The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (464 page)

Eisenhower knew this. On June 10, meeting with the American
Chiefs, who had arrived the day before, he put to them almost the same question Churchill had asked Jacob, what to do if a “stabilization” of the lines took place? Sixteen Allied divisions—four hundred thousand men—were now ashore. But at least six panzer divisions and the Fifteenth Army (if Hitler again changed his mind) presented a real threat. Eisenhower set his SHAEF planning staff to work to find a solution. George Marshall had come to London not to discuss options, but to demand that Anvil, the Marseilles landing conceived as a complement to the hammer of Overlord, be carried out as soon as possible. But after just two meetings between the British and Americans, Marshall conceded that Anvil could take place only when conditions were right. This was fine with Brooke, but only if Anvil did not come at the expense of Italian operations. To throttle Alexander’s momentum, Brooke told his diary later in the month, would be “madness.”
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The fall of Rome and the D-day landings triggered the need for a final decision on Anvil. That, in turn, triggered a crisis in the Allied ranks. Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff all agreed that the only military objective was to defeat Germany as quickly as possible. But they disagreed on how best to meet that objective. Eisenhower’s overriding concern was to reinforce and supply Overlord. He was open to alternatives to Anvil, including Caliph, the infusion of troops into the Bordeaux ports. He was willing to consider allowing Alexander to exploit his Italian victories in order to draw more Germans away from France. His was a strictly military objective, and yet he possessed the sharp political skills needed to bring it off, for Churchill and Marshall brought both military and political perspectives—and talents—to the table. Marshall had promised Stalin Anvil at Tehran, in part because of Stalin’s transparent political discomfort with his Western allies appearing on his flanks (within his sphere of influence) by driving north through Austria, as Churchill advocated. Churchill’s strategy was as political as Stalin’s; he wanted to get to middle Europe before the Soviets did. Brooke, like Eisenhower, took a strictly military position, but one at odds with Ike’s. Anvil formed Churchill’s penultimate great strategic debate of the war; the last debate came in the final weeks of the conflict when Eisenhower refused to strike toward Berlin. To be sure, Eisenhower and Montgomery soon differed over a broad-front or narrow-front strategy as the best way to get across the Rhine and to the Elbe, but that was for the two commanders to debate and resolve in coming months.

“Now,”
Brooke told his diary on June 11, Marshall finally saw the wisdom of the Italian operations Brooke had championed for a year. He added, “I do not believe he [Marshall] has any strategic vision whatsoever.” Eisenhower’s support of Anvil was conditional; if the Normandy beachhead did not expand according to the timetable, a Brittany landing would put reinforcements next to Bradley and the First Army. If the Allies
broke out of Normandy, Anvil might be the better choice. Ike, wisely, wanted to wait and see. Marshall, on the other hand, backed Anvil unconditionally. But after five days of talks between June 9 and 13, the Combined Chiefs arrived at a decision satisfactory to all.
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It took the form of a directive to Eisenhower and Jumbo Wilson, commander in chief of the Mediterranean theater. The directive held that all Allied forces should be deployed “to assist in the success of Operation Overlord.” To that end, three amphibious options in support of Overlord were to be considered, and the best one selected: the choices were Brittany; the south of France; or the head of the Adriatic, with the dual objective there of cutting off Kesselring in Italy and then racing to Vienna. Option three invited trouble, which duly arrived not long after the ink dried. Field Marshal Alexander and Jumbo Wilson endorsed the Adriatic operation, code-named Armpit, no doubt by the Americans. Anvil, meanwhile, was soon rechristened Dragoon, no doubt by the British. Churchill, who believed that too much miscellaneous equipment was going ashore, argued that wherever the Allies went, they should be filling the landing crafts with fighting men and bayonets rather than “dental chairs and Y.M.C.A. institutions.”
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By the twelfth, when Churchill and Brooke crossed the Channel on board the destroyer HMS
Kelvin,
the Allies were a few days behind schedule, yet not distressingly so. Men and supplies were pouring in through the Mulberries; the Germans had virtually no presence in the air. Still, progress had been so minimal that Churchill had to take his picnic lunch with the sea at his back, just four miles behind the front lines. There, Montgomery displayed his maps and again stressed his strategy, arrived at in January, to draw the Germans to his front in order that the Americans could swing out from their zone. Brooke was taken not only with Montgomery’s expert presentation but by the fact that the French countryside looked remarkably undisturbed after five years of German occupation and five weeks of Allied bombardment. Churchill described the situation thus: “We are surrounded by fat cattle lying in luscious pastures with their paws crossed.” He reboarded
Kelvin
late in the afternoon, and after a short cruise up and down the beach during which
Kelvin
fired a few salvos toward the German lines for Churchill’s benefit, the ship turned for England. The last time he departed France, five years earlier, he told Ismay that they likely had but three months to live.
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Just before midnight that night, as Churchill and Brooke neared London aboard Churchill’s train, the first pilotless German bombs lifted off from their ramps in Belgium and northern France. They flew at between three thousand and four thousand feet and at speeds around 350 miles per hour.
Each carried a 1,875-pound high-explosive warhead. They were all targeted on Tower Bridge, but only four of the twenty-seven that were launched hit Greater London that night and early on the thirteenth. Some fell into the sea, and others veered off course over the English countryside, a trend that continued for the next month when out of 2,754 flying bombs that hit Britain, only 800 hit Greater London. Most were catapulted from the ramps the RAF had been targeting for months; some were launched from Heinkel 111s, to little effect.

They were devilish devices, propelled by a pulse-jet engine that worked by alternately gulping compressed air and jet fuel, which accounted for the pulsing, throaty
thrump, thrump, thrump, thrump
as they rumbled overhead. Their most sinister feature (aside from the payload) was the terrifying screech they made as they fell to ground. Their targeting was rudimentary. A miniature propeller (a vane anemometer) on the nose of each bomb was preset to spin a certain number of times (based on distance and air speed) between launch and London. When the preset number of revolutions was reached, the propeller tripped the diving controls, putting the bomb into a nosedive. The screech—or buzz—of the falling bomb was a result of the engine stalling during the dive, an unintended design consequence of the weapon. Thus, as Londoners fast learned, as long as you could hear the damnable things passing overhead, you were safe. If you heard the engine stop, you were in trouble. Berlin called the bombs the vengeance weapon, V-1 for short. Londoners anointed them doodlebugs and buzz bombs.
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On the third night of the attacks, Duff Cooper dined at the Dorchester with Lady Cunard, who, as she had during the Blitz, refused to leave her apartment. Told by Cooper that the new attacks were being carried out by pilotless planes, she claimed that was impossible and that anyone who believed “such rubbish” was stupid. A hotel servant who overheard the conversation offered that the pilotless planes were a good sign, “as it proved how short of men the Germans were, that they were obliged to send their aeroplanes over empty.” During a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff on June 19, Churchill decreed that henceforth the weapons would no longer be called “pilotless planes” but “flying bombs.” Brooke found Churchill “in very good form” that night, “quite 10 years younger, all due to the fact that the flying bombs have again put us into the front line!!”
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The arrival of the flying bombs marked the start of a new era, soon anointed the “rocket age,” a concept made all the more horrifying by virtue of the fact that Hitler—and only Hitler—had all the rockets. During the next four weeks, the 2,754 V-1s that hit Britain killed 2,752 Britons and destroyed more than eight thousand houses. That ratio continued into early August, by which time, Churchill told the House, “5,735 of these robots have been launched upon us, killing 4,735 persons, with 14,000
more or less seriously injured.” He told the House that while he was touring a wrecked neighborhood, an old man asked him, “ ‘What are you going to do about it?’ I replied, we have never failed yet. He seemed contented with the reply. That is the only promise I can make.” The need to bomb the V-1 launch sites in northern France disrupted operations in Normandy, and reduced the number of missions over Germany. Still, where Hitler delivered 4,500 tons of explosives to Britain that summer, the British and Americans dropped 48,000 tons on Germany, but at a terrible cost of more than 14,000 flyers killed or missing. The V-1s did not kill many, but coming as they did hourly, day after day, week after week, they set everyone’s nerves on edge. “I am sure of one thing,” Churchill told the House, “that London will never be conquered and will never fail, and that her renown, triumphing over every ordeal, will long shine among men.” But, as Brooke told his diary, “The danger really lies in the flying rocket with a 5-ton warhead.” This was the V-2, which the British high command—but not the British people—knew was coming, and soon.
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As the buzz bombs came on, the battle of the beachhead turned into a stalemate, and the alliance itself appeared poised to self-destruct. The core dispute was over Anvil, the secondary invasion of France. After being guided by Eisenhower and Brooke to a wait-and-see attitude toward Anvil, Marshall had journeyed to Italy in mid-June, where he learned from Alexander and Wilson that they were keen on the Adriatic operation. His response, and that of the other American Chiefs, was to harden their stance. Anvil must go forward, sometime in August at the latest. Now what had been a debate turned into a crisis. Alexander and Churchill argued to the British Chiefs of Staff for the Adriatic plan. Brooke dismissed any strike toward Vienna as “wild hopes,” not least because such an operation could not start until September and they would then “embark on a campaign through the Alps in winter!” At a June 21 meeting, Churchill, “who had evidently been lunching very well,” Brooke wrote, “meandered for ¾ hours producing a lot of disconnected thoughts which had no military value.” Over the next few days Churchill and the British chiefs drafted separate but almost identical memos for Roosevelt and his chiefs that called for no diminution in Alexander’s forces; that is, they implicitly called for the cancellation of Anvil. On June 27, the importance the British attached to Italy appeared to be validated by an Ultra decrypt that revealed Hitler’s intent to defend the northern Apennines, since a breakthrough there would have “incalculable military and political consequences.” Churchill argued in his long memo that Overlord could be nourished without stripping Alexander’s army. He ended with “Let us not wreck one great campaign for the sake of winning the other.” Roosevelt’s reply, Brooke wrote, was “a rude one at that.” The Americans insisted that Anvil be “carried out at once.” And the
most unseemly part of Roosevelt’s reply in Brooke’s estimation was his last paragraph: “Finally for pure political considerations over here I would never survive even a slight setback in Overlord if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”
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Yet the British had not argued for a diversion but wanted only to press on in Italy. Churchill drafted an angry response, including the line: “The whole campaign in Italy is being ruined, and ruined for what?” For, as he saw it, ten mostly untrained divisions, including seven French made up mostly of black North Africans, to advance “up the Rhone Valley about five months hence.” He offered to fly to Washington, Bermuda, Quebec, wherever Roosevelt would meet him, in order to resolve the deadlock. In the end, he did not send the cable. He had no leverage. As Brooke put it to Churchill on June 30, it came down to essentially telling the Americans, “All right, if you insist on being damned fools, sooner than falling out with you, which would be fatal, we should be damned fools with you, and we shall see that we perform the role of damned fools damned well.”
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B
y mid-June the war in the east had remained relatively dormant for six weeks. With the Eastern Front stabilized, the Russians faced a strategic dilemma as to how to deal with the three German Army Groups they faced: North, Center, and South. To continue the attack in the southernmost sector held the promise of striking deeper into Romania on a track for Bucharest, Belgrade, and Budapest. Yet by virtue of a huge salient that Army Group Center had forged beyond Minsk, such a course would leave the right flank of the Red Army exposed. Similarly, in the north, if the Red Army struck out westward from Estonia toward Riga with the Baltic on its right, it would find its left threatened by Army Group Center. Neither strategy would result in the Red Army taking a direct bearing on Berlin; the southern strategy would grind to an end in the Balkans, the northern in East Prussia.
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