The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  The list of troubles was long and growing longer. As in every speech since the previous May, he offered reassurances to a brave people who needed but did not demand reassurance: “I thought it would be a good thing to go and see for myself… some of our great cities and seaports and which have been most heavily bombed… and to some of the places where the poorest people have had it worst.” What he saw “reassured and refreshed.” It was like “going out of a hothouse onto the bridge of a fighting ship… a tonic which I should recommend any who are suffering fretfulness to take in strong doses when they have need of it.” The morale among the poor and the bombed, he proclaimed, was “splendid.” It all added up to the “vindication of the civilized and decent way of living” and “proof of the virtues of free institutions.” The cause would be “fought out… to the end. This is the grand heroic period of our history, and the light of glory shines on all.” He presumed all Englishmen felt the same.

  Many did. When Wendell Willkie, conducting an unscientific survey during his visit, asked a laborer if he supported the war and wanted to go through with it, the man replied, “Hitler ain’t dead yet, is he?” and turned back to work. The citizens of Hull were proud of the beatings they took, and informed The New Yorker columnist A. J. Liebling that Coventry had nothing on them. Hull, regularly hit hard by virtue of its location on the North Sea, and being the British port nearest to Germany, was but one of Britain’s major ports and cities that were taking such beatings. During the Blitz not one mayor of any British city ever asked Whitehall for special protection, not that any could have been arranged. Londoners, of course, never hesitated to tell anyone within earshot that they could take it. Yet Churchill’s attachment of glory to mass slaughter rang hyperbolic to many in America, where a clear majority of voters still answered no to the question of going to war for Britain. And no lights of glory shone on the Continent. Enslaved Europeans—who now truly lived dangerously—found scant hope in his words. Yet Poles and Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Norwegians, Czechs, Belgians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and now, too, the Greeks all knew that Churchill was the only European leader who remained to carry on the fight against Hitler. They all knew, as well, that he could not fight alone for much longer.224

  Churchill had taken to the airwaves not only to thank Britons but to explain the failures in the Balkans. Lowering his voice, he moved on to Greece. He told Britons: “Great disasters have occurred in the Balkans. Yugoslavia has been beaten down…. The Greeks have been overwhelmed. The victorious Albanian army has been cut off and forced to surrender.” And then to Africa, where the news was as dreadful: “Our forces in Libya have sustained a vexatious and damaging defeat. The Germans advanced sooner and in greater strength than we or our generals expected.” Strictly speaking, this was true. Although Churchill had not expected Rommel to attack so soon, in early March Ultra had revealed that Rommel would be ready weeks earlier than the British had predicted. Wavell’s hesitancy all along had little to do with the speed or strength of the Germans, either in Greece or North Africa. He assumed German advances on any front would be fast and strong; that was the German way. His overriding concern stemmed from dividing his forces. Yet Churchill, in his broadcast, without naming Wavell, rebuked the commander for the decision to send his tanks to Cairo for repair when future events—indeterminate when the decision was made—proved they were best left in Libya. Churchill: “The single armoured brigade which had been judged sufficient to hold the frontier till about the middle of May was worsted and its vehicles largely destroyed by a somewhat stronger German armoured force.” Without quite declaring so, Churchill had just told his people that the British had been trounced yet again.225

  Then, growling, he deflected the audience’s attention from HMG’s defeats onto Mussolini:

  I daresay you may have read in the newspapers that by a special proclamation, the Italian Dictator has congratulated the Italian army in Albania on the glorious laurels they have gained by their victory over the Greeks. Here surely is the world’s record in the domain of the ridiculous and the contemptible. This whipped jackal, Mussolini, who to save his own skin has made all Italy a vassal state of Hitler’s Empire, comes frisking up to the side of the German tiger with yelpings not only of appetite—that can be understood—but even of triumph.226

  And then he moved on to the guttersnipe. As for Hitler, Churchill repeated his January message to Ismay: “Hitler cannot find safety from avenging justice in the East, in the Middle East, or in the Far East. In order to win this war he must either conquer this Island by invasion, or he must cut the ocean life-line which joins us to the United States.” Churchill believed the arithmetic of the situation precluded either possibility: “There are less than seventy million malignant Huns—some of whom are curable and others killable…. The peoples of the British Empire and the United States number more than 200 million in their homelands and the British Dominions alone.” This English-speaking alliance possesses “more wealth, more technical resources, and they make more steel than the rest of the world put together.”227

  Churchill failed to cite a third possible path to victory for Hitler besides invasion and blockade. It was the strategy Admiral Raeder and Franz Halder (Chief of the German Army General Staff) had advocated for ten months, albeit meekly, given Hitler’s determination to burn Moscow. Halder proposed to dismember the British Empire before the Americans came in, beginning in the Mediterranean, east from Gibraltar to Egypt. Then he advised a strike across Iraq and Persia while enticing the Japanese into smashing Hong Kong and Singapore. The objective was to drive Britain out of Asia. The United States would then reassess the value of supplying Britain with war matériel for an increasingly futile battle. England finding itself cut off from its Dominions, from its Iraqi and Persian oil, and denied use of the Suez Canal, would be ripe for the kill. This was Churchill’s fear exactly.228

  He chose invective over full disclosure. No one objected to his classification of Mussolini as a jackal, but his reference to malignant Huns, killable at that, drew protests from Corder Catchpool, a Great War conscientious objector and pacifist who, in an open letter to Churchill, lamented the prime minister’s message as “not in accordance with truth, and that the spirit it breathes is a pagan spirit, the opposite of what Jesus taught as to the Christian attitude toward sinful mankind.” Catchpool predicted that “if this spirit predominates” in the British people and their leaders, “then the present generation will pass away without any hope of realizing that new and better world for which men are agonizing now.” Churchill made no reply to Catchpool.229

  Churchill ended his address with the final two stanzas of a poem by the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough, words “appropriate to our fortunes to-night, and I believe they will be so judged wherever the English language is spoken or the flag of freedom flies:

  For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,

  Seem here no painful inch to gain,

  Far back, through creeks and inlets making,

  Comes silent, flooding in, the main,

  And not by eastern windows only,

  When daylight comes, comes in the light,

  In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!

  But westward, look, the land is bright.230

  Westward was America, where vast quantities of Lend-Lease wheat, dried milk, powdered eggs, flour, canned pork, and canned fish were being assembled for shipment to Britain. But the first ship would not arrive for a month. Though Churchill proclaimed in public that setbacks stiffened resolve and would somehow in time transform into stepping-stones to victory, when he received bad news in private, he resorted to a behavior associated with children, artists, and geniuses: he sulked. He termed each new defeat the gloomiest, the most troublesome, the most fearful, the blackest. Yet he was never long gloomy, and never afraid. At dinner, among his cronies and family, he could, with a pout, a quiver of the lip, a growl and a scowl, shut down all conversation. Yet Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister, noted in his diary Churchil
l’s inevitable progress during conversations from doom to effervescence: “The PM in conversation will steep himself (and you) in gloom on some grim aspect of the war… only to proceed to fight himself out while he is pacing the floor with the light of battle in his eyes. In every conversation he reaches a point where he positively enjoys the war: ‘Bliss in that age it was to be alive…. Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?’ ” Churchill could be moody, petulant, rude, and mercurial, but he never subscribed to the patently obvious logic that given enough setbacks, defeat must necessarily follow. Menzies jotted in his diary, “There is no defeat in his heart.”231

  To Wavell, after Rommel pummeled the British in Libya, Churchill cabled, “We seem to have had rather bad luck.” Like a cowboy who gambled away his wages, he added: “I expect we should get this back later.” He had a way of seeing gold where others saw dirt. Had Britain not sent troops to Greece, Churchill told his cabinet, “Yugoslavia would not now be an open enemy of Germany.” It is true that Yugoslav guerrillas tied up several German divisions for the remainder of the war, but the sacrifice in Greece of more than 16,000 of Britain’s finest troops killed and captured in order to bring about that result cannot be construed as a design of strategic magnificence. Luck had not abandoned Wavell; Churchill had.232

  Since the previous June, when Churchill treated of such calamities in public, even as he promised more dangers to come, he did so with the remarkable result that with each phrase he applied another dash of mortar to the foundation of public trust, until his April 27 speech. For almost a year he had told his ministers that he did not want Britons’ tension over possible invasion to abate. It had not. The public’s tension was so acute, wrote Panter-Downes, the news from Greece and North Africa so bewildering and so bad, that the morning newspapers “became just about as comfortable as a bomb lying on the breakfast table.”233

  Churchill’s speech of April 27 had pushed the dinner hour back to almost 10:00, following which, General Sir Alan Brooke recalled, Churchill “was in great form… and kept us up till 3:30 A.M.” His great form may have been intended to mask his growing distress, for in the hours following his broadcast, one of his “golden eggs” had hatched. Enigma decrypts confirmed that the Germans were going to Crete, and that they would arrive via parachute and glider, with Crete’s three airfields as the objectives. This intelligence was so vital that Churchill suggested to the Chiefs of Staff that the actual texts be secretly flown to General Freyberg, the commander on Crete. Churchill assumed that Freyberg, once assured that the intelligence was valid, would deploy his forces in order to ambush and crush the German airborne units, so that any German seaborne forces that might appear—if the Royal Navy did not first sink them—would find themselves cut off on the beaches. If used to effect, the decrypts could prove a godsend. If not, and were Crete to fall, Egypt had to be the next target, and as things now stood, Egypt’s defense could not be guaranteed. The loss of Egypt and the Suez Canal, Churchill told the War Cabinet, “would be a disaster of first magnitude to Great Britain, second only to successful invasion and final conquest” of the Home Island.234

  Should Rommel reach Cairo, an evacuation from North Africa would have to take place that would make Norway, Dunkirk, and Greece look like training exercises. A War Cabinet directive of April 28, drafted by Churchill, called for plans to be drawn up for an evacuation but stipulated “no whisper of such plans is to be allowed.” But before any retreat took place, “no surrenders by officers or men will be considered tolerable unless at least 50 percent casualties are sustained by the Unit or force in question. According to Napoleon’s maxim, ‘when a man is caught alone and unarmed, a surrender may be made.’ But generals and staff officers surprised by the enemy are to use their pistols in self defence. The honor of a wounded man is safe.” Churchill was fond of the Napoleonic maxim regarding the surrender of an unarmed man. Had Wavell read Churchill’s autobiography, My Early Life, he would have known that Churchill once applied the maxim to himself when he found himself unarmed and staring down the barrel of a Boer rifle. In the telling of that tale, Churchill took pains to inform the reader that his pistol remained some distance away; he was thus both surrounded and unarmed.235

  The directive continued: “Anyone who can kill a Hun or even an Italian, has rendered a good service.” Then, having already broached the subject of evacuation, Churchill decreed, “It will be utterly impossible to find the shipping for moving a tithe of the immense masses of men and stores which have been gathered in the Nile Valley.” All the ships of the Royal Navy could not get them away, and this time there’d be no heroic fleet of yachts, trawlers, and dories sailing to the rescue. Conceivably, the British could flee south, through the Sudan to Kenya and safety. Those who survived would find themselves out of the war. Given the fact there was no real exit, the battle plan called for—as it did on the Home Island—a last stand.236

  The language in the directive was the sort Dill had in mind when he told Reith that nine out of ten of Churchill’s ideas as expressed in memos were less than brilliant. From Wavell’s perspective, the directive was a waste of paper. He needed no man to tell him to do his duty. Churchill envied Wavell his opportunity for glory. To Colville, he admitted that he would “lay down his present office—yes and even renounce cigars and alcohol”—for the chance to lead the resistance in Egypt.237

  Freyberg, meanwhile, on Crete, received and digested the Enigma intelligence, but the Secret Intelligence Service, in accordance with standard procedures, instructed him not to act on any single intelligence source without first verifying the information through a second source. Here was a piece of bureaucratic nonsense, for Ultra came straight from the horse’s mouth, and was therefore unimpeachable, as well as unverifiable. Freyberg maintained in later years that the real intent of the SIS directive was to scuttle the defense of Crete’s three airfields in order to protect the Ultra secret. Were the airfields to prove too well defended, the Germans might have deduced the leak in their security. Still, Freyberg decided he would man the airfields, and reinforce as best he could whichever airfield came under the heaviest attack. His problem was that the westernmost airfield, at Maleme, near the Royal Navy anchorage at Souda Bay, was seventy miles west of the airfield at Rethymnon, which in turn was eighty miles west of the third airfield, at Heraklion. Still, for the first time in the war, a British commander knew in advance exactly what was coming his way, and when. However, his forces had been so torn up in Greece that he lacked the men and internal lines of communications to mount an effective, coordinated defense of Crete, with or without help from Ultra.

  Max Beaverbrook resigned from the Ministry of Aircraft Production on April 30. He had made more enemies in the RAF than he had in the Luftwaffe. Beaverbrook’s liability now exceeded his utility, in part because he was willing and eager to gainsay Roosevelt, which could only hurt Churchill. Max believed the Americans were out to grab everything they could from Britain, including its remaining gold and, when the war was won, its overseas markets—the Empire. He proposed to send a mission to the United States to set the American people straight regarding Roosevelt’s canniness and the U.S. government’s unwillingness to fulfill promises made to Britain, promises that Max’s newspapers had endorsed. “The American government… is asking for the moon,” he wrote to Churchill, “and appears unwilling to pay six pence.”238

  Max’s mission to the United States could only hurt Churchill and the cause. Max had enough enemies in London; it would not do for him to make new ones in America. Churchill, seeking a way to keep Max in the game and the cabinet, resurrected him on May 1 as minister of state. It was an appointment that carried no specific duties, and invited trouble, for Max might poke his nose into the affairs of other departments, which would beget the enmity of the heads of those departments. Yet the lack of duties freed up time for Max to serve Churchill as friend, foil, and incubator of questionable ideas. Britons, not quite understanding the vagaries of the position, greeted t
he news with cheers, because they presumed Beaverbrook, given his talents for producing goods, would be overseeing war production. Many Britons considered Britain’s war production—and Churchill’s management of it—to be pathetic. War production wins wars; yet Britain’s factory output was, according to Fleet Street, in a state of slumber. Factory managers and workers shut down their plants on Fridays and took their usual holidays in the country; very few third shifts hummed away in the nation’s factories. The Sunday Express: “Do we even now understand that we are at a death grips in a fight for our lives?” The taking of holidays, chimed the newspaper, was “a scandalous situation.” The Daily Mail: “When are we going to get down to the job of winning the war? When are we going to run machines, factories, and shipyards to full capacity?” The solution, according to the press, was a shake-up in government, a radical shake-up. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote that Beaverbrook’s new job “carries with it a roving commission to kick inefficiency and departmental dawdling hard wherever it is encountered.” Though Britons were suspicious of Beaverbrook’s “Canadian accent,” his “Fleet Street Methods,” his Tory loyalties, and even his “street urchin” face, they knew he was just the man to straighten out the bureaucrats who had mucked up the production of everything from tanks to Blitz soup.239