by Max Hastings
As the prime minister prepared to sail, there was a flurry of lastminute business. He cabled Eden that while it might be desirable for Russia to declare war on Japan, Stalin should not be pressed too hard on this issue, ‘considering how little we have been able to contribute’ to the Soviet war effort. The Foreign Secretary was told, however, that on no account should he appear willing to satisfy Moscow’s demands for recognition of the frontiers which the Russians had established for themselves by agreement with Hitler, absorbing eastern Poland and the Baltic states. Not only would such action be unprincipled, it would discomfit the Americans, who were at that time even more hostile than the British to Stalin’s territorial ambitions. Meanwhile, Attlee was urged not to implement a threatened cut in the British people’s rations: ‘We are all in it together and [the Americans] are eating better meals than we are.’ Reducing supplies would savour of panic, said the prime minister. From Gourock on the Clyde on the morning of 13 December he telephoned Ismay to urge that ‘everything that was fit for battle’ should be dispatched to the Far East. Then, with his eighty-strong party which included Beaverbrook and the chiefs of staff – Dill still representing the army while Brooke took over at the War Office – he boarded the great battleship Duke of York, sister of the lost Prince of Wales.
The passage was awful. Day after day, Duke of York ploughed through mountainous seas which caused her to pitch and roll. Max Beaverbrook, who had been invited partly to provide companionship for ‘the old man’ and partly because he was alleged to be popular with Americans, wheezed that he was being borne across the Atlantic in ‘a submarine masquerading as a battleship’. Churchill, almost alone among the passengers, was untroubled by seasickness. Patrick Kinna, his shorthand-taker, found his own misery worsened by the cigar smoke that choked the prime minister’s cabin high in the superstructure. A stream of bad news reached the party at sea: the Japanese landed in north Borneo on 17 December, on Hong Kong island next day. Churchill minuted the chiefs of staff on the 15th, urging the vital importance of ensuring that Singapore was held: ‘Nothing compares in importance with the fortress.’ Heedless of the pitching of the storm-tossed warship, he dictated a succession of long memoranda, setting out his views on the way ahead.
Supplies for Russia from both Britain and the US must be sustained, he said, for only thus ‘shall we hold our influence over Stalin and be able to weave the mighty Russian effort into the general texture of the war’. He proposed that American troops should be sent to Northern Ireland, to provide an additional deterrent against German landings. By 1943, he said, Britain would be ‘more strongly prepared against invasion than ever before’. The possibility of a German descent on Britain continued to feature in his calculations. If Russia was knocked out, as still seemed likely, the Nazis could again turn west. Hitler must recognise the urgency of completing the conquest of Europe before America became fully mobilised. Churchill suggested that US bombers should deploy in Britain to join the growing air offensive against Germany. He expected Singapore to be defended for at least six months.
He interrupted his dictation to tell Kinna to make some sailors stop whistling outside his cabin. This was a distraction and a vulgarity which he could not abide – he once said that an aversion to whistling was the only trait he shared with Hitler. Kinna duly retired, but was too nervous of his likely reception to address the offending seamen, who lapsed into silence spontaneously. Oblivious of the towering seas outside, the pitching of the huge ship, Churchill resumed composition of his tour d’horizon. He wanted the Americans to land in French North Africa in 1942. The following year, he anticipated launching attacks against some permutation of Sicily, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, the French Channel or Atlantic coasts, possibly the Balkans. In his memoranda he made some wild assertions, for instance anticipating that when the time came to invade the Continent ‘the uprising of the local populations for whom weapons must be brought will supply the corpus of the liberating offensive’. But he also looked with imaginative foresight to the creation of improvised aircraft-carriers, which would indeed play a key role later in the war, and urged a carrier-borne air assault on Japan.
On 21 December he wrote a long letter to Clementine: ‘I do not know when or how I shall come back. I shall certainly stay long enough to do all that has to be done, having come all this way at so much trouble and expense.’ He told her he had no patience with those who denounced Britain’s unreadiness in the Far East: ‘It is no good critics saying “Why were we not prepared?” when everything we had was already fully engaged.’ In this he was surely justified. Those, like Dill, who had favoured reinforcing Malaya at the expense of the Middle East, were mistaken. It would have been absurd to dispatch desperately needed aircraft, tanks and troops to meet a putative threat in the Far East, at the likely cost of losing Egypt to an enemy already at its gates. It is hard to imagine any redeployment of available British resources in the autumn of 1941 which would have prevented disaster. So far-reaching were British weaknesses of leadership, training, tactics, air support and will in Malaya and Burma that the Japanese were all but certain to prevail.
The heavy seas imposed delays which caused Duke of York’s passage to seem to its passengers interminable. Churchill fulminated at the waste of time, but was obliged to concede that he could not subdue the elements. A five-day crossing stretched to nine, then ten. The chiefs of staff delivered their comments upon Churchill’s long strategic memoranda, which were discussed at a series of meetings under his chairmanship. They opposed a firm commitment to opening the major ‘Second Front’ in Europe in 1943. Germany, they said, must first be weakened by intensified and protracted bombing. They urged acknowledgement of the fact that ‘the Japanese will be able to run wild in the Western Pacific’ until Germany and Italy were disposed of. Churchill, who was undergoing one of his periodic bouts of scepticism about bombing, resisted any declaration of excessive faith in its potential. He warned against expecting the Americans to take as insouciant a view of Japanese Pacific advances as the chiefs proposed. He said it was essential to promote an offensive vision, rather than merely to advocate counter-measures against Axis thrusts. All this was very wise.
On 22 December Duke of York at last stood into Hampton Roads. The British party landed, and Churchill and his immediate staff boarded a plane for the short flight to Washington. Through its windows they peered down through gathering darkness, fascinated by the bright lights of the American capital after the gloom of blackedout London. There to meet the prime minister at the airport was Franklin Roosevelt, whose guest he became for the next three weeks. If this was a tense time for the British delegation, it was also an intensely happy one for Churchill. Who could deny his deserving of it, after all he had endured during the previous eighteen months? That first Anglo–American summit was codenamed Arcadia, paradise of ancient Greek shepherds. To the prime minister Washington indeed seemed paradisiacal. Installed in the White House, he enthused to Clementine: ‘All is very good indeed; and my plans go through. The Americans are magnificent in their breadth of view.’
From his first meeting with Roosevelt he emphasised the danger that Hitler might seize Morocco, and thus the urgent need that Allied forces should pre-empt him. Less convincingly, he cited the French battleships Jean-Bart and Richelieu, sheltering in North Africa, as ‘a real prize’. He was galled when Dill suggested that shipping shortages might make it impossible to convey an American army across the Atlantic in 1942, and swept this argument aside. The two national leaders and their chiefs of staff discussed, then dismissed, arguments for creating a war council on which all the Allies and British dominions would be represented. It was agreed that while the dominions should be consulted, policy must be made between the Big Three. This latter outcome was inevitable, but sowed the seeds of future unhappiness around the Empire, and especially in Australia.
While in Washington, Churchill learned of the crippling of the battleships Valiant and Queen Elizabeth by Italian human torpedoes in Alexandri
a harbour, together with the loss of two cruisers at sea. He was furious to hear that his deputy prime minister had informed the Australians and Canadians of the drastic weakening of the Mediterranean fleet. ‘I greatly regret that this vital secret should be spread about the world in this fashion,’ he cabled Attlee. ‘We do not give our most secret information to the Dominions.’
The British and American chiefs of staff held twelve joint meetings. To the relief of Churchill and his delegation, the US leadership immediately confirmed the conclusion of earlier ‘ABC’ Anglo–American staff talks that the Allies should pursue the policy of ‘Germany First’. It is sometimes insufficiently recognised how far Allied decisions for 1942 were influenced by shipping imperatives. The British were shocked, in the first weeks after Pearl Harbor, to discover how few bottoms would be available in the year ahead, before the huge US ‘liberty ship’ building programme achieved maturity. Britain required thirty million tons of imports a year to sustain itself, which must be borne across the Atlantic by merchant fleets much diminished by sinkings.
With the limited capacity available, there was much more scope for American action against the Germans, by supplying Russia and deploying US troops in the west, than against the Japanese in the Pacific. The Asian war required three or four times the freighting effort of the European one, because of the distances involved. A merchant ship could make only three round trips a year to the Pacific theatre. The ‘Germany first’ strategy thus represented not only strategic sense, but also logistic necessity. Yet, given the much greater popular animosity towards Japan in the US, it should never be taken for granted. Harold Macmillan observed later of the prime minister: ‘No one but he (and that only with extraordinary patience and skill) could have enticed the Americans into the European war at all.’ This overstated the case. But the US commitment to the western conflict indisputably represented a diplomatic triumph for Britain.
When Roosevelt introduced the prime minister to a throng of American pressmen, Churchill roused cheers and applause by climbing onto a chair so they could see him better. Asked whether it was true that Singapore was the key to the Far East war, he parried skilfully: ‘The key to the whole situation is the resolute manner in which the British and American democracies are going to throw themselves into the conflict.’ How long would it last? ‘If we manage it well, it will only take half as long as if we manage it badly.’ His exuberance was increased by further optimistic signals from Auchinleck in North Africa about the progress of Crusader.
On Christmas Eve, standing beside Roosevelt on the balcony as the White House tree lights were illuminated before a huge crowd, he said: ‘I cannot feel myself a stranger here in the centre and at the summit of the United States. I feel a sense of unity and fraternal association which, added to the kindliness of your welcome, convinces me that I have a right to share your Christmas joys…Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.’ He found his pulse racing after the balcony appearance, from which his words were broadcast: ‘It has all been very moving.’ That evening it was also a struggle to overcome private dismay: he learned of the fall of Hong Kong.
Roosevelt, matching the prime minister courtesy for courtesy and jest for jest, taunted him at dinner about having fought on the wrong side in the Boer War. When Churchill was asked about the quality of US food supplies to Britain, he complained: ‘Too many powdered eggs.’ He cabled Auchinleck, urging that now the desert campaign seemed to be progressing so well he should release an armoured brigade and four RAF squadrons for the Far East. On Christmas evening he left the rest of the presidential party watching a movie, and stumped off upstairs murmuring about ‘homework’. He was writing next day’s speech to the US Congress.
Washington Post reporter Hope Ridings Miller wrote: ‘Senators’…office telephones carried call after call from friends – wondering if there was some way, somehow, something could be done to obtain tickets for the biggest show on the season’s calendar.’ It was late in the morning when Churchill, wearing a blue polka-dot bow tie, clambered to his feet in the chamber on Capitol Hill. He grinned, donned spectacles, blinked back the tears that so often filled his eyes at dramatic moments. Congressman Frank McNaughton saw ‘a stubby, granite little man…dumpy, heavy-shouldered, massive-jawed, with a solid bald crown flecked with straggles of grey hair’. Hands on hips, Churchill began to address the audience beyond the dense bank of microphones. ‘Smiling, bowing, and looking very much at home,’ wrote Miller, ‘the Prime Minister flushed slightly as the ovation ushering him in increased in volume and burst into an ear-splitting crescendo. Compared with that demonstration, the tone in which he began his speech was so low those of us in the press gallery had a difficult time catching all his opening lines…A consummate actor, who carefully times his speech so that each word and each syllable is given the exact emphasis it should have, Mr Churchill also pauses at the proper time for applause…’
In the knowledge that Americans, and especially their legislators, were deeply wary of Britain as a suppliant, he said nothing of dependency, real though this was. Instead he talked of partnership, shared burdens. He flourished his own American parentage: ‘I shall always remember how each Fourth of July my mother would wave an American flag before my eyes.’ He reached his peroration: ‘Lastly, if you will forgive me for saying it, to me the best tidings of all is that the United States, united as never before, has drawn the sword for freedom, and cast aside the scabbard.’ He unsheathed an imaginary blade, and brandished it aloft. Then he sat down, sweating freely.
As one man, the chamber rose. The applause echoed on and on, until at last with a little wave Churchill left the rostrum. Hope Ridings Miller reported: ‘I never saw Congress in a more enthusiastic mood, and some diplomats, who habitually sit on their hands at a joint Congressional meeting, lest one gesture of applause might be diplomatically misinterpreted, clapped louder and longer than anybody.’ Interior Secretary Harold Ickes called him ‘the greatest orator in the world…I doubt if any other Britisher could have stood in that spot and made the profound impression that Churchill made.’ It was just after 1 o’clock. The prime minister, pouring himself a whisky in the Senate Secretary’s office, said to Charles Wilson, his doctor: ‘It is a great weight off my chest.’ At an informal lunch after his speech, he told congressmen: ‘The American people will never know how grateful we are for the million rifles sent us after Dunkirk. It meant our life and our salvation.’ If this was a flourish of flattery, it promoted a legend that Americans cherished. That night Wilson was alarmed to discover that Churchill had suffered an attack of angina pectoris. But there was nothing to be done, no change in the schedule to be considered. It would have been a political catastrophe if the world saw Britain’s elderly war leader flag.
Churchill used Roosevelt’s personal train to travel to Ottawa to address the Canadian Parliament, where he achieved another wonderful success. Back at the White House, he wrote happily to Attlee: ‘We live here a big family, in the greatest intimacy and informality.’ Peerless phrases slipped from his lips in even the most banal circumstances. At the White House lunch on New Year’s Day, as he transferred hash and poached egg to his plate, the egg slipped off. The prime minister restored it to the hash, with a glance at his hostess, ‘to put it on its throne’. It was fortunate that conversation sparkled, for the food at the Roosevelt White House was notoriously awful. After the meal, in her sitting room Eleanor Roosevelt and her secretary Malvina Thompson compared notes on the two leaders with another guest, the first lady’s friend and confidant Joseph Lash. Lash said the prime minister had the richer temperament, but the president was a more dependable, steadier man in a crisis. ‘ “Tommy”
clapped her hands and said she and Mrs Roosevelt felt the same. The president was more hardheaded, they felt. He was less brilliant, but more likely to do the right thing. The president also gave the impression of being more under control, of never letting himself go.’
It is striking how many of those who worked with Roosevelt deferred to his greatness, but disliked his personality. Diplomat Charles Bohlen, for instance, observed that despite the president’s pose of informality, ‘the aura of the office was always around him’. If Churchill’s outbursts of ill-temper sometimes irked colleagues, Roosevelt’s associates were made uneasy by his bland geniality, his reluctance to display anger, or indeed to reveal any frank sentiment at all. Where Churchill sought clarity of decision by working on paper, Roosevelt preferred to do business verbally. No minutes were taken of his cabinet meetings. This approach led to many confusions, on issues of war and domestic policy alike. The president prided himself on his powers of persuasion, and had raised to an art form the ability to send every visitor out of his presence confident that he had got what he wanted. Both Churchill and Roosevelt were often accused of betraying their own social class, but the president was a much more skilled politician. De Gaulle described him as ‘a patrician democrat whose every simple gesture is carefully studied’.
Halifax wrote with condescension but some justice about Churchill’s late-night sessions with the chiefs of staff at the White House: ‘Winston’s methods, as I have long known, are exhausting for anybody who doesn’t happen to work that way; discursive discussions, jumping like a water bird from stone to stone where the current takes you. I am sure the faults that people find with him arise entirely from overwhelming selfcentredness, which with all his gifts of imagination make him quite impervious to other people’s feelings.’ Some of Roosevelt’s intimates were struck by Churchill’s single-minded obsession with the war. The occupant of the White House, by contrast, was obliged to devote far more of his energies to domestic matters, and to managing Congress. ‘The difference between the President and the prime minister,’ wrote his secretary William Hassett, ‘is the prime minister has nothing on his mind but the war: the President must also control the government of the United States.’