Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [265]
On August 16, Churchill watched the Dragoon landing from an assault vessel a few miles offshore. In a letter to Clementine, he portrayed the splendour of the armada “all spread along twenty miles of coast970 with poor St. Tropez in the centre.” The invaders met little opposition, and were soon racing northeastward to a linkage with Eisenhower’s armies on September 12. The prime minister spent hours in talks about Mediterranean policy with Macmillan, Maitland Wilson and others. British handling of Italian affairs was unimpressive, and perceived as such by the Americans. Churchill and Eden acquiesced in the return from Moscow of exiled Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, and his inclusion in the Italian government in exchange for its recognition by the Russians. Dogged British resistance to the participation of Count Carlo Sforza, a former foreign minister who had been living in the United States and was esteemed by the Americans, annoyed Washington intensely. London was taken unawares when Marshal Badoglio was ejected from the Italian leadership in June 1944. Thereafter, British struggles to create and sustain a Rome government acceptable to Churchill and his colleagues incurred constant criticism from the U.S. State Department and media. The Americans’ own ideas were naïve, but founded in a commitment to Italian rights of self-determination, which they perceived the British as flouting in their old imperialistic way.
Increasingly Churchill’s attention focused upon Greece, where he perceived serious danger of a Communist takeover. The guerrillas of EAM/ELAS, armed by the SOE, were the best-organised force in the country. As the Germans began to withdraw from southern Greece, Churchill ordered that British troops should be readied to fly into Athens the moment the enemy abandoned the city, to forestall a Communist coup. It was hard to find men, when the Allied armies in Italy had been so much depleted for Dragoon, but forces for Greece, the prime minister insisted, had to be found. Some airborne units were earmarked.
Then he advanced towards the front, dressed in army summer rig with medal ribbons and a solar topee that would have looked absurd on any other man. Alexander drove him to a hilltop on which he could hear small-arms fire, watch machine gunners flail the enemy amid showers of empty cases spinning away into the dust and see tanks grinding into action. The outing provided him with as much happiness as any experience in the last months of the war. He was in the midst of a British army which, if not immediately triumphant, was indisputably predominant, in the company of a general whom he deemed a paladin. Alexander received far fewer reproaches for slow progress than did Montgomery. Churchill blamed the misfortunes of the joyless, bloody Italian theatre exclusively upon the Americans. They, he believed, had stripped Alex’s army of the means with which it might have changed the fate of Europe and spared the Balkans from Soviet domination. Many of those engaged in the struggle, and bearing its sacrifices, shared his opinion. A humble Eighth Army signaller wrote in his diary on August 27, 1944, “I feel sure this is a secondary971 front and therefore being denied the vital necessities of war.”
On August 29, Churchill landed back in Britain with a temperature of 103 degrees, and a patch on his lung which caused his doctors to prescribe another course of antibiotics. He had achieved nothing of substance in the Mediterranean, nor in Normandy, save to assuage a growing sense of his own impotence,