The Allies

by Winston Groom

  Churchill continued prodding Auchinleck, asking for exact details of his plans, recounting the difficulties inherent in his inaction. But the Scotsman, though acknowledging each of Churchill’s concerns with diplomatic aplomb, remained inert.

  The situation on Malta was critical. When the British finally began trying to convoy to the island again, only two of the first seventeen ships got through.

  At last, on May 10, Churchill sent this message to Auchinleck, backed by the army chief of staff and the entire defense committee: “We are determined not to let Malta fall without a battle being fought by your whole army for its retention. The starving out of this fortress would involve the surrender of over 30,000 men, Army and Air Force, with several hundred guns. Its possession would give the enemy a clear and sure bridge to Africa. Its surrender would sever the air route upon which both you and India depend for your aircraft reinforcements. It would compromise any offensive against Italy…Compared with the certainty of these disasters, we consider the risks you have set out and we accept them.”

  This was the first and only time that Churchill, as prime minister, ever told one of his generals to attack, or else.11

  It took Auchinleck several days to make up his mind. But by the time he finally acquiesced, he’d already become victim of the full brunt of a surprise attack by Rommel, while still in the midst of preparing the attack of his own.

  The battle raged for twenty-five days across the terrible desert, through the dreadful heat of day and bitter cold of night. It was mostly a battle between tanks and artillery, of machine guns mounted on trucks and jeeplike cars. Troops scrambled out of vehicles to scrape out holes in the sand to fire a 3-inch mortar—and knew how to do it. It was a war of constant motion, unlike any seen before the Nazi blitzkrieg. A tank would rumble warily along and suddenly be obliterated by an enemy land mine, or an artillery shot from a camouflaged position, or a bomb from an aircraft that came up behind.

  Auchinleck continued to reassure Churchill that he had the matter in hand. Rommel, he said, was expending himself—his troops, and tanks, and planes—and would soon have to admit failure and retreat. The Scottish general was the epitome of the calm, cool, cheery, resolute British officer, and Churchill began to sleep easier, knowing that Auchinleck was at the helm. So much easier, in fact, that he planned another trip to Washington to see Roosevelt, for there were still things to achieve between them that were so much clearer in person than in telegrams and letters.

  * * *

  THIS TIME, INSTEAD OF ARRIVING on a British battleship, Churchill came to Washington in a flying boat. This giant creation of the Boeing aircraft company was very comfortable compared with other airplanes of the time. It featured freshly cooked meals and sleeping accommodations, and whereas a sea voyage could take up to ten days, the plane was able to fly from London to Washington in twenty-seven hours. It was not, however, a particularly safe aircraft, especially when German warplanes were roaming the skies.

  Churchill had two main missions to accomplish in Washington. The first was to settle the idea, once and for all, that the Americans were still up to the invasion of North Africa, now code-named Torch. The second reason was the time had come to deal with the curious subject code-named Tube Alloys, which was what the British were calling their experiments in atomic fission. They had been working on nuclear energy since the 1930s—and so, Churchill knew, had the Germans. He wanted to share the considerable information gained by British scientists and let the Americans build the bomb.

  The flying boat landed in the Potomac on June 18, 1942. Churchill was flown to Hyde Park next morning, where Roosevelt was vacationing. The president awaited him at the airfield with his personal automobile, a Plymouth Phaeton convertible with special hand controls for brakes and gas. In this vehicle, Roosevelt gave Churchill a tour of his estate, as well as the fright of his life, when Roosevelt cruised along the edge of the large bluff overlooking the Hudson with nary a foot on the brake.

  On the matter of Tube Alloys, Churchill agreed to send his nuclear scientists to the United States to work with the team the Roosevelt administration already had in place. It was a portentous decision, for the British information cut months, if not years, off the time it took to build the bomb. They also agreed to keep this top secret project from their ally Joseph Stalin, lest he want to build a bomb of his own.

  Two days later, the two men took the presidential train to Washington, where they were to meet with Roosevelt’s military advisers on the matter of Torch. Churchill had just had his breakfast when he stopped by Roosevelt’s study. He found the president studying a telegram he’d just been handed. Without saying anything he gave it to Churchill.

  “Tobruk has surrendered, with twenty-five thousand men taken prisoners.”

  Churchill was dumbfounded. At first he didn’t believe it and asked a military adviser to call London. When his adviser returned, he told Churchill that not only was it true, they were expecting heavy air attacks on Alexandria at any moment and Auchinleck’s Eighth Army was being pushed back by Rommel hundreds of miles into Egypt.

  “This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war,” he wrote afterward. When he arrived he’d been reassured that the situation in the desert was stable—and now this! Instead of arguing Torch from a position of strength, he was forced to beg for American troops to land in North Africa to save his own men.

  As Churchill felt frustrated nearly to the verge of tears, Roosevelt said calmly, “What can we do to help?”

  When he had composed himself, Churchill asked for Sherman tanks that were just now coming off the U.S. assembly lines. General Marshall arrived and gave the order: three hundred Sherman tanks would be sent immediately to the Middle East by fast boat.12

  “Nothing could exceed the sympathy and chivalry of my two friends,” Churchill said. Not only that, but before Churchill left, he’d received word that the highly trained U.S. Second Armored Division would be sent to reinforce the British Eighth Army in six weeks’ time. “There were no reproaches. A friend in need is a friend indeed,” he said.13

  When Churchill returned to London’s summer sunshine, dark shadows hovered in the House of Commons. Forty or fifty members had instigated a motion of censure against him, stating, “[The House] has no confidence in the central direction of the war.”

  Churchill dutifully set the motion up for argument. Auchinleck had sent him a graceful apology for the setback, which Churchill accepted with a warning. “Every fit male should be made to fight and die for victory. You are in the same kind of situation as we should be if England were invaded, and the same intense, drastic spirit should reign.”

  Debate on the motion to censure Churchill occupied two full days, going on until three in the morning. It was mainly old enemies venting their spleen. When a vote was taken on the morning of July 2, the motion was defeated by a vote of 475 to 25. Churchill reminded Parliament of how history repeated itself when, in 1799, a vote to censure Prime Minister William Pitt failed to muster more than twenty-five votes. Now he could set about finding ways to redeem Africa from Field Marshal Rommel and the Germans.

  * * *

  TO SET THINGS IN MOTION, Churchill flew to Cairo to see what had happened to the Eighth Army. As it turned out, Auchinleck had simply been outmaneuvered by the Desert Fox. The army now held very strong positions for the defense of Egypt, starting around El Alamein, but was essentially right back where it had been a year ago, nearly five hundred miles to the east.

  Churchill arrived in Egypt on August 4 after an all-night flight and beheld the sunrise from the copilot’s seat of a British Commando bomber. “There in the pale, glimmering dawn, the endless winding silver ribbon of the Nile stretched joyously before us,” he wrote. “Often had I seen the day break on the Nile. In war or peace, I had traversed by land or water almost its whole length. Never had the glint of daylight on its waters been so welcome to me.”14


  Churchill had consulted with his top military advisers, and it was clear that changes needed to be made. It was decided that General Auchinleck would be replaced as commander of Egypt and the Near East by General Sir Harold Alexander. The Eighth Army would be taken over by William Gott, a popular and highly respected lieutenant general who held the full confidence of the troops. No sooner had this decision been made, however, than General Gott was killed when his plane was shot down by half a dozen German Messerschmitts. It was then decided that General Bernard Montgomery—who would make a bold name for himself in the annals of World War II, and who was supposed to lead the British contingent of Torch—would replace Gott as commander of the Eighth Army.

  Auchinleck was let down easy, and bore neither Churchill nor anyone else any animus. Always the gentleman, “the Auk” “received this stroke with soldierly dignity.” Later he became commander in chief of the British Indian army, a post he held until the end of the war.

  On August 10, 1942, Churchill enplaned in Cairo for Moscow, where he would meet for the first time “the great Revolutionary Chief and profound Russian statesman and warrior” Joseph Stalin. As his bomber weaved perilously between the towering mountains of Iran, Churchill mused on the purpose of his mission “to this sullen, sinister, Bolshevik State I had once tried so hard to strangle at its birth—and which, until Hitler appeared, I regarded as the mortal foe of civilized freedom.”

  Whatever else he intended to say, the most important part was that there would be no second front in France in 1942. Churchill had decided that Stalin needed to be told this in person, and with Roosevelt’s infirmities he was the man to do it. Furthermore, Churchill always had a policy to hear bad news early, and he would make no exception with Stalin and the Soviet leaders.

  They landed late in the afternoon and were put up in a well-lit dacha, complete with servants and “prepared with totalitarian lavishness.” Churchill and Averell Harriman, the American representative sent by Roosevelt, met with Stalin at the blacked-out Kremlin at seven in the evening.

  There, Churchill at last met “the ogre in his den,” as his wife Clementine had described it in a letter. Stalin, all five feet four of him, appeared with his hair slicked back like a New Orleans bartender, pockmarked face, and tobacco-stained teeth. He was dressed in a rough-cloth peasant’s blouse and trousers tucked into polished high leather boots. Harriman thought he looked much older and careworn than when he had visited him a year before.15

  The first two hours of the conference were “bleak and somber,” according to Churchill, who told Stalin right off that both the British and American military advisers had counseled against a cross-Channel invasion of France as too risky that year. Stalin, his face screwed up in a frown, responded that “a man who was not prepared to take risks could not win a war,” and wondered aloud why the British “were so afraid of the Germans.”

  Churchill rejoined that Hitler had sat on the opposite side of the Channel for all of 1940 trying to decide whether to invade England, and in the end he opted not to risk it. But Stalin remained gloomy and unpersuaded, suggesting that the British and the Americans were afraid to “bloody their armies.”16

  Stalin perked up a bit when Churchill got around to describing the air war on Germany. When the Americans arrived with their large air force, Churchill told the premier, it would be enough to inflict ruin on Germany’s industrial might. Stalin recommended bombing German homes as well as factories, to which Churchill replied righteously that only stray or mistargeted bombs would fall “on working men’s houses.”

  Refreshments were served and Churchill, who made an art of presenting crucial points in speeches as deftly as a prima ballerina leaps in dance, suddenly unfurled a map of the Mediterranean and North Africa. “Is it written in stone that a Second Front has to be across the English Channel into France?” he asked. Then he took a pen and drew a crocodile. Jabbing the pen at the creature’s belly, he declared to the startled dictator that it was better to attack such an animal “in its soft underbelly” than at its dangerous snout.17

  Pointing to the map laid out before Stalin and his advisers, including the dour Molotov, Churchill began explaining Torch, which he described as a kind of second front of its own. A British and American army, he said, would land in French Morocco and French Algeria and cross the Atlas Mountains; meanwhile, the British Eighth Army would hammer the Germans westward out of Egypt, across Libya, and shatter them on the American anvil in Tunisia. He told Stalin that the destruction of his North African army would force Hitler to divert more troops and airpower to the Mediterranean, either from the Russian front or from France, which the Allies intended to invade next year.

  Stalin asked exhausting questions about Torch, and when he was finally satisfied with the answers he said: “May God prosper this undertaking.” It was a strange declaration coming from the world’s most famous atheist, but nonetheless gratifying to Churchill and company.18

  Back at Churchill’s extravagant dacha next evening, the British contingent was assessing the productivity, or lack thereof, in the conference so far. The prime minister at one point casually described Stalin as “a peasant” whom he could handle, which produced a fervent reaction from Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, who was certain that the walls were bugged. The airman grabbed for a sheet of paper on which he scribbled Méfiez-vous! (“Beware!”) and flicked it across the table to Churchill, whereupon the prime minister read the note, put on his famous scowl, and, to the mortification of the diplomats present, turned and addressed the walls: “The Russians, I have been told, are not human beings at all. They are lower in the scale of nature than the orang-outang. Now then, let them take that down and translate it into Russian.”19

  The next morning at eleven the meetings were resumed. Stalin arrived surly and arrogant, thrusting at Churchill a paper making many accusations and demands—in particular, for the British to reverse their decision and invade France by the fall. Sensing that things were going badly, Churchill replied that he would answer it in writing. There then ensued a highly “unpleasant” conversation in which Stalin accused the British of being “too much afraid” of fighting the Germans, accusing them of breaking their promise, and stealing the Lend-Lease supplies destined for the Soviet Union. Churchill, seething at these charges but under complete control, answered each one succinctly, thoroughly, and profoundly—with frequent pauses, because he was speaking fast, to ask the translator: “Did you tell him that?”

  The Soviet dictator showed little reaction at being spoken to in such a forceful manner. Churchill closed by saying that he and his people had come all the way to Moscow in the spirit of comradeship to establish good relations; that for a year and a half they had been left to fight the Germans entirely alone (a veiled allusion to Russia’s nonaggression pact with Hitler); and that they resented the accusatory attitude of the Soviet premier. At this, Stalin called a halt to the meeting, saying that words wouldn’t win the war, only action. At that, they all went to bed.

  The next evening was a parting dinner for forty at Catherine the Great’s dining hall. It was described by one of the British legation as “a complete orgy,” with scores of courses including suckling pig, fish, chickens, and roasts, washed down with no less than nineteen vodka toasts. Stalin’s aide, one General Kliment Voroshilov, “nearly drank himself under the table”—but the mood was robust and genial and the banquet went off well.20

  The next evening around seven, Churchill went to Stalin’s office to say goodbye; he was leaving for Cairo at dawn. They had an hour’s “useful and important” conversation, in which Churchill expressed his concerns about the German drive toward the Caucasus Mountains, which was presently stalled at Stalingrad. If the Germans somehow broke through, they would take possession of the immensely rich oil fields of Baku and Persia.

  “We shall stop them,” the dictator told Churchill, “They will not cross the mountains.” He then confided that he had twenty-five Russi
an divisions guarding the mountain passes.

  When it was time to leave, Stalin cordially said to him, “You are leaving at daybreak. Why should we not go to my house and have some drinks?” Churchill rejoined that he was “in principle always in favor of such a policy,” and off they went to Stalin’s rooms in the Kremlin. They were there joined by the enigmatic Molotov, of whom Stalin said, “There is one thing about Molotov: he can drink.”

  They sat at a table in the dining room; a “handsome red-haired girl came in, kissed her father dutifully, and started laying the table,” while Stalin began uncorking bottles. There they sat for the next six hours, eating leftovers and drinking wine. As the wine and the conversation began to percolate, Churchill asked Stalin whether the stresses of war were worse on him than his collective farm ordeal, in which tens of millions of peasants perished. “It was all very bad and difficult,” the premier replied, “but necessary,” going on to explain that unless agriculture were centrally controlled Russia would be subject to famines.

  According to Churchill biographer Roy Jenkins, Stalin’s technique was to play dual roles as “hard cop, friendly cop,” to both “intimidate and bewilder. But at the same time to seduce his adversary—even if, to complete the paradox, the adversary was a necessary ally. Churchill stood up to this bombardment with remarkable tenacity, patience, and strength of character.” In the end, the British leader left with a feeling of goodwill that had been absent until then. Each man had taken the measure of the other and found common ground.21

  * * *

  BACK IN CAIRO, Churchill was confronted with news of trouble in India. The independence party had suddenly fomented riots and other disorders throughout the enormous country. Railways were sabotaged and mob violence broke out in the cities and countryside alike. The viceroy reported that the deep unrest “threatened to jeopardize the whole war effort of India in the face of the Japanese invasion menace.” His council recommended arresting the charismatic Mohandas Gandhi, his deputy Jawaharlal Nehru, and other members of the influential political party. It was a risk, but Churchill backed the viceroy; instead of a catastrophic revolution, the turmoil fizzled out and the population settled down for the duration. It was a small crisis amid the larger, more terrible crises, but Churchill excelled at dealing with each in its rightful place. In times of peace, rebellion in India would have been viewed in England as a calamity.