The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (468 page)

The skies over Britain had been empty of V-1 flying bombs for four days by the time Churchill boarded the
Queen Mary
at Greenock on September 5, bound for Quebec. Of slightly more than 10,000 V-1s launched toward Britain, 7,488 had crossed the Channel. Of those, more than 3,900 were shot down; 2,419 reached Greater London, killing more than 6,000 and injuring more than 18,000. On September 7, Duncan Sandys told reporters, “Except for a last few shots, the Battle of London is over.”

Sandys’s pronouncement was about as wrong as wrong can be. Early the next evening, the first two V-2 rockets fell in Greater London. They measured forty-six feet high, weighed fourteen tons at launch, and flew at more than 3,600 miles an hour, propelled by liquid oxygen and a three-to-one alcohol-to-water mixture. Launched from near The Hague, they covered the two hundred miles to London in just under five minutes. Outrunning their own concussive sound, they descended in silence at almost two thousand miles per hour; their roar, like a freight train overhead, arrived only after they detonated. Their 2,200-pound warhead could eradicate a city block. HMG, not wanting to tell the Germans if their targeting was effective, did not announce the assaults and instead told Britons that gas mains had exploded, a story HMG held to for weeks, even as Britons put two and two together when “gas mains” began erupting at the rate of five a day.
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By September 8, Churchill and the
Queen Mary,
with four thousand passengers on board, including wounded American soldiers, were more than halfway across the Atlantic. Clementine and Sarah made the trip, as did Jock Colville, Lord Moran, favored science adviser Lord Cherwell, and a vast number of British military representatives. The
Queen
took a southerly route in order to avoid any lurking U-boats, and thus the passengers found themselves sweltering in the Gulf Stream as temperatures reached eighty degrees, which to an Englishman is a heat wave. Churchill, still under the weather as result of his large doses of M&B, passed the time playing bezique and reading
Phineas Finn
and
The Duke’s Children.
He did not prepare for the upcoming conference, to Brooke’s chagrin. At meals he waxed pessimistic on the postwar world. He would miss none of his Labour colleagues except Bevin—“mediocrities,” he called them—if they bolted the coalition. And if he was voted out of office: “What is good enough for the English people is good enough for me.” Dark days were ahead, he pronounced over dinner one evening. Peace would find consumer goods in short supply, Britain in dire financial straits. All he wanted to do was get the soldiers home and see to it that they had houses. And, he said, “The idea that you can vote yourself into prosperity is one of the most ludicrous that was ever entertained.”
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The menu at one dinner included oysters, roast turkey, ice cream, cantaloupe, and Stilton cheese, “all washed down by a remarkable Liebfraumilch, followed by 1870 brandy; all of which,” Colville wrote, “made the conversation about the shortage of consumer goods a shade unreal.” All noted Churchill’s lethargy as the
Queen
drove west. Brooke: “He [Churchill] looked old, unwell, and depressed. Evidently he found it hard to concentrate and kept holding his head between his hands.” Lord Moran told Colville he did not give Churchill a long life, and, Colville wrote, “he thinks when he goes it will either be a stroke or the heart trouble” that had
first showed itself in the White House in 1941 and then again at Carthage in 1943. “May he at least live to see victory,” Colville told his diary, adding, “Perhaps it would be well that he should escape the aftermath.”
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The Château Frontenac and the Citadel were again taken over by Anglo-American luminaries, both military and civilian. The setting was familiar, but the business at hand was new. The Quebec conference (code-named Octagon) was more about managing the peace than winning the war—how best to keep Germany down once it was defeated, and how best to coordinate Allied forces in the Pacific. It had been nine months since Churchill had said his good-byes to Roosevelt in Cairo, their longest separation since sailing into Placentia Bay three years before. European military strategy was not on the agenda. The European Front was effectively in the hands of Eisenhower, who, although having made clear that he intended to pursue a broad-front strategy, was willing to exploit any German weaknesses, including the apparent gap to Montgomery’s immediate front. Churchill, still fixed on the Adriatic, declared to the Chiefs of Staff that “we are coming to Quebec solely to obtain landing ships out of the Americans” to land in Istria and seize Trieste. In the Pacific, the chiefs argued, Britain had to display solidarity with the United States by contributing large Royal Navy forces to the American push in the central Pacific. Churchill disagreed and stuck to his Sumatra and Singapore strategy. All of this led Brooke to tell his diary: “I am feeling
very, very,
depressed at the thought of this meeting, unless Winston changes radically we shall be in hopeless situation.”
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Brooke’s worries did not materialize. Churchill, not wanting to be seen as shirking his duties in the Pacific, agreed to a British naval presence in the central Pacific, where Admiral Nimitz’s fleets—and soldiers and Marines—were driving north, with Okinawa their penultimate destination, the Japanese homeland their final objective. MacArthur, meanwhile, was driving toward his objective, the Philippines. Nimitz and Admiral King wanted no part of any plan that included the Royal Navy; in fact, the Americans, so mightily re-armed, believed they had no need of the Royal Navy in order to defeat Japan. As always, they suspected Churchill was only after reclaiming lost British colonies. Churchill did nothing to help matters when he announced at one of the plenary sessions that Vienna and Singapore were the most important objectives in their respective theaters. By doing so, Brooke wrote, “he was not assisting with our discussions with the American Chiefs.” Yet, despite Churchill’s detours to Austria and Malaya, the military meetings went well, in part because the American Chiefs, flush with victories in the Pacific and confident that the European war could end by Christmas, were in a conciliatory frame of mind.
The Americans agreed to seek no further reductions in Alexander’s army. Indeed, Brooke told his diary, “The Americans have shown a wonderful spirit of cooperation.” The optimism had spread to many in high office, but not Churchill, who told Colville that “it was even money the Germans would still be fighting at Christmas, and if they did collapse the reasons would be political rather than military.”
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The Americans proved themselves amenable, as well, on the matter of zones of occupation in a vanquished Germany; they desired to occupy part of western Germany shoulder to shoulder with the British and sought only egress to Essen. Here, guided by Eden, Churchill introduced a new element by proposing that the French, too, be given a zone. This was a wily incremental stroke of the sort Roosevelt was master of. The Americans had yet to recognize de Gaulle’s FCNL, which by then was the de facto government of France, if not de jure in the eyes of Roosevelt. By not rejecting outright a French role in postwar Germany, Roosevelt tacitly acknowledged de Gaulle’s leadership, for if the time to carve the zones arrived within weeks, as many thought, who else but de Gaulle could accept such a proposal in the name of France? Roosevelt was not on his usual game. Churchill told Colville he feared the president was now “very frail.”
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On the matter of how to punish postwar Germany, Churchill, who had long proposed an economically reinvigorated but disarmed Germany, displayed his growing subservience to Roosevelt and the Americans. In late July, the Red Army had liberated the Majdanek death camp on the outskirts of Lublin. Unlike the Treblinka and Sobibor camps, which the Germans had destroyed and plowed under before the Red Army arrived, Majdanek was abandoned with such haste that it was functional when the Soviets marched through the gates. Reports reached the West within weeks. A hut lined with asbestos was used to burn inmates alive. Four gas chambers were used to kill up to 250 prisoners at a time, with either carbon monoxide or Zyklon B pellets, which produced cyanide gas when exposed to air. Bodies were carted to a nearby crematorium, where the remains were rendered into ashes; the ashes, in turn, were used to fertilize the cabbage crop. A warehouse contained tens of thousands of shoes. A local woman told a visiting American journalist that when the camp was in operation, loudspeakers continually played Strauss waltzes. “ ‘The Beautiful Blue Danube,’ ” she said, “can never be beautiful to us again.” Another woman repeated words the Americans had heard many times that day: “I hope you Americans will not be soft with the Germans.”
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At a dinner on September 13 attended by Churchill, Roosevelt, Lord Moran, Lord Cherwell, and Admiral Leahy, Henry Morgenthau outlined his plan for Germany’s future: plowing German industry under, destroying its shipyards and coal mines, and converting the country to a pasture.
Harry Hopkins was not at the table, nor was he even in Quebec, a source of worry for Churchill, who had always counted on Hopkins to explain and champion his thoughts to Roosevelt. Instead, here was Morgenthau, who had attended none of the previous conferences. When Morgenthau finished his presentation, Churchill objected. He was all for disarming Germany, he said, but not for making it a wasteland. “I agree with [Edmund] Burke,” he said. “You cannot indict a whole nation.” The English people, he warned, will not stand for the enslavement of their fellow working-class Germans. Morgenthau pointed out that destroying the Ruhr could only help British steel exports and Britain’s balance of payments. As Stalin had at Tehran, Roosevelt offered that a German factory turning out steel furniture could be easily converted into an armaments plant. Churchill had no counterplan to offer, but he made clear he would not go along with Morgenthau. His reaction had been “instinctive revulsion,” Moran noted, adding, “He hates cruelty.” But within forty-eight hours Cherwell had brought Churchill around. (It was during these weeks that Churchill told Moran that “if the Ruhr were grassed over it would be good for our trade.”) Roosevelt and Churchill signed off on the Morgenthau Plan on September 15.
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It was a stillborn concept. Stimson, Hopkins, and Hull thought the plan hideous, and told Roosevelt so. In early October, Hull told Roosevelt it would be inhuman to condemn Germans to starvation, and he read back to the president a transcript from a meeting where Roosevelt had endorsed the severest treatment of Germany: “Looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural in character.” Roosevelt did not recall the quote, but soon after his talk with Hull he scotched the Morgenthau Plan.

Both Churchill and Roosevelt had come to Quebec, as many of their companions had noted, tired and unfocused. The same could be said of the alliance. Robert Sherwood later wrote, “The Allies were well prepared for war to the death in Europe, but they were ill prepared for the cataclysm of sudden total victory.” The meeting in Quebec had really been called in order that the British and Americans could reach agreement on an agenda for the next gathering of the Big Three, which Roosevelt soon proposed to Stalin. It appeared a meeting of the minds had taken place at Quebec, when in fact it had not. Poland—Stalin’s first priority, and Churchill’s—was not even discussed.
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W
hen the conference ended on September 17, Churchill, his family, and a few aides journeyed by train to Hyde Park. There, with the pressures of plenary sessions out of the way, Churchill regained his strength, helped in part by a succession of picnics that Clementine described as “rather fun, really,” high praise coming from her. Harry Hopkins was on hand, which greatly cheered Churchill, who believed Hopkins’s absence in Quebec was due to his having fallen out with Roosevelt. In fact, Hopkins had been ill for most of the year.
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