The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (423 page)

He had been away from King, wife, and country for twenty-six days. It was to be his last flight on
Commando.
The aircraft, with a different crew, later disappeared with all hands. Cadogan was correct in describing the
beastly discomforts and dangers of flight, but he was wrong about Churchill. Churchill had known full well ever since his first flights to Cairo and Moscow six months earlier exactly how beastly such journeys were, and how necessary.

I
n Burma that week, Brigadier Orde Wingate took his brigade of jungle fighters—he called them his Chindits, the Burmese word for “lion”—across the Chindwin River and proceeded to harass the Japanese behind their lines. The need to reopen the Burma Road had been agreed upon at Casablanca, but Wingate lacked the men, and the RAF lacked the aircraft, to make good on that agreement. General Joe Stilwell, cooling his heels in northern India, the victim of Washington’s decision to reinforce MacArthur at his expense, lacked an army. And Churchill lacked the will. China, in his estimation, was not worth the effort. That week, the American press reported that large numbers of Japanese ships were sailing for Guadalcanal, most likely to reinforce the garrison there. But this report soon proved false; the Japanese were sailing to “the Canal” in order to
evacuate
their remaining troops. On February 9 a headline in the
New York Times
declared, F
OE
Q
UITS
I
SLAND
. New Guinea was the next Allied target; the Australians would lead the charge. The march to Tokyo had begun.
⁸⁶

For thirteen months the Americans, having no real choice in the matter given their lack of preparedness, had deferred to Churchill’s strategic judgment. They did so again at Casablanca. It would be the last time. The military tide had turned against Hitler at Stalingrad; now the political tide was turning against Churchill. His vision of the postwar world was drifting into crisper focus, and he was testing the words and phrases he intended to use to articulate that vision when the time was right. Yet, as the months went by, the shapes and forms that the new world would assume increasingly became a matter for Roosevelt and Stalin to determine. Churchill’s future, and that of his Empire, was now tied inexorably to the political wishes of his two allies who, Sir John Keegan wrote, “were now supplanting him in importance.” The decline in Churchill’s influence would be gradual; indeed, in early 1943 Churchill had yet to sense it, but it had begun.
⁸⁷

On February 2, a
New York Times
story explicating the decisions made at Casablanca was headlined
President Implies 1943 Invasion Plan.
Actually, that decision had not been made in Casablanca. It was more hope than goal, and with each passing week an atrophying hope at
that. On February 11, tired and with a head cold coming on, Churchill addressed the Commons. He did not promise a great invasion of Europe but promised that Britain’s enemies would “burn and bleed” (a favorite phrase) and that stern justice would be delivered to “the wicked and the guilty.” He had sent Roosevelt a draft of the speech for comments. Firm in his belief that the French hated the British and respected Americans, Roosevelt replied that “cooperation by French forces will be best if the American Supreme Command in North Africa is stressed.” Churchill duly edited his working notes and placed Eisenhower at the forefront. Within a week he found himself supremely relieved to have done so.
⁸⁸

In the days following his address, he could not shake the fatigue and head cold he had brought home from Africa. On the evening of February 16, his temperature shot up. Lord Moran, after listening to his chest, concluded his patient had “a patch” on his left lung. “What do you mean by a patch?” Churchill grumbled. “Have I got pneumonia?” An X-ray taken the next day and a second opinion by Dr. Geoffrey Marshall confirmed Moran’s suspicion: Churchill had contracted pneumonia. But given his age, it was the strain on his heart, not his lungs, that worried Moran. The patient took to his bed, with a copy of
Moll Flanders.
He ordered his paperwork reduced to a minimum and jotted notes to Roosevelt, himself taken ill by some African bug, and to Hopkins. To both he lamented his “heavy and long” condition. They responded with get-well notes. Churchill was not a difficult patient, Moran wrote, and did what he was told, “provided, of course, that he is given a good reason.” Dr. Marshall did not help matters when he referred to pneumonia as “the old man’s friend.” “Pray explain,” asked Churchill. “Oh, because it takes them off so quickly,” Marshall replied. Churchill was thus already in his sickbed when news arrived from the North Atlantic, from Russia, from India, and from Tunisia that might have put him there anyway.
⁸⁹

B
y mid-February, Rommel had barred the back door to Tunisia with his positions along the Mareth Line, a decade-old French defensive network that ran from the Gulf of Gabès inland to a great salt marsh. To Rommel’s northwest, on the far slopes of the Eastern Dorsal of the Atlas Mountains, the Allied flank was held against several of Arnim’s panzer divisions at Sidi Bouzid and along an eighty-mile front by the green American troops of the II Corps, under the command of Major General Lloyd Fredendall. His job was to keep Arnim in place and to watch and wait for Rommel, who sooner or later, with Montgomery in pursuit, would try to join Arnim. North of
Fredendall, poorly equipped brigades of formerly Vichy French held the ground. In the far north, Anderson’s First Army had been stalled for eight weeks on its drive to Bizerte and Tunis, where Kesselring had reinforced Arnim’s positions faster than the Allies could harass them. The Eastern Dorsal, thinly held by the Americans and French, defined the German left flank from Gafsa to just west of Tunis.

Eisenhower presumed correctly that Rommel would strike north toward Tunis, but the American was unsure of exactly which route Rommel would choose—the coastal plains or a swing through Gafsa followed by a sharp turn north. And would Arnim attempt a strike in the Faid Pass in the Eastern Dorsal, which would put Sidi Bouzid in his sights and threaten the Allied rear? Allied intelligence thought that scenario unlikely based on the belief that the mountain passes were not conducive to tank warfare. Also, Ultra decrypts gave no indication that Arnim was hatching such a plan. But after visiting Fredendall’s Sidi Bouzid deployments on February 13, Eisenhower concluded that the defenses were inadequate, and that this was where the Germans would strike. Eisenhower returned to Fredendall’s headquarters at Tebessa (ill placed and more than seventy miles west of Sidi Bouzid), intent on drawing up new plans.

He was too late. Arnim and Rommel attacked the next morning. By nightfall Rommel was through Gafsa, and Arnim’s tanks had plowed through the American positions at Sidi Bouzid. Both German panzer forces then made for the Kasserine Pass, in the Western Dorsal, which they overran on February 19 and 20, after overrunning two American battalions that had chosen poor defensive positions. Rommel’s panzers then poured north out of Kasserine on the twenty-first, his target Tebessa, where the Allies had stockpiled millions of pounds of food, fuel, and ammunition. Another panzer force swung north toward Thala, which if taken would put the Germans behind Anderson’s lines. With Arnim’s northern flank anchored at Tunis, Anderson and the French would find themselves in a vise. Alexander arrived from Tripoli on February 20 and, shocked at what he saw, immediately assumed command of all ground forces. He found the Americans at Kasserine totally unprepared for Rommel’s push, “too defensive” and too “shell and bomb conscious.” They had suffered the consequences of poor command, poor intelligence, and a hardened enemy. When Eisenhower (just that week promoted to four stars) ordered B-17s to bomb Kasserine, the planes became lost and bombed a friendly Arab village within the Allied lines and more than one hundred miles from the intended target. The Americans’ first major engagement with Germans ended as it had begun, in complete confusion. Alexander now found himself, as at Dunkirk and in Burma, presiding over a disaster.
⁹⁰

Within a week of crashing through Kasserine, Rommel, outrunning his
supplies and unable to exploit his success, fell back through the pass to the Mareth Line. So stunning was Rommel’s stroke that King George wrote a three-page letter to Churchill stating his dismay over both the political and military situations in North Africa. Churchill dutifully replied that his support of Eisenhower for supreme command had been proven “providential.” Had a British general overseen the defeat, he told the King, Britain’s enemies in America would have been served up a fine opportunity “to blaspheme.” Churchill reminded King George that the Eighth Army, 160,000 strong and “perhaps the best troops in the world,” was about to play a key role in Tunisia. Moreover, the great General Alexander would henceforth be in charge of strategy on the ground. This was not meant to disparage the Americans, Churchill offered, for they were brave, “but not seasoned.”
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Eisenhower sacked Fredendall on March 1 and replaced him with George Patton, who, Ike liked to say, “hates the Hun like the devil hates holy water.” The debacle at Kasserine Pass underscored Brooke’s doubts about conducting a large-scale invasion of France in 1943, even were the landing craft available. Although the American planners left Casablanca believing that they had been snookered by Brooke and Churchill, the rout at Kasserine proved the British correct. The Americans had to first learn how to conduct a modest campaign before contemplating an invasion of fortress Europe. Tommies in Anderson’s army soon came up with a line that captured the essence of Kasserine:
How Green Was My Ally.
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W
hile Rommel undertook his audacious strike, Mohandas Gandhi, half a world away, conducted one of his own. Before Churchill left for North Africa, the War Cabinet endorsed the arrest of Gandhi and hundreds of India National Congress members. On February 9, Gandhi, seventy-two, frail, and under house arrest at Poona, announced that he would fast for three weeks. British and Indian doctors monitored his condition. Churchill, suspecting Indian doctors were slipping glucose into Gandhi’s drinking water, informed King George that “the old humbug Gandhi” had remained so healthy “one wonders whether his fast is bona fide.” On the sixteenth day of the fast, with somber reports emanating from Gandhi’s doctors (which Churchill did not believe), Churchill telegraphed Jan Smuts: “What fools we should have been to flinch before all this bluff and sob-stuff.” On the following day, he cabled the viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow: “It now seems almost certain that the old rascal will emerge all the better from his so-called fast.” Lord Linlithgow replied that he believed that Gandhi (“the world’s most successful humbug”) was not in dire straits and that his
doctors had “cooked” their bulletins to produce the desired effect, all as part of a “wicked system of blackmail.” The American press championed the Mahatma’s cause; the British press for the most part derided Gandhi’s gesture as a ploy, as did Churchill, with sly nonchalance, when he later wrote in his memoirs that Gandhi’s taking glucose while on the hunger strike in conjunction with his “intense vitality and lifelong austerity” allowed him to safely ride out the dietary crisis. In fact, Churchill had learned during Gandhi’s fast that Indian doctors were not giving him glucose. He did not quite equate Gandhi with the wily main character in Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” but he came close. As for Gandhi’s stature in India, he wrote, “Mr. Gandhi’s death could have produced a profound impression throughout India, where his saintly qualities commanded intense admiration.” In arresting Gandhi, he wrote, the British “had judged the situation rightly.”
⁹³