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

  “Mr. Churchill’s historic broadcast dominated the minds and the talk of a majority of Britons last week,” Mollie Panter-Downes wrote on March 28. Yet “the general exhilaration was overshadowed by the almost simultaneous setback” in Tunisia when, on the twenty-second, German panzers counterattacked Montgomery’s Mareth forces. The German strike kept the Eighth Army off balance and in place for two days. Britons steeled themselves for more bad news, for since 1940, British setbacks had displayed a disconcerting tendency to grow into British defeats. Montgomery responded to the Axis stroke by shifting his main thrust to Freyberg on the left, who, reinforced by the British 1st Armoured Division, and supported by hundreds of RAF fighter and bomber sorties, smashed through the Tebega Gap on March 27. The Germans and Italians directly in front of Montgomery, fearing encirclement, fled north. The next day, Montgomery telegraphed Churchill: “My troops are in possession of whole Mareth defences.” An otherwise bleak month—in the North Atlantic, in North Africa, on the Russian steppes—was going out with a victory, and not just a British victory but, with Patton’s reinvigorated forces in the thick of it, an Allied victory.114

  Anthony Eden had been in Washington since mid-March for talks with Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull on the makeup and security of postwar Europe and the world. This was the Four Power Plan as Roosevelt saw it, with China as one of the powers, and France excluded. The War Cabinet had approved the plan in principle in November, but the Foreign Office was well aware of Churchill’s position on China. Hull held a similar position on France: it was irrelevant. Eden professed a fondness for Hull, but he noted a vindictive streak directed especially toward France and Germany, a mind-set Eden attributed to Hull’s having been raised in the hills of Tennessee, where feuds among the hill folk lasted for generations or until everybody was killed off. Hull, over tea with Eden and Roosevelt, suggested the Allies avoid trials after the war by simply shooting Hitler and his cohorts, as the Germans no doubt would shoot the Allied leaders if given the chance. Indeed, Hull had taken Hitler’s measure, but such a brutal (yet pragmatic) approach to settling scores offended Eden’s gentlemanly sensibilities. He later wrote that he was familiar with the hit song, “The Martins and the Coys,” adding, “I felt he [Hull] too could pursue a vendetta to the end.”115

  So could Roosevelt. When it came to France and Germany, he thought little of the French and less of Germans, especially Prussians. During their talks, Roosevelt reiterated to Eden his position on unconditional surrender: Germany would have no rights and East Prussia would disappear within the new Poland. Germany, too, would disappear, dismembered into harmless rump Germanys. Developing his idea a few months later, Roosevelt told Averell Harriman that postwar Germany would be denied airplanes, and German citizens would be forbidden to learn to fly. Germany, Roosevelt proclaimed, would be broken up “into three, four, or five states.” Churchill harbored doubts about the wisdom of reducing Germany to an amalgam of impotent agrarian states. His vision for the postwar world included his councils and federations of European nations, with Germany as a participant, but not Prussia. On Prussia he aligned himself with Roosevelt. George Kennan later wrote that both Roosevelt and Churchill failed to see “the true lower-class basis of the Nazi movement; how sure they both were it was still the Prussian Junkers they were fighting.” In fact, Hitler and his thugs despised the conservative Prussian class, a hatred that resulted in the degradation first of Prussia, and finally of all of Germany. In Prussia, Kennan wrote, lived courageous and idealistic sons and daughters of the conservative class who despised Hitler for the lower-class criminal he was. Here was a potential source of opposition to Hitler that neither Roosevelt nor Churchill cultivated. Instead, they intended to turn Prussia into a large meadow.116

  For Churchill (but not Roosevelt) the rest of Germany was another matter entirely. He had told Jock Colville two years earlier that he always included Germany as a member of the “European family.” Germany existed before the Gestapo, he told Colville, and it would exist after the Gestapo. “When we abolish Germany, we will certainly establish Poland—and make them a permanent thing in Europe.” But what exactly did “abolish” mean? And the Free Poles in London wondered exactly what “establish” meant when it came to Poland. And Stalin had long suspected that Churchill meant to revitalize Germany, which to the Russians amounted to an existential threat. Churchill had not defined his terms. Yet certain beliefs underlay his postwar plans. The future security of Western Europe depended on the strength and cooperation of the nations of Western Europe, and not on the good graces of Russia, or America, for that matter, which indeed had no treaty obligations with Poland or France. Churchill saw the need for an economically healthy Germany as a trading partner for Britain, but first and foremost, he tied Britain’s postwar military security to a vibrant France.117

  Yet for Roosevelt, France occupied the same place in his worldview that China held for Churchill; to wit, no place at all. Over dinner one evening, the president outlined to Eden his concept for postwar power sharing in Europe. It did not include France but rather would be based on the military might of the great powers—Britain, the United States, and the Soviets. The rest of Europe, Roosevelt told a stunned Eden, would be disarmed but for rifles. And France would be partially dismembered, portions of Alsace-Lorraine and northern France lopped off to join a chunk of Belgium in a new state, Wallonia. The president’s “ignorance of France was profound,” wrote the British historian John Grigg, “yet no impediment to his holding obstinate views on the subject.” Noting an unsettling consistency to the president’s thinking, Eden asked if France and Germany were to be dismembered, why not the British Empire as well? Roosevelt replied by suggesting that Britain contemplate giving Hong Kong back to China as a “good will” gesture. Eden, amused (and alarmed), asked Roosevelt what territories he intended to give up. Roosevelt made no reply. Eden also voiced his opinion that Chiang’s regime—corrupt and hated by legions of his countrymen, especially Mao Zedong—did not embody China and that a revolution of some sort would have to take place before China could assume a place among the great powers. Eden found the president’s musings to be “alarming in their cheerful fecklessness.” Roosevelt made his points with grace, he noted, but “it was too like a conjuror, juggling balls of dynamite, whose nature he failed to understand.”118

  All agreed that the military alliance known as the United Nations should emerge after the war as a world council of some sort. Stalin, in due time, would have to be brought into the discussions. Churchill, Hull, Eden, and Roosevelt each articulated different notions of how the postwar world should be configured, and in particular the Russian role in that world. But together, they lacked a vision of where they were going and how they would get there. Yet as regarded Russia, Roosevelt believed one thing with absolute certainty: if he were only given the chance to sit down alone with Stalin, all would be put right. This belief, George Kennan wrote, was born of F.D.R.’s assumption that although Stalin “was a somewhat difficult customer,” he could be brought around “if only he could be exposed to the persuasive charms of someone like F.D.R. himself…. For these assumptions, there were no grounds whatsoever; and they were of a puerility that was unworthy of a statesman of F.D.R.’s stature.” Churchill (and Eden) hoped for some sort of postwar continuation of the partnership with Russia, but ever since Stalin made known his postwar territorial ambitions, both Churchill and Eden had grown increasingly wary of his intentions. Thus, for London, France represented an insurance policy should Uncle Joe abrogate his agreements. In the coming months, Churchill reminded dinner companions of a truism that formed the heart of Britain’s desire to ally itself after the war with a strong France: if nothing stood between Moscow and the English Channel, then the Russians might someday stand on the Channel coast opposite the White Cliffs of Dover.119

  Roosevelt spoke in general terms of a continued American role in safeguarding the peace, but later in the year he told Harriman that he “had no intention of stationing
large American forces in Europe after the war, whether to help keep the peace or occupy Germany.” Even were Roosevelt to change his mind, a different president a few years hence might negate the policy and turn America inward, as had happened after the Great War. Eden suspected the U.S. Senate would never ratify any treaty that handcuffed America to the military fortunes of postwar Europe. How then to safeguard the peace? Churchill, on the one hand, sought to tie Britain’s postwar security to a special relationship with America. On the other hand, his responsibilities to his King and country demanded that he strive for a final settlement in Europe that did not depend entirely on an active American presence, or on the good graces of Stalin. In late March (over a dinner, Brooke recalled, of “plover’s [sic] eggs, chicken broth, chicken pie, chocolate soufflé and with it a bottle of champagne… port and brandy!”), Churchill expressed “his disapproval of Roosevelt’s plan to build up China while neglecting France.” Vital to Churchill’s plan for postwar Europe was a French state that emerged as a power, not a pauper.120

  With Stalin voicing his disappointment in, if not outright distrust of, the Americans and British, Vice President Henry Wallace publicly framed the postwar stakes in stark terms. “We shall decide sometime in 1943 or 1944,” he told reporters, “whether to plant the seeds of World War III.” That war will become a certainty, Wallace said, “if we allow Germany to rearm militarily or psychologically.” That war will be “probable if we double-cross Russia…. Unless the Western democracies and Russia come to a satisfactory understanding before the war ends, I very much fear that World War III will be inevitable.” Wallace’s remarks were a clear indication that America had reached no clear understanding with Stalin on postwar policies in Europe, specifically, the fate of Germany. The British press—which with Wallace accorded the Red Army heroic status—praised Wallace. The Manchester Guardian declared: “There is one-hundred times more anti-Russian feeling in the United States than there is in this country.” The paper also noted that in the United States “there is much more tolerance for fascist systems of government.” The Times stressed the point in an editorial: “To suppose that Britain and the U.S. with the aid of some lesser European powers could maintain permanent security in Europe through a policy which alienated Russia and induced her to disinterest herself in Continental affairs would be sheer madness.” Yet the problem, as Churchill and Eden increasingly saw it (and as Churchill had told the Turks in January), was that the Soviet Union might prove too interested in continental affairs following the war. How far west into postwar Europe Soviet influence extended would depend in large part on how far east Anglo-American armies were when someday they shook hands with the Red Army.121

  Trust and loyalty do not necessarily march together in lockstep. Churchill saw no need to abridge his loyalty to Stalin even as he sensed trouble over the far horizon. In fact, each of the major Western political players—Churchill, Roosevelt, Harriman, Hopkins, Beaverbrook, Hull, and Eden—was intent on proving that his deep and abiding loyalty to Stalin was equal to if not greater than that of the others. The Anglo-American political theme for 1943 was not really Europe First, but Uncle Joe First. Opening the second front was the only action that would demonstrate to Stalin’s satisfaction the loyalty of his allies. Within the highest Allied councils Beaverbrook became Stalin’s most vocal supporter, so much so that Harriman wrote, “Beaverbrook is for the appeasement policy toward Russia… and doesn’t give a hoot in hell about small nations. He would turn over Eastern Europe to Russia without regard to future consequences, the Atlantic Charter, etc.” For his part, Harriman favored a high-minded relationship with the Soviets that “must be friendly and frank but firm when they behave in a manner which is incompatible with our ideals.” Those lofty sentiments presumed that Stalin’s endorsement of the Atlantic Charter was sincere and that he actually gave a hoot in hell about Western ideals of democracy.122

  As he had shown with the Baltic states two years earlier, and with eastern Poland in 1939, Stalin first asked for what he wanted, and if his wishes were not granted, he took it. Roosevelt and Churchill believed that the opening of the second front would give them the leverage they needed to demand that Stalin cease all talk of borders and reconfigured European states until the peace conference following victory. This is what they insisted upon with their lesser allies, the Free Poles and Free French. They also believed they owed Stalin a second front, given the burden he was carrying and their fear that he would “lay this burden down” were they not to open that front. George Kennan ascribes a certain naïveté to this reasoning, given Stalin’s history. Would Stalin really contemplate laying his burden down in order to reach another agreement with Hitler, another “pact” that was only as good as Hitler’s word, which was no good at all, as Stalin had learned in 1941? Yet, how much, if any, leverage Churchill and Roosevelt gained by opening a second front could only be determined after they opened that front and, after opening that front, how far east they pushed it. Those questions were moot for the remainder of 1943.

  The Blitz had ceased in May 1941, but during the first months of 1943, German raids conducted by small groups of Focke-Wulf fighter-bombers took place with frightening irregularity, just often enough and just deadly enough to keep Britons on edge. The Germans flew in beneath the radar to bomb roadways, buses, trains, and. with sinister regularity, schools. A January raid saw a lone Focke-Wulf strafe a school in Woolrich before flying on to the Sandhurst Road School in Catford, Lewisham, where it dropped a 1,100-pound bomb, killing thirty-eight students and four teachers. FIENDISH ONSLAUGHT OF A MURDEROUS FOE read the next day’s headline of the Kentish Mercury. British rage only grew when the commander of the raid, a Captain Schuman, told reporters in Paris, “The bombs fell just where we wanted them to.”123

  The most deadly incident that year involved no bombs falling at all. It took place in London at the Bethnal Green tube station in the early evening of March 3. Thousands of pedestrians were making their way toward the station when the sirens sounded, followed immediately by the murderous cacophony from anti-aircraft rockets being launched in nearby Victoria Park. The rockets, though developed six years earlier, were newly deployed. What was terrifying about the “rocket guns,” the war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote, was not their actual report, but that “a rocket going up sounds like a bomb coming down.” When the rockets went up that evening, the crowd panicked and raced for the entrance to the Underground. A young writer for Stars and Stripes named Andy Rooney was among the throng. “I almost turned toward the shelter,” Rooney recalled, “but I wasn’t that far from my rooms and decided to keep going. I didn’t learn what happened until the next day, and then I realized, that’s where I almost went down into the station.” Rooney made the right decision; almost two hundred Londoners did not. A young woman carrying either a baby or a bundle tripped partway down the steep stairs, causing the people in front of her to fall and the crowd behind her to collapse into one deadly mass. Within fifteen seconds, the shelter had been converted into a charnel house, where 178 men, women, and children were suffocated and crushed. The Ministry of Information kept the details of the tragedy under wraps, with the result that Londoners, not knowing exactly what had happened, concocted their own explanations. One rumor had it that a German agent on the sidewalk had screamed that petroleum bombs were being dropped, thus panicking the crowd. Another, more popular explanation was that it was all the fault of the Jews, who were again accused, as during the Blitz, of losing self-control and rushing the shelter. A poll showed that while 29 percent of Londoners thought favorably of Jews, since the Blitz, those who thought unfavorably had doubled to 26 percent. There was talk in Parliament of proposing a law that forbade anti-Semitism. “A law against hating Jews,” Goebbels wrote in his diary, “is usually the beginning of the end for Jews.”124

  Churchill had moved to Chequers the night before the Bethnal Green incident in order to continue his convalescence. Brooke, too, had gone down for two weeks with influenza. The CIGS was so ill that
he could not even summon the energy to jot in his diary or undertake his birding. He and Churchill could do nothing but observe from their sickbeds as the situation in the Atlantic worsened, as the alliance drifted toward new shoals, and as Generals Alexander and Montgomery waited for the weather to clear in Tunisia.

  In March, Iran declared war on Germany and thus joined the United Nations. Averell Harriman, upon his return to Washington from Tehran the previous August, relayed to Roosevelt the young shah’s respect for Churchill and his belief (based on a personal promise from Churchill) that Iran had nothing to fear from the British. But, the shah had told Harriman, “Russia may be difficult!” The shah feared the postwar Soviet government might prove “aggressive” and expressed his desire for stronger ties to Washington. Harriman, the old railroad man, saw an opportunity. The Iranian railroad was in deplorable shape, an opinion he had offered to Churchill the previous summer along with an offer to rebuild and operate the railroad, which Churchill politely declined at the time. Now Harriman prevailed upon friends at the Union Pacific to send surveyors, rolling stock, and modern diesel locomotives to Iran in order to double the capacity of the Iranian railroads, which would double the supplies reaching Stalin and help offset the loss of the Arctic convoys. The British had been running just four or five trains a day from Basra north to Russia, with a capacity of three thousand tons. By late March, teams of American technical advisers, doctors (typhus was rampant; seven of ten Iranian children died before age nine), and railroad men had drifted into Tehran, including the former head of the New Jersey State Police, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the man who had hunted the Lindbergh kidnapper and whose new duty involved instilling discipline in the ranks of the Iranian police.125