The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  At noon that day, the twenty-seventh, as he addressed the Commons, Bracken handed him a note. Churchill glanced at it, then told the House, “I have just received news that the Bismarck is sunk.” He paused to read the mood in the chamber. “They seemed content,” he later wrote.282

  They were anything but. The Germans had lost a battleship; Churchill was losing Crete. Another evacuation—more flight than retreat—was under way. The British press did not, as it had with Greece, extend the benefit of the doubt. Opposition MPs, as they had throughout the month of May, expressed in the strongest possible terms their growing belief that Churchill and his coalition government lacked the ability to win the war. Defeat after defeat testified to Churchill’s shortcomings as a strategic war leader. His status as the beloved and brilliant orator who had roused Englishmen was secure, but his reputation as warrior was not. He “is undergoing a slump in his popularity,” Chips Channon noted in his diary, “and many of his enemies, long silenced by his personal popularity, are once more vocal.”283

  The leading critic was Leslie Hore-Belisha, who shortly after Churchill announced Bismarck’s demise, moved the discussion to the subject of Crete, telling the House that the debacle on Crete was due in large part to the virtual absence of anti-aircrafts guns on the island. He made a fair point. The defense preparation on Crete had been a sorry affair. Churchill, forewarned that Hore-Belisha intended to go after the anti-aircraft guns, was ready with his retort. It took the form of one of his favorite tactics, the bait and switch. Not for nothing had Churchill’s dearest friend, F. E. Smith (the late Lord Birkenhead), once said that Churchill spent his entire life rehearsing his impromptu remarks. Churchill deflected Hore-Belisha’s criticism by declaring that Hore-Belisha, in charge of the armed forces for almost three years under Chamberlain, had left them in “lamentable” shape. Hore-Belisha protested Churchill’s slapping him with the appeasement label; he had in fact advised Chamberlain to modernize the army and introduce a draft. Churchill responded with bare knuckles. “I am not throwing all the blame for this on my right honourable Friend at all—certainly not—but I think it is only fair when he… sets himself up as arbiter and judge, and speaks so scornfully of the efforts of some others who have inherited his dismal legacy…. I think when he speaks this way… it is only fair to point out to him that he is one of the last people in this country to take this line.” Among the mumbles and murmurs an MP raised his voice: “No recriminations.”284

  Churchill had not finished. “The honourable Gentleman said something about no recriminations, but extremely violent and hostile speeches have been spread about, doing a great deal of harm.” He cut to the heart of the matter, as he saw it: “The question arises as to what would happen if you allowed the enemy to advance and overrun, without cost to himself, the most precious and valuable strategic points? Suppose we had never gone to Greece, and had never attempted to defend Crete? Where would the Germans be now? Might they not… already be masters of Syria and Iraq, and preparing themselves for an advance into Persia?… There is… this vitally important principle of stubborn resistance to the will of the enemy.” The doctrine implied by some members that battles be chosen “only with a certainty of winning” and that without such certainty “you must clear out” flies against the “whole history of war” and “shows the fatal absurdity of such a doctrine.” It was masterful. With an angry rush of rhetorical questions and brass asides, Churchill had transferred the egg from his face to the face of Hore-Belisha, who had played no part whatsoever in the debacle unfolding on Crete. Meanwhile, Churchill avoided the vital questions of why British factories limped along far below capacity. He never got around to explaining why the AA defense on Crete had been so weak, although the answer was self-evident—very few anti-aircraft batteries were available.285

  Although correct in his admonition to Hore-Belisha that in battle there is no certainty of winning, Churchill, having for more than a year applied his own doctrine of giving aggressive battle when possible, had so far produced defeats. He had lamented to Colville the previous August that in his first three months as prime minister, “everything had gone wrong and he had nothing but disasters to announce.” The disasters had only grown in the ensuing ten months. Nothing had worked against the Germans, or against the Americans for that matter. The effort to bring America in proved an ongoing chore and so far as fruitless as the military escapades. Churchill’s moods began to take greater swings than usual, and more often. He expressed to Colville his dismay that the rearguard on Crete of 1,200 Royal Marines had been left behind. It was a shameful episode, he told Colville, the responsibility for which rested with all branches of the Middle East command. He began to suspect that his generals, even his cabinet, lacked a fighting spirit. He held them all responsible for the misfortunes.286

  He was worn out. Three days after Bismarck went down, Clementine convinced him to take a few days’ holiday at Chartwell. The house had been closed, the staff furloughed. It would be a spartan holiday. After dinner on the first night, Churchill lifted himself up from the table, took a step or two, lay down, and stretched out on the floor next to the table. There, while Clementine and Colville played backgammon, he proceeded to doze, unperturbed by the rattle of dice. The holiday was intended as a much-needed respite for Clementine as well as for Churchill. But the weather was cold, wet, and deplorable and Churchill was, in Colville’s words, “restless,” “brooding,” and “perturbed.” He left for London the next day. Always irritable around his staff, his peevishness even extended one morning to Clementine. He became, Colville wrote, “morose at lunch when he discovered Mrs. C had used some of his favorite honey, imported from Queensland, to sweeten the rhubarb.” Churchill, who had always mumbled to his ginger cat, goldfish, and ducks, now mumbled to himself. His health was taking the same turn as his moods. The head cold of early March had hung on, come and gone and come again, and at one point had festered into bronchitis, in part because he treated it with snuff,* which only made matters worse.287

  He displayed no generosity toward his colleagues, especially Eden, who, after months of diplomacy in the Balkans conducted at Churchill’s behest, was now soundly criticized by the press and Parliament. Churchill mounted no defense of Eden. Wavell, too, became a favorite Churchillian target, as did the press, the Royal Navy, and the “highly strung and quarrelsome” de Gaulle. The anger extended to Roosevelt’s habit (according to Churchill) of following American public opinion rather than leading it. Desperate for America to get in, and frustrated by its inertia, Churchill told Roosevelt, “I hope you forgive me if I say there is anxiety here…. What ever happens you may be sure we will fight on and I am sure we can at least save ourselves. But what good is that?”288

  With his defeats mounting, he took to interfering in matters best left to others. “John Peck and I agree that the P.M. does not help the government machine to run smoothly,” Colville noted in his diary. “He supplies drive and initiative, but he often meddles where he would better leave things alone and the operational side might profit if he gave it a respite.” The Admiralty, after the Bismarck episode, would have agreed, as would have Wavell. Yet how could Churchill give respite to his subordinates when Hitler gave none to Britain? The Blitz from April into early May had been as bloody as the previous autumn, with Clydeside, Liverpool, Belfast, and London hit. Was the renewed bombing campaign a softening up before invasion? With their Mediterranean positions tottering, with Hitler still at peace with Stalin, and with the beneficent spring weather upon the Channel, Britons could only wait for the answer.289

  As if to confirm their worst fears, during the final weeks of May, no bombs fell on London. A hush of suspense—as Churchill had termed the uneasy quiet before September 1939—again spread throughout the land. Other than the occasional German reconnaissance plane droning high overhead, the skies remained empty. The silence was unsettling. Beaverbrook told his fellow press magnate Lord Camrose that the Germans “would launch a very full attack against us… in the
next few days.” He emphasized “in the next few days” and added, “In my opinion invasion is imminent,” and although some people thought otherwise, “I know I am right.”290

  The Luftwaffe did not return to London in late May, nor in early June, nor again in any massed formations for almost three years. Sporadic night raids took place in retaliation for Churchill’s ongoing devastation of German cities, but the Luftwaffe was moving east, toward its jump-off points for a far greater, far more dangerous enterprise. Unknown to all the Englishmen who waited each night for the German raiders, the Blitz, part one, had ended on the terrible night of May 10.

  On May 28, after pondering for weeks the benefits to Britain of a violent German-American incident on the high seas, Churchill pushed the Admiralty to make such an incident happen. With Bismarck sunk but Prinz Eugen still on the loose, Churchill informed the first sea lord in a “Most Secret” memo of just how he’d like the cards played. The search for Prinz Eugen “raises questions of the highest importance. It is most desirable that the United States play a part in this. It would be far better, for instance, that she [Prinz Eugen] should be located by a United States ship, as this might tempt her to fire upon that ship, thus providing the incident for which the United States Government would be so thankful.” By orchestrating “a situation where Prinz Eugen is being shadowed by an American vessel, we have gone a long way to solve this largest problem.”291

  Although Roosevelt would not have been at all thankful for such an incident, the previous day he had taken a significant step in the direction of war. Moved by the distressing news of Bismarck’s raid, he went on the radio to declare an “emergency” in the Atlantic. He ordered the U.S. Navy Atlantic patrol zone pushed as far eastward as the security of American shipping demanded, even if that meant into the hottest war zones near Britain. Since Hitler’s U-boats did not operate in the western Atlantic, Roosevelt, by pushing his patrol zones eastward, appeared to be inviting a fight. More than eighty-five million Americans heard their president, at that time the largest radio audience in U.S. history. The speech interrupted the Dodgers game at Ebbets Field, the only instance before or since when an American major league ball game was preempted by a live presidential announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” intoned the Ebbets announcer, “the president of the United States.” Something big was up. Roosevelt was savvy enough to know that the mere interruption of regular broadcasting, more than his actual message, would powerfully convey his point, which was that America was almost but not quite at war: “It is unmistakably apparent to all of us that, unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.” He had not volunteered America to do the forceful checking—England was doing that—but he made clear that Hitler must be checked. This was significant. He had moved America a step closer to the battle.292

  On previous occasions Roosevelt, knowing the effect on Americans of the terrifying newsreels depicting London aflame, tried to instill a sense of urgency in his countrymen by claiming that German bombers had the range to bomb the American east coast. That was a stretch on Roosevelt’s part; other than Focke-Wulf 200s, German bombers lacked the range to reach much beyond the halfway point over the Atlantic. Roosevelt knew that no “weapons of destruction” would anytime soon arrive by air. After proffering his terrifying but impossible aerial scenario, Roosevelt turned to the Atlantic. The goal of the Axis powers was world domination, Roosevelt proclaimed; to attain it they must take control of the seas, and to take control of the seas they must defeat Britain. “They could then have the power to dictate to the Western Hemisphere. No spurious argument, no appeal to sentiment, no false pledges like those given by Hitler at Munich, can deceive the American people into believing that he and his Axis partners would not, with Britain defeated, close in relentlessly on this hemisphere of ours.” His words packed punch. “Yes, even our right of worship would be threatened. The Nazi world does not recognize any God except Hitler; for the Nazis are as ruthless as the Communists in the denial of God.” Roosevelt was prepared to start shooting in defense of international law. The mere threat of attack within the expanded patrol zone would henceforth be considered an attack upon America.293

  Roosevelt had spoken like a belligerent neutral, and Churchill read too much into the president’s words. The problem for Roosevelt was not how to provoke an incident, but how to avoid one. In any case, Prinz Eugen sailed home unmolested by the Royal Navy and undetected by the Americans. Churchill would have to wait for another incident to push America into war.

  As the troops who had fled Crete regrouped in Egypt, it became clear to Wavell that the entire Middle East command—navy, army, and air force—was so wounded that there really were no further offensive strategic gambles to take. It was time to dig in and await the Germans, from Syria to Tobruk, where the Australians already were dug in—dug in and cut off.294

  Churchill thought otherwise, and told Wavell “everything must be centered on destroying the German forces in the Western Desert.” The attack, code-named Battleaxe, was on for mid-June. Yet by the first of June not a single fully operational unit larger than a battalion remained of the 60,000 men—the best in his army—whom Wavell had ferried to Greece in March. Two entire divisions had vanished. More than 4,000 British and Anzac men had been killed, 8,000 wounded, and 21,000 captured in Greece and Crete, including the Royal Marines left behind on the beaches. Churchill later wrote that North Africa and the Balkans were but two theaters that formed part of a larger theater—the Mediterranean—which in turn was part of the European theater, with the Atlantic theater on one side and the Russian, after June 1941, on the other. Churchill stressed to the Commons that operations undertaken with the best of intentions within limited theaters (Norway, Greece, Crete, North Africa) that resulted in disasters did not necessarily spell the inevitability of defeat in the overall conflict. Yet as he had told Britons a year earlier, victory does not accrue from defeats and evacuations. Since Narvik, Britain had known nothing but defeats and evacuations.295

  Early June brought one small victory, but at the expense of further denuding Wavell’s army. Reports had arrived in Whitehall for weeks that the Vichy government in Syria was allowing Germans transit to Iraq. When in May, Vichy armed forces in Syria disputed the presence of Free French and British troops in Palestine and Transjordan, Churchill suggested to Wavell that he conduct a surprise attack on Vichy warships moored in Syrian ports, “killing without hesitation all who withstand us.” In early June, to forestall a large and dangerous German presence in Syria, made all the more easy by the fall of Crete, Wavell’s colonial and Free French troops wrenched Syria from Vichy France. Vichy and Free French forces fought their own little civil war for a week, but in the end, the British occupied Damascus. In a letter to Randolph, Churchill chimed that Syria was no longer “in the hands of the Frogs.” De Gaulle protested that Churchill had in effect stolen Syria. Churchill ignored de Gaulle; in fact, he told Colville he was “sick to death” of the Frenchman. This was a sentiment he expressed with increasing regularity over the next four years.296

  As the events of early June moved inexorably toward a climax in North Africa, both Rommel and Raeder saw that the supreme opportunity was at hand to crush the British in the eastern Mediterranean. Raeder drew up a naval plan to attack Alexandria and the Suez in consort with Rommel, who would push east from the Western Desert. Conceding to OKW the need to go ahead with Barbarossa—they could not persuade Hitler to postpone the Russian gambit, and knew it—they argued that a diversion to Egypt of less than one-quarter of the forces intended for the Soviet front would deal a fatal blow to the British in the Middle East. Churchill had been expecting just such a coordinated attack for more than a month, warning both Roosevelt and the War Cabinet that the loss of Egypt would be tantamount to the loss of the Home Island. It was a concern he voiced regularly, as his fortunes turned upon his “hinge of fate”—the Mediterranean.

  On June 6, Hitler
told his Wehrmacht commanders that during the coming battle in Russia, the commissars of the Soviet Union must all be killed. He added, “Any German soldier who breaks international law will be pardoned. Russia did not take part in the Hague convention and therefore has no rights under it.” Hitler’s hatred had overruled sound military strategy. At the very moment when he could kill the British in the Mediterranean, he rejected Rommel’s and Raeder’s plan to do so. He believed more important business needed to be conducted—the opening up of the Ostland to German soldier-farmers, and the business of securing that precious farmland by killing the racially impure, the vermin, who stood in his way—killing if need be all of the Slavs, Bolsheviks, commissars, judges, doctors, teachers, and especially, and first, all the Jews of Eastern Europe.297

  Summer was approaching, and shipping losses now far outstripped Britain’s capacity to replace them. That Churchill’s War Plans staff and their American counterparts had been meeting and planning in Washington, in secret, since February was comforting, but it didn’t save a single merchant ship. The Americans sent three battleships and the carrier Yorktown from their Pacific fleet to the Atlantic, which boded well for Churchill’s Atlantic convoys. Unfortunately, Admiral Stark, who opposed these moves, kept these warships near America’s east coast, which rendered them useless to the British. To the east, were Hitler to attack Russia, as Churchill believed he would, Britain might find itself better off overnight, but it would be short-lived if Hitler defeated Stalin quickly and decisively—which many in London and Washington thought a good bet. In that case, the Americans might rethink the wisdom of supporting Churchill, and Hitler at that point would have won his war, but for a final stroke against Britain. Always the possibility existed that some unexpected event, somewhere, might alter the American outlook, either to the betterment or detriment of Churchill’s European strategy.