The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (463 page)

By then, on the beaches and in the heavily wooded bocage, almost 2,500 American and 500 British and Canadian men lay dead, and 6,000 more had been wounded. The vast majority of American casualties took place on Omaha Beach, but by early afternoon the beach was theirs. Even as Churchill spoke, a half million more men in two dozen southern English ports and numerous small harbors and coves prepared to embark for Normandy. Patton’s 4th Armored Division was conducting war games on the Salisbury plain, awaiting its turn. More than one hundred tugboats readied to tow across the Channel the two Mulberry artificial harbors—made up of four hundred steel and concrete components weighing 1.5 million tons. Churchill first sketched these technological marvels in a 1917 memo to Lloyd George, and again in 1940. Each artificial harbor could handle more than ten thousand tons of supplies per day, enough to feed and arm twenty-five divisions. The men were ashore, and the means to supply them was on its way. Still, Churchill harbored enough doubts to return to the House later that evening, where he warned that the reports from the beaches gave no “indication of what may be the course of the battle in the next days and weeks, because the enemy will now probably endeavour to concentrate on this area, and in that event heavy fighting will soon begin and will continue without end, as we can push troops in and he can bring other troops up. It is, therefore, a most serious time that we enter upon. Thank God we enter upon it with our great Allies all in good heart and all in good friendship.”
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For weeks English farmers had been hoping for rain for the sake of their crops. The rain had finally arrived, Mollie Panter-Downes was to write, but the farmers now wished for blue skies “for the sake of their sons, fighting in the skies and on the earth across the Channel.” By early evening, trains carrying the first of the wounded began running through an English countryside in full springtime bloom, “festooned with dog roses and honeysuckle.” Women who had weeks earlier waved good-bye to their men now stood at railroad crossings, shopping baskets on their arms, and watched as the trains sped past. “They don’t know whether to wave or cheer or cry,” wrote Panter-Downes. “Sometimes they do all three.”
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The second front was now an irrevocable reality. Germany had never won a two-front war. Indeed, in Italy Hitler faced a third front. If he deployed his reserves properly, or if he robbed from his eastern front to eliminate the threat in the west, he might soon find himself, again, fighting a one-front war. The Bletchley crowd and Churchill—and the men on the beaches—awaited the Führer’s next move.

T
he Overlord plans called for the Americans to put thirteen divisions ashore in the first few weeks, the British and Canadians twelve. By early August, twenty-one of thirty-seven divisions in France were to be American. The disparity in Anglo-American numbers—and casualties—could only widen, and that begat another irrevocable reality. Not only was the slow but relentless transfer from Britain to America of command of the war nearly complete, so, too, was the transfer of global supremacy from London to Washington. Roosevelt, who on numerous occasions had made clear to Churchill his disdain for spheres of influence, was carving out the world’s largest. Indeed, America’s sphere of influence was expanding far beyond North and South America (claimed by James Monroe) to encompass the entire Pacific once the Japanese were defeated, which assuredly they would be. Australia, in 1942, had chosen America, not London, as the partner it would march beside into the future. The Philippines, when cleared of Japanese, would remain an American interest. Churchill did not begrudge Roosevelt the spread of American might, and could not stop it in any event. The potential for Soviet hegemony in much of Europe was what worried Churchill.

Triumph over Hitler was now—almost—a certainty, as was the prospect for postwar tragedy in Eastern Europe. Churchill and Britons might yet remain captains of their souls, but they were no longer masters of their fate. The European war would be fought on Eisenhower’s and Zhukov’s terms, the peace conducted on American and Russian terms, if America intended to make its presence known in postwar Europe, but Churchill had known since receiving Roosevelt’s February telegram that the president sought to get out of Europe at the first available opportunity. Churchill did not know that in March, Roosevelt had told the State Department he wanted no part in maintaining order in France, Belgium, and Italy, where he foresaw chaos, and the Balkans, which were already in an advanced state of chaos. Further, to keep American troops as far as possible from trouble, he instructed the State Department to insist that northwest Germany form the American zone of occupation, the better to get his boys home from North Sea ports should trouble occur elsewhere in Europe. In a memo to Edward Stettinius, Roosevelt frankly acknowledged that “political considerations in the United States makes
[sic]
my decision conclusive.” In late May, the president telegraphed Churchill with a summation of his directive to the State Department. Then, four days before D-day, Roosevelt reiterated his stance to Churchill. Quoting his February telegram,
Roosevelt said: “I am absolutely unwilling to police France and possibly Italy and the Balkans as well.” And, he offered, “The reasons are political, as you well know.” It was an election year.
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Beyond Europe, the British were no longer masters of the fate of hundreds of millions of subjects throughout the Empire. This was underscored in early June when Churchill received a reply from Roosevelt to his desperate plea for American shipping to relieve the “grievous famine in Bengal.” More than seven hundred thousand Bengalis had died since early 1943, in large part because the Japanese controlled Burma and its surplus rice. Churchill informed Roosevelt that although 350,000 tons of surplus Australian wheat was available, the ships to carry it were not. Could the president supply the ships? After waiting more than four weeks, Roosevelt replied in the negative, and with “regret.” He cited the effect of such a “diversion” on military operations. Churchill—and King George and London—could do almost nothing for the Bengalis; at least a million more died during the next twelve months.
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Edmund Burke wrote that empires die for a number of reasons, including the inability to govern disparate peoples in far-flung lands. Churchill possessed the will to save His Majesty’s Empire, and to guarantee the peace in Europe, but he lacked the way. Despite the staggering losses the British had sustained since 1939, despite their sacrifice and their refusal to give in when they fought alone, the peace, when it came, would be Stalin’s to violate. With the Americans in their ascendancy, the solution to containing a belligerent Stalin no longer rested with London. For better or worse, it rested with Washington. And Franklin Roosevelt had just made his thoughts clear on that subject.

Sometime in 1944, a new word crept into the lexicon of international politics: “superpower.” It was not coined with the British Empire in mind.

F
ew U-boats roamed the Atlantic in early June; their harvest was meager. The sea routes to Britain were secure, the flood of American men and matériel unstoppable. The British, Canadians, and Americans were ashore in Normandy. And with seven thousand American and British heavy bombers based in Britain, with Alexander driving to the Po Valley in northern Italy, and with the Russians poised to strike in the East, Germany had lost the war. But the Allies had yet to win it. Some, including President Roosevelt, believed they all but had.

A week before D-day, Roosevelt dropped a “blockbuster” on Washington reporters. In an almost offhand manner he outlined his “blueprint” for a postwar world organization. This was the first the press heard of the world council Roosevelt had proposed the previous November in Tehran. Roosevelt divulged no particulars, thus leaving both isolationists and internationalists somewhat befuddled. The president did stress that whatever came into being would not impinge on the “integrity” of the U.S. He chose the word carefully. It is synonymous with “sovereignty,”
Time
reported, a “wicked, isolationist word” in the minds of internationalists (known then as “one-worlders”), who championed a world government. Yet “sovereignty” formed the essence of isolationism and the national identity as championed by Senator Robert Taft and the anti-one-worlder Republican Party. Roosevelt was sending a message to both the internationalists and Republicans: his world organization would not diminish U.S. autonomy (the Republican fear), but it would move the United States toward a cooperative, multilateral role in world affairs (the one-worlder dream). The “blueprint,” Roosevelt told the press, envisioned an organization that would stop aggression, not an organization “which you would have to call on whenever some country wanted to build a bridge over a creek.” Roosevelt then permitted “some high authority” to leak more details to the press, including his intent to establish a World Court, and to build his new world council around the Four Powers, with smaller nations sitting in on a rotating basis.
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In June, Henry Luce editorialized in
Life
magazine on the coming new world order, and America’s role in it: “With the establishment of a firm lodgment on the continent, we are now the most powerful nation on earth.” But with that power came responsibilities, wrote Luce, including
the moral imperative for America to participate in the postwar recovery of Europe, especially as the Allies’ stated military strategy entailed the utter destruction of Germany. Europe would need to be rebuilt, not simply policed. Economic order had to be restored. The military story would end, perhaps soon, but the political story was just beginning. Here came Roosevelt with his vision of a postwar world council, a vision Churchill shared. And here came Luce with his vision for an American role in postwar Europe, which Churchill also shared. But Roosevelt, despite his call for a world organization, had made clear to Churchill that American troops would get out of Europe at the first opportunity. As for rebuilding Germany, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. was working up a plan that amounted to a Carthaginian peace of the very sort St. Augustine decried in his reflections on the obliteration of Carthage by the Romans, a peace that offered no hope to the vanquished, a peace, as St. Augustine saw it, bereft of any moral quotient, a peace that disgraced the victors.
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Churchill found this troubling. He envisioned the special relationship between Britain and America as forming the backbone of postwar European stability. Churchill, knowing that postwar Britain would not wield anything like the power of prewar Britain, and knowing that Russia would emerge as the greatest continental power, believed that if America intended to play no role, European salvation lay with the old diplomatic standby: spheres of influence. Roosevelt and Hull loathed any arrangement that smacked of European spheres of influence, believing, as had Woodrow Wilson, that they led ultimately to war. Churchill, with his eye on Greece, had just proposed to Stalin a division of labor in the region: Britain would manage Greek affairs, while Stalin would manage Romanian. It was an understanding between gentlemen. On June 1, Churchill asked Roosevelt for his blessing, and assured the president that Britain and Russia “do not of course wish to carve the Balkans into spheres of influence.” Yet that is exactly what Churchill and Stalin were edging toward, on Churchill’s part because Greece was an ally, and on Stalin’s part because Romania was an enemy. The two leaders indeed had “interests” in the region.
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As he had for a decade, and as he would in coming years, Churchill saw Britain as being in Europe, yet not fully “in.” It was as he had told Stalin in 1940: Britain lay just off the west coast of Europe (as Asiatic Russia lay just beyond the eastern reaches). As he had for four years, Churchill believed European peace and security could best be guaranteed through regional European councils and federations, including a Danubian federation in central Europe, and a Balkan council in that region. Central to Churchill’s vision for Western European security, recalled his son-in-law Lord Soames, was “France taking Germany by the hand and leading her back into the community of nations.” But Roosevelt held France, and especially de
Gaulle, in something approaching contempt, while Morgenthau wanted to take Germany by the neck, and wring it.
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Later in the summer, delegates from thirty-nine allied nations met at the Dumbarton Oaks conference, held at a Federal-style mansion in Washington, DC, that had once belonged to South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun and since 1940 had housed a Harvard University research center. There Roosevelt’s “blueprint” was used to lay the groundwork for the “United Nations Organization,” including a General Assembly and Security Council where the Four Powers would sit, joined by three other nations on a rotating basis. The Russians insisted that they be granted sixteen seats in the General Assembly, one for each Soviet republic. The Americans replied that in that case, the United States should have forty-eight seats. The Americans proposed that each permanent member of the Security Council have a veto, but also barred any party with a dispute before the Security Council from voting on it. The Russians objected to the implication that the Security Council might pass judgment on one of its own members. The Americans had no ready reply. The questions were left unresolved. France was excluded from the parley, rightly so, claimed Senator Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, because Britain, Russia, China, and the United States had “shed their blood for the rest of the world, while France has played the role of only a minor state in this war.” In London the European Advisory Commission had been sitting for over a year, its American, British, and Russian delegates studying questions of how best to deal with a defeated Germany. France—de Gaulle—had been excluded from any role.
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The war was not being fought to determine who fielded the strongest armies. Politics—
interests
—underlay the war, in the Clausewitzian sense, as it did all wars. This was why Churchill had reached out to Tito, and why he took in the wayward Romanian king, and insinuated HMG into Greek affairs, and grudgingly tolerated de Gaulle. He was positioning Britain for the future in those areas of Europe that he saw as critical to British interests. Stalin was doing much the same. And that was why Churchill had been trying to draw Roosevelt into a postwar role in Europe. If not America, who? The answer was self-evident: the Soviet Union. The writer and political commentator Walter Lippmann published a slim but important volume that summer,
U.S. War Aims,
in which he foresaw the implications of the power shifts taking place. Spheres of influence were a reality, he argued. After the war, America, splendidly protected by the moats of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, would need to protect the perimeters of its sphere—in Asia (where the restored European colonies would serve as buffer to China), and especially in the Atlantic. Anticipating NATO by five years, Lippmann argued that the Atlantic now assumed the central role in global politics that the Mediterranean had played for two
thousand years. To secure the Atlantic in alliance with Western European democracies would ensure that all of Western Europe formed a
cordon sanitaire
between the U.S. sphere and the Russian. This, Lippmann argued, would make war between the two powers “a virtual impossibility.” This was so, he wrote, because neither side could conceivably put an army into the other’s heartland and no other technology existed that might alter the military balance in a war.
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Lippmann’s “safety-in-distance” reasoning came undone a year later in a sunburst of atomic energy in the New Mexico desert. But his prediction of the Atlantic’s centricity in American affairs was prescient. His proposed alliances with Western European nations to safeguard America’s interests brought some comfort to Churchill, who sought some form of union with America. Yet Taft Republicans hated the word “alliance” as much as one-worlders hated the word “sovereignty.”

Thus, if Hitler was defeated by October, as many in Washington and London believed, no plan whatsoever was in place to safeguard and rebuild Europe. October was just sixteen weeks distant.

E
arly on June 9, Ultra revealed the unsettling news that Hitler had ordered his Fifteenth Army from the Pas de Calais to Normandy, and also ordered two panzer divisions rushed from Poland to Normandy. This was the hammer blow the Allies most feared. A panzer division and a brigade of SS Hitler Youth were already pounding Montgomery’s positions near Caen, with another panzer division on the way. Yet another panzer division was hitting the Americans near Carentan. The arrival of the Fifteenth Army and more panzers could doom the invasion. Then, late on the ninth, Ultra revealed one of the most welcome Führer directives of the war: Hitler, still suspicious that the Pas de Calais might be the real Allied target, rescinded his orders (OKW knew that George Patton and the Third Army were not in Normandy and concluded they might be heading for the Pas de Calais). Dumbfounded by Berlin’s change of mind, von Rundstedt and Rommel considered resigning. The next day Montgomery declared the beachhead secure, the eleven-mile gap between the British and American beaches having been closed. For Churchill, Montgomery’s assessment amounted to the unofficial opening of the summer travel season. The Old Man called Brooke and proposed they meet Monty at Montgomery’s Normandy headquarters on Monday, the twelfth. They were going back to France.
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Despite Montgomery’s declaration, Churchill feared a “crystallization of a front in France” and the subsequent repetition of the horrors of the
Great War, a concern, recalled Harriman, shared by Roosevelt. In static lines Churchill saw the potential for slaughter. So, too, did Rommel, but the slaughter of the invader, on or near the beaches. A few days after D-day, as the beachhead slowly widened and deepened, General Ian Jacob found Churchill in the map room pondering large charts of Normandy. How soon after all of the Allied divisions are fully ashore, Churchill asked, will the battle lines stabilize? They most likely will not, replied Jacob, until the Allies reach the Rhine. Such large-scale fluidity of entire armies ran counter to the Old Man’s Great War experience. He had known all along that many men would die on the beaches, and if not on the beaches, then in the bocage in the following days and weeks. Even if the lines did not stabilize, and the Allies advanced as Jacob predicted, there would be slaughter, and it would only increase as Allied armies neared the German homeland. Churchill knew the veracity of Marlborough’s admonition to his cautious Dutch ally during their war against the French: the pursuit of absolute victory without slaughter will, in the long run, result in slaughter without victory.
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The maps Churchill gazed at were marked by “phase lines,” series of concentric rings running inland from the beaches like ripples on a pond. They marked the timetable for the planned expansion of the beachhead in the days and weeks following D-day. Each line carried a notation of D + and a number. Caen, for example, was to be taken on D-day, and bridgeheads to be thrown east across the Orne River by D + 1. By D + 9, the lodgment was to be more than eighty miles wide and a dozen deep. By D + 17 (June 23), the entire Cotentin Peninsula, including Cherbourg, was to be secure. By then the Allies expected to hold a line stretching from south of Caen near Falaise, west through Vire, and ending at Granville on the Bay of Biscay. At that point, the plan called for a wheeling breakout by D + 20 from the western (American) flank, while the British and Canadians pivoted on the eastern, Caen flank. By D + 40, the Allies hoped to be halfway to the Loire. Somewhere near that date, the Anvil landing would take place, with the objective of driving up the Rhone Valley to Lyon and on to Dijon, there to make contact with the Normandy forces driving east. By D + 90, the British would be across the Seine and facing the Low Countries, with the Americans on the right facing Verdun. Such was the grand plan. Both Eisenhower and Montgomery later wrote that all of the Overlord objectives were met. They were, but the timetable was not. The lines indeed stabilized, slowly and steadily. During the first few days, the delays could be measured in hours, as could be expected for such a supremely complex operation. Yet, as happens to a navigator whose course is off by just a degree, time and distance have a way of turning small variances into very large errors.
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