Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (44 page)

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From Churchill’s point of view, the concept of ‘the English-speaking peoples’ was one way to preserve British influence in a world in which growing American power was a reality. In May 1943 he visited Washington for talks with Roosevelt and also addressed Congress. His speech, ‘acclaimed universally as a masterpiece’, allayed political pressure for a ‘Pacific first’ strategy by emphasizing British support for the defeat of Japan after the war in Europe had been won.
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(This also helped reassure the Australians – foreign minister H. V. Evatt was in the audience – and Churchill further took the trouble to meet Commonwealth representatives at the White House, speaking of ‘our beloved Australia and New Zealand’.)
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During his stay, he recalled in his memoirs, he proposed to US officials ‘some common form of citizenship, under which citizens of the United States and of the British Commonwealth might enjoy voting privileges after residential qualification’.
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This did not go down well with all concerned. Vice-President Henry Wallace was treated to Churchill’s musings on the theme after an official luncheon. The Prime Minister spoke of ‘freedom to travel in any part of the United States or the British Empire for citizens of both countries’ and also made it clear ‘that he expected England and the United States to run the world’ after the war. Wallace recorded:

I said bluntly that I thought the notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority, inherent in Churchill’s approach, would be offensive to many of the nations of the world as well as to a number of people in the United States. Churchill had had quite a bit of whiskey, which, however, did not affect the clarity of his thinking process but did perhaps increase his frankness. He said why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority, that we were superior, that we had the common heritage which had been worked out over the centuries in England and had been perfected by our [United States] constitution. He himself was half American, he felt that he was called on as a result to serve the function of uniting the two great Anglo-Saxon civilizations in order to confer the benefit of freedom on the rest of the world.

Churchill in turn disapproved of Wallace’s suggestion that Latin American countries could be included in the scheme for a passport-free zone. ‘He said if we took all the colors on the painter’s palette and mix them up together, we get just a smudgy grayish brown.’ Wallace accused him of believing in ‘the pure Anglo-Saxon race or Anglo-Saxondom ueber Alles’. Churchill, perhaps now on the defensive, replied that ‘his concept was not a race concept but a concept of common ideals and common history’.
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But, given his talk of mixing up the colours, it is hardly surprising that Wallace had taken him to be speaking racially.

Churchill’s efforts to strengthen cooperation between America and the British Empire were replete with difficulty. It was not just a question of differences in ideology, as in the Wallace episode. (The views of the idealistic, left-wing Vice-President were not exactly typical anyway.) Rather, the British faced a dilemma, not least with regard to the growing problem of post-war planning. A strong bilateral relationship between Britain and America, with Churchill and Roosevelt at the apex, could seem, from Ottawa or Canberra, to have the effect of excluding the Dominions. On the other hand, if the British insisted on Commonwealth consultation, the Americans might suspect a collective ‘ganging up’ against US interests. Churchill felt it necessary to emphasize to the President that ‘different parts of the Empire could meet together and discuss matters of common concern to them without, in any way, being assumed to be taking a stand against the United States or any other countries’.
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Churchill, though, did not tend to err on the side of excess solicitude towards those he claimed to regard as his ‘kith and kin’.
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When the Australians asked to take part in discussions about the fate of post-war Europe, his immediate reaction was that this would ‘have the effect of paralyzing foreign policy’ and that the British ‘must be accorded reasonable latitude’. Attlee, by contrast, spoke up for the Dominions’ right to be heard.
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Particularly revealing was Churchill’s comment, made around this time, about ‘the troublesome attitude of the Colonies’. He was actually talking about the Dominions.
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It is also telling that he clearly preferred ‘Empire’ to ‘Commonwealth’, although here he was prepared to compromise. When he received the freedom of the City of London in June he said that ‘the expression British Commonwealth and Empire may well be found the most convenient means of describing this unique association of races and religions, which was built up partly by conquest, largely by consent’. And, in another implied hit at anti-imperialists of the Wendell Willkie type, he added that the ‘universal ardour of our Colonial Empire to join in this awful conflict’ was ‘the first answer that I would make to those ignorant and envious voices who call into question the greatness of the work we are doing throughout the world’. He emphasized, too, though, that ‘Upon the fraternal association and intimate alignment of policy of the United States and the British Commonwealth and Empire depends, more than on any other factor, the immediate future of the world.’
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But the path of fraternal association did not always run smooth, even within the Commonwealth. Tensions with Canada were in evidence in the run-up to the Anglo-American strategy conference – codenamed ‘Quadrant’ – held in Quebec in August 1943. For some time the Canadians had been growing restive. They were giving Britain substantial economic help, which was to amount to a quarter of what the US (with a much, much larger population) provided under Lend-Lease.
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Canada also provided many volunteers for the fighting services: by the time of Pearl Harbor it already had 120,000 troops stationed in the UK. The demands of morale created pressure to give them something to do, and one result was the Dieppe Raid of August 1942. Commanded by the youthful, glamorous Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten – too highly promoted by Churchill – fewer than half of the 5,000 raiders returned.
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The Canadians were put to far better use in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. Unfortunately, the draft public announcement of the action did not mention them, referring only to ‘British-American’ troops. Worse still, owing to a communication muddle, Mackenzie King became convinced, wrongly, that the British had rejected his request for a correction. The dispute became public, and the enraged premier complained to the High Commissioner that Churchill and his colleagues trampled roughshod over Canada’s interests. In the end, Churchill agreed to make a Commons statement smoothing things over, but the Canadians also suffered other slights, real and imagined, and made their feelings known.
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General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, felt that Canada’s government and its military had ‘made more fuss than the whole of the rest of the Commonwealth concerning the employment of Dominion forces!’
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For Churchill to hold a conference with Roosevelt on Canada’s soil was one way to help restore Mackenzie King’s sense of dignity. The latter was sidelined from the key parts of the Quadrant talks, though; the not unreasonable argument against including Canada in Anglo-American military planning was that to do so would be unfair to the other Dominions. Mackenzie King recalled that he had been ‘not so much a participant in any of the discussions as a sort of general host’, whose job ‘was similar to that of the General Manager of the Château Frontenac’ (a renowned Quebec City hotel).
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All the same, Churchill did make serious efforts to soothe Mackenzie King’s
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and to help him meet his domestic critics’ allegations that Canada’s voice was being ignored. King found him ‘very understanding on matters of this kind’.
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Churchill also helped secure Ottawa a seat on the Allied committee that dealt with the development of the atomic bomb.
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Such demonstrations of consideration may have contributed to Mackenzie King’s effusiveness towards him: ‘I said when we were talking that I believed he was the one man who had saved the British Empire. He said no, if I had not been here someone else would have done it. I said I did not believe that was so.’
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It all showed that Churchill could be diplomatic (and even modest!) when he saw the necessity.

Quadrant resulted in important decisions on Operation Overlord (the planned invasion of France) and on Anglo-American nuclear cooperation. It was also agreed to create the South-East Asia Command (SEAC) under Mountbatten; eventually to reconquer Burma, the Americans nicknamed it ‘Save England’s Asiatic Colonies’.
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(Orde Wingate, the arrogant but brilliant commander of the ‘Chindits’ – a force which undertook long-range penetration behind Japanese lines – was part of the British team in Quebec; he was to be killed in an air crash in March 1944.) Meanwhile, Churchill developed a misguided obsession with capturing the northern tip of Sumatra, from which, he believed, it would be possible to bomb Singapore. Brooke, driven to distraction, reflected in his diary on his boss’s make-up: ‘It is a wonderful character – the most marvellous qualities and superhuman genius mixed with an astonishing lack of vision at times, and an impetuosity which if not guided must inevitably bring him into trouble again and again. [. . .] he is quite the most difficult man to work with that I have ever struck, but I should not have missed the chance of working with him for anything on earth!’
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Roosevelt and Churchill met again in Egypt in November, together with the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. The three men issued a joint communiqué, known as the Cairo Declaration, stating their intention that Japan be stripped of Pacific islands she had occupied since 1914 and that lost Chinese territories should be restored. The British had done their best to temper American generosity towards China, but failed to secure any mention of the return of their own possessions. (Australia and New Zealand were annoyed that they had not been involved in these decisions, which prompted a new assertiveness by them in foreign policy.)
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From Cairo, the President and the Prime Minister moved on to Tehran for a meeting with Stalin. There, Churchill would see further evidence of FDR’s determination to withhold his favours from the British.

This was the first meeting of the ‘Big Three’, or, as was increasingly the case – given the realities of Soviet and American power – the ‘Big 2½’.
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Roosevelt was determined to establish a warm relationship with (or indeed suck up to) Stalin, if need be at Churchill’s expense. He refused Churchill’s request for an initial bilateral meeting and insisted on meeting with Stalin instead. A ‘Grumbling but whimsical’ Churchill told Averell Harriman (US ambassador to Moscow) ‘that he was glad to obey orders; that he had a right to be chairman of the meeting, because of his age, because his name began with C and because of the historic importance of the British Empire which he represented’. Nevertheless, he said, he was prepared to waive his claims but would insist on giving a dinner party on 30 November, his sixty-ninth birthday.
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The Roosevelt–Stalin meeting on the 28th saw the two leaders reach accord on the future of territories liberated from the Japanese. The president criticized French rule in Indochina and raised the possibility of ‘a system of trusteeship’ there ‘which would have the task of preparing the people for independence within a definite period of time, perhaps 20 to 30 years’. According to the US record of the talks, ‘Marshal Stalin completely agreed with this view.’ Roosevelt warned his new friend not to raise the topic of India with Churchill, and Stalin ‘agreed that this was a sore spot with the British’.
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They were both happy to needle him on other issues, though. That night at dinner Stalin said that the ‘entire French ruling class’ was ‘rotten to the core’. Indeed, ‘It would be unjust and positively dangerous to leave them in possession of their former Empire’. Churchill’s protest that ‘he could not conceive of the civilized world without a flourishing France’ was rejected with contempt.
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The formal sessions of the conference dealt with military questions, Stalin pressing for a firm date for Overlord, and the future of Europe. But at dinner on the 29th imperial issues came up again. Roosevelt asserted that, after the war, ‘bases and strong points in the vicinity of Germany and Japan’ should be held under trusteeship. Churchill clearly suspected that some of these proposed bases might be on British territory, and he resented the idea that they might be subjected to international control:

THE PRIME MINISTER stated that as far as Britain was concerned they do not desire to acquire any new territory or bases, but intended to hold on to what they had. He said that nothing would be taken away from England without a war. He mentioned specifically, Singapore and Hong Kong. He said a portion of the British Empire might eventually be released but that this would be done entirely by Great Britain herself, in accordance with her own moral precepts.