The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (458 page)

The pilot, as usual, was scrutinizing the seas all around, near and far, with the result that he failed to set a steady course. He became mired in details and his dispatch boxes backed up. He had learned that the Americans were no longer painting their aircraft, which lessened their weight and added twenty miles an hour to their speed; “Pray let me know,” he asked the Aircraft Ministry, if the RAF was considering doing likewise. When he noticed an “untidy sack with holes in it and sand leaking out” in St. James’s Park, he demanded it be removed. The park had been closed to civilians, and other than military men on their way to secret meetings and a scaup duck that Brooke liked to observe, St. James’s Park was empty and neglected. Other details had political overtones. Churchill objected to a proposal by the Home Secretary to hold a national day of prayer for the success of Overlord. Such an event would be a “grave mistake,” Churchill wrote. “In my view there is no need for a national day of prayer or thanksgiving at this time.” Mollie Panter-Downes noted that Montgomery was making a show of touring the land inviting “God to scatter the Allies’ enemies and the public to scatter its cash in war bonds.” Churchill took note of and shut down Montgomery’s public relations and prayer tour. The prayers being said by Britons that spring were not only for the safety of their sons,
but for rain; a severe drought was killing winter crops and did not bode well for the summer harvest. Rural wells ran dry, forcing villagers into long lines to procure buckets of water. Panter-Downes wrote that with millions of troops moving about the country, England was in the position of the hostess of a modest house whose “influx of guests has run the cistern dry.”
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C
hurchill’s relations with his military chiefs were as arid as the countryside. On the heels of Operation Caliph, his plan to support Overlord by sending three divisions into Bordeaux, came proposals to liberate Norway, and to drive into the Aegean “in the event of Overlord not being successful” or German troops there being “beyond our power to tackle.” He saw these ventures as “flanking movements.” But the time for flanking movements had passed. He and Britain were committed to Overlord. Yet Churchill was not trying to evade that commitment; he was performing due diligence in the event that the Germans sent enough panzers to France to trigger a cancellation of the invasion, as agreed upon in Tehran. Eisenhower pondered the same question. His son and biographer later wrote that Eisenhower was in constant contact with Marshall during February and early March regarding the problem of what to do “should German moves in the next several weeks rule out Overlord as impractical.” As Eisenhower saw it, Anvil, the south of France operation, presented the only possible alternative. Churchill and Eisenhower understood that perfect certainty about Overlord could never be achieved, and that “an irrevocable commitment to Overlord was not possible until the troops were ashore in France.” And they could not go ashore until the Combined Chiefs of Staff delegated to Eisenhower the absolute authority to do whatever needed to be done in order to not only carry out Overlord but also sustain it. This they did in February when they formally designated him supreme allied commander, giving him authority over all Allied land, sea, and air forces. Churchill could probe and prod Eisenhower, but he could make no demands.
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This did not apply to Churchill’s British chiefs, from whom he demanded much. Brooke’s diary references to Churchill grew more furious. After one particularly difficult February meeting (and most were now difficult), Brooke wrote, “I often doubt whether I am going mad or he is really sane.” After another he wrote, “I can not stick any more meetings like this.” During a March meeting, Churchill claimed to have discovered a new island off the coast of Sumatra, and proposed sending a fleet there. Admiral Cunningham replied that with the Japanese fleet in Singapore, such a move would be “courting disaster.” Of the meeting Brooke wrote, “I began to wonder
whether I was in Alice in Wonderland, or whether I was really fit for a lunatic asylum.” And of Churchill: “I… am honestly getting very doubtful about his balance of mind…. I don’t know where we are or where we are going as regards our strategy…. It is a ghastly situation.” And on March 23, “I feel like a man chained to the chariot of a lunatic!!” To Dill, in Washington, Brooke wrote: “I am just about at the end of my tether.” Brooke was not alone in fighting ongoing battles with Churchill. Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham’s autobiography,
A Sailor’s Odyssey,
conveys the same frustration. Air Chief Marshal Portal also expressed his doubts about Churchill, who, Portal felt, did not appreciate the proper role of airpower. Yet Portal grossly overrated the effectiveness of strategic bombing. He shocked Brooke that spring when he claimed that he could have won the war by early 1944 if not for “the handicap of the other two services!!” Brooke usually reserved his double exclamation marks for prime-ministerial quotations.
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Brooke’s diary entries, when cherry-picked, portray a meddlesome and infuriating prime minister, the strangler fig in Brooke’s neatly tilled garden of military strategy. Yet Brooke’s diaries—and those of the other journal keepers—are informative only when taken as a whole. After a particularly disputatious afternoon meeting, Brooke was summoned to dinner by Churchill. The CIGS expected to be sacked. “On the contrary,” he wrote, “we had a
tête-à-tête
dinner at which he [Churchill] was quite charming, as if he meant to make up for some of the rough passages of the day.” They discussed their children and Churchill’s difficulty in controlling Randolph. They discussed “the President’s unpleasant attitude lately.” They mused on Italy, and the latest German air raids. Concerned for Brooke’s health, Churchill told him to take some time off so as not to wear himself out. Later that night, after a post-dinner meeting of the Chiefs of Staff where Brooke found Churchill to be “much more reasonable,” the CIGS told his diary, “He has astonishing sides to his character.” Equally astonishing is that it had taken Brooke almost three years of working side by side with Churchill to reach that conclusion. When thirteen years later Brooke—by then Lord Alanbrooke—sent a personally inscribed copy of his published (and abridged) diaries to Churchill, he wrote that his criticisms were his way of unwinding each night, mere “momentary daily impressions.” He added, “I look upon the privilege of having served you in war as the greatest honour destiny has bestowed on me.”
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Despite the tumultuousness of the staff meetings, to say nothing of the tumultuous goings-on in Churchill’s mind, the chiefs and Churchill complemented each other. Churchill brought illumination, which his chiefs brought into focus. Churchill never seriously considered sacking any of them, and none of them ever seriously considered resigning. In his capacity as minister of defence he never overrode their policies. Anthony Eden
wrote that attending a meeting with Churchill was “a splendid and unique experience. It might be a monologue. It was never a dictatorship.” Colville noted the criticisms leveled at Churchill by the Chiefs of Staff, who, in Colville’s opinion, lacked Churchill’s “imagination and resolution” and could not see that it was Churchill who provided them “guidance and purpose.” The chiefs and Churchill worked together in harness, the black steed of Churchill’s passion and the white steeds of the coolly logical Brooke, Cunningham, and Portal.
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Clementine Churchill later said of Brooke, “We might have won the war without Alanbrooke; I don’t think we would have won it without Winston.”
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The diarists noted Churchill being in “top form” as regularly as they noted his fatigue or inattention to his boxes or tendency to ramble on. A narrow sampling of “P.M. tired” diary entries yields as incomplete and distorted an image of Churchill as a narrow sampling of “P.M. in top form” entries. He had to be taken whole in order to form an accurate image of the man. Not for nothing did John Martin later say that Churchill had about him “a zigzag streak of lightning on the brain.”
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When he addressed his countrymen on March 26 the lightning was missing. The subject was the postwar world. He promised Britons that national health insurance would follow victory, along with a complete overhaul of housing, including “a clean sweep of all those areas of which our civilization should be ashamed.” The slums would go, but nothing would be done that would interfere with the war effort. Change would come, but only after victory. He proclaimed that “the greatest scheme of improved education that has ever been attempted by a responsible Government… will soon be on the Statute-book.” Britons were not impressed. “They feel like they have asked for bread,” Mollie Panter-Downes wrote, “but have been given, if not a stone, simply a promise of thousands upon thousands of prefabricated houses, at modest rent.” Steel shares rose immediately on the promise of the prefabricated future, “but peoples’ spirits noticeably did not.” Harold Nicolson was pained by the comments of colleagues who thought Churchill had sounded like “a worn and petulant old man…. The upper classes feel that all this sacrifice and suffering will only mean that the proletariat will deprive them of all their comforts and influence, and then proceed to render this country and Empire a third class state.”
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O
n his way to bed in the early hours of April 5, Churchill allowed to Colville that although the prospect of the second front worried him, “I am
hardening to it.” By “hardening” he meant that his support for Overlord was growing. He had used the same term a month earlier in a cable to Marshall, which he referenced in a March 18 telegram to Roosevelt, where he repeated, “I am hardening for Overlord as the time gets nearer.” On April 1, he again cabled Roosevelt, “As you know, I harden for it the nearer I get to it. Eisenhower is a very large man.” On April 7, Good Friday, Montgomery unveiled to the Chiefs of Staff and Churchill the final plans for Overlord. Brooke was duly impressed, calling it “a wonderful day.” According to Brooke, Churchill—“in a very weepy condition” and lacking “vitality”—addressed barely a few remarks to the assembled.
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In fact, Montgomery’s presentation had lessened Churchill’s anxiety over the invasion, for since the first meetings of January, Montgomery had put meat on the bones of Overlord. Six divisions would now go ashore in the first wave, supported on the flanks by three airborne divisions. By D-day plus two days, a further six divisions would be ashore. Montgomery laid out the particulars. Four natural phenomena had to fall into alignment like plums in a slot machine for the invasion to have any chance for success. Three could be predetermined: the tides, the phase of the moon, and the length of time between morning nautical twilight—dawn—and sunrise. The tides had to be near ebb but rising, such that combat engineers could clear exposed German mines and obstacles from the beaches. Then, three hours of rising tides would serve to carry the men farther up onto the beaches. The moon had to be a bomber’s moon—full or near full, in order that the paratroopers could operate in the lunar beam. Finally, the optimum length of time between dawn and sunrise had been calculated to be about sixty minutes, enough time for the navy and air forces to rake the beaches with shell fire but not so long as to allow the Germans to recover and coordinate their defense and counterattack. Three mornings in June fell into nearly perfect alignment on all three counts, the fifth, sixth, and seventh. Montgomery picked June 5 as the most favorable. The fourth natural element was entirely unpredictable: the weather. Ideally, Eisenhower told his press aide, the morning of D-day should be clear, with a light onshore breeze blowing the dust and smoke of battle inland, to confuse and blind the Germans.
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A few days after the April 7 meeting, Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt with a brief summary. Again he stressed his support for the enterprise. “I am becoming very hard set on Overlord.” He told Roosevelt that he had expressed to Eisenhower and Montgomery his “strong confidence… in this extraordinary but magnificent operation.” And he expressed his disagreement with “loose talk” on both sides of the Atlantic that predicted horrific Allied casualties. It would be the Germans who suffered, he told Roosevelt. To Eisenhower, Churchill offered that if by the coming winter,
the Allies had taken the Channel ports, Cherbourg, and Paris, he would “assert the victory to be the greatest of modern times.” Eisenhower replied that the Overlord timetable called for Allied armies to be on the German borders by winter. Churchill late in the month told Colville that on D-day he intended to be onboard a Royal Navy warship just offshore the beaches, and to be “one of the first on the bridgehead, if he possibly could—and what fun to get there before Monty.”
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