The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  To placate Stalin, Churchill instructed Eden to reassure the marshal that three British divisions had been pulled from the Mediterranean for deployment in Overlord, in accordance with the Quebec agreement. Yet he also informed Eden (but not Stalin) that he objected to this depletion of his forces and that he was gathering four more divisions to “repair the loss.” “This is what happens when battles are governed by lawyers’ agreements, and persisted in without regard to the ever-changing fortunes of war.” It fell to Eden to convince Stalin that Overlord had the full support of the prime minister, when in fact, that very week, Churchill told the Chiefs of Staff he wished to delay Overlord if doing so meant that the battle in Italy (and the Balkans, if he only could get there) would be “nourished and fought until it is won.” “We will do our very best for Overlord,” he told Eden, but “it is of no use planning defeat in the field in order to give temporary political satisfaction.” Three days later, he told Eden, as he had Smuts and the King, “There is of course no question of abandoning Overlord, which will remain our principal operation for 1944.” Yet delay amounted to abandonment. Overlord might safely be pushed back to June, or even early July 1944, but any further delay would take it into the spring of 1945. That, Stalin could not abide.296

  The Anglo-American commitment to Overlord gave Stalin leverage. He used it to effect on Eden and Hull. Eden came to Moscow with hopes of parsing Stalin’s intentions as to Russia’s postwar borders, but he was hobbled by the refusal of the London Poles and their new leader, Stanisław Mikołajczyk (who had not been invited to Moscow), to allow him to even discuss the matter. Eden acceded to their wishes, yet it was clear that Stalin, too, saw no need to discuss anything. He had already made up his mind. As divulged by Izvestia, he intended to preserve his territorial gains of 1939 and to exercise great influence in the “security belt” of the Balkans. Izvestia claimed that when the second front was launched, and only then, “will it be easier to decide all other necessary questions.” For five hundred years, Western Europe had maintained a cordon sanitaire of small client states as a buffer between itself and the Russians, who Europeans considered an Asiatic race. Stalin intended to turn the tables; the new cordon, under his control, would serve as a buffer against the West, especially Germany. Indeed, a few weeks later Czechoslovak president Eduard Beneš, justifiably wary of France and England, signed a twenty-year treaty of mutual assistance with Stalin.297

  Together, Hull and Eden might have brought some political will to bear on the question of borders, but to Eden’s amazement, Hull dismissed the boundary questions as “a Pandora’s box of infinite trouble” and refused to discuss the matter. Harriman offered Eden his full support if he pressed the issue with Stalin, but Eden, respecting the decision of Mikołajczyk, chose not to. Hull proceeded to spend his political capital—all of it—by demanding that Stalin acknowledge China as the fourth power in the nebulous four-power postwar league under discussion. Stalin was only too happy to oblige. He was not at war with Japan. If by signing a four-party declaration of solidarity in fighting “respective enemies” and pledging to participate in a postwar international peacekeeping body he could make the boundary issues disappear, he’d sign, and did. Hull was quite pleased that Stalin had not even raised the question of frontiers, but, Harriman later wrote, Hull failed to grasp the essential truth: Stalin considered the issue settled. The Moscow Accord, though celebrated in Washington and London, was symbolic at best. Stalin might as well have signed it with disappearing ink. But the table had been set for Tehran. An agenda had been worked out for the Big Three to work through. Roosevelt had gained acceptance of his nascent international organization, or at least gained Stalin’s willingness to talk about it. Stalin had gained a pledge by the Anglo-Americans to open the second front in the spring of 1944. England and Churchill had gained nothing, and the Polish question had simply been postponed.298

  By early November both the Italian campaign and the air campaign over Germany were flagging. This was not news Churchill wanted to deliver to Stalin in a few weeks’ time. In mid-October, Ultra decrypts had revealed Hitler’s decision to strengthen and hold his positions in Italy rather than stage a gradual, fighting retreat. Hitler ordered Kesselring’s strength increased from sixteen to twenty-three divisions. That bit of intelligence guaranteed that Eisenhower would not fight in both the Aegean and Italy. News mid-month that Erwin Rommel had been sent to Yugoslavia to command German forces there only reinforced Eisenhower’s decision to avoid Rhodes and the Balkans. He considered the mission in Italy fulfilled by the capture of Naples and the Foggia airfields, and the establishment of the 120-mile line that ran from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Aegean. Eisenhower and Marshall had always seen a secondary and diversionary role for Italian operations—more Germans sent to Italy meant fewer Germans to oppose Overlord. Hitler’s decision to reinforce Kesselring, Eisenhower later wrote, “was a great advantage to the Allies elsewhere.” He believed that although the Italian campaign was “a distinctly subsidiary operation… the results it attained in the actual defeat of Germany were momentous, almost incalculable.” Churchill, too, endorsed the idea of drawing Germans away from France and into Italy, telling Roosevelt so in a telegram on October 26: “The fact that the enemy have diverted such powerful forces to this theater vindicates our strategy.” Yet Churchill, seeking to fight far more than a holding action, also told Roosevelt, “At all costs we must win Rome and the airfields north of it.” Roosevelt, committed only to Overlord, did not reply. Eisenhower did not have a strategy (or orders) to get to Rome, and the Fifth Army lacked the means. Since taking Naples on October 1, the left flank of the Fifth Army had managed to slog northward about thirty miles; it had maintained its mile-a-day pace for almost two months.299

  As October went out, Mark Clark’s army straddled Highways 6 and 7, about twelve miles south of the town of Cassino and the routes north to Rome. At Cassino, Highway 6 turned north through the Liri Valley. And there, Monte Cassino, a Benedictine monastery called the abbey of abbeys by Benedictines, sat atop the mountain. Its oldest parts dated from the sixth century, when Benedict of Nursia and twelve disciples set to work building their refuge. Clark had to take the monastery in order to get on the road to Rome. But before he could take Cassino, he had to take other hills and towns along Highway 6—Monte Camino, Monte Lungo, Monte Sammucro, and the villages of San Pietro Infine and San Vittore. Although Clark had almost 250,000 men under his command, by late October, ferocious German resistance, freezing rains, and mud had stopped his army. On November 11, Clark called a two-week halt.300

  The air war over Germany brought its own disappointments. Operation Pointblank, the June decision to target German aircraft factories, was proving more costly than anyone, especially the Americans, had foreseen. American casualties were kept low as long as their B-17s flew missions protected by their P47C Thunderbolt fighters, which when fitted with a reserve fuel tank had an operational radius of five hundred miles, to beyond the Ruhr Valley and back. But when the Thunderbolts peeled away for home, the B-17s suffered horrific losses. During the second week of October, 148 went down with their ten-man crews, including 60 of 291 sent to destroy the ball-bearing factory at Schweinfurt. Pointblank was proving deadly and ineffectual. Bomber Harris continued his night raids against German cities. But his losses also mounted. The efficacy of massed attacks against German cities was in doubt. Churchill, knowing that Stalin approved of the raids, encouraged Harris to pursue his strategy. It was the only help Britain could give Stalin. Harris sent his air fleets to Kassel, where three thousand died and fires burned for a week; four thousand died in Würzburg; six thousand in Darmstadt; nine thousand in Weser; twelve thousand in Magdeburg. In November, Harris threw his bombers at Berlin, which the RAF visited sixteen times between November and March. The aircrews paid dearly. It was a price Churchill accepted because throughout 1943, the RAF, alone among Anglo-American forces, had inflicted pain on the German heartland. Anglo-American soldiers and sailors were fighting, but not well
enough or near enough to Germany to satisfy Stalin, with whom Churchill had an appointment in Tehran.301

  On November 12, Churchill and his usual troupe departed Plymouth aboard HMS Renown, final destination Alexandria, with ports of call at Gibraltar, Algiers, and Malta. Sarah accompanied her father as his ADC, and Gil Winant came along, since the agenda in Tehran would treat of both political and military issues. Winant therefore would find himself for several weeks in close proximity to Sarah, and the romantic affections they shared would have to remain unrequited in public. If Churchill learned of the affair, he never mentioned it. After calling on Gibraltar, Renown made for Algiers, where during his short layover Churchill did not see fit to meet with de Gaulle, who was in residence. De Gaulle was outraged, doubly so because Churchill had thought to invite General Joseph Georges for a chat. De Gaulle considered Georges, unfairly, to be one of the architects of France’s defeat in 1940. Duff Cooper, who had just been named minister to the French Committee of National Liberation, later wrote that de Gaulle, “ever on the lookout for an insult,” had found one in Churchill’s breach of etiquette.302

  Renown made Malta late in the afternoon of the seventeenth. It is fitting that Churchill spent the next two nights on the little island that had taken such a long and savage beating at the hands of the Luftwaffe, for the next day, the RAF conducted its largest raid yet over Germany. Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, and Berlin came in for it. Two weeks earlier Bomber Harris had briefed Churchill on cumulative RAF and Luftwaffe bomb damage to German and British cities. Whereas Coventry had lost 5 percent of the city center to German bombs, Hamburg had been 75 percent destroyed. As had Malta; its houses, quays, and roads—all constructed of brittle Maltese limestone—had for the most part been blasted back into the fossil particulates whence they came. But the fact that Churchill could take his rest on the island meant that the Maltese had come through the worst of it.303

  German cities were now getting the worst of it. The next raid over Berlin erased the homes of Goebbels’ mother and mother-in-law, blew the windows out of the Goebbels house, and reduced Hitler’s favorite hotel, the Kaiserhof, to rubble. Goebbels, the Gauleiter (a local political leader) of Berlin, bemoaned to his diary this “time of universal misfortune which has now fallen upon this city of four and a half million…. Hell itself seems to have broken loose over us.” A November 24 New York Times headline crowed: ZOO ANIMALS ROAM BERLIN STREETS; HEAT OF FIRES FELLS PEDESTRIANS. In fact, in regard to fires, Berliners could count themselves fortunate. The cool autumn weather and Berlin’s wide avenues and modern buildings kept firestorms of the Hamburg sort from breeding. Bomber Harris’s response to Berlin’s structural integrity was to send more bombers from England more often. And from Foggia, from where the Allied air forces could reach targets in southern Germany and Romania, came even more bombers.304

  The Old Man arrived on Malta with a bit of a sore throat, which within a day had festered into a nasty cold that kept him in bed for most of his short visit. He stayed in the Governor’s Palace as the guest of Lord Gort, and as the palace could offer no hot water for his bath, his mood worsened in lockstep with the worsening head cold. His room overlooked a busy promenade up from which drifted the sounds of Maltese making their way through the rubble. It was too much for Churchill, who flung off his bedclothes, threw open the windows, and bawled to the crowd below: “Go away, will you? Please go away and do not make so much noise.”305

  His funk worsened when he learned that Leros had fallen that day; the battle had been a Crete in miniature. The Germans arrived by sea and air; the RAF and Royal Navy did not dispute the issue; British troops on the ground were poorly led. The Royal Navy’s lack of aggression grated on Churchill, who christened the new naval commander of the Mediterranean, Admiral Sir John Cunningham (no relation to Andrew), “ ‘Dismal Jimmy’—and not without cause,” in Harold Macmillan’s estimation. The upcoming meeting of the military chiefs in Cairo also riled Churchill. He and the Americans still held opposing and irreconcilable views. He supported Overlord, but not at the expense of Rhodes, and especially Italy, the only theater where Anglo-American troops were taking pressure off the Russians. He intended to force a showdown. This troubled Brooke, who told his diary: “He [Churchill] is inclined to say to the Americans, all right, you won’t play with us in the Mediterranean we won’t play with you in the English Channel. And they will say all right then we shall direct our main effort in the Pacific.” To Clementine, Churchill cabled: “It is terrible fighting with both hands tied behind one’s back.”306

  Alexander and Eisenhower arrived on Malta in order to receive their special North African campaign ribbons. Both men lamented the stasis in Italy but for different reasons. Alexander, as the commander on the spot, had to report that the campaign had stalled. “All roads lead to Rome,” he told Lord Moran, “and they are all paved with mines.” The entire Mediterranean command believed that an amphibious flanking operation—preferably two, one on each coast—was the best way to get around Kesselring’s lines. Earlier in the month, Eisenhower’s staff began drawing up plans for such an operation. Code-named Shingle, it called for landing a reinforced division at Anzio, birthplace of Nero and Caligula and since Roman times a holiday resort. Anzio, and its sister city, Nettuno, sat on the Tyrrhenian coast about fifty miles north of, and behind, Kesselring’s lines. The towns, about a mile apart, faced narrow beaches. They were built in a basin ringed by woodlands and the Pontine Marshes. Several miles beyond the marshes high hills rose to the west and north. Alexander had sought at least five divisions for the venture, but neither the troops nor the transports were available; they were going to England, for Overlord.

  By the time Churchill arrived on Malta, the plan languished in the file of improbable operations. Eisenhower, by the time he arrived on Malta, and presuming he was headed to Washington to replace Marshall as chief of staff, was preparing his exit from the Mediterranean. He considered any new Italian venture a drawdown to the buildup for Overlord. Churchill gave Eisenhower an earful, on both the need to grab Rome and the risks inherent in Overlord. “How often I heard him say,” Eisenhower later wrote, “in speaking of Overlord’s prospects, ‘We must take care that the tides do not run red with the blood of American and British youth, or the beaches be choked with their bodies.’ ” Eisenhower, like Brooke, departed Malta believing Churchill would press the matters of Italy and Rhodes in Cairo and Tehran. Churchill meant to untie his hands.307

  During the two-day sail to Alexandria, he drew up a strategic plan. It amounted to Rome first, then Rhodes, by January. Churchill presumed the Sextant talks would be all about settling the Mediterranean issues, with the Pacific theater relegated to a lower slot on the agenda. But Roosevelt had invited Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang to Cairo with the intention of turning the agenda on its head. Brooke made the trip by air, aboard Churchill’s Avro York. Upon reaching Cairo, he told his diary: “I wish our conference was over.”308

  It had not even begun. When it did, Churchill saw at once that Roosevelt meant to deny him his showdown. During the first plenary session on November 23, held at Roosevelt’s villa a few miles outside Cairo, the president announced that he wanted to talk about the Pacific. Furthermore, Roosevelt pledged to Chiang that large-scale naval operations would soon start in the Bay of Bengal in support of an amphibious operation (code-named Buccaneer) in Burma, all intended not so much to knock Japan back but to get support through to Chiang’s forces, whose role in the Pacific war Roosevelt still saw as vital. Thus, Churchill wrote in his memoirs, the Combined Chiefs of Staff “were sadly distracted by the Chinese story, which was lengthy, complicated, and minor… with the result that Chinese business occupied first instead of last place at Cairo.” Yet, that week, General Sir Billy Slim (he had been knighted earlier in the year) drove from Assam into central Burma, with one of his corps heading for the Chindwin River, which it crossed on December 3. The Japanese at Slim’s front, confused by a British deception campaign, did not even know where Slim was
headed. Though Slim was forging opportunities ripe for exploitation, he and Burma were at the bottom of Churchill’s agenda.309

  Roosevelt told Churchill that he had put the Pacific war ahead of the European on the agenda because he did not want Stalin to think they “had ganged up on him on military action.” He believed that if they made Japan the primary focus of Sextant, Stalin’s suspicions would be allayed. Yet the decision also ensured that the Anglo-American bloc would arrive in Tehran without having reached solid agreement on the second front. Churchill, in his memoirs, could not resist taking a swipe at Roosevelt and Chiang. In spite of vast American aide to China (several millions of dollars of which was stolen by Madame Chiang’s family), Chiang “had been beaten by the communists in his own country, which is a bad thing.” Brooke, in his memoirs, was more blunt: “Why the Americans attached such significance to Chiang I have never discovered. All he did was lead them down a garden path to communist China!” As for Stilwell and Chennault, who were feuding over whether Lend-Lease matériel should go to Stilwell’s soldiers or Chennault’s Chinese air forces, Brooke wrote that Stilwell was “nothing more than a crank,” while Chennault, though “a gallant airman” had “a limited brain.” During the meetings, Madame Chiang, who spoke perfect English, translated for her husband, leaving Brooke with the impression that Madame “was the leading spirit of the two, and I would not trust her very far…. The more I see of her the less I like her.” Not so the other staff officers, whose collective breathing almost stopped when Madame’s “closely clinging dress of black satin with yellow chrysanthemums displayed a slit which extended to her hip bone and exposed one of the most shapely of legs.”310