by Walter Reid
Far from writing off the loan, or indeed making a further gift to help Britain out of her dire post-war financial straits, Keynes and Halifax, Britain’s negotiators, found that America required payment in full. Worse still, interest would be payable on the loan.
Keynes told the House of Lords, ‘I shall not, as long as I live, cease to regret that this is not an interest-free loan’. The rate of interest was 2 per cent; by later standards that may sound low, but it was not: it was quite simply the current Federal Reserve Prime Loan Rate. No concessions to sentiment were made.
While the war brought Britain to bankruptcy, it brought huge prosperity to America. Although the National Debt had risen from $37 billion to $269 billion, Gross National Product was up from $90.5 billion to $211.5 billion, personal savings had risen from $6.85 billion to $36.41 billion, steel production had increased from 53 million tons to 80 million tons and agricultural output had risen by 15 per cent.30 After Britain’s efforts in the common cause of the war, her economy did not return to pre-war strength until the 1980s.
Assessing the cost of war is inevitably a callous exercise. Recourse to war is a negation of our ability to regulate our affairs by the exercise of reason and humanity, and one life lost in war is one too many. A table of relative losses is a crude way of assessing who ‘won’ a war, but perhaps a necessary measure.
America suffered 418,500 deaths, 11,200 of them civilian. Total deaths were 0.32 per cent of her population. She entered the war not to defeat the Axis Powers but to defend herself, and she was able to do so without any fighting within her own borders. She emerged as the richest and most powerful nation on the globe, with a world role in both economic and diplomatic terms. Truman did not exaggerate when he said, shortly after taking office, ‘We have emerged from this war the most powerful nation in the world – the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history’. Sellars and Yeatman had written in 1930 that with the end of the First War ‘America was thus clearly top nation’. As always their perception was particularly sharp, but by 1945 their judgement was shared by the whole world.
The Soviet Union had become the other dominant power, but at a frightful cost in terms of lives. No one will ever know how many of her citizens died in a war that was won essentially by her alone. It is estimated that 23.5 million died, 1 million of them Holocaust deaths, and 10.7 million civilians: in all 13.39 per cent of her population. Can a country that suffers losses on that scale be said to have won a war? Communist theory, which saw history as a determinist pattern in which the individual counted for nothing, would say so.
Germany started the war and she paid for it. Some 7.5 million Germans died, including 160,000 Holocaust deaths and 1.84 million civilians, 10.77 per cent of her population. After the war her victors defended her frontiers and gave her the financial aid that fuelled the post-war economic miracle.
Poland, the immediate casus belli, lost 5 million citizens, 3 million in the Holocaust. Proportionally she suffered more than any other country, losing 18.51 per cent of her population in a war which was fought to defend her territorial integrity. She ended with Communist annexation instead of Nazi rule.
France made peace and her deaths were 1.35 per cent of her population. Total deaths were 562,000, including 83,000 holocaust victims and 267,000 civilians. Her allies restored her frontiers, and reinvestment fuelled by American aid stimulated the golden economic recovery of the de Gaulle years. But her self-respect was dealt a severe blow. The dark memories and confused loyalties of the Vichy years still have social resonance.
Britain lost 450,400 lives, 67,800 of them civilians, the total being 0.94 per cent of her population. Her dominions and Empire also sacrificed their lives in a struggle with which some of them were only remotely connected. The war hastened the end of Empire for Britain and her decline from a position of world pre-eminence. The route to economic recovery was a long and difficult one. She avoided invasion and defeat.
The Bretton Woods agreement provoked very strong resentment in Britain, in the press and in Parliament, which only reluctantly accepted the terms that were dictated to it. In America there was also resentment in the legislature, but it was resentment of the generosity of the deal. ‘Just what kind of saps do they think we are?’ asked one Congressman. Others referred to ‘Britain’s rotten imperialism’, and to a country that was ‘as covetous as a sponge’. As opposition to the terms hardened in the Congress, Truman carefully distanced himself, and it was largely to try to swing American opinion that Churchill went to make his famous speech at Fulton, Missouri. While the ‘Iron Curtain’ remark stuck in popular memory, his main purpose was to remind America of the alliance with Britain, and reassure her that the present government, though socialists, were patriotic men and his former colleagues.
And so what had started off in a kindly metaphor about lending your hosepipe, without thought of reward, to the neighbour whose house was on fire resulted in a series of payments to America over the next sixty-one years. The Economist wrote in December 1945, ‘Our reward for losing a quarter of our national wealth in the common cause is to pay tribute for half a century to those who have been enriched by the war’. As well as paying interest, Britain had to make over intellectual property in connection, amongst other things, with research and jet planes, radar, antibiotics and nuclear issues. The final payment of interest, $83 million, was made on 31 December 2006.
22
Placentia Bay
Before sending Hopkins to see Churchill, Roosevelt had reflected that a face-to-face meeting with the British leader would be the best way forward. That meeting eventually took place at Placentia Bay, off Newfoundland, on 9 August 1941 when Churchill, on board the Prince of Wales, escorted for the last part of his voyage from Scapa Flow by two American destroyers, dropped anchor close to the USS Augusta, flagship of the American Atlantic Fleet. The Augusta carried the President of the United States together with Admirals Ernest King and Harold Stark and Generals George Marshall and Hap Arnold, the commander of the army in the air. Churchill sent a self-consciously historic telegram to the King: ‘With humble duty, I have arrived safely, and am visiting the President this morning’.
The secrecy of the arrangements on the American side point up the sensitivity in America about any visible contact with Britain. It had been announced that the President was going on a fishing trip off New England on the Presidential yacht, the Potomac. The real nature of the voyage was kept secret even from Roosevelt’s family as well as his White House staff and the Secret Service. The Potomac made her way to Point Judith, Rhode Island, and then to Martha’s Vineyard Sound, where it met a flotilla of American warships. After Roosevelt transferred to the Augusta, the Potomac returned through Cape Cod Canal, so that those watching could see an FBI look-a-like, wearing white ducks and smoking a cigarette in a long holder.
Churchill had boarded the Prince of Wales to set off for Placentia Bay on 4 August 1941, the anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. He telegraphed to Roosevelt, ‘It is twenty-seven years ago today that the Huns began their last war. We must make a good job of it this time.’ When he reached Placentia Bay, he joined Roosevelt on the Augusta. He was uncharacteristically nervous: ‘I wonder if he will like me’, he mused to Averell Harriman.1
Thus began the first wartime meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt. They would have nine meetings in the course of the war, spending a total of 120 days together. On the following day, Roosevelt transferred to the Prince of Wales for the famous, heavily charged service at which Churchill had chosen the hymns, including Roosevelt’s favourite, ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’. Later in the day Churchill had a romp ashore and collected a posy of wild flowers. Jacob noted, ‘We clambered over some rocks, the PM like a schoolboy, getting a great kick out of rolling boulders down a cliff’.2
It is not clear what Roosevelt expected from Placentia Bay. A meeting with Churchill had been talked of for some time and the immediate catalyst appears to have been the German invasion of Russia. Thi
s jolted the President out of a state of exhaustion induced in Hopkins’s view by long battles with the isolationists. He was now concerned that Britain should be pinned down to precise war aims before America entered into extravagant arrangements with Russia. If, ultimately, America were to fight alongside Britain, Roosevelt wanted to be doing so on the basis of something like Wilson’s Fourteen Points, rather than appearing to be simply baling out a bankrupt imperial power.
Churchill was quite frank in his entreaties of the President. He made no attempt to suggest that he was not there to beg for aid. ‘You know that we know that without America the Empire won’t stand’.3 He might have been better to substitute ‘Britain’ for ‘Empire’, but the avowal was well judged, as part of Roosevelt’s purpose in attending the conference was to assess just how desperate Britain’s position was, and whether she could continue the defence of the West without America.
At a technical level at least, Britain could hold her own at the conference. The British delegation was bigger and better prepared than their opposite numbers. Hap Arnold did not even have an assistant to take notes for him. The British came with a better understanding of twentieth-century war: they had been fighting since 1939, and more of them had experience in the First World War.
The imbalance of representation pointed up the difference in expectations. Roosevelt simply did not attach to the conference the historic importance that Churchill accorded it. Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, did not attend – indeed he did not even know the conference was taking place.
On the second day of the conference, 11 August, three series of separate talks began, one among the diplomats, one between the Chiefs of Staff, and one between the President and Prime Minister. Churchill had great if imprecise expectations of what the meetings might lead to. He had told the Queen before he left, ‘I do not think our friend would have asked me to go so far for what must be a meeting of world-wide importance, unless he had in mind some further forward step’.4 He expected more than the limited results that the conference delivered. He failed to take account of Roosevelt’s caution and his capacity for tentative advance. At a personal level, Churchill unfortunately failed to recall his earlier 1918 dinner encounter with Roosevelt. The circumstances of that meeting had been bad enough, but Roosevelt was now miffed that he had made so little impression on Churchill.
Because Roosevelt did not commit his thoughts to paper, there are only glimpses of the impression Churchill made on him at Placentia Bay. According to his son, Elliott, Roosevelt described Churchill after the conference as, ‘A real old Tory, of the old school’, with ‘eighteenth-century methods’ of running the Empire.5 While Elliot Roosevelt’s statements have to be read with caution, that description does sound like an authentically superficial FDR appraisal.
At most of the war conferences Churchill was accompanied by one of his daughters, and similarly Roosevelt liked to have a member of his family with him. His third child, Elliot, was his ADC at most of the great meetings. At Placentia Bay, Franklin, Junior, was present too, and at Potsdam Anna was there in his place. Elliot was very different from his parents, and from time to time he was to some extent estranged from them. He settled neither in his marriages, of which he had five, nor in his careers, of which he had rather more. He volunteered to join the air force at the outset of war but failed a medical for active service and was given a desk job. There were suggestions that he had used his family connection to avoid danger, and to obtain promotion. This was not the case, but FDR faced some embarrassing heckling from students – ‘Poppa, I wanna be a captain!’ He managed to secure a move into aerial photo-reconnaissance, where he faced considerable danger with some distinction. He ended by being promoted brigadier general, certainly not on his father’s initiative, but again facing criticism for favouritism as the rank was normally only awarded to pilots.
In 1946 he published As He Saw It, which consisted mostly of his memories of the great war conferences that he had attended. The book was intended to make a humanitarian point that the world need not face the dangers of confrontation between the West and the USSR. He portrayed Russia in an idealised form, and attributed a similar view to his father. His vocabulary is limited, his observations banal, and the book is astonishingly naïve and superficial. His targets are in part the State Department, of which FDR thought little, and Churchill, who is portrayed as an antique relic from earlier centuries whose devotion to the perpetuation of the British Empire obstructed the President from redrawing the world in accordance with what is repeatedly referred to as ‘the twentieth century’ – a world order in which colonial peoples have been given their freedoms. FDR seems to have felt himself at one with Stalin in wanting an end to territorial acquisitiveness.
When they saw the book in draft, Elliot Roosevelt’s publishers told him that it needed spicing up. Perhaps as a result there are aspects that are unconvincing. There are suspiciously large chunks of verba ipsissima dialogue that just do not ring true, any more than the conversation which Elliot Roosevelt claims to have had at Chartwell, with Churchill emerging naked from his bath, with a cigar in his mouth. More importantly, were FDR’s criticisms of Churchill as the representative of empire, or his views of the benefits of decolonialisation, quite as simplistic as they are made to appear? Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have disagreed with some of the contents of the book. Churchill’s response to it was moderate and pretty restrained: Elliot Roosevelt was ‘not much of a fellow’.
But Eleanor Roosevelt was not at the conferences as Elliot was. And she did not disavow the book: on the contrary she wrote the foreword, which ended with the words, ‘This book gives one observer’s firsthand account of what went on at the major conferences and will furnish future historians with some of the material which will constitute the final evaluation of history.’ The book cannot be relied on in any individual detail, but it is written by someone who was on the periphery of great events and at the centre of the President’s family circle, and it hangs together convincingly as a record of the prejudices, assumptions and culture which informed FDR’s direction of the war.
The most important strands that emerge, apart from the insistence on the evils of empire and benefits of self-determination, are a desire to open up trade, particularly to America, a belief that Britain is always trying to play America off against Russia, and hence a desire to convince Stalin that Britain and America are only closely linked for the purpose of defeating Germany. Elliot Roosevelt reveals that as the war went on the conviction strengthened that Churchill had devious wishes that must be circumvented, perhaps notably a desire to postpone indefinitely the cross-Channel landings. If the book is broadly an accurate record of Roosevelt’s views, he regarded Churchill with a generally tolerant amusement, as an anachronistic survival with a quaint enthusiasm for wearing uniforms whenever he could.
At a human level, there is a certain poignancy in the photographs of the meetings on board the two great battleships. Roosevelt stands erect and apparently unaided, but in reality only with great effort, and with leg braces hidden in his trousers. In other photographs, Elliott Roosevelt supports his father with a firm grip on the elbow. Churchill, although the older man and the petitioner, is grinning, a swashbuckling buccaneer in his Trinity House uniform. Who was truly in command, Roosevelt, with all the power of twentieth-century America, or Churchill, with his enthusiasm and the confidence of an eighteenth-century grandee? After the war, Halifax, who had been British ambassador to the United States throughout most of the war years, recalled ‘I am sure [Roosevelt] was jealous [of Churchill]. Marshall told me that the President would not look forward to Winston’s visits. He knew too much about military matters; besides, he kept such shocking hours’.6
The outcome of the meetings was sadly far less than Churchill had hoped for. As usual the President said as much and did as little as he could. He told Churchill that he ‘would wage war, but not declare it’. According to an early draft of Churchill’s history Roosevelt ‘made clear that he would lo
ok for an “incident” which would justify him in the opening hostilities’.7 What he meant by such statements, which he had made before, remains obscure.
All that publicly emerged was the declaration of war aims, the ‘Atlantic Charter’. It had been prefigured a month or so earlier, when Roosevelt sent Churchill a telegram saying that there was disquiet in the United States about reports that Britain had set up ‘trades and deals’ with some of the occupied countries. There was a ‘stupid story’ that Yugoslavia would be set up again in its old shape, or that Trieste would be given to Yugoslavia. These rumours antagonised groups in America.8 The Charter was not an innocent and idealistic statement of common intent: it was a severely political document, designed to limit potential actions by the British government, reassure American critics and spell an end to the British Empire. Article 1 disclaimed territorial ambitions. Articles 2 and 3 said that territorial changes were to be in accord with ‘the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned’, and Article 4 defended the ‘right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live’.
Subsequent articles attacked imperial preference. It was a strange document to present for signature by a country which was struggling for its very survival, particularly as nothing tangible was received in return. Roosevelt had managed to attach checks and balances to the powers of a decadent imperialist nation. All that Churchill could hope for was that somehow, imperceptibly and subtly, America was closer to the British camp than it had been.