The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (451 page)

On Christmas Eve, Franklin Roosevelt announced in a radio broadcast the appointment of Dwight Eisenhower as supreme commander Allied Expeditionary Force. Henceforth, wherever General Ike put his headquarters would be known as SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. The president also asked Americans to pray for Churchill, ill in North Africa. Roosevelt and Eisenhower were religious men. The president told Harriman after Tehran that he believed the Russians “as deeply religious people were bound to stand up against the atheist ideology of Soviet communism and its repressions,” a naive sentiment that presumed that whoever stood up against Stalin would not be scythed down. In the spring, Roosevelt would write a prayer for the soldiers going ashore in Normandy; it ran on the front page of the
New York Times
on June 7. Churchill didn’t write prayers, and he didn’t say prayers. Eisenhower, who believed the God of Justice was on the Allied side, once told Lord Moran, “Freedom itself means nothing unless there is faith.” Bernard Montgomery claimed his chaplains were more important than his artillery. General Alexander, too, was a man of abiding faith, as was Jan Smuts, who kept his Greek Testament close at hand and examined every decision under the lens of Christian doctrine. Over dinner one night, Smuts admonished Churchill, “Gandhi… is a man of god. You and I are mundane people. Gandhi has appealed to religious motives. You never have. That is where you have failed.”
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In fact, Churchill believed that was where he had succeeded. On Christmas Day, the Coldstream Guards hosted a church service in an old corrugated-steel warehouse that the army was using to store ammunition. Although feeling well enough to attend the service, Churchill, per his habit, chose not to. Instead, he prepared to discuss the Italian campaign
with Eisenhower, who was due to arrive before noon. Clementine attended the service, along with Sarah, Colville, General Alexander, and Moran. As the padre intoned the
Gloria in Excelsis,
the bells of a nearby church rang out, and a white dove, which had been roosting in the rafters of the warehouse, “fluttered down in front of the congregation.” After the service, when Clementine told Winston of the dove, he dismissed the episode as a conjuring by the minister who, he said, most likely released the bird from under his surplice. When Alexander, who believed the mysteries of this life would be revealed in the next, told Churchill of the message from above delivered on the wings of a dove, Churchill huffed, “There is nothing in such stuff.”
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The remark surprised no one. He regularly reminded those around him that he had declared for agnosticism early in manhood. He had so informed his mother, Jennie, in letters home from India. He informed the world at large in his autobiography,
My Early Life,
where he wrote that while in India he passed through “a violent and aggressive anti-religious phase,” which in turn led to an embrace of good old-fashioned British empiricism. He soon realized under fire in combat that a dash of faith offered some comfort. The result was typical Churchill: “I therefore adapted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe.” His meager relationship with God was neither reverential nor deferential, but one that reflected Stanley Baldwin’s political philosophy: “Never complain and never explain.” He did not begin his speeches with pleas to the Almighty for guidance, nor did he end them with supplications for divine blessing. He did not ask Providence for the strength or wisdom to win the war. He told Britons, “As long as we have faith in our cause and unconquerable will power, salvation will not be denied us.”

Late one evening in Tehran, he told Stalin, “I believe God is on our side. At least I have done my best to make Him a faithful ally.” Stalin grinned, and replied, “And the devil is on my side. Because, of course, everyone knows the devil is a Communist and God, no doubt, is a good Conservative.” That was Churchill playing the straight man to Stalin. He did so again when (as told by Jan Smuts) he suggested the pope might play some role in securing the peace. “The Pope,” Stalin replied thoughtfully, “the Pope. How many divisions has he?” Stalin, Churchill noted with irony, seemed to bring up God quite frequently in conversation.
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Churchill did not.

Churchill’s scant theological leanings tended to incline toward Spinoza’s hands-off deity: God helps those who help themselves. Providence may have put him—and Cromwell, Marlborough, Pitt, and Nelson—on earth, but Providence disclosed no plan for success, and offered no guidance or revelation. Churchill guided himself.

Thus, while his wife and daughter and colleagues beheld the white Christmas dove and were moved to quiet contemplation and wonder, Churchill, in bed with his dispatch boxes, cigars, and whisky, found guidance in his maps and plotted the course of his armies. The agreed-upon date for Overlord was just four months away. Eisenhower was due to arrive at any moment to discuss operations in Italy, including putting an invasion force ashore south of Rome, at Anzio, a gambit that Churchill believed would open the road to Rome.

Churchill had awaked from his fever one day at Carthage to find Sarah sitting at the bedside. She had been reading
Pride and Prejudice
aloud to him, even as he slept. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “It doesn’t matter if I die now, the plans of victory have been laid, it is only a matter of time.”
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Yet by Christmas Day, it had become obvious to Churchill that not enough plans had been laid. The Fifth Army, slogging toward the Liri Valley, had gained less than ten miles in almost three weeks. It would certainly not be in Rome by New Year’s. The recollections of Eisenhower and Churchill part company at this point. Eisenhower fails to mention in his memoir the optimism at his headquarters in early December, when he thought a delay until January 1 of the announcement of his elevation to supreme commander was a grand idea, since by then the Allies might be in Rome. Churchill, in his history of the war, writes that the deadlock in Italy “led General Eisenhower to yearn for an amphibious flanking attack.” Strictly speaking, if to hope is to yearn, Eisenhower yearned for such an operation. But by Christmas he considered it beyond reach and believed that to attempt it would be overreaching, with possible catastrophic consequences. A plan for such an operation, code-named Shingle, had been on the books for two months. By Christmas, Churchill considered it absolutely critical to Allied success.
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Eisenhower described Shingle as an “end run” around Kesselring’s flanks. Churchill, unfamiliar with the American football term, asked what the expression meant. In English parlance it was a “cat-claw.” In boxing terms, it was a left hook delivered in conjunction with an uppercut by the Fifth Army at the Rapido River near its confluence with the Liri. Then, if all went well, Fifth Army would take Monte Cassino and strike up the Liri Valley to join hands within the week with the Shingle force. Then, with Kesselring’s forces presumably in disarray, the Fifth Army would march the final thirty-five miles to Rome, while the Eighth Army, on the Adriatic side of the Apennines, executed a sweeping left turn in the same direction. Eisenhower saw great risk in the Anzio operation, and he warned Churchill. He voiced his fear of “the hazard of annihilation to the landing force if Fifth Army should be unable to reach it by land.” He further feared that without resupply by the landing ships soon departing the Mediterranean for Britain and Overlord, the Anzio beachhead would remain exposed. It was one
thing, in Eisenhower’s estimation, to draw German troops away from France to Italy. It was another matter entirely if the Germans sent enough troops to Italy to defeat the Allied armies there. The force Eisenhower considered large enough to hold and exploit the Anzio landings simply was not available. These concerns he expressed to Churchill on Christmas Day, and again during their final meeting a week later, before Eisenhower left for Washington and London. But Shingle would not come on Eisenhower’s Mediterranean watch; he had no dog in that fight.
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Eisenhower expressed his doubts about Anzio in almost the same terms Churchill used to express his concerns about Overlord. Churchill was not the only commander who feared that an undersize force thrown onto a beach faced “annihilation.” The Christmas meeting was attended by most of the military brass in the theater—Eisenhower, Air Marshal Tedder, Jumbo Wilson, and Alexander. Brooke, who never backed down when he disagreed with Churchill, had already left for London. Another man whose opinion might have carried weight, Mark Clark, had not been invited to the meeting. His Fifth Army would supply the men for Shingle. The assembled agreed that the operation should be enlarged to two reinforced divisions, and should go forward. But it could not. With the exodus of landing ships from the Mediterranean to England, the planners came up fifty-six ships short.

Only Roosevelt could approve a change of plans regarding landing craft. Churchill sent a cable to the president: “The landing at Anzio… should decide the battle of Rome.” Yet, he told the president, eighty-eight landing ships were required, and that number could only be reached by delaying the scheduled transfer of the fifty-six ships to England for Overlord. It would “seem irrational” not to do so, Churchill wrote. To send the ships to England would result in “stagnation” or worse on the Italian front. He was angry, and he was frustrated. Between them, the Americans and British had pledged to build 1,500 ships and landing craft of all types per
month,
and yet in the only European theater where Anglo-American forces were fighting Germans, the fate of the Allied campaign rested with just fifty-six landing craft. Two days later, Roosevelt approved the use of the landing craft. Operation Shingle was on, and Churchill himself was planning the details, including an increase in the force from 20,000 to more than 70,000.
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S
plendid news from the polar region arrived on Boxing Day. The Royal Navy had brought the
Scharnhorst
to bay off the Norwegian coast. (This
was especially welcome news, as
Scharnhorst’
s escape from Brest in February 1942 had nearly brought down Churchill’s government.) When the German battle cruiser had in the previous days attacked a convoy bound for Russia, Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, aboard the
Duke of York,
gave chase.
Scharnhorst
made for the safety of Norway, but by Christmas night, Fraser and his heavy ships had closed in on the German ship. On the twenty-sixth, surrounded, nearly out of ammunition, aflame, and crippled by torpedoes and shells, the
Scharnhorst
finally went under, taking all but thirty-six of her crew of two thousand to the bottom.
Tirpitz,
wounded in late September by Royal Navy midget submarines, still lived, but the German navy, having already lost the submarine war, now had to face a reality that Churchill had seen in early autumn: the Battle of the Atlantic was over. There had been a time when the mere threat of sorties by the German surface fleet terrorized Allied shipping and kept the Home Fleet near home. Now the German threat—its surface fleet, and much of its U-boat fleet—had vanished. Hitler ordered newer, faster, more heavily armed submarines built, but they were not due for deployment until mid-1945. As 1944 came on, the buildup for Overlord proceeded apace. With the arrival of each fresh American division, Britain was being transformed into the largest military staging area in history.

On December 27, Churchill, under doctor’s orders, left Carthage for a two-week convalescence at Marrakech, during which time he took de facto command of the Mediterranean theater. He hinted at his intentions in a medical bulletin he wrote, which was issued from No. 10 Downing that week: “I feel a good deal better than at any time since leaving England, though of course a few weeks in the sunshine are needed to restore my physical strength…. The M and B, which I may also call Moran and Bedford, did the work most effectively…. I have not at any time had to relinquish my part in the direction of affairs, and there has been not the slightest delay in giving the decisions which were required from me. I am now able to transact business fully…. I shall not be idle.” In fact, with the British chiefs and War Cabinet in London, Churchill found himself free to plan his own war.
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At Marrakech, as after Casablanca, he again took over the Villa Taylor, surrounding himself with a diminished troop of family and friends—Beaverbrook was summoned for companionship—and a skeletal staff of typists, private secretaries, and military advisers. Randolph and Sarah joined their father, the son, as usual, tending toward bellicosity and drunkenness, which inevitably led to “a bickering match” between himself and Winston. Randolph was especially poisonous toward de Gaulle, whom he advised his father to dump, in part because de Gaulle had just arrested five former Vichy leaders for treason. Three of the five had aided the Allies
during Torch, and their safety had been spoken for by Roosevelt and Churchill. Henri Giraud opposed the arrests, but de Gaulle was forcing him out as co-president of the FCNL. De Gaulle was now the state, such as it was. To Harold Macmillan’s chagrin, Churchill listened to his son, who was feeding Winston numerous reports on de Gaulle that were “mostly invented.” “Randolph was the cause of the trouble,” Macmillan told his diary. “It is really too bad for the boy to worry his father. But Winston is pathetically devoted to him.” After witnessing several such scenes, Colville wrote, “Randolph is causing considerable strife in the family,” and when Randolph again went off on de Gaulle, Colville noted, “Winston almost had apoplexy and Lord Moran was seriously perturbed.” Randolph’s commanding officer, Fitzroy Maclean, assured Colville that Randolph’s behavior would change once they joined Tito in Yugoslavia, “owing to the absence of whisky and a diet of cabbage soup.” Years later, Evelyn Waugh, who served with Randolph in Yugoslavia, was told that Randolph, a heavy smoker, had undergone a biopsy for a suspected cancerous growth in his lung. To everyone’s surprise, including Randolph’s, the biopsy came back negative. “A typical triumph of modern science,” Waugh offered, “to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.”
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