The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (370 page)

O
n May 28, after pondering for weeks the benefits to Britain of a violent German-American incident on the high seas, Churchill pushed the Admiralty to make such an incident happen. With
Bismarck
sunk but
Prinz Eugen
still on the loose, Churchill informed the first sea lord in a “Most Secret” memo of just how he’d like the cards played. The search for
Prinz Eugen
“raises questions of the highest importance. It is most desirable that the United States play a part in this. It would be far better, for instance, that she
[Prinz Eugen]
should be located by a United States ship, as this might tempt her to fire upon that ship, thus providing the incident for which the United States Government would be so thankful.” By orchestrating “a situation where
Prinz Eugen
is being shadowed by an American vessel, we have gone a long way to solve this largest problem.”
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Although Roosevelt would not have been at all thankful for such an incident, the previous day he had taken a significant step in the direction of war. Moved by the distressing news of
Bismarck’
s raid, he went on the radio to declare an “emergency” in the Atlantic. He ordered the U.S. Navy Atlantic patrol zone pushed as far eastward as the security of American shipping demanded, even if that meant into the hottest war zones near Britain. Since Hitler’s U-boats did not operate in the western Atlantic, Roosevelt, by
pushing his patrol zones eastward, appeared to be inviting a fight. More than eighty-five million Americans heard their president, at that time the largest radio audience in U.S. history. The speech interrupted the Dodgers game at Ebbets Field, the only instance before or since when an American major league ball game was preempted by a live presidential announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen,” intoned the Ebbets announcer, “the president of the United States.” Something big was up. Roosevelt was savvy enough to know that the mere interruption of regular broadcasting, more than his actual message, would powerfully convey his point, which was that America was almost but not quite at war: “It is unmistakably apparent to all of us that, unless the advance of Hitlerism is forcibly checked now, the Western Hemisphere will be within range of the Nazi weapons of destruction.” He had not volunteered America to do the forceful checking—England was doing that—but he made clear that Hitler must be checked. This was significant. He had moved America a step closer to the battle.
²⁹²

On previous occasions Roosevelt, knowing the effect on Americans of the terrifying newsreels depicting London aflame, tried to instill a sense of urgency in his countrymen by claiming that German bombers had the range to bomb the American east coast. That was a stretch on Roosevelt’s part; other than Focke-Wulf 200s, German bombers lacked the range to reach much beyond the halfway point over the Atlantic. Roosevelt knew that no “weapons of destruction” would anytime soon arrive by air. After proffering his terrifying but impossible aerial scenario, Roosevelt turned to the Atlantic. The goal of the Axis powers was world domination, Roosevelt proclaimed; to attain it they must take control of the seas, and to take control of the seas they must defeat Britain. “They could then have the power to dictate to the Western Hemisphere. No spurious argument, no appeal to sentiment, no false pledges like those given by Hitler at Munich, can deceive the American people into believing that he and his Axis partners would not, with Britain defeated, close in relentlessly on this hemisphere of ours.” His words packed punch. “Yes, even our right of worship would be threatened. The Nazi world does not recognize any God except Hitler; for the Nazis are as ruthless as the Communists in the denial of God.” Roosevelt was prepared to start shooting in defense of international law. The mere threat of attack within the expanded patrol zone would henceforth be considered an attack upon America.
²⁹³

Roosevelt had spoken like a belligerent neutral, and Churchill read too much into the president’s words. The problem for Roosevelt was not how to provoke an incident, but how to avoid one. In any case,
Prinz Eugen
sailed home unmolested by the Royal Navy and undetected by the Americans. Churchill would have to wait for another incident to push America into war.

A
s the troops who had fled Crete regrouped in Egypt, it became clear to Wavell that the entire Middle East command—navy, army, and air force—was so wounded that there really were no further offensive strategic gambles to take. It was time to dig in and await the Germans, from Syria to Tobruk, where the Australians already were dug in—dug in and cut off.
²⁹⁴

Churchill thought otherwise, and told Wavell “everything must be centered on destroying the German forces in the Western Desert.” The attack, code-named Battleaxe, was on for mid-June. Yet by the first of June not a single fully operational unit larger than a battalion remained of the 60,000 men—the best in his army—whom Wavell had ferried to Greece in March. Two entire divisions had vanished. More than 4,000 British and Anzac men had been killed, 8,000 wounded, and 21,000 captured in Greece and Crete, including the Royal Marines left behind on the beaches. Churchill later wrote that North Africa and the Balkans were but two theaters that formed part of a larger theater—the Mediterranean—which in turn was part of the European theater, with the Atlantic theater on one side and the Russian, after June 1941, on the other. Churchill stressed to the Commons that operations undertaken with the best of intentions within limited theaters (Norway, Greece, Crete, North Africa) that resulted in disasters did not necessarily spell the inevitability of defeat in the overall conflict. Yet as he had told Britons a year earlier, victory does not accrue from defeats and evacuations. Since Narvik, Britain had known nothing but defeats and evacuations.
²⁹⁵

Early June brought one small victory, but at the expense of further denuding Wavell’s army. Reports had arrived in Whitehall for weeks that the Vichy government in Syria was allowing Germans transit to Iraq. When in May, Vichy armed forces in Syria disputed the presence of Free French and British troops in Palestine and Transjordan, Churchill suggested to Wavell that he conduct a surprise attack on Vichy warships moored in Syrian ports, “killing without hesitation all who withstand us.” In early June, to forestall a large and dangerous German presence in Syria, made all the more easy by the fall of Crete, Wavell’s colonial and Free French troops wrenched Syria from Vichy France. Vichy and Free French forces fought their own little civil war for a week, but in the end, the British occupied Damascus. In a letter to Randolph, Churchill chimed that Syria was no longer “in the hands of the Frogs.” De Gaulle protested that Churchill had in effect stolen Syria. Churchill ignored de Gaulle; in fact,
he told Colville he was “sick to death” of the Frenchman. This was a sentiment he expressed with increasing regularity over the next four years.
²⁹⁶

As the events of early June moved inexorably toward a climax in North Africa, both Rommel and Raeder saw that the supreme opportunity was at hand to crush the British in the eastern Mediterranean. Raeder drew up a naval plan to attack Alexandria and the Suez in consort with Rommel, who would push east from the Western Desert. Conceding to OKW the need to go ahead with Barbarossa—they could not persuade Hitler to postpone the Russian gambit, and knew it—they argued that a diversion to Egypt of less than one-quarter of the forces intended for the Soviet front would deal a fatal blow to the British in the Middle East. Churchill had been expecting just such a coordinated attack for more than a month, warning both Roosevelt and the War Cabinet that the loss of Egypt would be tantamount to the loss of the Home Island. It was a concern he voiced regularly, as his fortunes turned upon his “hinge of fate”—the Mediterranean.

On June 6, Hitler told his Wehrmacht commanders that during the coming battle in Russia, the commissars of the Soviet Union must all be killed. He added, “Any German soldier who breaks international law will be pardoned. Russia did not take part in the Hague convention and therefore has no rights under it.” Hitler’s hatred had overruled sound military strategy. At the very moment when he could kill the British in the Mediterranean, he rejected Rommel’s and Raeder’s plan to do so. He believed more important business needed to be conducted—the opening up of the
Ostland
to German soldier-farmers, and the business of securing that precious farmland by killing the racially impure, the vermin, who stood in his way—killing if need be all of the Slavs, Bolsheviks, commissars, judges, doctors, teachers, and especially, and first, all the Jews of Eastern Europe.
²⁹⁷

S
ummer was approaching, and shipping losses now far outstripped Britain’s capacity to replace them. That Churchill’s War Plans staff and their American counterparts had been meeting and planning in Washington, in secret, since February was comforting, but it didn’t save a single merchant ship. The Americans sent three battleships and the carrier
Yorktown
from their Pacific fleet to the Atlantic, which boded well for Churchill’s Atlantic convoys. Unfortunately, Admiral Stark, who opposed these moves, kept these warships near America’s east coast, which rendered them useless to the British. To the east, were Hitler to attack Russia, as Churchill believed
he would, Britain might find itself better off overnight, but it would be short-lived if Hitler defeated Stalin quickly and decisively—which many in London and Washington thought a good bet. In that case, the Americans might rethink the wisdom of supporting Churchill, and Hitler at that point would have won his war, but for a final stroke against Britain. Always the possibility existed that some unexpected event, somewhere, might alter the American outlook, either to the betterment or detriment of Churchill’s European strategy.

Meanwhile, Churchill needed a victory against the Germans, a strategic victory, something bigger than the colonial scuffles of Iraq, Syria, and East Africa. Although always eager to make mischief in Norway—where Hitler now kept seven divisions—Churchill saw his best opportunity in the same theater as Rommel saw his, North Africa. Churchill had shipped new tanks to Egypt at great risk in order that they could fight, and by all that was holy, Wavell had better fight with them. He did, though he knew that the British tanks carried puny cannons and tended to break down. Wavell, his forces depleted by the misadventures in Greece and Crete, launched his counter-attack, Battleaxe, on June 15. Rommel, his forces arrayed before Tobruk, expected the attack, and was ready. The attack sputtered from the start. On the morning of June 17, according to Churchill, “everything went wrong.” By that evening Battleaxe was seen for what it was, a total failure. The end came near the Halfaya pass, where German 88mm guns, secreted in the brush, held their fire until the British tanks came within spitting range. The tanks advanced no further; all but one were destroyed. The survivors dubbed the place Hellfire Pass. Again the British had to run. They fled eastward,
away
from their objective, Tobruk, sixty miles to the west and still surrounded. Wavell, flying to the front from Cairo, found his army in full retreat. Rommel had by then cut the British forces in two. Wavell had no choice but to concur with his commanders’ advice to withdraw. Almost one thousand British troops were left behind, dead and captured. The horizon was speckled with thick black plumes of smoke from more than two hundred British tanks burning like tiny oil refineries. The door to Egypt was open, and Rommel stood astride the threshold.
²⁹⁸

It was the end for Wavell. As the Army of the Nile fled for home, Churchill saw to it that it did so without Wavell. On June 21 he sent a cable to Wavell in which he lauded the general’s “command and conduct of these armies, both in success and adversity,” but said, “I feel however after the long strain you have borne, a new eye and a new hand are required in the most seriously menaced theater.” Churchill needed a savior of the Nile, a Nelson who, as Nelson had promised his King, would hunt down and annihilate the enemy.
²⁹⁹

Just six months earlier, Churchill had told his ministers, “In Wavell we
have got a winner.” Now Churchill needed a new winner, a leader who would take the fight to Rommel. His choice was General Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander in chief in India. He had been criticized by some for his conduct of the Norwegian campaign, but Norway had been an almost impromptu gambit, lacking in air and sea coordination. Churchill was now intent on giving his new commander everything he needed to wage war in the desert. Wavell, in turn, would relieve Auchinleck in India. Colville thought Wavell might go into a sulk and refuse the India posting. Churchill pondered that while they strolled that evening in the gardens. Merely firing Wavell, Churchill allowed, “would excite much comment and criticism.” He did not want Wavell “hanging about in London living at his club.” Happily, India was about as far from London as any place on the globe. When Dill predicted that Wavell would “use his pen” to write up his side of the story after the war, Churchill replied that “he could use his too, and would bet he sold more copies.” Where Dill saw Wavell as the victim of Churchill’s strategic folly, Churchill told Colville that he “never really had much confidence” in Wavell, who he had thought played slow for many of the same reasons Lincoln had said of General George McClellan, “He suffers from the slows.” Both Lincoln and Churchill harbored grand hopes of victories that never came. Yet where Lincoln generously supplied McClellan (who essentially sat on his hands), Churchill, after reinforcing Wavell in 1940, had since stripped him of his forces.
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