War
On Sunday 3rd September 1939, the inevitable finally happened: Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Berlin, delivered a final note to the German government. In it he stated that unless Hitler withdrew the troops he had sent into Poland two days earlier by 11 a.m. that day, Britain would declare war. No such undertaking was given. At 11.15 a.m. Chamberlain announced in sorrowful and heartfelt tones that Britain was now at war with Germany. France followed a few hours later.
Canada did not immediately join them. In 1914, as a quasiindependent Dominion, it had automatically gone to war along with the mother country, and some commentators insisted that the same should happen this time, since the declaration of war had been made by their monarch. Mackenzie King thought otherwise. The 1931 Statute of Westminster had turned Canada into a fully sovereign state and, as he repeatedly declared: “Parliament will decide.” And so the Canadian House of Commons was called in special session.
The resolution to declare war was put forward by Ernest Lapointe, the francophone minister of justice, who drew on the royal visit. As the royal couple had left, the Queen had said farewell with a blessing: “Que Dieu bénisse le Canada” (“God bless Canada”). Lapointe closed his speech with her words. It had the desired effect: although a small group of parliamentarians from Quebec tried to amend the bill, it passed by acclamation on 9th September. The Senate approved it the same day. That night the Cabinet drafted a declaration of war, which Lord Tweedsmuir signed on 10th September. Earlier hopes of a “limited” involvement were to prove an illusion. Between 1939 and 1945 almost 1.1 million Canadians – more than forty per cent of the male population between the ages of eighteen and forty-five – enlisted; virtually all of them were volunteers. More than forty-five thousand were killed.
The United States necessarily found itself in a different position. Two days before Britain declared war on Germany, as Nazi forces were advancing into Poland, Roosevelt had met a group of journalists in the Oval Office.
“Can we stay out of this?” one of them demanded.
“I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can and every effort will be made by this administration so to do,” Roosevelt replied. He reiterated that point on the evening of 3rd September in his fireside chat. “This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well,” he told the nation. “Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.”1
However warm the relationship that had developed between King and President, there could be no question of America joining the fighting on the British side – for the time being, at least. Although polls showed at least seventy-five per cent of Americans favoured the Allied cause that September, at least ninety-five per cent were equally fervently opposed to America’s becoming “involved in Europe’s wars”. Nor did that change soon – on the contrary. The period of inactivity during the first few months of the so-called “Phoney War” led some in the US government to question the seriousness of the British and French resolve in fighting the Nazis. Then the Allied disasters of April, May and June 1940, when the Germans swept through Western Europe, convinced many that Hitler’s forces were indeed invincible – further strengthening the feeling that America should steer well clear. One of the most notorious proponents of such a view was Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, whose position became increasingly isolationist, to the anger of his British hosts and the embarrassment of Roosevelt. He was eventually forced to resign from his post in November 1940 after an interview with the Boston Sunday Globe in which he declared: “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here.”
Armed intervention by the United States may have been out of the question, but a movement to aid Britain “by all means short of war” grew as Americans came to realize the danger that the Nazis might also ultimately pose to their continent. Admiration grew, too, for the determination with which the British, despised by many for their appeasement of Hitler in the run-up to the outbreak of war, were prepared to fight on, if necessary alone. The courage of the King and Queen – and their willingness to remain in London as German bombs rained down on the city – added to the feelings of sympathy.
So what of the friendship that had developed between the King and Roosevelt during their short time together? For George VI’s official biographer, there is little doubt that their meeting, however brief, helped encourage the Anglo-American alliance that was to be forged between the President and Winston Churchill after the latter became prime minister in May 1940 following the resignation of Chamberlain. The King and Queen, Wheeler-Bennett wrote, had, “in the course of their visit to the United States in the summer of 1939, disclosed to the American public the essential fact that ‘royalty’ are ‘people’, and in three days did more to demolish anti-British feeling in America than could have been achieved in a quarter of a century of diplomatic manoeuvring. Theirs was the foundation upon which others builded [sic]; theirs the spark which others tended into flame.”2
The warmth of this relationship was reflected in the letters Roosevelt and the King began to exchange in the spring of 1940. In one, dated 1st May, the President looked back to their time together at his country house. “Last June seems years distant,” he wrote to the King. “You will remember that the Saturday night at Hyde Park when I kept you up, after a strenuous day, I may have seemed pessimistic in my belief in the probability of war. More than a month after that I found the Congress assured that there would be no war, and for a few weeks I had to accept the charge of being a ‘calamity-howler’.”
“I certainly do not rejoice in my prophecies,” he continued, “but at least it has given me opportunity to bring home the seriousness of the world situation to the type of American who has hitherto believed, in much too large numbers, that no matter what happens there will be little effect on this country.” Roosevelt then added a personal note showing his genuine affection for the royal couple: “Always I want you and your family to know that you have very warm friends in my wife and myself over here, and you must not hesitate to call on me for any possible thing if I can help or lighten your load.”3
At this stage, though, what the King – and his country – really needed was not sympathy but arms: on 1st June 1940, Roosevelt had heeded a request from Churchill and authorized the sale of munitions worth $37 million to replace those lost during the evacuation of Dunkirk. Churchill followed this up by asking him to provide Britain with destroyers too: the Royal Navy was down to its last sixty-eight vessels, which it needed not just to defend its trade routes against German U-boat attacks but also to guard against the danger of invasion. Only America could help.
The King weighed in with a personal letter to the President in which he reminisced about “the delightful days” they had spent the previous June. After talking of the magnificent spirit, resolution and confidence shown by his fellow Britons in the face of the Nazi assault, the King got to the point: “As you know, we are in urgent need of some of your older destroyers to tide us over the next few months,” he wrote. “I well understand your difficulties and I am certain that you will do your best to procure them for us before it is too late. Now that we have been deprived of the assistance of the French Fleet – to put the least unfavourable interpretation on the present position – the need is becoming greater every day if we are to carry on our solitary fight for freedom to a successful conclusion.”4
The request put Roosevelt in an awkward position: it was difficult to reconcile the transfer of fifty destroyers to Britain with American neutrality; there was even the danger Hitler might consider it a casus belli. There was also the problem of how Congress would react: it had recently ruled that no military property could be transferred to a foreign country unless it had been previously certified as surplus to the needs of the service involved. Despite this, Roosevelt was prepared to accede to the request, but he also wanted something in return: namely to link provision of the ships with the plan that he and the King had discussed at Hyde Park to allow the Americans to use British bases in the Caribbean and the north Atlantic. Churchill was reluctant to make such a link, but Roosevelt insisted this was the only way he could sell the deal to Congress. Churchill finally accepted and an agreement was reached on 2nd September: Britain acquired fifty reconditioned destroyers, and the Americans were granted ninety-nine-year leases that would allow them to establish air and sea bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Antigua, St Lucia, Trinidad and British Guiana.
The King hailed the deal in a letter he sent to Roosevelt three days later: “The friendly action of the United States in making these all-important ships available for us has evoked a warm feeling of gratitude throughout this country, and we hope that our offer of facilities in the western Atlantic for the defence of North America will give equal satisfaction to your people,” he wrote. “I remember so well the talk we had on this particular subject at Hyde Park – but how far off all that seems now!”5
Yet, however warm the relationship between King and President – and, indeed, between their respective countries – there was still no chance of America actually entering the war. A few days after the agreement was signed, the Germans began an eight-month bombing campaign against British cities that became known as the Blitz, but Roosevelt showed no sign of making good on his promise at Hyde Park that if London were bombed, the United States would come in. Nor did the President’s re-election for a third term in November 1940 immediately change the situation: the mandate he had received from voters was for “all aid short of war”; however liberally he interpreted this, he knew that he had the support of neither Congress nor the American people to fight side by side with Britain against the Nazis.
On the positive side, though, the following month, after a special message from Roosevelt, the House of Representatives passed a bill to amend the Neutrality Act to allow US merchantmen to sail to war zones. The American Atlantic patrols that the King and the President discussed at Hyde Park were finally getting under way.
In the months that followed, there was more good news from Washington: the “Lend-Lease” legislation passed by Congress in March 1941 allowed Britain, which was rapidly running out of dollar assets, to continue to obtain much-needed arms from America, which had hitherto been available only on a “cash-and-carry basis”. Although the move was controversial, it showed quite how far relations between the two countries had moved since the start of the war. Then, in May, Roosevelt proclaimed an “unlimited state of national emergency” that authorized US warships escorting supply vessels bound for Britain to defend themselves against enemy attack – raising the prospect of America becoming embroiled in a shooting war.
In a letter that June, the King made yet another reference to their conversation at Hyde Park. “After so many years of anxiety, when what we wanted to happen seemed so far from realization, it is wonderful to feel that at last our two great countries are getting together for the future betterment of the world,” he wrote.6
Ultimately, though, the final impetus that drove America into the war came not from Europe but from Asia. On the morning of 7th December 1941, US time, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor: after just two hours of bombing, more than 2,400 Americans were dead, twenty-one ships had either been sunk or damaged and 188 US aircraft destroyed. The next day Roosevelt gave an address to Congress in which he declared the day of the attack was “a date that will live in infamy”. At the end of the speech, he asked Congress to approve a declaration of war on Japan. The Senate and House of Representatives did so almost unanimously – with only one vote against, by Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist congresswoman. When Germany and Italy responded three days later by declaring war on America under the terms of their alliance with Japan, Congress declared war on them too.
The catastrophe at Pearl Harbor coincided with more bad news for the British: attacks on Hong Kong and Malaya and the sinking of the great battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse. Yet it meant Britain was no longer fighting alone. The King was quick to write to Roosevelt. “My thoughts and prayers go out to you and to the great people of the United States at this solemn moment in your history when you have been treacherously attacked by Japan,” he wrote. “We are proud indeed to be fighting at your side against the common enemy. We share your inflexible determination, your confidence that with God’s help the power of darkness will be overcome and the four freedoms established throughout a world purged of tyranny.”7 But it would take almost four more years of fighting, in which both countries – and Canada, too – suffered appalling losses, before that common enemy was defeated.
When the King and Queen left Hyde Park, they had urged the President and his wife to pay a return visit to Britain. Although the outbreak of war necessarily meant a postponement, it was a message that was repeated by Churchill during the several meetings he had with Roosevelt after he became prime minister. Such a meeting, however, would have to wait for victory – which was still a long way off.
In the meantime, it was decided that Eleanor, who had remained in contact with the Queen, could travel to Britain on her own; the declared purpose was for her to be able to see at first hand the part women were playing in the war effort and to visit American troops stationed in Britain. It would also be rich in symbolism, serving as a sign of the strength of relations between the two countries. “I wish much that
I could accompany her, for there are a thousand things I want to tell you and talk with you about,” the President wrote to the King.8
Eleanor’s visit, which took place in October 1942, was an undoubted success – and one that brought home to the First Lady the extent to which the King and Queen were sharing the privations of the British people. The contrast with their time at Hyde Park could not have been greater: the vast rooms of Buckingham Palace were cold and damp, some of the windows were boarded up as a result of bombing, while the food on offer, at a time of rationing, was appropriately modest – even though it was served somewhat incongruously on gold and silver plates. The King and Queen personally took Eleanor on a tour of London to see the devastating aftermath of the Blitz. Their first stop was St Paul’s Cathedral; they then went on to the East End.
After Eleanor had left, the King wrote to Roosevelt to say what a pleasure it had been to receive his wife. “That she should have made the long journey in these dangerous war days has touched and delighted our people and they are very glad to welcome her here,” he said. He also expressed the wish that he and the President would be able to talk things over again in person, adding: “Let us hope this will be possible sooner than we think.”9 Eleanor herself wrote later of how her experiences in Britain had reinforced the respect she felt for the King and Queen. “The feeling I had had about them during their visit to the United States, that they were simply a young and charming couple, who would have to undergo some very difficult experiences, began to come back to me, intensified by the realization that they now had been through these experiences and were anxious to tell me about them,” she recorded in her autobiography.10
The King continued to hope that Roosevelt himself could come to Britain – a hope that seemed to have a good chance of becoming reality as the tide of the war gradually turned in the Allies’ favour. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, which brought Roosevelt together with Churchill and Stalin, the idea was mooted that the President travel that April to San Francisco to attend the opening session of the United Nations and then on some time in late May or early June to Europe, visiting Britain and then France, the Netherlands and the Front. By that time, the President confidently predicted, the war would be over. The high point would be a stay at Buckingham Palace.
Roosevelt, Churchill declared, would “get from the British people the greatest reception ever accorded to any human being since Lord Nelson made his triumphant return to London”. The King, for his part, was delighted at the prospect of welcoming as his guest a man who, by now, he had come to consider an old friend. “We shall do our best to make you comfortable here and it would be a real pleasure to the Queen and myself to have you with us and to continue that friendship which started so happily in Washington & at Hyde Park in 1939,” he wrote to the President. “So much has happened to us all since those days.”11
It was not to be, however. Although Roosevelt was aged just sixty-three and full of plans for the future, his health was deteriorating badly. During a long weekend at Hyde Park that March, Eleanor noted sadly that her husband no longer wanted to drive around the grounds in his Ford, letting her take the wheel instead – something he had never done before. He even allowed her to mix the cocktails, which would have been inconceivable just a few months earlier. On 29th March, looking drawn and grey, he returned from Hyde Park to Washington only to set off later that day to Warm Springs, Georgia, for a two-week rest, accompanied by Daisy Suckley and another cousin, Laura Delano. Also to be present at the house was Lucy Rutherfurd. Eleanor, however, did not go with him.
On the afternoon of 12th April 1945, while sitting for a portrait by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, Roosevelt became confused and raised his left hand shakily to his forehead. His head slumped forward. “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head,” he told Suckley. He then fell unconscious and was carried to his bedroom. Dr Howard Bruenn, his attending cardiologist, diagnosed a large cerebral haemorrhage. At 3.35 p.m. he died.
Roosevelt had still so much more he planned to do once his fourth term ended in 1948, both on the world stage and in his personal life. Eleanor was the key to both. The previous Christmas, while driving with his son Elliott around Hyde Park, the President spoke of his desire to become reacquainted with his wife. “Father spoke to me about Mother in terms I had never heard him use before,” Elliott recalled. “‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think that Mother and I might be able to get together now and do things together, take some trips maybe, learn to know each other again.’”12
Mourners lined the railway tracks as Roosevelt’s coffin was carried the eight hundred miles north from Warm Springs to Washington DC. After a funeral service in the East Wing of the White House, he was laid to rest in the rose garden of his beloved Springwood. In Britain, a week of mourning was ordered at court and the King cabled Eleanor to express his condolences. “The Queen and I are deeply grieved and shocked by the news of President Roosevelt’s death,” the King wrote. “In him humanity has lost a great figure and we have lost a true and honoured friend.”13
The King, although just forty-nine when the war ended, was not well: the stress of the conflict, coupled with a lifetime of heavy smoking, had taken its toll. This did not prevent him from setting off in February 1947 on another royal tour: a gruelling ten-week visit to South Africa. In the years that followed, his health deteriorated further. An arterial blockage in 1948 prompted fears he might have to have his right leg amputated in order to avoid gangrene; instead, he had an operation to free the flow of blood to the limb. Then, in September 1951, he had a malignant tumour removed from his lung. He appeared to recover and went on, as usual, to spend that Christmas and New Year at Sandringham; during his time there he was even well enough to go out shooting. On the morning of 6th February 1952 he was found by a servant dead in his bed. The cause of death was not his cancer but rather a coronary thrombosis – a blood clot to the heart – that he had suffered soon after falling asleep.
George VI was the first reigning monarch to visit the United States, but he would not be the last: since succeeding her father in 1952, the present Queen has crossed the Atlantic three times: in 1957, 1976 and 1991. The trips have reflected the different spirits of the respective ages in which they have taken place.
The first visit, which followed the debacle of Suez, was timed to mark the 350th anniversary of the founding of the State of Virginia. It was also a clear attempt to revive the Anglophile sentiments seen during the King’s time at Hyde Park: in her speeches during the ten-day visit, which followed a brief stop in Canada, the Queen repeatedly stressed – and hailed – the deep ties between Britain and America. In Washington, a million people braved the rain to watch her and Prince Philip drive from the airport to the White House. Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister, spoke approvingly of the “the warmth and gaiety of the welcome given to the Queen by her subjects and our allies across the sea”.14
Anglo-American relations were back on a much firmer footing when the Queen returned almost two decades later to mark the bicentenary of the War of American Independence. In a carefully worded speech in Philadelphia, she won plaudits from her hosts by praising the Founding Fathers for “having taught Britain a very valuable lesson”: namely, knowing when it was time to bow to the desire of subjects to govern themselves. “Without that great act in the cause of liberty, performed in Independence Hall two hundred years ago, we could never have transformed an empire into a commonwealth,” the Queen declared.15
If anything, the Queen received an even more enthusiastic welcome on her third visit which, taking place just three months after the victory of the US-led forces in the first Gulf War, underlined the continued strength of the special relationship between the two countries. She travelled widely, visiting Texas and Miami, as well as making the obligatory trip to Mount Vernon. She also notched up a number of firsts – among them holding the first royal receiving line at a baseball match and addressing a joint meeting of the United States Congress, a privilege that her father had been offered, but declined.
Where the Queen led, other members of the royal family have followed, notably Prince Charles, who visited in 1970 with Princess Anne and in 1985 with Diana, when Time hailed them as “the world’s most glamorous and relentlessly observed twosome”, while the New York Times reported simply: “The British have landed and Washington is taken.”16 The trip confirmed Diana’s trajectory on the path towards international celebrity status, but the jubilant welcome she and Charles received was tempered by rumours that their marriage was in trouble. When Diana crossed the Atlantic again in 1989, it was on her own.
Such trips – coupled with state visits to Britain by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and Ronald Reagan in 1982 – have added glitter to Anglo-American relations, helping them remain solid throughout the intervening decades. Yet no visit in either direction has quite recaptured the intimacy of that weekend in June 1939, when the Roosevelts welcomed the Queen’s mother and father to their family home. All of which makes the friendship between King and President forged one hot summer afternoon over hot dogs and cocktails unique.