by David Nasaw
Twenty-three
THE FALL OF FRANCE
It was Saturday, May 18, 1940. The ambassador was spending his weekend at St. Leonard’s. Late in the evening, Herschel Johnson, his number two man at the embassy, called to say that he had been visited that afternoon by Maxwell Knight of MI5, British Military Intelligence. “Johnson’s language,” Kennedy recalled in his unpublished Diplomatic Memoir, “was guarded but I gathered enough from what he said to learn that one of our clerks was suspected of having given out confidential information to sources allied to the Nazis.”
Johnson met with Kennedy at St. Leonard’s the next morning and told Kennedy a most “extraordinary story” of espionage at the American embassy. Tyler Kent, a twenty-nine-year-old code specialist from an old Virginia family who had joined the U.S. Foreign Service after college, served in Moscow, and been transferred to London in October 1939, had been consorting with Anna Wolkoff, the daughter of a former admiral in the czar’s navy. Wolkoff was connected to the Right Club, a secret society of English Fascists led by Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, a Conservative member of Parliament. Through the use of undercover agents, MI5 had learned that Wolkoff had bragged about receiving information from Kent that could only have come from the embassy. Scotland Yard was preparing to arrest Wolkoff the next morning, Monday, “and would search Kent’s rooms at the same time provided that we would waive any diplomatic immunity that might prevent such a search.” Kennedy agreed to waive immunity.1
The ambassador arrived at the embassy early on Monday morning, May 20. That same morning, Maxwell Knight of MI5, Franklin Gowen of the embassy, and three men from Scotland Yard made their way to Tyler Kent’s flat. They arrived at 11:15. On being refused entrance, they broke down the door, took Kent into custody, let the woman he was with go home, and searched his rooms, where according to Knight they discovered “a most amazing collection of documents [including] copies of secret and confidential code telegrams between various United States Embassies and Washington.” An hour or so later, they returned to the embassy, where Kennedy and Johnson took a quick look at the stolen materials: almost two thousand documents, two sets of duplicate keys to the code and file rooms, a tin box, and a locked, leather-bound book. Kent was brought into the office, where he insisted that he was not a spy but had taken the documents “only for my own information.”2
Tyler Kent had not been the highest-ranking or most efficient of the decoders, but it had fallen to him to code and decode the clandestine Churchill-Roosevelt cables. Had it become public knowledge in the spring of 1940 that the president of the United States, whose actions in the international arena were bound by strict neutrality laws, had been in secret communication with the bellicose first lord of the British Admiralty, Roosevelt and the Democrats would have been severely embarrassed six months before the presidential elections.3
The ambassador in London was frightened to the core at the possible repercussions. There were too many unanswered questions. For how long had MI5 suspected that Tyler Kent was a spy? Did the British have potentially embarrassing information about other embassy employees? Was Kent part of a larger spy ring? Were officials at other American embassies involved? To whom had Kent and his British Fascist accomplices given the materials they had stolen from the code and file rooms?
At seven o’clock that evening, Kennedy cabled Washington with the news he knew would set off alarms. He did his best to pretend that he had the situation fully in control, though it was obvious that he did not. “Following the receipt on Saturday of information that Tyler Kent associated with a gang of spies working in the interests of Germany and Russia, I today caused his private quarters to be searched, finding there substantial amounts of confidential embassy material, including true readings of messages in most confidential codes; also evidence of his personal connections with the spy group.” He had waived Kent’s immunity, participated fully with MI5 and Scotland Yard, and permitted Kent to be placed in custody. Kennedy “urgently requested . . . the department’s approval and instructions.”4
Within hours, he received a cable from Washington with orders that all further communications be decoded by Herschel Johnson and no one else. Hull needed to know at once if the strip cipher system, the most secret of the codes used by the State Department, had been compromised. A second cable informed the ambassador that Tyler Kent had been dismissed. A third directed him to keep a careful watch of all code clerks, their associates, and their outside activities.
The State Department was near frantic. To determine whether Kent had associates in other American embassies in Europe, Breckinridge Long, with J. Edgar Hoover’s assistance, recruited and dispatched teams of undercover agents, disguised as special couriers, to several European embassies.5
Embassy staff in London were instructed to put together a catalog of the stolen documents. “They are a complete history of our diplomatic correspondence since 1938,” Long wrote in his diary on receiving the documents. “It is appalling. Hundreds of copies—true readings—of dispatches, cables, messages. Some months every single message going into and out from the London Embassy were copied and the copies found in his room. It means not only that our codes are cracked a dozen ways but that our every diplomatic maneuver was exposed to Germany and Russia. . . . It is a terrible blow—almost a major catastrophe.”6
Long was overreacting. Kennedy proved remarkably adept at damage control. He met with the under-secretary at the Home Office, who spoke with the chief censor on his behalf. “They assure me,” he cabled Hull on May 24, that “nothing will be permitted to be printed here or abroad.” To avoid the spectacle of a public espionage trial, Kent was not deported but tried in London under the British Official Secrets Act, with no reporters, visitors, or spectators allowed into the courtroom and no documents from the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence, or indeed any other sensitive dispatches or cables, put into evidence. The jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts after deliberating for twenty-four minutes and sentenced Kent to seven years penal servitude, of which he would serve a little more than five.7
Breckinridge Long’s investigation revealed that Tyler Kent had acted alone. There had been no leak of the secret Churchill-Roosevelt communiqués. The “catastrophe” that the State Department had anticipated had not come to pass. In the end, the Tyler Kent affair was a sideshow, though a thoroughly frightening one.
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Meanwhile, on the continent all that Kennedy had feared and expected had come to pass. The Germans pushed on, almost unimpeded, pounding the French army and the British Expeditionary Force from the air and on the ground.
“The situation is terrible,” Kennedy wrote Rose on May 20 in his own hand, as he did not want to share what he had to say with his typists. “I think the jig is up. The situation is more than critical. It means a terrible finish for the Allies. I’m planning to get Rose[mary] and the Moores out either to Ireland or Lisbon. We will be in for a terrific bombing pretty soon and I’ll do better if I just have myself to look after. The English will fight to the end but I just don’t think they can stand up to the bombing indefinitely. What will happen then is probably a dictated peace with Hitler probably getting the British Navy, and we will find ourselves in a terrible mess. My God how right I’ve been in my predictions. I wish I’d been wrong. Well darling it’s certainly been a great adventure. It’s getting near the finish.”8
During the last week in May, after the failure of a French counteroffensive, General John Gort, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force in Europe, established a safe haven at the port of Dunkirk, just northeast of the advancing German troops, and began to evacuate his army across the English Channel. Churchill, who had urged his generals to fight on, reluctantly agreed that the army would be destroyed or captured by the Germans if it did not leave the continent at once. “My impression of the situation here,” Kennedy cabled Washington on the evening of May 27, “is that it could not be worse. Only a mi
racle can save the British expeditionary force from being wiped out or as I said yesterday, surrender.” Kennedy insisted that the Allies had no choice now but to sue for peace. “I suspect that the Germans would be willing to make peace with both the French and British now—of course on their own terms, but on terms that would be a great deal better than they would be if the war continues. . . . I realize this is a terrific telegram, but there is no question that it’s in the air here. . . . Churchill, Atlee and others will want to fight to the death, but there will be other numbers who realize that physical destruction of men and property in England will not be a proper offset to a loss of pride. In addition to that, the English people, while they suspect a terrible situation, really do not realize how bad it is. When they do, I don’t know which group they will follow—the do or die, or the group that want a settlement. It is critical no matter which way you look at it.”9
Kennedy’s suggestion that the British and French attempt “to make peace” before it was too late was not an outlandish one. Lord Halifax, still foreign secretary, had already proposed to the cabinet that the British consider joining with the French and inquiring of Mussolini, perhaps through President Roosevelt, what his terms were for staying out of the war and whether he would be willing to attend a four-power conference, with Germany, France, and Great Britain, to negotiate an end to the crisis. After three days of strenuous internal debate, Churchill convinced his colleagues not to approach Mussolini.10
“With France apparently falling,” Hull called together senior State Department officials “to consider the possible eventualities of the war situation in Europe. . . . We came to the general conclusion that the position of the Allied armies was desperate, and our attention centered on the necessity” of keeping the French and British navies out of German hands. Roosevelt cabled both governments asking for assurances, which were given, that they would not surrender their fleets to the Germans.11
The possibility that Britain’s gold supplies might be seized or surrendered to the Germans was no less frightening. Kennedy, on instructions from Hull, suggested to Kingsley Wood, the British chancellor of the Exchequer, and Montague Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, that it might be prudent for the government to consider shipping its gold and securities to Canada. “Kingsley Wood said he would consult the Prime Minister. . . . The next day he told me that Churchill would not agree to ship valuables to Canada because it might make the country think that the government was in panic. . . . I was learning rapidly,” Kennedy recalled in his Diplomatic Memoir, “that one can become unpopular by offering advice that people don’t want to hear. My contacts with the Churchill cabinet were certainly far less friendly than with the old government.”12
All of these scenarios, one more nightmarish than the next, were founded on the anticipated loss of most, if not all, of the quarter-million-man British Expeditionary Force. What neither Washington nor London knew was that Hitler, for reasons that remain open to debate to this day, instead of pressing forward to capture the British Army, had on May 24 halted the forward movement of his Panzer divisions fifteen miles south of Dunkirk. By the time he revoked that order two days later, the British evacuation was under way. On May 26 and 27, some 8,000 troops crossed the English Channel; on May 28, another 19,000; on May 29, some 47,000 more. By June 4, when the last boats departed from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, the impossible had happened: the bulk of the British Army and more than 100,000 French and Belgium troops had been saved.13
“We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance,” Churchill told the House of Commons on June 4, “the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.” Still, the army had been saved to fight again. “I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. . . . We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”14
Kennedy was stirred by Churchill’s eloquence. Still, for him, the most significant passages of the speech, as he recalled them years later in his Diplomatic Memoir, were not those devoted to the call to arms, struggle, sacrifice, and endless battle, but the prime minister’s admission and warning that “our thankfulness at the escape of our army . . . must not blind us to the fact that what has happened in France and Belgium is a colossal military disaster.”15
“If the French break—and the consensus here is that they will—,” Kennedy wrote Joe Jr. on June 6, two days after Churchill’s address, “then I should think the finish may come quite quickly. The British, of course, will fight, but only through pride and courage. With the French out of the way and the Germans in control of all the ports I can see nothing but slaughter ahead. I am arranging to send everybody away with the exception of about ten of us . . . who will stay and sleep at the Chancery [the embassy]. I am going to try to keep this place operating as long as they leave the building standing up.”16
“The strain is terrible,” he wrote that same day to Bob Fisher. “I hate to think what is going to happen to England, but since I am sure that I was born not to be bombed to death, I am very optimistic. I have got all the family and Eddie and Mary home. I propose to stick in London as long as there are any buildings left. I am moving my bed into the office this week, and here I stick.”17
His letter to Rose was almost wistful. “Didn’t someone say in the Bible once that you ‘have to pay for all your pleasures sooner or later.’ Well if they didn’t they should have because I’m satisfied everyone thinks it’s time and it would be nice to have the Bible as an authority.” He expected that France would fall soon now and “the Germans will invade England. . . . I of course will have to stay here through Bombing and Invasion but once this has happened I will expect F.D.R. to send for me. . . . Americans will have gone home and since there won’t be much to do, my place is home, I’ve done my duty. . . . We’ve been lucky so far that none of our friends have been killed but lots of boys have been. The atmosphere is very depressing. . . . On the whole I’m fine, lonesome and anxious to see if I can take it.” With Rosemary back in the United States, the burden of caring for her had returned to Rose, but that he assured his wife was only temporary. “When things settle down here under any regime, they [the nuns at her convent school] will be delighted to have her back and I’m sure she’ll come back hopping. This state of the world can’t keep on long at this tension.”18
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On June 10, Mussolini appeared on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia to declare Italy’s entrance into the war. On June 11, Churchill and key cabinet members and military advisers flew to the relocated French headquarters seventy miles from Paris to confer with Premier Reynaud and French army leaders.
The end was in sight. The only questions now were how long the French would be able to hold out, what would be the terms of surrender, and what would become of the fleet.
Returning from his meeting with the French, the prime minister summoned Kennedy. On greeting him, he offered the American ambassador a Scotch, as he always did; Kennedy refused, as he always did. Churchill had nothing much to report on France. “He still was not quite frank with me about the situation and hastens to remark on all occasions that Engla
nd is going to fight to a finish” and that even if the French lost their fleet, which he did not think likely, “the British would still fight on.” Again, he asked for American destroyers, which, he insisted, were more important now than planes “because of the terrific problem of protecting the Island from invasion and at the same time keeping trade routes open.” Kennedy promised to forward his request to the president.19
The next evening, Kennedy received a cable from Roosevelt, which he was asked to hand-deliver to Churchill. It was a copy of his reply to Premier Reynaud, who had three days earlier on evacuating his government from Paris requested that the president “declare publicly that the United States will give the Allies aid and material support by all means ‘short of an expeditionary force.’ I beseech you to do this before it is too late.” Roosevelt had delayed replying, but having learned from Churchill that the French were about to capitulate, he delivered an answer of stunning ambiguity: “As I have already stated to you and to Mr. Churchill, this Government is doing everything in its power to make available to the Allied Governments the material they so urgently require, and our efforts to do still more are being redoubled.”20
Kennedy found Churchill at dinner with his wife and two daughters and was asked to read aloud the president’s note to Reynaud. “Churchill then read it himself three or four times during dinner and was visibly moved by, I think, excitement, but possibly by champagne, which he was drinking, and told me he would immediately convey to Reynaud that his understanding of this message was that America assumed a responsibility if the French continued to fight.” He then rushed away to read the note to his cabinet, which did not interpret it as he had. “It was pointed out,” in the minutes taken of that evening session, that the president “had not stated in terms that the United States would declare war.” Churchill was not to be deterred. He insisted again and again that the message “could only mean that the United States intended to enter the war on our side” and told the cabinet that he intended to say so to Premier Reynaud.21