The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (444 page)

German cities were now getting the worst of it. The next raid over Berlin erased the homes of Goebbels’ mother and mother-in-law, blew the windows out of the Goebbels house, and reduced Hitler’s favorite hotel, the Kaiserhof, to rubble. Goebbels, the
Gauleiter
(a local political leader) of Berlin, bemoaned to his diary this “time of universal misfortune which has now fallen upon this city of four and a half million…. Hell itself seems to have broken loose over us.” A November 24
New York Times
headline crowed: Z
OO
A
NIMALS
R
OAM
B
ERLIN
S
TREETS
; H
EAT OF
F
IRES
F
ELLS
P
EDESTRIANS.
In fact, in regard to fires, Berliners could count themselves fortunate. The cool autumn weather and Berlin’s wide avenues and modern buildings kept firestorms of the Hamburg sort from breeding. Bomber Harris’s response to Berlin’s structural integrity was to send more bombers from England more often. And from Foggia, from where the Allied air forces could reach targets in southern Germany and Romania, came even more bombers.
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The Old Man arrived on Malta with a bit of a sore throat, which within a day had festered into a nasty cold that kept him in bed for most of his short visit. He stayed in the Governor’s Palace as the guest of Lord Gort, and as the palace could offer no hot water for his bath, his mood worsened in lockstep with the worsening head cold. His room overlooked a busy promenade up from which drifted the sounds of Maltese making their way through the rubble. It was too much for Churchill, who flung off his bedclothes, threw open the windows, and bawled to the crowd below: “Go away, will you? Please go away and do not make so much noise.”
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His funk worsened when he learned that Leros had fallen that day; the battle had been a Crete in miniature. The Germans arrived by sea and air; the RAF and Royal Navy did not dispute the issue; British troops on the ground were poorly led. The Royal Navy’s lack of aggression grated on Churchill, who christened the new naval commander of the Mediterranean, Admiral Sir John Cunningham (no relation to Andrew), “ ‘Dismal Jimmy’—and not without cause,” in Harold Macmillan’s estimation. The upcoming meeting of the military chiefs in Cairo also riled Churchill. He and the Americans still held opposing and irreconcilable views. He supported Overlord, but not at the expense of Rhodes, and especially Italy, the only theater where Anglo-American troops were taking pressure off the Russians. He intended to force a showdown. This troubled Brooke, who told his diary: “He [Churchill] is inclined to say to the Americans, all right, you won’t play with us in the Mediterranean we won’t play with you in the English Channel. And they will say all right then we shall direct our main effort in the Pacific.” To Clementine, Churchill cabled: “It is terrible fighting with both hands tied behind one’s back.”
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Alexander and Eisenhower arrived on Malta in order to receive their special North African campaign ribbons. Both men lamented the stasis in Italy but for different reasons. Alexander, as the commander on the spot, had to report that the campaign had stalled. “All roads lead to Rome,” he told Lord Moran, “and they are all paved with mines.” The entire Mediterranean command believed that an amphibious flanking operation—preferably two, one on each coast—was the best way to get around Kesselring’s lines. Earlier in the month, Eisenhower’s staff began drawing up plans for such an operation. Code-named Shingle, it called for landing a reinforced division at Anzio, birthplace of Nero and Caligula and since Roman times a holiday resort. Anzio, and its sister city, Nettuno, sat on the Tyrrhenian coast about fifty miles north of, and behind, Kesselring’s lines. The towns, about a mile apart, faced narrow beaches. They were built in a basin ringed by woodlands and the Pontine Marshes. Several miles beyond the marshes high hills rose to the west and north. Alexander had sought at least five divisions for the venture, but neither the troops nor the transports were available; they were going to England, for Overlord.

By the time Churchill arrived on Malta, the plan languished in the file of improbable operations. Eisenhower, by the time he arrived on Malta, and presuming he was headed to Washington to replace Marshall as chief of staff, was preparing his exit from the Mediterranean. He considered any new Italian venture a drawdown to the buildup for Overlord. Churchill gave Eisenhower an earful, on both the need to grab Rome and the risks inherent in Overlord. “How often I heard him say,” Eisenhower later wrote, “in speaking of Overlord’s prospects, ‘We must take care that the
tides do not run red with the blood of American and British youth, or the beaches be choked with their bodies.’ ” Eisenhower, like Brooke, departed Malta believing Churchill would press the matters of Italy and Rhodes in Cairo and Tehran. Churchill meant to untie his hands.
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During the two-day sail to Alexandria, he drew up a strategic plan. It amounted to Rome first, then Rhodes, by January. Churchill presumed the Sextant talks would be all about settling the Mediterranean issues, with the Pacific theater relegated to a lower slot on the agenda. But Roosevelt had invited Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang to Cairo with the intention of turning the agenda on its head. Brooke made the trip by air, aboard Churchill’s Avro York. Upon reaching Cairo, he told his diary: “I wish our conference was over.”
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It had not even begun. When it did, Churchill saw at once that Roosevelt meant to deny him his showdown. During the first plenary session on November 23, held at Roosevelt’s villa a few miles outside Cairo, the president announced that he wanted to talk about the Pacific. Furthermore, Roosevelt pledged to Chiang that large-scale naval operations would soon start in the Bay of Bengal in support of an amphibious operation (code-named Buccaneer) in Burma, all intended not so much to knock Japan back but to get support through to Chiang’s forces, whose role in the Pacific war Roosevelt still saw as vital. Thus, Churchill wrote in his memoirs, the Combined Chiefs of Staff “were sadly distracted by the Chinese story, which was lengthy, complicated, and minor… with the result that Chinese business occupied first instead of last place at Cairo.” Yet, that week, General Sir Billy Slim (he had been knighted earlier in the year) drove from Assam into central Burma, with one of his corps heading for the Chindwin River, which it crossed on December 3. The Japanese at Slim’s front, confused by a British deception campaign, did not even know where Slim was headed. Though Slim was forging opportunities ripe for exploitation, he and Burma were at the bottom of Churchill’s agenda.
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Roosevelt told Churchill that he had put the Pacific war ahead of the European on the agenda because he did not want Stalin to think they “had ganged up on him on military action.” He believed that if they made Japan the primary focus of Sextant, Stalin’s suspicions would be allayed. Yet the decision also ensured that the Anglo-American bloc would arrive in Tehran without having reached solid agreement on the second front. Churchill, in his memoirs, could not resist taking a swipe at Roosevelt and Chiang. In spite of vast American aide to China (several millions of dollars of which was stolen by Madame Chiang’s family), Chiang “had been beaten by the communists in his own country, which is a bad thing.” Brooke, in his memoirs, was more blunt: “Why the Americans attached such significance to Chiang I have never discovered. All he did was lead them down a garden path to communist
China!” As for Stilwell and Chennault, who were feuding over whether Lend-Lease matériel should go to Stilwell’s soldiers or Chennault’s Chinese air forces, Brooke wrote that Stilwell was “nothing more than a crank,” while Chennault, though “a gallant airman” had “a limited brain.” During the meetings, Madame Chiang, who spoke perfect English, translated for her husband, leaving Brooke with the impression that Madame “was the leading spirit of the two, and I would not trust her very far…. The more I see of her the less I like her.” Not so the other staff officers, whose collective breathing almost stopped when Madame’s “closely clinging dress of black satin with yellow chrysanthemums displayed a slit which extended to her hip bone and exposed one of the most shapely of legs.”
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Churchill warmed to Madame Chiang, telling Clementine by letter that he withdrew “all the unfavourable remarks which I may have made about her.” (Madame had voiced strong criticism of British imperial policies during a visit to India the previous year, inciting Churchill to “breathing fire and slaughter against her” to the Foreign Office.) The Chiangs had come out of the shadows to light up the Cairo conference, Madame Chiang by her very presence, but they did so at the expense of Anglo-American cohesion. The meetings with Chiang, Brooke told Marshall, were “a ghastly waste of time,” to which Marshall replied, “You’re telling me.” Still, Roosevelt brought Churchill around on the need for action in Burma, but Churchill’s initial support for Buccaneer evaporated when he realized that the landing craft needed for Burmese operations would come from the Mediterranean. Within ten days, as a result of Churchill’s counterarguments, Roosevelt overrode his military chiefs and conceded that Buccaneer was dead. Not until April 1945, with American Marines and U.S. soldiers fighting on Okinawa, just 325 miles from the Japanese homeland, would Allied troops finally reopen the India-China road links in northern Burma and retake Rangoon in the south, too late to make a difference in the war against Japan.
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After the disagreeable first meetings with Chiang, the conference only went further downhill. The Americans stunned the British by again arguing for an American supreme commander in Europe, an issue Churchill considered settled. The British flatly rejected the proposal. Lest the Americans pursue the question, Churchill pointed out that because of the long-held understanding between the Allies that theater commanders came from the partner with the most forces in the theater, a supreme commander for all of Europe would have to be British because Britain had more men, planes, and ships in Europe than the Americans did. Roosevelt dropped the issue, but he stuck to his Burma plans, which Brooke coldly and methodically dismantled during a meeting of the military chiefs. Admiral Ernie King, enraged by Brooke’s demeanor, rose from the table as if to settle the
issue with fists. Stilwell, who witnessed the scene, wished King “had socked” Brooke. Pug Ismay thought King’s ongoing animosity threatened the cohesion of the Combined Chiefs, and told King so. King replied, “Look here, General, when there’s a war they send for the sons of bitches, and that’s me.” Churchill, meanwhile, argued for his Aegean plans, cautioning Roosevelt that Overlord must not be spelled T-Y-R-A-N-T, a display of rhetoric Brooke thought “masterly.” Even the irascible King showed signs of supporting Churchill, but only because if the British navy stayed in the Mediterranean, it couldn’t get in his way in the Pacific. Churchill pushed his Aegean strategy with flights of oratory: “His Majesty’s government cannot have its troops standing idle; muskets must flame,” and Rhodes was the place they must flame. That display led Marshall to smack the table with his fist and exclaim, “Not one American soldier is going to die on that goddamned beach.” Marshall’s outburst quieted the room, including Churchill, who did not again mention Rhodes in Cairo. But the issue had not been resolved; Churchill carried his Aegean hopes to Tehran.
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The British had taken over the grand Mena House hotel in Giza, where Churchill and T. E. Lawrence had stayed two decades earlier when they created new states in the Middle East. The hotel’s grandiosity had moved Lawrence to remark that it made him a Bolshevik. Churchill loved it. There, he and Brooke hosted evening dinners as jovial as the afternoon meetings were disputatious. “King was as nice as could be and quite transformed from his afternoon attitude,” wrote Brooke after one such meal. Roosevelt’s dinner companions included Harry Hopkins and Hopkins’s son, Robert, a U.S. Army war photographer who had seen action in Italy. General Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson, Roosevelt’s old friend and political adviser, was on hand, as was Roosevelt’s son-in-law, Major John Boettiger. Colonel Elliott Roosevelt joined the party, a case of nepotism, but only fair as Alexander Cadogan remarked to his diary, “I suppose we can’t talk if we trail Randolph around with us.” As always, Roosevelt’s squad of Filipino mess men were on hand to produce his meals, including a turkey on Thanksgiving Day, which Roosevelt carved “with masterly, indefatigable skill.” A small dance followed, the music supplied by gramophone. All the young men danced with Sarah; Churchill danced with Pa Watson. The gathered sang
Home on the Range.
It was a jolly evening, although tears were visible on his cheeks when Churchill toasted the president. Churchill’s cold had abated; the bright Egyptian skies invigorated him, and his spirits brightened, as evidenced the next night when his small party dined and chatted until 1:30 in the morning. “P.M. talked to the whole table from 8:30… to 1:35,” recorded Cadogan, “then expressed surprise at having a sore throat.” Dickie Mountbatten fell asleep during Churchill’s oration, and even Sarah had trouble keeping her eyes open.
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The congeniality reached a high point when Churchill and Sarah suggested to Roosevelt that they all take a drive out to the pyramids, which the president had never seen. The idea so enthused Roosevelt, recalled Sarah, that “he leaned forward on the arms of his chair and seemed about to rise,” but of course could not, “and sank back again.” While the president readied himself, Churchill and Sarah waited outside, where Sarah noted that her father’s eyes “were bright with tears.” He turned to her and said, “I love that man.” Such was Sarah’s recollection two decades later. At the time she failed to mention the tears or the affection in a letter to her mother, but she did write, “It really is wonderful how they both get on—they really like and understand each other. The outing, like the evening festivities, had been a smashing success.”
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