The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (369 page)

Late on the twenty-sixth, Swordfish torpedo bombers from HMS
Ark Royal
scored a crippling hit on
Bismarck’
s rudder. Lütjens radioed the homeland with a last message: “Ship out of control. Will fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer.” Early on the twenty-seventh, as Tovey ran in for the kill, he flashed a message to his ships that lives on in Royal Navy lore:
“Get closer. Get closer.” Bismarck,
unable to steer, was doomed, but she could still shoot, her final salvos straddling both
Rodney
and
King George V.
The British poured hundreds of shells into the wounded ship, its guns now silent. It burned furiously, the hellish glow of the fires belowdecks visible to British gunners. Slowly, it began to settle by the bows. But it would not go down. Its crew attempted to scuttle her; still the great ship remained afloat. The battle, if it could be called that, had lasted for more than six hours. At around 10:30
A.M.
the British cruiser
Dorsetshire,
already having fired 250 shells at a range of just three miles—point blank in naval terms—ran close in and finished
Bismarck
with two torpedoes. Lütjens, his premonition fulfilled, died along with 2,100 of the 2,200 men on board. The sinking of
Bismarck,
ironically, bolstered the old timers’ case that battleships still ruled the seas. It had taken a task force of carriers, battleships, destroyers, cruisers, submarines, aircraft, bombs, shells, and innumerable torpedoes to sink the great ship, even as it limped along, crippled.
²⁷⁹

British destroyers conducted a brief search for survivors, but fearful of lurking U-boats they soon departed, leaving hundreds of Germans behind in the water. Or so went the official explanation. Word had already arrived from Crete that the Luftwaffe had bombed and strafed defenseless British sailors whose ships had been sunk from under them; Dickie Mountbatten soon confirmed the rumors to Churchill. Both sides, it appeared, had jettisoned any pretense to gentlemanly rules of engagement. Late in the day a Spanish cruiser came upon
Bismarck’
s final position and found only hundreds of bodies bobbing on the greasy gray swells.
²⁸⁰

T
here would be no sugar for the birds when Churchill addressed Parliament that day. Crete was on the brink; Cairo and the Suez Canal lay exposed. The Vichy government in Syria was thought to be welcoming German military advisers. Rommel appeared unstoppable. The ports and London had taken fierce hits since March. Leslie Hore-Belisha, a Liberal and former member of the Chamberlain government who fancied himself better qualified than Churchill to run the war, had made unflattering comments to the press concerning the “tempo of our war effort.” The old Marxist Harold Laski had lauded Churchill as a “war leader.” But
Laski—whose bushy eyebrows, plush mustache, long nose, and horn-rimmed eyeglasses qualified him as a double Marxist—cited production bottlenecks and lack of adequate evacuation plans in case of invasion as evidence of Churchill’s failings as prime minister and chief administrator. The
Daily Mail
put it bluntly: “When are we going to see an end of masterly retreats? Something is wrong. Britain needs new ideas. She certainly needs a radical shake-up on the home front.” Churchill needed a victory, and the sinking of
Bismarck
had given him one, or so he thought.
²⁸¹

At noon that day, the twenty-seventh, as he addressed the Commons, Bracken handed him a note. Churchill glanced at it, then told the House, “I have just received news that the
Bismarck
is sunk.” He paused to read the mood in the chamber. “They seemed content,” he later wrote.
²⁸²

They were anything but. The Germans had lost a battleship; Churchill was losing Crete. Another evacuation—more flight than retreat—was under way. The British press did not, as it had with Greece, extend the benefit of the doubt. Opposition MPs, as they had throughout the month of May, expressed in the strongest possible terms their growing belief that Churchill and his coalition government lacked the ability to win the war. Defeat after defeat testified to Churchill’s shortcomings as a strategic war leader. His status as the beloved and brilliant orator who had roused Englishmen was secure, but his reputation as warrior was not. He “is undergoing a slump in his popularity,” Chips Channon noted in his diary, “and many of his enemies, long silenced by his personal popularity, are once more vocal.”
²⁸³

The leading critic was Leslie Hore-Belisha, who shortly after Churchill announced
Bismarck’
s demise, moved the discussion to the subject of Crete, telling the House that the debacle on Crete was due in large part to the virtual absence of anti-aircrafts guns on the island. He made a fair point. The defense preparation on Crete had been a sorry affair. Churchill, forewarned that Hore-Belisha intended to go after the anti-aircraft guns, was ready with his retort. It took the form of one of his favorite tactics, the bait and switch. Not for nothing had Churchill’s dearest friend, F. E. Smith (the late Lord Birkenhead), once said that Churchill spent his entire life rehearsing his
impromptu
remarks. Churchill deflected Hore-Belisha’s criticism by declaring that Hore-Belisha, in charge of the armed forces for almost three years under Chamberlain, had left them in “lamentable” shape. Hore-Belisha protested Churchill’s slapping him with the appeasement label; he had in fact advised Chamberlain to modernize the army and introduce a draft. Churchill responded with bare knuckles. “I am not throwing all the blame for this on my right honourable Friend at all—certainly not—but I think it is only fair when he… sets himself up as arbiter and judge, and speaks so scornfully of the efforts of some others who have inherited his dismal legacy…. I think when he speaks this way… it is
only fair to point out to him that he is one of the last people in this country to take this line.” Among the mumbles and murmurs an MP raised his voice: “No recriminations.”
²⁸⁴

Churchill had not finished. “The honourable Gentleman said something about no recriminations, but extremely violent and hostile speeches have been spread about, doing a great deal of harm.” He cut to the heart of the matter, as he saw it: “The question arises as to what would happen if you allowed the enemy to advance and overrun, without cost to himself, the most precious and valuable strategic points? Suppose we had never gone to Greece, and had never attempted to defend Crete? Where would the Germans be now? Might they not… already be masters of Syria and Iraq, and preparing themselves for an advance into Persia?… There is… this vitally important principle of stubborn resistance to the will of the enemy.” The doctrine implied by some members that battles be chosen “only with a certainty of winning” and that without such certainty “you must clear out” flies against the “whole history of war” and “shows the fatal absurdity of such a doctrine.” It was masterful. With an angry rush of rhetorical questions and brass asides, Churchill had transferred the egg from his face to the face of Hore-Belisha, who had played no part whatsoever in the debacle unfolding on Crete. Meanwhile, Churchill avoided the vital questions of why British factories limped along far below capacity. He never got around to explaining why the AA defense on Crete had been so weak, although the answer was self-evident—very few anti-aircraft batteries were available.
²⁸⁵

Although correct in his admonition to Hore-Belisha that in battle there is no certainty of winning, Churchill, having for more than a year applied his own doctrine of giving aggressive battle when possible, had so far produced defeats. He had lamented to Colville the previous August that in his first three months as prime minister, “everything had gone wrong and he had nothing but disasters to announce.” The disasters had only grown in the ensuing ten months. Nothing had worked against the Germans, or against the Americans for that matter. The effort to bring America in proved an ongoing chore and so far as fruitless as the military escapades. Churchill’s moods began to take greater swings than usual, and more often. He expressed to Colville his dismay that the rearguard on Crete of 1,200 Royal Marines had been left behind. It was a shameful episode, he told Colville, the responsibility for which rested with all branches of the Middle East command. He began to suspect that his generals, even his cabinet, lacked a fighting spirit. He held them all responsible for the misfortunes.
²⁸⁶

He was worn out. Three days after
Bismarck
went down, Clementine convinced him to take a few days’ holiday at Chartwell. The house had been closed, the staff furloughed. It would be a spartan holiday. After dinner
on the first night, Churchill lifted himself up from the table, took a step or two, lay down, and stretched out on the floor next to the table. There, while Clementine and Colville played backgammon, he proceeded to doze, unperturbed by the rattle of dice. The holiday was intended as a much-needed respite for Clementine as well as for Churchill. But the weather was cold, wet, and deplorable and Churchill was, in Colville’s words, “restless,” “brooding,” and “perturbed.” He left for London the next day. Always irritable around his staff, his peevishness even extended one morning to Clementine. He became, Colville wrote, “morose at lunch when he discovered Mrs. C had used some of his favorite honey, imported from Queensland, to sweeten the rhubarb.” Churchill, who had always mumbled to his ginger cat, goldfish, and ducks, now mumbled to himself. His health was taking the same turn as his moods. The head cold of early March had hung on, come and gone and come again, and at one point had festered into bronchitis, in part because he treated it with snuff,
^*
which only made matters worse.
²⁸⁷

He displayed no generosity toward his colleagues, especially Eden, who, after months of diplomacy in the Balkans conducted at Churchill’s behest, was now soundly criticized by the press and Parliament. Churchill mounted no defense of Eden. Wavell, too, became a favorite Churchillian target, as did the press, the Royal Navy, and the “highly strung and quarrelsome” de Gaulle. The anger extended to Roosevelt’s habit (according to Churchill) of following American public opinion rather than leading it. Desperate for America to get in, and frustrated by its inertia, Churchill told Roosevelt, “I hope you forgive me if I say there is anxiety here…. What ever happens you may be sure we will fight on and I am sure we can at least save ourselves. But what good is that?”
²⁸⁸

With his defeats mounting, he took to interfering in matters best left to others. “John Peck and I agree that the P.M. does not help the government machine to run smoothly,” Colville noted in his diary. “He supplies drive and initiative, but he often meddles where he would better leave things alone and the operational side might profit if he gave it a respite.” The Admiralty, after the
Bismarck
episode, would have agreed, as would have Wavell. Yet how could Churchill give respite to his subordinates when Hitler gave none to Britain? The Blitz from April into early May had been as bloody as the previous autumn, with Clydeside, Liverpool, Belfast, and London hit. Was the renewed bombing campaign a softening up before
invasion? With their Mediterranean positions tottering, with Hitler still at peace with Stalin, and with the beneficent spring weather upon the Channel, Britons could only wait for the answer.
²⁸⁹

As if to confirm their worst fears, during the final weeks of May, no bombs fell on London. A hush of suspense—as Churchill had termed the uneasy quiet before September 1939—again spread throughout the land. Other than the occasional German reconnaissance plane droning high overhead, the skies remained empty. The silence was unsettling. Beaverbrook told his fellow press magnate Lord Camrose that the Germans “would launch a very full attack against us… in the next few days.” He emphasized “in the next few days” and added, “In my opinion invasion is imminent,” and although some people thought otherwise, “I know I am right.”
²⁹⁰

The Luftwaffe did not return to London in late May, nor in early June, nor again in any massed formations for almost three years. Sporadic night raids took place in retaliation for Churchill’s ongoing devastation of German cities, but the Luftwaffe was moving east, toward its jump-off points for a far greater, far more dangerous enterprise. Unknown to all the Englishmen who waited each night for the German raiders, the Blitz, part one, had ended on the terrible night of May 10.