The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (393 page)

That was a clever (and petty) way of putting things. Margesson’s skills had never been administrative; under Chamberlain he had excelled as a whip in keeping the party in line. For more than a year now he had served Churchill loyally, only to be sacked, Lord Lloyd recalled, when Churchill “needed a scapegoat for all the disasters in the western deserts, but he couldn’t face up to doing it personally.” Churchill, in his memoirs, simply states that Margesson “ceased to be Secretary of State for War.” In fact, Margesson first learned his fate from his own permanent under secretary, Percy James Grigg, who had served as Churchill’s private secretary when Churchill was at the Exchequer. Churchill asked Grigg to take Margesson’s job, but the career civil servant was hesitant to do so, for the jump from civil service to Crown minister meant a loss of all accrued pension benefits. Churchill pushed. Grigg took the job “as an act of patriotism,” recalled Malcolm Muggeridge, even though Grigg suspected that “Winston wanted a Secretary of War who would be a pure stooge.” Grigg proved anything but. Brooke later wrote, “Providence was indeed kind to me during
the war to have placed P.J. [Grigg] at the helm of the W.O.” Grigg served until the war’s end. When Grigg retired, recalled Muggeridge, his finances were “wiped out… finished,” and Churchill “never again communicated with him in any way.”
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As Churchill shuffled his cabinet, he waited for Beaverbrook’s decision on the Ministry of Production post, which, when it arrived in mid-February was, to his delight, in the affirmative. But less than two weeks later, Beaverbrook again offered his resignation. He was an ill man. He had long suffered from asthma; now it had worsened to the point where he contemplated ordering an RAF plane to fly him around at high altitude to clear his lungs and allow him some sleep. His breathing became so labored that Churchill, during a meeting, mistook the wheezing for a cat’s meow and ordered, “someone stop that cat mewing.” Beaverbrook was on the cusp of what Churchill later rather unnecessarily termed “a nervous breakdown.” Clementine took the occasion to advise her husband by letter: “My darling—Try ridding yourself of this microbe which some people fear is in your blood—Exorcise this bottle imp & see if the air is not clearer & purer—you will miss his drive & genius, but in Cripps you may have new accessions of strength.” Churchill accepted her advice, and Beaverbrook’s resignation. And with that, Cripps was in, lord privy seal and leader of the House of Commons.
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Yet what appeared to be a political defeat for Churchill can be seen as his snookering Cripps, whose talents were not in massaging the House but in coolly arguing legal issues, attributes that serve little purpose in that raucous chamber of partisan free-thinkers. Churchill soon dispatched Cripps to India on a mission to convince Gandhi to pledge his loyalty to the British in return for a guarantee of Dominion status after the war. Gandhi and the National Congress had rejected a similar offer a decade earlier. Now, with Gandhi preaching that Indians not fight for Britain but rather prostrate themselves peacefully before the Japanese invader, Cripps’s mission could only end in failure. Thus Cripps, argues historian and parliamentarian Roy Jenkins, found himself in a nominally high position that was, in fact, “more shell than kernel.” Before departing for India, Cripps, seduced by his romantic vision of Stalinist Russia, predicted—without the slightest supporting evidence—that the war would be (successfully) concluded in a year. Britons kept tallies on the predictions of their politicians; the public man who offered up a promise had better keep it.
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Churchill, too, had made promises—that Crete would be defended to the death, Singapore held, the Germans and Italians swept from North Africa. Churchill, for almost two years, had been telling his family, his secretaries, little schoolboys at Harrow, that “these are… the greatest days our country has ever lived.” The times were great for Churchill not because his
England was winning—it most decidedly was not—but because England was fighting Germany, and now Japan, to the death. Yet, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote that month, that although Britons trusted Churchill in the past because he had always told them the truth, “there’s an uneasy suspicion that fine oratory may carry away the orator as well as the audience.” By February Churchill understood that, which is why he now promised only more sacrifice, more defeats, and more hard times, promises he delivered on.”
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The honorable fight for British survival made the war great for Churchill. His faith in the rightness of his cause and the valor of ordinary Englishmen was unbounded. Calling upon reserves of patriotism that should have been exhausted, he had won the allegiance of almost fifty million Britons gathered around wireless sets in homes and pubs, in West End clubs, and East End warehouses. Even as Singapore tottered, and as Rommel again drove toward Egypt, and despite his unkept promises, polls showed that 79 percent of Britons supported Churchill. These were people who, believing that peace was worth any price, had rejoiced in Britain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia just four years earlier. His words then had failed to move them. Had they listened then, they would not have had to listen now as he told them of one disaster after another, and reminded them that he expected that they all go down fighting in defense of their country.

Now they listened, and Churchill persuaded them that the fate of mankind hung in the balance, and he roused their ardor, stitching the fabric of their resolution with gleaming threads of eloquence and optimism. Thus, from June of 1940 to early 1942, at a time when defeat and enslavement of the Home Island seemed, at first inevitable, then probable, and finally still quite possible, Churchill’s star continued to rise, to challenge the dark star of Hitler, whose oratory, though in a different language with contrary rhythms, and to very different ends, had spawned a murderous dystopia. The Führer and Tojo were a pair of Genghis Khans bent upon the destruction of all that civilized men cherished. Churchill was determined to preserve it, and preserve it while wearing a smile and flashing his “V” sign. “It is surprising how he maintains a lighthearted exterior in spite of the vast burdens he is bearing,” Alan Brooke observed, himself bearing a heavy burden as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and charged by Churchill with plotting the strategies to fight their way to final victory.
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In a broadcast beamed the previous year to the University of Rochester—located in the upstate New York city where his grandfather Leonard Jerome had practiced law before hitting it big in the New York stock market—Churchill wondered how Hitler had done it, how “nations were pulled down one by one while the others gaped and chattered” until they, too, fell into slavery and darkness. Now “the old lion with her cubs at her side stands alone against hunters who are armed with deadly weapons and
are propelled by desperate and destructive rage.” Will the lion now fall, the final victim? “Ah no!” declared Churchill, “the stars in their courses proclaim the deliverance of mankind. Not so easily will the onward progress of the peoples be barred. Not so easily will the lights of freedom die.”
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To the Commons, on the day after Pearl Harbor, he had invoked the same imagery: “In the past we have had a light which flickered, in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.” No matter that Hitler had extinguished the lamps across all of Europe, Churchill generated his own illumination.
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Whether it would be enough to light the path to victory grew more doubtful with each mile of desert Rommel stole, with each ship killed by U-boats, and with each new Japanese depredation. On February 12, Alec Cadogan wrote in his diary: “The blackest day, yet, of the war…. We are nothing but failure and inefficiency everywhere and the Japs are murdering our men and raping our women in Hong Kong.” The weather was horrid, food in short supply, his chickens had stopped laying. He wrote, “I am running out of whisky and can get no more to drink of any kind. But if things go on as they’re going, that won’t matter.” Cadogan wrote that pessimistic assessment three days
before
Singapore fell.
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O
n February 19, Admiral Ch
ichi Nagumo’s carrier strike force bombed Port Darwin, Australia, inflicting enough damage to force the abandonment of the port as a supply depot. The admiral had sailed his five aircraft carriers unmolested thousands of miles from the northern Pacific to Australia. The raid served to finish off any residual Australian sanguinity. Prime Minister Curtin wanted his troops home, now. The troops in question were the war-hardened 7th Division, then en route by ship to Australia from the Middle East. By that date the Japanese had advanced from Thailand into Burma, with Rangoon the obvious target. Churchill was far less concerned with Australian paranoia than he was with Burma, the final frontier between the Japanese and India. On the nineteenth, Churchill asked Curtin to allow the 7th Division to be diverted to the defense of Burma. Curtin refused, firm in his belief that with Singapore now lost, the 7th Division was needed for the defense of Australia. Both Roosevelt and Churchill had concluded otherwise; they believed that the Japanese would not risk sending tens of thousands of troops four thousand miles by sea from Java to Australia. But for Curtin, the bombardment of Darwin confirmed his worst fears. Roosevelt sent two messages to Curtin in which he
stressed the strategic importance of Burma and the need for Australians to help defend it. Curtin stood his ground. The next day Churchill, after repeating his request and before an answer arrived from Curtin, ordered the convoy to Burma. Two days later he informed Curtin, and in so doing verified for Curtin the very arrogance he had ascribed to the war planners in London. Curtin, furious, insisted the convoy turn away from Burma and make for Australia. Churchill backed down. No Australians would defend Rangoon. Instead, the 7th Division went home to join the almost 90,000 American troops Roosevelt had sent to Curtin, an army that by summer would make Australia one of the most secure places on the planet.
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By February 24, Wavell had been recalled to Bombay from the Dutch East Indies. Brereton’s minuscule air fleet, by then a mere two dozen planes, joined the exodus. A Dutch admiral, C. E. L. Helfrich, replaced Tommy Hart, “a good skipper in a bad storm,” not because Hart had failed—he lacked the ships to succeed—but because the Dutch intended to make a last stand off the coast of Java. Helfrich’s fleet consisted of five cruisers, including the USS
Houston
(aboard which Roosevelt once enjoyed taking his seafaring holidays), HMS
Exeter,
and ten destroyers. Under certain circumstances it might have proven a formidable force, but with supplies running low at Surabaya, Indonesia, and against the overwhelming Japanese force headed its way, the Allied fleet was sailing on hope, sailing alone, and, like
Prince of Wales,
sailing without air cover.
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The torrent of disasters was taking its toll on Churchill. On February 27, Mary Churchill told her diary: “Papa is at a very low ebb. He is not too well physically—and is worn down by the continuous crushing pressure of events.” That day, in the Java Sea, events were about to take yet another turn against Britain and her allies. In preparation for the invasion of Java, two Japanese naval task forces, each guarding about fifty troop transports, and each more powerful than the entire Allied fleet, closed on the north Java coast. Admiral Helfrich’s little navy, commanded at sea by a fighting Dutchman, Rear Admiral Karel Doorman, was about to refuel at Surabaya when Doorman received word of the Japanese presence. Flying his flag from the light cruiser
HMNS De Ruyter,
Doorman went looking for the Japanese transports in hopes of inflicting some damage before the more numerous and heavily armed Japanese warships of Rear Admiral Take Takagi found the Dutch. Just after 4:00
P.M.,
the two forces sighted each other and began shooting at a range of about six miles. Churchill was correct when he said that naval battles could be settled in minutes, but this one turned into an eight-hour slugfest. An American newsweekly tallied up the amazing results: “The Jap paid… Japanese heavy cruiser sank. Another Jap cruiser, the
Mogami
… retired in flames. Hits crippled a third
8-inch gun cruiser. Three Jap destroyers blazed up, appeared to be sinking…. Allied bombers reported hits on two more Jap cruisers. At least 17 Jap transports were bombed.”
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