The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Despite the tumultuousness of the staff meetings, to say nothing of the tumultuous goings-on in Churchill’s mind, the chiefs and Churchill complemented each other. Churchill brought illumination, which his chiefs brought into focus. Churchill never seriously considered sacking any of them, and none of them ever seriously considered resigning. In his capacity as minister of defence he never overrode their policies. Anthony Eden wrote that attending a meeting with Churchill was “a splendid and unique experience. It might be a monologue. It was never a dictatorship.” Colville noted the criticisms leveled at Churchill by the Chiefs of Staff, who, in Colville’s opinion, lacked Churchill’s “imagination and resolution” and could not see that it was Churchill who provided them “guidance and purpose.” The chiefs and Churchill worked together in harness, the black steed of Churchill’s passion and the white steeds of the coolly logical Brooke, Cunningham, and Portal.98

  Clementine Churchill later said of Brooke, “We might have won the war without Alanbrooke; I don’t think we would have won it without Winston.”99

  The diarists noted Churchill being in “top form” as regularly as they noted his fatigue or inattention to his boxes or tendency to ramble on. A narrow sampling of “P.M. tired” diary entries yields as incomplete and distorted an image of Churchill as a narrow sampling of “P.M. in top form” entries. He had to be taken whole in order to form an accurate image of the man. Not for nothing did John Martin later say that Churchill had about him “a zigzag streak of lightning on the brain.”100

  When he addressed his countrymen on March 26 the lightning was missing. The subject was the postwar world. He promised Britons that national health insurance would follow victory, along with a complete overhaul of housing, including “a clean sweep of all those areas of which our civilization should be ashamed.” The slums would go, but nothing would be done that would interfere with the war effort. Change would come, but only after victory. He proclaimed that “the greatest scheme of improved education that has ever been attempted by a responsible Government… will soon be on the Statute-book.” Britons were not impressed. “They feel like they have asked for bread,” Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, “but have been given, if not a stone, simply a promise of thousands upon thousands of prefabricated houses, at modest rent.” Steel shares rose immediately on the promise of the prefabricated future, “but peoples’ spirits noticeably did not.” Harold Nicolson was pained by the comments of colleagues who thought Churchill had sounded like “a worn and petulant old man…. The upper classes feel that all this sacrifice and suffering will only mean that the proletariat will deprive them of all their comforts and influence, and then proceed to render this country and Empire a third class state.”101

  On his way to bed in the early hours of April 5, Churchill allowed to Colville that although the prospect of the second front worried him, “I am hardening to it.” By “hardening” he meant that his support for Overlord was growing. He had used the same term a month earlier in a cable to Marshall, which he referenced in a March 18 telegram to Roosevelt, where he repeated, “I am hardening for Overlord as the time gets nearer.” On April 1, he again cabled Roosevelt, “As you know, I harden for it the nearer I get to it. Eisenhower is a very large man.” On April 7, Good Friday, Montgomery unveiled to the Chiefs of Staff and Churchill the final plans for Overlord. Brooke was duly impressed, calling it “a wonderful day.” According to Brooke, Churchill—“in a very weepy condition” and lacking “vitality”—addressed barely a few remarks to the assembled.102

  In fact, Montgomery’s presentation had lessened Churchill’s anxiety over the invasion, for since the first meetings of January, Montgomery had put meat on the bones of Overlord. Six divisions would now go ashore in the first wave, supported on the flanks by three airborne divisions. By D-day plus two days, a further six divisions would be ashore. Montgomery laid out the particulars. Four natural phenomena had to fall into alignment like plums in a slot machine for the invasion to have any chance for success. Three could be predetermined: the tides, the phase of the moon, and the length of time between morning nautical twilight—dawn—and sunrise. The tides had to be near ebb but rising, such that combat engineers could clear exposed German mines and obstacles from the beaches. Then, three hours of rising tides would serve to carry the men farther up onto the beaches. The moon had to be a bomber’s moon—full or near full, in order that the paratroopers could operate in the lunar beam. Finally, the optimum length of time between dawn and sunrise had been calculated to be about sixty minutes, enough time for the navy and air forces to rake the beaches with shell fire but not so long as to allow the Germans to recover and coordinate their defense and counterattack. Three mornings in June fell into nearly perfect alignment on all three counts, the fifth, sixth, and seventh. Montgomery picked June 5 as the most favorable. The fourth natural element was entirely unpredictable: the weather. Ideally, Eisenhower told his press aide, the morning of D-day should be clear, with a light onshore breeze blowing the dust and smoke of battle inland, to confuse and blind the Germans.103

  A few days after the April 7 meeting, Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt with a brief summary. Again he stressed his support for the enterprise. “I am becoming very hard set on Overlord.” He told Roosevelt that he had expressed to Eisenhower and Montgomery his “strong confidence… in this extraordinary but magnificent operation.” And he expressed his disagreement with “loose talk” on both sides of the Atlantic that predicted horrific Allied casualties. It would be the Germans who suffered, he told Roosevelt. To Eisenhower, Churchill offered that if by the coming winter, the Allies had taken the Channel ports, Cherbourg, and Paris, he would “assert the victory to be the greatest of modern times.” Eisenhower replied that the Overlord timetable called for Allied armies to be on the German borders by winter. Churchill late in the month told Colville that on D-day he intended to be onboard a Royal Navy warship just offshore the beaches, and to be “one of the first on the bridgehead, if he possibly could—and what fun to get there before Monty.”104

  On the day after Montgomery’s briefing, the debate over Anvil assumed new and troublesome dimensions. Ten days earlier, George Marshall proposed a halt in Italian operations once the Anzio beachhead was united with Alexander’s army, in order that ten divisions could be siphoned away from Italy in support of Anvil, which Marshall insisted must follow Overlord by July 10. The Americans’ rigidity on Anvil led Brooke to exclaim to his diary that it was “impossible to accept” Marshall’s plan to “go on the defensive in Italy. They fail to realize the forces available do not admit to two fronts in the Mediterranean.” Eisenhower told his naval aide, Commander Butcher, that he was “delighted” by Marshall’s decision “to forget Rome.”105

  Eisenhower and the British Chiefs of Staff debated the matter, Eisenhower arguing that the German army, not a psychological prize such as Rome, should be the target. Brooke and the British counterargued that Rome was a military target and had to be taken in order for the Allies to continue northward into France or toward Trieste. By April 8, the Anvil question had become an unholy mess. Brooke, seeing Anvil’s negative consequences to the Italian campaign, joined Churchill in trying to introduce some flexibility into the debate. Roosevelt and Marshall, for their part, remained inflexible; they had promised Anvil to Stalin at Tehran, and that was that. Ironically, it was the continuing stalemate on the Italian front that had brought the wisdom of Anvil into question. “There was no use in landing in France,” Churchill later wrote, “unless we did so at the right time…. All turned on the capture of Rome.” Churchill fired off a telegram to Marshall protesting the abandonment of Rome, and was coolly rebuffed. Jumbo Wilson advised scrubbing Anvil altogether because there were simply not enough landing craft in the Mediterranean to undertake the operation. The Americans offered to bring landing craft from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, but only for use in Anvil, thus thwarting any British plans for amphibious operations in the Aegean. Then they withdrew the offer.106

  Ad
miral King once again, as he had in 1942, began grumbling about the need to shift the war effort to the Pacific. Eisenhower played that card by reminding Brooke that U.S. Republicans wanted to draft Douglas MacArthur for a presidential run. MacArthur, in correspondence with Nebraska congressman Albert Miller, had disparaged the New Deal and offered that he believed the European war was just about over. The letters, which Miller leaked to the press, gave Britons pause. The implication of Eisenhower’s gambit was that as president, MacArthur would shift everything to the Pacific. But Brooke held firm: Italy must be reinforced, and certainly not stripped. Marshall saw Italy as a stalemate and a diversion from striking into Germany through France. Churchill saw Italy as a substitute for Anvil. Eisenhower, whose first and most critical duty was to make Overlord a success, was caught between his American superiors and the British. Finally, on April 19, after General Alexander announced his plan to begin his Italian offensive in mid-May with a hoped-for junction with the Anzio forces by early June, the Americans conceded that Anvil could not take place in July. Eisenhower and Brooke hammered out an “appreciation” for the Combined Chiefs that did not mention Anvil and called for Rome to be Alexander’s springtime objective. The Anvil debate, full of twists and turns, lay dormant until mid-June, when it metastasized into crisis.107

  In the east, Hitler had staked his hopes on the Wehrmacht’s resolve and the inability of the Red Army to fight on during a terrible winter, but the Red Army had ignored the winter. In February the Russians encircled 50,000 Germans on the lower Dnieper front. In March, the Red Army swept past Odessa, crossed the Dneister River on a three-hundred-mile front, and closed on Czernowitz, in Bukovina. The Russians bypassed the Crimea, leaving a German army trapped there. The Russian winter offensive had been so powerful that many in London and Washington believed the war would be over before summer. But even the Russians could not ignore the spring rain and mud season—the rasputitsa. In April the battle lines began to stabilize from the Baltic to the southern Ukraine.

  The stabilization of the Eastern Front, David Eisenhower later wrote, “dashed lingering hopes on both sides of the Atlantic that Germany would be defeated before summer.” This is a vital observation, and it relates to several other unsettling lines of thought that percolated through the ranks and led to “a climate of doubt that persisted at all levels.” Most obvious, Eisenhower writes, was the realization that if the war did not end before summer, Overlord would have to take place. That truth, in turn, led to doubts over the ability of green American recruits to stand up to the Wehrmacht; the debacle at Kasserine had taken place only a year earlier, and at Anzio—“part of the Kasserine legacy”—the men were still on the beaches. Those doubts commingled with growing doubts about Soviet intentions. Would the Red Army attack as agreed upon or stand by while the Anglo-Americans and Germans punched themselves out in the west? This was a fear Brooke had expressed to his diary at Tehran. On April 8, Eisenhower cabled the Normandy invasion date to Moscow. The Kremlin did not respond for two weeks, during which time the doubts only grew.108

  The question of unconditional surrender weighed on everyone. Eisenhower sought permission from Roosevelt to “clarify” the terms of surrender in order that he could drop propaganda leaflets over Germany assuring Germans that fundamental rights—religion, assembly, trade unions—would be restored. From Eisenhower’s soldierly perspective, Germans willing to surrender were far more desirable than an entire nation fighting to the last man standing. Roosevelt flatly refused, telling his Chiefs of Staff, “I am not willing at this time to say that we do not intend to destroy the German nation.” Any “clarification” of surrender terms would be read by Moscow as backtracking on the annihilation of Germany agreed upon in Tehran. Stalin was quite willing to expend millions of Russian lives to gain that end. Churchill, like Eisenhower, saw in unconditional surrender the potential for horrific loss in Allied lives, but he thought better of bringing the subject up with Roosevelt. Churchill’s frustration over his diminished role in all matters political and military was evidenced by a remark he made in mid-April to Cadogan: “This battle [Overlord] has been forced upon us by the Russians and by the United States military authorities.” That was true, as was the fact that he had “hardened” to the plan.109

  During April, as the invasion forces conducted field exercises on English beaches and in the countryside, the Allied air forces fully implemented Eisenhower’s pre-invasion air strategy known as the Transportation Plan, the object of which was to bomb every French rail hub, bridge, and tunnel that led to Normandy in order to isolate German forces and deny them mobility. Almost one hundred individual targets were marked for destruction, as well as dozens in Calais, to put the Germans off the scent. More than 120 German radar sites were added to the list. Eisenhower later wrote that Churchill feared that up to 80,000 Frenchmen would die in the bombings. Churchill was indeed worried, and told Roosevelt in an April telegram that he and the entire War Cabinet feared the “French slaughters” would result in 80,000 casualties, including 20,000 dead, an estimate that ultimately proved correct. It would be another Oran, a slaughter of Allies by friendly fire, Churchill argued, on a far bloodier scale. It was a strategy that would make enemies of the French. Churchill’s fear of French resentment did not in the end prove justified.

  The French themselves were divided on the issue, with several resistance leaders telling HMG that the bombings would be resented in France, while Major General Pierre Koenig, commander of French forces in Britain, told Eisenhower that the French people would accept twice the casualties if the sacrifice helped rid France of the reviled Boche. The War Cabinet asked Eisenhower to restrict targets to those that would yield no more than one hundred French casualties. Eisenhower refused, on the grounds that such restraint would “emasculate” the strategy. He assured Churchill that thousands of warning leaflets were dropped into the French countryside before the bombers came on. Not satisfied, Churchill went over Eisenhower’s head, to Roosevelt, and asked the president to overrule his general. Roosevelt flatly refused, telling Churchill, “However regrettable” the loss of French lives, “I am not prepared to impose from this great distance any restrictions on military action by the responsible commanders that in their opinion might mitigate against the success of Overlord or cause more Allied casualties.” The president’s reply hinted at a fundamental change in their relationship. Although Churchill was the man on the spot, in London and at the center of the planning and the action, his advice no longer carried the weight with Roosevelt that it once had. Roosevelt henceforth and from his great distance would be the final arbitrator in all such matters.110

  A German radio transmission intercepted in May vindicated Eisenhower’s air strategy: “The raids carried out in recent weeks have caused systematic breakdown of all main line; the coastal defences have been cut off from the supply bases of the interior.”111

  May came in, and brought with it the most beautiful weather in years. Alec Cadogan, spending a few days at his Northiam cottage, effused to his diary, “The daffodils are over, except the very late white ones. And the narcissi are still out, and the spiraea arguta, like little snowmen. And the wallflowers a warm cloth of gold and bronze. The old pear tree in full bloom…. Lilac coming out…. Another gorgeous summer day.” It was all “heavenly.” He also noted the need for rain. Churchill, however, ushered in the new month with “gloomy forebodings” about the future behavior of Russia. “I have always not liked the month of May,” he offered to Jock Colville, who recalled that one of the first remarks Churchill had made to him four years earlier was, “If I were the first of May, I should be ashamed of myself.” But May 1944 began to prove itself praiseworthy.112

  On May 11, Alexander made his move against the Gustav Line. In light of Anvil’s being postponed, it was hoped that this thrust would draw Germans away from Normandy. It did; twenty-five German divisions were now in Italy, and more had been sent to the Balkans in anticipation of an Allied thrust north toward Vienna. On May 15, after four
days of preparatory strikes, a Canadian corps was thrown into the battle for Monte Cassino. On the seventeenth, two Polish divisions led the final assault on the monastery. Along the Gustav Line twenty Allied divisions faced seven divisions of the German Tenth Army. The preponderance of Allied men, artillery, and aircraft began to bend the German lines. Kesselring ordered that reinforcements be rushed south from Anzio to defend his line.

  It was too late. The end for the Germans at Monte Cassino came on May 18 when, after a point-blank artillery barrage and an assault by the Polish II Corps, the heights were taken. On that beautiful spring morning, Polish troops—less four thousand killed and wounded—entered the ruins of the monastery. The Germans had fled overnight. The Allied army pursuing them was one of the most cosmopolitan in history. In the Imperial Army: Britons, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Newfoundlanders, Indians, Ceylonese, Swazi, Mauritians, and Caribbeans. In the American: a black division and a Japanese American regiment. Among the Allies: Italians, French, Poles, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, and Senegalese. By May 18, more than 32,000 men—including Germans—lay dead and buried within sight of St. Benedict’s mountain sanctuary. But Highway 6, the road to Rome, was open. With Kesselring’s withdrawal of troops from Anzio, the time was ripe for an Allied breakout there, which if successful would cut off the German Tenth Army, now fleeing north from the Gustav Line. On May 23, the Allies finally broke out from the beachhead, where they had lived under fire for four months. Three days later they linked up with Clark’s Fifth Army. Then they turned toward Rome.113

  As the Italian campaign came to life, a meeting was held in London that would have far more repercussions in coming years than the bloody battle for Monte Cassino. The previous November the London press had reported that the Nobel Prize–winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr had escaped to London from German-occupied Denmark by way of Stockholm. In fact, the RAF secreted him out in the cramped bomb bay of the aptly named Mosquito bomber, where he passed out for lack of oxygen. In London the scientist spoke with various luminaries, including Alec Cadogan, who gushed to his diary: “Bohr. What a man! He talked… for ¾ hour, about what I haven’t the least idea.” Soon thereafter Bohr disappeared. In fact, he had been taken to the United States, to Los Alamos, as an official British consultant to the Tube Alloys project; that is, he was working on the Manhattan Project. He brought with him German drawings for the design of a uranium heavy-water pile, which if built, would behave more like a reactor than a bomb, with resultant explosive forces not much more powerful than conventional bombs.114