The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (461 page)

By ten that morning, the winds had risen and the clouds had closed in. By eleven o’clock, gale warnings had been run up for the Channel. The June 4 storm scrubbed the fifth. That left the sixth, possibly the seventh, but only if the weather cleared. By then the men would have been aboard the transports for almost four days. A cancellation until late in the month would disrupt the entire logistics structure, to say nothing of the morale of the men and the leaders in London, Washington, and especially Moscow, where Stalin might conclude that his allies had never been sincere in their promise of a second front. A two- or three-week delay would give Rommel time to further reinforce his positions. Nothing could be gained by a postponement, but much would be lost. Eisenhower ordered that they reassemble at 9:30 that night to review the situation.
¹³³

Churchill by then was aboard his private train, parked on a siding outside Portsmouth near Eisenhower’s tented field headquarters. Brooke, as usual, took a dim view, writing in his diary, “Winston… is touring the Portsmouth area and making a thorough pest of himself.” The P.M. designated the train his “advance headquarters,” a moniker Eden found to be absurd, given that the train was cramped and there was only one telephone and one bath and “Mr. Churchill seemed to be always in the bath and General Ismay always on the telephone.”
¹³⁴

The P.M. had entrained on June 2 with the intention of boarding a Royal Navy cruiser at Portsmouth for a front-row seat as the men went ashore in Normandy. He had asked Admiral Ramsay to make the necessary arrangements but had not informed Brooke, knowing full well the CIGS would vehemently oppose such showmanship. Days earlier, Eisenhower had gotten wind of Churchill’s plans and insisted that he cancel them. Churchill refused, citing his position as HMG’s minister of defence, and the power vested in him by that office to go wherever he pleased in order to conduct HMG’s military business. Eisenhower, who thought Churchill’s presence in the fleet would be a distraction, and dangerous, took his case to King George, who, over three days and in three letters, pleaded with Churchill to reconsider. Finally, when the King implied that he, too, would join the battle—he was a former Royal Navy sailor, after all, and veteran of the Battle of Jutland—Churchill relented. He stressed in his memoir that he had deferred to his King, not to Eisenhower.

That squall behind him, Churchill waited aboard his train for another tempest to blow in: Charles de Gaulle. The War Cabinet had insisted the Frenchman be at least informed of the date of the invasion; to not do so would be an insult to France. On June 3, Churchill sent his York to Algiers to retrieve the general, several of his aides, and Duff Cooper. After an overnight flight, they arrived at Northolt Airport just past dawn on the fourth, as the Channel weather deteriorated.
¹³⁵

At Portsmouth, Churchill, Ernest Bevin, Jan Smuts, and Ismay waited on the railroad spur for de Gaulle, who soon could be seen walking up the line in the company of Duff Cooper, Anthony Eden, and Pierre Viénot, de Gaulle’s ambassador to HMG. Churchill, sensing the historic nature of the proceedings, stepped forward arms outstretched to embrace de Gaulle, who, in his khaki uniform and kepi, two stars on his collar, stood stiffly at attention. Of Churchill’s gesture, Eden later wrote, “Unfortunately, de Gaulle did not respond easily to such a mood.” The tableau resembled a short man trying to embrace a telephone pole. Smuts was altogether the wrong man to be on hand, having declared in a radio address that France would never regain its former position of authority in Europe, an insult the French could never forgive (although Smuts had also predicted the British
Empire would emerge from the war in extremis). The parley in the railroad car began well enough, with Churchill outlining the particulars of the military plan while de Gaulle, a military man first and foremost, listened intently, posed questions, and seemed to be enjoying himself. Then Churchill strayed to the topic of the civil governance of France, and the need for de Gaulle to ask Roosevelt’s permission to conduct civil affairs. With cold finality, de Gaulle cut Churchill off. “Why do you seem to think,” he thundered, “I have to submit my candidacy for the government of France to Roosevelt?” The French government existed as a matter of fact, de Gaulle stated, with himself at its head, and that was that. Churchill responded in kind, “I want you to know, General, that every time we must choose between Europe and the open sea we will choose the sea…. Between you and Roosevelt, I will always choose Roosevelt.” Bevin objected, telling de Gaulle that not all in the British government felt that way. Eden, too, tried to calm the waters, but to no avail. “The meeting,” he later wrote, “was a failure.”
¹³⁶

F
ranklin Roosevelt spent the weekend of June 3 and 4 resting at Edwin (“Pa”) Watson’s Blue Ridge Mountains home. He read his Book of Common Prayer in order to find the proper words for a blessing to be read on the night of the invasion. He intended to make a radio address on the fifth, but of course would make no mention of events in the English Channel. Rather, his purpose was to congratulate Alexander and Mark Clark on the liberation of Rome—“the symbol of Christianity”—which took place on June 4. It was a hollow victory, Sir John Keegan later wrote. Rome had been declared an open city. Clark should have bypassed it in pursuit of the retreating Germans, which the Fifth Army could then have encircled and captured, with General Oliver Leese’s Eighth Army driving in from the right flank to close off the German retreat. That was Alexander’s plan, drafted in accordance with the Clausewitz maxim that he, Eisenhower, and Churchill held dear: capture armies, not real estate. But Clark, suspicious of British tactics and intent on securing the glory he thought due him, instead took his army directly into Rome, and thus lost his chance to encircle the Germans. Kesselring and his armies began a fighting retreat 150 miles to their Gothic Line in the Apennines—the Allies called it the Pisa-Rimini line—where they successfully thwarted Allied advances into the Balkans until the final weeks of the war. Within eight weeks of the capture of Rome, at the insistence of Roosevelt and Marshall, and against Churchill’s earnest disapproval, Jumbo Wilson’s Mediterranean forces
were reduced by seven divisions, four French and three American, for deployment in Anvil. Clark got his front-page glory, for one day, until events in Normandy on June 6 erased Rome from the collective consciousness of Britons, Canadians, and Americans.
¹³⁷

A
t Eisenhower’s Portsmouth headquarters, the rain smacking the windows during the evening meteorological meeting of June 4 testified to Group Captain Stagg’s forecasting prowess. Across the Channel the gale was in full blow. An attempt to land on June 5 would have proven disastrous. Prospects for the next day appeared hopeless as well. Then Stagg made what Eisenhower called an “astonishing” forecast: late on June 5 fair weather in the form of a weak high lasting perhaps thirty-six hours would form a break between the low-pressure systems. That sounded promising for the sixth, but opened the unsettling possibility that the first landings might take place under suitable conditions while the follow-up landings would have to be scrubbed as the second storm arrived, leaving the initial forces trapped on the beaches. Eisenhower asked Stagg what exactly the weather would be like in twenty-four hours. “To answer that question,” Stagg replied, “would make me a guesser, not a meteorologist.” After pondering Stagg’s assessment, Eisenhower announced the invasion was on, pending a final review at the 4:00
A.M.
meeting on June 5, in seven hours. When they reconvened before dawn on the fifth, Stagg held to his forecast; a break in the weather was imminent. Eisenhower put questions to his commanders: Could the navy gunners spot targets? Could the parachute transports find their drop zones? Could the landing craft reach shore? The answer from each of the commanders was in the affirmative. “Okay,” Eisenhower announced, “we’ll go.”
¹³⁸

Later that morning, after paying a visit to British troops who were boarding their landing ships, Eisenhower played a game of checkers with Butcher; the result was a draw. That night, June 5, Dwight Eisenhower wrote by hand a message to be broadcast if the liberators were repulsed. It began: “Our landings… have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops.”
¹³⁹

Churchill, scrubbed from the mission by King George, took his train back to London. As the evening of June 5 came on, Churchill cabled Stalin with the news that the invasion was on for the following morning. Stalin was dining with the Yugoslav writer and Tito’s number three man, Milovan Djilas. Handed Churchill’s telegram, Stalin turned to Djilas and said, “Yes there will be a landing, if there is no fog. Until now there was always
something else that interfered. I suspect tomorrow it will be something else. Maybe they’ll meet up with some Germans.”
¹⁴⁰

Field Marshal von Rundstedt dined with cronies that night at his headquarters at Château St-Germain. Thanks to the misinformation of Fortitude, he now believed that the invasion in the west would come in the Pas de Calais and in tandem with the Russian summer offensive. Since the Eastern Front showed no signs of activity that week, the west should remain quiet as well. Shortly after nine o’clock he was informed that the second line of the Verlaine couplet—“Pierce my heart with a dull languor”—had just gone out over the BBC. German intelligence had known the meaning of the line for weeks. Von Rundstedt didn’t buy it. “Does anyone think the enemy is stupid enough to announce his arrival over the radio?” he exclaimed to a guest. Then, a bit worse for drink, he retired for the evening.
¹⁴¹

Erwin Rommel had told his superiors that the first day would spell the difference between victory and defeat for the Reich. That day, he said, would be
Der längste Tag
(“the longest day”). The evening of June 5 did not find Rommel in Normandy, because on the morning of the fourth, after studying the latest weather reports, which predicted a continuation of high winds, high seas, and rain, Rommel concluded that the Allied invasion would not come for at least several days. Thus reassured by the gales blowing in the Channel, he took himself off to Bavaria to celebrate his wife’s birthday. Because his meteorologists could not peer as far west into the Atlantic as could Eisenhower’s, Rommel had no idea that a brief break in the foul weather was on its way.

Brooke that night offered to his diary: “I am very uneasy about the whole operation. At the best it will fall very far short” of expectations, and “at the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war. I wish to God it were safely over.”
¹⁴²

Churchill dined with Clementine in the Annexe that evening, one of just four dinners alone in each other’s company since January. After dinner he made a final trip downstairs to the map room to assess the latest airborne dispositions. Shortly before she went to bed Clementine joined him, a rare foray for her into the domain of the planners and chartists. Churchill told her, “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?” His calculation did not include Germans. He knew that if his estimate of Allied casualties proved accurate, the invasion had been repulsed on the beach. His declaration—part melodrama, part cold calculation wrapped in sentiment—was in character. And consistent; he had proclaimed for two years that a disastrous defeat on the coast of France “was the only way in which we could lose this war.” And now the moment was at hand. He lingered in the map room for a few
moments before going to bed at about the time the first of the airborne troops glided and parachuted into the Normandy countryside.
¹⁴³

It was shortly after midnight, June 6.