13

Churchill Threatens to Resign

AS ANOTHER NINETY-SIX thousand Allied troops surrendered to the Japanese in the Netherlands East Indies, Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long wrote in his diary that he was now becoming “apprehensive lest we be left mostly alone to carry on this fight.” If Russia made peace and the British lost the Middle East, America would be left to face a conflict “in two oceans against a combined navy superior to ours.”¹

Assistant Secretary Long had reason to feel anxious. Not only did British forces still appear unable to fight effectively overseas—whether on land, ocean, or in the air—but their political leaders seemed incapable of embracing a postwar vision that would give British soldiers, as well as soldiers of the British Empire, a reason to do so.

The consequences, for the United States, were thus serious. If Britain refused or failed to set out a postwar vision for the peoples of its former imperium, would Congress permit American sons to continue to give their lives for a crumbling colonial empire no longer capable of fighting, or willing to fight, for itself?

Breckinridge Long had recently reported “a serious undercurrent of anti-British feeling” among the members of the Foreign Relations Committee on Capitol Hill: senators expressing the concern that, unless given some form of self-government, Indians “would not have the desire to fight,” once the Japanese reached the Burmese-Indian border, “just in order to prolong England’s mastery over them.”² Like the Burmese, Indians might well aid and abet a Japanese invasion, unless Prime Minister Churchill addressed the problem.

Long, who was advising President Roosevelt and the acting secretary of state, Sumner Welles, had agreed with the senators’ view. “Concerning India,” he reported from Senate hearings on the Hill on February 25, 1942, “the argument was that we are participating on such a large scale and had done so much for England in Lend-Lease that we had now arrived at a position of importance to justify our participation in Empire councils and such as to authorize us to require England to make adjustments of a political nature within the framework of her Empire.”³

The senators were, in other words, losing patience with the British. “We should demand that India be given a status of autonomy. The only way to get the people of India to fight,” they had concluded, “was to get them to fight for India.”⁴

Bowing to appeals from the President, the Prime Minister had felt compelled to give in to pressure directly “from Roosevelt,” as Leopold Amery, the British secretary of state for India, explained in a confidential letter to the viceroy in Delhi—the Prime Minister finally seeing the “American red light” that, together with the urgent prodding of Clement Attlee’s Labour Party colleagues, had “opened the sluice gates” to Indian self-government. Churchill himself had cabled the viceroy that, thanks to “general American outlook,” it would “be impossible to stand on a purely negative outlook”⁵—hence the decision to send out Sir Stafford Cripps to assure Indian leaders of postwar independence, and negotiate meanwhile Indian self-government.

Roosevelt had been delighted by Churchill’s climb-down—as had been senators in Congress and newspaper editorial writers across America, who mistakenly welcomed the Prime Minister’s decision to send out Cripps as a significant new demonstration, however reluctant, of the sincerity of the Atlantic Charter: putting into practice the moral aims of the United Nations.

None had quite reckoned, however, on the continuing obstinacy of Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, even at the nadir of British military misfortunes in the Far East.

 

No sooner did Cripps arrive in India on March 23, 1942, than he met a duo of doubting Thomases: the British viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and General Sir Archibald Wavell, the British commander in chief in India. Moreover, Churchill and the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery—whose son was an open Nazi sympathizer who hated Roosevelt and would later be hanged for treason—now proceeded to do their best, from London, to wreck the negotiations, in the subsequent view of President Roosevelt’s personal emissaries. “Colonel Johnson and Colonel Herrington both reported, without using the word, that in their opinion the British Government had deliberately sabotaged the Cripps Mission and indicated that likewise in their opinion the Government in London had never desired that the mission be other than a failure.”⁶

Roosevelt was at first disbelieving. Why, he wondered, were the British deliberately ignoring the Atlantic Charter? In his cable of March 10, the President had recommended “the setting up of what might be called a temporary government in India,” a “group that might be recognized as a temporary Dominion Government,” with executive and administrative responsibility for the civil government of India, “until a year after the end of the war,” when a formal constitution could be settled. “Perhaps the analogy of the United States from 1783 to 1789 might give a new slant in India itself, and it might cause the people there to forget hard feelings, to become more loyal to the British Empire, and to stress the danger of Japanese domination, together with the advantage of peaceful evolution as against chaotic revolution. Such a move is strictly in line with the world changes of the past half century,” the President had pointed out, “and the democratic processes of all who are fighting Nazism.” Moreover, he had specifically warned against allowing the British colonial authorities in India—the viceroy and his acolytes—to kibosh the mission. “I hope that whatever you do the move will be made from London,” he cabled Churchill—urging that the British viceroy of India, the pigheaded Marquess of Linlithgow, be discouraged from claiming that Indian self-government was being forced on him “by compulsion.”⁷

Churchill, tragically, did the opposite—blaming American pressure. As his military assistant, Colonel Jacob, later reflected, Churchill was a thorough Victorian—his worldview “greatly coloured by his experiences in India, South Africa, and Egypt as a young man, and by his connection with the central direction of the First World War as a Minister. All these experiences tended to give him a great feeling for the British Empire as something, though diverse and growing, which could be directed from London, the great Imperial centre.” Unfortunately, Churchill had “never been further East than India.” Moreover, India itself was a country he had not seen since the end of the nineteenth century, four decades in the past. “By training and historical connection he was a European first, and then an American,” thanks to his mother, Jennie, Jacob attempted to explain. “He did not seem to understand the Far East, nor was his feeling for Australia and New Zealand deep or discerning”—his assumption being that, once the Japanese forced the United States into the war, America would win the war for the British Empire and that American “power would in the end be decisive.”⁸

For Roosevelt, this casual British “assumption” was galling; indeed, the saga over Indian self-government was doubly vexing, coming on top of Churchill’s concurrent “duplicity” in dealing with Stalin: the Prime Minister agreeing to a draft treaty with the Russians that would, unless President Roosevelt stopped it, also vitiate the principles of the Atlantic Charter, by according Stalin the legal right to seize and rule the Baltic States and a large part of eastern Poland at the war’s end. So much for the self-determination and self-government the Prime Minister had signed up to on the USS Augusta. Even Sir Alec Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary at the British Foreign Office who had helped Sumner Welles draft the final wording of the Atlantic Charter in the summer of 1941, was appalled—railing in his diary at the perfidy of Churchill’s foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who was “quite prepared to throw to the winds all principles (Atlantic Charter). . . . We shall make a mistake if we press the Americans to depart from principles, and a howler if we do it without them.”⁹

In the event, President Roosevelt was able to stamp on such British appeasement of the Russians—for the moment at least. But getting the Prime Minister to back off from sabotaging the very Cripps mission he had authorized to negotiate Indian self-government proved a more difficult battle—threatening to ruin the President’s entire strategy.

 

To ensure that Churchill held to the Cripps mission plan, the President had decided to upgrade his munitions envoy to Delhi, Colonel Louis Johnson. Johnson was now told to fly to India as quasi American ambassador to the Indian government, in the rank of minister, bearing the title “Personal Representative of the President of the United States.”

Johnson duly arrived in Delhi on April 3, 1942. To his chagrin he found that the Prime Minister had pretty much destroyed any possibility of the Cripps mission succeeding—for Churchill had not only refused to recall the viceroy to London, as Deputy Prime Minister Attlee had urged him to do, but had deliberately encouraged the Marquess of Linlithgow to thwart Cripps’s negotiations with the Indian leaders, once Cripps arrived in Delhi on March 23—and even as Japanese forces drew every day closer to the Indian border.

So effective was the Prime Minister’s sabotage in this respect that, on April 3, 1942, Cripps had wired London, through the viceroy’s office, to give up. His “mission,” had failed, he cabled: the Indian Congress Party having decided it could not accept the pathetically emasculated version of self-government (“collaboration,” as Nehru called it) that was all Churchill, Amery, and Linlithgow would offer. Every mention Cripps made of a “National Government,” or “Indian Cabinet,” or “Indian Minister of Defense” to work with the British Commander in Chief in defending India had been immediately denied by the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow.¹⁰

The President was incredulous, given the deteriorating military situation—of which Churchill was either oblivious or willfully blind. On April 1, the Prime Minister had sent him a cable, claiming he was not in the least disturbed by the Japanese Army’s rout of British forces in Burma, since he thought the Japanese would “press on through Burma northwards into China and try to make a job of that. They may disturb India, but I doubt its serious invasion,” Churchill had added, complacently. “We are sending forty to fifty thousand men each month to the East. As they round the Cape we can divert them to Suez, Basra, Bombay, Ceylon or Australia.”¹¹

In view of the fact that similar British troops had failed to fight for Singapore, and were now failing to fight in Burma, Churchill’s assurance seemed to the President to be optimistic at best. “In his military thinking,” the Prime Minister’s own military aide noted, “Churchill was a curious blend of old and new. He tended to think of ‘sabres and bayonets,’ the terms used by historians to measure the strength of the two forces engaged in battle in years gone by. Thus, when he considered Singapore,” Colonel Jacob observed, “his mind seemed to picture an old fortification manned by many thousands of men who, because they possessed a rifle each, or could be issued with one, were capable of selling their lives dearly, if necessary in hand-to-hand fighting.”¹²

Had Churchill interviewed a single veteran of fighting against the Japanese, he might have recognized how disastrously he was underestimating the enemy, and the sheer unwillingness of British troops to “sell their lives dearly” for a form of colonialism that was doomed. As a result, no one was more shocked than Churchill when the situation in Burma and in the Indian Ocean now spiraled out of control.

 

Ominously, U.S. and British intelligence had already reported on March 31, the night before Churchill’s cable to the President, that the largest carrier fleet ever sent into combat by the Japanese—indeed the same force that had attacked Pearl Harbor—seemed to be heading through the Malay Barrier into the Indian Ocean.

In Churchill’s underground headquarters in London, the Map Room became a scene of high alarm. Was the Japanese fleet moving to support the Japanese conquest of Burma? Or was it out to destroy British maritime shipping in the Indian Ocean, and annihilate remaining Royal Navy warships there? Did the Japanese intend to invade Ceylon as the steppingstone to an amphibious assault on southern India?

In the Map Room on the ground floor of the White House, there was equal concern. In the circumstances, it seemed incomprehensible to the President that the British government would seriously allow the Cripps mission to fail.

As the six Japanese aircraft carriers, five battleships, and seven cruisers were identified steaming into the Indian Ocean, shock turned to dismay. Virtually unmolested, Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa proceeded in the ensuing days to decimate Churchill’s naval forces, sinking twenty-three British ships in the Bay of Bengal, while Japanese submarines sunk five more off the Indian coast, and Admiral Chuichi Nagumo attacked the British naval base at Colombo, Ceylon.

Then on April 5, 1942, Nagumo’s forces not only found two British cruisers, HMS Dorsetshire and HMS Cornwall, and sent them to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, but went on to attack and sink the British aircraft carrier HMS Hermes.

It was a devastating blow.

 

“Poor American boys!” Radio Tokyo had recently broadcast a sneering challenge to U.S. troops and sailors in the Java area. “Why die to defend foreign soil which never belonged to the Dutch or British in the first place?”¹³

The President, proud of the way the U.S.-Filipino Army had held out against the Japanese in the Bataan Peninsula for so long, despite virtually no supplies or reinforcement, was deeply disappointed by Churchill’s sabotage of self-government for Indians. It seemed to Roosevelt impossible that the British would cling to their colonial “rights of conquest” in India, rather than welcoming Indian participation in the war on the British side, when Gandhi himself had withdrawn from the Indian Congress Working Party to enable his “legal heir,” Jawaharlal Nehru, to negotiate a deal with Sir Stafford Cripps and the British government. Nehru had promised in writing that Indians, if given self-government, would defend India to the last hamlet; and Mohammed Jinnah, the Muslim League leader (and future founding governor-general of Pakistan), had also told Cripps he would go along with an Indian cabinet—yet still the viceroy and Churchill resisted.

In American eyes, Churchill’s refusal to allow Cripps to make concessions amounted to fiddling while Rome burned. In a cable on April 4, Colonel Johnson begged Roosevelt to intervene personally, since unless the President “can intercede with Churchill, it would seem that Cripps’ efforts are doomed to failure.”¹⁴ This prompted Welles to respond that he had “personally discussed with the President your telegram no. 145, April 4, 8p.m.,” but that he did not “consider it desirable or expedient for him, at least at this juncture, to undertake any further personal participation in the discussion. You know how earnestly the President has already tried to be of help. . . . In view of the already increasingly critical military situation do you not believe that there is increasing likelihood of the responsible leaders adopting a more constructive attitude?”¹⁵

 

For his part, Colonel Johnson, in Delhi, did not blame the Indians. Like Cripps, the colonel thought it was the British who, in such a critical military situation, should have been more reasonable, if they wanted Indians to fight for their own territory.

Instead of offering the post of minister of defense to an Indian with genuine military responsibilities under a British war minister, however, Churchill and Amery would only agree to offer, on April 7, the possibility of appointing an Indian member on the viceroy’s Executive Council with responsibility for “storage of petroleum products; welfare of troops; canteen organizations; stationery and printed forms for the Army . . .”¹⁶

How the British could be so stupid, at such a menacing time, seemed downright incomprehensible to the President. “I suppose this Empire has never been in such a precarious position in its history!” even Churchill’s own army chief of staff, General Alan Brooke, acknowledged in his diary on April 7, 1942.¹⁷

As was inevitable, Churchill cabled the President in growing desperation that evening to ask if the United States Pacific Fleet in Hawaii could be ordered into action in order to “compel” the Japanese to “return to the Pacific.”

The American fleet must save India and the British Empire—forcing the Japanese to retreat, “thus relinquishing or leaving unsupported any invasion enterprise which they have in mind or to which they are committed. I cannot too urgently impress the importance of this.”¹⁸

 

Churchill’s cri de coeur, when it arrived, caused consternation. Instead of negotiating with Nehru, Churchill bombarded the President with disingenuous claims about the exclusive fighting skills of Muslim rather than Hindu soldiers—despite the fact that neither Muslim nor Hindu nor Sikh soldiers were fighting the Japanese with anything but halfheartedness, as long as their home country was denied self-government.¹⁹

Despite Welles’s formal response to his cable begging the President to intervene personally, Colonel Johnson was, therefore, quietly encouraged to act on the President’s behalf. In a series of accelerando meetings on April 8 and 9, the colonel—who ran a top legal practice in America—knocked heads together and, after a meeting with General Wavell, got a “Cripps-Johnson Plan” unofficially accepted by the Indian Congress Party. “CRIPPS SAID TO HAVE ACCORD ON NATIONAL REGIME IN INDIA,” the New York Times reported triumphantly on April 9, 1942.

Cripps was delighted—as was Colonel Johnson, who reported proudly to the President that “the magic name here is Roosevelt,” and that “the land, the people would follow and love, [is] America.”²⁰

 

Colonel Johnson was speaking too soon. Churchill was still determined to counter the success of the Cripps mission, however dire the situation.²¹

Secretary Hull was still away from Washington, recuperating, but when he heard what had been done at this critical juncture, he too was disgusted—indeed, he deliberately titled the chapter of his memoirs covering the episode “Independence for India”—furious that Churchill had, after the signing of the original Atlantic Charter, “excluded India and Burma” from the principles and, as he put it, had already declared, in an address to Parliament in September 1941, that “Article 3 applied only to European nations under Nazi occupation and had no effect on British policy.”²²

For Roosevelt, Churchill’s panic-stricken plea for the United States to rescue the Royal Navy marked the end of their military honeymoon. The President had authorized the surrender of all Filipino and American troops remaining on the Bataan Peninsula, after doggedly fighting the Japanese since December 10, 1941. Though Corregidor might hold out a further month, failure of the British to fight the Japanese, and their assumption that their colonial empire would merely be rescued by Americans who did fight, was unacceptable.

Roosevelt would not have been Roosevelt had he allowed his personal feelings of disappointment to affect his judgment, however. Coalition war, the President knew, meant allying oneself with partners who did not necessarily share the same political or moral principles, or vision—as, for example, America’s military partnership with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Collaborationist, imperialist Vichy France was another possible ally, or at least non-hostile government—a government whose military compliance might be of profound significance in launching a Second Front against the Nazis, either in North Africa or mainland France. Leading a coalition of United Nations, in other words, was bound to involve associations that were at best necessary, and at worst cynical.

Deliberately trivialized by Churchill in his memoirs,²³ and ignored by most historians in the decades following the war, the saga of the Cripps mission—and the President’s role in it—marked in truth the end of Britain’s colonial empire, as Churchill willfully surrendered Britain’s moral leadership of the democracies in World War II.

Sir Ian Jacob, reflecting on the Anglo-American alliance, would later date the change that came over U.S.-British relations as taking place in 1943: the “change which came about when the Americans felt that they had developed enough power to conduct their own line of policy.”²⁴ In reality, however, the change had taken place much, much earlier—as the White House records and diaries of those visiting with the President would show.

 

The President had absolutely no intention of risking the gathering strength of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific in an unprepared battle with the Japanese Navy. Instead, ignoring what he’d told Welles to say officially to Colonel Johnson, he wired Prime Minister Churchill on April 11, asking him please not to recall Cripps, but to make one last effort at accommodating Indian aspirations for a national government.

Why Churchill closed off this possibility will be debated by historians and biographers to the end of time—“one of the most disputed episodes in Britain’s imperial ending in India,” as Oxford historian Judith Brown would later call it.²⁵

Did Churchill fear Sir Stafford Cripps returning to Britain in triumph—given broad British public support for a settlement—and supplanting him as prime minister? Or could Churchill simply not accept the idea of Indian leaders running their own country of four hundred million people, after all the years Churchill had fought to deny India self-government, let alone independence?

In any event, deliberately rejecting the President’s advice as well as widespread British and American hopes for an act of statesmanship, Churchill now did the opposite—withdrawing all previous assurances he’d given Cripps, which had been the basis of the tentative agreement with Nehru. “I feel absolutely satisfied we have done our utmost,” Churchill cabled the President with finality on April 11—and instructed Cripps to return to London without any agreement.²⁶

The President was dumbfounded. In a cable early that same day, Colonel Johnson had, by contrast, assured the President that, in regard to the impasse with Churchill, Sir Stafford Cripps and Nehru “could solve it in 5 minutes if Cripps had any authority” from Churchill. Johnson was at a loss to understand why the Prime Minister had become so intransigent. The Indian Ocean, after all, “is controlled by the enemy,” the Japanese, he pointed out to the President. “British shipping from India has been suspended; according to plan determined many days ago, British are retiring from Burma going north while fighting Chinese go south; Wavell is worn out and defeated.” In Colonel Johnson’s view, the British were finished not only as an imperial, colonial power, but as a first-rate nation. “The hour has come when we should consider a replotting of our policy in this section of the world,” he recommended. “Association with the British here is bound to adversely affect the morale of our own officers. . . . Nehru has been magnificent in his cooperation with me. The President would like him and on most things they agree. . . . I shall have his complete help; he is our best hope here. I trust him.”²⁷ India, in other words, could become a great democratic partner to the United States.

Sir Stafford Cripps had complained that a patronizing speech by Lord Halifax in New York on April 7, broadcast on CBS, had “done the greatest harm at a most critical moment,”²⁸ and Johnson was of like mind, telling the President that the address had “added the finishing touches to the sabotaging of Cripps. It is believed here it was so intended and timed and I am told pleased Wavell and the Viceroy greatly”—with Churchill breaking into a victory dance in the Cabinet Room below Whitehall “on news the talks had failed,” jubilantly declaring: “No tea with treason, no truck with American or British Labour sentimentality, but back to the solemn—and exciting—business of war.”²⁹

 

Johnson was certainly right about the viceroy, the Marquess of Linlithgow, who was if anything more intransigent—and racist—than the Prime Minister. Linlithgow had earlier described the Japanese, before Pearl Harbor, as “Yellow Bellies” who would probably enter the war on Germany’s side: “I don’t see how they can help it, the silly little things!” he’d mocked them in a letter to Lord Halifax. Burma might be threatened, but the British would prevail, he’d been sure. American weaponry nevertheless remained important. In fact, in terms of the Indian Army, Linlithgow was “greatly dependent upon your constituents in North America,” he’d admitted to Halifax, “for heavy gear. So don’t tell them what I think of them,” he warned.

What he thought was, in truth, mean, despicable, and almost unbelievably snooty. “What a country,” he derided America, “and what savages who inhabit it! My wonder is that anyone with the money to pay for the fare to somewhere else condescends to stay in the country, even for a moment! What a nuisance they will be over this Lease-Lend sham before they have finished with it. I shan’t be a bit surprised if we have to return some of their shells at them, through their own guns! I love some clever person’s quip about Americans being the only people in recorded times who have passed from savagery to decadence without experiencing the intervening state of civilization!” Halifax, he was quite sure, shared his views, but would just have to be stoic and go on with his work in Washington to obtain more free military assistance, while “toadying to your pack of pole-squatting parvenus!”³⁰

Why Churchill tolerated such an anti-American, bigoted buffoon as viceroy of India was hard both for Colonel Johnson and President Roosevelt to understand—especially since Linlithgow had begged Churchill for months to be allowed to retire, after almost six years in the post. Churchill had, however, insisted that, despite his unpopularity, Linlithgow should stay—with orders to abort Cripps’s mission.

This the Scottish aristocrat did with enthusiasm. Colonel Johnson he described as “Franklin D.’s boy friend,” whom Cripps had brought into “close sensual touch with Nehru, for whom J. has fallen.” It was too bad—though Linlithgow hoped others could correct “in the President’s mind, the distorted notion which I feel sure Johnson is now busy injecting into that very important organ.”³¹

Distorted or not, the news from India mystified the President, who became more and more concerned lest the British use their crucial, American-provided weaponry not to combat the Japanese, but to put down the inhabitants of India, who might well revolt if denied at least a semblance of self-government.

In the circumstances the President decided he must try one more time to pressure Churchill into seeing sense. Harry Hopkins had recently set off for London with General Marshall to discuss prospects for a Second Front in Europe, and was staying with the Prime Minister at Chequers, his country residence. To Hopkins the President now sent an urgent cable, asking him to “give immediately the following message to the former naval person.” As he added, “We must make every effort to prevent a breakdown.”³²

 

The President’s signal—which Churchill later derided, after the President’s death, as “an act of madness”³³—was a simple request: namely for the Prime Minister to “postpone Cripps’ departure from India until one more final effort has been made to prevent a breakdown in the negotiations.”³⁴

Roosevelt was, as he explained, “sorry to say that I cannot agree with the point of view set forth in your message to me that public opinion in the United States believes that the negotiations have failed on broad general issues. The general impression here is quite the contrary,” the President corrected the Prime Minister. “The feeling is almost universally held that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British to concede to the Indians the right of self-government, notwithstanding the willingness of the Indians to entrust technical, military and naval defense control to the competent British authorities”—as he had heard from Colonel Johnson himself. “American public opinion cannot understand why, if the British Government is willing to permit the component parts of India to secede from the British Empire after the war,” as per the original Cripps mission’s declaration, set out by the British government, “it is not willing to permit them to enjoy what is tantamount to self-government during the war.”³⁵

The President’s cable might have been simple, but it was not, sadly, the sort of language the Prime Minister was prepared to tolerate; indeed, the more that the walls of Britain’s empire appeared to be tumbling down in the Far East, the more the Prime Minister now dug in his heels. Reading the first lines of the message Hopkins handed him, Churchill’s blood rose. Worse followed, however.

The President warned in the cable that if Churchill did not relent and India were invaded by the Japanese “with attendant serious military or naval defeats, the prejudicial reaction of American public opinion can hardly be over-estimated.” He asked Churchill therefore to reconsider the Cripps mission, and “to have Cripps postpone his departure on the ground that you personally have sent him instructions to make a final effort to find a common ground of understanding.” The President—who had been remarkably polite and helpful till now—had clearly given up pretending. “I read that an agreement seemed very near last Thursday night,” he complained. Why had it been allowed to fail? If Cripps “could be authorized by you personally to resume negotiations at that point”—i.e., the position before Churchill had withdrawn the cabinet’s approval of the terms Cripps had gotten—“it seems to me that an agreement might yet be found.

“I still feel, as I expressed to you in an earlier message,” the President finished his cable, “that if the component groups in India could now be given the opportunity to set up a national government similar in essence to our own form of government under the Articles of Confederation”—on the “understanding that upon determination of a period of trial and error they would then be enabled to determine upon their own form of constitution and, as you have already promised them, to determine their future relationship with the British Empire”—then he was sure “a solution could probably be found.”³⁶

 

Poor Harry Hopkins, having handed over the rest of the President’s cable, now witnessed Churchill’s meltdown.

Hopkins, sickly but willing to do anything for his revered president, had traveled to London with General Marshall to ensure that U.S. planning to aid the Russians was not stymied by British bureaucracy and timidity. The spat over India, however, now banished European war plans to a back seat—Hopkins later telling Robert Sherwood that no “suggestions from the President to the Prime Minister in the entire war were so wrathfully received as those relating to solution of the Indian problem.”³⁷ To the secretary of war, Colonel Stimson, Hopkins even confided, on his return to Washington, “how a string of cuss words lasted for two hours in the middle of the night” in London³⁸—with Churchill adamant he would rather resign than permit an American president to dictate British imperial conduct. It was no idle threat.

The fact was, Churchill seemed exhausted, as all around him had noticed. He was drinking more, sleeping less, and busying himself in the minutiae of military operations across the world that he seemed unable or unwilling to delegate. The Australian prime minister had made it clear he had lost confidence in Churchill’s leadership, and the Pacific War Council in London was entering its “death throes”—soon to be entirely replaced by the Pacific War Council in Washington. Japanese naval forces were roaming at will like sea monsters off the coast of India—and British forces were in helter-skelter retreat in northern Burma, abandoning their Indian units to be killed or captured. General Rommel was once again forcing British Empire troops to retreat in Libya.

However, as one of Churchill’s own “closest and most affectionate associates” later confided to Hopkins’s biographer, “the President might have known that India was one subject on which Winston would never move a yard.”³⁹ Certainly Indian self-government, as Robert Sherwood recalled Hopkins telling him, was “one subject on which the normal, broad-minded, good-humored, give-and-take attitude which prevailed between the two statesmen was stopped cold”—indeed Churchill, rounding on the hapless Hopkins, told him he “would see the Empire in ruins and himself buried under them before he would concede the right of any American, however great and illustrious a friend, to make any suggestion as to what he should do about India.”⁴⁰ Calling in his stenographer, the Prime Minister was determined to put his feelings in writing. To the President he therefore dictated a nasty rebuke.

“A Nationalist Government such as you indicate would almost certainly demand,” he deceitfully claimed, “first, the recall of all Indian troops from the Middle East, and secondly, they might in my opinion make an armistice with Japan on the basis of free transit through India to Karachi of Japanese forces and supplies.”⁴¹

For Churchill to send such unqualified “opinions” was sailing close to dishonesty. Both claims were specious, as Churchill and the viceroy (with whom Churchill was in secret correspondence, bypassing Sir Stafford Cripps) well knew—contradicting the assurances Nehru had given Cripps and the President’s “Special Emissary,” Colonel Johnson.⁴² Nevertheless, Churchill argued in his draft response, “From their point of view this would be the easiest course, and the one entirely in accord with Gandhi’s non-violence doctrines”⁴³—despite Gandhi’s express withdrawal from the matter, and public statement that Pandit Nehru would decide the Congress Party’s conduct.

In Churchill’s lurid forecast, the “Japanese would in return no doubt give the Hindus the military support necessary to impose their will upon the Moslems, the Native States and the Depressed classes.” In conclusion, the Prime Minister made clear he would resign rather than permit this to happen—indeed, that he had “no objection at all to retiring into private life, and I have explained this to Harry just now”—a threat he larded with the prospect of a British parliamentary revolt by Conservatives in his favor. “Far from helping the defense of India, it would make our task impossible,” he warned the President. And though as prime minister he would “do everything in my power to preserve our most sympathetic cooperation,” he wanted the President to be aware that the U.S.-British alliance was now at stake. “Any serious public divergence between the British and United States Governments at this time might involve both of our countries in ruin.”⁴⁴

It was, in effect, blackmail.

 

In a subsequent telephone call to the President some hours later, Harry Hopkins relayed to Mr. Roosevelt the gist of Churchill’s draft cable. It was a document that, in fear of the whole Western alliance now collapsing, Hopkins had begged the Prime Minister not to encode and dispatch⁴⁵—in fact, so alarmed was Hopkins that he begged Churchill not even to raise the subject with the British cabinet, which was due to meet the following day, lest this become a test of the whole Atlantic coalition.

Roosevelt should simply back off, Hopkins therefore advised the President on the phone to the White House. He, Hopkins, would do his best to calm the Prime Minister down.

 

Mid-April 1942 now came to resemble, in terms of the Atlantic alliance, something of a French farce. Hopkins was begging Roosevelt, in the interests of Anglo-American cooperation, not to press for an Indian national government, but at the same time Colonel Johnson was cabling the President with the opposite plea: forwarding a personal appeal by Pandit Nehru, the Indian Congress Party leader, that contradicted Churchill’s dire predictions. Nehru had absolutely no intention of negotiating with the Japanese, if they did invade India, he made clear in his letter—being himself all too aware of the likely consequences of Japanese invasion, if it happened, and the “horrors” that would follow, “as they have followed Japanese aggression in China.”⁴⁶

“To your great country, of which you are the honored head, we send greetings and good wishes for success,” Nehru’s message ended. “And to you, Mr. President, on whom so many all over the world look for leadership in the cause of freedom we would add our assurances of our high regard and esteem.”⁴⁷

Hearing the alarm in Hopkins’s voice, the President, once again, could only sigh at Churchill’s negative attitude—which seemed all the more racially demeaning and self-serving at a moment when the Japanese controlled the Indian Ocean and were nearing the Indian border in Assam.

 

Churchill’s negative behavior at this juncture of the war seemed indefensible—moreover, shameful, given the mess into which the British had gotten themselves in the Far East. With the Japanese fleet causing mayhem off the Indian coast and threatening not only Ceylon and Calcutta with impunity (nine hundred thousand people had evacuated Calcutta, in fear of Japanese bombing and possible invasion), the Prime Minister could no longer fulfill his role in holding the northern flank or cornerstone of the President’s two-point military strategy in the Far East. Not only had Churchill been forced to appeal for U.S. air forces to be sent urgently to India to protect the subcontinent, but for U.S. naval forces to be sent to the Indian Ocean to save the Royal Navy.

For Churchill the situation was deeply humiliating—a fact that, in part, explained his psychological resistance to reason. Twice already he had declined to show an act of statesmanship over Indian aspirations. Backed into a corner, he was declining for a third time to do so, threatening resignation as prime minister if the President insisted upon Cripps being told to continue negotiations with Nehru.

It was at this juncture that Harry Hopkins, in the interests of Allied unity, hit upon a solution.

 

Hopkins might have little understanding of military strategy or tactics or combat, but he was an indefatigable fixer. He was devoted to his president—and in thrall to Winston Churchill. These were the two greatest men of their time, at least in the West—and he, Harry Hopkins, had the privilege of serving them as intermediary. It was crucial, he felt, to find some way of defusing the mine threatening the Atlantic alliance. Hopkins had never been to India, and dumping Indian aspirations for self-government, even so that Indians would defend the subcontinent from the approaching Japanese, seemed a small price to pay for unity between the United States and Britain. Yet how could he bring the two leaders of the Western world back on course?

Rather than supporting President Roosevelt’s doomed pressure on the Prime Minister to come to terms with Nehru, Hopkins hit upon an alternative: a new stratagem to persuade the President to rescue Britain’s collapsing empire in India and its forces in the Indian Ocean without having to grant self-government to India. It would involve a gigantic pretense, by making the U.S. an offer it could not refuse. In the ensuing months it would bring not Churchill, but the President’s military advisers, to the point of resignation, once they discovered how insincere it had all been. But at a critical moment in the war, when Allied unity seemed vital to the eventual victory of the democracies, it was all Hopkins could think of.

Churchill should, Hopkins suggested, simply ignore the President’s plea regarding India completely. Instead he should, Hopkins advised, ditch the draft of his resignation letter and commence a new message: beginning on a positive note in terms of the Western alliance, by promising wholehearted British military cooperation in carrying out General Marshall’s top-priority plan for a cross-Channel Second Front that very year.

Churchill’s new cable—encoded and sent at 3:50 P.M. on April 12, 1942—thus sidestepped the whole issue of India. It began, instead, by congratulating President Roosevelt on the truly “masterly document” that General Marshall had brought with him to London regarding U.S.-British strategy in Europe—adding that as prime minister and minister of defense Churchill was “in entire agreement in principle with all you propose, and so are the Chiefs of Staff.”⁴⁸

This was, in actuality, complete moonshine, as even Churchill’s own senior military assistant, General Hastings Ismay, later admitted. Perhaps, Ismay confessed in shame, “it would have obviated future misunderstandings if the British had expressed their views more frankly”⁴⁹—for the British chiefs of staff were not in “entire agreement” with General Marshall’s “masterly document.” In fact they were, from the very start, utterly opposed to American Second Front plans that would result in untold numbers of British deaths for no purpose. Even Churchill’s most slavish chronicler would state that Churchill was being “at best disingenuous.”⁵⁰

At the time, however, the chiefs of staff were willing to practice such a deceit on behalf of their prime minister/minister of defense—Churchill calculating that, over time, the Americans would recognize the impracticability of a cross-Channel landing that year. And in the meantime, the charade would be enough to get the American president off the Prime Minister’s back with regard to Indian self-government.

Hopkins’s suggestion worked. Churchill’s “masterly” signal did succeed in getting Roosevelt to back off. However, the problem of India would not go away so easily—indeed, the saga came to a head several days later, when Churchill was compelled to send a second, this time panic-stricken, plea to the President for help.