The Mantle of Command

by Nigel Hamilton

  The President’s cable might have been simple, but it was not, sadly, the sort of language the Prime Minister was prepared to tolerate; indeed, the more that the walls of Britain’s empire appeared to be tumbling down in the Far East, the more the Prime Minister now dug in his heels. Reading the first lines of the message Hopkins handed him, Churchill’s blood rose. Worse followed, however.

  The President warned in the cable that if Churchill did not relent and India were invaded by the Japanese “with attendant serious military or naval defeats, the prejudicial reaction of American public opinion can hardly be over-estimated.” He asked Churchill therefore to reconsider the Cripps mission, and “to have Cripps postpone his departure on the ground that you personally have sent him instructions to make a final effort to find a common ground of understanding.” The President—who had been remarkably polite and helpful till now—had clearly given up pretending. “I read that an agreement seemed very near last Thursday night,” he complained. Why had it been allowed to fail? If Cripps “could be authorized by you personally to resume negotiations at that point”—i.e., the position before Churchill had withdrawn the cabinet’s approval of the terms Cripps had gotten—“it seems to me that an agreement might yet be found.

  “I still feel, as I expressed to you in an earlier message,” the President finished his cable, “that if the component groups in India could now be given the opportunity to set up a national government similar in essence to our own form of government under the Articles of Confederation”—on the “understanding that upon determination of a period of trial and error they would then be enabled to determine upon their own form of constitution and, as you have already promised them, to determine their future relationship with the British Empire”—then he was sure “a solution could probably be found.”36

  Poor Harry Hopkins, having handed over the rest of the President’s cable, now witnessed Churchill’s meltdown.

  Hopkins, sickly but willing to do anything for his revered president, had traveled to London with General Marshall to ensure that U.S. planning to aid the Russians was not stymied by British bureaucracy and timidity. The spat over India, however, now banished European war plans to a back seat—Hopkins later telling Robert Sherwood that no “suggestions from the President to the Prime Minister in the entire war were so wrathfully received as those relating to solution of the Indian problem.”37 To the secretary of war, Colonel Stimson, Hopkins even confided, on his return to Washington, “how a string of cuss words lasted for two hours in the middle of the night” in London38—with Churchill adamant he would rather resign than permit an American president to dictate British imperial conduct. It was no idle threat.

  The fact was, Churchill seemed exhausted, as all around him had noticed. He was drinking more, sleeping less, and busying himself in the minutiae of military operations across the world that he seemed unable or unwilling to delegate. The Australian prime minister had made it clear he had lost confidence in Churchill’s leadership, and the Pacific War Council in London was entering its “death throes”—soon to be entirely replaced by the Pacific War Council in Washington. Japanese naval forces were roaming at will like sea monsters off the coast of India—and British forces were in helter-skelter retreat in northern Burma, abandoning their Indian units to be killed or captured. General Rommel was once again forcing British Empire troops to retreat in Libya.

  However, as one of Churchill’s own “closest and most affectionate associates” later confided to Hopkins’s biographer, “the President might have known that India was one subject on which Winston would never move a yard.”39 Certainly Indian self-government, as Robert Sherwood recalled Hopkins telling him, was “one subject on which the normal, broad-minded, good-humored, give-and-take attitude which prevailed between the two statesmen was stopped cold”—indeed Churchill, rounding on the hapless Hopkins, told him he “would see the Empire in ruins and himself buried under them before he would concede the right of any American, however great and illustrious a friend, to make any suggestion as to what he should do about India.”40 Calling in his stenographer, the Prime Minister was determined to put his feelings in writing. To the President he therefore dictated a nasty rebuke.

  “A Nationalist Government such as you indicate would almost certainly demand,” he deceitfully claimed, “first, the recall of all Indian troops from the Middle East, and secondly, they might in my opinion make an armistice with Japan on the basis of free transit through India to Karachi of Japanese forces and supplies.”41

  For Churchill to send such unqualified “opinions” was sailing close to dishonesty. Both claims were specious, as Churchill and the viceroy (with whom Churchill was in secret correspondence, bypassing Sir Stafford Cripps) well knew—contradicting the assurances Nehru had given Cripps and the President’s “Special Emissary,” Colonel Johnson.42 Nevertheless, Churchill argued in his draft response, “From their point of view this would be the easiest course, and the one entirely in accord with Gandhi’s non-violence doctrines”43—despite Gandhi’s express withdrawal from the matter, and public statement that Pandit Nehru would decide the Congress Party’s conduct.

  In Churchill’s lurid forecast, the “Japanese would in return no doubt give the Hindus the military support necessary to impose their will upon the Moslems, the Native States and the Depressed classes.” In conclusion, the Prime Minister made clear he would resign rather than permit this to happen—indeed, that he had “no objection at all to retiring into private life, and I have explained this to Harry just now”—a threat he larded with the prospect of a British parliamentary revolt by Conservatives in his favor. “Far from helping the defense of India, it would make our task impossible,” he warned the President. And though as prime minister he would “do everything in my power to preserve our most sympathetic cooperation,” he wanted the President to be aware that the U.S.-British alliance was now at stake. “Any serious public divergence between the British and United States Governments at this time might involve both of our countries in ruin.”44

  It was, in effect, blackmail.

  In a subsequent telephone call to the President some hours later, Harry Hopkins relayed to Mr. Roosevelt the gist of Churchill’s draft cable. It was a document that, in fear of the whole Western alliance now collapsing, Hopkins had begged the Prime Minister not to encode and dispatch45—in fact, so alarmed was Hopkins that he begged Churchill not even to raise the subject with the British cabinet, which was due to meet the following day, lest this become a test of the whole Atlantic coalition.

  Roosevelt should simply back off, Hopkins therefore advised the President on the phone to the White House. He, Hopkins, would do his best to calm the Prime Minister down.

  Mid-April 1942 now came to resemble, in terms of the Atlantic alliance, something of a French farce. Hopkins was begging Roosevelt, in the interests of Anglo-American cooperation, not to press for an Indian national government, but at the same time Colonel Johnson was cabling the President with the opposite plea: forwarding a personal appeal by Pandit Nehru, the Indian Congress Party leader, that contradicted Churchill’s dire predictions. Nehru had absolutely no intention of negotiating with the Japanese, if they did invade India, he made clear in his letter—being himself all too aware of the likely consequences of Japanese invasion, if it happened, and the “horrors” that would follow, “as they have followed Japanese aggression in China.”46

  “To your great country, of which you are the honored head, we send greetings and good wishes for success,” Nehru’s message ended. “And to you, Mr. President, on whom so many all over the world look for leadership in the cause of freedom we would add our assurances of our high regard and esteem.”47

  Hearing the alarm in Hopkins’s voice, the President, once again, could only sigh at Churchill’s negative attitude—which seemed all the more racially demeaning and self-serving at a moment when the Japanese controlled the Indian Ocean and were nearing the Indian border in Assam.

  Churchill’s negat
ive behavior at this juncture of the war seemed indefensible—moreover, shameful, given the mess into which the British had gotten themselves in the Far East. With the Japanese fleet causing mayhem off the Indian coast and threatening not only Ceylon and Calcutta with impunity (nine hundred thousand people had evacuated Calcutta, in fear of Japanese bombing and possible invasion), the Prime Minister could no longer fulfill his role in holding the northern flank or cornerstone of the President’s two-point military strategy in the Far East. Not only had Churchill been forced to appeal for U.S. air forces to be sent urgently to India to protect the subcontinent, but for U.S. naval forces to be sent to the Indian Ocean to save the Royal Navy.

  For Churchill the situation was deeply humiliating—a fact that, in part, explained his psychological resistance to reason. Twice already he had declined to show an act of statesmanship over Indian aspirations. Backed into a corner, he was declining for a third time to do so, threatening resignation as prime minister if the President insisted upon Cripps being told to continue negotiations with Nehru.

  It was at this juncture that Harry Hopkins, in the interests of Allied unity, hit upon a solution.

  Hopkins might have little understanding of military strategy or tactics or combat, but he was an indefatigable fixer. He was devoted to his president—and in thrall to Winston Churchill. These were the two greatest men of their time, at least in the West—and he, Harry Hopkins, had the privilege of serving them as intermediary. It was crucial, he felt, to find some way of defusing the mine threatening the Atlantic alliance. Hopkins had never been to India, and dumping Indian aspirations for self-government, even so that Indians would defend the subcontinent from the approaching Japanese, seemed a small price to pay for unity between the United States and Britain. Yet how could he bring the two leaders of the Western world back on course?

  Rather than supporting President Roosevelt’s doomed pressure on the Prime Minister to come to terms with Nehru, Hopkins hit upon an alternative: a new stratagem to persuade the President to rescue Britain’s collapsing empire in India and its forces in the Indian Ocean without having to grant self-government to India. It would involve a gigantic pretense, by making the U.S. an offer it could not refuse. In the ensuing months it would bring not Churchill, but the President’s military advisers, to the point of resignation, once they discovered how insincere it had all been. But at a critical moment in the war, when Allied unity seemed vital to the eventual victory of the democracies, it was all Hopkins could think of.

  Churchill should, Hopkins suggested, simply ignore the President’s plea regarding India completely. Instead he should, Hopkins advised, ditch the draft of his resignation letter and commence a new message: beginning on a positive note in terms of the Western alliance, by promising wholehearted British military cooperation in carrying out General Marshall’s top-priority plan for a cross-Channel Second Front that very year.

  Churchill’s new cable—encoded and sent at 3:50 P.M. on April 12, 1942—thus sidestepped the whole issue of India. It began, instead, by congratulating President Roosevelt on the truly “masterly document” that General Marshall had brought with him to London regarding U.S.-British strategy in Europe—adding that as prime minister and minister of defense Churchill was “in entire agreement in principle with all you propose, and so are the Chiefs of Staff.”48

  This was, in actuality, complete moonshine, as even Churchill’s own senior military assistant, General Hastings Ismay, later admitted. Perhaps, Ismay confessed in shame, “it would have obviated future misunderstandings if the British had expressed their views more frankly”49—for the British chiefs of staff were not in “entire agreement” with General Marshall’s “masterly document.” In fact they were, from the very start, utterly opposed to American Second Front plans that would result in untold numbers of British deaths for no purpose. Even Churchill’s most slavish chronicler would state that Churchill was being “at best disingenuous.”50

  At the time, however, the chiefs of staff were willing to practice such a deceit on behalf of their prime minister/minister of defense—Churchill calculating that, over time, the Americans would recognize the impracticability of a cross-Channel landing that year. And in the meantime, the charade would be enough to get the American president off the Prime Minister’s back with regard to Indian self-government.

  Hopkins’s suggestion worked. Churchill’s “masterly” signal did succeed in getting Roosevelt to back off. However, the problem of India would not go away so easily—indeed, the saga came to a head several days later, when Churchill was compelled to send a second, this time panic-stricken, plea to the President for help.

  14

  The Worst Case of Jitters

  IN HIS MEMOIRS, Churchill would omit his desperate plea to the President on April 15, 1942, for it was simply too embarrassing to quote.

  If the Prime Minister hoped there had been no witnesses to its reception in Washington, however, he was mistaken. For on that very day, the Canadian leader, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, happened to be staying at the White House.

  King, who had been invited to attend his first meeting of the new Pacific War Council in Washington, was suffering from bronchitis and a bad cold, but he found the President remarkably confident when he arrived. “Was conducted from the White House by the garden corridors to the President’s Secretary’s office, and from there into the Oval Office” in the West Wing, the Canadian prime minister noted in the detailed diary he kept. “The President was sitting working in his shirt sleeves, white shirt, no vest or coat. Gave me a very warm welcome. Laughed a little about his attire”—given King’s own, rather formal clothing—“and we went in together into the Cabinet room.”1

  The President’s naval aide, Captain McCrea, was there too—having been asked by the President to act as his liaison officer to the council. As McCrea noted in his own diary, Roosevelt told him privately: “Don’t keep any minutes, but write out a memorandum afterwards.”2

  King, by contrast, had been in the habit of keeping copious, careful notes of all his meetings in a special account he dictated each day—and his description of Roosevelt’s torment over India would provide historians with their most intimate glimpse of the President’s reluctant assumption of overall Allied strategic command, as the British Empire collapsed in all but name.

  The President was, in Mackenzie King’s admiring eyes, a patrician—the Canadian prime minister proud to be asked “to be seated to his right.” At 3:00 P.M. the President of the United States then “opened the proceedings,” saying “that what was most upon the minds of all present was the news from France and the situation in India, and in the Indian Ocean.”3

  It looked, the President confided, as if the nefarious fascist Pierre Laval would soon become prime minister of the Vichy government, leading to yet “closer collaboration with Germany.” Not only did this mean the Vichy French would now give voluntary aid to Nazi Germany, but “conditions” in France, the President noted, would continue to “become more serious through Laval’s ascendancy.”4 It was an ominous prospect. Laval—who was executed after the war—did indeed become Vichy prime minister a few days later and immediately agreed to dispatch three hundred thousand Frenchmen to work in German munitions factories. He also arranged to have all non-French Jews and their children rounded up and transported to German concentration camps, where they would be exterminated.

  “With regard to India” the President showed even more concern—incredulous the British could be so obstinate over Indian self-government, yet not wishing to embarrass Sir Ronald Campbell, the representative from the British Embassy in the absence of Lord Halifax, as the council considered “the immense perils which confront us” in India and the Indian Ocean (in Churchill’s phrase)—with no representative of India at the table.

  The latest British Navy’s “loss of the two ships ‘Dorsetshire’ and ‘Cornwall,’” especially, aroused the President’s incomprehension as U.S. commander in chief. “He mentioned,�
�� King recorded, “that this emphasized the need which the United States had asserted to the British of not allowing ships to get too far away from the coast, and the protection which land-based planes could afford.”5

  The more the President spoke, the more King saw how Roosevelt was quietly but confidently assuming the mantle of the war’s overall direction, not just the provision of its weaponry. As the Canadian premier pointed out to the council, “since Japan’s entry” it was no longer a European war, with “all plans” made “largely in consultation and co-operation with London”—a former time when “Britain was viewed as the centre of the Empire and the British Isles as the most important of the possible theatres of war.” The global conflagration created a new “political” as well as “strategic” reality. Henceforth, in order to avoid “alienation of feeling between different parts of the British Commonwealth and any of the free countries,” the old Dominions of the British Empire would look to leadership by the United States of America, not Britain—for the United States, not Britain, was now the glue holding together the antifascist alliance, the Canadian prime minister felt. “I pointed out how Australia’s problem had created a problem in Canada such as had scarcely been dreamt of before. Just as the feeling had grown up suddenly in Australia which was causing Australians to look more to the United States than to Britain, so to the amusement of some of us, British Columbians”—on the Canadian Pacific seaboard—”were beginning to adopt a similar attitude toward the Government of Canada,” with some of them “saying they would have to look to the United States rather than to Ottawa for an understanding of their problems.”6