The fates of big ships always affected morale. News of the successful sinking of the Bismarck had added extra fizz to Ian Fleming’s thirty-second birthday celebrations on 28 May 1941. The RNVR commander was in New York City with his boss, the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, on a mission from the British chiefs of staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee to help the Americans ‘set up a combined intelligence organisation on a 100 per cent co-operative basis’. The two men travelled south by train to Washington DC.

Before the Second World War, the United States of America had left foreign intelligence variously to the diplomats of the State Department, the Military Intelligence Division (or G-2) of the War Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence. (The FBI was purely domestic, though J. Edgar Hoover had bigger ambitions.) No one below the White House was collating intelligence and thus seeing the big strategic picture. Godfrey believed that what the Americans needed now was a unified secret intelligence service combining the functions of the four different bodies which in the UK all had different masters: sabotage and resistance in occupied countries (SOE), political warfare (PWE), economic warfare (MEW) and covert intelligence-gathering (SIS). Although Godfrey found the US army, navy and State Department all polite and friendly towards him, he was surprised to discover how much the army and navy loathed and detested each other, and what a snakepit bureaucratic Washington could be, like Whitehall at its very worst.

The only man who could knock heads together and make them co-operate was the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States. Admiral Godfrey was invited to dine at the White House on 10 June 1941, and given an hour with President Roosevelt afterwards in the Oval Office. According to Godfrey, after watching what he called ‘a rather creepy crawly film of snake worship’,* FDR drawlingly recounted his reminiscences of British Admiral Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall’s brilliance as Director of Naval Intelligence in the Great War, while Godfrey himself reiterated three times the crucial need for the Americans to have ‘one intelligence security boss, not three or four’.

By arrangement, on that very same day, 10 June, Colonel William J. Donovan submitted a memorandum to the president recommending the establishment of ‘a central enemy intelligence organization’ to analyse and appraise all information on enemy intentions and resources, both military and economic, and to determine the best methods of waging economic and psychological warfare. A week later, on 18 June, President Roosevelt accepted this proposal and appointed Donovan himself as his head of intelligence, under the camouflage title of ‘Coordinator of Information’ (COI). His job was to ‘collect and analyze all information and data which may bear upon national security: to correlate such information and data, and to make such information and data available to the President’. Roosevelt scrawled a note on the memo’s coversheet, ‘Please set this up confidentially … Military – not O.E.M. [Office of Emergency Management].’ The CIA historian Thomas F. Troy glosses ‘confidentially’ to mean there would be access to the president’s secret funds and ‘Military’ to denote ‘by virtue of the president’s authority as commander in chief’. William Stephenson, running British Security Co-ordination in New York, was jubilant. He cabled his boss, the Chief of the Secret Service, Sir Stewart Menzies, in London: ‘[Donovan] will be co-ordinator all forms intelligence … He will hold rank of Major General and will be responsible only to the President … You can imagine how relieved I am after three months of battle and jockeying for position in Washington that our man is in a position of such importance to our efforts.’

*

On Saturday 9 August 1941, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in a circle of warships at Placentia Bay off the little town of Argentia in Newfoundland, Canada. Churchill had crossed the Atlantic aboard the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, a trip organised in secrecy and later announced with a fanfare of publicity. The night before the two leaders met, Churchill watched once again the Alexander Korda romantic propaganda film Lady Hamilton,† which had premiered in Britain a week earlier. Laurence Olivier as Admiral Nelson defying Napoleon Bonaparte was speaking Churchillian words against Hitler. ‘Believe me, gentlemen, he means to be master of the world. You cannot make peace with dictators. You have to destroy them. Wipe them out!’

The President of the United States of America – ‘thrice-chosen head of the most powerful State and community in the world’ – encountered the British prime minister – ‘the servant of King and Parliament at present charged with the principal direction of of our affairs … approved and sustained by the whole British Commonwealth of Nations’ – and together the two leaders issued a joint declaration, the eight-point Atlantic Charter, with ‘certain common principles … on which they base their hopes for a better future’.

Churchill saw the meeting as symbolic of the unity of English-speaking peoples on ‘the broad high road of freedom and justice’, but also of ‘something even more majestic, namely the marshalling of the good forces of the world against the evil forces which are now so formidable and triumphant’. For this reason the agnostic premier stage-managed the Church Parade of Sunday 10 August on the quarter-deck of the Prince of Wales, facing the four guns of the fourteen-inch turret. The sun shone bright and warm. Hundreds of British and American sailors mingled in a congregation around the two leaders with their chiefs of staff, by a lectern draped with both flags. An American and a British chaplain alternated the prayers; the lesson was from Joshua: ‘I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of good courage …’ They sang the old hymns: ‘O God our help in ages past’, ‘Onward Christian soldiers’, ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’.

Some today dismiss the Atlantic Charter as empty rhetoric, but it came like cool fresh water to some of the hot and thirsty people caught up in a nightmarish world war. Take the passengers on the Swedish ship MV Vasaholm, all of whom were on the high seas because they were escaping from Nazi-occupied Europe to the freedom of the Americas. On 14 August 1941, the ship’s radio broadcast the news that Roosevelt and Churchill had met and agreed the Atlantic Charter, a statement of aims, the purposes for which the war was being fought. The Basques and Polish Jews on the ship, persecuted people going even further into exile from beloved homelands now occupied and oppressed, were moved by a vision for a better world, achieved on the very ocean they were now crossing. It seemed that the English and the Americans together were giving them a special message of hope:

The exiled Basque president José Antonio de Aguirre was one of those passengers on the Swedish ship heading for Brazil. A good friend of the Basque priest Father Onaindia, the man who tried to become the pastor of the Gibraltarian exiles in England, Aguirre himself was ending nearly a year and a half of clandestine life, hiding in Europe, a hunted man disguised as a Panamanian doctor. As a true Christian democrat, passionately opposed to what he called the ‘Christian dictatorships’ of Franco, Mussolini, Pétain and Salazar, Aguirre thought that the Atlantic Charter was ‘magnificent’: ‘It has a universality which could only be given by men of such moral stature as Roosevelt and Churchill, who understand perfectly that they are guardians not only of their own country, but also of the entire world.’

Every nation fighting for liberty soon put its name to the Atlantic Charter. It was accepted and endorsed by Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Free France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the USSR at the Inter-Allied council on 27 September 1941. The message went out loud and clear to imperial subjects and colonised peoples in every continent, including Gibraltar: a promise that one day they could freely choose their own form of government.

*

The US navy now put itself in harm’s way by escorting convoys half the distance across the North Atlantic. On 4 September, a German U-boat’s torpedo narrowly missed the USS Greer, while she was on Neutrality Patrol. President Roosevelt took this as an act of piracy and warned in a fireside chat on 11 September that ‘in waters which we deem necessary for our defence’, US warships would now shoot on sight any hostile Italian or German vessels. He added: ‘When you see a rattlesnake that is poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. These Nazi submarines and raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic.’

On 17 October, the destroyer USS Kearny tried to depth-charge the predatory German submarine U-568, but was itself torpedoed, and eleven American sailors died. Roosevelt made a rousing speech ten days later on Navy Day, 27 October, declaring, ‘America has been attacked.’ The president painted a lurid picture of Nazi plans to take over South America and abolish all religions in favour of a Nazi church offering blood and iron instead of love and mercy. A fortnight later, U-552 sank the destroyer USS Reuben James, killing 115 American sailors. The USA’s ‘state of unlimited emergency’ was fast slipping towards war.

*

World war engulfed the Pacific and the Far East. Eight aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy carried 350 aeroplanes to attack Honolulu’s Pearl Harbor in Hawaii early on Sunday 7 December 1941, ‘the day that will live in infamy’ in US history, sinking battleships, destroying aircraft, killing 2400 people and wounding another 1100. ‘What a holocaust!’ said Churchill.

Imperial Japanese forces also invaded Thailand and Malaya and attacked the British colony of Hong Kong, which surrendered on Christmas Day 1941. They also attacked Guam, the Philippine Islands, Wake Island and Midway Island. The Pacific had turned martial.

On 10 December 1941, Japanese aircraft caught the Royal Navy’s Force Z north of Singapore. At five foot four, Admiral Tom Phillips was even smaller than Nelson, but had fewer of his other qualities. An ‘armchair admiral’ with no practical war experience and little sea sense, a man who had flattered Churchill and annoyed Somerville, he had been rash enough to sail without air cover, which was exactly what the Japanese wanted. Admiral Phillips’s flag was on HMS Prince of Wales, the battleship that had wounded the Bismarck and carried Churchill to Placentia Bay. Also with him in Force Z were the battle cruiser HMS Repulse, John Godfrey’s old ship, now captained by Bill Tennant who had done such sterling work at Dunkirk, and four destroyers, Electra, Express, Tenedos and Vampire. But, without air cover, as James Somerville observed, ‘[b]attleships by themselves are quite useless.’

Eighty-five Japanese Mitsubishi G3M and G4M bombers and torpedo bombers, flying southwest from Saigon in Japanese-occupied Vietnam, tracked the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, then attacked and sank the vulnerable ships with four hits each from 800 kg torpedoes. British destroyers rescued nearly 1300 survivors from Prince of Wales and Repulse, but 763 men were lost. Admiral Tom Phillips had the courage to go down with his ship.

The news came as a bombshell in London. Churchill was in bed working on official papers when Dudley Pound rang with the news that both ships were sunk.

‘Tom Phillips is drowned.’

‘Are you sure it’s true?’

‘There is no doubt at all.’

Churchill put the telephone down. He was thankful to be alone. ‘In all the war I never received a more direct shock.’ Actually he was not wholly alone. His secretary Kathleen Hill was in the room, sitting unobtrusively in the corner, waiting to take dictation if the PM ordered. ‘When he was upset I used to try to be invisible. When the two ships went down, I was there. That was a terrible moment. “Poor Tom Phillips,” he said.’

General Sir Alan Brooke had just taken over from Sir John Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff at the beginning of the month. His diary for 10 December records:

Now Admiral James Somerville was sent east to sort things out, leaving Force H behind in Gibraltar. In the Mediterranean too, things were going badly. On 25 November 1941, U-331 had torpedoed the battleship Barham, which blew up. On 14 December, U-557 sank the cruiser Galatea. Five days later, the cruiser Neptune hit a mine; only one man survived. Worst of all, the next day, Italian divers from Decima Flottiglia MAS crept into Alexandria harbour in Egypt and planted limpet mines underneath the dreadnought Queen Elizabeth and the battleship Valiant whose explosions crippled both vessels. Seven of His Majesty’s big ships lost in four weeks emasculated the Mediterranean fleet.

*

But, Westward, look, the land is bright …

America seemed the best hope. The US Congress had declared war on Japan; Germany and Italy had duly declared war on the USA. But where would the USA range its armed forces? Across the Atlantic, as agreed in the earlier American–British conversations, or over the Pacific, to avenge Pearl Harbor?

Right at this moment of historic decision, the Spanish millionaire Juan March erupted as a hideous embarrassment. American banking laws had blocked the ‘Spanish Neutrality Scheme’ (i.e. secret bribery) dollar funds in New York from getting to Geneva, from where Juan March usually distributed them. Lord Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, had consequently appealed to Henry Morgenthau, US Secretary of the Treasury, to get them released as a ‘personal favour’ to Winston Churchill. This was quietly achieved. Then the British learned that March was actually using the US dollars for his own private transactions: buying more shares in the Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company;‡ buying tobacco in Central and South America for shipment to the Spanish government’s tobacco monopoly in Spanish Morocco; purchasing Argentine pesos. If this were to become apparent to the American banking authorities it ‘would put Halifax and Morgenthau in a most difficult position’.

On 15 December 1941, US Treasury agents stormed aboard the Juan March-owned, Spanish-flagged ship Isla Tenerife just as it was about to leave New York harbour. Detaining her master and wireless operator, they found war contraband in the ship’s stores: numerous parts of radio transmitters, rolls of armoured cable, two hundred drums of lubricating oil and $36,000 worth of silk. March’s local shipping agents, García and Díaz, were denounced as ‘fascists’; there was talk of a ‘spy ring’; a US radio station attacked March as a piratical, two-timing crook. The British authorities sent Juan March frantic messages to stop rocking the boat.

*

The Arcadia conference, from 22 December 1941 to 14 January 1942, was intended to decide the joint effort and grand strategy of the war. Winston Churchill seized the moment, flying to Washington DC to spend Christmas 1941 with Franklin Roosevelt at the White House. On 22 December, the two leaders agreed that the war would be waged first against Germany, the predominant member of the Triple Axis. This meant the Atlantic and European area was ‘the decisive theatre’, not the Pacific. The US chiefs of staff, General Marshall and Admiral Stark, confirmed Germany was the prime enemy. ‘Once Germany is defeated, the collapse of Italy and the defeat of Japan must follow.’

There were many meetings of the two Allies. In the fourteen days Churchill was in the White House, he and Roosevelt had lunch and dinner together every day but one. There were eight major White House meetings of president and prime minister, secretaries of war and navy, British and American chiefs of staff, plus Beaverbrook and Hopkins, and eight meetings of the British and American chiefs of staff alone. They still had not yet agreed on where precisely to hit at Germany. Churchill and Roosevelt favoured Gymnast, the plan to land in northwest Africa, but the American chiefs of staff wanted Bolero, a big build-up of Allied troops in the UK, prior to Roundup, a landing at Calais in France to strike for the heart of Germany. Not until 24 July 1942 would the decision be made to invade Morocco and Algeria before northwest Europe.

First things first. One of many complex political tasks was to create a coalition of all the countries fighting the Axis, a grand alliance of peoples to get them to co-ordinate their efforts and resources, and agree that no one should make an individual peace with the ‘savage, brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world’. On New Year’s Day 1942, representatives of the twenty-six ‘Associated Powers’ signed a joint declaration at the White House. President Roosevelt himself had made the final change to the draft that was circulated. He struck out the words ‘Associated Powers’ and inserted a name which he had thought up and was proud of: ‘the United Nations’.

And so, on 1 January 1942, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Poland, South Africa, the UK, the USA, the USSR and Yugoslavia all pledged, as ‘the United Nations’, ‘to defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice … in the struggle for victory over Hitlerism’.

* Eleanor Roosevelt’s ‘My Day’ column suggests this was footage shot in Burma by Armand and Michaela Denis of a priestess ritually dancing with a dangerously spitting king cobra.

† Alexander Korda was subpoenaed by a US Senate Committee to answer the charge that his Nelson film was ‘inciting the American public to war’. He did not have to testify on 12 December 1941 because the Pearl Harbor attack proved a more effective incitement. The fiercely non-interventionist America First Committee also had to disband itself at this time.

‡ Juan March finally gained control of BTLP Co. Ltd in 1948; the complicated 1970 court case (Belgium v. Spain) is well-known in international law for asserting that states have an obligation erga omnes (towards everyone) concerning the treatment of foreign investments, once they admit such investments or foreign nationals into their territory.