the Germans had yet to understand how pivotal to Britain’s war effort was the person of the prime minister.
The supply of aircraft to Fighter Command was a critical factor. While propaganda lauded the achievements of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, in Whitehall its conduct by Lord Beaverbrook provoked bitter criticism. For some weeks he ran the department from his private residence, Stornoway House in Cleveland Row, behind the Ritz Hotel. It is easy to perceive why many people, Clementine Churchill prominent among them, deplored the press baron, then sixty-one. He was a former appeaser, who had secretly subsidised the pre-war political career of Sir Samuel Hoare, most egregious of Chamberlain’s ministers. In January 1940 Beaverbrook addressed the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, about a possible peace offer to Germany. On 6 May he asserted in his own Daily Express that London would not be bombed, and that the Germans would not attack the Maginot Line. Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess later told Beaverbrook: ‘Hitler likes you very much.’ The historian G.M. Young suggested that Beaverbrook looked like a doctor struck off for performing an illegal operation. It was once said of his newspapers that they never espoused a cause which was both honourable and successful. The King opposed his inclusion in the cabinet, but among all men Churchill chose this old colleague from the 1917–18 Lloyd George government as his luncheon companion on 10 May 1940.
Beaverbrook cast a spell over Churchill which remained unbroken by his old friend’s petulance, disloyalty and outrageous mischief-making. The Canadian-born magnate’s command of wealth, such as the prime minister had always craved, impressed him. Churchill recognised in ‘dear Max’ a fellow original, full of impish fun, which was scantily available in Downing Street that summer. It is often remarked that Churchill had acolytes, but few intimates. More than any other person save his wife, Beaverbrook eased the loneliness of the prime minister’s predicament and responsibilities. Churchill’s belief in his old comrade’s fitness for government was excessive. But who among Beaverbrook’s cabinet colleagues was more blessed with dynamism and decision, such as seemed vital to meet the challenges of 1940?
As a minister, Beaverbrook trampled on air marshals, browbeat industrial chiefs, spurned consultation and cast aside procedure in pursuit of the simple objective of boosting fighter output. He ruled by row. Jock Colville once suggested that Beaverbrook took up more of Churchill’s time than Hitler. The prime minister himself remarked a resemblance between Beaverbrook and the film star Edward
G. Robinson, most notable for his portrayals of gangsters. It is hard to dispute that Beaverbrook was a monster. The Royal Air Force detested him. Much of his success in increasing aircraft output was achieved in consequence of decisions and commitments made before he took office. Yet for a brief season he deserved gratitude for injecting into the key element of British weapons production an urgency which matched the needs of the hour. He was supported by three great civil servants – Eaton Griffiths, Edmund Compton and Archibald Rowlands – together with Sir Charles Craven, former managing director of Vickers Armstrong, and Patrick Hennessy, forty-one-year-old boss of Ford at Dagenham. His other key prop, and sometimes adversary, was Air Marshal Sir Wilfred Freeman, who loathed Beaverbrook as a man, but grudgingly conceded his usefulness that summer.
Daily pressures upon the prime minister were unrelenting. The war cabinet met 108 times in the ninety-two days between 10 May and 31 July. His black dispatch box contained a pile of papers which seemed never to diminish, ‘a farrago of operational, civil, political and scientific matters’. Overriding War Office objections, he promoted Maj.Gen. Jefferis, a clever soldier engaged in weapons experimental work, and ordered that he should report directly to Lindemann at the Cabinet Office. He insisted that the maverick armoured enthusiast Maj.Gen. Percy Hobart should be given suitable employment, overruling Dill’s objections with the assertion that he should remember that not only good boys help to win wars: ‘It is the sneaks and stinkers as well.’ He harassed the service chiefs in support of one of ‘the Prof’s’ most foolish personal initiatives, aerial rocket deployments against enemy aircraft. Sir Hugh Dowding of Fighter Command wanted his pilots to kill German aircrew who took to their parachutes. Churchill, recoiling from what he perceived as dishonourable conduct, would have none of this. Travelling with Roger Keyes at the end of July, he told the admiral that he had ‘many detractors’ as chief of combined operations. Keyes responded tartly: ‘So had you, but you are now there in spite of it.’ Churchill said: ‘There are no competitors for my job now – I didn’t get it until they had got into a mess.’
Beyond pressing the urgency of fighter production, Churchill made few tactical interventions in the Battle of Britain, but one of the most justly celebrated took place in the Downing Street cabinet room on 21 June. There was fierce controversy between Lindemann and Sir Henry Tizard, chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, about a suggestion from air intelligence that the Luftwaffe intended to use electronic beams to guide its night raiders to British targets. Tizard dismissed the feasibility of such a technique. Churchill summoned him, together with Lindemann and senior airmen, to a meeting attended by twenty-eight-year-old scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones. It soon became obvious that Jones alone understood the issue. Though awed by finding himself in such company, he said to the prime minister: ‘Would it help, sir, if I told you the story right from the start?’ Churchill was initially taken aback, then said: ‘Well, yes, it would!’ Jones spent twenty minutes explaining how his own researches, aided by ‘Ultra’ German signals decrypted by the codebreakers at Bletchley Park – still fragmentary at this stage of the war – had led him to an understanding of the Luftwaffe’s navigational aids. Churchill, characteristically, found himself paraphrasing in his mind lines from the parodic nineteenth-century folklore collection The Ingoldsby Legends: ‘But now one Mr Jones/Comes forth and depones/That fifteen years since, he had heard certain groans.’
When Jones finished, Tizard expressed renewed scepticism. Churchill overruled him, and ordered that the young scientist should be given facilities to explore the German beams. Initially much dismayed by Jones’s revelations, he thrilled when the young ‘boffin’ told him that, once wavelengths were identified, the transmissions could be jammed. Jones himself, of course, was enchanted by the prime minister’s receptiveness: ‘Here was strength, resolution, humour, readiness to listen, to ask the searching question and, when convinced, to act.’ The beams were indeed jammed. Jones became one of the outstanding British intelligence officers of the war. Tizard’s career was, alas, virtually destroyed by his misjudgement. He was an old enemy of Lindemann, who now possessed ammunition with which to discredit him. Though a man of exceptional ability who had made a critical contribution to the creation of Britain’s radar defences, never again did Tizard wield important influence. But the ‘beams’ episode showed Churchill at his best: accessible, imaginative, penetrating, decisive, and always suggestible about technological innovation.
From the summer of 1940 onwards, decrypts of German signals assumed a steadily rising importance to the British war effort. Selected samples codenamed Boniface were delivered to Churchill daily, in a special box to which even the private secretaries were denied a key. The chiefs of staff deplored his direct access to Ultra, arguing that he often derived false impressions from raw intelligence, and misjudged the significance of enemy exchanges. Yet Ultra armed the prime minister for the direction of the war in a fashion unknown to any other national leader in history. It played a critical role in guiding Churchill’s own perceptions of strategy, both for good and ill, and fortified his confidence in overruling commanders.
The Bletchley Park codebreaking operation, still in its infancy in 1940, was the greatest British achievement of the war, and from 1941 became the cornerstone of its intelligence operations. The Secret Intelligence Service was directed by Brigadier Sir Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, a quintessential officer and gentleman, former president of ‘Pop’ and captain of the cricket XI at Eton, Life Guardsman and member of White’s club. Menzies owed his appointment to Halifax. His record was more impressive as a Whitehall intriguer than
