DECEMBER 24, 1943
LA MARSA, TUNISIA
MIDNIGHT
It is now officially Christmas.
And Winston Churchill is closer to death than Rome.
Christmas morning. Four hundred miles due south of Monte la Difensa. Floor-to-ceiling French windows covered in blackout curtains. The prime minister wears a bathrobe, slippers, and a special blue silk dressing gown emblazoned with golden dragons. Allied commanders in full uniform sit all around, everyone listening as the invalid Churchill lobbies his desperate new strategy.*
It is three months since the invasion of Italy. Capturing Rome by Christmas has not happened. Enraged by “the stagnation of the whole campaign on the Italian Front,” Churchill now makes his case for a second invasion of Italy, an audacious attack behind the Winter Line to finally take Rome.
The plan is known as Operation Shingle. When first conceived by Churchill, the amphibious assault on a beach known as Anzio was at first deemed a perfect “end run” around the German defenses by General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander in the Mediterranean. Ike was so confident in its success that he made plans to move his headquarters from Tunis to a palace in Rome after the first of the New Year.
But Shingle was canceled one week ago. Fifth Army commander Mark Clark made the decision. Eisenhower seconded it. The German defenses are too strong. Brutal winter sleet and snow are causing just as many casualties as the battles themselves. Hands are too frozen to pull a trigger and feet too frostbitten to march. German fighters no longer kill from mountaintops by lobbing down artillery fire—such a waste of precious shells. Better to let the Americans and British crawl close in the heavy snow and shoot them dead at short range.
There are many reasons Eisenhower, chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes across the table from the prime minister, has changed his tune about Shingle. Politics are among them: the American aligning himself with President Roosevelt’s favored invasion of France rather than extended fighting in Italy. But Ike is also an accomplished strategist. He now believes thousands of Allied soldiers will die on the Anzio beachhead. The landing zone lies on a flat plain extending inland to Rome. There will be no protection from the full might of the German army.
Boyish one year ago, the balding fifty-three-year-old Eisenhower has been drastically aged by the pressures and sleeplessness of wartime command. To the disappointment of Churchill, who longed for a British general to lead the Allied invasion of France, Eisenhower has been selected to take charge of Operation Overlord next May. Adding further insult, Eisenhower believes Churchill’s “soft underbelly” argument borders on delusional—and is determined to turn the Allied focus from Italy to France as soon as possible.
“The prime minister and some of his chief military advisers still looked upon the Overlord plan with scarcely concealed misgivings,” Ike will later recall. “Their attitude seemed to be that we could avoid the additional and grave risks implicit in a new amphibious operation by merely pouring into the Mediterranean all the air, ground, and naval resources available.”
So Eisenhower fights back. It is not lost on Churchill that Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin would never spend eight hours on Christmas Eve pleading with their generals about strategy; both would simply demand to be obeyed. But Churchill’s personal power is slipping, as is that of his once-mighty nation. U.S. troops are flooding into England, overwhelming the British with the immense scale of their force. It is America that now controls the pace of war in western Europe. On the other side of the continent, the Soviets are turning the tide, slowly pushing back the Germans. Tenuous though it may be, Italy and the Mediterranean is Britain’s only hope to assert itself as an equal Allied partner.
Yet politicians in Washington and London are clamoring for a quick end to the war—which, to many, means a focus on France. More insulting, Adolf Hitler publicly gloats that Rome will never fall into Allied hands. Churchill, as ever, refuses to concede. Tonight the prime minister will argue for as long as it is necessary, with whoever he needs to convince, in order to win this argument.
Eisenhower is equally insistent, stating bluntly that the landing force will suffer “annihilation.”
Every officer in the room knows what this means.
Churchill and Eisenhower have a strong relationship. This villa in which Churchill has lain in bed for two weeks is Ike’s personal residence. The stop in Tunisia was meant to be short. Instead, fever, lower-lobe pneumonia, and atrial fibrillation have made Churchill Eisenhower’s indefinite houseguest.
Eisenhower has gone to great lengths to keep the prime minister comfortable. When U.S. Army personnel assigned to serve as waiters failed to behave graciously toward the British leader, a furious Eisenhower had each man flown back to Algiers in the cramped hold of a B-17 bomber.
And yet at Christmas, of all times, Eisenhower uses the most damning word—annihilation—to voice his fears about an invasion planned by Winston Churchill.
The generals in this room were educated at the military academies of Sandhurst and West Point. They have made a career of studying how battles are won and lost. They have watched friends and classmates die because powerful men made stupid decisions. To them, annihilation is synonymous with personal grief—and one of World War I’s biggest debacles.
It was the infamous battle known as Gallipoli, an amphibious assault very much like what the prime minister is proposing in a new guise as Operation Shingle. More than 550,000 men died or were wounded.
And Winston Churchill planned that invasion.
“Merry Christmas,” exults Churchill as he leaves the assembled generals and shuffles off to bed. It is almost 1:00 a.m. Operation Shingle is reapproved. General Eisenhower has recused himself and allowed Churchill to make the final decision. Within a month, thousands of British and American forces will land on Anzio’s beach and sprint to Rome.
“It will astonish the world,” Churchill confides to British general Harold Alexander. Before going to sleep, Churchill writes an urgent message to Franklin Roosevelt, cajoling for landing craft.
The prime minister sees it clearly now—the capture of Rome and glorious redemption from those who doubt his strategy. The cross-Channel invasion of France will become of secondary importance. If all goes well, the Allies will fight from Rome to Paris long before it is necessary to launch Operation Overlord.
To his daughter, Sarah, the prime minister is even more confident:
“The war is won.”
Winston Churchill thinks it will be easy.
But as the prime minister well knows, the only easy day in this war was yesterday.