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

  Although Brooke regularly savaged Churchill’s strategic priorities, the two were actually in agreement on the Aegean. Yet events had bypassed the Aegean strategy, a fact that Churchill simply could not grasp. Brooke understood what Churchill did not: Rhodes was the correct play, but the timing had gone wrong. Churchill’s push for Rhodes could only result in increased American suspicion of his (imperial) motives and a decrease in American support of operations in Italy, a double disaster. It was a tragedy in Brooke’s judgment, the blame for which he put down to his own lack of “sufficient force of character to swing those American Chiefs of Staff and make them see the daylight.” Brooke later wrote that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown that October, not because of Churchill’s “Rhodes madness,” but because the Americans were stripping the Mediterranean of resources “for a nebulous 2nd front.” On November 1, he told his diary what might have been: “We should have been in a position to force the Dardanelles by the capture of Crete and Rhodes, we should have the whole Balkans ablaze by now, and the war might have been finished in 1943.” These were Churchill’s sentiments exactly. But the Combined Chiefs had agreed at Quebec to strip the Mediterranean of at least six divisions in order to feed Overlord. “It is heartbreaking,” Brooke wrote.284

  Caution, Churchill told one of his stenographers, Marian Holmes, had again prevailed over aggression. Miss Holmes found the P.M. “distressed” by the refusal of Roosevelt to see things his way. Churchill told her he felt “almost like chucking it in” and “the difficulty is not in winning the war; it is in persuading people to let you win it—persuading fools.” A few weeks later, on his way to Cairo and Tehran, Churchill offered to HMG’s new resident minister to Allied Mediterranean headquarters, Harold Macmillan: “Such caution leads to weak and faltering decisions—or rather, indecisions. Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman, or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together—what do you get? The sum of their fears.” Churchill, bitter, never forgave Eisenhower for making the decision. “I was grieved,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “that my small requests” resulted in Ike’s “obdurate” resistance to and ultimate rejection of the Rhodes venture.285

  Yet it was Eisenhower’s decision, not Eisenhower the man, that fueled Churchill’s bitterness. In a typically Churchillian display of generosity, the very week Eisenhower scuttled the Rhodes gambit, Churchill received permission from King George to commission a special North African campaign ribbon for Eisenhower and Alexander. The ribbons were embossed with the numerals “1” and “8” in reference to the two Allied armies. Churchill, on his way to Cairo, personally pinned the awards on Ike and Alex. Brooke, for his part, lacked Churchill’s ability to maintain numerous (and often conflicting) opinions about a man, with the result that Brooke’s criticism of his colleagues’ professional judgments, including Churchill’s, often took the form of ad hominem assaults. The CIGS blamed Eisenhower and Marshall for the inertia in the Mediterranean, the former for being seduced by Overlord due to its “being easier to understand” than the complexities of the Mediterranean theater, the latter due to the “limitations of Marshall’s brain” and his inability to “ever, ever see the end of his nose.”286

  On Overlord there could be no turning back, but not for want of trying on Field Marshal Jan Smuts’s part, with the support of King George. Even before Churchill arrived home from Quebec, Smuts whispered the folly of Overlord to the King. Smuts and the King dined together on October 13 and ratified their anti-Overlord alliance. The next day in a letter to Churchill, the King made known his doubts about the cross-Channel plan and expressed his belief that the “underbelly” strategy was correct. He advised Churchill to take the matter up with Roosevelt and Stalin when they met in late November. Churchill swiftly disabused the King of any notion of backing out, writing in return, “There is no question of our going back on what is agreed.” Yet there was a question, and Churchill raised it at the Chiefs of Staff meeting on the nineteenth when he requested a swing around to the Mediterranean even at the expense of Overlord. “I am in many ways entirely with him,” Brooke wrote that night, “but God knows where that may lead us to as regards clashes with Americans.” The next week Churchill and Smuts argued to the COS that the Mediterranean theater had more merit than a French landing and that since Britain controlled her own destinies, Britain could choose to fight where she chose. Even Max Beaverbrook, who was in attendance, came around. The Beaver had backed the cross-Channel strategy loudest and longest but, after pondering Churchill’s arguments, announced that since they had committed to the Mediterranean, they “should make a job of it.” Yet they couldn’t go it alone, and they knew it.287

  On November 1, Churchill wrote a memo to the chiefs in which he lamented Britain’s lack of available manpower for expanding operations: “We cannot add to the total; on the contrary, it is already dwindling.” All able-bodied men sixteen to sixty-five had been mustered for the services and armaments work, as had all able-bodied women aged eighteen to fifty. The manpower pool had evaporated. Still, Churchill found comfort in the fact that when Marshall took over command of Overlord, and Eisenhower replaced Marshall in Washington, a British commander in the Mediterranean, unfettered by American constraints, could then fulfill British destinies. Yet many in the American press argued that Overlord amounted to a demotion for Marshall and were calling for a bigger role, that of supreme Allied commander in the European theater. In mid-October, Churchill had asked Roosevelt for clarification on the matter, only to receive an indeterminate answer two weeks later. A week later, Churchill instructed Dill, in Washington, to make clear to Hopkins and Admiral Leahy that the British would never accede to a single European supreme commander; to do so would in effect deprive the British Chiefs of Staff of their sovereign authority. Churchill also expressed his doubts about Overlord to Roosevelt, but with not quite the conviction he had displayed to the British chiefs. “I do not doubt our ability… to get ashore and deploy,” he told the president. “I am, however, deeply concerned with the build-up and with the situation that may arise between the 30th and 60th days.” Getting ashore would be easy; staying ashore was what worried Churchill. A repulse, he told Roosevelt, could only “give Hitler the chance of a startling comeback.”288

  There was clearly much to thrash out before they met Stalin, and at Roosevelt’s suggestion, Churchill agreed to a bilateral conference, code-named Sextant, in Cairo before moving on to meet Stalin, presumably in Tehran, although there were growing doubts both in Moscow and Washington about meeting in such an out-of-the-way place. Roosevelt also suggested that Chiang Kai-shek join the party in Cairo in order that Pacific strategies could be addressed. This should have sounded alarms, but Churchill agreed and, with the Chinese legend of the celestial dragon that protects the holiest places in mind, chose Celestes as Chiang’s secret identity.

  During the eight weeks between the Allied landing at Salerno and early November, the Red Army struck along a five-hundred-mile front. By October 1 it had taken Smolensk and Katyn, three hundred miles north of Kiev. Stalin intended to fight on through the winter. His factories beyond the Urals were turning out almost 2,000 tanks per month; German factories struggled to produce 350 panzers per month. The Luftwaffe, having been peeled away from the Eastern Front to protect the Reich from the RAF, had lost air superiority. The Iranian rail line was pumping six thousand tons per day of matériel into Russia. The weather was worsening, but winter was not the enemy of the Russian soldier; thirteen million pairs of fleece-lined boots stamped Made in the USA ensured that the Red Army marched in relative comfort. One hundred thousand American-made Studebaker trucks assured that the troops’ supplies would follow close behind. The Americans offered to ship thousands of armored cars, but Stalin declined; he considered them to be death traps.

  The Soviet attack was fashioned on Marshal Foch’s broad-front strategy of 1918, whereby gains were exploited until the advancing troops needed replenishment, at which time other strikes we
re launched elsewhere on the front. As conducted by the Red Army, the strategy resulted in the Germans having to hurry reinforcements to points under attack while simultaneously restricting their ability to reinforce points that might be struck next. It was a strategy, Liddell Hart wrote, that “paralyzed [German] freedom of action.” The Red Army command “might be likened to a pianist running his hands up and down the keyboard.” On November 6 it took Kiev (just 120 miles from the Polish border) and crossed the Dnieper at several points south of Kiev. The crossing of the Dnieper was a crippling blow to Hitler, for the high west bank of the river offered him the best natural barrier in southern Russia and was expected to form the backbone of the eastern wall, which Hitler had just ordered built. The fortification—the easternmost bulwark of Hitler’s empire—was to run from the Sea of Azov north along the Dnieper to Kiev, and from Kiev north to the Baltic at Narva. But the eastern wall was to remain only a line on paper.289

  “The more furious the storm,” Goebbels told his diary in late September as the southern Russian front deteriorated, “the more determined is the Führer to meet it.” Still, he added, “It gives one the creeps to look at the map and compare what we had under our dominion… last year with how far we have now been thrown back.” Later that month Goebbels wrote, “We must achieve success somewhere. A kingdom for a victory.” Dimly grasping the possibility of national obliteration, he broached the subject of a negotiated peace to Hitler. Their thinking on the matter was in turns precise and delusional. Negotiations with either Britain or Russia would prove problematic, Hitler offered, for “England is not yet groggy enough nor sufficiently tired of war.” Any attempt at negotiation would only be seen by London “as a sign of weakness.” But in time, “the English would come to their senses.” In the east, “Stalin has the advantage,” and any peace feelers would only be seen in the Kremlin as dealing from weakness. Thus, in the east, “the present moment is quite unfavorable” for negotiations. That was because the Germans were losing in the east. So they pondered England again. “The Führer believes it would be easier to make a deal with the English than with the Soviets…. Churchill is absolutely anti-Bolshevik.” But the problem with the English was Churchill. Goebbels believed Stalin the safer bet as he was a “practical politician,” whereas “Churchill is a romantic adventurer, with whom one can’t talk sensibly…. The Führer does not believe that negotiations with Churchill would lead to any result as he is too deeply wedded to his hostile views, and besides, is guided by hatred and not by reason.” In order to better understand his English enemies, Goebbels that month read How Green Was My Valley. He concluded the English would never “become Bolshevized.” This might prove valuable from a negotiation standpoint; the Reich and England shared a common enemy, after all. Both Hitler and Goebbels seemed to have forgotten that Stalin had once been their ally.290

  On September 23 Goebbels displayed a modicum of sense on the matter while dining with Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze), the Führer’s East Prussian headquarters near Rastenburg. “We must come to an arrangement,” Goebbels advised, “with one side or the other. The Reich has never yet won a two-front war.” England seemed the better choice because “one can always make a better deal with a democratic state.” Yet here was Churchill indulging “in orgies of hatred against the Reich” while promising Britons (and Germans) that “the Reich is to face total destruction.” Falling under a momentary spell of rationality, Goebbels concluded that “it is quite doubtful whether we can choose between Russia and England.” Yet an approach must be made to one or the other. The German people, Goebbels told Hitler, are “yearning for peace.” Hitler allowed that he, too, yearned for peace. “The Führer stressed this,” Goebbels wrote. “He said he would be happy to have contact with artistic circles again, to go to the theater in the evening and visit the Artist’s Club.” He had plans for grand art museums in his hometown, Linz, but at the same time was intent on pushing “Vienna back artistically.” In the meantime, Hitler told Goebbels, “our big rocket… fourteen tons… is a murderous tool” that would set the English straight. This delighted Goebbels: “I believe that when the first of these missiles descends upon London, a sort of panic will break out among the English people.” That night the RAF smashed Hanover.291

  The Reich’s leaders saw their salvation in the planned “great reprisal campaign by rockets” set for February, target: London. Churchill was privy to just enough intelligence to form an incomplete yet increasingly worrisome picture of just what German rocket scientists were up to. He advised Roosevelt, “The Germans are preparing an attack on England, particularly London, by means of very long range rockets which may conceivably weigh 60 tons and carry an explosive charge of 10 to 20 tons.” England had no defense against such a weapon. Yet Churchill’s most trusted science adviser, Lord Cherwell, was offering “5 to 1 odds against” the Germans developing a rocket. Alexander Cadogan agreed with Cherwell, but confessed his lack of certainty to his diary: “They’re preparing something there’s no doubt” (italics Cadogan).292

  On October 3 Harriman departed Washington for his new assignment as American ambassador to the Kremlin. He stopped in London for a few days, but only to take his leave. Roosevelt had been pressing him to take the job for months. Since March the Russians had ignored the current ambassador, Admiral William H. Standley, after Standley disagreed publicly with Stalin’s declaration that the Red Army alone was bearing the full brunt of the war. Standley, whose remarks had not been cleared by Hull, urged Izvestia to publish full and honest accountings of Lend-Lease aid, including 85,000 trucks, 6,100 aircraft, and 8,600 tanks shipped to Russia. The Russian press soon made mention of Lend-Lease, but within weeks came the Katyn incident, the abandonment of Roundup, and the Anglo-American exclusion of Russia from the Italian negotiations. The Moscow post needed new blood; with reluctance Harriman took it. It meant good-bye to London and to Churchill, whose company Harriman thoroughly enjoyed, and to Pamela, whose bed he enjoyed (the lovers’ hiatus lasted almost three decades, until 1971, when Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward became the third Mrs. Harriman). Soon after Harriman left for Moscow, Ed Murrow and his wife, Janet, began frequenting Pamela’s salon where, not yet twenty-four, she led England’s best and the brightest in discussions that parsed the political mysteries of their age. She spoke French fluently, had dazzling blue eyes, a fabulous figure, and met Henry James’s ideal of the English beauty: a complexion “as bright as a sunbeam after rain.” She exerted a strong gravitational pull on men, including Murrow. Soon, Murrow and Pamela were conducting their own private salon. Murrow’s boss at CBS, William S. Paley, who also fell under Pamela’s spell, later called her the greatest courtesan of the twentieth century. It was meant as a compliment. Whatever Churchill knew of all this he kept to himself, for he cared deeply for Pamela, who, by delivering to Winston a fair-haired blue-eyed grandson, could do no wrong in his estimation.293

  Harriman, accompanied by his daughter Kathleen, arrived in Moscow on the eighteenth. His first duty was to open up the ambassador’s residence, Spaso House, to Eden, Molotov, and Hull, who were about to convene the first meeting of the Allied foreign ministers. The talks were intended as a prelude to the first meeting of the Big Three the following month in Tehran, although Stalin still held out for Moscow because, as Molotov explained to Eden, the marshal was “indispensable” to the Red Army’s fight. Roosevelt, fearing Tehran would find him so far afield that he’d be unable to meet his constitutional obligations to remain in contact with his government, requested that they meet in Ankara or Basra, but Stalin held firm. Eden, at first skeptical of Molotov’s assessment, soon witnessed Stalin in action and concluded that Molotov was not exaggerating. Stalin was in regular contact with his generals on the front lines, and was deeply involved with the planning of an operation in Crimea. Where Roosevelt happily delegated military strategy to his lieutenants and Churchill unhappily did likewise, Stalin was a hands-on commander in chief. Urged by Eden, he finally committed to go as far as
Tehran, but no farther. Stalin was not in a giving mood. He wanted guarantees on the second front, and he demanded the Arctic convoys be resumed.294

  In the spring the Admiralty had proposed, and Churchill accepted, a cessation of Arctic convoys, infuriating Stalin in the process. Now in the autumn, with Tirpitz crippled weeks earlier by an audacious attack by three British mini-submarines, and the U-boats having all but disappeared from the Arctic routes, Churchill pushed a reluctant Admiralty to send four large convoys to Murmansk, one per month until February. Presuming that Stalin would welcome the news, Churchill sent a message along to Moscow. Stalin, in a blunt response, claimed Britain had “an obligation” to send the four convoys and virtually demanded they make the run to Murmansk immediately. The Foreign Office found the telegram “outrageous.” Churchill refused even to respond, handing it back to the new Soviet ambassador, Feodor Gousev. But to Eden, in Moscow, Churchill cabled that he thought the Soviet “machine,” not Stalin, was behind the tone of the cable, in part because it took twelve days to prepare. “The Soviet machine is quite convinced it can get everything by bullying, and I am sure it is a matter of some importance to show that this is not necessarily always true.” Stalin shrugged off Churchill’s refusal, telling Eden, “I understand Mr. Churchill does not want to correspond with me. Well, let it be so.” Then Stalin came at Eden over the only matter that really mattered: the second front. It was exactly as Eden had predicted at Quebec. Unless Stalin got his assurances, and until he believed that the Anglo-Americans were fighting the same war on the same Continent, he was content to let the West stew over the two questions that would not go away: Would the Red Army stop at its borders after expelling the Germans, and would Moscow seek a separate peace with Hitler?295