by Max Hastings
Churchill revealed nothing of his private disappointment in the exuberant rhetoric with which he addressed his colleagues and the nation on returning to Britain. He felt obliged to satisfy their craving for good news, and told the war cabinet that American naval commanders were bursting with impatience to join the struggle, though others at Placentia detected nothing of the kind. His report of Roosevelt’s private remarks appears wilfully to have exaggerated the president’s carefully equivocal expressions of support. Pownall, now Dill’s vice-CIGS, wrote in his diary: ‘Roosevelt is all for coming into the war, and as soon as possible…But he said that he would never declare war, he wishes to provoke it.’ Uncertainty persists about whether the president really used these words, or whether Churchill put them into his mouth on returning to London. Even such sentiments fell short of British hopes. For all the president’s social warmth, he never indulged romantic lunges of the kind to which Churchill was prone. If not quite an anglophobe, Roosevelt never revealed much private warmth towards Britain. He left Placentia with the same mindset he had taken there. He was bent upon assisting the British by all possible means to avert defeat. But he had no intention of outpacing congressional and popular sentiment by leading a dash towards US belligerence. American public opinion was vastly more supportive of its government’s oil embargo against Japan, in response to Tokyo’s descent on Indochina, than it was of Roosevelt’s increasing naval support for Britain in the Battle of the Atlantic; this, ironically, though the embargo provoked the Japanese to bomb America into the war.
Churchill, at an off-the-record British newspaper editors’ briefing on 22 August, predicted that Japan would not attack in the East, and observed that the Battle of the Atlantic was going better. Suggesting that German U-boats would be reluctant to risk tangling with American warships, which were now operating actively in the western Atlantic, he said: ‘I assume that Hitler does not want to risk a clash with Roosevelt until the Russians are out of the way.’ The flush of British excitement faded. The prime minister’s lofty rhetoric could not overcome a sense of anti-climax, which extended across the nation. A War Office clerk seemed to a British general to judge Placentia rightly when he dismissed Churchill’s broadcast describing the meeting as ‘nothing dressed up very nicely’.
Vere Hodgson, the Notting Hill charity worker, heard the BBC promise ‘an important government announcement’ on the afternoon of 14 August, and expected a declaration of Anglo-American union. When, instead, radio listeners heard the words of the Atlantic Charter, she wrote in disappointment: ‘There was a statement of War Aims. All very laudable in themselves—the only difficulty will be in carrying them out.’ Churchill cabled Hopkins, revealing unusually explicit impatience: ‘I ought to tell you that there has been a wave of depression through cabinet and other informed circles here about President’s many assurances about no commitments and no closer to war, etc…If 1942 opens with Russia knocked out and Britain left again alone, all kinds of dangers may arise. I do not think Hitler will help in any way…You know best whether anything more can be done…Should be grateful if you could give me any sort of hope.’
At Downing Street, Churchill observed irritably that Americans had committed themselves to suffer all the inconveniences of war, ‘without its commanding stimuli’. Over dinner with Winant, the US ambassador, on 29 August, he again appealed explicitly for American belligerence. Colville recorded: ‘The PM said that after the joint declaration [the Atlantic Charter], America could not honourably stay out…If R declared war now…they might see victory as early as 1943; but if she did not, the war might drag on for years, leaving Britain undefeated but civilization in ruins.’ Influential American visitors continued to be courted with unflagging zeal. The journalist John Gunther was entertained at Chequers. A tedious Pennsylvania Democrat, Congressman J. Buell Snyder, chairman of the House Military Sub-Committee on Appropriations, was warmly received at Downing Street. Yet at the end of August Charles Peake, minister at Britain’s Washington embassy, expressed profound gloom about the prospect of the United States entering the war soon, perhaps at all. He even questioned—as did some members of the US administration—whether Roosevelt desired such an outcome. Although America could no longer be deemed neutral, it seemed plausible that it might cling indefinitely to its non-belligerent status. There was, and remains, no evidence that Roosevelt was willing to risk a potentially disastrous clash with Congress. Unless America became a fighting ally, Lend-Lease would merely suffice to stave off British defeat.
The autumn of 1941 was one of many wartime seasons which must be viewed without hindsight about what followed. British prospects everywhere seemed bleak. An American diplomat who spent ten days in Scotland returned to report to his embassy: ‘The attitude of the people he had been with, most of them big industrialists and realists in their points of view, is that the British are now losing the war, and that it is ridiculous to talk about subduing the German Army by bombing cities inside Germany…The German Army…must be beaten somehow or other on the ground, or the war is lost.’ Churchill agreed. ‘It will not be possible for the whole British Army (other than those in the Middle East) to remain indefinitely inert and passive as a garrison of this island against invasion,’ Churchill wrote to Ismay on 12 September. ‘Such a course, apart altogether from military considerations, would bring the Army into disrepute. I do not need to elaborate this.’
Moscow regarded the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt with its accustomed paranoia. A Soviet biographer of Churchill, writing more than thirty years later, asserted that at Placentia Bay, ‘plans were worked out to establish Anglo-American domination of the post-war world. The leaders of Britain and the USA were drawing up these plans while the USSR was bearing the brunt of the war and America had not yet entered it.’ Stalin, in desperate straits, wanted 30,000 tons of aluminium, together with 400 planes and 500 tanks a month from Britain. Churchill told Ambassador Maisky that Moscow would have to be content with half these quantities, and look to the Americans for the rest. On 15 September, Stalin demanded that twenty-five British divisions should be sent to the Russian front via Iran or Archangel. He had already asked Harry Hopkins to solicit Roosevelt to dispatch an American army to Russia. Hopkins, suitably amazed, said that even if the US entered the war, it was unlikely that she would dispatch soldiers to fight in the Caucasus.
It was a measure of Churchill’s anxiety to appease Moscow that he agreed in principle to send British troops to Russia. He speculated wildly that Wavell, a Russian-speaker, might command such a force. To try to assist the Russians and fail, he declared, was better than to make no attempt. He was flailing. On 23 October, the notion was formally abandoned. Stalin complained that badly crated British aircraft were arriving ‘broken’ at Archangel. The British hoped against hope that dire Russian threats to seek a separate peace were as much bluff as their own mutterings about launching a Second Front.
As Britain’s merchant fleet suffered relentless attrition in the Atlantic, food minister Lord Woolton briefed the cabinet on the necessity to ration canned goods. Churchill murmured in sorrowful jest: ‘I shall never see another sardine!’ In reality, of course, he suffered less than any other British citizen from the exigencies of war, and occasionally professed embarrassment that he had never lived so luxuriously in his life. If his energy was somewhat diminished by age, he had less need than ever before to trouble himself about personal wants, which were met by his large staff of domestics and officials. No ministerial colleague enjoyed his privileges in matters of diet, comfort, domestic and travel arrangements. Eden, as Foreign Secretary, waxed lyrical about being offered a slice of cold ham at a Buckingham Palace luncheon, and oranges at the Brazilian embassy. Every wartime British government diarist fortunate enough to travel, including the most exalted ministers and generals, devoted much space to applauding the food they enjoyed abroad, because the fare at home was so dismal.
The prime minister seldom ate in other people’s houses, but enjoyed an occasional meal at Buck
’s club. He sometimes attended gatherings at the Savoy of the Other Club, the dining group he and F.E. Smith had founded in 1910. There, more often than not, he sat beside Lord Camrose, proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, a friend who vainly coveted a government job. One night in the autumn of 1941 he slipped out of Downing Street with Eden and Beaverbrook to dine at the Ritz. Reminiscing, he said he would like to have his old First War colleagues Balfour and Smith with him now. Beaverbrook suggested that if Churchill had played his cards better, he might have become prime minister in 1916. Churchill said that the worst moment of his life came when Lloyd George said there was no place for him in the new cabinet.
The housekeepers at both Downing Street and Chequers were issued with unlimited supplies of diplomatic food coupons for official entertaining. These enabled Churchill and his guests to indulge a style unknown to ordinary citizens. The costs of Chequers rose dramatically in the Churchill years from those of Neville Chamberlain, matching the expansiveness of the hospitality. The Chequers Trust’s solicitor agreed with Kathleen Hill, Churchill’s secretary, in January 1942 that ‘the Food Account was very high’. The family made a modest regular cash contribution to compensate the trustees for the Churchills’ private share of the house’s costs, including paying a quarter of the bill for the little Ford car used by Clementine.
Privileged though the family’s domestic circumstances might be, the prime minister’s wife often found it no easier than her compatriots to find acceptable food. This caused dismay to insensitive visitors. Once in the following year, when Eleanor Roosevelt and other Washingtonians were guests in the No.10 Annexe, Mrs Churchill apologised for the fare: ‘I’m sorry dear, I could not buy any fish. You will have to eat macaroni.’ Henry Morgenthau noted without enthusiasm: ‘Then they gave us little left-over bits made into meat loaf.’ By contrast, some of Churchill’s guests recoiled from his self-indulgence at a time when the rest of the country was enduring whale steaks. One night when Churchill took a party to the Savoy, the Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King was disgusted that his host insisted on ordering both fish and meat, in defiance of rationing regulations. The ascetic King found it ‘disgraceful that Winston should behave like this’.
Churchill’s wit served better than his hospitality or the war news to sustain the spirit of his colleagues. At a vexed Defence Committee meeting to discuss supplies for Russia, he issued Cuban cigars, recently arrived as a gift from Havana. ‘It may well be that these each contain some deadly poison,’ he observed complacently as those so inclined struck matches. ‘It may well be that within days I shall follow sadly the long line of your coffins up the aisle of Westminster Abbey—reviled by the populace as the man who has out-borgiaed Borgia!’ Eden, arriving for a Chequers weekend, was shown upstairs by Churchill, who himself lit his guest’s bedroom fire. The Foreign Secretary wrote a trifle cattily: ‘I know no-one with such perfect manners as a host—especially when he feels like it.’
While great men discussed affairs of state at Downing Street or Chequers, below stairs the staff gossiped about The Master in the fashion of every patrician household. ‘Oh, Miss, you’ll never guess what he did next,’ Nellie the Downing Street parlourmaid would say to Elizabeth Layton, one of the prime minister’s three typists. Mrs Landemore the cook was a fount of tittle-tattle about the British aristocracy, while Sawyers the prime minister’s valet dispensed glasses of wine diverted from the dining room among the staff. Every Friday afternoon, or sometimes Saturday morning, a column of three big black cars stood waiting by the garden gate of Downing Street to waft the prime minister to Chequers at breakneck speed, his journey hastened by police outriders and sirens. Unless he took with him in the car some visitor with whom he wished to converse, he customarily dictated to a typist all the way. Arrived at his destination one day, he said to Elizabeth Layton: ‘Now run inside and type like HELL.’ The staff late shift were seldom released to their beds before 3 a.m.
Churchill was exultant when, on 8 September, Roosevelt issued a ‘shoot first’ order to US warships in the Atlantic, dramatically raising his nation’s stakes against Germany’s U-boats. But two weeks later, when Eden dined with the Churchills and Oliver Lyttelton, the Middle East Minister of State, who was just back from Cairo, ‘Winston was depressed at outset, said he felt that we had harsh times ahead.’ The prime minister knew from intercepted Japanese diplomatic traffic that Tokyo was winding down its foreign missions and evacuating nationals from British territory. Sir Stewart Menzies, ‘C’, showed him a cable from Berlin to Tokyo in which Hitler’s staff assured the Japanese that ‘in the event of a collision between Japan and the United States, Germany would at once open hostilities with America’. After Churchill was glimpsed by Bletchley codebreakers one Saturday, visiting their dank hutted encampment, four of its most senior staff wrote to him personally, appealing for more resources. This prompted an ‘Action This Day’ note to ‘C’: ‘Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority.’
On 20 October Churchill told the Defence Committee he ‘did not believe that the Japanese would go to war with the United States and ourselves’. After many months in which he had wilfully exaggerated the prospect of America entering the war, the chances of such a development were now greater than he avowed. It may be that, following so many disappointments, he did not dare to hope too much. The terrible, nagging fear persisted that Tokyo might launch a strike only against British possessions, without provoking the US to fight. The views of the British and American governments were distorted by logic. Both now possessed strong intelligence evidence of an impending Japanese assault. Yet it remained hard to believe that the Tokyo regime would start a war with the United States that it could not rationally hope to win.
The dispatch of a naval battle squadron to the Far East, supposedly to deter Japanese aggression, was the prime minister’s personal decision, and reflected his anachronistic faith in capital ships. Likewise, the squadron’s commander, Admiral Tom Phillips—ironically one of Churchill’s severest critics in the Admiralty—was his own choice, and a poor one, because Phillips’s entire war experience had been spent in shore-based staff appointments. Churchill likened the prospective impact of British battleships in the Far East to that achieved by the presence of Hitler’s Tirpitz in Arctic waters, ‘a threat in being’. Just as the Americans absurdly overrated the deterrent power of deploying a mere thirty-six USAAF B-17 bombers in the Philippines, so the prime minister failed to grasp the fact that, with or without Admiral Phillips’s squadron, British forces in the Far East were woefully deficient in strength and leadership.
The Director of Naval Operations, Captain Ralph Edwards, wrote in his diary when the battleship commitment was made: ‘Another Prayer from the prime minister, who wishes us to form a squadron of “fast, powerful modern ships—only the best to be used” in the Indian Ocean. This, he avers, will have a paralysing effect on the Japanese—why it should, the Lord alone knows…This, mind you, at the same time as he wishes to form a force at Malta, reinforce the Mediterranean, help Russia and be ready to meet a break-out by the Tirpitz. The amount of unnecessary work which that man throws on the Naval Staff would, if removed, get us all a month’s leave…If only the honourable gentleman were to confine himself to statesmanship and politics and leave naval strategy to those properly concerned, the chances of winning the war would be greatly enhanced. He is without doubt one of history’s worst strategists.’ Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, reporting the dispatch of Prince of Wales, Repulse and the carrier Indomitable: ‘There is nothing like having something that can catch and kill anything.’ This was a bizarre assertion, after two years of war had demonstrated both the vulnerability of capital ships and the shortcomings of the Fleet Air Arm.
In almost all respects, during the Second World War the Royal Navy showed itself the finest of Britain’s three fighting services, just as the US Navy was the best of America’s. Axis submarines and air attack inflicted heavy losses, but British seamen displayed consistent high courage and prof
essionalism. The navy’s institutional culture proved more impressive than that of the army, perhaps also of the RAF. The Battle of the Atlantic was less dramatic and glamorous than the Battle of Britain, but preservation of the convoy routes was an equally decisive achievement. The sea service’s chronic weaknesses, however, were air support and anti-aircraft defence. From beginning to end of the war, the Fleet Air Arm’s performance lagged far behind that of the US Navy’s air squadrons, partly because of inadequate aircraft, partly because the British did not handle them so well, and partly because there were never enough carriers. Churchill served the navy’s interests poorly by failing to insist that the RAF divert more long-range aircraft to maritime support operations, and especially to the Atlantic convoys.
As autumn turned to winter there seemed little cause for optimism at sea, in the air or on land. Wise old Field Marshal Smuts cabled Churchill from South Africa in considerable dismay on 4 November: ‘I am struck by the growth of the impression here and elsewhere that the war is going to end in stalemate and thus fatally for us.’ Many Americans perceived the British sitting idle behind their Channel moat, waiting for the United States to ride to their rescue. Averell Harriman wrote a personal letter to Churchill from Washington: ‘People are wondering why you don’t do something offensively. In my opinion it is important that more should be said about what you are doing.’ The diplomat urged energetic media promotion of the RAF’s bomber offensive, and of the Royal Navy’s convoys to Russia.
Smuts, meanwhile, believed that Russia was being beaten, and that the US was still determined to avoid belligerence. This view was widely shared in London. Britain’s army vice-chief of staff remained fearful of a German invasion of Britain, and baffled about how his own side might win the war: ‘Whatever may happen on the Russian front, it is only by successful invasion of these islands that Hitler can definitely win the war…I wish we had so clear an idea of how we could win. At present we cling rather vaguely to a combination of dissatisfied populations, lowering of morale amongst Germans and German troops, blockade and somewhat inaccurate bombing at night…America…seems further removed now from coming into the war than she was last April.’
