At this Churchill, who had a reputation for holding his liquor, seemed to become unhinged. He arose in a flush, in the process knocking over his brandy glass, and declared again with that famous scowl that war criminals “must be allowed to stand trial.” He then staggered out of the room, slamming the door behind him. In fact, he had not gone into the hallway but blundered into a darkened cloakroom, where he languished for several long moments before he felt arms “clapped above my shoulders from behind.” It was Stalin, “grinning broadly, declaring he was only playing.”30
“I consented to return,” Churchill later wrote, embarrassed to have caused a scene, “and the rest of the evening passed pleasantly.”31
By the end of the conference Stalin extracted from Roosevelt the promise of a date for Operation Overlord in spite of Churchill’s vehement objections, just as the Soviet dictator had hoped. But Stalin’s gratitude toward the American extended only so far. When Molotov asked Stalin later which of the other two Big Three he liked the most, the premier replied, “They’re both imperialists.”
At one point in the conference, Churchill could not resist bringing up Stalin’s view of territorial claims in the postwar world. But the cagey old dictator pushed the question off. “There’s no need to talk about that at the present: when the time comes we will have our say.” It may have been the understatement of the century.32
* * *
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT LEFT TEHRAN for Cairo, where he at last let be known his choice of the commander for Overlord. It was Eisenhower. Roosevelt had wanted to appoint George Marshall but, wrote Marshall in his memoirs, in the end the president had told him, “I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.” It was a major disappointment but Marshall, fine soldier that he was, accepted his fate and plunged back into his chief of staff work.
The Iowa was waiting when the president returned from Tehran; he ended his seventeen-thousand-mile odyssey in the Chesapeake Bay on December 16, when Roosevelt transferred from the battleship to his presidential yacht for a trip up the Potomac to Washington. In his diplomatic pouch, a piece of information awaited him that was so stunningly valuable Roosevelt could scarcely believe his eyes. The signals intelligence people, who had cracked the Japanese diplomatic and naval codes, had intercepted a document sent to Tokyo by Hiroshi Oshima, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin. A graduate of the Japanese military academy and student of military tactics, Oshima had just been given a tour of all the fortifications, gun positions, and defenses along the French coast that the Germans had erected to thwart a cross-Channel invasion from Great Britain. At night Oshima had sketched out in high detail everything he had seen during the day and sent this information to his superiors in Japan. It was now in the hands of the president of the United States, and soon would be in the hands of General Eisenhower.
When Roosevelt was wheeled into the White House he was greeted with cheers and applause—not only by the entire staff but by diplomats from the State Department, high-ranking military officers, and a delegation from Congress. Word had come out that he had had great success at Tehran, which he intended to announce in a fireside chat to the American people on Christmas Eve. He obviously could not talk much about Overlord, but he dwelled on the “spirit of cooperation” between the Big Three leaders. Of Stalin, he remarked that he “got along fine” with him.
“He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor,” Roosevelt said in a radio broadcast from his home in Hyde Park a little more than a week later. “I believe that he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia, and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.”
Of the Germans the president said, “We intend to rid them once and for all of Nazism and Prussian militarism and the fantastic and disastrous notion that they constitute a ‘master race.’ ”33
But Roosevelt was most proud of getting Stalin’s agreement on his United Nations scheme for keeping the peace after the war ended, as well as his assent for the Soviet Union, along with Great Britain and China, to become one of the four peacekeepers of the world. This, in the president’s mind, was to become his shining achievement: an organization for world peace that was actually backed up by military power.
At the beginning of the Tehran Conference, Roosevelt had worried that Stalin did not trust him at all, and had lumped him with Churchill, whom he vastly mistrusted. By the end of the conference Roosevelt believed he had mostly won over Stalin’s trust. The president’s close aide and speechwriter Robert Sherwood assessed the Tehran Conference to be the “supreme peak of Roosevelt’s career,” on grounds of the cooperation it elicited from the Big Three, especially Stalin.
Stalin saw more than the president suspected, however. For his part Stalin analyzed the character of his two fellow leaders as follows: Churchill was as he appeared—there was no guile, an open book. Roosevelt was not. A few months after the conference ended Stalin informed a delegation of Yugoslavians that Churchill was the kind of man “who would steal a kopek [worth less than a penny] out of your pocket.” Roosevelt, though, “only dips his hands for bigger coins.”34
* The lush-figured Madame Chiang, who spoke English and was ubiquitously at the side of her husband, was said to be the model for the evil Dragon Lady in the popular comic strip “Terry and the Pirates,” which lasted until 1973.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Churchill had left the Tehran Conference a very ill man. He had ailed with a sore throat and cold since leaving London, which he self-medicated with whisky. But since arriving in Tunis to pay a courtesy call on Eisenhower, Churchill seemed to have succumbed to a state of physical and mental exhaustion on the verge of collapse. His temperature rose to 102; it was feared he was infected with a particularly virulent strain of influenza that was killing thousands across Europe.
His doctor, Charles Wilson (Lord Moran), was beside himself with worry. They were in a primitive country with no respectable hospitals and no place for a proper diagnosis. Under the circumstances, Moran summoned from Cairo a heart specialist, a pathologist, and an X-ray machine with technician. On December 13 the X-ray revealed that Churchill was suffering from pneumonia. Moran prescribed sulfa drugs, but the next day Churchill’s heart went into cardiac fibrillation. “My heart is doing something funny,” he told the doctor, “can’t you do anything to stop this?” Moran sat by his bedside and held his wrist, taking his pulse and trying to calm him for the four hours it took the digitalis drug to return the heartbeat to normal. The pneumonia, however, was not improving; Winston Churchill, after all, was entering his seventieth year. On December 15, Moran sent a special military transport for Clementine, who flew the twenty-six hours to Tunisia to be at her husband’s bedside in a villa at Carthage. She arrived expecting to see a gray, dying man but instead was greeted by a cheerful pink-faced cherub “with a large cigar and a whisky and soda in his hand.” The worst had passed. Churchill later remarked that if he had in fact died it would have been all right. “The plans for victory have been laid,” he said, “it is only a matter of time.”1
The Germans were having none of that, however, and were putting up a ferocious fight about eighty miles south of Rome at a Gethsemane called Monte Cassino. Once the Allies landed in Italy and Mussolini, deposed, fled to Germany, he did not stay there. The Germans cannily reinstalled him as head of a puppet government in the part of Italy that the Germans still controlled, known as the Italian Socialist Republic, which had scraped up a small military arm to fight alongside the Nazi armies.
The German army was ensconced at Cassino in a large, sixth-century Benedictine monastery atop the mountain. Neither shelling nor bombing would drive them out. From their artillery positions on the heights, the Germans made the land below impossible to cross; Rome, which the Allies had hoped to take by Christmas, was now a distant goal. Churchill had hoped that by now the Allies would have been in the f
ar north, if not across the Alpine passes and into Austria. Italy is a long, narrow, north-and-south country flanked on both sides by seas; east and west, it’s ribbed, washboard-like, with multiple mountains and valleys. This makes it ideal ground for the kind of defensive warfare the Germans were waging under possibly the greatest German general of them all: Field Marshal “Smiling Albert” Kesselring.
Two months earlier, the Allies had conceived a plan, code-named Shingle, that involved an amphibious end run through the Tyrrhenian Sea along the coast to a town called Anzio, which would bypass Monte Cassino and link up with the British Eighth Army. Ike reconsidered the plan because the stalemate was costly, in terms of both Allied lives and the timetable for ridding Italy of Germans. But in the end he decided the scheme was too dangerous and could lead to a catastrophe if the troops—two reinforced infantry divisions totaling about twenty-five thousand men—landed on the Anzio beaches facing a strong German army where they could be cut off and annihilated.
Churchill, naturally, loved the idea. It was just his sort of plan—daring, surprising, and forceful. If it were a success, both the U.S. Fifth Army and the British Eighth Army that was operating on the Adriatic Sea side of the Apennines could link up for the final march into Rome, with the Germans scattered and in disarray.
Ill as he was, Churchill said all of this to Eisenhower during a visit on Christmas Day, 1943. But Ike remained skeptical and spoke of the “hazard of annihilation.” Churchill lacked a sufficient number of landing craft, which had been sent back to England for the invasion of France. Nevertheless, in the end Eisenhower approved the operation.
The plan stalled when Eisenhower left for a long-deserved two-week leave in the United States, after which he was to go to England to take charge of Overlord, never to return to the Italian theater. So Churchill tried an end run of his own. He cabled Roosevelt that an Allied amphibious landing beyond Monte Cassino “should decide the battle of Rome”—but, for the want of fifty-six landing ships, couldn’t go forward. Could Roosevelt order the fifty-six ships to remain in the Mediterranean theater long enough for Shingle to proceed? It made no sense, Churchill argued, not to supply them with the tools they needed in the one place they were actually fighting Germans. Failure to do so, he told the president, would result in a deadlock, or worse, in Italy. Overlord was six months distant: plenty of time to get the landing ships to England after the touchdown at Anzio, Churchill pleaded.
Roosevelt considered the matter, and two days later he approved delaying the return of the landing craft. Shingle was a go.
Churchill remained weakened by his bout with pneumonia and was recuperating in his favorite villa in Marrakech, attended by Clementine, Moran, and his daughter Sarah, among others. Sarah remained his favorite daughter, but she had married the stage comedian Vic Oliver, whom Churchill described as “common as dirt” and refused to shake his hand.
News from the sea was good. During the year, between the reconstituted Ultra intercepts that once more located the position of German submarines and the increased presence of U.S. and British destroyer escorts, the German undersea blockade of Great Britain and the terrible losses on the ocean crossings were significantly abated. The Battle of the Atlantic appeared to be won. A majority of German U-boats had been sunk.
More good news arrived on the day after Christmas, Boxing Day in England, when the German battleship Scharnhorst was sunk off Norway by the HMS Duke of York, taking all but thirty-six of her two-thousand-man crew to the bottom with her. The Scharnhorst and her sister ship Gneisenau, now damaged beyond repair, had been the scourge of the North Atlantic. With the Bismarck and Scharnhorst gone, and the Gneisenau and Tirpitz badly wounded, Hitler’s once vaunted surface fleet was all but wiped out.
The air war was likewise showing terrific success, with the RAF and U.S. Eighth Air Force turning much of western Germany, including the industrial Ruhr valley, into piles of crumbled, bloody brickbats. To accomplish this, these air forces braved Germany’s formidable air defenses day and night, aided by the development of longer-ranged fighter escorts. Hamburg, for example, a city of a million, had twelve square miles completely leveled one night by ten thousand tons of high-explosive bombs that caused a firestorm with 150 mph winds and temperatures exceeding three thousand degrees, killing forty thousand residents, and leaving eight hundred thousand homeless. A German official described it as “beyond all human recognition.”2
Churchill once pondered aloud whether this sort of total destruction, with its horrendous civilian casualties, wasn’t being “beastly.” But he apparently answered his own query by telling a reporter, “Opinion is divided whether…air power could by itself bring about collapse in Germany. There is no harm in finding out.”3
There was a heavy price to pay for this, however. The Germans had gradually adapted to British and American aerial tactics, including ruses to throw off radar. To combat the British, German night fighters used new, more powerful radar to track the bomber streams and new radar-controlled antiaircraft guns. By the middle of 1943 the RAF was losing an average of six hundred airmen every week, killed or captured. The Americans, who bombed in daylight, lost sixty of two hundred and forty B-17 bombers and their ten-man crews in a single raid on a ball-bearing factory in Germany.
* * *
ON JANUARY 22 THE SHINGLE landing force under Major General John P. Lucas achieved complete surprise when it landed on the Anzio beaches behind German lines. Unfortunately, Lucas was not the man for the job. He never liked the plan to begin with, referring in his diary to Churchill’s involvement as “amateur” and making a snide reference to Gallipoli. Lucas’s orders were somewhat vague about taking Rome, but he seems to have interpreted them as “get on the beach at Anzio and dig in,” which was exactly the opposite of everyone’s intentions. The Germans quickly brought powerful forces to the area and contained the Allied beachhead with artillery that they installed in low mountains that ringed the area. The Americans were in a terrain of reclaimed marshland kept dry by giant pumps. The Germans immediately turned the pumps off, flooding the land. Adding to the misery was terrible winter weather. As Churchill sourly put it, “I thought we were hurling a wildcat on the beaches at Anzio—but what we have instead is a stranded whale.”4
Following his failure to break out after a month, Lucas was relieved of command and replaced by Major General Lucian Truscott. By that time more U.S. and British divisions were poured into the Anzio pocket, bringing the Allied total of men to a hundred and fifty thousand, which the Nazi radio propagandist Axis Sally described as “the largest self-supporting prisoner of war camp in the world.” Even when a breakout was at last achieved in May, followed by the fall of Rome the next month, Anzio was roundly criticized in military circles for its forty-three thousand casualties and poor execution. Still, Churchill argued that the ultimate goal of capturing Rome was in fact achieved; it kept the Germans from moving five divisions to France. But for long, agonizing weeks, pinned to the beaches while Allied soldiers died, the Anzio operation indeed looked to be an eerie repetition of the Gallipoli debacle, which must have caused Churchill considerable discomfort.
When at last, after sixty-seven days in the Middle East and North Africa, Churchill felt up to coming home to resume his daily duties, he surprised Parliament, which was conducting routine business. Harold Nicholson described in his diary the prime minister’s triumphant return: “We were dawdling through questions…when I saw (saw is the word) a gasp of astonishment pass over the faces of the Labour Party opposite. Suddenly they jumped to their feet and started shouting, waving their papers in the air. We also jumped up and the whole house broke into cheer after cheer while Winston, very pink, rather shy,…crept along the front bench and flung himself into his accustomed seat.”
With Overlord now the preoccupying feature of the war for the Allies, there wasn’t a lot for Churchill to do in the four-month period before it launched. And so he set himself to worrying. In the off
-year elections, his Conservative Party took a beating in several important seats that had been considered “safe,” a fact Churchill viewed with grave foreboding. In February his dictating secretary wrote, “Somehow today he looks ten years older”; his aide Jock Colville told of Churchill sitting in his study “look[ing] old, tired and depressed.”5
He had reason for depression.
As Stalin’s armies moved through Poland, the Communists installed stooge regimes. In England they refused to accept the Polish government-in-exile for which, in fact, England and France had gone to war against Germany in 1939.
Churchill was further depressed that Roosevelt had turned down an invitation to meet with him in Bermuda at Easter, fearing that the president might be drawing closer to the Soviet Union. He was beginning to wonder whether the Big Three was actually the Big Two and a Half, with him being the half.
Nevertheless, at times he was compelled to show the old Churchill pugnaciousness, especially in times of danger. The closer to the actual war he got, the more animated he became. He was especially indignant after German bombs exploded on the Horse Guards Parade and blew out the windows of 10 Downing Street. Each night, when the warning sirens wailed, Churchill would pace restlessly until the guns began to fire, then put on his tin hat and coat and go to the roof of the building, where he could see the action. Sometimes he would go to the Hyde Park battery, where his daughter Mary was a gun captain, and “hear the child ordering the guns to fire.”6
More and more he lunched, dined, and even slept in his private train, which kept him closer to the war by visiting troops engaged in Overlord training. There was an ongoing argument over the implementation of Anvil, a plan to simultaneously land a large force of Allied soldiers in the South of France along the Mediterranean. These would consist mostly of the 250,000 Free French forces in North Africa, plus black troops from French and British colonies, and some American divisions. The Americans were all for it. Churchill preferred his strategy of landing somewhere in the Balkans. But for now he had to bend to Roosevelt, and Roosevelt wanted Anvil.
The Allies Page 43