Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  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 that it was essential to promote an offensive vision, rather than merely to advocate countermeasures against Axis thrusts. All this was very wise.

  On December 22, 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 America’s capital after the gloom of blacked-out 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 code-named Arcadia, the 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 indeed420; 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 preempt 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 Alexandria 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 U.S. leadership immediately confirmed the conclusion of earlier 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 U.S. “Liberty Ship” building programme achieved maturity. Britain required thirty million tons of imports a year to sustain itself, which had to 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 U.S. 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 United States, it should never be taken for granted. Harold Macmillan observed later of the prime minister: “No one but he421 (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 U.S. 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 U.S. food supplies to Britain, he complained: “too many powdered eggs.” He cabled Auchinleck, urging that, now that 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 U.S. Congress.

  Washington Post reporter Hope Ridings Miller wrote: “Senators’ … office telephones carried call422 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 earsplitting 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 world423 … I doubt if any other Britisher could have stood in that spot and made the profound impression that Churchill made.” It was just after one o’clock. The prime minister, pouring himself a whiskey in the Senate secretary’s office, said to Charles Wilson, his doctor, “It is a great weight off my chest.”424 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 dropped 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, and, with a glance at his hostess, said, “to put it on its throne.”425 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 “Tommy” Thompson compared notes on the two leaders with 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 hands426 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.”427 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 gesture428 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 self-centredness, 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 President429 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.”

  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 U.S. government seemed to be conducted. Ian Jacob thought the Oval Office “one of the most untidy rooms430 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?”431 They were unimpressed by Roosevelt as a warlord. Jacob wrote: “By the side of the Prime Minister he is a child432 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 gap433 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 United States and its armed forces when Britain’s record since 1939 was of almost unbroken battlefield failure and since 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 U.S. 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 in the media who were fiercely reluctant to offer Stalin open cheques on the U.S. Treasury. Roosevelt, like Churchill, stood head and shoulders above his military advisers in his understanding of the importance of supporting Russia’s war. While American deliveries, like those of Britain, lagged far behind promises, without the exercise of the president’s utmost 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 to a vast increase in U.S. 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 beginning was made at Arcadia. On January 5, 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 U.S. Chiefs of Staff to grapple with 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 Tripolitana. 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,”434 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 leave435 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.