The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (320 page)

M
ost, including Hitler, believed Churchill’s declaration to fight on alone applied only to the defense of England. But Churchill intended as
well to take the fight to Hitler. He told Britons many times in coming months that Hitler must break the Home Island in order to win the war. Actually, Churchill knew there was another way—in another place—for Hitler to win, one that would negate the need for an all-or-nothing invasion of England. It was also the place that afforded Churchill the best chance to take the fight to Hitler’s ally and, if Hitler came to his ally’s assistance, to Hitler himself. Where all Britons that summer scanned the seas and the skies overhead, Churchill looked far further, to the place he believed the war would be decided: the Mediterranean Sea.

The Mediterranean lay at the center of Churchill’s strategic vision, as it had for the ancient Romans, and as it now did for Mussolini. Churchill later called the Mediterranean “the hinge of fate” upon which the outcome of the war turned. Many in the German navy and Luftwaffe high command understood this. Later in the summer the commander in chief of the German navy,
Grossadmiral
Erich Raeder, told Hitler in private that “the British have always considered the Mediterranean the pivot of their world empire.” Raeder believed clearing the British from the Mediterranean would sever England from its Empire and force London to come to terms, if the U-boat blockade did not bring Britain to its knees first. Churchill believed likewise. But Churchill not only saw danger in the Mediterranean, he saw opportunity, the
only
opportunity for Britain to go on the offensive, by sea, air, and on land. This, Churchill intended to do. His war strategy can be summed up thus: defend England; defend and attack in the Mediterranean.
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Since the time of the Caesars, dominance of the Mediterranean—
mare nostrum
—had been vital to Italian security. The Mediterranean between Sicily and Tripoli, a distance of about 300 miles, was to Rome what the English Channel and the Northwest Approaches were to London. Malta, a British possession since 1814, and home to a Royal Navy fleet, sits directly astride the sea routes from Italy to its North Africa colonies. The main island of Malta, 95 square miles of Tertiary limestone, rises from the sea 100 miles south of Sicily and about 200 miles northeast of Tripoli. The nearest British naval base, in Alexandria, lay almost 1,000 miles to the east, Gibraltar 1,100 miles to the west. When France fell, the entire British air presence on Malta consisted of three obsolete Gloster Gladiator biplanes, dubbed
Faith, Hope,
and
Charity
by their pilots. A fourth Gladiator was stripped for spare parts. Gibraltar and the Suez Canal are the main portals into the Mediterranean, but Malta since the time of Nelson had been the geographical key to free run of the sea. The harbor at Valletta was the only British deepwater port between the anchorages at Gibraltar and Alexandria, and therefore critical to the Royal Navy, almost as vital as Scapa Flow, the Scottish anchorage and main base of the Home Fleet.

But the British, expecting at least an Italian air attack, if not a full-scale naval assault on Malta, moved their warships (but for submarines) from the naval base at Valletta to Alexandria, to help cover the eastern Mediterranean. Mussolini launched his first air raid on Malta on June 11, and never let up; he understood that only when he controlled the sea could his armies secure the perimeter. His navy of six battleships, nineteen cruisers, one hundred smaller vessels, and more than one hundred submarines was larger than the German navy, and larger than the combined British fleets at Gibraltar and Alexandria. Malta was so central to Churchill’s war strategy that he told the War Cabinet later in 1940 that if allocations of concrete for use in building coastal defenses had to be adjusted downward, it must not be done at the expense of three “vital” positions: The Home Island, Gibraltar, and Malta. Mussolini and Churchill (and Grand Admiral Raeder) knew that if the British lost Malta, the Mediterranean would become an Italian lake, and Gibraltar and the Suez Canal would become trapdoors to oblivion for the British. Mussolini, in his navy, had the way; whether he and his naval commanders had the will remained to be seen.
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Italy, like Britain, was an imperial sea power. Its most prized colonial possessions, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, were just two days’ sail from Sicily. The Italian merchant fleet, protected by the Italian navy, served as the lifeline to those colonies, which in turn fed Italy. On June 10, 1940, the day Mussolini plunged his dagger into France, the Italian merchant fleet, at 3.5 million tons, was the fifth-largest in the world, behind the U.K. (18 million tons), the U.S. (12 million), Japan (5.5 million), and Norway (4.8 million). More than three-quarters of the Norwegian fleet—1,000 ships that were at sea when the Germans struck in April—now sailed in alliance with Britain. Mussolini’s rush to climb aboard Hitler’s war wagon resulted in one of the least noted but most significant shipping defeats of the entire war. On June 11, the day after Mussolini invaded France, his merchant fleet was reduced by 35 percent when 220 Italian freighters and tankers were seized in neutral ports worldwide. Mussolini had failed to call his merchant fleet home before his betrayal of France. He would never make up the loss. Churchill saw opportunity here. He believed the Italians would strike from Libya toward Cairo, but he also believed that Mussolini, with the loss of so much of his merchant shipping, could no longer support his African adventures. Two days after Dunkirk and four days before Mussolini struck, Churchill sent a memo to the Air Ministry: “It is of the highest importance that we should strike at Italy the moment war breaks out.” In the early fall Churchill told the House, “Signor Mussolini has some experiences ahead of him which he had not foreseen at the time when he thought it safe and profitable to stab the stricken and prostrate French Republic in the back.”
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T
he possibility of a Nazi onslaught against the Home Island had first been raised at a Defence Committee meeting on May 20, when enemy panzers passed Amiens on their way to Abbéville, cutting off the BEF. After a brief discussion, chiefly about the lack of riflemen and rifle ammunition, eight Bren Guns—light machine guns—were manned in Whitehall, including the entrance to No. 10, and two more were placed above Admiralty Arch. They would have been useful only if Germans swarmed out of Buckingham Palace or Trafalgar Square. Three days later graver news from the Channel ports led to more realistic planning; Churchill alerted the Dominion prime ministers to the possibility of an “early heavy attack” on England and told his Chiefs of Staff that “some means of dealing with the enemy’s tanks”—he suggested land mines—might be found. By then the issue was judged to be serious. Martin Gilbert writes, “Invasion was now the dominant concern of those at the center of war policy. By the end of June it excluded virtually every thought in Englishmen’s heads.” In his diary Ironside wrote: “It is the weakness of waiting for an attack that preys upon people’s minds.” By then the French had surrendered to Italy, too, and RAF scouts were reporting the assembling of barges, lighters, and ferries in the ports of Belgium and northern France, and Whitehall knew that across the Channel, Nazi troops were singing, “We’re sailing against England.”
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In Parliament Churchill first addressed the question of defense against invasion on June 4, as the Dunkirk evacuation was winding down. Yet, even at that early date, with British fortunes approaching their nadir, offense, not defense, underlay his strategic vision:

Three weeks later, in a letter to South African prime minister Jan Smuts, a staunch British ally, Churchill made his offense-minded thoughts perfectly clear: “Obviously we have to repulse any attack on Great Britain by invasion.” He predicted that Hitler might turn toward Russia and “he may do so without trying invasion.” Then: “Our large army now being created for home defence is being formed on the principle of attack and opportunity, for large scale amphibious operations may come in 1940 and 1941.”
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But for the time being he could attack Hitler only with words. His most eloquent challenge to the Nazis was delivered the day after the French laid down their arms. He spoke for thirty-six minutes, reading from twenty-three pages of typewritten notes. He foresaw a climax:

Later, Edward R. Murrow would say of Churchill: “Now, the hour had come for him to mobilize the English language and send it into battle.”

It was as though a great bell had tolled, summoning Englishmen to sacrifice everything save honor in defense of their homeland and western civilization. The world beyond, other than the Empire, was deaf to it. Although listeners then and since took from Churchill’s words the impression that he was speaking about the bravery of Englishmen to Englishmen, he was not. He had chosen his words with care. He had not said that a thousand years hence, people would say this was England’s finest hour, but that it was the
British Empire’s
finest hour. Hitler had declared that his Reich would last one thousand years; Churchill had now claimed the same for his Empire. Each believed only one empire could survive. Neither considered the possibility
that both might perish. Britain fought on that summer, alone in Europe—the Dominions and colonies too distant to offer meaningful help, yet with the Empire comprising one-quarter of the earth’s population, sturdy in its support of the Home Island. But the Empire—including India and the outliers of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—could not respond fast enough or with enough force to thwart Hitler. Only one Canadian division, withdrawn from France, was in Britain.

Americans were sympathetic but pessimistic, and political leaders there and on the Continent were unimpressed by Churchill’s inspired words. Franklin Roosevelt, facing reelection in a country opposed to going to war, was not about to say or do anything that might appear to endorse Churchill and the British Empire. “For those who were not Germans,” writes Alan Brooke’s biographer, “there seemed that summer only one way of safety—instant and unconditional surrender—and for those who delayed only one fate—certain and imminent destruction.” Indeed, Hitler believed that the war was over. He had already staged a victory parade, marching conscripts of the 218th Infantry Division through the Brandenburg Gate. Forty of the Wehrmacht’s 160 divisions had been demobilized, and the Führer had drafted a peace treaty he was sure the British would sign, knowing that the alternative was annihilation.
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Some Englishmen would sign such a treaty. There existed therefore an alternative to Hitler having to “break us in this Island.” In a May 20 telegram to Roosevelt, Churchill had raised the possibility of a peace movement sweeping him from office and his successors having to negotiate with Hitler “in utter despair and helplessness.” He mentioned that possibility again in a June 15 cable to the president, suggesting that Hitler in effect need only
bend
Britain, bend it to near the breaking point, and the result would be a new government formed to negotiate a terrible peace in hopes of gaining deliverance for “a shattered or a starving nation.” The result would leave Britain “a vassal state of the Hitler empire.” Such a settlement would deny the warrior Churchill his battle, the political Churchill his office, and England its sovereignty. All were unacceptable. The Vatican indeed proposed a peaceful settlement of the conflict, and on August 1, King Gustav of Sweden, the doyen of European monarchs (and the source for much of Hitler’s iron ore), wrote King George VI, proposing a conference “to examine the possibility of making peace.” Some Englishmen—they called themselves “sound” and Winston “unsound”—thought this suggestion merited discussion. The men of Munich were still a force, particularly in the Establishment. Halifax, of course, was one. The United Press quoted him as inviting “Chancellor Hitler to make a new and more generous peace offer.” R. A. Butler, Halifax’s under secretary, was an energetic supporter of Gustav’s peace overtures. According to Björn Prytz, then
the Swedish minister in London, on June 7, when the prime minister was commuting to France, attempting to stiffen French resolve, Butler told Prytz that Churchill’s inflexibility toward the Third Reich was “not decisive.” He saw no reason why the war should not end now in a compromise peace, provided German terms were acceptable, and assured the Swede that British policy would be guided “not by bravado but by common sense.”
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