The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

by William Manchester

  Churchill’s old friend Admiral Keyes—though a dotard now in Churchill’s opinion—followed Milne. The old admiral made clear that he objected to the handling of the war effort by the Chiefs of Staff, yet, curiously, not by Churchill, whose loss to Britain were he to be forced out of office, Keyes declared, would be a “deplorable disaster.” A member noted that the admiral appeared to be claiming that Churchill both interfered in the war and at the same time didn’t interfere enough. Since the entire showdown was, supposedly, about Churchill’s performance, Keyes’s peroration, by its illogic, served only to bolster Churchill while undermining the opposition.256

  The next day, Aneurin Bevan demonstrated why he was almost Churchill’s equal in parliamentary close combat (Churchill cites the speech in the fourth volume of his war memoirs but fails to name the speaker; such was his antipathy toward Bevan). He began well enough. Of Churchill, he proclaimed: “The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle.” Then, after a pause for effect, he delivered his most memorable criticism of Churchill: “The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.” Unfortunately for the opposition, Bevan, as had Milne, proposed a questionable solution to the lack of military zeal. Bevan’s was to put British troops under the command of the many French, Polish, and Czech generals who had fled their homelands to London. This absurd suggestion self-evidently did not lend itself to further scrutiny by the House. Bevan then worked some class-warfare rhetoric into his address, claiming that had Rommel been born British, he would likely not have risen above the rank of sergeant, a preposterous assertion given Rommel’s upper-middle-class lineage and his long Imperial Army career, which began as an officer candidate and included a stint at the War College in Danzig. Still, Bevan had adroitly exposed the rot in the British class structure, a truth Churchill had acknowledged to Colville almost two years earlier when he declared that the boys from the secondary schools (public schools in America) who had won the Battle of Britain (they made up more than 70 percent of Fighter Command) deserved to run the country after the war. Churchill, an old reformer, was sincere in his sentiments, but by failing to express in public what he felt in private, he allowed Bevan to claim the issue as his own.257

  Hore-Belisha spoke last, but the old Liberal had learned nothing from his attack of the year before when, attempting to blame Churchill for the fall of Crete, he instead called attention to his own lackluster tenure under Chamberlain as secretary of state for war. Churchill turned that history against Hore-Belisha then, and did so again on this day. Twice within thirteen months, Hore-Belisha opened the door for Churchill, and twice Churchill burst through. When Hore-Belisha asked about the many mechanical and armament problems of the Churchill tank (designed and produced by the Chamberlain government), Churchill turned the tables by noting that only when the tank’s defects became known was it christened the Churchill. These defects had been overcome, he added, laughter now percolating through the chamber, and the tank could be expected to give long, strong, and massive service in the war effort. Churchill’s address, Harold Nicolson told his diary, amounted to an explication of the concept of attrition. Britain would soon have more guns and men and tanks in the desert than the Germans, and although Rommel had not yet been brought to bay, numerical superiority must, in time, spell the difference. Toward the end of his address, knowing that the opposition had inflicted fatal wounds upon itself, Churchill sounded “quite fresh and gay.”258

  When the House divided for the vote, the tally was 475 for the government, 25 against. Churchill had survived the strongest parliamentary assault of the war, and by a margin extraordinarily close to the prediction he had made in Washington. Twenty-five votes had been the maximum figure mustered against Pitt the Younger in 1799 when Napoleon appeared poised to rule both the waves and the Continent. Pitt had declared himself the only man in England capable of defeating the little Corsican, and Parliament gave him its vote of confidence. Yet for Churchill, the July vote was more a warning than a victory.

  Within days of arriving in Britain, Dwight Eisenhower learned that most Americans in London believed the European war would be lost within weeks unless Stalin parried Hitler’s lunges toward the Russian oil fields and the Don. Pug Ismay thought as much, and he told Harriman the Red Army would be finished “in three weeks,” although Harriman noted that Ismay had been saying as much for twelve months. This time, however, events seemed to validate Ismay’s dismal predictions. By early July, Eisenhower thought the Russian position so desperate that he proposed another look at Operation Sledgehammer, the plan for the cross-Channel invasion of Europe. “Even an unsuccessful attack” in France, he told his public relations aide, Lieutenant Commander Harry Butcher, would be “worthwhile” if it brought relief to the Russians. Churchill and his military chiefs wanted no part of Sledgehammer for the self-evident reason that it was bound to fail and would not result in any succor for the Russians. Butcher predicted to his diary: “If Germany rolls up Russia’s armies and gains the rich oil fields that seem to be easily in her grasp, will the United States then concentrate on licking Japan first and leaving Germany until later? How much later it is impossible to tell.” This was Churchill’s fear exactly. But if not Sledgehammer, then what?259

  Harold Nicolson saw the political implications this way: “If the Russians collapse, they and their friends here will say it was due to Churchill’s refusal of a second front. I very much fear that Churchill’s own position will not survive a Russian defeat.”260

  Marshall and King arrived in London in mid-July to address the question of a second front. They carried a memorandum from Roosevelt that outlined his priorities and conclusions. The events unfolding in Russia and in the North Atlantic made it perfectly clear to Roosevelt that it was past time to do something. Yet the question of what to do remained, as it had for almost seven months, what exactly? Roosevelt, although seeing the possible merits of Gymnast, still sided with Marshall and Stimson on the need to get into Europe, preferably before the American elections. “Roosevelt was always afraid the American public would get very Pacific minded,” recalled Averell Harriman, “and force him to change his Europe first policy.” Yet, if Europe proved beyond reach, North Africa—which Marshall considered a sideshow—presented a suitable political alternative. It would remove some of the moral high ground from beneath Stalin. The president made it clear to Marshall that he wanted American boys fighting somewhere before November 3, Election Day. Further, he made clear that if no action was taken by the Allies in 1942, the effect on morale at home and in Great Britain would be disastrous. The Middle East must be held, Roosevelt wrote, in order to prevent a “joining hands between Germany and Japan, and the probable loss of the Indian Ocean” as well as the loss of Egypt, Syria, the Suez, and Iraqi oil. Sledgehammer should be studied, he advised, but if it could not be executed, they should pick another target. One method of protecting the Middle East, he suggested, would be to consider a joint Allied operation “in Morocco and Algiers intended to drive in against the back door of Rommel’s armies.” And there it was, Gymnast reborn. Secretary of War Stimson called Gymnast Roosevelt’s “secret war baby.” Churchill, with his barrage of telegrams and personal visits, had brought Roosevelt around. But Churchill had not yet sold Marshall, and Roosevelt, despite his directives to Marshall, left the final decision in the hands of his top general.261

  As the Combined Chiefs in London prepared to choose a target in order to take pressure off Stalin, the Soviet leader’s position only worsened. The previous summer, the Germans had bypassed and cut off Sevastopol, the largest Soviet naval fortress on the Black Sea. During the Crimean War almost a century earlier, Sevastopol withstood a British and French siege for 329 days, time enough for Leo Tolstoy, then a young Russian lieutenant of artillery who happened to be marooned in the city, to write three “sketches” of life under siege. They are fairly short pieces, the first an almost lyrical celebration of the heroics of the brave and patriotic defe
nders. Yet in the final sketch, written after Sevastopol fell, a deepening despair and intense loathing for the brutality of war permeates the narrative. Tolstoy and much of the czar’s army escaped the city. Hitler, when he finally moved fourteen divisions against Sevastopol in early June, took the city in twenty-three days. Boris Voyetekhov, a correspondent for Pravda, wrote the epitaph this time—of Soviet naval destroyers unloading shells and leaving port with their decks and holds full of women and children, of the city in flames, and of the last defenders, out of ammunition, swimming out to sea, to certain death. Few in the garrison escaped alive; almost 90,000 were killed and captured. Hitler now owned the Black Sea coast, from Yalta to Kerch, along a two-hundred-mile front. Farther to the north, his armies poured into the Donets Corridor.

  By July 7, Army Group B had reached the Don, opposite Voronezh. Hitler’s April directive had called for this force to now begin wheeling south down the west bank of the river toward the great bend, where only sixty miles separate the Don and the Volga, and Stalingrad. But Army Group B’s commander, Fedor von Bock, feeling a soldier’s natural unease at leaving a strategic rail hub such as Voronezh unmolested on his flank, threw his Fourth Panzer Army across the Don and into Voronezh. The operation, he told Hitler, would take only a few days. Paulus’s Sixth Army, meanwhile, began its push down the west bank of the Don, alone, and with every mile that much more removed from its panzer screen.

  To the British press, Stalin’s situation looked dire, at best. Not privy to all the facts, and careless with the few it had, it was full of calls for a second front, sooner rather than later; in fact, a second front now. The Daily Worker was again free to join the chorus when HMG lifted the January 1941 ban on its publication, a sop to Stalin. The slogan “Second Front Now” was being scrawled on walls throughout Britain, the handiwork of labor agitators who, in Churchill’s estimation, were nothing more than “fools or knaves.” Dissatisfaction with Churchill had spread from the Parliament into factories and the armed services. Scottish and Welsh Communists were now one with certain London intellectual elites in believing that Churchill was as much a disaster as the disasters he presided over. Beaverbrook’s newspapers, while still supporting Churchill, now framed the moral essence of the fight in terms of helping Russia, as did the British people, who, Mollie Panter-Downes noted, “can’t or won’t recognize the existence of any substitute for a genuine, slap-up opening of a land offensive on the Continent.” Spring was the season, Panter-Downes wrote, when an “Englishman’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of invasion.” This summer, however, the question Britons asked was not when the Germans would come to England, but when Englishmen would cross to the Continent. What Britons expected, Panter-Downes wrote, was a demonstration of “the old national talent for the brilliant impromptu, the type of piratical, sea-borne foray which has often studded and sometimes made English history.”262

  Mountbatten had been planning just such a foray for months, the target Dieppe, the strategic port in northwest France. Yet Churchill had also understood for months that a strategically meaningful landing in Europe that summer was out of the question, although throughout the year he harbored hopes for 1943. Yet by July, even 1943 began to look problematic. Eisenhower, in his memoirs, wrote: “It became increasingly doubtful… that a full-out frontal attack could be launched in the early spring of 1943, and because it would be extremely hazardous to begin a major operation across the English Channel in the fall of the year, we began to realize that a large-scale invasion might not be possible before the spring of 1944.” Eisenhower reluctantly concluded, as had Roosevelt, that the spring of 1944 might be the earliest the Allies could put an army into France, far too late to help the Russians. Whether a landing in North Africa—or anywhere, for that matter—would do anything to improve the Soviet situation was now the question du jour among the military planners. Eisenhower’s aide Harry Butcher believed that German and Japanese “industrialized strength,” along with the rubber and oil of Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma, would spell the end of the “British Empire, as we have known it” and leave the United States in “a defensive position, virtually alone in the world.” Time reduced the implications to a stark reality: “Hitler is winning in Russia.” If the Red Army does no better than it has so far, “Russia will be defeated. Germany will win the present phases of World War II in Europe…. The allies will then have lost their best chance to defeat Germany and win World War II.”263

  The time had come for the Anglo-Americans to fight; to not fight was to lose the war in Europe. With that appalling scenario in mind, in early July Roosevelt instructed King and Marshall to remember three “cardinal principles” when they sat down in London with the British Chiefs of Staff: “speed of decision on plans; unity of plans; attack combined with defense but not defense alone.” So eager to get to work were the American and British staffs that they held informal meetings on July 19 in Churchill’s absence. That was a mistake. Churchill, as minister of defence and per the authority vested in him, had intended to preside at the first meeting. The chiefs’ violation of protocol resulted in a Churchillian detonation at Chequers, where, in front of Hopkins, he paraded up and down the great hall reading from a book of British war laws. As he finished each page, he ripped it from the book and threw it down. The chiefs got the message. Then, within two days of sitting down with the British on the nineteenth, the Americans reluctantly agreed that Europe was beyond reach in 1942. Three days later they agreed upon North Africa as the target. On July 24, Operation Gymnast was rechristened Operation Torch, and a jumping-off date of late October was settled upon. Torch meant that Roosevelt would have his men on the beaches before the election; for Churchill and Brooke, it meant taking the first step in their push to clear the Mediterranean. But Eisenhower—who within a few weeks would be promoted to three-star rank and named commander in chief of Torch—saw things differently from both Roosevelt and Churchill. Like Marshall, Eisenhower looked upon Torch primarily as a sideshow to Roundup, its only merit being that it possibly would “contain” the Germans after the Wehrmacht defeated the Red Army, a defeat that, as the last days of July arrived, Eisenhower believed was imminent. Torch for Ike was a colossal mistake. Its approval by Roosevelt, he told an aide, “is the blackest day in history.”264

  On July 27 Roosevelt cabled Churchill: “I cannot help feeling that the past week represented a turning point in the whole war and that now we are on our way shoulder to shoulder.” Actually, they were about to start bumping shoulders. The British and American principals, military and political, had agreed on a target, but for different and possibly conflicting reasons. It became apparent in coming weeks that neither the specific objectives in North Africa nor a follow-through strategy had been addressed. Even the makeup of the invasion force was in doubt. Roosevelt wanted the entire land portion of the venture to be an American operation, based in part on his political need to put American boys into action and in part on his belief that the French North Africans hated the English and would welcome the Americans. He proposed to Churchill that if the British desired to attack Algiers, they do so a week after the Americans landed on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The British role in Torch, Roosevelt insisted, must be limited to air and sea support. This stunned Churchill. Knowing that Roosevelt heeded the advice of his generals, Churchill tried to persuade Eisenhower to persuade the president to approve a real joint Anglo-American venture. He succeeded a few weeks later, but his influence over Roosevelt was lessening. Churchill understood, Harriman told the president, “that he is to play second fiddle in all scores and then only as you direct.”265

  As for Charles de Gaulle and any role he might play in the invasion, Roosevelt looked upon the Frenchman as a mere soldier and one who manifested Bonapartist ambitions, although nothing in de Gaulle’s deeds or words had ever indicated an ambition to become a military dictator. Eisenhower grasped what Roosevelt did not: de Gaulle was hated by the Vichy because he had not surrendered while they had, and because he was everyth
ing Vichy loyalists were not—patriotic and courageous. Roosevelt simply did not understand that, with the result that Eisenhower was told by Washington that “under no circumstances” was the Frenchman to be told of the decision on Torch. Churchill, too, had more than his share of problems with de Gaulle, but they came about as a consequence of trying to work with the obstinate Frenchman, not against him.266

  As Churchill saw it, the major flaw with the original plan for Torch resulted from Marshall’s fear that to venture too far into the Mediterranean—specifically to Algiers—might result in his army being cut off. The news of American resistance to attacking Algiers came as a “bombshell,” Churchill told the president, and he asked that a British contingency be added in order to strike Algiers, and that American troops be transferred from the Moroccan part of the invasion in order to facilitate a drive east from Algiers, with Tunis the ultimate objective. Roosevelt took his time pondering the concept, but he found Eisenhower in fundamental agreement with Churchill. By mid-September Roosevelt agreed to transfer ten thousand men to the eastern operation, which would now take place simultaneously with the Moroccan landings. This opened up opportunities that Brooke and Churchill had sought all along. For Brooke, a continental second front could not be contemplated as long as Malta lay under siege and Tunis was held by the Axis. Churchill, with his eye on flushing Italy from the war before thrusting northward into Germany’s southern flank, strongly believed that if Torch did not include a push from Algiers into Tunisia, with the capture of Tunis as the ultimate objective, it risked becoming a dead end. Churchill prevailed on the matter of Algiers, but the Americans and British continued to debate the details and objectives of Torch into late September, prompting Eisenhower’s aide Commander Butcher to complain to his diary, “Trying to follow the evolution of Torch is like trying to follow the pea in a three-shell game.”267