The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Blame for Burma’s loss and the failure of the first joint Chinese-American-British operation was apportioned along nationalist lines. Chiang, in a letter to Churchill, wrote bitterly, “In all my life of long military experience, I have seen nothing to compare with the deplorable, unprepared state, confusion, and degradation of the war area in Burma.” Such words did not endear the generalissimo to Churchill. Stilwell told Washington that he thought the British would rather lose Burma than be indebted to the Chinese for saving it. While Burma tottered, the United States suffered a humiliation of its own when Douglas MacArthur fled Manila for Australia on March 11. Allied thoughts concerning Operation Gymnast (the invasion of French North Africa) went up in the smoke of Rangoon, leading Roosevelt and Churchill to agree that “Gymnast cannot be undertaken.” Roosevelt also noted the irony that Stilwell and Alexander, the commanders designate of Gymnast, met instead in Burma, where the Japanese drove them out. Alexander, stranded in Assam and knowing a cul de sac when he saw one, put Billy Slim in charge of the remnants of Burcorps and returned to London. Roosevelt, who never really had a dog in the fight, offered jaunty condolences to Churchill: “I have never liked Burma or the Burmese…. I wish you could put the whole bunch of them in a frying pan… and let them stew in their own juices.” Churchill, in a note to Roosevelt, offered that the wisest course for the Japanese to now take would be to drive right up the Burma Road to China, and “make a job of that.”159

  This the Japanese did, for a short while, chasing Chiang’s tattered army into Yunnan province. Then the Japanese stopped. They had neither orders from Tokyo nor a strategic plan to carry though on their stupendous victories.

  Weeks earlier, in early March, Eden and Alec Cadogan suspected the fight might have gone out of Churchill. His most loyal friend, Brendan Bracken, and his most omnipresent political critic, Stafford Cripps, agreed that Eden should be made deputy defence minister. Cadogan and Eden also noted that for several weeks “there has been no direction of the war. War Cabinet doesn’t function…. There’s no hand on the wheel (probably due to P.M.’s health).” In fact, the alliance itself was drifting, rudderless. Throughout March and April and into May, Churchill and Roosevelt exchanged telegrams and letters that, taken in the aggregate, underscore Eden’s pessimism and show that the two leaders had differing objectives, militarily and politically, and lacked the means to achieve any of them, alone or together. The alliance was looking all hat and no cattle.160

  These were the weeks when Japanese armies rolled up Burma and Java and the Philippines, where the 75,000 American and Filipino troops trapped on Bataan surrendered on April 9, and marched off to a captivity that would kill almost half of them. Fortress Corregidor fell a month later. In Java, the Japanese had advanced from island to island, up and down the East Indies, until, on March 23, less than a month after landing, they took the Andaman Islands, located three hundred miles off the Thai and Burmese coasts in the Bay of Bengal. Nothing but open ocean separated the islands from Ceylon.

  Stalin, meanwhile, began expressing interest in a treaty with his allies that would secure the Soviet Union’s prewar borders, a concept entirely unacceptable to Roosevelt and Churchill, both of whom had long believed such matters should be addressed only at the postwar peace conference. Yet Churchill now began to see the practical merit in moderating that stance given that America and Britain had made no plans whatsoever to do anything anytime soon to ease Stalin’s burden, other than send small Arctic convoys, which U-boats regularly mauled. Roosevelt considered himself capable of mollifying Stalin, and so notified Churchill. “I think you will not mind me being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”161

  Throughout March, the most pressing question at the Admiralty was, where is Admiral Nagumo’s carrier strike force? Churchill thought it only a matter of time, and likely not a great deal of time, before Nagumo launched air and amphibious attacks on Ceylon to gain complete control of the Indian Ocean. That would put the Japanese athwart the sea-lanes to the Persian Gulf and from the Suez to India, and threaten the supply of Stalin by way of Basra as well as the supply of the British in India and Chiang Kai-shek in China. One of Churchill’s deepest fears—the loss of access to Persian and Iraqi oil—appeared a distinct possibility. Those two nations, lightly garrisoned by British colonial troops, now lay exposed between the forces of Tojo and Hitler, who was certain to make a spring push into the Caucasus, which, if successful, would bring him that much closer to the Middle East. Rommel, too, appeared poised to strike toward Cairo. Were he to get there, the roads to Baghdad would lie open. The troops Churchill had hoped to array on the Levant-Caspian front were now headed to India. The defense of the northern route into the Mosul oil fields, Churchill cabled Roosevelt, “now depends on the success of the Russian armies.” He had summed up the problem to Colville months earlier: “With Hitler in control of Iraqi oil and Ukrainian wheat… not all the staunchness of our Plymouth brethren would shorten the ordeal.” The Middle East was the only theater of war exposed to both Germany and Japan, and its defense fell exclusively to the British, who lacked the manpower to repel Rommel and the sea power to repel the Japanese. As March lurched toward April, the question remained, where was Nagumo?162

  Four months earlier. Louis “Dickey” Mountbatten, a mere captain, and an unlucky one at that—he had lost his ship at Crete—had been promoted to the rank of commander and shortly thereafter replaced Admiral Keyes as director of Combined Operations. Churchill charged Mountbatten and his small staff with planning raids on the Continent, and coordinating those raids with the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, Army, and RAF. Churchill told him to think of only offense, never defense, and to begin drawing up the matériel and personnel requirements—specialized landing crafts, close air support, waterproof tanks, beach spotters, aerial photography—required for a full-fledged invasion of France. Churchill promoted him over far more senior and experienced Royal Navy officers to vice admiral and sat him down on the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, where, Brooke later wrote, Dickie “frequently wasted his own time and ours.” Then Churchill—reasoning that the interservice nature of Combined Operations required a grand gesture—insisted that Mountbatten be promoted to the rank of lieutenant general in the army and air marshal in the RAF, thus earning Mountbatten the enmity of dozens of more senior offices in those branches of the military. From Churchill he earned the moniker of “triphibian,” a word Churchill coined for the occasion, and which soon found its way into Webster’s.163

  March closed with Mountbatten’s first significant foray as director of Combined Operations, a commando raid on the French port of St-Nazaire, located five miles upstream from the mouth of the Loire. The dry dock at St-Nazaire, built for the French passenger liner Normandie (which had burned at its Hudson River pier the previous month), was one of the largest in the world and the only one on the Atlantic coast that offered Bismarck’s surviving sister ship, Tirpitz, space enough for repairs. Tirpitz had for two months been riding at anchor in a fjord at Trondheim, safe from British aircraft. Yet for Germany, the battle cruiser’s safety came at a price. Tirpitz, at anchor, posed no threat to British convoys. Churchill and Mountbatten were of a mind that the destruction of the St-Nazaire dry dock, which would leave Tirpitz no place to run to if damaged, would make a sortie from Trondheim into the Atlantic too dangerous to risk. The British plan was audacious. Escorted by destroyers, gunboats, and 250 commandos, one of the fifty old American destroyers—Campbeltown—its bow packed with three tons of TNT, would sail right up the Loire estuary in the dead of night and crash through the gates of the drydock. The plan called for the crew to scuttle the ship while commandos destroyed the port facilities. Then the small gunboats would pick up the sailors and commandos, and everybody would get the hell out of town. Soon thereafter, if all went as planned, t
he explosives hidden on Campbeltown—set on a timer to allow the crew to escape—would blast the drydock to smithereens.

  Campbeltown crashed the dock at 1:34 A.M., remarkably just four minutes behind schedule. Everything had gone as planned, with the exception of the most vital component of all—the fuse that triggered the explosives. After Campbeltown crashed the gates, nothing. There she sat, a fish out of water. By the time those commandos not killed or captured got away down the Loire or into the countryside, Germans had swarmed aboard Campbeltown. A few dozen German technicians, precise as usual, began a methodical inspection of the ship. They worked through the morning while several hundred officers and men toured the vessel and took snapshots for their girls back home. More than four hundred Germans were aboard when, just before noon, the fuse elected to function. The explosion killed them all. For two days, teams of Germans collected bits and pieces of human remains scattered near the wrecked dock. The raid had its intended effect. Hitler treasured Tirpitz so much that he allowed it to make only two brief North Sea excursions that year in pursuit of Allied convoys. He thereafter refused to send it into the Atlantic proper. Instead, Tirpitz waited for two years in Norwegian fjords for the British invasion that never came. Finally, in November 1944, RAF Lancaster bombers destroyed the ship with six-ton bombs.

  The St-Nazaire raid made little strategic difference in the Battle of the Atlantic, other than to keep Tirpitz out of the Atlantic, but like the hunt for Bismarck, it captured the imaginations of Americans and Britons alike. Churchill, with a nod to the florid, picturesque narrative style of Thomas Macaulay, termed the raid “brilliant and heroic” and “a deed of glory.” The commandos, he wrote, had “been eager to enter the fray,” and did so “in the teeth of a close and murderous fire.” It was the sort of small, sparkling victory he so relished.164

  In North Africa and Asia, Churchill was getting nothing of the sort. Rommel sat in front of Ritchie’s Eighth Army just forty miles west of Tobruk. The German was reinforcing almost at leisure. That he meant to attack was certain; the only question was when. In Asia and the Pacific the Japanese had conquered everything in their path. In Russia the German spring offensive would surely come, when panzers would pour down Ukraine roads that wound east and south toward Stalingrad, and all the way to the Caucasus, and Iraq and Persia beyond. Almost three months had elapsed since Churchill warned the Commons that multiple disasters would strike; they indeed had. And now, with different motives and different goals, Stalin and Roosevelt prodded Churchill to action. Stalin not only sought to cement his 1939 borders, he insisted upon the opening of a second front. Roosevelt desired a decision on where and when American troops would fight, for it had been four months since Pearl Harbor and American voters were starting to wonder if it might be six more before American fighting men actually went on the attack. Franklin Roosevelt did not want the November midterm elections to come and go without American boys fighting Germans somewhere.

  As if to deride British arms, on the night when Mountbatten’s commandos steamed up the Loire, Admiral Nagumo and his force of five modern aircraft carriers, four battleships, and a bevy of cruisers and destroyers sallied into the Bay of Bengal, steaming for Ceylon. The Admiralty no longer need wonder where the Japanese admiral was. Against Nagumo the Royal Navy arrayed a far less powerful fleet made up of four older battleships, three smaller aircraft carriers, a few cruisers, several destroyers, and a great many inexperienced seamen. Its commander, Admiral James Somerville, a veteran of Mediterranean operations, based his ships in a secret anchorage (code-named Port T) at Addu Atoll rather than in Colombo and Trincomalee, where Nagumo expected to find and destroy the British fleet. Fortunately for Somerville, after four days of cruising south of Ceylon in search of Nagumo, he took most of his fleet back to Port T to refuel. When Nagumo appeared off Ceylon on Easter Sunday, April 5, he didn’t find Somerville, but over the next few days he did find 100,000 tons of British merchant shipping, an aircraft carrier, two cruisers, and a destroyer, all of which he sent to the bottom. The British and Japanese traded aircraft casualties, about fifty each, but the net loss for the British was far more severe. Churchill could count only fourteen heavy bombers in all of India. Nagumo, in turn, still had almost nine hundred of his original one thousand pilots and aircraft, more than enough to destroy either the British or the American fleet, whichever he found first. Admiral Somerville, overwhelmingly outgunned, was forced to flee the Indian Ocean and seek refuge on the east coast of Africa, leaving the Bay of Bengal—and India—completely unprotected.165

  Great Britain had been driven from the Indian Ocean. And yet, incredibly, it appeared that Nagumo had departed as well. Contact was again lost with the admiral. Churchill was sure Nagumo would soon return to finish the job. On April 7, Churchill (who inexplicably presumed that American naval strength was now “decidedly superior to the enemy forces in the Pacific”) asked Roosevelt to use those naval forces in order to lure the Japanese back into the Pacific Ocean. Churchill’s calculations are difficult to explain unless Roosevelt had failed to apprise him of the facts, which were that the Japanese outnumbered the Americans in battleships eleven to zero, and in aircraft carriers ten to four. A fifth carrier, Wasp, and America’s newest battleship, Washington, which Admiral King wanted to station in the Pacific, had been sent to Britain in order to ferry Spitfires to Malta, a task the depleted Royal Navy could no longer undertake. Symbolic of the plight of the Allied navies, the American admiral who commanded the Wasp task force was washed overboard in the mid-Atlantic and lost. And when Admiral Cunningham tried to run a relief convoy from Alexandria to Malta—the island was almost out of oil and food—every ship was lost. Brooke confided to his diary, “These are black days.”166

  The Allied naval situation was desperate in all oceans. Churchill’s tone reflected that truth when, on April 15, he warned Roosevelt that the British position was “grave” and that unless Admiral Yamamoto’s fleets were brought to battle and defeated, there was “no reason why the Japanese should not become the dominating factor in the Western Indian Ocean. This would result in the collapse of our whole position in the Middle East.” On April 17 he upped the ante when he cabled Roosevelt: “It is essential that we should prevent a junction of the Japanese and the Germans.” The junction Churchill had in mind was one between Rommel and the Japanese, the most likely scenario being a Japanese fleet pounding the port of Basra while Rommel slashed his way to Baghdad. Yet only half a junction could prove as fatal as an actual Axis hookup. Japanese control of the Persian Gulf would as effectively deny Britain oil as an actual Axis junction in the Middle East. A Japanese reduction of Basra and the nearby Iranian port of Abadan—home to the world’s largest oil refinery—would guarantee that Abadan oil could not be gotten out of Iran, supplies to Russia could not be gotten in, and, as Churchill warned Roosevelt, the British would be unable to “maintain our position either at sea or on land.” Brooke later wrote that from a strategic standpoint, Abadan was more important than Egypt, in that the loss of Egypt did not necessarily mean the loss of Abadan, but the loss of Abadan meant the loss of Egypt. Yet, as Averell Harriman learned later in the year, the British were so stretched worldwide that the only defense Churchill could throw up around Abadan consisted of six obsolete biplanes and a few anti-aircraft guns. If Hitler punched through from North Africa or from the Caucasus (once he took that region, which he intended to do by late summer), Abadan and all of Persia would be his for the taking.167

  Roosevelt, in reply to Churchill’s pessimistic musings, stated that his situation in the Pacific was “very grave” and pointed out that the American navy was supplying and protecting Australia and New Zealand. Left unsaid was the obvious: America was doing so because London could not. Roosevelt also deprecated the possibility of an Axis hookup, calling it a “remote prospect.” Yet that conclusion was no more based on fact than was Churchill’s presumption that the American navy had been fully reconstituted in the Pacific.168

  Churchill (and Brooke) had
believed since December that any junction between Germany and Japan would either prolong the war for years or lead to a negotiated settlement, and at the least would mean the end of Churchill’s government, if not the British Empire. This was the ordeal as Churchill had outlined it to Jock Colville on several occasions.169

  Yet, as events turned out, Admiral Nagumo himself shortened Churchill’s Asian ordeal. Nagumo was one with all Japanese commanders in his absolute belief that imperial orders must be followed to the letter. Creativity in the face of changing battlefield conditions was not a Japanese trait. The Japanese navy liked to divide its forces, which led to highly scripted and complex operations that demanded perfect coordination. The Japanese also favored diversionary tactics intended to lure the enemy into traps or to disrupt the enemy’s plans, but tactical inflexibility prevented them from reacting with vigor when their own plans were disrupted. Changes in plans are, necessarily, unscripted, and were therefore studiously avoided by Japanese commanders. The failure of Nagumo’s airmen to return a third time to Pearl Harbor on December 7 to destroy the fuel depots and repair shops is the best-known example of a Japanese opportunity lost in rigid adherence to the master plan. Such an attack had been hoped for but not planned to the letter and, more important, not ordered.170

  Admiral Yamamoto planned to dispatch in late April a carrier force to the Coral Sea to cover the planned invasions of Tulagi, in the Solomon Islands, and Port Moresby, on the southeast coast of Papua New Guinea. A Japanese victory in New Guinea would isolate Australia and mark a significant milestone on the road to Yamamoto’s main strategic war aim: the erection of an impenetrable ring of air and naval bases around the entire perimeter of the Co-Prosperity Sphere—the bloc of Asian nations led by the Japanese and free of Western powers—before the Americans could re-arm to dispute the issue. With the South Pacific in hand, Yamamoto planned to then take an outer Aleutian island or two in the North Pacific, and to take Midway Island, the outermost link in the Hawaiian chain, 1,100 miles west-northwest of Pearl Harbor. That would close his ring. It was an audacious goal.