The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (467 page)

Family matters were not discussed during the brief stay; to do so was to invite a scene. Randolph’s marriage to Pamela was in ruins, and all of London knew it. Harold Nicolson, in a letter to his sons, wrote, “Randolph’s marriage is going wonky and Winston is terribly distressed. The old boy is tremendously domestic and adores his family.”
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F
or four years the Mediterranean had occupied the center of Churchill’s strategic military vision, and rightly so, Harold Macmillan and Jan Smuts believed. Now it occupied the center of his political vision. From Brooke’s standpoint, Churchill’s vision, both military and political, had often not been acute; now it was failing utterly. “Life has a quiet and peaceful atmosphere about it now that Winston is gone [to Italy]!” he told his diary that week. “Everything gets done twice as quickly.” He added: “I feel we have now reached the stage that for the good of the nation and the good of his own reputation it would be a godsend if he [Churchill] could disappear out of public life. He has probably done more for this country than any other human being has ever done,” yet “I am filled with apprehension about where he may lead us next.” Churchill was tired, and knew it. A few weeks earlier he had told Clementine and Harold Macmillan, “I am an old and weary man. I feel exhausted.” Clementine countered with, “But think what Hitler and Mussolini feel like!” Winston replied, “Ah, but at least Mussolini has had the satisfaction of murdering his son-in-law.” Macmillan noted that the repartee followed by a short stroll seemed to revive Churchill.
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The trip to Italy revived him even more. After arriving in Naples on August 11, Churchill spent the next seventeen days organizing the eastern Mediterranean to his satisfaction. After two days of talks with Tito and Dr. Ivan Šubaši
, the Ban of Croatia, he was rewarded with only a vague promise from Tito—who was using half the ammunition supplied by Britain to fight Serbs—to strive for a democratic government following the
war. To Clementine, Churchill wrote: “It may well be the case of Tito first, the Ban second, and the king nowhere.” Still, Tito was one with Churchill on the need to kill Huns. Churchill was pursuing two strategic goals, one wartime and short-term, the other postwar and long-term. He sought compliant, friendly neutrals in the region postwar, in order that the Mediterranean remain a British lake. Yet to reach that goal he had to arm the very antimonarchist and sometimes pro-Communist partisans who wanted no part of being British stooges in peace. The fires of nationalism—which had torn apart Austria-Hungary—were again burning throughout the region. In Tito’s case, the saving grace (for Churchill) was his unwillingness to live under any thumb, be it Moscow’s or London’s. A well-armed neutral was almost as good as an ally. Greece presented a similar set of problems. Ultra decrypts verified a German withdrawal, which could leave Athens in the hands of the ELAS Communists, and that would surely result in civil war, an outcome that Churchill could not abide. In a cable to Roosevelt, he proposed sending ten thousand British troops to Greece to maintain order until elections took place, and he asked for American logistical support to carry it off. Roosevelt approved.
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The readmission of Italy to the regional community of nations also came in for Churchill’s scrutiny. He wanted the process to be gradual, and controlled from Washington and London, for the Italians had committed vile deeds. Yet he wanted the process to continue. “He was like a dog on a bone” over the matter, Harold Macmillan told his diary, adding, after listening to a long dissertation on Italy by Churchill, “Winston gave a really remarkable demonstration of his powers.” Over dinner with Macmillan he advised, “We should be guided by the precept of Machiavelli that, if one has benefits to confer, they should not be conferred all at once.”
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It was a working holiday. He took four dips in the sea, including one at the Blue Grotto, and thoroughly enjoyed several outings with Alexander during which he fired a howitzer (missing the target), toured the Cassino battlefields, and witnessed a firefight between German and Allied forces from just five hundred yards away. The firing was “desultory and intermittent,” he later wrote, “but this was the nearest I got to the enemy… and heard the most bullets in World War Two.” He could not let go of his Viennese ambitions, telling dinner guests one evening that the full-scale assault on the Gothic Line that Alexander planned to launch on August 26 might result in a breakthrough that would allow the Allies to “swing to the right, overcome Austria, and so change history.” When days earlier Roosevelt informed him that a conference was on for September in Quebec, Churchill had replied that he sought to put the Adriatic amphibious operation on the agenda. It was not to be. The Balkans and Eastern Europe held no promise—other than the promise of trouble—for Roosevelt and America.
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Years later, Malcolm Muggeridge, veteran of MI6, editor of
Punch,
and a frequent and sometimes vicious critic of Churchill, sided with the Old Man on the Aegean/Vienna strategy. “If he [Churchill] had had Roosevelt’s support that could have altered the whole war.” After the collapse of Italy, “there was nothing to stop them [an Allied thrust north], absolutely nothing…. All those populations [in Austria, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria] wanted someone to come in there before the Russians came. They didn’t give a damn as long as it wasn’t the Russians.” But it was the Russians, and they were coming.
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On August 15, Churchill watched the Dragoon landings from the deck of the Royal Navy destroyer
Kimberly.
Three American divisions went ashore in St. Tropez Bay, near Marseilles, and seven French divisions soon followed. Days earlier, during a short boat trip across Naples Bay, Churchill waved to American soldiers on board their landing ships and sailing for France. He later wrote, “They did not know that if I had had my way they would be sailing in a different direction.” The glittering prize of Austria was all but lost. Still, Churchill told Alexander that even if the war came to an early end, he should make “ready for a dash with armoured cars” to Vienna.
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In France the breakout phase was over; the pursuit phase had begun. Patton’s Third Army took Orleans on August 17. On August 23, the resistance in Paris staged a general uprising. On the twenty-fifth, after two days of gun battles in the streets, the Germans withdrew, a maneuver that spared Paris. Leclerc and his 2nd Armored Division liberated the City of Light that day, while de Gaulle, with a thespian’s timing, arrived that afternoon at the Ministry of War. Inspecting the premises, he found nothing missing after four years of occupation “except the state. It was my duty to restore it: I installed my staff at once and got down to work.”
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By the time Churchill returned to London on August 29, Montgomery had pushed the Germans back across the Belgian border and captured almost all of the V-1 launch sites. On August 31, Patton’s spearheads crossed the Meuse River at Verdun. Three days later, elements of the American First Army captured Namur, one hundred miles to the north. During the last week of August, Hitler ordered 20,000 slave laborers to reinforce the
Westwall,
which the Allies referred to by its Great War name, the Siegfried Line, consisting of four hundred miles of bunkers and anti-tank ditches that faced the old Maginot Line and ran along the Belgian and Dutch borders all the way to the Rhine.

In early September, the American First Army probed the Siegfried Line in the Eifel, the low range of mountains that spread from east Belgium into western Germany. Patton, by then, had pushed on another thirty-five miles
to the Moselle, just thirty miles from the German frontier and the great industrial area of the Saar, and just one hundred miles from the Rhine. But so rapid had been his charge that Patton’s main forces had run out of gasoline. His six strong divisions faced five weak German divisions, but he could not take the fight to them. Meanwhile, the British freed Brussels on September 3 and Antwerp the next day (but not the Scheldt Estuary, the gateway to the port), also less than one hundred miles from the Rhine, and the Ruhr, the heart of German industry. On this flank the British faced a gap almost one hundred miles wide; no Germans were available to fill it. “Rarely in any war,” Liddell Hart later wrote, “has there been such an opportunity.” To Montgomery, promoted to field marshal on September 1, Churchill cabled: “How wonderful it is to see our people leaping out at last after all their hard struggles.” On that day, Eisenhower took over direct command of the battle from Monty. Eisenhower’s decision to assume the dual role of supreme commander of air, sea, ground, and air forces “is likely,” Brooke wrote, “to add 3 to 6 months on to the war!”
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In the east, the Red Army remained halted outside Warsaw but had driven into Finland. There Marshal Mannerheim, who had replaced Risto Ryti as president in mid-August, was negotiating a peace treaty with Moscow, which was signed on September 19. In the south, the Red Army had smashed into Romania, where, after King Michael ousted Antonescu in a coup on August 23, the Romanians quit the Axis. At a stroke Hitler had lost—and Stalin gained—twenty Romanian divisions in front of the Red Army, and thirty more in Romania. When the front collapsed, the roads opened to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and Hungary beyond.

Bulgaria was next. The economy was in ruins; food prices had risen 700 percent since 1939. Consumer goods were nonexistent. Berlin had forced Bulgaria, an unenthusiastic partner from the start, to convert its industry to armaments production. But the Bulgarians had served Hitler well by embracing their role in the occupation of Yugoslavia and Greece, where they were known to take pleasure in torturing captured partisans. A story made the rounds that they had tied prisoners to the open tops of corrugated barrels and lit fires under them. To the House, Churchill condemned the Bulgarians and the “wickedness for which they have been responsible both in Greece and Yugoslavia. They have suffered nothing themselves. No foot has been set upon their soil…. The conduct of their troops in harrying and trying to hold down, at Hitler’s orders, their two sorely pressed small neighbours, Greece and Yugoslavia, is a shameful page for which full atonement must be exacted.” Since April, Moscow had been pressuring the Bulgarians to quit the Axis, but they could not as long as Hitler’s armies were closer at hand than the Red Army. On September 8, with the Red Army almost at the border, Bulgaria’s new prime minister, Konstantin Muraviev, declared for the
Allies. The Red Army crossed the border the next day and within a week had rolled across the country, putting Stalin’s armies just two hundred miles from the Adriatic. By late September, Stalin’s bulwark against any future threat from the West was taking shape. Churchill was likewise trying to build his bulwark against Russia on the northern Mediterranean littoral. And Hitler, but for his fanatical Austrian Nazis, was now virtually alone.
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O
n the homeward-bound flight from Naples to Britain, Churchill spiked a temperature of 103 degrees. A large party that included Clementine, Jock Colville, and the Chiefs of Staff awaited his arrival at Northolt airfield. But upon landing, Moran bundled up his charge and rushed him from the aircraft to a waiting car, which sped off to London. The Old Man’s temperature hit 104. An X-ray revealed a spot on his lungs; his pneumonia had returned for a third time. Again Moran paraded out the M&B doses and again Churchill took to his sickbed, this time at the Annexe. His recovery was swift; by September 1 his temperature was normal; Colville noted he had cleaned up his box and was “in tearing form.” On September 4, Churchill, infuriated by Stalin’s treatment of the Warsaw partisans, sent Roosevelt a copy of a telegram that had gone off to Stalin in which Churchill noted the slaughter in Warsaw (the Germans were now murdering doctors, nurses, and patients in the city’s hospital), adding that if the Warsaw Poles were overwhelmed, and it appeared they would be, “the shock to public opinion here will be incalculable.” When Stalin made no reply, Churchill proposed cutting off convoys to Russia but was persuaded by Eden that to do so would only further hurt the Poles. Stalin’s armies were legitimately in need of refit and resupply; to cease the convoys would only delay that effort. Days earlier Moran had told his diary, “Winston never talks of Hitler these days; he is always harping on the dangers of communism. He dreams of the Red Army spreading like a cancer from one country to another. It has become an obsession, and he seems to think of nothing else.” Churchill intended to address those concerns, and more, with Roosevelt at the upcoming conference in Quebec.
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