The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (407 page)

Churchill was serious. On August 8 he relieved Auchinleck of command, offering the general the consolation prize of the new Middle East command at Baghdad. It was a posting, Churchill admitted, that would be much smaller than Cairo, given that HMG could spare few troops in Iraq and Persia, but a theater nonetheless that “may in a few months become the scene of decisive operations.” Given his and Brooke’s lack of confidence in Auchinleck in combination with their fears of Hitler punching through to Iraq from the Caucasus, it is ironic that Churchill offered Auchinleck the Iraq command. But after pondering the offer for a few days, the Auk declined. Brooke thought Auchinleck behaved “like an offended film star” rather than putting duty first and taking the command, where he might “restore his reputation as active operations are more than probable.” But as Brooke well knew, the Tenth Army in Iraq was woefully unprepared to rebut a German attack, and, with Britain’s armed forces stretched to the limit, no reserves could be spared to boost its fighting strength. Were Hitler to break through to Iraq, the Tenth Army would not so much assume a role as suffer a fate. Knowing this, Auchinleck instead departed for India and retirement. Churchill, relieved at having made his decision, took himself off to the beach, where, as he later related to Harold Nicolson, “I then took off all of my clothes and rolled in the surf. Never have I had such a bathing.”
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In a letter to Clementine informing her of the command changes, Churchill credited Smuts, who “fortified me where I am inclined to be tender hearted, namely in using severe measure against people I like.” He used much the same
language three months later when he told Harold Nicolson that sacking Auchinleck was “a terrible thing to have to do. He took it like a gentleman.” Churchill may have truly liked Auchinleck, but he had conducted this unfortunate piece of business with the general not in person, but by letter.
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“That was how he did it,” recalled Bob Boothby, “in writing, ‘You are dismissed,’ signed in red ink, WSC typed in red ink under the signature. When he sacked somebody he never thanked them. I don’t remember any occasion when he thanked anyone for doing anything.” Around Whitehall, a sacking by Churchill was known as “the awarding of the Order of the Boot.” Boothby is partially correct, his recollection colored by his own exit from HMG. Early in 1941, he was accused of extorting commissions from Czech citizens who sought his help in reclaiming Czech assets seized by HMG after Munich. Boothby, who in the early 1930s had been touted as a possible future prime minister, had made many Tory enemies for his role as an anti-Chamberlain rebel. In 1941, with the Czech banking irregularities offered as their raison d’être, those enemies maneuvered to bring Boothby down. Boothby defended himself admirably in the House against the kickback charges, and sought Churchill’s help on the matter. Returning from the House that day, Churchill told Colville that “if there was one thing in the world he found odious, it was a man-hunt.” Yet he let Boothby go it alone, with the result that although Boothby managed to keep his seat in the Commons, he lost his position at the Ministry of Food. “I never forgave Churchill for that,” Boothby later recalled. “He ruined my wartime career.”
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Yet there is an element in Boothby’s tale that is common to the recollections of many who ran afoul of Churchill. Boothby never forgave Churchill for that incident, but he understood that Churchill’s “ruthlessness and aloofness may have helped to make him a great leader.” Churchill had his own awkward way of thanking those who served him. After the war he arranged for Boothby, an ardent European unionist, to go as one of the first five British delegates to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Later, Churchill sponsored Boothby for knighthood. The two dined together on occasion for the remainder of Churchill’s life.

Auchinleck had joined Boothby, Margesson, Wavell, Dill, Dowding, General Alan Cunningham, Dr. Tizard, and Admiral Dudley North on Churchill’s roll call of those he found wanting. Churchill believed that most of his admirals and many of his generals lacked spirit, and he succeeded in sacking several, vested as he was with great powers and an unforgiving temperament when he sensed a lack of aggressiveness. The Royal Navy’s admirals, Churchill once told Pound, “seem quite incapable of action.” Worse, some—including, Churchill believed, Andrew Cunningham at Crete—displayed a tendency to fear “severe losses” rather than to throw themselves and their ships into the teeth of the enemy. They “shirked” their tasks,
Churchill told Colville. Churchill was said to be so autocratic that Hitler told his own generals that they were fortunate to work for such a reasonable leader as himself rather than for the mercurial Churchill.
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Bob Boothby believed that Churchill’s ruthlessness toward subordinates was prompted not by any latent, mean-spirited inclination, but solely by the need to defeat Hitler. Churchill himself saw things that way; in his letter to Clementine recounting Auchinleck’s downfall, he offered that the changes made in Cairo “were necessary to victory.” As for Bernard Montgomery, who by August 10 was hastening to his new command in Egypt, Churchill told Clementine: “In Montgomery… we have a competent daring and energetic soldier” who “if he is disagreeable to those about him he is also disagreeable to the enemy.”
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While Churchill wrapped up his business with Auchinleck, great events transpired on a South Pacific island that few in London or Washington had heard of. Early on August 7, almost ten thousand U.S. Marines from the 1st and 5th regiments, First Marine Division, slogged ashore on the stinking, hot island of Guadalcanal, where the Japanese had almost completed an airfield from which they intended to sever the American shipping lanes that sustained Australia. Most of the leathernecks carried World War One Springfield bolt-action rifles and wore World War One–era leggings. They secured the beachhead with ease, and the next day they took the airfield. Much of their equipment and almost all of their rations failed to follow them ashore when on August 8, Admiral Frank (“Jack”) Fletcher, who had already had two aircraft carriers sunk from under him, turned his ships for home with the meager excuse that he needed to refuel (just as he had when he steamed away from the relief of Wake Island in December), thus earning him the everlasting antipathy of Marines and the moniker Frank “Always Fueling” Fletcher. Still, the Marines meant to hold their ground. America had taken the first step in the journey to Tokyo. For Churchill, the American action on Guadalcanal again raised the concern that had dogged him since January: Would the Americans proceed on that journey at the expense of the European front?
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L
ate on the tenth, Churchill departed Cairo for Tehran, the first leg of his journey to Moscow and “his visit to the Ogre in his den,” as Clementine had put it in a letter earlier that week. He later noted the irony of the pilgrimage to “this sullen, sinister, Bolshevik state I had once tried so hard to
strangle at birth.” Had Hitler kept his bond with Stalin, the Soviets “would have watched us being swept out of existence with indifference and gleefully divided with Hitler our Empire in the East.” What, Churchill wondered, did he owe the Soviets? Wavell gave the answer in a poem of many verses, the last line of each being: “No second front in nineteen forty-two.” Brooke offered his opinions about Moscow to his diary, and they were not conciliatory: “Personally I feel our policy with the Russians has been wrong from the very start, and as begun by Beaverbrook. We have bowed and scraped to them” without ever asking in return for information on Soviet “production, strength, dispositions, etc. As a result they despise us and have no use for us except what they can get out of us.”
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Three B-24 Liberators were needed to ferry the entire party to Moscow, including Brooke, Air Marshal Tedder, Cadogan from the Foreign Office, and Archie Wavell, who spoke Russian. It was an unnecessarily large party, Brooke wrote, made so because Churchill felt such a retinue of generals, admirals, and air marshals “increased his dignity.”
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Harriman had arrived in Tehran two days before Churchill, and he used the time to inspect the British-run Iranian railroad system, which he found to be “the worst mess I have ever seen.” He would know; railroading was in his blood. When Churchill arrived on the eleventh, Harriman proposed that the U.S. Army take over the railroad in order to expedite the delivery of Lend-Lease goods to Stalin. Churchill, dubious, agreed to discuss the matter in the autumn. Harriman then joined Churchill on
Commando
for the run to Moscow. The plane was routed east of the Caspian in order to avoid any stray German fighters. The din in the aircraft was such that the two men passed written notes between themselves whenever they had something to say.
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Brooke and his party followed in his B-24, but when one of the engines flared out, they had to return to Tehran for the night. The next day the Brooke contingent climbed into an American DC-3, a Lend-Lease offering that the Russians had lavishly outfitted with thick seats and Persian carpets. They flew north by west to Baku to refuel. To Brooke’s delight, the plane scared up thousands of water birds as it came in low over the Volga delta. From there they flew north along the Caspian coast, with the Caucasus just twenty miles to the west. The plain below, between the sea and the mountains, was the main line of advance from Russia into Iran. With the Germans driving from the north, Brooke expected to see trenches and anti-tank traps and concrete fortifications in numbers to match the Volga birds. He saw none. “The back door seemed to be wide open for the Germans to walk through for an attack on the Russian southern supply route,” he wrote, “and more important still, the vital Middle East Oil supplies of Persia and Iraq!”
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On his way to Moscow, Churchill learned that an eleven-ship relief convoy
bound from Gibraltar to Malta had lost eight ships and an escorting aircraft carrier to German submarines and aircraft. The three remaining ships brought 12,000 tons of food and petrol to Malta, relief, but at a terrible price. Churchill was not pleased, not only because of the losses, but because he knew that Stalin would demand a resumption of the Arctic convoys, and there were just not enough ships.
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After a ten-hour flight from Tehran, Churchill arrived in Moscow late in the afternoon of August 12. Greeted by Molotov, he climbed into a bulletproof car and set off at high speed for a dacha about a dozen miles outside Moscow. There, after availing himself of a hot bath, Churchill found that everything in the guesthouse had been “prepared with totalitarian lavishness.” Three hours later he was escorted into the blacked-out Kremlin. Stalin was attired in a gray rough-cloth peasant’s blouse and trousers of the same material, tucked into high boots. A handsome handworked leather belt was cinched around his blouse. His eyes had a yellow cast, his face was pocked, his teeth discolored, and his mustache scrawny and streaked. Harriman thought he looked noticeably older and grayer than he had the year before. The marshal and Churchill were close to the same height, around five foot seven, with Churchill an inch or so taller. Where Churchill was given to looking directly into the eyes of his conversation partners, Stalin gazed away into the distance as if he were not listening. But he was. Harriman described the three meetings that took place over the next three days as running “hot and cold”—very hot, and very cold.
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The first, which lasted three hours, began on a somber note when Churchill, getting right to the point, announced that there would be no second front in France that year. Any attempt to do so would be so paltry as to offer no help to Russia, and would likely result in the annihilation of the forces on the beaches. But in 1943, Churchill offered, the Allies were prepared to throw twenty-seven divisions ashore, half of them armored.

Stalin, Harriman reported to Roosevelt, “took issue at every point with bluntness.” He first lectured Churchill on the need to take risks in order to win wars, and then proclaimed, “You must not be so afraid of the Germans.” Churchill, keeping his cool, replied that the British air offensive against Germany was a success, and with American participation would visit ruin on Germany. Here, Stalin expressed some enthusiasm, suggesting that houses as well as factories be targeted. Churchill backed away, saying that any damage inflicted upon “working men’s houses” was a by-product of bombs missing industrial targets. He then steered the talk to Torch, which he declared was in fact a second front. Here, he sketched a crocodile and, poking his pen at the crocodile’s belly, offered that it was just as sound to strike here, in its soft underbelly, as it was—he now tapped the crocodile’s nose—to attack “its snout.” At that, Stalin seemed to take
interest, asking a great many questions about the operation before pronouncing Torch militarily sound. He added, “May God help this enterprise to succeed,” a strange utterance from the leader of an atheist dictatorship (he had been a seminarian before devoting himself to revolution and murder). After more questions from Stalin about the African campaign (including the need to bring de Gaulle in), the meeting adjourned. All in all, it had been a productive start.
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