The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Americans were sympathetic but pessimistic, and political leaders there and on the Continent were unimpressed by Churchill’s inspired words. Franklin Roosevelt, facing reelection in a country opposed to going to war, was not about to say or do anything that might appear to endorse Churchill and the British Empire. “For those who were not Germans,” writes Alan Brooke’s biographer, “there seemed that summer only one way of safety—instant and unconditional surrender—and for those who delayed only one fate—certain and imminent destruction.” Indeed, Hitler believed that the war was over. He had already staged a victory parade, marching conscripts of the 218th Infantry Division through the Brandenburg Gate. Forty of the Wehrmacht’s 160 divisions had been demobilized, and the Führer had drafted a peace treaty he was sure the British would sign, knowing that the alternative was annihilation.146

  Some Englishmen would sign such a treaty. There existed therefore an alternative to Hitler having to “break us in this Island.” In a May 20 telegram to Roosevelt, Churchill had raised the possibility of a peace movement sweeping him from office and his successors having to negotiate with Hitler “in utter despair and helplessness.” He mentioned that possibility again in a June 15 cable to the president, suggesting that Hitler in effect need only bend Britain, bend it to near the breaking point, and the result would be a new government formed to negotiate a terrible peace in hopes of gaining deliverance for “a shattered or a starving nation.” The result would leave Britain “a vassal state of the Hitler empire.” Such a settlement would deny the warrior Churchill his battle, the political Churchill his office, and England its sovereignty. All were unacceptable. The Vatican indeed proposed a peaceful settlement of the conflict, and on August 1, King Gustav of Sweden, the doyen of European monarchs (and the source for much of Hitler’s iron ore), wrote King George VI, proposing a conference “to examine the possibility of making peace.” Some Englishmen—they called themselves “sound” and Winston “unsound”—thought this suggestion merited discussion. The men of Munich were still a force, particularly in the Establishment. Halifax, of course, was one. The United Press quoted him as inviting “Chancellor Hitler to make a new and more generous peace offer.” R. A. Butler, Halifax’s under secretary, was an energetic supporter of Gustav’s peace overtures. According to Björn Prytz, then the Swedish minister in London, on June 7, when the prime minister was commuting to France, attempting to stiffen French resolve, Butler told Prytz that Churchill’s inflexibility toward the Third Reich was “not decisive.” He saw no reason why the war should not end now in a compromise peace, provided German terms were acceptable, and assured the Swede that British policy would be guided “not by bravado but by common sense.”147

  Hearing of this, the P.M. sent the foreign office a blistering memo scoring the “lukewarmness” in Butler—Butler, whining, protested that he had been misunderstood—and restated the government’s determination “to fight to the death.”

  Churchill told the King that “the intrusion of the ignominious King of Sweden as a peace-maker, after his desertion of Finland and Norway, and while he is absolutely in the German grip… is singularly distasteful.” His sovereign agreed. King George had caught the mood of his people; in his diary he wrote: “How can we talk of peace with Germany now after they have overrun and demoralized the peoples of so many countries in Europe? Until Germany is prepared to live peaceably with her neighbors in Europe, she will always be a menace. We have got to get rid of her aggressive spirit, her engines of war & the people who have been taught to use them.”148

  Afterward, Englishmen as skeptical of politicians as Bernard Shaw and Malcolm Muggeridge agreed that had anyone but Churchill been prime minister in the summer of 1940, Britain would have negotiated an armistice with Hitler. In London the tenacious Swedish envoy informed Stockholm that several influential MPs had echoed Butler. Two of His Majesty’s ambassadors—Hoare in Madrid, and Lord Lothian in Washington—were seeking contacts with their Nazi counterparts, preparing for diplomatic “conversations.”

  In Parliament the most prominent defeatist was Lloyd George, England’s prime minister in the Great War. Jealous of Churchill, once his colleague, the old Welshman had refused to join his cabinet. Instead he planned to replace him and approach the enemy, asking for terms. “I argue,” he told the House in his mellow, persuasive voice, “that the Government should take into consideration any proposals of peace which… review all the subjects that have been the cause of all the troubles of the last few years.” He made his position public. In the July 28 Sunday Pictorial, he wrote, “I foresaw the catastrophe impending.” Had his advice been followed, he continued, it would have led to “a better understanding between the angry nations and to the rebuilding of the temper of peace…. I wish to point out that conditions were then more favourable for a discussion on equal terms than they are today, or probably will be a few weeks hence.”149

  In Berlin Lloyd George was being seriously considered as a possible leader of a puppet government. German psychologists told the Führer that Lloyd George reflected Britain’s mood. He didn’t; neither did Butler nor the Swedish ambassador’s informants; they were no longer in step with their countrymen. Every literate Londoner, it seemed, was reading Guilty Men,* a Labour attack written under the pseudonym Cato on the appeasers that indicted fifteen Tories, among them Baldwin, Chamberlain, Halifax, and Hoare, for neglecting England’s defenses. It seemed that Englishmen everywhere were scorning any suggestion of negotiations; in the old British army phrase, they were “bloody-minded.” Even Tom Jones, a former deputy secretary to the cabinet, wrote from Cliveden, “Everyone is willing to be conscripted for any duty and the main regret is that we cannot all be used.”150

  Not only had the collapse of the French failed to discourage them; it had actually raised their morale.

  Churchill’s defiant spirit had set the whole kingdom afire. Dunkirk had been a defeat, yet Englishmen had decked it with the laurels of victory. They had always been braced by the thought that their backs were against the wall, that the odds against them were hopeless. Now they recalled the maxim: “England always loses every battle except the last one.” They were, they reminded one another, descendants of Englishmen who, Macaulay wrote, had “lit the bonfires from Eddystone to Berwick-bound, from Lynn to Milford Bay, warning of the Spanish Armada’s approach undismayed and had watched, unintimidated, the twinkling of Napoleon’s bonfires at Boulogne.”151

  Dorothy L. Sayers wrote:

  This is the war that England knows,

  When no allies are left, no help

  To count upon from alien hands,

  No waverers remain to woo,

  No more advice to listen to,

  And only England stands.152

  On their display boards, news vendors chalked: “We’re in the final—to be played on home ground.” Somerset Maugham, reaching Liverpool at last, found no discouragement over the French debacle, only men who said confidently, “It doesn’t matter; we can lick the Jerries alone” and “Fear of invasion? Not a shadow of it. We’ll smash ’em. It’ll take time, of course, but that’s all right; we can hang on.” “It was,” Maugham concluded, “a very different England from the England I had left a few weeks earlier. It was more determined, more energetic and more angry. Winston Churchill had inspired the nation with his own stern and resolute fortitude.”153

  In The New Yorker, Mollie Panter-Downes described the public temper as “grimly sane.” On June 22 she wrote: “The individual Englishman seems to be singularly unimpressed by the fact that there is now nothing between him and the undivided attention of a war machine such as the world has never seen before. Possibly it’s lack of imagination; possibly again it’s the same species of dogged resolution which occasionally produces an epic like Dunkirk.” By late summer she herself seemed to have been caught up in the emotional firestorm. “The ordinary individual is magnificent in a moment like this,” she wrote, and, two weeks later, “The calm behavior of the average individual continues t
o be amazing.” Like Maugham she finally concluded that the key to the nation’s soaring morale was the new prime minister. She quoted the Times, which had considered Churchill unsound for ten years, as continuing its suspicions—“Mr. Churchill is still, in some respects, a solitary figure”—and commented: “That solitary figure continues to command the devotion and confidence of all classes which has probably been equaled only by the great William Pitt in 1759, ‘the year of victories.’ England would seem to have found her man of destiny at a critical juncture, when her well-wishers were beginning to fear that destiny was taking the down, not the up, grade. An extraordinary leader and the determination of an extraordinary people have brought back hope and dignity to a scene that has long and humiliatingly lacked them.”154

  During the summer after France fell, Englishmen awaited, at any moment, the appearance, by sea and by parachute, of the German army. That was the German way. They appeared on the Polish frontier the previous year; they appeared off the coast of Norway that spring; they emerged from the Ardennes in May; they dropped from the sky into Rotterdam. Englishmen, therefore, believed themselves to be in deadly peril, and continued to do so with varying degrees of trepidation until the late summer of 1942, in large part because Churchill told them so. Churchill, in turn, believed the Germans might come, and demanded every necessary precaution be taken should the Germans come, but he did not believe—that summer or the next—that they would come. Soon after the French surrender, he told Colville: “Hitler must invade or fail. If he fails, he is bound to go East [to Russia], and fail he will.”155

  That statement was not the most precise formulation of his beliefs, but it contained the essence: Hitler could try to invade England, and would fail, or Hitler would turn against his partner Joseph Stalin. To that end, Churchill wrote a letter to Stalin in late June in hopes of opening up communications with the Marshal of the sort he had established with Franklin Roosevelt. He entrusted the letter to his new ambassador to Moscow, Sir Stafford Cripps, a socialist whose very appointment as ambassador Churchill intended as a signal to Stalin.

  The issue, as Churchill told Stalin (Churchill always pronounced his name Schtaleen), was whether Hitler’s “bid for hegemony of Europe threatens the interests of the Soviet Union.” It certainly threatened England’s. Churchill acknowledged that relations between London and Moscow had “been hampered by mutual suspicions” (a marvelous understatement), but said that now only they could contest Hitler’s quest for continental hegemony, by virtue of their geographical positions, which were “not in Europe but on her extremities.” The idea that Britain was part of Europe but not “in” Europe informed Churchill’s political beliefs for his entire life. He would have found nothing parochial or comical in the apocryphal London headline: FOG IN CHANNEL—CONTINENT ISOLATED. Indeed, Hitler had now isolated the Continent. Great Britain’s two objectives, Churchill told Stalin, were to “save herself from Nazi domination” and “to free the rest of Europe” from Nazi domination. The message was meant to reassure Stalin. Stalin never replied. Cripps reported that Stalin, after reading the letter, denigrated the possibility of German territorial ambitions and asserted his belief that Germany posed no danger to Russia. After Cripps was dismissed, Stalin ordered his minister of foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, to pass the minutes of his conversation with Cripps on to Berlin, a gesture intended to remind Hitler of Stalin’s abiding friendship.156

  Churchill had not read Hitler’s mind; Hitler had broadcast his intention to crush the Bolshevik Soviet Union in his autobiography, Mein Kampf. It was all there. He had written with absolute clarity: “This colossal empire [Russia] in the East is ripe for dissolution. And the end of the Jewish domination of Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” Hitler, in turn, had no need to try to read Churchill’s mind; he was reading his mail. It is not surprising, therefore, that in mid-July, Hitler declared to his military chiefs that “Britain’s hope lies in Russia and America.” He was correct. He noted that Britain was “back on her feet,” sustained in part by their Russian hopes. Therefore, he declared, “if Russia is smashed, Britain’s last hope will be shattered…. Decision: In view of these considerations Russia must be liquidated. Spring, 1941.”157

  Churchill arrived at his certainty regarding Germany and Russia through a balance of cold logic and intuition, although some of his colleagues would say it was more of a collision. This was how he approached all problems. Whether parsing geopolitical matters such as continental hegemony, or the Mediterranean theater, or the finer points of the defense of England, Churchill came at every issue with a painter’s eye; the whole was larger than the sum of its parts. He saw the beauty and vitality of details, and their effect on larger strategic issues, and demanded that they be scrutinized all the time. The most obvious and simplest of facts portended larger strategic issues. One fact, often neglected in the telling of the tale of that summer, underlay Churchill’s planning for a German invasion: A day is divided into daylight hours and nighttime hours. The Battle of Britain is often described as “a battle for air supremacy.” In fact, it was a battle for daytime air supremacy. Everything changed after dark. Night bombers—British and German—flew without fear of fighters, and with little fear of anti-aircraft fire, but sacrificed targeting accuracy. Fighter planes went aloft at night only when the moon was full, or nearly full, to protect their bombers or search the skies for the enemy’s. Armies could maneuver and fight by night or day. But in late June, the German army was in France, while the British army—hobbled but rebuilding—was in England. Churchill of course could not know that the Germans had not yet even contemplated an invasion. But he did know that if the Germans attempted one, they could arrive on English soil in meaningful numbers only by sea. Churchill believed they could not do so. In order to land at dawn, an invasion armada would have to sail at night, but with German fighter planes grounded during darkness, the Royal Navy—its largest ships equipped with radar—owned the night. At night, the Royal Navy could hunt the enemy’s invasion barges and ships at will. In a July 7 memo to Ironside, Churchill wrote: “Except in very narrow waters, it would be most hazardous and even suicidal to commit a large army to the accidents of the sea in the teeth of our very numerous armed patrolling forces.”158

  Churchill warned the House that it would be impossible for the Royal Navy “to prevent raids by 5,000 or 10,000 men flung suddenly across and thrown ashore at several points on the coast some dark night or foggy morning.” But those raiders would soon find themselves surrounded by units of the British army. If such a force came ashore in northern England or Scotland, it would find itself hundreds of miles from London, and irrelevant. No, the Germans had to come in overwhelming force, and land within one hundred miles of London. Churchill believed that Hitler—if he came—would try to decapitate the British government in London, in order to force a settlement with a new, more malleable government. A military conquest and occupation of all of Britain, from Devon to the Midlands to Scotland, was simply beyond the means of the Wehrmacht, not because the German army lacked the men and tanks, but because Germany lacked the shipping to even try to carry such a force to England.159

  If the Germans tried, Churchill expected to annihilate them. On June 18 he sketched his vision for the House:

  The efficacy of sea power, especially under modern conditions, depends upon the invading force being of large size. It has to be of large size, in view of our military strength, to be of any use. If it is of large size, then the Navy have something they can find and meet and, as it were, bite on. Now, we must remember that even five [German] divisions, however lightly equipped, would require 200 to 250 ships, and with modern air reconnaissance and photography it would not be easy to collect such an armada, marshal it, and conduct it across the sea without any powerful naval forces to escort it; and there would be very great possibilities, to put it mildly, that this armada would be intercepted long before it reached the coast, and all the men drowned in the sea or at the worst blown to pieces with
their equipment while they were trying to land…. There should be no difficulty in this, owing to our great superiority at sea.160

  The previous summer Hitler, unlike Mussolini on June 10, had had the good sense to bring his merchant fleet into the Baltic before striking into Poland. The small size of the German merchant fleet, about 1.2 million tons, was one of four fundamental facts—after the different conditions imposed by daylight and nighttime operations—upon which Churchill based his belief that if the Germans came to England, they would fail. For Churchill, these were the details on which all else turned.

  The first: He estimated that to put the first wave of 60,000 to 80,000 German troops ashore would require almost 60 percent of all German merchant shipping. To put a second wave of 160,000 ashore, along with ammunition, tanks, and heavy artillery, would require far more shipping than Germany had at its disposal. As will be seen, those same figures, which boosted Churchill’s optimism, dismayed the high command of the German navy.

  The second: Germany lacked the specialized landing craft that could put tanks and heavy artillery right on a beach. The Germans would have to capture a port to offload their armor and equipment. If they sailed into a port, they would find the facilities destroyed by the British, the harbor entrance mined behind them such that they could not sail out, and a ring of British artillery pouring fire down on the port.

  The third: Churchill later wrote that although the RAF—in both bombers and fighters—was outnumbered by almost 3 to 1, “I rested upon the conclusion that in our own air, in our own country and its waters, we could beat the German air force.”