Why the Allies Won

by Richard Overy

  The man western leaders met at Teheran was very different from the rude and irritable despot, under ‘intense strain’, who had greeted the first western mission to Moscow in September 1941. He made a remarkable impression on General Brooke, the British Chief-of-Staff, whose splenetic views on American strategy were well known. During the course of the conference, at which Stalin did much of the talking for the Soviet military, Brooke formed the view that he had ‘a military brain of the highest calibre’. He could not recall Stalin making a single strategic error. This was high praise indeed.53 Commander of the American air forces General Arnold echoed Brooke’s testimonial: ‘brilliant of mind, quick of thought and repartee, ruthless, a great leader …’54 The quality of any leader remains, of course, a matter of judgement. Stalin carried with him the disadvantages of dictatorship – the excessive centralisation, the pall of fear enveloping subordinates – but he brought a powerful will to bear on the Soviet war effort that motivated those around him and directed their energies. In the process he expected, and got, exceptional sacrifices from his besieged people. The ‘personality cult’ developed around him in the 1930s made this appeal possible in wartime. It is difficult to imagine that any other Soviet leader at the time could have wrung such efforts from the population. There is a sense in which the Stalin cult was necessary to the Soviet war effort. It provided a common focus of loyalty, and promoted a growing conviction about ultimate victory. That people suspended their disbelief, that they colluded with a myth later tarnished by revelations of the brutal nature of the wartime regime, should not blind us to the fact that Stalin’s grip on the Soviet Union may have helped more than it hindered the pursuit of victory.

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was everything Stalin was not. He was born in 1882 into a wealthy New York family, on a 100-acre estate beside the Hudson river. He had every social advantage. Excessively pampered by his mother, Roosevelt was sent first to the exclusive school at Groton, Massachusetts, modelled on the English public school, then on to Harvard, and to law school. He was not outstanding academically, but the tall, distinguished, sociable patrician, a member of America’s untitled aristocracy, needed little more than his name and background when he launched himself into politics in 1910. He had no particular scruples about which party to join; his cousin, Theodore, was the Republican President, but he adopted the Democrat ticket because they asked him to stand first. He soon became a political high-flyer. In 1913 he was appointed Assistant Secretary for the Navy. He was a solid administrator, and also an arch politician, utterly absorbed by the art of politics. A college friend remembered a man ‘extremely ambitious to be popular and powerful’.55 He had many Republican friends, whose social world he shared, but made his name fighting on issues for the common man. In 1920 he was chosen by James Cox, the Democrat candidate, to run as Vice-President. It was his first setback. He campaigned on support for the League of Nations, which America had not yet joined, but found the tide of opinion isolationist. In the Republican landslide he failed to win even his home state of New York. The following year, at the age of 39, he was struck by polio and paralysed from the waist down. He withdrew from politics to fight his affliction. Those who knew him well found him transformed by the struggle. The young politician had an arrogance, an intolerance of weakness, a hint of superficiality, that marred his energy and charm. During the seven years it took him to recover he became a more humble and more sympathetic personality. ‘He was serious,’ Roosevelt’s Secretary for Labour Frances Perkins later wrote, ‘not playing now.’56

  In 1928 he returned to politics, winning a narrow victory as Governor of New York State. Four years later he was returned as the first Democrat President since Wilson, with overwhelming support. During the 1930s Roosevelt struggled to repair the damage inflicted on the American economy by the Great Slump, and to heal the social wounds of unemployment and poverty. He promised Americans a ‘New Deal’ on jobs and welfare, and used the powers of the state, underdeveloped by European standards, to secure it. The results were mixed. There were still nine million unemployed by 1940, when Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third term. The New Deal legislation was dragged over the coals by the Supreme Court for the unconstitutional powers it gave to the President and the new state agencies he set up. He made a great many bitter political enemies in his attempt to strengthen Presidential rule. When the British ambassador Lord Halifax, recently arrived in Washington in 1940, met a group of Republican Congressmen he was astonished to be told that all present thought Roosevelt ‘as dangerous a dictator as Hitler or Mussolini’.57 When the Lend-Lease bill went through Congress, the isolationist Republican senator Arthur Vandenburg dubbed Roosevelt ‘Ace Power Politician of the World’.58

  Roosevelt was certainly an ambitious President, who disliked the obstruction of his policies. He devoted most of his energy to short-term political tactics, and was never choosy about the allies he found. He was obsessed with public opinion and his own popularity. He was an unsophisticated idealist, who once confessed that his political outlook could be summed up in two words: democrat and Christian. Though the idealism was genuine enough, friends and colleagues found his views on most issues ill-defined and pragmatic. Roosevelt’s instinct for political survival created in him a distrust of ideological conviction. Charles Bohlen, who interpreted for him at Teheran, thought the President ‘preferred to work by improvisation than by plan’. He disliked putting anything down on paper, and instead did much of his work in informal conversations, throwing round ideas, exploring options, testing the water. He could be disarming, flattering, cheerful, supportive, but was, by the general agreement of those around him, difficult to pin down. ‘Not a tidy mind,’ wrote an otherwise sympathetic British observer.59

  Roosevelt the shrewd tactician and Roosevelt the idealist were difficult to reconcile. This was particularly so in time of war. Though his public stance in the 1930s against violence – ‘I hate war’ – helped to maintain domestic political support among a largely isolationist population, it was difficult for him to hide his hatred of fascism and his expectation that America at some point would become involved with keeping the peace abroad. The ambiguities in this position were sufficiently pronounced to make it almost impossible for the American public to decide just where their President stood on the issue of war, yet to make it just as difficult for Roosevelt to seize the initiative and side openly with the democracies in 1940 and 1941. When Japan attacked in December 1941 everything was simplified for people and President alike: isolationism was dead as a political force and Roosevelt could lead his people in war unfettered by hostile opinion. He brought to the role of war leader some admirably suitable qualities. His was a big personality, made larger by years of publicity and the calculated wooing of popular approval. He had unrivalled experience in politics, having spent eight years in the highest office in the land. When it came to a job of work he was not hostage to party prejudice but hired Republican and Democrat alike. He was adept at managing Congress, and at building bridges between the many constituencies – ethnic, political, religious – that made up American society.

  The coming of war injected a lease of life into the Roosevelt administration. The President announced that ‘Dr New Deal’ was handing his practice over to ‘Dr Win-the-War’. He insisted on calling himself Commander-in-Chief, and made it clear that he was not going to stand back, as Woodrow Wilson had done, from the day-to-day business of fighting the war. He saw himself as the ringmaster of the coalition: ‘I am responsible for keeping the grand alliance together,’ he told Marshall.60 There was almost no established structure in American government for Roosevelt to play the role of military supremo, and the first frantic months of conflict were spent trying to devise one. The result was a chaos of appointments and committees. Eisenhower, recently promoted to the Pentagon, recorded his impression of life in the capital three weeks after Pearl Harbor: ‘Tempers are short. There are a lot of amateur strategists on the job; and prima donnas everywhere …’61 Gradually a central mac
hinery was established around the military chiefs. A new Joint Chiefs-of-Staff Committee was established, dominated by the army chief, George Marshall, but chaired by the President’s personal representative, Admiral William Leahy. He and Harry Hopkins were the only members of Roosevelt’s entourage allowed to enter the Map Room in the White House, where the President kept all his most important correspondence under lock and key, and look at what had been written. Though Roosevelt kept a close interest in international politics, in reality he played a smaller part in the military deliberations than he had intended. He preferred the informal atmosphere of discreet, usually unrecorded, one-to-one interviews rather than large chiefs-of-staff committees. Even in the intimacy of a closed discussion he gave surprisingly few clear directives. He preferred to suggest and encourage rather than order; he relied on his chief appointments to read between the lines and act on their own responsibility.62

  The flaws in Roosevelt’s leadership came with him into war. His informal administrative habits – suggestions which should have been orders, spoken directives instead of a written brief – made it infuriatingly difficult, from all accounts, to know exactly what policy was. Roosevelt himself seems to have viewed this as a strength as much as a weakness. ‘I am a juggler,’ he told a group of businessmen in 1941, ‘and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does … I am quite happy to mislead and to tell untruths if it will help to win the war.’63 Stimson found this ‘topsy-turvy, upside-down sytem’ appalling for the conduct of government business, though on balance it does not appear to have inhibited the American war effort any more than excessive centralisation might have done, if anything rather less. Roosevelt cheerfully appointed plenipotentiaries who trampled roughshod over the established departments of state. The inner circle of unofficial advisers – Hopkins, Harriman, Leahy – allowed the President to bypass the normal channels, and excited jealousies among the permanent officials. Above all Roosevelt remained a trimmer, an arbiter, aware that the diffuse character both of American society and of its wide political class required a great deal of politicking to hold a wartime consensus together. Roosevelt with his bruising experience of the New Deal was better placed than most American politicians to keep Americans fighting in a common cause.

  For all his inclination to compromise, on the big issues Roosevelt took a clear stand, backed by his closest advisers. He sustained aid for Britain against a good deal of popular criticism; he did the same for the Soviet Union. In 1942 he stuck to the strategy agreed with the British of defeating Hitler first. This was a choice vital to the outcome of the war, and it flew in the face not only of much popular opinion (isolationists were happy to fight Japan, but much less certain about fighting in Europe) but also of the Pacific-minded navy. All the while he stoked up popular enthusiasm inside and outside America with his idealistic vision of a new world order after the war based upon the principles of freedom and good-neighbourliness. These were ambitions honestly held but they had the added bonus of sustaining popular commitment to war after the initial thirst for revenge had been slaked.

  The net effect of Roosevelt’s leadership is difficult to judge. Like Stalin, as the war went on Roosevelt was able to leave much of the routine of war to the American and inter-Allied apparatus set up in 1942. He was a good judge of men, and appointed people who could do the job. Exuding confidence and optimism himself, he responded to these traits in others. When he made Marshall chief of the army in 1939 there were 33 generals more senior who might have hoped for the job. He liked Marshall because he told him the truth. What Roosevelt supplied was inspiration; he remained steadfast, unruffled even by defeats, supportive to all around him. He kept his anxieties to himself, just as he kept his disability from the public gaze. He had the strength to recognise his limitations, in itself a hallmark of intelligent leadership. At Teheran the critical Brooke observed that the President ‘never made any great pretence at being a strategist’. But he impressed all who met him at the conference. Churchill’s military aide, General Ismay, found him to be the perfect coalition chairman, ‘wise, conciliatory, paternal’.64 During 1944 his health deteriorated rapidly, worn down by a dozen years in office. He struggled on with his work, borne up by his confidence in victory, but on 12 April 1945, just weeks away from that outcome, he died. The country was stunned at the loss. In Moscow Molotov hurried to the American Embassy in the middle of the night, where, evidently deeply distressed, he spoke of Soviet respect for Roosevelt. Lord Halifax observed the effect in Washington: ‘Such a gap did the withdrawal of Roosevelt’s personality seem to leave that it was hard to imagine anybody filling it.’65

  Much the same might have been said of Churchill had he not survived a heart attack and serious bouts of pneumonia during the war. But survive them he did. Though Churchill was eight years older than Roosevelt, five years older than Stalin, he outlived them both by a good margin – and this despite a regime of indulgence and little exercise for most of his later life. Churchill differed from Stalin and Roosevelt not only in temperament and background but also in the circumstances of his wartime leadership. He was the only one of all the major wartime leaders, on either side, who was appointed during the conflict as a war leader. In the second place he was a leader by the grace of Parliament, which put him there in May 1940 and had the right at any time to remove him. Roosevelt was President for four years; Stalin was a dictator; Churchill was a chief minister, responsible to the Commons. The constitutional position of such an appointment remained ambiguous; the limits of authority depended on how much could be achieved through sheer force of personality.

  In Churchill’s case personality carried him a long way. He was so much larger than life, it is difficult for the historian to judge the true dimensions of his leadership. Canonised as the saviour of western civilisation, vilified as the flawed commander who diminished the empire he led, Churchill defies neutrality. Throughout his long and chequered career he provoked bitter resentments and deep affections. He was born in 1874, the eldest son of a Tory peer, Lord Randolph Churchill, and his American wife, Jenny. Disliked and ignored by his irresponsible, spendthrift, philandering parents, Churchill grew up at the time of Europe’s aristocratic fin de siècle, surrounded by a wayward family that staggered between debauchery and bankruptcy. He took the conventional upper-class trail, first public school at Harrow, then Sandhurst and a commission in the Hussars. He rode in one of the last British cavalry charges, at Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898. He found action irresistible. A year later he was a war correspondent in the Boer War, where he was captured. His dramatic escape made him into a popular hero. In 1900 he entered Parliament as a Conservative; four years later he changed sides in time to profit from the Liberal landslide of 1905. Twenty years later he switched back to his old party. In the interim he was in and out of high office. In 1910, at the age of only 36, he became Home Secretary; a year later he was moved to the Admiralty, where he masterminded the Dardanelles campaign in 1915. The calamitous failure of the enterprise cost Churchill his job, and almost ended his political career.

  After two years in the political wilderness, serving on the Western Front, Churchill was recalled to serve as Minister of Munitions in Lloyd George’s Cabinet, against strong Conservative resistance. Except for a brief spell between 1922 and 1924, he was in high office throughout the 1920s. He was never widely popular, either in the country at large or in Parliament. He was regarded as unprincipled and dangerous by the right; progressive opinion found him deeply reactionary. In 1929 he once again disappeared into the wilderness, and it was widely thought that this time it was for good. In the 1930s Conservative politics was dominated by Chamberlain, whose austerity, thoroughness and self-righteousness represented everything that Churchill was not. The two men despised each other. While Chamberlain wrestled with the crises of empire and of Europe, Churchill sat in virtual isolation on the back benches, berating the government ceaselessly for failing to hold the empire more firmly, and for rearming too slowly. Many found him to be a man out o
f touch with the modern age, a Victorian grandee whose values and habits were locked in the world before the war. If his career had ended in the 1930s he would be remembered largely as a political maverick, which was the reputation of his father.66

  Churchill was saved by the war. In 1939 a reluctant Chamberlain brought him back to the Admiralty. His thirst for action was undiminished. His shrill bellicosity set him apart from the rest of the Cabinet. In April 1940 he pushed for invasion of Norway, for which British forces were manifestly unprepared. The failure of the campaign carried strong echoes of Gallipoli, but its chief victim was not Churchill but Chamberlain. Widespread popular disillusionment with the war effort inside and outside Parliament made Chamberlain’s position untenable. Churchill was not the obvious successor. Anthony Eden, the Dominions Secretary, was more popular with the public; Lord Halifax, Foreign Secretary, was preferred by Chamberlain’s party. But Churchill was impossible to ignore. He was a man, Lloyd George once remarked, who ‘likes war’.67 On 9 May, one day before Hitler attacked in the west, Chamberlain called Halifax and Churchill to Downing Street to discuss the succession. Churchill’s version of events is melodramatic (and wrongly dated) – the long pregnant pauses in this, ‘the most important’ interview of his life, the silence finally broken by Halifax who ruled himself out of the running, the profound sense of responsibilities settling on his shoulders. In reality, Halifax had already decided that he did not have the stomach for war, and had told Chamberlain so. Churchill’s appointment depended only partly on Halifax, and more crucially on the willingness of the Labour opposition to work with a new Conservative leader. On 10 May Chamberlain was told that Labour would work with Churchill, and he reluctantly informed the King, who preferred Halifax. Churchill’s appointment as war leader was achieved against a great many odds, and at the behest of a Labour Party he disliked deeply. When Churchill entered the Commons the following day there was no more than a ripple of applause to greet him; the news was met in the Lords by complete silence.68