The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (429 page)

This was realpolitik in the most Germanic sense of the word. Those who like to debate just when the Cold War began—during the Anglo-Russo struggle for power in Persia and Afghanistan (the Great Game) in the nineteenth century, in Moscow in November 1917, with the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact—could do worse than look to the Katyn incident, not
necessarily at the actual murders, but at the Allied response in the months that followed as Stalin proclaimed his outrage (but never specifically his innocence). Churchill later wrote of the compromises that had to be entertained in the war against Hitler: “terrible and even humbling submissions must at times be made to the general aim.” He spoke those words while addressing a tragic affair that took place in 1944, during the Warsaw uprising, when Stalin refused British bombers the right to overfly Poland and land in Soviet territory. Yet his words applied to Katyn as well.
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Nancy Astor, during a visit to Moscow in 1931, had with her usual forthrightness asked Stalin when the mass murder of western Slavs would end. “When it is no longer necessary,” Stalin replied. Apparently, it was still necessary.
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T
hroughout April, relations between the Allies deteriorated—not only relations between Russia and Poland, but between the Anglo-Americans and Moscow. The need for Roosevelt and Churchill to meet became evident, if only to do (or say) whatever was needed to placate Stalin, and to decide where to go after Sicily, although that decision rested by default with George Marshall, who had yet to make any decision. Yet Brooke, by sending all available landing craft from Britain to North Africa, had effectively settled the question for that year in favor of his Mediterranean strategy. Brooke made his decision, in part, in reaction to Admiral King’s sending
his
landing craft to the Pacific, where MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz were preparing to begin their island-hopping march to Tokyo. This was yet another blow against “Europe first” as Brooke saw it. Yet Brooke’s shift of the landing craft did not play well at the newly built Pentagon, and underscored the need for Churchill and Roosevelt to meet again relatively soon. Churchill later wrote, “I was conscious of serious divergencies beneath the surface which, if not adjusted, would lead to grave difficulties and feeble action during the rest of the year.”
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That was a roundabout way of saying the British and the Americans had no strategy in place to fight the war in Europe after the war in Africa was finished. On that front, Allied fortunes had improved. Since busting through the Mareth Line in late March, Montgomery had pushed north, while Patton had punched away at mountain passes and squeezed eastward on the Axis left flank. On April 7, forward units of the Eighth Army and Patton’s II Corps awoke to find the enemy had vanished from their front. That morning a British reconnaissance patrol stumbled across a similar patrol from Patton’s II Corps. “This is certainly a pleasant surprise,”
offered Sergeant Bill Brown, from Devon. “Well, it’s good to see somebody besides a Nazi,” replied Private Perry Pearce of Kentucky. During just six critical weeks—from about the time Rommel went home sick in early March to mid-April—the advantage had shifted in Tunisia from the Germans to the Allies, in the air, on the sea, and on land. By April 20, Montgomery, General Anderson, the French, and George Patton had put Arnim’s army in a vise.
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The battle for Tunis had entered its most critical phase, a time of “scrunch and punch,” Churchill told Harold Nicolson and Duff Cooper on the twentieth over port in the House smoking room.
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That night Nicolson wrote of Churchill: “As usual he is very gay.” At times during the worst setbacks of the previous three years, his gaiety had been feigned, but Churchill, always determined, was now confident as well. When Nicolson asked about the status of the bey of Tunis, Muhammad VII al-Munsif, whom the Free French accused of being a Vichy sympathizer and German puppet, Churchill replied, “He will have to call himself
Obey
in future.” He told Nicolson of a virtual RAF massacre of German transport planes returning to Sicily after landing reinforcements for Arnim. And he revealed that the Vatican had just released a list of prisoners that included Violet Bonham Carter’s son Mark. “I only pray,” he told Nicolson, that the German planes “were not carrying our prisoners.”
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No British prisoners had been shot down, but Churchill was correct about the scrunch and punch. By April 22, Arnim had only seventy-six tanks in running order and was so short of gasoline that his men distilled local wines for fuel. The Allies had pushed the Germans into a pocket behind a 130-mile front that looped in a lazy half circle from just south of Cape Bon, where the Eighth Army was dug in, west and northward to Anderson’s First Army, hard by the Mediterranean coast about forty miles west of Bizerte. More Axis troops than were captured at Stalingrad were dug in behind the line; every ridge held artillery, every wadi and every road and track was covered by German machine guns and anti-tank guns. Alexander had originally tapped the American II Corps, which held the line between Anderson and the Fighting French, for a supporting role in the final push. Then politics intruded from Washington. Eisenhower, under pressure from home, explained to Alexander that if the American people believed their men “have not played a substantial part they will be even more intent upon prosecuting the war against the Japs” and commensurately less inclined to fight Hitler. To that end, Ike asked Alexander to assign the II Corps a greater role in the end game. Alexander acquiesced,
and ordered the II Corps shifted to the north of Anderson’s First Army, where it would now form part of the van in the final battle. Patton would not be on hand to lead the charge; he had left for Rabat to plan the Sicilian campaign, where he was to lead the American effort. Eisenhower put his deputy, Major General Omar Bradley, in command of the II Corps. The French held the line between Anderson and Montgomery, at Cape Bon. All was in place. Churchill had Arnim in a vise, and it was closing.
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A
fter Bletchley broke the U-boat code in March, convoys were routed away from known wolf pack hunting grounds, with the result that the Allies lost almost two-thirds less tonnage in April (250,000 tons) than in March—a significant improvement, but still terrible, and not worthy of a declaration of victory. And if Dönitz’s objective was to fight the battle to a stalemate, thereby preventing an Allied landing on the Continent, he was succeeding. In fact, the American press declared he was winning, period.
Time
wrote that “the hard and hopeful fact—for the Germans” is that “Germany [is] still winning the Battle of the Atlantic…. Churchill and Roosevelt both had indicated that the Allies could not hope to launch a major offensive before that margin was beaten in.” By early May, the margin had not been. Admiral Ernest King, blunt and incapable of obfuscation, declared, “The submarine menace is being dealt with…. We expect to bring it under control in four to six months.” That meant October, the close of the invasion season. Here was the first (and inadvertent) public acknowledgment on the part of the Anglo-Americans that no large-scale invasion of fortress Europe could possibly be undertaken until favorable weather again descended upon the English Channel. And that would be in May or June of 1944, at the earliest.
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Patrons of Washington bars and London pubs asked, what will one million American and British soldiers in England and Africa do for a year? Churchill pondered the same question. Secure now in the results soon to be obtained in Tunisia, and quite positive as to how best to exploit them, he proposed to Roosevelt on April 29 that they meet in order to decide where to go after the coming victory and the planned assault on Sicily. Italy appeared to Churchill to be the self-evident target. Another matter had to be addressed. The Americans had failed to exchange information on the atomic bomb, as agreed upon the previous year. Harry Hopkins had promised Churchill at Casablanca that the situation would be “put right.” It had not been. The Americans, Lord Cherwell told Churchill, had completely cut off the flow of information. Churchill, furious, asked how soon British
scientists could start work on a unilateral basis. Perhaps six to nine months, Cherwell replied, if given the highest priority, and that at the expense of all other war programs. Other issues needed to be discussed as well: the Poles, the Free French, Arctic convoys, the Pacific theater. When Roosevelt did not respond in a timely fashion to the proposal that they meet, Churchill took his case to Hopkins, adding that, as his doctors forbade his flying due to fears of reinvigorating his pneumonia, he could travel by ship in order to arrive in Washington by May 11. Finally, on May 2, as if inviting an old Harvard roommate down for a weekend of bridge, Roosevelt replied, “I am really delighted you are coming…. I want you of course to stay here [at the White House] with me.”
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The meeting, code-named Trident, was on. Stalin would not be there; his presence was required in Moscow for the start of Hitler’s summer offensive. In Russia, from Leningrad to Rostov, the spring
rasputitsa
had turned forest floors to marshes, marshes to lakes, and roads to quagmires. A
New York Times
correspondent wrote that along the entire front, “rusting cannon and broken tanks marked the course of old battles.” The relative strength of the two opposing armies was about equal. That raised the specter of stalemate. Yet near Kursk, Hitler had assembled the largest tank army in history, and it now awaited orders to attack. With Arctic convoys halted and the Iranian railroad unable to make up the loss, the Red Army would face the Wehrmacht, and soon, with only the men, weapons, and tanks on hand. Stalin’s factories and farms contributed 95 percent of the matériel and food his armies needed, but the 5 percent Lend-Lease contributed had proven critical. He needed that boost now, but it was not forthcoming. There was no doubt that the coming battle would be horrific, and quite possibly deciding. In London and Washington, there was growing doubt as to whether Stalin and the Red Army could sustain the effort much longer.
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The Soviet leader, as he had for sixteen months, sought from his partners only one answer to only one question: the date of the opening of the second front. Settling that question was high on the Trident agenda. With relations with Stalin at their lowest point since Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt considered his need to meet with Stalin clear and compelling, and to meet without Churchill. As Churchill prepared to sail for Washington, Roosevelt drafted a letter to Stalin wherein he proposed they choose an acceptable place to meet, perhaps Siberia or Alaska, but not Africa—too hot—and not an Atlantic venue such as Iceland, where Churchill, uninvited, might feel excluded. The letter, carried by the former ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph Davies, was to be hand delivered, and Churchill was under no circumstances to be made aware of its existence. Churchill’s claim on Roosevelt’s time and attention was lessening in proportion to (as the president saw things) Roosevelt’s growing stature within the alliance, a role cemented
by virtue of American factory output, and armed forces that now numbered six million strong, and Roosevelt’s conviction that he could make things right with Stalin if only they could sit down for an intimate chat.
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