The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  Churchill was, in truth, incensed by the repeated request; he wanted an American declaration of war, not a declaration of principles. As a guest of the President of the United States, however, he could only plead—and plead he was determined to do, with all the words at his command.

  The President, however, was as well known for his mastery of defensive as for aggressive tactics. In asking Churchill to speak to the whole American contingent, Roosevelt had felt it better to let the Prime Minister show his hand openly, rather than keep it cached, lest there be even a hint of behind-the-scenes transaction.

  To remind the gathering that war in Europe involved more than just a commitment to Great Britain, Roosevelt insisted that Hopkins, who had given the President a typed report of his trip to Moscow that afternoon, first entertain the assembled dignitaries with his eyewitness account of his stay in the Kremlin and his one-on-one interviews with the Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin—the “ghost” at the table, so to speak.

  It was the Prime Minister of Great Britain whom the assembled brass really wanted to hear, Roosevelt knew, however—and once Hopkins had spoken and the tables were cleared, Winston S. Churchill, the King’s First Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, rose to deliver his “strategic overview.”

  The longer the evening had progressed, the more Churchill—who had been given special dispensation to drink—had imbibed, and the more loquacious, even lyrical, he had become. The President’s military aide, General Watson, afterward admitted, for example, that he had been “curious as to whether he [Churchill] was a drunk.” As Churchill finally stood before the roomful of generals, he certainly assumed “a broader stance” than before—whether to steady himself or to marshal his thoughts, General Watson was unsure. Drunk or sober, the effect was remarkable, once he began his speech. “He held the floor that evening and he talked,” Elliott described. “Nor were the rest of us silent because we were bored. He held us enthralled even when we were inclined to disagree with him.”71

  Even the President was impressed, according to Elliott. “My experience of him in the past,” the younger Roosevelt observed, “had been that he dominated every gathering he was part of; not because he insisted on it so much as that it always seemed his natural due. But not tonight. Tonight Father listened.”72

  Watching Laurence Olivier and Vivian Leigh at the screening of the film Lady Hamilton the night before, onboard the Prince of Wales, one of the two banished British journalists had seen Churchill actually weep—the sight of which deeply moved the newsman. Olivier was a consummate British actor, but watching Winston Churchill, the journalist had found himself even more affected than by the screen icon. “I thought that in some extraordinary way he belongs definitely to an older England, to the England of the Tudors, a violent swashbuckling England perhaps, but a warm and emotional England too, an England as yet untouched by the hardness of an age of steel,” H. V. Morton afterward recalled. Why, Morton asked himself, did both ordinary and extraordinary people find themselves “so firmly held,” when Churchill spoke—“so silent until the last word?” He wondered if the enchantment might not lie in the fact that Churchill’s voice was “not of an industrialist, but of one who has, so to speak, missed the Industrial Revolution and speaks to us as if from the deck of the Golden Hind. Churchill’s voice is also classless. . . . Like the Elizabethans, he speaks not as an Etonian but as an Englishman.”73

  Sir Alec Cadogan—who was an Etonian, and the son of an earl—was disappointed, having heard his master speak in public so often before, but Morton’s was an apt insight, and one that chimed with Roosevelt’s growing respect for the Prime Minister. The President was skeptical of Churchill’s judgment in terms of military operations against the Germans, which thus far in the war had not produced a single victory on the battlefield. Roosevelt was far from impressed, moreover, by the Prime Minister’s choice of subordinates, since the British chiefs on first acquaintance appeared that evening to be a polite, characterless, minion-like group of yes men. Rather, the President’s admiration belied a sort of compassion: a recognition by Roosevelt of Churchill’s courage: his tenacity, in a sea of mediocrity, in trying to make the best of the impossible situation he’d inherited from his mealy-mouthed, appeasement-minded predecessor, Neville Chamberlain—who had definitely not impressed the President. And admiration, too, for the Prime Minister’s remarkable intellect, amounting almost to genius: his insistent, valiant efforts to place the problems of the world within a wider, historical and moral, framework.

  Not only was Churchill’s knowledge of history formidable, laced with a seemingly photographic memory for lines of poetry and idiosyncratic detail, but alongside his romantic exaggerations the Prime Minister could be disarmingly honest. Churchill thus admitted, freely, to his military audience—both his own countrymen and his American listeners—that his island nation, the previous summer, had been wholly unprepared for German invasion. “Hitler and his generals were too stupid,” the Prime Minister asserted. “They never knew. Or else they never dared.” According to Elliott, the subtext of this confession was an appeal for the United States, with all its military power, manpower, and industrial potential, to enter the war—Churchill’s underlying message being: “It’s your only chance! You’ve got to come in beside us! If you don’t declare war, I say, without waiting for them to strike the first blow, they’ll strike it after we’ve gone under, and the first blow will be their last as well!” Though his American listeners “could detect the underlying appeal,” Elliott noted, they could not fail to be moved by the Prime Minister’s personal courage and determination never to give in. Churchill’s “whole bearing,” Elliott Roosevelt recalled, “gave the impression of an indomitable force that would do all right, thank you, even if we didn’t heed his warning.”74

  The President, sitting at the head of the table, with the Prime Minister on his right, impressed Alec Cadogan, meanwhile, who was placed on Mr. Roosevelt’s left. In his diary that night he noted the President’s “great, and natural, charm.”75 Listening to Churchill’s studded rhetoric, the President seemed content to remain quiet, save when interrupting to ask about Russia, and how long the Prime Minister thought it would hold out (not long, Churchill answered, once Hitler took Moscow and the Germans reached the Urals, perhaps striking even beyond).

  The President chose not to argue. If war came to the United States—and as president he was determined to hold off that evil day—it was as well his chiefs of staff see for themselves who was at the helm of the fading British Empire: not only as England’s political leader but as a military strategist and commander in chief.

  Britain had now been at war for two long years—and had learned many lessons, Churchill confessed. In contrast to World War I he characterized the struggle as “a mobile war, in the air, on the land, and at sea,” a war in which science and mechanical science were playing a crucial role.76 The British could not, and would not, give up their position in the Middle East; for by fighting the Germans at the farthest point from their bases in Germany, the British Commonwealth forces had the best chance of meeting their adversaries “on even terms.”77 Meanwhile, in the air, with enough bombers manufactured in Britain as well as those purchased or leased from the United States, they could “bring home to the Germans the horrors of war, just as the Germans had brought it home to the British.” If the United States would take over full convoy protection across the whole North Atlantic, this would enable the Royal Navy to send destroyers to the South Atlantic; if the U.S. would join Britain in “sending an ultimatum to Japan,” it could halt Japanese expansion. And if, in the successful aftermath, a new League of Nations could be set up, then the world could perhaps learn the lessons of Versailles, and start afresh, on a new page of history . . .78

  “[N]ot his best,” Sir Alec Cadogan noted in his diary,79 but to the President it was exactly what he had hoped for. No businessman would want to enter a partnership, Roosevelt felt, with such a diffuse, fading imperial power; but by investing
in the company, so to speak, he might well help it stave off bankruptcy. Lend-Lease was, in fact, doing that; the next step would be military. But not yet. Not when the United States was, in all truth, still a military mouse, despite its roar.

  As Mr. Churchill rehearsed Britain’s strategy—to hang on to its collapsing colonial empire in the Middle East, India, Burma, Singapore, Malaya, and Hong Kong, and to harass Hitler’s Third Reich from its margins, in the hope that something might turn up, as in the parlance of Mr. Micawber—it was impossible for President Roosevelt and his chiefs of staff not to shake their heads at the Prime Minister’s mix of sentiment, myopia, and imagination. And luck! For not only had Hitler not invaded Britain when the country was at its most vulnerable, after the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940, but something else had come up. Not an American entry into the war, as Churchill had so ardently wanted, but something in some ways even more fortunate for Britain and for America: Hitler’s crazed decision, after failing to bomb the English into submission in the Battle of Britain, to attack Russia.

  No one but a Nazi madman could have undertaken such a gamble. Assuming—as the President did, especially after hearing Hopkins’s full report—that the Soviets would hold out, even if they had to retreat to the Urals, Hitler’s mistake would inevitably mean the survival of Great Britain. Though not necessarily the survival of the British colonial empire, which was, in President Roosevelt’s eyes, a different matter.

  As he listened and occasionally prompted the Prime Minister to comment on how he saw certain issues—the Russian campaign, the threat of an expanding Japanese Empire in the Far East—the President felt more and more strongly that America’s moment of destiny was approaching. Despite the fact that American isolationists were currently fanning public fears and dictating congressional attitudes, the United States was going to have to fight eventually, the President was certain. Secret decrypts made it quite clear that the Japanese were hell-bent on war, just as the Germans had been—and no amount of Chamberlain-style diplomacy, appeasement, or negotiating would placate them.80 Yet the war that Winston Churchill was seeking—a war that preserved Britain’s colonial empire, while smashing Hitler and Hirohito’s empires—was not what President Roosevelt saw in America’s tea leaves. If and when war came, America must fight for its own role in the sun, as leader of a postimperial, democratic world. America would thus become not just the arsenal of democracy, but—as the world’s most prosperous nation by far—the senior partner in a new world order, with open borders and open markets.

  To Churchill’s consternation, then, once the Prime Minister sat down, the President announced that the dinner was over. It was 11:30—and the President was going to bed. The British visitors were promptly seen off the ship at 11:45, and reaching his cabin onboard the Prince of Wales, the Prime Minister, too, retired. He was exhausted by his own peroration, the disappointments of the day—and the President’s request that he begin the drafting of a joint declaration of peace aims.

  “Considering all the tales of my reactionary, Old World outlook, and the pain this is said to have caused the President,” Churchill later wrote, he was proud to say it was he, not the President, who now produced the “first draft” of the declaration of principles that the President had requested, and that it was “a British production cast in my own words.”81

  As David Reynolds, the British historian, later revealed, this was not, strictly speaking, the case.82 In truth, the next morning, as Sir Alec Cadogan was enjoying his breakfast of “bacon and eggs” in the admiral’s cabin, he was summoned by the Prime Minister, who was already up and on deck. “He wanted an immediate draft of the ‘joint declaration,’ which he outlined verbally.” Cadogan then “worked up a text, about which Churchill ‘expressed general but not very enthusiastic approval,’ but it was typed up virtually unchanged for the Prime Minister to give to the President.”83

  The first draft was, then, a Cadogan production, rather than the Prime Minister’s. Moreover, Churchill later misrepresented his own feelings about the very idea of such a document.84 For what Churchill could not bring himself to admit, when penning his epic account of his war service, in 1949, was that this declaration was emphatically not what he had sailed all the way from Scapa Flow to Placentia Bay to obtain. Nor was it what Churchill wanted to subscribe to, as the prime minister of Great Britain and a servant of the British colonial empire. Biting his tongue, however, he approved Cadogan’s first iteration of the joint declaration—and turned to Plan B, set for 11:00 A.M. that Sunday morning, August 10, 1941: the arrival of the President of the United States on the Prince of Wales, and a rousing church service.

  At first the program went without hitch. As the crews of the two great warships prepared for the difficult maneuver, the clouds above Placentia Bay parted, the sun shone, and the shoreline reminded some who were present of the spare beauty of the Western Isles of Scotland.

  An American destroyer wedged lengthways between the main deck of the USS Augusta and the stern of HMS Prince of Wales allowed the President, his small staff, and three hundred American sailors to be piped aboard the British battleship for divine services without transferring to barges. There then followed a ceremony that Churchill had planned and rehearsed in detail with the crew of the Prince of Wales and his own staff, right down to the choice of hymns, even before their arrival in Canadian waters.

  The President, an Episcopalian, was delighted to participate in the religious ceremony—even sending a presidential invitation to each member of his own staff to attend. Loath to allow Churchill to control the media rendering of the event, however, Roosevelt had wisely sent for his own camera crew—a group of American army film cameramen and still photographers working in Gander, who had been ordered to fly immediately to Argentia by Grumman floatplane. Churchill might want to give the appearance of an alliance, but President Roosevelt was determined that the imagery reflect his joint declaration of principles of peace—and how better than by showing men worshiping God together?

  With the Royal Marine Band playing in the background, the President of the United States was “received with ‘honors,’” as he wrote his cousin that night, then “inspected the guard and walked aft to the quarter deck”—where, behind desks draped with the Stars and Stripes and Union Jack, he and the Prime Minister faced almost a thousand sailors grouped under the menacing fourteen-inch guns of the after-turret. The Prime Minister wore the dark blue uniform of the Royal Yacht Squadron, the President a blue double-breasted suit, “without a hat. It is a very great effort for the President to walk, and it took him a long time to get from the gangway to his chair, leaning on a stick and linking his arm with that of one of his sons who is acting as his A.D.C.,” Churchill’s military assistant recorded in his diary that night. “We heard that this was the longest walk that the President had ever taken since his illness many years ago.”85 As the President “slowly approached the assembled company,” wrote another British officer, “it was obvious to everybody that he was making a tremendous effort and that he was determined to walk along that deck even if it killed him.”86

  Recorded on film, the service was profoundly affecting to those who took part—as it was to those who saw it on newsreels across America and the free world in the days and weeks afterward. Urged by their captain to “raise steam in an extra boiler so as to give the hymns extra value,”87 the British sailors—intermingled with their American guests and sharing with them their hymnals—sang “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and—at the President’s urging—“Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” better known as “For Those in Peril on the Sea.” Six months later the huge warship would be attacked and sunk by Japanese planes in the South China Sea, its captain and many hundreds of the crew drowned.

  H. V. Morton noticed once again how the Prime Minister’s “handkerchief stole from its pocket”—for it was almost impossible not to be touched by emotion. “A British & an American chaplain did the prayers,” the President himself described
to Daisy.88 With their caps off, “it was difficult,” Morton later recalled, “to say who was American and who was British; and the sound of their voices rising together in the hymn was carried far out over the sea. In the long, frightful panorama of this War, a panorama of guns and tanks crushing the life out of men, of women and children weeping and of homes blasted into rubble by bombs, there had been no scene like this.” It was, he wrote, “a scene, it seemed, from another world, conceived on lines different from anything known to the pageant-masters of the Axis.”89

  Aboard the Prince of Wales, as the divine service ended, the President seemed wonderfully confident. “Captain Leach read the lesson—and then we were all photographed—front, sides & rear!” he described to Daisy. “Next I inspected the P. of W. in my [wheel]chair, then sherry in the Ward Room & then a ‘beautiful’ lunch of about 40—Toasts followed by two speeches.”90

  Churchill had certainly ordered nothing but the best for his guests, given the dire situation in an England suffering grave food shortages and universal rationing. The menu for the President and his entourage featured smoked salmon, caviar, turtle soup, freshly shot roast Scottish grouse, dessert, coffee, wines and liqueurs, with mood music played by the Royal Marine Band. In addition to the formal toasts to the King and to the President, there was even a risqué joke by Hopkins and welcome news that the German battleship Tirpitz had been espied in the dockyard at Kiel, meaning it would not have time to put to sea and prey upon the Prime Minister on his return voyage.