Finest Years

by Max Hastings

  The British were increasingly troubled by the difficulties of conveying their views to an American leadership of which both the political and military elements seemed resistant to its ally’s opinions. A British official in Washington wrote to London in May 1942: ‘No Englishman here has the close relationship with Hopkins and the President which are necessary. There is no one who can continually represent to the White House the Prime Minister’s views on war direction. The Ambassador does not regard it within his sphere. Dill dare not as he would ruin his relationship with the US chiefs of staff if he saw Hopkins too often.’ Brigadier Vivian Dykes of the British Military Mission wrote: ‘We simply hold no cards at all, yet London expects us to work miracles. It is a hard life.’

  Churchill concluded that only another personal meeting with Roosevelt could resolve the Second Front issue, or more appropriately the alternative North African landing scheme—Operation Torch—in Britain’s favour. He took off once more with Alan Brooke, in a Boeing flying-boat. By the afternoon of 19 June he was being driven around Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate, tête-à-tête with his host. Here was exactly the scenario which Churchill wanted, and which the US chiefs of staff deplored. Their commander-in-chief was talking alone with Britain’s fiercely persuasive prime minister. Churchill wrote in his memoirs that the two men thus got more business done than at conferences. This was disingenuous. What he meant, of course, was that he was free from impassioned and hostile interventions by Marshall and his colleagues. At Hyde Park the prime minister was enchanted to be treated as ‘family’, though his staff sometimes overreached themselves in exploiting guest privileges. Private secretary John Martin was sternly rebuked by Roosevelt’s telephonist, Louise Hachmeister, when she found him ensconced in her master’s study, using the president’s direct line to Washington.

  On 20 June at Hyde Park, Churchill handed Roosevelt a masterly note on strategy. Arrangements for a landing in France in September were going forward, said the prime minister. However, the British continued to oppose such an operation unless there was a realistic prospect of being able to stay. ‘No responsible British military authority has so far been able to make a plan for September 1942 which has any chance of success unless the Germans become utterly demoralised, of which there is no likelihood. Have the American staffs a plan? If so, what is it? If a plan can be found which offers a reasonable prospect of success His Majesty’s Government will cordially welcome it and will share to the full with their American comrades the risks and sacrifices…But in case no plan can be made in which any responsible authority has good confidence…what else are we going to do? Can we afford to stand idle in the Atlantic theatre during the whole of 1942?’ It was in this context, urged Churchill, that a North African landing should be studied.

  That evening, president and prime minister flew to the capital. They were together at the White House when a pink message slip was brought to Roosevelt, who passed it wordlessly to Churchill. It read: ‘Tobruk has surrendered, with 25,000 men taken prisoner.’ Churchill was initially disbelieving. Before leaving Britain he had signalled to Auchinleck, stressing the importance of holding the port: ‘Your decision to fight it out to the end most cordially endorsed. Retreat would be fatal. This is a business not only of armour but of will power. God bless you all.’ Now the prime minister telephoned Ismay in London, who confirmed the loss of Tobruk, together with 33,000 men, 2,000 vehicles, 5,000 tons of supplies and 1,400 tons of fuel. A chaotic defence, left in the hands of a newly promoted and inexperienced South African major-general, had collapsed in the face of an unexpected German thrust from the south-east. The débâcle was characterised by command incompetence, a pitiful indolence and lack of initiative among many units. Maj.Gen. Klopper’s last signal from Tobruk was an enigmatic study in despair: ‘Situation shambles…Am doing the worst. Petrol destroyed.’

  The prime minister was stunned, humiliated. It seemed unbearable that such news should have come while he was a visitor, indeed a suppliant, in Washington. Roosevelt, perceiving his guest’s despondency, responded with unprecedented spontaneity, generosity and warmth. ‘What can we do to help?’ he asked. After consultation with his chiefs of staff, the president briefly entertained a notion of dispatching a US armoured division to fight in Egypt. On reflection, it was agreed instead to send the formation’s 300 Sherman tanks and 100 self-propelled guns, for British use. This reinforcement, of quality equipment, was critical to later British victory at Alamein. Roosevelt’s gesture, which required the removal of new weapons from a US combat formation, prompted the deepest and best-merited British gratitude towards the president of the war.

  The American historian Douglas Porch, one of the ablest chroniclers of the Mediterranean campaigns, believes that Churchill fundamentally misjudged American attitudes towards Britain’s war effort. The prime minister wanted a victory in the Middle East, to dispel US scepticism about British fighting capability. Porch argues, however: ‘It was Britain’s beleaguered helplessness that evoked most sympathy in Washington and helped to prepare the American people psychologically to intervene in the war.’ It was certainly true that Americans pitied British material weakness. Yet an enduring source of US resentment, reflected in polls throughout much of the war, was a belief that the British were not merely ill-armed, but also did not try hard enough. It was one thing for the US to provide food and arms to a defiantly struggling democracy, it was quite another to see the British apparently content to sit tight in their island, and conduct lethargic minor operations in North Africa, while the Russians did the real business, and paid the horrific blood price, of destroying Hitler’s armies.

  It was remarkable how much the mood in Washington had shifted since January. This time, there was no adulation for Churchill the visitor. ‘Anti-British feeling is still strong,’the British embassy reported to London, ‘stronger than it was before Pearl Harbor…This state of affairs is partly due to the fact that whereas it was difficult to criticise Britain while the UK was being bombed, such criticism no longer carries the stigma of isolationist or pro-Nazi sympathies.’ Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana declared sourly that ‘there was little point in supplying the British with war material since they invariably lost it all’. Roosevelt’s secretary, William Hassett, wrote in his diary: ‘These English are too aggressive except on the battlefront, as assertive as the Jews, always asking for a little more and then still more after that.’ Hassett admitted that the president found Churchill ‘a delightful companion’, but added: ‘With a softie for president, Winnie would put rollers under the Treasury and open Second, Third, or Fourth Fronts with our fighting men.’

  As for the general public, an Ohioan wrote to the White House: ‘Tell that Churchill to go home where he belongs…All he wants is our money.’ An anonymous ‘mother of three’ sought to address Britain’s prime minister from California: ‘Every time you appear on our shores, it means something very terrible for us. Why not stay at home and fight your own battles instead of always pulling us into them to save your rotten necks?’ A New Yorker’s letter to a friend in Somerset, intercepted by the censors, said: ‘I knew when I saw your fat-headed PM was over here that there was another disaster in the offing.’ Such views were untypical—most Americans retained warm respect for Churchill. But they reflected widespread scepticism about his nation’s willingness to fight, and doubt whether the prime minister’s wishes coincided with American national interest. ‘All the old animosities against the British have been revived,’ wrote an analyst for the Office of War Information. ‘She didn’t pay her war debts after the last war. She refuses to grant India the very freedom she claims to be fighting for. She is holding a vast army in England to protect the homeland while her outposts are lost to the enemy.’

  A further report later in the summer detected a marginal improvement of sentiment, but found confidence in the British still much below that of the previous autumn. It noted: ‘Phrases such as “the British always want someone to pull their chestnuts out of the fire” and “E
ngland will fight to the last Frenchman” have attained considerable currency.’ The OWI’s July survey invited Americans to say which nation they thought was trying hardest to win the war. A loyal 37 per cent answered the United States, 30 per cent named Russia, 14 per cent China, 13 per cent offered no opinion. Just 6 per cent identified the British as most convincing triers. A similar poll the following month asked which belligerent was perceived as having the best fighting spirit. Some 65 per cent said America, 6 per cent named Britain. The same survey highlighted Americans’ stunning ignorance about the difficulties of mounting an invasion of Europe. A 57 per cent majority said they thought the Allies should launch a Second Front ‘within two to three months’. A similar 53 per cent thought that such an operation would have a ‘pretty good’ chance of success, while 29 per cent reckoned the odds 50-50, and only 10 per cent feared that an invasion would fail. A remarkable 60 per cent of respondents thought not merely that an invasion of France should happen inside three months—they anticipated that it would.

  US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote on 9 July 1942 to Stafford Cripps, who had expressed concern about Anglo-American relations: ‘The dominant underlying feeling is not bad…But there is a central difficulty. It is, as I see it, a lack of continuing consciousness of comradeship between the two peoples, not only in staving off an enemy that threatens everything we hold dear, but comradeship in achieving a common society having essentially the same gracious and civilized ends.’ Columnist Walter Lippmann expressed similar views to Maynard Keynes. There was a need, suggested Lippmann, for a new political understanding between Britain and the US about the future of its empire: ‘The Asiatic war has revived the profound anti-imperialism of the American tradition.’

  The Foreign Office was dismayed by remarks made by the anglophile Wendell Willkie during a visit to Moscow. He told British ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr that US public opinion towards Britain was shaping ‘dangerously’, and that he was ‘scared’ by it. Not one of the Americans he had met on his journey between Washington and Moscow, from truck drivers to ambassadors, had a good word for British behaviour abroad. He urged that the prime minister should make a speech on post-war policy showing that he realised that ‘old-fashioned imperialism’ was dead. Churchill, of course, had no intention of doing any such thing.

  A 6 July report to the Foreign Office about the British embassy in Washington was almost flagellatory about the American view of Halifax’s mission: ‘The Embassy…has a quite fantastically low reputation. It is regarded as snobbish, arrogant, patronising, dim, asleep and a home of reactionary and generally disreputable ideas.’ The report then listed popular American objections to Britain, headed by its class system, which was alienating workers—‘the British are going red’; imperialism; ‘British bunglers in high places: overcautious, contemptuous of all new ideas and defensively minded, tired old men bored with their own task…British sitting safely in own island with 3.5 million men under arms, Brits always being defeated…Lend-Lease is stripping America to supply the British who have not even paid their [First] war debts…Anti-British sentiment is a part of the central patriotic American tradition…Anglophobia is a proof of vigorous Americanism, socially acceptable in a way anti-Catholicism and anti-semitism are not…All the Roosevelt-haters hate the English because they are held to be popular with the President.’

  British postal censorship reported to the Foreign Office on a crosssection of US opinion monitored in mail intercepts. From Newark, New Jersey, a man wrote to a friend in Britain: ‘Believe me we here are disgusted reading of British retreats and nobody blames the Tommy. We blame the Brass Hats for their inefficiency and being outmanoeuvred by Jerry every time.’ On 11 September, a New Yorker wrote in the same vein: ‘There is no doubt that something is rotten about the British command everywhere…It isn’t always lack of material—it is more often blind stupidity.’ Another New Yorker, posted to Australia, wrote to a British friend in Stoke-on-Trent: ‘English imperialism is responsible for more of our griefs and wars than you can shake a stick at. Incidentally I’m surprised to find that a great many Aussies hate the set-up in England more than I do! You IMPOSSIBLE English!’

  Eden’s Minister of State Richard Law, son of former prime minister Bonar Law, dispatched an extraordinarily emotional report to the Foreign Office during a visit to America. He claimed that in US Army training camps ‘anti-British feeling was beyond belief…deliberately inculcated by certain higher officers, notably General [Brehon] Somervell, who mocked that Churchill lacked the “sustained excitement” to execute a cross-channel attack’. Throughout the higher command of the US Army, claimed Law, anti-British feeling was intense. There was violent jealousy of the prime minister, who was regarded as dominating and bamboozling the president. The American chiefs of staff ‘were about as friendly to the British as they would be to the German general staff if they sat round a table with them’. This was an extravagant assessment of Anglo-American tensions. But it illustrates the scale of concern in British official circles in 1942, when the nation’s military reputation was at its lowest ebb.

  Churchill knew that his nation and his soldiers had to be seen to fight. If they could not engage in Europe, they must do so in the Middle East. The long periods of passivity which gripped Eighth Army in North Africa, however necessary logistically, inflicted immense harm upon both British self-esteem and the nation’s image abroad. At a war cabinet meeting presided over by Attlee, Bevin declaimed theatrically: ‘We must have a victory! What the British public wants is a victory!’ When John Kennedy was summoned to Downing Street, the prime minister talked of current operations in North Africa, ‘then added a dig at the British Army (which unfortunately he can never resist) saying, “if Rommel’s army were all Germans, they would beat us.”’ Later, the DMO reported the conversation to Brooke: ‘I told him what Winston had said about the Germans being better than our troops & he said he must speak to Winston about this. His constant attacks on the Army were doing harm—especially when they were made in the presence of other politicians, as they so often were.’ Yet so ashamed was Kennedy, as a soldier, about the fall of Tobruk that for some time he avoided his beloved ‘Rag’—the Army & Navy club—to escape unwelcome questions about the army’s lamentable showing.

  While Churchill was in Washington in June, some American newspapers suggested that his government would fall. He was sufficiently alarmed by what he read to telephone Eden from the White House for reassurance that there was no critical threat to his leadership. Nothing important had changed, he was told, but Tory MP Sir John Wardlaw-Milne had tabled a censure motion in the Commons. Public opinion was fragile. ‘The people do not like him being away so much in such critical times,’ wrote a naval officer. A Mass-Observation diarist, Rosemary Black, deplored Churchill’s absence in America at a time when the British people were enduring so much bad news: ‘I myself felt pretty disgusted with him when I saw a photograph of him enjoying himself at the White House again. If only he’d keep those great gross cigars out of his face once in a way.’

  London voluntary worker Vere Hodgson, bewildered as the rest of the nation by the fall of Tobruk, wrote crossly in her diary: ‘The enemy did not seem to understand what was expected of them, and failed to fall in with our plans. Grrr! As Miss Moyes says, it makes you see green, pink and heliotrope. I woke up in the middle of Sunday night, and thought of that convoy delivered with so much blood, sweat and losses to Tobruk on Saturday—to fall like ripe fruit into German mouths. I squirmed beneath the bedclothes and ground my teeth with rage.’ She added after the prime minister broadcast two weeks later: ‘Mr Churchill’s speech did not contain much comfort. He dominated us as he always does, and we surrender to his overpowering personality—but he knows no more than any of us why Tobruk fell!’

  George King wrote to his son from Sanderstead in Surrey: ‘We heard yesterday that we have lost Tobruk; the same old story—rotten leadership. The Yanks will yet show us how to do the job. The “red tabs”form t
he only rotten part of the British Army!’ Lancashire housewife Nella Last, intensely loyal to Churchill, mused in bewilderment to her diary on 25 June 1942: ‘Where can soldiers go where they have a reasonable chance? Tobruk has gone—what of Egypt, Suez and India? Nearly three years of war: WHY don’t we get going—what stops us? Surely by now things should be organised better in some way. Why should our men be thrown against superior mechanical horrors, and our equipment not standardised for easier management and repair? There is no flux to bind us—nothing. It’s terrifying. Not all this big talk of next year and the next will stop our lads dying uselessly. If only mothers could think that their poor sons had not died uselessly—with a purpose…It’s shocking.’

  A report of the Home Intelligence Division of the Ministry of Information declared: ‘Russian successes continue to provide an antidote to bad news from other fronts…“Thank God for Russia” is a frequent expression of the very deep and fervent feeling for that country which permeates wide sections of the public.’ Membership of Britain’s Communist Party rose from 12,000 in June 1941 to 56,000 by the end of 1942. The British media provided no hint of the frightful cruelties through which Stalin sustained the Soviet Union’s defence, nor of the blunders and failures which characterised its war effort in 1941-42.

  In informed political and military circles there was no scintilla of the guilt about Soviet sacrifices that prevailed among the wider public. From Churchill downwards, there was an overwhelming and not unreasonable perception that whatever miseries and losses fell upon the Russian people, the policies of their own government—above all the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact—were chiefly responsible. Brooke wrote disgustedly about British aid to Russia: ‘We received nothing in return except abuse for handling the convoys inefficiently.’ John Kennedy expressed bewilderment about public attitudes: ‘There is an extraordinary and misguided enthusiasm for the Russians. Stalin is more of a hero than the King or even Winston.’ A naval officer, Commander Andrew Yates, wrote to a friend in America: ‘Little as I formerly liked him, the man who killed a million Germans, Jo Stalin, becomes my friend for life.’ A Ministry of Information official cautioned, however, against exaggerated fears that popular applause for Soviet military prowess equated with a mass conversion to communism, such as some Tory MPs perceived: ‘That danger will never come through admiration of the achievements of another country, but only through dissatisfaction with our own—dissatisfaction savage enough to cherish a revolutionary programme.’