Never Give In! (15 page)

15 November 1915

House of Commons

On 11 November the Dardanelles Committee was replaced by a War Committee, from which Churchill was excluded. The Government favoured evacuating the Gallipoli Peninsula. Accordingly, Churchill resigned from the Government. Just 40 years old and convinced that his political career was over, he announced his intention to join the Army in Flanders and fight in the trenches as a soldier. His wife, Clementine, remarked,
‘I thought he would never get over the Dardanelles; I thought he would die of grief.’
Here he defends his actions at the Admiralty.

The essence of an attack upon the Gallipoli Peninsula was speed and vigour. We could reinforce from the sea more quickly than the Turks could reinforce by land, and we could, therefore, afford to renew our attacks until a decision was obtained. To go slow, on the other hand – to leave long intervals between the attacks, so as to enable the Turks to draw reinforcements from their whole Empire, and to refresh and replace their troops again and again – was a great danger. Secondly, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, our Army has stood all the summer within a few miles of a decisive victory. There was no other point on any of the war fronts, extending over hundreds of miles, where an equal advance would have produced an equal, or even a comparable, strategic result. It has been proved in this war that good troops, properly supported by artillery, can make a direct advance of two or three miles in the face of any defence. The advance, for instance, which took Neuve Chapelle, or Loos, or Souchez, if it had been made on the Gallipoli Peninsula would have settled the fate of the Turkish Army on the promontory, would probably have decided the whole operations, might have determined the attitude of the Balkans, might have cut Germany from the east, and might have saved Serbia.

All through this year I have offered the same counsel to the Government – undertake no operation in the west which is more costly to us in life than to the enemy; in the east, take Constantinople; take it by ships if you can; take it by soldiers if you must; take it by whichever plan, military or naval, commends itself to your military experts, but take it, and take it soon, and take it while time remains. The situation is now entirely changed, and I am not called upon to offer any advice upon its new aspects. But it seems to me that if there were any operations in the history of the world which, having been begun, it was worth while to carry through with the utmost vigour and fury, with a consistent flow of reinforcements, and an utter disregard of life, it was the operations so daringly and brilliantly begun by Sir Ian Hamilton in the immortal landing of the 25th April.

Chapter 2

Oblivion and Redemption 1916–29

Following the failure of the Dardanelles landings in the Eastern Mediterranean, for which Churchill was made the scapegoat, he was in May 1915 forced to stand down as First Lord of the Admiralty, where he had been at the heart of the direction of Britain’s war effort on the high seas. Convinced his political career was in ruins and describing himself as ‘the escaped scapegoat’, in early 1916 he forsook the House of Commons for the trenches of Flanders, to serve as a soldier in the front line, where he commanded the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. It was not until July 1917 that he returned to Cabinet office, when appointed Minister of Munitions by the new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. Thereafter he served as Secretary of State for War and Air, as well as Colonial Secretary.

However, increasingly out of sympathy with the Liberal Party over its ever closer alignment with the fledgling Labour Party, he decided to forsake their ranks and ‘cross the floor’ for a second time.

Churchill was amazed when, in October 1924, the newly elected Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, invited him to become Chancellor of the Exchequer, an office which his father had previously held. Soon thereafter he returned to the Conservative fold. His tenure at the Treasury was most notable for Britain’s return to the Gold Standard, but the timing proved unfortunate, given the impending Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that was to follow.

‘THE HARDEST OF TESTS MEN HAVE EVER BEEN CALLED UPON TO BEAR’

23 May 1916

House of Commons

After spending several months in the trenches of Flanders under the fire of the enemy, Churchill returned to the House of Commons to give a soldier’s-eye view of the conflict. But he sat isolated on the Opposition benches, facing the Liberal-Conservative coalition and his words went largely unheeded.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to our Armies in France or in Flanders – and I make no doubt that our armies in the East exhibit a similar condition – is the very large number of officers and men in the prime of their military manhood who never, or only very rarely, go under the fire of the enemy. In fact, you perceive one of the clearest and grimmest class distinctions ever drawn in this world – the distinction between the trench and the non-trench population. All our soldiers, all our officers, are brave and honest men. All are doing their duty, a necessary duty, and are ready to do any other duty which they may be asked to perform. But the fact remains that the trench population lives almost continuously under the fire of the enemy. It returns again and again, after being wounded twice and sometimes three times, to the front and to the trenches, and it is continually subject, without respite, to the hardest of tests that men have ever been called upon to bear, while all the time the non-trench population scarcely suffers at all, and has good food and good wages, higher wages in a great many cases than are drawn by the men under fire every day, and their share of the decorations and rewards is so disproportionate that it has passed into a byword. I wish to point out to the House this afternoon that the part of the Army that really counts for ending the war is this killing, fighting, suffering part.

This war proceeds along its terrible path by the slaughter of infantry. It is this infantry which it is most difficult to replenish, which is continually worn away on both sides, and though all the other services of the Army are necessary to its life, and to its maintenance – and I am not in the least disparaging their importance and their value – it is this fighting part that is the true measure of your military power, and the only true measure. All generals in the field make their calculations in rifles, but my right hon. friend knows well how immense is the disparity between rifle strength and rations strength. We have suffered together disappointment in hearing that armies, so imposing on paper, so large in numbers when they left our shores, were whittled down by calculations of rifle strength by the generals on the spot to two-thirds or even a lesser fraction of their total number. Like him, I have rebelled against that calculation in the past, but, nevertheless, I have become convinced that it is really the true and proper method of computing your war effort at a given moment. Every measure which you can take to increase the proportion of rifle strength to rations strength will be a direct addition to your war power, and will be just as direct an addition to your war power as if you ordered new classes of recruits to join the Colours. Nay, more, it will be a net addition and not a gross addition to your war power. If I may use the language of business – and after all this war is becoming in many aspects to resemble a vast though hideous business – I would say that the rifle strength actually under the fire of the enemy is the dividend. Everything else of the whole vast military effort may be classed as working expenditure, the result of which is the production of war power. The object of the Army is to produce war power. Everything else that takes place leading to the lining up of men in battle is the preliminary steps by which the final result is achieved.

‘GRAPPLING WITH THE MOST TERRIBLE FOE’

31 May 1916

House of Commons

Just one month later the Battle of the Somme was to begin. On the first day – 1 July 1916 – the British Army sustained its greatest ever single-day loss: 55,000 men dead or wounded, and that was just the beginning. Churchill was proud to share the dangers of those courageous men in the front line, but he was bitter at having no hand in the direction either of policy or strategy. The 9th Scottish Division, to which he makes reference, was the one in which he commanded the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

At one end of our military system we have the country yielding willingly, though not without great difficulty, inconvenience, real hardship, much dislocation and risk, its whole manhood, its last reserves, or almost its last reserve, including men who have hitherto been kept back in some cases through very good reasons, but who must now go in spite of their reasons. You have that at one end of your military system. At the other end you have a comparatively, I would almost say an astonishingly, small proportion of war-worn soldiers who compose the fighting battalions, and they are heavily burdened, severely tried and short-handed, who go back again and again month after month, almost year after year, and between these two you have an enormous multitude of khaki figures collected with great difficulty, maintained at heavy expense; the greater part of them willing and eager to take part in the war, but through want of management or organisation, or defective organisation, are prevented from being useful either in industry or in the field. That is the broad outline of my case, and it is so important that I am bound to press it and labour it in bringing it before the House of Commons.

What is the proportion of rifle strength to ration strength? The Under-Secretary said euphemistically that there was some disparity between ration and rifle strength, and there always must be. Let us see what it is a little more closely. I shall keep on very broad and general lines in this respect, but I think it is absolutely necessary that the House and the country should follow the main outlines of Army organisation. After all, the electorate and hon. Members who represent it ought to be as familiar with the details of Army organisation as we used to be in peace-time with the details of any of the old political controversies here. Broadly speaking, I believe the following to be correct. I am speaking very broadly, allowing large margins for everything I say. Half the total ration strength of the British Army is at home, and half abroad. Of the half abroad, half of it fights and half does not fight. Of the half that fights about three-quarters fights as infantry in the trenches and in the assaults, and nearly all the losses fall on them. That is three-quarters of the half of the half, and the other quarter may consist of the artillery and other services who come under fire and who render the most effective service against the enemy, but who do not suffer to anything like the same extent. In other words, on this calculation, which is a very liberal one, very much on the other side, for every five men who are taken from the nation at one end – I would almost say out of every six men who are taken from the nation at one end – one effective infantry rifle is produced over the parapet at the other end. . . .

Two bold conclusions may be drawn which I will submit to the Committee. First of all, that the number and proportion of those who actually fight ought to be greatly raised, and that it should be greatly raised by a comparatively small addition to the total aggregate; and secondly, that so far as possible able-bodied men, and especially young men employed in all those other much more numerous parts of the military organisation, ought to take their mm at the front, and not leave it to the same lot to go on continuously, and come back wounded time after time, until they are finally knocked out. In my own experience it happened to my battalion to receive a draft of thirty-five men, out of which twenty-six had been previously wounded, some of them very severely wounded, and this at a time when you can see with your own eyes going about this country that there are millions of men here and elsewhere who have never yet heard the whistle of a bullet. There are more than a million – at any rate, I should think more than two millions – of men who have not heard the whistle of a bullet. . . .

I will tell the House the story of the 9th Scottish Division. This division was the premier division of Scotland, the first division of the New Army to be raised by Scotland at the beginning of the war. In the Battle of Loos, this division, with the other Scottish division, the 15th, played a very notable part. Out of the 9,500 infantry who advanced to the attack 6,000 were killed and wounded in the battle. Some of the battalions lost three-fourths of their strength, but nearly all succeeded in achieving the task which was set them of gaining the positions – some of the most important positions – and they were only lost when they were subsequently handed over at a later stage to other troops. One battalion of this division – a battalion of the Cameron Highlanders – went into action about 850 strong. Thirty officers, the colonel, the Cameron of Lochiel, the adjutant, and 110 men, the survivors alone out of that 850, took and held the objective which they were set to take. Four successive lines were swept away, but the fifth line went on without the slightest hesitation. With these troops shattered in the first day’s battle, the remnant of 1,200, collected out of the brigade of 4,000, were asked two days afterwards to make another attack, and they went over the parapet and renewed the attack with the utmost
élan
and good spirit.

You talk about the charge of Balaclava and the charge of the Fusiliers at Albuera, but those deeds pale before the deeds which have been done by the new divisions raised in the British Army. . . .