Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (39 page)

This was harsh; Menzies came back as Prime Minister in 1949 and stayed in office for sixteen years, hardly possible if he ‘loathed’ the Australians. But his criticisms of Churchill’s war leadership were by no means wholly fair either. True, there was much to complain about, especially Churchill’s habit of keeping the top brass up late at night for long, rambling meetings when they (but not he) had to be up early the next morning. A fair assessment came from Labour Party leader and War Cabinet member Clement Attlee, who in his memoirs challenged Menzies’s view. ‘Winston was sometimes an awful nuisance because he started all sorts of hares, but he always accepted the verdict of the Chiefs of Staff when it came to it, and it was a great advantage for him to be there driving them all the time’, he recalled. ‘Your advisers always tend to say “It can’t be done”, and it’s as well to have someone who’ll tell them it can.’
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Churchill made serious mistakes but he was not, as Menzies alleged, a dictator. The Greek episode actually proved this, as it resulted from the Cabinet collectively accepting bad advice from the men on the spot, not from Churchill as an individual overriding other people’s judgement.

IV

Menzies was no lone critic, however. The war was not going well and Churchill had to work constantly to maintain his position in Parliament. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 brought Britain another ally, but the bigger fish, America, had still to be landed. In August, Churchill met Roosevelt at a landmark conference held on board the US cruiser
Augusta
and the British battle-cruiser
Prince of Wales
at Placentia Bay, Newfoundland. Churchill would greatly have welcomed a US declaration of war, but had to be content with the promulgation of the Atlantic Charter, a joint statement of broad principles about the future of the world. FDR was eager to use the conference to promote an anti-imperialist agenda. Although the question of colonial freedom was not discussed explicitly, two points of the Charter were of crucial significance in relation to imperial questions.
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As finally agreed, Point 4 stated that Britain and America would ‘endeavour, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States [. . .] of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity’.
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The original US draft of this was clearly intended as an assault on the imperial preference system, a form of trade discrimination. Churchill’s friend Lord Beaverbrook, now Minister of Supply, who was at the conference, was highly concerned.
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Churchill’s own position, as a former free trader, was more than a little ironic. Although he had not been keen on the Ottawa Agreements, he knew that to tear them up without consulting the Dominions would provoke outrage. He was now, furthermore, leader of the Conservative Party. He told Mackenzie King: ‘When the tariffs were discussed, while he, himself, was not sympathetic to the Conservative position, he nevertheless had felt it his duty to stand up for it.’
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The British successfully pressed for the inclusion of the qualifying words about ‘existing obligations’ and for the removal of a reference to ‘discrimination’.
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This was achieved in spite of the powerful lever the Americans possessed in the form of British dependence on their economic aid. But in spite of Churchill’s efforts to protect the interests of the Dominions, he had not actually consulted them on the text of the Charter before its release. Mackenzie King, often touchy about such matters, observed that there had been enough time to run it past the British Cabinet but that Canada had been ‘ignored’. He complained to Malcolm MacDonald, Britain’s High Commissioner, ‘It was the way the British lost their friends, wanting them in foul weather and ignoring them in fair.’
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Point 3 of the Atlantic Charter was also to prove controversial, although its text was settled easily enough. Under it, the two governments declared that ‘they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them’.
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Understandably, some inhabitants of those parts of the Empire that did not have self-government took ‘all peoples’ to include them. Burmese leaders initially gave the Charter a ‘whole-hearted welcome [. . .] on the assumption that it meant full post-war self-government for Burma’.
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(The country did already have some limited self-government.) The response to the Charter within Churchill’s coalition was divided. ‘We shall no doubt pay dearly in the end for all this fluffy flapdoodle’, wrote Amery.
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But when Attlee addressed the West African Students’ Union in London he emphasized that the Charter’s principles would apply ‘to all peoples of the world’. He was rewarded with ‘loud and prolonged applause’, and the student who moved the vote of thanks said, ‘West Africans were proud of the Empire and were pleased to march shoulder to shoulder with the British to fight this war.’
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Churchill acted quickly to squash the raised hopes after he returned to England. He told Amery that he was ‘sure’ that Attlee ‘did not intend to suggest, e.g., that the natives of Nigeria or of East Africa could by a majority vote choose the form of Government under which they live, or the Arabs by such a vote expel the Jews from Palestine. It is evident that prior obligations require to be considered and respected, and that circumstances alter cases.’
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In September, Churchill secured the Cabinet’s agreement that the Charter ‘was not intended to deal with the internal affairs of the British Empire’. (Attlee apparently failed to stand up for his earlier fine words.)
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Churchill then made his position clear publicly in a statement in the Commons. ‘At the Atlantic meeting, we had in mind, primarily, the restoration of the sovereignty, self-government and national life of the States and nations of Europe now under the Nazi yoke, and the principles governing any alterations in the territorial boundaries which may have to be made’, he said. ‘So that is quite a separate problem from the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the regions and peoples which owe allegiance to the British Crown.’ He added that in the past the British had made past declarations on constitutional development within the Empire ‘which are complete in themselves, free from ambiguity and related to the conditions and circumstances of the territories and peoples affected’.
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Churchill showed this passage to J. G. Winant, the American ambassador, before he delivered it. Winant thought it ‘would simply intensify charges of Imperialism’ and begged him to omit it, to no avail.
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One of the most striking things about the statement, in fact, was the claim that Britain was already committed to progress towards colonial self-government and that the government had previously made unambiguous pledges to this effect. Yet when civil servants tried to answer questions about the commitments to which Churchill had referred, they found the cupboard was bare. ‘I do not think the P.M. can have realised the true nakedness of the land when he made the statement’, commented junior minister Harold Macmillan. ‘The declarations are not complete in themselves, nor are they free from ambiguity. They are scrappy, obscure and jejune.’
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Churchill’s Commons statement did not allay nationalist pressures. In October, U Saw, Prime Minister of Burma, arrived in London to demand that the Charter be applied to Burma. Churchill met him and told him that if Britain won the war ‘liberal ideas would then prevail on the lines of the Atlantic Charter’. However, the Charter was a ‘unilateral [
sic
] declaration which H.M.G. must hold itself free to interpret’.
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Saw told journalists that Churchill ‘was very blunt. I was blunt too.’
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He left for home disappointed, saying ominously, ‘I cannot foresee what the attitude of my people will be when I explain the response of the British Government to my request.’
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Before he got back to Burma he was arrested by the British after allegedly telling Japanese diplomats in Lisbon en route that he was prepared to lead an anti-British revolt. Churchill wanted him tried for treason but calmer counsel prevailed; Saw was detained in Uganda until 1946.
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The Charter controversy also made an impression in Africa. In a 5 November leader article the
West African Pilot
vented its anger at Churchill’s words in the Commons: ‘That a British prime Minister could utter such a statement during an unparalleled destructive war which has cost Colonial peoples their material resources and manpower is, indeed, a revelation. What, now, must we expect our fate to be after the war?’
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Nnamdi ‘Zik’ Azikiwe, the editor of this pioneering Nigerian nationalist newspaper, also cabled Churchill requesting clarification of the discrepancy between Attlee’s statement and Churchill’s. Did the Charter apply to West Africa or not? Churchill gave instructions for a reply, which, echoing his Commons statement, claimed that the government’s Empire policy was ‘already entirely in harmony with the high conceptions of freedom and justice which inspired the joint declaration [i.e. the Atlantic Charter]’. Therefore, no fresh statement of policy on Africa was required.
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But his efforts were to no avail. In 1943 Zik travelled with a delegation to Britain and used the Charter as the basis for a demand for a timescale for complete independence.
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In the same year the African National Congress demanded that the Charter’s principles should be applied to the whole world and pressed for the end of discrimination in South Africa.
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In 1945 the Pan-African Congress, meeting in Manchester, urged that the tenets of the Charter ‘be put into practice at once’.
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By putting his name to the Atlantic Charter, Churchill had unleashed expectations that he could not control.

V

If the Charter helped undermine the ideological foundations of British colonial rule, the Empire also faced a much more drastic and immediate physical threat. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 brought America into the war, a sure guarantee of ultimate victory. Churchill’s sense of relief was huge. Intriguingly, one of his first reactions was to send a telegram to De Valera: ‘Now is your chance. Now or Never. “A nation once again”. Am very ready to meet you at any time.’
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De Valera recalled his own reaction: ‘On being handed the written text I concluded that it was Mr Churchill’s way of intimating “now is the chance for taking action which would ultimately lead to the unification of the country”. [. . .] I did not see the thing in that light. I saw no opportunity at the moment of securing unity, that our own people were determined on their attitude of neutrality, etc.’
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The barriers to unification had certainly not gone away, and the cable could easily be read as a classic piece of Churchillian emotionalism; certainly it was vague, and De Valera concluded from his further contacts with the British that there was no chance of a bargain over Northern Ireland.
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After discussing things with members of his government, De Valera decided not to go to London.
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His failure to respond warmly to Churchill’s initiative cannot be seen as the high-handed rejection of a great opportunity to achieve Irish unity. Arguably, the real significance of Churchill’s telegram can be derived from the fact that the text was copied to Roosevelt, who was ‘Delighted’.
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If it achieved nothing else, the message at least appeared to show the Americans that the British were making an effort.

Ireland, of course, was a fairly minor concern for Churchill by this stage, as Japan’s assault on British territories in the Far East proved devastating. The sinking on 10 December of HMS
Prince of Wales
and HMS
Repulse
– recently despatched to Singapore in a failed attempt at deterrence – was a foretaste of disasters to come.
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By the New Year, Japan had seized Hong Kong and a substantial part of Malaya and had also made gains in Burma. Churchill’s priority, though, was Europe, and in Washington – where he travelled before Christmas to consult with the President – he secured a commitment from the Americans to a ‘Germany first’ strategy. As a result the Australians felt profoundly exposed and criticized the reinforcements planned for the Far East as wholly inadequate.
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Ian Jacob, a military aide to the British War Cabinet noted in his diary: ‘Throughout the time of our visit to Washington the Prime Minister received a series of most exasperating telegrams from Mr Curtin, the Prime Minister of Australia.’ Jacob wrote that during the war the Australian government had ‘taken a narrow, selfish and at times a craven view of events’, in contrast to the New Zealanders, who had been ‘a tower of strength’. However, he conceded: