The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (328 page)

The RAF had no warning that London was the target. At 4:00
P.M.
Dowding was at his desk in Bentley Priory when he was told British radar had picked up the huge formations approaching from Calais. During previous Luftwaffe raids, including over the past few days, the raiders had split up upon reaching the coast, where British fighters patrolling at 25,000 feet waited for that moment to pounce. On this day that moment never came.
Valhalla
was German slang for an extraordinarily large formation of aircraft. Wave after wave of Valhallas crossed the east coast of Kent, near Deal, and headed straight for London. Eagle Attack was still under way; the targets were industrial centers along the Thames. The Germans hit Woolwich Arsenal first, then the Victoria and Albert Docks, the West India Dock, the Commercial Dock, and the Surrey Docks. Behind them they left a flaming vision of apocalypse. Ships were sunk, catwalks mangled, cranes toppled, and fires set that covered 250 acres and served as a beacon for a second heavy raid. Many German bombs missed their marks and fell into East End neighborhoods—civilian neighborhoods. At dusk that evening, observers in the West End took note of what appeared to be a spectacular sunset. But the glow came from the east. The observers quickly grasped the horrific truth: this was not the tangerine handiwork of the setting sun; the East End was burning.
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In the late spring of 1940 it was decreed that the bells of London’s churches, which had pealed morning wake-up and evening curfew and called London’s faithful to Sunday service for almost three centuries, would ring now only to announce Cromwell, the code word that would alert all Britain to an imminent invasion. When the Chiefs of Staff ordered all troops in Britain to full readiness, that was enough for the Home Guard. At 7:30 they proclaimed Cromwell. Church bells throughout the kingdom rang out their warning. Men deployed. Civilians readied their homemade weapons. The Royal Engineers blew up key bridges, and in the confusion, several civilians were injured stumbling over hastily laid mines.
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It was a false alarm. No Germans arrived by sea, but for Londoners, the terror from the skies had begun. Given the hideous glow churning the clouds high above the East End, it would not have been unreasonable had Londoners concluded that their city was soon to be reduced to cinders and ash.
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The next day Home Forces commander Sir Alan Brooke told his diary
of the night’s heavy bombing and fires, and added, “Went to the office in the morning, where I found further indications of impending invasion.” He predicted that the next few weeks would prove “the most eventful weeks in the history of the British Empire.” The full moon and tides would align the next week. The Germans had not come during the July moon, or the August. They would have to come in the next ten days, or take their chances in October, when the weather, their ally since June, would become their enemy.
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T
o oppose an invasion, reinvigorate the blockade, and hunt U-boats, Churchill needed more destroyers. Help in that regard—very modest help—was on the way at last, but at a price. Franklin Roosevelt’s position on sending destroyers to Churchill had shifted (just slightly) between May and late August, a period of twelve weeks during which Churchill fumed to the cabinet that “although the president is our best friend, no practical help has been forthcoming from the United States as yet. We have not expected them to send military aid [troops or pilots], but they have not even sent any worthy contribution in destroyers or planes.” At one point, the kingdom’s finances looked so bleak that Chancellor of the Exchequer Kingsley Wood suggested requisitioning the nation’s gold wedding rings in order to raise twenty million pounds. Churchill approved the plan but suggested it be implemented at a later date, not to retain the twenty million in gold but “for the purpose of shaming the Americans” if for lack of American help England’s fortunes should evaporate.
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Churchill followed up his original request to Roosevelt for destroyers with another, and another, and another. His missives to Roosevelt became increasingly desperate, the memos to staff more disdainful of the timeliness and quality of American help. To HMG’s ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, in June: “We really have had no help worth speaking of from the United States so far.” That month had been the low point, symbolized perhaps by Henry Ford’s refusal to produce engines for British planes for fear his sales of new cars to Americans might be hurt, to say nothing of getting paid were England to lose, as Ford thought likely. In a late July telegram to Roosevelt, Churchill simply begged: “It has now become most urgent for you to give us the destroyers, motor boats and flying boats for which we have asked…. Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now.”
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Churchill lowered his request to forty ships, and then he raised it to sixty. He cautioned Roosevelt that the Italians, by sending some of their
submarines into the Atlantic (Mussolini had more than one hundred, more even than Germany), could help the Germans isolate England. He informed the president that ten British destroyers had been sunk in ten days, and almost one-third of the Royal Navy destroyer fleet had been lost since the start of the war. And he linked the destroyers to his strategic plans for the following year: “Our intention is to have a strong army fighting in France for the campaign of 1941.” Finally, he told Roosevelt that “time is all important,” for it would not be until February that British production of destroyers and anti-submarine craft could fill the shipping gap, which, however, could be filled by the prompt delivery of U.S. destroyers.
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By mid-August, more than three months after Churchill’s first plea for older destroyers, Roosevelt began to believe that Britain might, just might, hold on. Ignoring both the isolationists and the Neutrality Acts, the president sent Churchill a message through the State Department in which he proposed a two-pronged deal: a guarantee from England that its Home Fleet would sail to Canada were the Home Island to find itself in extremis, and a straight-up swap of several British naval bases for the American ships. The negotiations for the destroyers imparted a certain sticky relativism to the concept of U.S. neutrality. Germany and Italy, with whom America was not at war after all, would receive no such friendly overtures. Regardless of the sovereign right of nations to trade with any combatant not under legal blockade, a transfer of fifty destroyers to Britain was a clear step in the direction toward war, and that pleased Churchill. But the terms Roosevelt proposed did not. Churchill told Colville that Roosevelt wanted to put a “lien” on the British fleet in return for the destroyers. It was not the deal he expected; in fact, he expected a gift, with no strings attached, and told Roosevelt so: “I had not contemplated anything in the nature of a contract, bargain or sale between us” but rather “a separate spontaneous act.” Cadogan found Churchill “rather incensed” over Roosevelt’s proposed swap. Churchill, Cadogan jotted in his diary, “says he doesn’t mind if we don’t get destroyers.” But of course he did.
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Churchill could not abide Roosevelt’s linking the destroyers to a guarantee that were England to fall, its Atlantic fleet would run westward to Canada. He complained in a letter to Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King that the Americans sought to “get the British fleet and the guardianship of the British Empire, minus Great Britain.” In essence, were the United States to lose a friend, it would gain a fleet. It was the same sort of guarantee the British had wanted from the French. Yet the United States was a noncombatant, not an ally fighting alongside the British as the British had fought alongside the French. Churchill, not pleased, sent a cool response to the president on August 31: “You ask, Mr. President, whether my statement in Parliament on June 4th, 1940, about Great
Britain never surrendering or scuttling her Fleet ‘represents the settled policy of His Majesty’s Government.’ It certainly does. I must, however, observe that those hypothetical contingencies seem more likely to concern the German fleet or what is left of it than our own.”
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These were bold words, yet Churchill had done his naval calculations: Britain had a fleet of capital ships, including aircraft carriers, and more than nine hundred smaller, but very dangerous, craft. The Germans had nothing of the sort. In the end, no direct linkage between U.S. destroyers and a defeated British fleet made its way into the deal. Rather, the down payment for the destroyers took the form of British naval bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the Caribbean, leased to the Americans for ninety-nine years. Roosevelt, in explaining the transaction to Congress, could not resist the urge to gloat over the killing he had just made in the real-estate market: “The right to bases in Newfoundland and Bermuda are gifts—generously given and gladly received. The other bases mentioned have been acquired in exchange for fifty of our over-age destroyers.” The first eight of the over-age destroyers sailed to Britain in early September. Churchill took them. At that point he’d take anything.

Despite the ad hoc nature of England’s defenses in June and early July, by September a transformation had taken place. All summer the War Office, under Anthony Eden, had worked around the clock, rebuilding the army. By mid-July Britain had 1,500,000 men under arms; five weeks later Churchill told the House of Commons, “More than 2,000,000 determined men have rifles and bayonets in their hands tonight, and three-quarters of them are in regular military formations. We have never had armies like this in our island in time of war. The whole island bristles against invaders, from the sea or from the air.” Those numbers included the Home Guard, but they also included rebuilt regular army infantry and armored units, and the Canadian division. Churchill could not, of course, speak publicly of the specifics of the military transformation, but with each passing week, he grew more sanguine about the fate of any Germans who arrived on British soil. By August the regular army fielded seven divisions between the Thames and the Wash, the great estuary one hundred miles north of London, where the chiefs expected the Germans to come. But by then, invasion barges were streaming through the Channel at night toward the French Channel ports. That meant the Germans might come to the south coast, where only five divisions stood ready, with three in reserve. But by September the situation was even further improved. The troop disposition north of London amounted to four divisions and an armored brigade. In the south, nine divisions were deployed, and two armored brigades. One
division was stationed near London, where, if the Germans got that far, Churchill intended to fight street by street. And two divisions and six hundred tanks formed a reserve.
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As England’s defenses improved, Churchill felt confident enough to send to Egypt almost half of the best tanks in Britain, 48 anti-tank guns, 20 Bofors light anti-aircraft guns (desperately needed in London), and 250 anti-tank rifles. He did so to blunt an anticipated Italian attack, which duly took place on September 13.
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In August, having secured his gains in Ethiopia, Il Duce had marched his armies into British Somaliland, where they humiliated the British. Churchill fumed to Eden that “the losses sustained are not compatible with resolute resistance.” In particular, Churchill’s doubts about his Middle East commander, Archibald Wavell, were growing. Yet, given that Somaliland’s entire defense budget for the year was less than £900 ($3,600), how much resistance
could
have been forthcoming? Wavell’s casualties during the withdrawal from Somaliland had been light, a fact that the MP for Aberdeenshire, Robert Boothby, recalled infuriated the Old Man, who took it as a sign of a lack of fighting spirit, and so informed Wavell. Wavell replied, “Butchery is not the mark of a good tactician.” Churchill was wrong, and he knew it. Generally, those who stood up to him were accorded his respect, but Wavell was the exception to the norm.
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On September 13, Mussolini plunged his dagger into Wavell’s western flank. On that day, General Rodolfo Graziani, in command of the Italian Tenth Army and 80,000 of Italy’s finest troops—infantry, motorized, and led by 300 tanks—lunged eastward out of Libya and into Egypt, driving Wavell’s surprised and disordered troops before him. Technically, by crossing the Egyptian frontier, Mussolini had invaded a neutral country, not that such diplomatic niceties were of any concern to Il Duce. Egypt had gained its independence from Britain in 1922 and had been ruled since 1936 by King Farouk I. Farouk despised his British protectors, who were in Egypt by virtue of a 1936 treaty that granted Britain de facto sovereignty were the Suez Canal to be endangered, which, theoretically, it was. Farouk rather admired fascism, especially the Italian variety, as did many of the younger officers in the Egyptian army, including a pair of unknowns named Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Egypt’s politics were so striated by anti-British, pro-Axis, and nationalist factions that a declaration of war against the invading Italians could not be agreed upon. Thus, HMG kept a watchful eye on Farouk while British diplomats and generals ran the country. Graziani’s fight was never with the Egyptian people—many welcomed his presence—but with the British. In Graziani, Mussolini had found his hero. To subvert the Italians’ progress Churchill ordered Wavell to poison any wells that “we do not need for ourselves.” The Italians
pressed on for five days and sixty miles, to Sidi Barrani, where they paused to resupply. Then, inexplicably, given their advantage, rather than strike toward Alexandria and the Suez, they made camp, to the great relief of the outnumbered Tommies to the east. In addition to Graziani’s 80,000 men, the Italians had 150,000 more in reserve in Libya. Wavell’s Cairo command consisted of fewer than 40,000 men, including cooks, chaplains, and orderlies. His isolation was now total, but Churchill intended to reinforce him.
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