The Last Lion

  Meanwhile, Churchill needed a victory against the Germans, a strategic victory, something bigger than the colonial scuffles of Iraq, Syria, and East Africa. Although always eager to make mischief in Norway—where Hitler now kept seven divisions—Churchill saw his best opportunity in the same theater as Rommel saw his, North Africa. Churchill had shipped new tanks to Egypt at great risk in order that they could fight, and by all that was holy, Wavell had better fight with them. He did, though he knew that the British tanks carried puny cannons and tended to break down. Wavell, his forces depleted by the misadventures in Greece and Crete, launched his counter-attack, Battleaxe, on June 15. Rommel, his forces arrayed before Tobruk, expected the attack, and was ready. The attack sputtered from the start. On the morning of June 17, according to Churchill, “everything went wrong.” By that evening Battleaxe was seen for what it was, a total failure. The end came near the Halfaya pass, where German 88mm guns, secreted in the brush, held their fire until the British tanks came within spitting range. The tanks advanced no further; all but one were destroyed. The survivors dubbed the place Hellfire Pass. Again the British had to run. They fled eastward, away from their objective, Tobruk, sixty miles to the west and still surrounded. Wavell, flying to the front from Cairo, found his army in full retreat. Rommel had by then cut the British forces in two. Wavell had no choice but to concur with his commanders’ advice to withdraw. Almost one thousand British troops were left behind, dead and captured. The horizon was speckled with thick black plumes of smoke from more than two hundred British tanks burning like tiny oil refineries. The door to Egypt was open, and Rommel stood astride the threshold.298

  It was the end for Wavell. As the Army of the Nile fled for home, Churchill saw to it that it did so without Wavell. On June 21 he sent a cable to Wavell in which he lauded the general’s “command and conduct of these armies, both in success and adversity,” but said, “I feel however after the long strain you have borne, a new eye and a new hand are required in the most seriously menaced theater.” Churchill needed a savior of the Nile, a Nelson who, as Nelson had promised his King, would hunt down and annihilate the enemy.299

  Just six months earlier, Churchill had told his ministers, “In Wavell we have got a winner.” Now Churchill needed a new winner, a leader who would take the fight to Rommel. His choice was General Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander in chief in India. He had been criticized by some for his conduct of the Norwegian campaign, but Norway had been an almost impromptu gambit, lacking in air and sea coordination. Churchill was now intent on giving his new commander everything he needed to wage war in the desert. Wavell, in turn, would relieve Auchinleck in India. Colville thought Wavell might go into a sulk and refuse the India posting. Churchill pondered that while they strolled that evening in the gardens. Merely firing Wavell, Churchill allowed, “would excite much comment and criticism.” He did not want Wavell “hanging about in London living at his club.” Happily, India was about as far from London as any place on the globe. When Dill predicted that Wavell would “use his pen” to write up his side of the story after the war, Churchill replied that “he could use his too, and would bet he sold more copies.” Where Dill saw Wavell as the victim of Churchill’s strategic folly, Churchill told Colville that he “never really had much confidence” in Wavell, who he had thought played slow for many of the same reasons Lincoln had said of General George McClellan, “He suffers from the slows.” Both Lincoln and Churchill harbored grand hopes of victories that never came. Yet where Lincoln generously supplied McClellan (who essentially sat on his hands), Churchill, after reinforcing Wavell in 1940, had since stripped him of his forces.300

  Dill disapproved of Wavell’s dismissal, but he disapproved more of the appointment of Auchinleck. Wavell, he told Colville on the twenty-first, “has got twice Auchinleck’s brain.” Auchinleck’s first significant—and most fateful—decision was to appoint Lieutenant General Alan Cunningham, brother of the admiral, to command the newly renamed and soon-to-be strengthened Eighth Army. Cunningham had led the armies that had swept the Italians from Somaliland. He was a fine infantryman, but he did not know tank warfare. The Chiefs of Staff wrought a final change to the Middle East command when they relieved Air Marshal Longmore and put his deputy, Arthur Tedder, in command. This proved to be one of the more fortuitous promotions of the entire war. Tedder believed in using his aircraft in close ground support of infantry and tanks, a view shared by Dickie Mountbatten who, on June 21, told Churchill, “No naval or military operation should be undertaken without strong air cover.” Tedder had developed the tactic—“Tedder’s carpet”—of laying down bombs in front of advancing troops. Armies supported by air moved faster and farther, as Rommel had shown at Longmore’s expense. Tedder, in fact, allowed the army to direct his planes in tactical operations, something Longmore never countenanced. Still, Tedder shared one burden with Longmore: he did not have enough planes to make a difference, regardless of tactics.301

  Churchill told Auchinleck that he expected him to attack, and in the next two months at that. Auchinleck replied that his forces would not be ready until the autumn, at the earliest. Churchill fumed but backed off. He had no choice. His Middle East forces were denuded to such an extent that the question was not when to attack, but how best to defend. Such were Churchill’s contradictions. Stand up to the Old Man, as Auchinleck did, and he might back down; failure to stand up to him (Wavell) engendered his disrespect. He liked fighters.

  The unfortunate business of Wavell having been addressed, a large gathering sat down to dinner at Chequers on the twenty-first: Clementine, Mary, Ambassador Gil Winant and his wife, Constance, Colville, Commander Tommy Thompson, and the Edens. Churchill took the floor—he rarely relinquished it—and mused upon Russia. Days earlier, Stafford Cripps had warned Eden that Russia was weak and could “not hold out against Germany for more than three or four weeks.” Dill thought six or seven. Churchill, having perused his Enigma decrypts, announced at dinner “an attack on Russia is certain and Russia will surely be defeated.” Still, he claimed he was prepared to go all out to help Stalin. Days earlier he had told his military chiefs that he expected the Germans to very soon bring the war to Russia, with the Baku oil fields and Ukrainian wheat as objectives, and that Britain should “take every advantage which such a conflict offered.” The greatest advantage would be gained by giving the Russians the help they needed. Winant agreed, and told Churchill that the United States, too, would send Stalin everything it could. When Colville suggested that support for the Soviets might prove problematic given Churchill’s longstanding loathing of all things Bolshevik, Churchill replied that if “Hitler invaded Hell he would at least make favorable reference to the Devil.”302

  After dinner Eden and Colville joined Churchill on his nocturnal prowls in the garden. Colville had noted in his journal a few days earlier the arrival of hot and sunny weather; rhododendrons in full bloom, the heat “tropical and heavy with the scent of flowers.” Eden, holding forth on some topic, took a step backward and tumbled “head over heels into the deep ha-ha* and barbed wire fence at the edge of the lawn.” The three of them guffawed and traipsed though the moonlit woodlands, on the solstice, like the ancients, and fortified no doubt like the ancients by strong spirits. It was a fine time to be alive, Churchill told Colville, adding, “You will live through many wars but will never have such an interesting time as you are having now.” The Old Man, who lately had lectured Colville on the various invasions of Russia throughout history, somehow failed to note that this week marked the anniversary of Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia.* The men did not retire until well into the earliest morning hours, Churchill not to be seen again until at least 8:00 A.M., for his instructions were clear: he was not to be awakened before eight for any reason other than the invasion of Britain.303

  The skies were silent, empty of German aircraft, as they had been for the better part of a month. The ports slept unmolested, London untroubled.

  One thousand miles to the east, the
engines of more than 3,600 German panzers growled to life. Gunners eased high-explosive shells into the breeches of more than 7,200 pieces of artillery; officers stood ready, lanyards in hand. More than 600,000 mechanized vehicles, their engines idling, spewed exhaust that drifted low through fields and woodlands along a front that stretched almost nine hundred miles, from the Baltic, through occupied Poland, and south to the Black Sea. The weather held, pleasant and breezy. The German army of the east, the Ostheer, 153 divisions strong, was ready. More than three million assault pioneers and infantrymen (including fourteen divisions of reluctant Romanian infantry) crouched behind railway grades and in shallow ditches. Men checked their Mauser rifles and gave final nervous tugs to chin straps. They smoked a last ersatz cigarette or gulped down a final mouthful of ersatz coffee, for real tobacco and coffee had gone missing from their rations months earlier. If the ordeal before them went as planned, they would enjoy both again by Christmas, at home with their families, the war over, victory complete.304

  A few miles to their rear, nearly a million pack horses—almost five thousand per division—grazed on the infinite sea of grass. They were harnessed to wagons full of rations, shells, tents, and clothing. The metallic ring of bits and buckles carried on the breeze, a familiar morning song to young country boys and old infantrymen. Farther still to the rear, companies of Einsatzgruppen, SS killers, waited near their trucks for the word to go forth, to carry out their orders and their glorious destiny as codified by Jodl on Hitler’s order: to kill commissars, Jews, intellectuals, Bolsheviks of any age, and nationalists of any persuasion. Farthest to the rear, in the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler paced, and waited.305

  Seven hundred miles behind the Soviet lines, Joseph Stalin took his rest at the Kremlin. So sanguine was Stalin concerning his relations with Hitler that he had weeks earlier ordered Soviet forces to leave their concrete-reinforced and entrenched defensive positions to take up new positions farther to the east. He did so in order to reassure Hitler that Soviet troop deployments were not meant to be provocative and to show that he trusted Hitler. During those weeks more than eighty German reconnaissance flights took place over Soviet territory. They were dismissed by Berlin as a British ruse intended to create tensions between Germany and its friend Russia. Stalin bought the explanation.

  Throughout the spring Stalin had received detailed intelligence reports about Germany’s planned treachery from numerous sources, including the Americans in early June and his own chief of intelligence, who months before the invasion proffered the prescient scenario of a German three-pronged attack upon Russia almost exactly like the one that was about to unfold. Nothing if not consistent, Stalin ignored the warnings as he had Churchill’s warnings of April and early June. When on June 15, Stalin’s best spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, informed the Kremlin of the exact date of Barbarossa, Stalin, distrustful of spies, dismissed the intelligence. As for his trade agreements with Germany, the head of the German War Ministry later wrote: “The Russians executed their deliveries up to the eve of the attack.” The Soviets had deployed more than thirty-five new divisions near the border during the spring, but again, in order to not provoke Hitler, they were not put on alert. Just after midnight on the twenty-second, a German deserter told his Soviet captors that the invasion was to be launched at 4:00 A.M. The report made its way to the Kremlin, where it was dismissed out of hand. Two hours before dawn, after phone lines were cut, Soviet commanders were finally allowed to place their troops on full alert. Just before 4:00 A.M. more than 2,600 German Messerschmitts, Stukas, and Junkers medium bombers lifted off from airfields in Poland, East Prussia, and Romania, their departures timed such that they would overfly the infantry and artillery exactly at dawn. In the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, Ribbentrop was curtly informing Soviet ambassador Vladimir Dekanozov that German troops in Poland and on the Soviet border were at that instant taking “military countermeasures.”306

  Minutes later, as the German aircraft screamed overhead, German artillery opened the greatest cannonade in all history. Along the entire line, almost three million German troops lunged forward. The eruption and flashes of the great guns would have been visible from space, but mankind was twenty years distant from gaining any such heavenly perspective. In those few seconds and within the choking clouds of cordite, the Nazi-Soviet friendship pact disappeared.

  The Germans were arrayed in three Army Groups—North, Center, and South—commanded by field marshals Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, Bock, and Rundstedt, under the overall command of Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch. Each group sat astride a historic invasion route into European Russia. Army Group North would ply the Baltic coast, with Leningrad as its ultimate objective. Army Group Center would follow Napoleon’s path to Minsk and onward to Moscow. The southern group would strike toward the breadbasket of Russia, the Ukraine; its route demarcated to the north by the impassable Pripet Marshes—about the size of Indiana or Portugal—and to the south by the ridge of the Carpathian Mountains.

  Arrayed against the Germans were almost three million Russians, 120 Soviet divisions out of a total national force of 230. The Soviet infantry was backed up by the world’s largest, though mostly untested, air force—10,000 fighter aircraft—and almost 24,000 tanks of mixed quality, although the new, fast, and deadly T-34 was scheduled to roll off Russian assembly lines at the rate of 1,700 per month—if the factories survived the German onslaught. Sir John Keegan wrote that from the standpoint of matériel, “Stalin the warlord stood on equal, perhaps superior footing to Hitler.” Yet almost five hundred of Stalin’s generals had been promoted to that rank only the year before in an attempt to replenish the ranks thinned by Stalin’s murderous purges. The new generals were all untested. Worse, they and the millions of troops they led were peacefully asleep at their posts when the attack came. Churchill, too, was fast asleep, as was Stalin. Stalin’s lack of preparedness, and the immensity of the surprise that overtook him, indicates he had been in hibernation for quite some time. The Bear’s somnolence, Churchill later wrote, was astounding, given the intelligence available to him: “So far as strategy, policy, foresight, and competence are arbiters, Stalin and his commissars showed themselves at this moment the most completely outwitted bunglers of the Second World War.” Almost ten million Russian soldiers and at least fifteen million Russian civilians would pay with their lives in the next four years for Stalin’s bungling.307

  It was a “marvelous morning,” Harold Nicolson told his diary on the twenty-second, “with the smell of roses, hay, and syringa in the air.” If the day proved quiet, Jock Colville planned to steal some time to traipse the countryside. It was not to be. Just after dawn, a phone call from the Foreign Office awoke Colville with the news. Heeding Churchill’s standing order, he waited until just past 8:00 to notify the prime minister of the attack. Churchill greeted the news with a grim smile and instructed Colville to “tell the B.B.C. I will broadcast at 9 to-night.” So great was his initial joy at the news that he dispatched his valet to Eden’s bedroom, bearing a large cigar on a silver platter, and a message: “The Prime Minister’s compliments and the German armies have invaded Russia.”308

  Harold Nicolson, upon hearing the news, told his diary that he was “not so optimistic…. And if, as is likely, Hitler defeats Russia in three weeks, then the road to the oil is open, as also the road to Persia and India.” Gil Winant at first thought the news was a “put-up job between Hitler and Stalin,” an opinion Churchill and his secretaries (out of the ambassador’s earshot) “laughed… to scorn.” The laughter was born more of pure relief than real scorn.309

  Days earlier, burdened by defeats, his sensitivities scuffed by the increasing backbiting of backbenchers, Churchill ruminated over the fate of Tobruk’s garrison and the possible fate of Egypt while moping about his Chartwell gardens in the company of his yellow cat. He apologized to the cat during lunch for the absence of cream, the cat being seated in the chair to Churchill’s right. That week he told Eden that he now “wore the medals” of
the Dardanelles, Narvik, Dunkirk, Greece, and Crete. On the automobile journey to Chartwell, Churchill stopped along the coast to steal a glimpse of France, but as if to underscore Britain’s isolation, haze hid the Continent.310

  Everything changed with Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin. A year to the day after the French signed their armistice, Churchill looked eastward and, haze or no, beheld salvation, if, that is, the Russians could avoid defeat. The logic of the situation was compelling. Russia defeated would likely lead to Britain defeated. But Russia supported by Britain might buy enough time for the feet-dragging Americans to produce the tools Churchill needed to keep up the fight. Were America to extend Lend-Lease to Stalin, so much the better. Russia victorious was altogether another matter. The ideological enemy of twenty years would not likely change its stripes after the war, but Hitler’s gambit had rendered that question, for the time being, moot. Thus, without a War Cabinet policy in place to address the morning’s turn of events—let alone a strategy to implement such a policy—and after only a moment’s thought, and no hesitation, Churchill made his decision. He would embrace his new fighting partner.

  “Ally” seemed an inappropriate moniker given Stalin’s brutal history of pogroms and mass murder. The man, in fact, was a monster. His collectivization of Ukrainian farms in the early 1930s resulted in the death by starvation of at least five million peasants, and the execution of thousands more for the crime of hoarding state property—seed for the next year’s grain crop. His Siberian gulags were packed with almost two million prisoners, mostly political, who were worked to death building dams, railroads, and canals. Mass graves lay scattered around Moscow, full of murdered Russian Orthodox priests, university professors, doctors, lawyers, Trotskyites, and other enemies of the state. Churchill, for more than a decade after the Russian Revolution, had considered the Soviet Union to be “the moral foe of civilized freedom”—until Hitler came along. Yet where Hitler was all talk during the mid-1930s, Stalin was all action. By the time he invaded eastern Poland in 1939, he had, in his own provinces and among his own people, established his bona fides as the butcher of the century, perhaps of all time. Churchill, since 1917, had striven to destroy Communist Russia, to “strangle at its birth” this “sullen, sinister state.” Now the Soviets and British, Stalin and Churchill, battled a common enemy. Churchill that evening would try to convince Britain—and himself—that old differences must be put aside. The effort would tax even his oratorical skills, for in the eyes of fully half his countrymen, the godless Joseph Stalin was more fundamentally evil than Adolf Hitler.311