Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  Churchill felt able to take more for granted with his own nation’s legislature than did Roosevelt with his. Yet while the Americans perceived Britain’s government as entirely dominated by Churchill, the British took a legitimate pride in the effectiveness of their bureaucratic machine. Churchill’s team were bemused by the whimsical fashion in which the US government seemed to be conducted. Ian Jacob thought the Oval Office ‘one of the most untidy rooms I have ever seen. It is full of junk. Half-opened parcels, souvenirs, books, papers, knick-knacks and all kinds of miscellaneous articles lie about everywhere, on tables, on chairs, and on the floor. His desk is piled with papers; and alongside his chair he has a sort of bookcase also filled with books, papers, and junk of all sorts piled just anyhow. It would drive an orderly-minded man, or woman, mad.’ FDR’s famous dog, Fala, had to be evicted from a meeting in the cabinet room for barking furiously during a Churchillian harangue.

  Cadogan asked Halifax with mandarin disdain: ‘How do these people carry on?’ They were unimpressed by Roosevelt as a warlord. Jacob wrote: ‘By the side of the Prime Minister he is a child in military affairs, and evidently has little realisation of what can and what cannot be done…To our eyes the American machine of Government seems hopelessly disorganised…They will have first to close the gap between their Army and Navy before they can work as a real team with us.’ Had any American senior officer read these words, he would have answered that it was pretty rich for a British soldier thus to patronise the USA and its armed forces, when Britain’s record since 1939 was of almost unbroken battlefield failure, while her economic survival rested upon American largesse. Criticisms of Roosevelt’s working methods had substance, but ignored America’s untold wealth and achievements.

  The British, in the years ahead, would persistently underestimate US capabilities, and feed American resentment by revealing their sentiments. They failed, for instance, to recognise the potency of Roosevelt’s personal commitment to supplying Russia. Just as Churchill and Beaverbrook faced opposition on this issue in Britain, so the president was obliged to overcome critics at the top of the armed forces, in Congress and the media, who were fiercely reluctant to offer Stalin open cheques on the US Treasury. Roosevelt, like Churchill, stood head and shoulders above his military advisers in his determination to support Russia’s war. If American deliveries, like those of Britain, lagged far behind promises, without the exercise of the president’s formidable personal authority the Soviet Union would have been denied food, commodities, vehicles and equipment that became vital to its war effort.

  In Washington, the Allies agreed a vast increase in US weapons production – Beaverbrook made a useful contribution by urging the feasibility of this on Roosevelt. It would be more than two years before the full effects became apparent on the battlefield. The Americans, including George Marshall, were slow to grasp the length of the inevitable delay between decisions to arm and achievement of capability to unleash upon the enemy the vast war machine they planned to create. But a powerful beginning was made at Arcadia. On 5 January 1942 Churchill flew to Florida for five days’ warmth, rest and work. He revised the strategy papers he had composed on the voyage from Britain. Amid the obvious determination of the US chiefs of staff to grapple the German army, he committed himself to ‘large offensive operations’ in Europe in 1943. This even though news from the battlefronts was turning sour again. Rommel had been able to extricate seven German and Italian divisions from the desert battle, and was regrouping in Tripolitania. The Japanese were storming down the Malay peninsula, prompting the first stab of apprehension about Singapore. Large reinforcements were being rushed to ‘the fortress’, as Churchill so mistakenly called the island.

  Then there were a few more days with Roosevelt. ‘They tell me I have done a good job here,’ Churchill said to Bernard Baruch. The financier replied: ‘You have done a one hundred per cent job. But now you ought to get the hell out of here.’ The visitor was in danger of outstaying his welcome. The president had grown bored with the relentless, self-indulgent sparring between the prime minister and Beaverbrook. While never lacking confidence in the superior might of the nation which he himself led, Roosevelt found that it became tiring to live alongside the Englishman’s bombastic presence. He was glad to see his guests go. Churchill wrote in his memoirs: ‘The time had now come when I must leave the hospitable and exhilarating atmosphere of the White House and of the American nation, erect and infuriate against tyrants and aggressors. It was to no sunlit prospect that I must return.’ He knew with what dismay the British nation must greet the torrent of ill-tidings from the Far East, which had yet to reach a flood.

  The president said to the prime minister at their parting: ‘Trust me to the bitter end.’ Then Churchill took off in a Boeing Clipper flying-boat, one of three such aircraft purchased from the Americans the previous year. The Clipper flew low and slow, but offered its passengers a magnificent standard of comfort and cuisine. Dinner, served between Bermuda and Plymouth, consisted of consommé, shrimp cocktail, filet mignon with fresh vegetables, sweet, dessert, coffee, champagne and liqueurs. Then the passengers were able to retire to bunks, though Churchill wandered restlessly during the night. They landed in Britain on the morning of 17 January, after an eighteen-hour flight. That evening the prime minister briefed the war cabinet. ‘An Olympian calm’ prevailed at the White House, he said. ‘It was perhaps rather isolated. The president had no adequate link between his will and executive action.’ The British found the State Department ‘jumpy’. Secretary of State Cordell Hull had been enraged by the unheralded Free French seizure of the tiny Vichy-held islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off Newfoundland, a development which wasted precious Anglo–American time and goodwill to resolve. Amery noted wryly that in Churchill’s report to the cabinet he did not trouble to mention his visit to Canada.

  But the prime minister’s mood was exultant, as well it might be. He had achieved a personal triumph in the United States, such as no other Englishman could have matched. He told the king that after many months of walking out, Britain and America were at last married. If there was no doubt that henceforward Britain would be junior partner in the Atlantic alliance, Churchill had imposed his greatness on the American people, in a fashion that would do much service to his country in the years ahead.

  There were important nuances about this first visit, however. First, at a time when most of the decision-makers of both Britain and the US still thought it likely that Russia would be defeated, they failed to perceive the extent to which the war against Hitler would be dominated by the struggle in the East. At the turn of 1941–42, Roosevelt and Churchill in Washington supposed that they were shaping strategy for the destruction of Nazism. They had no inkling of the degree to which Stalin’s nation would prove the most potent element in achieving this. Though the USA was by far the strongest global force in the Grand Alliance, Russia mobilised raw military power more effectively than either Western partner would prove able to do.

  As for Anglo–American relations, Charles Wilson wrote of Churchill: ‘He wanted to show the President how to run the war, and it has not quite worked out like that.’ Eden told the cabinet: ‘There is bound to be difficulty in practice in harmonizing day-to-day Anglo–Russian co-operation with Anglo–American co-operation. Soviet policy is amoral: United States policy is exaggeratedly moral, at least where non-American interests are concerned.’ Despite the success of Churchill’s Washington visit, it would be mistaken to suppose that all Americans succumbed to the magic of his personality. His great line to Congress, ‘What kind of people do they think we are?’, prompted widespread editorialising. But in the weeks that followed by no means all of this was favourable to Britain. The Denver Post said sourly: ‘There is one lesson the United States should learn from England. That is to put our own interests ahead of those of everybody else.’ The Chicago Tribune’s attitude was predictably rancid: ‘It is unfortunate that Mr Roosevelt has had the example of Mr Churchill constantly before him as a g
uide. Mr Churchill is a man of very great capacity in many directions, but as a military strategist he has an almost unbroken record of disappointments and failures.’

  Some of the foremost personalities at Arcadia found each other unsympathetic. Henry Morgenthau, the Treasury Secretary, thought Max Beaverbrook cocky to the point of impertinence. In the absence of the newly appointed Alan Brooke, the British chiefs of staff made a weak team. The Americans liked Charles Portal, but the airman rarely imposed himself. Admiral Dudley Pound seemed a cipher, whose fading health disqualified him from meaningful participation. The Americans were too polite to allude in the visitors’ presence to Britain’s resounding military failures, but these were never far from their minds when they discerned extravagant assertiveness in Churchill or his companions. They had respect for the Royal Navy and RAF, but scarcely any for the British Army. Scepticism about British military competence would persist throughout the war in the upper reaches of the US Army, colouring its chiefs’ attitudes in every strategic debate.

  As for the president and the prime minister, Hopkins said: ‘There was no question but that [Roosevelt] grew genuinely to like Churchill.’ This seems at best half-true. Their political convictions were far, far apart. For all Franklin Roosevelt’s irrepressible bonhomie, excessive doses of Churchill palled on him. A joke did the rounds in Washington, and indeed featured in Time magazine, that the first question the president asked Harry Hopkins on his return from Britain in February 1941 was: ‘Who writes Churchill’s speeches for him?’ The prime minister sought to display courtesy by pushing the president’s wheelchair each evening from the drawing room to the lift. Yet it seems plausible that this gesture was misjudged, that it merely emphasised the contrast between the host’s enforced immobility and the guest’s exuberant energy. British witnesses at the White House observed Churchill striving to overcome his own irrepressible instinct to talk, and instead to listen to the president. It is hard to believe that Roosevelt’s profound vanity was much massaged by Churchill’s presence in his home.

  The president’s respect for the British prime minister’s abilities was not in doubt, any more than was his commitment to the alliance to defeat Germany and Japan. But he was a much cooler man than Churchill. ‘Even those closest to Roosevelt,’ wrote Joseph Lash, who knew him well, ‘were always asking,“What does he really think? What does he really feel?” ’ At no time did Roosevelt perceive himself engaged with the prime minister in a matched partnership. He was no mere leader of a government, but a head of state, who wrote to monarchs as equals. Churchill felt no deep sense of obligation to America for its provision of supplies. In his eyes, Britain for more than two years had played the nobler part, pouring forth blood and enduring bombardment in a lone struggle for freedom. Roosevelt had scant patience with such pretensions. He paid only lip service to Britain’s claims on the collective gratitude of the democracies. Churchill’s nation was now mortgaged to the hilt to the US. Sooner or later, the president had every intention of exercising his power as holder of his ally’s title deeds.

  Roosevelt had visited Britain several times as a young man, but never revealed much liking for the country. As president he repeatedly rejected invitations to go there. He perceived hypocrisy in its pretensions as a bastion of democracy and freedom while it sustained a huge empire of subject peoples denied democratic representation. Cooperation with Churchill’s nation was essential to the defeat of Hitler. Thereafter, in the words of Michael Howard, Roosevelt ‘proposed to reshape the world in accordance with American concepts of morality, not British concepts of realpolitik’. Roosevelt’s acquaintance with foreign parts had been confined to gilded European holidays with his millionaire father, and a 1918 battlefield tour. He nonetheless had a boundless appetite to alter the world. Eden was appalled when he later heard the president expound a vision of Europe’s future: ‘The academic yet sweeping opinions which he built…were alarming in their cheerful fecklessness. He seemed to see himself disposing of the fate of many lands, allied no less than enemy.’ The president mentioned, inter alia, a liking for the notion that the French colonial port of Dakar should become a US naval base. His hubris shocked not only the British, but also such wise Americans as Harriman.

  Eden claimed that Churchill regarded Roosevelt with almost religious awe. Yet the Foreign Secretary almost certainly misread as credulity Churchill’s supremely prudent recognition of necessity. In no aspect of his war leadership did the prime minister exercise a more steely self-discipline than in this relationship. ‘My whole system is founded on friendship with Roosevelt,’ he told Eden later. He knew that without the president’s goodwill, Britain was almost impotent. He could not afford not to revere, love and cherish the president of the United States, the living embodiment of American might. He dismissed doubts and reservations to the farthest recesses of his mind. For the rest of the war he sought to bind himself to Roosevelt in an intimacy from which the president often flinched. Churchill was determined upon marriage; Roosevelt acknowledged the necessity for a ring, but was determined to maintain separate beds, friends and bank accounts. The prospect of ultimate divorce, once the war was won, held no terrors for him.

  The second strand in that first alliance conference was the attitude of the US chiefs of staff. They were appalled by the spectacle of Britain’s prime minister establishing himself for weeks on end at the White House, engaged in strategic discussions with the president from which they were often absent. Marshall, an intensely moral man, deplored casual intermingling of professional and social intercourse – so much so that he always refused invitations to stay at Hyde Park, the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson River in upstate New York. So strict was his personal austerity that when he added a chicken run to his quarters at Fort Myer, he insisted upon paying personally for the materials used in its construction. Unfamiliar with the promiscuity of Churchill’s conversation, he resented every moment of the visitor’s intimacies with Roosevelt. ‘The British,’ wrote Henry Stimson, ‘are evidently taking advantage of the president’s well-known shortcomings in ordinary administrative methods.’ Hopkins cautioned Roosevelt against agreeing military decisions in the absence of Marshall. Yet, to the chief of the army’s fury, Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s proposal that if the Philippines fell, residual American forces should be redeployed to Singapore.

  Marshall was even more hostile than Roosevelt to British imperial pretensions. And while from the outset the president’s imagination was seized by the notion of a North African landing, Marshall’s was not. He and his colleagues were irked by a perceived British assumption that they could now draw on US manpower and weapons ‘as if these had been swept into a common pool for campaigns tailored to suit the interests and convenience of Great Britain’, in the words of Marshall’s biographer. ‘From the British standpoint it was easy to conclude that a course of action favorable to their national interest was simply good strategic sense and that failure of the Americans to agree showed inexperience, immaturity and bad manners.’ From the first day of the war, Marshall was bent upon engaging the Germans in north-west Europe at the earliest possible date, and avoiding entanglement in British ‘sideshows’.

  The only British officer with whom the chief of the army forged a close relationship was Dill. Ironically, the discarded CIGS now became a significant figure in the Anglo–American partnership. By an inspired stroke, when Churchill went home he left behind in Washington a somewhat reluctant Dill, who was shortly afterwards appointed chief of the British military mission. Between the embassy and the mission – housed in the US Public Health Building on Constitution Avenue – there were soon nine thousand British uniformed and civilian personnel in Washington. Dill also became British representative on the newly created Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee when it met in Washington in the absence of Pound, Brooke and Portal. Halifax, as ambassador, achieved no intimacy with the Americans, and it was never plausible that he should do so. Dill was understandably bemused by his new appointment: ‘It is odd that Winst
on should want me to represent him here when he clearly was glad of an excuse to get me out of the CIGS job.’ But he became Marshall’s confidant, a sensitive interpreter of the two nations’ military aspirations. In the years that followed Dill made a notable contribution to the Grand Alliance, calming transatlantic storms and explaining rival viewpoints. He prospered as a diplomat where he had failed as a director of strategy.

  Churchill’s first visit to Washington was thus a public triumph, a less assured private one. But he was wise to bask while he could in the sunshine of the new American relationship. Back at home, many troubles awaited him. History perceives 1940, when Britain stood alone, as the pivotal year for the nation’s survival. Yet 1942 would prove the most torrid phase of Churchill’s war premiership. The British people, so staunch amid the threat of invasion, two years later showed themselves weary and fractious. Amid the reality of crushing defeats, they tired of promises of prospective victories. In peace or war, the patience of democracies is seldom great. That of Britain had been progressively eroded by bombardment, privation and battlefield humiliation. In the press, the Commons and on the streets of Britain, Churchill now faced criticism more bitter and sustained than he had known since assuming office.