The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (455 page)

That the Allies could send almost an entire air force to bomb a single church testified to the awesome power of their air fleets. But thousands of planes meant thousands of casualties. On February 19, Colville noted that nine hundred bombers had been sent out to Germany the previous night, and that 5 percent did not return. Actually, as Churchill told the House on February 22, a thousand bombers had been sent to four German cities, nine thousand tons of bombs were loosed, and seventy-nine aircraft—8 percent—did not return. RAF losses were staggering, and mounting. But Churchill remained committed to the bombing campaign. He spoke to the House that day for one hour and eighteen minutes, his first major address in five months. He directed most of his remarks at Germans, telling them that unconditional surrender did not mean they would become slaves.

He also promised Germans that he intended to bomb Germany into ruins. He told MPs (and reminded Americans), “Turning to the air, the honour of bombing Berlin has fallen almost entirely to us. Up to the present we have delivered the main attack upon Germany.” Then he spoke of the cost: “Excluding Dominion and Allied squadrons working with the Royal Air Force, the British islands have lost 38,300 pilots and air crews killed and 10,400 missing, and over 10,000 aircraft since the beginning of the war and they have made nearly 900,000 sorties into the North European theatre.” But there would be no respite, for air crews or Germans: “Scales and degrees of attack will be reached far beyond the dimensions of anything which has yet been employed or, indeed, imagined.” He advised German citizens to flee their cities and take refuge in the countryside. He predicted German retaliation for the air campaign, and not the usual sort of raids that had been taking place. He disclosed for the first time in public what form the retaliation would take: “There is no doubt that the Germans are preparing on the French shore new means of assault on this country, either by pilotless aircraft, or possibly rockets, or both, on a considerable scale.”
⁶¹

Mollie Panter-Downes noted that Londoners did not much comment on Churchill’s warnings of impending attack “by pilotless planes and rocket shells.” Most people, she wrote, “had enough to worry about right now with planes that did have pilots.” But she had misheard Churchill. He had not warned of “rocket shells” of the sort batteries in Hyde Park shot skyward in search of German planes. Rather, he had warned of
rockets.
⁶²

In his address, Churchill covered every world battlefront, and every political nuance on the international scene and at home. He cautioned that the war in Europe would probably not end in 1944. He gave details of his pledge to Stalin made at Tehran that Soviet borders would be protected and that Polish borders would be moved. He declared the Curzon Line as
HMG’s policy, and declared his faith in Stalin’s promise that he sought “a strong integral independent Poland as one of the leading Powers in Europe.” He added, “He [Stalin] has several times repeated these declarations in public, and I am convinced that they represent the settled policy of the Soviet Union.” Then he took a swing at naysayers in Britain and America who denigrated the Grand Alliance:

When earlier that week the former Archbishop of Canterbury decried the bombing of German cities and the prospect of Rome being bombed wholesale, the House of Lords responded with an official declaration that the bombing of German cities must and would go on.

M
arch 1, and the invasion of France, was just three months distant. Churchill insisted it be called a “liberation” and that “invasion” be used only in reference to crossing the enemy—German—frontier. The Combined Chiefs of Staff obeyed the directive, and even Roosevelt agreed to do so. Invasion or liberation, Overlord would be the most critical step yet taken by the Anglo-Americans toward the destruction of Hitler. The Russians could not do it alone; nor, it appeared, could Bomber Command. Brendan Bracken saw Overlord as “the most desperate military venture in history.” Alec Cadogan, the permanent under secretary for Foreign Affairs, called it “the most hazardous enterprise ever undertaken.” It was that (at least from the Anglo-American standpoint), yet it was just one operation among many, one element on the military landscape.
⁶⁴

There were other landscapes—economic, political, social—over which the players had to make their way. For the next three months, Dwight Eisenhower’s horizon justifiably extended to Normandy, and not much further. Charles de Gaulle, in Algiers, had his sights set on getting to Paris, the London Poles on getting to Warsaw, Beneš on getting to Prague. The
Allied military chiefs parsed vistas worldwide—in Italy, in the vastness of the Pacific, in Burma. Likewise in the political sphere, Harriman, Halifax, Hull, and Eden shared many problems, and many solutions, but certainly not all. British diplomats around the world tussled with local leaders over local problems; in Bengal the famine was worsening. At home, British authorities clashed with disgruntled Britons over wages, ration cards, food shortages, and a beer shortage. Each participant in the drama operated in a limited sphere, but Churchill’s responsibilities encompassed all things military, political, and economic—internationally and in the Home Island. And it was all in flux. His duties were kaleidoscopic in their haphazard variety. Poland and Overlord certainly dominated his thoughts, but there were numerous other worries as well.

It was obvious that Romania, which had been extending peace feelers in Stockholm since late 1943, would soon be overrun by the Red Army. Churchill knew that once the Soviets gained Bucharest, the matter of a separate peace with Romania would become moot. The Hungarians and Bulgarians, too, were getting jittery as the Red Army rolled toward the Carpathians. In mid-March, after Hitler learned that the Hungarians had sent out peace feelers to the West, he sent in the Wehrmacht to occupy the country and installed a pro-Nazi puppet government. The new government soon ordered the deportation of 450,000 Hungarian Jews and Romas to the death camps. The Finns, too, saw the writing on the wall. With Leningrad freed, the Finns knew that the Red Army would soon come their way. It did, in an early June surprise attack. Finland’s Marshal Carl Mannerheim concluded a separate peace with the Soviets in August.

Greece was in a state of civil war. When Greek troops in Egypt mutinied in April, Churchill told General Bernard Paget, in Cairo, that HMG was “prepared to use the utmost force if necessary, but let us avoid slaughter, if possible.” Paget put down the revolt with the loss of one British officer and no Greeks. Yugoslavia, too, was in a state of civil war; by April Churchill threw his full support to Tito and cut all ties with the Chetniks. Churchill finessed King Peter, a Serb, into sacking his cabinet and appointing Dr. Ivan Šubaši
—a Croat, pro-Tito and acceptable to Stalin—as prime minister. Tito did not ask for a seat in the government and agreed to defer a plebiscite on King Peter until after the war.
⁶⁵

Italian politics came into play in March, when Roosevelt, citing American “public opinion” (it was an election year), pushed Churchill to sack King Emmanuel and Badoglio, who was, after all, a Fascist holdover. Churchill, preferring the strong hand of Badoglio to the fractious Italian politics that would surely result from his sacking, thought the idea foolish. “Why break the handle of the coffee pot,” he told Brooke, “… and burn your fingers trying to hold it, why not wait to get to Rome and let it cool off?”
⁶⁶

Roosevelt sifted all questions of Italy, Poland, and Ireland in terms of election year politics—Italian, Irish, and Polish Americans formed the backbone of his constituency. On the one hand, he did not want to lose the Polish bloc; on the other, he did not want Stalin doubting the sincerity of the agreements made at Tehran with regard to Poland. For his part, Churchill examined Poland strictly in terms of Britain’s commitment to the Free Poles. He considered other European countries—Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, Italy, Bulgaria—largely in terms of their susceptibility to Communist takeover. Upon Ireland, where he expected mischief, he kept a wary eye. Indeed, late in the year de Valera proclaimed Ireland’s duty and right as a neutral to offer sanctuary to Germans accused of war crimes. Where Roosevelt weighed issues regarding Europe in terms of American politics, Churchill weighed them in terms of Europe, its future, and Britain’s role in that future. Stalin, likewise, weighed matters in terms of Russia’s role in postwar Europe. His armies were now inside Poland, or as Roosevelt pointed out to Polish Americans throughout the year, inside one of the many configurations of Poland that had come and gone for over a century. He asked, which was the real Poland? His point was, Poland defied geographical definition, which even the American Polish community admitted was true. Yet American Poles and especially the London Poles were repulsed by the idea of ceding even one inch of prewar Poland to the Bolsheviks. Still, ever politically agile, Roosevelt managed to keep the Polish voting bloc in his pocket, as well as Stalin, or so he thought.
⁶⁷

In the forgotten war in Burma, the Americans and Chinese under Vinegar Joe Stilwell could only slog though the northern Burmese jungle in their mission to build the Ledo Road from northern India to China, their flanks protected by the guerrilla warfare genius Orde Wingate and his Chindits. Brooke thought the stress of battle “had sent Wingate off his head,” but before any consideration was given to relieving him, Wingate, the “Clive of Burma,” was killed in an airplane crash in March, thus removing the unique fighter from the scene. General Sir Billy Slim and the Fourteenth Army had captured a major Japanese supply base sixty miles south of Mandalay but had outrun their own supply lines. Further operations were canceled until after the monsoons. Malaria, as it had in Italy, felled more troops than the enemy. But the Allies had a new and secret scientific weapon in the war against mosquitoes and lice. Later in the year the British and American governments lifted censorship from “one of the great scientific discoveries of World War II.” It was a discovery, proclaimed
Time,
that would “be to preventive medicine what Lister’s discovery of antiseptics was to surgery.” Churchill told the Commons, “It is an insecticide called D.D.T. We have discovered many defences against tropical disease, and, above all, against the onslaught of insects of all kinds, from lice
to mosquitoes and back again. The excellent D.D.T. powder, which has been fully experimented with and found to yield astonishing results, will hence-forward be used on a great scale by the British forces in Burma and by American and Australian forces in the Pacific and, indeed, in all theatres.”
⁶⁸

Worldwide, disparate commanders demanded from the planners in Washington and London more men, more ammo, more medicines, and more 120-octane aircraft fuel. There was Overlord, to be sure, but there were also Burma, Norway, the Aegean, Anzio, the Philippines, the Marshall and Gilbert islands, and always, for Churchill, Sumatra. In mid-March he again proposed to his Chiefs of Staff a strike into Sumatra as a stepping-stone to Rangoon, an idea Brooke called “impossible” and “full of false deductions and defective strategy.” It was never carried out.
⁶⁹

Problems demanding solutions abounded. Palestine presented a singular one, not of any immediate military nature, but one with significant long-term implications. In 1939 the Foreign Office produced a white paper that called for an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1944 and the establishment of a single Palestinian state in which the Arabs, by virtue of holding veto power on any further Jewish immigration, would outnumber Jews three to one. The white paper, produced as a gambit should war come, was intended to placate Arabs throughout the Middle East. Chamberlain believed that if war came, the Arab world would be a far stronger ally against Hitler than five hundred thousand Palestinian Jews. Parliament was to take up the white paper in May 1944. The British military chiefs advocated adoption. Churchill did not, and considered the white paper to be a betrayal of the Balfour Declaration
^*
and a betrayal of Jews. He had opposed the policy in 1939 and still did, because the Arab majority within a single Palestinian state would never allow the Jewish minority to execute a partition into two separate states. If trouble arose over partition, Churchill told Ismay, it will come from the Arabs and that “left to themselves, the Jews would beat the Arabs.” He used parliamentary procedures to keep the bill from coming to a vote, thus delaying the debate until after the war. His support for Zionism never flagged, even when later in the year, two young Zionist terrorists assassinated Lord Moyne (Walter Guinness), resident minister in the Middle East. Moyne was an old Churchill family friend and had hosted Clementine onboard his yacht
Rosaura
during their pacific journey a decade earlier. He had long opposed Zionism,
but he had moderated his opinions somewhat since his posting to Palestine. When Churchill learned that Zionists worldwide protested the death sentence imposed on Moyne’s assassins, he advised Cairo officials, where the murder took place, to hang the killers, and hang them quickly. The sentence was carried out.
⁷⁰