The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (414 page)

I
n celebration of Montgomery’s glorious deeds (and before the Allies landed in North Africa), Churchill ordered that the church bells be rung throughout the land on the following Sunday, November 8. Brooke, Clementine, and daughter Mary were aghast at the suggestion. Clementine became “violent” in her opposition (“quite rightly,” thought Mary); Brooke “implored” Churchill to wait until the Torch forces had gained undisputed control of the beaches. Since 1939, too much had gone too wrong too often to risk ringing out false hope. Churchill heeded their advice, but only for a few days. By November 12, the Anglo-American army was safely ashore in North Africa, its eastern elements already pushing toward Tunisia. Montgomery by then had sent Rommel packing and had captured six divisions’ worth of Italians.
³⁵⁹

The church bells rang on Sunday, November 15. After three years of hope, there finally had arrived from El Alamein a dash of glory. Exhilaration was in the air, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, “a wave of emotion… that makes this moment something like those moments in the summer of 1940. There’s a big difference, however. Those were grim days in 1940. Today, though sensible Britons think there’s certain to be plenty of grimness ahead, for the first time they believe sober reasons for hope are at last in sight.”
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In an essay he wrote earlier that year, George Orwell observed that Englishmen always remember the military disasters—Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli, Passchendaele. These were the battles “engraved” upon common memory. The battles of the Great War that finally broke the Germans were simply unknown to the general public. “The most stirring battle poem in English,” Orwell wrote, “is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.”
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El Alamein not only engraved itself upon the common memory, it erased the old memories. Churchill had found his Wellington in Montgomery, a general as ruthless in pursuit of victory as himself. In 1940, Mollie Panter-Downes compared Churchill and his influence on British morale to Pitt’s leadership in 1759. In 1942, Churchill lost all of his battles before finally winning in the desert. As the year went out, nobody compared El Alamein
and 1942 with Waterloo and 1815, still less with 1759, “the year of victories,” of Pitt, and Wolfe at Quebec, of the Royal Navy smashing French fleets at Quiberon Bay and Cape Lagos, and of Minden, where English and Prussian foot soldiers and artillery ended French dreams of continental hegemony. “Our bells are worn threadbare with ringing for victories,” Horace Walpole bragged to a friend that year. This was the Empire in ascendancy. In the summer of 1759, the keel of a 3,500-ton man-of-war was laid at the Chatham Dockyard, and the next year, in commemoration of Britain’s
“annus mirabilis”
the ship was christened HMS
Victory
. At the end of 1759, David Garrick composed “Heart of Oak,” his paean to the ships and men of the Royal Navy. As 1942 neared its end, the last stanza of Garrick’s poem applied to all branches of HMG’s military:

Early in 1942, Churchill promised Britons more grave disappointments and disasters. As the months sloughed off the calendar, he certainly made good on that pledge, in Singapore, Burma, and the North African desert. The year had been anything but a year of victories, but it had been a year
with
victories. And that was enough.

C
hurchill alone among the Big Three had journeyed overseas that year—twice to Washington, once to Moscow—in order to prod the alliance into strategic agreement and in order to preserve the alliance. “The Big Three” was a phrase that might conjure an image of a mighty war wagon pulled by three noble steeds; yet, while Churchill and Roosevelt and the Combined Chiefs of Staff made every awkward effort to ride together in harness, Stalin rode alone. In fact, for most of 1942, the so-called Big Three were more a Big Two plus One. The Allied war effort, George Kennan later wrote, was less one of common, coordinated strategy than of simultaneous action, the Americans and the British in the west, Stalin in the east.
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Stalin’s military chiefs did not consult the British and Americans; they consulted Stalin. Stalin, in turn, was relentless in pressing his demands upon his two allies—for more matériel and a second front—which
Roosevelt and Churchill tried in good faith to meet. The Russian front exerted an almost gravitational effect on decisions made by Roosevelt and Churchill, like the moon on the tides. In fact, the Russian front might as well have been on the moon for the lack of intelligence that Stalin allowed to seep out. Roosevelt, sure that he could handle Uncle Joe, had yet to meet the man; Stalin, for his part, refused to leave Russia to meet his allies and did not trust the British. That month, the British ambassador to Moscow, Clark Kerr, reported to Churchill that Stalin not only did not believe the Americans and British would keep their promises to open a second front, but “feared we were building up a vast army which might one day turn around and compound with Germany against Russia.” Though sustained by Churchill’s letters and telegrams to Roosevelt and Stalin, the “Big Three” largely remained an impersonal linguistic contrivance until Churchill made his pilgrimages to Washington and Moscow. Then, and only then, did the Trinity become personal. The journeys he undertook that year were so hazardous that General Douglas MacArthur proposed Churchill be awarded the Victoria Cross: “No one of those who wear it deserves it more than he,” MacArthur told a British officer, if for no other reason than such journeys “through foreign and hostile lands may be the duty of young pilots, but for a Statesman burdened by the world’s cares, it is an act of inspiring gallantry and valor.”
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Churchill had found the path to glory during the year he fought alone after the French surrender, the Last Man Standing. “God knows where we would be without him,” Brooke had written in his diary at the close of 1941, “but God knows where we shall go with him.” In 1942 Churchill cemented his alliance, though like the foundation of an old country house, it was in need of constant repointing. With his alliance gained, he had found the path to victory.
That
was where they were going.

He liked to “pester, nag, and bite.” Speaking in the House shortly after the Torch landings, he anointed himself a “prod.” “My difficulties,” he admitted, “rather lie in finding the patience and self-restraint to wait through many anxious weeks for the results to be achieved.” Actually he pursued neither patience nor self-restraint with any real effort; he was too impatient. He told a member of his Defence Secretariat that action and results were all that mattered: “It was all very well to say that everything had been thought of. The crux of the matter was—has anything been done?” In the Western Desert, something had.
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“And now at last,” Brooke told his diary, “the tide has begun to turn.”
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W
ithin days of the North African landings, Churchill concluded that Torch might wrap up by Christmas. Alan Brooke, too, was confident, telling his diary that Ultra decrypts, if correct, indicated a good chance of “pushing him [the enemy] into the sea before long.” Churchill, enthused, began work on a “most secret” memo for the British Chiefs of Staff. His objectives included the “completion of Torch by Christmas”; “bringing Turkey into the war” by March; the buildup of the Anglo-American force in Britain by June; the assembly of landing craft and completion of “preparations for Roundup” by July. Finally, in August or September, “Action.” Such was the plan.
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On November 12, British paratroopers dropped into Bône, two hundred miles east of Algiers and halfway to Tunis, into which German reinforcements were now pouring. British commandos in small motor launches leap-frogged along the Tunisian coast ahead of General Anderson’s diminutive First British Army, which had begun its race to Tunis the day before. Anderson made good progress for a few days, but a lack of locomotives and rolling stock held up his tanks and supplies. The transport situation worsened when the late autumn rains arrived, turning roads into slurries. Anderson, balancing his need for speed against the need to protect his flanks, divided the First Army into three prongs, with the result that he found himself trying to crack a coconut with a fork rather than a bayonet.

Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander of German operations in the Mediterranean, had already sent his vanguard to Tunis, and by the end of the month he had put 20,000 Germans there, along with Stukas, panzers, and artillery, forces equal in size to Anderson’s and far more experienced. The rest of Eisenhower’s troops sat static in Oran and Morocco, the result of a lingering American fear that Hitler would strike into the American rear through Spain with the Luftwaffe and paratroops. Colonel Ian Jacob recorded in his diary that the American chiefs “regarded the Mediterranean as a kind of dark hole, into which one entered at one’s peril.” Marshall told Roosevelt that week that of three possible Axis options—invading Spain, driving through the Caucasus, and attacking Britain—the invasion of Spain seemed most probable. Accordingly, safety first was Eisenhower’s order of the day. On November 23 Brooke complained to his
diary of “the very slow rate of progress in North Africa,” which he blamed on Eisenhower’s inability “to handle the military situation confronting him.” By then, the Allies, with 250,000 troops ashore, had doubled the original landing force. Yet only Anderson was making headway, and not much at that. Churchill, unable to prod Eisenhower, unloaded on Brooke. Torch, he told the CIGS, “must be a springboard and not a sofa.”
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Success in Tunisia depended on two factors—bold initiative (lacking, other than Anderson’s drive toward Tunis) and the continued commitment of American resources. Any large-scale diversion of American men, planes, or ships to the Pacific could snuff out Torch. In fact, America that year had sent more troops—460,000 soldiers and Marines—to the Pacific than to Britain and North Africa, where a total of 380,000 Americans served, the vast majority far in the rear. Getting anything, men or machines, to Britain was the problem. U-boats in the Atlantic harvested more than 100 ships and 720,000 tons of Allied shipping that month, the greatest monthly loss of the war to date. Trying to explain the realities of the German naval blockade to Stalin, Churchill wrote, “You who have so much land may find it hard to realize that we [Britain] can only live and fight in proportions to our sea communications.” The U-boat successes, Churchill told Stalin, were the “limiting factor” in Anglo-American planning. And every American warship sent to the Pacific made the deadly work of the U-boats that much easier. Then, just days after Torch began, a naval battle in the Pacific whetted the appetites of Americans for more action against Japan, naval action, and this at a time when, as Churchill told Stalin, the Allies lacked the warships to protect both the Torch landings and the Arctic convoys upon which Stalin depended.
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On November 12, two days after Churchill’s Mansion House address, American and Imperial Japanese naval forces met again in “Ironbottom Sound,” hard by the coast of Guadalcanal. Since August, the Japanese had run troops and fast warships—the “Tokyo Express”—from Rabaul to Guadalcanal, four hundred miles down “the Slot,” and since August, the American navy had contested the Tokyo Express. In mid-October Tokyo had decided the time had come to obliterate the Americans on Guadalcanal. The Japanese plan called for a task force to shell the Marine airfield into oblivion in support of an invasion force, which would land during daylight sometime on or about November 13. The Americans, meanwhile, were running in their own reinforcements. Forewarned by coast watchers of the Japanese fleet headed their way, the Americans were ready when, at dusk on November 12, the Japanese made for Guadalcanal. The American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison later wrote that the ensuing battle (two, actually, separated by a day of uneasy quiet) “recalled the Anglo-Dutch battles of the seventeenth century, when each side slugged the other
until all but one went down.” No quarter was given. By the time it was over, the Americans had taken an awful beating, and had in fact suffered a tactical defeat. But the Japanese admirals, fearing that even larger U.S. forces might be on their way, failed to press on with the destruction of the airfield. Instead, they turned for home and in so doing handed the Americans a strategic victory. The cost to the U.S. Navy was terrible: a battleship, several cruisers and destroyers damaged, two cruisers and six destroyers sunk, and more than sixteen hundred bluejackets killed. It was a price Washington could bear.
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Days later, Churchill cabled congratulations on the victory to Roosevelt. Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt announced, “It would seem that the turning-point in this war has at last been reached.” Churchill preferred for the time being to stick with his hedged bet of “the end of the beginning.” After the war a captured contemporary Imperial Japanese Navy document validated Roosevelt’s enthusiasm: “It must be said that the success or failure in recapturing Guadalcanal… is the fork in the road which leads to victory for them or us.”
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The Americans had taken the most advantageous fork. But Alan Brooke and Air Marshal Portal feared that if the Americans chose now to strike hell-bent down the road to Tokyo, they would do so at the expense of the European theater. Portal argued that because the Americans considered North Africa an exercise in containment rather than a springboard to the Continent, they saw no contradiction in shifting resources from Britain to the Pacific. For Churchill, this would not do. He had promised Stalin a second front in 1943, and the initial success of Torch had, in his estimation, made that promise a practical possibility.
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In Russia later that November week, the Wehrmacht and Red Army reached another fork in another road. At dawn on November 19, Marshal Zhukov threw his armies north of Stalingrad against the German flank. The following day, his armies south of the city struck. Both armies then shot toward the great bend of the Don, thirty miles west of Stalingrad. Zhukov saw the German position around Stalingrad for what it was, more of a “fragile shell” than a steel ring. Supported by an artillery barrage of more than two thousand guns, their movements obscured by a ferocious blizzard, the Soviets—a million strong—smashed through the ill-equipped and none-too-enthusiastic Romanian, Hungarian, and Italian forces guarding Paulus’s flanks, killing and capturing more than three hundred thousand of Hitler’s allies. By the twenty-first, Paulus and the remainder of his Sixth Army—almost a quarter of a million men—found themselves within the Soviet pincers, which were closing fast. Two days later, the Soviets linked arms at Kalach, on the Don. The Fourth German Panzer Army was forced to flee westward, leaving Paulus’s Sixth Army
trapped in the ruins of Stalingrad. Paulus’s options were reduced to either standing and fighting or attempting a breakout westward from the city to the Don, there to join Field Marshal Erich von Manstein’s Army Group Don. But the genius of Zhukov’s plan was that it called for a broad encirclement of the Germans rather than a narrow pinch from which Paulus might escape. When Manstein, Germany’s greatest strategist, tried to break through to relieve Paulus, he got to within thirty-five miles of Stalingrad before he was stopped. In mid-December, Hitler, who a month earlier had broadcast to the world that the Sixth Army would never leave Stalingrad, reiterated his orders. Paulus, his escape now blocked by Zhukov, obeyed. He had no other choice.
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Stalin, as usual, failed to disclose to Churchill or Roosevelt the exact disposition or strength of the Red Army (a habit Churchill and Brooke found infuriating given Stalin’s regular belittling of Britain’s effort). Only the combatants amid the ruins of Stalingrad knew how the battle was going, and they didn’t know much. Their horizons could be measured in yards and feet. Soviet loudspeakers informed Paulus’s troops that a German soldier was dying every seven seconds. The most titanic battle in history raged within lines so compact that there were more troops than in all of Tunisia battling each other among a few square miles of rubble, a zone of death not much greater in size than Lower Manhattan or Kensington. The rotting viscera of the dead and the bodily wastes of the living bred typhus and dysentery that killed men as surely—but not as mercifully—as the storm of bombs and bullets. Stalingrad had become like a collapsing star, pulling all in its orbit toward its ever more compressed core, a fiery hell from which nothing escaped. The city was “a vast furnace,” a German survivor wrote, a world of “burning, blinding smoke… lit by the reflection of the flames.” At night—“scorching, howling, bleeding nights”—terrified dogs plunged into the Volga and paddled madly for the Russian side. Those in London and Washington who waited for news from Stalingrad would have to bide their time until broadcasts announcing the outcome issued forth from Berlin and Moscow. The loser would no doubt accompany an announcement with a somber dirge, the victor with a celebratory march.
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D
uring the last week of November, Dwight Eisenhower transferred his headquarters from Gibraltar to Algiers, where he and his second-in-command, Mark Clark, and their retinue took over the St. George Hotel and two villas. That put Eisenhower about three hundred miles west of the Allied front lines, which hooked south from the Mediterranean about fifty
miles west of the port of Bizerte to a terminus high in a mountain pass called Kasserine, located in the Western Dorsal of the Atlas Mountains, seventy miles southwest of Tunis. There, drifts of daisies and red poppies spilled over the flinty, wind-swept landscape; the ground was impermeable to entrenching tools, and the terrain offered little defilade.

Near the northern end of the line, Anderson’s forward elements had advanced to within just a dozen miles of Tunis. From the heights west of the city, British scouts looked across the plains that had once fed ancient Rome. In the far distance the minarets of Tunis stabbed up into the Mediterranean haze. Beyond Tunis, the ruins of Carthage overlooked the sea. The Romans had come 2,100 years earlier, intent on utterly destroying Carthage, and did so, but only after a long naval siege and house-to-house combat. If Anderson’s little army drove into Tunis, this battle could only end in like fashion. The race for Tunis was tightening, but Churchill, still confident that Anderson would take the city by Christmas and that Montgomery would soon run Rommel to ground, began in earnest his campaign for the next Allied effort: Operation Roundup—the invasion of France. Indeed, Montgomery that week pushed Rommel to El Agheila, halfway to Tripoli. Twice before, in 1941 and 1942, Rommel had turned from here and sent the British scrambling back toward Cairo. Short of tanks and gasoline, he could not do so again. After a brief standoff, the Desert Fox fled west, stalked by Montgomery, who now had struck into Tripolitania, the garden of Mussolini’s African empire. On December 2, Churchill, enthused by Monty’s exploits, told Roosevelt “the chances for Roundup may be greatly improved” by the successes in North Africa and Russian resistance at Stalingrad.
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George Marshall, too, was optimistic. He told Roosevelt that Tunis could be occupied within two or three weeks “provided that [Anderson’s] two divisions were sufficient to accomplish the task” and the Axis did not do something unexpected. Implicit in that astoundingly qualified assessment are two obvious questions. What plans were in place in the event Anderson’s little force proved
insufficient
to take Tunis and, what if the Axis
did
do something unexpected? There was no answer to either question. Meanwhile, more than one hundred thousand American troops served as reserves far in the rear of Anderson, out of action and on guard for an Axis strike through Spain.
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