The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (383 page)

Upon learning of the fate of his two warships, Churchill hastened to the Commons to deliver a brief statement. He returned the following day to summarize in a long address the news from various fronts and to explain more precisely the circumstances surrounding the loss of the
Prince of Wales.
“The House is depressed,” Nicolson jotted in his diary, and the loss of
Prince of Wales
“has numbed us.” The House expected Churchill to explain how the ships were lost; instead, he gave them: “These ships had reached the right point at the right moment and were in every respect suited to the task assigned to them.” Both ships were sunk, Churchill told the House, by continuous waves of airborne bomb and torpedo attack “delivered with skill and determination.” Seven Japanese planes were destroyed, but Churchill did not explain whether by anti-aircraft guns or by British fighter planes. Following Churchill’s remarks, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes—old, frail, but still sharp—rose and asked Churchill to assure the Commons that, “erroneous deductions” to the
contrary, “the battleship is still the foundation of sea power and that… the
Prince of Wales
was as well protected against under-water and air attack as the
Bismarck.
” The old admiral appeared to have learned nothing from Pearl Harbor. But the latter part of his statement held the key to his query. He asked again, Were the two ships “acting without the support of land-based or seaborne fighters?” The Speaker of the House deemed Keyes’s statement inappropriate.
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Keyes persisted. Churchill at first ducked, then deflected, the question by asking Keyes if he meant to imply that Admiral Phillips had “acted otherwise than on sound naval grounds.” Certainly not, replied Keyes. Another MP asked directly how the seven Japanese planes had been shot down, by British AA or British airplanes? Churchill finally responded: “They were destroyed by anti-aircraft fire.” Britain “had only a certain amount of aircraft” to meet its needs, Churchill explained, but had nonetheless sent “as many reinforcement as we could many months ago” to Singapore. In fact, not enough aircraft had been sent to protect the battleships. The fault for that did not reside with the late Admiral Phillips, but with those who had ordered him into hostile waters without air support. That would be the prime minister, with the consent of the War Cabinet and the Admiralty.
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Churchill claimed in his memoirs that “chance played so fatal a part” in the tragic loss of the ships. Yet chance was aided and abetted by Churchill adhering too long to his notions of battlewagons and their mythic prowess. The loss of his beloved ships moved him to at last grasp the strategic significance of sending airplanes, whether from airfields or carriers, against heavy ships, though he by no means abandoned his reverence for battlewagons—“gigantic castles of steel” he called them in 1923 (volume 1 of
The World Crisis
). A battleship took five years to build, but an aircraft carrier could be rigged out of a hull in months. Overnight, in keeping with his oft-voiced motto of K.B.O. (keep buggering on), he embraced carriers with enthusiasm. Days after the loss of
Prince of Wales,
he displayed his lifelong ability to learn fast when, on December 13, he approved Admiral Pound’s recommendation to send a task force of up to four aircraft carriers to the Indian Ocean, under the command of Admiral James Somerville. “I agree that Admiral Somerville should come home,” Churchill told Pound, “to organize this form of warfare.” Those words are telling for, although Somerville had been running carriers through the Mediterranean for two years to deliver fighter planes to Malta and Alexandria, large-scale, coordinated carrier operations—
“this form of warfare”—
were new and mysterious to Churchill and the Admiralty. The British proved quick studies, but the Japanese had developed carrier tactics years before, and in the previous week had demonstrated their skill at this form of warfare.
⁴⁴

Throughout his life, Churchill’s critics—wanting it both ways—claimed
on the one hand that he stuck to outdated positions for too long, and on the other hand that he was an opportunist, ever ready to switch positions. He did and he was, and he liked to say, “I would rather be right than consistent.” Margot Asquith in 1908 called him a man of “transitory convictions.”
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But his old colleague Rab Butler attributed Churchill’s tendency to switch sides to “the independence of his ideas” and to his “ever testing, courting, and encouraging new ideas.” He was as contradictory as the criticisms leveled against him. He had been adjudged a mental case by the military establishment when during the Great War he championed a new and heretical weapon, the tank, which he called his “land ship.” Yet in those years, the military establishment had demonstrated—if not mental illness—gross stupidity. The cartoonist David Low chose the army as Colonel Blimp’s profession after reading a serving British colonel’s letter to
The Evening Standard
that protested the mechanization of the cavalry but insisted that if tanks were to be brought into service, tank crews must be made to wear spurs.
⁴⁵

Churchill’s vision extended well beyond the known horizon, yet the same man who could envision as revolutionary a change in warfare as the tank, could not, in the face of overwhelming evidence, concede that battleships were dinosaurs. Days after the
Prince of Wales
went down, the old-school Churchill proposed to the War Cabinet the formation of a combined British and American battle fleet consisting of four new, sixteen-inch-gun battleships, along with older American ships in “numbers sufficient to enable a fleet action.” He simply did not grasp that fleet actions of that sort were now a thing of the past. Although he could never bring himself to entirely give up the old, when the facts demanded, he embraced the new, in the case of sending carrier task forces to the Indian Ocean, almost literally overnight.
⁴⁶

T
here would be no
Time
Man of the Year honors for Churchill that year. Stalin was in the running for the 1941 prize but failed to take it on the grounds of “grave disqualifications, one moral, the other empiric.” Stalin, by virtue of his 1939 pact with Hitler, had opened the floodgates for the Führer; now that coup “had proved a grim joke at the expense of Joseph Stalin.” The Indian Confederation of America did, however, vote Stalin “1941’s outstanding warrior,” and sent him a war bonnet.
Time
named Franklin Roosevelt Man of the Year “because the country he leads stands for the hopes of the world.” Roosevelt, who “in his own right and on his own record… stood out as a figure for the year and for the age,” had led America in mastering its “creeping paralysis” and “had guided the U.S.” to its “rendezvous with destiny.” He had forced America to grasp “what it can be and therefore will be.” Churchill,
Time
recorded, had had “no great moment in 1941.” True, Churchill had twice taken Cyrenaica—but only because he “lost it between times.” He had “met disaster” in Greece and Crete. British armies “were still losing campaigns” under his leadership. Yet
Time
dabbed salve on the wound: Churchill “was a man of the year, of the decade, and, if his cause is won, of all time.”
⁴⁷

The news from the Far East did not bode well for his cause. The news from America, specifically from Franklin Roosevelt, was disquieting. There was none. By the early hours of December 11, Churchill still had received no reply from Roosevelt to his request for a meeting. Hitler settled the issue that day when he declared war on the United States. Benito Mussolini goose-stepped right along. From the balcony above the Piazza Venezia in Rome, Il Duce anointed Roosevelt a “supreme fraud” who had led America into war through “diabolical obstinacy.” Mussolini pledged that the “powers of the pact of steel” were prepared to inflict more “formidable blows” upon their enemies. “Italians!” he bellowed. “Once more arise and be worthy in this historical hour. We will win!” His lackeys scattered among the crowd cheered. But thousands of other Romans assembled in the piazza below listened in silence. This was a war, and an enemy, they did not want.
⁴⁸

And there it was. Hitler and Mussolini with complete disregard for American industrial might had declared war on the United States of America. The U.S. Congress immediately returned the favor. America was in. Roosevelt signed the German declaration at 3:05
P.M.
One minute later, he signed the Italian declaration. Only then was Churchill’s Grand Alliance finally realized. Harold Nicolson wrote his wife, “We can’t be beaten with America in,” yet “not an American flag flying in the whole of London. How odd we are.”
⁴⁹

T
he previous June, on the eve of the German invasion of Russia, Churchill told Jock Colville that the Russians would likely be quickly defeated. By autumn he had raised his expectations. In late October, after asking his chief of military intelligence to give odds for Moscow falling by winter, Churchill offered his own, “I should be inclined to put it even.” Now the Red Army had gone over to the attack. On December 11 Churchill told the Commons that winter’s onslaught had not only brought the Germans to a standstill outside
Moscow but had “inflicted upon the German armies and the German nation, a bloody blow, almost unequaled in the history of war.” And December, he added, marked “not the end of the winter… but the beginning.” Where Russians were “habituated to the severity of their native climate,” the German invaders could only scratch meager shelter from the frozen ground, there to conclude, Churchill told the House, that Hitler’s Russian gambit was proving to be “one of the outstanding blunders of history.”
⁵⁰

With Hitler’s declaration of war Churchill concluded that it was vital to meet with Roosevelt, immediately. Yet he had
already
asked and been rebuffed. He dispatched another cable to Roosevelt: “Am most anxious” to discuss the Vichy situation in North Africa. Actually, as he had been since the eighth, he was most anxious to discuss everything. This time Roosevelt gave him what he wanted. “Delighted to have you here at the White House,” he cabled back.
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Overnight, Roosevelt found himself at war in two oceans, and overnight, Churchill’s gingerly approach to the Americans changed. When Lord Woolton, minister of food, proposed to increase food rationing, Churchill told him that with the Americans in, “our position is immeasurably improved,” and therefore, “we have no longer any need to strike attitudes to win the United States sympathy, we are all in it together, and they are eating better meals than we are.” When one of his military chiefs advised a continuation of the careful attitude toward America, Churchill replied, with a leer, “Oh that is the way we talked to her when we were wooing her, now that she’s in the harem we talk to her quite differently.”
⁵²

Within twenty-four hours of receiving Roosevelt’s invitation, Churchill, Beaverbrook, Harriman, First Sea Lord Dudley Pound, and Air Marshal Charles Portal were rolling north on board the prime minister’s private train, bound for the River Clyde, where the battleship
Duke of York
—sister ship of the
Prince of Wales
—waited to carry them to America. Also on board were the newly retired Field Marshal Dill (Alan Brooke stayed behind to man his new headquarters) and Churchill’s doctor, Charles Wilson (Clementine insisted Winston take the doctor along). Eighty ancillary staff and two dozen cryptographers also went; all of Churchill’s outgoing cables had first to be encoded before being sent to the intended recipient, as did the incoming traffic for the prime minister. His daughter Mary accompanied her Pa-
pa
on the train but would not be making the Atlantic crossing. Late morning on December 13, after bidding “Good-bye, darling” to Mary—who was last off the ship—Churchill and the
Duke of York
made for the Atlantic.
⁵³

Soon after clearing the Clyde, the ship ran into the worst weather the North Atlantic could throw its way. The escort destroyers, tossed about like rowboats, fell behind. The seas were so roiled that
Duke of York
spent most of the voyage battened down. Dr. Wilson possessed no medicines to
combat the nausea and lassitude that overcame almost everyone on board, including the prime minister. Churchill, in his longest letter to Clementine since a forlorn missive sent during a 1936 trip to Marrakech, rued the confinement but allowed that an extra dose of Mothersill’s Travel Remedy had staved off any serious bouts of seasickness. The seas were so violent, he wrote, that two of the party suffered broken legs and arms. Paraphrasing Samuel Johnson, he wrote, “Being in a ship in such weather as this is like being in a prison, with the extra chance of being drowned.”
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He never enjoyed the confinement of long sea voyages; this was the worst ever. Yet aboard the ship he found pleasure in the usual places: his cronies, good food, strong drink, and bad movies. Beaverbrook’s lieutenant, George Malcolm Thomson, recalled “there was one movie one night,
The Sea Hawk,
in which there was an attack on a British naval ship by pirates as I remember it. A great deal of countless stuff going on the deck of this sailing ship and I remember Churchill, who was always in his dressing gown. He had dined rather well I think, as usual. I can remember him getting up and shouting ‘We’re winning, we’re winning!’ ”
⁵⁵

Actually, wherever they were fighting, on sea and on land, but for a thin slice of North Africa, they were losing. And so, too, were the Americans. A
New York Times
headline that week screamed:
U.S. FLIERS SCORE: BOMBS SEND BATTLESHIP, CRUISER AND DESTROYER TO THE BOTTOM.
The
Times
did not say exactly where in the Pacific these alleged heroics took place. In fact, U.S. fliers had not only not hit a Japanese ship, they had not yet even located a Japanese ship.
⁵⁶

Still, one item of good news emanated from
Duke of York’
s radio shack: Auchinleck in Libya had accomplished as much in thirty days as Wavell and O’Connor had in sixty the previous year. Axis troops in Bardia, where Rommel had set up his headquarters in anticipation of taking Tobruk, found themselves surrounded. Rommel, outnumbered in tanks by four to one, had fled west with his remaining armor, toward Benghazi, which Auchinleck would claim on Christmas Eve. Days later, Rommel drew up his lines at El Agheila, four hundred miles west of Tobruk. It was an orderly retreat, but it was a retreat, Rommel’s first. The Western Desert had changed hands again. Yet this time, the enemy retreating across Cyrenaica was not Italian but German. Given the back-and-forth nature of the battle, and the resourcefulness of Rommel, Churchill resisted any temptation he may have harbored to proclaim in the name of the King, as he had a year earlier, another “Bardia Day.”
⁵⁷

While aboard ship, Churchill learned from Eden, in Moscow, that Stalin still maintained a healthy appetite for real estate, in spite of having lost much of western Russia to the Wehrmacht. Churchill told Eden that although Britain had declared war on “the cats-paws” of Hungary, Romania,
and Finland, the War Cabinet would refuse to satisfy Stalin on this new matter of postwar boundaries. Although Stalin’s defeat in the coming summer seemed as likely as, if not more likely than, eventual victory, he had his maps out, and he wanted assurances that Russia’s postwar western boundaries would preserve his territorial gains in eastern Poland, Romania, and Finland. As for the three Baltic states, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which had all bolted the czar’s collapsing empire in 1918, Stalin wanted them back. To Attlee, Churchill cabled: “Stalin’s demand about Finland, Baltic States, and Roumania [
sic
] are directly contrary to the first, second, and third articles of the Atlantic Charter, to which Stalin has subscribed. There can be no question whatever of our making such an agreement, secret or public, direct or implied without prior agreement with the United States.” He told Eden that to “approach President Roosevelt with his [Stalin’s] proposals would be to court a blank refusal and might experience lasting trouble on both sides.”
⁵⁸

He had often during Britain’s bleakest hours privately shared with friends and close associates his visions for the postwar world. “After the War” was a phrase heard in popular songs and a turn of phrase used often at the Churchill dinner table, in telegrams to Roosevelt, and in his addresses. It was shorthand for subjects not to be formally considered until Hitler was dead and Europe had reached the “broad, sunlit uplands” of liberty. He had earned the right to muse on the subject of “After the War,” yet not once in his first fifteen months as prime minister had he done so in public. Then, curiously given his public reticence on the matter, within a few hours of sitting down with Roosevelt at Argentia, he had set to work drafting the Atlantic Charter, which amounted to a bilateral declaration on international civil rights and the Anglo-American blueprint for the postwar peace (as well as a moral imperative that Americans might fight for). After the two leaders agreed on the text (without consulting Stalin), they announced the Atlantic Charter to the world.
⁵⁹

If Churchill and Roosevelt felt it their duty to state their vision of the postwar world, why should not Stalin? Stalin, whose borders after all had been violated, and whose capital was now under siege, believed his claims on the Baltic states to be self-evidently proper. Churchill downplayed Stalin’s maneuvers: “No one can foresee where the balance of power will lie… at the end of the war,” he cabled Eden, yet most probably it would lie with the
bloc
of America and Britain, which would emerge from the war far less “exhausted” than Stalin, who would need Anglo-American help to rebuild more than the Americans and British would need Stalin. Still, Churchill heard enough in Stalin’s demands to make him wary, though like a denizen of Plato’s cave, he could divine only shadows of things beyond his immediate vision, which was entirely focused on crushing
Hitler. He could not make out exactly what was coming by way of Moscow, or its size, or its speed, but he didn’t much care for it. Always remember, he had cautioned Eden, that Bolsheviks are “crocodiles” who understand only force. Years later he told his grandson, Winston Spencer Churchill, that he
knew
—at the first mention by Stalin of postwar boundaries—exactly where the seeds for the next European conflict would germinate, adding that from early 1942 on, he put every strategic decision in the war against Hitler under two lenses: “How will it shorten the war, and how will it prevent the Bear from stealing the peace.”
⁶⁰

Those may well have been the sentiments of an old man who wanted to reposition himself more favorably in the historical story line. Yet, given the Faustian pact Churchill and Roosevelt made with Stalin, it seems improbable that Stalin’s demands suddenly awakened in Churchill the prospect of postwar trouble. This was Joseph Stalin, after all, Hitler’s former partner, a gunman who in his youth robbed banks for the Marxist cause and later—also for the cause, his own—resorted to mass murder. Why did Churchill and Roosevelt during the next three years fail, utterly, to hatch any plans between themselves that addressed the possible—probable, even—
consequences
to Europe of their alliance with the Soviet dictator? Both spoke in the starkest terms of the consequences to the world were Hitler to win. From a moral perspective, Stalin was simply the lesser of two evils; he killed his political opponents because they opposed him, not because of their bloodlines. Hitler, victorious, would kill everybody. The death of Hitlerism was therefore the main objective of the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance, but each of the three Allied leaders had a different political agenda, and each envisioned a postwar world different in structure from that envisioned by the other two. Stalin’s political objectives were patently at odds with both the Atlantic Charter and Churchill’s hopes for democratic European spheres of influence, which he intended first and foremost would serve to keep Prussia (but not all of Germany) down on the farm, quite literally.

The wonder is not that in late 1941 Churchill foresaw future problems with Stalin, but why he ever could have thought otherwise. Churchill was well versed in the history of Russia’s relationship with Europe. He had lectured Colville the previous June on the Swedish invasion of 1700 and of Napoleon’s 1812 gambit. Now, twice within a generation, the Germans had turned on Russia. Russia was an Asian nation with a foot in Europe, and Western Europeans had regularly stomped on that foot. Protection of Russia’s western frontiers had driven Russian foreign policy for two centuries, Czarist, Leninist, and Stalinist. Moscow had always sought a security belt between itself and the West. The West, meanwhile, maintained a cordon sanitaire between itself and the Muscovites. The Poles had historically paid the price for their geographical position in relation to Russia’s security
needs, and had done so again when Hitler and Stalin signed their 1939 pact. By signing the pact, Stalin believed (incorrectly as he had learned in June) that he had widened his security belt. His war aims were to reclaim it, and to destroy the German threat once and for all. He articulated those aims often during the next three years. He linked all of his war decisions with Russian territorial interests and the German threat to those interests. He never disguised his aim, and held to it, wrote James MacGregor Burns, “with steel-like tenacity.” For Stalin, defeating Germany and reclaiming Russian security were two sides of the same coin. Churchill’s was a one-sided coin: defeat Hitler. His and Stalin’s objectives, therefore, were similar but not identical.
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