by Alan Watson
Yesterday I was on the bridge, watching the mountainous waves and this ship, which is no pup, cutting through them and mocking their anger. I asked myself, why is it that that the ship beats the waves, when they are so many and the ship is one? The reason is that the ship has a purpose and the waves have none. They just flop around.3
The troops on board would remind Winston Churchill vividly of part of his purpose in making the voyage. Cunard’s records show that starting on 24 August 1945, with 14,996 US troops returning to New York, the Queen Elizabeth was shuttling tens of thousands back home – nearly 15,000 on 14 September alone. America’s presence in Western Europe was flooding west while the Red Army stayed put.
On this voyage as on all his others on the two Queen Elizabeths he was revered and coveted. For Cunard there could be no more important passenger. Churchill would have had no cause to repeat the impatient ditty with which he always confronted his doctor, Lord Moran.
When you need a whisky:
‘Put your fingers on the bell
And make it ring like bloody hell!’4
The service would have been impeccable but the maps had gone, as had the map room which came as part and parcel with his premiership. He was – to the world at least and as yet – not at the centre of things.
In mid-Atlantic this must have been the tension that gnawed at him – that he had been marginalised by history. He had said to Moran days before the departure: ‘There are lots of flies buzzing round this old decaying carcass. I want something to keep them away. I want sun, solitude, serenity, and something to eat and something to drink.’ But Moran noted something else. He wrote, ‘What he really wants is something quite different. Looking up at me, he said “I think I can be of some use over there. They will take things from me.”’5
For Churchill this was a voyage of hope. He knew well that he was ‘a small lion walking between a huge Russian bear and a great American elephant’.6 He also knew that the new president, with whom in a few weeks he would travel to Fulton, believed the US Congress would never sanction US troops remaining in Europe for more than two years. The Cunarders would continue to run from East to West carrying them home. But he also felt in his heart the imperative to match the challenge of the time. From Berlin he had written to his daughter, Sarah: ‘Tonight the sun goes down on more suffering than ever before in the World.’7 But he had always believed in the strength and energy of that sunrise to the West. That was his distinction.
The ‘mountainous waves’ delayed the arrival in Manhattan by five hours and they docked at 8.30pm on 14 January. It was fine and cold, and their welcome revealed how right his instincts had been – that in the USA they would sit up and take notice. There were hundreds of police and a vast crowd of reporters. Churchill was indeed back at the centre of things. Smoking a large cigar he agreed to an impromptu press conference as soon as he had descended from the gangway. Crammed into a waiting room ablaze with flash bulbs bursting, and noisy with dozens of shouted questions, he went straight to his official remit – a $4 billion loan the United Kingdom was seeking from the United States. ‘Some countries were overrun,’ he said. ‘We were fighting and using up our credit. We borrowed all we could.’ But Britain only wanted to be helped ‘back on our feet again’. He beamed at his audience, wiping his eyes moist with the impact of the flashlights. This was the consummate political showman coming back on form. Walter Locke, an American journalist, wrote a sketch of him ‘round faced, round headed, benevolent, almost jolly . . . a look of genial impishness . . . humour flashes in his face and sparkles in his tongue. He sits slumped . . . this atomic bomb of an Englishman.’8
Locke was right to detect the power behind the bonhomie. Asked about his leadership of the Conservative Party his reply was sharp and will have brought little comfort to Anthony Eden reading it in London the next day. ‘I have no intention whatever of ceasing to lead the Conservative Party.’ As to becoming the first Secretary-General of the United Nations (a proposal being mooted at the time), ‘That is the first I’ve heard of it’.9 The implication was that it would be the last.
7
Have a Holiday, Get a Loan
The period between Churchill’s disembarkation on 14 January and the delivery of his speech at Fulton on 5 March can be seen as an interlude before the main event. Certainly what he would say at Fulton increasingly dominated his thinking as the weeks went past. Fulton became the drumbeat and, by his return to Washington in the days immediately before boarding the train with Truman, his mind was marching at its pace. Momentum and tension were palpable.
However, Churchill did have other preoccupations. The Attlee government had made it clear that a priority was to try and persuade the Americans to loan substantial funds to the UK. Certainly he was in the United States to enjoy himself in ways he found rejuvenating – receiving the generous hospitality of his Miami host, Colonel Clarke, soaking up the sun to the extent his pale complexion would allow, swimming, painting, drinking, smoking and talking.
But all this could not disguise the imperative of gaining the loan – his unofficial remit. He had to explain to the US authorities Britain’s desperate and deserving requirement for, if possible, an interest-free loan to mitigate its huge debts now that Lend-Lease had abruptly and brutally ended. Secretary of State James Byrnes, a tough and sometimes hostile partner for Britain, would travel down to meet Churchill in Miami as would his friend and banker Bernard Baruch. Byrnes would describe the visit as ‘purely social’. In Churchill’s mind he had summoned both men on the king’s business.
The difficulty Churchill encountered on this issue would profoundly influence his later behaviour in 1946. He understood in order to gain American financial generosity for Britain and indeed for Europe the British and the Europeans would have to do more for themselves. His experience in the USA at the beginning of the year shaped his thinking for the speech he would deliver six months later in Zurich.
In the middle of the Florida interlude, Churchill’s party crossed over to Cuba.
For Churchill this whole pre-Fulton episode followed the tracks of the past. He had first come to America in 1895 determined to see military action in Cuba where the Spanish were seeking to suppress rebellion, a task Churchill thought they would fail to achieve as certainly as decades later Batista would fall before Castro. Churchill was drawn almost as a moth to a candle by conflict and his good luck in escaping bullets ‘that whizzed past his head like demented insects’1 on several occasions confirmed his life-long imperviousness to physical danger.
Back in 1895 he had travelled to Cuba by the same route. He had crossed to New York by Cunard sailing in their steamship Etruria. He had stayed briefly in New York, which delighted him as did the Americans. They were ‘great, crude, strong young people’ and ‘boisterous’.2 He headed down to Florida by train – the sybarite in him rejoicing in the sun – and then to Cuba, where he not only saw action, escaped death and received his first decoration – from the Spanish – but also discovered Havana cigars which he was to savour for a lifetime and turn into one of the most successful political brands of all time.
Thus Churchill, for whom the past always informed the present and who was also well able to extract pleasure from the moment, built back up his energy and joie de vivre.
This was evident from the moment he arrived in Florida. On his arrival in Miami he was immediately immersed in a press conference held on the lawn of Colonel Clarke’s home where forty journalists and photographers gathered ‘in the shade of coconut palms and luxuriant tropical foliage’. Churchill remarked that it was ‘warmer than the Riviera’ and had to take off his grey felt hat to mop his brow.3 He joked about his painting – no, he wouldn’t be concentrating on Miami Beach’s ‘bathing beauties’. ‘I am not much good at figures,’4 he said.
However, he was very clear about the figures involved in the loan Britain needed. ‘We have got to face the extraordinary situation of buying food and goods against very heavy odds in our trade balance. We are
buying time – time to get on our feet again.’5 And Britain had the right to ask America for the loan. ‘We have suffered more financially than any other country.’ Pointedly given America’s late entry into the war, he said, ‘Other countries were not fighting and using up their credit.’ His conclusion was blunt: ‘That is why we seek the loan. We went all out and remained the only great unbroken nation from start to finish.’
It was the same argument he would use a few weeks later during James Byrnes’ and Baruch’s visit to Miami, knowing full well that Byrnes was on record saying that the USA should not extend credits abroad before there had been a full accounting and listing of American assets at home. The Senate would prove difficult.
That opinion on the Hill was so divided on the loan was in part Churchill’s fault. Earlier, in the House of Commons, neither Labour nor Tory were satisfied with what had been negotiated. The US negotiations had proved very tough and Britain’s brilliant economist John Maynard Keynes had failed to move them. As Keynes waspishly observed, America tried to ‘pick out the eyes of the British Empire’.6 Truman had cut off Lend-Lease with brutal brusqueness. It seemed that for any new arrangement, Britain would have to pay through the nose. The issue was not the rate of interest, although many Parliamentarians, including Churchill himself, believed that the loan should be interest free – an acknowledgement of what the free world owed Britain for its courage in 1940. The affront most resented by the Tories was the demand that imperial trading arrangements be abolished and replaced with a free-trading system that would favour the USA. In particular, the rump Tory Party left in the House of Commons after the party’s rout in the 1945 general election feared the impact on British agriculture of American imports. Most of them represented farming constituencies.
Thus it was that, when the government under Attlee brought a bill to the House accepting US terms for the loan, Churchill was constrained and lost control of half his party. The government expected the Tories to back the bill however reluctantly as the best that could be negotiated and far better than insolvency.
Churchill’s speech was ambiguous. He was clearly on a cross. He complained about the terms but could not and would not reject the American offer. Bob Boothby and others were contemptuous. This was an overt US attack on the British Empire and here was the man, pledged to defend it, now giving it away.
In the end the Tories abstained officially, Churchill sitting out the vote in impotence while half his MPs defied even this half-hearted whip and voted against the bill. Churchill was close to losing the leadership of his party, confirming his distaste for his role as Leader of the Opposition.
In the USA, by contrast, Churchill’s abstention on the loan was interpreted as a rejection of the American offer. For many, like Churchill’s friend Baruch, it seemed that as Churchill was against the loan, they did not need to be for it. Opinion in Congress was close and bad tempered. Thus for the loan to pass on the Hill, Churchill needed to clarify his position. His genius was not simply to explain his embarrassment in Westminster, but to use the message that he was preparing for Fulton to pressure the Americans on the loan. The implication of his Iron Curtain speech would be clear: to stop Stalin, Britain had to be supported.
The fact was that Churchill expected US generosity and believed Britain deserved it. The truth was that Churchill had accommodated himself to being disappointed by the Americans. The analogy is used of the lover determined not to be dismayed. Certainly he wooed Roosevelt, Truman’s predecessor, with pleas, entreaties and flattery that a medieval troubadour would have envied. And the course of true love became harder as the disparity between British and US power grew greater.
When Churchill met Roosevelt on the USS Augusta, in Placentia Bay Newfoundland on 9 August 1941, he was to challenge the president bluntly and emotionally over dinner about his opposition to the British Empire. Roosevelt’s hostility towards and occasional derision of Churchill’s imperialism is well documented by Roosevelt’s son. But in that year the USA had no troops engaged in Europe. Roosevelt’s hostility to the British Empire did not give him any moral high ground – that belonged to Churchill because Britain was fighting Hitler alone. The military deployment was Churchill’s, but he knew the reality of British weakness. He had the right and the nerve to display his anger at Roosevelt’s presumption but, ultimately, his task was to win America’s support both militarily and monetarily.
But by D-Day, and every week thereafter, the disparity of power yawned wider. Churchill’s relations with Roosevelt deteriorated. The prime minister felt himself snubbed and British interests endangered by Roosevelt’s wooing of Stalin. The USA had decided to give clear preference to the USSR within the Grand Alliance and, at a personal level, Churchill found it very difficult to take.
We cannot know how great a factor this became in the prime minister’s hesitancy about attending Roosevelt’s funeral in April 1945. His eventual decision not to attend surprised everyone on both sides of the Atlantic – particularly the new President Truman.
Many years later – on 15 October 1951 – Churchill was travelling by train from an election meeting he had addressed in Huddersfield. He was accompanied by Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Lord Layton and his own doctor, Lord Moran. Dinner was served and, emboldened by Churchill’s mood, Lord Layton asked him provocatively (according to Moran’s diaries):
‘Tell us, Winston, what was your biggest mistake . . . in the war?’7
Churchill did not hesitate.
‘I’ve no doubt at all. Not going to meet Truman after Roosevelt’s death. During the next three months, tremendous decisions were made and I had a feeling that they were being made by a man I did not know. It wasn’t my fault. I wanted to cross the Atlantic. But Anthony [Eden] put me off. He telegraphed from Washington that they did not want me.’8
Certainly Churchill discarded the opportunity to meet him and talk in depth after the funeral. That he missed this chance then will have contributed to the alacrity with which he accepted the invitation to Fulton.
8
A Synthesis of Agendas
For Churchill the motivation at the core of his wooing of America and its president was not a desire to be at the centre of events nor to recapture celebrity status – what drove him was not psychology but ideology. He saw Soviet power as a mortal threat. He believed an understanding with the Soviets was obtainable but only if the West displayed determination and force. At Yalta he had accepted Stalin’s promises but in his heart had not believed them. Roosevelt had. The time had come to compel Stalin to show his cards.
The paragraphs that follow delineate the deep roots of Churchill’s antagonism, tempered as it was by his recognition of what Russian courage and sacrifice had achieved in the war.
As we have seen, in proposing a toast in Moscow in October 1944, Churchill acknowledged this debt with complete sincerity. He knew well what tearing the ‘guts out of the filthy Nazis’1 had involved. From the launch of Barbarossa by Hitler on 22 June 1941 and D-Day on 6 June 1944, 93 per cent of German military casualties were inflicted by Soviet forces – 4.2 million German troops missing, wounded or killed. The cost to Russia was around 20 million casualties, civilian and military.
Churchill’s admiration, even veneration, of Russian sacrifice during the war did not mask his deep repugnance of Bolshevism. He had ordered Britain’s Arctic convoys to supply arms to Russia at an awful cost in casualties. He was clear that the menace of Hitler required that he do everything possible to sustain Russia, but this did not diminish his acute awareness of the threat of Bolshevism and the brutality of the Soviet regime. Roosevelt was less sure.
It is because of this that his Fulton speech was to have such ‘bottom’. As Britain’s Minister of War in 1919 he had backed military intervention in the Russian Civil War. In 1920 he described the Bolsheviks as having driven ‘man from the civilization of the 20th century into a condition of barbarism’.2 By 1942 he was already warning that ‘it would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid
the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe’.3 And after this had happened he told the House of Commons in a debate in 1949 that ‘the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race’.4
Thus Churchill’s loathing of Bolshevism was curtailed by the exigencies of the Second World War but it was not repudiated by him either privately or, on occasion, publicly. In the run-up to Fulton, Churchill felt the moment had come to beat ‘the crocodile’ over the head, and what convinced him of this were the events that concluded the war. They revealed Stalin’s intentions all too clearly. For Churchill, Stalin’s behaviour at Yalta and Potsdam was particularly galling as he felt he had been duped by Stalin’s promises to establish a form of democracy in the countries conquered by the Red Army.
For Churchill, two events were seminal. The first occurred in August 1944 when Stalin halted the Red Army, then sixty miles from Warsaw. There they waited while the SS annihilated the Warsaw uprising killing 250,000 civilians and condemning half a million to concentration camps. Stalin refused to allow the Western Allies to fly in supplies to help Poland’s Home Army from bases in the Ukraine and his refusal shattered America’s ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, who had pleaded for it.
Churchill was also outraged by Stalin’s ruthlessness, though not surprised. After all, Stalin had stated clearly that ‘This war is not as in the past: whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system – as far as his army can reach.’5 Days before Fulton, Stalin publicly amplified this message. Capitalism and communism could never co-exist. His message was that war was the inevitable result of capitalism.
It is at this point that Churchill’s journey to America and to Fulton crosses the trajectory of another powerful warning of Soviet intent also spurred by the recent events. This is what became known as the ‘long telegram’ written by George Kennan, the number 2 at the American embassy in Moscow. As I have mentioned before, it arrived in Washington two weeks before Fulton and was unknown to the public. It was secret, unreported in the press and unknown to the public. In the administration it caused a sensation. There is no conclusive evidence that the text was read by either Truman or Churchill, but the former would have been warned of its contents by Secretary of State Byrnes and the latter almost certainly by Kennan’s boss, Averell Harriman. Kennan had arrived in Moscow in July 1944 to serve under Harriman who authorised him to write this famous report of Soviet intentions – the ‘long telegram’. In Washington, they didn’t take much notice of Kennan’s warnings but, like Churchill, he had a laser-like ability to focus on events and, spurred by these, he took his opportunity in February 1946.
