The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  When workmen resumed their rush to hammer together protective barriers in Whitehall after Churchill had ordered them to cease, he again ordered the hammering stopped, thereby almost bringing to a halt the safeguarding of the very heart of government. His turbulent behavior, Colville wrote, could be explained by a string of disasters from Norway to Dunkirk, to the shipping losses in the Atlantic, and by the threat of invasion. Yet sometimes, when his staff expected an outburst after a particularly bad piece of intelligence had been gleaned, Churchill surprised all by his nonchalance. Ismay recalled a conference convened in August to discuss the role of the Home Fleet in case of invasion. The commander in chief of the Home Fleet, Admiral Charles Forbes, allowed that, in the event of invasion, his heaviest ships would not operate south of Wales. With the fate of England in the balance, it was expected that such a proposal to save the fleet while losing the war would surely drive Churchill to spontaneous combustion. Ismay, somewhat taken aback by Forbes’s statement, waited for the inevitable explosion. It never came. Churchill listened in silence. Then, gazing over his spectacles with an indulgent smile, he declared he never took much notice of what the Royal Navy said before an event, because he knew the navy would, once the action began, undertake the apparently impossible without a moment’s hesitation if the situation demanded it, as it surely would were the Germans to come across the Channel.346

  Where he could dismiss out of hand the advice of his valets and bodyguards, the advice of senior officials had at least to be treated with the appearance of sober reflection, although the end result was usually the same: Churchill got his way. An October conversation with General Alan Brooke turned to the whereabouts of General Percy Cleghorn Stanley Hobart, an erratic tank genius whose services were going unused. “Hobo,” as Hobart was known in the ranks, had retired and was serving as a corporal in the Home Guard. As Colville recalled the scene, Brooke believed Hobart too wild to recall to duty, but Churchill, citing General Wolfe brandishing his sword while standing on a chair in front of Prime Minister Pitt, declared. “You cannot expect to have the genius type with the conventional copy-book style.” Days later, Churchill met with Hobart and formed a favorable impression. He demanded that General Dill, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, give Hobart a tank division that week, if not that day. “Remember,” Churchill told Dill, “it is not only the good boys that help to win wars; it is the sneaks and stinkers as well.” Dill acceded to the order after protesting that Hobart was “impatient, quick-tempered, hotheaded, intolerant, and inclined to see things as he wished them to be instead of as they were.” The description fit Churchill. Hobart got his division, two in fact. Three years later Hobart’s “Funnies”—flame-throwing “Crocodile tanks” and mine-clearing “Flail” tanks—would be some of the first armored vehicles to come ashore on the beaches of Normandy. By then, the resurrected Hobart had been knighted for services rendered to the Crown.347

  By late October, Colville wrote, as the invasion threat ebbed, Churchill had regained a quotient of his engaging, if often infuriating and idiosyncratic, self. He followed outbursts—which still came frequently—not with a direct apology, but with generous praise of some disassociated virtue such that the injured party escaped with dignity intact. He reserved his most ferocious epithets for the enemy. “I never hated the Hun in the last war,” he told Ismay earlier in the year, “but now I hate them like… well, an earwig.” During a luncheon at Chequers, he allowed that, “A Hun alive is a war in prospect.” The parachute mines resulted in his “becoming less and less benevolent towards the Germans,” noted Colville, “and talks about castrating the whole lot.” Still, his loathing of the Hun in general was softened somewhat when it came to the individual soldier, sailor, or airman: When Sir Hugh Dowding advocated shooting at parachuting German pilots, Churchill disagreed, saying that parachuting pilots were “like sailors drowning at sea.”348

  He was easily brought to tears: the sight of an old Londoner poking among the smoking ruins of her home, movies great and silly, the successes—and failures—of his children, a christening, a choir in song. A good politician can harness such sensitivity to effect, and he was a master politician. No other leader on the world’s stage then or since dared wring himself dry so often. Churchill could pull it off. Common citizens and peers alike, on the political left as well as on the right, viewed his displays of emotion as proof of Churchill’s depth of character, never as weakness. Partisanship had evaporated under the heat of Hitler’s threat; Churchill could do no wrong. His national government, unified and resolute, transcended the politics of the past. His every word, every tear, every scowl that terrible autumn, was seen as pure Churchill to be sure, yet above politics, other than the politics of survival.

  Then he accepted the leadership of the Conservative Party. Chamberlain, dying of cancer, resigned from the War Cabinet early in October, leaving the Tories leaderless. Churchill was offered the post. He accepted over the passionate protest of Clementine, who correctly predicted that by taking the leadership, her husband would alienate large numbers of voters who had looked upon him as the “voice of the nation, irrespective of party.” Yet his logic in accepting it amounted to: Who else? There was nobody. It was either Churchill or someone of minimum ego, a man of such little substance he could find nourishment in Churchill’s wide shadow, because Churchill already was the leader—of the party, of Britain, of the Empire. As well, the party chairmanship was an office his father, Lord Randolph, had aspired to but failed to attain. Churchill, by accepting, may have done so more with the vindication of his father in mind than the political consequences. Given his own turbulent relationship with the Tories over the years, accepting the party chairmanship offered him a sweet opportunity for besting his former adversaries. Just a year earlier, in a letter to Clementine, he had lambasted “these dirty Tory hacks who would like to drive me out of the Party” because he had the audacity to oppose the appeasers.349

  Now, the opportunity presented itself to shepherd the hacks. Mary wrote that her father and mother had “several ding-dong arguments” over the issue. In the end, he took the post. Colville attached no special significance to the decision. He wrote in his diary: “The P.M. went to a meeting of the Conservative Party to accept the leadership.” Churchill tried in his acceptance remarks to remove politics from a purely political office, a clever gambit doomed to failure because no outsiders were on hand to appreciate the subtlety of his rhetoric. He accepted the role as leader, he told his fellow Tories, to preserve “the greatness of Britain and her Empire and the historic certainty of our Island life…. The Conservative Party will not allow any party to excel it in the sacrifice of party interests and party feelings.” It was his lone domestic political miscalculation that autumn, but it was a whopper, and brought fateful consequences almost five years later.350

  The North Sea and the English Channel were England’s faithful allies. Summer’s gentle mists and mild breezes had indeed given way to the “equinoctial gales” that Churchill surmised would, if frequent and ferocious enough, keep the German invasion barges in their French ports. The Old Man was one with British sailors, who for centuries believed that the equinoxes were alone responsible for the particularly powerful seasonal weather they encountered on their worldwide travels. Fortunately for Churchill, the old myths were correct in regard to the Channel weather. But the night skies offered no respite. By late October the nightly toll of London’s civilian casualties had fallen somewhat and the incidence of unexploded bombs had dropped considerably. Churchill asked Ismay whether the “easement which we feel is due to the enemy not throwing them, or to our improved methods of handling?” The answer was both. German bombers arrived each night, but the number of sorties was declining. The Luftwaffe was punching itself out. Of Hitler and his air offensive, Churchill declared, “That man’s effort is flagging.”351

  London Can Take It, a British propaganda film, gave Americans a visceral look at the courage of Londoners as their city burned. By the end of November t
he movie had played in 12,000 U.S. theaters. Charles Lindbergh—pro-German, Anglophobe, and isolationist—opined from his Long Island estate that such heroics were no reason to support the British cause, let alone join it. Joe Kennedy was that very month advising Hollywood producers not to make any such films, as they might annoy Hitler. The Luftwaffe in late October and November pounded other British cities—Birmingham, Bristol, Sheffield, Manchester, Coventry three times, Oxford, and Southampton and its port facilities. A November Gallup poll found that only 13 percent of Londoners took shelter when the sirens wailed, although almost 16,000 now lived in the Underground and beneath railroad bridges. Those with homes simply stayed in bed when the alarm sounded, making sure to pull their comforters tight in the event the windows blew in. HMG issued citizens jars of varnish mixed with liquid rubber, with instructions to paint the mixture over windowpanes in order to prevent shards. The stuff was useless.352

  On October 27 Churchill sent Roosevelt a message that captured Britain’s declining fortunes and the growing dangers facing the Empire. It was part boosterism, part desperate appeal. Churchill told the president that the U-boat and air attacks on the Northwest Approaches—“our only remaining lifeline”—could be “repelled only by the strongest concentration of our flotillas.” Yet in order to concentrate its destroyers in the approaches, the Home Fleet would have to lessen its presence in the North Sea, or reduce its destroyer presence along the south coast of England, or both. It could not be in all places at once. British food stocks were low and shipping losses were growing very worrisome, for in the last week of October, losses reached almost 160,000 tons, a figure that would have been thought a disastrous monthly loss the year before. Churchill told Roosevelt that much in the way of American matériel was needed for Home Island defense, and that the war would probably widen sometime in 1941 to include both Greece and Turkey, further threatening Britain’s already precarious position in the eastern Mediterranean. He ended his telegram with: “The world cause is in your hands.”353

  Churchill’s prediction regarding Greece proved spot-on, but his timing was off. The next day, October 28, Mussolini—without consulting Hitler—ordered eleven divisions, including the elite Alpini regiment, Italy’s finest fighters, across the Albanian border, over the Epirus Mountains and into Greece. The Italians far outnumbered the Greeks, had tanks where the Greeks did not, and fielded superior artillery. But, writes historian John Keegan, Mussolini had window-dressed his army “with expensive new equipment,” to the detriment of its fighting integrity. Thus, the Italians were overall weaker in arms, particularly in infantry. Infantry and machine guns made the difference in the mountain passes that tanks could not traverse. Mussolini’s troops lacked something else critical to attaining victory, too: motivation. They did not share Il Duce’s sense of destiny.354

  Mussolini’s motives were that he didn’t much like the Greeks and sought to assert enlightened Italian influence in the Balkans, and that he craved to show Hitler that Germany was not the only great power in Europe. Mussolini’s son-in-law Count Ciano had scribbled in his diary the previous November: “For Mussolini, the idea of Hitler waging war, and worse still, winning it, is altogether unbearable.” The charge into Greece would show Hitler that he, Il Duce, was no fantoccini (puppet). A collateral benefit could be expected to accrue as well from the takeover—the occupation of Greece would provide secure bases in closer proximity to British targets in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet the Italian charge across the doorstep of Egypt had brought Mussolini within reach of the biggest prizes short of London—Alexandria, Cairo, and the Suez. To capture those trophies, he would need to send his navy into full-blown battle against the Royal Navy. With the French fleet neutralized, the Italian and British Mediterranean fleets were fairly evenly matched; the Italians in fact held the edge in submarines and capital ships, the British in aircraft carriers, of which Mussolini had none. But where Mussolini sought to avoid a climactic naval battle, Churchill, in the spirit of Nelson, invited a fight. Mussolini’s prospects at sea appeared solid. His prospects on land appeared even more solid. In the Western Desert the Italians outnumbered Wavell’s forces by almost three to one, with another 180,000 Italian troops bivouacked to the southeast in the Horn of Africa. Even were an attack on Wavell to result in a bloody stalemate, the British would be pushed to the brink.355

  Yet Mussolini’s superior numbers on the ground counted for nothing without control of the sea. The Mediterranean formed the four center squares of Mussolini’s chessboard, and Churchill’s. By all that was strategically sound, Mussolini should have tried to drive the British out, supported in the air by his own air forces and the Luftwaffe. But in his most disastrous decision of the war (after joining Hitler in the first place), Il Duce chose to safeguard his navy and throw his ground troops into Greece, where the Greeks let the Italians wear themselves out assaulting mountain redoubts. Hitler learned of Mussolini’s strike while aboard his armored train en route to meet Il Duce in Florence. Arriving at the station, the Führer stepped from his car onto a red carpet. Mussolini strode forward, saluted, and announced, “Führer, we are on the march! Victorious Italian troops crossed the Greco-Albanian border at dawn today.” They repaired to a small room, where Hitler’s first words, spoken quietly as they clasped hands, were, “The whole outcome will be a military catastrophe.”356

  Churchill learned of Mussolini’s gambit early on the twenty-eighth when Colville interrupted a meeting at the CWR to announce that the Italians were bombing Athens. “Then we must bomb Rome,” replied Churchill. Within hours the War Cabinet authorized the bombing, with specific orders to avoid dropping any ordnance on Vatican City. “We must be careful not to bomb the Pope,” Churchill told Colville, because “he has a lot of influential friends.” Churchill’s concern for the safeguarding of His Holiness’s person had little to do with the pope’s moral presence on the world stage. Churchill’s view of the Papacy ran to the traditional Anglican; the pope was largely irrelevant. As British bombers made for Rome, Hugh Dalton, knowing of the woeful inaccuracy of their aim, expressed hope that the pope not be hit. Churchill replied, “I should like to tell the old man to get down into his shelter and stay there for a week.” The pope may have had friends in high places, but Churchill was not one of them. Within days the Italian army in Greece learned it had no friends—divine or otherwise. Mussolini threw in reserves that brought his strength up to fifteen divisions, but in just over four weeks, the outnumbered Greeks drove the Italians back through the mountain passes, back into Albania, whence they had come. If Greece were fated to fall to the Axis powers, Germany would have to do the heavy fighting.357

  The Greeks had a friend: Churchill. And they had a guarantee from Britain: a pledge made by Chamberlain in 1939 to step up with military help if Greek sovereignty was threatened. Given the sorry state of British military affairs, that was now an empty promise. To Churchill, however, a promise was a promise. Greek survival was at stake. That British survival was at stake as well had to be weighed against a very compelling, very English reason for keeping its promise to Greece: honor. Britain had failed the Czechs. It could not fail the Greeks. “We will give you all the help in our power,” Churchill told Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas, who at first demurred, for fear of invoking Hitler’s wrath. Only one military option was available to Churchill to meet his diplomatic obligation, to divide British forces in the Near East and send some to Greece and Crete. The rest would remain in Egypt to face down the Italian armies encamped since September at Sidi Barrani.

  It was a solution that defied the most fundamental military maxim: Do not divide forces if the division results in the increased likelihood of the destruction of all forces in detail. To send part of the Egyptian command to Greece was, Eden wrote in his diary, “strategic folly.” Eden, in Cairo since mid-October on a mission to assess the offensive possibilities offered there, telegraphed Churchill on November 1: “We cannot from Middle East resources send sufficient air or land reinforcements to have
any decisive influence upon course of fighting in Greece.” Churchill replied the next day: “Greek situation must be held to dominate other now. We are well aware of our slender resources.” All three senior commanders in the Middle East—General Wavell, Admiral Cunningham, and air chief marshal Sir Arthur Longmore—shared Eden’s opinion. Churchill did not. Wavell and General Dill expressed their doubts to each other but did not express them forcefully to Churchill, who thought Wavell and Dill pessimistic in any event, and chalked up any hesitancy on their parts to their natural conservatism. Yet their positions called for them to give the boss the bad with the good, regardless of the boss’s reaction. They chose—after Churchill made clear his displeasure with their opinions—to hedge their bets.358