There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs . . . Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no mercy to weakness in any form. With the Russians fighting as they are and the Americans so stubborn at Luzon, the whole reputation of our country and our race is involved.
Similar considerations were involved in the long resistance which Churchill put up to Roosevelt’s persistent nudges about Indian independence. Churchill had gone so far as to leave Stanley Baldwin’s “Shadow Cabinet” ten years earlier on this question, protesting at even the mildest flirtation by Tories with a move to eventual freedom for India. He was unlikely to vary this stand to please an American Democrat. Whenever the argument about self-determination came up, he was able to adapt his general opposition to make it sound like wartime exigency. At different times he argued that Britain could not break its trust with the Muslims, with the Untouchables, and with the princes, or at least not in time of war. In the immediate aftermath of the Singapore debacle, Roosevelt nonetheless strove to keep the question on the agenda. He even rather archly suggested a trial confederation for India, on the model of the thirteen colonies. If the analogy lacked force, the repeated application of pressure did not. Churchill even told Harry Hopkins that he was ready to resign on the point, rather than concede to his fellow Old Harrovian Jawaharlal Nehru. On May 31, 1942, Churchill cabled Hopkins expressing concern at the movements of Roosevelt’s commissioner in Delhi, Louis Johnson:
There are rumors that the President will invite Pandit Nehru to the United States. I hope there is no truth in this and that anyway the President will consult me beforehand. We do not at all relish the prospect of Johnson’s return to India. The Viceroy is also much perturbed at the prospect. We are fighting to defend this vast mass of helpless Indians from imminent invasion.
A few weeks later, on July 30, Churchill was fending off America’s favorite Asian politician in the same tones. “We do not agree,” he cabled to Roosevelt, “with Chiang Kai Shek’s estimate of the Indian situation. The Congress Party in no way represents India.” Two weeks after that, he cabled again, saying:
I take it amiss Chiang should seek to make difficulties between us and should interfere in matters about which he has proved himself most ill-informed which affect our Sovereign rights. Decision to intern Gandhi was taken by executive of Twelve, at which only one European was present.
In a not too subtle allusion to Chiang’s feline wife, who was known to have made an impression on Roosevelt, Churchill added: “The style of his message prompts me to say Cherchez la femme.”
That same month, August 1942, saw the first American success in replacing the British in the Middle East. Roosevelt had earlier suggested that the Americans operate the Trans-Persian Railroad, which the British had originally constructed. Averell Harriman, a man not unfamiliar with the railroad business (and the man who, under the title of “Defense Expediter,” was Roosevelt’s real envoy in London), prevailed on Churchill to agree that the line would be better if retooled and operated by the United States. When General Brooke objected that this would make British forces in Persia completely dependent on America, Churchill breezily responded: “In whose hands could we be better dependent?” He was later to distrust the use made by the United States of this, another of the many “openings” dictated by wartime pressure. But at that stage, with American tanks bolstering the British presence at Tobruk, Churchill was inclined to be sunny. He described himself in cables as Roosevelt’s “loyal Lieutenant,” “asking only to put my viewpoint plainly before you,” and employed this same characterization (rather different from the reverse imagery of master and mistress) in talking with Harriman. But he was always insistent on full acknowledgment where he could get it. He disliked Roosevelt’s presentation of the landings in North Africa as an all-American affair and suggested changing “Egyptian campaign” to “British campaign in Egypt” in the presidential press release on the subject in October 1942. This was modest enough in view of events at El Alamein.
Meanwhile, the maritime position of the United Kingdom was deteriorating catastrophically, and leading to an ever-greater dependence upon the United States. By way of his friend and colleague Oliver Lyttelton, on October 31, 1942, Churchill implored Roosevelt to bear the new situation in mind:
We must ask for a fair share of the merchant shipping and of the escort vessels. All our labour and capacity is engaged in the war effort. We have had to sacrifice 100,000 tons of merchant shipbuilding in order to get more corvettes, and we cannot hope to produce more than 1,100,000 British gross tons of new merchant ships in the calendar year 1943. We have lost enormously in ships used in the common interest, and we trust to you to give us a fair and just assignment of your new vast construction to sail under our own flag.
On the very next day, so intense was Churchill’s attention to every aspect of the relationship with Roosevelt, he wrote again. This time, the subject was another historical irony: General Jan Smuts, who had fought against Churchill in the Boer War, was now Prime Minister of South Africa. In this capacity, he had succeeded in bringing his country into the war on England’s side (not without stern opposition from the pro-Nazi Afrikaner militants who were later to create official apartheid). Churchill hoped that an invitation to Smuts might be procured to visit the United States:
He has of course great responsibilities in South Africa where his personality has held the fort. I hope however he may be persuaded to go. There are things he could say to the American people about the British Empire or Commonwealth of Nations which we could not say ourselves with equal acceptance. Naturally people are much hurt over here by the Luce-Willkie line.
Thus Churchill, former hammer of the Boers, recommended his old foe as an antidote to the “anticolonialism” professed for its own reasons by the American right.
A continuous feature of the Churchill-Roosevelt correspondence is Churchill’s extraordinary sensitivity to tone and nuance. In November 1942, he wrote to the President saying: “We have had a letter from General Hartle stating that under directive from the United States War Department (‘Any construction in excess of the requirements for a force of 427,000 must be accomplished entirely by your own labour and with your own materials and that Lend-Lease materials cannot be furnished in these instances’). This has caused us very great concern.” The matter in dispute here was the disposition of forces for a landing in Europe, but Churchill disliked very much to find things out in this way, rather than to have them conveyed first for his approval, and never let slip an opportunity to assert British amour propre. It was an unfailing source of hurt to him that he could never persuade Roosevelt to visit Britain during the war, and though he pretended to understand that there were physical difficulties in the way of the journey, he cannot have been surprised to be told, in December 1942, that “England must be out for me for political reasons.” Roosevelt never forgot the reserve strength of anti-British and “anticolonial” feeling, and always sought to forestall any gibes about “Britain’s quarrel.”
On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor that same month, Churchill’s commemorative message spoke only of “the British Commonwealth of Nations.”
Having stressed his own American parentage wherever possible, Churchill did the same for Harold Macmillan as 1942 drew to its close. Recommending him as a personal representative on Eisenhower’s staff, he asked Roosevelt for leave to publish the appointment and added: “He is animated by the friendliest feelings towards the United States and his mother hails from Kentucky.” In fact, Macmillan, whose name was routinely misspelled in the cable traffic, had a mother born in Spencer, Indiana. But the chance to stress bloodlines was one which Churchill never missed.
In February 1943, after the Casablanca Conference, Churchill sent Roosevelt a long, ruminative letter headed “Morning Thoughts.” Only one paragrap
h of this is reproduced in his memoirs. The whole and original version makes plainer his preoccupation with a post-victory settlement that would give Great Britain at least an equal footing with its wartime senior partner. When he spoke of the differences in proportion, he did so with the greatest circumspection. In a future United Nations, he wrote:
Great Britain will certainly do her utmost to organise a coalition of resistance to any act of aggression committed by any power; it is believed that the United States will cooperate with her and even possibly take the lead of the world, on account of her numbers and strength, in the good work of preventing such tendencies to aggression before they break into open war.
Toward the end of the “Morning Thoughts,” Churchill wrote: “At the same time one must not ignore the difficulties which the United States Constitution interposes against prolonged European commitments.” It is not clear whether Churchill actually believed that there was a constitutional impediment to such commitments, or whether he wished that there was a term set to the American presence in Europe, or whether he had simply been impressed by the strength of the isolationists in Congress even in wartime. The slip is intriguing, especially for a man who prided himself on a command of American politics.
Questions of precedence, particularly in North Africa, alternated with moments of warmth throughout 1943. In March, Roosevelt took up the question of bloodlines again, sending Churchill a photograph of the American general Sylvester Churchill, who had died in 1862, and pointing out a resemblance. In his later memoirs, Churchill confirmed that the general was indeed descended from the Dorsetshire Churchills and gave a family tree by way of illustration. It may also have pleased Churchill to receive a cable from Roosevelt later that month discussing rumors of a Nazi invasion of Spain and saying that in that contingency “the Combined Staffs should immediately study methods of re-establishing the Duke of Wellington’s war of a number of years ago.” The vagueness of the historic attribution here was made up for by an invocation of England’s glory.
If this allusion was unintentional in recalling historic antagonism between Britain and France, it was one of the few communications from Washington that did not specifically complain about French intransigence. Throughout 1943, Roosevelt’s detestation of de Gaulle continued to mount, as did his pressure on Churchill to disown the leader of the Free French. On May 21, 1943, to oblige Roosevelt, Churchill even cabled his War Cabinet to propose the withdrawal of British support for de Gaulle: a proposal that was finally shelved sine die. In this and other quarrels with the French leader, most of which took place at American instigation, were the seeds of much postwar rancor. Churchill’s “America First” prejudices extended as far as support for Roosevelt in the matter of Dakar, the French West African port which he hoped to secure for the United States after the war. De Gaulle never forgave the British for their uncritical Atlanticism, and exacted a high price for it when the option of Europe became, too late, an attractive one for the postwar British Establishment.
Visiting Washington at the end of May 1943, Churchill sent Roosevelt a memorandum which extended and developed the themes of his earlier “Morning Thoughts.” The core of the memorandum was an astonishing proposal for a quasi-merger between “the British Commonwealth” (as he called it on this occasion) and the United States:
He [Churchill] would like the citizens of each without losing their present nationality to be able to come and settle and trade with freedom and equal rights in the territories of the other. There might even be a common passport or a special form of passport or visa. There might even be some common form of citizenship, under which citizens of the United States and of the British Commonwealth might enjoy voting privileges after residential qualification and be eligible for public office in the territories of the other . . .
Churchill also proposed an extension of the “destroyers for bases” agreement under Lend-Lease whereby in the postwar world “the United States should have the use of such bases in British territory as she might find necessary for her own defense, for a strong United States was a vital interest of the British Commonwealth, and vice-versa.” Turning to the Pacific, there were “British islands and harbours” there. “If he had anything to do with the direction of public affairs after the war, he would certainly advocate that the United States had the use of those that they might require for bases.”
Present at the luncheon where these thoughts were propounded were Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. They might not have guessed that within a few years the United States would indeed have the use of British and British-controlled soil, and would have this use, moreover, without any romantic nonsense about reciprocal citizenship.
The next month, in fact, Roosevelt attempted to arrange a meeting with Stalin without Churchill’s knowledge or participation. The editors of the correspondence note that he “flatly lied” by later telling Churchill that such a meeting was Stalin’s idea. Churchill worried that any “big two” rapprochement would be at Britain’s expense, and expressed himself bitterly on June 25, 1943, this time mentioning the Empire:
You must excuse me expressing myself with the frankness that our friendship and the gravity of the issue warrant. I do not underrate the use that enemy propaganda would make of a meeting between the heads of Soviet Russia and the United States at this juncture with the British Commonwealth and Empire excluded . . . Nevertheless, whatever you decide, I shall sustain to the best of my ability here.
By way of mollification for his deceit, Roosevelt made a proposal for a later meeting of himself, Stalin, and Churchill in Quebec, which he referred to soothingly as “General Wolfe’s stronghold.” The two men were also able to extract some camaraderie from, of all things, the notorious Stalinist motion picture Mission to Moscow. (In this film, based on the mendacious book by Ambassador Joseph Davies, Churchill had been played by Dudley Malone, who had with Roosevelt been an Assistant Secretary in the Woodrow Wilson administration.) But these national and personal pleasantries did not suffice to disguise the growing divergence of interests in various theaters from the Mediterranean to the Far East, where General Stilwell showed increased vexation at Britain’s preference for fighting to restore her empire.
In September 1943, Churchill visited the United States again and, on receiving an honorary degree from Harvard, reiterated his proposal for “common citizenship” between the United States and the United Kingdom. It may be significant that at this time he was out of sympathy with the Labor governments of Australia and New Zealand, both of whom (perhaps with memories of Churchill and Gallipoli) were slightly refractory about the indefinite provision of troops. His continuous rhetoric about “the English-speaking peoples” in fact concealed an inclination to place America above the white dominions; “English-speaking” being always a synonym for “English by blood” in any case. His emphasis on this common tie was a conditioned response to the Anglophobia of many American field commanders. General George Marshall had become convinced that British policy in the Middle East and Asia was colonial in inspiration, and thus that it shirked the frontal assault upon Germany and Japan that was necessary to shorten the war. Churchill’s occasionally opportunist proposals, such as a plan to recover Malaya and Singapore, were so nearly designed to confirm American suspicions, and so unmilitary in themselves, that they met with opposition even from British Chiefs of Staff. The differences crystallized around the appointment of Lord Mountbatten to the position of “Supreme Commander, South East Asia.” Churchill felt moved to contact Roosevelt in October 1943 and to protest:
Some of the United States papers seem to have begun attacking Mountbatten bitterly, and he has been affected by accounts telegraphed here describing him as “The British Princeling and Glamour Boy who has ousted the proved veteran MacArthur from his rightful sphere . . . or words to that effect.
These semi-social and semi-colonial resentments, very common in the American press of that time, formed a permanent co
unterpoint to invocations of cousinhood or brotherhood, and were probably inseparable from them. The same mixed feeling of superiority and inferiority was aptly hit off a few weeks later, when five United States senators denounced Roosevelt for failing to uphold American interests. Referring self-pityingly to the United States as “a global sucker,” the five pressed for trade advantages to be exerted in repayment for American aid. The group was by no means composed of backwoodsmen or hicks, and was senior and bipartisan, consisting of Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia; Albert Chandler, Democrat of Kentucky; James Mead, Democrat of New York; Owen Brewster, Republican of Maine; and Henry Cabot Lodge, Republican of Massachusetts. The last name, in particular, exemplified the American tradition of anti-British, but Anglicized, ultra-conservatism.
Churchill’s response, which was addressed in the first instance to Harry Hopkins, allowed him to release a number of long-pent-up resentments. The Five Senators, he wrote, had it all wrong:
Complaints are made about the bases lent by Britain to the United States in the West Indies in 1940 in return for the fifty destroyers. These fifty destroyers, though very old, were most helpful at the critical time to us who were fighting alone against Germany and Italy, but no human being could pretend that the destroyers were in any way an equivalent for the immense strategic advantages conceded in seven islands vital to the United States.
This was, to say the least, a different tone from the one adopted by Churchill when the original “destroyers for bases” agreement was signed. Responding to the charge made by the senators that the British were “Out-Smarting their American Allies everywhere,” he replied that “we have nowhere ‘taken over’ territory alone except in Italian East Africa which we liberated alone. In the Solomons we never withdrew our administrators. They worked on secretly throughout the Japanese occupation and the natives responded most loyally.” Employing the standard rhetoric of solidarity, he deplored such charges being made at a time “when the blood and treasure of our two races is poured out.” It was not clear which two races were meant, since the usual tocsin sounded was to the effect that the English and Americans were one. But the slip was perhaps an apt one, given that the pressure of the five senators was to lead Roosevelt to set up the Foreign Economic Administration and was to prefigure even wider disagreements about the future of reconquered colonies.
Blood, Class and Empire Page 24
