The Grand Alliance (103 page)

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11. It is our duty to develop, equip, and maintain all these units during 1942.

Besides manning the forces, heavier demands were now put forward on behalf of the expanding munitions factories and workshops. If the country’s morale was to be sustained the civil population must also be well nourished. Mr. Bevin at the Ministry of National Service used all his knowledge and influence as an experienced trade-union leader to gather the numbers required. It was already obvious that man-power was the measure alike of our military and economic resources. Mr. Bevin, as the supplier of labour, and Sir John Anderson, Lord President of the Council, together devised a system which served us in good stead up to the end of the war, and enabled us to mobilise for war work at home or in the field a larger proportion of our men and women than any other country of the world in this or any previous war. At first the task was to transfer people from the less essential occupations. As the reservoir of manpower fell, all demands had to be cut. The Lord President and his Man-Power Committee adjudicated, not without The Grand Alliance

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friction, between competing claims. The results were submitted to me and the War Cabinet.

The first of these man-power surveys came before the War Cabinet in November. I put before my colleagues my own reflections on the main issues presented to us in the Lord President’s review. Obviously we must now cast a heavy burden on women.

MAN-POWER

Memorandum by the Prime Minister
6 Nov. 41

It may be a convenience to my colleagues if I set out
the provisional views which I have formed on some of
the major issues which we have to settle.

The age of compulsory military service for men
should be raised by ten years, to include all men under
fifty-one. While this might not make very many men
available for an active fighting rôle, it would assist the
Minister of Labour in finding men for non-combatant
duties in the Services.

The possibility that the age should be raised again
later on need not be excluded; but it would seem that
an increase of ten years in the upper limit would be
sufficient at the moment.

2. The case for calling up young men at eighteen
and a half, instead of nineteen, seems fully established.

Indeed, I would go further and call them up at eighteen
if this would make any substantial contribution.

3. On the whole, I am not yet satisfied, in view of the
marked dislike of the process by their Service menfolk,
that a case has been established for conscripting
women to join the Auxiliary Services at the present
time. Voluntary recruitment for these Services should
however be strongly encouraged.

4. Should the Cabinet decide in favour of compelling
women to join the Auxiliary Services, it is for consideration whether the method employed should not be by
individual selection rather than by calling up by age

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groups. The latter system would inevitably discourage
women from joining up until their age group was called.

5. The campaign for directing women into the
munitions industries should be pressed forward. The
existing powers should be used with greater intensity….

6. Employers might well be encouraged, in suitable
cases, to make further use of the services of married
women in industry. This would often have to be on a
part-time basis, and means must be found to ease the
burden on women who are prepared to perform a dual
rôle.

It was inevitable that the whole question of an invasion would have to be argued out again, and I addressed myself to this task with increasing conviction that it would not happen. At the same time the process was healthy and led to important judicious dispositions of our available strength.

Enormous requests were now made by the Home Command for armour, and tales of heavy German construction of tank-landing-craft received some credence.

No one can understand without reading the papers written at the time how hard was the strain, and how easy it was to make decisions which might be tragically falsified by events. I was like a keeper in the Zoo distributing half-rations among magnificent animals. Luckily they knew I was an old and friendly keeper.

Prime Minister to C.I.

3 Nov. 41

G.S.

All experience shows that all Commanders-in-Chief
invariably ask for everything they can think of, and
always represent their own forces at a minimum…. It is
only a few months ago that I saw with pleasure that we
might have a thousand tanks available to meet an
autumn invasion. Now we have got two thousand or
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more, and at least another fifteen hundred should be
available by the spring, making three thousand five
hundred.

General Brooke should organise these in the best
possible way, bearing in mind that for Home Defence
against invasion the utmost possible should be put in
the front line of formations, and that the reserve need
not be on the scale required in the Middle East.

2. While I am calling for the most vigorous measures
to resist invasion in the spring, I am of course very
sceptical of the stories that are told about its scale. The
evidence which supports the tale of the eight hundred
flat-bottomed vessels, each carrying at eight knots ten
tanks, rests on the flimsiest foundation – namely, an
agent saw some of these vessels being made at one
place, and he thought others were being made at other
places to the number of eight hundred. If there is any
other evidence behind this story, let me have it.

3. With the improvements in photography and the
increased power in the air, very formidable resistance
should be made to the assembly of large numbers of
vessels in the river-mouths of the Low Countries. Now
that we have the command of the air over the Pas de
Calais, it is not seen how Dunkirk, Calais, and
Boulogne can be used for the purposes of invasion. All
shipping gathered in these harbours and the smaller
ones could be bombed by daylight under fighter cover.

This was not the case last year.

4. There can be no question of our going back on
our promises to Russia. If of course Archangel freezes
up, we must do our best by other routes. But it is far too
soon to raise any such issues now, when the ink is
hardly dry on our promise, and we have been unable to
do anything else to help the Russians….

I thought it necessary to have a scheme which would enable a selected proportion of the Home Guard to be used as military formations in the event of invasion.

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Prime Minister to

23 Nov. 41

Secretary of State

for War

It is thought that the invasion danger will manifest
itself gradually by the assembly in the ports and river-mouths of large numbers of ships and landing-craft,
and also by troop movements on a great scale. At a
certain stage in these proceedings, which may conceivably take months and after all may only be a blind, we
should have to proclaim the “Alert.” If this moment were
rightly chosen, it should be about a fortnight before zero
day. It is not intended that the whole of the Home
Guard should thereupon cease their civilian occupations, but only that a special section of them should be
called out and embodied, like the militia used to be.

2. The rest of the Home Guard would not be called
out until a few days before zero hour, as far as we can
tell, or perhaps only when the embarkation of the
invaders had already begun. They would however
increase their viligance between the “Alert” and the
alarm.

3. The special section I have in mind would of
course consist, not of persons under eighteen and over
sixty years, but of the great mass of hefty manhood
now in reserved occupations who are not allowed to
join the Army but have volunteered for the Home
Guard. This class would attend additional drills, and
would be paid for attendance at these drills. They
would not come out whole-time till the “Alert.” There is
no need to make heavy weather of the proposal by
forming brigades with the War Office standards of
equipment. They would be armed with rifles, machine
guns, and Bren carriers. They can be organised in
battalions. They would not alter their characteristic
civilian and voluntary status until the “Alert.”

Pray let me have definite proposals on the scale of
four battalions in each corps area.

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I welcomed the keen interest which the United States military chiefs took in the defence of our Island, which they already regarded as the bastion of American security. We have seen how they feared lest in our efforts to hold the Middle East we should endanger our safety at home. In September and October an American officer, General Embick, was sent over by General Marshall, and I cordially invited him to go around all our home and beach defences and report fully the conclusions which he formed, both to me and to his own Government. General Embick was a most capable critic, and a good friend to Britain. I felt from the first however that he was unduly alarmist. Towards the end of November he produced his report, and I print my comment upon it as I wrote it at the time.