The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Churchill never asked why Bevan—and Bevan’s constituency—so hated him and his fellow Tories. “He [Churchill] has no gift for getting into other people’s minds,” his doctor later wrote, “sometimes he does not even appear to be interested.” Churchill had promised Britons only victory over Hitler, nothing more. But now they wanted more; they wanted some sort of explanation from Churchill of Tory peace aims, Churchill’s war aims being well known to all. Britons had deduced that with America in, victory was someday assured, and therefore there was no time like the present to begin a discussion of postwar housing and health and Social Security insurance. Churchill, as he had since 1940, considered any public discussion of the postwar world to be ill conceived, as it could only degenerate into a partisan affair. His stance would prove a costly misjudgment in three years, for although Britons loved their warrior Churchill, he refused to tell them which Churchill they’d get in peace, the old Tory or the old Liberal.120

  It was the old warrior who showed up in the Commons for three days of debate. The doubters spoke their piece, including John Wardlaw-Milne, Herbert Williams, and Earl Winterton, all Conservatives, and Emanuel (“Manny”) Shinwell, an old Glasgow radical and Red Clydesider, a tough, blunt-spoken patriot who shared at least one trait with Churchill, a loathing of pompous intellectualism. On this day, however, Shinwell shared nothing with Churchill. Harold Nicolson thought Shinwell’s attack on Churchill “vicious.” Randolph, on leave from Cairo, leapt to his father’s defense and attacked “most cruelly” those who had abused his father. Nicolson found Randolph to be “amusing and brave,” yet along with Bob Boothby, Nicolson “harbored a dreadful feeling that Randolph may go too far.” Pamela, in the gallery, “was squirming” as her husband let fly. Yet here was Randolph’s chance to do for his father what was denied Winston by his father’s early death—mount a display of dynastic solidarity. The result, however, was pure Randolph, pure bombast, and gave new meaning to the concept of bully pulpit. Nicolson noted that Churchill himself looked “embarrassed.”

  In the end, the father came to the defense of the son after Archibald Southby interrupted Randolph and implied that by virtue of Randolph’s being in London rather than in the Western Desert, he was not a fighting soldier. Churchill afterward chased Southby down in the lobby and, shaking his fist in the MP’s face, shouted, “You called my son a coward. You are my enemy. Do not speak to me.” Randolph, Colville later wrote, was a talented journalist, “a natural orator, an original wit.” He made friends easily but lost them more easily. He was “imaginative and original in his ideas,” but he became “excessively addicted to drink” and regularly turned “inexcusably abusive.” He “squabbled with his father,” but remained devoted to him, as the father did to the son. Southby’s mistake was not only to attack Randolph but to imply that he was not a brave soldier. Randolph was a brave soldier. His experience in the House that day, the jeers of his peers, and the awakening realization that he would always walk in his father’s shadow, moved him within months to volunteer for the newly formed Special Air Service and still later to volunteer for an extremely dangerous mission—to parachute into the mountains of Yugoslavia in order to fight alongside Tito’s partisans. Randolph, as did his father before him, chose to earn his country’s respect on the battlefield, or die trying.121

  The following day Churchill wound up the debate with what Nicolson thought a “very genial and self-confident” address wherein he congratulated his opponents on their adroit speechifying. But the engaging and conciliatory Churchill gave way in his peroration to the emphatic: “I make no apologies. I offer no excuses. I make no promises. In no way have I mitigated the… impending misfortunes that hang over us.” He ended with an avowal of his certainty in final victory. With that, he said he was finished. Nicolson had already concluded two days earlier that “it is clear there really is no opposition at all.” The Old Man insisted on a division—a vote. The bells were rung summoning members into the voting lobbies. The final tally: 423–1 in support of the government, with James Maxton, another old Red Clydesider, the lone dissenter. Bevan abstained. Dozens more could not vote; they were overseas, in uniform.122

  Though badly misjudging the mood of both the public and the House, Bevan increased his attacks. The Tribune let loose on January 30: “It would be an excellent thing for Mr. Churchill to make certain changes in his team, but it would be a profound mistake to suppose that from this alone any fundamental improvement would result…. This is no National Government and Churchill is no National Leader. He struts in that guise but in fact he insists that the war shall be conducted in accordance with the principles of the Tory Party. The British Empire is finished. Nothing can save it. Who wants to? Not the millions who suffered under it. They rejoice to see it go…. We shall need a different spirit than the one which breathed through the speech of the last Imperial spokesman—Winston Spencer Churchill.”123

  As Harold Nicolson exited the vote of confidence debate on the twenty-ninth, he stopped at the electronic ticker in the lobby, where he learned from the uncoiling stream of paper that “the Germans claim to have entered Benghazi.” Randolph Churchill was there and told Nicolson that only half of Rommel’s reinforcements had reached Africa, a spot of good news among all the bad, had it been true. In fact, all of Rommel’s supplies had gotten through, including sixty new panzers.124

  It had been just over a week since Rommel—his forces newly christened Panzer Army Africa—probed outward from his lines at El Agheila, near the Tripolitania frontier. That Rommel could even contemplate an offensive was due to Churchill’s Asian strategy. When Churchill stripped away Auchinleck’s men and matériel in hopes of saving Malaya, he dashed all prospects of the Eighth Army crushing Rommel. Of greater significance, in combination with the ongoing ravishing of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, the attrition of Auchinleck’s forces threw into question his ability to defend against Rommel. In fact, Auchinleck’s Operation Crusader had been destined to stall before it began, by events that took place ten weeks earlier, at sea. On November 12 the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, returning home from ferrying planes to Malta, was torpedoed twenty-five miles from Gibraltar. Only one crewman perished and more than 1,500 survived, a ready-made crew for another carrier, but no new carriers were on hand. Two weeks later, the battleship HMS Barham was torpedoed off Tripoli. Barham and more than 800 men of the crew went down so quickly that the U-boat commander who had shot her assumed the battleship had escaped when just moments later he raised his periscope to survey the scene and beheld an empty sea.

  Within days, with no jubilant announcement of the sinking coming out of Berlin, the British realized the Germans did not know Barham was gone. Churchill of course knew, but he sat on the news until after the vote of confidence. Then, on December 19, Churchill learned that six Italian frogmen riding atop miniature submersibles (he called them “human torpedoes”) had penetrated the Royal Navy anchorage at Alexandria and affixed mines to the battleships Queen Elizabeth (with Admiral Andrew Cunningham on board) and Valiant. The frogmen were captured, but not before the two largest ships in the eastern Mediterranean, their keels ripped apart, settled into the mud, useless hulks. The news was kept from the British people for six months. Churchill and the press had for more than a year denigrated Italian seamanship. Time ran a photo taken from astern of several Italian destroyers with the caption: “The British usually see them this way.” Yet the Italians, with much help from Stukas based in Sicily, had by late December reduced the entire British eastern Mediterranean fleet to a few destroyers and light cruisers.125

  In late December, Hitler sent Rommel ten ships bearing gasoline and rations along with an entire air corps transferred from the Russian front. At the time, both Churchill and Hitler considered Rommel to be in “mortal peril.” Then, in the last days of the old year, a British task force of three cruisers and four destroyers searching for Rommel’s supply ships sailed into a minefield. Within minutes all three cruisers were damaged; one of the destroyer
s was crippled, while another blew up and sank with the loss of all but one of the ship’s company. Thus, a lucky U-boat captain, six Italian swimmers, and an uncharted minefield succeeded in destroying virtually the whole of Britain’s eastern Mediterranean battle fleet. The Royal Navy no longer needed the largest anchorage in the eastern Mediterranean to shelter its ships. A cove would have sufficed. And Churchill possessed not nearly enough sea power in the eastern Mediterranean to interdict Rommel’s supplies.126

  By mid-January the supplies Rommel needed had arrived in Tripolitania, as had Rommel, having made good his retreat. Contrary to Randolph’s optimistic assessment, not a single German vessel had been lost. On the British side of the equation, Malta was cut off and under constant air attack; its dwindling fleet of aircraft could neither protect the island nor stop Rommel’s reinforcements. He had retreated before Auchinleck, but more to the point, he had escaped and re-armed. The peril had shifted to the Auk, although the danger was belied by the quietude that had settled over the desert, where the armies dug in and faced each other just beyond field artillery range.

  Nights were cool. Intermittent rain showers brought forth blooms to stunted shrubs. Small desert flowers scrabbled from beneath the cracked stones as sunshine as weak as chamomile tea threw indeterminate shadows across the sands. At nine each night both armies tuned their radios to the German news beamed from Belgrade, not for edification but to listen to the melancholy love song played at the end of every broadcast, a tune called Lili Marlene. Based on a little-known Great War poem called “The Song of a Young Soldier on Watch,” and later set to music and recorded by the Berlin cabaret singer Lale Anderson as “The Girl Under the Lantern,” with an understated omp-pah rhythm of a march, it told the tale of a young soldier who sought to meet his sweetheart under the lamppost beyond his barracks. Rommel loved the tune, Goebbels loathed it, and Frau Göring crooned it at parties to Nazi big shots. British Tommies, not understanding the German lyrics, made up their own words. The song, once heard, became hard to shake, a haunting presence in the mind. Churchill hated it, given its German genesis.127

  On January 21, Rommel probed the British lines with a reconnaissance in force, just as he had almost a year earlier. Within hours, the first British troops that Rommel’s panzers encountered crumbled before the Germans, just as they had a year earlier. It was now the turn of the British Eighth Army to retreat, again, this time under the command of General Ritchie. A good man and former staff officer under Alan Brooke, Ritchie had never commanded a corps, let alone an army in the field. Auchinleck, meanwhile, had replaced his experienced 7th Armoured Division at Rommel’s front with the newly arrived and green 1st Armoured Division, which was now falling back with heavy losses before the oncoming Germans. The Auk, as well, could no longer use the port of Benghazi in order to supply his troops; Rommel had leveled the place on his way out of town in December.

  By January 29, as Nicolson learned from the news ticker, Rommel was back. Recalling Churchill’s warnings to the House, uttered two days earlier, Nicolson that night jotted in his diary, “Grave disasters indeed.” By February 5 the Germans had raced two hundred miles from Benghazi to near Gazala, where they halted. The British dug in behind a defensive line running about forty miles southeast from Gazala before hooking east and partway around Bir Hacheim. Rommel was now approximately forty miles from Tobruk, which Auchinleck told London he intended to abandon if Rommel attacked. There would be no siege this time. Churchill did not object to the plan, but in the days that followed—based in part on incorrect Ultra decrypts—he pushed Auchinleck to execute a counterstroke within weeks. When Churchill learned that Auchinleck’s army would not be ready for any such undertaking until June, he termed the situation “intolerable,” adding that it would be “judged so by Roosevelt, Stalin, and everybody else.”128

  Auchinleck could fall back in semi-orderly fashion before Rommel, but no such option existed for Arthur Percival, the military commander of Singapore. He was trapped. Percival’s enemy, Lieutenant General Tomoyuki Yamashita, had since early December proved his mettle on the Malay Peninsula. Now came Percival’s turn to prove his. Yamashita considered his Twenty-fifth Army—charged with capturing Singapore—to be so well prepared for jungle combat in Malaya that it could accomplish its mission with only three of its five divisions. He had fought Chinese guerrillas for three years and noted their tactics of stealth and fast movement, which he trained his troops to emulate. He had spent six months in Germany the previous year, where he became familiar with the genius of blitzkrieg tactics—tanks in the spearhead, close air support, and bold strokes. Hitler had been so impressed with Yamashita that he’d promised him he would stipulate in his will that Germans “bind themselves eternally to the Japanese spirit.”129

  Yamashita had opened his campaign on December 8, when Japanese bombs from a dozen aircraft crashed down outside the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. That morning his troops made two landings four hundred miles north of Singapore, at Singora and Patini, on each side of the Thai-Malay border. The British had long anticipated such a stroke, but their immediate problem was diplomatic. When a British force arrived at the Thai border, Thai border guards refused it entry. Not knowing of the unfolding events at Pearl Harbor, and not wanting to precipitate a political crisis (the Americans would look very much askance at such an incursion), the British turned around and headed south. Yamashita had also made a diversionary landing farther south near Kota Bharu and the nearby airfield with the object of drawing the RAF to the airfield’s defense and away from his transports and main forces to the north. Within hours he took the airfield. By afternoon the few squadrons of RAF fighters in the region had been halved in numbers, leaving only mostly inexperienced Indian troops standing between Yamashita and an easy march to Singapore. Light tanks from Yamashita’s 5th Division smashed through the Indians, some of whom had never before seen a tank. Implicit in that fact is that the British had no tanks deployed to defend northeast Malaya. The capture of the Kota Bharu airfield rendered the few remaining British aircraft in northern Malaya orphans. Those losses and the loss of the Prince of Wales left Singapore hanging like low fruit, and Yamashita was keen to pluck it.130

  The British Plan B for Malaya had called for a scorched-earth policy similar to the ruin Churchill advised Stalin to inflict on Russian foodstuffs and, especially, Russian oil fields. Rubber and tin were Malaya’s most abundant natural resources. More than 40 percent of Britain’s rubber came from Malaya; more than half of the world’s tin came out of the mountainous spine of the peninsula. It was impossible to chop down the rubber trees, but all equipment having to do with mining and smelting tin should have been destroyed. It was not. The first elements of Yamashita’s 5th Division who rode into Kota Bharu not only found ample stocks of rice and gasoline but also discovered that, such was the haste of the British exit, the power plant had not even been turned off, let alone destroyed. Within a week the Japanese crossed the Kra Peninsula to smash the British airfield at Point Victoria, the southernmost point of Burma. With that stroke Yamashita cut off Singapore from airborne reinforcement by way of Europe and India.

  Throughout December, Yamashita’s 5th and 18th Divisions—the former moving down the eastern shore while the latter scoured the western—found rubber plantations and tin refineries abandoned but intact. They found British lorries topped off with petrol and ready to bring tin and rubber to ports, where docks that should have been demolished were ready to receive Japanese cargo ships. When the Japanese flushed the British from Penang, on the west coast of the peninsula, they found a small fleet of coastal gunboats in perfect running order, which they used to mount raids on British coastal positions. They came upon stores of rice and $250,000 in cash left behind in the British treasury. And they found a radio station, with the microphones on and the generator running, from which on Christmas Day they broadcast “Merry Christmas and an Unhappy New Year” to the residents of Singapore, who did not grasp their terrible position because British censors withh
eld all information regarding the whereabouts of the Japanese. On the day Penang fell, the British press office told reporters, “There is nothing to report.” In fact, all Europeans in Penang had been evacuated, leaving the natives to fend for themselves. The conquerors, wrote Cecil Brown, were “reverting to type… that is to say, they are looting food shops and… raping the native women.” Within a week the Japanese outflanked Kuala Lumpur, the capital of the Malay federation and the railroad center of the country. The railway was intact. In retreat, the British performed exceptionally well—as quartermasters to the Japanese. By New Year’s, Yamashita had raced halfway to Singapore.131

  There, Lieutenant General Arthur Ernest Percival and almost 90,000 men—including 17,000 Australian, 33,000 British, and 40,000 Indian—prepared to destroy the city and naval base if need be, and to fight amid the rubble to the last man, per Churchill’s orders. Yet Churchill’s initial hope that Singapore might hold out for six months under Percival’s command faded overnight when, upon his return to London from Washington, he was “staggered” to learn from Wavell that Singapore’s largest, fifteen-inch naval guns faced out to sea. The landward side of the city, which gave out to a gorge, was without heavy defenses. To Ismay, Churchill wrote, “I must confess…. It never occurred to me for a moment… that the gorge of the fortress was not entirely fortified against an attack from the northward.” Why, he asked, had he never been informed? Why, when he had for two years so stressed the defense of Singapore over the Kra Isthmus fallback strategy, had no defenses been erected? “I warn you,” he continued, “this will be one of the greatest scandals that could possibly be exposed.” In fact, Singapore was no “fortress” in the manner of Gibraltar; it was an island of gentle hills and ridges, twenty-seven miles long by thirteen miles wide. Churchill had formed images of the terrain and of the “fortress,” and they were incorrect. The only way to keep the Japanese off the island would have been to bring them to decisive battle on the peninsula; instead, the British fell back, toward the presumed safety of the fortress that wasn’t. As for the big guns facing the wrong way, Wavell had sent Churchill incorrect intelligence; several of Singapore’s fifteen-inch Vickers guns indeed covered the straits, but they had been supplied with armor-piercing ammunition intended for use against ships. Against men they were useless.132