The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  To the Chiefs of Staff he advocated less traditional means of helping the Russians. He told them to “make Hell while the sun shines.” Thus Churchill sent his beloved commandos out to ignite Norwegian warehouses and blow up Italian bridges. The results were so paltry—one or two Germans captured for three or four British casualties—that Churchill demanded the cabinet keep all news of commando results away from the press. If the Continent was ablaze, it was at the bidding of Hitler, not Churchill. And Stalin was on his own, alone with his hopes, as had been Churchill while England burned.327

  By September, Harriman, Beaverbrook, and Hopkins had made their way to Moscow to coordinate a rescue effort. Lend-Lease was Moscow bound. “You can trust him [Hopkins] absolutely,” Churchill cabled Stalin. “He is your friend and our friend.” Churchill, though disinclined to sacrifice British troops in France, nonetheless was eager to prove himself Stalin’s friend. When the service chiefs objected that “not a rowing boat, rifle, or Tiger Moth could be spared [for Stalin] without… grave risk” to England, he told them he expected all branches to give equally, and generously. For the remainder of the year, he made up the middle link in a three-man bucket brigade. He snatched from Roosevelt the munitions he sorely needed, dipped into his own stocks of tanks and guns, and passed everything along to Stalin via Arctic convoys and Iranian railroads. To further encourage Stalin, he promised that a “terrible winter of bombing lies before Germany. No one has yet had what they are going to get.”328

  Stalin was unmoved. He had twice, while pleading for a second front, reminded Churchill that Hitler had already dealt Russian soldiers and civilians more terrible blows than Churchill proposed to inflict on Germany a few months hence. The Red Army, not Churchill’s promise of a “terrible winter,” was all that stood between Hitler and Moscow. To encourage his armies to fight, Stalin proclaimed his policy regarding surrender. Up to a point, his words echo Churchill’s when Egypt appeared threatened: “Those falling into encirclement are to fight to the last and try to reach their own lines.” Yet where Churchill declared that to surrender if not surrounded and unarmed would result in dishonor, Stalin declared, “Those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any means, while their families are to be deprived of all state allowances and assistance.” Lest anyone doubt him, when Army Group Center overran Minsk just six days into the invasion, Stalin recalled to Moscow the general in charge of the city’s defense, Dmitry Pavlov. Pavlov and his top generals dutifully reported to the Kremlin, where they were tried, found guilty of incompetence, and summarily shot. Under Stalin, harshness in defense of the homeland took on new and unimaginable meaning. When he heard that the Germans were using tens of thousands of old men, women, and children as human shields, pushed along in front of the Wehrmacht as it approached Leningrad, and that the Bolshevik defenders of Leningrad held their fire for fear of injuring the civilians, he announced, “I think that if there are such people among the Bolsheviks, then they should be destroyed first, because they’re more dangerous than the German Fascists.”

  The citizens of Minsk might have disagreed; the Germans massacred thousands when the city surrendered in early July. From the Baltic to the Black Sea a war of annihilation had overtaken the dairy farms, granaries, small factories, and mills of Mother Russia. The peoples of White Russia, the Ukraine, and the Baltic states now found themselves crushed between two unforgiving armies—the largest in history—commanded by two unforgiving warlords.

  Churchill could not publicly excoriate Stalin for his myopia. He focused his anger on another blunder, one quite minor in the greater scheme of things. He just could not let go of Cripps’s bungling of the April telegram in which he had warned Stalin. Cripps’s delay roiled the Old Man well into the autumn, when far bigger fish were in need of frying. It was simply too much when he learned in the fall that Stalin had told Beaverbrook that he could not recall “when he was warned.” A half year had passed since Cripps’s error, and the Germans were by then hurtling toward the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. Stalin’s lack of concern when given credible warning was frustrating enough, but Cripps’s effrontery in sitting on his warning had infuriated Churchill for months. He told Eden, then in Moscow, that Cripps must bear “a great responsibility for his obstinate, obstructive handling of this matter.” Had Cripps “obeyed his instructions, it is more than possible that some kind of relationship would have been constructed between me and Stalin.”329

  That was unlikely. Stalin’s ongoing suspicion of Britain, not Cripps’s blunder, stood in the way of a relationship. In July 1940, Cripps had conveyed to Stalin Churchill’s warning of German designs in the East, which Stalin ignored and, incredibly, had actually passed on to Berlin in order to demonstrate his loyalty to Hitler. Cripps’s tenure as ambassador was marked by a measured and perceptive approach to the Soviet regime, which he rather admired. This was not a surprise, given his political persuasions, too far left even for his Labour Party. Cripps was a lawyer, considered by many the best in Britain. But Churchill cared little for the man’s legal talents; Cripps lacked the conviviality that Churchill desired in his companions. The ambassador came across as austere if not gloomy. He was both deeply religious and a vegetarian, a combination that had earned him around Whitehall the monikers of “Christ and Carrots” and “Stifford Crapps.” Years later, espying Cripps walking past (just out of earshot), Churchill offered, “There but for the grace of God goes God.” Yet many in Churchill’s circle considered Cripps’s talents wasted in Moscow and believed he could better serve the government in a post where his great intellect could be brought to bear. Churchill dismissed that notion, calling Cripps “a lunatic in a country of lunatics and it would be a pity to move him.”330

  The war had shifted east on June 22, and in so doing lowered the price Britons would pay in coming months to preserve their homeland. The price Russians would pay was incalculable, but Stalin let it be known that price was no object. Churchill believed that Stalin intended to fight to the end. To read of his demands on his people, and his threats to those who did not embrace the sacrifice required, is to shudder, in part because his show trials, his pogroms, and his gulags were all manifestations of who he was—a stone-cold killer. He had murdered to gain power, and murdered to keep it. No colleague ever wrote of Uncle Joe, as Churchill’s colleagues wrote of him, that he was all bluff and bluster. Stalin possessed none of Churchill’s eloquence, nor anything that could be called nobility of character. He saw no need to inspire his people, no need to ask his people to give their blood, toil, sweat, and tears. Yet, whatever their myriad differences in personality, politics, and spirituality, and they were profound, in Stalin Churchill had found an ally who, like himself, was willing to kill as many Germans as it took to defeat Hitler. Over the next three years, many in Washington and London came to believe that Stalin, like the Bolsheviks in the Great War, would quit if he could find a satisfactory way out. Churchill never believed that.

  Time magazine had just days before Hitler smashed into Russia noted under the headline of UNMURDEROUS WAR, the “most extraordinary thing about World War Two is not its speed, not its extent, not its tactical scope—but its relative unmurderousness.” This proved a colossal mischaracterization when, within four weeks, more soldiers and civilians perished by fire and steel in Russia than had been killed by any manner of weapons in all the previous twenty-two months of war in all of the European, Mediterranean, and African theaters. And it was only the beginning.331

  Stalin needed British and American help to make up his losses in matériel. Given that during the first seven weeks after the German invasion, only five American bombers were delivered to Russia, his prospects appeared bleak. Yet American bombers did not hold the key to Stalin’s survival. Millions of Soviet foot soldiers, armed and clothed and fed by America and Britain, and backed up by thousands of tanks, held the key. Stalin understood attrition. His war would be fought hand to hand and street by street for as long as Soviet soldiers stood. If they could buy enough time, Ch
urchill and Stalin had between them the makings of a lethal one-two punch. Churchill would one day possess enough airpower—supplied by American industrial muscle—to destroy German cities and every person within. “We will make Germany a desert,” he had told Colville, “yes, a desert.” Stalin, meanwhile, had the manpower to kill German soldiers indefinitely, if, that is, he and Churchill could buy enough time. America seemed to be edging closer to the conflict, yet Churchill had warned Harry Hopkins early in the year that in spite of re-armament plans, America was at least eighteen months—more likely two years—away from full production. That would put America in fighting trim by mid-1942 at the earliest, a half year too late were Hitler to finish off Stalin by Christmas 1941.332

  On July 20 a dinner was held at Chequers in honor of Harry Hopkins, who had arrived a few days earlier by way of a B-17 bomber. Hopkins brought smoked hams, cigars, and pledges of support from his boss, but carried no invitation for the meeting with Roosevelt that Churchill so craved. That alone would have been enough to put the P.M. in a funk, yet as frustrated as he was with Roosevelt’s inertia regarding a face-to-face meeting, he knew he could voice no such thoughts in front of Harry. He could, however, safely rail at the usual subjects—Mussolini and Hitler—and the need for revenge, and he did just that. He and Hopkins sat up chatting until almost 3:00 A.M. on the twenty-first, Churchill as usual doing most of the talking. Colville recalled, “When Winston started on what he was going to do to the Nazi leaders after the war—and the Nazi cities during it—Hopkins said that he—Winston—only read the bits of the Bible that suited him and they were drawn from the Old Testament.”333

  On July 24, Churchill received the invitation he had sought for so long. “Harry Hopkins came into the garden of Downing Street and we sat together in the sunshine. Presently he said that the president would like very much to have a meeting with me in some lonely bay or other.” Hopkins telephoned the president. Churchill was so enthused that when he got on the line, he mentioned “a certain rendezvous” before realizing that the line was not secure. He was mortified, Colville wrote. Mortified, but elated.334

  The time and place of the meeting—code-named Riviera—were agreed upon: sometime around August 9 or 10, at Argentia, Newfoundland, a small fishing village on Placentia Bay. By August 5 newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, having noted the disappearance of both Churchill and Roosevelt from their capitals, concluded a secret meeting was about to take place, somewhere in the northwest Atlantic. The United Press called it a “sea tryst.” Although Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s staffs maintained absolute secrecy, the boys of the press knew better, or thought they did. American reporters believed they saw their president on the deck of Potomac on the fifth when the presidential yacht steamed through Buzzards Bay, under the Boston & Maine railroad trestle, and north through the Cape Cod Canal. But the man wrapped in a shawl and waving from his deck chair was a Secret Service agent. Before dawn that morning, off Nantucket, Roosevelt had transferred from Potomac to the cruiser Augusta, which was now pounding north through the Bay of Maine.335

  Churchill entrained for Scapa Flow on August 3 in the company of Hopkins (just “returned dead-beat from Russia”), Harriman, Cadogan from the Foreign Office, and a bevy of private secretaries (but no female typists, for it was thought the journey too arduous for women). The Prof was on board; elevated to a barony, he had taken the title of Lord Cherwell of Oxford—a two-fingered poke in the eyes of his enemies among Oxford dons—as the River Cherwell runs through Oxford on its way to join the Thames. Inspector Thompson was making the trip, toting his trusty Colt. Churchill left his valet behind; the Old Man’s wardrobe and laundry duties—which were prodigious—fell to the gumshoe. The military was duly represented: Dill, Dudley Pound, and sundry colonels and group captains from the Defence Ministry, including Lieutenant Colonel Ian Jacob, who accompanied Churchill on most of his wartime journeys. It was a retinue, Colville recorded, that “Cardinal Wolsey might have envied.” Lunch on board the train consisted of sirloin steak followed by fresh raspberry and currant tart. Churchill took his with champagne. Jacob recalled Cherwell calculating on his slide rule (at Churchill’s request) the amount of champagne the Old Man had consumed in his lifetime, given that he claimed, “I have drunk fine Champagne with every dinner for the past twenty-years.” Cherwell’s answer—slightly less champagne than the volume of the railroad car—was a source of mild disappointment for Churchill. He was in fine fettle.336

  Late on the afternoon of August 4, the entourage departed Scapa Flow aboard Prince of Wales, its scars inflicted by Bismarck erased by new bulkheads and a fresh layer of gray paint. Captain Leach—the object of Churchill’s wrath after the Bismarck chase—was in command. The ship ran fast, blacked out, and in complete radio silence. Were Churchill to need any medical attention while on board he would have to see the ship’s doctor. Clementine had pleaded with him to take along his physician, Dr. Wilson, but Winston declined, averse as he was to the possibility that the American president might catch sight of a stethoscope following the British prime minister around. Brendan Bracken, newly named head of the Ministry of Information, had suggested Churchill take along cameramen and ministry scribes to record the important, though largely symbolic meeting. Churchill heartily embraced that idea. This being a sea journey, and his every move being filmed, he chose a naval theme from his ample wardrobe, including a dark blue Royal Navy sea coat—the mess dress of the Royal Yacht Squadron—nicely set off by a seaman’s cap. Thus attired, he chugged up and down ladders and along the lower decks of Prince of Wales (rising seas having rendered the quarterdeck unsafe), looking like a busy little tugboat captain. After dinner on the fifth, the party viewed Pimpernel Smith, with Leslie Howard, before turning in around midnight. The seas grew heavier and the great ship heaved. Churchill, finding the voyage a respite from the confines of London, retired to his cabin near the bridge with a C. S. Forester novel, Captain Hornblower R.N.337

  As the ship lurched westward, Churchill brooded over his prospects in the Western Desert, where his tanks had taken a beating at the hands of Rommel. He dictated a memo to the Chiefs of Staff admonishing them to “find a way to restore artillery to its prime importance upon the battlefield, from which it has been ousted by heavily armoured tanks.” The father of the tank was harboring doubts about his offspring, yet he should have known after the lessons of France and the Western Desert that the skillful deployment of massed tanks counted for far more than the thickness of their skin. Sheer volumes of tanks, supported by fighter aircraft, could overrun almost any position. The agenda for the coming meeting included tanks, thousands more tanks, made in America. But how many would go to Britain, to be deployed by Churchill where he saw fit, and how many to Russia, where they were most needed?338

  He therefore decided en route that he needed Beaverbrook at the meeting. The Beaver, asthmatic and claustrophobic, hated the freezing confines of bombers as much as he loathed being stuffed belowdecks on a ship. Still, he made his way to Newfoundland by airplane, arriving after a twelve-hour journey. The plane following, which carried Arthur Purvis, head of the British Supply Council, crashed into a hill shortly after takeoff, killing Purvis and his entire staff. The loss of Purvis (who had overseen British munitions purchases from America during the Great War) was “grievous,” Churchill later wrote. When the news broke, Beaverbrook “made no comment. It was wartime.” Beaverbrook, exhausted and not as well liked by the Americans as Purvis, would have to bear the burden of resupply alone, a burden made heavier by Churchill’s long shopping list, the pages of which he separated with a little red leather strip on which were engraved the words “Ask, and it shall be given. Seek and ye shall find.” Inspector Thompson, catching sight of the strip, remarked that the words were a good omen. Churchill agreed: “Yes, Thompson, I hope it is a good omen, for I have much to ask for.”339

  His sought far more than supplies. He planned to ask Roosevelt to take the necessary diplomatic steps—and military, if need be—to garr
ison U.S. troops, aircraft, and ships in the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. To do so would violate Portuguese sovereignty, but Churchill could no longer afford to abide by diplomatic niceties. And, given Britain’s weak position in Asia, he intended to ask Roosevelt to issue an extraordinary warning to Japan: Cease immediately all further territorial expansion or the United States would go to war. Churchill’s motive was transparent. Any explosion in Asia that brought the Americans in against Japan could only strengthen Britain’s precarious position in the Far East. He considered the present about as fine a time as any to force Japan’s hand. To guarantee that neither Roosevelt nor the State Department diluted the intended message, he set about drafting the threat himself.340

  On August 6, Roosevelt and Churchill sped toward their rendezvous, their actual whereabouts still unknown to the press. That day the editors of one of America’s most widely read newspapers, the Brooklyn Eagle, concluded, for no other reason than “the inability of American and British officials to deny” the rumors, that a meeting was indeed about to take place. Two nights later, Churchill took in That Hamilton Woman, which crudely plumbed the parallel between Britain’s struggles with Napoleon and Hitler. It starred Laurence Olivier as Nelson, grimacing behind his blind eye, and Vivian Leigh (Olivier’s wife of one year). Miss Leigh’s “dramatic progress,” a U.S. critic mused, “has left her only a gender’s distance from Mickey Rooney.” The film, a romantic hash Churchill much enjoyed (he penned a congratulatory note to the producer, Alexander Korda), treated of Nelson’s affair with Emma Hamilton, wife of the British ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples. The movie gave Churchill all of his victories that year; five times he viewed the movie, and five times Nelson emerged victorious. Churchill, Cadogan recalled, was “moved to tears” at the film’s climax, when the mortally wounded Admiral Nelson is told the battle is won. When the lights went up, Churchill addressed some of the ship’s crew who lingered in the wardroom: “Gentlemen, I thought this film would interest you, showing great events similar to those in which you have been taking part.” Cadogan retired for the evening, leaving Churchill and Hopkins at backgammon. Churchill’s luck was running strong; he took the American for the equivalent of almost two hundred dollars.341