The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Just before midnight that night, as Churchill and Brooke neared London aboard Churchill’s train, the first pilotless German bombs lifted off from their ramps in Belgium and northern France. They flew at between three thousand and four thousand feet and at speeds around 350 miles per hour. Each carried a 1,875-pound high-explosive warhead. They were all targeted on Tower Bridge, but only four of the twenty-seven that were launched hit Greater London that night and early on the thirteenth. Some fell into the sea, and others veered off course over the English countryside, a trend that continued for the next month when out of 2,754 flying bombs that hit Britain, only 800 hit Greater London. Most were catapulted from the ramps the RAF had been targeting for months; some were launched from Heinkel 111s, to little effect.

  They were devilish devices, propelled by a pulse-jet engine that worked by alternately gulping compressed air and jet fuel, which accounted for the pulsing, throaty thrump, thrump, thrump, thrump as they rumbled overhead. Their most sinister feature (aside from the payload) was the terrifying screech they made as they fell to ground. Their targeting was rudimentary. A miniature propeller (a vane anemometer) on the nose of each bomb was preset to spin a certain number of times (based on distance and air speed) between launch and London. When the preset number of revolutions was reached, the propeller tripped the diving controls, putting the bomb into a nosedive. The screech—or buzz—of the falling bomb was a result of the engine stalling during the dive, an unintended design consequence of the weapon. Thus, as Londoners fast learned, as long as you could hear the damnable things passing overhead, you were safe. If you heard the engine stop, you were in trouble. Berlin called the bombs the vengeance weapon, V-1 for short. Londoners anointed them doodlebugs and buzz bombs.14

  On the third night of the attacks, Duff Cooper dined at the Dorchester with Lady Cunard, who, as she had during the Blitz, refused to leave her apartment. Told by Cooper that the new attacks were being carried out by pilotless planes, she claimed that was impossible and that anyone who believed “such rubbish” was stupid. A hotel servant who overheard the conversation offered that the pilotless planes were a good sign, “as it proved how short of men the Germans were, that they were obliged to send their aeroplanes over empty.” During a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff on June 19, Churchill decreed that henceforth the weapons would no longer be called “pilotless planes” but “flying bombs.” Brooke found Churchill “in very good form” that night, “quite 10 years younger, all due to the fact that the flying bombs have again put us into the front line!!”15

  The arrival of the flying bombs marked the start of a new era, soon anointed the “rocket age,” a concept made all the more horrifying by virtue of the fact that Hitler—and only Hitler—had all the rockets. During the next four weeks, the 2,754 V-1s that hit Britain killed 2,752 Britons and destroyed more than eight thousand houses. That ratio continued into early August, by which time, Churchill told the House, “5,735 of these robots have been launched upon us, killing 4,735 persons, with 14,000 more or less seriously injured.” He told the House that while he was touring a wrecked neighborhood, an old man asked him, “ ‘What are you going to do about it?’ I replied, we have never failed yet. He seemed contented with the reply. That is the only promise I can make.” The need to bomb the V-1 launch sites in northern France disrupted operations in Normandy, and reduced the number of missions over Germany. Still, where Hitler delivered 4,500 tons of explosives to Britain that summer, the British and Americans dropped 48,000 tons on Germany, but at a terrible cost of more than 14,000 flyers killed or missing. The V-1s did not kill many, but coming as they did hourly, day after day, week after week, they set everyone’s nerves on edge. “I am sure of one thing,” Churchill told the House, “that London will never be conquered and will never fail, and that her renown, triumphing over every ordeal, will long shine among men.” But, as Brooke told his diary, “The danger really lies in the flying rocket with a 5-ton warhead.” This was the V-2, which the British high command—but not the British people—knew was coming, and soon.16

  As the buzz bombs came on, the battle of the beachhead turned into a stalemate, and the alliance itself appeared poised to self-destruct. The core dispute was over Anvil, the secondary invasion of France. After being guided by Eisenhower and Brooke to a wait-and-see attitude toward Anvil, Marshall had journeyed to Italy in mid-June, where he learned from Alexander and Wilson that they were keen on the Adriatic operation. His response, and that of the other American Chiefs, was to harden their stance. Anvil must go forward, sometime in August at the latest. Now what had been a debate turned into a crisis. Alexander and Churchill argued to the British Chiefs of Staff for the Adriatic plan. Brooke dismissed any strike toward Vienna as “wild hopes,” not least because such an operation could not start until September and they would then “embark on a campaign through the Alps in winter!” At a June 21 meeting, Churchill, “who had evidently been lunching very well,” Brooke wrote, “meandered for ¾ hours producing a lot of disconnected thoughts which had no military value.” Over the next few days Churchill and the British chiefs drafted separate but almost identical memos for Roosevelt and his chiefs that called for no diminution in Alexander’s forces; that is, they implicitly called for the cancellation of Anvil. On June 27, the importance the British attached to Italy appeared to be validated by an Ultra decrypt that revealed Hitler’s intent to defend the northern Apennines, since a breakthrough there would have “incalculable military and political consequences.” Churchill argued in his long memo that Overlord could be nourished without stripping Alexander’s army. He ended with “Let us not wreck one great campaign for the sake of winning the other.” Roosevelt’s reply, Brooke wrote, was “a rude one at that.” The Americans insisted that Anvil be “carried out at once.” And the most unseemly part of Roosevelt’s reply in Brooke’s estimation was his last paragraph: “Finally for pure political considerations over here I would never survive even a slight setback in Overlord if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”17

  Yet the British had not argued for a diversion but wanted only to press on in Italy. Churchill drafted an angry response, including the line: “The whole campaign in Italy is being ruined, and ruined for what?” For, as he saw it, ten mostly untrained divisions, including seven French made up mostly of black North Africans, to advance “up the Rhone Valley about five months hence.” He offered to fly to Washington, Bermuda, Quebec, wherever Roosevelt would meet him, in order to resolve the deadlock. In the end, he did not send the cable. He had no leverage. As Brooke put it to Churchill on June 30, it came down to essentially telling the Americans, “All right, if you insist on being damned fools, sooner than falling out with you, which would be fatal, we should be damned fools with you, and we shall see that we perform the role of damned fools damned well.”18

  By mid-June the war in the east had remained relatively dormant for six weeks. With the Eastern Front stabilized, the Russians faced a strategic dilemma as to how to deal with the three German Army Groups they faced: North, Center, and South. To continue the attack in the southernmost sector held the promise of striking deeper into Romania on a track for Bucharest, Belgrade, and Budapest. Yet by virtue of a huge salient that Army Group Center had forged beyond Minsk, such a course would leave the right flank of the Red Army exposed. Similarly, in the north, if the Red Army struck out westward from Estonia toward Riga with the Baltic on its right, it would find its left threatened by Army Group Center. Neither strategy would result in the Red Army taking a direct bearing on Berlin; the southern strategy would grind to an end in the Balkans, the northern in East Prussia.19

  Most significant, if Hitler took the strategically correct course and pulled in his northern and southern flanks, as well as the Minsk salient, he could establish a defensive line strong enough to prolong the war indefinitely in both the east and west. If Hitler folded Army Group North three hundred miles back to Königsberg and ran his line due south through Brest-Litovsk to
Kovel and the Carpathians, he would cut the length of his front in half and effectively double his strength. He could then contemplate shifting some his 166 divisions in the east to the west, a prospect that troubled Washington and London, and especially Montgomery, who for three weeks after the D-day landings expected a counterattack but did not know when or in what strength. The possible consequences of a German counterattack to the Red Army and the Anglo-American forces were vastly different. Punching holes in the Red Army lines was like digging on a beach; the next wave erases the effort. If Hitler wiped out thirty Soviet divisions, Stalin would replace them. But if he wiped out half of the twenty-five Allied divisions that were in France by late June, he would fling the Allies from the Continent. Sound strategy called for Hitler to do just that, to tighten his eastern line and concentrate his western armies against the invader.

  But, like Napoleon, Hitler could not bear to exchange conquered territory for security. To not do so was a faulty strategy, and, as Brooke put it, the Germans “were bound to pay the penalty” for it. The Russian high command had concluded in May that the key to opening the entire Eastern Front was to destroy Army Group Center, which still occupied the most critical sector of historic White Russia and blocked the roads to Warsaw and Berlin. The Russian operation was code-named Bagration, after Pyotr Bagration, a hero of Russia’s 1812 repulse of Napoleon. Stalin personally chose the day of attack: June 22, the third anniversary of Hitler’s plunge into Russia. To put the Germans off the scent, the Soviets conducted a disinformation campaign consisting of false radio signals that indicated a massive buildup of Soviet artillery and armored units south of the Pripet Marshes, which led the Wehrmacht to conclude that the main attack would come in the southern Ukraine. Then, to further muddle German thinking, on June 11 the Red Army struck out from the Leningrad sector into Finland. This assault was conducted with two objectives in mind: to serve notice to the Finns that their doom was nigh, and to keep Hitler wondering if the Soviets and British might be on the verge of launching dual operations through Finland and Norway for the purposes of cutting off Germany’s supply of Swedish iron ore. The Führer now kept seven divisions in Finland and twelve in Norway against that possibility. From the Allied perspective, the more Hitler scattered his forces, the better the chances for success in Normandy and on the Eastern Front.20

  As the date for Bagration neared, Montgomery found himself in virtually the same place he had been since D-day. He had planned to take Caen on D-day and then drive his armies east, with the Channel on his left and the Americans on his right, destination, the Seine. Failing to do so, he was forced to change his strategy. Rather than strike Caen, he allowed the Germans to punch themselves out at his front. Still, sooner or later (and Churchill was wary of anything that smacked of “later”), Caen would be the hinge upon which the entire plan turned. The American role was to break out from their beaches, take Cherbourg to the west, and swing around south and east to cover Montgomery’s right flank. But Rommel and the weather disrupted the plans. On June 19, the worst Channel storm in four decades blew for four days, destroying the Omaha Beach Mulberry harbor and bringing the war in Normandy to a halt. Eisenhower later called the action during June and July “The Battle of the Beachhead.” Had the master plan gone as planned, the battle would have been over by the time Churchill made his visit on June 12.

  The Channel storm was still raging on June 22, when on the Eastern Front a far more murderous storm broke at dawn as Operation Bagration kicked off. So effective was the Soviet misinformation campaign that only 37 weakly supported German divisions along the five-hundred-mile Minsk salient found themselves facing 166 Red Army divisions supported by 2,700 battle tanks and 1,300 field guns. The results were immediate, and staggering; the Red Army pushed one hundred miles west within days. Three weeks later, on July 11, another entire Soviet army hooked south under the Pripet Marshes on a general heading for Cracow. The Western press proclaimed Germany to be finished but for the formalities. A Kansas City Star headline brayed RED SPEED STUNS NAZIS, YANKS STRIKE IN FRANCE. In fact, the Germans had conceded the Cotentin Peninsula to the Americans. The Yanks took Cherbourg on June 25 after the German commander—ordered by Hitler to fight to the last man—asked his American counterpart to fire one artillery round at the main gate in order to preserve German honor. The Americans fired, and honor preserved, the Germans surrendered. Along the rest of the Normandy front the Allies had not advanced much beyond the beaches. Monty finally took Caen on July 9—D + 33—after bombing it almost to powder on July 8. That week George Patton and the first units of his Third Army—whose whereabouts vexed the Germans—landed in Normandy. That night was the last one of favorable moon and tides for an invasion at Calais; given that no Allied army appeared there, the Germans should have concluded that Patton was headed elsewhere, probably to Normandy. They did not.21

  By then von Rundstedt no longer commanded the armies to Montgomery’s front. In late June, with the Cotentin taken, von Rundstedt told his superiors that any counterattack on the British sector was bound to fail. “What should we do?” asked OKW’s Keitel. Replied von Rundstedt: “Make peace, you fools, what else can you do?” On July 1, von Rundstedt was forced into an early retirement. His replacement, Field Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge, a hero of the Russian battles and a born fighter, arrived on the scene full of fire in his belly. He castigated Rommel for his lack of initiative, and announced his intention to attack. But after his first visit to the front, he realized how desperate the situation really was. Von Kluge also carried a secret. For almost two years, a group of anti-Hitler conspirators had sought his support in a plot to kill the Führer. It was their understanding that von Kluge had agreed to join the plot, but only after Hitler was dead. Rommel, too, was aware of the plot. Not reporting that information to authorities was no less treasonous than joining the plot.22

  The Red Army, in the six weeks between June 22 and the last week of July, smashed more than two hundred miles west—in the center to the east bank of the Vistula and the outskirts of Warsaw, in the north to the borders of East Prussia, and in the south to northern Bukovina and the Hungarian frontier. Operation Bagration occupies little space in the collective memory of the West, where Normandy, the Ardennes Bulge, and Dunkirk have assumed sacred status, yet Bagration, more than any other action that year, served to put Germany down on one knee. Churchill did not even name the battle in the final volume of his war history, where he wrote with stupendous understatement, “The Russian summer offensive brought their armies in late July to the river Vistula.” Yet, Churchill was one with many in the West in his inability or unwillingness to grant Bagration its due. During those late June and July weeks when the Red Army swept through an area about the size of Great Britain (north to south and east to west), the Anglo-Americans were still fighting the Battle of the Beachhead on a front only a few miles deep and eighty miles wide, in a swath of Normandy about the size of Cape Cod.23

  On July 20, Churchill visited Cherbourg and Utah Beach before moving on to visit Montgomery’s positions over the next two days. He had notified Montgomery that he’d be coming, which led Monty to ask Eisenhower to keep visitors away at all costs. Montgomery’s planned breakout, code-named Cobra—a sweep to the Brittany ports and an envelopment of the Germans at Bradley’s front—was set to start within days.

  Churchill’s reaction to Montgomery’s query to Ike was to summon Brooke and fly into “an unholy rage” over Monty’s insubordination. “And who is Your Monty that he thinks he can dictate to me? Who does he think he is, trying to stop the Prime Minister from visiting?” It was now D + 44, and the Allied armies were not that much farther away from the beaches than they had been on his first visit of June 12. Churchill, fed up, told Eisenhower that he would support him in any decision having to do with relieving British generals who did not live up to Ike’s expectations. Although Eisenhower, too, was losing patience with Monty, he had no intention of relieving Britain’s revered hero of Alamein. Still, on July 20, Eisenhow
er’s naval aide, Commander Butcher, told his diary that Ike was “blue as indigo over Monty’s slowdown.” The problem, as Eisenhower saw it, was that Montgomery’s stated strategy of letting Rommel punch himself out against the British and Canadians depended upon Rommel’s following the script. He wasn’t doing that. “Rommel knew that play by heart,” Butcher wrote. He simply kept his panzers out of range of Montgomery’s artillery. Butcher did not know that Rommel was no longer in Normandy; he had been injured when an Allied fighter strafed his car on July17, and he was on his way to a hospital in Germany. In any event, another week of foul weather delayed Montgomery’s Operation Cobra. Still, though Eisenhower was not about to relieve Monty, he was so fed up with the general that he asked Churchill “to persuade Monty to get on his bicycle and start moving.”24