Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  Yet, however successful was the Hopkins visit from a British perspective, it did not alter fundamentals. “Winston is completely certain of America’s full help,”355 the Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, wrote doubtingly during a visit to Chequers at the end of February 1941. “Is he right? I cannot say.” Franklin Roosevelt was conducting his nation’s policy in accordance with a belief that he could not move faster than public opinion would allow. Such opinion was moving Britain’s way. To the boundless relief of the prime minister, on February 8 the Lend-Lease bill passed the House by 260 votes to 165, and on March 8 was endorsed by the Senate, 60 votes to 13. For months thereafter, the last of Britain’s foreign exchange continued to be drained to pay for supplies—only 1 percent of war matériel used by Britain in 1941 represented fruits of Lend-Lease. But the new measure ensured that, even when Britain’s cash was exhausted, shipments kept coming. Importantly, 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie supported it—and Britain.

  The president extracted for the British through Lend-Lease the most generous terms a U.S. legislature would swallow, much preferable to the straight loans of World War I, which Britain alienated U.S. opinion by failing to repay. A substantial minority of Americans, including many at the summits of industry and commerce, not merely opposed Roosevelt’s policies, but hated the man. He perceived his own power as circumscribed, in a fashion which the prime minister underestimated. Unlike Churchill, Roosevelt never led a coalition government, though he included some prominent Republicans such as Henry Stimson in his Cabinet. He always faced substantial opposition in Congress—sometimes only on lesser matters, but sometimes also on great ones. There was no doubt of his sincerity in desiring British victory. Having overcome his initial reservations about Churchill, partly thanks to Hopkins, by March 1941 he could declare to the American people: “In this historic crisis, Britain is blessed with a brilliant and great leader.” But Roosevelt considered himself lacking any mandate to dispatch American soldiers to fight in Europe. Until December 1941, while he provided increasing aid to Britain—“we must become the great arsenal of democracy,” a phrase borrowed from French economist Jean Monnet by way of Felix Frankfurter—he remained unwilling to lead a charge towards war. In this, he was assuredly wise. If the United States had plunged into belligerence with Germany before Pearl Harbor, and even in the unlikely event that Roosevelt could have pushed a declaration of war through Congress, he would thereafter have led a divided country.

  The historian Michael Howard, in 1941 a student at Oxford awaiting a summons to the army, has written: “It is never very easy for the British356 to understand that a very large number of Americans, if they think about us at all, do so with various degrees of dislike and contempt … In the 1940s the Americans had some reason to regard the British as a lot of toffee-nosed bastards who oppressed half the world and had a sinister talent for getting other people to do their fighting for them.” Melville Troy was an American cigar importer living in London. Though he admired the fortitude of the British amid the blitz, he was deeply anxious to see his own country spared from its horrors: “Personally I am very sorry to see America turning357 her pruning hooks and ploughshares into implements of war, and wish we had a Woodrow Wilson to keep us out of it.” Many of Troy’s fellow countrymen thought likewise.

  There was much, much more British wooing to be done. The extravagant courtesies shown by the government to Harry Hopkins were outdone when Winant arrived as ambassador. He was met at Bristol by Brendan Bracken and the Duke of Kent. A special train took him to Windsor, where King George VI was waiting at the station. The monarch then drove Winant in his own car to the castle. Never in history had a foreign envoy been received with such ceremony. Meanwhile, implementation of the Lend-Lease programme enlisted another key American player in Britain’s cause. Averell Harriman, fifty-year-old son of a railroad millionaire, was a supremely gilded product of Groton and Yale, a polo player and skier, international banker and collector of Impressionist paintings, a cosmopolitan of considerable gifts. Roosevelt explained Harriman’s new mission to reporters at the White House: “As soon as the Lend-Spend, Lend-Lease358—whatever you call it—bill is perfected, more or less, he will go over and—Oh, I suppose you will ask all about his title, so I thought I would invent one … we decided it was a pretty good idea to call him an ‘Expediter.’ That’s a new one for you. I believe it is not in the diplomatic list or any other list. So he will go over as ‘Defense Expediter.’”

  In the spring of 1941 Harriman became an important American advocate of aid to Britain. Nonetheless, in Washington Hopkins and Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, remained the only prominent members of the administration wholeheartedly committed to such a policy. Other leading Americans remained sceptical. In the War Department, U.S. generals cloaked dogged resistance to shipping abroad arms that were needed at home in a mantle of complaints about allegedly amateurish British purchasing policy. One officer, contemptuous of the informality of the Hopkins mission, told Harriman: “We can’t take seriously requests359 that come late in the evening over a bottle of port.”

  Among Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army George Marshall’s key subordinates, there were deep divisions about the merits of participation in the war, and of the British as prospective allies. Some senior officers unashamedly reserved their admiration for the Germans. Maj. Gen. Stanley Embick was a former chief of the War Plans Division who had become sceptical about Churchill and his people during service in France in World War I. Now he believed that Britain’s war effort would fare better if the country changed prime ministers. He thought that U.S. aid should stop far short of belligerency. Like his son-in-law, Maj. Albert Wedemeyer of the War Plans Division, Embick addressed every Anglo-American issue with a determination that his country should not be duped into pulling British chestnuts out of the fire. Maj. Gen. Charles “Bull” Wesson hated the British, because he had once been dispatched from Washington to London with a message for the Chiefs of Staff, and was kept waiting to deliver it. Raymond Lee wrote: “He resented this so much360 that it led to a wrangle and almost hatred on his part for the British, which he exploits at every opportunity. So small an act of discourtesy, either real or imagined, which took place many years ago, is having ill effects in the relations between the two countries today.”

  By contrast Col.—soon to be lieutenant general361 and a key figure in Marshall’s team—Joseph McNarney, who had visited Britain, believed it was vital to American national security that Churchill’s island should not fall. Marshall himself was less implacably hostile to the British than Embick, but in the summer of 1941, in the words of a biographer, “if rather than when continued to dominate362 his thinking about American involvement.” Nor was such caution confined to senior officers. Time and Life magazines interviewed U.S. Army draftees, and reported their morale to be low. At a camp movie night in Mississippi, men booed when FDR and Marshall appeared on a newsreel.

  Averell Harriman was in no doubt that America should fight. But he departed for London on March 15, 1941, fearful that Roosevelt was still unwilling to lead the United States anywhere near as far or fast as was necessary to avert a Nazi triumph: “I was deeply worried the president363 did not have a policy and had not decided how far he could go … The President obviously hoped that he would not have to face an unpleasant decision. He seemed unwilling to lead public opinion or to force the issue but [he] hoped … that our material aid would let the British do the job.” Few doubted that Roosevelt already stood among America’s greatest presidents. But he was sometimes also a notably cautious one.

  Harriman noted in a memorandum of March 11: “I must attempt to convince364 the Prime Minister that I, or someone, must convey to our people his war strategy or else he cannot expect to get maximum aid.” Like Hopkins, he was received in Britain on the reddest of carpets. He was met at Bristol by Commander “Tommy” Thompson, Churchill’s administrative aide, who led him aboard a plane which took them straight to Chequers. Harriman�
��s guest gift to Clementine Churchill was a box of tangerines, which she received with unfeigned gratitude. The envoy was enfolded in a warm prime ministerial embrace. Kathleen Harriman, who accompanied her father’s mission, wrote to her sister: “The PM is much smaller than I expected365 and a lot less fat … and looks rather like a kindly teddy bear … I’d expected an overpowering, rather terrifying man. He’s quite the opposite: very gracious, has a wonderful smile and isn’t at all hard to talk to. He’s got the kind of eyes that look right through you. Mother [Clementine] is a very sweet lady. She’s given up her whole life to her husband and takes a back seat graciously. Everyone in the family looks upon him as God and she’s rather left out.”

  In London, Harriman established himself on the second floor of a Grosvenor Square building adjoining the U.S. Embassy, and was also given his own office at the Admiralty. Churchill invited him to attend the weekly meetings of the Cabinet’s Atlantic Committee. Of Harriman’s first eight weekends in Britain, he spent seven at Chequers, though like most American guests he found his sense of privilege tempered by dismay at the coldness of the house. Churchill convoyed him, like Hopkins, as a prize exhibit on his own travels around the country. Here, he told the British people, was a living earnest of America’s commitment—the president’s personal representative.

  In private to Harriman, “the PM bluntly stated366 that he could see no prospect of victory until the United States came into the war.” If Japan attacked, said Churchill, the British naval base of Singapore would be at risk. At every turn, the prime minister sought to balance his desire to convince Roosevelt that Britain was a prospective winner against the need to exert pressure by emphasising the threat of disaster if America held back. Harriman urged Churchill to bolster Britain’s case by publishing details of its appalling shipping losses. Between February and April 1941, 142 ships totalling 818,000 tons had gone to the bottom, more than double the rate of sinkings in the early months of the war. At a Defence Committee meeting in May, Eden and Beaverbrook suggested that at least meat-ship losses might be disclosed, to emphasise the gravity of the food situation. Churchill, with the support of several other ministers, opposed this, “believing that we shall get the Americans367 in by showing courage and boldness and prospects of success and not by running ourselves down.” Moreover, figures which privately frightened the British government would deal a shocking blow to domestic morale if they were revealed, and would have provided a propaganda gift to Hitler.

  Some Americans displayed a condescension which irked the recipients of their aid. Kathleen Harriman described British reluctance to enthuse about American Spam and cheese: “The great difficulty is re-educating368 the people,” she wrote to her sister. “They prefer to go hungry rather than change their feeding habits.” A Tory MP wrote: “The idea of being our armoury369 and supply furnishers seems to appeal to the Yanks as their share in the war for democracy … They are a quaint lot—they are told that if we lose the war they will be next on Hitler’s list … and yet they seem quite content to leave the actual fighting to us; they will do anything except fight.” Duff Cooper, as minister of information, told newspaper editors on March 21, 1941: “The great thing is not to antagonise the United States370 … When we offered the bases against the [fifty loaned] destroyers we imagined, in Winston’s words, that we were exchanging ‘a bunch of flowers for a sugar cake.’ But not at all. The Americans have done a hard business deal.” After Lend-Lease was passed, Franks, the British driver for U.S. military attaché Raymond Lee, told his master that he noticed more goodwill towards Americans. “Well, yes,”371 agreed Lee sardonically. “Perhaps you might describe it that way, but it is only natural, don’t you think, that for seven thousand million dollars—that’s nearly a billion pounds—we ought to be entitled to a little bonhomie!” “Oh yes, sir, yes, sir, quite. That’s just what I mean, sir. I should say there is quite a bit more bonhomie in the air, sir.” This was only half true. Most British people considered that the United States was providing them with minimal means to do dirty work that Americans ought to be sharing themselves.

  The threat of Japanese aggression against the British Empire in the Far East dogged Churchill that summer of 1941. Germany was fully committed in Russia. Britain’s land forces in North Africa seemed to have a real prospect of victory against the Italians and such German troops as Hitler was willing to spare from the Eastern Front. But if Japan attacked, the strategic balance would once more be overturned. Cadogan, at the Foreign Office, wrote in July that Churchill was “frightened of nothing but Japan.”372 The prime minister expressed confidence that, if Tokyo moved against the British Empire, the Americans would intervene. His ministers, generals and officials were much less convinced. It was a nightmare prospect: that Britain might find itself at war in the east while America remained neutral. Some thought it likely that Japan would join Germany’s attack on Russia, rather than strike at Malaya. Eden asked Churchill what he would do in such an eventuality. The prime minister replied firmly that Britain would never herself initiate hostilities with Japan, unless the United States did so. Month after month in 1941, he sought to promote the illusion that Britain’s war effort was viable and purposeful. In private, however, he recognised its ultimate futility unless Roosevelt’s nation came in with both feet.

  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 U.S. 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 June 16, the award in absentia of an honorary doctorate from the University of Rochester, New York, inspired one of his finest radio broadcasts to Americans:

  A wonderful story is unfolding373 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.”374 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 United States 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 fourth: “I must say I do not think our friend375 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 today 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,”376 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 damaged. The court-martial proposal was dropped only when Adm. 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.”