The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Churchill’s long absence from London had been noted at the highest levels. Brooke told his diary on January 7, “Winston, sitting in Marrakech, is now full of beans and trying to win the war from there…. I wish to god he would come home and get under control.” He was coming home soon, but with no intention of getting himself under control. Yet he was not fully fit, was prone to bouts of exhaustion, and experienced occasional trouble on his feet, as borne out by the expedition into the ravine. One evening in Marrakech, Clementine confided to Lady Cooper, “I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die when it’s over…. You see… we’re putting everything we have into this war, and it will take all we have.”40

  It was taking all Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins had. In a New Year’s Eve cable to Churchill, the president made casual reference to spending a few days in bed “with a mild case of the ‘flu.’ ” Five days later, Roosevelt told Churchill that Harry Hopkins, too, had come down with the flu and would be spending a few days in the Naval Hospital. The illness wasn’t severe, Roosevelt offered, but “it makes you feel like an Italian soldier looks.” In fact, Roosevelt was a sick man, experiencing abdominal pains, fluid in his lungs, and heart palpitations. Hopkins was an even sicker man. He did not in fact spend a few days in hospital, but the better part of seven months, during which time he underwent surgery for his stomach ailments, all of which, he would learn within a year, his doctors had misdiagnosed. Hopkins, in great pain, was shuffled between the Mayo Clinic and the Naval Hospital before undertaking a long convalescence at White Sulphur Springs. So sudden and total was his disappearance that Churchill concluded he had had a falling out with the president. In February, Churchill dispatched one of the few letters he sent to Hopkins that year. It was a scroll, actually, hand-lettered with five lines from the final scene of Macbeth. It began: “Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt….” Stephen Hopkins, Marine Private First Class, eighteen, had been killed in the Marshall Islands. For three years Churchill had found a friend and ready ear in Hopkins, who had championed England’s cause more strongly and more effectively than did the president’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. Hopkins, not Roosevelt, had been Churchill’s best friend in the White House. He had completed the circuit between his boss and Churchill. That connection was now fraying.41

  By January 3, the Russians had driven one hundred miles beyond the 1939 Polish frontier; that is, the Red Army had struck into Poland for the second time in four years. Churchill saw the political implications of the Red Army’s success and telegraphed his concerns to Anthony Eden. The questions of the Baltic States and Bessarabia, Churchill wrote, “have largely settled themselves through the victories of the Russian armies.” Churchill reminded Eden that when at Tehran they offered Königsberg in East Prussia to Stalin, they made no mention of the Baltic States, “which clearly would be compromised” by a Russian march through them to East Prussia.” In fact, Churchill wrote, once the Russians take “physical possession of these territories… it is absolutely certain that we shall never be able to turn them out.”42

  The implication for Poland was clear. Then Eden cabled with the news that the London Poles insisted “Poland, as a reward for Polish suffering and fighting,” must “emerge from this war with… her eastern provinces intact and her western provinces increased.” That would not do; Churchill had already proposed to Stalin the ceding of a large swath of eastern Poland to Russia. Were the Poles to refuse the offer, Churchill told Eden, he would consider England’s obligations to Poland fully discharged: “I would certainly not take any further responsibility for what will happen in the future.” The London Poles, Eden reported, feared that in Poland’s war-weakened state, chewing off of large portions of Germany would prove difficult “in digesting.” As well, Eden offered, in light of the heroic victories of the Red Army, “there is public impatience with the Poles.” Britain may have gone to war for Poland, but Britons, like their American cousins, had put the Russians on a pedestal. Still, Eden was optimistic. But that faith was shaken by a telegram from Stalin to Churchill on January 7 wherein the marshal stated that the declarations of the London Poles left him to conclude that “there is no foundation for reckoning on the possibility of bringing these circles to reason. These people are incorrigible.” The London Poles, pressed by Eden, finally agreed to discuss “all outstanding questions” with the Russians, including the Curzon Line. But they would not accept the Curzon Line before any such discussions. Moscow rejected the offer. The London Poles, Stalin informed the British, “did not want neighborly relations with the Soviet Union.” That news, Eden later wrote, came “like a blow to the face.” With the Red Army now one hundred miles beyond Poland’s 1939 border, Churchill grasped the inevitable. To Eden he cabled: “Considering that Russia has lost perhaps thirty millions of citizens… they have the right as well as the power to have their western frontiers secured.”43

  Churchill departed Marrakech on January 14, intent on being in London when the troops went ashore at Anzio. He went by air to Gibraltar, and then by King George V to Plymouth, and finally by train to Paddington Station, where late in the morning of the eighteenth he was met by the entire cabinet and Chiefs of Staff. He had been away for sixty-seven days, an extraordinary amount of time for any leader to be absent from his capital, and doubly so for a leader during wartime. He took himself straightaway to the House, which had just reconvened after the Christmas recess. Harold Nicolson recorded Churchill’s entrance: “We were dawdling through questions… when I saw (saw is the word) a gasp of astonishment pass over the faces of the Labour Party opposite. Suddenly they jumped to their feet and started shouting…. We also jumped up and the whole House broke into cheer after cheer while Winston, very pink, rather shy, beaming with mischief, crept along the front bench and flung himself into his accustomed seat.” He rose to take questions, and although Nicolson applauded his effort, he also noted that he “looked pale when the first flush of pleasure had subsided, and his voice was not quite so vigorous as it had been.” Concerns about Churchill’s health now regularly found their way into the diaries of the Old Man’s colleagues.44

  Following Questions, Churchill chaired a cabinet meeting during which he disabused Brooke of any hopes that he would return to London under control. The P.M. “rambled on till 1:30 P.M.,” Brooke told his diary that night. “He was looking well, but I did not like the functioning of his brain much! Too much unconnected rambling from one subject to another.” Indeed, at the following day’s Chiefs of Staff meeting, Churchill launched into his plans for operations “after Anzio is over.” This was three days before Anzio even began. He foresaw putting several thousand commandos supported by tanks on islands off the Dalmatian coast. For Churchill, the Aegean still held its place as a theater of destiny. That night, Brooke unloaded to his diary: “The P.M. is starting off in his usual style!! I don’t think I can stand much more of it…. His method is entirely opportunistic, gathering one flower here, another there! My God how tired I am of working for him. I had not fully realized how awful it is until I suddenly found myself thrown into it again after a rest.”45

  Churchill was back.

  Eisenhower had arrived in London on January 16, assured by Roosevelt and Marshall that they would not second-guess his decisions, would never try to force commanders on him, and would back him completely. The president had put the “supreme” in supreme commander. Eisenhower had told the president that he intended to deploy his forces in pursuit of one military objective—the destruction of Hitler’s armies. All decisions would be taken with that objective in mind. “Geographical points,” he later wrote, “were considered only in their relationship” to killing German armies. And politics was not to be considered at all. He made clear to Churchill in coming weeks that were his superiors—Roosevelt and Marshall—to order him to undertake operations based on political priorities, he would of course obey those orders. But he would not otherwise bend his military strategy to politics
. Eisenhower noted Churchill’s “concern as a political leader for the future of the Balkans… but as a soldier I was particularly careful to exclude such considerations from my own recommendations.” Churchill also harbored a deep concern for Poland; in fact, with the Red Army driving west, he increasingly harbored concerns for all of Europe. This divergence in philosophies between Eisenhower the warrior and Churchill the warrior-politician would in coming months have profound consequences.46

  The Yanks had arrived in Britain, almost one million strong. Another million were due by June, and yet another million by year’s end. Dwight Eisenhower’s Irish driver (and alleged mistress), Kay Summersby, later wrote that London, “like a discreet matron carried away by one too many cocktails,” had become “a playgirl of a city.” Since the Battle of Britain, RAF pilots on weekend leave had hastened to London for forty-eight hours of whiskey and women. The GIs’ arrival “really blew the lid off.” The Americans spent their dollars in any number of stores and pubs and clubs; the locals had little money to spend and, with everything from sweets to eggs to clothes rationed, little to spend it on. Summersby declared her pride at watching the poorest of Londoners slide right past American PXs while casting “not a glance at the American boys emerging with cigarettes and sweets and other treasures.” Britons, meanwhile, saw their milk ration reduced to two pints per week. Irving Berlin’s all-soldier musical This Is the Army, starring its New York cast, was entering its third month of playing to standing room only crowds at the Palladium; every shilling of the proceeds went to the British armed forces.47

  One evening months earlier, after he had viewed photos of destroyed German cities, Harold Nicolson’s thoughts turned to London, which was largely unvisited by the Luftwaffe in 1943. Whereas almost three years earlier, Nicolson and all Londoners had feared for their lives, they now felt free to complain about their sacrifices. Nicolson was pleased that one of his favorite restaurants “retained all its old atmosphere,” but “the Travellers, on the other hand, has become a battered caravanserai, in which the scum of the lower London clubs are served inadequately by scared Lithuanian waitresses.” And when Nicolson came across boozy American troops frolicking in the Underground with their “East End Jewish girls,” he went home and told his diary, “I hate it.”48

  England, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, resembled “a vast combination of an aircraft carrier, a dock jammed with men, and a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with material labeled ‘Europe.’ ”49

  The legions of soldiers had time on their hands, if not on their side. Arriving GIs joined the uniformed Welshmen, Scotsmen, Norwegians, Poles, Dutch, Indians, Czechs, Belgians, Canadians, Newfoundlanders (until 1949, Newfoundland was a self-governing Dominion), Aussies, and New Zealanders who had turned Piccadilly Circus into the Times Square of England. It was the sort of chaotic commingling that had occurred on the island with regularity since prehistoric times and of which Daniel Defoe wrote:

  From this amphibious ill-borne mob began

  That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman.

  At night battalions of tarts strutted down the blacked-out streets, as they had at the height of the Blitz (Ed Murrow had called them “London’s bravest”). Now they solicited clients with whispers of “tovarisch” (“comrade”). Darkened doorways became love nests and from alleys drifted the sounds of fistfights and catcalls and blasphemies in a babel of languages. The whores carried small flashlights that they played on their faces for a few seconds when a soldier nodded interest, the narrow beams dancing in the deep shadows with a flickering, strobe effect. Old air-raid wardens in tin hats barked orders to cut the torches. They were ignored. When low-pressure atmospherics wrapped the city in a vile mix of acrid chimney effusions and impenetrable Channel fog, the nighttime became downright bizarre. Automobiles—the top half of their headlights painted black—crept along like purblind beasts of burden, led by passengers or Good Samaritans who placed one hand on the front fender while reaching out with the other in hopes of feeling their way to the proper destination. After much tribulation, many stumbles, and a bit of good luck, the autos and their caretakers might actually find their way home. London, after almost five years under blackout conditions, was still wrapped, Jock Colville wrote, “in Stygian blackness.”50

  On January 21, Eisenhower’s senior Overlord staff met for the first time, at Norfolk House, a neo-Georgian building just off St. James’s Park, which had been put off limits to civilians in part to mask the comings and goings at the former mansion. Montgomery presented his findings on the initial plans for Overlord. As he had told Churchill, he now told his colleagues, “The initial landing is on too narrow a front and confined to too small an area.” As well, the landings—code-named Neptune—called for too few men, just three divisions, which invited congestion on the beaches and possible disaster were the Germans to concentrate their tanks and send in their planes. Monty supported the concept of the Mulberry artificial harbors but stressed the need to capture the port of Cherbourg. That objective necessitated the widening of the landing zone to include a beach on the Cotentin Peninsula, which was separated from the main landing beaches by the four-mile-wide double estuary of the Vire and Douve rivers. To resolve that problem, Montgomery proposed dropping two divisions of American paratroops ten miles inland from the beach and west of the Douve. Finally, he insisted “the air battle must be won before the operation is launched.” Eisenhower, who had taken only a cursory look at the plans before he left North Africa, found himself in general agreement with Monty’s suggestions, but for one. Montgomery proposed scrapping Anvil, the two-division invasion of southern France, in order to free up the troops and landing craft needed to expand Overlord. Eisenhower acknowledged that Anvil could not now precede Overlord as planned, but he declared that it must follow soon after. He would consider an outright cancellation only as a last resort. All agreed that the time needed to assemble the appropriate force for Overlord—and to destroy German airpower and disrupt French rail lines—would delay the invasion for a month. That was exactly the flexibility Churchill and Brooke had sought, and believed they had gained, in Tehran.51

  Given the need to make the Normandy landings under a nearly full moon, and on a rising tide within sixty minutes after dawn, the delay effectively pushed Overlord into the first week of June. Secrecy being as critical as logistics to Overlord’s success, Operation Bodyguard was soon born, a multifaceted campaign of radio intercepts, double agents, and false intelligence. Its stepchild, Operation Fortitude, entailed the creation of phony armies from Scotland to southeast England. The phantom armies broadcast phony radio messages that the Germans were welcome to intercept and interpret at their own risk. The ranks of the nonexistent units consisted of brigades of inflatable rubber tanks and squadrons of plywood planes, which when photographed from the air by German reconnaissance flights indicated massive troop buildups.

  New Allied weapons also contributed to the cause. Major General Percy (“Hobo”) Hobart, the erratic tank genius whom Churchill had brought back into service in 1940 (over Brooke’s objections), was put in command of building specialty tanks—“swimming” tanks that could come ashore under their own power; tanks that “flailed” minefields with wildly spinning chains; and flame-throwing tanks capable of incinerating large buildings. Montgomery and Eisenhower added dimensions to Overlord not imagined by the original planners. Three days later, Eisenhower briefed the Combined Chiefs of Staff on his new plan. Even though events were now going the way Brooke had argued for, he could not bring himself to write a complimentary word about Eisenhower: “I certainly agree with his [Eisenhower’s] proposal, but it is certainly not his idea, and is one of Monty’s. Eisenhower has got absolutely no strategical outlook and is totally unfit for the post he holds.”52

  Days after Montgomery argued for the cancellation of Anvil (and Eisenhower agreed to postpone it), Churchill came up with another means to reinforce Overlord. It took the form of landing three armored divisions in Bordeaux a few weeks after the start
of the Normandy venture, which, according to plan, by twenty days after D-day would find Allied troops well inland. He code-named the operation Caliph, and proposed that the three divisions be moved from the Mediterranean to Morocco before being shipped around the Iberian Peninsula and into the port of Bordeaux. In Caliph, Churchill beheld a solution to a problem he anticipated: Anvil must necessarily draw down Alexander’s landing ships and troops and thereby force a halt in the springtime Italian campaign. In Churchill’s estimation, a shift from Anvil to Caliph would both support the Normandy invasion (Eisenhower’s first priority) and improve prospects in Italy (Churchill’s theater of destiny). It would establish two distinct theaters—France and Italy/Mediterranean—under two supreme commanders (Eisenhower and Jumbo Wilson). This was an alternative far superior to the god-awful muddle that would result from two simultaneous and mutually dependent operations within close proximity, one in southern France and the other in northern Italy, where Churchill presumed Alexander would be by May. Brooke dismissed Caliph as a “wild venture.” After the British Chiefs of Staff and Churchill discussed the matter, Brooke wrote, “I think we have ridden him of this for the present.” They had, but only for the present.53

  More than 25,000 Allied troops, British and American, went ashore at Anzio and Nettuno on January 22. Surprise was total. The beaches were undefended; the men came ashore with ease and by noon reached the first day’s objective of driving three miles inland. This put the invasion force about forty miles north of Kesselring’s rear, and sixty miles north of the Fifth Army. That morning, Brooke enthused to his diary over bagging 172 pheasants on a one-day shooting holiday and, in reference to the surprise attained at Anzio, added, “This was a wonderful relief.”