The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Within days of the Cologne raid, the Ministry of Information sent to Russia thousands of propaganda posters: “We lost 44 planes on that [Cologne] raid, but we are prepared to give our lives to destroy Fascism, as you are giving yours. The Fascists will not be able to stand the hell we shall give them together.” But from Stalin’s perspective, faced as he was with almost two million Germans rolling toward Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and the Caucasus oil fields, the British were neither giving enough hell nor sacrificing enough men.

  Two nights after Harris’s heavies smashed Cologne, more than 950 bombers hit Essen, selected as a target specifically because its ancient wood houses and warehouses would fall easy prey to incendiary bombs. A month later, 1,000 of Harris’s fleet visited Bremen. The bombers flew in new “streaming” formations, a parade of death that stretched from the target almost all the way back to the North Sea. RAF bombing accuracy, though still dismal, had been improved somewhat by the development of the “shaker” system, whereby planes equipped with the latest electronic navigation systems flew ahead and marked targets with flares and then a next wave of aircraft deposited loads of incendiary bombs on the target, thus providing a concentrated area of fire where the bombers of the main force could drop their high-explosive bombs. The results were devastating. Harris enthused to the press, “Give me a thousand bombers over Germany every night, and I will end the war by October. Give me 20,000 and I will stop it in a single night.” The RAF’s massed raids impressed the Americans, as Harris intended. Deliveries of B-17s and the American pilots and crews to man them spiked upward. German civilians got the message as well; while Russian and British soldiers as yet posed no threat to Germans, British bombers could get through to burn German cities. Yet Harris took away new and distressing knowledge: his nightly losses, more than 5 percent, were too high, and his resources were too meager to sustain such losses. He needed the Americans to get up to speed, but the American Eighth Air Force had yet to fly a mission.226

  The Cologne raid was seen by many in Britain and the United States as retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s Baedeker raids of April, so named because Göring had targeted several British national treasures that had earned honorifics in the Baedeker Guide, including Bath, Canterbury Cathedral, Bury St. Edmunds, and Ipswich. Britons joked that German pilots flew with a copy of Baedeker propped next to the bomb sight. It was a time, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, when owning “a house next door to Anne Hathaway’s cottage is… an uncomfortable liability… not a picturesque asset.” RAF response to the Baedeker raids was swift. In America, the New Republic parsed the question of whether it was retaliatory as well, and concluded that although Cologne had not been an act of revenge, the Allies should continually weigh both sides of the question in order to avoid any action that could “stain our record in the war or drag us down to the Nazi level.”227

  Americans and Britons had not yet fully grasped just how low the Nazi level in fact was. Within days of the Cologne raid, Berlin demonstrated the real nature of cold-blooded retaliation, and it was not about Cologne. Goebbels and his Führer had been mulling over for some time the best and most efficient manner to confiscate the property of those convicted—and executed—for treasonous actions or speech, or for simply being born racially impure. When Goebbels suggested that the confiscation of “terrorists’ ” bicycles would send a message to would-be troublemakers, Hitler “regarded this proposal as wonderful” and ordered its implementation. For almost three years, far more disproportionate Nazi retaliation against civilians (such as one hundred hostages shot for each German killed) for wrongs against the Reich had been well documented in the West—photos of hanging bodies, firing squads, pushcarts in Warsaw full of emaciated corpses. German vengeance was so swift and terrifying that some of Churchill’s advisers in Special Operations cautioned against taking isolated direct action (assassinations and large-scale sabotage) on the Continent until an Allied invasion was imminent, in order to protect civilians from German retribution. Yet Churchill had urged Special Operations to “set Europe ablaze.” As usual with implementing any such edict, timing is critical.228

  That lesson was learned in London after Reinhard (“the Hangman”) Heydrich, genius behind the Final Solution and deputy chief of the Gestapo, was assassinated in Prague by the British-trained Czech resistance fighters whom the RAF had parachuted into the country five months earlier. The assassins struck on May 27, lobbing a bomb into Heydrich’s Mercedes coupe, shattering the Hangman’s spine. He lingered for a week before dying a ghastly death from blood poisoning and infections caused by festering tufts of upholstery that had blown into his gut. Germany’s minister of justice—Hitler—moved swiftly to punish the evildoers. More than 1,300 Czechs were immediately executed. The assassins and five cohorts took refuge in a Prague church, where they were found and killed two weeks later. More than 3,000 Jews were transported from the “privileged” concentration camp of Theresienstadt to their deaths in the east. Goebbels, on the day Heydrich was attacked, had 500 of the few remaining Jews in Berlin rounded up; more than 150 were shot the night Heydrich died. But that was only the beginning.229

  Then the Reich took the blood-letting to levels not anticipated by anyone, including Churchill. On the morning of June 9, a battalion of German security police surrounded the fourteenth-century Czech village of Lidice. Nobody was allowed to leave. The next day the men and boys over age sixteen of the village, 172 in all, were taken behind a barn in groups of ten and shot. Several women were shot, too, and the rest—almost 200—were sent to slave labor camps in Germany. At the local hospital, the Germans found four women who had just given birth. The newborns were murdered, the mothers shipped off to labor camps. The village children, about 90 in all, were sent to Germany, where, if medical professionals established their Aryan purity, they were placed with good Nazi families. Before departing Lidice, the Security Police burned the village, dynamited the ruins, and bulldozed the rubble into a flat, dead landscape, including the cemetery, where the interred had been dug up and bulldozed back into the soil. Berlin ordered the entire operation be photographed. Goebbels called the result his Gemäldegalerie (picture gallery). Then, Goebbels announced the details of the Lidice operation to the world, lest anyone else have the temerity to murder another one of Hitler’s favorites. It was a tale even Bracken’s disinformation wizards could not have conjured in their most macabre moments.230

  Lidice, Goebbels proclaimed, was justice administered, not retaliation for Cologne. However, he added, if the Allies did not cease the mass bombing of German cities, “he would exterminate Germany’s Jews.” In fact, he had confessed to his diary almost three months earlier that at least 60 percent of the Jews transported to the east were to be “liquidated,” the remaining 40 percent were to become slave laborers, and worked to death. In this regard, the little doctor proved himself a man of his word.231

  The full extent of the British role in Heydrich’s assassination was not revealed for over fifty years. Hugh Dalton, head of SOE and considered a “blabber” who might promise Churchill something he couldn’t deliver, was kept in the dark by his subordinates in the Czech section. There is no record of Churchill approving the operation, but SOE had been created as a stand-alone entity, the better to facilitate plausible deniability. Churchill mentions neither the assassination nor Heydrich in his memoir of the war.232

  In a broadcast ten months before the Lidice massacre, Churchill proclaimed that “scores of thousands—literally scores of thousands” of Russians had been executed by the Germans. He couched his words in terms of reports from visiting British generals, but his real source was impeccable. German commanders, with their penchant for precise bookkeeping, radioed the death tallies directly to Berlin, and therefore to Bletchley. Thousands of victims were described as “Jewish plunderers” and “Jewish bolshevists.” This Churchill chose not to share with the public. He cautioned that the slaughter was “but the beginning” and went on to predict that “famine and pestilence” would “follow in
the bloody ruts of Hitler’s tanks.” The Führer, he declared, was outkilling even his Teutonic ancestors. And not since the Mongols came in the thirteenth century had Europe seen such “methodical, merciless butchery” on such a monstrous scale. “We are in the presence,” he concluded, “of a crime without a name.” From the Ukraine to the Baltic states, from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw where four hundred thousand souls existed on rotten flour and foul water, to Holland and to occupied France and Belgium, the crime grew more monstrous by the day. The previous October, the prison camp for political prisoners at Auschwitz, about forty miles west of Krakow, was enlarged in order to accommodate tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jewish. The new camp, Birkenau, was built not as a forced labor camp but as an extermination facility. In late 1941, the SS conducted tests of the gas Zyklon B on Jewish and Russian prisoners in the camp basements. Satisfied with the deadly results, the SS set to work building industrial gas chambers and crematoria that could process two thousand bodies at a time. By mid-1942, a few—very few—escapees from Auschwitz had brought news of the genocide to the West. At the time, the tales could not be verified. The crime Churchill cited still had no name. But Goebbels’ Gemäldegalerie had given it a face.233

  By June 12 Churchill felt that a meeting between himself and Roosevelt was past due. They needed to unravel the tangled mess created during Marshall’s April visit, to settle on an objective for their armies, and to discuss “Tube Alloys,” the atomic bomb project. On that topic, there was not a great deal to discuss; unbeknownst to Churchill, the Americans were about to contract for all of Canada’s uranium. (It would be almost a year before Churchill learned the extent of America’s uranium dealings.) In any case, Britain had no money in its Exchequer to build an atomic bomb, even if it could procure the uranium to do so. The Americans would have to carry the ball on atomic research, and carry it quickly. It was well known in both Washington and London that the Germans were trying to use “heavy water”—available in large quantities as a by-product of ammonia production at a Norwegian hydroelectric plant—to serve as a moderating solution in the creation of element 94 (plutonium) from uranium. Goebbels months earlier had scribbled in his diary one of his more prescient thoughts: “Research in the realm of atomic destruction has now proceeded to a point where its results may possibly be made use of in this war…. Tremendous destruction can be wrought…. It is essential that we be ahead of everybody, for whoever introduces a revolutionary novelty into this war has the greater chance of winning it.”234

  But it was not only the future of atomic research or the timing of the second European front that spurred Churchill’s request for a meeting with Roosevelt, but also a naval battle that began in the Pacific on June 4. Churchill had predicted in January that the Americans would regain fleet superiority in the Pacific by May or June, a wildly optimistic assessment based on no empirical evidence. He simply ignored the fact that Admiral Yamamoto had proven himself the most daring and successful naval strategist of the century, if not of all time. A more realistic line of thought would hold that if the Americans built more capital ships, Yamamoto would sink them.

  Yet Churchill’s hunch paid off on the morning of June 4 near Midway Island. Yamamoto intended to take Midway that day, and to annihilate the American fleet, which he expected to come in search of his own forces. As usual, his plan was complex, and it depended upon the Americans doing exactly what he expected. Five Japanese naval task forces participated; in aggregate strength at that point, the Japanese force was greater than the Royal Navy’s Atlantic and Home fleets combined, and it dwarfed anything the Americans could send to meet it. One Japanese force made for the Aleutian Islands, where it shelled the airbase at Dutch Harbor and occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska, at the western end of the chain. Four Japanese task forces made for Midway, consisting of an advance guard of sixteen submarines and an occupation force of five thousand men in twelve transports protected by two battleships and a bevy of cruisers and destroyers. Then came the big guns: Nagumo’s Pearl Harbor Strike Force of four heavy aircraft carriers, well screened by cruisers, and shadowed by seven battleships, on one of which Yamamoto put his flag. In all, more than 160 Japanese warships and support craft were involved. The strike at the Aleutians, intended to draw away Admiral Chester Nimitz’s forces, began at sunrise on June 3. By nightfall on the third, with his plan unfolding flawlessly, Yamamoto prepared to execute the final two phases: the occupation of Midway while the Americans presumably sailed north on a wild goose chase, and then the deployment of his fleet to hunt down and annihilate Nimitz’s navy. But Nimitz’s code breakers had parsed a strand of the Japanese naval code, which told them exactly where Yamamoto and his main force were headed: Midway.235

  As Yamamoto steamed for Midway, Nimitz prepared an ambush northeast of the island, in an empty swath of the sea that flanked Yamamoto’s expected course. Nimitz threw in his lot—the aircraft carriers Hornet, Yorktown, and Enterprise, along with as many cruisers and destroyers as he could afford. He put in no battleships because he had no battleships. At first things went exceedingly well for the Japanese. Just after daybreak on June 4, they bombed Midway, and then they massacred forty-three misnamed Devastator torpedo bombers from Nimitz’s carriers that had the misfortune of locating the Japanese fleet. Sixty American dive-bombers dispatched from Midway along with more planes from U.S. carriers failed to even locate Yamamoto’s ships. Shortly after 10:00 A.M., and for about two minutes, Yamamoto thought he had won the battle, and the war. He ordered his bombers re-armed and refueled for another run at Midway. But the slaughter of the low-flying American torpedo planes had left Yamamoto’s shield of Zero Fighters buzzing around his ships almost at sea level when they should have been hovering protectively high overhead. No commander on any Japanese bridge took note of this. Then, a few seconds before 10:26 A.M., three dozen Dauntless dive-bombers from Enterprise cruising at 14,000 feet beheld below four Japanese aircraft carriers, the fattest of targets, and the pride of Yamamoto’s fleet. The carriers’ decks were crammed with refueling aircraft, gasoline lines, bombs, and torpedoes. The U.S. Navy pilots rolled their planes and nosed down. Within six minutes the tide of war in the Pacific was reversed in a maelstrom of exploding fuel and bombs on the blazing flight decks of three of Yamamoto’s crippled carriers, including Akagi, which had led the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Darwin, Colombo, and Rabaul, the New Britain port that since its capture in January served as the Japanese base of operations in the South Pacific.236

  Six minutes. Here indeed was a small agate point of the sort Churchill relished and upon which fortunes turned.

  Churchill cabled his “heartiest congratulations” to Roosevelt. The battle, he wrote, had “very decidedly altered the balance of the Naval war.” Here he fell into characteristic hyperbole, except in this case he was absolutely correct. The balance in the Pacific had shifted so dramatically that he now worried that Admiral King—with the American people fully behind him—might persuade Roosevelt to finish off Japan before taking on Germany. King, who in fact was thinking along those lines, elicited the support of Marshall (still disgruntled over his April mishandling by Churchill), and the two began plotting just such a Pacific-first policy. Roosevelt quashed it. Still, Marshall planned to ship five times as many troops to MacArthur as to Britain, and was already shipping scores of B-17s to the Pacific that had been destined for Britain. The American chiefs appeared ready to abandon Europe-first. This disquieting prospect—in conjunction with Rommel’s latest misdeeds—led Churchill, in the same telegram, to call for a meeting with Roosevelt: “I feel it is my duty to come and see you.”237

  Prospects in Africa were troubling. Rommel had paused for a week in early June after bending back Ritchie’s southern flank and throwing the Eighth Army into disarray. Initially outnumbered, by mid-June the Germans held a two-to-one edge in tanks. Tobruk, and the 35,000 mostly South African, mostly green troops holed up there, lay exposed just thirty miles to Ritchie’s rear. The Tobruk garrison had been told by
headquarters that if circumstances developed as they appeared to be developing, the plan called for an evacuation, not a defense. Yet Ritchie failed to order either an evacuation or a buildup of the city’s defenses. He had lost control of events, and of the battle. Auchinleck presumed Ritchie would stick to the fall-back-and-evacuate plan; Churchill presumed Auchinleck would hold the city. Auchinleck had infuriated Churchill three months earlier when he claimed he would not be ready to attack until mid-June. When Rommel first struck in late May, the question became, would Auchinleck be ready to defend by mid-June? When Rommel lunged out of his positions on June 13 to send Ritchie’s army reeling even farther east, the answer became self-evident.238

  Thus, with American fortunes on the rise in the Pacific while British fortunes again evaporated in the desert, Churchill fretted over a disruption in the Europe-first strategy. Although Roosevelt was firmly disabusing his military men of their Pacific inclinations, no plans existed for a European thrust. Roosevelt wanted something done about that. Years later Marshall told Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison that “the one great lesson he learned in 1942 was that the political leaders must ‘do something’; they could not afford the impression of fighting another ‘phony war’ that year.” The U-boat war wasn’t phony in the least, and the Allies were losing it. Rommel appeared unstoppable. Russia, again, stood unsteadily at the precipice, and Hitler, again, seemed poised to push the Soviets off. Three days after congratulating Roosevelt on his victory at Midway, Churchill made ready to return to Washington.239