The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  A few weeks before the Cairo Conference, Eisenhower and Montgomery had made a five-pound bet (even odds) on whether Germany would fall by Christmas 1944. Ike bet yes, Monty no (Montgomery recorded his bets in a ledger). General Freyberg bet Monty ten pounds that the war against Germany would be over by October 31, 1944. Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who had planned the naval operations for Torch and Husky, bet an even fiver that the war would be over by January 1, 1945. Over dinner in Cairo on December 7—Roosevelt had flown that day to Tunis—Churchill polled Smuts, Eden, and most of the military chiefs as to their opinions of when the war with Germany would end. Admiral King—“consumed more than a bottle of champagne… and was showing wear”—predicted sometime between March and November 1944. Marshall agreed. Brooke gave six-to-four odds on March. Dill gave even odds. All the military men—Portal, Cunningham, Hap Arnold, Major Leslie Hollis—put their money on sometime between March and November. Churchill, Eden, and Smuts were not so sanguine. Churchill later wrote that he “was struck by the optimism. The idea was rooted that Hitler would not be strong enough to face the spring campaign, and might collapse even before Overlord was launched.”13

  Eisenhower, in his memoir Crusade in Europe, wrote that Churchill and the British hoped the Italian campaign “might lead to an unexpected [German] break that would make the Channel operation either unnecessary or nothing more than a mopping-up affair” to be conducted only when “the Allies could go in easily and safely.” Yet the votes of the American chiefs at the dinner indicate that it was they who thought that way. Churchill had pledged in Tehran that Overlord would take place in May; he knew it would be both a difficult and bloody affair. After seeing the initial plans for the invasion the previous August, he advised that more men go ashore. Otherwise, he feared a repulse on the beach. He never saw it as a mopping-up affair. Eisenhower by December had taken only a cursory look at the plans for Overlord. On his way to Washington, he told reporters, “We will win the European war in 1944.”14

  Other prognosticators had already seen their predictions go belly-up. Admiral William (“Bull”) Halsey, commander in chief of U.S. Navy South Pacific forces, had stated with confidence months earlier that 1943 would bring “complete, absolute defeat for the Axis.” Halsey no longer engaged in such speculation, telling reporters, “I refuse to gaze into the crystal ball anymore…. Only God knows.”15

  By December 9, unable to shake the sore throat and cold that had dogged him since he left London, Churchill felt he was on the cusp of a physical breakdown. Smuts thought the Old Man had “exhausted himself, and then had to rely on drink to stimulate [himself] again.” The South African began to doubt whether Churchill could stay the course. At lunch that day, Churchill admitted to Brooke that he felt tired, flat, “and had pains in his loins.” His degree of fatigue was evidenced by the fact the he had lost his appetite and hardly spoke. Between small spoonfuls of soup he swatted flies with a fly whisk and counted the corpses. He could summon only enough energy to pronounce the soup “dee-licious” while sending more flies to the mortuary. Brooke wondered how near Churchill was “to a crash.” Churchill wondered the same. He later wrote that he found himself so tired that he no longer dried himself after his bath, but lay on the bed wrapped in a towel.16

  Shortly after midnight on December 11, Churchill and his party left Cairo in their Avro York, bound for Tunis to pay a courtesy call on Eisenhower. Churchill intended to fly on to Italy from there, to buck up Alexander, whose armies were being ground down by the enemy, by the terrain, by the worst winter weather in years, and by an outbreak of typhus. Lice and malaria were the common enemy for both armies.

  At daybreak Churchill’s plane landed at an airfield outside Tunis. The place appeared abandoned. No guards were in evidence; no cars waited. Churchill’s pilot had brought them down to the wrong field. The prime minister hauled himself and his official boxes out of the York and sat down on the edge of the runway. There he waited, recalled Brooke, “in a very cold morning wind like nothing on earth.” A steel-cold mist blew out of the north. Moran pressed Churchill to get himself back inside the heated plane. He refused. He remained perched upon his boxes, a very long way from home. He wore a scowl on his face, which shone now with perspiration. “He seemed to be going from bad to worse,” Moran wrote. When the mix-up was sorted out, the party reboarded the York and made for the right airfield. By then Churchill had gone gray in the face, to Moran’s professional discomfort. After arriving finally at Eisenhower’s headquarters near Carthage, Churchill slumped into a chair, where he remained for the rest of the day, too weak even to read his telegrams.17

  Moran by then was sick with worry. His patient spiked a temperature of 102; he was exhausted, mentally and physically. His lungs were seriously congested. Here was a combination of blows even the Old Man might not survive. He was indeed an elderly man, having just begun the final year of his biblical three score years and ten. Moran believed with medical certainty that Churchill would probably not make it to the next year. The prime minister needed the best that medicine offered, but other than sulfa drugs and serums, mid-twentieth-century medicine did not offer much hope for an elderly man. Moran lacked the equipment and facilities to make a proper diagnosis. Of particular concern was the possibility that Churchill had contracted a virulent strain of influenza that was making its way around the world. In Germany it was called Kellergrippe (cellar flu), and it killed 2,000 Berliners that week. Britain reported 1,148 deaths for the week. When Goebbels learned that King George had taken ill, he gushed to his diary, “How wonderful if the epidemic were to prove fatal!”18

  Moran had a very sick man on his hands. A standing joke among Churchill’s private secretaries held that if the Old Man became suddenly ill, the secretary on duty was to summon Lord Moran, who would then summon a real doctor. Moran proceeded to do just that, requesting that a pathologist, Dr. Robert Pulvertaft, and two nurses be flown out from Cairo, and that an X-ray technician and his machine be sent from Algiers, along with a supply of digitalis, lest Churchill’s heart act up. A heart specialist, Dr. D. E. Bedford, was also summoned from Cairo. During the afternoon of December 13, the X-ray was duly taken. It showed a shadow on Churchill’s lung. “Do you mean I’ve got pneumonia again?” he demanded of Moran. Moran prescribed treatment with M&B (so called after the British company that made it, May and Baker), a sulfonamide early antibiotic. The next day, Moran found Churchill “breathless and anxious looking.” His pulse was racing and irregular; he was suffering from cardiac fibrillation. “My heart is doing something funny,” Churchill said. When it worsened, he pleaded, “Can’t you do anything to stop this?” Moran gave him a dose of digitalis and promised it would soon take effect. It did, but not for four hours, during which time Moran, holding Churchill’s hand and monitoring his pulse, realized “that we were at last right up against things.”19

  “No signs of improvement yet,” Moran wrote in his diary on December 15. That day, Pilot Officer John Colville received an urgent summons to report to No. 10 Downing Street in uniform. There he was told that the prime minister was “seriously, perhaps fatally, ill with pneumonia at Carthage.” Colville’s orders were to escort Mrs. Churchill to Tunis at once in order for her to be at her husband’s bedside. A twin-engine Dakota was waiting for them at Lyneham airfield, but Beaverbrook insisted the party wait until he could procure a four-engine B-24 Liberator. Twenty hours later, Clementine, Colville, and Grace Hamblin, serving as Mrs. Churchill’s secretary and orderly, boarded an unheated, blacked-out Liberator, and were soon Africa bound. The overnight flight to Gibraltar lasted nine hours, and from there, after a brief stopover, they continued on to Tunis, another six hours in the air, during which time they were cut off from any news. They could only speculate on the Old Man’s condition, and from Clementine’s somber demeanor, that was just what she was doing. Colville and Grace passed the hours sipping coffee and quietly chatting, in order to keep an eye on Mrs. Churchill, who “could not sleep and was rather alarmed.”20


  Hustled from the airfield at first light by Eisenhower’s staff, the party arrived outside Churchill’s villa, where inside Churchill lay in bed, barely stirring and somewhat disoriented, having realized Sarah was absent from the chair where she had been keeping a vigil. A moment later, Sarah escorted Clementine into the room; Churchill had not been told of her arrival and could have been excused if he thought he was delirious at the sight of an apparition. Colville entered a few minutes later, expecting to find a “recumbent invalid.” Instead he beheld “a cheerful figure with large cigar and a whisky and soda in his hand.” The crisis had passed.21

  Colville rejoined Churchill’s staff that week, and but for a brief interlude that summer when he was granted leave for RAF duty, he remained in the private secretariat until the end of the war.

  Eisenhower’s appointment as commander of Overlord (not yet made public) resulted in a shake-up of commands throughout Allied ranks. Air Chief Marshal Tedder would serve as Ike’s deputy, with authority over all air forces, strategic and tactical. Admiral Bertram Ramsay was given command of Overlord naval operations, including the landings, code-named Neptune. Churchill wanted Eisenhower’s chief of staff Bedell (“Beetle”) Smith, who got along well with the British, to remain in the Mediterranean, but Ike took Smith to London. Within weeks, Eisenhower insisted upon and was granted complete control of all Allied air forces, tactical and strategic. Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, of Fighter Command, went in as Eisenhower’s air commander in chief, with control of all tactical air forces. Bernard Montgomery was to leave the Eighth Army at the end of the month to command Twenty-first Army Group, the designation for the Allied troops in Britain dedicated to Overlord. In that capacity Montgomery would command all Overlord ground forces during the initial stage of the invasion. Churchill (and Eisenhower) preferred Alexander in that role, but the War Cabinet insisted upon the hero of El Alamein. Churchill acceded peacefully, in the belief that Alexander would emerge as the hero of Italy, where glory would accrue with the capture of Rome and the pursuit of the enemy all the way to Vienna. Henry Maitland (“Jumbo”) Wilson, Middle East commander in chief, was raised to supreme commander Mediterranean. Brooke remained as CIGS and with Churchill’s sponsorship was promoted to field marshal. Portal was elevated to air chief marshal. By Christmas, many of the appointees were on their way to London to take up their new posts. Jumbo Wilson, not yet familiar with the central and western Mediterranean, could not immediately bring anything to bear in that theater, where the command shake-up had created a power vacuum. Churchill, alone at Tunis with time on his hands and frustrated by the stasis in Italy, decided to fill it himself.

  On Christmas Eve, Franklin Roosevelt announced in a radio broadcast the appointment of Dwight Eisenhower as supreme commander Allied Expeditionary Force. Henceforth, wherever General Ike put his headquarters would be known as SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. The president also asked Americans to pray for Churchill, ill in North Africa. Roosevelt and Eisenhower were religious men. The president told Harriman after Tehran that he believed the Russians “as deeply religious people were bound to stand up against the atheist ideology of Soviet communism and its repressions,” a naive sentiment that presumed that whoever stood up against Stalin would not be scythed down. In the spring, Roosevelt would write a prayer for the soldiers going ashore in Normandy; it ran on the front page of the New York Times on June 7. Churchill didn’t write prayers, and he didn’t say prayers. Eisenhower, who believed the God of Justice was on the Allied side, once told Lord Moran, “Freedom itself means nothing unless there is faith.” Bernard Montgomery claimed his chaplains were more important than his artillery. General Alexander, too, was a man of abiding faith, as was Jan Smuts, who kept his Greek Testament close at hand and examined every decision under the lens of Christian doctrine. Over dinner one night, Smuts admonished Churchill, “Gandhi… is a man of god. You and I are mundane people. Gandhi has appealed to religious motives. You never have. That is where you have failed.”22

  In fact, Churchill believed that was where he had succeeded. On Christmas Day, the Coldstream Guards hosted a church service in an old corrugated-steel warehouse that the army was using to store ammunition. Although feeling well enough to attend the service, Churchill, per his habit, chose not to. Instead, he prepared to discuss the Italian campaign with Eisenhower, who was due to arrive before noon. Clementine attended the service, along with Sarah, Colville, General Alexander, and Moran. As the padre intoned the Gloria in Excelsis, the bells of a nearby church rang out, and a white dove, which had been roosting in the rafters of the warehouse, “fluttered down in front of the congregation.” After the service, when Clementine told Winston of the dove, he dismissed the episode as a conjuring by the minister who, he said, most likely released the bird from under his surplice. When Alexander, who believed the mysteries of this life would be revealed in the next, told Churchill of the message from above delivered on the wings of a dove, Churchill huffed, “There is nothing in such stuff.”23

  The remark surprised no one. He regularly reminded those around him that he had declared for agnosticism early in manhood. He had so informed his mother, Jennie, in letters home from India. He informed the world at large in his autobiography, My Early Life, where he wrote that while in India he passed through “a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase,” which in turn led to an embrace of good old-fashioned British empiricism. He soon realized under fire in combat that a dash of faith offered some comfort. The result was typical Churchill: “I therefore adapted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe.” His meager relationship with God was neither reverential nor deferential, but one that reflected Stanley Baldwin’s political philosophy: “Never complain and never explain.” He did not begin his speeches with pleas to the Almighty for guidance, nor did he end them with supplications for divine blessing. He did not ask Providence for the strength or wisdom to win the war. He told Britons, “As long as we have faith in our cause and unconquerable will power, salvation will not be denied us.”

  Late one evening in Tehran, he told Stalin, “I believe God is on our side. At least I have done my best to make Him a faithful ally.” Stalin grinned, and replied, “And the devil is on my side. Because, of course, everyone knows the devil is a Communist and God, no doubt, is a good Conservative.” That was Churchill playing the straight man to Stalin. He did so again when (as told by Jan Smuts) he suggested the pope might play some role in securing the peace. “The Pope,” Stalin replied thoughtfully, “the Pope. How many divisions has he?” Stalin, Churchill noted with irony, seemed to bring up God quite frequently in conversation.24

  Churchill did not.

  Churchill’s scant theological leanings tended to incline toward Spinoza’s hands-off deity: God helps those who help themselves. Providence may have put him—and Cromwell, Marlborough, Pitt, and Nelson—on earth, but Providence disclosed no plan for success, and offered no guidance or revelation. Churchill guided himself.

  Thus, while his wife and daughter and colleagues beheld the white Christmas dove and were moved to quiet contemplation and wonder, Churchill, in bed with his dispatch boxes, cigars, and whisky, found guidance in his maps and plotted the course of his armies. The agreed-upon date for Overlord was just four months away. Eisenhower was due to arrive at any moment to discuss operations in Italy, including putting an invasion force ashore south of Rome, at Anzio, a gambit that Churchill believed would open the road to Rome.

  Churchill had awaked from his fever one day at Carthage to find Sarah sitting at the bedside. She had been reading Pride and Prejudice aloud to him, even as he slept. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “It doesn’t matter if I die now, the plans of victory have been laid, it is only a matter of time.”25

  Yet by Christmas Day, it had become obvious to Churchill that not enough plans had been laid. The Fifth Army, slogging toward the Liri Valley, had gained less than ten miles in almost three weeks. It would certainly not be in Rom
e by New Year’s. The recollections of Eisenhower and Churchill part company at this point. Eisenhower fails to mention in his memoir the optimism at his headquarters in early December, when he thought a delay until January 1 of the announcement of his elevation to supreme commander was a grand idea, since by then the Allies might be in Rome. Churchill, in his history of the war, writes that the deadlock in Italy “led General Eisenhower to yearn for an amphibious flanking attack.” Strictly speaking, if to hope is to yearn, Eisenhower yearned for such an operation. But by Christmas he considered it beyond reach and believed that to attempt it would be overreaching, with possible catastrophic consequences. A plan for such an operation, code-named Shingle, had been on the books for two months. By Christmas, Churchill considered it absolutely critical to Allied success.26

  Eisenhower described Shingle as an “end run” around Kesselring’s flanks. Churchill, unfamiliar with the American football term, asked what the expression meant. In English parlance it was a “cat-claw.” In boxing terms, it was a left hook delivered in conjunction with an uppercut by the Fifth Army at the Rapido River near its confluence with the Liri. Then, if all went well, Fifth Army would take Monte Cassino and strike up the Liri Valley to join hands within the week with the Shingle force. Then, with Kesselring’s forces presumably in disarray, the Fifth Army would march the final thirty-five miles to Rome, while the Eighth Army, on the Adriatic side of the Apennines, executed a sweeping left turn in the same direction. Eisenhower saw great risk in the Anzio operation, and he warned Churchill. He voiced his fear of “the hazard of annihilation to the landing force if Fifth Army should be unable to reach it by land.” He further feared that without resupply by the landing ships soon departing the Mediterranean for Britain and Overlord, the Anzio beachhead would remain exposed. It was one thing, in Eisenhower’s estimation, to draw German troops away from France to Italy. It was another matter entirely if the Germans sent enough troops to Italy to defeat the Allied armies there. The force Eisenhower considered large enough to hold and exploit the Anzio landings simply was not available. These concerns he expressed to Churchill on Christmas Day, and again during their final meeting a week later, before Eisenhower left for Washington and London. But Shingle would not come on Eisenhower’s Mediterranean watch; he had no dog in that fight.27