The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History

CHAPTER 17

THE WOOING OF AMERICA

From the very beginning of his premiership, he saw what he had to do. Randolph Churchill has recorded how on 18 May 1940 he went into his father’s bedroom at Admiralty House. He found the Prime Minister standing in front of his basin and shaving with an old-fashioned Valet razor.

‘Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving.’ I did as I was told. After two or three minutes of hacking away, he half turned and said: ‘I think I can see my way through.’ I was astounded, and said: ‘Do you mean that we can avoid defeat?’ (which seemed credible) ‘or beat the bastards?’ (which seemed incredible).

He flung his Valet razor into the basin, swung around and said:—‘Of course I mean we can beat them.’

Me: ‘Well, I am all for it, but I don’t see how you can do it.’

By this time he had dried and sponged his face and turning round to me, said with great intensity: ‘I shall drag the United States in.’

Never mind the speeches, sublime though they were. Set to one side the strategic decisions, not all of which now look flawless. If you want to understand how he won the war, look at the way he wangled and wheedled his way to Washington, and his subtle but unmistakable manipulation of the priorities of the United States.

He used a tool of diplomacy that was as old-fashioned and erratic as the man himself. It was called charm. That was the secret of Churchill’s success. It wasn’t easy, and there were times when it didn’t look as though it would work at all.

—

LET US GO forward more than a year: to his first wartime meeting with Roosevelt, at a remote and underpopulated harbour called Placentia Bay in Newfoundland. It is 10 August 1941. Two great gunboats are converging on this place of rock and mist and pine—a landscape unchanged since the first Europeans arrived in North America. Like some modern version of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the potentates have come to parley.

In one ship there are admirals and generals led by the wheelchair-bound President of the United States. They have brought offerings of hams and lemons and other delicacies unobtainable in wartime London.

In the other ship is a nervous British posse led by Winston Churchill. They have brought ninety ripe grouse in the storerooms, and goodies from Fortnum and Mason. Churchill has spent the voyage reading three Hornblower novels in a row—as well he might, because his military options are running out.

The British get there too early. They have forgotten to turn their clocks back to American time—so they pull out and chug around for a bit, before returning for the rendezvous. A launch puts out from the British ship, the Prince of Wales.

If we consult contemporary footage, we see the Americans waiting on the deck of the Augusta. There is Roosevelt strapped into an upright position, in which he seems immensely tall.

There is movement below. The British have arrived. They are coming up the gangway; and here he is. As soon as Churchill is on the scene, it is impossible to keep your eyes off him.

He is wearing a short double-breasted coat and a yachting cap that has been pulled down over one eye, making him look a bit like a tipsy bus conductor. He is the only man champing a cigar, and conspicuously shorter than the others—all the rest of them stiff and erect in their braid; and he is somehow burlier in the shoulder.

He instantly presides over the choreography of events like a twinkle-toed boxer or ballroom dancer. He introduces one man to another; he salutes; he shakes hands; he salutes; he beams—and then comes the moment he has been waiting for during that emetic nine-day Atlantic crossing. It is his turn to shake hands with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the President of the United States; the first time they have met since 1918.

He knocks off another wristy salute and then—standing some distance away, so that Roosevelt will have to lean down and towards him to make contact—he holds out that surprisingly long arm. Churchill knows how much is at stake.

The war, to put it mildly, is not going well. For the British land forces, it has been a tale of one humiliation after another. They have been duffed up in Norway, kicked out of France, expelled from Greece—and in a particularly chastening episode they have managed to surrender Crete to a much smaller force of German paratroopers. The Blitz has already taken the lives of more than thirty thousand civilians. The U-boats are savaging British shipping—and even prowl the waters around them here on the coast of Canada.

Now Hitler has just broken his word—again—and launched himself upon Russia; and if Russia goes down, as seems likely, there is every prospect that the German dictator will be the unchallenged master of the continent from the Atlantic to the Urals. If that happens, Churchill knows that he will be forced from power, and that Britain—one way or another—will make an accommodation with fascism.

As he stretches out that elegant white hand he knows he is reaching for his only lifeline; and yet there is nothing about him to convey the gloom of his position. On the contrary, his face is suddenly wreathed in smiles, babyish, irresistible.

Roosevelt smiles back; they grip hands, for ages, each reluctant to be the first to let go, and for the next two days Churchill maintains his schmoozathon. We don’t know exactly what they say to each other at the first such Atlantic conference—the direct ancestor of NATO; but we know that Churchill lays it on thick. His mission is to build up a sense of common destiny; to work with the grain of Roosevelt’s natural instincts, and to turn the USA from distant sympathisers into full-blown allies in bloodshed.

On the way out to Canada, Churchill has already tried to create the mood. ‘We are just off,’ he has cabled Roosevelt cheerily. ‘It is 27 years ago today that the Huns began their last war. We must make a good job of it this time. Twice ought to be enough.’

We, eh?

Twice, eh?

That must have seemed a bit presumptuous in the White House. No one in Washington has given any commitments to entering another world war, let alone to sending American troops.

Sedulously Churchill works on that idea: of the two nations, united in language, ideals, culture. Surely they should also be united in their foes? On the Sunday morning there is a divine service. The crews of the two ships are suggestively mingled together, and they sing hymns—chosen by Churchill—that express that single heritage: two broadly Protestant nations bound together against a vile and above all a pagan regime.

They sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, and ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’. Finally they sing the traditional appeal for divine mercy on those who go down to the sea in ships: ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’. This complement of British sailors knows all about peril on the sea.

It is only a few months ago that the ship has been involved in the chase of the German battleships Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. The men singing today have seen their sister ship HMS Hood (she that opened fire at Oran) explode in a vast fireball. Indeed, they were so close that they had to steer straight through the wreckage of a disaster that cost the lives of 1,419 officers and crew. The Prince of Wales was also hit; she lost men, too. Her decks have lately been running with blood—and yet here she is, her tables laden with game birds.

That is the message from Britain to America: we are fighting, and we are dying, but we can take it; what about you?

In deference to Roosevelt’s immobility, the two leaders sit side by side to sing and to pray, Churchill with his black horn-rims on to read the words. The men stand in hundreds under the vast 14-inch guns of that doomed vessel. There are lumps in throats, tears in eyes. The reporters tell each other they are witnessing history.

At length the summit is over. A communiqué is produced, grandly entitled the ‘Atlantic Charter’. Churchill begins the turbulent crossing back to Britain—bearing . . . what?

The awful truth—and one he masterfully strove to conceal from Parliament and public—is that in spite of all his expert dramaturgy he had virtually nothing to show.

The British cabinet swiftly approved the ‘Atlantic Charter’. The US Congress didn’t even glance at the document, let alone ratify it. Churchill’s military attaché, Ian Jacob, summed up the quiet despondency of the British delegation as they heaved homewards over the grey Atlantic: ‘Not a single American officer has shown the slightest keenness to be in the war on our side. They are a charming lot of individuals but they appear to be living in a different world from ourselves.’

Andrew Schivial, a British civil servant from Stockton, recorded that he felt ‘left in the air when it was all over, with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction’. All the British got for their venture was 150,000 old rifles; no American troops—not even the whiff of a promise of American troops.

It seems incredible, looking back, that it took so long—two years and four months—before the USA joined Britain in the war against Hitler. Across the conquered continent, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other groups were already being rounded up and killed, if not yet systematically.

The Nazi policy of racially based murder was not quite as well publicised as it was to become, but it was not exactly secret. How could the Americans have stayed aloof, in all honour and conscience?

The answer to this question is to look at it the other way round. This was a war that did not yet threaten vital American interests, on a continent far away, where there had taken place in living memory a slaughter that had shamed mankind. How could any politician plausibly explain to the mothers of Kansas that it was their duty to send their sons to their deaths in Europe? And for the second time?

Since the injunctions of George Washington himself it had been the guiding principle of American policy that the republic should steer clear of foreign entanglements. Many Americans still resented Woodrow Wilson for getting them into the First World War; many Americans were sceptical about Britain; many were actively hostile.

Odd as it may seem today, there were many who regarded the Brits as a bunch of arrogant imperialists who had burned the White House in 1814 and who had a talent for getting other people to do their fighting.

Who was there to put the opposite case? Not the poisonous Joseph Kennedy, who was recalled at the end of 1940, having done a lot of damage to Britain’s standing; nor the British ambassador in Washington. This was none other than our old friend the Earl of Halifax: the beanpole-shaped appeaser—he who used to go hunting with Goering.

Halifax was the British envoy charged with appealing to the finer feelings of the United States—and he was having a terrible time. Shortly after arriving he is said to have sat down and wept—in despair at the culture clash. He couldn’t understand the American informality, or their habit of talking on the telephone or popping round for unexpected meetings.

In May 1941 the aristocratic old Etonian endured fresh torment when he was taken to a Chicago White Sox baseball game and invited to eat a hotdog. He refused. Then he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes by a group called the Mothers of America. Even for an appeaser, it seems a hell of a punishment. There was no way Halifax was going to get the Americans to drop their isolationism.

It had to be Churchill. First, he was half American—and some of his English contemporaries thought that this contributed the zap to his personality, perhaps even an element of hucksterism. Beatrice Webb said he was more of an American speculator than an English aristocrat. Secondly, he had been there on four trips before the war, lasting for a total of five months. He knew the place and had come deeply to respect and admire the Americans.

He first went in 1895, when he stayed with a friend of his mother called Bourke Cockran—whose rhetorical style he claimed to have adopted. He went again in 1900, on his Boer War lecture tour; and had a slightly rough ride from Americans who thought he was an emanation of the colonialist mentality. His audiences were patchy, and after listening to his accounts of his heroism some of them tended to side with the Boers. This experience may have coloured his attitude in the 1920s, when he became positively exasperated by America’s attempts to displace Britain’s naval power, especially in the Caribbean. When Eddie Marsh reproached him for his imperialist attitude, saying that he should ‘kiss Uncle Sam on both cheeks’, Churchill replied, ‘Yes, but not on all four.’

He became so anti-American—even at one stage suggesting that it might be necessary to go to war—that Clementine said he had disqualified himself from becoming Foreign Secretary. He went again in 1929, when he saw the Wall Street Crash (in which a man hurled himself from a skyscraper before his eyes) and was understandably appalled by Prohibition.

As one American temperance campaigner told him, ‘Strong drink rageth and stingeth like a serpent’.

To which Churchill replied, ‘I have been looking for a drink like that all my life.’

But the decisive trip was in 1931, after he had left office and begun perhaps the most right-wing period of his political life. He saw the American spirit of enterprise, the way their best people tended to go into business rather than politics. He saw that America was achieving il sorpasso—overtaking Britain and all other European powers to become by far the most powerful economy on earth. He recognised that the world’s economic recovery depended on American expansion and growth.

Gone was Churchill the anti-American; gone was any idea of somehow fending off the challenge. Now he began to formulate a new doctrine—of two nations with a common past and a common tradition, joint trustees and patent-holders of Anglo-Saxon ideas of democracy, and freedom, and equal rights under the law.

So began his relentless advocacy of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, and with his Anglo-American self (naturally) as the incarnation of this union. He proposed a common citizenship. He even suggested that the pound and the dollar should be merged into a single currency, and designed a curious £$ symbol.

This was the Churchill that set out to woo America in 1940. He began in that position known to every love-struck member of the human race, and which we might call romantic asymmetry. That is to say, the relationship meant a lot more to him than it did to Washington.

As he later put it, no lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as carefully as he studied Franklin Roosevelt. Since the President had once served in the navy he wrote to him in ingratiating terms ‘as one former naval person to another’. He took any opportunity to get the White House on the telephone. He started cultivating American journalists, and inviting them to Chequers.

He aimed his speeches squarely at the American audience who were listening to him in ever greater numbers on the radio. He ended the great 4 June 1940 speech with a direct appeal:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Notice the invocation of the Almighty—then as now a considerably bigger player in American politics than He is in Britain. He uses the same formula in the climax of the Oran speech in July: he leaves the judgement on his actions to the United States.

Slowly he began to make progress—but it was hard going, and expensive. First there was the destroyers-for-bases deal. Britain handed over bases in Trinidad, Bermuda and Newfoundland in return for fifty mothballed destroyers. The old bathtubs barely floated—only nine of them were operational by the end of 1940.

Then the Americans agreed to sell some weapons; but the terms of the Neutrality Act meant that Britain had to pay in cash, on the nail. In March 1941 an American cruiser was sent to Cape Town to pick up the country’s last remaining 50 tons of gold bullion, like bailiffs collecting the flat-screen TV. British businesses in America were sold at knock-down prices. When the British started protesting that they were broke, the American government took to querying Britain’s real ability to pay, like a social services department accusing some elderly benefit recipient of concealing her assets.

As for Lend-Lease, by which supplies were continued on the strength of future payments, Churchill may have publicly called it ‘the most unsordid act in history’. In private he said that Britain was being skinned and flayed to the bone. Under the terms of the agreement, the Americans insisted on interfering with Britain’s overseas trade, and stopped the UK from importing much-needed corned beef from Argentina.

The Lend-Lease Act continued to muck up Britain’s right to run its own commercial aviation policy, even after the war was over. It is startling to think that this supposedly unselfish and unsordid act of the US government entailed payments that ended only on—wait for it—31 December 2006, when Mr Ed Balls, then Economic Secretary to the Treasury, wrote a last cheque for $83.3 million or £42.5 million and a letter of thanks to the US government. Has any other country ever been so slavishly punctilious in honouring its war debts?

It has been argued that America took so much cash off Britain in the early stages of the Second World War that this liquidity finally lifted the USA out of depression. The first cranks of the US war machine were powered by UK gold—and yet in spite of the excellent terms they had secured, there were plenty of American politicians, in early 1941, who apparently thought the deal was too generous to the Brits. The Bill was passed in Congress by 260 votes to 165. What were they thinking of, those 165 senators who refused to throw Britain this highly expensive life-jacket? Did they want to watch the old place sink? Well, the truth is that possibly some of them did, just a little.

That was the audience Churchill had to win over. And yet by the end of that same year those same congressmen were eating out of his hand. On Boxing Day 1941 they packed into the chamber—senators and members of the House of Representatives, cheering and cheering Winston Churchill before he had even stood up to speak. What had changed their minds?

Well, there was the small matter of Pearl Harbor, and Japan’s unprovoked aggression; and then there was Hitler’s deranged decision, a few days later, to declare war on America. That may have helped, at last, to encourage the congressmen to identify more closely with Britain. The interesting question is why the Führer decided to make what looks like a colossal strategic mistake. Why did he declare war on America—when it was still perfectly conceivable that America could have stayed out of the European war?

The answer is that he had already concluded that America was effectively on Britain’s side. By the autumn of 1941 the USA was helping escort convoys; they had troops in Iceland; they were helping with training and supplies of all kinds. Yes, Churchill had succeeded in that strategic mission he had explained so clearly to Randolph eighteen months previously. By the end of 1941 he had become one of the most popular performers on American radio, second only to the President himself. By guile and charm and downright flattery, America had been dragged in.

Three days after Pearl Harbor he received appalling news. The Prince of Wales had been sunk by Japanese torpedoes off the coast of Malaya, with the loss of 327 lives. Of the British sailors who had been at Placentia Bay, almost all were dead. The Repulse, too, was sunk.

It had been Churchill’s decision—and his alone—to defy the scepticism of his naval chiefs and send those ships to the Far East. No one knew what the purpose of the mission was, what Churchill hoped to achieve with his ‘castles of steel’; and perhaps the truth is that there was no real strategic logic.

Churchill wrote to Roosevelt as he dispatched the British flotilla, boasting of their firepower. ‘There is nothing like having something that can catch and kill anything,’ he said. They couldn’t catch the Japanese torpedo planes, and they died for the sake of a Churchillian flourish. The purpose was surely political: to show the Americans, once again, the strength of British resolve and the reach of her power. Now that gesture was doubly pointless: the Americans were in.

Still—Churchill needed to make absolutely sure. As soon as he heard of Pearl Harbor, he rang Roosevelt; and then began making preparations to get over to Washington. After Placentia Bay Roosevelt had come to realise that Churchill had one of those bouncy-castle personalities that starts filling the room and pressing everyone else against the wall. He suggested Bermuda rather than the White House. Churchill was having none of it.

For three weeks he was the irrepressible house guest of the President and Mrs Roosevelt, in which time he contrived to exhibit himself naked to FDR (‘The British Prime Minister has nothing to hide from the President of the United States’), to have a small heart attack and to put on a virtuoso performance of Anglo-American schmaltz, culminating in that speech to both houses of Congress.

It is tremendous stuff. He invokes the memory of his mother; he quotes the Psalms; he appeals to God; he parodies Mussolini; he hams himself up with glorious archaic phrasing. ‘Sure I am . . .’ he says, rather than ‘I am sure’, as if he were channelling Yoda. His arms go out, they go up. He hammers the air, he clasps his lapels, he glowers and scowls and clenches his jaw in exactly the manner they have been hoping for.

The Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, he asks his audience: ‘What kind of a people do they think we are?’ Notice that—a single people, the Americans and the British. ‘Here we are together,’ he says. ‘Twice in our lifetime has the long arm of fate reached out across the Atlantic to pluck the United States into the forefront of the battle . . .’ Except that in this case the long arm didn’t belong to fate so much as to Churchill. He did the transatlantic plucking.

As Harold Macmillan later wrote, ‘No one but he (and that only with extraordinary patience and skill) could have enticed the Americans into the European war at all.’

That does not strike me as being much of an exaggeration. The world may owe its prime debt to F. D. Roosevelt, who ultimately had to take the decision to commit American blood and treasure. But without Churchill, I really don’t see how it could have happened. No other British leader would have set that strategic objective—to drag America in—and pursued it with such unremitting zeal.

Anyone who is still inclined to feel critical of the United States, for delaying so long before entering the war, should go to the American cemeteries at Omaha Beach. Walk among the thousands of white stone crosses (and the occasional Star of David) that are arranged with such perfect symmetry on the rolling green lawns; see the names and the states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Kansas, Texas—every state in the union. I doubt very much you will keep back the tears.

It is seventy years, as I write these words, since those soldiers made that sacrifice, on a scale and with a bravery that my generation finds incomprehensible. They weren’t wrong, those American congressmen, when they warned of the human consequences of engagement in another European war. Their doubts were reasonable; and it was Churchill who overcame them.

He later described how on the night of Pearl Harbor, ‘saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful’.

He had succeeded in his key strategic purpose; but he had not yet won.