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

by William Manchester

  And he pointed out the ultimate beauty of the plan: it would bring France and Germany together in mutually beneficial enterprises. It would be “an effective step,” Churchill told a meeting of Scottish Unionists, “in preventing another war between France and Germany and lay at last to rest that quarrel of 1,000 years between Gaul and Teuton. Now France has taken the initiative in a manner beyond my hopes.” He told the House during the debate of June 27 that to reach this day was why Britain had refused to quit in 1940:

  We fought alone against tyranny for a whole year, not purely from national motives…. It was not only our own cause but a world cause for which the Union Jack was kept flying in 1940…. The Conservative and Liberal parties declare that national sovereignty is not inviolable, and that it may be resolutely diminished for the sake of all the men in all the lands finding their way home together.

  He predicted the consequences if Attlee refused participation in the talks about the Schuman Plan:

  The absence of Britain deranges the balance of Europe. I am all for a reconciliation between France and Germany, and for receiving Germany back into the European family, but this implies, as I have always insisted, that Britain and France should in the main act together so as to be able to deal on even terms with Germany, which is so much stronger than France alone. Without Britain, the coal and steel pool in western Europe must naturally tend to be dominated by Germany, who will be the most powerful member.134

  Attlee stood firm; he would not send any ministers to Paris.

  Schuman held his meetings without the British. Almost a year later, in April 1951, France, Italy, West Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed the Treaty of Paris and by so doing created the European Coal and Steel Community. The six states pledged to create a “common market” for steel and coal. Here, then, was the first step on the road to the European Economic Community and, ultimately, the European Union. May 9—the date Schuman first read his proposal in the French National Assembly—is now celebrated by European Union member nations as Europe Day. (The Council of Europe, which Churchill championed, is not part of the European Union; its member states do not transfer any national legislative or executive sovereignty to the body, which acts through international legal conventions.) The evolution of Schuman’s concept into the European Union is a long and fascinating story, but it is not Churchill’s story. Events on the other side of the globe that June week in 1950 changed the trajectory of Churchill’s thinking, and the final years of his career.

  On June 25, the Cold War turned hot. On that day, 230,000 North Korean soldiers, supported by more than 250 Russian-made T-34 battle tanks (the best tank on the planet) and as many pieces of heavy artillery, drove south across the 38th parallel and into South Korea. South Korean forces were outnumbered by more than two to one in men. They had no tanks. On the twenty-seventh, the day the Commons debated the Schuman Plan, the United Nations passed Security Council Resolution 83, calling on member states to offer military support to South Korea. Moscow did not vote, having boycotted the Security Council for six months. The next day, the South Korean government fled Seoul. Within four weeks, the North Koreans had bottled up the South’s army and the American Eighth Army in the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula, near Pusan. Given that the North Koreans were clients—proxies—of Moscow, Churchill and the West had to entertain the very real possibility that with the attention of the United States drawn to Korea, Moscow might strike in Europe. If that came to pass, Europe west of the Iron Curtain was virtually defenseless.

  Overnight, Churchill’s Europeanism became far more narrowly focused. Coal and steel matters could wait. There was now only one priority: the creation of a unified European defense force. By the same token, Churchill’s Atlanticist vision, too, became more narrowly focused: America, which had all but abandoned Europe in 1945, had to be brought back into the European picture, in force.

  In June 1950, the NATO treaty of 1949 was backed up by nothing more than the paper it was printed on. In 1945, more than 2.8 million American soldiers and almost 300,000 airmen served in Europe. By 1946, 90 percent of both had gone home. By mid-1950, only 80,000 American troops and 20,000 airmen remained, and many of those were support troops.

  In late July, based on figures supplied by the Attlee government, Churchill outlined to the House the situation in Europe. The Russians fielded 40,000 tanks; how many were deployed in Europe was unknown, but Stalin had little reason to deploy tanks east of the Urals. The Americans and British each possessed about 6,000 tanks; America’s were sitting in America but for a couple of hundred in Europe. Soviet troop strength stood at least at 175 divisions, including 25 or more armored divisions, versus a total of a dozen French, American, and British divisions, of which only two were armored. The East Germans had been allowed by Moscow to create a defense force of 50,000, even though the Red Army provided more than enough men to defend East Germany. That was the status on the ground.135

  When it came to the air, nobody in HMG seemed to know how many aircraft the Soviets had, perhaps as many as 19,000. And how many of them were stationed within range of Britain? Again, nobody knew. Churchill hammered away at the Attlee government’s decision to sell one hundred jet fighters to Argentina, which claimed sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, and another 110 to Egypt, which was blocking Israeli ship traffic in the Suez Canal. What British air forces were available, he asked, to protect those American bombers in East Anglia? If the Soviets had only fifty atomic bombs, he told the House, and if Moscow dropped some of them on Britain, “It would not be pleasant.” The Soviets had captured the German rocket works at Peenemünde, he reminded the House, and had learned enough to launch devastating guided missile attacks (armed with conventional warheads) against Britain. And on the seas—or under them—the Soviet U-boat menace appeared to be “far more severe than was the German U-boat force in 1939 and 1940.” The European situation was beginning to look like the mid-1930s again, with an existential threat in the East, and Britain unprepared to defend itself. Churchill began again to sound like the voice from the 1930s wilderness. He warned the House that if the Soviets threw only half their strength against the West, the West would be outnumbered by at least eight to one. He added: “If the facts that I have stated cannot be contradicted by His Majesty’s Government, the preparations of the Western Union to defend itself certainly stand on a far lower level than those of the South Koreans.”136

  Ever since Fulton, Churchill’s hopes for world peace had rested with the deterrent of the atomic bomb. The Americans now stationed 180 “atomic bombers” in East Anglia. Moscow was aware of that figure because Attlee had announced it in the Commons. But Churchill sought—demanded—a British atomic deterrent. For four years he had pressed the Attlee government to reveal its progress, if any, in building a British atomic bomb, and for four years Attlee had disclosed nothing. His government was, in fact, hard at work building a bomb, for the same reason Churchill would have pursued the matter: to guarantee British sovereignty. Attlee was as determined as Churchill that British foreign policy and defense not be held hostage to the whims and wishes of the U.S. State Department or White House. Attlee’s refusal to discuss his atomic plans was proper; Churchill led the opposition, not HMG. Some in Britain concluded that the fourteen inscrutable men in the Kremlin had no design on Western Europe for the simple reason that Moscow could take it with impunity if it so desired, and since it had not, ergo, it had no desire to do so. This was the sort of convoluted logic—peace through trust—that infuriated Churchill. His position was clear, and he had stated it repeatedly since 1945, including to his New York hosts months earlier: “It is certain in my opinion that Europe would have been communized and London would have been under bombardment some time ago, but for the deterrent of the atomic bomb in the hands of the United States. That is my firm belief and that governs the situation today.” As for trusting to the goodwill of Stalin after the experience of trusting Hitler, who had claimed too many times that his appetite for
geography was satisfied, Churchill added: “Well, once bit, twice shy.”137

  In July, shortly after the North Koreans invaded the south, and with his stances on the need to re-arm and build a British atomic bomb in mind, he told a Plymouth audience, “The fourteen men in the Kremlin are not drifting with events. They work on calculation and design. They have a policy the aim of which we can see; but the execution and timing of their ambition for Communist world government we cannot predict.” He told a London audience: “We have always to be very careful nowadays—we politicians, if we take an interest in military matters, or are held to have accumulated some knowledge and experience about them—lest we should be described for electioneering purposes as warmongers.” In fact, Labour and many in the press slapped that label on him now on a regular basis. Yet, if the state of Western arms (other than the atomic bomb) was the measure, he was correct. France, which in 1940 sent 140 divisions against Hitler, now fielded fewer than ten. Britain had difficulty assembling a token force of one brigade to send to Korea in support of the Americans. Harold Macmillan told his diary: “It seems that to scrape together 3000 men and their equipment for Korea will take two months!… What have they done to the war equipment? It would appear that they have thrown it into the seas.”138

  On July 27 Churchill moved that the House go into secret session—“I spy strangers”—in order to address the status of the British atomic bomb. His motion lost by a single vote, 295 to 296. But if Churchill continued to push for divisions—votes—the day would come when Labour would lose one, and then another. The day would arrive when Attlee would have to call a general election. “Mismanagement” was the word Churchill now introduced into almost every critique of the Attlee government: “the mismanagement of the housing problem”; “the mismanagement in civil and domestic affairs”; “the mismanagement of our defence forces.” And this, directed at Attlee in the House: “The Prime Minister has appealed to us for national unity on Defence. That does not mean national unity on mismanagement of Defence.”139

  His message—and the phrases he used to deliver it—recalled the previous decade: “We must never despair. We must never give in,” he told the House. “Our scientific and technical ability is unsurpassed. We may well have time to reorganize and develop the mighty latent strength of Britain surrounded by her Commonwealth. But I warn the House that we have as great dangers to face in 1950 and 1951 as we had ten years ago.” The next day Harold Nicolson told his diary that the “state of public opinion after Winston’s grim speech… is one of paralyzed shock…. We are in a position of blind and dumb dread.”140

  The next week, in early August, the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe met for the second time in Strasbourg. “Consultative” was the operative word: motions passed by the Assembly were nonbinding on the governments of member nations. Schuman was there to present his plan. Paul Reynaud, now France’s defense minister, was on hand. The Germans sent two contingents, one of Socialists and one made up of members of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, whose leader, Konrad Adenauer, had been elected in 1949 the first chancellor of the Federal Democratic Republic of Germany—West Germany. British socialists led by Hugh Dalton were in attendance, as were Duncan Sandys, Harold Macmillan, and Winston Churchill for the Conservatives. On August 11, Churchill addressed the Assembly. He welcomed the Germans, and called for “a real defensive front in Europe” formed by a continental army made up of “large forces” of Americans, Britons, the French, Greeks, Italians, the Scandinavian countries, and the Low Countries. He forgot to mention the Germans, but his intent was clear. It would take compromise and sacrifice, he warned, and then he added words that anticipated the inaugural address of a young American president a decade later: “Those who serve supreme causes must not consider what they can get but what they can give.” He ended by offering a motion calling for “the immediate creation of a unified European Army subject to proper European democratic control and acting in full co-operation with the United States and Canada.”141

  Macmillan thought the speech masterful, delivered with power and touches of humor that found their mark. “It is really more like a broadcast than a speech,” he told his diary. “But then the trouble is that WSC’s broadcasts are speeches.” Churchill staked his reputation on his motion; defeat could end his long crusade for some sort of federal European structure, and certainly would mean the end of the idea of collective European security. He had addressed no details of command and control of such a European army, knowing that offering details might undermine the whole edifice. The French were wary of the Germans. The Germans were afraid of re-arming, believing that any German army would be large enough to provoke the Russians but not strong enough to repel them. The German General Staff had been abolished; Germans who served in a European army would therefore serve under the command of other nationalities. Macmillan, fearing that German volunteers would likely be former Nazis, preferred an army of conscripts—that is, if the Germans agreed to an army of any sort. The members of the Assembly pondered all of this and more before taking their vote. “No one is quite sure what turn the debate will take,” Macmillan wrote.

  The vote came in at 89 for the motion, 5 against, with 27 abstentions (including most of the British socialists). “It is strange,” Macmillan wrote that week, “how, abroad as well as at home, what Churchill puts forward one year as a daring paradox, becomes an accepted truism a year later.” Macmillan dined with Churchill the night of the vote, and found the Old Man “to be very pleased and very excited.” Given that the object of the Europeanists was to bring about reconciliation between Germany and France, Churchill had “a right to be pleased. Without his immense personal prestige, which he has thrown quite recklessly into this campaign, it might not have been achieved.”142

  In mid-September two divisions of U.S. forces under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur staged an amphibious assault at Inchon, in northwest South Korea. The invasion was a stunning success; within two weeks the Inchon forces and the Pusan armies met and then drove the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel. Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, was liberated, “the first Communist capital to be liberated by the forces of the free world,” crowed Time. By late October, UN forces were chasing the North Korean army up the peninsula toward the Yalu River, the border with China. MacArthur declared that the boys might well be home by Christmas. In mid-November MacArthur informed George Marshall—the new secretary of defense—that he was launching a general offensive by the U.S. Eighth Army northward to the Yalu, to detect how many, if any, Chinese might be in North Korea, and to secure the peninsula once and for all. In defiance of the most basic military doctrine, MacArthur divided the Eighth Army into four separate columns. MacArthur had earlier told President Truman that at most three hundred thousand Chinese might get into the fray but that he did not believe the Chinese would send in any forces. But they did. The Eighth Army had almost reached the Chinese border in northwest North Korea when, on November 25, one million Chinese troops smashed into the American lines, into the flanks, even into the rear of some forces. The Chinese armies, hidden on both sides of the Yalu in deep mountain passes, had gone completely undetected by the Allies. By the end of the year, UN forces—mostly American—had been driven back over the 38th parallel, and in the weeks that followed, driven eighty miles south of Seoul, which again was lost. It was the longest retreat in American history.143

  On November 30, Churchill’s seventy-sixth birthday, President Truman told reporters that the UN would not abandon its mission in Korea. He followed that with a promise to “take whatever steps are necessary” to meet military objectives. A reporter asked if the atomic bomb might be one such step. Truman replied that use of the atomic bomb was under “active consideration.” That statement, Dean Acheson later wrote, and a false news report that MacArthur might be given authority to use the bomb, threw the Attlee government into a panic, and resulted in Attlee’s “scurrying across the ocean” to meet with Truman.
Macmillan saw Truman’s remark as a typically “diplomatic” response, “a cliché as a synonym for doing nothing.” Attlee saw it as a step toward atomic war. The prime minister, in Macmillan’s words, “bolted, like a rabbit, from his hole, and is off to Washington (what a picture and what a contrast to the great Churchill days).”144

  Macmillan and Churchill did not know—and would not learn for another year—that Attlee had good reason to fret about the American position. The previous year Attlee had agreed to abolish the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff organization. That body had been critical to Churchill’s plans for continued Anglo-American military cooperation. Attlee shared Churchill’s desire for a continuation of the Anglo-American partnership, but whereas Churchill had always badgered the Americans for a real role in that relationship—even in 1944, when Britain was clearly the junior partner—Attlee had willingly assumed the subservient role. He had twice in 1950—in secret—assured Washington that if American air forces commenced bombing operations in China, Britain would commit her air forces to the cause. In doing so, he had written Washington a blank check. Now, with Truman mumbling about the possibility of using the atomic bomb in Korea or China, Attlee had to either stop payment or secure guarantees from Truman that Britain would be consulted if any such measure was taken under consideration. Thus, Attlee went to Washington in early December with hopes of resurrecting the gentleman’s agreement on the use of the atomic bomb that Churchill and Roosevelt had forged in 1943, which stipulated that neither country would use the bomb without the approval of the other, but which the McMahon Act of 1946 had effectively quashed. In this, Attlee failed utterly. Truman flatly refused to “consult” with the British, or anyone, on how America would defend itself. Truman offered to keep Attlee “informed” as a courtesy, but there’d be no “consultation.”