The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (452 page)

Yet Randolph, in his own insufferable manner, brought into clearer focus the trouble that was brewing with de Gaulle. De Gaulle, not Randolph, was the real source of the difficulty. To address it, Churchill sent his York aircraft to Algiers in order to retrieve his old friends Alfred Duff Cooper and his wife, Lady Diana Cooper. He was in his new position of HMG’s minister to the French Committee of National Liberation, and Lady Diana was a notable in her own right, at fifty-one still one of England’s great beauties. Her portrait had graced a
Time
magazine cover in 1926; she was a respected actress and one of England’s best-known hostesses. Over men, including Churchill, she exerted a certain power, as Lord Moran witnessed at dinner one evening in Marrakech. “There,” Moran whispered to Colville, “you have the historic spectacle of a professional siren vamping an elder statesman.” Duff Cooper, who loved France and the French, could only hope that he could exert such sway over de Gaulle. Cooper’s new assignment—to make peace with de Gaulle, or at least to avoid more trouble—proved difficult from the start.
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When Roosevelt telegraphed orders directly to Eisenhower to not allow the Gaullists to prosecute three of the arrested Vichy luminaries, Macmillan—now resident minister for the entire Mediterranean—feared a complete collapse of relations between the French and the British and Americans. Roosevelt added a handwritten postscript to his cable: “It seems to me that this is the proper time effectively to eliminate the Jeanne d’Arc complex and return to realism.” Upon learning of the cable, Macmillan told his
diary, “The president hates de Gaulle and the French National Committee…. He would seize on any excuse to overthrow them and restore Giraud.” De Gaulle delayed a showdown when he announced that the three Vichy leaders would not be tried until a French government was in place. Still, Roosevelt wanted de Gaulle out, and Churchill was leaning that way.
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The antics of Randolph and de Gaulle were distractions for Churchill, who wanted to focus his attention on only Italy. He summoned Captain Pim and his entire map room staff to Marrakech in order to better plot his Anzio campaign. Montgomery, on his way to London to assume his new command, flew in for New Year’s. Eisenhower, about to leave for a two-week vacation in the States before reporting for duty in London, was summoned by Churchill to discuss Anzio; again Eisenhower expressed his fears about the gambit—too small a force thrown against too powerful an enemy. On New Year’s Eve, Churchill asked Montgomery to look over the plans for the Normandy campaign. Montgomery at first protested that since the Combined Chiefs of Staff had approved the plans, it was not his place to second-guess them. Churchill insisted. Montgomery (never a man for celebrations anyway) cut short his New Year’s Eve dinner with Churchill and Clementine to take up the task. In deference to Monty, the rest of the party celebrated the New Year before the midnight hour. Punch was served, and orderlies and typists wandered into the room to partake of the festivities. After a brief speech by Churchill, everyone linked arms and formed a circle to sing “
Auld Lang Syne.”
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Montgomery wrote fondly of the evening in his memoirs, noting that it marked the beginning of a friendship between himself and Churchill and Clementine that only deepened over the next two decades. That was true; Montgomery signed the guest book at Chartwell forty-six times, second only to the Prof’s eighty-six. Yet the friendship almost sputtered at the start when Clementine invited Monty’s aide-de-camp, Noel Chavasse, to the New Year’s Eve dinner. “My ADC’s don’t dine with the Prime Minister,” Montgomery replied tartly. “In my house, General Montgomery,” said Clementine, “I invite who I wish and I don’t require your advice.” Chavasse dined.
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The next morning, New Year’s Day 1944, Churchill marched into Clementine’s room and announced, “I am so happy. I feel so much better.” Later in the day, the Old Man and his party, including Montgomery, motored to an olive grove in the countryside for a picnic, one of many during his days of recuperation. There, Monty delivered to Churchill his first, unfavorable, impressions of the Overlord plan. “This will not do,” Monty declared. “I must have more in the initial punch.” He had earlier offered his opinion to Eisenhower, who told him to recommend any and all changes he thought
appropriate when they next met in London. But Eisenhower had Italy, not Normandy, on his mind. He departed Marrakech that morning with the unsettling feeling that “the insistence of the P.M. indicated he had practically taken tactical command of the Mediterranean.” He had. Eisenhower’s staff began referring to Shingle as “the P.M.’s pet project.” It was. Marrakech picnics were “sacrificed to stern duty,” Moran wrote. “Councils of war” were held in the gardens of the Villa Taylor. When Moran pointed out to Churchill that Hitler not only made war policy but even planned the details, Churchill replied, “Yes, that’s just what I do.” With all the brass having departed, he found himself alone in Marrakech, happily so, prompting Lord Moran to tell his diary, “As the P.M. grows in strength his appetite for war comes back.”
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I
n early January 1944, RAF and American bomber crews sailed off on a series of secret missions over France that their superiors were closemouthed about. Normally, the flyers’ commanders briefed flight crews on intended targets—a particular factory, for example, or rail yard in a particular city. But now the flight crews were given only coordinates, and told not to miss. The airmen were not privy to the fact that throughout the late autumn, British reconnaissance flights had snapped photos of dozens of strange-looking wooden and concrete structures scattered from Normandy to the Pas de Calais. The structures looked like Alpine ski jumps—narrow and about five hundred feet long. Some sat upon concrete foundations. Heavy electrical cables and winches implied that the structures might serve as some sort of catapult. When analysts marked the sites on maps, they reached an unsettling conclusion: each was positioned such that its axis pointed toward London. It was left to one sharp-eyed WAAF (Woman’s Auxiliary Air Force) analyst to spot a propellerless aircraft near one of the sites. Another analyst recalled similar buildings being photographed at Peenemünde the previous May. The analysts could only conclude that they were looking at German launch sites. Exactly what manner of device was to be launched remained unknown. RAF and American bomb crews now flew in the service of Crossbow, Duncan Sandys’s operation to destroy the mysterious sites. But accuracy, as usual, left much to be desired. “The bombing of the launching emplacements,” Brooke confided to his diary on January 11, “is not going well.” The bombing, in fact, continued to not go well for seven more months.
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Not so Churchill’s Moroccan holiday. He worked mornings, picnicked in the afternoons, and dined splendidly by candlelight each night. Late in
the evening, dressed in his dragon robe, he sang along to Gilbert and Sullivan recordings sent to him for Christmas by Mary, “the best present I ever gave him.” Eduard Beneš, on his way home from Moscow, where he had signed a friendship treaty with Stalin, stopped by for dinner, during which Beneš expressed his belief that “we must be ready for a German collapse any day after May 1.” Again, as he had in Cairo, Churchill polled his dinner companions as to whether they believed Hitler would still be in power on September 3, 1944. Answering no were Sarah, Commander Tommy Thompson, John Martin, Beneš, and Major General Leslie Hollis. Hollis’s pronouncement carried weight; he was Ismay’s deputy and attended many of the overseas conferences and most of the military planning sessions throughout the war. Churchill and Beaverbrook answered yes.
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On January 12, Charles de Gaulle, after a month of what Duff Cooper termed “boorish” refusals to meet with Churchill, agreed to dine with the prime minister. Still offended by Churchill’s not seeing him while en route to Tehran, and furious over Roosevelt’s intervention in his plan to try the three Vichy loyalists, the general arrived in Marrakech in a “difficult and unhelpful” mood. Churchill, too, was in a low mood, having been shocked that day to learn that Count Ciano and the other conspirators who had ousted Mussolini had been shot. As Churchill waited for de Gaulle, Duff Cooper later wrote, he pondered ridding the alliance of the Frenchman once and for all, not only because Roosevelt sought to but because, as Churchill told Cooper, “You like the man, I don’t.” As the hour of the meeting approached, Cooper and Clementine advised Churchill to act with civility toward de Gaulle. “I hope there will be no explosions,” Clementine wrote in a letter to Mary. There were not. After a cool start (de Gaulle “talked as if he were Stalin and Roosevelt combined”) the two leaders “parted friends” two hours later. Churchill even agreed to attend a review of French troops the following day. The review, where Churchill and de Gaulle stood side by side, “was a great success,” Cooper wrote, and Churchill was “much moved by the cries of
‘Vive Churchill,’
which predominated over the cries of
‘Vive de Gaulle’
as the Spahis and Zouaves marched past.” Years later Cooper wrote of Churchill, “After spending more than a half century in the de-humanising profession of politics, Winston Churchill remains as human as a school-boy.” The words were written in appreciation of Churchill’s willingness to stick with de Gaulle—despite de Gaulle’s misdeeds—for the greater good of France and Europe.
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A picnic in the mountains (without de Gaulle) followed the review of troops. Such outings were not simple affairs to bring off. American troops guarded the surrounding area, which included a deep gorge through which
a river ran. Churchill’s orderlies laid out long trestle tables, white tablecloths, folding chairs, Berber carpets, and large wicker baskets containing oranges, olives, grilled lamb, and chilled liquid refreshments, “the whole caboodle,” recalled Lady Diana Cooper. So luscious were the oranges that Montgomery, who was leaving for London later in the day, ordered that an aircraft be procured, loaded with oranges, and sent ahead to England. As with any meal with Churchill, the picnic began on an uncertain note. Lady Cooper, a friend of three decades, had long known how to best approach Churchill at the dinner table. “He was always grumpy before dinner,” she recalled, “then after a couple of drinks, became funny and more witty.” After his first glass of brandy Churchill leaned in toward Lady Diana and whispered, “Lord Moran says I am to have another glass of brandy.” Yet Moran had said no such thing. “Well,” Lady Diana recalled, “three times he had another glass of brandy with the result that I saw it coming.” What she saw coming was an excursion by Churchill and several aides down to the river in the gorge, where he scrambled about on the boulders in the streambed. When it came time to ascend from the ravine, the Old Man found he lacked the mobility. Lady Diana lowered a long white tablecloth, into which Churchill was wrapped like a baby in a bundle. With two aides pulling, two pushing, and another carrying the Old Man’s cigar, they regained the high ground.
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Churchill’s long absence from London had been noted at the highest levels. Brooke told his diary on January 7, “Winston, sitting in Marrakech, is now full of beans and trying to win the war from there…. I wish to god he would come home and get under control.” He was coming home soon, but with no intention of getting himself under control. Yet he was not fully fit, was prone to bouts of exhaustion, and experienced occasional trouble on his feet, as borne out by the expedition into the ravine. One evening in Marrakech, Clementine confided to Lady Cooper, “I never think of after the war. You see, I think Winston will die when it’s over…. You see… we’re putting everything we have into this war, and it will take all we have.”
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It was taking all Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins had. In a New Year’s Eve cable to Churchill, the president made casual reference to spending a few days in bed “with a mild case of the ‘flu.’ ” Five days later, Roosevelt told Churchill that Harry Hopkins, too, had come down with the flu and would be spending a few days in the Naval Hospital. The illness wasn’t severe, Roosevelt offered, but “it makes you feel like an Italian soldier looks.” In fact, Roosevelt was a sick man, experiencing abdominal pains, fluid in his lungs, and heart palpitations. Hopkins was an even sicker man. He did not in fact spend a few days in hospital, but the better part of seven months, during which time he underwent surgery for his stomach ailments, all of
which, he would learn within a year, his doctors had misdiagnosed. Hopkins, in great pain, was shuffled between the Mayo Clinic and the Naval Hospital before undertaking a long convalescence at White Sulphur Springs. So sudden and total was his disappearance that Churchill concluded he had had a falling out with the president. In February, Churchill dispatched one of the few letters he sent to Hopkins that year. It was a scroll, actually, hand-lettered with five lines from the final scene of
Macbeth.
It began:
“Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt….”
Stephen Hopkins, Marine Private First Class, eighteen, had been killed in the Marshall Islands. For three years Churchill had found a friend and ready ear in Hopkins, who had championed England’s cause more strongly and more effectively than did the president’s chief of staff, Admiral Leahy, and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull. Hopkins, not Roosevelt, had been Churchill’s best friend in the White House. He had completed the circuit between his boss and Churchill. That connection was now fraying.
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