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

  On one point of language the president failed to prevail; he disliked the designation favored by the press, “World War Two,” and called for suggestions for a more poetic name. H. L. Mencken compiled a list of the many proposals that flowed into the White House, including the “War for Survival,” the “Necessary War,” the “Crazy War,” the “War Against Tyrants,” the “Devil’s War,” and “Hell.” Any and all of those names applied to the conflict, but the press stuck with World War Two. Churchill, too, offered Roosevelt a name for the war; it summed up in three words the entire legacy of the appeasers and isolationists: “The Unnecessary War.”96

  On January 5, after almost two weeks of discussions, not wanting to further tax Roosevelt’s hospitality yet not ready to return home (the American and British military chiefs were just getting down to business), Churchill accepted the offer of Lend-Lease administrator Edward Stettinius to spend a few days at Stettinius’s Pompano Beach, Florida, seaside manse. The Old Man needed a break, and Roosevelt and Hopkins needed a break—from Churchill. Eleanor Roosevelt later recalled, “I was solicitous for [Churchill’s] comfort, but I was always glad when he departed, for I knew that my husband would need a rest, since he had carried his usual hours of work in addition to the unusual ones Mr. Churchill preferred.” The meetings had so drained Harry Hopkins he checked into the Washington Naval Hospital for a week of bed rest.97

  Churchill and a dozen or so of his party along with a Secret Service detail flew down to the small airfield in West Palm Beach aboard Marshall’s plane. From there they motored an hour south to Pompano, where the locals were told that the activity out at the Stettinius house was due to the arrival of an English invalid by the name of Mr. Lobb. Mr. Lobb, upon arrival, headed straightaway for the beach, where he reveled in the warm ocean waters, and swam about, naked, until somebody spotted a large shark. “They said it was only a ‘ground shark,’ ” Churchill later wrote, “but it is as bad to be eaten by a ground shark as any other.” Inspector Thompson ordered him out of the water, but Churchill stayed put, pawing happily about. The shark, after describing a long, slow circle, swam off. “My bulk,” Churchill shouted to those on shore, “has frightened him into deeper water.” Still, from then on he kept to the shallows, where he basked “half submerged in the water, like a hippopotamus in a swamp.” Thompson thought Churchill, sunbathing, nude, “looked like a huge, well adjusted, and slightly over-bottled baby boy.”

  Roosevelt sent along his personal chef and a favorite recipe for clam chowder, but Churchill preferred Bovril washed down with champagne. He smoked his cigars and drank and frolicked in the surf in sunny and isolated South Florida, about as far from the war as he could get. It was his first holiday in three years. Although in early January Americans had no real idea of just what troubles were heading their way, Churchill, bobbing in the Florida surf, knew “without doubt” what lay before them all—“a time of tribulation” and “disappointments and unpleasant surprises.” He had told Britons as much for almost two years, and had told Americans the same just days earlier. He knew that upon his arrival in London—“it was to no sunlit prospect that I must return”—he would again have to inform the King, the Parliament, and Britons that the worst was yet to come. After five days of whisky, hot baths, and warm Florida, Churchill telephoned Roosevelt to inform the president that he was about to depart for Washington. Mindful of John Martin’s pleas to exercise some caution when speaking over nonsecure phone lines, he whispered, “I can’t tell you how we are coming, but we are coming by puff-puff, got it? Puff-puff.”98

  Mrs. Roosevelt invited a special guest to dinner on Churchill’s penultimate evening in the White House: Louis Adamic. Slovenian by birth, Adamic by 1942 had become one of the most popular and controversial ethnic American writers. His progressive ideas had found favorable conditions in which to sprout at the traditionally anti-imperialist State Department, which had developed on certain desks a list to the left. Having read and enjoyed Adamic’s latest book, Two-Way Passage, the First Lady must have known Churchill would find no comfort in the author’s company. Adamic argued the case for America to take the lead in postwar European political reconstruction by sending “qualified” liberal expatriate thinkers such as himself back to the Old World to inculcate in its citizens a less chauvinistic outlook, such that undesirable elements could not influence events. Chief among these undesirable elements was the “Eagle of Yugoslavia” Draja Mihailovich and his 150,000 mostly Serbian Chetnik guerrillas who had for seven months been fighting a vicious war against Hitler’s occupying forces, tying down ten German and Bulgarian divisions in the process. For this Mihailovich was hailed as a hero in the West, and by Churchill. Adamic, however, supported the partisans led by Josip Broz, a Croat by birth, Socialist by choice, and virtually unknown in America. His followers called him Tito (Churchill, per his habit of getting names wrong, called him Toty). As for other European elements, Adamic saw the Soviets as posing no threat to anyone after the war. Britain was another matter; Britain followed Mihailovich on Adamic’s list of undesirable scallywags to be excluded from postwar influence, especially in the Balkans. The Roosevelts, husband and wife, much impressed with Adamic, passed his book along to Churchill. He hated it.99

  In his memoir of that evening, Dinner at the White House, Adamic described Roosevelt as “vivid and agile,” the picture of charm. Even Fala, Roosevelt’s little Scottie dog, who roamed the room sniffing shoes and performing tricks, came in for Adamic’s praise. Adamic portrays Churchill as “a great leader and… also evil” and noted that he was “mostly stomach” with a fat cigar plugged into his “large, round mug.” His mouth and eyes “were shrewd, ruthless, unscrupulous.” When Adamic asked him how he liked Two-Way Passage, Churchill snarled, “I’m r-reading your book and I-I find it—int’r-resting.” Adamic’s sentence construction seems to ascribe a stutter to Churchill; yet although he experienced difficulty with the sibilant “s” (he had a very slight lisp), he did not stutter. In any case, Adamic correctly concluded before dessert that Churchill would never accept his utopian scheme, or anything like it. His demeanor, Adamic wrote, “was one of complex annoyance…. I was a bloody nuisance dragged in by F.D.R. and he had had to put up with me. This was implicit in his manner, integral with his whole personality…. He muttered something I did not understand. His half-closed eyes squinted up at me, and he stuck the cigar into his face and pressed his back against the wall.” That sounds like Churchill, when perturbed, bored, and, as Adamic implies, running on 80 proof. It was a safe bet that Churchill would not be sponsoring Adamic for membership in the Other Club.100

  It should be remembered that Churchill during those early weeks of the alliance could not predict with any certainty who among the men he met were destined to go down in history as giants, and who (like Adamic) were destined for the dustbin. George Marshall was still army chief of staff, but if responsibility for Pearl Harbor was to be assigned at the highest link of the command chain, Marshall might be sacked. Churchill would have sacked his top commanders after such a debacle. How much credence, therefore, to give Marshall’s opinions? The navy’s top man, Admiral Harold (“Betty”) Stark, though not officially accused of allowing Pearl Harbor to happen on his watch, was in fact within months kicked upstairs, as commander of the U.S. European Fleet (of which there was none) and naval liaison to London, where, like Field Marshal Dill in Washington, he acquitted himself well. Churchill had yet to hear the names Eisenhower, Patton, or Bradley. He knew of Douglas MacArthur’s reputation, yet it appeared during those weeks that MacArthur—the prime candidate to lead American forces, either in Europe or in Asia—was more likely to die a hero’s death in the Philippines, and soon. Admiral Ernest King, promoted to chief of naval operations (at Stark’s expense, as King saw it), resented Marshall and itched to bring the fight to Japan. Could King—hot-tempered, tough, and no admirer of the British Empire—be made to see the merits of Germany first? Churchill would just have to wait and see. Although Adamic in time faded fro
m the scene, his presence at Roosevelt’s table could not be ignored.

  Nor could Churchill ignore Mrs. Roosevelt, who “was allowed to sit in at such White House after-dinner conversations.” This, recalled one of his secretaries, “so distressed Winston,” for in England, following dinner, the women left the men to themselves. Churchill’s Chartwell dining table was round (at his insistence, in order to erase any implied hierarchy among guests), but after dinner it rarely included women. Churchill, Colville recalled, “did not in general find the company of women particularly stimulating.”101

  To that rule there existed certain exceptions: Lady Diana Cooper was one, Violet Bonham Carter, the daughter of Prime Minister Asquith another. And above all, there was Clementine. Yet Clementine, for her part, would never think of joining the men for a snifter of old Napoleon, not so much because she considered her place to be elsewhere, or because Churchill forbade her presence—he would not—but because her politics ran just far enough to the left of his that a forceful expression of her opinions in the presence of her husband’s circle of cronies would likely result in awkward silence. (Though Churchill was a liberal Tory in the manner of his father, Clementine was at heart an Edwardian Liberal, more comfortable with the traditional Liberal Party.) As well, she did not much care for two of his most favored pals—the Irishman Bracken and the Canadian Beaverbrook, whose aircraft production she respected but who had always annoyed her. So she chose not to participate in the after-dinner sessions, or in politics in general. When she hosted a luncheon or dinner, Clementine, reading her husband’s mood, steered the conversation away from any topic that might roil or bore him. If the talk turned to politics, Mrs. Churchill kept her counsel. As for Eleanor Roosevelt’s eagerness to socialize with guests such as Adamic and to participate in manly conversations, Churchill was astute enough to grasp that the First Lady was not merely performing wifely social duties, but was a political force, one heard and respected by her husband. Churchill, therefore, as a guest in the president’s house, and more beholden to Roosevelt with each tank and plane that rolled off American assembly lines, was willing, if not happy, to put up with the political pronouncements of Adamic and Mrs. Roosevelt.102

  Franklin Roosevelt, over the course of Arcadia, served up to Churchill everything he sought, and more. Roosevelt’s deference to Britain on military matters was understandable given that Britain had been fighting a war for more than two years, while the Americans had been losing one for two weeks. There were disagreements: Marshall wanted the Allied effort to begin with a landing on the French coast, in 1942, while Churchill had his sights on Gymnast, the landing in North Africa. To Churchill’s surprise and immense relief, as Auchinleck seemed about to stall in the desert, Roosevelt came up with Operation Super-Gymnast—the occupation at the earliest opportune moment of French North Africa by at least 100,000 American and British troops. If Eisenhower thought little of Gymnast, the man tapped by Marshall to lead American troops ashore—Major General Joseph Stilwell—thought even less. Stilwell—“Vinegar Joe” to his men—was chosen after his name topped a list prepared for Marshall of America’s most talented generals. Stilwell’s diary entries regarding Gymnast illuminate both the validity of his nickname and his loathing of the British. “Gymnast,” he wrote, had the potential to become “a rathole,” hard to supply and harder to keep. It was “a crazy gamble…. The whole goddamned thing is cockeyed.” Roosevelt, “a rank amateur in military matters, given to whims, fancies and childish notions,” had been “sucked in… by the Limeys.”103

  The lack of shipping and landing craft to undertake Gymnast ensured that it could not be carried out for several months, at best. In fact, within two weeks, with Auchinleck stalled in the desert, the prospects for Gymnast, super or otherwise, evaporated. Stilwell was told to forget about North Africa and was instead ordered to China, where Chiang—who Stilwell thought “a crazy little bastard”—waited for the help promised by Roosevelt. Yet, other than Stilwell, not much more help was forthcoming for Chiang. As for war matériel, the Americans pegged production of Grant and Sherman tanks at 45,000 for 1942, compared with just 4,200 since May 1940. Roosevelt proposed to build twice as many warplanes in 1942—45,000—than the United States and Britain had built in the previous two years. It was a staggering goal, four times the rate of German and Japanese production combined. Goebbels derided the projections as “insane figures.”104

  When during the meetings the Americans offered that at most they could convert 15 percent of U.S. auto plants to military production, Beaverbrook replied that 100 percent of British automobile factories had been converted, and encouraged Roosevelt to aim higher. He did, and on January 1 he ordered U.S. auto production halted by late February. Within weeks the dearth of new cars became moot when rubber, 90 percent of which came from Malaya and Indonesia, was rationed. The U.S. had no synthetic rubber factories to make up the shortfall. Americans soon learned what Britons had long known; without a spare tire or three stashed in the garage, the family car had a very limited range. Passage by rail—where for fifty years the Pullmans had been Americans’ preferred means of conveyance—was soon limited to troops and businessmen on official war business. And then the airlines—their routes and the national fleet of 434 aircraft—were commandeered. By spring, gasoline rationing, as a means to preserve rubber more than oil, dribbled onto the Eastern Seaboard and in the following year spread nationwide, guaranteeing that Americans in the heartland could no longer take their vacations at east or west coast beaches even if their bald tires could carry them there. That proved okay with most because by summer, oil and bilge tar and decomposing bodies—the U-boats’ harvest—regularly washed up onto America’s eastern beaches.105

  Roosevelt had agreed to truly power up the American dynamo, yet early in the new year, the steady, relentless hum of infinite American industrial power could only be imagined. America, humiliated in Guam, Wake Island, Pearl Harbor, and Manila, was itching for a fight but was not in the least ready for one. More worrisome from Churchill’s standpoint was that Americans including Anglophobes like Admiral Ernest King and Stilwell—and the thousands of volunteers who lined up outside recruiting offices—wanted to take the fight to the Japanese, and the sooner the better.

  The damage inflicted at Pearl Harbor precluded any such action. So devastating was the Japanese attack that a small aircraft carrier task force sent to relieve the five hundred U.S. Marines stranded on Wake Island ran for home when its commander, Rear Admiral Frank (“Jack”) Fletcher, decided that his need for fuel overrode his mission to relieve the Marines on Wake. When Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox asked Churchill what he would do with such a cautious admiral, Churchill held his tongue in deference to his new allies. Before surrendering, the doomed leathernecks on Wake inflicted the only damage thus far upon the Japanese navy, by damaging a cruiser and sinking a destroyer—with field artillery. So acute was the American navy’s embarrassment over the month’s events that one of King’s first actions as the new navy chief was to change CINCUS—the abbreviation for commander in chief, U.S. Navy—to COMINCH, because CINCUS was pronounced as it looked. Meanwhile, MacArthur and his army were in danger of going the way of Jim Bowie and his Texans at the Alamo. This Americans could not abide, especially if they detected a willingness in Washington to bolster the British Empire at the cost of sacrificing MacArthur. To Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Churchill made clear his fear that an American preoccupation with the Pacific in general and the Philippines in particular would hobble the Europe-first strategy that had been in the works for months, with the result that the war might be lost in both theaters before America entered either. Stimson happened to loathe Admiral King and believed in Europe-first. It was said that Stimson, trying to reassure Churchill, said of MacArthur’s army, “There are times when men have to die.” So it would be Europe first, after all.106

  Yet even such a seemingly unambiguous pronouncement as “Europe first” meant different things to different men. The decisions as to wher
e and when and how to attack Germany would have to be hammered out by the newly configured Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, its first members being George Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff; Admiral Harold Stark, U.S. Naval Forces Europe; Admiral Ernest J. King, chief of U.S. Naval Operations; and Lieutenant General Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold, U.S. Army Air Forces. For Britain: the aging first sea lord, Sir Dudley Pound; Sir Charles Portal at the RAF; and General Sir Alan Brooke as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The “imperial” in Brooke’s title grated on the political sensibilities of Marshall and King, this before they even met the man. The Combined Chiefs was not formally inaugurated until February, and the principals would not meet until spring, by which time they were in near total disagreement over exactly what “Germany first” or “Europe first” meant. By summer those differences would grow into the first real test of the alliance.

  On his final night in Washington, Churchill dined alone with Roosevelt and Hopkins before departing late in the evening for Norfolk, Virginia. The next morning he climbed aboard a Boeing Clipper for a three-hour flight to Bermuda, where the Duke of York awaited his arrival. Churchill found the flight much to his liking. The weather was fair, the food and drink plentiful. The big plane cruised at eight thousand feet at a steady 145 miles per hour. Churchill even took the controls for a spell. Recalling the unpleasant shipboard trip westward, he prevailed upon the plane’s captain, Kelly Rogers, to take him and a few of his staff all the way to England. The rest of the party followed by ship. The air journey almost proved disastrous when at dawn the next day, after an eighteen-hour flight, Rogers brought his plane out of low clouds, only to realize that he was off course. Where all aboard should have seen the coast of England, they beheld nothing but gray seas. They flew on, and on. Churchill recalled in his memoirs that after several minutes of disconcerting silence, Rogers announced he was turning sharply northward. It was a snap judgment, and a good one, for had they kept on their original course for another few minutes, they would have drifted over Brest, and the hundreds of German AA guns protecting the pride of Germany’s surface fleet—the battle cruisers Prinz Eugen, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau—moored in the harbor. The turn, however, appeared to RAF radar operators as the track of a lone German bomber heading for England from Brest. Six Hurricanes were scrambled, with orders to shoot down the interloper. Thankfully, Fighter Command’s aces failed to locate their target. After five weeks and more than nine thousand miles, Churchill arrived safely home, the first leader of any nation to undertake a transoceanic flight.107