The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (428 page)

Then, over the course of the next few days, Churchill was apprised of three developments that raised new and serious questions about the security of Britain, inter-Allied politics and the second front, and the possibility of a new Blitz carried out by new and terrifying weapons. The first shock came on April 13, when Churchill was told for the first time that the Chiefs of Staff had agreed that all available landing craft be sent from Britain to North Africa in order to meet the needs of Husky. Furthermore, the craft were to be kept at the ready in order to exploit any favorable opportunities that developed, presumably by way of a venture onto the Italian mainland. Churchill was a strong backer of exploiting opportunities, but he had not been made aware until this meeting that the paucity of landing craft forced an either/or choice: exploit Sicilian gains, or meet the needs of Sledgehammer, the small-scale strike into France. The shock was more emotional than intellectual; everyone had concluded almost a year earlier that Torch effectively moved Roundup (the large-scale invasion) into mid-1944. In spite of that certainty, Churchill (and Roosevelt) had made promises to Stalin that they could not deliver on. The latest news on the landing craft amounted to
the final knell. Over dinner with Brooke that evening—“started being stormy, then improved”—Churchill agreed to the proposal. He informed the War Cabinet that Sledgehammer (and, necessarily, Roundup) were off the table for that year, but he did not inform Stalin.
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The second piece of unsettling news arrived two days later, on April 15, when Churchill was informed that RAF intelligence indicated that the Germans were building rockets near Peenemünde, on the Baltic Sea coast. These rockets were not just an advanced version of the small but deadly
Nebelwerfer
rockets shot from tubes mounted on trucks, or the three- and five-inch solid fuel missiles deployed on ships and in anti-aircraft batteries. The German rockets were large, unmanned, and wingless craft propelled by exploding gases and guided by gyroscopes and navigation technology of a sort the British had yet to imagine.

It was the stuff of science fiction. The British had known for four years that the Germans were designing rockets, but nobody in British intelligence knew exactly how far along in the testing and production process German scientists and technicians might be. Nothing was known of propellant, range, guidance system, or payload. At the suggestion of Pug Ismay, Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys was assigned the task of finding out what the Germans were up to, and how to best develop countermeasures. This was nepotism straight up, but Sandys had been involved in the development of anti-aircraft technologies until his 1941 car accident put him out of the air defense planning hierarchy. He saw a future for rockets in warfare, not just for the short-range projectiles fired from tubes, but for futuristic vehicles like the Germans were apparently building, and might soon be testing. Sandys set up a committee code-named Crossbow to recommend countermeasures. Yet Crossbow had first to ascertain just what the Germans were doing. Nobody knew. Days after learning of the German rocket work, Churchill and Brooke motored to the Hatfield Aerodrome to witness a display of the latest British advances in fighter aircraft, described by Brooke as “without propellers, driven by air sucked in in front and squirted out the back! Apparently likely to be the fighter of the future.” It had been on the drawing board for more than a decade, and the first British turbo-jet engines had been tested in 1941. But the Exchequer lacked the specie to go into full production. Thus, the jet age arrived along with the rocket age, although neither had yet been christened. Hitler would do that.
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The third piece of news that reached Churchill was in some ways the most unsettling of all. That April week, Hitler told the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, that Jews were “pure parasites” which “like tuberculosis bacilli” infected healthy bodies. “Nations which did not rid themselves of Jews,” Hitler told Horthy, “perished.” Hungary, a German
ally, had not been forced by Berlin to deport its Jewish citizens, and to his credit Horthy did not start now, although he had no objection to forcing Hungary’s Jews into slave labor. Other leaders in other capitals had no such choice and no compunction about sending Jews east. Over the next few days, trains carrying more than 2,400 Belgian and French Jews left Brussels and Paris for Auschwitz. On April 19, German authorities in Warsaw decreed that the Jewish ghetto there be combed for Jews to be transported to the death camp at Treblinka. Since early 1940, more than 300,000 Warsaw Jews had died or been sent east. When German trucks and soldiers arrived to collect their cargoes, they encountered something entirely unexpected. More than 1,200 Jews armed with just a few dozen rifles, hand grenades, and homemade bombs fought off 2,100 German troops for almost three weeks, killing 300. The Germans blocked and then flooded underground tunnels and sewers through which Jews tried to flee. They brought in heavy artillery and shelled the ghetto for ten days, and then set the ruins ablaze to smoke out survivors. When they finally retook the ghetto, they shot 7,000 Jews and sent another 7,000 to Treblinka. Several thousand more, who had fled to the Christian part of the city, were hunted down or betrayed. News of the massacres seeped from the Reich and was given much play in the Free Polish and London press. By then, fewer than 50,000 Jews remained alive in Warsaw.
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Goebbels and Hitler ignored Allied condemnations of such alleged atrocities. Instead, they hatched a diversion. It took the form of a postwar plan of their own in response to the nebulous federations and world councils being discussed in Washington and London. This was a new “European Charter” that made no mention of
Herrenvolk
(the master race) or
Lebensraum
(“living space,” the plan to resettle Germans on conquered lands in the East). Instead, it pledged Germany’s intent, as a sort of European attorney, to guarantee the freedoms of every citizen under its care, a pledge the British could not make, said one German newspaper, because Britain lacked a National Socialist Party capable “of guiding the fate of European countries.” Goebbels intended to sell Europeans on the wisdom of “European cooperation,” a phrase he believed might prove effective in furthering his aims, which had nothing to do with European cooperation but rather with driving a wedge between the Soviets and their Western allies, especially Poland.
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The London Poles had in the previous weeks given Goebbels an opening and Churchill a headache. In contravention to Allied policy that discussion of postwar boundaries take place only following the defeat of Hitler, the London Poles published their intent to restore to Poland those portions of the Polish Ukraine grabbed by Stalin in 1939 (and earlier grabbed by Poland after the Russian Revolution). Stalin, for his part, suggested in
imprecise terms that the Poles should think of looking to East Prussia for satisfaction. What did that mean? Was Stalin intent on moving his zone of protection against future German aggression farther westward into Polish territory? Complicating matters was the fact that Poland had grabbed the Teschen portion of Czechoslovakia during the Munich crisis, thereby forfeiting some of the moral high ground when it came to talk of restoring boundaries. Eduard Beneš, whose country had been betrayed by the British at Munich, looked now to Moscow for help in restoring the Teschen region to Czechoslovakia. Britain had gone to war over Poland, but which Poland—the Poland that had been violated by Hitler, the Poland that had been violated by Stalin, or the Poland that had, in Churchill’s words, “jumped on the back of Czechoslovakia” in 1938? At best, the diplomatic situation was now all bollixed up. Goebbels, gleeful, saw his opportunity, but how best to exploit the suspicions that swam beneath the surface of Allied relations, how best to portray Stalin and the Bolsheviks as the true villains of Europe? For a decade, when the Nazis faced such a challenge, the most reliable arrow in their quiver was also the most crooked: the lie.
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On the morning of April 13, Berlin radio triumphantly announced that German troops operating in the Katyn forest, west of Smolensk, discovered mass graves that contained the bodies of more than 8,500 Polish army officers and men, their hands bound behind their backs. It appeared the victims had been shot in the back of the head at close range. Young conifers had been planted over the graves in an apparent attempt to disguise the atrocities. According to Berlin, the Russians had captured the men in 1939 (when Stalin in partnership with Hitler, chewed off his piece of Poland). The Soviets moved the prisoners east to three camps and, Berlin claimed, subsequently marched them out of those camps and murdered them. That the alleged execution methods matched exactly those of Hitler’s
Einsatzgruppen
did not perturb Dr. Goebbels, and for good reason. He knew the Russians had indeed murdered the Polish officers (who deserved it, he told his diary, since the Poles “were the real instigators of this war”). He even managed to express his shock over the news to his diary: “Gruesome aberrations of the human soul were thus revealed.”
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Thus the third troublesome development to come Churchill’s way that week. General Anders, who had gone to Moscow the previous year in search of missing Poles, had finally found them. The London Poles, already wary of Britain’s resoluteness in restoring Polish borders, now demanded resoluteness in pursuing the truth about Katyn. Two days after the radio bulletin, over lunch at No. 10, Churchill cautioned Władysław Sikorski, who intended to call for a Red Cross investigation, not to pursue the matter. Cadogan was present, and he recorded Churchill as saying, “Alas, the German revelations are probably true. The Bolsheviks can be very cruel.”
He advised Sikorski to look to the future, not the past. He was referring to the immediate urgency to preserve the alliance in order to defeat Hitler; only then could Poland emerge as a free member of the European community. As for the Polish officers, Churchill told Sikorski, “If they are dead, nothing you can do will bring them back.” But Sikorski, against Churchill’s advice, called for the Red Cross investigation. A few days later, Berlin also invited a Red Cross investigation. Goebbels enthused to his diary of the propaganda possibilities. Given that the disputes and hairline fractures within the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance were common knowledge, he saw a chance to help bring about an outright schism, and possibly a negotiated peace. “Our propaganda is suspected everywhere of having blown up the Katyn incident to enable us to make a separate peace either with the English or the Soviets.” Although this was not his intention, “such a possibility would naturally be very pleasing.”
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The Russians had a saying: Poles never learn, and they never forget. Poles, in turn, said of Russians: they are Slavs, but Slavs without hearts. Stalin’s reaction to the Polish accusations was swift and final. Within days he broke off relations with Sikorski’s government in London, of whom Stalin declared, “They think themselves clever tacticians, but God has given them no brains.” Churchill and Roosevelt each advised Stalin to suspend rather than break relations with the London Poles. He would not do so, the Poles having so clearly displayed their “treachery” with their “hideous charges.” Roosevelt warned Stalin that the break would have negative repercussions in the American Polish community. Stalin didn’t care in the least about Poles living in Buffalo or Chicago. Churchill warned Stalin that Goebbels would make much of the schism, at Allied expense. He assured Stalin that the London Poles were honorable and not “in collusion with the Germans” and added that he was convinced that “German propaganda has produced this story to make a rift” in Allied ranks (the imprecise word “produced” might be taken as either “concocted” or “disclosed”). Stalin did not bend. Churchill contemplated shutting down those Polish newspapers that criticized the Soviets, and told Stalin so. Stalin held firm. In fact, he announced that he would sponsor a new Polish government in exile, in Moscow. When the London Poles pressed the issue, Churchill warned that their “charges of an insulting character against the Soviet Government” would “seem to countenance the atrocious German propaganda.” On that front, Goebbels was winning. On April 28, Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “So far this business has been Goebbels’ greatest triumph.”
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In the appendix to
Closing the Ring,
the fifth volume of his war memoirs, Churchill printed part of a January 1944 memo to Eden that implies he was still trying to get to the bottom of the Katyn matter. But he left off the final line: “we should none of us ever speak a word about it.” The
memo was written at about the time in late autumn when the Soviets gave Kathleen Harriman and American correspondents a tour of Katyn. The correspondents noted many contradictions; if the Germans killed the prisoners in the summer of 1941, why were some wearing winter uniforms? And why were letters written in 1940 but never mailed found in some of the dead men’s pockets? On the return trip to Moscow, Kathleen Harriman and her fellow correspondents drank and sang to dull the images of the day. Despite the contradictory evidence, the correspondents came down on the side of the Soviets (considered heroes by most Americans). Cabled
Time
correspondent Richard Lauterbach: “As far as most of us were concerned, the Germans had slaughtered the Poles.” Four decades later, Averell Harriman, in defense of his daughter’s judgment, said, “She was not a historian, and it wasn’t her job to decide whether what she saw was right or wrong.”
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In fact, within six weeks of Berlin’s April announcement, Churchill and Eden knew what had happened at Katyn. Eden had asked for and on May 31 received a report by Sir Owen O’Malley, the Foreign Office liaison with the London Poles. O’Malley was clear in his opinion: “Most of us are convinced that a large number of Polish officers were indeed murdered by the Russian authorities.” In his detailed report, seen only by Churchill, the War Cabinet, and King George, O’Malley concluded, “We have, in fact, perforce used the good name of England like the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre; and in view of the immense importance of an appearance of Allied unity and of the heroic resistance of Russia to Germany, few will think that any other course would have been wise or right.” O’Malley then plumbed an ethical implication that was not strictly within his diplomatic purview: “What in the international sphere is morally indefensible generally turns out to be in the long run to have been politically inept.” London’s support of Moscow had come at the expense of the Poles, O’Malley wrote, who have been portrayed as reckless and tactless and who “have been restrained from putting their own case before the public.” HMG “have been obliged… to distort the normal and healthy operations of our intellectual and moral judgments.” Churchill ordered that O’Malley’s report be kept in a locked box and passed only by hand among members of the War Cabinet. Churchill, however, sent Roosevelt a copy in August. They were partners, after all. The report, Churchill told the president, “is grim, a well written story, perhaps too well written.”
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