“Across the country, faith in Churchill’s leadership was crumbling. The military debacles created a major political crisis for the prime minister.”

By Taylor Downing

ON THE AFTERNOON of Sunday, Feb. 15, 1942, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival left his command HQ just outside Singapore city. Accompanied by an officer with a white flag he went to the HQ of his adversary General Tomoyuki Yamashita where after some negotiation he signed a surrender document.

Percival’s Indian, Malaysian, Australian and British troops had been in retreat for two months under a relentless and fast-paced Japanese advance that at every point out-performed his troops. Photos of a British general with a force of about 100,000 men surrendering to a resolute Japanese commander with troops of about one quarter that number went around the world. Nothing symbolised the collapse of British power in Asia more clearly. And it was the largest surrender in British history. No one could hide a sense of shame including Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who later said that the fall of Singapore was “the greatest disaster to British arms which our history records.”

That same weekend, three large German warships, the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen, had sailed up the English Channel and passed through the 21-mile-wide Straits of Dover in broad daylight. It was a humiliation for the Royal Navy and the RAF, both of whom had tried desperately to stop the German ships from passing and failed.

Mass Observation was a group that recorded everyday comments by people across Britain. Observers wrote down verbatim what people were saying, and others kept diaries to record the reactions of friends and neighbours. The fact that Britannia no longer seemed to rule the waves and could not even stop German warships from passing within a few miles of the White Cliffs prompted complaints and indignation. In a grocery store in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire an observer noted down what her customers were saying: “They’ve made fools of us, haven’t they?” said one lady.

A male customer commented: “By gosh it’s time we bucked up what with one thing and another – there’s only the Russians…They wouldn’t have let them slip, you can bet.” Mass Observation concluded that people felt “this was the most bitter failure of the whole war…the blackest week since Dunkirk.”

The press erupted in outrage and the normally loyal Daily Mail led the charge with an attack not just on the government but on the prime minister too. Up to this point most government criticism had avoided attacking the PM but now the Daily Mail pointed the finger of blame at Churchill himself.

When he had become Prime Minister, Churchill had also appointed himself Minister of Defence. Every aspect of Britain’s military performance came under his supervision and so he could not escape responsibility when things went wrong.

On an RAF base at Digby in Lincolnshire, a young WAAF officer detected a new tone among her colleagues. As a Mass Observer she dutifully wrote down what she heard: “Up to now,” she recorded, “the government has been criticised often, but always with the reservation ‘Churchill’s all right.’ But now Churchill is condemned with the rest.” As one young WAAF said, “He roared all right in his time, but he’s outlived it.”

Churchill was thrown into a mood of despair by the disasters of that February weekend. After a Cabinet meeting, Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote in his diary: “PM truculent and angry.”

The next day in the House of Commons, Labour MP Frederick Bellenger told the prime minister: “There is in the country and indeed in the House… a feeling that we have not got the right kind of persons to direct this war to a satisfactory conclusion…we have not got the right kind of Government.” At this, the House cheered.

“Papa is at a very low ebb,” Churchill’s daughter Mary wrote after a private lunch with her father later in the month. She went on: “He is worn down by the continuous crushing pressure of events. He is saddened – appalled by events.”

But the military disasters continued throughout the spring of 1942. In Burma (Myanmar), British and Imperial troops were once again totally outclassed by Japanese forces. British-led troops retreated 900 miles across jungles, mountains and ravines. It was called the ‘longest retreat’ in British history. And it left the Japanese at the gates of India.

Losses in the Atlantic rose to terrifying levels: 420,000 tons of shipping in January 1942, rising to 830,000 tons in March. Three hundred British ships were sunk by U-boats in the first six months of the year, totalling more than a million tons of shipping. Britain needed not only armaments and munitions from America to fight the war but fuel and foodstuffs, metals and chemicals simply to survive. This was a battle that had to be won. And it 1942 it was being lost.

In the North African desert, a see-saw war was being fought up and down the Libyan coastline. Supplies continued to arrive to support 8^th Army led by General Neil Ritchie. A huge base was built up in Tobruk with vast supplies of fuel, rations and ammunition. Infantry units were brought up to strength and armoured brigades were re-equipped with new tanks including American Grants. But on May 26, Rommel launched an offensive at Gazala. Once again, the British Army were out-witted by their skilful foe. By June 8, 220 British tanks including many of the Grants had been knocked out. From London, Churchill cabled that “retreat would be fatal,” adding: “This is a business not only of armour but of will power.”

But sadly, the necessary will power was lacking. Ritchie led a retreat to the Egyptian border but ordered Tobruk, well supplied and garrisoned, to hold out as it had done in the previous year. Rommel had a different idea.

On Saturday June 20, he launched an assault upon the garrison. By afternoon his panzers had reached the harbour. On the following day, the commander ordered a surrender. In 1941, Tobruk had held out defiantly for eight months; in June 1942, it collapsed in a weekend.

Churchill was in Washington, at the White House with President Roosevelt when the news came through. As many as 33,000 British-led troops had surrendered to an Axis force of perhaps half that size. Churchill was shattered.

‘This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war,” he later wrote, adding: “Defeat is one thing. Disgrace is another.’

Across the country, faith in Churchill’s leadership was crumbling. Mass Observation reported that July was “a month of discontent and disappointment.”

A middle-class woman in Hampshire who kept a diary for Mass Observation recorded a neighbour saying that “she thought we would be under German rule here before too long.” Another friend “pleaded guilty to having lost faith in Churchill.”

The military debacles created a major political crisis for the Prime Minister and his government. A vote of censure was put down in Parliament. Aneurin Bevan, the left-wing Labour MP, famously summed up the mood of many: ‘The prime minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle. The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.” But despite the rhetoric, Churchill easily defeated the censure vote.

With a new offensive due in Egypt, Churchill desperately needed a military victory. Brendan Bracken, a close friend and supporter of the PM, said to a colleague: “If we are beaten in this battle, it’s the end of Winston.”

After a tense few months, the PM finally got what he needed when General Montgomery’s 8^th Army smashed the Axis forces at El Alamein in early November. Four days later, American troops landed in French North-West Africa in Operation Torch. The fighting in the desert was a long way from being over but victory looked increasingly certain. Churchill’s standing quickly revived and by mid-December, Gallup recorded that satisfaction with Churchill’s leadership had been restored.

The year 1940 is usually thought to be Churchill’s most difficult year as prime minister, with the fall of France, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. But in reality, it proved to be his “finest hour.” It’s often imagined that from here on it was plain sailing along the long, slow route to final victory in 1945. But that was not the case. Churchill’s blackest hour came in 1942. When he dictated his memoir-history for this period of the war he described the long run of disasters in 1942 as “galling links in a chain of misfortune and frustration to which no parallel could be found in our history.” He reflected that if he had been dismissed during the year of military disasters he would then “have vanished from the scene with a load of calamity on my shoulders.”

But Churchill survived. Military victory brought a revival of his political fortunes. As he also later wrote: “Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.”

Taylor Downing is the author of 1942: Winston Churchill and Britain’s Darkest Hour, published by Pegasus Books in October, 2022. Historian, writer and broadcaster, he has written several best-selling books and has produced more than 200 television documentaries. Visit his website www.taylordowning.com