Churchill and the Navy by Richard Hough

Author:Richard Hough [Hough, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Enough. Enough for Winston Churchill, in spite of a personal political disaster, but still buoyed up by the expectation of a new Battle of Trafalgar on the morrow. Enough for Fisher, bitter, enraged, but still plotting in his room at the Charing Cross Hotel. Enough for broken-hearted Asquith going through the motions of forming a new government like an automaton.

Those who felt a sense of imminent fulfilment that night of 17 May, experiencing the sharp tang of adrenaline and that unique strain of excitement which only a warrior experiences before battle, were the commanders and the men of the battleships and battle-cruisers, the whippy light cruisers of men like Commodores Reginald Tyrwhitt and William Goodenough, and the young bloods of the black destroyers pounding through the darkness towards their destiny. Theirs was the reality of war, far distant from the squalid manoeuvrings of the Westminster mandarins.

In Whitehall and London’s political homes, men slept uneasily, their minds restlessly concerned with the political upheavals and manipulations of the next day, and how, above all, that day would affect them and their future status and power. They were unaware of those hurrying men o’war and their crews who slept not at all.

A great victory in the North Sea would have saved Churchill. But as the signals arrived at the Admiralty in the early hours of 18 May indicating that the Germans were on their way home again and that there would be no new Battle of Trafalgar, Churchill made the decision to fight his own battle. For him there would be no tame retreat on this Whitehall battlefield. Until Asquith formally accepted his resignation, he remained First Lord, with a chance of holding on. Fisher’s behaviour – ‘Lord Fisher madder than ever,’ Hankey commented – gave Churchill some additional strength. Max Aitken, proprietor of the Daily Express and later Lord Beaverbrook, recalled a conversation at Admiralty House on the evening of 18 May which showed Churchill’s determination to remain as First Lord. ‘He was clinging to the desire of retaining the Admiralty as if the salvation of England depended on it.’36

For a few hours Churchill misguidedly entertained the idea that the Conservatives might save him and, disregarding Fisher’s much quoted adage ‘Never explain!!!’, made contact with Bonar Law. Two of the greatest disasters of his wartime period of office for which he was held to blame by the Conservatives were the sinking of the Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy, and the Coronel defeat. Recovering from the Admiralty files the papers covering these two events, he sent them with a letter to Bonar Law because, as he wrote, there was a ‘good prospect of our becoming colleagues’. ‘You must not suppose’, he concluded his letter, ‘that in sending you these I want to claim all the credit or avoid the blame, only hitherto the principle has been that the blame only came to me.’

Next, Churchill drafted a long public statement defending his Dardanelles policy and actions. On 19 May he took it round

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