The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (410 page)

The First Lady therefore arrived in England during a difficult period for race relations. Normally, she would have spoken her mind. But to the relief of Secretary of War Stimson, her behavior in Britain was “very temperate.” She was there to improve morale, not to reform the armed forces. Speaking her mind to Churchill was another matter. When, during a dinner at No. 10, the First Lady took him to task for first backing Franco and then, after Franco showed his Fascist stripes, not backing the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, Churchill growled that had the Loyalists won, the first heads to roll would belong to people such as herself and her husband. Mrs. Roosevelt responded by saying she didn’t care whether she lost her head. “Well,” Churchill snarled, “I don’t want to lose mine.” Clementine did not help matters when she offered that Mrs. Roosevelt was correct. As Churchill fumed, Clementine separated the combatants, announcing that it was time for the ladies to adjourn to the sitting room and leave the men alone with their brandies and cigars. Of her dining experiences with Churchill, Mrs. Roosevelt later wrote, “I found the P.M. not easy to talk to.”
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Churchill’s behavior could be forgiven given the events unfolding in the Atlantic and in the desert, although in truth he had treated Mrs. Roosevelt no differently than any guest. Of dining with Churchill, Harold Nicolson wrote, “Winston is bad at putting people at ease…. There is a mask of boredom and another mask or film of obstinacy, as if he were saying, ‘These people bore me and I shall refuse to be polite.’ ” Yet, suddenly Churchill would “cease thinking of something else, and the film will part and the sun comes out.” The First Lady saw the sun come out at Chequers,
when she was treated to the spectacle of Churchill playing with his two-year-old grandson, little Winston. “They sat on the floor,” she later wrote, “and played a game and the resemblance was ridiculous.” The scene reminded her of the story of the lady who, catching sight of Churchill and little Winston, remarked to Churchill on the resemblance. Churchill looked up and replied, “You are quite wrong, I resemble every baby.” He also showed the First Lady a room that he intended to have redecorated in order to accommodate the special needs of her husband, who, Churchill hoped, would soon visit England.
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L
ate on the moonlit night of October 23, almost a thousand pieces of British heavy artillery commenced firing along the El Alamein front. The barrage, which continued into the early hours of the twenty-fourth, served notice to Erwin Rommel that Bernard Montgomery was on his way. At first light, the Highlanders screamed their ancient battle cry,
Caberfeidh
,
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as the skirl of their bagpipes rent the silence. They attacked through the blowing grit of a dry desert dawn. By daylight, the Eighth Army—190,000 men, 1,400 anti-tank guns, and almost 1,000 tanks—smashed into Rommel’s lines across a six-mile front. The tanks soon stopped while sappers cleared narrow paths—just wide enough to accommodate tank treads—through the half million landmines Rommel had buried at his front. It soon became apparent that the British possessed too few sappers and too few mine detectors. But overall, numbers were with the British. On the northern, coastal end of the German lines (Montgomery’s real objective), the XV Panzer Corps was outnumbered at least six to one, in both tanks and men. Panzer Army Africa, more than half of which was made up of Italians, was outmanned and outgunned by almost two to one. To make matters worse for the Germans, Rommel had taken a sick leave weeks earlier and was at that moment resting in a hospital bed in Semmering, a lovely town perched on the pine-forested slopes of the southern Austrian Alps, as far removed from the war as any hamlet in Europe. At about noon, Hitler telephoned Rommel personally with the news from North Africa. “The situation looks very black,” the Führer offered. “Would you be willing to go back?”
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Rommel’s replacement in the field, General Georg Stumme, had assumed the British would attack the southern end of his lines, thirty miles from the sea, in part because the terrain was more favorable and in part
because Montgomery had positioned three dummy regiments in the south and had begun construction of a dummy waterline to the dummy forces. Stumme, in turn, lacked the gasoline to move his tanks about at will, north to south and back. He would have to stand and fight where he was. By late morning, under the onslaught of RAF fighters and Montgomery’s massed artillery, Stumme found himself completely cut off from almost all of his forces and commanders, north and south. By day’s end, Stumme was dead, felled by a massive coronary. Montgomery’s field guns raked the German panzer deployments, to horrific effect. Artillery, as Churchill had urged a year earlier, had finally found its place on the desert battlefield. Rommel, returning on October 25 to find a rout in progress, stanched his ruptured lines enough to blunt Montgomery’s initial thrusts. Rommel placed his Italian infantry between German mechanized units, in part to protect the Italians, in part to ensure that they remained on the battlefield. Yet unless he was resupplied, his diminishing numbers of men, tanks, aircraft, and artillery could only add up to retreat. He needed gasoline most of all. He radioed his status to Hitler—a message that the Bletchley crowd soon deciphered and Montgomery soon read.
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In London, Churchill, desperate for the latest news, badgered his generals without respite. For the first two days, Churchill simply asked Brooke how Montgomery was doing. When Montgomery’s progress stalled, Churchill’s tone changed. He prepared a stinging telegram for Alexander in which he sought answers to the apparent collapse of the offensive—a conclusion he reached after chatting with Eden over whisky rather than consulting with his military advisers over maps. Brooke recalled the unpleasantness in his memoirs: “What, he [Churchill] asked, is
my
Monty doing now, allowing the battle to peter out. (Monty was always
my
Monty when he was out of favor.)” Why, asked Churchill, had Montgomery “told us he would be through in seven days if all he intended to do was fight a half-hearted battle?” For Churchill, more than a line in the desert was at stake. A by-election weeks earlier had gone against the government by a margin of 66 to 34 percent, a stunning yet symbolic rebuke. Churchill had convinced Cripps, who was threatening resignation, to stay on as Speaker until the battle in the desert was finished, win or lose. A defeat in the desert would very likely result in Churchill being known henceforth as the former prime minister.
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For seven days Monty fought, and for seven days he had nothing to show but almost eight thousand wounded and two thousand killed, including the son of Churchill’s first true love of almost five decades earlier, Pamela Plowden. The Eighth Army could not punch through the minefield, which had become a no-man’s-land. Montgomery threw British and Australian tanks into the minefield with results that evoked the slaughter of the Great
War. His divisional commanders advised he quit the battle and regroup. Having none of it, he threatened to sack those who lacked the appropriate aggressive spirit and replace them with fighters. He understood that if he could not win by fast and bold strokes, he would win though attrition. He could afford to trade tank for tank and man for man until he carried the day. And so he continued to feed his men and tanks into the maw. The next few days would mark a turning point, one way or another, for Churchill, for Britain, for the future conduct of the war.

If Montgomery failed, Torch could not succeed, at least according to plan, not with the British Eighth Army tied down in Egypt, 1,600 miles from the Allied invasion force. In that case, Hitler, on his Russian front, would gain invaluable weeks, if not months, to drive farther into the Caucasus and to pour forces into Stalingrad with no need to watch his back. If Montgomery failed or if Stalingrad fell, Europe-first might become Europe-maybe for the Americans. Stalemate or defeat at El Alamein would exact a heavy political as well as a military price. Churchill informed Brooke that the office of prime minister would go to somebody else if Rommel held his desert position. In that case, Sir Stafford Cripps—who in private regularly deprecated Churchill’s war record, but as leader of the House was forced to explain the defeats to Parliament—might start serving vegetarian dinners in a new residence, No. 10 Downing Street. All depended upon Montgomery. Churchill was “finding the suspense almost unbearable,” Bracken told Dr. Wilson as the world waited for news from the desert.
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On October 30, thanks to Ultra decrypts and on the advice of his lieutenants, Montgomery shifted his main thrust from the coast about ten miles to the south. It was the sort of improvisation Montgomery disliked, but it worked. Rommel, by shifting his armor to the far north, to counter Montgomery’s initial strike, had weakened his southern sector. By then, the Desert Fox had fewer than four dozen tanks remaining fit for battle, and they were almost out of fuel. Two ships carrying gasoline to Rommel were sunk as they approached Tobruk, again thanks to Ultra. Montgomery pressed on. His New Zealanders broke Rommel’s lines on November 2. Rommel counterattacked in a furious two-hour tank assault, but realizing he was waging a battle of attrition he could only lose, he called off the attack. Early the next day, he left behind a rearguard and turned west. Hopes ran high, Churchill later wrote, that the moment had arrived for the “annihilation” of Rommel’s army. Rommel, too, expected as much, as he raced for Tripoli. But the late autumn rains had arrived. Rather than compete with foul weather and washed-out desert tracks, Monty, after a desultory twenty-hour chase, called for a one-day halt. British fighter pilots who were tracking the Germans and calling in the enemy’s positions were
dumbfounded. Where was the final, fatal strike? Where was the Eighth Army?
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Just after he began his retreat, Rommel received a direct order from Hitler: “Stand fast, yield not a yard of room.” Sheer will could prevail, the Führer believed, and not for the first time in history, and “as to your troops, you can show them no other road than to victory or death [
Sieg oder Tod
].” Mussolini, completely misreading the situation, sent a telegraph congratulating Rommel on “the successful counter-attack.” Rommel’s lieutenant, General Ritter von Thoma, called Hitler’s directive “a piece of unparalleled madness.” Rommel paused for twenty hours in order to adhere to the spirit if not the letter of the order. Then the Desert Fox and his few dozen tanks—soon to be pursued by ten times as many—ran for Libya. Left behind in the flinty scrabble were almost six thousand dead Germans and Italians, their corpses already blackening in the desert heat. British intelligence officers wandered among the bodies and yanked from pockets postcards and love letters from home, written in German and Italian, to sons and lovers and husbands: “We are so glad you are now in beautiful Egypt”; “May Saint Dominic protect you.” As night fell the discarded letters scudded across the desert on the breezes, as if following the survivors to sanctuary.
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Churchill, elated by the news from Egypt (and a handwritten congratulatory note from the King), told luncheon companions on November 6 that Rommel’s army had been cut from its positions, like a limpet is cut from a rock. Slashing the air, as if with a knife, Churchill asked, “And what happens to a limpet when it is cut from its rock. It dies a miserable death.” But not for nothing was Rommel called the Desert Fox. He had escaped and would live to fight another day, giving the lie to Machiavelli’s maxim that the fox cannot outrun the wolves. The Italian infantry were not as fortunate as their mechanized German brethren. To evacuate their own, the Germans commandeered what little transportation the Italians had. “The Italians,” Churchill told the Commons on November 10, “were left to perish in the waterless desert or surrender as they are doing.” The Battle of Egypt was won.
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On the final day of October, U-559 was depth-charged by the Royal Navy and forced to the surface off Port Said. Its crew was taken aboard British cutters while three tars boarded the submarine and made for the radio room. The scene played out almost exactly as it had aboard U-110 the previous year. U-559 foundered and went down, taking two of the British sailors with her. But the third managed to escape with the boat’s codebooks and Enigma machine, complete with the fourth wheel that had stymied
Bletchley for almost a year. The British now held the key to unlocking Dönitz’s naval communications. With that month’s U-boat codes in hand, Bletchley began reading German radio traffic even as the Torch armada lingered off North Africa. But the advantage vanished when Berlin changed the codes later in the month. Bletchley’s wizards found themselves once again stymied. The captured Enigma machine ensured a breakthrough, sooner or later, but later would not do. Dönitz now had more than two hundred U-boats available for duty in the North Atlantic. He sent one hundred or more on patrol during each of the next six months, more than twice as many as at the start of the year. British losses alone pushed over 710,000 tons in November, the worst of any month of the war; 117 ships went down that month, far more than could be made up by new construction.
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