Roosevelt welcomes Halifax to America,
the US and Britain begin joint military talks,
Hopkins meets Churchill, the Battle of the
Atlantic begins in earnest.
AWARE OF ROOSEVELT’S PASSION for everything to do with the sea and the navy, on January 21 Churchill had sent an innocuous invitation to the president. “You probably know that Lord Halifax will arrive at Annapolis in our new battleship HMS King George V,” he wrote. “I do not know whether you would be interested to see her.” The new battleship, the pride of the British fleet, would arrive in Chesapeake Bay at 7 a.m. on January 24.
The president needed a break. Cooped up in the White House during the long Lend-Lease battle, he had been on edge and was angered by the language used and the deliberate misunderstandings bandied about during the debate. To clear his mind, he dictated notes for a long, vituperative speech, never delivered, that listed all the “many deliberate attempts to scare the people.”1 A day on the sea inspecting a spanking new warship would calm him.
With the puzzled press in tow, Roosevelt set off for the Naval College dock at Annapolis early on January 29, boarded the Potomac and set off to see Churchill’s new toy. Much to his disappointment, the sea was too choppy for him to be manhandled aboard the 42,200-ton warship. While two American admirals were piped aboard to make a close inspection, he contented himself with having the Potomac circle the George V so that he could see her from every angle. The Halifaxes joined him and, chatting all the way, he drove them to the British ambassador’s residence.
It was an extraordinary precedent for a president to take such care in welcoming a representative of another government. As the New York Times observed, “It was the first time in American history that a President had left the White House and the capital to meet an Ambassador from a foreign power.”2 Nor was this conspicuous act of kinship lost on Churchill. “There was considerable meaning in this gesture of the President,” wrote Halifax’s biographer, Lord Birkenhead. “With that sense of timing which [Roosevelt] could at times so brilliantly exhibit he intended to certify to the world in a manner at once dramatic and unmistakable his sympathy with the cause of embattled Britain.”3
Roosevelt and Churchill were too well brought up in the English style to admit that their friendship contained an element of sentimentality, and both were far softer than they liked to appear to outsiders. A rare glimpse of their closeness at this stage, even before they had met face to face, was contained in a note Churchill had sent in response to Roosevelt’s “Ship of State” missive. “[I] was deeply moved by the verse of Longfellow’s which you had quoted,” wrote Churchill. “I shall have it framed as a souvenir of these tremendous days, and as a mark of our friendly relations, which have been built up telegraphically, but also telepathically under all the stresses.”4
The arrival of the King George V marked the start of direct military collaboration between America and Britain. The previous November, while the Lend-Lease debate was at its height, Chief of Naval Operations Stark had sent a memorandum to the president expressing anxiety about the lack of defense planning. Writing that America’s security depended on “the continued existence of the British Empire,” he averred “that Great Britain requires from us very great help in the Atlantic, and possibly even on the continents of Europe and of Africa, if she is to be enabled to survive.”
His proposal was that America should take the offensive against Germany in the Atlantic while fighting a defensive campaign against the Japanese. He asked permission to begin talks with British military and naval top brass. Without committing himself to Stark’s Atlantic-first policy, Roosevelt agreed to let the conversation begin.
King George V did not just deliver Halifax and his wife but five senior British military officers dressed as civilians, traveling under the guise of “technical advisers” to the British Purchasing Commission. The Pentagon was two years away from completion, so the five met with their American counterparts5 to establish a joint strategy at the US Department of War’s temporary home in the Gregory Building on Constitution Avenue on the National Mall.
They quickly approved Stark’s plan to divide the war into two theaters, the Atlantic/Europe and the Pacific/East Asia, and that priority be given to Hitler’s defeat. While details remained unresolved, by March 27 the Anglo-American team had come up with a plan, codenamed ABC1, short for “American–British Conversations,” to be followed if and when America entered the war. What Sherwood called America’s “common law alliance” with Britain had been consummated, and what would come to be called “the Grand Alliance” had begun.
The ABC talks failed to resolve an apparent contradiction between the president and prime minister on how to proceed. Churchill, used to running his own show, was convinced that there would be no need for the Allies to launch an invasion of mainland Europe. Unlike World War One, this war “would never see great land forces massed against one another,” he said.6 So long as Britain was able to defend itself from invasion, which with twenty-five army divisions assembled in the south of England seemed assured, it could wait until either the oppressed citizens of the Third Reich and its subservient empire rose against Hitler or until Hitler inevitably turned on Stalin to gain access to Russia’s great untapped resources of land, people, and minerals.
Roosevelt knew that American impatience would not allow a waiting game. Americans expected results, and the constant need to keep them pleased guided the president’s military strategy as it had done his backdoor entry into the war. The president bided his time, leaving it to Marshall to take the initiative in early June to make American dispositions according to the ABC plan and its derivative, the Rainbow 5 report. Marshall told Stimson, Knox, and Hull that they should interpret the president’s silence as assent.
Hitler was in no mood to declare war against the United States, even though the US needed perhaps two years to be fully prepared to counter German aggression. Nor would Lend-Lease appear to have made much difference to Hitler’s calculations. As a number of witnesses in the Lend-Lease debate had argued, Hitler already had plenty of grounds to go to war with America if he wished.
A key element in ensuring the swift amalgamation of American and British military efforts was the friendship that grew up between Churchill and Hopkins. On his arrival in Britain on January 9, Hopkins had confided to Edward R. Murrow, “I’ve come to try to find a way to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas. I want to get an understanding of Churchill and the men he sees after midnight.”7
For his part, Churchill understood the nature of Hopkins’s mission and was determined to charm him. Churchill’s equivalent to Hopkins, Brendan Bracken,8 was in no doubt that Hopkins was “the most important American visitor to this country we have ever had.”9 But, from what Churchill had gleaned about Hopkins’s modest upbringing and his concern for the poor and downtrodden, the prime minister was by no means sure how best to win him over.
In a Foreign Office brief for the prime minister, Hopkins was described as “the old conscience of Victorian liberalism arisen in our midst. He does not believe that a world in which some live in the sun and others in the shadow makes sense. He is sincerely interested to find out if we have similar views and aspirations.”10 There was some amusement to be had in Washington in imagining how Hopkins, a convinced egalitarian and perhaps the most committed New Dealer of all after Roosevelt himself, would get along with the hedonistic son of a duke who swore like a trooper, stayed up until all hours, surrounded himself with what starchy British Tories dismissed as “the Glamour Boys,” and downed champagne as if it were Coca-Cola.11
When Bracken went to welcome Hopkins off the British Overseas Airways Clipper from Lisbon, he found him on board “still sitting, looking sick and shrunken and too tired even to unfasten his safety belt.”12 By the time Hopkins met Churchill, at 10 Downing Street, he had recovered from the grueling flight across the Atlantic. “A rotund—smiling—red faced, gentleman appeared—extended a fat but none the less convincing hand and wished me welcome to England,” Hopkins wrote to Roosevelt from Claridge’s Hotel. “A short black coat—striped trousers—a clear eye and a mushy voice was the impression [I got] of England’s leader.” Hopkins told Churchill, “The president is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He has sent me here to tell you that at all costs and by all means, he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him.”13
Churchill remained on best behavior and trimmed his promises about life in Britain after the war to flatter Hopkins’s progressive views. In an altogether unlikely lyrical flourish, the prime minister regaled his American visitor with how he hoped, when peace returned, to provide all British homes with electricity, indoor plumbing, and a strong sense of social security.
“As the humble laborer returns from his work when the day is done, and he sees smoke curling upwards from his cottage home in the serene evening sky, we wish him to know that”—Churchill rapped on the table—“no rat-a-tat-tat of the secret police upon his door will disturb his leisure or interrupt his rest.” Churchill looked for a response from Hopkins. “What will the President say to all this?” he asked.
“Well, Mr. Prime Minister,” Hopkins replied, “I don’t think the President will give a damn for all that. You see, we’re only interested in seeing that that goddam son of a bitch Hitler gets licked.”14
Hopkins’s first task was to make arrangements for Roosevelt and Churchill to meet in April. Churchill said he was sorry that the rendezvous could not be in Bermuda because “the climate was nice.” His idea of the summit was to “bring a small staff—board a cruiser and by accident meet the President at the appointed place—and discuss our problems at leisure.” Hopkins quizzed Churchill on whether it was true, as reported by some in Washington, that he was anti-American and disliked Roosevelt. “This set him off on a bitter tho’ fairly constrained attack on Ambassador Kennedy who he believes is responsible for this impression,” Hopkins wrote to Roosevelt.15
Roosevelt had told Hopkins to discover exactly what Britain needed to keep Hitler’s forces from invading the Americas. Herschel V. Johnson, the State Department official filling in as ambassador until Kennedy’s successor arrived, was grateful that Hopkins was different from Kennedy and others from the administration who had visited Britain. “Some other Americans who had come to London devoted themselves to investigations to determine if the British really needed the things they were asking for,” recalled Johnson. “Harry wanted to find out if they were asking for enough to see them through.”16
Having decided that Hopkins was both a friend and a good ally, and that he was not averse to having a good time, Churchill treated his American guest to the full wonders of his extraordinary life. This meant weekends in the country, come what may. No military disaster or emergency was too great to prevent Churchill spending time at either Chequers, his official residence, or, when the full moon meant that Chequers was visible to night bombers, Dytchley House, the country estate of Bracken’s assistant, Ronald Tree, who had inherited much of his grandfather Marshall Field’s department store fortune.
Hopkins witnessed Churchill in full flow at the dinner table, casting his conversational net wide with colorful memories, vivid assessments of wartime strategies, and soaring visions of how victory would be achieved, backed by a vast hinterland of knowledge about history and culture. He learned of Churchill’s incessant energy, his short afternoon naps that allowed him to continue working until three in the morning, and his relentless regime of dictating memos, letters, and speeches, all the while sipping champagne, brandy, or Scotch whisky and chomping on a Havana cigar. Hopkins learned how Churchill took in his stride the rhythm of war, waiting for plans to work out and accepting without complaint the nasty surprises the Germans dealt.
Churchill’s style was quite different from the calm in which Roosevelt preferred to make decisions. But Hopkins recognized in Churchill a partner of extraordinary drive and focus that belied the character studies provided by those who could not see beyond Churchill’s bombast, booze, and bluster. As Hopkins told the British cabinet minister Oliver Lyttelton after a typical late-night session with Churchill, “Jesus Christ! What a man!”17
The affection and trust Churchill showed Hopkins was completely reciprocated. Churchill told the president, “It has been a great pleasure to me to make friends with Hopkins who has been a great comfort and encouragement to everyone he has met. One can easily see why he is so close to you.”18 “He was the most faithful and perfect channel of communication, slim, frail, ill but absolutely glowing with refined comprehension of the Cause,” wrote Churchill. “He was a crumbling lighthouse from which there shone the beams that led great fleets to harbor.”19
“Churchill is the government in every sense of the word,” wrote Hopkins. “He controls the grand strategy and often the details. Labour trusts him. The army, navy, air force are behind him to a man. The politicians and upper crust pretend to like him.”20 As Elliott Roosevelt recalled, “Hopkins’ mission was only supposed to last two weeks, but he was getting on so famously with Churchill and learning so much that he cabled for permission to stay.”21 Hopkins proved Churchill’s most appreciative audience, and officials found that when together they forgot time. “Hopkins was lunching with the P.M. and they were so impressed with each other that their tête-à-tête did not break up till nearly 4.00,” John Colville complained to his diary.22
Most importantly, Hopkins reported back to Roosevelt that the supplies given to Churchill would not be wasted. “They need our help desperately and I am sure you will permit nothing to stand in the way,” he wrote. “I am convinced this meeting between you and Churchill is essential—and soon—for the battering continues and Hitler does not wait for Congress. . . . This island needs our help now Mr. President with everything we can give them.”23
At a dinner in Glasgow, after Churchill and Hopkins had seen Halifax set off on his journey aboard the King George V, to show his solidarity with Churchill Hopkins quoted the book of Ruth. “Whither thou goest, I will go . . . even to the end.”24 Hopkins told a clutch of newspaper editors “the President and those around him were convinced that America’s world duty could be successfully performed only in partnership with Britain,” and he added that “although America was not yet in the war, she was marching beside [the British], and that should we stumble she would see we did not fall.”25 Beaverbrook confided to Sherwood that Hopkins’s words of encouragement at this time “provided more tangible aid for Britain than had all the destroyers and guns and rifles and ammunition that had been sent previously.”26
Before Christmas, Hopkins had sent a long missive to Roosevelt, listing all of Britain’s immediate needs and offering his assessment of the war. “Most of the Cabinet and all of the military leaders here believe that invasion is imminent,” he wrote. They were working toward an invasion “not later than May 1” and expected “an all out attack, including the use of poison gas” but that “the Germans will have to do more than kill a few hundred thousand people here before they can defeat Britain.” He concluded, “If Germany fails to win this invasion then I believe her sun is set. I am convinced that if we act boldly and promptly on a few major fronts we can get enough material to Britain within the next few weeks to give her the additional strength she needs to turn back Hitler.”27
Roosevelt did not hesitate. As soon as Lend-Lease passed the Senate, on March 8, Roosevelt cabled Churchill, “Confidentially, I hope to send estimates for new orders and purchases under the bill to the House on Wednesday [March 12].”28 Lend-Lease completed its passage through both houses of Congress on the afternoon of March 11 and was signed into law by the president half an hour later. The following day, while paying tribute to Roosevelt’s “generous and far-seeing statesmanship,” Churchill told the Commons that Lend-Lease was more than just a helping hand; it represented “a new Magna Carta” that laid down “the rights and laws upon which a healthy and advancing civilization can alone be erected” and described “the duty of free men and free nations, wherever they may be, to share the responsibility and burden of enforcing them.”29 It was an acknowledgment from the most imperialistic of prime ministers that from that moment Britain was prepared to share with America responsibility for maintaining order in the world.
A week later, Roosevelt responded to Churchill’s challenge when addressing the White House correspondents’ annual dinner. “America is not a country which can be confounded by the appeasers, the defeatists, the backstairs manufacturers of panic,” he said. The great debate over Lend-Lease that had taken place “in every newspaper, on every wave length, over every cracker barrel in all the land” was over. The result was “binding on us all.” “This decision is the end of any attempts at appeasement in our land, the end of urging us to get along with the dictators, the end of compromise with tyranny and the forces of oppression.” He declared that “every plane, every other instrument of war, old and new, every instrument that we can spare now, we will send overseas” to “the battle lines of democracy.” And he added that when the war was won “our country must continue to play its great part in the period of world reconstruction for the good of humanity.”30
Roosevelt duly signed an appropriations request for $7 billion on March 27. On his return to Washington, Hopkins was placed in charge of the committee advising how best to expedite help to Britain. To the amusement of both Roosevelt and Churchill, the first shipment of Lend-Lease aid contained 900,000 feet of fire-hose.
The handover of power from the British Empire to America came at a crippling cost to Britain. Even after Lend-Lease had passed Congress, Roosevelt kept up his demands that all available British dollars be handed over. Negotiations over the American naval bases in the British West Indies proved troublesome. Churchill urged the British to fall in with America’s wishes. “The United States has now openly espoused our cause and has virtually promised us financial help of inestimable value,” he told the cabinet on February 6. “We must do what we can to meet American difficulties.”31
Two weeks later, Halifax cabled Churchill that “it was of the utmost importance that we should without delay hand over to America our remaining resources in that country.” Churchill told the cabinet, “We shall have to resign ourselves to meeting American wishes. . . . It is clear we shall receive from America far more than we could possibly give.” He said, however, that he would send a private telegram to Roosevelt asking him not to sell British securities “at knock down prices.”32
Undeterred, Roosevelt had pressed Halifax to put all British investments and businesses in America into the hands of a joint United States and British board. Churchill wrote a pained note to Hopkins: “Is this really necessary? It will place us in great difficulties here.”33 Nonetheless, he complied. By mid-March, when Lend-Lease was the law, Churchill had become a little less patient with Morgenthau’s incessant demands. “I am clear that this is no time to be driven from pillar to post,” he wrote to Halifax. “Although they may not all realize it, their lives are now in this business too. . . . I refuse altogether to be hustled and rattled. God knows we are doing our bit.”34
The conclusion of the Lend-Lease bill coincided with a series of setbacks for Britain in Europe and North Africa. At first, in 1941, the democracies did well. The Greeks drove out the invading Italians, which encouraged Churchill to send to Greece some of his North African forces, who were keeping the Italians in Libya from occupying the Suez Canal and reaching the oil-rich sands of the Middle East. But Italian insouciance caused Hitler to take command of the Mediterranean Axis campaign, and before long German forces had occupied Yugoslavia, retaken Greece, and invaded Crete. Even more threatening, he sent his top general, Erwin Rommel,35 to Tripoli to drive the British from Egypt, and he waged a punishing bombing campaign against the heavily fortified island of Malta, an essential British strategic redoubt in the middle of the Mediterranean, halfway between Sicily and Libya.
The main danger to Britain, however, was the threat to its lifeline across the Atlantic, through which all supplies needed to pass. Frustrated at not being able to invade Britain, Hitler adopted the plan of Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, commander in chief of the German navy, to wage an intense U-boat campaign to disrupt shipping and deny Britain the seaborne deliveries it needed. Ignoring the ban on convoying in the Lend-Lease Act, Stark set about converting the mostly old patrol vessels operating in the Atlantic into a full-scale aggressive Atlantic fleet. In mid-February, he ordered that American warships should be prepared from mid-March to escort British vessels across the Atlantic.
The losses of British ships ferrying supplies to Britain were becoming acute. By March 6, Churchill conceded that Britain was losing the Battle of the Atlantic and appealed again to Roosevelt for immediate help. Drawing upon his experience when assistant secretary of the navy, the president arranged for British merchant ships to be repaired in American ports. As historian Kenneth Davis wrote, “Almost [Roosevelt’s] every word, deed, gesture—his every act or refusal of action in response to a specific challenge—had worldwide consequences.”36 The president now fully understood that he was at the helm of the Allied war effort, even though America was not at war.
The Battle of the Atlantic would prove to be the longest-running battle of World War Two, fought on the Allied side largely by merchant seamen under some of the worst conditions imaginable, mostly in the 3,000-mile stretch between Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Liverpool in the United Kingdom. British and Canadian ships were under attack from “three-dimensional warfare”: German surface ships, U-boats, and Focke–Wulf long-range bomber planes, matched by intense bombing of British Atlantic ports.
Britain countered this debilitating assault by bombing German U-boat bases, mostly in the Baltic but also in French, Belgian, Dutch, and Norwegian ports, by mining coastal waters, by patrolling by ship and airplane, particularly in the western approaches to the British Isles that marked the outer reach of Germany’s U-boats and warplanes, and by convoying, the bundling together of up to eighty ships with Royal Navy and Royal Air Force escorts until safely out of German range.
Slow ships awaiting protection from warships assembled in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Bermuda and traveled together, meeting up with others at rendezvous points in the eastern Atlantic before running the gauntlet on their way to Glasgow, Belfast, Liverpool, and Bristol. In that way, hostile raiders were obliged to come under considerable fire if they were to attempt to sink shipping. Allied ships capable of traveling faster than the maximum speed of U-boats, i.e. more than fourteen knots, journeyed alone. Most of the action took place where the sea route narrowed between Scotland and Ireland. Ireland’s refusal to allow Britain naval bases proved costly in lives and naval losses.37
Since the war began in September 1939, German warships had sunk 5.8 million tons of British, Allied, and neutral shipping. Germany had lost 178 submarines. In April 1941 alone, 488,000 tons were sunk. With Lend-Lease passed into law, the way was open for America to help Britain as never before. But there was still the problem of protecting British ships when the Lend-Lease Act specifically outlawed convoying by American vessels. Convoying soon became the new battleground on which isolationists waged a rearguard action.