Winston Churchill's War Leadership Read Online Free PDF Page A

spells as “the brown hours, when baffling news comes, and disappointing news.” Yet even when the news was bleak, Churchill found the means to combat depression. In those very “brown hours,” he told the Commons on 8 May 1940—when the battle in Norway was going so badly for Britain, provoking a political crisis with Churchill at its centre—“I always turn for refreshment to the reports of the German wireless. I love to read the lies they tell of all the British ships they have sunk so many times over, and to survey the fools’ paradise in which they find it necessary to keep their deluded serfs and robots.” This attitude was Churchill’s nature. It was also what he recognized as an essential feature of successful war leadership: avoiding depression and despair.
    During the many periods that still lay ahead, of setbacks on the battlefield or of the relentless German submarine sinkings of British merchant ships in the Atlantic, Churchill’s “brown hours” were many. The sinking of the British warships
Prince of Wales
and
Repulse
off Malaya three days after Pearl Harbor was one such time. The fall of Singapore in February 1942 was another. But Churchill never allowed such moments to dominate him or to affect him adversely beyond the moment. After the fall of Singapore, which he admitted to the House of Commons cast “the shadow of a heavy and far-reaching military defeat,” he went on to tell the parliamentarians: “Here is the moment to display that calm and poise, combined with grim determination, which not so very long ago brought us out of the very jaws of death”—the Dunkirk evacuation. “Here,” Churchill added, “is another occasion to show—as so often in our long story—that we can meet reverses with dignity and with renewed accessions of strength.”
    As parliamentary criticism of his leadership grew after the fall of Singapore, Churchill confided another of his fears to Roosevelt: “I do not like these days of personal stress and I have found it difficult to keep my eye on the ball.” He could not reveal in Parliament the facts as he knew them: that the Commander-in-Chief Far East’s report on the fall of Singapore told of “the lack of real fighting spirit” among the troops not only in Malaya but also in Burma, where a Japanese attack was expected at any moment. This information had to remain secret from all but the most inner circle, and it had to be kept from the House of Commons, even though it was both an explanation and a “defence” of what had happened. In the course of the war, Parliament had to take many things on trust; some information was conveyed to it in specially convened Secret Sessions, where Churchill spoke with great frankness, but where the usual parliamentary record was not made public. As Churchill told Roosevelt: “Democracy has to prove that it can provide a granite foundation for war against tyranny.”
    When, not long after the start of the Japanese war, one of Churchill’s staff brought him some particularly grim news, Churchill commented: “We must just KBO.” The initials stood for “Keep Buggering On.” At other moments of bad news he would burst into a popular music hall song of the First World War, “Keep right on to the end of the road.” He even sang this song to Stalin at a time when his Soviet ally suddenly began to accuse him of not really wanting to see the defeat of Hitler. That song, a member of the British delegation explained to a startled generalissimo, “is Britain’s secret weapon.”
    A war leader is only as strong as the information reaching him, and his ability to use that information. A determining factor in Churchill’s war leadership was his use of top-secret Intelligence. Some was provided by agents in the field, some by aerial reconnaissance. Information of crucial importance was also gleaned from careful clandestine reading of telegrams sent to and from neutral embassies in London, and from Signals Intelligence of