The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (402 page)

But it was not only the future of atomic research or the timing of the second European front that spurred Churchill’s request for a meeting with Roosevelt, but also a naval battle that began in the Pacific on June 4. Churchill had predicted in January that the Americans would regain fleet superiority in the Pacific by May or June, a wildly optimistic assessment based on no empirical evidence. He simply ignored the fact that Admiral
Yamamoto had proven himself the most daring and successful naval strategist of the century, if not of all time. A more realistic line of thought would hold that if the Americans built more capital ships, Yamamoto would sink them.

Yet Churchill’s hunch paid off on the morning of June 4 near Midway Island. Yamamoto intended to take Midway that day, and to annihilate the American fleet, which he expected to come in search of his own forces. As usual, his plan was complex, and it depended upon the Americans doing exactly what he expected. Five Japanese naval task forces participated; in aggregate strength at that point, the Japanese force was greater than the Royal Navy’s Atlantic and Home fleets combined, and it dwarfed anything the Americans could send to meet it. One Japanese force made for the Aleutian Islands, where it shelled the airbase at Dutch Harbor and occupied the islands of Attu and Kiska, at the western end of the chain. Four Japanese task forces made for Midway, consisting of an advance guard of sixteen submarines and an occupation force of five thousand men in twelve transports protected by two battleships and a bevy of cruisers and destroyers. Then came the big guns: Nagumo’s Pearl Harbor Strike Force of four heavy aircraft carriers, well screened by cruisers, and shadowed by seven battleships, on one of which Yamamoto put his flag. In all, more than 160 Japanese warships and support craft were involved. The strike at the Aleutians, intended to draw away Admiral Chester Nimitz’s forces, began at sunrise on June 3. By nightfall on the third, with his plan unfolding flawlessly, Yamamoto prepared to execute the final two phases: the occupation of Midway while the Americans presumably sailed north on a wild goose chase, and then the deployment of his fleet to hunt down and annihilate Nimitz’s navy. But Nimitz’s code breakers had parsed a strand of the Japanese naval code, which told them exactly where Yamamoto and his main force were headed: Midway.
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As Yamamoto steamed for Midway, Nimitz prepared an ambush northeast of the island, in an empty swath of the sea that flanked Yamamoto’s expected course. Nimitz threw in his lot—the aircraft carriers
Hornet, Yorktown,
and
Enterprise,
along with as many cruisers and destroyers as he could afford. He put in no battleships because he had no battleships. At first things went exceedingly well for the Japanese. Just after daybreak on June 4, they bombed Midway, and then they massacred forty-three misnamed Devastator torpedo bombers from Nimitz’s carriers that had the misfortune of locating the Japanese fleet. Sixty American dive-bombers dispatched from Midway along with more planes from U.S. carriers failed to even locate Yamamoto’s ships. Shortly after 10:00
A.M.,
and for about two minutes, Yamamoto thought he had won the battle, and the war. He ordered his bombers re-armed and refueled for another run at
Midway. But the slaughter of the low-flying American torpedo planes had left Yamamoto’s shield of Zero Fighters buzzing around his ships almost at sea level when they should have been hovering protectively high overhead. No commander on any Japanese bridge took note of this. Then, a few seconds before 10:26
A.M.,
three dozen Dauntless dive-bombers from
Enterprise
cruising at 14,000 feet beheld below four Japanese aircraft carriers, the fattest of targets, and the pride of Yamamoto’s fleet. The carriers’ decks were crammed with refueling aircraft, gasoline lines, bombs, and torpedoes. The U.S. Navy pilots rolled their planes and nosed down. Within six minutes the tide of war in the Pacific was reversed in a maelstrom of exploding fuel and bombs on the blazing flight decks of three of Yamamoto’s crippled carriers, including
Akagi,
which had led the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Darwin, Colombo, and Rabaul, the New Britain port that since its capture in January served as the Japanese base of operations in the South Pacific.
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Six minutes. Here indeed was a small agate point of the sort Churchill relished and upon which fortunes turned.

Churchill cabled his “heartiest congratulations” to Roosevelt. The battle, he wrote, had “very decidedly altered the balance of the Naval war.” Here he fell into characteristic hyperbole, except in this case he was absolutely correct. The balance in the Pacific had shifted so dramatically that he now worried that Admiral King—with the American people fully behind him—might persuade Roosevelt to finish off Japan before taking on Germany. King, who in fact was thinking along those lines, elicited the support of Marshall (still disgruntled over his April mishandling by Churchill), and the two began plotting just such a Pacific-first policy. Roosevelt quashed it. Still, Marshall planned to ship five times as many troops to MacArthur as to Britain, and was already shipping scores of B-17s to the Pacific that had been destined for Britain. The American chiefs appeared ready to abandon Europe-first. This disquieting prospect—in conjunction with Rommel’s latest misdeeds—led Churchill, in the same telegram, to call for a meeting with Roosevelt: “I feel it is my duty to come and see you.”
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Prospects in Africa were troubling. Rommel had paused for a week in early June after bending back Ritchie’s southern flank and throwing the Eighth Army into disarray. Initially outnumbered, by mid-June the Germans held a two-to-one edge in tanks. Tobruk, and the 35,000 mostly South African, mostly green troops holed up there, lay exposed just thirty miles to Ritchie’s rear. The Tobruk garrison had been told by headquarters that if circumstances developed as they appeared to be developing, the plan called for an evacuation, not a defense. Yet Ritchie failed to order either an evacuation or a buildup of the city’s defenses. He had lost control of events, and of the battle. Auchinleck presumed Ritchie would stick to
the fall-back-and-evacuate plan; Churchill presumed Auchinleck would hold the city. Auchinleck had infuriated Churchill three months earlier when he claimed he would not be ready to attack until mid-June. When Rommel first struck in late May, the question became, would Auchinleck be ready to
defend
by mid-June? When Rommel lunged out of his positions on June 13 to send Ritchie’s army reeling even farther east, the answer became self-evident.
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Thus, with American fortunes on the rise in the Pacific while British fortunes again evaporated in the desert, Churchill fretted over a disruption in the Europe-first strategy. Although Roosevelt was firmly disabusing his military men of their Pacific inclinations, no plans existed for a European thrust. Roosevelt wanted something done about that. Years later Marshall told Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison that “the one great lesson he learned in 1942 was that the political leaders must ‘do something’; they could not afford the impression of fighting another ‘phony war’ that year.” The U-boat war wasn’t phony in the least, and the Allies were losing it. Rommel appeared unstoppable. Russia, again, stood unsteadily at the precipice, and Hitler, again, seemed poised to push the Soviets off. Three days after congratulating Roosevelt on his victory at Midway, Churchill made ready to return to Washington.
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T
he two leaders had to work out the business of where to attack the Germans, of where best to
do something.
Their desperate ally in Moscow wanted to know not only where but when, and more specifically how soon. On June 16, before departing London for Washington, Churchill wrote a letter to King George asking the King’s “gracious permission” to propose that the King appoint Eden—“an outstanding minister”—to form a new government should Churchill be killed en route. Then Churchill and his entourage, minuscule compared with his January host, departed the capital. Dr. Wilson, with his supply of sleeping pills, came along, as did Pug Ismay, John Martin, stenographer Patrick Kinna, Frank Sawyers, the valet with Churchill’s whisky, and Inspector Thompson with his revolver. Commander Tommy Thompson, Churchill’s naval aide, and Brigadier D. G. Stewart, the director of War Plans, also made the trip. Shortly after arriving in Strannraer, Scotland, late on the seventeenth, the group boarded a Boeing flying boat captained by the self-same Captain Kelly Rogers who had flown Churchill home from Bermuda. Churchill, wielding a gold-topped Malacca walking stick and dressed in a siren suit topped off with a black Homburg, was quite animated. But remembering that long and dangerous
flight home in January, he was heard by Brooke humming a favorite tune of Tommies during the Great War, “We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here.”
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They cruised at five thousand feet, high enough to see the red smear of the solstice twilight on the northern horizon. Brooke was entirely enthralled by his first trans-Atlantic flight. Unfamiliar with the jargon of airmen, he noted in his diary that he slept well “after paying a visit to the pilot in his driving compartment on top bridge.” All aboard were bemused by the fact that their watches, as they crossed time zones, no longer kept time with the sun. Brooke consulted his watch to determine when in “real time” he might take breakfast. Churchill consulted neither the sun nor his watch but his stomach. For the duration of the war on such journeys Churchill took his meals on “stomach-time” regardless of what his timepiece or the sun told him. Tommy Thompson recalled that on that voyage, as the flying boat neared the American coast, the passengers discussed “the advisability of having lunch or high tea before arrival.” The question was put to Churchill, who “settled it with a flat statement that it was time for ‘high whisky.’ ” Sawyers produced the beverages. Captain Rogers took the party over fog-bound Nantucket Shoals and began the run down to Washington. Churchill took his usual seat in the co-pilot’s chair. Three hours later, as Rogers ran low up the Potomac, Churchill, spotting the Washington Monument and ever alert to navigational dangers, warned Rogers “that it would be particularly unfortunate if we brought our story to an end by hitting this of all other objects in the world.” After almost twenty-seven hours, the big plane skimmed up the Potomac and floated to a stop. On board, it was “stomach-time.” The evening meal was served as the party bobbed on the river in the fetid, still air of a Washington summer evening, in the sort of close heat that had driven every president since John Adams to seek relief elsewhere, which is exactly what Roosevelt had done, having decamped to his nine-hundred-acre Hyde Park estate, where cool breezes fanned his forested haven high above the Hudson River.
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Churchill and his party spent the night of the eighteenth at the British embassy. Rommel spent that night directing his engineers—“sappers” to the British—toward the British minefields in front of Tobruk. Earlier in the day, his panzers had broken Ritchie’s lines, which meandered from Tobruk about thirty miles to the south, where they gave out in a naked flank. Ritchie had chosen to stand firm there when his Gazala Line broke two weeks earlier. A better choice would have been to clear out of Tobruk and fall back nearer to the Egyptian frontier. With his lines broken, that is exactly what Ritchie now attempted. But the day’s battle lurched eastward so quickly that Tobruk and its garrison were bypassed. By nightfall the city was surrounded, retreat and resupply impossible. Churchill had told Auchinleck three days earlier
that he expected Tobruk to be held. Rommel intended otherwise. On the nineteenth, as Churchill made for Hyde Park, Rommel, his path through the minefields cleared, made straight for Tobruk.
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Churchill brought to Hyde Park a memorandum that he had composed for Roosevelt in which he argued that any attempt to invade France that year had no “chance of success unless the Germans became utterly demoralized, of which there is no likelihood.” What then to do, he asked Roosevelt, in a manner that answered his own questions: “Have the American staffs a plan? At what points would they strike?” And what of shipping and landing craft? Roosevelt had no answers. Operation Bolero, the buildup of forces in Britain, should continue, Churchill offered, but with an eye to striking somewhere other than France. As Churchill saw things, that left northern Norway (Operation Jupiter) or North Africa (Operation Gymnast) as the only alternatives. During two days of relaxed talks above the Hudson, Roosevelt pondered Churchill’s memo but made no commitments. He did agree verbally and informally to exchange information on the atomic bomb project. More important, Roosevelt pledged to fund the entire project. Yet, as Churchill would learn within months, the Americans, for security reasons (or for political reasons couched as security concerns), intended to exchange only information that Britain could use to construct weapons on British soil. Since Britain could in no way build the facilities in which to construct an atomic bomb, the Americans began withholding information.
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