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

by William Manchester

  As the Italian campaign came to life, a meeting was held in London that would have far more repercussions in coming years than the bloody battle for Monte Cassino. The previous November the London press had reported that the Nobel Prize–winning Danish physicist Niels Bohr had escaped to London from German-occupied Denmark by way of Stockholm. In fact, the RAF secreted him out in the cramped bomb bay of the aptly named Mosquito bomber, where he passed out for lack of oxygen. In London the scientist spoke with various luminaries, including Alec Cadogan, who gushed to his diary: “Bohr. What a man! He talked… for ¾ hour, about what I haven’t the least idea.” Soon thereafter Bohr disappeared. In fact, he had been taken to the United States, to Los Alamos, as an official British consultant to the Tube Alloys project; that is, he was working on the Manhattan Project. He brought with him German drawings for the design of a uranium heavy-water pile, which if built, would behave more like a reactor than a bomb, with resultant explosive forces not much more powerful than conventional bombs.114

  This should have told the Americans that the Germans were heading in the wrong direction if building an atomic bomb was their goal. But General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, believing that the drawings had been allowed to fall into Bohr’s hands in order to put the Allies off the scent, dismissed that intelligence. Bohr also believed that the results obtained at Los Alamos might prove to be either the biggest disaster to befall mankind—if the bomb was built and deployed down the road by nations now left out of the program—or the biggest boon, if it made war unthinkable. This was a new and unique way of looking at things, a concept Roosevelt and Churchill had not yet considered. An atomic bomb, for Churchill, was simply a bomb bigger than all others, a weapon to be used in pursuit of strategic objectives. That was the purpose of weapons, after all. Bohr saw more transcendent implications.115

  Such was Bohr’s renown that he was invited to meet with Franklin Roosevelt, to whom Bohr advised a policy of sharing atomic research with the Russians in order to maintain the trust between the Allies that had been nurtured for almost three years. The alternative—keeping the Russians out of the picture—would lead, Bohr believed, to a breakdown of trust, possibly of the alliance, and would have potentially disastrous postwar consequences, the most likely being a nuclear arms race, with the Russians making their own bomb sooner or later. Here was the scientist grasping immense political implications while so far the politicians grasped only the immediate military implications. Roosevelt sent Bohr back to London in March after telling him that any such proposal to expand the nuclear family would have to be approved by Churchill per the Quebec agreement of the previous year. This Bohr attempted to do. Sir John Anderson sent Churchill a memo that outlined Bohr’s thoughts and proposed a meeting be arranged. On it, Churchill scribbled, “collaborate” and “on no account.” Weeks went by. On May 16, after R. V. Jones impressed upon Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s science adviser, the importance of the meeting, Bohr was finally summoned to No. 10. Cherwell accompanied him.116

  The meeting did not go well. Bohr, who often told R. V. Jones that clarity and accuracy of statement are mutually exclusive, elected to err on the side of accuracy, thus delivering such a long and complex monologue that Churchill thought him “a muddled thinker” who wanted to give away British secrets to the Russians. “Indeed,” R. V. Jones later wrote, “Churchill did wonder if he was a Russian agent.” Churchill reiterated his belief that the atomic bomb was simply a bigger bomb than all others and that he and his friend Franklin Roosevelt had everything under control. Then he dismissed Bohr. R. V. Jones bumped into Bohr after the meeting and asked how it went. “It was terrible!” replied the great scientist. “He scolded us like two schoolboys!”117

  That week, Cherwell briefed the Chiefs of Staff on N spores—anthrax and bacteriological weapons. This was not the mustard gas of the Great War but something far more deadly. Churchill informed Ismay: “As you know, great progress had been made in bacteriological warfare and we have ordered a half million bombs from America for use should this mode of warfare be employed against us.” Cherwell explained in detail the effectiveness of the bacterial agents; victims died suddenly and peacefully a week after exposure. Just six bombers could drop enough “gas” to kill everyone within a square mile. Churchill intended his threat as a “deterrent” lest Hitler gas the troops on the Normandy beaches. The invasion forces would carry no gas masks. Were they gassed, Churchill intended to unleash every poison he had on the population of Germany. He had on many occasions since May 1940 pledged to his nation, to his family, and to the world that Britain would never be the first to use poison gas, but now, with the liberation of the Continent imminent, he pushed the chiefs for a plan to gas Germany if by doing so the war would end sooner. This shocked the Foreign Office, recalled Antony Head, who drafted a planning memo in response to Churchill’s query. “A Foreign Office chap wanted to include a paragraph,” recalled Head, “saying that such a policy would forfeit moral principle. In other words, it’s a bit of a shit streak to use gas, which we were all aware of. We put the paragraph in because he [Churchill] wanted it in such a hurry.” As for the Foreign Office scribe who authored the paragraph that raised objections to the use of poison gas, Churchill scribbled on the memo: “Pray tell, who are the uniform psalm-singing defeatists who have written this paper?”118

  By mid-May every soul in Britain—2.8 million Allied troops and 47 million Britons—knew the big show was close at hand. Almost five hundred American war correspondents reached that conclusion when they were told to sign powers of attorney and wills. The British people knew because Home Guardsmen were posted at just about every crossroads in the country, checking civilians’ papers and directing never-ending streams of jeeps and trucks this way and that. Late in the month, civilian travel to Ireland was banned. Military bases were locked down. HMG, at the insistence of Eisenhower, had a month earlier forbidden all diplomatic communications between embassies and their home countries—including those conducted by courier and cipher—except when initiated by the United States, Poland, or the U.S.S.R. No foreign diplomats were allowed to enter or leave the country. A ten-mile-wide coastal strip from the Firth of Forth to Land’s End had been made off-limits to civilians. Intra-island commercial shipping was shanghaied in its entirety for the invasion. The ports were jammed with every sort of ship afloat, as well as hundreds of components of the artificial harbors, on which thousands of workers applied final welds, after which the sections were submerged to hide their presence from German reconnaissance flights. Railways had announced that schedules could change without notice and that certain routes and trains would be off-limits to civilians, also without notice. This had now come to pass.

  Milk and mail delivery went by the boards because the milkmen and mailmen had been recalled to Home Guard duty. Regular commerce came to a halt; fresh fish disappeared from markets, coal from cellars, and beer from pubs. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote that if the High Command was seeking to confuse the Germans with all the troop movements, they had clearly succeeded in confusing the locals. Residents of villages that were full of Yanks one night awakened to find them gone by dawn, replaced by Canadians, who were in turn replaced by the British. The big London railway stations were full of only soldiers and their wives and girlfriends. “The women who have come to see their men off nearly always walk to the very end of the platform,” wrote Panter-Downes, “to wave their elaborately smiling goodbyes as the train pulls out. Sometimes they look to one as if they’re standing on the extreme tip of England itself.”119

  And from across the Channel came the regular dull throb of Allied bombs falling in France, similar to the roll of distant thunder, with the unsettling difference that the concussive pulse generated by high explosives moves through bedrock at the speed of sound and can spawn a tremor in a tumbler of water at forty miles, or in a man’s belly.

  The French knew nothing, but de Gaulle suspected much. On May 15, de Gaulle, in Algiers, unilaterally declared the French Co
mmittee of National Liberation the provisional government of France, with himself as president. He proclaimed the Third Republic had not ended but had only been interrupted by the bastard Vichy regime. Roosevelt, driven as Eden saw it “by his absurd and petty dislike of de Gaulle,” still wanted to throw de Gaulle overboard. Eden considered that option to be “folly” and advised Churchill in the strongest terms to not do so. Although Churchill heeded Eden’s advice, he was one with Roosevelt in telling de Gaulle nothing about Overlord until after it had been launched.120

  In London on the fifteenth, the very few in the land who knew the exact dates and time of the invasion gathered for a final briefing at Montgomery’s headquarters at St. Paul’s School. Eisenhower and the SHAEF command attended, as did the entire War Cabinet, King George, the British Chiefs of Staff, dozens of American generals, Jan Smuts, and Winston Churchill. No representative of the Free French attended, even though Eisenhower planned to land the First French Army in Marseilles in the follow-up to Overlord. Churchill again offered a few fighting words after the briefing, as he had on April 7. Butcher called Churchill’s address a real “stemwinder,” wherein he proclaimed “bravery, ingenuity, and persistence as human qualities of greater value than equipment.” One phrase in particular struck Eisenhower: “Gentlemen,” Churchill intoned, “I am hardening toward this enterprise.” Eisenhower took this to mean that Churchill, who “had long doubted its feasibility and had previously advocated its further postponement in favor of operations elsewhere… had finally, at this late date come to believe with the rest of us” that Overlord was the “true course of action in order to achieve victory.” Eisenhower wrote these words just three years after the war, in his memoir Crusade in Europe. The passage has dogged Churchill ever since. The British historian Max Hastings cites Eisenhower’s recollection when he writes in Winston’s War that Churchill had all along believed Overlord “represented an option but not an absolute commitment.”121

  In fact, it was both. Churchill had at first considered Overlord a commitment lacking muscle, and he had argued (successfully) that the early, puny version be beefed up. Every plan in war is an option, to be examined, weighed, and adjusted, until it is carried out, or not. Eisenhower later wrote that part of his job was to make alternate plans in case Overlord proved “impractical” to carry off, or if strategic objectives changed in a way that brought that particular option into doubt. In war, several options must be kept open at the same time; if only one option is on the table, it is not an option. By early March, within five weeks of Eisenhower and Montgomery’s strengthening of the plan, Churchill began sending his “hardening” telegrams to Marshall and Roosevelt. By May 15 he had long since hardened to the plan, a hardening that had not come about with the speed of quick-set cement, but the end result was the same. On May 8, just a week before the final unveiling of the plan, during a private lunch with Eisenhower, Churchill leaned into the table and announced, with tears in his eyes, “I am in this thing with you to the end.” Eisenhower failed to mention the luncheon in his memoir. When David Eisenhower wrote of the May 15 meeting in his 1986 book, Eisenhower at War, he did not imbue Churchill with the monolithic resistance to Overlord that his grandfather had in his book. Rather, the younger Eisenhower refers to the evolution over three years of Churchill’s position on cross-Channel operations, from Sledgehammer to Roundup and finally to Overlord.122

  Churchill had not been alone in his concerns about Overlord. Air Chief Marshal Leigh-Mallory expressed serious doubts to Eisenhower about the wisdom of the American airborne attacks. The terrain was atrocious, unsuitable for both parachutists and gliders. German anti-aircraft batteries would have a field day in targeting the slow-moving transport planes, whose gas tanks were not self-sealing, and were thus flying firetraps. He foresaw a “futile slaughter” of the paratroopers followed by the likely failure of the landing at Utah Beach on the Cotentin Peninsula, which in turn would lead to the ruination of the entire enterprise. Eisenhower heard Leigh-Mallory out before conducting a “soul-racking” examination of the problem, alone. He decided to go ahead with the airborne operations. Yet, Eisenhower instructed Leigh-Mallory to put his concerns in writing, to protect the airman from condemnation in the event his dire predictions came to pass. In that case, Eisenhower expected to bear the responsibility.123

  Churchill often expressed his concerns through emotion accompanied by tears, thus appearing indeterminate, even weak. Yet all the participants were concerned; they would have been foolish not to be, and they were not foolish men. Montgomery expected the Germans to begin throwing panzer and mechanized infantry divisions at the beachhead within hours of the landings. His logic was simple. The trickery of Bodyguard would expire at H hour, when the troops went ashore, at which time the Germans would finally know the truth and react with force and speed and fury. Eisenhower, concerned that the Germans would mass on the beaches, asked Churchill to extend the ban on diplomatic communications beyond D-day, to lull the Germans into believing the real invasion was yet forthcoming. Again, his logic was simple: if the Germans did not believe D-day was a feint, the invasion was in deep trouble from the start.124

  Years later, when it was all over, Eisenhower in his memoirs stressed the abominable consequences had Overlord failed. Churchill could have written the words. “The two countries [Britain and the United States] were placing all their hopes, expectations, and assets in one great effort…. Failure… would be almost fatal. Such a catastrophe might mean the complete redeployment” of U.S. forces to the Pacific. The effect on Allied morale would be “so profound that it was beyond calculation.” Finally, if Overlord failed, Russia “might consider a separate peace.” Churchill had argued that very case ever since he first saw the preliminary—and inadequate—plans for Overlord the previous August.125

  Since early in the year, Erwin Rommel’s command, Army Group B in northwestern France, had been working to batten down the northwest French coast. Rommel could not know of the delay in Allied plans wrought by Montgomery’s proposals of late January, but he knew the Americans and English were coming, if not in May, then in June. His orders were to complete construction of a defensive barrier roughly four hundred miles in length—Hitler called it his Atlantic Wall—from Brittany, east through the Cotentin Peninsula, and on through Normandy, across the Seine estuary to the Pas de Calais. Rommel believed that the Allies were not likely to attempt a landing on the Cotentin, where the Germans would only have to seal the seventy-mile-wide neck of the peninsula to trap the invaders. Brittany, farther south, was also a similar dead end. Even were the Allies to find a way to put men ashore on Brittany’s inhospitable beaches, they would find the ports of Brest, Lorient, and St-Nazaire well fortified and bristling with arms. Any landings even farther south would take the Allies beyond the range of their Spitfire fighter support, which was critical to the operation. Brittany would put the Allied armies closer to the Pyrenees than to Paris. The Seine estuary was too irregular; the chalk cliffs of the Pays de Caux were too high; they gave out near Dieppe, which by virtue of the British raid in 1942 had demonstrated the unwisdom of trying to invade a fortified port directly. That left Normandy or Calais.126

  Rommel’s superior in the west, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, agreed with Rommel’s overall assessment but favored the Pas de Calais as the target; it offered the straightest line and shortest distance between England and France. The German Fifteenth Army, nineteen divisions strong, was stationed there, and in Allied headquarters it was assumed that it would be released promptly to deliver a counterstroke in Normandy when the troops came ashore. Hence, the Allied campaign of false radio transmissions. German intelligence was intercepting a great deal of radio traffic between numerous Allied units in the southeast of Britain. The signals were as false as the phony units sending them, all part of Operation Fortitude and intended in part to keep the German Fifteenth Army tied down in Calais. Although in general agreement on the site of the invasion, von Rundstedt and Rommel disagreed on the fundamental ques
tion of how best to meet the invader, wherever he arrived. In addition to static defenses manned by artillery and infantry, six panzer divisions were available in northwestern France. Rommel, the apostle of armored war in 1940, was now an apostate. He wanted to dig in on the beaches and fight a defensive battle, yet one that admitted to flexibility and timely deployment of reserves, a battle such as Montgomery successfully fought during Rommel’s first assault at El Alamein in 1942.

  To that end, Rommel insisted that the six panzer divisions—more than 1,100 tanks and self-propelled guns—be placed under his command in order to bring them to bear on the beaches. Von Rundstedt favored holding the tanks in reserve until he could launch a decisive counterattack once the Allies showed their hand. His logic was simple: the Wehrmacht by brilliant armored maneuver had defeated both the French and the BEF in 1940, and it could do so again. Flexibility underlay von Rundstedt’s claim on the panzers. But Rommel wanted the tanks put under his command, because, unlike in 1940, the Allies now controlled the air, as evidenced by the ongoing destruction of the very rail and road routes that von Rundstedt needed to deploy his tanks for counterstrokes. The debate lasted into April.127

  Thanks to Ultra, the Allies were privy to almost every exchange of views between Rommel, von Rundstedt, and Berlin. Churchill was reading messages soon after they were sent. Hitler, who initially favored Rommel’s strategy (and his prediction of Normandy as the target), finally made a decision that effectively hobbled both Rommel and von Rundstedt. Employing the wisdom of Solomon, the Führer divided the panzers between Rommel and OKW—the German army supreme command. Von Rundstedt would have no claim on the tanks. Hitler further ordered that the panzers under OKW could be deployed only on his authority. Only three of the six armored divisions were arrayed south of the Seine, and only one was under Rommel’s direct command near the Normandy coast. Hitler’s decision served himself, Rommel, and von Rundstedt ill, but it served the Allies well. It was “probably the most important decision of all those affecting the Allies and the Overlord plans,” F. W. Winterbotham wrote in The Ultra Secret.128