Winston's War: Churchill, 1940-1945

by Max Hastings

  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, 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 January 17, 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.” Cordell Hull had been enraged by the unheralded Free French seizure of the tiny Vichy-held islands of St.-Pierre and Miquelon, off Newfoundland, a development which wasted precious Anglo-American time and goodwill to resolve. Amery noted wryly436 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 dating, 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 in both Britain and the United States 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 United States was by far the strongest global force in the Grand Alliance, the Soviet Union mobilised raw military power more effectively than either Western partner.

  As for Anglo-American relations, Charles Wilson wrote of Churchill: “He wanted to show the President437 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 practice438 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 learn439 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. Roosevelt440 has had the example of Mr. Churchill constantly before him as a guide. 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 one another 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 U.S. Army, colouring its leaders’ 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 was 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?”441 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 trying 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,”442 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 upon the collective gratitude of the democracies. Churchill’s nation was now mortgaged to the hilt to the United States. 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 world443 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 opinions444 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 U.S. 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 friendship445 with Roosevelt,” he told Eden later. He knew t
hat, 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 U.S. 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,446” wrote Henry Stimson, “are evidently taking advantage of the president’s well-known shortcomings in ordinary administrative methods.” Hopkins cautioned Roosevelt against agreeing to military decisions in the absence of Marshall. Yet, to the army chief of staff’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 United States manpower and weapons “as if these had been swept into447 a common pool for campaigns tailored to suit the interests and convenience of Great Britain,” in the words of a Marshall 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 northwest Europe at the earliest possible date and avoiding entanglement in British “sideshows.”

  The only British officer with whom Marshall 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 U.S. Public Health Building on Constitution Avenue—there were soon nine thousand British uniformed and civilian personnel in Washington. Dill also became the 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 Winston should want me448 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, but a less assured private one. Still, 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.

  NINE

  “The Valley of Humiliation”

  1. Critics

  THROUGHOUT HISTORY, societies have enthused about victorious overseas conflicts and recoiled from unsuccessful ones. The U.S. declarations of war represented the fulfilment of all Churchill’s hopes since May 1940. Yet 1942 proved, until its last weeks, the most unhappy year of his premiership. It was not only that Britain suffered a further succession of defeats; it was that public confidence in the prime minister’s leadership waned in a fashion unthinkable during the Battle of Britain. Even if it remained improbable that he would be driven from office, he was beset by critics who questioned his judgement and sought to constrain his powers. Between his return from the United States in late January and the Battle of El Alamein in November, there were no moments of glory, and almost unremitting bad news. The British Empire suffered the heaviest blows in its history, which only the American alliance rendered endurable.

  On the train back to London after his flying boat landed from Washington, Churchill indulged a last flicker of complacency. He told his doctor: “I have done a good job of work with the President … I am sure, Charles, the House will be pleased with what I have to tell them.” A glance at the day’s newspapers disabused him. He laid down the Manchester Guardian without enthusiasm. “There seems to be plenty of snarling,”449 he said. In the days that followed, ill tidings crowded forward. Naval losses in the Mediterranean meant that in the forthcoming months, Britain could deploy no battle fleet from Alexandria. Amid reports from Malaya that the British Army was falling back routed upon Singapore, Churchill enquired whether there was a case for writing off the “fortress” and diverting reinforcements and aircraft elsewhere. His message was copied in error to the Australian representative to the War Cabinet, Sir Earle Page—a man “with the mentality of a greengrocer,”450 in Brooke’s scornful phrase—who in turn forwarded it to Canberra. Prime Minister John Curtin responded with an indignant cable to Churchill, asserting that to abandon Singapore would be “an inexcusable betrayal.”

  Relations between the Australian government and London, never cordial, entered a new phase of acrimony. Churchill valued Australia’s fighting men, but was contemptuous of its weak Labor government. He contrasted Australian pusillanimity—what would now be called “whingeing”—unfavourably with the staunchness of New Zealand. Throughout the war, he treated all the self-governing dominions as subject colonies, mere sources of manpower. Dominion politicians visiting London were accorded public courtesy and private indifference. Robert Menzies, the former Australian prime minister who was now opposition leader, commanded respect, but even Menzies had been moved to protest back in 1940, when his government heard of the Dakar operation only on reading about it in the press. The sole imperial figure to enjoy Churchill’s confidence was Jan Smuts, South Africa’s seventy-two-year-old prime minister. He was a man of notable intellect and good sense, a friend since the end of the Boer War and Churchill’s peer in adventure and experience. It was Smuts, honoured with field marshal’s rank in 1941, who said: “We should thank God for Hitler451. He has brought us back to a realization of brute facts … He has, in fact, taken the lid off Hell, and we have all looked into it.”

  Churchill’s impatience with the dominions was understandable. Their governments—with the notable exception of New Zealand’s—often displayed
a parochialism irksome to a British prime minister directing a global struggle for survival. Neither Canada nor Australia, for instance, introduced universal conscription for overseas service until the last stages of the conflict. But Churchill’s condescension towards Canberra and Ottawa was no more likely to please sensitive colonial governments than his absolute dismissal of Indian opinion won friends in the subcontinent. “The PM is not really interested in Mackenzie King,”452 wrote Charles Wilson about Canada’s prime minister. “He takes him for granted.”

  The New Statesman complained, “Mr. Churchill has been unwilling to give453 so much as a gracious word to win the support of India and Burma.” The prime minister’s later reluctance to release scarce shipping to relieve the Bengal famine, which killed three million people, appalled both the viceroy and Leo Amery, secretary of state for India. When Amery wished454 to make a broadcast to explain British policy, the prime minister vetoed it, saying that such action was making too much of the famine and sounding apologetic. More than any other aspect of his wartime behaviour, such high-handedness reflected the nineteenth-century imperial vision of Churchill’s youth. As the Far East situation deteriorated, for four months there seemed a real possibility that Australia would be invaded. The Canberra government turned openly to the United States for protection, in default of reassurance backed by reinforcements which the threadbare “mother country” could not provide.