by Lynne Olson
At the age of sixty-seven, Churchill was far removed from his youthful days as a Liberal cabinet minister, when he had emerged briefly as something of a social reformer himself. Together with David Lloyd George, he had been the driving force behind the introduction of major welfare reforms in Britain shortly after the turn of the century, including measures to reduce poverty and unemployment. Unlike Lloyd George, however, Churchill was not—and never would be—a social radical. His view of society tended to be extremely paternalistic, rather like an “old, benevolent Tory squire,” said the Labour Party’s Herbert Morrison, “who does all he can for the people—provided always that they are good obedient people and loyally recognize his position, and theirs.”
As Clementine Churchill once confided to Lord Moran, the prime minister knew virtually nothing about how ordinary Britons lived—and had no real interest in correcting that deficiency. “He’s never been in a bus,” Clementine said, “and only once on the Underground. That was during the [1926] General Strike, when I deposited him at South Kensington [station]. He went round and round, not knowing where to get out, and had to be rescued eventually.” With some vehemence, she added: “Winston is selfish…. You see, he has always had the ability and force to live his life exactly as he wanted.”
Yet, despite the great social chasm between him and most of his countrymen, Churchill had managed to forge an almost mystical connection with them in regard to fighting the war. Even before he became prime minister, he had inspired the British people with his resolve to battle the enemy until the end, no matter what the cost. As first lord of the Admiralty from September 1939 to May 1940, he had emerged as the most popular public figure in the nation. “In Mr. Churchill,” wrote the editor Kingsley Martin, “we have seen a man of action, who … reminds us that, whatever else we are or think we are, we were born and bred British, and British we must now live or die.”
As Martin suggested, Churchill and the British people shared many of the same qualities—dogged resolution, courage, energy, and combativeness. When they traveled with the prime minister during the Blitz, Winant and Averell Harriman witnessed the close affinity he had with his compatriots, who mobbed him wherever he went. Three years later, on V-E Day, Churchill would stand on a Whitehall balcony and declare to the vast, delirious crowds standing before him: “This is your victory.” As one, they would roar back: “No, it’s yours.”
When it came to social policy, however, there was almost no connection between Churchill and the people—a fact that was underscored by the reaction of the prime minister and his government to the release of the Beveridge Report in late 1942. Named for Sir William Beveridge, its chief author, the report proposed the creation of a social safety net to ensure a minimum standard of living for all Britons that included family allowances, a national health service, and a full employment policy.
The public went wild over the report, which was portrayed as a social Magna Carta and became an immediate bestseller. Londoners stood in line for hours “to buy this heavy two-shilling slab of involved economics as though it were unrationed manna dropped from some heaven,” Mollie Panter-Downes reported in The New Yorker. Throughout the rest of the war, the reforms proposed by the Beveridge Report dominated the political debate in Britain. While many in the Labour Party demanded that the government begin immediate discussions on how to implement this blueprint for the future, Churchill and most of his fellow Tories resisted such ideas. The prime minister viewed the report as an unwelcome distraction from the war effort and its proposals as far too costly for an economically straitened Britain to undertake after the conflict was over. As he saw it, the document’s author, a former head of the London School of Economics, was little more than “an awful windbag and dreamer.” Other government officials did their best to ignore the report, refusing to discuss it or give it any official publicity.
AN ARDENT ADVOCATE of the aims of the Beveridge plan, Gil Winant was dismayed by Churchill’s hostile reaction to the idea of postwar social reforms. Like Murrow, Winant had close ties to Beveridge and many other prominent left-wing intellectuals and writers in Britain, including Harold Laski, H. G. Wells, R. H. Tawney, and John May-nard Keynes. The ambassador spent many evenings in the basement kitchen of Keynes’s home in Bloomsbury; in turn, he hosted small dinners for Keynes, Laski, and others in his Grosvenor Square flat, where far-ranging discussions about planning for the postwar world continued far into the night.
For decades, Winant’s main focus had been on social justice and the creation of a better life for workingmen and -women throughout the world. “When the war has been won by democracy, we must be prepared to conquer the peace,” he said on the day he was named ambassador to Britain. A few months earlier, he had talked to William Shirer about his ideas for the postwar reconstruction of Europe and the creation of a peace economy “without the maladjustment, the great unemployment and deflation and depression that followed the last war.” In a BBC broadcast, he declared: “There is a deep consciousness that peace and social justice must come hand in hand.” Ever since he arrived in Britain, Winant’s speeches and private conversations had centered on the need to persuade the nations of the world “to concentrate on the things that unite humanity rather than on the things that divide it.”
Roosevelt had sent him to Britain precisely because of his intimate ties with left-wing intellectuals and politicians, who the president believed would take over leadership of the country during or immediately after the war. But, in his tenure as ambassador, Winant had become personally close to Churchill as well. Refusing to give up on the prime minister where social reforms were concerned, he occasionally tried to nudge him in the right direction. When Churchill, at a meeting of employers and workers’ representatives, praised British trade union members for giving up certain rights for the duration, Winant, speaking at the same meeting, gently encouraged the British leader to give more consideration to the workers’ needs. Fighting the enemy, he said, “requires not only skill and hard work and materials, but an understanding that is sensitive to the devoted loyalty of the people.”
ON JUNE 6, 1942, the U.S. ambassador gazed out from a train window at the bleak, hardscrabble landscape of northeast England’s coal country. He had acceded to Clem Attlee’s plea for help in ending the coal strike, and now the two of them were on their way to Durham, where union leaders and more than four hundred delegates, representing thousands of striking miners, were waiting.
When he and Attlee arrived at the grimy union hall, Winant was given an enthusiastic welcome by the miners. He immediately launched into his speech, which, without mentioning the strikes, equated the battle against fascism with the fight for social democracy. The miners and other workers, he said, were on the front lines just as much as soldiers in the field, with the same responsibility to continue the fight. “You who suffered so deeply in the long Depression years know we must move on a great social offensive if we are to win the war completely. It is not a short-term military job. We must solemnly resolve that in our future order we will not tolerate the economic evils which breed poverty and war.” Then, in an exquisitely subtle admonition directed at the British government, Winant added: “This is not something that we shelve for the duration. It is part of the war.”
It was one of Winant’s finest speeches. His usual hesitancy at the beginning, the long pauses and the stumbling over words, dropped away as he offered with passionate intensity his vision for a new postwar world. Leaning forward in their seats, the miners focused intently on every word.
“What we want is not complicated,” the ambassador declared. “We have enough technical knowledge and organizing ability…. We have enough courage. We must put it to use. When war is done, the drive for tanks must become a drive for houses. The drive for food to prevent the enemy from starving us must become a drive for food to satisfy the needs of all people in all countries. The drive for manpower in war must become a drive for employment to make freedom from want a living reality…. Just as the peopl
es of democracy are united in a common objective today, so we are committed to a common objective tomorrow. We are committed to the establishment of the people’s democracy.”
Winant’s eyes swept over his audience. “We must always remember,” he said, “that it is the things of the spirit that in the end prevail. That caring counts. That where there is no vision, people perish. That hope and faith count, and that without charity there can be nothing good. That by daring to live dangerously, we are learning to live generously. And that by believing in the inherent goodness of man, we may meet the call of your great Prime Minister and ‘stride forward into the unknown with growing confidence.’ ”
When he finished, there was a long moment of silence, followed by an explosion of applause and thundering shouts of “Hear, hear.” For the next hour and a half, the miners peppered Winant with questions about America, the war, and the general state of the world. Afterward, he was swallowed up in a boisterous throng wanting to shake his hand and thank him for coming. “We think, sir,” exclaimed the union’s treasurer, “that you are a grand guy.” A few hours later, the striking miners in Durham voted to return to work, as did miners in Lancashire and Yorkshire.
“WINANT TALKS, STRIKE ENDS” read a banner headline in the following day’s Daily Express. Lamenting the backwardness of the British government in defining the postwar world, the Daily Herald compared Winant’s speech to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in its call for “a new, greater world emancipation.” The Herald urged that the ambassador’s words “be committed to memory, recited in all the schools, preached about in all the churches.” The Manchester Guardian, meanwhile, hailed Winant’s remarks as “one of the great speeches of the war.”
Yet, though the ambassador’s eloquence helped resolve the coal strike, the larger question of war aims—what were the reasons for fighting this war?—remained a highly contentious issue. A few months after the strike, that issue would be at the heart of an ugly controversy in the midst of Operation Torch, the Anglo-American assault on North Africa. Winant and Murrow would again be involved, but this time on opposite sides. Murrow would openly defy his network and the U.S government, while Winant would be compelled to defend a policy he privately believed to be tragically misguided.
THE GENERAL CHOSEN TO HEAD THE INVASION OF NORTH AFRICA was appalled by his new assignment. Dwight Eisenhower had been dispatched to England in June 1942 to oversee the buildup of American forces in Britain and, he thought, to prepare for an Allied landing in France. That was the plan he had devised as war plans chief in Washington and the one toward which he and George Marshall had been working for the previous seven months. But to the disgust of both generals, Winston Churchill persuaded Roosevelt in July that the initial Anglo-American assault should take place in North Africa later that year. In Eisenhower’s view, the day that Roosevelt agreed with Churchill was the “blackest day in history.”
Adamant that the Allies lacked the resources to challenge Hitler on the Continent, the British argued that a landing on the rim of Africa would, in fact, clear the way for an eventual successful attack on Europe. After establishing control in French North Africa, the Allies would sweep east and strike at the rear of Rommel and the Afrika Korps, while the British Eighth Army would hit the Germans from the west. As the British saw it, the ouster of Axis troops from the region would not only save Egypt and the Suez Canal but also reopen the Mediterranean to Allied supply vessels and troopships, now forced to steam thousands of miles out of their way to reach the Middle East and India. In Alan Brooke’s estimation, a victory in North Africa would release at least half a million tons of shipping for use in a large-scale offensive operation on the Continent.
Roosevelt, however, was less convinced by the shipping argument than by the fact that American troops finally would see action against the Germans. In response to Stalin’s incessant demands for a second front, the president had promised the Soviet foreign minister in May that the Allies expected to open such a front later that year. FDR was also facing pressure from an increasingly restive American public, who, after Pearl Harbor, considered Japan, not Germany, to be the country’s primary enemy. Unless U.S. forces were sent to the European theater soon, congressional and public pressure might force a massive shift of American resources to the fight against Japan. “Only by an intellectual effort,” Henry Stimson wrote to Churchill, had the American people been “convinced that Germany was their most dangerous enemy and should be disposed of before Japan.”
In exchange for his agreement to the North Africa operation, Roosevelt insisted that he be allowed to set most of its ground rules. Above all, he said, it must be a predominantly American operation, with an American commander, to dissuade Vichy French forces in North Africa from resisting. When France capitulated to Germany in June 1940, the French government, under its new president, Marshal Philippe Pétain, was allowed by Hitler to establish itself in Vichy, a town in central France. The French, FDR told Churchill, would be far less likely to oppose U.S. troops than they would the British, who had destroyed much of the French fleet at the Algerian port of Oran two years before and who supported Charles de Gaulle, the rebel general who had escaped to London to rally the French against Vichy and the Reich.
Unlike Britain, the United States had maintained diplomatic relations with the Vichy government, which had been permitted by the Germans to retain control of French North Africa and the country’s other colonial possessions, as well as its fleet. The Roosevelt administration had come under severe criticism at home for its ties to Vichy, which had collaborated closely with the Nazis and imposed authoritarian rule in the region it controlled in southern France. Vichy officials had instituted repressive policies against Jews long before receiving German orders to do so, and later assisted the Nazis in rounding up Jews for deportation to concentration and death camps. When they were hired, Vichy police had to take the following oath: “I swear to fight against democracy, against Gaullist insurrection and against Jewish leprosy.” Roosevelt, however, believed that, despite all their sins, it was important to stay on good terms with the Vichy leaders, who he hoped would keep French North Africa and the fleet out of Nazi hands and perhaps, at some point, come over to the Allied side.
At the same time, the president had taken a great dislike to the prickly, difficult de Gaulle, even though he had never met him. Another U.S. condition for Torch was exclusion of the general and his Free French forces from the operation. In addition, Roosevelt decreed that de Gaulle must be given no prior information about the landings, “regardless of how irritated and irritating he may become.” Having won the battle over North Africa, Churchill was more than willing to agree to Roosevelt’s terms. “I consider myself your lieutenant,” he cabled the president. “This is an American enterprise in which we are your help mates.”
It was, however, an American enterprise that Eisenhower, on every level, considered a nightmare. He and his subordinates had just a few months to plan one of the most audacious amphibious landings in history, bringing two assault forces from the United States and Britain to the shores of a continent “where no major military campaign had been conducted for centuries.” As Churchill’s military adviser, Pug Ismay, observed in his memoirs, any amphibious operation was an extraordinarily difficult feat to pull off. It required “highly trained personnel, a great variety of equipment, a detailed knowledge of the points at which the landings are to take place, accurate information about the enemy’s strength and dispositions, and perhaps above all, meticulous planning and preparation.” None of those conditions could be said to apply to Torch.
Eisenhower and his subordinates worried about the battle-readiness of American assault troops, most of whom had been given little or no combat training. Indeed, some did not learn how to load, aim, or fire a rifle until they were on the ships transporting them to North Africa. The American command was also concerned that too few weapons, supplies, and ships were available to support such a massive undertaking. “We were still existing in a stat
e of scarcity,” Eisenhower later wrote. “There was no such thing as plenty of everything.” And, until just a few weeks before the invasion was launched, arguments still raged about where the landings would take place.
The British wanted to go ashore as far east as possible, so that troops could quickly move into Tunisia, Torch’s chief objective, to forestall the landing of additional German troops there and to take control of Tunis and Bizerte, the country’s crucial deep-water ports. According to the British scenario, Rommel would then find himself trapped between the Torch forces and the Eighth Army. Eisenhower supported the British plan, only to be overruled by Marshall and his lieutenants, who feared that, by landing so far east, the Allies would be the ones caught in a trap—attacked from the rear by German forces advancing through neutral Spain. The American brass insisted that the assault troops must land at Casablanca, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, some one thousand miles west of Tunis. Although Churchill felt that Marshall was being overly cautious (as did Eisenhower), the British leader once again acquiesced. The result was a compromise. Allied forces would land at three widely separated sites: Casablanca in Morocco, and Algiers and Oran in Algeria. Algiers, the site closest to Tunis, was still more than five hundred miles away from the operation’s main target.
THE ASSIGNMENT HANDED to Eisenhower that summer would have taxed the most superhuman of commanders. In addition to organizing what James MacGregor Burns would later describe as “this bizarre, doubt-ridden and unpredictable” mission, he had to create from whole cloth a unified command for Torch’s two national forces. Since no such structure had existed in all of military history, he had no manual to consult or precedent to follow. His Army friends told him it was an impossible task. He and Torch were doomed to failure, they said, and he would be made the scapegoat for the inevitable defeat. “I was regaled,” Eisenhower later wrote, “with tales of allied failure, starting with the Greeks, five hundred years before Christ, and coming down through the ages of allied quarrels to the bitter French-British recriminations of 1940.”
