The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (345 page)

O
n January 2 Harold Nicolson, while strolling through old London—still smoldering from the December 29 raid—noted small groups of sullen civilians standing around in the ruins. He noted their quiet mutterings about the need for revenge, the more revenge the better, and sooner, too. “We are fighting devils,” Nicolson wrote that night, “and I don’t see why we shouldn’t fight like devils in order to let them see what it is like.” He noted on his rambles a subtle but definite decline in esprit de corps. When the news of the Taranto raid played across the newspapers in late November—grainy aerial photos of wrecked Italian ships—it was met with skepticism, especially among the lower economic classes, who thought the photos fake. The welcome news that the Greeks were trouncing the Italians in Albania was held up by Cockney newsboys as proof of the sorry state of British arms, for the Italians, trounced by the Greeks, had trounced the English in Somaliland. The string of recent British victories against the Italians in North Africa were seen by East Enders as meaningless. The real enemy, Hitler, still prowled Europe, uncontested and unmolested.
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London’s poor were skeptical, yet socialist ward bosses in Silvertown, Stepney, and the East End slums had failed to kindle any revolutionary fires among them. East Enders remained faithful to the cause even as their filthy tenements burned and crashed down around them. Most now chose to stay home when the bombs came, and scorned the Anderson shelters, which, carped the ward bosses, “couldn’t protect a rooster from rain.”
Anderson shelters at least posed no public health menace, unlike the ersatz shelters under railroad overpasses, which were not much more than vectors for disease. A constable visiting one first heard and then smelled it before he saw it: “The first thing I heard was a great hollow hubbub, as if there were animals down there moaning and crying. And then… this terrible stench hit me. It was worse than dead bodies, hot and thick and so fetid that I gagged and then vomited. Ahead of me I could see faces peering towards me lit by lanterns and candles. It was like a painting of Hell.” The Cockneys were refused even the satisfaction of reading of their plight in the newspapers; the Ministry of Information, under Duff Cooper, forbade any reporting of where bombs fell or the number of casualties. Those workingmen who took their news from the Communist, alarmist, and decidedly adversarial
Daily Worker
could no longer do so after January 21, 1941, the day HMG took the extraordinary step of shutting it down. Still, newspaper obituaries offered clues; bomb victims were said to have died “very suddenly.” If the obituaries contained a grouping of “very sudden” deaths in a particular neighborhood, it was a good bet that the neighborhood in question had been hit hard.
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That certain squalid sections of the East End and Southwark, of Manchester, Birmingham, and Britain’s other industrial areas, had been destroyed brought forth an ironic response from many of the displaced. The Germans were ridding Britain of slums, a job HMG had avoided for forty years. Londoners who lost their homes to bombs waited an average of five months before being placed in livable abodes. Churchill had outlined to Colville a relief plan to reimburse homeowners up to £1,000 (about $55,000 U.S. in 2012) for their losses, but Parliament had yet to make good on the promise. Soon after John Reith took up his new duties as minister of works (after Churchill eased him out of the Ministry of Transportation), he was instructed by Churchill to “press on” in rebuilding bombed neighborhoods. Yet Churchill told Edward Bridges, secretary to the cabinet, that as far as reconstruction of wrecked cities was concerned, “We must be very careful not to allow these remote post-war problems to absorb energy which is required, maybe for several years, for the prosecution of the war.” Cockneys—all Britons—would have to wait a decade for new homes, for reliable supplies of electricity, coal, gas, water, and petrol. The wait for clothing, paper goods, and fresh, plentiful food would last well into the next decade. The only commodities delivered to Britons with any regularity in early 1941 were German bombs.
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In his memoirs Churchill equated 1940 with “shooting Niagara” and termed early 1941 a “struggle in the rapids.” In January 1941 the lifeline of
Lend-Lease lay coiled on the far shore. Churchill and England fought on,
alone,
a fact he made clear when he articulated the “theme” of his memoirs of 1940:

In the historical memory of many Americans, the year 1941 does not begin until December 7. For Churchill and Britain, the entire year indeed saw a long and terrible struggle in the rapids. It is true that the Home Island fought with the full support of the Dominions, and given the fact that one-quarter of the world’s population lived within the British Empire, it might appear facile to suggest that England stood alone. But in large part it did. Canada would ultimately send 90,000 airmen to Britain; they would play a significant role in the bombing of Germany. But the first Royal Canadian Air Force bomber squadron was not commissioned until mid-1941. Three Royal Canadian infantry divisions and two armored divisions were available for the fight but were widely scattered throughout the Empire, including a division in Britain and a battalion in Hong Kong. Australia offered four infantry divisions. Canberra’s enthusiasm for the European war decreased throughout the year as the threat of Japanese attack increased. New Zealand sent 50,000 soldiers and 10,000 airmen overseas during the next two years, but only Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg’s North African corps was operational in early 1941. South Africa offered three divisions, but only for deployment in Africa, where Erwin Rommel mauled them as the year wore on. In early 1941, the forces sent by the Dominions, when combined with British forces, were vastly outnumbered by the Axis. After the fall of France, Hitler had
demobilized
forty divisions, far more than all the armed forces of the Dominions combined. Even late in 1941, after it scrambled for months to put men into uniform, the entirety of the British Empire’s armies worldwide—ninety-nine divisions—was dwarfed by the Wehrmacht by a ratio greater than two to one. In early 1941, almost all of Hitler’s troops were stationed within six hundred miles of London.
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British prospects in the Mediterranean and the Balkans, if the Germans appeared on the scene, looked precarious at best. By the first week of January, the Luftwaffe had stationed more than 150 bombers and fighters in Sicily, just one hundred miles and thirty minutes from Malta. Such a force
could menace the Mediterranean from the French Riviera to North Africa. To oppose the German air fleet, the British had but fifteen beat-up Hurricanes parked on Malta, the most critical piece of real estate in the central Mediterranean. Malta was under siege, ringed by Italian minefields and submarines, the Luftwaffe and Italian air force overhead. It was England in miniature—isolated and battered—but with two vital differences: the Germans and Italians, not the RAF, controlled the skies over Malta, and the Italian navy, not the Royal Navy, surrounded the island. Aggressive strategy demanded, as it had since the previous summer, that Mussolini send his fleet and Hitler his paratroopers to take the island.

Menacing German forces had been dispatched to the greater Balkan region. By mid-January almost 500,000 German troops—“tourists,” Berlin claimed, who happened to bring along their tanks and artillery—took up positions along the Romanian side of the Danube, again as in Roman times the boundary that separated the barbarian from the civilized world. This sojourn by the Wehrmacht was Romania’s reward for joining the Axis in November, a decision born more of necessity than choice. Having succumbed in 1940 to Stalin’s demand for the provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and to Hitler’s demand that northern Transylvania be ceded to Hungary, the Romanian dictator, General Ion Antonescu, could turn only to Hitler for a guarantee that the rump Romania remain intact. It had not occurred to Stalin that 500,000 German troops were about 480,000 more than needed to guarantee Romania’s sovereignty. Yugoslavia and Bulgaria lay south across the Danube. The kingdom of the Bulgars was essentially an eighteenth-century, pre-industrial nation. Its leaders and people lived with the sure knowledge that sooner or later, either Stalin or Hitler—with their mechanized might—would no longer tolerate Bulgarian neutrality. Wherever Hitler intended to go—to Greece in aid of Il Duce seemed a logical destination—he first had to push through Bulgaria. Yet, Bulgarian roads were decrepit and its railroads were in no shape to move a modern army. Bulgaria offered a route south and beyond, but not the best route. Not so Yugoslavia, where the old Hapsburg railroad system connected to the rail lines of Greece, Hungary, Romania, and Austria. Hitler wanted Yugoslavia; Churchill needed Yugoslavia. Hitler could take Bulgaria; Churchill could not protect it. He deduced that the German “tourists” were destined for the Balkans, the threshold to the Mediterranean, the “hinge of fate.”

The German naval war staff understood Churchill’s thinking, and had prepared a paper in the autumn that warned, “The fight for the African area” is “the foremost strategic objective of German warfare as a whole…. It is of decisive importance for the outcome of the war.” The Italians, ill led and inefficient, could not win that fight alone, as their humiliation at the
hands of the Greeks and their losses at Taranto and against O’Connor in the desert confirmed. The cagey Franco would not do it, at Gibraltar. Raeder predicted that if the Axis did not occupy Vichy northwest Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria), Churchill and the Gaullists would do so in due time, supported by American industrial might. Therefore, the German naval planners concluded, Germany must do it. It was Britain’s good fortune that Hitler was a land warrior who rarely (other than in the matter of U-boats) embraced the advice of his very capable admirals. Hitler, looking toward Russia, agreed only to the half measure of sending aircraft to Sicily, and troops to Romania, in anticipation of some future foray into the Balkans, most likely to Greece in support of his hapless ally.
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Churchill outlined his Mediterranean strategy on January 6 in a long memo to “Pug” Ismay and the Chiefs of Staff Committee. He saw three critical objectives, reverse images of what the German naval staff saw. The British must hold what they had from the Suez to Gibraltar; engage and defeat the Italian navy and drive the Italian army from Africa (which O’Connor, having taken Bardia the day before, was doing); and keep the Germans out of the Mediterranean. Churchill interwove his immediate goals and his operational wish list, the former concise, the latter detailing the hopes of an impatient man. Yet in contrast to Hitler, who issued Führer Directives that were orders pure and simple and allowed for no interpretation, Churchill probed and examined and sought guidance from his military chiefs. His first priority for early 1941, he wrote, was “the speedy destruction of the Italian armed forces in North-East Africa.” Tobruk must be established as a base from which to conduct Libyan operations. In East Africa, the Italians must be swept away. That would secure the Suez and the southeast shore of the Mediterranean.

In the western Mediterranean, there was a chance that Franco would deny Hitler transit to Gibraltar, which raised the happy prospect that Hitler might try to force his way to Spain through unoccupied France in violation of the June surrender terms. In that case, Churchill believed that “the Vichy Government… may either proceed to North Africa and resume war from there, or authorize General Weygand to do so.” To that end Churchill offered Pétain and Weygand Britain’s assistance were they to take the fight to Africa. It was a pipe dream. The Vichy leaders were edging closer to, not away from, willing servitude to their German masters. They believed that Germany would win the war; indeed, they
wanted
Germany to win the war. As well, Weygand, in Morocco, loathed de Gaulle, while de Gaulle loathed Weygand and hated with a fury the Fascist-minded Vichy minister of state, Pierre Laval. The French accorded more importance to their personal grudges than to their national honor. The previous June, Weygand and Pétain had squandered their chance to fight for the honor of France. They had quit, but not before a final act of treachery
when they tried to draw in the RAF’s last reserves. With each passing month, Churchill’s goodwill toward the French had diminished. He allowed to Colville on one occasion and to luncheon guests on another that had Britain “thrown away those planes in France… the war might have been lost.”
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He would get no help in the western Mediterranean from Vichy France. As Laval’s collaboration with the Nazis became ever more apparent, Churchill told Colville he rued the “lamentable lack of Charlotte Cordays.”
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To secure the eastern Mediterranean he proposed a Balkan bulwark of Yugoslavia, Greece, and Turkey. In essence he hoped to convince the Balkan nations that a bundle of wheat was not as easily broken as individual stalks. With the Italians on the run in Africa, the time had come to divert some of Wavell’s desert forces to Greece, not only to support the Greeks but to gird the loins of the Yugoslavs and Turks. “The attitude of Yugoslavia,” Churchill wrote, “may well be determined by the support we give to Greece,” as would be the attitude of Turkey. He was inviting a showdown with Hitler. But the Greeks understood that the surest way to provoke Hitler was to invite British troops into the fray. As General Alexander Papagos drove the Italians back through mountain passes into Albania, the military situation appeared promising, but Greeks were going hungry. Winter, not the Italian army, was reducing Greek resolve. Mussolini could reinforce his Albanian legions, but Prime Minister Metaxas could not. He desperately needed supplies—tanks, anti-tank guns, rifles, airplanes, ammunition, food, and clothing. He asked the United States for help, but Congress had yet to begin debate on the Lend-Lease bill, and Britain, not Greece, would be the primary beneficiary of any U.S. aid. Metaxas could not crush the Italians without help, yet he continued to decline Churchill’s help, a quite reasonable demurral given the half million Germans encamped on the Romanian side of the Danube.
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