign 1944: Sixty Years On, London, Routledge, 2006, pp. 30–31.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Montgomery of Alamein, The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery, p. 228.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Stephen Hart, Colossal Cracks: Montgomery’s 21st Army Group in Northwest Europe, 1944–45, Mechanicsburg, PA, Stackpole Books, 2007, p. 46.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Montgomery of Alamein, The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery, p. 231.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

For an extended discussion of this see D’Este, Decision in Normandy. Montgomery claimed in his memoirs that from the beginning his plan had been to ‘threaten to break out on the eastern flank, that is in the Caen sector…draw the main enemy reserves, particularly his armoured divisions, into that sector and to keep them there…[while making] the break-out on the western flank – using for this task the American forces under General Bradley’ (p. 200). This was rubbish. A reader perusing the detailed notes for Montgomery’s briefing at St Paul’s on 15 May will search in vain for any mention of this ‘plan’. To be sure, as early as 10 June Monty was alluding to an evolving plan like this in his ‘diary notes’ of the campaign and was claiming that it represented his original intention. But this collection of aides-memoires was written ‘very much with future historians in mind’ (Brooks, ed., Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy, p. 8) and in any case as GOODWOOD shows Monty never consistently stuck to it. There was nothing wrong with Montgomery switching to a new plan under changed circumstances. It was the essence of martial common sense, and since Second Alamein Montgomery had shown again and again that he could be very good at improvising new ideas as campaigns changed. The thing that infuriated his fellow former generals in the post-war battle of the memoirs was his insistence that he had always intended to fight in Normandy this way. It was this nonsense which provoked Eisenhower in a May 1946 letter to gently chide his former subordinate. OVERLORD had ‘generally followed the conceptions we had held before the invasion was launched’, Ike conceded. But ‘on the other hand, the operations immediately following the landing diverged quite considerably, in a tactical sense, from what we had hoped to execute’. (D’Este, Decision in Normandy, p. 729. My emphasis.)

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

D’Este, Decision in Normandy, p. 547.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Buckley, Monty’s Men, p. 110.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 437.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

This landing on the French Mediterranean shore had initially been dubbed ‘ANVIL’ to complement ‘SLEDGEHAMMER’, the original name of the cross-Channel invasion. Since by summer 1944 the latter had long since been rebranded as OVERLORD the metaphor was perhaps considered redundant. According to the agreement at Tehran, ANVIL/DRAGOON was originally supposed to take place coterminously with OVERLORD. But the expansion of the original COSSAC cross-Channel plan from a three- to a five-division landing, plus the decision to launch an amphibious assault at Anzio in early 1944, meant that there were insufficient ships to conduct both operations simultaneously.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6, p. 122.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 834.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, p. 604.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 824.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 828.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, pp. 127–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 566 (6 July 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 590 (9 September 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

Hey, The View from the Corner Shop, p. 291 (29 August 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

Helen D. Millgate, ed., Mr Brown’s War: A Diary from the Home Front, Stroud, History Press, 1998, p. 371 (3 September 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 203, 24 August 1944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 204, 31 August 1944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91

Stebbing, Diary of a Decade, p. 276 (5–7 September 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 585 (28 August 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 93

For Operation MARKET GARDEN see Antony Beevor, The Battle of Arnhem: The Deadliest Airborne Operation of World War II, New York, Viking, 2018; Buckley, Monty’s Men, pp. 208–31; Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94

Beevor, The Battle of Arnhem, p. 30; Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 555.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 446.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96

Buckley, Monty’s Men, p. 218.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 446; Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality, pp. 107–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98

Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality, p. 89.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99

Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality, p. 113.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 100

Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality, pp. 100, 147.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 101

Beevor, The Battle of Arnhem, p. 36.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 102

Four men of the division subsequently received Victoria Crosses, three of them posthumous. An RAF transport pilot also received a posthumous Victoria Cross for his actions during MARKET GARDEN.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 103

Beevor, The Battle of Arnhem, p. 35.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 104

The story by Major Brian Urquhart (no relation to 1st Airborne Division’s commander) was heavily publicised in Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far and the subsequent 1977 film adaptation by Richard Attenborough, but a close reading of his allegations fail to convince. See Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality, pp. 131–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 105

Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality, p. 127.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 106

Buckley, Monty’s Men, p. 209.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 107

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 560.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 108

Ritchie, Arnhem, Myth and Reality, p. 115.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 109

HC Deb 28 September 1944, vol. 403, col. 483.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 110

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 209, 5 October 1944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 111

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 211, 19 October 1944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 112

Wing, ed., Our Longest Days, p. 222 (29 September 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 113

For the Scheldt campaign see Buckley, Monty’s Men, pp. 232–59.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 114

For Operation OLIVE and the late 1944 campaign in Italy see Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 617–30.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 115

For the 1944 manpower crisis see John Robert Peaty, ‘British Army Manpower Crisis 1944’, PhD diss., King’s College University of London, 2000.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 116

Fennell, Fighting the People’s War, p. 567.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 117

Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded, p. 216.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 118

12. Are We Never to Be Free of Damage or Death?

Stebbing, Diary of a Decade, pp. 264–6 (27 June 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

For the Baby Blitz see Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 119–21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

O’Brien, Civil Defence, pp. 440–42.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Basil Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom, London, HMSO, 1957, p. 520.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

White, The Battle of London, pp. 222–9; Overy, The Bombing War, p. 191.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom, p. 520.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

NA INF 1/264 Home Intelligence Daily Report no. 175, 10 February 1944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Stebbing, Diary of a Decade, p. 241 (31 January 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

HC Deb 22 February 1944, vol. 397, col. 683.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Calder, The People’s War, p. 559.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

O’Brien, Civil Defence, p. 652, Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom, p. 370. The first of the new weapons had actually landed on a railway bridge in Bethnal Green in the early hours of the morning on 13 June, killing six people. It was the only successful attack in a planned opening salvo of 500 missiles that day which was such a debacle that the commanding officer responsible was almost court-martialled.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

For the V-weapon Blitz see Christy Campbell, Target London: Under Attack from the V-weapons During WWII, New York, Little, Brown, 2012.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Stebbing, Diary of a Decade, p. 263 (19 June 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell: I Have Tried to Tell the Truth 1943–1944, London, Secker & Warburg, 1998, p. 272 (30 June 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom, pp. 525–6; Calder, The People’s War, pp. 559, 562.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Mauren Waller, London 1945: Life in the Debris of War, London, St Martin’s Press, 2005, pp. 24–5; Hugh Martyr, ‘V-Weapons Campaign’, World War II Database, https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=340; Martin Langfield, ‘The Aldwych V-1 Blast: June 30, 1944’, The Secret Fire https://secretfire.wordpress.com/the-aldwych-v-1-blast-june-30-1944/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Colin Dobinson, AA Command: Britain’s Anti-Aircraft Defences of World War II, London, Methuen, 2001, p. 438.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

White, The Battle of London, p. 266.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Millgate, ed., Mr Brown’s War, p. 365 (28 July 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Charlie Hall, ‘ “Flying Gas Mains”: Rumour, Secrecy, and Morale During the V-2 Bombardment of Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 33, no. 1, 2022.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Waller, London 1945, pp. 36–8, 41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom, p. 527. Most V-2s which landed elsewhere than London were off-target, but a few rockets were deliberately aimed at Norwich and Ipswich.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Calder, The People’s War, p. 562.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

‘Lest We Forget New Cross’, The Woolworth’s Museum, https://www.woolworthsmuseum.co.uk/1940s-remembernewcross.htm; Waller, London 1945, p. 43.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

‘Ivy Mildred Croughton Millichamp’, Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/30641125/ivy-mildred-millichamp. Just hours before, a V-2 had hit a residential block in Stepney, killing 134 people.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom, pp. 525–6; Calder, The People’s War, pp. 559, 562.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Technically there was also a ‘V-3’, an extremely long-range cannon designed to bombard London from northern France, but it was never used for this purpose.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

O’Brien, How the War Was Won, pp. 340–41. The autobiographical film based on von Braun’s life, I Aim at the Stars (1960), includes the line ‘But Sometimes I Hit London’, often wrongly attributed to the comedian Mort Sahl.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

O’Brien, How the War Was Won, p. 347.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Collier, The Defence of the United Kingdom, pp. 523–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

White, The Battle of London, pp. 250, 272; Waller, London 1945, p. 24.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Jonathan Oates, Attack on London: Disaster, Riot and War, Barnsley, Wharncliffe, 2009, p. 103; Waller, London 1945, p. 26.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

White, The Battle of London, pp. 260–64.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 194.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Waller, London 1945, p. 53.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 194; White, The Battle of London, p. 269.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 84.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 192–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Harris and Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing, p. 62. Germany by this time possessed (unbeknownst to the Allies) 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas, most of it deliverable by aircraft, and members of Hitler’s inner circle including Martin Bormann and Josef Goebbels repeatedly exhorted him to use them.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Oates, Attack on London, p. 103.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Matthew Grant, Citizenship, Sexual Anxiety and Womanhood in Second World War Britain: The Case of the Man with the Cleft Chin, London, Routledge, 2013, p. 181.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Peter Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell: Smothered Under Journalism, 1946, London, Secker & Warburg, 1998, p. 110 (15 February 1946).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Hulten and Jones committed their crime spree in October 1944, by which time the main V-1 Blitz on London was already over.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

For the story of Hulten and Jones see Simon Read, Dark City: Crime in Wartime London, Shepperton, Ian Allan, 2010, pp. 78–108.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Read, Dark City, p. 88; Jason Evans, ‘How a Welsh Teenager Became a Violent Killer, Preying on Random Men and Women for Thrills’, Walesonline.uk 25 June 2023, https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/elizabeth-jones-cleft-chin-murder-27150667.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell: Smothered Under Journalism, pp. 108, 110 (15 February 1946).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Amy Helen Bell, Under Cover of Darkness: Murders in Blackout London, London, Yale University Press, 2024.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Read, Dark City, pp. 7–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Grant, Citizenship, Sexual Anxiety and Womanhood, p. 183.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, p. 457.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 56.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, pp. 183–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

All statistics that follow in this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, are from Howlett, Fighting with Figures. For crime in wartime Britain see Peter Adey et al., Crime, Regulation and Control During the Blitz, London, Bloomsbury, 2016; Stuart Hylton, Their Darkest Hour: The Hidden History of the Home Front 1939–1945, Stroud, Sutton, 2001; Edward Smithies, Crime in Wartime: A Social History of Crime in World War II, London, Unwin Hyman, 1982; Donald Thomas, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War, London, John Murray, 2003.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Felonious offences which were heard at a court of quarter sessions or assizes court rather than a magistrates’ court.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

During 1939, 4,747 female inmates were committed to English and Welsh prisons (including on remand). By 1944 that number had risen to 8,605.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, p. 163.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Hylton, Their Darkest Hour, pp. 194–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Thomas, An Underworld at War, pp. 158–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Thomas, An Underworld at War, pp. 189–91.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Daily Express, 14 March 1945, p. 3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Daily Mirror, 31 January 1945, p. 2; News of the World, 4 March 1945, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War, London, Yale University Press, 2009, p. 164.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Leicester Evening Mail, 1 February 1944, p. 5. Sonya O. Rose, ‘Sex, Citizenship, and the Nation in World War II Britain’, American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 4, 1998.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Grant, Citizenship, Sexual Anxiety and Womanhood, p. 178.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Evening Standard, 19 January 1945.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Sunday Express, 28 January 1945.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Reynolds, Rich Relations, pp. 411–14.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Davison, ed., The Complete Works of George Orwell: I Have Tried to Tell the Truth, p. 12 (3 December 1943); Reynolds, Rich Relations, pp. 204–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Reynolds, Rich Relations, pp. 216–37; Graham Smith, When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain, London, I. B. Tauris, 1987. The pre-war non-white population of the UK probably numbered 16,000 people at most (Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, p. 453).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Robert N. Murray, Lest We Forget: Experiences of World War II West Indian Ex-service Personnel, Nottingham, Turnaround Distribution, 1996; Sonya O. Rose, ‘Race, Empire and British Wartime National Identity, 1939–45’, Historical Research, vol. 74, no. 184, 2001; Wendy Webster, Mixing It: Diversity in World War Two Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Sonya O. Rose, ‘Girls and GIs: Race, Sex, and Diplomacy in Second World War Britain’, The International History Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 1997.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Murray, Lest We Forget, pp. 106–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Reynolds, Rich Relations, p. 267.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Allport, Demobbed, pp. 90–92.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Allport, Demobbed, p. 95.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

Allport, Demobbed, p. 176.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Allport, Demobbed, p. 84.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Hermann Mannheim, Group Problems in Crime and Punishment, London, Routledge, 2013, p. 112.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in Twentieth-Century England, London, Longman, 2011, pp. 22–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Pat Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 181–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Daily Mirror, 31 January 1945, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

13. Kill Boche, Terrify Boche

In February 1944 Spaatz had been appointed to the newly created United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe (USSTAF) command, which exercised overall control of American strategic and tactical air forces in the European theatre, including, but not limited to, RAF Bomber Command’s direct equivalent, the US Eighth Air Force.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Probert, Bomber Harris, pp. 335–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 337; Overy, The Bombing War, p. 574.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 574.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

The USAAF had ‘bombed short’ with even grislier results at the beginning of Operation COBRA, killing at least 100 American troops including Lieutenant General Lesley McNair, the highest-ranking US officer to die in action in the European war.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

O’Brien, Civil Defence, p. 345; Overy, The Bombing War, p. 577.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 341.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Harris, Bomber Offensive, pp. 292–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 355.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Middlebrook and Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, p. 564.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 371.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 387–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 367.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 4, p. 178.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

British Bombing Survey Unit, The Strategic Air War Against Germany, p. 41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 4, p. 301.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Sebastian Cox, ‘The Dresden Raids: Why and How’, in Paul Addison et al., eds., Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945, Chicago, IL, Ivan R. Dee, 2006.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 391.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas About Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 254.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

For the Dresden raid see Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945, New York, Harper Perennial, 2005.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

For the Pforzheim raid see Tony Redding, Bombing Germany: The Final Phase, Barnsley, Pen & Sword, 2015.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Friedrich, The Fire, p. 95.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

The other ‘forgotten’ firestorm of the war is that which befell in Kassel in October 1943 in which the 6,000 deaths represented a higher proportion of the civic population than in Hamburg three months earlier.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 3, p. 199n.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Redding, Bombing Germany, pp. 24, 30.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 476.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Calculated from Middlebrook and Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, pp. 672–90.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Middlebrook and Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, p. 708. This figure also includes shot-down aircrew who died while prisoners of war. Another 8,195 Bomber Command aircrew were killed as a result of non-operational (mostly training) flights and thirty-seven were killed in ground combat.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Daniel Swift, Bomber County: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010, p. xvii.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 406.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Although Harris did not mention it, they would also have received the War Medal 1939–45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Probert, Bomber Harris, pp. 412–13. Harris was, unusually, not offered a peerage by the new Labour government, despite Churchill’s protests on his behalf. This was later asserted as further evidence that a squeamish post-war elite had washed its hands of Bomber Command. Harris had, of course, indicated in his June 1945 letter to Portal that he would refuse any offer of such an honour and Attlee’s government could plausibly claim that it was therefore merely respecting his own stated wishes; Harris’s later complaints that he had been snubbed by Labour smack of him trying to have it both ways. When Churchill’s Conservatives returned to power in 1951 he was offered and accepted a baronetcy. He returned to England in the same period and lived there until his death in 1984.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

At least one operational sortie was required to receive the 1939–1945 Star. Two months of operational flying prior to 6 June 1944 was the minimum prerequisite for the Air Crew Europe Star. Those eligible for both the Air Crew Europe Star and the France and Germany Star received a ‘France and Germany’ clasp to wear on the former of the two decorations.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

The sole exception to this in 1945 was the ‘Battle of Britain’ clasp for the 1939–1945 Star awarded to Fighter Command aircrew who had flown combat operations over the United Kingdom between the canonical beginning and end dates of that campaign (10 July–31 October 1940). Only a couple of thousand individuals were eligible for that award and the arguments about who ought and who ought not to be included as an official member of ‘the Few’ went on for the next fifteen years. It is little wonder the service ministries chose not to pursue a similar distinction for any other larger combat branch until 2013. See Jeremy A. Crang, ‘Identifying the “Few”: The Personalisation of a Heroic Military Elite’, War and Society, vol. 24, no. 2, 2005.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Heather Hughes, ‘Memorializing RAF Bomber Command in the United Kingdom’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2023.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Gray, ‘A Culture of Official Squeamishness?’

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, p. 256; Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 395–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 397.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 481.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Probert, Bomber Harris, pp. 455–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

William S. Carter, ‘Anglo–Canadian Wartime Relations, 1939–1945: RAF Bomber Command and No. 6 (Canadian) Group’, PhD diss., McMaster University, 1989.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

See Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Jeffrey Fear, ‘War of the Factories’, in Michael Geyer et al., eds., The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol. 3: Total War: Economy, Society and Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 118–20.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Edward E. Keso et al., ‘The Magnesium Industry’, Economic Geography, vol. 25, no. 4, 1949.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Fahey, ‘The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, pp. 374–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Fahey, ‘The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, p. 163.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

British Bombing Survey Unit, The Strategic Air War Against Germany, p. 36.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Len Deighton, Bomber, New York, Harper & Row, 1970, p. 115.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Fahey, ‘The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, pp. 172, 185.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Fahey, ‘The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, p. 215.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Fahey, ‘The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, pp. 247, 253, 287.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Fahey, ‘The Economic Cost of Strategic Bombing’, introduction.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

British Bombing Survey Unit, The Strategic Air War Against Germany, p. 34.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 298–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Of course, no one on the Allied side could have been certain at the beginning of 1943 that victory was foreordained. The Battle of the Atlantic was still ongoing; the Wehrmacht had still not been defeated in a summer campaign in Russia; the possibility that Hitler would turn things around with devastating new generations of super-weapons, including chemical and bacteriological agents, was still the stuff of plausible nightmares.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 345.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Harris, Despatch on War Operations, p. 40.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (European War), Washington DC, 1945, pp. 37, 71.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

British Bombing Survey Unit, The Strategic Air War Against Germany, p. 161.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, p. 272; Gian Gentile, ‘Advocacy or Assessment? The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan’, Pacific Historical Review, vol. 66, no. 1, 1997.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, London, Walker, 2006, p. 223.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, pp. 232–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Hansen, Fire and Fury, pp. 280–84.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, pp. 597–602; Overy, The Bombing War, p. 454.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 462.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Stargardt, The German War, p. 463.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 460; British Bombing Survey Unit, The Strategic Air War Against Germany, introduction.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine, pp. 287–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 463–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

As Mancur Olson put it, the combination of the two turned ‘tactical supply problems’ into ‘strategic supply problems’ for Germany. See Mancur Olsen, ‘The Economics of Target Selection for the Combined Bomber Offensive’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institute, vol. 107, no. 628, 1962.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

It is unclear whether securing the daylight air superiority over Germany which was necessary for a breakthrough in both night and day bombing could have occurred earlier than 1944. This would have required, among other things, large numbers of effective long-range fighter escorts, either British or American, in 1942 or 1943. Portal was unconvinced by the possibility of such a fighter for a long time, though the RAF’s resistance had deeper systemic and cultural roots than just the objections of one CAS. For a discussion of the issues see David Stubbs, ‘A Blind Spot? The Royal Air Force (RAF) and Long-Range Fighters, 1936–1944’, Journal of Military History, vol. 78, no. 2, 2014.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Noble Frankland, History at War: The Campaigns of an Historian, London, Giles de la Mare, 1998, p. 70.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 359. Portal’s correspondence was actually drafted by Bufton.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 362.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Sebastian Cox, ‘Sir Arthur Harris and Some Myths and Controversies of the Bomber Offensive’, Royal Air Force Historical Society Journal, vol. 47, no. 1, 2010, pp. 17–19.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

Webster and Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, vol. 3, p. 189.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 345.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

W. Hays Parks, ‘ “Precision” and “Area” Bombing: Who Did Which, and When?’, Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 1995, pp. 162–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Parks, ‘ “Precision” and “Area” Bombing’, pp. 153–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 331.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 347. My emphasis. There is no evidence that USAAF leaders objected on moral grounds to radar-directed bombing, morale bombing, the strafing and bombing of civilians in the final months of the war or remote-controlled ‘robot plane’ attacks. Ronald Schaffer, ‘American Military Ethics in World War II: The Bombing of German Civilians’, The Journal of American History, vol. 67, no. 2, 1980, pp. 332–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Parks, ‘ “Precision” and “Area” Bombing’, pp. 153–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

Peter Gray, ‘The Gloves Will Have to Come Off: A Reappraisal of the Legitimacy of the RAF Bomber Offensive Against Germany’, Air Power Journal, vol. 13, no. 3, 2010.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

The argument advanced in Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, New York, Basic Books, 2015.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Redding, Bombing Germany, pp. 321–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

Friedrich, The Fire, pp. 93–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

John D. Alexander, ‘Justice in Warfare: The Ethical Debate over British Area Bombing of German Cities in World War II’, PhD diss., Boston University, 2014, p. 15.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

Probert, Bomber Harris, p. 267.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

Overy, The Bombing War, p. 435.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

14. What a Small Nation We Are

Patrick Delaforce, The Battle of the Bulge: Hitler’s Final Gamble, London, Longman, 2006, p. 73. For the Battle of the Bulge, in addition to Delaforce see Antony Beevor, Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge, New York, Viking, 2015.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 336.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Beevor, Ardennes 1944, p. 173.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

E. D. Smith, Victory of a Sort: The British in Greece, 1941–46, London, Robert Hale, 1988, pp. 188–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

William Jackson et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 6, part 3: Victory in the Mediterranean: November 1944 to May 1945, London, HMSO, 1988, pp. 75–6; Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20, pp. 2100–101 (5 December 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Jackson et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 6, part 3, pp. 98–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 416 (8 December 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20, p. 2152 (8 December 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Loukianos Hassiotis, ‘British Public Opinion and Military Intervention in Greece, December 1944–January 1945: Stories from Mass-Observation’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 50, no. 2, 2015, p. 302.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Martin Kitchen, British Policy Towards the Soviet Union During the Second World War, London, Palgrave, 1986, p. 272. The obvious comparison is with Eastern Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Alan J. Foster, ‘The Politicians, Public Opinion and the Press: The Storm over British Military Intervention in Greece in December 1944’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 19, no. 3, 1984, p. 484.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Hassiotis, ‘British Public Opinion and Military Intervention in Greece’, p. 310.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953, London, Yale University Press, 2007, p. 190.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1991, pp. 98–9; Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, p. 108.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Kimball, ed., Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence, vol. 2: Alliance Forged, November 1942–February 1944, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984, p. 767 (29 February 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill, New York, W. W. Norton, 2021, p. 288.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

In April 1943 the Germans had revealed the mass graves of thousands of Polish officers and NCOs murdered by the NKVD at Katyn Wood near Smolensk during the Soviet occupation three years earlier. The British and American governments had grudgingly accepted the implausible Soviet explanation that the Germans were to blame for the massacre in the name of Allied comity. The London Poles had not.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Robin Edmonds, ‘Churchill and Stalin’, in Robert Blake et al., eds., Churchill, New York, W. W. Norton, 1993, p. 319.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, p. 81; Hastings, Winston’s War, p. 83.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 458.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

David H. Close, The Greek Civil War, London, Routledge, 1995, p. 64.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20, p. 2037 (28 November 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Jackson et al., The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 6, part 3, pp. 75–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

IWM D 4709 80/5/1, Harry Wilson.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Close, The Greek Civil War, p. 88; Panagiotis Delis, ‘The British Intervention in Greece: The Battle of Athens, December 1944’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2017, p. 221.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20, pp. 2194–5 (11 December 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 20, p. 2336 (24 December 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

Including an electrically heated toilet seat which the main passenger found wanting. Hastings, Winston’s War, p. 431.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 540 (26 December 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

He did not enjoy it for long. George II died in Athens on 1 April 1947, barely six months after returning to Greece. Damaskinos died in 1949. The Greek monarchy was finally abolished in 1973.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

HC Deb 18 January 1945, vol. 407, col. 408.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 553 (18 January 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Hassiotis, ‘British Public Opinion and Military Intervention in Greece’.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Beevor, Ardennes 1944, p. 366.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Caddick-Adams, Monty and Rommel, p. 449.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Hastings, Winston’s War, p. 425.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Hastings, Winston’s War, pp. 426–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Economist, 30 December 1944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Hastings, Winston’s War, p. 414; Foster, ‘The Politicians, Public Opinion and the Press’, p. 483.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Dill was buried with elaborate ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery and later he would be honoured with an equestrian statue – a unique distinction for a non-American national.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine, p. 279.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, p. 74.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, pp. 482–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, p. 103.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Alan Dobson, US Wartime Aid to Britain 1940–1946, London, Routledge, 1986; George C. Herring Jr, ‘The United States and British Bankruptcy, 1944–1945: Responsibilities Deferred’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 2, 1971.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Dobson, US Wartime Aid to Britain, p. 211.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Colville, The Fringes of Power, pp. 513–14 (12–13 September 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Roberts, Masters and Commanders, pp. 549–50.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Hastings, Winston’s War, p. 414.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

John Charmley, ‘Churchill and the American Alliance’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 11, no. 1, 2001, p. 368.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 463.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Martin Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21: The Shadow of Victory, January–July 1945, Hillsdale, MI, Hillsdale College Press, 2018, pp. 500–501 (19 February 1945); Pimlott, ed., The Second World War Diaries of Hugh Dalton, p. 835 (23 February 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 844.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Hastings, Winston’s War, p. 417.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 345.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

For VERITABLE see Buckley, Monty’s Men, pp. 270–80.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Overy, Blood and Ruins, p. 344.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Buckley, Monty’s Men, p. 272.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Buckley, Monty’s Men, p. 279.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

For PLUNDER and VARSITY see Buckley, Monty’s Men, pp. 281–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

By Air to Battle: The Official Account of the British First and Sixth Airborne Divisions, London, HMSO, 1945, p.143.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 673 (22 March 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 577 (24 March 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Danchev and Daniel Todman, eds., War Diaries, p. 678 (26 March 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21, p. 934 (12 April 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 447 (13 April 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21, p. 998 (17 April 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 871.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

For the spring 1945 campaign in Italy see Porch, The Path to Victory, pp. 640–50.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

This was no longer Kesselring; after being injured in a traffic accident in Italy in October 1944 he had been summoned back to Germany. After his recovery he served as commander-in-chief on the Rhine for a few weeks before the surrender.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21, p. 1241 (1 May 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

File Report 2263, ‘Victory in Europe,’ May 1945, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, 1945–1951, London, Walker, 2008, p. 6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 457 (8 May 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21, p. 1326 (8 May 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

15. The Thought of Him Was Like Home and Safety

George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, New York, Vintage, 1992, p. 34.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Martin Gilbert, The Day the War Ended: May 8, 1945 – Victory in Europe, New York, Henry Holt, 1995, pp. 311–14.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Gilbert et al., eds., The Churchill Documents, vol. 21, p. 1326 (8 May 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, p. 520.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Gallup, ed., The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, p. 57 (March 1942).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

This section of the speech was omitted from the newsreel version shown at cinemas, probably because of the editors’ awareness that it would not be universally popular. Toye, The Roar of the Lion, p. 149.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

IWM D 4709 80/5/1, Harry Wilson, 21 September 1944.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, p. 32.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Allport, Browned Off and Bloody-Minded, pp. 175–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

The Americans were a brigade-sized force, trained on Chindit lines, officially called the 5307th Composite Unit and for propaganda purposes labelled ‘Merrill’s Marauders’. Their depiction as the sole white Allied participants in the campaign in the 1945 Erroll Flynn movie Objective, Burma! proved so inflammatory to Anglo–American relations that it had to be withdrawn from release in the UK.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Royle, Orde Wingate, p. 289; McLynn, The Burma Campaign, p. 267.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

For THURSDAY see Allen, Burma, pp. 324–85; Lyman, A War of Empires, pp. 400–417.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Royle, Orde Wingate, p. 311.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

In Philip Warner, Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier, London, Cassell, 2001, p. 309.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Wilson, Churchill on the Far East in the Second World War, pp. 125–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

McLynn, The Burma Campaign, p. 156.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

McLynn, The Burma Campaign, p. 89.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Royle, Orde Wingate, p. 318. ‘We are all Chindits now’, Mountbatten added, but very much as a consolatory afterthought.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Sykes, Orde Wingate, p. 511.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Peaty, ‘British Army Manpower’, pp. 131–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Lyman, A War of Empires, pp. 390–91.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War, p. 357.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

For Slim see Duncan Anderson, ‘Slim’, in Keegan, ed., Churchill’s Generals.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, p. 36.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Wilson, Churchill on the Far East in the Second World War, p. 132; Reynolds, In Command of History, pp. 448–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Anderson, ‘Slim’, p. 300.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

For the 1944 Arakan campaign see Allen, Burma, pp. 170–90; Lyman, A War of Empires, pp. 292–311.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

McLynn, The Burma Campaign, p. 255.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 383.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

For the Imphal-Kohima campaign see Allen, Burma, pp. 191–315; Callahan, Triumph at Imphal-Kohima; Lyman, A War of Empires, pp. 322–98.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

McLynn, The Burma Campaign, p. 318.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

Lyman, A War of Empires, p. 270.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Mutaguchi himself was sacked in August 1944 and spent the remainder of the war in retirement in Tokyo.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 379.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Allen, Burma, p. 638.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Lyman, A War of Empires, p. 254.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Bell, Churchill and Sea Power, p. 292.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Bell, Churchill and Sea Power, pp. 298, 300.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Bell, Churchill and Sea Power, p. 296.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

S. Woodburn Kirby et al., The War Against Japan, vol. 4: The Reconquest of Burma, London, HMSO, 1965, p. 13.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

For the EXTENDED CAPITAL campaign see Allen, Burma, pp. 386–488; Lyman, A War of Empires, pp. 465–82.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, p. 156.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, p. 159.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, pp. 437–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Allen, Burma, p. 522.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

The Times (London), 4 May 1945, p. 4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Allen, Burma, p. 638.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Daniel P. Marston, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Indian Army in the Burma Campaign, London, Praeger, 2003.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

The Indian divisions included some battalions of British Army troops but the number of these was shrinking by 1945.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Marston, Phoenix from the Ashes, pp. 169–70; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 381.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Viscount Slim, Defeat into Victory, London, Cassell, 1956, p. 447.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

McLynn, The Burma Campaign, p. 438.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here, pp. 35–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Robert Tombs, The English and Their History, London, Vintage, 2016, p. 813. The next occasion would be the Falkland Islands War in 1982.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

For the BPF see Arthur Marder et al., Old Friends New Enemies, vol. 2: The Pacific War 1942–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 404–50; Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Allies Against the Rising Sun: The United States, the British Nations, and the Defeat of Imperial Japan, Lawrence, KS, University of Kansas Press, 2009, pp. 193–216. After the Okinawa operation in late May 1945 the BPF would be attached instead to Admiral William Halsey’s US Third Fleet and redesignated Task Force 37.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

HMS Indefatigable, HMS Indomitable, HMS Victorious and HMS Illustrious; a fifth carrier, HMS Formidable, would join in April.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Marder et al., Old Friends New Enemies, p. 364.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Marder et al., Old Friends New Enemies, p. 430.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Marder et al., Old Friends New Enemies, p. 362.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

Armoured Aircraft Carriers in World War II, https://www.armouredcarriers.com/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Marder et al., Old Friends New Enemies, pp. 449–50.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Allport, Britain at Bay, pp. 466–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Graham Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race, New York, Basic Books, 2013, pp. 194–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb, p. 211.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945, London, Macmillan, 1964, p. 162.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

Barton Bernstein, ‘The Uneasy Alliance: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Atomic Bomb, 1940–1945’, The Western Political Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2, 1976, p. 208.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Leslie R. Groves, Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, Boston, MA, Da Capo, 1983, p. 408.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Reynolds, In Command of History, p. 483.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

16. To Beat the System

The Times (London), 15 August 1945.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

For V-J Day see Kynaston, Austerity Britain, pp. 86–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 885.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 772 (25 July 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Wing, ed., Our Longest Days, p. 261 (26 July 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

M-O File Report 2268, ‘A Report on the General Election June–July 1945’, October 1945, p. 125.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

Henry Pelling, ‘The 1945 General Election Reconsidered’, The Historical Journal, vol. 23, no. 2, 1980, p. 408.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

R. B. McCallum et al., The British General Election of 1945, London, Routledge, 1964, pp. 240–41.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

Dilks, ed., The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, p. 759 (5 July 1945); Bew, Citizen Clem, p. 344.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Richard Sibley, ‘Essay in Labour Statistics: The Swing to Labour During the Second World War, When and Why?’, Labour History Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 1990, p. 26.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Richardson Dougall, ed., Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference), 1945, vol. 2, Washington DC, US Government Printing Office, 1960, p. 45 (17 July 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

McCallum et al., The British General Election of 1945, p. 261.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Birmingham had an extra parliamentary seat added at the 1945 election, raising its number from twelve to thirteen.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

Both men returned to the Commons in November by winning by-elections, Bracken in Bournemouth, Macmillan in Bromley.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

John Swift, ‘Randolph Churchill and the General Election in Preston, 1945: Bucking the Trend’, Northern History, vol. 48, no. 1, 2011.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

M-O File Report 2268, pp. 126–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Jefferys, ed., Labour and the Wartime Coalition, pp. 225–6 (19 and 26 July 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

Pugh, Speak for Britain!, p. 277.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

Harvey, ed., The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey, p. 384 (28 July 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 611.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

Pelling, ‘The 1945 General Election Reconsidered’, p. 408.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

Marr, The History of Modern Britain, p. 44.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Brooke, Labour’s War, p. 304; Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 358; Pugh, Speak for Britain!, p. 277.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Kit Kowol, Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024, p. 226; Kenneth Harris, Attlee, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982, p. 250. It was not that Morrison thought Labour would win the snap election – on the contrary, he thought it would lose. But that would give the ambitious home secretary an opportunity to unseat Attlee as party leader.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 359; Pugh, Speak for Britain!, p. 277; Brooke, Labour’s War, pp. 317–18. Strictly speaking, the May 1945 caretaker ministry was a re-emergence of Baldwin and Chamberlain’s old ‘National Government’ which had been subsumed within the wartime coalition five years earlier. Though overwhelmingly Conservative, it included a small number of ‘Liberal National’ MPs, as well as nominal independents like Sir John Anderson, who remained in place as chancellor of the exchequer.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Marr, The History of Modern Britain, p. 73.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

Marr, The History of Modern Britain, p. 40.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

McCallum et al., The British General Election of 1945. Voting in twenty-three seats in north-west England and Scotland was also delayed by a few days because 5 July fell within the traditional local ‘wakes’ or holiday period.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 362.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

Richard Toye, ‘Winston Churchill’s “Crazy Broadcast”: Party, Nation, and the 1945 Gestapo Speech’, The Journal of British Studies, vol. 49, no. 3, 2010, p. 676.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Toye, ‘Winston Churchill’s “Crazy Broadcast” ’, pp. 676–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

M-O File Report 2268, p. 12.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Psephologists R. B. McCallum and Alison Readman later estimated the ‘waste caused by the abnormality of the times’ at about 6 per cent of the national vote, which, if they were right, made the turnout in 1945 fairly average for a mid-century British election. McCallum et al., The British General Election of 1945, p. 258.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

See James Hinton, ‘1945 and the Apathy School’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 43, 1997.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 362.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

McCallum et al., The British General Election of 1945, p. 181.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Calder, The People’s War, p. 577.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

M-O File Report 2268 p. 93. Gallup’s national polling suggested the same concerns. In May 1945 41 per cent of those sampled thought housing would be the most important issue in the upcoming election, with the next most important issue full employment (15 per cent). Social security was rated 7 per cent; health not even mentioned. Gallup, ed., The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, p. 100 (May 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Paul Addison, ‘The Impact of the Second World War’, in Paul Addison et al., eds., A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939–2000, London, Blackwell, 2005, p. 14.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Steven Fielding et al., England Arise!: The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 60.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Pelling, ‘The 1945 General Election Reconsidered’, p. 413.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, p. 80.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Calder, The People’s War, p. 579.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 360.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

John Ramsden, ‘Winston Churchill and the Leadership of the Conservative Party, 1940–51’, Contemporary Record, vol. 9, no. 1, 1995.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 886.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 885.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6, p. 693.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Fielding et al., England Arise!, pp. 66–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

Penelope Summerfield, ‘Education and Politics in the British Armed Forces in the Second World War’, International Review of Social History, vol. 25, no. 2, 1981, p. 133; S. P. MacKenzie, Politics and Military Morale: Current Affairs and Citizenship Education in the British Army, 1914–1950, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, pp. 69–73; Andrew Thorpe, Parties at War: Political Organization in Second World War Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 274.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

Fielding et al., England Arise!, pp. 66–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God, New York, Grove, 1987, pp. 267–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Jeremy A. Crang, ‘Politics on Parade: Army Education and the 1945 General Election’, History, vol. 81, no. 262, 1996, pp. 221–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Daily Herald, 27 July 1945.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Margaret Cole, The General Election of 1945 and After, London, Faber, 1945, p. 17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Steven Fielding, ‘What Did “The People” Want?: The Meaning of the 1945 General Election’, The Historical Journal, vol. 35, no. 3, 1992, p. 625.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010, London, John Murray, 2014, pp. 147–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

William Harrington et al., The 1945 Revolution, London, Davis-Poynter, 1978, pp. 20–21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

See e.g. Corelli Barnett, ‘The Wartime Roots of Britain’s Postwar Industrial Decline’, Contemporary Record, vol. 1, no. 2, 1987.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Figures in McCallum et al., The British General Election of 1945. Note that the number of ballots cast did not precisely coincide with the number of electors in 1945. Although most constituencies in the UK were now single-member and most ballots cast on a straightforward one-person, one-vote principle, there were a few vestigial anomalies: the business premises vote, the university constituencies, and a small number of still-surviving double-member constituencies. All these would shortly be abolished.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

The Liberal Party had even more reason to be frustrated with the distortions of first-past-the-post. They actually received over 800,000 more votes than they had got in 1935 and yet they were rewarded with a net loss of nine MPs.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

McCallum et al., The British General Election of 1945, p. 252. The ‘anti-socialist’ bloc here includes Churchill’s Conservative-dominated coalition, the Liberal Party, the Irish Nationalists and other independent candidates clearly hostile to Labour. The Welsh nationalists are not included in either camp. Had the Liberals put up more candidates in 1945, in all likelihood ‘anti-socialist’ votes would have slightly outnumbered ‘pro-socialist.’

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

McCallum et al., The British General Election of 1945, p. 249.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

Pugh, Speak for Britain!, p. 282.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

M-O File Report 2268, p. 95.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Gallup, ed., The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, p. 107 (March 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Phil Tinline, The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares, London, Hurst, 2022, p. 127. For a challenge to conventional views about the ‘Hungry Thirties’ myth see David Cowan, Politics of the Past: Inter-war Memories and the Making of British Popular Politics, 1939–2009, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2024.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Mark Franklin et al., ‘The Undoing of Winston Churchill: Mobilization and Conversion in the 1945 Realignment of British Voters’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 25, no. 4, 1995, p. 445.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

Sibley, ‘Essay in Labour Statistics’, p. 28.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

M-O File Report 2282, ‘Post Mortem on Voting in the Election’, September 1945, p. 3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, p. 64.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Imperial War Museum Department of Printed Books, J. H. A. Sparrow, Tour of India and South East Asia Command, 28th June 1945–15th October 1945, 02(41).13 [South East Asia Command]/6, p. 6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

Johnes, Wales Since 1939, p. 10.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Sibley, ‘Essay in Labour Statistics’, p. 29.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

M-O File Report 2268, p. 107.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Fielding, ‘What Did “The People” Want?’, p. 636; Sibley, ‘Essay in Labour Statistics’, p. 23; Fielding et al., England Arise!, p. 64; Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 370.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 366, pp. 370–71.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Field, Blood, Sweat, and Toil, p. 343.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, p. 67.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

Sibley, ‘Essay in Labour Statistics’, pp. 24–6. Common Wealth briefly enjoyed a membership of over 15,000 people. But first-past-the-post proved an insuperable barrier to its ambitions for serious parliamentary representation and it only won a single seat in 1945 (Chelmsford again, uncontested by Labour) and was wound up soon afterwards. The wartime West Derbyshire by-election was won by a candidate of the radical and pacifist Independent Labour Party (ILP) unaffiliated with Attlee’s party.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81

Gallup, ed., The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, p. 111 (June 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82

HC Deb 2 April 1946, vol. 421, col. 1213. His exact wording has often been disputed.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83

Fielding, ‘What Did “The People” Want?’, p 637. The East Lewisham constituency was abolished in the 1950 election so whether Morrison could have held it in the new political mood was never tested.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 84

Ramsden, The Age of Churchill and Eden, p. 66.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 85

The extent to which the Conservatives really tacked left in the 1950s has been disputed: see John Ramsden, ‘ “A Party for Owners or a Party for Earners?” How Far Did the British Conservative Party Really Change after 1945?’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 37, no. 1, 1987, pp. 49–63; Richard Toye, ‘From “Consensus” to “Common Ground”: The Rhetoric of the Postwar Settlement and Its Collapse’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 48, no. 1, 2012.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 86

On Labour’s inability to implement planning see Stephen Brooke, ‘Problems of “Socialist Planning”: Evan Durbin and the Labour Government of 1945’, The Historical Journal, vol. 34, no. 3, 1991; J. D. Tomlinson, ‘The Iron Quadrilateral: Political Obstacles to Economic Reform under the Attlee Government’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 34, no. 1, 1995.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 87

Public expenditure on social services was 9.2 per cent of national income in 1938–9 and 11.7 per cent in 1950–51. ‘Cost of the British Social Services, 1938–1952’, Social Security Bulletin (United States Government), February 1954.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 88

Kynaston, Austerity Britain, p. 169.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 89

Marr, The History of Modern Britain, p. 86.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90

Marr, The History of Modern Britain, p. 129.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91

Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, p. 339. It was this, not the modest increase in welfare as a percentage of GDP, which really distinguished the post-war Labour government from the pre-war Conservative one.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92

For the long-term continuities here see David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 93

Marr, The History of Modern Britain, pp. 94–5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 94

Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 613.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 95

The journalist Anthony Howard later said 1945 marked ‘the greatest restoration of traditional social values since 1660’. Calder, The People’s War, p. 584.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 96

Kowol, Blue Jerusalem, p. 252; Henry Pelling, Britain and the Second World War, London, Collins, 1970, p. 326. Labour trimmed the legislative delaying powers of the House of Lords in 1949 from two years to one but otherwise made no serious attempt to restrict the prerogatives of hereditary authority or alter the British constitution.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 97

Debutantes were presented to the monarch until 1958. The last sentence of capital punishment was delivered in 1965, though it was never carried out. The final execution by hanging had taken place one year earlier.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 98

O. Harvey, The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, 1937–1940, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1971, p. 222.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 99

M-O File Report 599, ‘Expectations of Social Change Brought About by War’, March 1941.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 100

Calder, The People’s War, p. 18, pp. 583–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 101

M-O File Report 1364, ‘Reconstruction Report’, July 1942, p. 8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 102

Harris, ‘Great Britain: The People’s War?’, p. 249.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 103

Rodney Lowe, ‘The Second World War, Consensus, and the Foundation of the Welfare State’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 1, no. 2, 1990, pp. 177–8. Lowe suggests that the real advocates for ‘People’s War’ state activism and social reconstruction formed at most 5–20 per cent of the public – a minority, but an especially vocal, articulate and well-connected minority, which therefore impressed itself more thoroughly in the historiography of the war than its numbers ever warranted.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 104

Jose Harris, ‘Did British Workers Want the Welfare State? G. D. H. Cole’s Survey of 1942’, in Jay Winter, ed., The Working Class in Modern British History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 208–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 105

David Edgerton, ‘A Cliché to Be Avoided Like the Plague: The “People’s War” in the History and Historiography of the British Second World War’, The English Historical Review, vol. 138, no. 594–5, 2023.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 106

Even at the July 1945 election some of the brighter elements in the Conservative Party had already realised this. Ralph Assheton persuaded Churchill to campaign on the theme of individual freedom, meaning most of all a reduction in taxation and the repeal of wartime controls and regulations. Despite being drafted at short notice, this message seems to have achieved some impressive purchase. In the final week or two before the vote, Labour’s national lead fell to its lowest level since 1943. Assheton’s rhetoric, in other words, was getting through to at least some voters. In East Fulham, electors leaning towards the Conservatives had spoken of their dislike of controls and confiscations – ‘depriving people of property’, a hatred of ‘filling in forms’, and so on (M-O File Report 2268, p. 99). Churchill’s reference to a Labour ‘Gestapo’ may merely have been a slur too far.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 107

17. ‘… Only in the End to Achieve Nothing’

Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, London, HarperCollins, 2023, p. 168 (9 August 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

Tolkien had no way of knowing this, but they were destined for Essen, where they would kill over 660 people that night and destroy 600 buildings. It was the largest raid on the Ruhr city in the war. Middlebrook and Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries, p. 606.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 138 (23 October 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 167 (29 May 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 77 (9 June 1941), p. 133 (23–25 September 1944).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, pp. 160–61 (30 January 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

‘The prospect of victory [over Sauron], the best possible outcome the forces of Good can hope for, is melancholic…the destruction of the great Evil will bring about the fading away of good things.’ Patrice Hannon, ‘The Lord of the Rings as Elegy’, Mythlore, vol. 24, no. 2, 2004, pp. 36–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 340 (January–February 1956).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Boston, MA, Houghton Mifflin, 1994, Foreword to second edition, pp. 11–12.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

Janet Brennan Croft, War and the Works of J. R. R. Tolkien, London, Praeger, 2004, p. 58.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, London, Houghton Mifflin, 2001, p. 164.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

Croft, War and the Works, pp. 57–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

Claire Langhamer, ‘Mass Observing the Atom Bomb: The Emotional Politics of August 1945’, Contemporary British History, vol. 33, no. 2, 2019, p. 212.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

M-O File Report 2277, ‘The Atom Bomb’, August 1945, pp. 1–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

M-O File Report 2277, p. 5; the Manchester Guardian sharpened the comparison between recent events in Germany and Japan by pointing out that the RAF had performed one and a half Hiroshima bomb’s worth of destruction on Cologne during the war. Gardiner, Wartime, p. 584.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

M-O File Report 2277, p. 5.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

Langhamer, ‘Mass Observing the Atom Bomb’, p. 219.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

For Bergen-Belsen see Ben Shephard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945, London, Pimlico, 2006.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

‘Richard Dimbleby Describes Belsen’, BBC, 3 June 2024, https://www.bbc.com/videos/c87z7p0j3g5o

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

Shephard, After Daybreak, pp. 98–100.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

M-O File Report 2248, ‘German Atrocities’, May 1945, p. 1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

HC Deb 17 December 1942, vol. 385, col. 2083.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945, London, Cassell, 1999, pp. 316–17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

Todman, Britain’s War: A New World, p. 405; even after hearing of Belsen he was capable of writing in his diary that ‘although I loathe antisemitism, I do dislike Jews’. Nicolson, ed., The Diaries and Letters of Harold Nicolson, p. 469 (13 June 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

‘How the First Report from Belsen Concentration Camp Shocked the World’, BBC, 22 October 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-63317358.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

The centrality of the Shoah to the Nazi genocidal project in wartime Europe would not be clearly appreciated in Britain until the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

M-O File Report 2248, pp. 4–5, p. 11.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

M-O File Report 2248, pp. 19, 21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

M-O File Report 2278B, ‘Feelings About the Peace’, August 1945, p. 2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

M-O File Report 2268, pp. 1–2.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

M-O File Report 2268, p. 3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 31

M-O File Report 2268. p. 11.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 32

Peter Howlett, ‘The Wartime Economy, 1939–1945’, in Roderick Floud et al., eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 3, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 24.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 33

White, Battle of London, pp. 329, 333.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 34

A. J. P. Taylor, England 1914–1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 598.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 35

Marr, The History of Modern Britain, p. 53.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 36

Geoffrey Warner, ‘The Impact of the Second World War upon British Foreign Policy’, in Brian Brivati et al., eds., What Difference Did the War Make?, London, Cassell, 1995, p. 100.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 37

Taylor, England 1914–1945, p. 598; Alan S. Milward, The Economic Effects of the Two World Wars on Britain, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1970, p. 68.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 38

Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, p. 262.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 39

Taylor, England 1914–1945, pp. 598–9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 40

Milward, The Economic Effects of the Two World Wars, pp. 69–71.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 41

Elizabeth Johnson et al., eds., The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 24, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 398–411 (13 August 1945).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 42

Bew, Citizen Clem, p. 372. Truman later claimed that he had been poorly advised by the Treasury and State Departments.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 43

Richard Toye, ‘Churchill and Britain’s “Financial Dunkirk” ’, Twentieth Century British History, vol. 15, no. 4, 2004, p. 334.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 44

Allport, Demobbed, pp. 41–7.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 45

Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain, p. 45.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46

File Report 2483, ‘Fuel Crisis’, May 1947.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47

C. C. Newton, ‘The Sterling Crisis of 1947 and the British Response to the Marshall Plan’, The Economic History Review, vol. 37, no. 3, 1984, pp. 397–8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48

Marr, The History of Modern Britain, p. 35.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 49

The Dutch left in 1949.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 50

John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World, London, Red Globe Press, 1998, pp. 147–50.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 51

David Cannadine, In Churchill’s Shadow: Confronting the Past in Modern Britain, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 36.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 52

John Charmley, ‘Churchill’s Roosevelt’, in Ann Lane et al., eds., The Rise and Fall of the Grand Alliance, 1941–45, London, Palgrave, 1995, p. 97.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 53

Warner, ‘The Impact of the Second World War’, p. 101.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 54

Weight, Patriots, pp. 452–3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55

Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny, p. 959.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56

Howlett, ‘The Wartime Economy’, p. 25.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57

Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, p. 283.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58

Warner, ‘The Impact of the Second World War’, p. 103. Britain was not handicapped by excessive welfare spending on its post-war ‘New Jerusalem’, pace the arguments of Correlli Barnett. See Jose Harris, ‘Enterprise and Welfare States: A Comparative Perspective’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 40, no. 1, 1990, p. 180. A stronger case could be made that the UK’s high post-war defence spending and maintenance until 1968 of a worldwide strategic base network was a factor in its relative decline.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59

The final Lend-Lease settlement had effectively written off about $20 billion of outstanding debt owed by the UK to the United States. See Howlett, ‘The Wartime Economy’, p. 17.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 60

Peter Hitchens, The Phoney Victory: The World War II Illusion, London, I. B. Tauris, 2018, p. 222.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 61

Paul Kennedy asks the useful question ‘Why Did the British Empire Last So Long?’ in Paul M. Kennedy, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945: Eight Studies, London, Fontana, 1984, pp. 199–218.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 62

Marr, The History of Modern Britain, p. 86.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 63

Marcelo de Paiva Abreu, ‘Britain as a Debtor: Indian Sterling Balances, 1940–53’, Economic History Review, vol. 70, no. 2, 2017.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 64

The American experience of being Top Nation in the eighty years since the war has hardly been an uninterruptedly golden advertisement for the advantages of that role.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 65

M-O File Report 2228, ‘Special Pre-Peace News Questionnaire’, April 1945, pp. 23–4.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66

Churchill had been made a Knight Companion of the Garter in 1953.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67

Weight, Patriots, pp. 453–6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68

Tombs, The English and their History, p. 755. For British memory of the war see Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War, New York, Pearson Longman, 2004; Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory, London, Routledge, 2000.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69

John Ramsden, ‘Refocusing “The People’s War”: British War Films of the 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 33, no. 1, 1998.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70

The only other example is the much less well-known Appointment in London (1953), which was a commercial failure. During the war itself a number of films including Target for Tonight (1941) and One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942) chronicled the offensive, though mainly in the period before the switch from precision to area bombing.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 71

The film skirts lightly over the deaths of thousands of Ruhr workers, many of them foreign slave labourers, in the flooding caused by the dams’ destruction.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 72

Wallis was a prickly character who had stored up a sizeable collection of grudges about his alleged mistreatment by the state during the war. John Ramsden, The Dam Busters: A British Film Guide, London, I. B. Tauris, 2002, pp. 60–62.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 73

O’Brien, ‘The Myth of the Plucky Brit’.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 74

Lucy Noakes, Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020, p. 170.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 75

Seumas Spark, ‘The Treatment of the British Military War Dead of the Second World War’, PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2009.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 76

Renamed the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) in 1960.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 77

Bayeux War Cemetery, CWGC https://www.cwgc.org/visit-us/find-cemeteries-memorials/cemetery-details/2033300/bayeux-war-cemetery/.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 78

Manchester Guardian, 21 November 1940.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 79

George Wilson, letter to his wife, International Bomber Command Centre Digital Archive, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/1227. My thanks to Dan Ellin for locating this record.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 80

List of Illustrations

1 President Franklin D. Roosevelt with Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the deck of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, 1941 (Bettmann/Getty Images)

2 General Arthur Percival negotiates the surrender of Singapore Island (ullstein bild Dtl./Getty Images)

3 Japanese tanks crossing a Burmese stream via a makeshift bridge, 1942 (Bettmann/Getty Images)

4 Sir Miles Lampson (left), the British High Commissioner in Egypt, with Mostafa Nahas, leader of the Wafd Party (Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

5 General Claude Auchinleck (Bettmann/Getty Images)

6 General Erwin Rommel, commander of the Deutsches Afrikakorps (Bettmann/Getty Images)

7 Churchill and Stalin at their first face-to-face meeting in Moscow, 1942 (Bettmann/Getty Images)

8 The British War Cabinet, 1941 (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

9 A ruined street near the Grand Harbour, Malta (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

10 General Bernard Montgomery watches from the turret of his personal command tank (IWM/Getty Images)

11 One of Rommel’s Panzer crews surrender to an advancing British soldier, 1942 (Fotosearch/Getty Images)

12 Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke (IWM/Getty Images)

13 Sir William Beveridge, economist and social reformer (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

14 Hut 6, Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 1943 (Bletchley Park Trust/SSPL/Getty Images)

15 Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, with senior staff officers (Leonard McCombe/Picture Post/Getty Images)

16 The seven air crew of a four-engine Avro Lancaster disembark after a successful ‘op’ in 1943 (Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

17 British soldiers crossing the rubble of Catania, Sicily, 1943 (ClassicStock/Getty Images)

18 Orde Wingate (Bettmann/Getty Images)

19 A starving family from the Bengali countryside arrived in Calcutta (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

20 Sir Stafford Cripps (left) with Indian nationalist leader Mahatma Gandhi (Bettmann/Getty Images)

21 American oil tanker SS Pennsylvania Sun burns after being struck by U-Boat torpedoes in the Gulf of Mexico, 1942 (PhotoQuest Archive/Getty Images)

22 Members of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) 1941 (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

23 Tanks of British 11th Armoured Division advance towards the Dutch town of Gemert, 1944 (IWM/Getty Images)

24 Wreckage in the wake of a V-1 missile attack, Clerkenwell, London, 1944 (Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

25 A statue of justice overlooking the ruins of Dresden, Saxony, 1945 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

26 The American Red Cross club known as ‘Rainbow Corner’ in Piccadilly Circus, London (Kurt Hutton/Picture Post/Getty Images)

27 British paratroopers guard a street in Athens, 1944 (AFP/Getty Images)

28 Clement Attlee celebrates his 1945 General Election victory (Mirrorpix/Getty Images)

29 Celebrations in London on Victory-over-Japan (V-J) Day, 1945 (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

While every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders of illustrations, the author and publishers would be grateful for information about any illustrations where they have been unable to trace them, and would be glad to make amendments in further editions.

Acknowledgements

Advance Britannia is the culmination not merely of a ten-year writing project, but, in a sense, of a fifty-year obsession about the Second World War and Britain’s unique role in it. Many of the opinions represented in this volume owe their ultimate origin to some or other dim and distant past conversation, enquiry, chat, studied exchange, heated argument, or irreverent line of banter conducted in person or online. While I can never properly acknowledge all those whose ideas contributed to the making of this book, the following people deserve special mention – whether it is because they generously took the time to read and comment on some of the draft chapters, they provided assistance in obtaining primary source documentation, they offered a forum for discussion, or simply because they made me smile when I badly needed to. My thanks go to Lucy Betteridge-Dyson, Andreas Biermann, Jonathan Boff, Rachel Chin, David Edgerton, Dan Ellin, Brian Farrell, Colin Greenwood, Christopher Guyver, Charlie Hall, Brett Holman, Peter Jackson, James Jeffries, James Kightly, Ian Kikuchi, Jane Gulliford Lowes, Rachel Mann, Stephen Moore, Andrew Muldoon, Phillips P. O’Brien, Patrick Porter, Gary Sheffield, Chris Smith, Phil Tinline, Dan Todman, George Wilton, and Paul Woodadge. It goes without saying that any remaining errors of fact contained in Advance Britannia are entirely the responsibility of one or more of these people and not me (jk).

My London friends D’Maris Coffman and Tom and Moira Deveson have been exceedingly generous over the years in providing a place to stay while in the British capital as well as great conversation (and a non-stop flow of hot sweet tea) to boot.

For fourteen years, the History Department in the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Syracuse University has been my day job and has provided the practical and intellectual foundation for the writing of this book. I need to express special thanks to Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber for funding the professorial chair which bears their name and which I have been honoured to hold for the past three years. Susan Branson, Christina Cleason, Michael Ebner, Samantha Herrick, Norman Kutcher, Junko Takeda, Brian Taylor and John Western have been good colleagues and friends. My undergraduate and graduate students are ever-reliable sources of inspiration, exasperation and optimism about the future, and usually in equal measure. It would be remiss of me not to include here my gratitude to the Interlibrary Loan department at Syracuse University Library, which made the last five years infinitely easier to navigate.

I have been fortunate indeed to have such professional, patient and encouraging publishers as Profile Books in London and Alfred A. Knopf in New York. My special thanks to Nick Humphrey, Todd Portnowitz, Cecily Gayford, Keith Goldsmith, Penny Daniel, Nick de Somogyi and Linden Lawson. Wendy Strothman at Aevitas Creative has ably looked after my business affairs in North America. My London agent Andrew Gordon at David Higham Associates was the first person to whom I pitched the idea of what was to become Britain at Bay and Advance Britannia back in 2016, and he has been a fount of sound advice and often-necessary encouragement ever since. It is no exaggeration to say that without him I doubt either book would ever have been completed.

My parents were born during the Second World War and my grandparents lived through it as adults. Most of those who remembered it and who shared those memories with me when I was a child are gone now but what they had to say left an indelible mark on me and, by extension, this book, all the same. My beloved sisters Carolyn and Susan remember them too. My wife, Barbara, has been my constant and true companion, confidante and guiding spirit in the great adventure of our lives, the fulcrum of which has been the raising of our children, Thomas, Grayson and Lizzie. What do I owe her? That’s easy: everything.

Index

The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of the book. Each link will take you to the beginning of the corresponding print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

A. V. Roe, 363

Aachen, Rhineland, 178

Abadan, Iran, 25, 46

Abdine Palace incident (1942), 60–61

Aberdeen, Scotland, 283

abortion, 458

Abyssinia see Ethiopia

Acland, Richard, 456

Adastral House, London, 330

Addu Atoll, Maldives, 47

Aden, 183

Admiral Graf Spee, 27, 45

Admiral Scheer 27

Africa Star, 120

African Americans, 345–6

agriculture, 275–81, 289–90

Aid Britain Crusade, 343

Air Crew Europe Star, 360

air gap, 155, 165, 168–9, 171, 174

Air Ministry, 179, 181, 185–6, 188, 191, 201, 203, 205, 330, 356, 363, 373

Air War Plans Division, 189

air-raid shelters, 271

air-to-surface vessel (ASV) radar, 169

Airborne Army, 1st Allied, 320

Airborne Division, 82nd US, 317

Airborne Division, 101st US, 317, 337

Airborne Division, 1st British, 317, 320–21

Ajax, HMS, 388

Akers, Wallace, 438

Akyab, Burma, 241

Aldiss, Brian, 409

Aldwych, London, 330

Alexander, Harold, 102–4, 109, 111, 218, 416

- Burma withdrawal (1942), 417; death (1969), 477; Greek Dekemvriana (1944–5), 379–80, 388; Italian campaign (1943), 219–20, 221, 222, 229; North African campaign (1942–3), 102–4, 109, 111, 218; Operation DRAGOON (1944), 314

Alexandria, Egypt, 61, 63, 77, 94

Algeria, 100, 118, 119

Allen, Gordon, 167

Allied International Military Tribunal see Nuremberg Trials; Tokyo Trials

Alliluyeva, Svetlana, 105

Alyn Valley, Flintshire, 272

American Red Cross, 344

Amery, Leo, 16, 239, 248, 255, 257, 259, 261, 264, 442

Among the Dead Cities (Grayling), 367, 371

Anders, Władysław, 293, 297

Anderson, George, 404

Anderson, John, 151, 153, 438

Anderson, Kenneth, 119, 216, 218, 269, 274

Anfa, Morrocco, 208

Anstruther-Gray, Bill, 457

anthrax, 272

anti-submarine warfare (ASW), 163, 171, 173

Antwerp, Belgium, 315, 323, 379, 398

Anzio offensive (1944), 230

Apennine Mountains, 223, 228

Apollo, 11 mission (1969), 333

Arab Revolt (1916–18), 183

Arakan campaign

- First (1942–3), 241–2, 246, 413, 417; Second (1944), 414, 415, 418–19

Arcadia Conference (1941), 96

Archangel, Russia, 97

Ardennes offensive

- 1940 Blitzkrieg, 5–6, 10, 126; 1944 Wacht am Rhein, 379, 389–90, 398

area bombing, 184–207, 354–76, 478

Dresden, 351, 356–7, 361–2, 376; Hamburg, 199–207, 294, 295, 361, 363, 376

Argentan, Normandy, 302, 305, 306, 312

Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 39, 288

Ariete, 72, 82, 86

Ark Royal, HMS 62

Armoured Division, 11th British, 304, 305, 312, 315, 399, 466

Armoured Division, 7th British, 72–3, 81

Armoured Division, 9th British, 325

arms production, 5, 94, 133, 139, 272, 281, 283, 300

Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), 152, 449, 450

Arnhem, Gelderland, 233, 317–23, 344, 400

von Arnim, Hans-Jürgen, 216, 220

Arnold, Henry ‘Hap’ 96, 224, 314

ASDIC sonar system, 171, 173

Assam, India, 52, 54, 240, 243, 409, 415–23

Assheton, Ralph, 449

Athens debate (1944), 381, 389, 444

Athens, Greece, 379–81, 385–9

Atlantic Charter (1941), 17–19

Atlantic Monthly, 238

Atlantic Wall, 303

Atlantis, 27

atomic bombs, 334, 437–9, 463, 465–6, 476

Attlee, Clement, 6, 291, 440–41

- Athens debate (1944), 381; Beveridge Report (1942), 149, 150–53; Bomber Command and, 193, 205, 362, 364; death (1967), 477; general election (1945), 290, 440–57; general election (1951), 457–8; India, relations with, 247, 250, 259; Japanese surrender (1945), 440; Lend-Lease cessation (1945), 469–70; Operation CULVERIN plan (1943–4), 425; Potsdam Conference (1945), 443; Tobruk debate (1942), 89–90, 93; US loan (1946), 470, 471

Attlee, Violet, 440

Auchinleck, Claude, 19, 63–7, 70–78, 79, 84, 101–2, 110, 120–21, 126, 242–3, 431

- Battle of El Alamein, First (1942), 79, 80–83, 88; Battle of Gazala (1942), 70–77, 86, 91, 113, 122; Battle of Mersa Matruh (1942), 77–8, 81, 83, 86; Bengal famine (1943–4), 260–61; Churchill, relationship with, 63–6, 101–2, 112, 241, 243; Indian Army, return to (1943), 242–3, 247, 416; Indian soldiers, views on, 249; Quadrant Conference (1943), 245–6; tropical medicine research, 423

Auftragstaktik, 85

Augsburg, Bavaria, 189

Auschwitz concentration camp, 466

Australia, 25, 27, 33, 34, 43, 66, 121, 128, 362, 472

- Battle of the Java Sea (1942), 45; Bomber Command force, 198; British Pacific Fleet in, 434; Japan invasion plans (1945), 437

Australian Division, 9th, 121

Austria, 314

auxiliary forces, 143

Avondale Park, 404

Avranches, Normandy, 312

Avro Lancasters, 176, 189, 191, 194, 282, 350, 351, 355, 357, 363, 481

Avro Manchesters, 181

AWPD-42 plan, 189

B

B-17 Flying Fortresses, 189

B-25 Mitchells, 427

B-29 Superfortresses, 423, 424, 437

B-Dienst, 172

Baby Blitz (1944) see Operation STEINBOCK

Badoglio, Pietro, 223, 226–7, 231

Baedeker Blitz (1942), 135

Bailey, Douglas, 29, 56

Baker, Stanley, 478

Baku, Azerbaijan, 104

Baldwin, Stanley, 241, 277, 448, 454, 455, 458

Balfour, Harold, 179, 206

Ballard, George, 25

Baltic States, 10, 381

Bamber Bridge, Lancashire, 345

Bangkok, Thailand, 413

Bank of England, 254, 471

Barham, HMS, 62

Barking, London, 332

Barnett, Correlli, 83, 230

Barr, Niall, 73

Barry, Tom, 42

Barton, William, 359

Bastogne, Belgium, 379, 390

Bath, Somerset, 135

Battersea, London, 327

Battle of the Admin Box (1944), 418–19

Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 110–12

Battle of Arnhem (1944), 233, 317–23, 344, 398, 400

Battle of Athens (1944–5), 379–81, 385–9, 444

Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 6–7, 15, 158–75, 214, 276, 286, 288, 297, 403–4

Battle of Berlin

- RAF campaign (1943–4), 293–5, 297, 326, 327, 354, 368; Soviet offensive (1945), 397–8, 401, 430

Battle of Bir Hakeim (1942), 71, 73

Battle of Britain (1940), 6, 7, 11–12, 120, 272, 450

Battle of the Bulge (1944–5), 389–91, 398

Battle of Cape Matapan (1941), 61, 62, 70, 120

Battle of the Caucasus (1942–4), 104

Battle of Crete (1941), 9, 63, 69

Battle of Donbaik (1943), 242

Battle of El Alamein

- First (1942), 79, 80–83, 88; Second (1942), 82, 112–28, 214, 231, 310, 365, 457, 477

Battle of Enfidaville (1943), 218

Battle of Gazala (1942), 70–77, 86, 91, 113, 122

Battle of Guadalcanal (1942–3), 407

Battle of Hong Kong (1941), 16

Battle of Hürtgen Forest (1944), 324

Battle of Imphal (1944), 414–16, 419, 422–3

Battle of Iwo Jima (1945), 324, 424

Battle of the Java Sea (1942), 45–6

Battle of Jitra (1941), 37–8

Battle of Kampar (1941–2), 38

Battle of Kasserine Pass (1943), 217

Battle of Kharkov (1942), 96

Battle of Kohima (1944), 420–23, 427

Battle of Kursk (1943), 296, 297

Battle of Leyte Gulf (1944), 434, 435

Battle of Longstop Hill (1943), 218

Battle of Mandalay (1945), 428–9

Battle of Mareth (1943), 217–18, 221

Battle of Medenine (1943), 217

Battle of Meiktila (1945), 427–8, 432

Battle of Mersa Matruh (1942), 77–8, 81, 83, 86

Battle of Midway (1942), 44, 48, 240, 407

Battle of Monte Cassino (1944), 228, 230, 292–4, 297, 477

Battle of Moscow (1941–2), 88, 96

Battle of Okinawa (1945), 424, 432, 435, 436

Battle of Passchendaele (1917), 98, 182, 192, 283, 399

Battle of Remagen (1945), 400

Battle of Rhodes (1943), 234–5

Battle of the River Plate (1939), 120

Battle of Rostov (1942), 104

Battle of the Ruhr (1943), 176–82, 191, 194–5, 199, 365, 366, 368, 370

Battle of Saipan (1944), 324

Battle of Sittang Bridge (1942), 53, 430

Battle of Slim River (1942), 38, 53

Battle of the Somme (1916), 36, 98, 122, 182, 192, 283, 302

Battle of Stalingrad (1942–3), 123, 134, 204, 296, 365

Battle of Surabaya (1945), 472

Battle of Taranto (1940), 61, 69, 120

Battle of Ypres

- First (1914), 109; Second (1915), 109, 260; Third (1917), 98, 182, 192, 283, 399

Batu Arang colliery, Malaya, 26

Bauhaus, 201

Baum, Vicki, 314

Bay of Bengal, 46, 54, 55, 240, 243, 262

Bay of Biscay, 169

Bayeux, Normandy, 479

Bayley, Victor, 28

Beauchamp, Tony, 238

Beaverbrook, William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron, 403, 441

beer, 137

Beer Hall Putsch (1923), 118

Belfast, Northern Ireland, 140, 284, 480

Belgium, 5, 102, 220, 315, 323–4, 364, 379

- Battle of the Bulge (1944–5), 389–91

Belgrade, Serbia, 226

Bengal, British India, 25

- famine (1943–4), 255–65, 276, 466

Benghazi, Libya, 63

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 466–7

beriberi, 244, 430

Berlin, Germany, 178

- Allied bombings (1940–45), 294–5, 297, 326, 327, 354, 356, 368; Soviet invasion (1945), 397–8, 401, 430

Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, 320

Betts, Barbara, 447

Bevan, Aneurin, 89, 90, 92

Beveland Peninsula, Netherlands, 324

Beveridge Report (1942), 133–5, 145–54, 447, 455, 462

Beveridge, William, 133, 134, 145–52, 447

Bevin, Ernest, 90, 93, 445, 460

- Athens debate (1944), 381; Beveridge Report (1942), 142, 144, 150, 152; conscription and, 282; general election (1945), 443, 444, 445, 447, 453; Northern Ireland audit (1941), 287; Stalin, views on, 397; unconditional surrender, views on, 210

bigamy, 342–3, 349

Biggin Hill, Bromley, 477

biological weapons, 272, 336

Bir Hakeim, Libya, 71, 73

Birtley, Tyneside, 141

Bismarck, 120, 199

von Bismarck, Otto, 178

Black Forest blood week (1944), 375

black market, 254, 337, 341

Black Pit, 155, 165, 168–9, 171, 174

Black Watch, 122

Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, 272

Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 9, 106, 159, 170, 172–3, 217, 272, 308, 384, 419, 459, 478

Blitz (1940–41), 6, 9, 14, 41, 53, 67, 135, 136, 178, 180, 284, 477

- casualties, 480; fires, 201; housing stock damage, 469; industry, targeting of, 186–7, 283; looting during, 342; morale and, 135, 136, 187, 364–5; shelter syndrome, 68

Blitz Spirit, 347

Blitzkrieg (1940), 5–6, 126, 379, 428, 432

Blohm & Voss, 199, 200, 204

Board of Trade, 138

Boat Race, 460

bocage, 312

Bochum, Ruhr, 178, 356

Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, 189

Bohlen, Charles, 382

Bohr, Niels, 439

Bomber Command, 135, 176–207, 350–76, 479–81

- anthrax cattle cakes, 272; Battle of Berlin (1943–4), 293–5, 297, 326, 327, 354, 368; Battle of the Ruhr (1943), 176–82, 191, 194–5, 199, 365, 366, 368, 370; Casablanca Conference (1943), 184–5, 190, 206; Dresden bombing (1945), 351, 356–7, 361–2, 376; Kiel bombing (1945), 358–60; Lübeck bombing (1942), 135, 365; medals, 360–61; Missing Research and Inquiry Service (MRES), 479; mobilisation of capital, 362–4; morale, 195–9; Operation GOMORRAH (1943), 199–207, 294, 295, 361, 363, 376; Operation NOBALL (1944), 351–2; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 296, 300, 350–51; Pforzheim bombing (1945), 357–8, 373–5; POINTBLANK directive (1943), 184–91, 199, 206, 355; Quadrant Conference (1943), 294; Rostock raid (1942), 135, 365; transportation, targeting of, 350–51, 354, 366–7, 368, 370, 371, 372

Bomber Offensive (Harris), 185, 365–6

bombes, 170

Bône, Algeria, 119

Bonham Carter, Violet, 55–6

book burnings, 374–5

Book of Zechariah, 410–11

boomerangs, 196–7

Border Regiment, 406

Borneo, 407, 424, 425

Bose, Subhas Chandras, 414–15, 422

botulinus toxin, 336

Bourguébus Ridge, Normandy, 304, 306, 309

Bracken, Brendan, 147, 442

Bradley, Omar, 318–19, 322, 379, 391

Brains Trust, The, 147

Branson, Clive, 264

von Braun, Wernher, 333–4

Brecht, Herbert, 202

Breckland, East Anglia, 269–70, 274, 275

Brecon Beacons, Wales, 270, 290

Bremen, Germany, 402

Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 470

Brewster Buffalo fighters, 38

Bridgend, Wales, 282

British Army

- Eighth Army see Eighth Army; Fifteenth Army Group, 219, 231; First Army, 215–16, 218; Fourteenth Army, 245, 252, 408, 411, 415–32, 472; IV Corps, 406, 426; reserve divisions, 325; Twenty-First Army Group, 301, 310–13, 320, 325, 331, 390–91, 398–401, 403; XXX Corps, 114–16, 317–22, 399; XXXIII Corps, 426, 428

British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU), 366

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 289, 330, 404, 407, 449, 450, 458, 460

British Empire, 1, 5, 13–19, 25, 40, 75, 77, 81, 391–2, 407–8, 471–3, 474

Atlantic Charter (1941), 17–19; imperial preference, 12–13; opium trade, 31; Prestige of the White Race, 26, 28, 30, 34, 42, 475; RAF and, 180, 183; sea communications, 160, 175

British Guyana, 363

British Institute of Public Opinion, 152

British Pacific Fleet (BPF), 432–7

Brittain, Vera, 272–3

Brogan, Colm, 460

Bromley, Kent, 3

Brooke, Alan, 49–52, 55, 64–5, 66, 74, 78, 128, 317, 324

- Africa Star, views on, 121; Alexander appointment (1942), 101–4, 126; Bengal famine (1943–4), 261; Casablanca Conference (1943), 212, 213–14, 225; Churchill, relationship with, 49–52, 55, 64–5, 102, 112, 232; death (1963), 477; Dodecanese campaign (1943), 235–6; Montgomery, relationship with, 109; Moscow Conference (1942), 101, 104–5; Operation CULVERIN plan (1943–4), 425; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 232–3, 297, 299, 302, 312; Operation PLUNDER (1945), 401; Quadrant Conference (1943), 225; Second Front plans (1942–3), 96, 97, 98–100; Slim appointment (1943), 417

Brooke, Basil, 287–8

Brooke-Popham, Robert, 28

Brown, Richard, 331–2

Browning machine guns, 194

Browning, Frederick ‘Boy’ 319–21

Brunswick, Saxony, 356

Brussels, Belgium, 315

Bryant, Arthur, 51, 272–3, 461

Buchenwald concentration camp, 467

Buckingham Palace, London, 461, 462

Buffalo personnel carriers, 400, 401

Bufton, Sidney, 188, 354

Bulgari, 316, 382, 384–5

Bunker Hill, USS, 436

Burgess, Anthony, 450

Burma, 16, 40, 45, 52–5, 57, 102, 103, 128, 237–46, 406–32

- Arakan Operation (1942–3), 241–2, 246, 413; Battle of Donbaik (1943), 242; Battle of Mandalay (1945), 428–9, 432; Battle of Meiktila (1945), 427–8, 432; Chindits, 237–9, 243–6, 410–14, 416; independence (1948), 459, 472, 479; Operation CAPITAL (1944), 426; Operation DRACULA (1945), 429; Operation EXTENDED CAPITAL (1944), 426–32; Operation Ha-Go (1944), 414, 415, 418–19; Operation LONGCLOTH (1943), 237–9, 243–6, 410, 411, 412, 414, 417; Operation THURSDAY (1943), 244, 410–13, 418; Rangoon liberation (1945), 409, 417, 424, 426, 428–32; rice exports, 25, 256; Thai–Burma Railway, 45

Burma Independence Army (BIA), 57

Burma Road, 54

Burma Victory (1945 film), 416

Bush House, London, 330

Bushey Hall, Hertfordshire, 190

Butler, Richard Austen, 149, 259

C

Cadogan, Alexander, 13, 16, 17, 105, 469

Caen, Normandy, 301, 302, 305, 308, 309, 351

Caerwent, Monmouthshire, 272

Cairo, Egypt, 3, 8, 58–61, 78–9, 101–4

Calabria, Italy, 213

Calcutta, Bengal, 255, 256, 257, 260, 407

Calder, Angus, 461

Calvados, Normandy, 305

Camberley Staff College, 109

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, 198

Cambridge University, 31

Campbell-Johnson, Alan, 407

Canada, 106–8, 121

- aluminium exports, 363; ammonium sulphate exports, 278; Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 155–8, 163, 165, 171; Bomber Command force, 198, 362; Japan invasion plans (1945), 437; Netherlands campaign (1945), 319, 401; Octagon Conference (1944), 323, 395, 396, 426; Operation MARKET GARDEN (1944), 319; Operation OLIVE (1944), 324; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 298, 313; Operation VERITABLE (1945), 398–9; Quadrant Conference (1943), 224, 225, 239, 243–6, 294, 410, 438–9

Canterbury, Kent, 135

Canterbury, William Temple, Archbishop, 339

Canterbury Tale, A (1944 film), 462

Cape Farewell, Greenland, 155

Cape of Good Hope, 8, 27

Cape Town, South Africa, 165

Cardiff, Wales, 288

Carentan, Normandy, 308

Caribbean, 11, 164, 362, 363

Carve Her Name with Pride (1958 film), 477–8

Casablanca, Morocco, 118, 119

- Symbol Conference (1943), 184–5, 190, 206, 208–15, 223, 225, 234

Castle, Barbara, 447

Catholicism, 36, 284–6, 288, 289

Caucasus region, 104

Caviar Conference (1942), 101, 104–5

Cecil, Robert, 1st Viscount, 32

cemeteries, 359, 479–80

Cenotaph, London, 480

Central Ammunition Depots, 272

Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset, 271

Ceylon, 25, 30, 46–8, 240, 407, 427, 430, 459, 472

Chamberlain, Hilda, 7

Chamberlain, Ida, 5, 11

Chamberlain, Neville, 4–6, 7, 8, 19, 146, 364, 444

- bombs, views on, 181; declaration of war (1939), 4–6, 7, 8, 316–17, 470; Ireland, views on, 287; Munich Agreement (1938), 10, 105, 385, 397; Norway debate (1940), 92, 93; resignation (1940), 89, 92, 93; Russia, views on, 10; United States, views on, 11

Changi military complex, Singapore, 44–5

Channon, Henry ‘Chips’ 77, 91, 94

Chelmsford by-election (1945), 456

Chelsea, London, 327

Chemical Defence Experimental Station, Porton Down, 272

chemical weapons, 315, 336

Chemnitz, Saxony, 356

Chequers, Buckinghamshire, 1, 95, 99

Cherbourg, Normandy, 301, 307

Cherwell, Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount, 258, 261

Cheshire, Leonard, 197

Chiang Kai-Shek, 52, 240, 423

Chiefs of Staff Committee (COS), 4, 11, 49, 51

China, 1, 27, 36, 43, 52, 240, 410, 413, 423

Chindits, 237–9, 243–6, 410–14, 416

Chindwin River, 238, 239, 244, 415, 422, 423, 426, 427

Chiswick, London, 331

cholera, 255

Christianity, 36, 284–6, 288, 289, 410–11, 459

Christie, John, 339

Christmas Island, 25, 57

Church of England, 460

Churchill tanks, 106–7, 218

Churchill, Clementine, 94, 302, 449

Churchill, Randolph, 442

Churchill, Winston, 6, 8, 13–14, 89–95, 465
airborne force, creation of (1940), 220; Alexander appointment (1942), 101–4, 126; Arakan Operation (1942–3), 241–2, 246; Athens debate (1944), 381, 389, 444; Athens visit (1944), 388; Atlantic Charter (1941), 17–19; Auchinleck, relationship with, 63–6, 101–2, 112, 241, 243; Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 111; Battle of El Alamein, First (1942), 83; Battle of El Alamein, Second (1942), 119, 120; Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 158–9, 164, 167–8, 173–5; Bengal famine (1943–4), 258–65; Beveridge Report (1942), 150–54; Bomber Command and, 178, 189, 192, 356, 361–2, 364; Brooke, relationship with, 49–52, 55, 64–5, 102, 112; Casablanca Conference (1943), 208–14, 225; Caviar Conference (1942), 101, 104–5; Channel Dash (1941), 21; Convoy SC-107 (1942), 158; death (1965), 476–7; Dodecanese campaign (1943), 232–6; Dresden bombing (1945), 356, 361–2; Gallipoli campaign (1915–16), 98; general election (1945), 440–57; general election (1951), 457–8, 472; German dissidents, views on, 210; Greek Dekemvriana (1944–5), 379–81, 385–9, 391–3, 444; Hyde Park meeting (1942), 99, 439; Irwin sacking (1943), 417; Italian campaign (1943–5), 220, 223, 225, 230, 232, 314; Lend-Lease Act (1941), 12, 14–15, 150; Malaya, fall of (1941–2), 17, 32, 35, 39–40, 41, 45–6, 240; Mansion House speech (1942), 119, 408; Montgomery, relationship with, 299; Northern Ireland, views on, 286; Octagon Conference (1944), 323, 395, 396; Operation AVALANCHE (1943), 232; Operation CRUSADER (1941), 20; Operation CULVERIN plan (1943–4), 425; Operation DRAGOON (1944), 313–15; Operation HUSKY (1943), 220, 225; Operation JUBILEE (1942), 107–8, 303; Operation LONGCLOTH (1943), 238–9, 243–6, 417; Operation MARKET GARDEN (1944), 323; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 225, 229, 232–3, 296–304, 315; Operation PLUNDER (1945), 401; Operation TORCH (1942), 119; Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 1–2, 14–16; Poland, relations with, 384; Potsdam Conference (1945), 441–2; prime minister, accession to (1940), 6, 8, 9; Quadrant Conference (1943), 225, 226, 239, 243–6, 438–9; racist views, 258–9, 264; Rommel myth and, 84, 86; Roosevelt, aid request to (1940), 10; Roosevelt’s death (1945), 402–3; Second Front plans (1942–3), 95, 98–100; Second World War, The, 159, 167, 192, 209, 225, 264, 314, 315, 361–2, 416, 449; Soviet Union, relations with, 10; Tehran Conference (1943), 229–30, 296, 396; Tobruk debate (1942), 79, 89–95; Tobruk, fall of (1942), 74, 75, 78, 99; Tolstoy Conference (1944), 384–6, 397; Trident Conference (1943), 219; Tube Alloys project (1941–3), 438–9; V-Blitz (1944–5), 330; Victory in Europe Day (1945), 404–5, 407; Washington Conference (1942), 75; Wingate’s death (1944), 416; Yalta Conference (1945), 356, 396–7

Chuter Ede, James, 443

citizenship education, 247

Civil Defence, 135, 136, 300, 329

Claridge’s, London, 460

Clark, Mark, 227–8, 292, 314

class, 141–4, 454, 455–6, 457, 458, 474

von Clausewitz, Carl, 162

Cleft Chin Murder (1944), 336–9, 343–4

Closing the Ring (Churchill), 159, 416

Clydebank, Scotland, 281, 282, 480

coal, 26, 31, 114, 140, 142, 252, 282, 368

Cockleshell Heroes, The (1955 film), 478

Cocos Islands, 57

Cold War (1947–91), 225, 460

Colditz, Saxony, 478

Colditz Story, The (1955 film), 478

Cole, George Douglas Howard, 462

Cole, Margaret, 451

Collister, Peter, 407

Cologne, Rhineland, 177, 178, 193, 365

Colombo, Ceylon, 46, 48

Colville, John ‘Jock’ 17, 388, 389, 395, 460

Combat Air Patrol (CAP), 435

Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO), 184, 190, 191, 354

Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee (CCS), 95–6, 99, 184, 212

Combined Shipping Adjustment Board (CSAB), 173

Comilla, Bengal, 411

Commandos, 360

Common Wealth Party, 456

Commonwealth Corps, 437

Commonwealth of Nations, 13, 251, 404, 472

- Battle of Hong Kong (1941), 16; Bomber Command forces, 362; Indian independence movement and, 251; Irish withdrawal (1948), 288; North African campaign (1940–43), 58, 61; Operation CORONET plan (1945), 437; Operation CULVERIN plan (1943–4), 424; Operation EXTENDED CAPITAL (1944–5), 430; Operation JUBILEE (1942), 106, 107; Operation MARKET GARDEN (1944), 319; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 301

Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 359

Communist Party of Finland, 316

Communist Party of Great Britain, 93, 143–4, 289

Communist Party of Greece, 379–81, 385–9, 391–3

Communist Party of India, 252

concentration camps, 203, 370, 375, 466–7

concentration of force, 96

conscription, 72, 143, 231, 274

Conservative Party, 6, 76–7, 89, 145, 272–3

Beveridge Report (1942), 149–54; general election (1945), 290, 440–57, 462; general election (1951), 457–8, 462, 472

Consolidated B-24 Liberators, 101, 168–9

Convoy ONS-154 (1942), 166

Convoy SC-107 (1942), 155–8, 165–6

Convoy SC-130 (1943), 171

Cooper, Diana, 29

Cooper, Duff, 29, 36

Corbett, Thomas, 102

Corsica, 229

Cos, Greece, 234, 235

Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy, 301

country estates, 271–4

countryside, 271–81

County War Agricultural Executive Committees, 278–9

Coventry, West Midlands, 187, 205, 358, 480

Cowan, David ‘Punch’ 431

Coward, Noël, 473, 474

Cox, Harry, 156

Cranborne, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Viscount, 91, 188

Crete, 9, 63, 69

crime, 336–49

Crimp, Reginald, 3, 115, 116

Cripps, Richard Stafford, 64, 250–51, 264, 408, 446, 460, 471

Crosland, Tony, 450

Crossman, Richard, 477

Croydon, London, 329

Cruel Sea, The (1953 film), 477

Cuba, 363

Cummins, Gordon, 339

Cunningham, Andrew, 425

Curtin, John, 40

CVEs, 169, 171

Cyprus, 387

Czechoslovakia, 8, 362

Czeres, Vera, 270

D

D-Day (1944) see Operation OVERLORD

Dachau concentration camp, 375

Dad’s Army, 275

Dagenham, Essex, 278

Daily Express, 77, 90, 205, 403, 441, 450, 467

Daily Herald, 21, 237, 451

Daily Mail 22, 191, 220, 237, 441, 450

Daily Mirror, 76, 134, 205, 337, 343, 349

Daily Sketch, 450

Daily Telegraph, 150

Dalcroy, 156

Daleby, 156

Dalmatia, 225

Dalton, Hugh, 2, 90, 443, 460, 470

Dam Busters, The (1955 film), 478

Damaskinos of Athens, 386, 388

Dambusters Raid (1943), 191, 239, 478

Daniel, John Edward, 289

Darjeeling, Bengal, 416

Datchworth, Hertfordshire, 333

De Guingand, Freddie, 391

De Havilland Mosquitos, 177, 357, 394

De Valera, Éamon, 285, 287–8

Defence Medal, 360

Defence Regulations (1939), 269, 341

Deir el Shein, Egypt, 81, 83

Dempsey, Miles, 312, 319, 323, 431

Denmark, 331, 402, 403

Deptford, London, 332

Desert Fox, The (1951 film), 87

Deutches Afrikakorps, 8, 27, 84, 94

- Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 110–12; Battle of El Alamein, First (1942), 79, 80–83, 88; Battle of El Alamein, Second (1942), 82, 112–28, 214, 231, 310, 365; Battle of Gazala (1942), 70–77, 86, 91, 113, 122; Battle of Mersa Matruh (1942), 77–8, 83, 86; Tunisian campaign (1942–3), 124, 134, 212, 214–19

Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, 4, 120, 133

Diego Suarez, Madagascar, 46, 48

Dieppe raid (1942), 106–8, 303

Dig for Victory campaign, 275, 477

Dill, John, 97, 393

Dimapur, Nagaland, 420

Dimbleby, Richard, 466–7

Distressed Areas, 140

Dives River, 308, 310

divorce, 340, 343, 348–9, 458

Dobkin, Harry, 339

Dobson, Gerald, 343

Dodecanese campaign (1943), 233–6

Dolphin, 170

Domesday Book, 278

Dominions, 9, 32, 34, 43, 95, 121, 472

Donald, James, 478

Donbaik, Burma, 242

Dönitz, Karl, 62, 124, 158–67, 170, 172–4, 214, 403

Dönitz, Peter, 171–2

Dortmund, Ruhr, 178, 357

Douglas C-47 Dakota, 394, 410, 419

Douglas C-54 Skymaster, 388

Douglas-Home, Alec, 458

Doulton, Alfred, 406

Dover, Kent, 136

Downton Abbey, 272

Draft Rules of Aerial Warfare (1923), 373

Dresden, Saxony, 203, 351, 356–7, 361–2, 376

Driberg, Tom, 76

Duisberg, Ruhr, 178, 356

Dundee, Scotland, 282, 288

Dunkirk (1958 film), 478

Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 6, 13, 77, 102, 103, 110, 126

Durham, County Durham, 459

Durham Light Infantry, 235

Düsseldorf, Ruhr, 178, 356

Dutch East Indies, 33, 43, 45, 424, 471, 472

dysentery, 113, 413, 430, 466

E

Eady, Muriel, 339

Eaker, Ira, 184, 190

Ealing comedies, 440

East China Sea, 433

East Fulham, London, 447, 448, 453, 455

East Lancashire Regiment, 399

East Riding, Yorkshire, 271

Eastern Strike Force, 45–6

Economist 210, 392

Eden, Anthony, 2, 19, 91

- Abdine Palace incident (1942), 60–61; Athens visit (1944), 388; ; Battle of El Alamein (1942), 114; general election (1945), 447, 453; German dissidents, views on, 210; Gott, relationship with, 103; Greek Dekemvriana (1944–5), 386, 388; Holocaust reports (1942), 467; Italian campaign (1943–5), 226, 229; Operation CULVERIN plan (1943–4), 425; OVERLORD planning (1943), 229; Prime Minister (1955–7), 458; Roosevelt’s death (1945), 402; Stalin, views on, 397; Suez Crisis (1956), 233, 472–3; Tobruk debate (1942), 91, 93; Tolstoy Conference (1944), 384, 385; Trident Conference (1943), 174; unconditional surrender, views on, 226

Edenbridge, Kent, 329

Edinburgh, Scotland, 288

Education Act (1944), 458

Edward VII, King of the United Kingdom, 461

Egginton Hall, Derbyshire, 274

Egypt, 3, 8–9, 27, 58–61, 101–4, 110–17, 128, 412, 469, 470

- Abdine Palace incident (1942), 60–61; Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 110–12; Battle of El Alamein, First (1942), 79, 80–83, 88; Battle of El Alamein, Second (1942), 82, 112–28, 214, 231, 310, 365, 457, 477; Battle of Mersa Matruh (1942), 77–8, 81, 83, 86; Suez Canal, 8, 27, 58, 65, 84, 233, 470, 472–3; Suez Crisis (1956), 233, 472–3

Eighth Air Force (United States), 350, 352–5, 367, 371

Eighth Army (United Kingdom), 8–9, 19–20, 63, 64, 65, 70–79, 80–89, 143, 231, 403

- Alexander appointment (1942), 101–4; Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 110–12; Battle of El Alamein, First (1942), 79, 80–83, 88; Battle of El Alamein, Second (1942), 82, 112–28, 214, 231, 310, 365, 457, 477; Battle of Gazala (1942), 70–77, 86, 91, 113, 122; Battle of Mareth (1943), 217–18, 221; Battle of Medenine (1943), 217; Battle of Mersa Matruh (1942), 77–8, 81, 83, 86; Foggia airfields capture (1943), 228; Operation HUSKY (1943), 219, 221, 222; Operation OLIVE (1944), 316, 324; Po Valley offensive (1945), 403

Eindhoven, Brabant, 318

Einsatzkommando, 87

Eisenhower, Dwight, 100, 352

Battle of the Bulge (1944–5), 390–91; Dodecanese campaign (1943), 235; German campaign (1945), 398, 401, 404; German surrender (1945), 404; Italian campaign (1943), 219, 223, 224–9, 230; Montgomery, relationship with, 390–91; Operation MARKET GARDEN (1944), 317; Operation NOBALL (1944), 351–2; Operation OVERLORD (1943–4), 233, 272, 296, 297, 299, 302, 306, 312; Paris liberation (1944), 315; Tunisian campaign (1943), 216, 217; unconditional surrender, views on, 210

elections

1918 general election, 441, 452, 453; 1940 Preston by-election, 442; 1942 Maldon by-election, 76–7; 1944 Skipton by-election, 456; 1945 Chelmsford by-election, 456; 1945 general election, 290, 440–57, 462; 1951 general election, 457–8, 462, 472

Electra, HMS, 45

Elephant Boys, 339

Elsham Wolds, Lincolnshire, 481

émigré forces, 7–8, 72, 95, 198, 289

- Czech, 362; Dutch, 320; French, 71, 73, 92, 362; Polish, 293, 297, 313, 362, 384

Empire Antelope, 156

Empire Day, 461

Empire Leopard, 156

Empire Lynx, 156

Empire Sunrise, 155

employment, 138–45, 153, 281–3, 286–7, 474

Encounter, HMS, 45

England, 272–5, 289, 290–91

ENIGMA, 9, 70, 106, 111, 159, 170, 384

Eritrea, 27

Escort Group C4, 165

Essen, Ruhr, 176, 177–8, 179, 181, 182, 186, 358

Essex Regiment, 81, 293

Essex Scottish Regiment, 106, 107

Essex-class fleet carriers, 435

Ethiopia, 63, 68

Eton College, Berkshire, 460

eugenics, 148

Eureka Conference (1943), 229–30, 296, 396

European Coal and Steel Community, 459

evacuees, 272, 288

Evening Standard, 330, 344, 448

Exeter, Devon, 135

Exeter, HMS, 45

F

Fabian Society, 449, 451, 462

factories, 5, 94, 133, 139, 144, 272, 281, 283, 300

Fairey, 274

Fairey Albacores, 47

Fairey Swordfishes, 171

Falaise, Normandy, 305, 313, 315, 351

Fallschirmjäger, 69, 220, 292, 399

family allowances, 148, 149

Farouk I, King of Egypt, 58–61

Fascist Grand Council, 223

Fat Man, 437, 463

Fea, Thomas, 156

Fellers, Bonner, 85

Fergusson, Bernard, 244

Fernando, Gratien, 57

Ferring, Sussex, 359

Festung Europa, 106, 107

Field, The, 341

Fieseler Storches, 84

Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, 304

Fifteenth Air Force (United States), 372

Fifteenth Army (Germany), 303, 323

Fifteenth Army (Japan), 414

Fifteenth Army Group (United Kingdom), 219, 231

Fifth Army (United States), 227, 228, 292

Findon, Edrick Albert, 342

Finland, 10, 316

Fire and the Fury, The (Hansen), 367–8, 371

fire watching, 138

First Army (United Kingdom), 215–16, 218

First Army (United States), 324, 379

First Canadian Army, 324

First World War (1914–18), 37, 46, 55, 85, 127, 192, 282–3, 290–91, 311

- Battle of the Somme (1916), 36, 98, 122, 182, 192, 283, 302; Battle of Ypres, First (1914), 109; Battle of Ypres, Second (1915), 109, 260; Battle of Ypres, Third (1917), 98, 182, 192, 283, 399; cemeteries, 479; Gallipoli campaign (1915–16), 90, 98; general election (1918), 441, 452, 453; memorials, 480

Flakartillerie, 194, 195, 199, 200, 203, 295, 357

Flashman series (Fraser), 406

Fleet Air Arm (FAA), 435

Fleet Street, 460

Fleming, Launcelot, 339

Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, 403, 430

Flesh Wounds (Holbrook), 304

Florida, United States, 164

Focke-Wolf, 277

Foggia, Italy, 224, 225, 227, 228

Folgore, 86

food, 137–8, 142, 144

Foot, Michael, 448

Force Z, 34–5, 37, 47

forced labour, 45, 87, 203, 277, 351, 368–9, 375

Fordson N tractors, 278

Formby, George, 461

Formidable, HMS, 435

Formosa, 435

Fort Bliss, Texas, 333

Foster, Rodney, 120

Foster, William, 156

Fourteenth Army (United Kingdom), 245, 252, 408, 411, 415–32, 472

France, 4–6, 8

- Algeria (1830–1962), 475; Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 6, 13, 77, 102, 103, 110, 126; Free France (1940–44), 71, 73, 92, 362; German invasion (1940), 5–6, 10, 87, 102, 110, 126, 298, 364; Indochina (1887–1954), 413, 471, 475; Operation DRAGOON (1944), 313–15; Operation JUBILEE (1942), 106–8, 303; Operation OVERLORD (1944) see Operation OVERLORD; Operation ROUNDUP plan (1942), 98, 100, 102, 212–13, 215, 224; Operation SLEDGEHAMMER plan (1942), 95–100, 101, 104–6, 212; Paris liberation (1944), 309, 315; Resistance, 315, 375; Vichy France (1940–44), 6, 46, 48, 219

France and Germany Star, 360

Frank, Anne, 466

Fraser, David, 38

Fraser, George MacDonald, 406, 428

Fraser, Jim, 127

Fredendall, Lloyd, 217

Free Dutch forces, 320

Free French forces, 71, 73, 92, 362

Freetown, Sierra Leone, 165

French Indochina, 413, 471, 475

French Resistance, 315, 375

Freya radar, 194

Freyberg, Bernard, 292, 293, 297

Friedrich, Jörg, 358

Frisch, Otto, 439

Frost, John, 321

Fuchs, Klaus, 439

Fujiwara Iwaichi, 56–7

Fulham, London, 447, 448, 453, 455

G

Gallacher, William, 93

Gallipoli campaign (1915–16), 90, 98

Gallup, 145, 153, 381, 446, 448, 456, 457

Game, Philip, 341

Gandhi, Mohandas, 248, 251, 260

Gazala, Libya, 20, 63, 64, 70–71, 73–4, 77–8, 86, 91, 113, 122

Gelsenkirchen, Ruhr, 178, 356

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 473

general elections see elections

Geneva Conventions, 44, 373

Geneva Opium Conference (1925), 32

genocide, 262

George II, King of Greece, 386, 388

George VI, King of the United Kingdom, 69, 301, 360, 440, 445

German Revolution (1918–19), 368

Germany, 4–7, 14, 210–11, 369, 397–405, 430

Allied bombings (1940–45), 135, 176–207, 271, 293–5, 350–76, 478; Allied invasion (1945), 397–405, 430; Baedeker Blitz (1942), 135; Battle of Arnhem (1944), 233, 317–23, 344, 400; Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 6–7, 15, 158–75, 214, 286, 288, 297, 403–4; Battle of Berlin (1943–4), 293–5, 297, 326, 327, 354, 368; Battle of Britain (1940), 6, 7, 11–12, 120; Battle of the Bulge (1944–5), 389–91; Battle of the Caucasus (1942–4), 104; Battle of Crete (1941), 9, 63, 69; Battle of Hürtgen Forest (1944), 324; Battle of Kursk (1943), 296, 297; Battle of Moscow (1941–2), 88, 96; Battle of Rhodes (1943), 234–5; Battle of the Ruhr (1943), 176–82, 191, 194–5, 199, 365, 366, 368, 370; Battle of Stalingrad (1942–3), 123, 134, 204, 296, 365; Beer Hall Putsch (1923), 118; Blitz (1940–41) see Blitz; Blitzkrieg (1940), 5–6, 126, 379, 428, 432; Channel Dash (1941), 20–21; Convoy SC-107 attacks (1942), 155–8, 165–6; Crete invasion (1941), 9, 63, 69; Dieppe raid (1942), 106–8, 303; ENIGMA, 9, 70, 106, 111, 159, 170; food supplies, 276–7; forced labour, use of, 45, 87, 203, 277, 351, 368–9, 375; France, invasion of (1940), 5–6, 10, 87, 102, 110, 126; Holocaust (1941–5), 87, 118, 375, 466–7; Indian Ocean incursions (1939), 27; July, 20 plot (1944), 86, 211; Kristallnacht (1938), 375; Leningrad, siege of (1941–4), 96; Lüneburg Heath surrender (1945), 403–4; Malta, siege of (1940–42), 62, 67–70; Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939), 7, 10, 382, 383; Munich Agreement (1938), 10, 105, 385, 397; North African campaign (1940–43) see North African campaign; Operation BAGRATION (1944), 316; Operation DRAGOON (1944), 313–15; Operation OVERLORD (1944) see Operation OVERLORD; Operation STEINBOCK (1944), 326–7; Poland, invasion of (1939), 4, 373, 384, 404; Potsdam Conference (1945), 441–2, 443; Reims surrender (1945), 404; Resistance, 86, 210–11; Siegfried Line campaign (1944), 324; Soviet Union, invasion of (1941), 2, 7, 9–10, 69, 190; subterranean factories, 369–70; US, declaration of war on (1941), 13; V-weapons, 180, 172, 326–37, 342, 351–2, 466, 477; Wacht am Rhein offensive (1944–5), 379, 389–90, 398

von Gersdorff, Rudolf-Christoph, 211

Gestapo, 375

Gibraltar, 8, 62, 101, 114, 118

Gibson, Guy, 191, 198, 239

Gilbert Islands, 424

Glamorgan, Wales, 288

Glasgow, Scotland, 281, 282, 288

Gloucestershire Regiment, 407

Gneisenau, 20–21

Goch, Rhineland, 357

Goebbels, Josef, 84, 178, 204, 210

Goering, Hermann, 69, 327

GOLD beach, 298, 301, 307

Gordon Highlanders, 222

Gothic Line, 314, 324

Gott, William ‘Strafer’ 103

Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), 9, 106, 159, 170–73, 217, 272, 308, 384, 419, 459, 478

Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), 459

Government of India Act (1935), 241, 249

Granada cinema, Tooting, 335

Grand Hotel (Baum), 314

Grandville, Normandy, 302

Grant tanks, 70, 94, 114, 419

Grant, Matthew, 343–4

Grant, Ulysses, 209

Grayling, Anthony Clifford, 367, 371

Greece, 63, 155, 230, 264, 379–81, 385–9, 391–2, 409

- Battle of Crete (1941), 9, 63, 69; Dekemvriana (1944–5), 379–81, 385–9, 391–3, 444; Dodecanese campaign (1943), 233–6; Great Famine (1941–2), 276

Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), 379–81, 386–9, 391–3

Green Park, London, 192

Green, Muriel, 323, 441

Greenland, 155

Greenwood, Arthur, 6, 364

Greenwood, Desmond, 359

Greenwood, Walter, 143

Grodno, Belarus, 383

Gropius, Walter, 201

Groves, Leslie, 438

Gruinard Island, Outer Hebrides, 272

Grumman Avengers, 433

Grumman Hellcats, 436

Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, 407

Guangxi, China, 423

Guards’ Chapel, Wellington Barracks 329

Guderian, Heinz, 432

Guingand, Francis ‘Freddie’ 125

Guinness, Alec, 478

Gulfamerica, 164

Gurkhas, 243, 292–4

Gustav Line, 228

H

H2S, 199, 203, 295, 355, 372

H2X, 372

Hackney Marshes, London, 271

Hagen, Rhineland, 356

Hahira, 156

Haig, Douglas, 182, 291

Haigh, John, 339

Haileybury school, Hertfordshire, 460

Haldon Hills, Devon, 274

Halifax, Edward Wood, 1st Earl, 6, 12, 364, 392, 395

Halifax, Nova Scotia, 171, 239

Halifax bombers, 181, 357, 359

Hamburg, Germany, 199–207, 361, 363, 376, 402, 430

Hamilton, Nigel, 126

Hanaya Tadashi, 418–19

Hancock, Alexander, 449

Handley Page Halifaxes, 181, 357, 359

Handley, Tommy, 134

Hangman’s Hill, Monte Cassino, 292–4

Hannibal, 86

Hanoi, Vietnam, 413

Hanover, Saxony, 356, 402

Hansen, Randall, 367–8, 371

Hardegen, Reinhard, 164

Harland & Wolff, 286

Harriman, Averell, 1, 22, 473

Harrington, William, 451

Harris, Arthur Travers, 182–207, 365–6, 370–76, 477

- Battle of Berlin (1943–4), 293–5, 297, 326, 354, 368; Battle of the Ruhr (1943), 176–82, 191, 194–5, 199, 365, 366, 368, 370; Bomber Offensive 185, 365–6; Churchill, relationship with, 192–4, 361–2; death (1984), 477; Despatch on War Operations (1945), 366; Dresden bombing (1945), 351, 356–7, 361–2, 376; Kiel raid (1945), 358–60; medals, views on, 360–61; morale, views on, 196–7; Operation CHASTISE (1943), 191, 239, 478; Operation GOMORRAH (1943), 199–207, 294, 295, 361, 363, 376; Operation NOBALL (1944), 351–2; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 296; POINTBLANK directive (1943), 184–91, 199, 206, 355; precision bombing, views on, 190–92; Transportation Plan (1944), 350–51, 354, 366–7, 368, 370, 371, 372

Harrogate, North Yorkshire, 341

Harrow School, Middlesex, 103, 259, 460

Hartington, 156

Hartlepool, County Durham, 156

Harvey, Oliver, 2, 17, 461

Harvey, William, 404

Harvie-Watt, George, 20

Hastings, Max, 184

Hathaway, Henry, 87

Hatimura, 156, 157

Havler, Edward, 156

Hawker Hurricanes, 419

Hawkins, Jack, 478

Hay, Will, 461

Headlam, Cuthbert, 20, 77

healthcare, 448

Heap, Anthony, 120

Heath, George, 338

Heathrow, Middlesex, 274

Hedgehog spigot mortar, 171

Heeresgruppe Afrika, 216–18

Hefferson, Jim, 107

Hendon, Middlesex, 445

Henley Regatta, 460

Henry, Duke of Gloucester, 91

Herman, Arthur, 259

Hermes, HMS, 48

Hey, Kathleen, 4, 120, 133, 316

HF-DF, 155, 171, 173

High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, 182, 185, 186, 190, 196

Highclere Castle, Hampshire, 272

Hildesheim, Saxony, 358

Hill, Diana Murray, 139

Hillington, Glasgow, 282

Himmler, Heinrich, 211

Hinge of Fate, The (Churchill), 159, 209, 225, 264

Hirohito, Japanese Emperor, 437

Hiroshima atomic bombing (1945), 437, 439, 463, 465–6

Hitler, Adolf, 5–7, 14, 105, 210, 464

- Battle of El Alamein, Second (1942), 113, 117; Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 158; Beer Hall Putsch (1923), 118; Channel Dash (1941), 20; death (1945), 403; France, invasion of (1940), 5–6; Indian Ocean plan (1941), 46; Italian campaign (1943), 227, 228, 230; July, 20 plot (1944), 86, 211; Malta, siege of (1940–42), 69–70; Munich Agreement (1938), 10, 105, 385, 397; Mussolini’s ouster (1943), 227, 230; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 308; Operation PAUKENSCHLAG (1942), 165; Operation TORCH (1942), 118; Poland, invasion of (1939), 4; resistance against, 86, 210–11; Sicilian campaign (1943), 223; Singapore, fall of (1942), 42; Soviet Union, invasion of (1941), 2, 7; Tobruk, capture of (1942), 75, 77; US, declaration of war on (1941), 13; Wacht am Rhein offensive (1944–5), 390

Hitler Youth, 203, 309, 312, 401

Hobbema, 156

Hodges, Stanley, 346

Hodson, James Lansdale, 135, 347

Hogg, Quintin, 153

Holbrook, David, 304

Holocaust (1941–5), 87, 118, 375, 466–7

Home Guard, 120, 138, 286, 317

Home Intelligence, 13, 14, 21–2, 75–6, 108, 134, 152, 179, 211, 317

Home Office, 274, 346

homosexuality, 458

Hong Kong, 16, 28, 128, 407

Hopkins, Harry, 99, 209, 393

Horn of Africa, 27

Horrocks, Brian, 399, 431

housing, 447, 448, 469

Housman, Alfred Edward, 302

Howe, HMS, 433

Hull, Cordell, 210

Hulten, Karl, 336–9

Hump airlifts (1942–5), 240, 410, 423

Hunan, China, 423

Hungary, 382, 384–5

Hürtgen Forest, 324

Hussars, 305

Hut, 8, Bletchley Park, 170, 172, 173

Hutton, David, 156

Hyde Park, New York, 99, 439

Hyde, Ronald, 330

Hythe, Kent, 120

I

Ice Cold in Alex (1958 film), 477

Iida Shōjirō, 53

Ilford, London, 332

illegitimate births, 340, 343, 346, 348

Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), 185, 438

Imperial Civil Service, 30

Imperial Defence College, 125

imperial preference, 12–13

Imperial War Graves Commission, 359, 479

Imphal, Manipur, 414–16, 419, 422–3

Implacable, HMS, 173

In Search of England (Morton), 275

incomes, 141, 277, 279

Indefatigable, HMS, 173, 435

India, 8, 9, 25, 26–7, 33, 53, 66, 128, 237–65, 407–9, 469, 470

- Battle of Imphal (1944), 414–16, 419, 422–3; Battle of Kohima (1944), 420–23, 427; Bengal famine (1943–4), 255–65, 276, 466; Burma campaign (1941–5) see under Burma; Cripps Mission (1942), 250–51, 264, 408; Government of India Act (1935), 241, 249; Hump airlifts (1942–5), 240, 410, 423; independence (1947), 430, 459, 472; independence movement, 248–53, 257, 414; inflation crisis (1943–4), 253–6, 260; Quit India Movement (1942–5), 251–3, 257, 260, 414; sterling balance system, 254, 265, 469

Indian Army, 65, 237–54

- Arakan operation (1942–3), 241–2; Battle of Imphal (1944), 414–16, 419, 422–3; Battle of Kohima (1944), 420–23, 427; Catering Corps, 247; Christmas Island mutiny (1942), 57; Josh groups, 249; morale, 253–4; North African campaign (1940–43), 82, 89; Operation EXTENDED CAPITAL (1944–5), 426–32; Operation LONGCLOTH (1943), 237–9, 243–6, 410, 411, 412, 414, 417; Operation THURSDAY (1944), 244, 410–13, 418; Public Relations (IAPR), 238; Singapore, fall of (1942), 56

Indian National Army (INA), 57, 414–15, 422

Indian National Congress (INC), 248–53, 257

Indian Ocean, 25–7, 46, 48, 54, 57, 175, 239–40, 263, 407

Indonesia, 387

see also Dutch East Indies

Industrial Assurance Societies, 134

industry, 94, 140–42, 144, 281–3, 286, 290

Infantry Division, 3rd British, 437

Infantry Division, 50th British (Tyne Tees), 218

Infantry Division, 51st British (Highland), 122

Infantry Division, 53rd British (Welsh), 399

Infantry Division, 70th British, 245–6

Infantry Division, 76th British, 325

Infantry Division, 77th British, 325

inflation, 141, 143

Inland Revenue, 143

Inns of Court, 31, 460

İnönü, İsmet, 214

International Monetary Fund (IMF), 473

Iran, 25, 27, 46, 104

Iraq, 183, 417

Ireland, 283–4, 285, 287–8

- Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 172, 288; Northern Ireland, 140, 275, 283–8; War of Independence (1919–21), 36, 42

Irish Republican Army (IRA), 42, 285

Irrawaddy River, 52, 54, 240–41, 244, 417, 426, 427

Irwin, Noel, 242, 246, 417

Is India Impregnable? (Bayley), 28

Ismailia, Egypt, 78

Ismay, Hastings ‘Pug’ 75, 168

Istria, 225

Italian campaign (1943–5), 124, 219–32, 314

- Battle of Monte Cassino (1944), 228, 230, 292–4, 297, 477; Gothic Line, 314, 324; Operation AVALANCHE (1943), 224–9, 232; Operation DICKENS (1944), 292–4; Operation HUSKY (1943), 212, 215, 219–24; Operation OLIVE (1944), 316, 324; Operation SHINGLE (1944), 230; Po Valley offensive (1945), 403

Italy, 4, 8, 14, 19, 27

- Allied invasion (1943–5) see Italian campaign; Battle of Cape Matapan (1941), 61, 62, 70, 120; Battle of Crete (1941), 9, 63, 69; Battle of Mareth (1943), 217–18, 221; Battle of Rhodes (1943), 234–5; Battle of Taranto (1940), 61, 69, 120; Ethiopian War (1935–7), 68; Malta, relations with, 67; Malta, siege of (1940–42), 69–70; Mussolini’s ouster (1943), 204, 223, 227, 230; North African campaign (1940–43), 60, 82, 86, 113, 115, 117, 217–18

Iwo Jima, Japan, 324, 424

J

Jackson, Ashley, 46

Jackson, Robert, 265

Jacksonville Beach, Florida, 164

Jacob, Ian, 65

Japan, 14, 27, 161, 193, 406–39

- atomic bombings (1945), 437–9, 463, 465–6, 476; Battle of Guadalcanal (1942–3), 407; Battle of Imphal (1944), 414–16, 419, 422–3; Battle of the Java Sea (1942), 45; Battle of Kohima (1944), 420–23, 427; Battle of Leyte Gulf (1944), 434, 435; Battle of Midway (1942), 44, 48, 240, 407; Battle of Okinawa (1945), 424, 432, 435, 436; Battle of Saipan (1944), 324; Burma campaign (1941–5) see under Burma; Ceylon raid (1942), 48, 240; Chinese War (1937–45), 1, 27, 36, 43, 52, 240, 423; Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign (1942–5), 424; Hong Kong invasion (1941), 16, 407; Kamikaze squadrons, 434–7; Malaya invasion (1941), 2, 3, 16, 22, 34–46, 56–7, 407; Mariana and Palau Islands campaign (1944), 424; Operation CORONET plan (1945), 437; Operation Ha-Go (1944), 414, 415, 418–19; Operation OLYMPIC plan (1945), 437; Operation U-Go (1944), 414–23, 427; Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 1–4, 13, 14–16; Singapore invasion (1942), 16, 34–46, 240, 407; Soviet invasion (1945), 437; surrender (1945), 440; Takao sinking (1945), 285; Tokyo bombings (1944–5), 424

Jarrow March (1936), 454

jeep carriers, 169

Jeschonnek, Hans, 204

Jews, 87, 118, 375, 466

Jeypore, 156

Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 250, 251

Jitra, Kedah Sultanate, 37

Jodl, Alfred, 226

Johnston, Tom, 290

Jones, Edward William, 347

Jones, Elizabeth, 336–9, 343–4

Josh groups, 249

Joubert, P. B. 196

Journey Home, The (1944 report), 145, 152

Joyce, William, 477

JUNO beach, 298, 301

Jupiter, HMS, 45

jus in bello, 368, 375–6

jute, 282

Juvisy-sur-Orge, Île-de-France, 350

K

Kachin people, 53

Kamikaze squadrons, 434–7

Kammhuber Line, 194, 203, 294, 295

Kampfgruppen, 321

Kanchanaburi, Thailand, 407

Kandy, Ceylon, 407

Kangaroo personnel carriers, 399

Karen people, 53, 57

Karlsruhe, Baden, 356

Kasserine Pass, Tunisia, 217

Kedah Sultanate, 37

Kennedy, John, 97

Kent, England, 290

Kenya, 363

Kesselring, Albert, 62, 67, 69, 84, 88, 113–14, 227–8, 292, 314

Keyes, Roger, 92–3

Keynes, John Maynard, 395, 469–70, 473

Kharkov, Ukraine, 96

Ki-43 Oscar, 38, 419

Ki-44 Tojo, 419

Kido Butai, 46–8, 55, 240

Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, 358–60

Kimberley, HMS, 313

King, Ernest, 96, 164, 174, 213, 314, 407, 433, 434

King George V, HMS, 433

King’s Dragoon Guards, 228

Kingsclere, Devon, 345

Kingsway, London, 330

Kitchener, Horatio Herbert, 1st Earl, 101

Kleve, Rhineland, 357

Klopper, Hendrik, 74, 75, 76

von Kluge, Hans, 312

Kohima, Nagaland, 420–23, 427

Krefeld, Ruhr, 178

Kriegsmarine, 7, 9, 124, 155–75

- Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 6–7, 15, 158–75, 214, 286, 288, 297, 403–4; Channel Dash (1942), 20–21; Convoy SC-107 attacks (1942), 155–8, 165–6; Indian Ocean incursions (1939), 27; Lüneburg Heath surrender (1945), 403–4; Mediterranean operations, 62; Operation PAUKENSCHLAG (1942), 163–7, 170

Kristallnacht (1938), 375

Krupp, 178, 186, 358

Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, 39, 470

Kunming, Yunnan, 52

Kuomintang, 240, 423

L

Labour Party, 6, 89–90, 92, 93, 145, 148–52, 381, 440–62

- Beveridge Report (1942), 148–52, 447, 455, 458; general election (1945), 290, 440–57, 462; general election (1951), 457–8, 462, 472; land nationalisation plans, 459

Labrador, 155, 166

Lack of Moral Fibre (LMF), 197

Ladies May Now Leave Their Machines (Hill), 139

Lampson, Miles, 58–61, 79

Lancashire, England, 288

Lancaster bombers, 176, 189, 191, 194, 282, 350, 351, 355, 357, 363, 481

Land Girls see Women’s Land Army

land requisition, 269–75, 278–9

Lane, Arthur, 44

Langford, Gladys, 404

Laski, Harold, 90, 446

Laski, Marghanita, 143–4

Lautenschlager, Hermine, 374

Lawrence Castle, Devon, 274

Lawrence, Thomas Edward, 238

Le Creusot, Loire, 189

League of Nations, 32, 58

Leahy, William, 393

Ledo, Assam, 240, 410, 420, 423

Lee Kuan Yew, 40

Leeds, West Yorkshire, 341

Leicester, Leicestershire, 343

Leigh-Mallory, Trafford, 299

Leipzig, Saxony, 356

Lend-Lease Act (1941), 12–15, 393–5

- China and, 240, 410, 423; Soviet Union and, 46, 104, 394; UK and, 12–15, 110, 121, 150, 156, 276, 363, 393–5, 408, 469

Leningrad, Russia, 96

Lentaigne, Walter, 245

Leros, Greece, 234, 235

Lesley, Odette, 334

Let Us Face the Future (1945 manifesto), 447–8, 451, 453

Lewis, Norman, 227

Lewis, Saunders, 289

Lewisham, London, 329

Liberal Party, 6, 76

Liberty cargo vessels, 394

Libya, 1, 3, 8, 19–20, 58, 60, 62–77

- Battle of Gazala (1942), 70–77, 86, 91, 99, 108, 113, 122; Holocaust in, 87; Siege of Tobruk (1941), 19, 65, 245

Liddell Hart, Basil Henry, 98, 220

Light Division, 90th, 81, 82

Limehouse, London, 445

Lincoln, Lincolnshire, 198

Linlithgow, Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess, 241, 242, 257–8, 260

Lion-class battleships, 173

Lisbon, Portugal, 53, 223

Little Boy, 437, 463

Littorio, 86

Liverpool, Lancashire, 155, 157, 165, 166, 171, 284, 288

Ljubljana Gap, 314

Lloyd George, David, 291, 441, 452

London, England, 2, 135, 136, 192, 271, 327

- Blitz (1940–41), 6, 9, 14, 41, 53, 67–8, 135, 178, 469, 480; Operation STEINBOCK (1944), 326–7; V-Blitz (1944–5), 329–37, 342

Long-Range Penetration Group (LRPG), 237–9, 243–6, 410–14, 416

Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 179–80, 464–5, 478–9

Los Alamos, New Mexico, 438

Loutraki, Greece, 409

Love on the Dole (Greenwood), 143, 454

Love on the Supertax (Laski), 143–4

Lovett, Robert, 203

Low Walker, Newcastle, 141

Löwenbräukeller, Munich, 118

Lowestoft, Suffolk, 136

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein, 135, 365

Lublin Poles, 383–4

Luftwaffe, 9, 88, 114, 124, 135–6, 352–4

- Baedeker Blitz (1942), 135; Battle of Berlin (1943–4), 295, 354; Battle of Britain (1940), 6, 7, 11–12, 120; Battle of El Alamein (1942), 113, 115, 124; Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 162; Battle of the Ruhr (1943), 194–5; Blitz (1940–41) see Blitz; Malta, siege of (1940–42), 62, 67; Operation GOMORRAH (1943), 295; Operation HUSKY (1943), 222–3; Operation STEINBOCK (1944), 326–7; Operation VERITABLE (1945), 398; Tobruk, capture of (1942), 74

Lulworth Ranges, Dorset, 271

Lumber Jills, 280

Lumsden, Herbert, 115

Lüneburg Heath, Saxony, 403–4

Lviv, Ukraine, 383

Lyman, Robert, 265

Lynn, Vera, 291, 477

Lyttelton, Oliver, 1st Viscount, 157, 173–4, 212

M

MAC Ships, 171

Macarthur, Douglas, 437

MacDermott, John, 284, 287

MacDonald, Ramsay, 454

MacInnes, Colin, 477

MacKie, Ronald, 29–30, 56

Maclean, Fitzroy, 225

Macmillan, Harold, 381, 442, 458

MacVeagh, Lincoln, 392

Madagascar, 46, 48

Madras, British India, 248

Magennis, James, 285

magnesium, 181

Mahdist War (1881–99), 101

Maher Pasha, Aly, 60

Main, T. F. 346

Mainz, Rhineland, 357

Maisky, Ivan, 92, 94

malaria, 244, 255, 413, 416, 423

Malay College Kuala Kangsar, 30

Malaya, 2, 3, 16, 22, 25, 26, 27–46, 56–7, 387, 407, 408, 470, 475

- Singapore, fall of (1942), 16, 34–46, 56–7, 66, 240, 407

Maldives, 47

Maldon by-election (1942), 76–7

Malta, 61–3, 64, 67, 77, 88, 113–14, 128, 396

Malta Story (1953 film), 477

Mametz Wood, Somme, 283

Manchester, Lancashire, 341

Manchester Guardian, 441

Manchester Regiment, 44

Mandalay, Burma, 243, 410, 422, 426, 427, 428–9

Mandrel, 194

Manhattan Project (1942–6), 334, 438–9

Manila, Philippines, 430

Mannheim, Baden, 186

Mannheim, Herbert, 347

Mareth Line, 217–18, 221

Mariana Islands, 324, 424

Maritima, 156

Mark I thermite bombs, 185

Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke, 105

marriage

- bigamy, 342–3, 349; divorce, 340, 343, 348–9, 458; illegitimate births and, 348

Marseilles, Provence, 314

Marshall Islands, 423

Marshall, George, 11, 174, 314

- Casablanca Conference (1943), 210, 212–13, 214, 215; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 233, 296, 299; Operation SLEDGEHAMMER plan (1942), 95, 96, 97, 99–100, 212; Quadrant Conference (1943), 224, 239; Tehran Conference (1943), 296; Trident Conference (1943), 224

Marshall Plan (1948), 471

Martin, John, 2

Martin, Kingsley, 344

Mashonaland, 184

Mass-Observation

- on atomic bombs, 465–6; on Beveridge Report, 152; on consequences of war, 461; on employment, 145; on general election, 441, 442, 446, 447, 453; on goals of war, 475–6; on Greek Dekemvriana, 381, 389; on Hitler’s death, 403; on Holocaust, 467; Journey Home, The (1944 report), 145, 152; on post-war mood, 468, 470; on Second Front plans, 97; on US entry into war, 13, 14

Massawa, Eritrea, 27

Masters, John, 412

Matilda II tanks, 81

Matrimonial Causes Act (1937), 348

Matter of Life and Death, A (1945 film), 462

Maugham, William Somerset, 30

Mayu peninsula, Arakan, 241–2

McCallum, Neil, 222

medals, 120, 360–61

Mediterranean Sea, 61–3, 114, 128

Medjerda River Valley, Tunisia, 215

Meiktila, Burma, 427–8, 432

memorials, 480

Merchant Navy, 157, 469

merchant shipping, 6, 8, 15, 27, 48, 62, 97, 114, 155–75, 276, 469

- Avondale Park sinking (1945), 404; Convoy ONS-154 (1942), 166; Convoy SC-107 (1942), 155–8, 165–6; Convoy SC-130 (1943), 171

Merlin engines, 282

Mersa Matruh, Egypt, 77–8, 83, 86, 117

Messerschmitt Bf, 109s, 70

Messina, Sicily, 226

Mexico, 164

MI5, 272, 459

middle class, 142, 455, 458

Middle East Supply Centre, 265

Middleton, Drew, 209

Mikołajczyk, Stanisław, 384

Milk Cow submarines, 172

Millichamp, Eric, 333

Mills, John, 478

Ministry of Agriculture, 277

Ministry of Aircraft Production, 177, 363

Ministry of Civil Aviation, 274

Ministry of Defence, 274

Ministry of Economic Warfare, 187, 357

Ministry of Food, 341

Ministry of Information, 13, 152, 205

Ministry of Labour, 146, 282

Ministry of Social Security, 134

Ministry of Supply, 141, 272

Missing Research and Inquiry Service (MRES), 479

Mittelwerk GmbH factory, Thuringia, 370

Mogaung, Burma, 413

Molotov, Vyacheslav, 95, 101, 104, 106, 383, 384, 443

Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939), 7, 10, 382, 383

Mong-Yu, Burma, 240

monsoon, 54, 240, 242, 243, 415, 417, 420, 422, 423, 428–9

Montague Browne, Anthony, 473

Montague, Frederick, 149

Monte Cassino, Italy, 228, 230, 292–4, 297, 477

Montgomery, Bernard, 82, 103–4, 108–28, 299, 324–5, 431, 477

- Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 110–12; Battle of El Alamein, Second (1942), 82, 112–28, 231; Battle of Mareth (1943), 217–18; Battle of the Bulge (1944–5), 390–91; Eisenhower, relationship with, 390–91; Foggia airfields capture (1943), 228; German surrender (1945), 403–4; Italian campaign (1943), 219–20, 221, 228, 230, 231; Operation GOODWOOD (1944), 305–12; Operation HUSKY (1943), 219–20, 221; Operation MARKET GARDEN (1944), 317–23, 398, 400; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 299, 301–2, 305–13; Operation PLUNDER (1945), 400–401, 427; Operation VARSITY (1945), 400; Operation VERITABLE (1945), 398–9; St Paul’s briefing (1944), 301, 307, 311; Tunisian campaign (1942–3), 217–18

Montgomery, Betty, 108

Montgomery, David, 108

Montgomery, Henry, 109

Montgomery, Maude, 109

Moorehead, Alan, 77, 128, 208, 215

Moran, Charles Wilson, 1st Baron, 51

Morocco, 100, 118, 119

Morris, Jan, 26

Morrison, Herbert, 150, 152, 328, 331, 336, 443, 445, 453, 456, 459, 460

Morrison, Ian, 29, 34, 36, 39, 41, 42

Morton, Henry Vollam, 275

Moscow, Russia, 88, 96

Moscow Conference

First (1942), 101, 104–5; Second (1944), 384–5

Mosquito fighter-bombers, 177, 357, 394

Mount Pelion, 156

Mountbatten, Louis, 1st Earl, 49–50, 96, 244, 261, 262, 413, 416, 427

Muggeridge, Malcolm, 277

Mulberry harbours, 299, 301

Mulheim, Ruhr, 178

Munich Agreement (1938), 10, 105, 385, 397

Munich, Bavaria, 178, 204, 356

munitions factories, 5, 94, 133, 139, 272, 281, 283, 300

Münster, Rhineland, 178

Murmansk, Russia, 97

Muslim League, 250

Mussolini, Benito, 8, 14, 60, 67

- Allied invasion (1943), 221, 223; death (1945), 403; Malta siege (1940–42) 69–70; ouster (1943), 204, 223, 227, 230; Tobruk, capture of (1942), 77

mustard gas, 315

Mutaguchi Renya, 414–23

Mutual Aid Treaty (1942), 12, 394

Myitkyina, Burma, 52, 240, 410, 413

N

Nagasaki atomic bombing (1945), 437, 463

Naguib, Mohamed, 58, 59, 61

Nahas, Mostafa, 60, 61, 78

Naples, Campania, 224–9

Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 83

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 59, 61

National Health Service (NHS), 448, 458

National Insurance, 134, 148

National Union of Agricultural Workers, 279

National Wholemeal Loaf, 137

Naylor, Edna, 133

Nazi Germany see Germany

Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939), 7, 10, 382, 383

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 248, 249, 251, 257

Netherlands, 8, 264

- Battle of the Java Sea (1942), 45; Convoy SC-107 (1942), 155; East Indies colony, 33, 43, 45, 424, 471, 472; German invasion (1940), 220, 364; Hunger Winter (1944–5), 276; Operation MARKET GARDEN (1944), 233, 317–23, 344, 398, 400

New Guinea, 121, 430

New Statesman, 344

New York Herald Tribune, 307

New Zealand, 25, 34, 78, 81, 82, 117, 276, 292–3, 472

Newall, Cyril, 181

Newcastle, Tyneside, 141

Newfoundland, 11, 17, 155

News Chronicle, 147, 441

Niblett, Robert, 252

Nichols, Beverley, 281

Nicolson, Harold, 2, 16, 17, 89, 91, 92, 112, 151, 381, 402, 454, 467

Nijmegen, Gelderland, 318

Nimitz, Chester, 433, 434, 436

Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell), 473

Ninth Army (United States), 390

noblesse oblige, 264, 383

Noel-Baker, Philip, 446

Norden bombsight, 189, 371–2

Normandy landings (1944) see Operation OVERLORD

North African campaign (1940–43), 8–9, 19–20, 27, 40, 58–61, 70–89, 101–4, 174

- Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 110–12; Battle of El Alamein, First (1942), 79, 80–83, 88; Battle of El Alamein, Second (1942), 82, 112–28, 214, 231, 310, 365, 457, 477; Battle of Enfidaville (1943), 218; Battle of Gazala (1942), 70–77, 86, 91, 113, 122; Battle of Kasserine Pass (1943), 217; Battle of Longstop Hill (1943), 218; Battle of Mareth (1943), 217–18, 221; Battle of Medenine (1943), 217; Benghazi, fall of (1942), 63; Bomber Command and, 193; Operation COMPASS (1940–41), 120; Operation CRUSADER (1941), 19–20, 63, 71, 74, 120; Operation GYMNAST plan (1942), 99–100; Operation TORCH (1942) see Operation TORCH; Tobruk, fall of (1942), 70–77, 99, 108; Tobruk, siege of (1941), 19, 65, 245; Tunisian campaign (1942–3), 124, 134, 212, 214–19

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 382, 475

North Irish Horse, 218

North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board, 290

Northern Ireland, 140, 275, 283–8

Northumberland, England, 271

Norway, 8, 97, 155

Norway debate (1940), 92, 93

Norwich, Launcelot Fleming, Bishop, 339

Norwich, Norfolk, 135

Nova Scotia, Canada, 163, 171, 239

Novy, Henry, 2

nuclear weapons, 334, 437–9, 463, 465–6, 476

Nuremberg, Bavaria, 296, 356

Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 373

Nye, Archibald, 64

O

O’Brien, Phillips Payson, 124, 478

O’Neill, Herbert, 123–4

Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 438

OB West, 303, 308, 312

Oberhausen, Ruhr, 195

Oboe, 177, 199, 295

Octagon Conference (1944), 323, 395, 396, 426

Oder River, 390

Ohio, 114

oil, 25, 27, 46, 52, 164, 190

precision bombings and, 353–6, 363, 366, 368, 370–72

Okinawa, Japan, 424, 432, 435, 436

Old Bailey, London, 461

Oldham, Lancashire, 333

OMAHA beach, 298, 301, 303, 307

One That Got Away, The (1957 film), 477

Operation ANVIL plan (1943), 296

Operation AVALANCHE (1943), 224–9, 232

Operation BAGRATION (1944), 316

Operation BARBAROSSA (1941), 9, 190

Operation BLUECOAT (1944), 313

Operation BODYGUARD (1944), 301, 302

Operation CAPITAL plan (1944), 426

Operation CHASTISE (1943), 191, 239, 478

Operation COBRA (1944), 312–13

Operation COMPASS (1940–41), 120

Operation CORONET plan (1945), 437

Operation CRUSADER (1941), 19–20, 63, 71, 74, 120

Operation CULVERIN plan (1943–4), 424–5, 433

Operation DICKENS (1944), 292

Operation DRACULA (1945), 429

Operation DRAGOON (1944), 313–15

Operation EXTENDED CAPITAL (1944–5), 426–32

Operation GOMORRAH (1943), 199–207, 294, 295, 361, 363, 376

Operation GOODWOOD (1944), 304–12

Operation GRENADE (1945), 399

Operation GYMNAST plan (1942), 99–100

Operation Ha-Go (1944), 414, 415, 418–19

Operation HERKULES plan (1942) 70

Operation HUSKY (1943), 212, 215, 219–24, 225

Operation ICEBERG (1945), 424, 432, 435, 436

Operation JUBILEE (1942), 106–8, 303

Operation LIGHTFOOT (1942), 112–17

Operation LONGCLOTH (1943), 237–9, 243–6, 410, 411, 412, 414, 417

Operation MARKET GARDEN (1944), 233, 317–23, 344, 398, 400

Operation NOBALL (1944), 351–2

Operation OLIVE (1944), 316, 324

Operation OLYMPIC plan (1945), 437

Operation OVERLORD (1944), 302–13, 315, 327

- beaches, 298, 301, 303, 306, 307; BLUECOAT, 313; BODYGUARD, 301, 302; casualties, 297, 302, 311–12; COBRA, 312–13; Falaise pocket, 313, 315, 351; GOODWOOD, 304–12, 351; Mulberry harbours, 299, 301; planning of, 98, 108, 187, 224–6, 229, 232–3, 296–302; Transportation Plan (1944), 350–51, 354; US troop buildup, 344–7

Operation PAPERCLIP (1945), 333

Operation PAUKENSCHLAG (1942), 163–7, 170

Operation PEDESTAL (1942), 114

Operation PLUNDER (1945), 400–401

Operation ROUNDUP plan (1942–3), 98, 100, 102, 212–13, 215, 224

Operation SHINGLE (1944), 230

Operation SLEDGEHAMMER plan (1942), 95–100, 101, 104–6, 212

Operation STEINBOCK (1944), 326–7

Operation STRUGGLE (1945), 285

Operation SUPERCHARGE (1942), 116–17, 122, 123, 126

Operation THURSDAY (1944), 244, 410–13, 418

Operation TORCH (1942), 112, 118–19, 122–4, 134, 184, 214, 216, 269, 392

- Burma campaign and, 241; merchant shipping and, 165, 174; SLEDGEHAMMER abandonment and, 99–100, 212; Vichy France and, 219

Operation U-Go (1944), 414–23, 427

Operation VARSITY (1945), 400

Operation VERITABLE (1945), 398–9

opium, 31–2

Oppenheimer, Robert, 438, 439

Oran, Algeria, 118, 119

Orissa, British India, 256

Orkney Islands, 282

Orne River, 301, 310

Orpington, Kent, 333

Orwell, George, 108, 329, 336–7, 338, 345, 461, 473

Ouistreham, Normandy, 301

Oxford University, 31

P

P-51 Mustangs, 353

Paderborn, Westphalia, 358

Padua, Veneto, 403

Pakistan, 459, 472

Palembang oil refineries, Sumatra, 433

Palermo, Sicily, 222

Palestine, 78, 183, 387, 459, 472

Panter-Downes, Mollie, 142

Panzer III tanks, 70

Panzer IV tanks, 70

Panzer-Grenadier, 399

Panzerarmee Afrika, 8, 63, 70–77, 85, 89, 94

- Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 110–12; Battle of El Alamein, First (1942), 79, 80–83, 88; Battle of El Alamein, Second (1942), 82, 112–28, 214, 231, 310, 365; Battle of Gazala (1942), 70–77, 86, 113, 122; Battle of Mersa Matruh (1942), 77–8, 83, 86; Tunisian campaign (1942–3), 216–19

Panzerfaust 401

Panzers, 5, 6

- Battle of Arnhem (1944), 321; Italian campaign (1943–5), 227; Normandy campaign (1944), 308, 309, 312, 313; North African campaign (1940–43) see Panzerarmee Afrika; Operation VERITABLE (1945), 398; Soviet Union, invasion of (1941), 9, 97; Wacht am Rhein offensive (1944), 389–90

Panzerschreck, 293

Papandreou, Damaskinos, 386, 388

Papandreou, Georgios, 386–9

Parachute Regiment, 321

Paris, France, 309, 315

Parsons, 141

Parthenon, 156

Pathfinder Force, 177, 196, 200, 295, 351, 355, 362

Patton, George, 118, 216, 219–20, 222, 324

Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 1–4, 13, 14–16

Pearson, Drew, 392

Pegu, Burma, 406, 428, 430

Peirse, Richard, 182

Penang, Malaya, 42

People, 446

Pepperpots, 398

Percival, Arthur, 36–7, 40, 41–2, 43, 240

Persia see Iran

Peshawar, North-West Frontier Province, 470

Pforzheim, Baden, 357–8, 373–5

Philippines, 86, 424, 430, 433

Phillips, Tom, 35, 47, 433

phosgene gas, 272

phosphates, 25

Picture Post, 147

Pilsen, Bohemia, 178

Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, 17

Plaid Cymru, 289

Plauen, Saxony, 358

Ploeşti oil refineries, Romania, 224

Plymouth Brethren, 410, 412

Po Valley offensive (1945), 403

POINTBLANK directive (1943), 184–91, 199, 206, 355

Poland, 4, 8, 92, 118, 373, 381, 383–4, 397, 404, 467

Polish émigré forces, 384

- Bomber Command, 362; Italian campaign (1943–5), 293, 297; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 313

Polish Home Army, 383–4

Pontine Marshes, 228

Port T, Maldives, 47

Port Talbot steelworks, Swansea, 290

Port-en-Bessin, Normandy, 301

Portal, Charles, 1st Viscount, 49, 96, 183, 186–90, 195, 203

- area bombing, views on, 186, 188, 354, 361, 370–71; death (1971), 477; Dresden bombing (1945), 357; Hamburg bombing (1943), 294; medals debate and, 360, 361

Porton Down, Wiltshire, 272

Portugal, 53, 223

Postscripts (radio programme), 450

potash, 278

Potsdam, Prussia, 358, 361

Potsdam Conference (1945), 441–2, 443

Pound, Dudley, 21, 49, 51, 96, 425

Powell and Pressburger, 462

Powell, Anthony, 50

Pownall, Henry, 3, 34

precision bombing, 177, 185, 188–92, 366–8, 371–2

Prestige of the White Race (PWR), 26, 28, 30, 34, 42, 475

Preston by-election (1940), 442

Preston, Bert, 133

Preston, Margaret, 133

Priestley, John Boynton, 145, 450

Prince of Wales, HMS, 16, 21, 34, 35, 433

prisoners of war

- Allied, 44–5, 56–7, 86, 203, 277, 368–9, 407; Axis, 211, 271, 280, 399, 471–2

Prolongation Acts, 444

Protestantism, 284–6, 288

Punjab, British India, 57, 248, 253, 255, 256, 261

Q

- Quadrant Conference (1943), 224, 225, 226, 239, 243–6, 294, 410, 438–9

- Quebec Conference

- First (1943), 224, 225, 226, 239, 243–6, 294, 410, 438–9; Second (1944), 323, 395, 396, 426

- Queen Elizabeth, HMS, 63, 394

- Queen Mary, RMS, 239, 394

- queueing, 138

- Quickswood Hugh Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Baron, 449

- Quit India Movement (1942–5), 251–3, 257, 260, 414

R

Rabaul, New Guinea, 430

racism, 258–9, 345–6

RAF Journal 187

Rainbow Corner club, London, 344

Rajputana Rifles, 293

Ramillies, HMS, 48

Ramsay, Bertram, 299

Rangoon, Burma, 52–4, 409, 417, 424, 427, 429

rationing, 14, 145, 254, 257, 260, 348, 465, 468, 477

Raven, Alan, 407

RE8, 201

Reach for the Sky (1956 film), 477

Read, Herbert, 273

Red Cross, 344

Regent’s Canal, London, 271

Reggio Calabria, 227

Regia Marina, 27, 61, 69

Reichswald Forest, 398

Reims, Marne, 404

Relton, Edward, 140

Remagen, Rhineland, 400

Repulse, HMS, 16, 21, 34, 35

Reyrolles, 141

Rhodes James, Richard, 411–12

Rhodes, Greece, 233, 234–5

Rhodesia, 184, 362

von Ribbentrop, Joachim, 118

rice, 52, 255–6, 258, 260, 262

Rifle Brigade, 3

Rinos, 156

Ritchie, Neil, 64, 65, 70, 71, 72, 73–4, 78

Ritz, London, 460

Roberts, Andrew, 258–9

Roberts, Philip ‘Pip’ 312

Rocksavage, Cheshire, 272

Rolls-Royce, 282

Rolo, Charles, 238

Romania, 10, 224, 316, 381, 385

Rome, Italy, 225, 226, 228, 232, 292, 297

Romeike, Franz, 176

Rommel, Erwin, 8–9, 19, 27, 60, 62, 64, 65, 69, 72–8, 84–9, 92, 432, 477

- Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 110–12; Battle of El Alamein, First (1942), 79, 80–83, 88; Battle of El Alamein, Second (1942), 82, 112–28, 214, 231, 310; Battle of Gazala (1942), 70–77, 86, 113, 122; Battle of Kasserine Pass (1943), 217; Battle of Medenine (1943), 217; Battle of Mersa Matruh (1942), 77–8, 83, 86; Italian campaign (1943–5), 223, 226; Malta invasion plans (1942), 69, 77, 88; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 303, 308; Tunisian campaign (1942–3), 216–17

Roosevelt, Elliott, 17

Roosevelt, Franklin, 2, 10–13, 18, 96, 123, 382

- Arcadia Conference (1941), 96; Atlantic Charter (1941), 17–19; Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 168, 173–5; Bengal famine (1943–4), 262; bombing raids and, 190, 193; Burma campaign (1941–5), 239, 243, 424; Casablanca Conference (1943), 208–14, 223; China, relations with, 240; Churchill’s aid request (1940), 10; Convoy SC-107 (1942), 157–8; death (1945), 402; Dodecanese campaign (1943), 235; Hyde Park meeting (1942), 99, 439; India, relations with, 250; Italian campaign (1943–5), 223, 230; Lend-Lease Act (1941), 12, 15, 240, 394; Operation DRAGOON (1944), 314–15; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 229, 233, 296; Operation SLEDGEHAMMER plan (1942), 95, 99, 106; Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 1–4, 15; Second Front planning (1942–3), 96, 99, 106; Second Washington Conference (1942), 75, 96; Tehran Conference (1943), 229–30, 296, 396; Tobruk, fall of (1942), 75, 99, 108; Trident Conference (1943), 219

Roskill, Stephen, 159

Rostock, Mecklenburg, 135, 365

Rostov, Russia, 104

Rotterdam, Holland, 205

Royal Air Force (RAF), 143, 176–207, 271, 469

Battle of Alam el-Halfa (1942), 111; Battle of Berlin (1943–4), 293–5, 297, 326, 327, 354, 368; Battle of Britain (1940), 6, 7, 11–12, 120, 272, 450; Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 168–9; Bomber Command see Bomber Command; Burma campaign (1941–5), 53, 416, 420; Casablanca Conference (1943), 184–5, 190, 206; Expansion Scheme ‘M’ (1938), 181; Malaya, fall of (1941–2), 38, 41; Malta, siege of (1940–42), 62, 67; medals, 360–61; Missing Research and Inquiry Service (MRES), 479; morale, 195–9; Operation CHASTISE (1943), 191, 239, 478; Operation GOMORRAH (1943), 199–207, 294, 295, 361, 363, 376; Operation NOBALL (1944), 351–2; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 296, 300; POINTBLANK directive (1943), 184–91, 199, 206, 355; transportation, targeting of, 350–51, 354, 366–7, 368, 370, 371, 372

Royal Armoured Corps, 264

Royal Army Medical Corps, 2

Royal Army Service Corps, 347

Royal Artillery, 310

Royal Ascot, 460

Royal Canadian Air Force, 362

Royal Canadian Navy, 155–8, 165

Royal Engineers, 360

Royal Hamilton Light Infantry (RHLI), 106, 107

Royal Marines, 107

Royal Navy, 469

Battle of Cape Matapan (1941), 61, 62, 70, 120; Battle of Taranto (1940), 61, 69, 120; Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 6–7, 15, 158–75, 214, 286, 288, 297, 403–4; Battle of the Java Sea (1942), 45; Bismarck sinking (1941), 120; Dunkirk evacuation (1940), 6, 13, 77, 102, 103, 110, 126; Indian Ocean patrols, 27; Malaya, fall of (1941–2), 28, 33–5, 37, 45, 47; Operation CULVERIN plan (1943–4), 424–5, 433; Operation ICEBERG (1945), 424, 432, 435, 436; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 298, 300; Pacific Fleet, 432–7; South China Sea sinkings (1941), 16, 21

Royal Navy Propellant Factory, 272

Royal Observer Corps, 271

Royal Ordnance Factories, 141, 282

Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), 284–5, 286

rubber, 25, 27

Ruhr, Germany, 176–82, 191, 194–5, 199, 365, 366, 368, 370, 397

Rulers of the Indian Ocean (Ballard), 25

von Rundstedt, Gerd, 308, 312

Rutherford, Edie, 2, 15, 441

Ruweisat Ridge, Egypt, 81–2

S

Sackville-West, Vita, 112, 280

Saint-Lô, Normandy, 312

Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, 324, 424

Sakishima Islands, 435

Salerno, Campania, 227, 232

Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, 270

Samos, Greece, 235

San Francisco Conference (1945), 403, 430, 445

Sandys, Duncan, 331

Sardinia, 229

Satō Kōtoku, 420–22

Saturn V, 333

Savoy Grill, London, 460

Saw, U, 53

Sawyers, Frank, 1

Scharnhorst, 20–21

Scheldt Estuary, 323, 398

von Schlabrendorff, Fabian, 211

Schüttler, Rosalie, 178

Scobie, Ronald, 380, 387, 388

Scotland, 97, 140, 281–3, 288–91

Scott, Harold, 343

Scottish National Party (SNP), 289

Sea Shall Not Have Them, The (1954 film), 477

Second Army (United Kingdom), 312, 318–19, 323

Second Front plans (1942–3), 95–100, 101, 104–6, 108

Second World War, The (Churchill), 159, 167, 192, 209, 225, 264, 314, 315, 361–2, 416, 449

Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), 459

Seebhom, Alfred, 85

Senegal, 87

sepsis, 423

Seventh Army (Germany), 303, 308, 313

Seventh Army (United States), 219–20, 222

sex; sexuality, 340, 343–4, 348, 349, 458

Shaftesbury Avenue, London, 344

Shameful Harvest (Street), 279

Shan people, 53

Shark, 170, 172, 173

Sharp, George, 156

Shawcross, Hartley, 457

shelter syndrome, 68

Sherman tanks, 111, 114, 218, 394, 431

Shetland Islands, 282

shipbuilding, 140–41, 161, 167, 281, 282, 286, 300

Shire Folk myth, 179–80, 478–9

Shirer, William, 392

Short Brothers, 181, 286

Short Stirlings, 181, 286

Short Sunderlands, 286

Shropshire, England, 329

Shurmer, Percy, 442

Shwebo Plain, Burma, 426

Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 204

Sicily, 212, 215, 219–24

Siege of Leningrad (1941–4), 96

Siege of Malta (1940–42), 62, 67–70

Siege of Tobruk (1941), 19, 65, 245

Siegfried Line, 324

Sierra Leone, 165

Sinclair, Archibald, 271

Sind, British India, 256

Singapore, 16, 27–46, 56–7, 66, 128, 240, 407, 430

Singh, Mohan, 57

Sink the Bismarck (1960 film), 478

Sinzweya, Burma, 418

Sirri Pasha, Hussein, 60

Sittang River, 53, 430

Skipton by-election (1944), 456

slave labour see forced labour

Slim, William ‘Bill’ 416–32, 472, 477

Slovakia, 382

slum clearance, 448

small escort carriers, 169

smallpox, 255

Smith, Kevin, 175

Smith, May, 120

Smuts, Jan, 75, 117

social class, 141–4, 454, 455–6, 457, 458, 474

Social Insurance and Allied Services (1942 report), 133–5, 145–54, 447, 458, 462

social welfare, 133–5, 145–54, 447, 458, 462

Solomon Islands, 174, 213, 407

Somerville, James, 46–8, 240

Somme, France, 331

see also Battle of the Somme

South Africa, 12, 17, 27, 43, 81

South African Division, 1st, 121

South China Sea, 2, 19, 20, 28

South East Asia Command (SEAC), 244

Southwick House, Hampshire, 272

Soviet Union, 7, 19, 160, 211, 297, 298, 382–9

- Battle of Berlin (1945), 401; Battle of the Caucasus (1942–4), 104; Battle of Kursk (1943), 296, 297; Battle of Moscow (1941–2), 88, 96; Battle of Stalingrad (1942–3), 123, 134, 204, 296, 365; East Prussian offensive (1945), 390; Finnish War (1939–40), 316; German invasion (1941), 2, 7, 9–10, 69, 190; Greece, relations with, 385, 389; Japanese War (1945), 437; military aid to, 32–34, 46; Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (1939), 7, 10, 382, 383; Moscow Conference (1942), 101, 104–5; Operation BAGRATION (1944), 316; Operation SLEDGEHAMMER plan (1942), 95, 101, 104–6; Poland, relations with, 383–4; potash exports, 278; Potsdam Conference (1945), 441–2, 443; Siege of Leningrad (1941–4), 96; Tehran Conference (1943), 229–30, 296, 396; Tolstoy Conference (1944), 384–6; Vistula offensive (1945), 397; Yalta Conference (1945), 356, 396–7

Spaatz, Carl, 350, 352–6, 368, 370

SPAM, 276

Sparrow, John, 454

Special Air Service (SAS), 478

Special Operations Executive (SOE), 8, 360, 375, 386, 478

Spectator, 123–4, 140

Speer, Albert, 89, 204, 334, 369, 430

Spitfires, 282, 394, 406, 436, 477

Sportpalast, Berlin, 178

Springett, George, 3

Spruance, Raymond, 433

Sri Lanka, 459, 472

SS (Schutzstaffel), 87, 203, 204, 211, 321, 375

St Albans, Hertfordshire, 342–3

St John’s, Newfoundland, 155

St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 290, 402, 469, 477

St Paul’s school, Barnes, 301, 307, 311

St Tropez, Provence, 313–14

Stage II, 298, 408, 469

Stalin, Joseph, 7, 9, 97, 101, 104–5, 123, 210, 215, 225, 226, 382–9

- Caviar Conference (1942), 101, 104; Operation OVERLORD (1944), 229, 296, 304; Potsdam Conference (1945), 441–2, 443; Tehran Conference (1943), 229–30, 296, 396; Tolstoy Conference (1944), 384–6; Yalta Conference (1945), 396–7

Stanford Principal Training Area, 269

Stark, Harold, 11, 96

von Stauffenberg, Claus, 211

Staveley Road, Chiswick, 331

Stebbing, Edward, 3, 317, 326, 328–9

steel, 140, 281, 282, 366, 368

sterling balance system, 254, 265, 469

Stettin, Pomerania, 178

Stettinius, Edward, 395

Stilwell, Joseph, 240, 410, 412–13, 420, 423

Stimson, Henry, 100, 225

Stöber, Johanna, 373–4

Stockport, 156

Stokes, Richard, 179, 206

Stone, Robert, 60

Stormont Castle, Belfast, 285

Strachey, John, 460

Strait of Messina, 212–13, 222

Straits Chinese, 30–31, 43

Strategical Intercept Company, 85, 111

Street, Arthur, 205–6, 279

Strube, Sidney, 90

Stumme, Georg, 116

Stuttgart, Württemberg, 356

Sudan, 59, 61, 101

Suez Canal, 8, 27, 58, 65, 84, 233, 470, 472–3

Suez Crisis (1956), 233, 472–3

Sumatra, 41, 424–5, 433

Sunday Chronicle, 281

Sunday Express, 344

Sunday Pictorial 287

Sunday Telegraph, 477

Supermarine Seafires, 436

Supermarine Spitfires, 282, 394, 406, 436, 477

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), 299, 307, 314, 318–20, 350, 391

surveys, 13, 14, 145, 152

Swan Hunter, 141

Swansea, Wales, 283, 288, 290

Sweden, 155

SWORD beach, 298, 301, 306

Sydney, New South Wales, 434

Symbol Conference (1943), 184–5, 190, 206, 208–15, 225, 234

Syria, 78

T

Taiwan, 435

Takao, 285

Tame Boar, 295

Tamils, 30

Tata, 252

taxation, 143

tea, 137

Tebourba, Tunisia, 215, 216

Tedder, Arthur, 221, 299, 306, 354, 356

Tehran Conference (1943), 229–30, 296, 396

Temple, William, 339

Tenasserim, Burma, 53

Territorial Army, 40, 81

Tewfik, Mohammed Ali, 60

Texas, United States, 164, 333, 363

Thai–Burma Railway, 45

Thailand, 35, 36, 45, 407, 413

Thatcher, Margaret, 148, 360

Their Finest Hour (Churchill), 167

Thibaw, King of Burma, 427

Thirkell, Angela, 460

von Thoma, Wilhelm, 125

Thompson, Charles ‘Tommy’ 302

Thompson, Tommy, 1

Thorpe, Jack, 304

Tiger Force, 437

Tiger tanks, 310–11

Timber Corps, 280

Times, The, 21, 27, 147, 238, 307

tin, 25, 31

Tinian Islands, 424

Tinsel, 194

Titmuss, Richard, 136, 283

Tito, Josip Broz, 226, 403

Tobruk, Libya, 19–20, 61, 63, 65, 70–77, 91, 99, 108, 117, 245

Tobruk debate (1942), 79, 89–95

Todd, Selina, 451

Tojo Hideki, 44, 46, 406

Tokyo, Japan, 424

Tokyo Trials (1946–8), 373

Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, 179–80, 463–5, 478–9

Tolstoy Conference (1944), 384–6

Tombs, Robert, 477

Tomlinson, Peter, 182

Tooting, London, 335

Tooze, Adam, 368

Torquay, Devon, 136

Town Like Alice, A (1956 film), 477

trade unions, 26, 142, 143, 144, 149

Transjordan, 183

Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), 142, 152

transportation, 138, 350–51, 354, 366–7, 368, 370, 371, 372

Travancore, Madras, 255

Trenchard, Hugh, 1st Viscount, 190

Tribune, 329

Trident Conference (1943), 219, 224, 225, 229

Trieste, Italy, 382, 403, 430

Trincomalee, Ceylon, 48

Tripoli, Libya, 62, 82

Triumph and Tragedy (Churchill), 314, 315, 416, 449

Truk, Micronesia, 430

Truman, Harry, 395, 396, 402, 439, 441–2, 469–70, 471

Tube Alloys project (1941–3), 438–9

Tunisia, 87, 119, 124, 134, 212, 214–19

Tunisian campaign (1942–3), 124, 134, 212, 214–19

- Battle of Kasserine Pass (1943), 217; Battle of Longstop Hill (1943), 218; Battle of Mareth (1943), 217–18, 221; Battle of Medenine (1943), 217

Turing, Alan, 170

Turkey, 214, 234

Twelfth Army Group (United States), 318, 379

Twenty-Eighth Army (Japan), 430

Twenty-First Army Group (United Kingdom), 301, 310–13, 320, 325, 331, 390–91, 398–401, 403

Tyneside, England, 140–41

Type VII submarines, 172

Type XXI submarines, 172

typhoid, 412, 466

typhus, 466

U

U-boats, 7, 15, 62, 88, 118, 124, 155–75, 214

- Convoy SC-107 attacks (1942), 155–8; Lüneburg Heath surrender (1945), 403–4; Operation PAUKENSCHLAG (1942), 163–7, 170

Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire, 271

Uganda, 53

Ulm, Württemberg, 356

ULTRA, 9, 70, 106, 111, 159, 170, 172, 173, 217, 308, 384

unconditional surrender, 209–12, 223

unemployment, 140, 153, 287, 474

United Kingdom, 135–54, 269–91, 297–8, 440–62, 470–71
agriculture in, 275–81, 289–90; arms production, 5, 94, 133, 139, 272, 281, 283, 300; Baby Blitz (1944), 326–7; Baedeker Blitz (1942), 135; Battle of Britain (1940), 6, 7, 11–12, 120, 272, 450; Blitz (1940–41) see Blitz; conscription in, 72, 143, 231, 274; countryside, 271–81; crime in, 336–49; employment in, 138–45, 153, 281–3, 286–7, 474; food supplies in, 137–8, 263, 275–81; general election (1945), 290, 440–57, 462; Home Guard, 120, 138, 286, 317; incomes in, 141, 277, 279; industry in, 94, 140–42, 144, 281–3, 286, 290; land requisition in, 269–75, 278–9, 289–90; Lend-Lease aid, 12–15, 110, 121, 150, 156, 276, 363, 393–5, 408, 469–70; manpower shortage, 300; religion in, 36, 284–6, 288, 289; shortages in, 137–8, 263, 275–81; social welfare in, 133–5, 145–54, 447, 458, 462; Tube Alloys project (1941–3), 438–9; US loan (1946), 470, 471; US soldiers in, 98, 344–7; V-Blitz (1944–5), 172, 180, 326–37, 342, 351–2, 466, 477; winter storms (1946–7), 470

United Nations, 262, 382, 403, 430, 445, 472

United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), 261

United Provinces, British India, 256

United States, 10–13, 19, 160, 297, 298, 391–6

Anglo-American loan (1946), 470, 471; Arcadia Conference (1941), 96; Atlantic Charter (1941), 17; Battle of the Atlantic (1939–45), 163–5, 173–5; Battle of Guadalcanal (1942–3), 407; Battle of Hürtgen Forest (1944), 324; Battle of Iwo Jima (1945), 324, 424; Battle of the Java Sea (1942), 45; Battle of Leyte Gulf (1944), 434, 435; Battle of Midway (1942), 44, 48, 240, 407; Battle of Okinawa (1945), 424, 432, 435, 436; Battle of Saipan (1944), 324; Bengal famine (1943–4), 262; Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 470; Burma campaign (1941–5), 239, 243, 424; Casablanca Conference (1943), 208–15, 223, 225; Churchill’s aid request (1940), 10; Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), 95–6, 99, 184, 212; Convoy SC-107 (1942), 155; German declaration of war (1941), 13; Gilbert and Marshall Islands campaign (1942–5), 424; Greek Dekemvriana (1944–5), 391–3; Hump airlifts (1942–5), 240, 410, 423; India, relations with, 250; Italian campaign see Italian campaign; Lend-Lease Act (1941) see Lend-Lease Act; Manhattan Project (1942–6), 334, 438–9; Mariana and Palau Islands campaign (1944), 424; Norden bombsight, 189, 371–2; Octagon Conference (1944), 323, 395, 396; Operation CORONET plan (1945), 437; Operation GYMNAST plan (1942), 99–100; Operation OLYMPIC plan (1945), 437; Operation OVERLORD (1944) see Operation OVERLORD; Operation PAPERCLIP (1945), 333; Operation ROUNDUP plan (1942), 98, 100, 102, 212–13, 215, 224; Operation SLEDGEHAMMER plan (1942), 95–100, 101, 104–6, 212; Operation TORCH (1942) see Operation TORCH; Pearl Harbor attack (1941), 1–4, 13, 14–16; Quadrant Conference (1943), 224, 225, 239, 243–6, 438–9; San Francisco Conference (1945), 403, 430, 445; Second Washington Conference (1942), 75, 96; Siegfried Line campaign (1944), 324; Tehran Conference (1943), 229–30, 296, 396; Trident Conference (1943), 219, 224; Yalta Conference (1945), 396–7

United States Army

- Fifth Army, 227, 228, 292; First Army, 324, 390; Ninth Army, 390; Seventh Army, 219–20, 222; Twelfth Army Group, 318, 379

United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), 164, 201, 271, 344, 352–5, 371–2

- Battle of Mandalay (1945), 428; Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO), 184, 190, 191, 354; Dresden bombing (1945), 351, 356–7; Norden bombsight, 189, 371–2; oil plants, targeting of, 353–6, 366, 368, 370–72; Operation GOMORRAH (1943), 200, 201; Operation NOBALL (1944), 351–2; POINTBLANK directive (1943), 184–91, 199, 206, 355; Romania bombings (1943), 224; Tokyo bombings (1944–5), 424; transportation, targeting of, 350–51, 354, 366–7, 368, 370, 371, 372

United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), 366

Urquhart, Robert ‘Roy’ 321

UTAH beach, 298, 301

V

V-weapons, 315, 326–37, 351–2, 370, 466, 477

- V-1 flying bombs, 180, 326, 328–31, 333–7, 342, 351–2, 370, 466, 477; V-2 rockets, 172, 180, 331–7, 352, 370, 466

Valetta, Malta, 62, 68, 114

Valiant, HMS, 63

Van der Elst, Violet, 339

Varsity Match, 460–61

Veilchen, 155–8, 162, 163, 165

venereal disease, 198, 343, 345

Venezuela, 164, 363

Vergeltung, 328

Very Long Range (VLR) bombers, 168–9, 171

Vichy France (1940–44), 6, 46, 48, 219

Vickers-Armstrong, 38, 141

Victor Emanuel III, King of Italy, 223

Victoria Cross, 191, 197, 285, 420–21

Victory in Europe Day (1945), 404–5, 407, 408

Victory-over-Japan Day (1945), 440

Vienna, Austria, 382

Vilnius, Lithuania, 383

Virginia Beach, Virginia, 164

Vistula River, 181, 383, 390, 397

Volksdeutsche, 210–11

Volkssturm, 399

Volturno River, 228

Vought Corsairs, 436

W

Wacht am Rhein offensive (1944–5), 379, 389–90, 398

Wadi Akarit, Tunisia, 218

Wafd Party, 60, 61, 78

Walden, George, 279

Wales, 270, 272, 275, 281–3, 288–91

Wallis, Barnes, 478

Walsingham, George de Grey, 8th Baron, 269

Walthamstow, London, 332

Wandsworth, London, 329

War Office, 50, 108, 143, 247, 270, 274, 286, 311–12, 342, 454

Wardlaw-Milne, John, 76–7, 89, 91

Warm Springs, Georgia, 402

Warren, C. Henry, 272, 275

Warsaw, Poland, 205, 430

Warsaw Uprising (1944), 383–4

Warspite, HMS, 46

Washington Conference

- First ‘Arcadia’ (1941), 96; Second (1942), 75, 96; Third ‘Trident’ (1943), 219, 224, 225, 229

Waterloo Station, London, 330

Waugh, Evelyn, 460

Wavell, Archibald, 55, 63, 72, 103, 127, 241, 242, 247, 260–61, 466

‘We’ll Meet Again’ (Lynn), 477

Wedemeyer, Albert, 213

Welchman, Gordon, 170

welfare state, 133–5, 145–54, 447, 458, 462

Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke, 83, 105

Wellington Barracks, Westminster, 329

Wesel, Rhineland, 319

West Ham, London, 332

West Indies see Caribbean

Westphalia, Germany, 195

Westwall, 324

Whitaker, Denis, 106

Wiesbaden, Hesse, 357

Wilhelm II, German Emperor, 368, 452

Wilhelmshaven, Saxony, 359

Wilson, George William, 481–2

Wilson, Harold, 146, 447, 477

Wilson, Harry, 59, 387, 409

Wilson, Henry ‘Jumbo’ 234–5

Winant, John, 1–2

Wingate, Orde, 237–9, 243–6, 410–14, 416, 417, 418, 414

Wingate’s Raiders (Rolo), 238

Winter War (1939–40), 316

Wolf Packs, 155–8, 162, 163, 165–6, 170–71

Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), 330, 465–6

Women’s Land Army, 275, 280–81

Wooden Horse, The (1950 film), 477

Woodford, Essex, 446, 449

Woolwich, London, 2

Woolworth’s, Deptford, 332

working class, 141–2, 455–6, 457, 474

World Bank, 473

Worms, Rhineland, 357

Wuppertal-Barmen, Rhineland, 178

Würzburg, Franconia, 358

Wurzburg radar, 194

Y

- Yalta Conference (1945), 356, 396–7

- Yamashita Tomoyuki, 35–8, 41–2, 43–5, 86

- Yamato, 434

- York, North Yorkshire, 135, 198

- Young, Douglas, 289

- Young, Peter, 451

- Yugoslavia, 225–6, 230, 382, 384, 385, 403

Z

- Zahme Sau, 295

- Zuckerman, Solomon ‘Solly’, 350, 354, 367

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A Note About the Author

Alan Allport, a British-born historian, is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society who specializes in the British role in World War II. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently the Dr. Walter Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is the author of Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938–1941, which won the Historical Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Crown Award; Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two, winner of the Longman–History Today Book Prize; and Browned Off and Bloody-Minded: The British Soldier Goes to War, 1939–1945. He lives in Syracuse, New York.

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