From June 1940, Churchill was making efforts to get America into the war, usually eliciting depressing responses. But Churchill persisted, remaining gracious and patient. Right from the outbreak of war, he recognized the need to court American opinion and to do everything possible to involve America on Britain’s side, as a noncombatant at first. Hence the deal to exchange fifty old American destroyers for ninety-nine-year leases on sites on British Caribbean islands that was concluded in August 1940. The British received some much-needed additions for convoy escort, and the Americans were able to extend their eastern seaboard and Atlantic defenses by building military facilities on British islands. But there was much more to the deal than this, as Churchill knew. It tautened the psychological, military, and political bonds across the Atlantic. Churchill, with his American ancestry and interest in America as a world power (he had begun writing his History of the English-Speaking Peoples before the outbreak of war, delivered to Cassell in autumn 1939 as a 500,000-word typescript, though not, as it turned out, the final one) was better qualified than any other British politician to appeal to American opinion and to convince America that he was the man to trust in resisting Hitler. In pursuing this line, Churchill understood that the American public needed to see the British war effort close up—to view its military encounters as well as the war’s impact on the home front. Thus he warmly welcomed American guests into his circle and sought to show them around his battered but unbowed country.
The message to the American people was sent in other ways, too, and Churchill’s image was burnished through pro-British propaganda disseminated by British information services and pro-British Americans. Americans were generally unaware of his colorful and controversial political past, which was a good thing. They were enthralled by his extrovert style and bulldog appearance. Americans came to love Churchill. As the New York Times put it, “This is the kind of leadership a free people deserve. . . . He has refused to treat his people like children, and they are responding gloriously with all they have and all they are.” Roosevelt was greatly impressed by Churchill though was obliged by American political realities to avoid being seen to commit too much or too little to the British cause.
Churchill forged relations with America as a matter of priority. In November 1940, while staying at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire, he was visited by Lord Lothian, ambassador to Washington, at a moment when economic disaster loomed. He sent a telegram to Roosevelt on November 16, telling him of a long letter that would be delivered to him upon Lothian’s return to the American capital. Churchill viewed this letter “as one of the most important I ever wrote,” for it contained the seeds of the Lend-Lease scheme that was to provide Britain’s financial base for the rest of the war. In the month following Roosevelt’s receipt of the letter, January 1941, Churchill (again at Ditchley) received the president’s personal envoy, Harry Hopkins. The prime minister lost no time in establishing a warm relationship with him and doing all he could to ensure that he was well placed to report to his master on the British war effort and the man at its center. The Americans still needed to be convinced that it was worth backing Britain. Much as the British might look askance at the American attitude, asking why they were not rolling up their sleeves and joining the war against a tyrant who would sooner or later threaten them, this was the way things stood in a land far removed from the din of European battle. Hopkins was welcomed into the Churchill circle, and the prime minister took to his humor, his gambling, his dress, and his colorful past. He took him to Scapa Flow to see Lord Halifax depart aboard the battleship HMS King George V to take up his position as ambassador to America following the death of Lothian. Churchill entertained Hopkins at Chequers, where, snug in his siren suit (an all-in-one garment, designed to be put on over nightclothes when the air raid sirens sounded), the PM fared better than his guest, who experienced the house’s renowned chilliness. Hopkins accompanied Churchill on a tour of Swansea and Bristol, both men receiving honorary degrees at Bristol University, a city bearing the scars of heavy German bombing.
Lend-Lease resulted from Churchill’s personal appeal to Roosevelt and his dire warning that unless Britain was supported with material aid, it could be defeated and America left exposed. He had said on February 9, 1941, that his response would be to assure President Roosevelt that “we shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long drawn-out trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”55 Churchill’s logic, in addressing the American government, was to argue that America must help Britain in any way possible, even when Britain ran out of cash to pay for goods. America could not afford to allow Britain to fight alone; Hitler’s onward march, and possible British defeat, was a problem for America just as much as it was for Europe. Lend-Lease, dubbed by Churchill the “most unsordid act in any nation’s history,” duly received congressional approval in March 1941, and over thirty billion dollars’ worth of American-produced material would galvanize the British Empire’s war effort over the next four years. (Nearly ten billion dollars flowed in the other direction, known as Reverse Lend-Lease.)
Churchill and Roosevelt had their first wartime meeting at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, in August 1941. This trip presaged what was to become a familiar aspect of wartime communication and decision making: the globetrotting summit meeting among the major Allied leaders, with Churchill emerging tens of thousands of miles in the lead, signified his enormous appetite for travel, no matter what the dangers and discomforts, and his Herculean efforts to forge the Grand Alliance and conduct policy making in person.
HMS Prince of Wales, Britain’s newest battleship, transported a delighted Churchill across dangerous Atlantic waters. He took to the venture like a schoolboy let loose for the holidays, spurred on by the whiff of danger and sense of a historic moment in the making. The journey was made in great secrecy, the prime minister and his entourage of officials, chiefs of staff, and newsmen traveling by rail from Marylebone Station to Scapa Flow. On both the outward and homeward journeys, Churchill entertained the ship’s wardroom each evening with a picture show, having brought with him a variety of films, from American comedies and westerns like High Sierra to stirring British historical dramas like Lady Hamilton (which made Churchill weep), to cartoons and slapstick like Donald Duck’s Foxhunting and Laurel and Hardy’s Saps at Sea. Each day, Churchill would wander about the ship and spend hours closeted with his chiefs of staff or in bed with his papers, conducting the empire’s war effort from the high seas. He also found time to read a novel, C. S. Forester’s Captain Hornblower RN.
The meeting at Placentia Bay set the tone for the wartime summits that were to see Churchill and his chiefs of staff, together with the attendant flock of advisers and journalists, venture to such places as Bermuda, Cairo, Casablanca, Quebec, Tehran, Washington, and Yalta. There was a great deal of ceremony aboard the battleship and the president’s cruiser, culminating in a joint church service that filled the Prince of Wales’s deck with sailors and the strains of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” The result of the meeting was the Atlantic Charter, a document that with its promise to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” was to reverberate throughout the British Empire and would be cited ad infinitum by nationalists seeking a greater share in the direction of their countries’ destinies. This was a cat that Churchill was to rue letting out of the bag, for he had had only the territories overrun by Germany in mind when framing it—not Britain’s extensive collection of colonies. The charter was greeted with some disappointment in Britain, and indeed among the company of the Prince of Wales, who had hoped that the historic meeting would be the drumroll for an American declaration of war on the side of the British Empire. For a while, Churchill actually thought he had succeeded in obtaining from Roosevelt a commitment to join the war, though he soon understood that the president’s encouraging words stopped short of this. But, as Churchill
said in an explanatory broadcast to the nation on August 24, 1941:
The meeting was . . . symbolic. That is its prime importance. . . . Would it be presumptuous of me to say that it symbolizes . . . the marshaling of the good forces of the world against the evil forces which are now so formidable and triumphant? . . . This was a meeting which marks for ever in the pages of history the taking up of the English-speaking nations amid all this peril, tumult, and confusion, of the guidance of the fortunes of the broad toiling masses in all the continents.56
For Churchill, the meeting and the charter bound America more closely to Britain’s cause and moved America a step closer to joining the war as a full belligerent—including the agreement to extend America’s responsibility in securing the Atlantic sea lanes—a process that was completed four months later as American battleships burned at their moorings in Hawaii and Germany joined its eastern ally and declared war on America. Returning from this first meeting with Roosevelt, the Prince of Wales caught up with a convoy of seventy-two vessels plowing the Atlantic swells on its way to Britain. Churchill stopped off briefly to visit Iceland, where British and Canadian troops were deployed in aid of Atlantic defense.
Working with the Man
Churchill’s energy and drive were legendary, along with the manner in which he kept all around him on their toes. His work rate and ability to tirelessly deal with innumerable people and issues across a vast spectrum of war was phenomenal and without equal in history. He was a dynamic information processor and decision maker at the center of a well-oiled machine. Brigadier Jacob captured a typically frenetic opening to the day: “Sawyers brings the breakfast; then Kinna is sent for to take something down; meanwhile the bell is rung for the Private Secretary on duty who is asked for news, and told to summon someone, say CIGS [Chief of the Imperial General Staff] or Pug. Then it is the candle for lighting cigars that is wanted. Then someone must get Hopkins on the phone. All this while the Prime Minister is half sitting, half lying, in his bed, breathing rather stentoriously, and surrounded by papers.”57 His attitude to his work is perfectly summed up by his reaction in Quebec in August 1943 when, at midnight, Cordell Hull rose from the table to go to bed. “W. was scandalized,” Eden wrote, “and explained in reply to Hull’s protest that it was late, ‘Why man, we are at war!’”58
His capacity to work without respite inspired people but presented challenges for those not used to the peculiar rhythm and pace of Churchill’s life, made more unusual and taxing by the demands of war. Senior figures in the autumn of their years (like Churchill himself) found it difficult to keep up with him and didn’t necessarily appreciate the demand to do so or his verbal blitzes. They would despair when, after a late-night conference on the heels of a tiring day, they were obliged to sit up with their leader and watch a film. Throughout the war, Churchill drove himself with scant regard for his health. Even his journeys overseas, accomplished in de Havilland Flamingos, battleships, Liberator bombers, destroyers, troopships, and the like, never seemed to ruffle him, and his gift of a smiling, pugnacious, calm, and confident front was a boon to colleagues and commanders both at home and overseas. Even when abroad, his staff attempted to stick as closely as possible to what amounted to Churchill’s routine—the morning hours spent working in bed, regular baths, formal dinners, and after-dinner games.
Those who worked alongside him have left a rich record of the man observed at close quarters. May Shearburn, a typist, recalled the need to endure petulant insults and his “genius for not recognizing other people’s problems.” But she also experienced his kindness and was aware of the incalculable strains under which he worked. “Are you ready?” he might begin a session of dictation, the secretary poised over a specially silenced typewriter. “I’m feeling very fertile tonight.” Sometimes, with a twinkle in his eye, he would say that he would need two young ladies tonight. As he dictated and tried sentences aloud, he would walk up and down the room, muttering phrases to himself, sometimes dictating, sometimes rehearsing the delivery of the speech that was forming. Of course, he loved powerful prose and evoking men of action from British history, such as Henry V, Drake, Marlborough, and Wellington. He often employed suitably archaic language: “Yes. The time is right for another feat of arms,” Sir Ian Jacob recalls him saying.
His moods ranged from “charming, amusing, light-hearted and talkative to moody, bad-tempered, irascible and silent.”59 Fortunately, most people who saw the bad side also got to see the good. As his friend Brendan Bracken put it, it was like being in love with a beautiful woman who infuriates you but can smile and be forgiven in a moment. On the whole, Churchill’s secretaries wrote of their time with him in tones of affection and admiration: they knew how great was their master’s load, how great the moment of history in which they had the chance to share. Elizabeth Layton wrote: “He was simply sweet all the time.”60 On Christmas Day 1942, he worked in bed “in a grand temper,” Layton recalled, then “sat up in bed and read a book . . . looking like a benevolent old cherub.”61 “The more one is with him, the more one gets to understand his funny little ways,” she wrote, “and why he gets cross at this or that. One can anticipate his wants sometimes, and he always appreciates that. He likes one to know what kind of a smoke he wants, or when he wants a different type of pen passed to him. . . . There is nothing in the world he hates more than to waste one minute of his time!”62 On Marian Holmes’s first encounter with him as a secretary, Churchill said, “You know you must never be frightened of me when I snap. I’m not snapping at you but thinking of the work.”63
Churchill’s secretaries, while often overworked and harangued, were at least given the courtesy of being acknowledged and treated as part of the entourage. They had an important and difficult job to do. Elizabeth Layton, a personal secretary, found that his speech impediment made dictation difficult, as did the presence of a fat cigar between his lips. She would work for three consecutive days from two in the afternoon until two or even four thirty in the morning, with duties at Chequers every other weekend and regular dictation in the car between Downing Street and Chequers. He could be demanding and could tease or bark at her. But she endured these trials, aware that her master was “the spearhead of our stand against Nazism” and aware of his occasional smile, his gratitude, and his concern about her eating properly and keeping warm in the winter. Churchill rode his personal secretaries hard, expecting dictation straight onto the silent typewriter and the production of an almost instant, accurate typescript of what he had said, and always ready to go off “like a rocket” if an error was made or the unfortunate secretary fidgeted. But they understood the situation: “I didn’t mind—we were all so impressed by the stature of our master, so engaged in the tremendous task to which he was unsparingly devoting himself, that we would take anything from him.”64 Often, he was playful: “Gimme more work,” he might proclaim, or “Stop muckin’ me about,” when told there were no more papers in his Box.65
His robust style of interaction with colleagues and subordinates, so much in contrast to the skills of diplomacy he displayed in his dealings with Roosevelt and the American leadership, was well known. As Sir Ian Jacob wrote, “Having decided at the start exactly what he wanted to do, Churchill would first try to beat down opposition by a deluge of argument.” None of his ministers found him easy to deal with; he was combative and made no attempt to curb his pugnacity. “He was always ready to contend that opposition to his particular friends must be the result of inertia, orthodoxy, or jealousy of Government departments.” He had a soft spot for the eccentric or the man who incurred the hostility of officials. General Sir Alan Brooke’s war diaries give a fascinating insight into the challenges and frustrations of working with such a dynamic, assertive superior and of the ways in which he could be handled. Eden once suggested he should not go and interfere with commanders in the Middle East. “You mean like a great bluebottle buzzing over a huge cowpat?” Churchill enquired. (He went anyway and sacked Auchinleck.) The previous November (1941), he ha
d even removed the most senior soldier from his post, the chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill. His dispatch to Washington as Churchill’s personal representative and chief of the British Joint Staff Mission, and replacement as CIGS by Alan Brooke, were inspired moves.
Churchill’s fascination with war, travel and danger had many outlets during his first prime ministership. His desire to watch dogfights was almost childlike, and he frequently strained at the leash in his urgency to get to the front line to witness military action, or as close as the restraining stratagems of his peers and advisers would allow him. A trip to France that involved a voyage by submarine was “a tremendous lure for this man of adventure,” as was his penchant for taking over the controls of aircraft in which he was being conveyed, even of the superliner Queen Mary on a transatlantic crossing (insisting during lifeboat drill that a machine gun be mounted in his boat). When driving around London, Churchill’s cars would move fast, jump traffic lights, and take roundabouts on the right-hand side. He had a special train for his not infrequent movements around the country and early in the war visited most places on the British coast where an enemy landing might take place. The Churchills would descend upon Chequers or Ditchley Park in a wave of secretaries, policemen, valets, and often soldiers.
Churchill shared the danger of the people of London, insisting on working from the prime minister’s official residence, 10 Downing Street. The house was hit by a bomb, and he was persuaded to make use of the abandoned Down Street tube station off Piccadilly (“the Burrow”). Then there was the Downing Street Annex. While running the war effort from the imperial capital, he would take regular strolls in St. James’s Park, often in the dark. After his bodyguard Walter Thompson had walked into a tree, it was decided to procure a walking stick fitted with a torch.
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