The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (394 page)

Jolly good news, were any of it true. In fact, not a single Japanese warship was sunk; only one sustained any damage whatsoever. Admiral Doorman drowned inside his doomed ship, followed before midnight by half his fleet. A few nights after the battle, HMS
Perth
and USS
Houston
charged into Banten Bay, near Sunda Strait, and in desperation attacked an overwhelmingly superior Japanese force. Both cruisers were destroyed. Later the same day, HMS
Exeter
(the hero of the December 1939 Battle of the River Plate, where the
Graf Spee
was scuttled) and two destroyers tried to flee Java. All three were sunk. The Japanese had taken the Java Sea without losing a single warship. The annihilation of the Allied fleet was a catastrophic defeat, especially for the Dutch, who had been a major power in the East Indies for three hundred years. The British were on the run, to Burma and India, where they hoped to regroup. But the Japanese were outrunning them. On February 28, Japanese forces landed on Java. Eight days later the island was theirs, as were more than 90,000 Dutch, and thousands of British, Australian, and American prisoners. With the surrender of Java, Wavell’s ABDA command simply disappeared.
¹⁵³

In Rangoon all order had disappeared a month earlier. The evacuation of Rangoon, ongoing since the Christmas raids, had grown desperate with the first concerted bombings of early February. By February 20, refugees and vehicles of all sorts packed the road north. Thousands took to the Irrawaddy River in small boats. Professional thieves—
dacoits
—fell upon the fleeing citizens, British and Burmese alike, and killed them for what they carried. The fire brigade fled, as did the police and the entire British diplomatic contingent. A British official wrote that city streets were empty except for “criminals, criminal lunatics, and lepers.” Somehow, five thousand felons had been released from prison. After sundown they made Rangoon “a city of the damned.” Lepers, wild dogs, and lunatics fought over scraps of rotting food at garbage dumps and in back alleys. Business owners and the few remaining Burmese soldiers implemented a scorched-earth policy, burning factories, stores of medicines, and supply depots. The few remaining Flying Tigers—the last defenders of the city—departed the deranged scene that night for Magwe, to the north, where the remnants of the RAF and the main British force, such as it was, had already dug in.
¹⁵⁴

Churchill, in late February, dispatched to Rangoon general Harold Alexander, who had served in France under Brooke and was the last senior officer to get off the beach at Dunkirk. “If we could not send an army,” Churchill later wrote, “we could at any rate send a man.” “Alex” was an aristocrat, an Ulsterman, a fighter and a man of honor, but two decades
earlier, two of his instructors at the staff college, Alan Brooke and Bernard Montgomery, had concluded that he was “an empty vessel.” Perhaps Monty and Brooke did not see that Alexander’s lack of enthusiasm for planning was due to his greater love of fighting. In France in 1940 he had displayed a knack for which British generals had “always shown a special aptitude… the art of retreat and evacuation.” That talent helped save the British army. He also displayed a flair for interservice diplomacy, a trait that would well serve Churchill and the Allied cause. In Burma Churchill needed both a man and an army. In Alexander he had the man, but he lacked an army. British colonial forces in Burma did not number enough to properly be called a corps, let alone an army. An Indian division stationed on the far side of the Sittang River, to the east of Rangoon, had been mauled by the oncoming Japanese Fifteenth Army, itself a force of only two small divisions, about sixteen thousand men. The only Burmese division in the vicinity was suffering attrition through desertion, fueled not by cowardice but by Burmese hatred for the British. A lone British armored brigade held Rangoon. Such was Alexander’s “army.” He arrived in Rangoon on March 5, just in time to preside over the loss of the city and lead the chaotic breakout from the capital northward to Prome. Rangoon, aflame and abandoned, fell on March 8.
¹⁵⁵

The Japanese used the port to bring in 20,000 more men, and the reinforced Fifteenth Army soon spread outward from Rangoon into the Irrawaddy delta, the most fertile and productive estuary in the British Empire and the source of surplus grains and rice critical to the sustenance of Bengal. The delta had for five decades supplied Bengal enough rice to stave off want; no major famine had occurred in India for more than fifty years, in part because of the relationship between the Burmese rice surpluses and Bengal’s needs. The Japanese broke that connection, stealing the Irrawaddy’s bounty for Tokyo’s consumption and destroying what they couldn’t steal. The delta’s loss, along with unprecedented cyclones in Bengal later in the year and a worsening drought on the upper Subcontinent, guaranteed rising prices and grain and rice shortages in Bengal, whether or not Japanese troops arrived there anytime soon. The Japanese objective was nothing less than to drive the British out of Burma, starting at Rangoon, six hundred miles south of the Assam frontier. Alexander promptly put Lieutenant General William (“Billy”) Slim in charge of the newly formed Burma Corps (Burcorps) in hopes of repelling the invader. Slim was a real fighter, who had subdued the Iraqi and Iranian revolts the previous year. Yet Burcorps was an army on paper only. The British receded before the Japanese tide, Alexander withdrawing north toward Prome while Vinegar Joe Stilwell, commanding six undersize and unenthused Chinese divisions, covered his eastern flank.
¹⁵⁶

The presence of the hated Chinese on Burmese soil—reluctantly agreed to by Wavell—served only to bring more Burmese deserters into the Japanese ranks. A week after the fall of Rangoon, Alexander and Stilwell met for the first time in a pretty little hillside colonial town near Mandalay, a village the British had named May Town—Maymyo. The two generals did not exactly hit it off. Stilwell, with a good ear for upper-class English speech, later declared,
“Extrawdinery!”
Alexander, with a condescending gaze, “looked me over as if I had just crawled from under a rock.”
^*
Yet if a joint command was what it took to fight the Japanese, Stilwell was glad to be on board. He wanted not only to hold the city of Toungoo but to attack. But Chiang, to Stilwell’s fury, delayed his decision to order Chinese forces south from Mandalay until it was too late, with the result that by the end of the month, the Japanese overran Toungoo. Stilwell and Alexander now had but one decision to make, whether to run to China or to India. Stilwell sent half his Chinese forces back up the Burma Road, the other half north toward Myitkyina, near the Indian frontier, and the only navigable track from India to China. The Japanese commenced chasing Stilwell’s troops up the Burma Road and Alexander’s emaciated force up the west bank of the Irrawaddy. Burma was doomed.
¹⁵⁷

It took the entire month of April for the Japanese to finish the job, during which time Alexander and Slim skulked off toward Assam, while most of Stilwell’s Chinese troops fled to Chungking, joined by hundreds of Burmese deserters. Stilwell, offered a ride out for himself and his immediate staff on an Army Air Force plane, chose instead to walk out with 114 men to Assam, a miserable journey of over two hundred miles along the Irrawaddy and through high mountain passes. His men no longer looked up when an airplane passed over; the Allies had none in the skies. The trek took almost three weeks. As they slogged toward the Assam frontier, Alexander, Slim, and Stilwell raced the Japanese and the coming monsoon rains. When on May 17 Alexander arrived in Kalewa, a border town at the confluence of the Chindwin and Myittha rivers, he had with him just two dozen field guns and as many trucks. It was the longest retreat in British military history. Almost one-third of his original force of thirty thousand stayed behind as casualties and deserters. Stilwell did not lose a man, but his little band arrived in Assam half starved, with the Japanese at their
back. The monsoon rains arrived three days later. The Burma Road was lost, along with Burma, Lord Randolph Churchill’s imperial legacy, presented by him to Queen Victoria as a New Year’s present in 1886.
¹⁵⁸

B
lame for Burma’s loss and the failure of the first joint Chinese-American-British operation was apportioned along nationalist lines. Chiang, in a letter to Churchill, wrote bitterly, “In all my life of long military experience, I have seen nothing to compare with the deplorable, unprepared state, confusion, and degradation of the war area in Burma.” Such words did not endear the generalissimo to Churchill. Stilwell told Washington that he thought the British would rather lose Burma than be indebted to the Chinese for saving it. While Burma tottered, the United States suffered a humiliation of its own when Douglas MacArthur fled Manila for Australia on March 11. Allied thoughts concerning Operation Gymnast (the invasion of French North Africa) went up in the smoke of Rangoon, leading Roosevelt and Churchill to agree that “Gymnast cannot be undertaken.” Roosevelt also noted the irony that Stilwell and Alexander, the commanders designate of Gymnast, met instead in Burma, where the Japanese drove them out. Alexander, stranded in Assam and knowing a cul de sac when he saw one, put Billy Slim in charge of the remnants of Burcorps and returned to London. Roosevelt, who never really had a dog in the fight, offered jaunty condolences to Churchill: “I have never liked Burma or the Burmese…. I wish you could put the whole bunch of them in a frying pan… and let them stew in their own juices.” Churchill, in a note to Roosevelt, offered that the wisest course for the Japanese to now take would be to drive right up the Burma Road to China, and “make a job of that.”
¹⁵⁹

This the Japanese did, for a short while, chasing Chiang’s tattered army into Yunnan province. Then the Japanese stopped. They had neither orders from Tokyo nor a strategic plan to carry though on their stupendous victories.

Weeks earlier, in early March, Eden and Alec Cadogan suspected the fight might have gone out of Churchill. His most loyal friend, Brendan Bracken, and his most omnipresent political critic, Stafford Cripps, agreed that Eden should be made deputy defence minister. Cadogan and Eden also noted that for several weeks “there has been no direction of the war. War Cabinet doesn’t function…. There’s no hand on the wheel (probably due to P.M.’s health).” In fact, the alliance itself was drifting, rudderless.
Throughout March and April and into May, Churchill and Roosevelt exchanged telegrams and letters that, taken in the aggregate, underscore Eden’s pessimism and show that the two leaders had differing objectives, militarily and politically, and lacked the means to achieve any of them, alone or together. The alliance was looking all hat and no cattle.
¹⁶⁰

These were the weeks when Japanese armies rolled up Burma and Java and the Philippines, where the 75,000 American and Filipino troops trapped on Bataan surrendered on April 9, and marched off to a captivity that would kill almost half of them. Fortress Corregidor fell a month later. In Java, the Japanese had advanced from island to island, up and down the East Indies, until, on March 23, less than a month after landing, they took the Andaman Islands, located three hundred miles off the Thai and Burmese coasts in the Bay of Bengal. Nothing but open ocean separated the islands from Ceylon.

Stalin, meanwhile, began expressing interest in a treaty with his allies that would secure the Soviet Union’s prewar borders, a concept entirely unacceptable to Roosevelt and Churchill, both of whom had long believed such matters should be addressed only at the postwar peace conference. Yet Churchill now began to see the practical merit in moderating that stance given that America and Britain had made no plans whatsoever to do anything anytime soon to ease Stalin’s burden, other than send small Arctic convoys, which U-boats regularly mauled. Roosevelt considered himself capable of mollifying Stalin, and so notified Churchill. “I think you will not mind me being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”
¹⁶¹

Throughout March, the most pressing question at the Admiralty was, where is Admiral Nagumo’s carrier strike force? Churchill thought it only a matter of time, and likely not a great deal of time, before Nagumo launched air and amphibious attacks on Ceylon to gain complete control of the Indian Ocean. That would put the Japanese athwart the sea-lanes to the Persian Gulf and from the Suez to India, and threaten the supply of Stalin by way of Basra as well as the supply of the British in India and Chiang Kai-shek in China. One of Churchill’s deepest fears—the loss of access to Persian and Iraqi oil—appeared a distinct possibility. Those two nations, lightly garrisoned by British colonial troops, now lay exposed between the forces of Tojo and Hitler, who was certain to make a spring push into the Caucasus, which, if successful, would bring him that much closer to the Middle East. Rommel, too, appeared poised to strike toward Cairo. Were he to get there, the roads to Baghdad would lie open. The troops Churchill had hoped to array on the Levant-Caspian front were
now headed to India. The defense of the northern route into the Mosul oil fields, Churchill cabled Roosevelt, “now depends on the success of the Russian armies.” He had summed up the problem to Colville months earlier: “With Hitler in control of Iraqi oil and Ukrainian wheat… not all the staunchness of our Plymouth brethren would shorten the ordeal.” The Middle East was the only theater of war exposed to both Germany and Japan, and its defense fell exclusively to the British, who lacked the manpower to repel Rommel and the sea power to repel the Japanese. As March lurched toward April, the question remained, where was Nagumo?
¹⁶²

F
our months earlier. Louis “Dickey” Mountbatten, a mere captain, and an unlucky one at that—he had lost his ship at Crete—had been promoted to the rank of commodore and shortly thereafter replaced Admiral Keyes as director of Combined Operations. Churchill charged Mountbatten and his small staff with planning raids on the Continent, and coordinating those raids with the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, Army, and RAF. Churchill told him to think of only offense, never defense, and to begin drawing up the matériel and personnel requirements—specialized landing crafts, close air support, waterproof tanks, beach spotters, aerial photography—required for a full-fledged invasion of France. Churchill promoted him over far more senior and experienced Royal Navy officers to vice admiral and sat him down on the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, where, Brooke later wrote, Dickie “frequently wasted his own time and ours.” Then Churchill—reasoning that the interservice nature of Combined Operations required a grand gesture—insisted that Mountbatten be promoted to the rank of lieutenant general in the army
and
air marshal in the RAF, thus earning Mountbatten the enmity of dozens of more senior offices in those branches of the military. From Churchill he earned the moniker of “triphibian,” a word Churchill coined for the occasion, and which soon found its way into Webster’s.
¹⁶³

March closed with Mountbatten’s first significant foray as director of Combined Operations, a commando raid on the French port of St-Nazaire, located five miles upstream from the mouth of the Loire. The dry dock at St-Nazaire, built for the French passenger liner
Normandie
(which had burned at its Hudson River pier the previous month), was one of the largest in the world and the only one on the Atlantic coast that offered
Bismarck’
s surviving sister ship,
Tirpitz,
space enough for repairs.
Tirpitz
had for two months been riding at anchor in a fjord at Trondheim, safe from British aircraft. Yet for Germany, the battleship’s safety came at a price.
Tirpitz,
at
anchor, posed no threat to British convoys. Churchill and Mountbatten were of a mind that the destruction of the St-Nazaire dry dock, which would leave
Tirpitz
no place to run to if damaged, would make a sortie from Trondheim into the Atlantic too dangerous to risk. The British plan was audacious. Escorted by destroyers, gunboats, and 250 commandos, one of the fifty old American destroyers—
Campbeltown
—its bow packed with three tons of TNT, would sail right up the Loire estuary in the dead of night and crash through the gates of the drydock. The plan called for the crew to scuttle the ship while commandos destroyed the port facilities. Then the small gunboats would pick up the sailors and commandos, and everybody would get the hell out of town. Soon thereafter, if all went as planned, the explosives hidden on
Campbeltown—
set on a timer to allow the crew to escape—would blast the drydock to smithereens.

Campbeltown
crashed the dock at 1:34
A.M.
, remarkably just four minutes behind schedule. Everything had gone as planned, with the exception of the most vital component of all—the fuse that triggered the explosives. After
Campbeltown
crashed the gates, nothing. There she sat, a fish out of water. By the time those commandos not killed or captured got away down the Loire or into the countryside, Germans had swarmed aboard
Campbeltown
. A few dozen German technicians, precise as usual, began a methodical inspection of the ship. They worked through the morning while several hundred officers and men toured the vessel and took snapshots for their girls back home. More than four hundred Germans were aboard when, just before noon, the fuse elected to function. The explosion killed them all. For two days, teams of Germans collected bits and pieces of human remains scattered near the wrecked dock. The raid had its intended effect. Hitler treasured
Tirpitz
so much that he allowed it to make only two brief North Sea excursions that year in pursuit of Allied convoys. He thereafter refused to send it into the Atlantic proper. Instead,
Tirpitz
waited for two years in Norwegian fjords for the British invasion that never came. Finally, in November 1944, RAF Lancaster bombers destroyed the ship with six-ton bombs.

The St-Nazaire raid made little strategic difference in the Battle of the Atlantic, other than to keep
Tirpitz
out of the Atlantic, but like the hunt for
Bismarck,
it captured the imaginations of Americans and Britons alike. Churchill, with a nod to the florid, picturesque narrative style of Thomas Macaulay, termed the raid “brilliant and heroic” and “a deed of glory.” The commandos, he wrote, had “been eager to enter the fray,” and did so “in the teeth of a close and murderous fire.” It was the sort of small, sparkling victory he so relished.
¹⁶⁴

In North Africa and Asia, Churchill was getting nothing of the sort. Rommel sat in front of Ritchie’s Eighth Army just forty miles west of
Tobruk. The German was reinforcing almost at leisure. That he meant to attack was certain; the only question was when. In Asia and the Pacific the Japanese had conquered everything in their path. In Russia the German spring offensive would surely come, when panzers would pour down Ukraine roads that wound east and south toward Stalingrad, and all the way to the Caucasus, and Iraq and Persia beyond. Almost three months had elapsed since Churchill warned the Commons that multiple disasters would strike; they indeed had. And now, with different motives and different goals, Stalin and Roosevelt prodded Churchill to action. Stalin not only sought to cement his 1939 borders, he insisted upon the opening of a second front. Roosevelt desired a decision on where and when American troops would fight, for it had been four months since Pearl Harbor and American voters were starting to wonder if it might be six more before American fighting men actually went on the attack. Franklin Roosevelt did not want the November midterm elections to come and go without American boys fighting Germans
somewhere.