The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (419 page)

The nation’s food supply, as always, occupied Churchill’s thoughts as he prepared to leave for Casablanca. Hunger was not killing Britons, but it was diminishing their ability to work, in fields and factories. Churchill dictated a memo on January 12 that reflected the major consequence of the shipping crisis: the food crisis. To the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries he wrote, “Please make me a plan to have more eggs.” Of the millions of tons of barley and oats grown and imported, he asked, could not some be diverted to “garden hens” in order to increase the egg yield? The memo was similar to many he had sent regularly for almost three years, a combination of desperation and a call for clear thinking. After a visit to Britain months earlier, the Lend-Lease administrator Edward Stettinius reported that forests had been chopped down to harvest the lumber and to make room for farms. Golf courses and parks had been plowed up and converted to crop cultivation. Marshes had been drained. And still, rationing was tightened, and tightened again. Stettinius asked Americans in radio addresses and newspaper interviews to try to imagine that one-third of them lived in New England, rather than one-sixteenth, and that they depended for survival on shipments from thousands of miles away through U-boat-infested waters. Before leaving for Britain, Stettinius asked a colleague what an appropriate gift might be for his hosts.
^*
The answer was “food.”
⁴⁵

A
fter dispensing his thoughts on eggs, Churchill departed No. 10, pausing for a moment to hug his cat, Smokey, and to instruct Elizabeth Layton to make sure that the feline did not suffer from loneliness in his master’s absence. He then set off for an RAF airfield near Oxford, where
Commando,
the B-24 that had ferried him to Cairo and Moscow in August, was being fueled for the nine-hour flight to Casablanca. The trip was of course top secret, but Churchill’s exit belied the fact. Harriman and Ismay, who were also making the trip, were already at the blacked-out airfield
when they saw “in the distance a convoy of limousines led by one car with the brightest headlights” in spite of the blackout. The convoy roared up to the aircraft with sirens screaming and lights flashing. Churchill—code-named Air Commodore Frankland—stepped from his car “thinly disguised in the uniform of an air commodore.” The real air commodore exclaimed, “Good God, the only mistake they made was they didn’t put it in the local newspapers.” Churchill’s bodyguard tried to hustle him aboard the B-24, but he lingered on the runway and at his leisure reduced his cigar to a stub. Air Commodore Frankland would board when he was ready and not before.
⁴⁶

A few minutes later
Commando’
s four big Pratt & Whitney engines growled to life and the plane with its precious cargo lifted into the night. The captain took it up to seven thousand feet. It was midwinter, and frigid inside the metal shell. The aircraft had since August been updated with a heating system of sorts—a kerosene-powered contraption rigged up near the cots. The device almost made an Icarus of Churchill. He awoke in the night with a sharp pain in his foot, caused by the heating element glowing red hot upon his toes. Kerosene fumes permeated the cabin. Afraid the heater would ignite his blankets or the fumes, Churchill jostled Portal awake. The air marshal assessed the situation and reached the same conclusion. They disabled the heater and flew on, chilled and sleepless. All aboard bundled up with their extra layers of clothing, all but Churchill, who wore nothing but his silk nightshirt. “On his hands and knees,” recalled Lord Moran, “he cut a quaint figure with his big, bare, white bottom.” Before departing for Casablanca, the passengers had been issued parachute harnesses, extra clothing, and currency from all the countries they would overfly, as well as notes written in Arabic promising a reward to whosoever gave the bearer safe passage.
⁴⁷

In the early morning, they descended out of high clouds over the Moroccan coast, just west of Casablanca. Below, feluccas drifted on fair seas, and in the harbor dozens of stranded yachts rode at anchor, unable to repatriate to Italy, Greece, or France. Landward, verdant smudges of ancient date palm, orange, and olive groves sketched the outer reaches of the city, in which the minarets of dozens of mosques stabbed skyward and the red-tile roofs of whitewashed limestone houses looked as if a sack of pomegranates had burst and scattered its contents across the landscape. Far to the southeast, the snowcaps of the Atlas Mountains, gilded by morning light, cast their ragged shadows seaward. On the far side of the mountains, Bernard Montgomery was driving Erwin Rommel west, through Tripolitania and toward Tunisia. After landing at the Medouina Airfield, Churchill, to the dismay of his bodyguards, chose to light a cigar and wait on the tarmac for the arrival of Ismay’s B-24. The secrecy of the entire mission was going
up in smoke. When Ismay stepped from his plane, he was horrified to see Churchill standing in the open, attired in his light blue airman’s livery. “Any fool can see,” Ismay exclaimed, “that is an air commodore disguised as the Prime Minister.”
⁴⁸

Casablanca promised an oasis of gay colors after the dead gray of a London winter, a painter’s delight. Expecting as much, Churchill had instructed Sawyers to bring along brushes, paints, and palette. The weather, Churchill wrote to Clementine, proved to be very un-English and much to his liking, “bright with occasional showers and like a nice day in May for temperature.”
⁴⁹

It had been a year since he departed the warmth of south Florida, a year that closed without a second front in Europe. The errant Dieppe raid of August had only underscored his doubts in that regard and had demonstrated to the satisfaction of most of the Combined Chiefs (but not to George Marshall) the futility of trying to establish that front in 1942. Stalin, however, expected that Churchill and Roosevelt would use their time together to deliver that front in 1943. Yet, by the time Churchill landed in Casablanca, he had been convinced by Brooke’s arguments and Kesselring’s reinforcement of Tunis that Roundup was effectively scotched for 1943. He arrived prepared to argue the case for further action in the Mediterranean. It was the only strategy within reach. However, he was always open to suggestion if the suggestion had to do with taking the fight to Germany. He counseled his military chiefs that if the lessons of Dieppe and the vicissitudes of weather and logistics led the Allies to require a guarantee of success before considering taking offensive action, they would find themselves unable and unwilling to take
any
action. “The maxim ‘Nothing avails like perfection,’ ” he warned, “may be spelt shorter, ‘paralysis.’ ”
⁵⁰

Dwight Eisenhower had commandeered the Anfa Hotel and eighteen surrounding villas a few miles outside Casablanca and near enough to the beach that the rumble of the surf carried up to the compound. Churchill enjoyed strolling along the beach and dipping into the surf when the seas allowed. When they did not, noting the fifteen-foot breakers, he came to understand how so many landing craft had foundered during the landings. One villa was reserved for de Gaulle, if he showed up. The
New York Times
later reported, “Many acres of the resort were enclosed in two lines of barbed wire, on which tin cans were hung. If any one had been foolhardy enough to approach these lines he would have been riddled by bullets from machine guns or bayoneted by some of the hundreds of American infantrymen who stood helmeted atop roofs or patrolled the shady walks around the area.” Actually, one overweight sixty-eight-year-old former trooper was foolhardy enough to do just that. Returning one evening from a stroll along the beach, Churchill and his bodyguard, Walter Thompson,
were dropped off by their driver on the wrong side of the compound, and outside the wire. Unwilling to walk the long perimeter, Churchill, eyeing the wire, saw a solution. “We can climb that, Thompson,” he declared, and began to swing a leg over the wire. Thompson heard the
click
of a round being snapped into a rifle, followed by shouts of “Halt!” Four soldiers leveled their rifles at the intruders. “It’s
Churchill,
” Thompson yelled. The soldiers lowered their weapons, cursing at having almost shot the prime minister, and cursing the prime minister for almost forcing their hand.
⁵¹

Field Marshal John Dill and Roosevelt’s military chiefs arrived on January 13. Dill, more than any other Briton, had so far earned Marshall’s respect, so much so that Brooke’s roster of conference attendees had Dill listed in the American contingent. Yet Dill, in the preceding weeks, had passed on to Brooke the general’s strategic goals and plans, gleaned by Dill’s close friendship with Marshall. Thus, Brooke went into the meetings doubly armed, with his plans and with Marshall’s. That evening, Brooke met with Churchill and stressed that although the Americans and certain members of the British Joint Planning Committee favored an invasion of Sardinia over Sicily, he did not, and intended to make his case to the Americans accordingly. He sought Churchill’s assurance that the British delegation would speak with one voice. Churchill concurred.

In all of North Africa, from Cairo to Casablanca, the British had more troops on the ground than the Americans did and more planes in the air, and they were alone in patrolling the Mediterranean Sea, where the Americans feared to go. It rankled within HMG that Franklin Roosevelt did not acknowledge these facts in his addresses to his countrymen. Eden later wrote that he was “concerned about the fact” that Roosevelt’s declarations “contained not a single word about the British share in the operations,” due in large part to the “legend” that the British “were most unpopular in North Africa.” Eisenhower’s deputy, Mark Clark—in Brooke’s estimation a “very ambitious and unscrupulous” man—was intent on promulgating that legend. He infuriated Brooke by spreading the rumor that the French in North Africa would not fight alongside the British. But Brooke’s respect for Eisenhower increased when Eisenhower eased Clark out as his deputy and put him in command of the reserves. Still, Clark’s and Roosevelt’s political shenanigans aside, until such time as the Americans put more men in the field in the fight against Hitler and conducted that fight with better results than Eisenhower had so far obtained, Churchill possessed leverage. He intended to use it at Casablanca—next target, Sicily, followed by Italy. The proposed Sicilian campaign already had a code name: Husky.
⁵²

The president arrived late in the afternoon on January 14 after a five-day
journey by Boeing flying boat with stops at Miami, Trinidad, and Brazil, and an eighteen-hour flight across the Atlantic to Bathurst, a squalid outpost at the mouth of the Gambia River in West Africa. From there he flew in an army C-54 to Casablanca. His doctor, Admiral Ross McIntire, was as concerned about his patient’s health as was Moran for Churchill’s. McIntire, worried about Roosevelt’s heart, kept digitalis on hand lest the cruising altitude of eight thousand feet trigger an angina episode. Flying was a dangerous business. The American press was not apprised for ten days of the daring journey. When told, the scribblers were agog: “Franklin Roosevelt, with his great sense of historical drama, had again created history with a dramatist’s breath-taking stroke. No President of the U.S. since Abraham Lincoln had ever visited a battle theater. No President had ever left the U.S. in wartime. None had ever been to Africa. None had ever traveled in an airplane.” Now,
Time
reported weeks later, came Franklin Roosevelt, thirty-second president of the United States, “to shatter all four precedents at once.” All true, as was the fact that Roosevelt and his men arrived in Casablanca unprepared for Churchill.
⁵³

That much became clear during preliminary discussions and at an informal dinner on the fourteenth. Marshall and King stated their desire to wage “all out” war in the Pacific rather than holding actions against Japan. King proposed—to Brooke’s amazement—that 70 percent of the war effort be directed toward the Pacific, 30 percent toward Europe. Brooke pointed out that “this was hardly a scientific way of approaching war strategy.”

Brooke knew he had a fight on his hands regarding Sicily but presumed he had the full backing of all the British chiefs. Yet some within the British planning staff and one among the contingent had gone off the reservation: Dickie Mountbatten. Mountbatten considered Sardinia the best target, and he crossed the aisle to argue to Harry Hopkins in private the merits of Sardinia. This schism in the British command might have proved problematic had not Mountbatten also argued the case to Hopkins for two other of his favorite schemes—battleships made of ice, and a Rube Goldberg–style weapon Hopkins described as “fantastic.” According to Mountbatten, a new type of explosive could be crammed into an old submarine and run right up to the base of a fifty-foot bluff somewhere on the coast of France. The subsequent explosion, Mountbatten proclaimed, would “blow a road right into France.” Then, rather than invasion forces having to assault an enfiladed port (as at Dieppe), they could proceed directly through the newly created pass. Mountbatten may not have studied the results of a similar scheme, when Union forces burrowed a huge mine under Confederate lines during the siege of Petersburg in 1864. The mine indeed created an opening, a crater into which Union troops poured—and into which
Confederates poured deadly fire, annihilating the attackers. Hopkins listened, politely, to Dickie’s proposal, and judged Mountbatten to be a “courageous, resourceful man” whom the British chiefs “push around.” Only time would tell what might become of Mountbatten’s indestructible frozen dreadnoughts and exploding submarines.
⁵⁴