The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  As Eisenhower prepared to hit Salerno (and not with a roundhouse punch), Churchill, still in Washington, proposed to the War Cabinet that the agenda for the agreed-upon tripartite meeting be topped by discussions on the fate of Germany after the war and Russia’s role in determining that fate. Russia, and its possible behavior in the future, had become for Churchill a pressing political concern. To Smuts, on September 5, he offered that “Russia will be the greatest land power in the world after this war” and that a continuation of the Anglo-American alliance and its overwhelming airpower would supply the necessary “balance with Russia at least for the period of rebuilding.” After that, Churchill wrote, “I cannot see with mortal eye, and I am not yet fully informed about the celestial telescope.”258

  On September 5, President Roosevelt invited Mrs. Ogden Reid to join himself and Churchill for lunch at the White House. She was the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune and a strong supporter of Indian independence. She was known for speaking her mind, and Roosevelt had no doubt that she would speak it to Churchill. She did, asking Churchill, “What are you going to do about those wretched Indians?” He replied, “Before we proceed further let us get one thing clear. Are we talking about the brown Indians in India, who have multiplied alarmingly under benevolent British rule? Or are we talking about the Red Indians in America, who, I understand, are almost extinct?” Mrs. Reid was speechless. Roosevelt could not contain his laughter; it was the sort of awkward moment he relished.259

  Later that day Churchill, who had accepted an invitation from Harvard president James Conant to speak there, took himself off by private train for the overnight run to Boston. On September 6, he addressed a standing-room-only crowd of more than 1,300 students and faculty in Harvard College’s Sanders Theatre, tucked into Memorial Hall, a redbrick Victorian Gothic edifice as grand as a cathedral and, with the names of Harvard’s Civil War dead embossed on twenty-eight white marble tablets affixed to the walls of the transept, as sacred a place as can be found in that fount of secular wisdom. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt had walked its corridors, as had Cabots, Lawrences, and Lowells; and Admiral Yamamoto, dead now four months at the hands of American fliers. Inspired by Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, Sanders boasted a semicircular lecture hall with perfect acoustics, high vaulted ceilings, and dark hardwood paneling. But for the statue that stood to the right of the lectern—the Revolutionary War agitator James Otis, depicted speaking out against George III and his Writs of Assistance in 1761—Sanders offered as English a venue as Churchill could hope for to unveil his remarkable proposal for the postwar world. There he stood, the chancellor of Bristol University, upon a Harvard stage, attired in the cap and gown of an Oxford don borrowed from Princeton for the occasion. He spoke for about four minutes on the cooperation thus far between Britain and America, then:

  The great Bismarck—for there were once great men in Germany—is said to have observed towards the close of his life that the most potent factor in human society at the end of the nineteenth century was the fact that the British and American peoples spoke the same language. That was a pregnant saying. Certainly it has enabled us to wage war together with an intimacy and harmony never before achieved among allies. The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship. I like to think of British and Americans moving about freely over each other’s wide estates with hardly a sense of being foreigners to one another…. All these are great possibilities, and I say: “Let us go into this together. Let us have another Boston Tea Party about it.

  Let us go forward as with other matters and other measures similar in aim and effect—let us go forward in malice to none and good will to all. Such plans offer far better prizes than taking away other people’s provinces or lands or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the futures are the empires of the mind.”260

  Churchill was always diligent in seeking Roosevelt’s approval for remarks he intended to make on American soil. His extraordinary proposal of common citizenship had certainly been cleared by Roosevelt, who in fact assured him that America was now so far removed from its isolationist past that the idea of dual citizenship would not “outrage public opinion or provide another Boston Tea Party.” Eager to measure public reaction to the speech, Churchill ordered the British embassy to sift American newspapers for opinions. The Oxford political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, a Latvian expatriate and staff member at the embassy, was assigned the task. He reported that because the White House had announced the speech would contain little of political significance, it had not been covered. As well, two horrific train crashes that week occupied the front pages of American newspapers. Churchill’s great American moment went largely unnoticed. Still, the New York Times declared the speech “has opened a vast and hopeful field of discussion…. Down the grim corridors of war light begins to show.”261

  On this day Churchill quite possibly reached the high-water mark of his war leadership. He had nurtured, nagged, and prodded the alliance for almost two years to such a degree that inevitability now attached to the future. First would come victory over Hitler in Italy—I’ll soon be meeting Alex in Rome, he told Lord Moran—and then victory over Hitler in Germany. And now here came Roosevelt in apparent agreement on the need to forge a permanent Anglo-American relationship. The potential appeared limitless, including the prospect of the two nations sharing a common military staff system, perhaps even a common currency, the dollar sterling, a Churchillian dream of long standing. Outside Memorial Hall, a battalion of cadets, male and female, stood smartly at attention, while Churchill addressed them briefly from the steps. He had doffed his robes, which had lent him an air of a Cardinal Wolsey, and was attired in a dark blazer, navy bow tie, and light trousers. The cadets listened in respectful silence as Churchill paraphrased his earlier address, punctuating his words by jabbing the granite steps with his walking stick. Then, to cheers, he stepped back and thrust up his “V” for victory. He was ebullient on the return trip to Washington, flashing his “V” to the engineers of passing trains, and darting out to the rear platform of the Pullman in his flowered dressing gown to flash the sign as the train slowed at each station along the way. It was left to Lord Moran to find the poignant irony in Churchill’s behavior: “The P.M. stood for some time at the window of his car giving the victory sign to odd workmen in the fields, who could see nothing but a train rushing through the countryside.”262

  On September 7, the Italian naval minister promised Albert Kesselring that the Italian fleet was about to sail “from Spezia to seek battle with the British Mediterranean fleet,” and “would conquer or perish” in the ensuing showdown. This pleased Kesselring, although doubting the trustworthiness of the entire Italian government, he had crafted a battle plan to occupy Rome were the Italians to evidence any treachery. He had also concluded that the Allies would play small and invade near Salerno rather than farther north.

  Late in the afternoon of the eighth, the BBC announced the Italian surrender. The news came as a complete surprise to Victor Emmanuel and Marshal Badoglio who, not having been informed of Allied plans, thought they had more time to deploy Italian troops in order to make the changeover from enemy to co-belligerent. Later that night and into the morning of the next day, 55,000 men of the British X Corps and the U.S. VI Corps, under overall command of Mark Clark and the Fifth Army, went ashore near Salerno, almost 160 miles south of Rome and 35 miles south of Naples. No aerial or seaborne bombardment preceded the landings in order to keep Kesselring guessing right up to the moment the men went ashore.

  But it was exactly as Kesselring expected. He had seen the tentativeness of Eisenhower’s campaigns in Tunisia and Sicily and foresaw more of the same in Italy. And he got it, first with Montgomery’s landings in Calabria, and now at Salerno. Berlin radio had predicted both operations three weeks earlier. Kesselring had deployed five divisions such that they could rapidly respond to landings from Naples to Salerno. Now th
ey responded. John Steinbeck wrote as a war correspondent from the beaches: “The Germans were waiting for us. His 88s were on the surrounding hills and his machine guns in the sand dunes. His mines were in the surf and he sat there and waited for us.” Allied caution had again trumped aggression, and the price paid not only by the troops on the beaches, but by Rome—by all of Italy—was dear. Kesselring, his plans to take Rome in place for weeks, hit the city on September 9 and occupied it the next day after the Italian divisions there drifted off to Tivoli without a fight. “Thus the main problems connected with our security in Italy have been solved,” Goebbels chimed to his diary. Life changed overnight for Rome’s citizens; they had committed “treachery” in Goebbels’ estimation, and deserved the fate that awaited them. Romans joined the citizens of Warsaw, Paris, Rotterdam, and Brussels as prisoners of the Reich.263

  Churchill believed that Italy’s collapse, if it could be capitalized upon quickly, opened up opportunities in the Aegean. On September 8, as the troops were going ashore at Salerno, a British officer parachuted into the Italian lines on Rhodes, just off the Turkish southwest Anatolian coast. The island was the linchpin of Churchill’s Balkan strategy; its capture would take pressure off the Turks (who claimed sovereignty over the Dodecanese Islands) and, he hoped, persuade them to come into the war on the Allied side. If the Turks came in, the Black Sea would become an Allied lake and the Danubian Basin would be made ripe for Churchill’s ultimate Balkan thrust north into the German flank. The mission of the officer was to persuade the commander of the 30,000 Italian troops on Rhodes to attack the 7,000 Germans across the island. The Italians hesitated; the Germans did not. They attacked preemptively and routed the defenders, executing more than one hundred Italian officers in the aftermath.

  Churchill’s Aegean initiative was off to a most inauspicious start. He ordered his Middle East commander, Maitland (“Jumbo”) Wilson, to dispatch a brigade of four thousand infantrymen to Leros, Kos, five other islands of the Dodecanese, and nearby Samos. The brigade, sliced into battalion-size formations, joined commandos already at work, and the now-friendly Italian troops deployed in the Dodecanese. But until Rhodes was taken, any gains in the Dodecanese would be difficult if not impossible to hold. “This is the time to play high,” Churchill cabled Wilson. “Improvise and dare.” (Churchill later lamented, “He improvose and dore.”) On the thirteenth, Churchill sent off more encouragement to Wilson: “This is the time to think of Clive and Peterborough and of Rooke’s taking of Gibraltar.” Yet the brigade amounted to less than half the force called for by the original plans drawn up after Casablanca, and the Germans, not the RAF, controlled the airfield on Rhodes. Wilson lacked the troops and planes needed to take Rhodes, but Eisenhower had plenty of both. Churchill presumed that once Eisenhower saw the Aegean treasures to be gained at little cost, he would climb on board. He did not.264

  While events on Rhodes spiraled into mayhem on September 9, Admiral Cunningham sailed his fleet right up to the Taranto quays in order to put ashore the British 1st Airborne Division, six thousand strong, a gallant operation necessitated by the lack of landing craft to carry the men ashore. The troops landed with only five jeeps, no trucks, no tanks, no artillery, and therefore no means to exploit their audacious arrival. The operation was ironically and aptly named “Slapstick.” This unfortunate choice came just a month after Churchill demanded that staff planners not use code names that were boastful or lent themselves to ridicule. It would not do, he wrote, for “some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called BUNNYHUG or BALLYHOO.” Whoever came up with Slapstick had either not read or had ignored the message.265

  On the way into Taranto, Cunningham’s ships passed the Italian fleet coming out. Tense moments ensued; Cunningham had no way of knowing if the Italians would abide by the terms of surrender or fight. The Italian minister of marine, whose fleet now sailed quietly past Cunningham headed for Malta and surrender, had not exactly been straightforward with Kesselring. Hitler had hoped the Italians would at least have the decency to deliver their navy to neutral Spain. Göring had thought otherwise, predicting that Italian treachery would extend to surrendering the fleet to the Allies. He was correct and was prepared for this eventuality. Dornier bombers carrying newly designed radio-guided gliding bombs were ordered aloft to punish the retreating Italians. Roma, the flagship, hit by two bombs, broke in half and went down with more than 1,300 of its crew. The rest of the fleet was delivered safely into British hands. Kesselring soon turned the new bombs on the British fleet at Salerno; a cruiser was lost and tars fast learned that aerial bombing had taken a great and dangerous leap forward. The guided bombs portended even more sinister weapons. If an engine was strapped to such a device, and if it was outfitted with even a rudimentary guidance system, it could be flung across the Channel into London. Days later, Duncan Sandys delivered a memo to Churchill that predicted exactly that. After reading it, Churchill told John Anderson that some sort of futuristic German rockets would descend on London by the end of the year.266

  By the evening of September 10, the entire Mediterranean Sea—but not the airspace over its eastern reaches—belonged to the Allies. Yet by the twelfth, it became distressingly clear that Salerno did not. The men there, pinned down by furious German resistance, hadn’t gotten off the beaches. Before going ashore, they had been told by their commanders that they’d be in Naples in three days. Instead, they were still fighting so near the beaches that they could watch their supply ships burn under the new bombs of the Luftwaffe and hear the screams of men in the water. By then, Badoglio and Victor Emmanuel had fled Rome to rendezvous with Allied gunboats, which took them off to Malta. “Surprise, violence, and speed,” Churchill wrote, “are the essence of all amphibious landings.” At Salerno, Albert Kesselring had turned those criteria against the invaders. It was now obvious to Churchill that the rake of war would have to tear over the length of Italy. Churchill, still in Washington, grumbled to his doctor, “These things always seem to happen when I’m with the president.”267

  There was good reason for that. Churchill went abroad when he saw an acute need to prepare for or react to battlefield climacterics, as after Pearl Harbor and Midway and before Torch and Husky. He liked to conduct business face-to-face, which usually resulted in his getting what he wanted. Now he wanted to get into the Balkans. The Americans believed his motive for doing so was to redress the errors of the Great War, and by comparing the ordeal at Salerno to the mishandled invasion at Gallipoli in 1915, Churchill only reinforced the Americans’ belief in that regard. In fact, he wanted to get to Vienna before the Russians. Cadogan told his diary that Churchill, at the White House, spent his days “hurling himself violently in and out of bed, bathing at unsuitable moments and rushing up and down corridors in his dressing gown.” He also kept Roosevelt up past 2:00 A.M., and during these long parleys pressed him to keep an open mind on the need for flexibility regarding Overlord. In effect, in spite of the agreements just made in Quebec, he was asking Roosevelt to view Overlord as one of many options, including the developing situation on Rhodes. Roosevelt rebuffed him. Then, in need of respite from Churchill and the hours he kept, the president took himself off to Hyde Park. Before leaving he told Churchill to make himself at home in the White House.268

  Harriman knew from experience that it was always flexibility with Churchill, whether the battleground was military or diplomatic. Churchill’s postwar union with America was a case in point; he told Harriman he “liked the idea of a loose association rather than a formal treaty… an association flexible enough to adjust itself to historical developments.” Flexibility had defined since early 1942 the meetings between the British and American chiefs. The discussions were always disputatious, yet so far they had always ended with unified statements of intent. If circumstances later deranged the timely realization of those pledges, that was war and all of its vagaries. The critical point was that the strategies agreed upon admitted to flexibility. Churchill and Roosevelt never f
linched from trying to impose design upon chance, which so often rules the business of war, but to date neither had demanded rigidity in strategy. The alliance—a real coalition as Churchill saw it—was functioning. After all, he had been handed the keys to the White House by Franklin Roosevelt, from wherein he conducted high-level meetings, a British prime minister chairing sessions of the American Chiefs of Staff. Here was his dream being made real, a British premier presiding over the crafting of collective policy, in the White House, no less. Of course, the courtesy would be reciprocated when Roosevelt journeyed to London, and especially once some sort of “union” between the English-speaking peoples had been agreed upon in the legislatures of both lands. It need not at first be strictly formal, as he told Harriman, for formal relationships often begin as informal understandings, as had this alliance.269