The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (417 page)

They settled on Casablanca in the newly liberated French protectorate of Morocco as the conference site, and on Symbol as the code name for the meeting. As it would be a parley to mull over military strategy, Roosevelt told Harriman to inform Churchill that the president wanted “no ringers” at the conference. That is, he wanted to exclude his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. This put Harriman in a delicate spot, for Churchill worked in harness with Anthony Eden. Harriman had to persuade Churchill to exclude Eden, not because Eden had nothing to add, but because Roosevelt sought to distance himself from Hull, who was “forceful, stubborn, and difficult to handle” and would likely prove “a nuisance at the conference.” Churchill reluctantly agreed to the decision. Hull, offended, complained to Harriman that the president was not keeping him informed. That was true; Franklin Roosevelt served as his own secretary of state. Yet the exclusion of Eden did not diminish Churchill’s enthusiasm for the meeting. He proposed to Roosevelt that they travel under the aliases Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but British officials thought the aliases were an invitation to the more cynical members of the press to term the venture quixotic. Churchill agreed, and cabled Roosevelt that in order to confuse the enemy, they should travel
incognito
“as Admiral Q and Mr. P…. We must mind our P’s and Q’s.” Although he agreed to leave Eden behind, he informed Harriman that he was bringing along “a couple of private secretaries,” his map room staff, and “one or two of the Joint Staff Secretariat.”
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O
n Christmas Eve Eisenhower notified Roosevelt and Churchill that the winter rains had forced a shutdown of Tunisian operations for two months. The Germans had driven the British forward elements from the aptly
named Longstop Hill, within sight of Tunis. Kesselring and Arnim had won the race. Brooke told his diary: “I am afraid that Eisenhower as a general is hopeless. He submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties, partly, I am afraid, because he knows little about military matters.” The words echo Brooke’s sentiments regarding Churchill, of whom he wrote, “Perhaps his most remarkable failing is that he can never see the whole strategical problem at once. His gaze always settles on some definite part of the canvas and the rest of the picture is lost.” Yet Brooke, as coolly logical as Stafford Cripps, failed as did Cripps to grasp the essential Churchill. Churchill had not learned his debating skills at an army staff college, where officers are trained to remove the emotional from strategic planning; nor had he learned his skills as a barrister at the bar. His education took place in the House of Commons, where knife fights were fought with words and the objective was to gut an opponent’s policy by gutting the opponent. After four decades of honing his skills in the House, Churchill could approach Brooke in no other manner but to cajole, belittle, and berate. In fact, Churchill, more intuitive than logical, possessed the painter’s gift for seeing myriad vistas, far and near. He scanned the entire canvas and when he came upon a scene of interest, he paused and pondered before moving on, never fast enough for Brooke. Thankfully for Brooke, Churchill manifested another trait. After arguing his case as if compromise were evil incarnate and the chiefs were too foolish to understand the perfect wisdom of his position, he acceded to their viewpoint if, that is, he had failed to bring them around to his. Brooke did not grasp that when it came to strategic thinking, Churchill could weigh the value of and consequences of several strategic solutions at once, military and political. It fell to Brooke to nudge him toward the most practical.
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And that is what Brooke did in the days before the Casablanca parley. He outargued the master arguer, with the result that soon after the new year, the British, in reaching a strategic consensus, accomplished what the Americans did not. Roosevelt warned his generals that the British would arrive at Casablanca with a plan, “and stick to it.” They did, but only after Brooke persuaded Churchill to abandon his newfound enthusiasm for Roundup. When Churchill, arguing his case, informed Brooke that “we had promised Stalin we would do so when in Moscow,” Brooke replied, “No
we
did not promise!” Brooke, after much difficulty, convinced Churchill that 1943 would afford opportunity in one theater only, the Mediterranean. And that was the case the British prepared to argue at Casablanca. In fact, Churchill prepared so well for the conference that he needed a cruise ship, HMS
Bulolo,
to carry his support staffs, secretaries, and cryptologists to Africa. He had told Harriman he’d be bringing some people along; in fact, he was bringing practically everybody.
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Before Churchill made for Casablanca, a messy political affair intruded into the war-making machinery. Late in the year, his old friend Noël Coward, who had worked undercover for Bracken’s Ministry of Information, was nominated for knighthood, a reward Coward’s good friend King George thought appropriate but that Coward’s friend Winston Churchill considered ill advised. Churchill argued against the knighthood based on Coward’s having been fined £200 by HMG as a result of spending more than £11,000 during trips to America, which was in violation of the Exchequer’s currency laws. This was an extraordinary amount of money, and more than the average British family earned in ten years.
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Almost seven decades later, Churchill’s resistance to the knighthood was ascribed by some in the press to his “homophobic” mind-set, a charge not supported by any of Churchill’s inner circle, who dutifully recorded in their diaries his regular and often acerbic criticisms of men and women, great and small. Did Churchill know who in his circle was a homosexual and who was not? “I wouldn’t think he cared,” recalled Jock Colville. Churchill was well aware of the homosexual proclivities of certain of the West End theater crowd, sundry university dons, as well as myriad luminaries in HMG and the military, such as his former secretary Eddie Marsh and his bisexual friend Bob Boothby, and T. E. Lawrence, to whom Churchill remained loyal long after Lawrence’s death. Winston and Clementine lunched on occasion with W. Somerset Maugham (“Willy” to his friends), who late in life found “great pleasure” in Churchill’s presence at his dining table. Evelyn Waugh (who had had a few homosexual affairs at Oxford) was always welcome in the Churchill house, Churchill grateful to Waugh for watching out for Randolph when they served together in Yugoslavia. Churchill, a presiding member of the louche aristocracy (as characterized by the British historian Roy Jenkins) that ruled England, lived a life of valets, gardeners, chauffeurs, champagne, perfumed handkerchiefs, and pink silk underclothes, all the while surrounded by a coterie of the most eccentric Englishmen and -women—including his mother, father, and son—who enjoyed flirtations with debauchery. Homosexuality, illegal in Britain, was considered dangerous but not immoral by Churchill’s crowd, and only for the political scandal that might attach to public disclosure. Homosexuals might be a security risk, Churchill once told one of his private secretaries, not only because of the danger of blackmail but because they might feel alien in the mainstream of their own society, “like a black in a white country, or a white in a black one.”
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Though he cared little about a person’s sexual preference, Churchill was often quick with clever barbs about homosexuals. Of the notorious Tom Driberg—Beaverbrook protégé, Labour MP, and serial seducer of young men—Churchill remarked, “That’s the man who brought sodomy into
disrepute.” When he learned from MPs in the smoking room that Driberg had married a somewhat plain woman, Churchill announced, “Buggers can’t be choosers.” Yet when it came to something as serious as a knighthood for Coward, Churchill stuck to the facts.

Churchill opposed the knighthood because he took HMG’s currency laws seriously. He complained about (and paid) heavy excise taxes on the Cuban cigars that found their way to his humidor. He was not a diligent manager of his own money, but he was diligent in paying his taxes (and in taking advantage of any tax loopholes that presented themselves). Despite Coward’s secret intelligence work, which could not be divulged in any event during wartime, it simply would not do for news to escape in the midst of fiscal drought, coal shortages, and food rationing that Noël Coward, having been fined for burning through the equivalent of ten years of middle-class wages in a few months while sating his voluptuary appetites in America, had been rewarded with a knighthood.
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Churchill’s personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson (who had been knighted the previous year), was another case altogether. Although Churchill never called Wilson a friend, as he did Coward, the doctor had committed no transgressions that might reflect poorly on Churchill or England. On New Year’s Day, Doctor Wilson was made a peer, and became the First Baron Moran.

C
hurchill had intended to depart London for Casablanca on January 11, but when foul weather pushed his departure back a day, he used the time to fire off a memo to Sir Henry Tizard, who had recommended the RAF follow the lead of the Americans and resort to daytime bombing raids, with the objective of gaining more accuracy. Churchill replied that “since a great proportion of our losses are due to flak, which is more accurate by day than by night, the day bombers will have to fly at a very great height,” which would further reduce their accuracy. This was the great tactical conundrum. The Americans, with faith in the protective firepower of their Flying Fortress’s eleven .50-caliber machine guns, had embraced the tactic of daylight raids. Yet while conducting a very few such raids over France and the Netherlands, and not one over Germany, they had suffered terrible casualties among their bomber crews. Six months earlier, on July 4, six American bombers—in a statement of American independence—took part in a daylight raid on German airfields in Holland; the planes missed
their targets and two of the six never returned. Churchill believed the best—and safest—way to reduce Germany was by night bombing. Five hundred American bombers were parked in East Anglia, and he wanted them in the air over Germany, at night, even though such a tactical shift would require the retraining of every American airman. Churchill intended to voice his opposition to daytime bombing to the Americans at the upcoming Casablanca meeting. He also meant to ask the Americans just when they might begin dropping bombs on Germany.
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The ongoing dispute between Prof Lindemann—Lord Cherwell—and Tizard only served to further muck up the works, and ill serve Churchill. Sir Henry sought to bury the hatchet with Cherwell, but Prof saw no reason to extract it from between Tizard’s shoulder blades.
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Churchill told Tizard that his bombing suggestion was “all a matter of numbers” and instructed him to prepare a report for his return. But Cherwell, not Tizard, accompanied Churchill to Casablanca, and nobody could assemble numbers like the Prof. Cherwell’s objective was to destroy German morale, ergo German houses, which usually contained residents. He and Churchill of course hoped to destroy German industry as well, but poor bombing accuracy—day or night—proscribed inflicting a mortal wound on German industry. But Cherwell knew that as long as bombs fell somewhere within a city, they destroyed houses, and therefore morale. He had advocated that strategy almost a year earlier, in a study that came to be known as the “Dehousing Paper.” He had Churchill’s full support. Thus, there could be no doubt that Tizard’s numbers would never stack up to Cherwell’s, or that Sir Henry’s suggestion would ever fly.
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By this date, after almost forty months of war, the British had poured 70,000 tons of bombs into Germany, the equivalent of 6,000 sorties by Lancaster heavy bombers and more than four times the tonnage the Luftwaffe dropped on Britain during the height of the 1940 Blitz. Within six months, Bomber Command would double that tonnage. But the American Eighth Air Force had yet to get off the ground in any meaningful way. It was headquartered near Bomber Command at the Wycombe Abbey, a girls’ school in a former country house tucked into the lovely meadows and crofts of Buckinghamshire. In the months since the school’s students and teachers were sent packing, the Eighth had done little more than unpack its charts, sextants, and slide rules. The Eighth Air Force’s commander, Major General Carl Spaatz (whose name Churchill mispronounced as “spots”), and much of the Eighth had been siphoned off to North Africa,
with the result that the Americans, in a few night raids, dropped fewer tons of bombs on Germany during the final months of 1942 than the Luftwaffe had dropped on London on the first
night
of the Blitz. This was unacceptable to Churchill, who intended to say as much in Casablanca to the overall U.S. air commander, General Ira Eaker, himself a believer in the invincibility of airpower. “The Americans had been in the war for more than a year,” Churchill later wrote, “but so far had never thrown a single bomb on Germany by daylight methods.”
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