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

  To the south, in the Black Sea sector, three German armies under Erich von Manstein controlled most of the Crimea. The Ostheer had yet to take Rostov, the Kerch Peninsula, or Sevastopol. This Manstein intended to do. But the main German thrust would begin in the Ukraine sector, where Army Group South (including Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army and Fourth Panzer Army) was to smash east into the Donets Basin and make for Voronezh, located on the far side of the Don (and which city Bock was ordered to bypass). The Fourth Panzer Army was then to wheel south, keeping the Don on its left flank until it reached the great bend in the Don, just sixty miles from Stalingrad and the Volga—Stalin’s last great natural barrier. Hitler decreed, “We must try to reach Stalingrad,” and if they could not take it, smash it with artillery and air attacks until it became useless as an industrial base. Army Group South’s final objective, after destroying Stalingrad, was to punch south between the Volga and the Don and drive into the north Caucasus hills. Part of this German force, arrayed in the Black Sea sector, was to wheel sharply south, take Rostov-on-Don, and make for the Baku oil fields and the Caucasus Mountains beyond. Vital to the success of the entire enterprise was that once across the Don, these two massive forces move toward the Caucasus shoulder to shoulder, with the Volga on one flank and the Black Sea on the other, across an eight-hundred-mile-wide front. Once the Caucasus were taken, the war in the east would be over. The result, Hitler told Goebbels, would be that Russia “will then be to us what India is to the British.”209

  Hitler named his offensive Operation Blue. Stalin, as he had a year earlier, had gained reliable intelligence as to Hitler’s plans, and, as he had a year earlier, he ignored the information. He presumed any action in the Ukraine sector was meant to be a feint, while the real attack would come against Moscow. As he had been a year earlier, Stalin was soon proven wrong. The preliminaries to Operation Blue opened in the Crimea on May 8 with a German dash down the Kerch Peninsula. It was all over within the week. The Germans captured 170,000 Soviet troops, who had dutifully obeyed Stalin’s orders to stand firm. Only Sevastopol, surrounded, remained under Soviet control. Then, on May 12, in a bold stroke that took everyone but the Germans by surprise, the Red Army struck at the Kharkov salient with almost 650,000 men, 1,000 airplanes, 13,000 guns, and 1,200 tanks. The counterstroke, approved by Stalin, was the brainchild of the theater commander Semyon Timoshenko, and the political boss of the Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev. For three days the Soviets drove the Germans westward, but by doing so they exposed their flanks. Although Hitler’s worried generals called for a frontal defense of Kharkov, the Führer termed the Soviet attack “a minor blemish” and refused to change his master plan. He was soon proven correct when Paulus and Erwin von Kleist wheeled their armies into the Soviet flanks and within the week encircled the Soviet army. Stalin had no reserves to throw in. By May 22, the Soviet defeat was total, with almost 240,000 Soviet prisoners taken, and most of the guns and all the tanks lost. Khrushchev, summoned to Moscow by Stalin to explain how it had all gone wrong, presumed he’d be shot. That Khrushchev survived his inquisition was not due to mercy on Stalin’s part—the concept was alien to the man—but because Stalin believed in the motivational power of terror.210

  The Kharhov and Kerch battles had cost Stalin more than 410,000 killed and captured even before the curtain went up on Operation Blue. Given that few of the Red Army prisoners would survive the German slave labor camps, Russian losses that May measured twice the combined Union and Confederate battlefield deaths during the American Civil War, and almost half of British and Dominion battlefield deaths during the four years of the Great War. Hitler, a serious student of Clausewitz, was holding to the Prussian’s dictum to annihilate enemy armies rather than try to capture cities. By the end of May, all roads east and south lay open to the Germans.211

  Months earlier Churchill made a grim prediction to King George, who recorded it in his diary: “If by the spring, Russia was down and out, and Germany was renewing its blitzkrieg here, all our hopes of victory and help from USA would be dashed if America had not by then sent us masses of planes etc.” The King seems to have confused “blitzkrieg” and “blitz,” but no matter, Hitler would launch both against Britain were Stalin to go down before America tooled up.212

  On May 31 Roosevelt cabled Churchill: “I have a very strong feeling that the Russian position is precarious, and may grow steadily worse during the coming weeks.”213

  Roosevelt’s pessimism stemmed in part from two days of talks with Soviet foreign minister Molotov, who had arrived in Washington from London on May 29 with demands for an immediate second European front and a doubling in Lend-Lease aid, without both of which the Soviet position loomed dire at best. Regarding the latter demand, Roosevelt explained that each ship that went to Russia meant one fewer ship to build up forces in Britain for the very second front Molotov sought. To placate Molotov on that point, Roosevelt agreed to release an official announcement (which had been dictated by Molotov) after Molotov returned to Moscow: “In the course of the conversations full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942.” Here was Roosevelt at his most politically astute, for he knew that Churchill considered such a front in 1942 a strategic impossibility. The president had served the ball into Churchill’s court. Yet, Harriman later wrote, Roosevelt felt that raising Soviet expectations for a second front could only bolster Soviet morale, an end in itself. Soviet morale was about the only thing Roosevelt could boost because, as he told Molotov, the U-boats prevented the boosting of Soviet matériel. Harriman acknowledged that Roosevelt’s statement “provided employment for a whole generation of… historians who solemnly argued its merits” in myriad books and journals. Yet the measure of an event has to be taken in the immediate context of the times, and at the time, Roosevelt’s pledge helped preserve the alliance, even if it amounted to a Potemkin village of a promise.214

  Molotov had spent the week before his Washington visit in London, where he and Eden had negotiated a twenty-year treaty of peace in which the Soviets agreed to address the issue of borders only after the war was won. Churchill had been prepared to jettison his long-standing position on that subject and accede to Stalin’s demands regarding prewar borders and the Baltic states. Churchill later wrote: “My opinions about the Baltic states were, and are, unaltered, but I felt I could not carry them farther forward at that time.” Cordell Hull furiously disagreed, and in a cable to Winant, approved by Roosevelt, threatened to disavow the entire business if Britain appeased Stalin. For Hull, at stake were the tenets of the Atlantic Charter. As well, he insisted that all border issues were to be settled after the war by a new world organization (which he championed mightily). An open break loomed for the alliance. Then Roosevelt suggested to the British that a verbal promise of a second front “should take the heat off Russia’s diplomatic demands upon England” regarding postwar borders. Eden made the pitch, and to his surprise and relief Molotov went for it. It was a masterful bit of negotiation, one that kept both the Russians and Americans happy, and the alliance intact.215

  With Roosevelt’s promise in hand Molotov returned to London for the formal signing of the friendship treaty. But he arrived bearing a new demand: that the British put in writing their own guarantee of a second front. Churchill tried to impress upon Molotov that Britain in Western Europe and North Africa was tying up almost one-half of Luftwaffe fighter strength and one-third of its bombers. Thirty-three Axis divisions sat idle in Western Europe, and eleven more, including two armored divisions, fought on in North Africa. That Britain and America had not launched a second front of the exact sort Stalin sought did not mean they were not forcing Hitler to spread his forces thin. The Allies might not be killing many Germans in the west, Churchill argued, but neither were those Germans killing any Russians. Molotov listened politely, but he still wanted his guarantee. And so to placate both the Americans and the Soviets, Churchill drafted a communiqué for Molotov to take home. It was simila
r to Roosevelt’s promise, and stated “full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent task of creating a second front in Europe in 1942.” With that “understanding” in hand, it appeared to Molotov that both the Americans and the British had given him what he wanted. In fact, they had given him nothing. Understanding the need to open a second front and doing something about it was not the same thing. To further clarify his (somewhat disingenuous) promise, Churchill composed an aide-mémoire to Stalin in which he reiterated his belief in the need for a second front: “We are making preparations for a landing on the Continent in August or September, 1942.” Then Churchill added the caveat that all was conditional and nothing was guaranteed: “We can therefore give no promise to the matter.” Molotov left London for Moscow on June 10, and dutifully passed Churchill’s letter and his logic on to Stalin, who didn’t buy any of it.216

  Molotov’s party had stayed at Chequers during the earlier treaty negotiations, at which time burly Russian bodyguards and two (also burly) Russian chambermaids attended to the needs of Molotov and his two aides. The bodyguards swept the bedrooms for listening devices—“infernal machines”—Churchill called them. Revolvers were dutifully placed on Molotov’s bedside table and under the diplomats’ pillows. Their beds were made up to leave an opening in the middle of the bedcovers “out of which the occupant could spring” were assassins to appear on the scene. The maids sat without a word on chairs outside their bosses’ doors day and night. The entire scene struck Churchill as peculiar. But Churchill, in turn, treated the Russians to an unforgettable experience. They witnessed him at rest, which was a relative concept. Churchill’s visits to Chequers afforded him a chance to unwind, and to do so in company of his choosing (although the Russians were an exception to that rule).217

  The diary entries and letters of visitors to Chequers cast light on a consistent Churchillian pattern of behavior: nobody got as wound up unwinding as Churchill did. The heavier his previous week’s burdens, the greater his need for an Alice in Wonderland weekend, as Brooke called them. Thus, the sense of “anticipation” within the ranks noted by Ian Jacob whenever Churchill appeared at Chequers. Brooke later wrote that he took away no “happy memories” from these long and liquid weekends, each evening “extending well into the morning hours.” The Old Man relaxed with a fury, and always with a quotient of wit and good cheer in inverse proportion to what might fairly be expected from a man who had just suffered a terrible week, and most of the weeks since May 1940 had brought terrible news of one sort or another.218

  The week of Molotov’s first visit was no exception. While Eden and the Russian worked out the details of the treaty, Erwin Rommel sent the British Eighth Army packing. On May 26 Rommel swung around General Ritchie’s Gazala Line south of Bir Hacheim. Ritchie was not ready. Worse, although he outnumbered Rommel in tanks 700 to 560, he had not massed his tanks in order to strike Rommel’s vanguard. Rommel, as usual, had massed his tanks. He expected to break Ritchie’s lines in a day, but he ran up against General William (“Strafer”) Gott and his XIII Corps along with a brigade of Free French. Gott and the French gave Rommel more of a fight than he had yet experienced in North Africa. It took the Desert Fox ten days to clear out the truculent French, who then took to calling themselves the Fighting French. But by then, Ritchie had lost control of the battle.219

  Once again, the desert winds had turned against Churchill, who often appears in his colleagues’ diaries at his most animated after having taken just such a hard military hit. Talking (at length) was Churchill’s way, recalled John Martin, “of clearing his head.” He talked at the table and he talked on the march. His staff had been delighted when he insisted on the installation of a movie projector at Chequers: “We thought if we had a nice film in the evening he would go to bed,” John Martin recalled. “But far from it; he started all over again after the films.”220

  During his weekends of rest he displayed the uncanny ability to work, relax, and rage simultaneously. After telling dinner guests one evening that he hoped victory would bring “an end to bloodshed,” he followed with “I must confess I would like to see Mussolini, that bogus mimic of ancient Rome, strangled like Vercingetorix in old Roman fashion.” Hitler he would exile to some remote island, “though he would not so desecrate St. Helena.” He soon took a harder stand on Hitler’s fate, telling the cabinet, “This man is the mainspring of evil. Instrument—electric chair for gangsters no doubt available through Lend Lease.” He liked to pepper his dinner-table asides and speeches with the sort of clichés favored by Moscow propagandists in attacks on the bourgeois West (until the alliance): “hyena,” “lackey,” “dupe,” “flunky,” “jackal.” When used by Pravda, such phrases conjured up in Englishmen images of raving Reds, but they worked for Churchill. His often preposterous asides were easily misconstrued as the mirthful musings of a merry old man. They were anything but. Hopkins was more correct than he knew when he quipped that Churchill must have read only the Old Testament.221

  Along with Molotov, spring had arrived in Britain—the traditional invasion season. Travel by British civilians to the south coastal regions was restricted, as in the previous two years. The word in the pubs was that the Allies were building up armies down on the coast and getting ready to jump a big one across the Channel. The Allies were doing nothing of the sort. In fact, Churchill told Molotov, defenses were fully manned with the expectation that the Germans would arrive if Moscow capitulated. He offered that pessimistic assessment only after Molotov had asked, what will England do if the Red Army collapses? Out came the maps, and Churchill commenced a lesson on the difference between land powers and sea powers. It had become clear to him that neither Stalin nor Molotov understood a fundamental truth: the Allies could not win on land until the seas were cleared of Germans. He told Molotov that he was confident that, backed by American industrial might, the Allies would win, but he stressed, as he had to the King, that if the Red Army collapsed, Hitler would turn toward England.222

  In that case, he expected Britons to offer themselves up by the scores of thousands. “It would be better,” he told Colville the previous July, “to make this island a sea of blood than to surrender.” Those were Stalin’s sentiments exactly regarding Russians, dictated to his terrorized subordinates from the dacha where he took his weekend rest. His orders to stand firm were dutifully executed by Russians as the mounting slaughter in his country bore out. At Hitler’s Berchtesgaden retreat, the Berghof, the topic of defending the homeland had not arisen during weekend retreats. The Führer and his cronies consumed tea and pastries while Hitler delivered monologues on the Roman Empire, Jews, and Christianity (and how its “mendacity and hypocrisy” had sapped Nordic development). In the evenings the Führer strolled mountain paths while he opined at length in the company of his Alsatian bitch, Blondi, and his cohorts—Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, and Göring. They never discussed defeat. And for good reason: they were winning.223

  On the night of May 30–31—the day Roosevelt cabled to Churchill his deep concern about the Russian front—the RAF threw everything it had against Germany, a demonstration of power and destruction that Churchill hoped would underscore the validity of his claim that the aerial front was indeed a real second front. That night, more than 1,100 British heavy bombers plastered Cologne, ushering in a short-lived era of thousand-bomber raids. The chief of the RAF’s Bomber Command, Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris, faced with American opposition to the shipment of even more B-17s to Britain (the planes were accumulating on airfields), conceived the idea of massive nighttime raids in order to show the Americans the efficiency of the British strategic air offensive. Harris had to put crews still undergoing training into his bombers in order to assemble a fleet large enough to carry out his plans. He had waited almost two years for the opportunity to punish Germany with such force. In the autumn of 1940, while surveying the destruction the Luftwaffe had inflicted on London, he offered a bit of Old Testament wisdom to his superior, Air Marshal Charles Portal: “Well, they a
re sowing the wind.” Harris now intended that they would reap the whirlwind. Portal believed the RAF could bring Germany to its knees—and the war to an end—sometime in late 1943. Churchill was far less sure. His oft-stated wish to make Germans bleed and burn aside, on the strategic efficacy of bombing Germany, Churchill had offered to Portal, “I have my own opinion about that, namely, that it is not decisive, but is better than doing nothing.” In Churchill’s estimation, the immediate value of RAF bombing lay in showing the Russians that Britain was doing something. Intending to do much more, Churchill proclaimed the raid “a herald of what Germany will receive city by city from now on.”224

  It had been more than fifteen months since he had asked Lord Cherwell to devise a punishing, retaliatory bombing strategy. It had been less than five months since Bomber Harris was promoted to air marshal and brought to Bomber Command his strategic bombing philosophy, that volume trumps accuracy. It was a strategy born of necessity, since the accuracy of British night raiders was still pathetic; fewer than one-quarter of RAF bombs fell near their targets. Harris would have preferred a scalpel, but he was handed a cudgel. Among the RAF’s unintended targets that spring was the ancestral home of Thomas Mann. Better known as the Buddenbrookhaus, the house had stood in the Baltic port city of Lübeck for two hundred years. In fact, 80 percent of the old city of Lübeck was destroyed in what Goebbels called “the British craze for destruction.” Mann, safely ensconced in a California bungalow, broadcast a message back to Germany: “I remember Coventry and realize that everything must be paid back.” Such were Bomber Harris’s sentiments exactly.225