The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  For many young American men who wondered if they’d be one of the 800,000 draftees Roosevelt needed for his “muster,” revelations arrived via the local draft board as the new year came in. The army got all the draftees; navy and Marine corps recruiting standards were set higher than draft standards, a policy that would leave the bluejackets and leathernecks vastly undermanned should America ever to go to war. All told, almost one million young American men marched off to boot camp, but not yet to war. Those Americans who had already chosen army careers pondered their prospects for advancement. Dwight Eisenhower, a fifty-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, had until late 1939 served in Manila as chief of staff to Douglas MacArthur, commander of U.S. Army forces in the Philippines. On January 1, Eisenhower served as chief of staff for the 3rd Division. He sought a field command and had told an old friend, George Patton Jr., that he considered himself qualified to command a regiment—perhaps one of Patton’s—but that he harbored few hopes of ever attaining higher rank. Eisenhower’s name appeared on a list drawn up for General of the Army George Marshall of eighteen career officers who might qualify for division command: Eisenhower was ranked eighteenth.13

  Although Roosevelt, in 1939, had ordered Army chief of staff George Marshall to build up American armed forces, by early 1941, America fielded only the seventeenth most powerful army in the world, strong enough to lick Canada or Mexico should the situation arise, but no match for the Wehrmacht.

  The French in the new year cared little for the latest news from London, or America, or any place in between. The world Frenchmen knew and loved had died the previous June. The Nazi occupiers made sure little news reached Frenchmen in any event. The winter weather was brutal. Gales pushed freezing cold and snow south to the Riviera. Marseille found itself isolated from the rest of southern France by snowdrifts. In Paris, breadlines lengthened, and a shortage of coal for fireplaces spelled doom for the trees of the city’s parks. Parisians could only watch as German troops stole food that came by way of America and Morocco and southern France. The French were beaten, and they discerned a future that offered only misery, hunger, and slavery. On New Year’s Day, Pétain told his countrymen that for the foreseeable future, “We shall be hungry.” The old marshal had to have the coupons clipped from his ration card just like everyone else. He was a beaten man.14

  Charles de Gaulle, in London, was not. He understood the unbreakable strength of dreams. On New Year’s Day, he called on the people of France to remain indoors for an hour, a purely symbolic yet powerful protest that left the streets empty but for the enemy. Most Frenchmen had never heard of de Gaulle until June 18 of the previous year, when, in a BBC address broadcast from London, this minor general declared himself the regent of French honor, its guardian and protector. He told Frenchmen, “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.”

  He was a Catholic whose politics ran to the right; his oratorical skills were meager, yet they transcended politics. He was not a man of any party; he was a man of France, specifically of the myth of France, where given his exile, his presence was, necessarily, a spiritual one. Posters bearing photos of Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Roosevelt hung on walls throughout their lands, but Vichy had erased from France all pictorial representations of de Gaulle. Vichy propagandists described him as short, fat, ugly, and a misfit. Frenchmen had no image of the man. Instead, and despite German efforts to jam the BBC, they were guided by only his disembodied voice crackling across the airwaves. By the time Napoleon was de Gaulle’s age, his life was nearly finished; the myth surrounding him was complete. De Gaulle was just beginning. Now he called for resistance, and in the dark of night a spark was struck. He wrote in his memoirs: “I felt within myself a life coming to an end…. At the age of forty-nine I was entering upon adventure, like a man thrown by fate outside all terms of reference.” Churchill saw the immense importance of imbuing Frenchmen with the will to fight, the need to fight. He had done much the same for Britons by leading his listeners back into the mists and myths of English history, where the soul of England resided. There was a critical difference, however: Britons could see and touch their Winnie. Yet, even though Frenchmen could form no image of de Gaulle, he had won over their souls. Churchill recognized this; Franklin Roosevelt did not, with unfortunate results for all concerned.15

  January 1 arrived in a somber Berlin. The Wehrmacht had months earlier demolished the Maginot Line. Its coal stoves, bunks, and rations enough to feed 250,000 for a year were packed up and shipped off to German air-raid shelters, where the citizens, based on assurances from their leaders, had presumed the ill-gotten supplies would gather dust from want of use. Instead, dust settled now into Berlin shelters, sifted down from the streets above, where the homes of Berliners burned under RAF bombs.16

  Berliners crowded shelters on a regular basis, though Jews were forbidden entrance, forbidden in fact to take shelter in any of the basements of Berlin. If they could gain access to a building, Jews were confined to the ground floor; otherwise they took their chances in the streets. Berliners were depressed by the bloody harvest of Hitler’s adventures and by their increased awareness that their lives under the Nazis bore no resemblance to the lives they had once lived, or had hoped to live. The Tiergarten was empty, dark, silent, and studded with bomb craters. Such festivities as there were took place behind shuttered windows. In his New Year’s Eve address, Hitler excoriated “this criminal” Churchill who for three months has bombed German cities by night “and—as especially the inhabitants of Berlin know—has made special targets of hospitals.” The Führer promised he would respond to “the Churchill crimes” and assured Germans that “the war will be waged to the end—until the responsible criminals have been eliminated.” He added, “It is the will of the democratic war-inciters and their Jewish-capitalistic wire-pullers that the war must be continued…. We are ready…. The year 1941 will bring completion of the greatest victory in our history.” William L. Shirer saw only gloom in Berlin. He had just left Europe after fifteen years on the Continent, leaving behind the “Nazi blight and the hatred and the fraud and the political gangsterism and the murder and the massacre and the incredible intolerance and all the suffering and the starving and the cold and the thud of a bomb blowing the people in a house to pieces, the thud of all the bombs blasting men’s hope and decency.”17

  Berliners, as did Londoners, found ways to express their cynicism. The lyrics of the German war song “Wir fahren, wir fahren, wir fahren gegen Engeland” (“We are marching, marching, marching against England”), which had played over and over again on state radio the previous summer as the BEF was encircled at Dunkirk, had been revised: “Wir fahren, wir fahren, wir fahren, schon seit Jahren, mit langen weissen Haaren, gegen Engeland.” (“We are marching, marching, marching; we have for years been marching; with hair turned white by the passage of time we go on marching, against England.”) Shirer noted a riddle making the rounds in Berlin: “An airplane carrying Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring crashes; all three are killed. Who is saved? Answer: The German people.” Shirer, with insight into the Nazi mind-set that was lacking in Whitehall, predicted that the British blockade of Germany would not succeed in starving Germans, because “Hitler, who is never sentimental about non-Germans, will see to it that every one of the one hundred million people in the occupied lands dies of hunger before one German does. Of that, the world can be sure.”18

  Excepting the myriad peoples who lived within the British Empire, Churchill was not himself overly sentimental about non-Britons and, since their surrender, the French in particular. Pétain, on New Year’s Day, told Frenchmen that food shortages in southern France were the result of the British blockade. He did not tell his countrymen that food shipments from the United States to French Morocco, intended for occupied France, were being diverted by the Germans—with Vichy compliance—to Germany. Pétain’s obfuscations infuriated Churchill, who in coming months complained bitterly to Roosevelt. When in a few weeks’ time
the American secretary of state Cordell Hull expressed his opposition to Britain’s continued blockade of Vichy, Churchill exploded, telling Halifax, “I cannot believe the United States government would wish us to do simply nothing, and have the war prolonged by having all these cargoes, containing not only food but rubber and other war materials, pass unhindered into Germany.” He voiced his cynicism to Roosevelt in typically Churchillian fashion. “For instance, there is a French ship… with 3,000 tons of rubber on board which is certainly not all for the teats of babies’ bottles.” All kinds of munitions and raw materials, he told Roosevelt, “are going straight to Germany or Italy.” From Churchill’s perspective, if food shipments to France had to be cut off in order to prevent leakage of matériel to Germany, then so be it. The ships needed to supply Britain could not be spared to supply France, he told Roosevelt, especially as he did not want the British people, “who, apart from heavy bombardment likely to be renewed soon, are having to tighten their belts and restrict their few remaining comforts, to feel that I am not doing my best against the enemy.” If the British blockade meant that Frenchmen went hungry so that Englishmen might live, such was war.19

  In Britain, the U-boat blockade had resulted in all goods but the essential disappearing from pantry shelves. Everyone, including the cabinet, was on half rations (everyone except the swells at Claridge’s, the Savoy, the Ritz, and any London dining clubs that remained unbombed). City dwellers with friends in the country might come into a few eggs a month; all others would go eggless. Alec Cadogan was thankful after procuring a few chickens; then they stopped laying. Turkeys were in short supply, and expensive. Meat was parceled out at less than one pound per person per week, bone in, half the ration of a year earlier. To a nation of meat eaters who, for centuries, had begun their day with a mutton chop and ended it with roasts, puddings, and kidney pies, this was carnivoricide. Not only were meat and eggs disappearing, but so were the cooks, butlers, and scullery maids of the rich and near rich. A domestic servant crisis developed in the kitchens and laundries of the West End and in the country houses of the gentry when cooks and laundresses marched off to work in the armaments factories. Mollie Panter-Downes observed a marked increase in newspaper help-wanted advertisements taken out by “anguished ladies” in search of servants who would find, it was promised, “enormous wages, happy homes, and safe locales, where a bomb is guaranteed to be unknown.” Those servants had less to iron and more to mend: clothing rationing took full effect later in the year, limiting purchases to the value of coupons, no cash allowed, regardless of the shopper’s cash flow. Women’s Sunday-best dresses would have to do until the end of the war. Suede elbow patches on men’s jackets now served a purely functional purpose.20

  East Enders meanwhile, lower on the social ladder than even those in service to the rich, had no need to fret over the paucity of clothing or beef: they could afford neither in any event. The poor supped on “Blitz soup,” a viscous canned concoction foisted upon them by the Ministry of Food. The ministry also supplied dried eggs, which Londoners anointed “dregs.” The good citizens of Britain were told that tripe was restricted but chickens for the time being were not. Horsemeat—approved for human consumption—appeared in butcher shops. No coupons were required for its purchase, but sales flagged. Britons avoided horsemeat with the same fervor as Muslims avoid pork.21

  Fresh meat was not the only item absent from the British retail scene. Silk stockings had gone missing from stores; tobacco was priced beyond the means of most; razor blades were scarce; and pipe cleaners were nonexistent, having been appropriated by women for use as hair curlers. A tea crisis occurred when the Pelton gasworks was hit. It took up to an hour to boil water for tea over small fires stoked from sticks and paper. The problem of how to roast the Sunday joint of beef without gas was rendered moot by the absence of joints of beef. A coal shortage loomed if deliveries from the Welsh mines to London did not increase to 410,000 tons per week from the current 250,000 tons, a situation Churchill found difficult to understand given the slackening in the Blitz and the general good repair of the railroads. Other statistics showed that in spite of German bombs, Britons maintained their humanity after a fashion denied those who lived under Hitler: almost 50,000 British dogs and cats had been rescued from bombed houses.22

  HMG conducted surveys. The divorce rate was down by half. The birthrate had not declined, and “Winston” as a first or middle name for baby boys more than tripled in popularity.* Surprisingly, in light of dietary restrictions and the lack of central heat, cases of pneumonia and diphtheria were down. The crime rate was also down, curiously, thought Churchill, given the ample opportunities for looting, an “odious” crime in his estimation. Some looting could be excused. He told home secretary Herbert Morrison that a sentence of five years penal servitude given to six auxiliary London firemen caught stealing whisky from a burning pub was “out of proportion when compared with sentences of three or six months for stealing valuables.” The firemen, after all, had procured the whisky for “immediate consumption” rather than for personal enrichment. Such bureaucratic blockheadedness riled the Old Man. When a Londoner was fined £100 for disposing of a delayed-action bomb “without authorization,” Churchill’s fuse ignited. Was this man fined, he asked Morrison, for saving his home? Rather than official opprobrium, he decreed that the heroic citizen should be “awarded the George Medal.” And when an obviously “crazy female” was given five years penal servitude for expressing the opinion that “Hitler was a good ruler, a better man than Mr. Churchill,” he told Morrison that the sentence was “far too heavy.”23

  On January 2 Harold Nicolson, while strolling through old London—still smoldering from the December 29 raid—noted small groups of sullen civilians standing around in the ruins. He noted their quiet mutterings about the need for revenge, the more revenge the better, and sooner, too. “We are fighting devils,” Nicolson wrote that night, “and I don’t see why we shouldn’t fight like devils in order to let them see what it is like.” He noted on his rambles a subtle but definite decline in esprit de corps. When the news of the Taranto raid played across the newspapers in late November—grainy aerial photos of wrecked Italian ships—it was met with skepticism, especially among the lower economic classes, who thought the photos fake. The welcome news that the Greeks were trouncing the Italians in Albania was held up by Cockney newsboys as proof of the sorry state of British arms, for the Italians, trounced by the Greeks, had trounced the English in Somaliland. The string of recent British victories against the Italians in North Africa were seen by East Enders as meaningless. The real enemy, Hitler, still prowled Europe, uncontested and unmolested.24

  London’s poor were skeptical, yet socialist ward bosses in Silvertown, Stepney, and the East End slums had failed to kindle any revolutionary fires among them. East Enders remained faithful to the cause even as their filthy tenements burned and crashed down around them. Most now chose to stay home when the bombs came, and scorned the Anderson shelters, which, carped the ward bosses, “couldn’t protect a rooster from rain.” Anderson shelters at least posed no public health menace, unlike the ersatz shelters under railroad overpasses, which were not much more than vectors for disease. A constable visiting one first heard and then smelled it before he saw it: “The first thing I heard was a great hollow hubbub, as if there were animals down there moaning and crying. And then… this terrible stench hit me. It was worse than dead bodies, hot and thick and so fetid that I gagged and then vomited. Ahead of me I could see faces peering towards me lit by lanterns and candles. It was like a painting of Hell.” The Cockneys were refused even the satisfaction of reading of their plight in the newspapers; the Ministry of Information, under Duff Cooper, forbade any reporting of where bombs fell or the number of casualties. Those workingmen who took their news from the Communist, alarmist, and decidedly adversarial Daily Worker could no longer do so after January 21, 1941, the day HMG took the extraordinary step of shutting it down. Still, newspaper obituaries offered clu
es; bomb victims were said to have died “very suddenly.” If the obituaries contained a grouping of “very sudden” deaths in a particular neighborhood, it was a good bet that the neighborhood in question had been hit hard.25

  That certain squalid sections of the East End and Southwark, of Manchester, Birmingham, and Britain’s other industrial areas, had been destroyed brought forth an ironic response from many of the displaced. The Germans were ridding Britain of slums, a job HMG had avoided for forty years. Londoners who lost their homes to bombs waited an average of five months before being placed in livable abodes. Churchill had outlined to Colville a relief plan to reimburse homeowners up to £1,000 (about $55,000 U.S. in 2012) for their losses, but Parliament had yet to make good on the promise. Soon after John Reith took up his new duties as minister of works (after Churchill eased him out of the Ministry of Transportation), he was instructed by Churchill to “press on” in rebuilding bombed neighborhoods. Yet Churchill told Edward Bridges, secretary to the cabinet, that as far as reconstruction of wrecked cities was concerned, “We must be very careful not to allow these remote post-war problems to absorb energy which is required, maybe for several years, for the prosecution of the war.” Cockneys—all Britons—would have to wait a decade for new homes, for reliable supplies of electricity, coal, gas, water, and petrol. The wait for clothing, paper goods, and fresh, plentiful food would last well into the next decade. The only commodities delivered to Britons with any regularity in early 1941 were German bombs.26

  In his memoirs Churchill equated 1940 with “shooting Niagara” and termed early 1941 a “struggle in the rapids.” In January 1941 the lifeline of Lend-Lease lay coiled on the far shore. Churchill and England fought on, alone, a fact he made clear when he articulated the “theme” of his memoirs of 1940: