The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  The month of May proved anything but merry. Disaster struck from the air, in the Atlantic, and in the eastern Mediterranean. Shipping losses in the Atlantic were still horrific; a chart tracking them looked “like a fever patient’s graph,” Mollie Panter-Downes wrote. The Blitz of 1941 had entered its third and most terrible phase, with London taking beatings more vicious than those of 1940. Tarpaulins had disappeared, leaving Londoners to root about inside their roofless houses in dampness and filth. Clocks moved ahead another hour, to double daylight saving, affording Londoners another two hours of fitful sleep before the sounding of the morning all clear and two more hours of daylight in the evening to contemplate the destruction all around. The government could offer them scant aid. When a member of Parliament asked Churchill “not to close his mind” to the question of welfare relief for bombed-out citizens, Churchill replied, “I will keep my mind ajar.” Still, Londoners did not complain. Rather, wrote Panter-Downes, they would gladly “lose their homes all over again for the pleasure of hearing that Berliners had just caught as big a packet of hell” from the RAF as they had caught from the Luftwaffe. Londoners could still no doubt take it, Panter-Downes wrote, but had begun to wonder if their government could dish it out. The twelve-month toll of dead Britons approached 47,000.240

  Gibraltar was the last British toehold on the continent. Tobruk was under siege. Crete was clearly Hitler’s next target, its defense problematic at best. The Vichy government was powerless to oppose German troop movements through France to Spain, if Berlin so demanded. Vichy was powerless, too, if Berlin insisted on putting troops into Syria as a prelude to going to Iraq, where an advance guard of Germans pilots and troops were preparing in consort with the Iraqi prime minister to grab the Mosul oil fields. Franklin Roosevelt, as usual, did not accede to Churchill’s pleas for a more belligerent American role. May came in with the usual question hanging fire: Where next would Hitler or one of his surrogates strike, and when?241

  The answer arrived at sunrise on May 1. The Iraqis had struck the night before. Alec Cadogan jotted in his diary: “Those dirty Iraqis are attacking us at Habbaniya. We have authorized bombing.” Cadogan, the Foreign Office mandarin whose duties as permanent under secretary of state for foreign affairs included the articulation of the legal details and niceties of making war, ran into Churchill as the two were entering Parliament. “So you’ve got another war on your hands tonight,” Churchill offered before disappearing down the hallway. Yet, Iraq was another sideshow. The Iraqis were led by Rashid Ali El Gailani, who after staging a coup in March appointed himself prime minister and drove the pro-British regent into exile. Now he had attacked, in violation of a treaty of long standing that granted the British free transit of Iraq and the airbase at Habbaniya, which Rashid’s troops had surrounded. The Iraqi port of Basra was the door to Persia. From Basra came the oil that fueled the Royal Navy worldwide. Churchill could not allow such Iraqi insolence to stand, not only because of the risk of losing the Mosul oil fields, but because he himself, as colonial secretary, had created Iraq one Sunday afternoon in Cairo twenty years earlier, a day, he fondly remembered, spent in the company of T. E. Lawrence and the Hashemite princes he had chosen to rule the newborn nations of Transjordan and Iraq.242

  Yet to rid Iraq of Rashid and the German threat he needed to peel away more of Wavell’s Middle East forces. Wavell, justifiably wary of further diminutions of his troops, suggested instead a parley with Rashid, in hopes of resolving the issue without a fight. Churchill and the War Cabinet overrode the reluctant general. The battle began with the relief of the RAF garrison under siege at Habbaniya, then moved on to a brief fight at Fallujah, west of Baghdad. Then, after a swift march to the capital by a brigade of the 10th Indian Colonial Division, Rashid was put to flight. The 10th was commanded by the profane and savvy Major General William (“Billy”) Slim, of whom Churchill said in jest, “I cannot believe that a man with a name like Slim can be much good.” Slim was not only good, he had a knack for moving his forces rapidly and over great distances, a talent that he would put to use in Burma in two years. With the 10th Indian Colonial Division on the offensive, Berlin sent a contingent of officers to bolster Rashid’s resolve. The German commander, while on final approach to Baghdad’s airport, was killed by shots fired by nervous Iraqi gunners. The few German squadrons that Hitler had sent to Iraq left for home, never to return. The British needed just a month to retake Baghdad, and then just three days to set up a new Iraqi government.243

  Churchill accorded the Iraq campaign a very few pages in his memoirs, calling Iraq a “swift and complete success.” Yet he noted that Hitler missed a grand opportunity. “The Germans had, of course, at their disposal an airborne force which would have given them… Syria, Iraq, and Persia, with their precious oil fields.” From Persia, where he was held in high regard by the Shah, Hitler could reach “out very far toward India, and beckon to Japan.” But Hitler’s gaze was fixed upon Russia. Not even the prospect of gaining Iraqi and Persian oil at small cost, nor even the prospect of flying the swastika flag over the Suez Canal, could move him to alter his focus.244

  Still, although Hitler gazed intensely eastward, he intended to follow through on his Greek and North African successes. For that reason, in Crete, Churchill was about to find himself with another Mediterranean battle on his hands. His “golden eggs” aside, given the sorry state of Freyberg’s forces, a successful defense of Crete would prove dicey at best. Yet when logic went against him, Churchill went against logic. When the Ultra decrypts of late April revealed the German plans to attack Crete, he had cabled Wavell: “It seems clear from our information that a heavy airborne attack by German troops and bombers will soon be made on Crete…. It ought to be a fine opportunity for killing the parachute troops.” The island, he told Wavell, “must be stubbornly defended.” Yet Churchill soon jettisoned his fantasy of slaying paratroopers and faced the facts. He confided to the War Cabinet—but not to Freyberg—that he thought the defense of Crete impossible in the long run. Crete lost would result in German control of the air in the eastern Mediterranean. That, Churchill told the cabinet, “is the greatest menace we have to face.”245

  A map of the eastern Mediterranean shows why Hitler was going to Crete. As the largest and southernmost of the Greek islands, it is located in the center of the eastern Mediterranean. The aerial radius from Crete extended to Tobruk, to Alexandria, and north to Athens, and to Romania beyond. British bombers could reach the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti from Crete; German bombers could reach Alexandria. The loss of Crete would place British sea-lanes to Alexandria in mortal danger. Tobruk, already under siege by Rommel, would become vulnerable to massed German air raids. The loss of its naval base at Souda Bay would force the Royal Navy to sail the eastern Mediterranean under the guns of the Luftwaffe. Yet the map also showed Crete to be a most difficult piece of real estate to attack, a long and slender mountainous spine that stretches 200 miles west to east, but is no more than 35 miles wide at its widest. Three mountain ranges from five thousand to eight thousand feet in height run laterally along the island and effectively isolate the north coast from the south. A German invasion by sea was problematic at best; the coastline consists of more cliff than beach. Even had gently sloping beaches awaited the invaders, the Germans had no shallow-draft landing craft in the Mediterranean capable of putting an army on the shore quickly. That left the air, and an air operation of this scope had yet to be attempted in that brief span of warfare since men had first parachuted from aircraft.

  General Kurt Student proposed exactly that. Student commanded the Luftwaffe’s elite airborne unit, XI Corps. During the 1940 invasion of the Low Countries, Student’s first parachute division, 7 Flieger, proved the utility of dropping support troops behind enemy lines, to harass and create diversions. On Crete, Student envisioned his men in the lead role. Their targets as Ultra had revealed were the three RAF airfields, which were the keys to Crete. Göring, having been humbled in the air over Britain, embraced Stude
nt’s plan as a means to recoup his prestige as well as steal yet more territory for Hitler.246

  Churchill had all winter believed that Crete could be successfully defended from conventional attack, but until the Ultra transcripts, he knew nothing of Student’s bold plan. He did know, however, that the loss of Crete would mean the virtual isolation of the Suez Canal and of Wavell’s command, a prospect so dangerous to British survival that he cabled Roosevelt: “I feel Hitler may quite easily gain vast advantage very cheaply, and we are so fully engaged that we can do little—nothing to stop him spreading himself.”247

  His gloom would have deepened had Hitler chosen a far more important target. Malta, not Crete, was the correct target to hit first if Hitler’s objectives were to secure his North African position and to isolate the British in the eastern Mediterranean and then to kill them via the stepping-stones that led to Cairo: Crete, Syria, and the Libyan desert. Churchill and Mussolini had long known that whoever held Malta would hold hostage the east-west sea-lanes critical to British resupply of Cairo, as well as the north-south Axis supply routes to North Africa. Hitler understood this, too. When Mussolini invaded Albania the previous year, Hitler fumed that Malta and Crete were better targets if Il Duce was intent on securing the Mediterranean. Hitler’s closest military advisers at OKW—to a man—pleaded the case for sending Student’s force to Malta. When Keitel and Jodl brought Student the plan, he refused on the grounds that Malta was too heavily defended. It was not, but Hitler and Student lacked the intelligence data that might have told them otherwise.248

  As critical as Malta was to the British, by May 1941, the RAF air fleet on the island—a few squadrons of Hurricanes—had not grown much in a year. The Italian navy had been bitten hard at Taranto and Cape Matapan, but it was still larger than the British fleets at Gibraltar and Alexandria. Mussolini had more submarines in the sea than the British had ships of all classes. But Mussolini’s admirals, who operated virtually independent of Il Duce, did not want their ships to fight the decisive battle for the Mediterranean. In effect, they did not want to lose their ships even if by doing so they might win the war. Thus, the Führer chose to let the Luftwaffe pummel Malta, as it had London. Between January 1941 and July 1942, the Luftwaffe and Italian air forces dropped more tons of bombs per person on the island’s 270,000 residents than on any other target in Europe. Malta became the most heavily bombed target in the history of warfare. During one stretch, the bombs fell for 179 of 180 days. The Maltese learned to live in caves carved deep into the limestone. Churchill urged the Commons to adopt a relief plan for Malta, similar to the reimbursement scheme he sought for Britons whose homes had been destroyed. In an astounding affront to the people of Malta, the House of Commons did not even respond. Had British civilian casualties during the Blitz been proportional to those on Malta, almost 800,000 Britons would have perished. Yet the Maltese hung on, even as they died under German bombs.

  The far western Mediterranean looked poised for disaster as well. On April 24 Churchill had cabled Roosevelt: “The capacity of Spain and Portugal to resist the increasing German pressure may at any time collapse, and the anchorage at Gibraltar be rendered unusable. To effect this the Germans would not need to move a large army through Spain but merely to get hold of the batteries which molest the anchorage, for which a few thousand artillerists and technicians might be sufficient.” Were Gibraltar to be abandoned, the effect on Royal Navy operations in the Mediterranean would be immediate and disastrous, as would the effect in the eastern Atlantic. The Portuguese Azores, 950 miles off the Iberian coast, and the Cape Verde Islands, 350 miles off the western coast of Africa, were perfect staging areas for U-boats. The islands assumed the same strategic significance in the Atlantic as did Malta in the Mediterranean. If Germany controlled the Atlantic islands, her U-boats could patrol far into the South Atlantic, to the west, and, most worrisome for Churchill, station themselves astride his convoy routes around the Cape of Good Hope. For months German submariners had been secretly putting into the islands’ coves for minor repairs. Churchill pleaded with Roosevelt to order carrier-based reconnaissance flights to safeguard British convoys in the vicinity of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands.249

  Time, as always, was not on Churchill’s side. He told Roosevelt that a British force was ready to take the Atlantic islands should Hitler take Spain or Portugal but that the force needed more than a week to deploy. He asked the president to “send an American squadron for a friendly cruise in these regions.” Harriman, in complete agreement with Churchill as to the immediacy of the danger, had days earlier sent his own desperate cable to Roosevelt: “England’s strength is bleeding. In our own interest, I trust that your Navy can be directly employed before it is too late.”250

  Roosevelt declined a show of naval force in the vicinity of the Azores, declined to order reconnaissance flights into the fray, declined all of Churchill’s pleas and suggestions. The president’s refusal, Colville observed, made Churchill “gravely depressed.” On May 3, Churchill—“in worse gloom than I have ever seen him”—dictated to Colville another telegram to the president, this one “drawing a somber picture of what a collapse in the Middle East would entail.” Iraq could fall, and Turkey, and the eastern flank of Egypt—Palestine—would be threatened. The Mideast command would collapse. The telegram complete, he indulged in his habit of divining the future. In this instant, the gloom bled through. He sketched for Colville, Ismay, and Harriman—as he had in the cable to Roosevelt—a picture of the world controlled by Hitler, with the United States and Britain isolated and forced to accept a terrible, and in time, fatal peace.251

  Churchill was just desperate enough to add a remarkable request to his cable apprising Roosevelt of the situation: “Therefore, if you can not take more advanced positions now [in the Atlantic], or very soon, the vast balances may be tilted heavily to our disadvantage. Mr. President… the one decisive counterweight I can see to balance the growing pessimism… would be if the United States were immediately to arrange herself with us as a belligerent Power” (italics added). It had come to this: the British prime minister was asking—begging—America to declare war.252

  He had asked Roosevelt much the same question the previous year as France was falling but had framed that request in terms of the “moral effect” an American declaration might have on the French. His new plea was based on a far more fundamental need: survival. Roosevelt, again, declined. He lacked the support to give Churchill what he needed, with the result that Churchill found himself, as usual, desperately short on time and desperately lacking in matériel.

  On the moonlit night of May 10, the Luftwaffe smashed London and continued pounding it with high explosives and incendiaries until dawn on the eleventh. The Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice had arranged to spend the night in the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He wrote that soon after the raiders appeared, “great tawny clouds of smoke, rolling in sumptuous Baroque exuberance, had hidden the river completely and there we were on the dome, a Classical island in a more than Romantic Inferno. It was far and away the most astonishing spectacle I have ever seen.”

  Churchill was safe at Ditchley that night, watching a Marx Brothers movie and making inquiries about the damage to London when word came in that the Duke of Hamilton, an old friend of his, had telephoned and sought most urgently to speak to Churchill. Churchill asked Brendan Bracken to take a message from the duke. A few minutes later Bracken returned and informed the P.M.: “Hess has arrived in Scotland.” Churchill thought it a joke and told Brendan to inform the duke to “kindly tell that to the Marx Brothers.” But a flood of new messages soon confirmed the story. Rudolf Hess, deputy Führer, third in command of the Third Reich, member of Hitler’s secret cabinet council, leader of the Nazi Party, Hitler’s friend—perhaps his only true friend—for more than a dozen years, had parachuted into Scotland. Either through luck or skill, Hess had actually landed quite near the duke’s manor. Thus began an episode of sheer lunacy.253

  Nobody knew what to
make of the news. Pamela Churchill, who was at Ditchley that weekend, recalled that the secretaries, who were vital in connecting Churchill to “whatever was happening” in the outside world, could garner no intelligence on Hess’s adventure. Everybody who was present—Pamela, the secretaries, Churchill—“had no idea what was happening” and could only speculate and wonder if “it might be the biggest thing in the whole war” or if perhaps “Germany was breaking up.” History anointed Hess a sideshow, but when news of his advent first arrived “it was a very thrilling moment.”254

  Hess’s immediate objective was to reach the Duke of Hamilton, who had met Hess but once, at the 1936 Olympic Games, but who Hess presumed to be a fan of Hitler. Hess’s delusional and singularly unilateral mission was to bring the war to a peaceful conclusion. Knowing of Hitler’s hatred for the Russians (but not being privy to the invasion plans), Hess believed (in part on being told so by his astrologer) that he and Hamilton could arrange peace through the large anti-war faction Hess believed existed in Britain. In interviews with doctors and cabinet officials, Hess stressed that Hitler was pained deeply over the need to sink British ships and bomb British cities. The Führer, Hess claimed, found it most difficult to give the orders necessary to fight such a ruthless war with Britain. Hess, in what Churchill termed his “keynote,” claimed he “thought that if England once knew of this fact it might be possible that England on her part would be ready for agreement.” In other words, once England realized how kind and considerate a fellow Hitler really was, England would meet the Führer’s wishes.255

  Churchill in his memoirs writes that he attached no special significance to Hess’s arrival, though in the first hours after learning of Hess’s mission, Churchill was as much in a tizzy as everyone else. In short order it became clear that Hess was crazy. In fact, Hess’s arrant mental condition was so evident that Churchill considered his subsequent sentence of life in prison to be unjust. Hess may have once stood close to Hitler, Churchill wrote, but he “had, in my view, atoned for this by his completely devoted and frantic deed of lunatic benevolence.” He was, wrote Churchill, “a medical and not a criminal case, and should be so regarded.”256