Churchill 1940-1945 Read online

Humanity with all its fears,

  With all the hope of future years

  Is hanging breathless on thy fate.

  What was Churchill to make of this? He referred to the letter and the verse it contained soon afterwards in his broadcast to America of 9 February 1941, the broadcast which contained the famous words ‘Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.’ Roosevelt’s message had obviously meant much to him. But in the event it was to be very many months, and only after Pearl Harbor, that Roosevelt’s practical encouragement was translated into an alliance in war. Roosevelt’s interlocutors tended to come away from him convinced that he had made promises at which he had done no more than hint. Churchill as much as anyone else was frequently misled in this way.

  Where the Prime Minister had initially looked for America’s support purely for its moral value, he came increasingly to need it also for material reasons. He was still, however, not looking to America for manpower. An overlooked passage in the ‘Tools’ speech contains the words ‘It seems now to be certain that the government and people of the United States intend to supply us with all that is necessary for victory. In the last war the United States sent two million men across the Atlantic. But this is not a war of vast armies, firing immense masses of shells at one another. We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American Union. We do not need them this year, nor next year; nor any year that I can foresee.’

  He was convinced that America would not stand by if they knew that British cities were being bombed. De Gaulle described him in the garden at Chequers ‘raising his fist towards the sky as he cried: “So they won’t come!” ’ De Gaulle asked him why he wanted to see the bombers and Churchill replied that the bombing of Oxford, Coventry and Canterbury would cause such a wave of indignation that the United States could not stand apart. On other occasions he felt that invasion itself might have the same beneficial effect. He came however to accept that America would not enter the war before the Presidential election on 5 November 1940. By 1 November he was convinced that Roosevelt was going to win by a large majority and that he would then lose no time in bringing America into the war. In the event, of course, the result of the election no more resulted in an American declaration of war than the bombing of Britain had done.

  Churchill sent an elaborate telegram of congratulations to Roosevelt following his victory in the Presidential election and was very concerned that he had received no reply. He tried to chase matters up through the British Embassy and eventually an unconvincing story came back about the message’s being lost.

  In February 1941 FDR sent Wendell Willkie, his Republican opponent in the 1940 Presidential election, to Europe to assess the situation. Willkie was anxious to see whether a peace could even then be negotiated, and Roosevelt was by no means committed to joining in the war against the Axis powers. He was still anxious to know exactly what Hitler and Mussolini were after. He was certainly not bending all his efforts to preparing America for entry into the war.

  Before the 1940 Presidential election Churchill had been very critical of America’s detachment from Britain’s desperate plight. On 27 May 1940 he said that the United States ‘had given us practically no help in the war, and now that they saw how great was the danger, their attitude was that they wanted to keep everything which would help us for their own defence’.11 A month later he told his American friend, Bernard Baruch, ‘I’m sure we shall be all right here but your people are not doing much’.12 It was bitterly disappointing to find that things appeared to have changed very little after the election.

  It is very difficult to be clear about Roosevelt’s deepest beliefs. He may have had few. He was essentially a political and pragmatic creature, reactive in instinct, seeking to achieve practical ends. Douglas Macarthur was typical of some of his critics when he described the President as ‘A man who never told the truth when a lie would serve him just as well’. But his reputation for unreliability largely flowed from his desire to avoid making enemies unnecessarily. In May 1942 Roosevelt famously told Morgenthau, ‘You know I am a juggler, and I never let my right hand know what my left hand does … I may have one policy for Europe and one diametrically opposite for North and South America. I may be entirely inconsistent, and furthermore I am perfectly willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war.’13

  Despite the obscurity of his convictions, exacerbated by his practice of committing little to paper and rarely dictating records of his conversations, he certainly entertained some prejudices that informed his relations with Britain and with Churchill. He, and the Democratic Establishment generally, had a distaste for the institution of empire – except in its American form – so great that they conceived themselves as charged with the responsibility for dismantling it wherever they could. In Britain, Roosevelt said, there was ‘too much Eton and Oxford’. Quite why a political party in one country should have seen it as their duty to alter the culture of another is not easy to understand today, but Roosevelt’s circle was gratified by signs of the erosion of the traditional class structure in Britain under the influence of the stresses of the early months of the war. They saw Bevin, Laski and others as instruments of change.

  Both Roosevelt and Churchill were warm and convivial men. They wanted to get on well and they often did. The picture which Churchill was concerned to paint in his history and in his public pronouncements was of a close and trusting relationship. In reality, there was no great measure of trust on either side. Both parties entered the alliance for the benefit of their own national interests. Both were frequently angered, and expressed their anger, when differences emerged. Churchill was particularly upset by what he regarded as instances of a mean-minded failure to look at the interests of the alliance as a whole. He referred to the President’s pet dog when he expostulated in 1944: ‘What do you want me to do – stand up and beg like Fala?’ There were many similar outbursts in a relationship that was far from the romantic union as it was later portrayed.

  21

  Lend-Lease

  On 7 December 1940 Churchill appealed to Roosevelt in a letter on which he had worked for no less than two weeks and extensively revised, and which was patently addressed to America’s self-interest.1 It had originally been drafted by Lothian and was greatly redrafted for circulation to the Cabinet. Churchill then worked up a third version, which was the one that went to Roosevelt. It has been described as perhaps ‘the most carefully drafted and redrafted message in the whole Churchill–Roosevelt Correspondence’.2

  His communications, like his speeches, did not consist simply of magnificent and memorable phrases. The bravura climaxes followed on detailed, supremely well-argued and logical forensic analyses. The Secret Session speeches are particularly worth studying. They are almost completely free from oratorical flourishes, but rather consist of the logical deployment of substantial data, skilfully set out in a persuasive argument of which a distinguished member of the Bar would be proud.

  So the letter began with a painstaking explanation of the circumstances by which Britain was surrounded. Churchill set out precisely her dangers and weaknesses. He then put forward arguments that were directed towards America’s own welfare:

  The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies. While we will do our utmost, and shrink from no proper sacrifice to make payments across the Exchange, I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone … We here should be unable, after the war, to purchase the large balance of imports from the United States over and above the volume of our exports which is agreeable to your tariffs and industrial economy. Not only should we in Great Britain suffer cruel privations, but widespread unemployment in th
e United States would follow the curtailment of American exporting power.3

  His arguments were well chosen. America’s reaction to the war, and to the fall of France, was concern for her own safety. Roosevelt feared the loss of the British fleet to Germany. He used Mackenzie King, the Canadian Premier, as an intermediary in an attempt to obtain a promise from Churchill that Britain’s navy would be sent to America rather than fall into German hands.

  Lend-Lease was distinct from the Destroyers for Bases deal. The difference between the situations of Churchill and Roosevelt at this point in the war is neatly reflected in the fact that Churchill’s letter setting out Britain’s urgent need for military supplies was read by Roosevelt as he lay back in a deck chair on the US warship Tuscaloosa cruising in the Caribbean sun.4 Churchill’s message, at over 4,000 words, was the longest he had sent to Roosevelt.

  The message did the trick. It was at the press conference at the end of the cruise that the burning house and the metaphor of the hosepipe made their appearance. Roosevelt pinched the metaphor from Secretary of the Interior, Harold L. Ickes. Ickes was distinctly pro-intervention and had written to Roosevelt on 2 August 1940, in favour of the Destroyers for Bases deal and going on to say that ‘It seems to me, we Americans are like the householder who refuses to lend or sell his fire extinguishers to help put out the fire in the house that is right next door although that house is all ablaze and the wind is blowing from that direction’.

  British public opinion liked the metaphor; American public opinion noted that the policy proceeded ‘on the general theory that the best defence of Great Britain is the best defence of the United States’. Churchill’s description of the deal as involving the British Empire and the United States being ‘somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage’ was a euphemistic gloss. The deal was very much a practical one to the advantage of the United States, and it even had to incorporate a pledge that the British fleet would never be surrendered to the Germans but would, if the worst came to the worst, be moved to the Empire.

  That last point was of significance. Churchill was aware of America’s concern about the fate of the British fleet, and frequently used it to blackmail Roosevelt. America’s fleet was designed for use only in the Pacific, leaving her Atlantic coast vulnerable to a victorious Germany. In his important message to Roosevelt on 20 May 1940 Churchill had been at pains to say that if his government fell as a result of invasion, its successor might be required to surrender, as he would never do.5 ‘Excuse me, Mr President’, he wrote ‘putting this nightmare bluntly … Evidently I could not answer for my successors who in utter despair and helplessness might have to accommodate themselves to the German will.’

  He pressed home this point in successive telegrams. Roosevelt did not answer the 20 May message. His next letter – of 30 May – is in jolly terms that fail to echo Churchill’s anguish: ‘My dear Churchill:- Ever so many thanks for that remarkably interesting story [of 7 May] of the Battle of the River Plate – a grand job by your three cruisers.’6

  It was hardly surprising that at the end of 1940 Churchill complained that he had found American attitudes chilling. He considered that America had given Britain nothing that had not been paid for and nothing that was essential to Britain’s resistance. But he became much more sanguine in the course of January 1941. There were two reasons for this. One was Roosevelt’s submission of the Lend-Lease bill to Congress, and the other was Harry Hopkins’s mission. Hopkins was a close friend and confidant of Roosevelt – indeed he had his own apartment in the White House. He was not an obvious Churchillian. He was committed to the New Deal and shared Roosevelt’s suspicion of aristocratic decadence. For all of the war years Hopkins was in very poor health, his life in the balance on many occasions. But he took no account of his frailty and committed himself to the service of his country at war without regard for the cost. He travelled ceaselessly, not only within the United States: he made repeated and frequently very uncomfortable journeys back and forth across the Atlantic. He was present at all the great conferences. At times Roosevelt relied on him and his judgement more than any other person.

  The influence of this frail Rasputin whose powers rested on no legitimate constitutional basis was greatly resented – not least by those on the right who remembered Hopkins’s career in the Civil Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration, and feared that as America increasingly exerted influence on the shape of post-war Europe he and his President were bound together on a mission to impose a socialist character on the liberated Continent.

  The extent of Hopkins’s influence is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that this former welfare administrator had no wide vision or sense of history. He prided himself on being a ‘doer’ rather than a ‘talker’, and rather enjoyed his popular image as a playboy. But he came to be a friend and confidant of Churchill almost as much as of Roosevelt, and he was certainly liked more by Clementine Churchill than by Eleanor Roosevelt. His great ability was to cut through the talk and diplomacy that surrounded complicated issues and insist on a no-nonsense approach to the practical question that lay at their heart. It was for this reason that Churchill proposed elevating him to the peerage with the title ‘Lord Root of the Matter’. When Truman conferred the Distinguished Service Medal on Hopkins, the citation referred to his attacks on the problems of the war by means of ‘piercing understanding’.

  Not long before his own death, Dill wrote a moving letter of condolence on the death of Hopkins’s son in the Pacific. He said, ‘Harry, this war has hit you very hard. I know of no one who has done more by wise and courageous advice to advance our common cause. And who knows it? Some day it must be known.’7 Long before the end of the war Churchill’s trust in the man was such that he treated him almost as his ambassador to the President.

  He referred to his first meeting with Hopkins in his history of the war and to ‘that extraordinary man, who played, and was to play, a sometimes decisive part in the whole movement of the war. His was a soul that flamed out of a frail and failing body. He was a crumbling lighthouse from which there shone the beams that led great fleets to harbour.’8

  Hopkins’s formal letter of authorisation from the President was couched in the ornate style of an earlier age:

  Reposing special faith and confidence in you, I am asking you to proceed at your early convenience to Great Britain, there to act as my personal representative. I am also asking you to convey a communication in this sense to His Majesty King George VI.

  You will, of course, communicate to this Government any matters which may come to your attention in the performance of your mission which you may feel will serve the best interests of the United States.

  With all best wishes for the success of your mission,

  I am

  Very sincerely yours,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  Hopkins arrived in Britain with the peculiar prejudice that Churchill was hostile to America in general and to Roosevelt in particular. He himself certainly had had a personal prejudice against Britain, which had only recently been dispelled when he had been charmed by the Queen’s kindness to his infant daughter during the Royal visit of 1939.9

  Churchill rolled out every available red carpet, and Hopkins was with him for three of his four weeks in Britain, and on the most intimate basis, seeing him at the closest of quarters, watching him at work throughout the day and at play when partially off-duty in the long evening sessions at Chequers. Hopkins was indeed, as Bracken said, ‘the most important American visitor to this country we have ever had’.10 Unknown to Hopkins or to Churchill, the FBI kept a watch on Hopkins’s activities, and J. Edgar Hoover reported to Roosevelt on how the trip was going.11 They were also keeping a file on Churchill.

  Hopkins was met at Poole by Brendan Bracken (whom he described rather quaintlyinhisreport as ‘Churchill’s Man Friday’)and was thentaken in some state to the capital. No effort was spared to make him feel welcome. All the trouble
that was lavished on Hopkins was worthwhile. Even before he returned to the United States, he reported favourably to his boss:

  Dear Mr. President:

  These notes are sent by Col. Lee, who is returning with Halifax. Will you save them for me until I get back, when I shall try to put them into readable form.

  The people here are amazing from Churchill down, and if courage alone can win – the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately, and I am sure you will permit nothing to stand in the way. Some of the ministers and underlings are a bit trying, but no more than some I have seen.

  Churchill is the gov’t. in every sense of the word – he controls the ground strategy and often the details – labour trusts him – the army, navy, air force are behind him to a man. The politicians and upper crust pretend to like him. I cannot emphasise too strongly that he is the one and only person over here with whom you need to have a full meeting of minds.

  Churchill wants to see you – the sooner the better – but I have told him of your problem until the [Lend-Lease] bill is passed. I am convinced this meeting between you and Churchill is essential – and soon – for the battering continues and Hitler does not wait for Congress.

  The perceptive comment about the ‘politicians and upper crust’ is instructive.

  At the first meeting over dinner at Number 10, Hopkins asked Churchill if there were anything that the USA could do for Britain. Churchill said, ‘I should like a million rifles. I don’t like telling the British army to fight the Germans with dummy rifles made of wood.’ Hopkins said he was not sure that they had a million rifles; perhaps they could find 500,000. Soon he left the room, returning to say that he had spoken to the President, and that the first consignment of a million rifles would be shipped on the following day. Churchill dissolved into tears. This anecdote was told by Bracken (who was at the dinner) to Lascelles. It is almost certainly a true account of what happened at the dinner, though it is not known whether the shipment was ever made. Hopkins understood the magic of moments such as this, and what they meant to Churchill – and to an extent to Roosevelt. Such alchemy could impart a romantic and emotional dimension from time to time into a relationship that was otherwise cold, calculating and often unappealing.12