The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (409 page)

A
fter almost thirty-six months of war, the only general Churchill could bring himself to pay tribute to was not British, but Erwin Rommel, who he
anointed “a great general” in front of a very surprised House of Commons. The British government that summer conducted a survey in order to gauge the public’s opinion of the army, which, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, had never been accorded the kudos bestowed upon the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. In one of the questions, homeowners were asked to name the war’s “outstanding general.” The government presumed respondents would offer the name of a British general. A distressingly high percentage of those surveyed answered “Rommel.” England and Churchill liked a “first-class performer.” Yet Churchill’s respect for Rommel went only so far. Before departing Cairo, he issued orders to Alexander and Montgomery. They were to “take or destroy at the earliest opportunity the German-Italian army commanded by Field Marshal Rommel.”
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Late on August 23, Churchill, Dr. Wilson, and Harriman boarded
Commando
in Cairo for the run to Gibraltar, with Brooke and his staff following fifteen minutes later in a B-24 Liberator. The fourteen-hour flight took Churchill over the desert and French North Africa and out to sea, where under low clouds they ran just thirty feet above the Mediterranean. According to the captain’s reckoning, Gibraltar should have heaved into view, but a heavy mist hung low over the water. The Rock was invisible. Churchill, as was his habit on final approaches, climbed into the cockpit. After a glance out the window, he voiced his fear that they were going to crash into Gibraltar. Vanderkloot, busy at the controls, muttered a few words of encouragement, and flew on. After several anxious minutes, Churchill recalled, the plane “flew into clear air, and up towered the great precipice of Gibraltar.” Vanderkloot’s reckoning was spot on. Once they were all on dry land, Churchill’s military bodyguards, fearing an assassination attempt, confined him to Governor’s House. He would have none of it, and proposed disguising himself as an Egyptian demimondain or an American tourist with a toothache (presumably with a knotted bandage around his head) in order to tour the fortress. But in Governor’s House he stayed, where over lunch he made clear that he would rather be in Egypt, on the front lines, especially were Rommel to attack within days, which according to Ultra he would do. But he was the prime minister, not a field marshal, and his place was in London, not on the line. Late in the afternoon, angry at having to fly from, not toward, the pending battle, he boarded his plane.
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Rommel attacked on August 31. “What I now needed,” Montgomery later wrote, “was a battle which would be fought in accordance with my ideas.” He got exactly that. Rommel’s plans called for turning the Eighth Army’s southern flank, above the Qattara Depression, much as he had turned Ritchie’s flank on the Gazala Line three months before. Montgomery, anticipating that tactic, fortified the Alam-el Halfa ridge to his rear
with an entire infantry division along with dug-in artillery. Then he massed four hundred tanks in front of the ridge, intending to let Rommel flail against his protected left flank. Rommel expected Montgomery to counterattack, at which time he planned to swing past Montgomery’s flank and drive through the center of the Eighth Army. When Montgomery refused Rommel’s gambit, the German cabled his Mediterranean commander, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, “The swine will not attack.” Actually, Montgomery’s command of just two weeks—“brave but baffled” Churchill had called the Eighth Army—was not yet ready to attack, but they were ready to defend their turf. One of Montgomery’s first orders to his troops was that if attacked, they would not withdraw. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, “We would fight on the ground we now held, and if we couldn’t stay there alive, we would stay there dead.” Rommel learned by September 3 what those who knew Monty had long known: Bernard Montgomery fought battles on his terms and his terms only. By September 4, Rommel had punched himself out against the Alam-el Halfa lines. The two opposing armies settled again into a dusty and belligerent stasis, with two critical differences between this standoff and all the others since 1941. The RAF had established overwhelming air superiority, and the three hundred new Sherman tanks had arrived to add muscle to Montgomery’s army. Rommel, in desperate need of the men, gasoline, and tanks that Hitler had promised, would have to make do with what he had.
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Churchill, enthused by the Eighth Army’s gallant stand, but impatient as always, pestered Brooke for an early
offensive
stroke by Montgomery. Churchill, Brooke told his diary, “started all his worst arguments about generals only thinking about themselves and their reputations and never attacking until matters were a certainty.” Monty, not yet prepared to go on the offensive, stood his ground, against both Rommel and Churchill. And so Churchill, too, learned what Rommel had gleaned at Alam-el Halfa.
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E
arly October brought messages from Stalin that worrisomely implied a deteriorating Red Army position. The Luftwaffe had established a two-to-one air superiority in Russia. Stalin requested five hundred fighter planes per month—more than 10 percent of American production—to remedy the situation. Implicit in the Luftwaffe’s air superiority was verification of Stalin’s argument that RAF bombing of Western Europe had done nothing to take the pressure off Russia. In fact, the Americans had yet to drop a single bomb on Germany, whereas the Luftwaffe by early October had destroyed most of Stalingrad.

Paulus’s Sixth Army had been fighting within the city limits for a month and had destroyed the Red October and Tractor factories. All that remained for Hitler to secure his victory was for Paulus to reach the banks of the Volga and hold his ground. The possibility of Stalin negotiating a separate peace with Germany once again dominated Churchill’s thoughts. Montgomery, meanwhile, was not yet ready to attack in the desert. The tanks he needed had been sent to Russia, but not enough to placate Stalin, who asked for eight thousand more
per month,
far more than America produced. In the Atlantic, the U-boats were still sending more tonnage to the bottom than the Allies could replace. With the need to deploy all available destroyers out to protect the Torch fleet, which was then readying to sail from America and Britain, no further convoys to Russia could be contemplated. Stalin, in need of 500,000 tons of supplies per month (about seventy shiploads), accused the British again, as he had in the summer, of stealing food, weapons, and matériel that the Red Army needed. As if to validate Stalin’s paranoia, the British and Americans canceled the October convoy to Murmansk, this
after
Stalin pleaded for more help. The situation in the Mediterranean was no better. Malta was down to less than two weeks’ supply of food, leading Brooke to lament to his diary, “God knows how we shall keep Malta alive.” Churchill, meanwhile, prodded Brooke to prod Alexander and Montgomery into launching their attack, well before they were ready, in Brooke’s estimation. To his diary, Brooke offered, “It is a regular disease he [Churchill] suffers from, this frightful impatience to get an attack launched.”
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As Churchill waited for the curtain to go up in Egypt, Eleanor Roosevelt arrived in London for a three-week visit. Like Harriman, she came bearing a Virginia ham. During her stay she and Clementine conducted exhaustive (and exhausting) tours of wrecked neighborhoods, RAF bases, and air-raid shelters. When she met with a contingent of black American troops, she “liked it when their officer, white, insisted that his men were the best in the army.” The First Lady, a political activist, was the sort of woman men of Churchill’s generation usually beheld from afar, other than when the suffragettes had pushed their way into manly venues where they did not belong. Churchill understood Mrs. Roosevelt to be politically significant, and not merely because she was the wife of the president. A Gallup poll had found that for every two Americans who thought the First Lady talked too much, three “approved of her courage and ability to speak out.” Eleanor Roosevelt regularly and with passion advised her husband on matters of policy, including the matter of blacks serving alongside whites in the U.S. military. Her prodding in that regard had brought results. George Marshall pledged to Roosevelt that blacks would make up 10 percent of the troops sent to Britain.
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That ratio engendered resentment among many of the 90 percent of American troops who served alongside blacks. Eden tried to persuade Eisenhower to cease the influx of black soldiers, not because HMG or Britons harbored racist beliefs but because white Americans were regularly beating the hell out of black Americans on the streets of London. And the need to find separate quarters for black and white Americans placed a further burden on the atrophied stocks of housing. Eisenhower was only obeying a directive from the Adjutant General’s Office that ordered “wherever possible separate sleeping accommodations be provided for Negro soldiers” but in all other regards they be treated as the equals of white soldiers. In fact, they were not. American dining facilities were segregated; black American women were brought over to staff the roving Red Cross canteens that served blacks. The British people, for the most part, accepted blacks in their midst more readily than did the Americans, especially American officers, all of whom were white and many of whom refused to dine in restaurants that served blacks. British villagers were especially welcoming of the blacks. One pub owner, disgusted by the behavior of white Americans, placed a sign in his window: “For the use of the British and coloured Americans only.” But in London, to placate white Yanks (who were flush with dollars), many restaurants banned black Americans, and by doing so inadvertently closed the doors on British citizens. When a black official from the Colonial Office was refused service at his favorite restaurant after American officers complained to the proprietor, the repercussions reached all the way to the cabinet, where, after pondering the incident, Churchill commented, “That’s all right, if he brings a banjo they’ll think he’s one of the band.”
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Something other than precise analysis affected Churchill’s opinions of all peoples other than English-speaking. He shared with the Western press and much of the English-speaking world a condescending attitude toward people who were of other than Anglo-Saxon ancestry. Churchill’s memos, his dinner-table asides, even his public addresses, are rife with references to Japs, Wops, Frogs, and Huns, often modified with such choice adjectives as “foul,” “filthy,” “wretched,” and “nasty.” His friends, family, and colleagues expressed themselves likewise: Sir Alexander Cadogan’s diary entries are xenophobic romps, peppered with demeaning references to just about everybody of any nationality other than English—this from the permanent secretary of the Foreign Office, responsible during the war for vetting the legal niceties of Britain’s foreign affairs, including the wording of the Atlantic Charter, parent document to the United Nations. Cadogan considered the Slavs to be “poor dears,” the Iraqis “filthy,” and the Japanese “monkeys.” The usually polite and progressive Harold Nicolson referred to “the Japanese” when he contemplated Japan in his diary, until,
that is, Japan began trouncing the British in Asia, after which Nicolson wrote of the “monkey men.” Lord Cherwell despised Jews. Even Clementine could demean with the best of them. In a late 1941 letter to Winston, who at the time was America-bound on board the
Duke of York,
Clementine wrote words of encouragement: “Well my beloved Winston—May God keep you and inspire you to make good plans with the president. It’s a horrible World at present, Europe over-run by the Nazi hogs, & the Far East by yellow Japanese lice…. Tender Love & thoughts, Clemmie.” Such were the times.
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Churchill called peoples of African ancestry “blackamoors,” and he didn’t much like them. Once, late in life, he asked his physician, Lord Moran, what happened when blacks got measles; could the rash be spotted? When Moran replied that blacks suffered a high mortality rate from measles, Churchill offered, “Well there are plenty left. They’ve got a high rate of production.” When, during his second premiership, his cabinet debated the adoption of new laws limiting West Indian immigration, Churchill proposed his suggestion for a national motto: “Keep England White.”
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