His most welcome birthday gift arrived by way of North Africa. Auchinleck had shown Rommel during the preceding week that some British generals could fight. The operation, code-named Crusader, was the largest desert offensive yet undertaken by the British. Under the command of General Alan Cunningham, the hero of Ethiopia, its mission was to swing south around Rommel’s lines, which ran fifty miles from his headquarters in Bardia to Sidi Omar. Then, Cunningham planned to swing part of his force northwest in order to draw Rommel into a set-piece battle that, when successfully concluded, would lead to the relief of Tobruk and drive Rommel westward and out of Cyrenaica. Each army fielded about 115,000 men, but Cunningham’s seven hundred tanks outnumbered Rommel’s by more than two to one, and the British general had surprise on his side. Steady rains had kept German air reconnaissance on the ground; Rommel had no idea the British were about to attack. In fact, Rommel was about to attack Tobruk at the very moment the British emerged from the desert mists on November 17. So complete was the surprise that Rommel’s forces were facing the wrong way.
Cunningham made the mistake of thinking Rommel would behave in accordance with his plan and wander into his trap. Rommel did not, because for almost two days he did not believe a British attack was actually taking place, so intent was he on taking Tobruk. When Rommel failed to respond as predicted, Cunningham blundered by spreading his tanks across the desert in a series of isolated columns. Rommel, finally realizing the extent of the British attack, quickly massed his tanks, turned them around, and on November 23, in the largest tank battle thus far fought in the desert, smashed into and through the British lines. The British, in isolated batches and without coordinated command, turned eastward, and fled for home. The Germans also raced east, all the way to the Egyptian border, and then fifteen miles beyond. So confused were the British that entire units of Tommies mingled with Germans, all rushing pell-mell and hell-bent for the Egyptian border. Were Cunningham an aggressive optimist, he might have concluded that he had the Germans surrounded, and that Rommel was ripe for the kill. But he concluded the exact opposite and lost control of the battle.389
Auchinleck regained it. On November 25, he relieved Cunningham and ordered the Eighth Army to regroup and attack, presuming, correctly, that Rommel had outrun his supply lines. Within four days Auchinleck drove a corridor through to Tobruk. By the following week, Cunningham was hospitalized in Cairo; the official explanation was that he suffered from “exhaustion.” Rommel withdrew into the desert. But then, the best fighters can take a punch or two without sustaining any real damage. Rommel would surely re-arm, and return. On the day before Churchill’s birthday, soon after the Eighth Army made contact with the besieged troops in Tobruk, Auchinleck wired the prime minister: “birthday message to you is, Corridor to Tobruk clear and secure. Tobruk is as relieved as I am.”390
The Home Island was now a fortress. More than a thousand tanks—the equivalent of three fully equipped armored divisions—were deployed within one hundred miles of London, ready to swarm the beaches and strategic ports should the Germans come ashore the following spring. Two days after his birthday Churchill told the Commons:
We have several million men who will fight to the death if this country is invaded, but for whom we have not been able to manufacture the necessary number of rifles, although our rifles are now numbered by a good many millions. Therefore we supplement them with machine-guns, tommy-guns, pistols, grenades and bombs, and, when other things fail, we do not hesitate to place in the citizen’s hands a pike or a mace, pending further developments. After all, a man thus armed may easily acquire a rifle for himself.391
But Churchill envisioned another use for his ever-growing forces. Believing since June of 1940 that the Germans would not come, he had built up his armies in anticipation of the day they would drive Rommel into the sea, the day they would go to French North Africa, and the day they would cross the Channel to fight on the Continent. Royal Navy engineers had been at work all year designing Churchill’s artificial harbors—named “Mulberries” by Churchill. New corvettes and destroyers were sliding down shipyard ways. Tank transport ships had been designed. Lancaster heavy bombers rolled off assembly lines. Europe was Churchill’s ultimate objective. When the time was right, he would go there in overwhelming numbers of ships and tanks and men and airplanes, and he’d bring his ports with him.
The Commons and King stood foursquare behind him, although the British army had yet to win a real victory against Hitler. In fact, against the Germans in 1941 Churchill could show nothing but defeats and a few diversions by his commandos and saboteurs. True, Bismarck had been dealt with, but that action was more symbolic than strategic as the registry of shipping losses from U-boats confirmed. True, Auchinleck had put Crusader back on track, but Rommel was by no means beaten. Harold Nicolson cringed when Churchill exulted in the House at Auchinleck’s good fortune. Libya was a sideshow, Nicolson recorded. “Moscow may fall, Japan may come in against us. France may join the Axis. We may be beaten in Libya.” Were any of these eventualities to come to pass, he lamented, “I feel [it] will react very badly on Winston’s prestige.”392
His prestige did not suffer, even as fresh vegetables, sugar, coal, and new clothing grew as scarce as victories. Britons, pummeled since 1940, stood by their Winnie, who, wrote Nicolson, “is the embodiment of the nation’s will.” Yet his political enemies were of a mind that one or two more disasters on the magnitude of Greece or Crete would spell the end of him. “Christ and Carrots” Cripps, in fact, was aiming to take his rightful place, as he saw it, in the cabinet, perhaps even at the head of a new government, should Churchill lose another battle.393
Kathleen Hill compiled a list of more than 120 well-wishers who had sent birthday greetings from around the world—kings, queens, and displaced continental potentates, from the entire ship’s company of HMS Churchill, as well as from all the boys of Harrow. Dominion officials high and low sent messages. Winant jotted a note, Wavell, from India, paid his respects, as did “that ass” de Gaulle. Eden, Attlee, and most of the cabinet sent their regards, as did the maharaja of Nepal. Even Stalin sent a note. No birthday salutations arrived from Franklin Roosevelt.394
Churchill lacked only that which he desired most of all, his American cousins fighting at his side. America stood behind him, but not beside him. With just four weeks remaining in 1941, he had no good reason to believe that America would be fighting when 1942 arrived. After almost two years of pleading, cajoling, flattering, prodding, and warning Roosevelt, he had come up short. As with others who brought their cases to Roosevelt, Churchill heard magical words but came away with no answers to his questions. Though the relationship he had with Roosevelt was just ambiguous and promising enough to sustain Churchill’s hopes of salvation, it lacked a real strategy. It lacked singleness of purpose. Roosevelt still saw it in terms of “all help short of war.” To Churchill, that meant ultimate stalemate, or worse. He sought a relationship with Roosevelt built on his premise “victory or death.” The word for such a relationship is “alliance.”395
During the first days of December, Stalin’s most dependable and merciless ally, winter, caught the Germans unprepared. The first snow had fallen on October 6, early even for Moscow, and a harbinger of a winter that would long be remembered for its ferocity. Still, the Germans pressed on. By December 2, a German reconnaissance battalion worked its way through Khimki, a suburb of Moscow. On December 4, the temperature fell to minus thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit; wind-whipped snow slashed at men’s skin and eyes like jagged steel filings. The next day, the temperature fell to minus thirty-seven, turning rubber brittle and gasoline into jelly. When their gearboxes froze solid, tanks went nowhere. German soldiers froze to death in their summer uniforms, within sight of Moscow, because Hitler’s military chief of staff, General Alfred Jodl, had decreed that the issuance of winter uniforms would cast doubt on the Reich’s promise of victory before winter. The Red Army counterattacked on December 5, smashing its way through the German
lines in front of Moscow. This was a real counterattack, even though it rolled the Germans back only a few dozen miles. The Germans dug in. For thousands of Germans, clad in their summer gray, their foxholes became their graves. In the first week of December, almost two thousand German soldiers had had frostbitten limbs amputated. The Wehrmacht’s ordeal was only beginning.396
During the first week of December, Churchill regularly telephoned Bletchley to ask about the disposition of the Japanese Combined Fleet (Kido Butai). The Imperial Japanese battle fleet, flying the flag of Vice Admiral Chu¯ichi Nagumo, had disappeared into the vastness of the north Pacific. Another Japanese fleet was rumored to be making for the South China Sea, with designs upon Siam, Malaya, or Java; nobody knew. Each time Churchill asked, the Bletchley reply remained the same: No intelligence was forthcoming. The Japanese navy had vanished.
3
Vortex
DECEMBER 1941–NOVEMBER 1942
By the first days of December 1941, Churchill knew that events in the Far East were moving far ahead of his knowledge of them. Was it to be Peace or War? He had no say in the matter and could do nothing but wait, a state of inactivity he loathed, which demanded a trait he lacked, patience.
These were the longest nights, when the omnipresent bleakness of an English winter seeped into the ancient oak timbers and cold stone floors of Chequers. Churchill’s bodyguard, Walter Thompson, recalled that when the winter rains arrived, the ancient house took on a “preternatural and malign” aura. The household staff tried to invest the home with as much Yule warmth as was allowed by the strictures imposed by war and the lack of effective central heat. Churchill spent his weeknights in London, deep within the Annexe, his small room there outfitted with one modest stuffed chair, a small desk, an electric feet warmer, and a twin-size dormitory bed. Naked incandescent bulbs hung on long wires that coiled downward from the concrete ceiling, buttressed by walls of heavy timber, yellowed by eighteen months of cigar smoke. Against the confines of that dank place, Chequers offered succor. The domestic staff bustled about placing sprays of pine boughs and holly branches throughout the great house. Old English country houses display a singular knack for generating more raw cold during winter months than the great outdoors. Chequers being no exception, housemaids piled Welsh coal into the grates, except in the great hall and Churchill’s bedchamber, where as was his wont at Chartwell, he demanded log fires, which he liked to prod with an iron poker, in silence and for long periods of time.1
Churchill’s favorite weeks of the year, the Christmas holidays, were approaching, their start marked at Chequers by servants maneuvering the tall Christmas fir into the great hall, where they adorned it with baked cookies, glass ornaments, and wax candles. Lest the tree ignite, housekeepers tied large sponges onto broomsticks and soaked them in buckets nearby—Churchill’s favorite bath sponges, in fact, purloined from the Old Man, who was given to rumbling downstairs, barefoot in a damp silk dressing gown, and demanding his bathing accoutrements of the first servant he encountered.2
The wine cellar at Chequers, always well stocked thanks to the generosity of friends, contributed much to a spirit of holiday good cheer. Pol Roger Champagne flowed at each meal. Friends had donated enough Napoleon brandy to pickle a ship’s company of would-be Nelsons, “enough to last twenty years of war,” Pamela recalled. Churchill’s valet, Frank Sawyers, kept a little spirit lamp on hand in order to warm the Old Man’s brandy glass, a ritual repeated two or three times each evening. Numerous boxes of cigars arrived, gifts from all over the world. The Cuban government had been generous in that regard, having honored Churchill with a lovely old Queen Anne dresser, the drawers of which were stuffed with hundreds of the finest Havanas. The Exchequer assessed a hefty excise tax on the cigars; Churchill fumed but paid it. The Prof—Lord Cherwell—insisted Churchill forsake the cigars because he feared German agents lurking in Havana might have poisoned the filler. The task of testing the gifts of food and cigars for sinister ingredients fell to young Victor Rothschild, the 3rd Baron Rothschild, a chemist at MI5, and an expert in solving booby-trapped devices. Rothschild concluded that the goods were safe. Still, the Prof cautioned Churchill not to smoke his Romeo y Julietas. He smoked them anyway, whisky in hand, as he wandered the halls of his armed fortress. He had everything he needed to face the dangers beyond the walls—safety for his family, ample food, strong drink, and good company.3
The weekend following his birthday, Churchill invited Averell Harriman and his daughter Kathleen to Chequers. Kathleen, a correspondent for Newsweek, was a close friend of Pamela’s, and as the American woman’s twenty-fourth birthday was in a few days, the Churchills proposed a birthday celebration in the country, with Gil Winant and many of the usual gang in attendance, a little something that promised modest respite from the strains of war. Churchill inscribed for Kathleen a copy of his memoir of the Sudan campaign, The River War. Though her birthday fell on Sunday, the party was held on Saturday, December 6, the feast of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors (and merchants, archers, and children), celebrated throughout Britain with gifts for the children and with much ceremony in Canterbury Cathedral and in the hundreds of small churches erected in Nicholas’s name along the coast, from where Englishmen had sailed to build the Empire and from where they now sailed to defend it. With the gales of winter in mind, British sailors called Nicholas “the saint of cold December,” and in chapels ashore and on board ships sought his protection:
One there is whom once our fathers
Took their own, their saint, to be
Since his prayers had helped the children
And the sailors on the sea;
Lord, who dost thine angels send,
Make Saint Nicholas our friend.
On the night of the sixth, Clementine, with a cold coming on, retired early, as did the rest of the household but for Churchill. He drafted several memos addressing the food situation—excepting the armed forces, the average Briton’s diet had fallen below the minimum level to sustain good health or the strength to work a full shift in an armaments factory. As Churchill worked away, Brooke telephoned with the news that a Japanese fleet of transports and warships might be heading into the Gulf of Siam toward either the Kra Peninsula or Bangkok. Or it might be a bluff, no one knew. Britain lacked the means to stop such a force in any event. Before donning his silk smock, Churchill checked in a final time with the Bletchley analysts, in hopes that they might lay a golden egg with regard to the whereabouts of the Japanese battle fleet.4
They could not. The Japanese fleet remained invisible.
Since his birthday Churchill had contemplated more than the location of the Japanese navy. Stalin that week had finessed Britain into declaring war on Finland, Hungary, and Romania. The two latter states had tried and failed to avoid war by appeasing both Germany and Russia. Finland, invaded by Stalin in late 1939 and not surprisingly seeking revenge—and its pre-1939 borders—had joined the Axis days after Hitler strode into Russia. Though Churchill thought Finland’s choice of partners “obnoxious” and loathed Romania’s Antonescu, he told the War Cabinet that he wanted it to be “on record that in his view this declaration of war on Finland (and also on Hungary and Romania) would not assist either our cause or that of the Russians. The sole justification for it was that it was necessary in order to satisfy the Russian Government.” Churchill threw Stalin a bone—three bones—because he could not deliver fast enough the airplanes and tanks Stalin sought. Most important, he could not deliver a second front in Europe. Instead, that week he ordered Eden to Moscow to mollify Stalin.5
He continued to ponder the diplomatic conundrum he and Roosevelt might soon face in Asia. Were the Japanese to attack British or Dutch interests but not American, Britain would find itself fighting a new war. But would America come in under such circumstances? For almost six months Churchill had asked Roosevelt for a direct answer. The president had not given one. Accordingly, Churchill informed Harriman that in the event of a Japanese attack, Britain would
not declare war “within the hour” as he had earlier promised, but would wait until Roosevelt took “such action as, under the circumstances, he considers best.” Then, and only then, would Britain—“within the minute”—declare war on Japan.6
The two leaders had agreed that week to proceed as partners in an extraordinary venture, the building of an atomic bomb. When American physicists weeks earlier endorsed the Maud Committee’s conclusion that a nuclear fission bomb was feasible, Roosevelt diverted several millions of discretionary (and off the books) funds to Vannevar Bush and his atomic scientists. Bush and his cohorts so successfully wrapped a curtain of secrecy around themselves and their work that within months, the American press reported that exploration of the atom at universities had come to a stop, except for the pursuit of “artificial radioactive materials for medical research.” Bush, at Roosevelt’s request, told Churchill of the American decision to build the bomb, and suggested the joint Anglo-American project be code-named Mayson, in case Maud had been compromised. Churchill replied: “I need not assure you of our readiness to collaborate with the United States Administration in this matter.” He appointed Sir John Anderson—“the man without mercy”—as chief administrator on the British side, and put Lord Cherwell in charge of the scientific end of the operation. The atomic project offered Cherwell an opportunity to spite his enemies in academia. It also held promise as a means to annihilate his most hated enemy, Germany.7
On the morning of December 7, spurred by the report of Japanese naval forces in the Gulf of Siam, Churchill drafted a proposed threat to Japan, and sent it off to Roosevelt. He sought Roosevelt’s approval to inform Tokyo that the British and Dutch would construe any incursion by Japanese forces from Indochina into Thailand as an attack on their interests and “should hostilities unfortunately result the responsibility will rest with Japan.” Two days earlier, Halifax had cabled the news that Roosevelt finally agreed to join Britain in such a warning, though no such assurance had yet arrived from the president. Given Britain’s state of readiness in the Far East, Churchill’s note to the Japanese amounted to his brandishing an empty scabbard.8
The Last Lion Page 61