The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (354 page)

L
end-Lease passed the U.S. House of Representatives on February 8, by a vote of 260–165, thanks in part to a young Texas congressman and rising star in the Democratic Party, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Now the bill would move on to the Senate, where passage was by no means assured. The following night Churchill—his African victories mounting and his meetings with Hopkins and Willkie having concluded with success—addressed Britain and America, his first radio broadcast in five months, and the first since September 1939 in which a British leader could cite any military successes, however modest. He intended to give something of a State of the Empire address. Knowing that America was listening, he served up the good news first, the “series of victories in Libya which have broken irretrievably
the Italian military power on the African Continent…. Thus, we have all been entertained, and I trust edified, by the… humiliation of another of what Byron called ‘Those Pagod things of saber sway / With fronts of brass and feet of clay.’ ”

Of Hitler, Churchill asked, “What has that wicked man… been preparing during these winter months? What new devilry is he planning?” Would the coming “phase of greater violence” center on England? “What fresh form of assault will he make upon our Island home and fortress; which let there be no mistake about it is all that stands between him and the dominion of the world?” Churchill then made an astonishing statement, given that he believed through his Ultra decrypts just the opposite of what he now said:

He had told his military chiefs since June that the invasion scare begat vigilance on the part of Britons. In his broadcasts and speeches, he chose his words with great care. He never told Britons that Hitler
was
coming, but only that they must be prepared
if
Hitler came. Britons learned little or nothing from their newspapers and the BBC of German troop movements on the Continent or British deployments on the Home Island. They were in the dark. Thus, when they heard their prime minister speak of gas attacks, or the need to fight on the beaches and in the fields, they understandably came away quite concerned, which was Churchill’s intent.

Churchill followed the invasion warning with an oft-repeated premise:

Here was yet another warning to Stalin, and a signal to Hitler that the British intelligence services were aware of his intentions. Churchill had a
message for Bulgarians, as well, advising them not to repeat their mistake of the Great War when they “went in on the losing side.” This time around, Churchill said, “I trust the Bulgarians are not going to make the same mistake again.” Then he gave voice to his dream of a bulwark in the Balkans: “Of course, if all the Balkan people stood together and acted together, aided by Britain and Turkey, it would be many months before a German army and air force of sufficient strength to overcome them could be assembled.” Yet Ultra decrypts had by then shown that the requisite German strength to smash Greece had already been assembled.
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Sidestepping his inability to mount any real offense against Germany, he worked in more good news regarding the Italians. At dawn that day Admiral James Somerville had sailed his squadron of three battle cruisers into the harbor at Genoa and proceeded to bombard “in a shattering manner” the naval base there. It appeared Somerville had as easy a go of it with the Italians as Drake had with the basking crocodiles of Cartagena. “It is right,” Churchill pronounced, “that the Italian people should be made to feel the sorry plight into which they have been dragged by Dictator Mussolini; and if the cannonade of Genoa, rolling along the coast, reverberating in the mountains, reached the ears of our French comrades in their grief and misery, it might cheer them with the feeling that friends—active friends—are near and that Britannia rules the waves.”
Rules the waves?
Britannia, in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, and most distressingly, in the approaches to the Home Island, by no means ruled the waves. Britannia, in fact, for the first time in her history had good reason to fear the sea.
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Of Japan, Churchill made no mention. Yet Alec Cadogan had reported to Eden three days earlier that the Foreign Office had listened in on “some very bad-looking Jap telephone conversations from which it appears they have decided to attack us.” Such rumors of impending Japanese belligerency abounded throughout the year, but Churchill faced more than enough problems in Europe to preclude his having any meaningful influence in the distant Pacific. Events in the Far East were not only beyond his ability to control by diplomatic carrot, but beyond his means to address with military stick, should the Japanese attack British interests there.
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He ended with a reading of the Longfellow verse Roosevelt had sent along with Willkie, which segued into a final slavish expression of thanks to “this great man” Roosevelt. To address the fears of Americans that Lend-Lease would someday result in American boys going abroad, Churchill declared, “We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American Union. We do not need them this year, nor next year, nor any year that I can foresee.” He needed arms, aircraft, and especially shipping, but he did not need armies. This war, he claimed, differed
from the Great War, when “America sent two million men across the Atlantic. But this is not a war of vast armies, firing immense masses of shells at one another.” “The fate of this war,” he declared, “is going to be settled by what happens on the oceans, in the air, and—above all—in this island.” And then: “We shall not fail or falter, we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down.” The last line of the speech lives on as one of Churchill’s best known: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”
¹²⁴

That statement appears at first pass to be a whopper, given that Germany was a land power, one that only armies could defeat. Yet Churchill—and many of his generals—was informed by his experiences in the Great War, when massed armies faced off for four years along five hundred miles of trenches. Stasis defined the Great War. When the armies did meet—as at the Somme and Passchendaele—unimaginable slaughter resulted. Warfare had since changed, and though Churchill knew intellectually that it had, he did not know it in his gut. Even after the Germans, employing new tactics and new weapons, swept to victory over France in six weeks the previous spring, even as British tanks now swept across Libya, Churchill remained convinced that if great armies met in Europe, the lines would stabilize, and the slaughter commence. This belief would underlie his thinking for the next three years. He believed that if the Germans came to England, they would be obliterated on the seas, on the beaches, and in the fields. Likewise, he believed that if the British returned to Europe too soon and undermanned, they, too, would be obliterated. He therefore sought other means to bring Germany to its knees. He had told his military chiefs the previous summer that airpower was Britain’s “one sure path” to victory, but that remained an untested premise, and Britain lacked the aircraft to prove it in any event. Neither the Royal Navy nor the RAF could, alone or together, kill the German army, and killing the German army was the
only
path to British victory. To do so Churchill needed troops, millions more than Britain and the Dominions could muster. Only two nations could supply the manpower: the United States and the Soviet Union, and neither in early 1941 was prepared to do battle with the Wehrmacht. Churchill was correct when he offered that Western Civilization would either be lost or saved in the coming conflagration. Yet he had no strategy in place to meet the challenge.

Jan Smuts, who heard the speech in South Africa, cabled, “Each broadcast is a battle.” Everything about Churchill’s speeches was extraordinary, not least the speed with which they were scrawled in longhand or dictated straight to the typewriter in odd moments between pressing duties. All his life, critics had called his language florid and overstated. After Dunkirk, overstating England’s plight was impossible; after forty years in Parliament,
he had finally been provided with a canvas high enough and broad enough to bear his brilliant colors. He gave the lie to Theodore Dreiser’s line in
Sister Carrie
“How true it is that words are but vague shadows of the volumes we mean.” His words cast their own shadows, and they were long and deep. Certainly he demonstrated that powerful words could alter the course of history. Yet powerful weapons, which Churchill then lacked, and Hitler did not, can alter the course of history more quickly.
¹²⁵

One effect of Churchill’s warning on invasion was for Dominion ministers worldwide to telegraph their great concern for the fate of the Home Island to Whitehall. Churchill’s Dominions minister, Viscount Cranborne, sent Churchill a copy of a telegram he had drafted to the Dominion governments, outlining the pros and cons for German invasion. Churchill responded with vehemence. “What is the point,” he asked, “with worrying the Dominions with all this questionable stuff?” He went on to tell Cranborne that if the Germans came, they would be cut off from resupply and communications within a week. RAF bombers would obliterate their landing sites and shipping. Then, “apart from the beaches we have the equivalent of 30 divisions with 1,000 tanks” in reserve, “to be hurled” at the invaders. A million members of the Home Guard stood ready to “deal with sporadic descents of parachutists.” All of this information was for Cranborne only; Churchill saw no purpose in it being passed on to the Dominions, where it would likely be leaked. The most telling number in Churchill’s reply to Cranborne is the number of divisions under arms in England: thirty. When, in March, Churchill’s secretary of state for war, David Margesson, proposed limiting reinforcements to Egypt to two divisions, Churchill shot back: “I do not accept the view that only two divisions can be spared from the immense force now gathered at home. We must not get too ‘defense minded.’ ” Ten months earlier Churchill’s regular army in England consisted of the drenched and unarmed survivors of Dunkirk. Now he had an army, a small army relative to Hitler’s, but an army.
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On February 15, Churchill sent Eden and Dill back to Cairo and Greece. Their mission was not to push Wavell into furthering his Libyan gains, but to push him to prepare for Churchill’s planned foray into the Balkans, a strategy Churchill had outlined in a long cable to Wavell. In essence, Churchill wrote, as German intervention in Greece “becomes more certain and imminent,” it will be necessary to ship from Egypt to Greece “at least four divisions, including one armoured division.” Churchill’s hope was that if “Greece, with British aid, can hold up for some months German advance, chances of Turkish intervention will be favoured.” If events in Greece didn’t work out as planned, “we must, at all costs, keep Crete.” It
was an ambitious plan, given that Churchill lacked the tools to challenge Hitler not only in Western Europe but anywhere. The prime minister also instructed Wavell to “take all possible precautions for the safety of our two Envoys having regard to nasty habits of Wops and Huns.”
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A
cross the Atlantic that month, Franklin Roosevelt was trying to sell Lend-Lease to the U.S. Senate. The isolationists were not buying. Senator Burton Wheeler, a Montana Progressive, crony of Joe Kennedy’s, and one of the founders of the America First Committee, proclaimed in a radio address that Roosevelt was going to “plow under every fourth American boy.” Roosevelt called the accusation “dastardly.” Wheeler, taking his rest at Kennedy’s Palm Beach manse, declined to say more. He didn’t have to. Dastardly or not, he had a point.