by Max Hastings
Roosevelt told Lothian there could be no suggestion of American subsidy until Britain had exhausted her ability to pay cash, for Congress would never hear of it. There was a widespread American belief in British opulence, quite at odds with reality. Amid the Battle of Britain, the US administration questioned whether Churchill’s government had honestly revealed its remaining assets. Washington insisted upon an audited account, a demand British ministers found humiliating. Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on 7 December 1940, saying that if Britain’s cash drain to the US continued, the nation would find itself in a position in which ‘after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilization saved and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.’
In responding to Churchill, Roosevelt never addressed this point, and his evasion was significant. He acknowledged a strong US national interest in Britain’s continued resistance—displaying extraordinary energy and imagination in moving public and congressional opinion—but not in its post-war solvency. American policy throughout the war emphasised the importance of strengthening its competitive trading position vis-à-vis Britain by ending ‘imperial preference’. The embattled British began to receive direct aid, through Lend-Lease, only when the last of their gold and foreign assets had been surrendered. Many British businesses in America were sold at fire-sale prices. The Viscose rayon-manufacturing company, jewel in the overseas crown of Courtaulds and possessing assets worth $120 million, was knocked down for a mere $54 million, because Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau insisted that the cash should be realised at a week’s notice. New York bankers pocketed $4 million of this sum in commission on a riskless transaction. Shell, Lever Bros, Dunlop Tyre and British insurance interests were alike compelled to sell up their US holdings for whatever American rivals chose to pay. The governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, wrote in March 1941: ‘I have never realised so strongly as now how entirely we are in the hands of American “friends” over direct investments, and how much it looks as if, with kind words and feelings, they were going to extract these one after another.’
The British government exhausted every expedient to meet US invoices. The Belgian government-in-exile lent £60 million-worth of gold which had been brought out of Brussels, although their Dutch and Norwegian counterparts refused to sell gold for sterling. An American cruiser collected from Cape Town Britain’s last £50 million in bullion. Lend-Lease came with ruthless conditions constraining British overseas trade, so stringent that London had to plead with Washington for minimal concessions enabling them to pay for Argentine meat, vital to feeding Britain’s people. Post-war British commercial aviation was hamstrung by the Lend-Lease terms. If Roosevelt’s behaviour was founded upon a pragmatic assessment of political realities and protection of US national interests, only the imperatives of the moment could have obliged Churchill to assert its ‘unselfishness’. Whatever US policy towards Britain represented between 1939 and 1945, it was never that. ‘Our desperate straits alone could justify its terms,’ wrote Eden about the first round of Lend-Lease.
Most of the British did not anyway care for their transatlantic cousins. Anti-Americanism was pronounced among the aristocracy. Halifax, whom Churchill dispatched to Britain’s Washington embassy in December 1940, told Stanley Baldwin: ‘I have never liked Americans, except odd ones. In the mass I have always found them dreadful.’ Lord Linlithgow, a fellow grandee who was viceroy of India, wrote to commiserate with Halifax on his posting: ‘the heavy labour of toadying to your pack of pole-squatting parvenus! What a country, and what savages those who inhabit it!’ Halifax told Eden that he had proposed him as an alternative candidate for the ambassadorship: ‘I only said that I thought you might hate it a little less than myself!’
Installed at the embassy, the former Foreign Secretary endured much suffering in the service of Britain, not least during a visit to a Chicago White Sox baseball game in May 1941, at which he found himself invited to eat a hot dog. This was too much for the fastidious ambassador, who declined. During a trip to Detroit he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes by a group calling itself ‘The Mothers of America’. Oliver Harvey, Eden’s private secretary, described the aloof Halifax’s performance in his role as ‘pretty hopeless—the old trouble of being unable to make real personal contacts…All business in the U.S.A. is now transacted by telephoning and “poppingin”, both of which H can’t abide. He only goes to see the President on business—and naturally usually to ask for things—he has never got on to a more intimate chat basis with him.’ Dalton related a mischievous story that Halifax broke down and wept soon after his arrival in Washington, ‘because he couldn’t get on with these Americans’.
Many Tory MPs shared the grandees’ distaste for the US. Cuthbert Headlam, admittedly something of an old woman, wrote of Americans with condescension: ‘They really are a strange and unpleasing people: it is a nuisance that we are so dependent on them.’ A Home Intelligence Report found ‘no great enthusiasm for the US or for US institutions among any class of the British people…There was an underlying irritation largely due to American “apathy”.’ Fantastically, some British officers questioned whether it would be in Britain’s interests for America to become a belligerent. Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, with the British Mission in Washington in April 1941, noted that some of his colleagues believed ‘it wouldn’t really pay us for the US to be actively engaged in the war’. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, later C-in-C of Bomber Command, wrote with characteristic intemperance about the difficulties of representing the RAF in Washington in 1941. It was hard to make progress, he said bitterly,
when one is dealing with a people so arrogant as to their own ability and infallibility as to be comparable only to the Jews and the Roman Catholics in their unshakeable conviction that they alone possess truth. As to production generally out here. This country is now at a crossroads. Up to date they have had a damn fine war. On British dollars. Every last one of them. The result has been a magnificent boom after long years of black depression and despair…They lose no opportunity of impressing upon us individually how magnificently they are fighting (sic) and how inept, inefficient and idiotic and cowardly is our conduct of those few miserable efforts we ourselves are making in battle and in industry…Such production of war materials as has been achieved up to date has therefore been all to their profit and in no way to their inconvenience…They will come in when they think that we have won it. Not before. Just like they did last time. They will then tell the world how they did it. Just like they did last time.
If Harris’s tone was absurdly splenetic, it was a matter of fact that Britain and France provided the surge of investment that launched America’s wartime boom. In 1939, US gross national output was still below its 1929 level. Anglo-French weapons orders and Anglo-French cash thereafter galvanised US industry, even before Roosevelt’s huge domestic arms programme took effect. Between 1938 and the end of 1942 average income per family in Boston rose from $2,418 to $3,618, in Los Angeles from $2,031 to $3,469, admittedly boosted by inflation and longer working hours. It could be argued—indeed was, by the likes of Harris—that Britain exhausted its gold and foreign currency reserves to fund America’s resurrection from the Depression.
In London, ministers and generals found it irksome to be required to lavish extravagant courtesies upon American visitors. Hugh Dalton grumbled about attending a party given at the Savoy by the Sunday Express for American broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing: ‘It is just a little humiliating, though we shall soon get more and more used to this sort of thing, that the majority of the Ministers of the Crown plus foreign diplomats, British generals and every kind of notability in the press world have to be collected to help to boost this, I am sure, quite admirable and well-disposed American broadcaster.’ Dalton was disgusted when the guest of honour asked him blithely whether there were factions in Br
itain willing to make peace with Germany. Nor was such impatience confined to ministers. Kenneth Clark of the Ministry of Information suggested the need for a campaign against ‘the average man’s…unfavourable view of the United States as being a country of luxury, lawlessness, unbridled capitalism, strikes and delays’.
The British were exasperated by American visitors who told them how to run their war, while themselves remaining unwilling to fight. A British officer wrote of Roosevelt’s friend, the flamboyant Col. William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan: ‘Donovan…is extremely friendly to us & a shrewd and pleasant fellow and good talker. But I could not but feel that this fat & prosperous lawyer, a citizen of a country not in the war, & which has failed to come up to scratch even in its accepted programme of assistance, possessed very great assurance to be able to lay down the law so glibly about what we and other threatened nations should & sh[ou]ld not do.’
It is against this background of British resentment and even hostility towards the US that Churchill’s courtship of Roosevelt must be perceived. The challenge he faced was to identify what D.C. Watt has called ‘a possible America’, able and willing to deliver. This could only be sought through the good offices of its president. Churchill, least patient of men, displayed almost unfailing public forbearance towards the USA, flattering its president and people, addressing with supreme skill both American principles and self-interest. He was much more understanding than most of his countrymen of American Utopianism. On the way to Chequers one Friday night late in 1940, he told Colville ‘he quite understood the exasperation which so many English people feel with the American attitude of criticism combined with ineffective assistance; but we must be patient and we must conceal our irritation. (All this was punctuated with bursts of “Under the spreading Chestnut Tree”.)’
Churchill himself knew the United States much better than most of his compatriots, having spent a total of five months there on visits in 1895, 1900, 1929 and 1931. ‘This is a very great country, my dear Jack,’ he wrote enthusiastically to his brother back in 1895, when he stopped by en route to the Spanish war in Cuba. ‘What an extraordinary people the Americans are!’ He was shocked by the spartan environment of West Point Military Academy, but much flattered by his own reception there: ‘I was…only a Second Lieutenant, but I was…treated as if I had been a General.’ During his December 1900 lecture tour he was introduced in New York by Mark Twain, and told an audience in Boston: ‘There is no one in this room who has a greater respect for that flag than the humble individual to whom you, of the city which gave birth to the idea of a “tea party”, have so kindly listened. I am proud that I am the natural product of an Anglo-American alliance; not political, but stronger and more sacred, an alliance of heart to heart.’
He had met presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover, along with Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, Hollywood stars, Henry Morgenthau, William Randolph Hearst and Bernard Baruch. He had lectured to American audiences in 1931-32 about the perceived shared destiny of the English-speaking peoples. Many of his British contemporaries saw in Churchill American behavioural traits, above all a taste for showmanship, that his own class disliked, but which were now of incomparable value. Humble London spinster Vere Hodgson perceived this, writing in her diary: ‘Had he been pure English aristocracy he would not have been able to lead in the way he has. The American side gives him a superiority complex—in a way that Lord Halifax would not think in good taste—but we need more than good taste to save Britain at this particular moment.’
In 1940-41, Churchill sometimes displayed private impatience towards perceived American pusillanimity. ‘Here’s a telegram for those bloody Yankees,’ he said to Jock Colville as he handed the private secretary a cable in the desperate days of May 1940. In dispatches to Washington, the malignant US ambassador Joseph Kennedy made the worst of every such remark which he intercepted. He translated Churchill’s well-merited dislike of himself into allegations that the prime minister was anti-American. Kennedy’s dispatches inflicted some injury on Britain’s cause in Washington, cauterised only when Roosevelt changed ambassadors in 1941, replacing Kennedy with John ‘Gil’ Winant, and Churchill embarked upon personal relationships with the president, Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman. Churchill’s broadcasts, however, already commanded large American audiences, and imposed his personality upon Roosevelt’s nation in 1940-41 almost as effectively as upon his own people. By late 1941, Churchill ran second only to the president in a national poll of US radio shows’ ‘favourite personality’. ‘Did you hear Mr Churchill Sunday?’ Roscoe Conkling Simmons asked his readers in the Chicago Defender on 3 May 1941. ‘You may be against England, but hardly against England as Mr Churchill paints her…Did you note how he laid on the friendship of Uncle Sam?’ Churchill’s great phrases were repeated again and again in the American press, ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ notable among them.
If Churchill had not occupied Britain’s premiership, who among his peers could have courted the US with a hundredth part of his warmth and conviction? There was little deference in his make-up—none, indeed, towards any of his own fellow countrymen save the King and the head of his own family, the Duke of Marlborough. Yet in 1940-41 he displayed this quality in all his dealings with Americans, and above all their president. When the stakes were so high he was without self-consciousness, far less embarrassment. To a degree that few of his fellow countrymen proved able to match between 1939 and 1945 he subordinated pride to need, endured slights without visible resentment, and greeted every American visitor as if his presence did Britain honour.
By far the most important of these was, of course, Harry Hopkins, who arrived on 8 January 1941 as the president’s personal emissary, bearing a letter to King George VI from his fellow head of state, saying that ‘Mr Hopkins is a very good friend of mine, in whom I repose the utmost confidence.’ Hopkins was a fifty-year-old Iowan, a harness-maker’s son who had been a lifelong crusader for social reform. He met Roosevelt in 1928, and the two men formed an intimacy. Hopkins, the archetypal New Dealer, in 1932 became federal relief administrator, and one of the strongest influences on the administration. Roosevelt liked him in part because he never asked for anything. It was the heady scent of power that Hopkins savoured, not position or wealth, though he had a gauche enthusiasm for nightclubs and racetracks, and was oddly flattered by press denunciations of himself as a playboy. He cherished contrasting passions for fungi and the poetry of Keats. The high spot of his only pre-war visit to London, in 1927, was a glimpse of Keats’s house. A lonely figure after the death of his second wife from cancer in 1937, he was invited by FDR to live at the White House. Hopkins had pitched camp there ever since, with the title of Secretary of Commerce and undeclared role of chief of staff to the president, until he was given responsibility for making Lend-Lease work.
Hopkins’s influence with the president was resented by many Americans, not all of them Republicans. He was widely unpopular, being described by critics as ‘FDR’s Rasputin’, an ‘extreme New Dealer’.
At the outset of World War II he had been an instinctive isolationist, writing to his brother: ‘I believe that we really can keep out of it. Fortunately there is no great sentiment in this country for getting into it, although I think almost everyone wants to see England and France win.’ Physically, he cut an unimpressively dishevelled figure, his long neck and gaunt features ravaged by the stomach cancer that had almost killed him. Many people who met Hopkins perceived, through the haze from the cigarettes he chain-smoked, ‘a walking corpse’. A Time photograph of him carried the caption: ‘He can work only seven hours a day.’ Brendan Bracken, sent to greet Hopkins off the flying-boat that brought him to Poole harbour, was appalled to find this vital visitor slumped apparently moribund in his seat, unable even to unfasten his seatbelt. The relationship with the British upon which the envoy now embarked became the last important mission of his life.
On 10 January 1941 Churchill welcomed Hopkins for the first time in the li
ttle basement dining room of Downing Street—the house was somewhat battered by bomb blast—for a tête-à-tête lunch that lasted three hours. The guest opened their conversation with the forthrightness that characterised Hopkins’s behaviour: ‘I told him there was a feeling in some quarters that he, Churchill, did not like America, Americans or Roosevelt.’ This was Joseph Kennedy’s doing, expostulated the prime minister, and a travesty. He promised absolute frankness. He said that he hoped Hopkins would not go home until he was satisfied ‘of the exact state of England’s need and the urgent necessity of the exact material assistance Britain requires to win the war’. He then deployed all his powers to charm his guest, with unqualified success.
Hopkins’s intelligence and warmth immediately endeared him to Churchill. Throughout his political life the president’s man had decided upon courses of action, then pursued them with unstinting energy. If he arrived in Britain with a relatively open mind, within days he embraced the nation, its leader and cause with a conviction that persisted for many months, and did incalculable service. That first Friday evening, the American drove to join the prime minister and his entourage at Ditchley in Oxfordshire, Churchill’s weekend residence on moonlit nights during the blitz, when Chequers was perceived to be vulnerable to the Luftwaffe. The text of the Lend-Lease Bill, now beginning its hazardous passage through Congress, had just been published. Britain’s dependence on the outcome was absolute. However, Churchill warned the chancellor, Kingsley Wood, that he himself would say nothing to Washington about looming British defaults on payments for arms, should Lend-Lease fail to pass the US legislature: ‘We must trust ourselves to [the president].’
Hopkins was extraordinarily forthcoming to his hosts, who welcomed his enthusiasm after the cold scepticism of Joseph Kennedy. That first weekend, on the way to see Churchill’s birthplace at Blenheim Palace, the envoy told Brendan Bracken that Roosevelt was ‘resolved that we should have the means of survival and of victory’. Hopkins mused to the great CBS broadcast correspondent Ed Murrow, then reporting from London: ‘I suppose you could say—but not out loud—that I’ve come to try to find a way to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas.’ Churchill, for his part, diverted his guest during the month of his visit with a succession of monologues, strewing phrases like rose petals in the path of this most important and receptive of visitors. At dinner at Ditchley, the prime minister declared: