Finest Years (64 page)

The troubles of the alliance were most conspicuous at its summit. Churchill, speaking of Allied deception plans, famously observed that truth is so precious that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. He might have said the same about his relationship with the US. Benign deceits were indispensable. In May 1942, when criticism of his leadership was at his height, a letter-writer to
The Times
suggested that instead of being prime minister, Churchill should fill ‘
a place that has long been
vacant in our body politic; it is the post of Public Orator'. The proposal was mischievous, but this was a role which Churchill indeed filled to supreme effect in conducting Britain's dealings with the US. In his speeches between 1940 and 1945 he created a glorious fiction of shared British and American purposes. He never hinted to his own public, still less the transatlantic one, his frustrations and disappointments about the policies of Roosevelt, any more than he did about those of Stalin. Roosevelt, in his turn, largely reciprocated. The key to understanding the wartime Anglo-American relationship is to strip aside the rhetoric of the two leaders and acknowledge that it rested, as relations between states always do, upon perceptions of national interest. There was some genuine sentiment on Churchill's side, but none on Roosevelt's.

As D-Day approached, Churchill's attitude was bewilderingly complex, perhaps even to himself. He thrilled to a historic military operation, the success of which would go far to fulfil every hope he had cherished since 1940. He emphasised to his own people, as well as to the Americans, that Britain was wholeheartedly committed. He took the keenest interest in every detail of the invasion plans, and personally originated the
Mulberry
artificial harbours which were to be deployed off the Normandy coast. But he never ceased to lament the consequences of the huge commitment to Eisenhower's campaign for that of Alexander in Italy. He knew that the United States would
dominate operations in north-west Europe once the Allies were ashore. The British war effort would attain its apogee on 6 June. Thereafter, it must shrink before the sad gaze of its chieftain. At the British Army's peak strength in Normandy, Montgomery commanded fourteen British, one Polish and three Canadian divisions in contact with the enemy. The US Army in north-west Europe grew to sixty divisions, while the Red Army in mid-1944 deployed 480, albeit smaller, formations. Seldom was less than two-thirds of the German army deployed on the eastern front. Throughout the last year of the war, Churchill was labouring to compensate by sheer force of will and personality for the waning significance of Britain's contribution.

For all his declarations of optimism to Roosevelt and Marshall, and at the 15 May final briefing before the King and senior Allied commanders at Montgomery's headquarters, St Paul's School in West London, he nursed terrible fears of failure, or of catastrophic casualties. Every rational calculation suggested that the Allies, aided by surprise, air power and massive resources, should get ashore successfully. But no one knew better than Churchill the extraordinary fighting power of Hitler's army, and the limitations of the citizen soldiers of Britain and the United States, most recently displayed at Anzio. His imagination often soared to heights unattained by lesser mortals, but also plunged to corresponding depths. So often—in France and the Mediterranean, at Singapore, in Crete, Libya, Tunisia, Italy—his heroic expectations had been dashed, or at least limply fulfilled.

If, for whatever reason, D-Day failed, the consequences for the Grand Alliance would be vast and terrible. Hitler's defeat would still be assured, but no new invasion could be launched until 1945. The peoples of Britain and the United States, already tired of war, would suffer a crippling blow to their morale, and to confidence in their leader. Eisenhower and Montgomery would have to be sacked, and replacements identified from a meagre list of candidates. This was a US presidential election year. Disaster in Normandy might precipitate defeat for Roosevelt. At Westminster and in Whitehall there were already plenty of mutterings that Churchill himself was no
longer physically fit to lead the country. ‘I'm fed up to the back teeth with work,' he growled to his secretary Marion Holmes on the night of 14 May, ‘so I'll let you off lightly.' Though his fears about
Overlord
were unlikely to be fulfilled, and his apprehensions were magnified by his burdens and exhaustion, who could blame him for allowing them to fill his mind? What seems most remarkable is the buoyancy and good cheer with which, in the last weeks before D-Day, he concealed black thoughts from all but his intimates.

Alan Brooke invoked the authority of the King to dissuade Churchill from viewing the D-Day assault from a cruiser in the Channel. The prime minister felt that he had earned the right to witness this greatest event of the western war: ‘
A man who has to play
an effective part, with the highest responsibility, in taking grave and terrible decisions of war may need the refreshment of adventure,' he wrote aggrievedly. Yet, beyond the risk to his safety, Brooke surely feared that, should there be a crisis on the day, Churchill would find it irresistible to meddle. It was for this reason that, since 1942, the CIGS had always sought to ensure that the prime minister was absent from any theatre where a battle was imminent. On the morning of 6 June, had Churchill been aboard a warship in the Channel, he would have found it intolerable to stand mute and idle while—for instance—the Americans struggled on Omaha beach. Commanders striving to direct the battle deserved to be spared from Churchillian advice and imprecations.

Thus he was obliged to content himself with a round of visits to the invasion forces as they prepared for their moment of destiny. ‘
Winston…has taken his train
and is touring the Portsmouth area and making a thorough pest of himself!' wrote Brooke ungenerously. The day of 4 June found the prime minister aboard his railway carriage, parked a few miles from the coast in a siding at Droxford in Hampshire, amid a revolving cast of visitors. Eden was irritated by the inconveniences of the accommodation, which had only one bath and one telephone: ‘
Mr Churchill seemed to be
always in the bath and General Ismay always on the telephone. So that, though we were physically nearer the battle, it was almost impossible to
conduct any business.' Out of earshot of the prime minister, Bevin and the Foreign Secretary chatted amiably, though disloyally, about the possibility of sustaining the coalition government if ‘the old man' was obliged to retire. Bevin said he could work with Eden as prime minister, so long as the Tory committed himself to nationalising the coal mines, which the unions would insist upon. Smuts joined them, and asked what they had been discussing. When told Bevin's terms, ‘Socrates' said crisply: ‘
Cheap at the price
.' It was a curiously tasteless discussion for the three men to hold, as a quarter of a million young men prepared to hurl themselves at Hitler's Atlantic Wall. But it reflected the new mood among Britain's politicians, looking to a future beyond Winston Churchill.

De Gaulle came, belatedly summoned from Algiers. The prime minister walked down the rail tracks to meet him, arms outstretched in welcome. De Gaulle 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 the governance of liberated French territory. The British must respect US 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 it was 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 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 next day. The Soviet warlord responded with unbridled cynicism: ‘Yes, there'll be a landing, 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 jibe.

By the evening of 5 June, Churchill was back in London. As Clementine departed for bed, she bade goodnight to her husband in his map room below Whitehall. He said: ‘Do you realise 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 6 June 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 British, American 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 noblest 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 US 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, 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 3,000 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 6 June. 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 pre-invasion bombing, the German build-up proved much slower than had been feared. By nightfall on 7 June, 250,000 of Eisenhower's men were ashore. Three evenings later there were 400,000. Churchill warned MPs of the need to avoid exaggerated optimism. Though ‘great dangers lie behind us, enormous exertions lie before us'. On 10 June, 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 12 June, 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, Admiral Ernest King, a venture akin to striking a match on an iceberg: ‘
Don't look so glum
. 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 cattle 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 6,000 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 V1 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 their descent and detonation. They were soon landing close by him. On Sunday, 18 June, a V1 killed sixty people during a service in the Guards' Chapel, 300 yards from his study. During one noisy night of explosions and anti-aircraft fire, at 2 a.m. he was dictating to his secretary, Marion Holmes. ‘
The PM asked if I were
frightened. 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 19 June: ‘
[Churchill] was at his best
, and said the matter 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.'