The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (453 page)

B
y January 3, the Russians had driven one hundred miles beyond the 1939 Polish frontier; that is, the Red Army had struck into Poland for the second time in four years. Churchill saw the political implications of the Red Army’s success and telegraphed his concerns to Anthony Eden. The questions of the Baltic States and Bessarabia, Churchill wrote, “have largely settled themselves through the victories of the Russian armies.” Churchill reminded Eden that when at Tehran they offered Königsberg in East Prussia to Stalin, they made no mention of the Baltic States, “which clearly would be compromised” by a Russian march through them to East Prussia.” In fact, Churchill wrote, once the Russians take “physical possession of these territories… it is absolutely certain that we shall never be able to turn them out.”
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The implication for Poland was clear. Then Eden cabled with the news that the London Poles insisted “Poland, as a reward for Polish suffering and fighting,” must “emerge from this war with… her eastern provinces intact and her western provinces increased.” That would not do; Churchill had already proposed to Stalin the ceding of a large swath of eastern Poland to Russia. Were the Poles to refuse the offer, Churchill told Eden, he would consider England’s obligations to Poland fully discharged: “I would certainly not take any further responsibility for what will happen in the future.” The London Poles, Eden reported, feared that in Poland’s war-weakened state, chewing off of large portions of Germany would prove difficult “in digesting.” As well, Eden offered, in light of the heroic victories
of the Red Army, “there is public impatience with the Poles.” Britain may have gone to war for Poland, but Britons, like their American cousins, had put the Russians on a pedestal. Still, Eden was optimistic. But that faith was shaken by a telegram from Stalin to Churchill on January 7 wherein the marshal stated that the declarations of the London Poles left him to conclude that “there is no foundation for reckoning on the possibility of bringing these circles to reason. These people are incorrigible.” The London Poles, pressed by Eden, finally agreed to discuss “all outstanding questions” with the Russians, including the Curzon Line. But they would not accept the Curzon Line before any such discussions. Moscow rejected the offer. The London Poles, Stalin informed the British, “did not want neighborly relations with the Soviet Union.” That news, Eden later wrote, came “like a blow to the face.” With the Red Army now one hundred miles beyond Poland’s 1939 border, Churchill grasped the inevitable. To Eden he cabled: “Considering that Russia has lost perhaps thirty millions of citizens… they have the right as well as the power to have their western frontiers secured.”
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C
hurchill departed Marrakech on January 14, intent on being in London when the troops went ashore at Anzio. He went by air to Gibraltar, and then by
King George V
to Plymouth, and finally by train to Paddington Station, where late in the morning of the eighteenth he was met by the entire cabinet and Chiefs of Staff. He had been away for sixty-seven days, an extraordinary amount of time for any leader to be absent from his capital, and doubly so for a leader during wartime. He took himself straightaway to the House, which had just reconvened after the Christmas recess. Harold Nicolson recorded Churchill’s entrance: “We were dawdling through questions… when I saw (
saw
is the word) a gasp of astonishment pass over the faces of the Labour Party opposite. Suddenly they jumped to their feet and started shouting…. We also jumped up and the whole House broke into cheer after cheer while Winston, very pink, rather shy, beaming with mischief, crept along the front bench and flung himself into his accustomed seat.” He rose to take questions, and although Nicolson applauded his effort, he also noted that he “looked pale when the first flush of pleasure had subsided, and his voice was not quite so vigorous as it had been.” Concerns about Churchill’s health now regularly found their way into the diaries of the Old Man’s colleagues.
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Following Questions, Churchill chaired a cabinet meeting during which he disabused Brooke of any hopes that he would return to London under
control. The P.M. “rambled on till 1:30
P.M.,
” Brooke told his diary that night. “He was looking well, but I did not like the functioning of his brain much! Too much unconnected rambling from one subject to another.” Indeed, at the following day’s Chiefs of Staff meeting, Churchill launched into his plans for operations “after Anzio is over.” This was three days before Anzio even began. He foresaw putting several thousand commandos supported by tanks on islands off the Dalmatian coast. For Churchill, the Aegean still held its place as a theater of destiny. That night, Brooke unloaded to his diary: “The P.M. is starting off in his usual style!! I don’t think I can stand much more of it…. His method is entirely opportunistic, gathering one flower here, another there! My God how tired I am of working for him. I had not fully realized how awful it is until I suddenly found myself thrown into it again after a rest.”
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Churchill was back.

Eisenhower had arrived in London on January 16, assured by Roosevelt and Marshall that they would not second-guess his decisions, would never try to force commanders on him, and would back him completely. The president had put the “supreme” in supreme commander. Eisenhower had told the president that he intended to deploy his forces in pursuit of one military objective—the destruction of Hitler’s armies. All decisions would be taken with that objective in mind. “Geographical points,” he later wrote, “were considered only in their relationship” to killing German armies. And politics was not to be considered at all. He made clear to Churchill in coming weeks that were his superiors—Roosevelt and Marshall—to order him to undertake operations based on political priorities, he would of course obey those orders. But he would not otherwise bend his military strategy to politics. Eisenhower noted Churchill’s “concern as a political leader for the future of the Balkans… but as a soldier I was particularly careful to exclude such considerations from my own recommendations.” Churchill also harbored a deep concern for Poland; in fact, with the Red Army driving west, he increasingly harbored concerns for all of Europe. This divergence in philosophies between Eisenhower the warrior and Churchill the warrior-politician would in coming months have profound consequences.
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The Yanks had arrived in Britain, almost one million strong. Another million were due by June, and yet another million by year’s end. Dwight Eisenhower’s Irish driver (and alleged mistress), Kay Summersby, later wrote that London, “like a discreet matron carried away by one too many cocktails,” had become “a playgirl of a city.” Since the Battle of Britain, RAF pilots on weekend leave had hastened to London for forty-eight hours
of whiskey and women. The GIs’ arrival “really blew the lid off.” The Americans spent their dollars in any number of stores and pubs and clubs; the locals had little money to spend and, with everything from sweets to eggs to clothes rationed, little to spend it on. Summersby declared her pride at watching the poorest of Londoners slide right past American PXs while casting “not a glance at the American boys emerging with cigarettes and sweets and other treasures.” Britons, meanwhile, saw their milk ration reduced to two pints per week. Irving Berlin’s all-soldier musical
This Is the Army,
starring its New York cast, was entering its third month of playing to standing room only crowds at the Palladium; every shilling of the proceeds went to the British armed forces.
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One evening months earlier, after he had viewed photos of destroyed German cities, Harold Nicolson’s thoughts turned to London, which was largely unvisited by the Luftwaffe in 1943. Whereas almost three years earlier, Nicolson and all Londoners had feared for their lives, they now felt free to complain about their sacrifices. Nicolson was pleased that one of his favorite restaurants “retained all its old atmosphere,” but “the Travellers, on the other hand, has become a battered
caravanserai,
in which the scum of the lower London clubs are served inadequately by scared Lithuanian waitresses.” And when Nicolson came across boozy American troops frolicking in the Underground with their “East End Jewish girls,” he went home and told his diary, “I hate it.”
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England, wrote Mollie Panter-Downes, resembled “a vast combination of an aircraft carrier, a dock jammed with men, and a warehouse stacked to the ceiling with material labeled ‘Europe.’ ”
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The legions of soldiers had time on their hands, if not on their side. Arriving GIs joined the uniformed Welshmen, Scotsmen, Norwegians, Poles, Dutch, Indians, Czechs, Belgians, Canadians, Newfoundlanders (until 1949, Newfoundland was a self-governing Dominion), Aussies, and New Zealanders who had turned Piccadilly Circus into the Times Square of England. It was the sort of chaotic commingling that had occurred on the island with regularity since prehistoric times and of which Daniel Defoe wrote:

At night battalions of tarts strutted down the blacked-out streets, as they had at the height of the Blitz (Ed Murrow had called them “London’s bravest”). Now they solicited clients with whispers of
“tovarisch”
(“comrade”). Darkened doorways became love nests and from alleys drifted the sounds of fistfights and catcalls and blasphemies in a babel of languages.
The whores carried small flashlights that they played on their faces for a few seconds when a soldier nodded interest, the narrow beams dancing in the deep shadows with a flickering, strobe effect. Old air-raid wardens in tin hats barked orders to cut the torches. They were ignored. When low-pressure atmospherics wrapped the city in a vile mix of acrid chimney effusions and impenetrable Channel fog, the nighttime became downright bizarre. Automobiles—the top half of their headlights painted black—crept along like purblind beasts of burden, led by passengers or Good Samaritans who placed one hand on the front fender while reaching out with the other in hopes of feeling their way to the proper destination. After much tribulation, many stumbles, and a bit of good luck, the autos and their caretakers might actually find their way home. London, after almost five years under blackout conditions, was still wrapped, Jock Colville wrote, “in Stygian blackness.”
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O
n January 21, Eisenhower’s senior Overlord staff met for the first time, at Norfolk House, a neo-Georgian building just off St. James’s Park, which had been put off limits to civilians in part to mask the comings and goings at the former mansion. Montgomery presented his findings on the initial plans for Overlord. As he had told Churchill, he now told his colleagues, “The initial landing is on too narrow a front and confined to too small an area.” As well, the landings—code-named Neptune—called for too few men, just three divisions, which invited congestion on the beaches and possible disaster were the Germans to concentrate their tanks and send in their planes. Monty supported the concept of the Mulberry artificial harbors but stressed the need to capture the port of Cherbourg. That objective necessitated the widening of the landing zone to include a beach on the Cotentin Peninsula, which was separated from the main landing beaches by the four-mile-wide double estuary of the Vire and Douve rivers. To resolve that problem, Montgomery proposed dropping two divisions of American paratroops ten miles inland from the beach and west of the Douve. Finally, he insisted “the air battle must be won before the operation is launched.” Eisenhower, who had taken only a cursory look at the plans before he left North Africa, found himself in general agreement with Monty’s suggestions, but for one. Montgomery proposed scrapping Anvil, the two-division invasion of southern France, in order to free up the troops and landing craft needed to expand Overlord. Eisenhower acknowledged that Anvil could not now precede Overlord as planned, but he declared that it must follow soon after. He would consider an outright cancellation
only as a last resort. All agreed that the time needed to assemble the appropriate force for Overlord—and to destroy German airpower and disrupt French rail lines—would delay the invasion for a month. That was exactly the flexibility Churchill and Brooke had sought, and believed they had gained, in Tehran.
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