Churchill 1940-1945: Under Friendly Fire

by Walter Reid

  At this Washington Conference Churchill agreed with Roosevelt, although not in writing, that there would be a free exchange of information between Britain and America in regard to research on the atomic bomb, which had begun in Britain in August 1941, the project code-named ‘Tube Alloys’. In the event the Americans very soon failed to honour the agreement and the matter had to be addressed again at the meeting in Quebec in August 1943. There is plaintive correspondence from Churchill to Hopkins on the subject. In the secret Quebec Agreement it was formally accepted that there was to be a free exchange of information between the two powers, although no information was to be passed to any other country. In reality the prospect of an independent British bomb disappeared when the United States secured the entire Canadian output of uranium and heavy water for a period of nine years from May 1943. For what it was worth, neither Britain or America would use an atomic bomb without the consent of the other; Churchill’s consent was indeed obtained to the use of the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although in the event they were dropped after he had left office. But in the following year Congress unilaterally cancelled the Quebec agreement and passed the McMahon Act. The position was confirmed in agreements of 1948 and 1955. Britain had almost no entitlement to share America’s nuclear secrets.

  The atmosphere at Washington was strained by divergent views over empires in general and the Indian Empire in particular. America’s preoccupation with imperialism is difficult to understand, and not free from ambivalence, even hypocrisy. Cordell Hull said that the United States’ relationship with the Philippines was ‘a perfect example of how a nation should treat a colony or dependency’. America had experience of more direct overseas rule during the Spanish American War, and although American expansion, which went ahead apace during the war, was generally achieved in an informal way, there was not a great difference in practice between America and Britain. The Atlantic Charter, with its references to self-determination, both expressed and reinforced America’s anti-colonial position, and Roosevelt went so far as to talk about placing all colonies under international trustee-ship. His mission to see the end of colonies, particularly if they were British or French, is all the stranger in view of his admiration for the colonial exploits of his kinsman, Theodore Roosevelt.

  The State Department felt it their right and responsibility to request strict timetables from Britain for independence for its colonies. Pressure of this sort became very strong in the course of 1942 and 1943. Thereafter things were slightly easier, not least because America found herself extending her own territorial possessions, particularly in the Pacific. There were also embarrassing questions about Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. At the end of the war United Nations trusteeship was only applied to League of Nations mandates which already existed and to captured enemy territory.

  That however was in the future. For the present, Churchill had to face personal pressure from Roosevelt; and indeed in April 1942 he sent the President via Hopkins a palpably insincere threat of resignation on the colonial issue: ‘I should personally make no objection at all to retiring into private life’; but his view, he said, would be supported by the Cabinet and by Parliament’.7

  On 10 March 1942, the day before Churchill announced the Cripps mission to India, he had to put up with a long cable from Roosevelt on the Indian problem. The President took it upon himself to analyse some of the constitutional arrangements that had been established in America during the War of Independence, including the temporary government formed under the Articles of Confederation. He put forward complex proposals for arrangements in India based on the experience of the emergent United States in the eighteenth century. He said that all of this was ‘none of his business’, and he was of course entirely right. The first draft of Roosevelt’s message contained the revealing phrase that what he was writing was no more than ‘a purely personal thought based on very little first-hand knowledge on my part’. Harry Hopkins said that nothing that Roosevelt had done during the war had annoyed Churchill so much as making his various proposals regarding a problem which was, as he said, none of his business, and certainly had nothing to do with the war that was being fought.

  Even Republicans like Henry Luce saw the twentieth century as ‘the American Century’, in which the United States had ‘our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world’.8 Luce was strongly against the New Deal, and he did not want positive intervention abroad: America’s influence would be passive, not active. But New Dealers were interventionists and went further and saw America’s domestic reforms as a model for the world, a world in which Britain was not regarded as truly democratic. Reg Tugwell, for instance, said in April 1941, ‘This war will never be won by force. It can only be won as a by-product of carrying the New Deal to the world … This is the Democratic revolution we must preach and practise everywhere’.9

  It is easy to understand that this exporting of the New Deal caused disquiet among those Americans who saw their President as a closet socialist or worse, now exporting his quasi-communist views. Roosevelt’s global interference was resented at home as well as abroad. Robert Taft saw that exporting American values might appeal both ‘to the nationalistic sentiment of those Americans who picture America dominating the alliance and the world’, and to ‘the do-gooders who regard it as the manifest destiny of America to confer the benefits of the New Deal’ on other nations and other races. But he also recognised the new American policy for what it was, one example of imperialism replacing another: ‘It is based on the theory that we know better what is good for the world than the world itself. It assumes that we are always right and that anyone who disagrees with us is wrong … Other people simply do not like to be dominated, and we would be in the same position of suppressing rebellions by force in which the British found themselves during the nineteenth century’.10

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  London, July 1942. Where to Attack and When

  The Second Washington Conference had the same aftermath as the First: Marshall and Hopkins together with King came back to London in July 1942, this time to try to unpick the agreement on North Africa. The two military men at least were unhappy with what had been agreed at Washington. Roosevelt was also concerned that delay in tackling Hitler carried a risk of a switch to a Pacific policy. The Americans came to press for ROUNDUP in 1943, and failing that for SLEDGEHAMMER in 1942. A choice between the two was an easy one for Churchill: dropping SLEDGEHAMMER on the one hand meant the abandonment of a wildly premature landing and on the other relief for the embattled British army in Egypt.

  So SLEDGEHAMMER was subjected to close examination in the course of the Americans’ visit. Brooke bluntly pointed up the fact that America lacked the six trained divisions that the operation required, that there were not the necessary landing craft, or logistical backup, that the weather would be unsuitable and that the German resistance would be formidable. He was clear that there could be no landings in 1942, and even 1943 was doubtful, depending on what happened to Russia. He found Marshall difficult to deal with, intent on a rigid strategy which would not alter with events.1 After four days Marshall gave way. SLEDGEHAMMER was abandoned. Instead there would be an Anglo-American landing in North Africa, TORCH, commanded by Eisenhower, with Alexander as Deputy Commander and Montgomery in charge of the British element. As TORCH was only agreed in July, it would transpire later, but was not evident then, that ROUNDUP could not take place in 1942 or 1943 and would be subsumed in OVERLORD in 1944.

  Churchill was delighted. TORCH was what he wanted, and the operation would preponderantly be a British one. If the adoption of TORCH was a success, however, JUPITER, a Churchillian projected landing in Norway, was a failure. Brooke complained that Churchill could not pass a map of Norway without suggesting a landing there. But not everyone was so dismissive of Norwegian adventures: when Churchill suggested a raid on Norway to take the pressure off Russia and the Chiefs vetoed it, he was supported by Eden, whose private secretary, Oliver Harvey’s comment was,
‘The slowness and lack of imagination of the Chiefs of Staff are enough to frighten one’.2 Churchill wanted to roll ‘the map of Hitler’s Europe down from the top’. His real wish was for the vetoed JUPITER plus TORCH in 1942. He was never to have JUPITER.

  The outcome of the visit, acceptance of the TORCH concept, was a triumph for Churchill’s diplomacy and his decision to let the Americans see for themselves the practical impossibility of implementing SLEDGEHAMMER. It was not however an outcome that Marshall and the American chiefs accepted easily. Hollis found that neither Marshall nor King had a grasp of strategy. Their gift was in procurement. ‘Their plan therefore seemed childlike in its simplicity.’3 They could not resist the appeal of the short crossing of the Straits of Dover; what could be done when they landed with an American contribution of only two and a half divisions, minimal air cover and no suitable landing craft did not concern them; nor did the tidal discrepancies along the French coast. They resisted the displacement of SLEDGEHAMMER by TORCH to the last. A.B. Cunningham noted the American Chiefs’ lack of enthusiasm. He told the First Sea Lord in August that King was dead against TORCH.4 At one point Roosevelt had asked the Chiefs what they would substitute for North Africa. ‘The Pacific’ was the reply. ‘Very well’, said Roosevelt, ‘Send me your plan to Hyde Park’. There was of course no plan.5

  With SLEDGEHAMMER abandoned, ROUNDUP was to be a full-scale invasion with about forty divisions, taking place in 1943. Churchill’s ideas about ROUNDUP are contained in a paper of 15 June 1942 where, as so often, he argues for a series of feints and probes. ‘At least six heavy disembarkations’ were envisaged along the north and west of Europe, from Denmark and Holland in the north, to the Pas de Calais and on to Brest and Bordeaux. These were the views which he communicated to Marshall and to Stalin, but his plans were thrown out in their entirety by the Chiefs of Staff, who insisted on a maximum of four thrusts, concentrated on the Pas de Calais and Le Havre. The Chiefs of Staff dissented from Churchill on the value of any contribution by the liberated peoples. Contrary to what was later said, Churchill was entirely committed to a 1943 Second Front, although a very different type from that on which the Chiefs of Staff insisted and more different still from OVERLORD as it was to evolve.

  Brooke was cautious and uncertain on many of these issues. He was favourably disposed to ROUNDUP and Churchill only won him over with great difficulty to TORCH, which was to prove a crucial allied operation and, incidentally, the one which opened the way to the ‘Mediterranean Strategy’ of which Brooke was to be so proud.

  Lascelles, from his privileged viewpoint as the King’s Private Secretary, got it right in his diary for 13 May 1943: ‘Winston is so essentially the father of the North African baby that he deserves any recognition, royal or otherwise, that can be given to him. It was his imagination (stimulated perhaps by Smuts to some extent) that first saw the prime importance of this theatre of war; and it was his unflinching courage that built up the 8th Army into the wonderful fighting machine that it has become. He has himself publicly given the credit for TORCH to Roosevelt, but I have little doubt that W. was really its only begetter.’6

  Churchill and the British had largely got what they wanted, but by 10 July 1942 the American Chiefs had become so exasperated by delays in establishing a Second Front that they proposed shifting from Europe First to a major offensive against Japan. King always tended to argue for Pacific priority, but even Marshall, who was generally committed to the European theatre, was concerned that TORCH did nothing for Russia, diverted troops away from any French landing, and required a new line of sea communications. More generally, there was a growing feeling that the British were simply not doing enough to engage the Germans. Dill had much work to do to reassure his American contacts, and to argue that TORCH had a logical place in the advance on the European mainland.

  Roosevelt, however, having been told that no responsible British general, admiral or air marshal could recommend SLEDGEHAMMER, resisted his advisers. He said to Hopkins, ‘I do not believe that we can wait until 1943 to strike at Germany. If we cannot strike at SLEDGEHAMMER, then we must take the second best – and that is not the Pacific.’7

  The blame for the delay in a mainland European landing lay in part with America herself. Despite what had been said about Germany First, America was tending to Pacific First for 1942. Admiral King and even the European-minded Marshall diverted troops and landing craft that had been earmarked for Britain to Guadalcanal. The pre-invasion American build-up in Britain, BOLERO, stalled. By mid 1942 there were almost 400,000 US soldiers in the Pacific: only 60,000 in Europe. By October of that year just one and a half American divisions had reached Europe. Between that and the lack of landing craft that persisted throughout the war, Marshall was not in a strong position to push even for a 1943 Continental landing. The importance of landing craft was realised late and it never proved possible to produce adequate supplies. In the spring of 1943 most of America’s were in the Pacific. In the Atlantic theatre she had just eight converted merchantmen; Britain had eighteen.

  Another consequence of the backtracking on Germany First was that, largely because of the diversion of shipping to the Far East, the American Chiefs told Eisenhower out of the blue on 25 August that the TORCH landings would be confined to Casablanca and, possibly, Oran. Nothing would be attempted further into the Mediterranean. This was a bombshell to American planners, and precipitated what Ike called ‘the Great Transatlantic Essay Competition’ as they sought to change Washington’s mind.

  From the British perspective it was even more unwelcome. Part of the justification of TORCH for Britain was that it would secure entry to the Mediterranean, and in doing so would save something like a million tons of Allied shipping a year. America ignored this consideration.

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  An Indian Interlude

  Cripps, at least, gradually became less of a threat. His mission, with proposals for a greater degree of Indian self-government, failed, the failure due more to a lack of cooperation from the Indian political parties than to Cripps himself. But Cripps’s goose was pretty well cooked by then, anyway. He did himself more harm than good in India, and as far back as 29 September 1942 Churchill had told the King that he was thinking of disposing of him for good.1 That he could now contemplate something that would have caused such a hoo-ha just a year earlier reflects a remarkable fall in Cripps’s stock. Cripps resigned from the War Cabinet in November.

  The Cripps mission had given Roosevelt the opportunity to give lots of gratuitous advice: a greater degree of independence was ‘in line with the world changes of the past half-century and with the democratic processes of all who are fighting Nazism’. When the talks failed, he asserted that American opinion put the blame almost entirely on Britain. Churchill, in his history, referred to Roosevelt’s interfering as ‘idealism at other people’s expense and without regard to the consequences of ruin and slaughter … The President’s mind was back at the War of Independence, and he thought of the Indian problems in terms of the thirteen colonies fighting George III’. Churchill was against independence moves not only because of his underlying prejudices, but also because he thought that premature self-government would lay India open to Japanese expansion. His reference to not having ‘become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’ in his Mansion House speech in November 1942 was a swipe at Roosevelt’s interference.

  It was not as if Roosevelt’s America was a model of interracial harmony. Throughout the 1930s lynchings and other racially motivated murders took place at about the rate of thirty a year in the United States. With FDR’s first victory, those who sought to outlaw the practice looked to him for help, but he chose not to support the Costigan-Warner Bill and in the process lose support in the southern states. In 1939 he did go so far as to create the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department to address the evil, but it was 1946 before anyone was successfully prosecuted for lynching. The perpetrator, a police official, was fined $1,
000 and sentenced to one year in prison.

  In different circumstances and in an age when American imperialism is commonplace, it is difficult to see why the Roosevelt administration felt obliged to interfere with other countries’ colonial possessions. Roosevelt thought that the fact that America was fighting the Japanese was excuse enough. He said on one occasion that the only reason that American boys were being killed in the Pacific was because of land grabs by Britain, France and Holland. The historical analysis was peculiar, but the interference went on.

  William Phillips was sent to India as American High Commissioner, with the rank of ambassador, towards the end of 1942. He was authorised personally by Roosevelt to investigate India. He criss-crossed the subcontinent and interviewed officials, nationalists and journalists. He met Dr Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the head of the Muslim League, but not Gandhi who was on hunger strike at the time. He had two meetings with Churchill. In the second, a very unsympathetic Churchill told him, ‘My answer to you is: take India if that is what you want! Take it by all means! But I warn you that if I open the door a crack there will be the greatest blood bath in all history; yes, blood bath in all history. Mark my words, I prophesied the present war and I prophesy the blood bath.’2 The prophecy was, sadly, all too accurate. The cost of the end of imperialism in India was 15 million displaced persons, 12 million of them left homeless, and at least half a million deaths.3