The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  On January 30, Karl Dönitz was promoted to Grossadmiral and replaced Erich Raeder as commander in chief of the navy (Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine). The appointment of the submariner Dönitz could only mean that the submarine war would intensify. It did, with horrific results for the Allies. Churchill warned Roosevelt that they must assume that Dönitz would be “ready to play a game in which the cards are in [his] hands.” Dönitz was as firm a believer in the lethality of his U-boats as Göring was of his airplanes, with the difference that Dönitz’s U-boats had hobbled Britain, and might yet cripple her. Britain’s convoy escort ships were, Churchill informed Roosevelt, “quite inadequate to deal with the German forces.”99

  The U-boats cruised safely that winter, aided by the worst weather in North Atlantic history. The gales kept escort ships in harbors and Allied long-range bombers battened down on airfields. Such was the fury of the North Atlantic between November and March that ninety-two ships were lost at sea to waves and wind. The U-boats rode out the storms beneath the waves and took their harvest. In March, two convoys bound from New York and sailing on parallel courses with eighty-eight merchant ships were attacked over three nights by fifty U-boats. Twenty-two Allied ships and almost four hundred seamen went to the bottom. German sailors called it the “greatest convoy battle of all time.” That massacre brought to almost 21,000 the number of British merchant seamen killed since the start of the war, more than one-fifth of Britain’s civilian sailors and, relative to the other services, the highest casualty rate of the war. Ships could be replaced; experienced crews could not.100

  In mid-March, as the losses mounted, Stewart Menzies informed Churchill that Bletchley had finally broken the German naval code. The Bletchley wizards had also deduced from charting Allied convoy and U-boat positions that the British merchant marine code must have been long compromised, with catastrophic results. Bletchley reworked the British convoy code such that the Germans could no longer listen in on ship-to-ship transmissions and Dönitz could no longer pinpoint convoy locations. Despite that progress, Allied losses in March totaled 108 ships and 627,000 tons, more than half the total British shipping lost during the ten months of March to December 1941, when Churchill had given the battle its name.

  The British would exploit the Bletchley breakthrough in coming months, but March’s horrific losses certainly did not auger a change of Allied fortune, given that they came against the sinking of just fifteen of the more than one hundred U-boats operating in the North Atlantic. The U-boats were so numerous that the Allies could no longer resort to evasive routing for convoys, with the result that the entire convoy program began to disintegrate. March’s losses, Churchill cabled Roosevelt, brought Britain near to a “hand-to-mouth” subsistence level. Dönitz had reduced Britain’s annual food, fertilizer, and fuel imports from 50 million tons prewar to under 23 million, a figure considered by Churchill to be below the minimum needed to sustain the island. Roosevelt, against the wishes of his military advisers, finally came down on the side of Harriman, who advised that feeding Britain, even at the cost of fighting Germans, was the most pressing issue. Food would go to Britain at the expense of the American armed services, whose demands, Roosevelt believed, were inflated and whose ability in utilizing available ships to meet those demands was notoriously lacking. Churchill, to make more hulls available for transatlantic shipments, reduced sailings to India by half, a measure that, in combination with the Japanese occupation of Burma and an ongoing drought, brought Bengal to the verge of famine.101

  The Atlantic convoys sailed with little protection, and paid a dear price. Escort ships normally assigned to convoy duty were needed for the run-up to Husky. In mid-March, with losses rising, and on the advice of the Admiralty, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to cancel that month’s convoy to Russia, and to not run any more until September. Roosevelt suggested they not break the news to Stalin for “three or four weeks.” He volunteered Churchill for the duty, and asked to see a copy of his message before it was sent. He also offered to send “a supporting message” in tandem with Churchill’s, in order to present a unified front. Churchill expressed his thanks for the gesture. On March 30 Churchill cabled the bad news to Stalin. Roosevelt never sent the supporting message.102

  Stalin’s reply was curt, the final line worrisome: “You realize of course that the circumstances cannot fail to affect the position of Soviet troops.” What, exactly, did he mean by that? It was well known that German diplomats in Stockholm had expressed interest in a German-Soviet prisoner exchange, brokered by the Swedes. Stalin refused the offer; he tended to prefer that repatriated prisoners be shot or imprisoned in case their experiences in the West had resulted in their embrace of anti-Bolshevik blasphemies. But the mere mention of talks between Germans and Russians could only lead to the worrisome question of what else they might be discussing. Fear of a separate peace had been omnipresent in the Foreign Office and the State Department for almost two years.103

  Churchill believed that Stalin would never negotiate with Hitler, but the surest way of discouraging such thoughts on Stalin’s part was to win the Battle of the Atlantic. However, the slaughter of March implied that the Allies were not doing so. The Germans had improved U-boat propulsion and radar detection. The Kriegsmarine deployed sonar decoys, small radio canisters launched while submerged to confuse listening posts on British escorts. They also deployed buoyant anti-radar decoys that when launched from U-boats mimicked the radar profile of a U-boat on the surface, with the result that Allied bombers took to chasing nonexistent targets. Each Kriegsmarine measure and countermeasure was soon countered by British improvements in sonar and especially radar, which was being made more powerful and small enough to fit into the nose of a Sunderland flying boat. It was all part of the naval quotient of Churchill’s Wizard War.

  The Germans, far ahead in submarine design, had drawn blueprints for bigger, faster boats with six forward torpedo tubes, and that were capable of deep dives to greater than seven hundred feet at high speed. But Dönitz couldn’t build them fast enough due to the relentless Allied air attacks on German shipyards. He outfitted his boats with schnorchels—telescopic breathing tubes that allowed the U-boats to cruise just beneath the waves on diesel power rather than on batteries. But all the German innovations would prove for naught, for the most effective weapon in the Allied arsenal was the American shipyard, where workers were just beginning to build cargo ships and escort destroyers faster than Dönitz could sink them. And, although Dönitz suspected that Bletchley was now reading Kriegsmarine radio traffic, he could not bring himself to accept it as fact. Still, his successes against Allied shipping in March convinced him that more U-boats, better radar, and the most advanced torpedoes could finish the job. Samuel Eliot Morison later wrote: “No enemy ever came so near to disrupting Atlantic communications as Dönitz did that month.”104

  Goebbels, since Casablanca, had been preaching the evils of “unconditional surrender” to the German people. The Hun-hating Lord Vansittart played into Goebbels’ hand when he told the House of Lords in March that all Germans were accomplices to Hitler and that Germany should be destroyed “utterly and forever as a military power.” It fell to the government’s advocate, Lord Chancellor Viscount John Simon, to rebut Vansittart by declaring that the British government (and Premier Stalin) held that, although Nazism must be destroyed, “the whole German people is not, as Dr. Goebbels has been trying to persuade them, thereby doomed to destruction.” The London News Chronicle welcomed Simon’s statement: “It shows that the Government is making a rational and a constructive approach to the problem of Germany’s future.”105

  Stalin had made public his thoughts on the subject on February 23 in his Order of the Day, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army. The Red Army, the marshal declared, “was not created for the purpose of conquering” other nations. It was now prepared to drive the Wehrmacht from its borders, Stalin added, and would do so that year, but its strength must be preserved to
guarantee the peace. These words raised more questions in London and Washington than they answered. Did Stalin mean to assuage German fears of annihilation as proffered by Goebbels? Did he really intend to stop at his borders after expelling the Nazis? How, if the defeat of Hitler was the first priority of the Allies, could Hitler be beaten if the Red Army halted at its borders after driving out the Germans? Or might Stalin, after driving out the Germans, stop inside Poland’s old eastern border, to reclaim the lands he and Hitler had taken in 1939? That would create—at far less cost in Russian lives—a buffer between Russia and a subdued but not yet vanquished Germany. The message within the message was clear, and disturbing. If the Western Allies were not fighting on the Continent by the time the Red Army restored its borders, the Red Army might stop its westward march. Stalin added his favorite gibe: “In view of the absence of a second front in Europe, the Red Army alone is bearing the whole weight of the war.”106

  That was true. Only an Anglo-American victory over Germans would provide an effective response to Stalin. Bernard Montgomery intended to deliver such a victory. He struck on March 20, when 25,000 New Zealanders under General Freyberg, after a long and difficult trek far around the Mareth Lines, delivered a left hook to the enemy flank. Gaullist forces operating just north of Freyberg lent a hand when the New Zealanders encountered Germans dug in on mountain ridges. “Can you clear the Germans?” Freyberg asked a French officer, a viscount whose name was Jacques Philippe de Hautecloque, but who went by the nom de guerre Leclerc. “But of course,” Leclerc answered. The French soon began killing Germans and collecting large numbers of prisoners, a modest victory, but their first since June of 1940. To the northwest, George Patton’s II Corps had been hammering the German flank at El Guettar since March 16, with the objective of slashing its way east to the Bay of Gabès. It was a battle of American artillery and the 1st Infantry Division—known to its men as the Big Red One—versus German tanks. Patton would not win it, but his troops proved their mettle while drawing two German armored divisions away from Montgomery’s immediate front, thereby making Monty’s job a great deal more manageable.107

  Montgomery’s main force consisted of Englishmen, Poles, Czechs, Australians, Gurkhas, with their wicked curved kukris, which could take an arm off at the shoulder, and Highlanders, who would happily chase the devil himself—Auld Clootie to a Highlander—straight through Hell if so ordered. At 10:00 P.M. sharp on March 21, they attacked the Mareth fortifications. Eisenhower called the Eighth Army “the most cosmopolitan army to fight in North Africa since Hannibal.” It was indeed an imperial army, recalled Sir William Deakin, and the fact that a British imperial presence was being brought to bear on the European conflict was a source of abiding pride for Churchill. If the Eighth Army was to be the last truly imperial army, Deakin recalled, Churchill wanted it to play “a decisive part.” Montgomery was intent on its doing just that. His tactic of delivering a hook and a jab in tandem, of hitting the Germans in places they didn’t anticipate and in ways that disrupted their order of battle, had served him well at El Alamein, and it served him well on the twenty-first.108

  On the night the Eighth Army threw its left hook—March 20—Churchill broadcast to his countrymen and the world. The topic, for the first time during his premiership, was the postwar world. He outlined in broad strokes his plans for Britons at home, and Britain abroad. He cautioned that 1943 would not see an end to the war, nor perhaps would 1944, but in the end, the Allies would beat “Hitler and his powers of evil unto death, dust, and ashes.” And then they would do the same to Japan; it would take time, but victory in the East would be attained. After victory, the three great powers—Britain, America, and Soviet Russia—would form the backbone of a “world organization” that would serve as “safeguard against future war.” Within this organization, there would be smaller “councils” in Europe, where the last two great wars had begun. Lesser states could then express themselves through these councils. In Europe, he predicted that the “largest common measure of integrated life” could be achieved without destroying the ancient and individual characteristics of its myriad peoples. Russia must be one of the guarantors of that life; “thus and thus only will the glory of Europe rise again.” He had obviously not consulted Roosevelt on the speech. Other than references to China’s “long torment” and its need of “rescue,” he did not include China as one of the great postwar powers. At best, if Churchill had a say in the matter, China would take its rightful place as a lesser state with friends in high places. Anthony Eden, in Washington that week for talks with Roosevelt (who believed in a four-power postwar structure), was told in no uncertain terms by Cordell Hull that “Churchill had made a serious mistake in his speech… by not mentioning China.”109

  After sketching his vision of postwar Europe, Churchill moved on to the Beveridge Report and postwar social changes in Britain. The policies he championed that evening would have appeared radical even to a New Dealer. “You must rank me and my colleagues as strong partisans of national compulsory insurance for all classes, for all purposes, from cradle to grave.” On health: “We must establish on broad and solid foundations a national health service.” On education: “I hope our education will become broader and more liberal.” No one who aspired to higher education would be denied the opportunity, including factory workers, for whom some sort of “part time release” from work must be found. Housing: Entire cities and towns had to be rebuilt, “an immense opportunity not only for improving our housing, but for employment.” The taxes to pay for all this would be heavier than before the war, but not so heavy as to “destroy initiative and enterprise.” Yet, caveats: “First of all we must beware of attempts to over-persuade or even to coerce His Majesty’s Government to bind themselves or their unknown successors, in conditions which no one can foresee and which may be years ahead, to impose great new expenditure on the State without any relation to the circumstances which might prevail at that time…. I am not in any need to go about making promises in order to win political support or to be allowed to continue in office.” And, “I tell you around your firesides to-night that I am resolved to not… make all kinds of promises and tell all kinds of fairy tales to you who have trusted me and gone with me so far, and marched through the valley of the shadow, till we have reached the upland regions on which we now stand with firmly planted feet.”110

  It was masterful; he had declared himself for reform and against fairy tales, leaving unanswered the question, was Beveridge’s report reform or fairy tale? That question was partially answered by a Tory public relations campaign that began within days of Churchill’s call for individual initiative and enterprise. Posters appeared on buildings throughout the land reminding Britons of “Our National Heritage.” The centerpiece of each poster was a picture of a national hero—Drake, Elizabeth, Marlborough, Pitt, Nelson, Wellington. Churchill’s photo assumed a lesser place on each poster. The message was clear: heroes and individual initiative underlay Britain’s greatness. Partisan politics had been dormant for almost three years in the comforting shade of the flag of truce that flew over the coalition government. Churchill wanted things to stay that way, although he looked the other way as Tory posters with his portrait sprouted across Britain. Labour rank and file, meanwhile, feared a loss of their political identity if they continued to serve in a national government that proscribed partisan rhetoric. For weeks many Labourites had advised Attlee and his cabinet cohorts to bolt the coalition, the idea being that Labour would declare absolute loyalty to Churchill on the war effort but simultaneously reclaim its identity and the freedom to oppose the Tories on the domestic front. Harold Nicolson believed such a split was certain to take place within four months.111

  Nicolson rued the fact that Conservatives were forcing Labour’s hand by not coming at the Beveridge Report more honestly, by arguing against the improbable parts while trying to find a way to make the more practical elements work. When the report was brought up for debate in the House, the government paraded out
a coalition of cabinet ministers—Tories Sir John Anderson and Kingsley Wood, and Labourite Herbert Morrison—to argue the government’s case, which amounted to, as Nicolson feared it would, a transparent attempt to sweep it under the rug. That the dour Anderson did much of the sweeping only hurt the Tory cause. Labour argued for the immediate creation of a Ministry of Social Security; Tories insisted that such decisions await the end of the war. The leftist Manchester Guardian called the Tory performance “a lamentable exhibition of how not to handle political dynamite.” The Times warned Parliament, “The public is in earnest in its determination to secure a new and firmer social foundation… after the war.” Still, in a vote that came in at 338 for the government, including 23 Labourites, versus 121 against, the House endorsed the Tory strategy, which was to accept the plan in principle but not in detail. The Conservatives had employed the same strategy of obfuscation that Churchill had himself four decades earlier called “terminological inexactitude”; that is, the Tory response to Beveridge did not exactly add up to lies, but neither did it add up to anything comprehensible.112

  Churchill believed that the best way to outflank Beveridge without threatening the national government was to stress the absolute necessity of maintaining the coalition, such that when the war ended, Britons would remember who had insisted on solidarity and brought them through the ordeal. To stem the rising tide of Labour unrest and to preserve his status as war leader, Churchill told the Commons that per the agreement made in 1940, a general election would not be permitted. Labour MPs asked why, if the Americans can hold interim elections without harming the war effort, could not Britons? Churchill held firm; there would be no contested elections. Those intent on “seeing the war through to a victorious conclusion,” he warned the House, should “avail themselves of every occasion to mark their disapproval of truce breakers.” This was less a renewed call for national unity than an adroit maneuver by Churchill, who in effect had just equated parliamentary dissent with disloyalty. Yet beyond the walls of Parliament, Churchill’s Tory functionaries felt free to declaim at will on the evils of socialism, because such exhortations were neither disruptive to the war effort nor disloyal to the war leader. Oliver Lyttelton, intent on explicating the perils of Labour collectivism versus Churchill’s theme of heroic individualism, told a Conservative meeting: “The great periods in our history were nearly always associated with an outstanding individual and not with a political system…. Nothing could be more ghastly than a uniform cow-like public opinion, which is left willing to browse on artificially fertilized fields, and chew the cud of common pasture.”113