The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  The readmission of Italy to the regional community of nations also came in for Churchill’s scrutiny. He wanted the process to be gradual, and controlled from Washington and London, for the Italians had committed vile deeds. Yet he wanted the process to continue. “He was like a dog on a bone” over the matter, Harold Macmillan told his diary, adding, after listening to a long dissertation on Italy by Churchill, “Winston gave a really remarkable demonstration of his powers.” Over dinner with Macmillan he advised, “We should be guided by the precept of Machiavelli that, if one has benefits to confer, they should not be conferred all at once.”39

  It was a working holiday. He took four dips in the sea, including one at the Blue Grotto, and thoroughly enjoyed several outings with Alexander during which he fired a howitzer (missing the target), toured the Cassino battlefields, and witnessed a firefight between German and Allied forces from just five hundred yards away. The firing was “desultory and intermittent,” he later wrote, “but this was the nearest I got to the enemy… and heard the most bullets in World War Two.” He could not let go of his Viennese ambitions, telling dinner guests one evening that the full-scale assault on the Gothic Line that Alexander planned to launch on August 26 might result in a breakthrough that would allow the Allies to “swing to the right, overcome Austria, and so change history.” When days earlier Roosevelt informed him that a conference was on for September in Quebec, Churchill had replied that he sought to put the Adriatic amphibious operation on the agenda. It was not to be. The Balkans and Eastern Europe held no promise—other than the promise of trouble—for Roosevelt and America.40

  Years later, Malcolm Muggeridge, veteran of MI6, editor of Punch, and a frequent and sometimes vicious critic of Churchill, sided with the Old Man on the Aegean/Vienna strategy. “If he [Churchill] had had Roosevelt’s support that could have altered the whole war.” After the collapse of Italy, “there was nothing to stop them [an Allied thrust north], absolutely nothing…. All those populations [in Austria, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria] wanted someone to come in there before the Russians came. They didn’t give a damn as long as it wasn’t the Russians.” But it was the Russians, and they were coming.41

  On August 15, Churchill watched the Dragoon landings from the deck of the Royal Navy destroyer Kimberly. Three American divisions went ashore in St. Tropez Bay, near Marseilles, and seven French divisions soon followed. Days earlier, during a short boat trip across Naples Bay, Churchill waved to American soldiers on board their landing ships and sailing for France. He later wrote, “They did not know that if I had had my way they would be sailing in a different direction.” The glittering prize of Austria was all but lost. Still, Churchill told Alexander that even if the war came to an early end, he should make “ready for a dash with armoured cars” to Vienna.42

  In France the breakout phase was over; the pursuit phase had begun. Patton’s Third Army took Orleans on August 17. On August 23, the resistance in Paris staged a general uprising. On the twenty-fifth, after two days of gun battles in the streets, the Germans withdrew, a maneuver that spared Paris. Leclerc and his 2nd Armored Division liberated the City of Light that day, while de Gaulle, with a thespian’s timing, arrived that afternoon at the Ministry of War. Inspecting the premises, he found nothing missing after four years of occupation “except the state. It was my duty to restore it: I installed my staff at once and got down to work.”43

  By the time Churchill returned to London on August 29, Montgomery had pushed the Germans back across the Belgian border and captured almost all of the V-1 launch sites. On August 31, Patton’s spearheads crossed the Meuse River at Verdun. Three days later, elements of the American First Army captured Namur, one hundred miles to the north. During the last week of August, Hitler ordered 20,000 slave laborers to reinforce the Westwall, which the Allies referred to by its Great War name, the Siegfried Line, consisting of four hundred miles of bunkers and anti-tank ditches that faced the old Maginot Line and ran along the Belgian and Dutch borders all the way to the Rhine.

  In early September, the American First Army probed the Siegfried Line in the Eifel, the low range of mountains that spread from east Belgium into western Germany. Patton, by then, had pushed on another thirty-five miles to the Moselle, just thirty miles from the German frontier and the great industrial area of the Saar, and just one hundred miles from the Rhine. But so rapid had been his charge that Patton’s main forces had run out of gasoline. His six strong divisions faced five weak German divisions, but he could not take the fight to them. Meanwhile, the British freed Brussels on September 3 and Antwerp the next day (but not the Scheldt Estuary, the gateway to the port), also less than one hundred miles from the Rhine, and the Ruhr, the heart of German industry. On this flank the British faced a gap almost one hundred miles wide; no Germans were available to fill it. “Rarely in any war,” Liddell Hart later wrote, “has there been such an opportunity.” To Montgomery, promoted to field marshal on September 1, Churchill cabled: “How wonderful it is to see our people leaping out at last after all their hard struggles.” On that day, Eisenhower took over direct command of the battle from Monty. Eisenhower’s decision to assume the dual role of supreme commander of air, sea, ground, and air forces “is likely,” Brooke wrote, “to add 3 to 6 months on to the war!”44

  In the east, the Red Army remained halted outside Warsaw but had driven into Finland. There Marshal Mannerheim, who had replaced Risto Ryti as president in mid-August, was negotiating a peace treaty with Moscow, which was signed on September 19. In the south, the Red Army had smashed into Romania, where, after King Michael ousted Antonescu in a coup on August 23, the Romanians quit the Axis. At a stroke Hitler had lost—and Stalin gained—twenty Romanian divisions in front of the Red Army, and thirty more in Romania. When the front collapsed, the roads opened to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and Hungary beyond.

  Bulgaria was next. The economy was in ruins; food prices had risen 700 percent since 1939. Consumer goods were nonexistent. Berlin had forced Bulgaria, an unenthusiastic partner from the start, to convert its industry to armaments production. But the Bulgarians had served Hitler well by embracing their role in the occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece, where they were known to take pleasure in torturing captured partisans. A story made the rounds that they had tied prisoners to the open tops of corrugated barrels and lit fires under them. To the House, Churchill condemned the Bulgarians and the “wickedness for which they have been responsible both in Greece and Yugoslavia. They have suffered nothing themselves. No foot has been set upon their soil…. The conduct of their troops in harrying and trying to hold down, at Hitler’s orders, their two sorely pressed small neighbours, Greece and Yugoslavia, is a shameful page for which full atonement must be exacted.” Since April, Moscow had been pressuring the Bulgarians to quit the Axis, but they could not as long as Hitler’s armies were closer at hand than the Red Army. On September 8, with the Red Army almost at the border, Bulgaria’s new prime minister, Konstantin Muraviev, declared for the Allies. The Red Army crossed the border the next day and within a week had rolled across the country, putting Stalin’s armies just two hundred miles from the Adriatic. By late September, Stalin’s bulwark against any future threat from the West was taking shape. Churchill was likewise trying to build his bulwark against Russia on the northern Mediterranean littoral. And Hitler, but for his fanatical Austrian Nazis, was now virtually alone.45

  On the homeward-bound flight from Naples to Britain, Churchill spiked a temperature of 103 degrees. A large party that included Clementine, Jock Colville, and the Chiefs of Staff awaited his arrival at Northolt airfield. But upon landing, Moran bundled up his charge and rushed him from the aircraft to a waiting car, which sped off to London. The Old Man’s temperature hit 104. An X-ray revealed a spot on his lungs; his pneumonia had returned for a third time. Again Moran paraded out the M&B doses and again Churchill took to his sickbed, this time at the Annexe. His recovery was swift; by September 1 his temperature was normal; Colville noted he had cleaned up his b
ox and was “in tearing form.” On September 4, Churchill, infuriated by Stalin’s treatment of the Warsaw partisans, sent Roosevelt a copy of a telegram that had gone off to Stalin in which Churchill noted the slaughter in Warsaw (the Germans were now murdering doctors, nurses, and patients in the city’s hospital), adding that if the Warsaw Poles were overwhelmed, and it appeared they would be, “the shock to public opinion here will be incalculable.” When Stalin made no reply, Churchill proposed cutting off convoys to Russia but was persuaded by Eden that to do so would only further hurt the Poles. Stalin’s armies were legitimately in need of refit and resupply; to cease the convoys would only delay that effort. Days earlier Moran had told his diary, “Winston never talks of Hitler these days; he is always harping on the dangers of communism. He dreams of the Red Army spreading like a cancer from one country to another. It has become an obsession, and he seems to think of nothing else.” Churchill intended to address those concerns, and more, with Roosevelt at the upcoming conference in Quebec.46

  The skies over Britain had been empty of V-1 flying bombs for four days by the time Churchill boarded the Queen Mary at Greenock on September 5, bound for Quebec. Of slightly more than 10,000 V-1s launched toward Britain, 7,488 had crossed the Channel. Of those, more than 3,900 were shot down; 2,419 reached Greater London, killing more than 6,000 and injuring more than 18,000. On September 7, Duncan Sandys told reporters, “Except for a last few shots, the Battle of London is over.”

  Sandys’s pronouncement was about as wrong as wrong can be. Early the next evening, the first two V-2 rockets fell in Greater London. They measured forty-six feet high, weighed fourteen tons at launch, and flew at more than 3,600 miles an hour, propelled by liquid oxygen and a three-to-one alcohol-to-water mixture. Launched from near The Hague, they covered the two hundred miles to London in just under five minutes. Outrunning their own concussive sound, they descended in silence at almost two thousand miles per hour; their roar, like a freight train overhead, arrived only after they detonated. Their 2,200-pound warhead could eradicate a city block. HMG, not wanting to tell the Germans if their targeting was effective, did not announce the assaults and instead told Britons that gas mains had exploded, a story HMG held to for weeks, even as Britons put two and two together when “gas mains” began erupting at the rate of five a day.47

  By September 8, Churchill and the Queen Mary, with four thousand passengers on board, including wounded American soldiers, were more than halfway across the Atlantic. Clementine and Sarah made the trip, as did Jock Colville, Lord Moran, favored science adviser Lord Cherwell, and a vast number of British military representatives. The Queen took a southerly route in order to avoid any lurking U-boats, and thus the passengers found themselves sweltering in the Gulf Stream as temperatures reached eighty degrees, which to an Englishman is a heat wave. Churchill, still under the weather as result of his large doses of M&B, passed the time playing bezique and reading Phineas Finn and The Duke’s Children. He did not prepare for the upcoming conference, to Brooke’s chagrin. At meals he waxed pessimistic on the postwar world. He would miss none of his Labour colleagues except Bevin—“mediocrities,” he called them—if they bolted the coalition. And if he was voted out of office: “What is good enough for the English people is good enough for me.” Dark days were ahead, he pronounced over dinner one evening. Peace would find consumer goods in short supply, Britain in dire financial straits. All he wanted to do was get the soldiers home and see to it that they had houses. And, he said, “The idea that you can vote yourself into prosperity is one of the most ludicrous that was ever entertained.”48

  The menu at one dinner included oysters, roast turkey, ice cream, cantaloupe, and Stilton cheese, “all washed down by a remarkable Liebfraumilch, followed by 1870 brandy; all of which,” Colville wrote, “made the conversation about the shortage of consumer goods a shade unreal.” All noted Churchill’s lethargy as the Queen drove west. Brooke: “He [Churchill] looked old, unwell, and depressed. Evidently he found it hard to concentrate and kept holding his head between his hands.” Lord Moran told Colville he did not give Churchill a long life, and, Colville wrote, “he thinks when he goes it will either be a stroke or the heart trouble” that had first showed itself in the White House in 1941 and then again at Carthage in 1943. “May he at least live to see victory,” Colville told his diary, adding, “Perhaps it would be well that he should escape the aftermath.”49

  The Château Frontenac and the Citadel were again taken over by Anglo-American luminaries, both military and civilian. The setting was familiar, but the business at hand was new. The Quebec conference (code-named Octagon) was more about managing the peace than winning the war—how best to keep Germany down once it was defeated, and how best to coordinate Allied forces in the Pacific. It had been nine months since Churchill had said his good-byes to Roosevelt in Cairo, their longest separation since sailing into Placentia Bay three years before. European military strategy was not on the agenda. The European Front was effectively in the hands of Eisenhower, who, although having made clear that he intended to pursue a broad-front strategy, was willing to exploit any German weaknesses, including the apparent gap to Montgomery’s immediate front. Churchill, still fixed on the Adriatic, declared to the Chiefs of Staff that “we are coming to Quebec solely to obtain landing ships out of the Americans” to land in Istria and seize Trieste. In the Pacific, the chiefs argued, Britain had to display solidarity with the United States by contributing large Royal Navy forces to the American push in the central Pacific. Churchill disagreed and stuck to his Sumatra and Singapore strategy. All of this led Brooke to tell his diary: “I am feeling very, very, depressed at the thought of this meeting, unless Winston changes radically we shall be in hopeless situation.”50

  Brooke’s worries did not materialize. Churchill, not wanting to be seen as shirking his duties in the Pacific, agreed to a British naval presence in the central Pacific, where Admiral Nimitz’s fleets—and soldiers and Marines—were driving north, with Okinawa their penultimate destination, the Japanese homeland their final objective. MacArthur, meanwhile, was driving toward his objective, the Philippines. Nimitz and Admiral King wanted no part of any plan that included the Royal Navy; in fact, the Americans, so mightily re-armed, believed they had no need of the Royal Navy in order to defeat Japan. As always, they suspected Churchill was only after reclaiming lost British colonies. Churchill did nothing to help matters when he announced at one of the plenary sessions that Vienna and Singapore were the most important objectives in their respective theaters. By doing so, Brooke wrote, “he was not assisting with our discussions with the American Chiefs.” Yet, despite Churchill’s detours to Austria and Malaya, the military meetings went well, in part because the American Chiefs, flush with victories in the Pacific and confident that the European war could end by Christmas, were in a conciliatory frame of mind. The Americans agreed to seek no further reductions in Alexander’s army. Indeed, Brooke told his diary, “The Americans have shown a wonderful spirit of cooperation.” The optimism had spread to many in high office, but not Churchill, who told Colville that “it was even money the Germans would still be fighting at Christmas, and if they did collapse the reasons would be political rather than military.”51

  The Americans proved themselves amenable, as well, on the matter of zones of occupation in a vanquished Germany; they desired to occupy part of western Germany shoulder to shoulder with the British and sought only egress to Essen. Here, guided by Eden, Churchill introduced a new element by proposing that the French, too, be given a zone. This was a wily incremental stroke of the sort Roosevelt was master of. The Americans had yet to recognize de Gaulle’s FCNL, which by then was the de facto government of France, if not de jure in the eyes of Roosevelt. By not rejecting outright a French role in postwar Germany, Roosevelt tacitly acknowledged de Gaulle’s leadership, for if the time to carve the zones arrived within weeks, as many thought, who else but de Gaulle could accept such a proposal in the name of France? Roosevelt was no
t on his usual game. Churchill told Colville he feared the president was now “very frail.”52

  On the matter of how to punish postwar Germany, Churchill, who had long proposed an economically reinvigorated but disarmed Germany, displayed his growing subservience to Roosevelt and the Americans. In late July, the Red Army had liberated the Majdanek death camp on the outskirts of Lublin. Unlike the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, which the Germans had destroyed and plowed under before the Red Army arrived, Majdanek was abandoned with such haste that it was functional when the Soviets marched through the gates. Reports reached the West within weeks. A hut lined with asbestos was used to burn inmates alive. Four gas chambers were used to kill up to 250 prisoners at a time, with either carbon monoxide or Zyklon B pellets, which produced cyanide gas when exposed to air. Bodies were carted to a nearby crematorium, where the remains were rendered into ashes; the ashes, in turn, were used to fertilize the cabbage crop. A warehouse contained tens of thousands of shoes. A local woman told a visiting American journalist that when the camp was in operation, loudspeakers continually played Strauss waltzes. “ ‘The Beautiful Blue Danube,’ ” she said, “can never be beautiful to us again.” Another woman repeated words the Americans had heard many times that day: “I hope you Americans will not be soft with the Germans.”53