The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (433 page)

De Gaulle’s presence in Algiers unsettled him. To Clemmie he wrote, “Everyone here expects he [de Gaulle] will do his utmost to make a row and assert his personal ambition.” To counter that prospect, the British had secreted out of France General Alphonse Georges (whom Brooke had last seen during the doomed defense of Brittany). It was hoped that the new French Committee would be sufficiently packed with anti-Gaullists such as Georges to keep the tall Frenchman in line. After lunching with Giraud and Georges, Churchill wrote Clementine, “In their company I recaptured some of my vanished illusions about France and her Army.” Within two days, the gathered Frenchmen defied Churchill’s low expectations and agreed to form the French Committee of National Liberation. It appeared that de Gaulle’s influence would be diluted by the presence of Giraud and Georges. Roosevelt believed the agreement would be short-lived and told Churchill that whatever the French agreed to among themselves,
they still operated under Anglo-American martial law. “The bride [de Gaulle] evidently forgets there is still a war in progress,” Roosevelt wrote. “Good luck in getting rid of our mutual headache.” But getting rid of the Frenchman was not that simple. Within weeks, at de Gaulle’s insistence, the new French Committee demanded official recognition as the government in exile of France. Roosevelt refused, demanding, as he had during Churchill’s visit to Washington, that France when freed was to be “occupied” by Anglo-American forces until such time Frenchmen chose their own government. He offered to “accept” the French Committee but not to recognize it.
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And so, on the afternoon of June 4, with no movement on the French question, Churchill boarded his Avro York for the flight to Gibraltar, having brought the Fighting French as close to solidarity as he could, and having brought Marshall around. At the last minute he asked Alexander to accompany him to London to settle some matters known only to himself. Alexander—in the thick of planning the Sicily campaign—could only acquiesce. This meant the York now had one passenger too many. Churchill, in a snap judgment, told Pug Ismay that he must depart the aircraft because “he was very heavy and would overload the airplane.” Ismay grabbed his suitcase and hitched a ride on a transport, which subsequently experienced an engine fire on the way to Gibraltar. Neither Alexander nor Ismay “felt in the least aggrieved” by Churchill’s “deliciously ingenuous lack of consideration” for their personal safety and convenience because “we knew he would treat himself in exactly the same way—and worse—if he thought it would help the war.” Churchill had planned to transfer at Gibraltar to a Boeing flying boat for the final leg of the trip, but hideous weather forced him instead to go by B-24 Liberator. He arrived home the next morning. He had been out of the country for a month.
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That day, a German spy at the Lisbon airport reported to his superiors that a thickset man smoking a cigar had been seen boarding a commercial flight, another flying boat, destination London. Phone calls were made, German fighter aircraft scrambled. The hapless aircraft was shot down over the sea, killing all fourteen passengers, including the popular screen actor Leslie Howard. The brutality of the Germans, Churchill later wrote, “was only matched by the stupidity of their agents.” Yet, he wrote, his safe arrival home was another example of the “inscrutable workings of fate.”
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The incident unsettled Britons. The prime minister was out there somewhere in the air, and Britons felt ill at ease about his absence. Upon his safe return, Panter-Downes wrote: “It’s not only the conventional clucking old ladies who are hoping to goodness that the Prime Minister won’t find it necessary to make any more long and dangerous trips for quite a while.” It was the week of the favorable June moon. No invasion forces sailed for Sicily,
but they were ready, and waiting, as was Churchill. The lunar cycle put July 9 in the middle of the three most favorable nights for action.
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C
hurchill had long voiced hopes that Stalin would emerge from the war as a guarantor rather than a disturber of the peace. He envisioned Poland and Czechoslovakia—along with Britain and America—standing “together in friendly relations with Russia.” Yet in June, Poland’s formal relations with Stalin, already suspended, ceased altogether, while Anglo-American relations with Russia reached, in Harriman’s estimation, the “low point in the history of the alliance.” When apprised of the decisions made during Trident, Stalin scorned them. He briefly pondered Roosevelt’s request for a private meeting but declined as soon as he learned of the postponement of a second front until 1944. There was no point in meeting and nothing to discuss. He spit out identical and bitter messages to Roosevelt and Churchill wherein he listed their previous promises for a second front in 1943 and warned that the Soviet government “cannot align itself with this decision, which… may gravely affect the subsequent course of the war.” He told them, “Your decision creates exceptional difficulties for the Soviet Union… and leaves the Soviet Army… to do the job alone.” Churchill tried to mollify him: “I quite understand your disappointment but” the best way to help Russia would be by “winning battles and not by losing them” and certainly not by throwing away 100,000 men in a false start on French beaches. That produced even greater bitterness: “You say you ‘quite understand’ my disappointment,” Stalin replied, pointing out that Churchill could not understand, because he was not in Moscow to witness the fact that “the preservation of Soviet confidence in its Allies… is being subjected to severe stress.”
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Harriman arrived in London late in the month, sent by Roosevelt on another difficult mission: to inform Churchill that Roosevelt had asked for a one-on-one meeting with Stalin, was rebuked, and was now asking again. Harriman told Churchill over a dinner that lasted into the early morning. After all, Harriman argued, you and Brooke went to Moscow in August to make the relationship personal. Why should the president not do likewise? Churchill voiced disappointment, yet he appeared to understand Roosevelt’s rationale. But overnight, as the disappointment turned to hurt and then anguish, he changed his mind. The following morning he shot off a cable to Washington in which he argued that his journey to Moscow the previous year was intended to get the relationship going, whereas if Roosevelt met with Stalin at this juncture, it would appear to Britons—and
the world—to be a slight to Britain. He was correct, yet his opposition was unnecessary. Stalin had no intention of meeting Roosevelt. He ignored a request from Roosevelt to allow American bombers to land in Russia after attacking the Romanian Ploesti oil fields (54 of 178 American bombers were lost on the mission). He had recalled Maisky from London and Litvinov from Washington. There was an atmosphere now “alarmingly reminiscent” of the tensions that preceded the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939. That is, the question of Stalin making a separate peace, never far below the surface for months, had again bobbed into view. “It was fortunate,” Robert Sherwood later wrote, “that Hitler did not know how bad relations were between the Allies at that moment, how close they were to a disruption which was his only hope of survival.” Churchill grew so tired of Stalin’s diplomatic obduracy that he stopped communicating with him for weeks. There was no more to say.
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L
ate on July 9, the largest armada in history hove to thirty miles off the coast of Sicily, 2,600 troop transports, tankers, and ammunition ships, landing craft, and warships, divided about equally between American and British. The British contingent, carrying Montgomery’s Eighth Army, lay off the southeast coast, between Cape Passero and Syracuse. The American ships carrying Patton’s Seventh Army aligned themselves roughly between landfalls near Ragusa and Licata, in the west. They had sailed from every North African port, as well as from Canada, Britain, and the United States, from where an entire infantry division was dispatched with all its rations, Jeeps, field guns, trucks, fuel, and ammunition. The men on board the troop ships knew that almost 200,000 Italians and 35,000 Germans waited on shore, although some relief was found in reports that three or four Italian and one German division were deployed in the far northwest corner of the island, having been taken in by false radio messages and an Allied naval feint in that direction. Still, the men knew that the Hermann Göring Division was dug in behind the American beaches. Though torn up in Tunisia, the men and panzers of the Hermann Göring Division were still ready for whatever came their way.

The Allies had no doubts as to Kesselring’s willingness to fight. Success depended in large part upon the Italians displaying the same lack of warrior spirit they had shown before the surrender of Pantelleria, an island fortress midway between Tunis and Sicily. Pantelleria—called the Italian Gibraltar—was crisscrossed by tunnels and redoubts and protected by dozens of artillery batteries and squadrons of fighter planes. Mussolini had long
pledged that the garrison would fight to the last man. In early July, an Allied fleet began shelling the island. After a week of naval and aerial shelling, and as Allied landing craft circled off the coast, awaiting final orders to make for Pantelleria’s lone beach, the garrison’s commander signaled that he was out of water and ran up the white flag. He had received permission to do so directly from Mussolini, who was now certain that he alone was the last Italian willing to fight. Mussolini’s doctor had for a long time been dosing his patient with ever increasing amounts of Bellafolina and Alucol for the stomach cramps that afflicted Il Duce in times of stress, especially stress brought on by military defeats. The regimen was now administered on almost a daily basis. The patient, in fact, was as broken as his people.
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Churchill, who thought that three thousand Italians at most garrisoned Pantelleria, had made a wager with Eisenhower: five centimes (one-twentieth of a cent) for each Italian captured beyond the three thousand Churchill predicted. Eleven thousand surrendered. Eisenhower chose not to collect his four dollars from Churchill.
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Now, on July 9, as his fleets battled the seas, Eisenhower pondered whether the Italians on Sicily would put up more of a fight when the Allied armies went ashore at dawn. The weather was already proving itself a formidable enemy, a gale out of the west worsened as the flotilla approached Sicily. On Malta, Eisenhower pondered maps and weather reports in his headquarters, deep inside a tunnel in the Lascaris Bastion, built by the Knights of Malta and used since the start of the war as a communications center by the Royal Navy. Admiral Andrew (“ABC”) Cunningham’s meteorologists had given Eisenhower hourly updates as the day progressed, and a tutorial on the Beaufort scale—a measure of wind and waves on a scale of one to twelve. Each hourly report was worse than the previous. Air Marshal Tedder, at Eisenhower’s side in the tunnels, noted the audacity of an attempt to invade Italy by sea: “Fancy invading Italy from the south. Even Hannibal had the sense to come in with his elephants over the Alps.” All day, vast fleets of aircraft passed overhead as even more departed from Malta’s newly reconditioned airfields, all on their way to bomb Sicilian beaches and two dozen Axis airfields. Late in the evening Eisenhower stepped outside to watch paratroopers from the American 82nd Airborne Division and the British 1st Air Landing Brigade sail overhead toward their drop zones. The British troops were in towed gliders, many of which, cut loose too soon, lost their way in the winds and the darkness and dropped into the sea with the loss of all aboard.
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As Eisenhower watched the aerial flotilla drift by, a cable arrived from Marshall: “Is the attack on or off?” Eisenhower had no answer and did not reply. But the hour was fast approaching when the landings could not be aborted. Montgomery’s forces, on the east side of Sicily, found themselves
in the lee of the wind, Patton’s troops, with no protection from the prevailing winds, had a rough ride. If all went well, the three American and four British and Canadian divisions would stake a claim to more than one hundred miles of Sicily by dinnertime on the tenth. As the troop ships marked time, the cruisers, destroyers, and battleships of the fleet ran in along the coast and raked the beaches with high-explosive shells. But orders to go ashore had yet to come down. Then, toward midnight, the winds abated. Eisenhower had already decided that the invasion would go on, storms or no. The word went down to the men on the ships.
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