The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965

by William Manchester

  The Russians had a saying: Poles never learn, and they never forget. Poles, in turn, said of Russians: they are Slavs, but Slavs without hearts. Stalin’s reaction to the Polish accusations was swift and final. Within days he broke off relations with Sikorski’s government in London, of whom Stalin declared, “They think themselves clever tacticians, but God has given them no brains.” Churchill and Roosevelt each advised Stalin to suspend rather than break relations with the London Poles. He would not do so, the Poles having so clearly displayed their “treachery” with their “hideous charges.” Roosevelt warned Stalin that the break would have negative repercussions in the American Polish community. Stalin didn’t care in the least about Poles living in Buffalo or Chicago. Churchill warned Stalin that Goebbels would make much of the schism, at Allied expense. He assured Stalin that the London Poles were honorable and not “in collusion with the Germans” and added that he was convinced that “German propaganda has produced this story to make a rift” in Allied ranks (the imprecise word “produced” might be taken as either “concocted” or “disclosed”). Stalin did not bend. Churchill contemplated shutting down those Polish newspapers that criticized the Soviets, and told Stalin so. Stalin held firm. In fact, he announced that he would sponsor a new Polish government in exile, in Moscow. When the London Poles pressed the issue, Churchill warned that their “charges of an insulting character against the Soviet Government” would “seem to countenance the atrocious German propaganda.” On that front, Goebbels was winning. On April 28, Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “So far this business has been Goebbels’ greatest triumph.”139

  In the appendix to Closing the Ring, the fifth volume of his war memoirs, Churchill printed part of a January 1944 memo to Eden that implies he was still trying to get to the bottom of the Katyn matter. But he left off the final line: “we should none of us ever speak a word about it.” The memo was written at about the time in late autumn when the Soviets gave Kathleen Harriman and American correspondents a tour of Katyn. The correspondents noted many contradictions; if the Germans killed the prisoners in the summer of 1941, why were some wearing winter uniforms? And why were letters written in 1940 but never mailed found in some of the dead men’s pockets? On the return trip to Moscow, Kathleen Harriman and her fellow correspondents drank and sang to dull the images of the day. Despite the contradictory evidence, the correspondents came down on the side of the Soviets (considered heroes by most Americans). Cabled Time correspondent Richard Lauterbach: “As far as most of us were concerned, the Germans had slaughtered the Poles.” Four decades later, Averell Harriman, in defense of his daughter’s judgment, said, “She was not a historian, and it wasn’t her job to decide whether what she saw was right or wrong.”140

  In fact, within six weeks of Berlin’s April announcement, Churchill and Eden knew what had happened at Katyn. Eden had asked for and on May 31 received a report by Sir Owen O’Malley, the Foreign Office liaison with the London Poles. O’Malley was clear in his opinion: “Most of us are convinced that a large number of Polish officers were indeed murdered by the Russian authorities.” In his detailed report, seen only by Churchill, the War Cabinet, and King George, O’Malley concluded, “We have, in fact, perforce used the good name of England like the murderers used the little conifers to cover up a massacre; and in view of the immense importance of an appearance of Allied unity and of the heroic resistance of Russia to Germany, few will think that any other course would have been wise or right.” O’Malley then plumbed an ethical implication that was not strictly within his diplomatic purview: “What in the international sphere is morally indefensible generally turns out to be in the long run to have been politically inept.” London’s support of Moscow had come at the expense of the Poles, O’Malley wrote, who have been portrayed as reckless and tactless and who “have been restrained from putting their own case before the public.” HMG “have been obliged… to distort the normal and healthy operations of our intellectual and moral judgments.” Churchill ordered that O’Malley’s report be kept in a locked box and passed only by hand among members of the War Cabinet. Churchill, however, sent Roosevelt a copy in August. They were partners, after all. The report, Churchill told the president, “is grim, a well written story, perhaps too well written.”141

  This was realpolitik in the most Germanic sense of the word. Those who like to debate just when the Cold War began—during the Anglo-Russo struggle for power in Persia and Afghanistan (the Great Game) in the nineteenth century, in Moscow in November 1917, with the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact—could do worse than look to the Katyn incident, not necessarily at the actual murders, but at the Allied response in the months that followed as Stalin proclaimed his outrage (but never specifically his innocence). Churchill later wrote of the compromises that had to be entertained in the war against Hitler: “terrible and even humbling submissions must at times be made to the general aim.” He spoke those words while addressing a tragic affair that took place in 1944, during the Warsaw uprising, when Stalin refused British bombers the right to overfly Poland and land in Soviet territory. Yet his words applied to Katyn as well.142

  Nancy Astor, during a visit to Moscow in 1931, had with her usual forthrightness asked Stalin when the mass murder of western Slavs would end. “When it is no longer necessary,” Stalin replied. Apparently, it was still necessary.143

  Throughout April, relations between the Allies deteriorated—not only relations between Russia and Poland, but between the Anglo-Americans and Moscow. The need for Roosevelt and Churchill to meet became evident, if only to do (or say) whatever was needed to placate Stalin, and to decide where to go after Sicily, although that decision rested by default with George Marshall, who had yet to make any decision. Yet Brooke, by sending all available landing craft from Britain to North Africa, had effectively settled the question for that year in favor of his Mediterranean strategy. Brooke made his decision, in part, in reaction to Admiral King’s sending his landing craft to the Pacific, where MacArthur and Admiral Nimitz were preparing to begin their island-hopping march to Tokyo. This was yet another blow against “Europe first” as Brooke saw it. Yet Brooke’s shift of the landing craft did not play well at the newly built Pentagon, and underscored the need for Churchill and Roosevelt to meet again relatively soon. Churchill later wrote, “I was conscious of serious divergencies beneath the surface which, if not adjusted, would lead to grave difficulties and feeble action during the rest of the year.”144

  That was a roundabout way of saying the British and the Americans had no strategy in place to fight the war in Europe after the war in Africa was finished. On that front, Allied fortunes had improved. Since busting through the Mareth Line in late March, Montgomery had pushed north, while Patton had punched away at mountain passes and squeezed eastward on the Axis left flank. On April 7, forward units of the Eighth Army and Patton’s II Corps awoke to find the enemy had vanished from their front. That morning a British reconnaissance patrol stumbled across a similar patrol from Patton’s II Corps. “This is certainly a pleasant surprise,” offered Sergeant Bill Brown, from Devon. “Well, it’s good to see somebody besides a Nazi,” replied Private Perry Pearce of Kentucky. During just six critical weeks—from about the time Rommel went home sick in early March to mid-April—the advantage had shifted in Tunisia from the Germans to the Allies, in the air, on the sea, and on land. By April 20, Montgomery, General Anderson, the French, and George Patton had put Arnim’s army in a vise.145

  The battle for Tunis had entered its most critical phase, a time of “scrunch and punch,” Churchill told Harold Nicolson and Duff Cooper on the twentieth over port in the House smoking room.* That night Nicolson wrote of Churchill: “As usual he is very gay.” At times during the worst setbacks of the previous three years, his gaiety had been feigned, but Churchill, always determined, was now confident as well. When Nicolson asked about the status of the bey of Tunis, Muhammad VII al-Munsif, whom the Free French accused of being a Vichy sympathizer and German puppet, Churchill replied, “
He will have to call himself Obey in future.” He told Nicolson of a virtual RAF massacre of German transport planes returning to Sicily after landing reinforcements for Arnim. And he revealed that the Vatican had just released a list of prisoners that included Violet Bonham Carter’s son Mark. “I only pray,” he told Nicolson, that the German planes “were not carrying our prisoners.”146

  No British prisoners had been shot down, but Churchill was correct about the scrunch and punch. By April 22, Arnim had only seventy-six tanks in running order and was so short of gasoline that his men distilled local wines for fuel. The Allies had pushed the Germans into a pocket behind a 130-mile front that looped in a lazy half circle from just south of Cape Bon, where the Eighth Army was dug in, west and northward to Anderson’s First Army, hard by the Mediterranean coast about forty miles west of Bizerte. More Axis troops than were captured at Stalingrad were dug in behind the line; every ridge held artillery, every wadi and every road and track was covered by German machine guns and anti-tank guns. Alexander had originally tapped the American II Corps, which held the line between Anderson and the Fighting French, for a supporting role in the final push. Then politics intruded from Washington. Eisenhower, under pressure from home, explained to Alexander that if the American people believed their men “have not played a substantial part they will be even more intent upon prosecuting the war against the Japs” and commensurately less inclined to fight Hitler. To that end, Ike asked Alexander to assign the II Corps a greater role in the end game. Alexander acquiesced, and ordered the II Corps shifted to the north of Anderson’s First Army, where it would now form part of the van in the final battle. Patton would not be on hand to lead the charge; he had left for Rabat to plan the Sicilian campaign, where he was to lead the American effort. Eisenhower put his deputy, Major General Omar Bradley, in command of the II Corps. The French held the line between Anderson and Montgomery, at Cape Bon. All was in place. Churchill had Arnim in a vise, and it was closing.147

  After Bletchley broke the U-boat code in March, convoys were routed away from known wolf pack hunting grounds, with the result that the Allies lost almost two-thirds less tonnage in April (250,000 tons) than in March—a significant improvement, but still terrible, and not worthy of a declaration of victory. And if Dönitz’s objective was to fight the battle to a stalemate, thereby preventing an Allied landing on the Continent, he was succeeding. In fact, the American press declared he was winning, period. Time wrote that “the hard and hopeful fact—for the Germans” is that “Germany [is] still winning the Battle of the Atlantic…. Churchill and Roosevelt both had indicated that the Allies could not hope to launch a major offensive before that margin was beaten in.” By early May, the margin had not been. Admiral Ernest King, blunt and incapable of obfuscation, declared, “The submarine menace is being dealt with…. We expect to bring it under control in four to six months.” That meant October, the close of the invasion season. Here was the first (and inadvertent) public acknowledgment on the part of the Anglo-Americans that no large-scale invasion of fortress Europe could possibly be undertaken until favorable weather again descended upon the English Channel. And that would be in May or June of 1944, at the earliest.148

  Patrons of Washington bars and London pubs asked, what will one million American and British soldiers in England and Africa do for a year? Churchill pondered the same question. Secure now in the results soon to be obtained in Tunisia, and quite positive as to how best to exploit them, he proposed to Roosevelt on April 29 that they meet in order to decide where to go after the coming victory and the planned assault on Sicily. Italy appeared to Churchill to be the self-evident target. Another matter had to be addressed. The Americans had failed to exchange information on the atomic bomb, as agreed upon the previous year. Harry Hopkins had promised Churchill at Casablanca that the situation would be “put right.” It had not been. The Americans, Lord Cherwell told Churchill, had completely cut off the flow of information. Churchill, furious, asked how soon British scientists could start work on a unilateral basis. Perhaps six to nine months, Cherwell replied, if given the highest priority, and that at the expense of all other war programs. Other issues needed to be discussed as well: the Poles, the Free French, Arctic convoys, the Pacific theater. When Roosevelt did not respond in a timely fashion to the proposal that they meet, Churchill took his case to Hopkins, adding that, as his doctors forbade his flying due to fears of reinvigorating his pneumonia, he could travel by ship in order to arrive in Washington by May 11. Finally, on May 2, as if inviting an old Harvard roommate down for a weekend of bridge, Roosevelt replied, “I am really delighted you are coming…. I want you of course to stay here [at the White House] with me.”149

  The meeting, code-named Trident, was on. Stalin would not be there; his presence was required in Moscow for the start of Hitler’s summer offensive. In Russia, from Leningrad to Rostov, the spring rasputitsa had turned forest floors to marshes, marshes to lakes, and roads to quagmires. A New York Times correspondent wrote that along the entire front, “rusting cannon and broken tanks marked the course of old battles.” The relative strength of the two opposing armies was about equal. That raised the specter of stalemate. Yet near Kursk, Hitler had assembled the largest tank army in history, and it now awaited orders to attack. With Arctic convoys halted and the Iranian railroad unable to make up the loss, the Red Army would face the Wehrmacht, and soon, with only the men, weapons, and tanks on hand. Stalin’s factories and farms contributed 95 percent of the matériel and food his armies needed, but the 5 percent Lend-Lease contributed had proven critical. He needed that boost now, but it was not forthcoming. There was no doubt that the coming battle would be horrific, and quite possibly deciding. In London and Washington, there was growing doubt as to whether Stalin and the Red Army could sustain the effort much longer.150

  The Soviet leader, as he had for sixteen months, sought from his partners only one answer to only one question: the date of the opening of the second front. Settling that question was high on the Trident agenda. With relations with Stalin at their lowest point since Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt considered his need to meet with Stalin clear and compelling, and to meet without Churchill. As Churchill prepared to sail for Washington, Roosevelt drafted a letter to Stalin wherein he proposed they choose an acceptable place to meet, perhaps Siberia or Alaska, but not Africa—too hot—and not an Atlantic venue such as Iceland, where Churchill, uninvited, might feel excluded. The letter, carried by the former ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph Davies, was to be hand delivered, and Churchill was under no circumstances to be made aware of its existence. Churchill’s claim on Roosevelt’s time and attention was lessening in proportion to (as the president saw things) Roosevelt’s growing stature within the alliance, a role cemented by virtue of American factory output, and armed forces that now numbered six million strong, and Roosevelt’s conviction that he could make things right with Stalin if only they could sit down for an intimate chat.151

  Early on May 11, RMS Queen Mary glided through the Verrazano Narrows and dropped anchor off Staten Island. The grand ship had spent half of the seven years since her maiden voyage in war service, as a troop transport. She was known around the fleet as the “Gray Ghost.” Her prewar red-and-black smokestacks had been slathered with gray paint, as well as her black hull and pearl-white superstructure. Anti-aircraft guns rather than deck chairs now spread across the upper decks. Her interior finery—paneled walls, overstuffed settees, China services, acres of carpets, and the world map in the main dining room—had been carted off to New York warehouses at the start of the war, to be stored alongside the innards of Queen Elizabeth and Normandie. She could carry 16,000 troops, and had ferried almost that many to Australia shortly after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Her speed—almost thirty knots—made her uncatchable. No U-boat possessed the speed to plot a shot at her unless it found itself fortuitously positioned close abeam as she lunged past.

  British and American cruisers had escorted the ship westward while Sun
derland flying boats cruised overhead. Aboard the Queen Mary for this crossing were more than five thousand Italian and German prisoners of war captured in Tunisia, and destined for a not unpleasant internment in sunny midsouth locales. The prisoners were pleased with their fate; when taunted by Italian-speaking Americans in North Africa, they rejoined, “All right, laugh. But we’re going to America. You’re going to Italy.” The highest-ranking German officers fared the best; they would be billeted at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, where they could buy from the Sears catalogue, where vegetable gardens were encouraged and coffee and tobacco were plentiful. Yet the Atlantic passage had not been pleasant for the prisoners, six days locked belowdecks, egress to the upper decks blocked by barbed wire and sand-bagged machine gun emplacements manned by Royal Marines. The ship was infested with lice, the result of a previous cargo of kit bags that had been stored in a Cairo warehouse. The prisoners (or any German spies who scouted the ship in Scotland) might have concluded from numerous newly printed signs in Dutch hung throughout the vessel that somebody important—perhaps Queen Wilhelmena—was on board. Ramps that could accommodate a wheelchair had been conspicuously built in certain sections of the ship, as if in preparation for Franklin Roosevelt on the return voyage. That was exactly what British intelligence hoped the Germans would conclude.152