The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (268 page)

The mauled
Exeter
headed for the Falkland Islands and repair.
Ajax
and
Achilles
were less battered, though the captain of the
Achilles
had been wounded in both legs and
Ajax
’s after gun turrets had been knocked out. The real loser, however, was Langsdorff. He himself had been hit by one British shell; his casualty list included thirty-seven men killed in action. His ship was a wreck. She had been hit eighteen times. Gaping holes had been opened in the deck and both flanks, several guns no longer functioned, her galleys were ruined, and she was almost out of ammunition. A voyage home was out of the question; even if unchallenged she could never make it. Repairs were essential. He limped into neutral—but anti-Nazi—Uruguay and asked for two weeks to put his ship in shape. He was given seventy-two hours.
Ajax
and
Achilles
, he knew, would be radioing for reinforcements. He did what he thought was sensible. His men were given berths on German freighters in the port, his ship was scuttled, and he himself, after wrapping himself in an old banner of imperial Germany—
not
the Nazi swastika—shot himself. He left a note: “For a captain with a sense of honor, it goes without saying that his personal fate cannot be separated from that of his ship.”

The Royal Navy’s triumph, wrote Churchill, “gave intense joy to the British nation and enhanced our prestige throughout the world. The spectacle of the three smaller British ships unhesitatingly attacking and putting to flight their far more heavily gunned and armoured antagonist was everywhere admired.” His youngest daughter remembers: “It was a glorious victory, and brought a gleam of light into a dark December.” Harwood was knighted and made an admiral. The sea lords proposed to leave
Exeter
in the Falklands, unrepaired, until the end of the war, but Winston would have none of it. Instead, he proposed to bring Sir Henry and his British ships home. He had not exaggerated the country’s elation; acclaiming the heroes would guarantee their remembrance and give civilian morale a badly needed lift.
⁴¹

By now Churchill had established his authority over the Admiralty. “Conveniently forgotten,” one historian writes, was “his role in scaling down the navy’s cruiser-building programme when Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1924–29. Remembered was his experience of the Admiralty, his love of the sea and the navy, his deep knowledge of the role of sea power in British history, and his reputation for getting things done.” His weakness was his love of gadgetry and wildly improbable schemes. Admiral J. H. Godfrey notes: “Anything unusual or odd or dramatic intrigued him: Q ships, dummy ships, the stillborn operation ‘Catherine’ ” (of this, more presently), “deception, sabotage, and, no doubt influenced by Professor Lindemann, the application of novel scientific methods.”
⁴²

In retrospect some of his projects seem absurd. “White Rabbit Number 6,” as he called it, was a “trench-cutting tank,” capable of excavating an earthwork six feet deep and three feet wide at a rate of one mile an hour. Weighing 130 tons, standing eight feet tall, and stretching eighty feet long, it was to be used at night, penetrating the enemy’s lines and taking him by surprise. The cabinet approved it; no one seems to have asked how surprise could be achieved by a device whose noise would be deafening. At the Admiralty, according to Godfrey, these schemes were regarded as outlets for the first lord’s “demonic energy and extraordinary imagination,” and generally tolerated, though some were considered “offensive.” One pet project was an antiaircraft device which he called the Naval Wire Barrage (NWB). It looked like a large umbrella stand. In reality it was a multiple launcher into which were crammed fourteen three-inch projectiles, each carrying two thousand feet of wire with a small parachute at one end and a two-pound bomb at the other. Once the launcher had been rocketed aloft, the projectiles would be ejected at four thousand feet downward, their descent slowed by the parachutes. If an aircraft struck a wire, the bomb would be drawn upward and explode when it hit the plane’s wing. It was the Prof’s idea. Churchill thought NWBs marvelous, and despite his Ordnance Department’s advice he ordered forty of the ungainly contraptions mounted on forty RN ships. They proved worthless. Rear Admiral R. D. Nicholls puts it bluntly: “The NWB was considered by everyone except Winston as plain crazy.” Then he takes the larger view: “It was just part of the price—and not a very high one—that had to be paid to keep Winston going. Without him Britain and the Free World were sunk.”
⁴³

In fact, as the war progressed, many of his ideas were to generate highly useful innovations: “Window” (strips of tinfoil dropped by bombers to confuse enemy radar), “Pluto” (a pipeline under the Channel), “Gee” (a device for guiding pilots), and “Mulberry” (the artificial harbors used in the D day invasion of Hitler’s Europe).

What was needed now was a concept, a device,
something
that would make submarining so dangerous that Karl Dönitz would be walking the Kurfürstendamm looking for a job. Thus far, nothing had been found that surpassed the last war’s answer to the U-boat, the destroyer. Unfortunately, the Royal Navy was incredibly short of destroyers—and the prospects for more were dim. “It is most disconcerting,” Winston wrote Rear Admiral Fraser at the start of the war, “that we only get six destroyers in the present year, then no more for nine months, and only three more in the whole of 1940. Nine destroyers in sixteen months,” he declared, “cannot possibly be accepted.” Later, in his memoirs, he wrote: “Destroyers were our most urgent need, and also our worst feature.”
⁴⁴

Here was a void that wanted filling. He hadn’t forgotten the Nazi peril in the sky, so he called for the design and mass production of an “antisubmarine and anti-air vessel,” built with “the greatest simplicity of armament and equipment” to free the few destroyers in commission for duty elsewhere. The ships he had in mind, he wrote in an Admiralty memorandum, “will be deemed ‘Cheap and Nasties’ (cheap to us, nasty to the U-boat).” Because they would be “built for a particular but urgent job,” they would be useless once their mission was accomplished. Not to worry; the important thing was to “get the job done.” The Prof, now working full time at the Admiralty, told him modern warfare could certainly be nasty, but never inexpensive. The
Unterseewaffe
threat would continue to grow. The Admiralty would have to fight back with its very thin line of destroyers.
⁴⁵

Most senior naval officers who worked with Winston allude to this quintessential Victorian trait—the late Victorians believed inventors could accomplish anything, and in the world of their limited imagination they were right. Yet these same officers had exaggerated claims for asdic before Winston saw or heard it. And he and the Prof (whom the admirals had come to detest)
did
contribute to technological warfare. One early contribution was Britain’s effective response to the magnetic mine. Here Churchill revealed the double standard found in all warriors; a weapon is admirable if his side has found it first, despicable if found first by the enemy. In a memorandum to Inskip a year earlier, he suggested that disabling the Kiel Canal would be a prime objective in any war with the Reich, and recommended that “
special fuses with magnetic actuation
” be considered. But while the British were still studying the problem, the Germans solved it. In the first weeks of the war their magnetic mines, dropped by parachute in shallow waters of channels and harbors and activated when a ship passed over them, became a nightmare for merchantmen.
⁴⁶

Winston was outraged. The “Nahrzees” (he was working on that idiosyncratic delivery, and each time, he came closer to making “Nazi” sound like an unspeakably vulgar moist petard) had stolen his idea. Briefly he persuaded himself that the device itself was criminal. The new mines, he said, were “contrary to the accepted rules of sea warfare,” and he told the House of Commons: “This is about the lowest form of warfare that can be imagined. It is the warfare of the I.R.A., leaving the bomb in the parcels’ office at the railway station. The magnetic mine… may perhaps be Herr Hitler’s much vaunted secret weapon. It is certainly a characteristic weapon, and one that will no doubt be for ever associated with his name.” Lacking a specimen of the mine, no counter could be devised. Then, as Churchill wrote, “fortune… favoured us.” The night of November 22 a Nazi plane was seen dropping a large object, attached to a parachute, into the mud of the Thames estuary off Shoeburyness. Before dawn two RN officers skilled in underwater weapons retrieved the device, which, as suspected, turned out to be a magnetic mine. Here the Prof intervened, devising a method of demagnetizing ships by girdling them with an electric coil—degaussing, as it is called. Before the winter was out, Winston had his own magnetic mines and had forwarded a plan to sow the Rhine with ten thousand fluvial mines, only to have it vetoed in the spring by the French, who feared Nazi reprisals.
⁴⁷

Franklin Roosevelt later said: “Winston has fifty ideas a day, and three or four are good.” He was no crank; when he hit the jackpot it was the mother lode. Although the Germans were the first to produce the magnetic mine, their very success demonstrated that his conception had been sound. Most of his schemes were politely discussed and then dropped. The difficulty was that his Admiralty staff was dealing with genius, with a man who thought in cosmic terms, and that the price for some of these excursions was beyond the grasp of career naval officers.

So it was with “Catherine,” named after Catherine the Great, “because,” he explained, “Russia lay in the background of my thought.” Churchill introduced this proposed operation to his closest advisers in a five-page outline on September 12, Britain’s tenth day at war. Unlike the rest of the Admiralty, Churchill had stopped speculating over where the Kriegsmarine would strike next and instead considered a Royal Navy counteroffensive. Thinking defensively, his admirals had assumed that if they could keep U-boat sinkings of Britain-bound merchantmen to a minimum and blockade enemy ports, they would have done their job, leaving it up to the soldiers to do theirs. But the first lord was taking a very different line. He was talking about a naval strategy which had never entered their minds, and as he talked, they wished it hadn’t entered his. The command of the Baltic Sea, as he later pointed out in his memoirs, was “vital to the enemy. Scandinavian supplies, Swedish ore, and above all protection against Russian descents on the long undefended northern coastline of Germany—in one place little more than a hundred miles from Berlin—made it imperative for the German Navy to dominate the Baltic.” Moreover, as he had noted earlier, an “attack upon the Kiel Canal” would render “that side-door from the Baltic useless, even if only at intervals.”
⁴⁸

Churchill was contemplating an imaginative—and perilous—action: the seizure of the entire Baltic, the Reich’s only sea link with Norway, Finland, and especially Sweden, the Ruhr’s chief source of iron ore. He knew it would be difficult, but no one could doubt that success would bring Hitler to his knees. His source of raw materials for tanks, artillery, mortars, and rifles would be cut off.

A critical challenge lay in the narrow waters joining the North Sea and the Baltic; navigation of them by a strong fleet would attract swarms of Luftwaffe bombers. Winston had already discussed possible solutions with the Admiralty’s director of naval construction. “It would… be necessary,” he noted in his September 12 memorandum, “to strengthen the armour deck so as to give exceptional protection against air attack.” He planned to commit two British battleships (“but of course 3 would be better”) with fifteen-inch guns; “their only possible antagonists” would be the
Scharnhorst
and the
Gneisenau
, “the sole resources of Germany” in the battleship class. Both would be destroyed by the heavier guns of the British battleships, which would outrange them and “would shatter them.” Escorting them, and shielding them, would be a dozen vessels yet to be built, “mine bumpers,” he called them, with “a heavy fore end to take the shock of any exploding mine.” Confiding only in Pound, he set down the five-page précis of his plan, marked “Most Secret.” He wrote: “I commend these ideas to your study, hoping that the intention will be to solve the difficulties.” Distribution of Catherine was confined to eight copies, “of which all except one,” he wrote, “will be destroyed after the necessary examination has been made.”
⁴⁹

Pound commented: “There can be little doubt that if we could maintain control of the Baltic for a considerable period it would greatly enhance our prestige.” But the first sea lord saw difficulties. If the Soviet Union became a Nazi ally, the operation was doomed. The “
active
cooperation of Sweden” in providing a base, repair facilities, and oil must be assured, and the British ships committed must be expendable, “such that we can with our Allies at that time win the war without [them], in spite of any probable combination against us.” Winston scrawled, “I entirely agree.” To him Catherine had become “the supreme naval offensive open to the Royal Navy.” Others receiving Winston’s presentation studied it seriously and thought it feasible if… And then they, too, saw problems. The decisive problem was air power. Even admirals who underrated it had to consider the Luftwaffe threat. Battleships could be taken into the Baltic, but RAF fighters could not accompany them; the ships would be under constant, heavy attack from land-based enemy aircraft. Churchill dismissed the Luftwaffe. He wrote Roosevelt: “We have not been at all impressed by the accuracy of the German air bombing of our warships. They seem to have no effective bomb sights.” In any event, he held, the ship’s antiaircraft gunners could eliminate the air threat.
⁵⁰

He convinced no one. The support for Catherine, never strong, faded away. Moreover, it seems not to have occurred to Winston that the Nazis could occupy Denmark, move heavy artillery to the shore, and lay mines in the Kogrund Channel. Catherine died a slow, quiet, expensive death. Apart from preempting the time of Britain’s best naval minds, twelve million pounds was spent on special equipment for the battleships’ escorts. Churchill was disappointed, but because the entire plan had been highly classified he faced no barrage of criticism. Indeed, his reputation at the Admiralty shone as brightly as ever. The general verdict among the sea lords and other senior officials was that Catherine had been brilliantly conceived, that it could have ended the war if successful, but that too much had been at stake—and the ice too thin for skating.