The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Churchill enjoyed travel destinations—Marrakech and the Riviera especially, almost any place warmer than England—far more than he enjoyed the journey, especially if undertaken by way of warship or small plane, where the accoutrements of fine dining and plump mattresses were sadly lacking. When he was confined in a steel or aluminum shell, his restlessness and imagination overtook him. Of his air journey, he later wrote, “I must admit I felt rather frightened,” when contemplating the endless ocean spaces below and the distance, more than a thousand miles, from land. “I had always regarded an Atlantic flight with awe.” As well he should have. Just two years earlier it was considered sheer folly to attempt an aerial crossing of the North Atlantic in winter, when the weather was at its most unpredictable. The fact that American bomber crews now hopscotched to Britain via Newfoundland and Iceland was due more to their need to refuel rather than to any improvements in weather forecasting or navigation, both of which were still primitive. At night, if the skies were clear, pilots charted their course by the stars. High cloud cover could prove lethal. A plane that lost its way most likely ended up downed, with little chance of rescue for those on board. So perilous was the crossing that the preferred means of getting bombers to Europe was by ship, a means of conveyance Churchill on that occasion found to be unacceptably slow. He was now an old man in a hurry.108

  Soon after he arrived back in London, the news of his heart problems became known, in large part because he could not keep quiet. He told Eden that he felt “his heart a bit” and had some breathing problems when he tried to dance. Eden passed that news along to his parliamentary secretary, Oliver Harvey, who noted in his diary, “The doctors have told him [Churchill] his heart is not too good and he needs rest.” Harvey also told Eden that he had best be ready to assume power if Churchill’s health worsened. Harvey also noted that in sickness and in health, Churchill’s enjoyment of his Edwardian luncheons was never diminished: “He had beer, three ports, and three brandies for lunch today, and has done it for years.” Yet Churchill was down. Hong Kong was gone, Singapore soon to be threatened. And Rommel that day had emerged yet again, viperlike, from under his rock. After drinks with the Old Man, Eden jotted in his diary, “Winston was tired and depressed, for him…. He is inclined to be fatalistic about the House [of Commons], maintained that the bulk of the Tories hated him… and would be only too happy to yield to another.” Yet any thoughts of promotion Eden might have entertained were premature (by more than thirteen years, as events turned out). Churchill, his gloomy musings to Eden aside, had no intention of quitting.109

  On his first day home, while reading the papers on the train to London, he turned to Dr. Wilson and, in a tired voice, said, “There seems to be plenty of snarling.” There was. Attlee had warned him by cable that his reception in London would be something less than a triumph. Much mumbling and interruption had occurred in the Commons, Attlee reported, when the first lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, attempted to give members more details of the circumstances in which the Prince of Wales had been caught. The House seemed “fractious,” Attlee wrote, and the public and press were “rather disturbed” about the overall situation in the Far East, for which they blamed the government’s lack of preparedness. Of more concern to Attlee, the House—and the Evening Standard and Daily Mail—was “a good deal apprehensive” about India, specifically about the political situation there. Murmurs emanated from the Antipodes as well; the tone in Australia, Attlee reported, was “very negative.” Churchill—the entire world—was well aware of that fact. Australian prime minister John Curtin, fearful of a Japanese invasion, had declared in a signed article in the Melbourne Herald his nation’s intent, taken “free of pangs as to our traditional links with the United Kingdom,” to align its foreign policy with and seek the protection of the United States. In effect, Australia had bolted the Empire, an action codified ten months later when the Australian parliament ratified the Statute of Westminster,* retroactive to September 3, 1939, the day London declared war. It was a slight Churchill never forgot. Despite his oft-expressed appreciation for the wartime sacrifice of the Dominions and despite his love of warm, beachy destinations, Churchill would never visit Australia, even when the jet age rendered such a journey no more arduous than a long nap in a garden chair.110

  A great many MPs of all political stripes and many in the press, Tory and Labour alike, were calling for a cabinet shake-up. Some questioned whether Churchill, as prime minister, could still lead the country; more had concluded that as minister of defence he could no longer lead the war effort. The Commons seemed primed for revolt. Churchill attributed the criticism to the “vast, measureless array of disasters” approaching by way of Japan, as well as the belief held by many Britons that the new alliance with America meant that the survival of the Home Island “was no longer at stake.” The relief engendered by that conviction allowed “every critic, whether friendly or malevolent, to point out the many errors that had been made.” Chief among those errors, according to his critics, was Churchill’s creation of the office of minister of defence and appointment of himself the first chief of that department, where he had nothing to show but a plethora of defeats. They wanted him out of that job. Yet a defense “establishment” of the sort the Americans were about to house in their new Pentagon Building did not exist in Britain. Churchill’s Ministry of Defence consisted mainly of himself. If replaced, he would be denied his channels of communication with the Chiefs of Staff, and that was unacceptable. His critics acknowledged that he had inspired the nation and procured his Grand Alliance, but at the cost of alienating the Australians, who feared for their lives, and further alienating Indian nationalists who, along with many Americans, including Roosevelt, considered Churchill to be an old school imperialist. He came home to “unhappy, baffled public opinion, albeit superficial, swelling, and mounting about me on every side.” He decided to meet the criticism head-on, first by warning the nation that more defeats were on their way, and then by demanding a vote of confidence in the House. It was an astute maneuver, one his critics should have anticipated given Churchill’s philosophy in matters both military and political: when attacked, counterattack.111

  On January 20, as Churchill prepared to address his countrymen, Adolf Hitler spoke to his. By then Goebbels had seen to it that any mention of Churchill in German newsreels or newspapers carried with it some reference to his being a strategic nincompoop, a pawn of the Jews, or a drunkard. Hitler outdid Goebbels:

  That twaddler, that drunkard Churchill, what has he achieved in all his lifetime? That mendacious creature, that sluggard of the first order. Had this war not come, future centuries would have spoken of our age, of all of us and also of myself, as the creators of great works of peace. But had this war not come, who would speak of Churchill?… one of the most abominable characters in world history, incapable of a single creative action, capable only of destruction.

  Hitler then repeated a boast made in 1940. Given the fate of the Third Reich, his choice of words have now an oracular and ironic ring to them: “True, one day they will speak of him as the destroyer of an empire he, not we, have ruined.”112

  Also on that day, January 20, Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command of the SS, and the ruthless acting protector of Bohemia, convened a conference in the Berlin suburb of Grosser-Wannsee. Göring had months earlier demanded from the SS a “final solution of the Jewish question.” The fifteen Nazi bureaucrats and members of the SS who met at Wannsee intended to coordinate nothing less than the extermination of the eleven million Jews who dwelled in Europe and the Soviet Union. “Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west,” Heydrich declared. SS lieutenant colonel Adolf Eichmann, a thirty-six-year-old technocrat, served as conference secretary. He kept concise minutes, which were subsequently edited by Heydrich, who inserted coded language of the sort Nazis employed when referring to lethal actions taken against Jews, partisans, and Communists. “Eliminated by natural causes” referred to death by a combination of
hard labor and starvation. “Transported to the east” referred to the mass deportations of Jews to ghettos in occupied Poland, and then on to the gas chambers planned for Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. “Special actions” and “treated accordingly” served as Nazi code words for summary execution by firing squad or death by gassing in the specially rigged trucks of the Einsatzgruppen, as had been taking place in the East since Barbarossa began. Tens upon tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews had already been shot, their bodies dumped into mass graves that are still being discovered seventy years later. So confident were the attendees at the Wannsee conference of ultimate success that the nation-by-nation list they compiled of Jewish populations included Ireland (4,000) and England (330,000). So efficient was the Nazi killing machine that Estonia, it was duly noted, was already “free of Jews.”

  Three weeks before Heydrich convened his conference—Churchill was just arriving in Ottawa—two Czech commandos were parachuted from a British Halifax bomber into the Czechoslovakian countryside. They made for Prague, where Heydrich—hated by all Czechs—had his headquarters. The two Czechs had been trained by Hugh Dalton’s Special Operations Executive. Their mission, sanctioned by the Czech government in exile, was to shadow Heydrich until such time as the opportunity presented itself to assassinate him.113

  Sir Stafford “Christ and Carrots” Cripps, having been granted his wish to leave Moscow, arrived home to London on January 23. He was not yet ready for a retirement dinner and a return to the law courts. The political left had anointed him as the best successor to Churchill were the prime minister to be shoved from office, a shake-up that even some on the right thought overdue. Goebbels, too, thought Cripps was destined for No. 10, from where it was assumed in Berlin that he would Bolshevize England, a feeling shared by many Tories. Cripps was a dour man and an uninspired orator whose only enjoyment seemed to be an occasional cigar, but early in the war he declared he’d given up cigars as a symbolic sacrifice. It was said that Churchill’s reaction to that gesture was to mumble, “Too bad, it was his last contact with humanity.” Two days after Cripps’s return, the prime minister offered him a place in the cabinet as minister of supply, where he would in effect serve under Beaverbrook if Churchill could persuade the Beaver to take the post of minister of production. This would put Cripps in the cabinet but outside the War Cabinet and, worse, under Beaverbrook, whom Cripps despised. Cripps, cautious and adroit politician that he was, deferred his decision on the matter until after the vote of confidence about to take place in the Commons.114

  Cripps was the most viable of three possible contenders for the premiership in early 1942. Eden and Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin were the others. But Eden and Bevin were Churchill loyalists of high magnitude; their betraying him and the coalition government was out of the question. Attlee, head of the Labour Party and Churchill’s natural opponent, had also placed his loyalty to the government above his ambitions. But Cripps was interested, though he was unwilling to make his move until he was sure his support ran deep.

  Beaverbrook also saw himself as a possible contender. He had his admirers, himself chief among them. Averell Harriman recalled that Beaverbrook “in the winter of ’42 when things were going very badly… thought that Churchill was going to be consumed by the power and he [Beaverbrook] would have a chance at that time to become prime minister.” Undoubtedly Beaverbrook possessed some of the qualities of a war leader, foremost his ability to marshal production. But his abrasive personality bled through in public and guaranteed that he could never marshal, as had Churchill, the spirit of Englishmen. This Beaverbrook understood at some level, and he admitted as much in a letter in which he berated Churchill for his North African policy: “On the rock bound coast of New Brunswick the waves beat incessantly. Every now and then comes a particularly dangerous wave that breaks viciously on the rocks. It’s called the ‘rage.’ That’s me.” His best side, wrote his biographer Kenneth Young, emerged in his service as Churchill’s lieutenant and friend, where his agile brain appealed to Churchill, and which the Old Man used “as a whetstone on which to sharpen his own remarkable wits.” The Beaver’s worst side would be exposed by any shifty attempt to promote himself to captain. In the end, the friendship of three decades trumped ambition; Beaverbrook publicly dismissed the notion of seeking high office and soon after, in a letter to Churchill, professed his devotion to “the leader of the nation, the savior of our people.” Still, he soon began quietly telling Labourites that Churchill was on his way out. He did so behind Churchill’s back, knowing full well that such talk could only hurt his old friend. Churchill was not blind to the Beaver’s shenanigans. Ernest Bevin said of Churchill’s relationship with Beaverbrook, “He’s like a man who’s married a whore; he knows she’s a whore but loves her just the same.”115

  No pretender had earned, as Churchill had since 1940, the wide public respect and popularity needed to assume command in wartime. With criticism coming at him from the Commons and the press, Churchill “resolved to yield nothing to any quarter.” He had three unassailable advantages, and he knew it. In 1940 and 1941 he had shown himself the guardian of the national will; unlike Chamberlain, he loved the House of Commons and held sacred that body’s place in English life; and though he had critics, he had no rival who could best him in the hearts of Englishmen. Years later, Brian Gardner, Fleet Street veteran and historian, wrote, “Most Britons were prepared to go on waging war with the man they knew, whom many loved, in the siren suit, with the cigar, the V-sign, and the grin. His removal would have been resented. The House of Commons knew this, and most members acted accordingly.”116

  The attack against Churchill was led by the Labour MP Aneurin (“Nye”) Bevan, a forty-four-year-old hard-drinking product of the North Wales coalfields, and a speaker whose oratory was as tempestuous and cutting as the gales that raced down the Snowdon Massif. He managed The Tribune, a left-wing sheet begun by Stafford Cripps five years earlier, which, on the twenty-third, went after Churchill, and went to the nub of the problem as Bevan saw it: “The question is beginning to arise in the minds of many: is he [Churchill] as good a war maker as he is a speech maker?”117

  Beaverbrook, who pollinated his newspapers with young, up-and-coming left-wing intellectuals, had mentored Bevan in the 1930s. But for Bevan’s lack of ruthlessness, Beaverbrook believed he might have emerged as the Lenin of England, although Beaverbrook also claimed Bevan had become enthralled “with the pleasure of high living,” which diverted him from a more pure-Leninist path. Yet, along with Cripps, Bevan had opposed appeasement in the late 1930s and at the time reluctantly saw Churchill as the only alternative (as had Cripps), yet not so much to save the British Empire as to help safeguard the Soviet socialist experiment. This was not patriotism, as Churchill saw it, but the opportunistic championing by the left wing of foreign causes and complex philosophical/political systems of a sort only an intellectual could love. When Colville later wrote that Churchill “hated casuistry,” he had Bevan in mind. While Churchill “considered parliamentary opposition to be the lifeblood of British politics, the form in which Aneurin Bevan applied it seemed to contribute nothing toward our principal objective, which was to win.” Yet Churchill thought personal animus a waste of time, once telling colleagues in the House, “Such hatred as I have left—and it isn’t much—I would rather reserve for the future than the past.” He called that “a judicious and thrifty disposal of bile.” Churchill enjoyed the company of many of those with whom he disagreed, but he drew the line at Bevan, not because of Bevan’s views but because Churchill doubted his patriotism.* That, for Churchill, was an unforgivable sin.118

  Bevan was the MP for Tredegar, a coal town in the Sirhowy Valley of western Gwent, a place where the local surgeons were kept busy setting the smashed bones of miners and quarrymen, and where the leading causes of death for males were tuberculosis (the Cough) and pneumoconiosis (Black Lung), the disease that killed Bevan’s father. Bevan’s grandfather had forged the iron fences around a ceme
tery built far outside town in the mid-nineteenth century, a burial ground where every headstone bears the date 1849, for that was the year cholera swept the valley. The North Wales of Bevan’s youth was a place where few over forty had their teeth, where fresh water was so scarce that baths were a rare luxury, and where “cobwebs were used to stop bleeding.” There, the cure for coal dust in the eyes was “a comrade’s lick.” There, in the Ebbw Vale, Bevan early on pledged himself to enlist the government to bring modern medicine to his people. When he spoke to what was in his heart, he did not summon images of distant gathering storms or promise sunlit uplands; he explicated the here and now in words and phrases that crashed down upon listeners like wind-driven hail. Bevan (like Roosevelt and unlike Churchill) spoke to his audiences, not at them. Churchill’s listeners basked in his phrases as if at a great distance from some cosmic power source, but Bevan pummeled his audiences with his words. His thick black hair was usually mussed; he was a tad jowly; and his dark eyes telegraphed anger, determination, and inflexibility. Churchill years later called Bevan “as great a curse to this country in time of peace, as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war.” Yet Bevan had earned the respect of many of his enemies, for there wasn’t a false bone in the man. When he wore a scowl, which he habitually donned in Churchill’s presence, he bore a resemblance to John L. Lewis, a grandson of Wales and himself a product of the coal mines of America. Churchill, when peering at Bevan across the House chamber, saw in the Welshman’s eyes “the fires of implacable hatred.” Indeed, Bevan’s goal, for the rest of his life, was nothing less than the extermination of the Conservative Party.119