The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  He was. The next day, he wrote to Roosevelt, “The people here are amazing from Churchill down, and if courage alone could win the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately, and I am sure you will let nothing stand in the way.” He continued: “Churchill is the gov’t in every sense of the word—he controls the grand strategy, and often the details—labour trusts him, the army, navy, air force are behind him to a man… I cannot emphasize too strongly that he is the one and only person over here with whom we need to have a full meeting of the minds.”94

  Churchill, seeking more than a meeting of the minds, again asked Hopkins about a parley between the leaders. Hopkins advised Roosevelt that a meeting was “essential—and soon—for the battering continues and Hitler does not wait for Congress.” But Roosevelt wanted no meeting until his “problem” of Lend-Lease made its way through Congress. As to the rumors rife in Washington (instigated, Roosevelt believed, by Joe Kennedy) that Churchill harbored a personal dislike for Roosevelt, Hopkins declared, “I cannot believe that it is true Churchill dislikes either you or America, it just doesn’t make sense.” He added, “This island needs our help now, Mr. President, with everything we can give them.”95

  On the fourteenth, Churchill, Clementine, Hopkins, Dr. Wilson, John Martin, Churchill’s naval assistant Commander “Tommy” Thompson, and Lord and Lady Halifax entrained at King’s Cross for the five-hundred-mile overnight trip to Thurso, the northern terminus of the British rail system and the northernmost town on the British mainland. From there Halifax would sail for America aboard Britain’s newest battleship, King George V, the pride of the Royal Navy. Martin recalled that they arrived at dawn to the frozen Scottish landscape, the deserted heath covered with snow and “a blizzard howling at the windows.” Churchill, fighting a cold, added a morning whisky to his arsenal of medicines. Their final destination was Scapa Flow, reached from Thurso by an overnight run through maniacal seas on board King George V. The next morning Halifax and the battleship continued on to America. Churchill, Hopkins, and the rest of the party made their way back south to Edinburgh and on to Glasgow, where on the seventeenth, Churchill told dockyard workers (and Hopkins), “We do not require in 1941 large armies from overseas. What we require are weapons, ships and aeroplanes.” Churchill knew 1942 might prove another story altogether, but why peer too far ahead?96

  That night, after dinner at the Station Hotel, Hopkins lifted his glass in a toast that was to become one of the best remembered of the twentieth century. “I suppose you wish to know,” he began, “what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return. Well, I’m going to quote you one verse from that Book of Books… ‘Wither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgeth, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.’ ” Then, he quietly added, “Even to the end.” Churchill was in tears. Hopkins’s words, Dr. Wilson noted in his diary, “seemed like a rope thrown to a dying man.”97

  The first weeks of 1941 brought Churchill good military news from one quarter only, North Africa. His generally mellow mood noted by Colville at the turn of the year had its genesis in early December with news of the first British victories over the Italians in western Egypt, during Operation Compass. He grew more mellow with each report of a new Italian retreat, first in North Africa, then, within weeks, by the smashup of Mussolini’s East Africa empire. By sending men and tanks considered critical to the defense of the Home Island to Africa, he had finally taken the fight to the enemy. In his memoirs Churchill wrote that although Britain’s American friends “took a more alarmist view of our position” and considered “the invasion of Britain as probable, we ourselves felt free to send overseas all the troops” the Royal Navy ships could carry in order to “wage offensive war in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Here was the hinge upon which our ultimate victory turned, and it was in 1941 that the first significant events began.”98

  The events had begun on December 6, 1940, when O’Connor kicked off Operation Compass. By the new year, he had raced fifty miles west from Sidi Barrani and was closing on Bardia, intent on fulfilling Churchill’s order “to maul the Italian Army and rip them off the African shore to the utmost possible extent.” Bardia, next up on the firing line, was no mere camp in the desert. Sited high above a harbor, it was protected on the landward side by almost twenty miles of trenches and fortifications. Within the lines, General Annibale Bergonzoli, veteran of the Spanish Civil War and a true fighting general, commanded almost 45,000 men. To Mussolini, Bergonzoli radioed: “In Bardia we are, and here we stay.” By then, O’Connor’s armor had been reduced to just two dozen heavy tanks. He knew that his infantry would have to do the hard work, work that devolved upon the 6th Australian Division, newly arrived from Palestine. On January 3, following an all-night aerial pounding of Bardia and the surrounding trenches, the Sundowners advanced. Waves of them came on, screaming as one, “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz.” They went right through the wire and poured into the trenches. Slashing and shooting, they drove a mile-wide wedge to the heart of the city. Three Royal Navy battleships sailed up to the city walls and pummeled the seaside cliff literally into the sea. By dawn on the fourth it was over. Bergonzoli had fled in the night with a few troops, west toward Tobruk. He had, in a manner of speaking, fulfilled his promise to Il Duce. Almost all of his 45,000 troops stayed in Bardia, but as prisoners of the British.99

  On January 5, following the fall of Bardia, Churchill cabled Wavell: “Hearty congratulations on your second brilliant victory, so profoundly helpful at this turning-point to the whole cause. You knocked and it was opened.” He took such delight in the fall of Bardia that he declared January 5 “Bardia Day.” Victories of any sort were in such short supply that one would expect such a reaction from such a naturally enthusiastic man as Churchill.100

  Victory, the word Colville noted had vanished from Britain’s vocabulary, had found its way home to Whitehall, to Fleet Street, Chequers, Buckingham Palace, and to the East End. Churchill encouraged Wavell to pursue his foe: “It is at the moment when the victor is most exhausted that the greatest forfeit can be extracted from the vanquished.” True enough. This was the same message Lincoln had sent to General George Meade following Meade’s victory over Lee at Gettysburg. But Churchill pulled a switch where Lincoln had not. An opportunity had presented itself, as he saw it, of inflicting more damage on the Italians, not in the desert, but in Greece. Churchill’s priorities had changed soon after the new year. What he had previously given to Wavell, he now took. He made that clear in a cable on January 11: “Nothing must hamper capture of Tobruk, but thereafter all operations in Libya are subordinated to aiding Greece…. We expect and require prompt and active compliance with our decisions, for which we will bear full responsibility.”101

  The victories over the Italians validated for Churchill his long-held belief that when fighting two enemies it is wise to “consider whether the downfall of your strongest foe cannot be accomplished through the ruin of his weakest ally; and in this connection, a host of political, economic, and geographical advantages may arise and play their part in the argument.” In the Great War he applied his strategy to Germany’s weakest ally, Turkey, his target the strait between Turkish Asia and Europe—the Dardanelles. As the Dardanelles campaign took shape, Sir Henry Wilson, former sub-chief of the General Staff, pronounced his philosophy of secondary theaters: “The way to end this war is to kill Germans, not Turks…. All history shows that operations in secondary and ineffectual theater have no bearing on major operations.” The veracity of Wilson’s maxim was relative to time and place. He was wrong in 1915, because the business of killing Germans had been brought to a bloody standstill by the trench and the machine gun. Churchill’s Dardanelles plan offered a strategic alternative to the butchery of Flanders. The strategy made sense, but the execution of it proved wanting and resulted in the debacle of Gallipoli. In fairness to Churchill, the British army’s Gallipoli campaign became necessary only when the French and Briti
sh fleet lost its nerve in the Dardanelles at the very moment the Turks were about to quit their defense of those straits. The fiasco on the peninsula followed.102

  Now Churchill was again striking the weaker enemy, but killing Italians in Africa inflicted no pain whatsoever on Hitler’s Reich. Killing Italians in the desert was not a strategic alternative; it was a sideshow that depleted Churchill’s forces against the day when he might have to fight Germans in not one, but two theaters. By his own choice, that day was almost upon him. The strategy of striking the weaker of two enemies contains at least one flaw: the stronger might strike back. Churchill expected Germany to do just that in Greece or North Africa, and he welcomed the prospect.

  But on January 10, the blow came in the Mediterranean. On that day, at the height of O’Connor’s stunning Libyan push, the aircraft carrier Illustrious, escorting a convoy from Alexandria to Malta and steaming about one hundred miles east of that island, scrambled her Fulmar fighters in pursuit of two lurking Italian torpedo bombers. The Italians were decoys. Almost three dozen German Junkers Ju 88 bombers and Stuka dive-bombers based in Sicily swept down upon Illustrious and put six bombs through its flight deck. Illustrious, afire and unable to land or sortie its planes, limped to Malta, where it was bombed again, in port. The vital aircraft carrier would be lost to the war effort for more than a year. During the attack, the cruiser Southampton was crippled, and scuttled the next day. In less than ten minutes, a handful of German fliers wrenched control of the central Mediterranean from Britain. Wavell in Cairo, along with all of his ships, planes, tanks, and men, had, in just minutes, been cut off from London. Reinforcements would have to again arrive via the 14,000-mile Cape route. Churchill received the news at Ditchley, while delivering a discourse on war to Harry Hopkins.103

  No such calamities were befalling the British in the Libyan desert. Wavell, despite having fourteen Italian divisions at his front and Churchill with his Balkan plans on his back, ordered O’Connor to drive on. Tobruk, sixty miles beyond Bardia, fell on January 21, the Australians again leading the charge, this time donning gas masks as they fought through a vicious sandstorm that gave more fight than did the defenders. So paltry was the Italian opposition that an Aussie who had served in Palestine proclaimed, “The police in Tel Aviv gave us a better fight than this.” Large groups of Italians tried to surrender to anybody in uniform, including an Associated Press reporter. One Australian commander told a crowd of prospective prisoners that he was quite busy and could they please come back the next day. After hauling down the Italian flag and hoisting one of their bush hats in its stead, the Australians changed the name of Via Mussolini to Via Ned Kelly. The insult was complete.104

  Despite Churchill’s new Balkan priorities, O’Connor was determined to hunt down the fleeing Italians. Derna, one hundred miles west of Tobruk, fell without a fight on the twenty-ninth. The Italian garrison fled, joined by the Italian farmers who had colonized this green and fertile slice of coast. A joke made the rounds among the Aussies—the Italians were fleeing Cyrenaica with hopes of getting to Rome and the protection of the Vatican Guard. Churchill could not resist taking a shot at Il Duce. This was the story, he mused, “of the decline and fall of the Italian Empire… that will not take a future Gibbon so long to write as the original work.”105

  O’Connor drove farther west, and inland. His 7th Armoured Division took the fort at Mechili, but the Italians got their tanks out and fled for Tripoli along the coast road, which curved to the south between Derna and Benghazi. O’Connor struck out overland in hopes of hooking around and blocking the Italians at Beda Fomm, south of Benghazi. He intended to trap Marshal Graziani, General Bergonzoli, and the whole lot. It took the British thirty hours to navigate the 150 miles of trackless desert. They arrived at Beda Fomm on February 5 with just a half hour to spare before the first Italian columns came into view. Many of O’Connor’s tanks never finished the journey; the unforgiving terrain of ravines, jagged boulders, and spindles of volcanic rock murdered tracks and engines. But the Italians operated with a greater handicap. In drafting their armored tactics, they (like the French) allowed for only one in thirty tanks to carry radios. Once the dance began, they could not choreograph any new moves.106

  A wild shootout ensued, lasting more than a day, and the Italians got the worst of it. The scene turned bizarre when Arab traders wandered upon the battlefield and proceeded to sell fresh eggs to both sides. Italian commanders threw crew after crew into the battle, only to watch them burn in their tanks. Those who survived were captured, and those few who escaped disappeared into the emptiness of the desert. O’Connor, victorious, had taken his army farther than any armored force in the brief history of tank warfare. Churchill had thought his “tremendous swoops and scoops” through Cyrenaica would take most of February, but it was all over by February 7, all of it finished. Almost the entire Italian army in eastern Libya had been captured or killed, ten divisions obliterated, 130,000 prisoners taken, 400 tanks destroyed. The battle for Cyrenaica was over.107

  To further humiliate Mussolini, O’Connor radioed the news of Bergonzoli’s surrender to Wavell on an open frequency: “Fox killed in the open.” Graziani escaped westward with the remnants of his Libyan army, reduced now by half, to 125,000 troops and soon to be bottled up in Tripolitania, a threat to nobody, respected by no one, including the Bedouins who with impunity picked over the charred carcasses of tanks in which rested the incinerated corpses of young Italians. Even Eden, not known as a fount of humor, fired an insult Mussolini’s way: “Never have so many lost so much to so few.” Mussolini—Churchill called him “the crafty cold-blooded black-hearted Italian”—gazed now from Rome upon the ruins of his North African ambitions.108

  The road to Tripoli and the heart of Italian North Africa lay open. The first of Churchill’s strategic priorities—to sweep the Italians from Africa—was nearly fulfilled. O’Connor, intending to keep up the hunt, sent an aide to Cairo to convince Wavell of the need to pursue the Italians. But Wavell, who had for weeks known of Churchill’s Balkan strategy, had already begun planning his new spring campaign. The maps on the walls of his headquarters were no longer of Libya, but of Greece. Almost 60,000 of his best troops under the command of Jumbo Wilson packed their kits and readied for the journey across the sea. When Greek prime minister Metaxas died suddenly in late January, his successor, Alexandros Koryzis, accepted Churchill’s offers of assistance. O’Connor was soon replaced by Philip Neame and given command of the Army of the Nile.

  When Wavell unveiled his African plans the previous autumn, Churchill had purred like six cats, and more. “He was rapturously happy,” recalled Ismay, in his memoirs. “Wars are won by superior willpower,” Churchill had declared, “and now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.” Churchill, Ismay wrote, “was always prone to count his chickens before they hatched.” But the results Wavell and O’Connor obtained exceeded even Churchill’s grandest predictions.109

  On February 6, Hitler briefed the man he was sending to North Africa to boost the spirits of the beaten Italians: Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel, who the previous May famously drove his 7th Panzer Division to the English Channel. In Africa, Rommel would command only one smallish armored division and a light mechanized division. His eighty new Panzer Mark III and Mark IV tanks were faster and tougher than anything the British had, but they were vastly outnumbered by Wavell’s medium and heavy tanks, and would remain so unless Wavell was ordered to do something inexplicable, such as send his tanks off to Greece, Crete, or some other destination. Rommel called his command the Afrika Korps. If the convoying across the Mediterranean of the tanks and men of his 15th Panzer Division went as planned, he’d be fully operational by mid-May. His mission until then was something like O’Connor’s, but in reverse—to hold the line in Tripolitania, and to probe eastward if possible. A British push to Tripoli was expected; basic military principles called for exploiting success. Rommel’s orders were to blunt the expected advance, and to
absolutely avoid committing himself to any general engagement in Cyrenaica against the more numerous British. Although he was the sort of general who followed orders to the letter, he also thought it a general’s supreme duty to take the fight to the enemy. He considered nothing finer than waging a well-planned, well-executed battle—offensive, not defensive. His standing orders now conflicted with his love for action, yet the truly innovative soldier always finds a way to have his way, to derange events in his favor, as Churchill liked to put it.110

  On the same day Hitler briefed Rommel, O’Connor received orders to send his remaining tanks east to Cairo, for maintenance. It was the wrong day to order up repairs, one of those seemingly minor events that in war weigh heavy on the future, though no commander on either side could reasonably predict the consequence at the time. The order seemed to make good sense. The British 7th Armoured Division had atrophied to less than brigade strength, just a few dozen tanks. Any tanks not in need of repairs would be by the time they rolled almost five hundred miles east to where their journey had begun, for prewar British planners had not thought of putting tanks on flatbed trucks in order to transport them to and from the battlefield. Libya had no railroad facilities; British tanks in the desert traveled to where they were going, however great the distance, under their own steam. Thus, as Rommel made for North Africa, Wavell’s armor made for Cairo. It was altogether the wrong direction. Churchill months later called the decision an “act of improvidence.”111

  In East Africa that week, a force of British and colonial troops was well on its way to securing another of Churchill’s objectives—to flush the Italians from the Horn. Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), where the Duke of Aosta commanded a flimsy and ill-supplied army of occupation, was Churchill’s first target. Eden, during his October visit to the region, met in Khartoum with Wavell, Emperor Haile Selassie, and South African prime minister Jan Smuts, who sent more than 30,000 South African troops to the Sahara to fight for London. Selassie, the first world leader to take refuge in London after the fall of his regime, had returned to Khartoum to tell anyone who listened that the time was right for him to become the first leader to reclaim his capital, and could do so if his men were better armed and better led. Eden and Smuts agreed to help, but each for different reasons. Eden, pushed by Churchill, sought a juncture between the Arabian and African sectors of the Muslim world, a unity of political purpose that would offset the growing anti-British Islamic presence in Jerusalem and Baghdad. Smuts needed a victory to overcome opposition from Boer nationalists, who had no love for England. Smuts had fought on the Boer side forty years earlier but grew to appreciate the British worldview. He believed in the British Empire, yet as one of the architects of the League of Nations, he also believed in a world council dedicated to righting wrongs. Deeply religious—he always carried in his kit a copy of the New Testament—he believed nations (white nations, in any event) had a moral obligation to wage war against nations guilty of self-evident ethical abominations, such as Germany under Hitler. In this interventionism he stood foursquare with Churchill, in part because economic benefits tended to follow intervention. It had been Britain and France, after all, who used their League of Nations mandates to open new imperial pathways in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Selassie’s cause was just; Smuts was on board.112