Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire

by Walter Reid

  On 10 June 1940, following the dire events in France, he delivered a speech at Charlottesville, Virginia, which must have encouraged Churchill. But just four days later he wrote to Churchill saying that ‘while our efforts will be exerted towards making available an ever increasing amount of materials and supplies[,] a certain amount of time must pass before our efforts in this sense can be successful to the extent desired’.6

  There was then a period of two months when the President did not communicate with Churchill at all, although in the same period Churchill wrote to Roosevelt no less than four times. No one knows what was going on in the President’s mind during these eight weeks. Of this period Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, said, ‘I do know that in every direction I find a growing discontent with the President’s lack of leadership. He still has the country if he will take it and lead it. But he won’t have it very much longer unless he does something. It won’t be sufficient for him to make another speech and then go into a state of innocuous desuetude again. People are beginning to say: “I am tired of words; I want action.” ’7

  Every positive initiative the President took was followed by qualifications and retractions. James MacGregor Burns, not a hostile biographer, memorably described Roosevelt in 1941:

  Once again Roosevelt was caught between divided administration counsels, between the conflicting demands of isolationists and interventionists. Once again there was a period of veering and drifting in the White House; once again Roosevelt’s advisers – Stimson, Ickes, and others – lamented the President’s failure to lead. And once again Roosevelt responded to the situation by improvisation and subterfuge. He publicly ordered naval patrolling in the now enlarged security zones; he privately ordered a policy of seeking out German ships and planes and notifying British units of their location. On May 27, while pickets trudged dourly back and forth in front of the White House with their anti-war signs, Roosevelt announced his issuance of a proclamation of ‘unlimited national emergency’. The next day, however, he took much of the sting out of his move by disclaiming any positive plans along new lines.

  The President, said Hopkins, ‘would rather follow public opinion than lead it’. Indeed, as Roosevelt anxiously examined public opinion polls in 1941, he once again was failing to supply the crucial factor of his own leadership in the equation of public opinion. His approach was in sharp contrast to that of his great world partner. ‘Nothing is more dangerous in wartime’, Churchill said later in the year, ‘than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature. There is only one duty, only one safe course, and that is to try to be right and not to fear to do or say what you believe to be right.’8

  Roosevelt may simply have felt that he could not move too far ahead of opinion, or it may be that he was simply enjoying a period of the tranquillity which his capacity for a philosophic detachment from day to day worries frequently allowed him. Some events during this period suggest that his mind was slowly moving towards giving some sort of support to Britain. For instance he brought the Anglophile Stimson into the Cabinet as Secretary for War, and the Republican Frank Knox became Secretary of the Navy. But Roosevelt was far from being the most enthusiastic supporter of Britain in her fight against fascism. Ickes and the Secretary of the Treasury, Morgenthau, were more anti-fascist than he: they attributed the President’s caution to Hull, the Secretary of State.9 As the Presidential election approached, it was his opponent, Wendell Willkie, rather than Roosevelt, who campaigned for increased assistance to Britain.

  When the President broke his silence, his first message to Churchill proposed the Destroyers for Bases deal. Churchill’s reaction to the very substantial strings attached to the Destroyers deal, and later to Lend-Lease, was realistic: ‘[We] cannot afford to risk the major issue in order to maintain our pride and to preserve the dignity of a few small islands.’10 But some Cabinet members took a different view. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, saw the strings attached to Lend-Lease as tugging at the sinews of the Empire. Beaverbrook said, ‘They have taken our bases without valuable consideration. They have taken our gold. They have been given our secrets and offered us a thoroughly inadequate service in return.’11

  Churchill could see that the invidious nature of the deal was not something that should be unduly publicised, and in a letter to Roosevelt of 22 August 1940 he pressed that the two parts of the transaction should not be linked in a formal exchange of letters. ‘I had not contemplated anything in the nature of a contract, bargain or a sale between us. It is the fact that we had decided in Cabinet to offer you naval and air facilities off the Atlantic coast quite independently of destroyers or any other aid.’12

  After the war, Churchill spoke affectionately of Roosevelt, partly because of the picture he wanted to leave for posterity and in part simply because his emotional nature often put extravagant language into his mouth; but there were times when he genuinely warmed to FDR’s vitality and enthusiasm. Within the multiplicity of unresolved and sometimes contradictory sentiments that filled the President’s mind, there was indeed in the early part of the war a weakness for the British and French cause. Indeed, after the war, Truman objected to publication of any correspondence between the President and the Prime Minister on the grounds that it would encourage the Congress to press for publication of that correspondence in its entirety; it was thought that publication in full might reveal a bias on the part of FDR towards Britain during the time that America remained neutral.13 But there was not a great number of exchanges between Roosevelt and Churchill during the Phoney War.

  Behind the scenes, British Intelligence worked on American public opinion, with hundreds of agents operating in America as British Security Co-ordination. Three floors in the Rockefeller Center were filled with these people, manipulating moods, planting stories and trying to effect a change in the climate of opinion. They had to work on an amalgam of views in America some of which were positively hostile to assisting Britain, some indifferent. Even at the top of the Democrat political Establishment, there was huge ambivalence about the British cause. Irish and Italian Americans were key elements of the FDR coalition. His ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, wanted Germany to win. His Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, was anxious to see the British fleet moved to America. In the event, the steps that nudged America towards support for Britain were closely tied to recognition of her self-interest. The Destroyers for Bases deal and to an extent Lend-Lease appealed to her desire to strengthen her peripheral defences and enhance her capacity to strike.

  20

  Destroyers for Bases

  Roosevelt’s true sentiments are difficult to ascertain. It was he who inaugurated correspondence with Churchill at the beginning of the war, while the latter was still at the Admiralty, but he had little affection for him. He thought Churchill had snubbed him at a formal dinner in London during the First World War when he was a lowly Assistant Secretary of the US Navy. FDR told Joseph Kennedy in December 1939 that at the dinner Churchill had ‘acted like a stinker … lording it all over us’. Ten years after that meeting, when Churchill was out of office and on a visit to America, Roosevelt, then Governor of New York, declined to see him.1

  Roosevelt’s ambivalence towards Britain was pervasive. While he was hostile to many aspects of what he considered Britain stood for, he certainly had some sympathy with her in the war that she was now fighting alone. Isolationist pressures, evident since his first victory in 1933, and American neutrality statutorily enshrined in successive Neutrality Acts, made it inevitable that America would not enter the war at the outset. The question was whether, and if so when, she might join in. If Pearl Harbor had not taken place the question might have had a different answer; it is impossible to say for certain that FDR would otherwise have exercised sufficient leadership to enter the war.

  Roosevelt’s policy before the war had been based on a desire to strengthen France and Britain against Germany with promises of material ai
d. They would be America’s front line. He sought to establish closer links with British political leaders. He had got on well with Ramsay MacDonald, but not with his successors. Chamberlain, not well disposed towards America, declined an invitation to visit the United States. Roosevelt encouraged and promoted the visit by the King and Queen in 1939 and made reassuring noises to the King about what might happen if Britain were bombed. He told them that he would sink any U-boats he saw. He expressed fears about German naval activity in South America and said he would wish to establish a western hemisphere naval patrol, using British bases in the West Indies. He raised this again formally with the British government some weeks later and it was eventually to form part of the Destroyers for Bases deal of September 1940.

  The King was much reassured, as was Mackenzie King who acted as a sort of minister-in-attendance throughout the visit. But as always, Roosevelt was telling people what they wanted to hear: when in the event war broke out and he clearly proclaimed neutrality, Mackenzie King felt ‘really ashamed’.

  The fact is that Roosevelt’s thoughts on foreign policy were shallow and immature, and his pronouncements often spontaneous and meaningless. He told Canada’s Governor General, Lord Tweedsmuir, that if war broke out in Europe the United States ‘would be in the next day’. Duff Cooper, as First Lord of the Admiralty, was told that America would be with him ‘within three weeks’. On the other hand he was not against appeasement: when Chamberlain went to Munich to meet Hitler, Roosevelt sent a personal telegram: ‘Good man’.2 He thought that he knew Germany better than any career diplomat. He had indeed visited the country many times before the First World War and even went to school there for six weeks. Later he honeymooned there. He met the Kaiser and from the imperial yacht stole a pencil that bore the Kaiser’s tooth marks. Despite all this, he had no affection whatsoever for Germany; and yet he supported Boer relief during the South African War.

  His failure to wake up to the reality of Soviet expansionism towards the end of the war was rooted in a firm view formed before the war that Russia had given up militant communism in favour of a benevolent state socialism. This flawed vision survived the show trials and murders of the 1930s. On the whole he saw Russia moving in a social democrat direction, rather as the United States was doing under his leadership. On the other hand, the empires, particularly the British Empire, were institutions of the past, whose policies had largely been responsible for the outbreak of the First World War, and for the eastern dimensions of the Second. He had a collection of no less than 1.2 million postage stamps. Churchill spent an exciting evening at Washington watching him sticking them into his albums. The collection accompanied the President to Casablanca and Teheran. Anthony Eden said that Roosevelt had learned his geography from his stamps. His appreciation of world politics was of about that level.

  Churchill’s appeal for destroyers was made in a desperate telegram, his first communication with the President after becoming Prime Minister, sent on 15 May 1940, when the Battle of France was at its height. A bad day, ‘an awful day’ said Cadogan, ‘Don’t know where this will end’. The telegram began, ‘Although I have changed my office, I am sure you would not wish me to discontinue our private, intimate correspondence … The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood.’3 The crux of the message lay in the words,

  I trust you realise, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe, established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear. All I ask now is that you should proclaim non-belligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces. Immediate needs are, first of all, the loan of 40 or 50 of your older destroyers to bridge the gap between what we have now and the large new construction that we put in hand at the beginning of the war … We want several hundred of the latest types of aircraft …[,] anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition …

  Roosevelt replied speedily enough but essentially negatively. He offered no tangible help. Lending destroyers would require the approval of Congress, which he did not want to seek at that time.4 His reply ended with a limp dismissal: ‘The best of luck to you. Franklin D. Roosevelt’.5

  Churchill was more realistic than the Foreign Office, which was inclined to offer concessions to the United States in the vague hope that this would redound ultimately to Britain’s advantage. Churchill wanted only to make concessions for value. Despite what he said to the President about a lack of linkage, he refused to allow the Americans to build bases on British islands except in exchange for destroyers and munitions. He fought the Foreign Office, seeking to minimise the number of leases offered: ‘It doesn’t do to give way like this to the Americans. One must strike a balance with them.’6 He refused to allow information about Asdic and Radar to be given gratuitously to the Americans. He wrote on 17 July 1940, ‘I am not in a hurry to give our secrets until the United States is much nearer war than she is now’.7 The secrets eventually went to America in August 1940 in a box which found its way into the wine cellar of the British Embassy in Washington.

  The Destroyers for Bases deal is very frequently represented as a unilateral act of generosity on the part of the Americans. It was far from that. The deal was opposed by a number of senior officials, notably Ambassador Kennedy and Admiral Stark. Roosevelt eventually decided that opposition to the deal would be so great in Congress that he resorted to executive action to implement it. He only did so after repeated demands from Churchill, culminating on 31 July 1940 with a message which enumerated eleven British destroyers that had been sunk or put out of action within the last ten days: ‘Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is the thing to do now’.8 This message seems to have done the trick: only a few days earlier, Roosevelt had told the Secretary for the Navy Knox that Congress would veto a sale of destroyers, and had suggested that Knox might think ‘at a little later date of trying to get Congressional action to allow the sale of these destroyers to Canada on condition that they be used solely in American hemisphere defence’ (my emphasis). Roosevelt knew that the Caribbean islands were ‘of the utmost importance to our national defence as naval and air operations bases’, while the destroyers were ‘the same type of ship which we have from time to time been striking from the naval list and selling for scrap for, I think, $4,000 or $5,000 per destroyer’.

  In the event of course there was not a sale but a deal: it was a deal which the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, ‘who had been almost tearful in his pleas for help and help quickly’, had first suggested to Churchill on 24 May. At that time Churchill dismissed it out of hand. Now he had to accept the ignominious terms.

  There were weeks of difficult negotiation before the agreement was signed on 2 September. As Roosevelt had privately acknowledged, the fifty destroyers Britain received were elderly relics of the previous war, and of limited value. By the end of the year only nine of them were in service with the Royal Navy. They were notoriously poor sea boats, which required extensive modification before they could be used. Their British crews hated them. By October 1943 the Admiralty wanted to scrap these ancient vessels, which needed constant refits. On 31 December 1940 Churchill allowed himself to hint to FDR that his destroyers would be more useful if they were in better order. He annexed to his telegram a list of defects, ‘in case you want to work up any of the destroyers lying in your yards’.9 In return America received long leases of no less than eight British islands in the Caribbean and Western Atlantic, where they could build naval and air bases.

  In 1939 one fairly typical poll found that 62 per cent of Americans were in favour of neutrality and only 2 per cent wanted to go to war. The reasons for this lack of enthusiasm were diverse. Irish- and German-Americans would obviously be against war, but there was also a large constituency that was simply disillusioned with the failure of the First World War to end wars:
126,000 Americans had died in that war. There was no enthusiasm for war in 1939: there was indeed positive opposition, reflected in movements such as America First. This body was highly organised and by spring 1941 consisted of 700 chapters with a total membership of 1,000,000. It was supported by many high-profile figures such as Charles Lindbergh who said just before Pearl Harbor that only three groups wanted war: ‘the British, the Jews and the Roosevelt Administration’.

  America First was not quite balanced by its adversary, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which had about 600 chapters. The Committee was supported by some interesting political heavyweights such as Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Congressman J.W. Fulbright and Dean Acheson. It also had its scattering of showbiz personalities: if America First had Lillian Gish, the Committee to Defend America had Gene Tunney.

  The various anti-fascist groups – there was a number, including the Century Group and the White Committee – must not be thought of as sentimentally pro-British. Indeed the democratic idealism which animated some of them made them very critical of a Britain that they tended to regard as unattractively reactionary. They were first and foremost pro-America. It was the Century Group which produced the idea of exchanging the old destroyers in return for bases and assurances about the British fleet. White said that many of his Committee

  had no great love for the British ruling classes. We have not relented in our general theory that George III was a stupid old fuddy duddy with instincts of a tyrant and a brain corroded and cheesy with the arrogance and ignorance which go with the exercise of tyranny. Yet I think I am safe in saying that our whole group felt … that if Great Britain were inhabited by a group of Red Indians under the command of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Geronimo, so long as Great Britain had command of the British fleet, we should try to arm her and keep that fleet afloat.10