The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Stalin, Harriman reported to Roosevelt, “took issue at every point with bluntness.” He first lectured Churchill on the need to take risks in order to win wars, and then proclaimed, “You must not be so afraid of the Germans.” Churchill, keeping his cool, replied that the British air offensive against Germany was a success, and with American participation would visit ruin on Germany. Here, Stalin expressed some enthusiasm, suggesting that houses as well as factories be targeted. Churchill backed away, saying that any damage inflicted upon “working men’s houses” was a by-product of bombs missing industrial targets. He then steered the talk to Torch, which he declared was in fact a second front. Here, he sketched a crocodile and, poking his pen at the crocodile’s belly, offered that it was just as sound to strike here, in its soft underbelly, as it was—he now tapped the crocodile’s nose—to attack “its snout.” At that, Stalin seemed to take interest, asking a great many questions about the operation before pronouncing Torch militarily sound. He added, “May God help this enterprise to succeed,” a strange utterance from the leader of an atheist dictatorship (he had been a seminarian before devoting himself to revolution and murder). After more questions from Stalin about the African campaign (including the need to bring de Gaulle in), the meeting adjourned. All in all, it had been a productive start.302

  The next day’s meeting was scheduled for late in the evening to allow Brooke, Tedder, and Cadogan to reach Moscow first. After an eleven-hour flight from Baku they arrived in time for dinner at Churchill’s dacha. All recorded similar impressions of the extravagant accoutrements in the villa, including marble walls, wood paneling, rooms too numerous to count, a large aquarium full of tropical fish (which Churchill wanted to feed), and patches of ripe raspberries in the walled gardens. Most of all, they were struck by the food, in variety and abundance unlike anything they had seen in three years. Cadogan thought it all “really rather vulgar.” Before dinner Churchill sat down with Tedder to recount the previous day’s meeting with Stalin, whom he called “a peasant” and one he could handle at that. Tedder was mortified; all except Churchill knew that the walls likely contained microphones. Tedder scribbled a note and shoved it across the table; it read, “Méfiez-vous” (“Beware”). The Kremlin, too, Tedder assured Churchill, was bugged. At this, Churchill turned and addressed the walls: “The Russians, I have been told, are not human beings at all. They are lower in the scale of nature than the orang-outang [sic]. Now, then, let them take that down and translate it into Russian.”303

  Shortly after ten on the thirteenth, Churchill left for the Kremlin and his second meeting with Stalin. It proved a disaster. Harriman saw it coming. The previous year when he and Beaverbrook brought Lend-Lease to Moscow, their first meeting with Stalin had gone well, but he had arrived at the second in full offensive mode, blunt and insulting. He did so again this day, when he began by reading from a memorandum that Harriman described as “bristling with recriminations,” all directed toward Churchill and his “refusal” to open a second front in 1942. He demanded that the front be opened that year. Churchill, shrewdly, promised to respond in writing, thus delaying further recriminations. Stalin came at him verbally, demanding greater sacrifices by the Western powers. Ten thousand* Russians were sacrificed daily, he declared. What were the British doing? Churchill touted the RAF bombing campaign and promised to “shatter almost every dwelling in every German city” as the war went on. Stalin smiled at that, but claimed a “reluctance” to fight on the part of the British. It was fear, in fact. He accused the British of stealing Lend-Lease material, and snarled that they should try fighting for a change, like the Russians, to which Churchill replied, “I pardon that remark only on account of the bravery of the Russian troops.” Harriman, recalling his experience of the previous year, slipped Churchill a note telling him not to take Stalin too seriously. But Churchill hit back, speaking so rapidly that his interpreter fell behind. “Did you tell him this?” Churchill asked his interpreter, and again, “Did you tell him this?” He wanted Stalin to hear each and every point. The British and Americans were not cowards, and they would demonstrate that soon. He and Roosevelt were willing to sacrifice 150,000 men in France if they thought it would help Russia, but a foolish enterprise would serve no one. “Did you tell him this?” again he asked after each rejoinder. Harriman thought it was Churchill’s “most brilliant” performance, during which he not once reminded Stalin of his pact with Hitler. Stalin finally leaned in to the table, and said, “Your words are of no importance, what is important is your spirit.” With that, the tension eased. Stalin invited Churchill and Harriman to dine with him the next evening. When the meeting ended at midnight, Churchill, enraged, banged down the corridors of the Kremlin, “looking neither left nor right. He struck a match on the Kremlin wall and without breaking stride lighted a cigar.”304

  He kept Harriman up into the wee hours analyzing Stalin’s change in demeanor. Their best guess was that other commissars on the Politburo, holding more power than the West believed, insisted that Stalin take a harder line. Harriman predicted a return to affability at the next meeting.

  The next night—later that day, in fact—Stalin hosted a dinner for forty in Catherine the Great’s state rooms. Harriman thought the affair more subdued than the feasts he and Beaverbrook had been treated to the previous year. Churchill later wrote, “Silly tales have been told of how these Soviet dinners became drinking bouts. There is no truth whatever in this.” Actually there was a great deal of truth. Brooke called the banquet “a complete orgy” of nineteen courses and vodka toast after vodka toast raised by all around the table, a dozen or more in the first hour. The table “groaned” under the weight of hors d’oeuvres and fish and chickens and a suckling pig with a black truffle eye and orange peel mouth. Stalin’s aide General Kliment Voroshilov almost drank himself under the table, which he had in fact done at a dinner for Eden in December. When Voroshilov held up his glass to click Stalin’s, Brooke was sure the general must have been seeing a half dozen glasses. But the toast came off, as did the banquet. The verbal jousts were friendly, but still pointed. Stalin recounted Lady Astor’s comment made during her prewar visit to Moscow: “Oh, Churchill, he’s finished.” The marshal told Churchill he had disagreed. “If a great crisis comes,” he recalled saying, “the English people might turn to the old war horse.” That pleased Churchill, who asked if Stalin had forgiven him for trying to crush the Bolshevik revolution after the Great War. “All that is in the past,” Stalin replied. “It is not for me to forgive. It is for God to forgive.” The leg-pulling and toasts went on for four hours. Upon leaving the Kremlin after 1:00 A.M., and still smarting from the talks of the previous day, Churchill told Cadogan he did not really know what he was doing here and he planned to return to London without seeing Stalin again. “He was,” Cadogan told Dr. Wilson, “like a bull in the ring maddened by the pricks of the picadors.”305

  But when he again met with Stalin, all went well, as Harriman had predicted. They gathered at seven that evening in Stalin’s private rooms in the Kremlin. Bottles were uncorked, food prepared, and the leg-pulling began again, but with good humor. Churchill could not resist chiding Stalin on his pact with Hitler; Stalin, in turn, asked why the British had tried to bomb Molotov when he was in Berlin in 1940. Churchill replied, “In war no advantages can ever be neglected.” Stalin, still smarting from the cancelation of Arctic convoys, asked, “Has the British Navy no sense of glory?” Churchill replied that he knew a great deal about navies. Stalin shot back, “Meaning that I know nothing.” Churchill then delivered a monologue on the differences between sea powers and land powers, as he had with Molotov in May. The meeting pushed past ten o’clock. Churchill, remembering that he had plans to dine with the Polish general Wyadłsław Anders, who was in Russia searching for thousands of missing Polish army officers, sent off a note canceling their engagement. Stalin and Churchill talked—and drank—past midnight, trading tales and information. Churchill told Stalin that a major British raid would soon
take place on the French coast, at Dieppe; Stalin offered to share with the British the blueprints for a new type of rocket (he never did). At 1:00 A.M., a suckling pig was produced, which Stalin fell upon. Churchill finally departed after three with a “splitting headache” (his only reference to the effects of alcohol in his memoirs). By dawn he was bound for Tehran.306

  He arrived back in Cairo on August 17, having concluded, as he later told the House, that Stalin was “a man of massive outstanding personality… a man of inexhaustible courage and will-power, and a man direct and even blunt in speech…. Above all, he is a man with that saving sense of humour which is of high importance to all men and all nations, but particularly to great men and great nations…. I believe I made him feel that we were good and faithful comrades in this war but that, after all, is a matter which deeds, not words, will prove.”307

  Early in the morning of August 19, Louis Mountbatten launched his largest military venture of 1942, a triphibious raid on Dieppe by air, sea, and land of five thousand mostly Canadian infantry supported by thirty Churchill tanks. This was the operation Churchill had played up to Stalin. In Cairo, Churchill waited for reports on the results. The results were disastrous—almost one thousand killed and two thousand captured. Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff, who had approved the Dieppe raid, shared responsibility for the horrific results of Mountbatten’s misjudgment.

  The first post-battle report from Mountbatten that reached Churchill proclaimed that the “morale of returning troops is excellent…. All I have seen are in great form.” He could not have seen very many, given the numbers of dead and captured. Based in part on that faulty intelligence, Churchill cabled the War Cabinet, “The results fully justified the heavy costs.” Only weeks later, as the real casualties were tallied, did Churchill see the folly of the scheme. Yet, the raid served a tangential political purpose, arguing against any further continental excursions for 1942. Even if the Allies possessed the right type and sufficient quantities of landing craft to mount an invasion, and they did not, the results at Dieppe spoke directly to the need for much heavier firepower in such landings, more tanks, specialized tanks for clearing mines, and paratroop disruption behind enemy lines. It verified Brooke’s (and Eisenhower’s) thesis that a beachhead could only be held if supported by massed aerial bombing of German positions and transportation links leading to the beaches. It verified the need for overwhelming fire support from the navy right up to the moment when troops hit the beach, and after, by way of long-distance barrages laid down by battleships, not pot shots by gunboats. Given that the American Eighth Air Force was just getting off the ground and that the scores of warships needed to support any large-scale landing were dispersed across the Atlantic on convoy escort duty, only one conclusion could be drawn from Dieppe as it pertained to a second European front: no further landings could be contemplated for at least a year. Any reasonable man could understand that, but, as Churchill had learned days earlier, Stalin was not that kind of man.308

  Churchill liked to proclaim that he judged the results, not the man. The slaughter of Dieppe should have cost Mountbatten his career, and it would have had he not been a Churchill favorite. Churchill was ruthless in purging those who displeased him, but his treatment of Mountbatten was an altogether different matter. By the late summer, Mountbatten’s staff at Command Operations numbered more than 350, including dozens of Americans. Combined Operations had grown from a minuscule unit to Dickie’s fiefdom. Although on paper Vice Admiral Lieutenant General Air Marshal Mountbatten answered to the Chiefs of Staff, he in fact had been granted a unique measure of power that he exercised almost unilaterally. Brooke didn’t think much of his command qualifications, and he thought even less of many of his schemes. Yet Dickie charmed many, including Franklin Roosevelt, who, as a former naval person himself and the scion of seafarers, liked the cut of Dickie’s jib. Lady Emerald Cunard, the queen of London’s hostesses, did not, and offered to Jock Colville that Mountbatten “was one of the most tedious men she knew; he thought a mask of superficial charm could compensate for never having read a book.” In fact, in the coming months, Churchill was to give Dickie far more significant commands, in Burma, and later in India. He had earned Churchill’s confidence and, most important, his absolute loyalty. That’s all he needed.309

  Churchill later wrote that valuable lessons were learned at Dieppe, that the Canadians had not died in vain. But the British chiefs should not have needed a debacle like Dieppe to learn the lessons; they were paid to plan, not to experiment. The maxims of fire support and overwhelming force that Mountbatten violated were well known, including by Churchill, who in this case did not pay his usual attention to the smallest of details. The raid was a complete failure, and the many lives sacrificed in attempting it were lost with no tangible result. Yet Brooke had discussed the plan during at least two staff meetings and had voiced no dissenting opinion at the time. Only when the butcher’s bill was tallied did Brooke confide to his diary that “for such an enterprise” the total casualties—three thousand out of five thousand men—were “far too heavy.” Usually quick to denigrate Mountbatten, Brooke did not. Nor did Churchill, whose first concern was that his new Eighth Army commander, Bernard Montgomery, might have had a hand in planning the debacle before departing England for Cairo. He had not. In fact, the raid was originally scheduled for early July, but foul weather and German aircraft attacks had forced its postponement. Montgomery, at the time, advised that it be permanently scrubbed. Montgomery bore no responsibility for Dieppe, and Mountbatten escaped taking any. But Beaverbrook took the slaughter of his fellow Canadians hard, and for the remainder of his life loathed Dickie Mountbatten.310

  After almost thirty-six months of war, the only general Churchill could bring himself to pay tribute to was not British, but Erwin Rommel, who he anointed “a great general” in front of a very surprised House of Commons. The British government that summer conducted a survey in order to gauge the public’s opinion of the army, which, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, had never been accorded the kudos bestowed upon the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. In one of the questions, homeowners were asked to name the war’s “outstanding general.” The government presumed respondents would offer the name of a British general. A distressingly high percentage of those surveyed answered “Rommel.” England and Churchill liked a “first-class performer.” Yet Churchill’s respect for Rommel went only so far. Before departing Cairo, he issued orders to Alexander and Montgomery. They were to “take or destroy at the earliest opportunity the German-Italian army commanded by Field Marshal Rommel.”311

  Late on August 23, Churchill, Dr. Wilson, and Harriman boarded Commando in Cairo for the run to Gibraltar, with Brooke and his staff following fifteen minutes later in a B-24 Liberator. The fourteen-hour flight took Churchill over the desert and French North Africa and out to sea, where under low clouds they ran just thirty feet above the Mediterranean. According to the captain’s reckoning, Gibraltar should have heaved into view, but a heavy mist hung low over the water. The Rock was invisible. Churchill, as was his habit on final approaches, climbed into the cockpit. After a glance out the window, he voiced his fear that they were going to crash into Gibraltar. Vanderkloot, busy at the controls, muttered a few words of encouragement, and flew on. After several anxious minutes, Churchill recalled, the plane “flew into clear air, and up towered the great precipice of Gibraltar.” Vanderkloot’s reckoning was spot on. Once they were all on dry land, Churchill’s military bodyguards, fearing an assassination attempt, confined him to Governor’s House. He would have none of it, and proposed disguising himself as an Egyptian demimondain or an American tourist with a toothache (presumably with a knotted bandage around his head) in order to tour the fortress. But in Governor’s House he stayed, where over lunch he made clear that he would rather be in Egypt, on the front lines, especially were Rommel to attack within days, which according to Ultra he would do. But he was the prime minister, not a field marshal, and his place was in London, not on the li
ne. Late in the afternoon, angry at having to fly from, not toward, the pending battle, he boarded his plane.312

  Rommel attacked on August 31. “What I now needed,” Montgomery later wrote, “was a battle which would be fought in accordance with my ideas.” He got exactly that. Rommel’s plans called for turning the Eighth Army’s southern flank, above the Qattara Depression, much as he had turned Ritchie’s flank on the Gazala Line three months before. Montgomery, anticipating that tactic, fortified the Alam-el Halfa ridge to his rear with an entire infantry division along with dug-in artillery. Then he massed four hundred tanks in front of the ridge, intending to let Rommel flail against his protected left flank. Rommel expected Montgomery to counterattack, at which time he planned to swing past Montgomery’s flank and drive through the center of the Eighth Army. When Montgomery refused Rommel’s gambit, the German cabled his Mediterranean commander, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, “The swine will not attack.” Actually, Montgomery’s command of just two weeks—“brave but baffled” Churchill had called the Eighth Army—was not yet ready to attack, but they were ready to defend their turf. One of Montgomery’s first orders to his troops was that if attacked, they would not withdraw. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, “We would fight on the ground we now held, and if we couldn’t stay there alive, we would stay there dead.” Rommel learned by September 3 what those who knew Monty had long known: Bernard Montgomery fought battles on his terms and his terms only. By September 4, Rommel had punched himself out against the Alam-el Halfa lines. The two opposing armies settled again into a dusty and belligerent stasis, with two critical differences between this standoff and all the others since 1941. The RAF had established overwhelming air superiority, and the three hundred new Sherman tanks had arrived to add muscle to Montgomery’s army. Rommel, in desperate need of the men, gasoline, and tanks that Hitler had promised, would have to make do with what he had.313