Churchill 1940-1945 Page 16

  So the new CIGS did not have to wait long before facing the Churchillian proposals that so infuriated him. In his first two weeks Brooke had to deal with suggestions for assaults on Trondheim and Sicily and the suggestion that two divisions be sent to Russia. Similarly, in the autumn of 1941 Dill had had to deal with plans for action in Norway, Sicily, Italy, France and North Africa. These Churchillian interventions can seem wayward and capricious, but they are, rather, the products of a fecund imagination and of a conscious philosophy of opportunism. In October 1941, Churchill said, ‘He is an unwise man who thinks that there is any certain method of winning this war. The only plan is to persevere.’

  Part II

  ‘There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies.’

  (Churchill to Sir Alan Brooke, 1 April 1945)

  18

  Westward, Look!

  In a broadcast speech on 27 April 1941, Churchill spoke movingly of his identification with the people he met at ‘the front’, by which he meant ‘the streets and wharves of London or Liverpool, Manchester, Cardiff, Swansea or Bristol [and the people he met there] … Of their kindness to me I cannot speak, because I have never sought it or dreamed of it, and can never deserve it … You can imagine how deeply I feel my own responsibility to all these people; my responsibility to bear my part in bringing them safely out of this long, stern, scowling valley through which we are marching, and not to demand from them the sacrifices and exertions in vain.’ He dealt frankly with Greece, which Britain had been bound to assist, the reverses in Libya, ‘this whipped jackal, Mussolini, who to save his skin has made all Italy a vassal state of Hitler’s Empire, frisking up at the side of the German tiger with yelpings not only of appetite … but even of triumph’. He did not minimise what lay ahead. But he ended by referring to America, and quoting two verses of one of his favourite poems, Arthur Hugh Clough’s, ‘Say not the struggle naught availeth’:

  For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,

  Seem here no painful inch to gain,

  For back, through creeks and inlets making,

  Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

  And not by eastern windows only,

  When daylight comes, comes in the light;

  In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly

  But westward, look, the land is bright.

  The metaphor was very obvious, and his listeners knew what he meant. They understood as well as he did that Britain might hold her own, but that she could never hope to defeat Germany without American aid. But even as late as April 1941 Churchill had to look hard to discern much brightness in the west. In the end the United Kingdom and the United States fought the war together, and, as far as Churchill’s memoirs revealed, as the closest of cousinly allies. But in 1939 or indeed 1941 the relationship was distant and reserved. It was indeed almost hostile.

  Ever since the end of the First War the transatlantic connection had been strained and cool, weakened by differences in three key areas: trade, naval rivalries and war debts.

  In 1922 Lloyd George proposed an all-round cancellation of the debts that had arisen out of the First World War. At the beginning of that war, America had been a net debtor nation, but by the end of the war she was net creditor of $3.7 billion, precisely the reverse of her debt in 1914.1 Britain owed the United States $4,000 million but was owed $7,000 million by her European allies. America however refused the proposed debt cancellation and insisted that Britain pay her debts in full. That left Britain with no alternative but to seek payment from her other allies and to require payment of German reparations. The consequences had much to do with the origins of the Second World War. Britain’s response to America pointed out to the world where generosity was not to be found: the Balfour Note of 1922 publicly stated that Britain would only seek from her wartime allies and from Germany such sums as she needed to enable her to pay her debt to America.

  It is worth noting that Churchill’s attitude to foreign debts was typically generous. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he presented very moderate terms to the French. ‘We have not sought’, he explained at a party dinner in Birmingham, ‘to be judged on this question by our ability to extract the uttermost farthing. We think it our duty to consider not only the capacity of our debtors to pay, but the circumstances under which these debts were incurred.’2 How far short of his policy was that of America.

  Eventually, as the Depression bit, Britain effectively defaulted on her war debts to America and the Lausanne Conference of 1932 linked the reduction of German reparations to a corresponding reduction in war debt payments. The reaction in America was bitter, and in 1934 the Johnson Act forbade loans to any government that had not repaid its First World War debts. This Act was still in force at the outbreak of the Second World War and had to be revoked before Lend-Lease could be enacted. Much of the hostility to Lend-Lease stemmed from recollection of what had happened in 1932.

  Differences with America continued, principally in relation to trade and Far Eastern interests, tensions which crystallised into a strong naval rivalry. In 1927 when America intervened in Nicaragua, Sir Robert Vansittart, then in charge of the American Department at the Foreign Office, proposed despatching a British warship to the area. A class of British warships was planned specifically for use against America.

  American naval expansionism was reflected in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which allowed America parity with Britain in terms of numbers of capital ships. At that time Churchill was prepared to accept parity at this level, providing Britain retained superiority overall, taking into account warships such as cruisers. At the 1927 Disarmament Conference in Geneva, America tried to go further and sought overall parity. Churchill was very resistant to this: ‘There can be no parity between a power whose navy is its life and the power whose navy is only for prestige … It always seems to be assumed that it is our duty to humour the United States and minister to their vanity. They do nothing for us in return but exact their last pound of flesh.’3 He was instrumental in bringing the Cabinet to reject the concessions which the Americans sought. On 20 July 1927 he went further:

  We do not wish to put ourselves in the power of the United States. We cannot tell what they might do if at some future date they were in a position to give us orders about our policy, say, in India, or Egypt, or Canada, or on any other great matter behind which their electioneering forces were marshalled. Moreover, tonnage parity means that Britain can be starved into obedience to any American decree. I would neither trust America to command, nor indeed to submit. Evidently on the basis of American naval superiority speciously disguised as parity immense dangers overhang the future of the world.4

  This strand in Churchill’s thinking is reflected by various remarks in these years. He was recorded as saying that the Americans were ‘arrogant, fundamentally hostile to us, and that they wished to dominate world politics’. In a memorandum of November 1928 he wrote: ‘Whatever may have been done at enormous cost and sacrifice to keep up friendship is apparently swept away by the smallest little tiff or misunderstanding, and you have to start again and placate the Americans by another batch of substantial or even vital concessions.’5

  As late as 1916, and not long before America entered the First War alongside Britain, the General Board of the [US] Navy considered how it would use airships in a war against the United Kingdom.6 It was an axiom of American naval planning between the wars that the rivalries of Britain and the United States made a conflict not unlikely. Equally, speakers at the US Army and Navy War Colleges, many of them with experience of fighting alongside the British armies in 1917 and 1918 emphasised, first, the differences that had existed between the allies as Britain sought to control American troops and, secondly, that alliance between Britain and America was an unnatural state of affairs.

  American war games in the 1920s and 1930s involved wars against Red. Red was Britain. ‘Every senior American officer who attended one of the two service war colleges in the interwar years was educated to be wary of
Great Britain, if not to distrust her’.7

  These games and lectures had a profound effect in conditioning American officers to an attitude of suspicion and even hostility towards Britain. They were told that the Americans alone had entered the First World War for altruistic reasons, and that America could not fulfil her role as a first-class power unless she developed fleets of the same size as Britain’s. The first three questions from the audience put to Herbert Gibbons, lecturing to the Army War College in 1928, began with the words, ‘In the event of our becoming involved in a war with England …’

  It is interesting that Admiral Ernest J. King, the Chief of the Navy when America entered the war as Britain’s ally, not only had a generalised hatred of the British, but had distilled it in his Naval War College thesis on the subject of the Royal Navy as a potential enemy in the context of trade, shipping and naval disputes. It is said that when King opened the first meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff he said that he had served under Britain in the last war and would never serve under her again or allow any of his ships to serve under her if he could help it.8 In these years, if Britain had a special relationship it was not with America but with France, the strongest military power in Europe.

  In 1917 Woodrow Wilson said to Colonel House, ‘England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have by any means. When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands.’9 After the war, America did indeed preserve the economic lien, but the political link of the war years dissolved when she failed to join the League of Nations. Her financial harshness to her former allies contrasted with her generosity to her former enemy, when she granted a huge loan which allowed Germany to reform and modernise her industry.

  There was in fact little talk of anything like a ‘special relationship’ in these days. It was not a concept which America readily invoked. In the famous speech at West Point on 5 December 1962 when the former Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, spoke of Britain’s having lost an empire and having not yet found a role, he spoke about the chimerical and illusory concepts to which Britain attached herself, and specifically to ‘a role based on a “special relationship” with the United States’.

  19

  America and Europe

  In the years, then, that ran up to the Second World War, the relationship between Britain and the United States was about as cool as it ever was in times of peace between the two countries. America’s naval ambitions had been awakened by the First World War and there were real and worrying tensions in this area between America and Britain, still the paramount naval power in the world. But overall America’s reaction to the First World War was an inward-looking one, reinforced by the Neutrality Acts passed from 1935 onwards. The war had been an anomaly in American policy: being drawn in to the disputes of the decadent imperial powers had been a mistake.

  While the interwar years were generally a period of isolationism for the United States, in the second part of the 1930s Roosevelt attempted to modify that isolationism by removing artificial trade barriers and by seeking a diplomatic solution to the tensions on the European continent. So far as military preparations were concerned, the President did not wish any involvement in Europe, but rather the creation of a powerful American rim from which a defensive air force could operate. Beyond that rim, he preferred to let others fight for America: at the time of Munich he summoned the British ambassador, and told him that dismembering Czechoslovakia would be ‘the most terrible, remorseless sacrifice that has ever been demanded of a state’.

  America’s lack of interest in substantial military operations is reflected in the fact that in 1940 she was twentieth in the world in terms of military power. She had only five army divisions, a one-ocean Pacific navy and 160 pursuit planes with 52 heavy bombers.1 When war broke out the British Chiefs of Staff thought the most useful help they would be likely to receive from America would be in the realm of financial and economic support.

  They were not alone in viewing America without any great enthusiasm. Chamberlain had considerable reservations about America, and as late as January 1940 recorded that, ‘I don’t want the Americans to fight for us – we should have to pay too dearly for that if they had a right to be in on the peace terms’.2 It was indeed only after Hitler’s attack on Czechoslovakia that Chamberlain saw America as having any place at all in Britain’s foreign policy. Thus, what had been planned as a royal visit to Canada was extended into a visit to America, and the Canadian element became insignificant. The British ambassador had noted that despite extensive isolationism in the United States, ‘[I]n the event of a very grave crisis [this visit] might have decisive results’.3

  The ambassador in question was Sir Robert Lindsay: his appointment had been extended to allow him to manage the royal visit, but he was shortly succeeded by Lord Lothian. Lothian’s background had been as an appeaser, but his mission to strengthen Anglo-American relations was important and fairly successful. Partly as a result of lobbying between 12 and 21 September 1939 Roosevelt persuaded Congress to perform a turn-around on the Neutrality Acts and allow exports to belligerents on a cash-and-carry basis. Obstacles were put in the way of significant purchases by Germany and Russia.

  Chamberlain’s scepticism was part of a long tradition. In 1927 Lord Hankey, a particularly cold-blooded spokesman for the interwar establishment, enunciated it: ‘Time after time we have been told that, if we made this concession or that concession, we should secure the goodwill in [sic] America. We gave up the Anglo-Japanese alliance. We agreed to pay our [war] debts … I have never seen any permanent result follow from a policy of concessions. I believe we are less popular and more abused in America than ever because they think us weak.’4

  Churchill was ready to apply flattery to the United States and her President with his bricklayer’s trowel, and from time to time he was genuinely carried away by romantic notions of links between the English-speaking peoples. But there were plenty of occasions when he recognised the cold self-interest of the American administration for what it was. In November 1937 he wrote to Lord Linlithgow about the ‘increasingly grim’ situation in Europe. He referred to the fact that the United States ‘signals encouragement to us’, but significantly added, ‘for what that is worth’. His realistic appreciation is reflected in the ‘Theme’ of the second volume of his history of the war: ‘How the British people held the fort alone till those who hitherto had been half-blind were half-ready.’

  The encouragement which the United States signalled, to which he referred, was the product of a slight change in Roosevelt’s position. When he first became President in 1933 he was not greatly interested in Hitler and regarded Germany as a problem for Britain and France, but after the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and Japanese attacks on China in 1937 he became more involved. In October 1937 he spoke of the need to ‘quarantine’ aggressor states.

  In January 1938 the President offered to convene an international conference to try to devise a general peace settlement. Chamberlain requested that it be delayed so that he could deal directly with Germany and Italy. Under pressure from Eden, whose resignation was in part precipitated by this issue, he ultimately asked Roosevelt to go ahead. Chamberlain had said a year earlier that it was ‘always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans except words’ and his view was justified in this instance: the talks never took place.

  By the end of 1938 Roosevelt was talking of the need for more planes, and there was a steady increase in the production of armaments in the United States from 1940, but he continued to see responsibility for facing up to Hitler as resting with Britain and France. If they accepted the burden they would be acting as what he called ‘America’s front line of defence’.

  ‘What the British need today’ he said as late at February 1939, ‘is a good stiff grog, inducing not only the desire to save civilisation but the continued belief that they can do it. In such an event they will have a lot more sup
port from their American cousins’.5 It was convenient that civilisation should be saved by someone else, on a front line of defence that was 3,000 miles away from Washington.

  On 10 June 1940, following the dire events in France, he delivered a speech at Charlottesville, Virginia, which must have encouraged Churchill. But just four days later he wrote to Churchill saying that ‘while our efforts will be exerted towards making available an ever increasing amount of materials and supplies[,] a certain amount of time must pass before our efforts in this sense can be successful to the extent desired’.6

  There was then a period of two months when the President did not communicate with Churchill at all, although in the same period Churchill wrote to Roosevelt no less than four times. No one knows what was going on in the President’s mind during these eight weeks. Of this period Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, said, ‘I do know that in every direction I find a growing discontent with the President’s lack of leadership. He still has the country if he will take it and lead it. But he won’t have it very much longer unless he does something. It won’t be sufficient for him to make another speech and then go into a state of innocuous desuetude again. People are beginning to say: “I am tired of words; I want action.” ’7

  Every positive initiative the President took was followed by qualifications and retractions. James MacGregor Burns, not a hostile biographer, memorably described Roosevelt in 1941:

  Once again Roosevelt was caught between divided administration counsels, between the conflicting demands of isolationists and interventionists. Once again there was a period of veering and drifting in the White House; once again Roosevelt’s advisers – Stimson, Ickes, and others – lamented the President’s failure to lead. And once again Roosevelt responded to the situation by improvisation and subterfuge. He publicly ordered naval patrolling in the now enlarged security zones; he privately ordered a policy of seeking out German ships and planes and notifying British units of their location. On May 27, while pickets trudged dourly back and forth in front of the White House with their anti-war signs, Roosevelt announced his issuance of a proclamation of ‘unlimited national emergency’. The next day, however, he took much of the sting out of his move by disclaiming any positive plans along new lines.