by Max Hastings
De Gaulle came, belatedly summoned from Algiers. The prime minister walked down the rail tracks to meet him, arms outstretched in welcome. The Frenchman ignored the offered embrace, and vented his bitterness that he himself was denied a role in the Allied return to his country. Churchill told him that the Americans insisted that his committee should not be granted its claim to the governance of liberated French territory. The British must respect U.S. wishes. He urged de Gaulle to seek a personal meeting with Roosevelt, in the hope that this might resolve their differences. The Frenchman later claimed that at Droxford Churchill told him that if forced to choose between America and France, Britain would always side with the United States. This was almost certainly false, or at least a wilful exaggeration. But de Gaulle’s bitterness about being denied authority in France, a claim which he had striven for four years to justify, confirmed an animosity towards Britain which persisted for the rest of his life. Churchill exchanged cables with Roosevelt about the possibility of sending the Free French leader back to Algiers. In the event, he was allowed to remain. But Anglo-French relations were poisoned to a degree unassuaged by de Gaulle’s subsequent elevation to power.
The Yugoslav partisan leader Milovan Djilas was with Stalin at his dacha outside Moscow when word came that the Allies would land in France the next day. The Soviet warlord responded with unbridled cynicism: “Yes, there’ll be a landing935, if there is no fog. Until now there was always something that interfered. I suspect tomorrow it will be something else. Maybe they’ll meet up with some Germans! What if they meet up with some Germans? Maybe there won’t be a landing then, but just promises as usual.” Molotov hastily explained to the Yugoslav that Stalin did not really doubt that there would be an invasion, but enjoyed mocking the Allies. On this matter, after the prevarications and deceits of the previous two years, the Soviet leader had perhaps earned his jibes.
By the evening of June 5, Churchill was back in London. As Clementine departed for bed, she bade good night to her husband in his Map Room below Whitehall. He said: “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand young men may have been killed?” Unlike the Americans, with their unshakeable optimism, Churchill had borne the consequences of so many failures since 1940. It would be the crowning misery if British arms now failed to acquit themselves in a manner worthy of this crowning hour.
The D-Day landings of June 6 represented the greatest feat of military organisation in history, a triumph of planning, logistics and above all human endeavour. The massed airborne assault on the flanks which began in darkness, the air and naval bombardment followed by the dawn dash up the fire-swept shoreline by more than 100,000 American, British and Canadian engineers, infantrymen, armoured crews and gunners, achieved brilliant success. In a spirit that would have warmed the prime minister’s heart, as one landing craft of the East Yorkshire Regiment approached the beach at La Brèche, company commander Major “Banger” King read Henry V aloud to his men:
On, on you noble English!
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof.
At Colleville, the local mayor appeared on the sands to welcome the invaders, his person adorned by a gleaming brass fireman’s helmet. At Omaha Beach, the U.S. 29th Division landed to meet the most savage resistance of the day. “As our boat touched sand and the ramp went down,” an infantryman recalled later, “I became a visitor to hell.” To Ernest Hemingway, serving as a war correspondent, the guns of the supporting battleships “sounded as though they were throwing whole railway trains across the sky.” The invaders fought doggedly through flame and smoke, wire entanglements, pillboxes, minefields and gun positions, to stake out the claims of the Allied armies inside Hitler’s Europe.
Hitler’s Atlantic Wall was breached. Churchill spent the morning of D-Day in his Map Room, following the progress of the landings hour by hour. To few men in the world did the battle mean so much. At noon, he told the House of Commons: “This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complex and difficult that has ever taken place.” He lunched with the king, then returned for the afternoon to Downing Street, then at 6:15 felt able to tell the Commons that the battle was proceeding “in a highly satisfactory manner.” Instead of the carnage which Churchill feared, just three thousand American, British and Canadian troops died on D-Day, together with about the same number of French civilians. By nightfall, in places the invaders had advanced several miles inland, securing perimeters which would soon be linked. A long and terrible struggle lay ahead, as invaders and defenders raced to reinforce their rival armies in Normandy. There were days when more Allied soldiers perished than on June 6. But the triumph of Overlord was assured.
Critically aided both by Anglo-American deception plans, which kept Hitler in expectation of further landings, and by preinvasion bombing, the German buildup proved much slower than had been feared. By nightfall on June 7, 250,000 of Eisenhower’s men were ashore. Three evenings later, there were 400,000. Churchill warned Parliament of the need to avoid exaggerated optimism. Though “great dangers lie behind us, enormous exertions lie before us.” On June 10, in a cable to Stalin he expressed extravagant hopes about Italy. Alexander, he proclaimed, was “chasing the beaten remnants of Kesselring’s army swiftly northwards. He is on their tracks while mopping up the others.” In truth, such a display of energy, so comprehensive a victory, was entirely beyond Alexander and his armies.
Two days later, on June 12, Churchill was at last allowed to visit the invasion beachhead in Normandy, an expedition which, of course, he adored. On the way to Portsmouth, he sought to tease a companion, Adm. Ernest King, a venture akin to striking a match on an iceberg: “Don’t look so glum936. I’m not trying to take anything away from the United States Navy just now.” He was enchanted by the spectacle of the invasion coast, cabling again to Stalin: “It is a wonderful sight to see this city of ships stretching along the coast for nearly fifty miles and apparently safe from the air and the U-boats which are so near.” Lunching with Montgomery, he expressed surprise that the Norman countryside seemed relatively unscathed: “We are surrounded by fat cattle937 lying in luscious pastures with their paws crossed.” Before returning to England, the destroyer which carried him fired a few rounds towards German shore positions, at a range of six thousand yards. He declared his delight at sailing for the first time aboard a ship of the Royal Navy in action.
Back home, a grim welcome awaited. That night, German V-1 flying bombs began to fall on London. Churchill stood outside Downing Street, scanning the sky and listening to the growling motors of the “doodlebugs” overhead, whose sudden silence presaged descent and detonation. They were soon landing close by him. On Sunday, June 18, a V-1 killed sixty people during a service in the Guards’ Chapel, three hundred yards from his study. During one noisy night of explosions and antiaircraft fire, at two a.m. he was dictating to his secretary Marion Holmes. “The PM asked if I were frightened938. I said ‘No.’ How can one feel frightened in his company?” The first sea lord, Cunningham, was often a critic of the prime minister, but wrote in his diary after a meeting of the anti–flying bomb Crossbow Committee on June 19: “[Churchill] was at his best, and said the matter939 had to be put robustly to the populace, that their tribulations were part of the battle in France, and that they should be very glad to share in the soldiers’ dangers.”
In truth, however, the British people were much shaken by the V-1 offensive. They were almost four years older, and incomparably more tired, than they had been during the blitz of 1940. The monstrous impersonality of the doodlebugs, striking at all hours of day and night, seemed a refinement of cruelty. Mrs. Lylie Eldergill, an East Londoner, wrote to a friend in America: “I do hope it will soon940 be ended. My nerves can’t take much more.” Brooke was disgusted by the emotionalism of Herbert Morrison, the home secretary: “He kept on repeating941 that the population of London could not be asked to stand this strain after 5 years of war … It was a pathetic performance.” The bombardment severely affected industrial
production in target areas. In the first week, 526 civilians were killed, and thereafter the toll mounted. It was a godsend to morale that Rome’s fall and D-Day had taken place before the V-1 offensive began. Hitler made an important mistake, by wasting massive resources on his secret weapons programme. The V-1s and subsequent V-2 rockets were marvels of technology by the standards of the day, but their guidance was too imprecise, their warheads too small, to alter strategic outcomes. The V weapons empowered the Nazis merely to cause distress in Britain. They might have inflicted more serious damage by targeting the Allied beachhead in Normandy.
Macmillan described Churchill one evening at Chequers at around this time: “Sitting in the drawing-room942 about six o’clock [he] said: ‘I am an old and weary man. I feel exhausted.’ Mrs. Churchill said, ‘But think what Hitler and Mussolini feel like!’ To which Winston replied, ‘Ah, but at least Mussolini has had the satisfaction of murdering his son-in-law [Count Ciano].’ This repartee so pleased him that he went for a walk and appeared to revive.” One of Brooke’s most notorious diary entries about the prime minister was written on August 15:
We have now reached the stage943 that for the good of the nation and for the good of his own reputation it would be a godsend if he could disappear out of public life. He has probably done more for this country than any other human being has ever done, his reputation has reached its climax, it would be a tragedy to blemish such a past by foolish actions during an inevitable decline which has set in during the past year. Personally I have found him almost impossible to work with of late, and I am filled with apprehension as to where he may lead us next.
Yet if Churchill was indeed old, exhausted and often wrong-headed, he was unchallengeable as Britain’s war leader, and Brooke diminished himself by revealing such impatience with him. The prime minister possessed a stature which lifted the global prestige of his country far beyond that conferred by its shrinking military contribution. Jock Colville wrote: “Whatever the PM’s shortcomings944 may be, there is no doubt that he does provide guidance and purpose for the Chiefs of Staffs and the F.O. on matters which, without him, would often be lost in the maze of inter-departmentalism or frittered away by caution and compromise. Moreover he has two qualities, imagination and resolution, which are conspicuously lacking among other Ministers and among the Chiefs of Staff. I hear him much criticised, often by people in close contact with him, but I think much of the criticism is due to the inability to see people and their actions in the right perspective when one examines them at quarters too close.” All this was profoundly true.
Even in the last phase of the war, when American dominance became painfully explicit, Churchill fulfilled a critical role in sustaining the momentum of his nation. After D-Day, but for the prime minister’s personal contribution, Britain would have become a backwater, a supply centre and aircraft carrier for the American-led armies in Europe. On the battlefield, there was considerable evidence that the British Army was once more displaying its limitations. The war correspondent Alan Moorehead, who served through the desert, Italy and into Normandy, enjoyed a close relationship with Montgomery. His view was noted after the war by Forrest Pogue: “By July, the American soldier945 [was] better than the English soldier. Original English … came from divisions which had been much bled. In first few days [I] went with Br. tanks. They stopped at every bridge because there might be an 88 around.” These strictures might be a little harsh, but the Americans were justified in thinking the British, after five years of war, more casualty-averse than themselves.
In 1944–45, Churchill exercised much less influence upon events than in 1940–43. But without him, his country would have seemed a mere exhausted victim of the conflict, rather than the protagonist which he was determined that Britain should be seen to remain until the end. “So far as it has gone,” Churchill told the Commons, “this is certainly a glorious story, not only liberating the fields of France after atrocious enslavement but also uniting in bonds of true comradeship the great democracies of the West and the English-speaking peoples of the world … Let us go on, then, to battle on every front … Drive on through the storm, now that it reaches its fury, with the same singleness of purpose and inflexibility of resolve as we showed to the world when we were alone.” And so he himself sought to do.
EIGHTEEN
Bargaining with an Empty Wallet
FOR CHURCHILL, the weeks that followed D-Day were dominated by further fruitless wrangles with the Americans. Roosevelt sent him a headmasterly rebuke946, drafted by Cordell Hull, for appearing to concede to the Russians a lead role in Romanian affairs, in return for Soviet acquiescence in British dominance of Greece. To the Americans, this attitude reflected the deplorable British enthusiasm for bilaterally agreed spheres of influence. Churchill replied irritably next day: “It would be quite easy for me, on the general principle of slithering to the left, which is so popular in foreign policy, to let things rip, when the King of Greece would probably be forced to abdicate and [the Communists of] EAM would work a reign of terror … I cannot admit that I have done anything wrong in this matter.” If Roosevelt proposed to take umbrage about British failure to inform the White House about every cable to Stalin concerning Greece and Romania, then what of U.S. messages to Moscow concerning Poland, which the British were not made party to? Churchill concluded sadly: “I cannot think of any moment947 when the burden of the war has lain more heavily upon me or when I have felt so unequal to its ever-more entangled problems.”
The prime minister still favoured landings on the Atlantic coast of France instead of Anvil and, even more dramatically, a major assault on Istria, the northeast Italian coast beyond Trieste, to take place in September. Brooke was cautious about this, warning that the terrain might favour the defence, and could precipitate a winter campaign in the Alps. But the Chiefs and their master were galvanised by an intercepted German signal on June 17. In this Hitler declared his determination to hold Apennine positions as “the final blocking line” to prevent the Allies from breaking into the northern Italian plain of the Po. Here, in British eyes, was compelling evidence of the German commitment to Italy, and thus of the value of contesting mastery there. The Americans—both Eisenhower and the U.S. Chiefs—were unimpressed. There followed one of the most acrimonious Anglo-American exchanges of the war.
The British Chiefs insisted that it was “unacceptable” for more Allied forces to be withdrawn from Italy. Eisenhower, as supreme commander, reasserted his commitment to the landings in southern France, and even more strongly rejected British notions, propounded in a plan drawn up by Maitland Wilson as Mediterranean C-in-C, for a drive from northeast Italy to the so-called Ljubljana Gap. On June 20 Ike wrote to Marshall that Maitland Wilson’s plan “seems to discount the fact that Combined Chiefs of Staff have long ago decided to make Western Europe the base from which to conduct decisive operations against Germany. To authorize any departure from this sound decision seems to me ill-advised and potentially dangerous … In my opinion to contemplate wandering off overland via Trieste to Ljubljana repeat Ljubljana is to indulge in conjecture to an unwarrantable degree … I am unable to repeat unable to see how overriding necessity for exploiting the early success of Overlord is thereby assisted.” The American Chiefs signalled on June 24 that Maitland Wilson’s Trieste plan was “unacceptable.” They confirmed their insistence that the three U.S. and seven French divisions earmarked for Anvil should be withdrawn from Italian operations.
Ill-advisedly, Churchill appealed against this decision to Roosevelt, while on June 26 the British Chiefs of Staff reaffirmed the “unacceptability” of the redeployment in a signal to their counterparts in Washington. Marshall remained immovable. On the twenty-eighth, Churchill dispatched a note to the president in which he wrote: “Whether we should ruin all hopes948 of a major victory in Italy and all its fronts and condemn ourselves to a passive role in that theatre, after having broken up the fine Allied army which is advancing so rapidly through the peninsula, for the sake of ‘Anv
il’ with all its limitations, is indeed a grave question for His Majesty’s Government and the President, with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, to decide.” He himself, he said, was entirely hostile to Anvil. The next day, Roosevelt rejected Churchill’s message: “My interests and hopes,”949 he said, “center on defeating the Germans in front of Eisenhower and driving on into Germany, rather than on limiting this action for the purpose of staging a full major effort in Italy.” Roosevelt added, in the midst of his own reelection campaign, that there were also political implications: “I should never survive even a slight setback in ‘Overlord’ if it were known that fairly large forces had been diverted to the Balkans.”
Amazingly, Churchill returned to the charge. In a message to Roosevelt on July 1, after a long exposition of the futility of Anvil—“the splitting up of the campaign in the Mediterranean into two operations neither of which can do anything decisive, is, in my humble and respectful opinion, the first major strategic and political error for which we two have to be responsible”—he concluded: “What can I do, Mr. President950, when your Chiefs of Staff insist on casting aside our Italian offensive campaign, with all its dazzling possibilities … when we are to see the integral life of this campaign drained off into the Rhone Valley? … I am sure that if we could have met, as I so frequently proposed, we should have reached a happy agreement.” This was woeful stuff. It was supremely tactless for the prime minister to suggest to the president that, if he had been able to browbeat him face to face, he might have persuaded him to override his own Chiefs of Staff. To the British Chiefs, he expressed contempt for their American counterparts: “The Arnold-King-Marshall combination is one of the stupidest951 strategic teams ever seen. They are good fellows and there is no need to tell them this.”
