Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

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HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT

LONDON, ENGLAND

APRIL 17, 1945

4:08 P.M.

Conversation ceases as Winston Churchill rises to his feet. There is Johnnie Walker scotch whisky on his breath, and he wears a bow tie with his three-piece suit. The rotund prime minister’s trademark half-smoked, well-chewed cigar is nowhere to be seen as he stands somberly in the center aisle of Britain’s ornate House of Lords debating chamber, preparing to remember his late friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was devastated when he received the news of FDR’s death.

“I felt as if I had been struck a considerable blow,” Churchill will write in The Second World War: Triumph and Tragedy, the sixth volume of his war memoirs. “I was overpowered by a sense of deep and irreparable loss.”1

Standing five foot eight and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, Winston Churchill is already a mythic figure in England. He is the son of the legendary Randolph Churchill, a dynamic British statesman who died at the age of forty-five never having fulfilled his goal of becoming prime minister. It would be left to the eccentric Winston to fill that position, although the journey was neither short nor easy. Winston was in a self-described political wilderness for much of his career, and was considered out of touch with political reality, thanks to his criticism of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, a time when few British politicians were bothered by the rise of Adolf Hitler. Once Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, at the height of the Nazi threat, he inspired the British people with fearless radio speeches that offered them hope at a time when they had none. When the Luftwaffe bombed London, Churchill was often seen in public, visiting bomb sites at great threat to his own life. Throughout his career, the one steadfast presence has been that of his wife, Clementine. They have been married for thirty-six years and have five children.

It is warm in London this April. “An excess of sunshine,” in the words of one British meteorologist, now makes the air thick inside the century-old, un-air-conditioned chamber. Nevertheless, the 615 elected members of Parliament (MPs, for short) are almost all in attendance, seated in rows on either side of the aisle. Churchill’s Conservative Party sits to his right, the opposition Labour Party to his left.

The MPs had more room to spread out before the war, but German bombers destroyed the House of Commons meeting room in 1941.2 So now they pack into the smaller debating chamber, with its high ceilings and the boarded-up remains of the great stained-glass windows that were shattered by massive Luftwaffe Betonbombes.

The seventy-one-year-old Churchill is a creature of habit, rising each morning at 7:30 in his official residence at 10 Downing Street, just a half mile up the road from the Houses of Parliament. He works in bed until 11:00, whereupon he bathes, pours a weak Johnnie Walker Red scotch and water, and then works some more.3 He sips Pol Roger champagne with lunch at 1:00 p.m. Whenever possible, this is followed by a game of backgammon with Clementine at 3:30. He takes a ninety-minute nap at 5:00 p.m. Arising, Churchill bathes a second time, works for an hour, eats a sumptuous dinner at 8:00 p.m., and smokes a post-dinner cigar with a vintage Hine brandy. After that, he goes back to his study for more work until well past midnight.

Unless he is traveling, this is how almost every day of Winston Churchill’s life is structured, right down to the minute.

But today there is a different feel. Tonight will be the last time that American B-17s and British Lancasters will pound the German city of Dresden. Firebombs have already killed tens of thousands there. This was done with Churchill’s full approval. One out of every 131 Londoners fell victim to German bombs, thus he has few moral qualms about punishing the German people.

What makes today special for Churchill is that it marks a personal and political crossroads. He must mourn the death of a very good friend whose company he compares with the joy one gets in drinking a fine glass of champagne, while also reckoning with the fact that this same friend betrayed him and the British people.

Conflicting emotions stir inside the prime minister as he begins his speech: “When I became Prime Minister, and the war broke out in all its hideous fury, when our own life and survival hung in the balance, I was already in a position to telegraph to the President on terms of an association which had become most intimate and, to me, most agreeable. This continued through all the ups and downs of the world struggle until Thursday last, when I received my last messages from him,” Churchill says.

His voice is patrician and unmistakably English, and his tone is that of professor lecturing a classroom, allowing his fellow MPs a glimpse into what was long a private relationship.

One and all know that Churchill and Roosevelt were exceptionally close. What they do not know is that Roosevelt behaved very badly toward Churchill and England in the weeks leading up to his death. FDR was ineffectual in dealing with Joseph Stalin when the three met in the Black Sea resort of Yalta two months ago, allowing the Russians to dictate the future of postwar Europe at the expense of the British. It was Churchill who, during the early days of the war, relentlessly sought to build what he called the “Grand Alliance” between the three powers. To defeat Nazi Germany, he needed the industrial strength of the United States and the strategic power of Russia. But as time passed, Churchill was edged out of the alliance like an unwanted suitor.

Thus, the British Empire, which has ruled the globe since the voyages of Captain James Cook in the 1770s, is no more. Much of the world will soon be ruled by the United States and Russia.

Just as devastating to Churchill, a man who understands the powerful role symbolism plays in molding public opinion, the Americans are denying the British people their moment of glory. During the war, English cities have been bombed relentlessly, and homes set ablaze. The British Commonwealth has seen three million casualties in the deserts of Africa, in the jungles of Borneo, in the fields of Europe, and in the skies over their beloved Britain. Between 1939 and 1940 they stood with France against Nazi Germany. When France fell, England stood alone.

It was Roosevelt and America who came to their rescue. “There never was a moment’s doubt, as the quarrel opened, upon which side his sympathies lay. The fall of France, and what seemed to most people outside this Island the impending destruction of Great Britain, were to him an agony, although he never lost faith in us.”

Churchill now tells Parliament of the time FDR sent an emissary bearing a note “Written in his own hand. This letter contained the famous lines of Longfellow: ‘Sail on, O ship of State, Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, with all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!’”

Roosevelt did more than supply inspirational verse. He also “loaned” Great Britain ships, planes, tanks, and trucks.

“The bearing of the British nation at that time of stress, when we were all alone, filled him and vast numbers of his countrymen with the warmest sentiments towards our people,” Churchill says to the members of Parliament.

The same Roosevelt of whom Churchill now speaks so warmly is the very politician who has just given Berlin to the Russians. All Allied forces on the Western Front, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery’s included, have been ordered to halt sixty miles short of Berlin, on the banks of the Elbe River.

The command came from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who now inexplicably sees Berlin as having no strategic value. Yet as Winston Churchill knows all too well, the order could not have been given without the approval of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There are four million Allied soldiers in Germany right now, and three million of them are American. The people of the United States would find it unsettling to see a British commander get the glory of capturing the German capital, though Eisenhower sees no problem in allowing a Russian commander to know that very same sense of glory.

The British people will be denied that symbolic moment when Monty and his Tommies march into Berlin. There will be no victorious poses in front of Hitler’s bombed-out Reichstag, allowing all of England to rejoice that their plucky island nation persevered in the face of long odds, and finally conquered the Führer’s capital.

Making the betrayal sting even more is the fact that Churchill is half American. His mother, the beautiful Jenny Jerome Randolph, is from Brooklyn. His grandfather was editor of the New York Times. His ancestors came to America on the Mayflower, and a later generation wintered with George Washington at Valley Forge and waged a revolution against the British. Churchill is even distantly related to a Native American of the Iroquois nation. In this way, his forefathers were even more American than those of the late president.

Yet it is America that now commits the unconscionable act of deferring to Russia at the expense of Britain—in effect, killing England.

Winston Churchill is sad. Sad for his lost friend, sad for FDR’s betrayals, sad for his nation, and, in the end, sad for the uncertainty that is to come. Churchill has already exchanged a number of cables with Harry Truman, and has yet to get a clear read on him.

After so many years of being wary of Nazi Germany, Churchill now sees the Russians as the world’s greatest threat. The divide between the Communist worldview and that of Britain’s is so great that Churchill will compare it to an “iron curtain,” a phrase that will go down in history.

Churchill has been prime minister for five years. But unbeknownst to him, he will be voted out of office in just three months—rejected by the nation he loves, just as he was pushed aside by Stalin and FDR.

“For us, it remains only to say that in Franklin Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known, and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and comfort from the new world to the old,” Churchill concludes to a chorus of “Hear, hear” from MPs on both sides of the aisle.

The exhausted prime minister has spoken for twenty minutes. He then takes his seat. Winston Churchill could use a scotch. This has been a very long day.