The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Sometime in 1944, a new word crept into the lexicon of international politics: “superpower.” It was not coined with the British Empire in mind.

  6

  Anchorage

  JUNE 1944–MAY 1945

  Few U-boats roamed the Atlantic in early June; their harvest was meager. The sea routes to Britain were secure, the flood of American men and matériel unstoppable. The British, Canadians, and Americans were ashore in Normandy. And with seven thousand American and British heavy bombers based in Britain, with Alexander driving to the Po Valley in northern Italy, and with the Russians poised to strike in the East, Germany had lost the war. But the Allies had yet to win it. Some, including President Roosevelt, believed they all but had.

  A week before D-day, Roosevelt dropped a “blockbuster” on Washington reporters. In an almost offhand manner he outlined his “blueprint” for a postwar world organization. This was the first the press heard of the world council Roosevelt had proposed the previous November in Tehran. Roosevelt divulged no particulars, thus leaving both isolationists and internationalists somewhat befuddled. The president did stress that whatever came into being would not impinge on the “integrity” of the U.S. He chose the word carefully. It is synonymous with “sovereignty,” Time reported, a “wicked, isolationist word” in the minds of internationalists (known then as “one-worlders”), who championed a world government. Yet “sovereignty” formed the essence of isolationism and the national identity as championed by Senator Robert Taft and the anti-one-worlder Republican Party. Roosevelt was sending a message to both the internationalists and Republicans: his world organization would not diminish U.S. autonomy (the Republican fear), but it would move the United States toward a cooperative, multilateral role in world affairs (the one-worlder dream). The “blueprint,” Roosevelt told the press, envisioned an organization that would stop aggression, not an organization “which you would have to call on whenever some country wanted to build a bridge over a creek.” Roosevelt then permitted “some high authority” to leak more details to the press, including his intent to establish a World Court, and to build his new world council around the Four Powers, with smaller nations sitting in on a rotating basis.1

  In June, Henry Luce editorialized in Life magazine on the coming new world order, and America’s role in it: “With the establishment of a firm lodgment on the continent, we are now the most powerful nation on earth.” But with that power came responsibilities, wrote Luce, including the moral imperative for America to participate in the postwar recovery of Europe, especially as the Allies’ stated military strategy entailed the utter destruction of Germany. Europe would need to be rebuilt, not simply policed. Economic order had to be restored. The military story would end, perhaps soon, but the political story was just beginning. Here came Roosevelt with his vision of a postwar world council, a vision Churchill shared. And here came Luce with his vision for an American role in postwar Europe, which Churchill also shared. But Roosevelt, despite his call for a world organization, had made clear to Churchill that American troops would get out of Europe at the first opportunity. As for rebuilding Germany, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. was working up a plan that amounted to a Carthaginian peace of the very sort St. Augustine decried in his reflections on the obliteration of Carthage by the Romans, a peace that offered no hope to the vanquished, a peace, as St. Augustine saw it, bereft of any moral quotient, a peace that disgraced the victors.2

  Churchill found this troubling. He envisioned the special relationship between Britain and America as forming the backbone of postwar European stability. Churchill, knowing that postwar Britain would not wield anything like the power of prewar Britain, and knowing that Russia would emerge as the greatest continental power, believed that if America intended to play no role, European salvation lay with the old diplomatic standby: spheres of influence. Roosevelt and Hull loathed any arrangement that smacked of European spheres of influence, believing, as had Woodrow Wilson, that they led ultimately to war. Churchill, with his eye on Greece, had just proposed to Stalin a division of labor in the region: Britain would manage Greek affairs, while Stalin would manage Romanian. It was an understanding between gentlemen. On June 1, Churchill asked Roosevelt for his blessing, and assured the president that Britain and Russia “do not of course wish to carve the Balkans into spheres of influence.” Yet that is exactly what Churchill and Stalin were edging toward, on Churchill’s part because Greece was an ally, and on Stalin’s part because Romania was an enemy. The two leaders indeed had “interests” in the region.3

  As he had for a decade, and as he would in coming years, Churchill saw Britain as being in Europe, yet not fully “in.” It was as he had told Stalin in 1940: Britain lay just off the west coast of Europe (as Asiatic Russia lay just beyond the eastern reaches). As he had for four years, Churchill believed European peace and security could best be guaranteed through regional European councils and federations, including a Danubian federation in central Europe, and a Balkan council in that region. Central to Churchill’s vision for Western European security, recalled his son-in-law Lord Soames, was “France taking Germany by the hand and leading her back into the community of nations.” But Roosevelt held France, and especially de Gaulle, in something approaching contempt, while Morgenthau wanted to take Germany by the neck, and wring it.4

  Later in the summer, delegates from thirty-nine allied nations met at the Dumbarton Oaks conference, held at a Federal-style mansion in Washington, DC, that had once belonged to South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun and since 1940 had housed a Harvard University research center. There Roosevelt’s “blueprint” was used to lay the groundwork for the “United Nations Organization,” including a General Assembly and Security Council where the Four Powers would sit, joined by three other nations on a rotating basis. The Russians insisted that they be granted sixteen seats in the General Assembly, one for each Soviet republic. The Americans replied that in that case, the United States should have forty-eight seats. The Americans proposed that each permanent member of the Security Council have a veto, but also barred any party with a dispute before the Security Council from voting on it. The Russians objected to the implication that the Security Council might pass judgment on one of its own members. The Americans had no ready reply. The questions were left unresolved. France was excluded from the parley, rightly so, claimed Senator Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, because Britain, Russia, China, and the United States had “shed their blood for the rest of the world, while France has played the role of only a minor state in this war.” In London the European Advisory Commission had been sitting for over a year, its American, British, and Russian delegates studying questions of how best to deal with a defeated Germany. France—de Gaulle—had been excluded from any role.5

  The war was not being fought to determine who fielded the strongest armies. Politics—interests—underlay the war, in the Clausewitzian sense, as it did all wars. This was why Churchill had reached out to Tito, and why he took in the wayward Romanian king, and insinuated HMG into Greek affairs, and grudgingly tolerated de Gaulle. He was positioning Britain for the future in those areas of Europe that he saw as critical to British interests. Stalin was doing much the same. And that was why Churchill had been trying to draw Roosevelt into a postwar role in Europe. If not America, who? The answer was self-evident: the Soviet Union. The writer and political commentator Walter Lippmann published a slim but important volume that summer, U.S. War Aims, in which he foresaw the implications of the power shifts taking place. Spheres of influence were a reality, he argued. After the war, America, splendidly protected by the moats of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, would need to protect the perimeters of its sphere—in Asia (where the restored European colonies would serve as buffer to China), and especially in the Atlantic. Anticipating NATO by five years, Lippmann argued that the Atlantic now assumed the central role in global politics that the Mediterranean had played for two thousand years. To secure the Atlan
tic in alliance with Western European democracies would ensure that all of Western Europe formed a cordon sanitaire between the U.S. sphere and the Russian. This, Lippmann argued, would make war between the two powers “a virtual impossibility.” This was so, he wrote, because neither side could conceivably put an army into the other’s heartland and no other technology existed that might alter the military balance in a war.6

  Lippmann’s “safety-in-distance” reasoning came undone a year later in a sunburst of atomic energy in the New Mexico desert. But his prediction of the Atlantic’s centricity in American affairs was prescient. His proposed alliances with Western European nations to safeguard America’s interests brought some comfort to Churchill, who sought some form of union with America. Yet Taft Republicans hated the word “alliance” as much as one-worlders hated the word “sovereignty.”

  Thus, if Hitler was defeated by October, as many in Washington and London believed, no plan whatsoever was in place to safeguard and rebuild Europe. October was just sixteen weeks distant.

  Early on June 9, Ultra revealed the unsettling news that Hitler had ordered his Fifteenth Army from the Pas de Calais to Normandy, and also ordered two panzer divisions rushed from Poland to Normandy. This was the hammer blow the Allies most feared. A panzer division and a brigade of SS Hitler Youth were already pounding Montgomery’s positions near Caen, with another panzer division on the way. Yet another panzer division was hitting the Americans near Carentan. The arrival of the Fifteenth Army and more panzers could doom the invasion. Then, late on the ninth, Ultra revealed one of the most welcome Führer directives of the war: Hitler, still suspicious that the Pas de Calais might be the real Allied target, rescinded his orders (OKW knew that George Patton and the Third Army were not in Normandy and concluded they might be heading for the Pas de Calais). Dumbfounded by Berlin’s change of mind, von Rundstedt and Rommel considered resigning. The next day Montgomery declared the beachhead secure, the eleven-mile gap between the British and American beaches having been closed. For Churchill, Montgomery’s assessment amounted to the unofficial opening of the summer travel season. The Old Man called Brooke and proposed they meet Monty at Montgomery’s Normandy headquarters on Monday, the twelfth. They were going back to France.7

  Despite Montgomery’s declaration, Churchill feared a “crystallization of a front in France” and the subsequent repetition of the horrors of the Great War, a concern, recalled Harriman, shared by Roosevelt. In static lines Churchill saw the potential for slaughter. So, too, did Rommel, but the slaughter of the invader, on or near the beaches. A few days after D-day, as the beachhead slowly widened and deepened, General Ian Jacob found Churchill in the map room pondering large charts of Normandy. How soon after all of the Allied divisions are fully ashore, Churchill asked, will the battle lines stabilize? They most likely will not, replied Jacob, until the Allies reach the Rhine. Such large-scale fluidity of entire armies ran counter to the Old Man’s Great War experience. He had known all along that many men would die on the beaches, and if not on the beaches, then in the bocage in the following days and weeks. Even if the lines did not stabilize, and the Allies advanced as Jacob predicted, there would be slaughter, and it would only increase as Allied armies neared the German homeland. Churchill knew the veracity of Marlborough’s admonition to his cautious Dutch ally during their war against the French: the pursuit of absolute victory without slaughter will, in the long run, result in slaughter without victory.8

  The maps Churchill gazed at were marked by “phase lines,” series of concentric rings running inland from the beaches like ripples on a pond. They marked the timetable for the planned expansion of the beachhead in the days and weeks following D-day. Each line carried a notation of D + and a number. Caen, for example, was to be taken on D-day, and bridgeheads to be thrown east across the Orne River by D + 1. By D + 9, the lodgment was to be more than eighty miles wide and a dozen deep. By D + 17 (June 23), the entire Cotentin Peninsula, including Cherbourg, was to be secure. By then the Allies expected to hold a line stretching from south of Caen near Falaise, west through Vire, and ending at Granville on the Bay of Biscay. At that point, the plan called for a wheeling breakout by D + 20 from the western (American) flank, while the British and Canadians pivoted on the eastern, Caen flank. By D + 40, the Allies hoped to be halfway to the Loire. Somewhere near that date, the Anvil landing would take place, with the objective of driving up the Rhone Valley to Lyon and on to Dijon, there to make contact with the Normandy forces driving east. By D + 90, the British would be across the Seine and facing the Low Countries, with the Americans on the right facing Verdun. Such was the grand plan. Both Eisenhower and Montgomery later wrote that all of the Overlord objectives were met. They were, but the timetable was not. The lines indeed stabilized, slowly and steadily. During the first few days, the delays could be measured in hours, as could be expected for such a supremely complex operation. Yet, as happens to a navigator whose course is off by just a degree, time and distance have a way of turning small variances into very large errors.9

  Eisenhower knew this. On June 10, meeting with the American Chiefs, who had arrived the day before, he put to them almost the same question Churchill had asked Jacob, what to do if a “stabilization” of the lines took place? Sixteen Allied divisions—four hundred thousand men—were now ashore. But at least six panzer divisions and the Fifteenth Army (if Hitler again changed his mind) presented a real threat. Eisenhower set his SHAEF planning staff to work to find a solution. George Marshall had come to London not to discuss options, but to demand that Anvil, the Marseilles landing conceived as a complement to the hammer of Overlord, be carried out as soon as possible. But after just two meetings between the British and Americans, Marshall conceded that Anvil could take place only when conditions were right. This was fine with Brooke, but only if Anvil did not come at the expense of Italian operations. To throttle Alexander’s momentum, Brooke told his diary later in the month, would be “madness.”10

  The fall of Rome and the D-day landings triggered the need for a final decision on Anvil. That, in turn, triggered a crisis in the Allied ranks. Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff all agreed that the only military objective was to defeat Germany as quickly as possible. But they disagreed on how best to meet that objective. Eisenhower’s overriding concern was to reinforce and supply Overlord. He was open to alternatives to Anvil, including Caliph, the infusion of troops into the Bordeaux ports. He was willing to consider allowing Alexander to exploit his Italian victories in order to draw more Germans away from France. His was a strictly military objective, and yet he possessed the sharp political skills needed to bring it off, for Churchill and Marshall brought both military and political perspectives—and talents—to the table. Marshall had promised Stalin Anvil at Tehran, in part because of Stalin’s transparent political discomfort with his Western allies appearing on his flanks (within his sphere of influence) by driving north through Austria, as Churchill advocated. Churchill’s strategy was as political as Stalin’s; he wanted to get to middle Europe before the Soviets did. Brooke, like Eisenhower, took a strictly military position, but one at odds with Ike’s. Anvil formed Churchill’s penultimate great strategic debate of the war; the last debate came in the final weeks of the conflict when Eisenhower refused to strike toward Berlin. To be sure, Eisenhower and Montgomery soon differed over a broad-front or narrow-front strategy as the best way to get across the Rhine and to the Elbe, but that was for the two commanders to debate and resolve in coming months.

  “Now,” Brooke told his diary on June 11, Marshall finally saw the wisdom of the Italian operations Brooke had championed for a year. He added, “I do not believe he [Marshall] has any strategic vision whatsoever.” Eisenhower’s support of Anvil was conditional; if the Normandy beachhead did not expand according to the timetable, a Brittany landing would put reinforcements next to Bradley and the First Army. If the Allies broke out of Normandy, Anvil might be the better choice. Ike, wisely, wanted to wait and see. M
arshall, on the other hand, backed Anvil unconditionally. But after five days of talks between June 9 and 13, the Combined Chiefs arrived at a decision satisfactory to all.11

  It took the form of a directive to Eisenhower and Jumbo Wilson, commander in chief of the Mediterranean theater. The directive held that all Allied forces should be deployed “to assist in the success of Operation Overlord.” To that end, three amphibious options in support of Overlord were to be considered, and the best one selected: the choices were Brittany; the south of France; or the head of the Adriatic, with the dual objective there of cutting off Kesselring in Italy and then racing to Vienna. Option three invited trouble, which duly arrived not long after the ink dried. Field Marshal Alexander and Jumbo Wilson endorsed the Adriatic operation, code-named Armpit, no doubt by the Americans. Anvil, meanwhile, was soon rechristened Dragoon, no doubt by the British. Churchill, who believed that too much miscellaneous equipment was going ashore, argued that wherever the Allies went, they should be filling the landing crafts with fighting men and bayonets rather than “dental chairs and Y.M.C.A. institutions.”12

  By the twelfth, when Churchill and Brooke crossed the Channel on board the destroyer HMS Kelvin, the Allies were a few days behind schedule, yet not distressingly so. Men and supplies were pouring in through the Mulberries; the Germans had virtually no presence in the air. Still, progress had been so minimal that Churchill had to take his picnic lunch with the sea at his back, just four miles behind the front lines. There, Montgomery displayed his maps and again stressed his strategy, arrived at in January, to draw the Germans to his front in order that the Americans could swing out from their zone. Brooke was taken not only with Montgomery’s expert presentation but by the fact that the French countryside looked remarkably undisturbed after five years of German occupation and five weeks of Allied bombardment. Churchill described the situation thus: “We are surrounded by fat cattle lying in luscious pastures with their paws crossed.” He reboarded Kelvin late in the afternoon, and after a short cruise up and down the beach during which Kelvin fired a few salvos toward the German lines for Churchill’s benefit, the ship turned for England. The last time he departed France, five years earlier, he told Ismay that they likely had but three months to live.13