The fifty-eight-year-old admiral had studied English at Harvard two decades earlier and had served as naval attaché in Washington in the late 1920s. During his time in Cambridge and Washington, he had grown to respect Americans, and had also learned to play a ruthless game of poker. He was not a gambler, but he knew how to play a hand. Once he took Port Moresby and Tulagi, he intended to shut the door on American designs in the South Pacific by building an airfield on the small British protectorate of Guadalcanal. In support of those objectives, his Port Moresby task forces were to seek out and destroy the meager American fleet that would surely steam into the Coral Sea to dispute the matter. The American response would have to be meager; two of its four aircraft carriers in the Pacific stood off the Hawaiian Islands, which left only two available for duty in the Coral Sea. The odds lay heavily with the Japanese, whose strength and experienced airmen far exceeded the Americans’ and Britons’ combined. Yamamoto held the cards, a hand made sweeter by virtue of his having dealt it himself.171
Then, Franklin Roosevelt launched an audacious—though largely symbolic—strike of his own. In early April, Roosevelt dispatched two of his four carriers to within five hundred miles of Japan in order to carry out a bombing raid on Tokyo. From one of the carriers, USS Hornet, sixteen American twin-engine B-25 medium bombers commanded by Colonel Jimmy Doolittle set off for Japan. The damage Doolittle’s raiders inflicted was minimal, but Yamamoto, shocked at the affront to his emperor, decided that the time had come for “the annihilation” of the American Pacific fleet. He ordered that the Midway and Coral Sea ventures be carried out virtually simultaneously. Doolittle’s raid was just the sort of diversion Churchill had pressed Roosevelt to undertake, and it had had the desired effect on the Japanese. Roosevelt, ebullient over Doolittle’s success, telegraphed Churchill, “We have had a good crack at Japan,” and added that he hoped it would lead to Japan pulling its “big ships” from the Indian Ocean. This was why the president had played down Churchill’s concern over an Axis juncture in the Middle East as a “remote prospect.” Yet the prospect would prove to be remote only if the Japanese navy committed an inexplicable error.172
This Admiral Nagumo did when, after pummeling the British in the Indian Ocean, he sent three of his aircraft carriers back to Japan for refitting. In trading planes with the British in the Indian Ocean—about fifty each—Nagumo had come out the winner by virtue of the fact that the British were just about out of aircraft, while Nagumo still had almost all of his. Nagumo’s fleet emerged, as usual, unscathed. By mid-April, the Royal Navy had virtually nothing left, and what little it had was steaming for East Africa. The Americans had not much more. Churchill’s desperation during those weeks was entirely justified. Yet, rather than finish the job, Nagumo, evidencing early symptoms of what the Japanese later called Victory Disease, chose to go home and perform a cosmetic refitting on his ships. Churchill often complained that his generals preferred certainty to hazard. In this case, Nagumo certainly did.
His decision proved disastrous when in early May a diminished Japanese carrier force met the Americans in the Battle of the Coral Sea. It was the first aircraft-carrier battle in history and the first naval battle where combatants could not see the opposing fleet. The Americans lost one carrier sunk and one damaged. The Japanese lost one light carrier sunk—the first such Japanese casualty of the war—and two heavy carriers damaged. The American navy’s losses, relative to its overall strength, were far more egregious than the Japanese losses. But Yamamoto folded his hand. By doing so he lost an opportunity and the battle. Churchill later wrote that had the Japanese sailed into the Coral Sea with two or three more carriers, the Americans might well have never sailed out. Yamamoto had long maintained that in order to force a settlement with America, Japan had to destroy the U.S. Pacific fleet within six months of the start of war, or face the consequences of a re-armed United States. Although the Coral Sea affair was an opportunity lost for Yamamoto to do just that, another soon presented itself. He scheduled his decisive battle for dawn on June 6—one day shy of six months after Pearl Harbor. The place would be Midway Island.173
In their exchange of telegrams that winter and spring, Churchill and Roosevelt weighed almost every issue in terms of shipping tonnage, to the point where they became experts on the calculus of hulls and cargo and “man-lift,” the capacity needed to carry men from one place to another. When Churchill asked for the use of American ships to move 40,000 troops to India, Roosevelt agreed, but he told Churchill that such a shuffling of resources would result in a cascade of disrupted plans: the end of Gymnast; the gutting of the effort to send American troops to Britain for a 1942 invasion of Europe; a halt to shipping munitions to China; and a further reduction in the amount of goods reaching the Russians, who, Roosevelt offered, “are killing more Germans… than you and I put together.” He further declared that America’s 1942 man-lift capacity was only 90,000 men, a figure he hoped to double in 1943. This shocked Churchill, who in reply proposed that Roosevelt could solve the problem by “giving orders now to double or treble the American man-lift by 1943,” as if Roosevelt could somehow conjure ships. Churchill offered that if no improvement could be made to those figures, “there may well be no question of restoring the situation [in Europe] until 1944,” which obviously meant that all the inter-Allied talk about a large-scale invasion in 1942 or 1943 was just that, talk. In that case, he wrote, the Allies would reap the “many dangers that would follow from such a prolongation of the war.” Shipping was now a zero-sum game. Roosevelt replied with a remarkably detailed calculation of future American “man-lift” that ended with: “Thus, neglecting losses, the total troop-carrying capacity of U.S. vessels by June, 1944, will be 400,000 men.” Since these figures were known to the two leaders and their most trusted lieutenants only, the press on both sides of the Atlantic—and Stalin—continued to beat their drums for an immediate second European front, unaware that shipping constraints and the lack of American preparedness, not Churchill, to whom the press ascribed a hesitancy in the matter, were the reasons that there could be none in 1942, and most likely not in 1943 either.174
Roosevelt had not pulled his estimate of 400,000 men from a hat; it was the minimum initial number of American combat troops the Combined Chiefs agreed were needed for a successful invasion of Europe. Roosevelt’s prediction of when these troops would be ready—June 1944—proved remarkably accurate, and it is largely ignored by those, then and since, who blame Churchill for not busting into Europe earlier. Yet, in the spring of 1942, Churchill and Roosevelt knew that they could not simply wait out Germany for two years. They had to fight, in tandem. But where, and when?
Sir Stafford Cripps arrived in Delhi on March 22. For the next three weeks he conducted lengthy discussions with leaders in Gandhi’s National Congress, offering them autonomy down the road. The offer was based on the War Cabinet’s promise of postwar Dominion status for India in exchange for absolute loyalty in the war against Japan. Dominion status amounted to de facto independence. The talks went nowhere. If politics is the art of compromise in furtherance of a cause, Gandhi, by not giving an inch, hurt his cause. He persisted in his belief that the British presence in India was bait for the Japanese, who were more likely to invade India if the British did not depart. He demanded either immediate independence or, at the least, a national government. Chiang had just weeks earlier tried to impress upon Gandhi the need to fight the Japanese, for the Japanese despised peacemakers more than war givers, and gave no quarter to either, as the recent slaughters in Singapore and the Nanking massacre in 1937 attested to. The Japanese would spare no one, Chiang warned, whether the British stayed or left. Gandhi listened politely; the generalissimo went home rebuffed. Gandhi understood, George Orwell later wrote, that “if you are not prepared to take life, you must often be prepared for lives to be lost in some other way.” Gandhi accepted that a nonviolent opposition to a Japanese invasion might cost millions of lives. Cripps argued the same case as had Chiang, and got no f
urther. Churchill expected as much. He later wrote, “In the intensity of the struggle for life from day to day, and with four hundred million helpless people to defend from the horrors of Japanese conquest, I was able to bear this news, which I had thought probable from the beginning, with philosophy. I knew how bitterly Stafford Cripps would feel the failure of his Mission, and I sought to comfort him.” Churchill may have been feeling unusually expansive when writing those words, for upon his return to London, Cripps, not Churchill, found his name associated with the mission and its failure.175
It was over India and empire that Churchill and Roosevelt had their first serious political argument. Roosevelt presumed he could speak frankly to Churchill on most matters, including—and mistakenly—India. Churchill, out of politeness, kept Roosevelt abreast of Cripps’s progress, or lack thereof. When the talks broke down, Roosevelt blamed Churchill, in the most frank terms. The two men had very different long-term objectives. Beyond the defeat of Hitler, Churchill wanted above all to preserve the British Empire, including of course India, a goal that was anathema to Roosevelt, a devout anti-imperialist. “Preserve,” for Churchill, meant “protect.” For Roosevelt it meant “keep.” On April 11, Roosevelt sent a private letter to Churchill, by way of Harry Hopkins, in which he outlined his position on India in terms of the thirteen colonies and George III. Roosevelt suggested Churchill consider that India might be ripe for the same transformation as the American states had experienced—from colonies to loose federation and finally to nationhood. Churchill in his memoirs offered a benign take on Roosevelt’s musings: “The President’s mind was back in the American War of Independence…. I, on the other hand, was responsible for preserving the peace and safety of the Indian continent, sheltering nearly a fifth of the population of the globe. Our resources were slender and strained to the full.” Had Roosevelt not offered one final incendiary opinion in his missive, the matter might have remained benign. But he added this: “The feeling is almost universally held here that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British government to concede to the Indians the right of self-government. I feel I must place this issue before you very frankly, and I know you will understand my reasons for so doing.”176
Churchill not only did not understand but was enraged by what he saw as Roosevelt’s meddling. He had thought that his reaction in December to Roosevelt’s verbal lecture had set things straight regarding India, but here was Roosevelt again, and in writing, no less. The note reached Chequers at 3:00 A.M. on Sunday and found Hopkins and Churchill still up and chatting. Upon reading the message Churchill unleashed a barrage of curses that echoed throughout the great house. After regaining (some) of his composure, he voiced his long-held belief that any imposition of political will by the Hindus upon one hundred million Indian Muslims would result in a total breakdown of order, and large-scale bloodshed, and this at the very moment the Japanese were waiting in the wings, with Gandhi and his “Quit India” cohorts ready to accept the enemy peacefully, thereby easing a Japanese passage to the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Muslim League was demanding the creation of a separate Muslim state, Pakistan. To accede to Gandhi’s demands would necessitate acceding to the Muslim League. With the war on, Churchill was unwilling to do either. India’s defense against Japan required military action, not political. India was poor and life was hard—the average Indian earned less than $15 per year and could expect to live just twenty-seven years. Yet, without its tether to London it would be a far poorer place, and were the Japanese to arrive, Churchill believed it would become a desolate place.177
At the end of his tutorial, he told Hopkins that if his resignation would advance the alliance and American opinion, he was willing to do so, but even in that case he was sure the cabinet would continue with its present Indian policy. It was an idle threat, but credible in that the free world looked upon Churchill as the hero of the war. Roosevelt could ill afford to be seen as the man who drove Winston Churchill into political exile. Roosevelt, Harriman later recalled, “was for breaking up the British empire, and Churchill had no intention of doing so…. India was a known subject, but not one to discuss with Churchill.” Hopkins concluded likewise after Churchill’s harangue, and cabled Roosevelt accordingly.178
Churchill drafted a sober reply to Roosevelt in which he told the president that a serious disagreement between them “would break my heart, and would surely deeply injure both our countries at the height of this terrible struggle.” He also allowed that Roosevelt’s letter would remain private, a backhanded yet clear way of telling Roosevelt that the cabinet would erupt if it got wind of his preachifying. Yet, Churchill appears not to have grasped a nuanced element of Roosevelt’s thinking: Roosevelt was willing to fight for the survival of Britain, but not for the survival of British interests, that is, the British Empire. “The winds of change had begun to blow,” Christopher Soames, later Churchill’s son-in-law, recalled, “but Churchill had yet to see them.”179
Within months, Gandhi and the Indian National Congress called for strikes. The “Quit India” movement took to the streets. Ten battalions of British and Indian troops who should have been killing Japanese soldiers became tied down fighting Indian nationalists; more than one thousand Indians were killed. When it was over, the British placed Gandhi under house arrest at a small palace at Poona, and jailed his deputy Jawaharlal Nehru and thousands of “Quit India” partisans for the duration of the war. Gandhi had distanced himself from reality when he advised not only Indians but also Czechs and European Jews to accept their fate: “I can conceive [of] the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of the dictators.” That proved to be an ironic choice of words given that Hitler’s final butcher’s bill exceeded six million Jews, and several hundred thousands of Czechs and Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and at least twenty million Polish and Russian civilians. On April 19, Joseph Goebbels dropped an entry into his diary that Churchill himself could have written: “Gandhi gave an interview in which he once again urged non-resistance. He is a fool whose politics seem merely calculated to drag India further and further into misfortune.”180
Writing years later, Churchill minced no words: The “people of Hindustan… were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island.” By 1942 the cost to Britain of defending India was running at almost one million pounds per day, an amount fixed by contracts drawn up in India at exorbitant rates and at the inflated prewar rate of exchange. In essence, the viceroy and India were billing London for India’s defense. Churchill informed the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, that HMG reserved the right to file counterclaims after the war. Yet for Churchill, the fact that more than a million Hindu and Muslim men “volunteered to serve” (italics Churchill) in the defense of India, trumped all criticisms of HMG’s imperial policy, whether by Roosevelt or Gandhi or anyone else. Loyalty, not British imperial might, kept India bound to London. In return, Churchill wrote, London “effectively protected” India from “the horrors and perils of World War.”181
In their ongoing correspondence, both Roosevelt and Churchill displayed a knack for knowing when a personal touch was called for—a best wishes to a spouse, or a few generous words about the other fellow’s predicaments. Shortly after the India episode, Roosevelt gave Churchill a stamp that had been canceled at Argentia the previous August. This gesture was pure Roosevelt, simple, understated, and symbolic, much like his fireside chats. Churchill reciprocated with a typically Churchillian flourish; he sent Roosevelt specially bound volumes of the complete works of Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill.182
Churchill’s most cutting response to Roosevelt’s position came when, in his memoirs, he took a mighty swipe at his old friend. Of the president’s suggestion that the British simply walk away from India, he wrote: “I was thankful that events [the war against Japan] made such an act of madness impossible.” Idealism was all well and good, Churchill continued, but not “idealism at other people’s expense and without regard to the consequences
of ruin and slaughter which fall upon millions of humble homes.” Such ruin and slaughter in fact descended upon India in 1946, and led in 1947 to its partition into Pakistan and India, after the murder of thousands of Hindus and Muslims, and the forced migration of millions more.183
Hopkins had come to London not to discuss India but to accompany General George Marshall, who was there to brief Churchill and the British chiefs on the proposed American strategy in Europe. Marshall’s plan, drawn up by Eisenhower, was straightforward. Operation Sledgehammer would relieve pressure on the Russians—who Eisenhower expected to soon be in dire straits—by putting several divisions ashore in France in the vicinity of Cherbourg on the Cotentin Peninsula. The plan, Roosevelt cabled Churchill, “has my heart and mind in it.” It didn’t have Churchill’s. He told Roosevelt that Sledgehammer should not be undertaken if Russia was losing, but only if Russia was winning, for if Russia “is in dire straits, it will not help her or us to come a nasty cropper on our own.”184
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