JAMES LEASOR
War at the Top
Based on the experiences of
GENERAL SIR LESLIE HOLLIS
KCB, KBE
Originally published in the US as
The Clock with Four Hands
Published by
James Leasor Ltd at Smashwords
81 Dovercourt Road, London SE22 8UW
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ISBN 978-1-908291-35-6
First published 1959
This edition published 2011
© James Leasor 1959, Estate of James Leasor 2011
This book is dedicated by permission to
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL KG
the greatest Englishman of all
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
EDMUND BURKE
If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL The Gathering Storm
War Memoirs, Vol. I
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to acknowledge the very great help and cooperation so many people have so generously given in connection with the preparation of this book. Our debt of gratitude is particularly heavy to the following:
The Rt. Hon. Lord Beaverbrook, PC.
The Rt. Hon. Lord Hankey, PC, GCB, GCMG, GCVO, FRS.
The Rt. Hon. Admiral of the Fleet Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, KG, PC, GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, GCB, DSO.
Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal, KG, GCB, OM, DSO, MC.
Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, KCMG.
Major-General Sir Edward Spears, Bt., KBE, CB, MC. Major-General Sir Colin Gubbins, KCMG, DSO, MC.
Air Commodore H V Rowley.
Colonel Dudley Clarke, CBE.
Mrs Joan Bright Asdey, OBE.
Colonel S J Bassett, CBE, RM.
Mr Lawrence Burgis, CMG, CVO.
Rear-Admiral A D Nichol, CB, OBE, DSO.
Mr Stuart Anderson, MBE.
We would also thank Miss Mary Cosh and Mr Michael Sedgwick for their research, Mr Edwin Merrett and the staff of the Daily Express Library for their willing help in checking so many references, the Admiralty Librarian, the Press Officer of the London Transport Executive, and Mrs Eileen Rufus for typing the manuscript.
Any errors remaining are our own.
LCH JL
FOREWORD
by
General Sir Leslie Hollis, KCB, KBE.
Before I explain what this book is about, I would like to say what it is not about. It is not a history of the war, nor is it my autobiography. It simply contains some of my experiences and the impressions I gained during the nine years from 1936 to 1945; years which, in my view, have had a more decisive effect on the world's destiny than any other similar period of time.
During these years, I attended more than 6,000 meetings of the Chiefs of Staff, and also most of the decisive conferences abroad between the Allies; and while I had no direct responsibility for the plans made or the decisions reached, I formed my own judgement about them and the men who made them.
The idea for this book took shape early last year when James Leasor and I were walking through the labyrinth of passages under Great George Street in London, better known to us as The Hole in the Ground, which housed the Cabinet War Room, the nerve centre of British war direction.
I had not been there for some years, and I was moved to see how faithfully everything had been preserved. Yet it was really but a ghost of the headquarters I had known, for the War Cabinet Ministers, Chiefs of Staff, Staff Officers and Civil Servants who used to scurry along the passages like busy ants had all gone.
The empty Cabinet Room was just as I remembered it; chairs drawn up at the baize-covered table, with blotting pads and name cards in front of each place: Mr Ernest Bevin, Sir Stafford Cripps, Mr Bracken, Sir Dudley Pound, Sir John Dill; they were all ghosts, too. Only the aftermath of their decisions, often reached in the early hours of the morning, after long and bitter discussion, live on.
As I stood in this empty room, remembering the discussions that had taken place and the personalities who had clashed here, I communicated my thoughts to Leasor, who suggested that we should write the story of this place - or as much of the story as we are allowed to tell.
So much for the background to the events we describe; now for the cast who play out the drama.
First, the man who dominated every meeting - Winston Churchill. My working days during the war had two beginnings; one was around seven-thirty in the morning when we started to deal with reports that had come in overnight, and the other was around ten-thirty in the evening, when Ministers would invariably be called to discuss some supply or manpower problem. And in the early war years, for reasons this book makes plain, we were nearly always desperately short of everything needed to wage war successfully: men and women in the Services and the factories, ships, cement, steel, guns and tanks.
By the time the atmosphere in the Cabinet War Room was blue with smoke and possibly sharp with acrimony, Mr Churchill - the 'Old Boss,' as we called him - would trundle in wearing his siren suit, with dragon-decorated slippers and a cigar. At once each Minister would passionately press his claim to priority. The 'Old Boss' would pass by, unruffled, to take his seat, and then ask Ismay what was on the agenda.
As Ismay replied, Churchill would toss the butt of his cigar in the fire bucket behind him. He never took aim, but he rarely missed. The Marines on guard outside the room made considerable sums selling these butts as souvenirs. Frequently, Churchill would quell the clamour of the Ministers by one wisecrack. I remember once, when everyone was pressing their own claims for war material, he grunted: 'Same old story. Too many little pigs and not enough teats on the old sow.'
Or, again, when Ernest Bevin kept interrupting a meeting to say how he must have half a million extra men, although it was perfectly obvious that this number could not be raised, Churchill stopped him by asking quietly: 'What do you expect me to do? Go out into the streets and make them?'
It is impossible to recall Churchill without remembering Beaverbrook, who was nearly always present at these meetings. I liken him to an old eagle perched high on some rocky crag, surveying the scene beneath him, ready to swoop on the instant one of his projects became involved. He was Churchill's closest confidant, and so powerful was the influence of his buoyant spirit upon the Prime Minister that once, when Churchill was in ill-health, Sir Edward Bridges, now Lord Bridges, not one of Beaverbrook's closest friends, said earnestly: 'We'll do anything we can to get Churchill right again. We'll even send for Beaverbrook, if necessary!'
This Canadian millionaire was both a goad and a guide to the Prime Minister. Tireless, although sometimes almost consumed by asthma, he drove himself to the limit of endurance and frequently beyond it; as indeed he drove his subordinates. His contribution to victory was prodigious.
Then there was General Ismay. As head of the Prime Minister's Defence Office he held a position of unique authority and responsibility. He could easily have fallen foul of the Chiefs of Staff, but he never did; in fact, they would have been lost without him and his amazing gift for smoothing over clashes of temperaments. He got on equally well with Ministers, Service Chiefs, Civil Officials, Americans - everyone, in fact. He knew everything and he said little. As one who served as Ismay's No. 2 for thirteen years, I think I can say I knew him pretty well; he was indeed the wisest of old owls.
Next, we introduce General Sir Alan Brooke - now Viscount Alanbrooke - resolute, volatile, vibrant, versatile and sharp tempered. He would speak so quickly that Churchill sometimes said he couldn't follow what he did say. From my experience it was usually something he didn't want to hear! Alanbrooke was not, in my view, quite so omniscient as his Boswell, Sir Arthur Bryant, would have us believe, but he was still a very good wartime CIGS. He was an equally good General in the field.
From the Army to the Navy and the imperturbable Sir Dudley Pound, who often looked half asleep (for he suffered from a grave illness of which this was one symptom). Then someone would mention the word 'ship' or 'sea' or 'Navy,' and he was at once wide awake. Churchill deeply admired him, and he carried on his slight shoulders the terrific burden of the war at sea when the Germans virtually had everything their own way. It was ironic that he did not live to see this state of affairs entirely reversed.
Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, was another calm character with a brain like a rapier. I never saw him ruffled, even under vicious and uninformed attacks on the Air Force. He would sit, surveying the critic coldly from beneath his heavy-lidded eyes, never raising his voice or losing his temper, but replying to rhetoric with facts. A great man, Portal, who enjoyed the complete confidence of the.US Air Chiefs.
Montgomery was, in my view, the best and most successful General in the field in either the British or American camps. (I can't vouch for the Russians.) He was a master of his profession and a born leader: beside him Bradley and Patton were only good amateurs. He used to say that war was a rough and dirty business, and from his close experience of it I would not challenge that remark. Strangely enough the two and a half years I spent as Chief Staff Officer to the Minister of Defence after the war were without any question the most miserable and wretched of my life. That this should have been so was largely due to a clash of temperament with Montgomery, who had become Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
The Labour Party were then in power and were expected to make slashing economies in defence expenditure, and so the three Chiefs of Staff - for there were three and not only one as Montgomery seemed to think - were each very properly determined to extract as much for his own Service as would be possible in some very lean years.
Had the Minister of Defence, Mr A V Alexander, now Viscount Alexander of Hillsborough, been a strong character he would still have had a hard job to reach a fair and constructive balance between the three Services at this time. But he was not a strong character; while he gave an outward impression of ferocity and strength of purpose, in the event he was always much milder than his utterances would suggest. Alexander was frequently brow-beaten by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dr Hugh Dalton, who hated the Services, and had it not been for Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, who supported us on all occasions, we would have all come off worse than we did; and so would the country.
In the deep, dank waters of this muddy political pond Montgomery lay like a huge pike, with snapping jaws and voracious appetite, determined to have the biggest share of everything for the army.
This determination could be defended, but it was the way the CIGS went about it that infuriated us all. His method at a meeting was to place on the table a paper - which had not been previously circulated and which demanded everything for the Army - and then ask us peremptorily to read it. Then he would ask in short staccato tones: 'Do you agree, do you agree, do you agree?' As a result we seldom reached agreement on anything -as Montgomery states in his memoirs. But the cause of this I lay largely at his door.
Then there was Roosevelt - an enigma; a great President, and a good friend to Britain when we needed help most in 1940-41. But after America's entry into the war, when her strength grew, he showed frequent suspicion of 'British Imperialism.' He made appalling mistakes. His championing of Chiang Kai-shek nearly wrecked the Cairo Conference. But worse was to follow, when he failed to see through Stalin at Yalta. Churchill visualized so clearly what would happen between Russia and the West after the war if Roosevelt's policy prevailed, but with Britain's coffers almost empty, and America disposing four-fifths of the men, equipment and ships of the Western Alliance, what could he do? I fear that history will tend to minimize Roosevelt's good points and magnify his errors: but he was a great man all the same.
Of the American Service leaders, Eisenhower was the leading soldier-statesman; only he could have held together the vast amalgam of US and British Armies, Navies and Air Force. Eisenhower was no strategist, but then he did not have to be one. There were quite enough, if not too many, without him.
General Marshall was the best military 'logistic' organizer on our side. He started from scratch, and in a couple of years or so built up a huge US Army and Air fighting machine. Marshall, like Eisenhower, was no strategist, and would probably not have made a great field General, but he was a man of charm and integrity. He and Sir John Dill did a tremendous job in ironing out Anglo-American differences before they became public.
The American Admiral King, rough, ruthless and unbending, on the other hand, was anti-British, and particularly anti-Royal Navy. He regarded the Pacific as his own personal war, which was one of the reasons why he built up such a huge 'private army' - the US Marines. A pity our Admirals did not think along the same lines. King was one of the most difficult of all the Allied leaders to get on with. I managed fairly well, principally because I was a Marine.
Then there was de Gaulle: tall, austere, aloof, very touchy and difficult to handle. Roosevelt never forgave him for occupying the islands of St Pierre and Miquelon without first asking permission. De Gaulle showed his own opinion of the American President on several occasions. Once, when Roosevelt cabled that he was going to Casablanca and would like to see him, the French General replied that there was no point in their meeting; he had nothing he wanted to discuss with him. Churchill had to put up with a lot from his tantrums, but treated him like a boy who has had an unfortunate background and needed both encouragement and the occasional stick. That de Gaulle had the makings of greatness, present events have proved.
I would also like to add here a few words in praise of an almost unknown but frequently maligned body of men who appear but infrequently in the memoirs of the great captains of the war, and even then are only referred to in a rather disparaging way as 'Whitehall Planners.'
These were not - as might be inferred - a lot of doddering incompetents ambling about the corridors of The Hole in the Ground' intent on nothing but making their returns, but officers of all three Services, with representatives of other Government departments; men of the very highest calibre.
We all met regularly, often several times a day, in The Hole in the Ground,' and so I knew them well. There were the Joint Planning Staff which consisted of the Directors of Plans of each of the Services, plus such groups as Strategical Planning Staff, the Executive Planning Staff, the Future Operational Planning Staff and, later on in the war, the Post-Hostilities Planning Staff together with the Joint Intelligence Staff. They had to examine every operation suggested by the Chiefs of Staff who did not lack any fervour in off-loading every possible problem on to them. Indeed, the guidance of the three Chiefs of Staff was - to be kind about it - extremely woolly and vague, and sometimes almost useless, and it was the ineluctable task of the Defence Ministry planners to translate these vague instructions into something workable.
The advice they rendered to the Chiefs of Staff about some of their pet schemes was not always palatable, and I remember occasions when officers of great distinction were dismissed forthwith because they were honest enough to point out that some plan was quite impossible and hopeless, even though their honesty was proved in the event through some unusually grave fiasco of arms.
These planners, so often dismissed contemptuously by people who knew nothing about them, have their own memorial; the Americans modelled their system on ours, which is the greatest possible tribute that could have been paid to these largely unknown men who laboured fantastic hours with me in The Hole in the Ground,' and who translated so many schemes from their seniors into action - and pointed out the folly of so many more.
Well, such is our cast. Let us begin the story, for they have long parts to play; and the curtain has still to come down on the last act of the drama.
Haywards Heath Sussex
CHAPTER ONE
There is no such thing as an inevitable war.
If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom.
BONAR LAW, Speech July 1914
As the flying boat soared up and turned above the glittering bay, weeping tears of sea-water from her wings, Leslie Hollis had a quick last view of Government House, with the grey shape of the battleship Duke of York in Bermuda harbour, and beyond, the white surf breaking on the beach.
Then she righted herself, spray scudded past the windows from the ends of the floats, and she was off east towards Britain. A few American aeroplanes flew with her out to sea and then fell back, and she was on her own, starting the strangest and most crucial flight of the war.
At that precise moment, and 2,800 miles east - in the nursery of a Devonshire mansion then in use as Control Room for Ferry Command, dealing with American bombers flying across the Atlantic to Britain - a Wing Commander announced casually: The British Airways flying boat "Berwick" from Baltimore, was airborne from Bermuda at fourteen forty-five hours Greenwich Mean Time. Kelly Rogers is Captain. No information about passengers or freight. ETA in England oh-eight twenty-three hours tomorrow.'
With a red crayon an airman orderly carefully chalked this information on a blackboard under the date, January 17, 1942. A bored WAAF telephone operator looked up from filing her nails as he did so.
'Why does anyone want to leave Bermuda these days?' she asked.
A teleprinter girl shrugged her shoulders.
'Search me, dearie,' she replied and started to tap the keys.
The Wing Commander began to give the details of the next plane expected over the West Country: a Lockheed bomber being ferried from the States...
As the chain of islands fell away like a lost necklace in the sea behind the 'Berwick' the men inside her large saloon looked at each other, the same uneasy thought in their minds: would they ever reach England?
Unconsciously, they all looked at Mr Churchill whose idea this flight had been, as he stretched, out in his easy chair, piercing the end of a new cigar. He appeared not to notice their stares, and applied himself to lighting up, as though that were his only worry.
Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord, took off his braided cap and placed it carefully in the rack above his seat, smoothing back his thinning hair. He looked out of the window rather wistfully at the shrinking picture of the British warship. Untried though the Duke of York was, with her tests unfinished, gunners who had never fired their guns and many of her crew who had never even been to sea before, at least she seemed safer than this flying machine for a mid-winter crossing of the Atlantic.
In the back of the aeroplane, enigmatic, calm and bland as a Buddha, Lord Beaverbrook sat staring straight ahead of him towards the control cabin. No one could even guess his thoughts. As a son of the Manse, he was, in fact, repeating to himself the 23rd Psalm: The Lord is my shepherd...'
Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, glanced at his watch involuntarily to check their take-off time, gave a little sigh at the thought of the boring flight ahead, and then produced a pack of cards.
'How about a game?' he asked Hollis.
'A little later, if I may,' Hollis replied. 'I've got all the reports to catch up on first.'
Portal nodded, and began shuffling the cards on the small table in front of him.
As Military Secretary to the War Cabinet, Brigadier Leslie Hollis had accompanied the Prime Minister and the Chiefs of Staff to the Washington Conference, called immediately after Pearl Harbor to decide strategy since America was involved in the war. Now they were all on their way home. While at the Conference, news came of the fall of Singapore, and the loss of the great British ships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, off Malaya. The tide of war was flowing so strongly and ferociously against Britain, both in the Far East and in North Africa, that Churchill, away from London for four weeks already, yearned to be back, and fretted at the thought of a further seven days at sea aboard the Duke of York, which had brought them from Britain to Bermuda.
He flew back in this flying boat from Washington to Bermuda to rejoin the battleship, occupying the honeymoon suite in the tail, and on the way a solution presented itself: why not fly the Atlantic in the 'Berwick'?
When Captain Kelly Rogers, who commanded the aircraft, conducted him round the machine, the idea took hold of him. Mr Churchill was most impressed by the fact that engineers could actually walk inside the wings to adjust the engines during flight, and he accepted Rogers' invitation to try the controls for himself, and flew for about twenty minutes, putting the flying boat into a couple of slightly banked turns and remarking on the vast difference between it and the first aeroplane he had flown in 1913 - an early Short's biplane in which he had taken some flying lessons. By the time they had landed in Bermuda harbour, Mr Churchill's mind was made up: he would ask Rogers to fly him home in this flying boat.
A launch waited to take him to Government House, and he called for the Speaker of the Bermuda Parliament and announced that he wished to address the members. It was Thursday - a half holiday in Bermuda - and everyone had dispersed to their homes, but runners were sent after them. When they reassembled, the Prime Minister, unwearied, buoyant and brilliant as ever, stood under the portraits of King George III and his Queen which hang on the walls of the Bermuda Parliament building, and spoke to the members.
While all this was going on, and naturally quite unaware of Churchill's intention, Rogers remained in the 'Berwick,' preparing for his return flight to Baltimore. He was therefore surprised when the launch that had so recently taken Churchill ashore came out on the Prime Minister's instructions to ferry him to Government House.
He found Mr Churchill waiting with one question: Could the 'Berwick' carry him on to England in the morning? Astonished at the request, Kelly Rogers thought for a few moments, and then nodded. Yes, she could.
Satisfied, Mr Churchill announced that he was calling an immediate conference between Sir Charles Portal and Sir Dudley Pound in the drawing-room, at which he also desired the presence of Kelly Rogers. The pilot sat down at the oval table, not knowing quite what to expect. Beyond the windows, the sun shone on the Duke of York, riding at anchor in the harbour, and following their gaze, Churchill lit a cigar and addressed the meeting.
'Outside lies the Duke of York, waiting to take me to England, which I can reach in seven days,' he began. 'During that time I have ears to hear but no lips with which to speak. On the other hand, Captain Kelly Rogers here assures me that in the aeroplane in which we have just flown here, we can fly to England tomorrow - and in not more than twenty-two hours. This means many days saved, and during that time many things may happen.'
He paused, looking round at his colleagues.
'Such a flight cannot be regarded as a war necessity! he added, 'but as a war convenience.'
The others did not share Mr Churchill's view that such a flight, in such an unsuitable aircraft, and in mid-January, was at all convenient. They thought it was entirely unnecessary and an incalculable risk, and said so.
An aircraft of this type had never flown the Atlantic before in mid-winter, and was not intended for the journey on which they would encounter severe icing, and very bad weather nearer the British Isles. Since the 'Berwick's' ceiling was barely 8,000 feet, they would not be able to fly above the weather and escape its ferocity. Further, although the flying boat could normally carry seventy-four passengers, she would now only be able to take seven with any reserve of petrol, for Rogers wisely insisted on carrying 5,000 US gallons - making his flying boat an all-up weight of 87,784 lb. at take-off. Worst of all from a safety point of view, they would have to maintain radio silence for most of the journey because of the secrecy of their flight. This meant that, should they be forced down on the bitterly cold Atlantic, they would have no way of guiding in any rescue craft.
Kelly Rogers therefore came under some hard and prolonged questioning as to the feasibility of the flight. He was one of Britain's most experienced civilian air pilots: less than a month before the outbreak of war he had flown the Imperial Airways flying boat 'Caribou' 3,000 miles from Southampton to New York, to inaugurate the first transatlantic air mail service between Britain and America. Then in January 1940, he had travelled to the Belgian Congo to salvage another Imperial Airways flying boat, 'Corsair,' which had come down in the jungle - a task that took him nine months. He knew the risks involved in flying the Atlantic in such a plane, and gave immediate replies to all the questions that were put to him. At last Mr Churchill turned to the others, taking the cigar out of his mouth, beaming with satisfaction.
'He seems to have all the answers, doesn't he?' he said approvingly. Rogers replied that he was confident in speaking as he did because 'merchant airmen' (as the pilots of civilian airliners were then called) had gained confidence enough to regard a flight from Bermuda to Britain 'as an everyday occurrence.'
Without more ado, Mr Churchill therefore announced that if weather conditions were suitable for flying next morning, he would fly home to England. If they were not, he would travel in the Duke of York. Portal would act for him in all matters relating to the flight, but the final decision as to whether or not they would make it would be left to Kelly Rogers.
'We all knew we had to reach home base or die,' writes General Hollis. 'As the meeting broke up, the general view seemed to be that the latter alternative would be our fate. All the cards seemed stacked against us, but since the Prime Minister's mind was set on making the journey by air, no one was courageous enough to appear cowardly before him. Secretly, we hoped the weather might be bad or some defect would be found in the aircraft, and then the whole mad flight would be abandoned, but to our alarm and disappointment neither of these hopes materialized. We had to go. As I shaved next morning I knew how the old Roman gladiators must have felt when they saluted Caesar on entering the arena, saying, "We, who are about to die, salute thee."...'
After an early breakfast, they assembled without enthusiasm on the jetty harbour for the launch to ferry them out to the 'Berwick.' Mr Churchill sat in a deck chair, anxious to be away and increasingly impatient of the delay caused by the fact that, by mistake, their luggage had been loaded in a tugboat which was already half-way across the harbour on its way to the Duke of York, lying in the Roads. They were forced to wait in the growing heat for several hours before this mistake could be rectified, and then the luggage had to be stacked carefully aboard the Boeing.
'With a full load of petrol on board, we did not clear the land by overmuch,' recalls Hollis. 'But we were soon flying at a medium height above a huge carpet of ten-tenths cloud, and I started work on my report of the Conference.'
Churchill alone appeared in great spirits, ebullient and irrepressible, and after lunch he lit a cigar and invited Kelly Rogers to join him for coffee. He was enjoying his journey and also savouring the surprise with which his Cabinet colleagues would see him return a week before he was expected.
In the rainy darkness outside the Control Room in Devonshire, the sentries buttoned up their greatcoat collars against the bitter wind from the Atlantic. Inside, the air felt stale and used up: against the friezes on the nursery wallpaper showing gnomes and fairies, the cables, boards and complicated electronic equipment appeared incongruous and unreal. The Wing Commander gave another brief report on the 'Berwick's' progress: 'Kelly Rogers is just half-way over and only a mile off his course. He's a great one, riding the weather fronts beautifully.'
'He'd need to, in this gale,' remarked another officer who had just come in from the black-out, pulling off his soaking raincoat and hanging it up on a peg behind the door.
Nearly 1,500 miles away, the 'Berwick' struggled east through the cold darkness. Dinner was served: wines, roast chicken, a sweet, and brandy. No one felt very hungry; now and then the aircraft dipped and rose again in an air pocket, and the roar of the engines came up with a new harshness, making those unaccustomed to flying look at each other quickly.
‘The best case I can make for this meal,' said Pound drily, 'is that at least we're getting rid of some of the weight this ship's carrying!'
'It was like a dinner on the night before execution,' says Hollis now. 'I don't know how we all got through with it.'
Churchill lit another cigar: he seemed impervious to the danger, unaware of the fantastic risk they were running; the thought of it certainly did not spoil his appetite - or his enjoyment of the food.1
'After dinner, Portal invited me to play cards. We had two hands of picquet, both of which he won,' continues General Hollis. 'As night descended, a glorious moon arose, and the whole scene was one of very great beauty. This, however, was no time for admiring the scenery, and I excused myself from a third game and worked on through the night. I had hoped to write my report during the week we would have been at sea. Now I had to do seven days' work in one.'
As the evening wore on Portal showed card tricks to Pound; and Churchill and Beaverbrook went up on to the flight deck looking at the star-sown sky and the pale, fluffy carpet of clouds beneath them. On they flew into night and ice, while frost traced white frozen patterns on the windows. Kelly Rogers worked the crude mechanism that split the ice from the ailerons, for the flying boat had no modern de-icing gear, and he flashed a spotlight so that the Prime Minister could see the hard white ice crusts being broken from the wings. Lower and lower the flying boat came down over the dark sea; now and then the wind flung handfuls of rain against the small portholes.
In the saloon, thick with cigar smoke, the shaded reading lights glowing redly on the little tables, Hollis kept on working. From time to time he looked up, thinking of a phrase, and saw his colleagues playing cards, relaxed, talking among themselves, with darkness and eternity only a few feet away.
'Several times the absurdity of the whole situation struck me,' he wrote later. 'Here was I trying to do a week's work in a night - and for what purpose? I seemed to be working in vain. So far as I knew a machine of this type had never flown the Atlantic before. We had nothing to defend ourselves with, if any enemy plane found us, no rubber dinghies to survive in if we came down. And we were losing height as the bad weather forced us nearer and nearer the sea. We had to keep radio silence, of course, lest any German air or sea patrol should pick up our signal and locate us. The odds against us ever reaching home seemed enormous.'
They flew on past the point of 'three engine no return'; then the last milestone of the sky, the point of 'four engine no return,' which meant that the nearest way home was the way ahead.
'At five o'clock I felt too tired to do any more work and lay back in my chair and slept,' says General Hollis.
When dawn came it was so cold that Mr Churchill's valet warmed his master's shoes in the kitchen oven. Radio reports began coming in of worsening weather over England, for although the flying boat was not sending messages, it could receive them. The black cloud-tops beneath them grew purple and then the sun brushed the sky with pale pink and orange, and soon after first light an officer, whom Portal took to be the navigator on duty, told him that their position had been checked by the sight of a star about five o'clock in the morning. But even so, they did not appear to be where they hoped they would be by that time.
'I did know from experience what could happen to dead reckoning in a relatively slow aircraft after five or six hours without a chance of checking drift,' Portal admitted later. Within seconds, everyone else also knew what had happened - and the danger they were in: they were due over German occupied France at any moment.
The telephone rang on the desk of Air Commodore H V Rowley, Acting Air Officer Commanding No. 10 Fighter Group, and responsible for coastal defence from Southampton in the south to Milford Haven in the west.
'Fighter Command here,' said a voice over the miles of wire. 'Just thought we'd tip you off. A VIP's flying in from the west in the morning. And when I say VIP I mean a VIP. He expected to land anywhere between Plymouth and Milford Haven. Just thought you'd better be in the picture. OK?'
'OK.'
The line went dead; Rowley walked into the Group operations room and by first light had fighters airborne over Fairwood Common, Cornwall and Exeter. Every half-hour they were replaced by others to make sure that both pilots and planes were kept continually at the utmost readiness. Hours passed, but still no aircraft was sighted from the west.
Back inside the 'Berwick,' Hollis awoke slowly and rubbed his eyes: the sky was pink and fresh through the round windows, but the air in the saloon seemed sour.
‘There was a great deal of coming and going between the control cabin, chiefly affecting Sir Charles Portal,' he wrote afterwards. 'He wore a strained look on his usually calm and unruffled countenance, and we subsequently learned that, largely due to his advice - he could, of course, give no orders - we made an immediate turn to the north-west. Thus, by a matter of minutes, we avoided coming out in a clear sky right over Brest, the most heavily defended French occupied port in the Channel. We were so low and so slow that the German gunners could not have failed to bring us down. I seriously considered tearing up my report and burning the whole thing in the aircraft kitchen, rather than risk its capture.'
Portal later apologized to Churchill for what he feared might have been a lack of politeness in his suggestions.
Churchill grunted.
'In war you don't have to be polite,' he replied, 'you just have to be right!'
As the 'Berwick' turned north-west a plot appeared on the radar screens of No. 10 Fighter Group Control Room showing an aircraft approaching thirty miles west and slightly north of Brest. It was immediately marked 'Hostile' and Rowley, seeing it was laying a direct course for England, thought it must be a single enemy bomber, and put up a flight of fighters to intercept it.
Meanwhile, in the Ferry Command control room in the West Country, the Wing Commander looked at his watch.
Time to feed some weather dope to Kelly Rogers,' he said, and as he spoke, Rogers' voice came over the radio for the first time in clear speech.
'I elect to go into Mount Batten, Plymouth,’ he announced briefly.
The British fighters passed very close to the returning 'Berwick,' but the fact that it was not spotted and shot down - after escaping the Germans - by its own side was largely due, says General Hollis, 'to the heavy cloud conditions, and also to further changes of course. We were all very thankful, too, that we missed the planes sent up to search for us. Only a few days previously a British general had been shot down in similar circumstances and we did not want to repeat this performance.' Air Commodore Rowley adds: 'By the grace of God and the difficult weather conditions the fighters failed in their mission. Fighter pilots at that time were apt to be light on the trigger, and a Boeing was not a very well-known type of flying boat. I retired to the officers' mess and soothed my jangled nerves with some light refreshment.'
The travellers from the 'Berwick' were soon soothing their own nerves in the same way, on the train to London, more relieved than they would admit at being again on land.
'I was glad then that I hadn't destroyed my report,' writes General Hollis. 'It was a unique document for our journey had actually begun on Sunday, December 7, 1941, when Churchill asked John G Winani, the American Ambassador, and Averell Harriman down for dinner at Chequers. Harriman had ingratiated himself with Mr Churchill's family, and then with the Prime Minister, who accepted him as a confidant and friend, and they travelled a great deal together.
'Harriman had been a rich playboy in his younger days, but later devoted himself to the interests of his country and was also very friendly to the British. He had the ear of President Roosevelt, but in my view he did not, in fact, help us as much as Harry Hopkins did.'
He and Churchill appeared to have the highest regard for each other, until one day at the Washington Conference General Marshall came into the room and beckoned to him, saying, 'Come in and tell me what you know.' Hollis calls this 'our first intimation that Harriman was gathering news to relay to his own colleagues in the States. He sent Roosevelt a great many telegrams, but they contained little of any importance. The President thought very highly of them, although they were mostly made up of snippets of gossip about personalities in British public life - such as the number of glasses of brandy certain British politicians might drink after dinner...'
On this occasion at Chequers, Churchill, half listening to his companions and half to the nine o'clock radio news, heard some vague references to Japanese attacks on American shipping at Hawaii, and on British ships in the Dutch East Indies. Harriman leaned forward and said he was sure there had been a reference to Japanese attacking the Americans. At that moment Churchill's butler, Sawyer, came into the room.
'It's quite true,’ he said. ‘We heard it outside ourselves. The Japanese have attacked the Americans.'
The three men at the table sat looking at each other, remembering Churchill's words at a Mansion House luncheon the previous month when he had said that should Japan attack America a British declaration of war would follow 'within the hour.' Churchill walked to his office, and asked them to put through a call to the President at the White House immediately. Winant, at his elbow, asked him anxiously: 'Don't you think you had better get confirmation first?' Mr Churchill shook his head and stood waiting, cigar in hand, until the President was on the line.
‘They've attacked us at Pearl Harbor,' said Roosevelt. 'We're all in the same boat now!'
Churchill thereupon decided to go to Washington to discuss plans with him, taking with him Lord Beaverbrook and the Chiefs of Staff, and Brigadiers Ian Jacob and Leslie Hollis.
This Washington Conference had been, in Hollis' view, the most difficult of all the conferences, for the Anglo-American alliance was still untempered steel. The Americans were reeling under the disaster of Pearl Harbor, and possibly a little nervous that the war-tried British might try to tell them what to do. We, on the other hand, were anxious to show that we had no desire to act as senior partners in the new-formed alliance, but as equals. We had no pattern to guide us, and the discussions were therefore long and wearisome.'
Hollis had brought his civilian secretary Mr Jones with him, and during a lull in the conference Jones said that he would be very grateful if Hollis could help him to realize a life's ambition: to set foot in the White House Could he possibly give him a paper which he could deliver there and so be able to tell his wife that he had achieved his aim?
This was quite easy to do, and Hollis gave Jones some documents to take to Mr Churchill's secretary. He duly presented his pass at the heavily guarded entrance to the White House, and, having stated his mission and been scrutinized, was ushered upstairs to the first floor where Mr Churchill had his rooms. To his alarm, as he stood in the corridor looking around him, the great door of one of the main bedrooms began to open slowly, and President Roosevelt emerged in his wheelchair. Mr Jones had no idea what to do, and therefore pressed himself against the wall in the faint hope that he would not be noticed. Mr Roosevelt noticed him, however, and seeing that he was obviously English, wished him 'Good morning,' and asked whether Mr Churchill was ready to receive him.
Mr Jones had no idea, but said he would find out. Roosevelt nodded towards another door behind which Mr Churchill presumably had his secretariat. Jones knocked on this door and a gruff voice, unmistakably the Prime Minister's, grumbled something within.
'Please open it for me,' said Roosevelt, and Jones did so and stood to one side. To his horror, Mr Churchill was revealed standing within a few feet of him freshly emerged from his bath, wrapping a towel around himself and looking with some surprise at the entry of the American President. He was, however, entirely equal to the occasion.
'Come in, Mr President,' said the Prime Minister grandly. 'England has nothing to hide.'
The President later invited Mr Churchill to accompany him to a special church service that Christmas, and with some difficulty Hollis managed to acquire a ticket for this historic occasion; but all through that morning the Niagara of memoranda and instructions and orders and telegrams proceeded without respite, and at last Mr Churchill's valet came into the bedroom where Churchill and Hollis were working to say it was time to prepare for church.
The Prime Minister announced that he wished to wear a white waistcoat with his dark suit. The valet replied that he did not think this would be in keeping. Mr Churchill told him to fetch the white waistcoat. The valet then made the point that the church would probably be overheated, and so the white waistcoat would be doubly inappropriate for such an occasion. Mr Churchill persisted that he wanted his waistcoat. At this a look of despair crossed the face of his faithful valet. He admitted that the white waistcoat had not been packed: it had been left behind in London.
'Sawyer,' asked Mr Churchill sadly, 'how could you?'
Because of his work General Hollis was despairing of being ready for church himself, but Churchill, seeing his disappointment on his face, patted him on the shoulder.
'Never mind, my boy,' he said generously, 'you will watch while I shall pray.'
So busy were they at the conference that the Prime Minister even worked in his bath, arid once he sent for Hollis to read him some secret reports that had just arrived. Hollis began to read, and suddenly Mr Churchill gripped his nose between thumb and forefinger and disappeared like a pink, plump porpoise under the surface of the bath water.
Hollis stopped reading for a few seconds until the Prime Minister surfaced again, wiping water from his eyes and hair. Accusingly, he looked over the rim of the bath at Hollis.
'Why did you stop reading?' he asked in an aggrieved tone. 'Don't you know that water is a conductor of sound?'
All these memories crossed Hollis' mind as the train took them through the snow-bound English countryside towards London.
‘Thinking about your report?' asked Admiral Pound in the silence.
'No,' replied Hollis. 'As a matter of fact, I was thinking about how I got involved with this set-up in the first place - how it all began...'
It began, so far as Leslie Hollis was concerned, nearly six years before, on a March afternoon in 1936. As a Royal Marines major who had been attached to the Plans Division of the Admiralty for the past two years, he was in his office preparing for his next posting to command the Royal Marines Detachment in HMS Hood. The telephone rang on his desk; he picked up the old-fashioned ear-piece.
'Hollis, Plans,' he said crisply.
'Burgis2 here,' said the voice at the other end of the line. 'Sir Maurice Hankey asked me to telephone you. Would it be convenient for you to come and see him this afternoon at five o'clock?'
'Of course.'
The strange wording of the request both surprised and disturbed him. In 1936, Sir Maurice Hankey, now Lord Hankey, held three positions of immense political power. Since 1912 he had been Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, the governmental body charged with the task of advising the Cabinet on the safety of the Empire; for seventeen years of this time he had also been Secretary to the Cabinet, and, in addition to these appointments, for the past eleven years he had been Clerk to the Privy Council.
During the First World War, Hankey was said to be the only man to attend every political and inter-Allied conference, and afterwards, when he was given the thanks of both Houses of Parliament, praise galore, and, more usefully, a gift of £25,000, Lloyd George declared he was the best Chief of Staff he had known. Mr Baldwin called him 'the ablest Civil Servant any country could possess,' and A J Balfour gave him the highest praise of all. 'Without Hankey,' he said, 'we should not have won the war.' Hankey owed much of his success to his ability to draft superlatively good minutes of meetings, to record clear-cut conclusions and to prepare memoranda on a variety of subjects, as required by the Government; all this when the Ministers themselves were not always very clear about what they had resolved.
At the Peace Conference in 1919, for instance, when many controversies and much friction disturbed the atmosphere, Clemenceau would rise from the table and say: 'Gentlemen, it is luncheon. Let us leave Monsieur Hankey to tell us later what we have decided.' After lunch, Hankey would table a list of 'Conclusions,' to all of which all the delegates would exclaim that that was exactly what they had been trying to say all the time.
Hankey had built up the system of the Cabinet Secretariat, by which records were kept and procedure made. Some might call him a soldier in peace and a secretary in war, but he did not mind: while his physical stature was slight, his power in 1936 was prodigious. He wore his responsibilities easily, however, often ate a two-shilling vegetarian lunch and travelled by bus whenever possible instead of taking a taxi.
Although Hollis had seen Sir Maurice when accompanying his own Director to meetings of the Overseas Defence Committee, and other Sub-Committees of the CID, between a Royal Marines major on a staff job of limited tenure and a man of such eminence there was fixed a great and seemingly unbridgeable gulf. Surely a summons from such a man could only mean one thing: the sack.
Hollis looked at his watch; it was already after four. He took down his bowler hat and umbrella, left the office, and walked into the first men's outfitters he saw.
'A stiff white collar, please, size fifteen,' he told the assistant. If he were going to be dismissed from the Service - and try as he might he could think of no other reason why Sir Maurice should send for him so suddenly - then he would go out smartly, and as befitted an officer of the Royal Marines.
He put on the new collar in the shop, crammed the old one into his pocket, and walked over the road to Westminster Abbey. The nave was nearly deserted. Here and there a few figures knelt in prayer; in the background an organist conducted an unseen choir at practice. Leslie Hollis, a clergyman's son, knelt down for a few moments, convinced that his career was at an end. He prayed that, somehow, whatever disaster might befall him, his wife and two young daughters would not have to face privation. Nineteen thirty-six, with two million men unemployed in Britain, and the number rising, was not a hopeful year for an ex-Regular Marines officer of forty to begin looking for another job.
Then, feeling more composed and resigned to whatever the meeting might bring, he walked smartly across to Whitehall Gardens to Sir Maurice Hankey's office. Burgis met him in his outer room, looking rather sharply at Hollis' pale, set face.
'I suppose you know why you are being sent for?' he asked. Hollis shook his head. As Burgis started to explain, a secretary entered the room.
'Sir Maurice will see you now,' she said, and held open the door. Hollis followed her into a room that was far more luxuriously furnished than the usual Government office; a fire burned discreetly in a burnished grate. Beyond the wide windows the Thames glittered in the afternoon sun. Hankey stood up, a slight, austere figure.
'Hollis,' he began at once, 'I've sent for you because I want you on my staff. We're reorganizing the Joint Planning Sub-Committee of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. I want you to be Secretary. How do you feel about it? You can have twenty-four hours to think it over.'
This was indeed the reverse of all Hollis' forebodings: suddenly the world seemed a brighter, happier place.
'I don't need any time at all, sir,' he replied. 'I'll take the post now.'
'Good. Sit down and I'll tell you what it's all about.'
Thus, quite unexpectedly, began the career that was to bring Leslie Hollis into the closest contact with all the political and Service leaders of the 1939-1945 war, in which he became assistant secretary of the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and attended no less than six thousand meetings of this body, an average of three every day. He was privy to all the great decisions, and, working with his friend and colleague, Lord Ismay, at Winston Churchill's elbow, endured the clash of temperaments that frequently provoked them.
His was the strangest war of all: largely fought, as we shall see, hundreds of feet beneath London, in the troglodytic world he later built for the War Cabinet, the Chiefs of Staff, and their advisers. Against the background hum of fans, pumping in filtered air from miles away, Hollis, Ismay and others worked for eighteen hours a day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
During these years Hollis was to employ relays of secretaries and typists, who arrived every four hours; but frequently he himself would work round the clock. Night, day, morning and evening were only hours to fill with work. Frequently he had to spend days on end without coming up to breathe fresh air. Eventually, missing regular exercise, for he had been an excellent hockey and tennis player in the Royal Marines, he engaged a masseur, who pummelled him for an hour at seven o'clock every morning. But even through these visits Hollis would dictate his memoranda to a stenographer.
On that March afternoon in 1936, however, these things belong to an unimagined and undreamed of future: the present was absorbing enough. It appeared that Hankey had been anxious for some time to have a Royal Marines officer on his staff - he had served in the Marines himself - and he wanted a man who would understand his thinking and his outlook but he feared lest such a move would be criticized as favouritism. Now that this new Governmental Sub-Committee was being formed, however, with a Naval Captain, a Group-Captain from the RAF, and an Army Colonel to advise the Directors of Plans of the three Services and the Chiefs of Staff on defence plans, it provided the opportunity he needed.
Because the estimates for expenditure to defend Great Britain and His Majesty's Dominions beyond the seas were so small,3 competition for the available money was great between the three Services, and tempers frequently ran high over financial discussions. At such times, a neutral Royal Marines officer could be very valuable in keeping the balance - and the peace between them.
The Chiefs of Staff Committee at that time consisted of Admiral Sir Ernie Chatfield, Air Marshal Sir Edward Ellington, and Field-Marshal Sir Cyril Deverell, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. In addition to their professional responsibilities as heads of the three fighting Services, these officers also held the corporate responsibility of advising the Government on strategic matters, either if the Government asked - which was rare - or if the Chiefs of Staff Committee felt that the situation warranted such a step. But as heads of the three Services they were kept busy on a variety of problems affecting their own Service, so any strategical plans required were first drafted, not by them, but by three junior officers known as the Joint Planning Committee. In 1936 this Committee consisted of Captain Tom Phillips, Royal Navy; Group-Captain Arthur Harris, and Colonel Ronald Adam.
These three officers were also the Directors of Plans for the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the War Office respectively, and were kept so busy on planning matters concerning these departments that they had little time to prepare any plans for their superiors. Nor could responsibility for national defence be passed further down the line; they were the end of the line.
By this extraordinary duplication of jobs everyone was so busy with their own affairs that the whole reason for having fighting Services at all was in danger of being forgotten. Indeed, after a decade of refusal to rearm, and an almost pathological inability on the part of successive governments to admit the increasing danger from Germany, no plan of any kind existed for the defence of Britain in the event of war. But by March 1936, when Hitler marched on the Rhineland in his first act of repudiation of the Versailles Treaty, even Mr Baldwin, the Prime Minister, known more widely to the public for his pipe4 than for his grasp of foreign and defence problems, felt that this policy of vacillation and drift must end. Since all the officers appointed to produce defence plans were seemingly too busy to do so, three other officers - Captain Charles Daniel, Royal Navy, Colonel Dick Dewing, and Group-Captain Hugh Frazer of the RAF - were chosen to form this entirely new Sub-Committee of the Joint Planning Committee, of which Hollis would be the Secretary. Hankey had specifically arranged that these four officers would have no other Service responsibilities; it was sufficient responsibility to produce a plan to save their country.