The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (29 page)

It was partly that Britain had finally done something warlike: after a year of dither, shambles and evacuations—from Norway to Dunkirk—the British armed forces had ‘won’ something, no matter how one-sided the contest or how hollow that victory.

More importantly the MPs could tell from the event that the man they had reluctantly commissioned to lead them had a streak of belligerent ruthlessness unlike anyone else. They knew that no other politician had the guts, the nerve, to do what he had just done. They could suddenly see how Britain might win.

That was why they waved their Order Papers. And that was the message that Churchill sent via Mers-el-Kébir to Washington, where they were still refusing to send the ancient destroyers: that Britain was not going to give in, but would do whatever it took.

Churchill ended
that speech on Oran to the House of Commons by saying that he left the judgement of his actions ‘to the nation and the United States’; and the second audience was crucial. The son of Jennie Jerome knew that he had no hope of eventual victory unless and until he could also embroil his motherland.

CHAPTER 17

THE WOOING OF AMERICA

F
rom 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.

—

L
ET 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.