The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (494 page)

Overnight, Churchill’s Europeanism became far more narrowly focused. Coal and steel matters could wait. There was now only one priority: the creation of a unified European defense force. By the same token, Churchill’s Atlanticist vision, too, became more narrowly focused: America, which had all but abandoned Europe in 1945, had to be brought back into the European picture, in force.

In June 1950, the NATO treaty of 1949 was backed up by nothing more than the paper it was printed on. In 1945, more than 2.8 million American soldiers and almost 300,000 airmen served in Europe. By 1946, 90 percent of both had gone home. By mid-1950, only 80,000 American troops and 20,000 airmen remained, and many of those were support troops.

In late July, based on figures supplied by the Attlee government, Churchill outlined to the House the situation in Europe. The Russians fielded 40,000 tanks; how many were deployed in Europe was unknown, but Stalin had little reason to deploy tanks east of the Urals. The Americans and British each possessed about 6,000 tanks; America’s were sitting in America but for a couple of hundred in Europe. Soviet troop strength stood at least at 175 divisions, including 25 or more armored divisions, versus a total of a dozen French, American, and British divisions, of which only two were armored. The East Germans had been allowed by Moscow to create a defense force of 50,000, even though the Red Army provided more than enough men to defend East Germany. That was the status on the ground.
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When it came to the air, nobody in HMG seemed to know how many aircraft the Soviets had, perhaps as many as 19,000. And how many of them were stationed within range of Britain? Again, nobody knew. Churchill hammered away at the Attlee government’s decision to sell one hundred jet fighters to Argentina, which claimed sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, and another 110 to Egypt, which was blocking Israeli ship traffic in the Suez Canal. What British air forces were available, he asked, to protect those American bombers in East Anglia? If the Soviets had only fifty atomic bombs, he told the House, and if Moscow dropped some of them on Britain, “It would not be pleasant.” The Soviets had captured the German rocket works at Peenemünde, he reminded the House, and had learned enough to launch devastating guided missile attacks (armed with conventional warheads) against Britain. And on the seas—or under them—the Soviet U-boat menace appeared to be “far more severe than was the German U-boat force in 1939 and 1940.” The European situation was beginning to look like the mid-1930s again, with an existential threat in the East, and Britain unprepared to defend itself. Churchill began again to sound like the voice from the 1930s wilderness. He warned the
House that if the Soviets threw only half their strength against the West, the West would be outnumbered by at least eight to one. He added: “If the facts that I have stated cannot be contradicted by His Majesty’s Government, the preparations of the Western Union to defend itself certainly stand on a far lower level than those of the South Koreans.”
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Ever since Fulton, Churchill’s hopes for world peace had rested with the deterrent of the atomic bomb. The Americans now stationed 180 “atomic bombers” in East Anglia. Moscow was aware of that figure because Attlee had announced it in the Commons. But Churchill sought—demanded—a British atomic deterrent. For four years he had pressed the Attlee government to reveal its progress, if any, in building a British atomic bomb, and for four years Attlee had disclosed nothing. His government was, in fact, hard at work building a bomb, for the same reason Churchill would have pursued the matter: to guarantee British sovereignty. Attlee was as determined as Churchill that British foreign policy and defense not be held hostage to the whims and wishes of the U.S. State Department or White House. Attlee’s refusal to discuss his atomic plans was proper; Churchill led the opposition, not HMG. Some in Britain concluded that the fourteen inscrutable men in the Kremlin had no design on Western Europe for the simple reason that Moscow could take it with impunity if it so desired, and since it had not, ergo, it had no desire to do so. This was the sort of convoluted logic—peace through trust—that infuriated Churchill. His position was clear, and he had stated it repeatedly since 1945, including to his New York hosts months earlier: “It is certain in my opinion that Europe would have been communized and London would have been under bombardment some time ago, but for the deterrent of the atomic bomb in the hands of the United States. That is my firm belief and that governs the situation today.” As for trusting to the goodwill of Stalin after the experience of trusting Hitler, who had claimed too many times that his appetite for geography was satisfied, Churchill added: “Well, once bit, twice shy.”
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In July, shortly after the North Koreans invaded the south, and with his stances on the need to re-arm and build a British atomic bomb in mind, he told a Plymouth audience, “The fourteen men in the Kremlin are not drifting with events. They work on calculation and design. They have a policy the aim of which we can see; but the execution and timing of their ambition for Communist world government we cannot predict.” He told a London audience: “We have always to be very careful nowadays—we politicians, if we take an interest in military matters, or are held to have accumulated some knowledge and experience about them—lest we should be described for electioneering purposes as warmongers.” In fact, Labour and many in the press slapped that label on him now on a regular basis. Yet, if the state of Western arms (other than the atomic bomb) was the
measure, he was correct. France, which in 1940 sent 140 divisions against Hitler, now fielded fewer than ten. Britain had difficulty assembling a token force of one brigade to send to Korea in support of the Americans. Harold Macmillan told his diary: “It seems that to scrape together 3000 men and their equipment for Korea will take two months!… What have they done to the war equipment? It would appear that they have thrown it into the seas.”
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On July 27 Churchill moved that the House go into secret session—“I spy strangers”—in order to address the status of the British atomic bomb. His motion lost by a single vote, 295 to 296. But if Churchill continued to push for divisions—votes—the day would come when Labour would lose one, and then another. The day would arrive when Attlee would have to call a general election. “Mismanagement” was the word Churchill now introduced into almost every critique of the Attlee government: “the mismanagement of the housing problem”; “the mismanagement in civil and domestic affairs”; “the mismanagement of our defence forces.” And this, directed at Attlee in the House: “The Prime Minister has appealed to us for national unity on Defence. That does not mean national unity on mismanagement of Defence.”
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His message—and the phrases he used to deliver it—recalled the previous decade: “We must never despair. We must never give in,” he told the House. “Our scientific and technical ability is unsurpassed. We may well have time to reorganize and develop the mighty latent strength of Britain surrounded by her Commonwealth. But I warn the House that we have as great dangers to face in 1950 and 1951 as we had ten years ago.” The next day Harold Nicolson told his diary that the “state of public opinion after Winston’s grim speech… is one of paralyzed shock…. We are in a position of blind and dumb dread.”
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The next week, in early August, the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe met for the second time in Strasbourg. “Consultative” was the operative word: motions passed by the Assembly were nonbinding on the governments of member nations. Schuman was there to present his plan. Paul Reynaud, now France’s defense minister, was on hand. The Germans sent two contingents, one of Socialists and one made up of members of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, whose leader, Konrad Adenauer, had been elected in 1949 the first chancellor of the Federal Democratic Republic of Germany—West Germany. British socialists led by Hugh Dalton were in attendance, as were Duncan Sandys, Harold Macmillan, and Winston Churchill for the Conservatives. On August 11, Churchill addressed the Assembly. He welcomed the Germans, and called for “a real defensive front in Europe” formed by a continental army made up of “large forces” of Americans, Britons, the French, Greeks, Italians,
the Scandinavian countries, and the Low Countries. He forgot to mention the Germans, but his intent was clear. It would take compromise and sacrifice, he warned, and then he added words that anticipated the inaugural address of a young American president a decade later: “Those who serve supreme causes must not consider what they can get but what they can give.” He ended by offering a motion calling for “the immediate creation of a unified European Army subject to proper European democratic control and acting in full co-operation with the United States and Canada.”
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Macmillan thought the speech masterful, delivered with power and touches of humor that found their mark. “It is really more like a broadcast than a speech,” he told his diary. “But then the trouble is that WSC’s broadcasts
are
speeches.” Churchill staked his reputation on his motion; defeat could end his long crusade for some sort of federal European structure, and certainly would mean the end of the idea of collective European security. He had addressed no details of command and control of such a European army, knowing that offering details might undermine the whole edifice. The French were wary of the Germans. The Germans were afraid of re-arming, believing that any German army would be large enough to provoke the Russians but not strong enough to repel them. The German General Staff had been abolished; Germans who served in a European army would therefore serve under the command of other nationalities. Macmillan, fearing that German volunteers would likely be former Nazis, preferred an army of conscripts—that is, if the Germans agreed to an army of any sort. The members of the Assembly pondered all of this and more before taking their vote. “No one is quite sure what turn the debate will take,” Macmillan wrote.

The vote came in at 89 for the motion, 5 against, with 27 abstentions (including most of the British socialists). “It is strange,” Macmillan wrote that week, “how, abroad as well as at home, what Churchill puts forward one year as a daring paradox, becomes an accepted truism a year later.” Macmillan dined with Churchill the night of the vote, and found the Old Man “to be
very
pleased and
very
excited.” Given that the object of the Europeanists was to bring about reconciliation between Germany and France, Churchill had “a right to be pleased. Without his immense personal prestige, which he has thrown quite recklessly into this campaign, it might not have been achieved.”
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I
n mid-September two divisions of U.S. forces under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur staged an amphibious assault at Inchon, in
northwest South Korea. The invasion was a stunning success; within two weeks the Inchon forces and the Pusan armies met and then drove the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel. Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, was liberated, “the first Communist capital to be liberated by the forces of the free world,” crowed
Time.
By late October, UN forces were chasing the North Korean army up the peninsula toward the Yalu River, the border with China. MacArthur declared that the boys might well be home by Christmas. In mid-November MacArthur informed George Marshall—the new secretary of defense—that he was launching a general offensive by the U.S. Eighth Army northward to the Yalu, to detect how many, if any, Chinese might be in North Korea, and to secure the peninsula once and for all. In defiance of the most basic military doctrine, MacArthur divided the Eighth Army into four separate columns. MacArthur had earlier told President Truman that at most three hundred thousand Chinese might get into the fray but that he did not believe the Chinese would send in any forces. But they did. The Eighth Army had almost reached the Chinese border in northwest North Korea when, on November 25, one million Chinese troops smashed into the American lines, into the flanks, even into the rear of some forces. The Chinese armies, hidden on both sides of the Yalu in deep mountain passes, had gone completely undetected by the Allies. By the end of the year, UN forces—mostly American—had been driven back over the 38th parallel, and in the weeks that followed, driven eighty miles south of Seoul, which again was lost. It was the longest retreat in American history.
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On November 30, Churchill’s seventy-sixth birthday, President Truman told reporters that the UN would not abandon its mission in Korea. He followed that with a promise to “take whatever steps are necessary” to meet military objectives. A reporter asked if the atomic bomb might be one such step. Truman replied that use of the atomic bomb was under “active consideration.” That statement, Dean Acheson later wrote, and a false news report that MacArthur might be given authority to use the bomb, threw the Attlee government into a panic, and resulted in Attlee’s “scurrying across the ocean” to meet with Truman. Macmillan saw Truman’s remark as a typically “diplomatic” response, “a cliché as a synonym for doing nothing.” Attlee saw it as a step toward atomic war. The prime minister, in Macmillan’s words, “bolted, like a rabbit, from his hole, and is off to Washington (what a picture and what a contrast to the great Churchill days).”
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