The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  The command of Selassie’s troops went to an experienced desert fighter, Lieutenant Colonel Orde Wingate, who represented the style of irregular soldiering manifested famously by the likes of General Charles George Gordon in the Sudan, and Lawrence of Arabia, the adventurous sort of soldiering that Kipling lauded and Churchill loved, having done more than a bit of it himself. Wingate showed up in Khartoum in early November bearing a suitcase containing one million pounds sterling. Backed by his start-up money and a firm belief that he was the man who would put the Lion of Judah back upon his throne, Wingate assembled a little army. It was a motley crew: eight hundred men from the Sudan Frontier Battalion and about eight hundred Abyssinian troops, the entire group led by about seventy British commandos. Wingate—a Bible scholar, and a bit beyond eccentric—christened his command “Gideon Force.”113

  Overall command of the expedition went to Lieutenant General Alan Cunningham, brother of Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, commander in chief of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. Cunningham was a fine infantryman and not afraid of a fight. Sir John Keegan called the East Africa campaign “a Beau Geste episode” rife with dashing colonials upon prancing camels, long desert treks, upraised scimitars, oasis gunfights, all in all a series of colonial brawls, fought for the most part between colonial troops for colonial advantage. It was nineteenth-century stuff. Churchill loved it, not least of all the public humiliation inflicted upon Il Duce. Yet, given that Italy’s per capita economic output in 1941 was akin to that of Britain’s a century earlier, it was truly nineteenth-century stuff, and a cakewalk for Churchill.114

  On January 20, Haile Selassie and Wingate had crossed the frontier where the Blue Nile cascades into the Sudan from Ethiopia. Wingate’s column, though almost comically weak, drove up the Ethiopian plateau toward the capital of Addis Ababa, three hundred miles distant. Two Indian divisions marched across the frontier north of the Blue Nile on a bearing for Gondar. The following day, the Sudan Defence Force crossed into Ethiopia south of the Blue Nile. On February 11, Cunningham’s army of South Africans, the King’s African Rifles, and the Royal West African Frontier Force marched out of Kenya and into southern Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland. The Italians fled from the south of Abyssinia so rapidly that Cunningham’s forces could not keep up. The Italians were on the run and British prestige was on the rise.115

  Events in the desert and East Africa, therefore, made for good news to impart to Hopkins, who stayed on until early February, and to Wendell Willkie, who arrived in late January. Willkie, the Republican loser in the November election, was a big six-foot-one, 220-pound Hoosier who pronounced America “Amurica.” He strongly opposed what he called Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup” social programs and had campaigned against Roosevelt’s relief programs on the slogan “You can’t beat Santa Claus.” His presence in London as Roosevelt’s informal ambassador therefore informed the world that Amurica was acting as one. The isolationists might yet dispute that, but Roosevelt was in the process of shoving the American Firsters off the stage. Willkie carried with him a handwritten note from Roosevelt:

  Dear Churchill,

  Wendell Willkie will give you this. He is truly helping to keep politics out over here. I think this verse applies to you people as it does to us.

  … Sail on, O ship of State!

  Sail on, O Union strong and great!

  Humanity with all its fears,

  With all the hopes of future years,

  Is hanging breathless on thy fate.

  As ever yours,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow verse was personal, symbolic, perhaps, but it meant a great deal to Churchill. He had the letter framed and toted it about, frame and all, to show visitors, a material manifestation of true friendship.116

  John “Gil” Winant, Roosevelt’s replacement for Joe Kennedy, also arrived in early February. A former governor of New Hampshire, Winant, though a New Yorker by birth, manifested a dour taciturnity often associated with natives of the Granite State. Harold Nicolson found Winant to be “very shy”; he tended to twist his hands while proffering “coy platitudes.” Yet Nicolson concluded that Winant was a man of “superb character” who carried himself with “ungainly charm” and manifested a “real if inarticulate force.” Winant’s credentials were impeccable: St. Paul’s School and Princeton. An early supporter of the New Deal, he was rewarded with a post on the new Social Security Board. Roosevelt confided to Harvard’s James Conant that Winant would get along well with the Labour faction in Britain, which, Roosevelt told Conant, would almost certainly “be in power when the war is over.”117

  Winant, tall and lanky, considered dark, somber suits to be the only appropriate attire for a gentleman. Photographs of him are reminiscent of Abe Lincoln at his most weary. The resemblance to Lincoln, when noted, pleased Winant no end. Yet the resemblance in large part stemmed from a deep sadness in his eyes, due in no small measure to his being a most unhappily married man. Within weeks of arriving in London he fell in love with Sarah Churchill, an “innocent” affair according to Colville, but one doomed from the start, innocent or not. It simply would not do for the married American ambassador to take up with a married woman who happened also to be the prime minister’s daughter. As she had with Vic Oliver, Sarah had fallen for a much older man, a lifelong habit: “Maybe I was looking for a substitute father [she wrote of her marriage to Oliver]; indeed, I have sometimes thought I was trying to marry my father.” Winant was Churchill’s junior by a decade, yet his dour countenance made him appear a decade older than the Old Man. Within days of arriving, he reinvigorated the American embassy by returning all operations to No. 1 Grosvenor Square from the country estate to which Joe Kennedy had decamped the year before, when the first bombs fell.118

  Churchill trusted Winant, enough to allow him to vet those of his speeches that might be interpreted by Americans as meddling in U.S. affairs. As with the other Americans who came to call that winter (William Averell Harriman, Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Hopkins, and Willkie), Churchill opened his weekend houses to Winant. Rare was the weekend in 1941 when Churchill did not host one or more of the Americans. He grew truly fond of their company, and he valued their forthrightness. As well, he knew he must allow them to witness how he managed the war. R. A. Butler wrote that Winant and the other Americans “react well to exhibitions of resolution.” This, of course, was exactly how Churchill wanted them to react, and it perhaps led to a third reason he extended weekend invitations: the visiting Americans became an audience for his frequent declamations on resolve and revenge, on war and on peace.119

  Harry Hopkins departed England on February 8, sold on Churchill’s resolution and on the inevitability of invasion. Churchill had portrayed to Hopkins a grim and desperate scene when the Germans would come ashore, which Hopkins reported to the president: “The most important single observation I have to make is that most of the cabinet and all of the military leaders here believe that invasion is imminent. They believe it may come at any moment, but not later than May 1.” Indeed, many in the military and the cabinet believed that, but Churchill did not. He believed the surest way for Hitler to lose the war would be to invade England, which would expose his shipping to annihilation, and likewise any Germans who made it ashore. Hopkins, too, came to believe that, telling Roosevelt “her sun would set” were Germany to invade. Yet, that was a premise—an all-or-nothing premise—Churchill did not want to test. But if the test came, Britons were ready. Two weeks after first meeting Churchill, Hopkins cabled Roosevelt: “The spirit of this people and their determination to resist invasion is beyond praise. No matter how fierce the attack may be you can be sure they will resist it, and effectively. The Germans will have to do more than kill a few hundred thousand people here before they can defeat Britain.” In fact, as Hopkins grasped after his exposure to Churchill’s late-night sessions, Hitler would have to kill them all.120

  Lend-Lease passed the U.S. House of Representatives o
n February 8, by a vote of 260–165, thanks in part to a young Texas congressman and rising star in the Democratic Party, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Now the bill would move on to the Senate, where passage was by no means assured. The following night Churchill—his African victories mounting and his meetings with Hopkins and Willkie having concluded with success—addressed Britain and America, his first radio broadcast in five months, and the first since September 1939 in which a British leader could cite any military successes, however modest. He intended to give something of a State of the Empire address. Knowing that America was listening, he served up the good news first, the “series of victories in Libya which have broken irretrievably the Italian military power on the African Continent…. Thus, we have all been entertained, and I trust edified, by the… humiliation of another of what Byron called ‘Those Pagod things of saber sway / With fronts of brass and feet of clay.’ ”

  Of Hitler, Churchill asked, “What has that wicked man… been preparing during these winter months? What new devilry is he planning?” Would the coming “phase of greater violence” center on England? “What fresh form of assault will he make upon our Island home and fortress; which let there be no mistake about it is all that stands between him and the dominion of the world?” Churchill then made an astonishing statement, given that he believed through his Ultra decrypts just the opposite of what he now said:

  A Nazi invasion of Great Britain last autumn would have been a more or less improvised affair. Hitler took it for granted that when France gave in we should give in; but we did not give in. And he had to think again. An invasion now will be supported by a much more carefully prepared tackle and equipment of landing craft and other apparatus, all of which will have been planned and manufactured in the winter months [italics added]. We must all be prepared to meet gas attacks, parachute attacks, and glider attacks, with constancy, forethought and practiced skill.

  He had told his military chiefs since June that the invasion scare begat vigilance on the part of Britons. In his broadcasts and speeches, he chose his words with great care. He never told Britons that Hitler was coming, but only that they must be prepared if Hitler came. Britons learned little or nothing from their newspapers and the BBC of German troop movements on the Continent or British deployments on the Home Island. They were in the dark. Thus, when they heard their prime minister speak of gas attacks, or the need to fight on the beaches and in the fields, they understandably came away quite concerned, which was Churchill’s intent.

  Churchill followed the invasion warning with an oft-repeated premise:

  He [Hitler] may carry havoc into the Balkan States; he may tear great provinces out of Russia, he may march to the Caspian; he may march to the gates of India. All this will avail him nothing. It may spread his curse more widely throughout Europe and Asia, but it will not avert his doom.

  Here was yet another warning to Stalin, and a signal to Hitler that the British intelligence services were aware of his intentions. Churchill had a message for Bulgarians, as well, advising them not to repeat their mistake of the Great War when they “went in on the losing side.” This time around, Churchill said, “I trust the Bulgarians are not going to make the same mistake again.” Then he gave voice to his dream of a bulwark in the Balkans: “Of course, if all the Balkan people stood together and acted together, aided by Britain and Turkey, it would be many months before a German army and air force of sufficient strength to overcome them could be assembled.” Yet Ultra decrypts had by then shown that the requisite German strength to smash Greece had already been assembled.121

  Sidestepping his inability to mount any real offense against Germany, he worked in more good news regarding the Italians. At dawn that day Admiral James Somerville had sailed his squadron of three battle cruisers into the harbor at Genoa and proceeded to bombard “in a shattering manner” the naval base there. It appeared Somerville had as easy a go of it with the Italians as Drake had with the basking crocodiles of Cartagena. “It is right,” Churchill pronounced, “that the Italian people should be made to feel the sorry plight into which they have been dragged by Dictator Mussolini; and if the cannonade of Genoa, rolling along the coast, reverberating in the mountains, reached the ears of our French comrades in their grief and misery, it might cheer them with the feeling that friends—active friends—are near and that Britannia rules the waves.” Rules the waves? Britannia, in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and most distressingly, in the approaches to the Home Island, by no means ruled the waves. Britannia, in fact, for the first time in her history had good reason to fear the sea.122

  Of Japan, Churchill made no mention. Yet Alec Cadogan had reported to Eden three days earlier that the Foreign Office had listened in on “some very bad-looking Jap telephone conversations from which it appears they have decided to attack us.” Such rumors of impending Japanese belligerency abounded throughout the year, but Churchill faced more than enough problems in Europe to preclude his having any meaningful influence in the distant Pacific. Events in the Far East were not only beyond his ability to control by diplomatic carrot, but beyond his means to address with military stick, should the Japanese attack British interests there.123

  He ended with a reading of the Longfellow verse Roosevelt had sent along with Willkie, which segued into a final slavish expression of thanks to “this great man” Roosevelt. To address the fears of Americans that Lend-Lease would someday result in American boys going abroad, Churchill declared, “We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American Union. We do not need them this year, nor next year, nor any year that I can foresee.” He needed arms, aircraft, and especially shipping, but he did not need armies. This war, he claimed, differed from the Great War, when “America sent two million men across the Atlantic. But this is not a war of vast armies, firing immense masses of shells at one another.” “The fate of this war,” he declared, “is going to be settled by what happens on the oceans, in the air, and—above all—in this island.” And then: “We shall not fail or falter, we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.” The last line of the speech lives on as one of Churchill’s best known: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”124

  That statement appears at first pass to be a whopper, given that Germany was a land power, one that only armies could defeat. Yet Churchill—and many of his generals—was informed by his experiences in the Great War, when massed armies faced off for four years along five hundred miles of trenches. Stasis defined the Great War. When the armies did meet—as at the Somme and Passchendaele—unimaginable slaughter resulted. Warfare had since changed, and though Churchill knew intellectually that it had, he did not know it in his gut. Even after the Germans, employing new tactics and new weapons, swept to victory over France in six weeks the previous spring, even as British tanks now swept across Libya, Churchill remained convinced that if great armies met in Europe, the lines would stabilize, and the slaughter commence. This belief would underlie his thinking for the next three years. He believed that if the Germans came to England, they would be obliterated on the seas, on the beaches, and in the fields. Likewise, he believed that if the British returned to Europe too soon and undermanned, they, too, would be obliterated. He therefore sought other means to bring Germany to its knees. He had told his military chiefs the previous summer that airpower was Britain’s “one sure path” to victory, but that remained an untested premise, and Britain lacked the aircraft to prove it in any event. Neither the Royal Navy nor the RAF could, alone or together, kill the German army, and killing the German army was the only path to British victory. To do so Churchill needed troops, millions more than Britain and the Dominions could muster. Only two nations could supply the manpower: the United States and the Soviet Union, and neither in early 1941 was prepared to do battle with the Wehrmacht. Churchill was correct when he offered that Western Civilization would either be lost or saved in the coming conflagration. Yet he had n
o strategy in place to meet the challenge.