by Max Hastings
We seek no treasure, we seek no territorial gain, we seek only the right of man to be free; we seek his rights to worship his God, to lead his life in his own way, secure from persecution. As the humble labourer returns from his work when the day is done, and sees the smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that no rat-a-tat-tat—[here he rapped on the table] of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest. We seek government with the consent of the people, man’s freedom to say what he will, and when he thinks himself injured, to find himself equal in the eyes of the law. But war aims other than these we have none.
Churchill’s old colleagues—the likes of Balfour, Lloyd George, Chamberlain, Baldwin, Halifax—had for years rolled their eyes impatiently in the face of such outpourings. Familiarity with Winston’s extravagant rhetoric rendered them readily bored by it, especially when it had been deployed in support of so many unworthy and unsuccessful causes in the past. Yet now, at last, Churchill’s words and the mood of the times seemed perfectly conjoined. His sonorous style had an exceptional appeal for Americans. Hopkins had never before witnessed such effortless, magnificent dinner-table statesmanship. He was entranced by his host: ‘Jesus Christ! What a man!’ He was impressed by the calm with which the prime minister received news, often bad. One night during the usual evening film at Ditchley, word came that the cruiser Southampton had been sunk in the Mediterranean. The show went on.
During the weeks that followed, Hopkins spent twelve evenings with Churchill, travelled with him to visit naval bases in Scotland and blitzed south coast towns. He marvelled at his host’s popularity and absolute mastery of Britain’s governance, though he was less impressed by the calibre of Churchill’s subordinates: ‘Some of the ministers and underlings are a bit trying,’ he told Roosevelt. Eden, for instance, he thought talked too much. Hopkins attained a quick, shrewd grasp of the private distaste towards the prime minister that persisted among Britain’s ruling caste: ‘The politicians and upper crust pretend to like him.’ He was in no doubt, however, about the fortitude of the British people. ‘Hopkins was, I think, very impressed by the cheerfulness and optimism he found everywhere,’ wrote Churchill’s private secretary Eric Seal. ‘I must confess that I am surprised at it myself…PM…gets on like a house afire with Hopkins, who is a dear, & is universally liked.’ Roosevelt’s envoy told Raymond Lee: ‘I have never had such an enjoyable time as I had with Mr Churchill.’
Back in Washington, the president was much tickled by reports of Hopkins’s popularity in Britain, as the Interior Secretary Harold Ickes noted: ‘Apparently the first thing that Churchill asks for when he gets awake in the morning is Harry Hopkins, and Harry is the last one he sees at night.’ Maybe so, growled the cynical Ickes, but even if the president had sent a bubonic plague-carrier, Britain’s prime minister would have found it expedient to see plenty of him. Among the envoy’s most important functions was to brief Churchill about how best to address the American people and assist Roosevelt’s efforts to assist Britain. Above all, the prime minister was told, he should not suggest that any commitment of US ground troops was either desirable or likely. Hopkins concluded his report to the president: ‘People here are amazing from Churchill down,’ he wrote, ‘and if courage alone can win—the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately.’
When the envoy landed back at New York’s LaGuardia airport in February 1941, the new ambassador-designate to Britain, ‘Gil’ Winant, called out to him as he descended from his plane: ‘Are they going to hold out?’ Hopkins shouted back ‘Of course they are.’ This was a self-consciously theatrical exchange for the benefit of the assembled throng of reporters, but nonetheless sincere. Thereafter, Hopkins’s considerable influence upon the president was exercised towards gaining maximum American support for Britain. Londoner Vere Hodgson was among those who thrilled to a BBC broadcast by Roosevelt’s envoy: ‘He finished with really glorious words of comfort: “People of Britain, people of the British Commonwealth of Nations, you are not fighting alone.” I felt after this the War was won.’
Yet, however successful was the Hopkins visit from a British perspective, it did not alter fundamentals. ‘Winston is completely certain of America’s full help,’ the Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, wrote uncertainly during a visit to Chequers at the end of February 1941. ‘Is he right? I cannot say.’ Franklin Roosevelt was conducting his nation’s policy in accordance with a belief that he could not move faster than public opinion would allow. Such opinion was moving Britain’s way. To the boundless relief of the prime minister, on 8 February the Lend-Lease Bill passed the House by 260 votes to 165, and on 8 March was endorsed by the Senate, sixty votes to thirteen. For months thereafter, the last of Britain’s foreign exchange continued to be drained to pay for supplies—only 1 per cent of war material used by Britain in 1941 represented fruits of Lend-Lease. But the new measure ensured that even when Britain’s cash was exhausted, shipments kept coming. Importantly, 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie supported it—and Britain.
The president extracted for the British through Lend-Lease the most generous terms a US legislature would swallow, much preferable to the straight loans of World War I, which Britain alienated US opinion by failing to repay. A substantial minority of Americans, including many at the summits of industry and commerce, not merely opposed Roosevelt’s policies, but hated the man. He perceived his own power as circumscribed, in a fashion which the prime minister underestimated. Unlike Churchill, Roosevelt never led a coalition government, though he included some prominent Republicans such as Henry Stimson in his cabinet. He always faced substantial opposition in Congress—sometimes only on lesser matters, but sometimes also on great ones. There was no doubt of his sincerity in desiring British victory. Having overcome his initial uncertainties about Churchill, partly thanks to Hopkins, by March 1941 he could declare to the American people: ‘In this historic crisis, Britain is blessed with a brilliant and great leader.’ But Roosevelt considered himself lacking any mandate to dispatch American soldiers to fight in Europe. Until December 1941, while he provided increasing aid to Britain—‘We must become the great arsenal of democracy,’ a phrase borrowed from the French economist Jean Monnet by way of the American judge Felix Frankfurter—he remained unwilling to lead a charge towards war. In this he was assuredly wise. If the United States had plunged into belligerence with Germany before Pearl Harbor, and even in the unlikely event that Roosevelt could have pushed a declaration of war through Congress, he would thereafter have led a divided country.
The British historian Michael Howard, in 1941 a student at Oxford awaiting a summons to the army, has written: ‘It is never very easy for the British to understand that a very large number of Americans, if they think about us at all, do so with various degrees of dislike and contempt…In the 1940s the Americans had some reason to regard the British as a lot of toffee-nosed bastards who oppressed half the world and had a sinister talent for getting other people to do their fighting for them.’ Melville Troy was an American cigar importer living in London. Though he admired the fortitude of the British amid the blitz, he was deeply anxious to see his own country spared from its horrors: ‘Personally I am very sorry to see America turning her pruning hooks and ploughshares into implements of war, and wish we had a Woodrow Wilson to keep us out of it.’ Many of Troy’s fellow countrymen thought likewise.
There was much, much more British wooing to be done. The extravagant courtesies shown by the government to Harry Hopkins were outdone when Winant arrived as ambassador. He was met at Bristol by Brendan Bracken and the Duke of Kent. A special train took him to Windsor, where King George VI was waiting at the station. The monarch then drove Winant in his own car to the Castle. Never in history had a foreign envoy been received with such ceremony. Meanwhile, implementation of the Lend-Lease programme enlisted another key American player in Britain’s cause. Averell Harriman, fifty-year-old so
n of a railroad millionaire, was a supremely gilded product of Groton and Yale, a polo player and skier, international banker and collector of Impressionist paintings, a cosmopolitan of considerable gifts. Roosevelt explained Harriman’s new mission to reporters at the White House: ‘As soon as the Lend-Spend, Lend-Lease—whatever you call it—bill is perfected, more or less, he will go over and—Oh, I suppose you will ask all about his title, so I thought I would invent one…we decided it was a pretty good idea to call him an “Expediter”. That’s a new one for you. I believe it is not in the diplomatic list or any other list. So he will go over as “Defense Expediter”.’
In the spring of 1941 Harriman became an important American advocate of aid to Britain. Nonetheless, in Washington Hopkins and Henry Stimson, the Secretary for War, remained the only prominent members of the administration wholeheartedly committed to such a policy. Other leading Americans remained sceptical. In the War Department, US generals cloaked dogged resistance to shipping abroad arms that were needed at home in a mantle of complaints about allegedly amateurish British purchasing policy. One officer, contemptuous of the informality of the Hopkins mission, told Harriman: ‘We can’t take seriously requests that come late in the evening over a bottle of port.’
Among chief of the army Gen. George Marshall’s key subordinates there were deep divisions about the merits of participation in the war, and of the British as prospective allies. Some senior officers unashamedly reserved their admiration for the Germans. Maj.Gen. Stanley Embick was a former chief of the War Plans Division who had become sceptical about Churchill and his people during service in France in World War I. Now he believed that Britain’s war effort would fare better if the country changed prime minister. He thought that US aid should stop far short of belligerency. Like his son-in-law, Major Albert Wedemeyer of the War Plans Division, Embick addressed every Anglo-American issue with a determination that his country should not be duped into pulling British chestnuts out of the fire. Maj.Gen. Charles ‘Bull’ Wesson hated the British, because he had once been dispatched from Washington to London with a message for the chiefs of staff, and was kept waiting to deliver it. Raymond Lee wrote: ‘He resented this so much that it led to a wrangle and almost hatred on his part for the British, which he exploits at every opportunity. So small an act of discourtesy, either real or imagined, which took place many years ago, is having ill effects in the relations between the two countries today.’
By contrast Colonel—soon to be lieutenant-general and a key figure in Marshall’s team—Joseph McNarney, who had visited Britain, believed it was vital to American national security that Churchill’s island should not fall. Marshall himself was less implacably hostile to the British than Embick, but in the summer of 1941, in the words of his biographer, ‘If rather than when continued to dominate his thinking about American involvement.’ Nor was such caution confined to senior officers. Time and Life magazines interviewed US Army draftees, and reported their morale to be low. At a camp movie night in Mississippi, men booed when FDR and Marshall appeared on a newsreel.
Averell Harriman was in no doubt that America should fight. But he departed for London on 15 March 1941 fearful that Roosevelt was still unwilling to lead the US anywhere near as far or fast as was necessary to avert a Nazi triumph: ‘I was deeply worried the president did not have a policy and had not decided how far he could go…The President obviously hoped that he would not have to face an unpleasant decision. He seemed unwilling to lead public opinion or to force the issue but [he] hoped…that our material aid would let the British do the job.’ Few doubted that Roosevelt already stood among America’s greatest presidents. But he was often also a notably cautious one.
Harriman noted in a memorandum of 11 March: ‘I must attempt to convince the Prime Minister that I, or someone, must convey to our people his war strategy or else he cannot expect to get maximum aid.’ Like Hopkins, he was received in Britain on the reddest of carpets. He was met at Bristol by Commander ‘Tommy’ Thompson, Churchill’s administrative aide, who led him aboard a plane which took them straight to Chequers. Harriman’s guest gift to Clementine Churchill was a box of tangerines, which she received with unfeigned gratitude. The envoy was enfolded in a warm prime ministerial embrace. Kathleen Harriman, who accompanied her father’s mission, wrote to her sister: ‘The PM is much smaller than I expected and a lot less fat…and looks rather like a kindly teddy bear…I’d expected an overpowering, rather terrifying man. He’s quite the opposite: very gracious, has a wonderful smile and isn’t at all hard to talk to. He’s got the kind of eyes that look right through you. Mother [Clementine] is a very sweet lady. She’s given up her whole life to her husband and takes a back seat graciously. Everyone in the family looks upon him as God and she’s rather left out.’
In London, Harriman established himself on the second floor of a Grosvenor Square building adjoining the US embassy, and was also given his own office at the Admiralty. Churchill invited him to attend the weekly meetings of the cabinet’s Atlantic Committee.
Of Harriman’s first eight weekends in Britain, he spent seven at Chequers, though like most American guests he found his sense of privilege tempered by dismay at the coldness of the house. Churchill convoyed him, like Hopkins, as a prize exhibit on his own travels around the country. Here, he told the British people, was a living earnest of America’s commitment—the president’s personal representative.
In private to Harriman, ‘the PM bluntly stated that he could see no prospect of victory until the United States came into the war’. If Japan attacked, said Churchill, the British naval base of Singapore would be at risk. At every turn the prime minister sought to balance his desire to convince Roosevelt that Britain was a prospective winner against the need to exert pressure by emphasising the threat of disaster if America held back. Harriman urged Churchill to bolster Britain’s case by publishing details of its appalling shipping losses. Between February and April 1941, 142 ships totalling 818,000 tons had gone to the bottom, more than double the rate of sinkings in the early months of the war. At a Defence Committee meeting in May, Eden and Beaverbrook suggested that at least meat ship losses might be disclosed, to emphasise the gravity of the food situation. Churchill, with the support of several other ministers, opposed this, ‘believing that we shall get the Americans in by showing courage and boldness and prospects of success and not by running ourselves down’. Moreover, figures which privately frightened the British government would deal a shocking blow to domestic morale if they were revealed, and must provide a propaganda gift to Hitler.
Some Americans displayed a condescension which irked the recipients of their aid. Kathleen Harriman described British reluctance to enthuse about American Spam and cheese: ‘The great difficulty is re-educating the people,’ she wrote to her sister. ‘They prefer to go hungry rather than change their feeding habits.’ A Tory MP wrote: ‘The idea of being our armoury and supply furnishers seems to appeal to the Yanks as their share in the war for democracy…They are a quaint lot—they are told that if we lose the war they will be next on Hitler’s list…and yet they seem quite content to leave the actual fighting to us; they will do anything except fight.’ Duff Cooper, as Minister of Information, told newspaper editors on 21 March 1941: ‘The great thing is not to antagonise the United States…When we offered the bases against the [fifty loaned] destroyers we imagined, in Winston’s words, that we were exchanging “a bunch of flowers for a sugar cake”. But not at all. The Americans have done a hard business deal.’ After Lend-Lease became operational Franks, British driver to US military attaché Raymond Lee, told his master that he noticed more goodwill towards Americans. ‘Well, yes,’ agreed Lee sardonically. ‘Perhaps you might describe it that way, but it is only natural, don’t you think, that for seven thousand million dollars—that’s nearly a billion pounds—we ought to be entitled to a little bonhomie!’ ‘Oh yes, sir, yes, sir, quite. That’s just what I mean, sir. I should say there is quite a bit more bonhomie in the air, sir.’ This was o
nly half-true. Most British people considered that the US was providing them with minimal means to do dirty work that Americans ought properly to be sharing themselves.
The threat of Japanese aggression against the British Empire in the Far East dogged Churchill that summer of 1941. Germany was fully committed in Russia. Britain’s land forces in North Africa seemed to have a real prospect of victory against the Italians and such German troops as Hitler could spare from the eastern front. But if Japan attacked, the strategic balance would once more be overturned. Cadogan, at the Foreign Office, wrote in July that Churchill was ‘frightened of nothing but Japan’. The prime minister expressed confidence that if Tokyo moved against the British Empire, the Americans would intervene. His ministers, generals and officials were much less convinced. It was a nightmare prospect, that Britain might find itself at war in the East while America remained neutral. Some thought it likely that Japan would join Germany’s attack on Russia, rather than strike at Malaya. Eden asked Churchill what he would do in such an eventuality. The prime minister replied firmly that Britain would never herself initiate hostilities with Japan, unless the United States did so. Month after month of 1941, he sought to promote the illusion that Britain’s war effort was viable and purposeful. In private, however, he recognised its ultimate futility unless Roosevelt’s nation came in with both feet.
