The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Other precincts fared worse. The Germans dropped “Molotov breadbaskets,” containers that spit out dozens of incendiaries as they fell. The Guildhall went down, and eight of Wren’s churches. Paternoster Row disappeared, the publishers and bookbinders done in—as they had been in the Great Fire of 1666—by their stockpiles of glue and paper. Among the lost and irreplaceable treasures: William the Conqueror’s eleventh-century parchment charter granting London its freedom. More than a thousand fires started in the East End, always the recipient of ordnance when the Germans released their bombs thirty seconds too soon. Fire wardens, silhouetted by the whipping flames and the glow of exploding incendiaries, scrambled along smashed rooftops, while firemen below scrambled as walls collapsed. The fires burned for two days. Across the river, in Southwark, firemen ran hoses out hundreds of feet onto the mudflats of the Thames, only to watch them melt. “Poor old” London, Harold Nicolson wrote, “is a char woman among capitals, and when her teeth begin to fall out she looks ill indeed.” When Churchill and Clementine toured the wreckage the next day, an old woman approached and asked when the war would end. Churchill turned to her and replied, without a smile: “When we have beaten them.”422

  While London burned into the early hours of December 30, Americans gathered around radios as Franklin Roosevelt chatted from his fireside about the state of the world. He stressed the need to safeguard the Atlantic Ocean by supporting Britain, and the need, ultimately, to help Britain defeat the Nazis. Aware that many voters of Irish and Italian ancestry might find aiding Britain an unpalatable prospect, he predicted that both Ireland and Italy—the former neutral, the latter “forced to become accomplices of the Nazis”—would sooner or later be enslaved by Nazi Germany. In Asia the Chinese were putting up a “great defense” against the Japanese. Then, as if to say “enough said,” he added a phrase long since forgotten: “In the Pacific is our fleet.” The danger as he saw it lay in Europe, where the British fought alone, and to the British must go material support. The plan went like this: “As planes and ships and guns and shells are produced, your Government, with its defense experts, can then determine how best to use them to defend this hemisphere…. We must be the great arsenal of democracy…. There will be no ‘bottlenecks’ in our determination to aid Great Britain…. Their strength is growing. It is the strength of men and women who value their freedom more highly than they value their lives.”423

  The phrase “arsenal of democracy” would long be remembered on both sides of the sea. These were defiant words, reassuring and full of promise, but what did they mean in terms of Britain’s inability to pay? “No bottlenecks”? Was not Britain’s lack of specie a bottleneck? Roosevelt had also declared his intention to “eliminate the dollar sign” but had offered no specifics on how to do so. On the final day of the year, Churchill telegraphed his appreciation to Roosevelt for “all you said yesterday… especially the outline of your plans giving us the aid without which Hitlerism cannot be extirpated from Europe and Asia.” He omitted a line he had written in a draft: “Remember Mr. President, we do not know what you have in mind, or exactly what the United States is going to do, and we are fighting for our lives.”424

  Churchill and Britons had survived to the end of what he called “the most splendid, as it was the most deadly, year in our long English and British story.” It was a year, he later wrote, that surpassed the year of the Spanish Armada, Marlborough’s campaigns, Nelson’s victories against Napoleon, even the entirety of the Great War. During 1940, “this small and ancient Island… had proved itself capable of bearing the whole impact and weight of world destiny.” He added, “Alone, but upborne by every generous heartbeat of mankind, we had defied the tyrant at the height of his triumph.”425

  He and his countrymen had indeed, without flinching and without wavering, defied the tyrant. But they had not yet defeated him.

  They fought on, into the New Year of 1941. Alone.

  2

  The Rapids

  JANUARY–DECEMBER 1941

  Shortly after midnight on January 1, 1941, Churchill telegraphed Franklin Roosevelt: “At this moment when the New Year opens in storm, I feel it is my duty on behalf of the British government, and indeed of the whole British Empire, to tell you, Mr. President, how lively is our sense of gratitude and admiration for the memorable declaration which you made to the American people, and to the lovers of freedom in all the continents on Sunday last.” He again resisted the urge to remind the president that he and the British people had no idea whatsoever of just exactly what America was going to do, or how, or when. He had no knowledge of the particulars of the Lend-Lease bill—titled, with no end save symbolism, H. R. 1776—about to be introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives, nor of course could he know the content of the bill when it emerged from the Senate, if it emerged from the Senate. When Lend-Lease began its trip through Congress, it would do so on Washington’s terms, not Churchill’s. If the congressional journey devoured too much time, Britain would go broke, a sorry enough circumstance for the greatest empire in history but now, with the Wehrmacht poised across the Channel, likely fatal as well. It was that close-fought a thing. Still, Jock Colville found Churchill’s demeanor “mellow” on the last day of the old year. The telegram to Roosevelt manifested that measured good cheer, taking the form of holiday salutations in which he left unstated an obvious truth, one he could never articulate in public: only if 1940 proved to be America’s last year of peace could 1941 prove to be Britain’s first year of hope.1

  Although Churchill claimed he had but one goal, the defeat of Hitler, those who worked for him often had no idea how he proposed to reach it. “His restless mind,” wrote Lord Noel Annan, who as a young man in 1941 worked in the War Cabinet office, “bred one military scheme after another.” Annan arrived at work each morning “wondering which rabbit had jumped out of the hat during the night.” Would it be “Churchill’s plan to land at Bordeaux, or at Spitzbergen, or Sardinia, North Africa, the tip of Sumatra? What such expeditions were expected to achieve, and how they would escape annihilation by superior forces, was clear only to Churchill.” Maps were blank canvases, the contours of which Churchill filled in and studded with pins and painted with arrows—his arrows—pointing hither and yon toward hoped-for glorious victories in some far-distance place. But, wrote Annan, he was “oblivious of mountains or logistics” that the maps might bring to light and in so doing render his arrows pointless.2

  Vanquished continental statesmen, royals, and the entire Dutch, Belgian, and Polish governments in exile greeted the New Year in the London clubs, hotels, and private houses where they had taken up residence. King Zog, of Albania, lived at the Ritz. King Haakon of Norway dined at Claridge’s, where meats, fishes, and fruits not available to most Londoners appeared nightly on the menu. Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands lived at Claridge’s and asked strangers for the latest news while wandering the corridors in her woolen bathrobe. Czechoslovakia’s ousted president, Eduard Beneš, made the best of his hopeless cause in the capital of the empire that two years earlier had betrayed him. When in the autumn King Carol II of Romania, a royal playboy, sought asylum, the Foreign Office denied his request on the grounds that he kept a mistress. Churchill shot off a note to the FO: “It is true he has a mistress… but since when have private morals been a bar to asylum?” Carol was given permission to flee to Bermuda. His teenage son, Michael, grabbed the crown, remained in Romania, and waited for the proper moment to outmaneuver the dictator Ion Antonescu. He would have a long wait. The kings of Greece and Yugoslavia arrived later in the spring after disasters by way of the Wehrmacht befell their kingdoms. King George II of the Hellenes took up residence at Claridge’s. Peter, the seventeen-year-old king of Yugoslavia enjoyed viewing American westerns from the balconies of West End cinemas, where he was often seen, his thumb cocked, picking off desperadoes with his forefinger, bang, bang.3

  The Polish prime minister in exile Władysław Sikorski spent much of his time in Scotland, where
20,000 Polish troops trained, and dipped into mostly empty pockets to raise almost £500 to help repair the London Guildhall, which the Luftwaffe had toppled. While the Poles trained in Scotland, the Free French cooled their heels in the south of England. Charles de Gaulle—referred to by many around Whitehall as “that ass de Gaulle”—had been ensconced since June 1940 in his shabby office on the third floor of St. Stephen House, where he fumed as much at Vichy leaders as at Germans. Although he had in October set up a Free French “state” in Brazzaville, French Equatorial Africa (modern Chad), in actuality, the closest he could get to French Dominions in Asia and North Africa were old maps pinned to his office walls. De Gaulle, Wilhelmina, Beneš, Sikorski—all the beaten leaders—dreamed of someday returning to their homelands, victorious. Meanwhile, London, command center of the Free World, would have to do.4

  The children in British cities, more than 600,000 in all, had been packed off to the countryside, but they were no longer sent abroad. They would stay in England to the end. A copy of Magna Carta had been sent to Washington, DC, but Churchill decreed that Britain’s works of art stay. “Bury them in caves and cellars,” he declared. “None must go. We are going to beat them.” London was now the last redoubt, for the Empire’s art, for the continental refugees of high birth and low who had poured into the city for two years, the final stop for the lot of them, Churchill included.5

  T. S. Eliot, a fire warden at the Faber Building, where he was an editor, crafted a phrase that captured the essence of the nation’s ordeal in five words:

  “History is now and England.” (“Little Gidding”)

  On January 1, Churchill, fuming over Roosevelt’s desire to haul off to America the remaining British gold in South Africa, suggested to Colville that America’s love of doing good business might overrule its inclination to become a Good Samaritan, with fatal consequences for Britain. He had inserted into and then deleted such accusatory ruminations from his New Year’s Eve telegram: “I will gladly give directions for any gold in Capetown to be put on board any warships you may send…. I feel however that I should not be discharging my responsibilities to the people of the British Empire if, without the slightest indication of how our fate was to be settled in Washington, I were to part with this last reserve, from which alone we might buy a few month’s food.” This was an opinion best offered in person, between friends. The ongoing traffic between them in telegrams notwithstanding, Roosevelt and Churchill had yet to formalize a partnership, let alone a friendship.6

  In the final hours of New Year’s Day, Churchill climbed to the Foreign Office roof with his new foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Eden was “vain and occasionally hysterical” in Colville’s opinion, and very protective of his political patch. P. J. Grigg, Eden’s successor at the War Office, considered him to be “complete junk.” Churchill thought otherwise and had big things in mind for Eden, beginning with the Foreign Office. Eden was content to stay at the War Office following the death of Lord Lothian and Halifax’s appointment as ambassador to the United States, but he heeded Churchill’s summons to higher office. He later recalled that when Churchill first offered him the Foreign Office, Churchill “reiterated that he was now an old man, that he would not make Lloyd George’s mistake of carrying on after the war, that the succession must be mine.” That would prove a long time passing.7

  Eden came from the finest English stock. His lineage on his father’s side included Robert Eden, the last colonial governor of Maryland. His mother’s side included the Calvert family and Lord Baltimore (whose family crest adorns the Maryland state flag) and reached back to the Greys. Eden’s first wife could cite Thomas à Becket as a distant relation. Eden had won the Military Cross during the Great War, and at twenty became the youngest brigade major in the English army. At Oxford he had studied Russian, Persian, and several Arabic and Chinese dialects. When Baldwin in late 1935 made the young war hero and rising Tory his foreign secretary, Churchill opined in a letter to Clementine, “I think you will now see what a light-weight Eden is.” But Eden, repulsed by appeasement, resigned in early 1938, thus earning Churchill’s respect. Churchill groomed, encouraged, and rewarded the younger man in a generous and protective spirit of a sort he could not possibly have learned from his own father.8

  Thus it was with his successor-designate that Churchill climbed to the roof of the Foreign Office that night. The air was infused with the aroma of woodsmoke from dozens of still smoldering fires. Broken clouds drifted overhead; a cold, light rain fell. Below spread London, wrapped in darkness blacker even than in Norman times, when the meager light of pitch and tow torches lent to the Thames a zinc hue and cast London Bridge into relief to guide pilgrims home. Gazing skyward, the skies quiet but for sporadic anti-aircraft firing, Churchill and Eden wondered, What would the new year bring? The entire world wondered the same, yet even the mere posing of the question was an act of self-deception, for the answer was inescapable: it would bring a year of storm.

  Some in those dark hours heard the knock of opportunity. Newly promoted Lieutenant General Bernard Law Montgomery, fifty-three, a career soldier, Dunkirk evacuee, and son of an Anglican priest, believed his future bright. He commanded V Corps and coastal defense of Britain, having replaced General Claude Auchinleck, a tough Ulsterman who as commander of the Norwegian fiasco asked for and did not receive the tactical air support he needed to press the attack. He came away certain that ill-supported troops cannot give battle. Auchinleck’s open disdain for sending men into battle without the tools to finish the job—especially close air support—earned him unjustified enmity in Whitehall and a reputation for undue caution. It also earned him a transfer to India where, early in his career, Auchinleck had studied and become fluent in almost all the dialects of the subcontinent. In his new position of commander in chief, India, it was presumed that Auchinleck’s caution would not be exploited by any adversary. Montgomery had never gotten along with Auchinleck and welcomed his departure. “Monty,” as Montgomery’s troops called him, considered his own chances for promotion splendid, and justifiably so in his estimation, an assessment not shared by some of his superiors who found him pompous and mischievous, a term that, when employed in England, connotes sneakiness, not playfulness. He was four years a widower, his wife having died in his arms of an infection caused by an insect bite. On the day of the funeral, Montgomery appeared late for a staff meeting. “Gentlemen,” he told his staff, “I ask you to forgive this display of human weakness.” Since then, he had given himself over to the army. Montgomery’s “pugnacious attitude” and his willingness to gas the Germans should they arrive impressed Churchill, who kept an eye on the man.9

  A forty-year-old Royal Navy hero also impressed Churchill. Captain Louis (“Dickie”) Mountbatten—great-grandson of Queen Victoria, second cousin of George V, and cousin to the murdered Romanovs—was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his gallantry in 1940 when he brought his destroyer, HMS Kelly, safely to port from the North Sea, where it had been cut almost in half by German torpedoes. Churchill dictated a congratulatory note, and scribbled in the margin of a copy: “I hardly know him.” That soon changed, for Churchill had known Mountbatten’s father, Prince Louis Battenberg, a naturalized Austrian who in 1914, as first sea lord, worked with Churchill, then at the Admiralty, to bring the British Navy up to a state of war readiness. Battenberg’s reward was to be forced into early retirement by the wave of Germanophobia that washed over Britain. Churchill stood by, silent, as Battenberg was banished. Perhaps to atone for his silence then, or because he could not resist a hero, especially one of aristocratic lineage, Churchill took a keen interest in Mountbatten, which much enhanced the captain’s prospects of advancement. Mountbatten was charming, fearless, and reckless. And lucky: in just fourteen months Dickie had been torpedoed, bombed, and strafed, had collided with another ship, and had run over a floating mine. At the beginning of the new year, Mountbatten commanded a destroyer squadron in the Mediterranean, where such small warships as Kelly were lost with
distressing regularity. Mountbatten’s command of such a vulnerable ship as well as his wild fighting style much diminished his chances of surviving long enough to gain any further promotion.10

  The new year found James Joyce in Geneva, dying. F. Scott Fitzgerald soon followed the expatriate Irishman into the night. Virginia Woolf, who had long suffered from depression, followed them both, by her own hand. German bombs had erased her London house. Confiding her thoughts on the war to her diary, Woolf wrote, “I was thinking: we live without a future. That’s what’s queer, with our noses pressed to a closed door.” As she gazed from her window upon the downs and spires and old stone walls of the countryside that she loved, she summoned Walter de la Mare’s melancholy words “Look thy last on all things lovely,” and in twelve weeks’ time filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse.11

  Most Britons—Churchill foremost among them—saw a future, and were willing to fight and die for it. That winter, Britons gave way to inexplicable bursts of primitive emotion. “We want more!” cried Londoners in defiance as they danced madly though the streets while stomping out incendiaries during one early January raid. Malcolm Muggeridge found himself delighting—disturbingly so—in “the sound, the taste and smell of all this destruction… the faces of bystanders wildly lit in the flames… it seemed as if the Book of Revelation had verily come to pass.” Churchill was one with Londoners and Muggeridge. Every night lit by flames was another glorious occasion to either live or die, to stride toward the day when he could deliver unto Germany his version of justice.12