The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  The isolationist argument was simple, and inflexible. Britain’s plight did not much move isolationists, because they saw Britain as everything America strove not to be: imperial, elitist, defined by class distinctions, made wealthy by virtue of taking goods from its colonies rather than by virtue of making goods at home. Could this realm, this distant island, this England, even be properly termed a democracy? Such were the questions Congress would debate. The isolationists prepared massive opposition, much of it centered on Churchill. In the minds of America Firsters, Churchill’s pledge to never negotiate an end to the war had lured Roosevelt into a cursed web.51

  For many Americans, and not just the America Firsters, here was Old Europe at it again. Americans had gone over once before and received small thanks, had not even been repaid the money they loaned to defeat the Kaiser. Churchill understood this. He respected Americans enough to stay out of their debate, or at least to not enter it directly. Rather than try to inspire Americans, as he had his countrymen in 1940, he intended to inspire Hopkins.

  Churchill knew that his people were willing to take the aerial punishment, but only as long as they believed something greater than aerial revenge upon German cities was forthcoming. Britons craved a real victory in the field against Hitler’s armies. A victory of any size would do, obtained in any fashion, and on any front. Still, although he had yet to deliver such a victory, a visit by Churchill to a wrecked neighborhood always brought cheers from the locals. Londoners, when they stuck tattered little Union Jacks into their piles of smashed bricks and snapped timbers, sent a statement of deadly purpose to Churchill. Churchill, in turn, with each appearance, told them that he heard them.

  That year he toured every major industrial city and port in England, Scotland, and Wales. He liked to drop into airfields, barracks, AA emplacements, and coastal defenses, and hoist a toast to the defenders, preferably with whisky (“I like my tea cool and yella” he told a young officer who offered him a spot of tea during one such visit). If, when he was strolling along St. James’s Street on his way to business in Whitehall, a passing workman proffered a hand, he took it. He understood the need to be seen and heard by the people. He grasped the power of photographs to record visits to blasted neighborhoods, such that every citizen who viewed the images felt as if their Winnie had visited their house and theirs alone.52

  He chose settings with dazzling skill, where the symbolism of the moment could be captured on film, as with his visit later in the spring to the House of Commons after a bomb the night before obliterated the debating chamber. He was seen to have tears in his eyes as he surveyed the wreckage and pledged, in a steady but strained voice, to rebuild the chamber. But when a photographer appeared, his demeanor changed. The resultant photograph captured the scene as choreographed by Churchill. There he stands, in profile, the sharp white northern latitude light diffused by a fine haze of pulverized stone, a scene of utter wreckage, the ancient seat of government smashed. Yet it is Churchill more than the wreckage that the observer notes, his chin thrust forward in defiance, an invitation to Hitler to take another swing. His gaze in such photos is firm, and always directed at a particular shocked or bewildered bomb victim, or skyward, toward some unseen enemy, perhaps toward a higher power, though he put little faith in higher powers. His eyes are never downcast. There is a contemplative quotient to his stare, as if he were regarding a vista he intended to paint. And there is a calmness, too, as if his thoughts were simultaneously with the bomb victim—whether an old Cockney woman or the Commons itself—and in some faraway place. It is the hard, unsettling gaze of a man who has been wronged, and who is intent on righting that wrong.

  A visit to a burning street, a few words, a symbolic pose assumed at the instant the photographer triggered his flash, a posture of immutability and imperturbability—this was about all Churchill could offer Britons as the Blitz wore on. He could not of course tell them of naval and troop dispositions; even weather forecasts were censored. He told them he would share with them in the suffering. He told them they must wait for victory. And he told them, “I make no promises and give no guarantees, except that we will do our best.” And from them he expected their best. He presumed that not only could London take it, but that London would take it. Harold Nicolson recorded his appreciation: Churchill “does not try to cheer us up with vain promises.” Churchill knew his countrymen. When offered the choice to deliver false good news or the hard truth, he served the bad, for Englishmen, he proclaimed, “seem to like their food cooked that way.”53

  Like Nicolson, so, too, did Churchill hear the murmurings for revenge during his wanderings about town. In Berlin, the Tiergarten, roped off, became increasingly pocked with bomb craters. But British bomb damage, measured by smashed machine tools and fuel depots, was meager, a fact Churchill was acutely aware of. The Germans had dropped far more bombs on Britain since September than the RAF had dropped on Germany, almost four tons of bombs for each ton the British dropped. Even had the British attained tonnage parity, RAF targeting was so terrible that the awful results would not have changed. As well, the price paid in manpower for such inefficiencies could not be maintained. More RAF bomb crews had been killed or captured over Germany than Berliners had been killed on the ground. The most recent testimony to RAF aerial inefficiencies took the form of a message delivered on the last day of 1940 from the British embassy in Budapest. The American naval attaché in Berlin had stated that British air raids on Berlin had done “little damage.” Churchill found that intelligence the most troublesome of many such “melancholy reports.” The matter of bombing imprecision, he told his staff, “causes me a great deal of anxiety.” And yet, although the RAF raids had little effect on German industrial production, they boosted the morale of Englishmen, a trade-off Churchill was forced to accept.54

  Big four-engine Stirling and Halifax bombers were rolling off assembly lines; they could tote almost seven tons of bombs, nearly triple the capacity of the Luftwaffe’s Dorniers and Heinkels. The Avro Lancaster heavy bomber (ready for flight tests) would comprise a horrific weapons system when loaded with a four-thousand-pound bomb (not yet fully developed) and dozens of thirty-pound phosphorous bombs (not yet produced in sufficient quantities) along with hundreds of incendiary bombs. The big bomb was intended to blow away roofs and windows within a wide radius, thus assuring an ample supply of air to fuel the incendiaries and the phosphorous bombs, the former designed to start fires, the latter to melt anything, including people, that came in contact with the phosphorous gel. The Prof believed that German morale would suffer under such an onslaught, a beneficial side effect of the bombing strategy, the primary objective of which was the destruction of Germany’s industrial capacity. It was based on the assumption championed by Churchill that even were Hitler to reach the gates of India or the Suez, if Germany itself was destroyed, Hitler must lose his war. Churchill, throughout the year, told his friends and family in the most graphic terms what he planned to do to German cities; in his broadcasts, he told Hitler and the people of Germany. He warned them:

  You do your worst and we will do our best. Perhaps it may be our turn soon; perhaps it may be our turn now. We live in a terrible epoch of the human story, but we believe there is a broad and sure justice running through its theme. It is time that the Germans should be made to suffer in their own homeland and cities something of the torment they have twice in our lifetime let loose upon their neighbours and upon the world.55

  Few in Germany took him seriously. Hitler derided him as “that noted war correspondent.” Churchill was well known for his bluster. Yet he yearned for the day when his Lancasters—hundreds of Lancasters flying in great formations—would show them all, Hitler foremost, that his threats had been anything but bluster. He pressed the Ministry of Production for “the largest supply of aircraft gas containers for immediate retaliation” after learning that the army was well supplied with gas artillery shells, an anomalous state of affairs given that “one would hardly expect the army to be engaged in
firing gas shells for the next few months. Only invasion would seem to render this necessary.” The very quantity—seven thousand—of aircraft gas bombs indicates he envisioned for them a strategic rather than a tactical role.56

  Hitler considered Churchill the obstacle to peace, and promised “to drop 100 bombs” for each British bomb until Britain gets rid of “this criminal and his methods.” The Führer termed Churchill’s speeches to Englishmen “symptomatic of a paralytic disease, or the ravings of a drunkard.” Such bellicosity delighted Churchill, who listened on a gramophone to translated versions of Hitler’s rants. He instructed the technicians to leave intact on the recordings the background cheers of the Führer’s adoring hordes. Churchill liked to march around his study in his dressing gown while repeating the parts where Hitler mentioned him by name. Had Hitler better understood the tenacity of Britons and their Parliament, he would have known that Churchill was here to stay. At the height of the Blitz, by a vote of 341–4 the Commons rejected an Independent Labour Party motion to negotiate an armistice. Given the traditional fractiousness of British politics, this was a remarkable declaration of intent to fight on, and to do so behind Churchill.57

  Yet many, including Jock Colville (who shuddered at the idea of a Nazi victory), thought the prospects afforded by a compromise peace preferable to the prospect of “western Europe racked by warfare and economic hardship; the legacy of centuries, in art and culture, swept away; the health of the nation dangerously impaired by malnutrition, nervous strain and epidemics; Russia and the U.S. profiting from our exhaustion; and at the end of it all compromise or a Pyrrhic victory.” Such a scenario had recently been advanced by the military historian and strategist Basil Liddell Hart, who predicted that Hitler, with Napoleon’s fate in mind, as well as his outrage over the punishing Versailles peace terms imposed after the Great War, would be emboldened to fight on even were that to ensure the destruction of Germany and all Europe. Of Liddell Hart’s thesis, Churchill declared, “It is out of date and he seems more a candidate for a mental home than for serious action.” Curiously, Churchill had long adhered to another of Liddell Hart’s theories, to always attack the weaker of two military enemies.58

  As to the immediacy of any German threat to British soil and the climactic battle he so sought, Churchill concluded after a perusal of early January Ultra decrypts that invasion would not come in the winter and likely not in the spring either. It appeared that German troops in the northern coastal areas of France and Belgium were being shipped to the south, thereby reducing the chances of invasion. This opinion he chose not to share with the Americans, for fear that the U.S. supply effort might wane. Some of his military advisers—who read the same Enigma decrypts—disagreed with him and insisted that invasion was still imminent. He encouraged them to prepare for that eventuality—to seek more tanks, more artillery, more gunboats, more infantry divisions. The greater the buildup of military might, the better, he reasoned, for, as he had since the previous June, Churchill intended to use it elsewhere. As his own minister of defence, he told the War Cabinet he wanted to again reinforce Wavell in the Middle East as he had in the autumn, with even more troops and tanks stripped from Britain. He possessed great persuasive skills but not dictatorial powers; the War Cabinet had to approve the reinforcements, and the army, air force, and naval chiefs sought to keep the troops on the Home Island. Churchill demanded that the fight be taken to the Italians in North Africa. He sought, as well, to bait Hitler into reinforcing Mussolini in Africa. He confided to Colville that he “did not see how invasion [of England] could be successful and he now woke up in the mornings… feeling as if he had a bottle of Champagne inside him and glad that another day had come.” As the Germans appeared unwilling to put themselves within his reach by descending onto British beaches, Churchill would satisfy himself with battling Italians until such time as Hitler came to their assistance. Then he could fight Germans.59

  What he could do on the Continent that winter was limited to a few inaccurate bombs and much bombast lobbed in Hitler’s direction. He launched pleas to Roosevelt, scribbled numerous memos, attended War Cabinet meetings, kept the King apprised, and waited for American help and better bombing weather to arrive. That was a meteorological knife that cut both ways. The same storms that grounded German night raiders grounded Bomber Command. The first weeks of the new year administered repeated doses of wretched weather. From Moscow, where temperatures fell to below minus twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit, to the Dover coast, which froze, snow, sleet, and bitter cold swept the Continent. Blizzards hit southern France before whipping northwestward across Brittany, and then across the Channel, across Britain, and out into the Atlantic, where Allied convoys pitched and rolled in the furious gales. Central France suffered its worst snowstorm in fifty years, Hungary its coldest winter in more than one hundred. Spaniards, already starving, now froze. Belgians found themselves down to less than two ounces of meat per person per day. Typhus killed the children of Warsaw; bread in that city was not to be had, because Stalin and Hitler had split between themselves the entire Polish wheat harvest.

  Although the Luftwaffe in January proved less a strategic presence than a deadly nuisance, almost 1,600 Britons died that month. At the end of the month, the civilian death toll since the start of the Blitz stood at 30,000, fully half of the total British casualties, military and civilian, since the start of the war. Almost 500,000 apartments and houses had been destroyed. The cost to the Germans since late September had been about 600 planes and crews, less than 2 percent of sorties flown. Yet despite their relatively modest losses, the Germans had little to show. British aircraft production had not in the least been hobbled.

  The Blitz in 1941, Churchill later wrote, fell into three phases, the first phase being the January lull. Londoners termed the relatively quiet skies the “Lullablitz.” The quiet only heightened the uncertainty of where and when the Luftwaffe would next strike and made these weeks a time, Churchill later wrote, “to peer into the future and attempt to measure our ordeal.” He asked his RAF chiefs, Beaverbrook, and the intelligence chiefs to determine if the abeyance in raids was due solely to foul weather or to the depletion of German air capabilities, or, the most troubling scenario, if it was purely voluntary, with more sinister plans being readied for the spring. What, Churchill demanded, were German capacities and limitations when it came to airmen, engines, training, planes, and bombs? As the assessments of German strength arrived from various ministries, the Prof weighed the increasingly conflicting statistics while Churchill kept his distance and allowed everyone to have at it. When he convened his chiefs at Chequers to distill the conclusions, the overriding consensus was that nobody knew what the prime minister needed to know.60

  One certainty stood out among the uncertainties: if things were to be made right in the air, Max Beaverbrook would do so. The Beaver had the face of a gargoyle, a Canadian maritime accent as heavy as a sodden goose-down comforter, and the absolute loyalty of Churchill. He suffered from asthma and continued to threaten to resign when he felt put out, which was often. Churchill refused to consider any such exit. Beaverbrook’s mid-1940 crusade at the Ministry of Aircraft Production to expand fighter production had “played havoc with the war policy of the RAF,” lamented air chief marshal Joubert, “but he most certainly produced the aircraft that won the Battle of Britain.” By early 1941, the strength of RAF bomber and fighter squadrons had increased by almost half over 1940’s total, but Britain’s three thousand combat-ready planes remained far outnumbered by the Luftwaffe’s fleet. That the gap was closing was due to Max.

  All Britons wondered about the quiet skies, and worried, for surely this must be the calm before the storm. Had not a disquieting calm settled over all of Hitler’s previous targets in the days and weeks before he struck? Mollie Panter-Downes observed that Londoners appeared “to be taking advantage of what may be the last few weeks of comparative sanity to warn everybody else that complete chaos is approaching.” Chemical warfare was expected. But wh
at exactly did chemical warfare mean? Would pestilence, plague, and other unimaginable vectors of death be delivered by fantastical weapons? Rumor spread that English women would be compelled by the conquerors to bear German babies and that English males would be sterilized. (The truth was more appalling. SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler put forth his plans the previous summer in the Sonderfahndungsliste GB, or Special Search List for the invasion of Great Britain, which called for all healthy Englishmen of military age to be shipped to Greater Germany as slaves. Six battalions of Einsatzgruppen—the hunter-killers of the SS—would be stationed in a half dozen major British cities to facilitate the roundup.)61

  The paranoia found its way into official circles. Sir John Anderson, now Lord President of the Council, kept up pressure on refugees from the Continent, including Jews who had fled the Nazis without proper paperwork.* Hundreds were rounded up and made to join thousands of other continentals who had been interred in camps since the summer. Arthur Koestler, the repentant former Communist, arrived in Britain without proper paperwork and was packed off to Pentonville Prison, where he resided behind bars for almost two months, during which time Darkness at Noon was published. “It was a terrible time,” recalled the actor Paul Henreid. “We jumped at every ring of the doorbell… an apprehensive dread took hold of us. How long before it was our turn?” Yet most detainees—excepting hardcase Fascists such as Oswald Mosley—were released in coming months. Henreid’s dread would have deepened had he known that Himmler knew who had fled to England; their names were on the Sonderfahndungsliste GB. They were to be found and killed. The dread and paranoia spread to Ireland after Luftwaffe raiders overflew their British targets in early January and dropped their payloads onto Irish farms. A one-ton parachute bomb dropped into Dublin’s Jewish quarter and hit the city’s largest synagogue, an incident that Goebbels claimed the British had perpetrated in order to sully the good name of Germany among Irishmen.62