Churchill and the King

by Kenneth Weisbrode

  CHAPTER NINE

  Reversal

  It is said that war is a succession of periods of boredom interspersed by the occasional moment of terror. As between “slow-time” and “tank-time” there are few gradations in combat. This may be the experience for many among the rank and file. Not for Churchill. He welcomed constant action.

  War almost never happens that way. Rather, there is a cycle of gains, losses, and frustration, right up to the very end and even through the aftermath. War may later appear, as it does in Churchill’s histories, as the unveiling of a heroic plot, reaching a climax. In the moment, however, there was adversity of a different order: less a contest of strength than, increasingly, one of endurance, reminding us of Rudyard Kipling’s advice about dealing with triumph and disaster: “And treat those two impostors just the same.”

  There were three general phases of this war: the period from fall 1939 to spring 1940, or the Phony War; the year from June 1940 to June 1941 when Britain fought for its survival, more or less alone; and the subsequent phase beginning with the German attack on the Soviet Union and lasting to the end in 1945.

  Near the middle of the second phase, Churchill and the king were amazed, emboldened, yet deeply chastened, by their ordeal. The king, staying at Sandringham, sent his prime minister his

  best wishes for a happier New Year, & may we see the end of this conflict in sight during the coming year [1941]. I am already feeling better for my sojourn here, it is doing me good, & the change of scene & outdoor exercise is acting as a good tonic. But I feel that it is wrong for me to be away from my place of duty, when everybody else is carrying on. However I must look upon it as medicine & hope to come back refreshed in mind & body, for renewed efforts against the enemy.

  I do hope & trust you were able to have a little relaxation at Xmas with all your arduous work. I have so much admired all you have done during the last seven months as my Prime Minister, & I have so enjoyed our talks together during our weekly luncheons. I hope they will continue on my return as I do look forward to them so much. . . .

  It was indeed kind of you to help me with my broadcast on Xmas day, & very many thanks for the Siren Suit.

  Churchill replied with a warm yet formal tone that had by now become typical:

  I am honoured by Your Majesty’s most gracious letter. The kindness with which Your Majesty and the Queen have treated me since I became First Lord and still more since I became Prime Minister has been a continuous source of strength and encouragement during the vicissitudes of this fierce struggle for life. I have already served Your Majesty’s father and grandfather for a good many years as a Minister of the Crown, and my father and grandfather served Queen Victoria, but Your Majesty’s treatment of me has been intimate and generous to a degree that I had never deemed possible.

  Indeed, sir, we have passed through days and weeks as trying and as momentous as any in the history of the English Monarchy, and even now there stretches before us a long, forbidding road. I have been greatly charmed by our weekly luncheons in poor old bombed-battered Buckingham Palace, and to feel that in Your Majesty and the Queen there flames the spirit that will never be daunted by peril, nor wearied by unrelenting toil. This has drawn the Throne and the people more closely together than was ever before recorded, and Your Majesties are more beloved by all classes and conditions than any of the princes of the past. I am indeed proud that it should have fallen to my lot and duty to stand at Your Majesty’s side as First Minister in such a climax of the British story.

  —

  The spring of 1941 came hard. Churchill was more depressed than usual. The only bright side was his conviction that the course of the war would soon be decided. But the mood shifted by midsummer. One of his favorite phrases—“Keep buggering on”—now prompted a new retort:

  “Ah yes, Mr. Prime Minister, but you can’t go on fighting rearguard actions all the time!”

  Yes, there was hope. Russia was still in the war, barely, but had begun to show signs of a capacity to persevere for another couple of months, while Roosevelt’s envoy Harry Hopkins had told him in March that the United States would soon enter the war.

  Clemmie had been unsure. “Jock, do you think we are going to win?” she asked Colville.

  “Yes.”

  So did Brooke. He recalled that in June he thought that “Russia would not last long, possibly 3 or 4 months, possibly slightly longer” but England was still “safe from invasion during 1941.” Some optimism was still in order.

  In August, Churchill traveled to Newfoundland on HMS Prince of Wales for his first wartime meeting with Roosevelt. On the journey he read books by C. S. Forester and watched the film Lady Hamilton. In Placentia Bay the two ships approached each other amid the melodies of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Save the King.” Churchill, in blue naval uniform, saluted, then boarded USS Augusta and approached Roosevelt, with beaming smile, hat, and summer suit, his body being held up by his son Elliott.

  “At long last, Mr. President.”

  “Glad to see you aboard, Mr. Churchill.”

  The two shook hands and then Churchill gave FDR a letter from the king, which read, in part:

  This is just a line to bring you my best wishes, and to say how glad I am that you have an opportunity at last of getting to know my Prime Minister. I am sure you will agree that he is a very remarkable man, and I have no doubt that your meeting will prove to be of great benefit to our two countries in the pursuit of our common goal.

  The two went belowdecks and got down to business. “I need not tell you,” Roosevelt later wrote to the king, “that we make a perfectly matched team in harness and out—and incidentally we had lots of fun together as we always do.” They dined on smoked salmon, caviar, turtle soup, roast grouse, “coupe Jean d’arc” [sic], broiled spring chicken, buttered sweet peas, spinach omelet, candied sweet potatoes, chocolate ice cream, cookies, and cupcakes. Churchill toasted Roosevelt and Roosevelt toasted the king. They sang hymns chosen by Churchill—“For Those in Peril on the Sea,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”

  Churchill delivered a detailed briefing on his return to the king, who sounded impressed with the “very blun[t]” talks. The prime minister also delivered a letter from Roosevelt, written during the conference and extending his regrets that the king, too, was not there to participate. The king must have been relieved, less because he had not taken part or in some way stood watch over the encounter but more because he was aware, like Churchill, of the tremendous necessity of American aid: “Now that Winston has returned, I am going away to Balmoral for a real change. . . . I need it in every way.”

  So did Churchill, evidently. Just a few weeks later he bemoaned the state of affairs: “‘The Army won’t fight. . . . The Army always wants more divisions, more equipment.’ Said that he had ‘sacked Wavell,’ and now he would ‘sack Dill and go himself.’ Dill was of no use, little better than Wavell, etc. etc.”

  Wavell griped in turn, “Winston is always expecting rabbits to come out of empty hats . . . an unreasonable genius is this Winston.”

  Back in Washington, Halifax had reported in November that the American secretary of state, Cordell Hull, “evidently thinks that he may find himself at war with Japan at any time without much notice. I still remain completely sceptical . . . but I am quite prepared to be proved wrong at any moment.” Nearly two weeks later, Churchill was at Chequers with Winant and Harriman. Harriman recalled that “during dinner, at nine o’clock Sawyers . . . would always bring in a small radio, a present from Harry Hopkins. It turned on by lifting the lid.” Churchill, he remembered, “was a bit despondent that evening and was immersed in his thoughts.” On the radio “the news started with unimportant events . . . a number of items about the fighting on the Russian front and on the British front in Libya. . . .”

  “Suddenly there was a pause and the announcer said he had a specia
l dispatch. ‘The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbour.’” Churchill remembered that he “did not personally sustain any direct impression, but Averell said there was something about the Japanese attacking the Americans, and, in spite of being tired and resting, we all sat up.”

  “What’s this about bombing Pearl Harbour?” Harriman asked.

  “Tommy [Thompson, Churchill’s aide] said, no, it was Pearl River.” Harriman disagreed. Then Sawyers, “who had heard what had passed, came into the room, saying, ‘It’s quite true. We heard it ourselves outside. The Japanese have attacked the Americans.’”

  Churchill jumped into action after a brief silence. So they would go to war with Japan. “Don’t you think you’d better get confirmation first?” Winant asked. “Good God, you can’t declare war on a radio announcement.” Winant proposed a telephone call to the president.

  “In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. . . . ‘It’s quite true,’ he said. ‘They have attacked us at Pearl Harbour. We are all in the same boat now. . . . This certainly simplifies things. God be with you.’”

  Harriman and Winant “took the shock with admirable fortitude,” Churchill recalled. “In fact, one might almost have thought they had been delivered from a long pain.”

  “Fancy the U.S. Fleet being in harbour,” the king wrote in his diary, “when the authorities must have known Japan was already on a war footing.”

  —

  Churchill proceeded right away to see Roosevelt in Washington and was said to have changed for the better: “The Winston I knew in London frightened me,” Lord Moran remembered. “I used to watch him as he went to his room with swift paces, the head thrust forward, scowling at the ground, the sombre countenance clouded, the features set and resolute, the jowl clamped down as if he had something between his teeth and did not mean to let go. I could see that he was carrying the weight of the world, and wondered how long he could go on like that.” The trip to America rejuvenated him. Yet there, after opening a heavy White House window, he had a small heart attack. “There is nothing serious,” Moran told him. “You have been overdoing things. . . . You’re all right. Forget your damned heart.”

  The attack on Pearl Harbor had followed the invasion by Hitler’s armies of the Soviet Union the previous summer. The Soviet Union and the United States were now fully at war. Churchill said with regard to the latter, “[P]reviously we were trying to seduce them. Now they are securely in the harem.” More or less. The addition of two allies carried costs and burdens, as well as benefits. For all the matériel the Americans could provide, much would have to go to the Soviet Union, some no doubt at Britain’s expense; for all the casualties the Soviets took, far exceeding those of the others combined, the moral and political demands their alliance would place upon Britain and the United States would be considerable. The Russians may have “look[ed] like a lot of pigstickers,” according to Dill, but they counted. Coordination was not the least of the difficulties. The Allies needed a common strategy, and the challenge of reaching agreement about that, given vast differences in size, culture, and geography, was formidable. Churchill seemed to work for it harder than anyone. He traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Urals. He was the man in the middle, sensitive to even the slightest (and sometimes not so slight) suggestion that the rulers of the two empires on the rise would gang up against the man leading the one on the ropes—the “Cinderella,” in other words—“from Casablanca to Teheran, by way of Washington and Quebec,” who “fought a series of rearguard actions for British influence, prestige and power.” Churchill’s chosen epithets were more rustic: “I will come anywhere, at any time, at any risk” despite being, as he put it, a “poor little English donkey” with the “great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched, and on the other side the great American buffalo.” It was this poor donkey “who was the only one, the only one of the three, who knew the right way home.” He would also describe the donkey as a lion and the buffalo as an elephant, but the point was the same.

  The characterizations had more to do with the war than with personal politics. It was up to the Big Three to determine the general plan of the war, and this involved tough compromises. The centerpiece of the war from this point to the end of 1943 was fulfillment of the so-called Mediterranean strategy—securing command over North Africa and driving Italy out of the war, it was hoped, in order to divert sufficient Axis strength to the south so as to make victory on the eastern front more likely while preparing the way, eventually, for victory in the west. Neither Roosevelt nor Stalin was keen on the strategy, and it took all Churchill’s talents of persuasion to drive it through. Stalin accused him of buying time in order to bleed Russians, no matter how well Churchill argued that the Mediterranean strategy would divert critical German strength—particularly aircraft—away from the Russian front. Roosevelt and his generals also protested, but on more theoretical grounds: if there was to be a cross-Channel invasion, it should happen soon. The Mediterranean flank, they said, was a policy of scatterization. It had long been American doctrine to “hit them where they are, not where they ain’t.” Halifax reiterated it in May 1943:

  The Americans want us to pledge ourselves to attack Northern France on a certain fixed date next year, whereas our people, while as anxious to do this as the Americans, feel that whether or not it will be a practicable operation depends on how hard we and the Russians can strain and hit the Germans between now and then. For this reason our people want to do everything to knock Italy out of the war.

  Getting the Americans to accept that logic was exasperating. Churchill even went so far as to consider some strange alternatives in order to deflect pressure for the cross-Channel invasion—for example, another by way of Portugal and Spain. This produced even worse exasperation in Brooke: “Do you know the Pyrenees? I do. I’ve been all over those tracks as a boy. And if you think we’re going to conduct the invasion of Europe across the Pyrenees, you’re an even bigger fool than I thought you were!”

  One of Churchill’s least favorite Americanisms was “overall strategic concept.” His riposte was to champion an “underall strategic concept.” To him strategy was inseparable from experience and the long record of history. Marshall was not impressed: “I told him I was not interested in Drake and Frobisher, but I was interested in having a united front against Japan.” Brooke, as usual, was torn:

  He knows no details, has only got half the picture in his mind, talks absurdities and makes my blood boil to listen to his nonsense. I find it hard to remain civil. And the wonderful thing is that ¾ of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other ¼ have no conception of what a public menace he is and has been throughout the war! It is far better that the world should never know, and never suspect the feet of clay of that otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and again. . . . Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being.

  Internal—here understood as inter-Allied—obstacles once more compounded and complicated external ones. Sometimes it can be hard to say which were more trying for the protagonists. At the time the problems appeared in layers: fronts and more fronts, including the front of high expectations. Churchill in January “confess[ed] to feeling the weight of the war upon me even more than in the tremendous summer days of 1940.” Lunching with the king on February 24, 1942, he said that “Burma, Ceylon, Calcutta, Madras and parts of Australia might well be lost.” A week and a half later he added, “The weight of the war is very heavy now, and I must expect it to get steadily worse for some time to come.” Brooke also admitted to having “had for the first time since the war started a growing conviction that we are going to lose this war unless we control it very differently and fight it with more determinatio
n.”

  Churchill had just survived a vote of no confidence in the Commons, which had made him “very angry,” according to the king, like “hunting the tiger with angry wasps about him” from the ranks of his “weaker brethren.” To him, it was an unnecessary, though not overly difficult, distraction at an inconvenient moment. The opposition to Churchill has tended to be minimized, even overlooked, in retrospect for obvious reasons, but it was there. It could have sidetracked and possibly overpowered him. Andrew Roberts has argued persuasively that the old Chamberlainites—still influential in framing Tory opinion—stood firmly in Churchill’s way right up to the end of the war, in fact. “Churchill’s position in the Conservative Party was never wholly free from ambiguity, and he was conscious of it.”

  A more minor but tiresome problem was the status of the Duke of Windsor. Relations between the two brothers had more or less frozen since the abdication, and the Windsors were left to do as they pleased so long as it was elsewhere. But the war threw up complications, not least because they had to leave France. In addition to coping with their obsession with money, keeping them away from Britain was difficult once they had escaped. The governorship of the Bahamas became the compromise, one that the king fully supported. Halifax thought that “it is quite a good plan that they should go to the Bahamas . . . but I am sorry for the Bahamas.” Chips Channon was another who thought the solution was for the best: “They will adore it, the petty pomp, the pretty Regency Government House, the beach and the bathing; and all the smart Americans will rush to Nassau to play backgammon with Wallis! It is an excellent appointment, and I suggested it two years ago and have been harping upon it ever since.” He was not the only one. At one point later Lascelles, who never stopped mistrusting Churchill on this score, warned him to cease “harping on this problem” at the risk of the king’s health.