The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Jan Smuts, who heard the speech in South Africa, cabled, “Each broadcast is a battle.” Everything about Churchill’s speeches was extraordinary, not least the speed with which they were scrawled in longhand or dictated straight to the typewriter in odd moments between pressing duties. All his life, critics had called his language florid and overstated. After Dunkirk, overstating England’s plight was impossible; after forty years in Parliament, he had finally been provided with a canvas high enough and broad enough to bear his brilliant colors. He gave the lie to Theodore Dreiser’s line in Sister Carrie “How true it is that words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean.” His words cast their own shadows, and they were long and deep. Certainly he demonstrated that powerful words could alter the course of history. Yet powerful weapons, which Churchill then lacked, and Hitler did not, can alter the course of history more quickly.125

  One effect of Churchill’s warning on invasion was for Dominion ministers worldwide to telegraph their great concern for the fate of the Home Island to Whitehall. Churchill’s Dominions minister, Viscount Cranborne, sent Churchill a copy of a telegram he had drafted to the Dominion governments, outlining the pros and cons for German invasion. Churchill responded with vehemence. “What is the point,” he asked, “with worrying the Dominions with all this questionable stuff?” He went on to tell Cranborne that if the Germans came, they would be cut off from resupply and communications within a week. RAF bombers would obliterate their landing sites and shipping. Then, “apart from the beaches we have the equivalent of 30 divisions with 1,000 tanks” in reserve, “to be hurled” at the invaders. A million members of the Home Guard stood ready to “deal with sporadic descents of parachutists.” All of this information was for Cranborne only; Churchill saw no purpose in it being passed on to the Dominions, where it would likely be leaked. The most telling number in Churchill’s reply to Cranborne is the number of divisions under arms in England: thirty. When, in March, Churchill’s secretary of state for war, David Margesson, proposed limiting reinforcements to Egypt to two divisions, Churchill shot back: “I do not accept the view that only two divisions can be spared from the immense force now gathered at home. We must not get too ‘defense minded.’ ” Ten months earlier Churchill’s regular army in England consisted of the drenched and unarmed survivors of Dunkirk. Now he had an army, a small army relative to Hitler’s, but an army.126

  On February 15, Churchill sent Eden and Dill back to Cairo and Greece. Their mission was not to push Wavell into furthering his Libyan gains, but to push him to prepare for Churchill’s planned foray into the Balkans, a strategy Churchill had outlined in a long cable to Wavell. In essence, Churchill wrote, as German intervention in Greece “becomes more certain and imminent,” it will be necessary to ship from Egypt to Greece “at least four divisions, including one armoured division.” Churchill’s hope was that if “Greece, with British aid, can hold up for some months German advance, chances of Turkish intervention will be favoured.” If events in Greece didn’t work out as planned, “we must, at all costs, keep Crete.” It was an ambitious plan, given that Churchill lacked the tools to challenge Hitler not only in Western Europe but anywhere. The prime minister also instructed Wavell to “take all possible precautions for the safety of our two Envoys having regard to nasty habits of Wops and Huns.”127

  Across the Atlantic that month, Franklin Roosevelt was trying to sell Lend-Lease to the U.S. Senate. The isolationists were not buying. Senator Burton Wheeler, a Montana Progressive, crony of Joe Kennedy’s, and one of the founders of the America First Committee, proclaimed in a radio address that Roosevelt was going to “plow under every fourth American boy.” Roosevelt called the accusation “dastardly.” Wheeler, taking his rest at Kennedy’s Palm Beach manse, declined to say more. He didn’t have to. Dastardly or not, he had a point.

  Although the goal of the America Firsters was to create a fortress America immune from foreign attack and insulated from the perils of international intrigue, partisans like Wheeler and Kennedy knew that the most direct route to the hearts of American parents was not to explicate complex geopolitical scenarios but to cite the likelihood of their sons’ dying in defense of the old and corrupt imperial order. Wheeler’s point was unassailable in its logic: if America was dragged into war, American boys would die. All of them—Churchill, Roosevelt, even the America Firsters—expected the price of Britain’s survival to soon be calculated in U.S. dollars. The isolationists, though rankled by that prospect, could, just barely, live with it. But that the price of British survival might soon be calculated in U.S. lives was a calculus the isolationists simply could not abide. Churchill could.

  In arguing his case for U.S. assistance, Churchill had to avoid, at all cost, any word or deed that smacked of imperialism, anything that would make Roosevelt’s task that much more difficult. To Halifax, he wrote, privately: “It is astonishing how this misleading stuff put out by Kennedy that we should do better with a neutral United States than with her warring at our side should have traveled so far.” Publicly, he could voice no such opinion. Hopkins had warned Churchill that Lend-Lease and the isolationists were Roosevelt’s battles to fight, that “any move on the part of Great Britain to suggest that the United States would eventually fight on the British side would be fatal” to Lend-Lease and the supplies Churchill so desperately needed.128

  Churchill told Colville he found it discouraging that Roosevelt was being led by public opinion, but in fact, he understood that Roosevelt was guiding the crowd in a direction of his choosing. This was real leadership, not cheap manipulation, for the herd could only arrive at the desired destination if the shepherd was a masterful shepherd. Churchill could not advise Roosevelt, nor could he interfere in the president’s shepherding. Given his personality and the power vested in him in Britain, this frustrated him, and he freely expressed that frustration to the War Cabinet, but never to Roosevelt. Keeping his counsel was not one of Churchill’s most dominant traits; the unsent messages to Roosevelt at the turn of the year are cases in point. That those communications remained unsent underscores another of his traits: the wisdom, when occasion demanded, to hold his tongue.129

  Joe Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh testified against Lend-Lease. Lindbergh declined to draw any moral distinction between Germany and Britain and, in the tradition of Baldwin and Chamberlain, cautioned against provoking Germany. He stated several times he wanted neither Germany nor Britain to win, that “it would be a disaster for Europe” if either side won, a curious line of thought given that one side or the other would have to, someday, win. Of Hitler, he said: “I feel I should maintain a position of absolute neutrality.” He favored a negotiated end to the war rather than a British victory, which could only be obtained by invasion of Germany and would result in “prostration, famine, and disease” throughout Europe. America, he said, should not “police the world.”130

  Joe Kennedy, hoping for reinstatement within Roosevelt’s inner circle, unleashed a weak and unassertive message that avoided any mention of Hitler and urged America to build up its own defense. Lend-Lease, Kennedy declared, posed some constitutional problems vis-à-vis abdication of congressional oversight in foreign affairs, but all in all, he considered aid to Great Britain a good thing. Then he voiced his true sentiments to newsmen, on background: A certain “anonymous American statesman” (almost certainly Kennedy) told the British writer John de Courcy that many Americans felt “the American people have been bamboozled” and that increased aid to Britain would “lead to inflation and bankruptcy for many of us.” The anonymous statesman resented the fact that those Americans who disagreed with Mr. Churchill were tagged as isolationists, “a word that has lost most of its meaning and has become a term of abuse.” His congressional appearance and anonymous sniping finished “Jittery Joe” politically.131

  In early February, James Conant made his interventionist plea before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a call against “acquiescing in silence to policies which might lead to the wiping
out on this continent of the free way of life.” Conant termed the conflict less an imperialistic battle than a “religious war” waged “by picked men fanatically devoted to a philosophy which denies all premises of our American faith.” And then Conant, one of Roosevelt’s leading science advisers, tossed in a cautionary aside, reminding the nation that the Fascists “are well armed by modern science.” Within days of testifying, Conant was on his way to London, sent by Roosevelt to ascertain just how well armed Britain was by modern science.132

  The Chicago Tribune continued to editorialize against Roosevelt and Lend-Lease. Americans listened to the America Firsters, but they began to listen less and were moved by them even less. The isolationists, the writer and political commentator Walter Lippmann wrote, had “forced the United States to make a separate peace and to withdraw from all further association with the other democracies to keep the world safe for democracy.” Lend-Lease, he wrote, would ensure that “this country passes from large promises carried out slyly and partially by clever devices to substantial deeds openly and honestly avowed.”133

  Roosevelt had been doing some substantial avowing. His “Arsenal of Democracy” speech had moved America. His “Four Freedoms” speech had moved the world. By late February, Gallup polls showed that 55 percent of Americans thought Britain worth saving and worth supplying. Churchill had sold Roosevelt, and Roosevelt had just about closed his sale with the Congress. Yet, Lend-Lease still lingered in the U.S. Senate, and Gallup polls throughout winter found that almost 80 percent of Americans were against sending an army overseas.

  Curiously, in his memoirs Churchill fails to credit an instrumental voice, Edward R. Murrow, in bringing Americans on board his foundering vessel. As much as Churchill and Roosevelt used the new medium of radio to great effect in order to sell their views (it had been just seven years since Roosevelt made his first fireside chat), they knew they could not take to the airwaves too often or try to sell too hard. Fortunately for Churchill, Americans tuned their sets to CBS and Murrow, a newsman who possessed, Eric Sevareid wrote, “a hard core of integrity which the impact of no man however powerful or persuasive ever has chipped.” Murrow’s reports from London came straight from the heart, and went straight to the heart of the matter, so much so that Ed Murrow was one of the first people Harry Hopkins sought out upon his arrival in London. Murrow spoke of the plight of a people at war. He was, wrote Sevareid, “the greatest broadcaster by far in the English tongue” and “a Boswell-to-a-great-city” in whose broadcasts “one will never find a case of sentiment becoming sentimentality.” Murrow’s reportage, more so even than Churchill’s brilliant rhetoric, served to replace in (some) Americans the image of Britons as appeasers and imperialists with an image of them as courageous lovers of freedom. After a night of bombs, Murrow broadcast that as he “walked home at seven in the morning, the windows in the West End were red with reflected fire, and the raindrops were like blood on the panes.” No America Firster could summon such imagery with such power for his cause.134

  Yet Churchill understood America well enough to know that such imagery, no matter how powerful, was not enough to move America to war. When a luncheon guest at No. 10 suggested that the bombing of Athens by the Germans might prove “a good thing from our point of view as it would shock American opinion,” Churchill dismissed the notion. Americans’ sentiment, he declared, was not a “classical sentiment” and such raids on ancient and beautiful cities would not horrify Americans any more than other raids on other helpless cities, including London, then the most bombed city in the world. Churchill understood that America would not come in until America itself was the victim of attack.135

  Much of the intelligence Churchill received (other than Ultra, and some of that was fragmentary) was murky and given to multiple interpretations. Much was rumor. Hints of incomprehensible deeds lurked within the tales. In Romania, rumor had it, Premier General Ion Antonescu—dictator since September and Hitler’s ally since November—was “committing sadistic atrocities unsurpassed in horror.” In fact, Antonescu was putting down a revolt by his erstwhile allies in the Fascist Iron Guard, still a powerful Romanian force. Colville told his diary that the Iron Guard had rounded up Jews, herded them into slaughterhouses and killed them “according to the Jews’ own ritual practices in slaughtering animals.” Antonescu’s loyalty to Hitler was such that the Führer included a qualified kudos (along with a threat) in his New Year’s greeting to Mussolini: “General Antonescu has recognized that the future of his regime, and even of his person, depends on our victory. From this he has drawn clear and direct conclusions which make him go up in my esteem.” Churchill drew his own conclusions regarding the Romanian. He instructed Eden to inform Antonescu that “we will hold him and his immediate circle personally responsible in life and limb” were the rumors of mass murder to prove true.136

  More such stories from occupied nations made the rounds, and more often. Hangings for espionage or treasonous offenses against the Reich were to be expected, as was the hanging of Germans who spied against the British Empire. This was war, after all. The British had hanged two German spies just after the close of the old year. But the Germans were taking retaliation to new and unimaginable heights. Polish priests who had fled Warsaw told their superiors at the Vatican that they feared the Germans planned to “exterminate” the entire Polish people. Another seemingly preposterous story, this one out of Germany, reached the United States. Doctors in the Reich, so the story went, were transporting tens of thousands of “lunatics and cripples” by buses into the forests and there murdering them. Time, under the headline EUTHANASIA? made brief mention of the tale, but prefaced its report with the caveat that the British had admitted to concocting and spreading similar tales during World War One. William L. Shirer stumbled across the same story months earlier and committed it to his diary before departing Berlin. Given German censorship, broadcast of the news was patently impossible. Shirer feared he’d be shot if the Gestapo were to discover his diary.137

  The world now knows that the rumors which long ago seeped from the Continent augured an unimaginable terror. Between 1935 and 1941, Hitler invited the world to witness as the Reichstag pushed through laws that deprived Jews first of privileges, then of rights, then of citizenship, and then of their status as human beings. But the window went dark in late 1940 and was shuttered tight when many Western journalists departed Berlin in early 1941. Increasingly harsh Nazi excess was expected, but how far into the deepest and blackest regions of human depravity it would go, nobody then knew, or could imagine. Hitler had promised in a January 1939 speech that a new war would mean “the end of the Jews.” He repeated the threat in January 1941. Should “the rest of the world be plunged into a general war through Jewry, the whole of Jewry will have played out its role in Europe.” He made his intentions clear. But it bears remembering, that even one with so fertile an imagination as Churchill could not imagine at the time the utter evil that the Reich was distilling, and would soon tap.

  Churchill tried nonetheless to look beyond the present dangers to the world he envisioned after the war. However wide the range of topics discussed at his dinner table—invasion, the Americans, Charlie Chaplin’s latest, the need to bomb every Hun corner of Europe—he often steered the conversation to the postwar world. At Chequers one evening he sketched his concept of a Council of Europe made up of five nations—England, France, Italy, Spain, and Prussia (old Prussia, which had risen a century earlier to unite all the German principalities)—together with four confederations—Northern, Danubian, Mitteleuropean, and Balkan. These nine powers, vested with a supreme judiciary and a supreme economic council to work out currency and trade questions, would manage the affairs of the Continent. There would be no reparations, no war debts, and no demands made on Prussia, although, other than a defensive air arm, Prussia would be limited for one hundred years to fielding only a militia. The English-speaking world would exist apart from the council and yet be connected. And, the English-speaking world woul
d control the seas as a reward for final victory. Russia would somehow (Churchill offered no details) fit into an Eastern reorganization. This was his “Grand Design.” Yet he could not make such ideas public, he told Colville, while “every cottager in Europe was calling for German blood and when the English themselves were demanding that all Germans should be massacred or castrated.”138

  Churchill reserved for the dinner table any speculation on the postwar world. In public his only stated goal was victory. Any public discussion of the postwar world would have invited the distractions and divisiveness of partisan politics, of Labourites versus Liberals versus Tories, all touting their respective views on education, “class,” jobs, and housing. No good could come of that during wartime. As well, anything short of victory would result in a world not worth living in. When a speech Harold Nicolson gave to the members of a private club on the postwar world was later published, Churchill “absolutely blew up.” Nicolson had spoken of a world federation, of the need to grant economic concessions to British colonies, and of the need to offer food to any country that liberated itself. “On what authority,” Churchill demanded of Nicolson’s boss at the Ministry of Information, “does Mr. Nicolson say we are offering a ‘New World government’ or a ‘Federation’?” That an under secretary should declare his opinions on such matters was improper, Churchill wrote, “especially when I have on several occasions deprecated any attempt to declare [post] war aims.” Nicolson feared for his job, but Churchill relented after Nicolson explained that the speech had not been intended for publication. A much-relieved Nicolson scribbled in his diary: “Winston has no capacity for meanness, and that is why we love him so.”139

  Actually, Churchill’s penchant for petty and at times outright nasty behavior was quite well known, but Nicolson, having escaped his wrath, can be excused for voicing his relief in such glowing terms. Nicolson made no further speculative public forays into the realm of postwar political affairs. In public, Churchill needed to speak with great care, for many of the words he loved to use had very different connotations across the Atlantic. In America, “class” was a dirty word, and “empire” evoked old men of the old order in the Old World—the very order and world Churchill cherished.140