by Max Hastings
2 Walking Out
That summer, countless hours were expended by British diplomats, staff officers and the prime minister himself, weighing and debating every subtlety of US behaviour and opinion. Few lovers expended as much ink and thought upon wartime correspondence as did the prime minister on his long letters to Roosevelt, sometimes dispatched twice or thrice weekly, in which he described the progress of Britain’s war. He adopted a confiding tone, taking it for granted that the president shared his own, and his country’s, purposes. He extended his courtship to the president’s people. On 16 June, the award in absentia of an honorary doctorate from Rochester University, New York, inspired one of his finest radio broadcasts to Americans:
A wonderful story is unfolding before our eyes. How it will end we are not allowed to know. But on both sides of the Atlantic we all feel—I repeat, all—that we are a part of it, that our future and that of many generations is at stake. We are sure that the character of human society will be shaped by the resolves we take and the deeds we do. We need not bewail the fact that we have been called upon to face such solemn responsibilities. We may be proud, and even rejoice amid our tribulations, that we have been born at this cardinal time for so great an age and so splendid an opportunity of service here below. Wickedness—enormous, panoplied, embattled, seemingly triumphant—casts its shadow over Europe and Asia. Laws, customs, and traditions are broken up. Justice is cast from her seat. The rights of the weak are trampled down. The grand freedoms of which the President of the United States has spoken so movingly are spurned and chained. The whole stature of man, his genius, his initiative, and his nobility, is ground down under systems of mechanical barbarism and of organized and scheduled terror.
Churchill’s words moved many people in his audience. Yet in Washington, Halifax observed wearily that trying to pin down the Americans was like ‘a disorderly day’s rabbit-shooting’. Roosevelt offered much to Britain—aircrew training, warship repair facilities, the loan of transports, an American garrison to replace British troops in Iceland, secret military staff talks throughout February and March, growing assistance to Atlantic convoy escorts. But still the US stood well short of belligerence. In July, Roosevelt’s Draft Renewal Bill passed the House of Representatives by only one vote. Churchill hankered desperately for a meeting with the president. More than that, he persuaded himself that if such an encounter took place, it would presage a decisive change in the Anglo-American relationship.
When, at last, Roosevelt fixed an August rendezvous at Placentia Bay, off Newfoundland, the prime minister’s hopes were unbounded. He wrote to the Queen before his departure on the 4th: ‘I must say I do not think our friend would have asked me to go so far for what must be a meeting of world-wide notice, unless he had in mind some further forward step.’ He was in tearing spirits on the rail journey north, as was his entourage on discovering the lavish scale of catering provided. From Scapa Flow he cabled the president, using language that assumed a community of purpose far closer than that which Roosevelt acknowledged: ‘We are just off. It is 27 years ago to-day that Huns began their last war. We must make a good job of it this time. Twice ought to be enough.’ Then, in Colville’s words, ‘with a retinue which Cardinal Wolsey might have envied’, Churchill set sail aboard the great battleship Prince of Wales for Newfoundland. Harry Hopkins, newly returned from Moscow and once more in a state of collapse, joined them for the passage. That marvellously brave man had travelled most of the way from Russia in the gun blister of a Catalina flying boat.
One of the few useful purposes fulfilled by British battleships in the Second World War was to convey Churchill on his wartime journeys in a style befitting the arbiter of an embattled empire. There was an irony about his presence aboard Prince of Wales. Only a few weeks earlier, he had demanded courts martial of officers deemed to have lacked resolution in the navy’s contest with the Bismarck. He was furious that Prince of Wales had broken off action after Hood’s sinking, even though the British battleship was severely damaged. The court martial proposal was dropped only when Sir John Tovey, C-in-C Home Fleet, said that if any such retribution was attempted, he himself would resign his post and serve as ‘prisoner’s friend’.
En route to the Atlantic rendezvous, much less work was done than became usual on later voyages. There was no agenda to prepare, because the British delegation had no notion how the meeting might evolve. They seized the opportunity for rest. Churchill read with relish three of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels, tales of derringdo about the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic wars. He fantasised enthusiastically about a possible sortie from north Norway by the Tirpitz, which might enable him to participate in a great naval engagement. Mothersill pills were much in demand as specifics against seasickness.
Humble members of the British delegation, such as a cluster of clerks, were amazed by manifestations of the prime minister’s informality. ‘Working in H[arry] H[opkins]’s cabin this morning,’ Corporal Geoffrey Green wrote in his diary, ‘& WSC came in wearing only pyjama coat & cigar—no pants—grinned at us and said “good morning”—too amazed to reply properly!’ The ship’s storerooms were packed with delicacies from Fortnum & Mason, together with ninety grouse, killed ahead of the usual shooting season to provide a treat for the prime minister’s exalted guests. On the American side, Hopkins cabled Washington suggesting that hams, wine and fruit, especially lemons, would be acceptable to the British party.
Placentia Bay is a rocky inlet on the south coast of Newfoundland, where some five hundred inhabitants occupied a fishing settlement ashore. The British discerned a resemblance to a Hebridean sea loch. Early on the morning of 9 August, Prince of Wales began to stand in. Then her officers realised that the ship’s clocks were set ahead of North American time. The ship turned and ploughed a lazy course offshore for ninety minutes, before once more heading into the anchorage. At 9 a.m. her anchors rattled down a few hundred yards from the US cruiser Augusta, which bore the president. The British remarked the contrast between the zig-zag camouflage of their own vessel, dressed for battle, and the pale peacetime shading of the American warship’s paintwork.
No one knows exactly what was said at the encounters aboard Augusta between Churchill and Roosevelt. But Hopkins, who was present, described the mood. The president adopted his almost unfailing geniality, matched by the opacity which characterised his conversation on every issue of delicacy. As for his companion, no intending suitor for marriage could have matched the charm and enthusiasm with which the prime minister of Great Britain addressed the president of the United States. Churchill and Roosevelt were the most fluent conversationalists of their age. Even when substance was lacking in their exchanges, there was no danger of silences. They had in common social background, intense literacy, love of all things naval, addiction to power, and supreme gifts as communicators. Both were stars on the world stage. In the twenty-first century, when physical fitness is a preoccupation of many national leaders, it may also be remarked that neither of the two greatest statesmen on earth seemed much reduced by the fact that one was a fifty-nine-year-old cripple, the other a man of sixty-six famous for his over-indulgence in alcohol and cigars.
One of Roosevelt’s intimates, Marguerite ‘Missy’ LeHand, declared him ‘really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone’. Yet for all his essential solitariness, the president had a gift for treating every new acquaintance as if the two had known each other all their lives, a capacity for forging a semblance of intimacy which he exploited ruthlessly. Churchill, by contrast, had scant social interest in others. After the untimely death of his close friend F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, in 1930, he was unwilling to interest himself in any other human being, save possibly Beaverbrook and Jan Smuts, for long enough to establish a social, as distinct from political, communion. Indeed, at Placentia he pricked the president’s vanity by forgetting that the two had met earlier—in London in 1918.
Churchill loved only himself and Clementine, while to Roosevelt’s mistresses it wa
s rumoured—though probably mistakenly—that he had recently added the exiled Crown Princess Marthe of Norway. While Roosevelt sometimes uttered great truths, he was a natural dissembler. Henry Morgenthau claimed to be baffled by the presi-dent’s contradictions: ‘weary as well as buoyant, frivolous as well as grave, evasive as well as frank…a man of bewildering complexity of moods and motives’. Roosevelt was much more politically imaginative than Churchill. He told Wendell Willkie in the spring of 1941 that he thought Britain would experience a social revolution when the war was over, and he was right. Churchill, meanwhile, gave scarcely a moment’s thought to anything that might follow Britain’s desperate struggle for survival against the Axis, and was implacably hostile to socialism. Roosevelt, like his people, regarded the future without fear. Optimism lay at the heart of his genius as US national leader through the Depression. Churchill, by contrast, was full of apprehension about the threats a new world posed to Britain’s greatness.
At Placentia Bay the prime minister strove to please the president, and Roosevelt, fascinated by the prime minister’s personality, was perfectly willing to be pleased. However, the shipboard meetings between British and American service chiefs were tense and stilted. Generals George Marshall and Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, and Admirals Harold Stark and Ernest King, were wary. On security grounds, Roosevelt had given them no warning of the intended meeting until they boarded Augusta. They had thus prepared nothing, and were determined to say nothing, which committed their nation an inch further than existing policy avowed. The British—CIGS Sir John Dill, First Sea Lord Sir Dudley Pound and Vice-Chief of Air Staff Sir Wilfred Freeman—were bemused by the fact that the US Army and Navy preferred to conduct briefings separately, and outlined entirely different strategic viewpoints.
When Marshall spoke of creating a US Army of four million men, the British expressed amazement. There seemed no prospect, they said, that land fighting would take place in the continental United States. Shipping did not exist to transport and supply a large army overseas. What need could there be for such a mobilisation? Churchill himself was at pains to assure the mothers of America that even if their nation entered the war, their sons would not be required to shed blood on the battlefields of Europe. A month before Placentia, he rebuked Auchinleck for telling journalists that US troops were needed. Such remarks, said the prime minister, strengthened the hand of American isolationists, and ran ‘contrary to what I have said about our not needing the American Army this year, or next year, or any year that I could foresee’. British strategic calculations denied a requirement for British or US land forces capable of engaging the Wehrmacht on the Continent, because Dill and his colleagues did not perceive this as a viable objective.
At Placentia, Arnold said little on behalf of the US Air Force, while Marshall talked more about equipment than strategy. The Americans said they found it hard to satisfy British demands for weapons. They claimed that requests were submitted in muddled profusion, through a variety of channels. The British felt a chasm between their own mindset, formed and roughened by the experience of war, and that of their American counterparts, still imbued with the inhibitions of peace. It was not easy for men with lesser gifts of statesmanship than the prime minister to subdue their consciousness that the leaders of America’s armed forces resented shipping to Britain arms which they wanted for themselves. It was hard for Dill and his colleagues not to be irked by the caution of these rich, safe Americans, when they themselves were battered by the responsibility of conducting Western civilisation’s struggle for survival. The Royal Navy’s officers noted the lack of curiosity displayed by the Americans, notably Admiral King, about their experiences of battle, for instance against the Bismarck. Privately, US sailors mocked Dudley Pound, ‘the old whale’ as British soldiers called him. Dill got on well with Marshall, but Ian Jacob wrote bleakly in his diary: ‘Not a single American officer has shown the slightest keenness to be in the war on our side. They are a charming lot of individuals, but they appear to be living in a different world from ourselves.’
Roosevelt was irritated to learn that the prime minister had brought with him two well-known journalists, H.V. Morton and Howard Fast. Though they were barred from filing dispatches until back on British soil, this was a reminder that Churchill sought to extract from the meeting every ounce of propaganda capital. Roosevelt, meanwhile, was determined to keep open every option, to proceed with utmost caution. The reporters were denied access to US ships.
It is important to recognise that both the British and the Americans still expected Russia to suffer defeat, leaving Britain alone once more to face the Nazi empire—and soon also, perhaps, the Japanese. Churchill urged Roosevelt to offer the strongest possible warnings to Tokyo against further aggression. It has been suggested that he went further, pleading for pre-emptive US military action in the Far East, but this seems implausible. Several times during the conference, Churchill asked Averell Harriman if the president liked him. Here was an admission of the prime minister’s vast anxiety, and vulnerability.
‘It would be an exaggeration to say that Roosevelt and Churchill became chums at this conference, or at any subsequent time,’ wrote Robert Sherwood, White House familiar and later biographer of Harry Hopkins. ‘They established an easy intimacy, a joking informality and a moratorium on pomposity and cant—and also a degree of frankness in intercourse which, if not quite complete, was remarkably close to it. But neither of them ever forgot for one instant what he was and represented or what the other was and represented…They were two men in the same line of business—politico-military leadership on a global scale…They appraised each other through the practised eyes of professionals, and from this appraisal resulted a degree of admiration and sympathetic understanding of each other’s professional problems that lesser craftsmen could not have achieved.’ While the prime minister eagerly succumbed to sentiment in forming a view of his fellow potentate, the president did not reciprocate. Churchill and Roosevelt achieved a friendship of state. The American and British peoples felt that they understood their respective leaders, but the British had better reason to make the claim. Churchill was what he seemed. Roosevelt was not.
The prime minister brilliantly stage-managed his part of the Placentia meeting, himself choosing hymns for the Sunday church service beneath the huge guns of Prince of Wales, before a pulpit draped with the flags of the two nations—‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ and ‘Eternal Father Strong to Save’. Scarcely a man present went unmoved. ‘My God, this is history!’ muttered a fellow clerk ‘in a hushed, awed voice’ to Corporal Geoffrey Green. As excited photographers clicked shutters from vantage points on the turrets and upperworks, a colleague said to Ian Jacob that the occasion must fulfil the fantasies of a pressman high on hashish.
That afternoon Churchill took a launch on a brief visit to the shore, wandering a while with Cadogan, the Prof and his secretaries, and somewhat unexpectedly picking wildflowers. Senior officers of the two nations continued to shuttle to and fro between their ships, each arrival and departure being greeted with full ceremonial by bands and honour guards, which ensured that the anchorage was never tranquil. Next day there were further talks, desultory as before, between the service chiefs. Roosevelt marginally raised the stakes in the Atlantic war by agreeing that US warships should escort convoys as far east as Iceland. He justified this measure back in Washington by asserting that there was little purpose in providing American supplies to Britain without seeking to ensure that they reached their destination.
The most substantial outcome of the president and prime minister’s encounter was the Atlantic Charter, a strange document. It had its origin in a suggestion by Roosevelt that the two leaders should issue a statement of common principles. As published, it represented a characteristically American expression of lofty intentions. Yet it was drafted by Sir Alexander Cadogan, the attendant Foreign Office mandarin. The Charter was signalled to London for approval by the war cabinet, whose members w
ere dragged out of bed for the purpose. In the small hours of the next morning—another drizzly affair, like most in Newfoundland—an officer reported to Churchill just as he was going to bed that London’s reply had arrived. ‘Am I going to like it?’ the prime minister demanded—in Jacob’s words ‘like a small boy about to take medicine’. Yes, he was told, all was well. His ministers had endorsed the Anglo-American statement. When published, its noble phrases in support of a common commitment to freedom rang around the world, and gave hope to colonial subjects in a fashion that Churchill certainly did not intend. Back in the USA, however, the Charter roused little popular enthusiasm. It was never signed, because this would have made it necessary to present the document to the Senate for ratification as a treaty.
Before they parted, the president offered the prime minister warm words of goodwill and a further 150,000 old rifles. But there was nothing that promised America’s early belligerence. This was what Churchill had come for, and he did not get it. By 2.50 p.m. on 12 August it was all over. Low cloud cut off the ships’ view of the shore. Augusta slid away into a fog as sailors lined the side of Prince of Wales to salute the departing president. Then the British set their own course for home. ‘It was hard to tell whether Churchill returned from Newfoundland entirely satisfied with his conference with Roosevelt,’ wrote Ian Jacob. The prime minister told his son Randolph that he had enjoyed ‘a very interesting and by no means unfruitful meeting with the president…and in the three days when we were continually together, I feel we made a deep and intimate contact of friendship. At the same time one is deeply perplexed to know how the deadlock is to be broken and the United States brought boldly and honourably into the war.’