The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (353 page)

The road to Tripoli and the heart of Italian North Africa lay open. The first of Churchill’s strategic priorities—to sweep the Italians from Africa—was nearly fulfilled. O’Connor, intending to keep up the hunt, sent an aide to Cairo to convince Wavell of the need to pursue the Italians. But Wavell, who had for weeks known of Churchill’s Balkan strategy, had already begun planning his new spring campaign. The maps on the walls of his headquarters were no longer of Libya, but of Greece. Almost 60,000 of his best troops under the command of Jumbo Wilson packed their kits and readied for the journey across the sea. When Greek prime minister Metaxas died suddenly in late January, his successor, Alexandros Koryzis, accepted Churchill’s offers of assistance. O’Connor was soon replaced by Philip Neame and given command of the Army of the Nile.

When Wavell unveiled his African plans the previous autumn, Churchill had purred like six cats, and more. “He was rapturously happy,” recalled Ismay, in his memoirs. “Wars are won by superior willpower,” Churchill had declared, “and now we will wrest the initiative from the enemy and impose our will on him.” Churchill, Ismay wrote, “was always prone to count his chickens before they hatched.” But the results Wavell and O’Connor obtained exceeded even Churchill’s grandest predictions.
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O
n February 6, Hitler briefed the man he was sending to North Africa to boost the spirits of the beaten Italians: Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel, who the previous May famously drove his 7th Panzer Division to the English Channel. In Africa, Rommel would command only one smallish
armored division and a light mechanized division. His eighty new Panzer Mark III and Mark IV tanks were faster and tougher than anything the British had, but they were vastly outnumbered by Wavell’s medium and heavy tanks, and would remain so unless Wavell was ordered to do something inexplicable, such as send his tanks off to Greece, Crete, or some other destination. Rommel called his command the
Afrika Korps.
If the convoying across the Mediterranean of the tanks and men of his 15th Panzer Division went as planned, he’d be fully operational by mid-May. His mission until then was something like O’Connor’s, but in reverse—to hold the line in Tripolitania, and to probe eastward if possible. A British push to Tripoli was expected; basic military principles called for exploiting success. Rommel’s orders were to blunt the expected advance, and to absolutely avoid committing himself to any general engagement in Cyrenaica against the more numerous British. Although he was the sort of general who followed orders to the letter, he also thought it a general’s supreme duty to take the fight to the enemy. He considered nothing finer than waging a well-planned, well-executed battle—offensive, not defensive. His standing orders now conflicted with his love for action, yet the truly innovative soldier always finds a way to have his way, to derange events in his favor, as Churchill liked to put it.
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On the same day Hitler briefed Rommel, O’Connor received orders to send his remaining tanks east to Cairo, for maintenance. It was the wrong day to order up repairs, one of those seemingly minor events that in war weigh heavy on the future, though no commander on either side could reasonably predict the consequence at the time. The order seemed to make good sense. The British 7th Armoured Division had atrophied to less than brigade strength, just a few dozen tanks. Any tanks not in need of repairs would be by the time they rolled almost five hundred miles east to where their journey had begun, for prewar British planners had not thought of putting tanks on flatbed trucks in order to transport them to and from the battlefield. Libya had no railroad facilities; British tanks in the desert traveled to where they were going, however great the distance, under their own steam. Thus, as Rommel made for North Africa, Wavell’s armor made for Cairo. It was altogether the wrong direction. Churchill months later called the decision an “act of improvidence.”
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In East Africa that week, a force of British and colonial troops was well on its way to securing another of Churchill’s objectives—to flush the Italians from the Horn. Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), where the Duke of Aosta commanded a flimsy and ill-supplied army of occupation, was Churchill’s first target. Eden, during his October visit to the region, met in Khartoum with Wavell, Emperor Haile Selassie, and South African prime minister Jan Smuts, who sent more than 30,000 South African troops to the Sahara to
fight for London. Selassie, the first world leader to take refuge in London after the fall of his regime, had returned to Khartoum to tell anyone who listened that the time was right for him to become the first leader to reclaim his capital, and could do so if his men were better armed and better led. Eden and Smuts agreed to help, but each for different reasons. Eden, pushed by Churchill, sought a juncture between the Arabian and African sectors of the Muslim world, a unity of political purpose that would offset the growing anti-British Islamic presence in Jerusalem and Baghdad. Smuts needed a victory to overcome opposition from Boer nationalists, who had no love for England. Smuts had fought on the Boer side forty years earlier but grew to appreciate the British worldview. He believed in the British Empire, yet as one of the architects of the League of Nations, he also believed in a world council dedicated to righting wrongs. Deeply religious—he always carried in his kit a copy of the New Testament—he believed nations (white nations, in any event) had a moral obligation to wage war against nations guilty of self-evident ethical abominations, such as Germany under Hitler. In this interventionism he stood foursquare with Churchill, in part because economic benefits tended to follow intervention. It had been Britain and France, after all, who used their League of Nations mandates to open new imperial pathways in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Selassie’s cause was just; Smuts was on board.
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The command of Selassie’s troops went to an experienced desert fighter, Lieutenant Colonel Orde Wingate, who represented the style of irregular soldiering manifested famously by the likes of General Charles George Gordon in the Sudan, and Lawrence of Arabia, the adventurous sort of soldiering that Kipling lauded and Churchill loved, having done more than a bit of it himself. Wingate showed up in Khartoum in early November bearing a suitcase containing one million pounds sterling. Backed by his start-up money and a firm belief that he was the man who would put the Lion of Judah back upon his throne, Wingate assembled a little army. It was a motley crew: eight hundred men from the Sudan Frontier Battalion and about eight hundred Abyssinian troops, the entire group led by about seventy British commandos. Wingate—a Bible scholar, and a bit beyond eccentric—christened his command “Gideon Force.”
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Overall command of the expedition went to Lieutenant General Alan Cunningham, brother of Admiral Sir Andrew Browne Cunningham, commander in chief of the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. Cunningham was a fine infantryman and not afraid of a fight. Sir John Keegan called the East Africa campaign “a
Beau Geste
episode” rife with dashing colonials upon prancing camels, long desert treks, upraised scimitars, oasis gunfights, all in all a series of colonial brawls, fought for the most part between colonial troops for colonial advantage. It was nineteenth-century stuff. Churchill loved it, not least of
all the public humiliation inflicted upon Il Duce. Yet, given that Italy’s per capita economic output in 1941 was akin to that of Britain’s a century
earlier,
it was truly nineteenth-century stuff, and a cakewalk for Churchill.
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On January 20, Haile Selassie and Wingate had crossed the frontier where the Blue Nile cascades into the Sudan from Ethiopia. Wingate’s column, though almost comically weak, drove up the Ethiopian plateau toward the capital of Addis Ababa, three hundred miles distant. Two Indian divisions marched across the frontier north of the Blue Nile on a bearing for Gondar. The following day, the Sudan Defence Force crossed into Ethiopia south of the Blue Nile. On February 11, Cunningham’s army of South Africans, the King’s African Rifles, and the Royal West African Frontier Force marched out of Kenya and into southern Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland. The Italians fled from the south of Abyssinia so rapidly that Cunningham’s forces could not keep up. The Italians were on the run and British prestige was on the rise.
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Events in the desert and East Africa, therefore, made for good news to impart to Hopkins, who stayed on until early February, and to Wendell Willkie, who arrived in late January. Willkie, the Republican loser in the November election, was a big six-foot-one, 220-pound Hoosier who pronounced America “Amurica.” He strongly opposed what he called Roosevelt’s “alphabet soup” social programs and had campaigned against Roosevelt’s relief programs on the slogan “You can’t beat Santa Claus.” His presence in London as Roosevelt’s informal ambassador therefore informed the world that
Amurica
was acting as one. The isolationists might yet dispute that, but Roosevelt was in the process of shoving the American Firsters off the stage. Willkie carried with him a handwritten note from Roosevelt:

The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow verse was personal, symbolic, perhaps, but it meant a great deal to Churchill. He had the letter framed and toted it about, frame and all, to show visitors, a material manifestation of true friendship.
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John “Gil” Winant, Roosevelt’s replacement for Joe Kennedy, also arrived in early February. A former governor of New Hampshire, Winant, though a New Yorker by birth, manifested a dour taciturnity often associated with natives of the Granite State. Harold Nicolson found Winant to be “very shy”; he tended to twist his hands while proffering “coy platitudes.” Yet Nicolson concluded that Winant was a man of “superb character” who carried himself with “ungainly charm” and manifested a “real if inarticulate force.” Winant’s credentials were impeccable: St. Paul’s School and Princeton. An early supporter of the New Deal, he was rewarded with a post on the new Social Security Board. Roosevelt confided to Harvard’s James Conant that Winant would get along well with the Labour faction in Britain, which, Roosevelt told Conant, would almost certainly “be in power when the war is over.”
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Winant, tall and lanky, considered dark, somber suits to be the only appropriate attire for a gentleman. Photographs of him are reminiscent of Abe Lincoln at his most weary. The resemblance to Lincoln, when noted, pleased Winant no end. Yet the resemblance in large part stemmed from a deep sadness in his eyes, due in no small measure to his being a most unhappily married man. Within weeks of arriving in London he fell in love with Sarah Churchill, an “innocent” affair according to Colville, but one doomed from the start, innocent or not. It simply would not do for the married American ambassador to take up with a married woman who happened also to be the prime minister’s daughter. As she had with Vic Oliver, Sarah had fallen for a much older man, a lifelong habit: “Maybe I was looking for a substitute father [she wrote of her marriage to Oliver]; indeed, I have sometimes thought I was trying to marry my father.” Winant was Churchill’s junior by a decade, yet his dour countenance made him appear a decade older than the Old Man. Within days of arriving, he reinvigorated the American embassy by returning all operations to No. 1 Grosvenor Square from the country estate to which Joe Kennedy had decamped the year before, when the first bombs fell.
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Churchill trusted Winant, enough to allow him to vet those of his speeches that might be interpreted by Americans as meddling in U.S. affairs. As with the other Americans who came to call that winter (William Averell Harriman, Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Hopkins, and Willkie), Churchill opened his weekend houses to Winant. Rare was the weekend in 1941 when Churchill did not host one or more of the Americans. He grew truly fond of their company, and he valued their forthrightness. As well, he
knew he must allow them to witness how he managed the war. R. A. Butler wrote that Winant and the other Americans “react well to exhibitions of resolution.” This, of course, was exactly how Churchill wanted them to react, and it perhaps led to a third reason he extended weekend invitations: the visiting Americans became an audience for his frequent declamations on resolve and revenge, on war and on peace.
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Harry Hopkins departed England on February 8, sold on Churchill’s resolution and on the inevitability of invasion. Churchill had portrayed to Hopkins a grim and desperate scene when the Germans would come ashore, which Hopkins reported to the president: “The most important single observation I have to make is that most of the cabinet and all of the military leaders here believe that invasion is imminent. They believe it may come at any moment, but not later than May 1.” Indeed, many in the military and the cabinet believed that, but Churchill did not. He believed the surest way for Hitler to lose the war would be to invade England, which would expose his shipping to annihilation, and likewise any Germans who made it ashore. Hopkins, too, came to believe that, telling Roosevelt “her sun would set” were Germany to invade. Yet, that was a premise—an all-or-nothing premise—Churchill did not want to test. But if the test came, Britons were ready. Two weeks after first meeting Churchill, Hopkins cabled Roosevelt: “The spirit of this people and their determination to resist invasion is beyond praise. No matter how fierce the attack may be you can be sure they will resist it, and effectively. The Germans will have to do more than kill a few hundred thousand people here before they can defeat Britain.” In fact, as Hopkins grasped after his exposure to Churchill’s late-night sessions, Hitler would have to kill them all.
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