The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester & Paul Reid

Author:William Manchester & Paul Reid [Manchester, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Europe, World War II, Presidents & Heads of State, Great Britain, Biography & Autobiography, Military, History
ISBN: 9780316222143
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-06T06:00:00+00:00

With the vote of censure behind him and the decision made in favor of Torch, Churchill’s attention turned to Egypt, and Stalin. Based on Ultra decrypts, he had prodded Auchinleck for weeks to take the offensive against Rommel, unfairly in Brooke’s estimation. Ultra allowed Churchill to peer over his generals’ shoulders as if he were with them in the field poring over intelligence reports. Yet Ultra was sometimes wrong. Churchill took Rommel’s (decrypted) pleas for reinforcements at face value, while some at Bletchley cautioned that Rommel might be exaggerating his needs in order to force action in Berlin. On one occasion Churchill goaded Auchinleck by citing a decrypted Luftwaffe signal that appeared to reveal the Germans had only half as many tanks in Africa as Auchinleck believed based on his field intelligence. But Bletchley was incorrect; the deciphered message referred only to the German tanks at Auchinleck’s immediate front. Rommel, after taking several necessarily desultory and ultimately futile cracks at Auchinleck’s El Alamein positions during the first weeks of July, settled into a defensive mode and awaited his promised reinforcements. For his June victory over Ritchie, he was awarded by Hitler a field marshal’s baton. He would later say he would have preferred to be given a division. With Rommel dug in before El Alamein and with the fight possibly gone from Auchinleck, Churchill concluded that the situation in the desert called for his presence.279

His getting to Egypt involved doing so without contracting any of numerous diseases he would be exposed to along the way. In order for the aircraft to avoid Germans, the outbound leg of the journey would take at least five flying days, going south from Gibraltar to Takoradi, in the Gold Coast, followed by a three-day, three-flight hopscotch across central Africa. This sojourn through “tropical and malarious regions,” as Churchill put it, would require a series of inoculations, some of which required ten days to take effect. Dr. Wilson and the War Cabinet sought to put an end to the idea. Just that week, news of a great medical discovery had sifted through the ranks. Two American doctors visiting London from Johns Hopkins University had told Harry Butcher over a few bottles of port of a new drug “called penicillin and derived from bread mold. Takes eleven acres of mold to cure the scorched face of one flyer.” Such a drug would have made Churchill’s trip safer, but it had yet to be mass-produced. Given the risks posed by African insects and German fighter planes, it appeared that Churchill would not be straying far from London.280

Then an American pilot, Captain William Vanderkloot, twenty-six years old and a veteran of ferrying Lend-Lease bombers to Britain, suggested a daring approach: depart England for Gibraltar late in the evening by a four-engine B-24 bomber and refuel in Gibraltar the following morning; then, after departing the Rock at dusk, overfly Spanish Morocco, dodge far south over the desert during the night, and then swing east almost 1,900 miles to the Nile, south of Cairo.

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