The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (386 page)

Adolf Hitler, in Berlin, had forbidden the singing of all Christmas carols except “O Tannenbaum.” Fir trees represented the towering strength of the Aryan race. The swastika, not an angel or cross, topped Berliners’ Christmas trees, what few there were. Those
Volk
fortunate enough to procure trees likely used them for fuel. Winter had arrived, but coal had not. Food grew scarce, even as it was stolen from the Belgians, French, Poles, and Dutch, who by late 1941 had taken to boiling tulip bulbs for sustenance. Berliners greeted each other with
“Ach, das leben ist shwer”
(“Life is hard”). For German troops in Russia, life was hard, brutish, and short. Soviet propagandists smuggled thousands of Christmas cards into Germany, entitled “Living Space in the East.” They depicted “a frozen vista of rows of wooden crosses topped with German helmets.”
⁸⁰

Soon after Churchill addressed America’s children, three hundred Free French sailors descended upon the islands of St-Pierre and Miquelon, France’s oldest and smallest colony, located just off the Newfoundland coast. The islands were Vichy property, and Roosevelt, who hoped to lure Vichy into the Western fold through kindness, wanted them to stay that way. But the Vichy government had set up a radio transmitter on St-Pierre for purposes, wrote Churchill, “of spreading Vichy lies and poison” and quite possibly to “signal U-boats now hunting United States ships.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull pressured Canada to shut down the station, but Ottawa, not wanting to offend Pétain, declined. De Gaulle, however, saw an opportunity for a symbolic victory over the Vichy lackeys, and before Churchill left for America, he informed him of his plans to capture the
islands. Churchill at first approved but then objected after Hull voiced his vigorous disapproval. De Gaulle went ahead anyway. His forces arrived in gunboats and captured the islands without a fight. The victors raised their flag, emblazoned with the Cross of Lorraine. The British were elated. The Canadians were relieved to be off the hook. The Americans were aghast, as was Vichy France. Hull, infuriated (for here was a bald violation of the Monroe Doctrine), referred to de Gaulle and his followers as the “so-called Free French,” thus assuring enmity between America and Frenchmen of all political persuasions at the exact moment Churchill saw the looming necessity to court the Vichy in North Africa. For if the Allies were ever to take the fight all the way from Egypt to Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, a compliant—better yet, a cooperative—Vichy regime would be far more vital to success than a brigade or two of de Gaulle’s troublemakers.
⁸¹

De Gaulle, therefore, had just mucked up the works. Yet he and his cohorts appeared to be the only Frenchmen willing to die in the fight against Hitler, and for that he had earned Churchill’s respect and (guarded) support. Cordell Hull, on the other hand, treated de Gaulle with aloofness bordering on contempt. As punishment for his insolence, Hull—the “so-called Secretary of State” according to many in the American press—insisted the Free French be excluded from the roster of Allied countries that were to sign a pledge of allegiance to one another on New Year’s Day. Churchill argued for the inclusion of the Free French, but Hull, backed by Roosevelt, carried the day. Churchill sidestepped another spat, and France, free or otherwise, did not officially exist within the alliance, known around Washington as the Associated Powers.

F
or a century Hong Kong had manifested handsomely the imperial British way of life. It was built on the profits of opium and piracy, ruled in fact from the offices of the towering Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and fueled by gin slings and afternoon handicaps at the Happy Valley Racecourse. Hong Kong had been the free-wheeling, free-trade heart of Britain’s Far East empire, open for business to any sea captain of any nationality willing and able to journey there, including Franklin Roosevelt’s maternal grandfather, Warren Delano Jr., who made and lost several fortunes in the Clipper trade. Delano’s daughter Sara, having actually sailed to that city during the American Civil War, inculcated in her son, Franklin, a romantic concept of Hong Kong and China and their roles in the world. Hong Kong was about to assume a new role. Since December 8, fewer than 8,000 Scots, Englishmen, Indians, Canadians, and some local Chinese had been
surrounded by more than 30,000 Japanese troops. When the Japanese crossed from the mainland and cut off the water supply, the fight was all but over. Hong Kong’s defenders understood that London considered the city a tactical position, to be held as long as possible in order to delay the Japanese and gain time to reinforce the more vital city of Singapore.

Despite Churchill’s order to the defenders of Hong Kong to fight “from house to house” if necessary, and his exhortation “to resist to the end,” Hong Kong’s governor Sir Mark Young, surrounded and outgunned, surrendered on Christmas Day. It was the first colonial possession the British lost in the Pacific, ever. The victors took prisoner thirty Maryknoll missionaries and forced the captive proselytizers to bear witness as Japanese infantrymen bayoneted dozens of hog-tied British and Canadian prisoners. Prisoners spared the sword were beaten with rubber hoses and had water forced “down their throats until they nearly drowned.” The rape of Hong Kong’s Eurasian, Chinese, and white women began immediately. Three British nurses were raped, then bayoneted, and then burned. Three days later, Japanese troops—
Time
dubbed them “the dwarf-like men”—strutted through the city in triumphal review. By then, their brothers in Yamashita’s Twenty-fifth Army had negotiated one-third of the Malay Peninsula, their target, Singapore. That fortress, Churchill told Wavell, “was to be held at all costs.”
⁸²

On the day after Christmas, Churchill addressed the U.S. Congress. Listeners in Britain, where the BBC aired programs without corporate sponsorship, were surprised to learn that their prime minister’s message was brought to them by a toothpaste company. Although such cultural divergences between the two nations lent credence to Bernard Shaw’s observation that they were two countries separated by the same language, Churchill considered that language the uniting factor and, intending to demonstrate to Americans his mastery of it, had spent more than twelve hours crafting his words. Relieved to be among friends and cousins now (he could trace his American ancestry back five generations, to an officer who served under Washington), he began on a light note and surged ahead without regard to whether the moment was proper for glib pleasantries: “I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been an American, and my mother British, rather than the other way around, I might have got here on my own.” With their applause and cheers, the assembled gave him what he came for: approval. Warming to his topic—retribution—he saw no need to inspire the Americans; Japan had done that. He saw no reason to gird Americans against the prospect of firestorms in their cities, of four-thousand-pound bombs obliterating their Parliaments and cathedrals and families, since other than the possibility of nuisance attacks on each coast, massed assaults were far beyond the technological reach of Germany and Japan. Lloyd’s of London,
in fact, was offering odds of ninety-nine to one against the chance of any property damage occurring on the Atlantic coast.
⁸³

Churchill worked in this bit of I-told-you-so, which engendered absolute silence from the gallery: “If we had kept together after the last war, if we had taken common measures for our safety, this renewal of the curse need never have fallen upon us. Do we not owe it to ourselves, to our children, to tormented mankind, to make sure that these catastrophes do not engulf us for the third time?” He excoriated the usual suspects with his usual delicious words and phrases: the “wicked men” who spread their “pestilences” and will “stop at nothing that violence and treachery can suggest.” Churchill went after the “filthy Quislings” and “the boastful Mussolini… a lackey and serf, the merest utensil of his master’s will.” Then he gripped his lapels, slowly rocked forward, and delivered the line that brought Congress to its feet, including the isolationists. Of the Japanese he asked, “What kind of a people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we will never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?”
⁸⁴

The
New York Times
(under the headline
Churchill Predicts Huge Allied Drive in 1943
) called the speech, which ran for more than thirty minutes, “typical” Churchill, “full of bubbling humor, biting denunciation of totalitarian enemies, stern courage, and hard facts.” Yet some of Churchill’s so-called hard facts were flabby. Citing Auchinleck’s “victory in the Libyan campaign,” Churchill declaimed, “Had we diverted and dispersed our gradually growing resources between Libya and Malaya, we would have been found wanting in both places.” That was, at best, a lawyerly way of putting things. In spite of his autumn admonition to the British Chiefs of Staff that no diversions detract from Auchinleck’s offensive capabilities, Churchill days earlier had ordered the 18th Division, then en route to the Suez, diverted to Singapore. Then, on the day
before
he addressed Congress, he ordered Auchinleck “to spare at once” for Singapore’s defense heavy artillery, AA guns, trucks, one hundred new American tanks, and four squadrons (about forty-eight aircraft) of fighter planes, all of which Auchinleck was in need of, soon desperately so. Brooke lamented to his diary that Auchinleck was “struggling along with the forces at his disposal… little knowing his activities must be shortly curtailed” by Churchill’s transfer of men and matériel to the Far East. Churchill didn’t see things that way. The diminution of his forces, he told Auchinleck, could be accomplished “without compromising Acrobat,” the push through Tripoli to Tunisia. And Gymnast, Churchill told his general, was still in good shape because America was now in. He added: “All our success in the West would be nullified by the fall of Singapore.” That was true.
⁸⁵

That night he was awakened by “oppressive” heat in his bedroom, which
was likely caused by a radiator valve stuck in the open position, a familiar nuisance to Americans who lived with central heat but a mystery to Britons, who for the most part did not. He attempted to remedy the situation by lifting a window, which stuck fast. He heaved, and felt a pain in his left arm and chest. In his memoirs he wrote, “I strained my heart slightly.” Actually, as Dr. Wilson ascertained the next morning, Churchill had suffered a mild heart attack. Although Moran’s memoirs
^*
were considered by Churchill’s friends and family to be self-serving and often inaccurate, the doctor’s medical sense was sound. In this case he correctly diagnosed Churchill’s heart problem, with the result that Churchill found a new detail to dwell on: his pulse. He demanded at all hours that Wilson check his heart rate, yet he also told the doctor not to impart any unsettling news. On several occasions over the next few days, Wilson observed Churchill making quick and furtive checks of his pulse. The doctor told him to ignore his heart rate, which is akin to telling someone not to conjure an image of a polar bear. When his self-diagnosis continued, Wilson took a calculated risk; he persuaded Churchill to slow down a bit but did not tell him what had actually happened, or that what he really needed was several weeks of bed rest. Such a prescription would have terrified Churchill and, more important, Wilson believed, the Americans and Britons.
⁸⁶

Two days after his heart episode, Churchill boarded a special train and chugged north to Ottawa in order to thank Prime Minister Mackenzie King and the Canadian people for their support. It seemed to Dr. Wilson that Churchill expected nothing less from the Dominions, and in fact took the Canadians for granted, especially the prudent and plodding Mackenzie King, who was prone to such banal observations as “the great thing in politics is to avoid mistakes.”
⁸⁷

Canada had paid for its loyalty. Most of its merchant and cruise fleets had been placed at HMG’s disposal; many Canadian ships had been lost. The Canadians in Hong Kong were now prisoners, or dead. Churchill was most grateful for Canadian support vis à vis Vichy France. Although Canada, like
America, officially recognized Vichy, the vast majority of Canadians shared Churchill’s contempt for the puppet government. When he addressed the Canadian Parliament on December 30, with full knowledge that such sentiments would further agitate Cordell Hull, he praised the fighting spirit of Charles de Gaulle. Then he reminded his audience of the prediction made by Weygand before the fall of France: “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” He paused, and directed a hard stare toward the assembly. Then: “Some chicken! Some neck!” That brought every man in the chamber to his feet. It was his most buoyant speech in eighteen months; the Canadians loved it, and Churchill knew it. Before departing Parliament, Churchill posed in the Speaker’s Chambers for the photographer Yousuf Karsh. Seeking to capture Churchill at his most leonine, Karsh, without warning and just before he triggered his camera, snatched Churchill’s cigar from his mouth. Karsh got the result he sought, a highly perturbed Churchill, looking more the pugilist than the statesman. The artist called his iconic photograph “The Roaring Lion.” Moments later, after the storm had passed, Karsh made another photo, this of a benign Churchill, a smile creasing his almost cherubic face. Clementine called it the “happy” picture.
⁸⁸