‘Keep a bit of India.’
Churchill to Wavell, 31 August 1945
The British Empire was rather like a great country estate: its acres and its assets supporting the power and prestige of its proprietors through several generations. The Second World War proved to be a great leveller. The Churchills were the last to live in the big house, in the style to which they were accustomed, albeit with nagging thoughts about the unpaid bills. When the Attlees took over in 1945, they shut up the big house, through a mixture of choice and necessity, and moved to more modest accommodation on the residue of the estate, which they conscientiously set about improving as farmland. But everyone could see that the game was up.
India, of course, was the big house and Africa the hobby farm. Within two years, the British Empire was to undergo liquidation, not only in India but also in Palestine, manifestly unable to sustain Britain’s traditional great-power pretensions. This was accepted, as the reorganization of Europe was at Potsdam, under constraint. Ernest Bevin was the dominant presence both in international policy-making and in the public eye; the number of references to him in The Times in these years easily outscores those to either the Prime Minister or Churchill (or indeed President Truman). Though he often bemoaned the fact that Britain’s reduced resources limited his initiative, Bevin asserted a strong foreign policy which showed that he had no wish to abdicate a world role. The Middle East was promoted to the sort of strategic position formerly occupied by India, with informal influence now preferred to formal control, and appealing, as Bevin put it, to peasants rather than pashas. Moreover, the Labour Government’s commitment to economic development in Africa showed an aspiration to reinvent a sort of welfare-state colonialism. Yet it remains only a clever paradox to talk of the revival of imperialism under Attlee and Bevin. The British Empire was indeed finished as any real rival or equal to the new superpowers, the Soviet Union and, above all, the United States.
In Britain, many people did not see the outcome of the war in this way in 1945. They just thought that they had won. Understandably, they lived for the moment – and had lived for this moment during long years of anticipation. ‘London went crazy last night,’ the Daily Mail reported when VJ-Day finally came on 15 August. It said that ‘the rollicking thousands who turned out to celebrate made the biggest and noisiest crowd London ever saw.’1 The Leader of the Conservative Opposition in the House of Lords, Lord Cranborne, heir to the Marquess of Salisbury and a key supporter of Churchill since Munich, improved the day by reading the minds of his countrymen. ‘In this moment of victory, their first thoughts would go to God, who had brought them through this great danger; and next to their King, the corner stone of that great Empire of which they were proud to be citizens,’ he told his fellow peers. ‘He had passed through the Valley of Death; long might he live to guide them through the sunny uplands of prosperity and peace.’2
Many American observers, however, were not too blinkered to see what was happening – and the Chicago Tribune was not too polite to offer its own opinion. Its valedictory tribute to Churchill as a British statesman – ‘the greatest of his age’ – turned on his ability to summon the New World in support. ‘In the classic British tradition, he has husbanded the manpower of England and skilfully shifted the heavier burden of fighting to the allies,’ it commented. ‘In a changing and developing world, he has not lost sight of the only thing that is eternal in British foreign policy, the interests of the empire, and has skilfully used every weapon at his command to protect them.’ Hence a subsequent warning for Britain that ‘we have no interest in maintaining her oppressive empire, and we are certainly not going to allow her domination of our foreign policy to continue, which is the only way in which that empire can be maintained.’ The losing imperialist war that the British had fought in Asia, on this reading, had been subsumed in a bigger, better war that the United States had won. ‘Who, then, would dispute our title to the victory?’ another editorial demanded. ‘The British, defeated in Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, and Borneo, and driven from all their colonial possessions?’3
These territories were to be retrieved, at least for the time being. Churchill’s insistence on fighting in Burma and the Malayan peninsula, rather than committing British forces against Japan itself, had long been a sore point with the Americans, who rightly suspected that the prime objective was imperialist. Relations between Allied commanders in this theatre made Ike and Monty seem like brothers, with the American General (‘Vinegar Joe') Stilwell egregious in his views. The Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, ‘Glamour Boy’ Mountbatten, was only the worst of the hated Limeys who appear in Vinegar Joe’s diary – ‘the bastardly hypocrites do their best to cut our throats on all occasions. The pig-fuckers.’4
From 1943, the tide had turned against Japan, and thus in favour of the British, relieving pressure on India. The 14th Army, commanded by General Sir William Slim (whom even Stilwell respected), successfully concluded the protracted Burma campaign, and belatedly achieved the recognition deserved by this ‘forgotten army’ – a paradoxical kind of fame. By mid-September, Singapore and Hong Kong were to be back in British hands. In Triumph and Tragedy Churchill suggested that rogue Japanese might still have carried on fighting, making occupation ‘a matter of urgency’.5 The real urgency, of course, was for the British to pull this off before the Americans obstructed a restoration of imperial control that had never been part of Roosevelt’s plan (as was shown by his actions against French efforts to retrieve Indo-China or his talk of ceding Hong Kong to China). After San Francisco, after Potsdam, Truman had his own priorities and simply shrugged as the Union Jack was raised again over these territories.
The fact was that, though the British Empire might have survived the war, it had not really won the war. Its finest hour was behind it. It was hardly likely to last for a thousand years. It was actually well into its last thousand days.
By August 1945 decisive changes in the position of the British Empire had already been determined. It no longer constituted a united force capable of acting as a superpower; and the consequences were now inescapable. It was what Attlee, in his matter-of-fact language, had called at Potsdam ‘the way the course of the war had dealt the cards’. In particular, it was the prime task of his Labour Government to meet the costs of victory, as incurred – with Labour’s full concurrence – under the wartime Government of his illustrious predecessor. ‘Read Keynes’ paper today on our financial outlook,’ Sir Alec Cadogan wrote on the morning after VJ-Day. ‘It is certainly grim reading! There are terrible times ahead of any Govt. in this country.’6
If there is a different kind of story to be told about the two years between the end of the Second World War and the moment when the King–Emperor lost his Empire, it correspondingly needs telling in a different way. What happened in the heroic age of Churchill and Roosevelt is made more humanly accessible for us today through the personal records kept by a number of men – only men unfortunately – who were conscious that they were watching history happen from a privileged vantage-point. Cadogan’s sense that ‘I've lived through England’s greatest hour’ was not his alone.7 Some of the most faithful diarists happily continued into the post-war era: in Britain, Hugh Dalton, now with new eminence as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the economic adviser James Meade and, for a short time, his colleague Lionel Robbins; in the United States, James Forrestal, a lonely survivor in Truman’s cabinet, and Arthur Vandenberg, still pivotally influential in the Senate; in India, Lord Wavell as Viceroy.
But when the tumult and the shouting dies, and the captains and the kings depart, Kipling failed to remind us that the chroniclers and courtiers often push off too. ‘Charles, will you transfer your services to Attlee?’ Churchill had teased his doctor at an anxious moment.8 Lord Moran, of course, did no such thing, but his diary abruptly declines in significance with the break-up of Churchill’s court. Jock Colville, at thirty, with his career to make, soon left Downing Street for the Foreign Office, where Alec Cadogan was now serving his final months before becoming Britain’s first permanent representative at the United Nations. Sir Alan Brooke handed over as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (to Montgomery) as soon as he could. He was made a mere baron by Churchill – Haig had been given no less than an earldom by Lloyd George – but became Viscount Alanbrooke under Attlee. Between them, these four diarists did for the Churchill of 1944–5 what Boswell had done for his eloquent, irascible, fallible hero, Dr Johnson. The new Prime Minister, for obvious reasons, never found his Boswell – never even found his Sawyers (who was to leave Churchill’s service in 1946).
Leo Amery, Harold Macmillan and Harold Nicolson all lost their seats in Parliament in 1945. Only Macmillan was to come back later. Amery instead went into retirement, plagued by the trial and execution of his son John as a Nazi collaborator. Nicolson continued his diary but dearly missed the thrilling access to the great and famous that the House of Commons had given him, and never succeeded in getting into the House of Lords. Chips Channon held his seat, ‘stunned and shocked by the country’s treachery, and extremely surprised by my own survival’, and was much disappointed by the new Parliament – ‘never have I seen such a dreary lot of people.’9
Harry Butcher went home to the United States with the hugely popular General Ike in the summer of 1945 and quickly realized that his diary was a potential goldmine, with an obliging publisher on hand to unlock the gold as soon as 1946. Henry Morgenthau and Edward Stettinius, rich men who felt their dismissal by Truman more keenly than any financial incentive, left the diaries of their days of power locked up for future academics to edit.
Isaiah Berlin’s time at the Washington embassy had effectively come to an end in June 1945, when he had been sent to San Francisco for the end of the conference. Excluded from the British delegation to Potsdam by Eden – ‘I can't have Isaiah chattering round the place’ – Berlin was to spend some months at the Moscow embassy before gravitating back to academic life.10 The reports to the Foreign Office that Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, continued to sign in Washington were never the same again. But though the post-war style was certainly less rhetorical, the events usually less dramatic, and the personalities often less colourful, the agenda inherited from the war was actually little changed.
‘ATOMIC BOMB: JAPS GIVEN 48 HOURS TO SURRENDER’ was the Daily Mail headline on 7 August. The detonation over Hiroshima was the big news worldwide. Its immediate significance in speeding the end of the war was well recognized even if its long-term effects were not. Eye-witness reports brought home the horrors, with initial suggestions of up to a quarter of a million killed; at least 80,000 died that day. Opinion in Britain was divided from the outset. ‘A shocking thing,’ one young working-class woman said. ‘I don't think myself they ought to have made it.’ Another woman of virtually the same age and class said: ‘Well, I think nothing on earth’s too bad for the Japs. I was very glad it was them got it, because there’s no good ones.’11
A statement from Downing Street, drafted by Churchill and released by Attlee, accompanied the first news, naturally stressing the British contribution to the project. ‘Japan is faced with obliteration by the new British-American atomic bomb’ was how the Daily Mail began its report, and photographs of half a dozen of the British scientists involved in its development appeared on the front page. It was true that the Manhattan Project (the American code-name) or Tube Alloys (as the British called it) had benefited from British co-operation, especially in the early stages of the alliance. A typically informal understanding between Churchill and Roosevelt had been formalized in the Quebec Agreement of 1943, giving Britain a veto over the use of atomic weapons. One informed American estimate was that without British co-operation there would have been no atomic bomb available during 1945.12 Though the Quebec Agreement was not to be revealed even to the relevant joint congressional committee in Washington until May 1947, its gist was hinted at in the London press, with the confident British assumption that Truman was bound by assurances tendered by his predecessor. This was becoming a familiar story.
The end of the Japanese war was an American business. The news that the Soviet Union had declared war (not until 8 August) came now as an anti-climax, overshadowed and overtaken by news of a second bomb, dropped on 9 August, which blasted Nagasaki and finally broke the dogged Japanese resistance. The surrender was made to Americans, on terms devised by Americans. Unlike the long-delayed downfall of Hitler, all this happened within days. It was obviously an immense relief for the overstretched British forces serving in Asia, spared the prospect of participating in a final assault upon the Japanese home islands. This was the immediate British interest, colouring immediate reactions at home; but there was another effect, with fundamental importance for British economic prospects.
VJ-Day arrived a hundred days after VE-Day. Stage II of Lend-Lease – which had conventionally been expected to last for over 500 days – thus ended with no agreement in place on Stage III, which had now begun. This was Keynes’s ‘awkward’ possibility – in spades. Even when the British had had the President’s assurances at Quebec that Stage II of Lend-Lease would continue in the same spirit as previously, these had turned out to count for little, and promises ‘beyond the dreams of justice’ amounted to even less. Lacking any agreement on Stage III, the British now pinned their hopes on the goodwill of the Americans, relying upon them to see the problem in the same light as themselves. Disappointment was thus inevitable, and feelings of betrayal too.
The only top-level contact on this matter had been at Potsdam, just before Churchill left, at a meeting of the joint chiefs of staff. Churchill had been focused on the immediate problem of easing restrictions on Lend-Lease supplies to the British in the Japanese war. Truman responded that ‘he was handicapped in his approach to this matter by the latest renewal of the Lend-Lease Act’ and asked for patience ‘as he wished to avoid any embarrassment with Congress’. These Stage II problems were virtually to solve themselves with the sudden end of the war; the real problem was Stage III. But all that Truman had said on Stage III at Potsdam was that ‘he was not quite clear how far he could accept liability for reconstruction and rehabilitation of the United Kingdom under existing United States law.’13
These matters were all the more sensitive because they were already being openly debated in the United States – by all the usual suspects. Indeed, if this debate is counter-pointed with the British claims, some idea can be gained of the chasm that existed between the incompatible assumptions of the two allies, well before they belatedly sat down to negotiate Stage III. ‘The British have recently made much of the poverty the war has brought them,’ commented the Chicago Tribune, just after the Hiroshima bomb, warning that such stories were being ‘told with the obvious purpose of getting 14 billion dollars of lend-lease indebtedness and 4½ billion dollars of World War I debts wiped off the books. There is also talk of further large gifts.’14 A public tutored to be watchful of the wily British was being put on its guard.
In London, informed people knew perfectly well that Lend-Lease must end with the Japanese war. But they held their breath, as though fearing to precipitate the impending avalanche. Two days after VJ-Day, Hugh Dalton resumed his diary, now that he was nicely installed at 11 Downing Street, the Chancellor’s official residence. ‘I am conscious of having some mountainous problems in front of me, especially with “overseas financial liabilities”,’ he wrote privately: ‘Lend-Lease may be stopping any time now and the resulting gap will be terrific.’15 Earlier that week (13 August) The Times had talked discreetly of the Government’s need, ‘with the end of lend-lease now in prospect’, to prepare for a financial accord with the United States. Keynes’s much-redrafted paper was now before the new cabinet, which it warned of ‘a financial Dunkirk’. This was still on the assumption that Lend-Lease ‘would continue to the end of 1945’.16 In the American press, reports that Lend-Lease would be ended very much sooner were already appearing. They turned out to be well founded.
On Monday, 20 August, a formal letter was handed over in Washington, terminating all Lend-Lease supplies at once except against cash payment. Dalton and Bevin, with their advisers, looked at its terms the same evening, dismayed and shocked. Perhaps they should have recalled that this was virtually a repeat of what had happened to Russia after its war ended on VE-Day: a lesson that the British had not absorbed and treatment from which they had imagined themselves in some special way exempt. It seems to be a legend, though one often repeated, that Truman later repented what he had done; he certainly says no such thing in his memoirs.17
True, there were personal reasons to explain the abruptness and the narrow legalism of the decision. It reflected not only the determination of Leo Crowley, as administrator of Lend-Lease, to pre-empt congressional criticism but also his opportunism in securing presidential authority for immediate action in the absence of key State Department officers. Dean Acheson, who took a more accommodating view, was celebrating his promotion to Under-Secretary with a short holiday in Canada. William Clayton, Byrnes’s Assistant Secretary, was in London.
Will Clayton was in a difficult position. A tall Southerner of forceful personality, he was an ideological free trader and thus axiomatically in favour of giving teeth to the free-trade aspirations in Article VII of the Lend-Lease agreement. This was likely to pit him against the British if they tried to hang on to imperial preference; but he was certainly no Anglophobe and was quite ready to argue against tariffs in his own country. The real answer, as he saw it, lay in free multilateral trade, aided by the flexible multilateral currency arrangements to finance it that had been agreed at Bretton Woods. In all of this, of course, there was much common ground between him and British multilateralists like Lionel Robbins, James Meade and (usually) Keynes. On his visit to London, Clayton had already been sounded out informally about Stage III assistance to Britain, on which he was ready to smile in principle – if it meant that Britain signed up to the multilateral agenda – coupled with the warning that there were bound to be strings. Keynes noted the smile, ignored the warning. Then Clayton heard of the precipitate ending of Lend-Lease, in his absence, behind his back, upsetting his strategy. He was appalled, not because he was in the pocket of the British but because he needed more time to bring them to terms.
The news made a slightly delayed public impact. The Labour movement’s own paper, the Daily Herald, close to Bevin, ran the announcement as only the third story on 22 August (first was the Japanese occupation and second a statement from the President of the Board of Trade, Sir Stafford Cripps, on clothes rationing): ‘Lend-Lease Stops But Food Safe’. The following day it reported, this time as the second story, that Lord Halifax was to return from holiday to the Washington embassy, thus continuing negotiations with Clayton, who was obviously seeking to soften the suddenness of the blow – and was just as obviously therefore singled out for reproof by critics in the United States. None of this reporting, however, signalled a major crisis in Anglo-American relations.
It was the Government’s decision to raise the temperature in the House of Commons on 24 August that made the difference. As Prime Minister, Attlee made a statement which bluntly regretted the lack of prior consultation. In paying tribute to Lend-Lease for enabling maximum Allied mobilization, he also offered an exposition of its rationale. ‘The very fact that this was the right division of effort between ourselves and our allies leaves us, however, far worse off when the sources of assistance dry up than it leaves those who have been affording the assistance,’ he explained. ‘If the role assigned to us had been to expand our exports so as to provide a large margin over our current needs which we could furnish free of charge to our allies, we should, of course, be in an immeasurably stronger position than we are today.’ This was very well put (as newspaper comment agreed) and for the very good reason that it closely paraphrased Keynes’s ‘Financial Dunkirk’ paper for the cabinet.18
The essence of Britain’s difficulty was that Lend-Lease was not a series of gifts but a system of flows. It did not have a one-off effect: simply on consumption, like a Christmas present. Instead it was meant to work upstream into production, thereby distorting the dynamics of the British economy. So the supply process, deliberately geared to aiding the Allied war effort, necessarily required time for adjustment to Britain’s peacetime needs – especially the need to export. Put in these terms, the Keynes–Attlee point might seem irrefutable. But when, on 23 August, the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial, ‘Santa Claus Dies Hard’, it was defining the problem in quite different terms. The British had got used to expecting handouts and evidently believed ‘that the way to get capital is to get America to donate’. Now they wanted more. ‘Strangely enough, there are Americans willing to give it to them,’ the Tribune commented. It advised Mr Clayton to come home.
Back in the House of Commons, speaking as Leader of the Opposition, Churchill was notably supportive of the new British Government. ‘I cannot believe that this is the last word of the United States,’ he declared; ‘I cannot believe that so great a nation, whose lend-lease policy was characterised by me as “the most unsordid act in the history of the world”, would proceed in such a rough and harsh manner as to hamper a faithful ally, the ally who held the fort while their own American armaments were preparing.’ To the Chicago Tribune, of course, this was ‘the familiar refrain of the war debt defaulters thru the last two decades, that our allies were fighting America’s war until we were induced to come to their aid’. And Britain’s problems? ‘Those are their problems.’ The editorial was headed: ‘The Dining Room is Closed’.19
The termination of Lend-Lease closed a chapter in Anglo-American relations – and with an unhappy ending. The fine print of the agreements may have been impenetrably arcane, the legal advice disputable, the economics beyond the reach of many people: but each side of the story seemed essentially simple on each side of the Atlantic. The House of Commons had been told that Keynes would be joining Halifax in negotiations in Washington, and pious remarks were made about saying nothing to prejudice a settlement and avoiding recrimination. But the Daily Mail of 25 August was not alone in its judgement: ‘On the face of it the American action would seem to be harsh and almost callous.’ The British myth of the most unsordid act was simple and compelling. ‘President Roosevelt devised the Lend-Lease system to take the dollar sign out of inter-Allied transactions and help win the war,’ a further Mail editorial claimed three days later. ‘It would be ironical if, with the war won, the grand object achieved, the dollar sign should be put back in.’
This was certainly the reaction that Mass-Observation reported in Britain, with two out of three people critical of what Truman had done. There were two main theories: that Roosevelt would have acted differently (a popular view) and that the move was ideologically motivated. ‘I'm not up on the details,’ said a young working-class woman, ‘but everybody’s saying they've done it against our Labour Government – that’s the long and short of it.’ Some defended the United States. ‘I think she is right,’ said a working-class man in his mid-forties. ‘It’s her money – we can't expect to have it put in our hands.’ But more felt the other way: either confirmed in their prejudices (‘Well, I never did like them much') or recoiling from unjust treatment (‘oh, it’s not right at all, it’s taking a wicked advantage'). One middle-aged working-class man thought it put wartime German propaganda in a new light: ‘They were always saying we'd sold out to America and we'd find ourselves bankrupt at the end of the war. And it looks to me they were right.’20
Keynes had made some changes to his brief before the Labour cabinet saw it, but chiefly in presentation. If the financial Dunkirk was to be avoided, three things were essential. Two of them rested in Britain’s own hands: intense expansion of exports and drastic cuts in overseas spending. The third, though, was substantial aid from the United States. Keynes had given up the bright idea of asking for retrospective Lend-Lease for the period of American neutrality; in its place was a simple, bold, cheeky suggestion that the United States should make a grant-in-aid of perhaps $5 billion to Britain. Justice remained the core of his approach, though the labels he had previously used were now abandoned. Temptation, in the sense of a big loan on ordinary business terms, made no appearance, in deference to Treasury criticism. Austerity, therefore, remained as the only ostensible alternative, yet as unattractively represented as ever.
This meant, of course, that there was no real fallback position. There had been, earlier in the summer, an attempt to prepare one in the Treasury, through the efforts of the young Otto Clarke, under the sponsorship of Sir Wilfrid Eady, the Joint Second Secretary. They wanted to explore a humdrum alternative to the visionary dream of Justice – a bit of hand-to-mouth borrowing within the sterling area, which itself might be expanded to include Britain’s trading partners in Europe, where other countries faced similar problems; an acceptance of unavoidable austerity; and bilateral trading arrangements to conserve precious dollars, thus delaying the free convertibility of sterling, as ultimately required by Bretton Woods. All of this had been simply brushed aside by Keynes, who, in one of his less prescient predictions, denied that dollars would prove scarce in the post-war world and thus that the United States was likely to run a big trading surplus.
The essence of their differences, however, was as much political as it was economic. What Clarke and Eady envisaged (rather more presciently in their case) was ‘the atmosphere of secrecy and leakage which will be inevitable in Washington’, in which the British negotiators must be in a position ‘to break off, knowing that there was some Plan II, which could be used to keep us going’. They did not deny the grandeur of appealing to Justice, but suggested that ‘we must look at it as it might appear to the U.S.A., from the other end of the telescope.’21
Here was one foreseeable difficulty in Keynes’s approach, duly foreseen within the Treasury. In the Economic Section of the Cabinet Office, another foreseeable difficulty was identified by its Director, James Meade, when he learnt that trade experts, like Lionel Robbins, were deliberately excluded by Keynes from the British negotiating team. Meade’s problem was not with the central argument of Keynes’s ‘really brilliant’ analysis, which he welcomed for its commitment to multilateral trade, just as Article VII had long required.22 ‘We can't do without American asssistance in Stage III,’ Meade argued. ‘We shan't get such assistance except in return for implementing Article VII.’ Thus concessions on trade policy, especially over imperial preference, were inevitably the quid pro quo. ‘Meanwhile Keynes and the financial pundits are to go to Washington to try to negotiate a financial arrangement for Stage III,’ Meade noted at the end of August; ‘and the commercial policy pundits are only to follow later if the Americans refuse (as I am willing to bet they will) to talk about other financial assistance without simultaneously talking about the implementation of Article VII.’23This was another bet that Keynes was to lose.
There is little doubt that Keynes had left cabinet ministers with a very optimistic view of the prospects. Uneasily conscious of his own deteriorating health, he needed to believe for many reasons: because the case was intrinsically good, because it would complement the grand design of Bretton Woods, because it would vindicate his faith in Anglo-American co-operation, and because, if he were going out on the high-wire without a safety net, he simply needed to believe in himself. ‘When I listen to Lord Keynes talking,’ so Bevin was reputed to have said, ‘I seem to hear those coins jingling in my pocket; but I am not so sure that they are really there.’24
In the British press, and hence in the eyes of its British readers, the story began in hope. After all, the war had seen so many problems and misunderstandings sorted out between the Allies. The Times was soon canvassing the idea of a loan at a nominal rate of interest. ‘This solution would be entirely in accord with the spirit of President Roosevelt’s declared principle that the United Nations should share equitably the burden of the war,’ it argued on 29 August, ‘for it is as a direct consequence of the way in which the allied war effort has been financed that both the British deficit and the sterling debts have arisen.’ Such analysis, though rightly pointing to the only sort of solution likely to prevail, was oblivious to the fact that Keynes’s brief excluded the option of an interest-bearing loan; and it demonstrated the common British fallacy that the magic of Roosevelt’s name could still unlock doors, even Treasury doors, in Washington.
The only objective cause for British optimism was the new President’s own report to Congress on Lend-Lease. ‘TRUMAN SAYS “WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN” ’ was the Daily Mail's front-page headline on 31 August on a move that ‘brought the Roosevelt touch back into world politics last night’. True, the President seemed to be suggesting that Lend-Lease had been repaid in victory and should be written off. But Byrnes quickly backtracked, obviously fearful that the President’s manifestly popular move in unilaterally withdrawing Lend-Lease would be spoilt if he unilaterally withdrew any claim for repayment. Many Americans saw this as a bargaining chip in their hands, not to be relinquished except for British concessions. The Mail later printed a centre-page article by Henry Morgenthau (14 September) under the title ‘Make a Bonfire of all books that record war debts’, arguing for post-war aid to Britain. Only a couple of months previously he had been the long-established master of the US Treasury; now he was an old man speaking the language of a suddenly distant era.
The formal negotiations in Washington opened on Tuesday, 11 September. On Wednesday, Halifax and Keynes held a defiant press conference, replete with the Dunkirk spirit. Thursday’s Daily Mail led with ‘HALIFAX SAYS “BRITAIN ASKS NO FAVOURS”’; the Daily Herald had ‘BRITAIN “NOT A SUPPLICANT” IN AMERICA’. But it soon became apparent that the reception for their remarks was cool where it really mattered, in the United States. Keynes had seized the opportunity for laying out in public the lines of a case that had now become familiar in private: the sacrifices in a common cause and the greater adverse effect on the British economy justifying a faithful ally in seeking mutual co-operation to ease the transition to peace. It was a theme that he went on to develop in private; but the leak of his analysis in the New York Times on 21 September was the real test of how far such arguments carried. The next day’s British papers duly picked up the story, proudly showing how outstandingly the country had contributed to victory. ‘Britain and America have fought together, suffered together, triumphed together,’ the Daily Mail declared: hence its bewilderment that the war had enriched America while impoverishing Britain.
As the reception in the American press showed, however, such claims were read as implicit reproaches to the United States and slights upon its own record. The Times, in a magnificent display of transatlantic tone-deafness, chose this moment (22 September) to run a story canvassing the obvious solution: ‘Retrospective Lend-Lease’. This was defunct as a proposal. Indeed, within the negotiations, claims for retrospective compensation for purchases made before Lend-Lease were dubbed ‘half-dead cats’, which sufficiently indicates their moribund status.
Keynes had told the Treasury at the outset ‘that the atmosphere is perhaps rather too good. One’s experience in Washington has always been that when things look beastliest all will be glowing three months hence, and vice versa.’25 This was the best forecast he made, especially the bit about vice versa. What was reported in Britain depended partly on whether it was in the Labour loyalist Daily Herald, anxious to sustain the Government’s bargaining strategy, or the Tory imperialist Daily Mail, readier to credit American offers. The headlines rode a switchback of expectations, initially ranging from good to not so good, and latterly reaching consensus on bad to very bad.
How to pay for the war – he had used this as the title of a pamphlet in 1940 – was once Keynes’s big problem. Now there was a new question: how to pay for the peace? Pending demobilization, and with occupied countries to feed, the costs of the peace were not very different from the costs of the war – except that there was no Lend-Lease to help cover them. In this situation, the urgency of the Washington negotiations was matched only by their protracted length, and the acute public concern over their outcome only by the sparsity of reliable information. Behind closed doors, in London as in Washington, the story was often no less baffling.
As so often in Anglo-American relations, the British Empire was a thorn in the flesh. The Americans knew that the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Halifax, had himself served as Viceroy of India from 1926 to 1931, and though they may not have grasped exactly why he had been known as Lord Irwin at that time, it was exactly what was to be expected of such a manifestly aristocratic grandee (whom Senator Vandenberg was probably the only person in the world to call ‘Ed'). Being an ex-Viceroy was not Halifax’s only claim to notoriety. He had also been Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, and thus forever tarred as one of the men of Munich. Further, he had famously been passed over in favour of Churchill as Prime Minister in 1940, a decision that nobody now regretted. Sent to Washington, almost in exile, his talent for appeasement and personal ingratiation was let loose upon the Americans, with Churchill’s full backing this time. In between the financial negotiations themselves, Halifax had his work cut out in seeking to fend off the imperial and international complications that threatened to spoil Britain’s case.
Leo Crowley, the villain of Lend-Lease termination, bulked large in British demonology. His face, Keynes once said, reminded him of the ‘buttocks of a baboon’ and British insiders started calling him the Baboon.26 Indeed they went so far as to code-name their copious telegrams to Washington BABOONS (the even more numerous answering telegrams were NABOBS) – an amazing indiscretion for Halifax to permit since any such leak in leaky Washington to the news-hungry American press would surely have created an embarrassing diplomatic incident and further diminished British prospects.
While Keynes and Halifax negotiated in Washington, their every move was to be laboriously reported by telegram to the core ministerial team in London: Dalton as Chancellor, Bevin as Foreign Secretary and Cripps as President of the Board of Trade. All three were, in the end, converts to Bretton Woods, Bevin the hardest nut to crack because of his initial suspicion that fixed currencies might herald a new Gold Standard. ‘Any danger of a settlement tonight?’ he would ask with a grin as he marched into the cabinet room.
In London, night by night, these three busy cabinet ministers read the rapidly accumulating NABOBS that Keynes usually drafted himself. They found their NABOBS replete with wit, insight and, above all, detail, such as only a mind fully engaged with the tortuous course of the negotiations could fully appreciate. The three met frequently to sanction the hundreds of BABOONS that were fired off to Washington. Asked on one occasion if he had the relevant telegram, Bevin replied: ‘I've got 'undreds.’27 Their minds then switched, day by day, to their other pressing tasks.
The Washington negotiations, though important, were not all-important; they did not take place in a vacuum or insulated from other issues that affected Anglo-American relations. Bevin obviously had other problems on his plate, like the London conference of foreign ministers which he hosted for three weeks in September. Likewise, Dalton had to concentrate on his first budget, presented in late October. And Cripps, as well as running the Board of Trade, was heavily involved in the work of Attlee’s cabinet committee on India and was conducting a copious correspondence with his contacts in the Indian National Congress, notably Jawaharlal Nehru.
In an Anglo-American context, India turned out to present less of a political problem than in Churchill’s day, simply because of Churchill’s removal from power. Even the Chicago Tribune acknowledged that the election of a Labour Government brought independence appreciably nearer. Leo Amery, the outgoing Secretary of State for India, magnanimously sought consolation for the abrupt ending of his own political career. ‘From the point of view of the things we both agree about so far as India is concerned, I am by no means sure that the change is not all for the good,’ he had written to the Viceroy. ‘The last few weeks of the late Government made me feel that I might have even greater difficulties with Winston, and less support, than I had during the Coalition.’28 Wavell was inclined to agree: ‘I think Labour is likely to take more interest in and be more sympathetic towards India, but will have some weird ideas about it.’29 He was soon to have the opportunity of finding out more at first hand, summoned home for the second time that year.
In place of Amery at the India Office stood the unimposing figure of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, long seen as an idealistic friend to Congress and, at seventy-three, only slightly younger than Gandhi, whom he much admired. But it was the more recent political experience and greater political weight of Attlee and Cripps that really drove policy within the India Committee. Not surprisingly, a revival of the Cripps Offer, with its phased plan for constitution-making on a representative basis, became Government policy. To Wavell, in London from late August, this looked like a concession to Cripps’s vanity in wanting a quick settlement with his name to grace it, whereas the emergence of the demand for Pakistan counselled delay in reaching independence. ‘I agreed the time-lag would be considerable and might amount to 5 or 6 years,’ Wavell told Pethick-Lawrence.30Such thinking was regarded as reactionary by Cripps and Attlee.
The Viceroy recorded a rather more congenial response when he met Bevin, ‘who I thought was very sensible about Palestine’, among other matters. ‘He was anxious,’ Wavell noted on 31 August, ‘to get some announcement out about progress on the Indian political situation before Sept 10, when he meets Foreign Ministers of U.S.A. and Russia.’ This was to be the first of the meetings set up at Potsdam; if Bevin could signal a policy change to two allies both critical of British imperialism, this would obviously ease the pressure on Great Britain. That such moves would not have been countenanced by the previous government was made clear to Wavell later the same day when Churchill, in ‘his usual jeremiad about India’, depicted himself as the anchor that had now been cast off. His final injunction echoed in the Viceroy’s ears as he left: ‘Keep a bit of India.’31
It is little wonder that this visit confirmed Wavell’s self-image as the sole repository of disinterested common sense. Not reactionary, like Churchill, certainly not, but ready now to implement cautious changes in the Indians’ own best interests – maybe even independence by 1951? Although seeing that a purely military approach would no longer work, Wavell was inhibited in exploring political initiatives by his own distaste for politicians. Through these spectacles, the honest soldier could see that Attlee ‘made it clear, without intending to do so, that the Cabinet was thinking more of placating opinion in their own party, and in the USA, than of the real good of India’. And the discerning Viceroy found Cripps just as easy to decode over dinner when Cripps ‘revealed in what he said that at the back of his mind was pledges to the party tail and fear of their pressure, instigated by Congress propaganda, rather than the real good of India’.32 Still, he recognized a better atmosphere in the India Committee; previously he had needed to use the accelerator, now he needed to apply the brakes, but at least he was allowed to stay in the driving seat for the time being. He left London better satisfied than on his previous visit, after little more than a couple of weeks rather than a couple of months, and with agreement on an announcement to take back to India.
Wavell’s statement was made in Delhi on 19 September. It had all the marks of compromise. The Viceroy spoke of the early realization of self-government yet tempered this with phrases that left his future options open. ‘It is now for Indians to show that they have wisdom, faith and courage to determine in what way they can best reconcile their differences,’ he said.33 In India, this left an aftertaste of disenchantment, a taint of procrastination. It reopened the scars of the propaganda war over the failure of the Cripps Mission, not least for Nehru, who wrote: ‘I have not yet got over Stafford Cripps’ behaviour just after his visit to Delhi in 1942.’34 Whether Congress, still less the Muslim League, were prepared to trust a Labour Government remained to be seen, given the way that their earlier hopes had been blighted.
In the London press, however, the tone was generally positive and non-partisan. ‘BRITAIN MAKES NEW OFFER TO INDIA’, proclaimed the Daily Mail, which presented it as a renewal of the Cripps Offer, while the Daily Herald, anxious to proclaim the novelty of Labour’s approach, had an upbeat banner headline: ‘CABINET OFFERS INDIA NEW DEAL’. Perhaps this verbal homage to Roosevelt was the right way to win American approval. Certainly Wavell, for all his aversion to politics and salesmanship, had done his best to oblige on this occasion by repeating his announcement for an American film crew in Delhi. Though the news came too late to help Bevin through his London conference, which, after a week, was already heading towards deadlock, in Washington India was already on the agenda.
The British Empire was a central issue in the financial negotiations because of the sterling balances. That meant, above all, India, because Britain owed more to India than to the rest of its sterling creditors. From the first, Keynes had linked the amount of American assistance that Britain would need at the end of the war with its existing indebtedness to wartime creditors in the sterling area. Confidentially, in his advice to the Treasury, he had contemplated writing down these sterling debts by about a third – in effect, a partial default. Any such cut, discounting a debt in this way, was normally something for a creditor rather than a debtor to determine. Yet the Indians, as creditors, were hardly likely to agree; and the British, as debtors, and as trustees of the Raj, did not want to propose such a default directly. But if the Americans proposed it, that would be another matter, of course, strengthening the British hand in bargaining with India (and others) for relief later.
The Americans could safely be relied upon to make such a link. To many of them it seemed outrageous that, if they made dollars available to the British, these might simply be recycled into paying off the sterling balances. For these balances had been run up to finance British war purchases of a very similar kind to those supplied by the United States under Lend-Lease. Why, then, should the Americans alone contemplate wiping the slate clean on what they had supplied to Britain – still less contemplate providing more dollars to pay for what others had supplied to Britain on a cash basis? And especially when all this had happened within the wretched Empire, which was thus being privileged as a creditor over the Great Republic!
Lord Halifax found himself in the thick of these developing arguments. The American team was now pressing the British to come out with it, say what they meant, and actually tell them how much they were thinking of cutting the sterling balances. ‘This put us in a little difficulty, as we have to be very careful not to give our sterling creditors away behind their back,’ Halifax noted in his diary on 19 September. ‘The Americans plainly thought that we should tell India where she got off, and that this little financial pill could be well covered up with the sugar of Wavell’s political announcement.’35
There were some nice moral issues here. The British delicacy about not doing anything behind the Indians’ backs was partly for fear of getting found out. Then again, was it right to default on debts to underdeveloped countries simply because they were in the Empire? ‘Did we really intend to be negotiating independence with India and Ceylon with one hand and holding out the begging bowl with the other?’ Otto Clarke later demanded. He commented that it was ‘remarkable that the Americans were pressing us, for if we had proposed such things ourselves we should have been submerged with cries of “British Imperialism” ’.36 As Halifax put it: ‘one can imagine the howl that American public opinion would set up, if their own interests were not engaged, over such unilateral action on our side.’37 At any rate, the idea of trading political concessions to the Indians in exchange for financial concessions from them was ruled out.
On the sterling balances, though, embarrassment apart, the British were ultimately on the same side of the fence as the Americans. Their interests coincided – but not with those of the Indians. At one point, the whole Washington negotiation became sidetracked in exploring this imperial morass. Harry White, Keynes’s old sparring partner in the US Treasury (where he was now under suspicion as a Soviet agent), made his last fling: an ingenious plan for the United States itself to take over the sterling balances. It would then write off one third (as Britain would) but its own unique financial strength meant that the United States could afford to offer creditors ready cash on the remainder (as Britain could not). The twist was that these dollars would naturally come at a price, discounted for cash payment by no less than 50 per cent – a second cut. The arithmetic and the transfers were all forbiddingly complex. India was to remain, in British eyes, ‘the stumbling block to this (and perhaps to any) scheme’.38 The fact that, on this White Plan, Indian and other sterling creditors would have lost about 70 per cent of their balances could itself not be discounted as a reason for killing this plan.
Meanwhile the London conference had been concluded. It was supposed to follow up on the substantive issues unresolved at Potsdam but proved unable to agree even on a communiqué, and had dispersed amid discord. Held at Lancaster House, with Bevin in the chair as host, it was not a happy inauguration into the world of diplomacy. Formally, what broke up the conference was failure to agree on whether the Big Three foreign ministers of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union should be joined on their council by those of France and China as the Big Five. The silky prevarications of Molotov on this issue failed to disguise a more visceral conflict with Bevin on wider issues. Molotov said (as the interpreter translated it): ‘Eden is a gentleman, Bevin is not.’39 Bevin said that Molotov’s repudiation of his own earlier agreement over the Big Five was ‘the nearest thing to the Hitler theory I have ever heard’.40 There was a threatened walk-out, first provoked and then averted by Bevin, and a memorable sing-song after a banquet, improvised by Bevin, with renderings of ‘Cockles and Mussels’ and ‘Roll Out the Barrel’.
Most MPs, especially on the Labour benches, had been elected only weeks earlier amid professions of Anglo-Soviet friendship. Such hopes were not dramatically dashed but now suffered a process of erosion. As early as 24 September the Daily Herald was running bleak headlines: ‘MOLOTOV IS FORCING SOVIET BLOC ISSUE – Wants to Build up Two-Zone Europe’. On 3 October it was ‘BIG FIVE TALKS COLLAPSE: SOVIET STAND’. Yet its editorial stance was simply to profess bafflement at the failure of the foreign ministers to work out their problems in a spirit of conciliation. The same day’s Daily Mail went no further than commenting: ‘One of the most unfortunate things about it is the resultant loss of faith in Russian political integrity.’
A cold-war perspective might suggest that Russian behaviour had now succeeded in driving the British and Americans into each others’ arms. But this was not – or certainly not yet – the case. Whether Rumania and Bulgaria were to have democratic elections was the key isue for Byrnes. For Bevin, it was more evidently Russia’s designs in the Mediterranean, notably its claim to the Italian colony of Tripolitania. ‘It was not a question of power politics,’ he told Molotov, ‘but it would cause great uproar if any new miltary power were to come across the lifeline of the British Empire.’41 Churchill could not have put it more clearly, or in terms less likely to overcome ingrained American suspicions of British motives.
All told, the breakdown of the London conference failed to mark an epoch. Truman showed as little concern over it as he did over Mackenzie King’s tip-off that the defection of a Soviet agent, Igor Guzenko, had exposed a spy ring in Canada. Neither event brought about any fundamental change in the USA’s policy towards the Soviet Union, which was to play a waiting game. Though the temperature may have been falling, no cold-war priorities intervened to influence, still less divert, the course of the Loan negotiations.
Palestine was seen as a more immediate problem than Russia in the autumn of 1945. Lionel Robbins, taking a weekend off from Washington to visit his sister in Philadelphia, found her ‘very gloomy about the anti-British propaganda now being carried on by the New York Zionists’, which was indeed now overshadowing the negotiations.42 For example, the well-publicized intervention of the financier Bernard Baruch, denouncing loans that would be used to subvert free enterprise, came after prompting by American Zionists keen to enlist financial muscle in favour of their current agenda. Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, their leader, told Baruch: ‘President Truman must be “stiffened up” to insist upon the admission of one hundred thousand immigrants into Palestine which he requested.’43
The demand that Britain should admit 100,000 Jewish refugees to Mandate Palestine had become the crux, and was to remain crucial until the end of the mandate itself. It made the link between the horrors of the Jewish holocaust under the Nazis, the fate of the Displaced Persons of eastern Europe – many housed in DP camps in the west – and the dream of a Jewish national home as enshrined in the Balfour Declaration.
For Churchill, Zionism had always been British imperialism by other means. That he should lose faith in the means was an appalling setback for the Weizmann strategy of using moderation to win British support. When Churchill refused to take the Zionist case to Potsdam in July, it had come as a further blow to Weizmann. ‘He has lost much of his old enthusiasm and vitality and I think he is losing grasp of events,’ Richard Meinertzhagen noted after they dined together.44 Advised by Halifax of the potency of the issue in the United States, where criticism without responsibility appeared an easy option, Churchill had been moved to some apostate reflections in his last days in power. ‘I do not think we should take the responsibility upon ourselves of managing this very difficult place while the Americans sit back and criticize,’ he wrote in a minute to the Foreign Office. ‘I am not aware of the slightest advantage which has ever accrued to Great Britain from this painful and thankless task,’ he ruminated. ‘Somebody else should have their turn now.’45
By the time that Baffy Dugdale attended the World Zionist Conference, held in London at the beginning of August, she could see most of her long-held assumptions tottering like a house of cards. The electoral landslide that swept away Churchill was the biggest since the landslide that had swept away her Uncle Arthur in 1906. The historian Lewis Namier, helping to revise Weizmann’s speech in the light of events, offered her an uncomfortable perspective: ‘Lewis thinks that as a Governing Class we are finished.’46 Events seemed to bear this out.
The great consolation seemed to be that the Labour Party had a strong Zionist plank in its platform. This claimed, citing Nazi treatment of the Jews as its justification, that there was ‘neither hope nor meaning in a “Jewish National Home”, unless we are prepared to let Jews, if they wish, enter this tiny land in such numbers as to become a majority’.47 Hugh Dalton had been instrumental in getting this declaration adopted the previous autumn, and had, of course, expected to be Foreign Secretary in a Labour Government, well placed to push through a policy that he acknowledged would mean a transfer of the Arab population. It was all a wonderful piece of Fabian demographic engineering: Jews would find a new home in Palestine while Palestinians would have to look for one elsewhere in the Arab world. Dalton was close to Weizmann, who had been delighted at the sweeping nature of a commitment initially made before Moyne’s assassination but not subsequently amended during the months before Labour fought the 1945 election.
The Zionist conference thus took place at a moment when Weizmann’s hopes of Churchill had been betrayed but not yet his hopes of a Labour Government. As with the Indian National Congress, more radical figures were not so trusting; David Ben Gurion’s suspicion of the British was already well formed (and well founded as it turned out). Baffy Dugdale sensed the vulnerability of Weizmann’s position. Rabbi Baeck, the Chief Rabbi of Berlin until 1943, got an understandably emotional reception on the first day, as did the Director of the Department of Immigration in the Palestinian Jewish Agency, with his ‘report on his recent visit to the Camps, where the Jews are still living in scandalously bad condition’. To Dugdale the great gulf was between European suffering, on the one side, and the Americans and British on the other. ‘There is great (and perhaps unreasonable) feeling that the latter have not done enough,’ she wrote, with some understatement of an anti-British reflex that most Americans at the conference clearly shared.48
The demand for admission of 100,000 Jews – the apparently obvious, simple and just remedy staring everyone in the face – was to be taken to the Colonial Office by a delegation led by Ben Gurion. In his view, there could be no co-operation with the British Government until it abandoned the White Paper of 1939, restricting immigration. Weizmann’s failure to gauge the conference’s more radical mood was apparent to the loyal Baffy. Into the second week, she wrote of ‘a big row in the morning, which led to Rabbi Silver putting himself at the head of the extremists’, which graphically demonstrated a shifting balance. The new prominence and confidence of American Zionists made them the dynamic force in a new situation.
President Truman could not afford to insulate himself from such pressures. He too thought it right to ask for the admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, and had advice to this effect from a confidential investigation of the camps (the Harrison Report) which he asked Byrnes to deliver personally to the British Government at the start of the London meeting of foreign ministers in September. Meanwhile Truman made his general thinking clear enough to the Washington press: although ruling out the commitment of American troops, he wanted agreement on increased immigration. ‘This revelation,’ a worried British embassy reported, ‘has, of course, put new fight into the assorted Zionist battalions, who seem to see more hope in Truman’s more simple and direct approach to their problem than in his predecessor’s delicate manoeuvrings.’49
Roosevelt’s calculated ambiguity combined with Churchill’s post-Moyne loss of interest in Zionism had made it relatively easy to maintain a front of unity over Palestine. Truman did not directly repudiate Roosevelt’s policy: he just seemed unsure of what it actually was, unsure of what Ibn Saud had been told, but quite sure that some plain speaking would do no harm. To Attlee and Bevin, on the other hand, the responsibility of power had a sobering effect in detaching them from the innocent simplicities of the Dalton policy. ‘Let the Arabs be encouraged to move out, as the Jews move in,’ the Labour Party Declaration had read.50 That the new Foreign Secretary had meanwhile discovered the problem to be rather more complex became apparent in the course of September. In particular, the pledges on immigration – giving the Arabs themselves a say in the matter – were not repudiated.
This obviously came as a shock to Zionists. Dugdale wrote that ‘of course there is black despair, they had hoped so much from the change of Government!’51 If the British Government was unwilling to commit itself, what about the Americans? Zionists seized on rumours of Truman’s support for the 100,000 plan as at once a rebuke to the British and a potent counter-weight. They seized too on rumours of a split in the cabinet, perhaps involving Dalton; though in fact these proved insubstantial, if only because the Chancellor, besieged by NABOBS, had other pressing concerns.
Weizmann was hardest hit. Others were disappointed by the British, but took it as predictable. Weizmann, however, was also disappointed in them, having believed for so long that they would yield to his entreaties. His Zionist critics had half expected any misplaced hopes to be betrayed and resorted readily enough to other methods: direct action on the ground in Palestine and exploitation of the political process in the United States, where power really lay. Weizmann himself contemplated resignation but instead resigned himself to an almost Gandhian abdication of practical politics. ‘Weizmann’s present idea is to demand that the British clear out of Palestine, having failed to administer the Mandate,’ Meinertzhagen recorded at the end of September. ‘He thinks once we are out, he can come to a working arrangement with the Arabs.’52 In this perspective, if only the British would quit Palestine, their divide-and-rule tactics would be exposed as a sham, and peace would ensue.
It was Truman himself who escalated the crisis. He was pushed by the imminence of the first elections he had faced during his presidency: admittedly, only for mayor of New York but a contest that he wanted the Democrats to win under his leadership and where the Republicans were bidding for the support of the large Jewish vote. Alerted by Byrnes in London that a public statement on Palestine was coming, presumably confirming his support for the 100,000 demand, Bevin warned that the Americans would in that case face a public statement from himself, asking them to commit large numbers of troops. Attlee too warned of the inflammatory consequences, citing the presence of 90 million Muslims in India as a relevant consideration.
The President gave a promise to keep silent until the end of the London conference. He then went back on it when he met the press on 29 September, giving them an inevitably partisan view of the frustration by the British of his efforts on the 100,000 agenda. This came, moreover, some five weeks before polling day. That this was the reason was candidly acknowledged by Byrnes when, still in London, he tried to explain the facts of life to Bevin. It did not wash. Bevin’s anger was ignited with a high-octane mixture of right-minded moral indignation and wrong-footed political embarrassment.
Britain was now publicly in the dock. Any delay was read as a callous refusal to help 100,000 Jewish refugees, when the means lay in its hand to rescue these prime victims of the war from their post-war sufferings in the camps. As Halifax reported from Washington, the issue was politically explosive, not only in New York, but in the Senate, with both parties vying for position. An influential Republican Senator, Robert Taft, was explicitly linking Palestine with the outcome of the Loan negotiations.53
Obviously the British case did not go by default, but it was heard mainly at home. The Daily Mail, for example, acknowledged the plight of the refugees. ‘Nothing would please this country more than to let them in,’ it asserted. ‘But the British people, unlike President Truman, have been living with the Palestine problem for 25 years, and they know that such a solution is impracticable.’ Arab hostility to a unilateral lifting of the agreed immigration quotas would leave Britain vainly trying to hold the balance in Palestine itself and set the Middle East ablaze. Britain would be blamed for the outcome and it was ‘easy to imagine the protest about “British Imperialism” and “power politics” 'that would doubtless ensue.54
Hitler had proved an invaluable common enemy in enforcing common wartime priorities, thus helping to mitigate differences between Zionist activists and the British Government. But Hitler also served to raise the stakes for Zionism, judged as a response to the Jewish holocaust he had perpetrated. After Hitler, a suppressed antagonism between Zionism and British policy was thus unleashed. With world power slipping from the British Empire to the United States, it was natural that American views on the future of Palestine should assume more importance. In parallel, an older, genteel, elitist Zionism, compatible with the interests of the British Empire, was plainly giving way to a newer, rawer, populist Zionism, driven by the priorities of American politics. It was in this context that Zionism emerged as a major complication in Anglo-American relations, political and economic alike.
There were many hopes betrayed in the first weeks of peace. For most Zionists, the fact that Bevin proved even less prepared than Churchill to further their aims was an acute blow. For many Indian nationalists, the election of a Labour government was likewise perceived as disappointing in its impact on policy, as seen in its conspicuous failure to employ the word independence. For British voters who had hoped for good relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union, the London conference proved disturbing – without even the consolation of American friendship, it seemed, now that the lifeline of Lend-Lease had been abruptly cut with nothing to replace it.
Perhaps it is not surprising that Mass-Observation found many British people frankly unhappy, once peace had finally arrived. One survey at the end of August showed only 32 per cent saying they were cheerful and 57 per cent depressed. Specific comments evoked feelings of unease about the Russians after Potsdam, of resentment towards the Americans after the termination of Lend-Lease, of reproach to the British themselves for the way that ‘united effort ceased’ as soon as the fighting ended. ‘Perhaps it is a reaction,’ was one response; ‘perhaps a sense of the futility of it all; perhaps the feeling which practically every one has, that the peace problems are going to be as great as the war ones.’
No single voice speaks for all. Some comments focus on material difficulties that faced nearly everyone: ‘Crowded round me are discontented folks waiting for more food, clothes and liberty in work.’ But others remain poignant in their confessional anonymity, hinting at a dimension of tragedy which, though it may have been widely shared, was individually experienced. ‘I have lost my youth, and to what end?’ one woman lamented. ‘I was happier when I lay listening to bombs and daring myself to tremble; when I got romantic letters from abroad; when I cried over Dunkirk; when people showed their best sides and we still believed we were fighting for something.’55