The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (372 page)

Harold Nicolson, upon hearing the news, told his diary that he was “not so optimistic…. And if, as is likely, Hitler defeats Russia in three weeks, then the road to the oil is open, as also the road to Persia and India.” Gil Winant at first thought the news was a “put-up job between Hitler and Stalin,” an opinion Churchill and his secretaries (out of the ambassador’s earshot) “laughed… to scorn.” The laughter was born more of pure relief than real scorn.
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Days earlier, burdened by defeats, his sensitivities scuffed by the increasing backbiting of backbenchers, Churchill ruminated over the fate of Tobruk’s garrison and the possible fate of Egypt while moping about his Chartwell gardens in the company of his yellow cat. He apologized to the cat during lunch for the absence of cream, the cat being seated in the chair to Churchill’s right. That week he told Eden that he now “wore the medals” of the Dardanelles, Narvik, Dunkirk, Greece, and Crete. On the automobile journey to Chartwell, Churchill stopped along the coast to steal a glimpse of France, but as if to underscore Britain’s isolation, haze hid the Continent.
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Everything changed with Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin. A year to the day after the French signed their armistice, Churchill looked eastward and, haze or no, beheld salvation,
if,
that is, the Russians could avoid defeat. The logic of the situation was compelling. Russia defeated would likely lead to Britain defeated. But Russia supported by Britain might buy enough time for the feet-dragging Americans to produce the tools Churchill needed to keep up the fight. Were America to extend Lend-Lease to Stalin, so much the better. Russia victorious was altogether another matter. The ideological enemy of twenty years would not likely change its stripes after the war, but Hitler’s gambit had rendered that question, for the time being, moot. Thus, without a War Cabinet policy in place to address the morning’s turn of events—let alone a strategy to implement such a policy—and after only a moment’s thought, and no hesitation, Churchill made his decision. He would embrace his new fighting partner.

“Ally” seemed an inappropriate moniker given Stalin’s brutal history of pogroms and mass murder. The man, in fact, was a monster. His collectivization of Ukrainian farms in the early 1930s resulted in the death by starvation of at least five million peasants, and the execution of thousands more for the crime of hoarding state property—seed for the next year’s
grain crop. His Siberian gulags were packed with almost two million prisoners, mostly political, who were worked to death building dams, railroads, and canals. Mass graves lay scattered around Moscow, full of murdered Russian Orthodox priests, university professors, doctors, lawyers, Trotskyites, and other enemies of the state. Churchill, for more than a decade after the Russian Revolution, had considered the Soviet Union to be “the moral foe of civilized freedom”—until Hitler came along. Yet where Hitler was all talk during the mid-1930s, Stalin was all action. By the time he invaded eastern Poland in 1939, he had, in his own provinces and among his own people, established his bona fides as the butcher of the century, perhaps of all time. Churchill, since 1917, had striven to destroy Communist Russia, to “strangle at its birth” this “sullen, sinister state.” Now the Soviets and British, Stalin and Churchill, battled a common enemy. Churchill that evening would try to convince Britain—and himself—that old differences must be put aside. The effort would tax even his oratorical skills, for in the eyes of fully half his countrymen, the godless Joseph Stalin was more fundamentally evil than Adolf Hitler.
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Stafford Cripps came for lunch that day, June 22, during which Churchill baited the ambassador by calling the Russians “barbarians” and offering that “not even the slightest thread connected communists to the very basest type of humanity.” Colville recalled that Cripps took it “in good part and was amused.” Churchill was roused. Reversing his prediction of the previous day, that Russia would soon lose, he offered five-hundred-to-one odds that Russia would still be fighting, indeed, “fighting victoriously,” two years hence. He adjourned to his study to prepare his speech and remained there for the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening. It was a lengthy speech, an address at once lyrical, poetic, and powerful, promising the free world redemption and Hitler destruction. It was an address that no modern committee of speechwriters could produce, for Churchill painted with his words, creating images that, like all great art, become more real than the scenes depicted, and more evocative than the sum of his grammatical strokes and rhetorical shadings. Colville recalled that, as with his paintings, Churchill made revisions and added final touches to the speech, right up to nine o’clock, the hour of delivery. And as with his paintings, his intent was to challenge his listeners’ imaginations and not merely their intellect.
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His pace was measured. The invasion of Russia, he declared, was one of the “climacterics of the war,” wherein all of Hitler’s “usual formalities of perfidy were observed with scrupulous technique.” He tagged Hitler “a monster of wickedness, insatiable in his lust for blood and plunder” and “a bloodthirsty guttersnipe” who found satisfaction “grinding up human lives and trampling down the homes and rights of millions of men.” The Führer’s
bloodlust, moreover, “must be fed, not only with flesh but with oil,” an oblique way of saying that were Hitler to steal enough Soviet oil, just imagine the places he would go. And although he did not employ the phrase “unconditional surrender,” he set out his terms of war, and of peace, which could only be termed unequivocal and unconditional: “We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime.” And: “We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang.” Britain would take the fight to Hitler on the land, in the air, and on the sea until “we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke.” He took a few moments to remind his listeners that “no one has been a more consistent opponent of communism than I have for the last twenty-five years,” but said that “all this fades away before the spectacle that is unfolding.” Without naming Stalin, he declared that the past “with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies flashes away.” And then he treated of the struggle in the style of a perfectly scored symphony, where the spaces between the notes carry as much weight as the notes themselves:

This was not a class war, he offered, but a war to rescue mankind from tyranny, fought “without distinction of race, creed, or party.” And lest after such a performance Britons might still hesitate to fight and die for Stalin and his creedless Communists, he brought the Soviet battle home to Britons by declaring it “no more than a prelude to an attempted invasion of the British Isles.” He closed with a message to both Britons and Americans: “The Russian danger is therefore our danger, and the danger of the United States.”
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He had more than put in a kind word for the devil; he had rehabilitated him and outfitted him with wings and a halo. An old Balkan proverb (one of Roosevelt’s favorites) proclaimed that it is permissible to walk hand in hand with Satan when crossing a bridge over a chasm. Churchill had just made the transit.
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Harold Nicolson thought the address “a masterpiece.” Although
Churchill conveyed the sense that Russia might fall—and China, Europe, and India—“he somehow leaves us with the impression that we are going to win this war.” Yet Nicolson believed the Russians, “incompetent and selfish… will be bowled over in a touch.”
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Churchill again had displayed his genius for inspirational rhetoric, but a transformation of sorts was taking place. Sir John Keegan pegs the invasion of Russia as the moment when Churchill’s “campaign of bold words” began to give way “to a battle of brute facts.” The real killing—in numbers even Stalin could not yet imagine—had begun.
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Hitler’s astounding betrayal of his partnership with the Russians paralyzed Stalin and many of his senior commanders. Soon after the attack began, a field officer used his radio to inform his superiors that his unit was under fire. He asked, “What shall we do?” He was told, “You must be insane,” and reprimanded for making the call on an open frequency. Not until the Germans had advanced twenty miles did Stalin begin to grasp the situation, and not until late in the evening did the Soviet government inform its citizens that Germany had invaded the Motherland. Molotov, not Stalin, made the announcement. No official reaction to Churchill’s speech came out of Moscow. Stalin remained in his dacha for a week, stunned, as Hitler’s three army groups struck two hundred miles into Soviet territory. When Molotov encouraged him to return to the Kremlin, Stalin replied, “Lenin left us a great legacy, and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up.”
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Such was his shock that Stalin did not broadcast any message to his nation until July 3. When he spoke, listeners heard the tremulousness in his voice and the clinking of a glass as he refreshed his throat. By then Finland had joined the German ranks and the front extended a further six hundred miles, from the Baltic to Petsamo on the Arctic Ocean. The Finns attacked the northern flank as the Romanians did at the southern, while the Germans mauled the center.

With the Führer’s turn eastward, the threat to Britain of invasion vanished—for the time being. In his memoirs Churchill captured his joy at hearing of Hitler’s foray with two words: “Eastward ho!” Yet on the morning of the invasion, his grin had been one of grim determination, for he understood that unless the Russians became the first Europeans to keep up the fight against the Wehrmacht, the consequences for Britain would, in the end, prove fatal. The Russians did not have to defeat the Germans (they could not), but they
had
to keep up the fight. As events developed on the Russian front over the next several months, Churchill stood firm on that premise. At an August meeting of the War Cabinet, he offered that were “Germany to beat Russia to a standstill and the United States had made no further advance toward entry into the war, there was a danger
that the war might turn against us.” “Standstill” meant stasis, which next to an outright Russian defeat was what Churchill most feared. “Standstill” meant breathing room for Hitler, but not for England. Weeks later Churchill telegrammed Roosevelt to share his concern that “as soon as Hitler stabilizes the Russian front, he will begin to gather perhaps fifty or sixty divisions in the west for the invasion of the British Isles.” Indeed, Hitler had strong forces in the west, although the Luftwaffe had gone east, and the French ports contained few invasion barges. But that could change.
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Churchill, therefore, told his ministers that Britain must remain prepared to repel an invasion. He did so in part because the collateral benefit of preparation was the creation of forces that he could deploy elsewhere. Two memos that Churchill sent to his ministers days after Hitler’s betrayal of Stalin capture the workings of his mind. The first reduces his invasion strategy to its essence. In it he told Dill and Ismay that September 1 would be a good date to announce that anti-invasion defenses had been brought to the highest efficiency. He added, “It would be necessary to make it clear… that meanwhile no vigilance is to be relaxed. On the contrary, a note of invasion alarm should be struck, and everybody set to work with redoubled energy.” Then, to the real root of the matter: “This however, must not prevent the dispatch of necessary reinforcements to the Middle-East.”
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The second memo captures the collision of logic, intuition, and imagination that made Churchill who he was (and regularly confused his generals, and was beginning to confuse his American friends). In it, he told Dill and secretary of state for war David Margesson that the success of German parachutists on Crete raised a new and disturbing specter: “We have to contemplate the descent from the air of perhaps a quarter of a million parachutists, glider-borne or crash-landed airplane troops.” This was the aeronautical equivalent of his outrageous claim the previous autumn that 500,000 German troops could be carried to England by ship, in a single sailing. Churchill did not know the exact numbers of German parachutists killed on Crete, but he knew that of a force of around nine thousand, about half had been killed; of the five hundred Ju 52s that carried them, about half had been destroyed. This, to capture three airfields. The Ju 52, when configured for civilian duties, carried seventeen passengers. Lufthansa, the German airline, flew Ju 52s; Hitler’s private plane had been one, until he switched to a Focke-Wulf 200. Configured for military use, the Ju 52 could carry about a dozen parachutists. Thus, at least 21,000 Ju 52s would be required in order to land 250,000 parachutists on England’s scores of airfields in a single drop. Germany had built only about 3,000 of the aircraft since its introduction in 1931. But Churchill could not rest on the assumption that Hitler lacked
such a massive air fleet; perhaps the Führer had been building airplanes in some huge, secret underground factory. Churchill’s solution was to order that every one of the RAF’s 500,000 support personnel, “without exception,” should be armed “with a rifle, a tommy gun, a pistol, a pike or a mace” in order to greet the enemy when he came. If the enemy did
not
come, Churchill would be in possession of 500,000 weapons—made in America—that he could someday issue to his armies, when the day came that they ventured back into Europe.
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