The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (432 page)

Harangued by Roosevelt, Churchill cabled London on May 21 and advised that HMG break off relations with de Gaulle. Eden replied immediately with a strong dissenting opinion. Giraud and de Gaulle had agreed to meet in Algiers the next week to consummate their marriage by way of creating a new French National Committee. Would it not be wiser, Eden asked, to await the results of that meeting before making such a profound decision? Churchill agreed. A final decision could wait until after Giraud and de Gaulle met. In this decision, Churchill displayed a consistency he held to throughout the war. He deferred (often with great reluctance) to his Chiefs of Staff in military matters, and he deferred (again, often with reluctance) to the War Cabinet in strictly political matters. As a believer in the “Parl” he could not do otherwise. Eden later kidded him about his back-and-forth on de Gaulle, attributing the duality of his opinions to his being half American. But both knew the real reason Churchill inclined to bow to Roosevelt lay with the increasing leverage the Americans had over the British. Here, Eden served the P.M. well, as did Brooke on military affairs, by steering Churchill away from his more incendiary and quixotic inclinations, political or military. In turn, he led them forward, relentless in his quest for their common objective: victory.
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Yet, how to fight the war, not how to manage the French or the postwar world, was why Trident had been convened. Left unresolved as the talks neared their end was the strategic question Churchill considered the most critical: where to go after Sicily. What would become of twenty battle-hardened divisions, of Tedder’s four thousand aircraft and Cunningham’s navy? The momentum of the African victory and the pending Sicily campaign must be maintained. Churchill for his part had Italy and Mussolini in his sights. Only one obstacle stood in his way: George Marshall. Late on May 25, Marshall stopped by Roosevelt’s office to say his good-byes to Churchill. He found the two leaders putting the finishing touches on a communiqué to Stalin before setting off to bed. Roosevelt had told Churchill that if he wanted to argue the case for invading Italy, he’d have to stay in Washington for another week. That would not do. Churchill had
been gone from London for almost four weeks. He would be off just after sunrise, to visit Alexander and Eisenhower in Algiers. Marshall, having paid his respects, was about to leave, when Roosevelt said, “Why don’t you go with Winston?” Coming from the commander in chief, this was more an order than a suggestion. It was now past 2:00
A.M.
Churchill was due to depart in six hours. The dutiful Marshall had so little time to pack for the trip that he left his dress slacks behind. But he made the flight.
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Churchill and Marshall departed Washington aboard the Boeing Clipper
Bristol,
bound for Newfoundland, the first leg of the journey to Algiers. Accompanying Churchill, along with Marshall, were Ismay and Brooke, as well as Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, himself the victim of a stomach virus that would force him to leave off at Gibraltar and return to London. Churchill’s stenographer Patrick Kinna, was on board, having become in his twenty-two months of service a trusted member of the team. Scotland Yard’s Thompson and another detective were also on hand, as was Captain Richard Pim, the caretaker of the maps, all of which were rolled and stowed. Sawyers the valet served, as usual, in his capacity as quartermaster of Churchill’s beverages, his Quadrinox sleeping pills, and his hot-water bottle.
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The journey much impressed Brooke, who for every leg of every trip that year kept a log of the miles covered and time spent in the air (almost nine hours and 1,300 miles on the leg to Newfoundland). All on board signed one another’s “short snorters.” These were banknotes carried by those who had made a transatlantic flight, signed by others who had done the same. The “sect,” as Brooke called it, was the idea of the first Americans who had undertaken the crossing. Anyone who failed to produce his short snorter upon demand forfeited a dollar or bought a short snort of whisky. In time, as such journeys became more frequent, the participants taped new banknotes to the old in order to accommodate the growing numbers of signatures. Churchill gamely signed his short snorters as the flying boat made its way north through steady mist. After a four-hour stopover at Botwood for dinner, and with foul weather dropping fast upon the coast,
Bristol
lifted off at dusk for the seventeen-hour flight to Gibraltar. The outside temperature was zero, inside not much warmer. Sometime during the night lightning struck the plane, twice. After spending a moonlit night seven thousand feet above the Atlantic, the group reached Gibraltar late in the afternoon of May 27, and stayed the night at the governor’s residence. The next afternoon, they climbed into their new Avro York aircraft, a converted Lancaster fitted out with five berths, drawing room, lavatory, and eight windows to take in the views. By nightfall they were drawing warm baths in Algiers, at the villas of Cunningham and Eisenhower.
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O
n the day Churchill and Marshall departed Washington, a British convoy steamed into Alexandria after an uneventful two-thousand-mile run from Gibraltar through waters free of Axis mines and Axis ships. The Mediterranean was open for the first time since 1941. Brooke, always calculating shipping tonnage, concluded that an effective gain of one million tons of shipping was realized by cutting forty-five days and ten thousand miles from the London-to-Egypt voyage via the Cape of Good Hope.
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Allied shipping losses in May fell to 200,000 tons—about forty ships. But Dönitz paid with forty U-boats to attain those meager results, twice his losses for March and April when he had sent almost one million tons to the bottom. By June he had pulled his fleets back to the far eastern Atlantic. For the month of June, his U-boats claimed just six ships and 27,000 tons of Allied shipping, a 95 percent reduction from March. British aircraft equipped with microwave radar could now detect surfaced U-boats at night or in fog; coordinates were relayed to surface ships, which then closed in on the targeted submarines. Thirty-eight U-boats were lost to such tactics in the Bay of Biscay during May (called “Black May” in the
Kriegsmarine
) and early June, three fewer than the number of Allied merchantmen sunk in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, and twelve more than the number of U-boats launched during those weeks. Even as he abandoned the western Atlantic, Dönitz’s losses mounted. Since early 1943, British and American merchant ships had been launched faster than the U-boats could sink them, while increased Allied air patrols and the improvements in radar ensured that U-boats were being sunk in far greater numbers than Hitler could replace them. By July American ship construction outpaced losses from all sources—U-boats, mines, surface ships, and aircraft. America had finally hit its stride, building half again as much shipping that year (more than 12 million tons) than Britain produced during the entire war.

Churchill no longer fretted over either the strangulation or the invasion of Britain. Yet final victory was by no means imminent. The American armies had to mature and American shipbuilding had to reach even greater levels, levels that could sustain Britain, Russia, MacArthur, and a second European front all at the same time. “Henceforth,” Churchill later wrote, “the danger was not destruction but stalemate.”
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Beaverbrook agreed. “There seems a real danger,” he wrote to Harry Hopkins, “that we shall go on indefinitely sewing the last button on the last gaiter.” If the Allies were not prepared to assume the risks and suffer the casualties of a second front, “then let us concentrate at once exclusively
on the production of heavy bombers and think in terms of 1950.” Churchill had told the U.S. Congress much the same when on May 19 he cautioned, “No one can tell what new complications and perils might arise in four or five more years of war. And it is in the dragging-out of the war at enormous expense, until the democracies are tired or bored or split, that the main hopes of Germany and Japan must now reside. We must destroy this hope.”
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E
very North African port from Alexandria to Casablanca was full of warships, troop transports, landing craft, and cargo ships. Of the one million men holding the North African shore, 160,000 of them would be going to Sicily. Like Lincoln in the months after Grant drove his men across the Rapidan toward Richmond, Churchill now knew his army—British, colonial, French, and American—had gained confidence and strength in the killing fields of North Africa. This army must not be brought to a halt. It had to push on. Such a force had to be led to greater triumphs, to the end.

Churchill told Marshall and Eisenhower that this monstrous machine, once set in motion, could be recalled only with great difficulty. To take this army only as far as Sicily would be to defy momentum, and to defy the strategic maxim to always exploit gains. “Keep on until you get Italy,” he told Eisenhower, again and again. Within forty-eight hours of arriving in Algiers, Churchill brought Marshall and Eisenhower around to fundamental agreement. By air and sea the Allies would pound Italy. The rail yards of Rome, just five miles from the Vatican, were the first target. (Churchill, while in Washington, had assured New York archbishop Francis Spellman that precautions had been taken to avoid destroying the Eternal City itself.) Airpower alone might drive Italy out of the war. If it did not, the army could. The final decision to land it on the Italian mainland would rest with Eisenhower. Where on the boot of the mainland the Allies might strike after Sicily would depend on how many Germans poured into Italy, and where they set up their defense. If the Germans drew their line north of the Po River, an Allied thrust toward Tuscany would cut off any Axis forces to the south and avoid a four-hundred-mile slog up the boot. Another strategy entailed stabbing into Naples, followed by a quick run north to Rome. Churchill was so sure that Italy was ripe for the kill that he told Eisenhower that British civilians would gladly halve their rations for a month if it helped flush Italy from the war, an outcome that might, he proposed, come in time for the two of them—himself and Eisenhower—to meet in Rome for Christmas dinner.
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Marshall endorsed the Italian gambit, but like Churchill in Washington (who neglected to stipulate the conditions necessary for Overlord to proceed), Marshall failed to articulate a belief that he held to be self-evident: operations in Italy, whatever form they took, would in no way interfere with the planning and execution of Overlord. This oversight, like Churchill’s, would lead to trouble within the Anglo-American ranks before the year was out.

Marshall went home and Eisenhower put his staff to work to determine where in Italy to strike. Churchill’s demeanor accordingly grew gay. “I have no more pleasant memories of the war than the eight days in Algiers and Tunis,” he later wrote. On one morning, an Eisenhower aide found Churchill breakfasting in bed on “one bottle of white wine, one bottle of soda, and a bucket of ice.” He was in fine fettle. He had prevailed. On June 1, the party flew to Tunis and motored on to Carthage, where Churchill addressed the troops in the Roman amphitheater. The acoustics were so perfect that no loudspeakers were needed. That night at dinner Churchill offered, “Yes, I was speaking where the cries of Christian virgins rent the air whilst roaring lions devoured them, and yet I am no lion and am certainly not a virgin.” At another dinner, the table had been set for thirteen, but “in deference to British superstition,” Eisenhower’s aide, Harry Butcher, was invited to make it fourteen. When the talk turned to diaries, Churchill proclaimed the practice was foolish because a diary reflected only the daily intuitions and emotions of the writer, which events might later prove incorrect or unsound, thereby making the diarist appear the fool. For his part, Churchill said he’d prefer to wait until the war was over to write his impression, such that “if necessary he could correct or bury his mistakes.” All in all, Brooke concluded, Churchill was “in remarkable form.” He was, but for de Gaulle.
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