The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Early on Christmas Day, Japanese soldiers entered a hospital where some sixty wounded defenders lay on cots. They immediately began bayoneting them under their blankets. A doctor who tried to stop them was shot. Eleven nurses were carried off to an adjoining room and gang-raped; seven of them were murdered. By that afternoon it was apparent that further resistance was futile and the British commander surrendered.

  There was little that Churchill could do except grind his teeth and dispatch two infantry divisions destined for North Africa to the Far East. But before they could arrive everything fell apart.

  The story was the same all over the Pacific. Singapore, the capital of British-held Malaya, was a gigantic fortress with 16-inch guns bristling to repel any invasion fleet. Except that the Japanese did not come by sea; they came by land after invading northern Malaya and making their way down its long peninsula, using a combination of tanks and bicycles.

  Unable to stop the enemy onslaught, British commander Sir Arthur Percival ordered a retreat across the Strait of Malacca into the fortress, which was awash in terrified civilians drinking themselves stupid on gin at the famous Raffles hotel bar and other posh watering spots. Overhead, Japanese air raids bombed nearly every foot of the twenty-five-mile-wide island.

  In January 1942 the Japanese invaded Singapore using inflatable rubber boats, often disguised as Singaporean citizens. The British seemed powerless to stop them. One reason might have been that most of the British troops consisted of Indian divisions, who might not have fought as hard for the occupiers of their own country. According to official records, some five thousand Chinese living in Singapore were decapitated in this brutal attack, their heads stuck on pikes around the city as a warning against working for Westerners. When time came for the surrender, Percival turned over an army of 130,000 soldiers, including recent reinforcements, the most humiliating surrender in British history. Many of these were sent to work building a Japanese railroad in the pestilent jungles of Thailand and Burma, where they died by the tens of thousands of disease, starvation, and murderous Japanese cruelty. (Their story was widely told in the Academy Award–winning David Lean film The Bridge on the River Kwai.)

  The problem, in short, was this: the British simply didn’t have the sea power, or the manpower, to defend their far-flung empire and fight the Germans and Italians simultaneously. In a cruel irony, they had been depending on America’s eight Pearl Harbor battleships, which now were destroyed or crippled, to join them in the defense of Singapore.

  On the plus side, after a ferocious tank battle in North Africa, the British had managed to break up Rommel’s Afrika Korps siege of the Libyan fortress Tobruk, in which two British colonial divisions had held out for most of the year. This was a major feat of arms—but the British still needed to drive the Germans and Italians out of North Africa. This seemed increasingly difficult, as the Nazis were intent on reinforcing and resupplying the Desert Fox from bases across the Mediterranean in Italy and Crete.

  * * *

  THE WEEK AFTER PEARL HARBOR, Churchill headed back across the Atlantic in the battleship Duke of York (as it happened, the sister ship to his previous transportation, HMS Prince of Wales, which now rested at the bottom of the Gulf of Siam) to attend the Arcadia conference with Franklin Roosevelt. Accompanying him was First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Dudley Pound, Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, eighty staff members, and twenty cryptographers. Once in the North Atlantic they encountered the worst winter storm of a decade. It kept the big warship battened down for the entire trip while towering waves threw it violently about—rolling, wallowing, heaving, and causing almost everyone to become seasick. Several of the party suffered broken legs or arms. Churchill wrote, “Being in a ship in such weather as this is like being in a prison, with the extra chance of being drowned.”

  Churchill stayed in his cabin in his nightshirt making notes but came out in the evenings to watch movies such as The Sea Hawk, starring Errol Flynn, or read the seafaring stories of C. S. Forester. The plan, once they had reached American shores, had been to steam up the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. But the storm had made them late by several days, and Churchill chose to take a plane at Norfolk.

  When he arrived in Washington at the Anacostia air base, Roosevelt was waiting for him on the runway in a car. Churchill was exceedingly appreciative of the gesture. He stayed at the White House in well-appointed rooms next to Roosevelt’s “fixer,” Harry Hopkins, with whom he would become well acquainted in the years to come.

  At their first conference meeting, Churchill was relieved that Roosevelt and his advisers had agreed Germany was the most immediate and dangerous threat, and that military efforts should be weighted toward the war in Europe instead of in the Pacific. He was horrified, however, that Roosevelt’s military men—most prominently, the Army’s powerful chief of staff General George C. Marshall—were already planning to stage a cross-Channel invasion of France in 1942. As much as anyone, Churchill understood the dangers of an amphibious assault, arguably the most complicated and perilous of military maneuvers. The enemy, if prepared and alert, always has the edge and, with sufficient force, could well turn such an operation into a slaughter of the Allies.

  The Germans, meanwhile, had been preparing to repel an invasion of France for a year and a half, building row upon row of artillery positions and machine-gun pillboxes, beach obstructions, tank barriers, and other fortifications. They also maintained a formidable air force that could wreak havoc on the landing beaches. If an invasion was attempted hastily and without proper planning and support, the English Channel, Churchill again warned, “would run red” with Allied blood.

  On Christmas Eve 1941, Churchill was present for the annual Christmas tree lighting at the White House—the last of these until 1945—in which the president flipped on the red, white, and blue lights that festooned a forty-five-foot spruce growing on the South Lawn. On Christmas Day the two attended services at the Foundry Methodist Church, a Washington institution, where the Briton was deeply moved by a children’s choir’s rendering of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” a song he’d never heard before.4

  The next day, at the stroke of noon, Churchill strode into the U.S. Capitol to address the second joint session of Congress since America had entered the war. The congressmen were charmed by his opening remarks. “I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been American,” he said, “and my mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got here on my own.”5 But later, his I-told-you-so observation that “If we had kept together after the last war, if we had taken common measures for our safety, this renewal of the curse need never have fallen upon us,” was met in the chamber with an uncomfortable stony silence.6

  Still, as Churchill warmed to his subject, the mood lifted once more. “What kind of people do they think we are!” he spat of the Japanese. His eyes were flashing and glistening. The Washington politicians jumped to their feet—including the isolationists—with furious clapping, pounding, and fist shaking; some were cursing and others gave hurrahs. “Is it possible,” Churchill shouted, “they do not realize that we will never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?”7

  The congressmen remained on their feet amid the roaring and applauding, some with tears running down their cheeks, as the British prime minister strode from the platform flashing his signature gesture, the famous V for victory sign. This was Winston Churchill at his grandest.

  * * *

  BACK IN ENGLAND AGAIN, Churchill encountered a foul mood that matched the foul gray winter weather outside. Rommel had sprung up once more and was on the move in North Africa; the British armies seemed to be losing everywhere in the Far East. The Japanese had begun an invasion of Burma at the same time they had attacked Hong Kong and Malaya; indications were that they planned to use Burma as a staging area to invade India, the British Empire’s c
rown jewel. To make matters worse, the code breaking at Bletchley had suddenly dried up. The Germans had added a new rotor to their enigma machine and, once again, there were precipitous merchant shipping losses in the North Atlantic.

  The threat of a German invasion still hung in the air—and, though nothing like the Blitz, the Germans still carried out nighttime bombing attacks on major British cities, purposely targeting civilian buildings for the terror factor. When the people (and the press) are uneasy and unsatisfied they look for someone to blame—and Churchill was conspicuously at the top of that heap. He was uneasy and disconcerted himself by all the bad news. But deep down he was not unsatisfied, for when the Americans joined the fight against the Axis he was certain they would win.

  As spring approached, Churchill called a special session of the House of Commons to cast a vote of confidence (or no confidence) in himself. He was even beginning to have second thoughts in his own mind as to whether he was the right person to lead the nation for the rest of the war. He handily won the vote of confidence, but rumors (usually with some foundation) circulated that thus-and-so person was going to challenge him. The threat never materialized.

  During the spring and summer of 1942 Churchill was utterly consumed by the war and, as its chief architect in Great Britain, immersed himself in matters great and small. Unlike Roosevelt, who served as more or less the chairman of a kind of joint war management committee, Churchill featured himself as the arbiter of almost everything—and in many ways he was equipped for it. As first lord of the Admiralty he had absorbed an enormous working knowledge of naval affairs: how ships worked, what they were capable of, and what they were not capable of. He also understood everything from troop and cargo transports to aircraft carriers to battleships and submarines. Churchill was also a pilot, going back to the days of World War I, and he had kept well abreast in the ensuing years of important matters in the Royal Air Force. And so far as the army went, he had cut his teeth on the dangerous mountains of the Punjab, the deserts of North Africa, and the plains of the Transvaal as well as in the trenches of Flanders fields.

  Yet one dilemma that bedeviled Churchill almost to the end of the war was how to deal with the abominable losses in the Arctic convoys that the British navy was escorting past German outposts in the icy north. These ships would leave American ports with guns, planes, tanks, and other assorted supplies bound for the Russian port Archangel and the Russian front. The Russians had no navy to speak of, and so it fell to the British to protect them. The Germans had established numerous airfields in the north of Norway, which the convoys had to pass, as well as submarines and a sinister fleet of capital ships (including the battleship Tirpitz and a number of battle cruisers that were kept at Trondheim, Norway). On top of all this was the issue that for nearly half the year the sun shined almost twenty-four hours a day, removing at least cover of night as protection from the enemy.

  One of these convoys, named PQ17, sailed from its rendezvous at Iceland on June 27, 1942. Consisting of thirty-four merchant ships and escorted by two cruisers, nine destroyers, and various support vessels, it was soon located by enemy air patrols. Word came down that the Tirpitz and her escorts had steamed out of Trondheim and were presumed to be on their way toward the convoy.

  The cruisers’ orders were not to go east of Bear Island unless the convoy “was threatened by a force [the cruisers] could fight.” “Clearly,” Churchill wrote, “this meant that [the cruiser force commander] was not intended to fight the Tirpitz,” which could have blown him out of the water from sixteen miles away. The cruiser force commander chose to stay with the convoy anyway. But on the fourth of July word was received that the appearance of the Tirpitz was imminent, and orders came down for the convoy to “scatter.” That meant that the cruiser force with its destroyers would turn back out of harm’s way and the convoy ships would be at the tender mercies of the Germans. Of the thirty-four convoy ships, twenty-three were sunk; their crews perished in the icy wastes of the Barents Sea.

  It was heartbreaking, depressing, and infuriating—to no one more than to Winston Churchill, who concluded that until some better way was found, he could not sanction any further convoys along that route while daylight hours prevailed most of the time.

  In the aftermath of this disappointment Churchill received a “surly” letter from Stalin, all but accusing the British navy of cowardice in the face of the enemy. He further issued a veiled threat that the Soviet Union might drop out of the war, conveniently ignoring the fact that in their original Lend-Lease agreement the Russians had contracted to escort their own goods from U.S. ports. (The British, after all, had taken on the responsibility only as a matter of necessity after the Russians proved incapable of doing so.)

  Infuriated, Churchill sent Stalin’s letter to Roosevelt who, as was his custom, urged conciliation. “We have got always to bear in mind the personality of our Ally and the difficult and dangerous situation that confronts him,” Roosevelt cautioned. Roosevelt suggested that they lead Stalin on about the possibility of a second front in 1942, when neither of them believed it could be accomplished.

  So Churchill let the matter drop, with no rejoinder to the Soviet premier. “After all,” he said, “the Russian armies were suffering fearfully and the campaign was at its crisis.”8

  The war in the air remained an issue of constant fascination and frustration to Churchill, who was still exultant over the results of the Battle of Britain two years earlier, but wary of Hitler’s ability to damage his homeland. Technological developments came so fast—especially in the field of radar—that as soon as the British installed such devices in their airplanes, the Germans would shoot one down, find it, and copy it.

  One very simple idea was suggested by the technicians eager to confuse German radar in their night fighters and ground antiaircraft batteries. Bundles of tinfoil—“the kind they wrap candies in”—would be tossed out of a plane to flutter down like a cloud and appearing on radar screens exactly like the image of planes. This would confuse the German radar operators completely. The bomber crews got wind of this development—they called it “Window”—and wanted to use it immediately to help make their flights more secure. But Churchill worried that if British bombers began using this strategy to protect themselves, the Germans would soon catch on and start using it when they bombed England, which would of course confuse the British radar operators. As Churchill put it, “A tense controversy ensued.”9 But after several months Churchill relented: British bombers could use Window to protect themselves and the British fighters. Should German bombers appear with a Window of their own the British technicians would just have to figure something out.

  * * *

  DURING THE SPRING AND SUMMER of 1942, Churchill was primarily occupied with the deteriorating situation in the North African desert of the British Eighth Army vis-à-vis Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

  Even though the British had relieved the siege of Tobruk and chased the German and Italian army westward in late 1941, by the spring of 1942 Rommel was back, resupplied and reinforced, and ready for another try. Tobruk was the only deepwater port in Libya, and Rommel needed it as a supply depot to achieve his ultimate goal of taking the Egyptian city Alexandria and the Port of Suez. This would mean control of the Suez Canal by the Germans: a major defeat for the British.

  In January 1942, even though the British army outnumbered Rommel’s forces in men, tanks, artillery, and airplanes, the wily German sent out a large reconnaissance that caught the British napping. Rommel decided to expand this raid into a battle, but the British rallied and stopped the Germans just short of Tobruk.

  Churchill was concerned that the area commander, General Claude Auchinleck, was frittering away valuable time reorganizing the Eighth Army when he should have been attacking Rommel. On February 20, Churchill wrote to him: “According to our figures you have substantial superiority in the air, in armour, and in other forces over the enemy. There seems to be a danger
that he may gain reinforcements as fast or even faster than you. Pray let me hear from you. All best wishes.”

  Auchinleck replied that he understood the situation but felt he was in a strong defensive position and would attack the enemy when he was able to pull together a set piece battle. This disturbed Churchill, but he didn’t order an attack at that time, nor did he relieve Auchinleck. After all, the Scottish general was an officer of proven field merit, who had successfully driven Rommel from his siege of Tobruk the previous year.

  As the weeks and months wore on, however, Churchill became increasingly anxious about the Eighth Army’s inaction—in particular, because of the drastic situation on the island of Malta, located roughly in the center of the Mediterranean Sea. Malta was the Allies’ only outpost from which British airpower could intercept and sink enemy convoys bringing troops and supplies to the Afrika Korps.

  The Germans knew this, of course, and exerted every effort from their own air bases in Sicily and on Crete to ensure that no supplies got into Malta’s ports. So severe were their exertions that the Malta base was at near starvation much of the time and without such essentials as antiaircraft ammunition with which to defend itself. The island, which had been a British possession since the era of the Crusades, was battered almost daily with air raids by German and Italian high-altitude fighters and dive-bombers, which left tens of thousands of British troops, as well as the civilian population, living like troglodytes in caves or beneath the ground. Its towns and cities were bombed to rubble, earning it the dubious distinction of being the Verdun of the maritime war.

  On March 20 a convoy of four merchant ships left Alexandria with supplies for Malta but was attacked by a combination of Axis planes and warships. The escorting British convoy held off all of these, including an Italian battleship—only to see two of the convoy’s ships sunk just eight miles from the island, and the other two sunk as they were unloading in the harbor. Of 26,000 tons of supplies, Malta received only 5,000. There were no more for another five months.10