The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Churchill, peering backward though history, grasped the ultimate mortality of empires, all save the British Empire, which functioned as a parliamentary democracy, a fact that for Churchill justified—demanded—its continuance. He once told Colville that the one great lesson he had learned from his father was that “the British alone had managed to combine Empire and Liberty.” There were inequalities, to be sure, and he wanted them rectified. He told Attlee that the old order was changing and the “pomp and vanity must go.” He told Eden that in Egypt “too many fat, insolent and party interests had grown up under our protection” and that in time the rich pashas and landowners would have to pay taxes at the rates paid by the wealthy in Britain, which rates Churchill intended to keep high in order that the financial burden of the war did not fall unfairly on Britain’s working class. He pondered as a slogan for postwar reconstruction: “Food, house, and work for everyone.” Yet his cousins across the Atlantic considered “empire” and “liberty” to be antonyms. Of Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “He’s very human and I like him, tho’ I don’t want him to control the peace.” Churchill understood, wrote Colville, that “republicanism and anti-colonialism were shibboleths in Washington and that no American paused to consider the implications of either.”354

  Churchill believed that the diaspora of English-speaking peoples that had taken place since the sixteenth century had resulted in an empire unique in history, an empire, he wrote, “based on Government by consent and the voluntary association of autonomous states under the Crown.” He was one with Aristotle: rule shows the man—to which could be added, rule shows the nation. His was an empire of shared democratic ideals, shared risks, and shared rewards. It was a nation, the mightiest oak in the forest of nations, yet it cast a beneficent shadow in which less civilized peoples might find shelter and grow. On accepting the Tory chairmanship in 1940, he repeated his father’s words that he had shared with Colville, that Britain “alone among the nations of the world… found the means to combine Empire and liberty. Alone among the peoples we have reconciled democracy and tradition.” He considered the Empire synonymous with democracy, and worthy of long life—even perpetual life—whatever the sacrifice required of himself, of Britons, and of the King’s colonial armies.355

  A year before his Mansion House speech, Churchill addressed the boys of Harrow. He told them: “Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”356

  He had not yielded in 1942, when defeat had been the order of the day. Even with America in (and for eleven months Clementine regularly reminded Churchill that America was in, yet not really in), he lacked the requisite military might to kill his enemies. What remained for Churchill but optimism? The dark days of the previous two years did not justify it, yet he always found the sunny side. He was no man of sorrow. Gloom regularly overtook him after the military disasters that had occurred with depressing regularity, yet it did not linger. It never, his daughter Mary recalls, “un-manned him.”357

  An air of inevitable Allied victory is attached to America’s entry into the war; yet 1942 had passed with Britain still on the knife edge. Only in hindsight do we know that El Alamein and Midway Island were turning points; that Hitler erred in his U-boat deployment; and that he erred in not erasing Malta from the map. As 1942 drew to a close, Churchill remained true to his conviction that the rings of steel and concrete that Germany and Japan had thrown up around their respective conquests should be relentlessly probed until weak spots were exposed, and then exploited. By air the RAF had penetrated the German ring, and now, by land, in North Africa, the Allies were testing the tensile strength of the ring, as was Stalin in his namesake city. On Guadalcanal the Americans refused to relinquish their tenuous grip on the southernmost radius of the Japanese ring.

  Shortly before Montgomery attacked at El Alamein, Churchill replied to a request by Anthony Eden for his opinion on the “Four Power Paper,” a Foreign Office summary of the postwar organization of the Four Great Powers—Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Churchill cautioned Eden against jumping to conclusions as to just who would be included in the so-called four great powers. “We cannot, however, tell what sort of a Russia and what kind of Russian demands we shall have to face.” He added, “It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe.” As for China, “I cannot regard the Chungking Government as representing a great world power. Certainly [China] would be a faggot-vote on the side of the United States in any attempt to liquidate the British Empire.” In general, Churchill told Eden, he favored a “United States of Europe capable of defending itself against all threats.* Yet, he advised, as enjoyable as it was to ponder such questions, “the war has prior claims on your attention and mine.” He closed with a piece of homegrown wisdom: “I hope these speculative studies will be entrusted mainly to those on whose hands time hangs heavy, and that we shall not overlook Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery Book recipe for the jugged hare—‘First catch your hare.’ ”358

  In celebration of Montgomery’s glorious deeds (and before the Allies landed in North Africa), Churchill ordered that the church bells be rung throughout the land on the following Sunday, November 8. Brooke, Clementine, and daughter Mary were aghast at the suggestion. Clementine became “violent” in her opposition (“quite rightly,” thought Mary); Brooke “implored” Churchill to wait until the Torch forces had gained undisputed control of the beaches. Since 1939, too much had gone too wrong too often to risk ringing out false hope. Churchill heeded their advice, but only for a few days. By November 12, the Anglo-American army was safely ashore in North Africa, its eastern elements already pushing toward Tunisia. Montgomery by then had sent Rommel packing and had captured six divisions’ worth of Italians.359

  The church bells rang on Sunday, November 15. After three years of hope, there finally had arrived from El Alamein a dash of glory. Exhilaration was in the air, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, “a wave of emotion… that makes this moment something like those moments in the summer of 1940. There’s a big difference, however. Those were grim days in 1940. Today, though sensible Britons think there’s certain to be plenty of grimness ahead, for the first time they believe sober reasons for hope are at last in sight.”360

  In an essay he wrote earlier that year, George Orwell observed that Englishmen always remember the military disasters—Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli, Passchendaele. These were the battles “engraved” upon common memory. The battles of the Great War that finally broke the Germans were simply unknown to the general public. “The most stirring battle poem in English,” Orwell wrote, “is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.”361

  El Alamein not only engraved itself upon the common memory, it erased the old memories. Churchill had found his Wellington in Montgomery, a general as ruthless in pursuit of victory as himself. In 1940, Mollie Panter-Downes compared Churchill and his influence on British morale to Pitt’s leadership in 1759. In 1942, Churchill lost all of his battles before finally winning in the desert. As the year went out, nobody compared El Alamein and 1942 with Waterloo and 1815, still less with 1759, “the year of victories,” of Pitt, and Wolfe at Quebec, of the Royal Navy smashing French fleets at Quiberon Bay and Cape Lagos, and of Minden, where English and Prussian foot soldiers and artillery ended French dreams of continental hegemony. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” Horace Walpole bragged to a friend that year. This was the Empire in ascendancy. In the summer of 1759, the keel of a 3,500-ton man-of-war was laid at the Chatham Dockyard, and the next year, in commemoration of Britain’s “annus mirabilis” the ship was christened HMS Victory. At the end of 1759, David Garrick composed “Heart of Oak,” his paean to the ships and men of the Royal Navy. As 1942 neared its end, the last stanza of Garrick’s
poem applied to all branches of HMG’s military:

  Through oceans and deserts,

  For freedom they came,

  And dying, bequeathed us

  Their freedom and fame.

  Early in 1942, Churchill promised Britons more grave disappointments and disasters. As the months sloughed off the calendar, he certainly made good on that pledge, in Singapore, Burma, and the North African desert. The year had been anything but a year of victories, but it had been a year with victories. And that was enough.

  Churchill alone among the Big Three had journeyed overseas that year—twice to Washington, once to Moscow—in order to prod the alliance into strategic agreement and in order to preserve the alliance. “The Big Three” was a phrase that might conjure an image of a mighty war wagon pulled by three noble steeds; yet, while Churchill and Roosevelt and the Combined Chiefs of Staff made every awkward effort to ride together in harness, Stalin rode alone. In fact, for most of 1942, the so-called Big Three were more a Big Two plus One. The Allied war effort, George Kennan later wrote, was less one of common, coordinated strategy than of simultaneous action, the Americans and the British in the west, Stalin in the east.362

  Stalin’s military chiefs did not consult the British and Americans; they consulted Stalin. Stalin, in turn, was relentless in pressing his demands upon his two allies—for more matériel and a second front—which Roosevelt and Churchill tried in good faith to meet. The Russian front exerted an almost gravitational effect on decisions made by Roosevelt and Churchill, like the moon on the tides. In fact, the Russian front might as well have been on the moon for the lack of intelligence that Stalin allowed to seep out. Roosevelt, sure that he could handle Uncle Joe, had yet to meet the man; Stalin, for his part, refused to leave Russia to meet his allies and did not trust the British. That month, the British ambassador to Moscow, Clark Kerr, reported to Churchill that Stalin not only did not believe the Americans and British would keep their promises to open a second front, but “feared we were building up a vast army which might one day turn around and compound with Germany against Russia.” Though sustained by Churchill’s letters and telegrams to Roosevelt and Stalin, the “Big Three” largely remained an impersonal linguistic contrivance until Churchill made his pilgrimages to Washington and Moscow. Then, and only then, did the Trinity become personal. The journeys he undertook that year were so hazardous that General Douglas MacArthur proposed Churchill be awarded the Victoria Cross: “No one of those who wear it deserves it more than he,” MacArthur told a British officer, if for no other reason than such journeys “through foreign and hostile lands may be the duty of young pilots, but for a Statesman burdened by the world’s cares, it is an act of inspiring gallantry and valor.”363

  Churchill had found the path to glory during the year he fought alone after the French surrender, the Last Man Standing. “God knows where we would be without him,” Brooke had written in his diary at the close of 1941, “but God knows where we shall go with him.” In 1942 Churchill cemented his alliance, though like the foundation of an old country house, it was in need of constant repointing. With his alliance gained, he had found the path to victory. That was where they were going.

  He liked to “pester, nag, and bite.” Speaking in the House shortly after the Torch landings, he anointed himself a “prod.” “My difficulties,” he admitted, “rather lie in finding the patience and self-restraint to wait through many anxious weeks for the results to be achieved.” Actually he pursued neither patience nor self-restraint with any real effort; he was too impatient. He told a member of his Defence Secretariat that action and results were all that mattered: “It was all very well to say that everything had been thought of. The crux of the matter was—has anything been done?” In the Western Desert, something had.364

  “And now at last,” Brooke told his diary, “the tide has begun to turn.”365

  4

  Crosscurrents

  NOVEMBER 1942–DECEMBER 1943

  Within days of the North African landings, Churchill concluded that Torch might wrap up by Christmas. Alan Brooke, too, was confident, telling his diary that Ultra decrypts, if correct, indicated a good chance of “pushing him [the enemy] into the sea before long.” Churchill, enthused, began work on a “most secret” memo for the British Chiefs of Staff. His objectives included the “completion of Torch by Christmas”; “bringing Turkey into the war” by March; the buildup of the Anglo-American force in Britain by June; the assembly of landing craft and completion of “preparations for Roundup” by July. Finally, in August or September, “Action.” Such was the plan.1

  On November 12, British paratroopers dropped into Bône, two hundred miles east of Algiers and halfway to Tunis, into which German reinforcements were now pouring. British commandos in small motor launches leap-frogged along the Tunisian coast ahead of General Anderson’s diminutive First British Army, which had begun its race to Tunis the day before. Anderson made good progress for a few days, but a lack of locomotives and rolling stock held up his tanks and supplies. The transport situation worsened when the late autumn rains arrived, turning roads into slurries. Anderson, balancing his need for speed against the need to protect his flanks, divided the First Army into three prongs, with the result that he found himself trying to crack a coconut with a fork rather than a bayonet.

  Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander of German operations in the Mediterranean, had already sent his vanguard to Tunis, and by the end of the month he had put 20,000 Germans there, along with Stukas, panzers, and artillery, forces equal in size to Anderson’s and far more experienced. The rest of Eisenhower’s troops sat static in Oran and Morocco, the result of a lingering American fear that Hitler would strike into the American rear through Spain with the Luftwaffe and paratroops. Colonel Ian Jacob recorded in his diary that the American chiefs “regarded the Mediterranean as a kind of dark hole, into which one entered at one’s peril.” Marshall told Roosevelt that week that of three possible Axis options—invading Spain, driving through the Caucasus, and attacking Britain—the invasion of Spain seemed most probable. Accordingly, safety first was Eisenhower’s order of the day. On November 23 Brooke complained to his diary of “the very slow rate of progress in North Africa,” which he blamed on Eisenhower’s inability “to handle the military situation confronting him.” By then, the Allies, with 250,000 troops ashore, had doubled the original landing force. Yet only Anderson was making headway, and not much at that. Churchill, unable to prod Eisenhower, unloaded on Brooke. Torch, he told the CIGS, “must be a springboard and not a sofa.”2

  Success in Tunisia depended on two factors—bold initiative (lacking, other than Anderson’s drive toward Tunis) and the continued commitment of American resources. Any large-scale diversion of American men, planes, or ships to the Pacific could snuff out Torch. In fact, America that year had sent more troops—460,000 soldiers and Marines—to the Pacific than to Britain and North Africa, where a total of 380,000 Americans served, the vast majority far in the rear. Getting anything, men or machines, to Britain was the problem. U-boats in the Atlantic harvested more than 100 ships and 720,000 tons of Allied shipping that month, the greatest monthly loss of the war to date. Trying to explain the realities of the German naval blockade to Stalin, Churchill wrote, “You who have so much land may find it hard to realize that we [Britain] can only live and fight in proportions to our sea communications.” The U-boat successes, Churchill told Stalin, were the “limiting factor” in Anglo-American planning. And every American warship sent to the Pacific made the deadly work of the U-boats that much easier. Then, just days after Torch began, a naval battle in the Pacific whetted the appetites of Americans for more action against Japan, naval action, and this at a time when, as Churchill told Stalin, the Allies lacked the warships to protect both the Torch landings and the Arctic convoys upon which Stalin depended.3

  On November 12, two days after Churchill’s Mansion House address, American and Imperial Japanese naval forces met again in “Ironbottom S
ound,” hard by the coast of Guadalcanal. Since August, the Japanese had run troops and fast warships—the “Tokyo Express”—from Rabaul to Guadalcanal, four hundred miles down “the Slot,” and since August, the American navy had contested the Tokyo Express. In mid-October Tokyo had decided the time had come to obliterate the Americans on Guadalcanal. The Japanese plan called for a task force to shell the Marine airfield into oblivion in support of an invasion force, which would land during daylight sometime on or about November 13. The Americans, meanwhile, were running in their own reinforcements. Forewarned by coast watchers of the Japanese fleet headed their way, the Americans were ready when, at dusk on November 12, the Japanese made for Guadalcanal. The American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison later wrote that the ensuing battle (two, actually, separated by a day of uneasy quiet) “recalled the Anglo-Dutch battles of the seventeenth century, when each side slugged the other until all but one went down.” No quarter was given. By the time it was over, the Americans had taken an awful beating, and had in fact suffered a tactical defeat. But the Japanese admirals, fearing that even larger U.S. forces might be on their way, failed to press on with the destruction of the airfield. Instead, they turned for home and in so doing handed the Americans a strategic victory. The cost to the U.S. Navy was terrible: a battleship, several cruisers and destroyers damaged, two cruisers and six destroyers sunk, and more than sixteen hundred bluejackets killed. It was a price Washington could bear.4