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

by William Manchester

  On the sixth, Churchill received word from Eden that an Italian diplomat in Tangier had approached his British counterpart with authorization from Badoglio to open negotiations with the Allies. “Don’t miss the bus,” Churchill replied, adding that although surrender must be unconditional, “we shall be prepared to accord conditions as acts of grace and not as a bargain.” He suggested the term “honorable capitulation” be used in the talks, but Eden reminded him that “unconditional surrender” had been announced publicly at Casablanca. This was a problem. Churchill instructed Eden to convey to the Italians that their surrender would have (possibly favorable) conditions attached, conditional upon their surrendering unconditionally. Roosevelt had concurred in this line of reasoning the previous week, when he cabled Churchill: “Eisenhower should be authorized to state conditions when and if the Italian Government asks him for an armistice.” Berlin was well aware of the developing situation; a branch of its intelligence service was intercepting phone calls between Churchill and Roosevelt in which they discussed surrender terms for the Italians. One condition Churchill insisted upon was that 70,000 British prisoners in Italy must be repatriated to England, not transported to “the land of the Huns.” The Vatican suggested that by declaring Rome an open city, the Allies might entice the new Italian government to the peace table more quickly; Churchill nixed the idea. Rome was to be bombed relentlessly, he told Eden, until the new government surrendered. A few weeks later, Churchill told reporters, “Of this you can be sure, we will continue to operate on the Italian donkey at both ends, with a carrot, and with a stick.” The Italian matter was on the Quebec agenda.216

  The Battle of the Atlantic was not. The Allies were on the verge of victory. There would be many lost ships and lost sailors over the next twelve months and beyond, but the German blockade was broken.

  Elsewhere, the air battles over the Ruhr and Hamburg were reaching monstrous climaxes. Churchill had told the U.S. Congress in May what he had in mind for Japanese cities; his words applied to German cities as well: “It is the duty of those who are charged with the direction of the war to… begin the process, so necessary and desirable, of laying the cities and other munitions centres of Japan in ashes, for in ashes they must surely lie before peace comes back to the world.” Since May, residents of the Ruhr Valley, who otherwise knew little of the battles in the Atlantic and Russia, were aware from nightly visitations by the RAF that a horrific turn had come in the air war. The RAF had been trimming wicks since 1940; during the early summer of 1943, it set western Germany ablaze. So relentless was the bombing that Churchill, while viewing a British reconnaissance film of the carnage in the Ruhr Valley, turned to his dinner companions and asked, “Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?” He posed that question in late June over brandy, and it did not mark a philosophical turn on Churchill’s part. In the weeks since he posed the question, they had taken it further, and indeed Churchill was intent on taking it much further still. He had his doubts about the effectiveness of the air war, but as he once told the press, “Opinion is divided whether… air power could by itself bring about collapse in Germany. There is no harm in finding out.”217

  Many of Goebbels’ diary entries between May and late July treat either of the treachery of Jews (he had reconfirmed his thoughts on Jewish treachery after rereading the anti-Semitic screed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), or the increasingly effective RAF bombing in the Ruhr Valley and on Hamburg. The Krupp Works at Essen was hit, completely halting steel production. Three dams in the Ruhr Valley—the Eder, Sorpe, and Moehne—were damaged or destroyed on May 17 when just nineteen Lancasters from the specially trained 617 Squadron, flying only sixty feet above the water, dropped two-ton, barrel-shaped “bouncing” bombs, which skipped upstream to hit the dams just below the waterline. Eight of the Lancasters and their crews were lost, but explosions breached the Moehne dam with catastrophic effect. The resultant flood drowned several dozen factories, and 1,200 residents downstream. “The attacks,” Goebbels wrote, “were very successful.”218

  As Goebbels noted the increasing damage inflicted by the RAF, he took some satisfaction in the numbers of British bombers shot down each night. Now, nightly, came flights of five hundred, seven hundred, nine hundred or more Halifax and Lancaster bombers; by day, the American B-17s arrived, in far smaller numbers. The Anglo-American air forces were now administering vicious round-the-clock punishment to the Reich. This was the “24-hours service” that Churchill had promised the American press. Yet the German fighter defense was especially devastating against the American daylight raiders. As a result, in June the Combined Chiefs amended the Casablanca bombing directive, which called for the destruction of German morale (houses), transportation hubs, oil refineries, and armaments industries. Henceforth the air forces were to destroy Germany’s aircraft industry. The new directive was code-named Pointblank. In coming months it would serve less as a blueprint for joint Anglo-American strategy than as a source of dispute between RAF and the American planners. Indeed, Bomber Harris simply continued bombing German cities. If aircraft factories were hit in the bargain, so much the better.

  With RAF casualties running disturbingly high, often more than 5 percent, approval was given to employ the secret Window program—strips of aluminum foil dropped from incoming bombers that caused German radar screens to dissolve into meaningless static. Window had been kept quarantined in the year since its development for fear that if it was deployed, the Germans would solve it and turn it against Britain. During that year, 2,200 RAF heavy bombers had been lost and almost 18,000 trained airmen killed or captured, including 4,000 airmen captured or killed during the recent offensive. To stanch the bleeding, the War Cabinet allowed Harris to deploy Window. Goebbels, in his diary entry of July 26, noted an unexplained drop-off in RAF casualties, just twelve aircraft shot down of more than seven hundred. This was Window at work.219

  Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city and largest port, suffered the consequences that week, during what Brooke described as “a new climax of horror.” On July 24, the RAF dropped 2,400 tons of bombs on Hamburg, an amount almost exactly equal to the tonnage of bombs the Luftwaffe had deposited on Britain during the previous twelve months. The RAF returned two days later, but low clouds and rain forced most of the raiders to turn back. Clear skies and the RAF returned on the night of the twenty-seventh and again on the twenty-ninth. Again Goebbels rued the ease with which the RAF penetrated German defenses. He also rued the death of Hamburg, “A city of a million inhabitants has been destroyed in a manner unparalleled in history.” The British in three raids dropped almost ten thousand tons of high explosives and incendiaries on the city. The result, a German official wrote, was “beyond all human imagination.” Almost 800,000 citizens were left homeless; the fire storm consumed oil depots and the port, twelve square miles of the city, and more than 40,000 residents.220

  In one night and in one city and during one firestorm, the RAF had made up for all of London’s casualties during the Blitz. A secret German document recounted the disaster: “Trees three feet thick were broken off or uprooted; human beings were… flung alive into the flames by winds which exceeded 150 miles an hour.”* Residents who took shelter underground “were suffocated by carbon-monoxide poisoning and their bodies reduced to ashes as though they had been placed in a crematorium.” Churchill took along on the Queen Mary stereoscopic slides of the damage, along with a small device to view the images. Desiring that Stalin be apprised of RAF results, shortly after arriving in Quebec, Churchill sent the slides and the viewfinder on to Moscow. The images, Churchill wrote Stalin, “give one a much more vivid impression than anything that can be gained from photographs.” On August 9, a Daily Mirror headline crowed: 50 German Cities Will Be Hamburged. The raids were, as Brooke wrote, a climax of sorts. They also marked the beginning of even more deadly raids. With almost 80 percent of Hamburg erased from the map, Bomber Harris now put Berlin—he called it “The Big City”—in his sights.221

 
The Luftwaffe did not turn Window against Britain that year, in part because with much of the Luftwaffe deployed in the east, attacks against Britain had all but ceased; fewer than 2,400 Britons died by German bombs that year. The Germans did, however, invigorate their nighttime fighter defenses, including locating and targeting British bombers by triangulating RAF electronic emissions, and refining their radar to penetrate Window. The RAF soon began paying its previously high price. On average, six hundred RAF airmen were killed or captured each week during the next year. When the Economist opined that the air raids were costing the Allies too much, Goebbels lamented to his diary, “Would to god that were true.” By forcing Germany to defend itself, the raids assured that the Luftwaffe could not attain air superiority over the Russians. And in Italy, where the Allies now held a ten-to-one superiority, the Luftwaffe had all but disappeared. The Germans also had to commit massive ground forces in the west, where more than ninety-five divisions—one-third of German troop strength—were arrayed, including thirteen in Norway, forty-five in the Low Countries and France, and twenty-four in Italy and the Balkans. None were fighting Americans or Britons, but neither were they fighting Russians. They were as effectively tied down as if under attack, but Stalin, who was losing ten thousand Russians—soldiers and civilians—per day, did not see things that way. Churchill believed this validated his strategy of hitting Germany from all sides, by all methods, at all times. Goebbels agreed, writing, “It is not a soothing thought to imagine the English attacking us at any point they please with relatively small forces.”222

  That was the very strategy that Henry Stimson was urging Roosevelt to repudiate, even as the Queen Mary and Churchill closed on Nova Scotia. “None of these methods of pinprick warfare,” Stimson wrote to Roosevelt, “can be counted on” to either lead to the defeat of Germany or “to fool Stalin into the belief” that the West had kept to its pledge to open “a real second front.” It was time, Stimson urged the president, to demand Churchill make good on that pledge. Further, it was time that an American was appointed commander of the invasion. He told Roosevelt, “We cannot rationally hope to be able to cross the Channel… under a British commander” because, although the British “have rendered lip service to the operation their hearts are not in it.”223

  Where Stimson saw ineffectual pinpricks, Churchill saw flexibility, the essence of his opportunistic strategic vision. The Americans tended to underestimate the complexity of a cross-Channel operation, while Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff tended to exaggerate its potential pitfalls, leaving each side in doubt of the other’s strategic vision. Marshall stunned Brooke during the conference when he offered that “20 or 30 divisions” landed in France would suffice to rid Europe of Hitler. Brooke knew that such a paltry force would be slaughtered. Stimson and Marshall, for their part, suspected the British did not consider the North African and Italian ventures to be a means to an end—a softening up of Europe as prelude to Overlord—but intended to delay if not undermine the cross-Channel thrust.224

  Eisenhower believed so as well, and later wrote, “The doctrine of opportunism, so often applicable in tactics, is a dangerous one to pursue in strategy.” The Americans suspected the British sought only to nibble away at the edges of the Reich by sea and air and on land in order to drive Germany to the brink, at which time an invasion of France would result in an almost bloodless march from Normandy to Berlin.

  That was not true. Churchill and Brooke sought to punch away at Germany until such time as the march to Berlin—and it would be bloody, not bloodless—would have a strong prospect for success. Churchill later reduced the differences in strategic thinking to a few choice phrases. The Americans, he wrote, “feel that once the foundation has been planned on true and comprehensive lines all other stages will follow naturally and almost inevitably…. The British mind does not work quite in this way. We do not think that logic and clear-cut principles are necessarily the sole keys to what ought to be done in swiftly changing and indefinable situations.” These ideas informed Churchill’s strategic thinking. Its essence was “to assign a larger importance to opportunism and improvisation, seeking rather to live and conquer in accordance with the unfolding event than to aspire to dominate it often by fundamental decisions. There is room for argument about both views. The difference is one of emphasis, but it is deep rooted.” Churchill had, since 1940, endorsed a cross-Channel thrust, but as a means of exploiting a collapse in German morale and firepower, not as a means of evoking the collapse. Ismay, writing after the war, confirmed that philosophy when he wrote, “Mr. Churchill and his advisors always recognized that ultimately the death blow to Germany must be delivered across the Channel” (italics added).225

  Onboard the Queen Mary, Churchill was receiving his first briefings on Overlord, the proposed invasion of Normandy. He liked what he saw, up to a point. General Frederick Morgan had been ordered by the Combined Chiefs to produce a plan for a “full scaled assault” on Europe. He had been warned that based on Admiral King’s needs in the Pacific, he could expect only 3,300 assault and troop ships to carry out his plan. Thus limited, Morgan’s plan called for three seaborne and two parachute divisions to land in the general area of Caen. Two dozen British, Canadian, and American divisions would follow in the first weeks after the initial landings. That, Churchill concluded, would not trigger a German collapse if that was the intent; nor was it enough to exploit a German collapse if one was imminent. Churchill suggested that more troops go ashore along a broader front. Five months would pass before the Americans saw the wisdom of his suggestion.

  Satisfied with the overall plan, Churchill, as usual, fretted over the details. Given that twenty-foot tides were common along the Normandy coast, he demanded to be briefed on the progress in building the Mulberry artificial harbors he had championed more than two years earlier. Only by building these harbors could enough men, machines, rations, and ammunition be gotten safely ashore in a timely fashion. The target was 12,000 tons daily; success depended on reaching it. Fuel for the trucks and tanks would come by way of another technological marvel, a pipeline under the ocean (Pluto) from southeast Britain to the Normandy town of Port-en-Bessin. The pipeline’s deployment would be made more complex because it would probably take place under Luftwaffe attack. A third marvel was intended to protect the artificial harbors from high seas—an artificial breakwater (called a lilo) that consisted of large inflatable rubber bladders that supported underwater concrete screens. A demonstration took place in Churchill’s stateroom bathroom. The Great Man watched, perched upon a stool and dressed in his dragon dressing gown, as an admiral and a brigadier splashed away at the overflowing bathtub in which a miniature lilo calmed the waves. A stranger who witnessed the scene, Ismay wrote, “would have found it hard to believe that this was the British high command studying the most stupendous and spectacular amphibious operation in the history of war.”226

  Churchill sought assurance that progress was being made on another concept he held dear: Mountbatten’s floating airfields made of ice and code-named Operation Habakkuk. The idea, Churchill stressed, “deserves very keen examination.” He had selected the code name, citing the Old Testament text from Habakkuk, “Behold ye among the heathen… for I will work a work in your days… which ye will not believe.” Indeed, many among the planning staff were nonbelievers. The idea, which Mountbatten introduced to Churchill during a Chequers weekend, had taken shape in Canada, not surprisingly given the sometimes frigid temperatures there. But Churchill envisioned deploying these million-ton monsters off the coasts of France and in the Indian Ocean, where they would serve as refueling stations for the RAF. No consideration appears to have been given to one critical design flaw: even outfitted with their planned refrigeration systems, the ice crafts would melt. Brooke disparagingly called Habakkuk “one of Dickie Mountbatten’s bright ideas,” but promised Mountbatten that he would be given an opportunity to present the idea in Quebec. The CIGS really had no choice but to acquiesce, for Dickie, having Chu
rchill’s ear, operated on the principle of why talk to the monkey when you have the organ grinder. Thus, the disdain in Brooke’s diary entry upon being told by Churchill that he planned to elevate Mountbatten to the Southeast Asia Command: “He [Mountbatten] will need a very efficient Chief of Staff to pull him through.”227

  The Atlantic voyage passed much like the one of May, with nightly games of bezique played with Harriman, who on the previous voyage had cautioned Churchill against deprecating the American daylight bombing strategy. Harriman now cautioned Churchill, who feared Overlord would derail his plans in Italy, against deprecating Overlord. Roosevelt, Harriman warned, was intent that Overlord take place in May 1944, and that was that. Churchill responded that he hoped only to reach the Po River in northern Italy, hold that line, and strike into the Balkans from the Aegean. Given the difficulties of terrain, supply, and the enemy, on any march to the Po, three hundred miles north of Rome, that was far more easily said than done. Eisenhower believed that any plan to reach the Po would necessitate withholding so many men from Overlord “that the cross-Channel operation could not be undertaken in the spring of 1944.” That was unacceptable to the Americans.228