The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (427 page)

T
he Blitz had ceased in May 1941, but during the first months of 1943, German raids conducted by small groups of Focke-Wulf fighter-bombers took place with frightening irregularity, just often enough and just deadly enough to keep Britons on edge. The Germans flew in beneath the radar to bomb roadways, buses, trains, and. with sinister regularity, schools. A January raid saw a lone Focke-Wulf strafe a school in Woolrich before flying on to the Sandhurst Road School in Catford, Lewisham, where it dropped a 1,100-pound bomb, killing thirty-eight students and four teachers. F
IENDISH
O
NSLAUGHT OF A
M
URDEROUS
F
OE
read the next day’s headline of the
Kentish Mercury.
British rage only grew when the commander of the raid, a Captain Schuman, told reporters in Paris, “The bombs fell just where we wanted them to.”
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The most deadly incident that year involved no bombs falling at all. It took place in London at the Bethnal Green tube station in the early evening of March 3. Thousands of pedestrians were making their way toward the station when the sirens sounded, followed immediately by the murderous cacophony from anti-aircraft rockets being launched in nearby Victoria Park. The rockets, though developed six years earlier, were newly deployed. What was terrifying about the “rocket guns,” the war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote, was not their actual report, but that “a rocket going up sounds like a bomb coming down.” When the rockets went up that evening, the crowd panicked and raced for the entrance to the Underground. A young writer for
Stars and Stripes
named Andy Rooney was among the throng. “I almost turned toward the shelter,” Rooney recalled, “but I wasn’t that far from my rooms and decided to keep going. I didn’t learn what happened until the next day, and then I realized, that’s where I almost went down into the station.” Rooney made the right decision; almost two hundred Londoners did not. A young woman carrying either a baby or a bundle tripped partway down the steep stairs, causing the people in front of her to fall and the crowd behind her to collapse into one deadly mass. Within fifteen seconds, the shelter had been converted into a charnel house, where 178 men, women, and children were suffocated and crushed. The Ministry of Information kept the details of the tragedy under wraps, with the result that Londoners, not knowing exactly what had happened, concocted their own explanations. One rumor had it that a German agent on the sidewalk had screamed that petroleum bombs were being dropped, thus panicking the crowd. Another, more popular explanation was that it was all the fault of the Jews, who were again accused, as during the Blitz,
of losing self-control and rushing the shelter. A poll showed that while 29 percent of Londoners thought favorably of Jews, since the Blitz, those who thought unfavorably had doubled to 26 percent. There was talk in Parliament of proposing a law that forbade anti-Semitism. “A law against hating Jews,” Goebbels wrote in his diary, “is usually the beginning of the end for Jews.”
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Churchill had moved to Chequers the night before the Bethnal Green incident in order to continue his convalescence. Brooke, too, had gone down for two weeks with influenza. The CIGS was so ill that he could not even summon the energy to jot in his diary or undertake his birding. He and Churchill could do nothing but observe from their sickbeds as the situation in the Atlantic worsened, as the alliance drifted toward new shoals, and as Generals Alexander and Montgomery waited for the weather to clear in Tunisia.

In March, Iran declared war on Germany and thus joined the United Nations. Averell Harriman, upon his return to Washington from Tehran the previous August, relayed to Roosevelt the young shah’s respect for Churchill and his belief (based on a personal promise from Churchill) that Iran had nothing to fear from the British. But, the shah had told Harriman, “Russia may be difficult!” The shah feared the postwar Soviet government might prove “aggressive” and expressed his desire for stronger ties to Washington. Harriman, the old railroad man, saw an opportunity. The Iranian railroad was in deplorable shape, an opinion he had offered to Churchill the previous summer along with an offer to rebuild and operate the railroad, which Churchill politely declined at the time. Now Harriman prevailed upon friends at the Union Pacific to send surveyors, rolling stock, and modern diesel locomotives to Iran in order to double the capacity of the Iranian railroads, which would double the supplies reaching Stalin and help offset the loss of the Arctic convoys. The British had been running just four or five trains a day from Basra north to Russia, with a capacity of three thousand tons. By late March, teams of American technical advisers, doctors (typhus was rampant; seven of ten Iranian children died before age nine), and railroad men had drifted into Tehran, including the former head of the New Jersey State Police, Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the man who had hunted the Lindbergh kidnapper and whose new duty involved instilling discipline in the ranks of the Iranian police.
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The takeover of the railroad meant that responsibility for the transport of British troops and matériel into Persia, and of British oil out, now rested with the Americans. It was the very erosion of autonomy that had troubled Churchill and Brooke the previous summer. Yet for the sake of their Soviet
ally, they had no choice other than to agree. Harriman’s management skills paid off; by late 1943, capacity on the Iranian railroad had increased to over six thousand tons per day. Harriman knew railroads, and he knew oil. In 1925 he had been a partner in a consortium to modernize the newly nationalized Soviet Baku oilfields, until the U.S. government barred American companies from doing business with the Reds. By 1943 they were all friends, by virtue of treaties—the Reds, the British, the Americans. The Americans in Iran had come only to help the Allied cause, although Harriman, consummate businessman that he was, had his eye on the future as well. The war would not last forever, but Iranian oil would.

C
hurchill had tried since Casablanca to keep Stalin abreast of the progress (or lack thereof) in building up sufficient armies in Britain to seriously contemplate a second front on the scale Stalin demanded. The Old Man touted the eight objectives agreed upon at Casablanca, all of which remained unfulfilled by April. He touted British airpower and Montgomery’s success at Mareth; Stalin was not impressed. In March (before canceling the Arctic convoys), Churchill informed Stalin that of the twenty-seven divisions America had pledged to send to the United Kingdom to prepare for the invasion of France, seven had gone to Torch, and three more were set to go to Husky. In Britain there is “only one, in addition to the strong air force…. The reason why these performances have fallen so far short… is not that the troops do not exist, but the shipping at our disposal and the means of escorting it do not exist.”
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This was Churchill’s elongated way of telling Stalin that in the spring of 1943, there was one fewer American division in England than when Churchill had visited Stalin the previous August. Despite the pledge made at Casablanca to carry twenty-seven divisions and 938,000 American troops to Britain by December 31, 1943, the Americans had so far come up twenty-six short, although they still had eight months to fulfill their promise. Churchill told Stalin he did not mean to denigrate the American effort, although in effect that was what he was doing. He pointed out that in order to sustain operations in North Africa, the Pacific, and India, and to supply Russia, Britain had to cut its own imports “to the bone.” This was true; yet here Churchill in deference to Roosevelt failed to point out the obvious. Had the Americans not dedicated so much shipping to supplying Douglas MacArthur, more would have been available for the “Europe First” strategy. Finally, Churchill told Stalin that were Germany to weaken, Britain would contemplate an assault on the Continent, but if Germany did not
weaken, “a premature attack with inferior and insufficient forces would merely lead to a bloody repulse… and a great triumph for the enemy.”
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Yet any weakening on Germany’s part could only be induced by the Red Army. Roosevelt had implied as much in his own message to Stalin: “We hope that the success of your heroic army, which is an inspiration to all of us, will continue.” Stalin was not in the least satisfied with the logic of Roosevelt or Churchill. In a telegram on March 15, he repeated his demand that the “blow from the West should… be struck in the spring or early summer.” Anglo-American “uncertainty” and delay of cross-Channel operations, he told them, “arouses grave anxiety in me, about which I feel I cannot be silent.”
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By mid-April, four weeks after Stalin expressed his anxiety, the threat in the North Atlantic appeared to have abated, as had the threat of an Axis counterstoke in Tunisia. Yet everyone from King George to Britain’s bakers and candlestick makers had long since learned to put little stock in appearances. The weather in Britain by mid-April showed signs of improvement, but clear skies were always a worrisome invitation to the Luftwaffe. The few unbombed flower beds in parks put on subdued shows, while American soldiers commandeered rugby pitches in Hyde Park, where they played pickup games of baseball (and sometimes faced down British troops who sought to take over the pitch for its intended purpose). The sheep in Hyde Park took to grazing along nearby streets, the iron fences of the park having been torn out and melted down to build tanks and bombs. One Hyde Park battery of AA guns was commanded by Auxiliary Territorial Service sergeant Mary Churchill (who once intervened between two groups of Brits and Yanks about to come to blows over the use of a rugby pitch). Spring, indeed, was nigh. But with HMG still forbidding weather forecasts, Britons never knew what was coming their way.
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As always, this included German aircraft. “The London public fears that the German air
blitzkrieg
will suddenly break out again overnight,” wrote Goebbels. “Would to God that we were in a position to do it!” Now the RAF regularly bombed the Ruhr Valley and Berlin in increasingly heavy assaults. Churchill kept Stalin apprised throughout April of the massed attacks on Berlin and Hamburg, of tonnage thrown in excess of 700 tons a night, then 800, and then, “the best Berlin has got yet,” 1,050 tons. Some Church of England clerics took exception to “the frankly jubilant way in which the press whoops about the tonnage of bombs dropped on German cities.” But the average Briton, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, saw the RAF bombing as “a bad job which has got to be done.” Britons, who had “got hell” during the Blitz, allotted little sympathy to German citizens. German propaganda called the raids “terror bombings.” They were. And they were necessary; Churchill could give Stalin little else.
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In mid-April, the War Cabinet decreed that Britain’s church bells could once again call worshippers to Sunday service, beginning on Easter Sunday. And after a superbly nonsensical debate in the Commons, it was agreed that church bells would no longer be reserved for use as a warning in the event of invasion. When an MP asked Churchill what warning system would replace the bells, he replied, “For myself, I cannot help thinking that anything like a serious invasion would be bound to leak out.” Austin Hopkinson objected: “How can news possibly leak out,” he asked, “when it is an offense to spread alarm and despondency?” “Factual statements,” Churchill replied, “especially well intentioned, would fall into that category.” That week, St. Paul’s regained its voice and Londoners heard the Stedman Cinques flawlessly rendered by Alfred Peck and his thirteen assistants, who had been practicing for three years with muffled clappers. In Coventry, only the cathedral’s spire remained, and from it came a bronze tolling. The peal of bells rolling over greening meadows and newly plowed fields augured a return to the splendid isolation from (most) continental calamities that Britons had enjoyed for almost nine hundred years, until the Luftwaffe arrived overhead in 1940. The bells need never have been silenced in the first place; Britons would have known the enemy invasion was at hand by simply turning on their wireless, or by opening their front door and looking up. Yet the bells connected Churchill’s yeomanry—and Churchill—to England’s past. That they were allowed to ring again only reinforced that connection. All was well.
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