Three hours later, he finally rises from the bed. His determination has returned.
19
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT
LONDON, ENGLAND
APRIL 17, 1945
4:08 P.M.
Conversation ceases as Winston Churchill rises to his feet. There is Johnnie Walker scotch whisky on his breath, and he wears a bow tie with his three-piece suit. The rotund prime minister’s trademark half-smoked, well-chewed cigar is nowhere to be seen as he stands somberly in the center aisle of Britain’s ornate House of Lords debating chamber, preparing to remember his late friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was devastated when he received the news of FDR’s death.
“I felt as if I had been struck a considerable blow,” Churchill will write in The Second World War: Triumph and Tragedy, the sixth volume of his war memoirs. “I was overpowered by a sense of deep and irreparable loss.”1
Standing five foot eight and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, Winston Churchill is already a mythic figure in England. He is the son of the legendary Randolph Churchill, a dynamic British statesman who died at the age of forty-five never having fulfilled his goal of becoming prime minister. It would be left to the eccentric Winston to fill that position, although the journey was neither short nor easy. Winston was in a self-described political wilderness for much of his career, and was considered out of touch with political reality, thanks to his criticism of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a time when few British politicians were bothered by the rise of Adolf Hitler. Once Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, at the height of the Nazi threat, he inspired the British people with fearless radio speeches that offered them hope at a time when they had none. When the Luftwaffe bombed London, Churchill was often seen in public, visiting bomb sites at great threat to his own life. Throughout his career, the one steadfast presence has been that of his wife, Clementine. They have been married for thirty-six years and have five children.
It is warm in London this April. “An excess of sunshine,” in the words of one British meteorologist, now makes the air thick inside the century-old, un-air-conditioned chamber. Nevertheless, the 615 elected members of Parliament (MPs, for short) are almost all in attendance, seated in rows on either side of the aisle. Churchill’s Conservative Party sits to his right, the opposition Labour Party to his left.
The MPs had more room to spread out before the war, but German bombers destroyed the House of Commons meeting room in 1941.2 So now they pack into the smaller debating chamber, with its high ceilings and the boarded-up remains of the great stained-glass windows that were shattered by massive Luftwaffe Betonbombes.
The seventy-one-year-old Churchill is a creature of habit, rising each morning at 7:30 in his official residence at 10 Downing Street, just a half mile up the road from the Houses of Parliament. He works in bed until 11:00, whereupon he bathes, pours a weak Johnnie Walker Red scotch and water, and then works some more.3 He sips Pol Roger champagne with lunch at 1:00 p.m. Whenever possible, this is followed by a game of backgammon with Clementine at 3:30. He takes a ninety-minute nap at 5:00 p.m. Arising, Churchill bathes a second time, works for an hour, eats a sumptuous dinner at 8:00 p.m., and smokes a post-dinner cigar with a vintage Hine brandy. After that, he goes back to his study for more work until well past midnight.
Unless he is traveling, this is how almost every day of Winston Churchill’s life is structured, right down to the minute.
But today there is a different feel. Tonight will be the last time that American B-17s and British Lancasters will pound the German city of Dresden. Firebombs have already killed tens of thousands there. This was done with Churchill’s full approval. One out of every 131 Londoners fell victim to German bombs, thus he has few moral qualms about punishing the German people.
What makes today special for Churchill is that it marks a personal and political crossroads. He must mourn the death of a very good friend whose company he compares with the joy one gets in drinking a fine glass of champagne, while also reckoning with the fact that this same friend betrayed him and the British people.
Conflicting emotions stir inside the prime minister as he begins his speech: “When I became Prime Minister, and the war broke out in all its hideous fury, when our own life and survival hung in the balance, I was already in a position to telegraph to the President on terms of an association which had become most intimate and, to me, most agreeable. This continued through all the ups and downs of the world struggle until Thursday last, when I received my last messages from him,” Churchill says.
His voice is patrician and unmistakably English, and his tone is that of professor lecturing a classroom, allowing his fellow MPs a glimpse into what was long a private relationship.
One and all know that Churchill and Roosevelt were exceptionally close. What they do not know is that Roosevelt behaved very badly toward Churchill and England in the weeks leading up to his death. FDR was ineffectual in dealing with Joseph Stalin when the three met in the Black Sea resort of Yalta two months ago, allowing the Russians to dictate the future of postwar Europe at the expense of the British. It was Churchill who, during the early days of the war, relentlessly sought to build what he called the “Grand Alliance” between the three powers. To defeat Nazi Germany, he needed the industrial strength of the United States and the strategic power of Russia. But as time passed, Churchill was edged out of the alliance like an unwanted suitor.
Thus, the British Empire, which has ruled the globe since the voyages of Captain James Cook in the 1770s, is no more. Much of the world will soon be ruled by the United States and Russia.
Just as devastating to Churchill, a man who understands the powerful role symbolism plays in molding public opinion, the Americans are denying the British people their moment of glory. During the war, English cities have been bombed relentlessly, and homes set ablaze. The British Commonwealth has seen three million casualties in the deserts of Africa, in the jungles of Borneo, in the fields of Europe, and in the skies over their beloved Britain. Between 1939 and 1940 they stood with France against Nazi Germany. When France fell, England stood alone.
It was Roosevelt and America who came to their rescue. “There never was a moment’s doubt, as the quarrel opened, upon which side his sympathies lay. The fall of France, and what seemed to most people outside this Island the impending destruction of Great Britain, were to him an agony, although he never lost faith in us.”
Churchill now tells Parliament of the time FDR sent an emissary bearing a note “Written in his own hand. This letter contained the famous lines of Longfellow: ‘Sail on, O ship of State, Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, with all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!’”
Roosevelt did more than supply inspirational verse. He also “loaned” Great Britain ships, planes, tanks, and trucks.
“The bearing of the British nation at that time of stress, when we were all alone, filled him and vast numbers of his countrymen with the warmest sentiments towards our people,” Churchill says to the members of Parliament.
The same Roosevelt of whom Churchill now speaks so warmly is the very politician who has just given Berlin to the Russians. All Allied forces on the Western Front, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery’s included, have been ordered to halt sixty miles short of Berlin, on the banks of the Elbe River.
The command came from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who now inexplicably sees Berlin as having no strategic value. Yet as Winston Churchill knows all too well, the order could not have been given without the approval of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There are four million Allied soldiers in Germany right now, and three million of them are American. The people of the United States would find it unsettling to see a British commander get the glory of capturing the German capital, though Eisenhower sees no problem in allowing a Russian commander to know that very same sense of glory.
The British people will be denied that symbolic moment when Monty and his Tommies march into Berlin. There wil
l be no victorious poses in front of Hitler’s bombed-out Reichstag, allowing all of England to rejoice that their plucky island nation persevered in the face of long odds, and finally conquered the Führer’s capital.
Making the betrayal sting even more is the fact that Churchill is half American. His mother, the beautiful Jenny Jerome Randolph, is from Brooklyn. His grandfather was editor of the New York Times. His ancestors came to America on the Mayflower, and a later generation wintered with George Washington at Valley Forge and waged a revolution against the British. Churchill is even distantly related to a Native American of the Iroquois nation. In this way, his forefathers were even more American than those of the late president.
Yet it is America that now commits the unconscionable act of deferring to Russia at the expense of Britain—in effect, killing England.
Winston Churchill is sad. Sad for his lost friend, sad for FDR’s betrayals, sad for his nation, and, in the end, sad for the uncertainty that is to come. Churchill has already exchanged a number of cables with Harry Truman, and has yet to get a clear read on him.
After so many years of being wary of Nazi Germany, Churchill now sees the Russians as the world’s greatest threat. The divide between the Communist worldview and that of Britain’s is so great that Churchill will compare it to an “iron curtain,” a phrase that will go down in history.
Churchill has been prime minister for five years. But unbeknownst to him, he will be voted out of office in just three months—rejected by the nation he loves, just as he was pushed aside by Stalin and FDR.
“For us, it remains only to say that in Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old,” Churchill concludes to a chorus of “Hear, hear” from MPs on both sides of the aisle.
The exhausted prime minister has spoken for twenty minutes. He then takes his seat. Winston Churchill could use a scotch. This has been a very long day.
20
THIRD ARMY HEADQUARTERS
HERSFELD, GERMANY
APRIL 17, 1945
MORNING
George Patton and Winston Churchill are simpatico. They both believe that the Soviet Union is now the biggest threat to the world and to democracy. Patton is convinced that Churchill is the only man in power who knows what the world is “walking into.”
For now, Patton keeps his comments to himself. Volatile words could get him fired—or even killed. Patton is a man of strong beliefs, and as he will tell the press in a few weeks, he is utterly sure of the Russian danger: “Churchill had a sense of history. Unfortunately, some of our leaders were just damn fools who had no idea of Russian history. Hell, I doubt if they even knew [that] Russia, just less than a hundred years ago, owned Finland, sucked the blood out of Poland, and were using Siberia as a prison for their own people. How Stalin must have sneered when he got through with them at all those phony conferences.”1
This morning, Patton sits at his desk in one of the small trailers that form his mobile command center, thinking about his future. Unless he finagles a command in the Pacific, he knows that his career is all but done.
Still a powerful force, the Third Army was poised to wheel north to capture Berlin, just as they made the hard left turn for Bastogne until Eisenhower stopped them.
Patton believes that letting the Russians have Berlin is folly. And he told Eisenhower this a few days ago. Americans should not only take Berlin, Patton said, but keep on pushing as far to the east as possible. In time, the entire world will come to realize that he is right.
But by then it will be too late. The Russians have already pushed through Austria and are now approaching Fortress Berlin from the south and east. Soon they will take total control of Eastern Europe—a stranglehold they will maintain for the next fifty years.
Fear of the Russians is spreading throughout Germany. Millions of civilian refugees flee toward the American lines—only to be turned back.2 More than a half million German soldiers have raised their hands in surrender so that they will not have to face the Russians. In fact, so many Wehrmacht fighters are giving up that the Allies no longer accept all prisoners of war, because it is impossible to house and feed so many men. When the men of the once feared Eleventh Panzer Division attempt to quit the war, the Third Army will accept them as prisoners only under the condition that they bring their own food.
As Patton sips coffee in his headquarters, he knows that his future may lie as a civilian. He has once again appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and is at last getting the kind of public respect and glory he so desperately craves. Should Patton enter politics, he will be a formidable force.
But the war isn’t over. For the first time in recent memory, the Third Army is not being ordered to go on the defensive. In fact, the opposite is true. Patton has just been given an additional three armored divisions so he can spearhead the final American attacks of the war in southern Germany.
“There was a big meeting yesterday and we got the ball for what looks like the final play,” he writes to Beatrice. As a general, he is not subject to having his letters read by the military censors. Yet his wording is deft, nonetheless: he alludes to what is about to happen yet does not violate national security, lest this letter somehow fall into German hands.
His letter to his wife continues: “Sometimes I feel that I may be nearing the end of this life. I have liberated ‘J.’ and licked the Germans. So what else is there to do?”
The “J.” to whom Patton refers is his son-in-law, thirty-eight-year-old Col. John Waters, who was captured in Tunisia two years ago.
* * *
On the surface, Task Force Baum, the “Hammelburg mission,” was simply a daring attempt to rescue American prisoners of war. Shortly after crossing the Rhine in late March, Patton received word that the POW camp near the German town of Hammelburg held three hundred U.S. soldiers—many of them officers. Its location was sixty long miles from Patton’s army. Among them was Col. John Waters, the husband of Patton’s beloved daughter Beatrice.
After conquering the Polish town of Szubin, Russian soldiers had discovered the remains of a hastily abandoned POW camp. The Allied prisoners had been marched three hundred miles west in the dead of February to prevent their falling into Russian hands. Prison records showed that Waters was once incarcerated there.
Patton will later insist that he did not know Waters was incarcerated in Hammelburg. Yet the truth is he was informed of this fact by the American Military Mission in Moscow on February 9. Furthermore, on the eve of the attack, Patton specifically wrote to Beatrice, “Hope to send an expedition tomorrow to get John.”
Patton’s staff questioned his plan to rescue the prisoners, stating that Patton needed at least thirty-five hundred men to liberate the POW camp, rather than the mere three hundred who were being deployed. Even the hero of Bastogne, Lt. Col. Abe Abrams, thought the mission so foolish that he turned it down, giving the command role to Lt. Harold Cohen. But Cohen didn’t want it, either. He told Patton that he was incapacitated by hemorrhoids. Patton called Cohen’s bluff, ordering that he be taken into the next room and examined by a doctor. Only when the hemorrhoids were confirmed did Patton give the lead role to Capt. Abraham J. Baum, the twice-wounded twenty-three-year-old son of a Brooklyn blouse maker.
Baum and his rescue force were already exhausted from the Rhine crossing. They were handed just fifteen maps for fifty-seven vehicles. It was possible that Task Force Baum would not even find Hammelburg, let alone the POW camp.
Yet Patton, normally such a meticulous planner, ordered the rescue mission to proceed. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had received a great deal of media exposure for liberating thousands of Allied POWs in the Pacific, and Patton hoped to “make MacArthur look like a piker.”3
German opposition was heavy, and soon half the task force lay dead or dying.
But the Americans got through. Less than twenty-four hours after setting out, Task For
ce Baum miraculously arrived at the gates of Oflag XIII-B, as the camp was known. Seeing gray uniforms, they began firing at what they mistakenly believed to be German guards. Instead, the uniforms belonged to Serbian prisoners of war being interned at the camp. The German commandant, Gen. Günther von Goeckel, took pity on the Serbians and requested that a contingent of American prisoners march out the gates and tell their rescuers to cease firing. Meanwhile, von Goeckel and the remaining German guards fled. They no longer had any interest in defending the camp.
At 6:15 p.m., Patton’s son-in-law Colonel Waters marched out the front gate carrying a white flag of surrender. Several American officers and a lone German officer were by his side. Waters was noticeably gaunt from more than forty pounds of weight loss. He walked slowly, intending to tell Captain Baum to stop firing.
Waters never made it. A German guard in a camouflage uniform, not knowing that a truce had been arranged by the camp commandant, steadied his rifle atop a fence post and took careful aim. The bullet entered John Waters’s right hip and exited through his left buttocks. He collapsed to the ground, where he lay until he could be carried back into the camp. There, fellow POW and chief surgeon of the Yugoslavian Army, Radovan Danic, quickly removed the bullet.
As Task Force Baum stormed the gates to the camp, cheered by hundreds of American prisoners, one thing became quite clear: Col. John Waters wasn’t physically capable of going anywhere.
Captain Baum soon found himself faced with another dilemma: instead of three hundred POWs, there were well over a thousand. The task force simply didn’t have enough vehicles to carry every single prisoner back to freedom. The convoy needed to turn around and race back to the American lines under cover of darkness before the Germans could counterattack.
An estimated seven hundred prisoners soon draped themselves atop tanks and halftracks, gorging themselves on K-rations the task force had brought along for just that purpose.4 Those well enough to walk followed along behind the column.
Killing Patton: The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General Page 21
