The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (424 page)

Roosevelt’s special envoy to India, William Phillips, in Delhi since January, asked permission of the viceroy to visit Gandhi and Nehru. Lord Linlithgow refused, and instead invited Phillips on a tiger hunt. Phillips could hardly make a complete report to Roosevelt without seeing Gandhi, but he’d have to try, for Churchill had put Gandhi off-limits. Leo Amery, secretary of state for India and Burma, advised Churchill, “I do hope you will make it quite clear to the president that his people must keep off the grass.” Churchill’s explosion in front of Hopkins the previous April and the treatment accorded Phillips were clear signals to Roosevelt to stay out of British affairs. The president kept his counsel, despite the pro-Gandhi editorializing of the American press. Roosevelt and Churchill never saw eye to eye on India. In fact, Harriman recalled, “They couldn’t see
at all
on India” (italics Harriman).
⁹⁴

Gandhi ended his fast on March 3. In newsreels he appeared to be in good health. Churchill, still recuperating from his illness, was not.

By early March, Bernard Montgomery, in position in the town of Medenine, about twenty miles southeast of the Mareth Line, knew with certainty that Rommel would attempt a spoiling attack by hooking out from his Mareth defenses toward Medenine. Air reconnaissance and Ultra decrypts gave Montgomery an advantage he intended to exploit. He prepared for Rommel’s attack by massing and concealing his anti-tank artillery. Ultra had been so precise that Montgomery knew which brigades of panzers Rommel intended to deploy, and where he intended to deploy them. On March 6, Rommel struck. Thanks to Ultra, he stood no chance. Montgomery, his anti-tank guns in position, destroyed fifty-two of the oncoming panzers. The Germans and Italians stopped, turned, and
retreated to their Mareth defenses. The importance of the British victory at Medenine cannot be overstated; had Rommel sent the Eighth Army sprawling eastward, the Allied timetable in North Africa would have been set back indefinitely. A British defeat would have scotched the invasion of Sicily in 1943, and Italy as well. Stalin, already doubting the ability of his allies to kill Germans, would have had no choice but to at least contemplate a separate peace. But Montgomery held. On March 9, Rommel, hobbled by malaria and festering skin lesions, handed over command of his army to General Giovanni Messe, who now served under Arnim in the newly created Army Group Africa. That night, Rommel departed North Africa for Berlin, never to return.
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On the Eastern Front, the victories at Stalingrad and Rostov reinvigorated the Red Army, which struck west throughout January and into February. Yet, as it had the previous spring, it advanced too far and too fast, with the result that its lines thinned. Once across the Donets River, the Russians discovered the Germans had changed the gauge on the railroads, forcing the Red Army to send tens of thousands of trucks and horse carts down muddy and rutted roads. Manstein, sure that Stalin’s army had overextended itself again, waited for his moment. He struck in the third week of February with fourteen tank and infantry divisions, and within a fortnight he retook Kharkov, driving the Russians back eighty miles along a two-hundred-mile front. Stalin blamed Churchill and Roosevelt for the setback, claiming the German success “involved a lessening of the German forces in France” due to the lack of Anglo-American aggressiveness. Hence, “renewed Russian complaints about bearing the whole weight of the war.” In fact, Stalin
was
bearing almost the entire weight of the war, and Churchill and Roosevelt, to their consternation, were not yet prepared to relieve Stalin of some of that weight. This the Germans knew, and were thankful for. On March 2, Hermann Göring told Goebbels that he was “somewhat worried about our having pretty much stripped the West in order to bring things to a standstill in the East. One dreads to think,” Goebbels confessed to his diary, “what would happen if the English and Americans were suddenly to attempt a landing.”
⁹⁶

The English and the Americans were making no such plans. In fact, during the bleak days of mid-February, when everything everywhere appeared to be unraveling, Eisenhower recommended pushing Operation Husky back from June until July. Churchill received the news in bed, his pneumonia coming on hard. A month’s delay would be disastrous, he cabled Eisenhower, and to Harry Hopkins he predicted that if during May and June
“not a single American or British soldier” was killing any Germans or Italians “while the Russians are chasing 165 divisions around,” the result would be “grievous reproach at the hands of the Russians.” Britain, he told his military chiefs, “would become a laughingstock.” In fact, the original statement of intent drawn up by the Combined Chiefs at Casablanca called for Husky to begin with “the favorable July moon,” those nights of the month when the crescent moon before setting gave paratroopers just enough light to find their targets in advance of the amphibious troops. At Casablanca, Churchill and Roosevelt pushed hard for the June moon, and the Combined Chiefs had since asked Eisenhower to reconsider, but General Ike held firm to his timetable. Nonetheless, Eisenhower only further fueled Churchill’s doubts about his aggressiveness when in early April he warned that the presence of two German divisions in Sicily cast doubt on the Allied ability to invade the island. Churchill erupted. How, he asked the Chiefs of Staff Committee, could they reconcile “the confidence the General showed about invading the continent across the Channel” with his discomfort at the prospect of sending one million men now in North Africa to face two German divisions in Sicily? “I don’t think we can be content with such doctrines.” He added, “What Stalin would think of this when he has 185 German divisions on his front, I cannot imagine.”
⁹⁷

Actually, he knew exactly what Stalin would think. He had twice promised Stalin a second front in 1943, most recently when he predicted that Tunisia would be cleared by April “if not earlier.” By early April, with Eisenhower’s armies stuck for three months in the mud and mountains of Tunisia, Churchill’s promises to Stalin were self-evidently worthless. Even had Eisenhower taken Tunis by then, the omnipresent shipping shortages guaranteed that no second front could materialize in France that year. Churchill tried to placate Stalin, telling him that Husky was forthcoming, that the RAF was preparing to pummel the industrial heart of Germany, the Ruhr Valley, with heavy raids, including a planned operation to destroy the dams and hydroelectric plants that powered German armaments factories. Dönitz’s submarine pens were being bombed; the American Eighth Air Force, with more than six hundred bombers, was now up and flying. Churchill indicated his willingness to embrace more sinister tactics. Told of the German successes in Russia, he instructed Ismay to inform the military chiefs that if Hitler used poison gas in Russia, “we shall retaliate by drenching the German cities with gas on the largest possible scale.” That was bluster, but by no means was it bluff. Stalin needed help, and Churchill intended to give what he could. Stalin’s armies faced twenty times as many Germans as the Anglo-Americans faced in Tunisia. In only one military classification did the Western allies exceed the Russians in manpower: chaplains.
⁹⁸

A
t Casablanca Roosevelt and Churchill made “control of the seas” their first priority. They meant the Atlantic. In the three months since, as measured by men and ships, they not only failed to control the seas, but had lost control.

On January 30, Karl Dönitz was promoted to
Grossadmiral
and replaced Erich Raeder as commander in chief of the navy
(Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine).
The appointment of the submariner Dönitz could only mean that the submarine war would intensify. It did, with horrific results for the Allies. Churchill warned Roosevelt that they must assume that Dönitz would be “ready to play a game in which the cards are in [his] hands.” Dönitz was as firm a believer in the lethality of his U-boats as Göring was of his airplanes, with the difference that Dönitz’s U-boats had hobbled Britain, and might yet cripple her. Britain’s convoy escort ships were, Churchill informed Roosevelt, “quite inadequate to deal with the German forces.”
⁹⁹

The U-boats cruised safely that winter, aided by the worst weather in North Atlantic history. The gales kept escort ships in harbors and Allied long-range bombers battened down on airfields. Such was the fury of the North Atlantic between November and March that ninety-two ships were lost at sea to waves and wind. The U-boats rode out the storms beneath the waves and took their harvest. In March, two convoys bound from New York and sailing on parallel courses with eighty-eight merchant ships were attacked over three nights by fifty U-boats. Twenty-two Allied ships and almost four hundred seamen went to the bottom. German sailors called it the “greatest convoy battle of all time.” That massacre brought to almost 21,000 the number of British merchant seamen killed since the start of the war, more than one-fifth of Britain’s civilian sailors and, relative to the other services, the highest casualty rate of the war. Ships could be replaced; experienced crews could not.
¹⁰⁰

In mid-March, as the losses mounted, Stewart Menzies informed Churchill that Bletchley had finally broken the German naval code. The Bletchley wizards had also deduced from charting Allied convoy and U-boat positions that the British merchant marine code must have been long compromised, with catastrophic results. Bletchley reworked the British convoy code such that the Germans could no longer listen in on ship-to-ship transmissions and Dönitz could no longer pinpoint convoy locations. Despite that progress, Allied losses in March totaled 108 ships and 627,000 tons, more than half the total British shipping lost during the
ten months
of March to December 1941, when Churchill had given the battle its name.

The British would exploit the Bletchley breakthrough in coming months, but March’s horrific losses certainly did not auger a change of Allied fortune, given that they came against the sinking of just fifteen of the more than one hundred U-boats operating in the North Atlantic. The U-boats were so numerous that the Allies could no longer resort to evasive routing for convoys, with the result that the entire convoy program began to disintegrate. March’s losses, Churchill cabled Roosevelt, brought Britain near to a “hand-to-mouth” subsistence level. Dönitz had reduced Britain’s annual food, fertilizer, and fuel imports from 50 million tons prewar to under 23 million, a figure considered by Churchill to be below the minimum needed to sustain the island. Roosevelt, against the wishes of his military advisers, finally came down on the side of Harriman, who advised that feeding Britain, even at the cost of fighting Germans, was the most pressing issue. Food would go to Britain at the expense of the American armed services, whose demands, Roosevelt believed, were inflated and whose ability in utilizing available ships to meet those demands was notoriously lacking. Churchill, to make more hulls available for transatlantic shipments, reduced sailings to India by half, a measure that, in combination with the Japanese occupation of Burma and an ongoing drought, brought Bengal to the verge of famine.
¹⁰¹

The Atlantic convoys sailed with little protection, and paid a dear price. Escort ships normally assigned to convoy duty were needed for the run-up to Husky. In mid-March, with losses rising, and on the advice of the Admiralty, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to cancel that month’s convoy to Russia, and to not run any more until September. Roosevelt suggested they not break the news to Stalin for “three or four weeks.” He volunteered Churchill for the duty, and asked to see a copy of his message before it was sent. He also offered to send “a supporting message” in tandem with Churchill’s, in order to present a unified front. Churchill expressed his thanks for the gesture. On March 30 Churchill cabled the bad news to Stalin. Roosevelt never sent the supporting message.
¹⁰²

Stalin’s reply was curt, the final line worrisome: “You realize of course that the circumstances cannot fail to affect the position of Soviet troops.” What, exactly, did he mean by that? It was well known that German diplomats in Stockholm had expressed interest in a German-Soviet prisoner exchange, brokered by the Swedes. Stalin refused the offer; he tended to prefer that repatriated prisoners be shot or imprisoned in case their experiences in the West had resulted in their embrace of anti-Bolshevik blasphemies. But the mere mention of talks between Germans and Russians could only lead to the worrisome question of what else they might be discussing.
Fear of a separate peace had been omnipresent in the Foreign Office and the State Department for almost two years.
¹⁰³

Churchill believed that Stalin would never negotiate with Hitler, but the surest way of discouraging such thoughts on Stalin’s part was to win the Battle of the Atlantic. However, the slaughter of March implied that the Allies were not doing so. The Germans had improved U-boat propulsion and radar detection. The
Kriegsmarine
deployed sonar decoys, small radio canisters launched while submerged to confuse listening posts on British escorts. They also deployed buoyant anti-radar decoys that when launched from U-boats mimicked the radar profile of a U-boat on the surface, with the result that Allied bombers took to chasing nonexistent targets. Each
Kriegsmarine
measure and countermeasure was soon countered by British improvements in sonar and especially radar, which was being made more powerful and small enough to fit into the nose of a Sunderland flying boat. It was all part of the naval quotient of Churchill’s Wizard War.