19

No Second Dunquerque

ON TUESDAY, JUNE 23, 1942, three days after the fall of Tobruk—and the day that Major General Eisenhower set off to London to take command of the still-meager U.S. forces rehearsing for the Second Front¹—the Canadian prime minister received the long-awaited call from Washington.

“[T]he President said: Hello Mackenzie. How are you? I expressed the hope that he was well. He said, Yes, very well. He then said: Winston and I are sitting together here. We want you to come down to Washington for a meeting of the Pacific Council on Thursday.”²

 

“We drove to the White House through the private entrance to the grounds, at the rear,” Mackenzie King noted in his diary entry for June 25. “We were shown into what I imagine judging from pictures, etc. would be Mrs. Roosevelt’s sitting room”—for there was to be held, prior to the Pacific Council meeting, a conference of representatives of all the British Dominions, addressed in person by Mr. Churchill.

As he waited, King found a chance to speak with Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the British representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee in Washington.

Dill—who had been chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) before General Alan Brooke, but had been fired by the Prime Minister for constantly contesting Churchill’s interference in the operations conducted in the field—was gloomy. “He said to me that he regarded the reverse at Tobruk as very serious; from the quiet impressive way he spoke to me, it was clear that he felt this equally. He spoke of the difficulty of a campaign in the desert and of Egypt, and gave me the impression that he felt the whole situation was very grave. While he did not say it, I felt he realized it might be impossible to save the situation so far as the Suez was concerned.”³

Captain McCrea, Roosevelt’s naval aide, then ushered them into the next-door conference room, where the Dominion representatives of the British Empire took their places. Standing to address them in secret session, Churchill was, if anything, more pessimistic than his listeners, according to King: “When he came to speak on the Middle East, Churchill said that as far as he was concerned, he was prepared to lose the Middle East rather than sacrifice Australia’s position if it had to come to that.”

This was bleak—strangely contradicted, however, by Churchill’s appearance. The Prime Minister looked “remarkably fresh,” King noted, “almost like a cherub, scarcely a line in his face, and completely rested though up to one or two the night before,” as he gave the assembled representatives a “review of the whole situation.”

“He started at once with Libya and the fall of Tobruk,” King recounted. “Said that we must not conceal the fact that it was a very serious reverse to him; it had been quite unexpected. The reports he had received from [General] Auchinleck had led him to feel that the British forces would be able to hold situations [positions] successfully and to win out, but there it was, and now the next concern was over Egypt. He said he had no doubt in his own mind about the British being able to hold Egypt. The enemy would find fighting over the desert, many miles [distant] of each other, no water, a very arduous business . . .”

The Prime Minister’s mixture of brutal frankness and yet confident hope was bewitching to the Canadian prime minister, seated among senior fellow Dominion leaders and representatives—especially when Churchill went on to admit “that the present situation, bad as it appeared, was nothing to what it had been in April last at the time the Japanese fleet were assembled in the Indian Ocean. . . . Pointed out that it looked at one time as though India might readily have fallen to the enemy. There was very little in the way of protection in Ceylon or in India.” The United States, however, had saved England’s imperial bacon. “Happily since then, the Japanese fleet had encountered the attacks it had”—first in the Tokyo raid, then the Coral Sea and Midway—“and he now felt that India was in a better position than she had been in at any time from [point of view of] the number of soldiers there. She was better protected”—especially by Americans—“than she had ever been. As to the internal situation”—where Gandhi was putting together what would become his historic “Quit India” protest movement—Churchill was indifferent: “the British had made the best offer they could,” he declared, claiming that “India was not a country,” as King quoted him. “It was a continent, full of different races, etc. and had to be so regarded.”

This was not a view that the Canadian premier shared. “I felt, however, that Churchill did not really appreciate the position in India.” The Prime Minister spoke about never having changed his views—but claimed he had not allowed them “to interfere with the utmost effort being made at this time to meet the situation through Cripps.”⁴

Given Churchill’s “sabotage” of Cripps’s mission, this was untruthful; yet there was something almost hypnotic about Churchill’s oratory even to the Indian representative at the meeting, Sir Girja S. Bajpai. Churchill spoke of Russia, China, Australia. “Explaining the difficult situation generally,” King recounted, “Churchill said it was the wide space that had to be covered with only limited numbers of men and supplies. He said it was like a man in bed trying to cover himself with a blanket which is not large enough. When his right shoulder was cold and he pulled it over to cover it, the left became uncovered and cold. When he pulled it back, the situation was reversed. Similarly when he hauled the blanket up to put around his neck and chest, his feet became cold and exposed and got cold. When he went to cover them up, his chest became exposed and he got pneumonia or something of the kind.”

The Dominion representatives, spellbound, waited for the British prime minister to tell them how he proposed to deal with this “grave” situation.

Churchill was, however, aware he had his audience in thrall—and deferred the capstone of his talk. “He then suddenly stopped,” King wrote, “and in a dramatic way, began to go over the situation compared as it was at the beginning of the war.” Russia and now the United States were in the fight, he reminded them, on Britain’s side, “and he referred to the heroism of the Russians and the magnificent work which the Americans were doing on their production etc.”

Finally, however, the Prime Minister came to the climax of his peroration.

“He then said: but we have an ally which is greater than Russia, greater than the U.S.”

The assembled Dominion representatives were agog.

Churchill was nothing if not an actor, when faced by an attentive audience. The Prime Minister, the Canadian premier recorded, “paused for a moment, and said: it is air power.”⁵

 

Air power?

The Dominion representatives were at first disbelieving.

Troops of the British Empire had in the past two years lost Norway, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, and only four days before had surrendered Tobruk without a fight. They now looked to be losing Egypt, the gateway to the Levant. Did the Prime Minister really believe Britain’s new “ally,” far from any war front, would magically reverse the tide of war and defeat Germany and Japan any time soon?

It seemed ludicrous, given the failure of Germany’s vaunted air power, the Luftwaffe, to bring Britain to its knees in 1940 and 1941.

It was all that Mr. Churchill could produce for his Dominion listeners at that moment, however—the Prime Minister extolling the recent, highly controversial RAF thousand-plane “bombing of Cologne and Essen,” which had produced an uproar in the House of Commons, as the death toll among German civilians threatened to vitiate the moral principles upon which the Allies were defending “human civilization.” “Told of the destruction there,” Mackenzie King noted the Prime Minister’s response: “He said our objective would continue to be military targets, though, some times, the airmen might go a little wide of the target. That the destruction of Cologne”—one of the glories of European medieval architecture—“had given the Germans great trouble in moving populations, taking care of those moved, trying to rebuild roads, etc., and intimated that there would be more of it, and it would be most demoralizing.”⁶

Demoralizing? This was debatable—indeed, the deliberate killing of so many civilians might be counterproductive, strengthening rather than diminishing the resolve of ordinary Germans, as the Canadian prime minister—who read the Bible before rising each day—was uncomfortably aware. That morning King had read a passage that had given him guidance “throughout the day”: “Chapter VII of Jeremiah with its words: ‘Obey my voice and I will be your God and He shall be my keeper. Walk ye in all the ways that I have commanded you that it may be well unto you.’”⁷

“Terror bombing,” as the Germans called it, did not sit well with such walking. Even Lord Halifax, a deeply religious man, had blanched when recently told by a British pilot what he had done—“a red-headed young Scottish sergeant-pilot from Motherwell who had been on nearly every trip to Germany including Rostock, but had missed Cologne as he was getting ready to come over here. About Rostock he said the fires were tremendous; ’I’m afraid we not only killed them but cremated them.’”⁸

The Prime Minister’s much debatable paean to his new “ally,” however, now led him to his ultimate revelation—a confidential admission in the White House that was far, far more welcome to the Dominion representatives.

 

As Mackenzie King recorded that night, “Churchill reserved to the last part of his talk the reference to the European front; here he spoke very positively”—or negatively.⁹ A Second Front, he confided in absolute candor, was simply not on the cards for that year.

“He said, using the expression ’By God,’ nothing would ever induce him to have an attack made upon Europe without sufficient strength and being positively certain that they could win. He said that to go there without a sufficient force would be to incur another Dunkirk, and what would be worse than that, they would have of course to supply the French with arms and cause them to rise when any invasion was made, and that to have to leave them to the Huns [in a subsequent evacuation] would be to have the whole of the French massacred, and none of them left.”¹⁰

Churchill’s only answer, beyond RAF terror raids on German cities, was therefore more minor raids on the French coast to force the Germans at least to keep their defense forces stationed there, rather than in Russia; but “he did not think they could afford to contemplate the invasion of the continent before the spring of 1943, despite the number of troops that the Americans might be able to send across . . . Perhaps in the spring, shipping facilities will be better and the attack could take place then.”¹¹

Stopping there, Churchill asked for questions or comments, “and turned to me.”¹²

 

Mackenzie King’s testimony would be important to historians, because the Canadian premier’s relationship to the President was a sort of marker in the war’s changing dynamic. Canada was producing huge amounts of war materiel, food, and shipping; it was also providing a considerable number of volunteer troops to the global struggle against the Axis powers. Canada, in fact, was now as important to the war effort as Great Britain—and King, as Canadian prime minister, was as opposed to a cross-Channel Second Front as was Winston Churchill—a fact the President had been aware of ever since King had stayed with him at the White House, earlier that year, when King had experienced a strange vision relating to Mr. Roosevelt.

“Had a very distinct vision during the night,” the Premier had noted in his diary in April. “It seemed as though some being was seeking rest; alongside were forces in the nature of flames, not of a fire but of passion or an animal instinct like fighting, etc. were continually banging at the side of this individual and in a way seeking to compel a yielding to its influence.” The person “who came to mind” with respect to this dream “was the President and the influence of those” of his senior military staff “who were forcing him into a line of warfare without sufficiently surveying the whole field. The more I think of the vision,” King recorded, “the more I feel it was to let me see that there was a spiritual significance behind the attitude which I took yesterday at the Pacific Council and again with the President last night in discussing the plan of campaign in Europe for this year.”¹³

At that time—April 16, 1942—it had become clear to the Canadian prime minister that the President had no idea how few divisions there were, in reality, in Britain, with Roosevelt imagining there were a hundred. Nor had the U.S. president quite recognized, in King’s view, the magnitude of military effort required to mount a successful cross-Channel assault. King had therefore warned the President at the April Pacific War Council that a failed assault would make Britain itself vulnerable to attack. There had been “no dissent” from the council members—the Australian representative supporting King, and speaking “very emphatically about the necessity of avoiding the possibility of a second Dunquerque, and how disastrous anything of the kind would be. He said he wished to support very strongly what I had said.” The New Zealand representative had spoken “in an equal strain, saying that while everyone believed in a second front, and the need for offensive action, up to the present there had been no one who could say how it could be done.”¹⁴

That was two months ago; now, in the wake of the disaster being suffered by the British Eighth Army in Libya and Egypt, a cross-Channel invasion seemed even less mountable that year—especially, Mackenzie King reflected, when the lives of volunteer Canadian troops, training in Britain, were at risk.

It was, in this respect, a tragic moment: Prime Minister King as straightforward as Churchill in responding to the British prime minister’s appeal for questions or comments. Addressing the Dominion assembly on June 25, 1942, King warned “that the subject he had dealt with was one about which we [Canadians] were most concerned. That we felt very strongly he was right in what he had said about the necessity of overwhelming forces, and not taking unnecessary risks.”¹⁵

It was abundantly clear, then, that in late June 1942 it was not simply the British who were balking at the implications of a cross-Channel Second Front, but America’s crucial ally, the Canadians—whose premier felt no shame or inhibition in sharing with the President his concerns. None of the Dominions, in fact, were willing to risk another military debacle, whatever the U.S. chiefs might favor—especially after the surrender of Tobruk and the flight of the British Empire forces of the British Eighth Army toward Suez and Cairo.