The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Churchill—not knowing with certainty Hitler’s planned betrayal of Stalin—could only surmise that the Germans and Soviets had between themselves agreed upon more efficient means for the exchange of critical matériel than had Britain and America. In fact, in the four months since Roosevelt had agreed to send fifty American destroyers, only a few that had arrived were battle ready, and all of them, of course, had been given in exchange for British territory. American matériel was not killing many Germans. And Roosevelt’s welcome and inspiring words killed no more Germans than did Churchill’s. Britain’s financial crisis of the previous summer had not ameliorated; it was worsening, daily. Shipping losses had not been stemmed; they worsened each time a convoy sailed. American factories were now turning out British tank turrets and engines—paid for with Britain’s diminishing cash reserves—yet all would be for naught if the cargoes never reached Britain. Just before the new year, Churchill, Eden, Beaverbrook, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Kingsley Wood met to discuss a major problem with supplies—the price demanded by the Americans. Rumor out of the London embassy had it that the Americans were prepared to “wash their hands” unless Britain spent more than $250 million—half of its remaining cash reserves—on “Programme B,” arms and munitions enough to outfit ten full divisions, forces not needed until late 1942 at the earliest. The British, on the other hand, sought the matériel proposed in “Programme A”—aircraft engines, tanks, and patrol boats, of which they were in desperate need. The meeting ended with the decision to tell the Americans that if they insisted that “B” must precede “A,” the British wanted neither.40

  Churchill had let loose in a mid-December telegram he drafted to Roosevelt: “If you were to ‘wash your hands of us’ i.e. give us nothing we cannot pay for… we shall certainly not give in,” and though Britain could survive for the time being, it “could not be able to beat the Nazi tyranny and gain you the time you require for your rearmament.” Again he held his tongue, and the letter. It was never sent.41

  Churchill, in the spirit of postwar thankfulness, titled his memoir of 1941 The Grand Alliance.* Given the meager, though widening, stream of war matériel arriving from America early that year, a more appropriate title might have been The Grand Abeyance. He needed an American in London, a man of high official capacity, a man he could trust, a man who grasped what was truly at stake. Roosevelt needed a fixer in London, someone whose advice he could trust and act upon, a man who could debunk or verify Joe Kennedy’s claims of poor English morale, a man who could judge if Churchill was a drunk, and if he liked or disliked Roosevelt. Both Churchill and Roosevelt needed a man in London who by virtue of his conductivity would complete the circuit and start the juice flowing between the two leaders. In London, during the first week of January, there was no such American.

  But he was on his way. Franklin Roosevelt had dispatched to London a man who appeared about as average an American Joe as ever trod the halls of the White House: Harry Hopkins, son of an Iowa gold prospector and traveling salesman, his mother a schoolteacher. Yet Hopkins was no average guy; he was Roosevelt’s most trusted adviser, despised equally by those who hated Roosevelt and those who loved the president but, according to Hopkins’s biographer Robert E. Sherwood, considered to be “an Iowan combination of Machiavelli, Svengali and Rasputin.” He was due to arrive in Britain via floatplane by way of Lisbon on January 9. His visit was considered so inconsequential by the Foreign Office that its minions failed to pass on to Churchill the telegraph announcing his advent. When Churchill first learned that a certain Harry Hopkins would soon be arriving in London, he asked, “Harry who?” When apprised by Brendan Bracken of Hopkins’s special relationship with Roosevelt, Churchill, grasping the importance of the visitor, called for the unrolling of red carpets, if any had survived the Blitz.42

  While dressing for dinner on January 6, the day he delivered his long memo to Ismay, Churchill delivered to Colville “a discourse on Ladysmith and why he always remembered January 6th.” Earlier that day he sent a short note off to General Sir Ian Hamilton, a friend since their India days: “Am thinking of you and Wagon Hill when another January sixth brings news of a feat of arms.” In his message to Hamilton he recalled as “one of the most happy memories” the two months spent as a newly recommissioned lieutenant in the South African Light Horse during the British march to lift the Boer siege of Ladysmith. There Hamilton commanded a brigade of mounted infantry that held a vital ridge south of the city, Waggon Hill.* In the early hours of January 6, 1900, the Boers smashed into Hamilton’s lines. Inexplicably, he had left his left flank exposed. But Hamilton stood his ground and rallied his troops, and for sixteen hours, until thunderstorms put a finish to things late in the afternoon, defended the hill, which if lost might have spelled a different ending for that war. The besieged British held on until the South African Light Horse appeared on the scene seven weeks later. Churchill, ever in a hurry, was the first of the Light Horse to ride into the relieved city.43

  Waggon Hill was fought by nineteenth-century men under nineteenth-century conditions. Earthworks snaked along ridgelines, and targeting balloons drifted high overhead. From gun pits came the flash and rumble of rifled cannon. Messages flashed rearward via heliographs; horses sought purchase on muddy slopes as they strained to haul caissons up to the lines. The weapons on the field and all of the slaughter would have been familiar to veterans of Antietam or Cold Harbor, or Balaclava. Yet Waggon Hill qualifies as one of the first battles of the twentieth century, not only temporally but by virtue of the deployment of water-cooled machine guns, sandbagged gun emplacements, and the lethal steel ribbons of rusted barbed wire, upon which hung the bodies of young Englishmen and Boers. The era in which they had grown to manhood died there with them that day. Four decades on, their battle had long since been forgotten, except by those few still alive who had fought alongside them and those, like Winston Churchill, who wished they had.

  The feat of arms that Churchill brought to Hamilton’s attention—the capture of Bardia—was a minor affair against the Italians on the Libyan coast, and by no means a victory to compare with Ladysmith. As Churchill spun his tale to Colville, Franklin Roosevelt was preparing to deliver his State of the Union address before the U.S. Congress, giving Churchill a new reason to remember the date of January 6. At 2:03 P.M. eastern standard time, Roosevelt steadied himself behind the podium. Then before the assembled senators and representatives, three network microphones, and his wife, Eleanor, who looked down from the gallery, he sketched the general outline of Lend-Lease. During the next fifteen minutes, in terms sure to encourage Churchill and infuriate Hitler and isolationists alike, he pledged American support for those countries fighting against the Axis, and more:

  I… ask this Congress for authority and for funds sufficient to manufacture additional munitions and war supplies of many kinds, to be turned over to those nations which are now in actual war with aggressor nations…. They do not need man power, but they do need billions of dollars worth of the weapons of defense.

  The time is near when they will not be able to pay for them all in ready cash. We cannot, and we will not, tell them that they must surrender, merely because of present inability to pay for the weapons which we know they must have.

  I do not recommend that we make them a loan of dollars with which to pay for these weapons…. Let us say to the democracies…. We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom. We shall send you, in ever-increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. This is our purpose and our pledge.44

  There it was. No American cruisers would be going to Cape Town to haul away Britain’s gold. Roosevelt would stand in as Churchill’s second in the great duel. To Greece, China, and Britain foremost would go several billions of dollars’ worth of tanks, clothing, food, guns, ammunition, and fuel. With crude oil priced at about $1.15 per barrel, a Colt .45 “tommy gun” at about $200, the newly tested half-ton reconnaissance car—the Jeep—at around $800, and new B-17s rolling off the line at $27
6,000 apiece, several billions of dollars’ worth of matériel would go a long way indeed.45

  The president’s words—if they translated into congressional action—eased the most acute of Churchill’s financial worries, for an infusion of American matériel with costs deferred would buy time. Yet Roosevelt had spoken to matters far beyond merely buying time for Britain. He spoke to America’s future, with profound consequences for Churchill and the British Empire. His address has been known since as the “Four Freedoms” speech, in reference to the four moral precepts he attached to the end, a caboose that evolved into a locomotive. The address was a sublime statement of American generosity and American democratic ideals. It contained no mention of Churchill and, but for two offhand references to the British navy, no reference to the British Empire. To those who might reasonably seek a moral basis for aiding nations arrayed against Japan and Germany, to those who asked why this largess, Roosevelt offered his “Four Freedoms”:

  In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

  The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

  The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

  The third is freedom from want… which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

  The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point… that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world….

  Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them…. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.

  Franklin Roosevelt had pushed open an imposing portal that America would never, could never, close. He did not immediately step through. He and America were not prepared. Yet he had announced his intent to remake the world in America’s image. “Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them” is an absolute statement that admits to no moral relativism and cannot be applied on a sliding scale. Roosevelt usually favored building coalitions, yet he had just made a case for unilateralism in the propagation of freedom.

  He had made plain that dictators would not be tolerated in this new world order. He decreed that the Four Freedoms held everywhere. Yet “the democracies” he pledged to support included Greece, run by a dictator, and China, run by the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek. And what of empires of the democratic, liberal, British variety? Here, Roosevelt was silent. In Churchill’s world, “empire” and “freedom” were interchangeable, if the empire in question was the British Empire. Not so in Roosevelt’s world, as Churchill would learn to his enormous consternation in the coming months and years. Of democratic rights, Roosevelt had not declared, “Our support goes to those who struggle to keep those rights.” Rather, he announced his intent to support those who struggle to gain or keep those rights. Yet within the British Empire such rights were granted by His Majesty’s Government. Within the British Empire, some who struggled to gain those rights—Louis Botha, Michael Collins, Gandhi—were considered terrorists.

  Reaction to the address was predictable. The influential German newspaper Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung dismissed it as “Eccentric Arguments for a Lost Cause.” The Chicago Tribune took much the same position: Lend-Lease would prove “a bill for the destruction of the American Republic.”

  Churchill’s wait was almost over. He would not see the actual wording of the Lend-Lease bill for four days, but, despite his uncertainty as to its specific content, he had heard enough to express his thanks to Roosevelt in a speech January 9, on the occasion of Lord Halifax’s imminent departure to Washington as the Crown’s new ambassador: “I therefore hail it as a most fortunate occurrence that in this awe-striking climax in world affairs there should stand at the head of the American Republic a famous statesman… in whose heart there burns the fire of resistance to aggression and oppression, and whose sympathies and nature make him the sincere and undoubted champion of justice and freedom, and of the victims of wrongdoing wherever they may dwell.”46

  Halifax’s departure was eclipsed by the golden promises from Washington. Still, Churchill found much good to say about the repentant appeaser: “In Edward Halifax we have a man of light and leading, whose company is a treat and whose friendship is an honor to enjoy,” a man who has “never swerved from the path of duty as he saw it shining out before him.” Halifax did not behold any prospects of luminous paths in his new position. He confided to Alec Cadogan that he felt the prime minister was trying to get rid of him. Cadogan had not the heart to tell Halifax that he was correct, or that he, Cadogan, thought the appointment “a grave mistake.” Then there was the matter of Halifax’s feelings about Americans. To Stanley Baldwin, Halifax wrote, “I have never liked Americans, except the odd ones. In the mass I have always thought them dreadful!” Yet Halifax embraced his new American duties with alacrity, and conducted them with wisdom and finesse.47

  Churchill, in his send-off for Halifax, avoided any trip wires. In any case, he wasn’t speaking to those millions, nor directly to Roosevelt, but to Roosevelt’s good friend and adviser Harry Hopkins, who, just arrived in London, would surely hear of the kind words Churchill had spoken about his boss, sugary words that would no doubt be fresh in Hopkins’s mind when he lunched with Churchill the following day. And that was a good thing, for Churchill by now understood that Hopkins was no ordinary visitor.

  Before the new partners could get down to the business of financing Britain’s war, Churchill had first to win over Hopkins, and Roosevelt had to fight a political battle. Roosevelt knew that no critic could with truth say Lend-Lease committed a single American soldier to the British cause. The president’s position, a slippery foothold on the truth, was that Lend-Lease would help guarantee only that Britain get the job done without American troops. Roosevelt had talked himself into a Harold Lloyd sort of pickle, out on a ledge with no place to go. He had to nudge America close enough to Churchill’s fight to make a difference, yet not so close as to be drawn over the edge. The last war and the sordid peace that followed (both of which looked to many Americans like sops to Old Europe) were fresh in Roosevelt’s memory. He was not a European patriot and in fact believed European spheres of influence led inexorably to European wars. If Roosevelt was to join Churchill’s cause, he knew that he must articulate new principles—his Four Freedoms—on which to base his proposed policies. Roosevelt truly believed that England defeated meant America threatened, that is, American interests threatened. Many in Congress did not. Yet the president and the Congress had plenty of time to work things out. America would not be rushed by anyone.

  Churchill was “delighted” by the Lend-Lease bill, Colville told his diary on the eleventh, adding that Churchill considered Lend-Lease to be “a virtual open declaration of war” or “at any rate an open challenge to Germany to declare war if she dares.” But the prime minister was well aware, too, of the sentiments of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kingsley Wood, who told Colville on the tenth: “In view of this bill [Lend-Lease] it will be more difficult for us to resist the American tendency to strip us of everything we possess as payment for what we are about to receive.”48

  As Lend-Lease was making its way through the U.S. House of Representatives and, if passed there, the U.S. Senate, Churchill knew he must keep his frustrations with American inertia private, and muzzle those of his many colleagues who bitterly protested the lease of the West Indian bases to America as amounting to the same sort of “capitulation” Britain had demanded of Turkey and China in the nineteenth century. Churchill understood that the sorry state of the American destroyers and the injury to national pride over the loss of West Indian bases were ultimately irrelevant. The real significance of Lend-Lease, for which he was effusively grateful, was that it brought
America a step closer to war. Lend-Lease took shape not because Churchill had begged so effectively or had outfoxed Franklin Roosevelt—he had not—but because Roosevelt, in spite of tremendous political risk and strong popular dissent, considered it to be in America’s interest to aid Britain and, of more immediate political concern, judged his countrymen ready to join him in taking that step.49

  Roosevelt knew that in defending Lend-Lease he must avoid any statement that bolstered the isolationist case. He had to focus more on the morality of the war than on the weapons Churchill needed, because without a national consensus on the former, the latter would never be manufactured in sufficient quantities to make any difference. In shepherding America to war, or at the least, to preparedness for war, he could not take too long or too heavy a step. He shanghaied Harvard University president James Conant into testifying in support of Lend-Lease before Congress and impressed upon him the need to address only what it authorized, not what it might portend, though failure to pass the bill would, Roosevelt argued, put America at risk of attack should Britain be defeated.

  The isolationists did not buy any of it. Although they supported modest aid for Britain, Conant believed they wanted a guarantee that Lend-Lease “would not be a step toward America’s involvement in the war.” They would get no such guarantee even were Roosevelt in a giving mood, which he told Conant he was not. Yet Roosevelt had preempted the isolationists, who could not afford to appear weak on defense, nor could they criticize the self-evident Four Freedoms. Any attack in that quarter would engender as much support as an attack on motherhood. Still, they knew their countrymen. Vanquishing true and absolute Evil didn’t much cut it in 1941 America. Nor among the isolationist America Firsters did the Wilsonian mandate that America “must make the world safe for democracy.” America had turned inward during the 1930s, properly so, claimed the isolationists, for danger lurked without.50