The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  For the passengers on the two upper decks, the voyage had had about it a holiday atmosphere, made jollier with each new telegram from Alexander. On May 7, he cabled that the 1st United States Armored Division had entered Bizerte while the British had poured into Tunis. On the eighth, as Germans and Italians tried to flee Tunis by ship, Admiral Cunningham issued the order: “Sink, burn, and destroy. Let nothing pass.” On the tenth, Churchill suggested to Attlee and Eden, in London, that England’s church bells be rung that night. The date happened to be the third anniversary of his premiership. The bells were rung.154

  Goebbels found the celebrations in London distasteful: “The capture of Tunis and Biserte is… blown up by the English as a sensational event…. All London is drunk with victory.” Yet, Goebbels confessed, “We are indeed experiencing a sort of second Stalingrad.”155

  On board the Queen Mary, each day’s news had been celebrated over long luncheons and longer evening meals followed by hands of bezique and poker. (Beaverbrook and Harriman agreed beforehand that they would not take advantage of Churchill’s limited poker skills.) The African victory instilled in the pilgrims a sentiment absent from Allied ranks since Pearl Harbor: confidence.156

  The principals talked their way across the Atlantic; or rather, they listened as Churchill spoke. Reverting to his opposition to the American Air Force daylight strategy and its paltry destruction of German industrial targets achieved at great cost to the fliers, he told Harriman he intended to voice his displeasure to Roosevelt. Harriman warned that the surest way to provoke the American Chiefs to pack off their B-17s to the Pacific was for Churchill to denigrate the American effort in Europe. Churchill deferred to Harriman on the matter. During one of his shipboard monologues, Churchill put his hand on Beaverbrook’s knee and said softly, “You don’t talk anymore.” Nobody could talk, Beaverbrook later told Harriman, “because the P.M. talks all the time.” Yet the Beaver managed to produce “a tirade against the Poles” when informed by Churchill of a telegram from Stalin that excoriated HMG for allowing the London Poles to conduct their “anti-Soviet smear campaign.” Beaverbrook—who Harriman considered naive about Stalin—threw his support to Stalin. Churchill threw his support to both Stalin and the Poles, a dual loyalty that could not end well. The subject changed to Burma. Churchill was displeased with Wavell’s progress there, yet he and Wavell agreed that Burma was a malarial swamp unsuited for modern warfare. The British spring push in the western Burmese province of Arakan had ended in failure, and would have ended in utter disaster but for the inspired retreat brought off by General William (“Billy”) Slim. Churchill held Wavell accountable. Wavell, in turn, fed up with Churchill’s long-standing lack of faith in his abilities, threatened to resign. He did not, but only after Brooke told him that if he, Brooke, resigned every time Churchill took an unfair swipe at him, he’d have to do so “at least once a day.” Brooke, for his part, told his diary that the upcoming Washington meetings “will entail hours of argument and hard work trying to convince [the Americans] that Germany must be defeated first… they will pretend to understand… and will continue as at present to devote the bulk of their strength to try and defeat Japan!!” Of the pending meetings, Brooke wrote, “I hate the thought of them.”157

  During a lifeboat drill five days out from New York, Churchill disclosed to Harriman that he had ordered a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the lifeboat which was to carry the highest-ranking personages. “I won’t be captured,” he told Harriman. “The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy.” Harriman, distressed at the thought they might actually have to take to the lifeboats, reminded Churchill of his guarantee that a German torpedo could not sink the Queen Mary. “Ah,” Churchill replied, “but they might put two into us.” Here was the bluster of the old warrior who loved a good fight. Of the more than six thousand soldiers on board, Allied and Axis, very few had actually killed an enemy. Churchill had; several, in fact. He loved a fight, but he hated unnecessary fights that cost men their lives. So, too, did Marshall and Roosevelt. But the Americans’ sensibilities were informed by politics, decency, reason, and the lessons of Scripture, to which as good Christians they subscribed. Churchill’s sensibilities were informed from having witnessed slaughter firsthand on battlefields, in the Sudan and India in the previous century, in Belgium in 1916, and in London in 1940. More so than the American military chiefs, he could see the slaughter that would take place if an inadequate or ill-prepared Allied army landed on French beaches. In coming months, the conflict between his fertile imagination and his fervent desire to kill Germans took its toll on him, and on the alliance.158

  Churchill loved a parade as much as a good fight. He proposed to Harriman, at Beaverbrook’s prodding, to disembark the Queen Mary off Battery Park in order to make an unannounced progress by motorcar up Manhattan’s avenues, no doubt to great and spontaneous popular acclaim in light of the news from North Africa. Harriman impressed upon the P.M. the dangers inherent in such a venture, the possibility of lurking Italian and Irish radicals, to say nothing of German operatives. With regret, Churchill withdrew his proposal and instead disembarked on Staten Island, where the presidential train, with Roosevelt’s private car Ferdinand Magellan bringing up the rear, waited on a dockside spur. Harry Hopkins was on board, ready to greet his friend.159

  Lunch was served during the run down to Washington, “small steak” being one of the menu choices. The entire British contingent went for the “small steak,” which turned out to be so generous that none finished his portion. “It resembled a whole week’s meat ration,” Pug Ismay later wrote. “We were out of practice.” By late afternoon on May 11, Churchill and Roosevelt were drinking cocktails in Roosevelt’s oval study upstairs at the White House. The following day, Sir John Anderson learned that the supplies of Canadian uranium and heavy water Britain needed in order to produce an atomic bomb had been purchased by the United States—the entire Canadian production capacity. The Americans had frozen Britain out of the Manhattan Project. Indeed, there was much to discuss with the president.160

  On May 13, Churchill received a message from Alexander: “Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over…. We are masters of the North African shores.” Arnim had been captured by the British on Cap Bon along with 150,000 prisoners who included twelve generals and 110,000 Germans. All of this since Churchill set sail. The New York Times reported that when a German general approached Bernard Freyberg somewhere north of Enfidaville and asked for peace terms, the New Zealand commander replied: “Unconditional surrender.” British tanks, with infantry hanging on their sides, were taking joy rides along the coastal roads of Cap Bon. Every time a tank swung its gun, groups of Germans and Italians rose from the scrub and poppies, hands raised. It was like a grouse shoot; everybody among the Allies took their bag. The French, defeated in 1940, captured 25,000 Axis troops, the Americans almost 38,000, of whom almost 34,000 were Germans. That brought to 400,000 the total of Axis prisoners taken in North Africa since November, at a cost to the British Eighth and First Armies of 35,000 killed, wounded, and missing. The Americans lost about 18,000 killed, wounded, and missing.161

  The war in North Africa was over. The genesis of the victory, Averell Harriman believed, lay in Churchill’s “desperate gamble” in late 1940 to send England’s tanks to Egypt at the moment of the Home Island’s and the Empire’s greatest peril.162

  A few days after arriving in Washington, Churchill told the U.S. Congress that “the proud German Army has once again proved the truth of the saying, ‘The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet’; and that is a point which may have its bearing upon the future. But for us, arrived at this milestone in the war, we can say ‘One Continent redeemed.’ ”163

  On the day of the North African surrender, Mussolini took himself off to Rocca delle Caminate, his summer palace near Forlì, where he spent several days clipping articles from newspapers and underlining stories about the African campaign with red and blue c
rayons. The strut had left his step. His aides noticed that where once his desk was a paradigm of order, it was now cluttered, “like a junk-stall with half opened books, Fascist badges and medals, sheaves of wheat bound in tricolour ribbon.” He was embittered, and believed Italians had lost their will to fight, due in part to dozens of Allied air raids on Genoa, Turin, and Naples. The raids had had the effect Churchill intended. Rome’s turn came on May 16. The RAF had been hitting Italy in spot raids for almost three years; now hundreds of American B-17s appeared over Rome. Il Duce concluded the bombing was a prologue to the invasion of Sicily (not Corsica or Sardinia, or southern France, or Greece, as was thought in Berlin). And after Sicily, Mussolini believed, the Italian mainland would be the Allies’ next target.164

  Il Duce’s instincts were sound, but he no longer had the power to inspire his people to heroic resistance, or to convince Berlin that Sicily was the next target. As he was prone to wild pronouncements, and evidencing the onset of either failing nerves or senility, his opinion was ignored in Berlin.

  A New York Times headline that week read: INDIA STAFF HERE: WAVELL’S PRESENCE SEEN AS HINT OF EARLY ACTION AGAINST JAPANESE. The Times of London ran a similar story, prompting Clementine to write to her husband, “I’m worried at the importance given by the Press… to the presence of Wavell… in your party. I’m so afraid the Americans will think that a Pacific slant is to be given to the next phase of the war…. Surely the liberation must come first.” She had perfectly captured Brooke’s fear, and Churchill’s, and England’s.165

  To a degree, Wavell’s presence at the conference was about taking the war to Japan, but not by way of Burma, where the weak British winter push toward Akyab had been mauled by the troops of Major General Masakazu Kawabe. Churchill and Brooke had decided on their way to Washington to tell Roosevelt that Operation Anakim, the planned invasion of southern Burma, was off the table until 1944. The manpower and resources simply did not exist. Still, two strategies for taking the fight to Japan by way of China were debated in Washington, and Burma played a role in each. Joe Stilwell favored an overland strategy from India, through northern Burma and into China. Yet MacArthur was siphoning off the American troops that had been allotted to Stilwell, and Stilwell’s Chinese troops showed no fight. Claire Chennault, who sought to configure his Fourteenth Air Force on Chinese soil as soon as possible, championed an aerial strategy conducted against Japan from bases in China. Wavell saw the obvious flaw in Chennault’s plan: China had no gasoline refineries and no means of fueling bomber groups or fighter squadrons. In fact, Allied DC-4 transports flying over the eastern Himalayas—“the Hump”—to deliver fuel and ammunition to China had to make room in their cargo bays for the gasoline needed for the return trip to India. The lack of available troops (especially American troops), tanks, and trucks argued against Stilwell, who concluded that his theater of war was neglected because “Churchill has Roosevelt in his pocket…. The Limeys are not interested in the war in the Pacific, and with the president hypnotized they are sitting pretty.” Stilwell, fluent in Mandarin Chinese, respected the Chinese people but thought Chiang corrupt and inept. Although Churchill thought little of Stilwell’s plan, he was in complete agreement with Vinegar Joe’s assessment of Chiang. Neither Stilwell nor Chennault could put forth any plan to help Chiang that could be seriously considered until Burma was retaken, and for this endeavor there was no plan, only a name. When it came to capturing Burma, Churchill told Brooke, “You might as well eat a porcupine one quill at a time.”166

  Churchill soon shifted his animal analogy from porcupine to shark: “Going into the jungles to fight the Japanese is like going into the water to fight a shark.” Instead, he believed the Allies should “set a trap or capture him on a hook.” The best place to set such a trap, he concluded, was the northern tip of Sumatra, from where the Royal Navy could harass Japanese supply lines between Tokyo and Singapore. This strategy soon exercised a hold over him, much the same as had Jupiter, the invasion of northern Norway.167

  Contrary to the New York Times headline, Wavell’s presence in Washington had more to do with India than with taking the fight to Japan. Churchill thought it time to shuffle the entire command structure in India and Burma, by way of appointing a new viceroy and new commander for Indian military affairs, and creating the position of supreme commander, Southeast Asia. The latter position would not be going to Wavell, about whose aggressiveness Churchill still voiced doubts. No, he had his eye on Wavell for viceroy of India. Eden had politely refused the offer for fear it would end his career; traditionally the viceroy was made a lord, and lords were traditionally denied the premiership. Churchill’s choice of Wavell as viceroy, therefore, would signal to Roosevelt that HMG thought that the situation in India demanded a strong military hand rather than a deft political touch.

  Churchill favored Auchinleck for commander in chief, India. He liked Air Vice Marshal Sholto Douglas, formerly of Fighter Command, now RAF chief in the Middle East, for the head of the new Southeast Asia Command, or SEAC. Churchill thought the appointment was inspired, in part because Douglas, as an airman, would better appreciate the logistics of supplying Chiang’s forces by air. The Americans objected to Douglas. He was as vocal a critic of America as Stilwell was of Britain, and his transparent ambition, as well as his part in the downfall of the hero of the Battle of Britain, Hugh Dowding (who had been kicked upstairs to Washington), were well known on the Potomac. For their part, the Americans began to refer to SEAC as See England Acquire Colonies, so firm was their belief that Churchill wanted to regain his lost Asian domains and had no intention of helping Chiang.168

  During the two weeks of Trident, Roosevelt gave Churchill what he sought on the atomic bomb project: full cooperation and a promise to share the finished product, which Roosevelt thought might be ready for use in the current war, which he believed might last into 1946 or even 1947. Churchill informed the War Cabinet that a formal agreement would follow. The president also finally acted on Harriman’s March suggestion and directed the War Shipping Administration to transfer more ships to the British flag—fifteen to twenty hulls per month. Yet Roosevelt had been singing that tune for months; this latest promise, too, would go unfulfilled. Admiral King and MacArthur needed those hulls. The shadow of King and his Pacific strategy darkened every meeting, from the British standpoint. “The swing toward the Pacific is stronger than ever,” Brooke complained to his diary, “and before long they will be urging that we defeat Japan first!”169

  Brooke believed the Americans felt they had been “led down the garden path” by Torch and Husky, “and now they are not going to be led astray again.” France and only France formed the core of George Marshall’s strategic plan. Yet there existed one simple and sublime way to satisfy Marshall as well as avoid a full American tilt toward the Pacific, and that was for the British to wait until the Americans insisted upon a date for the invasion of France, which they did, and then agree to it, which the British chiefs did. In doing so, Churchill and Brooke gave Roosevelt and Marshall what they had all along demanded. Acceding to the cross-Channel strategy ensured that the president’s and Marshall’s attention would be focused at least as much on the European front as on the Pacific. The date agreed upon was May 1, 1944. But whether this was to be the small-scale landing, Sledgehammer, or the larger investment, Roundup, was not decided. So much confusion attached to just what exactly these code names meant that at the State Department and around Eisenhower’s headquarters, the newly proposed operation was referred to as Roundhammer. Whatever they chose to call it, it meant that yet another pledge made at Casablanca, and the most important to Stalin—to put men somewhere into France by August 1943—would go begging for another year.170

  Churchill did, however, have in mind a supreme commander for the invasion, Alan Brooke. That a British general should assume command seemed self-evidently correct to Churchill. After all, Britain had far more men, planes, tanks (albeit many were American built), and ships within the European and North A
frican theaters than did the Americans. As well, at the time of Eisenhower’s appointment as commander of Torch, there had been an implied understanding (as Churchill saw it) between himself and Roosevelt that a Briton would command the invasion of France. A committee had been set up to plan that invasion (soon code-named Overlord), headed by an Englishman, Lieutenant General Frederick E. Morgan, whose title was COSSAC—Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (designate). Morgan shared with Marshall the belief in a straight-line approach to Germany. He took his assignment seriously and was in no way inclined to put on a show of championing the merits of Overlord simply to placate (or deceive) the Americans.