Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour

by Lynne Olson

  American and British newspapers showed no such hesitation in speculating about the reason for his sudden visit. “There is no doubt that Mr. Winant hurried back to tell what England needs most, and to make clear that the need is urgent … that the war has reached a crisis,” the columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote in the New York Times. A correspondent for London’s Daily Mail reported he had been told by “a high Washington authority” that the “meeting between Winant and Roosevelt is as important as a meeting between the President and Mr. Churchill himself. It is a strategy conference.”

  In London, both Winant and Averell Harriman had felt increasingly cut off from what was happening in Washington and the rest of the United States. Cable traffic from Roosevelt, Hopkins, and other officials was spotty, and letters often took more than a month to arrive from America, if they ever came at all. (Much of the mail between the United States and Britain during this period was lost in merchant ship sinkings.) Harriman complained to FDR that there was “almost a Chinese wall” of silence between London and the American capital. “My source of information is entirely from British ministries,” he wrote the president. “My usefulness will be in direct proportion to the extent to which I am kept informed of developments in fact and thought in Washington.”

  What little he and Winant knew about the situation in America spelled disaster for Britain. According to the latest polls, the percentage of Americans willing to risk war by aiding the British was declining. The first Lend-Lease shipments of food—dried eggs, evaporated milk, bacon, beans, and canned meat—had arrived in Britain in late May, providing some relief. But there was little of anything else. Weapons, planes, tanks, and other matériel still were not being produced in large numbers in the United States, and there were not enough ships to carry to Britain the trickle of armaments that had come off the assembly line. Despite the administration’s urging, American industries continued to resist a large-scale conversion to war production. What’s more, several industrial tycoons, like car manufacturer Henry Ford, were rabid isolationists and refused to fill orders for the British. A Senate investigation revealed that government production targets had not been met and that a sizable number of the companies that did accept government contracts were guilty of corruption and waste. “We are advertising to the world … that we are in a mess,” one Democratic senator said in disgust. Unless the United States intensified its mobilization, a government report warned, its war production would be outstripped by Britain and Canada within the year.

  Indeed, the Lend-Lease situation was so dismal in the summer of 1941 that William Whitney, one of Harriman’s top aides in London, quit in protest over America’s failure to do more. “We are deceiving the people on both sides of the Atlantic by allowing them to think that there is today a stream of lease-lend war materiels crossing the Atlantic, when in fact there is little or none,” Whitney wrote in his letter of resignation. “My view is that the Administration … should show Congress and the people, that while we are boasting that we are at enmity with Hitler alongside Britain, we are doing a disgracefully small share of the job.”

  Three days before Winant returned to America, the president had appeared to signal a profound shift in course. Pledging to prevent Germany from controlling the Atlantic, Roosevelt declared an unlimited national emergency and seemed to imply that the United States would soon begin convoying: “The delivery of needed supplies to Britain is imperative. I say this can be done; it must be done; it will be done.” To many in America and Britain, FDR’s declaration sounded “almost like a call to arms.” His speech, noted Robert Sherwood, was “taken as a solemn commitment; the entry of the United States in the war against Germany was now considered inevitable and even imminent.” But at a press conference the following day, Roosevelt, as he had done so often before, backed away from all notions of belligerency: there would be no convoying, at least for the present, and no fighting. In the view of Dean Acheson, then an assistant secretary of state, the president, along with much of his administration and most of the country, seemed “paralyzed between apprehension and action.”

  Armed with firsthand knowledge of Britain’s perilous position, Winant, who, in the words of General Raymond Lee, was “straining every nerve and resorting to every expediency” to bring the United States into the conflict, was determined to press Roosevelt and his administration as hard as he could. In a memo to Foreign Office subordinates, Anthony Eden wrote: “Winant asked me today to consider what, short of war, the USA could do to help us…. I had the impression he would not at all mind if the proposals entailed risks of war.”

  In Washington, Winant, at Roosevelt’s invitation, stayed at the White House. In his meetings with the president and other administration officials, he forcefully emphasized the desperate future facing Britain and its people. They urgently needed military aid, particularly planes and tanks, as well as U.S. naval protection for convoys. There was no truth to current rumors that Britain was on the verge of seeking a negotiated peace, the ambassador said. But if the United States failed to provide enough aid, he warned, the British will to resist, resolute as it was, might begin to weaken. “We must not wait too long.”

  FDR responded—up to a point. He authorized the dispatch of four thousand marines to Iceland to take over its defense from the British, a step that placed American troops nearer Britain in case of invasion. He also authorized naval protection of U.S. merchant vessels and troopships as far as Iceland, with instructions to shoot on sight if necessary; British convoys remained unprotected. In public, Roosevelt downplayed the urgency of the ambassador’s visit.

  On Winant’s return to Britain, Churchill ordered a plane to pick him up at the base in Scotland where he landed and bring him immediately to Chequers. When the ambassador told the prime minister about the new American actions, Churchill, while somewhat heartened, knew they were far from enough to stave off disaster. “If Munich had been Great Britain’s least glorious hour, mid-1941 was surely America’s,” a British historian later wrote.

  BACK AT WORK IN LONDON, Winant was forced to come to grips with another intractable problem: his increasingly problematic relationship with Averell Harriman. Taking advantage of his nebulous job description—an “excellent mandate, in no way tying my hands”—the ambitious Harriman was involving himself more and more in matters that had nothing to do with Lend-Lease. As a businessman and sportsman, he had long been known for his sharp-edged, elbows-out tactics. In a practice match preceding a 1920s championship polo contest, he had, for example, urged Manuel Andrada, a member of the opposing team, to harass Laddie Sanford, one of Harriman’s own team members, who was vying with him for a place on the championship squad. “Laddie was not the most courageous man in the world and Andrada was one of the toughest,” Harriman said years later. “The upshot was that he knocked Sanford to hell and gone. I don’t know if Laddie was a better player than I was, but he was no good that day, I can tell you. It’s an amusing incident, but I was determined to get back. I just could not believe I couldn’t beat Laddie. Because, you know, he was soft.”

  Years later, when Harriman came to Washington to advise the Roosevelt administration on the transport of raw materials, he set out to appropriate the duties of the businessman advising the government on railroads and the rest of the transportation industry—the job he had wanted. In London, he encroached on Winant’s turf in much the same way. Although Harriman assured Roosevelt in a memo that “we are working together as one team” and added that “I have never worked in a more congenial atmosphere, largely due to Gil’s generous personality,” he operated with little regard for the ambassador. In his diary, Raymond Lee complained that Harriman was using his position to “interfere in anything and everything,” adding that Winant “has been entirely too patient.” Harriman controlled his own payroll and communications, reporting directly to Roosevelt and Hopkins, and invited official visitors from Washington who had nothing to do with his mission to use the Lend-Lease offices as their London base and
to consult with him about their dealings with British officials.

  But it was his diligent cultivation of Churchill that produced the richest dividends in expanding the scope and influence of his job. In June, while Winant was in Washington consulting with Roosevelt, the prime minister, in the wake of his country’s recent military disasters, asked Harriman to go to the Middle East and Africa to assess the state of British forces and facilities there and determine what America could do to help. For a man who had no official diplomatic accreditation to Britain and whose own country wasn’t even in the war, it was an extraordinary assignment by any standard. To his military commanders in the region, the prime minister made clear that Harriman should be treated as his own personal representative and given the same opportunities for inspection as if he had been a member of Britain’s War Cabinet: “Mr. Harriman enjoys my complete confidence and is in the most intimate relations with the President and Mr. Harry Hopkins. No one can do more for you…. I commend Mr. Harriman to your most attentive consideration.” Harriman, not surprisingly, was jubilant about the assignment. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so excited about anything,” Kathleen Harriman wrote to her sister.

  During his five-week expedition, Harriman traveled sixteen thousand miles, crisscrossing the Middle East and much of Africa. He inspected ports, harbors, aircraft assembly facilities, and ship repair docks, and talked to dozens of British troops, pilots, civil servants, mechanics, and others involved in the fight against the Germans. Intriguingly, his military escort in Cairo turned out to be none other than the man he was cuckolding in London. Randolph Churchill, now working as a public information officer at British headquarters, had been detailed by his father to act as Harriman’s aide while the American toured military installations and conferred with the brass in the Egyptian capital. Of Harriman, Churchill wrote to his son: “I have made great friends with him and have the highest regard for him. He does all he can to help us.”

  Harriman, who never let his heart rule his head, apparently was unperturbed at finding himself in this ticklish situation, and he and Churchill’s son chatted amiably about Pamela and what was going on in London. A few days later, Randolph, who at that point clearly did not know about his wife’s affair, wrote to Pamela about how much he liked Harriman: “I found him absolutely charming, & it was lovely to be able to hear so much news of you & all my friends…. He spoke delightfully about you & I fear that I have a serious rival!” To his father, Randolph wrote even more glowingly of Harriman: “He has definitely become my favorite American…. He clearly regards himself more as your servant than Roosevelt’s. I think he is the most objective and shrewd of all those who are around you.”

  From Cairo, Harriman sent Churchill an unsparing, toughly worded report about the many shortcomings he had found in Britain’s Middle East operations, including a waste of equipment; poorly trained tank crewmen; inadequate intelligence; lack of coordination between the RAF, army, and navy; and “a sense of complacency and absence of urgency” at the Cairo headquarters. Above all, he focused on the shortage of vital armaments and supplies—tanks, ships, fuel, transport vehicles, even spare parts. While the other difficulties were clearly part of Churchill’s bailiwick, the shortages were a problem that only American aid could rectify.

  The U.S. envoy’s diligence, unrelenting hard work, and persistent questioning during the grueling inspection tour won the respect, albeit much of it grudging, of many of those whose work he scrutinized. A British friend passed on to Harriman a conversation he had overheard between two Whitehall officials: “ ‘Mr. Harriman is a go-getter, isn’t he?’ Reply: ‘I expect he is.’ ‘He asks very potent and embarrassing questions.’ Reply: ‘Oh, does he?’ ‘Yes, insists on an answer and gets it.’ ”

  Churchill, too, was much impressed by Harriman’s efforts, but, as the Lend-Lease representative discovered when he returned to London in early July, the prime minister was now preoccupied by more pressing matters than the Middle East snafus. On June 22, Hitler had broken his 1939 nonaggression treaty with Joseph Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union with more than two million troops. Late that night, Churchill made a broadcast to his countrymen pledging Britain’s full support to the Soviet Union, despite his long-held view of its government leaders as “the mortal foes of civilized freedom.” As much as the prime minister despised Stalin’s “wicked regime,” he needed the Russians to bear the brunt of a new German onslaught, to lift some of the burden of fighting from British shoulders so that he and his severely weakened country could regroup.

  Then, a few days after the German invasion, Harry Hopkins arrived in London with an invitation to Churchill to meet Roosevelt the following month off the coast of Newfoundland—their first encounter since the infamous Gray’s Inn dinner in 1918. As soon as he heard of the gathering, Harriman was determined to be a participant. Churchill, who was anxious to make a good impression on the president, was not averse to having the sympathetic Harriman by his side to give him counsel and reassurance. As a result, the American had no trouble convincing the prime minister he should be included in the entourage. But when Harriman returned to Washington in late July to deliver a firsthand report of his Middle East trip, he learned to his chagrin that Roosevelt had no intention of inviting him along.

  FDR had wanted a small, intimate meeting with Churchill, with only a few close advisers in attendance. When Churchill urged that the senior military staffs of both countries be included, the president reluctantly agreed. But he refused to add Harriman to the party, despite the intercession of Harry Hopkins and appeals from Harriman himself, who told the president that Churchill expected to see him there. At the last moment, however, Churchill added Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office to the conference’s mushrooming list of participants, and Roosevelt finally relented, extending an invitation to Harriman and undersecretary of state Sumner Welles to join the presidential entourage.

  EARLY ON THE MORNING of August 9, the British battleship Prince of Wales, showing the scars of its recent clash with Germany’s naval behemoth the Bismarck, glided into Newfoundland’s Placentia Bay. On the admiral’s bridge, a tense Winston Churchill peered out at the mist-shrouded horizon, searching for the American ships carrying Roosevelt and his party.

  The prime minister regarded the upcoming meeting with the president as one of the most fateful encounters of his life. During the five-day voyage from Britain, he had been nervous yet buoyant; his bodyguard remarked that Churchill “probably never had shown so much exuberance and excitement” since his school days at Harrow. Said another of Churchill’s aides: “He had firmly determined from 1940 onwards that nothing must stand in the way of his friendship for the President on which so much depended.”

  Harry Hopkins, who accompanied Churchill on the Prince of Wales, was equally anxious. As he had told Ed Murrow earlier, both the prime minister and president were prima donnas, accustomed to being the center of attention and getting their own way. It was his job, Hopkins said, “to keep those two in close and friendly relations.”

  As the camouflaged Prince of Wales, flanked by her destroyer escorts, edged into the bay, Churchill spotted the looming shapes of the American flotilla—five destroyers and the heavy cruiser Augusta, the flagship of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Clambering aboard the Augusta, as the U.S. Marine Band played “God Save the King,” he was greeted by a beaming Franklin Roosevelt, holding tight to the arm of his son Elliott. “At last we’ve gotten together,” the president declared. Churchill, smiling just as broadly, nodded: “Yes, we have.”

  Throughout the four-day conference, Averell Harriman hovered in the background, acting as an adviser to Churchill and having little to do with Roosevelt or the other Americans. Unsure of the impression he was making on the president, Churchill repeatedly asked him: “Does he like me, Averell? Do you think he likes me?” The answer was yes, although Churchill initially annoyed Roosevelt by telling him how happy he was that they were finally meeting face-to-face after so many months of cables and ph
one calls. His face darkening, FDR reminded him of the Gray’s Inn dinner thirty-three years earlier. “Papa completely forgot they had met before,” Mary Soames remarked years later. “He hadn’t been warned or reminded, and it had just slipped his mind.” Although Roosevelt reportedly never quite got over his annoyance at Churchill for what he viewed as a slight, he was as determined as the prime minister to make the conference a success and laughed off Churchill’s lapse in memory.

  Indeed, by most accounts, both leaders kept their formidable egos under tight control during the conference. Thirty-year-old Elliott Roosevelt, who was accustomed to seeing his father “dominating every gathering he was part of,” was amazed that, during the sessions with Churchill, he actually listened. Churchill, for his part, was assiduous in deferring to FDR and repeatedly described himself as “the president’s lieutenant.” By the end of lunch on the first day, they were calling each other “Franklin” and “Winston.”

  While their friendship was never as close as Churchill later made it out to be, the American and British leaders, as Robert Sherwood put it, established an “easy intimacy, a joking informality … a degree of frankness” at the meeting that continued throughout their four-year relationship. After their last shipboard session, Roosevelt urged Churchill’s bodyguard to “take care of him. He’s about the greatest man in the world. In fact he may very likely be the greatest.” The president would later tell his wife that the Newfoundland conference “had broken the ice,” adding that he “knew now that Churchill, who he thought was typical of John Bull, was a man with whom he could really work.” About Roosevelt, Churchill wrote years later: “I formed a very strong affection which grew with our years of comradeship.”