The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (406 page)

The teetotaler Montgomery, with his rumpled corduroy trousers and nonregulation turtleneck sweater, was not the sort who would normally grace Churchill’s dinner table, but Montgomery had acquitted himself well in France and at Dunkirk. He was egotistical and brusque, but most
of all he was a fighter, and this Churchill respected. In late July, it appeared unlikely, however, that Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Churchill, each possessed of a wildly differing temperament, would anytime soon be conducting vital military business in close proximity with one another, each dependent on the others for common success. The final week of July found Churchill, troubled by events in the Middle East and by personalities in the Kremlin, intent on visiting both venues. Eisenhower had begun planning the North African campaign. Monty, meanwhile, cooled his heels in southeast Britain, awaiting an improbable German invasion or an even more improbable promotion to an active field command in an actual war zone.

By July 14, Hitler’s eastern army (
Ostheer
) had established its bridgehead across the Don at Voronezh, but it had taken Army Group B’s Fourth Panzer Division a week to take the city. The delay would prove costly as the seasons changed. Meanwhile, Paulus’s Sixth Army had kept to the original plan and wheeled south along the Don’s west bank. The
Ostheer
had now driven 140 miles farther than in the previous summer, yet the dawdling of the Fourth Panzer Army in Voronezh while Paulus raced south meant that Army Group B was being stretched thin. Stalin by then had rescinded his “stand firm” orders and was now allowing the Red Army to retreat before the
Ostheer,
which lessened the chances of entire Soviet armies being encircled and captured. As a result, although the Germans had captured more than 90,000 Soviet troops within the Donets Corridor since their victory at Kharkov, five times that many Russians had backtracked to fight another day. Still, by the first days of August, the
Ostheer
had driven another 150 miles. Rostov-on-Don, gateway to the Caucasus, fell, and with it the last direct Soviet rail links with the Baku fields. For Stalin, this was a personal affront; in 1908 he had robbed the Rostov–Moscow train in order to help the revolutionary cause. For the same cause he had robbed the Tiflis bank in his native Georgia, leaving three dead at the scene. Rostov and Georgia had been his stomping grounds. They were now Hitler’s.

Farther south, elements of Army Group A’s First Panzer Army reached Stavropol on August 5, one hundred miles from the foothills of the Caucasus. On the ninth, after racing across the Kuban Steppe, German panzers cruised to within sight of the oil derricks at Maikop. Far to the east-northeast, Army Group B, less Bock, whom Hitler sacked for dawdling at Voronezh, had resumed its offensive and had shot across the Don north of the great bend. Paulus’s Sixth Army was now heading full bore for the Volga, and Stalingrad. The question being asked in Moscow, London, and Washington was, would the Germans bypass Stalingrad or try to take it? In fact, on July 23, Hitler had issued Führer Directive No. 45, an order Sir John
Keegan described as the “most disastrous of all issued over his signature.” The Führer decreed that while Army Group A made for the Caucasus, Army Group B would take and hold Stalingrad. The city was of high strategic value to the Soviets, which is why Hitler had ordered it smashed in his April directive. Yet destroying a position is not the same as holding it. Stalingrad carried symbolic weight for Hitler, named as it was for his Bolshevik nemesis. In deciding to inflict a symbolic defeat on Stalin, the Führer had forsaken his Clausewitz.
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Stalin had allowed his troops to fall back since the Germans crossed the Don, but five days after Hitler issued his directive to take Stalingrad, Stalin issued one of his own; all available forces would be thrown into Stalingrad, and “not a step back” would be tolerated. “Die, but do not retreat” became the Order of the Day on the banks of the Volga.
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Western dailies dutifully updated their maps of the Russian front as the German advance pushed ever eastward. A great deal of black ink was required to mark German-held terrain. Yet the maps failed to tell the true story. Army Group A, stretched as it was along a five-hundred-mile front, was rolling though territory, but not holding territory. Panzer spearheads far outran the infantry, which could only slog along at ten or fifteen miles a day. Even farther to the rear, supply trains struggled along roads not made for modern vehicular traffic. The result, wrote Sir John Keegan, was a front so broad that in some places just a few hundred Germans “held” dozen of miles of ground. Western readers who took their news seriously were dismayed at what they read of the Soviet plight. Stalin’s generals, however, saw an opportunity.
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W
ith the vote of censure behind him and the decision made in favor of Torch, Churchill’s attention turned to Egypt, and Stalin. Based on Ultra decrypts, he had prodded Auchinleck for weeks to take the offensive against Rommel, unfairly in Brooke’s estimation. Ultra allowed Churchill to peer over his generals’ shoulders as if he were with them in the field poring over intelligence reports. Yet Ultra was sometimes wrong. Churchill took Rommel’s (decrypted) pleas for reinforcements at face value, while some at Bletchley cautioned that Rommel might be exaggerating his needs in order to force action in Berlin. On one occasion Churchill goaded Auchinleck by citing a decrypted Luftwaffe signal that appeared to reveal the Germans had only half as many tanks in Africa as Auchinleck believed based on his field intelligence. But Bletchley was incorrect; the deciphered message referred only to the German tanks at Auchinleck’s immediate
front. Rommel, after taking several necessarily desultory and ultimately futile cracks at Auchinleck’s El Alamein positions during the first weeks of July, settled into a defensive mode and awaited his promised reinforcements. For his June victory over Ritchie, he was awarded by Hitler a field marshal’s baton. He would later say he would have preferred to be given a division. With Rommel dug in before El Alamein and with the fight possibly gone from Auchinleck, Churchill concluded that the situation in the desert called for his presence.
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His getting to Egypt involved doing so without contracting any of numerous diseases he would be exposed to along the way. In order for the aircraft to avoid Germans, the outbound leg of the journey would take at least five flying days, going south from Gibraltar to Takoradi, in the Gold Coast, followed by a three-day, three-flight hopscotch across central Africa. This sojourn through “tropical and malarious regions,” as Churchill put it, would require a series of inoculations, some of which required ten days to take effect. Dr. Wilson and the War Cabinet sought to put an end to the idea. Just that week, news of a great medical discovery had sifted through the ranks. Two American doctors visiting London from Johns Hopkins University had told Harry Butcher over a few bottles of port of a new drug “called penicillin and derived from bread mold. Takes eleven acres of mold to cure the scorched face of one flyer.” Such a drug would have made Churchill’s trip safer, but it had yet to be mass-produced. Given the risks posed by African insects and German fighter planes, it appeared that Churchill would not be straying far from London.
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Then an American pilot, Captain William Vanderkloot, twenty-six years old and a veteran of ferrying Lend-Lease bombers to Britain, suggested a daring approach: depart England for Gibraltar late in the evening by a four-engine B-24 bomber and refuel in Gibraltar the following morning; then, after departing the Rock at dusk, overfly Spanish Morocco, dodge far south over the desert during the night, and then swing east almost 1,900 miles to the Nile, south of Cairo. A fully gassed-up Liberator could cruise slightly more than seventeen hours at an average speed of 240 miles per hour. It had what it took to make such a journey in two legs.

Churchill liked the spirit of the idea, and he liked the means of transportation—Vanderkloot’s modified B-24 Liberator, named
Commando.
The bomb racks had been removed, and eight seats had been bolted down amidships. Toward the rear of the plane, wood slats had been rigged into two berths for the comfort of the highest-ranking passengers, but comfort was a relative concept. The plane was neither heated nor pressurized, necessitating at high altitude the use of oxygen masks, another source of worry to Churchill’s doctor, who feared the consequences to his heart of freezing temperatures and thin air. Churchill, not sharing Wilson’s
concern, asked the RAF ground crew to customize his oxygen mask in order to allow him to smoke his cigars. The request was dutifully carried out. Vanderkloot’s proposed route to Cairo could be covered in twenty-three hours compared with five days spent amid “Central African bugs.” If they could reach Cairo, there was no reason they could not reach Moscow; Churchill had not yet met Stalin and he felt a face-to-face meeting was the best way to establish a relationship and clear the air. There was much air to clear. Churchill made an executive decision: he would journey to Cairo. When Stalin invited Churchill to Moscow on the thirty-first, the itinerary was expanded to include the Kremlin. The entire journey would prove a daunting undertaking, even for young pilots, and an exhausting slog for an overweight old man with a quirky ticker and seemingly perpetual chest colds that he unwisely chose to treat with snuff and whisky, a generous supply of which Sawyers secreted into
Commando’
s bomb bay.
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Brooke left Britain for Cairo by air early on the morning of August 1, intending to swing through Malta on his way. The journey was too dangerous to risk having both Brooke and Churchill on the same airplane. The previous year, Eden and Dill had overshot Malta on their way to Greece and almost flew into the sea. German and Italian fighter planes sought out lone British bombers accompanied by Spitfires on the sound premise that a big shot might be aboard. Brooke arrived at Malta to find scenes of “incomprehensible” destruction, food and gasoline shortages, a harbor full of wrecks, and a population on the brink of starvation. The roads were so full of rubble, and petrol was in such short supply, that Malta’s military commander, Field Marshal Gort, had to ride his bicycle around the island. Gort appeared “depressed,” as he and his little garrison waited in this “backwater” for the final German assault, which good strategy dictated must be imminent. In fact, a joint German and Italian invasion had been approved in April. But days before Brooke’s arrival—and unbeknownst to the British—Hitler, with the cost of the Crete invasion still fresh in his memory, postponed the invasion of Malta because it appeared Rommel might get to Cairo on his own.
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Churchill departed London just after midnight on August 1. As he waited on the tarmac, a cable reached him from Dill, in Washington, which concluded: “In the American mind, Roundup in 1943 is excluded by acceptance of Torch.” This was not at all what Churchill wanted to hear, given that after Cairo he was going to Moscow to inform Stalin that no second front would materialize in Europe in 1942, a chore he compared to “carrying a large lump of ice to the North Pole.” He was not prepared to add 1943 to the equation. The cable, however, served one useful purpose: it would show Stalin that decisions on the second front had not been made by Churchill unilaterally, but had resulted from American and British solidarity.
To bolster that argument, Roosevelt, at Churchill’s request, instructed Averell Harriman to meet Churchill in Cairo and to continue on with him to Moscow.
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With Dill’s message in hand, Churchill boarded
Commando.
Box lunches had been stowed in the bomb bay; there was no space for anything resembling a galley, and no meals could be prepared. A little propane camp stove was rigged to heat water for tea or Churchill’s hot-water bottle. Tommy Thompson and Churchill’s doctor made the trip, along with Inspector Thompson, Sawyers, Ian Jacob, two secretaries, and Alexander Cadogan, who represented the Foreign Office. Eden remained in London to run the store in Churchill’s absence. Clementine motored out to the airfield and watched as the “monster bomber, throbbing, roaring & flashing blue lights,” lifted off into the night sky. Once aloft,
Commando
swung low over blacked-out southern England, past Land’s End and out over the Atlantic, where it climbed to 15,000 feet and ran the 1,500 miles to Gibraltar. Lest any Axis spies prowling that citadel spot him, Churchill told Brooke he intended to disguise his identity with a gray beard. He spent August 2 on the Rock, and lifted off again at dusk. Conversation on board was impossible; the plane had not been soundproofed. Just before sunrise, Churchill climbed from the bomb bay and into the copilot’s seat, from where he beheld “in the pale, glimmering dawn the endless winding silver ribbon of the Nile.”
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He had first seen the river from horseback more than forty years earlier, and although at the time he had yet to dab a canvas with oils, he described it in painterly tones as “a thread of blue silk drawn across an enormous brown drugget; and even the blue thread is brown for half the year… the picture painted in burnt sienna is relieved by a grateful patch of green.” Now the whitewashed concrete sprawl of Cairo spilled out of the patch of green, the western edges of the city thrusting toward al Jizah and the pyramids. Rommel, after again testing Auchinleck’s lines during the preceding week, sat just 140 miles to the northwest. And here came Churchill, exhilarated to find himself “the man on the spot.”
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He came not to praise Auchinleck, but neither had he yet decided to bury him. Of two things Churchill was certain: the Eighth Army needed a new commander (Auchinleck had taken over from Ritchie), and Auchinleck should return to Cairo from the front in order to tend to the business of his entire Middle East command, which stretched from Tehran to El Alamein. Brooke arrived firm in his belief that Auchinleck had lost the confidence of the Eighth Army, was a poor judge of character, and should be replaced. Churchill, not yet sure, had invited the general he most respected, Jan Smuts, to Cairo for consultation. Wavell also arrived, from India, in order to brief Churchill and Brooke on events in that theater. It became clear to Churchill that Wavell and especially Auchinleck were so preoccupied with
the immediate threats to their fronts that all of Iraq and Iran were essentially without central command, and this with the Germans driving toward Baku and the Caucasus. Churchill proposed setting up a new command in Baghdad, to be called the Middle East command. Brooke had been advocating just such a change for weeks. Auchinleck’s old command would be renamed the Near East command, a change Churchill had long championed the self-evident reason, as he later wrote, that Egypt and the Levant “was the Near East… India, Burma, and Malaya, the East… and China and Japan, the Far East.” The name changes were fine and well, the sort of housekeeping details Churchill relished, but the obvious and as yet unasked questions were, who would command, and where.
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Auchinleck sealed his fate by nominating Lieutenant General Thomas Corbett as the new commander of the Eighth Army. Corbett, in Brooke’s estimation, was a “small man” and clearly “totally unsuited” for that command, further proof that Auchinleck could not pick a leader. The Eighth Army was tired. The troops, Churchill told the War Cabinet, were poised to retreat to the Nile delta if an attack came. Late on the third, Churchill kept Brooke up until all hours, lecturing the CIGS on the need for Auchinleck to return to Cairo in order to tend to the business of the Middle East command while someone new took command of the Eighth Army, which led Brooke to exclaim to his diary: “Exactly what I have always told him from the start!” Churchill offered the command to Brooke, a proposal that sorely tempted the CIGS, who in France had “tasted the thrill of commanding a formation in war.” Yet he knew he was the wrong man for the job, having no experience in desert warfare, and so told the Old Man.
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On August 6, after visiting the front with Auchinleck and meeting Corbett, who Churchill found to be agreeable but without personality, Churchill made the decision to ease the Auk out of Cairo and into the new command in Baghdad. Then the plans collapsed. Churchill offered Auchinleck’s job to Brooke, who, like Marshall, was greedy for just such a theater command but was also honest enough to acknowledge (again, as he had three days earlier when offered the Eighth Army) his lack of desert warfare experience. More important, Brooke was selfless enough to not wish the job of working with Churchill on anyone else. The CIGS concluded (but did not inform Churchill in so many words) that the best service he could render England was to stick with Churchill, for better or for worse. Churchill cabled the War Cabinet that Harold Alexander, an obvious choice, be sent at once to replace Auchinleck. Yet Alexander had just been appointed to lead the British forces in Torch, and he had already begun planning that mission with Eisenhower. As for the Eighth Army, Brooke favored Montgomery, whose career he had nurtured for years. Churchill was inclined toward William (“Strafer”) Gott, the man
who, along with the Fighting French, had in May delayed Rommel for a week, thus saving Ritchie’s army, and perhaps Cairo. Brooke thought Gott tired and in need of rest rather than a new command. Churchill, having spent part of the day with Gott, thought otherwise. The P.M. prevailed. The command of the Eighth Army went to Strafer Gott. Bernard Montgomery was chosen to replace Alexander in Torch, and Eisenhower was duly notified of the changes by London.
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By lunchtime the next day, Gott was dead, his flying boat shot out of the sky by a rogue German fighter as the general flew from the front to Cairo for a hot bath and few days of rest. Churchill and Brooke, stunned by Gott’s loss, shuffled their dwindling deck and produced Bernard Montgomery. Lest Eisenhower conclude that his British allies could not make up their minds, Churchill sent a cable to London asking that Eisenhower not be informed of Montgomery’s promotion. But Montgomery had already reported for duty at Eisenhower’s headquarters. It fell to Ismay to inform Eisenhower that Montgomery, too, was being posted to Egypt, and that yet a third British general would be assigned to Torch. Eisenhower, taking in the news, told Ismay, “You seem to have a lot of Wellingtons in your army. Tell me, frankly, are the British serious about Torch?”
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