The Last Lion

  During the July meetings, the British and American military chiefs had begun to take the measure of one another, and the results were decidedly mixed, and not strictly along national lines: Dudley Pound, the first sea lord, was in Brooke’s estimation “an old dodderer” and “beyond retirement.” Pound, who was almost sixty-five, was so given to falling asleep at staff meetings that he was replaced by Brooke as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee: “He [Pound] is asleep 90% of the time,” Brooke told his diary, “and the remaining 10% is none too sure what he is arguing about.” Brooke had no way of knowing that Pound’s drowsiness was due to an undetected brain tumor. The CIGS considered Pound’s American counterpart, Admiral Ernest King, to be “a shrewd and somewhat swollen headed individual” who was “biased entirely in favor of the Pacific.” King (so tough, blue jackets claimed, that he shaved with a blowtorch) had long been known for his hair-trigger temper and heavy drinking. He had sworn off whisky for the duration, but not, as Brooke was to note, champagne or wine, which on more than one occasion resulted in King’s becoming quite “nicely lit up” and combative. King joined Eisenhower and Churchill in Brooke’s pantheon of those who lacked strategic vision. Marshall, too, in Brooke’s estimation “has got no strategic vision, his thoughts revolve around the creation of forces and not on their employment.” Yet Marshall shared Brooke’s steadfast belief in “Europe First,” although they disagreed on where and when to strike. They both had to keep an eye on Admiral King. As for the strengths of the other major American players, Brooke found Eisenhower “quite incapable of understanding real strategy.” The Army Air Force’s Hap Arnold “limits his outlook to the air,” and General Mark Clark was “very ambitious and unscrupulous.” Yet as a group, Brooke later chirped, the Americans were “friendliness itself.”268

  Churchill, for his part, did not think much of his own Chiefs of Staff or high-ranking officers in general. Referring to the COS during a luncheon, he told his guests, “I am obliged to wage modern warfare with ancient weapons.”269

  For their part, the American military chiefs thought as little of their boss’s strategic acumen as the British chiefs thought of Churchill’s. Marshall was especially wary of politicians. He had pledged to himself never to laugh at Roosevelt’s jokes, and he upheld the pledge. Churchill, in April, had displayed his political side to Marshall, who, though completely loyal to Roosevelt and respectful of Churchill as a statesman, remained loyal first and foremost to his troops. He saw no glory in death. He hated to see men die under any circumstances, most of all the transparently political, and that is how he looked upon Torch.270

  Although Brooke (and Churchill) had sent Marshall home in April with the false impression that they had agreed to a 1942 invasion of France, the two generals got along well professionally, recalled Sir Ian Jacob. This was despite Brooke’s “hard, distant, lofty” demeanor, which was manifested by his speaking rapidly and, according to Jacob, with an overbearing air of self-assurance. Brooke also, recalled Jacob, tended to allow his tongue to dart out of his mouth and flit around his lips, lizardlike, an unfortunate quirk that distracted listeners from the merit of his words. If Brooke possessed a sense of humor, it was well concealed.271

  Compared to Brooke, the dour George Marshall was a cutup. He was also—blessedly for the alliance—unaware of Brooke’s contemptuous diary jottings in which he pilloried his American counterpart. Brooke called Marshall a “great man, a great gentleman, a great organizer, but definitely not a strategist.” In fact, Brooke termed Marshall’s strategic abilities “the poorest.” Marshall, in turn, thought much the same of Brooke, and told Hopkins that although Brooke “might be a good fighting man, he lacked Dill’s brains.” Brooke, though critical to a fault, harbored no ambition other than to win the war. Years later, when he prepared his diaries for publication, he took pains to add italicized explanations for many of his biting pronouncements. Marshall by then was a dying old man whose stature in American and European history could in no way be diminished by Brooke’s long-ago scribbling. And Eisenhower by then was president, a shock to Brooke, who wrote: “He certainly made no great impression on me at our first meeting… and if I had been told then of the future that lay in front of him I should refuse to believe it.”272

  Brooke was egalitarian; he criticized everybody, American and British, Mountbatten and Churchill most of all. Churchill, Brooke concluded, “never had the slightest doubt that he had inherited all the military genius of his great ancestor Marlborough!” Yet he could not “understand a large strategic concept and must get down to detail!” As with all who dealt with Churchill, Brooke learned that he was “quite impossible to argue with” and if he did concede a point, tended to later “repudiate everything he had agreed to.”273

  Brooke’s worst invective was directed toward Dickie Mountbatten, who the CIGS found to be “the most crashing bore,” prone to “always fiddling about with unimportant matters and wasting other people’s time.” Mountbatten “suffers from the most desperate illogical brain,” he told his diary, “always producing red herrings.”274

  The paths of Eisenhower and Bernard Montgomery also crossed during the early summer. Several weeks before the July meetings, Eisenhower paid a courtesy call on Montgomery, who commanded the 3rd Division in southeast Britain. Ike made the mistake of lighting one of his daily ration of eighty Chesterfields while waiting for Monty to wind up a staff briefing. The ascetic Montgomery (a devout nonsmoker and nondrinker) detected the aroma of tobacco smoke in the air and barked out that whosoever was the offender should snuff out the fag, immediately. Eisenhower complied, and so learned his first lesson about the diminutive and combative Englishman: Monty liked things his way and only his way. This was true also on the battlefield, where he preferred a set-piece style of combat in which events unfolded in strict accordance with his well-laid plans. Churchill, on the other hand, liked to quote Napoleon’s maxim, to wit, that forming a “picture” of a battle was foolish, for conditions could easily be deranged by Providence. Churchill had run up against Montgomery’s asceticism the previous year, when after a day of inspecting Montgomery’s troops near Brighton, he repaired with Monty to the Royal Albion Hotel, where Churchill anticipated a good whisky and a cigar. Monty declined the libations, declaring that he neither drank nor smoked, and furthermore was 100 percent fit. Churchill rejoined that he both drank and smoked and was 200 percent fit.275

  The teetotaler Montgomery, with his rumpled corduroy trousers and nonregulation turtleneck sweater, was not the sort who would normally grace Churchill’s dinner table, but Montgomery had acquitted himself well in France and at Dunkirk. He was egotistical and brusque, but most of all he was a fighter, and this Churchill respected. In late July, it appeared unlikely, however, that Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Churchill, each possessed of a wildly differing temperament, would anytime soon be conducting vital military business in close proximity with one another, each dependent on the others for common success. The final week of July found Churchill, troubled by events in the Middle East and by personalities in the Kremlin, intent on visiting both venues. Eisenhower had begun planning the North African campaign. Monty, meanwhile, cooled his heels in southeast Britain, awaiting an improbable German invasion or an even more improbable promotion to an active field command in an actual war zone.

  By July 14, Hitler’s eastern army (Ostheer) had established its bridgehead across the Don at Voronezh, but it had taken Army Group B’s Fourth Panzer Division a week to take the city. The delay would prove costly as the seasons changed. Meanwhile, Paulus’s Sixth Army had kept to the original plan and wheeled south along the Don’s west bank. The Ostheer had now driven 140 miles farther than in the previous summer, yet the dawdling of the Fourth Panzer Army in Voronezh while Paulus raced south meant that Army Group B was being stretched thin. Stalin by then had rescinded his “stand firm” orders and was now allowing the Red Army to retreat before the Ostheer, which lessened the chances of entire Soviet armies being encircled and captured. As a
result, although the Germans had captured more than 90,000 Soviet troops within the Donets Corridor since their victory at Kharkov, five times that many Russians had backtracked to fight another day. Still, by the first days of August, the Ostheer had driven another 150 miles. Rostov-on-Don, gateway to the Caucasus, fell, and with it the last direct Soviet rail links with the Baku fields. For Stalin, this was a personal affront; in 1908 he had robbed the Rostov–Moscow train in order to help the revolutionary cause. For the same cause he had robbed the Tiflis bank in his native Georgia, leaving three dead at the scene. Rostov and Georgia had been his stomping grounds. They were now Hitler’s.

  Farther south, elements of Army Group A’s First Panzer Army reached Stavropol on August 5, one hundred miles from the foothills of the Caucasus. On the ninth, after racing across the Kuban Steppe, German panzers cruised to within sight of the oil derricks at Maikop. Far to the east-northeast, Army Group B, less Bock, whom Hitler sacked for dawdling at Voronezh, had resumed its offensive and had shot across the Don north of the great bend. Paulus’s Sixth Army was now heading full bore for the Volga, and Stalingrad. The question being asked in Moscow, London, and Washington was, would the Germans bypass Stalingrad or try to take it? In fact, on July 23, Hitler had issued Führer Directive No. 45, an order Sir John Keegan described as the “most disastrous of all issued over his signature.” The Führer decreed that while Army Group A made for the Caucasus, Army Group B would take and hold Stalingrad. The city was of high strategic value to the Soviets, which is why Hitler had ordered it smashed in his April directive. Yet destroying a position is not the same as holding it. Stalingrad carried symbolic weight for Hitler, named as it was for his Bolshevik nemesis. In deciding to inflict a symbolic defeat on Stalin, the Führer had forsaken his Clausewitz.276

  Stalin had allowed his troops to fall back since the Germans crossed the Don, but five days after Hitler issued his directive to take Stalingrad, Stalin issued one of his own; all available forces would be thrown into Stalingrad, and “not a step back” would be tolerated. “Die, but do not retreat” became the Order of the Day on the banks of the Volga.277

  Western dailies dutifully updated their maps of the Russian front as the German advance pushed ever eastward. A great deal of black ink was required to mark German-held terrain. Yet the maps failed to tell the true story. Army Group A, stretched as it was along a five-hundred-mile front, was rolling though territory, but not holding territory. Panzer spearheads far outran the infantry, which could only slog along at ten or fifteen miles a day. Even farther to the rear, supply trains struggled along roads not made for modern vehicular traffic. The result, wrote Sir John Keegan, was a front so broad that in some places just a few hundred Germans “held” dozen of miles of ground. Western readers who took their news seriously were dismayed at what they read of the Soviet plight. Stalin’s generals, however, saw an opportunity.278

  With the vote of censure behind him and the decision made in favor of Torch, Churchill’s attention turned to Egypt, and Stalin. Based on Ultra decrypts, he had prodded Auchinleck for weeks to take the offensive against Rommel, unfairly in Brooke’s estimation. Ultra allowed Churchill to peer over his generals’ shoulders as if he were with them in the field poring over intelligence reports. Yet Ultra was sometimes wrong. Churchill took Rommel’s (decrypted) pleas for reinforcements at face value, while some at Bletchley cautioned that Rommel might be exaggerating his needs in order to force action in Berlin. On one occasion Churchill goaded Auchinleck by citing a decrypted Luftwaffe signal that appeared to reveal the Germans had only half as many tanks in Africa as Auchinleck believed based on his field intelligence. But Bletchley was incorrect; the deciphered message referred only to the German tanks at Auchinleck’s immediate front. Rommel, after taking several necessarily desultory and ultimately futile cracks at Auchinleck’s El Alamein positions during the first weeks of July, settled into a defensive mode and awaited his promised reinforcements. For his June victory over Ritchie, he was awarded by Hitler a field marshal’s baton. He would later say he would have preferred to be given a division. With Rommel dug in before El Alamein and with the fight possibly gone from Auchinleck, Churchill concluded that the situation in the desert called for his presence.279

  His getting to Egypt involved doing so without contracting any of numerous diseases he would be exposed to along the way. In order for the aircraft to avoid Germans, the outbound leg of the journey would take at least five flying days, going south from Gibraltar to Takoradi, in the Gold Coast, followed by a three-day, three-flight hopscotch across central Africa. This sojourn through “tropical and malarious regions,” as Churchill put it, would require a series of inoculations, some of which required ten days to take effect. Dr. Wilson and the War Cabinet sought to put an end to the idea. Just that week, news of a great medical discovery had sifted through the ranks. Two American doctors visiting London from Johns Hopkins University had told Harry Butcher over a few bottles of port of a new drug “called penicillin and derived from bread mold. Takes eleven acres of mold to cure the scorched face of one flyer.” Such a drug would have made Churchill’s trip safer, but it had yet to be mass-produced. Given the risks posed by African insects and German fighter planes, it appeared that Churchill would not be straying far from London.280

  Then an American pilot, Captain William Vanderkloot, twenty-six years old and a veteran of ferrying Lend-Lease bombers to Britain, suggested a daring approach: depart England for Gibraltar late in the evening by a four-engine B-24 bomber and refuel in Gibraltar the following morning; then, after departing the Rock at dusk, overfly Spanish Morocco, dodge far south over the desert during the night, and then swing east almost 1,900 miles to the Nile, south of Cairo. A fully gassed-up Liberator could cruise slightly more than seventeen hours at an average speed of 240 miles per hour. It had what it took to make such a journey in two legs.

  Churchill liked the spirit of the idea, and he liked the means of transportation—Vanderkloot’s modified B-24 Liberator, named Commando. The bomb racks had been removed, and eight seats had been bolted down amidships. Toward the rear of the plane, wood slats had been rigged into two berths for the comfort of the highest-ranking passengers, but comfort was a relative concept. The plane was neither heated nor pressurized, necessitating at high altitude the use of oxygen masks, another source of worry to Churchill’s doctor, who feared the consequences to his heart of freezing temperatures and thin air. Churchill, not sharing Wilson’s concern, asked the RAF ground crew to customize his oxygen mask in order to allow him to smoke his cigars. The request was dutifully carried out. Vanderkloot’s proposed route to Cairo could be covered in twenty-three hours compared with five days spent amid “Central African bugs.” If they could reach Cairo, there was no reason they could not reach Moscow; Churchill had not yet met Stalin and he felt a face-to-face meeting was the best way to establish a relationship and clear the air. There was much air to clear. Churchill made an executive decision: he would journey to Cairo. When Stalin invited Churchill to Moscow on the thirty-first, the itinerary was expanded to include the Kremlin. The entire journey would prove a daunting undertaking, even for young pilots, and an exhausting slog for an overweight old man with a quirky ticker and seemingly perpetual chest colds that he unwisely chose to treat with snuff and whisky, a generous supply of which Sawyers secreted into Commando’s bomb bay.281

  Brooke left Britain for Cairo by air early on the morning of August 1, intending to swing through Malta on his way. The journey was too dangerous to risk having both Brooke and Churchill on the same airplane. The previous year, Eden and Dill had overshot Malta on their way to Greece and almost flew into the sea. German and Italian fighter planes sought out lone British bombers accompanied by Spitfires on the sound premise that a big shot might be aboard. Brooke arrived at Malta to find scenes of “incomprehensible” destruction, food and gasoline shortages, a harbor full of wrecks, and a population on the brink of starvation. The roads were so full of rubble, and petrol was in such sh
ort supply, that Malta’s military commander, Field Marshal Gort, had to ride his bicycle around the island. Gort appeared “depressed,” as he and his little garrison waited in this “backwater” for the final German assault, which good strategy dictated must be imminent. In fact, a joint German and Italian invasion had been approved in April. But days before Brooke’s arrival—and unbeknownst to the British—Hitler, with the cost of the Crete invasion still fresh in his memory, postponed the invasion of Malta because it appeared Rommel might get to Cairo on his own.282

  Churchill departed London just after midnight on August 1. As he waited on the tarmac, a cable reached him from Dill, in Washington, which concluded: “In the American mind, Roundup in 1943 is excluded by acceptance of Torch.” This was not at all what Churchill wanted to hear, given that after Cairo he was going to Moscow to inform Stalin that no second front would materialize in Europe in 1942, a chore he compared to “carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole.” He was not prepared to add 1943 to the equation. The cable, however, served one useful purpose: it would show Stalin that decisions on the second front had not been made by Churchill unilaterally, but had resulted from American and British solidarity. To bolster that argument, Roosevelt, at Churchill’s request, instructed Averell Harriman to meet Churchill in Cairo and to continue on with him to Moscow.283