Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  During his long stay, Churchill made himself very much at home. Like Mae West he did much of his best work in bed, though in Churchill’s case this involved reading reports and dictating letters or speeches to his secretaries. Until midday he remained propped up against a bank of pillows, reading glasses perched on his nose, clad in bedclothes or a flamboyant knee-length robe, with memoranda, newspapers, and articles of clothing strewn across his bed and the floor. On his first morning in Washington, Churchill accosted the president’s butler, Alonzo Fields, and made a short speech that was a model of clarity. “Now, Fields,” he intoned, “we had a lovely dinner last night but I have a few orders for you. We want to leave here as friends, right? So I need you to listen. One, I don’t like talking outside my quarters; two, I hate whistling in the corridors; and three, I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple glasses of scotch and soda before lunch and French champagne and ninety-year-old brandy before I go to sleep at night.” Fields, unfazed, replied: “Yes, sir,” and did his part for the Anglo-American alliance by seeing that the requirements were met.

  When he did rise and dress for the day, Churchill’s outfits stirred lively commentary among the White House staff. The British leader often wore a knee-length double-breasted coat, buttoned to the neck. He carried a wooden walking stick rigged with a flashlight. (It had been a wedding gift from King Edward VII.) Roosevelt’s secretary, Grace Tully, first saw Churchill the morning after his arrival, when he appeared as a “chubby, florid, bald-headed gentleman dressed in one-piece, blue denim coveralls and with a big cigar in his mouth shambling toward my office.”

  For the next three weeks, Roosevelt and Churchill, with Hopkins often in their company, lived together almost as members of an extended family. They dined together, drank together, and smoked together. They invaded one another’s private bedrooms for late night discussions; they sat together for a private screening of the Humphrey Bogart film The Maltese Falcon; they ate lunch from plates balanced on the president’s desk in his study. Roosevelt was several times wheeled into Churchill’s bedroom, while the prime minister remained unashamedly in bed—and Churchill felt no qualms in knocking on Hopkins’s bedroom door at all hours of the day and night. (The two men had become close confidantes in January 1941, when Hopkins traveled to London as Roosevelt’s personal emissary.) One time, at two in the morning, the British prime minister and the president’s consigliere engaged in fierce debate while Churchill sat on the edge of Hopkins’s bed, their voices hushed so as not to awaken the rest of the household.

  Roosevelt, according to a story told by Hopkins, was once wheeled into Churchill’s bedroom just as the prime minister was emerging from his bath, stark naked. The president, flustered, told his attendant to back him out of the room, but Churchill theatrically declared, “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.” The story was probably embellished for dramatic effect—Churchill later told Robert Sherwood that “he never received the President without at least a bath towel wrapped around him,” and added that he would never claim to have nothing to hide from Roosevelt, as “The President himself would have been well aware that it was not strictly true.”

  Even so, a week after his arrival Churchill was as comfortable in the White House as if he had lived there for years. To the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, he wrote, on January 3, 1942: “We live here as a big family, in the greatest intimacy and informality, and I have formed the very highest regard and admiration for the President. His breadth of view, resolution, and loyalty to the common cause are beyond all praise.”

  The two leaders often appeared together in public. On his first day in Washington, Churchill joined Roosevelt at a regularly scheduled press conference in the Oval Office. After brief opening remarks, Roosevelt introduced the prime minister, and invited the reporters, who were crowded in a semicircle around the president’s desk, to put questions to him. Churchill was dressed in a dark civilian suit with a blue and white polka-dot bow tie, and was smoking one of his oversized Cuban cigars. Even standing, he could not be seen by the reporters standing in the back of the crowded room, so he climbed onto his chair, an act that drew a round of cheers and applause from the assembled newsmen. Churchill performed masterfully, sparring with good humor, and venturing to say that while the war would be long and hard, “We may wake up and find we ran short of Huns.” Asked whether Singapore was “the key to the whole situation” in Asia, Churchill, without a pause, shot back, “The key to the whole situation is the resolute manner in which the British and American Democracies are going to throw themselves into the conflict.” How long might it take to win the war? “If we manage it well,” the prime minister replied, “it will only take half as long as if we manage it badly.” Asked whether he had any doubts about the ultimate victory of the Allies, he replied, “I have no doubt whatever.” The Washington Star pronounced that the performance had been “electric,” a “sparkling and unique scene.” Newsweek reported that Roosevelt “looked like an old trouper who, on turning impresario, had produced a smash hit, and some thought they detected in his face admiration for a man who had at least equaled him in the part in which he himself was a star.”

  On Christmas Eve, Churchill participated in the tree-lighting ceremony on the White House lawn. It was a dark night, lit by a crescent moon that hung low on the horizon. Roosevelt, standing with the British leader on the South Portico, pressed a button that illuminated the colored lights of the tree. When the crowd’s applause had died down, the president introduced his guest as “my associate, my old and good friend.” Churchill spoke to a radio audience numbering in the millions on both sides of the Atlantic. For reasons of blood, or common cause, or a common language, he said, “I can not feel myself a stranger here in the center and at the summit of the United States.” He continued, “Let the children have their night of fun and laughter . . . before we turn again to the stern tasks and formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world.” The night was bitter cold, and Eleanor recalled, “there was little joy in our hearts. The cold gripped us all so intensely that we were glad of a cup of tea on our return to the house.”

  The day after Christmas, Winston Churchill was driven to Capitol Hill to address a joint session of Congress. He addressed the House chamber through a dense thicket of microphones, looking over his glasses, a conspicuous gold watch chain hanging from the pocket of his trousers, his hands tucked under the lapels of his coat. He spoke for thirty-five minutes, with the audience hanging on his every word. It was a great speech, a classic Churchillian stemwinder; he had sweated blood over it all through Christmas Day and night. He knew there remained considerable anti-British sentiment in Congress, and that the American people were more aroused against Japan than Germany. “I cannot help reflecting,” he began, “that if my father had been American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own.”

  The observation received a hearty laugh, and established a friendly tone for a speech that would range across some sensitive territory. The British leader served up some roundabout criticism for the isolationists, hinting at the policy errors that had allowed Germany to rearm, and driven the United States and Britain apart in the 1930s. The room fell very silent during those passages. But when Churchill turned to the Japanese, the legislators were quickly on their feet. He thundered: “What sort of people do they think we are? Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them, until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?” The congressmen and senators responded with a mighty guttural eruption of savage joy, and Churchill thought to himself, “Who could doubt that all would be well?” As he left the podium he made his signature gesture, his right index and middle fingers held up in a “V” for victory. The Washington P
ost reported that the effect was “instantaneous, electric. . . . The cheers swelled into a roar.”

  Back at the White House, Roosevelt (who had listened on the radio) told him that he had done extremely well. The prime minister was elated—his powers had not failed him. “I hit the target all the time,” he declared in triumph to Moran.

  Before dinner each night the two leaders, Hopkins, and various other members of the president’s official family gathered for cocktails in the Red Room. Roosevelt sat by a tray of bottles and mixed the cocktails himself. This was a cherished part of the president’s daily routine, his “children’s hour,” as he sometimes called it, when he let the day’s tensions and stresses slip away. “He loved the ceremony of making the drinks,” said Churchill’s daughter Mary Soames; “it was rather like, ‘Look, I can do it.’ It was formidable. And you knew you were supposed to just hand him your glass, and not reach for anything else. It was a lovely performance.” Roosevelt did not take drink orders, but improvised new and eccentric concoctions, variations on the whiskey sour, Tom Collins, or old-fashioned. The drinks he identified as “martinis” were mixed with too much vermouth, and sometimes contaminated with foreign ingredients such as fruit juice or rum. Churchill, who preferred straight whiskey or brandy, accepted Roosevelt’s mysterious potions gracefully and usually drank them without complaint, though Alistair Cooke reported that the prime minister sometimes took them into the bathroom and poured them down the sink.

  The British leader slept late, napped in the afternoons (sometimes creeping into a random bedroom if his own was too far away), and liked to talk late into the evenings. He imbibed throughout the day, remaining razor-sharp and supremely articulate like the high-functioning alcoholic that he was—he drank sherry in the morning, whiskey at midday, wine with dinner, and smoked Cuban cigars and nursed glasses of brandy well into the small hours of the morning. Roosevelt’s aides were amazed. Mike Reilly, chief of the president’s Secret Service detail, said that Churchill “ate, and thoroughly enjoyed, more food than any two men or three diplomats; and he consumed brandy and scotch with a grace and enthusiasm that left us all openmouthed in awe.” He added: “It was not the amount that impressed us, although that was quite impressive, but the complete sobriety that went hand in hand with his drinking.”

  During the several weeks that Churchill spent in the White House, Roosevelt stayed up later than was his custom, and drank more heavily, but without the benefit of the afternoon naps. Once, a few days after Christmas, the president smoked and drank and talked with Churchill until three in the morning. Dr. Ross T. McIntire, who was responsible for looking after the president’s health, regarded the British leader as “Public Enemy Number One.” He tried to impose a bedtime for the president of 11 p.m., but noted, “it was rarely observed.” Eleanor was appalled. “There is no question,” she said, “when you are deeply interested it is possible to go on working ’til all hours of the night. But for the people who have to wait up ’til you are through, it is a deadly performance.” As the daughter of an alcoholic, she was put off by excessive drinking, and did not like the influence that Churchill seemed to exert on both her husband and her sons. She grew increasingly concerned about the effect of late nights and brandy and cigars on Roosevelt’s fragile health. “Mother would just fume,” Elliott Roosevelt remembered, “and go in and out of the room making hints about bed, and still Churchill would sit there.” When she shared her concerns with her husband, he retorted that she “needn’t worry because it wasn’t his side of the family that had a drinking problem.”

  Roosevelt had genuine and heartfelt respect for Churchill. After dining with the president that January, Sam Rosenman recalled that “the conversation was mostly about Churchill—Roosevelt was most enthusiastic about him and praised his rugged, bold approach to the problems of the war.” Their personal friendship was at the heart of the alliance. The bond was abetted by their shared language, naturally—but also by their patrician upbringings, their elite schooling, their common interests in history and literature, and their self-identification as old lions of the sea, having both held civilian cabinet or subcabinet positions in their respective navies. Hopkins believed that during the long visit, Roosevelt “grew genuinely to like Churchill and I am sure Churchill equally liked the President.”

  Churchill had originally intended to stay only a week, but once comfortably nested at the White House he accepted Roosevelt’s invitation to extend his stay. His visit, interrupted by brief jaunts to Canada and Florida, lasted three weeks, until his departure on January 15, 1942.

  NEITHER THE AMERICAN nor the British military staffs were entirely pleased that the two leaders were cocooned together in the White House. They were vexed by the thought that the president and prime minister were cooking up schemes behind their backs, and would settle major issues over their late night libations, without letting their military advisers into the discussions. Each side suspected that his principal was pitted against a master confidence man, and would give away too much in one-on-one negotiations. Their intimacy might fortify the alliance, but it might also short-circuit the rightful function of the cabinets and the military chiefs of staff. Alexander Cadogan, a British diplomat, wrote in his diary that he feared Churchill “hero-worshipped” the American president. American general Joseph W. “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell vented that “The Limeys have [Roosevelt’s] ear, while we have the hind tit.”

  The military leaders met for the conference dubbed “Arcadia” in the opulent boardroom of the Federal Reserve Building, a four-year-old marble edifice that sat directly opposite navy headquarters on Constitution Avenue. Their first meeting convened on the morning of Christmas Eve, under an agenda titled: “Fundamental basis of joint strategy.” Eleven more such meetings would follow in the weeks to come. The British were represented by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, Field Marshal Sir John Dill (recently supplanted by Brooke as chief of the Imperial General Staff), and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army chief of staff, was informally acknowledged as head of the American team. He was joined by Admirals King and Stark and General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces.

  The British service chiefs, tempered by nearly two and a half years of war, were well accustomed to working together. They came to the meetings well prepared, with well-crafted arguments supported by crackerjack staff work. “They knew their stuff,” said Captain John L. McCrea of the American naval staff. “They all talked exceedingly well and made much sense. The staff organization was superb, as well. Three brigadiers did the bulk of the work, and their reports of the meetings were masterpieces.”

  In contrast to the well-oiled machinery of the British high command, the American chiefs were really nothing more than an ad hoc committee. The army and navy had always been institutionally separate and co-equal, with two cabinet-rank civilian secretaries sitting atop their respective departments, and efforts to blend the military planning process had been halting and unsuccessful. Therefore, the American military chiefs had to learn to deal with one another at the same time they were learning to deal with the British. General Arnold was subordinate to Marshall and tended to defer to him. Both King and Stark represented the U.S. Navy, and to the British it was not immediately clear which admiral was dominant. Having run on fumes for the two weeks since December 7, the Americans had not found much time to prepare for the conference. They spoke off the cuff, throwing their ideas out without having vetted them through an internal process of planning and analysis. Inevitably, they could not avoid seeming confused and amateurish. They were at the base of a steep learning curve.

  Marshall, speaking for the Americans, opened with a strong and unequivocal reaffirmation of the Europe-first principle. That policy, spelled out in a secret memorandum to Roosevelt (and signed by Admiral King with the other service chiefs), recognized that “Germany is the predominant member of the Axis Powers.” Even with the entry of Japan into the war, “our view remains that Germa
ny is still the prime enemy and her defeat is the key to victory. Once Germany is defeated the collapse of Italy and the defeat of Japan must follow. In our considered opinion, therefore, it should be a cardinal principle . . . that only the minimum of force necessary for the safeguarding of vital interests in other theatres should be diverted from operations against Germany.”

  The merit of the Europe-first principle was never doubted by King or any other member of the Allied high command. Of the Axis partners, only Germany could be attacked simultaneously by the United States, Britain, and Russia. Germany possessed greater scientific and industrial resources than Japan, and given enough time might develop new and fearsome weapons of mass destruction. Should Russia fall, Hitler’s juggernaut could be concentrated on a single front. But should Germany and Italy fall, the great bulk of Allied naval and military power would be liberated for use in the Pacific. “As far as I know,” wrote Dwight D. Eisenhower, the recently promoted brigadier general who was serving as the army’s war planning chief, “the wisdom of the plan to turn the weight of our power against the European enemy before attempting an all-out campaign against Japan has never been questioned by any real student of strategy.” Even Admiral Nimitz, who had his hands full with the Japanese, said the logic of the Germany-first principle “was well understood by all of us who had to carry on the war in the Pacific.”

  And yet the strategy, stated in the abstract, left plenty of room for interpretation and debate. Exactly what proportion of available troops, ships, and war matériel would be sent to the Pacific? Ten percent? Twenty? Thirty? If the situation in the Pacific was unstable (as indeed it was), should that theater receive a larger share of resources on a short-term, emergency basis? How much territory should be conceded to the rampaging Japanese? Were Australia and New Zealand to be sacrificed? How much offensive capability should the Allies build up in the Pacific, if only to keep pressure on the enemy’s perimeter? Could a Pacific counteroffensive be launched even before Germany was defeated? On those questions, the joint memorandum of the service chiefs to the president was silent. Under the heading “The Safeguarding of Vital Interests in the Eastern Theatre,” it stated only that “The minimum forces required to hold the above will have to be a matter of mutual discussion.” As Eisenhower observed, there was nothing controversial in Germany-first as a rule, “but it was to prove difficult indeed to develop a feasible plan to implement the idea and to secure its approval by the military staffs of the two nations.”