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

  Hitler’s decision was equivalent to Roosevelt taking over day-to-day operations from Marshall, or Churchill supplanting Brooke. But whereas a peevish Hitler squelched dissent, Churchill (himself often peevish) fostered an often-fractious give-and-take between himself and his generals, with the result that decisions taken were made stronger by having been annealed in the furnace of debate. Hitler’s takeover of the army apparatus not only banked the fires of debate, but further fractured his chain of command and set up fiefdoms within the German armed forces, each reporting to Hitler but not to the others, such that Hitler and Hitler alone was privy to all information. He thus deprived himself of the unified and coherent counsel of the experts who could best counsel him. But Hitler, suspicious of the lot of them, felt he served his own cause more efficiently by forcing his generals to toil in partial darkness. It later proved a disastrous decision, but at the time it appeared inspired, for as Mollie Panter-Downes wrote that week, “The idea of Hitler as a crazy, Chaplinesque commander who would quickly blunder toward disaster isn’t so popular as it was before some of those supposedly crazy notions of his proved pretty sound after all.” If anyone was blundering to disaster that week, it was Churchill and Roosevelt, in the Far East.68

  Late in the afternoon of December 22, after almost ten terrible days at sea, the Duke of York sounded Hampton Roads, at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The plan had been to cruise right up the Potomac, but Churchill had had enough. He took a military plane to Washington, accompanied by a few of his aides. As the aircraft made its final approach along the Potomac, the group gazed out the windows and “transfixed with delight” took in a sight none had seen in more than two years: “the amazing spectacle of a city all lighted up.” When Churchill touched down at the Anacostia naval air station, he saw Franklin Roosevelt sitting in the backseat of a large black sedan that had pulled onto the tarmac. The president had come across the river to welcome his guest in person. It was the sort of generous, seemingly offhand gesture that Roosevelt was master of. Nobody, especially Churchill, was immune to such charm. From Roosevelt’s perspective, the arrival by air of a foreign leader was an event not to be missed; no American president had ever flown on an airplane while in office, let alone learned to fly one, as had Churchill more than two decades earlier. Roosevelt watched from his limousine as the prime minister of Great Britain emerged from the aluminum skin of a flying machine into the Washington night as if to proclaim, change is in the air.69

  Churchill was put up in a suite just down the hall from the president’s private rooms and across the hall from the Lincoln study, where Hopkins resided. Rarely was a foreign dignitary accorded such treatment. Late that night the two leaders met in Roosevelt’s second-floor study, where Churchill passed on to Roosevelt drafts of the three strategic papers he had composed during his journey. Taken as a whole, the papers were prescient: Churchill saw a maritime war against Japan while Allied ground forces retook islands in a stepping-stone march to Tokyo. He envisioned hitting Germany on the periphery until such time as Russian and Anglo-American armies could squeeze Berlin from the east and west. He saw the need to control the Atlantic as a prerequisite for any European forays. And he saw the strategic value in clearing North Africa and claiming the Mediterranean—knocking Italy out of the war in the bargain—before undertaking an invasion of Europe. Roosevelt was familiar with the gist of Churchill’s thoughts, Churchill having worked them into a long letter to the president in late October, to which Roosevelt had made no reply. As well, during the secret meetings of a year earlier between American, British, and Canadian military chiefs (ABC-1 talks), an overall war policy had been worked out in the event of America coming in against both Germany and Japan. The plan called for the defeat of Germany first, beginning with aerial bombing and naval blockade, accomplished in part by shifting some of America’s Pacific fleet to the Atlantic. That gentleman’s agreement, Churchill hoped, would be codified during the next few days, because with Japan having set America to raging, he feared the American military chiefs might shift to a Japan-first strategy, with disastrous results for Britain if Hitler dispatched the Russians before the Yanks showed up.70

  Code names for hoped-for operations abounded in Churchill’s plans, many chosen by himself. Acrobat was to be the assault that would leave Auchinleck “in possession of Tripoli” within weeks, with his tanks poised “on the French frontier of Tunis.” Churchill had no desire to chase Rommel across North Africa; he meant to crush the German’s armored forces and then kill Rommel’s infantry, pinned down as it would be on the coastal plain. Yet with each passing day it appeared that Auchinleck—low on supplies, his troops exhausted—might come up short. That would imperil Churchill’s hopes of getting the Americans into the desert war. When Auchinleck kicked off Crusader, Churchill (taking a naval analogy too far) told the Commons that the outcome of desert battles, like sea battles, could be determined in a matter of hours. The battle had now lasted more than a month, and although Rommel had retreated to the Tripolitania frontier, Auchinleck’s Eighth Army, under the command of General Neil M. Ritchie, lacked the tanks to finish him off. Acrobat, therefore, looked to be finished before it started. Still, “the Auk” cabled Churchill with just the news he needed to get Roosevelt on board: the Germans were “hard-pressed,” he reported, and he advised that Churchill “press forward with Acrobat.” He believed he’d be ready to go on the attack by mid-February.71

  Auchinleck’s optimism also bade well for Whipcord, the most optimistic of Churchill’s plans, which was based on the belief that after taking all of Tripoli, the British could jump right to Sicily “while the shock of battle still reigns” in North Africa. With Sicily in the bag, any remaining Germans and Italians in the desert would presumably find themselves isolated, and doomed. That, in turn, would set the stage for Gymnast, the pacification of all of French North Africa, with or without the consent of Vichy, accomplished by landing British—and, hopefully, American—forces commanded by the hero of Dunkirk, Harold Alexander, near Dakar and Casablanca. To bolster Auchinleck, Churchill ordered that several transports carrying the 18th British Division, along with squadrons of fighter planes, anti-tank guns, and one hundred new American tanks, be sent to Cairo via the Cape of Good Hope. Days earlier he had told the Defence Committee that its “guiding principle” should be that “no resources” required for North African operations “should be diverted elsewhere.”72

  His strategic musings were one with his grand strategies of a year earlier, hopes within hopes. He always saw the European theater in terms of forging a ring around Germany, by naval blockade in the North Sea and eastern Atlantic, and on land from French North Africa, east to Cairo and north through Baghdad to the Caucasus, the eastern perimeter of the ring delineated by the 1,800-mile Soviet front. Churchill meant to probe and test the ring by sea, by air, and on land until he found weaknesses, and then exploit them. He wanted to take the fight everywhere at once, a strategy that frustrated his military advisers (and would frustrate his American allies for the next three years). “Churchill is the greatest military genius in history,” Ismay told Averell Harriman. “He can use one division on three fronts at the same time.” The editor of Brooke’s diaries, Arthur Bryant, writes that “until the end of 1941 Britain had no real strategy for winning the war,” and sought only to avoid losing the war by swinging “wildly with all she had, whenever and where ever she was able, and contain her European enemies in a ring of salt water and sand.” Yet unlike the previous year, Churchill now had an ally capable of supplying limitless numbers of men and weapons. The Christmas conference where all this would be parsed was code-named Arcadia, an appropriate moniker given Arcadia’s literary association with refuge and calm, as well as being home to the temple of Zeus. In Washington, Churchill would find refuge, and in Roosevelt, Zeus, for there was no longer any doubt about who would craft the lightning bolts that would destroy Hitler. The question foremost in Churchill’s mind was who would decide where and when to loose them.73

&
nbsp; Max Beaverbrook considered Churchill’s myriad operations to be diversions from the real war, in Russia, where he believed British tanks and troops would serve a greater purpose than in North Africa. General George Marshall also considered Africa a sideshow; he wanted to go ashore in France that year. Dwight Eisenhower, Marshall’s deputy for all of a week, held a similar view, though with an eye toward a different theater of war: “I’ve been insisting that the Far East is critical,” he noted in his diary, “and no sideshows should be undertaken until air and ground there is in satisfactory shape. Instead, we are taking on Magnet, Gymnast, etc.” Eisenhower, unhappy with his desk job, confided to his diary that he’d “give anything to be back in the field.” Averell Harriman, however, agreed with Churchill’s ring strategy, and saw the strategic significance of Turkey and the Middle East, where others, especially Beaverbrook, did not.74

  General Sir Alan Brooke, on the job as CIGS for only three weeks, agreed with Churchill that clearing North Africa and the Mediterranean held the key, but only if overwhelming force could be brought to bear there, an impossibility given the shifting of resources from the Middle East to the Far East, and the ongoing shipping losses in the Atlantic. British generals had for two centuries been trained to think in terms of the naval strategy necessary to sustain land forces in any given theater. Unlike the continental powers, Britain did not have to maintain a standing army of four or five million men to protect its borders; the North Sea and Channel did that. The British army was, by virtue of England’s island geography, always an expeditionary force dependent on the Royal Navy. Brooke was such a “salt water” general. He understood that the most significant benefit to be gained by Allied control of the Mediterranean would be an immediate, effective increase in merchant tonnage of one million tons—the equivalent of 200 cargo ships—as a result of cutting the Middle Eastern supply route from almost 14,000 miles around the Cape to less than 4,000 directly through the Mediterranean. Such “new” shipping could then be used to carry more arms and food to Britain, and American troops to Britain or the Far East. Unless and until the Mediterranean was cleared, Allied shipping would descend further into crisis. Another factor contributed to Brooke’s enthusiasm for Mediterranean operations. He had come off the beaches at Dunkirk and harbored no desire to return to France until he could do so in overwhelming force.75

  This brought him into line with Churchill’s belief in the need to return to France as well as with Churchill’s Mediterranean thinking, but for different, and ultimately conflicting, reasons. As for Churchill’s desire to fight in Norway, the Far East, and Africa simultaneously, Brooke knew that Britain—the entire Empire—lacked the men and matériel, especially the shipping, to attempt most, let alone all, of Churchill’s multiple and far-flung operations. But Brooke was in London; Churchill was in Washington, where he had the full attention of the president and his military chiefs. Roosevelt, within days of Churchill’s arrival, deferred to his advice on the matters of Acrobat, Gymnast, and Magnet, the plan to replace British troops stationed in Northern Ireland by four or more American divisions in order to free up British troops for deployment to North Africa. The details were to be sorted out by the newly created Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee—made up of the American and British army, navy, and air chiefs and their delegates in each capital. The first meetings stunned Dill, who telegraphed to Brooke that the Americans came with no agenda and recorded no minutes. Dill concluded that “at present [the United States] has not—repeat, not—the slightest conception of what the war means, and their armed forces are more unready for war than it is possible to imagine.”76

  To further complicate matters, where Churchill saw opportunities in North Africa, Roosevelt saw them in China. Chiang Kai-shek was dependent on the Burma Road, China’s only link to the outside world, over which went fuel and ammunition for Chiang’s armies. Were the Japanese to cut the road, Chiang would likely be finished. The entire Allied air defense along the Burma Road consisted of a few squadrons of RAF fighters in Burma and about seventy American mercenaries of the American Volunteer Group, whose few squadrons of fighter planes were divided between Kunming and Burma. The AVG irregulars were paid five hundred dollars for each confirmed Japanese kill. The Americans painted a shark’s toothy snout on the noses of their Curtiss-Wright P-40B Tomahawks, and added an evil eye near the radiator intake in hopes of spooking Japanese pilots. They called themselves the Flying Tigers, and they served under a master tactician, Claire Chennault, a retired American army air corps captain who now held the rank of brigadier in Chiang’s Chinese air force. Madame Chiang Kai-shek called the Americans her “flying angels.” They were few in numbers and lacked spare parts and bullets, but they were the only Allied force since Pearl Harbor to have inflicted any pain whatsoever on the Japanese.77

  Within days of Churchill’s arrival in Washington, Archie Wavell, at Roosevelt’s urging, was appointed supreme allied commander in the Far East. His mandate was to hold Malaya, and to coordinate with Chiang in defense of the Burma Road. The latter directive appealed to nobody except the Americans—the Burmese hated the Chinese as much or more than they hated the British. Wavell thought Chiang’s forces not up to the task; and Churchill considered all of China a sideshow. Although his father had brought Burma into the Empire in the mid-1880s, Churchill saw value in defending the place in terms of shielding India rather than in saving Burma or defending Chiang and his supply route. Wavell’s ABDA (American-British-Dutch-Australian) command was to set up shop in Batavia as soon as possible.

  Lacking meaningful air and naval support, his lines of supply already in jeopardy, Wavell was in effect being asked to take one for the home team. Neither Churchill nor his chiefs liked the idea, yet, Churchill later wrote, “it was evident we must meet the American view.” With that, he avoided the first spat in the partnership he had sought for so long. Churchill and Roosevelt understood they must accommodate each other much like partners in a three-legged race, where individual mobility and strengths are subordinated to the common cause. Disparate strategic goals, political and military, must not be allowed to undermine the common cause. They understood that for the duration they could not exploit each other’s weaknesses, as they might in a friendly rivalry over tariffs. They knew they had to act as one and speak as one, because both their foe in Berlin and their new friend in Moscow were absolute masters of exploiting weakness. The avoidance of a spat in the early days of the alliance did not mean that there would be none down the road, but it meant that the two leaders trusted each other enough to handle the spats as they came along. There would be many.78

  Shortly after 5:00 P.M. on Christmas Eve, Roosevelt and Churchill made their way to the south portico of the White House. There, the president flipped an electrical switch to illuminate the national Christmas tree, a thirty-foot-tall live Oriental spruce planted far down on the South Lawn and draped with red, white, and blue lights. Roosevelt had ordered the gates opened, and a crowd had gathered behind ropes on the lawn. Following a brief statement by Roosevelt, Churchill delivered a few remarks of his own, which were broadcast back to London by the BBC. As Churchill spoke, soft golden light spilled from the mansion’s windows, a sight that would appear strange to most Britons and virtually every European, even the victorious Germans, whose leader had ordered that Germany be blacked out. Churchill, in his Christmas message, simply noted that for at least one night every home “throughout the English-speaking world should be a brightly-lighted island of happiness and peace. Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play.” And then it was off to drinks, dinner, and a late-to-bed, to prepare the address he would make to Congress in two days. So this was Christmas 1941, another year gone, and a new war just begun. America would not light its national Christmas tree again until 1945.79

  Adolf Hitler, in Berlin, had forbidden the singing of all Christmas carols except “O Tannenbaum.” Fir trees represented the towering strength of the Aryan race. The swasti
ka, not an angel or cross, topped Berliners’ Christmas trees, what few there were. Those Volk fortunate enough to procure trees likely used them for fuel. Winter had arrived, but coal had not. Food grew scarce, even as it was stolen from the Belgians, French, Poles, and Dutch, who by late 1941 had taken to boiling tulip bulbs for sustenance. Berliners greeted each other with “Ach, das leben ist shwer” (“Life is hard”). For German troops in Russia, life was hard, brutish, and short. Soviet propagandists smuggled thousands of Christmas cards into Germany, entitled “Living Space in the East.” They depicted “a frozen vista of rows of wooden crosses topped with German helmets.”80

  Soon after Churchill addressed America’s children, three hundred Free French sailors descended upon the islands of St-Pierre and Miquelon, France’s oldest and smallest colony, located just off the Newfoundland coast. The islands were Vichy property, and Roosevelt, who hoped to lure Vichy into the Western fold through kindness, wanted them to stay that way. But the Vichy government had set up a radio transmitter on St-Pierre for purposes, wrote Churchill, “of spreading Vichy lies and poison” and quite possibly to “signal U-boats now hunting United States ships.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull pressured Canada to shut down the station, but Ottawa, not wanting to offend Pétain, declined. De Gaulle, however, saw an opportunity for a symbolic victory over the Vichy lackeys, and before Churchill left for America, he informed him of his plans to capture the islands. Churchill at first approved but then objected after Hull voiced his vigorous disapproval. De Gaulle went ahead anyway. His forces arrived in gunboats and captured the islands without a fight. The victors raised their flag, emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine. The British were elated. The Canadians were relieved to be off the hook. The Americans were aghast, as was Vichy France. Hull, infuriated (for here was a bald violation of the Monroe Doctrine), referred to de Gaulle and his followers as the “so-called Free French,” thus assuring enmity between America and Frenchmen of all political persuasions at the exact moment Churchill saw the looming necessity to court the Vichy in North Africa. For if the Allies were ever to take the fight all the way from Egypt to Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, a compliant—better yet, a cooperative—Vichy regime would be far more vital to success than a brigade or two of de Gaulle’s troublemakers.81