Dan Snow's History Hit - 1942: Churchill's Real Darkest Hour

Episode Date: January 23, 2022

Most people think that Britain's worst moment of the war was in 1940 when the nation stood up against the threat of German invasion. Yet, eighty years ago, Britain stood at the brink of defeat. In 1942, a string of military disasters engulfed Britain in rapid succession, including the collapse in Malaya; the biggest surrender in British history at Singapore and the passing of three large German warships through the Straits of Dover in broad daylight.Taylor Downing, historian, writer and broadcaster, joins Dan on the podcast to draw the startling parallels between events in 1942 and today. They discuss just how unpopular Churchill became in 1942 against the backdrop of a new low of public morale, the two votes attacking his leadership in the Commons and the emergence of a serious political rival. As people began to claim that Churchill was not up to the job and that his leadership was failing badly, it was 1942 that was in fact Britain’s real darkest hour.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hey everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. 80 years ago, 1942, the war was going badly for Britain and the US, particularly in the first six months. In this episode of the podcast, I talk to Taylor Downing. He's the author of a new book about 1942. He's written many wonderful books before. He's been on this podcast before. He is a historian. He's a filmmaker. He is a legend, a wonderful, wonderful historian, a wonderful history communicator. And we start by talking about Churchill's very personal crisis 80 years ago over Christmas. And in 1941, he had a heart attack while staying at the White House. He was not in a good way physically or mentally,

and the defeats kept piling up in Asia, in North Africa, in the decisive battlefield, which was, of course, the Battle of the Atlantic. Don't forget the naval war, folks. And as Taylor shows, Churchill came under really very severe criticism inside the UK, arguably his position as Britain's warlord was threatened. Such an interesting topic, this little chipping away, little looking inside the Churchill myth. Fascinating. How close did Churchill come to losing his job in 1942? Taylor Downing will tell us. If you like to watch documentaries about the Second World War, then let me tell you, we've got plenty of them. History Hit TV is the world's best history channel. It's like Netflix for history. You simply head over to History Hit hit tv the link is in the description for this

podcast you click on that link you get two weeks free check the whole thing out if you don't like it then subscribe simple as that but if you do like it which you will you enter a long and happy relationship with history we're making more shows all the time i'm off to the antarctic we're making a big show about shackleton down in the antarctic and later this year we've got some exciting first world war archaeology to share with you as well. It's all coming up. So please go and check out History Hit TV. But in the meantime, everyone, here is Taylor Downing talking about Churchill's Darkest Hour. Enjoy. Taylor, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

You're welcome. Happy to be talking to you again. Obviously, you know me, I love an anniversary, but 1942, I think it's really interesting the way you've termed this as Churchill's darkest hour. Let's start with the end of 1941, though. Let's start with his little trip to the White House and his big day when he spoke to both a joint session of Congress and then went home. And what happened to him? Well, it was a very hot evening in Washington. It was the 26th of December 1941. So Boxing Day, 1941. It's a very, very hot evening. And he'd been given a suite of rooms actually in the White House, in one of the wings of the White House. And he tried to open the window to get a bit of air,

you know, very British sort of thing. Don't rely on air conditioning or anything, you know, get some air into the room. And he struggled with this window. And he really found it quite difficult. And then he felt a pain in his chest. And he thought, oh, I pulled a muscle. So he speaks to his doctor the next morning and says, he's had this little incident. And the doctor examines him and realises that he's had a very minor sort of heart failure. And the doctor has got seconds to decide what to do. If he tells the prime minister that the normal treatment in those days would have been sort of six weeks rest. Well, this is a critical point in the war. The prime minister can't take six weeks out of things. If he tells him he's got to rest, you know, he'll probably undermine his complete

leadership. On the other hand, if he says carry on and then he has a serious heart attack the next day, he, the doctor, will be blamed for the consequences. So anyway, he says, you know, you've had a little bit of an incident, but take it easy. Key thing, Dan, I think, is that although he knew this was a very minor form of heart attack, the doctor didn't inform anybody else or the cabinet back in London weren't told. So Churchill carries on. And unfortunately, you know, although he has other illnesses later on in the war, this wasn't a harbinger of a sort of bigger

heart attack still to come. Do you think his health problems are part of this crisis that he faced in 1942? What do you make of Churchill, the man, his energy, his ability to stay in this extraordinary position that he'd found himself in at the top of this gigantic war-making machine by 1942? Oh no, I don't think his health was one of the issues in 1942. It became a bit more of an issue later in the war, in 43 and 44. But in 42, he was an extraordinary tough fellow. I mean, he's 67. He constantly says that, oh, when Lloyd George was running the First World War as prime minister, you know, he was in his 50s. I'm more than 10 years later than him and so on. So he moaned a bit about it.

But actually, he was very, very tough, very resilient, enormously hardworking. I mean, the hours that he put in, the work that he did, the way he kept all his officials absolutely on top form. He used to have, he's quite well known now, but I love this story that he did, the way he kept all his officials absolutely on top form. You know, he used to have, it's quite well known now, but I love this story that he used to have this sticker that he would stick on certain of his memos. He was constantly dictating memos, demanding information on this, ordering such and such to be done at high speed. And he had this sticker that he would stick on some of them. It was a big red sticker. I've seen them. They're in the archives. It says, action this day.

And he demanded, if he said, when can we do this? Or what's the response to that? He demanded that officials get back to him later that same day. And for a sort of civil service coming out of the sort of interwar period that was fairly gentlemanly and fairly relaxed in the way it worked, this absolutely galvanised the whole system of government at the top. And of course, as all management training today says, change starts at the top, or the example is led by the sort of chief executive, by the leader. And Churchill was a great one for setting an example of bringing pace, energy and determination to the whole process

of the war leadership. But 1942 was a year where Churchill could not impose his will on the course of the war through speeches and energy and the bureaucracy. I mean, things went badly for Britain and initially as well in the Pacific for the new British ally, the US. Let's re-rehearse the military setbacks and then we'll talk about some of the domestic issues he faced. So very early on, Pearl Harbour just happened. Britain comes under attack. First shots of the Pacific War, in fact. Before Pearl Harbour, Britain was attacked in Malaya. And how did that go?

Well, sadly, it was a complete and utter disaster. The Japanese proved very, very agile, very mobile. Whereas British defences, normally the defensive position would be to block a road. And all the Japanese would do would be to go off in the jungle, surround the road, get behind the troops, force a sort of hasty and shambolic retreat, abandoning huge quantities of supplies and often abandoning several men. So within weeks, the Japanese who seemed to be breaking all rules of sort of jungle warfare, as far as the imperial forces were concerned, just rolled back the Allied troops with great speed.

And it was a relatively small Japanese force that advanced through Malaya, overwhelming the far greater numbers of the British, Indian and Australian troops. And Singapore falls in February, which Churchill describes in quite grandiose terms, doesn't he? He calls it the greatest disaster that has ever befallen British arms. About 25,000, maybe something like that, Japanese troops overwhelm this supposedly impregnable fortress of Singapore, which had been built up since the 1920s as the sort of bastion, as the centrepiece of Britain's military defence in Asia. About 85,000 Allied troops surrendered to about 25,000, something like that, Japanese forces. It was an absolute catastrophe as far as Britain's standing and imperial standing in the Far East was concerned.

Let's talk about North Africa now. Well, there's one other incident we just need to talk about before we go to North Africa, which is the sailing of these three big German ships up the Channel. Channel Dash. The Channel Dash. They were refitting in the French harbour of Brest, and Hitler recalls them to their ports in the Baltic. And they decide, instead of going a long route all the way around Scotland and into the Baltic that way, they decide they're just going to dash up the channel at high speed. Very high risk strategy because they've got to ultimately go through the 22 mile gap

between Dover and Calais. But they pull it off with tremendous efficiency. The British response is uncoordinated. Communications constantly break down. The RAF don't quite know what the Navy are doing. The Navy don't get reports from the RAF. And the ships sail right through the Straits of Dover. And as far as many people at home are concerned, the British people, this is the sort of ultimate humiliation. This is such a catastrophe. The Spanish hadn't been able to do this with the Armada hundreds

of years before. And here, big German capital warships sailing right through the harbour. You know, the Brits are seeing British ships being sunk by the Japanese in the Far East, and yet no amount of RAF attacks on these three ships score a single hit. They are in fact hit by mines off the Dutch coast, but people in Britain don't know that at the time. And it was such a humiliation. And there's this wonderful record of mass observation, which records what individual people around the country are thinking. And mass observation is just full of people saying, this is the most humiliating setback. How could we possibly let German warships sail through the

Straits of Dover? People are absolutely humiliated. The Royal Navy, you know, Britannia not only doesn't rule the waves in the Far East, but it can't even rule the waves outside Dover. You know, this just seems such a catastrophe. And the Daily Mail, which is usually very loyal to Churchill, turns on him and says, you know, we've got the wrong sort of leadership that allow this sort of catastrophe to happen. Okay, we've got the Channel Dash. Let that allow this sort of catastrophe to happen. OK, we've got the Channel Dash. Let's also deal with other military failures, and then we'll come back to that kind of issue of leadership.

Battle of the Atlantic, how's that going? Battle of the Atlantic is going extremely badly in the first months of 1942. The Germans have changed their... We had cracked their Enigma codes, the naval codes, in 1941, and have been able to identify where the wolf packs of U-boats were located in the Atlantic and divert convoys away from where it was known the U-boats were sort of waiting for them and losses had gone right down. But at the end of 41, beginning of 42, the Germans had added a new rotor blade to the back of their Enigma machines, which made it,

I don't know the arithmetic exactly, but it's something like 26 million times more complicated to decode. And until much later in 1942, until they'd actually captured some of these new machines and the new code books, Bletchley Park was in the dark, as the phrase had it at the time. So losses of convoys were shooting up. There's hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping are lost each month. That's dreadful loss of life. But it's also millions of tons of supplies that the country needed coming from America were ending up at the bottom of the Atlantic. So the Battle of the Atlantic was something that concerned Churchill enormously.

He knew this was the battle that would lose Britain the war. Britain was reliant upon imports, not just all the things it needed for its military machine, but the food, the chemicals, the supplies it needed to keep the country alive. So this was the battle that really could have lost Britain the war. Also, we've got North Africa. Tobruk, after heroic defence of Tobruk, Tobruk then falls in the summer of 1942. Devastating.

Absolutely. Another catastrophe. A garrison of 33,000 men. There's half a million gallons of fuel. There's quantities of supplies, food, rations and so on. And whereas the garrison had held out very courageously for about eight months in 1941, in June 1942, as you said, it surrenders in one weekend. And Churchill is actually in the White House in a meeting with Roosevelt when news of this comes through. And he's absolutely devastated. He calls, you know, defeat is one thing, disgrace is another. Because yet again, a large-ish Allied force, about 33,000 men, had surrendered to an enemy force that was probably half that number. Churchill says he can't hide from the president the sense of shame and the damage to the reputation to British arms

that this surrender in Tobruk led to. Is that all, by the way? Is that the worst things that happened to him? Well, there's all sorts of other things that happened. There's a defeat in Burma, what was called the longest retreat in British history. Rangoon, another imperial capital, is surrendered in March. A 900-mile retreat gets the Japanese right to the gates of India, opens up the Bay of Bengal for the Japanese Navy to come in and start sinking ships apparently at random. So yet another catastrophic retreat and defeat, this time leaving the Japanese, as I say, right at the door to India. India, the jewel in the crown and all that, you know, very, very important British possession,

now felt itself threatened by an enemy at the gates. Well, and a naval enemy pushing into what is now Sri Lanka, of course, as well. The forgotten raids on Ceylon, I always think, are so fascinating in Easter. 1942, bad moment, not just in the Pacific, but the Indian Ocean as well. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, four big warships are sunk around Ceylon, as it then was Sri Lanka today. And yet again, one asks the question, have the admirals not learned any lessons from the last few months about leaving ships at sea undefended from air attack?

And the Navy survives by basically hiding, which is not very much in keeping the glorious tradition as the Royal Navy anyway. So, Taylor, let's get on to the bit that, you know, domestically, we think of Churchill as this absolutely, you can't lay a glove on him. And in a way, that's what makes the general election defeat in 1945 so extraordinary to people. What's going on? But actually, your work has really opened my mind to the fact that there was a sort of lively criticism of Churchill, his record and his character during the war itself, particularly in the first maybe eight months of 1942. How deep did that go?

Very deep. Absolutely no question that there was a widespread sense that whilst Churchill had been absolutely the man two years before in 1940, the Battle of France, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, you know, he'd come up with the phrases that had rallied a nation. He'd really led from the front that we will never surrender and all those very famous speeches and quotations and the role that he played then was absolutely right. But again, according to mass observation, this wonderful resource, it's becoming very clear to many people that Churchill is no longer the man for the job. People say, you know, well, he roared well once, but he's not up to it now. He seemed to be exhausted. He seemed to be running a system

that was constantly failing, a military system that was constantly failing, not just military defeats, but these disasters and humiliations. And in a sense, Dan, you know, he had nowhere to hide. When he became prime minister, he'd appointed himself minister of defence. And so he was uniquely, this had never been done before in war, he was uniquely in charge of the military situation. And he was today what we would call a micromanager, you know, he meddled in everything, he wanted to get involved in tactical decisions, not just in strategic decisions. His generals and admirals and air marshals constantly sort of found him irritating with the demands he made on them

and the questions he asked and the level of detail he wanted to be involved with. So when things start going wrong, and one military failure, one military debacle follows another, he can't really blame anybody else because he is so obviously the person in charge of Britain's military war effort. And that rubs off the papers get very hostile to him. The questions that are asked in the House. There are two votes, a vote of no confidence in January and a vote of censure in June, both of which he survives. I mean, it would be remarkable if he hadn't. But both of them give an opportunity for not just the opposition, but for many Conservative MPs to really speak their mind. This man is

no longer the man for the job. He's past it. He needs to devolve some of the decision making, at least a Minister of Production, at least to control the production side. Other people say he needs a Minister of Defence. He should be taking a strategic charge, but somebody else should be looking more at the nitty gritty of it all. And all of this is aired over and over again in Parliament, in the press. You read the press from the months March, April, May 1942. And well, at least once a week, there's a leader or there's an article criticising Churchill. And mass observation picks up on this and is recording people all over the country saying the guy's passed it. He's not the leader. I can see that we'll all be living under the Third Reich before long if this goes on. We just can't take this level of losses anymore. You listen to Dan Snow's history hit. We're talking about 1942 and how bad

things got for Churchill and the Allies. More coming up. Have you ever thought about sex in ancient Rome? Perhaps you've pondered over the origins of civilisation. Or maybe you've had restless nights contemplating where Alexander the Great's lost tomb might be. I know I have. If so, we've got the perfect remedy. It's the Ancients on History hit. The Ancient History podcast. We've got interviews with leading experts on all of the above and so much more. So why not give the podcast a listen? Subscribe to The Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

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By subscribing to Gone Med from history hit wherever you get your podcasts we see at the moment we also have leadership crisis leadership in the uk and we get a lot of critiques by people going, look, I sort of like Boris Johnson, but he may be sick or it's bad advisors. He needs to appoint some, this odd expression that keeps coming, grownups. What does that criticism of Churchill take? I mean, do you get people directly going,

he is not fit for this job? Or is it a lot about kind of what needs to read? Like you mentioned the Minister of Munitions and Production. Is it also about reshuffles and maybe better advisors? No, no, I think it really does go beyond that. I think from my reading of the documents, the press, the mass observation reports, the diarists who are recording conversations they have with neighbours and friends, it really does go quite deep. It really does go to the fact that Churchill himself is no longer up for the job. I think probably there are parallels

in a sense. I mean, there are no true parallels in history. All circumstances are different. But there are certain echoes today in that today we've got medical emergencies and pandemic and so on that create a sense of crisis. In 1942, any democratic society at war is going to be military defeats that create a crisis. And what we see during the course of the first eight, nine months of 1942 is so many military defeats create a political crisis that Churchill has to confront. He survives these votes against him in Parliament, but a credible leader emerges, a man called Sir Stafford Cripps, not well remembered today, but he was the absolute opposite of Churchill. He was an austere figure. He was a teetotaler.

He was very much associated with the Soviet war effort. He'd been ambassador in Moscow for a while. And so whereas Churchill is associated with British defeats, Cripps manages to associate himself very cleverly in media terms. He associates himself with great heroic Soviet resistance on the Eastern Front. He's thought to be a sort of super efficient manager, organiser. And so he emerges, and again, mass observation pick up on this and say he is the first serious rival since the fall of Chamberlain to Churchill. So Churchill is under criticism in the press, his popular standing collapses in the country, and another potential political rival appears. But Cripps never really pushes it, never pushes it to the extreme. In my view, he could have almost unseated Churchill in 1942, but he doesn't. And Churchill survives. And of

course, what every leader needs in war is a military victory. And he gets one in October. But let's quickly talk about the importance. You mentioned arithmetic in Parliament and Cripps and things. Is itlee really important here? Is Labour's commitment to keeping Churchill in office almost decisive? Very, very important. I mean, he makes Attlee in the course of 1942 Deputy Prime Minister. So remember, let's go back to 1940. When Churchill comes in, he's a member of a Conservative government.

There's the view that what is needed now is a national coalition to confront a conservative government. There's the view that what is needed now is a national coalition to confront a national emergency. So Churchill leads a coalition between the conservative and the Labour Party. Clement Attlee, who's the leader of the Labour Party, is effectively his deputy, but is a formally appointed deputy prime minister in 1942. And he is very keen to do the patriotic thing, not only to support Churchill, but to support the war effort as it's being run at the time. So a lot of the criticism against Churchill is also fired by some, particularly the left of the Labour Party is fired at Attlee as well. So Attlee stands by Churchill throughout 1942 as a sort of loyal deputy, and largely keeps the

Labour Party in line in support of Churchill. So you're absolutely right. He plays a very prominent part. But there are others too. Ernest Bevin, as Minister of Labour, largely acts to keep the workforce on side. There are strikes and there are disputes, but they're relatively small, certainly in 1942. So the Labour Party is backing Churchill, the national leader, throughout 1942. And Churchill gets a victory. I mean, the Pacific War is stabilised. The Japanese fleet is eviscerated at Midway.

Churchill struggles to have much credit for that. But North Africa, Montgomery, his man, a big victory at Alamein in November 1942. He puts Montgomery in the job. He deliberately sends resource there that could otherwise go on. He can reasonably claim to take some credit for Alamein, right? Yes, he can, yes. I mean, North Africa was the one theatre where the British army could confront the German army and the Italian army as well on the land.

Having been thrown out of Europe after Dunkirk and the Italian army as well on the land. Having been thrown out of Europe, you know, after Dunkirk and the fall of France in 1940, where else could Britain actually fight on the land? It could maintain its bombing offensive against Germany, which was a bit disastrous to begin with, but was building up momentum. Disastrous because we simply didn't have the technology to hit targets with any level of accuracy. But the one place where land battles could be fought was North Africa. And so it became a very important theatre for Churchill. He sent enormous supplies out. And what he couldn't understand was why was it that this well-equipped army repeatedly

at the end of 1941 and then at the Battle of Gazala in May, June 1942, why was it that the Eighth Army kept losing? And he decides it's probably an issue of leadership. And he appoints General Montgomery to take command in August 1942. He isn't his first choice. The first choice that Churchill makes, General Gott, is actually killed after his appointment he's flying from the front line back to Cairo and his aircraft is shot down and by the time they get to the burning wreck and pull the bodies out Gott is killed so he's Churchill's second choice as commander is Montgomery but he is a different kettle fish he's new to the desert war he's been

in Britain for the last two years since Dunkirk. And he brings new ideas, new determination. And he really inspires his troops. You read reports of Montgomery. He led from the front. He would travel from one unit to another and make these little short speeches, some of which were filmed and we can look at today, which seems slightly silly today because he doesn't say much other than, you know, we'll hit them for four, or we'll bat them out of North Africa, or some sort of sporting metaphors. And it all sounds

a bit jokey now. In fact, it's been caricatured by comedians many times since. So it all seems a bit odd to us today, but it had its effect in the time. You know, your average private or corporal or sergeant wasn't used to seeing a three-star general turn up and address them as equals almost. So they were absolutely inspired by his determination and he imposes a strict physical training regime to get the men fitter. He slightly reorganises the relationship between armoured units and infantry units to better coordinate initially his defence and then his attack. And finally, as you say, at the Battle of El Alamein, it's about an eight, ten day battle. It's not easy. But finally, the tanks break through and

Churchill at last on the 4th of November 1942 gets the message he's desperately wanted to receive all year, the message from General Alexander that says the German and Italian forces are in full retreat, we have broken through the enemy lines and this is the beginning of the big turnabout at the end of 1942. four days later the american troops land in northwest africa to casablanca oran and algiers huge landing vast operation that's been planning for many many months so in the eastern section of north africa the eighth army are finally on a roll recapturing all the towns and the cities, Tobruk and others, Benghazi, others that they'd lost. And from the western tip of North Africa, the Americans slowly start moving eastwards. And although there's a lot of fighting still to go in North Africa, again, it does look as though the tide really has turned. And of course, on the Eastern Front at roughly the same time,

the end of 1942, the beginning of 1943, the Red Army is finally successful at the Battle of Stalingrad in defeating the German Sixth Army. Von Paulus surrenders in front of the newsreel cameras. A German field marshal surrendering, you know, the first time ever in history. So come the beginning of 43, it really does look as though the tide has turned. Lastly, what about Churchill, where we started, Churchill's health? What about his mental health? How did he cope during this year? We know he had suffered from terrible depression. Did he find 1942 particularly difficult? Yes, he did, without any question. The Black Dog, as he called it, these sort of periods of Black Depression, he had many of them. And there are so many accounts of this. Those who are with him in cabinet, who keep diaries, you can read over and over again,

Cadogan is Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, their diaries are full of accounts of Churchill in deep despair at the humiliations that military defeats bring. His daughter Mary has a private lunch with her parents in Downing Street in March 1942. She says, Papa is at a very, very low ebb. He's really being brought down by the scale of events. So I think there's no question that it really did get to him. There's one point where Sir Anthony Eden, his foreign secretary, who's the sort of deputy leader of the Conservative Party, says, you know, the government's out of control. We're not having proper meetings. We're not making proper decisions. You know, this is very unlike the Bulldog Churchill

that we're more familiar with, the man who makes a decision quickly, comes to a decision quickly, enforces it rapidly, you know, gets things done. Clearly, there were moments in 1942 where these humiliations did get to him and really did upset him. And of course, he wanted to be the leader of a military successful country. That was what he'd been obsessed with military history, with the great victories of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. You know, he was full of Britain's grand military story. And the fact that he should be prime minister, he should be war leader in a period of absolute disaster for British arms really did get to him. well who can blame him i the older i get the more i regard any politician who can remain in the kind of cauldron of decision making and stress like that just as a physiologically i find it completely

fascinating what's it do to the human body i get very stressed if i'm you know i've got to get five podcasts a week and i find that quite anxious making you know it's crazy Taylor thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast what is your book called the book is called 1942 Britain at the Brink and it's out in January 1940 1942 it's out in January 2022 there I'm so stuck in my historic period I even get today's date wrong it's out in in January 2022. It's a really interesting reappraisal. So thank you very much indeed, Taylor Downing, for coming on. Thank you.

I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project.

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