The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (401 page)

O
n the night of May 30–31—the day Roosevelt cabled to Churchill his deep concern about the Russian front—the RAF threw everything it had against Germany, a demonstration of power and destruction that Churchill hoped would underscore the validity of his claim that the aerial front was
indeed a real second front. That night, more than 1,100 British heavy bombers plastered Cologne, ushering in a short-lived era of thousand-bomber raids. The chief of the RAF’s Bomber Command, Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris, faced with American opposition to the shipment of even more B-17s to Britain (the planes were accumulating on airfields), conceived the idea of massive nighttime raids in order to show the Americans the efficiency of the British strategic air offensive. Harris had to put crews still undergoing training into his bombers in order to assemble a fleet large enough to carry out his plans. He had waited almost two years for the opportunity to punish Germany with such force. In the autumn of 1940, while surveying the destruction the Luftwaffe had inflicted on London, he offered a bit of Old Testament wisdom to his superior, Air Marshal Charles Portal: “Well, they are sowing the wind.” Harris now intended that they would reap the whirlwind. Portal believed the RAF could bring Germany to its knees—and the war to an end—sometime in late 1943. Churchill was far less sure. His oft-stated wish to make Germans bleed and burn aside, on the strategic efficacy of bombing Germany, Churchill had offered to Portal, “I have my own opinion about that, namely, that it is not decisive, but is better than doing nothing.” In Churchill’s estimation, the immediate value of RAF bombing lay in showing the Russians that Britain was doing something. Intending to do much more, Churchill proclaimed the raid “a herald of what Germany will receive city by city from now on.”
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It had been more than fifteen months since he had asked Lord Cherwell to devise a punishing, retaliatory bombing strategy. It had been less than five months since Bomber Harris was promoted to air marshal and brought to Bomber Command his strategic bombing philosophy, that volume trumps accuracy. It was a strategy born of necessity, since the accuracy of British night raiders was still pathetic; fewer than one-quarter of RAF bombs fell near their targets. Harris would have preferred a scalpel, but he was handed a cudgel. Among the RAF’s unintended targets that spring was the ancestral home of Thomas Mann. Better known as the Buddenbrookhaus, the house had stood in the Baltic port city of Lübeck for two hundred years. In fact, 80 percent of the old city of Lübeck was destroyed in what Goebbels called “the British craze for destruction.” Mann, safely ensconced in a California bungalow, broadcast a message back to Germany: “I remember Coventry and realize that everything must be paid back.” Such were Bomber Harris’s sentiments exactly.
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Within days of the Cologne raid, the Ministry of Information sent to Russia thousands of propaganda posters: “We lost 44 planes on that [Cologne] raid, but we are prepared to give our lives to destroy Fascism, as you are giving yours. The Fascists will not be able to stand the hell we shall
give them together.” But from Stalin’s perspective, faced as he was with almost two million Germans rolling toward Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, and the Caucasus oil fields, the British were neither giving enough hell nor sacrificing enough men.

Two nights after Harris’s heavies smashed Cologne, more than 950 bombers hit Essen, selected as a target specifically because its ancient wood houses and warehouses would fall easy prey to incendiary bombs. A month later, 1,000 of Harris’s fleet visited Bremen. The bombers flew in new “streaming” formations, a parade of death that stretched from the target almost all the way back to the North Sea. RAF bombing accuracy, though still dismal, had been improved somewhat by the development of the “shaker” system, whereby planes equipped with the latest electronic navigation systems flew ahead and marked targets with flares and then a next wave of aircraft deposited loads of incendiary bombs on the target, thus providing a concentrated area of fire where the bombers of the main force could drop their high-explosive bombs. The results were devastating. Harris enthused to the press, “Give me a thousand bombers over Germany every night, and I will end the war by October. Give me 20,000 and I will stop it in a single night.” The RAF’s massed raids impressed the Americans, as Harris intended. Deliveries of B-17s and the American pilots and crews to man them spiked upward. German civilians got the message as well; while Russian and British soldiers as yet posed no threat to Germans, British bombers could get through to burn German cities. Yet Harris took away new and distressing knowledge: his nightly losses, more than 5 percent, were too high, and his resources were too meager to sustain such losses. He needed the Americans to get up to speed, but the American Eighth Air Force had yet to fly a mission.
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The Cologne raid was seen by many in Britain and the United States as retaliation for the Luftwaffe’s Baedeker raids of April, so named because Göring had targeted several British national treasures that had earned honorifics in the
Baedeker Guide,
including Bath, Canterbury Cathedral, Bury St. Edmunds, and Ipswich. Britons joked that German pilots flew with a copy of
Baedeker
propped next to the bomb sight. It was a time, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, when owning “a house next door to Anne Hathaway’s cottage is… an uncomfortable liability… not a picturesque asset.” RAF response to the Baedeker raids was swift. In America, the
New Republic
parsed the question of whether it was retaliatory as well, and concluded that although Cologne had not been an act of revenge, the Allies should continually weigh both sides of the question in order to avoid any action that could “stain our record in the war or drag us down to the Nazi level.”
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Americans and Britons had not yet fully grasped just how low the Nazi level in fact was. Within days of the Cologne raid, Berlin demonstrated the real nature of cold-blooded retaliation, and it was not about Cologne. Goebbels and his Führer had been mulling over for some time the best and most efficient manner to confiscate the property of those convicted—and executed—for treasonous actions or speech, or for simply being born racially impure. When Goebbels suggested that the confiscation of “terrorists’ ” bicycles would send a message to would-be troublemakers, Hitler “regarded this proposal as wonderful” and ordered its implementation. For almost three years, far more disproportionate Nazi retaliation against civilians (such as one hundred hostages shot for each German killed) for wrongs against the Reich had been well documented in the West—photos of hanging bodies, firing squads, pushcarts in Warsaw full of emaciated corpses. German vengeance was so swift and terrifying that some of Churchill’s advisers in Special Operations cautioned against taking isolated direct action (assassinations and large-scale sabotage) on the Continent until an Allied invasion was imminent, in order to protect civilians from German retribution. Yet Churchill had urged Special Operations to “set Europe ablaze.” As usual with implementing any such edict, timing is critical.
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That lesson was learned in London after Reinhard (“the Hangman”) Heydrich, genius behind the Final Solution and chief of the Gestapo, was assassinated in Prague by the British-trained Czech resistance fighters whom the RAF had parachuted into the country five months earlier. The assassins struck on May 27, lobbing a bomb into Heydrich’s Mercedes coupe, shattering the Hangman’s spine. He lingered for a week before dying a ghastly death from blood poisoning and infections caused by festering tufts of upholstery that had blown into his gut. Germany’s minister of justice—Hitler—moved swiftly to punish the evildoers. More than 1,300 Czechs were immediately executed. The assassins and five cohorts took refuge in a Prague church, where they were found and killed two weeks later. More than 3,000 Jews were transported from the “privileged” concentration camp of Theresienstadt to their deaths in the east. Goebbels, on the day Heydrich was attacked, had 500 of the few remaining Jews in Berlin rounded up; more than 150 were shot the night Heydrich died. But that was only the beginning.
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Then the Reich took the blood-letting to levels not anticipated by anyone, including Churchill. On the morning of June 9, a battalion of German security police surrounded the fourteenth-century Czech village of Lidice. Nobody was allowed to leave. The next day the men and boys over age sixteen of the village, 172 in all, were taken behind a barn in groups of ten and shot. Several women were shot, too, and the rest—almost 200—were sent to slave labor camps in Germany. At the local hospital, the Germans found
four women who had just given birth. The newborns were murdered, the mothers shipped off to labor camps. The village children, about 90 in all, were sent to Germany, where, if medical professionals established their Aryan purity, they were placed with good Nazi families. Before departing Lidice, the Security Police burned the village, dynamited the ruins, and bulldozed the rubble into a flat, dead landscape, including the cemetery, where the interred had been dug up and bulldozed back into the soil. Berlin ordered the entire operation be photographed. Goebbels called the result his
Gemäldegalerie
(picture gallery). Then, Goebbels announced the details of the Lidice operation to the world, lest anyone else have the temerity to murder another one of Hitler’s favorites. It was a tale even Bracken’s disinformation wizards could not have conjured in their most macabre moments.
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Lidice, Goebbels proclaimed, was justice administered, not retaliation for Cologne. However, he added, if the Allies did not cease the mass bombing of German cities, “he would exterminate Germany’s Jews.” In fact, he had confessed to his diary almost three months earlier that at least 60 percent of the Jews transported to the east were to be “liquidated,” the remaining 40 percent were to become slave laborers, and worked to death. In this regard, the little doctor proved himself a man of his word.
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The full extent of the British role in Heydrich’s assassination was not revealed for over fifty years. Hugh Dalton, head of SOE and considered a “blabber” who might promise Churchill something he couldn’t deliver, was kept in the dark by his subordinates in the Czech section. There is no record of Churchill approving the operation, but SOE had been created as a stand-alone entity, the better to facilitate plausible deniability. Churchill mentions neither the assassination nor Heydrich in his memoir of the war.
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In a broadcast ten months before the Lidice massacre, Churchill proclaimed that “scores of thousands—literally scores of thousands” of Russians had been executed by the Germans. He couched his words in terms of reports from visiting British generals, but his real source was impeccable. German commanders, with their penchant for precise bookkeeping, radioed the death tallies directly to Berlin, and therefore to Bletchley. Thousands of victims were described as “Jewish plunderers” and “Jewish bolshevists.” This Churchill chose not to share with the public. He cautioned that the slaughter was “but the beginning” and went on to predict that “famine and pestilence” would “follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler’s tanks.” The Führer, he declared, was outkilling even his Teutonic ancestors. And not since the Mongols came in the thirteenth century had Europe seen such “methodical, merciless butchery” on such a monstrous scale. “We are in the presence,” he concluded, “of a crime without a name.” From the Ukraine to the Baltic states, from the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw where four hundred thousand souls existed on rotten flour and foul water, to Holland
and to occupied France and Belgium, the crime grew more monstrous by the day. The previous October, the prison camp for political prisoners at Auschwitz, about forty miles west of Krakow, was enlarged in order to accommodate tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly Jewish. The new camp, Birkenau, was built not as a forced labor camp but as an extermination facility. In late 1941, the SS conducted tests of the gas Zyklon B on Jewish and Russian prisoners in the camp basements. Satisfied with the deadly results, the SS set to work building industrial gas chambers and crematoria that could process two thousand bodies at a time. By mid-1942, a few—very few—escapees from Auschwitz had brought news of the genocide to the West. At the time, the tales could not be verified. The crime Churchill cited still had no name. But Goebbels’
Gemäldegalerie
had given it a face.
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B
y June 12 Churchill felt that a meeting between himself and Roosevelt was past due. They needed to unravel the tangled mess created during Marshall’s April visit, to settle on an objective for their armies, and to discuss “Tube Alloys,” the atomic bomb project. On that topic, there was not a great deal to discuss; unbeknownst to Churchill, the Americans were about to contract for
all
of Canada’s uranium. (It would be almost a year before Churchill learned the extent of America’s uranium dealings.) In any case, Britain had no money in its Exchequer to build an atomic bomb, even if it could procure the uranium to do so. The Americans would have to carry the ball on atomic research, and carry it quickly. It was well known in both Washington and London that the Germans were trying to use “heavy water”—available in large quantities as a by-product of ammonia production at a Norwegian hydroelectric plant—to serve as a moderating solution in the creation of element 94 (plutonium) from uranium. Goebbels months earlier had scribbled in his diary one of his more prescient thoughts: “Research in the realm of atomic destruction has now proceeded to a point where its results may possibly be made use of in this war…. Tremendous destruction can be wrought…. It is essential that we be ahead of everybody, for whoever introduces a revolutionary novelty into this war has the greater chance of winning it.”
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