Authors: James MacGregor Burns
Keeping Roosevelt informed and sympathetic was Churchill’s cardinal policy. The two men still had not met as President and Prime Minister, but their correspondence was becoming frequent and far-ranging. Early in 1941 the President sent Hopkins to England as his personal representative. The British were put off a bit by his unkempt state and blunt talk, but soon they caught the measure of the man. “There he sat,” Churchill remembered later, “slim, frail, ill, but absolutely glowing with refined comprehension of the Cause”—the Cause being the defeat of Hitler—“to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties, or aims.” General Ismay, stiffly noting that Hopkins was deplorably untidy, soon decided that not even Churchill was more single-minded in his conviction that Nazism must be crushed.
Other Roosevelt men followed: W. Averell Harriman, to help expedite Lend-Lease at the British end; William J. Donovan, Roosevelt’s old Republican adversary and personal friend, who conferred with Churchill’s men in the Balkans and the Mediterranean area; and a new ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—John G. Winant, former Republican governor of New Hampshire, slow of speech, Lincolnesque of mien, and as committed as Hopkins to Churchill’s Cause.
To the dispatch of such emissaries Churchill responded in kind.
On the death of Lord Lothian he chose his Foreign Secretary, Halifax, as Ambassador to the United States, thus also making way for Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office. To signalize the appointment, Churchill sent Halifax across the Atlantic in his newest and mightiest battleship, the
King George V,
after journeying to Scapa Flow, with an ailing, shivering Hopkins in tow, to see him off. Roosevelt, at the other end, sailed out from Annapolis to greet the new Ambassador—and also got a chance to look over Churchill’s newest dreadnaught.
But all turned on plans being shaped in London—and by March 1941 Churchill and his military chiefs were facing a dire strategic predicament. The Germans were threatening Greece from their Balkan enclaves. Britain, historically a patron of the ancient nation, was providing air support to the counterattack against the Italians. Some kind of Nazi assault was inevitable, British strategists felt, and hence it was crucial to organize an anti-Nazi bloc in the area; in this they had the support of Colonel Donovan, who went from capital to capital exhorting resistance on the natives’ part and offering American aid in the long run but little at the moment. All through the winter London feverishly marshaled diplomatic and military pressure to win the support of Yugoslavia and Turkey. But Belgrade was too exposed to Axis attack, and too divided internally, to put up a resolute front against Hitler, and Ankara feared that acceptance of British aid would simply provoke a Nazi assault on its spirited but underarmed troops.
Amid all the murk and doubt only one nation seemed fixed in its purpose. Athens informed London categorically that it would resist German invasion, as it had Italian. Would the British help them?
Such a question was bound to excite Churchill’s passion, sympathy, and proclivity toward certain strategies. He admired Greek courage; he wanted to set an example—especially for the United States—of British willingness to succor a besieged ally; and the Balkans had long seemed a likely avenue for an ultimate re-entry into the Continent. All this made his dilemma sharper: to send troops to Greece meant taking them away from his North African front. General Archibald Wavell had trounced the Italians; but how soon would Hitler send reinforcements down the Italian boot, across Sicily, and into Africa? Would Greece turn out to be a trap? But could Britain stand by idly, as Eden said, and see Hitler win a bloodless victory?
Some of Churchill’s military men flatly opposed any drain from North Africa, which they viewed as second in importance only to the home islands themselves. “Why will politicians never learn the simple principle of concentration of force at the vital point and
the avoidance of dispersal of effort?” General Alan Brooke wondered. Unlike Roosevelt, Churchill was not simply and neatly commander in chief. Unlike Hitler, he could not easily override his generals. He had assumed the post of Minister of Defence so that no intermediary would dilute his direct influence on generals and planners. He deluged them with politely worded minutes and chits that could cut like a lash. Hour by hour his orders, reminders, requests poured out of his office urging “action this day,” overriding excuses, demanding reports. But his sheer vitality betrayed a basic lack of authority and control; he had to deal with professional soldiers who admired his strategic versatility and imagination but deplored his amateurism; he had to clear major decisions with his War Cabinet, which included Labourites as well as Tories; he was answerable to Parliament, which at any time could question his policies, express lack of confidence, and even—though it would be almost un-British—vote him out of office. Within this ancient constitutional system Churchill influenced men less by his formal authority than by his inexhaustible energy, sweeping imagination, popular standing, capacity to cajole, flatter, manipulate, and overwhelm.
And now the soldiers awaited the politicians’ decision on Greece. For a time even Churchill drew back. Military co-ordination with the Greeks was faltering; the Balkan common front seemed less likely than ever; a German general named Erwin Rommel was building up striking power in Libya. “Do not consider yourselves obligated to a Greek enterprise if in your hearts you feel it will only be another Norwegian fiasco,” Churchill wired to Eden in Cairo. But Eden, Dill, and Waved favored standing by Greece, no matter how hazardous the course.
It was less Churchillian strategy than Churchillian temperament that decided the issue. For months his febrile eye had been sweeping the shores of Europe for openings. He had a leaning toward quick, daring assaults that would exploit Britain’s sea power, keep the enemy off balance, minimize losses, and widen the role of heroism and dash. With all his bent for modern arms, he had a distaste for mass armies, for their heavy apparatus of mechanics, signalmen, lorries, supply depots, laundries, motor pools. War for him was still an enterprise for bravery and brawn, for mobile forces darting and feeling and jabbing. And behind his strategy and temperament was a sense of history—of the role of character and courage, of contingency and chance. One vast effort might fail and all would be lost. Many efforts by unflinching men along a broad periphery might fail, too, but one force might get through and open up a host of new opportunities.
So London stayed committed to Greece, and on April 6—the
same day they invaded Yugoslavia—the Germans smashed into the little country from the northeast.
There was something magnificent about a nation, itself beleagured, that stood by its commitment to a small ally despite a sinking realization of the hazards. It was magnificent—but it was not war. Hitler, as usual, followed the soldier’s strategy of massing overwhelming force at the crucial points, and his strategic initiative gave him tactical flexibility. He marshaled fourteen divisions—four armored—for a quick assault. Gallantry and dash on the other side were not enough. Soon the British troops with their Greek comrades were streaming south in a nightmare of shrieking Stukas, burned-out vehicles, blocked one-lane mountain roads, dust, and mud. The British Navy rescued the survivors off the southern coasts of the Peloponnesus; 12,000 dead, wounded, and prisoners were left behind.
Meantime, in North Africa the other pincer was turning. Hitler had not planned a major offensive toward Cairo, but once again he was in the right place with the biggest battalions. Testing the British and Australian defenses, Rommel soon felt out the weaknesses resulting from the diversion to Greece. Then, in a series of nicely executed strokes, he turned Wavell’s left flank, drove the British out of Benghazi, and put Tobruk under siege. Wavell’s great turn-of-the-year victory over Italy was canceled out.
The third and crudest chapter was to come: Crete. With Greece and Yugoslavia secured, Hermann Goering planned an audacious exercise for his pilots, glider men, and paratroops—the first large-scale air-borne attack in history. The Germans mobilized 16,000 paratroopers and mountain soldiers and about 1,200 planes. The blow fell on May 20. The defenders killed hundreds of Germans in the air and on the ground; the British Navy in one night destroyed a convoy, drowning 4,000 men. But the Germans kept coming by air. Within a week the British were performing another miracle of evacuation—and Hitler was celebrating his most daring victory of all.
By now Churchill’s strategy was under heavy fire. Old David Lloyd George, his chief in World War I, rose in the House of Commons to flay the conduct of the war. He remembered passing through discouraging days in the first war. “But we have had our third, our fourth great defeat and retreat.” There was no question about Churchill’s brilliance, he went on. But he needed some “ordinary persons” around him—” men against whom he can check his ideas, who are independent, who will stand up to him and tell him really what they think.…” A dozen other members joined in the attack. Before a rapt house Churchill responded with spirit to Lloyd George’s “not particularly exhilarating talk.” So the former
Premier wanted the present one to “be surrounded by people who would stand up to me and say, ‘No, No, No,’ ” Churchill declaimed. “Why, good gracious, has he no idea how strong the negative principle is in the constitution and working of the British war-making machine?” The problem was not more brakes, but more speed. “At one moment we are asked to emulate the Germans in their audacity and vigour, and the next moment the Prime Minister is to be assisted by being surrounded by a number of ‘No-men’.”
Only three Members voted against the government, but recriminations swelled after the debacle in Crete. Churchill grumbled in the House that neither Hitler nor Mussolini had been summoned before their parliaments to account for their mistakes. He reminded the Members that the Germans could readily shift air power along the interior railroads and airways of Europe, while Britain had to send aircraft “packed in crates, then put on ships and sent on the great ocean spaces until they reach the Cape of Good Hope, then taken to Egypt, set up again, trued up and put in the air when they arrive….” He would not go into tactical details. “Defeat is bitter.” The only answer to defeat was victory.
In Parliament Churchill overcame his foes; it was his friends who puzzled him. After Greece, Roosevelt wired him condolences on the loss, congratulations on British heroism in the “wholly justified delaying action,” but added ominously: “Furthermore, if additional withdrawals become necessary, they will all be a part of the plan which at this stage of the war shortens British lines, greatly extends the Axis lines, and compels the enemy to expend great quantities of men and equipment. I am satisfied that both here and in Great Britain public opinion is growing to realize that even if you have to withdraw farther in the Eastern Mediterranean, you will not allow any great
debacle
or surrender, and that in the last analysis the naval control of the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean will in time win the war.”
Churchill bridled at what seemed to be Roosevelt’s counsel of despair. The loss of Egypt and the Middle East would be grave, he warned Roosevelt. In this war every post was a winning-post, “and how many more are we going to lose?” He would be frank. “The one decisive counterweight I can see to balance the growing pessimism in Turkey, the Near East, and in Spain would be if United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent Power.”
Defeat is bitter. After the loss of the Balkans, Churchill faced strategic bankruptcy. Where could he stop Hitler? During these anxious weeks his soldiers had mopped up Italians in East Africa and bested Vichy Frenchmen in Syria; but they had not beaten Nazis. By June he was reduced to the tactics of desperation: to
bolster the defense against Rommel he took the terrible risk of sending ships loaded with tanks directly through Gibraltar to Wavell, depleting tank strength at home and risking sinkings in the Mediterranean. The gamble succeeded, but Wavell still could not force Rommel back. Reluctantly Churchill decided to shift Wavell out of the Mideast command. Nothing seemed to be going well. In May the Germans gave London its worst bombing yet and destroyed much of the House of Commons; Churchill stood in the wreckage and cried.
It was clearer to him than ever: America was his only hope. So far, he told the House of Commons in his May 7 speech, his government had made no serious mistakes in dealing with Washington. “Neither by boasting nor by begging have we offended them.” Now must be awaited the full deployment of that mighty democracy of 130 million people. But everyone knew that time was getting short, and the mighty democracy was moving with awful deliberation. Churchill concluded a broadcast to his people:
“For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
“And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look, the land is bright.”
Eastward the land was dark and disquieting. During the lull of 1940-41, London and Washington tried to divine Tokyo’s next moves. Would the Japanese expand their drive into China, or turn north toward Soviet Siberia, or south toward the exposed colonies of France and Holland, or east toward the Philippines or even Hawaii? Step by step the soldiers and diplomats of Tokyo had been building the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; they had occupied Hainan, poured troops into northern French Indochina, signed the Tripartite Pact, set up a puppet government in Nanking, demanded oil and trade in the Dutch East Indies. What next?
Rumors drifted through Tokyo. “…There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the United States, are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor,” Ambassador Grew noted in his diary late in January 1941. “I rather guess the boys in Hawaii are not precisely asleep.”