The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Days later, Churchill cabled congratulations on the victory to Roosevelt. Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt announced, “It would seem that the turning-point in this war has at last been reached.” Churchill preferred for the time being to stick with his hedged bet of “the end of the beginning.” After the war a captured contemporary Imperial Japanese Navy document validated Roosevelt’s enthusiasm: “It must be said that the success or failure in recapturing Guadalcanal… is the fork in the road which leads to victory for them or us.”5

  The Americans had taken the most advantageous fork. But Alan Brooke and Air Marshal Portal feared that if the Americans chose now to strike hell-bent down the road to Tokyo, they would do so at the expense of the European theater. Portal argued that because the Americans considered North Africa an exercise in containment rather than a springboard to the Continent, they saw no contradiction in shifting resources from Britain to the Pacific. For Churchill, this would not do. He had promised Stalin a second front in 1943, and the initial success of Torch had, in his estimation, made that promise a practical possibility.6

  In Russia later that November week, the Wehrmacht and Red Army reached another fork in another road. At dawn on November 19, Marshal Zhukov threw his armies north of Stalingrad against the German flank. The following day, his armies south of the city struck. Both armies then shot toward the great bend of the Don, thirty miles west of Stalingrad. Zhukov saw the German position around Stalingrad for what it was, more of a “fragile shell” than a steel ring. Supported by an artillery barrage of more than two thousand guns, their movements obscured by a ferocious blizzard, the Soviets—a million strong—smashed through the ill-equipped and none-too-enthusiastic Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian forces guarding Paulus’s flanks, killing and capturing more than three hundred thousand of Hitler’s allies. By the twenty-first, Paulus and the remainder of his Sixth Army—almost a quarter of a million men—found themselves within the Soviet pincers, which were closing fast. Two days later, the Soviets linked arms at Kalach, on the Don. The Fourth German Panzer Army was forced to flee westward, leaving Paulus’s Sixth Army trapped in the ruins of Stalingrad. Paulus’s options were reduced to either standing and fighting or attempting a breakout westward from the city to the Don, there to join Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group Don. But the genius of Zhukov’s plan was that it called for a broad encirclement of the Germans rather than a narrow pinch from which Paulus might escape. When Manstein, Germany’s greatest strategist, tried to break through to relieve Paulus, he got to within thirty-five miles of Stalingrad before he was stopped. In mid-December, Hitler, who a month earlier had broadcast to the world that the Sixth Army would never leave Stalingrad, reiterated his orders. Paulus, his escape now blocked by Zhukov, obeyed. He had no other choice.7

  Stalin, as usual, failed to disclose to Churchill or Roosevelt the exact disposition or strength of the Red Army (a habit Churchill and Brooke found infuriating given Stalin’s regular belittling of Britain’s effort). Only the combatants amid the ruins of Stalingrad knew how the battle was going, and they didn’t know much. Their horizons could be measured in yards and feet. Soviet loudspeakers informed Paulus’s troops that a German soldier was dying every seven seconds. The most titanic battle in history raged within lines so compact that there were more troops than in all of Tunisia battling each other among a few square miles of rubble, a zone of death not much greater in size than Lower Manhattan or Kensington. The rotting viscera of the dead and the bodily wastes of the living bred typhus and dysentery that killed men as surely—but not as mercifully—as the storm of bombs and bullets. Stalingrad had become like a collapsing star, pulling all in its orbit toward its ever more compressed core, a fiery hell from which nothing escaped. The city was “a vast furnace,” a German survivor wrote, a world of “burning, blinding smoke… lit by the reflection of the flames.” At night—“scorching, howling, bleeding nights”—terrified dogs plunged into the Volga and paddled madly for the Russian side. Those in London and Washington who waited for news from Stalingrad would have to bide their time until broadcasts announcing the outcome issued forth from Berlin and Moscow. The loser would no doubt accompany an announcement with a somber dirge, the victor with a celebratory march.8

  During the last week of November, Dwight Eisenhower transferred his headquarters from Gibraltar to Algiers, where he and his second-in-command, Mark Clark, and their retinue took over the St. George Hotel and two villas. That put Eisenhower about three hundred miles west of the Allied front lines, which hooked south from the Mediterranean about fifty miles west of the port of Bizerte to a terminus high in a mountain pass called Kasserine, located in the Western Dorsal of the Atlas Mountains, seventy miles southwest of Tunis. There, drifts of daisies and red poppies spilled over the flinty, wind-swept landscape; the ground was impermeable to entrenching tools, and the terrain offered little defilade.

  Near the northern end of the line, Anderson’s forward elements had advanced to within just a dozen miles of Tunis. From the heights west of the city, British scouts looked across the plains that had once fed ancient Rome. In the far distance the minarets of Tunis stabbed up into the Mediterranean haze. Beyond Tunis, the ruins of Carthage overlooked the sea. The Romans had come 2,100 years earlier, intent on utterly destroying Carthage, and did so, but only after a long naval siege and house-to-house combat. If Anderson’s little army drove into Tunis, this battle could only end in like fashion. The race for Tunis was tightening, but Churchill, still confident that Anderson would take the city by Christmas and that Montgomery would soon run Rommel to ground, began in earnest his campaign for the next Allied effort: Operation Roundup—the invasion of France. Indeed, Montgomery that week pushed Rommel to El Agheila, halfway to Tripoli. Twice before, in 1941 and 1942, Rommel had turned from here and sent the British scrambling back toward Cairo. Short of tanks and gasoline, he could not do so again. After a brief standoff, the Desert Fox fled west, stalked by Montgomery, who now had struck into Tripolitania, the garden of Mussolini’s African empire. On December 2, Churchill, enthused by Monty’s exploits, told Roosevelt “the chances for Roundup may be greatly improved” by the successes in North Africa and Russian resistance at Stalingrad.9

  George Marshall, too, was optimistic. He told Roosevelt that Tunis could be occupied within two or three weeks “provided that [Anderson’s] two divisions were sufficient to accomplish the task” and the Axis did not do something unexpected. Implicit in that astoundingly qualified assessment are two obvious questions. What plans were in place in the event Anderson’s little force proved insufficient to take Tunis and, what if the Axis did do something unexpected? There was no answer to either question. Meanwhile, more than one hundred thousand American troops served as reserves far in the rear of Anderson, out of action and on guard for an Axis strike through Spain.10

  Churchill’s newfound enthusiasm for Roundup brought him into agreement with Marshall, and into disagreement with Alan Brooke. Churchill had made clear to Brooke that Torch must be a springboard, but a springboard to where? Western France? Southern France? Sardinia, Sicily, Italy, or the Balkans? Both Churchill and Brooke saw opportunities in Sicily and Sardinia to secure air supremacy over the Mediterranean and southernmost Europe, possibly to bomb Mussolini out of the war. And always in Brooke’s calculations was the immediate benefit to Allied shipping gained by opening the Mediterranean, thereby reducing round-trip journeys to Egypt by thousands of miles and effectively adding scores of ships to the fleet. But Churchill had a far more aggressive strategy in mind—he had rediscovered Roundup and he wanted to proceed in the Mediterranean. And Operation Jupiter, the invasion of northern Norway, had crept back into his calculations as a means to help safeguard the Arctic convoys and aid Stalin. As for Sicily and Sardinia, Churchill told Brooke, “You must not think you can get off with your ‘sardines.’… No, we must establish a western front.” In Brooke’s judgment any talk of a continental second front was premature. Britain had the troops but lacked the mea
ns to feed and fuel them once ashore, and in fact lacked the landing craft to put them ashore. America was not yet prepared to carry the load, not in the air, not at sea, and most assuredly not on the ground in France. Operation Bolero, the buildup of American forces in Britain, had actually slowed, as Churchill knew full well, as did Roosevelt, having been reminded by Churchill that without Bolero, there could be no Roundup.

  In wanting to attack everywhere, Churchill manifested two abiding traits: impatience and flexibility in the face of changing fortunes. His belief in an opportunistic strategic approach—attack the weaker of two enemies if the stronger could not be engaged—had not diminished since the 1941 Greek debacle, nor since 1915 and the Dardanelles, for that matter. Now Italy was weak and getting weaker. Once driven from Africa, it would be ripe for the kill. As usual, Churchill was consistent in combining the political and the military in his strategic thinking. In this, he was one with Clausewitz, but increasingly at odds with the Americans, who adhered to other Clausewitz maxims: avoid turning flanks and take the fight directly to the enemy if an opportunity presents itself, and if—a critical Clausewitzian caveat—your armies are equal to or greater in strength than the enemy’s. Those conditions had clearly not yet presented themselves on the Continent.

  But Sicily held promise. The military and political repercussions for Mussolini would be far greater were the Allies to take Sicily rather than Sardinia. Yet from a strictly military standpoint (which the Americans adhered to), Sardinia had much to offer. It was half again closer to southern France and northern Italy than was Sicily. Allied bombers based there would be that much closer to European targets, and an invasion of Tuscany from there would have the effect of cutting off Rome and most of the boot of Italy from Germany, eliminating the need for a three-hundred-mile slog from the toe of Italy to Rome. But Churchill called Sardinia “that piddling option.” Only Sicily (“the glittering prize”) was worth going after. On the subject of Sicily, Brooke and Churchill were not far apart. For Brooke, taking Sicily was necessary in order for the British to retake the Mediterranean; Sardinia would not accomplish that. For Churchill, Sicily offered the first step of a campaign north toward Vienna by way of Italy (which would be crushed in the bargain), the Balkans, and the Ljubljana Gap through the Julian Alps and into Austria, but—and this was critical—only if Turkey entered the war on the Allied side in order to protect the Balkan flank. Churchill’s plan was simplicity itself, to drive Italy from the war in order to induce Turkey to enter it.11

  Roosevelt, too, grasped the strategic benefits of striking at Germany from the south, and told Churchill so in a November 11 telegram in which the president suggested that he and Churchill and their military chiefs begin planning a follow-up to Torch to include “forward movements directed against Sardinia, Sicily, Italy, Greece and other Balkan areas and including the possibility of obtaining Turkish support for an attack through the Black Sea against Germany’s flank.” Churchill responded with enthusiasm. He proposed to Roosevelt that after consolidating their North African positions, they “strike at the under-belly of the Axis in effective strength and in the shortest time.” Here, exactly, was the strategy he had outlined to Stalin in August. And here came Franklin Roosevelt offering encouragement in the matter.12

  Churchill needed no convincing. His generals and their American counterparts, however, did. Other than the Italian lack of will to fight (as Churchill believed), there was nothing soft about Europe’s underbelly. The Apennine Mountains thrust north through Italy to the Alps, where from France to Slovenia the terrain favored defensive and guerrilla tactics, as several German and Bulgarian divisions were learning in Yugoslavia, and as Mussolini had learned in Greece. Of the Ljubljana Gap, Eisenhower later told his naval aid that he would be damned if he’d put his army into “that gap whose name I can’t even pronounce.” Admiral King saw the Mediterranean as a dead end, a place where American ships would go to die. The soft underbelly, wrote Samuel Eliot Morison, was “boned with the Apennines, plated with the hard scales of Kesselring’s armor, and shadowed by the wings of the Luftwaffe.”13

  Marshall had always advocated a straight-line approach from Britain across the Channel, not only because it was the shortest distance between two points, but because the countryside of northern France and the Low Countries was indeed “soft” and conducive to large-scale armor movement, as the Germans had shown in 1940. Marshall intended to take that straight line in 1943. Yet he lacked the men to do so; Torch had been undertaken at the expense of Bolero, the buildup of American troops in England. Roosevelt backed Marshall, nominally, although just months earlier, the president had concluded with reluctance that the shipping shortage and the final decision on Torch precluded any such venture in France until 1944. Days before he sent his cable to Churchill, Roosevelt assured Marshall that the cross-Channel strategy still had his full support; it did, but Roosevelt had no timetable in mind. His biographer James MacGregor Burns writes that “tactical developments had outrun his [Roosevelt’s] strategic decision making” and that Roosevelt “had no definite battle plan.” Yet, in his November cable to Churchill, Roosevelt clearly indicated that the underbelly option appeared to be the most promising answer to the question of where next after North Africa.14

  Thus, Roosevelt proposed a favorite Churchillian scheme to Churchill while Churchill proposed Marshall’s favored strategy to Brooke, who was appalled at the prospect of a premature landing anywhere on the Continent. Of course, Churchill’s newfound enthusiasm for Roundup (even if it had been incubated in the need to placate Stalin) did not in the least diminish his desire to go to Italy. They could do both. Northern Norway, too, was never far from Churchill’s thoughts, nor was the Aegean. They could do it all.

  Robert Sherwood later wrote that those who accuse Churchill of hesitancy if not outright cowardice in regard to the invasion of France (as had Stalin, quite bluntly, during Churchill’s Moscow visit) take a too linear and simplistic approach. Three months before Torch kicked off, Churchill told Roosevelt that the British would willingly accept Marshall as supreme commander of Roundup. Churchill did this knowing full well that Marshall had one and only one strategy in mind, to strike straight into France. Sherwood: “This nomination of the most vehement proponent of the Second Front would hardly indicate that Churchill was attempting to relegate it [Roundup] to the Files of Forgotten Things.” He was not trying to do that, yet he had also begun to proclaim a truth as he saw it, that a disastrous defeat on the coast of France “was the only way in which we could lose this war.” That conclusion was self-evidently correct. A defeat on the coast of France would lead, if not to immediate defeat, to Marshall and King’s shifting the entire American effort to the Pacific. Harry Hopkins, at the time, told an audience at Madison Square Garden that there would be a second front, “and if necessary a third and a fourth front, to pen the German army in a ring of our offensive steel.” These were Churchill’s sentiments exactly. Roundup was to be one of several operations. His multifront thinking was a constant source of worry to Brooke, who wrote in his diary, “He is now swinging away from those [Sardinia and Sicily] for a possible invasion of France in 1943!” Eisenhower, meanwhile, was swinging toward Sardinia, where three German divisions were dug in. But to Brooke’s astonishment, Eisenhower’s “very bad plan… never went beyond the landing on the beaches.”15

  On the day Roosevelt sent his underbelly telegram (November 11), Churchill told the Commons that the Allies would in the coming year bring strong force to bear against Hitler in Western Europe. He did not promise a timetable for an actual invasion, nor did he define just what “strong” meant. The invasion, he said, would take place only when “in due course” Germany became demoralized (presumably by the pounding inflicted by the Russians and the RAF). He said, “Moreover, you have first to get sufficient ascendancy even to prepare to strike such a blow.” He stressed that planning and preparation for such operations may look like inertia, but were in fact critical. The New York Times ran with that story
the next day, under the headline: INVASION ACROSS CHANNEL IS PLEDGED BY CHURCHILL. In fact, he had made no such pledge, but the horse was out of the barn. Ever since, the Allied failure to cross the Channel in 1943 has been attributed to Churchill’s reluctance, beginning with a pledge he never made, an irony given that by late November 1942, Churchill (next to Marshall) was Roundup’s biggest booster.16

  The American military suspected Churchill liked to engage in “eccentric operations” that depended on bravado, surprise, and speed for success. He did, but that was in part because the British army could not engage the Wehrmacht on anything like equal terms, and the American army had yet to prove its battle worthiness. Cordell Hull and the U.S. military chiefs (and the Free French) also suspected Churchill of harboring imperial designs in the eastern Mediterranean; he did not. He had attacked Vichy “intriguers” in Syria and Madagascar in order to safeguard the Suez Canal and Middle East oil supplies, upon which the British war effort depended. Marshall also suspected, correctly, that Churchill wanted to first clear the entire Mediterranean as a prelude to any contemplated landing in France, thereby, in Marshall’s estimation, further delaying his straight-line strategy. And now here was Marshall’s boss, the commander in chief, encouraging Churchill on his underbelly strategy. Yet Roosevelt was only approaching the business of war in the same way he approached politics; he liked to allow events to proceed until a choice of action became self-evident. By December no single strategy had become self-evident. Clearly, it was time for Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff to sit down and work one out.17

  The news from North Africa only added to the urgency to do so. On December 1, Kesselring’s reinforced troops skirmished with Anderson’s forward units and drove the British back. Tanks would occupy a central place in the battle for Tunis, and Anderson’s tanks, the American M3 Lee and its modified cousin, the M3 Grant, were obsolete—the main gun was not fitted to a traversing turret, rivets used in construction became lethal projectiles when the tank was hit, and its high profile made it an easy target. They were no match for the German Panzer Mark IV tank and its 75mm gun. A week later, General Dieter von Arnim took command of the Fifth Panzer Army at Tunis, now 25,000 strong, with almost a quarter million Italians and Germans soon to arrive by way of Europe and Rommel’s approaching army. The previous year at Kiev, Arnim’s masterful tank deployments led to the encirclement of an entire Russian army. He intended, after joining forces with Rommel, to annihilate the Americans and British in Tunisia. Within a week of arriving in Tunisia, he went on the offensive.18