The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (421 page)

De Gaulle met with Giraud on January 23 and afterward issued a typically enigmatic announcement: “We have met. We have talked.” Roosevelt also met with the two Frenchmen, separately. Giraud and the president chatted with no bodyguards in attendance, but when de Gaulle arrived at Roosevelt’s villa, the Secret Service detail—many of the agents armed with tommy guns—took up concealed positions behind shrubs and draperies. The union of sorts between the reluctant Frenchmen appeared to be a fait accompli, although the governing body that was struggling into existence was so ill defined as to be nonexistent, and was not recognized by London or Washington as having any official role elsewhere within the French empire, or in France, where de Gaulle was considered a national hero.
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Just after noon on Sunday the twenty-fourth, a fiercely sunny and hot day, de Gaulle and Giraud’s union—a “shotgun wedding,” Eden and Roosevelt called it—was consummated with a ceremonial handshake on the lawn of Roosevelt’s villa, with Roosevelt (hatless) and Churchill (under a gray homburg) looking on. Fifty shocked reporters were also present; they had been brought over from Algiers not knowing whom they’d be meeting. One photographer in the group was Sammy Schulman, a short, mustachioed, and brassy shooter whom Roosevelt had known for a decade. A month later, Roosevelt regaled Washington reporters with the story of what happened next: “I worked it out beforehand with Sammy. After the pictures of the four of us were taken, Sammy Schulman in the front row said, ‘Oh, Mr. President, can we have a picture of the two Generals shaking hands?’ So I translated Sammy to Giraud, and Giraud said,
‘Mais, oui,’
and he got right up and held out his hand. It took Churchill and myself five minutes to persuade de Gaulle to get on his feet to shake hands. And we got them to do it. And I think you have all got that picture. If you run into a copy of the picture, look at the expression on de Gaulle’s face!”
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The expression of feline contentment Churchill wears betrays the fate of the canary. Sammy’s shots of the four leaders and of de Gaulle and Giraud are some of the most iconic images of the war. Yet they capture a false image; de Gaulle, in fact, had agreed to nothing more substantive than a handshake with Giraud. As much as Roosevelt derided de Gaulle, the Frenchman had had the last laugh at Casablanca. His Fighting French
forces numbered 50,000, just one-fifth the number of former Vichy troops serving under Giraud, yet de Gaulle and his men supplied the spirit of the French army in North Africa. De Gaulle’s army had been formed in reaction to established authority; in a legal sense they were mutineers, first against the defeated Third Republic, then against Vichy, where they were considered freebooters. Charles Maurass, a septuagenarian royalist, Vichy mouthpiece, poet, polemicist, and Pétain counselor, pronounced, “De Gaulle is a traitor who leads the scum of the earth.” This the Gaullists took as a compliment. The Fighting French would never serve willingly under former Vichy loyalists, and although Giraud was brave and decent, many in his officer corps were not. Giraud himself served at the pleasure of the Americans, an insult to Gallic pride, and he had so far failed to repeal anti-Jewish Vichy laws or free Gaullist prisoners. The handshake altered nothing, and meant nothing. The marriage lent credence to an old saying in the French cavalry: “Beware of women when they are in front of you, beware of horses when they are behind you, and beware of your leaders wherever they were.”
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M
oments after Sammy snapped his photos, Roosevelt uttered one of the most iconic phrases of the war. Speaking from notes, he outlined in general and necessarily imprecise terms the decisions taken over the previous ten days. Then he nonchalantly added an incendiary line: the Allies demanded “unconditional surrender” from the Axis. Hopkins later recalled the president telling him that the phrase had simply “popped into his mind” as he compared the difficulty of getting Giraud and de Gaulle together to that of arranging a meeting between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. “Unconditional Surrender” Grant. “And the next thing I knew,” Roosevelt told Hopkins, “I had said it.” Roosevelt the multilateralist had just seemingly issued one of the most unilateral declarations in American history, but it was not spur of the moment. In fact, Churchill days earlier advised his War Cabinet that he and Roosevelt had discussed the matter and decided upon terms of “unconditional surrender” for Germany and Japan. The War Cabinet insisted Italy should be included. Churchill understood the matter was to be kept secret. But Roosevelt let it slip. Churchill, in his memoirs, took a mild swipe at Roosevelt when he wrote of Roosevelt’s explanation of how he came to utter the words: “I do not feel this frank statement is in any way weakened by the fact that the phrase occurs in the notes from which he spoke.”
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“Churchill was indignant” at dinner that night, recalled Averell
Harriman, angered not so much by the policy of unconditional surrender but the “unfortunate way Roosevelt announced it.” The words “unconditional surrender” sent several messages to several quarters. To the British and American people it signified that there would be no “Darlan deal” with Hitler, Tojo, or Mussolini. It meant that no mere armistice would leave Germany free to refit for purposes of future misdeeds. It meant that no Wilsonian-style Fourteen Points—imprecise, and open to infinite interpretation—would infect the negotiations. In fact, there would be no negotiations. “Unconditional surrender” told Stalin that the Americans and British were in it for the duration. Yet it also told Stalin that his allies expected him to go the distance. The prospect of Stalin making a separate peace with Hitler had worried the Anglo-Americans for more than a year.
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Churchill’s memory proved fallible when in 1948 he told Roosevelt biographer Robert Sherwood that he had “heard the words ‘Unconditional Surrender’ for the first time from the president’s lips at the conference.” Ernest Bevin’s memory, too, proved faulty when in 1949, as a cabinet member in Clement Attlee’s Labour government, he excoriated Churchill and “unconditional surrender” for the crippling costs associated with rebuilding Germany. Churchill replied to Bevin as he had to Sherwood, that he had heard the words for the first time from the president’s lips at Casablanca. Only later did Churchill recall the telegram to the War Cabinet of January 1943. Such errant recollections have muddled the issue ever since.
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Criticism and controversy attended the expression from the moment Roosevelt uttered it. Eisenhower didn’t like it because it did not define “unconditional,” and when the time came for cease-fires and surrenders, Eisenhower would be the man on the spot. “Around headquarters,” wrote Eisenhower’s press aide, Harry Butcher, such troubles were “attributed to the hard-boiled” insistence of Churchill and Roosevelt on “unconditional surrender…. No surrender has ever been made without some conditions.” Eisenhower would later ask his superiors to precisely define the term; they would not. Stalin had said he need not be consulted but only be apprised of decisions taken at Casablanca, and so he was. He did not make a public statement on “unconditional surrender” until his annual May Day speech, where he turned the tables on his two allies by implying that unless they kept their promise to open a second European front that summer, any talk of unconditional surrender was just that, talk. Later in the year, Stalin told Harriman that Roosevelt’s remark “was an unfortunate statement.” Two years hence, Goebbels employed it as a propaganda tool, extolling Germans on the need to fight to the death because the enemy had left open no other option. “It was a godsend to Goebbels,” Harriman later recalled. By the end of the year, Churchill, too, harbored doubts, and told Stalin as
much. That conversation remained private until after the war. In public, Churchill never wavered on “unconditional surrender.”
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Following the news conference, Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to delay his departure to the United States for one day in order to accompany him to Marrakech, “the most lovely spot in the whole world.” It is “the Paris of the Sahara,” he told the president, where for centuries caravans had arrived from central Africa and where the traders were swindled in the markets and entertained in “the most elaborately organized brothels in the African continent.” The two leaders—Macmillan called them the Emperors of the West and the East—sent most of their troop on ahead by air. A small motorcade carried the president, Churchill, and a few aides on the 150-mile trip. The road was lined on both sides by American sentries positioned a few dozen yards apart, an entire division of Patton’s infantry, which might better have served the cause by fighting in Tunisia than by performing guard duty in Morocco. In Marrakech the party bivouacked in the Villa Taylor, an oasis of orange and olive groves surrounded by high walls, and home to the American vice consul Kenneth Pendar. A narrow three-story tower rose skyward from the house. Churchill ordered Roosevelt and his wheelchair carried up in order that the president might take in the Atlas Mountains at sundown when, as the sun fell into the Atlantic, the distant snow-covered peaks slowly faded from white to rose to blood red. The two partners enjoyed a “jolly” dinner that night after composing a joint telegram to Stalin in which they congratulated him for his leadership at Stalingrad. The cable also outlined the decisions made during the conference, only one of which held any interest for Stalin, the pledge to put men into France that year.
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When Roosevelt left for home the next morning, Churchill accompanied him to the airfield, dressed in velvet slippers and his green-and-red-and-gold-dragon dressing gown. He was thus attired a few hours later, supine in bed under the cover of a light-blue silk bedspread with a six-inch-wide entredeux, the scene lit by numerous candles, when he summoned Brooke and announced that they would “be off” at 6:00
P.M.
that evening. Brooke had come to expect that a summons from Churchill might well find him in bed, or emerging from his bath, toweling off his round, white Humpty-Dumpty self, climbing into his silk underclothes, all the while declaiming on some new scheme that he had hatched. On this occasion, Brooke pleaded that he had presumed they’d be staying for two days and that he hoped to get a day of needed rest and do some bird-watching in the foothills. Churchill did not budge. Brooke tried to turn the tables, arguing that a day of painting would be a welcome respite for the P.M. This, too, failed to move the Old Man. “We are off at six,” he replied, a cigar plugged into his face. “To where?” asked Brooke. “I have not decided yet,” Churchill
answered. To either London or Cairo, he added, pending an answer from the Turks.
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It was to be Cairo. Churchill spent a few hours before his departure up in the villa’s tower, where he painted his only picture of the war, a landscape scene he later gave to Roosevelt. At dusk,
Commando
and an accompanying B-24 carrying Brooke and staff officers lifted off from Marrakech, eastbound for the overnight flight to the Nile. As they climbed to more than 14,000 feet to clear the mountains, the temperature inside the planes fell to below freezing and the clatter of the engines blotted out all conversation. Churchill’s craft had been outfitted with windows and a salon with armchairs, such that he at least could peer out in order to track his progress. Brooke and those on board the other Liberator could do nothing but count rivets on the plane’s cold aluminum skin. Churchill’s party reached Cairo at dawn after an eleven-hour flight. Shortly thereafter they arrived at the home of the British ambassador, Miles Lampson, and his wife, Jacqueline, who asked if they might like breakfast. Brooke suggested they wash up first, but Churchill proclaimed, “No! We shall have breakfast now!” Mrs. Lampson escorted the party into the dining room and asked if the prime minister would like a cup of tea. “I have already had two whiskies and soda and two cigars this morning,” Churchill replied, and then asked for a glass of white wine, which, when produced, he emptied in one long gulp. He was in fine fettle and ready for business.
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