The political subtleties and de Gaulle’s behavior being parsed by Londoners during the first half of July were shunted to the rear when at midmonth it became clear that the German attack at Kursk was going nowhere. That week the Soviets mounted a counterattack toward Orel, north of the salient; within days the Germans were retreating westward across a three-hundred-mile front. A Soviet attack toward Belgorod, south of the salient, stalled, but Field Marshal Manstein informed Hitler that Army Group South lacked the reserves to hold back the Red Army much longer. The same could be said of Dönitz’s ability to hold back Allied shipping in the Atlantic, where Germany was losing one U-boat per day on average. Churchill (who called U-boats “canaries”) cabled Roosevelt, “My cat likes canaries… we have altogether 18 canaries this month.”199
The news from Sicily and the Mediterranean was also welcome. After the men had gotten safely ashore on July 10, the Italians had receded from the beaches, and by the fifteenth, it appeared that Sicily might go into the bag within two or three weeks, despite ferocious German resistance. Reports from the Balkans indicated a precipitous fall in the morale of the twenty-four Italian divisions scattered from the Aegean islands to northern Yugoslavia. They would rather surrender to Anglo-American forces than be massacred by the Greeks, or by Tito’s partisans. And in Italy, British intelligence concluded that the Italian forces south of Naples would surrender after putting up a token resistance if the Allies landed, but they would not surrender beforehand. The time to strike Italy proper was almost at hand.
By the third week of July, Montgomery’s army, halfway to Messina, was meeting heavy resistance from the Hermann Göring Division at Catania, south of Mount Etna. The Eighth Army had the Germans to its front and several rivers and malarial wetlands on its flanks. Malaria began to fell more of Monty’s men than did German bullets. But within the week, Montgomery’s army resumed its slog toward Messina along the coastal plains. Patton, after a rough start on the beaches—also at the hands of the Hermann Göring Division—had detached a corps, which was now racing toward Palermo. The battle for Sicily was going well.
In June, Eisenhower had told Churchill that a decision on whether or not to invade Italy would depend upon how the Sicily operation turned out. But Eisenhower had made no decision about where in Italy the Allies would go after Sicily, or when. He rejected Naples as too far north. The toe of Italy, just across from Messina and 350 miles south of Rome, appeared as far as Eisenhower was willing to go. He did tell Jan Smuts, then in Algiers, that Rome should be the ultimate target. Eisenhower’s German counterpart, Albert Kesselring, was already planning the escape of his forces from Messina, across the narrow straits to the mainland. He could contemplate such a withdrawal only because the Allies had not seen fit to cut off his escape route by invading the toe of Italy when they first went ashore in Sicily, an error Eisenhower grasped weeks later. Meanwhile, on July 19, seven hundred Allied heavy bombers hit the rail yards of Rome. John Martin assured Churchill that “the Pope has a good shelter.” By the twenty-second, Patton’s detached corps had taken Palermo, cutting Sicily in two.200
A visit to London by Secretary of War Henry Stimson during these days threw Churchill’s plans for furthering his Italian gains into utter confusion. Stimson, seventy-five, a tough old trooper, had served as secretary of war under William Howard Taft and as a colonel of artillery in France during the Great War. He hated the Hun and was in agreement with Marshall in favor of the cross-Channel strategy. While in London he was told by one of the planners of the French invasion that any prolonged activity in the Mediterranean might threaten the timetable for operations in France. This deeply troubled Stimson, who saw no future in Italy or the Balkans. When Churchill pointed out to him that Marshall had agreed to a push into Italy proper, Stimson rejoined that Marshall envisioned only temporary action there, perhaps to capture Italian airfields in order to take the bombing to southern Germany. This discussion took place while the Germans at Catania had stopped Montgomery in his tracks.
Churchill used that setback to paint a horrific picture for Stimson of the fate that would befall 50,000 Allied troops on the beaches of France were the Germans to show up in force, which they surely would. The Allies would be driven back into the sea, leaving “the Channel full of corpses” and the entire Western Front in disarray. Churchill added that were he C in C, he would not support Roundhammer (as Stimson mistakenly called the cross-Channel strike), but as prime minister he had pledged his support to whatever the Combined Chiefs decided upon. Stimson pronounced the entire episode a colossal double cross, “like hitting us in the eye.” Arriving in Algiers, he told Eisenhower that Churchill “was obsessed with the idea of proving to history” that a Balkan strategy was wise “and would repair the damage history now records for [his] misfortunes at the Dardanelles in the last war.” Eisenhower, in turn, feared that if he did not follow up the impending victory in Sicily, he’d be accused of “missing the boat.” His aide, Harry Butcher, recorded the frustration at headquarters: “Yet our own government seems to want to slam on the brakes just when the going gets good.” These were Churchill’s feelings exactly.201
Stimson’s intuitive reading of Churchill was correct. The secretary’s suspicions would have been confirmed had he known that Churchill in mid-July had told the British Chiefs of Staff that the twenty-seven divisions allotted to the cross-Channel thrust “will not be equal to the task of landing and maintaining themselves on land.” Instead, he again argued that Jupiter, the invasion of northern Norway, be brought back into play, and that Mountbatten’s proposed aircraft carriers made of ice be used there in a supporting role. Stimson might have become unhinged had he been privy to Churchill’s line of thought regarding Roundup. That operation, Churchill told the chiefs, should be relegated to the status of a feint. He proposed a similar strategy in Italy, in which he advocated luring German reinforcements into the toe of Italy: “we could contain them there with our right hand and hit out at Naples with our left.”202
Stimson took himself home to Washington, intent on warning Roosevelt and Marshall of Churchill’s wavering before Churchill appeared on the scene to ambush them all. That Churchill was coming to North America had been agreed upon midmonth when he and Roosevelt decided that their need to meet was acute and growing more so. Roosevelt had suggested September 1, but Churchill pushed for mid-August, as he believed events in Sicily were fast outpacing plans. “I must say,” Eden’s parliamentary secretary Oliver Harvey told his diary, “the PM doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet.” The leaders settled upon Quebec City, mid-August, at the Citadel, where in 1759—the year of victories—on the Plains of Abraham, Wolfe and the English snatched Canada from Montcalm and the French. Churchill and Roosevelt invited Stalin, who withheld his response for almost two weeks before declining, although he did acknowledge the need to meet, and suggested a winter rendezvous. Churchill selected the code name for the Quebec meeting, Quadrant, and he put Italy at the top of the agenda. Smuts had sent him a report from Algiers in which he argued, “Rome may mean virtually Italy and its possession may mean this year a transition of transforming the whole war situation and next year finishing it.” This was the position Churchill intended to stake out at Quadrant, for he respected Smuts’s military judgment above all others’, including, on rare occasion, his own. Yet wires had already been crossed; Eisenhower had agreed with Smuts on the need to take Rome at some point, but he had not agreed with Smuts on the timetable to attack Rome. General Ike had his sights set much lower down the leg of Italy.203
Churchill, enthused over Smuts’s rosy predictions, sent Roosevelt a copy of Smuts’s letter. Roosevelt replied, “I like General Smuts’s idea and I hope something of that kind can be undertaken.” That response would have mortified Stimson, but for Churchill, the president’s message was as tasty as one of those Virginia hams the Americans so generously carried to London.204
Brooke, too, had reason in late July to allow a smile to crease his usually dour visage; Churchill fo
r the third time in as many months told the CIGS that he was the man to lead the invasion of France, a mere feint was Churchill to have his way, but a vital command none the less. The occasion was a sherry party at No. 10, at which Churchill asked Brooke’s wife, Benita, what she thought of her husband becoming the supreme commander of the invasion of France. She was stunned. Brooke had still not told his wife.205
On the hideously hot Sunday afternoon of July 25, King Victor Emmanuel III summoned Mussolini to the Villa Ada, where more than four hundred acres of gardens and forest scrubbed Rome’s air of grime and heat. Mussolini, like Churchill, lunched with his king each week, on Mondays in Il Duce’s case. The Sunday summons was anomalous but not necessarily troubling. Il Duce was well aware of the machinations of many within his Grand Council, including his son-in-law Count Ciano. The previous day, the council passed a motion that gave the King added powers, which amounted to a vote of no confidence in Il Duce. Yet, although his minions had mutinied, Mussolini had no doubts as to who would emerge triumphant; he had fought these political wars for more than two decades. This was, after all, Anno XXI of his rule.
The King, wearing a gray marshal’s uniform and trousers seamed with red stripes, was at the villa’s main door to greet his minister. They moved to a ground-floor salon. Mussolini stood as the King spoke. Things were not going well in Italy, the King offered. Even the Alpine Brigade—one of Italy’s more storied units—was rumored to be on the verge of mutiny, and, most insultingly, the troops were singing a nasty little ditty about Il Duce. The council’s vote, the King added, accurately reflected the country’s feelings toward him. In that case, Mussolini replied, I should tender my resignation. He presumed the King would reject that idea. But Emmanuel did not. “I have to tell you,” he replied, “that I unconditionally accept it.” Mussolini slumped into a chaise. The King informed his former premier that he intended to appoint the old warrior and head of Mussolini’s armies, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, as premier. He then offered to take Mussolini under his personal protection, since he, the King, was his only remaining friend in Italy. A car was waiting outside; it happened to be surrounded by several carabiniera. Il Duce understood: he was under arrest. Emmanuel had undone two decades of fascism in just twenty minutes.206
The German ambassador to Rome had the day before reported to Berlin that “Mussolini’s position has never been stronger.” The ambassador was soon recalled to Berlin. Goebbels lamented Il Duce’s downfall to his diary: “It is simply shocking to think that in this manner a revolutionary movement that has been in power for twenty-one years could be liquidated.”207
Badoglio, Ciano, and the Grand Council presumed that Fascist rule would be preserved, simply without Il Duce. But by nightfall, King Emmanuel, now an absolute monarch, dissolved the Italian Fascist Party. Badoglio, who was to be in charge of only civil authority, took to calling himself the King’s executive assistant. The Italian people assumed that Emmanuel would secure peace with honor within days. Nobody in Rome seemed to consider how the Germans might react. The Italian people’s renewed faith in royalty was to be short-lived. The new government signaled Berlin that it would continue the fight, but Goebbels and Hitler considered the message nothing more than a delaying tactic to afford Badoglio time to make a separate peace with the Allies. Indeed, within days, Italian diplomats in neutral capitals began to quietly extend peace feelers in the Allied direction.
Churchill learned of Il Duce’s downfall at Chequers while watching a movie, Sous les Toits de Paris, in the company of Clementine, daughters Mary and Sarah, Alan Brooke, Lord Moran, and John Martin. The projector was stopped, the lights went up, and everyone clapped. London learned of the news during the BBC midnight broadcast, when the Roman decree announcing Mussolini’s “resignation” was read. Harold Nicolson noted that the decree did not bear the date of Anno XXI. Violet Bonham Carter telephoned Nicolson, overjoyed because this meant the release of her son, Mark, who had been captured in Tunisia. Churchill addressed the Commons on July 27. Peace should be made quickly with Italy, he advised. He condemned the sordid treatment in the British and American press of Italy and its King; the House of Savoy always claimed a special little corner of his heart. He went on: until matters were settled, however, “Italy can stew in its own juice.” Nicolson found this phrase to be vulgar, and worse, it defied translation into Italian for BBC rebroadcast to Italy. Nicolson settled on “L’Italia fara il suo proprio minestrone”(loosely: “Italy must boil in its mixed-up soup”).208
“A memorable moment,” wrote Brooke of Mussolini’s end, “and at least a change from ‘the end of the beginning’ to ‘the beginning of the end.’ ” As for Churchill’s speech, Goebbels recorded, “This old rogue [dieser alte Gauner]” was “riding triumphantly on his high horse.”209
The Mediterranean hinge had turned. Yet Sicily lay more than 1,200 air miles from Berlin, almost four times the distance from Normandy to the Rhine, and with the Alps blocking the way. Allied troops and tanks would not be traversing the Apennines and Julian Alps anytime soon, and if they someday set out on that course, they would find the going far more difficult than a race across the Low Countries. The Americans knew geography and they knew arithmetic. Measured in miles and the difficulty of terrain, attacking Germany from southern Italy was like attacking Washington, DC, from Houston by way of the Appalachian Mountains. Attacking Germany from Normandy, on the other hand, was like going to Washington from the North Carolina coast by way of farmlands, plains, and forests. As Churchill and Brooke prepared for the voyage to Canada, their main concern was that Roosevelt, goaded by Stimson, would scotch any further initiatives in Italy. “Marshall absolutely fails to realize what strategic treasures lie at our feet in the Mediterranean,” Brooke complained to his diary, “and always hankers after cross-Channel operations.”210
Churchill, who hungered for any and all operations that promised success, as Italy surely did, meant to settle the issue once and for all during Quadrant.
Shortly after midnight on August 5, Churchill, accompanied by Clementine, Mary, and a court of 250, departed London by train bound for Glasgow, and then by launch for the short run to Greenock, where the Queen Mary, riding at anchor in the Firth of Clyde, awaited his arrival.211
That Mrs. Churchill was among the company was surprising. Her husband’s love for her was absolute. He respected her opinions, which she stated with force. But he rarely sought her advice on policy matters. Clementine traveled only as the Great Man’s wife, and in that regard, given the immense responsibilities he faced, he tended to ignore her. He had business to conduct on board ship, and did so over lunches and dinners. She was shy and found no joy in sharing her table with eight or ten strangers who sought only her husband’s time and energy. She did not manifest a natural or carefree demeanor in such surroundings, her daughter Mary later wrote, and “thus, in a life full of people, she knew much loneliness.” She was prone to tension and anxiety. This, Churchill did not understand, given his lack of interest in any “illness which was rooted in nervous or psychological origins.” (He once told his doctor he liked neither psychiatrists nor their “queer ideas about what is in people’s heads.”) The “nervous strain” under which Clementine had lived for four years was “extracting its price,” Mary later wrote, and by the time she departed for Quebec, “she was in a state of profound physical and nervous exhaustion.” She had no outlets whereby she might find some private joy, did not paint, write books, garden, or gamble. In fact, she hated gambling. Her father had lost much of her legacy at the tables. Churchill did not fare very well himself on the green baize, where, until the war came, he loved to spend an evening while she took to her bed to worry over the probable damage to the family finances. It was hoped the sea voyage might alleviate her stress, yet a voyage such as this, cooped up with strangers, was sure to put her in bed, ill, and soon did.212
Averell Harriman, accompanied by his daughter, Kathleen, joined the party. They were heading to their Arden, New York, home for their first vac
ation in two years. Brigadier Orde Wingate also made the trip, having arrived in London from Burma less than twelve hours earlier, in time to dine with Churchill. Wingate’s “brilliant exploits” leading his Chindits in Burma so impressed the Old Man that he decreed the general must go to Quebec. Such was the haste to get Wingate on the train that “Clive of Burma” did not even have time to change out of his rumpled field uniform. Lord Moran was along, as usual. Within minutes of meeting Wingate, about whom he had heard so much from Churchill, Moran concluded that the jungle warrior “is only a gifted eccentric. He is not another Lawrence.” After further chats with Wingate, Moran decided that the hero of Burma was “hardly sane—in medical jargon, a borderline case.”213
Late on the afternoon of August 5, the Queen Mary, with the P.M. and his party safe on board, slipped down the Firth of Clyde and past the headlands of Arran. The weather, Brooke noted, was “dirty” and blowing hard. The great ship rolled slightly as it made its way into the North Channel of the Irish Sea and then into the Atlantic proper. She had been repainted and partially refurbished and, like England, appeared fresh, powerful, and confident. Yet Brooke believed the ship was heading for troubled waters. “The nearer I get to this conference the less I like it. I know we shall have hard fighting with our American friends.”214
The previous November, Churchill had proclaimed the end of the beginning for Hitler’s Reich. August of 1943 marked the beginning of the end. Each day at sea, news arrived to bolster that conclusion. The Red Army took Belgorod on August 5, and began pushing west. The lower Dnieper River, Kiev, and the Ukraine were its autumn targets. When Field Marshal Manstein told Hitler that Berlin must send twenty divisions’ worth of reinforcements or yield the Donets Basin, Hitler replied that he could spare no forces; they were going to Italy. The previous week, General Heinz Guderian, the architect of blitzkrieg, told Goebbels of his “grave concern” over the status of the war, especially in light of the fact that “we can’t afford to be active on all fronts.” Also galling to Guderian was the futility of pulling armored units away from the Russian front, where they were desperately needed, for service in Italy and the Balkans, where the geography favored infantry and artillery over tanks. Since early May, sixteen German divisions (including four evacuated from Sicily) had been shifted to Italy, where in April there had been none. Eight more had gone to the Balkans and Romania, and thirteen now stood vigil in Norway. Guderian’s observations, taken together with Goebbels’ admission that the RAF was now administering ever more punishing blows to Germany, amounted to a complete validation of Churchill’s strategy of flexibility and opportunism.215
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 Page 102
