9

The Mockery of the World

“SINGAPORE HAS WEAKENED his position enormously,” the Führer remarked of Churchill—in fact, talking with his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler thought Churchill’s days as prime minister might now be numbered: the sorry chain of British failure in the field of battle inevitably leading “one day,” he postulated, “to catastrophe.”¹

Such thoughts led, sickeningly, to ever-greater hubris on the part of the Führer. Satisfied that the British would never be able to interfere with his plans for the extermination of German and European Jewry, an emboldened Hitler was now encouraged by Britain’s pusillanimous showing on the field of battle to be more murderous than ever toward the millions of “Hebrews” his henchmen were rounding up and incarcerating across the Third Reich and its occupied territories.

“Once again the Führer expressed his determination to cleanse Europe of its Jews, ruthlessly,” Goebbels noted in his diary on the day of Churchill’s broadcast announcing the fall of Singapore. “No room for squeamish sentimentality. The Jews have earned the catastrophe they are suffering today. They will be destroyed, at the same time as we destroy our enemies. We need to accelerate the process with utter ruthlessness, and will be doing humanity, for thousands of years tormented by the Jews, a priceless service. We have to make sure we spread this virulent anti-Semitic attitude throughout our own people, whatever the objections. The Führer puts great stress on this, repeating it afterwards to a group of officers, to get it into their thick heads. He is fully aware of the great opportunities the war is providing us. The Führer recognizes he is waging war on a vast canvass and that the fate of humanity depends on its outcome . . .”²

The two men then gleefully discussed how the pitiful performance of British Empire forces could be used to insert a wedge between the transatlantic partners: Roosevelt and Churchill.

 

The “widespread political gloom and plummeting morale” that Dr. Goebbels perceived in reports from London were, in the early months of 1942, all too real—a British Empire without clothes, dangerously increasing the chance that Hitler would get away with mass murder in Europe and Russia on a scale so immense it would eventually be called “the Holocaust.”

In Berlin—many hundreds of miles from the fighting—Goebbels began to describe the war against the Allies, in his own metaphor, as a boxing match. The Axis had, unfortunately, not quite “KO’d” its adversaries in the first round, he acknowledged eight months after the launch of Operation Barbarossa; it would require many more punches. The winter, in particular, had been tough going on the Eastern Front, but for the rest he was once again confident the Third Reich would prevail in battle. “As long as we go on fighting as we are, the day will come when England and America are flattened,” he noted. “Once again,” he prided himself after seeing the latest newsreels on the German Navy’s daring seamanship in the English Channel, “we’re on our feet, and the German people welcome the successes of the Axis powers with great pride and satisfaction.”³

Alerted by his U.S. ambassador in London that the Prime Minister was lapsing into depression over recent events,⁴ Roosevelt sympathized with his new partner—even though, in the President’s eyes, Churchill seemed to have invited the latest battlefield disasters by his inability to pick effective subordinates, and his insistence on meddling in operational matters. Added to this, however, was Churchill’s refusal to credit why British soldiers were refusing to fight.

The Prime Minister’s cables to General Percival in Singapore had been meticulous in their detailed military instructions for defense against siege—instructions entirely worthy of Churchill’s childhood fascination with soldiering, his love of military history, his training at Sandhurst military college, and the many savage wars in which he had personally fought, as subaltern on India’s North-West Frontier and lieutenant colonel in the trenches in World War I.⁵ But although the Prime Minister had every idea of what he was talking about, he seemed to have no idea to whom he was speaking. The nation he had dreamed his entire life of leading was no longer the Victorian society in which he had grown up as the grandson of a duke and son of a lord—indeed, the people of Britain were now more isolationist than those in the United States. Poorly led by “toffs” and “Blimps,” British soldiers were voting with their feet—for the most part simply no longer willing to lay down their lives in foreign fields on behalf of a colonialist empire in which they no longer believed.

Churchill’s myopia in this regard never ceased to amaze President Roosevelt. Reeling from the vituperative criticism in the British press, the Prime Minister neither blamed himself as British quasi commander-in-chief nor even attributed the surrender of Singapore to the fortunes of war, but instead derided the troops—expressing to a friend “a dreadful fear that our soldiers were not as good fighters as their fathers were. ‘In 1915 our men fought on when they had only one shell left and were under fierce barrage,’” Churchill confided to Violet Bonham-Carter. “‘Now they cannot resist dive-bombers. We have so many men in Singapore, so many men—they should have done better.’”⁶

 

Churchill was far from alone in such reflections.

The Prime Minister’s blindness reflected an older English generation, born in Queen Victoria’s reign, unwilling to surrender the privileges of their class. “It is the same in Libya. Our men cannot stand up to punishment. And yet they are the same men as man the merchant ships and who won the Battle of Britain,” Harold Nicolson—a member of Parliament, governor on the board of the BBC, and married to the daughter of the third Baron Sackville-West, living in Sissinghurst Castle—noted with equal puzzlement in his diary. “There is something deeply wrong with the whole morale of our Army.”⁷

Sir Alec Cadogan, who had helped Sumner Welles draft the Atlantic Charter, felt the same concern—though he at least could see that without commanders able to inspire their troops, Britain was a spent power. “Our generals are no use,” Cadogan wrote in his diary, as news came in that the Japanese were within striking distance of Singapore. “[D]o our men fight? We always seem to have ‘Indian Brigades’ or Colonials in the front line. . . . Our army is the mockery of the world.”⁸ After the battle was lost, the Prime Minister’s Singapore speech certainly did nothing to reassure his senior civil servant in the Foreign Office. “His broadcast not very good—rather apologetic,” Cadogan noted, “and I think Parliament will take it as an attempt to appeal over their heads to the country—to avoid parliamentary criticism.”⁹

Woven through the anger and distress in the debate in the House of Commons on February 24 was a common, underlying thread: “the implication that our Army has not fought well,” Nicolson recorded frankly—and in shame. “How comes it that we were turned out of Malaya by only two Japanese divisions? How comes it that our casualties were so few and our surrenders so great? This is the most disturbing of all thoughts,” he confessed in the quiet of the night. He added that he had wakened from a dream in which a hand on his shoulder had not been that of his wife, as he had thought. It was the hand, he recorded, of “Defeat.” “This Singapore surrender has been a terrific blow to all of us. It is not merely the immediate dangers which threaten in the Indian Ocean and the menace to our communications with the Middle East. It is the dread that we are only half-hearted in fighting the whole-hearted. It is even more than that. We intellectuals must feel that in all these years we have derided the principles of force upon which our Empire is built. We undermined confidence in our own formula. The intellectuals of 1780 did the same.”¹⁰

Nicolson, like Churchill, was only half-right. For sure, grand ideals of universal disarmament at the conclusion of the “war to end all wars” in 1918, as well as economic hardship in the Great Depression a decade later, had set the Western powers at a tragic disadvantage in relation to rising military dictatorships. Yet imagining that “principles of force,” rather than a postcolonial moral vision, could have kept an ailing colonial empire alive did little credit to Nicolson as a historian of the Versailles Treaty. It was this tragic nearsightedness—reflecting an empire that had lost its way, and could find no alternative vision of the future—that threatened to doom Britain to defeat in its struggle against the Axis powers.

Ironically, it was Dr. Joseph Goebbels, analyzing Churchill’s broadcast acknowledging the fall of Singapore, who recognized how much the Prime Minister was throwing himself at the mercy of the United States—utterly dependent as Churchill now was on the might of America, as the British will to fight abroad appeared effectively broken. “It had been his great and remorseless effort to get the U.S. into the war, and now he had achieved it,”¹¹ Goebbels paraphrased the Prime Minister’s broadcast. All Churchill could offer Britons were more tears, the propaganda minister mocked—determined, for his own part in Berlin, to let Britain’s continuing military disasters “water the plant” of conflict between the two transatlantic allies rather than devote extra Nazi propaganda to the mission.¹²

Buoyed like his führer by Japan’s astonishing successes in the Far East, Rommel’s rebound in North Africa, and preparations in Russia for a renewed German offensive as soon as the snow melted, Goebbels was once more convinced that German force of arms and military professionalism would prevail. Wherever an Englishman looked, he was faced by “retreat, humiliation, capitulation and white flags,” the propaganda minister jeered. “To what depths has Churchill led his great English empire!”¹³

By February 19, 1942, Goebbels was noting in his diary that the fall of Singapore and the successful passage of the German battleships through the English Channel had given rise to a sense of victory among the public in Germany that “actually worries me more than the reverse.”¹⁴

 

Anxious about reports of Churchill’s sinking mood, the President telephoned from the Oval Office to speak with his U.S. ambassador in London, John Winant. He then cabled direct to Churchill at his War Rooms.

“I realize how the fall of Singapore has affected you and the British people,” Roosevelt wrote, but it was, he urged, important that the British not lose heart. “It gives the well-known back seat drivers a field day but no matter how serious our setbacks have been, and I do not for a moment underrate them, we must constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy.”¹⁵

From there the President went on to tell the despairing British leader—who admitted he was finding it difficult to “keep my eye on the ball”¹⁶—what the new strategy of the United Nations in the Far East should best be.

It was time, the President made clear, to face facts. America and the United Nations would have to begin again, pivoting not on their farthest outposts in the Orient, but on their backstops, in North and South Asia—i.e., at the extremities of Japan’s rampage. In this way, the United States could stretch and disperse Japan’s naval forces, while securing bases that could be supplied, expanded, and used as launching pads for later Allied counteroffensive action, as per his original Victory Program, once American war production ramped up.

The prospect was unappetizing in the short term, he allowed. General Wavell’s supreme command in the South Asia region would have to be dissolved. Britain’s great Dominions in the southern Pacific—Australia and New Zealand—would have to come under American, not British, military protection and control. The Pacific, in fact, would have to become an American theater of war, from Chiang Kai-shek’s U.S.-funded and -supplied Chinese forces operating in the north (with an American general, Joseph Stilwell, acting as Chiang’s chief of staff) down to the vast Australian continent in the South Pacific—where an American commander in chief would be installed.

In terms of the latter, the President already had in mind the man he wanted—however controversial the half-million dollars the general had just extracted from the president of the Philippines. For what would win the war for the United Nations, Roosevelt recognized, was not only the moral purpose and industrial might of America, but the determination of Americans to use that might offensively, under aggressive leaders. And General Douglas MacArthur, for all his faults and fantasies, was nothing if not aggressive.

 

MacArthur’s military blunders in the Philippines had been appalling—even Dr. Goebbels noting that MacArthur’s “successes” only existed “on paper”¹⁷—but in the United States they had been hushed up. In the battle for high morale—especially when compared to General Percival’s performance in Singapore—General MacArthur had proven himself a potentially great wartime leader, whose Filipino troops were fighting as hard as his Americans.

Already on February 4, 1942, General Marshall had, on behalf of the President, warned MacArthur he would be needed for a higher command. “The most important question concerns your possible movements,” Marshall had warned the general—once Bataan could no longer be held, and dissolved into guerilla warfare conducted behind the Japanese lines. “Under these conditions the need for your services [there] will be less pressing than [at] other points in the Far East.”¹⁸ Once spirited out of the Philippine Islands, MacArthur would, the President was certain, quickly put an end to the veritable panic sweeping through Australia—where the port and town of Darwin, on Australia’s north coast, now suffered its own Pearl Harbor: an unprotected American convoy devastated in the harbor, as was the town itself, and its airfields heavily bombed, on February 19, 1942, despite ample advance warning.¹⁹

The air attack on Darwin would at least wake up the sleepyheads in Australia, the President consoled himself. No landings had taken place, at least. In taking full responsibility for the protection of Australia and New Zealand, however, the United States would now expect a quid pro quo. Roosevelt would insist that the British use the forces released by this new southern Pacific strategy to defend Burma, in the north—which offered the only overland supply route for U.S. munitions to Chiang Kai-shek.

Would the British prove any more robust in fighting for Burma than they had in Malaya, though? Roosevelt had cause to wonder. And beyond Burma, could Britain’s forces stop the Japanese from invading the Indian Subcontinent? If not, Japan would control too much of the Far East to be evicted.

In the President’s eyes it was thus a thousand pities that Churchill had so set his heart and mind—year after year, month after month, week after week—against Indian self-government: self-government that could ensure the willing cooperation of India’s own political leaders and population—as it had in the Philippines with respect to Quezon and his forces.

Somehow, the President reasoned, Churchill must be bucked up—and urged to embrace the future, not the past.

From London Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease administrator and special envoy, reported confidentially that the “surrender of their troops at Singapore has shattered confidence to the core” in the English capital—so much so, in fact, that the British were losing confidence “even in themselves but, more particularly, in their leaders.”

Churchill, according to Harriman, looked as if he had lost the thread. “Unfortunately Singapore shook the Prime Minister to such an extent that he has not been able to stand up to this adversity with his old vigor”—leading “astute people, both friends and opponents” to say it was “a question of only a few months before his Government falls.”²⁰

For President Roosevelt, attempting to lead the United Nations at a critical moment in the history of humanity, the collapse of British imperial armed forces on the field of battle presented a new and potentially fatal threat to the Allied effort.

Rarely in the history of war had the connection between moral and military goals been more vividly demonstrated than in the cascading collapse of the British Empire in the spring and summer of 1942. The British seemed finished as a martial race. They had no genuine map for the future, only the past. Yet somehow, with a centuries-old network of foreign bases and its island fortress off the coast of Northwest Europe, as well as its not inconsiderable industrial capacity, Britain had to be saved—not only from its enemies but from itself.

Churchill had looked to American military industrial production as a panacea that would rescue Britain. In reality it was American moral leadership that would ensure the survival of the democracies.

It was to this challenge, the President recognized in late February 1942, that America must now rise.