The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (346 page)

Churchill took a regional view. He predicted that if the Germans came to Il Duce’s aid in Greece by way of Romania, Bulgaria, and the Black Sea, “Turkey will come into the war.” He followed this hopeful prognostication with a string of first-magnitude “ifs.” “If Yugoslavia stands firm and is not molested, if the Greeks take Valona and maintain themselves in Albania, if Turkey becomes an active ally, the attitude of Russia may be affected favorably.” That is, Russian fear of an “obnoxious and indeed deadly… German advance to the Black Sea or through Bulgaria to the Aegean” would be lessened by a British presence in the Balkans. Indeed, he wrote, a British presence might persuade Stalin to side with Britain, “but we must not count on this.” True. With Hitler’s armies poised in Romania, it was highly unlikely that any of Churchill’s “ifs” could come to pass. The Yugoslav government was so petrified of provoking Hitler that it refused in March to even meet with Eden, who by then was prowling the region,
pleading Churchill’s case for solidarity. Metaxas, in Greece, continued to decline with a polite “no” Churchill’s offers of military aid right up to his sudden death at the end of January, leaving General Alexander Papagos, the hero of the battle against Italy, to ponder Churchill’s proposals, which he finally accepted in early March. The Turks, for their part, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with Churchill’s invitation to commit national suicide. They faced Hitler on one side, and their ancient enemy, Russia, on the other. Against these foes, their army contained not a single tank. In fact, Anthony Eden wanted Turkey to remain neutral for the simple reason that Britain could offer no military protection to Ankara if the Turks joined the British cause.
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Churchill finished his memo with a confident prediction, which echoed the prediction he had made to Colville and to the House the previous summer: “One cannot doubt that Herr Hitler’s need to starve or crush Great Britain is stronger than it has ever been. A great campaign in the East of Europe, the defeat of Russia, the conquest of the Ukraine, and the advance from the Black Sea to the Caspian, would none of them separately or together bring him victorious peace while the British air power grew ever stronger behind him and he had to hold down a whole continent of sullen, starving peoples.” But British airpower was not yet strong enough to make a difference, and against a continental enemy it might never prove sufficiently strong. Armies and well-armed allies would make the difference. But Churchill had no armies, and he had no allies. Even if he had, even were he to build his Balkan bulwark, he could not, unlike Hitler, furnish modern weapons to his friends. Churchill, in fact, had no weapons, old or new, to furnish to anyone. Britain, under U-boat blockade, its cash balances evaporating, had but one option, to hold out at home and in the Mediterranean.
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Churchill’s stream of memos, many dealing with the most mundane of matters, had widened into a river; some of his subordinates would claim a river in flood. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill, dining one evening with Sir John Reith, a prewar Chamberlain loyalist, allowed that of Churchill’s memos “one… out of ten was perhaps useful—occasionally very good.” Important ministers wasted a great amount of time, Dill offered, by having to deal with “silly minutes from the P.M.” Some of Churchill’s memos indeed treat of subjects not usually associated with Great Men of History, but Churchill would not have been Churchill without his memos. He loved to ponder the finer details of making war, and to then compose the memos that drove Dill to make his intemperate remarks to Reith.
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Among Churchill’s inquiries, he asked after the progress in developing a four-thousand-pound bomb, for he desired to deliver to the Reich the
deadliest bomb possible, as soon as possible. Enamored of the idea of dropping incendiaries into the Black Forest with the intention of burning every stick of lumber to the ground, he suggested the RAF test its wares on the French forest of Nieppe, where drought had turned the undergrowth into kindling. Operation Razzle, a scheme to burn German crops, held his interest, although much of Germany’s farmland was in the east, beyond the reach of the RAF. He pushed Duff Cooper at the Ministry of Information to take a more honest approach with the news so that Britons might actually believe some of what they read in their newspapers and heard on the BBC. He insisted the press not announce civilian casualty numbers, reasoning that such figures depressed the morale of frontline troops, which he considered Britons to be. Food was always an issue. In one memo he lamented the egg crisis, in another he proposed a solution: “Backyard fowls use up a lot of scrap, and so save cereals.” He overlooked no beast: “Have you done justice to rabbit production…. They eat mostly grass… so what is the harm in encouraging their multiplication in captivity?” He tagged the rabbit memo “Action This Day.” He believed feeding Britons was more important than buying weapons, and he demanded the import of enough food “to maintain the staying power of the people even if this meant a somewhat slower” buildup of the army. On occasion his coolness bled through. Asked by a minister how best to help the thousands of homeless wandering about London, he suggested they be sent to far-flung places where they would no longer be in the way during air raids.
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He launched a classic memo after reading an account of a general who ordered every soldier in his division to run regular seven-mile jogs:

Churchill’s memos, Dill told Reith, suggested that he “seemed often unable to appreciate or understand major issues.” Actually, both Dill and Reith were unable to appreciate Churchill’s grasp of
all
the issues, not only those issues apparent to everybody but also those apparent only to himself. Dill fell silent when Reith asked whether he thought Churchill “did more harm than good—i.e., more nuisance and upset to those running the war.” Reith took Dill’s silence as a yes. “I am sure,” Reith jotted in his
diary, “that he [Dill] would have said more harm than good, which is what I feel.”
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What Dill and Reith failed to recognize was that Churchill saw but one “major issue”: victory over Hitlerism. As to his memos having a deleterious effect upon “those running the war,” Reith allowed his partisan wrath to unhinge his logic. Churchill was running the war. In doing so he tried to project the image of a ruthless warlord, emitting thunder and lightning, partly in hope of striking fear into the hearts of the Germans—he failed there—but largely to rouse the spirits of his countrymen. There his success was tremendous. Margery Allingham, the mystery novelist, wrote an American friend:

By putting Churchill in the saddle, she wrote, “the British horse gave himself the master whom he knew to be far more ruthless in a British way than anything possible to be produced elsewhere in Europe.”
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The sailors of the French fleet at Oran had the year before experienced Churchill’s “British way” of ruthlessness. Hundreds of thousands of Germans—in Dresden, Hamburg, and Berlin—soon learned the veracity of Allingham’s observation. Two years hence, 40,000 Germans would die during three nights of RAF raids on Hamburg—the same number of Britons who had died during the first year of Luftwaffe bombing. Churchill took no pleasure in such methods, but he believed war could be waged only with fury. His upbringing and his worship of the British Constitution guaranteed lifelong deferential relationships with Parliament and the Chiefs of Staff, relationships that precluded, up to a point, any unilateral actions that might smack of the bloodthirsty, the foolhardy, or the dictatorial. Yet as he demonstrated when he pressed ahead with the raid on Oran, at times he behaved like a coalition of one, his options open-ended. He was not a dictator, but even if he had been, in early 1941 he lacked the means to sate any dictatorial inclinations. He expressed to Dill the core truth of the matter: “I feel very doubtful of our ability to fight the Germans anywhere on the mainland of Europe.”
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Churchill—not knowing with certainty Hitler’s planned betrayal of Stalin—could only surmise that the Germans and Soviets had between themselves
agreed upon more efficient means for the exchange of critical matériel than had Britain and America. In fact, in the four months since Roosevelt had agreed to send fifty American destroyers, only a few that had arrived were battle ready, and all of them, of course, had been given in exchange for British territory. American matériel was not killing many Germans. And Roosevelt’s welcome and inspiring words killed no more Germans than did Churchill’s. Britain’s financial crisis of the previous summer had not ameliorated; it was worsening, daily. Shipping losses had not been stemmed; they worsened each time a convoy sailed. American factories were now turning out British tank turrets and engines—paid for with Britain’s diminishing cash reserves—yet all would be for naught if the cargoes never reached Britain. Just before the new year, Churchill, Eden, Beaverbrook, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kingsley Wood met to discuss a major problem with supplies—the price demanded by the Americans. Rumor out of the London embassy had it that the Americans were prepared to “wash their hands” unless Britain spent more than $250 million—half of its remaining cash reserves—on “Programme B,” arms and munitions enough to outfit ten full divisions, forces not needed until late 1942 at the earliest. The British, on the other hand, sought the matériel proposed in “Programme A”—aircraft engines, tanks, and patrol boats, of which they were in desperate need. The meeting ended with the decision to tell the Americans that if they insisted that “B” must precede “A,” the British wanted neither.
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Churchill had let loose in a mid-December telegram he drafted to Roosevelt: “If you were to ‘wash your hands of us’ i.e. give us nothing we cannot pay for… we shall certainly not give in,” and though Britain could survive for the time being, it “could not be able to beat the Nazi tyranny and gain you the time you require for your rearmament.” Again he held his tongue, and the letter. It was never sent.
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Churchill, in the spirit of postwar thankfulness, titled his memoir of 1941
The Grand Alliance.
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Given the meager, though widening, stream of war matériel arriving from America early that year, a more appropriate title might have been
The Grand Abeyance.
He needed an American in London, a man of high official capacity, a man he could trust, a man who grasped what was truly at stake. Roosevelt needed a fixer in London, someone whose advice he could trust and act upon, a man who could
debunk or verify Joe Kennedy’s claims of poor English morale, a man who could judge if Churchill was a drunk, and if he liked or disliked Roosevelt. Both Churchill and Roosevelt needed a man in London who by virtue of his conductivity would complete the circuit and start the juice flowing between the two leaders. In London, during the first week of January, there was no such American.

But he was on his way. Franklin Roosevelt had dispatched to London a man who appeared about as average an American Joe as ever trod the halls of the White House: Harry Hopkins, son of an Iowa gold prospector and traveling salesman, his mother a schoolteacher. Yet Hopkins was no average guy; he was Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser, despised equally by those who hated Roosevelt and those who loved the president but, according to Hopkins’s biographer Robert E. Sherwood, considered to be “an Iowan combination of Machiavelli, Svengali and Rasputin.” He was due to arrive in Britain via floatplane by way of Lisbon on January 9. His visit was considered so inconsequential by the Foreign Office that its minions failed to pass on to Churchill the telegraph announcing his advent. When Churchill first learned that a certain Harry Hopkins would soon be arriving in London, he asked, “Harry who?” When apprised by Brendan Bracken of Hopkins’s special relationship with Roosevelt, Churchill, grasping the importance of the visitor, called for the unrolling of red carpets, if any had survived the Blitz.
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W
hile dressing for dinner on January 6, the day he delivered his long memo to Ismay, Churchill delivered to Colville “a discourse on Ladysmith and why he always remembered January 6th.” Earlier that day he sent a short note off to General Sir Ian Hamilton, a friend since their India days: “Am thinking of you and Wagon Hill when another January sixth brings news of a feat of arms.” In his message to Hamilton he recalled as “one of the most happy memories” the two months spent as a newly recommissioned lieutenant in the South African Light Horse during the British march to lift the Boer siege of Ladysmith. There Hamilton commanded a brigade of mounted infantry that held a vital ridge south of the city, Waggon Hill.
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In the early hours of January 6, 1900, the Boers smashed into Hamilton’s lines. Inexplicably, he had left his left flank exposed. But Hamilton stood his ground and rallied his troops, and for sixteen hours, until thunderstorms put a finish to things late in the afternoon, defended the hill, which if lost might have spelled a different ending for that war. The
besieged British held on until the South African Light Horse appeared on the scene seven weeks later. Churchill, ever in a hurry, was the first of the Light Horse to ride into the relieved city.
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Waggon Hill was fought by nineteenth-century men under nineteenth-century conditions. Earthworks snaked along ridgelines, and targeting balloons drifted high overhead. From gun pits came the flash and rumble of rifled cannon. Messages flashed rearward via heliographs; horses sought purchase on muddy slopes as they strained to haul caissons up to the lines. The weapons on the field and all of the slaughter would have been familiar to veterans of Antietam or Cold Harbor, or Balaclava. Yet Waggon Hill qualifies as one of the first battles of the twentieth century, not only temporally but by virtue of the deployment of water-cooled machine guns, sandbagged gun emplacements, and the lethal steel ribbons of rusted barbed wire, upon which hung the bodies of young Englishmen and Boers. The era in which they had grown to manhood died there with them that day. Four decades on, their battle had long since been forgotten, except by those few still alive who had fought alongside them and those, like Winston Churchill, who wished they had.

The feat of arms that Churchill brought to Hamilton’s attention—the capture of Bardia—was a minor affair against the Italians on the Libyan coast, and by no means a victory to compare with Ladysmith. As Churchill spun his tale to Colville, Franklin Roosevelt was preparing to deliver his State of the Union address before the U.S. Congress, giving Churchill a new reason to remember the date of January 6. At 2:03
P.M.
eastern standard time, Roosevelt steadied himself behind the podium. Then before the assembled senators and representatives, three network microphones, and his wife, Eleanor, who looked down from the gallery, he sketched the general outline of Lend-Lease. During the next fifteen minutes, in terms sure to encourage Churchill and infuriate Hitler and isolationists alike, he pledged American support for those countries fighting against the Axis, and more: