The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  In the forgotten war in Burma, the Americans and Chinese under Vinegar Joe Stilwell could only slog though the northern Burmese jungle in their mission to build the Ledo Road from northern India to China, their flanks protected by the guerrilla warfare genius Orde Wingate and his Chindits. Brooke thought the stress of battle “had sent Wingate off his head,” but before any consideration was given to relieving him, Wingate, the “Clive of Burma,” was killed in an airplane crash in March, thus removing the unique fighter from the scene. General Sir Billy Slim and the Fourteenth Army had captured a major Japanese supply base sixty miles south of Mandalay but had outrun their own supply lines. Further operations were canceled until after the monsoons. Malaria, as it had in Italy, felled more troops than the enemy. But the Allies had a new and secret scientific weapon in the war against mosquitoes and lice. Later in the year the British and American governments lifted censorship from “one of the great scientific discoveries of World War II.” It was a discovery, proclaimed Time, that would “be to preventive medicine what Lister’s discovery of antiseptics was to surgery.” Churchill told the Commons, “It is an insecticide called D.D.T. We have discovered many defences against tropical disease, and, above all, against the onslaught of insects of all kinds, from lice to mosquitoes and back again. The excellent D.D.T. powder, which has been fully experimented with and found to yield astonishing results, will hence-forward be used on a great scale by the British forces in Burma and by American and Australian forces in the Pacific and, indeed, in all theatres.”68

  Worldwide, disparate commanders demanded from the planners in Washington and London more men, more ammo, more medicines, and more 120-octane aircraft fuel. There was Overlord, to be sure, but there were also Burma, Norway, the Aegean, Anzio, the Philippines, the Marshall and Gilbert islands, and always, for Churchill, Sumatra. In mid-March he again proposed to his Chiefs of Staff a strike into Sumatra as a stepping-stone to Rangoon, an idea Brooke called “impossible” and “full of false deductions and defective strategy.” It was never carried out.69

  Problems demanding solutions abounded. Palestine presented a singular one, not of any immediate military nature, but one with significant long-term implications. In 1939 the Foreign Office produced a white paper that called for an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1944 and the establishment of a single Palestinian state in which the Arabs, by virtue of holding veto power on any further Jewish immigration, would outnumber Jews three to one. The white paper, produced as a gambit should war come, was intended to placate Arabs throughout the Middle East. Chamberlain believed that if war came, the Arab world would be a far stronger ally against Hitler than five hundred thousand Palestinian Jews. Parliament was to take up the white paper in May 1944. The British military chiefs advocated adoption. Churchill did not, and considered the white paper to be a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration* and a betrayal of Jews. He had opposed the policy in 1939 and still did, because the Arab majority within a single Palestinian state would never allow the Jewish minority to execute a partition into two separate states. If trouble arose over partition, Churchill told Ismay, it will come from the Arabs and that “left to themselves, the Jews would beat the Arabs.” He used parliamentary procedures to keep the bill from coming to a vote, thus delaying the debate until after the war. His support for Zionism never flagged, even when later in the year, two young Zionist terrorists assassinated Lord Moyne (Walter Guinness), resident minister in the Middle East. Moyne was an old Churchill family friend and had hosted Clementine onboard his yacht Rosaura during their pacific journey a decade earlier. He had long opposed Zionism, but he had moderated his opinions somewhat since his posting to Palestine. When Churchill learned that Zionists worldwide protested the death sentence imposed on Moyne’s assassins, he advised Cairo officials, where the murder took place, to hang the killers, and hang them quickly. The sentence was carried out.70

  Churchill, like many in senior army and Foreign Office positions, was sympathetic to Arab nationalism—the Arabs had helped Britain drive the Turks out of the Levant. As well, Muslims were at least monotheistic, unlike Gandhi and his troublesome Hindus with their grotesque pantheon of hydra-headed gods and multi-appendage goddesses. Yet unlike many of the Arabists in the military and Foreign Office, Churchill never courted Arabs at the expense of Jews. Relations between Anglican and Jewish Englishmen were often based on complete ignorance. At the end of the war and soon after the Nazi atrocities against Jews became known, Harold Nicolson, upon learning that the Daily Mirror (which he thought was owned and run by Jews) was encouraging service members to vote Labour in the upcoming election, confessed to his diary, “Although I loathe anti-Semitism, I do dislike Jews.”71

  Churchill was no anti-Semite, although his words had smacked of anti-Semitism in 1920 when he opposed giving economic aid to Soviet Russia, citing “the gravest objections to giving all this help to the tyrannic Government of these Jew commissars.” He was at first wary, too, of the Balfour Declaration. Its call for a Jewish “national home” did not necessarily mean “autonomous state,” but the door was opened and Chaim Weizmann led his Zionist followers through. When it came to Palestinian Jews, although many of his generals were mostly pro-Arab if not anti-Semitic, Churchill pushed hard for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, Arab opposition or no. During a cabinet meeting the previous July, he had reiterated his support: “I’m committed to the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine… and at the end of the war we shall have plenty of force with which to compel the Arabs to acquiesce in our designs.”72

  The French always demanded Churchill’s time. In Algiers the French were at each other’s throats, again, which only reinforced Roosevelt’s belief that de Gaulle should have no role whatsoever in Overlord or the civil administration of liberated France. In early March, the Gaullists in Algiers put former Vichy minister of the interior Pierre Pucheu on trial for conspiring with the Germans in the executions of hundreds of French citizens. Harold Macmillan considered Pucheu to be a traitor and “a black criminal,” but he feared repercussions for de Gaulle if Pucheu were shot. The trial itself damaged de Gaulle’s reputation. The prosecutor, General Pierre Weiss, was “an object of universal contempt,” Macmillan wrote, not least because he was “an open and known pederast, surrounded by ‘pansy’ officers.” Although Macmillan thought Pucheu put up a strong defense, he predicted “rough justice will be done.” It was. Pucheu was found guilty and shot, an act, Churchill told Colville, that did de Gaulle and the French “very great harm” in London and “above all in the United States.” Still, Churchill insisted that the Leclerc Division, heroes of the Tunisian campaign, be brought from North Africa to Yorkshire in order to train for their as yet undefined role in the Battle of France. Duff Cooper would later write that he admired de Gaulle for his “superb intransigence” and admired Churchill for sticking with de Gaulle despite his own misgivings and despite Franklin Roosevelt, whom Cooper called “the stumbling block” to restoring France to its proper place in the European family.73

  In late March, de Gaulle took his intransigence to new levels when his French Committee of National Liberation declared itself the provisional government of metropolitan France—all unoccupied French territories worldwide. Macmillan saw the decree as a direct rejoinder by de Gaulle to Roosevelt over the president’s refusal to recognize the authority of the FCNL. Henri Giraud opposed the gambit, but Giraud no longer cast a shadow in French politics. His greatest sin, in de Gaulle’s eyes, had been his willingness to act as America’s protégé. Giraud had been America’s man in Algiers; de Gaulle considered himself France’s man. “Giraud has been an unconscionable time dying,” Macmillan wrote an underling in Algiers, adding, “Let him die.” Churchill, counseled by Macmillan and Duff Cooper, accepted the fact that de Gaulle—now sole president of the FCNL—was destined to return to France as that nation’s leader. He advised Roosevelt to invite de Gaulle to Washington in order that the Frenchman might bask in symbolic recognition. It would have t
o be symbolic because the Americans still refused to recognize the FCNL.74

  Anthony Eden violently disagreed with Roosevelt on the matter of de Gaulle, telling his diary, “President’s absurd and petty dislike of de Gaulle blinds him. It would be folly for us to follow him in this.” Roosevelt made his disdain for de Gaulle clear in a late April telegram in which he told Churchill, “I do not have any information which leads me to believe that de Gaulle and his Committee of National Liberation have as yet given any helpful assistance to our allied war effort.” Still, Roosevelt, urged on by Churchill, agreed to meet de Gaulle in Washington at some point down the road, but only if de Gaulle requested the meeting. “I will not ever have it said,” Roosevelt told Churchill, “that I invited him to visit me in Washington.”75

  The men of the two Moroccan-French divisions that had suffered 2,500 killed and wounded on the Gustav Line had just cause to dispute Roosevelt’s denigration of French help in the war effort. As did the men of Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division. As did the more than one hundred thousand members of the French resistance armed by the Special Operations Executive. Dozens of independent French resistance groups had taken up dozens of disparate duties. Some printed clandestine newspapers—La Voix du Nord, Libération (sud), Défense de la France. Some helped downed Allied flyers escape over the Pyrenees into Spain and Portugal. The resistance was populated by Communists, Gaullists, monarchists, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, republicans, socialists. More than 90,000 were killed during the war, and the Germans, in reprisal for resistance activities, murdered several thousand more Frenchmen—including women and children. In the final weeks before D-day, French railroad workers (cheminots) sabotaged their own rail lines; other resistance cells blew up German communications centers and electric power stations. They operated even as Allied bombers intent on disrupting German communication and rail hubs dropped ordnance right on top of them.

  Forty thousand Maquis (the Corsican name for the brushwood in which fighters took cover), poorly armed and lacking ammunition, were prepared to do their part. They were young men who had fled to the Massif Central and Savoy Alps to avoid slave labor in Germany. By the spring, German soldiers and Vichy police were battling the Maquis in their mountain redoubts. The Maquis, like the rest of the resistance, waited for more guns, bombs, and ammunition. They listened for the secret phrases inserted into BBC broadcasts that warned them and guided them—“The dice are on the table.”… “It is hot in Suez.”… “The tomatoes should be picked.” They especially waited to hear two lines from Paul Verlaine’s poem “Chanson d’automne” (“Autumn Song”). The first, “Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne” (“The long sobs of the violins of autumn”), was to be broadcast on the first two nights of the invasion month. The second, “Blessent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone” (“Pierce my heart with a dull languor”), would signify that the invasion was imminent. The French underground awaited those words, and awaited the return to France of the man all of France considered their leader: Charles de Gaulle.76

  The Anglo-American alliance had from the beginning lumbered along despite political and military differences of opinion over de Gaulle, the Aegean, India, the timing of Overlord (and now Anvil). With victory assured if not yet in sight, differences in American and British postwar economic goals began to seep into the relationship like sand into a well-oiled gearbox. Late in 1943, five senators, including Republican Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts and Democrat Richard Russell of Georgia, proclaimed that America had become a “global sucker.” They called for American aid to be used as a lever—the British saw it as a cudgel—to obtain postwar economic and political advantages. Churchill had had the five in mind when he excoriated “naysayers” in his February speech. By early 1944, Roosevelt was troubled enough by the trade picture (and by congressional pressure) to drop from Lend-Lease all British purchases of discretionary goods that did not directly contribute to the war effort. The cost to Britain to buy these goods stood at about $400 million, or roughly one-third of its $1.5 billion in gold and dollar balances (a balance Roosevelt had kept hidden from the U.S. Congress).

  The new policy could only add more debt to the British balance sheet and undercut Britain’s ability to compete in world markets after the war, especially against the United States. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. was then working up the financial and banking parts of that policy in detail. From a strictly financial standpoint, such machinations were journal entries, a way to manage accounts. It was only business. Morgenthau, an abiding friend to Britain during his decade at Treasury, was in fundamental agreement with the demand for Britain to spend down its balances, but he advised taking no action until later in the war to avoid disrupting—possibly obliterating—postwar Anglo-American relations. But the five senators, the press, and the Congress had forced the issue.

  There were other issues. Roosevelt asked Churchill—demanded, really—that British and American trade officials sit down in Washington (the meeting to be chaired by Roosevelt) to work out a postwar oil policy. Churchill didn’t like that idea at all, and in late February he told Roosevelt that many in Britain saw such a meeting as the first step “to deprive us of our oil assets in the Middle East.” Roosevelt replied with a curt rebuff; the talks must proceed, in Washington. “I cannot change my position in this regard.” As for British worries over Middle East oil, Roosevelt replied, “I am disturbed by the rumors the British wish to horn in on Saudi Arabian oil reserves.” In late February Roosevelt sent two telegrams to London in which the president cited the “manifest need” for all of the United Nations to address the issues of postwar trade and monetary policy, oil, tariffs, commodities, and cartels. Believing the telegrams had been ghostwritten by Roosevelt underlings (as usual, he could not bring himself to denigrate his “friend”) and signed by the exhausted president, Churchill sent a memo to Eden and advised they simply ignore the communications: “All this frantic dancing to the American tune is silly…. My recommendation is to let it all rip for a bit.”77

  Britain exported virtually nothing to offset Lend-Lease imports; the ratio in dollar imports and pound exports was near one hundred to one. That would appear to set up an economic disaster in the making, yet the eminent British historian Peter Clarke points out in The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire that Britain’s problems were more financial than economic. Clarke pegs the spring of 1944 as the start of those one thousand days. The country was running at full employment, with factories humming along on three shifts, but they were producing weapons and munitions, not exportable goods. The question, addressed later in 1944 by 1,200 international bankers at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire, was how could Britain trade its way out of the financial hole it would find itself in at war’s end? The short answer was: on terms set by America. After Bretton Woods, the U.S. dollar served as the world’s reserve currency; artificial exchange rates were banished; nations paid their debts at the new—and ultimately burdensome to Britain—rates of exchange. The World Bank was created on the principle that nations could not draw down from their “paper” account surpluses without first making real deposits, at exchange rates set by the markets, with the result that by the end of the war, the British pound—and Britain—was relegated to secondary status. Churchill did not deem Bretton Woods worthy of mention in his memoirs of the war.78

  Roosevelt convened his preliminary oil summit in the spring, at which time the British had no choice but to abandon their policy of restricting production at their Middle East concessions in order to maintain profit margins. Yet, concluded Time, the “big problem” with oil “in the postwar world will not be scarcity but surplus [and price collapse].”79

  In early March, Churchill received a short letter from Roosevelt that contained an extraordinary proposal in the form of a memorandum on the future of Iran prepared for the president by Major General Patrick Hurley, an Oklahoma oilman, former secretary of war under Herbert Hoover, and now Roosevelt’s man in Tehran. In his note, Rooseve
lt offered that it would take “thirty or forty years to eliminate the graft” in Iran and to properly prepare the people for democracy. In the interim, the country would “need trustees”; Roosevelt nominated America, Russia, and Britain for that role. The trustees’ mandate would be the “care and education” of Iranians. For comic relief he tossed in, “From your and my personal observation I think we could add something about cleanliness as well.” One line offered a direct challenge to Churchill and the British Empire: “I do not want the United States to acquire a ‘zone of influence’—or any other nation for that matter.”80

  Hurley’s report had to do with Iran, but his vision went far beyond the Middle East. “This plan,” he wrote, “may become the criterion for the relations of the United States toward all the nations which are now suffering from the evils of greedy minorities, monopolies, aggression, and imperialism.” Although Hurley included Germany in his pantheon of evil imperialists, Great Britain was his real target. France, Holland, and Belgium would no doubt emerge from the war too hobbled to maintain their empires. Italy had already lost hers. Germany would lose all. That left Britain, which to be maintained (by America) as a power in the new order “must accept the principles of liberty and democracy and discard the principles of oppressive imperialism.” Hurley did not mince a word: “I must say that if imperialism is dead, it seems very reluctant to lie down.” He expressed his belief that “the ultimate destiny of the English speaking peoples is a single destiny,” yet “British imperialism is being defended today by the blood of the soldiers of the most democratic nation on earth.” That relationship had to change. America was “approaching the irrepressible conflict between world-wide imperialism and world-wide democracy” and had to assert its values, specifically the Four Freedoms. Hurley called his policy “nation building.” Roosevelt did not inform Churchill that Hurley held a stake in the Sinclair Oil Company, which was then in negotiations with Iran for oil concessions.81