The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (403 page)

Churchill and Roosevelt returned to Washington early on the twenty-first. Later that morning, as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Pug Ismay chatted in the president’s study, an aide entered and handed Roosevelt a telegram. He glanced at the contents and passed it to Churchill. It read: “Tobruk has surrendered with twenty-five thousand men taken prisoner.” Churchill, thinking it must be a mistake, sent Ismay off to get the facts. Presently Ismay returned to not only confirm the fall of Tobruk but advise Churchill that much of the remaining British fleet at Alexandria had been sent south of the Suez Canal to avoid exposure to the Luftwaffe attacks that were expected any minute. Churchill, for a change, was speechless. He later wrote that the shock of the loss was great, but even more shocking was the performance of the army. Singapore, and now Tobruk, had destroyed the reputation of the British army. “Defeat is one thing,” he wrote, “disgrace is another.” After a moment of respectful silence, Roosevelt leaned forward and asked, “What can we do to help?” Churchill asked the president to ship at once as many new Sherman tanks as he could spare. Roosevelt summoned Marshall, who reported that a few hundred brand-new Shermans were on their way to American armored divisions. He added that it would be a shame to take them away from his men, but if Britain needed them,
they’d be on their way. Within days, three hundred new tanks, many so new they lacked engines, were loaded onto five cargo ships. A sixth ship carried the engines. When it was sunk by U-boats, Roosevelt dispatched another. Roosevelt also tossed in one hundred self-propelled 105mm guns. It was a gesture Churchill never forgot. But at the time, given Rommel’s genius for tank warfare, and given the decimation of the British desert army in terms of men, machines, and morale, it remained to be seen whether the American tanks would arrive in time to save Cairo.
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Over the next four days, Rommel struck deep into Egypt; on June 25 he took Mersa Matruh, just 140 miles from Alexandria. That evening Auchinleck flew out to the front, relieved Ritchie of command, and took personal command of the Eighth Army. The citizens of Cairo and Alexandria were now as distressed as the disintegrating Eighth Army. Panicked Alexandrians caused a run on Barclays Bank. Merchants in Cairo sold out their inventories of luggage within hours. A steady drizzle of ashes fell onto Cairo’s streets, the result of the British high command’s burning of secret papers. Rommel was expected, and soon. Auchinleck, meanwhile, took his ragged army seventy miles east, to a defensible neck of sand that ran forty miles from El Alamein on the sea to the edge of the great Qattara Depression, a natural obstacle that even Rommel dared not challenge. Rommel paused, too. He intended to wait and hit the British head-on as soon as he was reinforced. Until then, he would bide his time west of El Alamein—just 60 miles west of Alexandria and 140 miles northwest of Cairo—with just a dozen tanks fit for battle.
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It was then that Benito Mussolini decided his presence was called for upon the field of battle. Mussolini’s motto was
“Il Duce ha sempre ragione”
(“Mussolini is always right”). By the last days of June, he was convinced that Rommel, now poised before El Alamein, would push the final miles to Alexandria, and then to Cairo. The marshal of the Empire—the highest rank in the Italian military, created by Mussolini for himself—journeyed to Derna, where a magnificent pure-white stallion groomed for his triumphant entrance into Cairo waited in its stall for its magnificent rider. Resplendent in his pure-white uniform, Mussolini inspected the troops in Bardia, more than two hundred miles from the action. There he awaited Rommel’s invitation. But Rommel had stopped replying to Mussolini’s communiqués. Mussolini ended his adventure at Bardia. Rommel, his lines drawn tight at El Alamein, awaited the infusion of tanks and gasoline and men that he had been promised, and that he needed in order to drive to Alexandria and east to Iraq. But RAF cryptologists were reading messages between Berlin and Rommel, with the result that when Berlin radioed the departure date of German supply ships sailing from Italy to Tobruk, RAF pilots started their engines. There was hope yet for the Desert Rats.
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S
hortly after Churchill learned of the disaster at Tobruk, Harry Hopkins suggested he meet two American generals whom the president and Marshall held in high regard, major generals Mark Clark and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Just two years earlier both had held the rank of lieutenant colonel. Both had since risen high in the ranks due in large part to having earned Marshall’s complete loyalty. Eisenhower, fifty-one and Clark’s senior by five years, had never held an active field command. He had been promoted to brigadier general less than a year earlier; within days he would arrive in London a major general and gain a third and fourth star within a year. His only field experience was administrative—as chief of staff of the 3rd Division during the Louisiana maneuvers the previous summer, where the audacious tactics of George Patton’s 2nd Armored Division had much impressed Eisenhower. Yet Eisenhower had shown Marshall his stuff soon after Pearl Harbor, when given the task of getting relief to his old boss, Douglas MacArthur. Eisenhower failed, but not for want of effort; there simply was no relief to give at the time. He had since labored for Marshall as deputy chief of staff in the War Plans division, or had until the previous week, when Eisenhower—his friends called him Ike—finally got his field command, the biggest of them all: commander of the U.S. Expeditionary Force assembling in Britain. Clark would go along as Eisenhower’s deputy.

Churchill, prostrate by the news from Tobruk and the oppressive Washington heat, met the two generals in his “air-cooled room,” the same rooms he had occupied in January, just across the hall from Hopkins’s suite. It was Hopkins’s command center, from where he did the president’s bidding. It was no accident that important White House guests were billeted across the hall from Hopkins—Harry could more easily choreograph events, as he did on this day with Churchill and the generals.
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Churchill listened as Clark and Eisenhower chatted up the prospects of a cross-Channel invasion in 1943. The two generals had just left their first meeting with Roosevelt, where Operation Roundup, the full-scale invasion of France set for 1943, had been the primary topic of conversation. Churchill let the Americans do most of the talking. The disaster at Tobruk had put North Africa in the forefront of his thoughts, and Laval’s coup had brought Gymnast back into the mix. With Eisenhower about to leave for London, it had become clear to all concerned that the American Chiefs of Staff should also depart for Britain for further talks with their British counterparts. The agreement reached by the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington amounted to nothing more than an agreement to meet again in London.
Churchill, too, planned to sit in on those meetings—if not guide them—and made ready to depart Washington on the twenty-fifth. As in January, he knew his homecoming would not be a celebratory affair. U.S. newspaper headlines gave him fair warning: A
NGER IN
E
NGLAND
; T
OBRUK
F
ALL
M
AY
B
RING
C
HANGE OF
G
OVERNMENT
; C
HURCHILL TO
B
E
C
ENSURED.
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Rather than make straightaway for London to face the crisis, Churchill, along with Ismay, Marshall, and the dutiful Sawyers, journeyed by train to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, where they watched a newly formed American infantry division conduct a live-fire exercise. As the recruits strutted their stuff, Churchill asked Ismay what he thought of the exercise. Ismay replied, “To put these troops against continental troops would be murder.” “You’re wrong,” Churchill replied. “They are wonderful material and will learn very quickly.”
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L
ate on June 25, Churchill and his party, joined by Averell Harriman (who toted some kerchiefs and a Virginia ham for Clementine), boarded a flying boat at Baltimore. At breakfast time the next morning (according to their watches), they landed at Botwood, Newfoundland, for fuel and a sturdy morning meal that most Britons could only dream of: “excellent lobster washed down with Scotch whisky.” That week, to placate the vast majority of Londoners who could not afford to pay two or three pounds ($10 to $15) for a meal out, the government placed a cap of five shillings (about one U.S. dollar) on restaurant meals. The plan didn’t work; proprietors simply added overhead costs to the bill and trebled the price of wine, on which there was no price limit. Worse, whisky, long rationed at one bottle per month per customer, was in such short supply (alcohol was needed to manufacture smokeless gunpowder) that even regulars could no longer procure their allotted bottle from local merchants. Nobody was starving in Britain, yet very few Britons washed down lobsters with aged Scotch whisky.
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Almost seven hundred thousand British homes had been destroyed since 1940. Six million Britons lived without operating sewage systems. In London, more than three hundred thousand houses, one in eight, had been wrecked. Water lines remained smashed. Basements of ruined buildings had been converted (after the bodies of the drowned and burned had been removed) to rainwater catch basins. When the British offered the arriving Americans the use of a barracks for their general headquarters, a Yank who reconnoitered the place learned to his dismay that sewage flowed openly and, given that the newest building was built in 1860, there was no heat. Tens of millions of continental Europeans (and several thousand
Britons who lived in the Underground) would have happily taken up residence in such a place. The American officer wondered how his staff could work there during the winter.
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He needn’t have asked. A nationwide coal shortage meant cold hearths throughout the land. As Churchill winged his way home, Parliament debated the rationing of coal, which would mean even less coal to heat homes and coal gas to power factories. More than 30,000 coal miners, meanwhile, were in uniform, yet the same citizenry that demanded a second front were demanding that those miners return home to dig the coal. The people demanded their coal; they demanded a second front; they demanded a victory
somewhere.
And they demanded their fish. Fresh salmon and cod had disappeared from fish markets. Britons found themselves chilled in their houses, with no fish in their pots, a ration of two eggs and two thin chops per week, and with little whisky in the cupboard. Starved for sugar, they queued up at candy counters for a penny’s worth of gumdrops, “as though,” wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, “it was biblical manna.” Yet, these were strictures the British could live with,
if
their leaders delivered a victory. “Bewilderment has been the outstanding national emotion,” Panter-Downes wrote, ever since Rommel took Tobruk “with the seeming ease of shattering a child’s toy.” Newspapers told Britons that “everything was going well.” It was not. Yet, Panter-Downes noted, Britons remained true to form, “grousing about their leaders in the corner pub while remaining fully determined to fight behind those leaders to the last ditch.”
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Some in Parliament did not share in that determination. Churchill arrived home to find a motion had been placed in the Commons by a Conservative MP, Sir John Wardlaw-Milne: “That this House, while paying tribute to the heroism and endurance of the Armed Forces of the Crown in circumstances of exceptional difficulty, has no confidence in the central direction of the war.” Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, supported by Leslie Hore-Belisha, seconded the motion. By the time Churchill arrived at the Cabinet Room on the twenty-seventh to plan his parliamentary defense, Aneurin Bevan was hard at work honing his parliamentary attack. The mood among conservatives, Churchill noted, was “fairly glum.”
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He had occupied No. 10 for almost twenty-six months, during which time he had presided over nothing but defeats. He fully expected to survive the vote of censure, telling a Roosevelt aide he thought at most twenty MPs would abandon him. That outcome might under different circumstances be enough to bring down a partisan government but not a national coalition. Yet Churchill understood there could be no more defeats. “Only a few more marches,” he later wrote, “one more success, and Mussolini and Rommel would enter Cairo, or its ruins, together. All hung in the balance, and… who would predict how the scales would turn?”
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