The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (364 page)

Churchill ended his address with the final two stanzas of a poem by the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough, words “appropriate to our fortunes to-night, and I believe they will be so judged wherever the English language is spoken or the flag of freedom flies:

Westward was America, where vast quantities of Lend-Lease wheat, dried milk, powdered eggs, flour, canned pork, and canned fish were being assembled for shipment to Britain. But the first ship would not arrive for a month. Though Churchill proclaimed in public that setbacks stiffened resolve and would somehow in time transform into stepping-stones to victory, when he received bad news in private, he resorted to a behavior associated with children, artists, and geniuses: he sulked. He termed each new defeat the gloomiest, the most troublesome, the most fearful, the blackest. Yet he was never long gloomy, and never afraid. At dinner, among his cronies and family, he could, with a pout, a quiver of the lip, a growl and a scowl, shut down all conversation. Yet Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister, noted in his diary Churchill’s inevitable progress during conversations from doom to effervescence: “The PM in conversation will steep himself (and you) in gloom on some grim aspect of the war… only to proceed to fight himself out while he is pacing the floor with the light of battle in his eyes. In every conversation he reaches a point where he positively enjoys the war: ‘Bliss in that age it was to be alive…. Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?’ ” Churchill could be moody, petulant, rude, and mercurial, but he never subscribed to the patently obvious logic that given enough setbacks, defeat must necessarily follow. Menzies jotted in his diary, “There is no defeat in his heart.”
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To Wavell, after Rommel pummeled the British in Libya, Churchill cabled, “We seem to have had rather bad luck.” Like a cowboy who gambled away his wages, he added: “I expect we should get this back later.” He had a way of seeing gold where others saw dirt. Had Britain not sent troops to Greece, Churchill told his cabinet, “Yugoslavia would not now be an open enemy of Germany.” It is true that Yugoslav guerrillas tied up several German divisions for the remainder of the war, but the sacrifice in Greece of more than 16,000 of Britain’s finest troops killed and captured in order to bring about that result cannot be construed as a design of strategic magnificence. Luck had not abandoned Wavell; Churchill had.
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Since the previous June, when Churchill treated of such calamities in public, even as he promised more dangers to come, he did so with the remarkable result that with each phrase he applied another dash of mortar to the foundation of public trust, until his April 27 speech. For almost a year he had told his ministers that he did not want Britons’ tension over possible invasion to abate. It had not. The public’s tension was so acute, wrote Panter-Downes, the news from Greece and North Africa so bewildering and so bad, that the morning newspapers “became just about as comfortable as a bomb lying on the breakfast table.”
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C
hurchill’s speech of April 27 had pushed the dinner hour back to almost 10:00, following which, General Sir Alan Brooke recalled, Churchill “was in great form… and kept us up till 3:30
A.M.
” His great form may have been intended to mask his growing distress, for in the hours following his broadcast, one of his “golden eggs” had hatched. Enigma decrypts confirmed that the Germans were going to Crete, and that they would arrive via parachute and glider, with Crete’s three airfields as the objectives. This intelligence was so vital that Churchill suggested to the Chiefs of Staff that the actual texts be secretly flown to General Freyberg, the commander on Crete. Churchill assumed that Freyberg, once assured that the intelligence was valid, would deploy his forces in order to ambush and crush the German airborne units, so that any German seaborne forces that might appear—if the Royal Navy did not first sink them—would find themselves cut off on the beaches. If used to effect, the decrypts could prove a godsend. If not, and were Crete to fall, Egypt had to be the next target, and as things now stood, Egypt’s defense could not be guaranteed. The loss of Egypt and the Suez Canal, Churchill told the War Cabinet, “would be a disaster of first magnitude to Great Britain, second only to successful invasion and final conquest” of the Home Island.
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Should Rommel reach Cairo, an evacuation from North Africa would have to take place that would make Norway, Dunkirk, and Greece look like training exercises. A War Cabinet directive of April 28, drafted by Churchill, called for plans to be drawn up for an evacuation but stipulated “no whisper of such plans is to be allowed.” But before any retreat took place, “no surrenders by officers or men will be considered tolerable unless at least 50 percent casualties are sustained by the Unit or force in question. According to Napoleon’s maxim, ‘when a man is caught alone and unarmed, a surrender may be made.’ But generals and staff officers surprised by the enemy are to use their pistols in self defence. The honor of a wounded man is safe.” Churchill was fond of the Napoleonic maxim regarding the surrender of an unarmed man. Had Wavell read Churchill’s autobiography,
My Early Life,
he would have known that Churchill once applied the maxim to himself when he found himself unarmed and staring down the barrel of a Boer rifle. In the telling of that tale, Churchill took pains to inform the reader that his pistol remained some distance away; he was thus both surrounded
and
unarmed.
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The directive continued: “Anyone who can kill a Hun or even an Italian, has rendered a good service.” Then, having already broached the subject of
evacuation, Churchill decreed, “It will be utterly impossible to find the shipping for moving a tithe of the immense masses of men and stores which have been gathered in the Nile Valley.” All the ships of the Royal Navy could not get them away, and this time there’d be no heroic fleet of yachts, trawlers, and dories sailing to the rescue. Conceivably, the British could flee south, through the Sudan to Kenya and safety. Those who survived would find themselves out of the war. Given the fact there was no real exit, the battle plan called for—as it did on the Home Island—a last stand.
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The language in the directive was the sort Dill had in mind when he told Reith that nine out of ten of Churchill’s ideas as expressed in memos were less than brilliant. From Wavell’s perspective, the directive was a waste of paper. He needed no man to tell him to do his duty. Churchill envied Wavell his opportunity for glory. To Colville, he admitted that he would “lay down his present office—yes and even renounce cigars and alcohol”—for the chance to lead the resistance in Egypt.
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Freyberg, meanwhile, on Crete, received and digested the Enigma intelligence, but the Secret Intelligence Service, in accordance with standard procedures, instructed him not to act on any
single
intelligence source without first verifying the information through a second source. Here was a piece of bureaucratic nonsense, for Ultra came straight from the horse’s mouth, and was therefore unimpeachable, as well as unverifiable. Freyberg maintained in later years that the real intent of the SIS directive was to scuttle the defense of Crete’s three airfields in order to protect the Ultra secret. Were the airfields to prove too well defended, the Germans might have deduced the leak in their security. Still, Freyberg decided he would man the airfields, and reinforce as best he could whichever airfield came under the heaviest attack. His problem was that the westernmost airfield, at Maleme, near the Royal Navy anchorage at Souda Bay, was seventy miles west of the airfield at Rethymnon, which in turn was eighty miles west of the third airfield, at Heraklion. Still, for the first time in the war, a British commander knew in advance exactly what was coming his way, and when. However, his forces had been so torn up in Greece that he lacked the men and internal lines of communications to mount an effective, coordinated defense of Crete, with or without help from Ultra.

M
ax Beaverbrook resigned from the Ministry of Aircraft Production on April 30. He had made more enemies in the RAF than he had in the Luftwaffe. Beaverbrook’s liability now exceeded his utility, in part because he was willing and eager to gainsay Roosevelt, which could only hurt
Churchill. Max believed the Americans were out to grab everything they could from Britain, including its remaining gold and, when the war was won, its overseas markets—the Empire. He proposed to send a mission to the United States to set the American people straight regarding Roosevelt’s canniness and the U.S. government’s unwillingness to fulfill promises made to Britain, promises that Max’s newspapers had endorsed. “The American government… is asking for the moon,” he wrote to Churchill, “and appears unwilling to pay six pence.”
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Max’s mission to the United States could only hurt Churchill and the cause. Max had enough enemies in London; it would not do for him to make new ones in America. Churchill, seeking a way to keep Max in the game and the cabinet, resurrected him on May 1 as minister of state. It was an appointment that carried no specific duties, and invited trouble, for Max might poke his nose into the affairs of other departments, which would beget the enmity of the heads of those departments. Yet the lack of duties freed up time for Max to serve Churchill as friend, foil, and incubator of questionable ideas. Britons, not quite understanding the vagaries of the position, greeted the news with cheers, because they presumed Beaverbrook, given his talents for producing goods, would be overseeing war production. Many Britons considered Britain’s war production—and Churchill’s management of it—to be pathetic. War production wins wars; yet Britain’s factory output was, according to Fleet Street, in a state of slumber. Factory managers and workers shut down their plants on Fridays and took their usual holidays in the country; very few third shifts hummed away in the nation’s factories. The
Sunday Express:
“Do we even now understand that we are at a death grips in a fight for our lives?” The taking of holidays, chimed the newspaper, was “a scandalous situation.” The
Daily Mail:
“When are we going to get down to the job of winning the war? When are we going to run machines, factories, and shipyards to full capacity?” The solution, according to the press, was a shake-up in government, a radical shake-up. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote that Beaverbrook’s new job “carries with it a roving commission to kick inefficiency and departmental dawdling hard wherever it is encountered.” Though Britons were suspicious of Beaverbrook’s “Canadian accent,” his “Fleet Street Methods,” his Tory loyalties, and even his “street urchin” face, they knew he was just the man to straighten out the bureaucrats who had mucked up the production of everything from tanks to Blitz soup.
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The month of May proved anything but merry. Disaster struck from the air, in the Atlantic, and in the eastern Mediterranean. Shipping losses in the Atlantic were still horrific; a chart tracking them looked “like a fever
patient’s graph,” Mollie Panter-Downes wrote. The Blitz of 1941 had entered its third and most terrible phase, with London taking beatings more vicious than those of 1940. Tarpaulins had disappeared, leaving Londoners to root about inside their roofless houses in dampness and filth. Clocks moved ahead another hour, to double daylight saving, affording Londoners another two hours of fitful sleep before the sounding of the morning all clear and two more hours of daylight in the evening to contemplate the destruction all around. The government could offer them scant aid. When a member of Parliament asked Churchill “not to close his mind” to the question of welfare relief for bombed-out citizens, Churchill replied, “I will keep my mind ajar.” Still, Londoners did not complain. Rather, wrote Panter-Downes, they would gladly “lose their homes all over again for the pleasure of hearing that Berliners had just caught as big a packet of hell” from the RAF as they had caught from the Luftwaffe. Londoners could still no doubt take it, Panter-Downes wrote, but had begun to wonder if their government could dish it out. The twelve-month toll of dead Britons approached 47,000.
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