The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (430 page)

E
arly on May 11, RMS
Queen Mary
glided through the Verrazano Narrows and dropped anchor off Staten Island. The grand ship had spent half of the seven years since her maiden voyage in war service, as a troop transport. She was known around the fleet as the “Gray Ghost.” Her prewar red-and-black smokestacks had been slathered with gray paint, as well as her black hull and pearl-white superstructure. Anti-aircraft guns rather than deck chairs now spread across the upper decks. Her interior finery—paneled walls, overstuffed settees, China services, acres of carpets, and the world map in the main dining room—had been carted off to New York warehouses at the start of the war, to be stored alongside the innards of
Queen Elizabeth
and
Normandie.
She could carry 16,000 troops, and had ferried almost that many to Australia shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Her speed—almost thirty knots—made her uncatchable. No U-boat possessed the speed to plot a shot at her unless it found itself fortuitously positioned close abeam as she lunged past.

British and American cruisers had escorted the ship westward while Sunderland flying boats cruised overhead. Aboard the
Queen Mary
for this crossing were more than five thousand Italian and German prisoners of war captured in Tunisia, and destined for a not unpleasant internment in sunny midsouth locales. The prisoners were pleased with their fate; when taunted by Italian-speaking Americans in North Africa, they rejoined, “All right, laugh. But we’re going to America. You’re going to Italy.” The highest-ranking German officers fared the best; they would be billeted at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where they could buy from the Sears catalogue, where vegetable gardens were encouraged and coffee and tobacco were plentiful. Yet the Atlantic passage had not been pleasant for the prisoners, six days locked belowdecks, egress to the upper decks blocked by barbed wire and sand-bagged machine gun emplacements manned by Royal Marines. The ship was infested with lice, the result of a previous cargo of kit bags that had been stored in a Cairo warehouse. The prisoners (or any German spies who scouted the ship in Scotland) might have concluded from numerous newly printed signs in Dutch hung throughout the vessel that somebody important—perhaps Queen Wilhelmena—was on board. Ramps that could accommodate a wheelchair had been conspicuously built in certain
sections of the ship, as if in preparation for Franklin Roosevelt on the return voyage. That was exactly what British intelligence hoped the Germans would conclude.
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The prisoners would be marched off the ship under guard at a Hudson River pier. Another group of passengers would leave the ship here, at anchor in the outer harbor. Among them was Sir William Beveridge, on his way to an international food conference at Hot Springs, Virginia. Beveridge and his wife were not part of the official delegation—anointed “the holy of holies” by Ismay—and therefore had not been quartered in the part of the ship that had been hurriedly deloused for the comfort of the holies. As a result, by the time the
Queen Mary
reached New York, Sir William and Lady Beveridge “bore unmistakable signs of ravage.” Max Beaverbrook and Averell Harriman were also on board, as well as Lord Cherwell and Lord Moran. The Chiefs of Staff and Archie Wavell were accompanied by a troop of almost one hundred staff officers. One passenger among the group traveled with a great many crates, boxes, and trunks packed with an odd assortment of habiliments. He was attended to by a platoon of private secretaries and Royal Marine bodyguards.
Queen Mary
had been chosen for the mission to ensure his safe passage. On deck, Air Commodore Spencer, attired incongruously in a navy blue yachting squadron jacket and cap, lit a cigar and gazed toward Manhattan, mostly hidden behind a steady mist and low fog. It had been almost forty-eight years since Winston Churchill first sailed into New York Harbor aboard the Cunard steamship
Etruria;
Victoria was queen and the sun never set on the Union Jack. Now Americans were singing a popular new tune, a syrupy hillbilly number composed by Paul Roberts and Shelby Darnell, “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere.”
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For the passengers on the two upper decks, the voyage had had about it a holiday atmosphere, made jollier with each new telegram from Alexander. On May 7, he cabled that the 1st United States Armored Division had entered Bizerte while the British had poured into Tunis. On the eighth, as Germans and Italians tried to flee Tunis by ship, Admiral Cunningham issued the order: “Sink, burn, and destroy. Let nothing pass.” On the tenth, Churchill suggested to Attlee and Eden, in London, that England’s church bells be rung that night. The date happened to be the third anniversary of his premiership. The bells were rung.
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Goebbels found the celebrations in London distasteful: “The capture of Tunis and Biserte is… blown up by the English as a sensational event…. All London is drunk with victory.” Yet, Goebbels confessed, “We are indeed experiencing a sort of second Stalingrad.”
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On board the
Queen Mary,
each day’s news had been celebrated over long luncheons and longer evening meals followed by hands of bezique and
poker. (Beaverbrook and Harriman agreed beforehand that they would not take advantage of Churchill’s limited poker skills.) The African victory instilled in the pilgrims a sentiment absent from Allied ranks since Pearl Harbor: confidence.
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The principals talked their way across the Atlantic; or rather, they listened as Churchill spoke. Reverting to his opposition to the American Air Force daylight strategy and its paltry destruction of German industrial targets achieved at great cost to the fliers, he told Harriman he intended to voice his displeasure to Roosevelt. Harriman warned that the surest way to provoke the American Chiefs to pack off their B-17s to the Pacific was for Churchill to denigrate the American effort in Europe. Churchill deferred to Harriman on the matter. During one of his shipboard monologues, Churchill put his hand on Beaverbrook’s knee and said softly, “You don’t talk anymore.” Nobody could talk, Beaverbrook later told Harriman, “because the P.M. talks all the time.” Yet the Beaver managed to produce “a tirade against the Poles” when informed by Churchill of a telegram from Stalin that excoriated HMG for allowing the London Poles to conduct their “anti-Soviet smear campaign.” Beaverbrook—who Harriman considered naive about Stalin—threw his support to Stalin. Churchill threw his support to both Stalin and the Poles, a dual loyalty that could not end well. The subject changed to Burma. Churchill was displeased with Wavell’s progress there, yet he and Wavell agreed that Burma was a malarial swamp unsuited for modern warfare. The British spring push in the western Burmese province of Arakan had ended in failure, and would have ended in utter disaster but for the inspired retreat brought off by General William (“Billy”) Slim. Churchill held Wavell accountable. Wavell, in turn, fed up with Churchill’s long-standing lack of faith in his abilities, threatened to resign. He did not, but only after Brooke told him that if he, Brooke, resigned every time Churchill took an unfair swipe at him, he’d have to do so “at least once a day.” Brooke, for his part, told his diary that the upcoming Washington meetings “will entail hours of argument and hard work trying to convince [the Americans] that Germany must be defeated first… they will pretend to understand… and will continue as at present to devote the bulk of their strength to try and defeat Japan!!” Of the pending meetings, Brooke wrote, “I hate the thought of them.”
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During a lifeboat drill five days out from New York, Churchill disclosed to Harriman that he had ordered a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the lifeboat which was to carry the highest-ranking personages. “I won’t be captured,” he told Harriman. “The finest way to die is in the excitement of fighting the enemy.” Harriman, distressed at the thought they might actually have to take to the lifeboats, reminded Churchill of his guarantee that a German torpedo could not sink the
Queen Mary.
“Ah,” Churchill
replied, “but they might put two into us.” Here was the bluster of the old warrior who loved a good fight. Of the more than six thousand soldiers on board, Allied and Axis, very few had actually killed an enemy. Churchill had; several, in fact. He loved a fight, but he hated unnecessary fights that cost men their lives. So, too, did Marshall and Roosevelt. But the Americans’ sensibilities were informed by politics, decency, reason, and the lessons of Scripture, to which as good Christians they subscribed. Churchill’s sensibilities were informed from having witnessed slaughter firsthand on battlefields, in the Sudan and India in the previous century, in Belgium in 1916, and in London in 1940. More so than the American military chiefs, he could see the slaughter that would take place if an inadequate or ill-prepared Allied army landed on French beaches. In coming months, the conflict between his fertile imagination and his fervent desire to kill Germans took its toll on him, and on the alliance.
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Churchill loved a parade as much as a good fight. He proposed to Harriman, at Beaverbrook’s prodding, to disembark the
Queen Mary
off Battery Park in order to make an unannounced progress by motorcar up Manhattan’s avenues, no doubt to great and spontaneous popular acclaim in light of the news from North Africa. Harriman impressed upon the P.M. the dangers inherent in such a venture, the possibility of lurking Italian and Irish radicals, to say nothing of German operatives. With regret, Churchill withdrew his proposal and instead disembarked off Staten Island, where the presidential train, with Roosevelt’s private car
Ferdinand Magellan
bringing up the rear, waited on a dockside spur. Harry Hopkins was on board, ready to greet his friend.
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Lunch was served during the run down to Washington, “small steak” being one of the menu choices. The entire British contingent went for the “small steak,” which turned out to be so generous that none finished his portion. “It resembled a whole week’s meat ration,” Pug Ismay later wrote. “We were out of practice.” By late afternoon on May 11, Churchill and Roosevelt were drinking cocktails in Roosevelt’s oval study upstairs at the White House. The following day, Sir John Anderson learned that the supplies of Canadian uranium and heavy water Britain needed in order to produce an atomic bomb had been purchased by the United States—the entire Canadian production capacity. The Americans had frozen Britain out of the Manhattan Project. Indeed, there was much to discuss with the president.
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O
n May 13, Churchill received a message from Alexander: “Sir, it is my duty to report that the Tunisian campaign is over…. We are masters of the
North African shores.” Arnim had been captured by the British on Cap Bon along with 150,000 prisoners who included twelve generals and 110,000 Germans. All of this since Churchill set sail. The
New York Times
reported that when a German general approached Bernard Freyberg somewhere north of Enfidaville and asked for peace terms, the New Zealand commander replied: “Unconditional surrender.” British tanks, with infantry hanging on their sides, were taking joy rides along the coastal roads of Cap Bon. Every time a tank swung its gun, groups of Germans and Italians rose from the scrub and poppies, hands raised. It was like a grouse shoot; everybody among the Allies took their bag. The French, defeated in 1940, captured 25,000 Axis troops, the Americans almost 38,000, of whom almost 34,000 were Germans. That brought to 400,000 the total of Axis prisoners taken in North Africa since November, at a cost to the British Eighth and First Armies of 35,000 killed, wounded, and missing. The Americans lost about 18,000 killed, wounded, and missing.
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The war in North Africa was over. The genesis of the victory, Averell Harriman believed, lay in Churchill’s “desperate gamble” in late 1940 to send England’s tanks to Egypt at the moment of the Home Island’s and the Empire’s greatest peril.
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A few days after arriving in Washington, Churchill told the U.S. Congress that “the proud German Army has once again proved the truth of the saying, ‘The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet’; and that is a point which may have its bearing upon the future. But for us, arrived at this milestone in the war, we can say ‘One Continent redeemed.’ ”
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On the day of the North African surrender, Mussolini took himself off to Rocca delle Caminate, his summer palace near Forlì, where he spent several days clipping articles from newspapers and underlining stories about the African campaign with red and blue crayons. The strut had left his step. His aides noticed that where once his desk was a paradigm of order, it was now cluttered, “like a junk-stall with half opened books, Fascist badges and medals, sheaves of wheat bound in tricolour ribbon.” He was embittered, and believed Italians had lost their will to fight, due in part to dozens of Allied air raids on Genoa, Turin, and Naples. The raids had had the effect Churchill intended. Rome’s turn came on May 16. The RAF had been hitting Italy in spot raids for almost three years; now hundreds of American B-17s appeared over Rome. Il Duce concluded the bombing was a prologue to the invasion of Sicily (not Corsica or Sardinia, or southern France, or Greece, as was thought in Berlin). And after Sicily, Mussolini believed, the Italian mainland would be the Allies’ next target.
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