The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  He told them that Germany “awaits our justice and our mercy.” He told them that Japan, “stained with cruelty and greed,” would likewise be vanquished. And he told them that Britain would fight the battle “hand in hand” with America.176

  That night, bonfires burned the length and breadth of the Home Island, on Beacon Hill in Hampshire and on other similarly named hills in Wales and the Lake District. They burned in town squares from Cornwall to Cambridge, from Oxford to Liverpool. They burned in Coventry and Manchester and Bath and Bristol, and from the Scottish Highlands to the windswept northernmost reaches of mainland Scotland. They burned on Guernsey and Jersey, freed that day, and they burned seven hundred miles to the north on the Orkney Islands. The fires glowed on the Isle of Man and the Isle of Arran, from north to south and east to west, from the Scillies to the Shetlands. Englishmen and Welshmen and Scotsmen and Ulstermen young and old, male and female, danced in the withering firelight, their faces glowing with sweat and dusted by soot and creased by wild grins. Since 1939, as in ancient times, they had proven that they were the warrior races. It was a scene that would have been familiar to Iron Age Britons, to Picts, Scots, and Celts, to the Romans, the Angles and Saxons and Danes, to King Harold, Thomas à Becket, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, to Elizabeth I and Raleigh, to Cromwell. And to Marlborough.

  Late in the evening a telegram arrived at the Annexe from Clementine in Moscow: “All my thoughts are with you on this supreme day my darling. It could not have happened without you.” Eden expressed similar sentiments from San Francisco: “It is you who have led, uplifted and inspired us through the worst days. Without you this day could not have been.” As was his wont, Churchill worked past midnight and well into the early hours of May 9. Hundreds of telegrams had to be answered; the box was in dire need of attention. As he worked on, London officials doused the searchlights in hopes of encouraging the crowds to disperse. In the streets, Churchill’s Englishmen, victorious, made for their homes.177

  It was five years to the day since Hitler had ordered his armies into the Low Countries. In those black days, Churchill told Englishmen that to give in was to sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age. But, he told them, if they never gave in—and they had not—they would someday reach the broad sunlit uplands.

  At that latitude and at that time of year dawn comes early, a faint blush on the far horizon. Night defeated, retreats. And light is born again.178

  7

  Ebb Tide

  1945–1955

  After almost six years of total war, Europeans had reached the upland regions. But from Warsaw to Paris, Berlin to Prague, they found themselves not in Winston Churchill’s sunlit pastoral, but in a mutilated, desolate, and blood-drenched landscape. The war had left Europe literally a shambles—a slaughterhouse. In triumph, the victors took measure of the appalling tragedy that had overtaken the Continent since 1939. At least 40 million Europeans had been killed, about equally divided between civilians and armed forces. Poland had paid the highest relative price. More than six million Poles, almost 20 percent of Poland’s prewar population, were dead, including three million Polish Jews. This is a number that defies comprehension. A modern reader might form some idea of the enormity of the Polish slaughter if he imagined picking up the morning newspaper every day for five years and reading that three thousand of his fellow citizens had perished the previous day in a terrorist attack. In Warsaw alone, seven hundred thousand had died, more than worldwide British, Commonwealth, and American battlefield deaths combined. Almost half of Poland’s doctors, dentists, lawyers, and university professors were among the dead. Weeks after the German surrender, Churchill, still furious over the failure of the London Poles to reach some sort of agreement with Stalin in 1944, told the House, “There are few virtues that the Poles do not possess, and there are few mistakes they have ever avoided.” Yet Poland’s biggest mistake was the accident of geography that had placed it between the Wolf and the Bear, and the Bear had prevailed. The Lublin Poles accounted for thirteen of the twenty ministers in the new Warsaw government. The sixteen Polish democrats arrested in late March were found guilty of crimes against the state and packed off to prison. Poland had, in effect, become the seventeenth Soviet republic.1

  Meticulous Nazi records soon accounted for another three million murdered Jews, gassed or shot, along with at least one million other “enemies of the state”: Communists, gypsies, and homosexuals. Vichy France had been most accommodating in arresting and handing over to the Germans such undesirables. At least 70,000 of France’s prewar Jewish population of 350,000 (of whom about one-half were naturalized citizens or refugees) were sent to their deaths in the east. Three-quarters of Holland’s 140,000 Jews were likewise trundled east to their deaths. Italy could count almost 350,000 war dead, split about evenly between soldiers and civilians. The French had lost 200,000 men in 1940, but by 1945, the number of civilians who had perished in bombing raids and concentration camps was 400,000. Ongoing civil and guerrilla wars in Greece and Yugoslavia had so far left 150,000 and 1.5 million dead, respectively. Partisans in both countries were still killing each other, a state of affairs that led Churchill, with Tito in mind, to tell Brooke, “When the eagles are silent the parrots begin to jabber.”2

  Meanwhile, Communist movements grabbed their share of power in Italy and France; the Red Army was or soon would be placing Communists in power in Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. Eduard Beneš returned to Czechoslovakia, where he was confirmed as president by a coalition of Democrats and Communists in the National Assembly. The three Baltic states had disappeared within the Soviet empire. Stalin felt that Russia, given its horrific and heroic sacrifice, had earned the right to take what it pleased. Almost eleven million Red Army soldiers were dead or missing; Soviet civilian casualties have never been calculated with exactness; perhaps fifteen million, perhaps as many as twenty million, were killed by bullet, noose, fire, and starvation, fully half of the Continent’s casualties. And still Europeans were dying. Millions of German land mines, from the Oder River to Brittany and Normandy (where six million were buried), were killing civilians at a rate of several hundred a week. Churchill proposed to Brooke that “the Germans find all the mines they have buried, and dig them up. Why should they not? Pigs are used to find olives.” Brooke shared the prime minister’s sentiments but could not resist pointing out to Churchill that pigs were used to find truffles.3

  On May 11, the third day of European peace, Churchill cabled President Truman with a request that they jointly invite Stalin to a tripartite meeting at “some unshattered town in Germany” not within the Russian zone of occupation, and that Truman first stop off in London in a display of unity. Churchill pointed out that twice the Americans and British had met Stalin on or near his territory, Churchill four times in all. He further stressed his belief that it was critical that “the American front will not recede from the now agreed upon tactical lines.” Truman’s response was immediate, unsatisfactory, and reminiscent of Roosevelt’s wartime hesitancy. Truman proposed that their respective ambassadors try to persuade Stalin to call for a meeting, and that he and Churchill travel to it separately in order to avoid the appearance of “ganging up” on Stalin. Churchill sent off another cable the next day, telling Truman, as he had Roosevelt, that he was “profoundly concerned about the European situation.” American armies were “melting” away, the French were virtually defenseless, and the Russians had two to three hundred divisions on active duty. “An iron curtain is drawn down upon their [the Russian] front.” Behind it, Poland was isolated, and controlled by Stalin’s Lublin puppets. It would be easy for the Russians, Churchill warned, to drive all the way “to the waters of the North Sea and the Atlantic.” He again proposed a meeting of the Big Three at the earliest possible opportunity in order to forge “a settlement with Russia before our strength has gone.”4

  To Eden, in San Francisco for the opening of the United Nations, he cabled similar sentiments:

  TODAY THERE ARE ANNOUNCEMENTS IN T
HE NEWSPAPERS OF THE LARGE WITHDRAWALS OF AMERICAN TROOPS NOW TO BEGIN MONTH BY MONTH. WHAT ARE WE TO DO? GREAT PRESSURE WILL SOON BE PUT ON US [AT HOME] TO DEMOBILIZE PARTIALLY. IN A VERY SHORT TIME OUR ARMIES WILL HAVE MELTED, BUT THE RUSSIANS MAY REMAIN WITH HUNDREDS OF DIVISIONS IN POSSESSION OF EUROPE FROM LUBECK TO TRIESTE, AND TO THE GREEK FRONTIER ON THE ADRIATIC…. ALL THESE THINGS ARE FAR MORE VITAL THAN THE AMENDMENTS TO A WORLD CONSTITUTION [THE UNITED NATIONS] WHICH MAY NEVER WELL COME INTO BEING TILL IT IS SUPERSEDED AFTER A PERIOD OF APPEASEMENT BY A THIRD WORLD WAR.5

  By the end of the month, Stalin and Truman set a tentative date of July 15 for the meeting. Churchill considered that to be a month too late, and he proposed mid-June or early July at the latest. A delay of a month or more, Churchill believed, would allow the Red Army and the Lublin Poles time enough to effectively settle the matter of new Polish borders without Anglo-American input or oversight. But Truman held firm. As well, he sent word to Churchill through former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Joe Davies that he [Truman] wanted to meet with Stalin before the Big Three met. Churchill warned Truman that any such bilateral meeting would be “regrettable” and would raise issues “wounding” to Britain, the Commonwealth, and the British Empire. Truman backed off but held to the mid-July date. The place would be Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin and the Versailles of Prussian princes. The town was heavily damaged but not utterly destroyed.6

  Throughout Germany, there was little left “unshattered.” Every major city and most of the larger towns had been completely destroyed—Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and Stuttgart in the south, Breslau in the east. The RAF and American Eighth Air Force had paid a heavy price for these results: 26,000 American and 55,000 British airmen died over Europe. But the air campaign had wiped out twenty-eight major towns of the Ruhr. On the ground, German soldiers paid a far heavier price. More than five million German soldiers, sailors, and airmen had been killed since 1939 in service to Hitler’s vision. Almost two million German citizens had died, as many as six hundred thousand under Allied bombs. The end of the war marked only the beginning of more pain for Germans. Near Berlin—a dead city—squads of German civilians overseen by Allied soldiers dug one hundred thousand graves in anticipation of filling them during the coming winter with the bodies of the frozen and the starved and no doubt thousands more suicides. At least half the German civilian war dead had perished at the hands of the Red Army while fleeing westward early in the year. Within twelve months, most of the Germanic population east of the Elbe—in East Prussia, Poland, the Czech Sudetenland—would be forcibly relocated into the Allied occupation zones, some fourteen million in all as a result of the Yalta agreement to redraw German and Polish borders, and Stalin’s demands at Potsdam that no Germans remain within the new Poland. At least one million died of starvation in the process.

  The Germanic population of the former Greater Reich fell to under three million from more than seventeen million before the war. The survivors had to be fed, along with eight million displaced persons within Germany—former slave laborers, of which four million lived in the Soviet zone. Hundreds of thousands of Dutch, French, and Polish displaced persons had to be sent home. And Stalin demanded that tens of thousands of Russian POWs be sent east, along with thousands of White Russians and Cossacks who had made the fatal error of joining the German side. The Western Allies dutifully delivered these Russians later that summer—some with families brought from the Ukraine—to Red Army checkpoints. Many were gunned down before even boarding the trains east; others committed suicide rather than return to face the noose. In his memoirs, Dwight Eisenhower makes mention of these “persecutees” and the “terror” they felt, and the suicides, but no mention of their nationality.7

  One million Germans had fled before the Russians and into Montgomery’s zone of occupation, where another million wounded Germans wasted away, with little medicine, little food, and little hope. Montgomery also had to tend to the upkeep of almost two million German soldiers who were now his prisoners and feared falling into Russian hands. In his memoirs, Montgomery wrote: “From their behavior it soon became clear that the Russians, though a fine fighting race, were in fact barbarous Asiatics who had never enjoyed a civilization comparable to the rest of Europe.” He told his diary, “Out of the impact of the Asiatics on the European culture, a new Europe has been born.” Two immediate problems had to be tackled, the feeding of Germans and the containment of the Russians, were they to wander farther westward. Britain could do neither alone. Weeks later, Churchill told the House that it “would be in vain for us in our small Island, which still needs to import half its food, to imagine that we can make any further appreciable contribution in that respect [trying to feed Germans].” And on the mass expulsion of Germans from newly configured Poland, he predicted, “It is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain.”8

  On May 13 Churchill took to the airwaves, warning Britons:

  I wish I could tell you tonight that all our toils and troubles were over. Then indeed I could end my five years’ service happily, and if you thought that you had had enough of me and that I ought to be put out to grass, I tell you I would take it with the best of grace…. There would be little use in punishing the Hitlerites for their crimes if law and justice did not rule, and if totalitarian or police governments were to take the place of the German invaders…. I told you hard things at the beginning of these last five years; you did not shrink, and I should be unworthy of your confidence and generosity if I did not still cry: Forward, unflinching, unswerving, indomitable, till the whole task is done and the whole world is safe and clean.

  He also warned of the coming battle with Japan, and repeated his pledge of five years: “We seek nothing.”9

  He did not disclose in his broadcast his belief that the Russians were now intent on making Europe unsafe and unclean. Nor could he disclose his favored solution to the Russian threat. That day, May 13, Brooke wrote of Churchill: “He gives me the feeling of already longing for another war! Even if it entailed fighting Russia!” He was. One of the wagers Montgomery recorded in his ledger in 1943 was a £100 bet between himself and George Patton, who gave even odds that “the armed forces of Great Britain will become involved in another war in Europe within ten years of the cessation of hostilities in the current war.” Patton’s bet was looking pretty good even before London streets were swept clean of streamers and rosettes from the V-E day festivities. Churchill now asked the British joint planners to study the feasibility of war with the Russians, code-named Operation Unthinkable. In fact, eight months earlier, the British chiefs had composed a paper for the Foreign Office on the possibility of Russia’s becoming a future adversary. At the time, Brooke wrote, the Foreign Office “could not admit that Russia may one day become unfriendly” and “considered it very remiss” for the chiefs to contemplate war with Britain’s current ally. Yet planning for future military contingencies is the responsibility of military planners. Eden accepted the paper. Still, Brooke told his diary later in May, after revisiting Operation Unthinkable, “The idea is of course fantastic, and the chances for success quite impossible. There is no doubt from now onwards Russia is all powerful in Europe.”10

  Of these weeks Churchill later wrote, “I could only feel the vast manifestation of Soviet and Russian imperialism rolling forward over helpless lands.” Almost a decade later, while addressing his Woodford constituency, he let slip that soon after V-E day, he had directed Montgomery “to be careful in collecting the German arms, to stack them so they could easily be issued again to the German soldiers whom we should have to work with if the Soviet advance continued.” No such telegram has been found in official records, but Montgomery, in his memoir, wrote that he protested to London an order that “these [German] weapons should be kept intact.” He does not name the official who issued the order.11

  A message Churchill sent to Eisenhower on May 9, however, contains the same sentiment:

&
nbsp; I have heard with some concern that the Germans are to destroy all their aircraft in situ. I hope that this policy will not be adopted in regard to weapons and other forms of equipment. We may have great need of these some day. And even now they might be of use, both in France and especially in Italy. I think we ought to keep everything worth keeping. The heavy cannon I preserved from the last war fired constantly from the heights of Dover in this war.12

  Neither telegram (if the Montgomery message ever existed) makes clear whether Churchill intended German troops to bear those surrendered weapons.

  Churchill, while contemplating a response to the Red Army, hoped for a diplomatic solution, but he planned for war. His fears were well founded, but he failed as he had a decade earlier to correctly read the mood of the British public. For four years, while the Red Army fought valiantly, the British and American people gave it its due. Indeed, the people of both nations had elevated the Red Army and Russians to heroic stature. Churchill had, too, for a year or so after June 1941.

  But circumstances had changed, dramatically and dangerously. The Red Army now occupied Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin. In March 1936 Churchill had told the House:

  For four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries falling into the hands of such a Power…. Observe that the policy of England takes no account of which nation it is that seeks the overlordship of Europe…. It has nothing to do with rulers or nations; it is concerned solely with whoever is the strongest or the potentially dominating tyrant.