The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  In Burma that week, Brigadier Orde Wingate took his brigade of jungle fighters—he called them his Chindits, the Burmese word for “lion”—across the Chindwin River and proceeded to harass the Japanese behind their lines. The need to reopen the Burma Road had been agreed upon at Casablanca, but Wingate lacked the men, and the RAF lacked the aircraft, to make good on that agreement. General Joe Stilwell, cooling his heels in northern India, the victim of Washington’s decision to reinforce MacArthur at his expense, lacked an army. And Churchill lacked the will. China, in his estimation, was not worth the effort. That week, the American press reported that large numbers of Japanese ships were sailing for Guadalcanal, most likely to reinforce the garrison there. But this report soon proved false; the Japanese were sailing to “the Canal” in order to evacuate their remaining troops. On February 9 a headline in the New York Times declared, FOE QUITS ISLAND. New Guinea was the next Allied target; the Australians would lead the charge. The march to Tokyo had begun.86

  For thirteen months the Americans, having no real choice in the matter given their lack of preparedness, had deferred to Churchill’s strategic judgment. They did so again at Casablanca. It would be the last time. The military tide had turned against Hitler at Stalingrad; now the political tide was turning against Churchill. His vision of the postwar world was drifting into crisper focus, and he was testing the words and phrases he intended to use to articulate that vision when the time was right. Yet, as the months went by, the shapes and forms that the new world would assume increasingly became a matter for Roosevelt and Stalin to determine. Churchill’s future, and that of his Empire, was now tied inexorably to the political wishes of his two allies who, Sir John Keegan wrote, “were now supplanting him in importance.” The decline in Churchill’s influence would be gradual; indeed, in early 1943 Churchill had yet to sense it, but it had begun.87

  On February 2, a New York Times story explicating the decisions made at Casablanca was headlined President Implies 1943 Invasion Plan. Actually, that decision had not been made in Casablanca. It was more hope than goal, and with each passing week an atrophying hope at that. On February 11, tired and with a head cold coming on, Churchill addressed the Commons. He did not promise a great invasion of Europe but promised that Britain’s enemies would “burn and bleed” (a favorite phrase) and that stern justice would be delivered to “the wicked and the guilty.” He had sent Roosevelt a draft of the speech for comments. Firm in his belief that the French hated the British and respected Americans, Roosevelt replied that “cooperation by French forces will be best if the American Supreme Command in North Africa is stressed.” Churchill duly edited his working notes and placed Eisenhower at the forefront. Within a week he found himself supremely relieved to have done so.88

  In the days following his address, he could not shake the fatigue and head cold he had brought home from Africa. On the evening of February 16, his temperature shot up. Lord Moran, after listening to his chest, concluded his patient had “a patch” on his left lung. “What do you mean by a patch?” Churchill grumbled. “Have I got pneumonia?” An X-ray taken the next day and a second opinion by Dr. Geoffrey Marshall confirmed Moran’s suspicion: Churchill had contracted pneumonia. But given his age, it was the strain on his heart, not his lungs, that worried Moran. The patient took to his bed, with a copy of Moll Flanders. He ordered his paperwork reduced to a minimum and jotted notes to Roosevelt, himself taken ill by some African bug, and to Hopkins. To both he lamented his “heavy and long” condition. They responded with get-well notes. Churchill was not a difficult patient, Moran wrote, and did what he was told, “provided, of course, that he is given a good reason.” Dr. Marshall did not help matters when he referred to pneumonia as “the old man’s friend.” “Pray explain,” asked Churchill. “Oh, because it takes them off so quickly,” Marshall replied. Churchill was thus already in his sickbed when news arrived from the North Atlantic, from Russia, from India, and from Tunisia that might have put him there anyway.89

  By mid-February, Rommel had barred the back door to Tunisia with his positions along the Mareth Line, a decade-old French defensive network that ran from the Gulf of Gabès inland to a great salt marsh. To Rommel’s northwest, on the far slopes of the Eastern Dorsal of the Atlas Mountains, the Allied flank was held against several of Arnim’s panzer divisions at Sidi Bouzid and along an eighty-mile front by the green American troops of the II Corps, under the command of Major General Lloyd Fredendall. His job was to keep Arnim in place and to watch and wait for Rommel, who sooner or later, with Montgomery in pursuit, would try to join Arnim. North of Fredendall, poorly equipped brigades of formerly Vichy French held the ground. In the far north, Anderson’s First Army had been stalled for eight weeks on its drive to Bizerte and Tunis, where Kesselring had reinforced Arnim’s positions faster than the Allies could harass them. The Eastern Dorsal, thinly held by the Americans and French, defined the German left flank from Gafsa to just west of Tunis.

  Eisenhower presumed correctly that Rommel would strike north toward Tunis, but the American was unsure of exactly which route Rommel would choose—the coastal plains or a swing through Gafsa followed by a sharp turn north. And would Arnim attempt a strike in the Faid Pass in the Eastern Dorsal, which would put Sidi Bouzid in his sights and threaten the Allied rear? Allied intelligence thought that scenario unlikely based on the belief that the mountain passes were not conducive to tank warfare. Also, Ultra decrypts gave no indication that Arnim was hatching such a plan. But after visiting Fredendall’s Sidi Bouzid deployments on February 13, Eisenhower concluded that the defenses were inadequate, and that this was where the Germans would strike. Eisenhower returned to Fredendall’s headquarters at Tebessa (ill placed and more than seventy miles west of Sidi Bouzid), intent on drawing up new plans.

  He was too late. Arnim and Rommel attacked the next morning. By nightfall Rommel was through Gafsa, and Arnim’s tanks had plowed through the American positions at Sidi Bouzid. Both German panzer forces then made for the Kasserine Pass, in the Western Dorsal, which they overran on February 19 and 20, after overrunning two American battalions that had chosen poor defensive positions. Rommel’s panzers then poured north out of Kasserine on the twenty-first, his target Tebessa, where the Allies had stockpiled millions of pounds of food, fuel, and ammunition. Another panzer force swung north toward Thala, which if taken would put the Germans behind Anderson’s lines. With Arnim’s northern flank anchored at Tunis, Anderson and the French would find themselves in a vise. Alexander arrived from Tripoli on February 20 and, shocked at what he saw, immediately assumed command of all ground forces. He found the Americans at Kasserine totally unprepared for Rommel’s push, “too defensive” and too “shell and bomb conscious.” They had suffered the consequences of poor command, poor intelligence, and a hardened enemy. When Eisenhower (just that week promoted to four stars) ordered B-17s to bomb Kasserine, the planes became lost and bombed a friendly Arab village within the Allied lines and more than one hundred miles from the intended target. The Americans’ first major engagement with Germans ended as it had begun, in complete confusion. Alexander now found himself, as at Dunkirk and in Burma, presiding over a disaster.90

  Within a week of crashing through Kasserine, Rommel, outrunning his supplies and unable to exploit his success, fell back through the pass to the Mareth Line. So stunning was Rommel’s stroke that King George wrote a three-page letter to Churchill stating his dismay over both the political and military situations in North Africa. Churchill dutifully replied that his support of Eisenhower for supreme command had been proven “providential.” Had a British general overseen the defeat, he told the King, Britain’s enemies in America would have been served up a fine opportunity “to blaspheme.” Churchill reminded King George that the Eighth Army, 160,000 strong and “perhaps the best troops in the world,” was about to play a key role in Tunisia. Moreover, the great General Alexander would henceforth be in charge of strategy on the ground. This was not meant to disparage the Americans, Ch
urchill offered, for they were brave, “but not seasoned.”91

  Eisenhower sacked Fredendall on March 1 and replaced him with George Patton, who, Ike liked to say, “hates the Hun like the devil hates holy water.” The debacle at Kasserine Pass underscored Brooke’s doubts about conducting a large-scale invasion of France in 1943, even were the landing craft available. Although the American planners left Casablanca believing that they had been snookered by Brooke and Churchill, the rout at Kasserine proved the British correct. The Americans had to first learn how to conduct a modest campaign before contemplating an invasion of fortress Europe. Tommies in Anderson’s army soon came up with a line that captured the essence of Kasserine: How Green Was My Ally.92

  While Rommel undertook his audacious strike, Mohandas Gandhi, half a world away, conducted one of his own. Before Churchill left for North Africa, the War Cabinet endorsed the arrest of Gandhi and hundreds of India National Congress members. On February 9, Gandhi, seventy-two, frail, and under house arrest at Poona, announced that he would fast for three weeks. British and Indian doctors monitored his condition. Churchill, suspecting Indian doctors were slipping glucose into Gandhi’s drinking water, informed King George that “the old humbug Gandhi” had remained so healthy “one wonders whether his fast is bona fide.” On the sixteenth day of the fast, with somber reports emanating from Gandhi’s doctors (which Churchill did not believe), Churchill telegraphed Jan Smuts: “What fools we should have been to flinch before all this bluff and sob-stuff.” On the following day, he cabled the viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow: “It now seems almost certain that the old rascal will emerge all the better from his so-called fast.” Lord Linlithgow replied that he believed that Gandhi (“the world’s most successful humbug”) was not in dire straits and that his doctors had “cooked” their bulletins to produce the desired effect, all as part of a “wicked system of blackmail.” The American press championed the Mahatma’s cause; the British press for the most part derided Gandhi’s gesture as a ploy, as did Churchill, with sly nonchalance, when he later wrote in his memoirs that Gandhi’s taking glucose while on the hunger strike in conjunction with his “intense vitality and lifelong austerity” allowed him to safely ride out the dietary crisis. In fact, Churchill had learned during Gandhi’s fast that Indian doctors were not giving him glucose. He did not quite equate Gandhi with the wily main character in Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” but he came close. As for Gandhi’s stature in India, he wrote, “Mr. Gandhi’s death could have produced a profound impression throughout India, where his saintly qualities commanded intense admiration.” In arresting Gandhi, he wrote, the British “had judged the situation rightly.”93

  Roosevelt’s special envoy to India, William Phillips, in Delhi since January, asked permission of the viceroy to visit Gandhi and Nehru. Lord Linlithgow refused, and instead invited Phillips on a tiger hunt. Phillips could hardly make a complete report to Roosevelt without seeing Gandhi, but he’d have to try, for Churchill had put Gandhi off-limits. Leo Amery, secretary of state for India and Burma, advised Churchill, “I do hope you will make it quite clear to the president that his people must keep off the grass.” Churchill’s explosion in front of Hopkins the previous April and the treatment accorded Phillips were clear signals to Roosevelt to stay out of British affairs. The president kept his counsel, despite the pro-Gandhi editorializing of the American press. Roosevelt and Churchill never saw eye to eye on India. In fact, Harriman recalled, “They couldn’t see at all on India” (italics Harriman).94

  Gandhi ended his fast on March 3. In newsreels he appeared to be in good health. Churchill, still recuperating from his illness, was not.

  By early March, Bernard Montgomery, in position in the town of Medenine, about twenty miles southeast of the Mareth Line, knew with certainty that Rommel would attempt a spoiling attack by hooking out from his Mareth defenses toward Medenine. Air reconnaissance and Ultra decrypts gave Montgomery an advantage he intended to exploit. He prepared for Rommel’s attack by massing and concealing his anti-tank artillery. Ultra had been so precise that Montgomery knew which brigades of panzers Rommel intended to deploy, and where he intended to deploy them. On March 6, Rommel struck. Thanks to Ultra, he stood no chance. Montgomery, his anti-tank guns in position, destroyed fifty-two of the oncoming panzers. The Germans and Italians stopped, turned, and retreated to their Mareth defenses. The importance of the British victory at Medenine cannot be overstated; had Rommel sent the Eighth Army sprawling eastward, the Allied timetable in North Africa would have been set back indefinitely. A British defeat would have scotched the invasion of Sicily in 1943, and Italy as well. Stalin, already doubting the ability of his allies to kill Germans, would have had no choice but to at least contemplate a separate peace. But Montgomery held. On March 9, Rommel, hobbled by malaria and festering skin lesions, handed over command of his army to General Giovanni Messe, who now served under Arnim in the newly created Army Group Africa. That night, Rommel departed North Africa for Berlin, never to return.95

  On the Eastern Front, the victories at Stalingrad and Rostov reinvigorated the Red Army, which struck west throughout January and into February. Yet, as it had the previous spring, it advanced too far and too fast, with the result that its lines thinned. Once across the Donets River, the Russians discovered the Germans had changed the gauge on the railroads, forcing the Red Army to send tens of thousands of trucks and horse carts down muddy and rutted roads. Manstein, sure that Stalin’s army had overextended itself again, waited for his moment. He struck in the third week of February with fourteen tank and infantry divisions, and within a fortnight he retook Kharkov, driving the Russians back eighty miles along a two-hundred-mile front. Stalin blamed Churchill and Roosevelt for the setback, claiming the German success “involved a lessening of the German forces in France” due to the lack of Anglo-American aggressiveness. Hence, “renewed Russian complaints about bearing the whole weight of the war.” In fact, Stalin was bearing almost the entire weight of the war, and Churchill and Roosevelt, to their consternation, were not yet prepared to relieve Stalin of some of that weight. This the Germans knew, and were thankful for. On March 2, Hermann Göring told Goebbels that he was “somewhat worried about our having pretty much stripped the West in order to bring things to a standstill in the East. One dreads to think,” Goebbels confessed to his diary, “what would happen if the English and Americans were suddenly to attempt a landing.”96

  The English and the Americans were making no such plans. In fact, during the bleak days of mid-February, when everything everywhere appeared to be unraveling, Eisenhower recommended pushing Operation Husky back from June until July. Churchill received the news in bed, his pneumonia coming on hard. A month’s delay would be disastrous, he cabled Eisenhower, and to Harry Hopkins he predicted that if during May and June “not a single American or British soldier” was killing any Germans or Italians “while the Russians are chasing 165 divisions around,” the result would be “grievous reproach at the hands of the Russians.” Britain, he told his military chiefs, “would become a laughingstock.” In fact, the original statement of intent drawn up by the Combined Chiefs at Casablanca called for Husky to begin with “the favorable July moon,” those nights of the month when the crescent moon before setting gave paratroopers just enough light to find their targets in advance of the amphibious troops. At Casablanca, Churchill and Roosevelt pushed hard for the June moon, and the Combined Chiefs had since asked Eisenhower to reconsider, but General Ike held firm to his timetable. Nonetheless, Eisenhower only further fueled Churchill’s doubts about his aggressiveness when in early April he warned that the presence of two German divisions in Sicily cast doubt on the Allied ability to invade the island. Churchill erupted. How, he asked the Chiefs of Staff Committee, could they reconcile “the confidence the General showed about invading the continent across the Channel” with his discomfort at the prospect of sending one million men now in North Africa to face two German divisions in Sicily? “I don’t think we can be conte
nt with such doctrines.” He added, “What Stalin would think of this when he has 185 German divisions on his front, I cannot imagine.”97

  Actually, he knew exactly what Stalin would think. He had twice promised Stalin a second front in 1943, most recently when he predicted that Tunisia would be cleared by April “if not earlier.” By early April, with Eisenhower’s armies stuck for three months in the mud and mountains of Tunisia, Churchill’s promises to Stalin were self-evidently worthless. Even had Eisenhower taken Tunis by then, the omnipresent shipping shortages guaranteed that no second front could materialize in France that year. Churchill tried to placate Stalin, telling him that Husky was forthcoming, that the RAF was preparing to pummel the industrial heart of Germany, the Ruhr Valley, with heavy raids, including a planned operation to destroy the dams and hydroelectric plants that powered German armaments factories. Dönitz’s submarine pens were being bombed; the American Eighth Air Force, with more than six hundred bombers, was now up and flying. Churchill indicated his willingness to embrace more sinister tactics. Told of the German successes in Russia, he instructed Ismay to inform the military chiefs that if Hitler used poison gas in Russia, “we shall retaliate by drenching the German cities with gas on the largest possible scale.” That was bluster, but by no means was it bluff. Stalin needed help, and Churchill intended to give what he could. Stalin’s armies faced twenty times as many Germans as the Anglo-Americans faced in Tunisia. In only one military classification did the Western allies exceed the Russians in manpower: chaplains.98

  At Casablanca Roosevelt and Churchill made “control of the seas” their first priority. They meant the Atlantic. In the three months since, as measured by men and ships, they not only failed to control the seas, but had lost control.