by Max Hastings
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 derring-do about the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. He fantasised enthusiastically about a possible sortie from northern Norway by the Tirpitz, sister ship of the Bismarck, which might enable him to participate in a great naval engagement. Mothersill’s 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,”377 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 August 9, Prince of Wales began to stand in. Then her officers realised that the ship’s clocks were set ahead of the Newfoundland Time Zone. The ship turned and ploughed a lazy course offshore for ninety minutes, before once more heading into the anchorage. At nine a.m., her anchors rattled down a few hundred yards from the U.S. cruiser Augusta, which bore the president. The British remarked the contrast between the zigzag 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 and the other a man of sixty-six famous for his overindulgence in alcohol and cigars.
One of Roosevelt’s intimates, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, declared him “really incapable of a personal friendship with anyone.”378 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 was rumoured—almost certainly 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 president’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 U.S. 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 U.S. service chiefs were tense and stilted. The Americans—generals George Marshall and Henry “Hap” Arnold, 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 the Air Staff Sir Wilfrid Freeman—were bemused by the fact that the U.S. Army and Navy chose to conduct briefings separately, and outlined entirely different strategic viewpoints.
When Marshall spoke of creating an 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 mobilization? 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. Army Air Forces, 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 mind-set, 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, U.S. 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 officer379 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 ministe
r had brought with him two well-known journalists, H. V. Morton and Howard Spring. 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 U.S. ships.
It is important to recognise that both the British and 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 additional aggression. It has been suggested that he went further, pleading for preemptive U.S. 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 Churchill380 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 practiced 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. 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 in 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!”381 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 superstructure, a colleague said to Ian Jacob that the occasion must fulfil the fantasies of “a pressman high on hashish.”382
That afternoon, Churchill took a launch383 on a brief visit to the shore, wandering awhile 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 ceremony by bands and honour guards, which ensured that the anchorage was never tranquil. The 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 U.S. 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 were 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?”384 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 United States, 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 August 12 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 Churchill385 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 meeting386 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.”
Churchill revealed nothing of his private disappointment in the exuberant rhetoric with which he addressed his colleagues and the nation on returning to Britain. He felt obliged to satisfy their craving for good news, and told the War Cabinet that American naval commanders were bursting with impatience to join the struggle, though others at Placentia detected nothing of the kind. His report of Roosevelt’s private remarks appears wilfully to have exaggerated the president’s carefully equivocal expressions of support. Pownall, now Dill’s vice CIGS, wrote in his diary: “Roosevelt is all for coming into the war387, and as soon as possible … But he said that he would never declare war, he wishes to provoke it.” Uncertainty persists about whether the president really used these words, or whether Churchill put them into his mouth. Even such sentiments fell short of British hopes. For all the president’s social warmth, he never indulged romantic lunges of the kind to which Churchill was prone. If not quite an Anglophobe, Roosevelt never revealed much private warmth towards Britain. He left Placentia with the same mind-set he had taken there. He was bent upon assisting the British by all possible means to avert defeat. But he had no intention of outpacing congressional and popular sentiment by leading a dash towards U.S. belligerence. American public opinion was vastly more supportive of its government’s oil embargo against Japan, in response to Tokyo’s descent on Indochina, than it was of Roosevelt’s increasing naval support for Britain in the Battle of the Atlantic; this, ironically, though the embargo provoked the Japanese to bomb America into the war.
Churchill, at an off-the-record British newspaper editors’ briefing on August 22, predicted that Japan would not attack in the east, and observed that the Battle of the Atlantic was going better. Suggesting that German U-boats would be reluctant to risk tangling with American warships, which were now operating actively in the western Atlantic, he said: “I assume that Hitler does not want to risk a clash with Roosevelt until the Russians are out of the way.” The flush of British excitement faded. The prime minister’s lofty rhetoric could not overcome a sense of anticlimax, which extended across the nation. A War Office clerk seemed to a British general to judge Placentia rightly when he dismissed Churchill’s broadcast, describing the meeting as “nothing dressed up very nicely.”388
Vere Hodgson, the Notting Hill charity worker, heard the BBC promise “an important government announcement” on the afternoon of August 14, and expected
a declaration of Anglo-American union. When, instead, radio listeners heard the words of the Atlantic Charter, she wrote in disappointment: “There was a statement of War Aims389. All very laudable in themselves—the only difficulty will be in carrying them out.” Churchill cabled Hopkins, revealing unusually explicit impatience: “I ought to tell you that there has been a wave of depression390 through cabinet and other informed circles here about President’s many assurances about no commitments and no closer to war, etc … If 1942 opens with Russia knocked out and Britain left again alone, all kinds of dangers may arise. I do not think Hitler will help in any way … You know best whether anything more can be done … Should be grateful if you could give me any sort of hope.”
At Downing Street, Churchill observed irritably that Americans had committed themselves to suffer all the inconveniences of war, “without its commanding stimuli.” Over dinner with John Winant, the U.S. ambassador, on August 29, he again appealed explicitly for American belligerence. Colville recorded: “The PM said that after the joint declaration391 [the Atlantic Charter], America could not honourably stay out … If R declared war now … they might see victory as early as 1943; but if she did not, the war might drag on for years, leaving Britain undefeated but civilization in ruins.” Influential American visitors continued to be courted with unflagging zeal. The journalist John Gunther was entertained at Chequers. A tedious Pennsylvania Democrat, Congressman J. Buell Snyder, chairman of the House military appropriations subcommittee, was warmly received at Downing Street. Yet at the end of August Charles Peake, minister at Britain’s Washington embassy, expressed profound gloom about the prospect of the United States entering the war soon, perhaps at all. He even questioned—as did some392 members of the U.S. administration—whether Roosevelt desired such an outcome. Although America could no longer be deemed neutral, it seemed plausible that it might cling indefinitely to nonbelligerent status. There was, and remains, no evidence that Roosevelt was willing to risk a potentially disastrous clash with Congress. Unless America became a fighting ally, Lend-Lease would merely suffice to stave off British defeat.