On 15 December 1943, as Churchill lay ill at Carthage, Brigadier Bedford, a heart specialist, arrived from Cairo. ‘He is giving digitalis to calm the heart,’ noted Macmillan. Later that day Lieutenant-Colonel Buttle, an expert on the new antibiotic sulphonamide, M & B, was flown in from Italy. ‘I had a long talk with him,’ Macmillan wrote, ‘and begged him to be firm and forbid telegrams or visitors.’ That evening Churchill summoned Lord Moran and told him: ‘I don’t feel well. My heart is doing something funny—it feels to be bumping all over the place.’ He had suffered a mild heart attack, ‘what is called “fibrillation”,’ Macmillan noted in his diary on the following day. ‘It was not very severe but has alarmed them all.’ On December 16 Professor John Scadding, a specialist in chest diseases, was flown from Cairo. Churchill’s pulse was steadier and his lung clearing. As he lay in bed, weak but cheerful, he asked Sarah to read to him. Their choice was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
On December 17 Clementine arrived at Carthage to be with her husband. That evening they dined alone. It was nearly six weeks since they had last seen each other. After dinner they were joined by Sarah and Randolph. Lord Moran was rather fussed that the talking went on too long, but, Clementine wrote to Mary, ‘Papa showed no sign of fatigue, and once or twice when I got up to go to bed, he would not let me go.’ During the night, Churchill suffered a second mild heart attack. ‘Papa is very upset,’ Clementine told Mary on December 18, ‘as he is beginning to see that he cannot get well in a few days and that he will have to lead what for him is a dreary monotonous life with no emotions or excitements.’
Churchill continued to receive visitors, though only one at a time. He also discussed by telegram with the Chiefs of Staff the proposed amphibious landing at Anzio, on the Italian Coast just south of Rome. On December 23 both Eisenhower and Alexander came to see him, to discuss details of the landing. Its aim was to lead to the capture of Rome, and an advance northward to the Pisa-Rimini line. On December 24 Churchill left his bed for the first time in two weeks, for a Christmas Eve conference with Alexander and several other Generals, Admirals and planners, about how to provide the landing-craft for Anzio in time for the target date of January 20. Even this, he telegraphed to the Chiefs of Staff shortly after midnight, meant a month’s delay in sending some of the ‘Overlord’ landing-craft to Britain. Then, on Christmas Day, five Commanders-in-Chief, summoned by telegram, converged on Carthage to make the final plans for Anzio, the importance of which was stressed at the outset by Eisenhower, who still felt strongly, as he told the gathering, ‘that the right course was to press on in Italy, where the Germans were still full of fight’.
Nothing was to be allowed to interfere with the May date for ‘Overlord’. But the Anzio landing had now become the next major Allied operation of war, and Churchill’s Christmas Day conference, which he attended in his dragon dressing-gown, set the seal on its importance, retrieving what could be retrieved of the Italian campaign. Admiral Sir John Cunningham was confident that he could put the men ashore. A successful landing, all were agreed, would lead not only to the rapid capture of Rome, but to the destruction of a ‘substantial part’ of the German forces in Italy. ‘We cannot afford to go forward leaving a vast unfinished business behind us,’ Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt when the conference ended. ‘If this opportunity is not grasped we must expect the ruin of the Mediterranean campaign of 1944.’
Churchill entertained the five Commanders-in-Chief to Christmas luncheon, his first meal out of bed since he had been taken ill. ‘The doctors are quite unable to control him,’ his Principal Private Secretary, John Martin, wrote home that day, ‘and cigars etc have now returned. I was amazed to find him dictating their bulletin.’ As well as dictating the doctors’ bulletin, Churchill dictated a resumé for the Chiefs of Staff, and for Roosevelt, of all the military decisions taken at the morning’s conference. That night he had a long talk with Macmillan about the French National Committee. He was angered that de Gaulle had turned against several former senior Vichy officials who had agreed some time earlier to work with the Allies, and was unwilling even to see him. Macmillan urged him to do so. ‘Well, perhaps you are right,’ Churchill said. ‘But I do not agree with you.’ Then, Macmillan noted in his diary, ‘He took my hand in his in a most fatherly way and said: “Come and see me again before I leave Africa, and we’ll talk it over”. He really is a remarkable man. Although he can be so tiresome and pigheaded, there is no one like him. His devotion to work and duty is quite extraordinary.’
***
On the morning of December 27 Churchill flew from Carthage to Marrakech. Despite his doctors’ worries about the danger of his flying above 10,000 feet in order to cross the mountains, and the need to use an oxygen mask for much of the flight, Air Commodore Kelly, the senior Air Force medical officer in North Africa, who especially accompanied Churchill, later recalled that ‘the PM was in great form’. By late afternoon he was at the Villa Taylor, which was to be his home for the next eighteen days. Learning from Roosevelt on December 29 that the President approved the Anzio landing, Churchill telegraphed: ‘The sun is shining today, but nothing did me the same good as your telegram showing how easily our minds work together on the grimly simple issues of this vast war.’ Alexander had told him that the initial landing would be made by one British and one American division. ‘I am glad of this,’ he told Roosevelt. ‘It is fitting that we should share equally in suffering, risk and honour.’
On December 31 Eisenhower and Montgomery reached Marrakech, to discuss the ‘Overlord’ plans with Churchill. That day he told Clementine, ‘I am not strong enough to paint.’ For New Year’s Eve, wrote Jock Colville, who had returned to Churchill’s Private Office after two years in the Royal Air Force, ‘Punch was brewed, the PM made a little speech, the clerks, typists and some of the servants appeared, and we formed a circle to sing Auld Lang Syne.’
On New Year’s Day 1944 Churchill went into his wife’s room more cheerful. ‘I am so happy,’ he said, ‘I feel so much better.’ That day he drove with Montgomery to a spot two hours away where they had a picnic lunch, then drove on into the mountains to a viewpoint which Churchill remembered from his holiday in 1936. ‘The General was in the highest spirits,’ he later recalled. ‘He leapt about the rocks like an antelope, and I felt a strong reassurance that all would be well.’
On January 4 Churchill telegraphed to Stalin, whose troops had just driven the Germans back across the 1939 Russo-Polish frontier, congratulating him on this advance, and telling him that everything was now going ‘full blast’ for ‘Overlord’. Montgomery, he added, ‘is full of zeal to engage the enemy and of confidence in the result’. That day Churchill learned that there would be a shortage of landing-craft at Anzio once the actual landing had been effected, as all but a third were to be withdrawn for ‘Overlord’ before the inevitable counter-attack could be repulsed. He at once proposed flying from Marrakech to Malta, to discuss the question with Alexander. Instead, Alexander persuaded him to allow an American and a British senior officer, General Bedell Smith and General Gale, both of whom knew all the details, to come and see him at Marrakech. They were able to assure him that the withdrawals would be phased in such a way as to avoid danger.
The Anzio commanders and their planning staffs flew to Marrakech on January 7 for a final two-day discussion. ‘Everyone is in good heart,’ Churchill telegraphed to Roosevelt when the meetings were over, ‘and the resources seem sufficient. Every aspect was thrashed out in full detail by sub-committees in the interval between the two conferences.’
Each morning Churchill worked; then, if the weather was good, he went for a lunchtime picnic. On January 12 de Gaulle was his guest; Churchill urged him to try to avoid such actions against former Vichy supporters as would create ‘so wide a schism in France that the resultant friction in any territory that might be liberated would hamper our military operations and therefore be a matter of concern to us.’ At one moment, when de Gaulle was being obstinate, Churchill said to him: ‘Look here! I am the leader of a strong, unbeaten nation. Yet every morning when I wake my first thought is how can I please President Roosevelt, and my second thought is how can I conciliate Marshal Stalin. Your situation is very different. Why then should your first waking thought be how you can snap your fingers at the British and Americans?’
Churchill’s friend Louis Spears had earlier remarked that the hardest cross Britain had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine; but all went well enough that day for de Gaulle to invite Churchill to review the French troops of the Marrakech garrison, and on the morning of January 13 the two men stood side by side on the saluting-base. After the parade Churchill drove off for another of his picnics. ‘Winston was in a heavenly mood,’ one of those present wrote, ‘very funny and very happy.’
On the following day Churchill left Marrakech by air for Gibraltar, where he went on board the battleship King George V. During the voyage he spent more than an hour in the Gunroom answering questions from the Midshipmen, one of whom wrote to his parents: ‘He seemed amazingly well & has terrific personality which seems to radiate from him.’ To Colville, who like himself had been at Harrow, Churchill confided that day that the lines in one of the school songs, ‘God give us bases to guard and beleaguer’, had always inspired him, despite the fact that he ‘detested football’.
Shortly before midnight the battleship reached Plymouth. The King had sent his own train to bring the Prime Minister to London. ‘Unlike the previous homecomings,’ recalled Churchill’s Private Secretary, John Peck, ‘there were no political, strategic or diplomatic dramas—the atmosphere was one of immense relief that the PM was back alive and well and truly in control of events.’ There was to be no relaxation, however, in Churchill’s schedule; reaching London on the morning of January 18 he was in the House of Commons two hours later for Prime Minister’s Questions, then, at noon, in his room at the Commons, gave the War Cabinet an account of his travels, leaving his room, Colville noted, ‘at 1.28, to lunch with the King at 1.30’.
***
Hoping for a rapid success at Anzio, on January 19 Churchill suggested to the Chiefs of Staff two follow-up operations. One was a 2,000-strong commando force for the Dalmatian Coast, ‘to go round and clean up every single island the Germans have occupied, killing or capturing their garrisons’. The other was an advance into northern Italy, forcing the Germans to withdraw behind the Alps, so that it would then be ‘open to us to turn left into France, or to pursue the Germans towards Vienna, or to turn right towards the Balkans’.
Such plans depended upon a rapid success at Anzio, where the landings began in the early hours of January 22. When Alexander reported that immediately after the landing he had sent out ‘strong-hitting, mobile patrols’ to make contact with the Germans, Churchill replied: ‘Am very glad you are pegging out claims rather than digging in beach-heads.’ But within four days it became clear that the Germans were determined, and able, to trap the landing forces at the beach-head, and that there would be no quick breakthrough, and no early link-up with the mass of the Allied armies to the south. ‘The Germans are fighting magnificently,’ Churchill told a friend during an evening at the Other Club on January 27. ‘Never imagine they are crashing. Their staff work is brilliantly flexible. They improvise units out of unrested remnants and those units fight just as well as the fresh ones.’
By January 28 it was clear that Anzio had failed in its purpose. ‘The situation as it now stands,’ Churchill telegraphed to Sir John Cunningham, ‘bears little relation to the lightning thrust envisaged at Marrakech’, and to the Chiefs of Staff he confided on January 29: ‘We hoped to land a wild cat that would tear the bowels out of the Boche. Instead we have stranded a vast whale with its tail flopping about in the water.’ Two days later, as the two senior American generals involved, Mark Clark and John Lucas, consolidated the bridgehead, Churchill told the War Cabinet that Anzio had now become ‘an American operation, with no punch in it’. Nor did he have means of influencing the Joint Chiefs, who on February 3 decided to transfer fighter aircraft from the Mediterranean to China, on the assumption that the Allied role in Italy would henceforth be purely defensive.
Churchill was distressed by this; the assumption of the defensive in Italy ‘is I think disastrous’, he told the Chiefs of Staff on February 3. ‘I never imagined that Alexander would not be free to push on to the north and break into the Po Valley.’ To bring the armies in Italy to a standstill, he warned, ‘would be most short-sighted and would simply enable the enemy to transfer divisions rapidly from North Italy to oppose the “Overlord” landing’.
To help the cross-Channel landing, the largest amphibious enterprise of all time, Churchill now presided over an ‘Overlord’ Committee of the War Cabinet, whose task was to ensure that nothing was neglected or delayed. His ‘fiery energy and undisputed authority dominated the proceedings,’ Ismay later recalled. ‘The seemingly slothful or obstructive were tongue-lashed; competing differences were reconciled; priorities were settled; difficulties which at first appeared insuperable were overcome; and decisions were translated into immediate action.’
***
British weapons were to be dropped in Poland; as the Red Army drew ever nearer it was in Britain’s interest, Churchill told the Defence Committee on February 3, that Poland should be ‘strong and well-supported. Were she weak and overrun by the advancing Soviet armies, the result might hold great dangers in the future for the English-speaking peoples.’
Stalin was a master of deception; on February 5 he assured Churchill that ‘of course Poland would be free and independent and he would not attempt to influence the kind of Government they cared to set up after the war’. On the following day Churchill urged the Polish Government in London to accept these assurances, and to cede eastern Poland to Russia in return for German territory in East Prussia, Silesia and on the Baltic Coast of Pomerania. Ten days later, at a meeting on February 16, he told the Polish Government leaders, in the words of the transcript of the discussion: ‘The Poles must rejoice at the advance of the Russian armies, dangerous though this might be to them, since it was their only hope of liberation from the Germans. There was no reason to suppose that Russia would repeat the German desire to dominate all Europe. After the war Great Britain and the United States of America would maintain strong forces, and there were good hopes of the world settling down into a peace of thirty or forty years which might then prove much more lasting.’ But if Poland rejected the proposed borders and took up a position against the Russians, he ‘doubted whether the United States would be ready to go on fighting in Europe for several years to liberate Warsaw. It was no use expecting us to do more than we could.’
Churchill argued in vain; the Polish Government in London was only prepared to consider ceding territory to Russia if it could have an assurance that an all-Party Government would be established in Poland as soon as she was liberated. Stalin would give no such assurance. He already had his own Polish nominees for an all-Communist Government waiting in the wings, ready to be installed in the first town to be liberated.
On February 22 Churchill gave the Commons a survey of the war. In answer to criticisms of the bombing of German cities, he explained that the Anglo-American bombing of Germany was ‘our chief offensive effort at the present time’. Since the war began, 38,300 British pilots and aircrew had been killed and more than ten thousand aircraft lost. But in the previous forty-eight hours, nine thousand tons of bombs had been dropped on Germany. ‘The air power was the weapon which both marauding States selected as their main tool of conquest,’ Churchill told the House. ‘This was the sphere in which they were to triumph. This was the method by which the nations were to be subjugated to their rule. I shall not moralise further than to say that there is a strange, stern justice in the long swing of events.’
Air power, as well as Russia’s increasingly clear determination to dominate Eastern Europe despite Stalin’s recent promises, was on Churchill’s mind at Chequers on March 4, when he told his guests that he did not have long to live, but that he had a political testament for after the war, ‘Far more important than India or the Colonies or solvency is the Air. We live in a world of wolves—and bears.’ The latest evidence of Stalin’s attitude to an independent Poland, Churchill told the War Cabinet two days later, was that ‘he was unlikely to be influenced by argument’. On March 10 Churchill warned Stalin that Russian treatment of Poland ‘will prove to be a touchstone and make all sorts of far more important things far more difficult’. And in a covering message to the British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, he commented, ‘Appeasement has had a good run.’
***
It was now less than three months before the cross-Channel landings. As well as presiding over the weekly ‘Overlord’ Committee of the War Cabinet, Churchill had regular talks with Eisenhower and his Chief of Staff, General Bedell Smith, with whom he examined every aspect of the landings, among them the artificial harbours, the airborne assault, the naval bombardment, and air support. ‘I am satisfied that everything is going on well,’ he telegraphed to Marshall on March 11. By a diligent reading of enemy top-secret cypher messages and other Intelligence reports, British staffs had built up a comprehensive picture of the location and size of every German unit in northern France.
By a successful British plan of deception, devised by Colonel John Bevan and his staff at the Central War Rooms, the Germans were led to believe that the main assault would come somewhere between Dieppe and Calais. It was once more the Germans’ own top-secret messages that, painstakingly decrypted, revealed that they had fallen for the deception. The true landing-point, the Normandy Coast, was kept secret from them. So too was the one condition for the landing laid down by the Chiefs of Staff; if, at the date chosen for the assault, the Germans had twenty mobile divisions in France capable of being sent to reinforce their troops at the beach-head, the whole operation would be called off.
To decide what to do if there were indeed twenty German mobile divisions in France on the date chosen, Churchill proposed flying to Bermuda for a discussion with Roosevelt. But while Lord Moran protested in vain that it was ‘all wrong’ that the Prime Minister should go, Roosevelt’s doctors were successful in persuading the President, who was suffering from a heavy cold, not to risk the journey. Churchill was relieved. ‘The PM this morning confessed he was tired,’ Cadogan wrote in his diary on March 21. ‘He is almost done in.’
In Italy, the Anzio beach-head was still encircled by the Germans; the main Allied forces, then fifty miles to the east, were unable to reach them because of a tenacious German defence at Monte Cassino. There was now no chance of the capture of Rome that spring, or of any exploitation farther north. The only remaining point of pressure on Germany that year, in the west, would be Normandy.
On March 23 Churchill went with Eisenhower on a two-day inspection of the American troops in Britain who would be taking part in the Normandy landings. Returning to Chequers, he worked for two days on his first broadcast for exactly a year. ‘The PM seemed very tired but sweet-tempered and solicitous,’ Marian Holmes noted in her diary at the end of the first day. In his broadcast, made from Chequers on the evening of March 26, Churchill, who knew how close Germany now was to developing a rocket bomb, spoke of possible new ‘forms of attack’ from Germany. But, he declared, ‘Britain can take it. She has never flinched or failed. And when the signal is given, the whole circle of avenging nations will hurl themselves upon the foe and batter the life out of the cruellest tyranny which has ever sought to bar the progress of mankind.’
Many of those who listened to Churchill’s broadcast could sense that he was tired. ‘People seem to think that Winston’s broadcast last night was that of a worn and petulant old man,’ Harold Nicolson noted in his diary. Worn he certainly was; two days later Brooke noted in his diary after a Staff Conference: ‘We found him in desperately tired mood. I am afraid that he is losing ground rapidly. He seems quite incapable of concentrating for a few minutes on end, and keeps wandering continuously. He kept yawning and said he was feeling desperately tired.’ Exhaustion, too, emerged; on March 29, after the Government had been defeated on a clause in the Education Bill, as a result of a Conservative back-bench revolt in favour of equal pay for men and women teachers, Churchill insisted on a Vote of Confidence.’ He looked tired, wounded and barely audible,’ noted Henry Channon. In the smoking-room, Nicolson told him that it had been excessive to insist the rebels swallow their vote. Could not some other method be devised to humble them? ‘No. Not at all,’ Churchill replied. ‘I am not going to tumble round my cage like a wounded canary. You knocked me off my perch. You have now got to put me back on my perch. Otherwise I won’t sing.’
The vote was taken on March 31. ‘The Government got its majority of over 400,’ Colville noted in his diary, ‘and the PM was radiant. I thought it was cracking a nut with a sledgehammer.’ Churchill was already on the move again, travelling by train overnight to Yorkshire, for a visit to the British troops training for the Normandy landings. One of the demonstrations he was shown was a lorry swimming through water.
On April 7, Good Friday, Churchill spoke to all the senior British and American officers involved in the Normandy plan. Wrote Brooke, ‘He was looking old and lacking a great deal of his usual vitality.’ Commented the Director of Military Operations at the War Office, General Kennedy: ‘Winston spoke without vigour. He did not look up much while he spoke. There was the usual wonderful flow of phrases, but no fire in the delivery. I thought he was going to burst into tears as he stepped down to sit beside Eisenhower and Monty and the Chiefs of Staff while the officers filed out of the room. But I afterwards heard that members of the audience who saw him on that day for the first time were tremendously impressed and inspired.’
Churchill was physically exhausted. ‘Struck by how very tired and worn out the PM looks now,’ Colville noted in his diary on April 12. Churchill was greatly disappointed that week to learn from Alexander, who had flown back to London, that the Anzio beach-head, although secure, could still not be linked up with the main army in Italy, nor could a new attempt to do so be started for another month. Nevertheless, he was able to ensure that no further troops would be withdrawn from Italy. ‘Although the fighting at the bridge-head and on the Cassino front has brought many disappointments,’ Churchill told General Marshall on April 12, ‘you will I trust recognise that at least eight extra German divisions have been brought into Italy down to the south of Rome and heavily mauled there’. The Enigma decrypts, Churchill pointed out, showed that Hitler had been saying ‘that his defeats in South Russia are due to the treacherous Badoglio collapse of Italy which has involved thirty-five divisions’.
‘At any rate,’ Churchill added, ‘I believe that our action in Italy has played a large part in rendering possible the immensely important advances made in South Russia, which as a further benefit are convulsing the Satellites’. Churchill now addressed the question of what the Allied object in Italy should be, telling Marshall, in support of a renewed British plea for landing-craft to be transferred at once from the Pacific to the Mediterranean: ‘At the moment my own position is as follows. We should above all defeat the German army south of Rome and join our own armies. Nothing should be grudged for this. We cannot tell how either the Allied or enemy armies will emerge from the battle until the battle has been fought. It may be that the enemy will be thrown into disorder, and that great opportunities of exploitation may be open. Or we may be checked, and the enemy may continue to hold his positions south of Rome against us with his existing forces. On the other hand, he may seek to withdraw some of his divisions to the main battle in France. It seems to me we must have plans and preparations to take advantage of the above possibilities.’
If the advance to Rome were successful, Churchill told Marshall, ‘I would not now rule out either a vigorous pursuit northward of the beaten enemy nor an amphibious cat’s-claw higher up to detain him or cut him off.’ Plans and preparations ought to be contrived ‘to render possible’ either an amphibious landing north of Rome or the South of France landing ‘in one form or another’. If thirty-four German divisions could be kept in the western Mediterranean theatre, he explained, ‘the forces there will have made an immense contribution to “Overlord”’. Churchill then told Marshall that he had ‘hardened very much upon “Overlord”’, and was ‘further fortified by the evident confidence of Eisenhower, Brooke and Montgomery’.
As the plans for the cross-Channel attack proceeded, Churchill was worried about the scale of French civilian casualties likely to be caused by the planned bombing of railway lines and rail junctions in northern France prior to the attack. Such casualties were estimated at between twenty and forty thousand. ‘Considering that they are our friends,’ Churchill wrote to Eisenhower, ‘this might be held to be an act of very great severity, bringing much hatred on the Allied Air Forces.’ Eisenhower agreed to reduce the scale of the bombing, but even so it was severe, and at least five thousand French civilians were killed.
Churchill worked both to ensure the success of the Normandy landings, and to mitigate the severity of the bombing of northern France. Those who worked closest with him were aware of the great strains upon him. ‘PM, I fear, is breaking down,’ Cadogan noted in his diary after a War Cabinet on April 19. ‘He rambles without a pause and we really got nowhere.’ Cadogan added: ‘I am really fussed about the PM. He is not the man he was twelve months ago, and I really don’t know if he can carry on.’ But carry on he did, and once again with renewed energy. In a debate on April 21, on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in which he looked forward to India being a self-governing Dominion after the war, his speech showed ‘more vigour’ than of late, Colville noted.
***
The month of May opened with a British protest to Russia, whose forces had entered Roumania and begun the widespread arrest of anti-Communist as well as Fascist leaders. The Russians at once complained about British interference, leading Churchill to tell Eden on May 2, ‘Never forget that Bolsheviks are crocodiles.’ And when further unjustified complaints arrived from Moscow a week later about alleged British interference in Roumania, Churchill told the War Cabinet that these complaints ‘led him to despair of the possibility of maintaining good relations with Russia’. In Greece also he feared that a showdown was approaching because of ‘Communist intrigues’. ‘We ought to watch this movement carefully,’ he warned Eden on May 4. ‘After all, we lost 40,000 men in Greece and you were very keen on that effort at that time. I do not think we should yield to the Russians any more in Greece.’
Recurring weariness was now a regular feature of Churchill’s day. ‘He looked very old and tired’ was Brooke’s comment on May 7. Churchill told Brooke that evening, Brooke noted in his diary, that he could still sleep well, eat well, ‘and especially drink well, but that he no longer jumped out of bed the way he used to, and felt as if he would be quite content to spend the whole day in bed’. Brooke added, ‘I have never yet heard him admit that he was beginning to fail.’ Churchill was sixty-nine. On May 10 he reached the fourth anniversary of his Premiership; more than two hundred weeks of responsibility and worry. Above all was the frightening spectre of the Normandy landings. To an American visitor, John J. McCloy, the Under Secretary for War, Churchill confided, ‘If you think I’m dragging my feet, it is not because I can’t take casualties, it is because I am afraid of what those casualties will be.’ He then told McCloy of the large number of his contemporaries who had been killed in what he called the ‘hecatombs’ of the First World War. He himself was ‘a sort of “sport” in nature’s sense as most of his generation lay dead at Passchendaele and the Somme. An entire British generation of potential leaders had been cut off and Britain could not afford the loss of another generation.’
On May 12 Churchill left London for three days of inspection of the assembling troops. To Eisenhower, who came with him for part of the journey, he had already stressed the need for extra vehicles to cater for the Free French Division which had been added to the landing force. In his appeal, Churchill pointed out that at the Anzio beach-head 125,000 men and 23,000 vehicles ‘only got twelve miles’ before being brought to a halt by the Germans. Churchill’s vigilance and drive were a crucial component of the war-making capacity of Britain. ‘Whatever may be the PM’s shortcomings,’ Colville noted on May 13, ‘there is no doubt that he does provide guidance and purpose for the Chiefs of Staff and the Foreign Office 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 the Chiefs of Staff.’ At the final briefing for senior officers on May 15, General Kennedy noted in his diary that Churchill spoke ‘in a robust and even humorous style, and concluded with a moving expression of his hopes and good wishes. He looked much better than at the last conference, and spoke with great vigour, urging offensive leadership, and stressing the ardour for battle which he believed the men felt.’
On May 20 Churchill received a clear indication that the Germans would not have the additional twenty divisions in Western Europe which would have meant that the Normandy landings would have to be called off. Helped by British military supplies parachuted to them, Tito’s partisans were holding down twenty-five German divisions in Yugoslavia, where Randolph was then serving as one of the British liaison officers with Tito. A further twenty-three German divisions were being engaged in Italy, where Alexander had renewed the offensive on May 14 and finally taken Cassino. Further German divisions were waiting on the Channel Coast near Boulogne for what was believed by the Germans, thanks to successful deception, to be the true target of the cross-Channel assault. The size and location of all these divisions were known through the German top-secret messages being decrypted every day at Bletchley, through agents, and through the ever-vigilant eyes of Air Force reconnaissance aircraft. Churchill’s daughter Sarah was then serving with the Photographic Reconnaissance Interpretation Unit at Medmenham, west of London.
When he spoke in the Commons on May 24, Churchill again seemed tired. ‘His charm and humour were unabated,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his sons, ‘but the voice was not thunderous and three times Members called out to him to “Speak up!”.’ Five days later, in reply to a request to have his portrait painted, he replied with a wry humour, ‘I am afraid I can make no promise in wartime, and will hardly be worth painting unless the war stops soon.’
During May 24 Churchill was told of a shortage of naval pumping equipment needed to raise the concrete caissons of the Mulberry harbour in order to tow them across the Channel. This crucial element in the assault had to be solved at once. It was Churchill who suggested calling upon the pumping resources of the London Fire Brigade.
On the last weekend before the Normandy landings, Churchill was at Chequers. There, he learned that Randolph had just escaped, with Tito, from a German parachute attempt to capture the Partisan headquarters. On May 28 Churchill wrote to Randolph: ‘We have a lovely day at where we live from time to time, and all is fair with the first glory of summer. The war is very fierce and terrible, but in these sunlit lawns and buttercup meadows it is hard to conjure up its horrors.’ On the following day, reading of the high French civilian deaths as the Allied bombing of French railway junctions intensified, Churchill wrote to the air commander, disagreeing that the ‘best targets’ had been chosen. ‘You are piling up an awful load of hatred,’ he wrote.
Alexander now reported that the troops at Anzio had joined with the main army in Italy; all was now ready for the advance to Rome. ‘How lucky it was,’ Churchill telegraphed to him on May 31, ‘that we stood up to our United States Chief of Staff friends and refused to deny you the full exploitation of this battle!’ As Alexander prepared for the battle of Rome, Admiral Ramsay was put in command of all naval forces in the Channel. On the following day, June 2, Churchill left London by train to visit troop assembly points in southern England. On June 3 he watched troops at Southampton embarking on their landing-craft; on the following day he visited more troops as they embarked. After he returned to the train, Marian Holmes noted in her diary, ‘He looked anxious, but he was amiable’.
On the evening of June 4 Churchill returned to London, to No. 10 Annexe. ‘Went into PM at 10.30 pm and didn’t emerge until 3.45 am,’ Marian Holmes wrote in her diary. ‘He drives himself too hard and he nearly fell asleep over the papers.’ During the night’s work Churchill went along the corridor to his Map Room. While he sat there in his chair, looking up at the maps, the news was brought in that Rome had been captured.
***
It had been hoped to launch the Normandy landings on June 5, but bad weather had forced a postponement of one day. During June 5 it became clear from decrypted German top-secret messages that, because of this bad weather, the Germans no longer expected a cross-Channel attack during the next four or five days. Rommel had even gone on leave that day to Germany. The Allied knowledge that this was the German calculation was a factor in Eisenhower’s decision to cross on the following day, despite a poor weather forecast.
Churchill had no visitors on the morning of June 5. As he dictated to his secretaries, he was brought a note from Clementine, who wrote, ‘I feel so much for you at this agonising moment—so full of suspense, which prevents one from rejoicing over Rome!’ ‘Tonight we go,’ Churchill telegraphed to Stalin on the afternoon of June 5. ‘We are using 5,000 ships, and have available 11,000 aircraft.’
Churchill and Clementine dined alone on the night of June 5. Then he went to the Map Room for a last look at the Allied and German dispositions, the latter revealed largely by Enigma decrypts. Before going to bed, Clementine joined him in the Map Room. His concerns were with those who in a few hours’ time would be approaching the beaches of German-occupied France, of Hitler’s much-vaunted Fortress Europe. ‘Do you realise,’ he told her, ‘that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand men may have been killed?’