The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  But why? No treaty obligated the United States to do so. And declare war on whom? Japan, possibly but not necessarily, and certainly not on Germany, where Churchill most needed America. Although Churchill pledged to Roosevelt in late October to declare war on Japan “within the hour” if Japan mixed it up with the Americans, Roosevelt had made no corresponding pledge should Japanese armies pour into Singapore or Hong Kong. A Japanese move against the Americans—which Churchill all year made clear he did not expect—would not necessarily bring America into Churchill’s war against Hitler. Only two events could bring that about, the first being an act of war by Hitler against America; yet he had already attacked the U.S. Navy three times without triggering a declaration of war. The second scenario would find Hitler declaring war on the United States in support of his Asian ally were Japan to attack America. The latter possibility, an invitation to ultimate German and Japanese obliteration, was almost too preposterous even for Churchill to contemplate, for only a fool or a madman would declare war on America where no state of war existed. And yet, Churchill long held to another maxim regarding the human condition and warfare: “Madness is however an affliction which in war carries with it the advantage of surprise.”372

  Thanks to the Bletchley crowd, Churchill had known since August that Josef (“Sepp”) Dietrich, a general in the Waffen-SS and one of Hitler’s oldest favorite cronies, had assured the Japanese ambassador in Berlin—in Hitler’s name—that “Germany would at once declare hostilities in the event of a collision between Japan and the United States.” Hitler would prove himself a madman later in the war, but in 1941 he was on top of his game. Given his craftiness and pathological willingness to lie, his message to the Japanese, relayed through Dietrich, meant everything, and nothing. The Führer might join the Japanese if they attacked British or American interests; then again, he might not.373

  Churchill told the War Cabinet in November that he did not want to be boxed in by “an automatic declaration of war” against Japan that would “give the anti-British party [American isolationists] cause for saying that the United States were again being dragged into a British colonial war.” By then he understood that America had to go in first, and that nothing short of an attack against America could bring that about.374

  Throughout most of 1941, Churchill ascribed to Japan sober enough judgment to not willingly and with forethought provoke the Americans into war, an opinion shared by the American isolationists. Robert McCormick’s Tribune declared in late October that Japan “cannot attack us” and that Pearl Harbor “is beyond the effective striking power of her fleet.” Yet Churchill also understood that Roosevelt’s ban on oil sales to Japan had been a virtual act of war, one that Japan’s war minister, Hedeki Tojo, could not abide, for reasons of both national pride and national survival. Tojo’s elevation to prime minister (he remained war minister, as well) in mid-October should have served to close the debate on Japan’s immediate inclinations; the war faction in Tokyo had swept away all of the moderates. For Tojo, if the stakes were Japan’s survival, which they now were, any distance and any objective, including Pearl Harbor, four thousand miles from Tokyo, must be overcome. McCormick, his head in the sand, can be forgiven his limited vision. But Churchill should have seen Tojo coming. American oil had propelled the Japanese navy for years, until just five months earlier. Only the Dutch East Indies could now supply that oil. And in order to take the Dutch refineries, the Japanese would first have to take Singapore.375

  Yet Churchill considered the Japanese to be an obedient and compliant race, which, once warned against aggression, as he had done, would heed the warnings. Hugh Dalton, who thought Churchill’s demeaning public references to the Japanese “rude,” captured the essence of the Old Man’s rationale: “The PM does not think the Japs will go to war with us,” because he had given the Japanese “very serious warnings” against further aggression in the Pacific.376

  That Churchill spoke of the Japanese as he might of little children, and to further presume that continued Japanese pursuit of an Asian empire could be forestalled by his “very serious warnings,” and to still further presume that Japan’s strategic plan was somehow conditional on Hitler’s successful invasion of Britain, betrays a dangerous Anglocentric naïveté. Britain was Churchill’s Home Island; the British Empire, including the autonomous commonwealths, spanned the globe, which made Britain, in that sense, the world’s only global power. Although England’s geographical position, within sight of the French coast, was strategically critical to Hitler, it was not to Tojo. Singapore held far more significance than London for the Japanese.

  Singapore’s six-year-old naval base—twenty-six square miles of protected anchorage, and built to send a clear message to Japan—straddled the sea-lanes to and from the resources Japan most needed, Dutch East Indies oil and Malaya rubber. It had been Hitler’s strategic misfortune to knock his head against the unyielding wall of fortress Britain for more than a year. Singapore, for the Japanese, was another matter entirely. It was many things—symbolic of British imperial might, one of the world’s great harbors—but given its defenses, it was no fortress. Churchill considered Singapore his Far Eastern jewel. Tojo considered it as nothing more than a target of opportunity.

  Throughout November, in a furious flow of telegraphic traffic, Churchill and Roosevelt discussed, and pondered, Japan. The British, having been given access to the American Magic intelligence (which decrypted Japanese diplomatic messages, but not Japanese military communications), could read the tea leaves as well as the Americans could. The Magic decrypts hinted that Japan might take extreme but unspecified measures were its demands—including Japanese hegemony in China—not met. Still, the Americans and Japanese held talks in Washington, with Roosevelt keeping Churchill apprised of the progress or lack thereof. Japanese ambassador Numura and special envoy Saburu Kurusu presented U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull a modus vivendi that “might give the Japanese government opportunity to develop public sentiment in Japan in support of a… comprehensive program of peace.” Roosevelt considered the proposals inadequate and “not in harmony” with America’s “fundamental principles” and demands. “I am not very hopeful,” he cabled Churchill on November 24, “and we must all be prepared for real trouble, possibly soon.”377

  On Sunday, November 30, Churchill turned sixty-seven. He was now just three years shy of the Bible’s allotted three score and ten years, and by any measure, biblical or actuarial, he was indeed an old man. He looked it. His face was deeply creased; his fair skin, which had always exuded a healthy glow, seemed pinched and parched. His stoop was more pronounced. He wore his scowl in public and in the Commons, for the benefit of the press photographers, who that year rarely captured him with any other expression. Before he retired to bed in the early hours of his birthday he cabled Roosevelt—his junior by almost eight years—and again, as he had in May, with full knowledge of Roosevelt’s “constitutional difficulties” asked the president—in a roundabout way—to declare war, this time against Japan. The plan, as Churchill outlined it, would have Roosevelt tell the Japanese that any further aggression, anywhere and against anyone, would result in Roosevelt placing “the gravest issues before Congress, or words to that effect.” Churchill, as he had in May, apologized to Roosevelt for the temerity of his suggestion, which given the very real constitutional restraints Roosevelt indeed labored under was impossible to execute. “Forgive me, my dear friend,” he wrote, “for presuming to press such a course upon you, but I am convinced that it might make all the difference and prevent a melancholy extension of the war.”378

  Birthday salutations arrived from around the world. The King and Queen sent along greetings in a message that would have been a firing offense for a Hallmark copywriter: “Many happy returns on the day from us both.” Churchill dutifully thanked Their Majesties for the “charming message which I received and read with great pleasure.” Beaverbrook dispatched a rather more emotional message: “This letter carries Birthday greetings of a
difficult colleague & devoted follower…. For those who have served you it will be sufficient glory to be known as Churchill’s man.” And from Harry Hopkins: “Dear Winston. Happy birthday. How old are you anyway?”379

  Dill sent greetings, a gentlemanly gesture given that Churchill had just two weeks earlier approved the general’s promotion to field marshal and then sacked him. Their relationship had long been unsatisfactory, with Dill unwilling to stand up to Churchill, who was unwilling to appreciate Dill’s caution in the face of overwhelming German military superiority in Russia, where Dill foresaw likely defeat for Stalin. That Dill was sixty, the mandatory retirement age for regular army officers, offered Churchill a convenient means of easing him out.* He chose not to consult Eden in the matter. When Eden, who thought Churchill underrated Dill (the P.M. called him “Dilly-Dally”), expressed his chagrin for sacking the CIGS without consulting the Foreign Office, the Old Man replied that he had done so because “I know you will not agree.” That was how he conducted his business. When a subordinate objected to a scheme, Churchill badgered the protester. When a subordinate gave in without a fight, Churchill doubted the man’s fighting spirit. Colville had noted two months earlier that Churchill’s dagger was in Dill’s back; in late November he gave it the final twist.380

  Dill’s replacement as CIGS was the commander in chief of Home Forces, General Sir Alan Brooke, a slim fifty-seven-year-old Ulsterman and soon to be the most famous of the Brookes of Colebrooke, a family long known for its military service to the Crown. Twenty-six members of his Ulster clan had fought in the Great War, twenty-seven were fighting in World War Two. The Brookes embodied the spirit of Cuchulain, the mythical Ulster warrior hero; they lived to fight.

  Knighted for his heroics at Dunkirk, Sir Alan Brooke was an outdoorsman and avid bird-watcher. In the opinion of Bernard Montgomery, he proved himself “the greatest soldier—soldier, sailor, airman—produced by any country” during the war. Brooke told his diary that he was wary of Churchill’s “impetuous nature, his gambler’s spirit, and his determination to follow his own selected path at all costs.” Brooke (“Brookie” to his friends) was not a churchgoing man, but upon Churchill’s elevating him to CIGS, the new chief’s “first impulse was to kneel down and pray to God for guidance and support” in working with Churchill. His new boss had his own reservations about Brooke: “I know these Brookes,” Churchill told Ismay, “stiff necked Ulstermen, and there’s no one worse to deal with than that.” Actually, Brooke’s older brother Victor had been Churchill’s best friend in India, and Alan Brooke had commanded II Corps in France with honor and distinction. Like Churchill, he did not countenance woolly thinking. His usual rejoinder in a debate was brutally straightforward—“I flatly disagree,” often accompanied by the snapping of a pencil. His nickname in the War Office was Colonel Shrapnel. He combined prudence and rigor; he was both feared and liked by his men. He disliked flamboyance, and therefore disliked Churchill’s cronies, especially Beaverbrook. Brooke found himself “revolted” one evening at Chequers as Beaverbrook poured “himself one strong whiskey after another…. The more I saw of him throughout the war, the more I disliked and distrusted him.” For Brooke, self-control was a duty, for Churchill, an impediment to life’s joys. Both men tended to demean lesser minds, and both, having experienced the slaughter of the Great War (Brooke at the Somme), resisted any strategic initiatives that might result in static lines and a repetition of that slaughter. Both were stubborn. In the years to come when Brooke went up against Churchill, he always gave as good as he got. Brooke, too, sent along birthday greetings.381

  Jock Colville had not sent a birthday message, busy as he was earning two shillings a day as a pilot trainee in the RAF. Churchill, over the objections of Eden, had in September finally given his blessings to Colville’s aviation ambitions, telling the young secretary that his patriotism was “gallant.” When they said their good-byes in the Cabinet Room, Churchill offered his hand and parting words: “I have the greatest affection for you; we all have, Clemmie and I especially. Goodbye and God bless you.” Colville departed with “a lump in my throat such that I had not had for many years.” Within several weeks, somebody with great influence prevailed upon the Treasury to raise Colville’s pay to the £400 per year he had earned while on Churchill’s staff.382

  L. S. Amery, in a birthday tribute voiced during a BBC broadcast, called Churchill “the spirit of old England incarnate, with its unshakeable self-confidence, its grim gaiety, its unfailing sense of humour… its unflinching tenacity. Against that inner unity of spirit between leader and nation the ill-cemented fabric of Hitler’s perversion of the German soul must be shattered in the end.”383

  Tojo’s ongoing perversion of the Japanese soul was manifested by his threats that week to cut the Burma Road in order to inflict new terrors upon the Yunnan province of China. Chiang Kai-shek appealed to Churchill for help, specifically to fill the Burma Road with trucks bearing arms. Churchill had to inform Chiang that no help would be forthcoming. As he explained to Roosevelt, Britain was “tied up elsewhere.” Tied down, tied up, it was all the same—he lacked the means to further his own cause, let alone Chiang’s. Ever optimistic, Churchill was pleased that Emperor Hirohito appeared to be “exercising restraint” even though the Anglo-American embargo was “forcing Japan to decisions of peace and war.” He was correct, but Tojo, not the poetically inclined Hirohito, would make the final decision. Churchill, clinging to his belief that the Japanese would pursue a sane course in the Pacific, ended his message to Roosevelt with a prediction: “I think myself that Japan is more likely to drift into war than to plunge in.”384

  On his birthday he told the War Office that war with Japan would “prejudice our chances of defeating Germany.” Above all, he advised, “Our policy must… be avoidance of war with Japan.” But that choice—war or peace in the Pacific—rested entirely with Japan.385

  Churchill had much to be grateful for; he was in good health, Clementine and the children likewise. Mary, just eighteen, had enlisted in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and was posted to an AA battery near Enfield. Randolph was back behind the lines in Cairo after seeing action in the Western Desert. He had been promoted to major and made a press liaison, a safe posting that afforded him nightly opportunities to drink, gamble (without success), and chase women. To his father Randolph conveyed his “love and deepest admiration.” Diana, prone as was her mother to severe bouts of nervous tension, did her duty as an air-raid warden, an unlikely sight, Sarah recalled, dressed in trousers and high heels. She also had been keeping vigil for months at the bedside of her husband, Duncan Sandys, as he recovered after suffering crushed legs in an auto accident. Sandys, wounded in the abortive Norway operation, had harbored hopes of returning to the field, until the car crash. He had since resumed work on his radar and anti-aircraft projects, including rockets, for which he had developed an affinity. Churchill sought to appoint Sandys under secretary for foreign affairs, a critical position, and one for which Sandys possessed no qualifications. Eden objected. Churchill dropped the scheme but brought Sandys into the War Office, an act of such flagrant nepotism that John Peck offered Colville five pounds if he suggested to the Old Man that Vic Oliver be made head of the Ministry of Information.386

  Vic Oliver sent birthday greetings but had months earlier gone his own way when he and Sarah parted company for good. Clementine had grown fond of Vic, but Churchill had never bothered to get to know him. Sarah, commissioned in the Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force, applied herself to learning the skills of photographic interpretation. Her acting career, such as it was, would have to remain on ice for the duration, but she had never possessed either great talent or a great following, and would never do so. She did possess and heavily indulged an affinity for fine wine and good liquor, but unlike her father did not possess the requisite metabolic talent to both drink freely and function flawlessly. She was stubborn, like her father, and Churchill had long ago given her the nickname, “The Mule.” It stuck. Ch
urchill expressed his pride at The Mule’s secret work, but other than an occasional dinner at Chequers, Sarah—in fact, all of the children—had seen little of their father that year. For that matter, Clementine did not see all that much of her husband.387

  She found succor in her relief work. She was the driving force behind the Aid to Russia Fund, which by war’s end raised more than £8 million for Russian relief, mostly from factory workers, although several well-heeled Tories wrote checks for more than £200,000. Mary found her mother to be “desperately tired, both physically and mentally” from the “strain of her social and domestic life.” The reference to the strain of Clemmie’s domestic life was Mary’s delicate way of implying that her mother suffered from nervous tension and that her parents’ relationship bore little resemblance to anything recognizably normal. So “totally preoccupied with events of national importance” was Churchill that year that he left all matters of the children for Clementine to grapple with, including Mary’s precipitous (and short-lived) engagement to her young beau, an event Churchill was not even aware of. He had little time for family affairs, and little inclination to find the time. Clementine dressed for dinner every night; most nights her husband did not appear.388