The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965
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Later, Averell Harriman said of Churchill, “He sent those two battleships to Singapore in order to help. He was very anxious to do his share in the Pacific. He knew it would be mostly the United States, but he wanted Great Britain to do its share.” Churchill had tried, and failed.37
Before sunrise on December 10, Churchill sent a message to Anthony Eden informing him that the government expected a declaration of war by Hitler within two days. He also told Eden that news had arrived overnight from North Africa by way of Auchinleck that Rommel was “in full retreat” westward. And in Russia, “magnificent Russian successes” had put the Germans on the “defensive and retreat.” Still ebullient over the U.S. entry into the Pacific war and its likely entry into the European war, he signed off with, “We are having a jolly time here.” The jollifications ended when Churchill, in bed opening his boxes of intelligence briefs, picked up the ringing telephone at his bedside. “It was the First Sea Lord,” he recalled. “His voice sounded odd. He gave a sort of cough and gulp, and at first I did not hear quite clearly. ‘Prime Minister, I have to report to you that the Prince of Wales and the Repulse have been sunk by the Japanese—we think by aircraft. Tom Phillips is drowned.’ ” In all the war, Churchill wrote, “I had never received a more direct shock.” As he lay in bed, speechless, he realized that in all of the Indian and Pacific oceans, there were no British or American capital ships, other than the survivors of Pearl Harbor, which he had been told were “hastening back to California.” He had no need to consult a map to grasp his position in the Pacific: “Over this vast expanse of water, Japan was supreme, and we everywhere were weak and naked.”38
Within that expanse the Japanese were rampaging faster and more furiously than any warrior nation in history. Japanese fliers had needed only a few hours on the seventh and eighth to rattle the foundations of three centuries of British, Dutch, and American imperialism. Within days the foundations cracked. Churchill, after the loss of the Prince of Wales, told Britons that with the American fleet based at Singapore, the city and naval base could hold out for six months, until offensive Allied operations could be undertaken. But there was no American fleet. Other than a few destroyers and the cruiser Houston, no American naval force existed in the western Pacific. Churchill did not grasp that Singapore’s fate—in large part due to London’s having underestimated the enemy—would likely be determined within weeks. Hong Kong’s tenure as a British possession could likely be measured in days. “The Japanese rising sun,” wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, was “sending ever more trenchant beams over that empire on which a benign British sun was supposed never to set.39
Inspector Thompson kept his counsel as Churchill “moped about, wept, and sat staring off to nowhere for two days after Prince of Wales and Repulse went down.” Thompson had “never seen him take a war shock so hard.” Churchill had suffered the sort of devastating loss experienced by Caesar Augustus who, after the slaughter of his finest legions in the Teutoburg Forest, allowed his beard and hair to grow out for months and took to wandering about his palace calling out, “Quinctilius Varas, give me back my legions.” Churchill, like the Roman, had sent the pride of his Empire to do battle with an enemy he little understood and vastly underrated, and had paid the price. Thompson recalled Churchill sitting for long moments while mumbling repeatedly to himself, “I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand it.”40
For more than a year he had been shuffling his army and naval forces about, much as he had once so long ago deployed with enthusiastic abandon his army of 1,500 toy soldiers across the Arabian rugs of his father’s London town house. He recalled in his autobiography, My Early Life, that his decision to embark on a military career was “entirely due” to sending “infantry divisions with cavalry brigades” into battle as a child. Those mock campaigns allowed him to study “the noble profession of arms” (although the young Winston stacked the deck against his “enemy,” brother Jack, whose army, at Winston’s insistence, consisted only of “coloured” troops, and lacked artillery). The toy soldiers, Churchill later reminisced, “turned the current of my entire life.” Those lead and tin legions (and every man jack of them a British soldier, no colonials or foreigners in Churchill’s ranks) were hand-cast and painted in Germany by Heyde and in Paris by C. B. G. Mignot. They would today be valuable to collectors for their craftsmanship and priceless for their association with the young Winston Churchill, but they are long lost. Churchill’s daughter, Lady Soames, attributes the paucity of early Churchill memorabilia to his parents seeing no reason to preserve for posterity anything of Winston’s. “In those days his [Churchill’s] hopes were so unpromising… they wouldn’t have had any idea he was a child prodigy.” A military career, at the time, was the only choice available to an aristocratic lad of meager talent. Had Lord Randolph lived to witness the Greek and Crete fiascoes, the siege of Tobruk, the loss of Prince of Wales, the looming threats to Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, and the very essence of the Empire, India, he would have judged the decision to discard his son’s toy lancers and fusiliers self-evidently correct. The adult Winston had juggled his armies and fleets like an inept prestidigitator; he slipped his peas under shells, shuffled them about, and Hitler and Tojo made them all vanish.41
Upon learning of the fate of his two warships, Churchill hastened to the Commons to deliver a brief statement. He returned the following day to summarize in a long address the news from various fronts and to explain more precisely the circumstances surrounding the loss of the Prince of Wales. “The House is depressed,” Nicolson jotted in his diary, and the loss of Prince of Wales “has numbed us.” The House expected Churchill to explain how the ships were lost; instead, he gave them: “These ships had reached the right point at the right moment and were in every respect suited to the task assigned to them.” Both ships were sunk, Churchill told the House, by continuous waves of airborne bomb and torpedo attack “delivered with skill and determination.” Seven Japanese planes were destroyed, but Churchill did not explain whether by anti-aircraft guns or by British fighter planes. Following Churchill’s remarks, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes—old, frail, but still sharp—rose and asked Churchill to assure the Commons that, “erroneous deductions” to the contrary, “the battleship is still the foundation of sea power and that… the Prince of Wales was as well protected against under-water and air attack as the Bismarck.” The old admiral appeared to have learned nothing from Pearl Harbor. But the latter part of his statement held the key to his query. He asked again, Were the two ships “acting without the support of land-based or seaborne fighters?” The Speaker of the House deemed Keyes’s statement inappropriate.42
Keyes persisted. Churchill at first ducked, then deflected, the question by asking Keyes if he meant to imply that Admiral Phillips had “acted otherwise than on sound naval grounds.” Certainly not, replied Keyes. Another MP asked directly how the seven Japanese planes had been shot down, by British AA or British airplanes? Churchill finally responded: “They were destroyed by anti-aircraft fire.” Britain “had only a certain amount of aircraft” to meet its needs, Churchill explained, but had nonetheless sent “as many reinforcement as we could many months ago” to Singapore. In fact, not enough aircraft had been sent to protect the battleships. The fault for that did not reside with the late Admiral Phillips, but with those who had ordered him into hostile waters without air support. That would be the prime minister, with the consent of the War Cabinet and the Admiralty.43
Churchill claimed in his memoirs that “chance played so fatal a part” in the tragic loss of the ships. Yet chance was aided and abetted by Churchill adhering too long to his notions of battlewagons and their mythic prowess. The loss of his beloved ships moved him to at last grasp the strategic significance of sending airplanes, whether from airfields or carriers, against heavy ships, though he by no means abandoned his reverence for battlewagons—“gigantic castles of steel” he called them in 1923 (volume 1 of The World Crisis). A battleship took five years to build, bu
t an aircraft carrier could be rigged out of a hull in months. Overnight, in keeping with his oft-voiced motto of K.B.O. (keep buggering on), he embraced carriers with enthusiasm. Days after the loss of Prince of Wales, he displayed his lifelong ability to learn fast when, on December 13, he approved Admiral Pound’s recommendation to send a task force of up to four aircraft carriers to the Indian Ocean, under the command of Admiral James Somerville. “I agree that Admiral Somerville should come home,” Churchill told Pound, “to organize this form of warfare.” Those words are telling for, although Somerville had been running carriers through the Mediterranean for two years to deliver fighter planes to Malta and Alexandria, large-scale, coordinated carrier operations—“this form of warfare”—were new and mysterious to Churchill and the Admiralty. The British proved quick studies, but the Japanese had developed carrier tactics years before, and in the previous week had demonstrated their skill at this form of warfare.44
Throughout his life, Churchill’s critics—wanting it both ways—claimed on the one hand that he stuck to outdated positions for too long, and on the other hand that he was an opportunist, ever ready to switch positions. He did and he was, and he liked to say, “I would rather be right than consistent.” Margot Asquith in 1908 called him a man of “transitory convictions.”* But his old colleague Rab Butler attributed Churchill’s tendency to switch sides to “the independence of his ideas” and to his “ever testing, courting, and encouraging new ideas.” He was as contradictory as the criticisms leveled against him. He had been adjudged a mental case by the military establishment when during the Great War he championed a new and heretical weapon, the tank, which he called his “land ship.” Yet in those years, the military establishment had demonstrated—if not mental illness—gross stupidity. The cartoonist David Low chose the army as Colonel Blimp’s profession after reading a serving British colonel’s letter to The Evening Standard that protested the mechanization of the cavalry but insisted that if tanks were to be brought into service, tank crews must be made to wear spurs.45
Churchill’s vision extended well beyond the known horizon, yet the same man who could envision as revolutionary a change in warfare as the tank, could not, in the face of overwhelming evidence, concede that battleships were dinosaurs. Days after the Prince of Wales went down, the old-school Churchill proposed to the War Cabinet the formation of a combined British and American battle fleet consisting of four new, sixteen-inch-gun battleships, along with older American ships in “numbers sufficient to enable a fleet action.” He simply did not grasp that fleet actions of that sort were now a thing of the past. Although he could never bring himself to entirely give up the old, when the facts demanded, he embraced the new, in the case of sending carrier task forces to the Indian Ocean, almost literally overnight.46
There would be no Time Man of the Year honors for Churchill that year. Stalin was in the running for the 1941 prize but failed to take it on the grounds of “grave disqualifications, one moral, the other empiric.” Stalin, by virtue of his 1939 pact with Hitler, had opened the floodgates for the Führer; now that coup “had proved a grim joke at the expense of Joseph Stalin.” The Indian Confederation of America did, however, vote Stalin “1941’s outstanding warrior,” and sent him a war bonnet. Time named Franklin Roosevelt Man of the Year “because the country he leads stands for the hopes of the world.” Roosevelt, who “in his own right and on his own record… stood out as a figure for the year and for the age,” had led America in mastering its “creeping paralysis” and “had guided the U.S.” to its “rendezvous with destiny.” He had forced America to grasp “what it can be and therefore will be.” Churchill, Time recorded, had had “no great moment in 1941.” True, Churchill had twice taken Cyrenaica—but only because he “lost it between times.” He had “met disaster” in Greece and Crete. British armies “were still losing campaigns” under his leadership. Yet Time dabbed salve on the wound: Churchill “was a man of the year, of the decade, and, if his cause is won, of all time.”47
The news from the Far East did not bode well for his cause. The news from America, specifically from Franklin Roosevelt, was disquieting. There was none. By the early hours of December 11, Churchill still had received no reply from Roosevelt to his request for a meeting. Hitler settled the issue that day when he declared war on the United States. Benito Mussolini goose-stepped right along. From the balcony above the Piazza Venezia in Rome, Il Duce anointed Roosevelt a “supreme fraud” who had led America into war through “diabolical obstinacy.” Mussolini pledged that the “powers of the pact of steel” were prepared to inflict more “formidable blows” upon their enemies. “Italians!” he bellowed. “Once more arise and be worthy in this historical hour. We will win!” His lackeys scattered among the crowd cheered. But thousands of other Romans assembled in the piazza below listened in silence. This was a war, and an enemy, they did not want.48
And there it was. Hitler and Mussolini with complete disregard for American industrial might had declared war on the United States of America. The U.S. Congress immediately returned the favor. America was in. Roosevelt signed the German declaration at 3:05 P.M. One minute later, he signed the Italian declaration. Only then was Churchill’s Grand Alliance finally realized. Harold Nicolson wrote his wife, “We can’t be beaten with America in,” yet “not an American flag flying in the whole of London. How odd we are.”49
The previous June, on the eve of the German invasion of Russia, Churchill told Jock Colville that the Russians would likely be quickly defeated. By autumn he had raised his expectations. In late October, after asking his chief of military intelligence to give odds for Moscow falling by winter, Churchill offered his own, “I should be inclined to put it even.” Now the Red Army had gone over to the attack. On December 11 Churchill told the Commons that winter’s onslaught had not only brought the Germans to a standstill outside Moscow but had “inflicted upon the German armies and the German nation, a bloody blow, almost unequaled in the history of war.” And December, he added, marked “not the end of the winter… but the beginning.” Where Russians were “habituated to the severity of their native climate,” the German invaders could only scratch meager shelter from the frozen ground, there to conclude, Churchill told the House, that Hitler’s Russian gambit was proving to be “one of the outstanding blunders of history.”50
With Hitler’s declaration of war Churchill concluded that it was vital to meet with Roosevelt, immediately. Yet he had already asked and been rebuffed. He dispatched another cable to Roosevelt: “Am most anxious” to discuss the Vichy situation in North Africa. Actually, as he had been since the eighth, he was most anxious to discuss everything. This time Roosevelt gave him what he wanted. “Delighted to have you here at the White House,” he cabled back.51
Overnight, Roosevelt found himself at war in two oceans, and overnight, Churchill’s gingerly approach to the Americans changed. When Lord Woolton, minister of food, proposed to increase food rationing, Churchill told him that with the Americans in, “our position is immeasurably improved,” and therefore, “we have no longer any need to strike attitudes to win the United States sympathy, we are all in it together, and they are eating better meals than we are.” When one of his military chiefs advised a continuation of the careful attitude toward America, Churchill replied, with a leer, “Oh that is the way we talked to her when we were wooing her, now that she’s in the harem we talk to her quite differently.”52
Within twenty-four hours of receiving Roosevelt’s invitation, Churchill, Beaverbrook, Harriman, First Sea Lord Dudley Pound, and Air Marshal Charles Portal were rolling north on board the prime minister’s private train, bound for the River Clyde, where the battleship Duke of York—sister ship of the Prince of Wales—waited to carry them to America. Also on board were the newly retired Field Marshal Dill (Alan Brooke stayed behind to man his new headquarters) and Churchill’s doctor, Charles Wilson (Clementine insisted Winston take the doctor along). Eighty ancillary staff and two dozen cryptographers also went;
all of Churchill’s outgoing cables had first to be encoded before being sent to the intended recipient, as did the incoming traffic for the prime minister. His daughter Mary accompanied her Pa-pa on the train but would not be making the Atlantic crossing. Late morning on December 13, after bidding “Good-bye, darling” to Mary—who was last off the ship—Churchill and the Duke of York made for the Atlantic.53
Soon after clearing the Clyde, the ship ran into the worst weather the North Atlantic could throw its way. The escort destroyers, tossed about like rowboats, fell behind. The seas were so roiled that Duke of York spent most of the voyage battened down. Dr. Wilson possessed no medicines to combat the nausea and lassitude that overcame almost everyone on board, including the prime minister. Churchill, in his longest letter to Clementine since a forlorn missive sent during a 1936 trip to Marrakech, rued the confinement but allowed that an extra dose of Mothersill’s Travel Remedy had staved off any serious bouts of seasickness. The seas were so violent, he wrote, that two of the party suffered broken legs and arms. Paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, he wrote, “Being in a ship in such weather as this is like being in a prison, with the extra chance of being drowned.”54