The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (340 page)

Mollie Panter-Downes saw Coventry as retaliation for the November 8 RAF raid over Munich, strategically not a significant target but dear, so dear, to the Nazis, home as it was of their putsch of November 8, 1923—Hitler’s failed attempt to overthrow the government and establish a right-wing government. Colville speculated that the Coventry raid was in retaliation for the November 11 British success at Taranto. Neither was correct. Coventry, Munich, London, Berlin, and Taranto were all part of a murderous slugfest—take a punch, hit back, take another punch.

After Coventry, Churchill told Portal to draw up a plan “for the most destructive possible bombing attack against a selected German town.” In early December, Portal outlined his recommendations, which were approved a few days later in a secret session of the War Cabinet, and code-named Abigail. Among the objectives: “We should rely largely on fires, and should choose a closely built-up town, where bomb craters in the streets would impede the firefighter.” And: “Since we aimed at affecting the enemy’s morale, we should attempt to destroy the greater part of a particular town. The town chosen should therefore not be too large.” Mannheim, Frankfurt, and Hamburg were among the cities considered. The War Cabinet minutes end with a recommendation that no announcement be made “that this attack was being carried out by way of reprisal for the German attacks on Coventry… and no special publicity should be given to it afterwards.” Hamburg, Germany’s second-largest city, was eliminated from consideration as too large. The War Cabinet selected Mannheim as the target. It was hit on December 16. The results were meager, about thirty civilians killed, but Abigail and Churchill were just getting started. His goal for 1941, he told Colville, was “to bomb every Hun corner of Europe.”
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O
n the last day of November, Churchill celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday at Chequers in the company of Clementine, the children, Beaverbrook, Bracken, and the American writer Virginia Cowles. It was a working birthday, the Old Man dictating his usual large volume of memos to sundry ministers, admirals, and generals. How, he asked Admiral Pound, with more American destroyers coming into service, did serviceable vessels “go down from 84 to 77”? He demanded an update on cement production, not only because cement was needed for bunkers but because he fancied the idea of huge, floating concrete gun platforms. He queried a minister as to why soldiers had been forbidden to “purchase cheap vegetables in the districts where they were quartered.” And he authorized “the ringing of church bells on Christmas Day, as the imminence of invasion has greatly receded,” although he counseled that steps be taken to ensure the people knew the bells were ringing for church services, not invasion.
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The next day, Sunday, December 1, the family repaired to the dim confines of the Ellesborough Parish Church, nearby Chequers, where “little Winston” was christened. Local parishioners stayed on after Matins to witness the ceremony, and the tears streaming down Churchill’s cheeks. “Poor infant,” he whispered within earshot of Virginia Cowles, “to be born into such a world as this.”
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Harold Nicolson, believing at midsummer that he and his wife, Vita, had only three weeks to live, pledged to each other that they would carry a “bare bodkin.” Yet he told his diary at the time: “I think it practically certain that the Americans will enter the war in November, and if we can last till then, all is well.” Colville, too, looked toward November for salvation: “If we can hold on until November,” he jotted in his diary on June 14, “we shall have won the war.”
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It was December 1. November was safe away. They had made it that far.

Almost 4,600 more civilians had not. The Blitz had now killed more than 18,000 Britons, including 2,000 children. Yet, for all the ongoing loss, “it was plain,” Churchill wrote, “that the Island would persevere to the end” for “winter with its storms had closed upon the scene.”
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War had always been a seasonal affair. Winter, as long as men had fought wars, was the season to dig in and await spring’s rains followed by the heat of summer. Then, when the roads dried, armies could resume the march and get on with the business of killing. The German invasion was surely off
until spring, but modern aircraft flying above the weather rendered winter obsolete. Modern war, or at least the high-altitude aerial component, was an all-weather affair, a truth strongly suggested by the German bombs that fell from on high—and killed Britons—regardless of the meteorological conditions below. The sailing was always clear at 26,000 feet.

Any succor England and Churchill derived from foul weather was offset by the mounting disaster in the Atlantic. Britain’s Northwest Approaches were in danger of being pinched shut by U-boats, which were sinking British merchant ships faster than new keels could be laid. More than 250,000 tons of British shipping went down in September, more than 300,000 tons in October, almost 376,000 tons in November, and 60,000 tons during the first week of December. One eastbound convoy from North America lost twenty-one of thirty ships. U-boat crews called these months
“Die Glückliche Zeit”
(“the happy time”). Since June, the only assistance America offered in the Atlantic battle had arrived in the guise of Roosevelt’s old destroyers, which were proving more of a burden than a godsend. During a December dinner with Eden, Churchill announced that the few destroyers that had arrived “aren’t much good” and were “badly built.” Later in the month, he demanded the Admiralty furnish an accounting of the condition of the destroyers, “showing their many defects and the little use we have been able to make of them so far.” The destroyers, dating mostly from the early 1920s, had been rendered obsolete by British improvements in destroyer design even before they were launched. The American ships were called “flush-deckers” because they lacked an elevated foredeck—a forecastle; they could not fire their forward gun in rough seas or at top speed. That did not bode well for convoy escort duty in the wild North Atlantic. They had been designed for coastal defense, Churchill explained to Roosevelt, before the era of dive-bombers. On picket duty in the North Sea, they would make “frightfully vulnerable” targets for Stukas.
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In any case, by December the destroyers had not arrived in meaningful numbers; only nine were fully refitted and commissioned by year’s end. They dribbled into British ports, their condition deplorable, all of them in need of refitting. One, rechristened HMS
Lewes,
was such a rust bucket that it was still undergoing repairs the following April when a German bomb knocked it out of commission (not out of action, for it had seen none) until 1942. Another was in such sorry shape that it was cannibalized for spare parts. Between May and December 1940, Churchill composed at least thirty-seven memos and letters to his staff and to Roosevelt on the subject of the destroyers and their lamentable condition.
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The promised destroyers were not the only American goods not showing up. Modern rifles, B-17 bombers, and ammunition topped Churchill’s shopping list. “What is being done,” he queried Halifax, “about our 20
motor torpedo-boats, the 5 PBY [patrol bombers], the 150–200 aircraft, and the 250,000 rifles…. I consider we were promised all the above, and more too.” Remember, he told Halifax, “Beg while the iron is hot.” Sir Alexander Cadogan, on Churchill’s orders, rang up Ambassador Lothian with the same question: “What is the status of the ‘other desiderata’ promised to us?” Lothian told Cadogan that the U.S. attorney general had held up the torpedo boats until at least January 1941, and that only
one
B-17 was ready to wing its way to Britain.
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Churchill was fed up. He told Hugh Dalton that he was tempted to simply tell Roosevelt, “If you want to watch us fighting for your liberties, you must pay for the performance.” The Prof egged him on: “The fruits of victory which Roosevelt offers seem to be safety for America and virtual starvation for us.” Always ready with a statistic, the Prof tossed more fuel onto the fire: “We are putting between 1/3 and one-half of our national effort into fighting Nazidom.” The American contribution so far—sold, not given—was “about 1/20 of the annual American national effort.” The Americans, Lindemann reminded Churchill, had from an accounting standpoint long ago written off the old destroyers, which were not even carried as assets on the U.S. books. These were hard facts to digest, given that the price England had paid for the fifty rust buckets took the form of British naval bases from Newfoundland to British Guiana, bases that American warships now sailed from in order to protect… America.
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Churchill peeled away pieces of the British Empire in exchange for obsolete boats. The Atlantic bases were the first to go, the first installment in the transfer of global supremacy from Britain to America. At the time, nobody, Churchill included, saw it quite that way. Indeed, he tried to frame the deal in terms of British largess when he told Parliament:

In fact, British sovereignty as measured in pence, shillings, and gold sovereigns was fast disappearing. Since the start of the war, Britain had paid almost $4.5 billion in cash (about $160 billion in modern dollars) for American food and matériel. The United Kingdom’s total remaining reserves of gold and dollar-denominated marketable securities was less than $2 billion, a sum accumulated since the start of the war mostly by
exporting pottery, Scotch whisky, and South African gold. Yet Britain’s immediate needs would cost twice that, a ratio that would not necessarily have proven disastrous in peacetime, but the U.S. terms of sale were cash-and-carry. Britain desperately lacked the cash to buy, and needed more ships in which to carry. “It was a time,” Churchill wrote, “marked by an acute stringency in dollars.” Lord Lothian summed up the situation when, with decidedly nondiplomatic clarity, he told Washington reporters: “Britain’s broke.” Roosevelt offered to send a cruiser to Cape Town in order to pick up and deliver to the United States $20 million in British gold bullion as a down payment for services rendered, an offer akin to a noncombatant lifting the boots and pocket watch from a dying trooper.
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Churchill’s weekend meeting with Lothian in mid-November resulted in the framework of a plan to address the supply and money questions, which Churchill worked into a long letter to Roosevelt. The letter, containing nineteen sections and which Churchill called “one of the most important I ever wrote,” went out on December 7. In essence, he told the president, it all came down to two things: control of the seas, a battle Britain was losing; and money, of which Britain had almost none.
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Churchill addressed the worldwide strategic situation for 1941 in the first sixteen sections of his letter. Absent is any sign of his previous fawning or pleading; this letter was straightforward and powerful. He was polite, yet firm. On the “mortal danger” of shipping losses, Churchill wrote: “Would this diminution continue at this rate it would be fatal…. In fact we have now only one effective route of entry to the British Isles… against which the enemy is increasingly concentrating.” To combat that threat, he asked for “a gift, loan or supply of American vessels of war.”
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Such was his concern that the Germans might either charm or shoot their way into Irish ports, he dangled before Roosevelt the prospect of a united Ireland. “It is not possible for us to compel the people of Northern Ireland against their will to leave the United Kingdom and join southern Ireland,” he wrote, “but I do not doubt that if the Government of Eire would show its solidarity with the democracies of the English-speaking world at this crisis, a Council for the Defense of all Ireland could be set up out of which the unity of the Island could probably in some form or another emerge after the war.” Given that a large portion of Roosevelt’s voter base consisted of Irish-Americans, this was a rumination that would play well in America, but wreak havoc in Belfast were it revealed. Churchill, more concerned with American sensibilities than those of Ulstermen, sent Minister of Health Malcolm MacDonald to Dublin three times to offer Prime Minister Eamon de Valera a united Ireland, if de Valera joined Britain against Germany. MacDonald, as Chamberlain’s Dominions secretary, had negotiated a trade agreement with Ireland in 1938. Churchill despised
the treaty but thought MacDonald might be an Englishman the Irish could work with. He was not. Three times de Valera declined MacDonald’s approaches, arguing that Churchill could not deliver on the promise even were he so inclined. Later in the year, when MacDonald was made High Commissioner to Canada, the back-channel dialogue ceased.
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