The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Yet what appeared to be a political defeat for Churchill can be seen as his snookering Cripps, whose talents were not in massaging the House but in coolly arguing legal issues, attributes that serve little purpose in that raucous chamber of partisan free-thinkers. Churchill soon dispatched Cripps to India on a mission to convince Gandhi to pledge his loyalty to the British in return for a guarantee of Dominion status after the war. Gandhi and the National Congress had rejected a similar offer a decade earlier. Now, with Gandhi preaching that Indians not fight for Britain but rather prostrate themselves peacefully before the Japanese invader, Cripps’s mission could only end in failure. Thus Cripps, argues historian and parliamentarian Roy Jenkins, found himself in a nominally high position that was, in fact, “more shell than kernel.” Before departing for India, Cripps, seduced by his romantic vision of Stalinist Russia, predicted—without the slightest supporting evidence—that the war would be (successfully) concluded in a year. Britons kept tallies on the predictions of their politicians; the public man who offered up a promise had better keep it.144

  Churchill, too, had made promises—that Crete would be defended to the death, Singapore held, the Germans and Italians swept from North Africa. Churchill, for almost two years, had been telling his family, his secretaries, little schoolboys at Harrow, that “these are… the greatest days our country has ever lived.” The times were great for Churchill not because his England was winning—it most decidedly was not—but because England was fighting Germany, and now Japan, to the death. Yet, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote that month, that although Britons trusted Churchill in the past because he had always told them the truth, “there’s an uneasy suspicion that fine oratory may carry away the orator as well as the audience.” By February Churchill understood that, which is why he now promised only more sacrifice, more defeats, and more hard times, promises he delivered on.”145

  The honorable fight for British survival made the war great for Churchill. His faith in the rightness of his cause and the valor of ordinary Englishmen was unbounded. Calling upon reserves of patriotism that should have been exhausted, he had won the allegiance of almost fifty million Britons gathered around wireless sets in homes and pubs, in West End clubs, and East End warehouses. Even as Singapore tottered, and as Rommel again drove toward Egypt, and despite his unkept promises, polls showed that 79 percent of Britons supported Churchill. These were people who, believing that peace was worth any price, had rejoiced in Britain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia just four years earlier. His words then had failed to move them. Had they listened then, they would not have had to listen now as he told them of one disaster after another, and reminded them that he expected that they all go down fighting in defense of their country.

  Now they listened, and Churchill persuaded them that the fate of mankind hung in the balance, and he roused their ardor, stitching the fabric of their resolution with gleaming threads of eloquence and optimism. Thus, from June of 1940 to early 1942, at a time when defeat and enslavement of the Home Island seemed, at first inevitable, then probable, and finally still quite possible, Churchill’s star continued to rise, to challenge the dark star of Hitler, whose oratory, though in a different language with contrary rhythms, and to very different ends, had spawned a murderous dystopia. The Führer and Tojo were a pair of Genghis Khans bent upon the destruction of all that civilized men cherished. Churchill was determined to preserve it, and preserve it while wearing a smile and flashing his “V” sign. “It is surprising how he maintains a lighthearted exterior in spite of the vast burdens he is bearing,” Alan Brooke observed, himself bearing a heavy burden as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and charged by Churchill with plotting the strategies to fight their way to final victory.146

  In a broadcast beamed the previous year to the University of Rochester—located in the upstate New York city where his grandfather Leonard Jerome had practiced law before hitting it big in the New York stock market—Churchill wondered how Hitler had done it, how “nations were pulled down one by one while the others gaped and chattered” until they, too, fell into slavery and darkness. Now “the old lion with her cubs at her side stands alone against hunters who are armed with deadly weapons and are propelled by desperate and destructive rage.” Will the lion now fall, the final victim? “Ah no!” declared Churchill, “the stars in their courses proclaim the deliverance of mankind. Not so easily will the onward progress of the peoples be barred. Not so easily will the lights of freedom die.”147

  To the Commons, on the day after Pearl Harbor, he had invoked the same imagery: “In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.” No matter that Hitler had extinguished the lamps across all of Europe, Churchill generated his own illumination.148

  Whether it would be enough to light the path to victory grew more doubtful with each mile of desert Rommel stole, with each ship killed by U-boats, and with each new Japanese depredation. On February 12, Alec Cadogan wrote in his diary: “The blackest day, yet, of the war…. We are nothing but failure and inefficiency everywhere and the Japs are murdering our men and raping our women in Hong Kong.” The weather was horrid, food in short supply, his chickens had stopped laying. He wrote, “I am running out of whisky and can get no more to drink of any kind. But if things go on as they’re going, that won’t matter.” Cadogan wrote that pessimistic assessment three days before Singapore fell.149

  On February 19, Admiral Chichi Nagumo’s carrier strike force bombed Port Darwin, Australia, inflicting enough damage to force the abandonment of the port as a supply depot. The admiral had sailed his five aircraft carriers unmolested thousands of miles from the northern Pacific to Australia. The raid served to finish off any residual Australian sanguinity. Prime Minister Curtin wanted his troops home, now. The troops in question were the war-hardened 7th Division, then en route by ship to Australia from the Middle East. By that date the Japanese had advanced from Thailand into Burma, with Rangoon the obvious target. Churchill was far less concerned with Australian paranoia than he was with Burma, the final frontier between the Japanese and India. On the nineteenth, Churchill asked Curtin to allow the 7th Division to be diverted to the defense of Burma. Curtin refused, firm in his belief that with Singapore now lost, the 7th Division was needed for the defense of Australia. Both Roosevelt and Churchill had concluded otherwise; they believed that the Japanese would not risk sending tens of thousands of troops four thousand miles by sea from Java to Australia. But for Curtin, the bombardment of Darwin confirmed his worst fears. Roosevelt sent two messages to Curtin in which he stressed the strategic importance of Burma and the need for Australians to help defend it. Curtin stood his ground. The next day Churchill, after repeating his request and before an answer arrived from Curtin, ordered the convoy to Burma. Two days later he informed Curtin, and in so doing verified for Curtin the very arrogance he had ascribed to the war planners in London. Curtin, furious, insisted the convoy turn away from Burma and make for Australia. Churchill backed down. No Australians would defend Rangoon. Instead, the 7th Division went home to join the almost 90,000 American troops Roosevelt had sent to Curtin, an army that by summer would make Australia one of the most secure places on the planet.150

  By February 24, Wavell had been recalled to Bombay from the Dutch East Indies. Brereton’s minuscule air fleet, by then a mere two dozen planes, joined the exodus. A Dutch admiral, C. E. L. Helfrich, replaced Tommy Hart, “a good skipper in a bad storm,” not because Hart had failed—he lacked the ships to succeed—but because the Dutch intended to make a last stand off the coast of Java. Helfrich’s fleet consisted of five cruisers, including the USS Houston (aboard which Roosevelt once enjoyed taking his seafaring holidays), HMS Exeter, and ten destroyers. Under certain circumstances it might have proven a formidable force, but with supplies running low at Surabaya, Indonesia, and against the overwhelming Japanese force headed its way, the Allied fleet was sailing on hop
e, sailing alone, and, like Prince of Wales, sailing without air cover.151

  The torrent of disasters was taking its toll on Churchill. On February 27, Mary Churchill told her diary: “Papa is at a very low ebb. He is not too well physically—and is worn down by the continuous crushing pressure of events.” That day, in the Java Sea, events were about to take yet another turn against Britain and her allies. In preparation for the invasion of Java, two Japanese naval task forces, each guarding about fifty troop transports, and each more powerful than the entire Allied fleet, closed on the north Java coast. Admiral Helfrich’s little navy, commanded at sea by a fighting Dutchman, Rear Admiral Karel Doorman, was about to refuel at Surabaya when Doorman received word of the Japanese presence. Flying his flag from the light cruiser HMNS De Ruyter, Doorman went looking for the Japanese transports in hopes of inflicting some damage before the more numerous and heavily armed Japanese warships of Rear Admiral Take Takagi found the Dutch. Just after 4:00 P.M., the two forces sighted each other and began shooting at a range of about six miles. Churchill was correct when he said that naval battles could be settled in minutes, but this one turned into an eight-hour slugfest. An American newsweekly tallied up the amazing results: “The Jap paid… Japanese heavy cruiser sank. Another Jap cruiser, the Mogami… retired in flames. Hits crippled a third 8-inch gun cruiser. Three Jap destroyers blazed up, appeared to be sinking…. Allied bombers reported hits on two more Jap cruisers. At least 17 Jap transports were bombed.”152

  Jolly good news, were any of it true. In fact, not a single Japanese warship was sunk; only one sustained any damage whatsoever. Admiral Doorman drowned inside his doomed ship, followed before midnight by half his fleet. A few nights after the battle, HMS Perth and USS Houston charged into Banten Bay, near Sunda Strait, and in desperation attacked an overwhelmingly superior Japanese force. Both cruisers were destroyed. Later the same day, HMS Exeter (the hero of the December 1939 Battle of the River Plate, where the Graf Spee was scuttled) and two destroyers tried to flee Java. All three were sunk. The Japanese had taken the Java Sea without losing a single warship. The annihilation of the Allied fleet was a catastrophic defeat, especially for the Dutch, who had been a major power in the East Indies for three hundred years. The British were on the run, to Burma and India, where they hoped to regroup. But the Japanese were outrunning them. On February 28, Japanese forces landed on Java. Eight days later the island was theirs, as were more than 90,000 Dutch, and thousands of British, Australian, and American prisoners. With the surrender of Java, Wavell’s ABDA command simply disappeared.153

  In Rangoon all order had disappeared a month earlier. The evacuation of Rangoon, ongoing since the Christmas raids, had grown desperate with the first concerted bombings of early February. By February 20, refugees and vehicles of all sorts packed the road north. Thousands took to the Irrawaddy River in small boats. Professional thieves—dacoits—fell upon the fleeing citizens, British and Burmese alike, and killed them for what they carried. The fire brigade fled, as did the police and the entire British diplomatic contingent. A British official wrote that city streets were empty except for “criminals, criminal lunatics, and lepers.” Somehow, five thousand felons had been released from prison. After sundown they made Rangoon “a city of the damned.” Lepers, wild dogs, and lunatics fought over scraps of rotting food at garbage dumps and in back alleys. Business owners and the few remaining Burmese soldiers implemented a scorched-earth policy, burning factories, stores of medicines, and supply depots. The few remaining Flying Tigers—the last defenders of the city—departed the deranged scene that night for Magwe, to the north, where the remnants of the RAF and the main British force, such as it was, had already dug in.154

  Churchill, in late February, dispatched to Rangoon general Harold Alexander, who had served in France under Brooke and was the last senior officer to get off the beach at Dunkirk. “If we could not send an army,” Churchill later wrote, “we could at any rate send a man.” “Alex” was an aristocrat, an Ulsterman, a fighter and a man of honor, but two decades earlier, two of his instructors at the staff college, Alan Brooke and Bernard Montgomery, had concluded that he was “an empty vessel.” Perhaps Monty and Brooke did not see that Alexander’s lack of enthusiasm for planning was due to his greater love of fighting. In France in 1940 he had displayed a knack for which British generals had “always shown a special aptitude… the art of retreat and evacuation.” That talent helped save the British army. He also displayed a flair for interservice diplomacy, a trait that would well serve Churchill and the Allied cause. In Burma Churchill needed both a man and an army. In Alexander he had the man, but he lacked an army. British colonial forces in Burma did not number enough to properly be called a corps, let alone an army. An Indian division stationed on the far side of the Sittang River, to the east of Rangoon, had been mauled by the oncoming Japanese Fifteenth Army, itself a force of only two small divisions, about sixteen thousand men. The only Burmese division in the vicinity was suffering attrition through desertion, fueled not by cowardice but by Burmese hatred for the British. A lone British armored brigade held Rangoon. Such was Alexander’s “army.” He arrived in Rangoon on March 5, just in time to preside over the loss of the city and lead the chaotic breakout from the capital northward to Prome. Rangoon, aflame and abandoned, fell on March 8.155

  The Japanese used the port to bring in 20,000 more men, and the reinforced Fifteenth Army soon spread outward from Rangoon into the Irrawaddy delta, the most fertile and productive estuary in the British Empire and the source of surplus grains and rice critical to the sustenance of Bengal. The delta had for five decades supplied Bengal enough rice to stave off want; no major famine had occurred in India for more than fifty years, in part because of the relationship between the Burmese rice surpluses and Bengal’s needs. The Japanese broke that connection, stealing the Irrawaddy’s bounty for Tokyo’s consumption and destroying what they couldn’t steal. The delta’s loss, along with unprecedented cyclones in Bengal later in the year and a worsening drought on the upper Subcontinent, guaranteed rising prices and grain and rice shortages in Bengal, whether or not Japanese troops arrived there anytime soon. The Japanese objective was nothing less than to drive the British out of Burma, starting at Rangoon, six hundred miles south of the Assam frontier. Alexander promptly put Lieutenant General William (“Billy”) Slim in charge of the newly formed Burma Corps (Burcorps) in hopes of repelling the invader. Slim was a real fighter, who had subdued the Iraqi and Iranian revolts the previous year. Yet Burcorps was an army on paper only. The British receded before the Japanese tide, Alexander withdrawing north toward Prome while Vinegar Joe Stilwell, commanding six undersize and unenthused Chinese divisions, covered his eastern flank.156

  The presence of the hated Chinese on Burmese soil—reluctantly agreed to by Wavell—served only to bring more Burmese deserters into the Japanese ranks. A week after the fall of Rangoon, Alexander and Stilwell met for the first time in a pretty little hillside colonial town near Mandalay, a village the British had named May Town—Maymyo. The two generals did not exactly hit it off. Stilwell, with a good ear for upper-class English speech, later declared, “Extrawdinery!” Alexander, with a condescending gaze, “looked me over as if I had just crawled from under a rock.”* Yet if a joint command was what it took to fight the Japanese, Stilwell was glad to be on board. He wanted not only to hold the city of Toungoo but to attack. But Chiang, to Stilwell’s fury, delayed his decision to order Chinese forces south from Mandalay until it was too late, with the result that by the end of the month, the Japanese overran Toungoo. Stilwell and Alexander now had but one decision to make, whether to run to China or to India. Stilwell sent half his Chinese forces back up the Burma Road, the other half north toward Myitkyina, near the Indian frontier, and the only navigable track from India to China. The Japanese commenced chasing Stilwell’s troops up the Burma Road and Alexander’s emaciated force up the west bank of the Irrawaddy. Burma was doomed.157

  It took the entire month
of April for the Japanese to finish the job, during which time Alexander and Slim skulked off toward Assam, while most of Stilwell’s Chinese troops fled to Chungking, joined by hundreds of Burmese deserters. Stilwell, offered a ride out for himself and his immediate staff on an Army Air Force plane, chose instead to walk out with 114 men to Assam, a miserable journey of over two hundred miles along the Irrawaddy and through high mountain passes. His men no longer looked up when an airplane passed over; the Allies had none in the skies. The trek took almost three weeks. As they slogged toward the Assam frontier, Alexander, Slim, and Stilwell raced the Japanese and the coming monsoon rains. When on May 17 Alexander arrived in Kalewa, a border town at the confluence of the Chindwin and Myittha rivers, he had with him just two dozen field guns and as many trucks. It was the longest retreat in British military history. Almost one-third of his original force of thirty thousand stayed behind as casualties and deserters. Stilwell did not lose a man, but his little band arrived in Assam half starved, with the Japanese at their back. The monsoon rains arrived three days later. The Burma Road was lost, along with Burma, Lord Randolph Churchill’s imperial legacy, presented by him to Queen Victoria as a New Year’s present in 1886.158