The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  This was Marshall’s first introduction to Churchill’s late hours and long monologues, in this case on the American Civil War and World War One. Brooke observed that Marshall “was evidently not used to being kept out of his bed till the small hours of the morning, and not enjoying it much!” Marshall told Brooke that he usually left the office at around 6:00 for a short ride on his horse and an early dinner at home, and that he might meet with Roosevelt once every month or six weeks. Brooke replied that he’d be lucky if he did not see Churchill for six hours. Despite the long hours and Churchill’s digressions, the talks moved along, the British appearing to agree to an entry into Europe that year. In any case, the lack of shipping and landing craft settled the issue; the Americans could spare only enough ships to transport fewer than three U.S. divisions to Britain. That meant that British troops would be in the van of any invasion, and that meant that the British held veto power over any such proposal. As well, although Royal Navy engineers were designing artificial harbors to supply the troops on the beaches, construction was at least a year off. In addition, no effort had been made to build the specialty tanks that could clear minefields or double as massive flamethrowers. What most disturbed Brooke was that all the landing craft then in Britain could deliver only four thousand men to the beaches in the first wave, a force so paltry that it invited annihilation.

  This was the hardest fact that Marshall had not addressed, leaving Brooke to jot in his diary that although Marshall displayed “a great charm and dignity… he did not impress me with his brain.” When Brooke expressed his surprise to Marshall that he had given no thought to what the Allies might do after landing—go east, go south, go north—Marshall had no answer, and in fact shocked Brooke by saying that he “had not even studied any of the strategic implications.” Still, Marshall left for Washington believing that the British had accepted his proposal to put men ashore that year. In fact, Churchill had agreed only to study the proposal.185

  Churchill had done to Marshall what Brooke and the British chiefs regularly did to him when he proposed a scheme not to their liking: voiced enthusiasm and then studied the proposal to death. Ismay, seeing through Churchill’s maneuver, told the chiefs, “Our American friends went happily homeward under the mistaken impression we had committed ourselves to both Roundup [the larger invasion of France] and Sledgehammer…. I think we should have come clean, much cleaner than we did” by reminding the Americans of the horrors of the last war and the debacle of 1940, as well as by telling Marshall that an invasion could be undertaken only when there was “a cast iron certainty” of success.186

  George Marshall harbored a soldier’s natural distrust of politicians. His April meetings with Churchill allayed that distrust; in Churchill, Marshall believed he had found a true statesman, a man he could trust. And in Marshall, Churchill had found a man he could respect, a man who told the truth, whatever the political costs. Thus, Churchill felt regret when Marshall, a few weeks after departing, realized the British had no intention of landing in France, in force, in 1942. The statesman had snookered the soldier. Yet Churchill claimed in his memoirs that he hadn’t intended to mislead Marshall, only to bolster his morale and voice British support for their shared, ultimate goal, a second European front. But Marshall, a man who expected to be told the truth, believed what the British had told him. Henceforth, he would prove himself not so easy a mark.187

  On April 17, the day Marshall and Hopkins left London, Operation Gymnast, the invasion of French North Africa, out of sight and mind for two months, again made its presence known, like a mole in the arcade game. The trigger this time lay with the Vichy government, which that week was hijacked by Pierre Laval, personally despised as much by Hitler as by Roosevelt and Churchill. But Laval was as pro-German a Frenchman as the Führer could wish for. Pétain, old and infirm, had dismissed Laval from the government in the last days of 1940 but now recalled him as vice premier. Within days Laval showed who was in charge when he began cooperating with the Gestapo in its quest to round up and ship east those Jews who had fled central Europe for the safety of France—both occupied and unoccupied France. With Laval in, American policy toward the Vichy regime became obsolete overnight. The American ambassador to Vichy, Admiral William Leahy, was recalled; within weeks Roosevelt made Leahy his chief of staff.188

  A neutral if not welcoming reception by French North Africans to any Anglo-American invasion had always been of primary importance to Roosevelt. For two years he had resisted the urgings of his liberal colleagues and continued to do business with Vichy. His motive was sound. Knowing that American boys would sooner or later be landing on French soil, or French colonial soil, Roosevelt had hoped to have Vichy as an ally when that day came. Counseled by Leahy, the president believed that French North Africa might not obey Laval’s orders and that Pétain, now a figurehead, might fly to Algiers to rally patriotic Frenchmen. The wild card was Admiral Jean Darlan, who remained in the Vichy government as commander of all French armed forces. He had long hated the English, even more so since Churchill had obliterated his beloved ships and hundreds of his sailors at Oran, where Darlan had sent them in order to stay out of German hands. Darlan was also despised by Washington. The Vichy French had at least behaved with consistent poltroonery. Churchill called Darlan a “naval crook,” yet even after Oran, Darlan pledged to never allow the French fleet to fall into German hands, a pledge he had so far kept. Still, Churchill considered the admiral’s word to be worthless, which is somewhat ironic given that it had been Churchill who had struck Darlan at Oran. From a military standpoint, Darlan, more than Laval, was the riddle in need of a solution. Would the admiral send his fleet to fight the Americans and British if they sailed to Vichy North Africa? From Brooke’s standpoint, the whole affair was a mess, a political minefield of the sort military men are keen to sidestep. The CIGS thought nothing would come of the regime change in Paris, by way of any new opportunities in North Africa. And nothing did. With Gymnast again in play (possibly), Churchill made plans to send Dickie Mountbatten to Washington to whisper its merits in Roosevelt’s ear in hopes that Roosevelt—despite the opposition of Marshall and King—would embrace the North African plan a second time.189

  On May 27, Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “Dickie will explain to you the difficulties of 1942… and outline plans for a landing in the north of Norway.” Churchill added that he welcomed Rommel’s attack and that South African premier Jan Smuts, on the scene with Auchinleck, “expresses high confidence in the result.” He closed with, “We must never let Gymnast pass from our minds.” This was not what Roosevelt wanted to hear. Marshall—who had been dragooning as many ships as he could to build up forces in Britain—understood with clarity that Churchill and Brooke had misled him. Now here Churchill came, suggesting a gross diversion from their agreed-upon goal of a landing in France. Churchill’s cable was at least straightforward; Mountbatten’s mission was to impress upon Roosevelt the “practical difficulties,” as Churchill saw it, entailed by Sledgehammer.190

  The choice of Dickie was inspired. He was staunchly pro-American and, like Roosevelt, charming and high born. Mountbatten was a naval hero, and Roosevelt, a naval animal, greatly admired naval heroes. Within a week, to the great distress of Marshall and King, Mountbatten had almost persuaded the president of the perils of Sledgehammer and had praised the wisdom of Churchill’s beloved Jupiter, the proposed invasion of northern Norway, which Brooke had been trying to kill for weeks. Even Churchill by then, with reluctance, sensed that any invasion of Norway was a long shot for that year. Yet Jupiter might well serve as a bargaining chip, to be dropped in favor of something more practical such as Gymnast. By the first week of June, Mountbatten had just about sold Roosevelt, whose choices had been whittled down (as Churchill intended) to Gymnast or nothing. Marshall and King did not see things at all that way; the Pacific, after all, was also a theater of war. They pressed Roosevelt for moves in that direction. Although Marshall and King suspected otherwise, no guile underlay Churchill’
s dealings with Roosevelt. Unless three criteria were met for Operation Roundup—sufficient troops, sufficient landing craft, and artificial harbor facilities—an invasion of France in 1942, or 1943 for that matter, could only end in disaster. Roosevelt understood this; after all, he had done the calculations as to man-lift. He simply needed a push in the proper direction; Churchill and Dickie gave it.

  Hopkins and Marshall’s route home from London in April had taken them over the North Atlantic, where fifty-nine American cargo ships destined for Murmansk were idled in Scottish and Icelandic ports. The reasons for the logjam were many and complex—lack of escorts, overburdened port facilities, the long wait to form convoys—but the most obvious explanation was simple: Admiral Dönitz’s U-boats were winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Since January, much of the battle had been fought within sight of the American east coast. Dönitz’s U-boat strength was up to 250 with more than 90 boats on patrol on any given day—50 or more in the Atlantic, 20 in the Mediterranean, and a dozen or more hunting Russia-bound convoys in the Arctic. On January 12, Dönitz, with American coastal shipping in his sights, had launched Operation Paukenschlag (Drumroll) off the east coast of America. U-boat commanders called the next several months their “second happy time,” referring to the easy pickings offered by unescorted American ships, which sailed—inexplicably—with running lights ablaze along the well-illuminated east coast of the United States. Resorts from New Jersey to Miami, desperate for business, had kept their seaside lights burning for fear that dousing them would spoil the tourist season, but vacationers, denied planes and trains, could not get there in any event.

  The U-boats found their targets starkly silhouetted by the luminous shoreline, a state of affairs that Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison (the official U.S. Navy historian of the war) called “one of the most reprehensible failures” of local governments and the American military during the war. Not until mid-April were the lights ordered turned off. American naval and Coast Guard ships and airborne patrols had begun, but the American navy, failing to grasp the hard-earned lessons of the Royal Navy, had yet to establish coastal convoys to protect ships heading from the Gulf of Mexico to Nova Scotia, where Atlantic convoys began and ended. Getting to Halifax was the responsibility of individual captains. U-boats simply lay in wait for them from New Orleans to the Canadian Maritimes coast. Thirty merchantmen were lost in the Maritimes alone in January, and almost twice as many in February. Churchill had since Pearl Harbor made clear to his subordinates that the war would be won if the Allies did not bungle the job. Off their coast, the Americans were bungling it, with the result, Churchill believed, that the U-boats threatened to bring about “the disaster of an indefinite prolongation of the war.”191

  At the Argentia conference, the Americans had pledged to increase annual merchant shipping production by almost sevenfold, to eight million tons. They would need every ton, as residents from Long Island to Florida’s east coast who regularly beheld the glow of exploding oil tankers out at sea knew. The flames continued unabated during a seven-month attack that Churchill called a “terrible massacre of shipping along the American coast.” The U.S. Navy was so unprepared to meet the challenge that Britain sent some of the fifty formerly American destroyers back across the Atlantic. Not until mid-April did the Americans destroy a U-boat by surface ship. By May the amount of fuel oil reaching New England from the Gulf of Mexico had plummeted by 90 percent. But where New Englanders could don an extra sweater, Russian troops needed guns, munitions, and trucks. Churchill tried to oblige. Stalin was desperate for spare parts to repair the Hurricanes that Britain had sent. Churchill ordered the RAF to dismantle several Hurricanes and ship the needed parts to Russia, a gesture that impressed Harriman, who noted that the American air force would never contemplate such a sacrifice. Stalin needed more than gestures. If the U-boats ravaged the Arctic convoys as they were shipping off the American coast, the Red Army would begin its summer campaigns lacking both a second front in France and the means to hold its own front. Between mid-April and mid-June, twenty-three out of eighty-four ships that left U.S. ports destined for Murmansk were sunk. Seventeen had to take shelter in Scotland, which prompted Stalin to accuse the British of “stealing” goods meant for the Red Army.192

  And then the situation got worse. When twenty-two of thirty-four ships in one late June convoy went down, Churchill was forced to cancel the Arctic convoys for two months. This infuriated Stalin, embarrassed Churchill, and further fueled the “Second Front Now” crowd in Britain, where the heroic deeds of the Red Army so enthralled the populace that a London publisher used his meager ration of paper to reprint Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which sold out within days.193

  The devastation on the seas underscored the importance of the Wizard War. Britain’s shipping losses had ameliorated somewhat during the last half of 1941, due to small improvements in radar, the protection offered by Icelandic and Greenland-based air patrols, the American presence across most of the Atlantic, and a decrease in German air attacks on coastal shipping following the invasion of Russia. Still, total losses of British, Allied, and neutral shipping exceeded four million tons in 1941. The losses would have been far greater but for the fortuitous capture on May 9, 1941, of an Enigma machine and code books from U-110 in the North Atlantic. The U-boat’s captain, F. J. Lemp, had just lost a running battle with the British escort destroyer HMS Bulldog. Lemp, presuming his boat was doomed, ordered it abandoned. But U-110 did not go down. As its crew bobbed in the seas, a boarding party from Bulldog stripped her of everything they could carry, including her codes and Enigma machine. The submarine was taken under tow, but soon sank. The Kriegsmarine believed her crew and secrets had gone down with her. The British now had in their possession a German naval Enigma machine, not a model but the real deal. Churchill waited more than seven months to tell Roosevelt the good news. By early 1942, already wary of too many “coincidental” interceptions of U-boats—best explained by the British having cracked the German codes, which the army and Luftwaffe dismissed as an impossibility—Kriegsmarine cryptologists added a fourth wheel to their Enigma machines, boosting the number of possible letter permutations from the billions into the trillions. The army and Luftwaffe elected to stick with their older, three-wheel models. It was the wrong decision, for Alan Turing and the Bletchley crowd were just now beginning to make calculating machines that possessed the single most critical attribute necessary for breaking a code: computational speed. There are, after all, only so many letters in the alphabet.194

  The addition of the fourth wheel to Enigma, however, gave the Kriegsmarine a hefty advantage in the Atlantic. Compounding that advantage, the German radio intercept and monitoring service (Beobachtungsdienst) had broken the British merchant code, allowing the Kriegsmarine to listen in on Allied intra-convoy conversations, including Royal Navy situation reports, which tracked the location of U-boats. The accuracy of the British reports greatly distressed Dönitz, but the advantage was his. He knew what the British knew, but the British did not know that he knew. Adding the fourth wheel to the naval Enigma machines resulted in a renewed slaughter of Allied shipping. Between January and June of 1942, U-boats sent six hundred ships, eight thousand crewmen, and three million tons of shipping to the bottom, about one-third of the total tonnage lost since 1939. British, Allied, and neutral losses during the first three months of 1942 increased at a “murderous” rate, Alexander Cadogan told his diary, from 420,000 tons in January to 835,000 in March. The holds of a 7,000-ton freighter such as the American-built Liberty Ships held enough cargo to fill almost one hundred railroad freight cars. Each ship lost, therefore, was the equivalent of a mile-long freight train falling into the sea, taking with it enough supplies to feed, clothe, and fuel a small city or an army division for three weeks. Although American shipyards would launch 2,710 Liberty Ships by 1945, in mid-1942, the Germans were sinking them far faster than they could be launched.195

  Yet, Hitler, ever fearful of a British invasion of Norway and the disrupt
ion of his supply of Swedish iron ore, played small with his U-boats. The Führer “sacrificed the glittering chances in the Atlantic,” Churchill later wrote, “and positioned every available surface ship and many a precious U-boat in northern Norwegian waters,” the area Hitler considered to be “the zone of destiny” in the war. He also stationed four new infantry divisions in Norway, bringing the total to eleven, more than 120,000 men. There they sat, and waited for the Englishmen who never came. Even though he used it as a bargaining tool, northern Norway truly topped Churchill’s list of invasion targets, a fact that Brooke knew only too well. But the three British military chiefs, unlike their German counterparts, could step back from their own interservice rivalries and unite in opposition to their leader’s latest questionable scheme. Germany’s best chance to secure its perimeter lay in an all-out assault in the Atlantic, but Hitler ignored Dönitz and shepherded his resources, not only in Norway but in the vicinity of the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, in hopes of sinking an invasion fleet, which also never came. Had he not done so, had he thrown his boats all in, Allied losses would have been far more horrific. As it was, Churchill termed the U-boat menace “our worst evil.” By summer, with Russia in desperate need of supplies, it became Stalin’s worst evil as well.196

  Despite the shipping losses, one statistic above all others offered comfort to Churchill: American oil-refining capacity was twenty times that of Germany. America had more oil underground than it could pump. The war would someday come down to who could afford to bleed the most oil. America’s enormous industrial productive capacity came powerfully into play, but only as a function of America’s ability to pump—and deliver—oil. British factories ceased production without American oil. Tanks went nowhere without gasoline. The United States had enough capacity to pump oil and build factories, tanks, and airplanes far into the future. But with oil, as with food and weapons, delivery was hobbled by the lack of ships to get the oil to Britain and Russia. In May, during the “second happy time,” just six U-boats operating in the Gulf of Mexico sank sixty-six ships, of which more than half were oil tankers. The Allies could not afford to lose oil-toting vessels at that rate and expect—or hope—to relieve Russia. Ships, Hopkins now believed, were more important than their cargoes. A few weeks after the Gulf of Mexico massacre, U-boats sent four hundred thousand tons of Allied shipping to the bottom in just seven days, a rate, Churchill informed Roosevelt, “unexampled in either this war or the last, and if maintained evidently beyond all existing replacement plans.”197