The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Harriman set to work with Beaverbrook to ensure that Churchill received the goods he needed. Since the Beaver spent most weekends with Churchill, Harriman, too, became a regular weekend guest at Ditchley and Chequers, the better to sort things out with Beaverbrook, as well as with Hopkins back in Washington. Harriman and Hopkins had been good friends for almost eight years, having met on a train while both were on their way to Washington during the early days of the New Deal. It was an unlikely relationship—the impeccably dressed tycoon and the scruffy liberal social worker—and for Churchill a fortuitous one.171

  Churchill sold Harriman, as he had sold Hopkins, on the inevitability of invasion. On Harriman’s second visit to Chequers, Churchill offered him a somber assessment. The times called for a “holding action,” he said, not “bold new strokes.” For his part, Harriman told Churchill that the boldest and most necessary stroke would take the form of a U.S. declaration of war, which he fully supported. That was exactly what Churchill wanted to hear.172

  Rather than bold strokes, Churchill told Harriman, only two strategic imperatives existed, defense of the Home Island and of the Suez Canal. Loss of one would result in the loss of the other, and of the war. (Yet Churchill was at that moment stripping troops from both the Home Island and Egypt in order to make a very bold stroke in the Balkans.) He played the invasion card not only with his American guests but also continually with Britons, if for no other reason than to impress upon Americans that Britons were not complacent. With both Harriman and renewed Luftwaffe bombing arriving in London at the same time, Churchill set to work imparting to Harriman a concise understanding of Britain’s predicament. Peaceful and empty beaches belied the invasion threat, so Churchill found other means of inducing fear of the Hun in Harriman. To that end, he allowed Harriman the great privilege of sitting in on secret Battle of the Atlantic War Cabinet meetings, where the news was all bad all the time. And to give Harriman a taste of fire, Churchill, at the howling of the sirens, escorted him to the roof of the Air Ministry, where after witnessing the horrors, Harriman concluded that Hitler might yet starve or burn Britain into submission. This he soon reported to his boss, as Churchill presumed he would.173

  To Harriman, as he had to Hopkins, Willkie, and Winant, Churchill expressed his strong desire to meet Roosevelt in person. From Roosevelt, as winter turned to spring, there came no reply.

  Early in March, Churchill’s team in the Balkans, led by Eden, concluded that they had a good fighting chance in Greece, but only if everything fell perfectly into place by way of getting the troops into position. Four months earlier Eden had thought any such adventure in Greece to be “strategic folly.” Now he was putting the best face on it, cabling the War Cabinet from Athens that despite the risks, the operation should go forth. Indeed, Eden reported that General Papagos and the Greeks now appeared stalwart. To fight and perchance to lose, Eden concluded, was preferable to not fighting at all. Eden, Wavell, and Dill were in agreement that if the British arrived in Greece and got into position before the Germans came, “there was a good chance of holding them.” They also concluded, “If the Germans arrived first, it should be possible to withdraw the majority of our forces without great loss.” But Dill considered the Greek situation “grimmer than we had thought.” He did not express those doubts with absolute precision to Churchill. In any case, the War Cabinet approved the Greek operation on March 7. The cabinet minutes noted Churchill’s view “that we should go forward with a good heart.” Wavell’s troops, who were doing the actual going forward, were taking on more and more of a symbolic role, the embodiment of Churchill’s lofty decision to do the right and proper thing. Generals such as Wavell are loath to send men into battle to die for political symbolism. Yet Wavell, like Dill, had not made his concerns clear to Churchill. Thus the War Cabinet made its “bleak decision” (as characterized by Eden) to fight in Greece. Then, with the decision made, Eden, in Athens, related to Churchill that General Papagos, who just a week earlier had seemed stalwart, was now “discouraged.” Colville, to his diary, expressed his fear that “our troops will find themselves in a dangerous plight.” Churchill was now growing wary of the whole business and felt, Colville wrote, that “it was thrust upon us,” partly in order to preserve British prestige in the eyes of the Americans, and partly because Eden, Dill, Wavell, and Cunningham—even after warning of the dangers of stretching resources—“recommended it so strongly.” In fact, Eden and company, worn down by Churchill, were only delivering the Balkan front that Churchill had insisted upon for months.174

  Churchill informed Roosevelt of the decision on March 10:

  Although it is no doubt tempting to try to push on from Benghazi to Tripoli… we have felt it our duty to stand with the Greeks, who have declared to us their resolve, even alone, to resist the German invader. Our Generals Wavell and Dill, who accompanied Mr. Eden to Cairo, after heart searching discussions with us, believe we have a good fighting chance.175

  Any hope for success in Greece rested in large part not with Wavell or Papagos but with Yugoslavia (and, as Eden had pointed out, with whose ever army arrived in Greece first). To Roosevelt, Churchill declared: “No country ever had such a military chance. If they [the Yugoslavs] fall on the Italian rear in Albania, there is no measure of what might happen in a few weeks.” Here he was again with his hypothetical reasoning—If this, then that, then maybe this. In fact, the Yugoslavs had no real “military chance” because they lacked the military muscle to take advantage of any so-called opportunity that might present itself. The Yugoslav army stood at more than a million men, but it was a late nineteenth-century army. Its entire armored strength consisted of fewer than one hundred World War One–era tanks. Its air force was minuscule. The Yugoslavs in no way thought that several German armored divisions poised on their borders constituted an opportunity. Churchill knew this, and soon enough so did Roosevelt, after Colonel Bill Donovan, who on the spot and surveying the war situation for the president, reported to Roosevelt that although he, Donovan, respected the fighting spirit of the Yugoslavs, they could no more stop Hitler than had any other small European nation. A fuller and more accurate accounting by Churchill would have informed Roosevelt of Admiral Cunningham’s fear that without air cover, his fleet sailed naked in Greek waters, and of Longmore’s fear of spreading dangerously thin his meager airpower, and of Jumbo Wilson’s fear of spreading his lines too thin. A full accounting would have informed Roosevelt of Wavell’s distress at the peeling away from Libya of 60,000 of his best desert troops.176

  The North African situation was thus: at the very moment Erwin Rommel was about to launch his panzers east toward Egypt, Churchill began moving his best and most battle-hardened troops from Libya to Greece, replacing them with green reinforcements.

  March had commenced with the Bulgarians sounding their sour note and Churchill declaring that the Battle of the Atlantic, if not soon won, would spell disaster. After the passage of Lend-Lease, the remainder of the month brought forth a steady stream of encouraging news, and went out with a hurrah of military and political good fortune.

  In East Africa, British and colonial armies continued to push through Abyssinia toward the port of Massawa on the Red Sea, where several Italian warships and thirty-five cargo ships rode at anchor. Churchill cabled Eden in Cairo that were the Italians to scuttle the ships, “we shall consider ourselves relieved of feeding the Italian population of Eritrea and Abyssinia.” Harold Nicolson had been quite correct when he opined that all of this East African business and much of the Libyan success had been a lot of chicken feed. Yet the African adventures—Sir John Keegan calls them “flights of his [Churchill’s] strategic imagination”—boosted morale at home and fed Churchill’s resolve to fight the war to a successful conclusion.177

  The real threats lay in the eastern Mediterranean—in Greece, Crete, and Syria, should the Germans advance along those lines—and in the Western Desert, with Erwin Rommel. As March rolled into its final week, those fronts remained quiet but for a
probe by Rommel. Then, good fortune came Churchill’s way on March 25, when an Italian battle fleet sailed from the heel of Italy to attack British troop transports bound for Greece. Mussolini, pressed by the Germans to intercept and sink British transports, had taken up the challenge.

  The Royal Navy knew of the operation in advance; British code breakers had solved the Italian cipher the previous summer. Admiral Cunningham, from his headquarters in Alexandria, ordered four cruisers and nine destroyers to lie in wait for the Italian fleet. Cunningham himself sailed from Alexandria on March 27 with his main battle squadron and the carrier Formidable. The two fleets met off Cape Matapan, the southernmost point of mainland Greece, late on the twenty-eighth. The Italian commander, Admiral Angelo Iachino, on board the battleship Vittorio Veneto, had divided his force into three squadrons, one of which, Iachino’s, the British found and harassed, damaging the Vittorio Veneto and stopping the cruiser Pola dead in the water. Admiral Iachino, presuming Cunningham’s main force was still in Alexandria, sent two cruisers and two destroyers to the aid of Pola. The British saw them coming on radar screens, a technology the Italians fatally lacked. A British searchlight stabbed across the water; gunners found their range, and in minutes the entire Italian squadron was sent to the bottom, along with more than 2,400 sailors and officers. The Italians had been caught so completely unawares that their guns were trained in the wrong direction. Churchill, elated by the news, told Colville that with “the tearing up of the Italian paper fleet” the British could now ferry their troops unmolested to Greece.178

  The final grand news of the month came out of Yugoslavia. With Bulgaria in Hitler’s fold and Turkey resolved to stay out of the war, Yugoslavia was Churchill’s last best hope for creating his Balkan front. Colville wrote that week: “The diplomatic battle for the soul of Yugoslavia is reaching its height and sways either way with vertiginous speed.” Churchill knew that if diplomacy did not deliver Yugoslavia to Hitler, Hitler would use other means. Yugoslavia’s regent, Prince Paul, understood the precariousness of his position. Paul, Churchill had told Colville weeks earlier, was like a man in a cage with a tiger, “hoping not to provoke him while steadily dinner time approaches.” Prince Paul had tried to stall for time. But time had run out. Harangued by Hitler at a meeting early in the month, and knowing his position was untenable, Paul (whom Churchill derided as “Prince Palsy”) overrode his own sentiments and those of his countrymen. He sent his ministers by secret night train to Vienna, where they signed the Tripartite Pact on the twenty-fifth. Cadogan had predicted the outcome days earlier, when he told his diary, “Yugoslavs seem to have sold their souls to the Devil. All these Balkan peoples are trash. Poor dears.” Learning that they had finally thrown in with Hitler, he scribbled, “Jugs are signing… silly, feeble, mugs.” Within hours of the agreement’s being signed, Churchill cabled the British ambassador in Belgrade, Ronald Campbell, and urged him to take whatever action he could to ensure that the pro-British factions in the Yugoslav government knew that London was behind them. “Continue to pester, nag, and bite,” Churchill told Campbell, but if the present government “have gone beyond recall,” then “we may have to resort” to other measures. He meant a coup d’état.179

  When the signing of the pact was announced in Belgrade, the city exploded into revolt, a rebellion nurtured into being by the resident RAF attaché, who inspired the Yugoslav air forces to action, having prepared the ground with cash and influence peddled by the SOE. “Good news,” Cadogan wrote, “of coup d’état in Belgrade.” Peter, the seventeen-year-old prince, was declared king and put upon his father’s throne. Prince Paul fled to Athens. “A great day,” Colville wrote on the twenty-seventh. “Revolution in Belgrade, which puts an entirely different complexion on events in the Balkans and turns darkness into dawn. The P.M. is overjoyed.” So much so that he cabled Hopkins with all the good news coming out of East Africa and Belgrade: “Yesterday was a grand day.”180

  It was a false dawn. When the reports from Yugoslavia were confirmed, Churchill concluded, “We must expect bad news.” He was correct. Hitler would not abide a double-cross and a revolt within the same week. Churchill’s practitioners of ungentlemanly warfare in the SOE had produced the coup; but it would be Hitler who set Yugoslavia ablaze. He greeted the news with fury. The time for pseudodiplomacy had passed. He told his generals his decision, dispensing with his usual verbosity: “I have decided to destroy Yugoslavia.”181

  On March 24, Rommel, fully eight weeks or more before he (and Churchill) expected his desert force to reach full strength, probed tentatively toward the British lines at El Agheila, four hundred miles west of Bardia and five hundred miles east of Tripoli, near the border between Cyrenaica and Tripolitania. Churchill had taken at face value Wavell’s prediction sent to London three weeks earlier that “no large scale attack was likely to develop [against Wavell] before the end of the summer” (italics added). Wavell had misread his opponent. And Rommel had misread his. He presumed he would find the British at El Agheila in great strength, and preparing to continue their westward attack. Instead, he found them ill prepared to receive even a reconnaissance in force. Rommel was not one to let such an opportunity pass without making mayhem. O’Connor may have weeks earlier telegraphed to the world that he’d “killed the fox in the open,” but a new fox had crept right up to the coop, and found the door wide open. Rommel stepped right in. He did so against the expressed orders of his commanders in Berlin, and against the wishes of General Garibaldi, under whom Rommel nominally served. Just the previous week, Berlin had ordered Rommel to avoid any general offensive actions until the early May arrival of his 15th Panzer Division. Churchill, too, had concluded that Rommel’s diminutive African army would not grow strong enough to pose any threat until mid-May. Therefore, upon learning of Rommel’s probe, Churchill cabled Wavell: “I presume you are only waiting for the tortoise to stick his head out far enough before chopping it off.” It was the same message he had sent to French commander in chief Georges in May 1940, when the long thrusts by German panzers appeared to have exposed their flanks.182

  Rommel probed for six days, but on the thirtieth, he launched a two-pronged blitzkrieg attack toward Benghazi, eighty miles up the coast, and overland toward Derna. Churchill had failed to take into account the character of his enemy. General Philip Neame, commanding the Western Army, had failed to study both his enemy and the terrain. Not until the week before Rommel made his move, and too late, did Neame inform Wavell that the escarpment south of Benghazi failed to protect his flank. He had believed the escarpment could be penetrated only at a certain few choke points; in fact it was porous. Had Neame flown over the terrain, he would have seen this.183

  In East Africa the news was better; by March 30 the British occupied the whole of Eritrea. The war there was about over, in large part due to Wingate’s stunning campaign, which earned him no promotion. He was a little too irregular for the old school generals in Cairo and London. As well, he soon had a breakdown and tried to kill himself by slitting his throat. His reward for his role in conquering Ethiopia was virtual banishment, to Burma. But in less than a year, his nonconformist qualities would serve Churchill well in battling a new enemy far more dangerous than the Italians.184

  Rommel’s mischief aside, the run of good fortune—the victories over Aosta in Ethiopia, the battering of the Italian fleet, and the Yugoslavs’ “recapture of their soul”—made for “a wonderful weekend,” Colville told his diary, “the culmination of a week of victories.” They were at Chequers, where Churchill, attired in his dressing gown, “spent much of the weekend pacing—or rather tripping—up and down the Great Hall to the sound of the gramophones (playing martial airs, waltzes and the most vulgar kind of brass-band songs), deep in thought all the while.”185

  He wandered the halls, deep in thought, because Ultra had revealed on March 26 that following the Yugoslav pact with Hitler (hours before the Yugoslav coup), several divisions of German troops and mechanized infantry had been ordered fro
m the Yugoslav border to southern Poland. Most significantly, so had three out of the five panzer divisions bivouacked in Romania. Thus, when Ultra revealed the orders to move out were canceled following the Belgrade revolt, the import of the reversal in German movements became clear. Russia had been Hitler’s next target, until the insolent Yugoslavs defied him. A Joint Intelligence Committee report also included the fact that the Germans had lengthened and reinforced runways at several Polish airfields, and they were not doing so, Cadogan concluded, “for the benefit of Lufthansa.”186

  On March 30, Churchill cabled Eden, in Athens with Dill, that as a result of the Yugoslav coup and “sure information recently received” (the Enigma decrypts), it looked as if “Bear will be kept waiting a bit.” The orders and counter orders that Ultra revealed made clear to Churchill Germany’s “magnitude of design” directed both southeast toward the Balkans and, eventually, east to Russia: “My reading is that the bad man concentrated very large armoured forces… to overawe Yugoslavia…. The moment he was sure Yugoslavia was in the Axis he moved three of the five panthers towards the Bear believing what was left would be enough to finish the Greek affair.” He noted that “it looks as if heavy [German] forces will be used in the Balkan Peninsula.” On the same day, he cabled William Fadden, acting Prime Minister of Australia (Prime Minister Robert Menzies was in London at the time): “German plans have been upset [by the Belgrade coup] and we may cherish renewed hopes of forming a Balkan front with Turkey…. Result unknowable, but prize has increased and risks have somewhat lessened.” Turkey, in fact, had nothing to gain by coming in on Britain’s side, and did not. Actually, were an enraged Hitler to fling his forces into the Balkans, the foremost risk to Britain—a broad front that would overstretch the already thin lines of the Greek and British forces—would become a reality.187