The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  His vision for postwar England was another matter. On that subject, he spoke. During a visit to Harrow late in 1940, he told the young boys of privilege who would someday administer the Empire, “When this war is won, as it surely will be, it must be one of our aims to work to establish a state of society where the advantages and privileges which hitherto have been enjoyed only by the few shall be far more widely shared by the men and the youth of the nation as a whole.” He allowed to Colville that since young men of all walks of life were fighting the heroic battles in the air, they should inherit the reins of power at war’s end. Churchill knew it could not hurt the cause were those sentiments to reach the American press. Later in 1941, he allowed Eden to speak in public of the postwar world. But Eden sounded more like the vengeful Versailles peacemakers of 1919 than one who might support Churchill’s brand of magnanimity in peace. Germany, Eden declared, was the worst master that Europe had ever known: “Five times in the last century she has violated the peace. She must never be in a position to play that role again.” Eden’s thoughts played well to the vengeful masses, yet Churchill told Colville that he envisioned a “re-united European family in which Germany will have a great place. We must not let our vision be darkened by hatred or obscured by sentiment. A much more fruitful line is to try to separate the Prussians from the south Germans.” That line reflects the belief long held by Englishmen that Prussia was the incubator of German militancy. It was true that for almost a century Prussia produced generals, but it was also true that National Socialism was incubated in Bavaria, in the south.141

  Eden’s generalizations on Germany’s postwar status—essentially, Germany as POW—were distilled into explicit policy points in an article published by Sir Robert Vansittart, a brilliant thinker and hater of all things German, who as a Conservative MP in the late 1930s had been one of Churchill’s allies in the Commons. Vansittart, who served as diplomatic adviser to the foreign secretary, did not differentiate between Germans and Nazis, and desired that after the war, the lot of them be fenced in and left to survive as best they could. “If your policy means anything,” Churchill wrote Vansittart, “it means the extermination of 40 or 50 million people.” Churchill intended “to talk rather more about the Nazis and rather less about the Germans.” When he learned that Vansittart intended to broadcast a speech that presumably would be rife with hatred, Churchill blocked it, that is, until he learned Vansittart intended to speak in French to the French people. This could be allowed, Churchill concluded, because “to the French people… his [Vansittart’s] particular views have a real attraction and value.”142

  The French had been crushed. They were too afraid to hate. The resistance leader, Georges Bidault, later wrote that “Paris, in 1941, was paralyzed; it would take a very long time to find men able, or even willing, to risk their lives for the sake of a vague and remote victory.” What harm could be done, Churchill decided, if Vansittart stoked Frenchmen’s dreams of revenge against Germans? Were the French to replace fear with hatred, they might greet each day sustained by the thought of killing their oppressors.143

  A luncheon guest at No. 10 wondered aloud how long it would take to sterilize every German. As recalled by another guest, Charles Eade, the editor of Sunday Dispatch, “Winston brought the lunch party back to reality by observing that if people like his guests, the product of a very high order of civilization, could be capable of discussing such subjects… it must surely give us some idea of what sort of things that the Germans themselves might be ready and willing to do to us if they ever have the chance.” The seepage of Vansittart’s brand of hatred into the hearts of decent Englishmen would turn them into the soulless murderers they were now fighting. That, for Churchill, was the same as defeat, and unacceptable.144

  He kept any hatred he harbored in check in public and usually in private. He told Hopkins that he “hated nobody,” and didn’t feel he had any enemies—“except Hitler, and that was professional.” To dining companions on more than one occasion he offered that “anger is a waste of energy. Steam which is used to blow off a safety valve would be better used to drive an engine.” Yet in the heat of the moment following some new and diabolical feat of the Luftwaffe performed at the expense of British civilians, Churchill, in private, often poured forth his loathing of Huns in general and Hitler in particular. He would “castrate the lot” or bomb “every Hun corner” of Europe. It could be fairly asked if his rages were fueled by alcohol, yet in Churchill’s case this would amount to a rhetorical question. The rages could come anytime, morning to night, and Churchill drank every day, morning to night. And his rage always and swiftly subsided. He understood the difference between ruthlessness born of the necessity of war, and thuggish cruelty born of pathological hatred. He ended many evenings with a final word to a secretary (or whoever remained awake at that late hour) on the need for Europeans, including Germans, to live together in harmony following the war. Hitlerism was his enemy, not the German people.145

  Whether behind a microphone or with his cronies in private, Churchill was canny enough to know when a calculated quotient of righteous anger was called for. When Clementine, during a March luncheon held in honor of James Conant, offered that the people of a nation such as Britain, where old ladies served tea and cigarettes to downed German pilots, could never grow to hate Germans, Churchill growled that before the war was over the British would be hating their enemies all right. He said that for Conant’s benefit, for the Germans had just dropped their latest bomb—a four-thousand-pounder—on Hendron, killing about eighty civilians. Such a monster bomb, unimaginable just two years earlier, shocked the sensibilities of civilized people. To address such dastardly technologies and tactics with an overly generous heart would undermine Churchill’s status as warlord in front of an important luncheon guest. He had to appear resolute yet not bloodthirsty.

  Another of his luncheon guests that day, Charles Eade, offered that British bombing was probably accurate enough to avoid killing innocent Germans. Knowing that wasn’t so and that German civilians were paying a high price, Churchill ducked the topic. Perhaps for this reason he decided not to inform Conant that the British had just readied for deployment their own four-thousand-pound bomb. When the talk came around to the calls by Britons for retaliation, Churchill fell back on the remark he had made in the Commons smoking room the previous autumn: “Duty before pleasure.” Eade recalled that Clementine laughed at this, and said, “ ‘You are blood-thirsty,’ a remark which the Prime Minister did not quite get, and it had to be repeated several times for his benefit.”146

  In his account of the Conant luncheon, Eade hints at another current of conversation at the table, but understandably failed at the time to grasp its import. When the topic of the German four-thousand-pound bomb came up, he asked if it contained “any new form of explosive,” which sparked a lively conversation among the well-lubricated guests. Anything new in weaponry, even the rumor of something new, begot terror. Death rays, magnetic mines that floated to the sea surface to seek out targets, huge new bombs—which were fact and which were fiction? Eade notes that at one point during the conversation, the Prof chose to ruminate on the subject of uranium, saying, “Uranium is continually halving itself. Why is there any uranium left on earth?” At the time, uranium was an element most people in Britain and America had never heard of, the physical properties of which very few even in scientific circles understood.147

  Conant understood. A chemist by education, he served under Vannevar Bush on the National Defense Research Committee, charged by Roosevelt with the task of funding research in order to bring the latest in science and technology to the American military. The NDRC reported directly to Roosevelt and had funded research on uranium. Just weeks earlier, two University of California (Berkeley) physicists had produced minuscule amounts of the hitherto unknown element 94, which they christened plutonium. Conant was familiar with the enormous power inherent in the uranium-235 isotope, though he considered the possibility of unleashing that power to
be more science fiction than scientific fact. The Prof thought otherwise, in part because the Maud Committee, formed by Sir Henry Tizard the previous year to determine the feasibility of building an atomic bomb, had kept Lindemann apprised of its progress. The Maud conclusion to date held that with enough money and in about four years’ time, a nuclear bomb equal in power to almost two thousand tons of TNT might, just might, prove possible. Two thousand tons equaled the bombing capacity of three hundred Lancaster bombers. This was a terrible power.

  During a private lunch with Conant a few days later, Lindemann again brought up the subject of uranium. Conant had recently dined at Oxford with a French physicist who predicted that nuclear power would someday drive electric power plants and possibly even submarines. Thus, when the Prof mentioned uranium, Conant, recalling the Frenchman, replied that some use for uranium might someday be found but that he and his fellow scientists at the NDRC “thought it unwise… to devote the precious time of scientists, with the German threat so critical, to a project which could not affect the outcome of the war.”148

  At that, Lindemann leaned into the table and said portentously, “You have left out of consideration the possibility of the construction of a bomb of enormous power.” Lindemann explained that by “arranging for two portions of the element to be brought together suddenly the resulting mass would spontaneously undergo a self-sustaining reaction.” This was a startling and provocative statement. Conant had assumed that uranium research in the United States, and most likely in Britain, had as its distant goal a sustained and controlled nuclear reaction, not a catastrophic event. Conant’s mission to England consisted largely of setting up a London center where American and British scientists would share secrets, mostly about improvements on proximity fuses, bombsights, and radar. Yet with Lindemann’s extraordinary hint at British interest in developing an atomic bomb, Conant realized that he had been made privy to the most secret of information. He knew, too, that proper channels of communication for such information needed to be established, and soon. For his part, Lindemann knew that Conant—directly or through his boss, Vannevar Bush—had the ear of the president, although he did not know, as Conant would learn to his “astonishment,” that Roosevelt had little interest in and was rarely briefed on technical matters, including radar and the critical role it had played in the Battle of Britain.149

  Conant took Lindemann’s revelation home to Bush, Roosevelt’s point man on atomic research. Within weeks, Bush was made director of a new and top-secret committee, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in which Conant served as Bush’s deputy. In October, the British passed on the Maud report in its entirety to the Americans, and a partnership was soon born.150

  Lindemann’s motive in bringing up the subject went beyond the sharing of science secrets with his American counterpart. The Prof was a truly Strangelovian character, called “Baron Berlin” by those of his many enemies who resented his Teutonic roots. His detractors—including Randolph Churchill—whispered the rumor that he was Jewish, to which Winston Churchill replied that he did not care and could not see why it mattered even if it was true. In fact, Colville wrote, the Prof “looked with contempt on Jews and coloured people” but he reserved his deepest hatred for Germany, not simply Nazis, but all things German. He shared with Churchill the desire to pulverize Germany but did not share Churchill’s dream of rebuilding Germany after the war. Lindemann’s preferred postwar Germany would be a dead Germany. In uranium he had found an extraordinary means to render it so.151

  Churchill knew that such a weapon made hatred all the more dangerous and made all the more necessary a vision and plan for the postwar world. However, he also believed that any weapon that could end the war sooner—mustard gas, bacterial warfare, assassinations and sabotage by the SOE, even something as futuristic and dastardly as an atomic fission device—possessed great utility. For the time being, however, conventional bombs would have to suffice. Lindemann, at Churchill’s request, commenced work on a scientific and policy paper that addressed how best to deal from the air with German cities. The Prof’s conclusions and their implementation by Halifax, Lancaster, and B-17 bombers would within three years go a long way toward fulfilling his dream of destroying Germany.152

  Churchill tried in his speeches to offer hope to his listeners, whether they were enslaved on the Continent or cowering in British air-raid shelters. As he regularly did for Englishmen, in a spring broadcast he offered the Poles his message:

  All over Europe races and States whose cultures and history made them a part of the general life of Christendom in centuries when the Prussians were no better than a barbarous tribe, and the German empire no more than an agglomeration of pumpernickel principalities, are now prostate under the dark cruel yoke of Hitler and his Nazi gang.

  Every week his firing parties are busy in a dozen lands. Monday he shoots Dutchmen: Tuesday Norwegians; Wednesday French or Belgians stand against the wall; Thursday it is the Czechs who must suffer… to fill his repulsive bill of executions. But always, all the days, there are the Poles…. A day will dawn, perhaps sooner than we now have a right to hope, when the insane attempt to found a Prussian domination on racial hatred, on the armoured vehicle, on the secret police, on the alien overseer and on still more filthy Quislings, will pass like a monstrous dream.

  And in that morning of hope and freedom… all that is noble and fearless in the New World as well as in the Old, will salute the rise of Poland to be a nation again.153

  His words on this occasion fell short of the mark, for the Poles were suffering depredations not visited upon any of the Western European peoples conquered by Hitler. Poles were starving faster than Himmler could shoot them. Himmler and Hitler as yet ruled no lands farther east on which they could resettle the Polish people, although they had concluded that Siberia would do nicely. Absent a place to send the Poles (and soon enough, to send all Slavs who lived west of the Urals), Reich policy was to put them to work readying the countryside for the millions of German warrior-farmers who would emigrate there to start new lives and make fine German babies. The Poles, at least the Catholics among them, would labor as slaves for the Nazis. But more than three million of Poland’s prewar population of thirty-four million were Jews. For them, the most sinister of Himmler’s programs had yet to begin, but already Poles, both Christians and Jews, beheld in their future nothing resembling Churchill’s “morning of hope and freedom.” Rather, they beheld darkness and slavery and unspeakable evil.

  No speaker could turn a phrase with Churchill’s skill, yet he sometimes turned one too many. Churchill’s “real tyrant is the glittering phrase,” Australian prime minister Robert Menzies jotted in his diary, “so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.” “Pumpernickel principalities” is just the sort of glittering phrase Churchill could not resist, but perhaps should have on that occasion.154

  Curiously absent from his broadcast to the Poles was any mention of Stalin, who in partnership with Hitler had chewed off eastern Poland in 1939. Churchill was by now convinced Russia would be Hitler’s next victim, and soon. It was inopportune to criticize the Russian Bear for its predations on Poland when at any moment the Bear might himself be mauled, securing for Churchill a new ally and a modicum of respite for Britons. The Poles, for their part, understood with terrible certainty that whether or not Hitler attacked Stalin, their prospects in no way changed for the better. Churchill’s words on this occasion were eloquent, the sort that inspired his countrymen, who were further inspired by the sight of captured German airmen, the wreckage of Luftwaffe bombers, searchlight beams stabbing into the night, and the crack of AA guns, all of which meant Churchill was giving it back. But Poles could give back nothing. Churchill’s words offered them only the modest succor afforded by the knowledge that Winston Churchill was out there, across the miles, and that he had not forgotten them.

  Menzies remained in London for much of the year. Though he supported Churchill, he knew that voters back home sough
t more say in the deployment of Australian troops. His political opposition in Canberra thought him too cozy with London, more British than the British. He pestered Churchill constantly for a greater role within the London government, including a permanent seat in the War Cabinet. Although Menzies, along with Jan Smuts, was frequently invited to sit in on War Cabinet meetings, Churchill was constrained by law—a happy coincidence, given his opposition to the idea—from giving a representative of an autonomous commonwealth nation a permanent seat in the War Cabinet. Still, Churchill found Menzies estimable and entertaining enough to sponsor him for membership in the Other Club, Churchill’s private dining society, where a man’s company was valued more than his politics. But as the year wore on, Churchill’s frustration with Menzies grew. The Australian, recalled Viscount Antony Head (at the time a colonel working in war plans), had taken to “laying down the law to Winston” and telling him where he was wrong on strategy and policy. After a sullen meeting between Churchill and Menzies, held at Chartwell, the Australian made ready to depart. Clementine called out to him, “Oh, Mr. Menzies, you must sign the guest book.” Churchill murmured, “Yes, and you know what to write—J. Christ.”155

  The second phase of 1941’s Blitz—the “Luftwaffe’s tour of the ports”—began in mid-February with four straight nights of raids on Portsmouth, where the quays were smashed and the city center reduced to rubble. The town anointed itself “the smitten city.” Then Plymouth came in for it, and the Mayflower stone, which marked the spot from which the Pilgrims had ventured forth to the New World, was blown to smithereens. Göring put Hull, Bristol, Merseyside, Swansea, and Glasgow in his sights, and hit them hard, especially—and worrisomely—just as convoys made port. Göring’s uncanny ability to find convoys on the open seas and hit the ports at such opportune times (for Germany) inclined Churchill to believe that a spy had to be forwarding information to the Germans. In fact, the Germans had cracked the British merchantman code years earlier. U-boats and Luftwaffe planners simply followed ships’ radio signals. Almost 150,000 tons went to the bottom within sight of land in the last days of February and first days of March, the third worst week of shipping losses since the war began. “The sinkings are bad and the strain is increasing at sea,” Churchill cabled Roosevelt.156