The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  On May 2, Eamon de Valera, prime minister of Ireland, motored to the German legation in Dublin to offer his condolences on the occasion of Hitler’s death. The “Dev” and Ireland had pulled it off, the only English-speaking country in the world to win the war by missing it. Days later Churchill excoriated de Valera during a worldwide broadcast. Referring to the U-boat menace of 1940 and 1941, Churchill said, “This was indeed a deadly moment in our life, and if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland, we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr. de Valera or perish forever from the earth. However, with a restraint and poise to which, I say, history will find few parallels, His Majesty’s Government never laid a violent hand upon them, though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural, and we left the de Valera government to frolic with the Germans and later with the Japanese representatives to their heart’s content.”160

  In Flensburg on May 2, Reichspräsident Dönitz’s newly appointed leading minister, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, made a radio broadcast to Germans in which he told them, “In the East the iron curtain behind which, unseen by the eyes of the world, the work of destruction goes on, is moving steadily forward.” The London Times ran the story the next day.161

  Montgomery took Lübeck on May 2, just twelve hours before the Russians got there. That put Monty’s army astride the neck of the Danish peninsula. The next morning, shortly before noon, four German officers were escorted to Montgomery’s trailer under a flag of truce. Monty, like the neighborhood curmudgeon who neither seeks nor welcomes visitors, threw open the door and demanded of his interpreter, “Who are these men? What do they want?” They were representatives of Field Marshal Keitel, and they wanted to surrender to the British three German armies that faced the Russians. They said they feared for civilians caught between the armies, and they feared savage treatment at the hands of the Red Army were they to surrender in that direction. Montgomery told them they should have thought of that before they started the war. The Germans asked how they could be saved. Essentially they were seeking Montgomery’s approval to continue the fight against the Russians without British interference in their rear. Montgomery refused. He told them that their situation was hopeless, and that until they surrendered, he would continue killing German soldiers and civilians. Then he directed them to a tent where he suggested they have lunch and think things over. They ate, they pondered; they agreed to return the next day with an answer. Two of the officers went back to Flensburg with Montgomery’s ultimatum. After consulting Dönitz, they returned the next day, May 4, and at 6:30 P.M. signed the instrument of surrender Montgomery had prepared. Expecting the Germans to do just that, Montgomery had ordered his troops to cease fire late on the third.162

  The British war in Europe was over. And in the Far East, British and colonial troops had freed Rangoon the previous day. That afternoon, Churchill called his military chiefs to No. 10, where Brooke found him “evidently seriously affected by the fact that the war was to all intents and purposes over as far as Germany was concerned. He thanked us all very nicely and with tears in his eyes for all we had done in the war…. He then shook hands with all of us.”163

  In San Francisco that day, May 4, Molotov admitted to Eden that the sixteen Poles who had been granted safe passage from Warsaw to Lublin had been arrested. Stalin, calling the Poles “diverginists,” admitted likewise in a cable to Churchill. Fifty of the fifty-one Allied nations had sent representatives to San Francisco. The fifty-first, Poland, had in effect ceased to exist. The Soviets proposed a horse trade to the British: they would approve the British and American nomination of Argentina for admittance to the United Nations in return for the admission of—in Cadogan’s words—“[the] beastly sham Polish Government.” This was a deft ploy on the part of Stalin and Molotov. Argentina, its government quasi-Fascist, had been a pro-Axis neutral for five years until finally seeing the light in late March, when Colonel Juan Perón took over and declared war on Germany. The Lublin Poles, whatever their Bolshevik leanings, had fought against the Nazis since 1939. If Argentina was to be granted admittance, Molotov argued, why not the new Polish government? Eden refused.164

  Eisenhower’s turn to accept a German surrender came at 2:41 A.M. British Double Summer Time on Monday, May 7, at his headquarters in Reims. General Alfred Jodl, for Dönitz, and Bedell Smith, for SHAEF, signed the instrument of unconditional surrender, with French and Russian officers as witnesses. Hostilities were to cease at midnight, and the German entourage was to proceed to Berlin to sign the Russian ratification on the ninth. Shortly before dawn, Pug Ismay had received a call from Eisenhower. “What’s happened?” Ismay asked. Came the reply: “It’s all over.” But it wasn’t over until Stalin said it was over. His troops were still mopping up in Czechoslovakia and along the Baltic. He sought to postpone any official announcement until the formal ratification by all parties in Berlin on the ninth.165

  A predawn thunderstorm broke over London with “an imitation of the blitz so realistic,” Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, “many Londoners started awake and reached for the bedside torch.” The V-2s had ceased coming over in late March, but nerves were still raw. The blackout had been lifted a week earlier, after 2,061 consecutive nights of darkness. But when the switch was thrown, London’s streetlights failed to flare, and though most Londoners took down their heavy blackout curtains (which they converted to black clothes and funeral coverings), they pulled their old curtains closed out of habit. A five-year-old girl who had lived her entire life behind the blackout curtains said to her mother, “It’s lovely to let out the light, but how shall we keep out the dark?”166

  On the afternoon of May 7, as crowds began to gather in expectation of an official announcement, Churchill hosted a lunch for his military chiefs at No. 10. It was a “disturbed” affair, Brooke wrote, marked by Churchill taking phone calls from Truman and Eisenhower over the matter of the official announcement, which Churchill sought to make that evening and Stalin wanted postponed for a day. “As usual,” Ismay later wrote, “he [Stalin] had his way.” Churchill agreed to delay the announcement, but for only twenty-four hours. Tuesday, May 8, was to be V-E day in England and America; the Soviets would celebrate victory on May 9. The lunch party adjourned to the garden for photographs. Champagne and glasses sat ready on a side table, put there by Churchill himself. He raised a toast to the chiefs as “the architects of victory,” and thanked them for the years of work that had brought them all to this day. Inexplicably, none returned the toast. Ismay could not bring himself to believe the slight was intentional. “I had hoped,” he later wrote, “that they would raise their glasses to the chief who had been the master planner; but perhaps they were too moved to trust their voices.”167

  That night, the BBC announced that the prime minister would address the nation from No. 10 at 3:00 P.M. the following day. In New York, Paris, Brussels, Moscow, and London, crowds had already taken to the streets. By dawn on May 8, more than a million Londoners—men, women, and children—pressed toward the gates of Buckingham Palace from Whitehall and Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square, from Hyde Park, Parliament Square, the Strand, and St. James’s Park and Green Park. London’s bells began ringing at sunrise, and rang throughout the morning, a tolling that carried away into the countryside and rolled down the Thames to the Channel. Children paraded through the streets wrapped in American flags and British and Russian flags. Thousands of Union Jacks flew from windows, joined by the Stars and Stripes and the Hammer and Sickle. Mothers hoisted children onto their hips, and the children in turn waved little Union Jacks fixed on slim sticks. Housewives in long breadlines (there was a loaf shortage) waved little Union Jacks while keeping a hand on their string bags. A group of sailors and girls formed a conga line in Piccadilly. Owners of bulldogs paraded their charges outfitted in Union Jack sweaters. Eight times that day, the masses called for their King and Queen, and eight times the royal couple stepped from their rooms onto a balcony at Buckingham Palace, King George attire
d in his Royal Navy uniform.

  Churchill lunched at the palace with the King, the man who five years earlier had handed the seals of office to him with great reluctance. When the crowd again called for a royal benediction, the King invited Churchill to join him and the Queen and the royal princesses, Margaret and Elizabeth, on the balcony. Always respectful of the monarchy, Churchill stood a discreet foot or so behind King George, his posture that of a five-foot-eight-inch man under a five-foot-six-inch ceiling. In photos of the scene, Churchill wears the impish smile of a little boy who has just been told, Behave yourself. When the crowd caught sight of Churchill, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, “there was a deep, full-throated, almost reverent roar.”168

  King George delivered a brief radio address later that day. “Today we give thanks to Almighty God for a great deliverance,” he began, and asked Britons “to join with me in that act of thanksgiving.” He ended by noting that “in the hour of danger we humbly committed our cause into the hand of God, and He has been our strength and shield…. Let us thank Him for His mercies in this hour of victory.” Across the Atlantic, President Truman, who was celebrating his sixty-first birthday, issued a proclamation that began “The Allies, through sacrifice and devotion and with God’s help, have wrung from Germany a final and unconditional surrender.” Declaring it “fitting that we as a nation give thanks to Almighty God, who has strengthened us and given us the victory,” he appointed “Sunday, May 13, to be day of prayer.” Neither the King nor the president made any mention of Winston Churchill.

  In Paris, Charles de Gaulle was swept along the Champs-Élysées and under the Arc de Triomphe by a throng of nearly one million Frenchmen. He told his countrymen: “Honor, eternal honor to our armies and their eternal leaders. Honor to our nation, which never faltered…. Vive la France.” Two months later, the provisional French Assembly delivered a vote that serves as a measure of how completely Franklin Roosevelt and the State Department had misread de Gaulle and France. The Assembly, a cantankerous mix of socialists, communists, liberals, conservatives, republicans, and monarchists, offered Charles de Gaulle the presidency of the Council by a unanimous vote. In October, when the United Nations officially opened, France, its soul reclaimed, took its place as the fifth permanent seat on the Security Council. Three months later, in January 1946, de Gaulle, contemptuous of the proposed new constitution that would underlie the Fourth Republic, resigned. He was, one of his ministers once said, “a man equally incapable of monopolizing power and of sharing it.” His self-imposed political exile lasted thirteen years, until January 1959, when, after capturing almost 80 percent of the electoral college vote, he was sworn in as president of the Fifth Republic.169

  In London on May 8, as three o’clock neared, MPs gathered in the palace yard, where loudspeakers had been set up to carry Churchill’s speech. “As Big Ben struck three,” Harold Nicolson recorded, “there was an extraordinary hush over the assembled multitude. And then came Winston’s voice.” His statement ran to just over five hundred words, and took only moments to deliver. Clementine listened at the British embassy in Moscow. Mary heard the address while playing bridge in the country with Jock Colville. Randolph was on an airplane over Yugoslavia when he heard his father’s words. Diana and Sarah listened in London. Churchill’s recitation of the signing of the surrender and the signatories was as droll as a stationmaster announcing departures and arrivals, until he intoned, “The evil-doers now lie prostrate before us.” At that the crowds gasped. Churchill ended with, “Advance Britannia!” The BBC played a recording of buglers sounding Last Post and closed with “God Save the King,” which Nicolson and the House sang along with, “very loud indeed.”170

  Lord Moran listened to Churchill’s speech in an overflowing House of Lords (where the Commons had met since the bombing of May 10, 1941). When Churchill finished, a peer turned to Moran and expressed his surprise that the prime minister had made no allusion to God. Moran turned to poet laureate John Masefield and asked what he thought. Masefield replied, “I’d rather have the honest utterance of Winston than the false rhetoric of a lesser man.” Abraham Lincoln, Moran offered, “would have struck a deeper note.” True, replied Masefield, but “he [Lincoln] was a man of deep piety.”171

  After delivering his statement, Churchill made ready to go to the House of Lords in order to read it to the MPs. On any other day, he could have made the short trip from No. 10 to Parliament in minutes to take Questions, which automatically closed at 3:15, but on this day, his car had to thread its way through the raucous crowds. MPs therefore made supplementary questions until Churchill arrived, which he did at 3:23, Harold Nicolson noted, looking “coy and cheerful.” “The House rose as a man,” Nicolson wrote, “and yelled and yelled and waved their Order Papers.” Churchill responded with a jerk of the head and a wide grin. He read his statement, and added two lines. The first was an expression of thanks to the House for its “noble support” throughout the war. Then, recalling the House’s response when, on November 11, 1918, it learned of the Armistice, he moved that “this House do now attend at the Church of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, to give humble and reverential thanks to Almighty God for our deliverance from the threat of German domination.” He added, “This is the identical Motion which was moved in former times.” The motion carried, and the sergeant at arms took up the mace (which, with the House cat, Minny, had survived the Blitz), and the MPs all streamed out, through the lobby, though St. Stephen’s Chapel, and into the sunshine of Parliament Square, where mounted policemen tried to forge a path through the gathered tens of thousands.172

  When Churchill appeared, the gathered erupted in a chorus of “Winnie, Winnie.” “The crowd,” Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, “had ears, eyes, and throats for no one but Churchill.” Mothers held up babies who would later be told they had seen the Great Man. A Cockney cried out, “That’s ’im. That’s ’is little old lovely bald ’ead!” After the service, Churchill departed in an open car, a fat cigar and the “V” for victory prominently displayed. Later in the afternoon, he stepped out onto a Whitehall balcony and told the crowd gathered, “This is your victory.”

  The crowd roared back, “No, it is yours.”173

  It was a day, Brooke told his diary, “disorganized by Victory! A form of disorganization that I can put up with.” He was pleased when Lady Grigg told him that she had seen him get into his car in Whitehall “with a crowd looking at you, and none of them realizing that beside them was the man who had probably done most to win the war against Germany.” “It was all wrong,” she said, adding, “tell Lady Brookie from me.” Brooke could not resist some parting shots at Churchill, including, “The P.M. has never once in all his speeches referred to the Chiefs of Staff” or how the chiefs conducted the war “at the highest level.” Churchill, during a broadcast five days later, paused in the middle of delivering what was in essence a history of the war, and said:

  And here is the moment when I pay my personal tribute to the British Chiefs of the Staff, with whom I worked in the closest intimacy throughout these heavy, stormy years…. In Field-Marshal Brooke, in Admiral Pound, succeeded after his death by Admiral Andrew Cunningham, and in Marshal of the Air Portal, a team was formed who deserved the highest honour in the direction of the whole British war strategy and in its relations with that of our Allies.

  The irascible Brooke waxed philosophic in his V-E day diary entry, citing God—as Churchill had not—as the source of his strength (in having to deal with Churchill) and his belief that victory was “ordained” by “a God all powerful looking after the destiny of the world.” “And yet,” Brooke wrote, despite his troubles with Churchill “of almost unbearable proportions…. I would not have missed the last three and one-half years of struggle and endeavor for anything on earth.”174

  Churchill returned to the Annexe as evening came on, and as hundreds of searchlights that had chased German planes and rockets for five years threw their beams upon London’s public buildings and the remaining spires of Wren’s
churches. Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament were bathed in white light; the face of Big Ben, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, “loomed like a kind moon.” A searchlight picked out Nelson’s column. From Fleet Street, Harold Nicolson looked toward St. Paul’s and beheld “a concentration of lights upon the huge golden cross.” He could hear the sound of cheering in the parks, and found the crowds to be happy “but quite sober.” As he made his way home, he noted the smell of distant bonfires in the air. “So I went to bed,” he wrote. “That was my victory day.”175

  Churchill dined that evening at the Annexe with Sarah, Diana and Duncan Sandys, and Lord Camrose, publisher of the Daily Telegraph. Camrose had long financed Churchill’s literary efforts, having paid £5,000 for the serial rights to Marlborough (the biography of his luminous ancestor) more than a decade earlier. His presence at the table augured a resurrection of his and Churchill’s publishing and financial arrangements.

  At about 10:30 P.M. Churchill was told the crowd in Whitehall was still calling for him. Wearing his siren suit now, he returned to the balcony where he had spoken in the afternoon. He told the assembled:

  My dear friends, this is your hour…. There we stood, alone. Did anyone want to give in? [The crowd shouted “No.”] Were we down-hearted? [“No!”] The lights went out and the bombs came down. But every man, woman and child in the country had no thought of quitting the struggle. London can take it. So we came back after long months from the jaws of death, out of the mouth of hell, while all the world wondered. When shall the reputation and faith of this generation of English men and women fail? I say that in the long years to come not only will the people of this island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human hearts, look back to what we’ve done and they will say ‘do not despair, do not yield to violence and tyranny, march straight forward and die if need be—unconquered.’