‘This makes us no longer a client receiving help from a generous patron, but two comrades fighting for life side by side.’
Churchill to Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor
In 1939 Britain had gone to war when Hitler attacked Poland, despite lacking the ability to assist in the defence of its territory. The fact that Stalin was complicit in this attack, gobbling up eastern Poland, further weakened the position of the Western powers. The defeat of their armies in France by June 1940 left the British Empire fighting on – alone indeed for crucial months (though the Axis powers’ aggression was to make Greece into an ally that winter). Not until Operation Barbarossa, launched by Hitler against his supposed Soviet friends in June 1941, did Britain enjoy relief from the efforts of a major fellow combatant. Churchill’s declared aim of victory at all costs, proclaimed in his speeches of 1940–41, thus seemed an amazing piece of effrontery or at best an enormous gamble.
It was not just that the British bet the farm: they also mortgaged it to the Americans. The United States did not come into the war until December 1941, though its assistance to Great Britain, notably through Lend-Lease, had already made it a co-belligerent in important respects. The economic bond between the two countries thus anticipated the formal alliance between them; and it continued to have a profound effect upon their relationship, one which is often obfuscated by Churchillian rhetoric about the common identity of the English-speaking peoples. Both in paying for the war and in actually fighting it on the ground in Europe, the significant differences between British and American aims, not to mention material resources, need to be understood.
If Britain had its imperial and other interests, for which it fought two world wars, the United States had its own interests too – interests not adequately defined by talk of making the world safe for democracy. Whether the Americans were better served by intervening in these two wars, fomented between internecine European regimes, was obviously for them to decide. An imaginative historian of the First World War vividly conveyed the misgivings that had kept the United States neutral until 1917, resisting high-flown moral appeals from Britain and her Allies:
World Justice makes its appeal to all men. But what share, it was asked, had Americans taken in bringing about the situation which had raised the issue of World Justice? Was even this issue so simple as it appeared to the Allies? Was it not a frightful responsibility to launch a vast, unarmed, remote community into the raging centre of such a quarrel?1
The author of this passage was none other than Winston Churchill, in his book The World Crisis, which we know to have made a big impression upon at least one influential American reader. Colonel Robert McCormick – he had served in the First World War himself – turned against war and became identified with isolationism, propagating his views as publisher of the Chicago Tribune. For him, Churchill remained a larger-than-life hero, as 1940 duly confirmed, but one committed to defending the British Empire, with interests directly opposed to those of the United States. Hence McCormick’s strident opposition to any pro-Allied, pro-intervention moves by Roosevelt (whose New Deal the Tribune in any case denounced as the road to Communism and dictatorship). The Colonel spoke for the forgotten Americans – those too often forgotten, at any rate, in the afterglow of Allied victory in what everyone liked to think of as a good war.
For McCormick’s image of Churchill, though a caricature in some ways, had the virtue of an identifiable caricature in conveying an esssential truth about the King’s First Minister. It has long been accepted that Churchill did his political career no good when he staked it from 1930 on a prolonged parliamentary struggle against the liberal consensus of the day on India. He went into the last ditch in opposition to the modest measures of provincial self-government eventually brought in by Stanley Baldwin’s India Act of 1935. Little wonder that Churchill’s assertion that there was a deplorable failure of will to stand up to Gandhi devalued his subsequent assertion that there was a deplorable failure of will to stand up to Hitler.
For Churchill, however, the two were linked. In May 1932 we find him lecturing a Tory supporter, Lord Linlithgow, soon to become Viceroy of India. ‘The mild and vague Liberalism of the early years of the twentieth century, the surge of fantastic hopes and illusions that followed the armistice of the Great War have already been superseded by a violent reaction against parliamentary and electioneering procedure and by the establishment of dictatorships real or veiled in almost every country,’ Churchill argued. ‘It is unsound reasoning therefore to suppose that England alone among the nations will be willing to part with her control over a great dependency like India. The Dutch will not do it; the French will not do it…’2 He himself had no intention of doing it, then or later.
The British Empire exerted a lifelong emotional pull over Churchill. He had been less than two years old when Queen Victoria assumed the title of Empress of India in 1876; when he eventually retired as Prime Minister in 1955, his final words recorded in the cabinet minutes spoke of ‘weaving still more closely the threads which bound together the countries of the Commonwealth or, as he still preferred to call it, the Empire’.3 Nor was his wartime rhetoric reserved solely for Westminster, the mother of parliaments; it was the Canadian House of Commons that provided the setting for a memorably defiant speech – ‘Some chicken, some neck’ – on his North American visit soon after Pearl Harbor. Indeed it was in Ottawa that Yousuf Karsh enshrined this moment for posterity, with the portrait known as ‘The Roaring Lion’, as was recognized at the time. ‘Unless we are greatly mistaken,’ commented the Calgary Herald on 11 February 1942, ‘it will be this portrait by Karsh that will go down through the centuries to give future generations their most accurate idea of of the physical appearance of Winston Churchill at the moment when three quarters of the people of the world had their hopes largely based on him.’4
In Churchill’s greatest speeches in 1940, the imperial dimension is clear and central. On 13 May, immediately after becoming Prime Minister, he declared the policy of his new Government: ‘to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.’ This was a universal aim, pitched in terms which still seem valid in the light of history, and Churchill was both sincere and eloquent in stating it. But it alone was not what made his offer of ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat’ seem worthwhile. When asked what was his aim, he gave one simple but daunting answer: ‘Victory – victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.’ And this logic was more concretely specified. ‘Let that be realized,’ he intoned; ‘no survival for the British Empire; no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for; no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards his goal.’5 The general and the particular were thus yoked together quite openly and explicitly. On 4 June 1940, faced with the enforced evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk, Churchill’s famous exhortations, that ‘we shall fight on the beaches’ and that ‘we shall never surrender’, were backed by a final appeal to the fallback strategy: ‘even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.’6
No one was more committed than Churchill to the notion of the English-speaking peoples, whose history he had essayed to write in the late 1930s, a work finally published in the 1950s. Churchill, with his American mother and English father, was characteristically projecting his own identity in world-historical terms. In this sense, or in this mood, or in this extremity, he recognized that one important residue of British power was its cultural legacy, exemplified and enshrined in the English language. A common constitutional heritage, grounded in the common law and the separation of powers, giving rise to common ideals of democracy, was pitted against the challenge of totalitarian aggression. No one could stroke these keys and pull out these stops better than Churchill; no one was better able to find the lost chord or give it the full benefit of the vox humana.
Some awkward questions had to be fudged well before the United States entered the war. Churchill showed himself highly skilled in eliding democratic claims with more primitive appeals, especially when the Americans were listening. They obviously were when (prior to Lend-Lease) he had reported an agreement with the neutral United States in August 1940 – offering them the use of imperial bases, accepting their offer of old destroyers – and explained it to the House of Commons. Was it a deal? It looked like a deal, it smelled like a deal – but by no means did Churchill so describe it. ‘We had… decided spontaneously,’ he claimed, to make the one offer. ‘Presently we learned,’ he went on – yes, that President Roosevelt was spontaneously making an offer too! And what it meant was that ‘these two great organizations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States, will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage.’7 Little wonder that a lot of literal-minded people stayed somewhat mixed up.
It needs to be remembered that the United States never went to war against Nazi Germany. There were all sorts of good reasons why not. The folk-wisdom, for many Americans, was that President Wilson’s eventual entry into the First World War had been mistaken, unnecessary, fruitless, unprofitable – and all the fault of British wiles anyway. That war to make the world safe for democracy had apparently fomented dictatorships in defeated countries like Germany while seeing ungrateful allies defaulting on the war debts owing to Uncle Sam (as Britain did in 1934, admittedly in response to defaults by its own war debtors). With the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, Congress tied down the plainly antifascist President with legislation designed to stop the United States from being sucked into another European war; this prevented not only him but private US citizens from making commitments to the belligerents. In practice this meant no more open-ended loans to the importunate British.
Churchill and Roosevelt sustained a supposedly personal correspondence throughout the war. It had been initiated by the President, shortly after the outbreak of the European war in 1939, writing to the First Lord of the Admiralty in Neville Chamberlain’s Government: a post again held, as it had been in 1914, by Winston Churchill. Then he had been a tempestuous and doubtfully loyal Liberal, chafing for action; now he was a restive and doubtfully loyal Conservative, suddenly restored to office. Then he had been just short of forty and already six years in Asquith’s cabinet; now he was to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday in November 1939, back in the cabinet, with no thought of retirement and with nowhere to go but up. He was obviously pleased to act as the conduit for informal approaches from the White House itself. Protocol was observed by clearing the correspondence with Chamberlain as Prime Minister.
Their extraordinary relationship flourished but it could hardly be an ordinary friendship. Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the First World War and one of Churchill’s intimates, had the cynical maxim: there are no friends at the top. Roosevelt and Churchill were right at the top for most of the Second World War; they came to call each other Franklin and Winston; they often genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. ‘Our friendship,’ Churchill wrote on the eve of D-Day in 1944, ‘is my greatest standby amid the ever-increasing complications of this exacting war.’8 Maybe. But neither allowed mere sentiment to deflect him in his dedication to the national interests of his own country. ‘My whole system is founded on partnership with Roosevelt,’ Churchill once confided to his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden.9
If Churchill and Roosevelt nonetheless built a kind of political friendship on these terms, they did so from scratch, with a motivation that was political rather than personal. It was a shrewd move by Roosevelt to cultivate the coming man, whom he remembered meeting while he himself was serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1918, three years before being afflicted with polio. Churchill, alas, did not remember, as became embarrassingly plain when the two men next met, this time as war leaders, on the cruiser USS Augusta in Placentia Bay, off Newfoundland, in August 1941 – despite the unabashed claim in Churchill’s war memoirs that in 1918 ‘I had been struck by his magnificent presence in all his youth and strength.’10 ‘A real old Tory of the old school,’ the President remarked privately after the Placentia Bay meeting, deploring the Prime Minister’s ‘eighteenth-century methods’ of running the British Empire.11
It is clear that Churchill hardly knew Roosevelt until their wartime meetings established a personal bond; and that the President was the less illusioned of the two. Yet there was an electricity between these two powerful men, positively charged when common aims reinforced personal rapport. The US Secretary to the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, was to be heartened on a visit to London in 1944 by the affection that Churchill professed. ‘Just to hear the President shout “Hello”,’ Churchill said, ‘is like drinking a bottle of champagne.’12 The voluminous correspondence between the two – it ran to 2,000 communications in five years – was remarkable, but never enough for Churchill. He wrote eloquently and, above all, frequently to his new friend – far more frequently than the cool and canny President replied, always careful to keep his distance.
There was no greater enemy of isolationism than Franklin Roosevelt. He used the term with calculated effect to depict and besmirch his political opponents. Yet he also had to reckon with the power of their constituency within American politics and tailor his own policies to that inescapable reality. Thus the Chicago Tribune was a newspaper that Roosevelt could not ignore, as frequent barbed references to it among his circle amply testify. Moreover, the ever-emollient President often found it rather useful to excuse himself to the disappointed British by pleading his political difficulties with Congress – which served the role of Mr Jorkins (in David Copperfield), who dwelt unseen in the back office while his law partner invoked his name to excuse his own disagreeable necessity for taking a stern line.13 It was the discredited Neville Chamberlain, a shrewd reader of Dickens, who had spotted the Jorkins analogy, but Winston Churchill who more often bore the brunt of the stratagem. Furthermore, beyond such tactical games, Roosevelt himself shared many of these common American suspicions of imperialism, which never ceased to influence his own policy and his own view of Churchill.
In particular, there was a lurking dilemma that showed itself on more than one important occasion. The rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter, signed jointly in Placentia Bay in August 1941, depicted two great democracies committed to resisting totalitarianism in defence of liberal values. It was a propaganda gain for the British to be so closely associated with the United States, even though the Americans were still not ready to enter the war. That is why Churchill assented to the Charter’s sweeping principles. Its first pledge – ‘no aggrandisement, territorial or other’ – presented no problem: even the old imperialist could see that the British Empire hardly needed another Iraq, another Tanganyika, and that these were not the broad, sunlit uplands he had in mind. Likewise the pledge of no territorial changes ‘that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’. Again, well and good.
The third pledge was ‘to respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’, buttressed by the promise that such rights would be ‘restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’.14 This too Churchill signed. But the Prime Minister found that it subsequently gave him a lot of trouble. He told the House of Commons that the Charter only applied to European states, like Poland, which had suffered loss of sovereignty, which was ‘quite a separate problem’ from that of self-government in British territories.15 The logic was that those who had not been deprived of such rights – because they had never had them in the first place – could not, of course, expect to have them restored. So much for any right to self-government in the Empire.
Though the British Prime Minister might go on telling the House of Commons that it made no difference to the position in India, the Deputy Prime Minister himself had lent credence to the wider interpretation. ‘IT MEANS DARK RACES AS WELL,’ the official Labour Party newspaper, the Daily Herald, had declared on 16 August 1941, reporting Attlee’s assurance that, in contrast to Nazi doctrines of racial superiority, the Atlantic Charter had a worldwide application.16 Roosevelt was of the same view and it reinforced his quiet determination not to pull Britain’s imperial chestnuts out of the fire (again). Roosevelt did not need to make a speech saying that he had not become president (for an unprecedented third term) in order to avert the liquidation of the British Empire.
There is little doubt that Lend-Lease was necessary to British survival. This was Roosevelt’s masterstroke. It should be remembered that the agreement to set it up in 1941 was made at a time when the British war machine was at full stretch in a last-ditch military resistance to the Nazis – and simultaneously running on empty. Once the seriousness of the crisis was brought home to him, Roosevelt had come up with a brilliant plan of his own, squaring the circle as he did so often in politics. The United States, though still neutral or at least non-belligerent, would again lend to Great Britain – not money this time, but war supplies instead. What it did not lend, it would lease (since leasing escaped legislative prohibition).
The President’s vision of Lend-Lease – dreamt up while he sat in a deckchair on a Caribbean cruise in December 1940 – quickly took shape. ‘I have been thinking very hard on this trip about what we should do for England’ – so Roosevelt explained it to Morgenthau on 17 December – ‘and it seems to me that the thing to do is to get away from the dollar sign.’17 Thus it was a scheme that simply jumped over the hurdles of ancient war debts by refusing to do the sums in the old-fashioned way. As Roosevelt told the American people in a broadcast that same day, it was like freely lending a garden hose to a neighbour facing a fire – a mounting crisis in which it was only sensible to ‘get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign’.18 Here was the premise of Lend-Lease: that it was in the Americans’ interests to support the British war effort, since their own defence depended upon it.
When the Lend-Lease Bill passed Congress in March 1941, Churchill spoke in the House of Commons of ‘our deep and respectful appreciation of this monument of generous and far-seeing statesmanship’ which showed that ‘the Government and people of the United States have in fact written a new Magna Carta.’19 The English-speaking peoples were now marching in step – marching to war together perhaps? Churchill’s hopes that this was so were encouraged by events, once American ships were deployed guarding the Atlantic shipping lanes and thus open to U-boat attacks – just how the United States had been drawn into the First World War. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, publicly declared in November: ‘We are in this fight to the finish.’20
Only a week after Knox spoke, on 10 November 1941, Churchill gave his own annual speech at the Mansion House in the City of London. He gratefully seized on Knox’s fighting talk to point to the contrast with the previous year: ‘Then we were alone, the sole champion of freedom.’ What a welcome change! Not only was the US Navy now in action in the Atlantic, and the two countries more closely aligned against a possible threat from Japan, but the year had also seen a crucial alleviation of Britain’s financial plight. ‘Then came the majestic policy of the President and Congress of the United States in passing the Lend and Lease Bill, under which in two successive enactments about £3,000,000,000 sterling were dedicated to the cause of world freedom without – mark this, for it is unique – the setting up of any account in money.’ Hence the phrase that has lived: that Lend-Lease ‘must be regarded without question as the most unsordid act in the whole of recorded history’.21
At the time these were not only fine phrases but they also made good political sense. It was not tactful to ask why the British should attribute such unworldly sentiments to Roosevelt’s plan when he himself chose to justify it to Congress as a hard-headed assessment of American self-interest in keeping Britain in the war (and the United States out of it still). And nobody in Britain would have called Lend-Lease the most unnecessary act – it was a vital lifeline, irrespective of its motive.
Never did more devil lurk in more detail. Over many months in 1941, the business was settled not only ad hoc but ad hominem. Difficulties of principle were deferred in favour of immediate working compromises; and the intervention of Harry Hopkins, as Roosevelt’s trusted go-between, facilitated eventual agreement. On the British side the key figure was John Maynard Keynes.
Now Keynes liked Americans – on the whole. Whether they liked him was a matter of taste, or at least of style. Soon to be created Lord Keynes in 1942, he was the most famous economist in the world, and knew it. The publication of his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), had made an enormous impression in the English-speaking world. Its aim was to revolutionize economic theory by demonstrating that full employment would not necessarily be achieved simply by letting market forces reach their own equilibrium. The relevance of such propositions to the practical proposals of the New Deal for restoring prosperity in the United States was obvious. Keynes, the exquisitely English product of King’s College, Cambridge, found that he was a hero to many young American Keynesians, notably in the other Cambridge in Massachusetts, where Harvard University proved particularly receptive to his novel ideas and provided many earnest young New Dealers to serve in Washington.
But not all Americans were economists – Keynes could sound too clever by half to laymen. Not all economists were Keynesians – Keynes’s ideas struck defenders of ‘sound money’ as outrageous nonsense. Not all American Keynesian economists were captivated – the Cambridge house-style, overlaid with an anglocentric Bloomsbury preciousness, was not everyone’s cup of tea. Lady Keynes, the former Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, tended and protected her now semi-invalid husband; she created her own circle of admirers, while leaving others bemused at her eccentricities. Everyone agreed that they made an extraordinary couple, quite unlike the folk honest Americans were used to doing business with. Although Keynes, working within the British Treasury since 1940 as a special adviser, like a ‘dollar-a-year man’, had worked his passage in establishing his respectable, pragmatic credentials with ministers and professional civil servants alike, in the United States he had to start all over again, literally on foreign territory.
Keynes first entered the Lend-Lease negotiations near their beginning in May 1941. Henry Morgenthau, he had found, was ‘certainly a difficult chap to deal with’, but Lydia had intuitively summed him up after sitting next to him at dinner. ‘He is a good man,’ she decided, ‘and will do you no harm on purpose.’22
The real problem, however, was not personal: it was how to strike a bargain when the rules seemed to keep changing. Like Alice, Keynes found it curiouser and curiouser. The sympathy and magnanimity shown towards embattled Britain, he marvelled, were touching; but how on earth to translate this into decisions? ‘There is no clear hierarchy of authority,’ he had to explain to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘The different departments of the Government criticise one another in public and produce rival programmes. There is perpetual internecine warfare between prominent personalities.’ One difficulty was that Washington did not speak with a single voice; another was that the British too often expected it do so. This was a clash of two different cultures of government. Keynes quickly realized that it was no use expecting things to be written down, in the British mandarin tradition of careful minutes, paving the way to agreed conclusions, carefully recorded and faithfully observed. ‘Nothing is ever settled in principle,’ he ruefully discovered. ‘There is just endless debate and sitting around.’23
What complicated the whole Lend-Lease agreement, however, as Keynes soon discovered, was ‘the question of what is called here “consideration”’.24 This introduced a new sort of language: that of a bargain in which the Americans should get back something of equal value. Hence Article VII of the agreement, as eventually drafted by the end of 1941, specified that the consideration was to be based on the fourth principle of the Atlantic Charter, as meanwhile signed by Churchill and Roosevelt. This was a pledge that their two countries would (‘with due respect for their existing obligations’) endeavour to promote equal access to the trade and raw materials of the world.25 Article VII amplified that this meant not only ‘the elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce’ but also ‘the reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers’.26 An unimpeachable statement, then, of the general presumption that international free trade benefited all.
The trouble was, as usual, the British Empire. Though Britain, until the First World War, had run its Empire on free trade lines – in contrast to the protectionist American record – the cry for imperial preference in trade had been strong for at least forty years. Joseph Chamberlain had staked his political career on the issue and his son Neville had, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, proudly signed the Ottawa agreements in 1932, formalizing a system of preferential tariffs as imperial policy – obligations by which Britain was still bound. Powerful Conservative newspapers, especially Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, remained devoted to the cause of imperial preference, as did cabinet ministers like Leo Amery. But they were a minority.
Here is a paradox worth pondering. Imperial preference was often the prime target for American critics of the British Empire, uniting at a stroke visceral Anglophobes and principled free traders. Yet Churchill himself, despite his well-earned reputation as an imperialist, actually cared little for imperial preference. His whole political career testified to this; he had spent twenty years as a Liberal precisely because the Conservatives adopted the Chamberlainite policy. Unlike Amery, Churchill saw as little potential in imperial preference as he did in imperial federation. He was only really committed to the Empire strategically and rhetorically – especially the latter perhaps. If so, one might conclude that he succeeded in arousing disproportionate American suspicion, hostility and resentment about an atavistic stage monster that was already on its last legs.
Churchill, then, regarded the Ottawa agreements as a pragmatic response to the slump, not as a cause to die for; and in this he spoke for his Coalition Government as a whole, as he often explained to Roosevelt. What the British cabinet could not stomach was simply being told by the Americans to eliminate imperial preference because it was discrimination, and to do so unilaterally, as though the Dominions had no voice in the matter. Though the Dominions may have served a Jorkins-like role in this scenario, the procedure undoubtedly contrasted with the sort of international negotiations that would be necessary to reduce, still less eliminate, tariffs. To the ideological free traders now dominating American policy, discrimination was the real evil, yet, to the British, American tariffs were surely as great an affront to the pure doctrine of free trade as the preference practised within the British Empire. On both sides, principle was compromised by prevailing practices and vested interests.
Everyone, it turned out, wanted free trade; it simply depended on what you meant by free trade. And it was not an issue on which the British view was likely to prevail above that of its more powerful ally.
It may well be that the consideration exposed inherent logical flaws in the whole arrangement. Lend-Lease had been offered to Britain in return for a consideration. Yet the title of the bill sent to Congress – ‘An Act Further to Promote the Defense of the United States’ – proclaimed that its rationale was to serve the USA’s own interest, which all members of the Roosevelt administration repeatedly affirmed thereafter. So why was there any need for a consideration? The war effort itself was what the United States got for its money. Great Britain, in the days when it had enjoyed the luxury of getting other countries to do its fighting for it, used to shovel out subsidies to them in just such a businesslike way, but without expecting any consideration.
This is not how it looked through American eyes. In the Mid-West, in particular, common sense spoke differently. How lightly these faraway people were being let off! Did they not understand the nature of a bargain, a deal, a trade? Did they not see that their oppressive structure of imperial taxation, all too reminiscent of King George III, had to go?
In the House of Representatives, the Lend-Lease bill had been carried by 260–165 in February 1941. But out of 124 Representatives from the eleven Mid-West states only 32 voted for: 92 against. Next month in the Senate, the bill had passed by 62–33; but in the Middle West there were only 8 Senators in favour, 14 against.27 The politics of Lend-Lease demanded that there should be recompense to the United States in some way or other.
Throughout the Second World War, Roosevelt was determined not to be another Woodrow Wilson, losing touch with public opinion. Instead the President set about crafting a policy that made political sense at home. From 1939 to 1941 the United States appeared as neutral as Ireland: that is, much practical support was given to Great Britain but it remained covert and unacknowledged in deference to historic sensibilities about the British Empire, from which both countries were glad to have made good their escape. Running for re-election for an unprecedented third term in 1940, Roosevelt had given his famous pledge in Boston, where the Irish were the backbone of the Democratic Party: ‘Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’28 He may have made the mental reservation that an attack on the United States would not count as a foreign war, but Roosevelt’s untutored listeners often supposed differently.
That is what those political opponents whom Roosevelt liked to brand ‘isolationists’ continued to hold against him, long after Pearl Harbor supposedly changed everything. For example, Arthur Vandenberg, Senator for Michigan, commented later that ‘all this talk about the “isolationists” is sheer bunk.’ It was a label Vandenberg had happily carried himself but he could claim that ‘we were perfectly aware they could not and would not “keep us out of war” – and they didn't.’ His own position all along, he claimed, was ‘that if this was our war we ought to go in through the front door and not through the back door – and we ought to go in as swiftly and conclusively as possible. But that would not have suited Mr Roosevelt’s purposes.’29
In saying this, Roosevelt’s critics surely had a point. For not only did the re-elected President take open steps to offer material aid to Great Britain in its hour of need – Lend-Lease, above all – but he also sanctioned secret military staff talks during 1941. These American–British conversations (ABC-1) came up with contingency plans, as staff talks will, that covered all sorts of eventualities. The central assumption, however, was that, if the United States were to enter the war, it would be against Hitler and that the strategic priority would be to knock out Germany.
‘America First’, the slogan of the isolationists, was given political potency through the leadership of the aviation hero Colonel Charles Lindbergh. Philip Roth’s novel The Plot against America (2004) suggests the dystopian possibilities of the movement and also its potential popular base. America First was a sentiment that recruited widespread support, especially in those states of the Middle West – Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio – where the Chicago Tribune was such a force, with its circulation of over one million. In these four states, the Gallup Poll showed that Lend-Lease attracted less than 40 per cent support, compared with nearly 60 per cent nationally. The Tribune's own poll of its readers in the summer of 1941 asked: ‘Shall the United States enter the war to help Britain defeat the Nazis?’ Over 80 per cent said no.
Hence the furore when the Tribune splashed its great scoop across the front page on 4 December 1941: ‘FDR’S WAR PLANS’. Based on a leak of ABC-1 from an isolationist senator, the story told of plans for a joint Anglo-American invasion of the European continent – assuming, of course, that the United States would have entered this foreign war. There was even a suspiciously exact invasion date mentioned in the plans (July 1943) and a specified requirement of a force of 5 million American troops.30 The political damage to Roosevelt was serious. Alas for the Tribune, the timing was such that, within four days, it had to reverse its editorial line completely and support the President in going to war.
For the United States was indeed attacked. On 7 December 1941 a key part of its navy was sunk at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, obviously locking the two countries into a war in the Pacific. Churchill’s recollection was vivid, as usual. He claimed that he heard the news on the radio at Chequers, his official country residence, where he was dining with the US Ambassador, John Gilbert Winant.
Now this seems an odd way for such intelligence to reach the war leader, giving conspiracy theorists leverage for some wild suggestions. It is true that the attack on the Americans was only one part of an amazingly ambitious two-prong Japanese attack, with the British Empire also targeted through an invasion of the Malayan port of Kota Bahru. In the event Kota Bahru was hit several hours before Pearl Harbor without setting the dogs barking at Chequers, or even the phones ringing apparently. At any rate, everyone at dinner that day was well aware that the Prime Minister was already committed to declaring war on Japan ‘within the hour’ should the United States be attacked. A telephone call to the White House, initiated by Gil Winant, settled the matter. ‘It’s quite true,’ Roosevelt told the Prime Minister, and allegedly added: ‘We are all in the same boat now.’31 What sort of boat was it that contained not only the President but the most notorious upholder of the British Empire, as well as the isolationists of the Chicago Tribune, dedicated to its downfall?
Pearl Harbor was a blow for the Americans, a boon for the British. Perhaps it is true that Churchill performed a little jig, as he later told Mackenzie King; certainly he leapt at the opportunity to declare war on Japan in solidarity with the Americans. War was not costless in view of the almost immediate loss of two British battleships off Singapore and the fall of the great imperial fortress itself within weeks. But it had the effect of tying together the two wars, against Japan and against Germany. Roosevelt was spared taking the decision to enter a foreign war only by an extraordinary move on Hitler’s part, in himself declaring war on the United States. The President capitalized on this with his usual dexterity by committing the US to his own preferred anti-fascist strategy: Europe First. This implied that the enemy at the gate (Japan) could be kept waiting there until the alliance between the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain had dealt with the threat from Hitler and Mussolini.
In this, of course, Roosevelt was at one with Churchill, who could hardly believe the favourable turn of events. Again the latter’s war memoirs lost nothing in the telling: ‘England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live.’32 The Former Naval Person, as he styled himself in their correspondence, received a wonderful telegram from the President, not only reporting the overwhelming majorities by which the Senate and the House of Representatives had passed the declaration of war but helpfully specifying who was aboard. ‘Today all of us are in the same boat with you and the people of the Empire,’ Roosevelt affirmed, ‘and it is a ship which will not and cannot be sunk.’33
The Anglo-American alliance was the engine of victory in western Europe just as the alliance with the Soviet Union was the necessary agent of German defeat in eastern Europe. This was what Churchill termed the Grand Alliance and the core of what Roosevelt liked to call the United Nations. In this sense Pearl Harbor marked not only a ‘day which will live in infamy’, as Roosevelt memorably declaimed, but a day more benignly famous for its effect on European history. Yet in some ways it is easy to exaggerate how much difference Pearl Harbor made, especially upon American perceptions of the war.
American isolationists have had a bad press. They have hardly been ignored, but they have certainly been derided. True, they had to change their tune abruptly after the United States entered the war. Yet their instinct for self-preservation and self-promotion did not suddenly disappear, and strategically the logic of America First was now Pacific First, to defeat Japan. It was largely the means rather than the ends that had changed. American primacy remained their goal, and not theirs alone. Such views did not lose their political clout simply because of Pearl Harbor. One national Gallup Poll in February 1942 asked Americans if their new British allies should actually repay the amount of Lend-Lease aid: yes, said 84 per cent, and later polls told much the same story.34
The Allies were fighting different wars in more senses than one. It was not just that the real war was against Japan for many Americans: their alliance with the British could hardly be one of equals. ‘If there is to be a partnership between the United States and Britain, weare, by every right, the controlling partner,’ the Chicago Tribune reasoned on 10 January. ‘We can get along without them. They can't get along without us.’35 One paradox was that British survival depended on American intervention, yet the inexorable effect of American intervention was to eclipse Britain within the alliance: soon outmanned when huge US armies were raised, soon outgunned when American armaments production came on stream and, not least, soon reduced to a degree of economic dependence which threatened the British Empire itself.
For Roosevelt, as for many Americans, it was a grievous inconsistency that India should have been mobilized for war in British interests, at the British behest, and with no clear commitment by the British to the principle of self-determination. At only one point during the war, however, did India move to the top of the political agenda. This was when the Cripps Offer – shorthand for wartime democratization plus post-war independence – was made in 1942. Like the Atlantic Charter, it was sanctioned by Churchill in sweeping terms that he subsequently repented but was not allowed to forget.
The big new fact was that the United States was now formally engaged in the war, giving Roosevelt a clear licence to speak. He needed to show his fellow Americans that their boys were not going to fight in any foreign wars for the British Empire. It was on Churchill’s very first wartime visit to Washington, in December 1941, that Roosevelt raised the issue, ‘on the usual American lines’, as Churchill’s war memoirs recount: ‘I reacted so strongly and at such length that he never raised it verbally again.’36 Never orally, perhaps; but the President returned to the topic with unusual verbal profusion only a couple of months later.
The draft of a long message to Churchill, written at the end of February 1942, although ‘purely a personal thought based on very little firsthand knowledge on my part’, survives as evidence of his continued concern about the European empires in Asia. The old master-and-servant relationship had not been altered by the Dutch, ‘nor by you in the Straits Settlements or Burma’, Roosevelt asserted, while the people of India, he maintained, felt ‘that there is no real desire in Britain to recognize a world change which has taken deep root in India as well as in other countries’.37
This draft was not sent, but it was certainly opportune, given the current military threat from Japan. ‘We have suffered the greatest disaster in our history at Singapore,’ Churchill acknowledged to Roosevelt.38 Its fall on 15 February was one reason why he reconstructed his government four days later. The big changes were that his crony Lord Beaver-brook was out of the war cabinet and that Sir Stafford Cripps took his place, with the title of Lord Privy Seal. These were ones that Churchill would not have made willingly. Cripps, expelled from the Labour Party just before the war for advocating a popular front with both Liberals and Communists, had just returned from a posting as British ambassador in Moscow, trailing the glory of the Red Army. This helped give him an almost messianic status, as a prophet of high-minded austerity, preaching total effort in a total war, at just the moment when Churchill’s authority, for the only time in the war, was seriously shaken. In the early months of 1942, Cripps had unexampled political capital; and he chose to invest it in an attempt to resolve the Indian problem.
Roosevelt was thus pushing on an open door – but giving it a decisive shove nonetheless – when he decided to send a redrafted version of his Indian message to Churchill on 10 March. He knew by then that some move could be expected from London, and pruned his more pointed criticisms, while keeping a lengthy disquisition on the model allegedly provided by the history of the American Revolution in paving the way to independent self-government, replete with many purported parallels with contemporary India. Churchill reprinted this document in his war memoirs in 1951, writing that it was ‘of high interest because it illustrates the difficulties of comparing situations in various centuries and scenes where almost every material fact is totally different’ – a rare moment when he allowed himself a satirical comment at the expense of the late President.39 Churchill’s reaction in 1942 had been equally dismissive, just more blunt. But he had already, two days before Roosevelt’s message, clinched on the suggestion that Cripps should fly to Delhi to try to achieve a settlement on a new basis. The main political parties – not only the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress but also the Muslim League – should be brought into negotiations to enlist them behind the war effort, on the basis of their immediate participation in the government pending full independence after the war.
This was the essence of the Cripps Offer. Amery was as surprised about it as anyone, but happy at least that India was now the focus of attention. Faced with explaining to the far more conservative Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, the course that events had taken, he tried to make sense of its knock-on momentum: ‘the pressure outside, upon Winston from Roosevelt, and upon Attlee & Co from their own party, plus the admission of Cripps to the War Cabinet, suddenly opened the sluice gates, and the thing moved with a rush.’40 Not mentioned but never forgotten, of course, was another crucial factor: the enemy at the gates of the Empire. Churchill did not make light of the military reverses, publicly commenting on the fall of Singapore: ‘Australia is threatened: India is threatened.’41 He announced the Cripps Mission to the House of Commons on 11 March, three days after the fall of Rangoon. After returning from India, Cripps was to report his eventual failure to the House on 28 April, the day before Mandalay was evacuated.
Perhaps such facts are all that is needed to explain why the Cripps Offer was rejected by the Indian National Congress. The comment of its great mentor, Mohandas Gandhi, was widely reported, that the offer was ‘a post-dated cheque’, often with the journalistic improvement ‘on a failing bank’.42 Stafford Cripps was the personally honourable individual who found that he was trading in a suspect specie, one which had exhausted its credit in 1942.
The European empires in southern Asia were falling like dominoes in the face of the relentless Japanese advance. The Dutch lost Indonesia, the French lost Indo-China, the British lost the Malayan peninsula and Burma. The collapse of supercilious white imperialists before little yellow men whom they had systematically slighted and disparaged was an object-lesson in Asian nationalism. Faced with the threat of the invader at home, the British had salved their pride with the noble myth of 1940: a nation courageously pulling together with a unity that spanned all classes, in a fitting image of a democracy at war with Nazism. Churchill’s timeless rhetoric captured this. Yet faced with the threat of the invader in their Asian empire, the British showed the ugly face of imperialism, leaving a shameful myth of 1942: an army and navy unable to protect the bastions of power, white officials ready to cut and run, saving themselves and their possessions while showing a racist disregard for others, even their own faithful servants. Here Churchill’s imperialist rhetoric exposed him as the captive of his own decrepit assumptions.
In India, where Congress leaders seldom thought of Japanese imperialism in any more favourable terms than of British imperialism, they faced an acute dilemma in 1942. Cripps had forged a friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru since the 1930s and well understood Nehru’s commitment against fascism, whether in Europe or in Asia. But it was asking too much of Nehru at this moment to trust Cripps: trust him to deliver on making a reality of cabinet government within the shell of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. The problem was not really one between Cripps and Nehru. It was that behind Nehru stood the enigmatic figure of Gandhi, responsible only to his own intuitions of right and wrong, and behind Gandhi was the inarticulate phalanx of Congress supporters throughout the country, over whom his charismatic hold was unrivalled and unbroken. And conversely, behind Cripps stood the sinister figure of Linlithgow, conscious that his days were numbered as Viceroy if a settlement were reached, and behind Linlithgow was the brooding presence of Churchill himself, alarmed at any news suggesting that the negotiations were likely to succeed.
Churchill did not stab Cripps in the back. Nor did Cripps exceed his brief in what he offered, intricate in its detail but simple in its thrust. Had Nehru finally committed Congress, as seemed likely at one moment (9 April), the British Government would likewise have been committed and – under a new Viceroy – the ‘Indianization’ of the government would have proceeded, subject only to British control of military operations. This was the deal that Cripps had brokered, aided latterly by the intervention of Roosevelt’s representative in Delhi, Colonel Louis Johnson; and this was the deal that finally collapsed (on 10 April), leaving Cripps without further hope. ‘He and Nehru could solve it in 5 minutes if Cripps had any freedom or authority,’ Johnson told the State Department.43 Ironically, it was not Cripps’s credentials that constituted a difficulty but Johnson’s. Fearful that the power of Roosevelt’s name was being used to identify the United States with a proposal unacceptable to the British Government, Harry Hopkins, currently visiting London, had played down Johnson’s status to Churchill; but the extent of American intervention was actually well appreciated on all sides, not least by Nehru and his Congress supporters.
It was the President himself who finally made this clear. On 11 April 1942 Roosevelt sent Churchill an exceptionally forthright message, no longer coded in terms of eighteenth-century history, not just regretting Cripps’s failure, nor just appealing for a further attempt at compromise, but stating the American position in stark terms. He claimed that it was ‘almost universally held that the deadlock has been caused by the unwillingness of the British Government to concede to the Indians the right of self-government’ and that American public opinion would not forgive the consequences should India be invaded as a result. He continued to press for an interim nationalist government to be set up.44 Churchill was still talking deep into the night with Hopkins when this message was received in London at 3 a.m. The Prime Minister asserted that he would not countenance any such proposal so long as he held office. ‘I should personally make no objection at all to retiring into private life, and I have explained this to Harry just now,’ he claimed, with more bravado than plausibility in a draft response, while Hopkins vainly tried to telephone the White House.45
No, Churchill did not resign. No, Roosevelt did not enforce a last-minute change in British policy on India. In the very short term, the fact that Cripps had already left India for home gave Churchill room for manoeuvre and Roosevelt time to retreat. Moreover, as the story of the Cripps Mission subsequently unfolded in the press, the reception in the United States turned out to be much more impressed by British good faith in making the offer than Roosevelt had surmised. Once the offer had been made and rejected, ‘the inherent difficulties and complexities of the problems’ seemed the main point to the New York Times, hitherto a principled supporter of Congress demands: ‘It is not simply a question, as many Americans supposed and as some Indian leaders still pretend, of whether “the peoples of India” should be given their “freedom”.’ The paper now saluted ‘the effort of the British to adopt the fairest compromise’; it detected ‘a disheartening unreality in the response of some of the Indian leaders’; and it dismissed Congress’s reply to Cripps as ‘the repetition of slogans that have suddenly lost their meaning’.46
The British case was much aided by the fact that Cripps and Churchill closed ranks in blaming Congress for the breakdown. Gandhi’s response, in simply calling on the British to ‘Quit India’, subsequently did little to recruit American sympathy since it so obviously hindered the war effort against Japan – a war mainly fought by the United States, of course. Perhaps it is not surprising that a US poll in April 1943, while showing over 60 per cent favourable to Indian independence, revealed that two-thirds of those in favour thought that independence should await the end of the war47 – an American endorsement of the post-dated cheque.
The Cripps Offer was not meant to fail. But the demonstration effect of its failure in India provided an immediate propaganda coup and subsequent ideological cover for the British. Moreover, Churchill himself, though almost always truculent when he spoke about India, in fact spoke about it very little, to the despair of his Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, whose diary bemoaned this paradox at length. For the rest of the war, to a surprising extent, the issue simply went to sleep.
*
Soon after Pearl Harbor, on New Year’s Eve 1941, Keynes reminded his Treasury colleagues of his most famous maxim: that in the long run we are all dead. He meant this as a warning against the complacent assumption that things would turn out for the best if only let alone. Writing with reference to the still unresolved fine print of Lend-Lease, he issued a call for the British to wake up and recognize the futility of seeking, as he put it, ‘to appease’ the Americans: ‘What will arouse suspicion will be our agreeing to unreasonable demands against our better judgement and then inevitably having to find some way of slipping out of our ill-advised words.’48
Churchill, currently on the North American visit that created the image of the Roaring Lion, evidently read the situation differently. Talking now with the President as an ally in Washington, the Prime Minister refused to reveal exactly what was said but assured Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, that ‘with every month that passes the fighting comradeship of the two countries as allies will grow, and the haggling about the lend-lease story will wane. After all, Lend-lease is practically superseded now.’49
By no means. Though Congress was sometimes blamed – Mr Jorkins again – Roosevelt showed himself determined to maintain Lend-Lease. The only difference was that it would now become reciprocal, within the framework of a bigger Mutual Aid Agreement, which the British were now asked to sign. The principle of Mutual Aid was that all the Allies should offer such help as they could to each other: the United States to Britain, yes, but also ‘Reverse Lend-Lease’ by Britain, especially for American forces stationed there.
‘Reverse Lend-Lease’ showed that the flow of necessary assistance was not all in one direction. In the Pacific war, Australia and New Zealand gave at least as much in Mutual Aid to the Americans as they received from them. Canada (which had refused Lend-Lease) and Britain were likewise to give each other support on a highly significant scale. It was the need to sign the original Mutual Aid Agreement that provoked heated debate in the British cabinet in January and February 1942.
Here is one of the great suppressed crises of the war. We see the impact on a shaken Prime Minister from the surviving documents, notably the text of a telegram, heavily revised by him in red ink.50 Presented with a tough draft message for his friend the President, he evidently decides to soften its language. ‘As I told you I consider situation is completely altered by entry of the United States into the war.’ Yes, he agrees with that. But the next sentence? ‘This makes us no longer a client receiving help from a generous patron, but two comrades fighting for life side by side’ – no, too strong, too choleric: ‘client’ is amended to ‘combatant’, ‘patron’ to ‘sympathiser’. The draft continues, striking the plaintive note of ethical superiority with which the British customarily preface their begging letters: ‘In this connection it must be remembered that for a large part of 27 months we carried on the struggle single-handed, and that had we failed the full malice of the Axis Powers, whose real intentions can now be seen [‘so clearly seen’, adds Churchill] would have fallen upon the United States.’
By this time we see Churchill warming to his work. He seems to have forgotten that his task is to tone down such sentiments and instead, persuaded of his own rectitude, he lets his own rhetoric carry an irrefutable argument forward. It is not, he wants Roosevelt to understand, the old argument of protection versus free trade (in which he appeals to his own record): the issue now is ‘the inappropriateness in time and circumstance of our being forced to part with our freedom of honourable discussion with you upon an issue, which in certain aspects touches our sovereignty and independence’. It is the client/patron point again. For would not a commitment to end imperial preference, just like that, at the behest of American paymasters, look like acceptance of ‘a condition of tutelage’? Hence the final red-ink appeal: ‘The key-note of our relations must surely be equality, coupled with rivalry in sacrifice and effort against the common foe, and for the sake of the common cause of liberty and equality.’
This is the clearest statement of the British case ever made by Churchill. In it he stands up to the Americans and tells them that if they want the British Empire as an ally, it must be treated as such on an equal basis, now that they are all in the same boat. But we shall never know Roosevelt’s reaction to this insubordinate missive. It was never sent. Churchill contented himself, after a couple of days for reflection, with a deliberately colourless report that the cabinet was resolved that ‘if we bartered the principle of imperial prefence for the sake of lease-lend we should have accepted an intervention in the domestic affairs of the British Empire’, from which all sorts of bad consequences would flow.51 Having nerved himself to strike while the iron was hot, he then decided to cool it.
The lion failed to roar. Churchill opted for what Keynes had termed appeasement. Often the best policy when up against hostile odds, it was one upon which he habitually relied in dealing with the United States. In general terms, of course, he saw that the consideration tied the United States to negotiations on multilateral trade, which was to the advantage of all, not a zero-sum game. But when it came to imperial preference, Churchill cowered behind the small print. He was helped by Roosevelt who, as usual, sugared the pill that he nonetheless insisted that the British swallow, sooner or later, in the short run or the long. When critics like Amery berated Churchill over signing up to the American trade agenda, the Prime Minister kept pointing to the ‘existing obligations’ proviso on which he had insisted. As he assured the House of Commons in April 1944: ‘I did not agree to Article 7 of the Mutual Aid Agreement without having previously obtained from the President a definite assurance that we were no more committed to the abolition of Imperial Preference, than the American Government were committed to the abolition of their high protective tariffs.’52
All these commitments stored up trouble for the future. Some were eventually enshrined in the convoluted text of the Mutual Aid documents: ambiguous undertakings, cleverly hedged, in the finest British mandarin tradition. Some of them were never written down at all, observing Roosevelt’s well-known distaste for a paper trail that would constrain his own freedom of manoeuvre. Two different ways of doing business were united only in papering over cracks that would later reopen amid mutual charges of bad faith. Even sympathetic American negotiators soon began to tire of the endless excuses that the British produced for prevaricating over the consideration. And the British meanwhile relied on whatever it was that the President might verbally assure the Prime Minister.
Lend-Lease, far from being superseded by the Anglo-American alliance, had thus gone from strength to strength. Arguments that no consideration was necessary as between allies went by the board, as did the notion that the other side of the bargain was now fulfilled by the provisions for mutual aid between them. Thus the consideration still remained fundamental to the Lend-Lease agreement. If it really ensured that the Americans would be compensated (twice over, at that) for all their help, it might be a smart deal to strike with a neighbour bereft of a garden hose. Even the backwoodsmen of Congress could understand that, so it was good politics. But when the British people heard Lend-Lease hailed as uniquely unsordid, they entertained expectations of rather more generous treatment.
Yet what was actually done under the auspices of Lend-Lease refutes many airy criticisms with a solid record of achievement. It created a supply line, harnessing the growing might of the American economy to the war needs of the British. In 1941 Germany and the United Kingdom each had about $6 billion in armaments production, well ahead of the USA’s $4.5 billion. By 1943, however, although the UK was up to $11 billion, as against Germany’s $13.8 billion, the United States was now producing $37.5 billion. American military equipment, manufactured in quantities that the world had never before seen, gave the Allies their cutting edge. Take aircraft production, which decided the control of the skies, so vital in modern warfare. At the peak of production, reached in 1944, the Soviet Union and Germany each produced about 40,000 aircraft, which would have given them parity against each other. Britain and Japan likewise roughly matched in production, albeit in the lower range of 26–28,000. What decisively changed the equation, in Europe and the Pacific alike, was the production by the United States alone of 96,000 aircraft that year.53
Lend-Lease did not just mean munitions, however necessary to the British fighting forces. Just as important was the flow of American goods, including foodstuffs. Lend-Lease thus sustained the British people at a standard of living adequate for them to continue fighting, even though their own export trade was deliberately abandoned in the process. It meant too that their own economic production was distorted ever more strongly by the priorities of a combined war effort. British industry was sacrificed to the needs of the war, and manpower mobilized for military purposes.
For Britain, the crucial impact of Lend-Lease was financial rather than economic. It is not as though the British economy was languishing during the war. Gross Domestic Product (at constant 1938 prices) had been as low as £4 billion at the bottom of the slump in 1933, climbing shakily to £5.2 billion by 1939. But it reached £6 billion in 1940, the first full year of war – an increase of 50 per cent over 1933. Levels of output, moreover, remained at least as high as this throughout the war, reaching a peak of £6.6 billion in 1943.54
This was a command economy in many ways, subordinating market forces to maximum mobilization and war production. Full employment replaced dole queues as labour shortage became the main problem, with the trade unionist Ernest Bevin, as Churchill’s Minister of Labour, using a manpower budget to juggle the needs of industry with the demands of the armed forces. Likewise inflation replaced deflation as the main problem, as Keynes had been quick to realize, and his schemes for restraining domestic demand were adopted and adapted by the Treasury. Everything was sacrificed to the war effort, with maximum production as the urgent priority, here and now, rather than seeking productivity gains that might have better served the long-term need for British competitiveness.
Yet this could only happen because the requirement to export was virtually ignored under Lend-Lease arrangements. The balance of payments for the war years shows that total British exports dwindled to a puny 100,000 US dollars a year from 1941 onward. Meanwhile imports, especially of munitions, zoomed up; in 1944 exports paid for about 1 per cent of total imports. Since these exchanges took place largely between Britain and the United States, and since Britain was responsible for the whole sterling area – mainly the Empire – the main effect can be seen in the accounts for the sterling area, measured in US dollars. It can be seen from the table below that the deficits with the United States during 1941–4 were largely covered by the receipts under Lend-Lease – somewhat offset, though, by the amounts that Britain and other sterling-area countries contributed to the United States in ‘Reverse Lend-Lease’ (as Mutual Aid was often called). Thus the foreign-exchange deficits in the left-hand column are in effect financed by the net receipts from Lend-Lease in the right-hand column.
Sterling-area balance of payments in US dollars (billions)55
|
deficit |
Lend-Lease |
Reverse Lend-Lease |
net Lend-Lease |
1941 |
–2.1 |
+1.1 |
– |
+1.1 |
1942 |
–4.4 |
+4.8 |
–0.3 |
+4.5 |
1943 |
–6.6 |
+9.0 |
–1.8 |
+7.2 |
1944 |
–7.4 |
+10.8 |
–2.5 |
+8.3 |
Lend-Lease thus solved the problem of externally financing the war, in the absence of anything like sufficient British export earnings, but it did so by creating dependency on the Americans, of a sort that would obviously have to end once the war was won. This may have been a rational division of labour between the Allies but one which inevitably distorted the British economy into supplying purely military needs, whereas the American economy remained more balanced in its huge wartime expansion. For the duration, it might be said, the Americans generously picked up the bills – but also picked off the markets that the British had formerly supplied themselves.
On the eve of peace, Keynes was to summarize the position in all its piquancy. ‘The fact that the distribution of effort between ourselves and our Allies has been of this character leaves us far worse off, when the sources of assistance dry up, than if the roles had been reversed,’ he wrote in a paper for the cabinet. ‘If we had been developing our exports so as to pay for our own current needs and in addition to provide a large surplus which we could furnish free of current charge to our Allies as lend lease or mutual aid or on credit, we should, of course, find ourselves in a grand position when the period of providing the stuff free of current charge was suddenly brought to an end.’56 Lend-Lease proved itself a wonderful weapon of war; but for the British it was a double-edged sword.
It was only as the end of the war came into sight that some of these rather theoretical arguments became immediate practical problems. For the British, it was a question of providing for themselves in a post-war world in which there would be no Lend-Lease – and perhaps no imperial preference either. For the Americans, it was time to implement a new international economic order with a different centre of gravity, no longer London but Washington. Moreover, Keynes secured British co-operation in this heady enterprise.
Here was the potent brew that made Bretton Woods famous. This charming resort in the hills of New Hampshire was pressed into service in order to avoid the stifling heat of Washington in the summer of 1944. This was a special blessing for Keynes, increasingly plagued by the heart condition that had first hit him in 1937, but still the British Treasury’s key player. Lydia Keynes fulfilled the indispensable role of preventing Maynard from overtaxing himself, as well as lightening the proceedings. And he could lean on the intellectual support of Professor Lionel Robbins, head of the Economic Section of the war cabinet, now in his second major transatlantic set of negotiations.
Robbins had experienced much the same learning-curve as Keynes before him. At the Hot Springs conference in 1943 – suddenly called by Roosevelt to steer the United Nations, as he called his allies, towards a common policy on food and agriculture – Robbins had been struck by the differences in Anglo-American institutional culture. In British experience, he mused, if an official was prepared to talk off the record, he could at least predict what line his own side would take. ‘With an American – the friendly American of goodwill I mean – it is different,’ Robbins thought. ‘Quite apart from the matters of discretion, in which they are certainly very lax, they are obviously in the dark concerning the machine they have to handle.’57
In some ways, this gave the British a technical advantage, in being able to shape the agenda according to a set plan. The result of the conference was the establishment of a permanent Food and Agriculture Organization (later absorbed into the United Nations Organization as set up in 1945 at San Francisco). ‘We have the satisfaction of having saved the proceedings of the conference from futility and lack of direction,’ Robbins claimed of Hot Springs. ‘And we know that this has been appreciated, not least by the Americans themselves which means that it has been worthwhile – though it is very easy for this kind of advantage to evaporate overnight.’58
It was an advantage on which the British hoped to capitalize at Bretton Woods; and it served well enough. The dominating influence over the conference, however, was inevitably that of the US Treasury. Morgenthau had so many more of the chips in this game than anyone else; and he was supported by an extremely able deputy.
This was Harry Dexter White. His forbidding reputation preceded him – ‘Of course, normally, Harry is the unpleasantest man in Washington’, so Robbins was told59 – and he came to Bretton Woods as the author of the White Plan, which was to provide the model for a new international monetary system. What was not known at the time was the extent to which White’s left-wing outlook made him a committed fellow traveller of the Soviet Union, to which he was actually passing confidential information.
The crux was simple. There was an American plan and there was a British plan. Both were highly professional, both were caricatured by their opponents, both had real merits; but it was no surprise that in the end it was the American plan that prevailed.
The trouble with the Keynes Plan, as published alongside the White Plan in 1943, was that it had seemed utopian. It proposed to escape from the bad old world of the Gold Standard, which had tied each currency to a fixed gold price, by inventing a new international medium of exchange to lubricate world trade. The new unit – ‘bancor’ was one name canvassed – could simply be willed into existence and would function like an overdraft facility, leaving each country with its own responsibility for balancing its books. The point was to create the conditions in which full employment could be maintained, rather than allow shortage of gold to impose deflationary policies, with all their attendant evils. It was an elegant conception. ‘Personally, I am very attracted by it and if I had my own way, I would go a long way to meet you,’ White himself had told Robbins. ‘But I know that we can never get it across.’60
Politics, then, demanded another approach. The White Plan started with traditional conceptions of central banking, requiring customers to make deposits before they could hope to exercise any drawing rights. It had the ring of sound money, unlike the clever dodges that the British were peddling. ‘If we are big enough suckers to swallow the Keynes plan,’ wrote a small-town Iowa newspaper, ‘we shall be swindled out of everything we have left from the war – and we shall deserve to be swindled.’61
It was only a matter of time before the British bowed to the inevitable. They would have to settle for a modified White Plan: banking principles, no funny money – but no rigid Gold Standard either. Instead there would be the chance to set up an international mechanism with a new sort of liquidity in financing trade flows. Keynes had already stood up in the House of Lords, a clear month before going to Bretton Woods, to explain that there would be ‘no longer any need for a new-fangled international monetary unit’ since the objectives could now be achieved through a compromise involving less radical reform.62 In a spirit of amity, he now told White that the remaining opponents of their compromise scheme were ‘rather dishonestly raising the bugbear of gold, since the mere suggestion that our proposals can be regarded in the light of a return to gold, is enough to make 99 per cent of the people of this country see red’. So the biggest difficulty lay in presentation to two different communities: that the proposals had been ‘drawn up on those lines which are most suitable from the point of view of satisfying American opinion, and unfortunately in this case, that means lines which are most likely to provoke opposition in this country’.63
Bretton Woods proved a triumph for White and Keynes alike. Since the British had already accepted the White Plan as the basis for agreement, a measure of personal magnanimity sealed the pact between them. One participant later commented: ‘The happiest moment in the life of Harry White came when he could call Keynes by his first name.’64 The fact that he was called by his second name – Maynard rather than John – was simply an agreeably eccentric English touch; and he was allowed his moment of glory.
‘Keynes was in his most lucid and persuasive mood; and the effect was irresistible,’ Robbins recorded. ‘At such moments, I often find myself thinking that Keynes must be one of the most remarkable men that have ever lived – the quick logic, the birdlike swoop of intuition, the vivid fancy, the wide vision, above all the incomparable sense of the fitness of words, all combine to make something several degrees beyond the limit of ordinary human achievement.’ Bent on reaching a mutually acceptable consensus, building on the solid Anglo-American staffwork that dominated the conference, Keynes’s genius was both enrapturing and persuasive on this occasion. ‘The Americans sat entranced as the god-like visitor sang and the golden light played around. When it was all over there was very little discussion.’65
This was, of course, too good to last. The irony of the conference was that the better the British did, the worse they came out – at least in the eyes of the mainly hostile American press. Even the New York Times was suspicious, still hankering after the stability of gold. Two new institutions were to be established: the World Bank, responsible for development, and the International Monetary Fund, responsible for finance. ‘The proposals are said to be half-baked and ill-considered; they involve inflation and encourage wasteful internal policies,’ Robbins reported on reactions. ‘The UK are held up as men of utmost eminence and diplomatic adroitness, whereas their opposite numbers on the American delegation are held up for ridicule.’66 To some extent the Anglo-American teamwork – with only the Canadians recognized as having comparable expertise – was maintained as a means of avoiding potential disruption from the forty or so other delegations represented.
An acute worry for the British delegation was Keynes’s precarious health. He frequently had to transact business lying down in his room, but he lasted the course at Bretton Woods. The conference was able to conclude ‘in a blaze of optimism and friendly feeling’, as Robbins put it. ‘At the end Keynes capped the proceedings with one of his most felicitous speeches, and the delegates paid tribute by rising and applauding again and again.’67
For the British, however, the most acute difficulties had been deferred, not solved. They subscribed hopefully to the common ideal for the post-war world but had no idea how to survive the transition to it. Within weeks, therefore, Churchill was to ask Roosevelt personally what on earth would happen to the British economy when Lend-Lease had to stop.
In the British people’s mythology of how they won the war, the names of two leaders remained invested with magic long into the post-war era. That of Winston Churchill was obviously the greater, with the successive volumes of The Second World War (1948–54) to embalm his own account. But it is generals who actually win battles; and from the time in 1942 that the victory at El Alamein made a full general of him, Sir Bernard Montgomery (as he also then became) ranked with the Prime Minister himself as an emblematic British hero. Montgomery wrote his own memoirs – with a pencil – and their publication in 1958, boosted by the unprecedented publicity given to Sunday newspaper serialization, laid out his version for British readers and for posterity. Whereas Churchill had carefully tailored his story to American susceptibilities, Montgomery managed – not for the first time – to affront his former Supreme Commander, now President Eisenhower, by reviving old disputes between American and British views over military strategy.
Like war itself, this was too serious a matter to be left to the generals. The most serious disagreement between Churchill and Roosevelt, from the time of Pearl Harbor to that of their Quadrant conference in Quebec in August 1943, was over a Second Front. We are all familiar with the idea of D-Day as the opening of a massive Second Front in the west, to squeeze the breath out of the Nazis, pressed as they were against an even more massive eastern front where Soviet advance eventually became relentless. But this sort of inevitability should not blind us to a long-lasting strategic dispute between the Allies that was only finally settled at Quadrant. Until then it was not just that Stalin was unavailingly pressing his Western Allies for a Second Front: Churchill and Roosevelt were themselves at odds on the issue for nearly two years.
Roosevelt had from the first wanted a western front to be opened as soon as possible, for political as well as strategic reasons. He wanted it not only to take some of the pressure off the Soviet Union, but because he also wanted American troops locked into the European struggle, which would seem less and less like a foreign war in the process. Moreover, this was consistent with the American military tradition, favouring the frontal assault rather than indirect approaches. Furthermore, it married with geopolitical strategic thinking which saw control of the European heartland as more important than maritime or peripheral operations. This logic led to the application of overwhelming force on the most direct line of assault on the enemy.
The US chief of staff, General George Marshall, was as indispensable to Roosevelt as Brooke was to Churchill. With towering integrity and formidable executive skills, Marshall saw his job as that of mobilizing a vast army to be landed as soon as possible in France. The trouble was that no such American army existed; the British Empire had far more men under arms than the United States in 1942. And, speaking on the chiefs of staff committee for the US Navy, Admiral Ernest King, with his inveterate scorn for the British, could always be relied upon to plead that the real war was in the Pacific – a predominantly naval war, of course.
The Roosevelt–Churchill partnership had been at its peak in 1942, while Britain still had real military clout within the Alliance. Thus Churchill temporarily got his way in maintaining that the Mediterranean was the key theatre.
This indeed was one of the Prime Minister’s longstanding beliefs. For example, he remained immensely proud of the fact that, in the middle of the Battle of Britain in 1940, with German invasion of England a real threat, he had been responsible for sending ‘nearly half our best available tanks’ to Egypt.68 There could be no greater measure of his essentially imperial vision, focused on bases like Gibraltar, Malta, Suez and the route to the East. And it was in Egypt and North Africa that he staged the only war in which the British did any serious, large-scale fighting on land during the next three years – until the invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943, when a further development of the Mediterranean strategy was implemented.
Moreover, in 1942 Churchill had got Roosevelt to support him. Rather than conserve resources to open a Second Front in France in 1943, as Marshall wished, the Americans were induced to invade North Africa themselves, with landings on both the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts. The Americans would thus challenge Rommel’s western flank while the British confronted him in the Western Desert. This plan – the sceptical Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, called it ‘FDR’s secret baby’ – was officially codenamed TORCH.69 With these landings in November 1942, American troops were committed to what Marshall, surely correctly, saw as an enterprise that would inevitably defer the Second Front. But it had solved the problem, as Roosevelt put it privately, of ‘finding a place where the soldiers thought they could fight’.70 Admiral King, not for the last time, had to reconcile himself to supporting European operations rather than having a free hand in the Pacific, as many Congressmen in middle America would have wished. In June 1942 a fast-rising but as yet unblooded protégé of Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, had been catapulted into command of TORCH. His fortunes and those of the President were henceforth to be interdependent.
Likewise, Churchill’s prestige soon became linked with that of the victor of El Alamein – hitherto an obscure railway halt in the Egyptian desert. In telling the story of the war, or listening to the way that the British people told it to each other, it is impossible to ignore Montgomery’s enormous reputation. This was built up, aided by virtually the whole of the British press, and by the reporting of BBC war correspondents, notably Chester Wilmot, originally of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Wilmot was later author of The Struggle for Europe (1952), an influential study not least because it was drawn on by both Churchill and Montgomery in the relevant parts of their own memoirs.
The British and Commonwealth press corps followed Montgomery through the campaign in the North African desert, where he emerged victorious over Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The fact that Rommel, uniquely among German generals, acquired not only a formidable but a favourable image among the Allied public was itself a propaganda coup for the British. Churchill had talked in the House of Commons in early 1942 of ‘a very daring and skilful opponent’, one whom he called ‘across the havoc of war, a great general’.71 Not only did this suggest that the British had a reasonable alibi for their persistent failures against him, culminating in the fall of Tobruk in June 1942, but it also gave the cue for hailing the genius of the British general who finally showed that even the legendary Rommel could be beaten.
It was Monty, of course, who emerged to fill that role. After El Alamein he immediately became a popular hero, with his corduroy trousers, and his jerseys, and his trademark beret, displaying two regimental badges. He did so in the first place in the eyes of his own tatterdemalion army. As well as British troops it contained a division each from Australia, India, New Zealand and South Africa. ‘In the Eighth Army,’ he liked to claim, ‘knit together and fighting side by side, were men from every walk of life and from every part of the Empire; one and all ready to share the toils and burdens of battle so that the rights of man might be preserved.’72 It was thus represented as both a democratic army and an imperial army, with less frequent mention of its notable reinforcement by Polish and French troops or its material advantage in the two or three hundred American tanks supplied by Roosevelt after the fall of Tobruk.
Whether his own sexually ambiguous nature gave a homoerotic charge to Monty’s solicitude for the soldier lads in the ranks was a question not debated in that age of innocence; but their responsiveness to his identification with them is unmistakable. Initially demoralized by Rommel’s mystique, they manifested a growing pride in belonging to the 8th Army as it blazed a trail of victories across North Africa after El Alamein, hounding the Afrika Korps into the sea in Tunisia by May 1943. Others might criticize their commander for his caution in not following up his advantage more decisively; but they appreciated his reluctance to risk their lives unnecessarily; and there is overwhelming evidence of Monty’s personal popularity with his troops. With his fellow commanders, however, this was not axiomatic. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, for one, felt that his Desert Air Force was starved of recognition by the press: ‘It’s always “Monty’s Army”, “Monty’s Victory”, “Monty Strikes Again.”’73
None of this happened by accident. Monty regarded morale as the key factor for a citizen army. Obviously, he was vain, hogging the limelight shamelessly; and, though physically small and unprepossessing in his looks, he made sure that he was projected like a film star in showing himself to his troops before engagements. The film Desert Victory (1943) was made by Captain Geoffrey Keating, granted unlimited facilities as head of his film and photographic unit to film Monty. The diary of Eisenhower’s head of publicity, Captain Harry Butcher, records the claim genially advanced by Keating, as one professional to another: ‘He said that England had no hero so he set out to make one and Montgomery was now “it”.’74
Just as Monty was what the British public needed by November 1942 – a general who could actually win battles while looking after the safety and welfare of his men – so Churchill needed a victory in North Africa to justify the Mediterranean strategy, on which he had staked so much, and thus shore up his war leadership at its only vulnerable moment. Little wonder that the Prime Minister was fully complicit in building up the legend of 8th Army and its inimitable commander, who had finally bested Rommel. An inveterate late-night movie buff, Churchill sent an early copy of Keating’s film to Roosevelt, who responded: ‘That new film Desert Victory is about the best thing that has been done about the war on either side.’75 His own generals, however, by now fuming at invidious comparisons with Monty, naturally tended towards the Coningham view.
Fame is often evanescent and intangible. But Montgomery’s wartime prominence can now be measured by an exact citation-count in The Times. In the period between D-Day and VE-Day (6 June 1944–8 May 1945) he was mentioned nearly 400 times – eight or nine times a week. This was three times as often as Omar Bradley, who became his equal in the Allied command structure, and more often even than Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander – or indeed than Stalin. Churchill, admittedly, was mentioned nearly 1000 times, and Roosevelt over 600.
It is surely significant that Monty’s place in the British popular consciousness was now in the same league as that of the Big Three. His name was used even in advertisements. Miss Gladys Storey’s Bovril Fund was promoted largely on the strength of his endorsement: ‘I want you to know that you, and all who contribute to your fund, have been a definite factor in our success,’ he wrote from Normandy, sharing the credit for once; ‘the men in our fighting areas, and the sick and wounded in our hospitals, all have a share in the Bovril in so far as it will go round. I must admit that I keep a tin occasionally for myself.’76
Churchill took to saying that before El Alamein they never had a victory, and after El Alamein they never had a defeat. Monty thus became the only charismatic figure on the British side to rival Churchill – or rather, not to rival but to complement (and compliment) him. The story circulating at the beginning of 1944 was that Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), told the King: ‘He is a very good soldier, but I think he is after my job.’ The King replied: ‘What a relief! I thought he was after mine!’77 This iconic status elevated Monty above ordinary criticism in British eyes. To the British public, El Alamein was a triumph – simultaneously a deliverance, a talisman, a myth and a sign.
But sheer numbers count in war, as the British were often uncomfortably reminded. When one of their delegation to the Teheran conference of the Big Three grew weary of endless toasts to Stalingrad, he proposed one to El Alamein, of which the Soviet officers seemed unaware. Asked how many Axis divisions had fought there, he exaggerated by saying fifteen. ‘In the Soviet Army, we do not call that a battle,’ came the response. ‘To us, that is a skirmish.’78 Another story circulated that the British emissary to Moscow, sent on the eve of war in 1939 to talk about a possible anti-German alliance, had been asked by Stalin how many divisions Britain could put in the field. Two, he had to reply. ‘Soviet Russia will have to put in 500,’ said Stalin, ‘so that will make 502.’79
The relative disparity, of course, was not actually so gross; but it was telling. And it told against Churchill. Granted, he had drawn the Americans into operations in North Africa, where their invasion from the west ultimately linked up with the advance from the east of the 8th Army under Montgomery. For a time, too, the prestige of Monty, the victor of El Alamein in 1942, eclipsed the initially faltering efforts of the novice Americans. At El Alamein, Monty had 200,000 men against Rommel’s 100,000; and this still outranked the Americans’ current commitment in the Pacific, where they had fewer than 50,000 men at Guadalcanal against 30,000 Japanese. The real comparison, however, is with the eastern front, where the Axis had 5 million troops in the field, countered by an even greater number of Russians. Roosevelt may not have known the exact numbers at the time but he appreciated the difference in orders of magnitude. The Americans found it heartening (as well as galling) to have the 8th Army on their side; but they found it indispensable to have the Red Army.
Moreover, though exposing divisions on the American side, TORCH also served to show who was in command: the commander-in-chief, of course, President Roosevelt. ‘I pray that this great American enterprise, in which I am your lieutenant and in which we have the honour to play an important part, may be crowned by the success it deserves,’ Churchill wrote, more as a courtier than as the power behind the throne.80 Roosevelt’s choice of military strategy may indeed have been political, but it also made good military sense to avoid a premature engagement in northern Europe. An assault on the French coast was doomed in 1942, as the ill-fated Dieppe raid in August, with its massive Canadian casualties, sufficiently indicated; and an attempt to invade in force in 1943 would have held many dangers. One would have been the effect of an abortive invasion on the political fortunes of either Roosevelt or Churchill.
Most arguments against mounting a Second Front, however, had a short shelf-life. The best reason for not doing it in 1943 was that it was better to do it in 1944. Hence the centrality of the issue at the Quadrant conference in August 1943. By this time, Churchill’s search for an alternative, outflanking strategy looked increasingly like a diversion of energy from the real Second Front. The ingenious operations he continued to propose had little attraction for the Americans, especially if these plans could be interpreted or represented as part of a deep-laid plot to reassert Britain’s great-power status and to prop up its Empire. As an irritated Roosevelt said to his chiefs of staff in late 1943: ‘The British look upon the Mediterranean as an area under British domination.’81 More or less anything in the Mediterranean or the Balkans was tainted by such suspicions, well founded or not. Above all, the Americans were not only paying the bills but providing more and more of the troops with every passing month. By the end of 1943 US forces were to number over 1.8 million in each theatre: against Japan and against Germany. Marshall was determined not to be thwarted again in making a reality of a mass cross-Channel invasion in 1944. This was OVERLORD. Like TORCH it was to be American-led, if not by Marshall himself, the obvious American name, then by the ever-eligible Eisenhower.
A popular and approachable figure, everybody’s friend, Ike succeeded in making a success of the D-Day landings, beginning on 6 June 1944. Montgomery served under him, with initial amity, as ground commander of all Allied troops, though his failure to take Caen as planned was a source of irritation to the Supreme Commander, still at his headquarters in England. The problem, then, was not so much to secure a bridgehead on the Continent but to make the planned break-out from Normandy to establish a real western front, which had still not been achieved some six weeks later.
More progress was apparent on the eastern front. During the summer Soviet forces, aided by Lend-Lease supplies from the United States, had driven forward, meshing the mobility of modern tanks with the slog, slog, slog of a war-hardened infantry numbered in millions. By the middle of August the offensive had penetrated deep into the Baltic states, taking the war to the frontiers of the Reich itself in East Prussia, and had swept into southern Poland. It was, of course, the Poles for whom the British had formally gone to war in 1939; the Poles who had established a government in exile in London once their forces had been defeated in the field; the Poles who had endured the extremes of Nazi occupation through five harrowing years; the Poles who took particular sustenance from the pledges of the Atlantic Charter. Had not Churchill and Roosevelt declared their intention ‘to see Sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’?82
It was not, however, the British or American armies that now stood at the gates of Warsaw but those of their ally, the Soviet Union. This seemed to many in the west a cause for rejoicing. In New York, for example, the tabloid Daily News celebrated on 28 July all over its front page:
Reds Take 6 Big Enemy Bases in War’s Greatest Victory
A British tabloid, the Sunday Pictorial, had the same approach on 6 August:
Russians Are Fighting On German Soil –
Montgomery Bursts Through
Even the least observant reader, taking in only headlines two inches high, could not miss these cheering tidings of Allied successes.
Then the Red Army was pushed off the front pages by a bigger, better story nearer home, as British and American newspapers became preoccupied with the advance of their own armies. First there was the American breakout in Normandy from the end of July. After their slow start, the British and Canadian armies in northern France (under Montgomery and General Henry Crerar) achieved gains to match those of the US armies (under Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton), pushing further south and then swinging east towards Paris. ‘U.S. TANKS REACH BREST,’ splashed the tabloid Sunday Graphic on 6 August, though the British papers generally preferred British headlines, like the next day’s Daily Mail: ‘MONTY SWINGS EAST – FOR PARIS’, or the mass-circulation Daily Mirror a couple of days later: ‘MONTY SENDS IN HIS TANKS’. Allied tanks made striking advances day by day, much as the German Panzer divisions had done in 1940.
Eisenhower was known to share the hope of an early end to the war. Indeed the worry now at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) was of premature euphoria. His press aide, Captain Harry Butcher, formerly a CBS executive, was concerned to be told by correspondents as early as 9 August that Montgomery’s chief of staff and Crerar himself had talked openly of the war being over in three weeks. ‘If the war doesn't end in three weeks – and it probably will not – the public will have been led up a blind alley, and naturally will be disappointed,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I told Ike about this superoptimism and he lamented it but said there was little he could do.’83
The newspapers for August 1944 show a degree of confidence on both sides of the Atlantic that was benign, verging on benighted. The New York Times abandoned its sober and cautious house-style in writing of ‘the nemesis that is now rising up against Germany on all her fronts’ and of how ‘the fighting spirit of the Germans begins to droop under the impact of defeat.’84 The Allies showered compliments on each other. In London the initial American advance after OVERLORD was lauded by The Times as ‘a sweep which has had few parallels in its dramatic quality and in its headlong speed’, while in New York it appeared that ‘acting together with perfect coordination, the Americans, British and Canadians have now set the whole Normandy front in motion… General Eisenhower may well make good his prediction that the war in Europe will end this year.’85
The division was thus between the optimists and the superoptimists. The Daily Mail, its masthead emblazoned every day with the motto ‘For King and Empire’, ran an editorial on 15 August: ‘We stand near a consummation we have scarcely dared to think about through five of the blackest, weariest, and yet most glorious years of our history.’ Its banner headline on 19 August read simply: ‘FRANCE: WE HAVE WON DECISIVE VICTORY’. Since the Germans were ‘irretrievably disorganised’, they would ‘probably never again be able to organise any sort of a front in France’. A leading article the same day, claiming that ‘complete victory in the West has been achieved’, gave credit where it was due: ‘The people of Britain may this day be proud indeed.’
This tone, triumphant if not triumphalist, was by no means confined to the political right in Britain. In the Liberal paper the News Chronicle, its influential columnist A.J. Cummings, a great believer in ‘Monty’, was scathing about ‘sceptics’ who said that the Nazis were capable of lasting out for months. There was an unaccustomed gaiety to the paper’s reporting of the advance upon Paris: ‘AMERICANS SWING ALONG SEINE TO FORM SECOND TRAP’.86
By the last week of August the liberation of Paris had been achieved, largely through external American action, but presented in terms that emphasized the role of the Resistance in mounting an internal rising. Thus the London Evening Standard on 23 August: ‘THE PEOPLE OF PARIS HAVE FREED THEIR CITY’, or the Daily Telegraph three days later: ‘Gen. de GAULLE ENTERS LIBERATED PARIS’. Everyone was caught up in the current mood, listening to the BBC for breaking news or seeing it confirmed in print. ‘The news is better every hour,’ commented the Mail.87 ‘One is dizzy, and too excited to write coherently,’ the backbench Tory MP Henry (‘Chips’) Channon jotted in his diary on 23 August after hearing on the radio about Paris, evoking Proustian memories of good pre-war dinners. ‘The news is increasingly wonderful,’ he gushed two days later, only to find even more to come: ‘The Allies march on to victory, more triumphs everywhere.’88
At this stage of the war, so much good news made for mutual magnanimity over the battle honours. In London the Daily Mail celebrated ‘PATTON’S TANKS 90 MILES FROM GERMANY’ on August 28, while in New York the Daily News on 5 September enthused: ‘BRITISH FREE ANTWERP AND BRUSSELS’. An assault on the Germans’ defensive Westwall, emblematically called the Siegfried Line by the Allies, lying in the path of the American advance, was now widely anticipated, and this further success was duly hailed on 16 September by the New York Post: ‘Official: SIEGFRIED LINE COMPLETELY PIERCED’. Almost immediately, for British, Canadian and American newspaper readers alike, the agonizing suspense over the fate of the airborne assault on the Rhine bridges in the Netherlands (MARKET GARDEN) was played out day by day.
These were the war stories that people in Britain and North America saw on the front pages throughout August and September 1944. The Red Army had apparently made a mysterious disappearance. Yet it was not all quiet on the eastern front. True, the Red Army paused on the Vistula; but its capacity to reach the greatest city on that river, Warsaw itself, could hardly be doubted. Appeals for an insurrection against the Nazi oppressors were made by Moscow Radio; they were heeded by the Polish Government in London, under Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, which sanctioned action by its undercover Home Army. But Warsaw was not Paris, where it all ended in roses, or at least Gaullism. The Warsaw Rising was undoubtedly heroic; it was also futile. No effective intervention came from the nearby Red Army until the Polish resistance had been brutally suppressed by the Germans. Stalin even prevented American and British aeroplanes, sent to drop supplies, from using Soviet bases for necessary refuelling until September, when it was too late. Meanwhile a rival government was established in Soviet-occupied Lublin, about a hundred miles south-east of Warsaw.
Churchill’s protests during August failed to elicit further action from either the Russians or the Americans. Unable to challenge Stalin, unwilling to affront Roosevelt, he decided to shut up, an inglorious decision duly endorsed by the British cabinet. ‘I do not remember any occasion when such deep anger was shown by all our members, Tory, Liberal and Labour alike,’ he wrote in Triumph and Tragedy, leaving his readers with the rueful comment that ‘terrible and even humbling submissions must at times be made to the general aim.’89
Any terror or humiliation experienced by the British Government, of course, palls besides what Warsovians experienced. Numbering well over a million in 1939, they were reduced to a handful of survivors living as fugitives in the rubble of their former capital. As for their sovereign rights and self-government, the Lublin Poles, loyal to Moscow in denouncing the Rising as a reckless and criminal adventure, competed for legitimacy with the London Poles, who had clearly suffered an enormous setback. The Polish troops serving in the Allied armies, notably those in Italy under General Wladyslaw Anders – who had languished in the Lubianka jail in Moscow between 1939 and 1941, before emerging to command the two Polish divisions in the 8th Army – had increasing reason to wonder exactly what they were fighting for, with such courage and hope.