In any case, by December the destroyers had not arrived in meaningful numbers; only nine were fully refitted and commissioned by year’s end. They dribbled into British ports, their condition deplorable, all of them in need of refitting. One, rechristened HMS Lewes, was such a rust bucket that it was still undergoing repairs the following April when a German bomb knocked it out of commission (not out of action, for it had seen none) until 1942. Another was in such sorry shape that it was cannibalized for spare parts. Between May and December 1940, Churchill composed at least thirty-seven memos and letters to his staff and to Roosevelt on the subject of the destroyers and their lamentable condition.391
The promised destroyers were not the only American goods not showing up. Modern rifles, B-17 bombers, and ammunition topped Churchill’s shopping list. “What is being done,” he queried Halifax, “about our 20 motor torpedo-boats, the 5 PBY [patrol bombers], the 150–200 aircraft, and the 250,000 rifles…. I consider we were promised all the above, and more too.” Remember, he told Halifax, “Beg while the iron is hot.” Sir Alexander Cadogan, on Churchill’s orders, rang up Ambassador Lothian with the same question: “What is the status of the ‘other desiderata’ promised to us?” Lothian told Cadogan that the U.S. attorney general had held up the torpedo boats until at least January 1941, and that only one B-17 was ready to wing its way to Britain.392
Churchill was fed up. He told Hugh Dalton that he was tempted to simply tell Roosevelt, “If you want to watch us fighting for your liberties, you must pay for the performance.” The Prof egged him on: “The fruits of victory which Roosevelt offers seem to be safety for America and virtual starvation for us.” Always ready with a statistic, the Prof tossed more fuel onto the fire: “We are putting between 1/3 and one-half of our national effort into fighting Nazidom.” The American contribution so far—sold, not given—was “about 1/20 of the annual American national effort.” The Americans, Lindemann reminded Churchill, had from an accounting standpoint long ago written off the old destroyers, which were not even carried as assets on the U.S. books. These were hard facts to digest, given that the price England had paid for the fifty rust buckets took the form of British naval bases from Newfoundland to British Guiana, bases that American warships now sailed from in order to protect… America.393
Churchill peeled away pieces of the British Empire in exchange for obsolete boats. The Atlantic bases were the first to go, the first installment in the transfer of global supremacy from Britain to America. At the time, nobody, Churchill included, saw it quite that way. Indeed, he tried to frame the deal in terms of British largess when he told Parliament:
Some months ago we came to the conclusion that the interests of the United States and of the British Empire both required that the United States should have facilities for the naval and air defense of the western hemisphere… [and] had decided spontaneously, and without being asked or offered any inducement… to place such defense facilities at their disposal…. There is of course no question of any transference of sovereignty.”394
In fact, British sovereignty as measured in pence, shillings, and gold sovereigns was fast disappearing. Since the start of the war, Britain had paid almost $4.5 billion in cash (about $160 billion in modern dollars) for American food and matériel. The United Kingdom’s total remaining reserves of gold and dollar-denominated marketable securities was less than $2 billion, a sum accumulated since the start of the war mostly by exporting pottery, Scotch whisky, and South African gold. Yet Britain’s immediate needs would cost twice that, a ratio that would not necessarily have proven disastrous in peacetime, but the U.S. terms of sale were cash-and-carry. Britain desperately lacked the cash to buy, and needed more ships in which to carry. “It was a time,” Churchill wrote, “marked by an acute stringency in dollars.” Lord Lothian summed up the situation when, with decidedly nondiplomatic clarity, he told Washington reporters: “Britain’s broke.” Roosevelt offered to send a cruiser to Cape Town in order to pick up and deliver to the United States $20 million in British gold bullion as a down payment for services rendered, an offer akin to a noncombatant lifting the boots and pocket watch from a dying trooper.395
Churchill’s weekend meeting with Lothian in mid-November resulted in the framework of a plan to address the supply and money questions, which Churchill worked into a long letter to Roosevelt. The letter, containing nineteen sections and which Churchill called “one of the most important I ever wrote,” went out on December 7. In essence, he told the president, it all came down to two things: control of the seas, a battle Britain was losing; and money, of which Britain had almost none.396
Churchill addressed the worldwide strategic situation for 1941 in the first sixteen sections of his letter. Absent is any sign of his previous fawning or pleading; this letter was straightforward and powerful. He was polite, yet firm. On the “mortal danger” of shipping losses, Churchill wrote: “Would this diminution continue at this rate it would be fatal…. In fact we have now only one effective route of entry to the British Isles… against which the enemy is increasingly concentrating.” To combat that threat, he asked for “a gift, loan or supply of American vessels of war.”397
Such was his concern that the Germans might either charm or shoot their way into Irish ports, he dangled before Roosevelt the prospect of a united Ireland. “It is not possible for us to compel the people of Northern Ireland against their will to leave the United Kingdom and join southern Ireland,” he wrote, “but I do not doubt that if the Government of Eire would show its solidarity with the democracies of the English-speaking world at this crisis, a Council for the Defense of all Ireland could be set up out of which the unity of the Island could probably in some form or another emerge after the war.” Given that a large portion of Roosevelt’s voter base consisted of Irish-Americans, this was a rumination that would play well in America, but wreak havoc in Belfast were it revealed. Churchill, more concerned with American sensibilities than those of Ulstermen, sent Minister of Health Malcolm MacDonald to Dublin three times to offer Prime Minister Eamon de Valera a united Ireland, if de Valera joined Britain against Germany. MacDonald, as Chamberlain’s Dominions secretary, had negotiated a trade agreement with Ireland in 1938. Churchill despised the treaty but thought MacDonald might be an Englishman the Irish could work with. He was not. Three times de Valera declined MacDonald’s approaches, arguing that Churchill could not deliver on the promise even were he so inclined. Later in the year, when MacDonald was made High Commissioner to Canada, the back-channel dialogue ceased.398
In his letter to Roosevelt, Churchill moved on to the possibility of Japan’s grabbing the oil of the Dutch East Indies. There wasn’t much to say on the matter, and he said it quite forthrightly: “We have to-day no forces in the Far East capable of dealing with this situation should it develop.” Then, to point number seventeen: money. Churchill let loose. It was clear, he wrote, that the more rapidly the United States fulfilled Britain’s needs, the sooner Britain’s finances would collapse, until, “we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies…. It would be wrong in principle… if, at the height of this struggle, Great Britain were divested of all saleable assets, such that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved… we should stand stripped to the bone.” Reduced to its essence, the letter is more a moral argument than a financial plea. Churchill closed by telling—not asking—Roosevelt to “regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common goals.”399
Roosevelt had a great deal to chew on. He received Churchill’s letter while aboard the cruiser Tuscaloosa on a two-week vacation in the Caribbean, which included stops at some of America’s new (and Britain’s former) naval bases. As later related by Churchill, his “great friend” read and re-read the letter, “as he sat alone in his deck chair, and that for two days he did not seem to reach any conclusion. He was plunged in intense thought and brooded silently.” The brooding may have been a result of w
hat Churchill made clear in his letter: Britain vanquished would leave the United States alone and unprepared for war, swayed by the isolationists into a mortally dangerous neutrality that could result in a U.S. accommodation with Hitler, a brokered peace both fatal and without honor.400
To avoid that outcome, Roosevelt had to find a way to help America’s proxy before the proxy went broke, or worse. He had been contemplating a possible solution to the problem for several months, urged on by his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, who had told him in an August letter that it would not reflect well on America if “Britain went down” and America had not sent destroyers to prevent an invasion. Ickes added a homey analogy: “It seems to me that we Americans are like the householder who refuses to lend or sell his fire extinguisher to help out the fire in the home that is next door, although the house is all ablaze and the wind is blowing from that direction.” By the time Roosevelt arrived back in Washington from his Caribbean vacation, he thought he had found his legal basis for funneling aid to Britain. It came by way of an obscure federal law that allowed the U.S. military to lease property not required for public use. On December 17—without offering any details of what he was pondering—Roosevelt told reporters (for the purpose of publication but without naming the source) of his struggle to find a way to help Britain. He told them, “What I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign.” Then he offered a variation on Ickes’s parable: “Suppose my neighbor’s house is on fire and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up to his hydrant, I may help him to put out the fire…. I don’t say to him… ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.’ No!… I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.” A reporter asked, “Mr. President, before you loan your hose to your neighbor you have to have the hose.” The reporter went on to point out that if British orders for goods could be met only by second and third shifts at American factories, no federal authority was in place to mandate that factories add those shifts. They were fair points; America could not help Britain while running on one shift. Roosevelt avoided mention of the fact that the neighbor in this case needed not only the hose but an army of firemen as well.401
On December 12, Lord Lothian, who had been instrumental for more than a year in pleading Britain’s case to Americans, died suddenly in Washington. When taken ill, Lothian, a Christian Scientist, refused medical attention. “What a monstrous thing,” Churchill exclaimed, “that Lothian should not have allowed a doctor to be called.” Lothian’s death, coming the very week Roosevelt was pondering Churchill’s letter, created a political vacuum in Washington at the worst possible moment. Churchill needed to appoint a new ambassador, and fast. He liked Lloyd George for the job, but only, he told Colville, “if he could trust him.” Were Lloyd George to prove disloyal, Churchill added, “he could always sack him.” But the ambassadorship would place the former prime minister under Halifax, which Colville argued “would be an obstacle from L.G.’s point of view.” On the other hand, if Halifax went to Washington, yet another former appeaser would have been exiled. Churchill drafted Halifax. “His high character was everywhere respected,” Churchill later wrote, “yet at the same time his record in the years before the war and the way in which events had moved left him exposed to much disapprobation and even hostility from the Labour side of our National Coalition.” Churchill told Colville that if Halifax remained in Britain he “would never live down the reputation for appeasement” and that he “had no future in this country.” Without the United States in the war, Churchill told him, the very best Britain could hope for was an unsatisfactory peace and that he, Halifax, “had a glorious future in America” if he proved successful in getting the United States in.402
In the final weeks of the year, while Roosevelt pondered his congressional strategy, Churchill could not do much more than watch as London burned, and ponder two questions: What exactly were the Americans going to do and when? And where was Hitler going to go and when? Spain and Gibraltar had been a source of angst for months. Ultra recently divined a German operation code-named Felix, about which nothing was known beyond the name. Churchill thought Felix might entail a strike into Ireland or Spain. He thought Spain more likely, he told Colville, because that’s where he would go if he were Hitler. That is exactly where Hitler sought to go, but Franco, in power largely through the sponsorship of Hitler and Mussolini, demurred. If Gibraltar was to be taken, Franco told Hitler, it would be taken by Spanish troops, not by a coalition of Germans and Spanish.403
In fact, the generalissimo had no intention of attacking Gibraltar. Spaniards were kept alive by food imports that Britain allowed to arrive only because Spain remained neutral. Franco understood that were he to allow Germans passage to Gibraltar, London would starve Spain by blockade. Thus, despite his debt to Hitler, he thought it best to forestall Hitler’s call to arms. In fact, he thought it best to sit this war out. Churchill, in late November, had telegrammed a warning to Roosevelt about the danger of losing Gibraltar and suggested that Roosevelt offer Franco “food month by month so long as they keep out of the war.” If Gibraltar were lost, Churchill told Roosevelt, it “would be a grievous addition to our naval strain, already severe.”404
Gibraltar corked would trap the entire British Mediterranean fleet in the bottle, but only if the Suez Canal was corked as well. Franco, wily and possessed of a sense of global strategy that Hitler lacked, told the Führer that if Germany took the Suez Canal, Spain would then take Gibraltar. The German grand admiral Raeder, who understood very well the centricity of naval power to Britain’s status as a world power, had long grasped the importance of the Suez to London, and had tried in September to convince Hitler to pursue the same strategy. Taking Gibraltar and the Suez, Raeder argued, would open pathways to the Middle East and make “doubtful whether an advance against Russia from the north will be necessary.” Churchill did not know that on the thirteenth of December, Hitler had canceled Felix, or that on December 18, he had signed a directive that began: “The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against Britain.” Preparations were to be completed by May 15. The operation was code-named Barbarossa.405
Churchill later wrote that when the Germans massed on the French and Belgian frontiers in May of 1940, and then cascaded across, he grasped that “we were about to learn what total war means.” Indeed, total war had come to France, and was being waged in the Atlantic, and in the skies over England. But in December 1940, the status of life in much of continental Europe—and in Manchuria and the Horn of Africa—was more of a gruesome peace brokered by bayonet than total war.
Stalin, having the previous year partnered with Hitler in the obliteration of Poland, was digesting his Baltic, Finnish, and Romanian territorial takeovers. In December, Stalin’s most trusted lieutenant, Soviet foreign minister Molotov, returned from Berlin after negotiations with Ribbentrop over how best to share the spoils, including the carcass of the British Empire. Churchill called Molotov “a man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness” whose very survival within the Bolshevik world of lies, insults, intrigue, and the always present threat of “personal liquidation” fitted him out “to be an agent and instrument” of a leader such as Stalin. Yet in Hitler, Stalin and Molotov encountered a better liar and a more ruthless, more cold-blooded intriguer. Though in December Hitler faced his armies to the west, his vision had already turned to the east.406
In the Far East, the Japanese had begun the tenth year of their Manchurian depredations, enslaving the populace in the name of pan-Asian solidarity. “China,” Churchill wrote in 1937, “is being eaten by Japan like an artichoke, leaf by leaf.” Now, the fourth year of the Sino-Japanese war found a frontline stalemate between Chinese general Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist troops and Japanese general Hideki Tojo’s invading armies. Behind the Japanese lines, 400,000 of Mao Zedong’s Communist troops were mak
ing the emperor pay dearly for Chinese real estate. Japan’s moderate prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, found himself trying to appease Tojo’s war party, which believed in purchasing empire by brute force. If Konoye emerged from the political intrigue with more power, the greater Pacific region might yet live in peace. If Tojo proved stronger, a pan-Pacific war was most certainly inevitable, though Churchill stuck to his long-held premise that Japan would think twice before mixing it up with a power as mighty as Great Britain.407
Germany, Japan, and Italy had signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin, on September 27, which pledged support for any signatory who was attacked by a power not already at war with the signatories. By doing so, the Axis arrayed itself against the rest of the world. Churchill later wrote that the agreement “opened wider fields,” but the Tripartite Pact posed a conundrum for Churchill concerning the Burma Road. The road wound seven hundred tortuous miles from Lashio, a Burmese railhead four hundred miles north of Rangoon, to Kunming, in Yunnan Province, China, and was absolutely vital to the supply of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist army. The British had closed it in August, Alec Cadogan wrote, in an agreement with Japan that “special efforts be made to produce a lasting peace in the Far East.” Japan had made no such effort, special or otherwise, because Japan was dealing from strength. The Imperial Japanese army and navy, fueled in large part by the importation of seven million barrels a year of American oil, could go anywhere they pleased in order to make good on their threats. Nearly three months later, in October, the Burma Road was reopened, but the question was, how would Japan react? If Tokyo responded with force, what would Italy and Germany do? Attack England (again)? And what would America do?408
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