“At five o’clock we are having a staff meeting. We have already had a meeting with the State Department officials, and during the next few days decisions will materialize. We can’t give you any more news about them at this time, except to say that the whole matter is progressing very satisfactorily.
“Steve [Early] and I first thought that I would introduce the Prime Minister, and let him say a few words to you good people, by banning questions. However, the Prime Minister did not go along with that idea, and I don’t blame him. He said that he is perfectly willing to answer any reasonable questions for a reasonably short time, if you want to ask him. . . . And so I am going to introduce him, and you to him, and tell you that we are very, very happy to have him here. . . . And so I will introduce the Prime Minister.
“(To the Prime Minister) I wish you would just stand up for one minute and let them see you. They can’t see you. (Applause greeted the Prime Minister when he stood up, but when he climbed onto his chair so that they could see him better, loud and spontaneous cheers and applause rang through the room.)
“THE PRESIDENT: (to the press) Go ahead and shoot.”35
The reporters shot—though the first question (“What about Singapore, Mr. Prime Minister? The people of Australia are terribly anxious about it. Would you say to be of good cheer?”) went so straight to the heart of the war crisis that the President almost fell off his wheelchair. “The President laughed so hard that he nearly choked on his cigarette holder,” Smith recalled.36
Faced with “wolves” the like of whom he’d never encountered before, Churchill acquitted himself extremely well. Chubby-cheeked, wielding his trademark cigar, and wearing a dark jacket with a polka-dot bow tie and striped pants, he parried calls for predictions and delivered memorable phrases of moral uplift. However, there was never any question but that he was now an admired but junior partner in a new coalition—utterly dependent on the United States for the successful prosecution of the war.
“My feeling is that the military power and munitions power of the United States are going to develop on such a great scale that the problem will not so much be whether to choose between this and that,” Churchill responded to questions of strategy, “but how to get what is available to all the theaters in which we have to wage this World War.”
Churchill was telling the truth. However defeatist Secretary Stimson and other generals might be, the numbers spoke for themselves. From the President himself and from Harry Hopkins, Churchill had heard preliminary numbers of estimated U.S. war production that had made the blood in the Prime Minister’s veins run faster—and did so even more when, at the first formal Anglo-American staff conference that followed, it was made clear the war would indeed be directed from Washington.
The writing was on the wall—and it read quite clearly: “United States of America First.”
Convincing the press and public that the democracies were united in confronting the Axis powers was one thing. Convincing the British visitors that the American military was, under its commander in chief, ready for the big leagues was another.
Fresh from bombed-out London, Churchill’s huge retinue of staff officers and clerks had expected a land of plenty, yet they found themselves awed by life in America. From thirty-six-page newspapers “an inch thick” to the huge cars in which they were taken to their hotels, Churchill’s almost eighty attendants were mesmerized by the very scale of things—much like Gulliver’s adventure in the “Voyage to Brobdingnag.”
The traffic in Washington, for example, amazed Churchill’s military assistant, Colonel Ian Jacob: “a flood of American saloon cars, all looking new, all almost alike, and most of them with only one or two people in them. There is a car to every 2½ people in the city. No-one walks a yard. Cars lie parked everywhere, and no-one bothers about having a garage. You simply leave the car on the side of the nearest street, if you can find a spare hole. The whole effect is as of an ant-heap, or a swarm of beetles.”37
As at the Newfoundland summit in August, there appeared to him to be a vast difference between the American approach to high command, however, and the British version. “At 5.30,” Jacob noted in his diary immediately after the President’s press conference, “there took place the first meeting between the Prime Minister and the president and their Chiefs of Staff,” held in the Cabinet Room, which was situated “in the West block, on the garden level,” next to the Mansion. “It is a pleasant room, about the size of the Cabinet Room at No. 10 [Downing Street] but a little wider. It has four French windows each in an archway, and is devoid of furniture except for a table and a number of chairs including arm chairs disposed around the walls. Two or three pictures of former Presidents hang on the walls which are white.” The long, almost coffin-shaped table was unexpectedly Arthurian, widest about halfway along one side, where Mr. Roosevelt presided. The table seated “16 in comfort, all of whom can see each other well.” To the right of the President sat Prime Minister Churchill; to the President’s left, the secretary of the navy, Mr. Knox, flanked by Admirals Stark, King, and Turner, the chief of naval planning; and to Churchill’s right, Secretary Stimson and the other U.S. and British chiefs of staff, occupying the rest of the table, together with Harry Hopkins and Max Beaverbrook.38
“The President led off with a statement as to the talks which he already had during the day with Churchill,” Secretary Stimson noted in his own diary—expressing surprise and delight as the President pulled out Stimson’s somewhat feeble “Memorandum of Decisions Made at the White House on December 21,” 1941, “and made it the basis of the entire conference.”39
“He went over it point by point,” Secretary Stimson noted, “telling the conference of their views on each point and then asked Churchill to follow and comment on it, which he did. There was then a little general discussion participated in by the American military and naval members and the British military and naval members, and it became very evident that there was a pretty general agreement upon the views of the grand strategy which we had held in the War Department and which were outlined in my paper. Churchill commented feelingly on the sentence of my summary where I described our first main principle as ‘the preservation of our communications across the North Atlantic with our fortress in the British Isles covering the British fleet.’”40
In truth Roosevelt was concealing from Stimson his own determination to proceed, as soon as practicable, with an American counterstroke: the invasion of Casablanca, Morocco, and Algeria with 150,000 troops. For the moment, however, the President expressed himself in complete agreement with the U.S. war secretary as to the importance of sticking to a “Germany First” strategy.
Roosevelt’s charm and confident air certainly deceived Colonel Jacob. “The President is a most impressive man and seems on the best of terms with his advisers,” Jacob described in his diary—evincing no idea of what was going on, in reality, namely an awkward dance between the Democratic president and his elderly Republican secretary of war, whose tone was one of fear and anxiety over the current situation in the Far East, and America’s limited ability to do anything offensively. By the side of the Prime Minister, the President appeared to the innocent Jacob to be “a child in Military affairs, and evidently has little realization of what can and can’t be done. He doesn’t seem to grasp how backward his country is in its war preparations, and how ill-prepared his army is to get involved in large scale operations.”41
The very opposite was, in verity, the case—the President all too aware of American disarray in the wake of Pearl Harbor and the time it would take, behind the scenes, to ready American forces of any size to be put into battle, yet determined to look beyond the current trials in the Pacific. “To our eyes,” Jacob wrote, “the American machine of government seems hopelessly disorganized. The President, to start with, has no private office. He has no real Private Secretary, and no Secretariat for Cabinet or Military business. The Cabinet is of little account anyway, as the President is Commander-in-Chief. But he has no proper machi
nery through which to exercise command. . . . We found this complete lack of system extended throughout. . . . Their ideas of organization and ours are wide apart, and they have first to close the gap between their Army and Navy before they can work as a real team with us.”
As a result, Jacob blamed American mismanagement and disorganization for what he saw as a disappointing military summit. As he put it, sailing back to England, “the Chiefs of Staff meetings which now took place almost daily for the next three weeks never really achieved anything. There was never any settled Agenda, and every kind of red herring was pursued. We thought we had achieved a considerable triumph when we got our general strategy paper agreed to,” he lamented, “without amendment by the U.S. Chiefs of Staff. I am pretty sure however that it is regarded as an agreeable essay which all can pay lip service to, while each American Service follows its nose and does the job which seems to stick out at the moment.”42
Poor Jacob—whose father had been a British field marshal in World War I—was completely bamboozled, unaware that the president’s modus operandi was the product of decades of experience in marshaling American talent to serve his purpose and strategies. In this respect, Churchill’s modus operandi and vivendi were the polar opposite. Churchill’s methods, however, could boast only of having produced in two years the longest series of military disasters in British history. By contrast the President’s methods, as U.S. commander in chief, had yet to be tested in war.
All too soon Jacob’s ignorance of the American system, and his dedicated bureaucratic approach to high command in the service of the British prime minister/minister of defense, were to embroil Roosevelt in the near-resignation of one of the senior members of the President’s own administration, his secretary of war. For what Jacob could not understand was that this was America, not India.
Jacob’s faux pas would be telling. British imperial bureaucracy had incontestably served its empire well. Over the centuries, following conquest or annexation, the British had learned to administer vast indigenous populations by imposing a hierarchy of paper wallahs, or colonial bureaucrats, much as the Chinese had done over millennia in their own territories: a governor and, below him, a multitiered hierarchy of civil servants, with small but highly disciplined naval and army forces on hand to impose civil order when and where required.
For generations this British system of colonial administration had proven almost unimaginably successful—but it had also led, in such a huge and scattered global jurisdiction, to a white elitism disguising an almost fatal aversion to manual labor. It was simply assumed that Indians, or coolies, or foreign servants and mercenaries, would provide the necessary muscle to maintain an imperial system that guaranteed order, was generally not corrupt, preserved freedom of religion—and ensured British profits. Thus a tiny cadre of British civil servants, educated at elitist British “public” (actually private) schools, had managed the necessary administrative and clerical paperwork of an empire with admirable diligence—one that elicited even Hitler’s admiration.43
In times of war, moreover, British Empire administrators and clerics had simply continued to do the same as they’d done in peace: giving orders in writing to those responsible for carrying them out. In recent decades, in the aftermath of World War I, with its terrible loss of life, there had been fewer and fewer competent British administrators—especially soldiers—willing or able to see these orders were executed. And once the fires of World War II had been kindled by Hitler in Europe and the French Republic collapsed, the heart had seemed to go out of the elderly British imperial motif. Against more disciplined, ideologically inspired, and well-armed Nazi troops in Norway, Belgium, France, Greece, Crete, Libya, and Egypt, Britain’s valiant forces—its Royal Navy, RAF, and Army—had simply failed to operate together as a unified, cohesive, modern military force on the field of battle, even though the performance of individuals and individual units—as in the Battle of Britain—was often meritorious.
The results, when pitted against Hitler’s Nazi legions in France, the Mediterranean, and North Africa, had shamed the island nation: campaigns studded by retreat, evacuation, and surrender. More worrying still, the current British performance in the Far East, following the Japanese declaration of war, held out little hope of being more fortunate. Hong Kong was expected, Churchill had assured the President, to hold out for several months, until reinforcements could be assembled and sent out; in fact, outnumbered four to one, the crown colony would surrender after seventeen days, on December 25, 1941. The same was to hold true of Singapore, the “Pearl Harbor” of the Far East—which Churchill had hoped would hold out for many months. Moreover, despite Churchill’s assurances to the President, the case of Libya—where General Auchinleck had already found it necessary to fire the Eighth Army field commander he’d appointed, General Alan Cunningham—was not promising to be any better in terms of British military competence on the field of battle, whatever the Prime Minister might claim.
In a word, the British had perfected the bureaucratic arts, but had let slip the art of fighting—at least in terms of modern combat. And the President, better than anyone, knew it: not from his “advisers,” but from his special sources.
However much his cabinet colleagues and subordinates deplored the habit, President Roosevelt liked to send for, see, and hear personal reports on what was going on around the world from those he trusted.
These reports to the President—both verbal and written—were necessarily anecdotal, but they ensured that a highly intelligent and above all curious U.S. commander in chief was able to gauge the reality of what was going on, rather than relying on the sanitized version from his various ambassadors and government officials, as Churchill did. The President’s emissaries thus kept him well informed, at least anecdotally, about reality on the ground, acting as the President’s “eyes and ears” outside the White House—at home and abroad. Where Churchill relied on his reading of history and his abiding, romanticized Victorian vision of British arms, the President liked to question every visitor, and every report. Moreover, the President’s emissaries and informants reflected every area of government and society, high and low. His wife, Eleanor, might—and did—attract opprobrium for her dedication to progressive social causes, for example, but the President, restricted by his wheelchair and the discomfort of traveling, admired her for her openheartedness and willingness to journey forth to see things firsthand. “You know, my Missus gets around a lot,” Roosevelt told Churchill’s physician, Dr. Wilson. “She’s got a great talent with people.”44
As Dr. Wilson reflected later, “when the President was so immersed in the war that he was in danger of forgetting the hopes and aspirations of the ordinary people, Eleanor was at his elbow to jog his memory.” This was in marked contrast to the doctor’s formal patient, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and his wife. “Mrs. Churchill played no such part in her husband’s political life. They were a devoted pair,” Dr. Wilson acknowledged, “but he paid little attention to her advice, and did not take it very seriously.”45
Wilson may have overstated the case, but his perception was revealing. Winston Churchill might paint his trip to Washington, both at the time and later, as an example of his own great leadership at a moment of world crisis. In many respects it was, in terms of Allied unity and propaganda—certainly when contrasted with the visit by his deputy prime minister, Major Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, only a month before. (“All quite useful for the Americans to hear,” Lord Halifax had written in his diary on November 10, 1941, after listening to Mr. Attlee making a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, “but I don’t think he is a very impressive personality.”)46 Churchill, by contrast, was out to impress—from the start.
Attempting to save the British Empire as Neville Chamberlain’s successor, Churchill had sought to infuse Britain’s military hierarchy with new energy from the top, even if this meant riding roughshod over his colleagues and staff. Like a natural, aggressive chess player, Chur
chill had a wonderful, instinctive grasp of grand strategy, backed by the ability to withdraw his mind from the current fray in order to achieve a transcending perspective across time and globe. This made him an inspiring speaker, and courageous leader in a great cause—giving heart to his staff and to his nation at a time of ever-worsening military defeats. It could not, unfortunately, substitute for good judgment.
Of all Wilson’s perceptions about Churchill, it was his recognition of Churchill’s poor judgment, in the context of a man so otherwise exceptional, that most testified to the doctor’s honesty. Churchill’s courage was genuine and exemplary, Dr. Wilson observed. On the other hand, in terms of people and decisions, Churchill was also endowed with desperately poor discernment. As Churchill’s own wife put it, Winston had surrounded himself all his life with “charlatans and imposters,” because his very genius—his ability to cast his mind across broad horizons, to play with ideas and invent “glittering phrases”—demanded a fawning rather than critical audience. Once asked by King George VI to become prime minister, in May 1940, Churchill had made himself minister of defense, thus licensing himself to become a quasi commander-in-chief. As the Prime Minister of Canada himself told Dr. Wilson, “Winston cowed his colleagues. He stifled discussion when it was critical and did not agree with his views.”47 Lord Hankey, who had for many years been secretary to the British cabinet and was the paymaster general, deplored Churchill’s moody behavior and impulsive decisions, referring to the Prime Minister in his diaries and letters as “the dictator,” a “Rogue Elephant” whose military disasters would have long since ended his career, had there been an alternative leader in Britain of any real timbre. “It was he who forced us into the Norwegian affair which failed; the Greek affair which failed; and the Cretan affair which is failing,” Hankey had lamented in his diary earlier that summer—adding, in October 1941, that the British war cabinet had become a “crowd of silent men,” enduring “the usual monologue by Churchill”—a British government of “utter incompetence,”48 while another senior civil servant, Sir Norman Brook, described the Prime Minister’s greatest failure as being “not much interested to hear what others had to say.”49 Leo Amery, the British secretary of state for India, declared that Churchill had reduced his country to “a one-man government, so far as the war is concerned.”50
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