The Last Lion

by William Manchester

  Harry’s boss, from whom Churchill sought billions, was known to display more talent as a horse trader than a gambler. Roosevelt was at that hour riding at anchor off Argentia, which as a result of the destroyers-for-territory deal had been transformed in just months from Crown property into one of the U.S. Navy’s largest bases. Roosevelt had taken title in fair trade.

  As Prince of Wales dropped anchor in Placentia Bay at dawn on August 9, Inspector Thompson offered to Churchill that the impending meeting with Roosevelt would surely make history. “Yes,” replied Churchill, “and more so if I get what I want from him.” Then he made ready to board a launch for the short trip across the water to Augusta, where Roosevelt waited. Bracken’s insistence on filming the occasion paid off. Footage of the ensuing meeting, released weeks later, had the effect of erasing from the public consciousness the sort of suspicions such secret assignations often engender. Had the sound not failed on the movie camera at the moment of truth, Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s greetings to each other would have been recorded for posterity.342

  There stands Roosevelt, near the gangway, his legs made stiff by the steel braces underneath his trousers. He grasps the arm of his son, Elliott, who is attired in his army service uniform. The president wears a lightweight summer business suit. He is smiling broadly, but the cigarette holder is missing; the absence of that jaunty prop means he’s all business. And there comes Churchill, scrambling up the ship’s gangway, resplendent in his nautical getup. A dark sailor cap is pulled low over his brow. He clutches a pair of gloves in his left hand, which precludes his doffing the cap, which in turn precludes the possibility of any photo being snapped of Churchill arriving hat in hand. He stoops somewhat, and manages an almost subservient slouch as he offers his right hand to the president, who stands almost a head taller than Churchill. Churchill, Colville noted, was keenly aware of the constitutional differences in the roles of prime minister and president: the British prime minister was the King’s first minister but was not, unlike the U.S. president, the head of state, or commander in chief. Churchill, therefore, always gave precedence to Roosevelt. In this case, he also gave the president an official letter of introduction from George VI. Unofficially, Churchill and Roosevelt should have needed no introduction because they had met at a dinner at Gray’s Inn in 1918, when Roosevelt served as assistant secretary of the navy. Unfortunately, Churchill had forgotten the meeting, a slight to the patrician American and just the type of minor itch that might have festered in a lesser man. But Roosevelt let the oversight go, and over lunch the two men got down to the business of Churchill’s wish list.343

  Roosevelt, however, had also arrived with a wish. He attached no specific conditions to it, yet his intent was implicit in the asking. If Churchill wanted to take home from Argentia news of American guarantees for massive amounts of aid, Roosevelt sought to take home something as significant, if less tangible—a joint statement of postwar aims. Both had for months avoided any public elucidation of their postwar aims, yet within hours of shaking Roosevelt’s hand, Churchill set to work on a joint statement, in part to negate “all the tales of my reactionary, Old World outlook, and the pain this is said to have caused the president.” Churchill, in his memoirs, took pride in having “cast in my own words” the “substance and spirit of what came to be called the “ ‘Atlantic Charter.’ ”344

  On August 10—Sunday—the two leaders allowed photographers to shoot some pictures for the folks back home. Roosevelt, his staff, and several hundred American sailors crossed over to Prince of Wales, where Churchill had personally choreographed a worship service for his guests, down to the details of seating, the hymns to be sung, and the order in which they would be given voice. He was seen to dab away tears as he and Roosevelt joined the ships’ crews in singing, “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” “It was a great hour to live,” he wrote in his memoirs, adding, “Nearly half of those who sang were soon to die.”345

  After the ceremonies, Churchill, Harriman, Inspector Thompson, and Alec Cadogan climbed into a whaleboat for a sojourn to the flinty and rain-swept beach, where Thompson observed a change in Churchill’s demeanor “as soon as we were on shore.” For the first time after “more than a year of some of the most crushing disappointments and reverses ever sustained by a single individual,” Churchill seemed to allow all his troubles to “sink into the deep ocean we had traversed.” He talked and talked and puffed on his cigar and pointed out sights to the group, and when the rain grew harder, he simply “cupped his hand over his cigar and went on talking and pointing and puffing.” Here was a good measure of his buoyant mood, for Thompson knew that when in Churchill’s presence “You don’t talk if he doesn’t.” He was talking, and at a clip. Cadogan recalled the party spending several hours wandering along the coastal crags, Churchill “like a schoolboy, taking great pleasure out of rolling boulders down a cliff.” He was animated; the meeting with Roosevelt was going quite well. Yet after two lunches, a dinner, and Sunday service with the president, Churchill was waiting for some sign, some confirmation of that which he sought most of all from this meeting: Roosevelt’s approval. He soon got it. Later that afternoon Churchill learned from Lieutenant (junior grade) Franklin Roosevelt, USN, that the young man’s father “said quite plainly and without reservation that you are the greatest statesman the world has ever known.” With that, the granting of Roosevelt’s wish for a joint statement became a sure thing.346

  In its final form, the Atlantic Charter contained eight points, including the pledge that the United States and Great Britain would seek no territorial gains “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny.” That phrase delighted Churchill, for it meant that America, a neutral power, had made what he called an “astonishing” and “war-like” statement of intent. Point Four had to do with free trade; specifically, it guaranteed that raw materials and trade would be enjoyed by all states “on equal terms.” Given America’s long history of protectionism versus Britain’s history of free trade, Churchill winced at the implication that Britain needed reminding on the subject and gave Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles an earful. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, the Americans saw tariffs and protectionism as the best defense against trading blocks, of which the British Empire (with its policy of imperial preference) was the world’s largest. Now, to mollify Churchill and the Dominions, which traded with London on special terms, the president and Welles agreed to modify Point Four by adding the words “with due respect for their existing obligations.” The negotiations over the fourth point offered insight into Roosevelt’s postwar economic aims. U.S. economic security could only, necessarily, come at the expense of Britain and its special relations.

  Point Eight as initially phrased also troubled Churchill. It called for world peace following the war, but recommended no means to keep that peace. He sought inclusion of a declaration of intent to form a world organization—a sort of League of Nations with muscle—led by the English-speaking world in order to guarantee the peace. Many in America wanted nothing whatsoever to do with any such international coalition, given the abject failure of the League. Still, Roosevelt granted Churchill his point (the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security), which greatly pleased the Old Man because it amounted to “a plain and bold intimation that after the war the United States would join with us in policing the world.”347

  Point Three vexed Churchill most of all, for it contained the seed most likely to grow into bitter fruit. It guaranteed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” as well as the restoration of “sovereign rights and self-government to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Churchill saw this as being directed to those nations conquered by the Nazis; but over the course of the next year he began to grasp that the charter lent itself to a “wider interpretation” than he and Roosevelt had intended, or wider than he, at least, intended. The Atlantic Charter, he later warned Roosevelt, could just as easily be interpreted by Arab
s as a mandate “to expel the Jews from Palestine.” This Churchill could not abide, given that he was, he said, “strongly wedded to the Zionist policy, of which I was one of the authors.” Most troubling to Churchill was the prospect that the Atlantic Charter might be cited by rebellious British colonial elements in Africa and India as justification for breaking away from the Empire to gain rights denied them by London. That is exactly how Roosevelt, from the start, intended it to be construed. Yet for the King, the cabinet, and the Foreign Office, that simply would not do. In any event, at Argentia, Churchill, construing the words in a manner to his satisfaction (restoration of rights, not the granting of), approved the inclusion of Point Three. Oliver Harvey, Anthony Eden’s senior private secretary, called the result a “terribly woolly document.” Eden, Harvey confided to his diary, felt Roosevelt had “bowled the PM a very quick one.” Yet Churchill considered the Atlantic Charter as symbolic and nothing more than a gesture by the two leaders, a nonbinding piece of paper, ratified neither by Congress nor Parliament. “It is silly,” he told L. S. Amery, “to make such heavy weather about these broad affirmations of principle.”348

  Cadogan had attended to the nuances of diplomatic verbiage within the Atlantic Charter, fabulously so in Churchill’s estimation. “Thank God I brought you with me,” he told Cadogan, who jotted in his diary, “The simplicity of the seven word tribute and his manner of saying it were proof of its sincerity, I was deeply moved and puffed up with great pride.” Such sentiments did not come easily to the austere Cadogan, who Inspector Thompson found to be “the coldest” Englishman he knew, and who had “a look that can wither croupiers.” It had been fifteen months since Cadogan told his diary on the eve of Churchill’s taking the premiership what he thought of Churchill’s leadership qualities: “Winston useless…. I am not at all sure of W.S.C.” He was sure now.349

  Churchill left for home with what he had come for: the promise of far more food, oil, and weapons. Roosevelt also pledged to replace the British forces in Iceland with American troops and to take over air and sea patrols west of Iceland, thus freeing up fifty British warships for patrol of the Northwest Approaches. As well, Roosevelt had agreed to voice Churchill’s ultimatum to the Japanese. Churchill, in memos to the cabinet and to acting prime minister Clement Attlee, took delight in pointing out that he had drafted the warning. In return, Churchill gave Roosevelt the Atlantic Charter, Point Three and all. The charter was duly announced to the people of both nations, and the world, on August 14.350

  Prince of Wales was on that day making for home, the seas still rough. The notables spent that evening playing backgammon (Churchill played rashly, but won) and watching a Laurel and Hardy movie and Donald Duck cartoons. When a convoy of more than seventy ships was spotted, Prince of Wales threaded its way among the freighters and tankers while Churchill, sweeping his binoculars over the ships, their decks crammed with airplanes and “cannons,” declared the sight “delectable.” After a stopover in Iceland followed by two more days at sea, Churchill reached Scapa Flow on August 18. The last British prime minister to venture abroad to meet a foreign leader had come home waving a worthless piece of paper. Churchill returned from overseas with something that would prove as valuable as Roosevelt’s promise of untold supplies of weapons—a growing fondness for, and trust in, the American president. A friendship had germinated, and would grow, although, as in any friendship, there would be rough spots, in time, very rough. Churchill arrived home content, rested, and enthusiastic, and it showed. Cadogan recalled that on the train journey from Scotland, the Old Man “did himself well, finishing up with a Benedictine, ten minutes later he called for a brandy. The attendant reminded him he had had Benedictine. He [Churchill] said, ‘I know, I want some brandy to clean it up.’ ”351

  He arrived back at the Annexe on the nineteenth, “smiling broadly,” Colville observed, “and still dressed in his nautical clothes.” An ebullient Churchill told the cabinet that Argentia “symbolizes… the marshalling of the good forces of the world against the evil forces.” He added, “The American Naval Officers had not concealed their keenness to enter the war.” Lieutenant Colonel Ian Jacob, who had recorded the sessions between the American and British military chiefs—Churchill did not attend—reached the opposite conclusion. To his diary Jacob confided that “not a single American officer had shown the slightest keenness to be in the war on our side.” Rather, the Americans “seem to think that the war can be won by our simply not losing it at sea.” Yet Churchill and Roosevelt had hatched a plan for changing the course of the sea war, perhaps the entire war. Roosevelt, Churchill told the cabinet, was all for provoking an “incident” on the high seas and was prepared “to wage war without declaring it.” That pledge sustained Churchill throughout the autumn, but in fact, the only thing Churchill had in writing from the president was the Atlantic Charter, which was, if nothing else, an eight-barbed hook on which Roosevelt could reel in empires, evil or benign.352

  Almost immediately upon his return to London, Churchill learned that Roosevelt had reneged on the promised threat to Japan. Roosevelt’s roar of the lion at Argentia, wrote his biographer James MacGregor Burns, “had become a lamb’s bleat.” Roosevelt instead tried to buy time by keeping up the talks with the Japanese, a process Hugh Dalton called “rather a humbugging negotiation.” Several attendees of the Argentia conference told Dalton that “there had been a slide-back in U.S. opinion since May or June” and that Roosevelt’s chance to bring America in had gone out with that tide. As for the promise of limitless supplies finding their way from America to Britain, the latest U.S. production figures showed a decrease in factory output since the first quarter of 1941, while only two billion of the seven-billion-dollar Lend-Lease program was actually under contract, not enough to make a difference if Russia fell.353

  Meanwhile, the news from Russia only grew worse. Ultra revealed that the Nazis had engaged in “mass shootings of [almost 40,000] victims described variously by Berlin as ‘Jews,’ ‘Jewish plunderers’ [and] ‘Jewish Bolsheviks.’ ” Hitler’s armies, seemingly omnipotent, were hell-bent for Leningrad and Moscow. The Führer ordered that Leningrad “be wiped off the face of the earth.” He soon decreed that Moscow be likewise erased. The situation in Russia was so dire that Churchill considered asking Stalin to destroy his own oil fields if defeat appeared imminent. He went so far as to advise the War Cabinet that “we must be ready to bomb the fields ourselves if the Russians did not destroy them.”354

  We have not yet declared or taken a direct part in a shooting war,” declared a September 2 New York Times editorial. “But we have taken a position which must force us ultimately to take such a direct part if our present policy does not prove sufficient to defeat Hitler. It is a position from which we cannot now retreat… a position from which the overwhelming majority of Americans have no wish to retreat.” No one seriously thought that the “present policy” of avoiding conflict with Germany while supplying Britain food and weapons would bring down Hitler. In essence, the New York Times had proclaimed: We have taken a position that at some point will lead to war, and we will stick by that position.355

  That line of thought held that America was a ship drifting toward war, and that wasn’t good enough for Churchill. To persuade Roosevelt to steer America into the war remained Churchill’s priority for the remainder of the year. When persuasion failed, the utility of chicanery presented itself. When his pleas to Roosevelt for more American naval action in the eastern Atlantic went unheeded, he cooked up schemes. One night earlier in the year, Churchill, Winant, and Harriman chatted over drinks about the benefit to Britain of an “incident” on the high seas involving a German attack on an American ship. The U.S. government—at least Congress—would have been shocked, and anything but thankful, had it learned that Winston Churchill was engaged in a ploy to precipitate a widening of the war, at America’s expense. His request that American ships locate and track Bismarck had been an attempt to drag the Yanks in. As were his pleas for American nav
al patrols in the Azores. Throughout the spring and summer, Roosevelt refused Churchill’s bait, and for good reason. The president had no solution to the problems that would arise from a U.S. warship running into the wrong German ship in the wrong place and with disastrous results. Roosevelt could only hope that nothing unfortunate took place on the high seas until such time as the U.S. Navy and the American people were prepared, militarily and emotionally, for war.356

  Then, at Argentia Roosevelt himself brought up the value of “an incident” on the high seas, and told Churchill that the United States planned to put at least one U.S. merchantman, flying the U.S. flag, in every convoy under escort by U.S. warships. The challenge to Hitler was obvious; were he to shoot at an American merchant ship guarded by American warships, he would face the consequences. Again, it seemed as if Roosevelt had given Churchill what he sought.

  The incident duly occurred on September 4, when the destroyer USS Greer, while making a mail run to Iceland, made sonar contact with a U-boat. Greer notified the British of the position and waited for British destroyers to show up. None appeared. Greer, meanwhile, dodged two torpedoes fired from the lurking U-boat, while the German sub dodged nineteen depth charges loosed by Greer. This potentially incendiary business on the seas ended with Greer and its crew steaming unscathed into port. Roosevelt seized the occasion on September 11 to deliver another of his fireside chats, one in which he brought America nearer to outright involvement in the European war. Declaring that Germany was guilty of an “act of piracy” in attacking Greer, he unleashed American ships and planes for offensive action. In waters “which we deem necessary for our defense,” he declared, “American naval vessels and American planes will no longer wait until Axis submarines lurking under the water, or Axis raiders on the surface of the sea, strike their deadly blow first.” They would shoot on sight. By moving the American defense zone even farther east, Roosevelt had, in effect, declared “undeclared war” in the mid-Atlantic. He then proclaimed—as he had to Churchill at Argentia—the right of U.S. ships to escort any nation’s ships, anywhere. Still, as he had in late April, he kept his warships out of the hottest battle zones—the Northwest Approaches, the Azores, and along the West African coast—where the dangers to British convoys bound from Britain around the Cape to the Middle East were greatest.357