The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (349 page)

The paranoia found its way into official circles. Sir John Anderson, now Lord President of the Council, kept up pressure on refugees from the Continent, including Jews who had fled the Nazis without proper paperwork.
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Hundreds were rounded up and made to join thousands of other continentals who had been interred in camps since the summer. Arthur Koestler, the repentant former Communist, arrived in Britain without proper paperwork and was packed off to Pentonville Prison, where he resided behind bars for almost two months, during which time
Darkness at Noon
was published. “It was a terrible time,” recalled the actor Paul Henreid. “We jumped at every ring of the doorbell… an apprehensive dread took hold of us. How long before it was our turn?” Yet most detainees—excepting hardcase Fascists such as Oswald Mosley—were released in coming months. Henreid’s dread would have deepened had he known that Himmler knew who had fled to England; their names were on the
Sonderfahndungsliste GB.
They were to be found and killed. The dread and paranoia spread to Ireland after Luftwaffe raiders overflew their British targets in early January and dropped their payloads onto Irish farms. A one-ton parachute bomb dropped into Dublin’s Jewish quarter and hit the city’s
largest synagogue, an incident that Goebbels claimed the British had perpetrated in order to sully the good name of Germany among Irishmen.
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F
or Churchill, Britons’ fears begat vigilance, which was good. His most pressing problem early in the year was not keeping the Germans out of England—he did not believe they were coming, other than by air. His critical problem was getting food and munitions in. Since October, U-boats in the Western Approaches had sent more than 150 British ships to the bottom, an average of 70,000 tons per week. January’s miserable weather helped moderate the losses, but in early February, with Göring on vacation enjoying his toy trains and pilfered art, Admiral Raeder asked Hitler to augment Admiral Karl Dönitz’s U-boats with several dozen of Göring’s two hundred or so four-engine Focke-Wulf 200 long-range bombers. The pride of Göring’s air fleet, they cruised at 220 miles per hour, could tote a 4,400-pound bombload, and had enough range to take off from Norway, fly around the British Isles, and land in occupied France. The bombers, Raeder argued, could perform reconnaissance duty and hit ships threading their way into ports. Hitler approved the request, and the results were immediate. February saw 320,000 tons of British shipping sunk, including 86,000 tons sent down by German aircraft. So great were British shipping losses and so meager was British air cover over the ports, especially at night, that a suggestion to put cats in the cockpits of fighter planes made the rounds in the RAF. The idea was that RAF pilots (who had been issued extra rations of carrots to augment their night vision) would shoot in the direction in which the cats looked, cats presumably seeing better than humans at night. If anyone had a better idea, now was the time to propose it, for between the losses at sea and the German’s smashing up of the ports, Britain found itself more isolated than ever. “This mortal danger to our lifeline gnaws at my bowels,” wrote Churchill. “The decision for 1941,” he predicted, “lies upon the seas.”
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He did not know that Dönitz had only twenty-two U-boats in the French Atlantic ports or that he could send only a dozen or so to sea at any one time. These months afforded the German navy its best opportunity to squeeze the life out of Britain, but Dönitz lacked the boats to do so. Still, he appeared near enough to ruling the waves that when an Admiralty report of yet another shipping disaster reached Churchill, he fretted to Colville (who had termed the news “distressing”): “Distressing? It is terrifying. If it goes on it will be the end of us.”
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Hyperbolic though Churchill’s outburst might now seem, at the time it was anything but. In the coming months, the battle in the Atlantic would
decide Britain’s fate. U-boats hunted British shipping westward to the central Atlantic, far beyond the range of British air patrols. Without enough hulls to carry the food they needed, Churchill faced a terrible choice: food shortages or weapons shortages. Britain could afford neither. Unless Franklin Roosevelt expanded the U.S. patrol zone into the eastern Atlantic, Britain’s losses could only worsen. Roosevelt, to Churchill’s dismay, declined to expose his navy to any new dangers by doing so.

The steel monsters plying the surface matched the terror of the U-boats.
Bismarck
and
Tirpitz,
undergoing final fitting-out somewhere in the Baltic, loomed as two of the Führer’s instruments of springtime destruction. Almost 42,000 tons of displacement each,
Bismarck
and
Tirpitz
were armed with eight fifteen-inch guns, powered by three Blohm & Voss turbines and a dozen Wagner boilers that generated 138,000 horsepower and speed in excess of 31 knots—over thirty-five miles an hour. Their optical equipment for targeting purposes was far superior to anything the British had, and they could outrun and outshoot any British battleship afloat. Yet Churchill, during the first weeks of 1941, did not even know where
Bismarck
was. The very uncertainty as to the two ships’ whereabouts was their greatest strength. Churchill later wrote that had Hitler kept “both in full readiness in the Baltic and allow rumors of an impending sortie to leak out from time to time,” the Royal Navy “should thus have been compelled to keep concentrated at Scapa Flow… practically every new ship we had,” with the result that convoys, already insufficiently guarded, would remain so. Allied (British, Dutch, Norwegian, and Canadian) merchant ships sailed with so little escort and were attacked so regularly that crews kept their lifeboats slung out over the sides for the entire voyage, ready for use.
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Such were the generally deplorable conditions upon the seas and in the air during the first two months of 1941. Living conditions on the Continent, from Poland to France, had only worsened since the previous May. Someday, somehow—if Churchill could drag the U.S. into the fight—the final and determining battles would be fought there. Until then, Churchill could only use the occasional broadcast to try to boost the morale of the enslaved Europeans as he had the spirits of Britons in 1940.

It was a hopeless task. Hitler had buried the hopes of all those he had conquered. Hitler held the western half of Europe, Stalin the eastern half. With the release of winter’s grip, the dictators planned to tighten theirs. They were partners. Stalin had been a faithful and dependable vendor to the Reich since Hitler struck westward to vanquish the imperialist democracies. He pledged to pour millions more tons of Russian grain and oil into Germany in the coming year. In return, Hitler promised to boost shipments of steel and capital goods to Russia. The target date for the first influx of German steel was mid-1941.

Hitler was most conciliatory regarding Russia in his New Year’s greeting to Mussolini: “I do not envision any Russian initiative against us so long as Stalin is alive, and we ourselves are not victims of any serious setbacks…. I should like to add to these general considerations that our present relations with the U.S.S.R. are very good.” Those words were a work of pathological obfuscation. German intelligence could detect no hint of any Soviet “initiative” against Germany because none was in any way contemplated. The Soviets sought only increased trade with Germany and increased influence in Eastern Europe, although Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov manifested a stubborn greed during his November talks with Ribbentrop. Molotov demanded more leverage in the Balkans. He demanded that German troops leave Finland and that Germany acknowledge Bulgaria to be within the Soviet sphere of influence. As well, he demanded that Hitler divulge any plans he might have pertaining to the Balkans and Greece.
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Such impudent requests infuriated Hitler, for he needed free rein in the region, especially in Bulgaria, in order to protect his southern flank from anticipated British adventures in Greece, and for another compelling reason, which he of course did not disclose to Stalin. The previous July he had told his commanders that he intended to attack Russia in the spring. This was why Bulgaria assumed new strategic importance; it not only protected the German southern flank from the British should they land in Greece but also anchored the southern flank of Hitler’s line opposite Stalin. In order to deflect Stalin’s gaze from central Europe, Hitler dangled the tantalizing prospects of a Russian share in the spoils of the dismembered British Empire were the Soviets to make the Tripartite Pact a four-way deal. So much plunder would there be, and so rich the rewards for the Soviets—in the Far East, the Near East, and in attaining their ancient goal of ready access to the Mediterranean. The idea appealed to Stalin. Yet England fought on, and Hitler could not yet deliver the corpse of the British Empire.

To Stalin, a greater role in the Balkans and Bulgaria appeared the more modest and surer bet and would result in Moscow’s geographical buffer edging farther west. In essence, it would result in Germany and Russia sharing hegemony in east-central Europe. Churchill believed Hitler never intended to share power, and he had tried to warn Stalin of that the previous June. Hitler had made clear in
Mein Kampf
that Germany’s destiny lay in the east. He had written that modern Germany would pick up where the Teutonic knights had left off six hundred years earlier, in east Prussia. He described the “regents of present-day Russia” as “common bloodstained animals” who belonged to “a nation which combines a rare mixture of bestial horror with an inconceivable gift for lying.” Hitler had always believed
Lebensraum
(“living space”) lay in the east, that is, in Russia. That was why in mid-1940 he ordered OKW to begin planning for
the invasion of Russia, and why, in December, he approved OKW’s plan (Barbarossa), which called for the attack to begin in mid-May, with victory expected in five months, before winter.
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The logic of a betrayal of Stalin was lost on everybody except Hitler and some—but by no means all—of his inner circle. Churchill, as he had the previous summer, tried to open up a line of communication with Stalin of the sort he had with Roosevelt. He failed. Stalin believed any warnings sent his way by London were ruses, ploys to precipitate trouble between Russia and its good friend Germany. In any case, Churchill had no hard intelligence to confirm his suspicions. Nor, early in the year, did the Americans. The American diplomat George Kennan later wrote that the American legation in Berlin, where Kennan then served, was “slow to recognize that in Hitler’s logic the inability to invade Britain would inevitably spell the necessity of invading Russia.” William L. Shirer’s sources in Berlin hinted at that outcome, but Shirer assumed along with the rest of the world that England must first be conquered. In late 1940, Shirer pondered in his diary the prospects of Hitler going to war with either America or Russia: “I am firmly convinced he does contemplate it and if he wins in Europe and Africa he will in the end launch it unless [because of isolationist appeasement] we are prepared to give up our way of life.” Once victorious in Europe, Shirer wrote, Hitler “will attack Russia, probably before he tackles the Americas.” Yet, “Hitler’s Germany can never dominate the continent of Europe as long as Britain holds out.”
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Churchill had believed that for a year, too. But he realized that were Hitler to crush the Russians, he could build more sinister heavy bombers at leisure, and perhaps even rocket weapons. He could build ships, U-boats, and modern landing craft. The Führer could then turn his armies westward, toward Britain. Churchill prepared Britons for that eventuality, and prepared his home armies, as well. The next move was Hitler’s. If he came to England in the spring, Churchill, his armies growing by the week, would be ready. If Hitler did not come to England, the day would come—perhaps two years hence—when Churchill would go to Europe. That was the plan. But Churchill faced a plethora of unknowns. He sensed the course Hitler would take in the east, but he lacked the counterintuitive instincts and the hard intelligence necessary to parse Hitler’s contorted logic. He could only wait.