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

  What was coming their way was an Allied armada divided into two broad streams and subdivided into five lesser streams—one for each target beach. The fleet, under the overall command of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, was made up of almost 7,000 vessels, including 1,200 combat ships (four-fifths of them Royal Navy), 700 tugs and minesweepers, and 800 large transports, many towing sections of the Gooseberry prefabricated breakwaters, which would protect the Mulberry harbors. Ten miles off shore, on board more than 4,200 landing ships and landing craft, more than 132,000 British, Canadian, and American young men of the Twenty-first Army Group under the command of Bernard Montgomery waited to make their run into the beaches. Shortly before dawn, while the troop transports stood off shore, seven battleships, two dozen cruisers, and one hundred destroyers hammered the beaches with thousands of high-explosive rounds. Four years ago that week, Admiral Ramsay had directed the evacuation of 337,000 British and French troops from Dunkirk, a feat performed over nine days under the guns and bombs of the Luftwaffe. The fleeing army of 1940 had left all of its baggage—tanks, guns, trucks—behind in Dunkirk. On this day, Ramsay intended to put his army ashore in nine hours, and they would be bringing their baggage with them, thousands of trucks, armored cars, field guns, tanks, bulldozers, and jeeps.145

  The Second British Army under Lieutenant General Miles Dempsey would land one Canadian and two British divisions on Sword, Juno, and Gold beaches, which ran westward for sixty miles from just east of Caen and the Orne River, where the 6th British Airborne Division, eight thousand strong, was assigned the task of taking key bridges. Then there was an eleven-mile break marked by cliffs, beyond which lay the two American beaches, where the three divisions of Omar Bradley’s First U.S. Army would land. The first beach, Omaha, ran west for almost twenty miles, from just west of Port-en-Bessin, which in ten weeks’ time would serve as the terminus of Pluto, the fuel pipeline under the sea. The port, guarded by gun emplacements and German flak boats, had to be taken intact. Finally, across the Vire and Douve estuaries, Utah Beach curved westward for three miles. It was the beach nearest Cherbourg. The early capture of the port facilities of Cherbourg was so great a priority, Eisenhower later wrote, that “rapid and complete success on Utah Beach was… a prerequisite to real success in the whole campaign.” Marshes traversed by a few causeways stretched behind Utah Beach to the roads that led to Cherbourg. To secure those causeways and crossroads, 15,000 American paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions arrived by glider and parachute soon after midnight, the parachutists dropped from 850 C-47 transports into the hedgerows and fields near the villages of Ste-Mère-Église, Ste-Marie-du-Mont, and St-Côme-du-Mont. The towns had to be taken in order to secure the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula. Many of the C-47s overshot the landing zones by miles, and dropped their paratroopers into the sea, or into the marshes, where they disappeared forever into the mud under the weight of their packs.146

  When shortly after dawn the battleships ceased their bombardment, the destroyers ran in to rake the beaches. It was a risky piece of business because German long guns—155mm and 177mm artillery—that could shoot far out to sea were arrayed in bunkers behind the beaches. The largest naval bombardment in history culminated with a barrage by several tank transports that had been converted into rocket platforms, each capable of unleashing salvos of 1,100 three-inch rockets, each salvo the equivalent of one hundred cruisers firing at once. The brilliant flashes of red and yellow that tore the sky, and the shudder of explosions on the beaches felt even aboard the ships, belied the ineffectiveness of the attack, because for all the flashing and banging and booms, very few Germans were killed, because the Germans had taken shelter in reinforced concrete bunkers deep under and behind the bluffs. As the destroyers finished their run and turned seaward, American B-17s came on a final time to hit the beaches and coastal defenses. But in the faint light and haze, most of the pilots overflew their targets and dropped their bombs inland.

  A short while later, the first wave of infantry made for shore, about a platoon to each landing craft. The little boats came on in neat formations, stitching the sea with hundreds of long gray wakes. Behind them more landing craft steered in lazy circles, waiting their turn. Stinking blue-gray plumes of diesel exhaust overlay the seas, which were running to three feet, a combination sure to induce retching in the human cargo. As each soldier embarked, he had been issued writing paper, a carton of cigarettes, and a small packet; its contents included seven sticks of chewing gum, one razor blade, chewing tobacco, insecticide, twelve seasickness pills, and two vomit bags. The seasickness pills had the unfortunate side effect of inducing a drugged lethargy. Sailors who knew that refused to take them; soldiers who took them soon wished they hadn’t. But the bags were put to use that morning.147

  The second wave would bring in combat engineers to deal with remaining mines, spotters to direct air and naval fire, and bulldozers to clear paths through the dunes, but all plans hinged on the first wave holding the beaches while sappers cleared the way for the following waves. As the landing craft of the first wave closed on the beaches, the big guns on the Allied ships fell silent; no fighter planes screamed close overhead, no bombers droned far above. In Britain seven thousand heavy bombers and five thousand Spitfires and P-51B Mustangs awaited further orders and targets. The German Third Air Fleet, stationed on the Normandy coast, consisted that morning of just 169 planes and pilots.148

  German gunners behind the beaches, not knowing if the Allied bombers would return, risked glances from their pillboxes, earthen bunkers, and fire holes strung along the bluffs. Gazing with incredulity through lifting haze and drifting smoke and the dust of pulverized concrete, they beheld the incoming landing craft, and behind that fleet, an armada that stretched to the horizon in all directions—seaward, eastward up the coast, westward down the coast. Thousands of barrage balloons drifted above the ships. For many Germans, the scene could only unfold in silence—their eardrums had been ripped by the concussions of the naval barrage. Though unprepared for what they saw, Erwin Rommel had prepared them well to defend against it. More than 11 million mines lay buried on the beaches, in the dunes, and in the waters around the anti-tank obstacles. Hundreds of miles of concertina wire curled in front of and on top of seawalls, up gullies in the dunes, and crosswise on the sand, where deep ditches had been dug that could swallow tanks. Even had no Germans waited, the mines and the barbed wire would have taken a terrible toll. But the Germans were there, and now they fingered their triggers and held lanyards slack and awaited the command to fire. The difference in the exact set of the tide along the entire front determined that H hour was slightly different on each beach. On Omaha, H hour was now, 6:30 A.M.149

  A bloodred sun climbed over Normandy’s farms and fields. Apple orchards were in full bloom. For a few lingering moments, all was quiet on the Western Front.

  Then, as the landing craft steered for the shingle, the warships opened up again, now lobbing their shells far inland. On Omaha Beach, where the Americans expected to encounter one or two battalions numbering perhaps 1,500 men (Ultra was not perfect), 7,000 men of the veteran 352nd Division raked the oncoming Americans with machine guns, mortars, and 88s pre-sighted onto every square meter of beach. Amphibious tanks swam toward the beaches; of twenty-nine going in to Omaha, twenty-two sank with their crews; five were blown up. Now the combat engineers and infantry were wading and swimming and crawling ashore under murderous German fire. Ernie Pyle took it all in from a ship standing off Omaha Beach. A bureaucratic snafu had kept him from going ashore in the first wave. He could only wait his turn, and did so by playing gin rummy while Bing Crosby crooned “Sweet Leilani” over the ship’s PA system. Pyle found the scene incongruous. Men sat reading Life magazine as the ship shuddered from nearby misses. They listened to BBC reports that told them “how the war before our eyes was going.” The ship was dry, warm, the coffee fresh. “But,” wrote Pyle, “it wasn’t like that ashore. No, it wasn’t like that ashore.”150

  J
ock Colville, granted two months’ fighting leave from No. 10, had rejoined his 168 Squadron of the Second Tactical Air Force two weeks earlier. He flew a Mustang over the Normandy beaches shortly after the first men went ashore. Low cloud cover kept the fliers under two thousand feet, low enough to identify individual Allied ships and “their huge guns belching flame and smoke” as they kept up the barrage. And low enough to prove dangerous. The vagaries of war were brought home to Colville when, “by a million to one chance,” a fifteen-inch shell from HMS Warspite struck one of the planes in Colville’s squadron. The plane and its pilot simply disappeared.151

  Shortly after 6:30 A.M. on June 6, Erwin Rommel received an urgent telephone call from OKW. The Allies were ashore, in Normandy. As at El Alamein, Rommel found himself away from his command at the very hour when his presence was most vital. He immediately asked OKW to send two panzer divisions to the beaches. He was told that only Hitler could make that decision, and that the question could be put to Hitler only when he awoke. The Führer had as usual worked well into the early morning hours and had elected to sleep in. No one dared wake him. Not until two in the afternoon did Hitler convene a staff meeting.152

  Rommel had based his defense on the tactical principles of the Great War—static positions, bunkers, tunnels, trenches, barbed wire, mines, all defended by concentrated fire. But whereas in the Great War the attacking British could always haul themselves back to their own trenches after a failed gambit, today there was no place to run to. Shortly after waking at eight o’clock, Churchill took himself to the underground map room to follow the plotting of Allied positions. The lines on the charts inched inland as the morning wore on, a hundred yards here, a half mile there. The news from the British and Canadian beaches was good, as it was from the westernmost American beach, Utah, where fewer than 200 men of 21,000 were killed going ashore. Tanks had raced across the causeways and established contact with the airborne units. But on Omaha it was a bloody and close-fought affair. There, as if to confirm Brooke’s and Churchill’s fears, the battle bore far more resemblance to the Somme and Passchendaele than to any action fought thus far in the Second World War.

  At noon, satisfied that the landings had not been repulsed out of hand, Churchill was driven to the House. All there knew that Rome had fallen, and presumed he would be speaking on that subject. He did, and at great length, delivering a history of the Italian campaign from Sicily to Rome. Then he paused. “I have also to announce to the House that during the night and the early hours of this morning, the first of the series of landings in force upon the European Continent has taken place.” The House erupted. Churchill continued: “So far the commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan. And what a plan! This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever taken place.” He later in the day telegraphed the same message to Stalin. Thus, within a span of just thirty hours, Rome had been taken and the Atlantic Wall breached. And neither bad luck nor the enemy had so far deranged events on the battlefield. Four years after being thrown out of France, the British were back.153

  By then, on the beaches and in the heavily wooded bocage, almost 2,500 American and 500 British and Canadian men lay dead, and 6,000 more had been wounded. The vast majority of American casualties took place on Omaha Beach, but by early afternoon the beach was theirs. Even as Churchill spoke, a half million more men in two dozen southern English ports and numerous small harbors and coves prepared to embark for Normandy. Patton’s 4th Armored Division was conducting war games on the Salisbury plain, awaiting its turn. More than one hundred tugboats readied to tow across the Channel the two Mulberry artificial harbors—made up of four hundred steel and concrete components weighing 1.5 million tons. Churchill first sketched these technological marvels in a 1917 memo to Lloyd George, and again in 1940. Each artificial harbor could handle more than ten thousand tons of supplies per day, enough to feed and arm twenty-five divisions. The men were ashore, and the means to supply them was on its way. Still, Churchill harbored enough doubts to return to the House later that evening, where he warned that the reports from the beaches gave no “indication of what may be the course of the battle in the next days and weeks, because the enemy will now probably endeavour to concentrate on this area, and in that event heavy fighting will soon begin and will continue without end, as we can push troops in and he can bring other troops up. It is, therefore, a most serious time that we enter upon. Thank God we enter upon it with our great Allies all in good heart and all in good friendship.”154

  For weeks English farmers had been hoping for rain for the sake of their crops. The rain had finally arrived, Mollie Panter-Downes was to write, but the farmers now wished for blue skies “for the sake of their sons, fighting in the skies and on the earth across the Channel.” By early evening, trains carrying the first of the wounded began running through an English countryside in full springtime bloom, “festooned with dog roses and honeysuckle.” Women who had weeks earlier waved good-bye to their men now stood at railroad crossings, shopping baskets on their arms, and watched as the trains sped past. “They don’t know whether to wave or cheer or cry,” wrote Panter-Downes. “Sometimes they do all three.”155

  The second front was now an irrevocable reality. Germany had never won a two-front war. Indeed, in Italy Hitler faced a third front. If he deployed his reserves properly, or if he robbed from his eastern front to eliminate the threat in the west, he might soon find himself, again, fighting a one-front war. The Bletchley crowd and Churchill—and the men on the beaches—awaited the Führer’s next move.

  The Overlord plans called for the Americans to put thirteen divisions ashore in the first few weeks, the British and Canadians twelve. By early August, twenty-one of thirty-seven divisions in France were to be American. The disparity in Anglo-American numbers—and casualties—could only widen, and that begat another irrevocable reality. Not only was the slow but relentless transfer from Britain to America of command of the war nearly complete, so, too, was the transfer of global supremacy from London to Washington. Roosevelt, who on numerous occasions had made clear to Churchill his disdain for spheres of influence, was carving out the world’s largest. Indeed, America’s sphere of influence was expanding far beyond North and South America (claimed by James Monroe) to encompass the entire Pacific once the Japanese were defeated, which assuredly they would be. Australia, in 1942, had chosen America, not London, as the partner it would march beside into the future. The Philippines, when cleared of Japanese, would remain an American interest. Churchill did not begrudge Roosevelt the spread of American might, and could not stop it in any event. The potential for Soviet hegemony in much of Europe was what worried Churchill.

  Triumph over Hitler was now—almost—a certainty, as was the prospect for postwar tragedy in Eastern Europe. Churchill and Britons might yet remain captains of their souls, but they were no longer masters of their fate. The European war would be fought on Eisenhower’s and Zhukov’s terms, the peace conducted on American and Russian terms, if America intended to make its presence known in postwar Europe, but Churchill had known since receiving Roosevelt’s February telegram that the president sought to get out of Europe at the first available opportunity. Churchill did not know that in March, Roosevelt had told the State Department he wanted no part in maintaining order in France, Belgium, and Italy, where he foresaw chaos, and the Balkans, which were already in an advanced state of chaos. Further, to keep American troops as far as possible from trouble, he instructed the State Department to insist that northwest Germany form the American zone of occupation, the better to get his boys home from North Sea ports should trouble occur elsewhere in Europe. In a memo to Edward Stettinius, Roosevelt frankly acknowledged that “political considerations in the United States makes [sic] my decision conclusive.” In late May, the president telegraphed Churchill with a summation of his directive to the State Department. Then, four days before D-day, Roosevelt reiterated his stance to Churchill. Quoting his
February telegram, Roosevelt said: “I am absolutely unwilling to police France and possibly Italy and the Balkans as well.” And, he offered, “The reasons are political, as you well know.” It was an election year.156

  Beyond Europe, the British were no longer masters of the fate of hundreds of millions of subjects throughout the Empire. This was underscored in early June when Churchill received a reply from Roosevelt to his desperate plea for American shipping to relieve the “grievous famine in Bengal.” More than seven hundred thousand Bengalis had died since early 1943, in large part because the Japanese controlled Burma and its surplus rice. Churchill informed Roosevelt that although 350,000 tons of surplus Australian wheat was available, the ships to carry it were not. Could the president supply the ships? After waiting more than four weeks, Roosevelt replied in the negative, and with “regret.” He cited the effect of such a “diversion” on military operations. Churchill—and King George and London—could do almost nothing for the Bengalis; at least a million more died during the next twelve months.157