Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [230]
The House of Commons knew nothing of his return until MPs looked up in astonishment in the middle of Questions, then leapt to their feet and began shouting, applauding and waving order papers. Harold Nicolson described how cheer after cheer greeted him
while Winston, very pink849, rather shy, beaming with mischief, crept along the front bench and flung himself into his accustomed seat. He was flushed with pleasure and emotion, and hardly had he sat down when two large tears began to trickle down his cheeks. He mopped clumsily at himself with a huge white handkerchief. A few minutes later he got up to answer questions. Most men would have been unable, on such an occasion, not to throw a flash of drama into their replies. But Winston answered them as if he were the young Under-Secretary, putting on his glasses, turning over his papers, responding tactfully to supplementaries, and taking the whole thing as conscientiously as could be. I should like to say that he seemed completely restored to health. But he looked pale when the first flush of pleasure had subsided, and his voice was not quite as vigorous as it had been.
Churchill retained his extraordinary ability to hold the attention of the House through long, discursive assessments of the war. After one such, he suddenly leaned across to the Opposition and demanded casually: “That all right?”850 MPs grinned back affectionately. His mastery of the Commons, wrote Nicolson, derived from “the combination of great flights of oratory with sudden swoops into the intimate and conversational.”
On the afternoon of January 19, Churchill presided at a Chiefs of Staff meeting, during which he urged commando landings on the Dalmatian coast, to progressively clear of Germans the islands off Yugoslavia. His hopes for Anzio were soaring. He spoke of forcing the Germans to withdraw into northern Italy, or even behind the Alps. Then Alexander’s armies would be free to pursue towards Vienna, strike into the Balkans, or swing left into France. Two days later, as the American Maj. Gen. John Lucas’s corps prepared to hit the beaches in Italy, the U.S. Fifth Army staged crossings of the Rapido River south of Rome. Churchill cabled to Stalin: “We have launched the big attack against the German armies defending Rome which I told you about at Tehran.” By midnight on January 22, thirty-six thousand British and American troops and three thousand vehicles were ashore at Anzio, having achieved complete surprise.
Yet through the days that followed, news from Italy turned sour. The Rapido crossings proved a disaster. The Germans snuffed out each precarious American bridgehead in turn. Kesselring acted with extraordinary energy, recovering from his astonishment about Anzio to concentrate troops and isolate the invaders. Four Allied divisions were soon ashore, yet going nowhere. As the Germans poured fire into the shallow beachhead, British and American soldiers manning their foxholes and gun positions found themselves trapped in one of the most painful predicaments of the war. “We did become like animals in the end,”851 said a soldier of the Sherwood Foresters. “You were stuck in the same place. You had nowhere to go. You didn’t get no rest … No sleep … You never expected to see the end of it. You just forgot why you were there.”
Casualties mounted rapidly, and so too did desertions. Nowhere from the beach to the front line offered safety from bombardment. The Luftwaffe attacked offshore shipping with new and deadly glider bombs. “It will be unpleasant if you get sealed off there and cannot advance from the south,” Churchill wrote to Alexander on January