The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 Read online

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  To the memory of

  JOHN COLVILLE, C.B., C.V.O.

  1915–1987

  Harrovian, Civil Servant, Fighter, Pilot, Scholar

  (William Manchester, August 1994)

  FOR BARBARA

  (Paul Reid, August 2012)

  In freta dum fluvii current, dum montibus umbrae

  Lustrabunt convexa, polus dum sidera pascet;

  semper honos nomenque tuum laudesque manebunt.

  As long as rivers shall run down to the sea,

  or shadows touch the mountain slopes,

  or stars graze in the vault of heaven,

  so long shall your honor, your name,

  your praises, endure.

  VIRGIL, AENEID, 1:607–9

  MAPS

  The British Isles, September 1940

  London and the City of Westminster, September 1940

  Eastern Mediterranean

  North Atlantic

  Southeast Asia

  Western Mediterranean

  Eastern Europe and the Middle East

  Western Europe

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 1988, William Manchester began writing The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, the third and final volume of his biography of Winston Churchill. Bill’s research was complete. He had assembled his notes in fifty-page bound 8½ × 21-inch paper tablets, which he called his long notes, or “clumps.” More than forty such tablets were dedicated to the war years 1940–1945, and a few addressed the postwar years 1946–1965.

  His notes consisted of photocopied extracts from myriad sources, including Churchill’s speeches, wartime memoirs, letters and telegrams Churchill sent and received, diary entries of contemporaries, official documents, newspaper clippings, and numerous secondary sources. They also included excerpts from transcripts of more than fifty interviews Bill conducted in the early 1980s with Churchill’s friends, family, and colleagues.

  Between 1988 and 1998, Bill, in increasingly poor health, wrote about one hundred pages of Defender of the Realm, a first draft covering the German invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940, and the beginning of the Battle of Britain in July 1940. Then, in 1998, he suffered two strokes that left his speech slightly slurred and his left leg partially paralyzed. Although the strokes did not steal his memory or his ability to formulate complex thoughts, Bill could no longer connect those thoughts on paper. He could no longer write.

  My first encounter with Bill was on the page, when I read his account of the assassination of President Kennedy, The Death of a President. By the time I met Bill in person, I had read all of his nonfiction works. Like so many readers, I thought the first two books of The Last Lion were magnificent, and like so many, I eagerly awaited the final volume.

  In 1996, I covered a reunion in West Palm Beach of Bill’s World War Two Marine buddies for the Palm Beach Post, where I worked as a reporter. Bill, ill with pneumonia, could not attend. Two years later, in 1998, I accompanied five of those old Marines to Bill’s home in Middletown, Connecticut, for a reunion designed to raise his spirits after his strokes and the death earlier in the year of his wife of fifty years, Judy. The Marines had all achieved success in life—an industrialist, a petroleum engineer, an oceanographer and Magellan biographer, and a Baptist minister with a doctorate in divinity—and they were proud of their service as enlisted men. By the end of the weekend, I felt as if all these Marines were my good friends, including Bill.

  Our friendship deepened in the years that followed. I visited Bill often, sometimes in the company of the old Marines, who gathered at Bill’s house once a year. Bill and I chatted by phone regularly. We talked history, politics, and, always, baseball, specifically the annual autumn demise of our Boston Red Sox. He asked for, and I sent him, copies of my stories. I felt certain that he would never finish Defender of the Realm, but when I suggested that he find someone to complete the book, he would shake his head no. He and his publisher, Little, Brown, regularly received calls and letters—even surprise office visits—from fans around the world asking when the book would be finished. In 2001 Bill told the New York Times that he could no longer put words to paper. Eventually, he agreed to consider a collaborator, but none proposed worked out. My surprise, therefore, was total when, late one evening in early October 2003, during one of my visits to Middletown, Bill asked me to finish Defender of the Realm. “You write,” he said, “I’ll edit. My red pencils are sharpened and ready.”

  He sent me home that weekend with about a dozen of his clumps and several books having to do with the Battle of Britain. My mission was to write sixty pages on the Blitz. Based on their impressions of my sample chapter, Bill, Don Congdon, Bill’s agent of fifty years, and Little, Brown decided I should proceed. Our collaboration began.

  But it would not last long. By early 2004 Bill was very ill. He died on June 1. By then I had realized that his clumps were not intended for literal transcription, but had served Bill as a narrative catalyst. The notes were arranged neither strictly chronologically nor by topic or character. Bill had inked into the margins numerous shorthand reminders and color-coded references to topics and sources only he could decipher. Some he had explained to me, others he had not. The notes had helped guide Bill toward a form—a portrait of Churchill—that he had already envisioned, much as an architect’s rough line drawings can conjure in his mind an image of his finished building. The notes contained enormous amounts of information, but they had no outline and no sense of narrative structure. Bill’s notes spoke to him in ways they could not speak to me.

  Over the course of several months, I assembled much of the original source material Bill had used, including the full transcripts of the interviews he had excerpted in his notes. To this I added a digital edition of Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 1897–1963, edited by Robert Rhodes James, along with new editions of memoirs and diaries of Churchill’s contemporaries. I perused official British government documents that had not been released when Bill was assembling his notes. I reread Bill’s earlier biographies and histories for insight into his approach to narrative pace and cadence. Only then could I begin to write the book.

  Bill spent many years on the Wesleyan University campus as an adjunct professor of history and writer in residence, but he was not an academic. He was a storyteller who made history accessible by masterful use of the dramatist’s tools—plot, setting, and character. He and I often discussed his approach, and agreed that the biographer must get out of the way of his subject, who should be placed squarely within his times and be allowed to speak and act for himself. In the case of the greatest Englishman of the twentieth century, the importance of doing this is obvious.

  At the start of the project, I spoke at length with the eminent British historian Sir John Keegan, who offered encouragement and guidance. Churchill’s namesake grandson, Winston S. Churchill, gave generously of his time, up to his death in 2010, answering yet more questions on the subjec
t of Sir Winston, as did Churchill’s daughter, Lady Soames.

  I thank the following friends and colleagues who offered wise counsel as the years went by; many read and commented on the manuscript in its various stages: Sanford Kaye, Jim Case, Rich Cooper, Jane Deering, Tess Van Dyke-Gillespie, Bill Gillespie, David Rising, Jeff Baker, Albin Irzyk (Brigadier General, U.S. Army, ret.), John Newton, Craig Horn, Howard Bursen, Dr. Porter Crow, Virginia Creeden, and Alex and Joan Balas. Thanks also to my former editors at the Palm Beach Post—Tom O’Hara, Jan Tuckwood, and Melissa Segrest—whose journalistic standards are in the highest and best tradition of American newspapering. Alan White (British Foreign Office, ret.) offered vital insight into the workings of the British government. Journalist John Murawski examined the manuscript with a reporter’s eye. Doctors Audrey Tomlinson, Ron Pies, David Armitage, and Michael First brought their vast clinical expertise to bear on matters of Churchill’s mental and physical health. My thanks also go to Maggi LeDuc, a recent graduate of American University, who spent many long hours in a successful search for photographs that captured the spirit of Churchill and his times.

  Historian Lynne Olson, author of Citizens of London, gave sound advice over the years when asked, and I asked often. Roosevelt scholar Warren Kimball provided invaluable guidance on the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship.

  Lee Pollock, executive director of the Churchill Centre, put the resources of that organization at my disposal. Those who seek to learn more about the extraordinary life of Sir Winston Churchill are well advised to begin their search by contacting Lee at www.winstonchurchill.org. Richard Langworth, editor of the Churchill Centre quarterly, Finest Hour, combed the manuscript for historical accuracy, as he had done for volume two, Alone.

  Over the past eight years, Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch and editorial director Geoff Shandler have given this project their full support. I thank them and assistant editor Liese Mayer and editorial assistant Brandon Coward, who, with constant good cheer, helped guide the project through its final stages.

  I owe my editor, William D. Phillips, an immeasurable debt of gratitude. Six times the manuscript passed between us, and six times Bill wrought improvements. This is his book, too. And after Bill finished his perusals of the work, Pamela Marshall took up her copyediting task, from the first word to the last, twice. It has been a pleasure to work with Bill and Pamela, but foremost, it has been an honor.

  I am profoundly grateful to Bob Kopf, Ken Linge, and Jim Miller; Ray Foster, my neighbor from Lynn, North Carolina; my brother, Jim Reid; and my good and true friends Marcello and Diane Fiorentino. Without them, this project could not have come to fruition.

  My agent Don Congdon did not live to see the finished manuscript. Don’s son and partner, Michael, stepped in and, like so many who had a hand in this project, did so with enthusiasm.

  In 2003 Bill Manchester, with one simple declarative sentence, changed my life: “I’d like you to finish the book.” Bill died years before he could hold in his hand a complete manuscript of Defender of the Realm. But even though he was not here to discuss the project, or to review my pages or help me decipher his cryptic notations, our partnership remained intact. Bill trusted me to tell this story, and for that I thank him.

  Five others, who long ago set in motion my role in this story, also did not live to see the completed manuscript: John and Eleanor Reppucci, my childhood neighbors in Winchester, Massachusetts; my sister Kathy; and my parents, Mary and Sam Reid, he a son of South Boston and the United States Naval Academy. They all loved a good tale, and all could spin one. My introduction to Churchill came almost six decades ago. On Saturday mornings I stood next to the stove as my father, attired in his old Annapolis bathrobe and a seaman’s cap, flipped pancakes and fried eggs while reciting along to Churchill’s wartime speeches, which played on our old RCA Victrola. “Listen to Winston,” my father commanded, stabbing the air with the spatula in syncopation with Churchill’s words. I listened.

  One year my father put the six volumes of Churchill’s The Second World War under the Christmas tree. Quoting Churchill, he summed up the moral of the story thus: Never give in.

  I offer those words to a new generation of readers, including my son, Patrick, who enthusiastically critiqued every permutation of the manuscript, my daughters, Georgia and Mary, and my stepsons, August and Alex. Never Give In.

  Paul Reid

  August 2012

  Tryon, North Carolina

  Preamble

  THE LION HUNTED

  On June 21, 1940, the first day of summer, Winston Churchill was the most visible man in England. France accepted Hitler’s surrender terms that day and, with virtually all of Europe now under the swastika, with the Soviet Union a Nazi accomplice, and the United States isolationist, Britain and the Dominions confronted the Third Reich alone. Prime minister for only six weeks, Churchill was defending more than his island home. As first minister of the Crown he was also the central figure of the British Empire, then extant, comprising almost one-quarter of Earth’s landmass and almost a quarter of its population. The gravity of his role was obvious. Yet though all saw him, all did not see him alike. He was a multifarious individual, including within one man a whole troupe of characters, some of them subversive of one another and none feigned.

  At No. 10 Downing Street everyone referred to the newly appointed sixty-five-year-old P.M. as “the Old Man.” In many ways he was an alarming master. He worked outrageous hours. He was self-centered and could be shockingly inconsiderate. Because of his lisp, and because he growled so often, his speech was often hard to follow, and aides had to learn what he meant when he referred to “that moon-faced man in the Foreign Office” or “Lord Left-leg-limps.” Although he never actually overruled his military advisers, he refused to delegate any of the prime minister’s powers to his staff. He wanted to make all decisions because, Sir Ian Jacob recalled, “he was determined to be Number One.” Jacob served as military assistant secretary to the War Cabinet during the war, and came to know Churchill’s obstinacy well.1

  Not only did Churchill insist on oversight of strategic matters, he mired himself in the details as well. Because the noise of modern warfare was appalling, he decided soldiers would be issued earplugs. It occurred to him that World War One weapons, taken as trophies, could be made fit for action. A survey was launched. And what would be done, he demanded to know, to safeguard the animals at the zoo if German bombs blew open the cages? Some of his musings on the finer points of warfare were prescient. He asked his liaison to the Chiefs of Staff, Major General Hastings (“Pug”) Ismay, to expedite the development of “some projectile which can be fired from a rifle at a tank like a rifle grenade, or from an anti-Tank [sic] rifle, like a trench-mortar bomb.”

  Yet woe unto the underling who brought to Churchill’s attention details he considered petty. When King George’s minister in Reykjavík suggested that Icelandic civilians be evacuated before the expected German invasion of that country, Churchill shot back, “Surely this is great nonsense.” The dangers faced by Icelanders were “trifling” and “anyhow they have a large island and plenty of places to run into.” He thoroughly enjoyed his meanderings in the thickets of details. One day that spring, while fiddling with an operational model of a mine intended to be deployed in the Rhine basin, he turned to an aide and said, “This is one of those rare and happy occasions when respectable people like you and me can enjoy pleasures normally reserved to the Irish Republican Army.”2

  This small pleasantry exchanged with a subordinate was not a rare behavior, yet neither was it a regular occurrence. Underlings were more likely to experience his wrath. His pale-blue eyes telegraphed his moods, and when his gaze—“as warm as summer sunshine” when he was pleased—turned ice-cold, his staff knew an eruption was forthcoming. Certainly his roar was awesome—he terrorized his admirals, his generals, and, daily, his staff. “God’s teeth, girl, can’t you even do it right the second time, I said ripe, ripe, ripe—P P P,” he bellowed to
Elizabeth Layton, a new typist at No. 10 who had the misfortune to interpret a mumbled “ripe” as “right.” Yet, as usual after his outbursts, Churchill uttered his version of an apology—he “forgave” Layton—and “was very amiable for the rest of the day.” Actually, his nature was informed by humane sympathy for all troubled men, including those Englishmen (he always preferred English and Englishmen to British and Britons) he held responsible for England’s present plight. Learning that a mob had stoned Stanley Baldwin’s car, he immediately invited the former prime minister to No. 10 for a two-hour lunch (at a time when every minute was precious to him), and when he was told that Neville Chamberlain was dying of cancer—Chamberlain would not survive 1940—Churchill instructed his staff to telephone all good news to the disgraced former prime minister.3

  Baldwin later told Harold Nicolson* of his lunch with Churchill, adding that he left Downing Street “a happy man” while feeling “a patriotic joy that my country at such a time should have found such a leader.” Of Churchill, Baldwin offered, “The furnace of war had smelted out all of the base metals from him.” Not all. In private he relished skewering his fallen enemies. He and his wife, Clementine, once recounted for luncheon guests the rumor emanating from Baldwin’s household that Baldwin was a “haunted man.” The former P.M. was so disrespected by his family and household staff, so the story went, that when he complained that the wireless was playing too loud, somebody turned it up even louder. And when the Baldwin family cupboard went bare, it was Baldwin who was dispatched by his relatives to the grocer to restock the larder. When asked by friends of Baldwin to submit a testimonial for the former prime minister’s eightieth birthday tribute, Churchill, through an intermediary (and thinking his remark private), gave them: “I wish Stanley Baldwin no ill, but it would have been much better if he had never lived.” And in his most famous cut of Baldwin, he said, “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” As for Chamberlain, Churchill told his new private secretary and a junior member of his staff, Jock Colville, that the former prime minister was “the narrowest, the most ignorant, most ungenerous of men.” On one occasion, Churchill managed to denigrate both Chamberlain and Baldwin in one breath, when he offered to his doctor, “Baldwin thought Europe was a bore, and Chamberlain thought it was greater Birmingham.” His pettiness was as unfeigned as his generosity, his sentimentality, and his love of England.4