The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (441 page)

B
y the time Churchill boarded HMS
Renown
on September 14, the U-boats had all but disappeared from the central and southern Atlantic but for irregular sniping along the South American and African coasts. Since late May, sixty-two convoys comprising 3,246 merchant ships sailed between America and Britain on the northern route; not a single ship was
lost. In the southern and mid-Atlantic and Indian Ocean (where Dönitz had sent several U-boats), September’s losses from all causes came to about 208,000 tons, not much more than a week’s losses earlier in the year. October’s losses would come in under 100,000 tons, at a cost to Dönitz of twenty-three U-boats; earlier in the year the British had budgeted a loss of 550,000 tons for October. The Allies were on track to lose less than half the tonnage in 1943 than they had lost in 1942. And Dönitz’s losses began to increase exponentially. As summer prepared to give way to autumn, Dönitz pulled his fleet even farther east.
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Still, in the Arctic, the threats from U-boats, from
Scharnhorst
and
Tirpitz,
and from long-range German bombers conspired against restarting the Russian convoys. Hitler placed his faith in technological advances, in the air and under the sea. Goebbels enthused to his diary over a new German torpedo (called Gnat by the Allies) that “listened” for and homed in on cavitation noise of around 24.5 kHz, which was equivalent to the “noise” made by propellers on a destroyer cruising at moderate speed. Nine Allied destroyers (and more than a thousand sailors) were lost in September to the new torpedo, but with Dönitz’s U-boats leaving the battlefield, the torpedo’s deadly efficiencies could not be exploited. With the sea-lanes to Britain secure, the buildup of troops and tanks in Britain in preparation for Overlord proceeded at will. Hitler had long held that control of the Atlantic Ocean was his best defense against the West. His defense had disappeared.
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By November, American transports were arriving at British ports after ten-day journeys during which the green troops stuffed belowdecks played poker, wrote letters, and ate hot navy chow. Some of the ships’ captains allowed army personnel to set up shipboard radio stations that played records over the PA system for the listening ease of the men below. One recording, however, was often banned: Bing Crosby’s new hit, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”
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Renown
brought Churchill safely into the Clyde on September 19. The voyage had been uneventful but for Mary almost being washed overboard when she accepted a young officer’s invitation to stroll the quarterdeck at the moment the ship made a sharp turn in high seas. Had she not snagged herself on a stanchion, she would have been swept away, the event witnessed by Ismay from the bridge but not by Churchill. “We had visions of plunging overboard,” Ismay later wrote, “rather than face the Prime Minister.”

Churchill received daily briefing on the Salerno landings during the five-day voyage, and the news was worrisome. Little progress was being made,
which is to say the men remained trapped on the beaches. For months Hopkins and Stimson had deprecated Churchill’s fears of French beaches running red with blood; yet the situation at Salerno was developing in exactly that way. Very worrisome was the fact that more men had gone ashore at Salerno in the first three days than were called for in the Overlord plan for France. Churchill continued to proclaim that the landing was beginning to look like the landings at Suvla Bay during the Gallipoli campaign. Each day of delay at Salerno brought ever increasing concentrations of Germans on the beach perimeter, and increased the chances of the Allies being thrown back into the sea. Churchill proposed to fly there himself to take charge, but Alexander, anticipating such an offer, had already left for the front. Not until Churchill was back on British soil did he receive the news he had been waiting for: “I can say with full confidence,” Alexander wrote, “that the whole situation has changed in our favor, and that the initiative has passed to us.” Yet it had taken Alexander almost three weeks to establish his armies in the toe and ankle of Italy, and he still had 150 miles to go before reaching Rome.
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Shortly after Churchill arrived home, Admiral Dudley Pound submitted his resignation. His brain tumor killed him a month later, on October 21, Trafalgar Day. He was “the smartest sailor in the Royal Navy,” Churchill told Jock Colville, “but cautious.” Yet Pound’s conservative deployment of HMG’s fleets had kept England in the chase for four years. Pound lived to see victory in the Atlantic, and the victory was his. Old British sailors will argue that the British Home Fleet at Scapa Flow, by virtue of being a “fleet in being,” played as critical a role as the boys in their Hurricanes and Spitfires in keeping Hitler out of England. Hitler tested Fighter Command but could not bring himself to test the Home Fleet. Myth attached to “the few,” but the sailors had done their duty, Pound foremost. Andrew (“ABC”) Cunningham, hero of the Mediterranean, replaced Pound as first sea lord.

Harry Hopkins checked himself into the hospital in a state of exhaustion as soon as Churchill departed for London. Eisenhower was also worn out and under a doctor’s care. Dill, too, was being ground down; he had injured himself while hunting boar in India the previous year and would not live out the next. And Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Kingsley Wood, whose stewardship of the British purse had kept the Island afloat financially, died suddenly two days after Churchill’s return to London. A shake-up in the ranks was taking place of a sort and magnitude no one had foreseen.

The same could be said of the shake-ups Britons experienced at home and at work. On September 23, Churchill addressed six thousand women from all walks of British life in Albert Hall. As with all of his speeches, he had composed it himself. He told the women:

He had come a long way in the three decades since declaring of the suffragettes, “What a ridiculous tragedy it will be if this strong Government and party which has made its mark in history were to go down on petticoat politics.”
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Churchill, the Chiefs of Staff, and the cabinet were in need of rest, but none was forthcoming. John Anderson moved over to the Exchequer, Attlee took over as lord president. Max Beaverbrook, who for health reasons had taken himself away from the pressures of producing goods, rejoined the government as lord privy seal. This was an ill-defined position that admitted to elasticity, perfect for Beaverbrook, whose real role in the new command structure was to serve as Churchill’s crony, booster, and foil. South Africa’s Jan Smuts now sat in on the War Cabinet meetings (informally, at Churchill’s invitation) and brought with him a growing distaste for Overlord, which he imparted not only to Churchill, who had his own doubts, but also to King George. The migration of ministers from post to post struck Churchill as both worrisome and comical; when the reorganization was complete, he took a partisan swipe at his Labour colleagues when he told Eden, “Except for me and you, this is the worst government England has ever had.”
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B
ritish troops entered Naples on October 1 to find that the Germans had very efficiently destroyed the port and its facilities before departing. Since
coming ashore at Salerno, the Fifth Army had advanced on average just over a mile per day. Still, Churchill cabled Alexander that he looked forward to meeting him in Rome in a month or so. But at Alexander’s rate of advance, his armies would not reach Rome, 120 miles to the north, until sometime in February 1944. Churchill’s hopes for the swift capture of Rome and a drive to northern Italy had been wrecked on the road to Naples. Albert Kesselring later said of the weakness inherent in the Allied strategy: “An air landing on Rome and sea landing nearby, instead of at Salerno, would have automatically caused us to evacuate all the southern half of Italy.” Now the Allies would have to pay in blood for every mile of ground between Naples and Rome, ground they could have purchased at little cost. By early October, the Eighth Army had moved up the Adriatic coast to take the port of Bari and the airfields at Foggia, and had connected with the Fifth Army in a continuous 120-mile line across the Italian peninsula from Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea to Termoli on the Adriatic. Montgomery’s army formed the right flank of the Italian campaign, but in Churchill’s mind it also formed the left flank of the Balkan front. A million Allied troops stood idle throughout Eisenhower’s command in the western Mediterranean; landing ships and craft were plentiful (although Eisenhower was about to transfer 85 percent of them to Britain). Churchill wanted to put a small percentage of those men and landing craft into the Aegean, where with the capture of Rhodes, the Balkan right flank would be turned, leaving the underbelly of the Balkans exposed. Tito waited with 200,000 well-armed partisans; the Chetniks fielded another 150,000. The Turks, beneficiaries of one hundred million dollars in British and American aide, fielded forty-five divisions, albeit poorly trained, poorly armed, and lacking armored support. Tito held strips of the Dalmatian coast, where supplies could be put ashore. Turkish airfields would allow the RAF to lend air support. The Allied forces Churchill sought would be needed only to prime the pump. Brooke years later wrote that it might have all been accomplished “without committing a single man in the Balkans.” Tito, Mihailovic, and the Turks (if they came in) could do most of the rest. Thus began Churchill’s newest Aegean adventure.
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He climbed onto his new hobbyhorse, Rhodes, which took its place in the stable alongside Norway and Sumatra. On October 3, German troops attacked the Dodecanese island of Kos just three miles off the Turkish coast. British control of the airfield there was vital if the RAF hoped to cover the Royal Navy as it advanced toward the Greek mainland. Holding Kos would also demonstrate British resolve to the Turks. Yet with the airfield and the island virtually undefended, the Germans took Kos in four days, along with more than 1,300 British soldiers and airmen. Now the Germans were within shouting distance of the Turkish mainland. The
Turks, not sanguine and for good reason, decided the time was not yet right to join the Allies.

“Another day of Rhodes madness,” Brooke wrote on October 7 after a particularly nasty “battle with the P.M.” over the wisdom of the Rhodes strategy. Churchill announced that he was leaving for Algiers in order to bring Eisenhower around. Brooke was beside himself: “This is all to decide whether we should try and take Rhodes…. He [the P.M.] is in a very dangerous condition, most unbalanced, and God knows how we shall finish this war if it goes on.”
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Churchill cabled Roosevelt with a request to send Marshall to Tunisia in order to settle the Aegean strategy. Roosevelt’s reply was “cold,” Brooke wrote, a flat refusal that left no room for interpretation. The president refused to force any decision on Eisenhower even if he agreed with Churchill’s strategy, which he did not. “It is my opinion,” Roosevelt wrote, “that no diversion of forces or equipment should prejudice Overlord as planned.” Churchill replied the next day, telling Roosevelt that the Aegean plan required only a few weeks’ use of nine landing ships, which would not be needed for Overlord for at least six months. He asked for “some elasticity and a reasonable latitude in the handling of our joint affairs.” The Mediterranean, he pleaded, was being “stripped bare at a moment when great prizes could be cheaply won.” Roosevelt stood firm. “If we get the Aegean Islands,” he replied, “I ask myself where do we go from there, and vice versa where would the Germans go if… they retain possession of the islands?” But Churchill didn’t care where the Germans might go. He cared about British influence in the eastern Mediterranean. He wanted the Royal Navy there, on station, to send a message to not only Hitler but also Stalin that the Balkans were within the British sphere. It was not to be. The German capture of Kos meant that the British troops on Leros could be neither reinforced nor evacuated. Hitler had no intention of going anywhere after taking the Dodecanese; his goal was to keep the British from grabbing these plums and going someplace themselves, such as the Dardanelles and the Balkans. He succeeded in doing just that. And with Germans now camped just off the Turkish coast, the prospect of Turkey joining the Allies all but disappeared. Churchill instructed Eden “to coerce the Turks into the war.” Asked by Brooke how Eden should go about doing that, Churchill replied, “Remind the Turkey that Xmas is coming.”
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