The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (363 page)

In the end, and too late, Wavell’s predictions of new hazards proved spot on. With Greece overrun, the door was now open for Stalin to swing toward the Dardanelles, or for Hitler to do likewise, or for both to move in
concert. Churchill had long been “working on the Turks” to bring them in on Britain’s side, but he admitted in a cable to Cripps that the Turks “are unresponsive through fear.” Indeed, the Turks were justifiably fearful that either Hitler or Stalin, or both, would soon put an end to their sovereignty. Sound military logic demanded it. After crushing Turkey, Hitler could elect to strike into Iraq, or swing through Syria to the Suez Canal, or both. Were he to sate a modicum of Stalin’s appetite for greater influence in Bulgaria and Romania (traditional Russian spheres of influence), Hitler would find himself free to pursue his Mediterranean strategy with an ally on his eastern flank. It was the strategy that his naval planners had stressed was necessary in order to defeat Britain. He was poised to eviscerate the greatest empire in history, to succeed where Napoleon had failed. He prepared to take the next step, to the island he deemed vital to his plan: Crete. But the plan that Crete was vital to was Barbarossa. Crete was home to three RAF airfields, from which long-range British bombers could reach the Ploesti oil fields, in Romania. Hitler needed that oil to fuel his march to Moscow. He was going to Crete to fight the British, but first and foremost, he was going in order to secure his flank.
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I
n early April, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in
The New Yorker:
“For the past fortnight Londoners had been listening to the unnatural silence at nights and wondering what was brewing.” By mid-month they knew. The Blitz, in its third incarnation, had returned. The Luftwaffe again had England’s biggest cities dead in its sights. On April 16 more than five hundred German bombers pounded London until dawn. During the raid, Colville dashed to the American embassy in Churchill’s armored car to ask Winant’s advice on a telegram. He found the ambassador on duty, his wife by his side. The bombs, Colville wrote, “came down like hailstones.” By the next morning the city looked as devastated as had been predicted in the late thirties, when the appeasers claimed that the bombers would always get through. The Admiralty wore a new gash. St. James’s Palace, where Churchill’s parents had moved in 1880, was burning. Austin Thompson, the vicar of St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, stepped out onto the steps of his church to call people in to shelter; a bomb erased both the vicar and his church from the cityscape. Chelsea Old Church was demolished, Jermyn Street wrecked, Mayfair badly damaged. Pall Mall, Piccadilly, and lower Regent Street were heavily damaged. Mounds of glass shards lined the edges of roads. Of the more than five hundred German bombers that had made the run, only a dozen had been shot down.
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Daylight and fair weather brought out the sightseers, including Pamela Churchill in the company of Averell Harriman, the two of them observed by Colville poking about the devastation in the Horse Guards Parade (in fact, they had just begun their love affair). Churchill made his way through the smoldering rubble in time to chair the 11:30 War Cabinet meeting, where he stunned Cadogan by noting that the damage to the Admiralty improved his view of Nelson’s Column—which had emerged undamaged—from his place at the table. Much of the capital did not share Nelson’s good fortune. By afternoon a steady, cold rain swept through the city, lending an air of desolation to the scene.
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The map of Europe in late April looked as if the sinister octopus of newsreel fame had spewed its black ink into almost every corner of the Continent. Switzerland, Portugal, and Sweden survived only at Hitler’s pleasure; each offered him a secure diplomatic conduit to the world beyond. Switzerland also afforded safe haven for his stolen gold, Sweden a steady flow of iron ore. Spain sat in his camp philosophically, but fearing an end to his U.S. food shipments—and sure starvation for his people—the wily Franco was still not about to grant the Wehrmacht free passage to Gibraltar, although Hitler could certainly force his way through Spain were he so inclined. But for these few exceptions to Hitler’s rule, the entire map of Europe had gone black. All, that is, but the obstinate Island.

On April 27, Churchill sent Eden to take responsibility in the Commons for the Greek debacle. By virtue of the power traditionally vested in him, a British foreign secretary would be expected to face the Commons after such a disastrous overseas gamble, yet Churchill made sure that the Foreign Office under Eden no longer operated with the smug independence it had enjoyed for more than a century, ever since “Pam” Palmerston made the office a virtual co-equal of the Office of Prime Minister. Churchill “had no love of the foreign office” Colville wrote, and “suspected them of pursuing their own policy” and of being “defeatist and prone toward socialism.” He “mistrusted their judgment.” Eden labored at Churchill’s pleasure, and served with absolute loyalty. Despite that loyalty, Churchill allowed Eden to assume the role of archery target for the MPs, as if Eden actually had initiated the unfortunate course of events in the Balkans. Yet, at the end of the day, by a vote of 477–3, the Commons voiced its support for the government.
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Several months later, to Colville’s astonishment, Churchill proclaimed that he “had instinctively had doubts” about the Greek venture from the beginning. The Greeks, Churchill told Colville, should have been advised to make the best terms they could with Hitler. He claimed blame for the fiasco lay with the War Cabinet and especially with Dill, whom, Colville noted, Churchill “has now got his knife right into.” Colville, incredulous
at Churchill’s claims, wrote of the incident as if he doubted his own powers of recollection, such were Churchill’s powers of persuasion. But on April 27, Churchill would have been hard-pressed to blame the government for the Greek tragedy, for everybody knew quite well that the prime minister
was
the government. That evening, in his first radio address since his “Give us the tools” speech of February 9, he took to the airwaves to explain as best he could this latest in the series of damnable events.
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The list of troubles was long and growing longer. As in every speech since the previous May, he offered reassurances to a brave people who needed but did not demand reassurance: “I thought it would be a good thing to go and see for myself… some of our great cities and seaports and which have been most heavily bombed… and to some of the places where the poorest people have had it worst.” What he saw “reassured and refreshed.” It was like “going out of a hothouse onto the bridge of a fighting ship… a tonic which I should recommend any who are suffering fretfulness to take in strong doses when they have need of it.” The morale among the poor and the bombed, he proclaimed, was “splendid.” It all added up to the “vindication of the civilized and decent way of living” and “proof of the virtues of free institutions.” The cause would be “fought out… to the end. This is the grand heroic period of our history, and the light of glory shines on all.” He presumed all Englishmen felt the same.

Many did. When Wendell Willkie, conducting an unscientific survey during his visit, asked a laborer if he supported the war and wanted to go through with it, the man replied, “Hitler ain’t dead yet, is he?” and turned back to work. The citizens of Hull were proud of the beatings they took, and informed
The New Yorker
columnist A. J. Liebling that Coventry had nothing on them. Hull, regularly hit hard by virtue of its location on the North Sea, and being the British port nearest to Germany, was but one of Britain’s major ports and cities that were taking such beatings. During the Blitz not one mayor of any British city ever asked Whitehall for special protection, not that any could have been arranged. Londoners, of course, never hesitated to tell anyone within earshot that they could take it. Yet Churchill’s attachment of glory to mass slaughter rang hyperbolic to many in America, where a clear majority of voters still answered no to the question of going to war for Britain. And no lights of glory shone on the Continent. Enslaved Europeans—who now truly lived dangerously—found scant hope in his words. Yet Poles and Dutchmen, Frenchmen and Norwegians, Czechs, Belgians, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, and now, too, the Greeks all knew that Churchill was the only European leader who remained to carry on the fight against Hitler. They all knew, as well, that he could not fight alone for much longer.
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Churchill had taken to the airwaves not only to thank Britons but to
explain the failures in the Balkans. Lowering his voice, he moved on to Greece. He told Britons: “Great disasters have occurred in the Balkans. Yugoslavia has been beaten down…. The Greeks have been overwhelmed. The victorious Albanian army has been cut off and forced to surrender.” And then to Africa, where the news was as dreadful: “Our forces in Libya have sustained a vexatious and damaging defeat. The Germans advanced sooner and in greater strength than we or our generals expected.” Strictly speaking, this was true. Although Churchill had not
expected
Rommel to attack so soon, in early March Ultra had revealed that Rommel would be ready weeks earlier than the British had predicted. Wavell’s hesitancy all along had little to do with the speed or strength of the Germans, either in Greece or North Africa. He assumed German advances on any front would be fast and strong; that was the German way. His overriding concern stemmed from dividing
his
forces. Yet Churchill, in his broadcast, without naming Wavell, rebuked the commander for the decision to send his tanks to Cairo for repair when future events—indeterminate when the decision was made—proved they were best left in Libya. Churchill: “The single armoured brigade which had been judged sufficient to hold the frontier till about the middle of May was worsted and its vehicles largely destroyed by a somewhat stronger German armoured force.” Without quite declaring so, Churchill had just told his people that the British had been trounced yet again.
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Then, growling, he deflected the audience’s attention from HMG’s defeats onto Mussolini:

And then he moved on to the guttersnipe. As for Hitler, Churchill repeated his January message to Ismay: “Hitler cannot find safety from avenging justice in the East, in the Middle East, or in the Far East. In order to win this war he must either conquer this Island by invasion, or he must cut the ocean life-line which joins us to the United States.” Churchill believed the arithmetic of the situation precluded either possibility: “There are less than seventy million malignant Huns—some of whom are curable
and others killable…. The peoples of the British Empire and the United States number more than 200 million in their homelands and the British Dominions alone.” This English-speaking alliance possesses “more wealth, more technical resources, and they make more steel than the rest of the world put together.”
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Churchill failed to cite a third possible path to victory for Hitler besides invasion and blockade. It was the strategy Admiral Raeder and Franz Halder (Chief of the German Army General Staff) had advocated for ten months, albeit meekly, given Hitler’s determination to burn Moscow. Halder proposed to dismember the British Empire before the Americans came in, beginning in the Mediterranean, east from Gibraltar to Egypt. Then he advised a strike across Iraq and Persia while enticing the Japanese into smashing Hong Kong and Singapore. The objective was to drive Britain out of Asia. The United States would then reassess the value of supplying Britain with war matériel for an increasingly futile battle. England finding itself cut off from its Dominions, from its Iraqi and Persian oil, and denied use of the Suez Canal, would be ripe for the kill. This was Churchill’s fear exactly.
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He chose invective over full disclosure. No one objected to his classification of Mussolini as a jackal, but his reference to malignant Huns,
killable
at that, drew protests from Corder Catchpool, a Great War conscientious objector and pacifist who, in an open letter to Churchill, lamented the prime minister’s message as “not in accordance with truth, and that the spirit it breathes is a pagan spirit, the opposite of what Jesus taught as to the Christian attitude toward sinful mankind.” Catchpool predicted that “if this spirit predominates” in the British people and their leaders, “then the present generation will pass away without any hope of realizing that new and better world for which men are agonizing now.” Churchill made no reply to Catchpool.
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