Foreign News: Mr. Bullfinch Takes a Trip

Mr. Churchill loves fine clothes, silk underwear, cream-colored pajamas, soft linen handerkerchiefs, grey suede gloves, chimneypot hats and lounge suits with a sly pin stripe. Bit of a dandy he is, always dashing about somewhere. A year ago it was a sea trip to Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay for the Atlantic Charter signing. Then two flights to Washington. Now it was the 10,000-mile trip to Egypt and Moscow. It was a relief this week to Sawyers, Churchill’s pale-lashed, nimble little valet, to be back again in No. 10 Downing Street.

The flight to Egypt found Churchill in “the office” (control cabin) of the four-motored American B-24 bomber, chattering with Pilot William Vanderkloot of Sarasota, Fla., winner of the Order of the British Empire for his Ferry Command radio-beam installations on the North Atlantic, and with Co-Pilot Jack Ruggles of San Francisco, once-wounded, four-year veteran of the Chinese Air Force.

“Nasty terrain!” exclaimed the Prime Minister, looking down on some of the desert of French North Africa. “What would happen if we couldn’t go on?” “Knock the kite around a bit, but nobody’d get hurt,” Ruggles guessed.

“But if we had to land down there.” Churchill mused, “we’d probably be made prisoners. . . . I’ve an idea the Nazis would like to get their hands on me. Probably they’d shoot me.”

Bagdad to Teheran. Back again in “the office” as the bomber flew northeast over the Persian mountains from Bagdad to Teheran, Churchill saw jagged peaks reaching up hungrily in the clear air. “Say, aren’t we flying rather close?” he asked. Vanderkloot answered: “About a thousand feet.” “Those peaks,” said Churchill, “would look better from higher up.” The bomber picked up another thousand feet.

Then Vanderkloot asked: “Are you a short-snorter, sir?” The rules of that august fraternity provide that if a short-snorter is unable to produce his card immediately, he must give a dollar bill to all short-snorters present. Leland Stowe’s Moscow interview with the two flyers revealed that Churchill then & there made up a new rule—that he had five minutes to produce his card. He distressed Sawyers by pawing through his luggage, finally found the dollar bill inscribed with the term “short-snorter” and the date of his induction into the fraternity of transocean flyers and passengers.

As Churchill’s bomber and two others carrying 14 British and six American military and diplomatic bigshots droned over Moscow, a full escort of fighters swarmed around them. At the airport Churchill stood at attention for God Save the King, The Star-Spangled Banner and The Internationale.

On the spot he made a brief newsreel speech for Russian home consumption: “We are full of determination to continue to fight hand in hand . . . like comrades and brothers, until the last remnants of the Hitlerite regime are smashed and only remain as a memory to the world and as a warning to future time.” Then he held up his ringers in the V salute.

“See that?” said a man in the crowd. “Two fingers! Get it? That means two fronts.”

Airport to Kremlin. From the airport a seven-car motorcade led by a black Packard limousine rolled on to Leningrad Highway past a huge statue of Lenin and mammoth apartment buildings with ragged faces, where war priorities had halted construction work. Nearer the city the highway merged into twelve-laned Gorki Street. Soldiers queuing up to buy afternoon newspapers and women carrying net sacks with bread and vegetables scarcely noticed the cars. But as the first limousine rolled down Gorki Street hill and turned west along the north wall of the Kremlin, U.S. and British correspondents recognized—in the light of a match held to a long black cigar—a cherubic face in the gap between a black Homburg and a dark business suit.

After a night in the country Churchill made his headquarters at the British Embassy’s Stary Dom house. His first meeting with Stalin lasted three hours and 40 minutes. The descendant of the fighting Dukes of Marlborough, trained in the sportsmanlike traditions of British colonial warfare and the superficially polite exchanges of British politics, finally faced the Georgian peasant who learned about politics in years of underground conspiracy and bloody revolution.

On the subject of a second front the two men, tough and plain-spoken in their respective ways, presumably had plenty to say to each other. W. Averell Harriman, representing President Roosevelt, sat in on the conferences with instructions that Roosevelt would be in agreement with “all decisions taken here by Mr. Churchill.” Whether there were any decisions remains to be seen. But if there were differences of opinion they were covered over afterward in a stage banquet in the Kremlin’s huge and somber Catherine Hall.

Caviar to Bonbons. At the main table Stalin sat with Churchill on his right and Harriman on his left. Wine, vodka and champagne washed down 26 courses, beginning with caviar and ending with bonbons. After 25 toasts, count was lost. Guests left as the morning sun struck the Kremlin’s eastern battlements. Churchill who has dressed for dinner virtually every night of his adult life, wore his zippered overall “siren suit.” What prompted him to wear it, what protests from Sawyers he overruled, he alone knew. Moscow wondered, decided finally that he was an “individualist.”

It was as an individualist again that during his last few hours in Moscow Churchill called for another appointment with Stalin. He was closeted with the Premier from 9 p.m. until 2:30 a.m. A few hours later, in a drizzling rain, he climbed back into his bomber.

Illuminating was the terse bread-&-butter note which Churchill sent to Host Stalin on leaving Moscow: “I take the opportunity to thank you for your friendly attitude and hospitality. I am highly satisfied that I have visited Moscow. . . . I am sure that our contact will be useful for the common cause. Please convey my regards to Mr. Molotov.”

The abrupt wording of the note spoke volumes. From the tone of the Russian press there was more than a hint at disappointment that no pledge of an immediate second front was made (see p. 25).

Moscow to Cairo. But Tripper Churchill was not yet ready to go home. From second-front talks with Stalin he apparently returned once more to North Africa, where a United Nations’ second front may be opened. He may even have made side trips from there. Not until eight days after the announcement that he had left Moscow did the British officially announce that Churchill was home. Just where he had been all the time was a military secret for the moment. But it was no secret that he had seen everything and everybody of importance in Egypt.

While going or coming he talked with General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Fighting French, and with wise old Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa. He had an audience with King Farouk (see p. 66), a chat with Nahas Pasha, Egyptian Premier, and the Shah of Persia. And the old (67) war horse could not be kept from the front. He flew west into the desert, changed into an armored car, got within four miles of the famous “Hill of Jesus,” had to be argued out of going to the edge of no man’s land. Through binoculars he saw Rommel’s fortifications, watched Messerschmitts fighting with Spitfires two miles away.

The chief censor had insisted that he be known only as “Mr. Bullfinch.”

But soldiers soon discovered who Mr. Bullfinch was. “Blimey, it’s Winnie,” they said. “Winnie’s come out into the bloomin’ desert.” “Hey, Winnie,” shouted Private Stanley Collins, an Australian, “Have you got a spare cigar?” Winnie handed over a fragrant Hoyo de Monterrey.

With General Sir Alan Francis Brooke, General Sir Claude Auchinleck and Lieut. General Sir Allan Moreshead, Australian Commander, Churchill saw the white of El Alamein sand dunes against the turquoise blue of the Mediterranean. Bronzed South Africans, stripped to the waist, were laying mines. One South African said he came from Pretoria. “I was there,” said Churchill, “before you were born.” (As a captured war correspondent of the London Morning Post in the Boer War.)

In a camouflaged tent at the headquarters of the 13th Corps, Churchill lunched on prawns mayonnaise, ham and tongue, rolls, butter and cold beer. Airmen invited to meet the “distinguished Mr. Bullfinch” reported that when he whammed a fly with 39 his long-tailed Egyptian fly whisk, he paused to comment dryly: “I don’t think that was a probable, gentlemen.” In an impromptu speech to flyers just off patrol duty, he said: “You have fought a battle comparable with the Battle of Britain. You need not doubt that you will be supplied with the best equipment.”

“The best equipment” and enough of it will be something new in Africa, a front which has rarely had either but which may be revitalized within the next few months. Winston Churchill’s visit to Egypt was perhaps no mere matter of curiosity. Last week Prime Minister Smuts, having flown home to Pretoria, declared, “We had the opportunity to go very thoroughly into the whole war position. . . . We want to see what can be done this year and for the great offensives of next year. . . . We have a plan for victory.”