Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [254]
For all his declarations of optimism to Roosevelt and Marshall, and at the May 15 final briefing before the king and senior Allied commanders at Montgomery’s headquarters, St. Paul’s School in West London, he nursed terrible fears of failure, or of catastrophic casualties. Every rational calculation suggested that the Allies, aided by surprise, airpower and massive resources, should get ashore successfully. But no one knew better than Churchill the extraordinary fighting power of Hitler’s army and the limitations of the citizen soldiers of Britain and the United States, most recently exposed at Anzio. His imagination often soared to heights unattained by lesser mortals, but also plunged to corresponding depths. So often—in France and the Mediterranean, at Singapore, in Crete, Libya, Tunisia, Italy—his heroic expectations had been dashed, or at least limply fulfilled.
If, for whatever reason, D-Day failed, the consequences for the Grand Alliance would be vast and terrible. Hitler’s defeat would still be assured, but no new invasion could be launched until 1945. The peoples of Britain and the United States, already tired of war, would suffer a crippling blow to their morale, and to confidence in their leaders. Eisenhower and Montgomery would have to be sacked, replacements identified from a meagre list of candidates. And this was a U.S. presidential election year, so disaster in Normandy might conceivably precipitate defeat for Roosevelt. At Westminster and in Whitehall, there were already plenty of mutterings that Churchill himself was no longer physically fit to lead the country. “I’m fed up to the back teeth with work,” he growled to his secretary Marion Holmes on the night of May 14, “so I’ll let you off lightly.” Though his fears about Overlord were unlikely to be fulfilled, and his apprehensions were magnified by his burdens and exhaustion, who could blame him for allowing them to fill his mind? What seems most remarkable is the buoyancy and good cheer with which, in the last weeks before D-Day, he concealed black thoughts from all but his intimates.
Alan Brooke invoked the authority of the king to dissuade Churchill from viewing the D-Day assault from a cruiser in the Channel. The prime minister felt that he had earned the right to witness this greatest event of the western war: “A man who has to play931 an effective part, with the highest responsibility, in taking grave and terrible decisions of war may need the refreshment of adventure,” he wrote aggrievedly. Yet, beyond the risk to his safety, Brooke surely feared that, should there be a crisis on the day, Churchill would find it irresistible to meddle. It was for this reason that, since 1942, the CIGS had always sought to ensure that the prime minister was absent from any theatre where a battle was imminent. On the morning of June 6, had Churchill been aboard a warship in the Channel, he would have found it intolerable to stand mute and idle while—for instance—the Americans struggled on Omaha Beach. Commanders striving to direct the battle deserved to be spared from Churchillian advice and imprecations.
Thus, he was obliged to content himself with a round of visits to the invasion forces as they prepared for their moment of destiny. “Winston … has taken his train932 and is touring the Portsmouth area and making a thorough pest of himself!” wrote Brooke ungenerously. The day of June 4 found the prime minister aboard his railway carriage, parked a few miles from the coast in a siding at Droxford, in Hampshire, amid a revolving cast of visitors. Eden was irritated by the inconveniences of the accommodation, which had only one bath and one telephone: