The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  When Roosevelt left for home the next morning, Churchill accompanied him to the airfield, dressed in velvet slippers and his green-and-red-and-gold-dragon dressing gown. He was thus attired a few hours later, supine in bed under the cover of a light-blue silk bedspread with a six-inch-wide entredeux, the scene lit by numerous candles, when he summoned Brooke and announced that they would “be off” at 6:00 P.M. that evening. Brooke had come to expect that a summons from Churchill might well find him in bed, or emerging from his bath, toweling off his round, white Humpty-Dumpty self, climbing into his silk underclothes, all the while declaiming on some new scheme that he had hatched. On this occasion, Brooke pleaded that he had presumed they’d be staying for two days and that he hoped to get a day of needed rest and do some bird-watching in the foothills. Churchill did not budge. Brooke tried to turn the tables, arguing that a day of painting would be a welcome respite for the P.M. This, too, failed to move the Old Man. “We are off at six,” he replied, a cigar plugged into his face. “To where?” asked Brooke. “I have not decided yet,” Churchill answered. To either London or Cairo, he added, pending an answer from the Turks.70

  It was to be Cairo. Churchill spent a few hours before his departure up in the villa’s tower, where he painted his only picture of the war, a landscape scene he later gave to Roosevelt. At dusk, Commando and an accompanying B-24 carrying Brooke and staff officers lifted off from Marrakech, eastbound for the overnight flight to the Nile. As they climbed to more than 14,000 feet to clear the mountains, the temperature inside the planes fell to below freezing and the clatter of the engines blotted out all conversation. Churchill’s craft had been outfitted with windows and a salon with armchairs, such that he at least could peer out in order to track his progress. Brooke and those on board the other Liberator could do nothing but count rivets on the plane’s cold aluminum skin. Churchill’s party reached Cairo at dawn after an eleven-hour flight. Shortly thereafter they arrived at the home of the British ambassador, Miles Lampson, and his wife, Jacqueline, who asked if they might like breakfast. Brooke suggested they wash up first, but Churchill proclaimed, “No! We shall have breakfast now!” Mrs. Lampson escorted the party into the dining room and asked if the prime minister would like a cup of tea. “I have already had two whiskies and soda and two cigars this morning,” Churchill replied, and then asked for a glass of white wine, which, when produced, he emptied in one long gulp. He was in fine fettle and ready for business.71

  On the morning of Saturday, January 30, Churchill and his party, joined now by Alexander Cadogan from the Foreign Office, boarded their Liberators for the flight to Turkey, their destination, Adana, near the coast just over the Syrian border. Adana had been selected because Ankara was considered too dangerous and too ripe a target for the Luftwaffe, the very situation that underlay Turkish fears of joining the Allies. As Churchill and Brooke flew north along the Mediterranean coast, Hitler promoted General von Paulus to field marshal on the premise that no German field marshal had ever been captured. It was Hitler’s way of telling Paulus that he was to fight to the end in Stalingrad, or use his pistol to take his leave with honor. With more than 100,000 of his men killed that month, and with his remaining forces cut in two, Paulus had no army and no fight left. He surrendered his headquarters that night, but the remnants of his army fought on. Churchill by then had boarded a train at Adana and traveled the few miles to where President nönü waited aboard a train of his own on a rain-drenched plain that had become a sea of mud. The downpour was so relentless that Turkish sentries assigned to protect Churchill took cover beneath blankets, a dereliction of duty that disgusted Brooke. After the two trains “docked,” the friendly but reluctant neutral and the confident warlord got down to business, a state of affairs remarkably similar to the meeting between Hitler and Franco at Hendaye in October 1940. The results proved similar as well, although Brooke took some satisfaction in the fact that Turkey appeared to assume “a more biased nature in favor of the Allies.”72

  The Turks feared two possible consequences of an alliance with the Allies: an attack by Germany in retaliation; and behavior of an imperialistic sort by the Soviets once the war was won. The czars had, after all, coveted the Dardanelles and egress from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean for two centuries (nönü had fought the British at Gallipoli in 1916). Churchill expressed his belief that the Soviets might indeed “become imperialistic,” but he argued that Turkey’s best protection in that case would be a pact with Britain and America. As well, Churchill offered that a postwar world council would possess sufficient military power—unlike the League of Nations—to reel in states that went astray. He made his case in French (or French as only he spoke it, as noted by Cadogan), “with English words pronounced as French” as he waved his arms about for effect. The argument expressed in English, Cadogan wrote, was excellent, but in French, “I have no idea!” Churchill, wisely, did not pressure the Turks, who, Cadogan wrote, “were resolutely disinclined to be drawn into a war.” The Germans knew all of this by virtue of reading Turkish signals traffic. Brooke termed the meeting “a great success.”73

  It was not, other than in the narrow sense that Brooke’s Mediterranean strategy could only fare better with Turkey friendly than with Turkey unfriendly. Yet neither was the meeting a complete failure. The Turks accepted a British offer to help modernize their army and allowed vast stores of British war matériel to be stockpiled in southeast Turkey, in case it was needed in Syria, Iraq, or Turkey, should Hitler violate Turkish neutrality. Still, one of the eight priorities decided upon at Casablanca could now be checked off, as unfulfilled.

  On February 2, Churchill—back in Cairo—learned that the rest of Paulus’s army in Stalingrad had surrendered that day, including twenty-three generals and more than 90,000 troops, who marched off to Soviet prison camps. Only 5,000 of them survived their captivity, the sole living remnants of Paulus’s original army of 450,000. The bells of the Kremlin rang the next day. In Berlin, radio programming was interrupted by the roll of muffled drums, followed by the announcement that the Sixth Army had been “overcome by the superiority of the enemy and by unfavorable circumstances confronting our forces.” The second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony followed the reading of the communiqué. Regular programming did not resume for three days. Hitler’s generals soon witnessed a marked change in the Führer. “His left hand trembled,” wrote General Heinz Guderian, “his back was bent, his gaze was fixed, his cheeks were flecked with red. He was more excitable, easily lost his composure, and was prone to angry outbursts and ill-considered decisions.” Hitler later told one of his doctors that his sleepless nights were filled with visions of maps marked with the final positions of his armies before they were destroyed.74

  Stalingrad was the single greatest military defeat in German history and only one of several disasters that had befallen the Ostheer since the beginning of the new year. On the Baltic, the Red Army brought relief to Leningrad in mid-January. After 515 days of siege and a yearlong rain of steel from six thousand German guns, the Russians opened a narrow land bridge into the city. In the Caucasus, Hitler’s Army Group A, reduced now to just a single army, had been driven back two hundred miles to Rostov, which the Red Army took in mid-February, thereby cutting off the Germans on the southern shore of the Sea of Azov. Two hundred miles to the north, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s armies had been driven west from the Don and out of Kharkov and Kursk. Since their November lunge across the Volga, the Russians had raced 250 miles across the Don and the Donets rivers. They were now only fifty miles east of the Dnieper. Marshal Zhukov had asked for much from Stalin in the way of men, weapons, tanks, and planes, and Stalin had delivered the goods. Now Zhukov had delivered the results. Stalin—like Churchill, a student of the American Civil War—began telling Western visitors to the Kremlin that Zhukov was his George McClellan except that Zhukov had never lost a battle. (General McClellan had likewise asked President Lincoln for much support, and received it, but he was meek in his appro
ach to the Confederates, and delivered no victories.)75

  The news from Russia put Churchill in top form. He dined on February 2 at the British embassy, where he watched a film of British troops entering Tripoli and held forth until almost midnight on one of his favorite topics, the 1898 Omdurman campaign in the Sudan. Randolph, on leave, joined the party. Alexander Cadogan, who sat between Randolph and Churchill, found Randolph to be “a dreadful young man. He has been an incubus on our party since Casablanca.” The father and son snapped and growled at each other throughout the evening. Had Cadogan been a frequent visitor to Chartwell, he would have known this was how dinner went when father and son shared the table. Accompanying Randolph (and keeping an eye on him) was Churchill’s prewar literary assistant, Bill Deakin, now Captain Deakin of the Special Operations Executive. Churchill had just learned from Deakin that while Serbian forces under Mihailovich were keeping Axis troops occupied in Serbia, farther north in Croatia and Slovenia, the peasants, schoolteachers, and intellectuals under Tito were doing likewise, but with no support from the Americans or British. After asking for a report on the matter, which Deakin produced in two days, Churchill shifted British policy in a manner nobody had foreseen.76

  Tito was a Communist, but he was killing Germans and their Croat Ustasha puppets, and was therefore worthy of assistance. That he was also killing Mihailovich’s Chetniks and King Peter’s supporters was troublesome, as London backed the return of the king. This was how matters tended to play out in the Balkans, where murderous ethnic feuds had been fought for centuries and where myriad peoples, Churchill once said, produced more history than they could consume. Still, within days of reading Deakin’s proposal, Churchill asked Eisenhower for long-range B-24 bombers capable of reaching northern Yugoslavia in order to drop supplies to Tito’s partisans. In April, Captain Deakin parachuted into German-occupied Croatia in order to establish relations with Britain’s newest and most unlikely ally, Josip Broz—Tito.77

  On February 3, Churchill prepared for the flight to Tripoli in order to congratulate the general who, like Zhukov, had asked for much, and had delivered: Bernard Montgomery. Late that day Montgomery’s forward elements crossed the Tunisian frontier. Tripolitania, the richest Italian colony in Africa, had fallen. A generation of Sicilian and Italian émigrés had paved roads and planted vineyards and olive groves there; they had built irrigation systems worthy of the ancient Roman aqueducts in order to nourish their holdings. It was the last of Italy’s African possessions. Il Duce, once emperor of more than 1.2 million square miles in Africa, had lost it all. Now, an American weekly reported, “Italians had only the sands blown across the Mediterranean by the sirocco to remind them” of their lost empire.78

  Per the agreements made at Casablanca, Alexander and the British now served under Eisenhower. Henry Maitland (“Jumbo”) Wilson replaced Alexander as commander in chief, Middle East. Alexander, when he reached Tunisia in two weeks’ time, would command all Allied land forces in that theater, a fortuitous circumstance in the estimation of Churchill, because Alex could do no wrong, while Eisenhower had so far done little right. Eisenhower’s performance had been so lackluster that George Marshall later expressed to Churchill his surprise that at Casablanca the British had not demanded the lead role in the North African operations. In his memoirs Churchill wrote that the idea never occurred to him. Indeed, Churchill had grown to truly like and admire Eisenhower. Yet with Cunningham directing the efforts at sea, Tedder in the air, and Alexander on the ground, and with the agreement for the invasion of Sicily in hand, Churchill had gained everything he sought while giving Roosevelt what he wanted, an American commander. Harold Macmillan captured the essence of the relationship when he later wrote that the British would run the American show in North Africa like “the Greek slaves ran the operations of the emperor Claudius.” Eisenhower, whom Brooke denigrated for never having commanded even a battalion in the field, brought one supremely valuable trait to the task—he brokered no chicanery among and between the Allies. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,” Eisenhower warned his staff. You can call a fellow officer a son of a bitch, he told them, “but the instant I hear any American officer refer to a brother officer as that British son of a bitch, out he goes.” He would need every bit of the goodwill engendered by his equable command instincts, for American troops in Tunisia were about to display their complete lack of readiness to fight Germans.79

  Churchill arrived in Tripoli on the fourth, and after a tour of the harbor by motor launch, he watched as the first British supply ship steamed into the port. With the harbor in British hands, the supply lines for the Eighth Army were reduced by 1,200 miles. Later that day, Brooke and Churchill reviewed the 51st Division, the reincarnation of the old 51st, which had surrendered in France almost three years before. The men of the 51st, who had come to Africa “pink and white” and inexperienced, were now “bronzed warriors of many battles and of a victorious advance.” Churchill, standing high on a reviewing stand, watched as the troops paraded past, pipers leading the way. Brooke, a tear running down his cheek, turned to Churchill, who shed tears as well. “One could sense the fathomless depth of relief,” Brooke later wrote, “caused by a realization that victory had now become a practical proposition.”80

  The next day, the party was off to Algiers, for what was scheduled to be a brief layover in the company of Eisenhower and Admiral Andrew (“ABC”) Cunningham before heading home to London late that night. Cadogan, having now experienced the travails of long-distance travel in an unheated bomber, pledged to his diary never to be “dragged around the world again in these conditions, which are filthy. I don’t think P.M. has ever looked into our plane or realizes how beastly it is.”81

  Eisenhower knew from experience exactly what Churchill’s visit would entail. Before he left London to command Torch, he and Churchill had instituted regular Tuesday luncheons and frequently took their business to Chequers on weekends, where, given Churchill’s work habits and absurdly late hours, Eisenhower often found himself having to stay overnight. Ike knew to expect late nights and long dinners upon Churchill’s arrival, and dreaded it. Compounding Eisenhower’s discomfort, a rumor had it that German—or Vichy, or Arab—assassins planned on ridding the world of the “Big Cigar Man,” whose presence in Algiers could bring nothing but headache to Eisenhower. Ike wanted Churchill out of town as soon as possible. “Safe in London,” wrote Eisenhower’s aide, Commander Butcher, Churchill “was worth an army, in Algiers he was a target and therefore a heavy responsibility.”82

  But Churchill had come to rest and dine, and this he did, over a long lunch hosted by Eisenhower and attended by Giraud and the resident general of Morocco, Paul Noguès, the former Vichy loyalist who three months earlier had tried to drive Patton’s army back into the sea. Cunningham hosted the evening meal at his villa, just across the compound from Eisenhower’s. Around the villa Churchill was known as “the man who came to dinner.” In fact, he told Brooke his intent was to be the man who came for a day or two, or more. But arrangements were already in place for a midnight departure, which would get Churchill to London without braving the daytime skies. Late in the evening Churchill and his party departed for the Maison Blanche airfield, where, after exchanging farewells with their hosts on the runway, they climbed aboard their two Liberators. Lord Moran swallowed his sleeping pills and took himself off to bed. Brooke donned his pajamas, over which he tugged a fur-lined flight suit and boots. Maps, charts, and beverages were stowed.83

  But the passengers went nowhere. One of the magnetos had failed on the number one engine of Churchill’s Liberator. After a fruitless two-hour attempt to start the engine, the pilot called it a night. The passengers disembarked, and the aircraft was locked down. Moran, by now fast asleep, was left behind. At about 2:00 A.M., residents of the two headquarter villas awakened to knocking upon the doors. Winston was back. Commander Butcher and the Americans believed that Churchill had planned the whole caper in order to grab an extra day in the sun, perchanc
e a dip in the sea. In any event, the man who came to dinner finally left for home late on February 6.84

  Clemmie had cabled Winston before he arrived in Algiers: “I am following your movements with intense interest…. The door is open and it is hoped that soon Mr. Bullfinch will fly home.” Churchill replied, “Keep the cage open for Saturday or Sunday, much love.” He returned to the nest on Sunday the seventh.85

  He had been away from King, wife, and country for twenty-six days. It was to be his last flight on Commando. The aircraft, with a different crew, later disappeared with all hands. Cadogan was correct in describing the beastly discomforts and dangers of flight, but he was wrong about Churchill. Churchill had known full well ever since his first flights to Cairo and Moscow six months earlier exactly how beastly such journeys were, and how necessary.