The Last Lion

  Before Churchill made for Casablanca, a messy political affair intruded into the war-making machinery. Late in the year, his old friend Noël Coward, who had worked undercover for Bracken’s Ministry of Information, was nominated for knighthood, a reward Coward’s good friend King George thought appropriate but that Coward’s friend Winston Churchill considered ill advised. Churchill argued against the knighthood based on Coward’s having been fined £200 by HMG as a result of spending more than £11,000 during trips to America, which was in violation of the Exchequer’s currency laws. This was an extraordinary amount of money, and more than the average British family earned in ten years.31

  Almost seven decades later, Churchill’s resistance to the knighthood was ascribed by some in the press to his “homophobic” mind-set, a charge not supported by any of Churchill’s inner circle, who dutifully recorded in their diaries his regular and often acerbic criticisms of men and women, great and small. Did Churchill know who in his circle was a homosexual and who was not? “I wouldn’t think he cared,” recalled Jock Colville. Churchill was well aware of the homosexual proclivities of certain of the West End theater crowd, sundry university dons, as well as myriad luminaries in HMG and the military, such as his former secretary Eddie Marsh and his bisexual friend Bob Boothby, and T. E. Lawrence, to whom Churchill remained loyal long after Lawrence’s death. Winston and Clementine lunched on occasion with W. Somerset Maugham (“Willy” to his friends), who late in life found “great pleasure” in Churchill’s presence at his dining table. Evelyn Waugh (who had had a few homosexual affairs at Oxford) was always welcome in the Churchill house, Churchill grateful to Waugh for watching out for Randolph when they served together in Yugoslavia. Churchill, a presiding member of the louche aristocracy (as characterized by the British historian Roy Jenkins) that ruled England, lived a life of valets, gardeners, chauffeurs, champagne, perfumed handkerchiefs, and pink silk underclothes, all the while surrounded by a coterie of the most eccentric Englishmen and -women—including his mother, father, and son—who enjoyed flirtations with debauchery. Homosexuality, illegal in Britain, was considered dangerous but not immoral by Churchill’s crowd, and only for the political scandal that might attach to public disclosure. Homosexuals might be a security risk, Churchill once told one of his private secretaries, not only because of the danger of blackmail but because they might feel alien in the mainstream of their own society, “like a black in a white country, or a white in a black one.”32

  Though he cared little about a person’s sexual preference, Churchill was often quick with clever barbs about homosexuals. Of the notorious Tom Driberg—Beaverbrook protégé, Labour MP, and serial seducer of young men—Churchill remarked, “That’s the man who brought sodomy into disrepute.” When he learned from MPs in the smoking room that Driberg had married a somewhat plain woman, Churchill announced, “Buggers can’t be choosers.” Yet when it came to something as serious as a knighthood for Coward, Churchill stuck to the facts.

  Churchill opposed the knighthood because he took HMG’s currency laws seriously. He complained about (and paid) heavy excise taxes on the Cuban cigars that found their way to his humidor. He was not a diligent manager of his own money, but he was diligent in paying his taxes (and in taking advantage of any tax loopholes that presented themselves). Despite Coward’s secret intelligence work, which could not be divulged in any event during wartime, it simply would not do for news to escape in the midst of fiscal drought, coal shortages, and food rationing that Noël Coward, having been fined for burning through the equivalent of ten years of middle-class wages in a few months while sating his voluptuary appetites in America, had been rewarded with a knighthood.*33

  Churchill’s personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson (who had been knighted the previous year), was another case altogether. Although Churchill never called Wilson a friend, as he did Coward, the doctor had committed no transgressions that might reflect poorly on Churchill or England. On New Year’s Day, Doctor Wilson was made a peer, and became the First Baron Moran.

  Churchill had intended to depart London for Casablanca on January 11, but when foul weather pushed his departure back a day, he used the time to fire off a memo to Sir Henry Tizard, who had recommended the RAF follow the lead of the Americans and resort to daytime bombing raids, with the objective of gaining more accuracy. Churchill replied that “since a great proportion of our losses are due to flak, which is more accurate by day than by night, the day bombers will have to fly at a very great height,” which would further reduce their accuracy. This was the great tactical conundrum. The Americans, with faith in the protective firepower of their Flying Fortress’s eleven .50-caliber machine guns, had embraced the tactic of daylight raids. Yet while conducting a very few such raids over France and the Netherlands, and not one over Germany, they had suffered terrible casualties among their bomber crews. Six months earlier, on July 4, six American bombers—in a statement of American independence—took part in a daylight raid on German airfields in Holland; the planes missed their targets and two of the six never returned. Churchill believed the best—and safest—way to reduce Germany was by night bombing. Five hundred American bombers were parked in East Anglia, and he wanted them in the air over Germany, at night, even though such a tactical shift would require the retraining of every American airman. Churchill intended to voice his opposition to daytime bombing to the Americans at the upcoming Casablanca meeting. He also meant to ask the Americans just when they might begin dropping bombs on Germany.34

  The ongoing dispute between Prof Lindemann—Lord Cherwell—and Tizard only served to further muck up the works, and ill serve Churchill. Sir Henry sought to bury the hatchet with Cherwell, but Prof saw no reason to extract it from between Tizard’s shoulder blades.* Churchill told Tizard that his bombing suggestion was “all a matter of numbers” and instructed him to prepare a report for his return. But Cherwell, not Tizard, accompanied Churchill to Casablanca, and nobody could assemble numbers like the Prof. Cherwell’s objective was to destroy German morale, ergo German houses, which usually contained residents. He and Churchill of course hoped to destroy German industry as well, but poor bombing accuracy—day or night—proscribed inflicting a mortal wound on German industry. But Cherwell knew that as long as bombs fell somewhere within a city, they destroyed houses, and therefore morale. He had advocated that strategy almost a year earlier, in a study that came to be known as the “Dehousing Paper.” He had Churchill’s full support. Thus, there could be no doubt that Tizard’s numbers would never stack up to Cherwell’s, or that Sir Henry’s suggestion would ever fly.35

  By this date, after almost forty months of war, the British had poured 70,000 tons of bombs into Germany, the equivalent of 6,000 sorties by Lancaster heavy bombers and more than four times the tonnage the Luftwaffe dropped on Britain during the height of the 1940 Blitz. Within six months, Bomber Command would double that tonnage. But the American Eighth Air Force had yet to get off the ground in any meaningful way. It was headquartered near Bomber Command at the Wycombe Abbey, a girls’ school in a former country house tucked into the lovely meadows and crofts of Buckinghamshire. In the months since the school’s students and teachers were sent packing, the Eighth had done little more than unpack its charts, sextants, and slide rules. The Eighth Air Force’s commander, Major General Carl Spaatz (whose name Churchill mispronounced as “spots”), and much of the Eighth had been siphoned off to North Africa, with the result that the Americans, in a few night raids, dropped fewer tons of bombs on Germany during the final months of 1942 than the Luftwaffe had dropped on London on the first night of the Blitz. This was unacceptable to Churchill, who intended to say as much in Casablanca to the overall U.S. air commander, General Ira Eaker, himself a believer in the invincibility of airpower. “The Americans had been in the war for more than a year,” Churchill later wrote, “but so far had never thrown a single bomb on Germany by daylight methods.”36

  He never ceased to express to the Chiefs of Staff both his keen de
sire to bomb Germany and his suspicion that the effects on German industry were neither “decisive” nor up to the “hypothetical and indefinite” objectives cited by Air Marshal Portal and Bomber Harris. “It is very disputable,” he wrote in a memo to Portal, “whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in the present war.” Yet Churchill had also tried to sell Stalin on the idea that the air war was not only a de facto second front but also an effective second front, a claim that Stalin dismissed (but Eisenhower agreed with, as did Goebbels when the bombs took an increasingly greater toll). At the core of Churchill’s fluctuating beliefs regarding airpower was the unsettling prospect that if airpower did not reduce Germany to ruin, large Anglo-American armies would have to do so. He had long known that armies would have to go ashore someday, but airpower, as seductively portrayed by Portal and Harris, held up the possibility of sparing the troops (although at terrible cost to the air crews). In one of Churchill’s disputatious memos to Portal he argued that even if “all the towns in Germany were rendered largely uninhabitable it does not follow that the military control would be weakened or even that Germany’s war industry could not be carried on.” In fact, Churchill feared Hitler would scatter war production throughout Eastern Europe such that it became independent of events in the Reich, and untouchable.

  In the end, his doubts proved justified. German production of tanks, planes, artillery, and submarines increased during each year of the war, and fell off only during the final twelve weeks (although the rate of increase was assuredly slowed by bombing). Churchill saw the inherent contradictions in the arguments put forth by the strategic bombing advocates. On the one hand, pinpoint accuracy (which was unattainable) was not necessary for a reduction in German morale, but it was absolutely necessary if German industry was to be destroyed. He had no choice but to continue the bombing. It might erode morale; it might smash industrial targets. Whatever the results, British morale would be boosted. Britons were not to be denied their revenge. By war’s end the effort cost Britain almost 11,000 aircraft and 55,000 killed, the Americans more than 8,000 planes and 26,000 killed. As for Spaatz, who later commanded all U.S. air forces in Europe and believed those forces could alone defeat Hitler in 1944, Churchill offered to Harris that the American was “a man of limited intelligence.” Harris’s reply to Churchill is ironic, given his bomber mania and the slaughter within his RAF ranks: “You pay him too high a compliment.”37

  Neutral nations also thwarted the destruction of German industry. Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, and Spain all carried on robust and profitable trade with Germany, to the ongoing frustration of the Allies. Almost 100 percent of Europe’s wolframite, a tungsten ore critical to the manufacture of armored steel plate, came from the Iberian Peninsula. Half of Portugal’s wolframite went to Germany, a trade policy that resulted in dead Britons. That was one reason Churchill for two years had considered the possibility of taking the Azores by force if Portugal’s dictator, Dr. António Salazar, did not agree to grant Allied ships and aircraft refueling rights in those islands. Were Allied aircraft allowed use of the Azores, the air cover over convoys would effectively double. Salazar continued to play both ends against the middle until late 1943, when—after Churchill threatened to take the islands by force—he finally granted refueling and landing rights to the Allies. When Salazar objected to American troops being stationed in the Azores, Churchill again threatened direct action, cabling Eden, “There is no need for us to be apologetic in dealing with any of these neutrals who hope to get out of Armageddon with no trouble and a good profit.”38

  The neutrals profited handsomely from their relations with Berlin. The Swedes supplied the Reich iron ore, canned fish, and ball bearings. The Swiss sold Hitler arms and ammunition, and industrial diamonds used in cutting tools and bomb fuses. Pressed in early 1943 by the British and Americans to curtail their arms trade with Germany, the Swiss promised to look at their trade practices, and then went on that year to increase shipments to Germany by over 50 percent. The Swedes were stubborn when pressed to limit trade with Germany, wrote Dean Acheson, then an assistant secretary in the State Department, but “the Swiss were the cube of stubbornness.” The neutrals argued that self-preservation drove their trade policies; it did not pay to say no to Germany. Even Franco, a Fascist and hostile neutral who flirted with outright union with the Axis, had to watch his back. To keep him on the fence the Allies continued to send Franco food to feed his people. There were consequences. The American press attacked Churchill as an appeaser after word leaked out of the State Department that he was pondering an offer to Franco to increase food and oil shipments in return for Spain’s making small concessions to Britain, including a reduction in Spain’s sale of wolframite to Germany. Lord Cherwell proposed turning the behavior of neutrals against the Germans. He developed a plan to clandestinely introduce botulin into the canned fish Sweden sold to Germany. “A small amount of it [botulin] would be enough to destroy all mankind,” he later told one of Churchill’s secretaries.39

  An irony attached itself to dealings with neutral nations. The Allies considered German-occupied countries to be legitimate targets of economic and military warfare. The citizens of those nations were therefore doubly victimized—by the Nazis and by RAF bombs, which were no more accurate when dropped on Holland or Norway or France than when dropped on Germany. But neutrals such as Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, and Spain were immune from RAF bombs, immune from the bloodiest consequences of the war. Neutrals might be persuaded by diplomacy to adopt policies acceptable to the Allies, but they could not be cudgeled into good behavior. Meanwhile, they supplied skilled workers, raw materials, machine tools, and bullets that killed American and British soldiers, and banked the profits. Eamon de Valera (whose term for the war was “the Emergency”) was an adroit fence-sitter, dutifully interning both German and British pilots who were forced to land in Ireland (and Americans, too, until an arrangement was made later in the year).

  The Swiss allowed Britain to manufacture their deadly efficient Oerlikon 20mm cannon under license but also sold the cannon and ammunition to Berlin. Both Tokyo and Berlin had reached an agreement years earlier with Switzerland to manufacture versions of the gun. Thus, when a Messerschmitt Bf 110 armed with Oerlikon cannons attacked a British frigate, also armed with the anti-aircraft version of the gun, each side found itself shooting at the other with the same Swiss weapon. Only Turkey among the largest neutrals displayed a modicum of moral fortitude, when it risked incurring Hitler’s wrath by suspending shipments of chrome to Germany; but it did so only in mid-1944, when Hitler was on a sure path to destruction and only after a threat of economic blockade by the Allies. Neutral nations could not be persuaded to act reasonably by B-17 bombers; nor could they be punished by B-17s when they did not. If Allied bombers blew one of Hitler’s munitions factories to smithereens, he could bank on the Swiss making up his loss, and the Swedes for the iron to smelt into new cannons. The ring of steel Churchill envisioned around Germany always admitted to a degree of porosity.40

  On January 11, the same day that Churchill mulled over Tizard’s bombing projections, the Sunday Dispatch announced the possibility of “one little bomb that would destroy the whole of Berlin… a bomb that would blast a hole twenty-five miles in diameter and wreck every structure within a hundred miles…. The explosive in this bomb would be the energy contained in the uranium atom.” HMG saw no need to comment on such a ludicrous example of sensationalist journalism.41

  Churchill also used the delay on the eleventh to take a first and perfunctory look at a three-hundred-page paper on postwar domestic policy titled “Social Insurance and Allied Services,” produced by Sir William Beveridge, released to Parliament in November and published by the government as a white paper in early December.* The British and American press had been parsing Beveridge’s plan for weeks. Churchill had not; the sheer length of the report argued against his reading it.

  Beveridge was Britain’s leading authority on unemployment insurance, master of
University College, Oxford, and an old colleague of Churchill’s from his days as a Liberal, when he and Lloyd George had asked Beveridge to prepare the nation’s first comprehensive plan for national insurance. The 1942 paper—the Beveridge Report, as it came to be known—amounted to a manifesto of social reform, which the Manchester Guardian called “a great and fine thing.” It outlined a compulsory, flat-rate national program that would address wage loss, maternity care, pensions, disability insurance, housing, education, widows’ benefits, health insurance, funeral expenses—every financial need encountered by Britons from birth to funerary interment. Churchill didn’t like what little he read, not because he opposed the idea of HMG restructuring Britain’s social security apparatus, but because, as he told the War Cabinet, he did not wish to deceive the people “by false hopes and airy visions of Utopia and El Dorado.” Besides, he offered, Britain would be nearly broke after the war, the United States would be a formidable competitor, and Britons would “get very angry if they felt they had been gulled or cheated” by promises made, and then unmade. Yet Beveridge, anticipating Conservative opposition, argued that in a postwar world of reduced tariffs and free markets, a shift of pension and health insurance costs from corporations to the government would make British industry more competitive in world markets.42