The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Simultaneous with the land battle was the naval battle of Crete, a contest between the German air force and the Royal Navy, which was in the vicinity to keep enemy convoys of troops from landing in Crete. Several convoys were sunk, but the price was high: three British cruisers and six destroyers were sunk and two battleships suffered crippling damage during the eventual evacuation of the twenty-two thousand British troops on the island. Despite such heavy losses, the navy rescued nineteen thousand of these in daring and gallant sorties into the maelstrom of aerial assault.

  By the fifth day, much of the Allied resistance had been broken, and in another week the island belonged to the Nazi empire, completing its conquest of the Balkans and the Peloponnesian Peninsula. Not only that, but in its weakened condition the British fleet now faced a rejuvenated Italian navy, which had come out from its hiding place in Trieste. “The period which we now had to face offered to the Italians their best chance of challenging our dubious control of the Eastern Mediterranean,” Churchill wrote solemnly. “We could not tell they would not seize it.”

  * * *

  ALL THE WHILE, THERE REMAINED a furious battle for control of the Atlantic Ocean. Three German battle cruisers, Sharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Hipper, remained poised at Brest under the protection of powerful antiaircraft batteries, awaiting their moment to prey on Allied convoys. Then, late in May, as the conflict on Crete reached its most pitiless intensity, the Admiralty got word that the newly constructed German battleship Bismarck—supposedly the most powerful and heavily armed and armored warship in the world—was loose somewhere in the North Atlantic. On May 21 this ship and her accompanying cruiser Prinz Eugen were spotted by British aerial reconnaissance in the fjord at Bergen, Norway.

  Although he knew his war vessels were outgunned, Churchill ordered an all-out search-and-destroy mission against this new and formidable menace. Next day air reconnaissance revealed that the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen had steamed into the open Atlantic and were headed for the Denmark Strait, an icy, misty Arctic narrows to the north of Iceland where the precious convoys cruised.

  Every available ship was sent to predetermined positions, hoping to ambush the monster. Soon after midnight on May 24, Britain’s most powerful battleship, HMS Hood, and the new battleship Prince of Wales, along with six destroyers, set out for the Denmark Strait. As a former first lord of the Admiralty, Churchill nourished a keen interest in the proceedings as they developed.

  At 5:37 as the cold day dawned, spotters on the Hood and Prince of Wales identified the Bismarck and Prinz Eugen about fifteen miles distant. Fifteen minutes later they opened fire. The Germans returned the fire within three minutes. The Hood was hit amidships, setting a large munitions fire spreading rapidly, and the Prince of Wales also caught a salvo. At six o’clock, barely eight minutes into the action, a shell from a Bismarck salvo tore into the Hood aft the conning tower; she blew up in a stupendous flash and roar, breaking the entire ship in two. Both parts sank within two minutes, taking all but three of her 1,418-man crew to the ocean bottom. The Prince of Wales boldly continued the fight, but a shell from the Bismarck wiped out everyone on the bridge. Because of mechanical troubles, the Prince of Wales retired under a smokescreen but remained shadowing the Bismarck just out of range.

  The Bismarck, however, had not escaped the battle unscathed. Two heavy shells from the Prince of Wales had penetrated beneath her waterline and she turned course, heading for German-occupied France and leaking a trail of oil. For four days the Bismarck was dogged by several British cruisers and by the limping Prince of Wales.

  Churchill was in an anxious frame of mind. The House of Commons was to meet that morning in an improvised Parliament building; they had been blown out of their chamber by German bombers two weeks earlier. How, he wondered, would they receive the news that Crete was lost and even now being evacuated, that the mighty Hood was sunk with nearly all hands, and that the Bismarck was at large on the high seas with precious British troop and commodities convoys helpless against her?

  Every available battleship of the Royal Navy was returned from convoy duties to engage the Bismarck, but these were scattered from Gibraltar to Nova Scotia and time was very dear. In addition to the battleships, two aircraft carriers were sent out: the HMS Victorious and the Ark Royal.

  Just before sunset on May 26, Fairey Swordfish biplanes from the Ark Royal spotted the Bismarck and launched a torpedo attack, several of which hit the German behemoth. One explosion jammed her rudder, causing the Bismarck to steam in circles, a pitiful, helpless target for the converging British battleships.

  Churchill had been in the Admiralty war room all evening, watching the charts and listening to the constant stream of reports. When he arose the next day the Bismarck was still afloat and her commander, Admiral Günther Lutjens, had sent a defiant message to the Kriegsmarine: “We shall fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer!”

  When he arrived at Parliament shortly after 10:30 that morning, Churchill was handed a note saying that after repeated hits the Bismarck at last had sunk with nearly two thousand hands. He arose with great pleasure, and so informed the House, to long and grateful cheering.

  The next day, Churchill wrote Roosevelt of his intense relief that such a monster would no longer menace the sea-lanes. “Now it is a different story,” he told the president, adding, “The effect upon the Japanese [who were already threatening war in the Pacific] will be highly beneficial. I expect they are doing all their sums again.”

  * * *

  IN JUNE 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union without warning, despite the German-Soviet peace pact. Stalin had plenty of warning from Winston Churchill himself, whose intelligence agents and Ultra contacts told him that the movement of three entire Panzer divisions to Poland could only mean that the Nazis intended to attack Russia. On April 3 Churchill sent a secret message concerning this matter, to be delivered personally to the Soviet dictator by his Soviet ambassador, Sir Stafford Cripps.19

  Stalin didn’t believe it, apparently thinking the message was a capitalist trick. All spring and into summer, the Germans massed their armies toward the Soviet border until they had assembled a hundred and fifty divisions—upwards of two and a half million men—along an 1,800-mile front. At 4 a.m. on June 22, the German ambassador to the Soviet Union delivered a declaration of war from Hitler, although by then the German air force was already bombing Russian cities. The German attack was furious. Much of the Soviet air force was destroyed on the ground, and those Russian army units that were poised at the border recoiled from the overwhelming might of the German host.20

  Churchill had already made up his mind on what stance the British should take in this development. Bitter and disgusted as Churchill was at Stalin’s failure to take warning, as well as the Soviets’ partnering up with the Nazis, he felt the only logical recourse was to hold his nose and go to Stalin as an ally. The night after the invasion, Churchill delivered one of his highly emotional broadcasts on the BBC, which bears repeating in some length.

  The Nazi regime is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. It excels all forms of human wickedness in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression. No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it.

  But all that fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding…

  We have but one aim, and one single irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke…

  It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people…

  When I spoke a few minutes ago about Hitler a
nd his blood-lust…I said there was a deeper motive behind his outrage. He wishes to destroy the Russian power because he hopes that if he succeeds he will bring back the main strength of his army and his air force from the East and hurl it upon this island, which he knows he must conquer or suffer the penalty of his crimes. His invasion of Russia is no more than a prelude to an invasion of the British Isles…

  The Russian danger is, therefore, our danger, and the danger of the United States. Let us redouble our exertions and strike with united strength while life and power remain.

  At that point Churchill represented a lone voice standing against the mighty Nazi juggernaut; he was certain to be among the first on the gallows should Hitler ever find his way to London. The notion of Hitler returning victorious from the Soviet Union with his whole army to conquer England was enough to stir patriotism in many an Englishman’s breast. By this stage, Churchill had even managed to drag the United States into it, much to the consternation of the American diplomatic corps—though probably not to Roosevelt, who was at the time vowing never to send anybody’s children off to foreign wars.

  For his part, Stalin was handicapped with the absence of five hundred Soviet army generals who had been liquidated in the purges. He soon found that promoting colonels unready for high command was a risky business. When the attack opened, Stalin was in his dacha. He remained there a full week in a state of utter shock, not once venturing to the Kremlin. Molotov tried to get him to return to his office but Stalin demurred. “Lenin left us a great legacy,” he replied, “and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up.”21

  * * *

  THE GERMANS HAD DIVIDED their army into three groups: north, south, and center. Within a month, they had driven an equal number of Russians back three hundred miles into their own territory. Headed for the oil fields of Baku and the wheat fields of Ukraine, the Germans hit the surprised Russian army in a blitzkrieg of 3,600 Panzer tanks, 2,700 fighters and bombers, and some 3 million German soldiers. They could, however, have driven the Russians back a thousand miles—or five thousand miles—and still would not have pushed the Russians’ backs to the wall. Russia is a country with great depth and elasticity, as we shall see.

  The invasion force consisted not of Germans alone, but of others who had thrown in their lot with the Nazis. Finland, for example, an age-old enemy of Russia, sent ten divisions. Romania and Bulgaria contributed heavily to the invasion troops; even the Spanish Communists, who had lost the civil war to Franco in ’39, scraped up a regiment or two to aid their fellow communists in the fight.

  For their part, the deceived and incensed Soviets began making demands on their new allies that were difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill. From the United States, they demanded at least the same—if not more—munitions and other war-making equipment as England had received. And from the British they demanded an immediate cross-Channel landing of troops to establish a second front to relieve the pressure on Moscow, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and other soon-to-be besieged cities. Churchill laughed at the impossibility of such a maneuver. England was barely holding on against invasion herself. But he deeply resented Britain’s own Communists, mostly factory organizers, who until now had denounced the fight with Germany as a “capitalist and imperialist war”; suddenly, overnight in fact, they were doing a hypocritical about-face. Soon the slogan “Second Front Now” began to appear, scrawled on fence walls, sidewalks, and buildings throughout the land.

  * * *

  ON AUGUST 9, CHURCHILL and Roosevelt met in a secret nautical rendezvous by warship. Roosevelt had eluded the press by sailing off from Washington on the presidential yacht for unknown parts north, then transferring to the heavy cruiser USS Augusta in the Atlantic off Nantucket. A Secret Service man in a deck chair wrapped in a blanket fooled reporters into thinking the president was aboard, headed for Campobello. In fact, he was headed to Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, where Churchill was waiting on board the Prince of Wales, which was still somewhat battered from her valiant fight with the Bismarck. Both old sea dogs enjoyed high times on their voyages; Churchill read C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels and watched Hollywood films in the wardroom.

  Dressed in a dark blue Royal Navy coat with two rows of brass buttons and an officer’s hat, Churchill the “former naval person” took a launch to the Augusta where Roosevelt awaited him, standing on the deck in a light summer business suit and clutching the arm of his son Elliott, who was wearing his Army captain’s uniform. Churchill and Roosevelt had met briefly in England toward the end of World War I but neither had much recollection of it.

  A movie camera caught Churchill eagerly clambering up the gangway, as well as a great shaking of hands and smiles between the two heads of government. “At long last,” Churchill cried, and Roosevelt replied, “Good to have you aboard, Mr. Churchill,” which should have told the prime minister of Great Britain where he stood in the order of things. After lunch, the two got down to business. Churchill had come with his vast wish list of American munitions and supplies, but Roosevelt made an additional suggestion: that the two create a joint statement of postwar aims. This famous and somewhat wishful document conceived by the president and written by Churchill came to be known as the Atlantic Charter. It called for a world free from war, from fear, from want, and was hailed in the press as the definitive guide for future world harmony.

  The next day Churchill, Roosevelt, and several hundred sailors from the Augusta visited the Prince of Wales across the bay. They joined with the British sailors in singing “Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Churchill wrote in his memoirs that “it was a great hour to live,” but he lamented ruefully that “nearly half who sang were soon to die.”22

  Once back on British soil, Churchill was more certain than ever that the United States would soon enter the war. At present, America was far from “neutral” under international accords, as she had been supplying war materials to both England and Russia and patrolling with warships and warplanes in the Atlantic far off U.S. shores. Roosevelt was fully aware of course of the powerful sentiment among many in the United States who abhorred the notion of sending American boys into another European bloodbath.

  * * *

  IN THE MEANTIME, CHURCHILL continued agitating for his generals to stay on the offensive where possible, particularly in Egypt’s Western Desert, where the Nazi general Rommel was still marauding. In June 1941 Churchill had relieved the overtaxed and overwhelmed General Wavell, replacing him as Middle East supreme commander with General Claude Auchinleck, the former commander of the British Indian army (despite misgivings by some of the prime minister’s close advisers). Auchinleck’s first substantial change was to appoint Lieutenant General Alan Cunningham to command the Eighth Army. A career infantryman, Cunningham did not fully understand mechanized armored warfare and its ability to move quickly in a desert environment. With his appointment, Churchill had ordered Auchinleck to attack the Germans but was rebuffed by Cunningham’s protest that he could not possibly have the army assembled for an offensive before autumn. Moreover, Auchinleck said that even though he had five hundred tanks he needed another two hundred and fifty to replace losses. This, Churchill responded, was “a comfort Generals only enjoy in heaven,” adding that “those who demand them don’t always get there.”23

  Following a series of telegrams between himself and Auchinleck, Churchill concluded that he and his general had “a serious divergence of views between us,” causing him “a sharp disappointment.” Still, he did not relieve and replace Auchinleck, possibly because he did not want to have to admit that he made a bad selection in the first place.

  To further complicate matters, the Australian government was objecting to having its troops fight in the Middle East as the possibility of war with Japan loomed on the horizon; the three Australian divisions were all the Aussies had to defend themselves. Churchill smoothed the matter over but it left him with a bitter taste.

  In the meanwhile, Rommel
now sat sullenly in place, ordered by Hitler not to advance farther at that time, due to trouble supplying him with gasoline. His thousand-mile line of communication with his supply base in Tripoli was menaced by the British-held fortress at Tobruk in his rear, which remained supplied by the Royal Navy. This was how matters stood in the Middle East through the summer and early autumn of 1941.

  * * *

  IN THE SOVIET UNION, the German drive seemed to have stalled. Despite enormous losses, the Russians had regrouped and offered a spirited defense. Russian partisans, meanwhile, had risen behind the invading army and disrupted its communications. Roads were breaking under the constant strain of traffic. The Russian rail system, which the Germans had intended to utilize for transportation, was insufficient, and heavy rains had slowed things to a crawl.

  The British were supplying the Russians with hundreds of fighter planes and munitions, which were shipped into the ice-free port of Murmansk. Stalin thanked Churchill for these, but he demanded still more and renewed his calls for a second front. The Soviet ambassador complained to Churchill that Russia was fighting the Germans “virtually alone.” Churchill reminded him that four months earlier the British were not only fighting the Germans alone; they were highly concerned that the Russians would invoke their mutual defense pact with the Nazis and join them for an invasion of England. “We never thought our survival was dependent on your action—either way,” he told the dumbfounded Soviet ambassador.24