The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (450 page)

The Russian army was not the only Allied force on the march in early December. On the second, Mark Clark and the Fifth Army struck out toward Monte Camino, with Monte Cassino its final objective. Clark was on his way to Rome. Some at Eisenhower’s headquarters thought he’d be there by New Year’s. All, including Eisenhower, were bucked up by Clark’s near-term prospects. Two days after Roosevelt told him that his appointment as supreme commander would become effective January 1, the president asked Eisenhower if he’d prefer the official announcement be delayed
“until Rome is captured.” Eisenhower’s press aide, Commander Butcher, thought that a fine idea because “since [Ike’s new command] isn’t effective until January 1, we might get Rome by then, which would make the transition perfect.” But between December 8 and Christmas Day, German reinforcements and terrible weather stalled Clark’s advance. He did not get to Rome by January 1. By then, Eisenhower was on his way to a two-week leave in the United States, and the Fifth Army was stalled in mud and freezing rain, within sight of its objective, Monte Cassino. By then, Churchill was plotting a new way of getting to Rome.
¹²

A few weeks before the Cairo Conference, Eisenhower and Montgomery had made a five-pound bet (even odds) on whether Germany would fall by Christmas 1944. Ike bet yes, Monty no (Montgomery recorded his bets in a ledger). General Freyberg bet Monty ten pounds that the war against Germany would be over by October 31, 1944. Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who had planned the naval operations for Torch and Husky, bet an even fiver that the war would be over by January 1, 1945. Over dinner in Cairo on December 7—Roosevelt had flown that day to Tunis—Churchill polled Smuts, Eden, and most of the military chiefs as to their opinions of when the war with Germany would end. Admiral King—“consumed more than a bottle of champagne… and was showing wear”—predicted sometime between March and November 1944. Marshall agreed. Brooke gave six-to-four odds on March. Dill gave even odds. All the military men—Portal, Cunningham, Hap Arnold, Major Leslie Hollis—put their money on sometime between March and November. Churchill, Eden, and Smuts were not so sanguine. Churchill later wrote that he “was struck by the optimism. The idea was rooted that Hitler would not be strong enough to face the spring campaign, and might collapse even before Overlord was launched.”
¹³

Eisenhower, in his memoir
Crusade in Europe,
wrote that Churchill and the British hoped the Italian campaign “might lead to an unexpected [German] break that would make the Channel operation either unnecessary or nothing more than a mopping-up affair” to be conducted only when “the Allies could go in easily and safely.” Yet the votes of the American chiefs at the dinner indicate that it was
they
who thought that way. Churchill had pledged in Tehran that Overlord would take place in May; he knew it would be both a difficult and bloody affair. After seeing the initial plans for the invasion the previous August, he advised that more men go ashore. Otherwise, he feared a repulse on the beach. He never saw it as a mopping-up affair. Eisenhower by December had taken only a cursory look at the plans for Overlord. On his way to Washington, he told reporters, “We will win the European war in 1944.”
¹⁴

Other prognosticators had already seen their predictions go belly-up.
Admiral William (“Bull”) Halsey, commander in chief of U.S. Navy South Pacific forces, had stated with confidence months earlier that 1943 would bring “complete, absolute defeat for the Axis.” Halsey no longer engaged in such speculation, telling reporters, “I refuse to gaze into the crystal ball anymore…. Only God knows.”
¹⁵

B
y December 9, unable to shake the sore throat and cold that had dogged him since he left London, Churchill felt he was on the cusp of a physical breakdown. Smuts thought the Old Man had “exhausted himself, and then had to rely on drink to stimulate [himself] again.” The South African began to doubt whether Churchill could stay the course. At lunch that day, Churchill admitted to Brooke that he felt tired, flat, “and had pains in his loins.” His degree of fatigue was evidenced by the fact the he had lost his appetite and hardly spoke. Between small spoonfuls of soup he swatted flies with a fly whisk and counted the corpses. He could summon only enough energy to pronounce the soup “
dee-
licious” while sending more flies to the mortuary. Brooke wondered how near Churchill was “to a crash.” Churchill wondered the same. He later wrote that he found himself so tired that he no longer dried himself after his bath, but lay on the bed wrapped in a towel.
¹⁶

Shortly after midnight on December 11, Churchill and his party left Cairo in their Avro York, bound for Tunis to pay a courtesy call on Eisenhower. Churchill intended to fly on to Italy from there, to buck up Alexander, whose armies were being ground down by the enemy, by the terrain, by the worst winter weather in years, and by an outbreak of typhus. Lice and malaria were the common enemy for both armies.

At daybreak Churchill’s plane landed at an airfield outside Tunis. The place appeared abandoned. No guards were in evidence; no cars waited. Churchill’s pilot had brought them down to the wrong field. The prime minister hauled himself and his official boxes out of the York and sat down on the edge of the runway. There he waited, recalled Brooke, “in a very cold morning wind like nothing on earth.” A steel-cold mist blew out of the north. Moran pressed Churchill to get himself back inside the heated plane. He refused. He remained perched upon his boxes, a very long way from home. He wore a scowl on his face, which shone now with perspiration. “He seemed to be going from bad to worse,” Moran wrote. When the mix-up was sorted out, the party reboarded the York and made for the right airfield. By then Churchill had gone gray in the face, to Moran’s professional discomfort. After arriving finally at Eisenhower’s headquarters
near Carthage, Churchill slumped into a chair, where he remained for the rest of the day, too weak even to read his telegrams.
¹⁷

Moran by then was sick with worry. His patient spiked a temperature of 102; he was exhausted, mentally and physically. His lungs were seriously congested. Here was a combination of blows even the Old Man might not survive. He was indeed an elderly man, having just begun the final year of his biblical three score years and ten. Moran believed with medical certainty that Churchill would probably not make it to the next year. The prime minister needed the best that medicine offered, but other than sulfa drugs and serums, mid-twentieth-century medicine did not offer much hope for an elderly man. Moran lacked the equipment and facilities to make a proper diagnosis. Of particular concern was the possibility that Churchill had contracted a virulent strain of influenza that was making its way around the world. In Germany it was called
Kellergrippe
(cellar flu), and it killed 2,000 Berliners that week. Britain reported 1,148 deaths for the week. When Goebbels learned that King George had taken ill, he gushed to his diary, “How wonderful if the epidemic were to prove fatal!”
¹⁸

Moran had a very sick man on his hands. A standing joke among Churchill’s private secretaries held that if the Old Man became suddenly ill, the secretary on duty was to summon Lord Moran, who would then summon a real doctor. Moran proceeded to do just that, requesting that a pathologist, Dr. Robert Pulvertaft, and two nurses be flown out from Cairo, and that an X-ray technician and his machine be sent from Algiers, along with a supply of digitalis, lest Churchill’s heart act up. A heart specialist, Dr. D. E. Bedford, was also summoned from Cairo. During the afternoon of December 13, the X-ray was duly taken. It showed a shadow on Churchill’s lung. “Do you mean I’ve got pneumonia again?” he demanded of Moran. Moran prescribed treatment with M&B (so called after the British company that made it, May and Baker), a sulfonamide early antibiotic. The next day, Moran found Churchill “breathless and anxious looking.” His pulse was racing and irregular; he was suffering from cardiac fibrillation. “My heart is doing something funny,” Churchill said. When it worsened, he pleaded, “Can’t you do anything to stop this?” Moran gave him a dose of digitalis and promised it would soon take effect. It did, but not for four hours, during which time Moran, holding Churchill’s hand and monitoring his pulse, realized “that we were at last right up against things.”
¹⁹

“No signs of improvement yet,” Moran wrote in his diary on December 15. That day, Pilot Officer John Colville received an urgent summons to report to No. 10 Downing Street in uniform. There he was told that the prime minister was “seriously, perhaps fatally, ill with pneumonia at Carthage.” Colville’s orders were to escort Mrs. Churchill to Tunis at once in order for
her to be at her husband’s bedside. A twin-engine Dakota was waiting for them at Lyneham airfield, but Beaverbrook insisted the party wait until he could procure a four-engine B-24 Liberator. Twenty hours later, Clementine, Colville, and Grace Hamblin, serving as Mrs. Churchill’s secretary and orderly, boarded an unheated, blacked-out Liberator, and were soon Africa bound. The overnight flight to Gibraltar lasted nine hours, and from there, after a brief stopover, they continued on to Tunis, another six hours in the air, during which time they were cut off from any news. They could only speculate on the Old Man’s condition, and from Clementine’s somber demeanor, that was just what she was doing. Colville and Grace passed the hours sipping coffee and quietly chatting, in order to keep an eye on Mrs. Churchill, who “could not sleep and was rather alarmed.”
²⁰

Hustled from the airfield at first light by Eisenhower’s staff, the party arrived outside Churchill’s villa, where inside Churchill lay in bed, barely stirring and somewhat disoriented, having realized Sarah was absent from the chair where she had been keeping a vigil. A moment later, Sarah escorted Clementine into the room; Churchill had not been told of her arrival and could have been excused if he thought he was delirious at the sight of an apparition. Colville entered a few minutes later, expecting to find a “recumbent invalid.” Instead he beheld “a cheerful figure with large cigar and a whisky and soda in his hand.” The crisis had passed.
²¹

Colville rejoined Churchill’s staff that week, and but for a brief interlude that summer when he was granted leave for RAF duty, he remained in the private secretariat until the end of the war.

E
isenhower’s appointment as commander of Overlord (not yet made public) resulted in a shake-up of commands throughout Allied ranks. Air Chief Marshal Tedder would serve as Ike’s deputy, with authority over all air forces, strategic and tactical. Admiral Bertram Ramsay was given command of Overlord naval operations, including the landings, code-named Neptune. Churchill wanted Eisenhower’s chief of staff Bedell (“Beetle”) Smith, who got along well with the British, to remain in the Mediterranean, but Ike took Smith to London. Within weeks, Eisenhower insisted upon and was granted complete control of all Allied air forces, tactical and strategic. Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, of Fighter Command, went in as Eisenhower’s air commander in chief, with control of all tactical air forces. Bernard Montgomery was to leave the Eighth Army at the end of the month to command Twenty-first Army Group, the
designation for the Allied troops in Britain dedicated to Overlord. In that capacity Montgomery would command all Overlord ground forces during the initial stage of the invasion. Churchill (and Eisenhower) preferred Alexander in that role, but the War Cabinet insisted upon the hero of El Alamein. Churchill acceded peacefully, in the belief that Alexander would emerge as the hero of Italy, where glory would accrue with the capture of Rome and the pursuit of the enemy all the way to Vienna. Henry Maitland (“Jumbo”) Wilson, Middle East commander in chief, was raised to supreme commander Mediterranean. Brooke remained as CIGS and with Churchill’s sponsorship was promoted to field marshal. Portal was elevated to air chief marshal. By Christmas, many of the appointees were on their way to London to take up their new posts. Jumbo Wilson, not yet familiar with the central and western Mediterranean, could not immediately bring anything to bear in that theater, where the command shake-up had created a power vacuum. Churchill, alone at Tunis with time on his hands and frustrated by the stasis in Italy, decided to fill it himself.