Lord Beaverbrook Read online

  No one was going to mess with Max Aitken. He was the inspired little tough from the town of Newcastle, on the banks of the Miramichi. If he had been intimidated by anyone, he wouldn’t have made it out of Newcastle. That’s the secret that Small Town boys know.

  But he kept going. Not only with his aircraft production, but with his intrigues and his papers. In fact, he knew exactly what was being said against the present administration in his papers, and didn’t always do anything to stop it, although he was portrayed as the puppet master of his employees. Churchill and others complained in 1940 of leftists in his employ. The Beaver responded that there may well be, but that didn’t mean he agreed with them. He also complained that he was accosted on both sides: on one for telling his employees what to say, and on the other for not telling them what to say.

  During this time certain of his younger friends, including journalist Peter Howard, wrote the pamphlet The Guilty Men, attacking Chamberlain, Baldwin, Lord Halifax, and the rest for the terrible lack of British preparedness. Certainly Beaver approved of this pamphlet. So would most of us. He yelled for metal, tin, and copper—he had people give anything they could to be melted down and used to make his planes. He demanded the gates from former prime minister Baldwin’s estate, and said he would send the police to take them. He must have delighted in this, but he was outvoted in parliament, and Baldwin’s iron gates stayed. (However, Max’s gates and railings at Stornoway House were taken with Max’s blessing.)

  CERTAIN NOTES FROM 1940 show what a man of mettle he actually was. Bombers were being built in the United States, pushed across the border to Canada, flown to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and put on ships to England. Those that weren’t sunk by the U-boat packs had to be reassembled at their destination. This to Beaverbrook was a criminal waste of time. He proposed to Churchill and got the go-ahead to hire Canadian, American, and Australian bush pilots to fly these planes across the Atlantic, and he then requisitioned and built an airport in Gander, Newfoundland, to get it done. Members of the British High Command howled at his presumption. Of course. Max went ahead. Of course. This was simply the bravest policy decision concerning aircraft in the Second World War.

  He also sought and got a dispersal of aircraft-production centres, to thwart the enemy and lessen its bombing successes, but was unsuccessful in trying to stop air-raid sirens, because, he maintained, they slowed work production.

  When his son-in-law, Drogo Montagu, Janet’s second husband (a fighter pilot and son of the Earl of Sandwich), was killed in the Battle of Britain, Max phoned his friend Peter Howard to say that nothing but total victory would ever ensure peace. And he sounded genuinely heartbroken.

  He was to break Churchill’s heart too. As Peter Howard records, when First Sea Lord Dudley suggested the French fleet be destroyed to save it from falling into German hands, Churchill was aghast, and asked Max for his opinion on the matter.

  “Attack it immediately,” Aitken replied. “The Germans will force the French fleet to side with the Italians in the Mediterranean Sea! They will do it by blackmail. They will threaten to burn Marseilles, or even to burn Paris, if the French do not comply.” For someone who hadn’t wanted war, he certainly understood what had to be done once the game was on. Max later recounted what followed. Churchill gave the order; Churchill wept.

  There was another moment recorded by both A.J.P. Taylor and Peter Howard. It came when certain naval officers were considering sending the British fleet to Canada if there was an invasion on British soil. Churchill, after receiving this note from the Naval office, handed it to Aitken. It was Canada they were thinking of sending the fleet to, and Aitken should be informed. But Aitken knew this would look like capitulation to the Americans, whose support they badly needed. Max simply said: “Winston, you can’t do that,” and it was settled.

  Though Beaverbrook distrusted the Americans, he realized they were desperately needed, and he would be the man sent to barter with them.

  “I’ve come to ask for your help, and I’m going to ask for a lot,” he quipped to the U.S. Senate.

  THERE WERE OF COURSE other things not so settled. One was Beaver himself. His unfortunate perversity of temperament, his anger at slights, that stayed with him most of his life, threatened to derail him and the part he played in the war effort. This was his finest hour, but he had to be prodded into staying on duty. It was unconscionable to request retirement so often, even more than Sea Lord Fisher in 1915, and it doesn’t sit well in retrospect. If it is aggravating now to have to read, imagine what it was like for Winston Churchill, who thought Beaverbrook his ablest minister.

  “I am placing my entire confidence, and to a large extent the life of the state upon your shoulders,” Churchill wrote to a disgruntled Max in January 1941.

  But Max had legitimate concerns. He was awake day and night, was blasted in the House for everything he tried to do, and was not well. And, as always, he was considered an intriguer. Also, he was frightened of the bombs that were dropping. He made no bones about his fear, and so more power to him that he stayed, and remained the most insistent force—except of course for Churchill himself—in wartime Britain. But just as when he was a boy of twelve, he wanted and needed to be his own man, and with Winston as both prime minister and minister of defence, it was hard to be that. Nonetheless, as Churchill wrote of Beaverbrook years later: “He did not fail—this was his hour.” Of course, as Max knew, this was also Winston’s hour. It was his finest hour, and the finest hour of the British people. The only other people at that time to show so much courage were the Russians. But that was to come.

  Max here—as usual—is not above criticism. The unfortunate fact is that he never was. That Churchill had to take time out of his busy office to deny his requests for resignation and write countless letters saying his resignation was not accepted, and to try and cajole him into staying, is nothing short of ingratitude on Max’s part. Any disappointment or contradiction of his orders encouraged him to vent his anger and browbeat Churchill, who had too much to worry about already. One has to feel for Churchill here, who was waging a war for the very survival of his country—while certain other countries in Europe gleefully hid up Hitler’s arse.

  Max’s relationships with other men of power would always be a double-edged sword, and as he built his planes, he pressed Churchill far too much. Finally, Churchill made Max overall minister of production.

  There was an uproar, on a huge scale. Ernest Bevin, a rising star in the Labour Party, and Attlee, who would become Conservative prime minister, were firmly against him, and Max, who for a short time had been a hero with Labour because of his fall 1941 visit to Soviet Russia, where he had signed a pact to send large-scale supplies to their war effort, was now losing influence.

  As the crisis surrounding Beaverbrook grew, all during the dark December of 1941 Churchill was facing his own political disasters. Singapore fell to the Japanese. After Pearl Harbor on December 6, the Americans, who had promised much material support, were in need of most of it themselves. Rommel was playing havoc with the British in the North African desert, and the public no longer trusted Churchill as both prime minister and minister of defence. Winston was working twenty-hour days. Sooner or later, if Attlee and others wanted Max gone, and if Max continued to insist on having his own way—as he had from the time he was a schoolboy—Churchill, already fighting rear-guard actions to protect himself, would no longer be able to protect Aitken.

  In February 1942, Max defined his authority as minister of production. It would in essence put everything, including shipbuilding, under his control. He would be his own man with everything concerning war production, or no man at all. This was always his way, from the moment he stepped on the train and met Mr. Stairs and tried to sell him a typewriter.

  But he was playing with fire here. For Churchill knew that, once gone, Max would this time (for all intents and purposes) be gone for good.

  IN THE WINTER OF 1942, after parrying with Aitken for a year or more and now in deep
political trouble himself, Churchill felt he had to reshuffle his cabinet. Peter Howard and others state that Winston showed Max two lists. On one, Max was in the cabinet, and on the other, Max was out. Max, looking over the lists, became miffed, and said he wanted out, especially if Attlee was to be deputy prime minister. Churchill felt he had to have Attlee.

  Then, in deference to Attlee, Winston chose Stafford Cripps rather than Beaverbrook as leader of the House of Commons.

  Preferring Cripps—or anyone else in the realm—was to Max a slap in the face, and a betrayal from an old friend, perhaps the best friend in England he had ever had. More stinging was this: Stafford Cripps had attacked Max’s plans to help the Soviet Union—for, of all things, being too generous. This was one of the achievements of which Max was most proud—having gone to Russia in the depths of the war and signed a pact with Molotov, even having redirected some of England’s own materials from Canada and the United States to help Moscow fight the war. (Because of this, Max would be awarded the Soviets’ Order of Sovorov in 1944.)

  Max told Winston that he would not serve in a government with Attlee as deputy prime minister. Attlee had done nothing to deserve this plum, he argued. It has been stated that, at this point, Churchill became exasperated, and told him to repeat his threat of resignation in front of Attlee and Cripps themselves. Max, in his usual huff, took the dare and did just that. Once he had done so, Churchill could no longer pretend he had not, and was forced to accept his resignation. Cripps and Attlee were ecstatic over this, and Churchill was deeply sorry.

  Here was the man who had built the Spitfire (with the help of Canada, and among others K.C. Irving and the woods of New Brunswick), which won the battle over the skies of Britain; the man who had ordered and financed the building of the Gander runway, so that bomber planes he had parlayed and fought for could take off and fly the treacherous North Atlantic. Here was the man who had gone to Australian, Canadian, and American bush pilots, some of them women, to get the job done. And all the while he was laughed at and ridiculed for doing so by men who would sleep safer and quieter because he had not relented in his job.

  Max believed Churchill had betrayed him. But the war was the most important thing, and victory the most important aim, and Churchill, sinking in the polls at that time, could only be so loyal. (Winston had to face a vote of no confidence later, in July of 1942. This is how he was rewarded by the House of Commons.) Max Aitken in a year and a half had done far more for England than Attlee or Cripps or anyone else in the wartime government, except for Winston himself, would ever do.

  When a boy, Max was very good at Birds in a Bush— a game in which one guesses the number of marbles in another boy’s hand. He was so good at it that it seemed almost diabolical. He had also played dice with lumber barons on the Miramichi when he was sixteen. He was always good at games of chance.

  He could never sit still. As a child he had listened to his father’s sermons, not at his mother’s side but up in the church balcony, as far away as he could get, fidgeting and wanting to be somewhere else. This eccentric had learned all his disobedience and human insight as a boy of seven—and had relied upon it to help save the Western world. He was now undercut by those who had always listened to sermons and would never wager anything on a game of Birds in a Bush. In a very grave way, those who couldn’t count the number of hairs on the teacher’s moustache, those who had sat in school, and raised their hands, and studied hard had taken their revenge, and congratulated each other that they had done so, while a bewildered Churchill, who cared for him more than he did ten of any others, could do nothing to help.

  The Beaver went away to a flat on the first floor of the Evening Standard building.

  This was because Stornoway, Gladys’s beloved house, had been bombed in the autumn of 1940.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Comrade Stalin’s Man

  A player of that talent doesn’t sit things out. So Max was sent as an envoy to Washington, and although what future British prime minister Harold Macmillan said at the time was true— that Max was suffering from twenty-hour days, months of strain and work, and was exhausted—he kept up a busy schedule. He seemed to convince—or share the opinion with—Roosevelt (they had New Brunswick in common; Max from the Miramichi, Roosevelt on Campobello) that a second front was necessary in 1942 to relieve Stalin’s army.

  To Beaverbrook this was a new cause, and a way to stick it to those who had pushed him aside in Britain. Besides, for him, the success of another front was simply a matter of logistics: cut out the unnecessary campaigns in North Africa, and get down to business attacking the Germans in France.

  It would prove far more difficult than it seemed. (Even by the time D-Day rolled around in June 1944, the Germans were still a massive and formidable force and came close on a number of occasions to turning the Allied advance.) It would also mean a strategic shifting of the whole war effort. It really does show Max at his worst. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel would then have had a one-way ticket to the oilfields of Russia—with his Afrika Corps freed from their duties in North Africa. In fact, Rommel always planned to do this, if he could defeat General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army.

  As Peter Howard says, the Allies also would have had to stop aircraft production to start wholesale landing-craft production. Churchill did not want to hear about it, and did not want Max sent back to Britain as Roosevelt’s quasi-representative. This showed Max as Max, a political gadfly—who now suddenly wanted to please his new friend, Joseph Stalin, and prove to his old enemies in the House of Commons that he was still the main talent, the boy wonder after all these years. More subtly, he also wanted to take Roosevelt’s immense power and use it to browbeat his enemies in London as well.

  So hear, hear! Friends with Roosevelt, after a life of distrusting the Americans. And friends with Uncle Joe, too! Yes, that same Joseph Stalin who murdered twenty-six million of his own people.

  Stalin had earlier influenced envoys Max (for the British) and Averell Harriman (for the United States) when they visited Moscow in 1941 by saying that the paucity of their offers meant that the West was happy Germany had attacked Russia and wanted Russia to fail. There was no “paucity”—Max saw to it. But Stalin was not completely wrong, as John Lukacs states in his book of essays on Churchill, Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian. Stalin might have been right to think Churchill wanted Hitler to attack Russia, but he was wrong to think Churchill wanted Stalin to lose.

  Now Stalin, with his country fighting on a wide front from Leningrad near the Finnish border, through Moscow, southeast to Stalingrad, needed relief. A second front was to him essential.

  How did Max convince himself that he liked Stalin? Well, Stalin was a rogue and a drinker. And Max liked all rogues and drinkers. Besides, Stalin could make himself likeable! And he had fooled more than Max. He had fooled Roosevelt, and to a degree Churchill. But as for Max and Stalin? Both came from religious backgrounds. Both hated the aristocracy and the pomposity of so-called experts. Max did not see Koba (Stalin’s nickname) as a mass murderer greater than Hitler. (This showed another terrible blind spot, and perhaps a Miramichi one: the belief that rogues are more drinkers than destroyers. Perhaps this appealed, in a foolhardy way, to Max’s own personal vanity, as rogue extraordinaire.) He took up Stalin’s cause—just as he had done all of his life with others—and suddenly became the loudest voice for a second front.

  So he went about explaining Comrade Stalin to the American press, with opinions that were partially true. Here is what Max Aitken said to support Mr. Stalin. It really shows him to be, on this occasion, most foolhardy.

  He said that there was no religious persecution in Soviet Russia. He was right as far as the war years went. Stalin knew he had to open the churches for his population to bear down and fight, and religious persecution was halted (or abated) for the first time in twenty years. People were allowed to pray in front of icons—some were icons of people Stalin himself had butchered—and take communion. Religious
persecution would start in earnest again after the war. Max said there was no persecution of the Jews, and he was right, as far as it went. Stalin started his campaign against the Jews after Golda Meir visited in 1948, when he began to worry that his Jewish population had only one capital, Jerusalem. Max also said Russia had the most heroic soldiers and greatest generals. Well, no more heroic than the British, American, Australian, or Canadian (or German or Japanese, for that matter), but fighting on their own ground. Certainly they had the greatest general in Marshal Zhukov (who was demoted as soon as the war was over). Besides this, when drinking and singing folk songs, Stalin was roguish and fun. That was the only side of Stalin that Max Aitken wanted to see.

  Max did not understand (and would go to his death without understanding) that this time the father figure he had chosen was most deadly—a man who was a God in his own country, a man who, along with Hitler, could be said to symbolically be represented by the two combatants Milton spoke about in Paradise Lost: “So frowned the Mighty Combatants that hell grew darker with their frowns/ So matched they stood.”

  Churchill, embarrassed and disappointed in Max, wanted to silence him, and asked if he would like to be British ambassador in Washington—that is, a man who must follow the party line. Beaver was to remain in Washington and replace Lord Halifax. Halifax agreed to this. Roosevelt agreed. Churchill agreed. Then Max declined—unless there was a second front.

  This act of disrespect smacks of wilful immaturity after sixty years.

  So, there was no ambassadorship. But Max kept insisting, spoke to the New York papers about how a second front was needed . . .

  WE ALL KNOW Max Aitken got his wish. A quasi–second front came in August 1942. But it was done in a way that was almost calculated to prove to him that he was mistaken—and to prove to his last great mentor, Joe Stalin, that such a thing was just not feasible at the time. It was a deadly frontal assault on a beach at Dieppe, by Canadian soldiers running up beaches against heavily armed pillboxes and impenetrable defensive positions, and Max bore the responsibility and felt the sting. At least in some way, because those who were against it wanted him to. Was this conscious or unconscious slaughter to prove a point to the boy from Newcastle? Who knows? Perhaps in the god-awful fog of war, both. Max did not see it coming until it was too late. For years after, he blamed Louis Mountbatten, the overlord of the operation, for the Canadian casualties at Dieppe.