The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Roosevelt sent Hurley’s proposal to the State Department for comment. Dean Acheson, then an assistant secretary of state, thought Hurley “vain and reckless,” and characterized his plan as “messianic globaloney.” Upon hearing that, Hurley charged Acheson with being “for monopoly and imperialism and against democracy.” Roosevelt, by pitting his minions against each other, avoided direct involvement in the entire unseemly affair. Although Hurley left government work in 1945 and Acheson later rose to secretary of state, the philosophical underpinnings of Hurley’s “nation building” intrigued many in Washington, then and since. Likewise, the question of whether Roosevelt’s economic agenda was simply imperialism of a different stripe has been pondered ever since. Churchill’s war was indeed imperial, in the sense he fought to preserve the British Empire by deploying—with the advice and consent of the Dominions—its imperial troops worldwide. He sought no financial gain; Roosevelt did. Churchill sought no territorial gain; Stalin did.82

  Much was in need of discussion. Churchill proposed meeting Roosevelt in Bermuda at the end of March. Roosevelt, having never fully recovered from Tehran and in increasingly ill health, declined. The president, in fact, spent the entire month of April fishing and reading and relaxing at financier Bernard Baruch’s 23,000-acre South Carolina plantation, during which time no one outside of his cabinet knew his whereabouts.83

  Churchill did not reply to Roosevelt’s “nation building” letter for almost three months. When he did, he told Roosevelt that Hurley’s pronouncements “make me rub my eyes.” He added, “I make bold, however, to suggest that British imperialism has spread and is spreading democracy more widely than any other system of government since the beginning of time.” Churchill thought in terms of postwar nation rebuilding, but Roosevelt had in mind something else entirely.84

  The question of Polish borders above all other political issues commanded Churchill’s attention. The Poles were proving themselves as stubborn as Stalin. Colville feared that the effort to persuade the Poles to cede territory would be compared to the betrayal of the Czechs at Munich. Owen O’Malley in the Foreign Office believed so, and he repeated to Colville a line from his report on the Katyn murders: “What is morally indefensible is always politically inept.” The Poles, for their part, refused to entertain any notion of ceding territory, this despite pledges by Stalin that Poland would remain free and independent. Then Stalin announced he could no longer communicate with Churchill on the matter because their correspondence was regularly leaked to the press by the British. In fact, the Soviet embassy was the source of the leaks. Stalin further mucked up the works when he permitted Pravda to run a story that claimed the British were in secret peace negotiations with Berlin, a charge that prompted Churchill to proclaim to Brooke, “Trying to maintain good relations with a communist is like wooing a crocodile…. When it opens its mouth you cannot tell whether it is trying to smile, or preparing to eat you up.” By mid-March, Churchill concluded that his efforts to forge a Polish-Soviet agreement had failed and that he soon would have to “make a cold announcement to Parliament” on the matter. “It all seems to augur ill,” Colville told his diary on March 18, “for the future of relations between this country and the U.S.S.R.”

  The Old Man began telling friends that he would not be around to witness those relations, because he had not long to live. One evening in March he informed the gathered—while “La Marseillaise” played on the gramophone—that although he had not much time left, he had a political testament for after the war: “Far more important than India or the Colonies or solvency is the Air. We live in a world of wolves—and bears” (italics Colville). Three nights later the Old Man lamented to Colville that “this world (‘this dusty and lamentable ball’) is now too beastly to live in. People act so revoltingly they just don’t deserve to live.” Yet, as always, he remained cautiously optimistic. On April 1 he wrote to Roosevelt of Stalin’s belligerency, “I have a feeling the bark may be worse than its bite.”85

  By then, more than two months after the first assaults on the Gustav Line and the Anzio landings, no progress whatsoever had been made at either place. The New Zealanders again tried to storm Monte Cassino on March 15, with the same bloody results as in February. On the twenty-fifth they called it off. Clark’s army had gained but a few miles in two months. The troops under siege at Anzio had gained nothing.86

  Events on the Home Island vexed Churchill as well. Three by-elections did not go well for the coalition government and especially for the Tories. In the first one, in January, a hitherto unknown Common Wealth Party (a Socialist party formed in 1942) candidate beat both the Tory and Labour candidates. This was a rebuke to the coalition and foreshadowed events to come. The Tories barely won the second election, held in a traditional Conservative constituency. This was a rebuke to Churchill, who had taken a strong stand against the Independent candidate. The third election proved even more of a disaster. For all but five of the previous 210 years, a member of the Cavendish family, one of England’s wealthiest, had represented West Derbyshire. When an Independent challenged the sitting Cavendish MP, twenty-six-year-old William John Robert Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, Churchill weighed in, calling the election a mandate on the government and telling electors “their votes can prove the heroic temper of our island in these tremendous days.” Voters gave Cavendish the boot.87

  The elections, like the Polish affair, did nothing for Churchill’s peace of mind. Colville found him in the Annexe one night, “sitting in his chair,” looking “old, tired, and very depressed.” He was muttering that any more such defeats might force a general election. “Now,” Churchill said, “with great events pending, when national unity was essential: the question of annihilating great states had to be faced.” Yet, he added, it was beginning “to look as if democracy had not the persistence to go through with it.”88

  Even his beloved Parliament briefly rebuked him, or so he believed when in late March an amendment was inserted into a groundbreaking education-reform bill, which passed the House by one vote. The amendment, sponsored by Thelma Cazalet, a former suffragette and the Conservative MP from Islington East, called for equal pay for women teachers. The problem, as Churchill saw it, was not with giving women equal pay (this would come to pass in his next premiership) but that the government bill had not included any such clause. The vote, therefore, amounted to a vote of no confidence. Churchill—who championed the reforms—demanded that the offending clause be removed and that the House pass the original government bill in a vote of confidence. Harold Nicolson blamed the episode on “the idiocy of the House” and hoped that Churchill might back down. He did not, telling one MP, “I am not going to tumble around my cage like a wounded canary. You knocked me off my perch. You have now got to put me back on my perch. Otherwise I won’t sing.” Cazalet withdrew her amendment. The House put Churchill back on his perch by a vote of 425–23. Roosevelt, who had just had his veto of a tax bill (which he said served the greedy, not the needy) overridden by Congress, thought Churchill’s battle with the Commons “splendid,” and cabled his congratulations, adding, “Results here would be almost as good if we operated under your system.” Colville thought Churchill’s forcing the issue was like “cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.”89

  That the House and prime minister had drifted into conflict was due in part to the fact that Anthony Eden was both Leader of the House and foreign secretary. No man could possibly do both jobs, and by late March, Eden was doing neither very well. Eden feared himself on the verge of a breakdown. He broached the subject of quitting the Foreign Office to Churchill, who rejected the notion: “You will have to go on as you are for a few months longer.” Then, in early April, with Eden clearly an ill man, Churchill offered some words of sympathy—“You are my right arm; we must take care of you”—and packed Eden off for three weeks of rest. In Eden’s absence Churchill took over the Foreign Office.90

  Thus, in the run-up to the great gambit in Normandy, Churchill served as prime mini
ster, defence minister, and foreign minister. In his multiple roles, he chaired cabinet meetings, and War Cabinet meetings, and Chiefs of Staff meetings, and took his weekly lunches with the King and Eisenhower. Alec Cadogan, at the Foreign Office, now serving temporarily under Churchill, began to pepper his diary entries with many of the same impressions Brooke and Colville confessed to their journals. On April 12, Colville told his diary: “Struck by how very tired and worn out the P.M. looks now.” The same day, Cadogan wrote: “[P.M.] kept me from my work for three hours today on matters that shouldn’t have taken twenty minutes. How does he get through his work?” Cadogan on April 19, after a late afternoon cabinet meeting: “An awful day…. P.M., I fear, is breaking down…. I am fussed about the P.M. He is not the man he was 12 months ago, and I really don’t know if he can carry on.” Brooke, the same day, after a Chiefs of Staff meeting that ran to 1:30 A.M.: “P.M. tired, listless, and lacking decision.”91

  The Old Man was tired—from setting a pace others had difficulty keeping up with. He promised Colville he would make his bedtime 1:30, but he regularly stayed up past three o’clock. He had a bed installed in his room adjacent to the House so that he could take short naps between sessions. He carried the greatest burden, and he not once considered laying it down. While Cadogan took himself home to dine at 8:00 P.M. after the “awful” cabinet meeting of the nineteenth, Churchill prepared for the Chiefs of Staff meeting that Brooke found so unproductive. Eden was, of course, on sick leave. “Everyone’s exhausted,” Alec Cadogan told his diary, “but I suppose we’ve got to plug along.” Even the young, strapping Jock Colville allowed a quotient of pessimism to penetrate his natural optimism. Everyone is “gloomy,” he wrote on April 14. “Now in the shadow of an impending struggle which may be history’s most fatal, a restless and dissatisfied mood possesses many people in all circles and walks of life. And over everything hangs the uncertainty of Russia’s future policy towards Europe and the world.”92

  “Public opinion at the moment is not good,” Harold Nicolson told his diary. “They are exhausted by five years of war.” Factory workers were sending HMG a message by voting with their feet throughout the land. More than two hundred thousand coal miners had gone out on strike in Wales and Yorkshire. Textile workers went out in Scotland. More than four times as many working days were lost to strikes that year as in 1940. Britons had not gone to the polls in a general election since 1935. They were impatient and exhausted. Brendan Bracken, foreseeing more unrest over the horizon, predicted to Jock Colville (much as Roosevelt had predicted to Harriman in 1941) “a crushing defeat for the Conservative Party at the next election and its possible collapse like the Liberals after the last war.” Nicolson, upon stepping into the lavatory at the Blackheath Railway Station, beheld a scrawl on the wall: “Winston Churchill is a bastard.” Nicolson, furious at the insult, feared that “Winston has become an electoral liability now rather than an asset. This makes me sick with human nature. Once the open sea is reached, we forget how we clung to the pilot in the storm.”93

  The pilot, as usual, was scrutinizing the seas all around, near and far, with the result that he failed to set a steady course. He became mired in details and his dispatch boxes backed up. He had learned that the Americans were no longer painting their aircraft, which lessened their weight and added twenty miles an hour to their speed; “Pray let me know,” he asked the Aircraft Ministry, if the RAF was considering doing likewise. When he noticed an “untidy sack with holes in it and sand leaking out” in St. James’s Park, he demanded it be removed. The park had been closed to civilians, and other than military men on their way to secret meetings and a scaup duck that Brooke liked to observe, St. James’s Park was empty and neglected. Other details had political overtones. Churchill objected to a proposal by the Home Secretary to hold a national day of prayer for the success of Overlord. Such an event would be a “grave mistake,” Churchill wrote. “In my view there is no need for a national day of prayer or thanksgiving at this time.” Mollie Panter-Downes noted that Montgomery was making a show of touring the land inviting “God to scatter the Allies’ enemies and the public to scatter its cash in war bonds.” Churchill took note of and shut down Montgomery’s public relations and prayer tour. The prayers being said by Britons that spring were not only for the safety of their sons, but for rain; a severe drought was killing winter crops and did not bode well for the summer harvest. Rural wells ran dry, forcing villagers into long lines to procure buckets of water. Panter-Downes wrote that with millions of troops moving about the country, England was in the position of the hostess of a modest house whose “influx of guests has run the cistern dry.”94

  Churchill’s relations with his military chiefs were as arid as the countryside. On the heels of Operation Caliph, his plan to support Overlord by sending three divisions into Bordeaux, came proposals to liberate Norway, and to drive into the Aegean “in the event of Overlord not being successful” or German troops there being “beyond our power to tackle.” He saw these ventures as “flanking movements.” But the time for flanking movements had passed. He and Britain were committed to Overlord. Yet Churchill was not trying to evade that commitment; he was performing due diligence in the event that the Germans sent enough panzers to France to trigger a cancellation of the invasion, as agreed upon in Tehran. Eisenhower pondered the same question. His son and biographer later wrote that Eisenhower was in constant contact with Marshall during February and early March regarding the problem of what to do “should German moves in the next several weeks rule out Overlord as impractical.” As Eisenhower saw it, Anvil, the south of France operation, presented the only possible alternative. Churchill and Eisenhower understood that perfect certainty about Overlord could never be achieved, and that “an irrevocable commitment to Overlord was not possible until the troops were ashore in France.” And they could not go ashore until the Combined Chiefs of Staff delegated to Eisenhower the absolute authority to do whatever needed to be done in order to not only carry out Overlord but also sustain it. This they did in February when they formally designated him supreme allied commander, giving him authority over all Allied land, sea, and air forces. Churchill could probe and prod Eisenhower, but he could make no demands.95

  This did not apply to Churchill’s British chiefs, from whom he demanded much. Brooke’s diary references to Churchill grew more furious. After one particularly difficult February meeting (and most were now difficult), Brooke wrote, “I often doubt whether I am going mad or he is really sane.” After another he wrote, “I can not stick any more meetings like this.” During a March meeting, Churchill claimed to have discovered a new island off the coast of Sumatra, and proposed sending a fleet there. Admiral Cunningham replied that with the Japanese fleet in Singapore, such a move would be “courting disaster.” Of the meeting Brooke wrote, “I began to wonder whether I was in Alice in Wonderland, or whether I was really fit for a lunatic asylum.” And of Churchill: “I… am honestly getting very doubtful about his balance of mind…. I don’t know where we are or where we are going as regards our strategy…. It is a ghastly situation.” And on March 23, “I feel like a man chained to the chariot of a lunatic!!” To Dill, in Washington, Brooke wrote: “I am just about at the end of my tether.” Brooke was not alone in fighting ongoing battles with Churchill. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham’s autobiography, A Sailor’s Odyssey, conveys the same frustration. Air Chief Marshal Portal also expressed his doubts about Churchill, who, Portal felt, did not appreciate the proper role of airpower. Yet Portal grossly overrated the effectiveness of strategic bombing. He shocked Brooke that spring when he claimed that he could have won the war by early 1944 if not for “the handicap of the other two services!!” Brooke usually reserved his double exclamation marks for prime-ministerial quotations.96

  Brooke’s diary entries, when cherry-picked, portray a meddlesome and infuriating prime minister, the strangler fig in Brooke’s neatly tilled garden of military strategy. Yet Brooke’s diaries—and those of the other journal
keepers—are informative only when taken as a whole. After a particularly disputatious afternoon meeting, Brooke was summoned to dinner by Churchill. The CIGS expected to be sacked. “On the contrary,” he wrote, “we had a tête-à-tête dinner at which he [Churchill] was quite charming, as if he meant to make up for some of the rough passages of the day.” They discussed their children and Churchill’s difficulty in controlling Randolph. They discussed “the President’s unpleasant attitude lately.” They mused on Italy, and the latest German air raids. Concerned for Brooke’s health, Churchill told him to take some time off so as not to wear himself out. Later that night, after a post-dinner meeting of the Chiefs of Staff where Brooke found Churchill to be “much more reasonable,” the CIGS told his diary, “He has astonishing sides to his character.” Equally astonishing is that it had taken Brooke almost three years of working side by side with Churchill to reach that conclusion. When thirteen years later Brooke—by then Lord Alanbrooke—sent a personally inscribed copy of his published (and abridged) diaries to Churchill, he wrote that his criticisms were his way of unwinding each night, mere “momentary daily impressions.” He added, “I look upon the privilege of having served you in war as the greatest honour destiny has bestowed on me.”97