The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (413 page)

The Darlan expedient indeed proved temporary when on Christmas Eve, Darlan, who had managed that year to earn the enmity of de Gaulle, Vichy France, Churchill, Eisenhower, and Hitler, was shot dead by a young French royalist named Ferdinand Bonnier de la Chapelle. Although trained by the SOE, Chapelle was not acting under orders from London. He was tried, convicted, and shot, all in less than two days. The mystery around the murder deepened when it was revealed that MI6 chief Stewart Menzies, having left England for the first time during the war, was dining just a few hundred yards away from Darlan’s house. Darlan’s last words were said to have been “the British have finally done for me.” Whether or not
the English had a hand in the murder, Darlan’s exit freed the Allies from having to further explain their association with the disreputable admiral. Churchill, in his memoirs, acknowledged that Darlan—a Fascist and Anglophobe who had made wrongheaded decisions for two years—had in the end made a decision that allowed the Allies to gain their foothold in North Africa. Had he ordered resistance against the Allies, Torch might have failed. Whether or not Darlan at the time fostered ambitions of ruling over French North African under Allied protection became moot with his death. He had deservedly earned the reputation of an arrogant, conniving turncoat, but his last turn of coat had finally put him on the right side. “Let him rest in peace,” Churchill wrote of Darlan, “and let us all be thankful we have never had to face the trials under which he broke.”
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Darlan’s exit left Giraud as head of the French military in North Africa, but it also left a vacuum in French civil affairs. The way was now open for de Gaulle and the Fighting French to assume a place at the table—at the head of the table if de Gaulle was to realize his ambitions. He was loathed in Washington, where Cordell Hull called the Free French “polecats.” Roosevelt, in a sarcastic handwritten addition to a cable to Churchill asked, “Why doesn’t de Gaulle go to war? Why doesn’t he start North by West half West from Brazenville? It would take him a long time to get to the Oasis of Somewhere.” The reference was to Brazzaville, located on the Congo River, and the capital of French Equatorial Africa. Yet despite the Frenchman’s arrogance, de Gaulle remained for Churchill and Britons the symbol of French valor, the hero who had wanted to fight Germans for three years and deserved the opportunity to do so. Two weeks before Darlan’s assassination, Eden had asked de Gaulle whether, if Darlan were to disappear from the scene, de Gaulle could reach some sort of agreement with French North African authorities. De Gaulle answered yes. Darlan had indeed disappeared. In order that the British (and therefore de Gaulle, to whom the British had made commitments) not be excluded from North African politics, Churchill appointed Harold Macmillan (with Roosevelt’s approval) as resident minister to Allied Headquarters, where, Churchill hoped, he would serve as a counterweight to Roosevelt’s man in Morocco, Robert Murphy. Macmillan, Churchill informed Roosevelt, “is animated by the friendliest feelings towards the United States, and his mother hails from Kentucky.” Actually, his mother was a Hoosier, and although Macmillan, like Churchill, was half American, he was British to the bone, and a Tory. Churchill had just dealt himself into the political game in North Africa. Given the stubbornness of Charles de Gaulle, it was to prove a risky and frustrating game of chance.
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O
n November 10, 1942, Churchill delivered two of his most memorable lines while addressing the traditional Lord Mayor’s dinner at Mansion House (the Guildhall having been destroyed during the Blitz). Referring to Montgomery’s desert victory, Churchill cautioned, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Then, after calling himself Franklin Roosevelt’s “active and ardent lieutenant” in the “mighty undertaking” taking place in French North Africa, Churchill sought to dispel any notion that he had just admitted to a subordinated role within the alliance. “Let me, however, make this clear…. We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” In uttering those words Churchill appeared to have confirmed for critics, then and since, his status as an outdated imperialist who either could not see or could not abide a simple truth—the age of European colonialism was just about over, its expiration aided and abetted by Franklin Roosevelt. Yet Churchill’s next line, infrequently noted, completed his thought: “For that task, if it were prescribed, someone else would have to be found, and under democracy, I suppose this nation would have to be consulted.” Churchill had been asked to form a government for one reason only, to win the war. He was determined that at war’s end Britain would regain territories lost to the Axis, much as America expected to recover Guam and Wake Island. If future events demanded a restructuring of the British Empire, the British people would decide the issue. Churchill ended his address with words that encapsulated his belief in both England and the Empire: “Here we are, and here we stand, a veritable rock of stability in this drifting world.”
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For Churchill, the British Empire was a variation on German philosopher Gottfried Liebniz’s best of all possible worlds. Yet that sentiment formed only a part of his worldview. He was a great European patriot as well as a British patriot, and his willingness to stand alone against Hitler was both an expression of that patriotism and the defense of a truth as Churchill saw it: Europe was the birthplace of Western political and aesthetic traditions, the defense of which, since the fall of France, had fallen to Britain. During his Wilderness Years, he had warned of the danger Hitler posed to Europe and by extension to Britain and the Empire. Even after war came, sober men such as Baldwin and Halifax believed they could preserve the Empire by reaching an agreement with—by again appeasing—Hitler. Churchill did not. Britain had gone to war to restore liberty
to Europe. Yet he knew that if Britain emerged from the war victorious, it would possibly emerge broken as well.

Churchill, peering backward though history, grasped the ultimate mortality of empires, all save the British Empire, which functioned as a parliamentary democracy, a fact that for Churchill justified—demanded—its continuance. He once told Colville that the one great lesson he had learned from his father was that “the British alone had managed to combine Empire and Liberty.” There were inequalities, to be sure, and he wanted them rectified. He told Attlee that the old order was changing and the “pomp and vanity must go.” He told Eden that in Egypt “too many fat, insolent and party interests had grown up under our protection” and that in time the rich pashas and landowners would have to pay taxes at the rates paid by the wealthy in Britain, which rates Churchill intended to keep high in order that the financial burden of the war did not fall unfairly on Britain’s working class. He pondered as a slogan for postwar reconstruction: “Food, house, and work for everyone.” Yet his cousins across the Atlantic considered “empire” and “liberty” to be antonyms. Of Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “He’s very human and I like him, tho’ I don’t want him to control the peace.” Churchill understood, wrote Colville, that “republicanism and anti-colonialism were shibboleths in Washington and that no American paused to consider the implications of either.”
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Churchill believed that the diaspora of English-speaking peoples that had taken place since the sixteenth century had resulted in an empire unique in history, an empire, he wrote, “based on Government by consent and the voluntary association of autonomous states under the Crown.” He was one with Aristotle: rule shows the man—to which could be added, rule shows the nation. His was an empire of shared democratic ideals, shared risks, and shared rewards. It was a nation, the mightiest oak in the forest of nations, yet it cast a beneficent shadow in which less civilized peoples might find shelter and grow. On accepting the Tory chairmanship in 1940, he repeated his father’s words that he had shared with Colville, that Britain “alone among the nations of the world… found the means to combine Empire and liberty. Alone among the peoples we have reconciled democracy and tradition.” He considered the Empire synonymous with democracy, and worthy of long life—even perpetual life—whatever the sacrifice required of himself, of Britons, and of the King’s colonial armies.
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A year before his Mansion House speech, Churchill addressed the boys of Harrow. He told them: “Never give in. Never give in.
Never, never, never, never
—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
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He had not yielded in 1942, when defeat had been the order of the day.
Even with America in (and for eleven months Clementine regularly reminded Churchill that America was in, yet not
really
in), he lacked the requisite military might to kill his enemies. What remained for Churchill but optimism? The dark days of the previous two years did not justify it, yet he always found the sunny side. He was no man of sorrow. Gloom regularly overtook him after the military disasters that had occurred with depressing regularity, yet it did not linger. It never, his daughter Mary recalls, “un-manned him.”
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An air of inevitable Allied victory is attached to America’s entry into the war; yet 1942 had passed with Britain still on the knife edge. Only in hindsight do we know that El Alamein and Midway Island were turning points; that Hitler erred in his U-boat deployment; and that he erred in not erasing Malta from the map. As 1942 drew to a close, Churchill remained true to his conviction that the rings of steel and concrete that Germany and Japan had thrown up around their respective conquests should be relentlessly probed until weak spots were exposed, and then exploited. By air the RAF had penetrated the German ring, and now, by land, in North Africa, the Allies were testing the tensile strength of the ring, as was Stalin in his namesake city. On Guadalcanal the Americans refused to relinquish their tenuous grip on the southernmost radius of the Japanese ring.

S
hortly before Montgomery attacked at El Alamein, Churchill replied to a request by Anthony Eden for his opinion on the “Four Power Paper,” a Foreign Office summary of the postwar organization of the Four Great Powers—Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Churchill cautioned Eden against jumping to conclusions as to just who would be included in the so-called four great powers. “We cannot, however, tell what sort of a Russia and what kind of Russian demands we shall have to face.” He added, “It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid the culture and independence of the ancient states of Europe.” As for China, “I cannot regard the Chungking Government as representing a great world power. Certainly [China] would be a faggot-vote on the side of the United States in any attempt to liquidate the British Empire.” In general, Churchill told Eden, he favored a “United States of Europe capable of defending itself against all threats.
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Yet, he advised, as enjoyable as it was to
ponder such questions, “the war has prior claims on your attention and mine.” He closed with a piece of homegrown wisdom: “I hope these speculative studies will be entrusted mainly to those on whose hands time hangs heavy, and that we shall not overlook Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery Book recipe for the jugged hare—‘First catch your hare.’ ”
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