The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (366 page)

O
n the moonlit night of May 10, the Luftwaffe smashed London and continued pounding it with high explosives and incendiaries until dawn on the eleventh. The Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice had arranged to spend the night in the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He wrote that soon after the raiders appeared, “great tawny clouds of smoke, rolling in sumptuous Baroque exuberance, had hidden the river completely and there we were on the dome, a Classical island in a more than Romantic Inferno. It was far and away the most astonishing spectacle I have ever seen.”

Churchill was safe at Ditchley that night, watching a Marx Brothers movie and making inquiries about the damage to London when word came in that the Duke of Hamilton, an old friend of his, had telephoned and sought most urgently to speak to Churchill. Churchill asked Brendan Bracken to take a message from the duke. A few minutes later Bracken returned and informed the P.M.: “Hess has arrived in Scotland.” Churchill thought it a joke and told Brendan to inform the duke to “kindly tell that to the Marx Brothers.” But a flood of new messages soon confirmed the story. Rudolf Hess, deputy Führer, third in command of the Third Reich, member of Hitler’s secret cabinet council, leader of the Nazi Party, Hitler’s friend—perhaps his only true friend—for more than a dozen years, had parachuted into Scotland. Either through luck or skill, Hess had actually landed quite near the duke’s manor. Thus began an episode of sheer lunacy.
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Nobody knew what to make of the news. Pamela Churchill, who was at Ditchley that weekend, recalled that the secretaries, who were vital in connecting Churchill to “whatever was happening” in the outside world, could
garner no intelligence on Hess’s adventure. Everybody who was present—Pamela, the secretaries, Churchill—“had no idea what was happening” and could only speculate and wonder if “it might be the biggest thing in the whole war” or if perhaps “Germany was breaking up.” History anointed Hess a sideshow, but when news of his advent first arrived “it was a very thrilling moment.”
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Hess’s immediate objective was to reach the Duke of Hamilton, who had met Hess but once, at the 1936 Olympic Games, but who Hess presumed to be a fan of Hitler. Hess’s delusional and singularly unilateral mission was to bring the war to a peaceful conclusion. Knowing of Hitler’s hatred for the Russians (but not being privy to the invasion plans), Hess believed (in part on being told so by his astrologer) that he and Hamilton could arrange peace through the large anti-war faction Hess believed existed in Britain. In interviews with doctors and cabinet officials, Hess stressed that Hitler was pained deeply over the need to sink British ships and bomb British cities. The Führer, Hess claimed, found it most difficult to give the orders necessary to fight such a ruthless war with Britain. Hess, in what Churchill termed his “keynote,” claimed he “thought that if England once knew of this fact it might be possible that England on her part would be ready for agreement.” In other words, once England realized how kind and considerate a fellow Hitler really was, England would meet the Führer’s wishes.
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Churchill in his memoirs writes that he attached no special significance to Hess’s arrival, though in the first hours after learning of Hess’s mission, Churchill was as much in a tizzy as everyone else. In short order it became clear that Hess was crazy. In fact, Hess’s arrant mental condition was so evident that Churchill considered his subsequent sentence of life in prison to be unjust. Hess may have once stood close to Hitler, Churchill wrote, but he “had, in my view, atoned for this by his completely devoted and frantic deed of lunatic benevolence.” He was, wrote Churchill, “a medical and not a criminal case, and should be so regarded.”
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The weirdness of the entire episode captured imaginations worldwide, just as it had captured Churchill’s. Days after Hess’s arrival, Roosevelt, dining with Sumner Welles, Harry Hopkins, and Robert E. Sherwood, asked Welles if he had ever met Hess. Welles had, and described Hess as fanatically loyal to Hitler and somewhat brutishly stupid. The men discussed Hess’s flight. Roosevelt fell silent for a moment. Then he posed the question everybody was asking: “I wonder what is
really
behind this story?” Stalin (who never trusted the British) asked both Beaverbrook and Churchill the same question months later. The whole thing was just too strange, and the obvious explanation—that Hess was crazy—seemed too pat. Churchill, or Hitler, or both,
had
to be up to something.
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Hess’s misadventure handed Churchill a grand opportunity to make mischief at Hitler’s expense. With Hess under wraps in the Tower of London and Hitler unsure of just what his protégé was saying to the British, Churchill told Roosevelt that “we think it best to let the press have a good run of it for a bit and keep the Germans guessing.” Hitler was not only guessing but sweating, from the moment he was apprised of Hess’s errand by two of Hess’s adjutants, who had the misfortune to deliver to Hitler a letter of explanation from Hess along with the news that Hess had already departed. They were immediately arrested. Hitler expressed to his personal architect, Albert Speer, his worry that Churchill might use the incident to pretend to Germany’s allies that the Reich had extended peace feelers toward Britain. “Who will believe me,” the Führer lamented to Speer, “that Hess did not fly there in my name, that the whole thing is not some sort of intrigue behind the backs of my allies?” Japan might change its policy. People would snicker. Hitler regained his buoyancy with the thought that Hess might drop into the North Sea and drown. After the news of Hess’s safe landing arrived, Hitler devised his official explanation: he declared that his old friend had gone mad. He also consulted his astrologer, who always divined happy portents from the tea leaves.
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Churchill, aware of Hitler’s use of astrologers, once summoned one himself. In a what-the-hell moment, he asked the surprised fortune-teller to tell him what
Hitler’s
fortune-teller was telling Hitler. Churchill told his friend Kay Halle the story years later with the caveat that “this is just between us.”
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Hess himself, cursed with good health, given his fate, lived on for another forty-six years, locked away in prison every day and hour and minute of them. His wife sued for divorce in 1944 on the grounds of “desertion and insanity.”
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Hess’s flight was one of two stories from overseas that year—until December 7—that held young American boys spellbound. The other was the hunt for the great German battleship
Bismarck.
The essayist and sportswriter Robert W. Creamer devotes almost as much ink to these two events as he does to Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak in his memoir of that memorable baseball season,
Baseball and Other Matters in 1941.
“Hess and the
Bismarck
served in my innocent mind, and in the minds of other half-thinking Americans,” wrote Creamer, “to counterbalance the Nazi victories in the Balkans and North Africa.”

The morning after Hess landed, a fine Sunday morning of sun and blue skies, fires still burned in London from the previous evening’s air raid. Almost three thousand Londoners lay dead in the rubble, the deadliest one-
night toll since the Blitz began nine months earlier. Services were canceled at Westminster Abbey. St. Mary-le-Bow was destroyed, its bells crashing down into the debris. The William Rufus roof of Westminster Hall was gone, the hall itself now a smoldering wreck. Colville watched from Westminster Bridge as fires burned all along the Embankment. Big Ben had been struck, but still tolled out the hours. The debating chamber in the Commons, at the northern end of the Palace of Westminster, had taken a direct hit and, to Churchill’s profound sorrow, “was blown to smithereens.” (The Lords’ chamber was undamaged; the House met there and at Church House for the remainder of the war.) In a letter to Randolph, Churchill mourned the loss of the chamber where he had served for almost forty years. He had once, during the Great War, called it the “the shrine of the world’s liberties.” Since September, MPs had prowled the darkened halls of Parliament by the light of hurricane lamps; the windows overlooking the Thames had long since been blown out and boarded up; the tapestries had been removed for safekeeping. Even the smoking room closed early so the attendants could get home to their families before the bombs came. The House chamber was destroyed, but Parliament, Churchill told his son, continued to function “undaunted amid the storms.” Days earlier he had ended an address in the old chamber with, “I feel sure we have no need to fear the tempest. Let it roar, and let it rage. We shall come through.” They were the last words he spoke there. A decade would pass before the Commons was rebuilt.
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As that Sunday evening came on, Colville noted yellow, smoldering bits of burnt paper from some wrecked Fleet Street publishing house raining down like leaves on a breezy autumn day. Hess was by then on his way to the Tower. Londoners waited in homes as dark as Hess’s prison cell for the expected nightly onslaught. It appeared obvious that Hitler was softening up Britain for the final attack. They imagined the worst was yet to come.
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W
ithin days of Hess’s arrival, more critical events overtook Churchill. He had been partially correct when he told Wavell that he thought the invasion of Crete would afford a good opportunity to kill parachutists. When dropped behind, or directly onto, British positions, the German airborne troops would find themselves outnumbered and cut off from support. If the Royal Navy—protected by Air Marshal Longmore’s too-few aircraft—could keep the coast clear of German reinforcements, the parachutists would be doomed.

That hope was stillborn. Having left so many men and so much equipment behind in Greece, the British on Crete found they lacked the troops,
anti-aircraft guns, and requisite radio communications between units to stop the Germans. The 30,000 Commonwealth and 10,000 Greek troops on Crete, though outnumbering the expected Germans by more than two to one, were at a disadvantage by having to cover all the airfields and ports along the length of the north shore, whereas the Germans could concentrate their forces at will, and with surprise. The British would have to react, and when they did, they’d face bad terrain and long distances along the single coast road. In essence, at any particular point, the Commonwealth forces would find themselves, as usual, outgunned. The situation in the air was even grimmer. Longmore’s air force on Crete consisted of fewer than a dozen Hurricanes and two dozen older planes. The air chief as well did not grasp the need to integrate air support with ground operations, a concept superbly practiced for two years by the Germans. Longmore’s few planes therefore did not coordinate with Freyberg’s infantry, rendering the former irrelevant and the latter exposed, as was the Royal Navy, which sailed without air protection. Churchill suggested that a dozen Hurricanes be sent from Malta. Such a pittance would have made no difference. The German air fleet assembling in southern Greece, fewer than 150 miles from Crete, was made up of more than 250 bombers, 150 Stuka dive-bombers, 200 fighters, 500 tri-motor Junkers Ju 52 transport planes carrying paratroopers, and 80 gliders carrying 750 airborne troops.
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The battle opened on May 19, with Stuka dive-bombers striking at British ships in Souda Bay; then the German fighters destroyed most of the meager British air fleet. Early the next morning, German paratroopers—almost four thousand strong—descended upon the Maleme airfield and the heights above Souda Bay. Sir John Keegan called it “the first great parachute operation in history.” Three battalions of New Zealanders, veterans of the desert and Greek campaigns, guarded the Maleme airfield. A New Zealand lieutenant recorded his thoughts as Germans drifted down: “Seen against the blue of the early morning Cretan sky, through a frame of grey-green olive branches, they looked like little jerking dolls” and “those beautiful kicking dolls meant the repetition of all the horror we had known so recently in Greece.” An Australian brigade guarded the Rethymnon airfield, seventy miles to the east and a little less than halfway to Heraklion, where just a few British battalions prepared to defend that airfield.
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