The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Stafford Cripps came for lunch that day, June 22, during which Churchill baited the ambassador by calling the Russians “barbarians” and offering that “not even the slightest thread connected communists to the very basest type of humanity.” Colville recalled that Cripps took it “in good part and was amused.” Churchill was roused. Reversing his prediction of the previous day, that Russia would soon lose, he offered five-hundred-to-one odds that Russia would still be fighting, indeed, “fighting victoriously,” two years hence. He adjourned to his study to prepare his speech and remained there for the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening. It was a lengthy speech, an address at once lyrical, poetic, and powerful, promising the free world redemption and Hitler destruction. It was an address that no modern committee of speechwriters could produce, for Churchill painted with his words, creating images that, like all great art, become more real than the scenes depicted, and more evocative than the sum of his grammatical strokes and rhetorical shadings. Colville recalled that, as with his paintings, Churchill made revisions and added final touches to the speech, right up to nine o’clock, the hour of delivery. And as with his paintings, his intent was to challenge his listeners’ imaginations and not merely their intellect.312

  His pace was measured. The invasion of Russia, he declared, was one of the “climacterics of the war,” wherein all of Hitler’s “usual formalities of perfidy were observed with scrupulous technique.” He tagged Hitler “a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder” and “a bloodthirsty guttersnipe” who found satisfaction “grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and rights of millions of men.” The Führer’s bloodlust, moreover, “must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil,” an oblique way of saying that were Hitler to steal enough Soviet oil, just imagine the places he would go. And although he did not employ the phrase “unconditional surrender,” he set out his terms of war, and of peace, which could only be termed unequivocal and unconditional: “We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.” And: “We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang.” Britain would take the fight to Hitler on the land, in the air, and on the sea until “we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke.” He took a few moments to remind his listeners that “no one has been a more consistent opponent of communism than I have for the last twenty-five years,” but said that “all this fades away before the spectacle that is unfolding.” Without naming Stalin, he declared that the past “with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies flashes away.” And then he treated of the struggle in the style of a perfectly scored symphony, where the spaces between the notes carry as much weight as the notes themselves:

  I see the ten thousand villages of Russia, where the means of existence was wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play. I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers…. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts…. Behind all this glare, behind all this storm, I see that small group of villainous men [who launched] this cataract of horrors upon mankind.

  This was not a class war, he offered, but a war to rescue mankind from tyranny, fought “without distinction of race, creed, or party.” And lest after such a performance Britons might still hesitate to fight and die for Stalin and his creedless Communists, he brought the Soviet battle home to Britons by declaring it “no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles.” He closed with a message to both Britons and Americans: “The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States.”313

  He had more than put in a kind word for the devil; he had rehabilitated him and outfitted him with wings and a halo. An old Balkan proverb (one of Roosevelt’s favorites) proclaimed that it is permissible to walk hand in hand with Satan when crossing a bridge over a chasm. Churchill had just made the transit.314

  Harold Nicolson thought the address “a masterpiece.” Although Churchill conveyed the sense that Russia might fall—and China, Europe, and India—“he somehow leaves us with the impression that we are going to win this war.” Yet Nicolson believed the Russians, “incompetent and selfish… will be bowled over in a touch.”315

  Churchill again had displayed his genius for inspirational rhetoric, but a transformation of sorts was taking place. Sir John Keegan pegs the invasion of Russia as the moment when Churchill’s “campaign of bold words” began to give way “to a battle of brute facts.” The real killing—in numbers even Stalin could not yet imagine—had begun.316

  Hitler’s astounding betrayal of his partnership with the Russians paralyzed Stalin and many of his senior commanders. Soon after the attack began, a field officer used his radio to inform his superiors that his unit was under fire. He asked, “What shall we do?” He was told, “You must be insane,” and reprimanded for making the call on an open frequency. Not until the Germans had advanced twenty miles did Stalin begin to grasp the situation, and not until late in the evening did the Soviet government inform its citizens that Germany had invaded the Motherland. Molotov, not Stalin, made the announcement. No official reaction to Churchill’s speech came out of Moscow. Stalin remained in his dacha for a week, stunned, as Hitler’s three army groups struck two hundred miles into Soviet territory. When Molotov encouraged him to return to the Kremlin, Stalin replied, “Lenin left us a great legacy, and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up.”317

  Such was his shock that Stalin did not broadcast any message to his nation until July 3. When he spoke, listeners heard the tremulousness in his voice and the clinking of a glass as he refreshed his throat. By then Finland had joined the German ranks and the front extended a further six hundred miles, from the Baltic to Petsamo on the Arctic Ocean. The Finns attacked the northern flank as the Romanians did at the southern, while the Germans mauled the center.

  With the Führer’s turn eastward, the threat to Britain of invasion vanished—for the time being. In his memoirs Churchill captured his joy at hearing of Hitler’s foray with two words: “Eastward ho!” Yet on the morning of the invasion, his grin had been one of grim determination, for he understood that unless the Russians became the first Europeans to keep up the fight against the Wehrmacht, the consequences for Britain would, in the end, prove fatal. The Russians did not have to defeat the Germans (they could not), but they had to keep up the fight. As events developed on the Russian front over the next several months, Churchill stood firm on that premise. At an August meeting of the War Cabinet, he offered that were “Germany to beat Russia to a standstill and the United States had made no further advance toward entry into the war, there was a danger that the war might turn against us.” “Standstill” meant stasis, which next to an outright Russian defeat was what Churchill most feared. “Standstill” meant breathing room for Hitler, but not for England. Weeks later Churchill telegrammed Roosevelt to share his concern that “as soon as Hitler stabilizes the Russian front, he will begin to gather perhaps fifty or sixty divisions in the west for the invasion of the British Isles.” Indeed, Hitler had strong forces in the west, although the Luftwaffe had gone east, and the French ports contained few invasion barges. But that could change.318

  Churchill, therefore, told his ministers that Britain must remain prepared to repel an invasion. He did so in part because the collateral benefit of preparation was the creation of forces that he could deploy elsewhere. Two memos that Churchill sent to his ministers days after Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin capture the workings of his mind. The first reduces his invasion strategy to its essence. In it he told Dill and Ismay that September 1 would be a good date to announce that anti-invasion defenses had been brought to the highest efficiency. He added, “It would be necessary to make it clear… that meanwhile no vigilance is to be relaxed. On the contrary, a note of invasion alar
m should be struck, and everybody set to work with redoubled energy.” Then, to the real root of the matter: “This however, must not prevent the dispatch of necessary reinforcements to the Middle-East.”319

  The second memo captures the collision of logic, intuition, and imagination that made Churchill who he was (and regularly confused his generals, and was beginning to confuse his American friends). In it, he told Dill and secretary of state for war David Margesson that the success of German parachutists on Crete raised a new and disturbing specter: “We have to contemplate the descent from the air of perhaps a quarter of a million parachutists, glider-borne or crash-landed airplane troops.” This was the aeronautical equivalent of his outrageous claim the previous autumn that 500,000 German troops could be carried to England by ship, in a single sailing. Churchill did not know the exact numbers of German parachutists killed on Crete, but he knew that of a force of around nine thousand, about half had been killed; of the five hundred Ju 52s that carried them, about half had been destroyed. This, to capture three airfields. The Ju 52, when configured for civilian duties, carried seventeen passengers. Lufthansa, the German airline, flew Ju 52s; Hitler’s private plane had been one, until he switched to a Focke-Wulf 200. Configured for military use, the Ju 52 could carry about a dozen parachutists. Thus, at least 21,000 Ju 52s would be required in order to land 250,000 parachutists on England’s scores of airfields in a single drop. Germany had built only about 3,000 of the aircraft since its introduction in 1931. But Churchill could not rest on the assumption that Hitler lacked such a massive air fleet; perhaps the Führer had been building airplanes in some huge, secret underground factory. Churchill’s solution was to order that every one of the RAF’s 500,000 support personnel, “without exception,” should be armed “with a rifle, a tommy gun, a pistol, a pike or a mace” in order to greet the enemy when he came. If the enemy did not come, Churchill would be in possession of 500,000 weapons—made in America—that he could someday issue to his armies, when the day came that they ventured back into Europe.320

  That day, he told Roosevelt in July, would come in 1943, after subjecting Germany and Italy to naval blockade and “ceaseless and ever growing air bombardment. These measures may themselves produce an internal convulsion or collapse.” That statement captures the essence of Churchill’s war strategy, and his faith in airpower. But plans should be made, Churchill added, to land “armies of liberation when opportunity is ripe.” Those landings, in turn, would be spearheaded by thousands of tanks off-loaded from the special tank ships Churchill was asking Roosevelt to build. In coming weeks Churchill made clear where he envisioned those landings would someday take place: in Norway and French North Africa. In the meantime, Churchill told Roosevelt, he intended to bring his tanks to Cyrenaica, to battle Germans and Italians. Churchill’s telegrams to Roosevelt in the weeks after the Russian invasion foreshadow a disagreement over strategic priorities that would bedevil the Anglo-American partnership for the next three years. George Marshall and his military advisers did not contest Churchill’s call for tanks, especially as Churchill was fighting Hitler, where the Americans were not. “The tools” were Churchill’s to use as he saw fit. Marshall and his planning staff had for months been forming a strategy in the event that America’s civilian leadership sent the U.S. army into war. Marshall’s preferred strategy was simplicity itself: Carry American armies to England, and from there take them to Europe by the shortest and straightest line, across the Channel and into France. This was the direct approach, versus Churchill’s indirect approach, which was coming now into focus.321

  But the invasion of Russia had changed the calculus of tanks and their deployment. Stalin needed tanks, now. For that reason, Churchill demanded that Britain must do for Russia what Roosevelt was doing for Britain—supply the tools, not only because to do so was the best way to help Russia, but because it was the best way to keep the wolf away from Britain. He knew just the man to produce the tools. Within the week, Beaverbrook took over the Ministry of Supply, which together with the ministries of Aircraft Production and Labour formed a three-legged beast that addressed the matériel needs of the armed forces. Immediately the Beaver ordered more factories built, more night shifts, and instilled in the department a sense of urgency he found lacking. The ministry dealt mostly with the army. When Churchill wanted bombers in January, the Beaver had delivered. Now Churchill wanted tanks, for Stalin, who Beaverbrook believed could survive if reinforced rapidly and heavily enough. Beaverbrook produced the tanks and in coming months persuaded the Americans to produce more, thousands more. “Some people take drugs,” Churchill told Colville. “I take Max.”322

  By mid-July Stalin had recovered enough of his composure to request that Churchill establish “a front against Hitler in the West [France] and in the North [the Arctic].” By such maneuvers, he argued, “the military situation of the Soviet Union, as well as Great Britain, would be considerably improved.” Then, either because he was still in shock or simply ignorant of British public opinion, Stalin proclaimed that such a front “would be popular with the British Army as well as the whole population of southern England.”323

  Thus began Stalin’s crusade for a second front. Within weeks he enlarged upon his request by asking Churchill “to create in the present year a second front somewhere in the Balkans or France, capable of drawing away from the Eastern front thirty to forty [German] divisions.” Stalin asked for 400 aircraft and 500 tanks per month, twice the quantities Britain had available, along with the delivery within three weeks of 30,000 tons of aluminum, enough to build more than 10,000 fighter planes. Then, Stalin offered, “It seems to me that Great Britain could without risk land in Archangel twenty-five to thirty divisions” in order to establish “military collaboration” between the Soviets and British on Russian soil. Churchill not only lacked the transports to dispatch thirty divisions—more than 450,000 men—to Russia, he lacked the divisions. Thanks to Churchill’s “invasion scare” re-armament program, thirty just happened to be the number of combat-ready divisions Churchill had in England that summer. Stalin wanted them all.

  Stalin’s request, Churchill later wrote, was “almost incredible,” and indicated “a man thinking in terms of utter unreality.” Cripps, always eager to help the Soviets, suggested that Churchill display his solidarity by sending just a few British divisions to fight alongside the Russians. Churchill attached much irony to the pleas of Cripps and Stalin, because just the previous year there had been a second front, in France. And just three months before Hitler smashed into Russia, Churchill had pushed into another front, the Balkans, thereby buying Stalin several more weeks to take defensive steps. But Stalin, secure in his pact with Hitler, chose to sit on the fence as events played out in France and in the Balkans. Now, he had no fence to sit on; the Wehrmacht had obliterated it. Churchill told Cripps as much after Cripps called for a “super-human effort” to help the Russians: “It is not our fault that Hitler was enabled to destroy Poland before turning his forces against France, and to destroy France before turning them against Russia.” As for any “super-human effort” “rising superior to space, time, and geography, unfortunately these attributes are denied us.”324

  When Cripps implied that the Soviets justly distrusted the British given Churchill’s refusal to send men to Russia or invade France, Churchill—still fuming over Cripps’s failure to deliver his April warning to Stalin—sent a scathing reply: “We have acted with absolute honesty. We have done our very best to help them at the cost of… exposing ourselves… when the spring invasion season comes.” To send two or three divisions to Russia “would be silly” and result in those troops being “cut to pieces as a symbolic sacrifice.” The Soviets, he told Cripps, had “brought their own fate upon themselves when… they let Hitler loose on Poland, and so started the war.” That the Russian government would “accuse us of trying to gain advantage… at their expense… leaves me quite cold. If they harbor suspicions it is only because of the guilt and self-reproach in their own hea
rts.”325

  There would be no second front anytime soon. Churchill could not comply with Stalin’s wishes, and the Chiefs of Staff would not, even had Churchill been so inclined. It was simply unthinkable, Churchill informed Cripps, to contemplate a return to France, where “the bloody repulse… that would be sustained” would result in “the loss of the Battle of the Atlantic and the starvation and ruin of the British Isles.” The British Expeditionary Force had been swept from France in 1940 and again just weeks earlier from Greece and Crete. Churchill could do no more. Hitler, Churchill informed both Cripps and Stalin, had “forty divisions in France alone.” As well, “the whole coast has been fortified with German diligence… and bristles with cannon, wire, pill-boxes, and beach mines.” Any British invasion “would only lead to fiascos” and “would be over without them [the Germans] having to move or before they could move a single unit from your [Russian] front.” As for a new Balkan front, it had taken seven weeks to land just two unopposed divisions in Greece. The best he could do, he told Stalin, was to send submarines to patrol the Arctic, and dispatch a few fighter squadrons to Murmansk, the vital and northernmost ice-free port in the Soviet Union.326