The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

  On September 12, their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, Winston and Clementine journeyed to Hyde Park, their last American stop before leaving for Halifax and the voyage home. The president toasted their health at dinner and tried to dazzle Clementine with “the magnetic quality of his charm” but failed. Clementine, her daughter Mary later wrote, “got along well” with Roosevelt but quickly concluded, “his personal vanity was inordinate.” It did not help when Roosevelt called Clementine “Clemmie,” a breach of etiquette in Mrs. Churchill’s estimation, as she regarded the use of Christian names a “privilege marking close friendship or long association,” neither of which described her relationship with Roosevelt.270

  After dinner that night, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that an infusion of several divisions of Polish infantry in aid of Tito’s partisans might be just the ticket for the Balkans, where Italian troops were already joining the Allied cause. “Any opportunity” that presented itself in the Balkans, Roosevelt told Churchill, should be taken advantage of. This understandably struck Churchill as a validation of his Balkan strategy, although Roosevelt, when announcing the third war bond drive earlier that week, had made no mention of the Balkans, or Tito, or Poles. Roosevelt told Americans that their troops—your boys, our boys—were on their way to Berlin and Tokyo. Indeed, in the Pacific, the Americans held Port Moresby; their bombers were pounding Rabaul, and a carrier task force was about to strike Wake Island. The invasion of Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands was planned for November. The advance to Tokyo had begun. Given that the Chinese were incompetent, the Russians were not at war with Japan, and the British were incapable of driving from India to Tokyo, it would be Americans and only the Americans who someday entered Tokyo.

  On the European front, it began to look like the Russians and only the Russians would someday reach Berlin. If the Red Army kept rolling west at its current pace, Anglo-American forces would someday enter Berlin only by invitation of Stalin. Churchill had argued for two years that unless agreement was reached with the Soviets to discuss borders only after final victory, whoever in the meantime took territory ruled that territory, which brought the question around, as always, to Poland. What would be the fate of Poland—and Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states, and Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania—after the Red Army swept through on its way to Berlin? Roosevelt’s suggestion of a move into the Balkans, therefore, helped assuage Churchill’s growing uncertainties in regard to Russia.271

  Happy to have Roosevelt in his court on the Balkans, Churchill returned the favor on the matter of the atomic bomb. The two leaders concluded what amounted to a private treaty. It bypassed both the (written) U.S. Constitution and the (unwritten) British in that neither Congress nor Parliament (nor the full cabinet in either country) knew that an atomic bomb was being produced. They agreed privately that all atomic secrets would be shared, that neither party would ever use the bomb against the other, and that each party would inform the other of intended use against a third party. The fourth clause held that postwar Britain would not pursue commercial use of atomic energy based on knowledge gained in the development of the bomb. This caveat stemmed from American fears that Britain might try to reap commercial rewards from America’s wartime financial sacrifice. Churchill’s acceptance of the condition shocked R. V. Jones, who had solved the question of how to jam the German targeting beams and now headed the scientific intelligence branch of the Air Staff. Churchill, Jones later wrote, “had signed away our birthright in the postwar development of nuclear energy.” Yet Jones understood two truths—the Americans had leverage, and it was typical of Churchill to make such a “magnificent gesture” in order to allay American fears. Churchill had conducted such business throughout Quadrant over dinners with Roosevelt and Hopkins, where men of honor transacted such business. Cadogan’s diary entries testified to the good fellowship. Churchill: “This water tastes funny”; Hopkins: “Because there’s no whisky in it. Fancy you a judge of water!” And Harry to “Mr. P.M.” as Churchill paced the room delivering another monologue: “Your pants is coming down.” Yet Churchill, in presuming that the bonhomie he found at the president’s table carried weight, failed to grasp a basic tenet of American politics: good cheer is nonbinding. Only the U.S. Congress can bind, and Churchill did not understand just how binding the U.S. Congress can be. Unlike Clementine, Churchill was quite dazzled by Roosevelt’s charm.272

  On September 12, Churchill learned early in the day that Waffen SS parachute commandos had plucked Benito Mussolini from his mountaintop confinement. As Churchill feared, a quisling government was about to be formed in northern Italy, but he had not foreseen that Mussolini, imprisoned for six weeks, would be at its helm. “Italy,” Churchill later wrote, “was now to pass through the most tragic time in her history.” Goebbels’ Italian labor force was growing exponentially. Tens of thousands of Italians were fleeing the developing battles in the south of Italy. Of the flood of “fugitives,” Goebbels confided to his diary, “Gigantic columns of Italian prisoners are on their way into the Reich. They are very welcome here as skilled workers.” “Slaves” would have been a more accurate description.273

  That week, German military propaganda celebrated the good news coming out of Italy, especially the drubbing inflicted on Mark Clark at Salerno, which the propagandists compared to Dunkirk and Gallipoli. But Salerno was not yet a battle won, which Goebbels knew well. He had warned the military propagandists to show caution; they had not. He summed up the situation to his diary with a line that happened also to be one of Churchill’s favorites: “I have always held… that the skin of the bear must not be distributed until the bear has been killed.”274

  By the time Churchill boarded HMS Renown on September 14, the U-boats had all but disappeared from the central and southern Atlantic but for irregular sniping along the South American and African coasts. Since late May, sixty-two convoys comprising 3,246 merchant ships sailed between America and Britain on the northern route; not a single ship was lost. In the southern and mid-Atlantic and Indian Ocean (where Dönitz had sent several U-boats), September’s losses from all causes came to about 208,000 tons, not much more than a week’s losses earlier in the year. October’s losses would come in under 100,000 tons, at a cost to Dönitz of twenty-three U-boats; earlier in the year the British had budgeted a loss of 550,000 tons for October. The Allies were on track to lose less than half the tonnage in 1943 than they had lost in 1942. And Dönitz’s losses began to increase exponentially. As summer prepared to give way to autumn, Dönitz pulled his fleet even farther east.275

  Still, in the Arctic, the threats from U-boats, from Scharnhorst and Tirpitz, and from long-range German bombers conspired against restarting the Russian convoys. Hitler placed his faith in technological advances, in the air and under the sea. Goebbels enthused to his diary over a new German torpedo (called Gnat by the Allies) that “listened” for and homed in on cavitation noise of around 24.5 kHz, which was equivalent to the “noise” made by propellers on a destroyer cruising at moderate speed. Nine Allied destroyers (and more than a thousand sailors) were lost in September to the new torpedo, but with Dönitz’s U-boats leaving the battlefield, the torpedo’s deadly efficiencies could not be exploited. With the sea-lanes to Britain secure, the buildup of troops and tanks in Britain in preparation for Overlord proceeded at will. Hitler had long held that control of the Atlantic Ocean was his best defense against the West. His defense had disappeared.276

  By November, American transports were arriving at British ports after ten-day journeys during which the green troops stuffed belowdecks played poker, wrote letters, and ate hot navy chow. Some of the ships’ captains allowed army personnel to set up shipboard radio stations that played records over the PA system for the listening ease of the men below. One recording, however, was often banned: Bing Crosby’s new hit, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”277

  Renown brought Churchill safely into the Clyde on September 19. The voyage had been uneventful but for Mary almost being washed o
verboard when she accepted a young officer’s invitation to stroll the quarterdeck at the moment the ship made a sharp turn in high seas. Had she not snagged herself on a stanchion, she would have been swept away, the event witnessed by Ismay from the bridge but not by Churchill. “We had visions of plunging overboard,” Ismay later wrote, “rather than face the Prime Minister.”

  Churchill received daily briefing on the Salerno landings during the five-day voyage, and the news was worrisome. Little progress was being made, which is to say the men remained trapped on the beaches. For months Hopkins and Stimson had deprecated Churchill’s fears of French beaches running red with blood; yet the situation at Salerno was developing in exactly that way. Very worrisome was the fact that more men had gone ashore at Salerno in the first three days than were called for in the Overlord plan for France. Churchill continued to proclaim that the landing was beginning to look like the landings at Suvla Bay during the Gallipoli campaign. Each day of delay at Salerno brought ever increasing concentrations of Germans on the beach perimeter, and increased the chances of the Allies being thrown back into the sea. Churchill proposed to fly there himself to take charge, but Alexander, anticipating such an offer, had already left for the front. Not until Churchill was back on British soil did he receive the news he had been waiting for: “I can say with full confidence,” Alexander wrote, “that the whole situation has changed in our favor, and that the initiative has passed to us.” Yet it had taken Alexander almost three weeks to establish his armies in the toe and ankle of Italy, and he still had 150 miles to go before reaching Rome.278

  Shortly after Churchill arrived home, Admiral Dudley Pound submitted his resignation. His brain tumor killed him a month later, on October 21, Trafalgar Day. He was “the smartest sailor in the Royal Navy,” Churchill told Jock Colville, “but cautious.” Yet Pound’s conservative deployment of HMG’s fleets had kept England in the chase for four years. Pound lived to see victory in the Atlantic, and the victory was his. Old British sailors will argue that the British Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, by virtue of being a “fleet in being,” played as critical a role as the boys in their Hurricanes and Spitfires in keeping Hitler out of England. Hitler tested Fighter Command but could not bring himself to test the Home Fleet. Myth attached to “the few,” but the sailors had done their duty, Pound foremost. Andrew (“ABC”) Cunningham, hero of the Mediterranean, replaced Pound as first sea lord.

  Harry Hopkins checked himself into the hospital in a state of exhaustion as soon as Churchill departed for London. Eisenhower was also worn out and under a doctor’s care. Dill, too, was being ground down; he had injured himself while hunting boar in India the previous year and would not live out the next. And Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Kingsley Wood, whose stewardship of the British purse had kept the Island afloat financially, died suddenly two days after Churchill’s return to London. A shake-up in the ranks was taking place of a sort and magnitude no one had foreseen.

  The same could be said of the shake-ups Britons experienced at home and at work. On September 23, Churchill addressed six thousand women from all walks of British life in Albert Hall. As with all of his speeches, he had composed it himself. He told the women:

  We are engaged in a struggle for life…. This war effort could not have been achieved if the women had not marched forward in millions and undertaken all kinds of tasks and work for which any other generation but our own unless you go back to the Stone Age would have considered them unfitted…. Nothing has been grudged, and the bounds of women’s activities have been definitely, vastly, and permanently enlarged…. It may seem strange that a great advance in the position of women in the world in industry, in controls of all kinds, should be made in time of war and not in time of peace. One would have thought that in the days of peace the progress of women to an ever larger share in the life and work and guidance of the community would have grown, and that, under the violences of war, it would be cast back. The reverse is true. War is the teacher, a hard, stern, efficient teacher. War has taught us to make these vast strides forward towards a far more complete equalisation of the parts to be played by men and women in society.

  He had come a long way in the three decades since declaring of the suffragettes, “What a ridiculous tragedy it will be if this strong Government and party which has made its mark in history were to go down on petticoat politics.”279

  Churchill, the Chiefs of Staff, and the cabinet were in need of rest, but none was forthcoming. John Anderson moved over to the Exchequer, Attlee took over as lord president. Max Beaverbrook, who for health reasons had taken himself away from the pressures of producing goods, rejoined the government as lord privy seal. This was an ill-defined position that admitted to elasticity, perfect for Beaverbrook, whose real role in the new command structure was to serve as Churchill’s crony, booster, and foil. South Africa’s Jan Smuts now sat in on the War Cabinet meetings (informally, at Churchill’s invitation) and brought with him a growing distaste for Overlord, which he imparted not only to Churchill, who had his own doubts, but also to King George. The migration of ministers from post to post struck Churchill as both worrisome and comical; when the reorganization was complete, he took a partisan swipe at his Labour colleagues when he told Eden, “Except for me and you, this is the worst government England has ever had.”280

  British troops entered Naples on October 1 to find that the Germans had very efficiently destroyed the port and its facilities before departing. Since coming ashore at Salerno, the Fifth Army had advanced on average just over a mile per day. Still, Churchill cabled Alexander that he looked forward to meeting him in Rome in a month or so. But at Alexander’s rate of advance, his armies would not reach Rome, 120 miles to the north, until sometime in February 1944. Churchill’s hopes for the swift capture of Rome and a drive to northern Italy had been wrecked on the road to Naples. Albert Kesselring later said of the weakness inherent in the Allied strategy: “An air landing on Rome and sea landing nearby, instead of at Salerno, would have automatically caused us to evacuate all the southern half of Italy.” Now the Allies would have to pay in blood for every mile of ground between Naples and Rome, ground they could have purchased at little cost. By early October, the Eighth Army had moved up the Adriatic coast to take the port of Bari and the airfields at Foggia, and had connected with the Fifth Army in a continuous 120-mile line across the Italian peninsula from Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea to Termoli on the Adriatic. Montgomery’s army formed the right flank of the Italian campaign, but in Churchill’s mind it also formed the left flank of the Balkan front. A million Allied troops stood idle throughout Eisenhower’s command in the western Mediterranean; landing ships and craft were plentiful (although Eisenhower was about to transfer 85 percent of them to Britain). Churchill wanted to put a small percentage of those men and landing craft into the Aegean, where with the capture of Rhodes, the Balkan right flank would be turned, leaving the underbelly of the Balkans exposed. Tito waited with 200,000 well-armed partisans; the Chetniks fielded another 150,000. The Turks, beneficiaries of one hundred million dollars in British and American aide, fielded forty-five divisions, albeit poorly trained, poorly armed, and lacking armored support. Tito held strips of the Dalmatian coast, where supplies could be put ashore. Turkish airfields would allow the RAF to lend air support. The Allied forces Churchill sought would be needed only to prime the pump. Brooke years later wrote that it might have all been accomplished “without committing a single man in the Balkans.” Tito, Mihailovic, and the Turks (if they came in) could do most of the rest. Thus began Churchill’s newest Aegean adventure.281

  He climbed onto his new hobbyhorse, Rhodes, which took its place in the stable alongside Norway and Sumatra. On October 3, German troops attacked the Dodecanese island of Kos just three miles off the Turkish coast. British control of the airfield there was vital if the RAF hoped to cover the Royal Navy as it advanced toward the Greek mainland. Holding Kos would also demonstrate British resolve to the Turks. Yet with the airfield and the island
virtually undefended, the Germans took Kos in four days, along with more than 1,300 British soldiers and airmen. Now the Germans were within shouting distance of the Turkish mainland. The Turks, not sanguine and for good reason, decided the time was not yet right to join the Allies.

  “Another day of Rhodes madness,” Brooke wrote on October 7 after a particularly nasty “battle with the P.M.” over the wisdom of the Rhodes strategy. Churchill announced that he was leaving for Algiers in order to bring Eisenhower around. Brooke was beside himself: “This is all to decide whether we should try and take Rhodes…. He [the P.M.] is in a very dangerous condition, most unbalanced, and God knows how we shall finish this war if it goes on.”282

  Churchill cabled Roosevelt with a request to send Marshall to Tunisia in order to settle the Aegean strategy. Roosevelt’s reply was “cold,” Brooke wrote, a flat refusal that left no room for interpretation. The president refused to force any decision on Eisenhower even if he agreed with Churchill’s strategy, which he did not. “It is my opinion,” Roosevelt wrote, “that no diversion of forces or equipment should prejudice Overlord as planned.” Churchill replied the next day, telling Roosevelt that the Aegean plan required only a few weeks’ use of nine landing ships, which would not be needed for Overlord for at least six months. He asked for “some elasticity and a reasonable latitude in the handling of our joint affairs.” The Mediterranean, he pleaded, was being “stripped bare at a moment when great prizes could be cheaply won.” Roosevelt stood firm. “If we get the Aegean Islands,” he replied, “I ask myself where do we go from there, and vice versa where would the Germans go if… they retain possession of the islands?” But Churchill didn’t care where the Germans might go. He cared about British influence in the eastern Mediterranean. He wanted the Royal Navy there, on station, to send a message to not only Hitler but also Stalin that the Balkans were within the British sphere. It was not to be. The German capture of Kos meant that the British troops on Leros could be neither reinforced nor evacuated. Hitler had no intention of going anywhere after taking the Dodecanese; his goal was to keep the British from grabbing these plums and going someplace themselves, such as the Dardanelles and the Balkans. He succeeded in doing just that. And with Germans now camped just off the Turkish coast, the prospect of Turkey joining the Allies all but disappeared. Churchill instructed Eden “to coerce the Turks into the war.” Asked by Brooke how Eden should go about doing that, Churchill replied, “Remind the Turkey that Xmas is coming.”283